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

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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?