Reading for Exams

2009-10-09T19:38:00.001-04:00

2009-10-06T00:08:00.003-04:00

"'The Peace which passeth understanding' is a feeble translation of the content of this word."
- T.S. Eliot

2009-10-05T13:34:00.000-04:00

The Concept of Aura in Benjamin's Artwork Essay

2009-09-24T12:50:00.001-04:00

In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” the second, less censored version of which I will primarily deal with here (1936), the concept of “aura” seems to thread its way in and out of multiple schools of media studies: aura becomes an index of diachronic shifts in “symbolic forms,” a synchronic marker of modern perceptual modes, and a key term in locating medium-specificity. What seems missing from the often one-dimensional treatment of Benjamin’s use of aura (it’s destroyed!) is the presence of a paradoxical investment in its positive potentialities. Tracking some of the modulations in the concept within the Artwork essay will more fully allow us speculate on the potential of aura within the mass media––the presence of which is much more apparent in the recently translated second version of the essay, as opposed to the now famous third version published in Illuminations ed. Arendt. What is accomplished in what Benjamin calls the liberation from industrial drudgery into a fantastic “playspace?” How much stress can we put on his depiction of the cinematic spectator going on “journeys of adventure” (117)? And, a question that I seem to be very personally invested in, can it be possible that vegging out can serve a revolutionary function?

Both Miriam Hansen, in her recent essay “Benjamin’s Aura” (2008) and Samuel Weber use as a common jumping off point the formulation of “aura” that has become most prevalent in critical discussions on Benjamin’s work. In the Artwork essay’s third and fourth sections, Benjamin refers to aura as “the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be.” In a strange spatiotemporal convergence, spatial proximity to work of art entails a certain apprehension of the temporal distance or historicity, what Benjamin variously calls its “authenticity,” “historical testimony,” “the mark of history,” all of which must be encountered in the presence of “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” (103). In this configuration of aura as a kind of uniqueness or authenticity, the profusion of reproductive technologies places the aura of the work of art in decline, a decline which Benjamin argues can be said to register new modes of perception in modernity. This is more or less the story we all know about the Artwork essay.

In Samuel Weber’s “Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin” (1992), he argues that the indexical relationship between aura’s decline and ephemeral shifts in sense perception sets up a series of binaries that are too often taken at face value, and that often do not hold up within the text: distance and nearness, ritual and politics, painting and cinematography, distraction and concentration, uniqueness and multiplicity, and so on. Weber’s essay performs a tactical collapse of these binaries when he calls into question the differentiation between the uniqueness of an auratic art object and the mass-like existence of a disseminated reproduction. Weber argues that aura is never itself, but always constituted in a process of self-detachment as demarcation of the self. The mountain scene, described by Benjamin in the third version of the essay as an “illustration,” and in both versions as illuminating the concept of aura, shows that distance and separation are already marked in the aura of the mountain scene by its shadows. (p.105 of Benjamin) “To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.” Weber argues that these shadows can be read as “marking the space within which the relation of subject to object takes place” (86). And, as Weber postulates, the decline of aura is then somewhat of a necessary condition of perception. The narrative of aura’s decline as a detachment from the authentic original “might well turn out to be part and parcel of [aura’s] mode of being. So understood, aura would name the undepictable de-piction of distancing and separation” (87). In this sense, the technological media reveal not a break in aesthetics, but rather an estrangement of a process that was always a necessary condition of aesthetic perception.

Similarly, if we look at the seemingly definitive line on p. 103: “The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and of course not only technological—reproduction.” The problem is that, this section begins by explicitly saying that the work of art has always been reproducible, and towards the middle, that authenticity is itself defined by technological means: “chemical or physical analyses.” Further, after this line that authenticity eludes reproduction, in a footnote that is only included in the third version of the essay, Benjamin writes: “To be sure, a medieval picture of the Madonna at the time it was created could not yet be said to be ‘authentic.’ It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries, and perhaps most strikingly so during the nineteenth” (as if aura is something cultivated). The diachronic narrative of auratic decline particular to modernity ends up functioning as a natural element of aesthetic perception, a separation of the object from itself.

Because aura is never attached to the unique existence of an art object, its existence in the age of technological reproducibility is not precluded, but rather, comes to take on greater political significance with the possibility of its synthetic production. This leads us to a second modulation in the concept of aura that must be tracked: In addition to these false polarizations, the revolutionary or utopian potential of “aura” that Benjamin gives more solid and confident treatment elsewhere (and masterfully tracked in Hansen’s essay) is shot through by reservations and caution throughout the Artwork essay. Hansen argues that this false polarization and attenuation of aura’s potentialities is “deliberately restrictive,” a sort of “sleight-of-hand” in order to protect them from what Benjamin calls the “aestheticizing of political life” under national socialism. Hansen writes: “one strategy of preserving the potentiality of aura, of being able to introduce the concept in the first place, was to place it under erasure, to mark it as constitutively belated and irreversibly moribund.” It was “a fetishistic deflection that would protect, as it were, the vital parts of the concept inasmuch as they were indispensable to the project of reconceptualizing experience in modernity” (356-7).

In an attempt to recover some of Benjamin’s investment in the potentialities of aura in mass media, Hansen complicates this first definition of aura with a perhaps more intuitive understanding of the term “as an elusive phenomenal substance, ether, or halo that surrounds a person or object of perception, encapsulating their individuality and authenticity” (340). Through a long archaeology of Benjamin’s work, Hansen amasses under the heading of this third category many different instances of the term aura that show it not as “an inherent property of persons or objects, but pertaining to the medium of perception, naming a particular structure of vision” (342). These include: aura as the logic of the trace in the clothing seen on subjects in photographic portraits, a sense that is reminiscent of Kracauer’s early essay on “Photography” wherein time uses the raw material of clothing to make an image of itself. Other instances in Benjamin’s work that Hansen aligns under this definition of aura as a perceptual mode include: the aura of the habitual or the everyday (358, 341), aura as resembling Roland Barthes’s notion of the “punctum” or the singular element in a photograph that one finds inexplicably fascinating, that “which pricks me but also bruises me, is poignant to me” (Camera Lucida 27), and aura as a sense of futurity, or a “spark that leaps across time” that “emerges in the field of the beholder’s compulsively searching gaze” (341). Benjamin himself refers to aura as a medium of perception in section IV of the Artwork essay when citing Alois Riegl’s research on the late Roman art industry as a methodological precursor to his own project: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (104).

But Hansen’s essay makes the crucial distinction that a medium of perception cannot be conflated with a technological medium—any interpretation of the Artwork essay must keep this division consistently in view. Benjamin’s sense of a medium in which human perception is organized, Hansen writes, “proceeds from an older philosophical usage referring to an in-between substance or agency—such as language, writing, thinking, memory—that mediates and constitutes meaning.” The artwork essay seeks to use historical shifts in “aura” in order to define the perceptual modes specific to modernity. And yet paradoxically, Hansen argues, it is the technological media—film, photography, radio, and so on—that serve for Benjamin to crystallize what he refers to as “changes in the medium of present-day perception” (104). Herein lies one of the main difficulties in interpreting Benjamin’s Artwork essay. Aura, which is supposed to serve as the index against which the condition of modern sense perception can be registered, is simultaneously used in medium specific definitions of film and photography.

Thus, Benjamin’s synchronic formulation of aura in the mass media places the technological apparatus and modes of perception in a causally ambiguous situation. If genuine aura, as Hansen writes, “contained structural elements that were indispensable to reimagining experience in a collective, secularized and technologically mediated form,” (357) are these potentialities to be located in the formal analysis of film’s physical support or in the social structures that organize themselves around these media?

One possible way we could talk about this coupling of technological apparatus with modes of perception is that it places Benjamin in a difficult relationship with Riegl, who frequently railed against aesthetic materialisms (such as those of Gottfried Semper). Riegl critiques the emphasis on raw materials and technics as asserting an overly deterministic role in the creation of art objects, allowing “‘technique’ to become interchangeable with ‘art’ itself and eventually to replace it. Only the naïve talked about ‘art’; experts spoke in terms of ‘technique’” (Problems of Style p. 4). But of course, Benjamin’s evocation of technological material or objects is hardly deterministic: as Hansen points out, for Benjamin the medium-specific difference between photography and film is less one of technological difference, than one of purely aesthetic choice (p. 349). ((that still frames can be sped up, cropped, and so on)) What I mean to say here is that it is not as simple as saying, for example, the personal computer has been invented and our perceptual faculties are now fundamentally altered as a result. Such a schema would leave no room for the political agency or subjective will that is indispensable to Benjamin’s project as a whole.

But, at the other end of the spectrum, I don’t think it’s possible to say that Benjamin’s investment in a revolutionary aura lies solely in the fact of technology’s mass scale. Benjamin does cite a “quantitative shift between the two poles” of production and reception, a sort of democratization of aesthetic production. In section 13 he writes: “Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character. The difference becomes functional. At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer. As an expert—which he has had to become in any case in a highly specialized work process, even if only in some minor capacity—the reader gains access to authorship” (114). The mass-scale of the media opens up a space for release, from the apparatus of industrial production into that of the film. However, what Benjamin calls the space-for-play or Spielraum that technology opens up is already, from the moment this essay was written, a space colonized by “film capital” and “fascism”. If aura has always named the endowment of an object with a value not its own, then the concept immediately offers itself up to violent mass mobilization and deadening commodity spectacle.

If you’ll permit me to apply some of Benjamin’s ambiguously subjective language, the question that wants desperately to be answered in the Artwork essay is, what is the nature of aura’s potentiality in the mass media that Benjamin places under erasure? The benefit of how the term is deployed here is that through some deep synthesis of the materials and the mode of perception, “aura” is able to name that which is “completely useless for the purposes of fascism,” and that which is “useful for the formation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (102). But at the same time, this leaves us with a set of incredibly difficult questions—because the space for play or Spielraum that the media opens up for us has almost always been a space that fundamentally does not belong to us. And here I can’t help citing Sony’s motto for the Playstation: “live in your world, play in ours.” Benjamin is fundamentally not talking about the technological domination of nature, or a dumbing down of culture, or an opiate for the masses, and I think this is something very difficult to fully wrap our heads around. So, the difficult question remains: at what point were the mass media utopian, and under what conditions could they still be?

review: Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past (2003)

2009-09-17T21:19:00.004-04:00

Since its publication in 2003, Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past has become a staple in the growing field of sound studies. A story about the development of sound-reproduction technologies, Sterne's book was one of the first in a now well-populated list of scholarship across many different disciplines that aims to rigorously examine sound as an historical, analytic, and philosophical category. Recently referencing The Audible Past on his blog, Sterne writes,

I guess the main thing to say is that the book was written at a time where there wasn’t a whole pile of other contemporary scholarship on sound that was aware of OTHER scholarship on sound. So there is a lot of effort to think through what it means to talk about sound in the humanities and why that matters. I’m not sure someone starting a sonic project today has to do that kind of work or deal with that kind of problem.

The foundational status of this book may account for some of its slightly awkward moments. Neologisms such as the “Ensoniment” (as opposed to Enlightenment) take some getting used to, and continuous polemics against the “visual bias” in the humanities at times become redundant (and not always because the field of sound studies has since gained so much traction). But the conceptual trajectory of the book as a whole is so well organized, one which makes such a pointed intervention not only in the historiography of sound, but of technology in general, that the reader can easily overlook these faults.

The Audible Past surveys the history of––to name only a sample of the devices Sterne deals with in this book––the stethoscope, sound telegraphy, telephone, phonograph, graphophone, gramophone, headsets, recording studios, wax cylinders, and hearing aids. However, Sterne is careful to characterize the scope of his study as “a deliberately speculative history” (27). In the book's introduction, entitled “Hello!”, Sterne acknowledges the massive task facing the historian of sound-reproduction technologies. Rather than aspiring to any claims of exhaustiveness or finality, Sterne writes, “this book uses history as a kind of philosophical laboratory” (27), an approach that requires the book to “continually move between the immediate and the general, the concrete and the abstract” (29). From long forgotten aberrancies such as the ear phonautograph (constructed out of an actual cadaver ear) to modern telephone networks, Sterne seeks to locate amid these various devices a unifying set of cultural practices and beliefs.

This is not at all to say that Sterne's account is a reductive one. Indeed, it is his central set of theoretical concerns or “speculations” that allows this wide range of technologies to serve as a good object of analysis in a cultural history of listening. Sterne writes in the introduction, “This book turns away from attempts to recover and describe people's interior experience of listening––an auditory past––toward the social and cultural grounds of sonic experience. The 'exteriority' of sound is this book's primary object of study” (13). To historicize sound through an account focusing on technology seems, if not all too obvious, then at least problematically determined––wasn't sound a culturally mediated object before sound-reproduction technologies? The Audible Past works in full view of these problems. To say that Sterne's book is too speculative to be a rigorous history, dealing with too great a number of technologies in too singular a manner, is to neglect the problematic placed rightfully at its core. Sterne's account problematizes technology's ability to frame our historically embedded techniques of hearing things, arguing instead for the cultural roots of technology. One must rigorously work through the assumptions of a history of the senses that begins with the advent of a technological incursion into that physiological process if it is to be a good history. Sterne's book does this, and succeeds.

The book's first chapter, “Machines to Hear for Them,” sets up one of the central points that allows Sterne's book to proceed analytically rather than chronologically: the social construction of “transducers, which turn sound into something else and that something else back into sound” (22). Sterne's emphasis on “transducers” falls not only on the technical function of inscribing sound waves or transforming them into electrical current, but also on the development of a physiological theory of hearing. “The objectification and abstraction of hearing and sound, their construction as bounded and coherent objects, was a prior condition for the reconstruction of sound-reproduction technologies” (23). Moving through the history of modern physiology and otology more specifically, as well as Alexander Graham Bell and his colleagues' interaction with these fields, Sterne argues that “the history of sound reproduction is the history of the transformation of the human body as an object of knowledge and practice” (50-51). By the middle of the 19th century, physiologists were conceiving of sound primarily as “the effect of a set of nerves with determinate, instrumental functions.” (61) This is not to rehash an old claim that a tree falling in the woods makes no sound without anyone to hear it, but rather to emphasize that the human ear defines a certain section of physical reverberations in space, and that sound as we know it is necessarily “anthropocentrically defined” (12). With this conceptual apparatus in place by the 19th century, “hearing, in other words is already an instrument” (61).

In the book's second and third chapters, Sterne charts the development of listening practices that grow out of these physiologically-based notions of sound. If sound reproduction required a concept of sound as the effect of a set of nerves and membranes, then it also required a set of specialized practices or techniques that shaped and perfected this instrument of hearing in various social contexts. Sterne argues that specialized listening practices such as stethoscopy and telegraphy helped develop the “audile technique” that will become instrumental in practices that are later disseminated on a mass scale by developing technologies. “From roughly 1810 on, audile technique existed in niches at either end of the growing middle class. It would not become a more general feature of middle-class life until the end of the nineteenth century, when sound reproduction became a mechanical possibility and the middle class itself exploded in size and changed in outlook and orientation” (98-99). Chapter 2 deals with the use of the stethoscope by physicians, and Chapter 3, whose subject matter bleeds into the two sections surrounding it, surveys the practices of telegraph operators and the gradual dissemination of these practices through growing public telephone networks.

By Chapters 4 and 5, Sterne has accumulated enough historical and conceptual material to make his central argument about the evolution of technologies and the development of media, one that is, in my view, extremely valuable for the study of culture and technology beyond the specificity of sound studies. Sterne writes, “techniques of listening do not simply turn sound technologies into media” (177). Rather, it is through a combined network of economic institutions and individual practices that media are constructed. Chapter 4 centers in on Sterne's useful definition of developing media as it took place in sound-reproduction technologies between the 1870s and 1920s:

A medium is a recurring set of contingent social relations and social practices, and contingency is key here. As the larger fields of economic and cultural relations around a technology or technique extend, repeat, and mutate, they become recognizable to users as a medium. A medium is therefore the social basis that allows a set of technologies to stand out as a unified thing with clearly defined functions. (182)

While the book's first sections dealt with the development of social practices, in Chapter 5 Sterne focuses on a specific instance of the industrial or economic side of this dynamic with the commercial rhetoric of sound “fidelity” surrounding reproduction technologies: “Manufacturers and marketers of sound-reproduction technologies felt that they had to convince audiences that the new sound media belonged to the same class of communication as face-to-face speech” (25).

The Audible Past is painstakingly organized––each of the book's sections is condensed into a series of focused arguments in the introduction which itself could serve as a standalone essay. Additionally, Sterne shows an almost overwhelming penchant for categorization: the three effects of mediate auscultation, the six elements common to medical, telegraphic, and popular listening practices, the four critiques of acousmatic theories of sound, etc. This mania for organization is what makes the book's last two sections somewhat surprising. In the overall conceptual trajectory of the book, which traces actual technosocial practices, a discussion of the Victorian “culture of death and dying” and the aura of “voices form the dead” surrounding the phonograph and graphophone seem a bit out of place, especially when Sterne tells us that ideas bubbling up about permanent archival and perfect technological memory were fundamentally inaccurate: “The first recordings were essentially unplayable after they were removed from the machine. […] If anything, permanence was less a description of the power of a medium than a program for its development” (288-9). Similarly, in the book's conclusion, Sterne launches a wide ranging discussion of the contemporary mania over digital technologies and the hopes invested in the possible futures supposedly enabled by them. Sterne's interest in these two sections seems to be taking him beyond the scope of this book in a way that renders his previously solid conclusions about the evolution of technology more problematic than this book has the space to resolve. While we have surveyed several causal agents––including physiological theories, advertising rhetoric, and social relations––here we move into the utopian imagination of technology's possible futures as itself a causal agent of technological change. This new interest seems to exceed the otherwise rigorous theoretical trajectory of the book.

These reservations aside, The Audible Past is a rare thing. Not only is it a comprehensive and well-organized history, but the book is an equally smart media theoretical engagement with questions of technics, the social origins of media, and technological change that should find a wide audience in many different academic fields.

Hermeneutics and suspicion

2009-09-15T19:57:00.010-04:00

For all you people who wanna know where Eve Sedgwick's "paranoid reading" originated, as well as much of the anxiety around demystifying hermeneutics came from, I'm outlining Ricoeur's opening argument in De l'Interpretation (published in 1965, translated into English in 1970 as Freud and Philosophy, though they were originally given at Yale in 1961), which, combined with a bit of Wahrheit und Methode (1960), and set against the background of the "sciences of man" and the homologies of Lévi-Strauss, as well as the emerging narrative grammars of Greimas, should let you reconstruct the amazing French hermeneutic adventures of the mid- and late-sixties.

The book follows closely Ricoeur's work on evil (in Fallible Man and especially The Symbolism of Evil, with its phenomenology of confession). Ricoeur's first move is to turn to Cassier on das Symbolische in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (one can read the following meditation on the symbolic as a polemic against Lacan--Lacan at least read it that way--and maybe even the turn in Lacan to the more rigid symbolic in the later Lacan as an increasing attempt to refute Ricoeur). The symbolic is the "mediating function" for the subject, that is, "the common denominator of all the ways of objectivizing, of giving meaning to reality" (10). But Ricoeur has brought this up only to reject its homogeneity, which he says (with reason) is introduced in order to conceive mediation from a Kantian perspective--that is, as an obstacle which we need to address, to deal with, in order to get from the subject to objects, from the subject to reality ("the symbolic, above all, indicates the nonimmediacy of our apprehension of reality," 10). From a late-phenomenological standpoint, this is unacceptable: one has to make room for the ability of this mediation itself to have reality. And so Ricoeur rejects using "the term symbolic for the signifying function in its entirety," because then we "no longer have a word to designate the group of signs whose intentional texture calls for a reading of another meaning in the first, literal, immediate meaning" (11-12).

You will recognize that this is the entire problem of hermeneutics itself that gets introduced into language: the notion is that language not only structures our relationship to reality, but at some point is itself real by becoming plurivocal, or capable of more than one reading, and thus calling out for interpretation. Furthermore, this notion of reality displaces the first, which was confined to the relation to objects: what we have are two types of realities now, one which deals with objects, one which involves the use of the plurivocal. The first reality will be governed by the use of language as sign (which can then be interpreted in a Saussurian way, as signifier/signified), and symbol Ricoeur will reserve properly for the second reality:

In every sign a sensory vehicle is the bearer of a signifying function that makes it stand for something else. But I will not say that I interpret the sensory sign when I understand what it says. Interpretation has to do with a more complicated intentional structure: a first meaning is set up which intends something, but this object in turn refers to something else which is intended only through the first object (12).

The project of understanding what a sign says is still bound up with Saussure, for Ricoeur, and we cannot extend it into the second domain, which is where, not a signifier and signified, or even signifiers and signifiers are related, but where meanings themselves are related: "superimposed upon the duality of the sensory sign and signification" is "a relation of meaning to meaning" (12-13). Thus despite the structuralist and semiological bracketing of meaning which occurs when we look at the signifiers and their relationship, the problem of meaning can reintroduce itself, indeed must introduce itself, whenever we are considering relations of this "higher degree" (12). What Ricoeur does is allow us some access to a different area altogether, not beholden to the sign, an area, or indeed a reality, that

presupposes signs that already have a primary, literal, manifest meaning. Hence I deliberately restrict the notion of symbol to double- or multiple-meaning expressions whose semantic texture is correlative to the work of interpretation that explicates their second or multiple meanings (13).

Ricoeur tries to enrich this zone of the symbol with reference to The Symbolism of Evil. There, he called the realm of the symbol the realm of the experience of the "sacred," based on his analysis of how a spot would somehow designate the sinner's situation, would become a stain. Two other experiences are related to this sacred realm: the experience of dreams and the experience of poetry or the poetic image. He then reiterates what he calls a symbol:

Symbols occur when language produces signs of composite degree in which the meaning, not satisfied with designating some one thing, designates another meaning attainable only in and through the first intentionality (16).

At this point, Ricoeur is tempted by a more narrow, indeed "too narrow" definition: analogy:

It is here that we are tempted by another definition which this time risks being too narrow. The definition is suggested to us by some of our examples. It consists in characterizing the bond of meaning to meaning in a symbol as analogy (16-17).

So the stain is an analogy of the physical with the existential. But this analogy is not based on a likeness:

It is not an argument; far from lending itself to formalization, it is a relation adhering to its terms. I am carried by the first meaning, directed by it, toward the second meaning; the symbolic meaning is constituted in and through the literal meanign which achieves the analogy by giving the analogue. In contrast to a likeness that we could look at from the outside, a symbol is the very movement of the primary meaning intentionally assimilating us to the symbolized, without our being able to intellectually dominate this likeness (17).

We're dealing with something like overintentionality, if you conceive intentionality in a strictly phenomenological sense. Interpretation in reading, or as an experience, then becomes something like the reverse of the reduction: we're lead by the grasp of one essence into another, plane of essences, an "architecture of meaning" or "texture" (18). In short, a text--even Scripture. But I mentioned that this notion of analogy was too narrow:

This correction of the notion of analogy does not suffice to cover the whole field of hermeneutics. I would consider rather that analogy is but one of the relations involved between manifest and latent meaning (17).

Other relations are being invented, indeed invented precisely by... psychoanalysis. I dwell so long on the problem of symbol and analogy because the payoff is huge: we begin to see psychoanalysis--and not only that, but the Nietzschian interpretation of metaphysics and the Marxist view of capitalism--as one particular option within the larger hermeneutic problematic and alongside the simpler construal of this problematic as the analogical relation between two meanings:

Psychoanalysis, as we shall see, has uncovered a variety of processes of elaboration that are operative between the apparent and latent meaning. The dream work is singularly more complex than the classical way of analogy; so too Nietzsche and Marx have denounced a multitude of ruses and falsifications of meaning. Our entire hermeneutic problem, as we shall state in the next chapter, proceeds from this twofold possibility of an "innocent" analogical relationship or a "cunning" distortion (17).

I dwell so long on all this, because, as you see, we here have the hermeneutics of suspicion. But this all is bound up in a general difficulty that Ricoeur feels in hermeneutics itself at this moment:

The difficulty--it initiated my research in the first place--is this: there is no general hermeneutics, no universal cannon for exegesis, but only disparate and opposed theories concerning the rules of interpretation. The hermeneutic field... is at variance with itself (27).

How? Through its tradition, which has two poles. At one end, we have the Aristotelian problem of semantics, which understands the sentence as "saying something of something," or declaring something about a being, understood already as meaningful and needing clarification or rather elucidation, proclamation. Such a stance recognizes that "real meanings are indirect" because "I attain things only by attributing a meaning to a meaning" (23). Clarification primarily revolves around circumscribing the possibility for error, for attributing meaning in a false way. On the other end, we have the sentence as Scripture, introduced by the Christian community (there is a notable absence of the Rabbinical tradition in Ricoeur's account) and then as text (via the "book of nature"), as something articulated according to specific forms (like allegory and indeed analogy), which must be understood in themselves to allow the sentence to be understood. In this view, the truth and falsity of a sentence becomes something like lying, and the process of unfolding meaning is an attempt to get past lying and to the authoritative version of something. Eventually, this second sense gets taken up into a new sense with the introduction of the problem of representation and Kant: the lying which interposes itself between me and the text is now seen as illusion, as mystification. So:

According to the one pole, hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message, a proclamation, or as is sometimes said, a kerygma; according to the other pole, it is understood as a demystification, as a reduction as of illusion. Psychoanalysis, at least on a first reading, aligns itself with the second understanding of hermeneutics (27).

This brings us to the problem that concerns us now, which is a mix of these two poles and an understanding of them all in terms of the concept of representation, Vorstellung:

The situation in which language today finds itself comprises this double possibility, this double solicitation and urgency: on the one hand, purify discourse of its excrescences, liquidate the idols, go from drunkenness to sobriety, realize our state of poverty once and for all; on the other hand, use the most "nihilistic," destructive, iconoclastic movement so as to let speak what once, what each time, was said, when meaning appeared anew, when meaning was at its fullest (27).

The distinction between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a more restorative hermeneutics then is explicitly introduced and identified with the first injunction:

Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience. In our time we have not finished doing away with idols and we have barely begun to listen to symbols (27).

Ricoeur draws some powerful consequences from this: what really opposes the hermeneutics of suspicion, is faith. "The contrary of suspicion, I will say blunty is faith... faith that has undergone criticism... postcritical faith" (28). This is linked with phenomenology itself, which seeks, in respecting the object, through the reduction, a "second naivete." By disengaging the noetic from the noematic, the intention from its correlate, one recalls and restores the object, by showing it to be the implicit object that speaks to me, that responds to my thinking. One sees what Ricoeur is getting at:

Is not the expectation of being spoken to what motivates the concern for the object? Implied in this expectation is a confidence in language: the belief that language, which bears symbols, is not so much spoken by men as spoken to men (29-30).

On the other hand, the hermeneutic of suspicion,

begins by doubting whether there is an object and whether this object could be the place of transformation of intentionality into kerygma, manifestation, proclamation. This hermeneutics is not an explication of the object, but a tearing off of masks, an interpretation that reduces disguises (30).

Fundamentally, there is a belief in the restorative hermeneutics that the the word is already, to some extent, authentic, because my relationship to it is not in question. This phenomenology/faith/hermeneutics "puts the accent on the object, then underscores the fullness of the symbol" (32). We see in short, that it relies on what Ricoeur has already defined as intrinsic to the symbol: the fact that it is the articulation of a second meaning, a leading of the one into the other. Phenomenology follows this movement, because it does not see the point in thinking that the opposite maneuvers--putting the accent on the subject, and doubting the connection between the manifest and latent, or first and second meanings--are necessary to lead one to a better interpretation. For what is grasped? In fact, everything is actually the about the replacement of both the object and the subject in the act of interpreation:

[Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud] clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a "destructive" critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting... Beginning with them, understanding is hermeneutics: henceforward, to seek meaning is no longer to spell out the consciousness of meaning (33).

The way this is possible is to align the hermeneutic with the work of the authority that codes it:

What all three attempted, in different ways, was to make their "conscious" methods of decyphering coincide with the "unconscious" work of ciphering (34).

They all feel immensely the weight of the representational problematic, and take it extremely seriously. But for Ricoeur, this is questionable, because by taking it too seriously we forget representation itself is representation "of something." Thus, we begin to think that we can just change old representations with new ones, stolen from their source, their point of emergence, and decoded, and thereby produce new meaning: but this transforms hermeneutics into the mere process of destroying all that has already been said, and replacing it with something that has nothing to say, because it is too busy asserting that, in uncovering the process of the production of representation reality has been revealed:

One first finds himself a slave, he understands his slavery, he rediscovers himself free within understood necessity... does not this discipline of the real, this ascesis of the necessary lack the grace of imagination, the upsurge of the possible? (35-6).

The point is not immediately that we should endorse a restorative hermeneutics. It is rather that we should not think the willingness to listen only comes from a willingness to suspect.

Lukács and montage

2009-09-14T10:01:00.004-04:00

In "Realism in the Balance" (1938) we see Lukács interpreting Bloch as elevating the mimetic factor of montage to the level of truth: for Bloch, montage mirrors--or simply, as mirroring, presents--reality. But this is simply inserting "reality" into abstraction, for Lukács, in order to believe that surrealists are realists. The true realism is going beyond empty formalism which supposedly presents, or rather just is the real (montage shows, in its form, reality), to create an experience of the real itself, or consciousness of totality by an increasing sense of the relation of independent objects. Speaking of Bloch on Joyce and Mann, Lukács says:

In the minds of the heroes of both writers we find a vivid evocation of the disintegration, the discontinuities, the ruptures and the "crevices" which Bloch very rightly thinks typical of the state of mind of many people living in the age of imperialism. Bloch's mistake lies merely in the fact that he identifies this state of mind directly and unreservedly with reality itself. He equates the highly distorted image created in this state of mind with the thing itself, instead of objectively unraveling the essence, the origins and the mediations of the distortions by comparing it with reality.
-"Realism in the Balance," in Aesthetics and Politics

Unless one reads this with Lukács readings of Hegel in the background, it will appear extremely conservative. One has to see that this "state of mind" which does so much work here is not something psychological, but rather consciousness. As such, it reflects reality, it is not itself reality: reality is the truth of consciousness, not consciousness itself. Taken as itself, it separates itself from what it reflects as well as the entire process of speculative reflection. It is therefore Bloch who, in Lukács view of things, actually relies on psychology, because he cannot see that consciousness only has a relationship to reality when it is conceived in terms of its relation to the totality, or to its truth (which includes both its reflection and its process of reflection). Thus any expression of a "state of mind" is seen as reality. Also, we must see "reality itself" here as something like "unarticulated" reality, something that has not yet been objectively unraveled but which disturbs each attempt to convert consciousness into a psychology, into a substance without spirit, that has its object only opposed to itself and reflects this object only by understanding it. Reality is not some pre-existing thing here that Lukács is saying Bloch misses, simply because a surrealist montage doesn't itself express reality. Bloch misses this because of the way he conceives this expression, this reflection--because it is for Bloch not mediated by the totality. Its relation to the totality is to present it immediately as truth that is real. Thus Lukács can go on to claim:

Great realism, therefore, does not portray an immediately obvious aspect of reality.
-"Realism in the Balance," in Aesthetics and Politics

Getting away with murder

2009-09-10T14:49:00.017-04:00

For the most part... specific ideological mirages are produced, as it were, in spite of the apparatus rather than because of it. In the desperate flight from everything ontological or foundational about the old philosophical "system," a kind of antisubstantialist doctrine about sheer process is invoked, and a momentum develops--thought as operation rather than as conceptualization--that nonetheless yields the old illusion of system and ontology in the pauses between the operations and the reified appearance of discourse served up on the page. Reification, indeed, not to mention commodification, would offer another "code" in which to characterize the same general fate or destiny of theoretical discourse, as it finds itself thematized and transformed into someone's personal philosophy or system.
-Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, 396

The key move here for me here comes from a realization Lacanian in its origins, but thoroughly Jamesonian (and Marxist) in its insightful, strategic articulation, which is (only?) now more fully understood by the speculative realists or object-ontologists: the process of fleeing ontology and ground itself is a function of a larger movement to flee substance.

One could account for the attractions of strategic essentialism precisely in this way: it offers something like ground and ontology, but still without substance. But perhaps the real question such essentialism is asking concerns substance without essence (Judith Butler, for instance, thoroughly grasps this).

Thus Graham Harman, in Tool-Being (a book you should probably check out, Grant, maybe even more than Malpas, now that I think about it), even more forcefully, and in a way that mirrors what Jameson is getting at:

Intellectuals have gotten very much into the habit of poking holes in all remaining versions of the old-substance concept, and measuring their own critical liberation by the extent to which they are able to do so. For this reason, it may seem a bit counterintuitive to ask the reader to restore a necessary concept of substance, even one of a new kind. It may seem at first like I am trying to get away with murder. But I have tried to make my case in a very straightforward way. If an entity always holds something in reserve beyond any of its relations, and if this reserve cannot be located in any of these relations, then it must exist somewhere else. And since this surplus or reserve is what it is, quite apart from whatever might stumble into it, it is actual rather than potential. But it is not present-at-hand, because I have shown that presence-at-hand turns out to be relational, against what is usually believed.
-Graham Harman, Tool-Being, 230

But what strikes me as pressing is not that objects are under attack. What Jameson allows us to see is that this might be merely a side-effect of the attack on substance (masking as an attack on ontology). For Jameson, what is really under attack in anti-substantialist discourse is positing, the thetic act--that act which Harman himself engages in.

Meillassoux is eloquent on this: what we do in positing such a Harman-like substance is properly speculative--it is thinking the absolute.

But Jameson goes further. He exposes the ideology at work: what has happened is that properly thetic acts have been conceived in terms of process, which in fact is merely a symptom of all thought being seen as process, as the elaboration of premises. "Thought as process rather than as conceptualization." And this is the precise Hegelian way to put it. Thought becomes an attempt to retreat from the totalization brought about by the Concept at each moment, to stay instead with the act of reflecting on an object: it is reflection as opposed to speculation. The upshot of this is that while also failing to grasp the truth of object, such reflection also sees a properly speculative-dialectical movement between these moments as a mere step-by-step series.

In other words, reflection changes the movement of its comprehension into something which never grasps its object (which is counter to the movement of conceptualization itself qua grasping, as Hegel constantly emphasizes with recourse to the genius of the German language), but merely adds another position from which we grasp it, and thus provides only more material for more reflection. So what we continually get are critiques of critiques, criticisms of criticisms--as has been remarked by Latour (most forcefully) and also Meillassoux (with Badiou) and Harman (as well as other new speculative thinkers). What Jameson adds is that this addition of more positions changes the nature of the movement itself: movement is addition, precisely, taking another step along some infinitely extending line. Thinking as process.

Unlike Jameson, the speculative thinkers don't correctly see this. For them, theoretical discourse leaves something out of its object: for Harman, as we said, it was objects themselves, and for the others, it is the speculative act itself, as what gains access to this object. In each case, they claim, what is happening is that we are multiplying critique without getting at any of what is left out. Thus the counter-move for them is not changing the notion of thinking as process, or combating the ideology. Rather, it is seen merely as a positive twist on the same maneuver: Latour himself would oppose criticism or theoretical discourse by "adding" to the object. From Jameson's point of view, there is no opposition here.

So, for Jameson, the positing of substance shouldn't be seen as itself directly transformative of that "habit" of intellectuals of which Harman speaks. It might definitely provide insight into new objects, but its effects on theoretical discourse will be indirect. This is so even from the other side, if we insist on the effects of the positing itself, as the Badiouians do, or Latour does in his own way: if we change the act of thinking, this does not necessarily imply a change in the way thinking unfolds, and so only has its effects indirectly.

This is why none of the speculative realists can ultimately deal with Derrida, though they would like to put him in the correlationist/reflective box and have done with him: even though his is a reflective thinking, he sees that this means thinking cannot be conceived as a process. Or at least he does his best to undo the notion of the step-by-step thinking involved (one only has to look at "Pas," or The Post Card, to see this), though this might make theoretical discourse around him all the more reflective and taken in by the ideology (I will soon read a famous footnote in Speech and Phenomena which will make both points clear).

Jameson sees the only direct effect coming from measuring of the weight of the thetic act, and undoing precisely its kinship with process. For him, this involves a movement of transcoding which, against its own tendencies, by the production of new skills in coding eventually generates new codes and thus maps the real--which all of these discourses do before they affect thinking itself (though I will say Latour might be closest to doing this, with his transcoding of Greimas, and thus less subject to the ideology). Thus Jameson remains true to the project of Marx, which is to turn the claims of philosophers to directly effect anything, even thought itself, on their heads.

cybernetic blazon

2009-09-04T20:33:00.005-04:00

One way of setting about our task of building a ‘thinking machine’ would be to take a man as a whole and to try to replace all the parts of him by machinery. He would include television cameras, microphones, loudspeakers, wheels and ‘handling servo-mechanisms’ as well as some sort of ‘electronic brain.’ This would of course be a tremendous undertaking. The object if produced by present techniques would be of immense size, even if the ‘brain’ part were stationary and controlled by the body from a distance. In order that the machine should have a chance of finding things out for itself it should be allowed to roam the countryside, and the danger to the ordinary citizen would be serious. Moreover, even when the facilities mentioned above were provided, the creature would still have no contact with food, sex, sport and many other things of interest to the human being. Thus although this method is probably the ‘sure’ way of producing a thinking machine it seems to be altogether too slow and impracticable. Instead we propose to try and see what can be done with a ‘brain’ which is more or less without a body, providing at most, organs of sight, speech and hearing.
--Alan Turing, "Intelligent Machines" (1948)

critical blazon

2009-09-04T12:07:00.006-04:00

“In the aftermath of this approach to questions of epistemology and historical progress, the last decades have seen an ever-increasing number of studies about the human body, representing a bewildering array of perspectives and approaches. Today we know the histories of a sexual body, a female body, a pregnant body, a Greek body—to list but a few of innumerable examples—as well as the histories of a body-in-pieces; in other words, of certain organs and body parts in their specific cultural, historical, and geographical configurations.”
--Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory (2006)

brief notes on Bernard Stiegler's theory of "technics"

2009-09-02T19:22:00.007-04:00

For me, one of the biggest “aha!” moments in Bernard Stiegler’s mathemagical (for someone not proficient in continental philosophy but very much keyed in to the specificities of modern media and theories thereof, I swear this thing reads like alchemy––in a good way…) Technics and Time 1, the Fault of Epimetheus (1998 [1994]) comes toward the close of the first full chapter titled “Theories of Technical Evolution. After moving through the wildly different (yet excellently synthesized) writings of Bertrand Gille on technical systems, André Leroi-Gourhan on the technological origins of the human, and Gilbert Simondon on autopoietic “concretization” of technical objects, Stiegler moves us into the pressing need for a theory of technics in our present technological moment. After all, the “technics” (an anglicization of the Ancient Greek concept of technê or tekhnê) of contemporary, everyday life seem far removed from the term’s original sense of handicraft, skill, or artisanal invention, a “making” or a “doing” in opposition to the “disinterested understanding” of epistêmê. (Ideally, I will put together a subsequent post tracking some of the shifts in meaning between technê and epistêmê, which tend all too often to stand as anchors in the virulent opposition between theory and practice). Today, we no longer work with tools, per se, but with machines and complex systems. We do not make or invent, but operate (and this goes far beyond some sort of programmer/end-user, mod/newb distinction; rather, it gets at a historical movement from technology and science to technoscience, from invention and discovery to institutionalized research and development).

…the human has no longer the inventive role but that of the operator. If he or she keeps the inventor’s role, it is qua an actor listening to cues from the object itself, reading from the text of matter. To draw further on the metaphor, the actor is not the author—and that is why existing technical objects are never thoroughly concrete; they are never consciously conceived and realized by the human from out of this ‘logic,’ which is strictly speaking empirical, experimental, and in a sense quasi-existential (it is the object’s mode of existence), the sense, namely, that this logic is revealed only in its realization, in the experience of the object itself, or, as it were, on stage, and not at the time of conception.” (75-6)

This gets at the very problem of writing about technological media (Stiegler problematically never mentions “media” save for references to the “mass media”––more on this below): media refer to an in-between substance rather than any particular object or event in itself. This perhaps could explain the fantastic variety of approaches to “media studies” and the great number of academic departments now positioning themselves as the discipline from which so launch a study of (the) media. On what does one’s focus fall in an account of a medium? What is mediated, and how? Rather than focusing on particular objects (gadgets, inventions, etc.) or specific contents (movies, news, undifferentiated data), Stiegler’s account zones in on a sort of performance theory of media, of a becoming-medium in the moment of use (for “medium” is surely what we mean once we speak about the potentialities and anticipations of the technical object rather than its hard material existence––the distension of the gadget in time rather than its silicon actuality). This is what attracts me to the concept of technics as a paradigm of media theory. This is the great virtue of books like Lucy Suchman’s Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (2007 [1987]) which includes transcripts of first-time user interactions with a XEROX machine, complete with typographical annotations to show inflection and a representation of lights and linguistic signals put out by the device. It is probably a safe claim that Stiegler’s theory of technics, the “realization” technical object “in the experience of the object itself,” is indeed a theory of media.

What I just can’t seem to swallow about Stiegler’s account is the sense that during this moment of interaction with the technical object, what Suchman would refer to as the “situated actions” of a user, the specificities of the operator’s interactions, the nature of her selections, and the volition behind them seem to have little presence in Stiegler’s text.

“The maieutic proper to the empiricism of what we are calling the experience of the technical object, which is its functioning, corresponds here as well to a selection of combinations. Operating on a backdrop of chance, the selection follows phyletic lines whose necessity is their horizon, dotted with mutations whose accidental effects become the new functional principles.” (76)

The “selections” made by the operator are seen here as a property of the technical object itself, in its particular configuration of limitations and possibilities, as if this set of limitations and possibilities attenuates in advance the “selections” to be made. Weaving in and out of Simondon’s texts and feeding off of their resonance with biological evolution, Stiegler continues:

“In evolving, the technical object constitutes a series of objects, a lineage or a line, a ‘family’ of which ‘the primitive technical object is the ancestor,’ and this generation is a ‘natural technical evolution.’ … The technical essence is the identity of the lineage, its family resemblance, the specificity of its patrimony, which is the secret of its singular becoming: ‘The technical essence is recognized in the fact that it remains stable through the evolutional lineage, and not only stable, but productive as well of structures and functions by internal development and progressive saturation’” (77).

We see a perverse flip on the horizon here, as if the machine is operating the human, determining in advance the kind and number of selections to be made by virtue of its cold “technical essence.” If the operations of the user are not determining this technical identity, what is? The presence of what Stiegler relegates to the category of “other systems”––economic, linguistic, sociological, educational, political, military, etc.––can perform only an “artificial attenuation” on the “natural evolution” of the technical system. So that when a state power with particular set of economic interests implements protectionist measures to influence the development of a certain technology (as when the Department of Defense announced a $550 million R&D initiative on flat panel television in 1993 to beat Japan to the market––no lie), this stands outside and separate from the “patrimony” of the device. But if this type of attempt to influence the selection of certain technical traits made on the macro-level of economic policy is deemed “artificial,” what makes selection on the level of the individual operator any less so?

Timelessness

2009-08-31T18:49:00.002-04:00

...historical knowledge has no claim to be opposed to other forms of knowledge as a supremely privileged one [as a sort of Marxism would hold]. We noted above that it is already found rooted in the savage mind, and we can see now why it does not come to fruition there. The characteristic feature of the savage mind is its timelessness: its object is to grasp the world as both a synchronic and a diachronic totality [in the Sartrean sense of this last word], and the knowledge which it draws therefrom is like that afforded by a room by mirrors fixed on opposite walls, which reflect each other (as well as objects in the intervening space) although without being strictly parallel. A multitude of images forms simultaneously, none exactly like any other, so that no single one furnishes more than a partial knowledge of the decoration and furniture but the group is characterized by invariant properties expressing a truth. The savage mind deepens its knowledge with the help of imagines mundi. It builds mental structures which facilitate an understanding of the world in as much as they resemble it. In this sense savage thought can be defined as analogical thought.
-Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 262-263

On Bruno Latour and Eve Sedgwick

2009-08-29T18:39:00.007-04:00

The practical problem we face, if we try to go that new route, is to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thoughts.
-Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"

Latour has been a guiding light for many people looking for a way to transform critical theory (that is, to give it more specificity) and bring it out of the morass of heavy ideological/cultural critique that was so prevalent in the last twenty or more years. (I should say he hasn't only been influential in critical theory, but also in the regular activities of various fields, like philosophy.)

I won't recapitulate his more recent (and not so recent) arguments about associations and things. Suffice it to say that many people find his critique of critique insightful because it stresses adding to the reality of whatever is being studied rather than undermining it, or searching for its conditions of possibility. (Latour is quick to say that phenomenology does something similar, but still goes the wrong way: I'd totally agree to the first part, the fact that phenomenology addes reality, as the main reason one gets interested in phenomenology in the first place.)

His parallel in literary studies and literary theory has to be the late Eve Sedgwick, whose paper on paranoid reading and reparative reading has become increasingly popular over the years as the Latourian critique of critique has hit home more and more.

Unfortunately, both reparative reading and positive or realist criticism (as I'll call it), is that it remains too close to 1) a shift merely in attitude, not of method and 2) the creation of new objects, not tools. I'll admit Latour is, to my mind, much more productive of tools, and so the criticism of him here is a bit less harsh. But when he says something such as the above statement, that we need somehow to condition ourselves to act positively, what he is doing is turning a question about method, indeed about the creation of tools, into something indistinct, something which the critic can either have or not, a property that is assumed to be too self-evident. Sedgwick is horrible on this front: the reparative reading, which does not suspect its text, which does not try to undermine it in order to prove a point, which does not try and look for contradictions but which, well, it's hard to say what it actually does... perhaps inflect it in a different way... well, this reparative reading (whatever it is), remains more a banner or sign which one can pin to one's analysis without having to make any methodological concessions or innovations at all, without citing differently, without writing differently, and fundamentally without thinking differently. It involves the worst of what theory does: it announces a methodological change without at all making this change, or, perhaps more accurately (and more perversely), announces a methodological change and turns methodology into an evaluation of the announcement.

While Latour shies away from such a perspective by the creation of a particular level at which his analysis will move, and both he and Sedgwick generally escape these criticisms because of the insightfulness and innovation of their work (in short, because of their sophistication), it isn't hard to see their statements producing a sort of criticism or critique that merely replaces the disasters of recent theory with other disasters. Before I say what these disasters actually are--for all of recent theory and all of the new theory aren't themselves disasters--let me say that this criticism would be, basically, feel-good criticism overconfident in the actuality of its object (though the diffuseness of Latour's object again keeps him from being so overconfident--not so for simpler associations), or a criticism that values individual judgment insofar as it is confident of its contributions and its grasp of rich areas of investigation. One can look at various philosophical realists (championing, like Latour, their pre-criticality) glimpse, at times, this sort of confidence that says now, we're not only getting at the real things, but also that our attitude, our willingness to add to the reality of things, assures us that we get at the reality of things--a field that I should say is less subject to this particular feel-goodery, however, because it has to pay attention to its method, or its way of inquiry, and so can't totally be assured of much. One can certainly look at literary criticism, however, and see that the turn to two areas in particular, affect and aesthetics, while they also respond to other necessities in the field (the return of aesthetics is a very much needed return, though the question is how much it ever really died off), also exhibits a certain Sedgwickian self-satisfaction--by which I mean less of a focus on method and on explicitly looking at how interpretation will proceed, in favor of creating a new object of inquiry with the old tools by the sheer force of one's individual grasp of the real (one can see both aesthetics and affect return in this way in Sianne Ngai's overrated, but sometimes insightful, Ugly Feelings).

What both here rely on is some notion that previous acts of criticism or critique somehow don't really display the qualities they attribute to a reparative or realist criticism. And this, this dismissal of the previous as too critical, is precisely the disaster of old critical theory that new critical theory would repeat. When Latour says, for example,

Once you realize that scientific objects cannot be socially explained, then you realize too that the so-called weak objects, those that appear to be candidates for the accusation of antifetishism, were never mere projections on an empty screen either...

in short implying that once you see your object as a richness rather than a mask, a fetish (Marx's sense), you begin to see the world of objects itself as things, as richnesses, as the real, which cannot serve as some ground with which to undermine the former set of objects--when Latour says this, how can he seriously think that previous theory and previous critique in general did not operate this way? I agree, there was a period when all you got was the social and the ideological. But good critique works this way pretty much whatever the situation.

Interestingly, Latour (along with Sedgwick) don't seem to really get at the problem--a problem literary theory (and not critical theory) has dealt with for a while. When they say that exposing the social or ideological conditions of possibility of an object has gone on too long, and that we need to care and protect our objects by adding to their reality, they're still assuming that there is some social or cultural connection between the individual critic's work and the societal effect of such exposure or protection. Yes, I agree with Latour: if you add to the reality of the object, you won't get such crazy things happening, probably, as the sociological critique of science hoisted on its own petard by crazy Republicans saying global warming isn't a fact, or inanely claiming that affirmative action is itself racist--thereby enlightening the enlightenment, or bringing down the idols that are the results of the process of bringing down the idols, a critique meant to advance learning, not impede it. But then again you might also still have these things happening, because fundamentally the way the public picks up these habits is not through the results of research but through instruction. That is, if they pick them up at all: frankly, it doesn't seem to me at all clear that academic work has much connection to the society whose products it unmasks. Or, because this borders on sounding unduly pessimistic, I should say that this connection is very very mediated, through all sorts of complexities (teaching, and I'd like to add method, are two of the more direct connections still available--the first direct because it is still immediate, the second because it has mediated, the connection, installed itself in a symbolic field or discourse and triangulated itself--to use a term from Frederic Jameson's "cognitive mapping"--in some way). Just adopting another attitude supposes that the power to point out the object, along with the object's being produced by society, is enough to guarantee that the resulting statement will be in some sense about a societal object. In philosophy, the same maneuver will allow one to talk about real or natural objects, "bypassing society," because they are produced by nature (or man controlling nature).

On this point, one is reminded of that dictum of Fredric Jameson: "In matters of art, and particularly of artistic perception [...] it is wrong to want to decide, to want to resolve a difficulty." It strikes me that both Latour and Sedgwick want to resolve difficulties, even if they aren't entirely dealing with artistic perception but interpretation more generally (with critical perception in general). We might also follow Jameson, who, in the essay from which I extract this remark (the famous "Metacommentary"), points toward Paul Ricoeur and his distinction between a negative and positive hermeneutic. The idea of a positive hermeneutic which would oppose a sort of demystifying critique (the negative hermeneutic) might be more helpful in the long run than Latour's realism (though it could be supplemented with the work on objects and things), and certainly, I think, is more helpful than Sedgwick's reparative reading (who cites Ricoeur only to, in effect, bypass him and replace his powerful notion with a hazy one). Why? Because, unlike reparative realism (as we might call it) Ricoeur links the positive hermeneutic to a search for an origin. In other words, the positive hermeneutic is not just a shift away from demystification, but is an effect of an effort to restore a forgotten meaning. In this respect, it points towards a goal (it is the explicit search for origin, though not as ground), which brings about a method, a process, or at the very least installs the work of criticism within a certain field that requires elaboration, systematic extension, of reflection (in the Hegelian sense, that is, the other side of dialectical unfolding, which reposes in non-being), which the conception of criticism as merely additive does not do.

Poets themselves

2009-08-26T19:51:00.005-04:00

It is the honorable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves.
-Advertisement to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads

"The Poets themselves..." Doesn't this mean that each reader is to become a Critic? Or, if the poet creates the taste by which he is enjoyed, that the critical function be distributed more widely, which amounts to something similar? This is how the taste is brought about: not by better poetry, but by a poetry that appeals to a different type of judgment, a different Critic, and is better thereby.

Blindness, continued

2009-08-19T21:20:00.004-04:00

Here's another (perhaps simpler) way to put what I was getting at a few days ago concerning "The Rhetoric of Blindness" (it might also be considered my reply to Sand's not unwarranted claim that the Derridian problematic is always--in fact, toujours déjà--identical or even the same).

De Man's criticism of Derrida is correct. Derrida, in Of Grammatology, ties the figural language in one or two passages in Rousseau's Essai, most famously the passage where early man calls other men giants, to a literal referent, fear (See Of Grammatology, 275-280: it is an extremely complex moment that needs to be reconstituted in full, not reduced to a paragraph or two as de Man does, and to the most simplistic logic, to boot). For de Man, this involves a failure to recognize the figurativeness, the "rhetoricity" (he rightly always puts it in quotes, though actually I don't think we need to--and this is my argument in a nutshell) of the figure Rousseau is talking about (metaphor). But this criticism is only right from the perspective of someone who is invested in figural language as de Man, the literary critic, is. In other words, the criticism is only right from within the sphere of the literary, or is only right insofar as deconstruction will is seen as a discourse with effects and implications that are specifically (indeed, almost solely) literary. In other words, this is only right as long as you are going to speak of deconstruction as literary criticism, and deconstruction's effects as the effects of literary criticism when it encroaches on other discourses.

Why? Because figural language--or ultimately the rhetorical and fictional character of literary discourse that mobilizes figures--suspends reference, or rather requires reference to occur without a corresponding semantic effect, the production of a definitive meaning that you can say is true (or false) of the discourse. In short, it is what makes you talk about Elizabeth Bennett or Oliver Twist as real people, as entities with meanings, despite the fact you know them to be fictional, lacking any correspondence in reality--and what makes you wrong for doing so. Now, I'd be the first to insist on the unreality of these characters and the way that a metaphoric meaning, say, does not just take the place of a literal meaning. But I do so because this is what establishes a science of literature, or gives specificity to literary discourse as a discourse that is able to move past this complication and say something about the fictional or rhetorical discourse involved (in fact, it also allows me to situate a particular literary text historically, or refer it to reality, even more rigorously: when I actually do refer it to reality, I situate where the fiction takes place, instead of trying to talk about how literature refers to real events). I do it, that is, because this insistence on the undecidability of literary discourse with respect to its truth allows me to be more precise about the discourse that I analyze. I don't insist on this unreality because I believe it to be productive of the same thing that deconstruction brings about.

Deconstruction, in other words, is not the same thing as the insistence upon a difference between reference and meaning, or rather it doesn't assume this insistence will produce the entirety of what decontruction produces. Deconstruction might, when it approaches the province of literature, involve itself in this insistence (as Derrida does in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, in a reading of Blanchot), but (and this is even the case in Demeure), it does not have to respect this distinction between the figural/fictional and the referential in the way that de Man says it should.

For de Man putting forth the distinction involves eventually "isolating" rhetoric "from its epistemological function," ("Epistemology of Metaphor," 49), or that indecision between the true and the false, and does so such that the distinction itself, if pressed, then actually resists this isolation. But this resistance, as it were, need not come solely from this distinction. This is why Derrida continually tries to pull the word "trope" from de Man's discourse and use it differently, most notably as a turning (not only of phrase). Seen in this light, the criticism of de Man seems is not as concerned with deconstruction but with literature, and thus, instead of deconstructing, "verges on establishing a metaphysics of rhetoricity," as Frances Ferguson puts it (Solitude and the Sublime, 53, note 8).

This is at once to recognize the immense achievement of the de Manian appropriation of Derrida: it suddenly gives you a mode of achieving critical effects that align with the project of deconstruction which are specific to the study of literature. That is, they don't have to start using the same concepts as Derrida, and looking for dissemination in King Lear. This is the origin of the 1975 battle between Joseph Riddell and J. Hillis Miller (see the latter's review of the work of the former, "Deconstructing the Deconstructors," and the former's reply to the latter, "A Miller's Tale," in the summer and autumn issues of Diacritics). Both Riddell (who writes against de Man) and Miller (who writes for him) miss the point and refuse to recognize de Man's achievement.

At the same time, it is to recognize that these effects are indeed an appropriation that, as I said last time, get at the same thing as Derrida, but precisely by seeing it as the same thing, as something that is not (as it is for Derrida) a continual problem calling for different inflections, or rather (as it is not for Derrida) a problem that stabilizes itself quite easily. (However, I should say that sometimes, when de Man says "Derrida's thesis" is "precisely" "asserting the priority of language over that of presence," I have my doubts the same thing is even being got at, since this like a huge misreading of what Derrida is doing. See "The Rhetoric of Blindness," 119.)

This is what Gayatri Spivak was getting at when she said (how exactly did it go, Sand?) that Derrida is whoever you want him to be. If you are a psychoanalyst, he is a critic of Freud. If you are a critic of Mallarme, god save you, he is the best of those critics. It is an insightful comment because it lets you recognize there is a world of difference between this statement and what de Man himself says, which is that Derrida is blind, as a critic, to Rousseau's text and misunderstands it, while, at the same time, "Derrida's version of this misunderstanding comes closer than previous version to Rousseau's actual statement because it singles out the point of maximum blindness the area of greatest lucidity: the theory of rhetoric and its inevitable consequences" ("The Rhetoric of Blindness," 136). And it makes me revisit a statement of hers (that I criticized a while ago but of which I now approve), if it is understood as applicable within the problematic that I am here trying to sketch (as it is not always, I think, by Spivak):

The aspect of deconstructive practice that is best known in the United States is its tendency towards infinite regression. The aspect that interests me most, however, is the recognition, within deconstructive practice, of provisional and intractible starting points in any investigative effort...
-Gayatri Spivak, "Draupadi" in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 246.

It goes on to talk about these starting points as recognized "complicities" ("...intractible starting points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities where a will to knowledge would create oppositions...") and there I do believe my criticisms apply--in fact for the same reasons that I am outlining here with respect to de Man. Derrida at that point becomes a political thinker, or appropriated to political discourse as it is articulated in the project of critical theory, just as for de Man he becomes a literary critic or literary theorist. This fate of Derrida, to be appropriated--and most oddly now appropriated by philosophy--isn't so much because his ideas get perverted or misunderstood (indeed, as I'm saying, de Man is understanding them and getting at the same thing), it is just that what is continually a problem for Derrida keeps getting solved. Now, this doesn't mean it is unsolvable. It in fact means that efforts to assert it is unsolvable end up solving it--while for Derrida (most of the time: he too succumbs to this) they don't.

Blindness

2009-08-16T16:34:00.001-04:00

De Man's famous essay, "The Rhetoric of Blindness" is, for me, about a very crucial deconstructive question: where does the deconstructor go in her or his analysis? Put in more correct terms--you can already see de Man misunderstanding or misconstruing it here, in a way that was crucial for the history of deconstruction--where is the site or place of inscription in which the overturning and displacement of a text (to use that classic formula of Derrida's from the interview "Positions" in the book that takes its name--Positions) takes place?

The answer, for Derrida, is not really an answer. Inscription takes place also in a text, in a place that is also displaced by the displacement, in a space that itself spaces itself out (though no longer as itself) if or when overturning comes to overturn the spacing of a text. But this is all fraught with inaccuracies of expression, if I can put it that way, and is ultimately quite problematic. That is, it is a problem, and chiefly a problem of when the overturning that I says comes to overturn the spacing of the text, indeed comes. It is a question of the coming of this other, what Derrida would later (in the lecture "Psyche: Invention of the Other," in another book that takes this for its name, though with one small difference--Psyche: Inventions of the Other) call the invention (in-venio) of the other.

De Man would simplify things, or rather solve the problem, deproblematize it once and for all in this essay--even though it might require a few revisions later. For him, the problem can be solved by saying the displacement of the site by displacement is the inevitable, not chance, outcome of an act of criticism or critique: deconstruction, in other words, becomes a criticism that itself can be (deconstructively) criticized. In short, the deconstructor is deconstructed as a critic would be criticized and thereby, de Man, claims (most outrageously) what Derrida calls text becomes literature--or that which inevitably escapes criticism.

This settles it. But it also doesn't. When Derrida opens up the problem of the invention of the other, when he calls what we were clalling overturning by a new name, isn't he merely restating the problem? "Invention" in other words, means merely the same thing: on the one hand, it is an act of constructing (inventing) an analysis, a critique, of setting up yourself as a deconstructor in relationship to what you will deconstruct. On the other hand, there is the problem of when, exactly, the coming of the other will come with respect to what you have invented, to your critique. De Man would then say there is no difference here, that this is just a repetition of the same problem. In other words, he would say that this lecture of Derrida's, which takes place twenty years later after the interview "Positions," is essentially the same problem, or has the same position. Or, rather, he would say that the problem is already solved.

What he--and the many, many others who think something similar--would fail to see would be precisely that Derrida, throughout his life, was overturning and displacing the problem of the overturning and displacement. And rather than this meaning that he operated in the same way, with the same problem, with the same positions (using that favorite figure of de Man's, the "irony of irony"), this would mean that he was reinscribing the problem along different lines, or reproblematizing it--not solving it. To think this would be to admit the chance that the two discourses were not inevitably the same, or rather to see that calling "overturning and displacement" "invention of the other" is not a naming of the same thing, or, more precisely, that the second phrase is not an outcome of the former, a development out of an inevitable residue of the first.

This is just to explicate a fine sentence I found recently, which goes like this: for Derrida, "[what] repeatedly institutes difference also acts to reify difference, so that the problem of trying to face [difference] continually reasserts itself as a problem" (Frances Ferguson, "Reading Heidegger: Paul De Man and Jacques Derrida," in boundary 2, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), pp. 593-610). To reify difference is to begin to think that the chance here is just inevitable, and to reduce the problem. This is what de Man, in trying to ensure difference is never reified, does. That is, its not a question of de Man (and others) getting Derrida wrong, or not getting at the same thing . It is just that this thing, for Derrida, is never the same, is continually a problem.

De Man and duplicity

2009-08-14T17:51:00.006-04:00

Here's my attempt to turn the de Manian version of deconstruction on its head... most significantly, by resignifying de Man's "irony" to mean "duplicity:"

Occasionally, Derrida will say something like the following, where he is speaking of the movement of deconstruction:

...No matter what their interest or their necessity may be today,the social sciences (notably those dealing with cultural or scientific and academic institutions) cannot, as such, claim to "objectify" a movement which, essentially, questions the philosophical, scientific, and institutional axiomatics of those same sciences.
-"Mnemosyne" in Memoires for Paul de Man, 15

To be understood, we have to take the statement ironically: the stress falls on the "as such" and on the quotations around the word objectify, and, instead of a brash assertion that deconstruction is impervious to the analysis of the social sciences, we get a statement that these social sciences will transform the nature of their claims and of their process of objectification insofar as they account for deconstruction. In other words, the statement is not "negative," it is, read ironically, quite "positive" (this is what people are getting at, in other words, when they say deconstruction is not negative, but is a hopeful endeavor).

But at what point does this irony become duplicity?

Derrida, to his credit, after saying this goes on to elaborate on the nature of the movement, which buttresses the point regarding deconstruction's ability to transform the discourses that attempt to comprehend it, especially by objectification. He makes other statements, in other words, that rely upon the statement here qua ironized. This not only clarifies the original sentence, or teaches us how to take it, but also makes his discourse one of unfolding such bald statements wherever they appear. In short, he tempers and directs the brashness, so as help distinguish it from the radicality of his task (which here does indeed include a challenge to discourses that would unproblematically comprehend deconstruction).

By no means does he engage in this slow separation of the duplicity of a sentence from its irony all the time. But it is, I'd say, generally the way he works when he lets one of these statements fly.

Not so with Paul de Man. For de Man, duplicity is constantly mashed together with irony, so as to make us confuse the former for the latter. But let me elaborate on the distinction, first, since "duplicity" carries a reference to truth that does not seem relevant here.

By a duplicity, I don't entirely mean a lie. But I do mean that, in duplicity, one forgoes (or tries primarily to forgo) reference to a schema where truth is indeed at play. Such a scheme would be the Heideggerian one, which does not at all define the true merely as the correct (nor does it keep the question of truth out of art or fiction). What is important in duplicity is the mere construction of a double, of another meaning, that, before it references any schema, will make one meaning less able to be unproblematically apprehended. It does not, without elaboration, continue to disrupt a schema by calling into question its truth or falsity, as irony does. (In short, it confuses phenomenality with truth, which violently turns everything on its head.)

The distinction, then, between de Man and Derrida becomes more clear. It involves the trajectory of their statements, the way they are elaborated. De Man ends up at statements which are just assumed to be ironic, when they are often merely duplicitous. He even constructs a notion of irony that allows these statements to be assumed to be ironic (if it isn't clear from what I have said, I am using irony differently than de Man's definition--or rather, insisting on the use of this definition in a different way than he uses it). Derrida occasionally sinks from his generally ironic discourse into duplicity. But I would also stress that Derrida is also not continually ironic. His statements can be understood otherwise.

The difference can be seen in "The Rhetoric of Blindness." The essays acts as if it ironizes Derrida, but it merely makes him duplicitous--that is, trying to say something other than Rousseau has already said. This is duplicitous in itself, which is evident on its reliance on unfounded, duplicitous statements, like,

The only literal statement that says what it means to say is the assertion that there can be no literal statements.
-"The Rhetoric of Blindeness," in Blindness and Insight, 133.

No elaboration. Just another conclusion, which relies, at bottom, on duplicity (not irony), the fact that "Rousseau explicitly says the opposite" (notice how "explicit" has lost any connection with truth):

In the narrative rhetoric of Rousseau's text, this is what is meant by the chronological fiction that the "first" language had to be poetic language. Derrida, who sees Rousseau as a representational writer, has to show instead that his theory of metaphor is founded the priority of the literal over the metaphorical meaning, of the "sens propre" over the "sens figuré." And since Roussau explicitly says the opposite, Derrida has to interpret the chapter on metaphor as a moment of blindness in whcih Rousseau says the opposite of what he means to say.
-"The Rhetoric of Blindness," 133

This is all, apparently, necessitated--look at all the has tos--but it does not at all serve to elaborate, to push the duplicity into irony, as I have defined it above.

This is just one of the problems of this disturbing essay (which nevertheless opens up some interesting, if naive, questions about Derrida's inscription). De Man works to revise some of its conclusions in Allegories of Reading, most notably through increasing elaboration. That doesn't ever seem to get him to the point of irony, though (in short, irony and allegory--of reading or not--do not a supplement make).

But we might legitimately wonder whether deconstruction, even as "practiced" by Derrida, has a tie to this sort of duplicity. I'd say it has in the past, but there is no reason why it can't untie them in the future. Derrida's more forthright work gets rid of it pretty thoroughly (The Gift of Death, for example, but also "earlier" texts like Glas).

Were I not so frequently associated with this adventure of deconstruction, I would risk, with a smile, the following hypothesis: America is deconstruction. In this hypothesis, America would be the proper name of deconstruction in progress, its family name, its toponymy, its language and its place, its principle residence. And how could we define the United States today without integrating the following into the description: It is that historical space which today, in all its dimensions and through all its power plays, reveals itself as being undeniably the most sensitive, receptive, or responsive space of all to the themes and effects of deconstruction. Since such a space represents and stages, in this respect, the greatest concentration in the world, one could not define it without at least including this symptom (if we can even speak of symptoms) in its definition. In the war that rages over the subject of deconstruction, there is no front; there are no fronts. But if there were, they would all pass through the United States. They would define the lot, and, in truth, the partition of America. But we have learned from "Deconstruction" to suspend these always hasty attributions of proper names. My hypothesis must thus be abandoned. No, "deconstruction" is not a proper name, nor is America the proper name of deconstruction.
-"Mnemosyne," 18.

Destroying rhetoric in the 18th century

2009-08-13T09:38:00.015-04:00

Addison quotes a French author in his "Pleasures of the Imagination" series in The Spectator. Fréard is talking about architecture, and the necessity of introducing "grandeur of manner" into buildings.

Addison explains this particular "grandeur" as what makes the dome of the Pantheon more impressive than a Gothic cathedral, even though the latter is larger: the general plannedness, or designedness of the structure is carried out across the large structure, while the cathedral is just large (indeed much larger) and supplemented by ornamentation. Design trumps bulk, or rather bulk is created when there is no design.

But there still remains the question of why the ornamentation (little figures and such) doesn't make up for the lack of planning, or why it doesn't signify design as much as the coffering of the Pantheon. Fréard says the following, which Addison quotes:

...that will have but a poor and mean effect where there is a redundancy of those smaller ornaments, which divide and scatter the angles of the sight into such a multitude of rays, so pressed together that the whole will appear but a confusion.

In short, ornament is seen not as an addition anymore to something that is lacking. It is seen as adding to what is already a plenitude. This makes it into something that scatters: if the eye is already being directed, adding something else will direct away from what was the unadorned direction. Or even more accurately, it will pull the eye away while also pulling the eye away while also soliciting it to follow the original direction: the view is scattered because it is split.

Who would have thought ornament could be seen as something so violent, when just a century before, it was considered to only enhance beauty if not carried too far? The general line of thought here is to convert this into a point about rhetoric as well: what is usually characterized as the 18th century destruction of classical rhetoric, beginning with neoclassicism and ending with the reformation of the educational system and the creation of public schools (which no longer stressed the classics, but stressed the need for general intelligibility), is not so much a destruction as a transformation of its role, which centers on the devaluing of its ornamental role (it should be noted that this general characterization has already fallen apart with due attention to the transformation of political rhetoric surrounding the Civil War, and can even be pushed farther back to the late 16th century, when the use of classical rhetoric was at its peak (see the work of Walter Ong on the rise of the idea of information).

But in order to convert this into a point about rhetoric, one also has to consider how, a century before, even ornament in rhetoric was less ornamental than it appeared. It was generally seen as the structure given to argument--that is, design. And if this is so, well, what we're talking about is not so much a destruction as a return of rhetoric. But how could it return in such a different guise?

One answer comes from yet another art, situated between literature or verbal argument and architecture: painting. The 18th century increasingly saw both architecture and (what is often harder to even think about today) literature as similar to painting (though Addison actually tries to retain the primacy of architecture over painting: I think we can still see he succumbs to this rubric however, which is why I started with his remarks on the Pantheon etc.). This is a bit unreal to us, who are more used to seeing literature in particular in terms of cinema--if anything. So what roughly happens is that the design given to argument had to become more visible. And this meant seeing what were essential aspects of classical rhetoric, like tropes, as things that popped out of the discourse. This was helped by the classicists' tendency to categorize rhetorical figures, which could easily allow them to be abstracted out of the linguistic medium. While this abstraction was once seen as more natural, or more accurately as something to be naturalized or internalized by education and made into a skill, the increasing tendency to see the verbal medium like paint strokes made naturalizing them unnecessary (I am arguing this instead of the general argument that proceeds by seeing this conversion of rhetoric into ornament rather than skill as a product of declining standards of education or emphasis on more public goals--an argument that is, I think, either unnecessarily pessimistic or unnecessarily nostalgic, and at its worst either undemocratic or Luddite, and tends to turn this transformation we are tracing here back again into destruction). So while skill is reinterpreted as involving, not the deployment of internalized knowledge, but something more explicit--namely, the arrangement of ornament--it also made ornament more obtrusive, less transparent, since it did not proceed from some background intention or knowledge.

(One could also say that the process of proceeding-from-background-knowledge has changed as well, since in Locke it becomes association, not expression. The notion of memory, considered not as preconscious but non-conscious knowledge, then also becomes more important: this is what produces the division in Addison between primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination.)

The explicitness of design, then, naturally produces another movement to eliminate ornament as superfluous to that design. The neoclassicists held on to the notion somewhat, trying to play with ornament as arrangement. But the increasing explicitness seems to have also made the notion of design expand beyond what mere arrangement can produce. Or rather, arrangement itself transforms to become the arrangement elements that are both smaller and larger than anything resembling the size of the classical rhetorical unit (which was either small trope--a few words--or a large rhetorical plan--considered as the relation between a block of sentences and the preceding block). I would say that this is the point at which we get the vague early-mid 18th century notions of design like variety, novelty, and the picturesque, and then more concrete notions of design as animating authorial intention, like genius (in Young), the general (in Johnson), and imagination (in Coleridge's sense). But the whole point of my little history here is that it would be a mistake to see this as an all-out retreat from design, a complete forfeiture, as many people do who are either not schooled in the 18th century (particularly its middle), or give too much credence to the notion that rhetoric relies on skill, considered as implicit knowledge that is then deployed (that is, the educational argument). What has happened is that design now appears in units which simply have less relationship to traditional rhetorical units, and a different function--one that is much more in keeping with the idea that using language is painting. But this means that rhetoric, far from being destroyed, is actually still at work: it just appears as that part of the text which can be traced to an origin or function, or rather to what gets called a "whole." Rhetoric has not lost, but regained much of its functionality. The only thing different is that language, in which rhetoric takes place, has become a thicker medium, incorporating the visual in painting. Thus, if you don't exit language and consider the history of other art forms, this will of course appear as a destruction, a thinning out.

Attention

2009-08-12T09:52:00.006-04:00

Johnson (and not Coleridge), the father of the (particularly English) idea that criticism is a task of focusing or unfocusing attention:

His plots, whether historical or fabulous, are always crouded with incidents, by which the attention of a rude people was more easily caught than by sentiment or argumentation; and such is the power of the marvellous even over those who despise it, that every man finds his mind more strongly seized by the tragedies of Shakespeare than of any other writer; others please us by particular speeches, but he always makes us anxious for the event, and has perhaps excelled all but Homer in securing the first purpose of a writer, by exciting restless and unquenchable curiosity, and compelling him that reads his work to read it through.
-Preface to Shakespeare

This rehearses all sorts of motifs in Johnson: the fantastic (found in the novel) as what distracts from the particular, the particular (and thus the fantastic too) as what distracts from the general; the knowledge of the audience that the play is only a spectacle, etc. But notice the particular valence given to the last phrase, "to read it through." Thoroughness, and a concomitant notion of the text as a completed unit, has become linked with attention. The author who creates such a finished work--which is finished not so much because it is closed off but because it has unfolded completely a general picture (copy, in Johnson's language) of nature--rouses attention and in a way deserves the attention, because (though later critics would disagree with this) we can't help but pay attention to it. Conversely, novels are boring (for Johnson), because they don't adequately depict the general, they are too fantastic, too unreal, and so they don't have any connection with us. In the end, this relies on a solid continuity, for Johnson, between the critical act and action itself: reading, for Johnson, is like running or lifting something--it is work, of the body. The art that hits this right level of generality prompts us to act--that is what he really means when he says Shakespeare has us waiting for the event--and attention is this action. All this, you see, lays the ground for the ridiculous idea that criticism is a sort of activity that can have huge effects in society. This is something that Johnson would actually disagree with, because for him the critical act is, while an act, extremely limited--precisely because it is an act, in fact. In other words, Johnson has a realistic view of action that makes him counter, ultimately, the idea that attention is something that can have massive effects... like what "close readers" (Leavis is the most forceful about this, though Brower, while he sounds less militant, basically is saying the same thing) often attribute to their work, seeing it as not only attention, but attention relevant to society, as it unlocks new dimensions of the text in question and cultivates a skill that can defeat manifest meanings. Johnson (and not, as is often said, Coleridge, who is the father of method, which the Brits first, and then the Americans horribly confuse with attention--even when confronted with, eheu!, theory) is the father of this idea, but he'd be quite disappointed with his progeny.

Demolition

2009-08-11T17:57:00.005-04:00

I have been trying to say this coherently for a while now... in fact just this week (in some comments to a post of mine) I had written that de Man's primary aim is to destroy the critical concepts that we employ, sometimes at all costs. Little did I know it was already said, in the precise way in which I was thinking it... and by Ferguson, some thirty years ago, to boot:

De Man's notion of "literary language" seems (to me at least) less an assertion of the value of the literary text and the "subject (if only as a function)" than a demolition of those concepts. "Literary language" appears as an extension and an undelineated consolidation of those figures of allegory and irony which he discussed in "The Rhetoric of Temporality." For the ironic use to which de Man puts literary history - the history of reading - implies that not even de Man's uncovering of previous misreadings can be a final stance. The text of any sign which can be read or assimilated in more than one way (i.e., most things with the possible exception of things like a stop sign by the side of the road, which bears a certain relation to the force of gravity) must be literary, since only misreadings or contradictory readings are potential indices to the very rhetoricity or literariness of which de Man speaks. But to speak of misreadings as testimony to literariness is not to valorize the literary text, but rather to insist that the bottom drop out of it. The apparent hypostatization of the text is itself rhetorical; it serves a polemical purpose by countering both the notion of the author as a unified subject who says what he thinks and the notion of an historical development or progression in which ideas become clearer (or conversely, a decline, in which they are less clear). But further, this apparent elevation of the literary text casts an ironic light upon a recurrent delusion which readers pass upon themselves. The problems of reading any literary text
are not to be resolved easily, or else the anecdote about the white Southerner leaping to the stage to defend Desdemona against Othello would not be so clearly a joke. Reading becomes a complicated process as soon as one recognizes that distinguishing between truth and fiction, or presence and absence, (ad infinitum) is never enough. For the difficulty is always in trying to imagine that the text means something different from what I think it means. And whereas de Man continually submits himself to
the delusion which we all open ourselves to in reading and writing about reading as if we had, finally, "got it right," his version of the text - as an empty meaning which lends itself to a variety of "full meanings" - exercises an ironic function. Like gravity in Baudelaire's De l'essence du rire, the language of a text continually and continuously exerts a force that leads to a fall; precisely at the moment at which any reader or any critic imagines that he has distinguished the figurative from the literal, the "real" meaning of the text, he asserts its presence as his subjectivity. And precisely at that moment, he is mocked by the text, which does not, and cannot, yield up any immutable classification of its figurativeness or its literalness.
-Frances Ferguson, "Reading Heidegger: Paul De Man and Jacques Derrida," in boundary 2 4.2, 593-610, 1976, 603

Dick Minim

2009-08-09T15:29:00.005-04:00

Samuel Johnson's story of Dick Minim (Idler 60 and 61) represents the point at which rigor has so completely become the underlying form of criticism (no matter how individual and capricious) that it can be mocked by being transposed into the mere form of capricious fiction itself.

This is why the narrative of the individual opinions of Minim can be so hilariously enumerated, despite the truth or falsity of the actual observations--which Johnson nevertheless refuses to make so commonplace as to prevent the genuine provocation of thought:

Of the great authors he now began to display the characters, laying down as an universal position that all had beauties and defects. His opinion was, that Shakespear, committing himself wholly to the impulse of nature, wanted that correctness which learning would have given him; and that Jonson, trusting to learning, did not sufficiently cast his eye on nature. He blamed the stanza of Spenser, and could not bear the hexameters of Sidney. Denham and Waller he held the first reformers of English numbers, and thought that if Waller could have obtained the strength of Denham, or Denham the sweetness of Waller, there had been nothing wanting to complete a poet. He often expressed his commiseration of Dryden's poverty, and his indignation at the age which suffered him to write for bread; he repeated with rapture the first lines of All for Love, but wondered at the corruption of taste which could bear any thing so unnatural as rhyming tragedies. In Otway he found uncommon powers of moving the passions, but was disgusted by his general negligence, and blamed him for making a conspirator his hero; and never concluded his disquisition, without remarking how happily the sound of the clock is made to alarm the audience. Southern would have been his favourite, but that he mixes comick with tragick scenes, intercepts the natural course of the passions, and fills the mind with a wild confusion of mirth and melancholy. The versification of Rowe he thought too melodious for the stage, and too little varied in different passions. He made it the great fault of Congreve, that all his persons were wits, and that he always wrote with more art than nature. He considered Cato rather as a poem than a play, and allowed Addison to be the complete master of allegory and grave humour, but paid no great deference to him as a critick. He thought the chief merit of Prior was in his easy tales and lighter poems, tho' he allowed that his Solomon had many noble sentiments elegantly expressed. In Swift he discovered an inimitable vein of irony, and an easiness which all would hope and few would attain. Pope he was inclined to degrade from a poet to a versifier, and thought his numbers rather luscious than sweet. He often lamented the neglect of Phaedra and Hippolitus, and wished to see the stage under better regulations...
-Idler 60

Besides the fact that it announces something about the general development of criticism, the ramble is important to me also for this latter gesture, where we take each opinion a little more seriously than we probably should. It transforms this formal maneuver into something more than satire (from which it is obviously derived), and less than full blown sarcasm. It allows Johnson to be vicious (as he is in mocking the Minim's praise of the "sound echoing the sense" at the end of 60), but not by adopting fully the tone, register, or genre that this requires. All we get is a portrait of capriciousness, and ultimately injustice, that disturbs. Johnson usually contains these instances, however frequent they are in his work (he is, indeed, obsessed with injustice, with the irremediable), by offering some sort of alternative. Here, there's no way out...

The rise of criticism as science

2009-08-05T21:04:00.005-04:00

Is the progressive development, throughout the British 18th century, of the notion that criticism must proceed from principles, or in short constitute a science, merely the other side of the development of the notion that artistic activity proceeds from faculties or powers like genius and imagination? Rigor would be what tempers the assertion that a certain piece of writing has its origin not just in the mere manipulation of elements, not just in the mere psychology of an author, but also in the unrealized possibilities of its expression--which are ultimately coextensive with language itself. This would be so if these possibilities are thought of as specifiable, determinable, as Johnson and Coleridge indeed did (it is more of a question whether the German Romantics ever made this leap, as they tend to focus on language itself--or begin to specify its essence). For the assertion then allows a nearly infinite process of further development, further elaboration, further proof. A series, a sequence of action can then be pursued: criticism suddenly involves not just specification, but investigation. The two combine, of course, in demonstration. This would explain the movement from genius to imagination, as well: what is less specifiable, but generally moving in the right direction, is disposed of or refined with a concept that promises epistemological or even metaphysical payoff--a promise that is more important as a promise, in that series of next steps that it makes visible, but which do not necessarily have to be pursued.

A caution...

2009-08-05T12:21:00.003-04:00

When I said (albeit rather quickly as I was growing tired that night) de Man puts forth the notion that literature is singular, unique, privileged, irreducible in order to understand its relation to society as mediated, complex, rather than immediate and representative--when I said this, I might have also stressed that de Man's view constitutes more of a caution against the immediate than a definite, positive account of mediation. In other words, de Man's goal is not so much to outline exactly what the artwork qua singular is, as to use this definition of the artwork in order to make us resist that jump from the work to society. De Man is giving us a caution rather than some positive notion, resting in the supposed fact of literature's irreducibility.

To understand this in more detail, one only has to follow Frances Ferguson (in Solitude and the Sublime and in her numerous essays) and look at how de Man would view multiple interpretations of a literary work. When we have more than one interpretation, we have an instance where mediation and immediacy are able to be confused: we might take the multiplicity of interpretations as somehow indicative of the way society at large interprets simply because where there is more than one interpretation, you might have some sort of sociality taking place (as reader-response critics do). The legitimate question would then emerge of how such a social work is still singular, or implies certain processes of production.

But de Man, because he would rather caution us than provide us with positive notions, condemns such an approach as immediacy (or phenomenalism: see his essay on Iser, "Reading and History"). But this still leaves open the question of what to do with multiple interpretations. De Man therefore takes the opposite tack. That is, he considers the multiplicity of interpretations as a fact, before it considers it as an indicator that there may thereby be a sociality established by virtue of this multiplicity. It is, indeed, a fact of language itself--which I touched at in my previous post in the remarks on privileged language: each word has an indeterminate multiplicity of significations. It will of itself produce differing interpretations. In the text itself there are already multiple readers.

In other words, de Man rightly sees that there is a difference between more than one interpretation and a social consensus of some sort. In fact, this difference makes possible the thought that the multiplicity of interpretations might at times oppose sociality, might make sociality in certain situations impossible. This is nothing less than the New Critical innovation of I.A. Richards, who grasps that a certain lack of consensus in the way meaning is understood entails a completely different literary text gets perceived than the one we might presuppose is there: the difference between the two then becomes a limited indicator of how perception involves culture, and the text itself on the page becomes something that is, as text, not fixed. This, in other words, is something coming very close to that socially indicative, and yet singular, text that we were saying a positive account might imply. Ferguson points out (see "On the Number of Romanticisms," ELH 58 (1991)) that as New Criticism evolves (helped along primarily by Empson and Leavis) it becomes more and more willing to just insist on the difference between sociality and multiplicity in order to say that certain types of multiplicity, usually virtuous people or people with common sense, create good types of sociality (this is what, in Fish and also Iser, reader response criticism also moves towards). What started as an exception becomes an argument for exceptionalism. Now, de Manian deconstruction takes this exception and makes it the rule: the notion that multiple interpretations might in fact oppose the formation of some sociality or consensus becomes the notion that multiplicity never entails sociality. Multiplicity is, rather, a fact of language which the social must confront. Or, better put, multiplicity is that which must always be reduced in order to talk about the social, for multiplicity has become precisely singularity.

This is why Ferguson sees deconstruction as an empiricist or materialist skepticism: to talk about anything that we can derive from the multiplicity of interpretations is to remove ourselves from its being a fact, from the dispersed and material process of its production, and therefore to erase its singularity.

This might be enough for now, but I'd like to actually consider the larger implications of this view.

For to understand deconstruction as empiricist/materialist skepticism is to change the terms by which people often disagree with it--before or after becoming enormously frustrated with it. In short, it makes it possible to see that retreating from deconstruction is not a retreat.

Often people see that deconstruction lacks something, but instead of seeing that this lack is really not enough of a lack, as Ferguson suggests, they see it as the limit, the bottom, if we can make this even more of a spatial metaphor. I choose this language because many use it: "deconstruction gives us nothing positive, in the end," is a common way to put it. I myself have just used the language in talking about de Man. But the question arises, why are we supposing that all alternatives are positive, are plenitudes? Why do we think that alternatives do deconstruction get us moving again, but in the wrong direction, the direction of positivity? To give up deconstruction on this view is seen as a return to normalcy, say, rather than what Ferguson suggests it might be: a furthering of, a fidelity to deconstruction.

But we've skipped over what this lack exactly is. What do people see that it lacks? Put as clearly as such a limited space as this can allow, deconstruction lacks a more concrete focus on the creation of rules, principles, or classifications--in short provisional regulations--which, to use two such concepts or regulations created by Derrida (see his Rogues: Two Essays on Reason), would help distinguish unconditionality from sovereignty. This would relate (by separating them more) this act of distinguishing (what we awkwardly call deconstruction "in practice") to what the distinction names, but cannot bring about: the unconditional renunciation of sovereignty (which is "real" deconstruction, which of course no longer is simply deconstruction).

Here, I'd like to make an important distinction: these regulations are quite different than what de Man imputes to language. On this basis, I think one can differentiate between Derridian deconstruction and de Manian deconstruction (as one can also distinguish Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction from Derrida's). It's not a matter of style or even of approach, but of the status each give to the concepts they are dealing with. De Man's are distinct from Derrida's in two ways: 1) they aren't provisional, and 2) they aren't rules or regulations, but rather names (or, sometimes, classifications). And while Derrida uses names, these names at bottom function to regulate. In de Man they refer and disrupt reference, generating a particular type of performance. As is obvious from much of what I have written on the subject, I find the Derridian status (and excuse me for this inaccurate, but convenient, word) much more rigorous, and ultimately much more useful--not to mention clearer and more honest. But there are huge benefits to what de Man does as well.

The point, however, is that both these regulations seem to come out of nowhere. We lack, in other words, some stable way of creating them. This is what makes both Derrida and de Man seem extraordinarily subjective to people--and thereby what makes them say (despite Derrida's continual statements to the contrary) that deconstruction is a form of criticism or critique (in short, that it is destruction, in not even a Heideggerian sense).

Giving up deconstruction, then, is seen as a way to return to a space where rules can be created out in the open. But to see deconstruction as Ferguson sees it--and I have continually thought this important since I began to read her work four or so years ago--is begin to see this openness within deconstruction itself. This does not mean that deconstruction is thereby saved. It just makes deconstruction able to be furthered in some larger project.

More precisely, seeing deconstruction as empiricism or materialism places it on a sort of continuum where all the alternatives to it don't become different in kind--as is the case with the language of lack and plenitude--and thereby seem like they are retreating from anything. We don't have to give up deconstruction by focusing on the creation of rules. We just have to bring it to the other side of the continuum (or bring what in it is more on this other side, like certain aspects of the status, I think, that Derrida gives his regulations). As Ferguson says, that other side is, of course, formal idealism.

Some notes on imagination

2009-08-03T19:49:00.004-04:00

I want to outline my general sense of the level at which Coleridge's critical concept is working. In other words, I don't want to linger on what, for Coleridge, the imagination actually is, as so many writers have already done, but rather share some points about how it is used. In short, the emphasis will be on its appearance in practical criticism. That doesn't mean we can overlook Coleridge's complicated attempt to philosophically pin down the thing. But it means our focus will be on what a sentence like "the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination" actually means for Coleridge when he says it about the musicality of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (Biographia Literaria, II.15, p. 20). It won't be about the relation between imagination and reason, say, and how the two work together in Coleridge's "system."

Our first point will, however, be one that briefly returns to the philosophy. Its implications are immense, however, and run through the whole of the practical criticism. The point is as follows: Coleridge follows Kant in distinguishing between transcendental philosophy and psychology. He doesn't do it fully, with anything like the rigor of Kant, but it is clear that imagination, for Coleridge, is not simply something psychological, however much he attributes it to a psyche. One could say that the whole point of the distinction between fancy and imagination is to bring about this difference: fancy is the product of associationism, which, though it does not necessarily have to take this direction (in Locke it is still very non-psychologistic), becomes in Hartley a psychology. Talking about various poetic ornaments arising from fancy is, for Coleridge, a way of talking about combinations of impressions in a man's head. Saying they arise from imagination means they have a transcendental foundation: they are operations among the faculties (or powers) of a subject. As Coleridge continually says, the two are of different kinds--or, as I would have preferred him to say, of different orders. So when we talk about Shakespeare's imagination, say, such as when we say he has the gift of imagination in his particular appreciation for musicality, we are not simply talking about a man's mind. This is so even when Coleridge uses the word mind, or even consciousness, because Coleridge is conflating mind, consciousness, self-consciousness, self, and spirit in a way that is common among Kant's followers (see I.273, Thesis VI, where Coleridge says explicitly that he will use these words this way). The words are conflated because it is more important to recognize in them the fact that they designate the subject transcendentally, not psychologically, considered. As I said, Coleridge does not always remain faithful to this distinction. But my growing sense is that he means for us to uphold it perhaps more than we usually think.

For it is popular to see Coleridge's critical concepts as the ultimate expressions of the Romantic author-centered, psychologistic or biographical criticism. But it isn't so clear to me that Coleridge is speaking of authors in the psychological sense when he speaks of Shakespeare in this way. I'm not trying to make him into some modern critic announcing the death of the author or anything, but I am concerned that our prejudices about Romanticism get in the way of seeing how Coleridge's concepts work. When Coleridge talks about a poet, he is indeed talking about a distinct author, but he's perhaps not talking about this author's psychology. He's talking more about the author's functions, the author-function involved in a work. In doing so he then allows us to trace certain features of a work to various functions. What this does is, ultimately, make them more specific by turning the features into tensions and elements from properties or ornaments. A transformation in rhetoric is being effected, ultimately: rhetoric, when it is used as ornament, is to be considered as an operation of the fancy and thus of psychology. Rhetorical language, imaginatively deployed, introduces distinctions between the part and the whole into the work. That is, where classical rhetoric talked of figurative language as distinct, recognizable elements inserted into the work by an author to be recognized by a reader, Coleridge talks about units of text which do not depend on such recognition for their operation. These units work, in other words, by cohering or conflicting with other such units. As such, they don't originate in a psyche--attributing the rhetoric to this origin will only turn it into ornament. They originate in the way a will is instantiated, brought into the world.

I'll stop here for now...

Demystifying the singular

2009-08-02T06:58:00.015-04:00

You all know I'm skeptical of de Man: I think that through equivocation on crucial issues he mislead theorists so much they are only now beginning to realize the extent of the damage. But this doesn't mean he wasn't also brilliant, or that his works aren't extremely useful. In other words de Man's power to mislead only came with a certain type of earned authority. It's just that his words require you to never let your guard down.

This is only more important to remember when they are strung together in the witty remark, the teachable fragment, the slogan, the aphorism--I'm not sure what exactly to call these particular segments in de Man's corpus. These remarks--like "the resistance to theory is itself theoretical," or "scholarship has, in principle, to be eminently teachable," or "it is better to fail in teaching what should not be taught than to succeed in teaching what is not true" (all three taken only from "The Resistance to Theory")--remain influential even today: though it is important to keep in mind the limits of de Man's influence (as is only appropriate when such an uncritical notion as influence is used), which to this day has not been sufficiently mapped out, such phrases still guide our attempts to articulate what, at bottom, we're doing.

Such a delicate, yet dangerous string of words I want to look at right now:

When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it.
-"Criticism and Crisis" (1967, updated in 1970), in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 3-19, 18

As you can see, this is not only highly polemical, but is also conveniently short, pithy, repeatable. One can imagine many theorists picking it up and using it in all sorts of situations. But it would be a mistake to see it merely as a general statement about anyone. Like most de Manian formulations, it is very precise. The task, then, is not to pull apart what is actually being said here from the sweeping, polemical force of the statement. Instead, it is to see that specificity alone gives such theoretical statements power. The trick of de Man's aphoristic formulation (and it is indeed a dirty one) is to let you think that theory must become less polemical as it gets more specific. Or (and this is oddly more likely), if it does allow you think otherwise, if it allows you to see polemic and precision's incompatability as superficial, it becomes your responsibility to assert this (which makes the trick even dirtier). But we'll try and get specific while also not taking over all the responsibility: we will remain critical of de Man insofar as he engages in a ruse that turns us all into his interpreters--or, better, his "demystifiers."

But, as we were saying, it isn't enough to see de Man's statement as just applying to anyone: we have to ask, first, who these "modern critics" that "demystify" actually are. Ironically, after all we just said, de Man isn't as specific as he should be about this: his answer is, the New Criticism and structuralism, or, rather, the New Critical tendency in American criticism (we can call it by its much misunderstood name: "practical criticism") as it is affected by structuralism coming from France. That's a lot of criticism, enough to seem like the most significant criticism in America and abroad (in other words, another trick involving sweeping generalizations). But it isn't enough to exhaust the totality of the field--not nearly enough, if we have the right view of things.

Why, then, this general practical criticism/structuralist poetics nexus, and not something else? Here de Man is most precise. Both, he says,

consist of showing that certain claims to authenticity attributed to literature are in fact expressions of a desire that, like all desires, falls prey to the duplicities of expression.
-"Criticism and Crisis," 12

This is what he calls "demystifying" literature. Let's be clear about what this process of demystification entails, according to de Man, for the above definition remains only a sliver of what he has to say about it. De Man goes on to say that the authenticity attributed to literature is in fact reducible to the notion--popular before the New Critics and before the advent of structural linguistics--that literary language was of a different nature than the system of language we normally use. (This, by the way, leads to the notion that the experience of this language is of a different order than everyday experience, or what I.A. Richards called, quite accurately, "the phantom aesthetic state:" the two notions imply each other and Richards, in the opening of his Principles of Literary Criticism, moved from this phantom state to this phantom literary language.) The process of demystification then would involve showing that a normal language system could serve as an adaquate basis for interpreting literature. One can see the task that the structuralist poeticians and practical critics, then, oddly have in common--and why de Man rightly groups them together: in the case of practical criticism, the task is to show that normal usage, or in fact everyday usage, provides us with enough meanings that we can outline possible interpretations of what the poem or prose work may be saying; in the case of structuralist poetics (which has a bit more complications I might get into below), the task is to outline how the system of signifiers that linguistics has studied can account for the work in question. Everyday language and the linguists' language both rid us of the need for any priveliged sort of literary language, which would be different in essence.

The larger meaning of de Man's statement becomes more and more obvious: both of these modes, in trying to undo the privilege accorded to literature, fall prey to its privilege. The implications are clear too: de Man is arguing for the restoration of a notion that literary language is different than the system of language we use everyday.

But before we outline what this really means, I would like to return to de Man's quote above regarding demystification. For while demystification involves a certain notion of literary language, it also proceeds in a certain manner which the quote makes clear: armed with her notion that the privelige accorded to literature can be accounted for by everyday language or the structure of language, the demystifying critic shows that the privelige is merely the expression of a desire. This shall remain even more important for us, for it means that demystification involves, prior to the critic's having any very clear notion about the proper sphere of literary language, a certain operation, a method, a "strategy" as de Man indeed calls it (13). Demystification is first and foremost the process of asserting that what is there can be the expression of something the critic, but not you, can see: a desire that is not fully apparent, that is duplicitous, and that needs the critic in order to make its full manifestation. Literature for the demystifier would then lack its "priveliged" or "authentic" status for another reason: literature could not be something impenetrable to the critic's process of making the work fully manifest, and in this respect could not be of a different nature than the critic's language. This, I claim, is the deeper reason behind de Man's notion that demystification involves dissolving literary language into everyday language: it is what in other essays he calls the critic's belief in the phenomenality of literature, the notion that it is something that can be made manifest and, moreover, can, eventually, be made fully manifest. One can also see that it involves a certain notion of the literary object requiring a consciousness that can judge it: in this respect the belief in the phenomenality of the literary work is also a belief in its fundamentally aesthetic nature--the work is there to produce judgments (Kant, of course, gave this view its most concentrated expression). We can also emphasize that it is aestheticism in a different, more perjorative sense: the critic, in this view, is the only one who can complete the artwork by mastering its duplicities, which makes her of the same nature as the artist, and their criticism, in turn, something participating in the art.

But, back to the point: if demystification involves asserting that there is more to the work, in the sense that there is something about it which is not as it seems and can eventually be made clear, when modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are demystified by it means that they are only making more explicit their inability to see that literature may perhaps not be something that manifests itself.

Now, there are two ways to justify this particular assertion. De Man's way, in the essay in question, is by stressing the fictionality of literature. What he says prior to his little aphorism makes this clear enough:

It [fiction] is demystified from the start.
-"Criticism and Crisis," 18.

That is, demystifying a literary text makes nothing in it manifest. This is not because criticism is powerless when confronted by it, but rather because the text's nature qua fictional is to disturb manifestation itself. This is a point not stressed enough--we overlook it constantly in talking about characters, say--but it perhaps lays too much stress on fictionality: de Man could be challenged by bringing up testimony, for example (Derrida, for one, does not evade this: his reading of Blanchot's "The Instant of My Death" in the slim but profound Demeure precisely investigates the possible weave between these two).

I will take the other route and justify the notion that literature does not manifest itself by talking more about what the demystifier supposes literature actually does. The easiest case would be a practical critic, who tries ultimately to establish a meaning for the text. Jonathan Culler shows why this is questionable. Instead, a better case for now would be the structuralist poetician. I'll take Roland Barthes, with his powerful notion of codes in S/Z.

The five codes Barthes considers are extremely useful. They aren't ultimately very rigorous tools to use, but they are so handy and so intuitive: Barthes constructs them in such a way that to an experienced critic they fit like a glove--only allowing actual reflection on the manipulation ultimately produced. In short, in the codes Barthes makes explicit something the critic has for a long, long time engaged in, but never reflected on at such length (this is why they are not to be unreflectively used like any old tools, as Kaja Silverman does in The Subject of Semiotics). This is pointing out the saturation of the text with a certain type of non-literal language which is, unless we want to stretch the word, nevertheless not figurative. He opens up a domain in which a certain understanding of the message is brought about which nevertheless does not have to deal with meaning (that is, literal or figurative, strictly speaking). The code remains the way that parts of the text (and remember this remains pertinent only for a classic text, which is not stressed enough) try to be received in a certain way: as such it is like innuendo, except with the final meaning subtracted, as it were, or made unncessary to grasp.

The cultural codes are, in particular, the most intuitive to the critic (they are also the most boring of the codes: the proairetic and hermeneutic are much more interesting and indeed useful). One understands, in other words, a character has a certain status by the mention of what he wears. Or one understands a fragment of a sentence about abstruse academics, say, not because of the meaning but because of the cultural doxa, which states that academics have no connection to the real world.

The critic then goes through the text and points out these codes: it is what we do especially when watching TV, say, and noting how a certain type of character is stereotypically treated. What is one doing in such an instance? What de Man would say is, precisely, that one is trying to manifest something in the work. Even though the code isn't dealing with meaning, it is nevertheless there to bring something to the fore. It is, in fact doing something even more than that: it is allowing a secure transit between the work, on the one hand, and culture on the other. By pointing out doxa in literature or other, similar artforms, what we are doing is supposing an almost immediate link between the forces which construct the code and the code itself as we find it in a particular message. In pointing it out, we believe we are directly in connection with those societal forces, on some level, and transform them in the act. Why? Because we suppose that the message is not already demystified--to use the quote above--or in other words we overlook the fact that there there may be nothing to manifest in the message except the cultural forces which produce it.

To be clearer, manifestation may not be necessary because the literary work is singular. That means it does not express or represent those cultural and societal forces, but merely is a product of them--indeed, uniquely, irreducibly so (the reduction, in other words, would be to representation). Or, to put it another way, manifestation may not be necessary because the link between a the coded literature and culture is never immediate: it is always and only a set of productive relays which may indeed make manifestation possible, but never necessary for the work to be both extant and also (this is the tough part) able to be criticized.

With this made clear, we now understand how de Man proposes to restore the difference between literary language and ordinary language: it is not by giving literary language an essence, but rather by subtracting it. Literary language is singular, irreducible. And this does not mean the literary work is thereby shut off in any way from ordinary language, culture, or society, but is indeed precisely produced by them--since the connection is not presumed to be simply, unproblematically, indeed naively immediate. It is, in other words, produced in a way that cannot be reduced to the production of something destined to be manifest, and therefore demystified. I'll stop here, but it now should be somewhat clearer why de Man says modern critics are being demystified by such a singular literature in demystifying it.

Coleridge and literary theory

2009-07-29T13:25:00.000-04:00

I know it is common for the literary theorist to look for precursors to literary theory. And I usually am one to hesitate before doing so: I don't like to call Plato a literary theorist, because, quite frankly, I'm still not sure whether we can even call him a philosopher of art. Nevertheless, I think it is important that we recognize how what Coleridge does--particularly in the Biographia Literaria--resembles literary theory. Not because this shows theory as such has been around for a while, but only because it shows that what Coleridge expressly does not do might have some affinity with what theory opposes.

For what Coleridge does not do is what he says Wordsworth does in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads and in his remarks on literature generally.

Recall that the Biographia begins with an account of Coleridge's life, and how his literary opinions are generally shaped, with a view to making some remarks about the proper place of meter in poetry and poetic diction in specific passages of poetry--remarks that indeed challenge, and attempt to correct, Wordsworth's views, through a distinction between fancy and imagination. But in order to do this, Coleridge must take a detour into the history of philosophy, looking particularly at 17th and 18th century theories of associationism, and overthrowing them using the idealism of Kant. Why? Because,

it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness.
-Biographia Literaria, IV.

In other words, the general task is to come to similar conclusions to Wordsworth's about the role of art in general, conclusions which rely upon and effectively bring about a distinction between something like fancy and something like imagination. Coleridge will do this, though by searching for principles and making this distinction explicit.

For Wordsworth, it is sufficient to look at poetic effects, and "conclude their diversity in kind:" that is, it is enough to categorize poetic activity based on his immediate perception of poetic effects into two general spheres. The result of this is that he makes a distinction but does not bring it to the fore. In other words, Wordsworth can be talking about something like fancy and something like imagination, but no one would really know: the opinions are grounded in the particular standpoint he has towards the poems and poetry, which is ultimately individual, subjective. Thus the source for what he has to say about the nature of poetry in general does not come from any argument: very much like Shelley in his Defense, statements like "The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure" are not based on any logic which can be reasoned out by another reader--we have to either accept them or reject them.

Coleridge, on the other hand, will talk about these poetic effects as resulting from various principles or reasons. The fancy and the imagination are these reasons, roughly put--this is why the distinction is so crucial. Like Edward Young's "originality," they are concepts that do not merely gather together poetic effects, or express a view upon poetry, but try to reveal poetry's origin in something we can all reason out. To this extent, they are not in any particular poem or prose work--this is why people (especially not schooled in the 18th century, which develops, step by step until German Romanticism, precisely this sort of critical concept) have such a tough time with them. Fancy, then, remains something more like an explanatory hypothesis than even a category of poetic effect (one can see that what Coleridge then is criticizing in Wordworth is precisely what ties him to an increasingly antiquated notion of rhetoric--that is, the notion of figural language as the production of effects).

So here is the first similarity between Coleridge and literary theorists: they both make the manifestation of some critical concept in a particular text unnecessary. Or, to put it the other way around, they do not look at poetry, say, for what is manifested in it--they don't make their points by grouping together certain aspects of the text which manifest themselves.

We just said that fancy and imagination are more explanatory hypotheses than terms used to point to what the text manifests. At the same time, they still more than merely hypotheses: they are derived from general philosophical principles--Coleridge eventually grounds it in metaphysics. Thus we can't say that the principles try to explain an aesthetic object, say. In other words, we might expect that outlining principles about an artistic object (poetry) would confine the principles themselves to the sphere delimited by the scope of their object, which here would be art--this is what it means for Coleridge's principles to be considered as explanatory hypotheses. But we must reject even this: Coleridge is not doing aesthetics, but is bringing metaphysics to bear upon texts.

This is the second similarity: theory resists confining itself to aesthetics, or a philosophical discourse upon art. It might seem like an obvious point, but it frustrates people constantly. For now the theoretical notion, like the Coleridgian notion of fancy or imagination, has no where to go: barred from resting in the realm of notions that group together textual effects or the manifestation of art, it also cannot become a general statement about the nature of art, which would account for the manifestations in another direction.

Thus Coleridge, like theorists, engages in philosophical activity but does not turn this activity into a set of statements about art. The extended passages on associationism and the grounding of the imagination and fancy in metaphysics indeed try to get at the "seminal principle," but the principle is ultimately a metaphysical notion with theological and ethical implications.

It may sound like there is also a problem emerging: by what right do philosophical (or semi-philosophical) statements come to bear directly upon poetry? It seems as if there is a shortcut here from one discourse to another, while the discourse proper to the consideration of literature (looking at what the text manifests) is done away with or at least set aside. Coleridge and theorists would reply--this is exactly the point. For what both oppose is stability we grant to the way poetry manifests itself, and on the other hand the stability we grant to the nature of art: the instability on the one side undoes the stability of the other.

Heidegger's rhetoric

2009-07-26T11:01:00.008-04:00

In order to think back to the essence of language, in order to reiterate what is its own, we need a transformation of language, a transformation we can neither compel nor concoct. The transformation does not result from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases. The transformation touches on our relation to language. That relation is determined in accordance with the sending that determines whether and in what way we are embraced in propriation by the essence of language, which is the original pronouncement of propriation. For propriation--owning, holding, keeping to itself--is the relation of all relations.
-"The Way to Language," in Basic Writings, 424-5

Um dem Sprachwesen nachzudenken, ihm das Seine nachzusagen, braucht es einen Wandel der Sprache, den wir weder erzwingen noch erfinden konnen. Der Wandel ergibt sich nicht durch die Beschaffung neu gebildeter Worter und Wortreihen. Der Wandel rührt an unser Verhaltnis zur Sprache. Dieses bestimmt sich nach dem Geschick, ob und wie wir vom Sprachwesen als der Ur-Kunde des Ereignisses in dieses einbehalten werden. Denn das Ereignis ist, eignend-haltend-ansichhaltend, das Verhaltnis aller Verhaltnisse.
-"Der Weg zur Sprache," in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Gesamtausgabe 12), 255-6

Look at the German, which is much clearer. For essential reasons, however, this lack of clarity isn't really the fault of David Farrell Krell--from whose version of "Der Weg zur Sprache" I quote. The 1959 lecture is too condensed, too compact, and at the same time too lacking in concision, in the controlled, step by step unfolding of thought that Heidegger elsewhere deploys. The lack of clarity, in other words, is there no matter what you really do to it. And this is for equally essential reasons: the essay is not so much an effort to be clear about what constitutes language as one of the most concentrated attempts to bring about the "transformation" (der Wandel) of language that Heidegger here talks about.

I say "most," only because this is the task behind many of Heidegger's other writings. The task in many of them is never really an exposition of what the thing under consideration (here, one would be tempted to say language) should act and function like, or, even more prevalent in most philosophical writings, how the thing poses a particular type of problem. Rather, Heidegger's aim (this is the most modest way of putting it, for it isn't simply an aim or goal) remains a transformation of our language--that is, if one understands language here properly. By this I mean that the transformation (der Wandel) of our language is not just some transposition (eine Verlagerung) or substitution of equally valid or even clearer language, a mere displacement--indeed it "does not result from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases," ergibt sich nicht durch die Beschaffung neu gebildeter Worter und Wortreihen. Transforming our language is not stating the problem in different and perhaps better ways, displacing it--which might suffice for most philosophers (and indeed rightly so: I'd consider that as my goal, certainly). Rather, transforming our language is... something that occurs in the light of what is brought to language in this lecture (and many other ventures of Heidegger) concerning language. In other words, transforming out language is something that this lecture itself takes as its theme, and in doing so (in fact, insofar as it takes this as its theme) also attempts to bring the transformation about.

So, what is brought to language concerning (another inadequate word) language? Speaking much too loosely, that language allows the proper in general (again, too loose, too generic) to be brought to light. This means, then, that the transformation in language is what allows us to hear (in language) that our language allows the proper in general into language. Or, to put it differently, to displace it (again, that's a task more than sufficient for me) the transformation in language is the process of understanding and responding to how, through language itself, the language that we have used and are using not only allows things to be designated (sign as reference), but also brings them and ourselves into relation to what, with respect to each, remains proper (sign as showing--and remains is a word I use carefully: it means that what remains proper is not simply proper).

I won't get into what all that means: I'm not trying to talk about how propriation works with repect to language, but merely am trying to hint at all that is involved in what Heidegger here brings to language. I want instead to focus on the following: if this sort of transformation what Heidegger does not only in most of his work--as I'm proposing--but also most concentratedly here, in "The Way to Language," how does he do it?

Here he allows you to hear a "formula" (eine Formel), a phrase, properly. That phrase outlines the task (Heidegger calls it the "risk") of the essay, or as I said the theme that it must also bring about--the results of which we have just outlined. This phrase, in other words, remains the "guideline" (der Leitfaden) on the way to language (398). And it is, quite simply, "To bring language to language as language," die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen.

One could then say that this phrase begins to be heard differently (that is, not yet properly), through the use of different ways of talking about language. Heidegger makes several journeys into other thinkers of language, including Humboldt and Aristotle, citing also medieval thought. What is talked about then becomes differentiated from what is not talked about, for example in the following, which constitutes a small but interesting point Heidegger makes about counting:

In the essence of language a multiplicity of elements and relations shows itself. We enumerated these, but did not put them in proper sequence. In running through them--which is to say, in original counting, which is not a reckoning in numbers--a certain coherence announced itself. Counting is a recounting. It previews the unifying power in cohesion, but cannot yet bring it to the fore.
-"The Way to Language," 407

Im Sprachwesen zeigt sich eine Mannigfaltigkeit von Elementen und Bezügen. Sie wurden aufgezählt und gleichwohl nieht aneinandergereiht. Im Durchgehen, d. h. im ursprünglichen Zählen, das noch nicht mit Zahlen rechnet, ergab sich die Bekundung eines Zusammengehörens. Das Zählen ist ein Erzählen, das auf das Einigende im Zusammengehören vorblickt und es gleichwohl nieht zum Vorschein bringen kann.
-"Der Weg zur Sprache," 240

"Reckoning in numbers," mit Zahlen rechnet, parrots a common conception of counting. The alternative, "recounting," Erzählen (also telling, relating), states this conception differently, to the extent that you cannot even say that it is an identical conception. And any reader of Heidegger will tell you that this second alternative, in all its simplicity ("counting is a recounting," das Zählen is ein Erzählen, compared to "a reckoning in numbers," mit Zählen rechnet), will be the one which is kept, which is pursued.

The possibility opens, however, of claiming that this is merely a sort of rhetorical operation, indeed with much attention to the work of metaphor. The complexity of the first conception, together with the simplicity of the second, does more than just specify a difference between thoughts: it also shows that one sentence has a certain attitude towards counting and, behind it, language in general--an attitude that needlessly complicates it. How? Metaphor comes in, in that Heidegger understands not only the thought underlying what the first sentence says, but also the vehicle (as we like to call it) from which reckoning is derived: recounting, recalling, which itself involves seeing (previewing, bringing to the fore). In other words, one might say that this is the key operation that allows Heidegger to make us hear something differently: people complain that Heidegger is too complex and gnomic, which means usually that he speaks too metaphorically about the issue, but what Heidegger is doing is actually showing you that, on the contrary, the rest of philosophy is only a set of different, less simple, metaphors.

So eventually in the course of thinking language, in the middle of the essay we begin to hear not only certain references to reckoning differently, but also hear our phrase differently. Indeed, we hear it not as "bring language to language as language," but as "bring the essence of language as the saying to the resounding word" (as this is translated).

So at a certain point Heidegger says the following:

Such way-making brings language (the essence of language) as language (the saying) to language (to the resounding word). Our talk concerning the way to language no longer means exclusively or even preeminently the course of our thought on the trail of language. While under way, the way to language has transformed itself. It has transposed itself from being some deed of ours to the propriated essence of language.
-"The Way to Language," 418-9

Die Be-wegung bringt die Sprache (das Sprachwesen) als die Sprache (die Sage) zur Sprache (zum verlautenden Wort). Die Rede vom Weg zur Sprache meint jetzt nicht mehr nur und nicht mehr im Vorrang den Gang unseres Denkens, das der Sprache nachsinnt. Der Weg zur Sprache hat sich unterwegs gewandelt. Er hat sich aus unserem Tun in das ereignete Sprachwesen verlagert.
-"Der Weg zur Sprache," 250

The formula that acted as a guideline now is different. In fact, it is not only different--Heidegger also says that it is proper. In this respect, it is not merely a metaphorical operation, as we said someone could claim. But how can Heidegger say this? How is the new way of hearing this phrase not only different but also more proper? The last sentence offers a hint, if we recall the distinction between transformation and transposition: rhetoric would be a mere transposition, a different ordering of the words. A transformation, which does not just differentiate, but allows access to the proper, is accomplished when this transposition occurs by the language itself: indeed, as Heidegger says, "it has transposed itself," er hat sich verlagert.

So the issue is not whether Heidegger actually used any rhetoric or not, or indeed differentiated anything or not, since these operations are in fact not opposed to allowing the sentence to be heard properly, not opposed to transformation. The issue, instead, is how can we be sure that the phrase "has transposed itself," thereby transforming itself: how the rhetoric, in other words, is also derived from transformation. This is what Heidegger then pursues--and I will let him speak for himself: I have only been trying to get us to this general point. The formula has transposed itself, he says,

except that the transformation of the way to language looks likes a transposition that has just now been effected only for us, only with respect to us. In truth, the way to language has its sole place always already in the essence of language itself. However, this suggests at the same time that the way to language as we first intended it is not superfluous; it is simply that it becomes possible and necessary only by virtue of the way proper, the way-making movement of propriation and usage. Because the essence of language, as the saying that shows, rests on the propriation that delivers us human beings over to releasement towards unconstrained hearing, the saying's way-making movement toward speech first opens up the path on which we can follow the trail of the proper way to language.

Allein, die Wandlung des Weges zur Sprache sieht nur für uns in der Rücksicht auf uns wie eine jetzt erst erfolgte Verlagerung aus. In Wahrheit hat der Weg zur Sprache schon immer seine einzige Ortschaft im Sprachwesen selbst. Dies heiBt jedoch zugleich: Der zunachst gemeinte Weg zur Sprache wird nicht hinfallig, sondern erst durch den eigentlichen Weg, die er-eignend-brauchende Be-wegung, moglich und notig. Weil namlich das Sprachwesen als die zeigende Sage im Ereignis beruht, das uns Menschen der Gelassenheit zum freien Horen iibereignet, offnet die Be-wegung der Sage zum Sprechen uns erst die pfade, auf denen wir dem eigentlichen Weg zur Sprache nachsinnen.

[He then doubles back to explain this.]

Our path's formula--to bring language as language to language--no longer merely encapsulates a directive for us who ponder over language. Rather, it betells the forma, the configuration of the well-enjoined structure within which the essence of language, which rests on propriation, makes its way.

If we do not think about it, but merely string along with the string of words, then the formula expresses a weft of relations in which language simply entangles itself. It seems as though every attempt to represent language needs the learned knack of dialectic in order to master the tangle. However, such a procedure, which the formula formidably provokes, bypasses the possibility that by remaining on the trail--that is to say, by letting ourselves be guided expressly into the way-making movement--we may yet catch a glimpse of the essence of language in all its simplicity, instead of wanting to represent language.

What looks more like a tangle than a weft loosens when viewed in terms of the way-making movement. It resolves into the liberating motion that the way-making movement exhibits when propriated in the saying. It unbinds the saying for speech.
-"The Way to Language," 418-9.

Die Wegformel: die Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen, enthalt nicht mehr nur eine Anweisung für uns, die wir die Sprache bedenken, sondern sie sagt die forma, die Gestalt des Gefüges, worin das im Ereignis beruhende Sprachwesen sich be-wegt.

Unbedacht, nur nach dem bloßen Wortlaut angehort, spricht die Formel ein Geflecht von Beziehungen aus, in das sich die Sprache verwickelt. Es scheint, als bedürfe jeder Versuch; die Sprache vorzustellen, der dialektischen Kunstgriffe, um diese Verwickelung zu meistern. Ein solches Verfahren, zu dem die Formel formlich reizt, versaumt jedoch die Moglichkeit, sinnend, d. h. in die Be-wegung sich eigens einlassend, das Einfache des Sprachwesens zu erblicken, statt die Sprache vorsteIlen zu wollen.

Was wie ein wirres Geflecht aussieht, lost sich, aus der Be-wegung erblickt, in das Befreiende, das die in der Sage ereignete Be-wegung erbringt. Sie entbindet die Sage zum Sprechen.
-"Der Weg zur Sprache," 250-1

Sterne's style

2009-07-25T17:25:00.006-04:00

I'm usually pretty critical of the notion of style. I find it usually serves to lump together several things that need to be rigorously distinguished: authorship, composition, method, technique, consistency, pathology, performance, rhetoric--to name a few. Moreover, all these things are too close to the side of the author, and yet people act as if it can be received in a total, unmediated perception on the side of the reader--which leads me to believe it is the ultimate fantasy of an aesthetic criticism (a criticism of critics who want to be writers) rather than something we can actually establish about a work (that is, as an element in a literary system of sorts).

But I find that style is something conspicuously absent from accounts of Sterne, which leads me to take it up and play with it. Or rather, it is veiled by something else--Tristram of course. Take the beginning of chapter nine, in the first volume:

YORICK was this parson's name, and, what is very remarkable in it, (as appears from a most ancient account of the family, wrote upon strong vellum, and now in perfect preservation) it had been exactly so spelt for near,——I was within an ace of saying nine hundred years;——but I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth, however indisputable in itself,——and therefore I shall content myself with only saying—It had been exactly so spelt, without the least variation or transposition of a single letter, for I do not know how long; which is more than I would venture to say of one half of the best surnames in the kingdom; which, in a course of years, have generally undergone as many chops and changes as their owners.——Has this been owing to the pride, or to the shame of the respective proprietors?——In honest truth, I think sometimes...

And so on. Tristram's digression carries us away. But what is left behind? Not plot so much as the particular way the interruptions, the hesitations are dashed off in a moment, quickly... In other words, not the interruptions themselves, which are often cited as examples of the narrator Tristram's character, but the sort of texture of these hesitations, which is a different thing all together. The layering, the piling on of clauses, parentheses, in short of conversational elements, in all their roughness, "I was within an ace of saying," damn the coherence of the thing--this is closer to something like Sterne's style.

The biggest marker of this is the dash--that wonderful tool of eighteenth century letter wrtiting. Sterne uses it so much that he integrates it into a mode of presenting the text, of switching from topic to topic in a way that is not characteristic of the narrator but of something beyond that--of the general consistency of writing that makes possible narration. The fact that something similar occurs in A Sentimental Journey should disabuse us of the notion that it is typical of Tristram:

They order, said I, this matter better in France. — You have been in France? said my gentleman, turning quick upon me, with the most civil triumph in the world. — Strange! quoth I, debating the matter with myself, That one and twenty miles sailing, for ’tis absolutely no further from Dover to Calais, should give a man these rights: — I’ll look into them: so, giving up the argument, — I went straight to my lodgings, put up half a dozen shirts and a black pair of silk breeches, — “the coat I have on,” said I, looking at the sleeve, “will do;” — took a place in the Dover stage; and the packet sailing at nine the next morning, — by three I had got sat down to my dinner upon a fricaseed chicken, so incontestably in France, that had I died that night of an indigestion, the whole world could not have suspended the effects of the droits d’aubaine...

It makes possible a consumable, discontinuous jokey text, a humorous tone. But it isn't any of these things. It's the consistency, the rhythm. It's as if room is being made for one-liners which never consummate themselves--if only because Sterne is more comedic than that (in the generic sense). Nevertheless, this consistency of Sterne remains interesting because it clearly presents the text in a certain way, which I think we lose precisely due to its successes. Probably like any style that really merits the (confusing) name.

Thinking Theory, Pt. I

2009-07-20T23:38:00.003-04:00

Let's ignore for a moment the weak title of this post and think instead about Julia Kristeva's essay "The System and the Speaking Subject." Specifically, I want to look at that essay in light of a distinction I tried to make a few weeks ago (here) between theory and genre.

First published in 1973, less than a year before Revolution in Poetic Language, "The System and the Speaking Subject" is a kind of mini-manifesto preempting many of the major claims of that book. It dates from Kristeva's most dense and abstract phrase; all the usual conceptual subjects are here: phenotext, genotext, the thetic, semanalysis, etc. What interests me, in light of the above distinction, is how much of this essay Kristeva spends positioning herself in relation to the internecine squabbles that famously dominated Parisian academia at the time. There are a couple of aggressive jabs at Althusser and his brood ("vulgar sociologism or those mechanistic assumptions which, under the ill-defined general term of 'ideology,' define superstructures which are without exception externally determined," 25; "sociological dogmatism," 27); there's a dismissal of Chomsky ("the linguistic revival which goes by the name of Generative Grammar," 27), a general critique of structural linguistics ("The semiological approach...from Hjelmslev on," 25), and several dismissive references to what Kristeva refers to as "idealist philosophy" (I'm not sure who this group is supposed to be; I'm guessing post-Hegelian phenomenologists, it's possible she has Derrida in mind specifically). The only major critical faction she does not specifically place herself in opposition to is the Lacanian one, which is unfortunate; if it weren't for Lacan's predictably obfuscatory influence Kristeva's fusion of structuralism and psychoanalysis might have been of considerably greater use.

I think that this series of critiques, which take up almost half the essay, helps make clearer the difference I'm getting at in distinguishing genre from theory. This entire essay is of course within the bounds of "theory" as a genre; that is, it is an entirely academic essay dealing entirely with theoretical matters - its genre is "critical theory." Despite this, only half (if that) of the essay actually consists of theorizing as an activity or a process or a movement within a specific text. The first half is taken up entirely with site-specific squabbles which, while of possible interest to the historian of this particular milieu, is of little to no relevance for the reader who is interested in the "theory" part of the generic distinction "critical theory." I happen to have basic familiarity with the intellectual scene Kristeva was operating in, and thus a basic familiarity with the rival factions she so determinedly situates herself in opposition to; even still, I was sometimes unsure who she was referring to with some of the more subtle digs. Furthermore, Kristeva's insistence on situating herself as an independent critical force leads to the confusing and ill-defined distinction between 'semiology' and 'semiotics,' the parsing of which requires detailed knowledge of the branching intellectual lineages of structuralist thought, information which has little to no bearing on the actual theoretical claims of Kristeva's essay.

The basic claim of the essay, the fundamental critique Kristeva is undertaking, is an important and interesting one - a call for a mode of structural reading which undertakes "the study of each signifying system as a practice...To rediscover practice by way of the system, by rehabilitating what is heterogeneous to the system of meaning and what calls in question the transcendental subject" (31). Kristeva seeks, in other words, to bring back into the field of semiotics the lived practices and the living subjects who produce each system of social meaning, practices and subjects which are flattened out by the structural concept of synchrony and metadiscursive position which semiotics claims for itself; at the same time, she wants to avoid the pitfall of the psychoanalytic insistence on "a divided subject (conscious/unconscious)." Ignoring for a second the telling similarities between Kristeva's approach and what would soon come to be called "deconstruction" (similarities which Kristeva would no doubt insist on calling differences), I'm wondering at the utility of an essay whose primary theoretical claims are buried behind factional disagreements which will, frankly, not only be of less and less interest from year to year as this essay ages, but will also become more and more impenetrable from year to year as the average student of critical theory will, increasingly removed from the scene of the battle, have less and less knowledge of the players and factions involved. "The System and the Speaking Subject" will always belong to "theory," but unfortunately less than half of it is concerned with theory.

Socially Mapping the 1920s Midwest

2009-07-19T13:07:00.014-04:00

In both Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922) and the sociological study by Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929), an attempt is made to systematically document and map the practice of everyday life in a representative American town. For the Lynds, this meant choosing the midwest as "the common denominator" of the US, a city with a population between 25,000 and 50,000, one in which there were more than one industry, and a city in which "social problems" would not overshadow the study's findings (race is carefully elided throughout the book). For Lewis, this meant constructing a fictional city Zenith in the fictional state of Winnemac, a state which would be "more typical than any state in the Union" (Lewis's own maps of which are included throughout this post--more info on them below).

"Middletown" was revealed later to be Muncie, Indiana--most famously by photographer Margaret Bourke-White who was sent by Life Magazine to document the town in May 1937. Muncie underwent a "gas boom" when a massive natural gas reserve was found in the area in 1886, ballooning the town to a population of tens of thousands and attracting outside capital to this thriving "gasopolis." Due to severe misuse and waste--it was thought cheaper to keep gas valves in the house open and burning than to waste a match relighting the flame--the field was all but depleted by 1890. The Middletown study takes place in the wake of this unevenly distributed and underdeveloped industrialization of the formerly agricultural town.

Characterizing Muncie's current state of labor and production in 1925, they write:

“If the working class in Middletown does not make the material necessities of its everyday life, the activities of the business class appear at many points even more remote. As the population has forsaken the less vicarious life of the farm or village and as industrial tools have become increasingly elaborated, there has been a noticeable swelling in the number and complexity of the institutional rituals by which the specialized products of the individual worker are converted into the biological and social essentials of living. It is by carrying on these institutional rituals that the business group gets its living.” (44)

Paradoxically, this "increasing elaboration" of the technics of everyday life is coupled with an "increasing standardization of leisure-time pursuits." Perhaps the most significant change found in the Lynds' study can be attributed to the triad of automobiles, movies, and radio, which together spawned a "cluster of habits that have grown up overnight." The write: “Indeed, at no point is one brought up more sharply against the impossibility of studying Middletown as a self-contained, self-starting community than when one watches these space-binding leisure-time inventions imported from without—automobile, motion picture, and radio—reshaping the city.” Here, the case study of social anthropology seems to come up against its limits when the "underlying groundwork of folk-play and folk-talk" is integrated into a web of cultural production and technological innovation that necessarily extends the boundaries of this town beyond its traditional patterns.

Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt on the other hand provides us with a very different type of perspective on the networks and systems organizing a representative midwestern town. George F. Babbitt--perhaps a reference to the frequently worn out automobile babbitt metal, a soft alloy "used for bearings connecting the piston rods to the crankshaft"--is the quintessential middle man. Breaking with the precedence of American businessmen novels that gave us portraits of tycoons, leaders of the masses--Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Norris's The Pit (1903), Dreiser's The Financier (1912)--Babbitt is little more than middle management in a small real estate development company owned by his father-in-law, spending his non-working hours at booster club meetings and indulging in flights of heroic fancy while parking his car in tight spots: "It was a virile adventure masterfully executed" (28).

But Babbitt, as a real estate developer and booster has a particular kind of vantage point on his city of Zenith:

Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercial righteousness about the 'realtor's function as a seer of the future development of the community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable changes'--which meant that a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow. This guessing he called Vision. In an address at the Boosters' Club he had admitted, 'It is at once the duty and the privilege of the realtor to know everything about his own city and its environs. Where a surgeon is a specialist on every vein and mysterious cell of the human body, and the engineer upon electricity in all its phases, or every bolt of some great bridge majestically arching o'er a mighty flood, the realtor must know his city, inch by inch, and all its faults and virtues.' (38)

Despite Babbitt's rhetorical flourishes--he is a great devotee of "the poetry of industrialism" (meaning tobacco ads)--his understanding of the city is absolutely one dimensional.

Though he did know the market-price, inch by inch, of certain districts of Zenith, he did no know whether the police force was too large or too small, or whether it was in alliance with gambling and prostitution. He knew the means of fire-proofing buildings and the relation of insurance-rates to fire-proofing, but he did not know how many firemen there were in the city, how they were trained and paid, or how complete their apparatus. He sang eloquently the advantages of proximity of school-buildings to rentable homes, but he did not know--he did not know that it was worth while to know--whether the city schoolrooms were properly heated, lighted, ventilated, furnished.

This is not just to say that Babbitt merely understands prices and ratios and abstract figures of the housing market; Lewis is pointing out here that there are thousands of other kinds of relations that make up this city, relations that Babbitt not only doesn't have access to, but that he wouldn't know how to understand in the first place. This is what makes him ultimately a sympathetic character--though Babbitt is unhappy with his life, he cannot even begin to understand what change would mean or entail. Babbitt understands the monetization of spatial relations, but in no way has access to detail or depth, let alone any sense of an outside. And, as Robert and Helen Lynd's study shows, any "outside" available to this representative small town may have been by that point paved over by a wave of "leisure-time inventions imported from without" to the point of total homogeneity.

One wants to say that Lewis's painstakingly drawn maps of Zenith and its surroundings are themselves an expressive act of Babbittry, a visualization of his understanding of the city. But the degree of his planning for the novel just doesn't bear this out. In a sociological research trip on part with the Lynds, Lewis traveled through the Midwest for eight weeks in preparation for his novel, transcribing his notes by topic in a large ring binder that serves as the index for an entire fictional world (the binder is now preserved at Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale). It contains countless pages of character biographies, a genealogy of the Babbitt family, the courses George would have taken in college (put together by consulting the 1888-89 University of Michigan course catalog), sketches of Babbitt's clothing, and lengthy back stories of minor characters who have little more than a single walk-on role in the novel. The binder also contains a "Locutions" section, a catalogue of expressions Lewis jotted down during his travels which would make their way into the novel. Some of my favorites: "all these free classes and flipflop and doodads;" "they say I'm a roughneck and a never-wuzzer;" "horse feathers!" "Yuh, I'm just as much agin the cranks and blatherskites an labor unions and so on as you are!"

The "Babbitt Maps," separated from Lewis's main research binder along with his wife in a divorce, were found in a Syracuse University archive (The Dorothy Thompson Papers). They consist of 13 holograph maps on separate leaves in Lewis's own hand, each of which was found slipped inside the dust jacket of an oversize edition of H.G. Wells's Outline of History. A fourteenth map, "Blocks Most Familiar to Babbitt", was sketched on the inside of the dust jacket itself (below).

Further maps show the interior of Babbitt's office and home, and even the arrangement of furniture in each room. Winnemac (and Zenith) would serve Lewis as the fictional setting for Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and the minor novels The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928) and Gideon Planish (1943). Details are built into these 1921(?) maps that show Lewis had planned several elements of this narrative world that wouldn't be fully developed until several novels later.

The degree to which this narrative world has been fleshed out is breathtaking, and one wonders if anything comparable had been attempted before outside of genre fiction. But the--what can we call it?--verisimilitude aspired to here seems wholly out of sync with a work of satire, the mode Lewis is most widely remembered for. I wouldn't say that Babbitt is a completely successful novel, and the existence of these maps only compounds this sense when one sees the scale at which Lewis was thinking. Lewis apparently intended George Babbitt to be less of a caricature, but he ended up cutting much of the material that would have shown introspection in the character. As James Hutchisson writes, "Instead, Lewis focused on the city, drawing it as the embodiment of machinery and consumerism and showing its deleterious effect on Babbitt." But on the other hand, maybe we can better understand Babbitt not as a character being subsumed by systems of modern consumerism, but an earnest desire to portray what it is like to attempt to think from within them. In this sense, the distance between the encyclopedic planning and the actual novel is less one attributable to Hemingway's iceberg theory of fictional composition than one of distance between drafts. The novel Babbitt constitutes the character George F. Babbitt's cognitive horizon as he navigates the totality of relations Lewis himself attempted to map.

Medium Specificity and the Prehistory of Photography

2009-07-18T17:21:00.005-04:00

Geoffrey Batchen’s Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography (1999), references an 1828 letter written by Louis Daguerre to his partner Nicéphore Niépce (they just don’t name 'em like that anymore): “I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature.” Batchen’s book is a prehistory of the photographic medium, an account of the social imagination of photography before its technological actuality (one repeatedly wishes Batchen would qualify this with the phrase “something like” photography).

Batchen positions his account between two schools of photographic criticism—“modernist formalism” (Bazin, Szarkowski, Barthes, Greenberg) and a group of critics emerging in the 1970s and 80s he puts under the rubric of “postmodernism” (i.e. John Tagg’s Althusserian apparatus critique locating photography as a prosthesis of the state; Allan Sekula’s more measured account of a dialectic between the threat and promise of photography, its honorific and repressive functions in portraiture and metrics, respectively; and Victor Burgin’s Lacanian interest in the construction of photographic meaning). Both groups attempt to define what photography is, and isn’t. For the formalists, it lies in the conditions of the photograph’s material support and the history of the photographic object itself. For the postmodernists, the photograph has no essence in itself, it has no history save for the institutions which use it. Batchen summarizes the impasse: “Is photography to be identified with (its own) nature or with the culture that surrounds it?” (17) And—here we begin to see Batchen’s problem with both accounts—"their argument is about the location of photography’s identity, about its boundaries and limits, rather than about identity per se.”

For Batchen, neither account suffices. Tagg, Sekula, and Burgin’s emphasis on the mutability of culture as the true substance of photographic meaning, the “assumption that mutability ‘as such’ can be delimited even if identity ‘as such’ cannot” for Batchen “is itself an essentializing gesture” (20-1). Batchen seeks to collapse the positions held by both camps and more or less begin on new ground in order to simultaneously examine “the historical and ontological complexity” of photography. His starting point is the ways in which both camps present the medium’s origins story. Ironically, the formalists retreat into historical forces in locating the origins of the medium—the emergence of a “‘poetic’ idea of photography”—and the postmodernists resort to locating the “fundamental,” “essential,” and “instrinsic” lines of inheritance from classical painting and the camera obscura, which one must then assume to be within every photographic image.

Batchen’s book in turn performs a “repetition of this traditional gesture” toward “the history of [photography’s] origins,” but this time with an eye toward how “any given foundation is continually being displaced by a dynamic and troubling play of differences.” The conception of photography, Batchen will argue, is based neither in nature nor in culture, but stands as a continual upsetting of these two categories (binaries amid a procession of many others which become too much, too convenient, too quickly: cf. “a movement that incorporates without synthesizing the conceptual poles nature-culture, real-ideal, general-particular, science-art, object-subject, reflection-expression” p. 81).

One of the most significant questions for Batchen is one of timing—why is it that though the basic components of photography were available—camera obscura images for millennia and the chemistry necessary to reproduce them by the 1720s—photography was not invented until the 1830s and not imagined, he argues, until the 1790s? This idea of prehistory is a central concern of André Bazin’s, notably in the 1967 essay “The Myth of Total Cinema” in which he wonders why the cinema was delayed 50 years after the coming of photography and at least eighty years after animation devices such as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope: “all the prerequisites had been assembled.…The photographic cinema could just as well have grafted itself onto a phenakistoscope foreseen as long ago as the sixteenth century.” It is unfortunate that Batchen does not engage more fully with Bazin here, let alone the other tenants of “modernist formalism.” He instead positions his account in relation to the work of his direct “postmodernist” precursors. A more complete encounter with Bazin would be invaluable here in an account of “prehistory,” the “desire” and imagination of a medium.

Batchen does make this crucial, one wants to say Bazanian, distinction between the “discovery” and the “invention” of photography, between “the chemistry necessary to the making of photographs” and “the actual idea of photography itself.” In a significant section of chapter 2, Batchen assembles a “roll call” of “proto-photographers.” The criteria are as follows: “Originality of method, accuracy of chemical formulas, success or failure—these need not be taken as crucial factors in this investigation. More important, who showed evidence, written or otherwise, of wanting to photograph, even before Daguerre and Talbot had in fact made such a thing possible? And when did this evidence appear with sufficient regularity and internal consistency to be described in Foucault’s terms as a ‘discursive practice?’” (36)

What baffles me is that Batchen almost never speaks in terms of potentialities, possibilities, or even futurity. Batchen aims to locate a “shift from an occasional, isolated, individual fantasy to a demonstrably widespread, social imperative” (36), but I’m not so sure these two categories are mutually exclusive—if anything, this is a quantitative difference not a qualitative one. The “regularity of a discursive practice”, in Foucault’s terms, in no way excludes the production of "fantasy," if one wants to encapsulate it in that way. In other words, what surprises me is that Batchen attempts to distill a unified epistemological entity out of a multiplicity of technical discourses, national contexts, and above all, utopian frameworks. Batchen’s “conception of photography” is something like a successor to the “dominant rhetorical tropes” of visuality and perception of preceding centuries, i.e. landscape and the picturesque, the camera obscura as a mirror held up to nature, and the idea of “nature” itself. No doubt these concepts underwent a transformation in the century leading up to the appearance of photography—”nature” was by 1800 no longer a tabula rasa but instead “came to be seen as an unruly, living, and active organism with a prolonged and continuing history” (59); similarly, no doubt the discourse of the picturesque and the concurrent spread of portable devices for machine-aided seeing such as the Claude glass, a tinted convex mirror that reflected the landscape in a “picturesque” manner (bending trees into the frame, keeping foreground and background in focus, joined together by a rose-tinted hue), provided techniques that fed into the imagination of photography. Batchen’s is a wonderful account of the social origins of a specific mode of photographic visuality, and a useful corrective to the commonplace discourse of technologically determined media “effects.”

However, I wonder what he loses by passing over the roads not taken, the various crazy schemes and utopian ideals of what photography would look like, the image-worlds it would open up for us. As François Arago said in his 1839 report to the French Chamber of Deputies on subsidizing Daguerre's development of photography--“When inventors of a new instrument apply it to the observation of nature, what they expect of it always turns out to be a trifle compared with the succession of subsequent discoveries of which the instrument was the origin.” Surely the “conception of photography” was not a unified entity before it was even (technologically) invented, an easy transition from a “camera obscura” mode of visuality to a temporally conditioned, embodied technique of seeing. Though Batchen writes, “everywhere we have looked photography’s origins are found inscribed within a dynamic play of differences that refuses to settle at any of the available poles of identification (nature, culture, the intrinsic characteristics of the medium, the exigencies of context)” (202), there is something uncomfortable about the predetermined nature of these polar opposites, as if the world between these poles is the only one possible in the first place.

Batchen’s critique of the postmodernist photographic theorists seems slightly caricatured: “Why, amid the general postmodern critique of binary structures, does this division between sameness and difference, nature and culture, substance and appearance, continue to be essentialized? Why, in short, assume that nature is frozen in place as the undifferentiated origin against which culture can secure its identity?” (21) Surely Alan Sekula in no way bases his account of, for instance, fin de siecle photographic archives that linked criminality to physical features on any conception of a unitary “nature” or the natural. This “essentializing gesture” of “oppositional logic” is the straw man which Batchen replaces with his own, ironically, all too singular, all too predetermined conception of the photographic. For Batchen, as for the “postmodernists,” “…there is [always!] an irony in the orchestration of this oppositional logic” (20).

This is not to say that I disagree with Batchen’s assessment that “Photographic history, it seems, always carries within itself the process of its own erasure. A singular point of origin, a definitive meaning, a linear narrative: all of these traditional historical props are henceforth displaced from photography’s provenance.” I couldn’t agree more—this line serves as a fantastic starting point for a historical or epistemological study of any medium. I’m just not convinced that the “way of rethinking photography that persuasively accords with the medium’s undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity” can lie between a litany of two unshakable poles. In his “Epitaph” section, Batchen closes the book by writing “what is really at stake in the current debate about digital imaging is not only photography’s possible future but also the nature of its past and present.” The question of photography’s possible futures is one that has always been at stake—why does it feel like a simple pronouncement of this fact (which Batchen sets up in so many ways but never really articulates) would make this book so much more palatable?

Culler on structuralism

2009-07-15T08:53:00.006-04:00

Jonathan Culler often confuses the pragmatic concerns of literary theory with the theoretical ones (even though he doesn't seem that practical to people), but has his head on his shoulders and occasionally isolates the most useful thing about an area of thought and puts it in the clearest, most memorable language. It is either because people don't pay enough attention to him (on the literary in theory, for example), or listen to him too closely (usually, on deconstruction), that they miss these moments, one of which I think is the following, where he says structuralism

can lead to a mode of interpretation based on poetics itself, where the work is read against the conventions of discourse and where one's interpretation is an account of the ways in which the work complies with or undermines our procedures for making sense of things. Though it does not, of course, replace ordinary thematic interpretations, it does avoid premature forclosure--the unseemly rush from word to world--and stays within the literary system for as long as possible. [It insists] that literature is something other than a statement about the world...
-Structuralist Poetics, 130, my emphasis.

I have been reading various accounts of the novel recently, like Ian Watt's, and (even despite Watt's amazing sensitivity) you wouldn't believe how often this rush from word to world occurs. Now, this rush, this premature foreclosure should not be condemned, perhaps, as much as Culler condemns it (see "Beyond Interpretation" in The Pursuit of Signs): in fact, its premature nature is often a weapon that can be used against certain systems which pervade the literary system (sexism, say, in Watt's case). But Culler's point I think is still valid: this sort of attack can only take place once we have indeed lingered within the literary system and have some sense of it. That staying within the system for as long as possible is not a guaranteed way to be free from these other conventional systems, then--no one can want that, or rather one can only want it--but it certainly allows a certain attack to distance itself from its double, a forclosure that is total, that is closed, that has no sense of the system at all. And Culler is right--that is something which is at the core of structuralism and structuralist interpretation.

But he is also wrong. Culler's biggest objection to structuralism is its faith in procedure. And insofar as his analysis concerns itself with the problems concerning the rigor of "discovery procedures" in linguistics, which presuppose no actual linguistic competence but just the systematicity of languge, I think his criticisms are valid (except that Culler's version of competence is too pragmatic at times for our purposes: Benveniste I think does well enough, and Culler, despite his lip service to the linguist, doesn't acknowledge Benveniste enough). But when he applies this criticism to certain literary structuralists--even Barthes, whose blind allegiance to the rigors of procedure is the only thing motivating such a weird book as Elements of Semiology--I think it falls flat, because what makes up this faith in these structuralist poeticians is, ironically, just this understanding of the benefits of lingering within the system which Culler here praises. In other words, it is a practical familarity with the merits of this level of analysis--the level that thinks in terms of the system rather than of the elements themselves so as to linger in it as long as possible--that many structuralists are talking about when they speak of the rigors of their procedure. What keeps Culler from understanding that the two things are the same is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is because the tendency to linger is not itself seen as an effect of procedure because it is an effect. But if this is the case, shouldn't we be willing to modify our notion of procedure? This is what the structuralist poeticians do, I think (following Benveniste, who does similar things in linguistics), and what Culler doesn't--in an act which makes up one of those confusions of pragmatic demands with theoretical ones that I spoke of at the beginning.

Reading for Exams

2009-07-08T17:14:00.004-04:00

"He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough - to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others. But if the book were an interesting one, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. he could get caught up in the story, so to speak, and little by little begin to forget himself. But this book offers him nothing. There is no story, no plot, no action - nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. That's all there is, Blue realizes, and he no longer wants and part of it. But how to get out? How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?"

- Paul Auster, Ghosts (from The New York Trilogy)

In other news, I've officially decided that Paul Auster is significantly overrated.

Essay and narrative

2009-07-05T11:53:00.002-04:00

At the beginning of Book 9 of Tom Jones, as with the beginning of every Book, Fielding has an introductory chapter which outlines the purposes of the form in which he is writing--which he calls history, and we call the novel. Like many of those introductory chapters, this one is also filled with (what we are usually too quick to call "self-reflexive") meditation on the function of the introductory chapters. He concludes they are more like essays appended to the history, and have a function of deterrence: they keep out the base readers and imitative writers of any foolish written thing, "monstrous Romances," the production of which this history here will only further encourage (428 of the Penguin edition, from which I'll cite). That is, the essay form itself accomplishes this deterrence: Fielding compares its function to that of the learned epigraphs before each of Addison and Steele's Spectators:

I question not but the ingenious author of the Spectator was principally induced to prefix Greek and Latin mottos to every paper, from the same consideration of guarding against the pursuit of those scribblers, who having no talents of a writer but what is taught by the writing-master, are yet nowise afraid nor ashamed to assume the same titles with the greatest genius, than their good brother in the fable was of braying in the lion's skin.

By the device therefore of his motto, it became impracticable for any man to presume to imitate the Spectators, without understanding at least one sentence in the learned languages. In the same manner I have now secured myself from the imitation of those who are utterly incapable of any degree of reflection, and whose learning is not equal to an essay (428-9).

However, Fielding then admits he cannot actually keep away the imitators of this sort of "self-reflexive" (again, an inadequate word) essay:

I would not be here understood to insinuate, that the greatest merit of such historical productions can ever lie in these introductory chapters; but, in fact, those parts which contain mere narrative only, afford much more encouragement to the pen of an imitator, than those which are composed of observation and reflection (429).

So the imitators of this essayistic form will surely be less. The essay still, then, serves its differentiating and deterring purpose:

To invent good stories, and to tell them well, are possibly very rare talents, and yet I have observed few persons who have scrupled to aim at both: and if we examine the romances and novels with which the world abounds, I think we may fairly conclude, that most of the authors would not have attempted to show their teeth (if the expression may be allowed me) in any other way of writing; nor could indeed have strung together a dozen sentences on any other subject whatever (429).

The last sentence here reveals why: the essay is not just a form, but something that requires skill to write and comprehend. It shows learning, and someone who can do this is probably more likely to be able to invent good stories and tell them well. Fielding isn't saying this entirely literally (it doesn't entirely follow from the logic of the sentences), but the associations are no doubt there, and I think they are important.

For if we take them seriously, we get the following assertion: the essay is a form which has a certain set of compositional requirements which are not foreign to the requirements of a narrative. For Fielding, this is construed in the following way: a narrative is well constructed and composed if it can be told in such a way that it can also bear argument, and not just remain the direct presentation of events. In short, a narrative is only a good narrative if it is told from the third person--thus we enter the famous Fielding-Richardson debate. But what we bring to bear on this, if we look at this passage on the essay, is not just the same old material. What we see is that for Fielding, narrative in the third person shows its superiority because it is going to sustain something like "a degree of reflection" along with the presentation of the events (I quote from above). This is what we mean when we say that it is not just the "direct presentation of events." Clarissa, of course, gains this reflection by deepening its first-person qualities: it presents an event in multiple ways, before it sustains any significant argument alongside them. Whether this is better or not is not the issue (I'm not taking sides). Indeed, if the goal is reflection in itself alongside the presentation of events, which seems to boil down to just a distance from pure mimesis, Richardson has as much claim to this as Fielding. Whether the first-person narrative or the third-person is more mimetic is at bottom up for grabs, because the first-person just expresses its fidelity to events in terms that are different than those of the third-person: put simply, in the first-person, this fidelity is to the form of the events, how they appear or what they appear as, while the third is to the dynamism of the actions, the way they unfold. (I might add a note here: certainly Fielding's experience in drama may make him think he is more distant from the imitation of events, but for this precise reason I think we can say that it is, in its own way, also precisely this imitation: the dramatic, which is often what lies behind the classic third-person narrative, is mimetic through and through, or is only seemingly different because it imitates less the content of the events than their qualities in time. Though the time of the narrative is more often mimetically based in the first-person narrative, especially of the epistolary kind, this does not mean that ultimately, and as many structuralists were somewhat willing to affirm, mimesis is more foreign to the third-person narrative, as it is expressed merely on a different plane: that of "significance." We're getting into complicated territory which I'll write more on in another post, so I'll just stick with what I said above and move on for now.)

As I said, for us what is less important is whether more reflection is actually gained by the presentation of the events (the story) in the third-person. What is significant to me is that the way Fielding is able to assert this is by saying that first, the presentation is more reflective because it mashalls the compositional requirements of the essay, and then that these requirements promote reflective writing and, when suitably embodied in a finished product, reflective reading. This no doubt says something about the essay--particularly that amazing species of writing that is the 18th century essay. I think we can also find this regard for the essay lies underneath Fielding's famous declaration (in the same Book and chatper, 431) that the particular type of skill that the novelist needs is one in conversation--when this is understood of course in the 18th-century sense, i.e. closer to its etymological roots, meaning conversing with things in the world, experiencing, associating (making associations), and gaining familarity with them. There is more to be said about these particular connections between the essay and the requirements of novelistic narrative. Most notably, there is the fact that all this means these requirements are not, for Fielding, requirements of skill anymore but of experience, which are very different--the first being a quality making visible abstract entitlement, the second being a sum of particulars which can be enumerated, or to which (in the 18th century essay in particular) one can testify. But for now, I'll just stop here.

Locke and freedom

2009-07-04T16:12:00.001-04:00

Locke's major contribution to Western thought was a powerful conception of freedom. Most importantly, and notably unlike conceptions before, it was a concept that could run quite consistently through a political philosophy and a modern philosophical psychology, exemplifying itself at nearly every level of importance in these two areas (thus bringing them into a close relation as never before--though Hobbes went far in this direction and indeed, in a gesture even more profound than Locke, seriously opened up the area for thought). This concept of freedom is stated by Locke in any number of forms, throughout both his Essay and his Treatises, as well as his very important Letter Concerning Toleration, but I will take a formulation from Section 57 of his Second Treatise on Civil Government, where I think the context is important:

Where there is no law, there is no freedom.

In other words, freedom is never absolute, but always governed in a particular way, such that the above proposition is always true. Nowhere is there a freedom that is not subject to a law.

This sounds paradoxical, but Locke (again building upon Hobbes, but in a particular way) shows that the opposite assumption is even more odd. To suppose that freedom is absolute (as he puts it, that it involves a liberty for every person to do what they want) means that it never can, with certainty (or in accordance with reason), be said to be freedom. In other words, and to put it more loosely, what is clear is that if by freedom we mean some consistently free behavior, some behavior that is able to be established with some certainty (that is, by reason), this consistency implies the presence of a rule or a law (which establishes or formalizes in what way the consistency operates). And in the case of a freedom that would know no bounds, one that would for example allow us to fly if we indeed wanted it to be so (one sees how we have moved into psychology, as this absurdity on the level of the mind is also the absurdity of political sovereignty), well then, this freedom would have to come from outside the consistent behavior, which makes it inconsistent and absurd.

This gets at the larger principle behind Locke's notion of freedom: freedom precisely generates itself as freedom, or develops out of itself and proliferates in such a way that it behaves as freedom, in some consistent manner. In other words, it generates its own consistency--which (as we said) is precisely law. Law, then, insofar as it is in accordance with the particular consistency of freedom, is not coming from the outside, but is precisely developing and securing freedom. In the case of absolute freedom, there is no development of this consistency, and therefore it must not have any internal basis for things to behave in accordance with what it dictates.

This consistency, as I'm calling it, Locke simply calls reason, or nature: and this is consistency itself, the likelihood that we can be certain by sensation or reflection--that is, by nature and natural faculties, though this establishing is not innate--that something will happen (see Essay Concerning Human Understanding, XVIII, 2).

So now, given all this, we can understand Locke when he says the following, from the same section of the Second Treatise:

Law, in its true notion, is not so much the limitation as the direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest, and prescribes no farther than is for the general good of those under that law: could they be happier without it, the law, as an useless thing, would of itself vanish.

Limitation, when understood as the consistency generated by freedom itself, becomes direction or mere directedness--and thus law becomes in fact that which tends to expand freedom, as Locke says immediately afterward:

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.

Now, this might just amount to a tautology--but as anyone in philosophy will tell you (though perhaps not in the nicest language) there is very little that isn't this way, and if tautologies annoy you, you're studying the wrong material. The important question, in other words, is to understand precisely in what way, and with what implications, this is tautologous, to expand and redescribe precisely what Locke is getting at and test it out--not to see what holes we can punch in the argument (that would be much to easy, and frankly not very interesting), but to see what sort of thoughts it indeed, as a certain framework, makes possible or impossible (a much larger task).

In this case, we find that the end of law is to preserve and enlarge freedom, when freedom itself is what we find produces law: the end of law is the end of freedom, and, moreover, the end of law is supposedly derived from the end of freedom, which is, Locke claims, internal to it. All these things develop into each other.

But if we look at how Locke argues this, or rather where and why he does, we might find some interesting reasons why this is so.

Locke in this instance is actually talking about education. He is at the beginning of a discussion "Of Paternal Power," which contests Sir Robert Filmer's notion that political authority is passed down through fathers from God (through Adam)--or rather, since this issue was contested thoroughly in the first Treatise, Locke is developing an opposing notion of paternal power (which he in fact renames parental power, to remove the father), which should replace the paternalistic notion. In sections 56-58, education becomes the manifestation of this particular power, which now acts in accordance with the law of nature.

For law only applies to those who are free, those who have the ability to use reason or act in accordance with it (fully), and it is children that Locke says are not born with this capacity. Therefore, parents have a particular power over children, which nevertheless needs to be distinguished from the paternalistic power of the sovereign--that is, his unquestioned, unrestricted authority, or (almost) absolute freedom (freedom that would exceed rule-boundedness, at the very least).

Education, then, becomes the activity that this power engages in--it is the area of this power's expenditure. It constitutes the slow process of bringing the child into the sort of freedom that characterizes the free being. And as such, it involves schooling them in nature and reason, and bringing them under law--making their activity rule-bound (for exactly how this is supposed to proceed, see Locke's very influential Thoughts Concerning Education).

One can see, then, the precise sort of tautology that we are talking about: it is an educational tautology, stemming from how Locke needs to show that what needs to be rule-bound or under law (the child) eventually should become rule-bound in order to be free--that is, by no means subject to paternalistic sovereignity. Stating that law is not so much the limitation as the direction of an interest to its proper sphere, is precisely what is necessary--because the notion behind this is that the child, at bottom, is a non-free being needing to be free.

This somewhat colors Locke's important notion of freedom. For the sort of (consistent) expansion that we find at the heart of the notion of law elsewhere, and that actually characterizes Lockean freedom to begin with (as we saw) then seems to be the sort of expansion a child undergoes as they learn from reason and nature. It is a sort of developmental directedness that characterizes the direction in which law applies to the free.

"I throw my works off the platform...I, William Seward, will now unleash my Word Hoard..."

2009-07-01T18:36:00.000-04:00

One of the most painful editorial decisions in composing my Generals list was choosing 'representative' texts by the small number of authors who are my true favorites and by whom I've read many works. Of my five favorite writers, I was spared the agony in three instances since my field is 20th C. American. James was likewise less of a problem since, after writing my master's thesis on his experimental phase I knew more or less what I have to say about him and which works I like to say it through. That left the problem of William Burroughs, who was a highly prolific writer. Which works to choose?

The title of this post nods towards the fact that the word "works" does double duty in texts by Burroughs; with opiate addiction serving as the most consistent metaphor of his 40-year career (well, opiate addiction and buttsex), "works" inevitably carries with it the shadowy implication of tying up for a shot, cooking up a dose for the next fix, another in a series of endless, identical injections. Indeed, Burroughs was often accused writing the same book over and over, of endlessly rehashing his junkies and pederasts (see, for example, Anthony Burgess's review of Cities of the Red Night in the Saturday Review, 1981). Despite the fact that it takes a particularly stubborn kind of blindness to enjoy Naked Lunch but pan Cities of the Red Night, I want to flip this negative criticism around and say: YES. William S. Burroughs did, in fact, write the same book over and over - which is not to say again and again, but rather, continuously. I think there's something important to be gained from understanding Burroughs's works not through some kind of Renaissance master, Walter Pater-y, Wagnerian conception of the opus, but rather as a continuous project, a kind of linguistic Burroughs Adding Machine generating sums greater than the input, a literary junk metabolism in which states of bliss and withdrawal alternate, a punctuated equilibrium of fixes.

One of Burroughs' best-known techniques was the "cut-up method" which he developed w/ Brion Gysin; the technique (which possibly originated w/ Dadaist Tristan Tzara), along with the complimentary "fold-in" technique, was a way of randomizing literary production by using pre-existing texts (either one's own or borrowed) to generate new texts with the help of a pair of scissors. From the moment he began consistently writing in the early '50s, pretty much everything Burroughs produced went into a trunk of typewriter papers which were eventually nicknamed the Word Hoard (the phrase appears twice in Naked Lunch; no-one seems to know whether the trunk's nickname preexisted or was borrowed from the book). The Word Hoard, which mostly consisted of individual segments Burroughs called "routines," was the basis for much of Burroughs's early writing. Kerouac and Ginsberg assembled Naked Lunch from the Word Hoard in Tangiers; when Burroughs later moved to Paris and met Gysin, the Word Hoard served as the raw material for his most experimental books, the Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, produced mostly with fold-ins; The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, produced mostly with cut-ups). Material was often reused; though Burroughs' first two novels (the autobiographical Queer and Junkie) were written in a straight-forward, linear manner, they formed the first seed of the Word Hoard and many phrases and even entire paragraphs from them reappear in Naked Lunch. In The Beat Book from 1974, Burroughs claimed that when he edited a novel, about half of the material was cut away and later recycled. In short, the Word Hoard and the methodology used to produce individual works (not to mention the recurrence of places, characters, and events between them) make it reasonable to claim that Burroughs works, though edited into and published as separate books, consist of one continuous production.

Even if we treat each of Burroughs' published books as independent works, the question still remains - can we even conceive of a "Complete Works of William S. Burroughs"? Burroughs published frequently in magazines, and these shorter pieces often found their way into novels. Due to the nature of the cut-up method, though, they were often significantly modified. How much repetition would our imaginary Complete Works have to sustain in order to justify its title? This problem isn't unique to Burroughs, of course; a Complete Works of Henry James would have to similarly wrestle with the problem of James's revisions for the New York Edition of 1909. With Burroughs the problem goes further - between 1964 (Nova Express) and 1981 (Cities of the Red Night) Burroughs produced only one major work (The Wild Boys); despite this, his production during this period was impressive. It included experimental films, audio tapes which were likewise subjected to the cut-up method, countless short articles and many interviews, including a number which later became Victor Bockris's book With William Burroughs: A Report From the Bunker. In the '80s, Burroughs began a series of spoken-word performances, many of which were taped, as well a vast number of multimedia collaborations with artists including Sonic Youth, Tom Waits, Robert Wilson, and David Cronenberg. The question then becomes - over how many media would a Complete Works of William Burroughs have to extend? In 1985 Burroughs released a spoken-word track called "Kim, Like the Great Gatsby" on the John Giorno Poetry Systems compilation Smack My Crack. The same text was later incorporated into his 1987 novel The Western Lands. If "Kim, Like the Great Gatsby" had been published as a written text in a magazine, it would be fairly simple to argue that there would be no need to include it separately in our imaginary collection. But does the same logic apply across different media?

This post is growing rather lengthier than intended, so let me try to come to some kind of point. The condition of Burroughs's works is hardly unique; in fact, with the proliferation of outlets and the decay of print media, it is likely that well-known 'writers' who are known only on the basis of the printed word will probably be increasingly uncommon. For the past year or so, I've been wrestling with the concept of "postmodernism" and what it might mean or even be. Definitional difficulties seem to inhere to the concept itself, and most every angle from which I've tried to tackle the question of what postmodernism is has led to a conceptual impasse which has frequently led me to believe that there is, essentially, no such thing as postmodernism. Having said that though, I want to tentatively suggest that the conceptual difficulties presented by The Complete Works of William S. Burroughs might be one way in which we can recognize the movement from the modern to the postmodern: the dissolution of the concept of the "opus," the Werk-an-sich which can be legitimately evaluated and understood as an independent production. The repetition which characterizes Burroughs's writing, the recurrence of themes, names, and even entire paragraphs of text - is not a flaw; it is an intrinsic part of the writing itself. So is the proliferation of texts across media. An important part of what makes Burroughs Burroughs is the way in which he ties together his works.

Sense and interpretation

2009-06-30T21:16:00.001-04:00

So I'm reading a lot of Todorov, just trying to keep many of his distinctions straight, as they end up shifting over time and indeed get taken up and modified by other critics (most significantly, Genette). One of the great aspects of the structuralist or structurizing approach (I say the latter for Todorov often had very sensible criticisms of structuralism's tendencies and retained a healthy Barthesian sense of the fragility of any literary element when isolated or even specified) is the proliferation of its distinctions, of its categories: often the work of analysis is a work of recatigorizing (they would call it the creationa and refinement of a typology)--not because the thing under consideration is just a pretense for debate (i.e. is itself unimportant), but because analysis occurs in terms of the structure. So I put this forth because even the changes, the recatigorizations, are themselves instructive and perhaps also form part of the system.

Todorov has a very interesting distinction in an earlier text, "Les catégories du récit littéraire" (from the famous 1966 issue of Communications, number 8: it is translated in Papers on Language & Literature, 16.1, 3-37), between sense and interpretation, or, better (because Todorov invokes Frege), sense and representation (two common translations of Frege's Sinn and Vorstellung--though we must see the weighty French word for sense, sens, here behind the English translation of the French translation of the German, and keep in mind that Vorstellung is, with Frege, also translated often as idea... oh translation...).

Sense and representation are each an image of the element which makes up the work, and imply two different ways on the whole of studying of that work. It should be obvious that the first, sense, implies poetics (using now the distinctions found in Poétique), while the second, representation or interpretation (noun), implies interpretation (verb). Thus:

The sense (or function [here's another word for you]) of an element of the work is its potential to enter into correlation with other elements of this work and with the entire work. [...] To be interpreted, an element is included in a system which is not that of the work but that of the critic (4).

This sounds circular: an interpretation or representation is just that which is not sense. But Todorov does give us something more positive--though I will tease it out of him with by pushing an analogy from linguistics (see Benveniste). When he says "the work," the work is that larger unit which can be integrated into the even larger literary discourse: as such it composes a system that involves (smaller) elements which cannot be correlated except by also being amenable, now as a (small) correlated or combined unit, to integration (into the (large) work or (larger) discourse, though just having integratable capacity is now what we are focusing on). Therefore the interpreted or represented element is an element that correlates with other elements in such a way that it cannot then form an integratable unit (except by then being considered in terms of its sense). Put more simply: the sense of an element involves the element's correlation, the representation or interpretation its inclusion--when inclusion is considered to be an operation incapable of integration. And now, if we define integration as a the property of discourse that makes a unit require distributional relations, we understand what this means: the represented or interpreted element does not require any other level, composed of other units (in a particular distribution), after it is included. Thus:

The sense of a metaphor comes from being opposed to another image or from being more intense by one or several degrees. The sense of a monologue occurs from its characterizing a person. [...] Each element of a work has one or more senses (unless it is deficient) which are finite in number and which it is possible to establish once and for all. [...] The interpretation of an element differs according to the personality of the crtic. The interpretation of a metaphor, for example, can be an inference about the death struggles of a poet or about his attraction to one 'aspect' of nature rather than another. The same monologue can then be interpreted as a negation fo the existing order, let us say, or as a statement about the human condition (4).

There is no structure, in other words, in the level in which the interpreted element is included. Even though it has subsumed a smaller unit into a larger unit, this difference in size (and not in structure) is the only real thing distinguishing them or providing them with indepenent organization qua levels of units.

We might also note that this also changes how we conceive of a work. If the work is integrated into discourse, its boundaries are only as stable as it is integratable into a larger unit. Todorov puts it this way: if the work enters into relationship only with itself, the work perforce has no sense (4). Thus "it is evident that the question of the sense of the work does not make sense" (4): that is, this question--which we may restate more fully as the question of whether the work itself would have a "final" sense--only allows an answer that would be an interpretation or representation of the work. The sense, even though it implies distribution, is not specifiable except through integration.

In Poétique, Todorov will simplify all of this: he will say that there are simply relations in the literary text between elements, and that these relations are what get studied: the relations being either syntactic (syntagmatic, or a relation between two elements that are seen to be present--in praesentia) or semantic (paradigmatic, or relation between elements present and absent--in absentia). The process of integration will become the verbal aspect, which is the relation between the elements and discourse at the level of the work. This last will not carry the heavy pseudo-linguistic function I have given it here with respect to the elements: since the elements are seen already from the point of view of poetics, there is no use in defining their basic nature as sense in opposition to representation. This is all for the better: we get to actually focus on the precarious relation between the elements and discourse. But here we get more of a sense of what is involved in putting the process of interpretation in abeyance (in fact, it refines interpretation's role).

Todorov and structuralist poetics

2009-06-27T21:46:00.000-04:00

Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction to Poetics—in the French, simply Poétique, though it originally appeared in a collection of essays with the (significant) question there interrogated (Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme?) appended—Todorov’s book is many things: an attempt to give unity to the structuralist investigation of literature, or at least (as the original French title makes clear) show how structuralism bears generally upon literary study; an attempt to give direction to many of the trends in literary study, which (thanks to Todorov’s remarkable breadth of knowledge) it continually takes into account; an attempt to project a future area for criticism. Above all, it is a clearheaded, sensible work: Todorov does not make superficial points, but condenses reflections that must be products of years of work with literature.

Todorov accomplishes all this first and foremost by proposing a field of investigation, poetics (the name is less important--but I explain it somewhat in a comment here), and skillfully making certain distinctions which not only saturate this field with useful concepts—that is, allow it to cull just the right amount from other trends in literary study—but also require the formulation of new concepts, made possible by the general trajectory in which the field is set moving. In short, the result of proposing the field of poetics is not a mashup of all sorts of theories, but a clean framework that is nevertheless flexible, meant to be used and developed in directions that, while keeping it consistent with itself, do not easily launch it into absurdity.

The founding gesture of poetics will make this clearer. Todorov distinguishes poetics from interpretation on the one hand, and from a science (a word he uses loosely) on the other. Interpretation, which Todorov usefully says may include diverse activities also called exegesis, commentary, explication de texte, close reading, or analyse, is an approach to literature that “sees the literary text itself as a sufficient object of knowledge” (3). In other words, its procedure implies the existence of an empirical object that, if thoroughly known, would give us all we need as critics who study literature. In fact, literature itself, as something apart from these objects, does not even exist for interpretation, to the extent that one could say—though Todorov doesn’t put it this way—that interpretation involves the dissolution of any idea of literature. What Todorov does say is something like the converse: interpretation involves only the consideration of real works, and the establishment of these works’ meanings. Interpretation’s aim “is to name the meaning of the text examined” (4). Its aim is also to fail at this, since it will be “forever incapable of realizing the meaning, but only a meaning” (4). It is important to note, however, that this means the failure is due to how what it specifies is so particular, so real that it demands, along with the effacement of literature itself or the idea of literature, the effacement of the critic who determines or qualifies this meaning, who makes it a meaning “subject to historical and psychological contingencies” (4). The failure is due to the ultimate impossibility of “fidelity to the object,” the inability, at bottom, “to make the text itself speak” (4), and not because at some point, a generalization must be made about how the work is indeed literary which will force the object into abstraction and interrupt interpretation. In short the idea of literature is still in the process of dissolution—it is precisely what never comes back to frustrate interpretation.

This is important because science takes up precisely this task: its aim “is no longer the description of the particular work, the designation of its meaning, but the establishment of general laws of which this particular text is the product” (7). These laws, however, are not laws of literature: a good example is a reading by Freud, who establishes psychoanalytic laws that explain a particular literary text (in other words we don't, without hesitation, call these laws literary, because they aren't). The work is “transpos[ed] into the realm considered fundamental” (7) or translated: its only meaning would be that psychoanalysis can appropriately consider such a text. Remember, however, naming the meaning is precisely foreign to science’s task, and therefore that science is by no means unproductive in this area. Laws are indeed being established which bear upon the idea of literature—historical, psychological, ethnographic, sociological, philosophical laws, which change our notion of what real works of literature are possible.

Poetics, as Todorov puts it, is not a compromise between the two activities here, but what “breaks down the symmetry thus established,” (7) or cuts across all of the features here elaborated. The cut, the disturbance of symmetry and mutual exclusion, is achieved by placing poetics within the field of science, but by making that science into a science of literature—which entails periodic contact with actual works and therefore interpretation.

Let us lay this out as clearly as possible. Todorov says,

In contradistinction to the interpretation of particular works, it [poetics] does not seek to name meaning, but aims at a knowledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each work. But in contradistinction to such sciences as psychology, sociology, etc., it seeks these laws within literature itself (6).

In other words poetics does not impede the consideration of the idea of literature, but does not seek to make this idea take the form of laws that are not about literature. Thus, “it is not the literary work itself that is the object of poetics” (6). Each work is regarded only as the manifestation of something abstract and general, “of which it is but one of the possible realizations” (7). We thereby put poetics in the category of science—and Todorov appropriately refers to it as “this science:” “this science is no longer concerned with actual literature, but with a possible literature” (7). Put differently, “the goal of this study is no longer to articulate a paraphrase, a descriptive résumé of the concrete work, but to propose a theory” (7).

At the same time, this theory is not external to literature: the theory proposed is “a theory that affords a list of literary possibilities, so that existing literary works appear as achieved particular cases” (7). Thus, interpretation is not excluded from this science: “The relation between poetics and interpretation is one of complementarity par excellence. A theoretical reflection upon poetics that is not sustained by observations of existing works always turns out to be sterile and invalid” (7). It pulls the scientific tendencies of poetics away from other sciences and focuses it upon literature—but in a way that we will soon specify, about which it is important, nevertheless, to say the following: interpretation certainly is not only present to ensure that this tendency is kept in check, as it has been present especially in Anglo-American circles. What we have here in Todorov is less an opposition between “science and poetry” (a famous, tired opposition, which also uses a different notion of “science”) than a suspicion towards interpretation, which, as we said, tends to dissolve the idea of literature—that is, doesn’t oppose itself to anything, or doesn’t stop at opposition, but invades and imposes upon anything that would abstract away from the real text, that would conceive of any possible literature other than the book in front of one’s face. If this means that the emphasis in poetics is indeed put upon science, if poetics indeed tends to establish more laws than suggest meanings, this is only because “a massive imbalance in favor of interpretation characterizes the history of literary studies” (12). But the conclusion Todorov reaches from this is that “it is this disequilibrium that we must oppose, and not the principle of interpretation” (12). And insofar as this is the case, the emphasis on science is not made to the detriment of interpretation: it just means interpretation is made into one of the many things that pulls poetics as a science away from literature. We may state this more robustly as follows: interpretation in poetics remains not primarily as what keeps the science in poetics in check, but which allows science to test its possible literatures against reality, or restrict a little the amount of the possible—that is, make sure the science is not wholly unmotivated, to use (too metaphorically) the semiological term. Insofar as this is the case, interpretation is still a major part of poetics. In fact, one thing can indeed be said for certain, even if science is emphasized: “neither of the two activities takes precedence over the other: both are ‘secondary’” (8). The emphasis on science is not one achieved by a hierarchy: it is the strategic focusing on what is already known to be merely secondary.

We then broach the more specific question of how precisely the science is actually kept in check, or is made into a science of literature—if indeed interpretation is not the thing that brings this about. In an earlier paper entitled “Structural Analysis of Narrative” (translated in Novel 3.1 [Autumn, 1969], p. 70-76), which shares many of the same points and even the same formulations with Poétique, Todorov gives us another distinction that can help us here: he says that we can discern internal approaches to a literary work and external ones. What is normally thought is that science is an external approach, or one of abstraction, and interpretation an internal approach:

For example, when Marxists or psychoanalysts deal with a work of literture, they are not interested in a knowledge of the work itself, but in understanding of an abstract structure, social of psychic, which manifests itself through that work. This attitude is both [that of science] and external. On the other hand a New Critic (imaginary) whose approach is obviously internal, will have no goal other than understanding the work itself; the result of his efforts will be [an interpretation:] a paraphrase of the work, which is supposed to reveal the meaning better than the work itself (70).

In Introduction to Poetics Todorov nicely uses these terms (in a phrase so key I'll set it off) to show precisely how poetics is situated, how it breaks down the symmetry between science and interpretation:

Poetics is therefore an approach to literature at once "abstract" and "internal" (6).

What we are asking then, in asking how poetics as science remains a science of literature, is precisely how this science, which we grant to be abstract, can also be internal if it is not clearly employing interpretation for these purposes.

The answer is that, as a science of literature, its object is not an object, but a discourse. Put differently, if a science just has an object, it is not a structuralist science—and the only science under consideration here is of the structuralist sort. But what, then, is a discourse? Todorov in another essay, parroting Benveniste (see “Subjectivity in Language” in Problems in General Linguistics), explains that discourse is a language in action, a language as it is put in use (in the semiological sense of langue—that is, a finite set of rules making possible all utterances), or a used-language, prior to its being an actual, real moment of language use, or an utterance (parole):

It is necessary to introduce [this concept of discourse] because the rules of language, which are common to all who use it, constitute only a part of the rules which govern our concrete verbal production. They only fix the norm of grammatical combinations within a sentence, a phonology, and a common meaning for words. But between the set of rules common to all utterances [langue] and the exact formulation of a specific utterance [parole] there is a gulf of indeterminacy. The gulf is bridged by the rules of each particular discourse (thus an official letter will not be written in the same way as an intimate one), as well as by the limitations inherent in the context of the speech act (the identity of the speaker and the listener, the time and place of the speech act). The rules of discourse are more restricted than those of [a] language, but less restricted than those of a specific speech act (“The Notion of Literature,” in New Literary History 5.1 [1973], 5-16, p. 14).

If discourse is a language in action, if we specify these rules we are not talking about something external to the utterance, even though what we specify may be abstract: the discursive statement by (Benveniste’s) definition involves (or rather is only “filled” by) the act by which it is uttered (when the utterance is considered as a product of a language: which is why it is not a speech act or performative). This is not necessarily so from the perspective of science: science may discuss structure in general and ignore (for the most part) discourse.

But, again, because what we are discussing is discourse, while we do not consider the literary work itself, we still talk about what is internal to these objects, or what will be realized by them, so we are also not open to the charge that what we talk about is external. At the same time, this is also why they are not pure—that is, not really abstractions, but indeed descriptions (of literary discourse). Todorov puts it this way:

Poetics situates […] abstract notions not within the particular work but in literary discourse; it asserts that they can exist there alone, whereas in the work we always deal with a more or less “mixed” manifestation; poetics is not concerned with this or that fragment with a work, but with those abstract structures which it names “description” or “action” or “narration” (9).

Some skeptics of structuralism might still object that this “there” is really nowhere: literary discourse is still too unreal for them. Unless there is some contact with empirical works, and not a continual interrogation of “the properties of that particular discourse that is literary discourse” (6), we condemn the literary study to the study of pure convention, to the description of literature as something completely unessential. So Christopher Norris in a review of the Introduction disparages Todorov by saying that poetics defines literature “only in terms of its own discursive methodology” (Modern Language Review, 78.3 [July, 1983], 636-637, p. 636). Without requiring contact with the empirical, the definition is “circular” (636).

I would doubt that this is so: there are indeed many questionable elements in Todorov’s account (one of which is that “reading is a trajectory […] that constitutes the text in space and not in linearity,” [5]: the spatialization of the line is precisely self-serving and circular, as much as it is typically structuralist, because it does not thereby abolish the line but, precisely as in Hegel, preserves it within space) but this I find to be pretty solid, if only because Todorov draws the ultimate conclusion from it. This is the following: if the poetics studies is literary discourse, and indeed does not of necessity require contact with real, empirical phenomena (“poetics is not the sum of empirical phenomena,” 10), then poetics must be a finite endeavor, which disperses itself as soon as the discourse which it studies disperses. And Todorov affirms this, and far from closing on what Norris—whose aim can only be to consciously mislead—calls a “grave resignation” (636) in fact seems quite happy that poetics has this sort of pertinence (once more, in the semiotic sense): Todorov says that as studies of other discourses, helped along by the example of the study of literary discourse, may indeed proliferate, poetics’

own role will be reduced to little enough: to the investigation of the reasons that caused us to consider certain texts, at certain periods, as ‘literature.’ No sooner born than poetics finds itself called upon, by t he very power of its results to sacrifice itself on the altar of general knowledge. And it is not certain that this fate may be regretted (72).

This is strong stuff, but it isn’t resigned. It is just announcing that wonderful but (in most of America) still unappreciated property of things structurally considered: they are finite, without ground, and without essence—wholly conventional, never natural. This is why the above argument does not strike me as circular: it is circular only insofar as structuralism as a whole is circular. This, though, is a distinct possibility: we can object to Todorov in another way, which would be that interpretation, perhaps not as the consideration of empirical works but instead as the consideration of works still “in themselves” in one aspect—in their singularity, their irreducibility—will at some point be impeded precisely by the focus on discourse. The irreducibility will precisely be reduced to structure. The only defense we can make for Todorov here would be the one that, again, defends structuralism generally from this “post-structualist” critique: it would be to affirm, with Todorov, the benefits of undoing—even slightly, or perhaps only slightly—the imbalance in favor of interpretation which has characterized the study of literature. This, though, is risky, I would do so only in the following manner, which is not Todorov’s, and which I sketch out much too quickly: unless such focus on singularity or irreducibility is paired with some way to extrapolate, to situate itself and strategically reduce itself, it remains too indeterminate even to be considered impractically, let alone practically, and in fact—this is the highest danger—can be confused precisely with the empirical. Structuralism may help in this process of extrapolation.

Hugo Gernsback and SF's Handicraft Roots

2009-06-26T17:02:00.000-04:00

While Hugo Gernsback's 1911 novel Ralph 124C 41+ (a wordplay on "one to foresee for one") is one of the foundational works of science fiction, it's also widely agreed to be "the worst science fiction novel ever written" (Everett Bleiler; similar sentiments in a talk recently webcast on SF and architecture by Warren Ellis). Setting aside this work's questionable merit ("Ralph 124C 41+, his heart thumping in a most undignified way, was acting more like a schoolboy than a master of science"), Gernsback's work as a magazine editor provides some fascinating materials when considering the emergence of science fiction within an environment of fin de siècle technological utopianism and DIY experimentation with radio homebrew. I've been digging through some of the Firestone Library's Gernsback materials and came across a few interesting points.

The Luxembourg-born Gernsback began his career as a publisher in 1908 with Modern Electrics, a hobbyist's guide to wireless experimentation, including how-to articles, descriptions of the latest developments in the field, and speculations on the future of wireless technology. It was in this steampunk incarnation of Wired magazine that Ralph 124C 41+ was first published, and here that, strangely enough, Lewis Mumford published his first bit of writing at the age of 15, titled "A Portable Receiving Outfit." Gernsback's next big success was Science and Invention, running from 1913 (originally as Electrical Experimenter) to 1931. In the August 1923 issue, Gernsback first edited a collection, calling on many of the same writers contributing technical pieces to write for this "Science Fiction Number."

This issue served as a sort of trial run for Gernsback's most famous publication, Amazing Stories, appearing in April 1926 and continuing, in one form or another, until the present day. In its early incarnations, the magazine largely published reprints of authors Gernsback wanted to appropriate as canonical works of "scientifiction," a term he patented and attempted to popularize with Amazing Stories. One finds in the first two years of the magazine stories by Wells, Verne, and Poe. There simply wasn't a large pool of authors writing in the genre (indeed, the "genre" at this point is little more than a business venture with no product), and those who were writing fiction along Gernsback's lines of "a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision" were put off by Gernsback's less than attractive editorial style (he believed that publication is payment enough). Burroughs was too expensive to contract, and Lovecraft had a good enough following of his own.

One of Gernsbacks' most important contributions is his development of a forum in which a community of genre fans could develop, in which a medium of popular criticism could develop around a particular set of aesthetic questions. He was one of the first magazine editors to regularly publish a letters to the editor section, responding each month. Indeed, in many of the correspondences between Gernsback and his readers, he seems to be behind the curve when discussing the poetics of the genre. In the July 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, nineteen year old reader Green Peyton Wertenbaker writes, "Scientifiction goes out into the remote vistas of the universe, where there is still mystery and so still beauty. For that reason scientifiction seems to me to be the true literature of the future. The danger that may lie before Amazing Stories is that of becoming too scientific and not sufficiently literary." Gernsback's unfortunate reply in the next month's issue: "we should state that the ideal proportion of a scientifiction story should be seventy-five per cent literature interwoven with twenty-five per cent science."

Gernsback never abandons his earlier technical publications, continuing with titles such as Short Wave Craft (seen above), Everyday Mechanics, and Technocracy Review. He opens a radio station WRNY which in 1928 broadcast one of the earliest radio programs with a live classical concert (conducted by fellow wireless enthusiast Joseph Kraus) and conducted experiments with television in the late 20s and into the 30s, though never with simultaneous image and sound--an image would be broadcast and then a sound over the same wavelength in a sort of shot countershot. One of the most interesting things about Gernsback's regular editorials and critical writings (publishing a short essay in each of his several publications each month) is the degree to which his (if you want to call it this) literary criticism and technical writings feed into one another--and this seems to be the case in the fan letter, pop critical discussion that flourished in his magazine empire. In the passage below from the Feb-March 1931 issue of Short Wave Craft, one can just as easily imagine the "experimenter" to be the writer of fiction as the hobbyist tinkering with tubes and resistors. (And note the way that the nature of television--a medium which has yet to come into being--is already seen to be determined not by the nature of its technological support but by a certain aesthetic of its use--potential technics?)

With television on the threshold, an entirely new radio paradise has been opened to the experimenter; because television will, no doubt, be transmitted on the shorter wave lengths for a long time to come. The up-to-date experimenter is, of course, thinking about this and is following the new art in all its different branches; so that, when television finally 'breaks,' he will be equipped to work with it as thoroughly as he has been familiarized with transmission and reception, 'phone as well as code.

Henry James considered as a hippopotamus retrieving a pea

2009-06-25T16:02:00.000-04:00

In several essays on Henry James, I've found mentioned a duality in his critical description of writing fiction. The process is simultaneously described as projection and reception, as self-expression and recording.

Dorothy Hale:

A superior sensibility is revealed precisely to the degree that it ‘records’ ‘dramatically and objectively,’ without, that is, the self-interest that would interfere with the appreciation of the subject’s virtues. By the same token, the more beautifully—which is to say, vividly and completely—the ‘thing’ is represented, the more it bespeaks its indebtedness to the viewer/artist’s sensibility.

What interests me about this seemingly insoluble cornerstone of the realist aesthetic is the degree to which it resurfaces in discussions on the materialities of inscription in James. In other words, I want to think through the way this toggling between privileged subject and unmediated object resurfaces (and is perhaps better thought through) when one considers, for instance, James's method of dictation to a typewriter, and the presence of cables and telegrams in his fiction. In Jamesian language, this is a question of "relations"--not only between individuals but between raw materials and their organization--relations between infinitesimal clues given meaning by the particular, "frail structure of wood and wire" of "In the Cage" (1898) or the "wild weed of delusion [that] easily grew too fast, and the the Atlantic cable [that] alone could race with it" in The Ambassadors (1903). Perhaps a bit of a jump, but let's just see what happens. And, disclaimer, what follows is some provisional rambling.

In any discussion of James, one can't help but draw on/push against some of the caricatures and complaints about his unwieldy prose style or trivial subject matter. My new personal favorite comes from H.G. Wells, who devoted an entire satirical novel--Boon (1915)--to the topic. "His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle. … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost even at the cost of its dignity upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things it insists are beyond it but it can at any rate modestly and with an artistic singleness of mind pick up that pea…"

By the time of his late work, James was almost exclusively composing his novels by dictating to a typewriter (a term which at that time referred to both the machine and its operator, most likely a young woman), and some attribute the peculiarly maundering quality of his sentences to this method of composition. Several bits of biographical history deserve mention here. According to one of his typists, Mary Weld, James's dictation was "remarkably fluent" and "when working I was just part of the machinery." According to another, Theodora Bosanquet, James wanted his typists to be "without a mind." As in James's Preface to The Ambassadors, the presence of the "author's vision" fades into the background; it paradoxically "hangs there ever in place like the white sheet suspended for the figures of a child's magic-lantern" … upon which it is the "charming office" of the protagonist Lambert Strether to project "a more fantastic and more moveable shadow" (again, here we have the unity of projection and reception).

But further testimony from Bosanquet, who, like brother William James, had an interest in automatic writing, reveals a decisive resistance from this apparatus of inscription/projection/reflection/etc.

Indeed, at the time when I began to work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of a Remington machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and he found it almost disconcerting to speak to something that made no responsive sound at all.

Interpreting these lines in Bodies and Machines, Mark Seltzer positions James next to "the dream of perfect referentiality in realist writing," arguing that he seems to feed off the clicking noise of the Remington typewriter as "the concerted response of an ideally responsive and automatized first reader," rendering the circuit between composition and reception illusory, a "dictatorial practice of writing [which] precisely obviates the conflations of the materialities of writing and technology visible, for instance, in Jack London's or Mark Twain's writing as working at the machine, or…" etc. etc.

However, there is obviously something to this breakdown of equipmentality, to the failure of line breaks or keystrokes (whatever the click corresponded to) to make themselves present and thus obstruct the telling of a story. It is important to recognize that, with the expansion of telephone/telegraph networks, public electricity grids, wireless transmission, etc., a rhetoric of technologically mediated immediacy flourished within the same milieu as literary realism, and Seltzer is right to note that "the entire question of the referentiality of later nineteenth-century writing might be reconsidered in terms of such technologies of automatic and immediate registration" (196). But James fell prey to bald fantasies of telepresence no more than he did to some vulgar realist desire for unmediated reality.

Which is why we must return to his strange preservation "superior artistic vision" in the context of such obviously determined relations to practices of composition. Surely similar conditions must obtain for James as for the telegraphist In the Cage: "The men she did track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one relation, the relation as to which the cage convinced her, she believed, more than anything else could have done, that it was quite the most diffused" (187). I'm left wondering, how can we can locate an "art of the novel" in which the autonomous presence of artistic genius, as James would have it, persists among the wired relations with which he works?

Willa Cather's Nonlinear History

2009-06-24T08:38:00.000-04:00

"Thus, what follows will not be a chronicle of 'man' and 'his' historical achievements, but of a philosophical meditation on the history of matter-energy in its different forms and of the multiple coexistences and interactions of these forms. Geological, organic, and linguistic materials will all be allowed to 'have their say' in the form that this book takes, and the resulting chorus of material voices will, I hope, give us a fresh perspective on the events and processes that have shaped the history of this millennium."

The quotation above is from the introduction of Manuel De Landa's excellent book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (published in 1997, it's fresh and fascinating in a way that 12-year old theory books rarely are. Also, it has a really cool rainbow cover art that is fresh and fascinating in a way that 12-year-old cover are rarely is. So, win-win). But I think that, if you substitute the word 'millenium' in the last paragraph for 'century,' you'd have a very good description of Willa Cather's masterful, elegaic 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Written in a deliberately flat style which Cather in a 1927 letter to the journal Commonweal described as "absolutely the reverse of dramatic treatment…something without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition…it is as though all human experiences...were of about the same importance,” the novel moves at a methodical pace through a loosely interconnected series of episodes in the life of the Bishop Jean Latour (later the titular Archibishop) of the newly created diocese of New Mexico in the middle of the 19th century.

Cather’s "unaccented" writing produces a narrative mode that corresponds with what De Landa calls “nonlinear history.” That is to say, rather than being constructed as an inevitable forward trajectory of teleological, progressive cause and effect with a climactic narrative arc, the equal weight given each episode produces a biographical narrative that is not a “history.” Though a historical narrative of the American Southwest is very much a part of the novel’s fabric, it is interwoven with the biographies of Latour and his companion Vaillant as a kind of narrative cross-hatching; though we are given a clear sense of when and where “historical” events intersect with events in the Bishop’s life (the Gadsden Purchase; Kit Carson’s war on the Navajo; the discovery of gold in Colorado), the course of the Bishop’s biography and the narrative of history are not staged as parallel lines. Rather, the material conditions and activities of the two principal characters are positioned in what can be described as a rhizomatic network of flows: flows of biological material, of religious trends, of national ideologies. Cather situates her story both literally and figuratively in a space that lies at the intersection of national, ethnic, religious, and economic lines, so that the impact and significance of these movements can be felt but without any of them being given causal primacy or an automatic significance over the others. Among the more prominent “flows” in the novel are the biological ones: genetic material, as represented by Cather’s descriptions of local populations and their phenotypic and genotypic relationships, and, even more significantly, the movements of cultivated plants and domesticated animals and the adaptation of these species to their new environments with greater or less success. It is not a coincidence that various plant species are used consistently as a metaphor for Catholicism; religion is itself of course a major flow in the novel, but rather than being a transcendental truth and a righteous destiny it is a living thing, varying with its location and changing with circumstance. As the renegade Padre Martinez tells Bishop Latour in the novel: “We have a living Church here, not a dead arm of the European Church. Our religion grew out of the soil, and has its own roots.

In its slow, episodic construction, Cather's text seems to recognize that "all structures that surround us and form our reality (mountains, animals and plants, human languages, social institutions) are the products of specific historical processes (De Landa, 11). Rather than situating itself within a master narrative of inevitable progress and manifest destiny, Death Comes for the Archbishop quietly shows the reader that "human history did not follow a straight line, as if everything pointed towards civilized societies as humanity's ultimate goal. On the contrary, at each bifurcation alternative stable states were possible, and once actualized, they coexisted and interacted with one another" (De Landa, 16).

Thinking About Thinking About

2009-06-22T10:21:00.000-04:00

"...the so-called 'vehicle' itself is at least questionable: self-conscious, vertiginously arch, fashionably solipsistic, unoriginal - in fact a convention of twentieth-century literature. Another story about a writer writing a story! Another regressus in infinitum! Who doesn't prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn't continually proclaim 'Don't forget I'm an artifice!'? That takes for granted its mimetic nature instead of asserting it in order (not so slyly after all) to deny it, or vice-versa? Though his critics sympathetic and otherwise described his own work as avant-garde, in his heart of hearts he disliked literature of an experimental, self-despising, or overtly metaphysical character."

- John Barth, "Life-Story"

This post is more a half-formulated observation than any kind of coherent statement, but perhaps my esteemed colleagues who work in other genres and periods can put in their two (s)cents.

Working more or less chronologically through my 20th C. American list, I've finally gotten to the part I've been eagerly waiting for: the radical prose experiments of the '50s and '60s, AKA "postmodernism": Burroughs, Gaddis, Barth, and, slightly later, others including Pynchon and, to be fair, Andy Warhol (whose a: A novel is generally unknown but nonetheless an awesome, radical challenge to the conceptual limit of the novel as a form). I first read most of these writers in high school (I probably wouldn't be sitting here writing this if Naked Lunch hadn't changed my life in the 8th grade), and it's exciting to revisit texts I had so much fun with...um...10 years ago.

One of the most interesting things to me about this section of my list - and what most excited me about these works when I first discovered them - is how self-reflexive these texts are. Obviously, experimentation and self-reflexivity have been a preoccupation of novelists American or otherwise since long before the middle of the 20th century (though I don't care to make it, there's certainly an argument to be made that between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake James Joyce had already said, done, and tried pretty much everything there was to say, do, and try with literary prose). Nonetheless, I find that with the group of texts I'm looking at the reflexivity rises to an obsessively frenzied pitch: as a wise man once said, postmodern narratives swallow their own tales.

What I find fascinating about this almost eschatological concern with the limit and significance of literary form is that the decline of this literary moment - which had its high point in the mid-60s and then tapered off; Gravity's Rainbow was, in a sense, its last hurrah - coincides with the rise to prominence of what we now (erroneously) call French post-structuralism and its critical progeny. Of course, 'post-structuralism' is concerned with far more than literary form, but there's a reason the words 'post-structuralism' and 'post-modernism' are often used interchangeably; Burroughs, Gaddis, Barth et al. share with the French critics (including Barthes and the Tel Quel group) an intense concern with the nature and limits of mimesis, genre, form, as well as, in the case of John Barth especially, an almost compulsive concern with the boundary between the inside and the outside - the same suspicion of binary distinctions that motivates many key texts by Jacques Derrida, such as "Structure, Sign, and Play" and "The Law of Genre." It's almost as if, once criticism as a genre took up the concerns which had occupied novelistic prose, the novel was free to take a break from self-reflexivity. Which is not to say that there aren't experimental novelists still hard at work, and once in a while a David Foster Wallace or a Mark Danielewski manages to do something interesting with the form; but the self-reflexive which marked that literary moment of the '50s and '60s certainly seems to have largely shifted into the genre of criticism.

At the risk of sounding like someone put too much Vico in my Kool-Aid, I wonder whether there's any significance to the passing of this particular conceptual torch. It's become fairly standard recently to announce the death of theory; maybe a more realistic explanation for what's happening is that we're finally seeing the difference between "theory" and genre; maybe the parasitic activity that we think of as "literary theory" is simply picking up and moving along, much as it did in the mid-6os when it jumped ship from the postmodern novel and found a new host in the critical essay.

Shirley Jackson's Mundane Horror, or, Fear Without Prepositions

2009-06-19T08:10:00.000-04:00

One of my interests both when putting together my reading list for Generals and while doing the reading has been the question of "genre fiction," its categorical implications and its relation to the canon. It is surely a banal observation at this point to note how much of a book's and a writer's reception hinges on the categories of literary production to which a text is assigned; there's a reason we take it for granted that Margaret Atwood, who has insisted that her works set in the future be called "speculative fiction," is a candidate for the Booker Prize, while Ursula K. Le Guin, who writes "science fiction," is not.

I first picked up Shirley Jackson's work at the beginning of high school at the recommendation of my 8th-grade English teacher; I remember liking some of her short stories and being puzzled by others. When putting together my Generals list I decided to revisit Jackson's work to see how I felt about it now, and having read two books by her in the last day and a half (The Lottery and Other Stories; We Have Always Lived In the Castle), I'm delighted to say that Jackson is now officially one of my favorite writers. Her short stories are so simple and straight-forward and at the same time so dense and complicated; each of them is a carefully polished, perfectly constructed gem - truly a wonderful (re)reading experience.

I'm fascinated, though, by Jackson's continued association with the horror genre. Stephen King, in his non-fiction survey of 20th century horror literature Danse Macabre devotes a long section to The Haunting of Hill House, calling it one of the finest horror novels of the 20th century. The blurbs on my edition of The Lottery run in a similar vein: "A gem of satanic shock!" screams the back cover. Another blurb speaks of "deadly supernatural possibilities." In truth, though, with virtually no exception, Jackson's work contains barely a hint of the paranormal or supernatural, much less of anything we would associate with "horror" as a genre. Many of her stories are horrifying, but not, as in the case of, say, Stephen King, because of the strange creatures bubbling up from the sewers, but because of their familiarity; far from being bloody chambers, Jackson's canvases are carefully drawn with unremarkable, quotidian strokes that somehow coalesce into a shocking whole. As far as Jackson's few explicit "ghost stories," like The Haunting of Hill House, their closest literary relative is without a doubt not H.P. Lovecraft but Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. But in thinking about the majority of Jackson's stories, which, though thrilling and at times terrifying contain no hint of any supernatural element, the closest literary relative I can come up with is Franz Kafka.*

The kinship I sense between the two writers is difficult to put into words; it might best be explained in terms of prepositions. Whereas horror writers like H.P. Lovecraft or Clive Barker describe the terror that lies outside the mundane, the terror that is completely alien to the mundane and renders it horrific by invading or penetrating it, and whereas a writer like Stephen King describes the terror that lies behind the mundane, underpinning it and occasionally erupting to the surface in a horrifying way, both Jackson and Kafka describe the terror that is the mundane. What we traditionally think of as horror or suspense fiction produces its effect by situating us within the familiar and then turning the screw to make it suddenly, shockingly unfamiliar; Jackson manages to horrify us by situating us within a network of reference points which are at once completely banal and singularly shocking, without shifting between the two registers. The key to this effect, I think, is a writing style that is pointedly resistant to metaphor.

Like Kafka's, Jackson's stories are deceptively open to explanation or interpretation; as with Kafka, Christian allegory and psychoanalysis are the simplest way out. It's easy to read Jackson's suburban/rural housewives like a Douglas Sirk movie or an episode of Mad Men, living lives of apple-pie desperation at the edge of a carefully-rouged neurotic abyss. But it is precisely this simple solution that Jackson dares the reader to resist. Reading "The Daemon Lover," there's nothing easier than checking the box marked "hysteria" as we watch the nameless female protagonist go store-to-store asking whether anyone has seen her titular disappearing beau; this is to flatten out the story towards the diagnostic. Similarly, the reading encouraged by the "horror" genre-branding ("A gem of satanic shock!") is the literal one, Disappearing Boyfriend, or, Don't Have Sex Before Marriage Cause He Might Turn Out to Be an Incubus! As with readings of Kafka, the most obvious answers are the medical and the moral. Indeed, I can't help thinking that part of Jackson's genius is the way she deliberately tempts us towards these readings, keenly aware of these two poles as the most automatic implications of mid-century middle-class American womanhood (to fully appreciate how original and powerful these stories are, I had to remind myself that they were written in the 1940s, before the neurotic suburban housewife had become a cultural cliche).

The problem is that both of these readings, the psychoanalytic and the moral, leave no room for the most interesting effects of "The Daemon Lover," like the mysterious voices in the apartment next to the empty one supposedly belonging to the vanished paramour. The brilliant thing about Shirley Jackson, I think, is that she nods towards easy solutions but deliberately make them insufficient through the effects of the text itself; any attempt to suggest what the text means requires excising crucial aspects of what the text does. To wrap up by returning to my original subject, I want to suggest that genre-classification operates by risking a similar blind spot; where interpretation sacrifices what the text does in favor what what the text means, generic categories sacrifice what the text does in favor of what a particular genre does, or of what we assume a text will do because of its generic associations. Christian allegories, psychoanalytic readings, and monsters from beyond the edge of rational thought are all figurative solutions to textual problems. Shirley Jackson, like Kafka, resists the figurative by being absolutely literal. Whatever else it might be, "The Lottery" is not a metaphor. It is not behind or beyond - it just is, and that, really, is what makes it so horrifying.

*Having reached the end of the post, it's obvious on re-reading it that when I say "Franz Kafka," I actually mean "Franz Kafka as read by Deleuze & Guattari in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature."

Defoe's Plague Year

2009-06-18T18:33:00.000-04:00

Daniel Defoe (c.1659-1731)
A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)

I very much enjoyed reading A Journal of the Plague Year for exams, mostly because of its expansiveness. This is an odd word that we sometimes use to describe the experience of the later, well-developed historical novel—War and Peace, say (we might also say it of Antony and Cleopatra, but I think for different and precisely non-novelistic reasons: there it is usually an issue of what the story demands of the dramatic production). But it is not entirely inappropriate here, I think: what we have is a thorough, if not well-ordered, wide ranging historical account, which achieves something in its scope.

I say that it is not well ordered, because, well, it isn’t: the book follows the general course of the plague through the year (though, while the beginnings are somewhat looked into, there is virtually no account of 1666—it is very much about the plague year, 1665), but is studded with various anticipations and retrospections which make it really a mix of individual little scenes, generally attempted to be juxtaposed (that’s probably the best way to put it) in chronological order. This isn’t very annoying to me, as it is for other scholars, from what I saw of the criticism. This is because I don’t really take the novel to be narrator-driven, as many others try to do. H.F., the saddler who gives us his account—made up out of his private journal from that year as well as historical material that he has in front of him—doesn’t really hold the story together, but merely acts as a sort of point of view or frame for the story.

To elaborate: H.F. has three narrator-functions. The first is to generally relay already-known information, to assemble already-processed information on the plague, such as the mortality bills of each parish, or government decrees (more on this in a bit). The second function is to testify to the stories related about the plague, to act as an eyewitness (again more on this, for it isn’t your typical eyewitness, but a cynical realist). The third is to situate the telling of the story on a particular level that will give you a very definite, but also very specific, view of the plague. None of these really hold the story together as a really tight act of narration, however: the narrative functions remain functions, and aren’t synthesized (or synthesized in the same way) as they are in, say, Robinson Crusoe.

Let’s see how. First, there is relaying or relation of things like the Orders of the Lord Mayor at the beginning of the novel:

Watchmen.
That to every infected house there be appointed two watchmen, one for every day, and the other for the night; and that these watchmen have a special care that no person go in or out of such infected houses whereof they have the charge, upon pain of severe punishment. And the said watchmen to do such further offices as the sick house shall need and require: and if the watchman be sent upon any business, to lock up the house and take the key with him; and the watchman by day to attend until ten of the clock at night, and the watchman by night until six in the morning (p.45 of the Signet Classic Edition, 1960).

This goes on for several pages. The interesting thing about this, though, is that the orders are not there to produce verisimilitude: as would be the case in a later work of realism, perhaps, the suspension of the tale to include such a document does not give us any reality effect: we are just left more informed. This is to say that, here, at least, Defoe isn’t engaging in any realism. I have my doubts about applying this term to Defoe in the first place (and about applying it in general, thanks to Jakobson’s famous essay on the topic, which I recently read), but here at least we can categorically state it doesn’t apply. And this is not because of the cited material here, but because the requirements for its effect are not there: there is not a surrounding density of fiction that would set off these orders and make them yield reality. At the very most, they pad the text. And they bring up a larger question: can we really consider this work a novel? Is it not just the relation of information like this? In other words, contrary to what we might suppose, doesn’t the fiction in this text interrupt the quotation and the relation of facts?

This brings us to the second function, which would refute this supposition: indeed, because the fictional parts serve as testimony, they tone down the informative function of the account and ends up turning it back into a novel—fiction, in other words, and not information, remains the base line for the account. This is so even though the testimony could not be real (or not entirely real—Defoe did live through the plague, though he was only five). Why? Because the constant acts of witnessing thicken the events related, give them a bit of depth and, through fictionalizing them, give us a greater sense of their contours. In other words, there is present a narrating-function of asserting this indeed happened (which need not mean that this indeed is real).

However, the interesting thing is how the H.F. does this: it will be precisely through doubting the story that he might relate. So he tells the story of the person cured by swimming across the Thames:

I heard of one infected creature who, running out of his bed in his shirt in the anguish and agony of his swellings, of which he had three upon him, got his shoes on and went to put on his coat; but the nurse resisting, and snatching the coat from him, he threw her down, ran over her, ran downstairs and into the street, directly to the Thames in his shirt; the nurse running after him, and calling to the watch to stop him; but the watchman, frighted at the man, and afraid to touch him, let him go on; upon which he ran down to the Stillyard stairs, threw away his shirt, and plunged into the Thames, and, being a good swimmer, swam quite over the river; and the tide being coming in, as they call it (that is, running westward) he reached the land not till he came about the Falcon stairs, where landing, and finding no people there, it being in the night, he ran about the streets there, naked as he was, for a good while, when, it being by that time high water, he takes the river again, and swam back to the Stillyard, landed, ran up the streets again to his own house, knocking at the door, went up the stairs and into his bed again; and that this terrible experiment cured him of the plague, that is to say, that the violent motion of his arms and legs stretched the parts where the swellings he had upon him were, that is to say, under his arms and his groin, and caused them to ripen and break; and that the cold of the water abated the fever in his blood.

I have only to add that I do not relate this any more than some of the other, as a fact within my own knowledge, so as that I can vouch the truth of them, and especially that of the man being cured by the extravagant adventure, which I confess I do not think very possible; but it may serve to confirm the many desperate things which the distressed people falling into deliriums, and what we call light-headedness, were frequently run upon at that time, and how infinitely more such there would have been if such people had not been confined by the shutting up of houses; and this I take to be the best, if not the only good thing which was performed by that severe method (161-2).

This is a typical instance: H.F. hears something and relates it (indeed little of the novel is his own personal story—if anything we want to know more about what being an alderman involved, say: but this desire only gives the narrator more authority to talk about others, in a way). But his skepticism, his doubt, his need to say how likely the story is true or false, serves to actually testify, to bear witness to the possible reality of the thing, as is the case here, where this maneuver is the most condensed: the very unlikelihood of the story testifies to the very reality of one of its details—namely, the fact that some those with the plague would start off running through the streets, and thus that it was necessary to confine people in their houses (the biggest issue of the text, for reasons to which we will return).

Another aspect of this function can be found in the skepticism H.F. has towards that which he himself actually sees (in other words, it need not be only his skepticism with regard to other stories). Take the long account of the astronomers and quacks at the beginning of the tale, who came out at the beginning of the plague with all sorts of predictions and remedies for the poor—capitalizing on the situation, in other words, to take advantage of people’s superstitions. H.F. laments all this, and yet he relates it: it is precisely through his disappointed attitude at the poor, who are suckered into the magic, that he allows us to see that it did happen (which is again different than, this is real). It is a sort of cold attention to irony, a sort of cynicism that we see—indeed you can see it here in this passage too, where it in fact becomes a tool to move the discourse along (it introduces another paragraph):

The ministers, to do them justice, and preachers of most sorts that were serious and understanding persons, thundered against these and other wicked practices, and exposed the folly as well as the wickedness of them together, and the most sober and judicious people despised and abhorred them. But it was impossible to make any impression upon the middling people and the working labouring poor. Their fears were predominant over all their passions, and they threw away their money in a most distracted manner upon those whimsies. Maid-servants especially, and men-servants, were the chief of their customers, and their question generally was, after the first demand of 'Will there be a plague?' I say, the next question was, 'Oh, sir I for the Lord's sake, what will become of me? Will my mistress keep me, or will she turn me off? Will she stay here, or will she go into the country? And if she goes into the country, will she take me with her, or leave me here to be starved and undone?' And the like of menservants.

The truth is, the case of poor servants was very dismal, as I shall have occasion to mention again by-and-by, for it was apparent a prodigious number of them would be turned away, and it was so. And of them abundance perished, and particularly of those that these false prophets had flattered with hopes that they should be continued in their services, and carried with their masters and mistresses into the country; and had not public charity provided for these poor creatures, whose number was exceeding great and in all cases of this nature must be so, they would have been in the worst condition of any people in the city (35-6).

The poor were idiots, but, the truth is (it did happen that), they had a hard time too… The general stupidity that he sees around him, and this tone that is not so much superior but attentive to their true interests, which they perhaps do not see (we will find that this characterizes the administrative point of view of the story)—all this makes us not believe that the account is more real, but that the account is accurate and that it relates something that did occur—that did occur to individuals who often act oddly. In other words, this cynicism with respect to the poor more generally but also to the dismal nature of the events as a whole, shows that the account is of actual people, as they are likely to behave (stupidly--and this is a cultural code), rather than, say, a collection of spectacles from the plague.

For this, I believe, is perhaps the greatest danger of the account: that we think, upon reading it, that it is just a collection of horrifying spectacles. And it is this, certainly: Defoe knows that people watch NASCAR for the wrecks, as it were. But this morbid fascination is diffused through a sort of wryness, which replaces horror with likelihood. Witness, for example, the end of the Journal, which is in the process of relating how people were too quick to conclude that the plague had receded when the numbers of the dead began to drop—thus prolonging the plague a into 1666, even though it was indeed on its way out:

But I should be counted censorious, and perhaps unjust, if I should enter into the unpleasing work of reflecting, whatever cause there was for it, upon the unthankfulness and return of all manner of wickedness among us, which I was so much an eye-witness of myself. I shall conclude the account of this calamitous year therefore with a coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:—

A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive! (240).

Tonally, this is generally like the rest of the work: it proceeds with caution in order to remain optimistic, and thereby generally testifies to something like we survived (indeed, I survived, or rather an I survived, and that's the subtitle of the work)—which is nothing other than this happened. One could say that this is the “reality” effect more generalized (it surpasses the level of the insignificant detail and becomes an attitude of the narrator): but the issue involved is not reality; it is history, it is experience. One gets the sense that what Defoe is up to is just trying to unearth the past—in general: this means making it more vivid, though not necessarily real. The point is that he make people aware of the plague over the distance of time (precisely because he might have been writing this as propaganda during the plague scares of 1721), not to live in another time. Thus the sort of distance, the lack of reality, even through the sort of proliferation of information.

This brings us to the final point, which is the most vague, and is probably the most questionable: I said that the narration situates things on a particular level, by which I mean the account gives you a sort of way to enter the events which is very specific—that is not entirely that which another account of things would have—even though it itself doesn’t really need to cohere as the account of one particular person as opposed to another. We get H.F.’s point of view, but we are left with the sense that another could give us an equally good point of view on things. What is so interesting and specific about H.F.’s point of view, however, is that it is one that erases precisely this possibility: it is the view of a potential administrator, someone who can observe all walks of life with ease. It is an ambulatory point of view, that of a walker in the city: notice how necessary it is that he remain mobile, how the worst affliction in the whole novel is being shut in one’s house for two weeks straight during the height of the infection in H.F.’s parish. This is not because what needs to be related has to be first-hand: again, we’re not testifying to the reality of the events, but only to their likelihood (and insofar as that is the case, an indirect experience, a story—like the longest one, of the baker, the sailor, and the carpenter, in which H.F. completely disappears and just narrates—is even better, since it can be doubted easier). Being inside is painful for H.F. because he cannot be where the plague is: he cannot witness it, track it, relate all of its effects—and thus he loses the capability to judge likelihood in the first place. Without that, the novel collapses. But this also reveals that what is more essential to the novel is that it cover the plague (as we now say that news “covers” something), that it spread with the plague in its account. I’m not trying to draw some conclusion that says writing is illness, or something like that. Rather, I’m trying to point out that what is essential for the account is not that it string itself along in time, and develop coherently, as would be the case for a typical narration, but that it rather spread out horizontally in order to encompass all aspects of its subject matter.

This last point, however, brings me back to my main take on the novel: with these three functions operating, there isn’t really any need for a coherent narrator, who will hold everything together. The text holds together, but because of the material involved and point of view we get: but that point of view is only one way of entering the events, I feel—it isn’t necessary for us to have it. This is because it does not have to be consistent, but, as we just said, that every level of the plague’s activity be represented in the book. The goal is to saturate, not to develop. In this respect, it is much more like a history than a historical novel.

Thus, I find it odd when people try to say that the text is jumbled: it can be, insofar as the narrator still gives us scenes and has a take on them. We see that, given its principle of organization, it is precisely what is necessary: we have to skip to all sorts of reflections on the high, low, middle people, to economic effects (how trade altered), to various places in the city and the plague’s activity there (how it started in the west, moving east), to the burial pits, to the ships on the river (all docked, floating with families sheltered in them), to how people in the country fared… all this has to be there, it has to be covered—and it does not matter so much what order that it gets covered in, so long as it is covered.

Thus, the point of view which I was talking about is very specific, however its breadth: what we need is the voice of someone who would plausibly relate all these things—not having much that is kept out of his view. A middling saddler does fine then. But at the same time, what we need more than the voice itself is the coverage of the plague. In many ways, we could say that H.F. is like a (television) reporter, the view always looking past the speaker with the mike into the background, into that area where we are on the scene (this also hints at something I’d venture: the novel is or seems more cinematic than linguistic, more pictorial, framed, than related, unfolded—we get scenes more than stories). I wouldn’t push that too far, though, because this need to saturate, to cover, characterizes governmental, bureaucratic, or administrative vision perhaps more than journalistic vision. And this makes sense, both on the level of the principle of the storytelling and its role as propaganda: in a lot of ways, Defoe’s Journal is saying, look at this from the government’s perspective, which has to deal with all of it, not just your puny little perspective upon it (thus the distaste for the poor, and, more than the poor, the crowd, the stupid populous mass, who doesn’t know what is right for it—something that runs throughout the novel). It is in that sense that the expansiveness of the story comes through: all the layers must be occupied by a vision, even if they can’t be completely, totally traversed—and indeed, where H.F. can’t get information (like the court, say), if he can only get a glimpse (as he does—he knows their location), this is enough (indeed, it makes things more plausible): the point is to show the multiplicity, the complexity involved in just how many sites this monstrous thing invades, rather than be confined to any one level.

This is why the story is also the story of a city (and tends to spatialize itself--a point implied in what's already been said): London is the hero of the Journal, some people say, more than any H.F. That might be true, but it is a hero if we mean by this merely that which needs to be depicted most often in the tale—that is, in the sense that the narrative isn’t one that really needs a hero in the first place, since it doesn’t develop anything but merely depicts all of its movements, all of its activities. London is the hero of the Journal, then, in the way that Baltimore is the hero of The Wire.

The sort of viewpoint involved is indeed similar to that show: what matters less is that things remain continuous (although The Wire masterfully weaves things together, rather than just accumulates them) than that everything be depicted, everything be represented, and we get some larger sense of the totality, of the scale of what is involved. So again, we can say that it is doesn’t cohere, as the critics do, but that poorly understands the multiplicity of the functions of narration—especially as they are present in the early stages of the novel’s development, in which Defoe is working.

Narrative and discourse

2009-06-14T12:06:00.000-04:00

There is a way of talking about 18th century novels that insists on their affinity to certain 20th century novels. I think that if we eliminate the superficial motives--pertinence is always gained by claiming modernity, and reducing complications to stereotypes (the 19th century is here the "age of the great realist novel")--this isn't entirely without merit: what is generally implied is that the era in which the novel is figuring itself out often resembles the era of the novel's decomposition, that the process of building the novel up makes it, at times, seem a lot like the process of taking it apart, and this is, in the face of the evidence--all those occasional similarities--somewhat compelling. In short, I like to think that we are not entirely wrong when we say that the 18th century novel is at times "modernist" or even "postmodern." Why? Because what we might be getting at, through the language of periodization or history, is something Genette outlines structurally: the shifting relations of narrative to discourse. In short, we might not be wrong, but (as is often the case) just lacking the right vocabulary:

Sometimes, as was the case in the classical period with a Cervantes, a Scarron, a Fielding, the author-narrator, complacently assuming his own discourse, intervenes in the narrative with an ironically insistent indiscretion, addressing his reader in a tone of familiar conversation. On the other hand, we see in the same period that he will sometimes transfer all the responsibilities of the discourse to one major character who will speak, i.e., will at the same time narrate and comment on the events in the first person. This is the case of the picaresque novels, from Lazarillo de Tormes to Gil Blas, and of other fictitiously autobio-graphical novels like Manon Lescaut or La Vie de Marianne. Or at times unable to be reduced to speaking in his own name or to conferring the task on one character, the author-narrator will divide the discourse among several characters, perhaps in the form of letters as the eighteenth-century novel did (La Nouvelle Heloise, Les Liaisons Dangereuses) or possibly in making the interior discourses of his major characters assume the narrative in succession in the smoother and more subtle manner of a Joyce or a Faulkner. The only time when the equilibrium between narrative and discourse seems to have been assumed with a perfectly clear awareness, without scruple or ostentation, is evidently the nineteenth century, the classic age of objective narrative, of Balzac and Tolstoy. In contrast, one can see to what extent the modern period has accentuated a consciousness of this difficulty, up to the point of making certain manners of expression almost physically impossible for certain aware and exacting writers.

For example, we can clearly see how the effort to bring the narrative to its highest degree of purity has led certain American writers like Hammett and Hemingway to exclude the exposure of any psychological motivation (always difficult to employ without recourse to general considerations of a discursive manner), qualifying statements implying a personal valuation by the narrator, logical liaisons, etc., up to the reduction of novel style to the abrupt succession of short sentences without conjunctions that Sartre posited of Camus' L'Etranger in 1943 and that we rediscovered ten years later in Robbe-Grillet. What has often been interpreted as an application of behaviorist theories to literature was perhaps only the result of a particularly acute sensitivity to certain incompatibilities of language.
-Gérard Genette, "Boundaries of Narrative," in Figures.

This one's for Grant

2009-06-11T17:28:00.000-04:00

Has it never happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren't interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven't you ever happened to read while looking up from your book?

This is what Barthes asks a the beginning of a little article in Le Figaro, written in 1970: "Writing Reading." He goes on to say that S/Z, which outlined his theory (he would insist on this word) of reading (the act, not in general, but not limited to the activity of a reader, either) the classic text, proceeded with this moment in mind (or in body): Barthes says he "took a short text," Sarrasine,

and I kept stopping as I read this text. Criticism ordinarily functions (this is not a reproach) either by microscope (patiently illuminating the work's philological, autobiographical, or psychological details) or by telescope (scrutinizing the gret historical space surrounding the author). I denied myself these two instruments: I spoke neither of Balzac nor of his time, I explored neither the psychology of his characters nor the thematics of the text nor the sociology of the anecdote. Recalling the camera's first feats in decomposing a horse's trot, I too attempted to "film" the reading of Sarrasine in slow motion: the result, I suspect, is neither quite an analysis (I have not tried to grasp the secret of this strange text) nor quite an image (I don't think I have projected myself into my reading; or if I have, it is from an unconscious site which falls far short of "myself"). Then what is S/Z? Simply a text, that text which we write in our head when we look up.

Whether this says anything significant, I don't know. What interests me is the filmic metaphor, which is also used by the highly influential New Critic Reuben Brower: he calls close reading (whatever that is) "reading in slow motion."

Barthes on clarity

2009-06-10T12:46:00.000-04:00

In short, what Julia Kristeva produces is a critique of communication (the first, I believe, since that of psychoanalysis). Communication, she shows, the darling of the positive sciences (such as linguistics), of the philosophies and the politics of "dialogue," of "participation," and of "exchange,"--communication is merchandise. Are we not constantly told that a "clear" book sells better, that a communicative temperament more easily finds a job?
-"Kristeva's Semeiotike" (1971) in The Rustle of Language

I think, like much in Barthes, that this is too brief, too condensed: there's not enough justification for such a negative attitude towards communication. Yet, like much in Barthes, precisely because of its compactness, despite lack of theoretical coherence it may still be helpful. D.A. Miller has recently said it best:

Our growing indifference to Roland Barthes's thought suggests that the reactionaries were right after all. What had seemed a stupid complaint during his heyday now, twenty years after his death, proves prophetic: Roland Barthes has nothing to say. Yet it is precisely at a moment when few read Barthes for his ideas, that the complaint seems most foolish, in having imagined that anyone ever read Barthes, ever could read him, just for these.
-"Foutre! Bougre! Ecriture!" in The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.2 (2001) 503-511.

Barthes may not be right here about clarity, in other words (though I still don't like his political position here), but there might be something to this: it repays reconstructing, then, if not his ideas, then at least his compact formulations (having nothing to say, then, isn't the same thing as orienting, formulating, structuring, which may reward reading and thinking and theorizing). We can find one early instance of similar formulations in Writing Degree Zero (1947-50, 1953):

In actual fact, clarity is a purely rhetorical attribute, not a quality of language in general, which is possible at all times and in all places, but only the ideal appendage to a certain type of discourse, that which is given over to a permanent intention to persuade.
-Writing Degree Zero, 58

This is part of the historical--that's the only way I can think of putting it--argument of Writing Degree Zero, sketching "the triumph and break-up of bourgeois writing," which is the title of the chapter from which this quote is taken. Let's set is back in its context, which is concerned with articulating that famous concept, "classical writing:"

This classical writing is, needless to say, a class writing. Born in the seventeenth century in the group which was closest to the people in power, shaped by force of dogmatic decisions, promptly ridding itself of all grammatical turns of speech forged by the spontaneous subjectivity of ordinary people, and drilled, on the contrary, for a task of definition, bourgeois writing was first presented, with the cynicism customary in the first flush of political victory, as the language of a privileged minority. In 1647, Vaugelas recommends classical writing as a de facto, not a de jure, state of affairs; clear expression is still only court usage. In 1660, on the contrary, in the Grammaire of Port-Royal for instance, classical language wears a universal look, and clarity has become a value. In actual fact, clarity is a purely rhetorical attribute, not a quality of language in general... (57-8).

But this is only part of a larger movement which Writing Degree Zero is more interested in: the coming into prominence of a notion that the entire textual surface of the text was imbued with meaning, and particularly with craftedness--which must later be undone by the anti-classicists and overcome (or not) by the degree zero writers. Thus, after our quote above finishes, Barthes concludes with the following:

It is because the pre-bourgeoisie of the Ancien Régime and the post-revolutionary bourgeoisie, using the same mode of writing, have developed an essentialist mythology of man, that classical writing, unified and universal, renounced all hesitancy in favour of a continuum in which every fragment was a choice, that is, the radical elimination of all virtualities in language. Political authority, spiritualistic dogmatism, and unity in the language of classicism are therefore various aspects of the same historical movement (58).

Barthes will elaborate the ramifications of this for criticism in Criticism and Truth (1966). But what is interesting to me is that Barthes, even later (1979), will introduce another word, simple, which offers an alternative to clarity as a virtue. Or rather, the question is whether this is elevated more to the level of a virtue than in WDZ, where it is more described as an effect. Or perhaps Renaud Camus's work here exhibits different qualities, different neutralities, than the writing degree zero found in that previous account and of which he is in that text, along with Sartre, considered the prime example. Barthes is talking of Camus's Tricks and the way it "seems to speak, and blunty, about sex, about homosexuality," the latter in particular recently "provok[ing] feats of discourse"--namely, that speaking about it "permits those who 'aren't' to show how open, liberal, and modern they are, and those who 'are' to bear witness, to assure responsibility, to militate." Barthes addresses all this with the following:

To proclaim yourself something is always to speak at the behest of a vengeful Other, to enter into his discourse, to argue with him, to seek from him a scrap of identity: "You are . . ." "Yes, I am..." Ultimately, which attribute hardly matters; what society will not tolerate is that I should be... nothing, or more precisely that the something I am should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant. Just say "I am" and you will be socially saved.

To reject the social injunction can be accomplished by means of that form of silence which consists in saying things simply. Speaking simply belongs to a higher art: writing. Take the spontaneous utterances, the spoken testimony then transcribed, as increasingly utilized by the press and by publishers. Whatever their "human" interest, something rings false in them (at lest to my ears): perhaps, paradoxically, an excess of style (trying to sound "spontaneous," "lively," "spoken"). What happens, in fact, is a double impasse: the accurate transcription sounds made up; for it to seem true, it has to become a text, to pass through the cultural artifices of writing. Testimony runs away with itself, calling nature, men, and justice to witness; the text goes slowly, silently, stubbornly--and arrives faster. Reality is fiction, writing is truth: such is the ruse of language.

Renaud Camus's Tricks are simple. This means that they speak homosexuality, but never speak about it: at no moment do they invoke it (that is simplicity: never to invoke, not to let Names into language--Names, the source of dispute, of arrogance, and of moralizing).
-"Preface to Renard Camus's Tricks," in The Rustle of Language, 291-2

Could one also say that Names are the source of "dialogue," "participation," "exchange?" Or does that reduce this text, and this notion of the simple, to a sort of structure, a theory--and not a looser operation of structuration--which we are outlining above?

Direct indirect speech

2009-06-08T15:20:00.000-04:00

I'm interested in a little piece of Tom Jones that I came across the other day. It isn't too remarkable, but I wonder about its function. At the beginning of Book II, in Chapter II, Captain Blifil is making the argument to Allworthy that "the living Monuments of Incontinence," bastards like little Tommy, shouldn't be treated well. All this proceeds in indirect or reported speech (emphases mine):

The captain could not so easily bring himself to bear what he condemned as a fault in Mr Allworthy. He gave him frequent hints, that to adopt the fruits of sin, was to give countenance to it. He quoted several texts (for he was well read in Scripture) [...] Whence he argued the legality of punishing the crime of the parent on the bastard.

Suddenly, though, we get his conclusion in direct speech, all in quotes:

He said, "Though the law did not positively allow the destroying such base-born children, yet it held them to be the children of nobody; that the Church considered them as the children of nobody; and that at the best, they ought to be brought up in the lowest and vilest offices of the commonwealth."

Except this is also still in indirect speech: the though, yet, that, and and that are all functioning to report what is being said rather than to actually say it. This is even more evident in Allworthy's reply:

Mr Allworthy answered to all this, and much more, which the captain had urged on this subject, "That, however guilty the parents might be, the children were certainly innocent: that as to the texts he had quoted, the former of them was a particular denunciation against the Jews, for the sin of idolatry, of relinquishing and hating their heavenly King; and the latter was parabolically spoken, and rather intended to denote the certain and necessary consequences of sin, than any express judgment against it. But to represent the Almighty as avenging the sins of the guilty on the innocent, was indecent, if not blasphemous, as it was to represent him acting against the first principles of natural justice, and against the original notions of right and wrong, which he himself had implanted in our minds; by which we were to judge not only in all matters which were not revealed, but even of the truth of revelation itself. He said he knew many held the same principles with the captain on this head; but he was himself firmly convinced to the contrary, and would provide in the same manner for this poor infant, as if a legitimate child had had fortune to have been found in the same place."

In other words, we have a weird sort of direct indirect speech going on here. I don't know about you all, but I have seen this elsewhere, and am just wondering about 1) its causes and 2) whether it is remarkable or not. Its causes are probably not that hard to explain: it could just be a typographical convention. But then again, and in a way that immediately makes things seem remarkable, the use of direct speech isn't just confined to the use of quotation marks. It isn't as if we could actually rid the text of them and have, all of a sudden, indirect speech. Grammatically, yes, perhaps. But not on the level of the organization of the text, which, through its use of particular cues for direct, quoted speech like "he said," defies this attempt to fix things. The function of direct speech is still present in the indirect speech--that is, if one were to remove the quotes. This is what makes this particularly odd in my mind. Another cause could just be grammatical convention. But then the issue becomes one of how long, and ultimately why this convention existed. Does it correspond to the rise of the novel, when larger units of storytelling are trying to organize themselves? I'm not sure...

Welcome!

2009-06-08T12:18:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone! This is a blog where Princeton's English graduate students can share their thoughts while they read for the October 2009 general field examinations. Little notes on books, thoughts about reorganizing reading lists, extraordinary adventures that happened while reading, or whatever--our goal to get some of our work out there so we all can discuss it together, especially since some of us are reading the same things. Enjoy! And good luck reading!

Reading for Exams

The Concept of Aura in Benjamin's Artwork Essay

review: Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past (2003)

Hermeneutics and suspicion

Lukács and montage

Getting away with murder

tag cloud update

cybernetic blazon

critical blazon

brief notes on Bernard Stiegler's theory of "technics"

Timelessness

On Bruno Latour and Eve Sedgwick

Poets themselves

Blindness, continued

Blindness

De Man and duplicity

Destroying rhetoric in the 18th century

Attention

Demolition

Dick Minim

The rise of criticism as science

A caution...

Some notes on imagination

Demystifying the singular

Coleridge and literary theory

Heidegger's rhetoric

Sterne's style

Thinking Theory, Pt. I

Socially Mapping the 1920s Midwest

Medium Specificity and the Prehistory of Photography

Culler on structuralism

Reading for Exams

Essay and narrative

Locke and freedom

"I throw my works off the platform...I, William Seward, will now unleash my Word Hoard..."

Sense and interpretation

Todorov and structuralist poetics

Tag Cloud for Note Taking

Hugo Gernsback and SF's Handicraft Roots

Henry James considered as a hippopotamus retrieving a pea

Willa Cather's Nonlinear History

Thinking About Thinking About

Shirley Jackson's Mundane Horror, or, Fear Without Prepositions

Defoe's Plague Year

Narrative and discourse

This one's for Grant

Barthes on clarity

Direct indirect speech

Welcome!