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. 

Scattered Thoughts on Wendy Brown (or) Ceci n'est pas un monolith

Disclaimer: What follows is a ramshackle summary of Wendy Brown's 1995 work, States of Injury.  Although the summary might be worthless, it helps me arrive at the questions that I'm thinking about in relationship to her work.  And, oh boy, Julianne, I'm hoping you have some insights on all of this, since you're much better versed in political theory and discourses of subjectivity than I...

So here we go: Drawing on Nietzsche, Marx, Foucault, and Weber, Wendy Brown's primary goal is to interrogate current definitions of citizenship, processes of identity, and practices of regulation, including those of some feminist reformers, that are associated with liberal bureaucratic states.  At the most general level, Brown's point is that emancipatory politics pursued within depoliticizing and regulatory environments will come to resemble the arenas they intend to subvert.  B's newer move (remember it's 1995 here) is to ask how a sense of woundedness can become the basis for a sense of identity.  She argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography ultimately legitimize the state: "Whether one is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands the heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector's rules." (169).  She tracks many different paths that the state has followed in order to legitimize its own power.  I won't go into detail, but some of those paths I find most interesting include: the expansion of state power through deregulation and privatization (18): the confessional frame of the post-modern liberal state in which feelings confessed acquire the status of truth and therefore enforce ontological essentialism (42); the implementation of Nietzsche's ressentiment to explain how marginalized social groups produce sites of rage to displace hurt (68); and the analysis of Marx's "Jewish Question" to consider how rights emblemize the ghostly sovereignty of the unemancipated individual (110).  

Although B has her Althusserian moments, evident when she claims that the language of resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires within the regime, she still has some fuzzy optimism reserved for the reader.  These, to my mind, remain incredibly vague.  True democracy, she insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not protection.  Sounds great, but when it comes time to get practical, she only prescribes the creation of a "post-modern feminist space" that must be "heterogeneous," "roving," with conversations oriented toward diversity and the common, rather than the individual/self.  Every time I reread "heterogeneous" and "roving," I can't help but conjure up the idea of some sort of feminist circus, moving from town to town. 

Anyways, this book is most useful for me not as an exemplar of political theory, but rather as a sort of methodological warning.  When Brown points out the many dimensions of the modern liberal state and its modes of power, she does so in a way that is much more nuanced than so much of the theory oriented toward identity politics.  As trite or obvious as it may seem to write something like: "the state is not an it, but an ensemble of discourses," (174) it's an important point.  I know that I'm guilty of lapsing into thinking about the state as a monolith--a singular entity whose goal is to sustain itself through means of repression and/or capitalist expansion.

Her analysis of Marx is also provocative.  Since I recently finished Anderson's Imagined Communities, Brown's work has me asking how Anderson's notion of the nation would link up with Marx's "On the Jewish Question." Marx is interested in how the state's "emancipation" of certain subjects operates as a form of political suppression that legitimates state powers and how the process of emancipation itself constitutes the power of the liberal state (you can see why this is nice for Brown).  It seems, then that Anderson's ideas about the necessary "emancipation" from Gods, Kings, and other masters would map on pretty neatly here. 

more sources of normativity

I'd just finished Korsgaard's account of normativity (save for the responses by the likes of Williams, Nagel, Cohen etc, helpfully included as the book's final chapters), which was precise but uninspiring, when I came across another account: Niklas Luhmann's theory in his Sociology of Law. There couldn't very well be a sharper contrast between the two--Korsgaard's theory is designed as a series of lectures, terribly, almost laboriously clear. It is an accout of normativity viewed from the inside, for actors who experience normative pressures. Luhmann's is neither of these things. It is quite difficult to read, which, in this case, is an odd byproduct of precision: the man does not use synonyms, and so when he begins to write about expectations of expectations of expectations of action by various actors, one finds oneself longing for the sort of manic thesaurus use evidenced by, say, the NY Times column Modern Love. That said, the theory is extremely clever--it is, basically, that there are two kinds of strategies for dealing with disappointment in expectations: the cognitive strategy, where one decides to alter one's expectations, and the normative strategy, where one does not, even if they are repeatedly disappointed. Which strategies are best for which types of things is largely a cultural decision, based on what the society sees as most conducive to its own survival. With increasing complexity, Luhmann argues, these strategies become more sharply differentiated. I haven't actually gotten to law yet, though the approach already makes it clear that one of the major problems in analytic legal philosophy, the problem of law's normativity, will not be a problem here. In short, very interesting and, I think, very useful.

contingency & literary criticism

Two of the recent intellectual subfields I find especially interesting--possible worlds in philosophy and counterfactuals in history/historiography--are engaged in the same set of problems, problems surrounding the querying of contingency. Insofar as either of these subfields have influenced literary studies, it has been in terms of providing an ontology of fiction. Thinking of the novel as a sort of large-scale, messy thought experiment designed to test and reflect upon contingent truths is not unhelpful (though it presents serious challenges to mimesis, among other things; cf. Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds), but this approach works badly or not at all for other forms of literary art--poetry, say, or essays.

It would be more interesting, I think, to try to perform counterfactual analyses, and to try to arrive at a kind of awareness of contingency, within literary works themselves. We tend not to do this for very good reason: books present themselves as pure compounded necessity--but then, so does the past (whether everything that exists exists necessarily can be taken up in the comments section), and historians are less shy about trying to arrive at historical rules through manipulation of the contingent.

Literary critics do, of course, do this to some extent through the measurement of individual texts against generic or aesthetic rules; if done in an especially systematic way, we arrive at something like Franco Moretti's studies. This sort of method, at its best, often tends toward a sociology of literary history, which suggests that the study contingency and necessity comes to literary criticism by way of history (including genre history and so forth). What I would like to think about, and what I would like your views on, is whether we can come up with a way of thinking about the contingent on the level of the individual work or author. My exceedingly modest proposal is to consciously contrast (pretended) first and multiple readings of a work--or perhaps, the reading in time with the timeless (I don't mean, of course, the critic's own first reading of a text, but the imaginary first-reading perspective that critics adopt when pointing out 'the reader does not yet know X' and so forth). Critics often shift between these modes, but I rarely see the contrast noted explicitly or used as a methodological tool; this contrast is one way, I think, of generating a heuristic sense of contingency. I do hope, however, you can come up with something a bit less modest than this--and I will likewise endeavor.

A Note on Our Favorite Subject

"That night she leaned over the washbasin in her room and cleaned a steel wool pad with disinfectant.  The she used the pad to scour a scrub brush, cleaning every bristle.  But she hadn't cleaned the original disinfectant in something stronger than disinfectant.  She hadn't done this because the regression was infinite.  And the regression was infinite because it's called infinite regression.  You see how fear spreads beyond the pushy extrusions of matter and into the elevated spaces where words play upon themselves."

-Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)

Mimicry and Whole Subjects?

Today I reread Bhabha's "Of Mimicry and Man," and understood less this time than ever before. Emily, consider this a call to arms-- I assume this is on your list and have great hopes that you can help me!  But be warned, what follows is really undigested.

In the essay, Bhabha argues that "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite." His first example of colonial mimicry comes in the essay's epigraph, an excerpt from Sir Edward Cust's "Reflections on West African Affairs...1839."  Cust cites the policy of conferring "on every colony of the British Empire a mimic representation of the British constitution."  I take the time here to include this example because often, Bhabha's notion of mimicry gets (mis)read as a 'strategy' by which the colonized imitates the colonizer, in the hope of gaining access to colonial power.  But Bhabha is explicit that mimicry is rather "one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge."

Sure. But this becomes awfully muddled once Bhabha begins discussing the gaze.  If I've understood correctly, once colonial mimicry has accomplished its goal of "partial representation," the colonized posses a particular type of gaze that contains within it the seeds of subversion.  In other words, the colonizer grants/inflicts partial subjecthood on the (usually racialized) colonized individual.  The colonized 'other' then looks back at the colonizer with a gaze that "shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze," but is also markedly different, thus rendering the observer observed by this uncanny mimic man.  

Still following?  Me too, or so I thought.  (How) have we made the move from mimicry as a strategy of colonial control to mimicry as the activity of the colonized?  Moreover, Bhabha's formulation hints toward a conception of subjecthood that seems awfully retrograde.  I don't want to suggest that Bhabha envisions a pre-lapsarian moment in which the colonized subject is "whole" or somehow "unspoiled," but it does seem like Bhabha grants the possibility of "wholeness" to the colonizer, even if only as a "wholeness" that can be disrupted by the ambivalent gaze of the colonized.  When Bhabha writes that "partial representation re-articulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence," I can't get around the surprising fact that such an argument depends upon a notion that identity has an essence.  Post-colonial theory appears to largely discard such an idea, so what are to make of Bhabha's work here?

I'm also interested in Bhabha's thoughts on camouflage--"As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically." If we concede that mimicry is not simply a strategy of colonial subjugation, but also one of resistance, or at least response, on the part of the colonized, might we connect colonial mimicry to minstrelsy, to camp, or to drag? At what point do we cross the line from mimicry to mockery?

Utopia & Infinite Regress

On Olaf Stapledon's masterpiece, the novel Starmaker--
Fredric Jameson has a comment in Archaeologies of the Future to the effect that Starmaker is less a utopian work than the sort of work that would be written inside a utopia. He states it simply as an impression, but an impression of that sort, if it is sufficiently precise, must have a conceptual skeleton. What follows, then, is a brief attempt at dissection, by way of a thesis about utopianism:

I've come to think that the nature of early modern utopias and particularly More's is importantly different from that of their generic descendents. One might say that they are in the lineage of Plato's Laws, while the utopias of Morris, say, or Skinner, follow The Republic--the former utopias are cynical states, predicated on an opposition both to the real governments their interlocutors live in and to an implicit ideal state, which cannot be attained due to very nature of human affairs. There is a high hope of human possibility and a despairing knowledge of human necessity; the latter must not be attributed merely to utopia's nonexistence--the main source of despair, if there is one, in later utopias--but to its indequacy even as an imaginative construct. Christianity had to give the dream of a perfect politics the lie--even as a dream--but Plato had already done the same thing, for reasons not far removed, in his last & longest dialogue. This is the tradition of utopia that makes distopias unnecessary, even childish & simplistic. Utopia's situation between these two realities, the earthly and the divine is, so far as I can tell, generally ignored by theorists of utopianism, and for good reason; I'm not convinced that this is a characteristic of nineteenth or twentieth century utopias at all, with the exception of Stapledon's Starmaker.

What this characteristic means, in effect, is that every utopia could have its own utopia; that there is a potential infinite regress asymptotically approaching divinity or idealism or the void or whatever. Starmaker is structured in terms of this regress: the successive utopias of which the novel consists are each in turn consumed in superior models--each might be the utopia of the one before. In another work, this could continue forever (one could imagine a Borgesian story on such a theme) but in in Stapledon's novel it doesn't, because the novel is a mapping of a theoretical infinite regress onto a finite universe. Ideas might embed themselves one in another forever, but the imiginative space in which Starmaker progresses is eventually consumed. All that is left, then, is the encounter with the divinity the book has been steadily moving towards. I'd better not give away the ending--though as you've probably gathered, giving away the ending to this strange, marvelous book is like giving away the ending to a book by Hobbes or Hume, more of a transgression against sense than plot--but it is hard to read it except as a gesture to utopia's qualititive failure to attain the ideal.

This bears out, or with a little adjustment could be made to bear out, Jameson's observation. And though all this is apropos of nothing, yet because this blog claims to be a place for infinite regress, it's only fitting that, like Stapledon, I should make my method my matter.

Troilus & Cressida

David Hillman has an article in the latest issue of Philosophy and Literature on Cavell’s writings on tragedy and Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida that is, I think, a good explanation of the play’s significance. His best point is probably that “Shakespeare found himself for once ‘irretrievably outside’ these characters—the position in which the skeptic places himself in relation to the other…it is a marker of Shakespeare’s greatness that he was not only able to make superb theatre of the position he faced here, but that he was then able to move beyond it and diagnose it as tragedy.”

I think what Hillman is noting here—though not in so many words—is that the movement from classical tragedy to psychological drama changes the location of the problem of agency. Characters driven by fate are internally unknowable; they move according to a logic that they instantiate, but do not control. If we ask why Agamemnon behaves as he does, our answer will probably not involve a detailed account of his individual psychology, but rather an elaboration of a tragic framework. The innovation from classical tragedy in a play like Othello (or, of course, Hamlet) lies in taking the basic structural condition of the genre—its fatal conception of the universe, the foregone nature of the ending—and making it an internal, psychological problem for the characters.

Troilus & Cressida does not quite do this—the fatal mechanism is clearly visible to the dramatis personae, but only partially incorporated in their characters. It is, as Hillman says, a transitional play, and it’s appropriate that this transition should be worked out through the story that lies at the center of a good deal of classical tragedy, the Trojan War. But what is not, I think, generally remarked upon, is that Troilus & Cressida gives us two distinct versions of tragedy as a psychological problem, the Trojan and the Greek.

The difficulty for both sides is the event that happens after the play’s close: not, that is, the fall of Troy, but the writing of the Iliad and the accompanying dramas, the betrayal of truth by myth. The men on both sides are nearly equally ardent in helping literature make them into archetypes, but the Trojans are desperate to deceive themselves, while the Greeks, too cynical for self-delusion, only hope to become heroes in the estimation of others. The contrast is between Hector and Achilles, Troilus and, say, Ulysses. There is not, here, the seed of one type of tragedy, but two—the former exemplified by Hamlet, the latter by Othello (and, perhaps, by Richard III, who has all the contempt of an English Tiberius for the credulity of his contemporaries) though problems of self-knowledge, of the terrible difficulty of self-deceit, and of radical otherness do have a way of overlapping.

It would be facile to trace a trend into the novel (though I am half-hoping that one of you will try it) in general, but there are certainly individual novelists who just retain enough of the lineaments of tragedy to show how formal problems of fate and determinism have been replaced by problems of either self-knowledge or the knowledge of others. I am thinking, here, of the instructive difference between Balzac and his great disciple, Henry James—in the former, but not the latter, tragedy is just barely still possible; one can die of love, though one is always dying in the deepest, most self-willed of delusions about the nature of the beloved. And Balzac is well aware of taking one branch of the Shakespearean lineage to a distant extreme. There is marvelous line in the novel Beatrix, regarding a young man who is persistently blind to the true nature of his mistress (please excuse the paraphrase from memory) to the effect that ‘if Iago had dropped a thousand handkerchiefs, they all would have been wasted on Calyste.’ But the illusions of Balzac’s characters, are, like Othello’s, destined to be lost; unlike Othello, many of them survive the disillusionment.

Kittler's Gendered Typewriter

I can imagine that much of what today seems obvious in Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter felt thrilling and innovative in 1986, when the work was published.  Although many of Kittler's insights now are "given" assumptions in media theory, there was still plenty here to excite me.

Kittlers work bears out Benjamin's insights concerning the mechanical reproducibility of art and its radical reframing of the human sensorium.  The distinct areas of acoustics, optics, and writing transformed by the media of gramophone, film, and typewriter are at the heart of Kittler's formal inquiries into new systems of graphic notation that supersede the dominant mode of symbolic, alphabetical writing in Western history.  He even sharpens Benjamin's thesis about reproducibility by postulating that the absence of so-called human reflexivity makes technological recording devices such as the phonograph, the cinematograph and the typewriter possible. As Kittler puts it (in mock-Cartesian terms), "Phonographs do not think, therefore they are possible" (33).  Cultic remains of art such as what we love to call aura or could also call 'soul' are not merely suspended in technological reproductions but escape these new writing systems all together.  It is in the nature of technology to record manifestations of human and social reality in absolute indifference to the concerns of man.  For Kittler, this radical departure from Western humanism constitutes the avant-garde core of technology that reinvents our sense perception from beyond ourselves.

For the most part, I buy these general ideas and especially appreciate what Kittler has to say about humanism in the face of technology.  But in the book's last chapter, "Typewriter," Kittler makes a sweeping claim about gender that I'm hesitant to get behind.  He writes: "The typewriter cannot conjure up anything imaginary, as can cinema: it cannot simulate the real, as can sound recording; it only inverts the gender of writing.  In so doing, however, it inverts the material basis of literature" (183).  While I don't dispute the fact that the invention and proliferation of the typewriter gave birth to a gendered workforce of secretaries and typewriters (were were at first also called "typewriters") I find it difficult to accept Kittler's premise that writing was initially and perhaps innately a "male" endeavor and that "typescript amounts to the desexualization of writing, sacrificing its metaphysics and turning it into word processing" (187).  Even if the typewriter does withdraw the process of writing from the body (a point which itself remains contestable), I'm still puzzled by how Kittler can so easily assume that the material basis of literature is gendered (male). 

One place we might turn in order to think about these questions is genre: gift-books, letters, and elegies, for instance, have long been considered gendered female, both in their production and reception.  Perhaps this line of thinking is unhelpful though, because they don't help me get through to Kittler's claim that it is the letter itself which falls under the masculine sign.

sources of normativity

I'm just beginning Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity on a recommendation from a legal-philosopher friend. Judging by the introduction, I doubt that it's going to have an account of normativity that much resembles the one that we, insofar as we are critics, and therefore default New Historicists/post-structuralists/etc. assume. Time, we tend to think, is a great worker of normativity, transforming 'is' to 'ought' (pace Hume) across the span of years or centuries, like Euhemerus' princes becoming gods.

The law explicitly allows time this privilege. I'm thinking, in particular, of possession--a factual thing--and property--a normative one. In the Roman law system possession becomes property after a certain period by a process called usucaption, originally instituted as a solution to defective property titles. In the early Republic, one year was required for usucaption of land, two for usucaption of movable real property (slaves, animals, certain farm implements). The same amount of time was required for some types of rights to disappear by non-use (servitudes: as the right to channel water through a neighbor's field, and so forth), and when Justinian lengthened the time needed for usucaption--a practical necessity given imperial expansion--the amount of time required for servitudes to become invalid changed symmetrically. The designated period, then, was the period required for relations to land or goods to become normative, in one way or another.

What I am wondering, then, is whether you can think of any other systems in which time is explicitly considered to create normative relations? I suppose the other example that comes to mind is the philosophy of conservativism, but I rather suspect that's usually an epistemological claim, a claim, that is, that time sorts out which practices are best, not that it in itself legitimates them. Examples? Limit cases?

experimental criticism

Instead of the post on Plato's Laws I'd planned (which: forthcoming), I thought I'd begin with a topic of general interest. I was discussing experimental philosophy (http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/) with a grad student of my acquaintance the other day, expressing a certain skepticism as to whether it's not just sociology by another name. He wisely remarked that while one is probably not doing philosophy while one is doing experiments and vice versa, the process that allows one to connect the two must be philosophical. By that logic there's nothing, I think, to prevent us from doing experimental criticism--so my question for all of you is: what sort of experiments would we do? I'm not suggesting, mind you, any servile aping of the sciences--I think the term 'experiment' is probably broad enough to have some application suited to our pursuits, even taking it in a non-metaphorical sense.

Obscure in Philadelphia

Congratulations, It's a blog!

Here it is, folks: the blog scaffolding that will enable us to procrastinate, pontificate, and fornicate about our generals lists.  We've done the initial steps to get this thing rolling, but please add images, change headings and whatnot.

Now who's actually finished reading something?

-Emily and Sarah