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