Turn It On

From Jo Tacchi's "Radio Texture: between self and others":

In the radio industry, there has been a long-standing notion of a stereotypical female listener, who invited the male presenter into her home, as 'romantic visitors descending on a bored housewife.'

[...]

Trisha was not 'having an affair' with an individual male presenter, or with the station as a whole. She was 'having an affair' with her self, in relation to a world that can, and does, exist in the soundscape that she was able to create when alone at home.

I, on the other hand, am attempting to 'have an affair' with BBC Radio 4 'as a whole.' 

Radio drama

Tyrone Guthrie, in the BBC Handbook for 1931: "An imaginative writer can build up a scene by subtle and ingenious word pictures, and for an imaginative listener, he will create illusions infinitely more romantic than the tawdry grottoes of the stage."

Hey Jude, don’t be afraid…

So I did actually read Jude the Obscure. And while I’d like this blog to go out on a happy note, I feel I must point out that Jude himself has a generals moment early on in the novel. He has been cramming not for the past month but for the past 10 years or so, and as he enters the college town in Wessex he finds himself in a sort of underworld trance where books and writers talk to him and he talks back.
Not to give the book away, but things don’t end well.


“Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard. He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus almost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostly presences with which the nooks were haunted.

…he had read and learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in his position, of the worthies who had spent their youth within these reverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer age. Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in his fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. The brushings of the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambs were as the passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings of each ivy leaf on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their mournful souls, the shadows as their thin shapes in nervous movement, making him comrades in his solitude. In the gloom it was as if he ran against them without feeling their bodily frames.

The streets were now deserted, but on account of these things he could not go in. There were poets abroad, of early date and of late, from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has recently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who is still among us. Speculative philosophers drew along, not always with wrinkled foreheads and hoary hair as in framed portraits, but pink-faced, slim, and active as in youth; modern divines sheeted in their surplices, among whom the most real to Jude Fawley were the founders of the religious school called Tractarian; the well-known three, the enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist, the echoes of whose teachings had influenced him even in his obscure home.

…Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the audience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased with a start at his absurdity. Perhaps those incoherent words of the wanderer were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over his lamp; and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it was, and what it betokened. Jude now perceived that, so far as solid flesh went, he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception of a belated townsman here and there, and that he seemed to be catching a cold…"

The Cratylus, The Birthday Party, and the language of Adam

Let me begin this very scattered (apologies!) post, on the Pinter I saw last night, the Plato I read last month, and the Adamic discourse that is everywhere in the seventeenth century, by quickly summarizing the Cratylus.

The dialogue begins with Socrates intervening in an argument between Hermogenes and Cratylus about whether names are conventional (Hermogenes' position) or natural (Cratylus' position). In response, Socrates puts forth a theory of words as tools, used to differentiate things in the world according to forms. He concludes that there must have been, in some distant era, original craftsmen who made words, and traces of that origin can still be seen, although language has been corrupted over time. Words, according to Socrates, are meant to be descriptive of their nature, of the things they refer to, and are therefore made from smaller words, which are themselves made from mimetic phonemes. In examining these phonemes, it becomes clear to the participants in the dialogue that the original namers favored a theory of the world as flux, not form, and associated positive qualities with motion. The first namers, then, were basically mistaken in their theory of reality (accd. to Plato). So: language is a coherent system, instituted by some original makers but substantially corrupted, mimetic down to the level of phonemes, only--wrong. I summarize at such length because it 1. is awesome and 2. offers an interesting analog to the theory of Adamic speech as it appears in the English seventeeth century.

There is a great deal of variation in what is meant by the language of Adam in the seventeenth century, but I think that it typically posits, like Plato, a humanly instituted, mimetic but corrupted (Babel, gentiles) language. The difference, of course, is that Adam's basic perception of reality was correct, unlike that of Plato's original makers. And unlike Plato's makers, Adam is a single individual--an important fact for seventeenth century radical protestants, since for them this theory is, I would argue, conceived against the role of religious institutions as legitimating meaning--primarily Catholicism, but also, most distantly, Judaism. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Thomas More had argued, in his debates with the Protestant St. German and Tyndale, that the church necessarily preceded the Bible, since the Bible could only have been sanctioned as the word of God by an already existing institution. This is precisely the difficulty that the idea of Adamic speech avoids by tracing meaning, finally, to an individual namer, and locating his authority in the perfection of his reason.

To come, now, to Pinter, who is after all the catalyst of this discussion: last night I saw, for the first time, The Birthday Party. It is a remarkable play, brilliant in a number of ways, but it left me extremely uneasy--and not merely because it was trying to do so. If you haven't seen this play, it takes place in a decaying seaside boarding house somewhere in England, run by a middle-aged woman of questionable sanity and her husband. They have one guest, who has been staying for a year, a helpless, depressive, relatively young man. We learn early on that two men have been inquiring about staying for the night; when they do eventually arrive, it is clear that they have come for some sinister purpose relating to the boarding house's sole guest. It is all terrifying language games and the decay of meaning from here on out, leading to a final contest between the guest and the men, under the thinnest tissue of English joviality. What these men are manipulating is, I think, Britishness and a system of meaning peculiarly associated with it, only its original significance is lost, and the element of force undergirding any system of meaning is laid bare. So far, all right--the play has often been compared to The Trial, not ineptly, and Pinter, in his later statements about it, says vague things about the role of the individual in resisting conformity or something like that. But! I have omitted, dear readers, a most striking fact: the two men are an Irish Catholic--McCann--and a Jew--Goldberg, and they frequently use terms and phrases associated with their respective religions. That, I'm sure you'll agree, changes everything--in fact, it brings us right back to the Catholic Menace and the seventeenth century, the fear that the closed conspiratorial, systems of Judaism and the Catholic Church inevitably make meaning an echo chamber for their own orthodoxies, inevitably impose it by means of a threat. Given the simple Englishness of the rest of the characters in the play, when McCann and Goldberg--really, primarily Goldberg--recycle anglicisms, it comes across as part frightening appropriation, part cruel parody. This, I would argue, is precisely the submerged thesis of the English adherents of Adamic speech; it is a startlingly regressive position for a play written in the 50s. This is not, so far as I am aware, the typical interpretation of this play. Yet it seemed to me quite necessary, and so I would be very curious to know, if you have seen or read it, what you think. It is probably not the best idea to trust a single viewing, since every performance is an interpretation, and possibly an idiosyncratic one.

Read This and Help Me Find Out!

Warning: The following post contains a confession of naive sentiments and deep ignorance.  For those of you with real appreciation and a critical eye for poetry, prepare to be horrified.

So you know that I've always resented the theory-literature and novel-poetics divide that refuses to die, despite efforts to kill it off dating back to Marx-Shakespeare-Freud-The Bible. But as I make my way through my Generals lists, every time I get to a collection of poetry, I become overwhelmed with a distinct feeling of helplessness.  I turn through the pages, most often thinking something along the lines of "Oh, that's beautiful/unusual/obscure/interesting." But the minute I try to think beyond my initial impressions, the poetry seems to turn to sand and runs through my fingers.  How can I make the poetry cohere with the vast majority of my list, which is composed of novels and theory? Since I tend to move between these two categories with some ease and fluidity, what is it about poetry that might make such an exchange more difficult?  Am I just too novice, or too resistant?

Almost one year ago, Evan posted that Stevens' "poetry is invulnerable to theory.  If he decides to hit one of his concepts on the head with an anvil, it gets right back up again, unhurt." Since I've just finished reading Harmonium, this statement caught my attention.  I'd like to think that Stevens' eye for a certain, rough-hewn America and his collections of jangling nouns that comprise a quirky sensuousness have definite bearing on my interests, but I remain unsure how to proceed.

So there it is: the crudest of questions. Can you enlighten me, dear bloggers? 

More on Mimicry

I’m back to reading novels (after, as Greg said, acting out my own marriage plot), so I’m finally going to respond to Sarah’s post on mimicry and add a bit on the two Naipaul novels I’ve just finished. Sarah, you’ll be delighted to hear that according to Simon there’s not one, not two, but at least three slipping definitions of mimicry in Bhabha’s essay. I think he includes mimicry in fact (the mimic man himself, Macaulay’s brown Englishman, black skins, white masks, etc.), as well as mimicry in discourse. In discourse, I think mimicry is both a strategy and a desire, a strategy for colonial power and knowledge that has buried within it a desire for the “not quite” Other. The mimic man is produced not by the strategy of colonial power but by the ambivalent limit desire places upon that strategy. And then when the mimic man returns the gaze, his mimicry reveals the desire buried within the strategy, and that’s when it becomes a menace or a threat. I’m not sure the colonized is a resisting agent observing the colonizer so much as his observation reveals the ambivalence of the colonizing discourse—the menace or threat is also part of the game of strategy and desire. As always with Bhabha, I could be making all this up.

Also in Simon’s class we read what he calls Bhabha’s Lost Essay (lost, perhaps, because it was written without recourse to mr-fancy-pants word play, punning, or punctuation). It’s called “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” and while mimeticism gets pulled down, the word “mimicry” isn’t yet in use to replace it. Bhabha’s example is Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. The typical view of Biswas is that the metaphor of the house bridges the void between the descriptive, realist, somewhat exotic colonial content and the literary value of the text, the transcendent bits, the universal appeal. In this way the book can enter the canon and be read by a class of preppy 10th graders in Buffalo. He doesn’t seem to be complaining that the colonial content is read as merely the background for universal appeal, but also that the colonial content becomes, in some way, a metaphor for universality, and thus disappears.

Bhabha thinks it would make a lot more sense to read the colonial novel in terms of metonymy rather than metaphor. He’d also like to replace realism’s irony with the colonial uncanny. His argument about Biswas rests on the bleak moments of Mr. Biswas’s colonial fantasy, sometimes written down, sometimes published in the local paper, acted out only in Mr. Biswas’s mental breakdown halfway through the novel. (I bought some of this, though Simon thinks Naipaul is not the example Bhabha needs, because while Mr. Biswas is a comic figure, or seemed so in 10th grade, this time around the novel seemed unrelentingly grim). In Bhabha’s essay, colonial fantasy quickly calls authority and intention into question, shatters the mirror of representation, breaks apart Western identifications with Mr. Biswas as a character or Trinidad as a place, and “sets itself up as an uncanny double.” Quick alignment of Mr. Biswas’s colonial fantasy to “The horror! The horror!” and “Ou-boum” in the Marabar Caves, and the essay ends. It’s awkward and abrupt, but it seems that metonymy was the way Bhabha got from mimesis to mimicry.

I’m wondering if the “metonymies of presence” in the mimicry essay can connect to Mr. Biswas, to Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men and to Sarah’s question about essences. These two characters have no essence that isn’t inflected by mimicry, yet they fill their novels entirely, there’s no clear essence or wholeness of Englishness that is also in the novels and is clearly being mimicked. If in metonymy the object refers to a whole, then what is the whole in this case? I think it’s not England, or Englishness, or the colonizer. The mimic man wasn’t created by the colonizer but by the colonizer’s discourse, the mix of ideology and desire, and that is the whole to which Bhabha’s metonymies of presence refer. As in camouflage, it’s not a matter of mimicking the whole owl or the whole forest, it is, in the Lacan epigraph, “against a mottled background…becoming mottled.” Or becoming a soda machine, whatever.

Specters and Specters and Specters and... (Derrida's Infinite Regress)

Last week I read Specters of Marx and am still puzzling over...well...over how much I didn't like it.  I know that much of my reaction is based on a naive response to deconstruction and an unreasonable investment in the idea that Marx, despite the ambiguity we find at times in his language, was asserting definite ideas that don't always leave room for multiple interpretations.  Anyways, I'm fairly certain that you all haven't read it, but my hope that you've read enough Marx that this post is somewhat interesting.

First, a brief (and inevitably inadequate) recap: In Specters, Derrida undertakes an investigation of which aspects of Marxism might still be useful (in the 1990s, since the work was delivered as a plenary address in 1993).  This undertaking is not an application of Marxism, but a "spectropoetics," an examination of the ways in which Marx and Marxism still haunt us, still have influence.  Moving from Shakespeare to a critique of Fukuyama to a discussion of media and finally to a reading of the famous table-turning scene in Capital, Volume One, Derrida uses deconstruction to identify and set loose the many meanings (ghosts) within Marxism that grant the philosophy its longevity and relevance. *Spoiler alert* The book ends with a plea for constant and endless examination of such conjurations.  Derrida argues that Marx's specters' most urgent demand is to examine the issue of simulacra in a way that exposes the haunting and haunted-ness of phenomena that make and displace our political world.

Where I start to chafe is where Derrida sees the project of deconstruction participating in a gift economy of sorts.  Deconstruction suggests that it is precisely when times are most unjust that justice may be done. Derrida makes the claim that "without the opening of the possibility of evil, there remains perhaps, beyond good and evil, only the necessity of the worst. "  But just when it seems as if Derrida is suggesting that Marx wants a sort of redemptive Christian economy based on gift-giving, he interrupts his own text to compare deconstruction's ideas of gift-giving to Heidegger.  Where Heidegger's notions are clearly located in a yearning for a disembodied being or spirit, Derrida points out that for deconstruction, an economy of the gift would always be linked to the figure of the specter, the dead relative whose inheritance is, properly speaking, yours, but actually becomes that 'of the community.'  From this notion of inheritance, Derrida concludes that the specter is, and always will be, a threat.

That being said (I think that's what's been said anyways), Derrida is quick to point out that academics who mutate the gift economy described my Marx into the academic exchange value "Marxism" miss the point. Marx has given us injunctions that inform the very map upon which we currently interpret the terms "work," "worth," "community" and "subjectivity."  These injunctions include to effect change now, to see our lot as Hamlet's rather than Christ's, to understand a gift economy as Nietzsche might have it, rather than as Heidegger might like it.  Pretty vague, no?  If the difference between the future of communism and the communism of the future for Derrida lies in the process of forming an alliance with a "threat," I'd like to know what that looks like.  Isn't it more than intertextuality, wordplay, and allusion?

 

Speaking more generally, my own discomfort with Specters comes in response to Derrida's insistence that the project of deconstruction is inherently Marxist or that Marx's own method was, itself, deconstruction.  Although I admire the insistence that those who practice a certain methodology be invested in and aware of that method's politics, I find it self-aggrandizing and anachronistic in a problematic way to claim such an alliance between Marx(ism) and Deconstruction.  It also feels ironic, given Derrida's insistence on openness, endless possibility--the very notion of differance--that his claims sometimes seem to shut down potentially productive readings of Marx: readings that would necessitate a more fixed, singular interpretation than deconstruction can allow. All the while that Derrida is valorizing the irreducible heterogeneity of Marx, he is claiming Marx as "his," claiming that only deconstruction can properly respond to the legacy of Marx.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. 

cover art

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/

contingency & offstage action

Much of the force of Elizabethan tragedy is in the disappointment of expectations. In renaissance tragedies, at least in Elizabethan ones, we find a great deal of wavering between two possibilities, two parallel sets of expectations. Even if we know which one to settle on—because of the title The Tragedy of X, say—the other remains very real to us. Take as examples Romeo and Juliet or Othello: these keep their alternate endings vivid to the last minute—in the latter case, even after the last minute--hence every critic of the play has to ask why Othello believes Iago; why, that is, the beautifully elaborated possibility of a happy ending is not reached. As Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, "history is not what happened, it is what happened in the context of what might have happened." This dictum holds doubly in drama, even if the ontological status of that "might" is debatable; indeed, even if possibility is merely a simulacrum.

Unlike the Elizabethan theater, however, the Jacobean is not a theater of possibility. The weird, fatalistic worldview of the dramas we tend to call Jacobean (some actually written under Charles) has often been remarked upon, usually with lip-service to Calvinist theories of predestination. But this is an unsatisfactory hypothesis, since research has shown that the cultural consensus in the Elizabethan period was broadly Calvinist, and that Arminianism did not become church policy until the reign of James--if the period we are talking about was experiencing a shift, then, it was away from predestination, not towards it (cf. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists). Why, then, this modality in Jacobean tragedy?

I offer (dear readers) a theory. A key factor in striking a deterministic mood in tragedy might be the proportion of events that are narrated rather than shown--that is, events that happen offstage, and are described by characters afterwards (I count only those within the time scheme of the play; the events that happen before the it opens are, of course, necessarily and always narrated). This is as straightforward as a relation of past tense to present or future tense; Webster's tragedies, for instance, contain a very great number of offstage incidents over the course of a given play (murders, marriages, liasons) that are only afterwards recounted. Characters, then, must mourn the consequences of what has already happened--rather than deliberating on what will happen, or even what is happening, thereby creating a sense of plausible alternatives. There is, on the other hand, very little offstage action in Shakespeare (the most notable exceptions are battles, especially sea battles, and voyages, but this is partly a consideration of staging), and I can think of none at all in Marlowe (who is all wild, erratic possibility spinning off the rails of set courses).

One reason, and I think an important one, for this shift to the offstage in Jacobean drama is the degree to which its typical themes are illicit erotic encounters. Deaths could be staged, but incest, adultery, and rape of course could not. Insofar as the motif is sexual deviance (why this motif is another question, but it is one that has been often & well discussed), the playwright's hand is forced--determinism becomes a consequence of focusing on the most irreducibly private spheres. If The White Devil, then, treated events it was able to show, it might read a good deal more like Shakespeare. And if Othello were just Iago's account of events, and not their true (& innocent) appearance on stage, then conversely, it might read like Webster.

Marital Blog

Although I know that this is supposed to be our very serious generals blog, I couldn't resist letting our immense reading public know that this very weekend, our own Emily is getting married!  Congratulations to one of the rare birds who is smart enough to marry the right man for the right reasons.