Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview 9781350366169, 9781350366152, 9781350366138

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CONTEMPORARY LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

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CONTEMPORARY LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY

AN OVERVIEW Jeffrey R. Di Leo

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Jeffrey R. Di Leo, 2023 Jeffrey R. Di Leo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Annabel Hewitson Cover image © miakievy/iStock, texture © Anatolii Kovalov/iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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CONTENTS

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS Introduction

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1 Early Theory 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Humanism 1.2 Rhetoric (or, the Quarrel Between Rhetoric and Philosophy) 1.3 Hermeneutics 1.4 Aestheticism 1.5 New Criticism

11 11 12 17 24 30 33

2 Structuralism and Semiotics 2.0 Introduction 2.1 Structure of the Sign (or, Saussure and Peirce) 2.2 Russian Formalism 2.3 Roland Barthes 2.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss 2.5 Narratology

41 41 43 50 56 61 67

3 Marxism 3.0 Introduction 3.1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 3.2 The Adorno–Benjamin Debate 3.3 Mikhail Bakhtin 3.4 Louis Althusser 3.5 Fredric Jameson

73 73 76 83 91 96 102

4 Psychoanalytic Theory 4.0 Introduction 4.1 Sigmund Freud 4.2 Jacques Lacan 4.3 Harold Bloom

109 109 112 118 124

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4.4 4.5

Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze Slavoj Žižek

130 136

5 Poststructuralism 5.0 Introduction 5.1 Jacques Derrida 5.2 Julia Kristeva 5.3 Jean-François Lyotard 5.4 Jean Baudrillard 5.5 New Historicism

143 143 147 152 157 163 169

6 Feminist Theory 6.0 Introduction 6.1 First Wave 6.2 Second Wave 6.3 Third Wave and Beyond 6.4 Hélène Cixous 6.5 Luce Irigaray

175 175 179 185 192 198 203

7 LGBTQ+ Theory 7.0 Introduction 7.1 Lesbian and Gay Theory 7.2 Lesbian Feminism 7.3 Judith Butler 7.4 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 7.5 Trans* Theory

209 209 213 220 225 229 235

8 Race and Justice 8.0 Introduction 8.1 Critical Race Theory 8.2 Law and Literature 8.3 Human Rights 8.4 Intersectionality 8.5 Subaltern Studies

239 239 244 247 250 255 258

9 Biopolitics 9.0 Introduction 9.1 Michel Foucault 9.2 Giorgio Agamben 9.3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 9.4 Surveillance Studies 9.5 Disability Studies

261 261 263 268 271 275 278

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10 Globalization 10.0 Introduction 10.1 Postcolonial Theory 10.2 Border Studies 10.3 Neoliberalism 10.4 Translation 10.5 World Literature and Theory

283 283 285 289 292 295 298

11 Ecocriticism 11.0 Introduction 11.1 Green Theory 11.2 Critical Climate Change 11.3 Anthropocene 11.4 Geocriticism 11.5 Blue Humanities

303 303 306 309 313 316 319

12 Posthumanism 12.0 Introduction 12.1 Cyborg Theory 12.2 Animal Studies 12.3 Systems Theory 12.4 Cognitive Criticism 12.5 Speculative Realism

323 323 326 329 334 338 341

13 Affect Studies 13.0 Introduction 13.1 Queer Affect 13.2 Materialism 13.3 Presentism 13.4 Trauma Theory 13.5 Holocaust Studies

347 347 350 353 357 360 364

14 Pop Culture 14.0 Introduction 14.1 Cultural Studies 14.2 Media Studies 14.3 Sound Studies 14.4 Game Studies 14.5 Celebrity Studies

369 369 373 380 385 388 395

15 Against Theory 15.0 Introduction 15.1 Antitheory

401 401 402

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15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5

Posttheory Object-Oriented Ontology Postcritique New New Criticism

BIBLIOGRAPHY I NDEX

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My primary debt of gratitude goes out to Ben Doyle of Bloomsbury for encouraging me to write an overview of contemporary literary and cultural theory. I appreciate the time, care, and attention he afforded this project, particularly with regard to shepherding it through the peer review and publication process. In addition, as editor of symploke– and executive director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute, I have had over the years the opportunity to converse with and learn from many talented theorists. Their work has significantly impacted my views on contemporary theory. I would like to thank these individuals for broadening and deepening my theoretical horizons. During the course of this project, I have benefited from the timely suggestions and insightful conversations of many individuals that have challenged and inspired the work in this volume in various ways: Frida Beckman, Jacob Blevins, Christopher Breu, Jane Gallop, Henry Giroux, Robin Goodman, Peter Hitchcock, Vincent Leitch, Sophia McClennen, Paul Allen Miller, Christian Moraru, John Mowitt, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Daniel T. O’Hara, Brian O’Keeffe, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Kenneth Saltman, Nicole Simek, Henry Sussman, Robert T. Tally Jr., Harold Aram Veeser, Jeffrey J. Williams, and Zahi Zalloua. I am also grateful to Kristen M. Kelly, Darrion A. Garcia, and Vikki Fitzpatrick, for their efforts in securing materials used for the development of this book; to Orlando Di Leo for his editorial assistance; and to the late John Fizer of Rutgers University for introducing me to literary theory. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Nina, for her unfailing encouragement, support, and patience.

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Introduction THE CITY OF THEORY The aim of this book is to provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of contemporary literary and cultural theory. But because it is such a sprawling and diverse area of concern, one might regard the challenges of such an endeavor as similar to those involved in describing a major city to someone. Some may have heard things about contemporary theory, but others may know little to nothing about it. Of the former, some may have heard good things about it—things like it’s a great place to live, and once you get settled in, you won’t want to live anywhere else. Others may have heard that though it has some great neighborhoods where you will feel at home, it also has some others where people often get lost. Still others will have been warned away from the city of theory because it conflicts with their way of approaching the study of literature and culture. All of which is to say—theory has quite a reputation. Depending on whom you ask, some will steer you away from it, others will point you to one particular neighborhood, whereas others still will encourage you to explore it openly. The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary literary and cultural theory so that the reader can make their own informed decision. While I will do my best to be an impartial guide—and try not to influence your opinion of what is presented—this will not always be possible because one of the ways new areas of theoretical concern come about is by developing from alleged omissions or mistakes of another theory. Such differences are frequently indicated with prefixes like “new-,” “post-,” and “anti-.” Thus, part of becoming a scholar of theory is acquiring the ability to sort out what is actually “new” about say the “ ‘New’ Criticism” (which we will turn to in Chapter 1) versus what is not—and then perhaps also deciding whether “new” implies better. It will also be difficult to be impartial because coming to understand and appreciate theory also involves coming to terms with one’s own fundamental beliefs about its more general role in the study of literature and culture. This task, when done well, has the effect of laying bare one’s web of belief—a web that includes a vast range of beliefs ranging from ones about art (aesthetics), morals (ethics), and truth (epistemology) to ones about society, politics, and the world. So, in spite of my best efforts to be an impartial tour guide to the city of theory, the close observer will catch glimpses of the author every now and again. The first one is that my approach to theory is pluralistic, which is to say, I believe that there are a variety of contemporary theories of literature and culture, and that each one has strengths and weaknesses that are always up for debate. Moreover, no effort is made to hide this pluralistic view of theory. Rather, it is encoded in the very design of this book. To wit, you might think of this book as a box of seventy-five snapshots of literary and cultural theory. They range from some representative “early” literary and cultural theory to some of the most current and cutting-edge work. Each snapshot will help you get a working picture of this area of theoretical concern. To continue the metaphor of the city of theory, you might think of each of them as a snapshot from one of theory’s many neighborhoods. As you dig deeper into this theoretical neighborhood, you will find a community of people who have made contributions to it. Some of these people agree with each other about the direction of the community, whereas others don’t. 1

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Some of these disagreements are so strong that people leave this community to form their own new community in the city of theory. Like any city, some neighborhoods have a long history, whereas others are of more recent origin. There are also those that are flourishing communities today and others that have been virtually abandoned. As this book focuses on “contemporary” theory, more emphasis is placed on snapshots of flourishing or emerging communities rather than ones that have been abandoned. To be sure, this book acknowledges that there are other ways to portray contemporary literary and cultural theory. One of them is to take a less panoramic approach and to focus instead on a much more limited number of neighborhoods. The most radical approach here is to choose to stay in just one of these neighborhoods for the entirety of our visit to the city of theory. A more moderate approach might be to focus on five or six neighborhoods. This book, however, will take you to fifteen different neighborhoods (a number which corresponds with the number of chapters in this book), and visit five different areas in each of these neighborhoods (a number which corresponds with the number of sections in each chapter). Also, each chapter includes an introduction, which prepares you for your neighborhood visits. Chapter introductions and sections are noted throughout the book by a number in parentheses, albeit only for material in higher numbered sections. So, for example, while related material from 8.4 (on intersectionality) would be noted in 7.2 (on lesbian feminism), material from 6.2 (on second-wave feminist theory) would not be. These notes let you know you will be visiting this new neighborhood in due course. While some neighborhoods will be left out of this book, so too will some of the different areas of neighborhoods that are included. While some effort will be made to inform you of these other neighborhoods and missing areas, our goal here is not completeness. Rather, the aim is to offer an overview of contemporary literary and cultural theory by taking you to some of the hottest areas of the city, while also providing a sense of some of the more important older ones.

EIGHT WAYS OF LOOKING AT THEORY As a stranger in a strange city, it is often hard to find your way. This is especially the case during your initial time in the city, a period where you perhaps do not know anyone and are unable to navigate well the terrain. But, if you ask someone who has lived there for a while to give you the lay of the land and to show you around, you will quickly start to get a sense of the city. But this emerging sense of the city comes with a price: namely, the sense of the city that one person gives you may be very different from the one someone else gives you. This is especially true regarding theory. Why? Because what theory is depends on whom you ask. In general, there are eight different responses to the question “What is theory?” They are as follows: 1 Theory is Professional Common Sense Someone who teaches literature or culture for a living is a professional. Their knowledge of the literary and cultural works that they teach is expressed to others through their classroom performance. However, much of this knowledge is the same as that of other teachers of literature

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and culture. Theory is just another name for the professional common knowledge or common sense of these teachers. It is what every professional teacher of literature and culture knows. Much of it, however, goes without saying, and can only be shown through observation of professional practice. 2 Theory is Methodology Theory is a set of general principles or procedures for studying literature and culture. These general principles or procedures are clearly stated and when followed result in successful readings of literature and culture. Unlike theory as professional common sense, which is largely unavailable to the student of literature and culture, theory as methodology is something that is directly available to students for them to learn and utilize in the study of literature and culture. The methodology here can be derived from first principles or can be the direct consequence of literary and cultural professionals self-reflecting on their professional practice—and then condensing it into a methodology. Either way, theory as methodology is effectively a cookbook for the study of literature and culture. 3 Theory is a Set of Movements or Schools Theory is a set of schools or movements that often include Russian formalism (2.2), the New Criticism (1.5), hermeneutics (1.3), phenomenology (1.3), structuralism and semiotics (2.0), post-structuralism (5.0), psychoanalysis (4.0), Marxism (3.0), reader-response (or reception) theory (Introduction, below), feminism (6.0), New Pragmatism (15.0), New Historicism (5.5), postmodernism (3.0 & 5.0), postcolonialism (10.1), gender theory (6.0), and queer theory (7.0). For the most part, this is the conception of theory used in the organization of this book, wherein each of the seventy-five snapshots of theory either represent in themselves a school or movement and/or are a sub-school or -movement of a larger movement. However, the difference between identifying twelve or so major schools and movements, and identifying seventy-five areas of interest, most of which were not identified in the aforementioned list and where potentially many others could be identified, shows the wide range of this view of theory. 4 Theory is High Theory Theory as high theory limits the number of schools and movements to only two: structuralism and poststructuralism. Moreover, because the majority of the principal thinkers associated with “high theory” are French, including Roland Barthes (2.3), Claude Lévi-Strauss (2.4), Jacques Lacan (4.2), Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze (4.4), Jacques Derrida (5.1), Julia Kristeva (5.2), Jean-François Lyotard (5.3), Jean Baudrillard (5.4), Hélène Cixous (6.4), Luce Irigaray (6.5), and Michel Foucault (9.1), high theory is arguably even more specific: French structuralism and poststructuralism. Of the eight ways of looking at theory presented here, this view of theory has attracted both the strongest proponents and opponents. Fittingly, the latter includes calls for Low Theory (14.1), which turns out to have none of the characteristics of High Theory.

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5 Theory is a Toolbox Theory as a toolbox regards it as a potentially useful set of concepts and devices. As tools, concepts used by theorists such as affect (13.0), trauma (13.4), cyborg (12.1), postcolonial (10.1), race (8.1), intersectionality (8.4), Anthropocene (11.3), law (8.2), disability (9.5), surveillance (9.4), border (10.2), translation (10.4), and many others are judged by their productivity and innovation in response to matters concerning literature and culture. Each tool in the theorist’s toolbox is regarded as valuable not in itself, but only to the degree that it proves to be productive and innovative in critical practice. The usefulness of each concept is contingent upon its ability to work in a particular context. This is a maximally flexible and pragmatic approach to theory that indiscriminately extracts concepts from a wide variety of schools and movements for potential use in critical practice. 6 Theory is Cross- and Multidisciplinary Theory as a cross- or multidisciplinary endeavor takes the standard concerns of the discipline of literature and fuses them with those of other disciplines. The discipline of literature finds its departmental homes not only in departments of English and Comparative Literature, but also in those of every other language taught at the university (e.g., Chinese, French, German, Arabic, and so on). A cross- or multidisciplinary approach to theory embraces other disciplines such as philosophy, linguistics, sociology, history, anthropology, and politics, and fuses work in one or more of these areas with that of the discipline of literature. Areas of theory in this book where this is explicitly at work include race and justice (8.0), biopolitics (9.0), globalization (10.0), neoliberalism (10.3), ecocriticism (11.0), posthumanism (12.0), affect studies (13.0), and pop culture (14.0). In short, at least half of the theory presented in this book can be described as cross- and multidisciplinary theory. 7 Theory is a Way of Life Theory as a way of life is a way to express the summation of the previous six ways of looking at theory as something that is more than the sum of its parts. To say that theory is what theorists do begs the question—but it also expresses one important way to look at theory. Rather than trying to abstract the theory from the theorist by reducing them to their professional common sense or methodology; to particular schools or movements, be they high or low; or to the contents of their tool box or the disciplines from which they draw their theory—this approach suggests that we should look at all of these things and more for their theory. 8 Theory is a Community Theory is a community, or, more precisely, a set of communities. They may not go by recognizable names like feminism (6.0), deconstruction (5.1), and psychoanalysis (4.0), but theory still is driven

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by communities of individuals who share common bonds of theoretical pursuit and interest. Like all communities, theoretical ones go through periods of growth and popularity—and periods of decline and unpopularity. Some become fashionable, while others languish in relative obscurity. For example, few today seem to want to live in the structuralist (2.0) community. Though it was once a thriving and active one, arguments and disagreements within the community led many to move to other communities or to take part in the formation of new ones. And this, of course, is not a bad thing. The legacies of structuralist community are widespread in the world of theory, including, most directly, in poststructuralism (5.0), the roots of which still branch through many of the more recent directions in theory.1

HOW TO APPROACH THE STUDY OF THEORY If you are a new kid in town—and then again, even if you are not—you are sure to be approached by folks with differing ways of looking at theory. They may fall into one of the ways outlined above or they may have another way of looking at theory. Many will try to convince you that their way is the only way to look at theory. It is at this point that one has an important decision to make. The easy thing to do is to either embrace their way of looking at theory or reject it—and then just drop the matter. I would suggest, however, that you consider doing something different. Rather than embracing or rejecting it, try to understand better how it works by gauging its strengths and weaknesses—and then leave the question of embracing or rejecting this approach to theory for a later point. Why? Because there is something important that can be learned about theory from all of these different ways of approaching it. You just have to be patient and let the accumulation of greater knowledge do its magic. As you consider their perspective—and come to form your own—I would encourage you to every so often step back and reflect on the bigger question of “What is theory?” This question often gets lost in the shuffle of moving to a new city with so many exciting things to do and memorable places to visit. The question that you might ask yourself every so often is what can theory do—not just for your understanding of literature and culture, but also for your understanding of your own life and the world in which you live. The study of theory is sure to lead you to questions about literature and culture that you probably would not have thought about on your own. And this is a wonderful thing. But it is just the beginning of what theory is capable of doing. If you keep an open mind in your exploration of theory, it can and will bring you to pursue increasingly bigger and deeper questions—questions that will not only enrich your appreciation of literature and culture, but also of life and the world. The possibilities for theory are limited more than anything else only by its disciplinary shape and identity within the academy. If one only regards theory as professional common sense, then this is all it will be. Learning it then only amounts to mimicking the behavior of your teachers with respect to literature and culture. But if one is open, for example, to understanding why theory, especially in the new millenium, is regarded by many as a multi- and interdisciplinary endeavor, then there

1 See Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “Running with the Pack: Why Theory Needs Community,” Intertexts 20.1 (2017): 65–79, for a defense of theory as community.

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are many more teachers to observe and mimic than just the ones that teach you literature and culture. Theory, as a multi- and interdisciplinary endeavor, operates within and among the humanities (particularly, history, languages, linguistics, the arts, philosophy, and religion, in addition to literature), the social sciences (including anthropology, ethnic and cultural studies, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology), and many of the professions (for example, architecture, business, communication, education, environmental studies, journalism, law, museum studies, media studies, military science, public policy, and sport science, among others). In addition to its now somewhat more standard-fare work in these areas, it has also made substantial inroads into the natural sciences (for example, biology, physics, the earth sciences, and the space sciences) and the formal sciences (especially mathematics, computer science, and systems science). To be sure, more disciplines from across the academy have integrated theory into their practice than at any other time in history. This, of course, is good news for theorists and theory at large. It is also good news for pupils of literature and culture because it encourages them to get a fuller picture of their areas of interest than just the one provided by the teachers in their discipline. But if you are studying theory only to gain a better understanding of literature and culture, all of these disciplinary possibilities for theory can become a distraction. For example, it may be difficult to limit one’s theoretical questions to just literature and culture when considering the material in this book on race and justice (8.0) while people are dying because of acts of violence done through racial injustice; it may be difficult to do the same when considering the material on globalization (10.0) while political refugees are being treated inhumanely or when reading about ecocriticism (11.0) as thousands of dead turtles wash up to shore. One of the powers of contemporary literary and cultural theory is that it often can and does respond to much more than just literature and culture. Moreover, it often will take you well beyond the central concerns of the study of literature and culture into those of many other disciplines both within the humanities and outside of them. For those who take the time to delve into the vast scope of theory today, it is difficult not to come away with the feeling that its concerns are not only about the study of literature and culture. Rather, one comes away with a better understanding of how the concerns of literature and culture are related to other ones that can range from those of the LGBTQ+ and disability communities to the work of environmental and human rights advocates. Given the continuous pull of theory into areas that are not primarily concerned with literature and culture—for example, animal studies (12.2) and game studies (14.4)—the study of theory can be challenging for some. It helps to be a pluralist about such matters because this allows you to enjoy the range of these theoretical interventions, rather than worry that one is being led astray from their home discipline. But then again, such matters will be ones that you will have to come to reckon with on your own as you become more familiar with the great variety of contemporary literary and cultural theory.

HOW TO USE THEORY Once you are no longer a stranger to theory and are able to find your way around some of its locales, you will eventually start to think like a theorist. This means that you will gain the ability to see literature and culture from the perspective of particular theories. So, for example, after studying

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a snapshot of postcolonial theory (10.1) or queer theory (7.4), a novel that you read or a movie that saw may come to mind. These become opportunities for you to use these theories to think about these texts. If you find that your thoughts lead to some type of interesting view of them, you might consider sharing your ideas with others. This sharing of ideas is a vital aspect of theory and its various communities. But this organic approach to using theory is not always possible. Sometimes you will not have read any literature or know of any films that speak to a particular theory that interests you. In this case, you may want to carry the general assumptions or concepts utilized in the theory into some research on literature or films that might bear some interesting fruits when thought through the terms presented by this theory. Ideally, it will be a theory that is in some way interesting to you, so the motivation to put other texts into dialogue with it will not be a chore. After all, seventy-five different snapshots of theory provide plenty of options for using theory to think through literature and culture. But, as you now know, there are those that contend that using theory is less like bringing a flexible toolbox to work on texts, and more like learning a methodology that can then be applied to texts. At its most extreme, theory as a methodology reduces theory to a set of recipes that are then used to interpret literature. Here is a sample of one of those recipes: Reader-Response Criticism Step 1 Move through the text in superslow motion, describing either your response or the response of an informed reader at various points. Step 2 React to the text as a whole, embracing and expressing the subjective and personal response it engenders. Lest you believe this recipe (or this type of criticism) is a joke, it is not. It comes from a widely-used textbook for writing about literature with “critical theory.”2 Moreover, reader-response criticism, though without its own section in this book, was a wellknown and much discussed theoretical approach to literature in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Among others, it was grounded in the work of two major theorists: one of them was David Bleich, whose main books on this topic were Readings and Feelings (1975) and Subjective Criticism (1978); the other was Stanley Fish, whose Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (1980) is representative of his reader-response criticism (Fish is discussed in the general context of theories of interpretation—1.3).

This recipe is adapted from the one found inside the front cover of Steven Lynn’s Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory, 2nd edition (New York: Longman, 1998). For those interested, Lynn also has recipes here for New Criticism; deconstruction; biographical, historical, and New Historical criticism; psychological criticism; and feminist criticism.

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I use this example of a theoretical recipe because its methodology is one that can be followed by anyone who can read and write. One way then to use theory is to first reduce it to a methodology (or recipe) and then to apply the methodology to a text (or to make the recipe). However, because there are no recipes for cooking with theory in this book, the opportunity to write some theoretical recipes and to then to cook (or bake with) them is always a possibility. One way that theory as methodology in use has been described is “Cookie-Cutter Theory,” wherein one presses the cookiecutter of a theoretical methodology to the “dough” of a text—and then bakes it. What should be apparent from these descriptions of how to use theory is that they are often connected to how one looks at theory. Each of the three examples above as to how to use theory is connected to a specific way of viewing theory: Theory as methodology implies that we use theory as a method (or recipe) to interpret texts; Theory as a toolbox implies that we use this toolbox to work on texts; and Theory as a way of life implies an organic approach to using theory wherein one just comes to think like a theorist. But to be fair, to ask how one uses theory assumes that how one looks at theory has a use (or pragmatic) dimension. If we turn to the other five ways of looking at theory, we see that their use dimension is less explicit: Theory as professional common sense implies that we use professional common sense when approaching texts—but if one is not a professional, then how does one know what this common sense is? This limits the usability of this view of theory for the non-professional (or amateur) theorist. Theory as a set of movements or schools implies that there is a wide variety of schools or movements that can be used to approach a text—but leaves it open as to how we should use them. This view of theory is more about its historical or conceptual development than its usefulness. Theory as high theory implies that only structuralism and poststructuralism can be used to approach a text—but still leaves it open as to how we should use them. This view of theory is more about the contributions of two particular schools or movements than the usefulness of high theory as an approach to literature and culture. Theory as cross- and multidisciplinary implies that disciplines other than those directly associated with the study of literary and cultural texts must be used to approach these texts—but still leaves it open which disciplines should be used and how they should be used as approaches to literature and culture. Theory as a community implies that we use the tactics favored by the community when approaching texts—but if one is not a member of this community, then how does one know the tactics that they favor? This limits the usability of this view of theory for those who are not members of a theory community.

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Still, while these five approaches to theory do not have a pragmatics built into them, all can quickly be adapted for use by the fledgling theorist. To do this, all one has to do is act like a professional, a high theorist, or a member of a theory community approaching a text. Whether this is preferable to carrying around a theory toolbox, recipe box, or thinking like a theorist will be for you to decide. The point that I want to emphasize here is that there is a gap between knowing what theory is and knowing how to use it. Some approaches to theory bridge this gap (theory as methodology; theory as toolbox; and theory as way of life) whereas others require you to take a leap before you are able to use them (theory as professional common sense; theory as high theory; theory as crossand multidisciplinary; and theory as a community). For the tyro, making a leap is much more difficult than taking a bridge across a gap. You should keep this in mind when and if you decide to use the contemporary theory presented in this book to approach various works of literature and culture.

ABOUT THIS BOOK This is a book about contemporary literary and cultural theory. To accomplish this, a number of major movements and schools of theory from the twentieth century are either deliberately not included (for example, reader-response criticism) or they are included but are the topic of a section (for example, hermeneutics [1.3], New Criticism [1.5]) rather than a chapter. In other cases, more recent areas that one might expect to find such as postmodernism are discussed within chapters under figures (for example, Fredric Jameson [3.5], Jean-François Lyotard [5.3], and Jean Baudrillard [5.4]). This allowed for more coverage of more recent or emerging areas of theory, particularly those in the last five chapters of this book. Roughly speaking, the earlier chapters in this book are more firmly rooted in the twentieth century, the middle chapters in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century theory, and the later chapters in twenty-first century directions in theory. Still, in spite of the roughly historical organization of the book, it is not a historical compendium of schools and movements. This is especially in evidence in the middle chapters where the names of schools and movements (for example, structuralism and semiotics [2.0], Marxism [3.0], psychoanalytic theory [4.0], poststructuralism [5.0], feminist theory [6.0], and LGBTQ+ theory [7.0]) give way to the names of key concepts and areas of interest (race and justice [8.0], biopolitics [9.0], globalization [10.0], ecocriticism [11.0], posthumanism [12.0], affect studies [13.0], and pop culture [14.0]). Given our earlier discussion of ways of approaching theory, this might be regarded as a shift from viewing theory as a set of movements or schools to regarding theory as a toolbox, a view that also historically parallels the dominant views of theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Arguably, then, the period before theory as covered in Chapter 1 (Early Theory) is referred to mainly by schools and movements; and an alleged period after theory as covered in Chapter 15 (Against Theory) is referred to mainly by the names of key concepts and areas of interest. Given then the organization of this book, it may be read as a kind of “story” of contemporary literary and cultural theory, which begins in Chapter 1 and concludes in Chapter 15. However, it also may be read like a “shuffle novel” wherein its beginning, middle, and end is determined by the reader. Not only can the chapters of this book be read (or used) in any order, so too may any of the

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seventy-five sections of the book be read (or used) in any order. Finally, this book can be approached as a “handbook,” wherein one turns to a chapter or section in order to fill in knowledge gaps regarding contemporary literary and cultural theory. Which is the better way to read or use this overview of theory really depends on your needs and interests. Moreover, my Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (2019), which is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of theory in the twenty-first century is intended to be a companion volume to Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. The former features original work by over 200 leading international scholars of theory, with individual chapters on the latest thinking in traditional schools such as feminist, Marxist, historicist, and postcolonial criticism and new areas of research in ecocriticism, biopolitics, affect studies, posthumanism, materialism, and many other fields. In addition, the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory includes a substantial A-to-Z compendium of key words and important thinkers in contemporary theory. It is suggested that the curious reader turn to the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory for further insight into contemporary theory. In many ways, this book is the direct consequence of my work on the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory. During the course of working on it, I noticed that there was no single-authored book on literary and cultural theory that attempted to take stock of the entirety of contemporary theory, that is, both theory’s traditional schools and areas of concern as well as newer and emerging ones. This book is thus my response to this void in the scholarship. However, in spite of its coverage of some traditional areas of theory, it is more than anything else the newer and emerging work of theorists that I believe will convince one-time visitors to the city theory to stay here for life. Theory today is stronger than ever because, among other things, it offers much more than just cookie-cutter approaches to literature and culture. Rather, at its best, it offers insight on not only how to understand the world, but also how to save it.3 Finally, the perspective on contemporary literary and cultural theory in this book is the result of many years of studying, teaching, and writing about it. Also, as I said earlier, my view of contemporary theory is a pluralistic one. More than any specific school, movement, or concept, it is the field of literary and cultural theory that interests me—and that I want to share with you here. The endgame though is not for you to drop everything that you are doing after reading this book and become a theorist like me. Rather, it is for you to mediate your own worldview with the thought and work of an area of interest that often gets lost in the shuffle of studying other things. In sum, I’d like to try to convince you of the value and importance of contemporary theory—and of the potential impact it can have on your life and our world.

3

For four responses to the question “Can Theory Save the World?,” see symplok e– 29.1/2 (2021): 521–59.

CHAPTER ONE

Early Theory 1.0 INTRODUCTION If theory is a set of schools or movements, then who ran the first school or established the first movement? This question often marks the fault line between a humanist conception of literary and cultural theory and an antihumanist conception. Broadly speaking, the humanist conception of literary and cultural theory is often traced back to ancient Greece, when the seeds of the Western tradition were being sown by poets and philosophers, and to ancient Rome, when the first empire was formed. It is a story that covers two millennia and countless thinkers. The first chapter in such an overview of literary and cultural theory often begins with Greek classics such as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics, and then moves on to Roman classics such as Horace’s Art of Poetry and Longinus’s On the Sublime. The humanist conception of literary and cultural theory, which is but a part of the greater Western tradition, is contained in classic texts from the Greeks to the present. These texts are sometimes referred to as the Great Books of the Western World, as they were eponymously titled in the fifty-four-volume set of works ranging from Homer to Sigmund Freud, famously published under the editorship of Robert Maynard Hutchins in 1952 by Encyclopedia Britannica. Hutchins, who served as President and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, was a fierce proponent of centering the university curriculum on these Great Books—and their Great Conversation on perennial questions and themes. The marker of these works as “Great Books” is their ability to carry forward the lines of thought (or conversation) established in the classical period, which for those who are history-challenged might be conveniently dated back to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE . It is a period that then extends forward into the “late” classical antiquity of Augustine of Hippo, who completed his Confessions around 400 CE , around 800 years later. I mention Augustine here because he is widely regarded as the originator of hermeneutics, which is one of the sections in this chapter. The classical period of literary and cultural theory, one that extends from the death of Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy and the teacher of Plato, to Augustine, the originator of hermeneutics (and, arguably, also semiotics [2.0]), is where we find the earliest “early theory.” Later “early theory” might then be said to include Western thought after Augustine through Friedrich Nietzsche. While the majority of this later period is dominated by the Middle Ages, a 1,000-year period which extends from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries CE , it also includes the work of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic thinkers. Again, I point this out only to say that depending on your view of literary and cultural theory, its beginnings range from the classical period to the twentieth century. However, regardless of one’s position here, it does not change the fact that classical thought (or “early theory,” if you will) had an enormous impact on many of the schools and movements of the 11

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twentieth century, particularly in psychoanalytic theory (e.g., Freud [4.1] and Jacques Lacan [4.2]), poststructuralism (e.g., Jacques Derrida [5.1] and Julia Kristeva [5.2]), feminist theory (Hélène Cixous [6.4] and Luce Irigaray [6.5]), and biopolitics (e.g., Michel Foucault [9.1]). Nevertheless, because much of the impact of this early theory on these particular schools and movements was, as we shall see, a negative one, their contributions are often termed antihumanism. To get a sense of this antihumanism, consider that Michel Foucault announced the end of the human era in the 1960s, and predicted in hindsight that man will turn out to have been relatively unimportant. This all brings us back to the question of humanism and antihumanism as working fault lines for the schools and movements associated with theory. Generally speaking, the schools and movements that more or less positively embrace and develop aspects of classical literary and cultural theory are called humanist. They include the work associated with all five sections of this chapter—humanism (1.1), rhetoric (1.2), hermeneutics (1.3), aestheticism (1.4), and New Criticism (1.5). However, in various ways, this is the only chapter in this book that can be described as humanist. The second closest one is Chapter 15, “Against Theory.” Ever other chapter, in one way or another, as we shall see, involves a significant dimension of antihumanism— that is to say, the majority of the sections in these chapters might be described as antihumanist, rather than humanist. Therefore, before we head into these various critiques of humanism conducted by contemporary literary and cultural theory, we need to reflect for a moment on humanism and some of its positive critical legacies.

1.1 HUMANISM When the roots of humanism are traced back to ancient Greece, its starting point is the thought of a man who travelled from city to city for forty years offering instruction for a fee. When he visited Athens, his great reputation preceded him, and the young men flocked to see him in a scene described by Plato in his dialogue, Protagoras. Though Plato disagreed with Protagoras of Abdera, calling him a Sophist because he took money for teaching, he greatly respected his thought. The cornerstone of Protagoras’s philosophy is found in the opening line of a book that he wrote called On Truth: “Of all things the measure is man: of existing things, that they exist; of non-existent things, that they do not exist.”1 Unfortunately, however, the rest of On Truth has been lost. Still, two major characteristics of humanism are quite clear from the line that survived: (1) By “man” he means the individual; and (2) By “measure” he means judge. Consequently, at the heart of humanism is the idea that the individual is the judge of whether a thing has a particular nature or not. So, if something appears to have a particular nature, then it has that particular nature. In other words, for Protagoras, all beliefs are true. Thus, at the origins of humanism is relativism, the view that no absolutes exist and that human judgment is always conditioned by a number of factors including our personal biases and beliefs. What is immediately striking here is the opposition of Protagoras’s humanism to the thought of Plato and Aristotle, who would never say that something is true just because we believe it to be true. Plato believed that the world as it appears to us is but a reflection of an ideal world: the world of

1

John Mansley Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 245.

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becoming (or appearances) and the world of being (or reality) are two different things. He uses the analogy of a cave to describe the difference between these two worlds. In his dialogue, The Republic, Plato writes of cave-dwellers who discover that their senses have led them to false knowledge about the world, and come to learn the impact of true knowledge and education on a person. Plato’s general approach to knowledge is called rationalism, which means that he believes that reason alone, without the aid of information from the senses, is capable of arriving at knowledge. The allegory of the cave tells us that not having true knowledge of the world is like being a person who mistakes shadows projected on the wall of a cave to be real things. The prisoners in the cave are akin to ordinary persons who do not know how to distinguish appearance from reality, false beliefs from justified true beliefs, or opinion from knowledge. Once people are shown the source of the shadows on the cave wall, there is no going back to a state of ignorance. While it is a painful journey out of the cave and into the sunlight, it changes us for the rest of our lives. When we see things for what they really are, we will not want to lack true knowledge ever again, even if it means being the subject of ridicule. Alluding to the trial of Socrates on the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens, Plato adds the following touch: “As for the man who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.”2 Plato’s philosophy makes a sharp distinction between the material world, perceived and known through the senses, and a super-sensory world apprehended by reason. The material world is correlated with matter, body, sense perception, many, opinion, particulars, and becoming. The super-sensory world (or world of “Ideas”) is correlated with mind, soul, reason, knowledge, one, truth, universals, and being. Plato rejects the concrete material world as a source of true knowledge. For him, it yields only relative, individual truth (opinion) obtained through the senses. For example, an object will be heavy to one person, light to another; opinion will vary about beauty. Such truth is, therefore, subjective, temporary, changing like the “truth” of Protagoras. True reality, however, is for Plato the super-sensory world of abstract ideas, apprehended only by reason. It is the world of objective, eternal, unchanging truth. Ideas (universals, absolutes) such as Beauty, Justice, and Courage have an independent character in this world. Concrete particulars exist only insofar as the Ideas “participate” in them. In other words, concrete particulars should be regarded as “copies” of Ideas. For Plato, all particulars, even all human beings, might cease to exist, but the world of Ideas would continue to be. As all particulars are subordinated to and derive their existence from the Ideas, so all Ideas, forming a pyramid, are subordinated to the highest idea, the Idea of the Good, which is positioned at the top of the pyramid. The Good, the analog of which in the cave allegory is the sun, is the supreme concept, and is the one absolute reality, self-sufficient and perfectly harmonious; it is the creative cause of the universe; it is the end of all from which flow all other Ideas, and through them the imperfect material world; it is pure reason and absolute virtue. While the eyes of the student of literature and culture might glaze over when Platonic metaphysics (that is, the nature of reality, existence, and being) and epistemology (that is, the sources, types, and limits of knowledge) are discussed, they always open wide when he discusses both the role of art in his ideal state and the intrinsic nature of art. Plato argues that art ought to have positive influence

2

Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1974), Book V, 517a.

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on its audience, and when it does not exert this type of influence, it must be censored. For Plato, not even the great poets of Greek antiquity are beyond censorship. Furthermore, art is regarded as an imitation of an imitation: something with much stronger ties to the world of appearances than the world of reality and truth. In The Republic, Plato explains why the censorship of art is especially important for children, that is, those who are just forming their character and are much more amenable to taking in the “desired impression.” He argues that we should keep them away from stories that contain “notions which are the very opposite of those which are to be held by them when they are grown up.”3 Plato says that children “cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal.”4 Consequently, given that literature often does not represent things or events as they truly are, it can exert a bad moral influence on the character development of the young. “Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes,”5 it must be kept away from the developing young minds in Plato’s ideal state—even if the representation is made by Homer or Hesiod, the two cornerstones of ancient Greek literature. In American culture, this would be the equivalent of keeping Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman away from schoolchildren. This line of thought leads Plato to banish poets from his ideal state because “the mimetic poet sets up in each individual soul a vicious constitution by fashioning phantoms far removed from reality, and by currying favor with the senseless element that cannot distinguish the greater from the less, but calls the same thing now one, now the other.”6 This latter attribute of the poets, that is, calling “the same thing now one, now the other,” is precisely one of the flaws of Protagoras’s humanism according to Plato. For Plato, poetry has the power to corrupt, therefore it along with poets must be banished from the ideal state that is established by philosophy—and ruled by a philosopher. Thus when considering the classical sources of humanism, the relativistic humanism of Protagoras stands in opposition to the absolutist humanism of Plato. Furthermore, when one takes into account the “quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, that is, its role in the state and relation to truth and reality, one begins to see that there are several very different senses of humanism. In The Republic, though, Plato goes into much more detail about the metaphysical and epistemological nature of poiesis, which in Greek literally means “making.” For him, poiesis refers to all forms of artistic creativity including music, drama, poetry, prose fiction, painting, and sculpture. And, to be sure, these areas are all associated with the humanities. Moreover, the allegory of the cave can also be used to illustrate the limits of poiesis. Again, true reality for Plato is the super-sensory world of abstract ideas or forms, apprehended only by reason. It is the world of objective, eternal, unchanging truth. Ideas (universals, absolutes) such as Beauty, Justice, Courage— and even “Bed”—have an independent character in this world. Concrete particulars exist only insofar as the Ideas “participate” in them. A concrete, particular bed (for example, the one you slept in last night) should be regarded as a “copy” of the Idea “Bed” which persists in the world of

3 Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 2nd edition, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875), 249; Book II, 377. 4 Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 251; Book II, 378. 5 Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 250; Book II, 377. 6 Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), Book X, 605b.

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objective, super-sensory truth. Therefore, the bed you slept in last night is, for Plato, a second removed from truth—the Idea of Bed. Art (poiesis) then, being an imitation (mimesis) of the world around us, is a third removed from truth. When we paint an image of the bed we slept in last night or tell a story about it or write a song about it, we are producing an “imitation of an imitation.” Plato says then “must we not infer that all the poets, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach?”7 “The poet is like a painter who . . . will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures.”8 For Plato, the artist is depicted as one who continuously lives in the cave, and produces images based on their sensory observations of images on the cave wall: “The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing of true existence; he knows appearances only.”9 Whereas Aristotle agrees with Plato that art is a mode of imitation (mimesis), he disagrees with him on what art imitates as well as on its psychological and moral effects on human beings. Plato believes that art is an imitation of an imitation, a feature that makes art far removed from truth. Aristotle, however, contends that while art is imitation, it is not an imitation of an imitation. For him, the artist does not imitate particular characters, emotions, or actions, but rather imitates universal characters, emotions, and actions. This places art in a closer relationship with truth, since these universal characters, emotions, and actions are truer than particular ones. For Aristotle, art, then, is an idealization of human life, not a direct copy. In addition, “it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.”10 “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”11 For Aristotle, works of art are created because “the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood”12 as is the instinct for “harmony and rhythm.”13 Furthermore, we enjoy observing art because there is pleasure in seeing certain things and actions imitated (e.g., “dead bodies”)14 as well as pleasure in observing the technical perfection of a work. There is also enjoyment in both learning something new and in recognizing what we already know through a work of art. Comedy involves the imitation of lower types of men whose faults are “ludicrous,”15 whereas tragedy involves the imitation of the action of men of a higher type. The purpose of tragedy is to arouse fear and pity, and to bring about a catharsis (purging) of these two emotions.16 In this latter regard, Aristotle and Plato disagree. Plato rejects tragedy on the ground that it arouses pity and fear, and that this, in turn, makes people emotionally weak. Aristotle believes that tragedy purges away these emotions and makes people stronger.

Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 495–6; Book X, 600. Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 496; Book X, 601. 9 Plato, The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. III, 496; Book X, 601. 10 Aristotle, Poetics, 3rd edition revised, trans. S. H. Butcher (London: Macmillan, 1902) 35; 1451a, IX, 1–2. 11 Aristotle, Poetics, 35; 1451b, IX, 3–4. 12 Aristotle, Poetics, 15; 1448b, IV, 2. 13 Aristotle, Poetics, 15; 1448b, IV, 6. 14 Aristotle, Poetics, 15; 1448b, IV, 4. 15 Aristotle, Poetics, 21; 1449a, V, 1. 16 Aristotle, Poetics, 23; 1449b, VI, 3. 7 8

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For Aristotle, tragedy has six elements: Spectacle (scenery, costumes), Song, Diction, Character, Thought, and Plot.17 The most important element is plot, for a good plot is necessary to produce the tragic effect of fear and pity. The second most important element is character. Even though Aristotle only focuses on one imitative art (poetry) and, in particular, only one form of that art (tragic drama), his Poetics, the source of these ideas, has come to be the single most influential work on art. Nevertheless, the Poetics is not the only work by Aristotle that takes up the subject of art. He also makes comments on art in general, and about tragedy in particular, in many of his other writings. For example, in his Rhetoric, he describes pity and fear in greater detail; in his Politics, he further discusses catharsis; in his Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics he comments on the general nature of art; and in his Parts of Animals and Physics he notes the relationship of art to nature. In brief, the early theory of Aristotle might be described today as both cross- and multidisciplinary. Much humanist literary theory builds upon these basic ideas established by Protagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Some of these ideas concern the following: Literature as a Source of Morality Plato’s banishment of the poets is an extreme position of the view that literature has a moral dimension. More moderate positions regard some works of literature as sources of moral improvement and others move in the opposite direction. The latter direction raises issues of the viability of censorship as a means of protecting society from immorality. Literature as a Source of Truth Whereas Plato’s metaphysics does not allow literature access to truth, Aristotle does provide for some type of relationship. These issues raise more general ones for humanist literary theory about the role of truth, fact, and history in literature. Literature and the Emotions Whereas both Plato and Aristotle agree that literature is related to human emotions, they disagree on the specific role. Both of these thinkers open up broader questions though about the relationship between human emotions and literature, including its ability to communicate universal truths about love, joy, empathy, fear, hatred, and pity. As such, humanism is often associated with the centrality of morality, emotions, and truth in literature and culture—or more broadly, human (or better, humane) values. During the Renaissance, emphasis was placed on a broad reading of classical thinkers, which were viewed as an antidote to the religious authority and scholasticism of the Middle Ages. Still, the humanists of this period tended to be Christians. Humanism that denies any role for religious authority, and claims that all values are human values, is sometimes called secular humanism to distinguish it from humanism associable with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Since the Renaissance, the term humanism has generally signified a return to Greek sources like Plato and Aristotle as opposed to religious authority and Scholasticism. 17

Aristotle, Poetics, 25; 1450a, VI, 7.

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Regardless though whether the source of human value and freedom is superhuman or secular, humanism always come back to the individual identified by Protagoras. The question though is whether the beliefs and values of that individual—the human—are sourced in God, nature, or are of her own “measure.” This leads us to add a few more ideas associable with humanist literary theory: Literature as a Source of Pleasure Literature has the ability to give humans pleasure. Whether this pleasure involves simple fulfillment or a complex mix of emotions, satisfaction or sublimity, the point is that humans are the measure of pleasure—not anyone or anything else. Hedonism, the view that the pursuit of pleasure is the sole aim of life, can be traced back to Aristippus, who was a student of Socrates. Literature as a source of pleasure is the most hedonistic element of all possible humanisms. Literature as a Source of Spirituality Literature has the ability to move humans beyond their personal experiences to those that bring them closer to God, nature, and the world (or cosmos). These experiences are sometimes described as beyond expression, description, and speech—and at their most (ineffable) extreme are termed as a spiritual or sublime experience. This is the most superhuman element of all possible humanisms. Finally, it should be noted that the origins of the word humanism come from Roman, not Greek, culture. Still, the Latin word humanitas is a combination of two Greek concepts: philanthropia, which in Greek brings together philia (friendship, love) and anthropos (human), which merged mean humanity or humane feeling; and paideia, which is the Greek word for education. For the Romans, the Latin word humanitas referred to both the commitment to humane values, and a broad education in subjects such as history, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and moral philosophy. These subjects would come to form part of the core of what we call today “the humanities.”

1.2 RHETORIC (OR, THE QUARREL BETWEEN RHETORIC AND PHILOSOPHY) Rhetoric in Greek antiquity was regarded as the art of speaking and writing both persuasively and well. It involved not only practical skills associated with delivering a persuasive speech—that is “oratory”—but also laid out rules for good composition. Even though its domain, range, and influence shifted over the years, rhetoric is commonly said to have flourished from Greek antiquity up until the late nineteenth century. Since the twentieth century, however, in spite of the influential work on literary rhetoric by most notably Kenneth Burke (1.5) and Wayne Booth (2.5), it has ceded significant ground to or has been incorporated into a number of other approaches to literature such as hermeneutics (1.3), narratology (2.5), and cultural studies (14.1), which draw on its long history for influence and inspiration. Some contemporary rhetoricians, however, find it extends to many other areas of literary and cultural theory, including Marxism (3.0), psychoanalytic theory (4.0), feminist theory (6.0), critical race theory (8.1), postcolonial theory (10.1), and even object-oriented ontology (15.3). This broader

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influence is largely made possible by a broader conception of rhetoric: namely, rhetoric as “the use of language in a context to have effects, language here understood to include not only words but also physical gestures, visual images, and other symbolic instruments.”18 Yet, despite its almost continuous presence and influence from Greek antiquity to the present, rhetoric has just about always been met with varying degrees of denunciation by philosophers. The major exceptions here from the humanist tradition are as follows: The Citizen Orator (Isocrates) This notion was advanced by Isocrates, who said “Mark you, the man who wishes to persuade people will not be negligent as to the matter of character; no, on the contrary, he will apply himself above all to establish a most honourable name among his fellow citizens; for who does not know that words carry greater conviction when spoken by men of good repute than when spoken by men who live under a cloud, and that the argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words?”19 Isocrates attacked the immoral teachers of rhetoric. He also won the praise of Plato, who “prophesized” that Isocrates’ work in rhetoric will make the work of “his literary predecessors look like very small-fry.”20 Plato even adds that Isocrates’ work in rhetoric “contains an innate tincture of philosophy.”21 The Philosopher-Orator-Statesmen (Cicero) This notion is advanced by Cicero, who said “no man can be an orator possessed of every praiseworthy accomplishment, unless he has attained the knowledge of every thing important, and of all liberal arts, for his language must be ornate and copious from knowledge, since, unless there be beneath the surface matter understood and felt by the speaker, oratory becomes an empty and almost puerile flow of words.”22 For Cicero, rhetoric is the art of thought—not persuasion—relating to all of the sciences, especially philosophy. Christian Rhetoric (Augustine of Hippo) This notion is advanced by Augustine, who says “For since by means of the art of rhetoric both truth and falsehood are urged, who would dare to say that truth should stand in the person of its defenders unarmed against lying, so that they who wish to urge falsehoods may know how to make their listeners benevolent, or attentive, or docile in their presentation, while the defenders of truth are ignorant of that art? Should they speak briefly, clearly, and plausibly while the defenders of truth speak so that they tire their listeners, make themselves difficult to understand and what they have to say dubious? Should they oppose the truth with fallacious arguments and assert falsehoods, while the defenders of truth have no ability to defend the truth or to oppose

Steven Mailloux, “Rhetoric,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 102. 19 Isocrates, “Antidosis,” in Isocrates, Vol. 2, trans. George Norlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 339. 20 Plato, Phaedrus, in Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 1973), 279a. 21 Plato, Phaedrus, in Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters, 279a. 22 Cicero, De Oratore, in Cicero on Oratory and Orators, ed. and trans. J. W. Watson (London: George Bell & Sons, 1903), 148; Bk. 1, Ch. VI. 18

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the false?” Augustine concludes from this that “While the faculty of eloquence, which is of great value in urging either evil or justice, is in itself indifferent, why should it not be obtained for the uses of the good in the service of truth if the evil usurp it for the winning of perverse and vain causes in defense of iniquity and error?”23 Topical Philosophy (Giambattista Vico) This notion is advanced by Vico, who believed that topics, rather than physical facts, alter one’s behavior through speech. Vico finds fault with René Descartes’ belief that rhetoric is able only to communicate what is already known. For Vico, rhetoric is not beneath the level of philosophical speculation, and is rooted in a probability-based reality. As such, by using topical philosophy, rhetoric has the power to create knowledge. For Vico, rhetorical invention precedes demonstration; rhetorical discovery precedes truth. Rhetoric creates data and hypotheses, and it is only through rhetoric that we can communicate our ideas and impressions of others. Vico’s thought, which comes at the end of the humanistic tradition, is an effort to argue for the preeminence of his topical versus the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1.3) and others.24 Each of these thinkers—Isocrates, Cicero, Augustine, and Vico—are noteworthy because they did not assume an opposition between philosophy and rhetoric. Still, to a great extent, the history of rhetoric is co-extensive with a history of philosophers’ separating the pursuit of truth and virtue from the “mere” art of speaking and writing both persuasively and well. The “reputation” of rhetoric in philosophical circles has seldom been very strong, even if its reputation deteriorated more drastically with the rise of modern philosophy after the death of Descartes in 1650. Even so, why is it that most philosophers remember Plato’s attacks on the Sophists and rhetoricians in the Gorgias, but forget that the Phaedrus presents dialectic as the highest form of rhetoric? Furthermore, why is it that one finds in much philosophy, at least until the birth of modern philosophy, a much more tolerant, even embracing, attitude towards matters of style and eloquence in philosophy? Why as well is there an overtly “anti-rhetorical turn” in philosophy after 1650 or so? Part of the answer is that many contemporary philosophers are interested in inquiry that draws it closer to science than literature. The characteristics of this inquiry include the use of a perfectly referential and transparent language, and a styleless style of writing that involves degree-zero pointof-view, character, time, and emplotment—all characteristics aimed to keep philosophy at odds with rhetoric. This is important because not only does science come to be treated by philosophers as the model for objectivity and certainty, it also comes to be regarded as a refuge from rhetoric: science is a sphere of inquiry free of the bad influence of rhetoric. If one wants both to distance philosophical inquiry from rhetoric and maintain a set of conditions as ideal as possible for objectivity and certainty, then science is the best available model within a secular worldview. If in scientific inquiry, the heavens speak, for example, not Isaac Newton, then

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 118–19. See, Giambattista Vico, On the Study of Methods of Our Time (1708–9), trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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in philosophical inquiry modeled after scientific inquiry, truth will speak, not Descartes. However, for some, it is not even a matter of drawing philosophy closer to science because early modern philosophy was generally indistinguishable from science. Modern philosophers prior to Kant, says Richard Rorty, were not doing something distinguishable from science. Some were psychologists in the manner of [John] Locke and [David] Hume—providing what Kant called a “physiology of the human understanding” in the hope of doing for inner space what Newton had done for outer space, giving a quasi-mechanical account of the way in which our minds worked. But this was a matter of extending the scientific world-picture, rather than of criticizing or grounding or replacing it. Others were scientific apologists for the religious tradition in the manner of Leibniz [5.4], trying to smuggle enough Aristotelian vocabulary back into Cartesian science [i.e., the science of René Descartes] to have things both ways. But this was, once again, not a matter of criticizing or grounding or replacing science but of tinkering with it in the hope of squeezing in God, Freedom and Immortality.25 This comment makes all the more interesting the ancient efforts of Aristotle, who aimed to combine science, philosophy, and rhetoric. Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, this rhetoric-free, scientific-like model for philosophical inquiry may help us to understand why one interpretation of Plato’s view on the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric has dominated the scene of modern philosophy. Plato’s work takes on more relevancy in rhetoric-free modern philosophy when it is seen as favoring the side of dialectic over rhetoric. In this interpretive climate, the modern philosopher finds himself or herself compelled to push for the conclusion that Plato was a lifelong enemy of rhetoric, if he or she is at all interested in maintaining Plato’s relevancy to modern philosophy. Plato is here generally of great assistance to the modern philosopher: there is usually little difficulty in mustering up a sufficient amount of evidence from his writings supportive of his disdain for rhetoric. His main rhetorical dialogues—in particular, Gorgias and Phaedrus—contain enough material to build a strong case against rhetoric. As one influential version of the account goes, Plato was “[a]larmed by the role of oratory in what he saw as the decline of values in Athenian society, and partly stung by the success of the Sophists, those rival teachers of philosophy, politics, and eloquence,”26 and because of this, devoted considerable efforts to attacking rhetoric. It is often claimed that Plato’s intent in the Gorgias and Phaedrus as well as other dialogues is not just to oppose rhetoric to dialectic, but rather to encourage dialectic to triumph over rhetoric. Further support for the case against rhetoric is commonly found in his equating of rhetoric with cookery and the gratification of pleasure, his exclusion of rhetoric and poetry from his “ideal” community, his devaluation of probability and opinion in comparison to certainty and knowledge, and finally, in the unobtainably high standards he set for “true” rhetoric.27 Given these conditions,

Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 144. Brian Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 84. 27 James L. Golden, “Plato Revisited: A Theory of Discourse for All Seasons,” in Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, eds. Robert J. Conners, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1984), 17. 25 26

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some maintain that Plato’s arguments against rhetoric are “not balanced and dispassionate evaluations of rhetoric’s validity or contribution to society, but frank polemics against it.”28 However, while there is little doubt that Plato presents a strong case against rhetoric, what is frequently left unsaid is that he also presents an argument in support of a role for rhetoric in philosophy. One of the strongest defenses of Plato as a proponent of rhetoric’s importance to philosophy comes from an historical interpretation of Plato’s Phaedrus (a general approach to texts that is taken up in the next section of this chapter, on hermeneutics). On such an interpretation, his critique of rhetoric is viewed against the backdrop of the historical situation in Athens at the time of its composition. When this is done, one finds that “genuine” philosophical rhetoric is for Plato a tool used by the philosopher-ruler of the state for shaping the polis, which is also to say, “genuine” rhetoricians must be philosophers.29 Speech and rhetoric are necessary to the philosopher-ruler as a means of persuading the citizens and shaping the polis in accordance with the standard of the Good and the Beautiful.30 On this account, not only is rhetoric far from antithetical to philosophy, it is not even denigrated in the slightest. The catch, of course, is that this is true only of one kind of rhetoric: “genuine” rhetoric. The same does not hold for its’ opposite, “professional” rhetoric. But, on this reading of Plato, the “professional rhetoric” that is the object of Plato’s scorn is less that of Isocrates and Lysias than of leaders at the time such as Epaminondas, Callistratus, and Timotheus—a point that can only be appreciated if one situates Plato’s critique of rhetoric in its historical setting. Epaminondas, Callistratus, and Timotheus were political leaders who actually delivered speeches in the 370s in Athens, whereas Isocrates and Lysias, like “most professionals,” were “ill-equipped to deliver speeches effectively and especially in political contexts, in the boule [a council of citizens] and ecclesia [an assembly of citizens], where the situation required that the political leader himself do the speaking.”31 This reading suggests that given the historical condition of Athens in the 370s, and given Plato’s ideal of a philosophical-rhetoric put to the ends of political action, it is most likely that “political rhetoricians” such as Epaminondas, Callistratus, and Timotheus are the real object of his scorn rather than the “professional” rhetoricians such as Isocrates and Lysias—that is, someone who “writes but does not speak, who teaches but does not criticize.”32 Thus, rhetoric, in its “genuine” or “real” sense, will be used “as a vehicle for philosophical rule and political persuasion,”33 whereas in its “false” or “ingenuine” sense it becomes a tool for political persuasion without the direction of the Good and the Beautiful, that is to say, without philosophy. “Rhetoric,” says Socrates, “taken as a whole,” is the art of influencing the mind or winning the soul “by means of ” (dia) “discourses,” “speeches,” or “words” (logon).34 Moreover, because Socrates also adds that rhetoric is important “not only in the courts of law and other public gatherings, but in private places also,”35 it might also be concluded—by following a lead from

Vickers, In Defense of Rhetoric, 84. Michael Morgan, Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth-Century Athens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 181. 30 Morgan, Platonic Piety, 180. 31 Morgan, Platonic Piety, 182. 32 Morgan, Platonic Piety, 182. 33 Morgan, Platonic Piety, 184. 34 Plato, Phaedrus, 261a. 35 Plato, Phaedrus, 261a. 28 29

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Quintilian on how to interpret this passage—that rhetoric also plays a role in dialectic. In his Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian observes the following: Plato in his Sophist in addition to public and forensic oratory introduces a third kind which he styles προσομιλητικń, which I will permit myself to translate by “conversational.” This is distinct from forensic oratory and is adapted for private discussions, and we may regard it as identical with dialectic.36 Dialectic then—if Quintilian’s comments apply as well to the Phaedrus, allowing it to be seen as a kind of conversational “oratory” for private places—is encompassed as well by rhetoric. Nevertheless, dialectic is more than just ordinary conversation, and its connection to rhetoric is a matter of much more speculation when the method of collection and division is discussed outside of the dialectical knowledge of the philosopher-rhetorician. How, then, is dialectic inseparable from rhetoric outside of the philosopher-rhetorician scenario? One response is that in addition to definition, collection, and division, the dialectical method includes four rhetorical strategies: the first involves phrasing of questions in such a way that they allow for a wide range of responses; the second rhetorical strategy comes into play when the respondent develops an answer “which sets forth hypotheses and demonstrates them through reasoning supported by examples, analogies, and parallel cases”; the third involves effective and responsible refutation and cross-examination; and the fourth strategy involves modification of the original position.37 All told, on this view, Plato’s theory of dialectic “draws upon science for its definition and structure, upon philosophy for its subject matter, and upon rhetoric for its strategies.”38 Furthermore, beginning almost from where our historical reading of rhetoric in the Phaedrus leaves off, this view takes the two senses of rhetoric at work in the Phaedrus and argues that they are indicative of a more general theory of “true” or “genuine” rhetoric at work, not only in the Phaedrus but also in many of Plato’s other writings. At its core, this theory of genuine rhetoric involves three basic functions: the “epistemological” function—to create knowledge; the “ethical” function—to promote values; and the “active” function—to produce or lead us to certain types of action.39 In Plato’s work, then, one finds “a theory that provided the basic structure and inspiration for Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and for many of the ideas later developed in the writings of Cicero and Quintilian” as well as others such as Vico.40 If the aim of this section was to look at rhetoric as a form of early theory, then not only has a possible fruitful relationship between rhetoric and philosophy been uncovered, but the way has been paved for reducing philosophy to little more than a form of rhetoric. If even the dialectical method—the allegedly ultimate philosophical strategy—is grounded in rhetorical strategies, then what space if any is left for philosophy and philosophical strategies that are rhetoric-free? While this account will not convince many contemporary philosophers to abandon themselves to rhetorical studies, it is a prequel to Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralism (5.1), where not only is the traditional

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Vol. 1, trans. H. E. Butler (New York: Putnam’s, 1920), 395 (III, iv, 10). Golden, “Plato Revisited,” 30–1. 38 Golden, “Plato Revisited,” 32. 39 Golden, “Plato Revisited,” 19–29. 40 Golden, “Plato Revisited,” 35. 36 37

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quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric turned inside out—so too is the relationship of speech to writing. In many respects, though, determining the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in Aristotle is much easier than in Plato. The incompatibility of rhetoric and philosophy as well as the general devaluation of rhetoric in Plato is relevant only from the perspective of a specific conception of rhetoric: that is, the kind of oratorical rhetoric practiced in the 370s by political leaders such as Timotheus, Epaminondas, and Callistratus. Otherwise, on the basis of another type of rhetoric— “genuine,” “real,” or “true” rhetoric—quite the opposite situation results. Not only is genuine rhetoric neither antithetical to philosophy nor disparaged in any way, but Plato actually argues that it is closely connected with the successful life of the philosopher-ruler: rhetorical strategies are necessary for the philosopher-ruler to be politically effective. The only thing “scandalous” about rhetoric in Plato is that too many people do not recognize its double nature, and merely associate rhetoric with sophistry and trickery. For Aristotle, on the other hand, rhetoric is a practical art, and an inevitability present in any discourse that seeks to persuade. Rhetorical example is a form of induction (the progression from particulars to a universal), and the rhetorical uses of enthymemes (a syllogism where one of the premises or the conclusion is implicit) are really syllogisms (a form of reasoning wherein a conclusion necessarily follows from two premises). “Every one who effects persuasion through proof does in fact use either enthymemes or examples: there is no other way.”41 In general, Aristotle defines rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”42 Its function is “not simply to succeed in persuading, but rather to discover the means of coming as near such success as the circumstances of each particular case allow.”43 The spoken word, according to Aristotle, has three modes of persuasion: “The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker [ethos]; the second on putting the audience in a certain frame of mind [pathos]; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”44 A good speaker then will be able to reason logically, understand human character and goodness in its various forms, and understand the emotions.45 It is no secret that philosophers have traditionally attempted to avoid philosophical practices that rely heavily on ethos and pathos. Moreover, it might even be argued that products of philosophical inquiry that rely on ethos and pathos are much less desirable than those that avoid them. The ideal is, rather, a non-rhetorical presentation that aims not at persuading its audience, but rather gaining the inward assent of the audience. Most definitely, such an audience will be able to follow long chains of reasoning, and will readily be able to comprehend complicated arguments—conditions that clearly do not necessitate any other modes of persuasion. Furthermore, unlike Plato, Aristotle lays out the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in such a way that there should be little disagreement among his readers. As the “counterpart” to dialectic, rhetoric “is an offshoot of dialectic and also of ethical studies.”46 Nonetheless, Aristotle,

Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. Lane Cooper (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), I.2.1356b5–b7. Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1355b26. 43 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.1.1355b9–b11. 44 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1356a1–a4. 45 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1356a21–a23. 46 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1356a25. 41 42

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like Plato, belittles “rhetoric when it masquerades as political science, and the professors of it as political experts—sometimes from want of education, sometimes owing to other human failings.”47 In rhetoric, “the term rhetorician may describe either the speaker’s knowledge of the art, or his moral purpose. In dialectic it is different: a man is a sophist because he has a certain kind of moral purpose, a dialectician in respect, not of his moral purpose, but of his faculty.”48 The value of rhetoric is further diminished by Aristotle by regarding as its duty to “deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us” and to concern itself with “the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.”49 In addition to being restricted to matters which cannot be dealt with in a systematic way and being a tool for popular communication, rhetoric is also limited to subjects which “present us with alternative possibilities,” that is, subjects in which the issue itself seems to be uncertain. No one wastes time deliberating on certainties, that is, “things that could not have been, and cannot now or in the future be, other than they are.”50 While rhetoric is clearly related to dialectic by Aristotle and is not without value,51 its province differs greatly from that of dialectic. Yet for all of his alleged “belittling” of rhetoric in comparison to dialectic, Aristotle’s efforts are to be admired not only for their attempt to position rhetoric vis-à-vis dialectic as carefully and systematically as possible, but also for situating rhetoric within a larger philosophical program. It is for these reasons and more that twentieth-century literary rhetoricians will turn more to the early theory of Aristotle than to Plato. Still, the positions of both on rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy are vital to understanding many of the directions taken by contemporary literary and cultural theory.

1.3 HERMENEUTICS Hermeneutics is about interpretation and understanding. It comes from the Greek word hermeneía, which means “interpretation” or “explanation.” In the context of literary and cultural theory, its major question is how do we interpret and understand texts from the past? Moreover, hermeneutics asks whether interpreting and understanding texts from the past is more an art or a science? For some, like Friedrich Schleiermacher, who describes it as “the art of understanding,” and HansGeorg Gadamer, who calls it “the art or technique of understanding and interpretation,” it is more like the former. However, for others, like Wilhelm Dilthey, who aimed to establish a scientific basis for hermeneutics that could be used in the study of the “human sciences,” that is, the humanities and the social sciences, it is more like the latter. While the origins of hermeneutics are often traced back to the work of sixteenth-century German theologians, Augustine of Hippo was concerned with the interpretation of the Bible in late antiquity. Around 396 CE , he began On Christian Doctrine, a work that is basically an introduction to the

Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1356a26–a29. Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.1.1355b17–b22. 49 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1357a1–a4. 50 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1357a5–a8. 51 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I.2.1355a20–1355b8. Rhetoric is useful because it prevents the triumph of fraud and injustice (1355a20–1355a24), instructs when scientific instruction fails (1355a25–1355a27), makes us argue both sides of a case (1355a28–1355a40), and is a means of defense (1355b1–1355b8). 47 48

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interpretation and explanation of the Bible. It is also the work quoted above in the previous section with relation to Christian rhetoric. Completed in 427 CE , On Christian Doctrine is an approach to the hermeneutics of Scripture that is in part grounded in Augustine’s early training in rhetoric, specifically the work of Cicero. This is most evident in the Book IV, where Cicero’s rhetoric is adapted to the needs of Christian orators. For Cicero, there are five separate general tasks that the orator must attend to when preparing a speech: (1) invention, the collection of materials; (2) dispositio, the arrangement of materials; (3) elocution, the verbal expression of materials; (4) memoria, the memorization of speech; and (5) actio, the technique of delivery.52 But whereas Cicero said that the mere study of rules such as these is not enough in oratorical education, Augustine said that the rules are not necessary at all. It is enough for the wise person to just study the Bible and the masters of Christian eloquence. Here hermeneutics is found to be in Augustine more of an “art” than a “science.” But Augustine does something much more here than adapt Roman rhetoric to the needs of Christian orators. He provides a way of interpreting and explaining the Bible grounded in both a theory of language and a theory of signs. He was the first in the Western tradition to do this, and his work here has strong resonances in twentieth-century structuralism and semiotics (2.0) as they also take up both theories of language and signs, particularly Ferdinand de Saussure (2.1) and Charles Peirce (2.1). For Augustine, a “sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the senses.”53 Some of these signs are “natural,” like smoke as a sign of fire, “which, without any desire or intention of signifying, make us aware of something beyond themselves”;54 and some of them are “conventional” like the ones “living creatures show to one another for the purpose of conveying, in so far as they are able, the motion of their spirits or something which they have sensed or understood.55 Conventional signs, such as words, are found, for example, in the Bible. They are further distinguished as literal and figurative. So “ox” as a literal conventional sign is a type of animal, but as a figurative conventional sign in the New Testament symbolizes one of the four evangelists. So, as a work of hermeneutics, On Christian Doctrine was composed as a kind of textbook for Christian orators. It aimed to assist them in both their orations and in their interpretations and explanations of the words in the Bible. It includes both general principles about signs and language as well as practical advice for handling the difficulties encountered in Biblical exegesis. As a Christian hermeneutics, Augustine emphasizes that the interpreter keep in view their love of God and their neighbor, and be guided by faith, hope, and love. Allegory came to play an important role in Augustine’s hermeneutics, particularly as it allowed for the Christian love of God and neighbor to be implied by various characters, actions, and ideas found in the words of the Bible. For Augustine, writes one of his contemporary biographers, the Bible was literally the “word” of God. It was regarded as a single communication, a single message in an intricate code, and not as an exceedingly heterogeneous collection of separate books. Above all, it was a communication that was intrinsically so far above the pitch of human

D. W. Robertson, Jr., “Translator’s Introduction,” in Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, xviii. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 34; Bk. 2, §1. 54 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 34; Bk. 2, §1. 55 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 34–5; Bk. 2, §2. 52 53

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minds, that to be made available to our senses at all, this “Word” had to be communicated by means of an intricate game of “signs.”56 Augustine wrote that “everything was said exactly as it needed to be said” in the Bible.57 Therefore, for him, the first question of hermeneutics is not “What does this mean?” but rather “Why does this word or this incident occur here and not some other?” It is here that allegory is most useful in providing a response to the question “Why?” Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, however, moves in a different direction as compared to Augustine’s. For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics is the art of avoiding misunderstandings. To accomplish this, we must reconstruct the original context of the work in order to avoid misunderstanding it. This contextual reconstruction aims to eliminate the prejudices and interests of the interpreter. In the case of Plato’s Phaedrus discussed earlier, the move to understand this text within the context of Athens in the 370s moves in the direction of this type of contextual reconstruction. Schleiermacher required that the interpreter identify with the mindset of the author. This hermeneutics held for any written texts comprised of language, including the Bible. Moreover, it also held for the interpretation of any human manifestation ranging from conversations to works of art. For Schleiermacher, contextual reconstruction solved a basic problem of hermeneutics: namely, the words of a text such as the Bible remain constant but the context that produced them has changed. Dilthey held, though, that it was not enough to just reconstruct the original context in its own terms. Rather, he believed that historians are always bound by the judgments of their own age. This position, called historicism, requires those who want to understand texts from the past to bring the past back to life in order to understand them. But for Dilthey there is another problem: individual features of a text are only intelligible in terms of the entire context of the text, and the entire context of the text is only intelligible through the individual features. This problem, called the hermeneutic circle, is resolved for him by the interpreter entering into a constant interplay and feedback between text and context. It is important to note that the hermeneutic circle assumes that the text is a unity or an organic whole. Why? Because without the assumption of an organic whole (or whole meaning or context) the part–whole circularity is not maintained. Finally, the difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences for Dilthey is that the former aim for understanding (Verstehen) whereas the latter focuses on explanation (Erklären). For both Schleiermacher and Dilthey, hermeneutics aims for the original meaning of a text. But Gadamer offered a different vision of hermeneutics. For Gadamer, understanding is not just a mental activity, but a basic fact of human existence. Furthermore, language is a common ground for understanding. Still, the historical or temporal situation of the interpreter is unavoidable. Therefore, there is no escape from the hermeneutic circle. In his major work, Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer argues that works from the past question our present concerns, and that we in turn question the past. Understanding involves our ability to reconstruct the question to which the past work was an answer. Thus, unlike the first question of Augustine’s hermeneutics which asked “Why?”, the first question of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is more like “What?” Specifically, “What was the question to which this work was the answer?”

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Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 252–3. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 145, 12; cited by Brown, Augustine, 253.

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But reconstructing this question involves neither reconstructing the past (Schleiermacher) nor bringing the past back to life (Dilthey). Rather, for Gadamer the past can only be understood by relating it to the present. Consequently, all interpretation is a dialogue of the past with the present. Gadamer sees this process as one wherein there is a fusion of horizons: understanding the past involves fusing past experiences with present interests and prejudices. Therefore, unlike Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, one that strives to eliminate the prejudices and interests of the interpreter, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is built upon embracing the prejudices and interests of the interpreter. Additionally, whereas both Schleiermacher and Dilthey assume that meaning is exhausted by the author’s intentions (otherwise there would be no need to reconstruct a context or bring the past back to life), Gadamer argues that meaning is never exhausted by the intentions of the author. New cultural and historical contexts add new possibilities for the meaning of texts through the fusions of horizons. The idea that prejudice in interpretation is good goes against the grain of much modern epistemology. However, in some ways, the embrace of prejudice by Gadamer is true to the roots of humanism in Protagoras, wherein “man is the measure.” For Gadamer, all interpretation is situational—that is, it is not possible to know a literary text as it is (for example, in its Platonic ideal). Consequently, understanding for Gadamer is not a passive activity (wherein one leaves “home” to interpret a text). Rather, it is a productive one (wherein one “comes home” in textual interpretation). Finally, from Gadamer’s perspective, the hermeneutic circle is not one that spins endlessly in the past. Rather, it is one that spins productively between the past and the present: the present is only ever understandable through the past with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present. The relativism at the core of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is one that is also attributed to Martin Heidegger, who shares with Gadamer a similar view of the relationship of understanding to human existence. We will turn to Heidegger later, when we take up object-oriented ontology (15.3). For now, suffice it to say that the notion that meaning is always historical found in Gadamer (and Heidegger) is one that goes against the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, wherein meaning is always absolute. The line between the relativity and absoluteness of meaning of a literary or cultural text marks one of the big divides in contemporary literary and cultural theory. One of the more robust efforts to defend the absoluteness of meaning in hermeneutics was done by E. D. Hirsch. In Validity in Interpretation (1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (1976), Hirsch argues that the interpreter has a moral duty to understand the text in relation to its original context. While every text has a number of valid interpretations, all of them must move with a typical system of expectations and possibilities. Hirsch established this point by making a distinction between meaning and significance. Meaning is constant over time and was put in the text by the author. For Hirsch, it is located in the consciousness of the author, not the words of the author. Significance, however, changes in relation to the interests of the interpreter. For Hirsch, a work can at different times have different significances, but only one meaning. This is because its significance is assigned to a work by a reader, but its meaning is placed in it by its author. Like Schleiermacher and Dilthey, a work is an organic whole. However, unlike them, its “wholeness” resides in the intention of its author. For Hirsch, authorial intention is never multiple or self-contradictory; rather, it is always singular and unified. Hirsch explains the nature of this meaning by drawing on the thought of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. As phenomenologists, both Husserl and Hirsch aim to understand the world as it is presented to us

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through the structure of our understanding. Phenomena as a concept here refers back to a distinction made by Immanuel Kant between the world of phenomena (or the phenomenal world), the world as it is presented to us through the structure of our understanding (rather than the world as it actually is), and the world of noumena (or the noumenal world), things as they actually are (rather than only as presented to us through the structure of our understanding). While Husserl’s phenomenology aimed to describe the general contents of experience, Hirsch’s phenomenology, which stresses the mediation between an interpreter and the interpreted, is often called phenomenological interpretation, or simply, hermeneutics. For Hirsch (following Husserl), meaning is an intentional object. As an intentional object, it is neither reducible to the psychological acts of the speaker or listener, nor is it independent of mental processes. For Hirsch, meaning is unchangeable because it is always intentional to someone at some time. Meaning is not objective (in the same way that the chair that you are sitting on is objective), but neither is it subjective (like an imaginary friend). Rather, for Hirsch, meaning is an ideal object. As an ideal object, it can be expressed in a number of different ways and still mean the same thing. For Hirsch, literary meaning is fixed to an author’s mental object when it is intended in the act of putting words on the page. Augustine had a similar idea in his philosophy of language where he made a distinction between the inner word and the outer word. The former is pre-linguistic and determined by, writes Tzvetan Todorov, “on the one hand, the imprints left in the soul by the objects of knowledge, and, on the other hand, immanent knowledge whose only source can be God”58; and the latter, is linguistic and associated with our thoughts and speech. Because Hirsch’s ideal object is pre-linguistic, it is more like Augustine’s inner word, rather than his outer word, which is linguistic. But there are also echoes of Plato’s cave in Hirsch, particularly when one begins to speak of Ideal Objects. One of the major differences, however, is that Plato’s Ideal Objects are unchanging and not the creations of human intentionality, whereas Hirsch’s Ideal Objects, though unchanging, are the creations of human intentionality. In brief, for Hirsch, we never get out of Plato’s cave—reading the images on the cave wall comes down to distinguishing their meaning from their significance without reference to any absolute knowledge. This is interesting given that Hirsch was also the author of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), a book that lists around 5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts that fit this description. In effect, these 5,000 items become the Ideal Objects of Hirsch’s cave of America. Hermeneutics as the science and art of interpretation is often presented as though it were the work of individuals working in isolation on texts. But Stanley Fish argues that it is only because interpretation is a community affair that texts appear to be the same to different interpreters. “Interpretive communities,” writes Fish, “are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.”59 For Fish, “these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way

Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol (1977), trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 43. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 171.

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around.”60 In other words, it is not an Ideal or Intentional Object that gives a text its stability and meaning, as Hirsch argues; rather, it is a community of interpreters. This position allows Fish to argue that the “notions of the ‘same’ and ‘different’ texts are fictions.”61 For Fish, the identity of a text is bestowed upon it by its interpreter, and is not an inherent property of the object. Fish’s position that textual identity is a social construction implies that authorial intention plays little role in the identity of the text. It also implies that different interpretations entail different texts. For Fish there is no difference between explaining a text and changing it. In looking back over the long history of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur observed “there is no general hermeneutics, no universal canon for exegesis, but only disparate and opposed theories concerning the rules of interpretation.”62 This latter point could not be more obvious in the case of Fish compared say to Augustine. Nevertheless, Ricoeur proposed two general directions for interpretation in Freud and Philosophy (1970). One direction seeks to “purify discourse of its excrescences, liquidate the idols, go from drunkenness to sobriety, realize our state of poverty once and for all.”63 The other direction “use[s] 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 its fullest.”64 For Ricoeur, all textual interpretation is “animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience,” a “tension” and “extreme polarity” that is the “truest expression of our ‘modernity.’ ”65 One direction he calls the “school of reminiscence” and the other the “school of suspicion.”66 If the aim of the school of reminiscence is the restoration of meaning, then the aim of its opposite, the school of suspicion, is the demystification of meaning. For Ricoeur, the school of reminiscence calls for interpretation to listen to conscious meaning and then spell it out. It is the kind of hermeneutics described by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Hirsch. The school of suspicion, however, works differently. For Ricoeur, the three “masters” that dominate the school of suspicion are Karl Marx (3.1), Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud (4.1).67 Though their lines of thought are “seemingly mutually exclusive,” “[a]ll three begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering” (34). Thus, for Ricoeur, “the Genealogy of Morals in Nietzsche’s sense, the theory of ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideals and illusions in Freud’s sense represent three convergent procedures of demystification.”68 In short, the hermeneutics of suspicion generally characterize the interpretative approaches of both Marxism (3.0) and psychoanalytic theory (4.0)—that is to say, a large chunk of twentieth-century literary and cultural theory. Ricoeur’s observations on the hermeneutics of suspicion—as we shall see—have recently become a negative focal point in the postcritical attack on theory (15.4).

Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 171. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? 169. 62 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 26–7. 63 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27. 64 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27. 65 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 27. 66 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 32. 67 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 32. 68 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 34. 60 61

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1.4 AESTHETICISM Oscar Wilde contends that art should be valued for itself alone, and not for any purpose it may serve. His position, called aestheticism, is encapsulated in the French phrase “l’art pour l’art,” which is translated as “art for art’s sake.” Aestheticism grew in influence in the first half of the nineteenth century in France through the work of writers such as Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Gustave Flaubert, and in the second half of the nineteenth century it became fashionable in England through the work of Walter Pater, Aubrey Beardsley, John Addington Symonds, and, most notably, Wilde. In the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde encapsulates the aesthete’s position with the famous line, “All art is quite useless.”69 For Wilde, the effect that art has on its perceivers is outside the scope of art. “All art is at once surface and symbol,”70 writes Wilde. Attempts to “read the symbol” or “go beneath the surface” of art are beyond the proper sphere of art.71 For Wilde, aestheticism—“the new aesthetics”—is comprised of three basic doctrines. The first is that “Art never expresses anything but itself.”72 Art does not necessarily express the social, political, religious, or philosophical conditions in which it was produced. For Wilde, art always merely expresses itself, and nothing beyond itself. The second doctrine is that “All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.”73 Here Wilde is rejecting both realism in art (the return to “Life”) and romanticism in art (the return to “Nature”). Both realism and romanticism are alternative views of art that are critical of Wilde’s own aestheticism. The third doctrine is that “Life imitates Art far more that Art imitates Life.”74 Wilde believes that nature imitates art far more than the opposite. His position here is that the effects we see in life and nature are more often than not ones that we have previously seen in art. The fourth, and final, doctrine of aestheticism is that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”75 According to aestheticism, art is unified and autonomous, which is to say, cut off from life. For Wilde, this also applied to criticism. This leads him to posit that some criticism was more lasting than the artworks that were its topic. Referring to the criticism of John Ruskin, Wilde contended that his descriptions of the paintings of J. M. W. Turner’s would outlive his “corrupted canvases.”76 But not because they see the art object for what it really is. Rather, for just the opposite reason: “the proper aim of criticism is [not] to see the object as in itself it really is,” but rather “criticism’s most perfect form . . . is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another.”77 “Who cares,” continues Wilde

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), in The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington (New York: Viking, 1946), 139. 70 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 139. 71 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 139. 72 Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1891), in Intentions: The Writings of Oscar Wilde, Volume 5, intro. Edgar Saltus (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1925), 61. 73 Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 61. 74 Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 62. 75 Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 62. 76 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist (1890),” in The Portable Oscar Wilde, 84. 77 Wilde, “The Critic as Artist (1890),” 83–4. 69

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whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-colored in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate, symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s gallery.78 To be sure, the highest criticism is itself autonomous art. For Wilde, as the purest form of personal impression, [the highest criticism] is, in its way, more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never trammeled by any shackles of verisimilitude.79 The phrase “least reference to any standard external to itself ” refers to Plato’s metaphysics, specifically, the forms of knowledge that are imitated in art and criticism. Here, Wilde is adapting Plato’s thought to raise the status of criticism as art. As unified and autonomous art, literary criticism in its highest form can outlast the literature that is its subject. While more moderate versions of aestheticism can be cited, they did not exert as powerful an influence over twentieth-century literary and cultural theory as the “new aesthetics” of Wilde. The notion of art as autonomous and constituting its own ontological realm, that is, realm of being, would be taken up not only in the New Criticism, discussed in the next section of this chapter, but would also be central to the poststructuralist notions of textuality that sought to challenge the autonomy of art and literature (5.0). This complicated relationship with aestheticism can also be found in the modernist writers who are often viewed as the direct heirs of this position on art. These writers include Henry James, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot (1.5), and Wallace Stevens—each of whom “would seek to minimize or obscure or deny their debt, so compromised had the aestheticist inheritance become by the late extreme mode of aestheticism known as fin de siècle decadence, notoriously symbolized by the homosexual practices for which Wilde was tried and imprisoned in 1895.”80 This decadence, however, did not concern the autonomous ontology (or, being) of aestheticism; rather, it is connected to Wilde’s claim that art is neither moral nor immoral, even if vice and virtue may be part of the material or subject matter of art. Wilde’s position on art is in direct opposition to positions on art like Plato’s that claim for art both a strong moral and social function. Plato’s moral position is exemplified in the banishment of poets from his ideal state. But perhaps even better than Plato, we might look to one of Wilde’s contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy, for comparative insight. Tolstoy’s approach to aesthetics is both moralistic and practical. He asserts that art must be justified on moral grounds, and rejects any position on art that conflicts with this fundamental principle. For Tolstoy, real or true art “is a means of union among men joining them

78

Wilde, “The Critic as Artist (1890),” 84. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist (1890),” 82. 80 Linda Dowling, “Aestheticism,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Volume 1, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 36. 79

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together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.”81 False or “counterfeit” art has the opposite effect: it is divisive and elitist. “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them,”82 writes Tolstoy. He believes that real art is infectious, and that “The stronger the infection the better the art.”83 Furthermore, the degree of infectiousness of art depends on three conditions: first, the more individual the feeling communicated by the art, the higher the degree of infection; second, the clearer the feeling communicated by the art, the higher the degree of infection; and third, and most importantly, the more sincere the artist, the higher the degree of infection. By this third point, Tolstoy means that better or more infectious art derives from artists who really feel what they are communicating through their art.84 For Tolstoy, these are the “three conditions which divide art from its counterfeits, and which also decide the quality of every work of art considered apart from its subject-matter.”85 In addition to the “internal” conditions of art noted above, Tolstoy also considers what may be termed the “external” conditions of art. He considers the great amount of time, energy, expense, and personal sacrifice that an opera or ballet demands, and asks “whether all that professes to be art is really art, whether (as is presupposed by our society) all that which is art is good, and whether it is important and worth those sacrifices which is necessitates.”86 For Tolstoy, arts such as opera and ballet as well as concerts, printed books, exhibitions, circuses, and painting are not self-evidently valuable and are not self-justifying. They are only valuable if they satisfy the moral and practical conditions he lays out for real art. Tolstoy’s position on art puts him at odds with aestheticism which argues that art is self-justifying or that its value is self-evident. Moreover, Tolstoy does not presume to know before he undertakes his analysis of art what is and is not good art. Rather, he aims to establish the principles upon which good art may be ascertained, and then applies those principles to particular artworks in order to determine their value. One of the implications of his position is that most of the “great” artists such as the operatic composer Richard Wagner, the artist Michelangelo, and the dramatist William Shakespeare fail to live up to Tolstoy’s principles of aesthetic value. In addition, some of Tolstoy’s own writings, such as Anna Karenina (1878) and War and Peace (1867), also fail to meet his conditions for real art, an implication that has led some to reject his theory. While Tolstoy does reject most of the traditional “canon” of fine arts, there are a few noteworthy exceptions, such as the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and some of the works of Charles Dickens. Tolstoy’s differences with Wilde regarding the connection between art, life, and morality though are but one chapter of a much larger topic that can either be traced back to Greek antiquity or forward to the eighteenth century, when Alexander Baumgarten introduced the term “aesthetics” for the area of philosophy dealing with sense-knowledge or sensible knowledge. The words “sense” and “sensitive” here refers to the Greek root of the word aesthetic, which is aesthesis, meaning Leo N. Tolstoy, What is Art? (1897), trans. Aylmer Maude (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), 51–2. Tolstoy, What is Art? 51. 83 Tolstoy, What is Art? 140. 84 Tolstoy, What is Art? 140. 85 Tolstoy, What is Art? 141. 86 Tolstoy, What is Art? 16. 81 82

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“sensation.” For Baumgarten, aesthetic knowledge was opposed to logic that dealt with “higher” or “intellectual” knowledge. With Baumgarten, aesthetics dealt with all sensible knowledge, not just knowledge of art. However, knowledge of art, as a specific area of aesthetics, dealt with artistic genius and sensible knowledge. For him, the beautiful in art involved a sensitive knowledge of the truth. However, it would be Georg W. F. Hegel who would establish the meaning of the term to be limited to art as he used it to refer to his own writing on art. Prior to Baumgarten, there were many theories of the nature of the beautiful in art (and nature). However, the term aesthetics was not applied to them. So, the term aestheticism is really of quite limited scope compared to philosophical speculation on the nature of beauty in art (and nature) that dates continuously back to the Greeks. For example, for Plato, beauty referred to the symmetry and proportion of form exemplified in abstract Ideas, whereas for Aristotle, beauty depended on an organic unity wherein each part contributes to the quality of the whole. Later, Kant found beauty in whatever produced a sense of harmony in the relations between the faculty of the will and the understanding, and Friedrich Schiller regarded the aesthetic as a basic category of life, stemming from the play of impulse, and allowing morality and feeling to coexist in unity. The point here is not to rehearse the history of ideas of truth and beauty in art and literature, but to point out the following: while aestheticism refers to a very specific approach to literature, the possibilities for an aesthetic view of literature are not limited to aestheticism.

1.5 NEW CRITICISM New Criticism originated in early twentieth-century Britain through the work of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson and later would take root in the US through the contributions of John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and W. K. Wimsatt. Moreover, the rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke is also often associated with the New Criticism, though his work remains something of an outlier compared to his British and American peers. Unlike aestheticism, which can be centered on the work of one dominant figure—Oscar Wilde— New Criticism is much less amenable to this type of centralization. The work of each of these literary critics represents an incredibly diverse range of ideas. Efforts to establish a general set of principles for New Criticism are often challenged when considered through the contributions of individual new critics. Like many of the movements in twentieth-century literary criticism, socalled New Critics often held differing beliefs about criticism. For example, New Criticism is often characterized as politically conservative and opposed to Marxism (3.0). However, these two characteristics cannot be claimed for Burke, who is often characterized as politically radical and an American Marxist. Nevertheless, the New Criticism is often said to be an alternative to historical and impressionistic approaches to literature and culture. Instead of relying on the impressions of the critic or the historical context of the literary work, New Criticism aims for a more scientific approach to literature. One sees this particularly in the major British New Critics, whose backgrounds were not in literary studies or history, but rather mathematics (Empson), philosophy (Eliot), and semantics (Richards). This scientific approach is evident in its championing of an intrinsic approach to criticism, rather than an extrinsic one. Intrinsic criticism approaches the literary work impersonally

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as an independent or autonomous object, whereas extrinsic criticism regards the literary work as a dependent or non-autonomous object that is the site of authorial intention replete with political, moral, and historical concerns. Moreover, while New Criticism shares with aestheticism the view that literary works are autonomous objects, the New Critics value irony, tension, paradox, and ambiguity in these objects, whereas aestheticism (1.4) does not. Still, compared to hermeneutics (1.3), which is built upon history and authorial-intention, New Criticism is far closer in character to aestheticism than hermeneutics. Part of the reason for this is that the New Critics focus their efforts on poetic language rather than non-poetic language. Poetic language is language as it functions within and only within the context of a poem, whereas non-poetic language is language that refers beyond itself or the work. Thus, unlike hermeneutics, which concerns the interpretation of any text including poetic and non-poetic ones, the New Criticism limits its primary focus to poetry. But even though the focus of New Critics may be on the relative irony, tension, paradox, and ambiguity, they approach it in the autonomous poem in a number of radically different ways. For example, Richards examines poetry in relation to the emotions and psychology of the reader, whereas Brooks investigates the objective structure of the poem. What binds all of these different strands of New Criticism together though is an extreme reverence for the text, which oddly enough is captured best in a line from Jacques Derrida (5.1): “there is nothing outside of the text.”87 Though the New Critics are at odds with Derrida regarding whether texts are coherent, unified, organic wholes, they are in total agreement with the general idea that there is nothing outside of the text that is of any concern to the literary critic. Of the British trio of New Critics noted above, Eliot is by far the most influential. Part of his influence comes from bringing the work of Matthew Arnold to bear on the New Criticism. Arnold argued in Culture and Anarchy (1869) that the wellbeing of society and political progress depends upon culture, which he defined as “the best knowledge and thought of the time.”88 For Arnold, “culture” makes “reason and the will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas, simply because they are new.”89 As perfection, culture is not only “harmonious,” but also exhibits the characteristics of “the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.”90 For Arnold, “sweetness” is the Greek idea of beauty and “light” their idea of truth, for “Greece did not err in having the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, so present and paramount.”91 For Arnold, the best poetry of the Greeks is that in which “religion and poetry are one.”92 So for Arnold, ordinary popular literature and culture, that is, literature and culture that does not have perfection as its ideal, works against both the wellbeing of society and political progress. In short, it creates anarchy. Culture, however, in the form of “real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light,”93 transforms and improves human character by working against the Philistine views of Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. 88 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1955), 70. 89 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 46. 90 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 54. 91 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 55. 92 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 54. 93 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 69. 87

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the middle class to prevent both anarchy and democracy. In their stead, class conflict would wane and a more egalitarian social order would prevail. All of this is possible contends Arnold simply through education and training centering on classical texts—or what we might call “the canon.” Eliot follows Arnold’s lead by focusing his attention on poetry and the canon. However, for Eliot, particularly in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), the question of to what extent the poet can be found in their poetry is central to his New Criticism. Against the romantic ideals of originality and self-expression, Eliot argues that the poem is neither an expression of the personality of the poet nor a sign of originality. For Eliot, once we stop viewing poetry romantically, that is as a function of the cult of originality and poetic self-expression, “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poet, his ancestors, assert their immorality most vigorously.”94 In other words, a great poem always asserts its relation to the works of dead poets and artists. For Eliot, the poet must develop a sense of the presentness of the past, that is, a sense of the tradition in which they are writing: Tradition . . . cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensible to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling of the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.95 Eliot’s comments here on the “pastness” and presentness of the past recall our discussion of hermeneutics wherein one foot moves backward to Schleiermacher (pastness of the past) and one forward to Ricoeur (presentness of the past). Ultimately, though, the mature poet is like the great musician who after absorbing trumpet composition and performance from Bach to bebop incorporates all of it into their own composition and performance à la Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis—or, perhaps more recently, is like a great remix artist (e.g., DJ Spooky). But the practice of developing a sense of the presentness of the past in poetry (or the other arts) leads Eliot to regard the poem (or other artworks) as a medium, not the expression of the personality of the poet (or the artist). For Eliot, the poet surrenders to “something which is more valuable.”96 “The progress of an artist,” writes Eliot, “is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”97 This depersonalization is necessary for the poet to reach the impersonalization of science. Eliot’s position on the extinction of personality view lines up well with the general aim of New Criticism for a more scientific approach to literature. The position is further deepened by Eliot’s view of emotion in poetry: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”98 But in recognition

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917), in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 4. 95 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 4. 96 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 7. 97 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 7. 98 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 10. 94

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of the difficulty of both these tasks, Eliot comments that “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”99 But to be clear, while poetry may be an “escape from emotion,” as an art form it still can express emotion. Eliot explains how in his formulation of the “objective correlative”: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.100 For Eliot, one finds this objective correlative in some of the tragedies of Shakespeare: If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series.101 One must recall too in this context that one of Eliot’s complaints about poetry from John Donne to Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson was the dissociation of sensibility, that is, during this period thought and feeling were pulled apart. Before this, however, thought and feeling were together. Eliot is here trying to link poetry to revelation, not explanation. By equating feeling with sensation, rather than emotion, he wants poetry to evoke thoughts (or ideas) directly through feelings (or sense images). The goal here is to make the associations of sensuous imagery alone imply content. Criticism for Eliot was neither ethical, nor historical, nor linguistic studies. Rather, it was “the disinterested exercise of intelligence,”102 “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste,”103 and “the common pursuit of true judgment.”104 Eliot’s vision of the “disinterested” criticism of specific passages and poems would become the calling card of New Criticism. “Comparison and analysis are the chief tools of the critic,” said Eliot.105 “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet,” wrote Eliot, “but upon poetry.”106 Eliot’s focus on the words on the page would become a key part of the New Critical approach to literature. So too would his denigration of the Romantic tradition in poetry and criticism—a tradition that Harold Bloom (4.3) would later pluck and save from the fires of Eliot and the New Criticism.

99

Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 10–11. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), in Selected Essays, 124–5. 101 Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” 125. 102 T. S. Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 11. 103 T. S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism” (1923), in Selected Essays, 13. 104 Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 14. 105 Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” 21. 106 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 7. 100

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As one of the earliest New Critics, I. A. Richards aimed for literary criticism to emulate science. In Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), he offered a scientific approach to the mental events that occurred during the reading of a literary work. One item that he focuses on are the attitudes that are triggered by our emotional responses when reading a literary work. This approach closely parallels a phenomenological approach wherein one studies the cognition of a literary work of art. By focusing on “imaginal and incipient activities or tendencies to action”107 rendered through the act of reading a literary work of art, Richards comes to the conclusion that bad poems elicit stock responses from their readers, whereas good poems elicit a diverse set of impulses. But in studying the responses to undergraduate students reading a range of poems in a controlled environment, he concludes in Practical Criticism (1929) that students, even advanced ones, are generally unsophisticated readers. They must be taught not only how to read poetry, but must develop through education a more diverse set of tastes. Richard’s debt to Eliot is substantial. In fact, in the second edition of his Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), Richards added an appendix on the poetry of Eliot. The value of Eliot’s poetry for Richards “lies in the unified response which this interaction creates in the right reader.”108 In terms of Eliot’s extinction of the personality of the poet in poetry, Richards imagines a parallel process in the ideal reader of literary art. For Richards, the ideal reader must be both detached like Eliot’s poet and disinterested like his perfect critic. Still, for Richards, this leads to a paradox for the ideal reader, namely, “to say that we are impersonal is merely a curious way of saying that our personality is more completely involved.”109 Finally, Richards provides a powerful image of the autonomous nature of literary works as books: “A book is a machine to think with, but it need not, therefore usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive.”110 To this statement, “to experience a broader range of impulses” should be added: a book is a machine to think with and to experience a broader range of impulses. For Richards, the fate of society depends upon our ability to recognize a fuller range of impulses, and books are the major machinery that provide us with this opportunity. Of his own book, Richards says, it “might better be compared to a loom on which it is supposed to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilization.”111 Like Arnold and Eliot, the aspirations of the critic extend far beyond the realm of mere literature—to nothing less than civilization itself. It would be Eliot, however, not Richards, who would speak most directly to the American New Critics, whose origins can be traced back to the Fugitive poets at Vanderbilt University in the early 1920s. Here, Davidson, Ransom, Tate, and Warren attempted to create a modern Southern literature through an engagement with the poetry and criticism of Eliot. Politically conservative, this group argued in a 1930 segregationist collection of essays112 that the South is “the last best hope for the European tradition of the educated gentleman farmer.”113 In general, they regarded the literary text as a coherent, unified, organic whole. Moreover, the unified, organic whole of American New Criticism functions as its “god-term,” wherein to a certain extent, these critics “exchange the

I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 1st edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924), 112. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), 2nd edition, with two new appendices (New York: Routledge, 2001), 274. 109 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 1st edition, 252. 110 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), 2nd edition, vii. 111 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1926), 2nd edition, vii. 112 Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand (1930) (New York: P. Smith, 1951). 113 John N. Duvall, “New Criticism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 593. 107 108

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inerrancy of the biblical word for that of the poetic word,” with ambiguity along with metaphor and irony becoming “the holy trinity of New Critical reading.”114 As a result, the New Critics tended to find the coexistence of ambiguity and coherence in an object not to be contradictory characteristics. One of the more noteworthy aspects of the American New Criticism came to be encapsulated in an argument made by Wimsatt and the philosopher Monroe Beardsley in the Sewanee Review in 1946. In “The Intentional Fallacy,” they argue that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.”115 “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s,” they continue, “(it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend it or control it).”116 The New Criticism firmly rejects the idea that literary texts convey a message from the author. For them, literary texts involve the coming together of a signifier and a signified, and are autonomous verbal artifacts where devices such as irony, ambiguity, and metaphor reveal to the close reader a rich and complex meaning. In short, the identity and meaning of the literary object does not have any relation to the intention of the author, who, for the New Critics, only functions as a critical diversion from the real object of attention: the text. But the same year Wimsatt and Beardsley published another article in the same journal. This one was entitled “The Intentional Fallacy.” In it, they took direct aim at Richard’s thesis in Principles of Literary Criticism, namely, the notion that the value of a poem can be determined by the psychological responses of its readers. “The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does),”117 write Wimsatt and Beardsley. “It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism.”118 Similarly, they also say that the intentional fallacy ends in relativism though substitute “biography” for “impressionism” as the second negative outcome. “The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.”119 As the affective fallacy specifically targets one of the pioneering works of New Criticism, one finds a potential fault line between its American and British versions. The idea that Richards confused the poem and its results, pointed out by Wimsatt and Beardsley, leads some to associate the work of this British New Critic with reader-response criticism. Recall that for Stanley Fish (1.3), who is often associated with reader-response criticism, the identity of a text is bestowed upon it by its interpreter, and is not an inherent property of the object. Again, for Fish, the “notions of the ‘same’ and ‘different’ texts are fictions,”120 which is another way of saying that in reader-response criticism, “the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.” Wimsatt and Beardsley set up a wall between relativistic theories such as those of Richards and Fish by terming their own view “objective criticism,” wherein the objectivity of the criticism is built upon the objective status of the literary text. Meaning for them is not the reader’s emotive response to the text; rather, it inheres in the coherent, verbal structure of the poem.

114

Duvall, “New Criticism,” 594. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), in W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), 3. 116 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” 5. 117 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” 21. 118 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” 21. 119 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” 21. 120 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” 169. 115

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According to the American New Critics, the nature and limits of literature and the literary are always decidable on exclusively textual grounds; there is never any need to draw on context (e.g., history, biography, politics, etc.) in the analysis and understanding of literature. This was a sharp turn from philological approaches to the text, that is, approaches that center on the history of language, wherein the intentions of the author were a key component to understanding it. Also important for the philologists, that is, those who study the history of language (2.1), were the material boundaries of the text, which the New Critics also decided played no role in understanding the text. Rather than relying on the biography of the author, the New Critics foregrounded the relationship between form and content in literary criticism. Close reading for the New Critics became then the means of unlocking the dynamics between the form and the content of a text. The relationship between form and content for the New Critics was such that content could not be extracted from form (or structure), which together formed an organic unity. Brooks expressed this idea in “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (1947), where he says: The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the “statement” which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed though a temporal scheme.121 But still, Brooks means something quite specific when he uses the terms “structure” and “form”: The structure meant is certainly not “form” in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelope which “contains” the “content.” The structure obviously is everywhere conditioned by the nature of the material which goes into the poem. The nature of the material sets the problem to be solved, and the solution is the ordering of the material.122 Thus, for Brooks, proper criticism responds to the structure or form of the poem (which includes irony, tension, paradox, and ambiguity), whereas improper criticism will attempt to paraphrase the propositional content or statement of the poem. For New Critics, the text was an object of aesthetic appreciation whose beauty could be determined through a close reading of the complexities and uniqueness of its language. Given its emphasis on the beauty of literary language, Northrop Frye called the New Criticism “the aesthetic view”—which, by the way, he did not intend as a compliment, but rather as a scathing criticism.123 Looking ahead, in semiological terms (2.0), the form of a text for the New Critics was its signifier and its content the signified. However, in opposition to semiology, which dismantled the form/ content distinction, the New Critics championed it. The New Criticism emerged in American universities in the 1920s and held sway in them until the mid-1970s when it was displaced by forms of theory and criticism with more affinities to a

Cleanth Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (1947), in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 203. 122 Brooks, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” 194. 123 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 350. 121

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different type of text, that is, one that was not autonomous, stable, coherent, or a source of identity. It is generally contended that the New Criticism rose to dominance in the American university because it was an approach to literature that suited well the expanded base of students attending the university through the GI Bill after World War II. As the New Criticism did not require any context or knowledge external to the text such as literary history, author biography, and philology, it served to equalize or democratize educational access with regard to the study of literature. Everything that a student needed to know about a poem was provided to them through a close reading of the formal organization and language of the poem. With this approach, the New Critics believed that the text revealed to the close reader the appropriate critical method, rather than the other way around. It was not that students were applying New Critical methods to the text; rather, it was the text that was supplying to them through close reading the requisite critical methodology. What the student was seeking was not the meaning of the poem; rather they were listening for how a text speaks itself. The differences between British and American New Criticism might be said to boil down to differences regarding the role of psychological factors in literary formalism. For the most part, this holds, especially if the contributions of Richards are weighed against those of Wimsatt and Beardsley. However, there is one American New Critic whose theory of literary form goes against both the characteristics of the British and American New Criticism described above—this American New Critic is Kenneth Burke. Not only does Burke’s work incorporate psychological factors into his literary formalism, but he also incorporates sociological, anthropological, rhetorical, and semantic factors in addition to Marxist ideas. In The Philosophy of Literary Form, which first appeared in 1941, with a second edition in 1967, and a third in 1973, Burke makes a key distinction between “semantic meaning” and “poetic meaning.” Semantic meaning has as its ideal “the aim to evolve a vocabulary that gives the name and address of every event in the universe.”124 “An ideal definition of a chair,” writes Burke, “would be such that, on the basis of the definition, people know what you wanted when you asked for one, a carpenter knew how to make it, a furniture dealer know how to get it, etc.”125 Poetic meaning, however, is not exactly the opposite of semantic meaning. Poetic meanings “cannot be disposed of on the trueor-false basis. Rather, they are related to one another like a set of concentric circles, of wider and wider scope. Those of wider diameter do not categorically eliminate those of narrower diameter. There is, rather, a progressive encompassment.”126 Moreover, for Burke, there are five levels of meaning production in literature: act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. He calls this his theory of dramatism, and it marks a break with both the British and American New Criticism. For Burke, literature is an expression of human motives and desires, and these five terms allow him to speak of literary structure in terms of motivation.127 In short, Burke’s view that human action is symbolic and his interest in human motivation make his work an outlier for both British and American New Criticism—and straddle in important ways ideas we will see in the next two chapters, on semiotics and structuralism (2.0) and Marxism (3.0).

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 141. 125 Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 141–2. 126 Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 144. 127 Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 106, n. 25. 124

CHAPTER TWO

Structuralism and Semiotics 2.0 INTRODUCTION Often termed the linguistic turn, structuralism was rooted in some of the implications of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose posthumously published Course in General Linguistics (1916) laid the groundwork for both the structuralist and poststructuralist (5.0) movements. For Saussure, the linguistic and philosophical foundations of language are determined by material and non-material differences among signs. Language on this view is not a representation of reality, but rather is a system of signs with no existential or analogical relation to anything outside of the sign system. On this revolutionary and powerful approach to language, awareness of reality is only possible through functional structures. Structuralism contends that form is imposed on nature by language, and nature in turn is manifested as the given of a particular structure. Hence, literary art as language under structuralism is abstracted from its existential, historical, and aesthetic context. As the term semiotics refers to the study of signs, it along with structuralism is also used in association with the work of Saussure. Moreover, as we saw earlier with Augustine of Hippo, semiotics need not be limited to the study of linguistic units or words (which for Augustine are “conventional” signs), but may also include “natural” signs like smoke as a sign of fire. Therefore, the study of semiotics often moves well beyond the use of language to other sign systems ranging from fashion and theater to gardens and countries. Roland Barthes, for example, wrote books on both the semiotics of fashion (The Fashion System [1967]) and Japan (Empire of Signs [1970]), the latter of which took up gardens, theater, and more. Because of his huge contributions to the development of both semiotics and structuralism, this chapter includes a separate section on Barthes (2.3). Nevertheless, while semiotics is related to structuralism in that both areas of study are grounded in the structure of the sign, there are two fundamentally different structures that may be attributed to signs: the binary structure of Saussure and the triadic structure of Charles Peirce. Structuralism is generally limited only to work based in the linguistics of Saussure, whereas semiotics can be based in either a binary conception of the sign (à la Barthes) or in a triadic conception of the sign (à la Umberto Eco). The differences here are quiet radical: if the structuralist proposes that language is not a representation of reality, but rather is a system of signs with no existential or analogical relation to anything outside of the sign system, then semiotics based on Peirce’s conception of the sign moves in the opposite direction by maintaining a strong existential and phenomenological relationship between signs and reality. Unlike the structuralists, who contend that language, in effect, imposes form on nature, and makes it manifest as the given of a certain structure, semioticians who work in the tradition of Peirce do not believe that language imposes form on nature, but rather that the form of nature pre-exists signification. Mediating between the structural linguistics of Saussure and the formalism of the New Critics was a movement that came to be know as Russian Formalism. Like the pioneering New Critic I. A. 41

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Richards, Russian Formalism aimed for the scientific study of literature. However, it also participated in the linguistic turn by turning to analytic models of language, plot, character, and larger textual structures. The early contributions of Russian Formalism would come to reverberate through a large chunk of twentieth-century literary and cultural theory including in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (3.3), who is often associated with this movement. One of the Russian Formalists, Vladimir Propp, became influential in the field of narratology, which is the study of narrative and narrative structure. This field, which is heavily influenced by structuralism, counts Barthes as one of its early representatives. Because of their associations with structuralism—and continued significance to contemporary literary and cultural theory—sections of this chapter are respectively devoted to Russian Formalism (2.2) and narratology (2.5). There is also a section devoted to the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (2.4), who put structuralism in general and Saussure’s linguistics in particular to use in the study of systems of marriage alliance. Like Barthes, the contributions of Lévi-Strauss to semiotics and structuralism are enormous. His work has also come to influence a number of other areas of contemporary literary and cultural theory including cultural studies (14.1), systems theory (12.3), and cognitive criticism (12.4). Unlike the New Criticism, which, as we already noted, did not revere the materiality of the text, the tradition passed down through the work of Saussure followed the philological tradition in its reverence for the materiality of the text. Nevertheless, the structuralists did not adopt the idealism of the philologists, that which gave the philological text a stable and fixed meaning. Through the innovative work of Louis Hjelmslev in the 1960s, who regarded text as a process, the structuralist depiction of text clearly came to differentiate itself from the text of the New Critics. For Hjelmslev, processes are the starting point in defining and individuating language, and it is only against the background of systems that texts come into existence.1 As the text of the New Critics was of classical origin, it might be termed the classical depiction of text to differentiate from the text that was the result of structuralism, which might be termed the contemporary depiction of text. Whereas the classical depiction of text stresses autonomy, stability, coherence, and identity, the contemporary depiction of text emphasizes non-autonomy, nonstability, non-coherence, and non-identity. The three masters of the contemporary depiction of text—Barthes, Julia Kristeva (5.2), and Jacques Derrida (5.1)—each contributed their own unique takes on the non-autonomy, non-stability, non-coherence, and non-identity of the text. One of the keys to understanding the shift from early theory to structuralism and its legacies is through the advent of the contemporary depiction of text. Not only does it represent the rejection or negation of the classical depiction of text, but it is also a reconceptualization of the linguistic and philosophical foundations of language. The New Criticism held sway in American universities until it came to be displaced by forms of theory and criticism with more affinities to a different type of text, that is, one that was not autonomous, stabile, coherent, or a source of identity. The contemporary depiction of text, like its classical counterpart, is articulated through a diverse range of theories and notions. Also, as with the classical depiction of text, a number of unlikely theories and notions can be grouped under this set of characteristics including structuralism and (Saussurean) semiotics, and later, poststructuralism (5.0) and cultural studies (14.1).

1 See Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943), trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962).

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While not an exclusive characteristic of the contemporary depiction of text, the extension of the domain of text to both written and non-written entities by semiotics and structuralism had a huge impact on the articulation of contemporary theories and notions of text. By the 1960s, the domain of text had extended from its traditionally delimited space of written discourse to that of any object whatsoever—written or spoken, aesthetic or otherwise. Whereas the New Criticism regarded the domain of literature to be a fairly narrow one, the contemporary depiction of text radically widened its domain with its limit cases—as for example in Jurij Lotman’s The Structure of the Artistic Text (1970) and Derrida’s Dissemination (1972)—regarding the world itself as text. In short, the influence of semiotics and structuralism has revolutionized and shifted the study of literature and culture for over a century.

2.1 STRUCTURE OF THE SIGN (OR, SAUSSURE AND PEIRCE) Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) is based on lecture notes from students who attended his courses on general linguistics in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1907 to 1911. In these lectures, Saussure aimed to create a true science of language—something that was not accomplished by his predecessors. Though the discipline of grammar, that is, the establishment of rules that distinguish between “correct and incorrect forms,” can be traced back to the Greeks, Saussure views it as flawed because “it is a prescriptive discipline, far removed from any concern with impartial observation, and its outlook is inevitably a narrow one.”2 He has similar concerns too with philology, which “seeks primarily to establish, interpret and comment upon texts,” and is preoccupied with “literary history, customs, institutions, etc.”3 For Saussure, philology is flawed because “it is too slavishly subservient to the written language, and so neglects living language.”4 In contrast to the grammarians and philologists, Saussure’s linguistics “takes for its data . . . all manifestations of human language.”5 The aims of linguistics are: (a) to describe all known languages and record their history. This involves tracing the history of language families and, as far as possible, reconstructing the parent languages of each family; (b) to determine the forces operating permanently and universally in all languages, and to formulate general laws which account for all particular linguistic phenomena historically attested; and, (c) to delimit and define linguistics itself.6 In the pursuit of these aims, the “linguist must take the study of linguistic structure as his primary concern, and relate all other manifestations of language to it.”7 Moreover, for Saussure, linguistic structure is not the equivalent of language, but only one part of it. In brief, linguistic structure is that which “gives language what unity is has,” and at its core involves a number of elements including

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916), ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983), 1. 3 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1. 4 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1. 5 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 6. 6 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 6. 7 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 9; my emphasis. 2

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the structure of the sign. “Linguistic structure is no less real than speech,” says Saussure, “and no less amenable to study.”8 He continues: Linguistic signs, although essentially psychological, are not abstractions. The associations, ratified by collective agreement, which go to make up the language are realities localized in the brain. Moreover, linguistic signs are, so to speak, tangible: writing can fix them in conventional images, whereas it would be impossible to photograph acts of speech in their details.9 Language, on the other hand, is a system of signs expressing ideas, and hence comparable to writing, the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signs, and so on . . . It is therefore possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as a part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek se–mîon [σημεῖον], “sign”). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science.10 So, linguistic structure is an element of linguistics that in turn is but one branch of semiology. We might consider them as concentric circles, where Saussure by far did the most work on the innermost circle (linguistic structure) and the least on the outermost (semiology). As a note on terminology, semiology is Saussure’s preferred term for the science of signs, which may also, more generically, be called semiotics. At the core of Saussure’s linguistic structure is the sign, which is the coming together of a signifier and a signified. The signifier and the signifier represent the division of language into two parts, but neither the signifier nor the signified is distinct before they come together in the sign. In other words, the signifier and the signifier are inchoate by themselves and become signs when articulated together. Saussure’s signifier is a sound image, and his signified is a thought image. In the case of the linguistic sign dog, the signifier (sound image) is the sequence of sounds “d-o-g,” and the signified (thought image) is the conceptual or mental image dog. For Saussure, A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound pattern is the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of the senses. This sound pattern may be called a “material” element only in that it is the representation of our sensory impressions. The sound pattern may thus be distinguished from the other element associated with it in a linguistic sign. This other element is generally of a more abstract kind: the concept.11

Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 15. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 15. 10 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 15–16. 11 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 66. 8 9

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FIGURE 1: Nature of the Linguistic Sign, Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68.

Saussure wants us to think of the coming together of the signifier and the signified like the two sides of a sheet of paper, wherein each side of the paper is only definable in relation to the other side. In short, the sound image is only meaningful when connected with a thought image, and the thought image is only meaningful when connected with a sound image. Again, the sound image and the thought image are inchoate or indistinct before they come together in the sign. Moreover, the linguistic sign for Saussure is completely arbitrary. In the case of the word “dog,” for Saussure it has no dog-like qualities. Saussure says: There is no internal connexion between the idea “sister” and the French sequence of sounds s-ö-r which acts as its signal. The same idea might as well be represented by any other sequence of sounds. This is demonstrated by differences between languages, and even by the existence of different languages. The signification “ox” has as its signal b-ö-f on one side of the frontier [between France and Germany], but o-k-s (Ochs) on the other side.12 Rather, the idea “dog” and the English sequence of sounds d-o-g, which acts as its signal, is established by convention or cultural agreement. That is, it is by convention the idea “dog,” and the English sequence of sounds, d-o-g, are a linguistic sign. In addition, the meaning of linguistic signs is not an essential one. That is to say, meaning is not the result of a correspondence between a word and a thing. Rather, meaning is the result of difference and relationship within a sign system. So, for Saussure, the signifier “dog” means that it is not every other signifier in the sign system, that is, it, “dog,” means not “cog,” “log,” “jog,” and so on. For Saussure, the meaning of a linguistic sign is determined through both its difference from the other linguistic signs in the system, and its relationship to all of the other linguistic signs in the system. In addition, meaning is the result of combination and selection within a sign system. So, for Saussure, a red light means “stop” because it is a system of three light colors: red, yellow, and green.

12

Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68.

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There is nothing in the color red that means stop. The color for stop could just as well be yellow or green. However, it is not, because this would be a different system of combination and selection. Combination and selection are important for Saussure’s linguistics because it allows him to explain how sentences come to have meaning. At the level of selection, each of the words in a sentence function along the paradigmatic axis of language, whereas at the level of combination, all of the words in a sentence function along the syntagmatic axis of language. Take for example the sentence, “I saw a dog today.” Each of the words in this sentence—“I,” “saw,” “a,” “dog,” and “today”—have their own paradigmatic axis from wherein they are selected. So, while “dog” was selected in this particular instance, it could have been “cat” or “frog.” The paradigmatic axis is the plane of both selection and association. But the meaning of the sentence is only complete after the final word is spoken or written. All of the words in this sentence form the syntagmatic axis of language. Different combinations of words yield different meanings for the sentence. What should be evident by this point is that Saussure has not provided any connection yet between language at either the level of signifier/signified or syntagmatic/paradigmatic axes to reality or the world. For that matter, he has not alluded to anything outside of language or sign systems. The closest we came to this is with “sound pattern,” but Saussure quickly qualifies that it “is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical.” It should be no surprise then that Saussure believes that language constructs and organizes our “access” to reality. But even the word “access” here is misleading, as language for Saussure does not represent an already existing reality in the way that Plato’s philosophy posited the world of becoming (appearances) and the world of being (reality). One of the most distinctive theses of the linguistic turn via Saussure is that different languages produce different mappings of the real. An example that is often used to motivate this point is that whereas Europeans see “snow,” Inuits, that is, people from Alaska and across the Arctic, have a large number of words for snow. Similarly, Aborigines have many words for desert. Therefore, the thinking goes, Europeans, Inuits, and Aborigines each have a different linguistic mapping of the real—or, more simply, have a different reality. Two further sets of distinctions are important for considering Saussure’s contributions to the study of language. The first is his distinction between a diachronic and a synchronic theoretical approach to linguistics. A diachronic theoretical approach to linguistics studies the historical development of a language, whereas a synchronic approach studies language at a particular moment of time. The synchronic approach is necessary for a science of language, and would become the way of structuralism. It is an approach that is an ahistorical one that focuses on the structural properties of language. The second distinction is the division of language between langue and parole. Langue is the system of language, that is, the rules and conventions that organize it. On the level of langue, language is a social institution. In his Elements of Semiology, Barthes describes langue as a “collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate.”13 Parole is language at the level of the individual utterance, that is, the use of language. Saussure compares the division of language into langue and parole to a game of chess: langue is analogous to the rules of the game, whereas parole is analogous to an actual game of chess. Langue is homogeneous in structure, whereas parole is performative and heterogeneous. In sum, for Saussure, structure makes meaning

13 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1964), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 14.

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possible both in language and chess, for imagine watching a game of chess and not knowing the rules. Language like the game of chess only becomes meaningful through rules (langue), and rules are only meaningful through performance (parole). Structuralism derived from Saussure’s linguistics comes to view literature as analogous to language (and chess). Meaning is always the result of the interplay of relationships of selection and combination made possible by the underlying structure. Moreover, on the same principles that Saussure sought to create a science of language, structuralists sought to create a science of literature. Narratology (2.5) was one of the major efforts in this regard. Related to work in the vein is the poetics of Russian Formalism (2.2). But before turning to them, let’s briefly examine Peirce’s alternative to Saussure’s conception of the sign. Peirce’s semiotic (or, as he sometimes termed it, semeiotic) was part of a systematic philosophy that incorporated logic, rhetoric, and grammar. He believed that “[l]ogic, in its general sense, is . . . only another name for semiotic, the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.”14 For Peirce, logic was “the science of the general necessary laws of Signs” and had three branches: Critical Logic or “logic in the narrow sense”—“the theory of the general conditions of the reference of Symbols and other Signs to their professed Objects, that is, it is the theory of the conditions of truth”; Speculative Grammar—“the doctrine of the general conditions of symbols and other signs having the significant character”; and Speculative Rhetoric—“the doctrine of the general conditions of the reference of Symbols and other Signs to the Interpretants which they aim to determine.”15 This division of logic or semiotic is reflected today in the semantics–syntactics–pragmatics distinction primarily attributable to the work of Charles Morris, a logical positivist, who sought to eliminate all metaphysical elements from philosophy, and to reorganize it along the lines of logical analysis.16 Others that follow Morris’s division of semiotic include Rudolf Carnap, another logical positivist, who defined “semiotic” as “a general theory of signs and their applications, especially in language; developed and systematized within Scientific Empiricism.”17 According to Carnap, semiotic has three branches: Pragmatics—“theory of the relations between signs and those who produce or receive and understand them”; Semantics—“theory of the relations between signs and what they refer to”; and Syntactics—theory of the formal relations among signs.”18 As Peirce wrote around 1897: A sign is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object.19

14 Charles Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (CP), six volumes, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–5), vol. 2, paragraph 227 (2.227). 15 Peirce, CP 2.93. 16 Charles Morris, Logical Positivism, Pragmatism, and Scientific Empiricism (Paris: Hermann and Cie, 1937), 4ff. 17 Rudolph Carnap, “Semiotic; Theory of Signs,” in Dictionary of Philosophy, 16th edition, revised; ed. Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), 288. 18 Carnap, “Semiotic; Theory of Signs,” 288–9. 19 Peirce, CP 2.228.

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That is to say, a sign is the subject of a triadic relation, involving the sign itself, an object or what the sign stands for, and an interpretant or the equivalent sign that the first sign creates in the mind of the person apprehending it. Of this definition of a sign, Morris observed the following significant features: “it does not limit signs to language signs; it does not introduce the term ‘meaning’; the interpretant is said to be ‘in the mind’; the term ‘sign’ is not completely clarified since the interpretant of a sign is itself said to be a sign; there is no reference to action or behavior.”20 Peirce embedded his semiotic in the metaphysics of his categories. He held that all phenomena or experiences whatsoever possess three modes (or aspects) of being, specifiable under the categories of firstness or the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else; secondness or the mode of being of fact, struggle, or “hereness and nowness” whose very essence is its “thisness”; and thirdness or the mode of being of that which is such as it is in bringing firstness and secondness into relation with each other. His definition of the sign from around 1902 better reflects the relationship between semiotic and the categories, although it is more obscure to those who are unfamiliar with the categories. “A Sign, or Representamen,” wrote Peirce, “is a First which stands in such a genuine triadic relation to a Second, called its Object, as to be capable of determining a Third, called its Interpretant, to assume the same triadic relation to its Object in which it stands itself to the same Object.”21 One virtue of this definition of the sign as opposed to the earlier definition is that the interpretant is not necessarily “in the mind.” It should be noted that Peirce thought that in order “to get more distinct notions of what the Object of a Sign in general is, and what the Interpretant in general is, it is needful to distinguish two senses of ‘Object’ and three of ‘Interpretant.’ It would be better to carry the division further; but these two divisions are enough to occupy my remaining years.22 It would have been interesting to see how Peirce would have further developed the senses of interpretant and object, for it is not altogether obvious how he would have done this or what theoretical significance this extension of the senses of interpretant and object would have served. For Peirce, the three senses of interpretant are the immediate interpretant, dynamical interpretant, and final interpretant. He described the immediate interpretant as “the interpretant as it is revealed in the right understanding of the Sign itself, and is ordinarily called the meaning of the sign.”23 The dynamical interpretant “is the actual effect which the Sign, as a Sign, really determines”;24 “it is the volitional element of Interpretation.”25 The final interpretant is that “which refers to the manner in which the Sign tends to represent itself to be related to its Object”26—it is “that which would finally be decided to be the true interpretation if consideration of the matter were carried so far that an ultimate opinion was reached.”27 On the other hand, the two senses of object are called the immediate object and dynamic object. The former is “the Object as the Sign itself represents it, and whose Being is thus dependent upon

Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (New York: George Braziller, 1970), 19. Peirce, CP 2.274. 22 Charles Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics (NEM), 4 vols. (in 5 books), ed. Carolyn Eisele (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), vol. 3, 842 (3:842). 23 Peirce, CP 4.536. 24 Peirce, CP 4.536. 25 Peirce, NEM 3:844. 26 Peirce, CP 4.536. 27 Peirce, NEM 3:844. 20 21

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the Representation of it in the Sign”;28 it is “the Object as cognized in the Sign and therefore an Idea.”29 The latter “is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the Sign to its Representation”;30 “the Object as it is regardless of any particular aspect of it, the Object in such relations as unlimited and final study would show it to be.”31 In discussing Peirce’s distinction between the object and the interpretant of a sign, it is hard not to recall Gottlob Frege’s distinction between the Sinn (sense) and Bedeutung (denotation or reference) of a sign. It is also interesting to note here that Frege was working out these ideas around the same time as Peirce, for his “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” was first published in 1892.32 Yet although Frege’s distinction between the Sinn and Bedeutung of a sign (word, sign combination, expression) is similar in some respects to Peirce’s distinction between the interpretant and the object of a sign, the two doctrines are quite different. The most obvious difference would be that Peirce’s three senses of interpretant and two senses of object do not directly correspond with Frege’s Sinn and Bedeutung distinction. This results in the possibility of parallels on a number of different levels. For example, it might be argued that Peirce’s immediate/dynamic object distinction parallels Frege’s Sinn and Bedeutung, or that one sense of Peirce’s interpretant and one sense of his object parallel Frege’s distinction. Which of these or others is the most parallel is not entirely obvious. The triadic character of the sign relation led Peirce to distinguish three main divisions of signs: (1) the sign in itself, (2) the sign as related to its object, and (3) the sign as interpreted to represent its object. In turn, (1), (2), and (3) are phenomena which each possess three aspects of being and as such are specifiable under the categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. As a result, each of the three divisions become a trichotomy. The first division (trichotomy) specifies three types of representamens. It is subdivided into the qualisign, a quality that is a sign; the sinsign, an actual existent thing or event which is a sign; and the legisign, a law which is a sign. The second division demarcates three ways the sign may be related to its object. This division is subdivided into the icon, a sign which refers to the object that it denotes merely by virtue of the sign’s own characters, and which the sign possesses just the same whether the object exists or not; the index, a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object; and the symbol, a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of a law. Finally, the third division distinguishes three ways in which interpretants may represent signs as related to their objects. It is subdivided into the rheme, a sign of qualitative possibility for its interpretant; dicisign, a sign of actual existence for its interpretant; and argument, a sign of law for its interpretant.33 Consequently, the application of Peirce’s principle, which claims that a first determine only a first; a second can determine only a second or a first; and a third can determine only a third, a second, or a first,34 to the three trichotomies yields Peirce’s ten classes of signs: (1) (rhematic iconic)

Peirce, CP 4.536 Peirce, NEM 3:842. 30 Peirce, CP 4.536. 31 Peirce, NEM 3:842. 32 Gottlob Frege, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892): 25–50. 33 Peirce, CP 2.233–72. 34 Peirce, CP 2.235–7. 28 29

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qualisign; (2) (rhematic) iconic sinsign; (3) rhematic indexical sinsign; (4) dicent (indexical) sinsign; (5) (rhematic) iconic legisign; (6) rhematic indexical legisign; (7) dicent indexical legisign; (8) rhematic symbolic (legisign); (9) dicent symbolic (legisign); and (10) argument (symbolic legisign).35 For completeness sake, it should also be noted that Peirce further divides signs into sixty-six and 59,049 classes. For the purposes of literary and cultural theory, Peirce’s semiotic and Saussure’s semiology yield completely different approaches to meaning. Structuralism, following Saussure, would come to view meaning as the interplay of relationships of selection and combination made possible by an underlying structure. Semiotics, following Peirce, would come to view meaning through the relationships among the sign itself, an object, and an interpretant, which are made possible by an underlying being—or reality, if you will. For general purposes of distinction, semiology is the science of signs based on Saussurean principles, whereas semiotics is the philosophy of signs based on Peircean phenomenology.

2.2 RUSSIAN FORMALISM Russian Formalism originated in early twentieth-century Russia through the work of Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Vladimir Propp, and Roman Jakobson. From the 1910s to the 1930s, this group of Russian critics argued for the autonomy of poetic language and literature. Moreover, they urged the separation of literature and politics until the group was suppressed around 1930 by the Soviets. The communists regarded this literary theory to be in conflict with Marxism (3.0) as it excluded social matters from the study of literature. After it was disciplined by the Soviets, the center of the formalist study of literature moved from Moscow to Prague, in Czechoslovakia. The Prague Linguistic Circle included Jakobson, who emigrated there from Russia, Jan Mukarovsky, and Réne Wellek. Though a relatively short-lived school of literary theory and criticism, Russian Formalism would come to exert a major influence on structuralism and poststructuralism as well as individual thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin (3.3) and Yuri Lotman. Moreover, because Jakobson and Wellek would emigrate to the US in the 1940s and taught at major American universities, Russian Formalism and the work of the Prague Linguistic Circle would come to be highly influential abroad as well. The Russian Formalists attacked previous scholarship in literary studies because they thought that it avoided literature. This prior scholarship fell into three types: (1) Philological, which included historical and linguistic studies of folklore and literature; (2) Historical, which focused on the historical background of literature; and (3) Moral and Social, which treated literature as the locus of moral and social improvement. For the Russian Formalists, each of these approaches was lacking because they expected the wrong things from literature and because by focusing on the message of literary works, they missed examining specifically literary problems. The “formalism” of Russian Formalism refers to its focus on the formal patterns and technical devices of literature, rather than philological, historical, moral, and social matters. In this regard, it shares a kinship with New Criticism, which is also described as a type of formalism. In general, formalism regards literature as a special type of language. Much of the theoretical effort of

35

Peirce, CP 2.254–64.

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formalism is directed at establishing what exactly constitutes the distinctiveness of literary or poetic language from ordinary language. For the formalist, whereas ordinary language is concerned with communication by reference to a world outside of language, poetic language is not concerned with communication or reference to a world outside of language. Rather, poetic language calls attention to itself, that is, to its formal features as language or a sign system. However, while the general features of formalism may be attributable to both New Criticism and Russian Formalism, the conceptual contributions of the latter, specifically as they were developed by the Prague Linguistic Circle, structuralism, Marxism (3.0), and poststructuralism (5.0) are significantly different. Russian Formalism sought out the universals of poetic language. It strove for the scientific study of literature. Writes Jakobson: The object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness—that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature. Until now literary historians have preferred to act like the policeman who, intending to arrest a certain person, would, at any opportunity, seize any and all persons who chanced into the apartment, as well as those who passed along the street. The literary historians used everything—anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines. They seemed to have forgotten that their essays strayed into related disciplines—the history of philosophy, the history of culture, of psychology, etc.—and that these could rightly use literary masterpieces only as defective, secondary documents.36 Their aim was to increase our ability to read literature with an eye toward what makes literature literature, that is, literariness. The method of Russian Formalism, articulated below by Eichenbaum, anticipates the hypothetical deductive method of Karl Popper, in that all assertions about literature coming from this science are subject to falsification: Our scientific approach has had no such prefabricated program or doctrine, and has none. In our studies we value a theory only as a working hypothesis to help us discover and interpret facts; that is, we determine the validity of the facts and use them as the material of our research. We are not concerned with definitions, for which the late-comers thirst; nor do we build general theories, which so delight eclectics. We posit specific principles and adhere to them insofar as the material justifies them. If the material demand their refinement or change, we change or refine them. In this sense we are quite free from our own theories—as science must be free to the extent that theory and conviction are distinct. There is no ready-made science; science lives not by settled truth, but by overcoming error.37 Utilization of a method of investigation akin to the scientific method led the Russian Formalists to focus on analytic models of language, plot, character, and larger textual structures. With regard to

36 Roman Jakobson, Modern Russian Poetry (1921); cited by Boris Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method” (1927), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 107. 37 Eichenbaum, “The Theory of the Formal Method,” 102–3.

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language, their work was squarely in line with the linguistic turn of structuralism, which became even more apparent in the work of Jakobson and the Prague Linguistic Circle; with regard to plot, their work was squarely in line with what came to be known as narratology (2.5), wherein the fundamental Russian Formalist distinction between story (the temporal-causal sequence of narrated events) and plot (the way the story is told, that is, the transformation through literary devices of the temporal-causal sequence of narrated events) was further developed. Jakobson’s work mediated between the synchronic structural linguistics of Saussure and the formalist diachronic study of literary forms. He sought out the universal linguistic features of poetic language, which he located in rhyme and meter. The notion of founding the study of literature as literariness on science meant for Jakobson that it would become more reliable. But in the process of increasing the reliability of literary studies, Jakobson transformed it into a science where the patterns it located were many times too subtle to have any effect on the average reader. However, for Jakobson, this was of no consequence because literary science was to focus only on linguistic matters in literature, and not social and moral ones. Whether or not the reader could appreciate or recognize the findings of Jakobson’s science did not matter because his science had no social or moral obligation to be meaningful to readers—his audience were only fellow scientists of literature. One of the differences of Jakobson’s late formalism from earlier work in this area was that for him a poetic work has a multiplicity of functions where one dominates, whereas earlier formalists took a more monistic point of view, that is to say, the view that one function dominates. For aestheticism, the traces of which could still be found in early Russian Formalism, the poetic work has only one function: the aesthetic function. But, argues Jakobson in 1935, this view is wrong: Equating a poetic work with an aesthetic, or more precisely with a poetic, function, as far as we deal with verbal material, is characteristic of those epochs which proclaim self-sufficient, pure art, l’art pour l’art. In the early steps of the Formalist school, it was still possible to observe distinct traces of such an equation. However, this equation is unquestionably erroneous: a poetic work is not confined to aesthetic function alone, but has in addition many other functions.38 For Jakobson, a poetic work can also have other functions such as an expressive function and a referential one. The difference though between a poetic work and a non-poetic one is that “a poetic work is defined as a verbal message whose aesthetic function is its dominant [function].”39 According to Jakobson, the dominant is “the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure.”40 His notion of the dominant is meant to bridge the gap between those who say that the work has only one function (monists) and those that say it has many functions (pluralists). This way Jakobson can acknowledge that the poetic work can referentially function as a “straightforward document of cultural history, social relations, or biography,”41 and that the “aesthetic function is not limited to the poetic work; an orator’s address, everyday conversation, newspaper articles, advertisements, a scientific

Roman Jakobson, “The Dominant” (1935), in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, eds. Ladislav Matˇe jka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), 83. 39 Jakobson, “The Dominant,” 84. 40 Jakobson, “The Dominant,” 82. 41 Jakobson, “The Dominant,” 84. 38

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treatise—all may employ aesthetic considerations, give expression to aesthetic function, and often use words in and for themselves, not merely as a referential device.”42 It should be noted that for Jakobson (and Mukarovsky too), the aesthetic function is a shifting category, not a fixed one. It is related to society, social acts, and ideologies. Jakobson rejects mechanistic formalism and contends that the way in which a literary system develops historically cannot be understood without understanding the way in which other systems impinge upon it. In this way, the work of Jakobson, Mukarovsky, and the Prague Linguistic Circle, which regarded literature not as a closed system but one with significant social relations, would come to separate itself from Russian Formalism, which treated literary works as unified organic wholes wherein social and political matters were not relevant to the science of literariness. The work of Bakhtin (3.3) will come to exemplify the Marxist implications of treating literature as not a closed system. It is interesting to note that Jakobson’s notion of the dominant itself became dominant in literary studies around the world through Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature, which first appeared in 1948. The book, which is a mash-up of Russian Formalism and New Criticism, went through several editions and has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Danish, Serbocroat, modern Greek, Swedish, Romanian, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, French, and Hungarian. In it, they write: An artifact has the structure proper to the performance of its function, together with whatever accessories time and materials may make it possible, and taste may think it desirable, to add. There may be much in any literary work which is unnecessary to its literary function, though interesting or defensible on other grounds.43 Thus, “poetry has many possible functions,” however, “[i]ts prime function and chief function is fidelity to its own nature.”44 Also, the Russian Formalist (and New Criticism) notion that philological and historicist approaches to literature are limited is also developed here as in other works by Wellek. Still, Wellek’s approach, one that views literature as a multilayered system of signs, and defends the importance of philosophical ideas in the study of literature, is a very different approach to literature from the linguistic approach of Jakobson. One of the key concepts introduced by the Russian Formalists is defamiliarization (ostranenie, a Russian word, that is also translated as estrangement). By focusing on the linguistic devices that make language new to us, they showed how literariness can work to break down our automatized responses to the world. “If we start to examine the general laws of perception,” wrote Shklovsky in 1917, “we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.”45 He continues, Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.”

42

Jakobson, “The Dominant,” 83–4. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 1st edition, 1948; 2nd edition, 1955; 3rd edition, 1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 29. 44 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, 37. 45 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism, 11. 43

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And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.46 The formalists held that perception through artistic form restores our awareness of the world and brings things to life. Shklovsky illustrates defamiliarization at work in literature with an example from Tolstoy: [I]n “Shame” Tolstoy “defamiliarizes” the idea of flogging in this way: “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and to rap on their bottoms with switches,” and, after a few lines, “to lash about on the naked buttocks.” Then he remarks: “Just why precisely this stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other—why not prick the shoulders or any part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vise, or anything like that?”47 For Shklovsky, this particularly “harsh example” shows how “[t]he familiar act of flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its name.”48 The technique of defamiliarization is one that Tolstoy constantly uses. In fact, for Shklovsky, “defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found.”49 The early Russian Formalist study of defamiliarization would develop with Mukarovsky and the Prague Linguistic Circle into the study of foregrounding, the aesthetically intentional distortion of linguistic components. Related to defamiliarization is Shklovsky’s notion of laying bare, wherein the novelist explicitly makes reference to the structuring technique of their novel. Shklovsky found in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (1759) an exemplary use of the technique of laying bare. Rather than defamiliarizing our perception of the world, Sterne lays bare his novelistic technique, which is to say, he often explicitly tells us what he is structurally doing in the novel. Here is an example from Tristam Shandy cited by Shklovsky: What I have to inform you, comes, I own, a little out of its due course;—for it should have been told a hundred and fifty pages ago, but that I foresaw then ’twould come in pat hereafter, and be of more advantage here than elsewhere.50 Shklovsky believes that laying bare is the most literary thing a novel can do, and admires Sterne because he does it a lot. “Sterne,” writes Shklovsky,

46

Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 12. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 13. 48 Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 13. 49 Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 18. 50 Viktor Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristam Shandy: Stylistic Commentary” (1921), in Russian Formalist Criticism, 30. 47

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even lays bare the technique of combining separate story lines to make up the novel. In general, he accentuates the very structure of the novel. By violating the form, he forces us to attend to it; and, for him, this awareness of the form through its violation constitutes the content of the novel.51 The Russian Formalist notion of laying bare would come to take on special importance in the analysis of the metafictional (and postmodern) novels of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the very term metafiction, which means fiction about fiction, is arguably an extension of Russian Formalist ideas about the technique of laying bare. Like the New Critics, who had their “Heresy of Paraphrase,” the Russian Formalists also disapproved of paraphrasing literature. Shklovsky expresses this idea well, and again with an example from Tolstoy. In a letter, Tolstoy said the following about Anna Karenina (1877): If I would want to say in words all that I intended to express in the novel, then I would have to rewrite the very novel which I have written . . . In all, or almost all I have written, I was guided by the need to collect thoughts, which were linked to each other in order to express myself. Every thought expressed in words loses its sense and becomes extremely banal, when it is isolated from the concatenation to which it belongs.52 This approach to paraphrase recalls Mozart’s response to King Leopold’s criticism that his operas had too many notes in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984). Mozart said his operas had just the right number of notes: not one note more, nor one note less was needed. The idea that new form produces new content is premised on the Russian Formalist belief that a text is a unified organic whole such that to change its wording (or notation) is to produce a different text. While the devices of literature can be studied apart from literature, there is no discussion of the content of literature without also a discussion of its form. Finally, at the origins of Russian Formalism was a social hope for art grounded in humanism. In 1914, Shklovsky wrote: At present the old art is dead already, whereas the new art is not yet born. Things are dead as well—we have lost a feeling for the world. Only the creation of new artistic forms may restore to man awareness of the world, resurrect things and kill pessimism.53 Of course, as the seeds of Russian Formalism developed into structuralism, semiotics, and narratology in the twentieth century, its originary humanism came to be increasing less apparent or relevant. But, as we shall see, a century later, the Russian Formalist aim of restoring our awareness of the world and killing pessimism would resurface as a major area of concern in the debates over antitheory (15.0).

Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristam Shandy,” 30–1. Viktor Shklovsky, “Svjas’ priëmov sjužetosloženija s obšcˇimi priëmami stilja” (1916), cited in Douwe Fokkema, “Continuity and Change in Russian Formalism, Czech Structuralism, and Soviet Semiotics,” PTL 1 (1976): 156. 53 Viktor Shklovsky, “Voskrešenie slova” (1914), cited in Fokkema, “Continuity and Change,” 153. 51 52

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2.3 ROLAND BARTHES Barthes has been described as a “man of prodigious learning, unflagging mental energy, and acutely original sensibility, [who] has established his credentials as aesthetician, literary and theatre critic, sociologist, metapsychologist, social critic, historian of ideas, and cultural journalist.”54 His thought proceeds through four major periods: social mythology, semiology, textuality, and morality. He regarded literature as one sign system among many, and in his early work on social mythology he showed how diverse cultural phenomena from wrestling and autos to food and film function as sign systems. From 1954 to 1956, Barthes wrote a series of monthly essays analyzing “some of the myths of French daily life.”55 Taking up topics ranging from wrestling and striptease to Einstein’s brain and Greta Garbo’s face, they were, in Barthes words, the “first attempt to analyze semiologically the mechanics of language.”56 Following the lead of Saussure, Barthes treated “so-called mass-culture” as a sign-system in these essays. His hope was that by showing how contemporary French mass culture functioned as a sign-system he would as well “account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.”57 In 1957, Barthes published all fifty-four short essays as a book entitled Mythologies.58 “The starting point of these reflections,” writes Barthes in his preface to Mythologies, “was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history.”59 As a whole, Barthes’ analyses of the myths of French daily life show how cultural artifacts “at every turn” confuse “Nature” with “History.” What this means is that culture has a way of presenting contingencies of meaning (History) as though they were necessities of meaning (Nature). It is important to recognize that Barthes’s mythological analysis, though grounded in Saussurean linguistic theory, was also indebted to his earlier rift with Jean-Paul Sartre. In his first book, Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes took issue with Sartre’s treatment of writing in What is Literature? (1948). For Sartre, the mission of the writer is to bear witness to the world in transparent prose that is engaged with reality, that is, to reveal the world, not to call attention to him- or herself. According to Sartre, literature is “a form of social action,” or more precisely, “a secondary form of action, action by disclosure.”60 Based on these ideas, Sartre finds modernist writing to be a “cancer of words.”61 Barthes, however, strongly disagrees with Sartre.

Susan Sontag, “Preface,” in Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (1953), trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), vii. 55 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 11. 56 Barthes, Mythologies, 9. 57 Barthes, Mythologies, 9. 58 Fifty-four short chapters in the original French, twenty-eight in Annette Lavers’ translation, another twenty-five in Richard Howard’s translation, with one L’operation Astra remaining untranslated. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (France, Editions de Seuil, 1957), Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1972), translated by Annette Lavers, and The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), translated by Richard Howard. 59 Barthes, Mythologies, 9. 60 David Caute, “Introduction,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (1948), trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1978), xii. 61 Sartre, What is Literature? 210. 54

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In Writing Degree Zero, Barthes argues that transparent prose, that is, prose that reveals reality (as it is) is not possible. Literary language is part of the institution of literature, and the institution of literature is one of the ways that culture organizes the world—or dresses up reality. For Barthes, writing promotes the myth that literature has a moral obligation to demystify itself by pointing to its own artifice, that is to say, to the arbitrariness of the sign. Consequently, good writing is writing that contends with itself as literature, that is, writing that is self-reflexive. “Zero-degree writing” points to its own surface, makes no pretense of depth, and is non-referential. For Barthes, the writings of Gustave Flaubert (which are self-conscious of their fabrication), of Marcel Proust (which are a postponement of literature, that is, an endless declaration to write), and of Alain RobbeGrillet (which aim at a neutrality of language) become exemplary. Writers such as Flaubert, Proust, and Robbe-Grillet, in Barthes’ view, do not confuse nature with history. Rather, their writing simply reveals how meaning is possible—albeit a meaning that is never completed or absolute. This early rift with Sartre is at the source of Barthes’ subsequent realization that he also has a rift with Saussure. Though Barthes at first believes that he is using a Saussurean model to analyze culture and language, he soon discovers that his mythanalyses add a level of signification not found in his mentor. Whereas the Saussurean model of signification is always already trapped in a signifier/ signified language scheme, Barthes comes to the conclusion that this is only one level of signification, which he terms “primary signification” or “denotation.” Barthes’ analyses of culture and literature reveal to him that semiological analyses of culture and language also reveal another level of signification not taken up by Saussure’s semiology, namely, “secondary signification” or “connotation.” At the level of connotation or secondary signification, Saussure’s sign, which is the combination of a signifier and a signified, in turn becomes a signifier. When this (secondary) signifier combines with a (secondary) signified, a secondary sign comes about. For example, consider again the case of the linguistic sign dog wherein the signifier (sound image) is the sequence of sounds “d-o-g,” and the signified (thought image) is the conceptual or mental image dog. Whereas for Saussure, this is the only level of signification, for Barthes, it is one of two levels of signification. As primary signification (or denotation), this level sets the stage for secondary signification (or connotation) wherein the linguistic sign dog becomes a signifier in a secondary sign relation with a different signified. This secondary signifier “d-o-g” can be, for example, the one attributed to the Cynic philosophers wherein the signified is “the man with the staff, the beggar’s pouch, the cloak, the man in sandals or bare feet, the man with the long beard, the dirty man.”62 Thus, Barthes is able to provide an account of how the connotation dog comes to be associated with the Cynics. And, of course, this secondary level of signification is subject to further (and unlimited) levels of signification: connotations of connotation. For Barthes, the level of secondary signification is where myth is produced. Moreover, this secondary-order semiological system is also where ideology is produced. For Barthes, myth is ideology as a body of ideas and practices which defend the status quo and actively promote the interests of the dominant group. In the case of the Cynics, the secondary-order semiological system of associating them with dogs is reflective of an ideology aimed at marginalizing their values against those of the dominant group, which, in this case, was Greek and Roman society. The Cynics aimed

Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983– 1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 128.

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at undermining the status quo of Greek and Roman society and connoting them with dogs, reflective of an ideology aimed at marginalizing their social and political vision. In “Myth Today (1957),” the essay which he appends to his early mythanalyses in Mythologies, Barthes comments that “myth is a type of speech,”63 and that its study “is but one fragment of this vast science of signs which Saussure postulated some forty years ago under the name semiology”— and “[s]emiology has not yet come into being.”64 These ideas would become the germ for his book, Elements of Semiology (1964). Barthes’ semiological approach to myth differed not only from its Greek and Roman counterparts, but also from that of his structuralist contemporary, Levi-Strauss (2.4). For Barthes, exposing myths was a form of political action, and semiology was the tool to accomplish this. Writing itself also promotes its own myths: chief among them is the myth of a literature which can have social significance—the kind of view which we saw earlier promoted by Tolstoy against the view of art for art’s sake and above by Sartre against modernist writing. From the perspective of Barthes’ semiology, writing is non-referential activity. It is also a marginal activity that he views as an exercise in negation tending toward silence. In terms of the progress of writing, Barthes views it here as moving toward the time where literature is no longer necessary. Writing aims to destroy itself, that is, to exist as a figure of its own problem. If there is truth in literature, it does not come from denotation or connotation much less than from representing reality. Rather, its truth lies in asking questions to which it is powerless to respond. Finally, the dream of literature is a world exempt from meaning, and the novel should be considered as the intentional murder of meaning. The question for Barthes thus becomes not what is the meaning of the novel, but rather how is meaning even possible? That is, upon what conditions can we say that there is meaning—albeit incomplete meaning? In “The Death of the Author (1968),” Barthes brashly asserts that all writing is “the destruction of every voice, every origin.”65 “Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.”66 “No doubt,” continues Barthes, “it has always been so: once a fact is recounted— for intransitive purposes, and no longer to act directly upon reality, i.e., exclusive of any function except that exercise of the symbol itself—this gap appears, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.”67 For Barthes, the announcement of the death of the author aims to recall a time before the invention of the “author,” who he says is “a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, inflected by English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of the ‘human person.’”68 Barthes also reminds us in his provocation of the connection between the rise of capitalism and the birth of the author. “Hence,” writes Barthes, “it is logical that in literary matters it should be positivism, crown and conclusion of capitalist ideology, which has granted the greatest importance to the author’s ‘person.’”69

Barthes, Mythologies, 109. Barthes, Mythologies, 111. 65 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968), in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 49. 66 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 49. 67 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 49. 68 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 49–50. 69 Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 50. 63 64

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The death of the author must be understood in the context of the birth of the text. In some ways, Barthes’ provocation was announcing a death that had already occurred over the past half-century with the advent of the New Criticism—and a birth that was emerging in the contemporary depiction of text. Oddly enough, with regard to authorship, there is some similarity between the New Critical position and the view on authorship that was presented by Barthes in “The Death of the Author,” even if their depictions of text differ radically. For Barthes, the reader is a product of the text, not a consumer of it. In addition, the author is not the source of meaning of a text. Rather, as Barthes demonstrates in S/Z (1970), the reader supplies codes to lexias (reading units). These codes for Barthes range from the hermeneutic (or code of enigmas, which gathers the semantic units which pertain to the formulation and solution of a problem—the voice of truth), semic (or connotative code, which gathers all the features of textual referents and builds their mental image—the voice of the person), and symbolic (which establishes networks of relations among signifieds and links these networks to universal themes) to the proairetic (or code of actions, which organizes the actions of characters into narrative sequences— the voice of empirics), cultural (or referential code, which is invoked whenever the text invites the reader to use their knowledge of the real world in the formation of meaning—the voice of science), and, arguably, many others (there is some disagreement on this point).70 For some structuralists, like Michel Foucault (9.1), codes are the sum total of a discourse, while for others, like Barthes, the forms of the already given order themselves into the codes of the language. For Barthes, then, codes are the forms imposed by language on reality that determine the perception of it, and the text of art amounts to nothing more than a set of codes which control its production. All told, then, the structuralist text can be said to be motivated by three elements: a) the sign; b) the codes that order the signs into the already said of a culture; and c) the discourses to which sets of codes belong. His prolegomenon on morality is The Pleasure of the Text (1973), where he effectively and innovatively introduces hedonism into literary criticism and theory. Barthes does this by uniting notions about textual generation with then current work in literary theory and psycholinguistics with his own lifelong intuitions. In broad terms, he proposes three distinct kinds of pleasure: the first is the pleasure and comfort that comes from Readerly textual fufillment, which he terms “plaisir”; the second is the rapture and ecstasy that comes from Writerly textual unsettlement and discomfort, which he terms “jouissance”; and the third is the textual pleasure that comes from finding ecstatic moments in Readerly texts. Barthes’ distinction between “plaisir” and “jouissance,” draws on the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan (4.2). However, the distinction between Readerly (lisible) and Writerly (scriptible) texts is wholely his own: the Readerly text is easy to read, predictable, transparent, un-self-conscious, and meets our expectations, whereas the Writerly text must be composed as it is read and calls attention to the structuring activity of the reader. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes: Text of pleasure [plaisir]: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss [jouissance]: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point

70 See Marie-Laure Ryan, “Narrative Codes,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 599–600.

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of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.71 But when compared to the passage that follows this passage, we see Barthes the textualist under the intertext of Julia Kristeva (5.2), Jacques Derrida (5.1), and Lacan transforming into Barthes the moralist under the intertext of hedonists spanning from Aristippus and Epictetus to the Marquis de Sade and Arthur Schopenhauer. Or, more significantly, Barthes transforming his attention from the concerns of literary theory and cultural criticism (which, for purposes of parallelism, might be termed, art de textualité) to philosophy in its broadest and most ancient sense, namely, one concerned with the art of living (art de vivre), the knowledge of how to enjoy life. Barthes continues: Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure [plaisir] and bliss [jouissance] is an anachronistic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under cover of an art de vivre shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure [plaisir]) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss [jouissance]). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.72 For Barthes, texts are structures of language in which authorial intention has no role in the meaning of the text. Meaning not only is produced independently of the author, but also resists closure. The reader interacts with the text to produce meaning that is many times a source of jouissance. Barthes makes a sharp distinction between this type of entity, which he calls a text, and something he calls a work. The latter is laden with authorial intent, finitely meaningful, and ultimately interpretable. Whereas a text is an unstable entity that is produced by the reader, a work is a stable entity consumed by the reader.73 It should be noted that Barthes restricts the domain of text to written entities only, and treats spoken entities as the domain of discourse. Semiology is not concerned with interpretation, but rather with analyzing texts. If interpretation or understanding is the fundamental human activity or a basic fact of human existence in the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Heidegger, then analysis is the fundamental activity of semiology. For Barthes, the move from “work” to “text” is a passage from hermeneutics to semiology. Semiology aims to leave aside the interpretation of objects. As Barthes says, the text “is not a coexistence of meaning, but passage, traversal; hence, it depends not on an interpretation, however liberal, but on an explosion, on dissemination.”74 While semiology in some way parallels hermeneutics by emphasizing that a text cannot be known as it is or that meaning is never exhausted by the author’s intentions, ultimately they are dissimilar theoretical enterprises. As a structuralist, Barthes’ goal was to reconstitute the literary work in order to reveal its rules of functioning, that is, the set of conventions that make meaning possible. He said, “Watch who uses signifier and signified, synchrony and diachrony, and you will know whether the Structuralist

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 14. 73 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” (1971), in The Rustle of Language Rustle of Language, 56–64. 74 Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 59. 71 72

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vision is constituted.”75 Against the New Criticism, which took for granted the fullness of meaning in literary works, Barthes argued that language is empty—and that the author is dead. His contributions are generally regarded as exemplary of the antihumanism of structuralism, though arguably his turn to morality in the last stages of his career was also a turn back to early Greek humanism in its hedonist, philosophical form.

2.4 CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS Structuralism is often said to have originated with the structural anthropology of Claude LéviStrauss. It is also often said to mark the beginning of the end of the dominance of the New Criticism. In Structural Anthropology (1958), Lévi-Strauss defines structure as follows: First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system. It is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo a change without effecting changes in all the other elements. Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering a series of transformations resulting in a group of models of the same type. Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the model will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to certain modifications. Finally, the model should be constituted so as to make immediately intelligible all the observed facts.76 Whereas Saussure proposed the use of linguistics as the basis for the study of other sign systems, Lévi-Strauss considered phonology the paradigm for the study of the sciences of man. Phonemes are the perceptually distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a language. So, in English, for example, the sounds p, b, d, and t in the words pat, pad, bat, and bad are phonemes. Lévi-Strauss learned structural phonology from Jakobson, who in the 1950s worked out a structural description of phonemes and phonological systems. In turn, Jakobson’s work on phonemes incorporated both the binary oppositions of Saussure and the semiotics of Peirce. LéviStrauss even attended a course taught by Jakobson at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1941. Though his aim in taking the course was to improve his linguistics for his work on the languages of central Brazil, Jakobson’s modifications of Saussure inspired him to draw an analogy between kinship systems and language, both of which he viewed as forms of communication. Moreover, in terms of social communication, for Lévi-Strauss, there are three basic modes: the exchange of goods and service, the exchange of women, and the exchange of messages.77 In his view, both kinship and economic systems share an analogous relationship with language. In short, structural linguistics, particularly the “phonological revolution” of Jakobson, had an enormous influence on the development of the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss (as well as on structuralist narrative [2.5], in particular, the work of Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov).

Roland Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity” (1963), in Critical Essays (1964), trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 214. 76 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1958), trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 279–80. 77 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 296. 75

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“Structural linguistics,” writes Lévi-Strauss, “will certainly play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played in the physical sciences.”78 Lévi-Strauss regarded the principles of analysis of Saussurean linguistics to be the most highly developed ones in the social sciences, and believed that they should be applied to all of the social sciences including anthropology. Lévi-Strauss’s four principles of structural analysis are as follows: First, structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure; second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of system—“Modern phonemics does not merely proclaim that phonemes are always part of a system, it shows concrete phonemic systems and elucidates their structure”; finally, structural linguistics aims at discovering general laws, either by induction “or . . . by logical deduction, which would give them an absolute character.”79 The study of the relations between terms was of particular importance to Lévi-Strauss: “The error of traditional anthropology, like that of traditional linguistics, was to consider the terms, and not the relations between the terms.”80 Lévi-Strauss applies these principles of analysis drawn from linguistic structuralism to kinship patterns, marriage rules, totemism, customs, rites, and other anthropological phenomena. Key to his thought is the analogous relationship between language and culture. He finds these analogies in the religion, myth, ritual, art, music, and cuisine of different societies. In terms of cuisine, he discovers systems of semantic oppositions such as raw/cooked, sweet/sour, and so on, and derives from these differential structures minimal culinary elements for which he proposes the term gusteme. Writes Lévi-Strauss, Like language . . . the cuisine of a society may be analysed into constituent elements, which in this case we might call “gustemes,” and which may be organized according to certain structures of opposition and correlation. We might then distinguish English cooking from French cooking by means of three oppositions: endogenous / exogenous (that is, national versus exotic ingredients); central / peripheral (staple food versus its accompaniments); marked / not marked (that is, savory or bland). We should then be able to construct a chart, with + and – signs corresponding to the pertinent or non-pertinent character of each opposition in the system under consideration.81

endogenous / exogenous central / peripheral marked / not marked

ENGLISH CUISINE + + –

FRENCH CUISINE – – +

Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 33. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 33. Both quotes in this passage are from Nikolai Troubetzkoy’s “La Phonologie actuelle,” in Psychologie du language (Paris: Alcan, 1933), 243. 80 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 46. 81 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 86, including the cuisine opposition chart. 78 79

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In terms of kinship systems, he discovers another system of semantic oppositions that are analogous to language. Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems. “Kinship systems,” like “phonemic systems,” are built by the mind on the level of unconscious thought.82 Kinship systems express rules of prohibited marriage (for example, the incest taboo) and in some cultures prescribe certain categories of relatives who should be married. In primitive societies, these rules form a system of exchange, where women are exchanged by men. Thus, Lévi-Strauss interprets kinship as a system of communication, a language, in which the women are the messages exchanged between clans, lineages, or families.83 Within these systems, Lévi-Strauss identifies minimal units of kinship as the elementary structures of a society.84 These structures are not the product of nature, but the result of culture, that is, they represent a cultural symbolism. Writes Lévi-Strauss, Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation.85 Thus, a kinship pattern is not only a system of communication with binary structures such as father–son, brother–sister, and so on, but is also, like language, characterized by the feature of arbitrariness. Lévi-Strauss also developed a structural method for the analysis of myths. His key contribution, “The Structural Study of Myth (1955),”86 appeared a few years before Barthes’ “Myth Today” (1957), and is quite different from the latter’s approach. For Lévi-Strauss, myths are messages based on a code with structures similar to those of language.87 Therefore, Lévi-Strauss applies the methods of linguistic structuralism to the analysis of myth. These methods include segmentation, classification, and the identification of binary oppositions. In his study of the Oedipus myth, LéviStrauss breaks down the text into basic units consisting of summarizing sentences. These express a relation in the form of a subject–predicate structure. Here are the summarizing sentences of the Oedipus myth as a syntagmatic chain:88

Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 34. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 61. 84 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 46. 85 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 50. 86 Lévi-Strauss’s article first appeared in the Journal of American Folklore 68 (1955): 428–44, and was republished as Chapter 11 of his Structural Anthropology (1958), 206–31. 87 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 206–31. 88 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 214. 82 83

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i.

Cadmos seeks his sister Europa, ravished by Zeus.

ii.

Cadmos kills the dragon.

iii.

The Spartoi kill one another.

iv.

Oedipus kills his father, Laios.

v.

Oedipus kills the Sphinx.

vi.

Oedipus marries his mother, Jocasta

vii. Eteocles kills his brother, Polynices viii. Antigone buries her brother, Polynices, despite prohibition. Lévi-Strauss also includes three peculiar proper names: ix.

Labdacos (Laios’ father) = lame (?)

x.

Laios (Oedipus’ father) = left-sided (?)

xi.

Oedipus = swollen-foot (?)

He now asks us to treat the myth “as an orchestra score would be if it were unwittingly considered as a unilinear series.”89 If we do so, the best arrangement, “for the sake of argument . . . (although it might certainly be improved with the help of a specialist in Greek mythology),” says Lévi-Strauss, is the following: i. ii. iii. ix. x.

iv. v.

xi. vi. vii. viii. “Bundles” of such relations within a myth form the “gross constituent units” of myth analysis, which he calls mythemes.90 These mythemes are then arranged on a syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis. The syntagmatic axis follows the narrative sequence of mythical events shown in the textual combination of the mythemes. The paradigmatic axis represents the semantic equivalences of the textual units in the form of columns. It should be noted that unlike Vladimir Propp, who focused on syntagmatic sequences (2.5), Lévi-Strauss’s method adds a significant paradigmatic dimension.

89 90

Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 213. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 211.

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The Oedipus myth, which contains four mythemes (1, 2, 3, 4) occurring in the textual sequence 1, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 1, 2, 1, is then represented as follows by Lévi-Strauss: 1 3 2 4 4

2 3

4 1 2 1 With this form of analysis, a semantic reduction of the text from eleven to four content units becomes possible. With such procedures of textual reduction, Lévi-Strauss arrives at specific deep structures in which he discovers a hidden logic of myth. The first column (the 1s) combines the three segments concerning a ritual offense of the nature of incest, that is, “an overrating of blood relations.”91 The second column (the 2s) “expresses the same thing, but inverted: underrating of blood relations.”92 The third column and fourth column concern autochthones, that is, mortals who have sprung from the soil, rocks and trees. Thus, the third column (the 3s) refers to “monsters being slain . . . . denial of the autochthonous origin of mankind.”93 And the fourth column (the 4s), are the men who are to some extent monsters, what he calls, “the persistence of the autochthonous origin of man.”94 Pulling all of this together, LéviStrauss summarizes the meaning of the Oedipus myth based on his structural analysis as follows: The myth has to do with the inability, for a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous (see, for instance, Pausanias, VIII, xxix, 4: plants provide a model for humans), to find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman. Although the problem obviously cannot be solved, the Oedipus myth provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem—born from one or born from two?—to the derivative problem: born from different or born from same? By a correlation of this type, the overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it. Although experience contradicts theory, social life validates cosmology by its similarity of structure. Hence cosmology is true.95

Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 215; original emphasis. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 215; original emphasis. 93 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 215; original emphasis. 94 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 216. 95 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 216. 91 92

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For Lévi-Strauss, every myth, not just the Oedipus myth, is “a kind of logical tool” which contains a kernel of four mythemes related by opposition and equivalence. He expresses this universal feature of myth with a formula:96 Fx(a) : Fy(b) ⯝ Fx(b) : Fa – 1(y) In this formula, x and y are functions representing actions, and a and b refer to two terms representing agents. The formula states that term a is replaced by its opposite a – 1 and that an inversion occurs between the function value y and the term value a. In the Oedipus myth, this means that the killing (Fx) done by the Sphinx (a) is related to the rescue of the men (Fy) by Oedipus (b), as the murder (Fx) committed by Oedipus (b) is related to the final rescue of the men (y) by the destruction of the Sphinx (a – 1). Fx : Fy is the conflict between good and evil. It is resolved by the hero committing a negative act, the destruction of the villain. This nevertheless results in the inverse, namely, a victory. In this way, “mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution.”97 But, states Lévi-Strauss, this can be impossible if the contradiction is real: [T]he purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of slates will be generated, each one slightly different from the others. Thus, myth grows spiralwise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted. Its growth is a continuous process, whereas its structure remains discontinuous. If this is the case, we should assume that it closely corresponds, in the realm of the spoken word, to a crystal in the realm of physical matter. This analogy may help us to better understand the relationship of myth to both langue on the one hand and parole on the other. Myth is an intermediary entity between a statistical aggregate of molecules and the molecular structure itself.98 Thus, by allowing us to eliminate contradictions, myth makes the world more livable for humans. In sum, Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis strives to reveal the structural pattern that gives deep meaning not only to the myths of different societies but also their religion, ritual, art, music, and cuisine. Myth, religion, ritual, art, music, and cuisine, at this deep level of meaning, is like a collective dream that is hidden and can only be revealed through structural analysis. But revealing the phonemic structure of these things does something further: it reveals the structure of the human mind. For Lévi-Strauss, the analysis he is undertaking reveals the structure that governs the very way human beings shape artifacts, institutions, and knowledge. He strives to determine the principles of thought formation that are universally valid for all human minds. The formula stated above represents a universal logic concerning myth that is shared by all humanity, and one that can only be revealed by the structural study of myth.

96 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 228. Note: the character ⯝ means “asymptotically equal to.” It is different from both “almost equal to” (≈) and “approximately equal to” (⬵). 97 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 224. 98 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 229.

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2.5 NARRATOLOGY Narratology, or structuralist narrative, is the structural study of narrative. It consists of general statements about the structure of story, plot, and the genres of narrative. Narratology studies what all narratives have in common and how narratives differ. It aims to describe the general rules used in the production and processing of narratives. Narrative itself can be defined as “an entity taken to constitute the representation of at least two related asynchronous events (or one state of affairs and one event) that do not presuppose or imply each other.”99 Barthes, for example, termed these events “functional units,” and made a distinction between two types of narrative events in his structural narratology: Cardinal Functions (or Kernels)— “real hinge-points of the narrative,” which are logically necessary to the causal structure of the plot; and Functional Catalyzers (or Satellites)—“merely ‘fill in’ the narrative space separating the hinge functions,” which, while they do not move the plot forward, add vividness to the narrative.100 “Narrative,” writes Barthes, “is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances [including] articulated language, spoken and written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances.”101 Moreover, for Barthes, “narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting . . ., stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, [and] conversation.”102 As a field of structuralist study, its early representatives (1960 to 1980) include Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, Lévi-Strauss, Tzvetan Todorov, and, of course, Barthes, who contributed a theory of narrative codes and events. The field also includes among its most influential later representatives Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman, and Gerald Prince. Its immediate precursors, however, include the Russian Formalists, particularly the work on plot by Shklovsky and Propp, and Saussurean linguistics. Nevertheless, the study of narratology can be traced back to Aristotle’s comments in the Poetics on two different ways of representing the same object: mimesis (μίμησις), which is translated as “imitation,” is the showing of the object by means of characters; and diegesis (διήγησις), which is translated as “narration,” is the telling of the object by a narrator. For Aristotle, when the object is shown (mimesis), the text is dramatic, whereas when it is told (diegesis), the text is narrative. Nevertheless, diegesis can embed mimetic elements such when the narrator lets characters tell the story.103 Aristotle’s comments fueled a variety of theories of the novel wherein mimesis came to be favored over diegesis. This was most explicit in the realism of Gustave Flaubert, where he attempted to reproduce in the novel a “slice of life” through a detached and objective point of view which utilized concrete detail, emotional restraint, and economy of expression; and the naturalism of Émile Zola, where he attempted to go beyond the photographic realism of his friend Flaubert, by turning the novel into a scientific experiment, where mechanistic and materialistic principles determined events, not the novelist. To create the appearance of truth, Flaubert’s narrator was invisible (giving way to his characters), whereas Zola’s was scientifically objective (giving way to Gerald Prince, “Narrative and Narratology,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 43. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966), in Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 93. 101 Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” 79. 102 Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” 79. 103 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448a; Chap. 3, ll. 19–23. 99

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mechanism and materialism). Henry James’s “free indirect discourse,” wherein the thoughts of the characters were said to be presented to be given without the mediation of a narrator, offered yet another technique to limit the role of the narrator (and diegesis) and maximize the opportunities for faithful representation and credible imitation (mimesis). The focus on mimesis, diegesis, and the role of the narrator in fiction led to the formation of the Chicago School of literary criticism, where Wayne Booth systematized the study of narrative technique grounded in Aristotelian principles in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). But the long history of commentary on narrative dating back to the Greeks and extending through the Chicago School is significantly different from the approach to narratology grounded in the principles of Saussurean linguistics and Russian Formalism. Here the work of Shklovsky and Propp stand out, both of whom did pioneering work on plot formation. Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization is relevant here because the variety of devices he identified to achieve this aesthetic effect—embedding, emplotment of puns and riddles, framing, juxtaposition, parallelism, repetition, and so on—amount to the basic elements of narrative technique. While Shklovsky said that the laws of plot formation are “still unknown to us,”104 he provided a storehouse of narrative techniques for structural narratologists to explore. Propp’s contribution to the study of plot was the identification of thirty-one different functions that can be present in folktales. In Morphology of the Folktale (1928), he defined function as “an act of character defined from the point of view of the significance for the course of the action.”105 “Functions of characters,” writes Propp, “serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled.”106 The functions are as follows: (1) Absentation—one of the members of a family absents himself from home; (2) Interdiction—an interdiction is addressed to the hero; (3) Violation—the interdiction is violated; (4) Reconnaissance—the villain makes an attempt at reconnaissance; (5) Delivery—the villain receives information about his victim; (6) Trickery—the villain attempts to deceive his victim; (7) Complicity—the victim submits to deception; (8) Villainy—the villain causes harm to a member of a family; (8a): Lack—one member of a family lacks something); (9) Mediation—misfortune or lack is made known; (10) Beginning Counteraction— the seeker agrees to counteraction; (11) Departure—the hero leaves home; (12) First Function of the Donor—the hero is tested which prepares the way for his receiving a magical agent or a helper; (13) The Hero’s Reaction—the hero reacts to the actions of the future donor; (14) Provision or Receipt of a Magical Agent—the hero acquires the use of a magical agent; (15) Spatial Transference, Guidance—the hero is transferred to the whereabouts of an object of search; (16) Struggle—the hero and the villain join in direct combat; (17) Branding, Marking—the hero is branded; (18) Victory—the villain is defeated; (19) Restoration/Lack Liquidated—the initial misfortune or lack is liquidated; (20) Return—the hero returns; (21) Pursuit, Chase—the hero is pursued; (22) Rescue— rescue of the hero from pursuit; (23) Unrecognized Arrival—the hero, unrecognized, arrives home or in another country; (24) Unfounded Claims—a false hero presents unfounded claims; (25) Difficult Task—a difficult task is proposed to the hero; (26) Solution—the task is resolved; (27) Recognition—the hero is recognized; (28) Exposure—the false hero or villain is exposed; (29) Transfiguration—the hero is given a new appearance; (30) Punishment—the villain is punished; and

Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (1925), trans. Benjamin Scher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990), 18. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928), 2nd revised edition, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 21. 106 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 21. 104 105

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(31) Wedding—the hero is married and ascends the throne.107 While all or some of these may appear in any one folktale, the functions always appear in the same order. Moreover, these functions are fulfilled by seven different “spheres of action”: villain, donor, helper, princess (“sought-for person”), dispatcher, hero, and false hero.108 Propp argues that stories are character driven, and that plots stem from the actions and decisions of the characters, and how they function in the story. Greimas, who drew on both Saussure and Propp developed what he called structural semantics. His aim in Structural Semantics (1966) was to produce a universal grammar of language through a semantic analysis of sentence structure. Universal grammar is the grammar that underlies all languages and is the common basis of experience. It denies the possibility that particular languages have unique effects on our experience. Moreover, like Propp, Greimas’s aim was not to determine the meaning of texts, but rather to understand how meaning is produced in texts. Structural semantics (sometimes also called semiotic reduction) regards the content of a text as a superficial expression of a deeper relation between actants and functions, which are two interrelated structures. Greimas’s actants are a modification of Propp’s “spheres of action.” Actants are defined as beings or things that participate in processes in any form whatsoever. They comprise three sets of binary opposition: subject–object, sender–receiver, and helper–opponent. From these three sets of binary opposition, all of the individual actors and roles of a story can be derived: if the actants are given social and cultural qualities, they become roles; if the actants are provided individuating qualities, they become actors (or, alternately, characters). Moreover, these three basic pairs describe the three basic patterns that recur in all narrative: desire, search, or aim (subject–object); communication (sender–receiver); and auxiliary support or hindrance (helper–opponent). For Greimas, there are three types of fundamental narrative sequences (or syntagms): disjunctional, that is, syntagms involving various kinds of movements and displacements, departures, and returns; contractural, that is, syntagyms pertaining to establishing or breaking a contract; and performative, that is syntagyms relating to tests and struggles. These three sequences are groupings for twenty narrative functions identified by Greimas—a significant reduction from Propp’s thirty-one functions. “The result,” writes Greimas, “is that if the actors can be established within a tale-occurrence, the actants, which are classifications of the actors, can be established only from the corpus of all the tales: an articulation of actors constitutes a particular tale; an articulation of actants constitutes a genre.”109 This method allows Greimas to treat a wide range of texts as narrative, and to show that content is independent of narrative. A particular actant can be fulfilled by a wide range of content. Todorov, who served as Greimas’s research assistant and wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Barthes, was, like them, a structuralist and a semiotician. Like Greimas, Todorov’s narrative grammar takes its cue from and develops on the work of Propp. The starting point for Todorov in Grammaire du Décaméron (1969) is the grammar of language, which is the linguistic capacity of speakers. The grammar of language includes morphology, semantics, phonology, syntax, and the lexicon of the language. Whereas Propp focuses on morphology and Greimas on semantics, Todorov will direct his attention to syntax, where his aim, like that of Greimas, will be a universal

Bengt Holbek, Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Danish Folklore in a European Perspective (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1987), 335. 108 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 79–80. 109 A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966), trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 200. 107

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grammar of narrative. In Todorov’s narrative grammar, derived from an analysis of the short stories in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1348–53), narrative elements function as syntactic categories: characters are assimilated to nouns; qualities and attributes of characters are assimilated to adjectives; and the actions of characters are assimilated to verbs. Characters are defined by their relationship to an adjective or a verb, wherein narrative adjectives are predicates which describe states of equilibrium or disequilibrium, and narrative verbs are such that all actions are reduced to three: to punish, to transgress, and to disguise. Each of these syntactical elements (nouns, adjectives, verbs) is combined into propositions, which are the basic elements of syntax. Propositions represent irreducible actions and are the fundamental units of narrative. There are two types of propositions: indicative, that is, actions which happened, which are associated with the real; and “all the other moods,” that is, actions which have not happened or been performed, which are associated with the unreal. These other moods are further subdivided into moods of will (renunciation, optative) and moods of hypothesis (condition, predictive). Sequences (viz., paragraphs) are collections of propositions (viz., sentences) and are a syntactic unit that is superior to the proposition. There are three types of sequences: logical, that is, cause and effect, which are further subdivided into alternative (exclusion), optional (disjunction), and obligatory (conjunction); temporal, that is, succession in time; and spatial, that is, parallelism with multiple divisions. For Todorov, a story (or récit) must have at least one sequence of propositions, and universal grammar aims to determine the rules for the formation of propositions and sequences. When all of this narrative grammar is applied to Boccaccio’s The Decameron, it yields two types of story (or récit): transgression from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium provoked by a verb (actions of a character); and transgression from disequilibrium to equilibrium to disequilibrium provoked by an adjective (qualities of a character). Of all of the early figures noted above, it is the work of Genette that has set the terms for the next generation of narratologists. His Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972) is a systematic theory of narrative, where he aims to identify the basic elements and techniques of narrative. One of his most basic distinctions is between story (histoire, the set of narrated events), narrative (récit, the narrative text itself), and narrating (narration, the act of narrative énonciation which produces the text). Or, more fully, I propose, without insisting on the obvious reasons for my choice of terms, to use the word story for the signified or narrative content (even if this content turns out, in a given case, to be low in dramatic intensity or fullness of incident), to use the word narrative for the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text itself, and to use the word narrating for the producing narrative action, and by extension, the whole of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes place.110 Given these three basic concepts, Genette then surveys the relationships among them. The first area concerns tense, which deals with the temporal relations between story and narrative. Tense is then subdivided into three subcategories: order, which concerns the relations between the temporal

Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972), trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 27.

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events in the story and their arrangement in the narrative; duration, which concerns the pace or speed of the narrative events; and frequency, which concerns the relationship between the number of times an event takes place in the story and the number of times this event is narrated in the text. The second area concerns mood, or the types of discourse used by the narrator to recount the story, and the forms and degrees of narrative representation. Here Genette makes a distinction between narrative perspective, that is, who “sees” the story, and narrative voice, who recounts the story. The third and final area is voice, which refers to the relationships between narrative and narrating. Each of these areas includes many additional distinctions and associated terminology. Moreover, Genette also coins new terminology for some old concepts. For example, instead of using the terms flashback and flash-forward, Genette respectively terms them analepsis and prolepsis. Also, telling and scene are respectively termed diegesis and mimesis by Genette. In short, the extensive terminology used by Genette has become the common language of contemporary narratology. Among the contemporary alternatives to structuralist narratology are what might generally be termed postclassical narratology.111 These contemporary forms of narratology do not necessarily negate the contributions of structuralist narratology—unless, of course, they are grounded in poststructuralism like the work of Jacques Derrida (5.1), whose “grammatology” is contrary to the aim of a universal grammar of narrative. Rather, postclassical narratology expands and diversifies this structuralist field by bringing more than just linguistics to bear on the study of narrative. These contemporary developments in narratology are often the result of different areas of literary and cultural theory intersecting with the findings of structural narratology. For example, the cognitive narratology of David Herman’s edited volume, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (2003) brings cognitive criticism (12.4) into the study of narrative; the affective narratology of Patrick Colm Hogan’s Affective Narratology (2011) brings affect studies (13.0) into the study of narratology; the feminist narratology of Ruth Page’s Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology (2006) brings feminist theory (6.0) into the study of narrative; and the rhetorical narratology of James Phelan’s Narrative as Rhetoric (1996) brings rhetoric into the study of narrative. Moreover, work on narratology has intersected with modal logic theory in Thomas Pavel’s Fictional Worlds (1986); with artificial intelligence and possible world theory in Marie-Laure Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991); with hermeneutics and phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume Time and Narrative (1984–8); and with history in Hayden White’s The Content of the Form (1987). In sum, most of the major areas of twentieth-century literary and cultural theory, from Marxism (3.0) and psychoanalytic theory (4.0) to poststructuralism (5.0) and postcolonial theory (10.1), have to varying degrees utilized the work of structuralist narrative. Also, in terms of more recent directions in literary and cultural theory, narrative theory has made significant contributions, as discussed below, to game studies (14.4).

111

This term was coined by David Herman in “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology,” PMLA 112 (1997): 1046–59, and its usage is supported by Gerald Prince (“Narrative and Narratology,” 46).

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CHAPTER THREE

Marxism 3.0 INTRODUCTION As a revolutionary social movement and functional political discourse inspired by the work of Karl Marx, the history of Marxism dates back to the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. This international organization, often called the First International, strove to unite a variety of communist, socialist, and anarchist groups and trade unions that were based on class struggle. Major mileposts in the history of Marxism are the successful revolutions in Russia (1917), Korea (1948), China (1949), and Cuba (1959), as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. While 1989 did not bring about the end of Marxism, it was for some the last major milepost in its social and political history. Marxism can be associated with a number of general ideas. They are as follows: (1) Dialectical Materialism—the basic notion that concrete reality moves through a dialectical process that utilizes a thesis–antithesis–synthesis pattern wherein as oppositions are overcome, new qualities are introduced. It consists of three laws: The Law of the Transformation of Quantity into Quality, wherein slow changes in quantity result in revolutionary changes in quality; The Law of the Unity of Opposites, wherein the unity of concrete reality consists in a unity of oppositions; and The Law of the Negation of Negation, wherein as oppositions negate each other, they are in turn negated by a higher level of historical development that preserves aspects of both of the negated oppositions. (2) From Primitive Communism to Class Struggle—whereas society was originally in a condition of primitive communal unity, by moving through a series of oppositions, it has reached its climax in a condition wherein there is a class struggle between the bourgeoisie, that is, the capitalists who own the means of production, and the proletariat, that is, the workers, who do not own the means of production. (3) The End of Capitalism—the process of dialectic ends when the proletariat triumph over the bourgeoisie. This triumph marks the end of capitalism and the end of dialectic because society will be rid of its internal oppositions or contradictions when it is rid of capitalism. (4) Revolution is a Law of History—it is a law of history that at a certain stage of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that is, at a certain stage of industrial society, there will be an international revolution. (5) Dictatorship of the Proletariat—whereas this process is one that results in utopia, that is, an age of harmony, there must be an intervening stage wherein the proletariat rule and through a process of re-education, eliminate all vestiges of capitalist ideology from society.

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(6) End of the State—as this process develops, the state, as an organized entity that functions through coercion, will become gradually less important and eventually disappear into a communal situation similar to the originary condition of society. (7) Dominance of the Mode of Production—in societies where there is high degree of alienation, literature and culture is controlled by the mode of production. Therefore, when there is a change in the mode of production, there is a resultant change in the literature and culture of society—which is to say, literature and culture can only be understood in economic terms. While these themes are typical of Marxism, neither Marx nor his close friend and lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels, nor any of their followers, espoused all of these ideas. Still, most of them can be associated in one way or another with the writings of Marx and Engels. However, the notion of dialectical materialism is clearly the contribution of Engels, not Marx. Marxist literary and cultural theory is founded upon the view that literature and culture must be understood in economic and social terms. While these terms are established in general accordance with Marxist principles, there are no general principles of Marxist literary and cultural theory. Much Marxist literary and cultural theory turns on one’s approach to the relationship between the economic base of society, that is, the relations of production (class relations of those engaged in production) and the forces of production (raw materials, tools, technology, workers), and the superstructure of society, that is, its legal, political, educational, and cultural institutions and practices. This superstructure generates particular forms of social consciousness, and it is from within this context that literature is taken up by Marxist literary and cultural theorists. As a theory of economic determinism, the superstructure of society is said to express or legitimate the base, whereas the base of society conditions or determines the superstructure. This position, called vulgar Marxism, reduces literature and culture to the economic conditions of society. In short, vulgar Marxism amounts to a reflection theory of literature and culture, that is, the position that the literature and culture of a society are reflections of its economic base. A less deterministic version of the relationship between base and superstructure with respect to literature and culture is limit Marxism, which says that economic conditions tell us what kind of literature and culture is likely as well as what is unlikely. Georg Lukács believed that literature could be read in accordance with the patterns and forces of society espoused by Marx. Like Marx and Engels, who said in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), “All that is solid melts into air,”1 Lukács believed that contrary to our ordinary ways of thinking, institutions and everyday objects are less solid than we think because they are embedded in the historical forces that produced them. For Lukács, literature must reflect these underlying forces. It does this by reflecting reality through typical characters, by which he means, characters that reflect the inescapable conflicts between historical forces that reach a decisive point of intensity and clarity. Here Lukács’s position on literature echoes Aristotle’s position on imitation (mimesis), namely, that art does not imitate particular characters, emotions, or actions, but rather imitates universal ones. Moreover, for Lukács, modern literature was bad because the simple flow of ideas is not enough. Great literature records our conscious response to our historical situation. For Lukács, history is

1

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), intro. Tariq Ali (London: Verso, 2016), 10.

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not a meaningless play of forces, but leads to a classless society—and great literature shows this. Moreover, the greatest literature does not merely reproduce the dominant ideology, but rather incorporates in its form a critique of these ideologies. Rather than rejecting nineteenth-century realism and naturalism like, for example, Oscar Wilde, Lukács favors a realism that reveals the oppositions or contradictions of bourgeois society. Critical realism achieves this, argues Lukács, through the use of typical characters, rather than untypical ones. Whereas Lukács’s realism and anti-modernism points to one possible direction for Marxist literary and cultural theory, critics of his position, who favor modernism in the arts and literature, such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht, point to another direction. Brecht’s epic theater used alienating or distancing effects to push his audiences to think objectively about both his plays and social reality. Rather than present typical characters (à la Lukács) with which the audience could empathize, Brecht wanted his audience to avoid this and instead to reflect on the social realities presented on the stage. Epic theater avoided the illusions of realism and often addressed the audience directly. Benjamin too believed that a conventional literary form like realism did not have the potential to be an effective critique against the dominant ideology, as audiences would be lulled into complacency by it. Rather, revolutionary art for Benjamin would break with conventional form in order to produce a more effective form of ideological critique. He also believed, contrary to Adorno, that technology could aide in the politicization of mass culture, and thus provide it with the potential to be used as a tool for political ends. Mikhail Bakhtin also did not regard literature as a direct reflection of social forces, but rather focused on the ways in which language was related to ideology. His work explored the ways language can disrupt authority and allow alternative voices to be heard. His concept of heteroglossia was central here as it showed how multiple voices can coexist in the literature and the ways in which this contributes to class struggle. Whereas the ruling class aims to narrow the meanings of words or discourse, the multi-accentuality identified by Bakhtin allows for class interests to wage battles within language for control over meaning. His work is closely associated with that of Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Vološinov to the point where some work with their names on it, such as Vološinov’s Freudianism (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), and Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), are often said to have been written by Bakhtin in an effort to avoid Stalinist censorship. Whereas Bakhtin’s thought has its roots in Russian Formalism, Louis Althusser’s is grounded in structuralism and psychoanalytic theory (4.0). His concept of ideology argues that we are all “subjects” of ideology that operates through interpellation, that is, by summoning us to take our places in the social structure. State apparatuses are the means through which interpellation takes place. The Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) comprise the religious, educational, family, media, legal, political communication, and cultural apparatuses, and the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) comprise the government, the administration, the army, the police, the courts, and the prisons. For Althusser, literature is not simply a form of ideology. Rather, it “makes us see . . . the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes.”2

2 Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971), trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 152.

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One of the fault lines in Marxism is its indebtedness to the philosophy of Hegel, particularly as it is transmitted through the notion of dialectical materialism. There are those like Althusser who argue that Marx’s real contribution is breaking from Hegel, whereas others like Fredric Jameson fully embrace a Marxism that explores “the great themes of Hegel’s philosophy—the relationship of part to whole, the opposition between concrete and abstract, the concept of totality, the dialectic of appearance and essence, the interaction between subject and object.”3 For Jameson, Marxism must utilize Hegel’s dialectic of thesis–antithesis–synthesis because “in the post-industrial world of monopoly capitalism” it is “the only kind of Marxism which has any purchase on the situation.”4 With Jameson, the Marxist work of Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin as well as Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch is explored as dialectical theories of literature—and utilized by him to establish his own unique form of Marxist literary and cultural theory. In short, the impact of Marxism on the literary and cultural theory of the twentieth century has been considerable, as it offered one of the major pathways to incorporating social, political, and economic concerns into the study of literature and culture. Moreover, as we shall see in later chapters, some of the general ideas of Marxism have been taken up either directly or indirectly in more recent literary and cultural theory. Still, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked a turning point in Marxist literary and cultural theory in the same way that—as we will see later—the events of the international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 marked a turning point in structuralist literary and cultural theory (5.0). Whereas the later change came to be called poststructuralism, the former might likewise be termed post-1989 Marxism.

3.1 KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS Marx and Engels argue that the history of society is the history of class struggles. In each historical period classes are formed as the result of the prevailing economic conditions, and when one looks back over the course of history, one sees much variation in class formation. Over the course of history, there are no fixed, ahistorical classes, rather “we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes . . . subordinate gradations.”5 Moreover, these subordinate gradations are based on the prevailing economic conditions. For Marx and Engels, economics determines just about everything in the society, including the nature of its legal, religious, philosophical, and artistic institutions: to understand each of these one must study the economic structures of which they are the products. In modern times, two classes have been produced by the Industrial Revolution: the bourgeoisie— who are the capitalists, those who own the means of production such as the factories; and the proletariat—who are the workers, those who are employed as wage-laborers by the bourgeoisie, and who do not own the means of production. Within a capitalist economic system, the proletariat

Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), xix. Jameson, Marxism and Form, xix. 5 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 4. 3 4

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are the subjects of increasing exploitation by the bourgeoisie. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx and Engels describe the proletariat as “a commodity like every other article of commerce, [who] are consequently exposed to the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”6 “Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and of the bourgeois state,” write Marx and Engels, “they are [also] daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.”7 These conditions push the proletariat into a struggle with the bourgeoisie, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the entire capitalist system. Marx and Engels view the proletariat as a “revolutionary class.”8 Whereas “other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”9 The aim of the communists is the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”10 Nevertheless, Marx and Engels are quite clear that the overthrow of capitalism will come about both through the revolutionary actions of the proletariat and through the economic progress of capitalism itself, which contains the seeds of its own destruction. The success of capitalism leads, for example, to overproduction, which in turn brings about its ruin. The communist’s push to organize the proletariat is aimed at bringing about a faster demise of capitalism, and is not the primary cause of capitalism’s downfall and demise. “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer,”11 write Marx and Engels. “In short,” they conclude, “the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing [capitalist] social and political order of things.”12 According to Marx and Engels, capitalism as an economic system will fail—it is just a matter of time. The role of the communists is to hasten capitalism’s demise, and to bring about a system of political power controlled by the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie. Such a system will, among other things, abolish private property and inheritance, and centralize banking, communication, and transportation. Under communism, the means of production will be controlled by the state. The basic notion that concrete reality moves through a dialectical process that utilizes a thesis– antithesis–synthesis pattern described earlier as dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Marxism. It is often contrasted with historical materialism, which is described as the science of Marxism. Historical materialism, or the materialist conception of history, is the social-scientific core of Marxism. In the German Ideology (1845–6), Marx and Engels work to distinguish it from the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach and the idealism of Hegel. Unlike, for example, the philosophical speculation of Feuerbach and Hegel, Marx and Engels ground their science in material premises: In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here one ascends from earth to heaven. In other words, to arrive at man in the flesh, one does not set out from

Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 16. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 19. 8 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 25. 9 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 25. 10 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 31–2. 11 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 32. 12 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 75. 6 7

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what men say, imagine, or conceive, nor from man as he is described, thought about, imagined, or conceived. Rather one sets out from real, active men and their actual life-processes and demonstrates the development of ideological reflexes and echoes of that process. The phantoms formed in the human brain, too, are necessary sublimations of man’s material life-process which is empirically verifiable and connected with material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer seem independent. They have no history or development. Rather, men who develop their material production and their material relationships alter their thinking and the products of their thinking along with their real existence. Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.13 By taking as their starting point “man’s material life-process which is empirically verifiable and connected with material premises,” Marx and Engels are able to demonstrate that all social institutions and practices, including legal, political, educational, and cultural ones, must be understood in terms of prevailing material conditions. This institutional superstructure is the level of consciousness or ideology, which in turn is a reflection of the material base of society. These are the foundations of a different kind of philosophy, a science aimed at changing the world, for, as Marx famously puts it in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845), “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it.”14 The base of society includes the relations of production and the forces of production. A contradiction between the relations of production and the forces of production is the basis for history existing as a succession of modes of production. This contradiction leads to the collapse of one mode of production and the succession of another mode. The main modes of production identified by Marx and Engels are primitive communism (hunter/gatherer society), slave (the ancient mode, master/slave society), feudal (lord/peasant), and capitalist (bourgeois/proletariat). The relations of production are the economic ownership of the forces of production, and the forces of production include the means of production and the labor power. These production forces comprise a wide area that includes changes in labor processes; education of the proletariat; the development of machinery, technology, and raw materials, and so on. In his “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx summarizes his guiding principle: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life . . . The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845–6), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 111–12. 14 Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 101. 13

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between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.15 Thus, for Marx and Engels, the intellectual life of society, including its literature and culture, is located in the superstructure of society with all of its other ideological materials or forms. Marx and Engels contend that ideology grows out of and conceals economic interests. It consists of the ideas and beliefs of the ruling class. In The German Ideology, they write, In every epoch the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, that is, the class that is the ruling material power of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual power. The class having the means of material production has also control over the means of intellectual production, so that it also controls, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of intellectual production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas, hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one and therefore the ideas of its domination.16 Moreover, the ruling class represents its ideology as the common interest of society: Each new class which displaces the one previously dominant is forced, simply to carry out its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society, that is, ideally expressed. It has to give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.17 Finally, ideology conceals the contradictory character of economic relations. In Capital, Volume Three (1894), Marx describes this as follows: The finished configuration of economic relations, as these are visible on the surface, in their actual existence, and therefore also in the notions with which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to gain an understanding of them, is very different from the configuration of their inner core, which is essential but concealed, and the concept corresponding to it. It is in fact the very reverse and antithesis of this.18 By focusing on the surface of economic relations, ideology conceals or distorts the contradictions that lie below the surface, and thereby serves the interest of the ruling class. Subsequent theorists developed the ideology of Marx and Engels in different directions. For example, whereas the concept of ideology noted above is a negative one, that is, it conceals or

Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 211. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 129. 17 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 130. 18 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three (1894), trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1991), 311. 15 16

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distorts economic relations, others have developed a more positive sense of ideology, by terming ideology the totality of forms of social consciousness. This sense can be gleaned from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, noted above, where Marx and Engels associate ideology with “the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic . . . ideological forms,” which makes ideology into an all-encompassing superstructure rather than a narrowly negative one. Because of the importance of ideology to Marxist literary and cultural theory, a few of the major refinements of Marx and Engels’ ideas on this topic will be noted. First, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács points out that “the dialectical method does not permit us simply to proclaim the ‘falseness’ of . . . consciousness and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and false.”19 He corrects this by examining “ ‘false consciousness’ concretely as an aspect of the historical totality and as a stage in the historical process.”20 For Lukács, ideology is a form of false consciousness that occurs when the subjective consciousness of a particular class is taken to be the objective consciousness of the society as a whole. Lukács comments, For only when this relation is established does the consciousness of their existence that men have at any given time emerge in all its essential characteristics. It appears, on the one hand, as something which is subjectively justified in the social and historical situation, as something which can and should be understood, i.e. as “right.” At the same time, objectively, it by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately. That is to say, objectively, it appears as a “false consciousness.” On the other hand, we may see the same consciousness as something which fails subjectively to reach its self-appointed goals, while furthering and realizing the objective aims of society of which it is ignorant and which it did not choose.21 For Lukács, the twofold identification of false consciousness allows for a dialectical determination of society as a concrete totality. Second, Antonio Gramsci proposed in his Prison Notebooks (1929–35) that the ideological superstructure of society be subdivided into civil society and political society, and thereby connected to hegemony: What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural “levels”: the one that can be called “civil society,” that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private,” and that of “political society” or “the State.” These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of “hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of “direct domination” or command exercised through the State and “juridical” government. The functions in question are precisely organisational and connective. The intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government.22

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 50. 20 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 50. 21 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 50. 22 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1929–35), ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 12. 19

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Hegemony for Gramsci is a process wherein the dominant groups in society through a process of intellectual and moral leadership win the consensus and consent of the subordinate groups in society. For Gramsci, there are two main reasons for this consensus and consent: (1) The “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. (2) The apparatus of state coercive power which “legally” enforces discipline on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively.23 In short, the dominant group achieves hegemony over the subordinate group by extending its ideology to every level of society including corporations, universities, political parties, and state bureaucracies. While Marx and Engels did not develop a specific form of literary and cultural criticism, through the work of thinkers like Lukács, Gramsci, and Althusser (3.4), ideology has become one of the major conceptual tools of Marxist literary and cultural theory. Through ideological analysis, literature becomes a site where class struggle is played out. Ultimately, for Marx, the material foundation of society provides everything that is needed to understand literature and the other arts. However, when we look back in socio-economic history, we find that there is no direct link or even relationship between the material foundation of society and its artistic production. This is particularly evident with the Greeks, whose artistic productions are “out of all proportion to the general development of [their] society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization.”24 Nevertheless, comments Marx, is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?25 The problem for him is not that the Greek arts are “out of all proportion to the general development of [their] society”—something that he believes can be easily understood. Rather, the problem is that the literature and arts from this era still provides us with pleasure. In Grundrisse (1858), he writes: [T]he difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an attainable model.26 Marx’s explanation of the attraction of literature and the arts from this era of social-economic development is as follows:

Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 12. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857–8), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 110. 25 Marx, Grundrisse, 111. 26 Marx, Grundrisse, 111. 23 24

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A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find a joy in the child’s naiveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples [are] in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.27 The value of Marx’s comments from Grundrisse is not his explanation of why we still appreciate Greek literature and art. Rather, it is the way he complicates the relationship between base and superstructure with regard to artistic production by acknowledging that there is no direct link or even relationship between social-economic development and artistic production. Still, regardless of the uneven relationship, according to Marx, it is not difficult understand. Some, however, would differ with his conclusion here. The character of the relationship between the material base of society and the artistic productions of the superstructure is open to a number of different lines of interpretation, including, but not limited to, versions of vulgar and limit Marxism. Engels regarded Marx’s discovery of historical materialism as one of his greatest discoveries. The other was his theory of surplus value. For Marx, exploitation occurs under capitalism when a net product can be sold for more than the wages received by the worker. Capitalist production is a form of commodity production where products are produced for sale as values. As the products of capitalist production belong to the capitalist, surplus value becomes the difference between the value of the product and the value of the capital involved in the production process. For Marx, value is a social relation among people, and under capitalism it takes on a particular form. As commodities are anything produced for the purpose of exchange, they have an exchange value, which corresponds to the form of appearance of something distinguishable from it; they also have a use value, which corresponds to their content. Exchange value is always contingent upon its circumstances, and any commodity has as many different exchange values as different commodities for which it can be exchanged. Use value is always constant and is derived from the labor expended in creating the commodity. There is no logical or intrinsic relation between use- and exchange value. “I discovered,” comments Marx, “that exchange-value is only an ‘appearance-form,’ an independent mode of manifestation of the value which is contained in the commodity.”28 Ultimately, for Marx, as he says in Capital, Volume One (1867), the commodity has a “mystical” and “mysterious” character: The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also

Marx, Grundrisse, 111. Karl Marx, “Marginal Notes on [Adolph] Wagner” (1879-1880), in Value: Studies by Karl Marx, trans. and ed. Albert Dragstedt (London: New Park Publications, 1976), 214.

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reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible and social.29 The mysterious thing here is the transformation of intangible human qualities into physical objects. This process is called reification, and for Marx it can be located throughout capitalism. The section of Capital in which this passage occurs concerns the “fetishism of the commodity.” In short, for Marx, the process of reification is obscured by commodity fetishism, wherein the socially produced value of things is mistaken for their natural value. Marx uses an analogy from “the misty realm of religion” to describe it: There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.30 Commodity fetishism is the most basic way in which capitalism conceals underlying social relations. For Marx, “it is . . . precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form— which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.”31 Commodity fetishism sets up a basic relationship between appearance and concealed reality, which can then be examined through ideology. “So far,” concludes Marx, “no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value in either a pearl or a diamond.”32 But commodity fetishism leads us to believe otherwise.

3.2 THE ADORNO–BENJAMIN DEBATE Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin were friends who corresponded with each other from 1928 until the death of the latter in 1940. They shared an interest in studying society from a Marxist perspective, though their work was largely focused on the superstructure of society, that is, ideology, class formation, and culture, rather than its material base, that is, the relations, forces, and modes of production. Together with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, they analyzed and critiqued the discourses, media, ideologies, and institutions of modern society. Their work, which was largely associated with the Institute for Social Research, has come to be called critical theory, or, because the Institute came to be part of Frankfurt University in 1923, the Frankfurt School. Even though Benjamin was not an official member of the Institute, he was in agreement

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 164–5. 30 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, 165. 31 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, 168–9. 32 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, 177. 29

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with its general approach to culture, which in its early years (1930–64) aimed to produce a general social theory that would provide an account of domination and power in society while at the same time strive for the social transformation of society. In general, critical theory has come to be associated with the systematic study of mass and commodity culture, authoritarianism, capitalist ideology, anti-Semitism, and modernity. Specifically, both Adorno and Benjamin wrote extensively on music, literature, aesthetics, and philosophy. Their debate, which occurred in the 1930s, concerned the emancipatory potential of mass art. At the center of this debate was the question of whether technologically reproduced art was useful for the purposes of fascism, with Benjamin contending that it is “completely useless”33 and Adorno disagreeing with him. Their debate was conducted against the background of the rise of Nazism in Europe, which both Adorno and Benjamin regarded as part of the groundwork of modernity and its misuse of technology. It was also conducted against the backdrop of Adorno emigrating to England in 1934 and then to New York in 1938 because of his political beliefs and Jewish heritage, and Benjamin during the same period trying to flee from Europe and the Nazis, who he believed were pursuing him. Whereas Adorno returned to Germany in 1949, Benjamin, in the words of Hannah Arendt (who fled Germany in 1933), “chose death in those early fall days of 1940 which for many of his origin and generation marked the darkest moment of the war—the fall of France, the threat to England, the still intact Hitler–Stalin pact whose most feared consequence at that moment was the close cooperation of the two most powerful secret police forces in Europe.”34 While Benjamin was a Marxist literary and cultural critic, his connection with Marxism and dialectical materialism was described by Arendt as “remote.”35 “Benjamin,” comments Arendt, probably was the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement, which God knows has had its full share of oddities. The theoretical aspect that was bound to fascinate him was the doctrine of superstructure, which was only briefly sketched by Marx but then assumed a disproportionate role in the movement as it was joined by a disproportionately large number of intellectuals, hence by people who were interested only in superstructure. Benjamin used this doctrine only as a heuristic-methodological stimulus and was hardly interested in its historical or philosophical background.36 A prime example of this is Benjamin’s “angel of history.” Whereas the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism regards history as moving forward into the future through a process of dialectic, Benjamin’s angel of history moves in the opposite direction, with his face “turned toward the past.” In “Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940),” Benjamin depicts this angel as similar to the one in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920), which

33 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 218. 34 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 153. 35 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 164. 36 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 163.

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. . . shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to say, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.37 Benjamin’s messianism, that is, his belief in the advent of a personal Messiah who would usher in the Kingdom of God, is more in evidence here than his Marxism. If anything, Benjamin’s “angel of history” recalls not Marx but rather the philosophy of Hegel, who said “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”38 By this Hegel means that history presents the world to philosophy for understanding. Contra Marx, who believed that the task of philosophy was to change the world, Hegel said that philosophy cannot provide “instruction as to what the world ought to be.”39 Rather, “as the thought of the world, [philosophy] appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has completed.”40 Benjamin’s “angel of history” neither dialectically moves forward into the future (like historical materialism), nor does it view the aim of philosophy to change the world (like Marx’s view of philosophy). Rather, with its back to the future into which it is propelled, it faces the past, which is piled at its feet like wreckage. Benjamin’s vision of history, philosophy, and social transformation is ultimately a messianic mystical one rather than a dialectical materialist one. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Benjamin points out that when “Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy.”41 “The result,” continues Benjamin, “was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.”42 But the “transformation of the superstructure,” he observes, “takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure,” or base, of society.43 Benjamin’s task here is to examine how the technological advances in reproduction that have occurred in the more than fifty years since Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production have changed and are changing the function of culture in society. “Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public,” writes Benjamin, “it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.”44

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Illuminations, 257–8. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 13. 39 Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 12. 40 Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 12. 41 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217. 42 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217. 43 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217–18. 44 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 219–20. 37 38

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FIGURE 2: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920). Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner.

Benjamin argues that the technical reproducibility in photography and film withers and destroys the aura and authenticity of artworks. He notes that while it has always been possible in principle to reproduce a work of art, the age of the mechanical reproduction of works of art “represents something new.”45 The advent of lithography at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which was surpassed in only a few decades by photography, allowed for the reproduction of the work of art. According to Benjamin, this technological advance in art reproduction resulted in “the most profound change”46 in the impact of the work of art upon the public—the loss of authenticity. 45 46

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 220. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 219.

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For Benjamin, authenticity is lost in the reproduction of works of art. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,”47 says Benjamin. “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”48 He contends that not only are mechanically reproduced works of art more independent of the original work of art than manually reproduced works of art, but “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach of the original itself.”49 Reproduction detaches artworks from “the domain of tradition” and destroys their “aura.”50 Once the work of art is detached from its aura, and its traditional and ritualistic significance, it can take on a significance unconnected to them. Comments Benjamin, “the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.”51 “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice— politics.”52 For some, under these conditions, the work of art risks being attributed with political significance, which in the hands of repressive governments is particularly dangerous. But not for Benjamin, which is the crux of his debate with Adorno. “The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in [The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism,”53 remarks Benjamin. “They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.”54 The technical reproduction of the work of art marks a decided shift from an older aesthetics marked by authenticity and the presence of the original to a new aesthetic of “reproducibility” and disconnection from the original. For Benjamin, a work of art is neither the result of individual creativity or genius nor is it an autonomous object disconnected from politics as it was for aestheticism. Rather, by striving to understand it in relation to its modes of production, Benjamin finds in the reproducibility of art emancipatory political potential. In contrast to fascism, which aestheticizes politics in its older, ritualistic sense, Benjamin offers a new aesthetics where the politicization of art involves its de-aestheticization, which involves breaking its link with aura, ritual, autonomy, and genius. Benjamin writes that “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual,” and “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”55 For Benjamin, film signals the greatest break from the older aesthetic of presence and authenticity: “for the first time— and this is the effect of the film—man has to operate with his whole living person, yet foregoing its aura.”56 “For aura is tied to presence,” continues Benjamin, “there can be no replica of it.”57 Both Adorno and Benjamin recognize that technological advances are inseparable from consumer culture and have the potential for politicization. However, whereas Benjamin was hopeful that the

47

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 220. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 220. 49 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 220. 50 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 221. 51 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 224. 52 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 224. 53 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 218. 54 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 218. 55 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 224. 56 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 229. 57 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 229. 48

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technology of aesthetic reproduction could transform mass consumer culture into an emancipatory force for the proletariat by providing them with an effective source of resistance to social and political oppression, Adorno fiercely opposed this idea. So impassioned was Adorno’s opposition to his friend on this subject that he would continue to refine his reply to Benjamin for the rest of his life. In 1947, Adorno published the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he co-wrote with Horkheimer. While Adorno would serve as director of the Institute of Social Research from 1958 to 1969, Horkheimer was its director from 1930 to 1958, an organization established in 1923 to look into the future of Marxism after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Under Horkheimer’s direction, the Institute came to focus on social philosophy and critical theory, and attacked positivism, an approach to philosophy that positively values science and the scientific method. The most celebrated version of positivism at the time (circa 1930) was the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, which included Carnap, Kurt Gödel, Herbert Feigl, Alfred Tarski, and its founder, Moritz Schlick, who was assassinated in 1936. “Our conception of history does not presume any dispensation from it; nor does it imply a positivistic search for information,”58 write Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1969 preface. “It is a critique of philosophy, and therefore refuses to abandon philosophy,”59 they continue. Their discussion of the culture industry in this work is a rebuttal to Benjamin’s position on the emancipatory power of the technology of aesthetic reproduction. Horkheimer and Adorno argue here that movies are not art; rather, they are commodities produced by the culture industry. “Film, radio, and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part,”60 write Horkheimer and Adorno. This system is subservient to the “absolute power of capitalism.”61 The interests of the motion picture, broadcasting, and publishing industries are “economically interwoven”62 with other, more powerful, capitalist industries such as the banking, petroleum, utility, and chemical industries. The culture industry “is the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production team may have selected.”63 The culture industry produces homogeneous and monotonous commodities: “art for the masses.” “Not only are hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change,”64 write Horkheimer and Adorno. “The details are interchangeable.”65 Film, for example, is comprised of a series of “ready-made clichés to be slotted anywhere.”66 “As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten.”67 According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the homogeneity of art produced by the culture industry serves an important social and

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), x. 59 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, x. 60 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120. 61 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120. 62 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 123. 63 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 124. 64 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 125. 65 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 125. 66 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 125. 67 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 125. 58

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political function: it maintains the status quo and destroys individuality. “The culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product.”68 Mass art aims to produce, control, and discipline its consumers. It even aims to deprive them of amusement by stunting their “powers of imagination and spontaneity.”69 “The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses” the desire for happiness, write Horkheimer and Adorno. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far. The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that the culture industry established anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance.70 The Hays Office here is a reference to the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, which was a set of guidelines developed by the motion picture industry to regulate the moral standards presented in movies. Will H. Hays was the head of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) that was formed in 1922 to project a positive image of the movie industry. In the 1920s, Hollywood was dubbed “Sin City,” and it was the task of the Hays Office and the MPPDA to promote a more morally upright image of Hollywood. Adorno and Horkheimer, however, find their efforts to control and discipline sexuality on the screen as contradictory: ascetic and unashamed, pornographic and prudish. The world depicted by mass culture is a “realistic” one that is a combination of clichés, propaganda, and advertising. “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies,”71 write Horkheimer and Adorno. “The sound film, far from surpassing the theater of illusions, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail with losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality.”72 On the basis of this, Horkheimer and Adorno conclude, “If most of the radio stations and movie theaters were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose very much.”73 “To walk from the street into the movie theater is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so.”74 Ultimately, true art is art that goes beyond existing social relations and reality, something that the art produced by the culture industry never achieves. “Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite,”75 comment Horkheimer and Adorno. “Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him.”76

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 127. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126. 70 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 140. 71 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126. 72 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126. 73 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139. 74 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139. 75 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 153. 76 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 153. 68 69

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The “freedom to choose an ideology” under late capitalism “everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same.”77 As Horkheimer and Adorno conclude, The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the technology of aesthetic reproduction does not transform mass consumer culture into an emancipatory force for the proletariat. Rather than providing the proletariat with an effective source of resistance to or escape from social and political oppression, it does the opposite: the culture industry shuts down all pathways to emancipation from late capitalism. “Amusement under late capitalism,” observe Horkheimer and Adorno, “is the prolongation of work”:78 It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit the strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself.79 Contra Benjamin, the only thing the mechanical reproduction of the work of art reproduces for Horkheimer and Adorno is late capitalism—and along with it, authoritarianism and bourgeois privilege. While they agree with Benjamin that technological reproducibility strips the work of art of its uniqueness, they do not think that technologically reproducible art is emancipatory because it originates from the same economic conditions and the same technological process that brought about fascism and totalitarianism. “The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with special designations links advertising with the totalitarian watchword,”80 comment Horkheimer and Adorno. “When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a word—say, ‘intolerable’—over the loudspeakers the next day the whole nation is saying ‘intolerable.’ ”81 Hence, advertising, the culture industry, and Hollywood films are associable with fascism, totalitarianism, and political propaganda: Advertising and the culture industry merge technically as well as economically. In both cases the same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical repetition of the same culture product has come to be the same as that of the propaganda slogan.82

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 167. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 137. 79 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 137. 80 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 165. 81 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 165. 82 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 163. 77 78

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In short, they regard the Hollywood film as similar to Nazi propaganda—that is, it is based in a repressive aesthetic, rather than an emancipatory one.

3.3 MIKHAIL BAKHTIN One of the first issues one approaches in considering the work of Bakhtin is what to include. While his classic work is Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), there has been some controversy as to whether he also wrote Valentin Vološinov’s Freudianism (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) and Pavel Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928). Michael Holquist, for example, says “ninety percent of the text of the three books in question is indeed Bakhtin himself.”83 However, others disagree. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, for example, “deem it unlikely that Bakhtin wrote these three remarkable books.”84 Bakhtin himself was silent on the topic. For example, on the occasion of Bakhtin’s 75th birthday in 1973, V. V. Ivanov declared that these works were written by Bakhtin. When Bakhtin was asked whether Ivanov’s declaration was true, he remained silent and never made a public statement. However, when the Soviet publishing agency asked Bakhtin to sign a statement shortly before his death that he was the author of these works, he refused.85 At stake here is the degree to which Bakhtin was a Marxist literary and cultural theorist. Whereas Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship attempts to reconcile formalism with Marxism, Vološinov’s Freudianism brings together Freudian psychology and Marxism, and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language explores the relationship between language and ideology. In short, Marxism is built into the structure of each of these works, and Medvedev and Vološinov “explicitly declare and implement a Marxist orientation” in all of their work.86 The question, however, is whether this Marxism is just “window-dressing” aimed at insuring publication in the Soviet Union. This is the view of Holquist, for example. For others, such as Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin had a “lifelong dislike of Marxism,” and the Marxism of these books is “in no sense window dressing to be removed by a skillful reader.”87 Still others, like Fredric Jameson (3.5), hail Bakhtin as an outstanding Marxist writer. Finally, there is Todorov, who attributes all of the work to Bakhtin, but sees the question of his Marxism as a moot point. In brief, the work of Bakhtin has been claimed by both Marxist and non-Marxist lines of literary and cultural theory. Bakhtin’s work can be broken down into four periods. The first period, which concludes in 1924, consists of writings on ethics and aesthetics wherein language is not central to his thought; the second, which coincides with his encounter with Russian Formalism (1924–9) and culminates in the publication of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, consists of the introduction of the concept of polyphony and his efforts to create a new model of language; the third period, which extends

Michael Holquist, “Introduction,” in M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), xxvi. 84 Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 2. 85 Ladislav Mateˇjka and I. R. Titunik, “Translators’ Preface,” in V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), trans. Ladislav Mateˇjka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), ix. 86 Mateˇjka and Titunik, “Translators’ Preface,” ix. 87 Morson and Emerson, “Introduction,” 2. 83

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from the 1930s into the 1950s, is defined by his work on the novel and the development of the concepts of carnival and chronotope, a category used in the analysis of texts that accounts for their precise spacio-temporal ratio; and the fourth period marks a return to the philosophical problems of the first period.88 It is the work from his second and third periods that has proven to be the most impactful to literary and cultural theory—even if Bakhtin’s philosophical and aesthetic contributions are considerable. For that matter, it might even be argued that a fundamental philosophical position on all human acts underlies his entire intellectual development: namely, one between “inside (‘I’/ myself) and outside (‘you’/others), and between open (laughing, unfinished, mobile: a personality) and closed (serious, completed, static: a thing).”89 Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony is a characteristic of literature wherein several contesting voices take part equally in dialogue. These voices represent not only a number of different ideological positions, but are also allowed to present these positions without authorial judgment or constraint. The author here is said by Bakhtin to be “alongside”90 the speech of the characters in a way that affords all voices equal position and does not privilege one voice over another. In literature that exhibits polyphony, any tension among these voices remains unresolved because there is no worldview that is imposed upon the text by the author. Texts that exhibit polyphony focus on process rather than product. This means that the polyphonic text resists closure though achieves a special type of unity: “the unity of an event,”91 which describes “a dialogic concordance of unmerged twos and multiples.”92 As long as polyphony continues, that is, there are utterances to establish it, there is neither a final truth to the text, nor is a single interpretation of the text possible. Opposed to the conception of the polyphonic text is the monophonic text, a text where one voice dominates. Bakhtin finds the novels of Tolstoy to be monophonic, whereas the novels of Dostoevsky exhibit the ideal of polyphony. As Bakhtin investigates deeper into the history of the novel, he determines that polyphony is a potential characteristic of all novelistic discourse, and the term comes to be another word for dialogism—a term he comes to use in two distinct senses. One sense of dialogism is when the speaker wants the listener to hear words as though they were spoken with quotation marks. This allows for two voices to persist in a single spoken utterance. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin makes the distinction between utterances spoken without quotation marks, which are monologic and single-voiced, and utterances spoken with quotation marks, which are dialogic and double-voiced. When quotation marks are not used, there is no recognition that there is another perspective on this discourse; when they are used, there is recognition of another perspective that is an equally valid one. When quotation marks are used, the voice of another is included along with the voice of the speaker. The voice of another in dialogism is part of the intention of the speaker, that is, the speaker intentionally enters into a dialogue with the voice of another. The second sense of dialogism is that no discourse exists in isolation from other utterances. Rather, all discourse is part of a greater whole, or “concrete living totality,”93 and always draws

88

See, Morson and Emerson, “Introduction,” 5–6. Caryl Emerson, “Mikhail Bakhtin,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 382. 90 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 6. 91 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 21. 92 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 289. 93 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 181. 89

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from the world of language that precedes it. Here dialogism is the notion that language is a social phenomenon, and as such, it is never dissociable from the intentions of others. It is the notion that everything must be understood as a part of a greater whole in which multiple meanings are in constant interaction or process with each other. What an utterance does is settle how these multiple meanings affect each other. Holquist calls this the “dialogic imperative, mandated by the preexistence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants.”94 This dialogic imperative “insures that there can be no actual monologue,” even though some can be deluded, like “grammarians, certain political figures and normative framers of ‘literary languages,’ ” into thinking that there are ways for language to be monological.95 What ensures that language is always dialogical—and never monological—is the force of what Bakhtin terms heteroglossia. It is that which, writes Holquist, insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different that it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close up a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress.96 For Bakhtin, the novel is the best place to see dialogism because novels are both polyphonic and heteroglossic. In “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–5), Bakhtin writes, The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purpose of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)—this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensible prerequisite for the novel as a genre. The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed by it, by means of the social diversity of speech types [or heteroglossia] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the

Michael Holquist, “Glossary,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 426. Holquist, “Glossary,” 426. 96 Holquist, “Glossary,” 428. 94 95

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rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel.97 While Bakhtin came under the influence of Russian Formalism in the late 1920s, by the time this passage was written in the mid-1930s, he was very far from endorsing their view of language as a closed system. Rather, his work emphasizes the social role of language, something more akin to an open and dynamic sign-system. Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to literature finds every utterance as standing against a background of other utterances as reply, polemic, allusion, and parody. This approach does not regard texts as organic unities, but promotes the notion that texts are multilayered and resistant to unification. Under this broad conception of text, he regards all cultural phenomena—from film and dance to music and carnival—as text. Bakhtin regards text, both written and oral, as the primary given of all of the disciplines comprising the human sciences, including literary studies and philosophy. For Bakhtin, text is the unmediated reality of thought and experience, and the only reality from which the disciplines of the human sciences can emerge. Where there is no text, claims Bakhtin, there is no object of study, or even an object of thought. A text is any complex of signs. The structure of the sign complex is such that in itself it reflects all texts within the bounds of a given area—texts are a type of monad. According to Bakhtin, the study of the arts is the study of texts whose structures are a mosaic. Through his close readings of writers like Dostoevsky and François Rabelais, Bakhtin shows how literary texts not only have a dialogical or polyphonous structure because they are both a layered mosaic of other texts98 and because of what he calls their carnivalization. In his discussion of carnival in Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin shows how carnival works to subvert authority by overturning hierarchies (e.g., fools become wise) and bringing together oppositions (e.g., heaven and hell). Writes Bakhtin, Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by its participants.99 Bakhtin says that carnival “was a consecration of inequality”100 that was collective and popular. In addition, it “led to the creation of special forms of marketplace speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no distance between those who came in contact with each other and liberating from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times.”101 All of this he finds abundantly

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–5), in The Dialogic Imagination, 262–3. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis” (1959–61), in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 99 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 7. 100 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10. 101 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10. 97 98

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represented in the writings of Rabelais—even though the earliest carnivalized literary forms can be traced back to the dialogues of Socrates and the ancient Greek satires of Menippus of Gardara. Dostoevsky is noteworthy here too because his work brings together the various traditions of carnivalized literature. Bakhtin’s approach to literature and language reveals a deep concern for their material conditions and political ramifications. Still, he did not regard literature as a direct reflection of social and economic forces, but rather focused on the ways in which language was related to ideology. In “Discourse in the Novel,” he tells us that the speaking person in the novel is always, to one degree or another, an ideologue, and his words are always ideologemes. A particular language in a novel is always a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for social significance. It is precisely as ideologemes that discourse becomes the object of representation in the novel, and it is for the same reason novels are never in danger of becoming a mere aimless verbal play. The novel, being a dialogized representation of an ideologically freighted discourse (in most cases actual and really present) is of all verbal genres the one least susceptible to aestheticism as such, to a purely formalistic playing with words.102 Language cannot be separated from ideology for Bakhtin both at the level of the speaker and the utterance. Consequently, because the novel is dialogical, it makes it much more difficult to separate from ideological concerns—and struggles. The fundamentally ideological nature of language is at the center of Bakhtin’s philosophy of language. But it is Vološinov who closes the loop between this conception of language and Marxism: First and foremost, the very foundations of a Marxist theory of ideologies—the bases for the studies of scientific knowledge, literature, religion, ethics, and so forth—are closely bound up with problems of the philosophy of language. Any ideological product is not only itself a part of reality (natural or social), just as in any physical body, any instrument of production, or any product for consumption, it also, in contradistinction to these other phenomena, reflects and refracts another reality outside of it. Everything ideological possesses meaning: it represents, depicts, or stands for something lying outside itself. In other words, it is a sign. Without signs there is no ideology. A physical body equals itself, so to speak; it does not signify anything but wholly coincides with its particular, given nature. In this case there is no question of ideology.103 ... [Moreover,] every sign is subject to ideological evaluation (i.e., whether it is true, false, correct, fair, good, etc.). The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value.104

102

Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 333. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 9. 104 Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 10. 103

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For Vološinov, “consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs,”105 which in turn, might be regarded as a semiotic recasting of Marx’s formula, “Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.” While Vološinov’s position on ideology is at odds with the reflection theory of ideology of classical Marxism, it does provide a pathway for a Marxist philosophy of language grounded in material reality—even though the material reality is not the forces and means of production, but rather language as a sociallyconstructed system of signs. In sum, Bakhtin’s literary and cultural theory explored the ways language can disrupt authority and allow alternative voices to be heard. His concept of heteroglossia shows how multiple voices can coexist in the literature, and the ways in which this exhibits a form of ideological struggle. Whereas the ruling class aims to narrow the meanings of words or discourse, the multi-accentuality identified by Bakhtin allowed for class interests to wage battles within language for control over meaning.

3.4 LOUIS ALTHUSSER Althusser’s main project was a rereading of Marx. While the empiricism of Marxist theory appealed to him, its humanism did not. He saw this humanism in the efforts of Marxist thinkers like Sartre, whose existentialism claimed that when humans do not accept responsibility for their freedom, alienation occurs. Marxist humanism, which places human freedom and self-determination at the center of Marxist theory, is a bourgeois model of the subject. It claims that humans are the source of knowledge and meaning, and that history is the result of human actions. Althusser describes this as the view that “it is man who makes history.”106 For Althusser, this bourgeois-humanist model of history disarms the labor movement and prevents the scientific investigation of history, the very science that Marx founded. Writes Althusser, Marx founded a new science: the science of history. Let me use an image. The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great “continents.” Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History.107 For Althusser, the philosophical problem with the bourgeois-humanist model of history of Sartre, Lukács, and others is that it effectively preserves the Cartesian subject (that is, Descartes’ thinking thing, or res cogitans [12.4]), a subject that is the centered and fixed agent of history. In its stead, Althusser presents another view of the subject, one that might be described as antihumanist. The conception of the subject developed by Althusser is deeply grounded in both structuralism and psychoanalytic theory (4.0). In addition to Marx, some of his major influences are Lévi-Strauss

Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 11. Louis Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis” (1972), in Essays in Self-Criticism (1974), trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976), 41. 107 Louis Althusser, “Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon” (1968), in Lenin and Philosophy, 4. 105 106

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and Jacques Lacan (4.2). Also, it might be noted that Michel Foucault (9.1) was one of his students at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where Althusser taught until 1980. Althusser’s rereading of Marx rejected both vulgar Marxism, which reduces ideology, literature, and culture to reflections of the economic conditions of society, and the Hegelian view of the social totality, in which the essence of the whole is expressed in its parts. Rather, Althusser offered in their stead the concept of social formation, which consists of the combination of economic, political, and social practices. For Althusser, rather than superstructure being a mere reflection or expression of the economic base of society, he regards it as necessary to the existence of the base of society. This allows Althusser to treat the superstructure of society as not completely determined by the economic base of society. The determinism of the economic base that remains in Althusser’s model is described as the “structure in dominance (structure à dominante).”108 On this view, while the economic base of society always determines its superstructure, at any particular moment in history it may not dominate. For Althusser, the dominant of a particular social formation depends on the form of economic production. He uses the concept of overdetermination “to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole, and hence back on each practice and each contradiction, defining the pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and non-antagonism of the contradictions in the structure in dominance at any historical moment.”109 For Althusser, economic contradictions are always overdetermined “because the existence of overdetermination is inevitable and thinkable as soon as the real existence of the forms of the superstructure and of the national and international conjuncture has been recognized—an existence largely specific and autonomous, and therefore irreducible to a pure phenomenon.”110 Moreover, overdetermination is not an aberrant historical phenomenon, but rather a universal one. Writes Althusser, [T]he economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in history, these instances, the superstructures, etc.—are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the “last instance” never comes.111 Thus, Althusser’s social formation is not a social order or system, but rather a kind of decentered structure where there is no overall unity or organizing principle. His revision of the idea of dialectical contradiction, a revision that emphasizes the condition of overdetermination, allows for the relative autonomy of each of the elements within the social formation. While these elements are determined by the economic level in the “last instance,” as he says above, it is one which “never comes.” One of Althusser’s aims was to transform Marxism into a science dedicated to the structural analysis of ideology. To achieve this, Althusser revises the standard Marxist notion of ideology as “false consciousness,” that is, a false understanding of the way in which society functions. This false

Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic” (1963), in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970), 204. Ben Brewster, “Overdetermination,” in Louis Althusser, For Marx, 253. 110 Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962), in For Marx, 113. 111 Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 113. 108 109

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consciousness is exemplified, for example, in the way we suppress the fact that the goods purchased on the open market are the result of the exploitation of labor. For Marx in The German Ideology, writes Althusser, Ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality is external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For these writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of “day’s residues,” presented in an arbitrary arrangement and order, sometimes even “inverted,” in other words, in “disorder.” For them, the dream was the imaginary, it was empty, null and arbitrarily “stuck together” (bricolé), once the eyes had closed, from the residues of the only full and positive reality, the reality of the day.112 Althusser, however, following Lacan, offers a very different account of ideology than Marx. “Ideology,” argues Althusser, “is a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”113 The “imaginary” used here by Althusser is part of Lacan’s three orders that constitute the human psyche (4.2): the Imaginary Order, that is, the preverbal order wherein the infant identifies itself as an entity unified with both its biological dependence on its mother and its surroundings; the Symbolic Order, the order that emerges with the acquisition of language, wherein the subject only interacts with the world through various forms of representation and structures of meaning; and the Real Order, that is, the order beyond the Imaginary and the structure and representation of the Symbolic, which is only accessible in jouissance (fleeting moments of joy and terror). For Althusser, ideology functions similar to Lacan’s understanding of the Real Order, that is, the world we construct around us after our entrance into the Symbolic Order. Namely, it is not possible for us to access the “real conditions of existence” because of our reliance on language in the Symbolic Order. Nevertheless, the structural science developed by Althusser allows us to understand how we are inscribed in ideology by a complex process of recognition, which is as close as we can come to understanding the “real conditions of existence.” For him, all ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.114 Thus, for Althusser, we cannot get outside of ideology as our consciousness is constructed under the form of an imaginary subjection, and we are always within ideology because of our reliance on

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” (1969), in Lenin and Philosophy, 108. 113 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 109. 114 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 111. 112

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language. Ideology does not reflect the world, but rather is a “representation” of our imaginary relationship to the world. In addition to his thesis about our imaginary relationship to the world, Althusser posits a number of others. One is that “Ideology has a material existence,” by which he means “an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices” and that this form of existence is material, not spiritual or ideal (idéale or idéelle).115 For Althusser, the state has two types of apparatuses: the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), which comprise the religious (the system of the different churches), educational (the system of the different public and private schools), family, media, trade union, legal, political (the political system, including the different parties), communications (press, radio, and television) and cultural (literature, the arts, sports, etc.) apparatuses; and the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), which comprise the government, the administration, the army, the police, the courts, and the prisons. The ISAs though seemingly disparate are actually unified by the common ideology of the ruling class that they serve. The educational ISA plays a particularly important role in the reproduction of the system, that is, “is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology.”116 For Althusser, “what the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e., as its dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has in fact replaced in its functions the previously dominant ideological State apparatus, the Church.”117 Moreover, the educational apparatus conceals its ideological function through its alleged neutrality: “an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is . . . lay), where teachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their ‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their ‘liberating’ virtues.”118 “To my knowledge,” comments Althusser, “no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses.”119 Ruling class hegemony over the ISAs helps to ensure the longevity of the RSA. Writes Althusser, “the Repressive State Apparatus functions ‘by violence,’ whereas the Ideological State Apparatus function ‘by ideology,’ ”120 which should be qualified with “primarily,” as the RSA functions secondarily through ideology, and the ISA secondarily through punishment or repression. For Althusser, ideology is manifested through actions that are “inserted into practices.”121 We act out the beliefs given to us to think. Althusser asks us to think of this in terms of Blaise Pascal’s conception of belief, which Althusser summarizes “more or less” as “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”122

115

Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 112. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 105. 117 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 103–4. 118 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 105–6. 119 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 98. 120 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 97. 121 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 114. 122 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 114. 116

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Another thesis, which Althusser calls his “central thesis,” is that “Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects,”123 that is to say, ideology conscripts subjects into ideological discourses. For Althusser, we are all “subjects” of ideology that operates through interpellation, that is, by summoning us to take our places in the social structure. Althusser contends that ideology functions through recruitment: [I]deology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”124 Althusser says that if this “takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round.”125 And, when the individual does turn around, “he becomes a subject” because he recognizes “that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else).”126 For Althusser, the fact that we do not recognize the act of being “hailed” as ideology attests to the power of ideology. State apparatuses are the means through which interpellation takes place. For Althusser, “the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately . . . the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.”127 Althusser’s notion of interpellation explains how ideology calls individuals into place and confers on them their identity. It also shows that as subjects of ideology, we are not free centers of initiative as humanism would have us believe. We exist as subjects only in ideology. We are constituted in ideology as subjects that are responsible, centers of initiative tied to an imaginary identity. Ideologies are systems of meanings that install us in imaginary relations to the real relations in which we live. For Althusser, there is no ideology in general; rather, there exist ideologies set up though their antagonisms with each other. State Ideology does not exist without some opposing ideology, and opposing ideologies are shaped by each other. Finally, for Althusser, we are “always-already subjects,”128 by which he means that we are a subject before we are born. While this might sound paradoxical, Althusser believes that it is not because “individuals are ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects which they always already are.”129 For Althusser, this is “the plain reality, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all.”130 To make this argument, Althusser again appeals to Lacan, specifically his notion of the “Name-of-theFather”:

123

Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 115. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 118. 125 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 118. 126 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 118. 127 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 116. 128 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 119. 129 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 119. 130 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 119. 124

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Everyone knows how much and in what way an unborn child is expected. Which amounts to saying, very prosaically, if we agree to drop the “sentiments,” i.e. the forms of family ideology (paternal/maternal conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected: it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is “expected” once it has been conceived.131 For Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father is the fundamental signifier that permits signification to proceed normally. It both confers identity on human subjects and signifies the “no” of the incest taboo, that is, the Oedipal prohibition.132 Overall, Althusser contends that ideological formations “govern paternity, maternity, conjugality, and childhood: what is it ‘to be a husband,’ ‘to be a father,’ ‘to be a mother’ in our present world?”133 They are ideological formations that substitute for the Real Order that we cannot know, and disguise the Symbolic Order, that is, the real nature of social relations. Moreover, the possibilities for critique of the Symbolic Order of ideology are represented by the Real Order. For Althusser, the psychoanalysis of Lacan provides him with a conceptual field to explore the relationship of the unconscious and language to ideology: “Only since Freud have we come to suspect what listening, and hence what speaking (and keeping silent) means (veut dire); that this ‘meaning’ (vouloir dire) of speaking and listening reveals beneath the innocence of speech and hearing the culpable depth of a second quite different discourse, the discourse of the unconscious.”134 For Althusser, the unconscious of a society is revealed through its ideology. Moreover, the structure of Althusser’s ideology might also be viewed through the structure of Saussure’s linguistics: ideologies are like a langue that remains unconscious in parole, or, alternately, ideologies act as langue, and the subject that is constituted in ideology acts as parole. Lastly, literature, for Althusser, is not simply a form of ideology. Rather, as a type of art, the relationship between literature and ideology “is a very complicated and difficult one.”135 First of all, Althusser does not “rank real art among the ideologies.”136 By “real art,” he means “authentic art,” that is, “not works of an average or mediocre level,”137 which, of course, is a sense of authenticity very different from that of Benjamin. For Althusser, real art “does not replace knowledge in the strict sense, it therefore does not replace knowledge (in the modern sense: scientific knowledge), but what it gives us does nevertheless maintain a specific relationship with knowledge.”138 He describes this relationship as one of “difference,” not “identity”:

131

Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 119. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan III: The Psychoses, 1955–56, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Routledge, 1992). 133 Louis Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, eds. Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 177, n. 4. 134 Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968) (London: New Left Books, 1970), 16. 135 Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 151. 136 Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 151. 137 Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 152. 138 Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 152. 132

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I believe the peculiarity of art is to “make us see” (nous donner à voir), “make us perceive,” “make us feel” something which alludes to reality. . . . What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of “seeing,” “perceiving” and “feeling” (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes.139 As such, “real” literature has a kind of special value akin to Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization or estrangement by allowing us to “see . . . the ideology from which it is born.” Nevertheless, for Althusser, like all ideology, all literature exists in an apparatus, which, in its case, is part of the Ideological State Apparatuses. So, because in the final analysis, these apparatuses—publishing, media, and communications institutions—serve the interests of the ruling class, so too does literature. Ultimately, Althusser does not develop in much detail this “difficult and complex” relationship between literature and ideology. However, it is something that will be taken up by several major contemporary literary and cultural theorists, including Fredric Jameson (3.5) and Slavoj Žižek (4.5), and developed in a number of different directions.

3.5 FREDRIC JAMESON In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson argues for “the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts.”140 To achieve, this we must heed the imperative “Always historicize!”141 Jameson calls this the “moral” of his book, “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought.”142 It is also one of his most important contributions to contemporary literary and cultural theory, whose implications were carried out most explicitly (albeit with a different concept of history) by the New Historicism (5.5). Jameson’s imperative “turns on the dynamics of the act of interpretation and presupposes, as its organizational fiction, that we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself.”143 “Rather,” for him, “texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brandnew—through sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.”144 This object-centered notion of history rejects the position that history can be grasped from the perspective of a single individual, that is, phenomenologically. Rather, for Jameson, there is only one “philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling” notion of history: the one provided by Marxism. For him, it the only notion of history that provides a refuge from the “blind zones in which the individual seeks refuge, in pursuit of [a] purely individual, a merely psychological, project of salvation.”145

139

Althusser, “A Letter on Art,” 152. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 17. 141 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9. 142 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9. 143 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9. 144 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 9. 145 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 20. 140

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“Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it.”146 Marxism liberates us from the refuges of the individual “with the recognition that there is nothing that is not social and historical—indeed, that everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.”147 Jameson regards the political perspective on literary texts as “not some supplementary method, not as an optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the mythcritical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation.”148 In The Political Unconscious, Jameson utilizes Althusser’s theory of structural causality and theory of ideology in an analysis of the early Modernist novels of Honoré de Balzac, George Gissing, and Joseph Conrad. For him, the novel is a source of ideological codes that are accessible through readings of the text’s political unconscious. This method, called dialectical criticism, is accomplished through the deployment of Althusser’s structural causality as a means of interpretation. For Althusser, there are three forms of causality that might be utilized by historical determination: mechanical causality, “the billiard-ball model of cause and effect”149; expressive causality, which “presupposes in principle that the whole in question be reducible to an inner essence, of which the elements of the whole are no more than the phenomenal forms of expression, the inner principle of the essence being present at each point in the whole”—the view that “dominates Hegel’s thought”150; and structural causality, which “can be entirely summed up in the concept of ‘Darstellung,’ the key epistemological concept of the whole Marxist theory of value, the concept whose object is precisely to designate the mode of presence of the structure in its effects, and therefore to designate structural causality itself.”151 For both Althusser and Jameson, the only form of causality in the science of history is structural causality, which they also describe as absent causality because the “cause” comes from “outside” of the effects.152 It is a view that encourages us to look at the world by means of structural effects (or effectivity) that Althusser contends are manifested in both the ISA and the RSA. History on this model is driven by necessity but not the type of historical determinism utilized in classical Marxism. The necessity of absent causality is the necessity of structural relations and the interpellation of the subject by these relations. In sum, for Jameson, “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.”153 Like Althusser, whose Marxist theory is less interested in the analysis of the modes of production than in their effectivity in State Apparatuses, Jameson’s work is focused on politics and culture

Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 19. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 20. 148 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 17. 149 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 25. 150 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 186–9; quoted by Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 24. 151 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, quoted by Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 24. 152 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, quoted by Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 24. 153 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 35. 146 147

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rather than economic analysis. This was particularly in evidence in his approach to postmodernism, wherein he argues that it is not a cultural style, but rather a periodizing concept. In his analysis of postmodernism, Jameson constructs a model that would describe a whole series of different cultural phenomena and at the same time show the ideological function of these phenomena in relation to late capitalism. It is a systematic theory of postmodernism as the dominant that exists at a particular historical moment—with history, of course, defined as absent causality. In this model, postmodernism is said to have features that are characteristic of the cultural logic of late capitalism. According to Jameson, there was a radical break that took place around the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s that marked the end of high modernism. This break is made evident by several factors. One is the institutionalization and canonization of works of high modernism in the university. Another is the emergence of a new type of art that positions itself as a reaction against the older generation of modernists and everything for which they stood. Still another is the rise of poststructuralism in literary and cultural theory (5.0). And finally, this break is in evidence by the arrival of late capitalism as a third and purer stage of capital. Regarding the latter, Jameson follows the general thesis of Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972), which he says “for the first time theorized a third stage of capitalism from a usably Marxist perspective.”154 For Jameson, it was a thesis that “made my own thoughts on ‘postmodernism’ possible, and they are therefore to be understood as an attempt to theorize the specific logic of the cultural production of that third stage, and not as yet another disembodied culture critique or diagnosis of the spirit of the age.”155 Still, the term late capitalism did not originate with Mandel, but rather was first used by the Frankfurt School to refer to the form of capitalism that developed during the modernist period. In Mandel’s view, there are three stages of technological development under capital. The first is market capitalism, which begins in 1848 with the machine production of steam driven motors; the second is monopoly capitalism, which begins in the 1890s with the machine production of electric and combustion motors; and the third is late capitalism (or, alternately, multinational capitalism or consumer capitalism), which begins in the 1940s with the expansion of capital into previously uncommodified areas (including other nations and other areas of life) through machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses. For Jameson, these three stages of technological development under capital correspond (or, are homologous) to three cultural stages: realism (market capitalism); modernism (monopoly capitalism); and postmodernism (late capitalism), wherein aesthetic production has been integrated into commodity production. “Capitalism,” writes Jameson, “is the first genuinely global culture and has never renounced its mission to assimilate everything alien to itself—whether that be the African masks of the time of Picasso, or the little red books of Mao Tse-tung on sale in your corner drugstore.”156 Moreover, multinational capitalism, that is, the rise of American capital on a global scale, entails the colonization of the Third World by the First World, both industrially and culturally.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 400. Mandel’s book was first published as Der Spätkapitalismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972) and then translated into English in 1975. 155 Jameson, Postmodernism, 400. 156 Fredric Jameson, “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism” (1975), in The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 417. 154

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Jameson regards the postmodern as “the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses—what Raymond Williams has usefully termed ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ forms of cultural production—must make their way.”157 According to Williams, at any social formation at any particular moment in history, three different cultural forces are in play. Reactionary and progressive forces are in interrelation with dominant forces such that the latter never attains complete power. Writes Williams, In authentic historical analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific effective dominance. It is necessary to examine how these relate to the whole cultural process rather than only to the selected abstracted dominant system.158 He describes “residual” cultural forces as what “has been effectively formed in the past, but . . . is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past”159 and “emergent” ones as the culture forces where “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created.”160 With regard to the latter, though, Williams concedes that “it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense ‘species-specific’) and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel.”161 Hence, by adopting Williams’s “emergent–dominant–residual” distinction, Jameson’s position on culture is caught somewhere between homogeneity and heterogeneity. “If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant,” contends Jameson, “then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable.”162 In short, for Jameson, the cultural dominant allows for the presence of diverse (or heterogeneous) features which various texts will exhibit in various combinations, but these features make up a cultural force field called the dominant which exercises some degree of cultural hegemony; that is, it dominates the production of culture. Jameson uses the polemic in architecture as a model for what happens in the other arts because the reaction against high modernism in architecture, that is, the International Style, and the discourse on the failure of architectural modernism is most visible in the writings and works of the new architects. He points out that while the features he enumerates as constitutive of postmodernism can be found in the works of artists we think of as modernists, for example, Raymond Roussel and Gertrude Stein, the difference is the social position or reception of these works. Whereas modernist texts were considered scandalous, obscure, subversive, immoral, and anti-social, but are now normative and canonical, postmodern texts which attempt to be oppositional in relation to the old modernism no longer scandalize anyone. Rather, postmodern texts, contends Jameson, are received with complacency.

Jameson, Postmodernism, 6. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121. 159 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122. 160 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 123. 161 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 123. 162 Jameson, Postmodernism, 6. 157 158

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However, Jameson proposes many other features for the postmodern than just our complacent reception of it. Some of them are as follows: (1)

Collapse of High- and Mass-Culture—postmodernism collapses the boundary between high-culture and mass culture by incorporating material from both realms not just as “quotation,” but in their structure and substance.

(2)

Flatness and Depthlessness—postmodernism effects a kind of superficiality or flatness that resists interpretation, that is, is an anti-hermeneutic. Moreover, it effects a kind of addiction to the image or reproduction without a model or referent in the real, that is, the logic of Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra (5.4).

(3)

Repudiation of Models of Depth—postmodernism replaces oppositions such as inside/ outside, appearance/essence, latent/manifest, authenticity/inauthenticity, subject/object, truth/false consciousness, and signifier/signified with notions of practices, discourses, textual play, multiple surfaces, and intertextuality.

(4)

From Work to Text—postmodernism replaces the concept of the work of art with concept of text—recalling Barthes’s distinction.

(5)

Commodity Fetishism—postmodernism commodifies the human subject and body.

(6)

Death of the Subject—postmodernism displaces the themes of anxiety and alienation of the subject with the fragmentation of the subject.

(7)

Pastiche—postmodernism renders individual styles impossible and incorporates previous “styles” as codes to be incorporated in the text along with many other discourses. These previous styles are mimicked, but not in order to be parodic or satiric. Rather, postmodernism is a type of blank parody or imitation of “dead” styles.

(8)

Retro and Nostalgia—postmodernism transforms the past into a series of stereotypical images as in the nostalgia film, e.g., George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). The stylistic connotation of the past replaces “real” history with pseudo-history in texts that leave us “condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.”163

(9)

Time and Affect Schizophrenia—postmodernism breaks down temporality, leaving us to live in a continual present that is a series of unrelated moments where we are not able to imagine the future. Experience of intensities, not memories or development. The materiality of the signifier overwhelms us to the point that language becomes fragmented along with the fragmentation of the subject. Euphoria replaces the older affects of anxiety and alienation.

(10) Collage—in postmodernism culture the perception of radical difference (or collage) becomes a meaning in itself because unity, similarity, and notions of form no longer apply. (11) The Hysterical Sublime—postmodernism is the inability to think or represent the immense communicational and multinational networks of late capitalism. The hysterical sublime is related to Kant’s notion of the sublime wherein the mind cannot represent the cultural

Jameson, Postmodernism, 25.

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forces that shape our existence. The hysterical sublime leads to conspiracy theories and high-tech paranoia in literature and film, and the obsession with representing technology. (12) Hyperspace—postmodernism is where buildings aspire to be total spaces, complete worlds, miniature cities, which corresponds to a new mode of collectivity, but still lacks the Utopian impulse of the International Style. In the hyperspace of the postmodern the human body cannot position itself in the depthlessness, such that it becomes impossible to perceive place in hyperspace. The dislocation and dissociation of hyperspace results in the impossibility of cognitively mapping our position relative to the external world. (13) Loss of Critical Distance—postmodernism results in the loss of all critical distance. All oppositional practices are immediately recuperable such that distance becomes impossible. There is no way to escape the logic of late capitalism as it is a system that is totalizing and global. The features of the postmodern as the cultural dominant under late capitalism are predominately spacial. For Jameson it is important for us to find a way to cognitively map the space of postmodernism because this is necessary in order for effective political change to occur with regard to the logic of late capitalism. A cognitive map would “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”164 However, as the features of postmodernism demonstrate, this is very difficult. To illustrate this, Jameson cites as an example, Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), which “taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, Assertion

Negation

(e.g. life)

(e.g., death)

FIGURE 3: Greimas’s Semiotic Square. Jameson, Postmodernism, 51.

164

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built perspectives) obtain.”165 Thus, without a cognitive mapping of the present, effective political change is not possible. Moreover, the “new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity,”166 comments Jameson. Efforts to contest the dominant ideology under late capital, “even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.”167 Finally, as a way to produce this cognitive mapping, Jameson turns to Greimas’s semiotic square, which he believes can not only provide a map of ideological and narrative closure, but also the emergence in both narrative and historical situations of the new or the unexpected. The four corners of the square (s1, s2, s–1, s–2) represent different positions in the production of meaning. The logical relations between the terms are contradiction and contrariety. However, when put together in the square, they produce a new level of meaning: complementarity (or implication). Whereas the contradiction between “life” and “non-life” and the contrariety between “life” and “death” are not new relations, the relation of “life” to “non-death” as one of implication adds a new level of meaning. When one or more of the terms in the semiotic square do not have a word associated with it (as in the case of “non-life” and “non-death”), a deeper-structural character is said to be revealed. Jameson deploys this square with Lacan’s three orders (4.2) overlain (Imaginary–Symbolic–Real) to reveal even deeper relations in narrative, historical, and ideological situations. Thus, as utilized by Jameson, the semiotic square becomes a productive tool used in the cognitive mapping of the dominant ideological contradictions of the present. An example from him would be the contrariety between “universal” and “particular,” where the complementarity of “particular” is termed “singular” but the complementarity of “universal” is an “empty slot,” “which remains enigmatic and unfilled, mysterious, the object of conjecture and philosophical speculation.”168 Here the semiotic square is able to identify one of the major political enigmas of our time—and points to a site of conjecture and speculation regarding a cognitive map of the present. Another opposition to place in this square is the contrariety between “philosophy” and “theory,” as Jameson contends that philosophy “is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlocking concepts which are its own cause,” and “theory, on the other hand, has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself and its ‘truths’: indeed, always itself complicit in the being of current language, it has only the vocation and never-finished task of undermining philosophy as such, by unraveling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds.”169

Jameson, Postmodernism, 51. Jameson, Postmodernism, 49. 167 Jameson, Postmodernism, 49. 168 Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia,” in An American Utopia: Variations on the Need to Censor Our Dreams, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016), 11–12. 169 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), 59. 165 166

CHAPTER FOUR

Psychoanalytic Theory 4.0 INTRODUCTION Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis, which he says is “the name (1) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (2) of a method (based upon that investigation) for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (3) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline.”1 In addition to being “a procedure,” “a method,” and “a collection,” it is also “a theory”—psychoanalytic theory. Freud’s theory has become one of the most celebrated and controversial of the twentieth century. Moreover, psychoanalytic theory has had a broad and deep influence on many different areas of twentieth-century literary and cultural theory. “The whole of psychoanalytic theory,” writes Freud, “is in fact built up on the perception of the resistance exerted by the patient when we try to make him conscious of his unconscious.”2 This resistance exerted by the patient occurs in a form of psychological analysis which “aims at laying bare the complexes which have been repressed as a result of the painful feelings associated with them, and which produce signs of resistance when there is an attempt to bring them into consciousness.”3 Whereas Shklovsky’s notion of laying bare is one wherein the novelist explicitly makes reference to the structuring technique of their novel, Freud’s notion is one wherein the analyst aims to “lift the veil of amnesia which hides the earliest years of childhood and to bring to conscious memory the manifestations of early infantile sexual life which are contained in them.”4 Though not the same notion, both notions share the aim of “lifting the veil” which respectively shrouds the literary text and the human psyche, that is, the aim of revealing what is hidden. The complexes, fears, and anxieties that are repressed in the unconscious identified by Freud demarcate the conceptual field of psychoanalytic theory. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory provides an account of the human psyche that he developed in the course of his practice as a medical psychologist. As a practicing psychological therapist, Freud found it necessary to develop a hypothesis about human nature in terms of which he could conduct his therapy. He settled upon psychoanalysis after rejecting both hypnosis and hysteria (or, seduction theory) as methods of therapeutic practice. Hypnosis was rejected because he found that what

Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), in Collected Papers, Volume 5, Miscellaneous Papers, 1888–1938, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 107. 2 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 68. 3 Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in Courts of Law” (1906), in Collected Papers, Volume 2, trans. Joan Rivière (London: Hogarth Press, 1948), 22; my emphasis. 4 Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 28. 1

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people say in a hypnoid state, that is “dream-like states of consciousness with diminished capacity for association,”5 provided less information about their unconscious than what they said to the analyst without suggestion. Hysteria, that is, the position that all neuroses are the product of childhood sexual abuse, was rejected when he came to the conclusion that many of the accounts told to him by his patients were not true. Of the latter rejection, though, it has been argued that just the opposite was the case: namely, that Freud gave up on seduction theory not because what his patients were telling him was not true, but because it was true. By covering up his patient’s abuse, the argument goes, he was able to maintain the credibility of his theory and protect his medical practice.6 As Freud saw it, psychoanalysis was a contribution to the science of psychology, which might be traced backward to 1590, when Rudolf Goclenius introduced the term “psychology” for “the science of the soul” in his eponymously titled book—and then forward to 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt established the first experimental laboratory of psychology. The contribution of psychoanalysis—“a depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious”—to science, according to Freud, “consists precisely in having extended research to the region of the mind,”7 extensions that were made possible by identifying the nature and function of the unconscious. Generations of psychoanalysts and psychologists would either take up Freud’s theory or use it as a springboard for their own theories. This group includes Alfred Adler, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Wilhelm Reich. In this chapter, we will take up the thought of Lacan, who, from the perspective of literary and cultural theory, has become one of the most important interpreters of Freud—and whose work has in many ways eclipsed in contemporary impact that of the founder. But there is also Kristeva (5.2), who, in additional to being a psychoanalyst, is also a major poststructuralist philosopher, who will be taken up later. But in addition to influencing the work of psychoanalysts and psychologists, Freud was also an important influence on the hermeneutics of Ricoeur, the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, and the Marxisms of Adorno, Althusser, Marcuse, and Sartre. In addition, his impact can be found in the work of literary and cultural theorists ranging from the performance theory of Judith Butler (7.3) and the feminist theory of Luce Irigaray (6.5) to the poststructuralisms of Jacques Derrida (5.1) and Jean-François Lyotard (5.3). In this chapter, in addition to Lacan, who stated that the purpose of his work was to “return to Freud,” though in applying Saussurean linguistics to an understanding of the unconscious took Freud’s psychoanalytic theory in a radically different direction, we will also take up the work of Slavoj Žižek, who was in turn greatly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis. Like Kristeva, Žižek is also a psychoanalyst, but his work is also noteworthy for his commitment to Marxism. Žižek, the most high-profile and popular Marxist philosopher in the world, is a prolific writer and wideranging thinker. In many ways, his work epitomizes the popular potential of psychoanalytic

5 Sigmund Freud, “The Defence Neuro-Psychoses” (1894), in Collected Papers, Volume 1, trans. Joan Rivière (London: Hogarth Press, 1948), 60. 6 See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). 7 Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 158.

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criticism, that is, the application of psychoanalytic theory to the understanding of literary and cultural texts (including film), to reach a mass audience. Prior to Žižek, however, this distinction was perhaps held by the recently-deceased literary critic, Harold Bloom, whose Freudian-based literary criticism and theory of literary influence is spread throughout his more than fifty books of literary criticism and appreciation as well as hundreds of anthologies on literary and philosophical works and figures he constructed with Chelsea House publishing. While the uses made of psychoanalytic theory by Bloom and Žižek could not be more different, the wide audiences that they have reached is perhaps similar in number, but not international range: Bloom’s primary reach is in the English-speaking world, particularly the US, whereas Žižek’s is the entire world. If Žižek is the most prominent proponent of psychoanalytic theory in the world, then perhaps Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze are its most prominent opponents—or are they? While Guattari and Deleuze follow psychoanalytic theory by offering that all texts are rehearsals of unconscious fantasies, they regard these texts as machines that perform psychic work. Guattari, like Žižek (and Kristeva), is also a psychoanalyst. However, his work is more akin to the so-called anti-psychiatry of David Cooper, R. D. Laing, Michel Foucault (9.1), and others, than to the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan. Described as schizoanalysis, Guattari sought to reinvent both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He sought out Deleuze, who was by then an influential philosopher in his own right, in the summer of 1969. The two agreed to work together to rethink the work of both Freud and Marx in view of the events of May 1968. The result was schizoanalysis and its core concept of the desiring-machine, a very different approach to psychoanalytic theory from the ones articulated by Freud and Lacan. In sum, psychoanalytic theory is a specific contribution to the science of psychology, whose history pre-dates by many centuries the work of Freud. Moreover, psychology is a field with many different theories about the nature and function of the human psyche. Some of those theories have found and continue to find their way into literary and cultural theory. Anti-psychiatry, a term coined by Cooper in 1967, is the view that psychiatric treatment is often more damaging than helpful to patients. A movement that was popular in the 1960s, anti-psychiatry counts Foucault, one of the most important theorists of the second half of the twentieth century, as one of its proponents. There is also more recently the development of positive psychology and happiness studies, two fields that have been working to shift the focus of psychology from mental illness to emotional wellbeing. Martin Seligman’s presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1998 is the widely accepted origin of positive psychology, in which he called on professional psychologists to emphasize wellbeing instead of mental illness. Specifically, Seligman encouraged his colleagues “to shift the focus in psychology from illness, misery, and pessimism to well-being, happiness, and optimism.”8 Whereas work in this area has been the subject of blistering criticism of psychoanalytic theorists such as Žižek, when paired with other areas of literary and cultural theory, for example, cognitive criticism (12.4), affect studies (13.0), and presentism (12.5), it becomes a far more productive form of psychology for utilization in contemporary literary and cultural theory. To be sure, while psychoanalytic criticism is not the only form of psychological

Daniel Horowitz, Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement that Aspired to Transform America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 18.

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criticism, it has been the dominant form of psychological criticism of literary and cultural texts in the twentieth century.

4.1 SIGMUND FREUD In 1922, Freud asserted that the “assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, [and] the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex” are “the principal subject-matter of psycho-analysis and the foundations of its theory.”9 “No one who cannot accept them all,” he states, “should count himself a psycho-analyst.”10 For over a ten-year period, Freud was the sole representative of psychoanalytic theory, with these principles as its “cornerstone.” However, in 1911 and 1913 two divergent movements in psychoanalytic theory took place: one direction, headed by Carl Jung, “divested the Oedipus complex of its real significance by giving it only a symbolic value, and in practice neglected the uncovering of the forgotten and . . . ‘prehistoric’ period of childhood”; the other direction, led by Alfred Adler, while reproducing many factors from psychoanalysis under other names, nevertheless “turned away from the unconscious and the sexual instincts, and endeavored to trace back the development of character and of the neuroses to the ‘will to power,’ which by means of overcompensation strives to check the dangers arising from ‘organ inferiority.’ ”11 Moreover, since the theoretical divergences of Jung and Adler, many others followed. In short, psychoanalytic theory represents a diverse body of work wherein even some of the core tenets of its founder—the Oedipus complex, the unconscious, and sexual instincts—were altered or rejected by his early colleagues. But the practice of adding and subtracting theoretical procedures, methods, and notions was also one that led Freud to both the establishment of psychoanalytic theory and to continuously refine it over the course of his life. Intrigued by earlier work on hysteria (viz., paralyses, faints, deliriums, spells, etc.) using hypnosis by Josef Breuer, Freud convinced him to take it up again after a ten-year hiatus. Their joint studies in this area, published as Studies in Hysteria (1895), yielded two important results: “first, that hysterical symptoms have sense and meaning, being substitutes for normal mental acts; and secondly, that the uncovering of thus unknown meaning is accompanied by the removal of the symptoms.”12 Freud’s early collaboration with Breuer foregrounded the factor of affect, which he defines as “pertaining to the feeling bases of emotion.”13 “[H]ysterical symptoms,” writes Freud, “came into existence when a mental process with a heavy charge of affect was in any way prevented from equalizing that charge by passing along the normal paths leading to consciousness and movement.”14 With treatment, however, “ ‘catharsis’ came about when the path to consciousness was opened and there was a normal discharge of affect.”15 Nevertheless, while Breuer contended that the cathartic treatment of patients was only possible through hypnosis, 9

Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 122. Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 122. 11 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 123–4. 12 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 108. 13 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Knopf, 1939), 217. 14 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 108–9. 15 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 109. 10

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Freud disagreed and abandoned hypnosis as a technique. He found that free association of unhypnotized patients provided all the material needed to “find the path leading to what had been forgotten or warded off.”16 The transition in technique from hypnosis to free association “altered the picture of the treatment so greatly, brought the physician into such a new relation to the patient and produced so many surprising results that it seemed justifiable to distinguish the procedure from the cathartic method by giving it a new name”17—psycho-analysis. Freud regarded his new technique, psychoanalysis, as “an art of interpretation,”18 a description that connects psychoanalysis to the traditions of hermeneutics in the same way that the early technique of catharsis connects it to the thought of Aristotle. The technique was dubbed a triumph for the interpretive art of psychoanalysis when it succeeded in demonstrating that certain common mental acts of normal people, for which no one had hitherto attempted to put forward a psychological explanation, were to be regarded in the same light as the symptoms of neurotics: that is to say, they had a meaning, which was unknown to the subject but which could easily be discovered by analytic means. The phenomena in question were such events as the temporary forgetting of familiar words and names, forgetting to carry out prescribed tasks, everyday slips of the tongue and of the pen, misreadings, losses and mislayings of objects, certain mistakes, instances of apparently accidental self-injury, and finally habitual movements carried out seemingly without intention or in play, tunes hummed “thoughtlessly,” and so on.19 These parapraxes (which are also called Freudian slips) and chance actions are a means of uncovering the unconscious. However, for Freud, they are of secondary importance compared to “the immeasurably more important interpretation of [free] associations,”20 which became even more important when psychoanalysis was applied to dreams. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, which was first published in 1899, demonstrates that “the greater and better part of what we know about the processes in the unconscious mind is derived from the interpretation of dreams.”21 The technique of free association when applied to our own dreams or to those of a patient in analysis results in two types of content: manifest dream-content, which is just the recollected dream; and latent dream-thoughts, which are the “residues of the [previous] day,”22 discovered by interpretation. “By the operation of the dream-work (to which it would be quite incorrect to ascribe any ‘creative’ character) the latent dream-thoughts are condensed in a remarkable way,”23 contends Freud. Namely, “they are distorted by the displacement of psychical intensities, they are arranged with a view of being represented in visual pictures; and besides all of this, before the manifest dream is arrived at, they are submitted to a process of secondary elaboration

16

Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 111. Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 112. 18 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 112. 19 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 113. 20 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 114. 21 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 114. 22 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 114. 23 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 114. 17

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which seeks to give the new product something in the nature of sense and coherence.”24 The dual concepts of condensation and displacement would come to be utilized by a number of literary and cultural theorists, including, most significantly, Lacan (4.2) in his theory of metaphor and metonymy, and Kristeva in her dialectical logic of contradiction (5.2). The motive for the formations of dreams comes from “an unconscious impulse, repressed during the day, with which the day’s residues have been able to establish contact and which contrived to make a wish-fulfillment for itself out of the material of the latent thoughts.”25 Every dream is the fulfillment of both a wish on the part of the unconscious and the wish to sleep. If we disregard the unconscious contribution to the formation of the dream and limit the dream to its latent thoughts, it can represent anything with which waking life has been concerned—a reflection, a warning, an intention, a preparation for the immediate future or . . . the satisfaction of an unfulfilled wish. The unrecognizability, strangeness and absurdity of the manifest dream are partly the result of the translation of the thoughts into a different, so to say archaic, method of expression, but partly the effect of a restrictive, critically disapproving agency in the mind, which does not entirely cease to function during sleep. It is plausible to suppose that the “dreamcensorship,” which we regard as being responsible in the first instance for the distortion of the dream-thoughts into the manifest dream, is a manifestation of the same mental forces which during the day-time had held back or repressed the unconscious wishful impulse.26 Thus, dreams on this model are a compromise-formation resulting from a struggle between an unconscious trend toward wish-fulfillment and a disapproving and repressive trend. It should also be noted that the dream-work also utilizes dream-symbols that are analogous to folklore and mythology, and that these dream-symbols have to be translated by the analyst. By Freud’s account, he rejected the position that all neuroses are the product of childhood sexual abuse (or seduction) because the accounts from his patients all “assumed a uniform character and it became inevitable to bow before the evidence and recognize that at the root of the formation of every symptom there were to be found traumatic [but not necessarily sexually abusive] experiences from early sexual life.”27 The rejection of hysteria (or seduction theory) led him to infer that “neuroses in general are an expression of disturbances in sexual life, [with] the so-called actualneuroses being the consequences (by chemical agency) of contemporary injuries and the psychoneuroses the consequences (by psychical modification) of bygone injuries to a biological function which had hitherto been gravely neglected by science.”28 As Freud writes, the result of the rejection of hysteria was that “sexual trauma stepped into the place of ordinary trauma,” with the latter owing its significance to “an associative or symbolic connection with the former.”29 Nevertheless, Freud’s formative contributions in this area were—and still are—met with, in his words, “tenacious

24

Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 114–15. Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 115. 26 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 115. 27 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 117. 28 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 117. 29 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 117. 25

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skepticism” and “embittered resistance.”30 The areas of contemporary literary and cultural theory where this resistance is most in evidence are feminist theory (6.0), LGBTQ+ theory (7.0), and affect studies (13.0). Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality would serve as his account of the traumatic experiences from early sexual life. However, for Freud, these traumatic experiences are standard aspects of the development of the libido, that is, the sexual instinct, which is made up of component instincts sourced to various organs of the body. Freud proposes three phases for the development of the libido: the oral phase, which is a pre-genital one, focuses on the desire to use one’s lips and mouth; the sadistic-anal phase, which is also a pre-genital one, is one “in which the anal zone and the component instinct of sadism [that is, obtaining sexual pleasure through the infliction of suffering] are particularly prominent,” and “the difference between the sexes is represented by the difference between active and passive”;31 and the phallic phase, where there is a “primacy of the genital zones,”32 and “in which for both sexes the male organ (and what corresponds to it in girls) attains an importance which can no longer be overlooked.”33 During the oral stage, the oral component instinct finds satisfaction by attaching itself to the sating of the desire for nourishment; and its object is the mother’s breast. It then detaches itself, becomes independent and at the same time auto-erotic, that is, it finds an object in the child’s own body. Others of the component instincts also start by being auto-erotic and are not until later diverted on an external object. It is a particularly important fact that the component instincts belonging to the genital zone habitually pass through a period of intense auto-erotic satisfaction. The component instincts are not all equally serviceable to the final genital organization of the libido; some of them (for instance, the anal components) are consequently left aside and suppressed, or undergo complicated transformations.34 In the early years of the childhood of boys, which is usually between two and five, sexual impulses converge on the mother as an object. This choice of an object, coupled with hostility toward another object, the father, is the basic content of the Oedipus complex, which, for Freud, “is of the greatest importance in determining the final shape of his [that is, the boy’s] erotic life.”35 And, if this were not enough, “the beginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex” and “the nucleus of all neuroses as far as our present knowledge of them goes is [also this] complex.”36 Freud describes the Oedipus complex as one in which he desires his mother and would like to get rid of his father as being a rival, [and which] develops naturally from the phase of his phallic sexuality. The threat of castration compels

30

Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 117. Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 119. 32 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 119. 33 Sigmund Freud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (1933), in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 98–9. 34 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 119–20. 35 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 120. 36 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Vintage, 1946), 202. 31

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him, however, to give up that attitude. Under the impression of the danger of losing his penis, the Oedipus complex is abandoned, repressed and, in most normal cases, entirely destroyed, and a severe super-ego is set up as its heir.37 For Freud, the role of castration in the Oedipus complex, as noted above, is also linked to Sophocles’ tragedy. Freud says that “the blinding with which Oedipus punished himself after discovery of his crime is, by the evidence of dreams, a symbolic substitute for castration.”38 It is also worth noting that the Oedipus complex is not just reserved for boys. It also occurs in girls; however it “is almost the opposite” in girls to what it is in boys. Writes Freud, The castration complex prepares for the Oedipus complex instead of destroying it; the girl is driven out of her attachment to her mother through the influence of her envy for the penis and she enters the Oedipus situation as though into a haven of refuge. In the absence of fear of castration the chief motive is lacking which leads boys to surmount the Oedipus complex. Girls remain in it for an indeterminate length of time; they demolish it late and, even so, incompletely. In these circumstances the formation of the super-ego must suffer; it cannot attain the strength and independence which give it its cultural significance, and feminists are not pleased when we point out to them the effects of this factor upon the average feminine character.39 For Freud, these Oedipus complexes (of which the female Oedipus complex is also called the Electra Complex)40 mark the first time that “the differences between the sexes find psychological expression.”41 According to Freud, in the course of psychoanalytic treatment, a special emotional relation is regularly formed between the patient and the physician. This goes far beyond rational limits. It varies between the most affectionate devotion and the most obstinate enmity and derives all of its characteristics from earlier erotic attitudes of the patient’s which have become unconscious.42 Freud calls this emotional relation transference, and says it serves as additional proof “that the motive forces behind the formation of neurotic symptoms are of a sexual nature.”43 One of the central distinctions in Freudian psychoanalysis, as already noted, is the that between conscious and unconscious. However, there is also a third distinction: preconscious. The preconscious is that which is “latent, which is unconscious only descriptively, not in the dynamic sense,” whereas “we restrict the term unconscious to the dynamically unconscious repressed; so that now we have three terms, conscious (Cs), preconscious (Pcs), and unconscious (Ucs), whose sense is no longer

Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” (1933), in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 129. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), 92, n. 11. 39 Freud, “Femininity,” 129. 40 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 99. 41 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 88–9. 42 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 122. 43 Freud, “Psycho-Analysis” (1922), 122. 37 38

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purely descriptive.”44 However, this tripartite division would become the more common one, that is, the “new topography,” the ego, the id, and the superego. Freud says that the ego controls voluntary movement and that its task is self-preservation. It is “principally determined by the individual’s own experience, that is to say by accidental and current events.”45 He describes it as being developed out of the “cortical layer”46 of the id, which is the great reservoir of the libido and the “core of our being.”47 The id, which has no direct relationship with the external world, only obeys one principle, the pleasure principle. The ego seeks to distinguish itself from the id through a variety of forms of repression. “The sole quality that rules in the id is that of being unconscious,”48 comments Freud. “Id and unconscious are as intimately united as ego and preconscious; indeed, the former connection is even more exclusive.”49 Finally, the superego is “the heir to the Oedipus complex and only arises after that complex has been disposed of.”50 It arises from an identification with the father and is “the successor and representative of the parents (and educators) who superintended the actions of the individual in his first years of life; it perpetuates their functions almost without change.”51 In sum, the superego is “the self-criticizing part of the mind out of which the conscious develops.”52 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which was first published in 1920, Freud introduces the death instinct: “If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the goal of all life is death,’ and, looking backwards, that ‘what was inanimate existed before what is living.’ ”53 He would later formally link the “love instinct” (Eros) to the “death instinct” (Thanatos). Together, they are the only basic instincts. “The aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish even greater unities and to preserve them thus—in short, to bind together; the aim of the second, on the contrary, is to undo connections and so to destroy things.”54 For Freud, “the final aim of the destructive instinct is to reduce living things to an inorganic state.”55 Along with these two primal forces is the “pleasure principle,” which Freud describes as “a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it is to free the mental apparatus from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation in it constant or to keep it as low as possible.”56 As to whether the pleasure principle “requires a reduction, or perhaps ultimately the extinction, of the tension of the instinctual needs (that is, a state of Nirvana) leads to problems that are still unexamined in the relations between the pleasure principle and the two primal forces, Eros and the death instinct.”57

Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), ed. James Strachey, trans. Joan Rivière (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 5. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 17. 46 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 15. 47 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 108. 48 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 43. 49 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 43. 50 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 121. 51 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 184. 52 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 218. 53 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1950), 50. 54 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 20. 55 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 20. 56 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 86. 57 Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 109. 44 45

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4.2 JACQUES LACAN “If psycho-analysis is to be constituted as the science of the unconscious,” observes Lacan, “one must set out from the notion that the unconscious is structured like a language.”58 The context for this comment was a seminar series from 1964 on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. It would be the eleventh annual seminar he gave in Paris from 1952 to 1980, and he thanks his friend, Lévi-Strauss, who he is “delighted to see here today and who knows how precious for me this evidence of his interest in my work is—in work that has developed in parallel with his own.”59 This expression of gratitude is both a public acknowledgment of the role of structuralism in the development of his psychoanalytic theory, as Lévi-Strauss is regarded as its originator, and a sign of one of the major divergences of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory from that of Freud, its originator, whose scientific models were in the life sciences, that is, the study of living organisms and life processes, rather than linguistic science. To many professional psychoanalysts, Lacan’s version of psychoanalytic theory was not only unorthodox but heretical to the doctrines of its major professional organizations. So much so that in 1953, Lacan and his followers were expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association for what were termed deviant practices. Nevertheless, for the next decade or so, Lacan engaged in a project that might be called the “return to Freud,” where he claims that the discoveries he made regarding structure and language with respect to the unconscious were actually discoveries made by Freud, who did not have access to the linguistic theory of Saussure or the structuralism of LéviStrauss. While theoretically it might be argued that Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory is only possible against the backdrop of the discoveries of Freud, his clinical practices deviated enough from professional norms that in 1963—after two years of negotiations with representatives of the International Psychoanalytical Association—he was stricken from the list of training analysts of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). Stripped of the right to train students, Lacan was then obliged to break with the SFP, which itself was dissolved in 1965. The resources and membership of the SFP was then split between the two new bodies, the Association Psychanalytique de France and the École Freudienne de Paris, founded by Lacan. The long and short of this is that while the concepts he lectured on in 1964—the unconscious, repetition, transference, and drive—had the same names as some of Freud’s major concepts, Lacan’s approach to them (and most others in the Freudian lexicon) was very different. Still, as Jameson put it, “Lacan’s work must be read as presupposing the entire content of classical Freudianism, otherwise it would simply be another philosophy or intellectual system.”60 “The linguistic materials are not intended,” continues Jameson, “to be substituted for the sexual ones; rather we must understand [Lacan’s work] as an attempt to create mediations between libidinal analysis and the linguistic categories, to provide, in other words, a transcoding scheme that allows us to speak of both within a common conceptual framework.”61

58 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1973), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 203. 59 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 2. 60 Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1977; revised 1988), in The Jameson Reader, eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 96. 61 Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” 96–7.

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One of the central differences between Lacan and Freud are their approaches to psychosexual development. For Lacan, psychosexual development involves the subject’s entry into language and emergence into consciousness. At the earliest stage of this development, which Lacan calls the Imaginary Order, there is no distinction for the infant between self and Other. The infant, who is no older than six months of age at this point, is a chaotic mix of feelings, images, perceptions, and needs. At this stage, the infant identifies itself with its surroundings and its biological dependence on the mother, who meets its biological and instinctual needs. The infant at this stage also starts to become fragmented into erogenous zones—specifically, mouth, anus, penis, and vagina—because of the attention given by the mother to these organs of the body. Because there is no boundary between self and Other, everything that is experienced by the infant is pleasurable. This earliest stage of existence in the Imaginary Order is when the subject is closest to the pure materiality of experience, or what Lacan will term the Real. The Imaginary Order exists in the preverbal, that is, it exists before the entry of the subject into speech and language. However, between six and eighteen months of age the infant becomes able to recognize “his own image in a mirror.”62 Whereas a monkey at the same age can also recognize their image in a mirror, they quickly tire of the experience. Infants, however, react differently. “Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up,” observes Lacan, “and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial . . . he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, bring back an instantaneous aspect of the image.”63 Termed by Lacan as the mirror stage, it is “an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image—whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.”64 The child’s identification with its own image, what Lacan calls the Ideal-I, is a primordial form of identification that “discloses libidinal dynamism,” one that occurs “before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.”65 According to Lacan, the mirror stage “situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone.”66 The mirror stage, which also exists before the entry of the subject into speech and language, creates an ideal version of the self that will later come to play a role in the narcissistic phantasies of the subject. The formation of the “Ideal-I” in the mirror stage, which is a bounded and simplified self, contrasts greatly with the unbounded and chaotic world of the infant. Also, the gaze of the mirror stage will come to refer to the uncanny sense that the object of our eye’s look is somehow looking back at us. Lacan will associate the affect of this as akin to that of the castration complex. While we may believe that we are in control of the eye’s look, Lacan shows that this is not the case because pure materiality of experience, or what Lacan will term the Real, always exceeds the structures of the next stage of development after the Imaginary Order, that is, the Symbolic Order.

Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (1949), in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 2. 63 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 2; my emphasis. 64 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 2; my emphasis. 65 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 2. 66 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” 2. 62

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For Lacan, the Symbolic Order emerges with the acquisition of language. The infant, who is between eighteen months and four years of age, interacts with the world through various forms of representation and structures of meaning characterized by the rules and constructs of language acquisition. It is here that the system of language described by Saussure’s linguistics begins to play a central role in the development of the infant. For example, in Saussure’s system, father only makes sense through an internal linguistic logic of difference, that is, father defined with or against other terms in the system, including mother, me, and law. Lacan identifies the Symbolic Order with the Law of the Father. However, because the entire linguistic system of Saussure that Lacan draws upon makes no reference to a reality outside of the system, father in the Symbolic Order has no relationship to a physical father. Rather, father is part of a network of signifiers that include mother, phallus, and law. The subject that comes about in the Symbolic Order is a fragmented self that desires the undivided self of the Imaginary Order but can never achieve again this wholeness. Rather, what the subject is left with are only illusory representations of wholeness in others that the subject mistakes for the ultimate Other. The other with a small “o” here is what Lacan terms the object petit a, whereas the Other with a big “O” names the social order, the symbolic realm where meaning happens. For Lacan, the Other is deeply implicated in the production of my desire. As Žižek describes Lacan’s view, “the problem with human desire is that . . . it is always ‘desire of the Other’ in all the senses of the term: desire for the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what the Other desires.”67 The Other is the unattainable source of desire for wholeness, which is a kind of transcendental signifier for the manifestation of desire. The Other is also within the realm of the inarticulable Real and underlies the limitations of representation. However, as there is no “Other of the Other,” there is no final guarantee of the Symbolic Order. There are just contingent and fragile points of stability. This “lack” in the Other allows the Symbolic Order to function and offers a way of thinking an outside or beyond the Symbolic Order. Ideology works by covering over this “lack” in the Other by phantasmatically projecting the possibility of wholeness. So, whereas the Other is the ultimate unattainable desire, the object petit a is the object on which the subject projects their desire—one that is characterized as the unattainable object of desire. Finally, there is the order of the Real that is only accessible to us in fleeting moments of joy and terror he terms jouissance—a notion that is very difficult to capture descriptively. Jouissance is the only possible way out of subjectivity, language, and the Symbolic Order of the phallus. Writes Lacan commentator Néstor Braunstein, “If desire is fundamentally lack, lack in being, jouissance is positivity, it is a ‘something’ lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure.”68 “ It is a plus,” he continues, “a sensation that is beyond pleasure.”69 Jouissance is a sort of illusion that affords an out-of-language experience, or as some contend, just a case of the Imaginary mistaking the Symbolic for the Real. The order of the Real is beyond both the self-projection of the Imaginary Order and the representation and structure of the Symbolic Order. The Real is the order of the unattainable

Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 87. Néstor Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. JeanMichel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 104. 69 Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” 104. 67 68

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materiality of existence and primal needs—one that “resists symbolization absolutely.” Lacan locates the “high point” of “the feeling of the real . . . in the pressing manifestation of an unreal, hallucinatory reality.”70 As such, human existence is distanced from the order of the Real, and for Lacan can be located somewhere between the desire for the self of the Imaginary Order and the fragmented self of the Symbolic Order. In Lacan, the Oedipus complex is mapped onto the acquisition of language. The phallus signifies all that the subject loses with the acquisition of language. It is neither an organ of the body, an object, or a fantasy. It signifies the power, authority, and rationality associated with the Name-of-the Father, the fundamental and transcendental signifier that permits signification to proceed normally. Name-of-the Father both confers identity on human subjects and signifies the “no” of the incest taboo, that is, the Oedipal prohibition.71 It is analogous to the knowledge and laws that control our lives. As such, Lacan reinterprets the tragedy of Oedipus to show the conflict between happiness and knowledge: [Oedipus] doesn’t know that in achieving happiness, both conjugal happiness and that of his job as king, of being the guide to the happiness of the state, he is sleeping with his mother. One might therefore ask what the treatment he inflicts on himself means. Which treatment? He gives up the very thing that captivated him. In fact, he has been duped, tricked by reason of the fact that he achieved happiness. Beyond the sphere of the service of good and in spite of the complete success of this service, he enters into the zone in which he pursues his desire.72 For Lacan, the tragedy of Oedipus is not the desire for his mother, but rather his desire to know. Happiness then leads Oedipus to pursue the desire to know to its end, which then leaves him “to deal with the consequence of that desire that led him to go beyond the limit, namely the desire to know.”73 “He has learned,” comments Lacan, “and still wants to learn something more.”74 Ultimately, for Lacan, “in a sense Oedipus did not suffer from the Oedipus complex.”75 “He simply killed a man,” continues Lacan, “whom he didn’t know was his father.”76 Acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father by the male subject entails knowledge of his systemic relation to others and the denial of sexual needs. However, the socialization of females differs from males for Lacan. Whereas the male subject experiences the castration complex, whereby he gives up the plenitude of bodily drives in order to access the symbolic power of the phallus, the female subject does not have the same experience. The female subject is both more full than the male because she does not fully experience the loss of the penis, and less full than the male because she

70 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 66. 71 See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan III: The Psychoses, 1955–56, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Routledge, 1992). 72 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 304. 73 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 305. 74 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 305. 75 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 304. 76 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 304.

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can never fully access the phallus. While both the male and female subjects are defined by a lack, it is different for each. For Lacan, the role of women is to serve as object petit a through which man constitutes himself in the Other. Still, none of this means that Lacan regards women as inferior. Rather, his position is that they are subjected: The fact that the woman is thus bound up in an order of exchange in which she is object is really what accounts for the fundamentally conflictual character, I wouldn’t say without remedy, of her position—the symbolic order literally subdues her, transcends her . . . For her, there’s something insurmountable, let us say unacceptable, in the fact of being placed in the position of an object in the symbolic order, to which, on the other hand, she is entirely subjected no less than the man. It is indeed because she has a relation of the second degree to this symbolic order that the god is embodied in man or man in the god, except for conflict, of course, there is always conflict.77 Lacan’s commentary on feminine sexuality is intended to be a contribution to a field ignored by Freud, who Lacan says, “argues that there is no libido other than masculine.”78 At the foundation of his view on feminine sexuality is the belief that sexual difference is assigned according to whether the subject possesses a phallus. Thus, for Lacan, writes Jacqueline Rose, “this means not that anatomical difference is sexual difference (the one as strictly deducible from the other), but that anatomical difference comes to figure sexual difference, that is, it becomes the sole representative of what that difference is allowed to be.”79 Finally, even though “the unconscious is structured like a language,” its signifier is not latent, but is always manifest. In other words, the signifier or “letter” of the unconscious is always in plain sight like the “purloined letter” of Edgar Allen Poe. However, because the signifier (S) is always in plain sight, that which it signifies or creates in the act of signification—the signified (s)—is not. This leads Lacan to propose the algorithm S/s, which places that which is signified below the signifier—a reformulation of Saussure’s linguistic sign. For Lacan, the “topography” of the unconscious is defined by this algorithm:

FIGURE 4: The signifier over the signified is Lacan’s algorithm for the topology of the unconscious. Source: Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 149.

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 262. 78 Jacques Lacan, Encore (1972–3); cited by Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction-II,” in Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, Feminine Sexuality, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 43. 79 Rose, “Introduction-II,” 42. 77

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For Lacan, “this primordial distinction goes well beyond the debate over the arbitrariness of the sign.”80 Lacan visually represents his formula with the classic (but faulty) diagram of Saussure’s “tree”:

FIGURE 5: Lacan’s diagram of Saussure’s “tree.” Source: Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 151.

In addition, he provides another diagram of his formula:

FIGURE 6: Lacan’s diagram of how the signifier enters the signified. Source: Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 151. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” (1957), in Écrits, 149.

80

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Here, in Figure 6, “we see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier concerned in the experiment, that is, by doubling a noun through the mere juxtaposition of two terms whose complementary meanings ought apparently to reinforce each other, a surprise is produced by an unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning.”81 What the diagram shows is that there is no direct exchange between signifier and signified, that is, “the illusion that the signifier answer to the function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever.”82 Additionally, it shows “how in fact the signifier enters the signified, namely, in a form which, not being immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality.”83 If this is all seems too “contrived,” then Lacan asks us to consider “a memory of childhood”:84 A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. “Look,” says the brother, “we’re at Ladies!”; “Idiot!” replies his sister, “Can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”85 For Lacan, “the rails in this story materialize the bar in the Saussurean algorithm”86 in that the boy sees “Ladies” and the girl sees “Gentlemen.” “For these children,” comments Lacan, “Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same country and neither can compromise on its own superiority with detracting from the glory of the other.”87 For Lacan, this story and its diagram are sexuality, the phallus, and the unconscious as language. It reveals how each sex is placed in a structure through language that they are unable to see: “two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings” that “are actually the same country.”88 None of this is latent, argues Lacan, it is all manifest—all in plain sight.

4.3 HAROLD BLOOM Bloom argues that the task of the critic is to uncover the repressed influences of the author’s predecessors. Even though these repressed influences are arrived at through a process that utilizes Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Bloom does not consider his approach to the criticism of poetry “Freudian literary criticism.”89 To say that a poem’s true subject is its repression of the precursor poem is not to say that the later poem reduces to the process of that repression. On a strict Freudian view, a good poem is a sublimation, and not a repression. Like any work of substitution that replaces the gratification of

81

Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 151. Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 150. 83 Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 151. 84 Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 151. 85 Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 152. 86 Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 152. 87 Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 152. 88 Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” 152. 89 Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 25. 82

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prohibited instincts, the poem, as viewed by the Freudians, may contain antithetical effects but not unintended or counterintended effects. In the Freudian valorization of sublimation, the survival of those effects would be flaws in the poem. But poems are actually stronger when their counterintended effects battle most incessantly against their overt intentions.90 For Freud, sublimation is the “process . . . through which the powerful excitations from individual sources of sexuality are discharged and utilized in other spheres,”91 whereas the essence of repression “lies simply in the function of rejecting and keeping something out of consciousness.”92 “Through repression,” writes Freud, “the ego accomplishes the exclusion from consciousness of the idea which was the carrier of an unwelcome impulse.”93 “Analysis frequently demonstrates,” continues Freud, “that the idea has been retained as an unconscious formation.”94 Thus, for Bloom, the critic must deal with repression in order to understand literature; that is, the task of the critic is to locate the works of precursors that have been retained as unconscious formations. Bloom uses repression as the center of his theory of literature instead of sublimation because he believed that the latter concept had played itself out whereas the former was Freud’s new word and vision. For Freud, sublimation was “the highest human achievement,” and one that “allies him to Plato and to the entire moral traditions of both Judaism and Christianity,”95 comments Bloom. Nevertheless, “[t]o equate emotional maturation with the discovery of acceptable substitutes may be pragmatic wisdom, particularly in the realm of Eros, but this is not the wisdom of the strong poets.”96 For Bloom, if sublimation worked for strong poets, it would only place and organize the dead poet. Repression, however, allows the dead poets to return and speak our most secret desires which we are loathe to recognize except in new tropes, that is, figures of thought wherein words take on a meaning other than the standard one. Thus, for Bloom, “the proper use of Freud, for the literary critic, is not so to apply Freud (or even revise Freud) as to arrive at an Oedipal interpretation of poetic history.”97 This Oedipal interpretation regards poems as “defensive processes in constant change, which is to say that poems themselves are acts of reading.”98 For Bloom, poems are not things, psyches, renewable archetypes, or “architectonic units of balanced stresses,” and in studying these poems we are not “studying the mind, nor the Unconscious, even if there is an unconscious.”99 Considering that Freud believed that psychoanalytic theory is “built up on the perception of the resistance exerted by the patient when we try to make him conscious of his unconscious,”100 Bloom’s latter claim squarely puts his literary criticism in tension with psychoanalytic theory—similar to the way that Freud’s work might be regarded in tension with biology.

Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 25. Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905), trans. A. A. Brill (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), 94. 92 Sigmund Freud, “Repression” (1915), Collected Papers, Volume 4, Papers on Metapsychology and Applied Psycho-Analysis, trans. Joan Rivière (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 86. 93 Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety (1926), trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1936), 17. 94 Freud, The Problem of Anxiety, 17. 95 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 9. 96 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 9. 97 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 25. 98 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 26. 99 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 26. 100 Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), 68. 90 91

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What Bloom believes we are studying as literary critics who focus on repression is a “kind of labor that has its own latent principles, principles that can be uncovered and then taught systematically.”101 For Bloom, these principles reveal strong poems as “a dance of substitutions, a constant breaking-of-the-vessels, as one limitation undoes a representation, only to be restituted in its turn by a fresh representation.”102 “Every strong poem,” writes Bloom “has known implicitly what Nietzsche taught us to know explicitly: that there is only interpretation, and that every interpretation answers an earlier interpretation, and then must yield to a later one.”103 Along with Freud, Nietzsche is the other “prime influence” on Bloom’s “theory of influence,” particularly his On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), which Bloom says “is the profoundest study available to me of the revisionary and ascetic strains in the aesthetic temperament.”104 For Bloom, repression is a primal struggle between a young “citizen of poetry,” which he calls an ephebe105 (in ancient Greece, a young man of eighteen to twenty years undergoing military training), and an old master, who is both a strong poet and a precursor. However, the primal scene of this struggle does not take us back to the primal scene of the Oedipus complex, but rather to what he calls the Scene of Instruction, “a six-phased scene that strong poems must will to overcome, by repressing their own freedom into patterns of a revisionary misinterpretation.”106 Bloom’s Scene of Instruction is described as follows: a Primal Scene of Instruction [is] a model for the unavoidable imposition of influence. The Scene—really a complete play, or process—has six stages through which the ephebe emerges: election (seizure by the precursor’s power); covenant (a basic agreement of poetic vision between precursor and ephebe); the choice of a rival inspiration (e.g., Wordsworth’s Nature vs. Milton’s Muse); the self-presentation of the ephebe as a new incarnation of the “Poetical Character”; the ephebe’s interpretation of the precursor; and the ephebe’s revision of the precursor. Each of these stages then becomes a level of interpretation in the reading of the ephebe’s poem.107 This six-stage “birth” cycle of the strong poet—one that is analogous to the primal scene of Oedipus—is repeated in each part of a six-part revisionary “life” cycle of the strong poet. For Bloom, the six revisionary ratios that comprise the life cycle of the strong poet are: (1) Clinamen, which is a poetic misreading that appears as a corrective movement in the poem implying that “the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves”;108 (2) Tessera, which is completion and antithesis wherein a “poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough”;109 (3) Kenosis, which is “a breaking-device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyches employ

Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 25. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 26. 103 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 26. 104 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 8. 105 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 10. 106 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 26. 107 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 27. This summary is attributed by Bloom to Thomas Frosch. 108 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14. 109 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14. 101 102

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against repetition compulsions,” wherein the later poet, “apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor’s poem-of-ebbing that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems”;110 (4) Daemonization, which is “a movement towards a personalized Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s Sublime”;111 (5) Askesis, a movement of self-purgation that intends the attainment of a state of solitude which is attained by yielding part of his own “human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others, including the precursor”;112 and (6) Apophrades, or the return of the dead, wherein the “later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first sight we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios.”113 For Bloom, each of the six stages of the life-cycle movement (viz., the Clinamen–Tessera– Kenosis–Daemonization–Askesis–Apophrades sequence) of the later poet is a multifaceted agon, that is, an intellectual conflict or apparent competition of ideas, that Bloom’s Scene of Instruction details. But while each poem can be seen as primarily either a Clinamen, Tessera, Kenosis, Daemonization, Askesis, or Apophrades poem (as for example, in the case of T. S. Eliot, with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” [1917] as a Clinamen poem, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” [1920] as Tessera, The Waste Land [1922] as Kenosis, The Hollow Men [1925] as Daemonization, Ash-Wednesday [1930] as Askesis, and Four Quartets [1935–42] as Apophrades), each poem as read repeats the entire revisionary “life” cycle. The “wheel” mentioned above is a double one: the inner wheel is the individual poem and the poet; and the outer wheel is the general life cycle. After agon, most of the revisionary machinery goes away so that what is left is the basic revisionary interplay between the returning tropes of the master poet and those of the would-be master such that the master’s tropes appear as haunted by the would-be master’s revisionary variants. Bloom compares the life cycle of the would-be-master poet to that of the blind Oedipus “on the path to oracular godhood.”114 Comments Bloom, “the strong poets have followed [Oedipus] by transforming their blindness towards their precursors into the revisionary insights of their own work.”115 Bloom’s position here is essentially a humanist one regarding how new poems originate from old ones. The ephebe clears imaginative space through creative misreadings of strong poets of the past. “It is only by repressing creative ‘freedom,’ through the initial [or primal] fixation of influence, that a person can be reborn as a poet,” comments Bloom. “And,” he continues, “only by revising that repression can a poet become and remain strong.”116 In short, only strong poets, that is, “major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death,”117 can overcome the anxiety of influence. Lesser poets, for Bloom, merely “idealize.”118 “Poetry,

Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 14–15. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 15. 112 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 15. 113 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 15–16; my emphasis. 114 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 10. 115 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 10. 116 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 27. 117 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 5. 118 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 5. 110 111

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revisionism, and repression verge upon melancholy identity,” concludes Bloom, “an identity that is broken afresh by every new strong poem, and mended afresh by the same poem.”119 In claiming that poems are not things, Bloom is pushing back on the notion that a poem is an organic whole, in the way, for example, that the New Criticism regarded them. Rather, he says that they are “only words that refer to other words, and those words refer to still other words, and so on, into the densely overpopulated world of literary language.”120 “A poem is not writing,” he continues, “but rewriting, and though a strong poem is a fresh start, such a start is a starting-again.”121 While Bloom spent much of his career aiming to distinguish his work from the likes of Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren and the legacies of the New Criticism, his work has more in common with it than the cultural and gender studies, and ideological criticism, that he often attacks. His critical disagreements with T. S. Eliot, whose work is widely championed by the New Criticism, center in part on Eliot’s “scorn for Emerson,” whom Bloom regards as the Ursuppe of American literature: everything that is great about American literature stems back to Emerson—and everything that is not so great about it ignores or rejects Emerson. Bloom views Eliot’s scorn for Emerson “so illinformed that some personal bias has to be noted in it”122 Though Eliot’s poetry “ravished” Bloom’s ear when he was a “child,” his prose “still displeases [him].”123 The complexities of Bloom’s love–hate relationship with Eliot serves as a thin line that distances his work from the New Criticism. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, the joint devotion to the aestheticism of Bloom and the New Critics has drawn their work closer together in the historical imagination of the critical tradition. Bloom was one of the most well-read, original, and prolific critics of any generation. He was also a literary industry who edited hundreds of anthologies for Chelsea House and who produced scores of popular literary books over a ten year period in late twentieth- and early-twenty-first century, with titles such as The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), How to Read and Why (2000), Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages (2001), and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003)—until his death in 2019. In these works, many written for a general audience, Bloom’s critical gift is reduced to pronouncements of “greatness” or “canonicity,” distantly underwritten by his theory of influence. His work here in defense of the literary tradition often put him at odds with other critics who sought to diversify the canon along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In both his literary criticism and his theory, however, Bloom steadfastly refused to bring in considerations of intersectional issues (8.4) such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. This is only mentioned here because Bloom frequently berated others for their socially and politically informed criticism—criticism that since at least the mid-1970s brought a whole new perspective on the literary canon. Bloom would have nothing of this “new” canon. Passing growls at political correctness are commonplace in his writing (e.g., of Marianne Moore, “Some day she will remind us also of what current cultural politics obscure: that any distinction between poetry written by women or poetry by men is a mere polemic, unless it follows upon an initial distinction between

Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 27. Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 3. 121 Bloom, Poetry and Repression, 3. 122 Harold Bloom, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, ed. David Mikics (New York: Library of America, 2019), 213. 123 Bloom, The American Canon, 213. 119 120

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good and bad poetry”).124 Plentiful too were ad hoc attacks on various forms of contemporary literary theory (e.g., of Toni Morrison, who is described as “a self-proclaimed African American Marxist and feminist”125 in whose work he “hear[s] a totalizing ideology,” but believes that “to read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all”).126 Bloom’s lifelong model for his criticism is Samuel Johnson, who taught him “that criticism, as a literary art, belongs to the ancient genre of wisdom writing.”127 “The deepest lesson,” he learned from Johnson, “is that any authority of criticism as a literary genre must depend on the human wisdom of the critic, not upon the wrongness or rightness of either theory or praxis.”128 Bloom also believed, following Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” (1890), that “the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul.”129 For Bloom, just as for Wilde, this type of criticism is both “more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself,” and “more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real not vague.”130 But, by Wilde’s own contention, the “highest criticism” is also merely “autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.”131 Mix Johnson and Wilde along with some Emerson, Ruskin, Pater, William Hazlitt, William James, and Kenneth Burke, and you have Bloom’s self-professed form of criticism—criticism that ultimately is accountable only to him. Bloom spent a lifetime in search of revelation through literature. As a type of secular rabbi, the religion of literature took him on an inward journey through readings of the words of others to a discovery of his own humanity. His literary criticism amply demonstrates that high literature can be a religion that brings richness to individual lives, but the cost of it is turning your back on the problems of society and the world. For Bloom, literature ends when its bewilderment ceases for him: I must have been nine or ten when I first read Shakespeare. I went from Julius Caesar; which I almost understood, on to Hamlet, where I was both fascinated and baffled. Hamlet still changes for me each time I return to it. How can you come to the end of it? Dante’s Paradiso still defeats me. Old age has not reconciled me to it. I am a Jew who evades normative Judaism. My religion is the appreciation of high literature. Shakespeare is the summit. Revelation for me is Shakespeare or nothing.132 “Criticism,” states Bloom, “is as much a series of metaphors for the acts of loving what we have read as for the acts of reading themselves.”133 “I am an experiential and personalizing literary critic,” he writes, “which certainly rouses up enmity, but I go on believing that poems matter only if we matter.”134

Bloom, The American Canon, 203–4. Bloom, The American Canon, 386. 126 Bloom, The American Canon, 388. 127 Harold Bloom, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 170. 128 Bloom, Possessed by Memory, 170. 129 Bloom, Possessed by Memory, epigram; Bloom citing Wilde. 130 Bloom, Possessed by Memory, epigram; Bloom citing Wilde. 131 Bloom, Possessed by Memory, epigram; Bloom citing Wilde. 132 Bloom, Possessed by Memory, 144. 133 Bloom, The American Canon, 174. 134 Bloom, The American Canon, 170. 124 125

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4.4 FÉLIX GUATTARI AND GILLES DELEUZE Guattari and Deleuze are independent thinkers who collaborated to rethink psychoanalytic theory and Marxism in the long shadow of the events of May 1968. It was a period where various discourses such as structuralism, feminism (6.0), Marxism, and psychoanalysis were interacting both to understand why the revolutionary moment of 1968 had failed as well as to rethink institutions such as the family, the state, and education. Their collaboration is one of the most fruitful and influential ones in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Guattari was a philosopher, political activist, and psychoanalyst with a clinical practice. He trained under Lacan, and in 1969 became a member analyst who remained with the École Freudienne de Paris founded by Lacan until its dissolution in 1980. However, his relationship to Lacan and the École was ambivalent, as Guattari’s aim was to reinvent Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Deleuze studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and taught at a number of institutions including the Sorbonne, the University of Lyons, and finally at the University of Paris VIII until his retirement in 1987. In the 1960s, and before he began his collaboration with Guattari, he published books on Nietzsche (1962), Kant (1963), Proust (1964), Bergson (1966), and Spinoza (1968), in addition to Masochism (1967), Difference and Repetition (1968), and The Logic of Sense (1969). A major philosopher in his own right, Deleuze began his friendship with Guattari through an exchange of letters in 1969. Though it was Guattari who first sought out Deleuze, it was Deleuze who initiated their collaboration.135 Deleuze was attracted to Guattari’s aim to reinvent Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and to his ideas about non-Oedipal sexuality among other things. Their first book together, Anti-Oedipus (1972) “took shape first with the help of ‘long, disorderly letters’ and then by meeting ‘for several days or weeks at a time’ ”—a process where “Deleuze saw Guattari as the diamond miner and himself as the polisher.”136 In Anti-Oedipus, they offer an account of the relationship between psychoanalysis and capitalism, which they call “schizoanalysis.”137 “The schizoanalytic argument is simple,” claim Deleuze and Guattari, desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement—desiring machines. The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and social production. We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of production, for having shunted it into representation. Far from showing the boldness of psychoanalysis, this idea of unconscious representation marks from the outset its bankruptcy or its abnegation: an unconscious that no longer produces, but is content to believe. The unconscious believes in Oedipus, it believes in castration, in the law.138

Frida Beckman, Gilles Deleuze (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 48. Beckman, Gilles Deleuze, 49. 137 See especially, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 273–382. 138 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 296. 135 136

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So, what then becomes of Oedipus under schizoanalysis? Here Deleuze and Guattari are very clear: Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction—a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. Destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the puppet of the superego, guilt, the law, castration. It is not a matter of pious destructions, such as those performed by psychoanalysis under the benevolent eye of the analyst. For these are Hegel-style destructions, ways of conserving. How is it that the celebrated neutrality, and what psychoanalysis calls—dares to call—the disappearance or the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, do not make us burst into laughter?139 For Deleuze and Guattari, we have been triangulated in Oedipus, and we will triangulate in it in turn. From the family to the couple, from the couple to the family. In actuality, the benevolent neutrality of the analyst is very limited: it ceased the instant one stops responding daddy-mommy. It ceases the instant one introduces a little desiring-machine—the tape recorder—into the analyst’s office; it ceases as soon as a flow is made to circulate that does not let itself be stopped by Oedipus, the mark of the triangle.140 Thus, the connection between psychoanalysis and capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari is not merely an ideological one. Rather, it is infinitely closer, infinitely tighter; and that psychoanalysis depends directly on an economic mechanism (whence its relations with money) through which the decoded flows of desire, as taken up in the axiomatic of capitalism, must necessarily be reduced to a familial field where the application of the axiomatic is carried out: Oedipus as the last word of capitalist consumption sucking away at daddy-mommy, being blocked and triangulated on the couch; “So it’s . . .”141 Deleuze and Guattari challenge here the dominant themes of psychoanalytic theory. The psychoanalytic concept of desire as lack is replaced by them with a new concept: desiring machines, which produce intensities and flows of libido through systems. These intensities and flows spurn both the logic of Freud’s Oedipus, wherein the mother launches both a complex and repression, and the Symbolic Order of Lacan, the Law of the Father, wherein the primary motivation of desire is a lack. However, for all of their ostensive anti-Oedipus, anti-Freud, and anti-Lacan positions, they reinvent psychoanalytic theory by offering that all texts are rehearsals of unconscious fantasies. The major difference for them is that they regard these texts as machines that perform psychic work. For them, texts produce free-floating and impersonal intensities that are not anchored to stable, autonomous subjectivity.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 311. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 312. 141 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 312. 139 140

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The late paintings of J. M. W. Turner (the same ones Ruskin described earlier as “corrupted canvases”) are exemplary in this regard: whereas the paintings of Turner’s first period are “end-ofthe-world catastrophes, avalanches, and storms” and those of the second period reconstruct the world through “archaisms having a modern function,”142 those of his third and final period are very different. Write Deleuze and Guattari, The canvas turns in on itself, it is pierced by a hole, a lake, a flame, a tornado, an explosion. The themes of the preceding paintings are to be found again here, their meaning changed. The canvas is truly broken, sundered by what penetrates it. All that remains is a background of gold and fog, intense, intensive, traversed in depth by what has just sundered its breadth: the schiz [that is, the split of schizophrenia]. Everything becomes mixed and confused, and it is here that the breakthrough—not the breakdown—occurs.143 A similar thing occurs for Deleuze and Guattari in “strange” literature. In Anglo-American literature this strange literature includes Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, “men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs.”144 The latter phrase is one they borrow from Antonin Artaud, but coin with a new meaning. For Deleuze and Guattari, the body without organs is a multiplicity of unconscious differences in which desire is constituted as an active process. The body without organs is defined by its power to be affected or to affect various external relations. It is a body that is neither defined by its subject, its object, or its parts, yet it is one that is nevertheless coherent and exists. The body without organs “is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass.”145 “It has nothing to do with phantasy,” claim Deleuze and Guattari, “there is nothing to interpret.”146 In brief, the body without organs is the schizophrenic subject who because of their persecution by desire, renounces it altogether and becomes a body without organs. Or, more precisely, desire is the body without organs, a [d]esire that stretches far: desiring one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO [body without organs] under one relation or another.147 Deleuze and Guattari’s work on affect and the body will become a key contribution to the affect studies (13.0) that will later come to the fore in literary and cultural theory. When these “strange” Anglo-American writers “overcome a limit” and “shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier,” they are said to be deterritorializing and reterritorializing the libidinal economy in

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 132. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 132. 144 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 132–3; my emphasis. 145 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 153. 146 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 153. 147 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 165. 142 143

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society. For Deleuze and Guattari, territorialization refers to the demarcation of social and cultural spaces by principles of law and rationality, that is to say, the Symbolic order. The cultural, physical, and biological world for them is comprised of strata, that is, layered regulatory systems. These strata preserve unity and cancel out variations that arise as the products of experience. Still, potentials and qualities of matter give rise to new systems and structures, which are said to overflow the strata. The strata constitute the matter they order, but are not dependent on this matter. Additionally, these strata have an abstract or virtual existence alongside the matter they affect, which Deleuze and Guattari describe as territorialized, that is, embodied instances of abstract or virtual functions. Deterritorialization occurs when differences exceed territorialized functions, and reterritorialization occurs when old systems are reformed in new situations or where new systems are formed. Whereas Plato believed that the world as it appears to us is but a reflection of an unchanging ideal world, Deleuze and Guattari contend that there is no unchanging ideal world. But still, there is an ideal world. Difference for them is that while the process of territorialization gives it unity, the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization subject it to change. Moreover, for Deleuze and Guattari, while individuals and social institutions can deterritorialize and reterritorialize, there are limits. We see this explicitly noted, for example, in reference to the “strange” writers noted above— writers who in spite of their efforts to overcome a limit, “of course . . . fail to complete the process . . . [and] never cease failing to do so.”148 Deleuze and Guattari explain why by reference to territorialities and fascism: The neurotic impasse again closes—the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land—or else the perversion of exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol—or worse still, an old fascist dream. Never has delirium oscillated more between its two poles. But through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; sperm, river, drainage, inflamed genital mucus, or a stream of words that do not let themselves be coded, a libido that is too fluid, too viscous: a violence against syntax, a concerted destruction of the signifier, nonsense erected as a flow, polyvocity that returns to haunt all relations. How poorly the problem of literature is put, starting from the ideology that it bears, or from the co-optation of it by a social order. People are co-opted, not works, which will always come to awake a sleeping youth, and which never cease extending their flame. As for ideology, it is the most confused notion because it keeps us from seizing the relationship of the literary machine with a field of production, and the moment when the emitted sign breaks through this “form of the content” that was attempting to maintain the sign within the order of the signifier.149 For Deleuze and Guattari, while it is possible for the flows of desiring machines such as the strange writers noted above and social institutions to create new forms of social control, one of the old ones—fascism—proves to be a territoriality difficult to overcome. In fact, according to Foucault, their “strategic adversary is fascism”:150

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 133. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 133; my emphasis. 150 Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, xiii; my emphasis. 148 149

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And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.151 In short, Foucault describes Anti-Oedipus as the “art of living counter to all forms of fascism.”152 This art of living is one where the fight against fascism is waged by desiring machines through deterritorializations that exceed the territorialized functions of fascism, and reterritorializations that form new systems. For Deleuze and Guattari, the territorialized space of the state is the body, and the body is governed by the logic of fascism. Deterritorialization breaks down the boundaries of this fascist territorialization and maps democratic flows of intensities from different points of the social matrix, which Deleuze and Guattari characterize as a rhizome. The term, rhizome, adapted from plant biology, is Deleuze and Guattari’s way of characterizing the multiplicity of the non-linear relations of thought and the everyday. It was introduced in a 1976 pamphlet, after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, which was republished as the introduction to their 1980 collaboration, A Thousand Plateaus. Here, they express the rhizome as n-1, “the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted.”153 “As a subterranean stem,” a rhizome is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots and radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: the potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome.154 Those characteristics, in brief, are: Principles of Connection and Heterogeneity—“any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be”;155 Principle of Multiplicity—“it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, ‘multiplicity,’ that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world”;156 Principle of Asignifying Rupture—“A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines”;157 and, Principle of Cartography and Decalcomania— “a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model.”158 “A rhizome has no beginning

151

Foucault, “Preface,” xiii. Foucault, “Preface,” xiii. 153 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 6. 154 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7. 155 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7. 156 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8. 157 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9. 158 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12. 152

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or end,” comment Deleuze and Guattari, “it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”159 Deleuze and Guattari offer a radical style of doing philosophy that they characterize as nomadology. Their use of the term, though, does not refer to nomadic peoples, but rather to the tendency toward deterritorialization that may be found to a greater and lesser extent in all phenomena. Nomadology then is a philosophical approach where rather than focusing on totalizing territorialities that unify phenomena, emphasis is placed on finding and enhancing deterritorializations, that is, in the construction of new concepts that multiply difference and variation in thought. In A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari introduce nomadology, they term artistic and political creativity and dissidence the war machine, which they say is the “exterior of the State apparatus”—“first attested to in mythology, epic, drama, and games”160 and “also attested to by epistemology, which intimates the existence and perpetuation of a ‘nomad’ or ‘minor science.’ ”161 This “nomad” science is one of two: “nomad, war machine science” and “royal, State science.”162 One of the distinctions between them is that nomad science produces structures that collapse, which for them is something to be celebrated, because of the creative lines of flight they produce in contrast to “royal, State science.” “The State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles,” comment Deleuze and Guattari, “but a war machine is necessary to make something round.”163 Finally, one of the concepts that has been greatly utilized in contemporary literary and cultural theory was introduced in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). For Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature has three characteristics: Deterritorialized Language—“In [minor literature] language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization”;164 Political— “[E]verything in a [minor literature] is political”;165 and Collective Value—“[I]n [minor literature] everything takes on a collective value.”166 One of the effects of the deterritorialization of language in minor literature is the dissolution of cultural codes. Also, as a collective activity, the writers of minor literature are not the strong authors of major literature as they are, for example, in Bloom. Rather, by contrast, the writers of minor literature are almost imperceptible and anonymous. In sum, schizoanalysis and its core concept of the desiring-machine is a very different approach to psychoanalytic theory from the ones articulated by Freud and Lacan, and nomadology and its core concept of deterritorialization, one that emphasizes the inhuman world of desire and force, is a very different approach to philosophy from the one articulated by Marx. Deleuze and Guattari offer a new path for the study of literature and culture that is not grounded in either the stability of the subject, the autonomy of the object, or the coherence of a structure. Rather, it is one actualized in the lines of flight of the free floating and impersonal intensities of the rhizome.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 351. 161 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 361. 162 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 364. 163 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 367. 164 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), trans. Dana Polan (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16. 165 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16. 166 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 16. 159 160

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4.5 SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK One of the reasons for the continuing relevance of both psychoanalysis and Marxism in contemporary literary and cultural theory is Slavoj Žižek. Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and educated at the University of Ljubljana, Žižek did not support the communist orthodoxies of his homeland. This limited his employment options and put him into conflict with the Communist Party, which he resisted joining until 1977. In 1981, he studied psychoanalysis with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law, and the 1980s took an active part in politics. He also ran for president of Slovenia, which is a four-member collective, when Slovenia was on the cusp of its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. His project can be described as reconciling psychoanalysis with collectivist politics. In How to Read Lacan (2006), Žižek acknowledges the perception held by many that both psychoanalysis and Marxism are dead. Writes Žižek, “with the new advances in brain sciences, [psychoanalysis] is buried where it always belonged, in the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist quest for hidden meanings, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers.”167 As one critic of Freud puts it, “no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all its fundamentals,” to which Žižek notes, “with the exception of Marx, some would add.”168 Žižek contextualizes this attitude toward psychoanalysis by pointing out that Freud situated his discovery of the unconscious as one of three successive humiliations of man, the “three narcissistic illnesses”: the first was the Copernican revolution that deprived man of a place at the center of the universe; the second was Darwinian evolution that took away man’s privileged place among living beings; and the third his own discovery of the unconscious, which shows that man’s ego is not in control of his psychic house. The humiliation continues this century, says Žižek, with the position that “our mind itself is a mere computing machine, processing data; our sense of freedom and autonomy is the user’s illusion of this machine.”169 Žižek then asks the central question: is psychoanalysis outdated? From three connected levels, he says, it seems to be: (1) The Level of Scientific Knowledge, where the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of the human mind appears to supersede the Freudian model; (2) The Level of the Psychiatric Clinic, where psychoanalytical treatment is rapidly losing ground to pills and behavioural therapy; and, (3) The Level of Social Context, where the Freudian image of a society and social norms that repress the individual’s sexual drives no longer seems a valid account of today’s predominant hedonistic permissiveness.170 But, against all of this “evidence,” Žižek draws the exact opposite conclusion but with a twist: “my aim is to demonstrate that it is only today that the time of psychoanalysis has come.”171 He makes this argument through Lacan, whose “return to Freud” was not “a return to what Freud said, but to the core of the Freudian revolution of which Freud himself was not fully aware.”172 This revolution was revealed by Lacan who showed how the unconscious “obeys its own grammar and logic: the unconscious talks and thinks”—in distinction from Freud

Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 1. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 1. Žižek is citing here Todd Dufresne, Killing Freud: 20th Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis (London: Continuum, 2004). 169 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 2. 170 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 2. 171 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 2; my emphasis. 172 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 2. 167 168

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who regarded the unconscious as “the preserve of wild drives that have to be tamed by the ego.”173 “Lacan’s thesis,” comments Žižek, “is that Freud was not aware of the notion of speech implied by his own theory and practice, and that we can only develop this notion if we refer to Saussurean linguistics, speech acts theory and the Hegelian dialectics of recognition.”174 For Žižek, Lacanian psychoanalysis is not about the ego taming the id, but rather about daring “to approach the site of my truth.”175 It is about “an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live with,” rather than “a deep Truth that I have to identify with.”176 For Žižek, psychoanalysis for Lacan is at its core “not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence.”177 In much of his work, Žižek uses Lacan’s ideas such as the triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, and the big Other as the Symbolic Order to explain our social and libidinal predicament. Moreover, the “unbearable truth” (with a small “t”) that arises in his explanations of our social and libidinal predicament is always a partial one—following the “Lacanian theory that every truth is partial.”178 Also, the strategy of positing counter-intuitive arguments against seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary is a trademark of Žižek’s argumentative style. One of the ways that Žižek utilizes the psychoanalytic tradition to explain our social and libidinal predicament is by reflecting on our obsession with happiness. Psychoanalysis, he points out, is a theory grounded upon the rejection of happiness. In its place, Freud developed the concept of the “death drive,” arguing that while unhappiness is readily attainable, happiness is not. To expect otherwise goes against the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. Freud’s position on happiness as transformed by Lacanian psychoanalysis then becomes the basis of one of Žižek major lines of argument: namely, the counter-intuitive one that we must reject the pursuit of happiness. It is an argument that showcases the basic elements of his antihumanism at work as well as his debt to psychoanalysis. Moreover, it showcases a number of the major themes of Žižek’s literary and cultural theory. Žižek argues that if the goal of life is happiness, then we are in for big problems. It is an argument that he has consistently made for the past thirty years, along the way adding to it additional layers of political and cultural evidence. Though heavily steeped in Lacanian psychoanalysis, his argument is not just directed to fellow analysts and philosophers, but rather to anyone who will listen to him. He draws our attention to his position on happiness by swimming against the strong American current in celebration and pursuit of happiness. A recent example is the sold-out debate he had with the psychologist Jordan Peterson on the topic of happiness. Called the “duel of the century,” Žižek defends a Marxist position on happiness, whereas Peterson takes the capitalist side. But Žižek finds it ironic that the participants in this duel “are both marginalized by the official academic community.”179 He says that though he is “supposed

Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 3. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 4. 175 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 3. 176 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 3. 177 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 3. 178 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 10. 179 Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson, “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism,” YouTube video, 2:37:47, April 20, 2019, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT1vutd4Gnk. 173 174

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to defend here the left, liberal line against the neo-conservatives,” he is most often attacked by left liberals. The politics of his position on happiness get even more complicated when one takes into account that he follows Lacan in regarding happiness as a “political factor.” In an early work, For They Know Not What They Do (1991), Žižek says, “What Saint-Just meant by ‘happiness’ has of course little to do with enjoyment: it implies revolutionary Virtue, a radical renunciation of the decadent pleasures of the ancient regime.”180 Ten years later he wrote in On Belief that “liberalism tries to avoid (or, rather, cover up)” a paradox at the center of this line of thought, namely, the idea that “‘totalitarianism’ imposes on the subject his or her own good, even if it is against his will—recall King Charles’ (in)famous statement: ‘If any shall be so foolishly unnatural as to oppose their king, their country and their own good, we will make them happy, by God’s blessing—even against their wills.’”181 Liberals avoid the paradox of happiness as a political factor by “clinging to the end to the fiction of the subject’s immediate free self-perception (‘I don’t claim to know better than you what you want—just look deep into yourself and decide freely what you want!’).”182 In short, following Lacan, Žižek’s proclamation of happiness as a political factor can be expressed by the formula: “There is no satisfaction for the individual outside of the satisfaction of all.”183 Žižek chooses the example of China in his debate with Peterson to illustrate the coming together of the three notions from the title of the debate: Happiness, Communism, and Capitalism. It also allows him to show how the Left in the twentieth century defined itself through opposition to two “fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capital with its aggressive market competition, [and] the authoritarian bureaucratic state power.”184 For Žižek, China combines these two features of modernity “on behalf of the majority of the people” in an extreme form: a “strong totalitarian state” and “state-wide capitalist dynamics.”185 He then asks, “Are the Chinese any happier for all that?” The answer here is of course “No,” which Žižek says is determined by psychoanalysis, not philosophy or economics. Psychoanalysis shows us that “humans are very creative in sabotaging our pursuit of happiness,” says Žižek. He continues by telling the audience, Happiness is a confused notion, basically it relies on the subject’s inability or unreadiness to fully confront the consequences of his/her/their desire. In our daily lives, we pretend to desire things, which we do not really desire, so that ultimately the worst thing that can happen is to get what we officially desire.186 In short, for Žižek, “we don’t really want what we think we desire.”187 Ultimately, for him, happiness is an “unethical category.”188

Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991) (London: Verso, 2008), 253–4. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 119. 182 Žižek, On Belief, 119. 183 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, 292. 184 Žižek and Peterson, “Happiness.” 185 Žižek and Peterson, “Happiness.” 186 Žižek and Peterson, “Happiness.” 187 Slavoj Žižek, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?” YouTube video, 2:01, June 25, 2012, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w. 188 Slavoj Žižek, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?” 180 181

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While Žižek rails against happiness from many different directions and contexts, the core tenets of his approach remain consistent: psychoanalysis establishes happiness as “the betrayal of desire.”189 As psychoanalysis, at least for Žižek, “is a kind of anti-ethics,”190 happiness is regarded by him as an “unethical category” both in the sense that he doubts its veracity as a mere category and that he does not see it as constitutive of morality like, for example, Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill (6.1). For Žižek, happiness is “not a category of truth, but a category of mere Being, and, as such, confused, indeterminate, inconsistent.”191 It is also a term used everywhere. Thus, it is hard for Žižek not to hit something or someone every time he swings his argument against happiness. His targets include not just the philosophical tradition regarding the pursuit of happiness (for example, Aristotle, Locke, and Mill), but also revered religious figures like the Dalai Lama, who he says “has had much success recently preaching the gospel of happiness around the world, and no wonder he is finding the greatest response precisely in the USA, the ultimate empire of the (pursuit of) happiness.”192 Other major targets include fundamental Christian beliefs such as the idea of living “happily ever after,” which he says is “a Christianized version of paganism.”193 Happiness is “a pagan concept,” writes Žižek, noting that pagans believe happiness is the goal of life and “religious experience and political activity are considered the highest forms of happiness (see Aristotle).”194 “In short,” concludes Žižek, “ ‘happiness’ belongs to the pleasure principle, and what undermines it is the insistence of a Beyond of the pleasure principle.”195 The politics, though, of his position on happiness defy easy Left/Right classification. For example, of conservatives, Žižek says they are “fully justified in legitimating their opposition to radical knowledge in terms of happiness: knowledge ultimately makes us unhappy.”196 For Žižek, there “is deep within each of us a Wissenstrieb, a drive to know.”197 However, he also notes, “Lacan claims that the spontaneous attitude of a human being is that of ‘I don’t want to know about it.’ ”198 As one Lacan commentator bluntly summarizes this position, “happiness amounts to the stupidity of ‘not wanting to know’ the truth about symbolic castration, the inconsistency of the Other, and the actual lack of the Other.”199 As a consequence of our “stupidity,” happiness not only becomes, as noted earlier, a political factor and can mean only that “everybody is identical with everyone else,” but also that “it is only the phallus which is happy and not its bearer.”200 Thus, by fully justifying the conservative argument for stupidity and grounding it in their pursuit of happiness, Žižek appears to be siding against liberals who fully reject this argument because they believe that knowledge leads to happiness.

Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002), 58. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Routledge, 2008), 16. 191 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 59. 192 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 59. 193 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 59. 194 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 59. 195 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 59. 196 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 61. 197 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 61. 198 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 61. 199 Lorenzo Chiesa, “Lacan with Artaud: j’ouïs-sens, jouis-sans, jouis-sens,” in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2006), 336–364.360n17 & 361n18. 200 Lorenzo Chiesa, “Lacan with Artaud,” 360n17 & 361n18. 189

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If conservatives find an ally in Žižek’s assault on happiness, then liberals find an enemy. For example, one of the casualties of Žižek’s assault on happiness is Jürgen Habermas. Žižek identifies Habermas as “the great representative of the Enlightenment tradition.”201 However, Žižek finds hidden in Habermas’s argument advocating biogenetic manipulation the underlying premise “that the ultimate ethical duty is that of protecting the Other from pain,” which would include in some cases keeping the Other “in protective ignorance.”202 Žižek says that keeping knowledge away from the Other is not about autonomy and freedom, as Habermas would have us believe, but is really about happiness, which thus places this “great representative of the Enlightenment tradition” on “the same side as conservative advocates of blessed ignorance.”203 In short, both conservatives and liberals become targets in Žižek’s critique of happiness because “the opposition between Rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one.”204 For Žižek, they are “two sides of the same coin.”205 What then should we be striving for if not happiness conservative- or liberal-style? Žižek’s answer here is clear: “not the Fascist with a human face, but the freedom fighter with an inhuman face.”206 To go along with this “inhuman face,” he also calls for an “ ‘inhuman’ ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject.”207 This direction for ethics is part of his critique of the humanist ethics of the Western philosophical tradition predicated on its use of “Man” and “human person,” which for Žižek “is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbor,”208 an account of subjectivity irreducible to the gentrified social ego. For him, until the mask of “Man” and “human person” are taken off the Neighbor, its pure subjectivity is obfuscated in ethics. When the mask of these concepts is removed through the ethics of psychoanalysis, the Neighbor is revealed to have all of the connotations commonly found in horror fiction: behind every homely face lurks an evil monster waiting to come out. Žižek uses the example of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining (1977), where “a gentle failed writer . . . gradually turns into a killing beast [who] with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family.”209 This is the “pure subjectivity” that humanist ethics masks with terms like “Man” and “human person.” To make this argument, Žižek reminds us that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the “Neighbor” is so traumatic and monstrous that Lacan applied Thing (das Ding) to the term—a term he borrowed from Freud who used it to designate “the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability.”210 Both Freud and Lacan find the Judeo-Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor” problematic because it domesticates the inhuman dimension of the Neighbor, that is, its pure subjectivity as “Thing.” Though humanist ethics masks this problem with terms like “Man” and “human” (which transforms the Neighbor into an image of the self), Žižek argues for the rejection of all ethics that universalize disavowing the inhuman subjectivity of the Neighbor including the Judeo-Christian tradition. So, Žižek’s anti-ethics (so termed to disassociate itself from

Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 63. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 63. 203 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 64. 204 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 82. 205 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 82. 206 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 82. 207 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 16. 208 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 16. 209 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 16. 210 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 16. 201 202

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both the Western philosophical and Judeo-Christian traditions), which serves as a base for his rejection of happiness, is also a rejection of humanism and the majority of Western ethics dating back to the Greeks. So, if taking on humanism, ethics, and the conservative and the liberal political establishment were not enough, Žižek’s critique of happiness also takes on the institution of psychology. Here he is directly following in the footsteps of his mentor, Lacan, in rejecting behavioural psychology and its contemporary instantiations, such as “positive” psychology and the new discipline of “happiness studies.” For Žižek, we live in “era of spiritualized hedonism,”211 where happiness is regarded “as the supreme duty.”212 “No wonder,” he says, “over the last decade the study of happiness emerged as a scientific discipline of its own: there are now ‘professors of happiness’ at universities, ‘quality of life’ institutes attached to them, and numerous research papers; there is even the Journal of Happiness Studies.”213 Žižek then beckons us to expand the critique of the happiness industry: The predominant critique proceeds in the way of demystification: beneath the innocent-sounding research into happiness and welfare, it discerns a dark, hidden, gigantic complex of social control and manipulation exerted by the combined forces of private corporations and state agencies. But what is urgently needed is also the opposite move: instead of just asking what dark content is hidden beneath the form of scientific research into happiness, we should focus on the form itself. Is the topic of scientific research into human welfare and happiness (at least the way it is practiced today) really so innocent, or is it already itself permeated by the stance of control and manipulation?214 From Lacan’s complaints about the rise of behavioural psychology in America to Žižek’s identification of the happiness research at the core of the military industrial complex today, there are plenty of reasons to be suspicious about the pursuit of happiness. But Žižek makes an even more important point about the rise of the happiness industry, one that should not get lost in the shuffle of his theoretical arguments against happiness: though we live in an era wherein “the goal of life is directly defined as happiness,” we still see an explosion in “the number of people suffering from anxiety and depression.”215 “It is the enigma of this self-sabotaging of happiness and pleasure,” comments Žižek of this rise in cases of anxiety and depression in an age devoted to happiness, that “makes Freud’s message more pertinent than ever.”216 Freud’s “death drive” might be regarded as a mediation of Nietzsche’s affirmation of the will and Schopenhauer’s negation of it. Žižek, however, argues that the death drive should not be confused with the return to the inorganic absence of any life-tension or with the craving for self-annihilation. For Žižek, “the death drive, on the contrary, is the very opposite of dying, it is a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain.”217

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 54. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 22. 213 Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 44. 214 Slavoj Žižek, A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name (Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), 246–7. 215 Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 54–5. 216 Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 55; my emphasis. 217 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 292. 211 212

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In sum, Žižek aims to disrupt the comfortable appearances of our social reality. He is critical of capitalism, humanism, liberalism, globalism, and multiculturalism. His approach has been termed both radical emancipatory universalism and postfoundationalism, though neither term really captures his unique mixture of Marxism and psychoanalysis. His use of psychoanalysis (particularly Freud and Lacan) and German idealism (particularly Kant and Hegel) allows him to explore a certain failure or excess in the order of being. Finally, one of his most well-known contributions is an inversion of the Marx’s thesis that ideology is false consciousness, which he famously states in Capital as “They do not know it, but they are doing it.”218 Utilizing psychoanalysis, Žižek rewrites this as “They know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still they are doing it.”219 In other words, rather than concealing or distorting reality, for Žižek, reality cannot be reproduced without the mystification of ideology. Moreover, ideology operates most often at the level of the unconscious. Žižek has applied Lacanian theory to everything from Kant to Alfred Hitchcock and developed a unique perspective on how to interpret literary and cultural theory, in particular in relation to film. His work not only reinvigorated literary and cultural interpretation through the use of Lacanian concepts such as the gaze and the Other, but also sparked renewed interest in both psychoanalysis and Marxism, which many had left for dead, particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1991), 32; Žižek citing Marx. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 33.

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Poststructuralism 5.0 INTRODUCTION One view of literary and cultural theory is that there are only two schools and movements: structuralism and poststructuralism. It is theory as high theory. At its foundation are the general principles of the structural linguistics of Saussure. By the mid-1960s, structuralism was fully established in a number of areas of thought including psychoanalysis (through Lacan), anthropology (through Lévi-Strauss), Marxism (through Althusser), history (through Michel Foucault [9.1]), linguistics (through Roman Jakobson), and in literature and culture (through Barthes). But, as one famous version of the story goes, then came the conference to celebrate the arrival of structuralism in the humanities—and with it, a presentation by the young French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. The conference, held at Johns Hopkins University under the title “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” was from October 18–21, 1966. It featured as speakers many of the most prominent structuralist thinkers in the world, including Barthes, Lacan, René Girard, Lucien Goldman, Jean Hyppolite, Georges Poulet, and Todorov. Jakobson was invited as one of fifteen “colloquists”—people to carry on a discussion of the presentations—but was unable to attend because of other commitments. Paul de Man, who went on to become one of the leading proponents of deconstruction in America, was also a colloquist. And Lévi-Strauss gave “counsel and encouragement” to the organizers, but also did not attend.1 All told, over 100 people attended this event at the university’s newly instituted Humanities Center. One of the aims of the conference was to celebrate the arrival of structuralism in the humanities and social sciences, which are described in the conference title as “the Sciences of Man.” These areas include anthropology, classical studies, comparative literature, history, linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, semiology, and sociology—and indeed all of these disciplines were represented at the conference.2 The title of Derrida’s presentation was “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In it, he discusses the “structurality of structure,” which involves “a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.”3 In other words, structuralism involves the concept of a structure with a center upon which meaning can rest secure. Derrida’s presentation aims to challenge the concepts of “center” and “fixed point of presence” necessary for structuralism. In his presentation, Derrida says,

Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), xvii. The papers and discussions from the conference are collected in this volume. 2 Macksey and Donato, The Structuralist Controversy, xvi. 3 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy, 247. 1

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The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the free-play of the structure. No doubt that orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the free-play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking a center presents the unthinkable itself.4 Derrida then goes on to show that the notion of the “center” of “structure” is an incoherent and contradictory one: The center is at the center of a totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure—although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistèmè as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent.5 Specifically, for Derrida, the concept of center is the product of a particular metaphysics. Namely, this is the one passed down through the Western tradition by Plato and Aristotle, that has an ontology (that is, theory of being) based in presence. Derrida will claim that this ontology is a “mythology,” and dub it the “mythology of presence.” His philosophy disrupts—or, as it is often stated, deconstructs—the stability of ontological presence by showing how it is always already in freeplay with absence. This, in turn, reveals the knowledge conditions (or the epistèmè) of philosophy and science as unstable or contradictorily coherent too. Comments Derrida, Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around.6 To make his argument regarding freeplay, Derrida draws heavily on the work of Lévi-Strauss— work which he says showcases the importance of the concept of freeplay. In the process, Derrida reveals the contradictions regarding presence in the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. Thus, by pointing out these contradictions in structuralist thinking, Derrida’s philosophy came to be characterized as poststructuralism. After his presentation, Derrida was asked a lot of questions. One of the best came from the philosopher Jean Hyppolite, who asked, “Is the center the knowledge of general rules which, after a fashion, allow us to understand the interplay of elements? Or is the center certain elements which enjoy a particular privilege within the ensemble?”7 After all, comments Hyppolite, “one cannot

4

Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 247–8. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 248. 6 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 263–4. 7 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 266. 5

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think of the structure without a center.”8 Derrida replied, “It is a rule of the game which does not govern the game; it is a rule of the game which does not dominate the game.”9 “The concept of structure itself,” continues Derrida, “is no longer satisfactory to describe that game.”10 But, how then does Derrida define structure? Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play” . . . a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.11 He concludes his reply to Hyppolite by bluntly stating, “I think that what I have said can be understood as a criticism of structuralism.”12 If structuralism offered the promise of knowledge and understanding in the human sciences through the identification of stable structures upon which meaning can rest secure, then poststructuralism identifies meaning as only a momentary stop in the continuing flow of interpretations. The instability of meaning in poststructuralism amplifies skepticism regarding any form of certainty regarding knowledge and understanding. Moreover, as we shall see in the section below on Derrida (5.1), the rejection of the metaphysics of presence (that is, idealist and transcendental ontologies, which he calls onto-theology) offers an account of philosophy where speech is no longer privileged over writing. Derrida calls this position grammatology. While Derrida would become one of the most prominent poststructuralist thinkers—a prominence launched in no small measure by his presentation at the Johns Hopkins conference— Barthes’ “transition” from structuralist to poststructuralist thinking might be identified with the increasing emphasis his later work placed on the “secondary signification (or connotation)” identified by his semiology. Whereas the structuralist Barthes might be said to focus more on the denotative as the neutral level of signification, the poststructuralist Barthes might be found in his treatment of denotation as the last connotation. In fact, both his essay “The Death of the Author” (1968) and his book S/Z (1970) are often regarded in the same early poststructuralist class as Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966). In both of these works by Barthes, the notion of a decentered reading process takes precedence over a centered structure which is the stable site of denotative meaning. In short, poststructuralism contends that signifiers produce signifiers—not signifieds. Moreover, for poststructuralists, selection and combination along the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes implies meaning is always present and absent, that is, unstable—a position contrary to the structural linguistics of Saussure, which is built upon the stability of meaning. Julia Kristeva shares with Barthes a foundation in structural linguistics and semiotics. Also, like Barthes, she was first associated with structuralism and later made a transition to poststructuralism. While Barthes was interested in psychoanalysis, Kristeva (5.2) was a practicing analyst, and her

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Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 266. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 267. 10 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 268. 11 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 268. 12 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 268. 9

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theory is an effort to “graft” psychoanalytic theory onto semiotics, which she called semanalysis. Her work was also, as we shall see, influenced by Bakhtin, particularly his notions of dialogism and carnivalization. Finally, like Derrida, Kristeva contends that the signifying process undermines the stability of meaning. Like Barthes and Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard critique the essentialist foundations of humanism and reject the notion of a unified subject with an essential core of being. This subject, the Cartesian subject, the centered and fixed agent of history, is the same one that was subjected to critique by Althusser. Also, the work of both was—for better or worse—prominently featured in discussions of the nature of postmodernism in the 1980s: with Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) offering the notion of paralogy (5.3), a kind of language game, in place of the master narratives of modernity; and Baudrillard’s Simulations (1975) presenting a theory of simulation contending that the postmodern world is one in which the real world has been replaced by simulations of reality (5.4). While both philosophers address many other issues in addition to postmodernism, their poststructuralist thought is often simply equated with postmodernist thought. Moreover, the equivalence created from the popular work of Lyotard and Baudrillard on postmodernism goes even further: namely, many use the term poststructuralism interchangeably with postmodernism. To complicate matters even more, if you consider that deconstruction is often used interchangeably with poststructuralism, you have a perfect storm for conceptual confusion. While poststructuralism accurately describes a variety of thinkers who approach it from differing positions, for example, psychoanalysis (Kristeva), semiotics (Barthes), ontology (Derrida), history (Foucault), and rhetoric (Paul de Man, who argues that literature is constituted by an undecidable play between the grammatical and rhetorical in texts), it should not be conflated with either postmodernism or deconstruction. Still, an incredibly diverse number of thinkers are associated with the term poststructuralism, including a number already discussed, namely Jameson, Lacan, Guattari and Deleuze, and Žižek— and a number to be discussed, namely, Cixous (6.4), Irigaray (6.5), and Foucault. As for the latter, Foucault’s work has been highly influential to both the New Historicism, which will be discussed in this chapter (5.5), and cultural materialism, which will taken up in our discussion of cultural studies (14.1). As the pre-eminent poststructuralist historian, Foucault’s thinking went through several phases, like Barthes. More extended focus here will be placed on his later work, which was concerned with power and the critique of totalities—work which has been seminal in an area of theory that has come to be termed biopolitics. Therefore, it will be directly addressed under that rubric (9.1)—even though it is also indirectly discussed in relation to New Historicism and cultural studies. Finally, the French poststructuralists are often associated with the experimental literary and philosophical journal Tel Quel both because many of them published in it and because of the large role it played in disseminating their thought. Launched by Philippe Sollers in 1960—and releasing its final issue in 1982—Tel Quel published many of the most important poststructuralist (as well as structuralist and semiotic) thinkers, including Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva. Still, its twenty-two-year run was not without controversy, with many of these same thinkers “breaking” with the journal for both philosophical and political reasons. Again, of the eight ways of looking at theory presented in this book, structuralism and poststructuralism have attracted both the most outspoken proponents and opponents. And, of the two, poststructuralism has attracted the most passionate proponents and opponents. This is

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particularly true of the work of Derrida and Baudrillard: the former’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” arguably launched poststructuralism by deconstructing LéviStrauss; and the latter’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), “The Spirit of Terrorism” (2002), and “Requiem for the Twin Towers” (2002) allegedly ended poststructuralism by marking the nadir of high theory—at least according to antitheorists (15.0).

5.1 JACQUES DERRIDA In 1967, the year following his presentation at Johns Hopkins, Derrida firmly established himself as one of the leading poststructuralist thinkers with the publication of three major books: Speech and Phenomena, which was an introduction to signs in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology; Writing and Difference, a collection of essays on writing in philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and anthropology; and Of Grammatology, which both made the case for the repression of writing in Western theories of language and outlined a new science of writing. Then, in 1972, five years later, he would establish beyond any doubt his pre-eminence in poststructuralism, with the publication of another three books in one year: Margins of Philosophy; Dissemination; and Positions, a collection of interviews. Though many more books would appear both until his death in 2004 and then posthumously, primarily through the publication of his seminars on various topics, his critique of Western metaphysics was well established in these early publications. One of the central themes explored in this work is the logocentrism of Western philosophy, that is, the notion that meaning exists independently of the language in which it is communicated. Logos is a Greek term that means reason, word, speech, and discourse, among other things. Hence, logocentrism literally means putting reason, word, speech, and discourse at the center—and from his presentation at Johns Hopkins, we already know that Derrida has deep reservations about centers. Hence, it will not be much of a surprise to learn that Derrida rejects logocentrism. He offers in its place a position on language that is a combination of Saussure’s position that a sign means by differing from other signs, and his is own observation that a sign also defers meaning. By defers meaning, Derrida offers that this meaning is never fully present, that is, it is both absent and present. This notion of differing and deferring is captured by the notion of différance, which we will look at more closely below. However, for Derrida, this endless play of signifiers differing and deferring is halted in reading. For example, when we read in context “nothing was delivered,” the signification process stops, albeit briefly. Still, for Derrida, not even context can control meaning, for it carries traces of meanings from other contexts. In “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1972), Derrida comments on Plato’s critique of writing in Phaedrus. It is an excellent place to see Derrida’s poststructuralism at work undermining key aspects of Western thinking. In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates assaults writing, saying that it is “exceedingly simple-minded” to believe that writing will result in something that is “reliable and permanent.”13 “Writing,” says Socrates, cannot “do anything more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned with.”14 Writing is also deficient because it cannot defend itself. “[O]nce a thing is put in writing,

13 14

Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Reginald Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 275c. Plato, Phaedrus, 275c–d.

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the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong.”15 Only “living” discourse accompanied by knowledge “written in the soul of the learner”—“living speech”—can defend itself in this way.16 It “knows to whom it should speak and to whom it should say nothing.”17 Written discourse, not knowing “when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused . . . always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.”18 Finally, in addition to being unable to defend itself and being unresponsive, writing also destroys memory and fills people with the conceit of wisdom. “They will cease to exercise memory,” writes Plato, “because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”19 Discourse for Plato should be human and living, and becomes so when implanted in the soul of the learner. Whereas living discourse is a sign of true wisdom, writing is dead discourse and not true wisdom. It is the “semblance” of wisdom because it tells people “of many things without teaching them” and as such makes “them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”20 While this critique of writing by Plato might simply be regarded as an afterthought, Derrida argues otherwise. According to Derrida, Plato seriously believes that the spoken word is more valuable than the written word. Nevertheless, Plato does not see how this position undermines his entire philosophical project—and Derrida sees it as his task to convince us of this. In the process, Derrida hopes to undercut what he views as one of the foundations of Western philosophy: the opposition of speech to writing. For Derrida, “the Phaedrus is less a condemnation of writing in the name of present speech than a preference for one sort of writing over another, for the fertile trace over the sterile trace, for a seed that engenders because it is planted inside over a seed scattered wastefully outside.”21 “Western philosophy,” says Derrida, is dominated by a “pattern” wherein “good writing (natural, living, knowledgeable, intelligible, internal, speaking) is opposed to bad writing (a moribund, ignorant, external, mute artifice for the senses).”22 Nevertheless, for Derrida, not only is the history of philosophy only understandable as a species of the history of writing, dialectic itself is possible only because of writing: in other words, writing is the condition of possibility of philosophy. A spoken speech, says Derrida, “a speech proffered in the present, in the presence of Socrates, would not have roused Socrates into a debate with Phaedrus. “Only the logoi en biblios,” continues Derrida,

Plato, Phaedrus, 275e. Plato, Phaedrus, 275e. 17 Plato, Phaedrus, 276a. 18 Plato, Phaedrus, 275e. 19 Plato, Phaedrus, 275a. 20 Plato, Phaedrus, 275a–b. 21 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination (1972), trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 149. 22 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 149. 15 16

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only words that are deferred, reserved, enveloped, rolled up, words that force one to wait for them in the form and under cover of a solid object, letting themselves be desired for the space of a walk, only hidden letters can thus get Socrates moving. If a speech could be purely present, unveiled, naked, offered up in person in its truth, without the detours of a signifier foreign to it, if at the limit an undeferred logos were possible, it would not seduce anyone.23 But, Derrida argues, it is never possible for speech to be purely present, unveiled, naked, offered up in person in its truth. Speech, says Derrida, is wrongly assumed to be closer to thought in the Western tradition, while writing is taken to be purely graphic. The secondary status of writing to speech is founded in part upon the belief that speech is closer to the emotions, ideas, and intentions of the speaker and therefore primary, whereas writing is secondary—a “dangerous supplement” which is at best an aid to memory. Derrida destabilizes the primacy of speech most memorably in his analysis of JeanJacques Rousseau’s confessional and linguistic writings in Of Grammatology (1967). Much like Plato, Rousseau views speech as the natural way to express thought, whereas writing is, as he says in his Confessions (1782), a “dangerous supplement.”24 However, when presence is no longer guaranteed by speech, writing becomes a necessary means to protect presence. Yet, for Rousseau, writing can only be a “supplement to speech”: [I]t is not natural. It diverts the immediate presence of thought . . . [It is] a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent. It is a violence done to the natural destiny of the language.25 For Derrida, “to supplement” means both to add and to substitute. Writing is therefore both an addition to speech and a substitute for speech. Yet speech itself is a supplement. It does not exist outside of culture. Speech cannot therefore play Edenic nature to writing’s fallen culture, because it always already belongs to “the order of the supplement.”26 For, “the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed the space of repetition and the splitting of the self [from pure self presence].”27 Nature may have preceded culture, but our sense of nature as pure presence is a product of culture. Writing is not the fall of language; it is inscribed in its origins. Rousseau, in a sense, already knows this, says Derrida: he “declares what he wishes to say,” but he also “describes that which he does not wish to say.”28 It is in the unraveling of this contradiction that the opposition between speech and writing is said to be deconstructed. The privileged term is shown to be dependent on the other for its meaning. In his analysis of Rousseau, as in many of his other analyses, it is the revealing of systems of difference “without positive terms” where Derrida’s poststructuralist readings gain their momentum.

23

Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 71. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 149. 25 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144; my emphasis. 26 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 149. 27 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 163. 28 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 229. 24

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Drawing on the untapped potential of Saussure’s analysis of language, Derrida comes to view différance as a term that stands for meaning which always is deferred and different (in French, the same verb, différer, means both “to differ” and “to defer”): the dimension of language which is both unconceptualizable and always unperceived, yet always both absent and present. For Derrida, différance becomes the prototype of what cannot be captured by Western metaphysics because it is the very condition of its possibility. Différance is neither an identity nor the difference between two identities. Rather, it is difference deferred. Moreover, it is différance that ultimately is the starting point of Derrida’s reading of the Phaedrus. Derrida’s interpretation of the Phaedrus turns on Socrates’ comparison of the writings that Phaedrus has brought along to a drug (pharmakon). Socrates says to Phaedrus, You must forgive me, dear friend; I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in town do. Yet you seem to have discovered a drug (pharmakon) for getting me out.29 Pharmakon is then shown by Derrida to be a “malleable” concept “through skewing, indetermination, or overdetermination, but without mistranslation.”30 The strategy of demonstrating the malleability of terms is characteristic of Derrida’s poststructural readings. In the case of pharmakon, he shows “in the most striking manner the regular, ordered polysemy that has . . . permitted the rendering of the same word by ‘remedy,’ ‘recipe,’ ‘drug,’ philter,’ etc.”31 Additionally, in characteristic fashion, he reveals the “rules and the strange logic that links it [pharmakon] with its signifier,” revealing how this polysemy “has been dispersed, masked, obliterated, and rendered almost unreadable not only by the imprudence or empiricism of translators, but first and foremost by the redoubtable, irreducible difficulty of translation.”32 Writing, then, which was invented as a remedy for forgetfulness, becomes though the poststructural readings of Derrida a poison—something much worse than that which it was envisioned to prevent: forgetfulness. “Writing,” says Derrida, “touted by Theuth [the Egyptian god of the underworld who is credited with inventing numbers, writing, and games of chance] as a remedy, a beneficial drug, is later overturned and denounced by the king and then, in the king’s place, by Socrates, as a harmful substance, a philter of forgetfulness.”33 Derrida then reminds the reader that the hemlock which Socrates drinks in Plato’s Phaedo “is never called anything but a pharmakon.”34 And it, too, is shown to reveal a polysemic logic: the pharmakon “is presented to Socrates as a poison; yet it is transformed, through the effects of the Socratic logos and of the philosophical demonstration of the Phaedo, into a means of deliverance, a way toward salvation, a cathartic power.”35 Writing then is linked with the hemlock which Socrates drank to end his life even if the path of the transformation of the meaning of pharmakon is reversed

Plato, Phaedrus, 230e. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 71. 31 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 71. 32 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 71–2. 33 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 126. 34 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 126. 35 Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 126. 29 30

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in the Phaedo and “less immediately readable.”36 In Derrida’s estimation, it is the pharmakon which gets Socrates to engage in dialectic. The aim of the type of poststructural reading done by Derrida—one that is often termed deconstruction—is to overthrow hierarchy everywhere. It is not just to neutralize oppositions or relationships of superiority as found, for example, in speech versus writing or nature versus culture, as we saw above. Rather, it is to demonstrate the violence that holds together this binary logic—“a violence,” as he says above, “done to the natural destiny of the language.” In Of Grammatology, Derrida tells us that a poststructural “reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.”37 “This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force,” he continues, “but of a signifying structure that critical reading should produce.”38 Finally, in Of Grammatology, Derrida argues that “There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte].”39 For him, text is the place of the effaced trace—the play of presence and absence. The breadth of Derrida’s notion of textuality is evident when one considers that not only is textuality the object of study, it is also the subject that studies. Accordingly, the subject–object distinction does not hold for Derrida—his poststructural readings are said to have deconstructed it. This, of course, is not to say there is nothing beyond language. “It is totally false,” comments Derrida, to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference. Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the “other” of language. I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite.40 Whereas structuralists contend that the reconstruction of the object in a way that manifests the rules of its functioning is the goal of critical activity, Derrida challenges this position because it is predicated on the ability to objectively describe objects in the world. His poststructuralism asserts that answers to questions like “What is X?” cannot be provided, regardless of whether X is literature or just an ordinary object. While Derrida’s grammatological “structure” is discernible, it denies the possibility of objective description. In this context, it is worth mentioning Derrida’s debt to—and difference from—the phenomenological tradition. The influence of the phenomenological tradition on the formation Derrida’s notion of textuality is second only in impact to that of the Saussurean system of differences. Derrida draws on various works on phenomenological description, such as Husserl’s efforts to describe the contents of experience as well as phenomenology, which stresses the mediation between an interpreter and the interpreted—a form of phenomenology often called phenomenological interpretation, or simply,

36

Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 126. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 38 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 39 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 40 Jacques Derrida, “Interview with Richard Kearney,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 123. 37

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hermeneutics. Nevertheless, his work differs significantly from work done in the phenomenological tradition. Poststructural reading as practiced by Derrida is not concerned with the mere description of either the transcendental or the existential contents of experience. The existential, descriptive phenomenologies of Sartre and the early Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and the transcendental, descriptive phenomenologies of Husserl or even E. D. Hirsch in Validity in Interpretation (1967) and Roman Ingarden in The Literary Work of Art (1931) each offer too stable an account of textuality for him. For Derrida, descriptive phenomenologies such as those of Husserl, Sartre, early Merleau-Ponty, Ingarden, and Hirsch reduce something that is irreducible. Hence, even if Derrida’s account of a text draws on descriptive phenomenology, the flow of his theory is in the opposite direction. Much the same condition holds for hermeneutics (or phenomenological interpretation) as well. Poststructural reading is not concerned with interpretation but rather with respectively providing a theoretical practice of reading texts (or, deconstruction, if you will). If interpretation or understanding is the fundamental human activity or a basic fact of human existence in the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, then reading is the fundamental activity of Derrida’s poststructuralism.

5.2 JULIA KRISTEVA Julia Kristeva’s poststructuralist theory is wide-ranging and stunningly interdisciplinary. It blends not only psychoanalysis (especially, Freud, Lacan, and Melanie Klein) and semiotics (from the Roman Stoics to Saussure, Peirce, and Hjelmslev), but also linguistics (including Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar and Jakobson), literary formalism (specifically, Bakhtin), logic, mathematics, and philosophy (Hegel, Marx, and Husserl). If this were not enough, she is also a pioneer of écriture feminine (along with Cixous [6.4]), which is sometimes translated as “feminine writing” or “writing the body.” Given her wide-ranging influences and varied contributions to literary and cultural theory, her work might also have been featured under several other headings, including structuralism and semiotics, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory (6.0), and affect studies (13.0). In fact, by her own admission, she does not see her work as fitting into any one area or discipline. “I do not put myself in a discipline or even, or only, in a tradition of thought,” says Kristeva. “I am attracted by the questioning which comes to me, hic et nunc [here and now], and in light of that I in fact prepared a kind of synthesis between different knowledges which had been bequeathed to me and which I attempt to improve at a given moment.”41 She also says that her research “is very much based on my personal development, on my biography, on the historical processes that I have lived through, whether these be intellectual movements like the Tel Quel, avant-garde structuralism, or the political movements in France, such as May ’68, the strike of ’75, the development of the university or my own experience of maternity.”42

Julia Kristeva, “Interview [with John Lechte]: Sharing Singularity,” in Julia Kristeva: Live Theory, eds. John Lechte and Maria Margaroni (London: Continuum, 2004), 144. 42 Kristeva, “Interview [with John Lechte]: Sharing Singularity,” 144. 41

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Basic to Kristeva’s work is the idea that language is comprised of two levels or poles: the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic involves psychic inscriptions controlled by the primary processes of condensation and displacement. At this level, one finds the rhythms and tones that do not represent anything, but that are still a meaningful part of language. Also, at the semiotic level are found the drives that organize language. For Kristeva, drives “are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, [which] articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.”43 For Kristeva, these drives are discharged through tones and rhythms, but are not representations of them. The semiotic level of language is the translinguistic or non-linguistic level of language wherein its elements “turn toward language even though they are irreducible to its grammatical and logical structures.”44 However, for Kristeva, the semiotic is different from semiotics. Semiotic (le sémiotique), as explained above, is an element of language. Semiotics (la sémiotique), however, is the science of signs, one that is concerned with making models, that is, “formal systems whose structure is isomorphic or analogous to the structure of another system (the one under study).”45 Semiotics borrows “its models from the formal sciences (such as mathematics or logic, which in this way are reduced to being a branch of the vast ‘science’ of language-models),” says Kristeva—and “could eventually become the axiomatization of signifying systems, without being hindered by its epistemological dependence on linguistics.”46 However, for her, “rather than speak of a semiotics [la sémiotique], we prefer to talk of a semiotic [le sémiotique] level, which is that of the axiomatization, or formalization, of signifying systems.”47 The symbolic, on the other hand, is the grammar or structure of language. It governs the ways in which symbols can refer or signify something. It is also at this level where the true self is articulated in language. The symbolic is language at the level of propositions that are part of a system of signs. However, Kristeva’s symbolic is not the same as Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic. For Lacan, the Symbolic is the entire realm of signification, whereas for Kristeva the symbolic is only one element of signification, the one associated with syntax. According to Kristeva, language always consists of a dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic even if the Western tradition tries to contain, control, and even refuse the semiotic level of language. This containment is dangerous according to Kristeva because it is only at the semiotic level of language that the individual can express himself or herself through language; the symbolic level of language allows for only a one-dimensional view of language and self. But, while the semiotic level motivates signification, it also threatens the stasis of the symbolic level through negativity. For Kristeva, negativity is not the operator of her dialectic as it is in Hegel’s thesis– antithesis–synthesis. Rather, Kristeva replaces Hegel’s dialectical negativity with expenditure or rejection, which becomes a further term in her dialectic. As she gets the term from psychoanalysis, it allows her to better connect the dialectic to drive. “In our view, expenditure or rejection are better

43 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. 44 Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul (1993), trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 35. 45 Julia Kristeva, “Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science” (1969), trans. Seán Hand, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 76. 46 Kristeva, “Semiotics,” 76–7. 47 Kristeva, “Semiotics,” 77.

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terms for the movement of material contradictions that generate the semiotic function,” writes Kristeva.48 “Certainly the terms’ implications in drive theory and general analytic theory make them preferable to that of negativity.”49 In short, whereas in Hegel’s dialectic, contradictions are overcome through negativity, in Kristeva’s dialectic, the contradictions between the semiotic and the symbolic are never overcome. The semiotic and the symbolic correspond at the explicitly textual level to what Kristeva respectively calls the genotext and the phenotext. The phenotext—which corresponds to the symbolic level of language—is the textual surface structure that can be described empirically by the methods of structural linguistics. The genotext—which corresponds to the semiotic level of language—is the level of textual deep structure wherein the production of signification takes place. Characteristics of the genotext include exteriority to the subject, timelessness, and a lack of structure. Genotext contains the possibilities of all languages and signifying practices as its predisposition before it is masked or censured by the phenotext. Textual analysis, for Kristeva, shows that whenever a text signifies, it participates in the transformation of reality by capturing it at the moment of its non-closure. Kristeva treats the text, not as a communicative process of social exchange based on the sender– receiver model of communication, but rather as a generative activity that she calls productivity. For Kristeva, the text is defined as a trans-linguistic apparatus that redistributes the order of language by relating communicative speech, which aims to inform directly, to different kinds of anterior or synchronic utterances. The text is therefore a productivity, and this means: first, that its relationship to the language in which it is situated is redistributive (destructive–constructive), and hence can be better approached through logical categories rather than linguistic ones; and second, that it is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.50 As productivity, texts have a redistributive relationship to the language in which they are situated. For Kristeva, texts are regarded as revolutionary transformations of the language because of the dialectical relationship that she establishes between language and text. Of primary concern is the dynamics of the production of texts, rather than the actual product. One of the factors determining the polyphonous character of texts, intertextuality, is not simply a matter of literary influence. The text is an intersection, absorption, and transformation of other texts and codes, and comprises in some sense the entirety of contemporary and historical language. Thus, for Kristeva, as text, the novel “is a semiotic practice in which the synthesized patterns of several utterances can be read.”51 In this regard, the influence of Bakhtin, who, as you will recall, viewed the literary text as a mosaic of quotations exhibited through a polyphonous and dialogical structure, is most apparent. “Bakhtinian dialogism,” writes Kristeva, “identifies writing as both subjectivity and

Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 119. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 119. 50 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1969/1977), ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36. 51 Kristeva, Desire in Language, 37. 48 49

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communication, or better, as intertextuality.”52 Finally, for Kristeva, the analytical process, comprised of the phenotext and genotext stages, is one of dissolution that inevitably leads to the hidden meanings of the text. For Kristeva, poetic language is unique because of the ability of its sounds and rhythms to reactivate the semiotic drive force in language. Kristeva describes this as a reversed reactivation of the contradiction between the semiotic and the symbolic. Poetic language reactivates the contradictions between the semiotic and the symbolic. It does not, however, represent the chora or drives of the semiotic. By reactivating these contradictions, poetic language displays the processes that make signification and language possible. Poetic language plays between the genotext and the phenotext, and in the process reactivates the contradiction between the semiotic and the symbolic. Like Lacan, Kristeva contends that subjectivity is the product of the acquisition of language and its use. However, she differs with Lacan concerning language acquisition. Whereas for Lacan, the mirror stage and the substitution of the Law of the Father for the desire of the mother are central to self-consciousness and signification, Kristeva offers another account. Instead of entering language and the social realm through the separation from the maternal and the fear of castration, Kristeva argues that separation occurs before Lacan’s mirror stage and Freud’s Oedipal Stage. For her, like Lacan and Freud, the separation is a painful one. But unlike them, it is also a pleasurable one. Rather than just paternal threats pushing the child into language acquisition and the social realm, she contends that paternal love is also part of this process. She calls this loving father the imaginary father, one whose loving support enables the child to abject (or separate) from its mother and enter the social. For Kristeva, before the mother becomes an object for the infant, it is neither object nor non-object. Rather, it is abject, a state between object and non-object. This abjection is one that the child finds both horrifying and fascinating. For Kristeva, the uncertain boundary between the mother and the child, the abject, becomes the primary experience of both horror and fascination. Rather than being something that is grotesque or unclean, the abject is for Kristeva that which threatens borders and calls identity into question. Moreover, Kristeva also connects the meaning of both language and life with love: Today Narcissus is an exile, deprived of his psychic space, an extraterrestrial [ET] with a prehistory bearing, wanting love. An uneasy child, all scratched up, somewhat disgusting, without a precise body or image, having lost his specificity, an alien in a world of desire and power, he longs only to reinvent love. The ET’s are more and more numerous. We are all ET’s.53 For Kristeva, the living body is a body that not only speaks, but also loves. Moreover, “love is something spoken, and it is only that.”54 Love is essential to the body because it helps to reconnect words with affects, that is, the physical and psychical manifestation of drives. For Kristeva, the connection between words and affects is established during the child’s acquisition of language. However, when it is broken or missing, particular forms of mild psychosis can appear. Part of Kristeva’s project is to reconnect language to bodily drives, and to show the role that love has in this process.

Kristeva, Desire in Language, 68. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (1983), trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 382–3. 54 Kristeva, Tales of Love, 277. 52 53

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Kristeva’s notion that bodily drives manifest themselves in language is one of the ways in which her semanalysis (sema, Greek for sign + analysis, short for psychoanalysis) brings the body back into language. Key to her theory is that drives operate in a dialectical relationship between the social and the biological levels—and one cannot be reduced to the other. For her, drives are energies that move between the body and representation. This is important to recognize because poststructuralism is often characterized as functioning only at the level of representation—and foregoing any speculation on its relationship to the body and the material. As such, poststructuralism is often characterized as a form of linguistic idealism wherein the external world is inaccessible to us through language. This is often the way in which, for example, Derrida’s poststructuralism is characterized—a characterization that though an inaccurate one is difficult to ascertain from his work if one does not regard the traces that language gives of something beyond language as a type of reference. With Kristeva, however, there is no such difficulty: the material, the body, and affect are always reminding us in her work of the dialectics between language and a material world. Whereas Derrida continuously has to defend himself against the claim that his poststructuralist thought amounts to the position that we live in the prison house of language and that there is nothing beyond language or the text, Kristeva’s poststructuralism is never subject to such a charge. Finally, by considering the role of the mother in object relations and moving away from the Oedipal Complex, Kristeva’s work is both a rejection of patriarchy and phallogocentrism, that is, psychoanalytic theory that centers on the phallus. “If it is not possible to say of a woman that she is (without running the risk of abolishing her difference),” asks Kristeva, “would it perhaps be different concerning the mother, since that is the only function of the ‘other sex’ to which we can definitely attribute existence?” But, for Kristeva, this leaves us caught in a paradox: First, we live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious and secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood. If however, one looks at it more closely, this motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what is more, it involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the relationship that binds us to her, one that cannot be localized—an idealization of primary narcissism. Now, when feminism demands a new representation of femininity, it seems to identify motherhood with that idealized misconception and, because it rejects the image and its misuse, feminism circumvents the real experience that fantasy overshadows. The result?—a negation or rejection of motherhood by some avant-garde feminist groups. Or else an acceptance—conscious or not—of its traditional representations by the great mass of people, women and men.55 This passage is from an article called “Stabat Mater” (1977) which was written in two columns: one column describes her motherhood and the birth of her son in 1976, and the other argues that we need to reconceive maternity. Kristeva takes Freud’s account of motherhood, which says that it is either penis envy (where the baby is equated with the penis) or a reactivated anal drive (where the baby is equated with feces), as merely masculine fantasy. “Freud offers only a massive nothing” regarding motherhood, says Kristeva, “punctuated with this or that remark on the part of Freud’s

55

Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater” (1977), trans. Leon S. Roudiez, in The Kristeva Reader, 161.

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mother, proving to him in the kitchen that his own body is anything but immortal and will crumble away like dough; or the sour photograph of Marthe Freud, the wife, a whole mute story.”56 Kristeva calls for us to reconceive the notion of maternity, and as part of the process, listen to “what modern women have to say about this experience.”57 “Pregnancy,” she writes, [s]eems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech. The fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a fantasy of totality—narcissistic completeness—a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis. The arrival of the child, on the other hand, leads the mother into the labyrinths of experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for an other. Not for herself, nor for an identical being, and still less for another person with whom “I” fuse (love or sexual passion). But the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one’s affective, intellectual and professional personality—such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. It then becomes a creation in the strong sense of the term. For this moment, utopian?58 Pregnancy, for Kristeva, is an example of the subject-in-process, a situation where neither the fetus nor the mother is a unified subject. Finally, argues Kristeva, we are all subjects-in-process, which is one of the ways in which her maternal notion of the subject moves beyond patriarchal and phallocentric models.

5.3 JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD Though Jean-François Lyotard is most widely known for The Postmodern Condition (1979), a work which closes with a call for us to “wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name,” it is said to be one of his “least representative books” from a publishing career that spanned over forty years—and nearly the same number of books.59 Nevertheless, his definition of “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives,” and argument that the totalizing structures of modernity are no longer a legitimate basis for social and political action have been highly influential in literary and cultural theory. Though The Postmodern Condition was his twelfth book, his thought had already gone in several different directions by the time he published it. His first book, Phenomenology (1954), was a textbook that went through ten editions. The final edition was published in 1986—seven years after the publication of The Postmodern Condition. In this textbook, Lyotard sought to situate phenomenology within the context of then contemporary Marxist thought. He valued the ability of phenomenology to relate experiences that could not be captured in language and argued that

56

Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 179. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time” (1979), trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, in The Kristeva Reader, 206. 58 Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 206. 59 Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1. 57

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phenomenology could be a foundation for the human sciences, particularly history and sociology. But still, for him, phenomenology alone cannot produce an account of the dialectical materialism of Marxism. For Lyotard, phenomenology tells us that history has “some meaning,” but not “a meaning— unique, necessary, and thus inevitable, of which humans are the toys and dupes, as they ultimately are in Hegelian philosophy of history.”60 The meaning of history by way of phenomenology, writes Lyotard, is a “collective meaning,” which is the result of the meanings projected by historical subjectivities at the heart of their coexistence, and which these subjectivities must recover in an act of appropriation that puts an end to the alienation or objectification of this meaning and history, constituting in itself a modification of this meaning and proclaiming a transformation of history. There is not objectivity on one side and subjectivity on the other, which are heterogeneous and at best brought into alignment; and thus there is never a total understanding of history, since even when this understanding is as “adequate” as possible, it engages history in a new way and opens up a new future. For this reason we can grasp history neither through objectivism nor subjectivism, and even less through a problematic union of the two, but only through a deepening of both which leads us to the very existence of historical subjects in their “world,” on the basis of which objectivism and subjectivism appear as two equally inadequate options through which these subjects can understand themselves in history.61 What is also clear here is that for Lyotard any adequate account of history must provide a role for the subject. Therefore, the structuralist account of history, a position that denies a role for the subject, is not an acceptable one for him. “In order to understand history (and there is no greater task for philosophy),” writes Lyotard, “we must therefore escape this impasse of equally total freedom and [total] necessity.”62 Ultimately, though, the account of human existence offered by phenomenology will prove inadequate in determining a third way to account for history between “total freedom” and “total necessity.” His next book, Discourse, Figure (1971), which appeared seventeen years after the publication of Phenomenology, offered a different account of human existence from the ones provided by phenomenology—one that emphasized the figural and aesthetic dimensions of experience. By the figural, Lyotard means the visual, which he discusses through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. He sets the figural against discourse, that is, the written text of structuralism and semiotics. One of the problems he has with structuralism and semiotics is the intellectual emphasis on discourse over the figural, that is, the emphasis on texts over sensuous experiences and gestures. Here, Lyotard’s discourse and figure resonates with Kristeva’s distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic, which for her are the two levels or poles that come together in language. Lyotard, however, avoids the reduction of discourse and figure to language, but rather speaks of the way they

Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology (1954), 10th edition, 1986; trans. Brian Beakley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 131. 61 Lyotard, Phenomenology, 131. 62 Lyotard, Phenomenology, 131. 60

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co-implicate each other: discourse includes figures, and figures are ordered discursively. Moreover, contra Lacan, Lyotard’s figural is not structured like a language. Rather, like Kristeva’s semiotic, the figural might also be described as translinguistic or non-linguistic. But, it is important to add that the figural is also a disruptive force. During the span between the publication of Phenomenology and Discourse, Figure, which was the European equivalent of his doctoral dissertation, Lyotard became deeply involved with the intellectuals and activists of Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), an editorial collective concerned with the history and theory of Marxism. One of the concerns of the journal was how to separate Marxism from Stalinism while at the same time not retreating from politics. As a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, he wrote articles for the journal, some of which were later collected in the edited volume Political Writings (1993).63 But he also wrote and distributed leaflets to union workers and protesters during this period. After ten years with Socialisme ou Barbarie, he left in 1964 to join Pouvoir Ouvrier (Worker’s Party), which he then left two years later, at which time he started to attend the seminars of Lacan. For some, his interest in the work of Lacan coupled with leaving Pouvoir Ouvrier and publication of Discourse, Figure (a work with scant overt discussion of Marx or Marxism) marked his turning away from Marxism. For others, it marked a new approach to Marxism. For his friend Derrida, though, who continued to be haunted by the spirit of Marxism all of his career, Lyotard ultimately sacrificed Marxism to postmodernism.64 If Discourse, Figure resonates with the work of Kristeva, then Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974) might be linked to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly Anti-Oedipus (1972). Libidinal Economy utilizes Freud’s theory of libido to offer a critique of philosophy and Marxism. The result is a theory of libidinal economy as political economy. For Lyotard, the formations of society are libidinal fields that are stabilized by Freud’s pleasure principle (Eros) and destabilized by the death drive (Thanatos). The energies of the libido are not representable. Also, like Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs, the energies of the libido cannot be contained by a system. But unlike them, Lyotard makes no distinction between fascist and liberatory forms of desire. Capitalism, for example, is regarded by him as a liberatory libidinal economy because it overthrows all institutions that get in the way of its pursuit of capital. For Lyotard, all institutions aim to totalize these flows of energy and exploit the libidinal economy to their advantage. Up to the publication of The Postmodern Condition, the representative works of Lyotard were deeply involved in debates concerning phenomenology, Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. But, arguably, because Lyotard was largely working as a radical political activist in the 1960s, and because the poststructuralism of Foucault (9.1) and Derrida was much more influential in the 1970s than his own work from this period, his twenty-five-year body of work took on a secondary status in literary and cultural theory of the time. All of this changed, however, in the 1980s with the publication of The Postmodern Condition, which launched Lyotard into the mainstream of literary and cultural theory. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard again argues against totalizing structures of knowledge. However, this time he is not discussing them in the context of a phenomenology of history grounded in Husserl and Sartre; or the figural dimensions of experience by way of Merleau-Ponty; or even a

Jean-François Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geimen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 64 John Mowitt, “The Gold-Bug,” in Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure (1971), trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xi. 63

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libidinal economy à la Marx and Freud. Rather, in The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard approaches totalizing structures of knowledge from the context of a pragmatics and game theory. His work here is influenced by the language games and “rule-following” of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, particularly his Philosophical Investigations (1953), and the work of the logician Saul Kripke—two analytic philosophers whose work is central to gaming studies (14.4), but very distant from the concerns of phenomenology, Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard asks, Where, after the metanarratives [of modernity], can legitimacy reside? Is legitimacy to be found in consensus obtained through discussion, as Jürgen Habermas thinks? Such consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.65 Lyotard analyzes how metanarratives (or, master narratives) reproduce and legitimize the dominant norms, institutions, and ideologies of modernity. For him, the postmodern is that which cannot be presented in the modern. It is knowledge founded on alternative models of narrative based in paralogy, a mode of legitimation determined by making moves within a pragmatics of knowledge, not by promoting law as a norm. Lyotard argues against the notion that the goal of dialogue is consensus—a notion that he attributes to Habermas. For Lyotard, “consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end.”66 Consensus requires “that it is possible for all speakers to come to agreement on which rules or metaprescriptions are universally valid for language games”—something which Lyotard contends he has shown is not possible through his analysis of the pragmatics of science.67 For him, “it is clear that language games are heteromorphous, subject to heterogeneous sets of pragmatic rules.”68 Nonetheless, in spite of his difficulties with consensus as the aim of dialogue, Lyotard is no enemy of dialogue as such. For him, rather than viewing the aim of dialogue as consensus and stability, he would rather that we view its aim as dissent and instability, that is to say, paralogy. Writes Lyotard, “This double observation (the heterogeneity of the rules and the search for dissent) destroys a belief that . . . humanity as a collective (universal) subject seeks its common emancipation through the regularization of the ‘moves’ permitted in all language games and that the legitimacy of any statement resides in its contributing to that emancipation.”69 For Lyotard, two of the benefits of paralogical inquiry are that it eliminates “terror” and it allows terms to be defined locally. “By terror,” writes Lyotard, “I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him.”70 “He is silenced

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxv; my emphasis. 66 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 65. 67 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 65. 68 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 65. 69 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66. 70 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 63. 65

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or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing).”71 However, when one eliminates the regularization of moves, one allows for the possibility of everyone participating in the game. Lyotard’s “permissiveness toward the various games” shields the players of games from acts of terror. “The decision maker’s arrogance,” writes Lyotard, “consists in the exercise of terror.”72 He continues, “It says: ‘Adapt your aspirations to our ends—or else.’ ”73 Thus, for Lyotard, terroristic behavior in the game results not from playing by one’s own rules, but rather by adapting one’s aspirations to the rules of the game. The second benefit of paralogy is the “principle that any consensus on the rules defining the game and the ‘moves’ playable with it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation.”74 “The orientation then favors a multiplicity of finite meta-arguments,” writes Lyotard, “by which I mean argumentation that concerns metaprescriptives and is limited in space and time.”75 This implies that “temporary” features may be favored over “permanent” ones—and that the notion of universal consensus is “neither possible, nor even prudent”—to borrow Lyotard’s comment about Habermas’s search for universal consensus.76 Lyotard says that the paralogical “orientation corresponds to the course that the evolution of social interaction is currently taking; the temporary contract is in practice supplanting permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well as in political affairs.”77 “This evolution,” adds Lyotard, “is of course ambiguous: the temporary contract is favored by the system due to its greater flexibility, lower cost, and the creative turmoil of its accompanying motivations—all of these factors contribute to increased operativity.”78 As to the question of whether to try to repair the “old” system or to simply replace it with a “new” system, Lyotard’s response is quite clear: “there is no question here of proposing a ‘pure’ alternative to the system” as any “attempt at an alternative . . . would end up resembling the system it was meant to replace.”79 Lyotard’s paralogism is not one of calm, dispassionate dialogue. Rather, it is an agonistic one. Writes Lyotard, “the first principle underlying our method as a whole: to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of general agonistics.”80 Jameson, commenting on Lyotard’s paralogism, writes that its “rhetoric” is “one of struggle, conflict, the agonic in a quasi-heroic sense,” and reminds us not to “forget Lyotard’s related vision of nonhegemonic Greek philosophy (the Stoics, the Cynics, the Sophists), as the guerrilla war of the marginals, the foreigners, the non-Greeks, against the massive and repressive Order of Aristotle and his successors.”81 In this light, one might regard Lyotard’s paralogism as a kind of “negative

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 63–4. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 64. 73 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 64. 74 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66. 75 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66. 76 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 65. 77 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66. 78 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66. 79 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66. 80 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 10. 81 Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xix. 71 72

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dialogics,” that is, dialogue aimed at disrupting the system rather than bringing it into equilibrium. Paralogism encourages renouncement of the notion that dialogue needs to be conducted in a calm, dispassionate, and respectful way. For Lyotard, this type of dialogue needs to be rejected because it allows the system to become more powerful as a hegemonic force and homogeneous game. Lyotard also presents here a theory of the postmodern sublime grounded in the Kantian sublime. For Lyotard, the sublime allows us “to present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.”82 The difference, however, between Kant’s modern sublime and Lyotard’s postmodern sublime is as follows: [M]odern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute real sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept. The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a strong sense of the unpresentable.83 Lyotard will develop this notion of the postmodern sublime and its political potential in other works including The Differend (1983). In this later work, Lyotard provides an account of the differends in various language games. The differend is the irreconcilable and irreducible difference between two or more language games or regimes of language. If the language of a community is regarded as a language game, in order for it to function there must be some shared rules within the community. For Lyotard, these rules are embedded in the phrases of the language and provide the community members with shared rules for meaning. The differend is the incommensurable difference between the shared understanding of one regime of language and others. Political conflict enters considerations of the differend because it provides an account of points of dispute or conflict over things like the good, the true, and the just among regimes of language games. Basic to the notion of the differend is that knowledge is constructed through various language games, that is, genres of discourse. These genres of discourse allow for some phrasing that excludes others. These exclusions are the differend, points where the incommensurability of the discourse does not provide those of a different regime of language access to the values and experiences of other regimes of language. The differend also shows us where new genres of discourse need to be developed that break down incommensurability, that is, provide more access among peoples of differing language games.

82 83

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 78. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81; my emphasis.

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Finally, with regard to rule-following, Lyotard places the postmodern writer and artist in the position of a philosopher: [T]he text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization (mise en oeuvre) always being too soon. Post modern would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).84 For Lyotard, a form of text that exemplifies “working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done” is the essay. In contrast, he finds the fragment to be modern. “It seems to me the essay (Montaigne) is postmodern,” writes Lyotard, “while the fragment (The Athenaeum) is modern.”85 The journal, Athenaeum, was a set of fragments published by the Schlegel brothers—Friedrich and August Wilhelm—between 1798 and 1800. The fragment is a literary form that the Romantic Movement believed opened up the relationship between the infinite and the finite—the epitome of the modern sublime. The essays of Montaigne, however, first published in 1580, exhibit well the epistemological skepticism of postmodern knowledge. Moreover, it is fitting that Michel de Montaigne is often regarded by philosophers as offering a counter-narrative of the epistemological foundations of modern philosophy. It is one whose skepticism stands in stark contrast to Descartes (12.4), the philosopher whose certainty of the cogito (or thinking thing) supposedly overcame skepticism to become the indubitable foundation of modern philosophy.

5.4 JEAN BAUDRILLARD Baudrillard’s world is one filled with objects. “Our urban civilization is witness to an everaccelerating procession of generations of products, appliances and gadgets,” he comments, “by comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species.”86 His first book, The System of Objects (1968), argues that social life is structured by our consumption of these objects. “Could we classify,” asks Baudrillard, “the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?”87 Baudrillard explores the classification system of consumer objects that code social behavior and consumer groups. In this work, he reconsiders consumer society through a Marxism tempered by Saussure and Freud, that is, by use of linguistic categories rather than economic ones. For Baudrillard, we live in a consumer society wherein traditional Marxist analysis fails to capture the status of objects. Commodities post-1945 have a communicational structure that can only be

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81. 86 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1968), trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 3. 87 Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 3. 84 85

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captured by a semiotics that relies not on a referential model akin to Peirce, but rather a differential one like Saussure. Baudrillard’s semiotics combines aspects of Freud and Saussure to show how in the commodity word and image is related to desire, rather than use value or utility. Symbols provide the codes that differentiate one consumer product from another. Upon consumption, symbols then transfer meaning from the product to its consumer. Moreover, as a poststructuralist, the free play of this semiotics is potentially endless, and provides the consumer with a strong sense of freedom and self-determination within the hyperreality of the new semiotic condition of consumer society. It is hyperreality because in Baudrillard’s system one cannot get outside of the fantasies and desires generated by consumer consumption within the system of objects. In Baudrillard’s economy of signs, individuals are not making consumption choices based on tastes in a marketplace of products. Rather, consumer objects are codes that function within a system of signs. Following Saussure’s principles, signs become meaningful only when differentiated from other signs—not by reference to an external reality. Within this system of signs, consumer objects are able to generate desire without corresponding to need or use value. For Baudrillard, the mode of production of a society requires an expansion of consumer consumption in order for it to be reproduced. The dependency of the reproduction of the mode of production on the reproduction of the act of consumption thus becomes a new development in capitalism. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard works out a poststructuralist theory of language that can supplement Marxism. In Saussure, the signifier and the signified are distinct and are only arbitrarily related. Signs then take on value through their relationship with other signs in the system. Baudrillard, however, argues that we should reverse Saussure’s process, that is, we should begin our theory of language from the combination of the signifier and the signified replete with systemic value. To do otherwise is to use the signified as an excuse to render signifier and signified as distinct. For Baudrillard, political economy mirrors Saussure’s separation of signifier and signified before their combination in the sign by its separation of use value from exchange value before their combination in the commodity. “By giving the Sr [Signifier] and the Sd [Signified] ‘in equivalence’ as constitutive agencies (instances) of the sign,” comments Baudrillard, Saussure’s theory of the sign “veils the strategic apparatus of the sign, which rests precisely on the disparity of the two terms and on the fundamental circularity of the dominant term.”88 He then explains: The Signifier–Referent is taken for an original reality, a substance of value and recurring finality through the supporting play of signifiers . . . Similarly, use value is given as origin and purpose (finalité), and needs as the basic motor of the economic cycle—the cycle of exchange value appearing here as a necessary detour, but incompatible with true finalities . . . In reality, this moral and metaphysical privilege of contents (Use Value and Signifier–Referent) only masks the decisive privilege of form (Exchange Value and Signifier).89 Baudrillard argues that the political economy of the sign needs to keep use value and exchange value together in the commodity, rather than make use value into a “mask” or excuse for exchange value. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press Ltd., 1981), 156. 89 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, 156. 88

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This reversal of the theory of the sign not only undermines structuralism but also undermines Marxism by radically altering its theory of the commodity. Ultimately, Baudrillard not only rejects structuralism but also Marxism. He offers in its place a theory of the sign as the mode of signification within capitalism. From The Mirror of Production (1973) onward, Baudrillard regards his critique of the political economy of the sign not as supplementing Marxism, but rather replacing it. Moreover, Baudrillard regards Marxism not as a critique of capitalism, but rather as its highest form of ideology. In addition, he believes that his own critique of the political economy of the sign is sufficiently distanced from Marxism in order to provide capitalism with a proper critique. One of the differences between Baudrillard’s semiology and those of Saussure and Barthes is that he provides a diachronic account of the formation of language usage, whereas their accounts are primarily synchronic. His diachronic account begins with pre-industrial society, where he says there were signs attached to referents and that the referents of these signs were subject to reversal. This began to change, however, in the Renaissance, which for him is the historical period when “the sign” emerged. For Baudrillard, the rise of capitalism was a reflection of these changes in modes of signification. By the late twentieth century, the sign became completely separated from the referent. Signs are now more like traffic signals; that is, they emit a meaning but it is not a meaning to which one responds linguistically: the code tells us that a red light means stop and that nothing more needs to be said in response to this signal. This code extracts signifieds from the social and recirculates them in media such as television as floating signifiers. The code itself might be regarded as the entire system of political economy including the rules through which the sign values of commodities are produced and regulated. In Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), this diachronic account of the sign morphs into a diachronic account of the three orders of simulacrum (or, appearance) that parallel the mutations of the law: Counterfeit, the first order of the simulacrum, which was the dominant scheme from the Renaissance to the industrial era, is based on the natural law of value; Production, the second order of the simulacrum, which was the dominant scheme of the industrial era, is based on the commercial law of value; and Simulation, the third order of the simulacrum, which is the “reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by the code,” is based on the structural law of value.90 Here, as indicated in the third order of simulation, the code still takes precedence over consumer objects. But within a few years, that is, by the time of the publication of Simulacra and Simulations (1981), its order and control will fade away as a final relic of structuralism in the precession of simulacra. In Seduction (1979), Baudrillard puts all modern theory into question under the sign of seduction. For him, seduction speaks to the sudden reversibility in the order of things where discourse is “absorbed into its own signs without a trace of meaning.”91 This sudden reversibility is a threat to every discourse. “This is why all disciplines, which have as an axiom the coherence and finality of their discourse,” continues Baudrillard, “must try to exorcise [seduction].”92 Baudrillard, however, does the opposite: he celebrates seduction because it plays on the surface and challenges theories like structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis which are interpretive strategies that favor the hermeneutics of suspicion, that is, hidden structures and meanings.

Jean Baudrillard, “The Order of Simulacra,” from Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), collected in Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 83. 91 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (1979), trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 2. 92 Baudrillard, Seduction, 2. 90

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Seduction takes from discourse its sense and turns it from its truth. It is, therefore, contrary to the psychoanalytic distinction between manifest and latent discourses. For the latent discourse turns the manifest discourse not from its truth, but towards its truth. It makes manifest discourse say what it does not want to say; it causes determinations and profound indeterminations to show through in the manifest discourse. Depth always peeks through from behind the break, and meaning peaks from behind the line. The manifest discourse has the status of appearance, a laboured appearance, traversed by the emergence of meaning. Interpretation is what breaks the appearance and play of the manifest discourse and, by taking up the latent discourse, delivers the real meaning. In seduction, by contrast, it is the manifest discourse—discourse at its most superficial—that turns back on the deeper order (whether conscious or unconscious) in order to invalidate it, substituting the charm and illusion of appearances. These appearances are not in the least frivolous, but occasions for a game and its stakes, and a passion for deviation—the seduction of signs themselves being more important than the emergence of any truth—which interpretation neglects and destroys in its search for hidden meanings. This is why interpretation is what, par excellence, is opposed to seduction, and why it is the least seductive of the discourses.93 Looking ahead, Baudrillard’s poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion in favor of surface play might be viewed as a kind of prequel to surface reading and postcritique (15.4). Though their strategies are different, their common enemy is the hermeneutics of suspicion. In Simulacra and Simulations, the distinction between a sign and its object are said to not have any purchase in the current phase of history, that is, the third order of simulation. Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra— that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.94 For Baudrillard, this is the condition of our society in the late twentieth century. One where we have become so reliant upon maps that all contact with a reality that precedes these maps has been forever lost. Or, more precisely, “it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction.”95 Baudrillard will return to this question of disappearance again twenty-five years later in one of the final texts that he wrote before his death, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2007).

Baudrillard, Seduction, 53–4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. 95 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 2. 93 94

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“Is everything doomed to disappear,” asks Baudrillard.96 “[O]r, more precisely,” he continues, “hasn’t everything already disappeared? (which connects up with the very distant paradox from a philosophy that never was: WHY IS THERE NOTHING RATHER THAN SOMETHING?).”97 It is this latter question that speaks to the metaphysical shift Baudrillard makes in his post-Marxist writing on hyperreality. The question, “Why is there nothing rather than something?” is a reversal of a question famously raised by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a philosopher who proposed that not only did God create the world, He created the best of all possible worlds. Though the world created by God is not a perfect one, it is far from imperfect. It is not a world without evil, but on the whole the good in the world exceeds the evil. More importantly, Leibniz’s world is founded in a metaphysics of things. Baudrillard, however, turns metaphysics inside out: the main philosophical question for the late twentieth century is why is there now the “nothing” of hyperreality, rather than the “something” of reality? For Baudrillard, the metaphysical question regarding nothingness corresponds to a particular form of nihilism that he comments on at the close of Simulacra and Simulations. For him, the death of God takes on a different character in the late twentieth century than it did at the end of previous century: Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death. Today’s nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so—the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.98 Rather than distance himself from nihilism or try to overcome it, Baudrillard fully embraces it as his metaphysical position: I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history.

96 Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2007), trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2016), 63; my emphasis. 97 Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? 63. 98 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 159.

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I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning. The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation.99 With this statement of nihilism, Baudrillard reaffirms his rejection of the hermeneutics of suspicion and along with it a large chunk of contemporary theory for a view of the universe as simulation. “The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation,” writes Baudrillard, “into the malefic, not even malefic, indifferent, sphere of deterrence: in a bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely realized no longer through destruction, but through simulation and deterrence.”100 As one of the major commentators on postmodernity, Baudrillard essentially leaves us in the “desert of the real” with no “dialectic stage” on the horizon to transition us to another critical stage. The reasons for our current predicament range from the expansion of consumer society and new media to the loss of a sense of use-value and history. While Baudrillard is mostly responsible for the entry of the terms simulation and simulacra into the contemporary critical lexicon, the concept of a world of appearances can be traced back through the history of philosophy to Plato’s cave, where images were projected on a wall. But the more recent precursor to Baudrillard’s simulation and simulacra is perhaps Benjamin, whose work of art has lost its aura through mechanical reproduction. Baudrillard might then be viewed as expanding Benjamin’s thesis to all objects in the postmodern world. Baudrillard’s work throughout his career has been a lightening rod for commentators, but perhaps none more famous and discussed than Bruno Latour’s comments in a 2003 lecture at Stanford University. “What has critique become,” asked Latour, “when a French general, no, a marshal of critique, namely, Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself—as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful attraction of this black hole of nothingness?”101 Latour is here referring two of Baudrillard’s late essays, “The Spirit of Terrorism” (2002) and “Requiem for the Twin Towers” (2002).102 On the basis of these and other examples, Latour wonders if critique has “run out of steam.” What is ironic about Latour’s question is that Baudrillard renounced critique—and along with it the hermeneutics of suspicion—over two decades earlier in both Seduction and Simulacra and Simulations. The better question to ask of Baudrillard is what becomes of philosophy when nothingness rather than somethingness becomes its major concern. For Baudrillard, the answer provides us with an understanding and explanation of contemporary culture and society. Nevertheless, we will turn our attention to these and other questions asked of theory and critique by Latour and others in due course (15.0). Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 160–1. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 159. 101 Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 228. 102 Both of these essays are collected in Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (2002), trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2012). 99

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5.5 NEW HISTORICISM New Historicism was a term coined in the 1980s for a poststructuralist approach to history that was emerging in literary studies. The field of literature in which it gained most currency was Renaissance studies, and the critic most often associated with its rise is Stephen Greenblatt. Though he first used it in a brief introduction to a journal issue103 in 1982, in major works before and after, such as Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), he preferred the term cultural poetics. In the latter work, he describes cultural poetics as “study of the collective making of distinct cultural practices and inquiry into the relations among these practices.”104 The major concerns of cultural poetics are “how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one medium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption [and] how the boundaries were marked between cultural practices understood to be art forms and other, contiguous, forms of expression.”105 But his own positive relationship with the term New Historicism—let alone the designation of it as a literary theory or doctrine is—at best—strained. In “Towards a Poetics of Culture” (1989), Greenblatt says that he coined the term in 1982 “out of a kind of desperation to get the introduction done.”106 “I’ve never been very good at making up advertising phrases of this kind,” continues Greenblatt, “for reasons that I would be quite interested in exploring at some point, the name stuck more than other names I’d very carefully tried to invent over the years.”107 But perhaps more interesting than the question of whether New Historicism or cultural poetics is the right term for his poststructuralist approach to history in the reading of Renaissance texts is Greenblatt’s description of his approach to theory. “My own work has always been done with a sense of just having to go about and do it,” says Greenblatt, “without establishing first exactly what my theoretical position is.”108 At best, therefore, he sees his approach to literature, history, and culture not as a theoretical doctrine, but rather as a practice. In fact, regarding New Historicism, Greenblatt says “it’s no doctrine at all.”109 Furthermore, Greenblatt describes the relationship of New Historicism to literary theory as both “unresolved and in some ways disingenuous.”110 Writes Greenblatt, On the one hand it seems to me that an openness to the theoretical ferment of the last few years is precisely what distinguished the New Historicism from the positivist historical scholarship of the early twentieth century . . . On the other hand the [new] historical critics have on the whole been unwilling to enroll themselves in one or the other dominant theoretical camps.111

Stephen Greenblatt, “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance,” Genre 15.1/2 (1982): 1–4. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 5. 105 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 5. 106 Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1. 107 Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” 1. 108 Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” 1. 109 Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” 1. 110 Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” 1. 111 Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” 1. 103 104

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Circa 1989, when Greenblatt is writing this, New Historicism is forming in the theoretical wake of structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. It is also a time when cultural studies in the US is coming to offer an alternative to theoretical accounts of literature (14.1). However, what was largely missing from this “theoretical ferment,” particularly with regard to literature, was history. While the dialectical materialism of Marxism offered a path to New Historicism, it was a path not taken. Rather, it was one that was taken by the British equivalent of New Historicism—something called cultural materialism (or, alternately, historical materialism). Its major proponent, Raymond Williams, was discussed earlier in reference to the work of Jameson. For cultural materialists, study of the history of the material base of society helps us to understand literature and culture. New historicists, however, reverse this formula, arguing that the study of literature and culture helps us to understand history. Here the major influences are the biopolitics of Foucault, that is, his later work on power, discourse, and subjectivity (9.1), and the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, particularly his notion of thick description, which he describes as “a semiotic one.”112 “[M]an is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” says Geertz, and “I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”113 This, however, cannot be accomplished by structural linguistics, which strives “to understand men without knowing them.”114 “Nothing will discredit a semiotic approach to culture more quickly than allowing it to drift into a combination of intuitionism and alchemy,” that is, by allowing it to drift into structural linguistics.115 For Geertz, one must attempt to see cultural artifacts from the position of those who belong to the culture. The latter is accomplished through a mastery of the webs of the culture in order to gain as complete an account as possible of the background and context of the cultural artifact. Thus, New Historicism might be regarded as the American version of cultural materialism. It should be no surprise then that its aversion to Marxism will lead Jameson to oppose New Historicism: for him, cultural texts are symptoms of history, whereas for the New Historicists, cultural texts are agents of history. What might be surprising, though, is that Greenblatt was a student of Williams at Cambridge University—and learned cultural materialism directly from its most celebrated practitioner. Nevertheless, if a tension with Marxism always seems to be percolating just below the surface of New Historicism, then so too does one with deconstruction. Catherine Gallagher, who like Greenblatt is also closely linked to New Historicism, explains this tension as follows: Many of us, however, found that we could neither renew our faith in Marxism or convert to deconstruction, for neither seemed sufficient to explain the permutations of our own historical subjectivities and our relationships to a system of power, which we still imagined as decentered, but which we no longer viewed as easily vulnerable to its own contradictions.116

112 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5. 113 Geertz, “Thick Description,” 5. 114 Geertz, “Thick Description,” 30. 115 Geertz, “Thick Description,” 30. 116 Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in The New Historicism, 42.

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So, with deconstruction off the table as a potential theoretical approach to Renaissance studies, and Marxism appearing to have run out of steam circa 1989, Gallagher and her New Historicist colleagues fashioned a set of practices (but no defined theory) that loosely drew from theorists such as Althusser, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Gramsci and theoretical movements such as formalism, hermeneutics, structuralism, phenomenology—and, yes, even Marxism. In a way, New Historicism was the result of the rise and success of theory in the 1980s—a success that made literary critics highly attuned to the benefits and costs of their theoretical approach. Even Lyotard’s critique of meta-narratives entered their deliberations, with Gallagher and others aiming to avoid totalizing narratives and to drift toward micro-narratives. Gallagher successfully encapsulates all of these theoretical anxieties of the time: Instead of resubscribing, as some Marxist critics have, to a historical meta-narrative of class conflict, we have tended to insist that power cannot be equated with economic or state power, that its sites of activity, and hence of resistance, are also in the micro-politics of daily life. The traditionally important economic and political agents and events have been displaced or supplemented by people and phenomena that once seemed wholly insignificant, indeed outside of history: women, criminals, the insane, sexual practices and discourses, fairs, festivals, plays of all kinds. Just as in the sixties, the effort of the eighties has been to question and destabilize the distinctions between sign systems and things, the representation and the represented, history and text.117 Looking forward, she adds, “some new historicists will continue to resist the goal of synthesizing their historical, literary critical, and political consciousness in one coherent entity” such as Marxism.118 “The new historicist,” continues Gallagher, “unlike the Marxist, is under no nominal compulsion to achieve consistency.”119 Whereas the disagreements between Marxism and New Historicism have been well established, its distance from deconstruction is far less established. In fact, Louis Montrose, another thinker closely associated with New Historicism, describes it as concerned with “the Historicity of Texts and the Textuality of History”—a phrasing that links it strongly to the textualist approach of poststructuralism. Writes Montrose, The post-structuralist orientation to history now emerging in literary studies may be characterized chiastically, as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all mode of all modes of writing—not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we study them. By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest, firstly, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question—traces whose survival we cannot assume to be merely contingent but must rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes

117

Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” 43. Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” 46. 119 Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” 46. 118

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of preservation and effacement; and secondly, that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the “documents” upon which historians ground their own texts, called “histories.”120 For Montrose, “the various modes of what could be called post-structuralist historical criticism (including modes of revisionist or ‘post’ Marxism, as well as ‘New Historicism’ or ‘Cultural Poetics’) can be characterized as a shift from History to histories.”121 History with a big H is the history of the old historicism, wherein literary history is considered a part of cultural history. One version of this comes from Hegel’s idealism, wherein the literary history of nations is viewed as an expression of the evolution of “Spirit.” The study of literature under this version of the old historicism is to regard it in the context of social, political, and cultural History (with a big H)—a History that consists of a seamless unified system of meanings that cannot be disturbed or altered by dissenting voices or accounts. By contrast, the New Historicism, as Montrose says, is history with a small h—one wherein there is no untextualized or unnarrated access to the past. On the one hand, the notion that we have no unnarrated access to the past calls upon theoretical work done on history under the rubric of structural narratology, in particular, the contributions of Hayden White; on the other hand, the notion that we have no untextualized access to the past calls directly upon the theoretical work of Derrida, whose theory of textuality is the most robust version in poststructuralism. The combination of these two approaches to the past leads to historians who no longer claim that their study of the past is detached and objective, that is, it is the study of history that does not and cannot transcend one’s historical situation. For those who study history with a small h, we construct the past from texts of all kinds, which we construe in line with our historical concerns. Moreover, on this approach to history with a small h, all texts are equal, which is to say, the literary text is regarded as neither sublime nor transcendent. Literary and non-literary texts are of the same order for those who attest to the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. Literature is neither read against the background of History nor is there a fixed History to set in the background. Small h history is merely one story about the past among many competing versions. While one may combine all of these small h histories together into a set and call them “histories,” they are very different from the History (with a big H) of both Hegel and Marx. There is no totalizing History or meta-narrative in the histories of New Historicism. There is also, as Greenblatt observed in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, no room for human freedom or agency in these histories with a small h: In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparently autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force.122

Louis Montrose, “The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, 20. Montrose, “The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” 20. 122 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 256. 120 121

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As a practice that offers no human agency and no human freedom, the New Historicism also denies the humanist ideal of the autonomous self. As such, the idea of the individual literary genius like the ones discussed by Bloom are not possible in the New Historicism. Whereas humanists such as Bloom view literary history as a series of isolated moments of genius, the very idea of individual genius is not possible within the New Historicism. But then again, not only is the autonomous self not possible, the same goes for the autonomous text cherished by the New Criticism. As H. Aram Veeser puts it, the “autonomous self and text are mere holograms” for the New Historicists—“effects that intersecting institutions produce.”123 While it might sound extreme to compare these holograms to Baudrillard’s simulations, the autonomous self and text are not possible within the context of either approach. Similarly, although it might be a stretch to call the New Historicism a nihilism, as Baudrillard terms his world of simulation, the New Historicist notion of “selves and texts [only] defined by their relation to hostile others (despised and feared Indians, Jews, Blacks) and disciplinary power (the King, Religion, Masculinity)”124 is no less bleak a vision of humanity, particularly when one also considers that it offers to us a world wherein there is also no room for critique and no access to any universal truths. In sum, the New Historicism, in spite of its heterogeneity and desire to not be attached to doctrines, might be characterized by five assumptions: (1) Every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices. (2) Every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes. (3) Literary and non-literary “texts” circulate inseparably. (4) No discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature. (5) A critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participates in the economy it describes.125 Finally, for all of its efforts to distance itself from Marxism, the New Historicism, like Derrida, is haunted by it. Or perhaps it would be better to say, in strict parallel with Derrida’s comment that Lyotard ultimately sacrificed Marxism to postmodernism, that New Historicism sacrificed Marxism to histories.

H. Aram Veeser, “Introduction,” in The New Historicism, xiii; my emphasis. Veeser, “Introduction,” xiii. 125 Veeser, “Introduction,” xi (slightly adapted). 123 124

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Feminist Theory 6.0 INTRODUCTION By the time of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, feminist theory had already more than 200 years of history behind it. This period, often said to begin with the letters Abigail Adams wrote to John Adams during the Continental Congress of 1776, is alternately termed old or first-wave feminism (6.1). It was fundamentally concerned with the liberty of women. Abigail wrote to her husband John, who would later become the second president of the US, that the new government that was being codified by Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others must provide greater freedoms to women. In one of her letters, she writes: [I]n the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.1 While Abigail ultimately did not convince the future president regarding the rights of women, her correspondence is valuable because she pointed out to him that “while emancipating the world, he still believes in giving men the absolute control over women.”2 If old feminism (or first-wave feminism) had its origins in the democratic revolutions in America and France, it was also pointed out by some writers during this period that its history goes back even further to early feminist writers such as Christine de Pisan, a fifteenth-century poet whom Simone de Beauvoir says was the first woman “to take up her pen in defense of her sex.”3 “Later,” continues Beauvoir, “she maintained that if little girls were well taught, they would ‘understand the subtleties of all the arts and sciences’ as well as boys.”4 From the late eighteenth century through World War I (1914–18), the rights of women was the major topic of feminism. But, after the war, there was a decline in feminism that has been attributed to a number of factors including the victory in securing suffrage in the US (the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified on August 18,

Abigail Adams, “Letter to John Adams, 31 March 1776,” in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York: Vintage, 1972), 3. 2 Miriam Schneir, “Abigail Adams,” in Feminism, 3. 3 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), 118. 4 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 118. 1

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1920, granted women the right to vote) and the UK (women were granted the right to vote in the UK through laws passed in 1918 and 1928); the rise of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which was regarded as anti-feminist; the economic depression which followed World War I; and the development of authoritarian governments in Germany and the Soviet Union that promoted the value of male supremacy. In Sexual Politics (1969), Kate Millett says that the first phase of the sexual revolution spans 1830 to 1930, and that the second phase, which she calls the “counterrevolution,” spans 1930 to 1960. For Millett, while the first phase of the sexual revolution effectively attacked the “political, economic, and legal superstructure, accomplishing very notable reform in the area of legislative and other civil rights, suffrage, education, and employment,” it did not dismantle the ideology of patriarchy—that is, a social system in which men dominate and exercise control over women in all important areas of life.5 The old feminism (or first-wave feminism) ranges from Abigail Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963). The focus here is on women as people with rights in society. In the 1960s, however, there is a shift in focus in feminism to the body. This new feminism or second-wave feminism (6.2) will focus on matters such as ownership of the body, the nature of the body, abortion, and women’s liberation. Also, as evidenced above by Millett, there will be attention to the omnipresence of patriarchy and the inadequacy of political institutions with respect to women. Carol Gilligan will even argue that men and women have different moral attitudes—and that one is as correct as the other. But as the second-wave feminism begins to unfold in the 1960s, so too does a suspicion among feminists regarding theory. As Mary Eagleton puts it, A suspicion of theory is widespread throughout feminism. Faced as we are with a long history of patriarchal theory which claims to have proved decisively the inferiority of women, this caution is hardly surprising. Many feminists see theory as, if not innately male—women are capable of doing it—then certainly male-dominated in its practice and masculinist in its methods.6 According to Eagleton, feminism argues that “the impersonality and disinterestedness of theory is fallacious, masking the needs and partiality of the theoretician and that it partakes in [a] kind of hierarchical binary opposition.”7 Continues Eagleton, [T]heory is impersonal, public, objective, male; experience is personal, private, subjective, female. The anti-theorists undermine the primacy of theory by valorizing the subordinated term, variously styled as the experiential, the body, jouissance, the Mother.8 Eagleton also cites Marguerite Duras, who echoes the feminist position that theory is oppressive to women and only further consolidates male power:

Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 64. Mary Eagleton, “Introduction,” in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Mary Eagleton (New York: Routledge, 1991), 5. 7 Mary Eagleton, “Introduction,” 5. 8 Mary Eagleton, “Introduction,” 6. 5 6

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Men must learn to be silent. This is probably very painful to them. To quell their theoretical voice, the exercise of theoretical interpretation. They must watch themselves carefully. One has scarcely the time to experience an event as important as May ’68 before men begin to speak out, to formulate theoretical epilogues, and to break the silence. . . . They are the ones who started to speak, to speak alone and for everyone else, on behalf of everyone else, as they put it. They immediately forced women and extremists to keep silent. They activated the old language, enlisted the aid of the old way of theorizing, in order to recount, to explain this new situation: May ’68.9 The question of whether feminism should be associated with theory or not will be an important one, especially after the events of May 1968. Again, this was a period where various discourses such as Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis were interacting both to understand why the revolutionary moment of 1968 had failed as well as to rethink institutions such as the family, the state, and education. Feminism would play a decisive role regarding how these institutions should be rethought—a move that echoes backwards through history to Abigail Adams’s failed plea to John Adams to rethink America’s nascent institutions with respect to the rights of women. Flash forward two centuries later and feminists are still working to reform patriarchal institutions, but now the question is whether the totalizing discourse of theory is the best approach to the feminist reform of society—or whether theory is itself part of the patriarchal problem. While Anglo-American feminism of the second wave tended not to theorize itself for the reasons described above—and opted instead for the terms politics and criticism to describe their practices— French feminism from the same period tended to be self-consciously theoretical. But this is not to say that French feminist theory simply uncritically adopted structuralist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist theory. Rather, the major French theorists, such as Julia Kristeva (5.2), Hélène Cixous (6.4), and Luce Irigaray (6.5), explored and challenged the patriarchal and phallocentric traditions that underwrote theory to offer a new direction for theory and feminism. One of the major themes of French feminist theory is its defense of the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan against other feminists who regarded it as the epitome of patriarchy and anti-feminism. Another theme was its development of the concept of écriture féminine (female writing), one that theorized a role for women’s bodies in writing. In the early 1990s, however, feminism started to move in another direction. It was one that was initiated by a generation of feminists born in the 1960s and 1970s, and came about because of the advances of second-wave feminism. It extended feminism in a number of new directions, including sex positivity, intersectionality (8.4), postmodern feminism, transfeminism, and ecofeminism. Termed third-wave feminism (6.3), it is often said to have been launched in the early 1990s with Anita Hill’s testimony, regarding sexual harassment by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, to an all-white Senate Judiciary committee. For third-wave feminists, second-wave feminism was just too white and too serious. But the “wave” story of feminism continues to develop. It now includes a fourth wave, said to have begun around 2012, when social media platforms gave women the opportunity to mobilize

Marguerite Duras, “An Interview,” in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), 111.

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and collaborate against abuse of power and to seek justice against assault and harassment. Moreover, there is even talk of a fifth wave that is now forming. While these successive “waves” are often viewed by feminists as a positive sign of the continuing journey or development of feminism, others argue against the “wave” story of feminism. “Those who constellate the ‘First and Second Waves’ of feminism as defined by a neglect of race experience and contributors of color,” writes Robin Goodman, “are undervaluing the critique of world-historical racism that influences the construction of feminism’s subject in many cases.”10 “Feminism relies on ‘women’ being more than what ‘women’ are,” continues Goodman, “for those who see in ‘women’ the potential of a better world.”11 While the “wave story” provides a popular and unified account of feminism, as Goodman notes, one should not use it as a means to limit what women are and can be. Another approach to feminism—both as theory and/or criticism—is to regard it as a set of feminisms without a grand narrative or story (récit). In this view, there are many feminisms, including African, anarchist, Asian American, Black American, Black British, cultural, Chicana, difference, ecofeminism, existentialist, French, gynesis, gynocritical, Irish, lesbian, liberal, libertarian, Marxist, multiracial, myth, Native American, postcolonial, poststructural, postmodern, psychoanalytic, radical, separatist, socialist, standpoint, third-world, transfeminism, womanist, among others. Still another approach is to avoid the entire project of locating feminism in feminisms and waves and instead to view it from the point of view of how feminists approach the terms that constitute its field of discourse. “Alternatives exist,” offers Goodman, “that neither get bogged down and trapped in the past nor repress it wholeheartedly, and perhaps will surprise us with new beginnings.”12 “Instead of enslaving our speech to already existing narratives that have been washed out and wrapped up in over-small packages, and instead of expanding the present as the transcendent moment of truth,” she suggests that it is best to approach feminism through the terms that are “constantly being revised by feminist encounters, speaking through our mothers’ mouths.”13 In a move indicating a fatigue with the wave on wave of feminism that echoes “the rhythms of fashion, where ephemeral image constellations and shiny surfaces pop up as ‘new and improved’ attractions and then pop out with the regulated and unmemorable cycles of the clock,” Goodman contends that approaching feminism through keywords engages “the deep structures of feminist thought and politics”—deep structures that call upon feminism’s past while looking to its future through engagements with the present.14 If this is the favored approach to feminist theory today, then every theoretical keyword with a deep contemporary valence should be regarded as a potential point of contact with feminist theory. In other words, keywords like affect (13.0), intersectionality (8.4), translation (10.4), and Anthropocene (11.3), which in this volume also define more general areas of theoretical concern, are also important points of contact for contemporary feminist theory. In short, this approach contends that feminism cannot and should not be localized in one wave or another, but rather should be viewed from the post-wave positionality of the keywords or concepts that define and organize contemporary theory. To think about, for example, affect, translation, and

Robin Truth Goodman, “Feminism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 134. Goodman, “Feminism,” 134. 12 Robin Truth Goodman, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory, ed. Robin Truth Goodman (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 13. 13 Goodman, “Introduction,” 13. 14 Goodman, “Introduction,” 13. 10 11

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the Anthropocene, for post-wave feminists of this kind, becomes an opportunity to think about feminism’s past, present, and future.

6.1 FIRST WAVE The origins of the first wave of feminism—or, alternately, the old- or classical feminism—can be stretched all the way back to the ancient Greek poet Sappho, who flourished in the second half of the seventh century BCE , which is about a century after the time of Homer and two centuries before Plato. In her poetry, Sappho celebrates the existence of women and advocates for their worth. She is also often the leading figure in an educational circle of choruses of unmarried girls (parthenoi). Sappho’s celebration of women stands in sharp contrast not only to the ancient Greek philosophers, but to much of the Western philosophical tradition until John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century—and then again Simone de Beauvoir in the twentieth. While Hildegard of Bingen, from the late Middle Ages of the twelfth century, and Christine de Pisan, from the fifteenth century, are considered major contributors to the origins of classical feminism, the story of the first wave of feminism is most often considered to begin in the late eighteenth century with figures such as Abigail Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft—and to have had a major turning point (or counterrevolution) around 1930. The contrast between the position on women of the first wave of feminism and the Western philosophical tradition is a stark one. In short, it is difficult to locate much in this tradition ostensibly in support of the position of women in society. Aristotle, for example, in the Generation of Animals, contended that the male supplied the soul during the act of conception and said that “the female is as it were a mutilated male.”15 In late antiquity, Augustine, who is said to be the most influential philosopher in the Western tradition, said that men and women are both created in the image of God only when the woman is married to a man and fulfills her role as a helper to man. Ultimately, however, for Augustine only man is in the image of God. And, in the late Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, who is often called the “Angelic Doctor” (Doctor Angelicus), considered the female to be an imperfect man. In short, until the modern period, the general position of Western philosophers is that females are inferior to males. But even in the modern period, this position is still advanced. For example, at the same time that Adams and Wollstonecraft are advocating for the rights of women, Kant was presenting quite the opposite position. In his first treatise on aesthetics, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Kant discusses the education and proper place of women: Deep meditations and long sustained reflection are noble but difficult, and do not well befit a person in which unconstrained charms should show nothing else than a beautiful nature. Laborious learning or painful pondering, even if a woman should greatly succeed in it, destroy the merits that are proper to her sex, and because of their rarity they can make her an object of cold admiration: but at the same time they will weaken the charms with which she exercises her power over the other sex. A woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mme [Anne] Dacier [who

Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), I:1144; 737a 26–30.

15

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translated the Iliad, Odyssey, and other Greek and Latin classics into French], or carries on fundamental controversies about mechanics, like the Marquise [Émilie] du Chatelet [whose essay on the nature of fire won the French Academy of Science prize in 1738], might as well even have a beard; for perhaps that would express more obviously the mien of profundity for which she strives. The beautiful understanding selects for its objects everything closely related to the finer feeling, and relinquishes to the diligent, fundamental, and deep understanding abstract speculations of branches of knowledge useful but dry. A woman therefore will learn no geometry; of the principle of sufficient reason or the monads she will know only so much as is needed to perceive the salt in a satire which the insipid grubs of our sex have censured. The fair can leave Descartes his vortices to whirl forever without troubling themselves about them.16 It is said—as if to excuse these inexcusable remarks—that in this early work on aesthetics, one published twenty-five years before the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant was under the influence of Rousseau. In Emile (1762), published two years before Kant’s Observations, Rousseau comments on the prospect of equal education for women: [W]omen are always exclaiming that we educate them for nothing but vanity and coquetry, that we keep them amused with trifles that we may be their masters; we are responsible, so they say, for the faults we attribute to them. How silly! What have men to do with the education of girls? What is there to hinder their mothers educating them as they please? There are no colleges for girls; so much the better for them! Would God there were none for boys, their education would be more sensible and more wholesome. Who is it that compels girls to waste her time on foolish trifles? Are they forced against their will, to spend half their time over their toilet, following the example set them by you? Who prevents you teaching them, or having them taught, whatever seems good in your eyes? It is our fault that we are charmed by their beauty and delighted by their airs and graces, if we are attracted and flattered by the arts they learn from you, if we love to see them prettily dressed, if we let them display at leisure the weapons by which we are subjugated? Well then, educate them like men. The more women are like men, the less influence they will have over men, and then men will be masters indeed.17 Rousseau also comments in Emile on the prospect of equal rights for women: All the faculties common to both sexes are not equally shared between them, but taken as a whole they are fairly divided. Woman is worth more as a woman and less as a man; when she makes a good use of her own rights, she has the best of it; when she tries to usurp our rights, she is our inferior. It is impossible to controvert this, except by quoting exceptions after the usual fashion of the partisans of the fair sex.

16 Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 78–9. 17 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762), trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1911), 327.

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To cultivate the masculine virtues in women and to neglect their own is evidently to do them an injury. Women are too clear-sighted to be thus deceived; when they try to usurp our privileges they do not abandon their own; with this result: they are unable to make use of two incompatible things, so they fall below their own level as women, instead of rising to the level of men. If you are a sensible mother you will take my advice. Do not try to make your daughter a good man in defiance of nature. Make her a good woman, and be sure it will be better both for her and us.18 In short, while men and women have rights, they are different rights. Women who seek the rights of men become inferior by the same misogynistic logic that leads Rousseau to conclude that women who seek the same education as men only advance the domination of men over women. In contrast to Rousseau, Wollstonecraft argues that it is unfair not to provide women with the same educational opportunities afforded to men. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), she writes: Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice. And how can woman be expected to co-operate unless she know why she ought to be virtuous? unless freedom strengthen her reason till she comprehends her duty, and sees in what manner it is connected with her real good? If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot; and the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interest of mankind; but the education and situation of woman, at present, shuts her out from such investigations.19 Moreover, Wollstonecraft argues, to apply two different systems of value to men and women makes a mockery of the concept of virtue: My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt. . . . I wish to shew that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone.20

Rousseau, Emile, 327. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), viii–ix. 20 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 34. 18 19

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While Wollstonecraft disagreed with Rousseau that educational reform should be limited to boys, she was very sympathetic to his image of man as an element in nature. She argued that the education of boys and girls should be similar, and based on a simple, naturalistic approach. She defended physical exercise, a healthy approach to human sexuality, simple clothing, and the nursing of children. However, it was not the positions of Rousseau that motivated her to write Vindication, but rather Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Wollstonecraft objected to Burke’s acceptance of social injustices, and strenuously rejected them in Vindication. A century after Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill wrote in defense of sexual equality and argued against all forms of legal discrimination against women in The Subjection of Women (1869). “All women are brought up from the earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite of that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others,” writes Mill.21 “All the moralities tell them,” he continues, “that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others.”22 While Mill is sympathetic to many traditional claims about the social roles of men and women, he nevertheless makes many controversial proposals, including the analogy between the subjection of women and the possession of slaves. Mill believes that the Enlightenment ideals of individual freedom and autonomy had almost eradicated slavery despite its long tradition. These same ideals should, if followed, eradicate the subordination of women to men. Mill strongly advocates in The Subjection of Women for the freedom of choice and the equality of persons. He also believes that moral progress is possible, and that it occurs over the course of history. Most of the civilized world has abandoned slavery, yet the oppression of women remains unrecognized by most men, and widely accepted. For Mill, men must recognize the slavery of women if reform is to happen. He also responds to a number of objections that have been raised by his philosophical predecessors to the equality of women, including the charge that women’s subordination across history indicates their willingness to consent to it. The compassion that Mill shows in his writing on sexual equality— contra just about all of his Western philosophical predecessors—is widely attributed to the strong influence of Harriet Taylor Mill, who was one of his strongest intellectual influences. By the second quarter of the twentieth century, particularly after the attainment of suffrage in the US and UK, a common belief regarding the social construction of gender identity takes root through the work of Virginia Woolf and Beauvoir. Both share a belief in androgyny—a word that combines the Greek terms for male (andros) and female (gyne)—as an ideal. At the root of the concept of androgyny is the combination of both masculine and feminine character traits in one individual—either of the male or female sex. As an ideal, androgyny is a perfect blend of female and male cultures into the ideal person. Still, as Gloria Steinem would later point out, androgyny is a concept that “raise[s] anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism [of the second-wave] has in mind.”23 In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”24 For Woolf, women have always faced social and economic

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), 3rd edition (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870), 27. Mill, The Subjection of Women, 27. 23 Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), 158. 24 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929), in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Anna Snaith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. 21 22

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obstacles to their literary ambitions. Except under extraordinary circumstances, “a room of their own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room”25 for women was out of the question. Woolf argues that the literary genius of women has been thwarted by their social and economic conditions, and makes her by case by showing why “it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”26 Writes Woolf, I agree with the deceased bishop, if such he was—it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.27 The question remains, though, of what to make of Woolf ’s defense of androgyny as a form of feminism. In A Literature of Their Own (1977), Elaine Showalter argues that androgyny for Woolf “represents an escape from the confrontation with femaleness or maleness.”28 She also argues that Woolf ’s definition of life as a “luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end,” is “another metaphor of uterine withdrawal and containment.”29 For Showalter, the consequences of Woolf ’s “flight into androgyny” are “at heart evasions of reality” and “the female experience.”30 Others, however, like Toril Moi in Sexual/Textual Politics (2002), do not regard Woolf ’s androgyny as a passive withdrawl from the world, but rather view it as a complete displacement of masculine/feminine gender identities. Here Moi finds in Woolf ’s androgyny an anticipation of Kristeva’s third “position” toward feminism (where position one is liberal feminism, and position two is radical feminism), which involves resisting the oppositional struggle “between rival groups and thus between the sexes” and challenging “the very notion of identity.”31 Comments Moi, “I

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 40. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 36. 27 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 37. 28 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, expanded edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 289. 29 Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 296. 30 Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 318. 31 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2002), 14; Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” 209. 25 26

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would stress with Kristeva that a theory that demands the deconstruction of sexual identity is indeed authentically feminist.”32 Finally, there is perhaps no better figure and set of concepts to mark the final chapter of firstwave feminism than Beauvoir, who argues in The Second Sex (1949) that “woman is the Other.” She approaches the issue of “woman” from the point of view of the individual woman’s consciousness of herself as such. “Otherness,” for Beauvoir, is a secondary status that the “Self ” posits by negation and out of a sense of inadequacy. Consequently, women share the status of “Other” with any group that has been so negated. For Beauvoir, there does not seem to be any natural sex difference. All differences that have been recognized throughout history are merely the creations of defensive selfconsciousness. This includes the traditional view of women in the Western philosophical tradition (e.g., Aristotle and Aquinas, as noted above) as atypical and deviant. Without the creation of feminine consciousness by men, argues Beauvoir, there would be no such thing as woman at all. For Beauvoir, woman is seen by man, and by herself, as “the other,” an atypical person. Woman helps man define himself through her alienness but can never become man. For Beauvoir, these are cultural facts, not natural ones: One is not born, but rather becomes a woman – it is civilization as a whole who creates this creature. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other. In so far as he exists in and for himself, the child would hardly be able to think of himself as sexually differentiated.33 The only way women can become authentic persons is to leave behind their role as “the second sex” by developing a consciousness that overcomes these distinctions: a consciousness that is neither Other nor Self and that is unbound by the dichotomous dictates of the master–slave relation. Education, for Beauvoir, is one of the most important means to the establishment of this “new woman.” It is a new woman that is free from biological difference, and that aspires toward androgyny as an ideal. This ideal will later become a political ideal: one version is monoandrogynism, wherein everyone in society ought to share all the best characteristics of both genders; and polyandrogynism, wherein everyone in society is free to choose his or her gender role. Compared with these two political ideals for androgyny, Beauvoir’s position is a moderate androgynism, which advocates for a common upbringing for both men and women. The ultimate version of androgynism is changing or altering the human body through surgery so as to eliminate sexual difference. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes, “The truth is that when a woman is engaged in an enterprise worthy of a human being, she is quite able to show herself as active, effective, taciturn—and as ascetic—as a man.”34 After the publication of The Second Sex, Beauvoir became a figure of inspiration for women’s movements around the world. She is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of contemporary feminism and is one of the most respected modern philosophers. Her work

Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 14. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 301. 34 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 671. 32 33

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belongs to the existentialist–phenomenological tradition, and is inspired by, among others, the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, her lifelong companion, whom she first met in 1929. As an existentialist, Beauvoir believes that existence precedes essence, and that humans are not determined and must accept responsibility for who they are. For Beauvoir, women are subject to social influences that rob them of both who they are and of an awareness of their freedom. For her, these social influences can be overcome by courageous self-assertion. In a male-dominated society, women are defined in terms of men’s nature, and when they accept this role they forego their freedom. Women must reject male myths of who they are and create woman as a free, independent being. They must also overcome the social and economic conditions which keep them from exercising their freedom. For de Beauvoir, social and economic liberation is the key to women’s freedom.

6.2 SECOND WAVE In 1968, the New York Times announced in its Sunday Magazine a second wave of feminism. According to Martha Lear, “feminism, which one might have supposed as dead . . . is again an issue.”35 “Proponents call it the Second Feminist Wave,” continues Lear, “the first having ebbed after the glorious victory of suffrage and disappeared, finally, into the great sandbar of Togetherness.”36 This was the first mention of a second wave of feminism, one that was necessary because “American women have traded their rights for their comfort.”37 The second wave is said to have been launched by NOW (The National Organization for Women), “which wants ‘full equality for all women in America, in truly equal partnership with men,’ now.”38 Whereas the anti-feminist status quo in 1968 argued that women now have economic power, second-wave feminists regarded this economic power to be a fraud “when it devolves ultimately upon the power to decide which breakfast food to buy,” which is “not what men mean when they speak of power.”39 For the president of NOW, Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), which “provided a powerful undercurrent to this second wave,”40 corporate power is a myth. “What it means generally,” says Friedan, “is that wives and widows own the stocks and men vote for them.”41 As Friedan explains in The Second Stage (1981), the aim of the second wave of feminism, which she calls “the women’s movement,” had an agenda which seemed “simple and straightforward”42 in the early 1970s. Writes Friedan, “thousands of women marching down Fifth Avenue on August 26, 1970, in that first nationwide women’s strike for equality, carrying banners for ‘Equal Rights to Jobs and Education,’ ‘The Right to Abortion,’ ‘24–Hour Child Care,’ ‘Political Power to Women.’ ”43

Martha Weinman Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” New York Times (March 10, 1968), Sunday Magazine [SM] 24. Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” SM24. 37 Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” SM25. 38 Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” SM24. 39 Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” SM24. 40 Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” SM24. 41 Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” SM24. 42 Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (New York: Summit Books, 1981), 10. 43 Friedan, The Second Stage, 10. 35 36

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Their “aim was full participation, power, and voice in the mainstream, inside the party, the political process, the professions, the business world.”44 But, asks Friedan in 1981, what happens once women begin to share power with men? “Do women change, inevitably discard the radiant, enviable, idealized feminist dream, once they get inside and begin to share that power, or do they then operate on the same terms as men?”45 Continues Friedan, What are the limits and the true potential of women’s power? I believe that the women’s movement, in the political sense, is both less and more powerful than we realize. I believe that the personal is both more and less political than our own rhetoric ever implied. I believe that we have to break through our own feminist mystique now to come to terms with the new reality of our personal and political experience, and to move into the second stage.46 That is, move into the second stage of the second wave of feminism. If the first stage of the second wave of feminism was a women’s movement about political power, abortion rights, and equal rights to jobs and education, then, for Friedan, the second stage of the second wave of feminism “may not even be a women’s movement.”47 Writes Friedan, The second stage cannot be seen in terms of women alone, our separate personhood or equality with men. The second stage involves coming to new terms with the family—new terms with love and with work. The second stage may not even be a women’s movement. Men may be at the cutting edge of the second stage. The second stage has to transcend the battle for equal power in institutions. The second stage will restructure institutions and transform the nature of power itself. The second stage may even now be evolving, out of or even aside from what we have thought of as our battle.48 For Friedan, the women’s movement—that is, the first stage of the second wave—started with facing the concrete, mundane personal truth of my own life and hearing the personal truth of other women—the “problem that has no name” because it didn’t quite fit the image of the happy suburban housewife we were all living in those days—that image of woman completely fulfilled in her role as husband’s wife, children’s mother, server of physical needs of husband, children, home. That image, which I called the “feminine mystique,” bombarded us from all sides in the fifteen or twenty years after World War II, denying the very existence in women of the need to be and move in society and be recognized as a person, an individual in her own right.

Friedan, The Second Stage, 13. Friedan, The Second Stage, 13. 46 Friedan, The Second Stage, 13. 47 Friedan, The Second Stage, 13. 48 Friedan, The Second Stage, 13. 44 45

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We broke through that image. So for nearly twenty years now, [that is, from the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963 to the publication of The Second Stage in 1981], the words written about and by and for women have been about women’s need to be, first of all, themselves . . . to find themselves, fulfill themselves, their own personhood . . . to free themselves from submission as servants of the family and take control of their own bodies, their own lives . . . to find their own identity as separate from men, marriage and child-rearing—and to demand equal opportunity with men, power of their own in corporate office, Senate chamber, spaceship, ballfield, battlefield, at whatever price. Organizing the women’s movement, we broke through the barriers that kept women from moving, working, earning and speaking in their own voice in the mainstream of society. For nearly twenty years we have been pressing our grievances against men in office and home, school and field, in marriage, housework, even sex.49 Friedan’s feminism, often termed liberal feminism, is perhaps the most mainstream point of entry into second-wave feminism. The work of Gloria Steinem is also associated with this type of feminism and the second wave. Increased focus on the body and women’s experience differentiate secondwave from first-wave liberal feminists such as Wollstonecraft and Mill. One of the more radical versions of second-wave feminism deals with equal rights and pornography. Catharine MacKinnon, with her colleague Andrea Dworkin, argue that pornography is a practice of sex discrimination that should be actionable in civil court by people who can prove that pornography harmed them. They propose civil rights laws regarding pornography that allow for claims of coercion into pornography, forcing pornography on a person, assault due to specific pornography, and trafficking in pornography. The goal is to stop the violence against women and children that MacKinnon and Dworkin document as endemic to pornography’s making and use. Key to MacKinnon’s second-wave feminism is her analysis of the concrete role of pornography in constructing and institutionalizing a sexuality of male dominance over women and children. She also analyzes evidence that pornography is predicated upon, and promotes, the social and economic inequality of the sexes. “There is a belief,” writes McKinnon in Feminism Unmodified (1987), “that this is a society in which women and men are basically equals.”50 “Feminism,” continues McKinnon, is the discovery that women do not live in this [equal] world, that the person occupying this realm [of equality] is a man, so much more a man if he is white and wealthy. This world of potential credibility, authority, security, and just rewards, recognition of one’s identity and capacity, is a world that some people do inhabit as a condition of birth, with variations among them. It is not a basic condition accorded humanity in this society, but a prerogative of status, a privilege, among other things, of gender.51 MacKinnon considers feminism a “discovery” because it has never been assumed:

Friedan, The Second Stage, 15. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 168. 51 MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 169. 49 50

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Feminism is the first theory, the first practice, the first movement, to take seriously the situation of all women from the point of view of all women, both on our situation and on social life as a whole. The discovery has therefore been made that the implicit social content of humanism, as well as the standpoint from which legal method has been designed and injuries have been defined, has not been women’s standpoint. Defining feminism in a way that connects epistemology with power as the politics of women’s point of view, this discovery can be summed up by saying that women live in another world: specifically, a world of not equality, a world of inequality.52 MacKinnon’s view that the social content of humanism is not the standpoint of women reveals its strained relationship with second-wave feminism. This holds not only for the humanist basis of the law, but also morality—an area where humanism does not make a distinction between the moral attitudes of men versus women. In her book In a Different Voice (1982), Carol Gilligan argues that women’s moral development and their mature approach to moral questions can be at times quite different from those of men. Gilligan criticizes Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. According to Kohlberg, a person’s moral abilities develop in stages. In the first stage, the preconventional stage, we follow authority to avoid punishment. In the second stage of our moral development, the conventional stage, we desire acceptance by a group and follow conventional moral standards. In the third and final stage of our moral development, the postconventional, we question conventional standards and base our ideas of morality on the universal moral principles of human welfare, justice, and rights. When Kohlberg’s theory is applied to women it turns out that women are on the average less morally developed than men. While many men continue to move up to the post-conventional level of impartial principles, women are more likely to stay at the lower conventional level of personal attachments and loyalties. Gilligan proposes an alternative model of moral development that reflects women’s distinctive moral perspective. Women also develop in three stages for Gilligan. The first stage is caring for the self only, the second is caring for others only, and the third is a balance between caring for the self and others—a recognition that caring for others depends on caring for the self. According to Gilligan, women develop by discovering better ways of caring for themselves and others. Women faced with moral decisions focus on relationships and view morality as taking care of these relationships. Men faced with moral decisions focus on following moral rules and principles. According to Gilligan, women’s morality is not inferior to that of men. The virtues of caring and responsibility are needed to ensure that society does not become a collection of isolated individuals who guard their individual rights and justice but who are lonely, unattached, and uncaring. The notion that women have a moral voice or perspective that is distinct from the moral voice of men speaks to the tendency in second-wave feminism to focus on the differences in women’s experience as compared to men. But unlike MacKinnon, who speaks of the role of pornography in constructing and institutionalizing a sexuality of male dominance over women and children, Gilligan contends that a woman’s moral perspective is by nature more personal and contextual than the natural moral perspective of a man. Whereas men are naturally motivated more by impartial and abstract principles about duty, women are naturally motivated more by feeling, care, and

52

MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 169.

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responsibility. The differences between MacKinnon’s approach to women’s experience and Gilligan’s, though, involves more that just a disagreement regarding the nature versus nurture argument—they are also very different second-wave approaches to feminism. In fact, from Gilligan’s perspective, MacKinnon’s focus on rights and the law is more reflective of the moral orientation of men as compared to the ideals of caring and responsibility that play a more central role in the moral orientations of women. Still, both MacKinnon and Gilligan concur on the existence of male bias and a general failure to take specific account of the standpoint of women. Both MacKinnon and Gilligan approach second-wave feminism from a theoretical perspective, albeit different ones: the social construction of sexuality in relationship to rights and the law versus the psychology of moral development. While a direct response to the psychology of Kohlberg, Gilligan’s In a Different Voice also deals with masculine bias in psychoanalytic theory including the way it led Freud to regard “women’s pre-Oedipal attachments to their mothers” as a “developmental failure” in women.53 The relationship between psychoanalysis and second-wave feminism is also developed in French feminism, particularly in the work of Kristeva (5.2), Cixous (6.4), and Irigaray (6.5). But, again, whereas second-wave French feminism tends to be self-consciously theoretical, Anglo-American feminism, particularly major feminist critics such as Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, tends to be much less theoretical. This is nowhere more in evidence than with respect to the question “What is women’s writing?” In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar maintain that many women writers achieved a distinctive voice by producing works that conceal deeper levels of meaning: In short, like the twentieth-century American poet H. D., who declared her aesthetic strategy by entitling one of her novels Palimpsest, women from Jane Austin and Mary Shelley to Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson produced literary works that are in some sense palimpsestic, works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning. Thus these authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards.54 However, as Gilbert and Gubar explain, male literary history differs from female literary history, particularly within the context of Bloom’s theory of literary anxiety. According to Gilbert and Gubar, the male writer “conceals his revolutionary energies only so that he may more powerfully reveal them, and swerves or rebels so that he may triumph by founding a new order, since his struggle against his precursor is a ‘battle of strong equals.’ ”55 However, for Gilbert and Gubar, a different situation holds for the female writer: [C]oncealment is not a military gesture but a strategy born of fear and dis-ease. Similarly, a literary “swerve” is not a motion by which the [female] writer prepares for a victorious accession to power [as in Bloom’s account] but a necessary evasion. Locked into structures created by and

Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982/1993) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7. 54 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 73. 55 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 74. 53

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for men, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers did not so much rebel against the prevailing aesthetic as feel guilty about their inability to conform to it. With little sense of viable female culture, such women were plainly much troubled by the fact that they needed to communicate truths which other (i.e. male) writers apparently never felt or expressed. Conditioned to doubt their own authority anyway, women writers who wanted to describe what, in Dickinson’s phrase, is “not brayed of tongue” would find it easier to doubt themselves than the censorious voices of society. The evasions and concealments of their art are therefore far more elaborate than those of most male writers. For, given the patriarchal biases of nineteenthcentury literary culture, the literary woman did have something crucial to hide.56 Thus, for Gilbert and Gubar, the anxiety of influence à la Bloom functions differently in women’s writing from that it does in male writing. So much so, that women’s writing deals with the prevailing aesthetic differently than male writing does. In terms of prevailing stereotypes about women as either angels or monsters (or madwomen), Gilbert and Gubar argue that the women writers they focus on accept these stereotypes on the surface while at the same time deconstructing them on a deeper level. For some feminists, however, like Mary Jacobus, Gilbert and Gubar’s strategy of focusing on the ways in which women writers aim to deceive the reader makes them “evasive at the cost of a freedom which twentieth-century women poets have eagerly sought: the freedom of being read as more than exceptionally articulate victims of a patriarchally engendered plot.”57 To this point, asks Toril Moi, “how did women manage to write at all, given the relentless patriarchal indoctrination that surrounded them from the moment they were born?”58 Moi says that Gilbert and Gubar never answer this particular question. Instead, however, they say “Despite the obstacles presented by those twin images of angel and monster, despite the fears of sterility and the anxieties of authorship from which women have suffered, generations of texts have been possible for female writers.”59 Moreover, Moi says that Gilbert and Gubar’s refusal to admit a separation between nature and nurture at the lexical level renders their whole argument obscure. For what is this “female creativity” that they are studying? Is it a natural, essential, inborn quality in all women? Is it “feminine” creativity in the sense of a creativity conforming to certain social standards of female behavior, or is it a creativity typical of a feminine subject position in the psychoanalytical sense?60 For Moi, the main problem with Gilbert and Gubar’s account, if not all Anglo-American feminist criticism, is “the radical contradiction it presents between feminist politics and patriarchal aesthetics.”61 In other words, by providing an account of women’s writing by way of patriarchal aesthetics, Gilbert and Gubar lock feminist criticism into a relationship with the very patriarchal (and authoritarian)

Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 74–5. Mary Jacobus, “Review of The Madwoman in the Attic”; cited by Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 63. 58 Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 63. 59 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 44. 60 Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 64. 61 Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 68. 56 57

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criticism feminist politics wants to overcome. For Moi, this can be avoided by turning to French feminist approaches such as those of Cixous and Irigaray. In short, for Moi, the problems of AngloAmerican feminist criticism stem from its under-theorization. A similar situation might be said to obtain in the work the Anglo-American feminist criticism of Showalter, who outlines a literary history of women writers in A Literature of Their Own. According to Showalter, the female tradition in English literature can be divided into three major phases: the Feminine Phase (1840–80)—a phase wherein female writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot imitated or internalized the dominate male aesthetic; the Feminist Phase (1880–1920)—a phase wherein radical feminist writers such as Elizabeth Robins and Olive Schreiner protested against male values and advocated for separatist suffragette sisterhoods and Amazonian utopias; and the Female Phase (1920–), which combines the characteristics of both the Feminine and Feminist phases in a phase of self-discovery. Early novelists in the Female Phase include Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, and Woolf. Richardson’s work, for example, is regarded as comparable to that of Proust and Joyce though unlike their work it explores female consciousness. “Like Joyce,” writes Showalter, Richardson had philosophical objections to the inadequacy of language; unlike Joyce, she regarded language as a male construct. Richardson maintained that men and women used two different languages, or rather, the same language with two different meanings.62 According to Showalter, Richardson “implies that women communicate on a higher level.”63 Her “stream-of-consciousness technique,” comments Showalter, was an attempt to present “the multiplicity and variety of associations held simultaneously in the female mode of perception.”64 According to Showalter, Richardson’s shapeless outpourings in her fiction were a natural expression of female empathy. However, later Female Phase writers, that is, those after Woolf, did not feel the need to express female discontents like earlier Female Phase writers. These later writers included Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, A. S. Byatt, and Margaret Drabble. Finally, for Showalter, feminist criticism can be divided into two types: feminist critique and gynocritics. The former, feminist critique, is concerned with woman as reader—with woman as the consumer of male-produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of sexual codes. I shall call this kind of analysis the feminist critique, and like other kinds of critique it is historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-constructed literary history. It is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film; and with the analysis of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 258. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 258. 64 Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 260. 62 63

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[And the latter, gynocritics,] . . . is concerned with woman as writer—with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works. No term exists in English for such as specialized discourse, so I have adapted the French term la gynocritique: “gynocritics.”65 Showalter’s gynocritics (or gynocriticism) sharply contrasts, as we will see, with the French feminists regarding the innateness of female sexuality and imagination. For Showalter, there is no fixed or innate female sexuality or imagination as there is, for example, in Cixous’s gynesis. Nevertheless, for Showalter, there is a difference between men’s writing and women’s writing, and gyncritics is her term for second-wave feminist criticism in the Anglo-American tradition that demonstrates this difference.

6.3 THIRD WAVE AND BEYOND By the 1990s, there was a highly publicized backlash against feminism by writers such as Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and Christina Hoff Sommers. Coined as postfeminism, these writers attacked second-wave feminism from a variety of directions. Roiphe, for example, argues that there are many cases where women are responsible for their supposed campus date rape. In “Date Rape’s Other Victim” (1993), Roiphe says, One in four college women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. One in four. I remember standing outside the dining hall in college, looking at a purple poster with this statistic written in bold letters. It didn’t seem right. If sexual assault was really so pervasive, it seemed strange that the intricate gossip networks hadn’t picked up more than one or two shadowy instances of rape. If I was really standing in the middle of an “epidemic,” a “crisis”—if 25 percent of my women friends were really being raped—wouldn’t I know it? These posters were not presenting facts. They were advertising a mood. Preoccupied with issues like date rape and sexual harassment, campus feminists produce endless images of women as victims—women offended by a professor’s dirty joke, women pressured into sex by peers, women trying to say no but not managing to get it across.66 Roiphe cites Neil Gilbert, who, while not disproving the one-in-four statistic, does say that this statistic is more about sexual politics than sexual behavior. For Gilbert and Roiphe, the date rape crisis is “more a way of interpreting, a way of seeing, than a physical phenomenon,” that is, it “is a matter of opinion, not a matter of mathematical fact.”67

Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Routledge, 1979), 25. 66 Katie Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim,” New York Times Magazine (June 13, 1993), https://www.nytimes. com/1993/06/13/magazine/date-rape-s-other-victim.html. 67 Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim.” 65

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Roiphe’s target here are second-wave feminists such as MacKinnon. “Compare victims’ reports of rape with women’s reports of sex,” writes MacKinnon.68 “They look a lot alike . . . In this light, the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.”69 Roiphe says that MacKinnon here is conflating sex and rape. Also, Roiphe claims that MacKinnon reinforces “traditional views about the fragility of the female body and will.”70 “Politically,” says MacKinnon, “I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”71 For Roiphe, this position utilizes a “language of virtue and violation” that “reinforces retrograde stereotypes,” which “backs women into old corners.”72 “Younger feminists,” comments Roiphe, “share MacKinnon’s vocabulary and the accompanying assumptions about women’s bodies.”73 In Roiphe’s postfeminism, rape is “a natural trump card for feminism,” and “a catchall expression, a word used to define everything that is unpleasant and disturbing about relations between the sexes.”74 Her objection to the treatment of rape by second-wave feminists is that it threatens to place women in a “passive sexual role” and is “the denial of female sexual agency,” two characteristics that threaten “to propel us backward.”75 Again, the “us” here are women who reject second-wave feminism but advocate for strong female agency and an active sexual role for women. Roiphe’s book on this topic, The Morning After (1994), was praised by like-minded postfeminists such as Paglia, who called it “an eloquent, thoughtful, finely argued book that was savaged from coast to coast by shallow, dishonest feminist book reviewers.”76 Paglia also praises fellow-postfeminist Sommers’s Who Stole Feminism? (1994) for its use of “ingenious detective work to unmask the shocking fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the servility of American media and academe to Machiavellian feminist manipulation.”77 “Sommers is a courageous academic philosopher,” writes Paglia, “who was one of the very first to systematically critique current feminist ideology and who took tremendous abuse for it.”78 “Sommers has done a great service for women and for feminism,” continues Paglia, “whose fundamental principles she has clarified and strengthened.”79 Paglia regards herself as a “militant reformer of feminism and academe,” who follows the “Sixties design of protest and opposition.”80 Writes Paglia, My highest ideals are free thought and free speech. I condemn all speech codes and espouse offensiveness for its own sake, as a tool of attack against received opinion and unexamined

68

Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim”; MacKinnon cited by Roiphe. Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim.” 70 Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim.” 71 Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim”; MacKinnon cited by Roiphe. 72 Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim.” 73 Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim.” 74 Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim.” 75 Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim.” 76 Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (New York, Penguin, 1995), xvi. 77 Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, xvi. 78 Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, xvi. 79 Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, xvi. 80 Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, xvi. 69

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assumptions. My heroes are the libertines of the Enlightenment and the aesthetes of the nineteenth-century Decadence. Science and art—intellect and imagination—must be reintegrated for a complete vision of the universe.81 Paglia regards herself as a defender against the corrupt palace elites, arrogant with power, [who] must be exposed and brought to justice everywhere, whether they are in the literature departments at Harvard and Princeton or in the headquarters of the National Organization for Women, which at the moment is merely an outpost of the Gloria Steinem coterie. Those who have poisoned the cultural atmosphere in America or gained high position by unethical means must be held accountable. It’s Nuremberg time.82 In short, Paglia, Roiphe, Sommers, and others were strongly pushing back in the early 1990s on second-wave feminism. Though each regards themself a defender of feminism, Paglia, Roiphe, and Sommers are not what has generally come to be thought of as third-wave feminism. Rather, it was opposition to their postfeminism that is widely regarded as a major source of third-wave feminism. The term third-wave feminism is often traced back to Rebecca Walker’s “Becoming the 3rd Wave” (1992). The context is Anita Hill’s testimony in 1991 to the US Senate Judiciary Committee regarding Supreme Court nominee’s Clarence Thomas’s alleged sexual harassment of her. For Walker, these senate hearings were particularly painful: A black man grilled by a panel of white men about his sexual deviance. A black woman claiming harassment and being discredited by other women . . . I could not bring myself to watch that sensationalized assault of the human spirit.83 Walker comments that the hearings “were not about determining whether or not Clarence Thomas did in fact harass Anita Hill,” but rather “were about checking and redefining the extent of women’s credibility and power.”84 Writes Walker, While some may laud the whole spectacle for the consciousness it raised around sexual harassment, its very real outcome is more informative. He was promoted. She was repudiated. Men were assured of the inviolability of their penis/power. Women were admonished to keep their experiences to themselves. The backlash against US women is real. Thomas’s confirmation, the ultimate rally of support for the male paradigm of harassment, sends a clear message to women: “Shut up! Even if you speak, we will not listen.”85

Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, xvi. Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, xvi–xvii. 83 Rebecca Walker, “Becoming the 3rd Wave,” Ms. (Jan./Feb. 1992), reprinted in Ms. (Spring 2002): 86. 84 Walker, “Becoming the 3rd Wave,” 86. 85 Walker, “Becoming the 3rd Wave,” 86. 81 82

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Walker, however, refuses to accept this imperative to be silent. “I will not be silenced,” she says. “I intend to fight back.”86 And she does by making a plea to all women, especially to the women of my generation. Let Thomas’ confirmation serve to remind you, as it did me, that the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives. I am not a postfeminist feminist. I am the Third Wave.87 Walker’s generation is Generation X, people who were born in the 1960s and 1970s who came of age during the second wave of feminism and the struggle for civil rights. Her mother, the writer Alice Walker, was also a Ms. editor in the 1970s. So Rebecca Walker, who “often played in the [Ms.] offices ‘tot lot,’ ”88 grew up in the company of second-wave feminists. Unlike the relationship of third-wave feminism with postfeminism, which is one of rejection, third-wave feminists do not necessarily have a different set of issues or solutions from second-wave feminists. Rather, third-wavers like Rebecca Walker aim to open up what had come to be perceived in the 1980s as the ideological rigidity of second-wave feminism. As Walker, one of the founders of the Third Wave Foundation, put it in her introduction to To Be Real (1995), For many of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn’t allow for individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories. We fear that the identity will dictate and regulate our lives, instantaneously pitting us against someone, forcing us to choose inflexible and unchanging sides, female against male, black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad. This way of ordering the world is especially difficult for a generation that has grown up transgender, bisexual, interracial, and knowing and loving people who are racist, sexist, and otherwise afflicted. We have trouble formulating and perpetuating theories that compartmentalize and divide according to race and gender and all of the other signifiers. For us the lines between Us and Them are often blurred, and as a result we find ourselves seeking to create identities that accommodate ambiguity and our multiple personalities: including more than excluding, exploring more than defining, searching more than arriving.89 One of the characteristics of this new generation of feminism is that it is less rigid about its identity than second-wave feminism. “People keep insisting on defining and defining and defining and making a smaller and smaller definition” of feminism, writes third-wave feminist Jennifer Baumgardner. “[I]t’s just lazy thinking on their part,” she continues. “Feminism is something

86

Walker, “Becoming the 3rd Wave,” 86. Walker, “Becoming the 3rd Wave,” 87. 88 Walker, “Becoming the 3rd Wave,” 87. 89 Rebecca Walker, “Being Real,” in To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, ed. Rebecca Walker (New York: Anchor, 1995), xxxiii. 87

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individual to each feminist,” concludes Baumgardner.90 As a consequence, third-wave feminism is broadly focused on issues of gender and social justice albeit in the context of no particular politics. Third-wave feminism often fashions itself as sex-positive and fun in contrast to second-wave feminism which it regards as frigid and frumpy. Moreover, third-wave feminism is broadly inclusive, respecting “not only differences between women based on race, ethnicity, religion, and economic standing but also,” says Leslie Heywood, “makes allowance for different identities within a single person.”91 Aside from its frequent association with new currents and theories in feminism such as sex positivity, intersectionality (8.4), postmodern feminism, transfeminism, and ecofeminism, another way to view third-wave feminism is as a tactical response to some of the theoretical challenges associated with second-wave feminism, which for the third-wavers is their old or establishment feminism. R. Claire Snyder describes these theoretical challenges and the tactical response by thirdwavers as follows: (1) Feminism without women—this is third-wave feminism’s tactical response to the theoretical “ ‘category of women’ debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s that began with a critique of the second-wave contention that women share something in common as women: common gender identity and set of experiences”;92 (2) Feminism without foundations—this is third-wave feminism’s tactical response to the “larger trend in intellectual life away from grand narratives of modernity and into the foundationless world of postmodernity,”93 which we saw earlier in the poststructuralisms of Lyotard and Baudrillard; and, (3) Feminism without exclusion—this is third-wave feminism’s tactical response to “rejecting a unified category of women and embracing the anarchic imperative of direct action,” a tactical response that might also be called “a philosophy of nonjudgment.”94 For Snyder, these third-wave “tactics” allow for it to continue the work of second-wave feminism “to create conditions of freedom, equality, justice, and self-actualization for all people by focusing on gender-related issues in particular,” while at the same time responding to some of the theoretical challenges that faced second-wave feminism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, nearing the end of the 2000s, she was not yet ready to call third-wave feminism a social movement—and says it may never become one. Why? “Because it strives to be inclusive of all,” writes Snyder, “collective action constitutes one of its biggest challenges, and one that it shares with other antifoundationalist discourses, such as radical democracy.”95

90

Tamara Straus, “Lipstick Feministas: Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Create a Manifesto for Third Wave Feminism,” Metro Santa Cruz (November 29-December 6, 2000), http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/11.29.00/ feminism-0048.html. 91 Leslie L. Heywood, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, A–Z, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006), 1: xx. 92 R. Claire Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism?: A New Directions Essay,” Signs 34.1 (2008): 183. 93 Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism?” 186. 94 Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism?” 188. 95 Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism?” 193.

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By the early 2010s, however, third-wave feminism was ceding the way to a fourth wave of feminism, one characterized by its use of technology which allows women from around the world “to build,” as Kira Cochrane reports, “a strong, popular, reactive movement online.”96 In other words, to achieve through technology the collective action that Snyder claims is a challenge for third-wave feminism. According to Cochrane, the majority of fourth-wave feminists “define themselves as intersectional feminists,” a theory that concerns the way multiple oppressions intersect. Fourth-wave feminists tend to regard intersectionality (8.4) “as an attempt to elevate and make space for the voices and issues of those who are marginalized, and a framework for recognizing how class, race, age, ability, sexuality, gender and other issues combine to affect women’s experience of discrimination.”97 While fourth-wave feminists are women and men of all ages, “many at the forefront are in their teens and 20s, and had their outlook formed during the decades in which attitudes to women were particularly confusing.”98 These decades were the 1990s and 2000s, when postfeminism was openly challenging second-wave feminism—and third-wave feminism was working to distinguish itself from second-wave feminism by developing a feminism without women, foundations, or exclusion. Fourth-wave feminists, writes Cochrane, grew up being told the world was post-feminist, that sexism and misogyny were over, and feminists should pack up their placards. At the same time, women in the public eye were often either sidelined or sexualized, represented in exactly the same way as they had been in the 70s, albeit beneath a thin veil of irony.99 One of the aims of fourth-wave feminism was to combat what Laura Bates termed everyday sexism. Bates created the Everyday Sexism Project in April of 2012, a place where women could share their everyday experience of misogyny—things like, sexual harassment, street harassment, body-shaming, and workplace discrimination. It was so successful that after its first year of operation it was rolled out to seventeen countries. Since 2012, many events from around the world have galvanized fourth-wave feminists to utilize media technology as a form of activism. They include: gang rapes in Delhi (India) and Pamplona, Navarre (Spain); the Isla Vista killings (US); the sexual abuse of women and children by Jimmy Savile (UK); the Bill Cosby (US), Jian Ghomeshi (Canada), and Harvey Weinstein (US) sexual assault cases; and, of course, many others. Hashtags generally associated with fourth-wave feminism span the globe: #AmINext (South Africa), #BabaeAko (Philippines; Filipino for “I am a Woman”), #BalanceTonPor (France; French for “DenounceYourPig” or “ExposeYourPig”), #BoycottAliZafar (Pakistan), #EtMaintenant (Canada; French for “AndNow”), #MeToo (US), #MoiAussi (Canada; French for “MeToo”), #NotinMyName (India), #QuellaVoltaChe (Italy; Italian for “TheTimeThat”), #WoYeShi (China; Mandarin for “MeToo”), #YoTambien (Spain; Spanish for “MeToo”), and many others. There are also much more specific hashtags such as #YesAllWomen, created in May of 2014 in

Kira Cochrane, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism: Meet the Rebel Women,” Guardian (March 14, 2016), https://www. theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women. 97 Cochrane, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism.” 98 Cochrane, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism.” 99 Cochrane, “The Fourth Wave of Feminism.” 96

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response to the killings in Isla Vista, California, and #BeenRapedNeverReported, created in October of 2014 in response to sexual assault by Ghomeshi. In sum, the focus of fourth-wave feminism around the globe is on equitable policies and practices for people of all perspectives. However, empowerment of women across the globe to speak out against sexual harassment and assault through technology is perhaps the feature of fourth-wave feminism that most distinguishes it from the other waves. Considering though that millions of people contribute to many different fourth-wave feminist movements, particularly through popular hashtags such as those related to #MeToo, which was only launched in 2017, there is every reason to believe that as long as social-media technology continues to be a preferred vehicle for social and political activism, the fourth wave will continue to be a progressive force in feminist theory. Nevertheless, as noted in the introduction to this chapter, localizing feminism to one wave or another can limit one’s ability to position feminism within the context of the keywords or concepts that define and organize contemporary theory. Again, for post-wave feminists, thinking about keywords and concepts such as affect, translation, and the Anthropocene becomes an opportunity to think about feminism’s past, present, and future. One finds this post-wave approach to feminist theory at work in just about every area of theory that has developed significantly over the past twenty years, including LGBTQ+ (7.0), race and justice (8.0), biopolitics (9.0), globalization (10.0), ecocriticism (11.0), posthumanism (12.0), and affect studies (13.0).

6.4 HÉLÈNE CIXOUS Hélène Cixous is a second-wave feminist, though her approach to it is very different from Friedan, MacKinnon, Showalter, and most of the other Anglo-American feminists discussed earlier. For one thing, like her second-wave French feminist peer, Kristeva, Cixous’s feminist theory fully engages psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, and radical politics in its critique of patriarchy and the gendered subject. So even though Anglo-American and French feminists are both concerned with the problem of sexual difference, their approach to its theory and politics is very different. Moreover, while Anglo-American and French feminists concur that “the very reason why women as a social group are oppressed is that they differ from men,” they disagree on “what that difference consists in, how far it extends, and how it is constructed in relation to power.”100 As Moi observes, for Anglo-American feminists used to reading say Millet or Friedan, the texts of French feminists such as Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray “must have seemed almost incomprehensible at first, steeped as these French intellectuals are in a European philosophical tradition and a psychoanalytical theory formation largely unknown to most Anglo-American feminists in the mid1970s.”101 But the differences between Anglo-American and French feminism extend far beyond mere comprehensibility. Writes Moi, Where we [Anglo-American feminists] were empirical, they [French feminists] were theoretical; where we believed in the authority of experience, they questioned not only the category of experience, but even that of the “experiencer”—the female subject herself. If we were looking

Toril Moi, “Introduction,” to French Feminist Thought: A Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 4. Moi, “Introduction,” 4–5.

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for a homogeneous female tradition in art or history, they insisted that female writing could only ever be visible in the gaps, contradictions or margins of patriarchal discourse. And when we were looking for women writers, they sought feminine writing, which, they confusingly claimed, could equally well be produced by men.102 It is for these reasons and others that the second wave of feminism is often divided between AngloAmerican and French feminist approaches. For the most part, up to this point, we have been focusing on developments in second-wave Anglo-American feminism and reactions to it in third-wave feminism. And though fourth-wave feminism is a global affair, major approaches to it, like Bates’s Everyday Sexism Project, champion the authority of experience—and are much more empirical than theoretical. In “Sorties” (1975), Cixous discusses the binary oppositions that comprise masculine discourse— and wonders where is woman in this phallocentric system? “Where is she?” asks Cixous, Activity/passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night Father/Mother Head/Heart Intelligible/Palpable Logos/Pathos Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress. Matter, concave, ground—where steps are taken, holding- and dumping-ground. Man Woman103 According to Cixous, thought has always worked through these and other “dual, hierarchical oppositions” including speaking/writing, high/low, superior/inferior, nature/history, and nature/ art.104 These hierarchical oppositions are found “[e]verywhere [where] ordering intervenes, where a law organizes what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical).”105 Cixous then asks whether the fact that “all these pairs of oppositions are couples” mean something? “Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought—all concepts, codes, and values—to a binary system,” wonders Cixous, “related to ‘the’ couple, man/woman?”106 Her answer here is affirmative— and is the key to opening the door to her treatment of sexual difference. For Cixous, hierarchical oppositions are based on the heterosexual couple. As such, they construct language as “a universal battlefield” structured in terms of a “victory” where one of the terms of these binary oppositions prevails over the other:

102

Moi, “Introduction,” 5. Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays” (1975), in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 63. 104 Cixous, “Sorties,” 64. 105 Cixous, “Sorties,” 64. 106 Cixous, “Sorties,” 64. 103

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We see that “victory” always comes down to the same thing: things get hierarchical. Organization by hierarchy makes all conceptual organization subject to man. Male privilege, shown in the opposition between activity and passivity, which he uses to sustain himself. Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition: activity/passivity.107 Given that “woman is always associated with passivity in philosophy,” language based on the heterosexual couple is structured in terms of masculine “victory” and feminine “defeat.”108 But not only is patriarchy coded into the structure of language via the heterosexual couple; it is also found at the level of ontology (or being). Comments Cixous, Ultimately the world of “being” can function while precluding the mother. No need for a mother, as long as there is some motherliness: and it is the father, then, who acts the part, who is the mother. Either woman is passive or she does not exist. What is left of her is unthinkable, unthought. Which certainly means that she is not thought, that she does not enter into the opposition, that she does not make a couple with the father (who makes a couple with the son).109 In short, “there is no place whatsoever for woman in this calculation”—a calculation that is structured by a phallocentric binary system. Cixous was strongly influenced by Derrida’s poststructuralism, and they would write a series of crossed works including Cixous’s Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (2001) and Derrida’s H.C. for Life, That Is to Say (2000). By drawing upon Derrida’s theory of différance, Cixous also believes that meaning is always deferred and different in language—that there is a dimension of language that is both unconceptualizable and always unperceived, yet always both absent and present. Thus, for both Cixous and Derrida, the only source of meaning is linguistic difference. Also, for both, there is always a trace of the excluded term from the binary opposition. Thus, when Cixous speaks of oppositions and the ontology of woman, she is calling upon Derridean différance as the prototype of what cannot be captured by Western metaphysics because it is the very condition of its possibility. So, even though Cixous approaches sexual oppression in terms of binary oppositions and contends that these binary oppositions create difference between people, one should regard this more in theoretical (Derridean) terms than experiential (Anglo-American) ones. Again, when Anglo-American feminists speak of different they mean the difference between two identities (men/ women; masculine/feminine), whereas when French feminists use the same term they are drawing upon Derridean différance, which is neither an identity nor the difference between two identities. Moreover, what is unique about Cixous’s feminism as compared to Anglo-American feminists of the second wave is that she believes that language is the domain in which difference is structured. In this regard, she was strongly influenced by Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Following Lacan, Cixous treats sexual difference as linguistically and socially arbitrary, and regards the phallus as a symbolic

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Cixous, “Sorties,” 64. Cixous, “Sorties,” 64. 109 Cixous, “Sorties,” 64. 108

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concept. Again, following Lacan, the phallus signifies all that the subject loses with the acquisition of language. It is neither an organ of the body, an object, or a fantasy. It signifies the power, authority, and rationality associated with the Name-of-the Father, the fundamental and transcendental signifier that permits signification to proceed normally. Phallocentrism is inseparable from the structure of the sign. As a signifier, the phallus holds the promise of full presence or power, which, because it is unobtainable, threatens both sexes with castration. Again, both males and females lack the wholeness of sexuality symbolized by the phallus. The child gets its sense of identity by entering the Symbolic Order of language, which is comprised of relations of similarity and difference. It should also be noted that Cixous and other French feminists are not only influenced by Lacan, but also defend Freud against criticisms of him by other feminists. Again, for Freud, the female child seeing the male organ recognizes herself as female because she lacks the penis. Moreover, the female child defines herself negatively, and suffers from penis envy, which Freud says is universal in women. This leads to a castration complex and the position that women are not a positive sex. French feminists defend Freud not as a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but rather as an analysis of one. For them, Freud is not describing reality itself, but is rather presenting an analysis of the mental representation of social reality. Lacan then through a combination of Saussurean linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis shows us how the unconscious is structured like a language. For Cixous, however, in order to eliminate the oppression and domination of women, we must resist the phallocentrism described by Lacan—and eliminate difference at the level of language. In other words, feminist resistance to phallocentrism must come from within the signifying process. For her, this is achieved by providing an alternative to the masculine symbolic—something she calls écriture feminine (feminine writing). This form of writing is Cixous’s challenge to the phallocentric theories of sexuality and subjectivities posited by Freud and Lacan. To accomplish this, Cixous argues that we reconsider the pre-Oedipal phase and the repressed other of the imaginary mother–child relationship. Rather than repressing the other of this imaginary mother–child relationship upon entry into the symbolic, Cixous contends that writing is the place of this other. What she means by this is that feminine writing or the feminine text is where both the unconscious drives of the child that occur in several different forms and the child’s closeness with the body of the m/other are written. For Cixous, écriture feminine is an effort “to hear what-comesbefore-language reverberating,”110 that is to say, it draws upon the pre-verbal spaces of instinctual drives and the unconscious. As a kind of writing through the body, écriture feminine gives birth to the polysemic nature of signification, a space far removed from the phallocentrism of the Symbolic. Again, as noted above by Moi, both women and men can engage in écriture feminine. Moreover, Cixous also encourages rethinking the role of parents in ensuring that children have the freedom to be themselves to the other. “It will be the task of woman and man,” writes Cixous, “to make the old relationship and all of its consequences out-of-date; to think the launching of a new subject, into life, with defamiliarization.”111 It should also be mentioned that Cixous associates écriture feminine with what she calls “the other bisexuality.”112 In contrast to the “bisexuality that melts together and effaces, wishing to avert castration,” Cixous opposes

110

Cixous, “Sorties,” 88. Cixous, “Sorties,” 89. 112 Cixous, “Sorties,” 84. 111

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the other bisexuality, the one with which every subject, who is not shut up inside the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theater, sets up his or her erotic universe. Bisexuality—that is to say the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes, evident and insistent in different ways according to the individual, the nonexclusion of difference or of a sex, and starting with this “permission” one gives oneself, the multiplication of the effects of desire’s inscription on every part of the body and the other body.113 This is Cixous’s way of moving beyond the binary logic of sexual difference. It is found in the gaps or between spaces of écriture feminine. “To say that woman is somehow bisexual is an apparently paradoxical way of displacing and reviving the question of difference,” writes Cixous. “And therefore of writing as ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine.’ ”114 Rather, what Cixous says, is that today, writing is woman’s. That is not a provocation, it means that woman admits there is an other. In her becoming-woman, she has not erased bisexuality latent in the girl as in the boy. Femininity and bisexuality go together, in a combination that varies according to the individual, spreading the intensity of its force differently and (depending on the moments of their history) privileging one component or another. It is much harder for man to let the other come through him. Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me—the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live—that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?—a feminine one, a masculine one, some?—several different, some unknown, which indeed [is] what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars.115 The other bisexuality of Cixous differs, however, from the neutral bisexuality (androgyny) of Woolf. Whereas Woolf ’s neutral bisexuality abandon’s the struggle to speak the female body, Cixous embraces the other bisexuality for its ability to stir up difference. For Cixous, female sexuality is an unknown and subterranean entity which can be accessed through écriture feminine, a form of writing that allows the vast female unconscious to be heard. Writing for Cixous is the place where subversive thought can germinate and where new identities and social formations for women will be created. Cixous’s feminism is visionary in that it imagines a possible language for woman. It does not, however, describe an actual language in the way that Showalter, for example, treats women’s writing. In this way, Cixous’s gynesis differs radically from Showalter’s gynocriticism. One way to think of the difference between their respective positions is to view gynocriticism as concerned with the sexuality of the text, and gynesis as concerned with the textuality of sex. Cixous’s call to put into discourse the other is concerned with non-knowledge, a space which master-narratives always control but cannot contain. For Cixous, “woman” is writing effect, not a person—and definitely not gendered, that is, masculine/feminine. Woman is disruptive of fixed meaning and a freeplay of signification that is beyond authorial control.

113

Cixous, “Sorties,” 84–5. Cixous, “Sorties,” 85. 115 Cixous, “Sorties,” 85–6. 114

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In sum, Cixous’s feminism is not only anti-realist, anti-humanist, and anti-essentialist, but also critical of patriarchal politics and defined practices of feminine writing. In “The Laugh of the Medusa (1976),” she writes: It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system: it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.116 Cixous’s claim here that écriture feminine “can never be theorized” is a continuation of her charge in “Sorties” that “[p]hallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone.”117 But in view of second-wave Anglo-American feminism, Cixous is a prime example of feminist theory—and one need go no further than her appropriation of Freudian, Derridean, and Lacanian theory to build her case for écriture feminine.

6.5 LUCE IRIGARAY Luce Irigaray is a trained psychoanalyst. She was also a member of the École Freudienne de Paris founded by Lacan. However, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), a book which was the European equivalent of her doctoral dissertation, was a thesis in philosophy, not psychiatry. Upon its publication, Irigaray was dismissed from both the École Freudienne de Paris and the University of Paris, where she was employed. Her dismissals were to a great extent because Lacan disapproved of her work. Speculum is a reading of the philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel that begins with a long exegesis on Freud. Irigaray’s thesis is that women in both the Western philosophical tradition and psychoanalysis are merely reflecting surfaces upon which masculine identity constitutes itself in a dialectical relation of dominance. According to the Western philosophical tradition and psychoanalysis, women are the non-essential essence that grounds male subjectivity. This notion of woman as a non-essential essence is captured by the term speculum, which also means mirror. In other words, women are a mirror for the production of male subjectivity. As such, while women are associated with the material ground of existence, they are characterized by an ontological status that is both “incomplete” and “uncompletable.” Irigaray describes their ontological status in the Western philosophical tradition and psychoanalysis in Speculum as follows: Woman, for her part, remains in unrealized potentiality—unrealized, at least, for/by herself. Is she, by nature, a being that exists for/by another? And in her share of substance, not only is she secondary to man but she may just as well not be as be. Ontological status makes her incomplete and uncompletable. She can never achieve the wholeness of her form. Or perhaps her form has

Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4 (1976): 83. Cixous, “Sorties,” 83.

116 117

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to be seen—paradoxically—as a mere privation? But this question can never be decided since woman is never resolved by/in being, but remains the simultaneous co-existence of opposites. She is both one and the other. She is at once decay and growth, for example, and this bodes ill for any semblance she might have with the eternal. And the Eternal (as we may call it) has no truck with potentiality. She is equally neither one nor the other. Or is she rather between one and the other—that elusive gap between two discrete bodies? Between two realizations of one body? Which implies that change can always come about, that somewhere anything could be refined otherwise. Is she the reverse of the coin of man’s ability to act and move around in the physical world we are calling “place”? Is she unnecessary in and of herself, but essential as the nonsubjective sub-jectum? As that which can never achieve the status of subject, at least for/by herself. Is she the indispensible condition whereby the living entity retains and maintains and perfects himself in his self-likeness?118 Irigaray’s description of the ontological status of woman in the Western philosophical tradition is interesting because one direction (woman as both one and the other) can be connected with mystical ascent and the higher union found in God, whereas the other direction (woman as neither one nor the other) points to non-being or no existence. While the latter position is the one that Irigaray wants to emphasize, namely, that woman does not exist in the Western philosophical tradition (and psychoanalysis), the former position is one held by medieval mystical philosophers such as Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa, who generally believed that the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) is related to our understanding of God. For example, for Nicholas, the admission of contraries is the starting point of mystical ascent. Both reality and God consist in a coincidentia oppositorum, that is, in both “to exist” and “not to exist” coincide. As such, from this philosophical perspective, to characterize women as a coincidentia oppositorum is to see both reality and God in them.119 But, for the Aristotelians—and most of Western philosophy until Hegel—a coincidence of opposites is a heresy: that is to say, things either exist or do not exist—and to not exist is of lesser ontological status than to exist. Irigaray, however, by pointing out that women in the Western philosophical tradition are both “one and the other” and “neither one nor the other,” aims to establish the position that woman in Western metaphysics is “unnecessary in and of herself.” But rather than deconstruct this philosophical system à la Derrida, Irigaray reconstructs or recreates a metaphysics of woman from within this system. For Irigaray, to question the function of women in “the all-powerful ‘machine’ we know as metaphysics” is to question the “choice” given to women in this metaphysics: “a choice that has always already been made by ‘nature,’ between a male pleasure and her role as a vehicle for procreation.”120 According to Irigaray, this metaphysical “choice”—one that can be found in the works of Aristotle, Freud, Lacan, and many others—abandons woman as “deformed and formless.”121 Writes Irigaray,

Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165. See Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “The Divine Structure of Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan: God, Transcendence, and Coincidentia Oppositorum,” Tristania XVI (1995), 47–50. 120 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 166. 121 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 167. 118

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But doesn’t her whole existence amount to an “accident”? An accident of reproduction? A genetic monstrosity? For a human life takes its form from its father, or more specifically from the male sperm, since the product of intercourse is not made up of the combination of sperm and ovum. If this is so, how can a girl be conceived? Except by chromosomal anomaly? In any case, she couldn’t lay claim to any substance. Merely added to—or taken away from—essence, fortuitous, troublesome, “accidental,” she can be modified or eliminated without changing anything in “nature.”122 This metaphysical account of woman leads Irigaray to conclude that “theoretically” there is “no such thing as woman.”123 “The best that can be said is that she does not exist yet.”124 Therefore, one might regard Irigaray’s contribution to Western philosophy as both demonstrating this—and creating or recreating a place for her. For Irigaray, the questions of sexual difference that she examines in Speculum and elsewhere are among “the important questions of our age, if not in fact the burning issue.”125 Citing Heidegger, who contends that “each age is preoccupied with one thing, and one alone,” Irigaray contends in that “[s]exual difference is probably that issue in our own age which could be our salvation on an intellectual level.”126 Her claim here comes in the mid-1980s, when questions of sexual difference have not yet experienced the backlash of postfeminism and third-wave feminism. Nevertheless, Irigaray bemoans that wherever I turn, whether to philosophy, science or religion, I find that this underlying and increasingly insistent question remains silenced. It is as if opening up this question would allow us to put a check on the many forms of destruction in the universe, like some kind of nihilism which affirms nothing more than the reversal or proliferation of existing values—whether we call these the consumer society, the circular nature of discourse, the more or less cancerous disease of our age, the unreliable nature of words, the end of philosophy, religious despair or the regressive return to religion, scientistic imperialism or a technique that does not take the human subject into account, and so on.127 Irigaray finds resistance everywhere to taking up sexual difference philosophically, that is, examining and providing responses to the ontological problem of the non-existence of woman described above. For her, “the arrival or discovery of such an event is resisted”128—even by theorists. “In theory,” continues Irigaray, “philosophy wishes to become literature or rhetoric, by breaking with ontology or returning to ontological origins.”129

Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 167. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 166. 124 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 166. 125 Luce Irigaray, “Sexual Difference” (1984), trans. Seán Hand, in French Feminist Thought, 118. 126 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 118. 127 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 118. 128 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 118. 129 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 118. 122 123

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But by the early 1990s, another line of criticism of Irigaray’s ontological approach to sexual difference will develop. In Essentially Speaking (1989), Diana Fuss described the theoretical models for understanding identity in the 1980s as essence versus difference. For her, “essentialism is typically defined in opposition to difference,” that is, the latter term represents “a complex system of cultural, social, psychical, and historical differences, and not a set of pre-existent human essences, [which] position and constitute the subject.”130 With respect to Irigaray, the “complex system of cultural, social, psychical, and historical differences” identified by Fuss is the philosophical program of Hegel, Freud, and Lacan that she is attempting to overcome or recreate in her call for a new ontological program for woman. But for Fuss, identity theorists are either essentialists or constructionists. Essentialists, claims Fuss, maintain “that the natural is repressed by the social,” whereas constructionists claim “that the natural is produced by the social.”131 By claiming that the real distinction for understanding identity is between essentialism and constructionism—and not, as Irigaray claims, between essence versus (sexual) difference—Fuss effectively associates Irigaray’s feminism (as well as Cixous’s) with essentialism. From the perspective of Irigaray and French theory, essentialism is the very Western philosophical tradition regarding woman that she is attempting to rewrite; from the perspective of Fuss, who here is a representative of Anglo-American theory, any philosophy that can be linked to sexual difference is essentialist. The association of Irigaray (and Cixous) with essentialism leads some Anglo-American critics to dismiss her feminism. But for her, such dismissal is precisely the type of “silence” on the ontology of sexual difference she notes—and if the dismissal of her work is based on misappropriating it as “essentialist,” then it betrays a basic misunderstanding of her approach to the history of the ontological status of woman in Western philosophy. Irigaray calls for “a change in the economy of desire,” which will necessitate “a different relationship between man and god(s), man and man, man and world, man and woman.”132 “This is a world that must be constructed or reconstructed,”133 comments Irigaray. It is a world that will forge an alliance between the divine and the mortal, in which a sexual encounter would be a celebration, and not a disguised or polemic form of the master–slave relationship. In this way it would no longer be a meeting within the shadow or orbit of a God of the Father who alone lays down the law, or the immutable mouthpiece of single sex.134 Moreover, for Irigaray, it is a world where there will be a “genesis of love between the sexes”—“a world to be created or recreated so that man and woman may once more or finally live together, meet and sometimes inhabit the same place.”135 It will be a place “that could be inhabited by each sex, body and flesh.”136 Irigaray wonders whether we could be witnessing the dawning of this new world. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), xii. Fuss, Essentially Speaking, 3. 132 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 120. 133 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 127; my emphasis. 134 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 127. 135 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 127; my emphasis. 136 Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 128. 130 131

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Immanence and transcendence are being recast, notably by that threshold which has never been examined in itself: the female sex. It is a threshold unto mucosity. Beyond the classic opposites of love and hate, liquid and ice lies this perpetually half-open threshold, consisting of lips that are strangers to dichotomy. Pressed against one another, but without any possibility of suture, at least of a real kind, they do not absorb the world either into themselves or through themselves, provided they are not abused and reduced to a mere consummating or consuming structure. Instead their shape welcomes without assimilating or reducing or devouring. A sort of door unto voluptuousness, then? Not that, either: their useful function is to designate a place: the very place of uselessness, at least on a habitual plane. Strictly speaking, they serve neither conception nor jouissance. Is this, then the mystery of female identity, of its self-contemplation, of that strange word of silence: both the threshold and reception of exchange, the sealed-up wisdom, belief and faith in every truth?137 For Irigaray, two lips pressed against each other is her trope for the female economy. It is meant to sharply contrast with the one of the masculine economy of phallocentrism, wherein the male body is the imaginary ideal upon which the bodily ego is constructed. Contra to Lacan, whose phallocentrism only casts woman as a lack, Irigaray’s speculum accounts for both the female sex and female sexuality. By enabling female sexuality and accounting for female sexual difference, Irigaray aims to create or recreate a world wherein both sexes “may once more or finally live together”—a sharp contrast to the phallocentric world where there can only be one sex, which is the masculine sex. However, because woman already exists within the one-sex phallocentric system, Irigaray aims to reconstruct or recreate woman within this system rather than deconstruct the entire system. Her approach is to create or recreate woman from within the structures of the phallocentric system. She does this through mimicry (or mimesis), wherein the feminine position takes seriously what the masculine position does not. Thus, as mimics operating within a system that has no positive position for them, the feminine position can operate at a distance from the system and carry out its mimicry in a defiant manner. In short, the feminine position can and does mock masculine mimesis through its mimicry. But, by carrying out this strategy of occupying the phallocentric system through mimicry, Irigaray, again, opens herself to the criticism that her two (lips) are a form of essentialism. She claims that part of the reason for this misunderstanding is that her work is “extremely difficult to translate given that the writing plays on the synonymy of homonymy of French words and their syntactic and semantic ambiguities.”138 But another reason for this misunderstanding is that “Speculum cannot suggest getting ‘the female body’ to enter into the male corpus, as the female body has always figured in the male corpus” though “not always in philosophy.”139 Comments Irigaray, Speculum criticizes the exclusive right of the use(s), exchange(s), representation(s) of one sex by the other. This critique is accompanied by the beginnings of a woman’s phenomenological

137

Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 128. Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (1990), trans. Alison Martin (London: Routledge, 2007), 53. 139 Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous, 53. 138

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elaboration of the auto-affection and auto-representation of her body: Luce Irigaray, signatory to the book. What this implies is that the female body is not to remain the object of men’s discourse or their various arts but that it become the object of a female subjectivity experiencing and identifying itself. Such research attempts to suggest to women a morpho-logic that is appropriate to their bodies. It’s aimed at the male subject, too, inviting him to redefine himself as a body with a view to exchanges between sexed subjects.140 In sum, Irigaray’s response to these critics is that her form of écriture feminine (feminine writing) not only defies dualisms and biological essentialism, but opens up a new place for the repressed feminine to be recreated, redefined, rearticulated, and reconceptualized by mimicking (and mocking) masculine discourse. It also, as noted above, invites the male subject “to redefine himself as a body with a view to exchanges between sexed subjects.” For Irigaray, all of this redefinition defies accusations of dualism and biological essentialism.

Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous, 53; my emphasis.

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LGBTQ+ Theory 7.0 INTRODUCTION Until the mid-twentieth century, there were prohibitions against the public portrayal of sexuality in the US. These prohibitions were enforced by obscenity law, which started to be loosened in the 1930s— and which by the mid-1960s were effectively removed. The virtual disappearance of these obscenity laws in the mid-1960s, write John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman in Intimate Matters (1988), “removed the barriers against the forthright presentation of sexual matters in literature and other media.”1 For literary context, consider that in 1957, a San Francisco police officer seized copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (1956) from the City Lights Bookstore “on the grounds that it was ‘not fit for children to read.’ ”2 Also, a warrant was issued for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights, and the store’s clerk was arrested. D’Emilio and Freedman write, “Ginsberg’s poem was targeted by censors in large part because of its open acknowledgement of homosexual desire.”3 In Howl, Ginsberg writes of people who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evening in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may4 The judge who heard the case rejected censoring the poem, arguing that it had “social importance,” and that “life is not encased in one formula where everybody acts the same or conforms to a particular pattern.”5 Ginsberg said of the poem that it represented a “crucial moment of breakthrough . . . an acknowledgement of the basic reality of homosexual joy . . . a breakthrough in the sense of a public statement of feeling and emotions and attitudes.”6

1 John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 277. 2 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 275. 3 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 276. 4 Allen Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions (1956), ed. Barry Miles (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 4 (lines 36–9). 5 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 276. 6 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 276.

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But, even if obscenity laws were loosening, sexual boundaries were growing tighter. “Hand in hand with the more permissive attitudes of sexual liberalism toward most forms of heterosexual expression,” write D’Emilio and B. Freedman, went an effort to label homosexual behavior as deviant. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, a gay subculture took root in American cities. As men and women constructed new opportunities for meeting one another, sustaining relationships, and deepening their sense of sexual difference, American society responded fiercely by raising the penalties that lesbians and gay men faced. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, federal, state, and local governments mobilized their resources against this underground sexual world.7 Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s, the sexual revolution was in full swing—and for some, like the “hippies,” it had already been accomplished. “For the hippies,” wrote Newsweek in 1967, “sex is not a matter of great debate, because as far as they are concerned the sexual revolution is accomplished.”8 “There are no hippies who believe in chastity, or look askance at marital infidelity, or see even marriage itself as a virtue.”9 It was also a period where not only, as we saw in the previous chapter, second-wave feminists were rethinking institutions such as the family, the state, and education, but also where gay and lesbian activists were waging social and political challenges to the liberal consensus on sex and sexuality. Various theoretical discourses such as Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis were interacting with the sexual revolution, and, just as with feminist theory, adding to our understanding as to how institutions should rethink sex and sexuality. In this regard, the work of Michel Foucault came to be of particular importance. In the History of Sexuality, the first volume of which appeared in 1976 and the fourth and final volume appearing posthumously in 2018, Foucault asks how did we come to speak about sex and sexuality? This is a particularly interesting question because in Greek and Latin there is no word for what has come to be known now as sex and sexuality. What Foucault finds in his studies is that sexuality is neither natural nor a thing. Rather, our discourse of sexuality developed over time through a series of shifts, adaptations, and displacements in “learned discourses, forms of reflection, and structures of truth in relation to the deployment of various modalities of power and governmentality,”10 which Foucault terms biopolitics (9.1). Thus, for Foucault, the study of sex and sexuality, that is, that which founds our identity as straight, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, polysexual, transsexual, queer, questioning, and other is the study of truth and power. In The Use of Pleasure (1984), Foucault describes the study of sex and sexuality as the study of “the games of truth in relationship of self with self and the forming of oneself as a subject, taking as my domain of reference and field of investigation what might be called ‘the history of desiring man.’ ”11 His genealogy of the “hermeneutics of the self ” in antiquity establishes sex and sexuality not as essential categories that

D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 288. Newsweek (February 6, 1967), 92; cited in D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 307. 9 Newsweek (February 6, 1967), 92; cited in D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 307. 10 Paul Allen Miller, “Confessions of the Flesh: Between Pleasure and Sexuality,” symploke– 29.1/2 (2021): 653–4. 11 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2 (1984), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 6. 7 8

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transcend history, but rather as ones that are constructed in relation to various modalities of power and governmentality. “Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check,” writes Foucault, “or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries to uncover.”12 Rather, he continues, sexuality is “the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.”13 This general theoretical approach to the study of sex and sexuality, that is, one that regards our identity as straight, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, polysexual, transsexual, queer, questioning, or other as in some way constructed will dominate literary and cultural theoretical work regarding sex and sexuality beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Early theoretical contributions during this period such as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), in addition to the work of Foucault, will set the basic theoretical terms for much of the LGTBQ+ theory that follows. But the question still lingers as what to call work that theoretically engages the literary and cultural dimensions of sex and sexuality. Once we get beyond the censorship of such discourse on the grounds of obscenity, and reach the 1970s, where significant work is beginning to appear in literary and cultural theory, gender theory becomes the operative term for the study of the identity politics of sexuality. Gender (and also sex role) refers in gender theory to the differences between men and women that are cultural or societal in origin. Masculine and feminine, as we saw, for example, in second-wave feminism, are generally used in gender theory to refer to distinctions on the basis of gender. Also, sex, in this context, refers to the differences between men and women that are biological in origin, and male and female are generally used to refer to distinctions made on the basis of sex. In the 1980s, gender theory began to argue for equal rights for gay and lesbian individuals. Some key texts from this period include John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), which challenged preconceptions about the Church’s past relationship to its gay members, including priests, bishops and saints. Boswell, whose book is regarded as one of the most extensive treatments of any single aspect of Western social history, demonstrated some of the important contributions gay men have made to society and the extent to which they have been socially tolerated to varying degrees. Another important work is Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple (1985), who writes that, Lesbian culture may be seen as “marginal” by heterosexual culture and heterosexual definition. “Marginal” is a word that implies, like the story of Columbus, that there is one world and it is flat. Fortunately at the heart of these [marginal] groups, one finds an entirely different schema, a map virtually unrelated to the “flat world” folks. Surely, Lesbian culture is central to Lesbians. Moreover, the work that comes from Lesbian culture, the special perspective, can be central to society as a whole.14

12 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, An Introduction (1976), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 105. 13 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 105–6. 14 Judy Grahn, The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (San Francisco: Spinter’s Ink, 1985), xvi.

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Still another relevant study is Karla Jay and Allen Young’s pioneering edited collection Lavender Culture (1978), which was “one of the first books to explore in-depth lesbian and gay creativity.”15 It includes articles about “sex, bars, baths, clothing, the politics of sado-masochism, the gay male and lesbian movements, aging and race.”16 In her “Foreword” to a new edition of Lavender Culture published upon the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots (which occurred after police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar located in New York City’s Greenwich Village that served as a haven for the city’s gay, lesbian, and transgender community, and are often said to have launched the Gay Pride Movement in NYC), Cindy Patton reflects on homosexuality in late twentieth-century America. “From our late twentieth-century vantage point,” writes Patton, “we can now see that there are and have been many homosexualities, a reeling matrix of class, gender (including butch, fem, sissy, clone), race, ethnicity, geographic locale which created possibilities and imposed prohibitions.”17 This “reeling matrix” of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and place speak to the increasing emphasis in the 1990s to situate intersectionally (8.4) each individual as far as possible into a set of coordinates that will assist in determining the conditions and contingencies that make possible the construction and constitution of sex and sexuality. Patton also points out that it is wrongheaded to treat these statements from gay and lesbian individuals from the late 1970s as “ ‘authentic voices’ of ‘essential’ identity,” and to see “them only as evidence for the historical specificity of queerness.”18 That is to say, these statements from gay and lesbian individuals are evidence for the historical specificity of queerness (à la Foucault) and reveal the constructedness of identity rather than any essentialism. But Patton also adds another potential layer to our understanding of them—namely, that we understand these statements as representing two cultures: “a High Culture we have queered and an alternative culture we have created.”19 For her, this “double culture”—one that is high culture and another that is alt culture— is “a way to think and be queer now.”20 Her comments on the two queer cultures reflect the shift in the 1990s to cultural studies (14.1) over theory. They also indicate the increasing preference of the term queer to gender to signify the various categories of gender identity and sexual orientation. While queer can be used by individuals of a specific gender identity, it more generally came to refer to anyone who is neither cisgender (individuals whose gender identity corresponds to the gender associated with the sex they were assigned at birth) nor heterosexual. In Fear of a Queer Planet (1993), Michael Warner argues that “queer” represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal . . . For both academics and activists, “queer” gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual.21

Cindy Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” (1994), in Lavender Culture (1978), ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: New York University Press, 1994), xxiii. 16 Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xxiii. 17 Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xvii. 18 Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xiii; my emphasis. 19 Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xiii. 20 Patton, “Foreword to the New Edition,” xiii. 21 Michael Warner, “Introduction,” in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi. 15

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In short, by the 1990s, queer theory comes to replace gender theory as the preferred general term for critical inquiry into sex and sexuality. The term queer theory was first used by Teresa de Lauretis at a conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz, about lesbian and gay sexualities in 1990. Her aim was to create some critical distance between the gay and lesbian studies, which emerged in the 1970s, and to emphasize the study of gay and lesbian sexualities in their own right instead of as deviations of heterosexuality.22 For both de Lauretis and Warner, queer theory is about resistance to regimes of the normal and counteracting discourse that normalize the heterosexual. Today, however, while queer theory is still widely used, LGBTQ+ theory is perhaps an even more inclusive designation for the work that is currently being done in literary and cultural analysis regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. LGBTQ+ theory encompasses a broad range of perspectives on sex and sexuality including gay and lesbian theory (7.1), lesbian feminism (7.2), Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity (7.3), the trans* theory of Jack Halberstam (7.5), and the queer affect theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (7.4). In addition to these topics, which are all covered in this chapter, LGBTQ+ theory also intersects in various ways with broader issues in race and justice (8.0), biopolitics (9.0), globalization (10.0), posthumanism (12.0), affect studies (13.0), and pop culture (14.0). But, while the terms lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning are all key points of contact for contemporary theories of sex and sexuality, the “+” in LGBTQ+ theory importantly indicates that there are also gender identities and sexual orientations not covered by the letters L, G, B, T, and Q. One example is Two-Spirit, a pan-Indigenous American identity. Other terms that mediate further layers to LGBTQ+ theory are intersex (individuals who are born with variations of sex characteristics that conform to neither definitions of male or female bodies), nonbinary (a person whose gender identity is neither exclusively woman or man), gender nonconforming (an individual whose gender identity or expression is outside of man/woman and masculine/feminine), and asexual (or ace, someone with little or no sexual attraction). In sum, LGBTQ+ theory makes sexual orientation and gender identity a fundamental category of literary and cultural analysis and understanding.

7.1 LESBIAN AND GAY THEORY After the Stonewall Riots in 1969, interest in the study of lesbian and gay literature and culture went on the rise, and has risen in scope and range in each successive decade. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s, the study of sex and sexuality underwent a renaissance of sorts, with the historical and theoretical work of Boswell and Foucault leading the way into a new understanding of sex and sexuality. Moreover, during this period, much of the work prior to the 1970s was re-evaluated and much of it was delegitimated because of its questionable methodological and theoretical foundations. For the most part, what is found questionable about this pre-1970 work on sex and sexuality is its implied or explicit biological essentialism, that is, rather than regarding sex and sexuality as a socio-cultural construct that influences identity formation (social constructionism), it assumed that individuals possessed an innate and fixed sexual identity that is both universal and transhistorical

22

Regarding the conference and its objectives, see Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities—An Introduction,” differences 3.2 (1991): iii–xviii.

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(biological essentialism). This emphasis on sexual-identity constructionism against any form of biological essentialism will result in (as we will see below) a split in the 1990s between lesbian and gay studies and queer theory. However, if one does look backward in history at lesbian and gay theory, one will find figures who attempted to advocate for the rights of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men—even if their theories regarding sex and sexuality exhibited biological essentialism. Some, like Freud, following Plato, believed that all humans were bisexual. For him, everyone incorporates aspects of both sexes, and everyone is sexually attracted to both sexes.23 In The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (1992), Margaret Cruikshank says that Freud speculated that homosexuality involved a narcissistic search for a love that symbolizes the self, a castration fear for men and penis envy for women. He did not regard it as a sickness, however, or as a condition that could be changed, and thus he opposed criminal punishments for homosexuality. Freud believed that the natural sexual feelings of children are both homosexual and heterosexual and that social conditioning usefully represses both bisexuality and homosexuality. Thus a homosexual person is arrested in his or her development. Followers of Freud, especially in the United States, interpreted this to mean that homosexuals are perpetually adolescents, immature, blocked in some way, incapable of leading normal lives. Abandoning Freud’s tolerant views, his disciples advocated treatment for homosexuality.24 But even if Freud’s biological essentialism regarding bisexuality pushes him to social toleration of homosexuality, his position on the usefulness of social conditioning points in the other direction. In short, contemporary lesbian and gay studies and queer theory widely rejects Freud and psychoanalysis as representative of both biological essentialism and normative-heterosexual (or, alternately, hetero-normative) systems of value. Another psychoanalyst who contributed to early lesbian and gay theory was Joan Rivière, who was a colleague of Melanie Klein and also one of Freud’s translators. In 1929, she published “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” an article wherein she theorizes on homosexual and bisexual development in women. Athol Hughes, a psychoanalyst who has edited Rivière’s papers, says that in this article, She demonstrates with convincing clinical material a fraudulent femininity in a certain type of woman, not overtly homosexual, but not fully heterosexual. This bisexual woman hides a wish for masculinity behind a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution she fears from both men and women.25 According to Hughes, “the roots of the homosexual development in women” for Rivière can be traced to a “frustration during sucking or weaning which gives rise to intense sadism towards both

Michael Ruse, Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 22. Margaret Cruikshank, The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. 25 Joan Rivière, The Inner World and Joan Rivière: Collected Papers, 1920–1958, ed. Athol Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2018), 89. 23 24

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parents, particularly the mother.”26 The result of this, following the work of Klein in the “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” (1928), is “an overpowering fear of her mother and consequent need to placate her.”27 Nevertheless, Rivière’s focus on both homosexual and bisexual women does not alter its grounding—like the work of Freud—in a biological essentialism that conflicts with constructivist notions of sex and sexuality. But aside from psychoanalytic theory—where the work of many other figures can be added to that of Freud and Rivière—there are others who wrote on lesbian and gay sexology even before Freud. Included in this group is Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a nineteenth-century German legal scholar (jurist) and lawyer who was the first person to demand not just the decriminalization of homosexual practices, but also the complete legal equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals. Despite his acknowledgment of a wide variety of sexual orientations and types, Ulrichs basically maintained a “third sex” theory of homosexuality. For him, lesbians are born with a male anima (psyche, spirit, or soul), and gay men are born with a female one. Ulrichs also coined a word for same-sex love, which is based on Pausanias’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. As Pausanias explains in the dialogue, Now you will all agree, gentlemen, that without Love there could be no such goddess as Aphrodite. If, then, there were only one goddess of that name, we might suppose that there was only one kind of Love, but since in fact there are two such goddesses there must also be two kinds of Love. No one, I think, will deny that there are two goddesses of that name—one, the elder, sprung from no mother’s womb but from the heavens themselves, we call the Uranian, the heavenly Aphrodite, while the younger, daughter of Zeus and Dione, we call Pandemus, the earthly Aphrodite. It follows, then, that Love should be known as earthly or heavenly according to the goddess in whose company his work is done.28 Pausanias attributes same-sex love to the heavenly Aphrodite, that is, the motherless daughter of Uranus; and opposite-sex love to the earthly Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Ulrichs coins the term Dioning (from Dione) for heterosexuals, and Urning (from Uranus) for homosexuals. Both Urning (or, Uranian) and homosexual were coined in the 1860s, and both terms were widely used before the latter term came to be preferred. There are also other figures who contributed to the study of lesbians and gays prior to 1970s, including Edward Carpenter, who was a prominent advocate of both women’s rights and overt homosexuality, whose work on relationships between the sexes in Love’s Coming-of-Age (1896) and The Intermediate Sex (1908) was influenced by the work of Havelock Ellis on human sexuality; Alfred Kinsey, who studied human sexual behavior, and who wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), which were based on 18,500 personal interviews and indicated a wide variation in behavior; Jeannette Foster, the author of the first critical study of lesbian literature, Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956), who was also the first librarian of Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research; and, Frantz Fanon, an influential postcolonial

Rivière, The Inner World and Joan Rivière, 89. Rivière, The Inner World and Joan Rivière, 89. 28 Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 180d–e. 26 27

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theorist (10.1) who, on the one hand, regarded homosexuality as a sign of psychological distress, exclusive to Western-raced people and directly related to their “Negrophobia” (“the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual”),29 and, on the other hand, regarded all “Negroes” as free from the disorder of homosexuality (“I had no opportunity to establish the overt presence of homosexuality in Martinique. This must be viewed as the result of the absence of the Oedipus complex in the Antilles”).30 Fanon, however, when confronted with the evidence of homosexuality in non-Western cultures, for example, transvestites in Martinique, claimed that they “lead normal sex lives”—and “can take a punch like any ‘he-man’ and are not impervious to the allures of women—fish and vegetable merchants.”31 Finally, there is Mary McIntosh, a British sociologist and lesbian and gay rights activist. Just before the Stonewall Riots, McIntosh published “The Homosexual Role,” where she argued that the current conceptualization of homosexuality as a condition is a false one, resulting from ethnocentric bias. Homosexuality should be seen rather as a social role. Anthropological evidence shows that the role does not exist in all societies, and where it does it is not always the same as in modern western societies. Historical evidence shows that the role did not emerge in England until towards the end of the seventeenth century. Evidence from the “Kinsey Reports” shows that, in spite of the existence of the role in our society, much homosexual behavior occurs outside the recognized role and the polarization between the heterosexual man and the homosexual man is far from complete.32 McIntosh’s work signals the more general view in the 1970s and 1980s that homosexuality has been wrongly or falsely conceptualized. To get it right, a social constructivist approach to sex and sexuality will come to be favored. Gone is biological essentialism with its innate and fixed sexual identity sourced to figures such as Plato or Freud that is both universal and transhistorical. It is replaced by an approach drawn from many different disciplines including sociology, anthropology, and history rather than just leaning heavily on the theoretical methodology of philosophy and/or psychoanalysis (as in, for example, the examples above, ranging from Ulrichs to Fanon). This change in approach is coupled with increasing emphasis on the study of the cultural production, dissemination, and the vicissitudes of sexual meaning, rather than the universal and transhistorical features of sex and sexuality. As a consequence, much of the lesbian and gay theory from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the 1960s is largely ignored because it does not conform to the theoretical and methodological contours of the field circa the final quarter of the twentieth century. Moreover, there is a shift in the 1970s and 1980s to lesbian and gay studies as opposed to lesbian and gay theory. Whereas a theoretical approach would be grounded in a fixed methodology replete with a rigid vocabulary concerning sex and sexuality (e.g., psychoanalysis), a

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 156. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 180, n. 44. 31 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 180, n. 44. 32 Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role,” Social Problems 16.2 (1968): 182. 29 30

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studies approach eschews both a fixed methodology and a rigid vocabulary (e.g., cultural studies [14.1]). Moreover, this studies approach to the study of lesbians and gays is regarded as a kind of Copernican revolution in the study of sex and sexuality. In 1993, Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin published The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Regarded at the time as the most comprehensive work of its kind, it presented lesbian and gay studies (two decades after the Stonewall riots) as a flourishing multidisciplinary endeavor concerning sexuality, sexual politics, and gender studies. Disciplines represented in the volume included African-American studies, anthropology, classics, critical theory, cultural studies, ethnic studies, history, literature, sociology, philosophy, and psychology, among others. Among the topics addressed were AIDS, Black nationalism, butch-fem roles, children’s books, the closet, colonialism, the cultural construction of gender, Freud, the hijras of India, homophobia, lesbian separatism, Robert Mapplethorpe, the media, the politics of representation, popular films, safe-sex education, S/M, Sappho, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, and Oscar Wilde, among many others. The volume had forty-two contributors whose work represented the diversity, range, and scope of lesbian and gay studies circa 1970–90. Among its forty-two contributors were Judith Butler, John D’Emilio, Cindy Patton, Teresa de Lauretis, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, all of whom we have already had some exposure to in the introduction to this chapter. And, as the editors noted, these contributors “produce and engage many different kinds of knowledge and meaning; they suggest many different topics and subjects for further inquiry; they demonstrate the cogency of many different methods, theories, styles, and approaches; and taken together, they transform our view of our cultures and world.”33 In short, as this volume illustrated, by the 1990s, lesbian and gay studies had become a massive field whose history “has yet to be written.”34 In fact, the editors warn that, [W]hen such a history comes to be written, it is likely to be contested: like any institutional history, the history of lesbian/gay studies will doubtless constitute acts of definition, an exercise in legitimation and delegitimation, and an attempt at political intervention. This is not the time or the place to begin to specify the intellectual roots of the field, to describe the conditions that made its emergence possible, or to fix its theoretical, methodological, thematic, or disciplinary contours.35 Thirty-years later, their warnings about fixing its theoretical, methodological, thematic, or disciplinary contours still hold and perhaps with even more currency, particularly in what has come to be known as queer studies (see below). Moreover, they add that lesbian/gay studies is not limited to the study of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Nor does it refer simply to studies undertaken by, or in the name of, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Not all research into the lives of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men necessarily qualifies as lesbian/gay

33 Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, “Introduction,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), xv. 34 Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xv. 35 Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xv.

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studies. Lesbian/gay studies, in short, cannot be defined exclusively by its subject, its practitioners, its methods, or its themes.36 So, how then is one to understand lesbian and gay studies if it “cannot be defined exclusively by its subject, its practitioners, its methods, or its themes”? The editors suggest that an analogy with women’s studies will aid us in understanding the field of lesbian and gay studies. Just as “women’s history is not intended to be merely additive; its effect is not to introduce another sub-department of history into the traditional panoply of historical fields—such as political history, economic history, social history, military history, diplomatic history, and intellectual history,”37 so too is lesbian and gay history not merely additive. Rather, like women’s studies which “seeks to establish the centrality of gender as a fundamental category of historical analysis and understanding,” lesbian and gay studies seeks to establish the centrality of sex and sexuality as a fundamental category of historical analysis and understanding. “Lesbian and gay studies does for sex and sexuality,” write the editors, “what women’s studies does for gender.”38 In sum, lesbian and gay studies intends to establish the analytical centrality of sex and sexuality within many different fields of inquiry, to express and advance the interests of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men, and to contribute culturally and intellectually to the contemporary lesbian/gay movement. In particular, lesbian/ gay studies focuses intense scrutiny on cultural production, dissemination, and vicissitudes of sexual meaning.39 However, in spite of the efforts of lesbian and gay studies to place emphasis on the “cultural production, dissemination, and vicissitudes of sexual meaning” coupled with a reluctance to establish its theoretical and methodological contours, some have argued that it took an essentialist view of sex and sexuality—and have proposed queer theory as an alternative. In “Queer Theory (1991),” de Lauretis articulates the problems with lesbian and gay studies as a general field of study. By the 1990s, writes de Lauretis, homosexuality is no longer to be seen simply as marginal with regard to a dominant, stable form of sexuality (heterosexuality) against which it would be defined either by opposition or by homology. In other works, it is no longer to be seen either as merely transgressive or deviant vis-à-vis a proper, natural sexuality (i.e., institutionalized reproductive sexuality), according to the older, pathological model, or as just another, optional “life-style,” according to the model of contemporary North American pluralism. Instead, male and female homosexualities—in their current sexual-political articulations of gay and lesbian sexualities, in North America—may be reconceptualized as social and cultural forms in their own right, albeit emergent ones and thus still fuzzily defined, undercoded, or discursively dependent on more established forms. Thus,

36

Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xv; my emphasis. Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xv. 38 Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xv. 39 Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, “Introduction,” xvi. 37

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rather than marking the limits of the social space by designating a place at the edge of culture, gay sexuality in its specific female and male cultural (or subcultural) forms acts as an agency of social process whose mode of functioning is both interactive and yet resistant, both participatory and yet distinct, claiming at once equality and difference, demanding political representation while insisting on its material and historical specificity.40 For de Lauretis, some of the “discursive constructions and constructed silences in the emergent field of ‘gay and lesbian studies’ ” need to be problematized. As an alternative to lesbian and gay studies, she coins queer theory, which she says is willing to examine, make explicit, compare, or confront the respective histories, assumptions, and conceptual frameworks that have characterized the self-representations of North American lesbians and gay men, of color and white, up to now; from there, we could then go on to recast or reinvent the terms of our sexualities, to construct another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual.41 As for the term “lesbian and gay,” she contends that it needs to be put at a critical distance because by 1990, it had established itself as an “often convenient formula.”42 Writes de Lauretis, “the phrase ‘lesbian and gay’ or ‘gay and lesbian’ has become the standard way of referring to what only a few years ago used to be simply ‘gay’ (e.g. the gay community, the gay liberation movement) or just a few years earlier still, ‘homosexual.’ ”43 However, it should be noted that queer theory is establishing itself around the same time that lesbian and gay studies is decidedly distancing itself from theory. The studies–theory divide in this area (as well as others) reveals an important contemporary fault line that is often distinguishable only on the basis of the claims of the general area of concern (viz., queer theory is theory whereas lesbian and gay studies are studies). This becomes an almost tautological exercise as figures such as Butler, Sedgwick, and de Lauretis can be found under both rubrics. More recently, queer studies, comment Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, is “the institutionalization of a new—or at least newly visible—paradigm for thinking about sexuality that emerged simultaneously across academic and activist contexts in the early 1990s, constituting a broad and unmethodological critique of normative models of sex, gender, and sexuality.”44 “Queer studies’ commitment to non-normativity and anti-identitarianism, coupled with its refusal to define its proper field of operation to any fixed content,” they continue, means that, while prominently organized around sexuality, it is potentially attentive to any socially consequential difference that contributes to regimes of sexual normalization. Rather than separating sexuality from other axes of social difference—race, ethnicity, class, gender,

Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” differences 3.2 (1991): iii. De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” iv. 42 De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” iv. 43 De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” iv. 44 Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, “Introduction,” in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, eds. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter (London: Routledge, 2013), xvi. 40 41

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nationality and so on—queer studies has increasingly attended to the ways in which various categories of difference inflect and transform each other. This kind of intersectional analysis is neither new nor an innovation of queer studies.45 These comments by Hall and Jagose come two decades after those of de Lauretis, Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, and indicate the ongoing reshaping of the range and scope of sex and sexuality. The emphasis on non-normativity and anti-identitarianism reveal the continuing commitment of work in this area against essentialism of any form, whether it is in the form of essential racial, ethnic, class, gender, and national characteristics or in the form of norms that categorize sex, gender, and sexuality. Again, the designation of this chapter as one on LGBTQ+ theory is an effort to recognize work in both queer studies and queer theory as indicative of a wider and dynamic set of approaches to sex and sexuality today.

7.2 LESBIAN FEMINISM In 1955, the Daughters of Bilitis was formed in San Francisco. As the first national organization for lesbians, it sought to educate lesbians about their legal rights and to work to increase their acceptance in society. While there were lesbian communities prior to the 1960s, they tended to center on homes or bars. One of the social and political goals of the Daughters of Bilitis was to bring about an end to the social and political isolation of lesbians. However, when the second wave of feminism began to take shape in the 1960s, the concerns of lesbians converged with the broader issues of the women’s movement and the sexual revolution. Unfortunately, however, the founder of the National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan, coined the term “lavender menace” to describe the lesbian members of the feminist movement. To conservative women’s organizations, the issues of lesbian members were regarded as hindering the women’s movement “in the same way that drag queens,” writes Nikki Sullivan, “had been regarded by homophiles as an obstacle to acceptance by the heterosexual majority.”46 One of the consequences of women’s liberation organizations regarding lesbians as undermining the credibility of second-wave feminism was the formation of lesbian–feminist groups. One of them, Radicalesbians, was formed in New York in 1970. Some of its original members, such as Rita Mae Brown, Barbara Love, and Ellen Shumsky, were previously members of the Gay Liberation Front, which they left because they believed it placed a lower priority on advancing the rights of lesbians as opposed to the rights of gay men. Radicalesbians wrote a famous manifesto, The Woman[-]Identified Woman, in 1970, which maintained that lesbianism is necessary to women’s liberation. The Radicalesbians, who were aiming to reclaim the “Lavender Menace,” argued that Only women can give to each other a new sense of self. That identity we have to develop with reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. This consciousness is the revolutionary force from which all else will follow, for ours is an organic revolution. For this we must be available

45 46

Hall and Jagose, “Introduction,” xvi. Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 32.

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and supportive to one another, give our commitment and our love, give the emotional support necessary to sustain this movement. Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors. As long as woman’s liberation tries to free women without facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one relationship with our oppressors, tremendous energies will continue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man, into finding how to get better sex, how to turn his head around—into trying to make the “new man” out of him, in the delusion that this will allow us to be the “new woman.” This obviously splits our energies and commitments, leaving us unable to be committed to the construction of the new patterns which will liberate us. It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves.47 On May 1, 1970, members of Radicalesbians rushed the stage of the “Second Congress to Unite Women” to express their issues and distribute copies of Woman[-]Identified Woman. Their efforts contributed to the passage of some pro-lesbian resolutions at the feminist conference—and the following year Radicalesbians was dissolved. One of the things that threatened the women’s movement at the time was the belief of heterosexual women that lesbians were introducing sex to the movement. For heterosexual women, the women’s movement was supposed to be a respite from sexuality. Lesbian feminists responded to heterosexual feminists by emphasizing the sensual aspects of lesbianism over its sexual ones. One of the consequences of emphasizing gender over sexuality was to push lesbian feminists closer to heterosexual feminists and further from gay men. But by basing their political coalition with heterosexual feminists on gender, “it often seemed,” writes Sullivan, “that to be a heterosexual woman-identified woman was a contradiction in terms.”48 Or, as the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists put it in 1979, We do not think that all feminists can and should be political lesbians. Our definition of political lesbian is a women-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women.49 The position of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists was that “any woman could (potentially) be a political lesbian since lesbianism is less a sexual identity than a political position,”50 or, as it was put at the time, “lesbians are feminists not homosexuals.”51

47 Radicalesbians, The Woman[-]Identified Woman (Pittsburgh: Know, Inc. 1970), 3–4. Pamphlet from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, NC. 48 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 33. 49 OnlyWomen Collective, “Political Lesbianism: The Case Against Heterosexuality,” in Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism, eds. OnlyWomen Collective (London: OnlyWomen Press, 1981), 5. 50 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 33. 51 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 33; Johnston cited by Sullivan.

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In Unpacking Queer Politics (2003), Sheila Jeffreys maintains that Lesbian feminism starts from the understanding that the interests of lesbians and gay men are in many respects very different, because lesbians are members of the political class of women. Lesbian liberation thus requires the destruction of men’s power over women.52 For Jeffreys, the principles that “inspired lesbian feminism from the beginning, and which distinguish it from subsequent forms of politics that lesbians have adopted, particularly queer politics,” are as follows: (1) Lesbian feminists are woman-loving; (2) Lesbian feminism is a separatist organization; (3) Lesbian feminism is a community and ideas; (4) Lesbian feminism believes that the personal is political; (5) Lesbian feminism rejects hierarchy in the form of role-playing and sadomasochism; and, (6) Lesbian feminism is a critique of the sexuality of male supremacy which eroticizes inequality.53 But many political feminists also critiqued “heterosexual penetration as a key factor in the oppression of women” and condemned “penetrative sex between lesbians on the grounds that penetration is, by definition, phallocentric.”54 Hence, one of the consequences of political lesbianism was to alienate “many working-class lesbians, lesbians of color, butches and femmes, ‘sex positive’ lesbians, and/or those whose lesbianism had been shaped in and through bar culture.”55 That is to say, some regarded political lesbianism as both desexualizing lesbianism and sex-policing lesbians. Other strands of lesbian feminism, however, were sex positive. They led to the publication of pro-sex magazines and to the production of “lesbian porn, sex toys for women, and lesbian S/M”56 among other items in support of lesbian sex and sexuality. These factions within lesbian feminism, which were the result of deep ideological differences, played themselves out in what has been termed the sex wars. The divisions within feminism regarding lesbians might be broadly divided into two periods, both of which are marked by stark oppositions. De Lauretis describes them as follows: Since the late 60s, practically since Stonewall, North American lesbians have been more or less painfully divided between an allegiance to the women’s movement, with its more or less overt homophobia, and its appropriation of lesbianism, and an allegiance to the gay liberation movement, with its more or less overt sexism. Of late [that is, in the late 1980s and early 1990s], this division has been recast as an embattled, starkly polarized opposition between sex-radical or s/m lesbians and mainstream or cultural feminist lesbians; an opposition where gay men are, on

Sheila Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 19. Jeffreys, Unpacking Queer Politics, 19. 54 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 34. 55 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 34. 56 Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, 34. 52 53

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this side, subsumed under the undifferentiated category “men” and/or not considered pertinent to lesbian life and thought, whereas on the other side, they would represent the cultural model and very possibility of lesbian radical sex.57 De Lauretis’s observation here is that this polarization is controlled by a “mechanical, toggle-switch binarism.”58 For de Lauretis, one sees this binarism “popularized”59 through two women’s magazine titles: one is Off Our Backs, an American radical feminist publication that ran from 1970 to 2008 aimed at “all women who are fighting for the liberation of their lives” that its publishers wrote in the first issue “will grow and expand to meet the needs of women from all backgrounds and classes”;60 the other, which ran from 1984 to 2006, is On Our Backs, the first women-run erotica magazine and the first magazine to feature lesbian erotica targeted at a lesbian audience. Moreover, in order to break associations with “maleness,” comments Alice Echols in Daring to Be Bad (1989), lesbian-feminists often resorted to and reinforced dominant cultural assumptions about women’s sexuality. They spoke platitudinously about the differences between women’s (and, by extension, lesbian’s) diffuse, romantic, and nurturing sexuality and men’s aggressive, genitally oriented sexuality.61 Examples include statements such as “the male seeks to conquer through sex while the female seeks to communicate”62 by Rita Mae Brown (who Echols says “did more than any other individual to raise feminists’ consciousness about lesbianism”),63 and “Men who are obsessed with sex are convinced that lesbians are obsessed with sex. Actually, like other women, lesbians are obsessed with love and fidelity” by a member of Gay Women’s Liberation in Berkeley.64 Moreover, the binarism even extended to heterosexual sex versus lesbian sex, which was described by a writer from the Los Angeles feminist newspaper Everywoman as “pure as snow”: “Fortunately, Lesbianism never really had anything to do with men, despite all attempts at interference, and as a consequence remains the only viable pursuit left on earth as pure as snow, ego-free, and non-profit.”65 With the formation of queer theory in the 1990s, the binarism, essentialism, and platitudes often found in lesbian feminism will give way to an anti-binarism and anti-essentialism that resists reduction to platitudes. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes in 1993, queer involves “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning [that occur] when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”66 57

De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” vii–viii. De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” viii. 59 De Lauretis, “Queer Theory,” viii. 60 Statement from Off Our Backs 1.1 (1970), https://web.archive.org/web/20051224044533/http://www.offourbacks.org/ Mission.htm. 61 Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (1989) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 218. 62 Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213; Brown cited by Echols. 63 Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213. 64 Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 213; Gay Women’s Liberation cited by Echols. 65 Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 218. 66 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8. 58

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Finally, it has been noted that lesbian feminists were for the most part white middle-class women. These white middle-class women claimed that their lesbian feminist discourse spoke for all women. In Margaret Mead Made Me Gay (2000), Esther Newton argues that white middle-class women claiming to represent all women may have “sharpened” “class and race antagonisms” since the 1970s.67 For Newton, there is an ideological hegemony in lesbian-feminist discourse that omits the differences and fragmentation among lesbian communities and cultures. There is perhaps no better place to view this at work than in the formation of the Combahee River Collective. In 1975, a group of Black lesbian feminists formed this collective as a response to racism in the women’s movement, to the lack of attention to sexuality and economic oppression in the National Black Feminist Organization, and to sexism in the Black freedom movements. By focusing on the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, the Combahee River Collective brought to lesbianfeminist discourse an ideological response to the hegemony of white middle-class women. In The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), the Combahee River Collective write: [W]e are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face . . . This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.68 The intersectional identity politics of the Combahee River Collective challenge essentialist and universalist notions of gender and sexual identity. In fact, their statement is where the phrase identity politics was coined. Still, during the 1980s there was debate concerning political activism of any form under the term identity—even if the terms were Black, lesbian, gay, and women. The issue here was the degree to which identity politics required that the belief that Black, lesbian, gay, women, and other identity terms represent essential, irreducible, and unchanging characteristics that are constitutive of a person or thing—versus socially constructed ones. However, in spite of its essentialist tendencies, the identity politics of the Combahee River Collective provide a glimpse of the possibilities available by resisting ideological hegemony in lesbian-feminist discourse. For the Combahee River Collective, the sources of Black lesbian-feminist

67 Esther Newton, “Will the Real Lesbian Community Please Stand Up?” (1982, 1998), in Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 161. 68 Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 264, 274.

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oppression can be most effectively dismantled through political struggle with several particular systems of oppression (and not just one, the heterosexual structure) that have used power to gain privilege over them. They view the political struggle ahead as a “revolutionary task” that will entail “a lifetime of work and struggle.” The intersectional identity politics of the Combahee River Collective foreground the ideals and hopes of a group of individuals to bring about the end of their own oppression. The later (and continuing) emphasis on intersectionality (8.4) as central to issues concerning race and justice (8.0) always already links back to the identity politics of this pioneering Black lesbian feminist collective.

7.3 JUDITH BUTLER Judith Butler argues that gender is for the most part not a set of natural or essential traits. Rather, gendered behavior, such as that which we commonly associate with masculinity and femininity, is a performance that is learned. “Gender reality is performative,” writes Butler, “which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.”69 She then continues, It seems fair to say that certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, and that these acts either conform to an expected gender identity or contest that expectation in some way. That expectation, in turn, is based upon the perception of sex, where sex is understood to be the discrete and factic datum of primary sexual characteristics. This implicit and popular theory of acts and gestures as expressive of gender suggest that gender itself is dramatized and known; indeed, gender appears to the popular imagination as a substantial core which might well be understood as the spiritual or psychological correlate of biological sex.70 Therefore, in order to avoid the misconception that gender is expressive of sex, Butler argues that the link between gender and sex needs to be broken: When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.71 Thus, with sex as radically independent of gender, Butler shows that the gendered self is not prior to its acts as it is in the phenomenological models of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, George Herbert Mead, and others. For the phenomenologists, “social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social sign.”72 However, as Butler points out, this does not imply that social agents necessarily exist prior to their constitution in language. “Though phenomenology sometimes

Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 527. 70 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 527–8. 71 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 6. 72 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 519. 69

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appears to assume the existence of a choosing and constituting agent prior to language (who poses as the sole source of its constituting acts),” says Butler, “there is also a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts.”73 This “subject” that Butler is referring to is not a “gendered self ” that exists “prior to its act,” as one strand of the phenomenological tradition would have us believe. Rather, the constituting acts of this subject result in both “the identity of the actor” and the constitution of “that identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief.”74 Consequently, for Butler, “there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.”75 What Butler provides here is a way of theorizing both the notion that gender is constructed, and that gender as a construction . . . regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own production. The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness.76 Butler’s position that gender is constructed through performativity provides a challenge to all forms of identity politics that utilize women as a common identity. Why? Because Butler is opposed to the notion that “the term women denote[s] a common identity.”77 Hence, for Butler, any feminist theory that that relies upon the category of woman as a universal presupposition is problematic. This includes not just second-wave Anglo-American feminist theorists from Friedan to Gubar but also French theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray. In their “effort to combat the invisibility of women as a category,” comments Butler, feminists run the risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be representative of the concrete lives of women. As feminists, we have been less eager, I think, to consider the status of the category itself, and, indeed, to discern the conditions of oppression which issue from an unexamined reproduction of gender identities which sustain discrete and binary categories of man and woman.78 To be sure, Butler’s concept of gender “troubles” much of what had come to be regarded as feminist theory up to 1990, when her first major book on this topic, Gender Trouble, was published. For her, like Foucault (9.1), there is no such thing as either normative sexuality or normative heterosexuality. However, through social compulsion or coercion, we are taught to believe otherwise. “Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo,” writes Butler.79

73

Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 519. Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 519. 75 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 522. 76 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 522; my emphasis. 77 Butler, Gender Trouble, 3. 78 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 519. 79 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 520; my emphasis. 74

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She then explains how social sanctions, punitive regulations, and taboos work together to compel normative heterosexuality by reminding us of how “cultures are governed by conventions that not only regulate and guarantee the production, exchange, and consumption of material goods, but also reproduce the bonds of kinship itself, which require taboos and punitive regulation of reproduction to effect that end.”80 In this regard, Levì-Strauss’s efforts to show “how the incest taboo works to guarantee the channeling of sexuality into various modes of heterosexual marriage” is one example of how “compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed . . . through the cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions.”81 For Butler, the body is both matter and “a continual and incessant materializing of possibilities.”82 By “materializing” the possibilities of one’s body, “one does one’s body, and indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well.”83 This “doing” of one’s body is a process whereby “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time.”84 In short, for Butler the gendered body as matter is not a given. Rather, the gendered body is something that is produced through a “legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural, or linguistic.”85 The implications for feminist theory of Butler’s position on the gendered body are significant: namely, it does not allow feminism to regard women’s bodies to exist outside of the legacy of their performative acts. Or, more simply, there is no such thing for Butler as gendered bodies outside of or external to their performativity. One of the implications of Butler’s notion that gendered bodies do not exist outside of or external to their performativity is that the “transvestite’s gender is as fully real as anyone whose performance complies with social expectations.”86 Her argument here is that because “the ‘reality’ of gender is constituted by the performance itself, then there is no recourse to an essential and unrealized ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ which gender performances ostensibly express.”87 Thus, the gender of the transvestite is as real as every other gender performance. Moreover, the gender of the transvestite has an added significance: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency.”88 To which Butler adds, [P]art of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary. In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity.89

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Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 524. Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 524. 82 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 521. 83 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 521. 84 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 523. 85 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 523. 86 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 527. 87 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 527. 88 Butler, Gender Trouble, 137; original emphasis. 89 Butler, Gender Trouble, 137. 81

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For Butler, the performance of drag shows us that sex and gender are not situated in nature because there is no original nature in a drag performance. Butler’s approach here, which she calls “antifoundationalist,”90 has a commonality with the antifoundational work of poststructuralists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard in that all of these thinkers reject the view that all knowledge has an indubitable foundation (in the way, for example, that Descartes’s cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—provides an indubitable foundation for knowledge). The difference, however, is that gender for her is not determined by language, difference, or the symbolic. Moreover, by directing our attention to the performativity of sex and gender, Butler effectively changes the terms and conditions of feminism. “Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived,”91 argues Butler. One of the consequences of Butler’s performative view of gender is that it “cannot be understood as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior ‘self,’ whether that ‘self ’ is conceived as sexed or not.”92 Unlike, say, McIntosh, who views homosexuality as a social role, or Erving Goffman, who “posits a self which assumes and exchanges various ‘roles’ within the complex social expectations of the ‘game’ of modern life,” Butler contends that the self is “outside.”93 That is, for Butler, the self is constituted in social discourse. However, any effort to ascribe to this “outside” self interiority is merely “a publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication.”94 In sum, “gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.”95 Nevertheless, it is “not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic, or the overwhelming history of patriarchy.”96 This position puts her at odds with most of the work done on gender in the twentieth century. “Gender,” writes Butler, “is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure, but if this continuous act is mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished to expand the cultural field bodily through subversive performances of various kinds.”97 With regard to lesbian and gay theory, Butler is quite clear that she is not comfortable with it because of its association with the identity categories (viz., gay, lesbian). Writes Butler, “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for liberatory contestation of that very oppression.”98 Moreover, Butler is not comfortable with lesbian and gay theory because she does “not understand the notion of ‘theory,’ and [is] hardly interested in being cast as its defender, much less in being signified as part of an elite gay/lesbian theory crowd that seeks to establish the legitimacy and domestication of gay/lesbian studies within the academy.”99 Rather than theory, Butler regards her

Butler, Gender Trouble, 15. Butler, Gender Trouble, 141. 92 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 519. 93 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 528. 94 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 528. 95 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 526. 96 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 531. 97 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 531. 98 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (1991), in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 308. 99 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 308. 90 91

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work on performativity as politics. “If the political task is to show that theory is never merely theoria, in the sense of disengaged contemplation, and to insist that it is fully political (phronesis or even praxis), then why not simply call this operation politics, or some necessary permutation of it?”100 Butler’s politics of performativity is critical of any approach that “invokes the lesbian-signifier, since its signification is always to some degree out of one’s control, but also because its specificity can only be demarcated by exclusions that return to disrupt its claim to coherence.”101 “What, if anything,” asks Butler, “can lesbians be said to share? And who will decide this question, and in the name of whom? If I claim to be a lesbian, I ‘come out’ only to produce a new and different ‘closet.’ ”102 However, in spite of her disclaimers regarding lesbian and gay theory, Butler’s work on performativity is widely regarded as a seminal contribution to this field—as well as to queer theory. It changed not only the way we think about identity, but also how we approach its politics and theory. In sum, just as Marx changed the way we think about class, Butler changed the way we think about gender and sex.

7.4 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines the structuring logics of same-sex desire (or queerness) and is interested in theories of the affective orientation (or affect) of human bodies and identities (or multiplicities). The former interest led her to develop the concept of homosociality, where she argues in Between Men (1985) that there is a triangular structure in homosocial desire between men where a woman is the supposed object of at least one of the men. In the structuring logic of this same-sex desire, “the ultimate function of woman is to be conduits of homosocial desire.”103 To develop the concept of homosociality, Sedgwick draws upon some earlier theoretical work. One theoretical source is Gayle Rubin’s “sex/gender system,” a term she coined in 1975 for “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied”104—a system Rubin develops through a feminist critique of Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of kinship systems in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969), wherein women function as gifts in economic exchanges between men. The other source is René Girard’s theory of triangular desire, a concept he first explored in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), wherein the object of desire, whether male or female, stands at the peak of the triangle and demands the competing desire of two rivals. The latter interest, which might be termed affective multiplicities, combines Sedgwick’s examinations of same-sex affect and desire into a highly influential and very expansive definition of queer in Tendencies (1993):

100

Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 308. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 309. 102 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 309. 103 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 99. 104 Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Ranya R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 159. 101

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What’s striking is the number and difference of the dimensions that “sexual identity” is supposed to organize into a seamless and univocal whole. And if it doesn’t? That’s one of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically. The experimental, linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures attaching to the very many of us who may at times be moved to describe ourselves as (among other possibilities) pushy femmes, radical faeries, fanatacists, drags, clones, leather folk, ladies in tuxedoes, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, bulldaggers, divas, Snap! Queens, butch bottoms, storytellers, transsexuals, aunties, wannabes, lesbian identified men or lesbians who sleep with men, or . . . people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such.105 This expansive definition illustrates one of the first “axioms” of Sedgwick’s approach to sexuality and gender in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), namely, “People are different from each other.”106 It also reveals the relative paucity of conceptual tools there are for dealing with this multiplicity. “A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization,” comments Sedgwick, “have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions.”107 She then goes on to further problematize the study of sexuality and gender with some additional axioms: the study of sexuality is not the same thing as the study of gender, and antihomophobic inquiry is not the same thing as feminist inquiry;108 there is no way to know in advance whether lesbian and gay identities should be conceptualized together or separately;109 the debate regarding nature versus nurture takes place in the context of unstable assumptions and fantasies about both nature and nurture;110 the search for a Great Paradigm Shift regarding sexuality and gender may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity;111 the relation of gay studies to debates on the literary canon is and should be a tortuous one;112 and, the paths of allo- (or difference, divergence) and auto- (or self, same) identification are likely to be strange and recalcitrant. While these axioms inform Sedgwick’s approach to gender and sexuality, her work in this area does not conform to any one theoretical method. Rather, she draws upon many different theoretical methods including psychoanalysis, feminism, deconstruction, and queer theory (which would include Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality). “As a general principle,” comments Sedgwick, “I don’t like the idea of ‘applying’ theoretical models to particular situations or texts—it’s always more interesting when the pressure of application goes in both directions.”113 What Sedgwick does, however, is utilize extant theories, if appropriate, to produce critical interpretations of the culture or experience at hand.

Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, Updated with a New Preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 2008), 22. 107 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 22. 108 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 27. 109 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 36. 110 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 40. 111 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 44. 112 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 48. 113 Sedgwick, Tendencies, 12. 105 106

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For example, when faced with the experience of breast cancer, she said “it’s hard not to think of this continuing experience as, among other things, an adventure in applied deconstruction.”114 For her, “there was no more “efficient demonstration of the instability of the supposed oppositions that structure an experience of ‘self ’ ”115 than deconstruction. These oppositions include: the part and the whole (when cancer so dramatically corrodes that distinction); safety and danger (when fewer than half of the women diagnosed with breast cancer display any of the statistically defined “risk factors” for the disease); fear and hope (when I feel—I’ve got a quarterly physical coming up—so much less prepared to deal with the news that a lump or rash isn’t a metastasis than that it is); past and future (when a person anticipating the possibility of death, and the people who care for her, occupy temporalities that more and more radically diverge); thought and act (the words in my head are aswirl with fatalism, but at the gym I’m striding treadmills and lifting weights); or the natural and the technological (what with exoskeleton of the bone-scan machine, the uncanny appendage of the IV drip, the bionic implant of the Port-a-cath, all in the service of imaging and recovering my “natural” healthy body in the face of its spontaneous and endogenous threat against itself).116 Moreover, her self-reflection on this use of deconstruction speaks well to the overall temper of her approach to theory: That deconstruction can offer crucial resources of thought for survival under duress will sound astonishing, I know, to anyone who knows it mostly from the journalism on the subject— journalism that always depicts “deconstruction,” not as a group of usable intellectual tools, but as a set of beliefs involving a patently absurd dogma (“nothing really exists”), loopy as Christian Science but as exotically aggressive as (American journalism would also have us find) Islam. I came to my encounter with breast cancer not as a member of a credal sect of “deconstructionists” but as someone who needed all the cognitive skills she could get. I found, as often before, that I had some good and relevant ones from my deconstructive training.117 This notion of theory as “usable intellectual tools” to respond to the text or experience at hand attests to Sedgwick’s overall approach to gender and sexuality. For her, there is a great deal of theoretical work that can be drawn from to understand gender and sexuality, and one always gets the sense that the prospect of producing more theoretical work is always a good thing. But, what is in lesser abundance for Sedgwick, comments Ramzi Fawaz, are “the ethical, affective, and political orientations required to make those theories have a palpable, materially nourishing, or transformative affect on our daily lives.”118 While Sedgwick provides critical interpretations of literature and culture that resist generalizing and transhistorical explanation, she is not averse to making broad claims relating to her approach Sedgwick, Tendencies, 12. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 12. 116 Sedgwick, Tendencies, 12. 117 Sedgwick, Tendencies, 12, n. 11. 118 Ramzi Fawaz, “ ‘An Open Mesh of Possibilities’: The Necessity of Eve Sedgwick in Dark Times,” in Reading Sedgwick, ed. Lauren Berlant (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 10. 114 115

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to gender and sexuality. For example, she says that what follows from the axioms above is that “an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition.”119 She makes her case for this broad claim by exploring two major contradictions in modern homo/heterosexual definition: “the first is the contradiction between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view)”;120 and, the “second is the contradiction between seeing same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter of liminality or transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting an impulse of separatism—though by no means necessarily political separatism—with each gender.”121 For Sedgwick, these “conceptually intractable” and “nominally marginal” definitional issues are central to “knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western culture as a whole.”122 The book in which these ideas are principally developed, Epistemology of the Closet (1990), establishes Sedgwick as a major theorist of knowledge (or, epistemologist). Her queer epistemology will bring her in “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You” (1997) to try to understand better the paranoia of critical interpretation, that is, what has come to be termed the hermeneutics of suspicion—rather than trying to reject paranoid reading as postcritique aims to do in the 2010s (15.4). For Sedgwick, “the possibility of unpacking, of disentangling from their impacted and overdetermined historical relation to each other some of the separate elements of the intellectual baggage that many of us carry around under a label such as ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ ” is an “enabling” one.123 One of the things she discovers is that “the methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice has involved a concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia.”124 Sedgwick’s work here has produced a remarkable account of how paranoia works in relation to affect studies (13.0). As an epistemologist, Sedgwick is concerned with how knowledge is performative. For her, the basic question of epistemology is not, “What is knowledge?” Rather, it is, “What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?”125 So, with respect to paranoia, her question is not “What is paranoia (in critical practice)?” but rather “What does paranoia do (in critical practice)?” By asking the latter question, Sedgwick finds that because Freud’s concept of paranoia is often at the center of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” it also performs as knowledge his famous generalization regarding paranoia: “the delusions of paranoiacs have an unpalatable external similarity and internal kinship to the systems of our philosophers.”126 As such, for Sedgwick, it “become[s] less a diagnosis than a prescription,”127 that is, Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1. 121 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 1. 122 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 2. 123 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You” (1997), in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 124. 124 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 125. 125 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 124. 126 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 125; Freud cited by Sedgwick. 127 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 125. 119 120

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[T]o theorize anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious or complaisant. I myself have no wish to return to the use of “paranoid” as pathologizing diagnosis, but it seems to me a great loss when paranoid inquiry comes to seem entirely coextensive with critical theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.128 The challenge then for Sedgwick is “to understand paranoia in such a way as to situate it as one kind of epistemological practice among other, alternative ones.”129 Again, the question here is not one of the “truth value” of paranoia, but rather one of its “performative affect.”130 Thus, for her, some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge. They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.131 In this regard, Sedgwick makes five general claims about paranoia as “a tool for better seeing differentials of practice.”132 First, Sedgwick notes that paranoia is “anticipatory,” which she then associates with the “first imperative” of paranoia: “There must be no bad surprises.”133 For Sedgwick, recognition of this imperative is fundamental to her epistemology because it establishes a necessary connection between knowledge and paranoia. Whereas for ontologically static conceptions of knowledge (e.g., foundationalism), paranoia only functions as the lack of foundation to belief (viz., Paranoia is a type of unfounded belief), in Sedgwick’s performative conception of knowledge, paranoia is a necessary aspect of all knowledge (viz., All knowledge is paranoid). She illustrates this point by quoting D. A. Miller: “Surprise . . . is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate, but it is also what, in the event, he survives by reading as a frightening incentive: he can never be paranoid enough.”134 Therefore, by anticipating events, paranoia works to establish conditions for knowledge that are antifoundational (and performative), rather than foundational (and static). Second, for Sedgwick, paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. By this, she means that paranoia tends toward “symmetrical epistemologies,” that is, epistemologies that refuse “to be only either a way of knowing or a thing known.”135 The epistemological symmetry of paranoia means that it both needs to be imitated to be understood, and it is only understood through imitation. Moreover, this epistemological symmetry is also “contagious” or a contagion: “Anything you can do (to me) I can do worse, and Anything you can do (to me) I can do first—to myself.”136

128

Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 126. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 128. 130 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 129. 131 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 130. 132 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 130. 133 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 130. 134 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 130; Miller cited by Sedgwick. 135 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 131. 136 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 131; original emphasis. 129

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Third, paranoia is a strong theory. Sedgwick reaches this conclusion by following the work of Silvan Tomkins, who characterizes a theory as “strong” that “is capable of accounting for a wide spectrum of phenomena which appear to be very remote, one from the other, and from a common source.”137 “Weak” theory, on the other hand, is, for Tomkins, theory that “can account only for ‘near’ phenomena,” which makes it “little better than a description of the phenomena which it purports to explain.”138 Therefore, strong theory is not determined for Sedgwick (and Tomkins) on the basis of “how it avoids negative affect or finds positive affect, but [on] the size and topology of the domain it organizes.”139 However, even though paranoia is a strong theory that organizes domains, for Sedgwick it is just “one kind of affect theory among other possible kinds” that might organize domains.140 In short, just because paranoia is a strong affect theory that organizes one domain, there may be others. Moreover, because paranoia is a strong theory that is also “a locus of reflexive mimeticism,” Sedgwick concludes that “[it] is nothing if not teachable.”141 Fourth, for Sedgwick, following Tomkins, affects can be qualitatively separated into two groups: negative affects and positive ones. Moreover, for Tomkins, in reference to these two groups of affects, there are two goals: the first is the general goal of seeking to minimize negative affect; and the second is the general goal of seeking to maximize positive affect. As a strong theory, paranoia concerns primarily negative affects, not positive ones. “The only sense in which [the paranoid] may strive for positive affect at all,” comments Tomkins, “is for the shield which it promises against humiliation.”142 For Sedgwick, because the goals of minimizing negative affect and maximizing positive affect are independent of each other, each can be associated with two different epistemologies—a point which she claims is supported by Proust and denied by Freud. Whereas Freud joins together the avoidance of pain and the seeking of pleasure under one rubric, the “pleasure principle,” Proust finds “jostling each other within me a whole host of truths concerning human passions and character and conduct”—and, insofar as “the perception of [them] caused me joy,” recognizes them as truths.143 Sedgwick’s account of the differential epistemology of paranoia as negative affect allows us to view the imperative to paranoia as an effort to minimize negative affect, rather than as an example of self-delusion (following, for example, Freud) or epistemological weakness (that is, regarding as unfounded belief). The fifth and final general claim about paranoia is that it places a great amount of trust or faith in exposure. This claim is directly linked by Sedgwick to the hermeneutics of suspicion of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, who each shared a form of trust or faith in (following Ricoeur’s phrasing) “procedures of demystification.”144 Sedgwick also finds a similar paranoid faith in exposure in universalist liberal humanism, the New Historicism, and Butler’s Gender Trouble.145 In fact, for her,

137

Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 131; Tomkins cited by Sedgwick. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 131; Tomkins cited by Sedgwick. 139 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 134. 140 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 134. 141 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 136. 142 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 136; Tomkins cited by Sedgwick. 143 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 137; Proust cited by Sedgwick. 144 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 139; Ricoeur cited by Sedgwick 139. 145 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 139–40. 138

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“paranoid thinking,” with its concomitant faith in exposure, “has become [normative] at every point in the political spectrum,” and is even the “structure” of popular cynicism.146 Sedgwick contends that understanding paranoia as affect-oriented (rather than drive-oriented, like Freud) makes “the inscription of queer thought with the topic of paranoia [possibly] less necessary, less definitional, less completely constitutive than earlier writing on it, very much including my own, has assumed” it to be.147 It will also, comments Sedgwick, “leave us in a vastly better position to do justice to a wealth of characteristic, culturally central practices, many of which can well be called reparative, that emerge from queer experience but become invisible or illegible under a paranoid optic.”148 In sum, reparative reading is paranoid reading that utilizes her affectoriented notion of paranoia. Sedgwick contends that her reparative reading will be less thesisdriven and less angst-ridden than the critique normally associated with the hermeneutics of suspicion. Reparative reading would seek to repair the damage of homophobia and other forms of prejudice and violence, rather than simply revealing allegedly new and ever more insidious forms of abuse in rather unlikely places.

7.5 TRANS* THEORY In “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity” (1994), Judith Halberstam declared “There are no transsexuals. We are all transsexuals.”149 For her, the transsexual body “threatens the binarism of homo/hetero sexuality by performing and fictionalizing gender.”150 However, “fictionalizing gender” means that we must “learn how to read it.”151 “In order to find our way into a posttransexual era,” continues Halberstam, “we must educate ourselves as readers of gender fiction, we must learn to take pleasure in gender and how to become an audience for the multiple performances of gender we witness every day.”152 Contrary to the transsexual era, wherein transsexuals are constituted as a genre, the posttransexual era for her is one that demands that “we examine the strangeness of all gendered bodies, not only transsexualized ones and that we rewrite the cultural fiction that divides a sex from a transsex, a gender from a transgender.”153 “All gender should be transgender,” writes Halberstam, “all desire is transgendered, movement is all.”154 In Female Masculinity (1998), Halberstam later commented that the refrain “There are no transsexuals. We are all transsexuals” was used “to point to the inadequacy” of the category transsexual “in an age of profound gender trouble.”155 The “age of profound gender trouble” is one that was theoretically shaped by Butler’s position that gender reality is performative, and for the most part not a set of natural or essential traits. Halberstam then qualifies the meaning of this refrain: 146

Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 143. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 146. 148 Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 147. 149 Judith Halberstam, “F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity,” in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 226. 150 Halberstam, “F2M,” 225–6. 151 Halberstam, “F2M,” 226. 152 Halberstam, “F2M,” 226. 153 Halberstam, “F2M,” 226. 154 Halberstam, “F2M,” 226. 155 Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, [1998] 2018), 153. 147

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I recognize, of course, the real and particular history of the transsexual and of transsexual surgery, hormone treatment, and transsexual rights discourse. I also recognize that there are huge and important differences between genetic females who specifically identify and genetic females who feel comfortable with female masculinity. There are real and physical difference between femaleborn men who take hormones, have surgery, and live as men and female-born butches who live some version of gender ambiguity. But there are also many situations in which those differences are less clear than one might expect, and there are many butches who pass as men and many transsexuals who present as gender ambiguous and many bodies that cannot be classified by the options transsexual and butch. We are not all transsexual, I admit, but many bodies are gender strange to some degree or another, and it is time to complicate on the one hand transsexual models that assign gender deviance only to transsexual bodies and gender normativity to all other bodies, and on the other hand the hetero-normative models that see transsexuality as the solution to gender deviance and homosexuality as a pathological perversion.156 Thus, for Halberstam, the topic of female masculinity provides an opportunity “to explore a queer subject position that can successfully challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity.”157 “Female masculinity is a particularly fruitful sight of investigation,” continues Halberstam, “because it has been vilified by heterosexist and feminist/womanist programs alike.”158 In Female Masculinity, Halberstam aims to “produce a model of female masculinity that remarks on its multiple forms but also calls for new and self-conscious affirmations of different gender taxonomies.”159 The methodology Halberstam utilizes to approach female masculinity is described as a “queer methodology” because it “attempts to remain supple enough to respond to various locations of information on female masculinity and betrays a certain disloyalty to conventional disciplinary models.”160 As such, Halberstam’s queer methodology is an interdisciplinary “combination of textual criticism, ethnography, historical survey, archival research, and the production of taxonomies.”161 It is utilized in Female Masculinity, writes Halberstam, in an attempt to make my own female masculinity plausible, credible, and real. For a large part of my life, I have been stigmatized by a masculinity that marked me as ambiguous and illegible. Like many other tomboys, I was mistaken for a boy throughout my childhood, and like many other tomboy adolescents, I was forced into some semblance of femininity for my teenage years.162 For Halberstam, then, queer theory, particularly as it is informed by the work of Butler on performativity, is put into open dialogue with transgender/transsexual theory. It is a dialogue that will produce “new and self-conscious affirmations of different gender taxonomies,” including ones that will make Halberstam’s own “female masculinity plausible, credible, and real.” Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 153–4. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 9. 158 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 9. 159 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 9. 160 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 10. 161 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 10. 162 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 19. 156 157

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But, as Viviane Namaste points out in Invisible Lives (2000), associating transgender/transsexual theory with queer theory is wrongheaded. According to Namaste, the “absolute neglect of everyday life for transgender people” means “queer theory as it is currently practiced needs to be rejected for both theoretical and political reasons.”163 And, by queer theory, Namaste includes the work of Butler, who she also criticizes for ignoring the ways in which the queer community has often itself oppressed gender nonconformists: “Critics in queer theory write page after page on the inherent liberation of transgressing normative sex/gender codes, but they have nothing to say about the precarious position of the transsexual woman who is battered and who is unable to access a woman’s shelter because she was not born a biological woman.”164 Namaste argues that “there is not one large ‘transgendered community,’ but rather several small networks of transsexual and transgendered people, as well as many TS/TG people unaffiliated with other individuals like them.”165 She also reminds us that when considering transsexual and transgendered people, we also need to consider “the lives of prostitutes, immigrants, and the working poor.”166 Finally, regarding Halberstam’s framework for transgender/transsexual theory, Namaste argues that it “does not respect the diverse ways transsexual and transgendered people make sense of themselves.”167 For example, it “does not respect the identities and lives of heterosexual FTMs [female to male], assuming that one cannot be politically progressive and heterosexual, and that transsexuals need lesbian and gay communities to advance their collective situation.”168 In Trans* (2018), Jack Halberstam argues that the objections to Butler’s work by Namaste and other transsexual theorists such as Jay Prosser, Henry Rubin, and Stephen Wittle “have arisen from a recommitment to essentialism with transsexual theory.”169 For Halberstam, these and other essentialists “have read the emphasis in post-structuralist gender theories on performativity as a way of denying the need for some trans* people to undergo sex reassignment surgeries.”170 Halberstam claims that for Prosser in Second Skins (1998) the transsexual body “vanishes within ever more abstract theories of gender, sexuality, and desire.”171 “Queer’s alignment of itself with transgender performativity represents queer’s sense of its own ‘higher purpose,’ ” writes Prosser, “in fact there are transgendered trajectories, in particular transsexual trajectories, that aspire to that which this scheme [viz., Butler’s] devalues.”172 “Namely,” he continues, “there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be nonperformative, to be constative, quite simply, to be.”173 But, despite being the object of critique by transsexual and transgender theorists, Butler’s theory of gender performativity has, according to Halberstam, “actually furnished trans* theorists with the

Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9. 164 Namaste, Invisible Lives, 9–10. 165 Namaste, Invisible Lives, 266–7. 166 Namaste, Invisible Lives, 270. 167 Namaste, Invisible Lives, 64. 168 Namaste, Invisible Lives, 64. 169 Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 120. 170 Halberstam, Trans*, 120. 171 Halberstam, Trans*, 120. 172 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 32. 173 Prosser, Second Skins, 32. 163

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theoretical framings necessary to push back on essentialist accounts of normative identities, on the one hand, and the fetishizing gaze at transgender bodies, on the other.”174 Nevertheless, Halberstam calls for contemporary trans* theory to “reset the terms of these debates: rather than remaining invested in an identitarian set of conflicts that turn on small differences and individual hurts, let us rather wage battle against the violent imposition of economic disparity and forcefully oppose a renewed and open investment in white supremacy and American imperial ambition transacted through the channels of globalization.”175 Ultimately, for Halberstam, the term trans* “puts pressure on all modes of gendered embodiment and refuses to choose between the identitarian and the contingent forms of trans identity.”176 “It is not a matter of whose gender is variable and whose is fixed,” writes Halberstam.177 “With the ghosts of [David] Bowie and Prince as our guides, we will go where trans* takes us, looking not for trans people (or people who have legally changed their sex) but for a politics of transitivity.”178 For Halberstam, the asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the authors of their own categorizations.179 For Halberstam, trans* bodies are “fragmented, unfinished, broken-beyond-repair forms” that “remind all of us that the body is always under construction.”180 These bodies “represent the art of becoming, the necessity of imagining, and the fleshy insistence of transitivity.”181 In sum, trans* theory for Halberstam is at odds with “the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed into concise definitions, sure medical pronouncements, and fierce exclusions.”182 One might surmise, then, that the opposite of trans* theory is trans theory, the one without the asterisk, a form of theory that chooses between identitarianism and the contingent forms of trans identity.

Halberstam, Trans*, 122. Halberstam, Trans*, 126. 176 Halberstam, Trans*, xiii. 177 Halberstam, Trans*, xiii. 178 Halberstam, Trans*, xiii. 179 Halberstam, Trans*, 4. 180 Halberstam, Trans*, 135. 181 Halberstam, Trans*, 136. 182 Halberstam, Trans*, 5. 174 175

CHAPTER EIGHT

Race and Justice 8.0 INTRODUCTION Race and racism entered the field of literary and cultural theory half a century ago. Prior to the 1970s, race was regarded as a natural category that was rarely spoken of in literary studies. To establish this point, consider that it was only in 1985 that Henry Louis Gates Jr. asked the question, “What importance does ‘race’ have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory?”1 He continues, If we attempt to answer this question by examining the history of Western literature and its criticism, our initial response would probably be “nothing” or, at the very least, “nothing explicitly.” Indeed, until the past decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in the history of criticism, race has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way.2 As Gates notes, “the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition have more been defined as a more or less closed set of works that somehow speak to, or respond to, ‘the human condition’ and to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision.”3 One of the masters of tracking these formal patterns of repetition and revision in the Western canon was Harold Bloom, who steadfastly refused to bring in considerations of race (as well as class, gender, and sexuality). Bloom’s work here in defense of the literary tradition often put him at odds with other critics like Gates who sought to diversify the canon along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. But the canon wars did more than just uncritically bring race, class, gender, and sexuality into the study of literature and culture. They also provided new anti-essentialist conceptions of these identity categories. Gates, for example, argues that race is not a natural and fixed category. Rather, race is an arbitrary linguistic category, and racism is the effort to make this arbitrary category a natural or essential one. “Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which—more often than not— also have fundamentally opposed economic interests,”4 argues Gates. “Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application.”5

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes” (1985), in The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, ed. Abby Wolf (New York: Basic Civitas, 2012), 213. 2 Gates, “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes,” 213. 3 Gates, “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes,” 213. 4 Gates, “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes,” 216. 5 Gates, “Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes,” 216. 1

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But there is of course another sense of racism that is different from the one Gates proposes. It posits racism as the inability or refusal to recognize the rights, needs, dignity, or value of people of particular races or geographical origins. This sense of racism has been closely connected with contemporary work in literary and cultural studies on human rights (8.3), or, what is sometimes also called natural rights. These rights are entitlements that belong to each person by nature or by virtue of being human regardless of race or geographical origin. Critical work in this area often provides a critique of Western conceptions of human rights, which it often views as flawed in various ways including on racial grounds. Work on human rights also shows how literary and cultural works can offer an important window to the perspectives of people whose lives are radically different from our own. In Poetic Justice (1995), for example, Martha Nussbaum argues that “literary works typically invite readers to put themselves in the place of people of many different kinds and to take on their experiences.”6 “Literary understanding,” writes Nussbaum, “promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of stereotypes that support group hatred.”7 For Nussbaum, unless we are capable of “entering imaginatively into the lives of distant others and to have emotions related to that participation,”8 we will fail to attain any real sense of impartial respect for human rights and dignity—and thereby end racism and other forms of discrimination and oppression. While theoretical justifications of racism can be traced back to at least the fifteenth century, it was the race pseudo-science of the mid-nineteenth century that brought the term into prominence. In the 1850s, people in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, were proposing pseudoscientific theories that “race” is a determinate biological category that can be used to establish a hierarchy among different ethnic groups. Most of these defenses of dividing people into groups based on shared, fundamental, biologically inheritable characteristics were developed to justify preexisting prejudicial practices, actions, and beliefs. Culture that asserts irrelevant differences between races or exploits irrelevant differences between races is termed racist culture. In the US, at least until 1954, racial discrimination was neither illegal nor widely regarded as immoral. Job discrimination, housing discrimination, judicial discrimination, and educational discrimination were a normal part of the Native American, Asian American, Latino/a American, Chicano/a American, and African American experience at this time. Add to this list slavery, lynching, unjust imprisonment as well as assorted forms of public humiliation, and you get a fair sense of the range of racially discriminatory practices in the US. Moreover, it must be remembered that the enslavement of African Americans is just one part of a larger set of racially discriminatory practices that included the exploitation of Asian American labor by the US railroad and agricultural industries as well as the killing of Native Americans and their forced expulsion from their homelands. While it is true that our ancestors were not all of one mind on race, and that the face of racism in the US has changed, Brown v. Board of Education and the emergence of the American civil rights movement radically reshaped the character of racism in the US.

Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination in Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 5. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 92. 8 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, xvi. 6 7

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In 1954, the US Supreme Court reversed in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the long-standing “separate but equal” doctrine, and began the desegregation of schools. By the next year, the civil rights movement in the US was beginning to take shape. Events like Rosa Parks’ refusal to adhere to the policy of forcing Blacks to sit at the back of public buses on December 5, 1955 spurred on the formation of various civil rights groups. These groups, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Martin Luther King, Jr., began a non-violent campaign against racial discrimination. One of the positive results of the efforts of the various civil rights groups was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established a commission to investigate infringements of Black voting rights. Also, in the same year, federal troops were sent by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower to enforce a federal court order to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. In 1962, US President John F. Kennedy would send federal troops to enforce integration at the University of Mississippi. By the 1960s, many organizations had focused attention on how society unfairly treated Blacks in the US. One of the most visible displays of solidarity regarding civil rights was the march on Washington, DC in 1963 in support of Black civil rights. In protest after protest, many legal institutions and societal beliefs were shown to be racist, and to prevent Blacks from achieving the full benefits of US citizenship. For example, until the 1960s, many states had laws and social beliefs that required Black Americans to sit in the back of public buses, to use separate drinking fountains in public parks, and even made it illegal for them to go to the same public schools as white Americans. As a result of the efforts of thousands of Americans, both Black and white, many of these laws were changed. And in 1964, the US passed the Civil Rights Act to end all discrimination, including religious, racial, and sex discrimination. The civil rights movement had a profound impact on US society. One result of this movement was that women, who believed that they were also treated unfairly by society, began to organize themselves into groups. Through protests and organized campaigning, these women—many of whom were also supporters of the Black civil rights movement—brought about changes in US law and social life in the 1960s through the 1970s. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made it illegal to sexually harass women in the workplace, is at least in part due to the efforts of women who wished to be treated better by US law and society. The social and political goals of feminism are also due largely to the efforts of women in the 1960s through the 1970s to change what they thought were sexist laws and practices in the US. Consequently, many have argued that racial discrimination and sexual discrimination, or simply, racism and sexism, have some deep similarities. Intersectionality (8.4), a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, provides a framework for understanding how race combines not only with sex and gender, but also with age, ability, sexuality, and other issues to produce various forms of discrimination and oppression. Moreover, the law and literature movement (8.2) in literary and cultural theory is founded upon doubts regarding whether the law (in this case, civil rights law) has meaning and value outside of its various cultural, literary, and philosophical contexts—or whether it is only through these contexts that it takes on meaning and value. In addition, this movement is concerned with the law in the context of the mutability of all textual meaning after the linguistic turn. Ordinarily, distinctions between different types of racism have been drawn. Some of the more common distinctions are overt racism, covert racism, unintentional racism, institutional racism, and environmental racism. Overt and covert racism both occur when race is used as a sufficient ground for treating people differently. The most common instances of overt and covert racism are

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when people of other races are treated differently through unprovoked violence, racial slurs, and unequal treatment. When other people of other races are openly met with this behavior, the racism is termed overt racism. Examples of overt racism would be the speech and action of members of groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and the neo-Nazis. These groups openly state their hatred for particular races of people, and center their actions on their overtly stated racist beliefs. Nevertheless, overt racism is probably not the most common form of racism in the US. Covert racism is much more common. Covert racists seldom if ever openly state their hatred for people of other races. The reason why many people become covert racists is that overt racism is not socially accepted. Some people argue that overt racism is much less dangerous than covert racism. We know what the overt racist believes because he tells us as much, and therefore, we are free to openly question and challenge his beliefs. Covert racism, on the other hand, is much less easy to identify because it is not openly stated. Others argue that overt racism is much more dangerous than covert racism. Overt racism challenges the moral opinion of the public majority that racism and racist comments and actions are wrong, whereas covert racism tacitly acknowledges and respects the belief that racist comments and actions are wrong by not openly showing their ill will toward other races. Unintentional racism occurs when an action, practice, or belief has the effect of either exploiting irrelevant differences between the races or of asserting irrelevant differences between the races. Whereas overt and covert racism are characterized by the motives and intentions of the racist, unintentional racism is defined by the harmful consequences of the speech and actions of these parties. Many times, unintentional racists do not intend to cause harm on racial grounds. Nevertheless, the consequence of their speech and/or action is regarded by others as a form of racism. An example of unintentional racism is a police officer pulling over a Black motorist driving in a predominantly white neighborhood even if the driver has not committed any moving violations. This action is viewed by many as racist because it would not have occurred had the person in question been white. Many times, the cause of racism can be linked to generalizations and stereotypes about people of varying racial backgrounds. Most of the time these generalizations and stereotypes are unsubstantiated and need to be changed. The problem is that many times these unsubstantiated assumptions and stereotypes are a basic part of our social, political, and economic institutions. Thus, changing these beliefs entails altering institutions that form the basis of our society, which can be very difficult. Racism of this kind is called institutional racism (or structural racism). It can be further classified as either overt, covert, or unintentional. For example, segregated public schools are an example of overt institutional racism; neighborhoods with highways built to divide white from non-white populations is an example of covert institutional racism; and educational testing with questions which white students have a better chance of answering correctly than non-white students is an example of unintentional institutional racism. Finally, environmental racism refers to the connections between race, poverty, and the environment. We know, for example, that people of color have been the worst victim of environmental pollution for a long time. A number of studies have concluded that communities of color are where most of the places of poison are located in the US. One study, for example, concluded that communities with the greatest number of commercial hazardous waste facilities had the highest composition of ethnic residents. In “Racisms” (1990), Kwame Anthony Appiah aims to clarify these ordinary ways of thinking about race and racism noted above and to point out some of their presuppositions. Appiah claims

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that there are “at least three distinct doctrines that might be held to express the theoretical content of what we call ‘racism.’ ”9 The first, racialism, is the proposition that “there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race.”10 The second, extrinsic racism, is the proposition that races are morally significant because they are “contingently correlated with morally relevant properties.”11 The third, intrinsic racism, is the proposition that races are morally significant because “they are intrinsically morally significant.”12 For Appiah, racial prejudice is a tendency to assent to false propositions about races and “to do so even in the face of evidence and argument that should appropriately lead to giving those propositions up.”13 Appiah believes that racialism is false. However, racialism, as he argues in In My Father’s House (1992), has worked to shape the modern idea of literature. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this false theory of race shaped “our modern understanding of literature—indeed of most symbolic culture—in fundamental ways, and this despite the fact that many of these assumptions have been officially discarded.”14 For Appiah, race, nationality, and literature are interconnected with each other in European and American thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such that “on the one hand, [there is] race and nationality, and on the other, nationality and literature.”15 “In short,” comments Appiah, “the nation is the key middle term in understanding the relations between the concept of race and the idea of literature.”16 Subaltern studies (8.5) is a general area of literary and cultural theory that is concerned with the members of subordinated national populations. Subaltern literally means “of lower rank” and includes Blacks, the working class, the colonized, women, and others. Though often associated with British colonialism and the economics and politics of postcolonialism (10.1), in general subaltern studies is concerned with changing the narratives that determine the identity, subjectivity, and speech of the subaltern. It combines work from Marxism, deconstruction, semiotics, and feminism to understand and alter the consciousness and culture of the subaltern. Work in this area has been heavily shaped by both the contributions of Gramsci and Gayatri Spivak (10.1). Finally, critical race theory (8.1) takes up the relationship among race, racism, and power. As Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic point out, critical race theory “considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious.”17 One of the things that critical race theory shows us is how race works as a

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racisms,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 4. 10 Appiah, “Racisms,” 4–5. 11 Appiah, “Racisms,” 15. 12 Appiah, “Racisms,” 15. 13 Appiah, “Racisms,” 15. 14 Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 47. 15 Appiah, In My Father’s House, 48. 16 Appiah, In My Father’s House, 48. 17 Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 3rd edition (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 3. 9

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category of both inclusion and exclusion within modern institutions. It also warns of the dangers of organizing political agency through race: namely, that in an effort to overcome the norms of racial regulation, political agency through race runs the risk of succumbing to the very norms it seeks to overcome. Whereas issues of race and justice were largely absent from literary and cultural theory fifty years ago, today many different theoretical roads take up these issues. As with the concepts of sex and gender, race is widely viewed as a socially-constructed category—or, at the very least, an antiessentialist one. Critical race theory (8.1), the law and literature movement (8.2), intersectionality (8.3), human rights (8.4), and subaltern studies (8.5) each bring further understanding to the functions, meaning, and status of race and racism in contemporary literary and cultural theory. But, of course, they are not the only word or even the last ones in this book. Looking ahead, postcolonial theory (10.1), affect studies (13.0) and Holocaust studies (13.5) will offer key theoretical interventions on this general topic, but a case might be made for other areas as well.

8.1 CRITICAL RACE THEORY After the advances of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there was a feeling among some activists, lawyers, and legal scholars that the movement had stalled in the 1970s. Some were even arguing that civil rights were regressing from the advancements that had been made. In an effort to address the civil rights stasis, if not regression, critical race theory took root to work out new theories and strategies to confront continuing forms of racism. Early theorists included Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, who in 1989 convened with other activists, lawyers, and legal scholars the first workshop on critical race theory. Though developed in the US, critical race theory has spread to many other countries, including Australia, Brazil, India, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK. Critical race theory addresses the relationship between race, racism, and power by drawing upon a number of different strands in critical theory including Marxism, poststructuralism, biopolitics (9.0), and second-wave feminism. Key thinkers here include Derrida, Gramsci, and Michel Foucault (9.1). It also draws upon work by the Black Power and Chicano movements, where figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, César Chávez, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sojourner Truth were all instrumental to the direction of these movements. Finally, critical race theory builds upon some of the work in critical legal studies, particularly their notion of legal indeterminacy, the idea that some legal cases can have more than one correct outcome. According to critical legal studies, by emphasizing one line of authority rather than another or by interpreting the facts in a different way than one’s legal opponent, most cases can be decided in differing ways.18 Overall, there are six general propositions that most critical race theorists agree on: (1) Racism is Ordinary, not an Irregularity—the fact that racism is regarded as ordinary behavior makes racism difficult to address and end. It also means that conceptions of equality that are color-blind only address the most egregious forms of racial discrimination such as mortgage redlining, that is, the policy where mortgage companies do not do business in areas with heavy minority populations. 18

Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 5.

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(2) Racism concerns Material Determinism—because racism advances the material interests of white elites and the psychic interests of working-class whites, and because these groups constitute a large segment of the population, there is little incentive for white elites and the white working class to end racism. Critical race theorists call this phenomenon interest convergence or material determinism. As an illustration of this, Derrick Bell argues that Brown v. Board of Education may have resulted less from a desire to help Blacks than to advance the interest of the white elite.19 (3) Race is Socially Constructed—because critical race theory contends that race is a sociocultural construct that influences identity formation, it denies that individuals possess an objective, inherent, and fixed racial identity that is both universal and transhistorical. Race is neither a biological reality nor a genetic reality, but rather a category that is invented, manipulated, and retired by culture and society based on convenience. As such, one of the aims of critical race theory is to debunk as pseudo-science biological-essentialist research that establishes permanent racial characteristics and profiles. (4) Critical Race Theory is concerned with Differential Racialization—that is, the ways in which the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times in responses to various social, political, and economic needs. As an illustration of this, consider that in one age, Middle Eastern people are exotic—and fetishized figures, whereas in another, they are regarded as fanatical, religiously-crazed terrorists.20 The consequences of differential racialization from one age to another are of particular interest to critical race theorists. (5) Critical Race Theory is Anti-essentialist and Intersectional—no person has a single, fixed, unitary, and essential identity. Rather, each person has many different and potentially conflicting identities, loyalties, and allegiances relating to their gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation, and other factors. (6) Voices-of-Color have Knowledge that Whites are Unlikely to Know—because of their different experiences with racism, writers of color may be able to communicate to their white counterparts things about discrimination and oppression that they may not know. As such, the legal storytelling movement within critical race theory encourages Black, Native American, Asian, and Latino writers to recount their experiences with racism and the legal system.21 Nonetheless, this voices-of-color proposition has an uneasy relationship with the anti-essentialism of critical race theory in the same way that queer theory has an uneasy relationship with the essentialism and platitudes often found in lesbian feminism. The notion of authentic voices-of-color appears to assume an essential identity underlying these voices—a notion that conflicts with the anti-identitarianism of critical race theory, that is, the notion that regards race as a socio-cultural construction with no fixed or essential identity.

See Derrick Bell, Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93.3 (1980): 518–33. 20 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 10. 21 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 8–11. 19

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But the notion that some critical race theorists are less committed to anti-essentialism than others speaks to some of the other divisions within the field. One of the larger ones is between the idealist and the materialist strands of critical race theory. Critical race theory idealists hold that discrimination and racism are constituted through attitudes, thoughts, and discourse. Also called discourse analysts, they focus on the social construction of race and racism by means of various categories and ideas.22 Critical race theory materialists (or economic determinists), however, contend that status and privilege are often allocated in society through racism.23 They focus on the “real” world as opposed to the world of discourse, and are concerned with issues such as immigration, divisions of wealth, globalization, the justice system, and nativism.24 Whereas critical race theory idealists work to eradicate racism by altering the discourse surrounding it, critical race theory materialists strive to end racism by altering the racial hierarchies that determine who tangibly benefits from racism through access to the best education, employment, and social networks.25 Moreover, while earlier critical race theorists tended to be materialists, later ones have preferred to combine idealist and materialist approaches to critical race theory. This combination of idealist and materialist versions of critical race theory is regarded as structural determinism. To explain how structural determinism operates in critical race theory, Delgado and Stefancic ask us to recall one of the most distinctive theses of the linguistic turn via Saussure: that different languages produce different mappings of the real. “Everyone has heard the story about Eskimo languages,” write Delgado and Stefancic, “some of which supposedly contain many words for different kinds of snow.”26 Now imagine, they continue, the opposite predicament—a society that has only one word (say, “racism”) for a phenomenon that is much more complex than that, for example, [there is] biological racism; intentional racism; unconscious racism; microagressions; nativism; institutional racism; racism tinged with homophobia or sexism; racism that takes the form of indifference, coldness, or implicit associations; and white privilege, reserving favors, smiles, kindness, the best stories, one’s most charming side, and invitations to real intimacy for one’s own kind or class.27 For Delgado and Stefancic, structural determinism is a theory that demonstrates the ways in which our system is not equipped to redress certain types of wrongs because its discourse does not account for them. Structural determinism exhibits itself in a number of ways in critical race theory, including the dilemma of law reform—it is difficult to think about something if one does not have a name for it in legal research, and it is difficult to name it until one’s community has identified it and begun to talk about it; the empathic fallacy—the mistaken belief that sweeping social reform can be accomplished through speech and incremental victories within the system; serving two masters— situations where the client and their community do not want the same remedy that their lawyer

Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 140. Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 21. 24 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 140. 25 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 21. 26 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 31. 27 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 31. 22 23

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wants; and race remedies law as homeostatic device—the notion that racial progress occurs at just the right slow pace so as to risk neither impatience and destabilization among minority groups nor jeopardizing the interests of elite groups. Finally, there are a number of strategies utilized by critical race theorists to redress the wrongs of society. First, they produce revisionist interpretations of history, that is, re-examine the historical record and replace interpretations of events that are comforting to the majority with ones that better exemplify the experiences of minorities;28 second, they offer a critique of liberalism, namely, a critique of the belief that color-blindness, neutral constitutional principles, and equality (equal treatment for all persons) are the best way to redress the wrongs of society; and third, they engage in storytelling and narrative analysis, that is, they build on accounts of everyday experiences of how people see race in an effort to come to a deeper understanding of it. Here, critical race theorists draw upon narratology as well as Lyotard’s concept of the differend in an effort to understand how and why narratives are valued by marginalized persons.29 In this regard, the differend is useful to critical race theory in situations where concepts, such as privilege and justice, come to have conflicting meanings among different groups.30 By questioning everything from legal reasoning and equality theory to Enlightenment rationality and the neutral principles of constitutional law, critical race theory offers a rigorous critique of the foundations of liberal society.31 It concerns the treatment and experience of all minority groups, including Asians, Native Americans, Blacks, Chicanos, and Latinos. Nevertheless, the question has been raised as to what extent critical race theory is founded upon a Black–white binary framework that establishes the treatment of African Americans as the standard for comparison regarding redress for the grievances of the extended BIPOC (which stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community.32 In addition, there is also a subarea of critical race theory known as critical white studies specifically devoted to the “study of the white race”33 and the socio-cultural construction of whiteness. One of its topics is how particular groups come not to be and then be affiliated with whiteness. As an example, in the United States, Irish-, Jewish-, and Italian Americans were once considered nonwhite, but over time came to be considered white through various means including the accumulation of wealth, and affiliation with labor unions and the Democratic Party.34

8.2 LAW AND LITERATURE “I am told at times by friends that a judicial opinion has no business in literature,” writes Benjamin Cardozo. He continues in, “Law and Literature” (1925), The idol must be ugly, or he may be taken for a common man. The deliverance that is to be accepted without demur or hesitation must have a certain high austerity which frowns at winning

Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 25. Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 51. 30 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 51. 31 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 3. 32 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 75. 33 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 85. 34 Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, 88–9. 28 29

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graces. I fancy that not a little of this criticism is founded in misconception of the true significance of literature, or, more accurately perhaps, of literary style.35 For Cardoza, who served on the US Supreme Court from 1932 until his death in 1938, literary style is important for lawyers and judges. “Form is not something added to substance as a mere protuberant adornment,”36 said Cardozo. Rather, form and content are “fused into a unity.” To make this point, which was also one advocated by the New Critics, Cardozo quotes Henry James: “Form alone takes, and holds and preserves substance, saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding.”37 Nevertheless, it would be nearly a half a century after Cardozo’s reflections on the significance of literary style on legal writing that the law and literature movement would begin to take shape— that is, roughly at the same time that critical race theory was in its early stages of development. While there were plenty of observations about the interrelations between literature and the law prior to the 1970s, it would be during this time period that a larger movement regarding law and literature developed. And by many accounts, James Boyd White is credited as the founder of it. In The Legal Imagination (1973), White argues that the study of literature can be of benefit to those who study and practice law. For White, literature offers insight to those in the legal profession because literature offers an understanding of the language (or languages) that constitute individuals, communities, and cultures. Literature also provides insight into different forms of expression, which can then be drawn from to bolster legal arguments. These differing forms of expression offer a range of rhetorical and narrative strategies that can then be put into the service of legal argumentation. White believes that literature provides its readers with a deeper sense of the nature of humanity. It teaches us to value each person as bearers of individual worth. This is an ethical and cultural lesson regarding humanity that often gets lost through stereotyping and treating people only as means to an end—rather than as a means in themselves. Ultimately, drawing literature to bear on law allows us to view the law as “an institution that is founded on the principle of recognizing others, in large part by giving them a chance to tell their stories and have them heard.”38 This storytelling dimension of law and literature offered by White is related to the one advanced in critical race theory, albeit with at least one crucial difference: whereas White views literature as providing insight into our humanity with respect to the law, the critical in critical race theory stresses our inhumanity with regard to race and other intersectional topics with respect to the law. White believes that literature can provide a strong dose of humanity to judges and lawyers willing to take the time to study it. Richard Posner, however, disagrees with this idea. In Law and Literature (1988), Posner argues that scholars of law and literature “need to give up on efforts to humanize the practice of law by immersing judges, lawyers, and law students in literary works, unrelated to law, selected for ideological reasons and viewed through the prism of moralistic literary criticism.”39 One of the major differences between White’s and Posner’s approaches to law and literature is that one of them believes in the general value of studying literature for legal practitioners

Benjamin Cardozo, “Law and Literature,” Yale Review (July 1925): 490. Cardozo, “Law and Literature,” 490. 37 Cardozo, “Law and Literature,” 491; James cited by Cardozo. 38 James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination (1973) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), xiv. 39 Richard Posner, Law and Literature, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 550. 35 36

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(White), and the other believes that the study of literature by lawyers, judges, and law students should focus on literature about lawyers, judges, and law students (Posner). “What literary texts that have law for a theme can do for legal teaching and scholarship,” writes Posner, “is to illuminate issues of jurisprudence or legal process.”40 This is especially true for jurisprudence, that is, the theory or philosophy of law, where Posner claims that a course on this topic “in college or law school could profitably substitute works of great literature for the dusty tomes of legal philosophy.”41 As an example, Posner comments that the film My Cousin Vinny (1992; dir. Jonathan Lynn) “can be mined for helpful hints on how to try a case”42 and “is particularly rich in practice tips” such as “how a criminal defendant’s lawyer must stand his ground against a hostile judge.”43 Regardless of whether this film qualifies as a work of “great literature,” Posner’s point is that the literature (and film) must be about the law in particular—and not just about humanity in general as White contends. The differences between White’s approach and Posner’s reveals two broad directions in the law and literature movement: law as literature, wherein the law is studied in the same way that we would study a work of literature; and law in literature, wherein literature is studied for its insights into the law. The first area, law as literature, can potentially bring just about any approach in the literary and cultural theory inventory to the study of law. The example above from Cardozo, brought a New Critical approach to the relationship between form and content, whereas White focuses on the rhetoric and poetics of the law. But much more progressive approaches are possible to the interdisciplinary study of law as literature, including the perspective offered by critical race theory, one which it tempered by work in Marxism, poststructuralism, biopolitics, second-wave feminism, and the Black Power and Chicano movements. The second direction, law in literature, is one where it has long been common to see canonical authors such as Dickens, Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Herman Melville discussed. However, the range of works now considered spans the history of literature across the globe. It also includes, as Posner’s comment indicates, film as well. In short, law in literature is a very large field of study, for as J. Hillis Miller writes, “scarcely a single novel exists that does not in some way dramatize details about law in a specific country at a specific time.”44 Still, while earlier work in law and literature tended to focus on law in literature, since the early 1970s, law as literature has grown considerably in conjunction with the development of new approaches to literary and cultural theory. Also, in addition to the law as literature and law in literature approaches, there is simply the law of literature approach. This approach examines law that directly impacts literature such as censorship and copyright. Moreover, Posner’s position that scholars of law and literature need to both “give up on efforts to humanize the practice of law” and to view it “through the prism of moralistic literary criticism” raises another potential point of division: the role of morality in bringing law and literature to bear on each other. Martha Nussbaum, for example, argues in Poetic Justice (1995) that the literary imagination provides “a more complex vision of human life.”45 Literature makes it possible to enter

Posner, Law and Literature, 546. Posner, Law and Literature, 546. 42 Posner, Law and Literature, 52. 43 Posner, Law and Literature, 446. 44 J. Hillis Miller, “Law,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 549. 45 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, xv. 40 41

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imaginatively into the lives of others, and that an emotional understanding of others’ lives is an important part of moral reasoning. Nussbaum puts storytelling and literature at the heart of moral philosophy. For her, reading literature ultimately strengthens our capacity to make good ethical judgments and to gain a “humanistic and multivalued conception of public rationality.”46 Through engagement with the literary understanding, contends Nussbaum, we come to better understand compassion, sympathy, and mercy. From her perspective, moralistic literary criticism leads not only to better lawyers, judges, and law students, but also to better people and a better world. Law and literature share a common impulse: “to produce order out of chaos, humanity out of brutality.”47 Hence, both law and literature “can function as peace-loving and peace-keeping.”48 Another ethical approach to law and literature is that of Richard Weisberg, who argues in Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (1992) and elsewhere that literature has the capacity to reveal the ways in which the law exhibits ressentiment, a key concept in Nietzsche’s ethics, that claims that the weak act out their resentment toward the strong. “Ressentiment arises,” comments Weisberg, “from a coexisting hatred and dependence on some individual or group. Its morality is essentially reactive, a bitterly creative response to the positive forms of life around it.”49 Like Cardozo, Weisberg believes that just as form cannot be separated from content in literature, the same holds with the law: that is, the way legal judgments are expressed cannot be separated from their content. Moreover, both literature and the law are ethical projects. However, because the law has lost its ethical direction, Weisberg argues for the combination of law and literature. He terms this combination poethics, which “endeavors nothing less than to fill the ethical void in which legal thought and practice now exist.”50 “Lawyer and writer stand together,” says Weisberg, “the former differing only in his coercive power, not in his technique or value system.”51 Broadly speaking, ethical strands in the law and literature movement such as those of Nussbaum and Weisberg are humanist ones. For comparison, they might be opposed to hermeneutic strands, that is, ones more concerned with issues of literary and legal interpretation.

8.3 HUMAN RIGHTS Every day, millions of people are denied what many consider to be their human rights. Some are imprisoned without being charged with a crime. Others are charged but are not given fair trials. Many are tortured or detained because of their political beliefs. Leaders of religious groups are murdered, and their followers persecuted. Women are raped in acts of war. Children are forced to work in dangerous conditions for long hours at low wages. Entire races of people are driven from their homes and countries, some are executed. And while the news media may report on selected human rights violations, they are but a small percentage of the human rights atrocities committed worldwide.

Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, xv. Alison LaCroix, Jonathan Masur, Martha Nussbaum, and Laura Weinrib, “Introduction,” in Canons and Codes: Law, Literature, and America’s Wars, eds. Alison LaCroix, Jonathan Masur, Martha Nussbaum, and Laura Weinrib (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 2. 48 LaCroix, Masur, Nussbaum, and Weinrib, “Introduction,” 2. 49 Richard H. Weisberg, Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 20. 50 Richard Weisberg, Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 4. 51 Weisberg, Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature, x. 46 47

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Some argue that all human beings, regardless of their racial, sexual, economic, and cultural backgrounds are guaranteed certain freedoms or rights. These human rights are natural rights, that is to say, rights with which all of us are born. Thomas Hobbes, for example, said that every person has a right to life, and that no society can arbitrarily abridge that right; John Locke said that all humans have the right to life, property, and liberty; Thomas Jefferson said in the US Declaration of Independence that all humans have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On the other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that we give up our natural rights to act on impulse and instinct when we enter the state, and receive mere civil rights in return. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, it is the central document in modern day human rights policy. Human rights, for many, belong to us by virtue of the fact that we are human beings. As Jack Donnelly states it, “Human rights are literally the rights that one has simply because one is a human being.”52 Some human rights theorists argue that no one has the right to interfere with the exercise of our natural rights. This includes our government as well as our society and culture at large. People have the right to protect their human rights, and governments have the right to protect individuals’ human rights as well. Conversely, no individual and no government has the right to interfere with the human rights of others. In the US, for example, the Bill of Rights guarantees our human rights, and the court system enforces and sets the limits on human rights in order to resolve conflicts. Others argue that human rights depend on the time and place in which you live, and that universal human rights are not possible. Furthermore, many contend that the dominant discourses on universal rights are founded upon Western notions of rights to the exclusion of non-Western notions of rights. Others charge that the dominant discourse on universal rights excludes sexual rights, economic rights, and women’s rights, among others. There have been many calls for a transformation of the concept of universal human rights. There has also been much questioning as to the authority of Westerners to impose their own concept of universal human rights on the rest of humanity. The nature of human rights itself is a complex topic for both moral absolutists and cultural relativists. On the one hand, if one assumes a form of cultural relativism, it is entirely possible that the very idea of universal human rights is problematized. Cultural relativists argue from the claim that different societies or cultures have different moral principles to the conclusion that there are no universal or absolute moral principles. Consequently, for the cultural relativist, it is very difficult to clearly delineate human rights that cross all cultural boundaries and that do not interfere with indigenous cultural practices. For example, while some argue that a woman’s right to control her body in reproduction is a universal human right, others contend that it is not because it conflicts with particular religious or cultural practices. On the other hand, if one assumes a form of moral absolutism (or universalism), and develops a notion of human rights on the basis of moral absolutism, then one runs the risk of postulating universal human rights that are at odds with alternative perspectives on the nature of morality. For example, there is no reason to believe that a notion of human rights based on a Buddhist conception of morality would be the same as one based on a Western conception of morality. Moral absolutists argue that there are general moral principles that cross racial, sexual, economic, and cultural lines. These moral principles are absolute, and hold for all peoples at all times and in all situations.

Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 2nd edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 10.

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Slavery, for the moral absolutist, is as morally wrong today as it was in ancient Greece—and the argument that slavery was part of the social, economic, and political condition of nineteenthcentury America does not matter to them. Literary and cultural theory has expanded its interest in human rights over the past twenty years. One of the things that it has focused on are the inadequacies in the language and justifications for human rights. For example, what does it mean to say, as Donnelly does, that human rights are simply ones we have as a human being? For Donnelly, human rights do not have a foundation in anything other than our status as human beings.53 But if there is no authority such as the law of God or natural law upon which to found human rights, how do we know what these rights are? How do we define “human being”? How do we enforce these rights? How do we reach a consensus on them? Contemporary literary and cultural theory has much to offer in this area though it has altered and reconceptualized our approach to human rights. In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler, for example, argues that vulnerability is common to all forms of life including the human subject. Vulnerability is a factor in our embodiment as human beings—one that opens us to loss, injury, and the world. Vulnerability through injury makes us aware that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact.54 For Butler, our shared vulnerability and mutual interdependence on each other leads her to posit an alternative notion of human rights and political community, namely, one founded upon a recognition of our shared experience of bodily vulnerability: Not only is there always the possibility that a vulnerability will not be recognized and that it will be constituted as “unrecognizable,” but when a vulnerability is recognized, that recognition has the power to change the meaning and structure of the vulnerability itself. In this sense, if vulnerability is one precondition for humanization, and humanization takes place differently through variable forms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject.55 Butler notes that national acts of mourning initiate fear, hatred, and oppression. They also trigger increased militarism and censorship. This situation allows some lives to be treated as “unrecognizable” and not-grievable because they are regarded as less-than-human. Butler’s politics of vulnerability recognition offers a way out of these forms of fear, hatred, and oppression. It also offers an alternative to the moral absolutism and cultural relativism impasse regarding human rights.

Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 18. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), xii. 55 Butler, Precarious Life, 43. 53 54

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Butler’s approach to human rights favors the human subject as the locus of rights rather than the human being. This is also a shift from the essentialist approach to human rights favored by humanism (e.g., Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, and Rousseau), to the anti-essentialist one favored by antihumanism. By approaching human rights through the subject, literary and cultural theorists are able to historicize and denaturalize our approach to human rights. But taking a closer look at human rights as approached from within the essentialist and humanist traditions, particularly how they are instantiated in literature, one finds, as Joseph Slaughter argues in Human Rights, Inc. (2007), the site where culture-bound knowledge confronts its own limits and turns back on itself to produce the most concise and chiastic formulation of communally constitutive common sense: Human rights are the rights of humans, inalienability is inalienable, impresciptibility cannot be prescribed, a person is a person.56 For Slaughter, the tautology, human rights are the rights of humans, creates the very subject that it is intended to serve. Human rights law is a combination of positive law (or written law, wherein rights are granted by an authority such as the state), and natural law (wherein rights exist in nature, that is, outside of and before the formation of society and positive law). Moreover, for Slaughter, the subject of international human rights discourse is the same as the subject of the bildungsroman (novel of formation) genre of literature. He then shows how international human rights legal discourse and the bildungsroman are “mutually enabling fictions”57 about human existence. “Human rights law and the Bildungsroman,” argues Slaughter, are “consubstantial and mutually reinforcing, but their sociocultural and historical alliance is neither unproblematic nor uncomplicated.”58 “Both human rights and the novel,” he continues, “have been part of the engine and freight of Western colonialism and (neo)imperialism over the past two centuries.”59 Not only does Slaughter show how a genre of literature can become an agent of colonialism and imperialism, but because “person” means something other than “human” in the law (the term “person” came to replace “human” in legal discourse), and because the Bildungsroman is of the same substance (consubstantial) with human rights law, the subject of the bildungsroman is also something other than the human. “From the point of view of the law,” writes Slaughter, “ ‘person’ is a technical term designating a ‘right-and-duty bearing unit’; it has no necessary relation to the human being since it merely names something that has been endowed with the capacity to ‘enjoy . . . the protections of the law and of the forces of the law.’ ”60 Consequently, while the person is the way the law incorporates the human being into its discourse, person and human being are not necessarily consubstantial. As the work of Butler and Slaughter reveals, the topic of human rights as approached by literary and cultural theory raises a host of questions about the subject of human rights, trauma, the nationstate, colonialism, and imperialism. It is also a highly interdisciplinary topic drawing upon work

Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 78. 57 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 4. 58 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 4. 59 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 4. 60 Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 58. 56

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from legal studies, history, rhetoric, literature, philosophy, and other areas. Miller’s comment that “scarcely a single novel exists that does not in some way dramatize details about law in a specific country at a specific time” also applies to human rights, particularly as it concerns our vulnerabilities as human beings. This includes perspectives on those who have been silenced and marginalized. Literature, as many have shown, has the potential to deepen our understanding of human rights. But as Gayatri Spivak warns, one must not be lulled into fixing people into groups as “righters” and “receivers” of wrongs when addressing issues of human rights. For Spivak, the redressing work of Human Rights must be supplemented by an education that can continue to make unstable the presupposition that the reasonable righting of wrongs is inevitably the manifest destiny of groups—unevenly class-divided, embracing North and South—that remain posed to right them; and that, among the receiving groups, wrongs will inevitably proliferate with unsurprising regularity. Consequently, the groups that are the dispensers of human rights must realize that, just as the natural Rights of Man were contingent upon the historical French Revolution, and the Universal Declaration upon the historical events that led to the Second World War, so also is the current emergence of the human rights model as the global dominant, contingent upon the turbulence in the wake of the dissolution of imperial formations and global economic restructuring. The task of making visible the begged question grounding the political manipulation of a civil society forged on globally defined natural rights is just as urgent; and not simply by way of cultural relativism.61 In short, Spivak reminds us to take into account our own structural position as subjects when addressing human rights issues—as opposed to simply adopting a righter/receiver model. Finally, while human rights as indicated above are fraught with many social, political, and economic tensions and limitations including questions regarding their universality versus cultural relativity, for some we have no choice but to stand on their side. Perhaps Derrida expressed this point best in the wake of the 9/11 attacks: We must more than ever stand on the side of human rights. We need human rights. We are in need of them and they are in need, for there is always a lack, a shortfall, a falling short, an insufficiency; human rights are never sufficient.62 Two general explanations as to why there has been so much interest in the past twenty years in international human rights is the rise in personal storytelling and the failure of the postcolonial state. James Dawes, for example, claims in That the World May Know (2007) that “human rights work is, at its heart, a matter of storytelling”63—something that increased greatly with regard to human rights since the 1990s. But there is also the argument made by Samuel Moyn in The Last Utopia (2010), that international human rights arose out of the ashes of the failed political processes

Gayatri Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (2004): 530. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 132–3. 63 James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 394. 61 62

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of the postcolonial state (10.1). But there are others as well that might simply be reduced to Derrida’s axiom: We need human rights. And recent work on the interconnections between human rights and other areas of literary and cultural theory such as biopolitics (9.0), globalization (10.0), ecocriticism (11.0), and affect studies (13.0) only further confirms the deepening of our need for and interest in human rights as a key topic of contemporary critical concern.

8.4 INTERSECTIONALITY In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced intersectionality in her article, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” Inspired by Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851) and the Black lesbian feminism of the Combahee River Collective, Crenshaw showed how the intersection of racial and gender oppression renders invisible the experiences of Black women in US antidiscrimination law. Crenshaw along with Delgado, Regina Austin, Charles R. Lawrence, Patricia J. Williams, and others had helped launch critical race theory, and would now address intersectional issues in their work. Moreover, intersectional issues would also come to bear on human rights law. In addition, much public policy in the US, including differential funding for disaster relief, mass incarceration, migrant and refugee discrimination, reproductive rights for poor women, and voter suppression, would be shaped by a sense of intersectionality. Indeed, a mere decade after Crenshaw coined the term, it was being vigorously expanded, developed, and explored in fields and disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences including American studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, history, political science, sociology, and women’s studies. And two decades later, the term became a rallying cry for a wide range of activism including antiviolence initiatives, workers’ rights campaigns, and many other grassroots organizations from all over the globe. Among the many social movements who utilized the term was the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet in spite of the ubiquity and utilization of the term intersectionality in both theory and practice (praxis), there is little consensus among scholars as to how to describe and utilize it. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge offer the following general description of intersectionality: Intersectionality investigates how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life. As an analytic tool, intersectionality views categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age—among others—as interrelated and mutually shaping one another. Intersectionality is a way of understanding and explaining complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences.64 Note though that they do not put a range or limit on the intersectional categories to be utilized in intersectional understanding and explanation. Whereas Crenshaw coined the term in reference to the intersection of two categories (race and sex), Collins and Bilge’s depiction is consistent with the general practice of bringing to bear whatever intersecting categories are necessary to solve the problem at hand. “People generally,” write Collins and Bilge, “use intersectionality as an analytic tool to solve problems that they or others around them face.”65 In such general practice, there is no predetermined set of intersectional categories. Rather, they are set by the task at hand. 64 65

Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 2nd ed. (Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), 2. Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 2.

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Moreover, the flexibility of intersectionality is further evidenced by the fact that different scholars regard it in different ways: for some, intersectionality is a concept; for others, it is a perspective; for still others, it is a type of analysis. It is also variably regarded by scholars as a methodological approach, a research paradigm, and a measurable variable and type of data.66 In all of these scholarly uses, intersectionality complicates single-identity category understandings and explanations of matters at hand. Thus, when measured by the standards of intersectionality, raceonly, class-only, gender-only, sexuality-only, nation-only, ability-only, ethnicity-only, and age-only understandings and explanations of literature and culture are always inadequate, incomplete, and insufficient. According to Collins and Bilge, there are six core ideas within intersectionality: (1) Social Inequality—intersectionality contends that social inequality is rarely caused by a single factor such as race, class, or gender. One of its aims is to add layers of complexity to understandings of social inequality by examining it through the interactions among various categories of power. (2) Intersecting Power Relations—intersectionality maintains that intersecting power relations often operate in and are organized through social institutions. However, these intersecting power relations are often hidden or masked by ideology. Intersectionality calls for an examination of how these power relations specifically intersect, for example, in racism and sexism. It also calls for an understanding of how power relations are manifested across structural, disciplinary, cultural, and interpersonal domains of power. (3) Social Context—intersectionality emphasizes the importance of examining intersecting power relations from within their particular social context. These social contexts can be local, national, and global. (4) Relationality—intersectionality embraces a both/and approach to categories as opposed to an oppositional approach. In this way, its framework for understanding social inequality and power relations is built upon interconnections and relationships between categories as opposed to differences and oppositions. The relationality of intersectionality is in evidence in its preference for terms such as dialog, solidarity, coalition, conversation, transaction, and interaction. (5) Social Justice—intersectionality is committed to social justice. This commitment makes it a critical discourse as opposed to a merely descriptive or analytical one. As such, for those who believe that fairness, meritocracy, and democracy have been achieved on a local, national, and global scale, there is no social inequality for intersectionality to solve. However, because intersectional scholars, activists, and practitioners all identify various forms of social inequality, social justice is always a central aim. (6) Complexity—intersectional analysis is a complex mode of critical inquiry. The complexity of intersectional analysis derives from its multifaceted approach to problems and the increasing complex world to which it responds with a parallel degree of complexity. The complexity of critical intersectional analysis can be a source of frustration to scholars and activists.67 66 67

Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 244, n. 6. Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality, 32–5.

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Intersectionality regards the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, age, and other categories in a person not as constituting their fixed or essential identity (essentialism), but rather as components of a site where intersecting power relations are performed by individuals in differing social contexts (anti-essentialism). Identity for the intersectionalist is something one does through a performance, not something one has by nature. As such, it is more proper to speak of shifting identifications, rather than the identity of a person. In Familiar Stranger (2017), Stuart Hall describes the difference between identity and identifications: Identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a nevercompleted process of becoming—a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.68 Thus, intersectionality does not require individuals to prioritize categories of their identity, but rather asks them to regard them all as constituting their shifting identifications. In short, a Black lesbian feminist need not concern themselves with the question of whether they are first Black, lesbian, or a woman. Rather, for the intersectionalist, all three of these identity categories commingle as different individual identifications or subjectivities. Again, it should be noted that while intersectionality utilizes identity categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age, it is in no way committed to fixed identities (essentialism). Rather, the notion that intersectional identity is a shifting set of subjectivities positioned differently in different social contexts captures well its general anti-essentialistic temperament. Moreover, intersectionality offers less a grand theory of individual identity than an approach to explaining and understanding the particularities of intersectional identifications. In doing so, it effectively continuously breaks down larger groups identifiable by race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age into ever smaller ones. Nevertheless, as Crenshaw explains, “the intersectional experiences of women of color disenfranchised in prevailing conceptions of identity politics does not require that we give up attempts to organize as communities of color.”69 “Rather, intersectionality provides a basis for reconceptualizing race as a coalition between men and women of color,” continues Crenshaw, “or a coalition of straight and gay people of color.”70 Moreover, by Crenshaw’s logic, this process of intersectionally reconceptualizing race theoretically holds for the other categories of identity as well, such as sexuality, class, gender, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age. “Recognizing that identity politics takes place at the site where categories intersect,” writes Crenshaw, “thus seems more fruitful than challenging the possibility of talking about categories at all.”71 “Through an awareness

Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 16. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” (1991), in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 377. 70 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 377. 71 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 377. 68 69

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of intersectionality,” she concludes, “we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics.”72

8.5 SUBALTERN STUDIES In his Prison Notebooks, composed from 1929 to 1935 (and first published between 1948 and 1951), Antonio Gramsci writes about subaltern social groups and subaltern classes. The subaltern for him are the underclass of society that are subject to the hegemony of the ruling class. “The subaltern classes, by definition,” writes Gramsci, “are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a ‘State’: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States.”73 Gramsci uses the term subaltern to refer to the rural peasant classes or social groups, which in his case, were located in Italy. He is interested in the history of the subaltern and their identity, which he utilizes in his theories about class struggle. Gramsci was interested not only in the subordination and oppression of the working class, but also all of the other factions of society who were subjected to subordination and oppression. In this way, his work expanded the scope of Marxist politics. This type of history, inspired by Gramsci’s studies, came to be known as history from below. It is an approach to historical research wherein the state is replaced by social history as the focus of concern. This bottom-up approach to history focuses on people who have generally been ignored in historical studies. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is regarded as one of the influential early works of history from below, which by the 1970s was beginning to flourish. One begins to see at this time, for example, women’s histories as well as the return of the peasant to colonial history. In 1972, for example, The Peasant Studies Newsletter was launched, and a year later, The Journal of Peasant Studies was formed. Also in the 1970s, Eric Stokes published The Peasant and the Raj (1978) and A. R. Desai published Peasant Struggles in India (1979).74 In South Asia, there were many people working on the history of subaltern groups in the 1970s even though the term subaltern was not yet used to describe them. In the late 1970s, however, by the time the founders of what came to be known as subaltern studies started to meet in England, there had already been two decades of studies on insurgencies in, and histories from below of, colonial India. One of their common points of agreement was dissatisfaction with the state-centered Cambridge School of South Asian history.75 Together, these South Asian intellectuals launched Subaltern Studies, which published twelve edited volumes from 1982 to 2005. Among the editorial group were Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pandey, and Sumit Sarkar—each of whom was variously influenced by structuralism, semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, poststructuralism, and postcolonial theory (10.1).

72

Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 377. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 52. 74 David Ludden, “A Brief History of Subalternity,” in Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the Globalization of South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 5. 75 Ludden, “A Brief History of Subalternity,” 6. 73

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Within a few years of the establishment of Subaltern Studies, the phrase also came to be associated with a distinctive approach to historical research. Its adherents came to be known as subalterns or subalternists. One of their aims was to change the way the identity, speech, and subjectivity of the subaltern was cast in historical discourse. Their publication was a sign of the growth of historical interest in South Asian studies in the 1980s. However, by the 1990s, subaltern studies had become a major a field of inquiry not just in history but also anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, sociology, and political science. In general, the subalterns contended that there were two separate political domains in colonial India: one associated with the elite, and another associated with the subaltern. The elite domain engaged the structures of power in the colonial states, whereas the subaltern domain consisted of actions such as violent protests by peasants that did not seem to follow the standard rules of politics. Therefore, the historians regard the domain of the elite as a political one, and the domain of the peasants as a pre-political one. The subalterns, however, disagreed with the assessment of the subaltern domain as pre-political. They argued that peasant unrest was not the consequence of hunger or primordial urges, but rather was often linked to a religious belief shared by a tribe or caste. Subalterns then demonstrated the political logic of these peasants by exploring their folklore and popular beliefs. Moreover, the subalterns argued that subaltern groups also shaped the anti-colonial nationalist movement in India. Whereas previous explanations focused on political leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi who moved the masses or Indian elites who sought greater political power, the subalterns reversed the agency here. Rather than the elites shaping anti-colonialism in India, the subalterns argued that it was the resistance to state and local authority of subaltern groups that shifted the leadership in more radical directions. Subalterns maintained that the nationalist movement must be viewed as an anti-colonial effort by the people of India and a political effort by elites to keep subaltern resistance under control. Later, the subalterns would shift their focus from reconstructing subaltern experience to deconstructing colonial power. Also, there was an increased effort to focus on the local experiences of subaltern groups as opposed to grand narratives about the history of India, and to critique the Eurocentrism of history writing. Robert Young describes this Eurocentrism in White Mythologies (1990): Marxism’s universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of world history is simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism: it was Hegel, after all, who declared that “Africa has no history,” and it was Marx who, though critical of British imperialism, concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating the conditions for future class struggle there.76 Subaltern studies showed how historical writing was Eurocentric by the way it measured all other historical experiences against those of the West. It also offered in its own historical studies nonEurocentric alternatives to the histories produced by the West.

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Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 2.

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Given the general characteristics of subaltern studies described above, it should not be surprising to learn that while it provided a major boost to the general study of subaltern histories, it also had its critics, including those in India who saw it as not giving enough credit to the heroism of figures in the nationalist movement such as Gandhi. Some Marxists also criticized it for its lack of focus on the economy and class struggle. Then, of course, there were the Cambridge historians, whose narratives of the political history of India were rendered obsolete by subaltern studies. But more interesting were the criticisms of subaltern studies from those associated with postcolonial theory (10.1) such as Spivak. In her article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), while Spivak generally approves of the work of the subalterns, she still offers some criticisms of it. First, she is not as optimistic as they are that the resistance of subaltern groups always involved the potential for emancipation, that is, the potential for the oppressed group to seize power from their oppressors. Second, because all of the leading members of the subaltern studies group are male, their work involves a male bias and often ignores the experiences of subaltern women. And third, she argues that the subaltern’s efforts to represent subaltern resistance was itself an act of discursive power, that is, who speaks in subaltern studies is not those who have been oppressed, but rather the subaltern historian. Overall, Spivak argues that the subaltern studies group needs to pay more attention to both the discourse of domination and the textual construction of power, that is to say, to be more poststructuralist (specifically, Derridean, and not Deleuzian or Foucauldian)77 in its approach to the subaltern. In sum, subaltern studies—or simply, subalternity—is an effort to reconstruct history from the bottom. Of central importance to this task are the experiences of the oppressed and the poor— experiences ignored by history from above, that is, history that assumes as its central point of focus the elites and the state. Subalternity, like intersectionality, presents a very complex account of oppression. Its critique of the Eurocentrism of history writing has been influential across the world and is all the more significant because it originated in the Third World, rather than Europe or North America. Though subalternity is regarded as a branch of postcolonial theory in the same way that intersectionality is regarded as a branch of critical race theory, just as intersectionality is perhaps the most well-known branch of critical race theory, subalternity is perhaps the most well-known branch of postcolonial theory. Subaltern studies gave an entirely new meaning and critical power to a term that in common parlance (that is, Gramsci’s usage aside) simply meant “of lower rank,” and is still used in the British military to describe all those whose rank is below captain. Finally, although subaltern as used within subaltern studies primarily refers to specific groups within colonial India, the term is now also widely used to refer to any subordinated or oppressed population including the poor, the working class, women, Blacks, and the colonized. As such, subaltern studies more generally refers to both the study of subordination and oppression in general, and in literature and culture in particular.

Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 308.

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Biopolitics 9.0 INTRODUCTION The Greek word bios means life. Connected with the Greek word logia meaning knowledge of, it constitutes the name of a mainstream field of natural science dating back to the Lyceum of Aristotle. However, in the modern world, the study of biology came to be regarded as entirely separate from philosophy. Biotheory today is reconnecting bios with theory and philosophy in new and interesting ways. The philosophy of biology traditionally was organized into three basic interpretations of biological phenomena: Reductionism, which maintains that all biological phenomena can be accounted for by chemistry and physics; Vitalism, which maintains that there is some controlling vital force within organic forms that cannot be reduced to either the terms of chemistry or physics; and Organismicism (or Organismic Biology), which rejects both reductionism and vitalism, and maintains that whole organisms cannot be understood merely as the sum total of the actions of their parts. However, Michel Foucault can be credited for reviving the Greek investigation of bios in ways different from the mainstream philosophy of biology by introducing a form of power based on the right to take life or let live. Biopolitics is a concept introduced by Foucault in the 1970s concerning the connections between life and politics. The bio in biopolitics draws on a fuller sense of the Greek word bios, which means not only life but also living and ways of life. Therefore, whereas biology literally means knowledge of (logia) life (bios), biopolitics literally means the politics of life, living, and ways of living. But, as Foucault points out, the type of knowledge (or episteme, which is also the Greek word for knowledge) regarding life constitutive of the modern age (that is, the nineteenth century) did not exist in the classical age (that is, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). This is important to note because for Foucault, the episteme is the condition of possibility for knowledge, and at any one historical moment there can only be one episteme. In fact, for Foucault, biology as a science that studies life did not exist in the classical age because life as we have come to know it in the modern age did not exist at this time. In The Order of Things (1966), writes Foucault, Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. And that, if biology was unknown, there was a very simple reason for it: that life itself did not exist. All that existed was living beings, which were viewed through a grid of knowledge constituted by natural history.1

1

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966) (New York: Vintage, 1973), 127–8. 261

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Whereas the living beings of natural history were grouped by class in a visible grid, the modern episteme says that “life, on the confines of being, is what is exterior to it and also, at the same time, what manifests itself within it.”2 Foucault sums up the difference between life in the classical and modern ages as follows: in “the Classical age, life was the province of an ontology which dealt in the same way with all material beings, all of which were subject to extension, weight, and movement”; in the modern age, “living beings escape . . . the general laws of extensive being,” and “biological being becomes regional and autonomous.”3 Contemporary interest in the concept of biopolitics often originates with Foucault’s analyses of questions of life, living, and ways of life as they relate to techniques of power, which he alternately termed biopolitics and biopower. Foucault’s groundbreaking work on sexuality, hygiene, and mental health in the eighteenth century and beyond provides powerful and provocative understandings of governance, and what he termed governmentality. His work on biopolitics and biopower from the 1970s until his death in 1984 have played a major role in establishing biopolitics as one of the most influential critical approaches in both the humanities and the social sciences today. In general terms, biopolitics in view of Foucault’s work comes to refer to the management of populations and the resources necessary for their survival through various types of accounting and record-keeping by the state. Its development coincides, argues Foucault, with the emergence of a new type of economic man (homo oeconomicus). Whereas the classical conception of economic man was “the man of exchange, the partner, one of two partners in the process of exchange,”4 the neoliberal conception of economic man “is not at all a partner of exchange,” but is rather “an entrepreneur,” that is, “an entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”5 Thus, neoliberal society (10.3), the hyper-driven market society wherein economic man operates as an entrepreneur, comes to bear in significant ways in any and all considerations of biopolitics. Today, biopower and biopolitics constitute the conceptual center of an expansive and expanding realm within contemporary literary and cultural theory. Both have deep connections with adjacent areas of concern such as technology, security, and death (and dying). When these adjacent concerns intersect with biopolitics and biopower the result are more specialized subareas such as biotechnology, biosecurity, and thanatopolitics. With regard to the latter term, thanatos is the Greek word for death, so thanatopolitics is the inversion of biopolitics. And it too can be regarded as a productive power. As Stuart Murray points out, “if biopolitics is a productive power that necessitates or silently calls for death as the consequence of ‘making live,’ then thanatopolitics is not merely the lethal underside of biopolitics but is itself a productive power in the voices of those who biopolitical power ‘lets die.’ ”6 For Murray, thanatopolitics asks how deaths productively disconfirm the condemnation of death by biopolitics. More generally, any area of literary and cultural theory where questions of life, living, and ways of living are connected to governmental control and political concerns can be considered a subarea

Foucault, The Order of Things, 273. Foucault, The Order of Things, 273. 4 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 225. 5 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226. 6 Stuart Murray, “Thanatopolitics,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 718. 2 3

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of biopolitics. These areas include, but are not limited to, gender studies, body studies, age studies, leisure studies, disability studies, cyborg studies, and surveillance and security studies. This chapter will look into two of these areas—surveillance studies (9.4) and disability studies (9.5). And, gender studies, which has already been addressed within the context of feminist theory and LGBTQ+ theory, and cyborg studies (12.1), which will be taken up later, offer additional opportunities for biopolitical engagement. The question of how life, living, and ways of living are managed by political and economic forms of power in each of these subareas are all topics within the general area of biopolitics. In addition to the areas already noted, one might also add immigration, abortion, capital punishment, and infectious disease prevention (e.g., Covid-19, HIV/AIDS, influenza). Consequently, biopolitics (like many of the key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural theory) is interdisciplinary in its orientation. Some of the fields within its interdisciplinary purview include anthropology, biomedicine, cultural studies, economics, gender studies, history (of science), international relations, law, literature, philosophy, political science, and science and technology. Moreover, it should be noted that while the work of Foucault is largely responsible for much of our current interest in biopolitics and biopower, he is neither the first thinker to address this topic nor does everyone agree with his theory of biopolitics. Thinkers such as Hobbes, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Arendt, as well as many others, have discussed structures of economic, social, and political power and the constellations of ideas intended to secure them. While these thinkers may not have used the terms biopolitics and biopower in their work, each was interested to varying degrees in the ways in which societies control life, living, and ways of life—or what is now termed social control or control society. In capitalist social and economic relations, the determination of life (and death) assumes crucial modes of biopolitical control regarding questions of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class, and attempts to manage extremes of uneven and combined development across the globe. Biopolitics, derived from Foucault’s understanding of political and economic forms of power, is not an unproblematic analytic in differentiating life study. This is not just because of the limits it seems to place on transforming biopolitical control, but also because the structural logics of capitalism and globalism are themselves in great flux. Since Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics in his lectures at the Collège de France in the spring of 1976, philosophers and social critics have challenged some of his central assumptions and considered variegations of biotheory across competing paradigms. In this chapter, we will look at both Foucault’s biopolitics (9.1) and a couple of major challenges and alternatives to it offered by Giorgio Agamben (9.2), and by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (9.3). But there are other challenges, including Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2006); Jacques Derrida’s Life/Death seminars of 1975–6 (2019) and The Beast and the Sovereign seminars from 2001 to 2003 (two vols., 2008– 10); Roberto Esposito’s Immunitas (2002) and Bios (2004); Donna Haraway’s “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies” (1989); and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2011). These and other biopolitical theorists offer different positions on the biopolitical subject as well as explore how changing conceptions of the human and nature affect life conditions today. Thus, while all biopolitics goes through Foucault—for many, its conceptualization does not end with him.

9.1 MICHEL FOUCAULT Foucault first introduced the problematic of biopower in his lectures at the Collège de France in the spring of 1976, and then devoted his next two years of lectures at the Collège (the 1977–8 and

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1978–9 academic years)7 to developing his thoughts on biopolitics. In his final lecture in 1976 under the course title “Society Must Be Defended,” he notes that in the second half of the eighteenth century “a new technology of power” emerges. He terms it here “biopower” and “biopolitics.”8 Foucault explains that while biopower “does not exclude disciplinary technology . . . it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques.”9 Disciplinary technology refers to new forms of human punishment that Foucault located in the history of Europe that moved away from grotesque and spectacular punishment to more subtle modes of coercing individual bodies. “Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies,” biopower “is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species.”10 Biopower addresses “manas-species” as “a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.”11 It is a “seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species.”12 The first object of biopolitics are processes “such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of the population, and so on.”13 In the second half of the eighteenth century, biopolitics seeks to control these processes. It is here that “the first demographers begin to measure these phenomena in statistical terms.”14 During this period, death is “no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life—as in an epidemic.”15 Death becomes “permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it.”16 While Foucault enumerates many different elements that enter into the domain of biopolitics both in its early stages and its later stages, he says “biopolitics will derive its knowledge from, and define its power’s field of intervention in terms of, the birth rate, the morality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment.”17 Also, in addition, it “deals with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.”18 Biopolitics is as well credited by Foucault with introducing “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures.”19 The topic of “bio-politics” is also discussed by Foucault around the same time in The History of Sexuality (1976). In Part Five of this book, entitled “Right of Death and Power over Life,” Foucault discusses “the ancient right to take life or let live” that comes to be replaced at the beginning of the

7 Foucault did not lecture at the Collège de France during the 1976–7 academic year. The 1977–8 lectures can be found in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and 1978–9 lectures in The Birth of Biopolitics. 8 Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 243. 9 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 242. 10 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 242. 11 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 242–3. 12 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 243. 13 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 243. 14 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 243. 15 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 244. 16 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 244. 17 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 245. 18 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 245. 19 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”, 246.

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eighteenth century by “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”20 The context here are the changes in the right of the sovereign to take life through the death penalty. Focus in the application of capital punishment shifts from emphasizing the “enormity of the crime” to “the safeguard of society” and “the monstrosity of the criminal.”21 “Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding,” comments Foucault, “that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private.’”22 Under the aegis of an emerging biopolitics, “life more than the law . . . became the issue of political struggles”23 to the point where even Aristotle’s observations on the nature of man as a political animal were no longer valid. Whereas “[f]or millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”24 As a form of power, biopower regulates and orders biological life. This regulation is achieved through governmentality by means of various statistics and other population technologies. As a form of power, biopower differs from and replaces the power of the sovereign. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault describes the difference between sovereign power and biopower as one between a “society of blood” (sovereign power) and a “society of ‘sex,’ or rather a society ‘with a sexuality’ ” (biopower).25 In sovereign power, “power spoke through blood: the honor of war, the fear of famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword, executioners, and tortures; blood was a reality with a symbolic function.”26 However, in biopower, the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used. Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object and a target.27 Foucault notes that these “new procedures of power that were devised during the classical age and employed in the nineteenth century were what caused our societies to go from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality.”28 For him, “nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, and regulations.”29 It should be noted that Foucault’s work on biopolitics and biopower was a position he arrived at later in his career, and is one that differs in key ways from his earlier work. In the 1960s, Foucault’s work focused on language and the constitution of the subject in discourse, or more specifically, what he calls discursive formations. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault describes Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138; original emphasis. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138. 22 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138. 23 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 145. 24 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 142. 25 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 147. 26 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 147; original emphasis. 27 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 147; original emphasis. 28 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 148; original emphasis. 29 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 148. 20 21

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discursive formations as “large groups of statements with which we are so familiar—and which we call medicine, economics, or grammar.”30 However, rather than viewing these groups of statements as “chains of inference (as one often does in the history of the sciences or of philosophy)” or “drawing up tables of differences (as the linguists do),” he describes them as “systems of dispersion.”31 “Hence,” writes Foucault, the idea of describing these dispersions themselves; of discovering whether, between these elements, which are certainly not organized as a progressively deductive structure, nor as an enormous book that is being gradually and continuously written, nor as the oeuvre of a collective subject, one cannot discern a regularity: an order in their successive appearance, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in their common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked and hierarchized transformations.32 On this view, which might be called linguistic determinism, the subject was an empty entity, an intersection of discursive formations, wherein discourses are practices that systemically form the objects of which they speak. In Foucault’s later work, which includes his thoughts on biopolitics and biopower described above, he shifted to the view that individuals are constituted by power relations, wherein power is the ultimate principle of social reality. Power according to this view is not a commodity that can be acquired or taken away. Rather, it is more like a network whose threads go everywhere. Foucault is more interested in how subjects are constituted by power, rather than who has power. Moreover, he rejects the view that we can locate power in a structure or in a particular institution. Foucault’s work on power and the nature of social institutions such as the prison, the madhouse, and the clinic would come to have an enormous impact on the intersections between politics and literary and cultural theory. Jeremy Bentham’s work on prison reform in the nineteenth century provides Foucault with a metaphor for the anonymous central power he describes. Bentham’s panopticon is a prison that would be structured in such a way that all of the cells would be visible from a central tower. This prison would be one where the cells do not interact with one another, and none of the prisoners in those cells know if and when they are being watched. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault describes the power of Bentham’s panopticon as both visible and unverifiable: “Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he always be so.”33 The effect of the panopticon is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”34 Herein, power is organized such that “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.”35 Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower via surveillance technologies such as Bentham’s will become foundational to the field of surveillance studies (9.4). Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 37; original emphasis. 31 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 37; original emphasis. 32 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 37. 33 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 201. 34 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201. 35 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201. 30

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For Foucault, power is everywhere: it is in all social relations. Moreover, power on this model is not just negative and repressive. Rather, it is also productive. The productive power of the panopticon creates subjects who are “responsible” for their own subjection. There is no individual sovereign now to point to as the cause of their subjection, but rather only an anonymous governmentality. This view of power leaves little to no room for autonomous individuals, that is, for human agents whose actions now lack complete freedom and autonomy. As such, Foucault’s biopolitics and biopower are a type of antihumanism. In short, biopower is omnipotent with respect to the psychic formation of the subject. Individuals for Foucault exist merely as an embodied nexus to be transformed by the deployment of external causal powers. History, in this view, is thus an endless play of domination. Like Nietzsche, Foucault takes a genealogical view of history rather than one that traces lines of inevitability or development. It is an approach to history that avoids all forms of global theorizing, totalizing forms of analysis, and systematic philosophizing. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), Foucault explains that genealogy breaks off the past from the present and emphasizes “the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality.”36 Genealogy is also opposed “to the search for ‘origins.’ ”37 “History is the concrete body of a development,” comments Foucault, “with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the origin.”38 Genealogy focuses on local, discontinuous, and illegitimate knowledges against the claims of efforts to present knowledges as global, continuous, and legitimate. The task of genealogy is “to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.”39 The aim of genealogy is critique. Given then that Foucault defines critique elsewhere as “the art of voluntary insubordination,”40 the aim of genealogy as critique is to uproot traditional foundations and to disrupt pretended continuity. In short, the purpose of a genealogical approach to history “is not to discover the roots of our identity, but rather to commit itself to its dissipation.”41 In sum, Foucault offers an alternative to both the Hegelian and Marxist views of history. History is discontinuous for Foucault, and neither teleological, as Hegel would have us believe, nor dialectical, as Marx contends. Moreover, Foucault’s position on power conflicts with the Marxist notion of a conflict between the ruling class and a subordinate class. Techniques of power are for Foucault neither invented by the bourgeoisie, nor the creation of a class seeking to exercise effective forms of domination. Rather, techniques of power were deployed from the moment that they reveal their economic and political utility for the bourgeoisie. Foucault’s notions of genealogy, power, and history were highly influential on the New Historicism.

Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76. 37 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 77. 38 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 80. 39 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 83. 40 Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, eds. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 32. 41 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 95. 36

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9.2 GIORGIO AGAMBEN When Giorgio Agamben published Homo Sacer (1995), it would be the first of what would come to be nine volumes of interconnected investigations into the foundations of Western institutions and political philosophy. The other volumes are Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999), State of Exception (2003), Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (2003), The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2007), The Sacrament of Language: The Archaeology of the Oath (2008), Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (2012), The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life (2011), and The Use of Bodies (2014). As the titles of these books indicate, Agamben is very interested in Foucault’s notions of the archive (that is, the limit of what can be known about a particular historical moment), archaeology (that is, a research method that avoids traditional approaches to history that focus on what has been said and done by focusing instead on the discursive formations—or sets of conditions—that enable things to be said and done), and genealogy (that is, a research method that also avoids traditional approaches to history by focusing instead on the unwritten rules or system of a particular social formation). In terms of biopolitics, however, Homo Sacer holds a place of special interest because it is here that Agamben—at least in his own mind—completes the work that Foucault began on this topic. “Foucault’s death kept him,” comments Agamben, “from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics.”42 But for Agamben, completing Foucault’s biopolitics does not simply mean following the tracks laid down by the deceased theorist. Rather, it involves reinterpreting biopolitics by going back to its point of origin to recover an aspect of power that was concealed in Foucault’s work. According to Agamben, this concealed point of origin is to be found in the notion of sovereign power. Agamben points out that the “Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word ‘life.’ ”43 Rather, they used two terms: “zoe–, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or group.”44 This distinction, argues Agamben, is fundamental to the origins of Western political philosophy for it amounts to a distinction between the bare existence common to all living things (zoe–) and a qualified life, that is, a particular way of life. When the Greeks discuss particular ways of life—such as when Plato describes three kinds of life in the Philebus, and when Aristotle distinguished the contemplative life of the philosopher as compared to the political life and the life of pleasure—they always use the term bios and never the term zoe–. However, according to Agamben, when sovereign power ceases in the modern era to be founded upon theology or nature, zoe– or bare life starts to become its foundation. In the process, sovereignty rearticulates and redefines the relationship between zoe– and bios with relation to power. In sovereign power, bios comes to refer to the lives that are included within the political community, and zoe– refers to those lives which are excluded from the political community—and are able to be killed with impunity. Agamben reaches this conclusion by drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s definition of

42 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), in The Omnibus Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 7. 43 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5. 44 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5.

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sovereignty, where he says the “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.”45 Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty reveals a paradox in the modern conception of sovereignty, namely, that the sovereign can be both inside and outside of the political order at the same time. Thus, for Agamben, as bare life (zoe–) is fundamental to sovereign power, the birth of biopolitics must be backdated to at least the sovereign exception. Agamben says that Foucault’s work on biopolitics is a “decisive abandonment of the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutional models (the definition of sovereignty, the theory of the State), in favor of an unprejudiced analysis of the concrete ways in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life.”46 “Clearly,” comments Agamben, these two lines (which carry on two tendencies present in Foucault’s work from the very beginning) intersect in many points and refer back to a common center . . . Yet the point at which these two faces of power converge remains strangely unclear in Foucault’s work, so much so that it has even been claimed that Foucault would have consistently refused to elaborate a unitary theory of power. If Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is exclusively based on juridical models (“What legitimates power?”) or on institutional models (“What is the State?”), and if he calls for a “liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty” in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individuation and totalizing procedures converge?47 What it interesting here is that whereas Foucault’s research methodology led him to the conclusion that the passage from the classical age to the modern age involved the transition from one model of power (sovereign power) to another model of power (biopower), Agamben insists that aspects of the nucleus of sovereign power remain or are retained in biopower—and claims that Foucault’s work does not allow for this. But is this really the case? In a lecture at the Collège de France in 1978, Foucault provides evidence that he does not completely abandon the traditional approach to power as Agamben claims: [T]he idea of a government as government of population makes the problem of the foundation of sovereignty even more acute (and we have Rousseau) and it makes the need to develop the disciplines even more acute (and we have the history of the disciplines that I have tried to analyze elsewhere [e.g., as in Discipline and Punish]). So we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then a society of discipline by a society, say, of government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism.48

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 13. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 47 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 48 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 107–8. 45 46

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Thus, given Foucault’s comments here, biopolitics does not completely turn away from considerations of sovereign power, but rather triangulates them with disciplinary power and biopower. Still, these lecture comments aside, if a philosopher of Agamben’s stature was led to believe that Foucault abandons the traditional approach to the problem of power in favor of one in which power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life reveals that there is at least a lack of clarity in Foucault’s work on this point. Moreover, for Agamben, the question of the degree to which Foucault’s biopolitics accounts for bare life (zoe–) and the state of exception as a paradigm of government do not simply go away with the triangulation of sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management. For, as Agamben says in State of Exception (2003), “there is still no theory of the state of exception in public law, and jurists and theorists of public law seem to regard the problem more as a quaestio facti [question of fact] than as a genuine juridical problem.”49 A state of exception is for Agamben the “no-man’s land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life.”50 It is here that the sovereign state both institutes the law and is the only element of the political order capable of suspending the law in exceptional situations. What is unique about this situation is that when the sovereign state suspends the law, the legal and political order is not itself suspended in this state of exception. In such times, the sovereign state, again, is both inside and outside the legal and political order. As Agamben points out, this state of exception is one where the “question of borders becomes all the more urgent: if exceptional measures are the result of periods of political crisis and, as such, must be understood on political and not juridico-constitutional grounds, then they find themselves in the paradoxical situation of being juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms, and the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form.”51 On the one hand, think of exceptional situations, say, involving civil war, insurrection, and resistance wherein legal terms simply cannot account for these events. On the other hand, there are also those situations where the “law employs the exception—that is the suspension of law itself—as its original means of referring to and encompassing life.”52 It is in these situations, that “a theory of the state of exception is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same time, abandons the living being to law.”53 For Agamben, the normalization of the state of exception was achieved in the concentration camps of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Here, beginning in 1933, prisoners were stripped of both their political and civil rights, and subject as bare life to the sovereign powers of the German state. As bare life (zo e–), the prisoners were excluded from the political community and are able to be killed with impunity in a state of exception. For Agamben, the relationship between bare life and sovereign power continues to define contemporary politics in various refugee crises around the world. William Spanos argues that rather than restricting the genealogy of bare life and the state of exception to Europe as Agamben does, the US as well needs to be considered in any genealogy of

49 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2003), in The Omnibus Homo Sacer, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 167. 50 Agamben, State of Exception, 167. 51 Agamben, State of Exception, 167. 52 Agamben, State of Exception, 167. 53 Agamben, State of Exception, 167.

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the exceptionalist state.54 Finally, Agamben’s argument that sovereignty reveals the permanence of biopolitics within Western political thought foretells a condition of permanent crisis—one wherein the norming of the state of exception draws a line from the Nazi concentration camps to the present production and reproduction of systemic racism.

9.3 MICHAEL HARDT AND ANTONIO NEGRI If Foucault might be characterized as leaving behind sovereign power in his pursuit of biopower, and Agamben might be said to put sovereign power into biopolitics, then Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri might be said to locate a type of sovereignty recognized by neither Foucault nor Agamben: empire. For Hardt and Negri, empire is a mode of sovereignty that is globally connected and sweeps aside centrist or static versions of power. It is something that is literally “materializing before our very eyes.”55 “Over the past several decades,” they write in Empire (2000), as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.56 One of the characteristics of this new world order is that “there is no place of power—it is both everywhere and nowhere.”57 “In the passage from modern to postmodern and from imperialism to Empire,” write Hardt and Negri, “there is progressively less distinction between inside and outside.”58 Whereas the modern nation-state is built upon the inside/outside distinction, the development of trans- and supranational organizations such as the United Nations indicate that there is increasingly no longer an outside. The United Nations, comment Hardt and Negri, “both reveals the limitations of the notion of international order and points beyond it toward a new notion of global order.”59 Empire is a global order that is an “ou-topia, or really a non-place.”60 It has “no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers.”61 Hardt and Negri describe empire as “a decentered and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.”62

William Spanos, The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 55 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xi. 56 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xi; my emphasis. 57 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 190. 58 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 187. 59 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 4. 60 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 190. 61 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii. 62 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xii. 54

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Hardt and Negri maintain that in this new geopolitical order, industrial capitalism has been replaced by cognitive capitalism, a form of capitalism wherein automated, networked, and global production processes result in a new form of labor: immaterial labor. Hardt and Negri define three types of immaterial labor that “drive the postmodernization of the global economy”: The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalized and has incorporated communication technologies in a way that transforms the production process itself . . . Second is the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other. Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labor in a bodily mode.63 The immaterial labor of cognitive capitalism brings affect, intellect, and bodies into capitalist production in ways not accounted for in industrial capitalism. For example, in the case of affective labor, that is, the labor of human contact and interaction (or “labor in the bodily mode”), what is produced are “social networks, forms of community, biopower.”64 Hardt and Negri state that “the role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor.”65 Moreover, the shift from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism results in not only a blurring of the distinction between physical and intellectual labor, but also between individual and collective work. The creation of wealth in this postmodern global economy tends toward what they call biopolitical production, that is, “the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest in one another.”66 It is important to note here that for Hardt and Negri economic value is linked to biopolitical production, that is, the production of forms of life and social relations, and not only material production, that is, the production of material objects. Hardt and Negri claim that Foucault prepared the way for their biopolitical production thesis by recognizing “the epochal passage in social forms from disciplinary society to the society of control,” and by pointing out a new form of power, biopower.67 “Disciplinary society,” write Hardt and Negri, “is that society in which social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and produce practices.”68 By contrast, the society of control is one “in which mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of citizens.”69 In societies of control, power is “exercised through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (in welfare systems, information networks, etc.) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and the desire for creativity.”70 Whereas disciplinary societies were Hardt and Negri, Empire, 293. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 293. 65 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiii. 66 Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiii. 67 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23. 68 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23. 69 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23. 70 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 23. 63 64

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explicitly articulated by Foucault, societies of control were not. Rather, according to Deleuze, the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of control was implicit in Foucault’s work—and he took the opportunity to follow through on this implication in his own work. Why societies of control are important to Hardt and Negri is because they follow Deleuze in regarding biopolitical control as extending “throughout the depths of consciousness and bodies of the population—and at the same time across the entirety of social relations.”71 “Society,” write Hardt and Negri, “subsumed within a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the social structure and its processes of development, reacts like a single body.”72 Thus, while Hardt and Negri take their inspiration from the biopolitics of Foucault, their thesis that empire is a regime wherein “biopower, economic production and political constitution tend to increasingly coincide” might be regarded as both a challenge to his work and creative rereading of it. Moreover—and perhaps more importantly—Hardt and Negri’s postmodern biopolitics is a direct challenge to and creative reworking of Marxism. “Postmodernism and the passage to Empire,” comment Hardt and Negri, “involve a real convergence of the realms that used to be designated as base and superstructure.”73 For them, Production becomes indistinguishable from reproduction; productive forces merge with relations of production; constant capital tends to be constituted and represented within variable capital, in the brains, bodies, and cooperation of productive subjects. Social subjects are at the same time producers and products of this unitary machine. In this new historical formation it is thus no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value, or a practice that is “outside.”74 By rejecting traditional models of production as a misrepresentation of the geopolitics of cognitive capitalism, Hardt and Negri offer a postmodern Marxist view of biopolitical production as reproduction. Within the machine of cognitive-capitalist geopolitics, the classical Marxist distinction between base and superstructure converges. One of the major consequences of biopolitical production is that nature is no longer “outside” of production. Rather, “through the processes of modern technological transformation, all of nature has become capital, or at least subject to capital.”75 Whereas the “industrial revolution introduced machine-made consumer goods and then machine-made machines,” biopolitical production has introduced “machine-made rare materials and foodstuffs—in short, machine-made nature and machine-made culture.”76 Thus, under postmodern biopolitics, the distinction between nature and culture no longer holds. Now that all of nature has become capital, and nature is indistinguishable from culture, there is truly nothing outside of capital. “There is nothing, no ‘naked life,’ no external standpoint,” write Hardt and Negri, “that can be posed outside this field permeated by money.”77 “Production and reproduction,” they continue, “are dressed in monetary

Hardt and Negri, Empire, 24. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 24. 73 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 385. 74 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 385. 75 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 272. 76 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 272. 77 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 32. 71 72

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clothing.”78 The sphere of biopolitics is one wherein “life is made to work for production and production is made to work for life.”79 But whereas the view of sovereignty of Agamben leaves us with the normalization of the state of exception and no opportunity for resistance, the new type of sovereignty described by Hardt and Negri is tempered by a vision of resistance and revolutionary hope. “Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power because it presents us, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative,”80 write Hardt and Negri. The alternative to imperial sovereignty is “the set of all the exploited and the subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them.”81 Their concept of a multitude that opposes imperial sovereignty has its roots in the political philosophy of Baruch Spinoza—and explicating the revolutionary hope of this concept becomes the focus of Multitude (2004). Here multitude is defined as “a set of singularities,” wherein a singularity is a “social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different.”82 For Hardt and Negri, in a multitude the component parts of the people are indifferent in their unity; they become an identity by negating or setting aside their differences. The plural singularities of the multitude thus stand in contrast to the undifferentiated unity of the people.83 As an identity, the opposition of the multitude toward imperial sovereignty provides the world with revolutionary hope. The revolutionary potential of the multitude might be thought of as a postmodern Marxist updating of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. If, as Marx and Engels state in Manifesto of the Communist Party, the aim of the communists is the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat,”84 then the aim of the multitude in the hands of Hardt and Negri is the overthrow of imperial sovereignty—and to create an alternative global society. So, Hardt and Negri’s work in Empire and elsewhere, following Žižek’s comment, might be regarded as the “Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century.”85 In sum, Hardt and Negri note that if biopower “stands above society, transcendent, as a sovereign authority and imposes its order,” then “biopolitical production, in contrast, is immanent to society and creates social relationships and forms through collaborative forms of labor.”86 The hope for an alternative global society rests not in biopower, but rather a biopolitics founded upon what they call in Commonwealth (2009) a “democracy of the multitude”87 directed toward the development of

Hardt and Negri, Empire, 32. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 32. 80 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 393. 81 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 393; my emphasis. 82 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 99. 83 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 99. 84 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 31–2. 85 Slavoj Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13.3/4 (2001): 190–8. 86 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 94–5. 87 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 21. 78 79

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the common/s. The common, write Hardt and Negri, is both “the common wealth of the material world—the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty” and “those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth.”88

9.4 SURVEILLANCE STUDIES Surveillance comes from the French word surveiller, which means to watch over or to watch over from above. David Lyon, who is often credited as helping to found surveillance studies as a field in the late 1990s, argues in The Electronic Eye (1994) that “surveillance can be detected in population documents from ancient Egypt and also in records of English landholding with the Domesday Book from 1086.”89 Moreover, as Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood point out, the “word ‘eavesdrop,’ which had its first printed use in 1606, originally referred to someone who literally stood within the space next to a house where rainwater dripped from the eaves, where one could secretly listen to what was said inside.”90 Lyon defines surveillance as “the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction.”91 The systematic aspect of surveillance implies, of course, that it is not random, but something that is done with a purpose. If this systematic aspect of surveillance is viewed through the context of the biopolitics of Foucault, then surveillance studies concerns the management and regulation of populations through identification, monitoring, categorization, and statistics. As a multidisciplinary field that includes anthropology, American studies, communication, cultural studies, criminology, geography, history, legal studies, literary studies, philosophy, political science, sociology, and others, surveillance studies is concerned with power and its distribution. Major sites of surveillance include policing and crime control, the workplace, government, the military, and consumer marketing. Nevertheless, sites of surveillance are continually expanding as information systems that utilize it come to regulate more and more aspects of everyday life. Moreover, to say that surveillance today is ubiquitous means that it has many different functions, forms, and meanings depending on the social, political, and economic setting. And, part of the task of surveillance studies is to identify and examine them. The question remains though as to what extent the many different functions, forms, and meanings of surveillance are subject to critique. In the early 1970s, before the formation of surveillance studies as a field in the late 1990s, surveillance was primarily the subject of critique. Focus was placed on the ways in which state and police surveillance, and centralized computer databases, threatened society. Terms like dataveillance, coined by Roger Clarke in 1988, echoed fears about the discriminatory use of large-scale sets of surveillance data to identify individuals as criminals in advance of any wrongdoing.92 But Clarke was just part of a conceptual

Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, viii. Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood, “Introduction: Surveillance Studies as a Transdisciplinary Endeavor,” in Surveillance Studies: A Reader, eds. Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), xxii. 90 Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxii. 91 David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 14. 92 Roger Clarke, “Information Technology and Dataveillance,” Communications of the ACM 31.5 (1988): 498–512. 88 89

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genealogy about surveillance that involves, among other sources, George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour (1949) and Foucault’s interpretation of Bentham’s panopticon. The notion of an all-powerful, centralized surveillance, whether in the form of Orwell’s Big Brother, Foucault’s biopower, or Bentham’s panopticon, immediately raises issues concerning privacy, domination, and power. In the case of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother conceptually connects surveillance with violence, fascism, and totalitarianism. A human face crushed under the boot of Big Brother is a visual image of surveillance that is difficult to erase from the conceptual field of surveillance studies. However, as the field of surveillance studies was formed during a period of wide-scale technological innovation, surveillance came to be regarded within this nascent field of study as “one of the dominant modes of ordering in the postmodern era”—rather than as only a symptom of totalitarianism and subject of critique.93 Here Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1992), which is a critique of Foucault, is often cited as one of the turning points regarding the concept of surveillance. As noted earlier, Foucault contended that there was a shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from societies of sovereignty to disciplinary societies.94 However, for Deleuze, the disciplinary societies identified by Foucault “reach[ed] their height at the outset of the twentiethcentury,” and were replaced in the twentieth century by societies of control. Deleuze argues that the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Foucault “brilliantly analyzed” were “vast spaces of enclosure.”95 “The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another,” comments Deleuze of these enclosures, “each has its own laws: first, the family; then the school (‘you are no longer in your family’); then the barracks (‘you are no longer at school’); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment.”96 Foucault, comments Deleuze, saw the enclosures of disciplinary society as a way “to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces.”97 They marked a transition from the goal and functions of societies of sovereignty that were “to tax rather than organize production to rule on death rather than administer life.”98 But for Deleuze, the “interiors” of disciplinary society underwent a crisis that accelerated at a rapid pace after World War II. The prison, hospital, factory, school, and the family endured a crisis of interiority. In spite of many efforts to reform these interiors, “everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the life of their expiration periods.”99 “These are the societies of control,” writes Deleuze, “which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies.”100 As Hardt sees it (a few years before the publication with Negri of Empire), Deleuze’s notion of control society is “a first attempt to understand the decline of the rule of civil society and the rise of a new form of control.”101 Instead of disciplinary enclosures, comments Hardt, where the “coordinated

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Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxiv; my emphasis. See, for example, Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 95 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter, 1992): 3. 96 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3. 97 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3. 98 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 3. 99 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. 100 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. 101 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 30. 94

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striations formed by the institutions of civil society branch out through social space in structured networks” for Deleuze “like the tunnels of a mole,”102 we need to move to a new animal to characterize societies of control: the snake, whose “infinite undulations” characterize for Deleuze “the smooth space of the societies of control.”103 “Instead of disciplining the citizen as a fixed social identity,” writes Hardt, “the new social regime seeks to control the citizen as a whatever identity, or rather an infinitely flexible placeholder of identity.”104 Hardt’s observations here encourage us to regard the post-disciplinary situation of empire as a society of control that is in part ordered by a post-disciplinary concept of surveillance. In short, via Deleuze’s societies of control, surveillance studies has shifted focus from a critique of surveillance to the position that “surveillance is central to the functioning of contemporary societies, from the level of state practices all the way down to interpersonal exchanges among family members and friends.”105 “While some may not agree,” write Monahan and Wood, that surveillance is the most important social process or cultural logic, it is difficult to contest its pervasiveness and influence. It is how organizations and people make sense of and manage the world. It is also how power relations are established and reproduced. For scholars, surveillance offers a rich approach to investigating social and cultural phenomena and detecting the power relations inherent in them.106 Thus, the concerns of contemporary surveillance studies include “the ways in which surveillance was a critical part of the rise of the modern nation-state, especially pertaining to the identification and governance of people at borders and within state territories”;107 the ways in which the identification and sorting of populations is increasingly conducted through computer algorithms; and the ways in which national security and the police utilize surveillance systems. Moreover, there are also issues concerning privacy and surveillance, workplace surveillance, the relationship between political economy and surveillance, and others, all pursued within surveillance studies as aspects of the contemporary cultural logic of a control society. Thus, a division might be posited between modern and postmodern surveillance theory: whereas modern surveillance theory regards “surveillance as an outgrowth of capitalist enterprises, bureaucratic organization, the nation-state, a machine-like technologic and the development of new kinds of solidarity, involving less ‘trust’ or at least different kinds of trust,” postmodern surveillance theory deals with “new forms of ‘vigilance and visibility’—technology-based, bodyobjectifying, everyday, universal kinds of surveillance.”108 In terms of modern surveillance theory, Hannah Arendt and Anthony Giddens, for example, both see “totalitarian tendencies—among which state surveillance would figure prominently—as immanent

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Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 30. Michael Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 31. 104 Hardt, “The Withering of Civil Society,” 36. 105 Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxxi. 106 Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxxi. 107 Monahan and Wood, “Introduction,” xxvii. 108 Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 51. 103

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within any bureaucratically organized nation-state.”109 In fact, Giddens argues in The Nation-State and Violence (1985) that surveillance is one of the main social processes that constitutes modernity. Moreover, Lyon claims that one of the continuing themes in surveillance studies is that “within liberal democratic nation-states where record-keeping, monitoring and observation become routine and technologically augmented that restrictions on liberty—and, especially post-9/11, mobility—may be anticipated.”110 The rise of reality television is a good illustration of the extent to which liberal democracies tolerate high levels of the invasion of privacy. “The culture industry,” writes Catherine Liu, “has been able to make surveillance natural and entertaining at the same time.”111 But whereas modern surveillance theory tends to situate surveillance practices within the context of the nation-state, postmodern surveillance theory takes its approach from outside the context of the nation-state in several ways. First, technology-based surveillance makes “surveillance amenable to automation and places increasing reliance upon the data-double or the virtual self.”112 Thus, if modern surveillance theory centers upon the concept of the panopticon, then, following Mark Poster, postmodern surveillance theory centers upon the superpanopticon, in which “database discourse produces objectified individuals with dispersed data ‘identities’ of which some may not even be aware.”113 Second, body-objectifying surveillance reflects increasing attention paid to the body itself as a source of surveillance data through various forms of biometrics such as those available through a Fitbit watch. Third, everyday surveillance includes not only workplace and criminal deviance, but also psychological classifications, educational differences, and health distinctions. Or, as Liu makes this point, “surveillance is built into everything we touch.”114 Yet, in spite of “the warnings about privacy and profits,” she continues, “there has been no stampede away from Google or Facebook.”115 And, fourth, universal surveillance, in the sense that surveillance permeates all life and no one is immune from the gaze.116 Here Hardt and Negri’s empire is one example of a surveillance formation outside of the political logic of the nation-state.

9.5 DISABILITY STUDIES According to Lennard Davis, “disability studies attempts to unpack the complex biocultural and biopolitical forces that are involved in ableism.”117 Though the terms disablism and ableism are often used interchangeably, some theorists have argued that they should be distinguished. Disablism is a term that specifically refers to discrimination and prejudice founded upon a disability. Ableism is a term that refers to the ideology of ability, which is a “ubiquitous belief system that privileges a certain type of person above another.”118 D. Christopher Gabbard describes the

Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 53. Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 53. 111 Catherine Liu, “Surveillance,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 708. 112 Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 55. 113 Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 55. See Mark Poster, “Databases as Discourse or Electronic Interpellations,” in Computers, Surveillance and Privacy, eds. David Lyon and Elia Zureik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 114 Liu, “Surveillance,” 708. 115 Liu, “Surveillance,” 708. 116 Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 55–6. 117 Lennard Davis, “Disability,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 454. 118 D. Christopher Gabbard, “Ableism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 357. 109 110

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model type of person in the ideology of ability as “a young, white, fully physically functional, healthy, reasonably intelligent, heterosexual male.”119 This, continues Gabbard, makes ableism “one of the most socially entrenched and accepted of -isms”120—and one that Gregor Wolbring argues is “an umbrella ism for other isms such as racism, sexism, casteism, ageism, speciesism, antienvironmentalism, gross domestic product (GDP)-ism and consumerism.”121 Thus, given that ableism is an umbrella “-ism” for many other -isms including racism and sexism, the biopolitics of ableism concerns a very wide range of discrimination and prejudice in culture and society. If emphasis is placed on the different centers of focus in disablism as opposed to ableism, then one might further distinguish between disability studies and ability studies: disability studies examines disablism, that is, discrimination against the “less able”; and ability studies examines ableism, that is, the belief system founded upon ability. Moreover, the term dis/ability studies is often used to signify a more balanced approach to disablism and ableism. The bifurcation of dis/ ability studies echoes the situation in other forms of oppositional identity study such as women’s studies, which is sometimes set in opposition to men’s studies (the interdisciplinary study of the history, culture, and politics of men and masculinity). And there is also the field of critical white studies, which while regarded as a subarea in critical race theory, might also be regarded in a complementary relationship with critical race theory in the same way that ability studies (or critical ability studies) is related to disability studies (or critical disability studies). But the concept of disability does not merely hinge on the interplay between the disabled/abled. Rather, it is connected with many other words and concepts such as infirmity, affliction, monstrosity, deformity, and cripple.122 Davis, for example, argues in Enforcing Normalcy (1995) that disability came to be associated with words such as deviance, abnormality, and disorder in the nineteenth century. These associations, established through legal, medical, and statistical discourses, led to the modern conception of disability as one related to the concept of normalcy, wherein disability is regarded as a by-product of normalcy. Today, however, the conceptual field has been greatly widened to connect disability to many other major areas of concern in contemporary literary and cultural theory including affect (13.0), biopolitics, gender, narrative, performance, queer, race, rights, sex, sexuality, space (11.4), and trauma (13.4). It is also important to note in this context that critical disability studies might be described as intersectional in its approach to issues of disablism and ableism. That is, disability tends to be regarded as the intersection of ability, race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ethnicity, age, and other categories in a person not as constituting their fixed or essential identity (essentialism), but rather as presenting a site where intersecting power relations are performed by individuals in differing social contexts (anti-essentialism). Again, identity on this intersectionalist approach to disability studies is something one does through a performance, not something one has by nature. As such, in critical disability studies, that is, disability studies that approach their topic intersectionally, it is more proper to speak of shifting identifications rather than the identity of a disabled person.

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Gabbard, “Ableism,” 357. Gabbard, “Ableism,” 357. 121 Gregor Wolbring, “The Politics of Ableism,” Development 51.2 (2008): 252–8, https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2008.17. 122 Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, “Disability,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 6. 120

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But the distinction between the anti-essentialism of critical disability studies and the essentialism of disability studies is but one way to illustrate their critical differences. Another is to systematically follow through on how considerations of biopolitics fundamentally alter the work of disability studies. Thus, when a critical effort is made “to unpack the complex biocultural and biopolitical forces that are involved in ableism,” the field of disability studies takes on some different contours. As David T. Mitchell explains in The Biopolitics of Disability (2015), the removal of discriminatory social barriers and “bodily limitations on public participation have been the two poles between which disability studies research has primarily shuttled since its founding moments in the 1970s.”123 According to Mitchell, barrier removal and impairment effects are the “twin pillars” of the research and politics of disability studies, with the “majority of disability studies research remain[ing] focused on pragmatic social changes brought about by” these pillars. Rather than continue in this direction, Mitchell points out that while “these two domains are critical to the developing contributions of disability studies and international disability rights movements, they are largely bounded by the terms of social recognition,” and “have almost nothing to say, for instance, about the active transformation of life that the alternative corporealities of disability creatively entail.”124 Thus, Mitchell aims to “explore how disability subjectivities are not just characterized by socially imposed restrictions, but, in fact, productively create new forms of embodied knowledge and collective knowledge.”125 In short, his work provides disability studies with some “alternative maps for living together in the deterritorialized, yet highly regulated spaces of biopolitics.”126 Moreover, the intersectionality of his work is foregrounded in the way “crip” and queer identities are combined (crip/queer) to forward this thesis. Queer for Mitchell designates, following the work of Randall Halle, “not the acts in which they engage but rather the coercive norms that place their desires into a position of conflict with the current order;”127 and crip, used in tandem with queer, designates “the ways in which such bodies represent alternative forms of being-in-the-world when navigating environments that privilege able-bodied participants as fully capacitated agential participants within democratic institutions.”128 For Mitchell, crip/queer is coined to recognize that “all bodies identified as excessively deviant are ‘queer’ in the sense that they represent discordant functionalities and outlaw sexualities.”129 “Thus,” concludes Mitchell, “crip/queer forms of embodiment contest their consignment to illegitimacy because sexual prohibition has proven one of the most historically salient forms of exclusion within biopolitics since the late nineteenth century.”130 Looking ahead, Mitchell says that disability studies “must be able to address what crip/queer bodies bring to the table of imagining the value of alternative lives, particularly lives that exist at the fraught intersections of marginalized identities such as disability, race, gender, sexuality, and class.”131 But if pushing the intersectionality and biopolitics of disability studies marks new frontiers

123 David T. Mitchell with Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 1. 124 Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 2. 125 Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 2. 126 Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 3. 127 Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 3; Halle cited by Mitchell. 128 Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 3. 129 Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 3. 130 Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 3. 131 Mitchell with Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability, 6.

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for the field, how might the current field be described, particularly from the position of literature and culture? Davis says that disability studies aims to correct the “often limited, stereotypical, and viewed[-] from[-]an[-]ableist perspective”132 of disability in literature and culture. For Davis, disability studies helps us to view “bodily or mental impairment as part of human diversity” and “seeks to place disability within current discussions of identity in literature and media.”133 As we have seen earlier, particularly in the context of LGBTQ+ theory, discussions of identity are increasingly both nonnormative and anti-identitarian. In critical disability studies, non-normative and anti-identitarian approaches push the field increasingly to take up intersectional and biopolitical issues. Finally, considering that nearly one-fifth of any given population has a disability, why is it that literature and culture so rarely concerns itself with disabled characters and themes? One of the tasks of disability studies is to change this situation by not only encouraging and promoting literary and artistic work on disability, but also by actively supporting the work of writers and artists with disabilities.

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Davis, “Disability,” 454. Davis, “Disability,” 454.

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Globalization 10.0 INTRODUCTION In An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), Gayatri Spivak describes the “beginnings of what we now call globalization” as commencing with the period of “modernization,” opened up by the end of World War II. It began with the establishment of the Bretton Woods Organizations, of the United Nations, of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—between 1945 and 1948. It was the beginning of the end of European colonialism. The middle of our century is the initiation of neo-colonialism. Colonialism has a civilizing mission of settlement. Neocolonialism had a modernizing mission of development. In the 1970s, the circuits of dominant capital became electronified. We entered the phase of “postmodernization.” Robert B. Reich, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor, has called this “electronic capitalism.”1 While some, like Immanuel Wallerstein, disagree with this characterization of the beginnings of globalization, and argue instead that its origins can be traced back to the international trade that has been going on since antiquity, Spivak’s account is noteworthy because of the way in which it connects globalization to colonialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism, which is the first topic taken up in this chapter. Postcolonial theory (10.1) is one of several major gateways to understanding the development and processes of globalization. As a field, it studies the connections between postcolonial emancipation and globalization, and provides theoretical insight into colonization and decolonization. This insight, in the case of leading postcolonial theorists such as Spivak, Edward Said, and Homi Bhabha, often involves the utilization not only of psychoanalytic theory, poststructuralism, and feminist theory, but also work from Marxism, human rights, and subaltern studies. Postcolonial theory presents both a critique of Western intellectual traditions and offers an alternative theoretical account based on the social, political, and cultural circumstances of former colonies. It also explores the cultural and literary politics of postcolonial nations in an era of increasing globalization. These politics often bear on the ways in which subalternity, racial difference, and legal inequality—all topics introduced in our earlier discussion of race and justice— are masked or concealed in colonial society. Even if Wallerstein is correct in his belief that globalization is just another word for international trade that has been going on since antiquity, the term neoliberalism rose to prominence in the 1980s and continues to the present to refer to an ideology that champions consumerism, global

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Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 98. 283

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trading, and international free markets all aimed at producing a better world. Neoliberalism, the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, is an economic and political project distinctly different from any other form of international trade that has occurred throughout history. Its increasing privatization, strengthening of private property rights, market deregulation, corporate mergers and takeovers, and decreasing state intervention and support for social provisions and public goods stages another major gateway to understanding the development and processes of globalization. Neoliberalism is a major economic dynamic in the process of globalization that some have even argued is leading to the McDonaldization—a term George Ritzer uses in The McDonaldization of Society (1993) to refer to the global business practices of the fast-food chain McDonalds—of some areas of literature and culture, specifically regarding literature and culture that is distributed globally. After discussing neoliberalism (10.3) more generally, we will look into the impact of globalization (and neoliberalism) on both translation (10.4) and world literature (10.5). Translation becomes an important aspect of the globalization of literature and culture when language becomes a barrier to its global diffusion. For example, literature written in Japanese is only accessible in translation to readers who cannot read it in the original. The politics of what gets translated, why it gets translated, and the quality of the translation impact not only our view of world literature in the era of globalization, but also perhaps serves as a bridge from globalization theory to world theory, a new paradigm that is reframing intellectual problematics across cognitive and geopolitical areas. While this world theory, or simply, worlding, is introduced in this chapter in connection with world literature, it is one that concerns a very wide range of disciplines. But if institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and multinational corporations like Walmart Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Toyota Motor Corporation (which are also among the ten biggest companies in the world) exemplify the institutional and corporate realities of globalization in the new world order, then the borders between the US and Mexico, Israel and Palestine, and Afghanistan and Pakistan speak to the geopolitical context wherein the era of globalization is still one where borders matter. Border studies (10.2), which is also taken up in this chapter, examines the establishment and disestablishment of borders including the walls that literarily separate the US and Mexico. As another major gateway to understanding the development and processes of globalization, border studies concerns not only colonial borders but also regional, national, and continental borders. Work in this area takes up and intersects with work in other areas of literary and cultural theory including race and justice, especially human rights; and biopolitics, particularly surveillance studies. Regardless of whether one chooses to describe “the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the birth of the Internet and related communication technologies, as well as the consolidation of world markets, transnational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, supranational media sociality, and international networks of finance, digital knowledge exchange, crime and terror sometimes at the expense of statal actors, national sovereignties, and political borders,”2 the beginnings of globalization or merely a sign of its intensification or changing character, the early years of the post-Cold War era are an important to its consideration.

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Christian Moraru, “Globalization,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 504.

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Post-1989 globalization has been described variously as late globalization, accelerated globalization, and contemporary globalization. Irrespective of how one terms it, it is also strong globalization, as Christian Moraru points out, because “it is demonstrably much better marked than ever before in people’s lives as well as in public consciousness.”3 While there are those, like James Clifford, who point out that there are millions of people from across the globe who live in poverty and are not aware of globalization, others would say that public consciousness of globalization is not a requirement to being impacted by it. “Globalization,” writes Moraru, is “the multifaceted, pluricentric, nonlinear, oftentimes contradictory process through which the world’s places, cultures, and communities become more and more interconnected” by means of “a host of techno-economic, political, and cultural forces.”4 It is also a process wherein global capital, politics, and technology increasingly tend to work in consort to flatten differences and to move toward standardization and universalization grounded in the logic of the market. In this regard, the major sections in this chapter—postcolonial theory (10.1), border studies (10.2), neoliberalism (10.3), translation (10.4), and world literature and theory (10.5)—provide several different points of entry into this expansive area of contemporary literary and cultural theory. The question today for many is not whether we live in an era of globalization, but rather will we be able to survive it—a biopolitical question that will serve as a bridge to the concerns of ecocriticism (11.0), the topic of our next chapter.

10.1 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Postcolonial theory deals with the consequences of colonialism. It is concerned with the political, economic, and cultural impact of colonialism both during its heyday and after former-colonial nations have achieved independence. Sometimes the term postcolonial is hyphenated (post-colonial) and is used to refer only to the historical period of independence, but not always. Also, while strictly speaking the independence of the US from Britain via the American Revolutionary War marks the beginning of the postcolonial period, because of the subsequent global political and economic status of the US, it is generally not afforded postcolonial status in postcolonial theory. Rather, given that the decolonization of the US resulted in the formation of political, economic, and cultural power over other nations, specifically developing and newly independent ones, it is described as neocolonial, not postcolonial. Whereas neocolonial nations such as the US are characterized by a new form of imperialism (neoimperialism), postcolonial nations are often the targets of the imperial ambitions of neocolonial nations. Rather, postcolonial theory marks its origins from the dismantling of the British Empire, beginning in 1947 and extending through 1965. During this period, India and Pakistan achieved independence in 1947, Sri Lanka in 1948, and Ghana in 1957. Then, between 1960 and 1965, many other states became independent, including British Guyana, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia and Singapore, Nigeria, Tanganyika, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uganda. The formation of the British Commonwealth (which became the Commonwealth of Nations) established a new political formation in which many of these former colonies of Britain came to participate. Thus, the British

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Moraru, “Globalization,” 504. Moraru, “Globalization,” 503–4.

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Commonwealth, which was formed in 1948, provided the impetus in the mid-1960s for the beginnings of commonwealth studies (or commonwealth literary studies), a field where writers from the former British colonies, particularly those who deal with the colonial encounter and its aftermath, are the focus of scholarly study. Related to commonwealth studies are fields of study concerned with all forms of double consciousness, a term coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to characterize African-American consciousness, one that is both American and Black. “It is a peculiar sensation,” writes Du Bois, “this double-consciousness, this sensation of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”5 W. Lawrence Hogue says that for Du Bois double consciousness is a “gift” of “secondsense” wherein the binary logic of subordination is rejected in favor of a subjectivity that is neither American nor Black but rather both. It is a double consciousness that Hogue describes as “accepting as permanent the tension and the contradiction between the two equal terms.”6 In terms of postcolonial theory, double consciousness refers to one’s capacity to live in two cultures at once: one linked to life under colonialism and the other linked to life under postcolonialism. One of the major theorists to address this topic was Frantz Fanon (whose work was referred to earlier, albeit in the context of gay and lesbian theory). Fanon, who studied under Lacan, wrote on the psychology of racism and colonialism. Born in the former slave colony of Martinique, Fanon was also a student of Aimé Césaire, who was one of the prime movers behind the négritude movement, one that firmly rejected Western stereotypes regarding Black people and embraced a collective sense of Black-African identity. Fanon, however, rejected négritude as an ideology that is unable to dislodge itself from colonial and racial ways of thinking. Whereas négritude built its movement upon embracing négre, a derisive term for Black people, Fanon finds it forever trapped in a dialectic (specifically, a Manichean logic, as described below) wherein Black people are inferior to white people. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he writes: There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at allcosts, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. How do we extricate ourselves?7 Recalling the work of Lacan on “the gaze,” Fanon writes on the effects of the colonial “gaze” on Black people, a gaze emblazoned with white, European, colonial superiority. The problem, according to Fanon, is that négritude cannot free itself from not only the European dialectic regarding Black/white superiority noted above, but also the Hegelian and Marxist positions on Africa noted earlier in the context of subaltern studies: in short, for Hegel, “Africa has no history,” and for Marx, the British colonization of India was for the best.

5 Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903), 5th edition (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1904), 3. 6 W. Lawrence Hogue, “Double Consciousness,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 460. 7 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 10.

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Not only does Fanon take issue with this view of colonization and African history, but he wants to provide an approach to the psychology of racism and colonization that frees itself from Hegelian and Marxist dialectics—one which he further associates with Manichaeism, a religion that originated in the Babylonia in the third century of the common era. Manichaeism generally contends that the framework of world conflict and redemption hinges on the opposition of good and evil, which are identified as light and darkness. Transported into the modern context, the West is associated with light and good, and the rest of the world with darkness and evil. The charge of those on the side of light and good is to civilize, tame, and conquer those on the side of darkness and evil. The problem with négritude for Fanon is that it does not “extricate” itself from the general Manichean system of thought—one that is symptomatic of colonial thought. Still, Fanon, following Sartre in Black Orpheus (1948), accepts—albeit with some qualification— the négritude movement as a necessary part of a greater dialectic. According to Sartre, “Négritude appears to be the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical application of white supremacy is the thesis: the position of Négritude as antithetical value is the moment of the negativity.”8 For Sartre, this negative moment “serves to prepare the way for the synthesis or the realization of the human society without racism,” and “Négritude is dedicated to its own destruction.”9 But in his assessment of négritude, Sartre, according to Fanon, also failed to acknowledge the affective appeal of the movement, dismissing it as a cognitive moment in the adventure of the dialectic. In other words, the question of anti-Black racism is not containable to a mere stage (Sartre’s response) nor is the solution found in négritude’s homogenized view of the Black subject, which denies the reality that “there are many black men.”10 The work of Fanon, Sartre, Albert Memmi, and others from the 1950s and 1960s is representative of Marxist writing from this period that dealt with the topic of colonialism, neocolonialism, and anti-colonialism. Works like Sartre’s Colonialism and Neocolonialism (1964), for example, a critique of French policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, were highly influential in what came to be known in the 1980s as postcolonial theory. Whether this Marxist work from the 1950s and 1960s is regarded as first-wave postcolonial theory or just early postcolonial theory, it would come to be significantly different from the approach of postcolonial theory in the 1980s and following. After this early period, postcolonial theory became increasingly less dialectical, that is, there was less of a tendency to approach the topic as one of colonizer and colonized, wherein a dialectics involving a thesis (white supremacy/the colonizer), its antithesis (Black negativity/the colonized), and their synthesis (a raceless society) is established as the basis of postcolonial critique as Sartre does in Black Orpheus—and more of a tendency to view it from the perspective of discourse theory. Here, the major influences are not Hegelian and Marxist thinking, but rather the discourse formations of Foucault as adapted to the topic of colonialism and postcolonialism by Edward Said. In Orientalism (1978), Said takes up the relationship between the West (or the Occident) and the East (or the Orient). While his work is broadly in the tradition of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre, it moves beyond their Marxist and Hegelian dialectics by drawing upon Foucault’s approach to history, discourse, and power. “I have found it useful here,” writes Said, “to employ Foucault’s notion of a

Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus (1948), trans. Samuel Allen (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), 60. Sartre, Black Orpheus, 60. 10 This line is adapted from “for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 136). 8 9

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discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism.”11 Said’s book traces the ways in which the West, particularly European culture, has produced a particular discourse regarding the East in order to exert authority over it. Orientalism, as discussed by Said, is not a specific place on the map, but rather a form of knowledge (or discourse formation) that can be utilized to manage and control people. Writes Said, “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively”12 after the Enlightenment, that is, in the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries. In short, Said views Orientalism as a species of Manichean thought, “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).”13 One of the aims of Said’s work is to help us to “unlearn” this relationship of absolute difference between the familiar and the strange presented in European discourse, that is, to engage us in (following Raymond Williams) the process of the “ ‘unlearning’ of ‘the inherent dominative mode.’ ”14 While Said is regarded by many as the originator of postcolonial theory and Orientalism one of its foundational texts, the work of the subalterns, beginning with the first volume of Subaltern Studies, which was published in 1982, was also formative to the field. In view of Said’s position on Orientalism, the subaltern’s historical studies of non-Eurocentric alternatives to the histories produced by the West might be regarded as key events in the process of unlearning the inherent dominative mode of history. Spivak, whose criticisms of the work of the subalterns in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) were discussed earlier, lays out a direction for postcolonial theory that like Said is also heavily invested in the discourse of domination and the textual construction of power. Still, if one wants to split poststructuralist hairs, whereas Said’s work on postcolonial theory is more aligned with Foucault’s discursive formations, then Spivak’s is more aligned with Derrida’s version of poststructuralism, namely, deconstruction. This is just another way of saying that poststructuralist theory has a generative relationship with postcolonial theory. It is also another way of saying that the subject and subjectivity comes to be an important topic in postcolonial theory in the 1980s and thereafter. Finally, two other concepts come to have an important role in postcolonial theory: hybridity and mimicry. The former term, on the micro level, write Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and Rosa Freedman, concerns the “study of the breaking up of racial, national, linguistic, or other identity binaries.”15 Hybridity reveals connections and influences that cross national borders and resists the epistemological essentialism that locates knowledge as bounded by borders. On the macro level, hybridity is “a way to analyze the impact of globalization, sometimes with direct connection to ‘reactive nationalisms or ethnicities.’ ” Homi Bhabha describes hybridity in The Location of Culture (1994) as a “difference ‘within,’ a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality.”16 In terms of postcolonial culture, Said, Spivak, and Bhabha all see hybridity as a way for writers to both

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 3. Said, Orientalism, 3. 13 Said, Orientalism, 43. 14 Said, Orientalism, 28; citing Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), 376. 15 Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and Rosa Freedman, “Hybridity,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 521. 16 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 13. 11 12

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understand as well as critique the West from a position that is both outside and inside. This socalled “third space” of hybridity for Bhabha is, drawing from Lacan, “neither the one nor the other,”17 a space that affords postcolonial writers a position both within their indigenous tradition as well as one that is both inside and outside of the European tradition. Moreover, Bhabha argues that the hybrid subject speaks from multiple locations. This is a form of mimicry wherein the colonial subject engages in “a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power.”18 Bhabha calls this mimicry a “sign of a double articulation”19—a phrasing that echoes the “double consciousness” of Du Bois. Mimicry, however, is “also the sign of the inappropriate . . . a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary power.”20 In short, mimicry is both a subversive force for the colonized subject because it radically destabilizes the “us/them” binary of neocolonial discourses as well as a potential threat to them via increased levels of surveillance.

10.2 BORDER STUDIES “We all live our lives in terms of spaces organized around boundaries and borders,” wrote J. Hillis Miller. There are the boundaries of our bodies, separating inside from outside, but exposed to the outside and able to be penetrated in various ways that are gender distinct, the walls of the various rooms in our houses or apartments, the wall separating our living space from the outside, the edge of our land if we own our house and the land it is on, the various geographical and topographical borders we cross or do not cross when we go outside our houses: roads, rivers, shores, township, county, city, state, or national borders, the border around the community with which we live, from example, the sharp line drawn in Deer Isle, Maine, where I now live most of the year, between those who are “from here,” and those who are “from away.” . . . Other borders can be adduced, class distinctions, for example, that have great force in the US just because we deny that they exist. We tend to claim that all US citizens are “middle class.” These many boundaries are so internalized that we take them for granted. We live our lives in terms of them without thinking much about it.21 For Miller, a “cascade of words” come to mind when the topic of boundaries and borders is broached. These words include: zone, edge, margin, frontier, horizon . . . barrier, wall (as in “the Berlin Wall,” “the Great Wall of China,” “the Israeli–Palestinian Wall,” the 700-mile wall between the US and Mexico

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 125; Bhaba citing Lacan. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 19 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 20 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86. 21 J. Hillis Miller, “Boundaries in Beloved,” symploke– 15.1/2 (2007): 26. 17 18

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that some Republican politicians want to build), front as in All’s Quiet on the Western Front or “Popular Front,” partition, hedge, fence, pale (as in “That’s beyond the pale”), gate, door, threshold, anteroom, foyer, borderline, borderland, in-between, boundary line, fault line, fissure, rift, border zone, terminal, term, terme, barrier, barricade, demarcation, zone, meridian, limit.22 While the specific context of Miller’s comments is a reading of boundaries and borders in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), his comments stage well the broader context of border studies— and border theory. “Events in the early 1990s,” writes Anssi Paasi, “gave a strong boost to border studies.”23 According to Paasi, this boost “was related to the removal of old states and borders, the rise of new ones, the moving (and the ‘ethnicization’) of conflicts from state borders inside states, and the related refugee problems.”24 By the late 1990s, the common refrain was that border studies are “mushrooming, that new theoretical approaches and interdisciplinary views on borders are needed.”25 This view resonated, claims Paasi, “with the invention of new keywords in the social sciences, often related to globalization (space of flows, de/re-territorialization, mobility, hybridity, post-modernity, neo-liberalism), which seemed to challenge the apparent fixity that had characterized the world of border research during the Cold War period,” that is, the period from 1946 to 1991, one situated between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But, as we have already encountered most of these keywords in other theoretical contexts (e.g., spaces of flows and de/re-territorialization in the work of Deleuze and Guattari; postmodernism has arisen in several contexts including Jameson, Lyotard, and Baudrillard; hybridity in postcolonial theory; and mobility in surveillance studies), an argument might be made that border studies has been enhanced by the development of poststructuralism—a term that can be used to describe the work of Deleuze, Guattari, Jameson, and Lyotard, and one that is closely associated with developments in postcolonial theory and surveillance studies. Still, in spite of growing interest, there is no “catch-all theory” of border studies. “A general border theory,” comments Paasi, “seems unattainable, and even undesirable, for two reasons”:26 First, individual state borders are historically contingent and characterized by contextual features and power relations. There can hardly be one grand theory that would be valid for all borders.27 . . . Second, current research in relational thinking treats bounded spaces generally as politically regressive and suggests that territories should be seen as open networked or topological spaces of relations.28 In short, approached through relational thinking, border studies is not concerned with specific borders. Rather, it is concerned with the general role of state borders as products of modernity.

Miller, “Boundaries in Beloved,” 24. Anssi Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” Political Geography 30 (2011): 62. 24 Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” 62. 25 Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” 62. 26 Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” 62. 27 Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” 62. 28 Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” 63. 22 23

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Relational thinking is a kind of critique of borders, one wherein borders are both “lines that surround spatial entities” as well as “lines that are crossed by all kinds of connections in the ‘topological’ world,” particularly connections regarding the economy.29 “Borders are never to be found only in border areas,” comments Paasi, “but are also located in wider social practice/discourse all around societies, and increasing in relation to global space.”30 This “open networked” or “topological spaces of relations” approach to border studies has led some to reterm (and rethink) the field as critical border studies—an approach that is attuned to developments in critical theory and philosophy, particularly those associated with poststructuralism and biopolitics. Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams have proposed an agenda for critical border studies. It consists of three major areas for research: border epistemology, border ontology, and the space-time of borders. First, in terms of border epistemology, critical border studies builds upon a poststructuralist epistemology. Derrida, for example, has shown the ways in which borders are a key element of knowledge in the West. However, as Parker and Vaughan-Williams remind us, “Western metaphysics has been conditioned by borders that it struggles to uphold even as it averts its gaze from the inevitably contingent, indeterminate character” of them.31 This contingency is for Parker and Vaughan-Williams (following Derrida) “obscured by violence that underpins and is expressed in the border.”32 For them, the idea of borders is epistemologically seductive. It is “a craving for the distinctions of borders, for the sense of certainty, comfort and security that they offer.”33 One of the tasks of critical border studies is to ask whether alternate epistemologies are possible, that is, epistemologies that avoid the seduction of the border. It also asks if alternative topologies are available that avoid the binary oppositions of inside/outside border-thinking. Among the alternate non-binary topologies are ones marked by margins and thresholds—rather than boundaries and borders. Finally, border epistemology asks what it feels like to exist as a border in the way that migrants who are not welcome feel. This latter epistemological shift in border studies is one from geopolitics to biopolitics. Second, in terms of border ontology, critical border studies examines the ways in which “the border” becomes a foundational element in an imagined world. This ontological question then turns to the ways in which borders as foundations are “linked to violence, force, and the deployment of a logic of exceptionalism à la Giorgio Agamben.”34 Critical border studies asks is it “possible to identify a new non- or de-territorial nomos [viz., body of law] of the earth à la Carl Schmitt?”35 For critical border studies, the biopolitics of Agamben and Schmitt afford opportunities to examine how the border as a foundational, ontological element of an imagined world is produced and reproduced. It also provides an opportunity to deploy new ontologies to reflect the changing and indeterminate nature of borders in critical border studies. Unlike the “older” ontologies of borders

29

Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” 63. Paasi, “Borders, Theory and the Challenge of Relational Thinking,” 63. 31 Noel Parker, Nick Vaughan-Williams, et al., “Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics 14 (2009): 584. While a total of seventeen individuals contributed to this article, only Parker and Vaughan-Williams are listed by name on the title page—the rest are cited in a footnote. 32 Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand?” 584. 33 Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand?” 584. 34 Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand?” 585. 35 Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand?” 585. The reference here is to Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2001). 30

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and boundaries, these “newer” ontologies utilize more fluid and less determinate poststructural concepts such as the threshold (or, soglia), the margin, and the event. Deployment of alternative ontologies is one of the major ways in which critical border studies is fundamentally different from border studies. Third, and finally, in terms of the space-time of borders, critical border studies asks how different political and ethical possibilities are opened or closed through alternative border epistemologies and ontologies. Issues here include what does it mean to transgress a border given alternative border epistemologies and ontologies? Does “transgressing” a border now mean that “transgression produce[s] the very border that is seemingly transgressed?”36 Or does it ethically and politically mean something else? Also, alternative border epistemologies and ontologies ask us to reconsider core–margin relations in a way that can change the strategic possibilities and potential of marginality. In sum, if Miller is right that “We all live our lives in terms of spaces organized around boundaries and borders,” then critical border studies asks, through its alternative epistemologies, ontologies, and politics, nothing less than for us to reconsider life. These biopolitical questions are only intensified in practices characterized by globalization, imperialism, and (as we shall see in the next section), neoliberalism. According to Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, “the study of territorial, geophysical, political and cultural borders today has become a primary, abiding and growing interest across scholarly disciplines, and is related to changing scholarly approaches to such key research subjects and objects as the state, nation, sovereignty, citizenship, migration and the overarching forces and practices of globalization.”37 Moreover, if we follow Paasi, and further link globalization to the space of flows, de/re-territorialization, mobility, hybridity, postmodernity, and neoliberalism, then border studies draws upon much of the contemporary literary and cultural theory that has been discussed earlier under the chapter heading of biopolitics. In particular, critical border studies might be viewed as an outgrowth of key developments in poststructuralism and biopolitics. Unlike first-generation border studies, which “centered on a localized, particularistic and territorially focused notion of borders,”38 critical border studies is much more de-centered and de-territorialized. Moreover, in critical border studies (rather than critical border theory), emphasis is less on developing a general theory of borders than on utilizing concepts from areas of contemporary literary and cultural theory (such as poststructuralism, biopolitics, and postcolonial theory) to re-examine and rethink well-established categories from geography and the social sciences. These categories include “region, place, space, territory, agency and power” as well as “social practices such as politics, governance and economics” and “cultural processes such as ethnicity or national socialization (education).”39

10.3 NEOLIBERALISM Neoliberalism, the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, is a broadly used term that refers to an economic and political project that rose to prominence in the 1980s and continues to

36

Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand?” 585. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, “Borders and Border Studies,” in A Companion to Border Studies, eds. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 2. 38 Wilson and Donnan, “Borders and Border Studies,” 8. 39 Anssi Paasi, “Generations and the ‘Development’ of Border Studies,” Geopolitics 10 (2005): 670. 37

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the present. Use of the term, though, can be confusing because it was coined in post-World War I Germany by the Freiburg School; is sometimes associated with Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins, and the 1930s London School of Economics; is at other times associated with the work of Milton Friedman and the emergence of the Chicago School of economics in the 1960s; and is at still other times associated with the neoliberalismo of Latin American pro-market economists of the 1970s. Some even trace the foundations of neoliberalism to eighteenth-century thought—alternately, to the French Physiocrat’s laissez-faire economics, to the classical (laissez-faire and free market) economics of Adam Smith, or even to the social and political philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Critics of the term sometimes point to its contested genealogy as evidence for dismissing it wholesale. The so-called “golden age of controlled capitalism” (1945–75) preceded the emergence of the neoliberal project. It was inspired by the economic and political thought of John Maynard Keynes who advocated for the market but not the free market. Keynes believed that public spending by the government should be increased during economic recessions to spur growth, and decreased during periods of growth to keep inflation down. This project was scrapped during the first wave of neoliberalism in the 1980s by US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, both of whom shared the neoliberal belief that government is inefficient and strove to end the Keynesian era of “big government.” The second wave of neoliberalism in the 1990s was forwarded by the market globalism of US President William “Bill” Clinton and the Third Way of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, both of whom continued the neoconservative hyper-patriotism, militarism, neglect of the environment, and rejection of multiculturalism of first-wave neoliberalism. Also, both waves were marked by increasing privatization, strengthening of private property rights, market deregulation, corporate mergers and takeovers, and decreasing state intervention and support for social provisions and public goods. The ideology of neoliberalism champions consumerism, global trading, and international free markets, all aimed at producing a better world. Neoliberal governance advocates individualism (or radical self-interest), competition, decentralization, strategic plans, cost-benefit analyses, outcomes management, and performance-based funding. Its proponents believe that the world is structured by equations—and that it is everyone’s job to maximize their economic, social, and political positions through mastery of these equations. Also, its proponents believe that everything is part of a market, and if it is not, “such as land, water, education, health care, social security, and environmental pollution,” as David Harvey points out in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), then these markets must be created, by the state, if necessary.40 Moreover, the neoliberal project argues that public value is determined by the market. The promise of neoliberalism, says Maurizio Lazzarato in The Making of the Indebted Man (2012), was that it would allow everyone the opportunity to be a shareholder, an owner, and an entrepreneur.41 But for Lazzarato, however, neoliberalism’s “entrepreneurial man” soon gave way to the “indebted man,” who now dominates the global economic landscape. Since the late 1970s, there has been a wide-ranging critique of neoliberalism. In his 1978–9 lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault explained how “neo-liberals,” at least in the US

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2011), trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012), 9. 40 41

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anyway, “try to apply economic analysis to a series of objects, to domains of behavior or conduct which were not market forms of behavior or conduct; they attempt to apply economic analysis to marriage, the education of children, and criminality, for example.”42 Henry Giroux, one of the most outspoken critics of the neoliberal project, describes it in The Terror of Neoliberalism (2004) as an ideology and politics buoyed by the spirit of a market fundamentalism that subordinates the art of democratic politics to the rapacious laws of a market economy that expands its reach to include all aspects of social life within the dictates and values of market-driven society. More important, it is an economic and implicitly cultural theory—a historical and socially constructed ideology that needs to be made visible, critically engaged, and shaken from the stranglehold of power it currently exercises over most of the commanding institutions of national and global life. As such, neoliberalism makes it difficult for many people either to imagine a notion of individual and social agency necessary for reclaiming a substantive democracy or to theorize the economic, cultural, and political institutions necessary for a viable global public sphere in which public institutions, spaces, and goods become valued as part of a larger democratic struggle for a sustainable future and the downward distribution of wealth, resources, and power.43 And William Davies describes it in The Happiness Industry (2015) as a “depressive-competitive disorder” that “arises because the injunction to achieve a higher utility score—be that measured in money or physical symptoms—becomes privatized.”44 For him, the authority in neoliberalism “consists simply in measuring, rating, comparing and contrasting the strong and the weak without judgment, showing the weak how much stronger they might be, and confirming to the strong that they are winning, at least for the time being.”45 The eviscerating consequences of the neoliberal imperatives for corporate managerialism, instrumentalism, rationalization, and austerity in social, political, and educational policy and practice have been widely discussed. Harvey’s Brief History surveys its economic and political dangers, while Giroux’s The Terror of Neoliberalism links it to the rise of authoritarianism, militarism, and the eclipse of democracy and democratic values. Others, like Jeffrey Di Leo in Higher Education under Late Capitalism (2017), show how academic identity has been recalibrated by the neoliberal project, and in Corporate Humanities in Higher Education (2014) how the humanities have been reshaped by it. Moreover, in Catastrophe and Higher Education (2020), Di Leo argues that the future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory. Without the aid of diverse and critical forms of theory, higher education is always already vulnerable to the formidable and destructive forces of economic neoliberalism. Left to its own designs, these destructive forces will continue to eat away at the educational center of academe and replace it with a vocational

Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 267–8. Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), xxii. 44 William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (London: Verso, 2015), 179. 45 Davies, The Happiness Industry, 179. 42 43

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training center. And once the educational center of higher education is replaced by this lower form of education, the argument for a bachelor’s degree rather a training certificate becomes increasingly more difficult to make especially if the immediate earning potential of the certificate is greater than the bachelor’s degree. In sum, higher education under neoliberalism is an educational catastrophe. Higher education under neoliberalism becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.46 Finally, there is also a growing body of work that explores its implications for contemporary culture and literature, with David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) providing a fine starting point for the cultural consequences of neoliberalism. In short, neoliberalism is a broad door through which a dominant economic and political project has entered into the study of literature and culture. Areas of contemporary literary and cultural theory where the logic of neoliberalism is often a conceptual centerpiece of analysis and critique include biopolitics and ecocriticism (11.0). Finally, it should be noted that postcritique (15.4)—one of a variety of forms of antitheory (15.0) that will be discussed later—utilizes a defense of neoliberalism in its rejection of critique—and theory.

10.4 TRANSLATION In 1978, André Lefevere proposed translation studies as the name of a discipline concerning “the problems raised by the production and description of translations.”47 At the time, “there seemed to be little interest in the study of translation,” comments Susan Bassnett.48 “Indeed,” she continues, “the notion of an independent field, some would say discipline in its own right, focusing on the theory and practice of translation would have been viewed with astonishment in the academic world.”49 However, by the early 1990s, “which saw the collapse of communism and the break-up of the former Soviet Union, China opening her doors to the world, and the end of apartheid in South Africa,” the situation of translation studies changed significantly. During the 1990s, translation studies “came into its own,” states Bassnett, “for this proved to be the decade of global expansion.”50 “Once perceived as a marginal activity,” she continues, “translation began to be seen as a fundamental act of human exchange.”51 For Bassnett, the rise of translation studies can be linked to both the digital media revolution and processes of globalization in the 1990s: Not only has it become important to access more of the world through the information revolution, but it has become urgently important to understand more about one’s own point of departure. For globalization has its antithesis, as has been demonstrated by world-wide renewal of interest in cultural origins and in exploring questions of identity. Translation has a crucial role to play in aiding understanding of an increasingly fragmentary world.52 46 Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Catastrophe and Higher Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 241. 47 Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Translation Studies, 1st edition (London: Metheun, 1980), 1. 48 Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition (London: Routledge, 2014), 1. 49 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 1. 50 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 2. 51 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 2. 52 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 2.

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But as interest in translation and translators grew in the 1990s, so too did two different images of the field. On one side, there was the image of the translator as a “force of good, a creative artist who ensures the survival of writing across time and space, an intercultural mediator and interpreter, a figure whose importance to the continuity and diffusion of culture is immeasurable.”53 On this view, writes Jeffrey Di Leo, our “commitment to translation is a good barometer of our commitment to the global community and international affairs.”54 For Di Leo, “it is unreasonable, even in an increasingly global community, to expect people to master multiple languages and cultures as a means of gaining an understanding of the world outside of one’s language or languages.”55 However, asks Di Leo, “What does it say then about our commitment to global understanding and multicultural awareness when we learn that only 3 percent of books published in the U.S. are translations?”56 For Di Leo, this figure—3 percent—is the real indicator of our commitment to global relations and world literature. On the other side, however, there is the image of the translation as “a highly suspect activity, one in which an inequality of power relations (inequalities of economics, politics, gender and geography) is reflected in the mechanics of textual production.”57 For Spivak and other postcolonial theorists, for example, translation has been used as “an instrument of colonial domination, a means of depriving the colonized people of a voice.”58 Translation, according to the colonial model, is one of the ways that the dominant culture of the colonizer reinforces its hegemonic power over the dominated culture of the colonized. As Mahasweta Sengupta puts it, “a cursory review of what sells in the West as representative of India and its culture provides ample proof of the binding power of representation; we remain trapped in the cultural stereotypes created and nurtured through translated texts.”59 Consequently, for Anuradha Dingwaney, the translation process in the colonial (and neocolonial) model entails a certain degree of violence, particularly when the colonized culture is regarded as the “other.”60 One of the consequences of the postcolonial position on translation is a rethinking of the relationship between the source text (viz., the “original” text) and the target text (viz., the “translation”). Whereas some translation theorists contend that there is an unequal relationship between the source text and the target text, the postcolonial position on translation contends that the relationship is one of equality. That is to say, the original text and the source text are equally the products of the creativity of the writer of the original and its translator. For Bhabha, this equality changes the very meaning of translation. Whereas formerly it referred to a process involving (or transaction between) a source text and a target text (or, an original language and a translated language), now translation is a metaphor for the increasing migration of people in our globalized world. For Bhabha, translation is connected to the third-space of hybridity discussed earlier:

Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 5. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “The Three Percent,” in The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print (Huntsville: Texas Review Press, 2019), 47. 55 Di Leo, “The Three Percent,” 47. 56 Di Leo, “The Three Percent,” 47. 57 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 5. 58 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 5. 59 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 5; Sengupta cited by Bassnett. 60 Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 5; Dingwaney cited by Bassnett. 53 54

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[T]he theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the “inter”—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the “people.” And by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.61 Thus, for Bhabha, translation—as an exploration of the Third Space—is a subversive force for the colonized subject because it radically destabilizes the source/target text binary of the colonial position on translation. Moreover, it is also a potential threat to neocolonialism as it is a key part of the process of “envisaging national, anti-nationalist histories of the ‘people.’ ” The postcolonial approach to translation might be described as dialogical in that it “happens in a space that belongs to neither source nor target absolutely.”62 Still, it is but one of a number of fundamentally different approaches to translation. Jakobson, for example, classifies translation into three types: rewording (or intralingual translation) is an interpretation of verbal signs by other signs of the same language; translation proper (or interlingual translation) is the interpretation of verbal signs by some other language; and transmutation (or intersemiotic translation) is an interpretation of verbal signs by nonverbal signs (for example, painting or music).63 There is also the notion of translatability, which Benjamin describes as “an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential for the works themselves that they be translated; it means, rather, that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability.”64 Derrida, then taking his cue from Benjamin, wonders if there is a text that remains “intact and virgin in spite of the labor of translation.”65 This question of what is “the intangible, the untouchable” in translation is one that Derrida says “fascinates and orients the work of the translator.”66 Which, finally, brings us to the question of the untranslatable, that is to say, what, if anything, resists translation? In The Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), there are entries on a wide range of philosophical, literary, and political terms that arguably resist translation.67 It is at this point that the conditions of possibility of translation, in their epistemological, ethical, and global senses, come to the fore. As to the latter, Brian O’Keeffe wonders to what extent translation enables the forces of globalization (isn’t the supreme triumph of translation the fact we are all suborned by the international language of finance?) or offers a means to resist

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 38–9. Bassnett, Translation Studies, 4th edition, 7. 63 Roman Jakobson, “On the Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959), in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 145. 64 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923), trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 254. 65 Jacques Derrida, “Des tours de Babel” (1985), trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 214. 66 Derrida, “Des tours de Babel,” 214. 67 Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, eds., The Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 61 62

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(can acts of deliberate untranslatability glitch and disrupt the smooth activities of internationalization?).68 The notion of untranslatability being a force for or against globalization provides a glimpse of the ways in which the major theoretical concepts of translation are now intertwined with other theoretical concepts such as globe, planet, and world. As noted earlier, it is entirely another matter whether the spread of translation across the globe is a good thing—or not.

10.5 WORLD LITERATURE AND THEORY “I realize more and more that poetry is a common property of mankind,” said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “and that it appears everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men.”69 However, he warns Germans that if they do not look at poetry produced outside of Germany, they risk becoming arrogant. “Therefore,” he continues, “I like to look around in foreign nations and advise everyone to do the same on his part.”70 “National literature means little these days; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must endeavor to hasten its coming.”71 With these remarks in 1827 to his young disciple, Johann Peter Eckermann, Goethe coins the term world literature, which in German is Weltliterature. However, the question of the arrival of the “epoch of world literature” remains a topic of vibrant debate. According to David Damrosch, world literature is often regarded in one or more of three ways: (1) World Literature is an Established Body of Classics—a classic is a work that not only has foundational and transcendent value, but also often imperial value. These classics often only refer to ancient Greek and Roman literature. (2) World Literature is an Evolving Body of Masterpieces—a masterpiece is a work from any time period that is nearly equivalent in value to the classics. These masterpieces include ancient Greek and Roman literature and sometimes are described as comprising a “great conversation.” (3) World Literature is Multiple Windows on the World—these windows into foreign worlds may or may not be masterpieces, and may or may not be visibly linked to each other (as they are in a “great conversation”).72 While Goethe holds all three conceptions of world literature, Damrosch offers the following refinement to them: “World literature is a mode of circulation and of reading—this mode is applicable to both individual works and bodies of works. This mode of circulation and reading is available for classics, masterpieces, and new discoveries.”73 However, for Damrosch, world literature is something different from global literature, which he defines as texts “that might be read solely in airline terminals, unaffected by any specific context

Brian O’Keeffe, “Translation,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 238; my emphasis. J. P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, ed. Hans Kohn, trans. Gisela C. O’Brien (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964), 94. 70 Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 94. 71 Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, 94. 72 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 15. 73 Damrosch, What is World Literature? 5. 68 69

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whatever.”74 This distinction is meant to emphasize the import of the “shaping force of local contexts” on world literature. Nevertheless, for Damrosch, even airport bookstores and their customers should be linked to specific contexts. “The airport bookstore is stocked by buyers who operate first and foremost within a national context and its distribution system,” comments Damrosch, “and the bookstore’s customers, mostly traveling to or from home, continue to read in ways profoundly shaped by home-country norms.”75 On the one hand, Damrosch does not want world literature to “disintegrate into the conflicting multiplicity of separate national traditions”; on the other hand, he does not want it to “be swallowed up in the white noise that Janet Abu-Lughod has called ‘global babble.’ ”76 The latter would make it more like an “infinite, ungraspable canon of works” than a finite, graspable one. But contra Damrosch, the increasing impact of globalization and neoliberalism on book production and distribution worldwide begs the question of whether world literature is not already global literature. Consider, for example, that one in four books sold worldwide is the product of one company, Penguin Random House. Given their disproportionately large global-market share, even if the airport bookstore is stocked by local buyers and its patrons bring with them their home-country purchasing norms, the majority of books available for purchase in airports are the products of multinational corporations. Today, Penguin Random House has more than 250 imprints and brands on six continents. It publishes 70,000 digital and 15,000 print titles annually and has more than 100,000 eBooks available worldwide. The company, which employs 10,615 people, is the world’s largest trade book publisher. But Penguin Random House is only a small portion of Bertelsmann, a much larger international media company that operates in fifty countries with divisions in broadcasting (RTL Group), magazine publishing (Gruner + Jahr), music (BMG), service provider (Arvato), education (Bertelsmann education Group), investment (Bertelsmann Investments), and printing (Bertelsmann Printing Group) in addition to Penguin Random House, its book publishing division. From the perspective of neoliberalism, the globalization of the book industry (and, by extension, world literature) is one of increasing corporate hegemony and decreasing literature and language differentiation. But if Damrosch’s approach to world literature aims to avoid being “swallowed up” by “global babble,” others are taking the opposite approach. Namely, they are embracing “world” and its cognate terms such as “planet,” “earth,” and “globe” in an effort to better understand the “worlding” not only of literature but also areas ranging from philosophy, history, and art to architecture, communication, and biology. In fact, Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru argue that “Disciplines from literary-cultural criticism and cybernetics to environmental studies and economics have been undergoing of late a spectacular and complex reorientation, the result of which is the incremental if still contentious recentering of entire fields, epistemologies, methodologies, and vocabularies on ‘world’ and its prefixed and suffixed brethren.”77 For them, this means that two objectives are being pursued: (1) Describing and Theorizing the World—the objective here is to offer new descriptions and theorizations that respond to the contemporary crises of the surrounding, empirical world;

Damrosch, What is World Literature? 25. Damrosch, What is World Literature? 25. 76 Damrosch, What is World Literature? 5. 77 Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru, “Introduction: World Theory in the New Millenium,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory, eds. Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 1. 74 75

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and, (2) The Worlding of the Disciplines—the objective here is to deploy new descriptions and theorizations of the world to rethink the work done across disciplines. From the perspective of world theory, the question of whether or not world literature is “swallowed up” by “global babble” becomes a matter of how one theorizes world, worlding, and worldliness—and how this theorization potentially reframes world literature. World theory often entails a paradigm shift because of its potential to reframe entire disciplines and their intellectual problematics. So, for example, in the case of worlding publishing, Di Leo argues that “the world from the perspective of the publishing industry is not found on a map or by the membership in the United Nations.”78 “Rather,” he concludes, “the world for the publishing industry is found on a financial table, or, more bluntly, is a financial table.”79 In terms of Goethe, however, the world is not a financial table but is rather a geographical scope that indicates the potential of literary production. Again, he is looking to world as a way for literature to escape from national and linguistic boundaries (or borders) as well as from the limits of local necessity. But as we know already from critical border studies, worlding as globalization can bring to the fore many other considerations regarding the worlding of literature such as the space of flows, de/re-territorialization, mobility, hybridity, postmodernity, and neoliberalism. Moreover, from the perspective of world theory, each of these considerations has the potential to radically alter the epistemology, ontology, and space-time of world literature. To bracket and not consider them because of their potential to provide an “infinite, ungraspable canon of works” in the name of world literature rather than a finite, graspable one is to bury one’s head in the ground of contemporary literary and cultural theory. That is to say, globalization does not go away as a concern for world literature just because it greatly complicates it. And while systems theory (12.3) and computational analysis offers ways to deal with the complexities of globalization with respect to literature, there are others including biopolitics and ecocriticism (11.0). While ecocriticism will be taken up in the next chapter, the connection between biopolitics and world theory can be established through Heidegger’s efforts to rethink the relationship between world (Welt) and earth (Erde). According to Heidegger, the Western tradition regards the world as the opposite of the earth. In this tradition, writes William Spanos, “especially since the third (anthropological) phase bearing witness to the ascendency of man (Anthropos) as sovereign over all he surveys, the earth, to oversimplify, has come to be seen as raw material to be shaped by man as maker (homo faber).”80 In “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), Heidegger says that during this anthropological phase, humans have reduced the earth to a standing- or disposablereserve (Bestand).81 According to Spanos, this “worlding of the earth” by Heidegger also renders humans disposable and is the genealogical origin of the biopolitics of Foucault, Agamben, and others. For Spanos, biopolitics is “an initiative of the worlding process that, as Agamben has put it, is culminating in the reduction of human life (bios) to bare life (nuda vida), life that can be killed without the killing be called murder.”82

Jeffrey R. Di Leo, “Worlding Publishing,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory, 381. Di Leo, “Worlding Publishing,” 381. 80 William Spanos, “Worldhood,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 739. 81 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 298. 82 Spanos, “Worldhood,” 740. 78 79

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Consequently, the genealogy of world via biopolitics brings very different questions to bear on world literature from one that seeks to avoid the complexities of globalization. In sum, as world theory aims to develop new descriptions and theorizations that respond to the contemporary crises of the surrounding, empirical world, it also encourages the development of new descriptions and theorizations of world literature.

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Ecocriticism 11.0 INTRODUCTION Ecocriticism is an abbreviation for ecological literary criticism. It can be traced back to the late 1970s, where it was coined by William Rueckert in “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978). However, it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that it began to be used with some frequency to refer to an interdisciplinary field in literary and cultural studies. Cheryll Glotfelty is credited as reviving the term in 1989 as an alternative to a domain within literary and cultural studies that was formerly referred to as the study of nature writing. Ecocriticism, or, alternately, green theory, might be regarded as concerned with the following: (1) The Environmental Imagination—ecocriticism analyzes the role that the natural environment plays in the imagination of a cultural community at a specific historical moment; (2) The Concept of Nature—ecocriticism examines how the concept of “nature” is defined; (3) The Value of Nature—ecocriticism asks what are the values that are assigned to nature or denied it and why; (4) The Relationship between Humans and Nature—ecocriticism explores the way in which the relationship between humans and nature is envisioned; (5) Literary Genres—ecocriticism investigates how nature is used literally or metaphorically in certain literary or aesthetic genres and tropes. It also explores the assumptions about nature that underlie these genres and tropes; and, (6) Environmental Activism—ecocriticism intervenes in current social, political, and economic debates surrounding environmental pollution and preservation.1 Moreover, though the terms ecocriticism and green theory are often used interchangeably, some use the former term in a more narrow sense to refer only to the study of literature and nature; and the latter term in a wider sense to refer not only to the study of literature, but also art, film, music, politics, and philosophy in relation to nature. In addition, it might be noted that ecocriticism is the preferred term in the US, whereas green theory is more often used in the UK. When Rueckert invented the term ecocriticism, though he clearly had the more narrow notion in mind (literature and nature), he nevertheless aimed to treat literature as nature. The move from and to as thereby broadened the study of literature by opening it up to the entire biosphere, that is,

1

Ursula Heise, “Science and Ecocriticism,” American Book Review 18.5 (1997): 4. 303

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the entire complex of planetary life (bios). “Poems,” writes Rueckert, “are green plants among us.”2 As plants, poems arrest the energy on its path to entropy and in doing so, not only raise matter from lower to higher order, but help to create a self-perpetuating and evolving system. That is, they help to create creativity and community, and when their energy is released and flows out into others, to again raise matter from lower to higher order (to use one of the most common descriptions of what culture is).3 This approach is one that applies the terminology of environmentalism to literature in metaphorical ways. Here, writes Ursula Heise, notions such as ecology, ecosystem, ecological balance, energy, resources, and scarcity have been transferred to texts conceived of as systems with an internal logic that, when activated by the reader, reveals the dynamic coexistence of diverse components and the text’s overall evolutionary, negentropic thrust.4 For Heise, applications of the terminology of environmentalism to literature are problematic because “they tend not only [to] revive the obsolete metaphor of the literary text as biological organism, but also to reintroduce, by way of nonliterary terminology, literary visions of nature as inherently creative, harmonious, and peaceful.”5 However, for Heise and many others, this does not mean that we should not establish a relationship between literature and nature, but rather that a more antagonistic relationship is needed. One place to view such antagonistic relationships is in the couplings of the prefix eco- with other areas of literary and cultural theory. For example, two areas that have been long coupled with ecological theory and criticism are feminist theory (ecofeminism) and critical race theory (environmental racism). In fact, associating the exploitation of the environment with sexism and racism precedes even Rueckert’s coinage of ecocriticism. In 1974, for example, Sheila Collins argued that “Racism, sexism, class exploitation, and ecological destruction are four interlocking pillars upon which the structure of patriarchy rests.”6 More recently, queer theory has been paired with environmental studies, with Robert Azzarello pointing out that both “articulate a profound interest in the ‘natural.’ ”7 And postcolonial theory has been studied in connection with literatures of the environment, which Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley connect to the work of Edward Said, who “helps us to see that to speak of postcolonial ecology is to foreground a spatial imagination made possible by the experience of

William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978), in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 111. 3 Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 111. 4 Heise, “Science and Ecocriticism,” 6. 5 Heise, “Science and Ecocriticism,” 6. 6 Sheila Collins, A Different Heaven and Earth: A Feminist Perspective on Religion (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1974), 161. 7 Robert Azzarello, “Unnatural Predators: Queer Theory Meets Environmental Studies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 138. 2

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place.”8 Postcolonial ecology here reminds us that ecological considerations can—and perhaps also should—be linked to the concept of place, which DeLoughrey and Handley say has infinite meanings and morphologies: it might be defined geographically, in terms of the expansion of empire; environmentally, in terms of wilderness and urban settings; genealogically, in linking communal ancestry to land; as well as phenomenologically, connecting body to place . . . Place encodes time, suggesting that histories embedded in land and sea have always provided vital and dynamic methodologies for understanding the transformative impact of empire and the anticolonial epistemologies it tries to suppress. Geocriticism (11.4), the area of literary and cultural theory that focuses on the relations between space, place, and literature, is discussed in this chapter as a subarea of ecocritical thought; and blue humanities (11.5), the area of literary and cultural theory that focuses on the relations between literature and water, including its places such as the rivers, seas, and oceans, is also explored here as a subarea of the general study of literature and the environment. But blue humanities, with its focus on the places of water on the earth, can also be regarded as a part of a broader conversation regarding the environment and the humanities in general. This field, called environmental humanities, encompasses at its core ecocriticism, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. Nevertheless, as one extends the interdisciplinary matrix of environmental humanities, areas such as cultural geography, environmental anthropology, gender studies, political science, religious studies, and others take on increasing significance. According to Heise, environmental humanities focuses on: (1) The Anthropocene—environmental humanities is concerned with the relationship of humanism, posthumanism, and multispecies theory to the Anthropocene, a geological epoch reflected in the notion of humans as the main drivers of the ecology of the earth; (2) Justice and Ecological Change—environmental humanities explores the tension-fraught intersection between the study of global ecological change and research on cultural difference, socioeconomic inequality, environmental justice and injustice, and geopolitical power struggles; and, (3) Narrative and Ecology—environmental humanities examines the role that narratives of decline, progress and change play in current accounts of ecological pasts and futures.9 While the move from ecocriticism (and green theory) to environmental humanities might seems far removed from the Rueckert notion of poems as green plants, the addition of areas such as the Anthropocene (11.3) and critical climate change (11.2) to ecocritical theory perhaps reflects a theoretical shift in focus from poems as living green plants to poems as dying green plants. Critical climate change, an area of literary and cultural theory that combines the work of environmental humanities with critical theory asks whether extant theory is even capable of addressing an issue such as climate change. At its most extreme, critical climate change offers that nothing in ecocriticism,

Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, “Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth,” in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4. 9 Ursula Heise, “Environmental Humanities,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 471. 8

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environmental history, and environmental philosophy has prepared us to address climate change— and what is called for are new philosophies and theories that can rise to the challenge. At a more modest level, ecocritical theory today draws upon a broad range of extant literary and cultural theory in its quest to fulfill its aims. In addition to those areas already mentioned—postcolonial theory (postcolonial ecology), queer theory (queer ecologies), feminist theory (ecofeminism), and race theory (environmental racism)—there is also work that combines ecocriticism with phenomenology (ecophenomenology), semiotics (biosemiotics), Marxism, poststructuralism, biopolitics, posthumanism, materialism (13.2), and object-oriented ontology (15.3), among others.

11.1 GREEN THEORY Green theory is a very large and diverse area of literary and cultural theory. When combined with environmental humanities, it moves well beyond the mere study of nature writing. But it should be noted that green theory does not leave it entirely behind as there is still a large subset of ecocriticism devoted to the study of nature writing (viz., nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment), which now also includes ecopoetry (viz., poetry with a strong ecological emphasis or message), ecocomposition (viz., an approach to writing instruction using concepts from ecology), ecobiography (viz., the representation of a human subjects’ entwinement with their environment), phytography (viz., writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (viz., the study of nonhuman poetic forms), among others. In this area of green theory, works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac (1949) are critically explored for the ways in which the relationship between humans and nature is envisioned. Leopold, for example, believed that the emerging conservation movement of his day was the beginning of a societal affirmation of a land ethic that “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”10 According to Leopold, “There is as yet no land ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants that grow on it.”11 A pioneer in the field of environmental ethics and wildlife conservation, Leopold’s work draws a straight line from nature writing to the environmental activism of green theory. But work like Leopold’s, which deals with “man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants that grow on it,” might also be called upon to point to some of the tensions between green theory and some of the literary and cultural theories discussed thus far. In the case of traditional Marxism, for example, Howard Parsons points out in Marx and Engels on Ecology (1977) that Marx, Engels, and Marxism, generally have been criticized for certain alleged positions on ecological matters: (1) they have pitted man against nature; (2) they have anthropocentrically denied the values of external nature; (3) they have overstressed the conflicts in nature and have understressed its harmony; and (4) they have denied basic human values.12

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949) (New York: Ballantine, 1974), 239. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 238. 12 Howard L. Parsons, ed., Marx and Engels on Ecology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 35. 10 11

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These criticisms are bolstered by other claims such as “nature is man’s inorganic body”13 and “the purely natural material in which no human labor is objectified . . . has no value.”14 The conclusion that some draw from this is that an ecological ethic is not possible in traditional Marxism. Still, others debate this and postulate ways for Marxism to become a viable form of ecotheory. This general pattern occurs as well with other areas of literary and cultural theory, wherein at first green theory appears to be incompatible with another area of theory (say, for example, feminism), but then after some adjustments within the area of theory, it appears to be—if not becomes—compatible. In the case of feminism, for example, Karen Warren argues that the four leading versions of feminism—liberal, socialist, radical, and traditional Marxist feminism—are inadequate, incomplete, or seriously problematic as a theoretical basis for ecofeminism. Therefore, she proposes the development of a new form of feminism, namely what she terms transformative feminism, as the theoretical grounding for ecofeminism.15 But theoretical adjustments aside, the question remains as to how one negotiates the anti-realist, anti-humanist, and anti-essentialist positions of many literary and cultural theorists with the realism, humanism, and essentialism of ecotheorists such as Leopold. Or, as Kate Soper put it, “It isn’t language which has a hole in its ozone layer.”16 In short, for many green theorists, nature is not socially constructed and is not merely a discourse. Rather, nature not only has an essence and is real, but is something that must be saved—rather than, say, deconstructed. One of the responses to this is an abandonment of the linguistic and textual legacies of poststructuralism in favor of some newer and different approaches to theory. As noted earlier, these may be adaptations or extensions of extant theories such as postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory to the aims of ecotheory or entirely new theories such as those found in affect studies (13.0), particularly, queer affect (13.1) and “new” materialism (13.2). However, in the case of one new approach, object-oriented ontology (15.3), when combined with green theory it might be better termed green antitheory, as object-oriented ontology is regarded as a form of antitheory (15.3)—but more on this later. The point here is that if ecocriticism is about the concept of nature and its value, areas of literary and cultural theory that challenge the essential status of nature appear to short-circuit its aims. What, for example is there to preserve, if nature has no essential nature? And, what is pollution, if nature has no core identity that can become polluted? But as anyone who has studied antiessentialism knows, even if nature has no essence, it does not necessarily follow that it is nothing (unless you are, for example, Baudrillard, who wonders why there is nothing rather than something)—or no thing outside of language or discourse. Rather, as discussed earlier, though poststructuralism is often characterized as a form of linguistic idealism wherein the external world is inaccessible to us through language, this is an inaccurate characterization. In the case of Derrida, it is a mischaracterization reached by ignoring the traces that language gives of something beyond language as a type of reference. However, in some poststructuralists, such as Kristeva, there is no such difficulty: the material, the body, and affect are always reminding us in her work of the dialectics between language and a material world.

Parsons, Marx and Engels on Ecology, 133. Parsons, Marx and Engels on Ecology, 122. 15 Karen J. Warren, “Feminism and Ecology,” Environmental Ethics 9.1 (1987): 3–20. 16 Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (New York: Blackwell, 1995), 151. 13 14

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In “Literature and Ecology,” Rueckert comments that there is a tendency “to over-refine our conceptual frameworks so that they can only be used by a corps of elitist experts and gradually lose their practical relevance as they increase their theoretical elegance.”17 This remark is perhaps prescient given the expansion of the conceptual framework of ecocriticism into areas of literary and cultural theory ranging from semiotics and phenomenology to postcolonial and queer theory. On the practical side of green theory, there is an aim to intervene in social, political, and economic debates regarding the devastation of the environment; on the theoretical side of green theory, there is the continuous refinement of its conceptual framework into new areas of literary and cultural theory. While activists often enter environmental debates with the practical aim of “saving the planet,” theorists (particularly after Lyotard) have become wary of such “grand narratives”—and focus instead on developing increasingly rigorous and complex conceptual frameworks. As an example of the latter, consider the effort to expand the range of colors associated with green theory. “Green,” writes Jeffrey Cohen, “has long been the favored color of ecocriticism.”18 But in Prismatic Ecology (2013), Cohen and others encourage “following other colors in their materiality [into] the messy intricacy,” multiplicity, and disorderliness of space. That is, into a spatial ecology that includes mysterious forces, object[s] and organisms that do not fully disclose themselves, radiation, black holes, distant arms of the galaxy and event horizons, shit and muck, the ephemeral and the volatile, disability, distillation, capitalism as an ordering system, domestication, alien substances, supernovas, urban sprawls, the undead, lost worlds, networks of travel or sonority, human difference, negativity, depression, the aurora borealis, deep-sea dwellers, luminescence for no audience, feedback loops, alien metals, soundscapes, slaughterhouses, environmental justice, chimeras, the vegetal, the indistinct, the solitary, failure, queerness, violence, swamps, an errancy of earth and seas and skies.19 But the question that may be asked apropos Rueckert’s comment is whether Cohen’s catalogue of the “messy intricacy,” multiplicity, and disorderliness of space is indeed a loss of practical relevance for ecocriticism at the cost of increasing theoretical elegance. In other words, while there is a certain elegance to an ecotheory that moves beyond the “green of nature” to a chromotopia that ranges from the “colors” of queerness and disability to those of the slaughterhouses and the undead, does ecocriticism in the process of color diversification start to lose some of its practical relevance? Does a polychrome ecotheory have a better chance of saving the planet than a monochrome one? One way to respond to this question is to view the adaptability of current directions in ecotheory to the multiplicities of human and non-human ecologies as a strong indicator of both its theoretical range and its practical relevance—something which is only further confirmed by the theoretical conjunction of ecotheory with many other areas of literary and cultural theory. Moreover, these developments in ecotheory appear to be in line with Rueckert’s formative vision of field—a vision inspired by the work of Kenneth Burke, specifically his notion of “perspective by incongruity,” that

17

Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 120. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Ecology’s Rainbow,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), xx. 19 Cohen, “Ecology’s Rainbow,” xxiii. 18

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is, a process wherein new meanings are created by “extending the use of a term by taking it from the context in which it is habitually used and applying it to another.”20 Writes Rueckert, [T]here is a certain splendid resonance which comes from thinking of poets and green plants being engaged in the same creative, life-sustaining activities, and of teachers and literary critics as creative mediators between literature and the biosphere whose tasks include the encouragement of, the discovery, training and development of creative biospheric apperceptions, attitudes, and actions.21 Arguably, the “discovery, training and development of creative biospheric apperceptions, attitudes, and actions” of Rueckert’s pioneering ecocriticism is now being continued and extended by a new generation of ecotheorists. Today, the application of Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” is not just to literature and ecology (as it was for Rueckert), but to other media (e.g., art, film, and music) as well as “other” ecologies (e.g., those associated with Cohen’s catalogue of messy, multiple, and disorderly spaces). For theorists, the extension of green theory into different media and texts coupled with its compatibility with and complementarity to many different areas of theory increases both its practical relevance and theoretical elegance.

11.2 CRITICAL CLIMATE CHANGE Climate change has a huge footprint—and not just on the planet. It is one that touches just about every academic discipline including many areas of the humanities. This disciplinary footprint has the ability not only to alter conversations within these areas, but also to encourage dialogue among them. Therefore, it is in the best interest of our future to keep considerations of climate change as broad and creative as possible so as to draw as many voices and perspectives into the conversation as possible. For some, this seems wrong-headed. They aim to localize discussion of climate change to scientific calculations of greenhouse gas and average surface temperatures of the earth. These narrow-minded individuals tend to believe that discussions of climate change are more the province of science than say the humanities—or even critical theory. The broad-minded, however, will move beyond basic greenhouse physics to a consideration of the political, aesthetic, ethical, and economic impact of climate change. And it is here that discussions within the humanities can interweave with discussions in the sciences—and hold the potential to radically transform both areas. Climate change asks of critical and cultural theorists nothing more or less than a re-evaluation of ourselves, even while it challenges us to put to use the critical tools we have at hand. For one thing, it calls for us to ask how critical concepts like power, ideology, mediation, capital, colonialism, gender, oppression, society, and construction help us to understand the challenges presented by climate change. For another, it asks whether the current crisis wrought by anthropogenic climate change defies or affirms the assumptions that underpin literary and cultural theory—and to what

20 Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 89. 21 Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology,” 121.

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extent. Can we respond—and, if so, how—through now established critical modes, such as those signaled by deconstruction, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, or those practiced under the rubrics of, among others, Agamben, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Žižek? Or does climate change demand a new kind of theory? There has been an innovative initiative of late to use anthropogenic climate change as the starting point to gauge the capacities of established critical modes such as deconstruction, poststructuralism, and Marxism—or more neutrally, to examine the degree to which the work of thinkers like Agamben, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Žižek can account for environmental disasters caused by humans. “The eco-catastrophic logics disclosed in the past decade,” comments Tom Cohen, “were not addressed by the master thinkers of the 20th century, whose idioms form different guilds and extensions today.”22 For Cohen and others, at issue is whether existing theory can “account” for anthropogenic climate change or whether climate change demands a new kind of “theory.” Also at issue is whether climate change, in the words of Cohen, “opens to an exteriority irrecuperable by the current tropological order”—and is “in a sense unrepresentable.”23 The locus of the Critical Climate Change (C3) initiative is the Institute of Critical Climate Change (IC3). In a series of colloquia and workshops beginning in 2005, the IC3 has embarked on discussions that have the potential to change the way engaged intellectuals regard climate change. “The IC3 project,” write Henry Sussman and Jason Groves, “has from its outset been at its core an incitement to torque the suggestive and empowering treasury of contemporary theoretical inquiries, improvisations, interventions and performances toward the actuality, in several senses, of an interrelated, if open-ended sequence of ecological, demographic, economic, and informational contemporary disasters” (30). The work of the members of this initiative, especially Cohen and Sussman, who have respectively edited two landmark collections of essays on C3—Telemorphosis (2012) and Impasses of the PostGlobal (2012)—has the potential to produce innovative and significant insight on the multiple disasters that color our present historical moment. If this were not enough, it also has the capacity to raise the bar on what we call and expect from “theory,” and to produce ruptures and revisions in the disciplinary fabric of the academy. In Impasses of the Post-Global (2012), Henry Sussman and Jason Groves comment that “the IC3 initiative, since its outset, has struggled to budge the discourse and its synthesis away from the corridors of academe into the tsunami’s debris.”24 The activism of the initiative and advocacy for more than just the application of theory to current disasters is a distinguishing characteristic of the work of the IC3. Write Sussman and Groves, “the discourse must also be budged away from melancholically lingering over wreckage and debris, whose finality forecloses the initiative in advance by staging its own belatedness, a melodrama in which the inertia of political apathy finds its perverse

22

Tom Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies: ‘Climate Change’ and the Rupture of Cultural Critique” (unpublished manuscript, 2011), i. This unpublished manuscript was the original version of his introduction to Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1, ed. Tom Cohen (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), which was substantially revised and retitled “Murmurations—‘Climate Change’ and the Defacement of Theory” in the final version of the book. The two versions of his introduction are substantially different. For the purposes of this chapter, I prefer the original version. 23 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” ix. 24 Henry Sussman and Jason Groves, “Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks,” in Impasses of the Post-Global: Essays in Critical Climate Change, ed. Henry Sussman (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 16.

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self-justification by the end of every episode, every foretold extinction event, every inundated island community.”25 They challenge those who engage in the IC3 initiative to avoid “armchair disaster tourism made up in the tweed of ecocriticism or ‘timely’ critical theory” and maintain that “the discourse needs to be dragged, looking forward rather back, out into the streets, or into the Department of Defense databases” and so on.26 The question remains, though, whether “the discourse,” as Sussman and Groves call it, even has the capacity to capture appropriately the disasters of the present. For Sussman and Groves, there is strong sense that the work of the IC3 is a continuation or extension of the project of critical theory: “Critique, as the theoretically driven responsible and rigorous decoding and reprogramming of messages, motives, trends, performances, and systematic aberrations, has a special mission and role to play in an engagement with the composite and evolving climate of catastrophe.”27 Though those involved in this “special mission” are encouraged not to sit in their armchairs and ponder the catastrophes, they still follow the modus operandi established for critique by critical theory: namely, one that is at its core a “theoretically driven responsible and rigorous decoding and reprogramming.” From this angle, the C3 initiative looks a lot like critical theory as usual—albeit turned toward subject matter not directly addressed by twentieth-century critical theorists. If this were all there were to the C3 initiative, it would be a novel though not particularly exciting appropriation of theory—one that would produce interesting readings of or engagements with eco-catastrophes though not really do anything outside of the normal scope of theory. Even if one held theory up to the standard of being able to appropriately respond to eco-catastrophes, while this would be innovative it would not be game- or theory-changing. What makes C3 a radical departure from theory as usual is the expectation that it be forward-looking—and possibly also strive toward reversing anthropogenic climate change. Or, more simply put: it presents the possibility that this is theory that will save the planet. In this regard, there seems to be two different directions for the C3 initiative: one takes it into the realm of critique and the progress of theory as usual; the other takes it outside the realm of critique by setting a new limit for theory. This is best seen in the vision of C3 described by Cohen. For Cohen, the C3 initiative as one that views itself as appropriating theory to examine ecocatastrophes is technically impossible—a non-starter. Writes Cohen, “any critical climate change imaginary encounters its own impossibility: since technically, ‘it’ (the ‘subject’ of climate change) may be defined as what lies outside the imaginary).”28 To get around this impossibility, Cohen proposes that the C3 initiative adopt “modes of thinking adequate to the disasters of the present”29— modes of thinking he terms “telemorphosis.” These modes of thinking “interface between memory regimes, tele-technics, and the mutations of eco-catastrophic processes.”30 One of the virtues of telemorphosis is that unlike “ ‘after theory’ hybrids that have tended, more often than not, to have consistently relapsed to recuperative and, at times, pre-theoretic positions,”31

25

Sussman and Groves, “Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks,” 16. Sussman and Groves, “Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks,” 16. 27 Sussman and Groves, “Spills, Countercurrents, Sinks,” 16. 28 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” iii. 29 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” vi. 30 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” iv. 31 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” iv. 26

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telemorphosis “names the ‘anthropogenic’ mutation of life forms in conjunction with that of teletechnologies, perceptual programs, and what one can no longer name mere archivization as such.”32 Clearly for Cohen, the subject matter of C3 is inaccessible to the imaginary. But the conceptual inadequacies do not end here for Cohen. For him, the C3 initiative “revokes, strictly speaking, the notion of eras”—and brings the telemorphotic critic into the realm of the “ex-anthropic,” a realm that eschews “referencing some species type or animal-man.”33 “ ‘Ex-anthropic’ does not presume that ‘anthropy’ exists, but acts as an index that operates outside the management of rigidly human perceptual, mnemonic, semiocultural narratives.”34 In short, all “posts” for him need to be retired including “post-humanism.” So, what’s left for “theory” in the “era” of climate change? Not much according to Cohen. Cohen’s work goes to great lengths to divorce itself from all known theoretical (and after theoretical) efforts to connect theory with eco-catastrophes. In a way, his notion of telemorphosis is theory on a scale, timeline, and alternative materiality that includes the “sixth mass extinction event on earth.”35 Against the “clock of geology” and “the monstrous temporalities in play,” approaches like “the recent academic hegemon of ‘cultural studies’ perhaps bursts apart,” writes Cohen, “and its consolidated modes of oppressive regimes and colonial positioning shifts from its declared topos: the otherness of the other, or ‘the other’ as human subject, and (as if all these positions were now placed on one side), a supposedly ‘wholly other’ that is not human, not divine, and involves prehistorical traces.”36 But even so, the “term ‘wholly other,’ circulated by Derrida, is at best a placeholder here, and a weak one,” comments Cohen, “saturated with theotropic resonance.”37 Cohen’s vision of C3 opens up a space that is not “readily assimilable to university programs”38 and breaks with “any recognizable politics (as currently defined).”39 There is a moment, though, when Spivak’s proposal for “the planet to overwrite the globe”40 in Death of a Discipline (2003) appears to have an affinity with Cohen’s notion of telemorphosis. Like Cohen’s notion, Spivak claims that there is no “formulaic access to planetarity.”41 For her, globalization is located in the “gridwork of electronic capital,” whereas the “planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system.”42 “When I invoke the planet,” writes Spivak, “I think of the effort required to figure the (im)possibility of this underived intuition.”43 Unfortunately, notes Cohen, Spivak rejects “planetarity” because of its lack of recognizable politics.44 But even so, there is little more than a superficial similarity between Cohen’s work and Spivak’s—which ultimately is just for Cohen another “failed probe” into the area of C3.

32

Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” iv. Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” vii. 34 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” vii. 35 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xii. 36 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xii. 37 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xii. 38 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xii. 39 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xv. 40 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 72. 41 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 78. 42 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72. 43 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 72. 44 Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xv. 33

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In sum, “climate change” for Cohen is a “non-name.” “Its spectralities appear in glacial forms,” writes Cohen, “in a graduated drip or sudden collapse, posted as futurity.”45 While it has a relationship to science, economics, and technology, it does not belong to any one of these areas. Moreover, it “implies an exteriorization without interiority of any sort.”46 If so, what then does this extreme vision of C3 portend for theory and the humanities? Even though Cohen would not like this characterization, the critical climate initiative gives theorists the opportunity to “reclaim,” “reinscribe,” and “reinvent” theory for a new era. By beginning with premises drawn from eco-catastrophes, theory in the era of climate change has the opportunity to connect its initiatives with work that moves beyond the problems of individuals and nations, literatures and cultures—and refocus its energies and imagination toward the disasters that threaten our planet. If nothing else, critical climate change (or telemorphosis, if you will) reminds us that perhaps the most significant knowledge that we can produce in the humanities is not going to come from the standard ways of thinking. Nevertheless, deviations from the standard ways of thinking are not to be found in the application of Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” nor are they located in pursuit of any of the aims of ecocriticism (or, green theory) stated in the introduction to this chapter. Hence, the dismissive characterization of green theory as “armchair disaster tourism made up in the tweed of ecocriticism” by C3. Work like Cohen’s suggests that we begin theory from conclusions about eco-catastrophes, and then work back to establish the premises that brought them about, a sort of abductive approach to theory. Namely, if theory cannot provide the premises to account for anthropogenic climate change, then we need to reject it wholesale—and seek premises that do. Critical climate change reminds us of both the limits of literary and cultural theory—and its potential.

11.3 ANTHROPOCENE Paul Crutzen is an earth scientist who in 1970 demonstrated that the chemical compounds of nitrogen oxide accelerate the destruction of stratospheric ozone. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery. A few years later, while attending a conference on earth system science, he objected to the use of the word Holocene, which is a geological time span that extends into the present. “Stop using the word Holocene,” said Crutzen to the conference participants. “We’re not in the Holocene anymore—we’re in the Anthropocene!”47 After his comment at this 1999 conference, the word Anthropocene (anthropo is the Greek word for “man”) quickly came into common usage and discussion. However, as Crutzen soon learned, the term had been used since the 1980s by Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist who worked on the photosynthesis of algae. So, a year later, they jointly published “The ‘Anthropocene’ ” (2000), where they noted earlier analogues to their theory in a number of sources including George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) and Antonio Stoppani’s declaration of the “Anthropozoic Era” in 1873. In their article, Crutzen and Stoermer declared that barring

45

Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xxii. Cohen, “A Labyrinth of Exanthropies,” xxii. 47 Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 42. 46

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major catastrophes like an enormous volcanic eruption, an unexpected epidemic, a large-scale nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a new ice age, or continued plundering of Earth’s resources by partially still primitive technology (the last four dangers can, however, be prevented in a real functioning noösphere [viz., the sphere of human thought]) mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come.48 Therefore, conclude Crutzen and Stoermer, “it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.”49 For context, consider that the Holocene, which means “recent scene,” is the post-glacial geological epoch that has been around for ten to twelve thousand years. It was proposed by Charles Lyell in 1833 and officially adopted by the International Congress in Bologna in 1885. In this article, however, Crutzen and Stoermer date the beginning of the Anthropocene only to the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1784. A few years later, Crutzen adds that the exploitation of the earth’s resources and devastation of the planet has “largely been caused by only 25% of the world population.”50 Still later, in collaboration with Will Steffen and John McNeill, he further clarifies his position, claiming that the Anthropocene has developed in two stages: Stage 1 began 1800 to 1850 with the fossil-fueled industrialization in Britain; and, Stage 2 began after 1945, with a Great Acceleration in “human enterprise,” wherein there is a precipitous rise in worldwide GDP, fertilizer consumption, paper consumption, foreign direct investment, international tourism, and population, among other things.51 But still, there are other accounts of the Anthropocene. One dates its origins at 1.8 million years ago, whereas another claims that it “actually began thousands of years ago as a result of the discovery of agriculture and subsequent technological innovations in the practice of farming.”52 The former, by Andrew Glikson, dates the Anthropocene to the mastery of fire by hominids,53 whereas the latter, by William Ruddiman dates it concurrent with the origins of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas era as evidenced in ice-core records.54 According to Jeremy Davies, these dating decisions about the Anthropocene “very often encode deep interpretive commitments.”55 For Davies, “the general rule is that the earlier the proposed starting date for the Anthropocene, the more emphasis its proponents place on human actions, as opposed to the ecological consequences that follow from them.”56

Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000), http://www.igbp.net/news/ opinion/opinion/haveweenteredtheanthropocene.5.d8b4c3c12bf3be638a8000578.html. 49 Crutzen and Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene.’ ” 50 Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (January 3, 2002): 23. 51 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36.8 (2007): 614–21. 52 William Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” Climate Change 61.3 (2003): 261. 53 Andrew Glikson, “Fire and Human Evolution: The Deep-Time Blueprints of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 3 (2013): 89–92. 54 William Ruddiman, “The Anthropocene,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 41 (2013): 45–68, and “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” 261. 55 Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, 47. 56 Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene, 47. 48

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Regarding the implications of the Anthropocene for social organization, Dipesh Chakrabarty, a member of the Subaltern Studies editorial group, has argued that postcolonial and Marxist critiques of capitalism, globalization, and imperialism do not adequately address this new epoch. According to Chakrabarty, postcolonial and Marxist critique “do not give us an adequate hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this planet for much longer than capitalism.”57 “A critique that is only a critique of capital,” continues Chakrabarty, “is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged.”58 In a tone echoing Cohen’s concerns about extant theory addressing the challenges wrought upon us by the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty writes, Whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of human existence.59 But unlike Cohen, who would have us abandon extant theory in the face of the Anthropocene, Chakrabarty is not yet ready to give up on postcolonial critique. “Critiques of capitalist globalization have not, in any way, become obsolete in the age of climate change.”60 Rather, for Chakrabarty these critiques must now be combined with the long history of humans as a species—a timescale that can span millions of years. But as Claire Colebrook argues, the Anthropocene is different in degree and kind from the predictions of climate change. For her, the notion that humans are readable as a geological force seems to destroy “once and for all” the positive futurity of promissory time. “By suggesting geological impact, and not just change within the human milieu,” comments Colebrook, “human time—the time of justice and the polity that had been increasingly disturbed by climate change—is now displaced.”61 In other words, whereas the lesser time and scale of climate change still offers us the prospect of human justice and political impact in the future, the greater time and scale of the Anthropocene negates both. For Colebrook, the Anthropocene makes us “far less likely to be just to future humans and future life.”62 Thus, contra Chakrabarty, who finds political hope in the combination of the long history of humans as a species with considerations of climate change, Colebrook finds it is displaced in the longer perspective of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, Colebrook also distances discussions of the Anthropocene from those of many other areas of ecocriticism—and not just climate change. For her, “the Anthropocene is not just one more claim about nature.”63 Rather, the Anthropocene erases the notion of nature as sublime: “[N]ature” is not some idea that we must assume but never know [that is, sublime]; nature [in the Anthropocene] is so real and so present as to have the force to erase decades of social construction, Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 212. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 212. 59 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 218. 60 Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 212. 61 Claire Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” in Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, and J. Hillis Miller, Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), 104–5. 62 Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” 105. 63 Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” 81. 57 58

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relativism, contestation, anti-humanism and theory (if theory is, as [Paul] de Man claimed, that which is constitutively resisted precisely because to think theoretically would be to remain suspended before parsing matters into narrative form). Nature, now, offers its own narrative and frames the human species, placing it within the scale and register of earth system science.64 Thus, literary and cultural theory from the position of the Anthropocene, leaves the theorist with no time “for post-humanism, anti-humanism, and—most of all—no time at all for questioning the prima facie value and existence of the human.”65 “The Anthropocene requires that we think of humans as a species,”66 writes Colebrook. And, in spite of the fact that what unifies humans as a species in the Anthropocene is evidence of their destruction, “once the species comes into being as a geological force its survival is constituted as an imperative.”67 In spite of their different approaches, Crutzen, Chakrabarty, and Colebrook agree that the Anthropocene changes global politics regarding the environment. What they disagree on is the role of humans and theory in global political change. Whereas Crutzen’s humanism leads him to maintain that the era of the Anthropocene “will require appropriate human behavior at all scales,” Colebrook offers that the Anthropocene forecloses the mandates of humanist politics in favor of nascent geological ones (or, more precisely, Anthropocene-political ones). And while Chakrabarty still holds out hope that extant theory can get together with work on climate change to find a path forward, Colebrook empties humanistic and post-humanistic theory of relevancy to the kind of issues presented by the Anthropocene.

11.4 GEOCRITICISM Geocriticism is the area of literary and cultural theory that concerns space, place, and mapping. The term itself was coined by Bertrand Westphal in French as géocritique in 2000, and has since then gained in theoretical currency with the publication of further works by him such as Geocriticism (2007). For Westphal, géocritique begins by locating a place. The critic then brings together a variety of literary and cultural representations of that place in an attempt to provide a multifaceted portrait of it. These representations include any and all media including everything from poems, plays, and films to ethnographic studies, travelogues, and tourist brochures. According to Robert Tally, one of the effects Westphal’s géocritique is that “any reading will be far less likely to be subject to ethnocentric or narrow interpretations, as individual biases or prejudices become leavened with multiple and diverse points of view.”68 Writes Tally, “place is not merely coordinates on a map but the living embodiment of the polysensory experiences of those many people who attempt to represent both it and the experiences associated with it.”69 However, there are a number of other approaches to geocriticism including one offered by Tally himself.

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Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” 81. Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” 82. 66 Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” 82. 67 Colebrook, “What is the Anthro-Political?” 82. 68 Robert T. Tally, Jr., Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 39. 69 Tally, Topophrenia, 39. 65

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Tally, who started using the term geocriticism in 2005, focuses on how writers map “the real and imagined places of their world.”70 For him, “the realistic London of Charles Dickens,” “the Paris of Honoré de Balzac,” “Amaurotum, capital city of Thomas More’s Utopia,” “Minas Tirith, capital of Gondor in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth,” and “[William] Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County,” are all part of what he terms literary cartography.71 According to Tally, geocriticism “allows us to understand ‘real’ places by understanding their fundamental fictionality, and vice versa.”72 But note that whereas Tally’s geocriticism begins with the author, and their mapping of the world, Westphal’s géocritique begins with a place, and then proceeds to explore various mappings of it. Either way, geocriticism, writes Tally, is a way of looking at the spaces of literature, broadly conceived to include not only those places that readers and writers experience by means of texts but also the experience of space and place within ourselves, our situatedness in space as a condition of our own existence. With geocriticism one emphasizes this inherent spatiality while also focusing one’s critical gaze on those aspects of literature, along with other texts not always deemed literary, that give meaning to our spatialized sense of being.73 Nevertheless, even though geocriticism (or géocritique) is a more recent direction in literary and cultural theory, the concepts of space, place, and mapping have long been important in the field. One of the more cited indications of this is Foucault’s statement in “Of Other Spaces” (1967) that “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space.”74 For Foucault, space is also the chief cause of “anxiety in our era.”75 He notes here that while the work of Gaston Bachelard and “the phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with qualities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well,”76 it is work that is nevertheless primarily concerned with internal space. Foucault here would like to focus on external space, that is, The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.77

Tally, Topophrenia, 38–9. Tally, Topophrenia, 40. 72 Tally, Topophrenia, 40. 73 Tally, Topophrenia, 49–50. 74 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967), trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22. 75 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23. 76 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23. 77 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23. 70 71

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For Foucault, these external spaces are of two types: utopias, that is, “fundamentally unreal spaces”;78 and heterotopias, “real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society.”79 Heterotopias are a kind of “effectively enacted utopia,” and are of two types: crisis heterotopias—“privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis”;80 and deviation heterotopias—“those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed”81—something he terms elsewhere disciplinary spaces. Foucault’s reference to the phenomenology of inner space and the efforts of Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1957) as well as his own characterizations of “other spaces,” that is, the external spaces of utopias and heterotopias, provide strong evidence that space has been a concern of literary and cultural theory long before geocriticism. But there is nevertheless much more work to be noted here including Henri Lefebvre’s work on space, which makes distinctions between perceived space (space seen, touched, and felt), conceived space (space as designed and built), and lived space (space as something that we emotionally and affectively relate to). In addition, there are the contributions of Jameson, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Blanchot, Michel de Certeau, and many others, to consider. In regard to Jameson, for example, as we saw earlier, not only is there the hyper-space of postmodernism to consider, but also the notion of cognitive mapping, which, especially in The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), draws this notion into conversation with space, cartography, and world theory. Moreover, also discussed earlier, and worthy of inclusion as precursors to geocriticism, are Bhabha’s third-space of hybridity, which connects space to postcolonial theory; Deleuze and Guattari’s territorialization, which demarcates social and cultural spaces by principles of law and rationality, that is to say, the Symbolic order; and the economic geography of David Harvey, which connects urban space with neoliberalism; as well as others. Moreover, one might consider the work of critical border studies, particularly with regard to border epistemology, border ontology, and the space-time of borders, as a field that both resonates with geocriticism and is roughly contemporaneous with it—even if border studies in general, which is also concerned with space, place, and mapping, also precedes geocriticism. A parallel might be drawn between the coining of ecocriticism by Rueckert in 1978, and the coining of geocriticism (géocritique) by Westphal in 2000. Just as Rueckert’s ecocriticism inspired the study of nature writing to include considerations of the environmental imagination, the concept and value of nature, how nature is utilized in literary genres, the relationship between humans and nature, and environmental activism, Westphal’s geocriticism (or, géocritique) suggests that the study of writing about place should include considerations of the geographical imagination, the concept and value of space and place, how space and place are utilized in literary genres, the relationship between humans and space (and place), and geopolitical activism. Moreover, similar to the discussions of literature and nature that preceded the work of Rueckert, there was also plenty of discussion of space and place in relation to literature prior to the work of Westphal. Nevertheless, just as ecocriticism is now a subarea of the broader field of environmental humanities, so too should geocriticism be regarded now as a subarea of the more wide-ranging work

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Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. 80 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. 81 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25. 79

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done in spatial humanities. Finally, questions of the ecologies of space and place, or, conversely, of the geographies of nature and the environment, bring ecocriticism and geocriticism into dialogue with each other. That is to say, when such questions are raised, the relationship of nature and its ecologies (viz., ecocriticism) comes to be theoretically implicated with the relationship of space and place to its geographies and cartographies (viz., geocriticism). If further evidence of the connections between ecocriticism and geocriticism is needed, just consider that the Greek roots of the word geography make its literal meaning earth writing (geo means earth, and graph means written down, printed, or drawn)—a meaning that is connotatively not very far from nature writing. Note as well that topography, which literally means place writing (topos means place in Greek), could also be transformed into topocriticism (or, topocritique) as an alternate name for the field of geocriticism (or, géocritique).

11.5 BLUE HUMANITIES There is a growing body of work known as the blue humanities. One of the aims of transdisciplinary work in this area is to raise awareness and increase activism regarding the catastrophic planetary effects of neglecting the challenges our oceans are facing. From plastic pollution and over-fishing to acidification and skepticism regarding climate change, humanities scholars and activists can complement the work of environmentalists and marine scientists in an effort to “save” the ocean. Blue humanities historicizes the ocean and makes it an important part of contemporary consciousness in a way that will hopefully encourage more research on and political support for understanding and reversing the multidimensional negative effects of neglecting to care for over two-thirds of our planet. Oceans make up more that 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Geographers and mapmakers segregate them into at least four major bodies of water—the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans—with an average mean depth of 12,081 feet. The Atlantic and Indian Oceans each comprise almost 30 million square miles of the earth’s surface, and the Pacific, over 60 million square miles. Each of these oceans, especially the nearly 5.5 million square mile Arctic, is by common scientific consensus facing some form of environmental catastrophe in the near future. If, like the rotation and orbit of the planets, these approaching ocean catastrophes were beyond human agency, there would not be much sense in changing our behaviors in order to prevent them. However, as we have come to learn in increasing depth and detail, some of these destructive oceanic influences have been around for centuries, while others have only come into being within the last fifty years. Conservationist and marine scientist Callum Roberts concisely summarizes the urgency of our situation: The oceans are changing faster than at almost any time in Earth’s history, and we are the agents of that transformation. Many of these changes will test the ability of its denizens to survive into the future. The alterations are also reshaping our own relationship with the sea and threaten many of the things that we most cherish and take for granted. Our failure to notice creeping environmental degradation has compromised our quality of life. In extreme circumstances, it threatens human welfare. History offers many examples of civilizations that have been destroyed by environmental catastrophes that they have unwittingly brought upon themselves.82

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Callum Roberts, The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea (New York: Viking, 2012), 5.

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But the difference today is that degradation of the oceans has the potential to destroy not just individual civilizations but our planet itself. Moreover, given the level of information we have regarding these threats and our options for reversing their course, we cannot say today that we have “unwittingly” brought them upon ourselves. We know much of what we are doing to the oceans, but many just don’t seem to care that it is destroying our planet. General apathy, or, in more extreme cases, denial that we are the agents of oceanic transformation, has led to a paucity of new data about our major bodies of water. James Lovelock, an independent scientist who has been dubbed “one of the world’s top 100 global public intellectuals,” says that “Observation in the real world and small-scale experiments on the Earth now take second place to expensive and ever-expanding theoretical models.”83 Though this may be “administratively and politically convenient,”84 it is not good for learning more about the earth. “Our tank is near empty of data, and we are running on theoretical vapor: this is especially true of data about the oceans . . . and about the responses of ecosystems to climate change—and, just as importantly, the effect of change in the oceans and ecosystems on the climate.”85 This data is needed because there is no single “cause” or set of “effects” for climate change. In fact, changing climates involve many elements where we rely on data including the “increase in Arctic temperatures, reduced size of icebergs, melting of icecaps and glaciers, reduced permafrost, changes in rainfall, reduced bio-diversity, new wind patterns, more droughts and heat waves, and more frequent tropical cyclones and other extreme weather events.”86 But it also includes data on human behavior as well, particularly regarding the slow violence of increasing numbers of affluent humans on our oceans. The notion of slow violence, coined by Rob Nixon in 2011, is central to the blue humanities, because ecological catastrophes with respect to the ocean are seldom viewed by the human eye. Nixon’s “slow violence” refers to the unseen and unheard violence that happens on a temporal scale that is beyond the capacities of our senses. He associates it with “climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnifications, deforestation, the radioactive aftermath of war, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes.”87 One example of this “slow violence” with regard to the ocean is the emission of carbon dioxide by human activities. Kerry Emanuel describes its effects on our oceans well: [A]s atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increase, roughly one quarter of the excess gas is absorbed by the ocean, increasing its acidity. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, ocean water has become 30 percent more acidic. Between 1995 and 2010 alone, the acidity of the uppermost 300 feet of the North Pacific Ocean increased by 6 percent. Among other potential problems, increasing acidity compromises the ability of a wide variety of marine organisms to form and maintain calcium carbonate shells. Such organisms are essential to the food chain: we threaten their welfare at our own peril.88

James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 8–9. Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 8. 85 Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 9. 86 John Urry, Climate Change & Society (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), 6. 87 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2. 88 Kerry Emanuel, What We Know About Climate Change, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 60. 83 84

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In short, ocean acidification by excess carbon dioxide is a prime example of a “multiplex pathology caused by an excess of affluent humans.”89 But, Nixon also says that without the attention of writer-activists, many environmental catastrophes would go unnoticed, misapprehended, and unchecked.90 Ian Buchanan and Celina Jeffery argue that we need to add “artists, film-makers, poets, and photographers” to this list as well. For them, by leveraging transdisciplinary inquiry, we can begin “to say why we need not only a blue humanities but also a blue humanity—a sense in which we restore our sense of connectedness and in the words of Rachel Carson, ‘return to the sea,’ in part, through a consideration of the contributions of creative artists and thinkers.”91 If the activism and range of texts considered separates green theory from ecocriticism, then the same grounds for separation might also be claimed for blue humanities, which alternately might be termed blue theory. Early work in this area includes Philip Steinberg’s The Social Construction of the Ocean (2001), if not also Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951), which stands to blue theory in the same way that Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) stands to green theory. Also, recent examples of sea writing (or, thalassography, from the Greek thalassa, meaning sea) include Dan Brayton’s Shakespeare’s Ocean (2012) and John Gillis’s The Human Shore (2012). However, in spite of a variety of “new ontologies, epistemologies, and narratives that flow through, and frame, oceanic engagements,” some worry how the critical theory of blue humanities can reach beyond academe.92 “It is still unclear,” write Daniel Wuebben and Juan José González-Trueba, “how the blue humanities and its explorations of ocean histories, cultures, and politics can reach beyond academia and help to protect the ocean’s liminal zones.”93 To that end, the activist aims of blue theory, blue humanities, and even, blue cultural studies (which Steven Mentz calls for in 2009), push ecocriticism as a field further from mere criticism—and ever closer to pure activism.94 The prospect of a transition from ecocriticism to ecoactivism calls up some of the more general questions that have been raised in each section of this chapter: Can literary and cultural theory save the planet? And if so, how?

Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 63. Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, 14–15. 91 Ian Buchanan and Celina Jeffery, “Towards a Blue Humanity,” symploke– 27.1/2 (2019): 12. 92 Daniel Wuebben and Juan José González-Trueba, “Surfing Between Blue Humanities and Blue Economies in Cantabria, Spain,” symploke– 27.1/2 (2019): 65. 93 Wuebben and González-Trueba, “Surfing Between Blue Humanities and Blue Economies in Cantabria, Spain,” 65. 94 Steven Mentz, “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,” Literature Compass 6.5 (2009): 997–1013. 89 90

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Posthumanism 12.0 INTRODUCTION In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti describes posthumanism as “the historical moment that marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and anti-humanism and traces a different discursive framework, looking more affirmatively towards new alternatives.”1 For Braidotti, the starting point of posthumanism is the death of “Wo/Man” (Woman/Man) in antihumanism. This death marks the decline of some of the fundamental premises of the Enlightenment, namely the progress of mankind through a self-regulatory and teleological ordained use of reason and of secular scientific rationality aimed at the perfectibility of “Man.”2 But for Braidotti, the historical decline of humanism doesn’t imply that the posthuman condition is some type of crisis of Man. Rather, for Braidotti, posthumanism strives to formulate “alternative ways of conceptualizing the human subject”3—and offers an “affirmative perspective on the posthuman subject.”4 These alternate ways of conceptualizing the human subject build on the legacies of antihumanism, specifically, on the epistemological and political legacies of poststructuralism. According to Braidotti, The crisis of Humanism means that the structural others of the modern humanistic subject reemerge with a vengeance in postmodernity. It is a historical fact that the great emancipatory movements of postmodernity are driven and fuelled by the resurgent “others”: the women’s rights movement; the anti-racism and de-colonization movements; the anti-nuclear and proenvironmental movements are the voice of the structural Other of modernity. They inevitably mark the crisis of the former humanist “centre” or dominant subject-position and are not merely anti-humanist, but move beyond it to an altogether novel, posthuman project.5 Thus, for Braidotti, posthumanism is an extension of the antihumanist philosophies of subjectivity that were discussed earlier, particularly ones associated with poststructuralism, feminism, and

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 37. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 37. 3 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 37. 4 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 45. 5 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 37. 1 2

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postcolonialism. In her estimation, this work can be developed into what she calls critical posthumanism—a project she develops in her trilogy, The Posthuman (2013), Posthuman Knowledge (2019), and Posthuman Feminism (2022). Moreover, to get a sense of the roots and range of posthumanism in the twentieth-century literary and cultural theory discussed up to this point, consider that in Posthumanism (2000), Neil Badmington associates it with the work of Barthes, Althusser, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Halberstam, Foucault, and Fanon. In other words, by Badmington’s measure, we have already covered quite a lot of posthumanism. In How We Became Posthuman (1999), one of the leading figures in critical posthumanism, N. Katherine Hayles, characterizes its four shaping ideas as follows: (1) Informational Patterns—the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life; (2) Devaluing Consciousness—the posthuman view considers consciousness as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow; (3) The Body as Original Prosthesis—the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born; and, (4) Humans as Intelligent Machines—the posthuman view configures the human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.6 For Hayles, the idea that humans are intelligent machines is the most important one. “In the posthuman,” writes Hayles, “there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.”7 But the affirmative perspective of critical posthumanism is just one strand of contemporary posthumanism thought. Another general approach is what Braidotti calls analytic posthumanism, which takes its lead from science and technology studies. For Braidotti, it is an interdisciplinary field that raises ethical and conceptual questions about the status of the human.8 Still another approach is what Braidotti calls reactive posthumanism. This approach comes from moral philosophy and is defended by liberal thinkers such as Nussbaum, who defend humanism as that which guarantees freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights and dignity. For Nussbaum, humanism is not in crisis or historical decline. Rather, she rejects the insights of antihumanist thought and defends the need for universal humanistic values—it is a defense that positions her against, for example, the work of feminist and postcolonial thinkers who defend the politics of the local. Reactive posthumanism—in opposition to critical posthumanism—is a negative perspective on the posthuman subject.9

Adapted from N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2–3. 7 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3. 8 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 39. 9 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 38–9. 6

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In short, for Braidotti what is most important in general approaches to posthumanism is one’s position on the human subject: its subjectivity (critical posthumanism), its values (reactive posthumanism), and its status (analytic posthumanism). But another approach offers that the posthuman entirely break from any and all considerations of the human subject and humanity. Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, for example, argue that the common denominator in all posthumanisms is a break with a pervasive, if often unacknowledged, assumption: that humanity is somehow separate from the rest of the universe and constitutes a center for orientation—a basic set of measures, values, and points of views—from which no judgment can escape, whether pertaining to science, philosophy, politics, or everyday practices.10 In short, for Thomsen and Wamberg, posthumanism and postanthropocentrism mean the same thing—a position that puts them at odds with Braidotti’s approach to posthumanism. Why? Because if posthumanism is postanthropocentrism (as Thomsen and Wamberg claim), then critical posthumanism (championed by Braidotti), which emphasizes the development of new approaches to the human subject, does not appear to be postanthropocentric. Therefore, given that postanthropocentrism and posthumanism are synonymous for Thomsen and Wamberg, critical posthumanism by their definition does not appear to be a form of posthumanism. Moreover, Thomsen and Wamberg argue that while Braidotti refers to herself as a critical posthumanist, she—along with Donna Haraway and Hayles—often “let biological life come more pervasively to the fore.”11 For Haraway, this comes in the form of the Chthulucene, that is, the new epoch she proposes where refugees from both human and non-human environmental disaster will come together; for Hayles, it occurs through her use of nonconscious cognition; and for Braidotti, through the self-organizing life of zoe–.12 Moreover, Thomsen and Wamberg also point out that Heise, Cary Wolfe, and Timothy Morton “have supplemented their principal posthumanist or postanthropocentric theorizing with more focused contributions to ecocriticism.”13 Their point about the biotheory of Braidotti, Haraway, and Hayles, and the ecocriticism of Heise, Morton, and Wolfe, is that post-anthropocentric inquiry can lead one beyond the confines or domain of critical posthumanism. Or, as they say, “it is possible to be post-anthropocentric without referring to the posthuman condition, just as it is possible to be post-anthropocentric while acknowledging the Anthropocene.”14 In this chapter, rather than attempting to resolve the question of whether posthumanism should be centered on new approaches to the human subject (critical posthumanism) or not (postanthropocentrism)—or whether analytic humanism is preferable to both—five different literary and cultural theories that are exemplary of posthumanist thought will be discussed: the first, cyborg theory (12.1), is most famously established in Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985),

10 Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, eds. Mads Rosendhal Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 1. 11 Thomsen and Wamberg, “Introduction,” 3. 12 Thomsen and Wamberg, “Introduction,” 3. 13 Thomsen and Wamberg, “Introduction,” 3. 14 Thomsen and Wamberg, “Introduction,” 2.

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a piece where feminism, poststructuralism, and post-Marxism come together in a unique form of posthumanism; the second, animal studies (12.2), connects posthumanism to the question of the animal—a topic broached by Derrida, Haraway, Wolfe, and others; the third, systems theory (12.3), is an approach to organization in terms of function, communication, and information that challenges the primacy of humans, whom it regards as merely one system among others; the fourth, cognitive criticism (12.4), is an approach to literary criticism grounded in science and technology studies, specifically, neuroscience and neurohumanities; and the fifth (and final), speculative realism (12.5), is an approach to posthumanism connected to the work of Morton, Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, and others, which challenges all humancentered understandings of the world—and seeks instead an investigation of the world-in-itself. In sum, posthumanism consists of a wide variety of positions, many of which provide conflicting portraits of the posthuman condition. A related term that adds another dimension to this topic is transhumanism, a notion that implies going beyond or exceeding the human. According to Keith Johnson, transhumanism (or h+) “embraces emergent technologies that promise liberation of one sort or another from fixed human identities.”15 For Johnson, the utopianism of transhumanism sets it apart from other forms of posthumanism. The main forms of transhumanism today are concerned with a particular set of scientific developments, specifically, those associated with artificial intelligence, artificial life, nano- and bio-technologies, the singularity (the point when self-optimizing and self-replicating technologies such as artificial life and artificial intelligence make humans and humanity an anachronism), neural enhancement, cyborgization, cryonics, and radical life extension, among others. According to Johnson, these and other technologies “hold the promise of effectively eliminating or mooting strong distinctions between, for example, male and female, child and adult, human and machine, living and nonliving, and so on.”16 As such, transhumanists, says Johnson, are “beta-testing the future before it arrives.”17

12.1 CYBORG THEORY The term cyborg was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in their article “Cyborgs and Space” for the journal Astronautics. They were medical researchers who proposed that astronauts of the future would need to be technologically altered to live in space for extended periods of time. One technological alteration, for example, could be a computer-controlled device that would provide oxygen to the human body. Such a device that would replace respiration would render unnecessary the need to provide astronauts with an oxygenated atmosphere during space travel. Clynes and Kline defined cyborgs as “self-regulating man-machine systems.”18 Cyborg, in turn, was derived from cybernetics, a term Norbert Wiener coined in 1948 for the interdisciplinary study of “control and communication in animal and machine.”19 Amanpal Garcha notes that the reference to animals and machines by Wiener suggests that “cybernetics views all information-exchanging systems equally, whether those systems are living or

Keith Leslie Johnson, “Transhumanism,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 723. Johnson, “Transhumanism,” 723. 17 Johnson, “Transhumanism,” 723. 18 Hassan Melehy, “Cyborg,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 434. 19 Amanpal Garcha, “Cybernetics,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 432. 15 16

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nonliving, large or small scale.”20 Thus, from the perspective of cybernetics, comments Garcha, there is no difference between a mind and a machine: The components that absorb and react to inputs can be transistors, neurons, groups of cells; they can also be whole machines or entire human beings. All of these components act in similar ways according to cyberneticians. They self-organize according to recursive patterns of inputs and outputs, with those patterns, inputs, and outputs able to be represented diagrammatically or mathematically.21 Moreover, cybernetics, the term at the root of cyborg, argues Garcha, “elaborated a philosophical position that was similar in its antihumanism to the ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and other poststructuralists.”22 Lydia Liu and Céline Lafontaine even respectively show that some poststructuralists were in contact with mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers who were associated with cybernetics—and in fact adopted concepts from cybernetics in their poststructuralist thought. Liu terms this relationship the cybernetic unconscious of poststructuralism—and for Lafontaine it is the cybernetic matrix.23 Though the roots of cybernetics extend through much twentieth-century poststructuralist thought, cyborgs entered literary and cultural theory with Haraway’s publication of “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985) in the Socialist Review. This article, subsequently reprinted in Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), grew out of “New Machines, New Bodies, New Communities: Political Dilemmas of a Cyborg Feminist,” a conference presentation at Barnard College in 1983. Among the many sources for this piece, Haraway cites science-fiction writers such as Samuel R. Delany, who explored how the human comes to be altered in its interactions with technology, as well as feminist sciencefiction writers, such as Octavia Butler, Anne McCaffery, Vonda McIntyre, Joanna Russ, and James Tiptree Jr. (pen name for Alice Bradley Sheldon), who challenge binary conceptions of gender. Additionally, around the same time as the development and publication of “A Cyborg Manifesto,” William Gibson introduced the term cyber-space in his novel Neuromancer (1984), and cyborg cinema in films such as Blade Runner (1982; dir. Ridley Scott) and The Terminator (1984; dir. James Cameron) were gaining momentum. In fact, Haraway says that Rachel, the “replicant” in Blade Runner, “stands as the image of a cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion.”24 In her article, Haraway directly brings cybernetics, fiction, and social reality to bear on her conception of a cyborg: A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.25 20

Garcha, “Cybernetics,” 432. Garcha, “Cybernetics,” 432. 22 Garcha, “Cybernetics,” 432. 23 Céline Lafontaine, “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory,’ ” Theory, Culture & Society 24.5 (2007): 27–46; and Lydia H. Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010): 288–320. 24 Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985), in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178. 25 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 149. 21

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Thus, as a creature of social reality, cyborgs are political constructions with the potential to liberate as well as oppress. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.26 Moreover, as a creature of fiction, cyborgs are radically contingent and malleable. Their nature is illusory and limited only by imagination. Haraway describes the boundaries between organisms and machines as a “border war,” one that has been carried out in “the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics,” namely, “the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the production of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflection of the other.”27 But her manifesto does not aim to clarify these boundaries or call for their destruction. Rather, Haraway strives to present “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”28 This confusion of boundaries and constructive responsibility leads Haraway to conclude that we are all cyborgs: By the late twentieth-century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation.29 In addition, not only is the cyborg a creature of social reality and fiction, it is also a creature of a post-gender world. The cyborg, has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a “final” irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.30 For Haraway, the cyborg has no origin story because such stories depend on the myth of original unity and fullness. The cyborg, however, is committed to partiality and irony. It is an oppositional creature as well as a utopian one. It is also a creature that is not structured by the polarity between public and private.

26

Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 149. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150. 28 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150. 29 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150. 30 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150–1. 27

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In short, Haraway’s cyborg theory reworks the relationship between the major dualisms in Western traditions: “self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/ appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man.”31 These dualisms, which become inoperative in cyborg theory, are a key component of the “logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self.”32 Writes Haraway, Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.33 As political constructions, cyborgs reveal posthumanism as deeply political and potentially emancipatory. Cyborg theory’s dream of a “powerful infidel heteroglossia” recalls the work of Bakhtin discussed earlier, wherein heteroglossia shows how multiple voices can coexist in literature and the ways in which this exhibits a form of ideological or class struggle. Again, for Bakhtin, whereas the ruling class aims to narrow the meanings of words or discourse, the multi-accentuality identified by him allows for class interests to wage battles within language for control over meaning. Haraway is suggesting here that a related thing happens with cyborg imagery—albeit in a post-Marxist context. Finally, cyborg theory also recalls the biopolitics of Foucault discussed earlier, which Haraway describes as a “flaccid premonition of cyborg politics”—a statement that probably also holds as well for the heteroglossia of Bakhtin.

12.2 ANIMAL STUDIES In “And Say the Animal Responded” (1997), Derrida said that he was committed to tracking down “the whole anthropomorphic reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the animal order, of the law over the living.”34 For Derrida, philosophy’s assertion of human superiority and refusal of the animal order is unacceptable. According to him, the anthropocentric perspective on the animal refuses them many of the powers attributed to humans, including “speech, reason, experience of death, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughter, tears, respect, and so on—the list is necessarily without limit.”35 Moreover, Derrida seems to be more concerned with the attribution of these powers to humans—than the denial of them to animals.

31

Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 177. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 177. 33 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 181. 34 Jacques Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?” (1997), trans. David Wills, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 138. 35 Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?” 137. 32

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Derrida is a key figure in animal studies in that his work renders problematic the Western philosophical approach to the animal. But what is perhaps even more surprising is that when he writes about these philosophical problems he uses “real” animals as examples. In “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)” (1997), he writes: The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats of the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature, and fables.36 In this essay, Derrida challenges an old philosophical position that animals are only capable of reacting like a machine. The question for him is not whether animals can speak, but rather the ability of this real cat to know the difference between a reaction and a response. Commenting on his work here in When Species Meet (2008), Haraway observes that Derrida “did not fall into the trap of making the subaltern speak”37—a comment that establishes a deep link between animal studies and subaltern studies. Nevertheless, comments Haraway, Derrida “did not seriously consider an alternative form of engagement either, one that risked knowing something more about cats and how to look back, perhaps even scientifically, biologically, and therefore also philosophically and intimately.”38 From the anthropocentric perspective, animal studies investigates the relationship of humans to the biological kingdom. Such studies often deal with animal rights, that is, the moral obligations of humans to animals. Debate here concerns whether humans (members of the species homo sapiens) should be free to use animals (non-human members of the biological kingdom animalia) in any way they desire, or whether our ethical practice should extend to animals. Animal ethics (a subarea of animal studies) asks whether it wrong to wear a fur coat, to harm animals in scientific research, or to raise animals for food even if we do not require these practices to live. Contemporary animal rights advocates reduce the moral difference between humans and (other) animals, while their antagonists work to widen it. Parallels are often made between our treatment of animals and our treatment of other humans. Some animal rights advocates argue that speciesism, or discrimination based on species, is just as objectionable as racism and sexism. In the case of speciesism, the interests of animals are subordinated to the interests of humans. Most people who argue that we should treat animals of all species equally believe that being a member of one species rather than another species is not a morally relevant difference. Consequently, the differences between species, like the differences between races and sexes, is nothing more than a difference in genetic code, and not sufficient grounds for discrimination. The Judeo-Christian tradition seems to support speciesism. Humans, according to this tradition, are different from animals. Humans are created in the image of God and have immortal souls, whereas animals are not created in the image of God and do not have immortal souls. Animals were placed on the earth to serve the needs of humans. Therefore, the Judeo-Christian tradition gives

Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)” (1997), trans. David Wills, in Signature Derrida, ed. Jay Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 385. 37 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 20. 38 Haraway, When Species Meet, 20. 36

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humans the right to dominate and discriminate against animals. As a result, animal rights advocates often turn either to utilitarian arguments or rights-based argumentation to support their positions, and not the Judeo-Christian tradition. According to a utilitarian argument for animal rights, the maximization of happiness is possible only if we stop animal research, refrain from eating animals, and cease using animals for clothing and research. Eating animals is not necessary for a happy and healthy life, and may even detract from our health; cosmetics and animal-product clothing are merely a product of our vanity; and the use of animals in research is unnecessary. Opponents have strong counter-arguments for these claims: for example, using animals in research often results in faster conclusions to medical studies, which can save human lives. Therefore, the happiness brought about by new treatments discovered through animal research outweighs the unhappiness that would have resulted from not using animals in research. Utilitarian proponents of animal rights, such as Peter Singer, often bolster their arguments by pointing out that because most animals are sentient (have conscious experience) and can experience pain, pleasure, and happiness, we have a moral obligation to maximize their happiness as well as our own. If we do not, we are guilty of animal discrimination, or speciesism. In Animal Liberation (1975), Singer argues that speciesism is analogous to sexual and racial discrimination. If it is unjust to ignore the interests of women (sexism) and members of other races (racism), then it is also unjust to ignore the interests of members of other species (speciesism), particularly their interest in not suffering. According to Singer, all sentient beings are equal because all sentient beings have the ability to suffer. Therefore, we share with animals an interest in avoiding suffering, and each of our interests should be given equal consideration. Some, however, respond by saying that this only shows that we refrain from making animals suffer, not that we should stop killing them for food, using them in experimentation, or making clothing out of them. The rights-based defense of animals charges that animals have rights because they have interests. For example, if an animal has an interest in keeping its skin, then the loss of that skin is bad for the animal. Rights-based animal advocates thus argue that many of the rights of animals are violated when we use them for clothing, food, and research. One of the common objections to this line of argument is that to have rights one must also have duties. Since animals do not have duties, they cannot have rights. Others argue that even if animals have some rights, they do not have a right to life. Beings only have a right to life if they understand the concept of the future. Thus, because animals do not understand what the future is, they do not have a right to life. It should be noted that animals do not fare any better under either Kantianism or social contract theory. In Lectures on Ethics (1775–80), Immanuel Kant argued that animals are different from humans because they are not autonomous and they lack the capacity to reason about their actions. Therefore, they are not subject to the moral law. Nevertheless, Kant believed that frivolous cruelty towards animals would indicate a depraved and immoral inclination. “We can judge the heart of a man,” writes Kant, “by his treatment of animals.”39 In addition, a “master who turns out his ass or his dog because the animal can no longer earn its keep manifests a small mind.”40 According to social contract theorists, we only have moral obligations to beings that enter into the social contract. Since animals cannot enter into such an agreement, we are not morally obligated

39 40

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (1775–80), trans. Louis Infield (London: Methuen, 1932), 240. Kant, Lectures on Ethics, 241.

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to them. The Kantian and social contract arguments are two of the main anthropocentric arguments against animal rights. Both views contend that morality is developed, maintained, and improved for human beings and other possible beings that can enter into moral agreements. Therefore, we treat animals differently not because they are not human, but because they cannot enter into moral agreements. Hence, according to this line of argument, the use of animals for food or research cannot be considered speciesism. Animal rights advocates make two major criticisms of the Kantian and social contract views. First, they argue that our treatment of animals is based not on the view that humans have better reasoning abilities, but rather on the view that the human species has a higher moral worth. In real life, we do not treat humans who lack the ability to enter into contracts (e.g., infants, comatose humans) as we treat animals. Thus, we are inconsistent in our application of the Kantian and social contract positions. Second, animal rights advocates argue that the ability to enter into a contract should not be the criterion which determines whether we are morally obligated to a being. Moreover, the limitations of anthropocentric approaches to animals become even more pronounced when one engages in animal studies from the post-anthropocentric perspective. Animal studies, when approached from this perspective, is about the relationships among all species. Furthermore, if one contends like Thomsen and Wamberg that postanthropocentrism and posthumanism mean the same thing (as noted in the introduction to this chapter), then the postanthropocentric approach to animal studies is also the posthuman approach. From the perspective of posthumanism (and postanthropocentrism), the issue of human exceptionalism, dominion, and superiority that embarrasses (per Derrida) the Western philosophical approach to the animal is traded for a vast array of interrelations, interdependencies, and interactions among species. These species include humans (members of the species homo sapiens) and animals (nonhuman members of the biological kingdom animalia)—and, depending on how far one wants to push species inclusivity, it could include all living things (zoe–). Moreover, from the perspective of posthumanism (and postanthropocentrism), advocacy for animals is often cut from the same political cloth as general advocacy for the “other.” So, just as various forms of theory and studies advocate against discrimination based on race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age, animal studies advocates against discrimination based on species. But, unlike the politics of representation that maintains that we must give a voice to those who do not have one or that we must speak for “the other,” the posthuman (and postanthropocentric) perspective does not maintain that humans must speak for animals or give them a voice. To do so would be to fall back into the anthropocentric perspective on animal studies—as well as risk the problems associated with speaking for the subaltern raised by Spivak and others. Rather, what Haraway—one of the central figures in postanthropocentric animal studies— proposes is that “instrumental relations” between species be established so that all species may flourish. A key idea here is the notion of response-ability in the relations between humans and animals as well as among animals. However, rather than conceive of the entities responsibly interacting with each other as ones with “fully secured boundaries called possessive individuals (imagined as human or animal),” Haraway speaks of responsive entities, that is, ones with “connections that demand and enable response, not bare calculation or ranking.”41 “Response,” she says,

41

Haraway, When Species Meet, 70–1.

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grows with the capacity to respond, that is, responsibility. Such a capacity can be shaped only in and for multidirectional relationships, in which always more than one responsive entity is in the process of becoming. That means that human beings are not uniquely obligated to and gifted with responsibility; animals as workers in labs, animals in all their worlds, are response-able in the same sense as people are; that is, responsibility is a relationship crafted in intra-action through which entities, subjects and objects, come into being.42 These relations constitute an instrumental economy in which we are “companion species to one another.”43 It is one based on a fluid “animal” ontology wherein “entities, subjects and objects” ontologically “come into being” through their response-ability. For Haraway, this idea is “not romantic or idealist but mundane and consequential in the little things that make our lives.”44 In short, Haraway’s postanthropocentric and posthuman approach to animal studies reconceives the relationship between animals and humans—and along with this, their ontology (or being) as well. Still, her position does not entirely leave behind anthropocentric arguments aimed at avoiding animal suffering such as Singer’s—a position which is turn is derived from Bentham’s famous question regarding animals, namely, “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”45 Rather, Haraway transmutes them into postanthropocentric terms by arguing for the “responsible sharing of suffering” between species. A similar transmutation occurs when it comes to the anthropocentric Judeo-Christian tradition command “Thou shalt not kill” when viewed from the position of postanthropocentric responsibility: The problem is not figuring out to whom such a command applies so that “other” killing can go on as usual and reach unprecedented historical proportions. The problem is to learn to live responsibly within the multiplicitous necessity and labour of killing, so as to be in the open, in quest of the capacity to respond in relentless historical, nonteleological, multispecies contingency. Perhaps the commandment should read, “Thou shalt not make killable.”46 In sum, both anthropocentric and postanthropocentric perspectives on animal studies are deeply concerned with animal ethics. However, their differing accounts of the relationship of humans to animals yield radically different ethical theories. The adoption of a postanthropocentric and posthuman perspective also leads Haraway to be highly critical of theorists such as Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, who offer alternative accounts of the animal: in the case of Derrida, “he failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him in the morning”;47 in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, however, Haraway’s criticisms are much harsher.

Haraway, When Species Meet, 70. Haraway, When Species Meet, 93. 44 Haraway, When Species Meet, 93. 45 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 283, n. 46 Haraway, When Species Meet, 80. 47 Haraway, When Species Meet, 20. 42 43

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In “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible” from A Thousand Plateaus, while Deleuze and Guattari work hard to get beyond the human–animal divide “to find the rich multiplicities and topologies of a heterogeneously and nonteleologically connected world,” Haraway abhors their “scorn for all that is mundane and ordinary and the profound absence of curiosity about or respect for and with actual animals.”48 And, given Haraway’s profound intellectual curiosity about animals, Deleuze and Guattari’s statement “Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool” does not sit well with her either.49 “I am not sure I can find in philosophy,” writes Haraway of Deleuze and Guattari, “ a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and horror at the ordinariness of flesh, here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist project.”50 Finally, though Deleuze and Guattari as well Derrida offer alternative paths for animal studies, for those who advocate for real animals, Haraway’s position appears here as the only responsible option.

12.3 SYSTEMS THEORY Systems theory, says Francis Halsall, refers to a number of differing theories “which consider organization in terms of function, communication, and information.”51 These theories include chaos and complexity theory, cybernetics, second-order cybernetics, dynamical systems theory, and social systems theory. Also, according to Henry Sussman, deconstruction should be added to this list. This is important to note because it provides a direct route from systems theory, which originated in science and engineering, to literary and cultural theory. But this should not be much of a surprise as the connections between cybernetics and poststructuralism (e.g., the cybernetic unconscious of poststructuralism) have already been noted. “Deconstruction is a leading branch of contemporary systems theory,” states Sussman, “conducted under an aura of nonchalance that is merely the disguise both for the comprehensiveness and scholarly rigor of its analyses and its situation at the microscopic level of linguistic and semiotic articulation (committing it to joint-processing at the ‘lower’ as well as ‘upper’ levels).”52 To establish this connection, consider that Gregory Bateson, who applied second-order cybernetics to anthropology, states in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) that all systems are governed by the following principles: (1) The system shall operate with and upon differences. (2) The system shall consist of closed loops of networks or pathways along which differences and transformations of differences shall be transmitted. (3) Many events within the system shall be energized by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part. (4) The system shall show self-correctedness in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the direction of a runway.53

Haraway, When Species Meet, 27. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 240; original emphasis. 50 Haraway, When Species Meet, 30. 51 Francis Halsall, “Systems Theory,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 712. 52 Henry Sussman, “Deconstruction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 114. 53 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 490. 48 49

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Sussman notes the teleology (in Greek telos means end or purpose) in Bateson’s systems thinking, which, he explains, “is in the thrust toward self-correction that [Bateson] believes can be implanted, through meticulous thinking, into machines, whether their configuration happens to be mechanical, cognitive, cybernetic, or ecological.”54 For Sussman, the self-correction of systems is “a messianic aspiration [that] marks the point at which the writing of systems (the program with which they have been uploaded) swerves unmarked into the metaphysics of ethical perfectibility and redemption.”55 Nevertheless, against the teleology of Bateson’s systems, Sussman situates the non-teleological systems of Deleuze, Guattari, and Derrida—thinkers whose works “demonstrate that systems are also the interface to open-ended networks of signification that proliferate, disseminate, verge toward no specific point or destination,”56 that is, telos. Sussman finds a kind of playfulness in the “random dispersions and haphazard coincidences of [the] constitutive signifiers that make systems.”57 In Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014), Bruce Clarke says that “while a system may be any complex totality composed of interdependent elements, the strong sense of the system concept denotes a complex ensemble unified in such a way that a process emerges from, and only from, the interdependent interactions of those elements.”58 According to him, the systems of the world are as numberless as are the “materialities involved in their constitution and communication.”59 He describes the connection between narrative and systems theory as follows: As a complex structure of signs, the literary object, such as a narrative text, is a social element and media object ready to be taken up and processed by an observing system. However, the narrative subject—the observer of the text—can be one of, or comprised of, multiple systems, most immediately the psychic systems (or minds) producing perception and intuitions of the text and the social systems (or conversations) within which the text circulates as an element of literary communication.60 Furthermore, Clarke notes that “systems may be physical or technological, biological or cultural, natural or designed, or some combination of these.”61 “Unlike stories,” he continues, “nothing restricts the nature of systems to ‘man’s dominion.’ ”62 In other words, systems theory is posthuman because humans are just one of countless systems in the world. Bateson directly critiques humanism in Steps to an Ecology of Mind by combining anthropology, astrology, biology, chemistry, and physics to form a transdisciplinary theory of cybernetics. For him, systems thinking occurs not within the human individual, but rather within a complex and conflicting set of relations. To get a sense of how this posthuman systems-thinking works, let’s look at Bateson’s description of a man cutting down a tree:

Henry Sussman, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 272–3. Sussman, Around the Book, 273. 56 Sussman, Around the Book, 211–12. 57 Sussman, Around the Book, 212. 58 Bruce Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 1. 59 Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative, 1. 60 Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative, 1. 61 Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative, 2. 62 Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative, 2. 54 55

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Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective (i.e. mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree–eyes–brain–muscles–axe-stroke– tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind.63 Bateson argues that his systems approach results in an ecological mind, wherein eco-mental systems replace anthropocentric approaches to the mind (e.g., Kantian epistemology). Moreover, whereas the anthropocentric approach to the mind pits man against nature, a systems approach is a postanthropocentric, relational one. For Bateson, the anthropocentric approach is “an ecology of bad ideas” that propagates a narrow epistemology, that focuses only on “ ‘What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species.”64 In doing so, “you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure,”65 that is, loops relating to non-human systems. Cybernetics is the study of biological and technical systems as adaptive and informational. These systems are communicational circuits that can be both formalized and subject to regulative intervention. In How We Became Posthuman (1999), Hayles separates the development of cybernetics into three waves of development based on the central concept of each: (1) First-Wave Cybernetics—from 1945 to 1960, homeostasis was the central concept of cybernetics. It theorizes organisms through their ability to retain their place and identity against changes in an external environment. First-wave cybernetics resulted in a theory of communication and control that applied equally to animals, humans, and machines. The concepts surrounding homeostasis are circular causality, feedback loops, information as signal and noise, instrumental language, and quantification. Some principal figures here are Norbert Wiener (who coined the term cybernetics), John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Warren McCulloch.66 (2) Second-Wave Cybernetics—from 1960 to 1980, reflexivity was the central concept of cybernetics. Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates. The concept of reflexivity in second-wave cybernetics is similar to the one used in critical theory, cultural studies, and social studies of science. However, whereas feedback loops were in the first wave linked to homeostasis, in the second wave they are linked to reflexivity. Also, the conceptual addition of observers who are inside the system differs from the firstwave wherein observers are outside the system. The concepts surrounding reflexivity are autopoiesis (self-making), reflexive language, structural coupling, and system environment.67 Of these, autopoiesis radically alters the idea of the informational feedback loop such that it no longer (like in the first wave) connects a system to its environment, but now no information crosses the boundary separating the system from its environment. Autopoiesis does not allow us to see a world “out there,” but only see what our systemic organization allows us

Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 318. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 492. 65 Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 492. 66 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 7. 67 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 16. 63 64

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to see. Some key figures here are Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela.68 (3) Third-Wave Cybernetics—from 1980 to the present, virtuality was the central concept. Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns. This definition plays off the duality at the heart of the condition of virtuality— materiality on the one hand, information on the other.69 The world here is essentially informational patterns as if the universe was ultimately a computer simulation. The third wave swelled into existence when self-organization began to be understood not merely as the (re)production of internal organization, but as the springboard to emergence. The concepts surrounding virtuality are emergent behavior, functionalities, and computational universe. Some key figures here are Rodney Brooks, Francisco Varela, and Hans Moravec.70 Of Wiener, Hayles says his aim in developing cybernetics was not to “dismantle the liberal humanist subject,” but rather to fashion “human and machine alike in the image of an autonomous, selfdirected individual.”71 For Weiner, writes Hayles, “the point was to extend liberal humanism, not subvert it.”72 “The point,” she continues, “was less to show that man was a machine than to demonstrate that a machine could function like a man.”73 Heidegger, however, was not as kind to Wiener as Hayles. He contends that cybernetics has taken the place of thought,74 and that with its development, “the destruction of the human being is complete.”75 Derrida, however, whose deconstruction draws heavily upon the work of Heidegger, says in Of Grammatology that whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the field of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts— including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.76 Nevertheless, deconstruction is just one subarea of systems theory, a field that has entered many different disciplines ranging from biology, meteorology, and management to communication, economics, and literary and cultural studies. Response to the question of whether the advent of systems theory marks the end of thinking (as Heidegger claims) or not is one of the ways to

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 9. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 10–11. 70 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 16. 71 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 7. 72 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 7. 73 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 7. 74 Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us” (1966), in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, trans. William J. Richardson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1981), 45–67. 75 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters, ed. Medard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 123. 76 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 9. 68 69

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distinguish humanism (and anthropocentrism) from posthumanism (and postanthropocentrism). In short, systems thinking is to posthumanism (and postanthropocentrism) as thinking is to humanism (and anthropocentrism).

12.4 COGNITIVE CRITICISM Cognitive criticism (or, alternately cognitive literary studies) is the intersection of cognitive science and literary and cultural theory. It is “the work of literary critics and theorists vitally interested in cognitive science,” says Alan Richardson, who have a “good deal to say to one another, whatever their differences.”77 These differences perhaps start with the question of whether work in this area is a species of humanism or posthumanism. If we regard posthumanism as equivalent to postanthropocentrism, then given that cognitive science is interested in human cognition, cognitive criticism would appear to be anthropocentric. But as one starts to dig down into some of the beliefs of cognitive scientists, cognitive criticism begins to look increasingly like a version of posthumanism. Still, whether cognitive criticism is critical posthumanism, which is centered on new approaches to the human subject, or analytic posthumanism, which takes its lead from science and technology studies, or a combination of both, arguably depends on the area of cognitive science foregrounded in the specific form of cognitive criticism. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary investigation of cognition by artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. Cognitive processes such as reasoning and perception are approached by cognitive scientists as a form of information-processing that involves the manipulation of mental representations. Moreover, according to Tim Crane, “cognitive scientists also hold either that these mental processes can be modeled by computers, or that these processes actually are computational processes (i.e. that the mind is a computer).”78 According to the classical approach to cognitive science, a representational system of symbols with syntactic and semantic properties is computationally processed. However, this approach was challenged by connectionism, which rejects the notion that mental representations are structured syntactically. Rather, for connectionists, cognition involves neural networks in which “representational content is holistically distributed across entire networks of simple representational units.”79 But, of course, contemporary cognitive science is continuously developing and refining its accounts of the neuroscience of consciousness, decision-making, empathy, mental imagery, perception, reading, and social behavior. Moreover, cognitive scientists have also developed nondualistic accounts of cognition, that is, accounts that challenge a distinction between the mind and the body. Dualism is the view that existence is composed of two separate, independent, and unique realms, and that neither one can be reduced to the other. Plato’s distinction between a world of the senses and a world of the intellect and Kant’s distinction between a noumenal world and a phenomenal world are types of dualism. So too is Descartes’ famous argument in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) that the mind is separate from the body. For Descartes, the body and the

Richardson quoted by Zunshine in “Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1. 78 Tim Crane, “Cognitive Science,” in The Oxford Guide to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 146. 79 Crane, “Cognitive Science,” 146. 77

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mind (or soul—he uses these terms interchangeably) have entirely opposite natures: the body (viz., res extensa or “extended thing”) is divisible and extended, and the mind (viz., res cogitans or “thinking thing”) is indivisible and unextended. Descartes’ position on the relationship between mind and body is referred to by a number of different phrases including Cartesian dualism, mind– body dualism, and psychophysical dualism. At the same time, Paul Churchland, for example, argues in Matter and Consciousness (1984) that talk about the mind and its mental states is mistaken and should be replaced with a scientific theory concerning how the brain works. Churchland begins by criticizing identity theory, the view that there is a one-to-one correspondence between mental states and brain states. Identity theorists believe that all discussion of mental states such as hoping, imagining, and believing can be reduced to discussion of brain states. Whereas the identity theorist believes that intertheoretic reduction between mental states and brain states is possible, Churchland maintains that it is not. Intertheoretic reduction is the name of the process whereby the terms and principles of an older, weaker theory are reduced or translated to the terms and principles of a newer, more powerful theory. According to Churchland, mental states are a remnant of a severely flawed and pseudoscientific theory, “folk” psychology, a theory so mistaken that its terms and principles must be completely dismissed. In place of folk psychology, Churchland defends eliminative materialism, which maintains that all human behavior can be explained in terms of neuroscience, the study of how the brain works. Eliminative materialists maintain that the terms and principles of folk psychology will cease to be used as we learn more about how the brain works. Churchland’s eliminative materialism concludes that there is no such thing as the mind and mental states, only the brain and brain states. Thus, Churchland’s non-dualistic approach to cognitive science not only refutes the mind/body distinction, but also any theory that refers to mental states including psychological theories. The various theories and methodologies of cognitive science have entered literary and cultural studies at a number of different points. One, mentioned earlier, is by providing a new direction for narratology. Cognitive narratology, a subarea of cognitive criticism (and narratology), focuses on the “mental states, capacities, and dispositions,” writes David Herman, “that provide grounds for— or, conversely, are grounded in—narrative experiences.”80 According to Herman, cognitive narratology addresses two broad questions: (1) How do stories across media interlock with interpreters’ mental states and processes, thus giving rise to narrative experiences?; and, (2) How (to what extent, in what specific ways) does narrative scaffold efforts to make sense of experience itself?81 Major areas of research in cognitive narratology include: (1)

Storyworlds as Mental States—inquiry into how do mental states and processes interface with storyworld character-inventories, spacio-temporal profiles, and ontological make-up;

David Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, §1, September 22, 2013, http://www. lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/38.html. 81 Herman, “Cognitive Narratology.” 80

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(2)

Narrative Perspective—inquiry into cognitively inflected accounts of narrative perspective or focalization in fictional and nonfictional texts;

(3)

Reader-Response—inquiry into cognitive reception theories;

(4)

Data and Diagrams—empirical studies ranging from measuring reading times to diagrams of storyworlds;

(5)

Transmediality—transmedial studies suggesting that narrative functions as a cognitive macro-frame enabling interpreters to identify stories or story-like elements across any number of media including literary, musical, and pictorial media;

(6)

Characterization—inquiry into characters and methods of characterization including techniques used by storytellers to figure forth their character’s mental lives;

(7)

Self-Conduct—inquiry into how stories provide a means for evaluating the conduct of self and others;

(8)

Emotions—inquiry into the way emotional responses undergird the telling and interpretation of stories;

(9)

Evolution—inquiry into the theory of evolution and evolutionary psychology with regard to narrative thinking;

(10) Counterfactuals—inquiry into how counterfactual scenarios support efforts to negotiate experience; and, (11) Non-Human Narrative—inquiry into what it might be like for nonhuman animals to encounter the world—and thereby reshape humans’ own modes of encounter.82 Finally, Herman qualifies the association of narratology with cognitive science by stating that it is preferable that cognitive narratology not be conflated with cognitivism, a position in cognitive science that views the mind as reducible to “disembodied mental representations that are disattached from particular environments for acting and interacting.”83 Instead, writes Herman, “research on storytelling and the mind can investigate how a culture’s narrative practices are geared on to humans’ always-situated mental states, capacities and proclivities.”84 Note as well that Herman frequently refers to “mental states” and their role in cognitive narratology—a theoretical choice that both puts him at odds with Churchland’s approach to cognitive science and speaks to some of the major differences in the field noted by Richardson. But cognitive narratology is just one of many ways that cognitive science has coupled with a major area of literary and cultural theory. Others include combining cognitive science with historicism, viz., cognitive historicism; queer theory, viz., cognitive queer theory; aesthetics, viz., neuroaesthetics; postcolonial studies, viz., cognitive postcolonial studies; and, disability studies, viz., cognitive disability studies. Contributors to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015), for example, make the case for these connections between cognitive science and literary and cultural studies, as well as others.

82

Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” adapted from §3.2. Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” §3.1. 84 Herman, “Cognitive Narratology,” §3.1. 83

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What becomes clear when surveying the recent contributions of cognitive criticism is that many of its areas of inquiry have already been explored by literary and cultural theory without the aide of cognitive science. For example, if we look back to the New Criticism, we will recall that I. A. Richards called for literary criticism to emulate science. And among the things that Richards focused on were the attitudes that are triggered by our emotional responses when reading a literary work. One can easily imagine now cognitive science as updating his work in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), wherein it would now offer a cognitive science approach to the mental events that occur during the reading of a literary work. Or, think of the phenomenological approach to the literary work of art, wherein one studies like Roman Ingarden the cognition of a literary work of art. The question, however, is what does the incorporation of cognitive science add to early theory? For that matter, what does it add to more recent areas of literary and cultural theory such as critical race theory or critical climate change? For some, the advances in cognitive science today are significant enough to warrant a reconsideration and re-evaluation of older areas of literary and cultural theory. This surely holds for Ingarden’s The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, which was published in 1937. New theories of cognition provide a different standard against which to measure his work. But for others, such as critical climate change, the prefix cognitive will never be a substitute for the prefix critical. Finally, while the field of cognitive criticism (or, cognitive literary studies) is a burgeoning one, the field of cognitive critical theory has attracted far less attention.

12.5 SPECULATIVE REALISM Speculative realism, writes Graham Harman, is “a loose philosophical movement opposed to trends that have dominated continental philosophy from its inception.”85 Its inception is linked to the work of Quentin Meillassoux, whose 2006 book, After Finitude, launched a philosophical ship that has attracted many supporters, opponents, and those like Harman who work hard to distinguish their own work within the speculative realism movement. What makes work in this general area particularly difficult to master is that it really is not a cohesive philosophical movement. “What prevented speculative realism from becoming a cohesive philosophical movement,” writes Harman, “was the vast range of options available within its rather general founding principles: realism plus unorthodox speculation.”86 In After Finitude, Meillassoux argues that after Kant, philosophy has been caught in the problem of correlationism, a philosophical approach wherein reality is defined in terms of how it appears or relates to humans. “Correlationism,” says Meillassoux, “rests on an argument as simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and theory about X without a positing of X.”87 “If you speak about something,” he continues, “you speak about something that is given to you, and posited to you.”88 Moreover, adds Meillassoux,

85 Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 184. 86 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 184. 87 Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism,” Collapse III (2007): 409. This is a transcript of the remarks made at the 2007 University of London speculative realism conference. 88 Brassier, et al., “Speculative Realism,” 409.

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Correlationism takes many forms, but particularly those of transcendental philosophy, the varieties of phenomenology, and post-modernism. But although these currents are all extraordinarily varied in themselves, they all share, according to me, a more or less explicit decision: that there are no objects, no events, no laws, no beings which are not always-already correlated with a point of view, with subjective access. Anyone maintaining the contrary, i.e., that it is possible to attain something like a reality in itself, existing absolutely independently of his viewpoint, or his categories, or his epoch, or his culture, or his language, etc.—this person would be exemplarily naïve, or if you prefer: a realist, a metaphysician, a quaint dogmatic philosopher.89 In short, speculative realists reject correlationism. Rather, they offer different forms of anticorrelationism, the view that reality can be examined in itself independent of any subjective mediation from a human observer. Correlationists argue, writes Peter Gratton, “that reality and human beings go together like conjoined twins: where you find one, you find the other.”90 Moreover, he notes two different types of correlationism that have been identified by speculative realists: (1) Weak Correlationism—the view that reality exists and we can think it, that is, that it exists and that it is non-contradictory, but we cannot know about it given the filters through which reality is understood. The speculative realists’ chosen representative of this position is Immanuel Kant. (2) Strong Correlationism—the view that there is no thinking about what is outside our own being in the world. Representatives of this view include Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger, Michael Dummett, Nelson Goodman, and Bruno Latour. As examples of this position, consider Latour’s claim that Pharaoh Ramses could not have died of tuberculosis, since it was not discovered until 150 years ago; and Merleau-Ponty’s comment that “Nothing will ever bring home to my comprehension what a nebula that no one sees could possibly be.”91 Both of these types of correlationism are rejected by speculative realism. Moreover, also rejected are all forms of idealism, including the versions posited by Plato, George Berkeley, and Hegel. As Plato’s version was discussed earlier, let’s turn briefly to Berkeley’s version of idealism. In Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley argues that nothing exists outside of the mind. For him, the existence of things consists in their being perceived. “Their esse is percipi,”92 writes Berkeley, meaning that to be is to be perceived. Nothing has “any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”93 Berkeley’s position on knowledge is that we only know what we find in our experience. Like John Locke, he is an empiricist. However, Berkeley believes that Locke had not followed his empiricism to its logical limit. Consequently,

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Quentin Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” Lecture at Middlesex University, London (8 May 2008): 1, https:// speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729–time_without_becoming.pdf. 90 Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 16. 91 Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” 15; adapted. Also, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. Donald Landes (London: Routledge, 2013), 432. 92 George Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), ed. Colin M. Turbayne (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 24; §3. 93 Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 24; §3.

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Berkeley strenuously disagrees with Locke on a number of positions, such as the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Where Locke maintained that primary qualities refer to qualities that exist independent of being experienced, and secondary qualities refer to qualities that exist dependent on being experienced, Berkeley can find no difference between these two types of qualities since both are dependent upon perception. For Berkeley, Locke’s primary qualities of extension, figure, motion, and so on, “are only ideas existing in the mind.”94 Berkeley calls his philosophy immaterialism, emphasizing in this label its rejection of matter. For him, “it is plain that the very notion of what is called Matter or corporeal substance, involves a contradiction in it,”95 and that “there is not any other Substance than Spirit, or that which perceives.”96 Berkeley’s argument against the existence of matter might be formulated as follows: (P1) Whatever can be thought of is an idea in the mind of the person thinking it. (P2) Nothing can be thought of except ideas in minds and anything else is inconceivable. (P3) What is inconceivable cannot exist. (Concl.) Therefore, matter, which by definition is not an idea in a mind, cannot exist. Thus, according to Berkeley, the world is not composed of both material substances (matter) and immaterial substances (minds, spirits, or souls), but only of the latter, which he simply calls “Spirit.” As such, Berkeley’s doctrines are best termed idealism. In terms of metaphysics, idealism is the position that reality is ultimately mental, spiritual, or nonmaterial in nature; in terms of epistemology, idealism is the position that all we know are our ideas. Berkeley’s positions are in accord with both epistemological and metaphysical idealism. Hegel’s idealism is often referred to as absolute idealism. For the purposes of speculative realism, it is an important type of absolute idealism because “there is a necessary relation between being and thinking, since for Hegel, the dialectic or relation between thinking and being is the absolute—the ‘and’ here is what is ultimately real.”97 For Meillassoux, Hegel’s idealism is also speculative because “it advances into thinking reality as it is: the correlation is taken as the absolute in-itself.”98 According to Gratton, compared with the infinite dialectical movement of Hegel’s absolute, strong correlationism appears as a modest alternative. Whereas the speculative idealism of Hegel posits an infinite and necessary being, strong correlationism rejects metaphysics—which is for Meillassoux, the positing of a necessary being—and embraces “our human finitude as well as our inability to establish assorted grounds for being, whether it be the Hegelian spirit, Leibniz’s monad of monads, or the other necessary entities of metaphysics.”99 Thus, speculative realism rejects not only the philosophical traditions of British empiricism (e.g., the work of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), but also all German idealism, including Hegel’s absolute idealism and Kant’s transcendental idealism, the view that the content of knowledge comes from our senses and that the form of our knowledge comes from reason. Moreover, also rejected by

Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 27; §9. Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 27; §9. 96 Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 26; §7. 97 Gratton, Speculative Realism, 15. 98 Gratton, Speculative Realism, 15–16. 99 Gratton, Speculative Realism, 16. 94 95

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speculative realism are efforts at blending British empiricism and German idealism, such as F. H. Bradley’s version of absolute idealism in Appearance and Reality (1899), which holds that there must be an absolute or a harmonious reality that transcends our thought and in which “mere thinking is absorbed.”100 What is very clear from speculative realists is that any anthropocentric approach to understanding reality must be rejected. This includes naïve realism, the view that real things exist and that we can have direct access to them. On this view, you do not question the existence of the baseball that hits you on the head. Rather, you simply assume that the baseball is real and exists. But while naïve realism might be a common-sense approach to the world, it is not an approach posited by many philosophers including the speculative realists. So, if all anthropocentric approaches to understanding reality including naïve realism are rejected, what is the view of speculative realism? Well, to begin with, as noted earlier, there are many different approaches to speculative realism. Just among the original four keynote speakers at the first conference on the topic of speculative realism in 2007 at the University of London— Meillassoux, Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier—there are widely divergent positions: (1) Transcendental Realism—for Brassier, existence is worthless. For him, “this apparently banal assertion harbours hidden depths which have yet to be sounded by philosophers, despite the plethora of learned books and articles on the topic.”101 Nihilism, argues Brassier, is “the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of humans, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home,’ nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do to re-establish the meaningfulness, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature.”102 Brassier’s nihilistic approach to speculative realism has been termed transcendental realism. (2) Vitalist Idealism—for Grant, idealism does not mean what it traditionally means for philosophers, namely, that the existence of the world depends on its human observer. “I’m very concerned to show that idealism, as it were” says Grant, “doesn’t look like we think it does. I’m very concerned that we see and acknowledge this to be the case, because the speculative tools that it has built into it are immense.”103 Continues Grant, “it seems to me that idealism is committed to a realism about all things, a realism that applies equally to nature and to the Idea.”104 According to Grant, the production of animals, flowers, forces, and species in nature is the same production process that results in thoughts. Moreover, none of these can be reduced to one product that preceded the other. “The Idea is external to the thought that has it, the thought is external to the thinker that has it, the thinker is external to the nature that produces both the thinker and thought and the Idea,”105 says

F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 182. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), x. 102 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, xi. 103 Brassier, et al., “Speculative Realism,” 336. 104 Brassier, et al., “Speculative Realism,” 338. 105 Brassier, et al., “Speculative Realism,” 339. 100 101

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Grant. For him, “we no longer have a series of interiorities with which it’s possible for anyone to recognize themselves in the production of their thoughts.”106 Grant’s vitalistic approach to speculative realism has been termed vitalist idealism. (3) Object-Oriented Ontology [OOO]—for Harman, aesthetics is first philosophy, that is to say, the root of all philosophy.107 “Aesthetic experience is crucial to OOO,” writes Harman, “as a form of non-literal access to the object.”108 “It occurs,” he continues, “when sensual qualities no longer belong to their usual sensual object, but are transferred instead to a real object, which necessarily withdraws from all access. For this reason, the vanished real object is replaced by the aesthetic beholder herself or himself as the new real object that supports the sensual qualities. Thus we can speak of the necessary theatricality of aesthetic experience.”109 Moreover, Harman aims to empty the aesthetic of all social, political, cultural, and biographical considerations, and focus purely on formal ones. Harman’s aesthetic approach to speculative realism has been termed object-oriented ontology. (4) Speculative Materialism—for Meillassoux, factiality is the fact of the contingency of everything. Against the idealist, the correlationist claims that we can conceive of the contingency of correlation, that is, the possibility that correlation will disappear with the extinction of humanity. This means, says Meillassoux, that the correlationist “can positively think of a possibility which is independent of correlation, since this is precisely the possibility of the non-being of the correlation.”110 Thus, for Meillassoux, “the effective ability of every determined entity—event, thing, or law of subjectivity—to appear or disappear with no reason for its being or non-being”111 is an absolute. The principle of factuality allows him to arrive at “a speculative realism which clearly refutes correlationism.”112 According to Meillassoux, “I can think an X independent of any thinking,”113 something which he has learned from correlationism and its fight against the absolute. Thus, the “principle of factuality unveils the ontological truth hidden beneath the radical skepticism of modern philosophy: to be is not to be a correlate, but to be a fact: to be is to be factual—and this is not a fact.”114 Meillassoux’s factual approach to speculative realism has been termed speculative materialism. To be sure, each of these positions on speculative realism, that is, Brassier’s transcendental realism, Grant’s vitalist idealism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, offer differing ways out of correlationism—and its human-centered understanding of the world. In addition, in the case of Meillassoux, correlationism is used to make his case for speculative realism: in other words, he both rejects and utilizes it. Harman says that this is a paradox

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Brassier, et al., “Speculative Realism,” 340. Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Penguin Random House, 2018), 59–102. 108 Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 260. 109 Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 260. 110 Brassier, et al., “Speculative Realism,” 430. 111 Brassier, et al., “Speculative Realism,” 431. 112 Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” 9. 113 Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” 9. 114 Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” 9. 107

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that gives Meillassoux’s speculative materialism its “unique cast.”115 For Harman, one example of this paradox is that Meillassoux contends both that “it is possible to gain direct access to the primary qualities of things as they really are,” and is “in agreement with the correlationist objection that killed off primary vs. secondary qualities in the first place.”116 In sum, while there is wide agreement among speculative realists as to what they reject, there is little agreement as to what to do after correlationism has been rejected. Nevertheless, Brassier’s nihilism, Grant’s vitalism, Harman’s aesthetics, and Meillassoux’s factuality each offer points of entry into speculative realism that have sparked interest in many fields other than academic or professional philosophy. For that matter, much of the work in speculative realism is regarded by academic philosophers as anti-philosophy. Statements such as Grant’s that idealism is really a form of realism are to professional philosophers what a statement such as comedy is really a form of tragedy would be to professional literary critics: namely, nonsense. Nevertheless, just as there are audiences for the latter, so too are there audiences for the former. “Though barely a decade old,” comments Harman, “Speculative Realism is already one of the most influential philosophical movements in art, architecture, and the humanities.”117 Finally, there are some who argue that speculative realism is also be a form of anti-theory, a claim that will be taken up in the final chapter in the context of object-oriented ontology (15.3).

Graham Harman, Speculative Realism: An Introduction (Medford, MA: Polity, 2018), 135. Harman, Speculative Realism, 135. 117 Harman, Speculative Realism, 1. 115 116

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Affect Studies 13.0 INTRODUCTION “Affect,” write Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between intensities and resonances themselves.”1 Its study in literary and cultural theory is often dated to the 1995 publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” and Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect.” In fact, Seigworth and Gregg, co-editors of The Affect Theory Reader (2010), an authoritative anthology of work in this area, dub this date the “watershed moment” regarding affect and theories of affect.2 In the case of Sedgwick, her affect theory, which was introduced earlier in the context of her contributions to queer theory, is one of the major strands of affect theory today. In this regard, you will recall that following Silvan Tomkins, Sedgwick argues that affects can be qualitatively separated into two groups: negative affects and positive affects. Moreover, regarding these two groups of affects, there are two goals: the first is the general goal of seeking to minimize negative affect; and the second is the general goal of seeking to maximize positive affect. Queer affect, which goes in a number of different directions, will be the topic of the first section of this chapter (13.1). Here, the work of Sedgwick and Sara Ahmed will be discussed as major contributions to affect theory. Another major strand of affect theory comes via the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, who describes affect as the ability to affect and to be affected. His theory of affect (affectus), which includes an account of its origin and nature, is extensively and uniquely developed in The Ethics (1677). Spinoza, however, enters contemporary literary and cultural theory regarding affect via Deleuze, who wrote two books on Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, Spinoza (1968), and, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970/1981). Deleuze, perhaps more than any other philosopher after Spinoza, is the one most closely associated with affect theory. Moreover, it is through a version of materialism linked to his philosophy that the second major strand of affect theory today has developed. Thus, materialism will be the topic of the second section of this chapter (13.2), wherein the formative contributions of Spinoza and Deleuze (and Guattari) will be discussed along with those of other major contributors to the topic of affect and materialism including Massumi, and Hardt and Negri—the latter of whom you will recall offer a theory of the immaterial labor of cognitive capitalism that brings affect, intellect, and bodies into capitalist production in ways not accounted

Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (London: Duke University Press, 2010), 1. 2 Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 5. 1

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for in industrial capitalism. As such, Hardt and Negri’s notion of affective labor is an important development regarding the coming together of affect and materialism. In addition, with respect to Deleuze and Guattari, it might be further noted that Massumi is the English translator of A Thousand Plateaus (1980), which was published in 1987. Also recall that Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs is defined by its power to be affected or to affect various external relations, something that will become a key notion in affect studies. But these are only two of many different strands of affect studies today. To get a broad sense of the possibilities here, consider the eight areas of affect theory identified by Seigworth and Gregg: (1) Phenomenology—here affect is studied through the interlaced practices of human and nonhuman nature. Phenomenologies and post-phenomenologies of embodiment are often utilized in this approach to affect. Representatives of this approach include Vivian Sobchack, Don Ihde, Michel Henry, Laura Marks, and Mark B. N. Hansen. (2) Cybernetics—here affect is studied through assemblages of the human/machine/inorganic such as the ones discussed earlier in cyborg theory. Cybernetics, the neurosciences (of matter, of distributed agency, of emotion/sensation, and so on), artificial intelligence, robotics, and bioinformatics and bioengineering (where life technologies work increasingly to blur the affectional line between the living and the non-living) are all utilized in this approach to affect. (3) Spinozistic—here affect is studied through work inspired by Spinoza that links materialism and affect. This includes contemporary approaches in philosophy that try to move beyond various gendered and other cultural limitations, whether in feminism (Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Genevieve Lloyd, and Moira Gatens), in Italian autonomism (Paulo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato), in philosophically inflected cultural studies (Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris, and Massumi), or in political philosophy (Agamben, Hardt, and Negri). This approach is discussed below (13.2). (4) Psychology and Psychoanalysis—here affect is studied through psychology and psychoanalytic theory where a biologism is open to impingements and pressures from intersubjective and interobjective systems of social desiring. Representatives of this approach include early Freud, Tomkins, Daniel Stern, and Mikkel Borch-Jacobson. With regard to the early Freud, recall his collaboration with Breuer, which foregrounded the factor of affect—one that he defines as “pertaining to the feeling bases of emotion.” With regard to Tomkins, note again the heavy influence of his work on Sedgwick. Work in this area, therefore, is directly connected to some of the work on queer affect, particularly the contributions of Sedgwick. (5) Activist—here affect is approached through politically engaged work. This work is most often undertaken by feminists, queer theorists, disability activists, and subaltern people living under the thumb of normalized power. Activist work of this kind attends to a hard and fast materialism as well as to the fleeting and flowing ephemera of the daily and the workaday, of the everyday and everynight-life, and of experience, where persistent practices of power can simultaneously provide a body with predicaments and potentials for realizing a world that subsists within and exceeds the horizons and boundaries of the norm. (6) Against the Linguistic Turn—here affect is approached in an effort to turn away from the linguistic approaches to affect. Approaches here range from cultural anthropology to geography to communication and cultural studies to performance-based art practices to literary theory—

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and often toward work increasingly influenced by neuroscience and cognitive science; but also by returning to and reactivating work that had been taking place well before and alongside the linguistic turn and its attendant social constructions including Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” Fanon’s “third person consciousness,” Benjamin’s non-sensual mimesis, Susan Langer’s “open ambient,” and John Dewey’s pragmatic idealities. Frequently work here focuses on ethico-aesthetic spaces that are opened up or shut down by a wide assortment of affective encounters. (7) Emotions—here affect is approached through critical discourses on the emotions and histories of the emotions. Work here includes studies of sociality, crowd behaviors, contagions of feeling, matters of belonging, and a range of postcolonial, hybridized, and migrant voices that forcefully question the privilege and stability of individualized actants possessing selfderived agency and solely private emotions within a scene or environment. (8) Science and Science Studies—here affect is approached through science and science studies, particularly work like that of Alfred North Whitehead that embraces a pluralist approach to materialism. Here work is the hinge where mutable matter and wonder perpetually tumble into each other.3 Moreover, we might also add to this list the intersection of narratology and cognitive criticism, which has been called affective narratology. Here theorists such as Patrick Colm Hogan strive to bring affect theory into the study of narratology. Also, there is the semanalysis of Kristeva, wherein she grafts psychoanalytic theory onto semiotics. As you will recall, Kristeva argues that love is essential to the body because it helps to reconnect words with affects, that is, the physical and psychical manifestation of drives. For her, the connection between words and affects is established during the child’s acquisition of language, and when the connection between words and affects is broken or missing, particular forms of mild psychosis can appear. Recall as well that Jameson proposes time and affect schizophrenia as one of the characteristics of postmodernism. This form of schizophrenia breaks down temporality, leaving us to live in a continual present that is a series of unrelated moments where we are not able to imagine the future. Experience amounts to intensities, not memories or development. The materiality of the signifier overwhelms us to the point that language becomes fragmented along with the fragmentation of the subject. Jameson’s observation reminds us that affect theory is also a way to theorize the present. Thus, in this chapter, presentism (13.3) will be introduced as one of the developments of affect theory. One of the ways this is achieved is through an affective mapping of the present—a notion that derives from Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping. Another way is through what Lauren Berlant terms the affective present, a focus on the present that is neither “shallow” nor “the narcissism of the now.”4 Berlant’s affective presentism will here be presented in contrast to another version of presentism, one that emerged around the same time as a response to the New Historicism. But what should not be overlooked in an affective mapping of the present is the question of affective mappings of the past. Arguably, this is one of the points of entry into trauma theory (13.4)

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Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 6–8; adapted. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.

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and Holocaust studies (13.5), which will be taken up in the final two sections of this chapter. Both are important dimensions of affect studies wherein the very concepts of trauma and the Holocaust are theoretically rearticulated. Still, some, such as Berlant, argue that their focus on exceptional events that shatter the ordinary is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. In short, the many different strands of affect studies link it in one way or another to much of the literary and cultural theory discussed in the previous chapters of this volume. From narratology and psychoanalytic theory to biopolitics and posthumanism, there is not a single area of twentiethcentury literary and cultural theory where affect studies does not strengthen and deepen the critical work in that area—except, perhaps, one: the New Criticism. As you will recall, one of the centerpieces of the New Criticism is the affective fallacy, that is, the fallacy of confusing “the poem and its results (what it is and what it does).”5 “It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from psychological effects of the poem,” write Wimsatt and Beardsley, “and ends in impressionism and relativism.”6 Nevertheless, affect theory not only shows how and why this New Critical position is wrong-headed, it also offers many different endings for the study of affect other than impressionism and relativism. But, perhaps more importantly, affect theory opens the door for the study of feelings in literary and cultural theory—one which the New Criticism would rather we leave closed.

13.1 QUEER AFFECT Sedgwick and the physicist Adam Frank open “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” (1995) by listing a few things that theory at the end of the twentieth century knows when it offers accounts of human beings or cultures: (1) To Avoid Biology—theory knows that it must distance itself from a biological basis if it aims to do justice to contingency, to performative force, to the possibility of change, and to individual, historical, and cross-cultural difference; (2) To Embrace the Linguistic Turn—theory knows that the most productive model for understanding representation is human language; (3) To Rely on Sight—theory knows that the physical sense of sight is central to the dismantling of dominant dualisms such as subject/object, self/other, and active/passive. Moreover, the preoccupation of theory with sight extends to other processes such as subjectification, selffashioning, objectification, and Othering; to the gaze; and to the core of selfhood; and (4) To Rely on Binaries—theory knows that binaries have not only survived structuralism, but have been propagated even more broadly. In addition to the above binaries, some others are presence/absence, lack/plenitude, nature/culture, repression/liberation, and subversive/ hegemonic.7

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Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” 21. Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” 21. 7 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” (1995) in Touching Feeling, 93–4. 6

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However, the aim of Sedgwick and Frank is to challenge these things that theory knows “not from the vantage point of the present but from (what we take to be) a moment shortly before their installation as theory.”8 They do this by drawing upon Tomkins’s work on affect, which they describe as a “phenomenology of emotions.”9 What is noteworthy here regarding the queer affect of Sedgwick is its indebtedness to psychology and phenomenology via Tomkins (whose work on affect has already been noted). What is also important to note is how it presents queer affect as going against the grain of dominant versions of theory. Namely, by embracing the biological and rejecting the linguistic turn as well as by troubling theory’s reliance upon binaries and sight. All of these aspects come together for Sedgwick in Touching Feeling (2003), where she says her aim is to “explore some ways around the topos of depth or hiddenness, typically followed by a drama of exposure, that has been such a staple of critical work of the past four decades.”10 Connected to the topos of depth or hiddenness is the effort to go beneath, behind, and beyond—all prepositions that her queer affect avoids. Instead, she invokes “a Deleuzian interest in planar relations, the irreducibly spatial positionality of beside”—a preposition that offers “some useful resistance to the ease with which beneath and beyond turn from special descriptors into implicit narratives of, respectively origin and telos.”11 As such, then, Sedgwick’s queer affect is a combination of Tomkins’ psychology and phenomenology of affect, and (Guattari) and Deleuze’s body without organs, which is defined by its power to be affected or to affect various external relations. The beside of queer affect for Sedgwick aims not to expose essentialisms, nor to unearth unconscious drives, nor to uncover violent or oppressive historical forces. Rather, Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object . . . Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping and other relations.12 Moreover, beside allows Sedgwick to further distance her work from old epistemological questions (such as “whether or not there are essential truths and how we could, or why we can’t, know them”) to “asking new questions about phenomenology and affect” such as “what motivates performativity and performance”?13 A focus on touching and texture leads her to some of these new affective phenomenological questions. Why? Because “texture and affect, touching and feeling seem to belong together” as both are irreducibly phenomenological.14 “To describe them primarily in terms of structure is always a qualitative misrepresentation,”15 says Sedgwick. “Attending to

8

Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” 94. Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” 94. 10 Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Touching Feeling, 8. 11 Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Touching Feeling, 8. 12 Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Touching Feeling, 8. 13 Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Touching Feeling, 17. 14 Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Touching Feeling, 21. 15 Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Touching Feeling, 21. 9

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psychology and materiality at the level of affect and texture,” she continues, is “to enter a conceptual realm that is not shaped by lack nor by commonsensical dualities of subject versus object or of means versus ends.”16 Rather, it is to enter the conceptual realm of queer affect. Another major contributor to queer affect is Sarah Ahmed, whose work is more generally termed queer phenomenology. According to Lauren Berlant, work in this area follows “the tracks of longing and belonging to create new openings for how to live, and to offer the wild living or outside belonging that already takes place as opportunities for others to re-imagine the practice of making and building lives.”17 Moreover, queer phenomenology, writes Berlant, calls for “a political analysis of the ongoing activity of bodily orientation and the modes of circulation through which subjects enter into contemporary worldliness, identity and belonging.”18 Ahmed utilizes queer phenomenology to analyze “unhappy queers as a crucial aspect of queer genealogy.”19 Here she is responding to a need of queer affect identified by Heather Love in Feeling Backward (2007). “We need a genealogy of queer affect,” says Love, “that does not overlook the negative, shameful and difficult feelings that have been so central to queer existence in the last century.”20 Ahmed’s contribution to this genealogy in The Promise of Happiness (2010) is an examination of the queer politics of unhappiness. The question she poses is what does it mean for queer affect to affirm unhappiness? By staging happiness, and its opposite, unhappiness, as affective forms of bodily orientation, Ahmed is able to give an account of the “bad feelings” of the figure of the “feminist killjoy”—a figure comparable to the figure of the “female troublemaker.” Both figures are intelligible if they are read through the lens of the history of happiness. Feminists might kill joy simply by not finding the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising. The word feminism is thus saturated with unhappiness. Feminists by declaring themselves feminists are already read as destroying something that is thought of by others not only as being good but as the cause of happiness. The feminist killjoy “spoils” the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness.21 Ahmed maintains that from this “feminists are thus attributed as the origin of bad feeling, as the ones who ruin the atmosphere.”22 But she is skeptical of this attribution because of her “childhood experiences of being a feminist daughter in a relatively conventional family always at odds with the performance of good feeling in the family.”23 Whenever she would point out sexism in the talk of others, she would always be viewed as “causing the argument,” while at the same time the “violence” of what was said by others to her, and the violence of their provocation, would go completely unnoticed.24 For her, situations like this one points to “a political struggle about how we attribute

Sedgwick, “Introduction,” in Touching Feeling, 21. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 198. 18 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 197. 19 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 89. 20 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: The Politics of Loss in Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 127. 21 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 65. 22 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 65. 23 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 65. 24 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 65. 16 17

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good and bad feelings, which hesitates around the apparently simple question of who introduces what feelings to whom.”25 “It is not just that feelings are ‘in tension,’ ” writes Ahmed, “but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity.”26 For Ahmed, queer affect is a way to theorize the positions of those subject to homophobia, sexism, and racism. The woman’s body, the queer body, and the body of color are all attributed as the cause of tensions and bad feelings—and they do not even have to say anything. “The mere proximity of some bodies involves an affective conversion,” writes Ahmed. “To get along,” she continues, [y]ou have to go along with things which might mean for some not even being able to enter the room. We learn from this example how histories are condensed in the very intangibility of an atmosphere, or in the intangibility of the bodies that seem to get in the way. Perhaps atmospheres are shared if there is an agreement in where we locate the points of tension.27 For Ahmed, the killjoy is a social threat not because of what they say, but because of the way they come between bodies “that would be, or should be, in agreement.”28 For her, the killjoy “teaches us that the nature of organic agreement depends on the localization of disagreement to ‘whatever’ gets in the way.”29 Thus, Ahmed sees it as her task to refuse this indifference to the “whatever,” that is, to bodies that get in the way. In sum, Ahmed’s genealogy of queer affect reveals that “those who refuse the promise of happiness become the cause of bad feeling, which causes unhappiness to take form in specific ways.”30 Nevertheless, “we need to think about unhappiness as more than a feeling that should be overcome.”31 Why? Because unhappiness both provides pedagogical insight into queer affect and reveals the limits of the promise of happiness.

13.2 MATERIALISM Terry Eagleton points out that there is a link between radicalism and materialism. It is one that is found both in the work of Spinoza and of Deleuze. In the radical lineage of Spinoza, writes Eagleton, matter is both alive and self-determining, rather like the populace of a democratic state. It is unnecessary to posit a sovereign power that sets it in motion. Besides, to repudiate a realm of spirits is to take the material world with unswerving seriousness, along with the material well-being of the men and women in it. It admits of no ethereal distractions from the business of setting poverty and

Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 69. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 67. 27 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 67. 28 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 213. 29 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 213. 30 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 213. 31 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 217. 25 26

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injustice to rights. It also allows one to reject all clerical authority, since if spirit is everywhere one looks then the priesthood can have no monopoly on it. It is thus that one can speak of the politics of matter.32 Thus, according to Eagleton, when one adopts the materialism of Spinoza, one is also investing “human beings with a degree of dignity by seeing them as part of a material world which is identical with the Almighty.”33 Spinoza, who was a monistic pantheist, believing that the world and God exist in an indissoluble unity, demonstrates to Eagleton not only the link between radicalism and materialism, but also the link between materialism and humanism. Eagleton’s comment regarding Spinoza’s humanism is important because it reminds us that the focus of The Ethics is human beings, specifically, their nature, possibilities, and psychology. Though he begins it with a proof of the existence of God, as Eagleton points out, it is a conception of God, wherein God is in everything, and everything is in God. The term pantheism captures well the latter aspect (Everything is in God), but sometimes misses the former (God is in everything). Moreover, for Spinoza, who uses the phrase “God, or Nature,” God is in some sense identical to nature. For Spinoza, God is the immanent (that is, indwelling) cause of the world, and is one substance (monism) that can be expressed in infinite ways, including as mind and as body. This position puts him at odds with Descartes, who argued that there are two substances (dualism) that have entirely opposite natures: the mind (viz., res cogitans or “thinking thing”) is indivisible and unextended, and the body (viz., res extensa or “extended thing”) is extended and divisible. Thus, for Spinoza, a human being as substance can be conceived of as mind (viz., a mode of thought) and as body (viz., a mode of extension), but there is no interaction between these two modes because they are different expressions of the same substance—one that can also be expressed or looked at in an infinite variety of ways other than simply as mind and as body. Consequently, human beings as mind and as body are autonomous ways of expressing the same substance, and each get their own account in The Ethics. One of the consequences of Spinoza’s monism is that there is no discussion of the mind controlling the body because this does not make any sense according to his metaphysics. Moreover, while he speaks of the emotions and happiness, his approach to them is very different from both the classical and modern tradition through Descartes. This difference is seen in his theory of affects, which might be summarized as follows: (1) Human bodies are capable of having affects (or, emotions). (2) These affects are either actions or passions. (3) Actions are affects that are clearly and distinctly understood. We are the cause of actions. Actions are active affects. Actions reveal our ability to affect. (4) Passions are affects that are not clearly and distinctly understood. They occur when human beings are affected by some stimulus that produces in them an affect. We are not the cause of passions. Passions are passive affects. Passions reveal our ability to be affected. (5) Our self-knowledge and agency are revealed through active affects, that is, actions. Here we act through knowledge.

32 33

Terry Eagleton, Materialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 4. Eagleton, Materialism, 4.

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(6) Our lack of self-knowledge and agency is revealed through passive affects, that is, passions. Here we respond to external and internal stimulus without knowledge, that is, either blindly or inadequately. This theory of affects can be found in Part III of Spinoza’s Ethics, entitled “Concerning the Origin and Nature of Emotions,” which has become one of the founding texts of materialist approaches to affect theory. It is also here that Spinoza speaks of the potential of this theory of affects, saying “nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capacities: that is, nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do, without being determined by the mind, solely from the laws of its nature in so far as it is considered corporeal.”34 Spinoza’s challenge of determining the body’s capacities independent from their determination by the mind for the most part lay dormant until Deleuze started to develop a version of materialism inspired by the work of Spinoza—but also in many ways very different from it. To get a sense of the similarity and difference, consider what Deleuze and Guattari say about affect in What is Philosophy? (1991). For them, philosophy and art “think” differently: art “thinks through affects and percepts,”35 whereas philosophy thinks through concepts. “In the one [that is, art], there is the constellation of a universe or affects and percepts; in the other [that is, philosophy], constitutions of immanence or concepts.”36 Moreover, there is also science, which “thinks” through “functions.” Still, no one of these ways of thinking “is better than the other, or more fully, completely, or synthetically ‘thought.’ ”37 Nevertheless, as our concern is affect, Deleuze and Guattari’s frame of thinking that concerns us here is art. For Deleuze and Guattari, “artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects,”38 and “the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another.”39 For them, Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.40 As such, the notion of affect in Deleuze and Guattari is very different from that of Spinoza, wherein affects are either actions or passions, but not beings. Whereas Spinoza’s affects are linked to man’s

Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics (1677), ed. Seymour Feldman, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1982), 106; Bk. III, Prop. 2, scholium. 35 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66. 36 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 66. 37 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 198. 38 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 175. 39 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 167. 40 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 164. 34

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knowledge of them and are not just limited to the realm of art, Deleuze and Guattari detaches their validity from self-knowledge—and place it in the very being of affect. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari contend that “no art and no sensation have ever been representational.”41 Rather, either sensation is “realized in the material and does not exist outside of this realization,” or it is “the material that passes into sensation.”42 Aesthetic figures for them “have nothing to do with resemblance or rhetoric but are the condition under which the arts produce affects of stone and metal, of strings and wind, of line and color, on a plane of composition of a universe.”43 In Parables for the Virtual (2002)—in which “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) is the first chapter—Massumi develops an “asignifying philosophy of affect” that draws on the work not only of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, but also the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson (who, not coincidently, Deleuze wrote a book on in 1966) and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. By terming his philosophy of affect asignifying, Massumi strives to differentiate it from signification and theories of the signifier. “Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification,” writes Massumi, “that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable, or interminable?).”44 In an effort to break from the “vocabulary” of signification, his asignifying affect theory adopts an entirely new one, which is one that is also careful not to “slip back in” “received psychological categories” such as emotion.45 For Massumi, it is important to maintain a conception of emotion, but also to clearly distinguish it from affect. For him, affect is an unqualified intensity, whereas emotion is a qualified intensity. And while affect and emotion share a relationship with intensity, each is of an entirely different order, and each follows a different logic. “An emotion is a subjective content,” writes Massumi, “the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal.”46 It is intensity that is “owned,” “recognized,” and “conventional.” Emotion is the “consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-circuits, into function and meaning.”47 By contrast, affect cannot be reduced to emotion because “affect concerns the movements of the body.”48 But by “the body” Massumi means (following Spinoza) the body as one with its transitions, which is another way of saying, there is no body. There is, rather, for Massumi, a continuous bodying. Each transition is accompanied by a variation in capacity: a change in which powers to affect and be affected are addressable by a next event and in how readily addressable they are, or to what degree they are present as futurities. That “degree” is a bodily intensity, and its present futurity is a tendency.49

Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 193. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 193. 43 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 66. 44 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), 20th anniversary edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 30. 45 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30. 46 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30. 47 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 30. 48 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxv. 49 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxiii. 41 42

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In brief, Massumi develops from Spinoza’s theory of affect “a way weaving together concepts of movement, tendency, and intensity.”50 While affect for Massumi “is not subjective in the sense of belonging to a subject to which the body belongs,” it is subjective in the sense that (following Spinoza) “every transition is accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity.”51 Lastly, affect is regarded by Massumi as autonomous to the extent that it “escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction it is.”52 “The autonomy of affect,” writes Massumi, “is its participation in the virtual: potential remaindered by the past, left in reserve for the future.”53 Thus, autonomy is regarded as a kind of openness, an openness that provides affect an “escape hatch to its own futurity.”54 Finally, like queer affect, the Spinozistic strand of affect theory also has a politics. Massumi describes affective politics as “an art of emitting the interruptive signs, triggering the cues, that attune bodies while activating their capacities differentially.”55 For him, affective politics is inductive in the sense that it is possible to induce bodies to “certain regions of tendency, futurity, and potential.”56 For Hardt and Negri, however, affective politics is about the shift from material labor to affective labor, which we described earlier as a form of immaterial labor associated with cognitive capitalism that brings affect, intellect, and bodies into capitalist production in ways not accounted for in industrial capitalism. Nonetheless, in view of the affective materialisms of Deleuze and Guattari, and Massumi (which some also term, new materialisms), one might question whether immaterial labor is really the right term for the type of affective labor discussed by Hardt and Negri. Or, at the very least, we might want to reassess the concept of affective labor as one that produces, maintains, and reproduces affects in view of both queer and materialist affect theories.

13.3 PRESENTISM Presentism is the view that we should read the past only in terms of the present. This position, which can be traced back to the early twentieth century, encourages scouring the past only for those materials directly relevant to the present. Over the past twenty years, there has been a revival of interest in presentism both as a response to the rise of cultural materialism and New Historicism in the 1980s, and as a development in affect theory. Cultural materialists, as you will recall, contend that the history of the material base of society helps us to understanding literature and culture, whereas New Historicists reverse this position and argue that the study of literature and culture helps us to understand history. Cultural materialists like Raymond Williams, for example, argue that “the whole lived social process, as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings”57 must be utilized in the study of literature, while New Historicists, following Foucault, claim that to analyze a discursive field we must “grasp the

Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxiii. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxv. 52 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxv. 53 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxvi. 54 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxvi. 55 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxviii. 56 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, xxxviii. 57 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 109. 50 51

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statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence, determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected with it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes.”58 Either way, the role of the present with respect to the study of literature is virtually non-existent. “At present,” writes Hugh Grady, “the trend toward historicizing Shakespeare appears to have become so dominant in the field and therefore so highly valued that more ‘presentist’ approaches, that is, those oriented towards the text’s meaning in the present, as opposed to ‘historicist’ approaches oriented to meanings in the past—are in danger of eclipse.”59 Grady, who made this comment in Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf (1996), along with Terrence Hawkes, author of Shakespeare in the Present (2002), co-edited Presentist Shakespeare (2006). They are two of the leading figures of the presentist revival. Hawkes, for his part, regards presentism as a form of literary criticism “whose roots in and connections with the here and now are fully and actively sought, deliberately foregrounded, [and] exploited as a first principle.”60 His presentism is built on the claim that it is not possible “genuinely to capture, or repeat, the past.”61 Rather, for him, like Gadamer, our access to the past is always informed by present concerns. “A presentist criticism’s engagement with the text takes place precisely in terms of those dimensions of the modern world,” writes Hawkes, “that most ringingly chime—perhaps as ends to its beginnings—with the events of the past.”62 In short, he views presentism as a form of literary criticism that takes the material present as its starting point. Because of its oppositional and formative relationship with New Historicism—and as a way to distinguish it from the presentism of affect theory—we might term the presentism of Grady and Hawkes as new presentism. The presentism of affect theory, at least as developed by Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism (2011), concerns “conceiving of a contemporary moment from within that moment.”63 For Berlant, “the present is perceived, first, affectively.”64 This affective present is “what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else, such as an orchestrated collective event or an epoch on which we can look back.”65 On this view, “the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect,” which is “a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now whose very parameters (when did ‘the present’ begin?) are also always there for debate.”66 Unlike new presentism, which locks the present into a relationship with the past, affective presentism is focused only on what is happening here and now. But this focus on the present should not be regarded as a “shallow presentism, or ‘the narcissism of the now.’ ”67 Rather, says Berlant, it

Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 28. Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 4–5. 60 Terrence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2002), 21. 61 Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, 3. 62 Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, 22. 63 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. 64 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. 65 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. 66 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. 67 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. 58 59

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“involves anxiety about how to assess various knowledges and intuitions about what’s happening and how to eke out a sense of what follows from those assessments.”68 Quickly, however, these epistemological anxieties become political ones when an effort is made to negotiate among different “styles of managing simultaneous, incoherent narratives of what’s going on and what seems possible and blocked in personal/collective life.”69 For Berlant, these political anxieties reveal the need to understand how to track the present in terms of the impasse, which is something that “designates a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward.”70 The impasse, for Berlant, “is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event.”71 These emerging events are variously referred to by Berlant as “the situation, the episode, the interruption, the aside, the conversation, the travelogue, and the happening.”72 In turn, “the situation” and these other references to “emerging events” become emerging genres for reflection about contemporary historicities. In the case of “the situation,” for example, Berlant contends that we have a genre emerging wherein a “state of animated suspension provides a way of thinking about some conventions with which we develop a historical sense of the present affectively as immanence, emanation, atmosphere, or emergence.”73 These emergent affective genres are regarded by Berlant as a sign of the waning of older realist genres including melodrama whose conventions “of relating fantasy to ordinary life and whose depictions of the good life now appear to mark archaic expectations about having and building a life.”74 History finds its way into Berlant’s affective presentism as a function of the ongoing present, “a place where pasts are specialized among many elsewhere that converge in the sensorium of the people feeling out the conditions of their historical sense.”75 Key to this approach to the past as the ongoing present is the notion of affective atmospheres as shared, not solitary. For Berlant (as well as Massumi), “bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and responding to atmospheres in which they find themselves.”76 Moreover, this notion of affective atmospheres should be regarded as a way of incorporating into affect theory what Raymond Williams termed structures of feeling. It is also a way of drawing out of cultural materialism notions relevant to presentism. For Williams, the judging of environments and response to atmospheres involves a wide variety of ways of thinking about these matters. He uses the term feeling as opposed to world-view or ideology to capture the idea that not all of these differing ways of thinking are systematic or formally held beliefs. Rather, they are more like “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.”77

Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. 70 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. 71 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4. 72 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 5. 73 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 5–6. 74 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 6. 75 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 17. 76 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 15. 77 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. 68 69

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“We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone,” continues Williams, “specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.”78 While Williams deploys this concept to explain how new formations of thought emerge, what links it to affective presentism is the way it captures the notion that “affective responses may be said significantly to exemplify shared historical time,”79 regardless of one’s position on the subject as the sovereign agent of history. For Berlant, the “ ‘structure of feeling’ is a residue of common historical experience sensed but not spoken in a social formation, except as the heterogeneous but common practices of a historical moment would emanate them: Williams wrote and interpreted all literary works in terms of the articulation of historical and bodily events.”80 This latter remark is important because is shows how affective presentism is concerned with history but not the one articulated by a New Historicism (and new presentism) still caught up in the linguistic turn. The emphasis of affect and bodily events in Williams refracts his cultural materialism as an early form of affective presentism (Williams coined the term structures of feeling in his 1954 book, Preface to Film). Ultimately, what Berlant demands of historians (including literary ones) in affective presentism is that they “produce as the present a sense of ‘noncontemporaneous contemporaneity,’ a history of the forces that bear on the every day and interrupt its appearance of apparent homogeneity to reveal the cracks in the local experience of life that can be mobilized toward alternative imaginaries.”81 In sum, affect theory allows Berlant to make the case for histories of the present, something that has been disrespected in literary and cultural theory because it is often presented as “a scene in which duped or epistemologically limited subjects grope their ways toward survival, except in exceptional moments.”82

13.4 TRAUMA THEORY In 2010, Stef Craps announced that trauma theory “is among the hottest research topics in the field today.”83 A year earlier, however, Berlant said “affect is the new trauma.”84 In Cruel Optimism (2011), discussed in the previous section, Berlant criticizes the work of trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth for detaching “the subject from the historical present, sentencing subjects to a terrifying suffusion of the past into something stuck in the subject that stands out ahistorically from the ordinary.”85 But the claim of “newness” for affect theory relative to trauma theory here by Berlant is curious considering that the landmark studies in each area were published around the same time: Sedgwick and Frank’s “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” and Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” were published in 1995, whereas Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience was published in 1996.

Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 15. 80 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 65. 81 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 68. 82 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 67. 83 Stef Craps, “Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Textual Practice 24.1 (2010): 52. 84 Lauren Berlant, “Affect is the New Trauma,” Minnesota Review 71–72 (2009): 131. 85 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 80. 78 79

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Craps explains that trauma theory arose in the mid-1990s “as a product of the ‘ethical turn’ affecting the humanities,” a turn that promised “to infuse the study of literature and cultural artefacts with new relevance.”86 The “old relevance” implied by this statement is poststructuralism, most specifically, deconstruction and the linguistic turn. The ethical turn, to which trauma theory contributed, aimed to be a correction to the linguistic turn, which was said to be turning its back to the world. “Amid persistent accusations that literary scholarship, particularly in its deconstructive, post-structuralist, or textualist guise, had become indifferent or oblivious to ‘what goes on in the real world,’ ” notes Craps, “trauma theory confidently announced itself as an essential apparatus for the understanding ‘the real world’ and even as a potential means for changing it for the better.”87 Moreover, trauma theory did so by adopting a deconstructive approach tempered by a psychoanalytic position on traumatic memory. Cathy Caruth, one of the founders of trauma theory, had not only been a student of Paul de Man, who was one of the leading proponents of deconstruction in America, but also thanks another member of the Yale School, Harold Bloom, in Unclaimed Experience “for his remarkable teaching, and conversations with me, about Freud.”88 Moreover, Caruth’s conversations with Bloom on psychoanalysis and literature would continue well after graduate school as she acknowledges them as ongoing ones in Unclaimed Experience. Just as it was important to note the influence of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, and Whitehead on the affect theory of Massumi, it is equally important to note the influence of Freud, de Man, and Bloom on the trauma theory of Caruth. For, like Massumi, Caruth both draws upon and goes beyond the work of her predecessors in the establishment of trauma theory. Unlike many at the time who were claiming that poststructuralist thought leads us away from history, and that “the epistemological problems raised by poststructuralist criticism necessarily lead to political and ethical paralysis,”89 Caruth challenges these charges. Trauma theory becomes a way for her to defend poststructuralist thought against the criticism that it implies that “we may not have direct access to others’, or even our own, histories.”90 For Caruth, the textualist approach of deconstruction, that is, the approach wherein all “reference is indirect,” provides access to history— albeit a unique form of access.91 Trauma theory involves “a rethinking of reference” in a way “aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding.”92 More specifically, trauma theory provides an account of understanding that permits “history to arise where immediate understanding may not.”93 In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth defines trauma as “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.”94 An example of this

86

Craps, “Wor(l)ds of Grief,” 52; my emphasis. Craps, “Wor(l)ds of Grief,” 52. 88 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), ix. 89 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11. 90 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11. 91 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11. 92 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 12. 93 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 12. 94 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11–12. 87

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definition of trauma is the “soldier faced with sudden and massive death around him,” writes Caruth, “who suffers this sight in a numbed state, only to relive it later on in repeated nightmares.”95 Moreover, she points to the growing set of experiences associated with trauma that are “now often understood in terms of the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD].”96 For her, the fact that there is something we term trauma (including PTSD) confirms the “possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential (that is, no longer based on simple models of experience and reference).”97 But by choosing to focus on trauma as the point of access to a form of history that is “no longer straightforwardly referential,” Caruth appears to equate history with trauma. This is a position that aligns her work with Jameson’s position on history in The Political Unconscious (1981), namely, that “history is what hurts.”98 For Caruth, all history must be understood in terms of trauma. The focus, however, of trauma theory on exceptional events that shatter the ordinary, is one that Berlant argues is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Nevertheless, for Caruth, following Freud and Lacan, trauma narratives speak to a crisis that never becomes what Berlant terms ordinary. For Caruth, the story of trauma is a narrative of a belated experience. Rather than telling of an escape from reality, that is, the escape from death, or from its referential force, trauma narratives attest “to its endless impact on life.”99 “The crisis at the core of many traumatic narratives,” writes Caruth, often emerges, indeed, as an urgent question: Is the trauma the encounter with death or the ongoing experience of having survived it? At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival. These two stories, both incompatible and absolutely inextricable, ultimately define the complexity of what I refer to as history in the texts that I read . . . In these texts, as I suggest, it is the inextricability of the story of one’s life from the story of a death, an impossible and necessary double telling, that constitutes their historical witness.100 In short, the experience of trauma presents some serious or insoluble problems (aporia), such as the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life. Trauma also reveals language as something that “defies, even as it claims, our understanding,”101 another of the many aporias of traumatic experience. For Caruth, the experiences of trauma are not accessible to us consciously. Therefore, following Freud, they are repressed as “unclaimed experience” and subject to a repetition compulsion. As she notes,

Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 12. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 12. 97 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 12. 98 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 102. 99 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7. 100 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7–8. 101 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5. 95 96

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the returning traumatic dream perplexes Freud because it cannot be understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits. Unlike the symptoms of a normal neurosis, whose painful manifestations can be understood ultimately in terms of the attempted avoidance of unpleasurable conflict, the painful repetition of the flashback can only be understood as the absolute inability of the mind to avoid an unpleasurable event that has not been given psychic meaning in any way. In trauma, that is, the outside has gone inside without mediation.102 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud argues that the shape of our lives is defined not by the meaningful distortions of neurosis, but rather this non-meaningful traumatic repetition. It is at this point, writes Caruth, that Freud “ultimately asks what it would mean to understand history as the history of a trauma.”103 This notion of traumatic experience that is subject to repetition was introduced by Freud some sixty years before PTSD was first listed and defined in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1980). Like Freud’s traumatic repetition, PTSD remains unknown to memory and is not felt as a past event. It should also be noted that Lacan associated The Real with trauma. For him, The Real is the order of the unattainable materiality of existence and primal needs. Also, as you will recall, it is an order that “resists symbolization absolutely.” At one point, he termed that which was inexpressible by the subject from within the Symbolic as troumatique, a traumatic void. But there appears to be a paradox in Caruth’s theory of trauma: she at once dissociates the traumatic event from meaning, while at the same time infers a causal relationship between the traumatic event and its effects. If an event does not have meaning, how then can it be said to have meaningful effects? Likewise, if a traumatic event has effects, this implies that it was meaningful enough to elicit an effect. The literal return of this traumatic event infers a relationship between the past and the present—without which, there would be nothing from the past that returns to the present. Caruth aims to explain this paradox in her notion of witnessing. For her, trauma resides in the unconscious. But it is not something that has been repressed in the unconscious. Rather, it is something that has always been latent in the unconscious. “If repression, in trauma, is replaced by latency,” comments Caruth, “this is significant in so far as its blankness— the space of unconscious—is paradoxically what preserves the [traumatic] event in its literality.”104 Thus, the witness has no grasp of the traumatic event either consciously or unconsciously. What then was witnessed? For Caruth, the answer is: impossibility. In short, trauma theory appears to deny the possibility of empirical knowledge of traumatic history. “The historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting,” says Caruth, “but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all.”105 So, yes, trauma theory deals with “history” and the “real world,” but trauma does not reside in an event, nor does the traumatic witness have access to an event. For Caruth,

Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 61. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 61. 104 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8. 105 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 18. 102 103

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when one listens to the crisis of a trauma, one listens not only for the event but also “to hear in testimony the survivor’s departure from it.”106 And it is by speaking and listening to these departures from the site of trauma that cultures can become linked. “In a catastrophic age,” writes Caruth, “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not simply as understanding the pasts of others but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the departures we have all taken for ourselves.”107 Ultimately, trauma departs from actual events and those who witnessed them, and travels into cultural memory where it is available for all to participate.

13.5 HOLOCAUST STUDIES Shoah means catastrophe in Hebrew. It is often used to refer to the Holocaust, the killing of nearly six million Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between the years 1941 and 1945. The Holocaust resulted in the death of around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. Holocaust studies is an area of study within literary and cultural theory that started to develop a few decades after the genocide. “Despite the magnitude of the historical events we call the Holocaust,” write Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, “its study developed slowly.”108 It would not be until that 1960s that academic books, such as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), would begin to address the topic. University courses on the Holocaust started to appear in the mid-1960s, with Erich Goldhagen’s course on “The Destruction of European Jewry” (1965) at Brandeis University and Sander Gilman’s “The Holocaust in Literature” (1973) at Cornell University among the first. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the number of university courses devoted to Holocaust literature and history had increased greatly. Commentators note this as a period wherein there was a shift in Holocaust consciousness that coincided with the airing of a television miniseries in the US on the Holocaust in 1978 that was viewed by 120 million people.109 Still, as university courses devoted to Holocaust literature and history became increasingly commonplace through the 1980s, so too did questions regarding how to represent the Holocaust. “By the late 1980s,” writes Michael Roth, “it had been common to ask the postmodern historian whether all representations of the Shoah were equally valid.”110 As he explains, the ethical turn, which resulted in trauma theory, was “an attempt to respond to this question without relying on some new epistemological foundation.”111 That is to say, trauma theory attempts to respond to the question of whether all representations of the Holocaust are equal by means of an antifoundational theory of knowledge, which, as we saw in the case of Caruth, leaves traumatic experiences such as the Holocaust as “no longer straightforwardly referential.” But does this also mean that all indirectly referential representations of the Holocaust are equally valid? In the case of Caruth, this is arguably 106

Caruth, “Introduction,” 10. Caruth, “Introduction,” 11. 108 Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes, “Introduction,” in Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2004), 5. 109 Hirsch and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 5–6. 110 Michael S. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History: Essay on Living with the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), xxiii. 111 Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History, xxiii. 107

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not a valid question because traumatic experience is not subject to representation. Nevertheless, questions about the limits of representation with respect to the Holocaust still linger. “As a subject of representation,” comment Hirsch and Kacandes, “the Holocaust stretches the limits of representability.”112 It also stretches the limits of literary and cultural theory because Holocaust studies concerns much more than just issues of reference and representation. Additionally, according to Hirsch and Kacandes, Holocaust studies concerns issues regarding: (1)

Good versus evil;

(2)

Violence, authority, obedience, conformity, resistance, and rescue;

(3)

Tolerance and prejudice;

(4)

Trauma, memory, and survival;

(5)

Racism and anti-Semitism,

(6)

Assimilation and marginality,

(7)

Exclusion and genocide;

(8)

The limits of art;

(9)

Speech in the face of unspeakability;

(10) The intersections of ethics and aesthetics; (11) The line between fiction and truth; (12) The possibilities of speaking and hearing trauma; (13) Imagining an atrocity while at the same time acknowledging one’s own distance from it; (14) Evading exploitation, appropriation, and trivialization; (15) The genres (e.g., fiction, poetry, drama, film, video, diaries, oral testimonies, memoirs, memorials, and museums) that do justice to the scope of the Holocaust; (16) The acceptable forms of identification, empathy, and active listening; and, (17) The appropriate pedagogical approaches to this subject.113 In sum, because of the wide range of issues in Holocaust studies, a broad array of theoretical work can be and is utilized in response to them. Moreover, Holocaust studies involves a tension between analysis and affect, which Saul Friedländer says is constitutive of work in this area. “The numbing or distancing effect of intellectual work on the Shoah is unavoidable and necessary,”114 writes Friedländer. Additionally, “the recurrence of strong emotional impact is also often unforeseeable and necessary.”115 Nevertheless, according to Friedländer, affect related to the study the Holocaust—both in the form of protective numbing and disruptive emotions—is something that is not completely accessible to consciousness.

112

Hirsch and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 22. Hirsch and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 6–7; adapted. 114 Saul Friedländer, “Trauma, Transference, and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah,” History and Memory 4 (1992): 51. 115 Friedländer, “Trauma, Transference, and ‘Working Through’ in Writing the History of the Shoah,” 51. 113

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One of the ways this affect is explained in Holocaust studies is through traumatic dissociation theories such as Caruth’s, which was discussed earlier. These dissociation theories largely stem from the pioneering the work of Pierre Janet, from whom the notion of the “wounding” of the mind gained prominence. For Janet (as well as Freud, Breuer, and others), trauma (which stems from the Greek word for wound) comes about by means of a sudden and unexpected emotional shock that results in a mental “wound.” But if trauma became a key concept in the ethical turn via an effort to reconnect theory with “the real world,” then new understandings of the concept of memory have been one of the most significant theoretical developments of Holocaust studies. Among the notable work in this area are the contributions of Charlotte Delbo, who writes about sense memory (la mémoire du sens) in the context of the unbearable wound of the Holocaust, and deep memory (la mémoire profonde) in the context of the inescapable and persistent presence of the Holocaust. Delbo’s deep memory aims to describe the way in which the Holocaust survivor can never set themself apart from what they have experienced. Delbo, a survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, writes, Auschwitz is so deeply etched in my memory that I cannot forget one moment of it.—So you are living Auschwitz?—No, I live next to it. Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory, an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self . . . In this underlying memory sensations remain intact.116 For Delbo, this deep memory coexists in the survivor with common memory (la mémoire ordinaire), which consists of ordinary experiences. Furthermore, there is still another type of memory. It is one that allows Delbo to write about the Holocaust. She calls it external memory (la mémoire externe). It allows her to depart emotionally from the camp in order to write about her experiences. Says Delbo, “when I talk to you about Auschwitz, it is not from deep memory my words issue.”117 Rather, the words “come from external memory, if I may put it that way, from intellectual memory, the memory connected with thinking processes.”118 In addition, there is Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, which is a form of retrospective memory assumed by surrogates on behalf of those with direct experience of an event. For Hirsch, postmemory describes “the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they ‘remember’ only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right.”119 But like Delbo’s deep memory, though Hirsch’s concept of postmemory was developed through her research on the Holocaust, it may also be used with respect to traumatic memory not related to the Holocaust. As such, postmemory in this broader sense is “defined through an identification with the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by an unbridgeable distance that separates the participant

Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory (1985), trans. Rosette Lamont (Marlboro, NY: Marlboro, 1990), 2–3. Delbo, Days and Memory, 3. 118 Delbo, Days and Memory, 3. 119 Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 9. 116 117

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from the one born after.”120 In this sense, postmemory involves what Hirsch describes as “retrospective witnessing by adoption,” that is, a process “of adopting traumatic experiences—and thus also the memories—of others as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story.”121 In short, the “notion of postmemory identifies an intersubjective transgenerational space of remembrance, linked to a cultural or collective trauma that is not strictly based on identity or familial connection.”122 Moreover, there is also Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, which is an alternative to notions of collective memory that relegate different victim groups to exclusive spheres of memory that compete with each other for recognition and remembrance. Rather, Rothberg’s multidirectional memory describes the ways in which traumatic memories relating to colonialism, slavery, and the Holocaust dialogue with one another. For Rothberg, memories are not private or essentially linked to identities, but are rather multidirectional, that is, “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing.”123 This latter point is pushed even further in the notion of transcultural memory developed by Rick Crownshaw, wherein memory is said to travel. Against the position that memories belong to particular groups and cultures, Crownshaw argues that memory travels because of the demographic displacement brought about by social and political violence, the increased use of mass media technologies to disseminate memories, and the increasing trade and migration that is the result of globalization. The notion of transcultural memory reminds us that memory is not only multidirectional but is also continuously moving through and across cultures.124 In sum, advancements in the concept of memory in Holocaust studies has in part contributed to the creation of memory studies, a new academic field devoted to the study of memory as a tool for remembering the past. And, in 2008, the journal Memory Studies published its first issue. While some of these memory studies put Holocaust studies into a dialogue with psychoanalytic accounts of memory, others push it in the direction of neurobiology and neuroscience. Of the latter, the work of Catherine Malabou stands out, particularly The New Wounded (2007), where she reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather at its center. Finally, it should be noted that Agamben’s biopolitics regards the death camp as the state of exception par excellence. For him, “the camp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)—will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize”125—a task in no small part aided through the wide-ranging work of Holocaust studies.

120

Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 10. Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 10. 122 Hirsch and Kacandes, “Introduction,” 14. 123 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3. 124 Rick Crownshaw, ed., Transcultural Memory (New York: Routledge, 2014). 125 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 102. 121

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Pop Culture 14.0 INTRODUCTION Pop culture, which is the short form of popular culture, greatly expands the range of texts and practices considered by literary and cultural theory. Because the term pop culture is more commonly known than many of the other terms associated with literary and cultural theory, it gives the false impression that it is not a very complicated one. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. In fact, as Stuart Hall contends, when the terms popular and culture are combined, the resultant “difficulties can be pretty horrendous.”1 In The Long Revolution (1961), Raymond Williams says that the definition of culture is comprised of three general categories: (1) Culture as a Process—culture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values. This is the ideal definition of culture. (2) Culture as Works and Practices—culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded. This is the documentary definition of culture. (3) Culture as a Particular Way of Life—culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior. This is the social definition of culture.2 Elsewhere, Williams describes four different contemporary senses of popular: (1) Popular means Inferior—what is popular involves inferior kinds of work, as in popular literature and popular presses as distinguished from quality presses. (2) Popular means Made by the People—what is popular is work actually made by people for themselves. (3) Popular means Well Liked—what is popular is work or practices that are well liked by many people. (4) Popular means Aiming to Gain Favor—what is popular is work or practices that deliberately sets out to gain the favor of the people.3

Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ ” (1981), in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition, ed. John Storey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 442. 2 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 57; adapted. 3 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 180; adapted. 1

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Finally, Hall further complicates our understanding of popular by adding three additional senses of the term: (1) The Market or Commercial Meaning of Popular—things are said to be popular because masses of people listen to them, buy them, read them, consume them, and seem to enjoy them to the full. This, for Hall, is the common-sense definition of popular. (2) The Anthropological Meaning of Popular—popular culture is all those things that “the people” do or have done. This is very close to the anthropological definition of the term, namely, the culture, mores, customs, and folkways of “the people,” or, more simply, their distinctive way of life. (3) The Social and Material Meaning of Popular—popular culture are those forms and activities from any period which have their roots in the social and material conditions of particular classes, which have been embodied in popular traditions and practices.4 Thus, given the varying ways that the individual terms culture and popular can be defined, it should come as no surprise that their combination in the term popular culture make it especially difficult to define. Moreover, there is also the added difficulty of periodizing popular culture, that is, what came before pop culture? Another difficulty is that much of what is termed culture is often not popular, and what is dubbed popular is often not considered culture. For that matter, there is also the question of to whom does popular culture belong given that the Latin popularis means “belonging to the people.” Who are these “people”? For Hall, the social and material meaning of popular is the preferable one because it insists that “what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define ‘popular culture’ in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture,” a tension he describes as a cultural dialectic.5 For Hall, the cultural dialectic of the social and material meaning of popular culture works as follows: It treats the domain of cultural forms and activities as a constantly changing field. Then it looks at the relations which constantly structure this field into dominant and subordinate formations. It looks at the process by which these relations of dominance and subordination are articulated. It treats them as a process: the process by means of which some things are actively preferred so that others can be dethroned. It has at its centre the changing and uneven relations of force which define the field of culture—that is, the question of cultural struggle and its many forms. Its main focus of attention is the relation between culture and questions of hegemony.6 Thus, for Hall, popular culture is a site of struggle between relations of force.

Williams, Keywords, 446–9; adapted. Williams, Keywords, 449. 6 Williams, Keywords, 449. 4 5

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But then again, this is just one of a number of different possible definitions of popular culture. Here, along with Hall’s definition, are some others: (1) Popular Culture is Mass Culture—popular culture is commercial work that is mass produced for mass consumption. (2) Popular Culture is not High Culture—popular culture is whatever culture is not determined by some means to be high culture. These means of determination might include mode of production, formal complexity, moral value, and critical insight, among others. (3) Popular Culture and High Culture are not Distinct—there is no way to distinguish between popular culture and high culture. All culture is regarded in this view as postmodern culture. A variation of this is Jameson’s view that postmodernism collapses the boundary between high culture and mass culture by incorporating material from both realms not just as “quotation,” but in their structure and substance. (4) Popular Culture is Well Liked—popular culture is culture that is well liked and widely favored by the people. (5) Popular Culture is Made by the People—popular culture is culture that originates from the people. (6) Popular Culture is a Site of Struggle—popular culture is a site of struggle between the forces of resistance of the subordinate groups and the forces of incorporation of dominant groups. As Hall notes above, the main focus of this view is the relation between culture and questions of hegemony. One of the contributions then of literary and cultural theory in this area is to provide a range of conceptions of and approaches to culture, popular, and popular culture. Moreover, while the study of popular culture as a subarea of literary and cultural theory is often associated with the rise of cultural studies in the 1990s, we have already noted earlier theoretical interest in popular culture as mass culture in both the semiology of Barthes—in particular, in his mythological analysis grounded in Saussurean linguistic theory—and in the critical theory of Benjamin and Adorno, in particular their debate concerning the emancipatory potential of mass art. Thus, both semiotics, which treats mass culture as a sign-system, and critical theory, which systematically studies mass and commodity culture in relation to authoritarianism, capitalist ideology, and modernity, must be considered as key contributions to the theoretical study of popular culture. One of the key differences, though, between these earlier approaches to popular culture and the ones associated with the rise of cultural studies was a change in attitude toward theory. The beginning of the new century marked the close of a particular view of theory that had dominated literary studies in the US for over a quarter of a century. In the 1970s, literature departments’ doubts about the usefulness of theory began to give way to the practice of rich, theoretical readings of literary artifacts. Elegant and close structuralist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive interpretations began to seriously compete with older, more traditional ways of reading like the New Criticism and influence studies, not just for credibility among academics, but also for limited institutional space. The practice of theory in the academic curriculum as well as the hiring and tenuring of theorists would serve both to legitimate and promote the varying political and social agendas of the theorists. Increasingly, emphasis on the libidinal, political, and/or social nature of

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signification would come to challenge the very profession of literary studies by laying the groundwork for cultural studies. In retrospect, the death of the literary in literature departments was hastened by the birth of theory. Through the 1980s, theory came to encompass a widening field of perspectives. Race, class, and gender studies began to eclipse the more formalist theories of the literary that dominated the late 1970s and early 1980s. Structuralism and deconstruction were becoming traditional in comparison to the emerging discourses of cultural studies. Increasingly, emphasis was being placed by theorists on the personal, social, and political dimensions of interpretation. After the institutionalization of deconstruction and structuralism in the US lost sight of the social and political dimensions of interpretation, a growing generation of critics sought to contextualize criticism. The high theory of the 1970s which was coming to acquire a timeless, ahistorical permanence in the 1980s through its codification in method was giving way to the low theory of cultural studies which re-emphasized the contingent, local, historical, and contextual character of all cultural artifacts. By the 1990s, cultural studies broadened to include postcolonial, queer, and media studies (14.2), while theory was showing only the faintest signs of life. Not only did theory no longer give the appearance of a unitary body of work—an appearance that it had held for some time—but it had also come to be regarded in many English departments similar to the way that the New Criticism had been regarded by those same departments twenty years earlier. High theories like deconstruction and structuralism were regarded as antiquated, and were at best seen only as flawed predecessors to the low theories of cultural studies. It might be argued that the low theory of the 1980s that eclipsed the high theory of the 1970s in turn had given way to the studies of the late 1990s. English departments at the time were said to do cultural studies, not cultural theory, postcolonial studies, not postcolonial theory, and so on. Moreover, this shift from theory to studies was widely regarded to be more than cosmetic. Studies were said to be produced by critical writing practices and did not necessarily immediately provide the meaning of a cultural artifact. At their best, they were said to be self-reflective enterprises that were credited and discredited relative to historical and social pressures. Moreover, there was said to be no absolute method for studies. What counted as a study was said to change over time. Theory, on the other hand, has come to be associated with method. One of the major differences, say, between deconstruction and cultural studies is that the former can be and has been reduced to a method, whereas the latter (supposedly) cannot be totalized in this way. Furthermore, theory, it was said, does not continually seek to redefine itself through a process of self-analysis and selfreflection, whereas this is not the case with studies. But are these studies really that radically different from theory? My own suspicion is that they are not. Rather, they were part of an effort to repackage theory into a politically and ideologically palatable form. Regardless, it was within the context of theory versus studies that the study of popular culture came to be regarded by some as co-extensive with cultural studies. The first section of this chapter is devoted to both the characteristics of cultural studies in the 1990s (which is widely regarded as their high point) and to some of the approaches to the study of culture that preceded them. The remaining sections of this chapter take up four different dimensions of current interest in the study of popular culture: media studies (14.2), sound studies (14.3), game studies (14.4), and celebrity studies (14.5). Given the formative influence of cultural studies on each of these areas of concern, they are designated as studies. However, just like popular culture, which can also be associated with

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areas of theoretical interest (e.g., semiotics and critical theory), each can also be linked to the work of theory and theorists. In sum, the study of popular culture has come become a site where cultural studies has been said to reveal the limits of theory. But this position is contingent on two things: first, our conception of theory; and second, our conception of popular culture. If one contends, as I do, that there are at least eight different views of theory, then pursuit of some of these approaches will foreground the limits of theory via the concerns of cultural studies (e.g., theory is methodology). Others, however, will present an image of theory much more consistent with cultural studies (e.g., theory is a way of life). And still others will flatly reject the claims of cultural studies (e.g., theory is high theory). Additionally, if one contends, as I do, that there are at least six different views of popular culture, then some can be shown to reveal the limits of theory (e.g., popular culture is made by the people), whereas others can be shown to draw heavily upon theory (e.g., popular culture is mass culture draws upon work in semiotics and critical theory, and popular culture is a site of struggle upon hegemony theory and Marxism).

14.1 CULTURAL STUDIES In the 1860s, Matthew Arnold established an approach to culture that would remain dominant in Britain until the 1950s. Arnold’s work on the problems facing Victorian society in Culture and Anarchy, published in 1869, not only established his reputation as a cultural critic, but also laid the foundations for the “culture and civilization” tradition in cultural studies. As noted earlier, Arnold argues here that the wellbeing of society and political progress depends upon culture, which he defined as “the best knowledge and thought of the time.”7 Arnold’s definition of culture can be expressed in four points: (1) Culture is the ability to know what is best. (2) Culture is the best that has been thought and said in the world. (3) Culture is the mental and spiritual application of what is best. (4) Culture is the pursuit of what is best. Beginning in the early 1930s, especially in Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930) and Culture and Environment (1933), F. R. Leavis took up Arnold’s work on cultural politics and applied it to the contemporary “cultural crisis.” Leavis (and his followers, the Leavisites) bemoaned the cultural decline that had begun in Arnold’s day, and that was only getting worse in their own. For Leavis, culture has always been something that has been kept by the “minority.” In Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, he writes: In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends; it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted first-hand judgment . . . The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante,

7

Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 70.

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Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognising their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or a branch of it) at a given time . . . Upon the minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that this is worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction to go, that the centre is here rather than there. In their keeping . . . is the language, the changing idiom, upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By “culture” I mean the use of such language.8 For Leavis, the minority was being challenged and had lost its authority. He believed that prior to the nineteenth century, particularly during the Elizabethan period, England had a vigorous common culture, but that during the Industrial Revolution it was split in two: one half, minority culture, the best that has been thought and said, was now merely a literary tradition; the other half, mass civilization, got in the way of genuine feeling and responsible thinking. The common culture that was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution involved a golden age of organic community. In Culture and Environment, he writes (along with Denys Thompson): What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied. Folk songs, folk dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products are signs and expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordering and patterning, involving social arts, codes of intercourse and a responsive adjustment, growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment and the rhythm of the year.9 This common culture posited by Leavis united intellectual stimulation and affective pleasure. Literary masters such as Shakespeare were said by him to belong to a community where the theater, for example, appealed both to cultivated and popular audiences. However, Leavis contends that the “mob” had “revolted” against literary masters such as Shakespeare. The resultant mass civilization and mass culture are regarded by him as a subversive threat—one with the potential for “irreparable chaos.” As a consequence of these impending threats, Leavis proposed “training” in resistance to mass culture and wrote manifestos to aide in this effort. In this regard, the subtitle of Culture and Environment, namely, The Training of Critical Awareness, refers directly to these efforts. The “culture and civilization” tradition, which included Arnold and Leavis as major figures, was eclipsed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the work of the “culturalists.” Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Paddy Whannel are some of the main writers associated with culturalism. All contend that by analyzing culture it is possible to reconstitute the patterned behavior and ideas shared by the people who were responsible for producing it. This stress on the active production of culture, rather than passive consumption of it, foregrounds the value of human agency in culturalism.

F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930), 3–5. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (1933) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 1–2. 8 9

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In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Hoggart argues that the traditional working-class culture of his childhood in the 1920s and 1930s was a “lived culture,” which by the 1950s had come to be threatened by mass culture. Unlike Leavis, who thought the working-class culture of the 1920s and 1930s was part of the decline of culture, Hoggart was nostalgic for the lived culture of this period. For Hoggart, the working-class culture of the 1950s was the working-class culture that was in decline. Not only did it lack moral seriousness, but the rise of television during this period represented the decline of movies, which had come to rely on gimmicks like CinemaScope to thwart this decline. Hoggart believed that it was possible through human agency for the working class to resist the manipulation of mass culture. “This is not simply a power of passive resistance,” writes Hoggart, “but something which, though not articulate, is positive.”10 “The working classes have a strong natural ability to survive change,” he continues, “by adapting or assimilating what they want in the new and ignoring the rest.”11 Moreover, for Hoggart, the working class are saved from the “worst effects” of mass culture because “they are living elsewhere, living intuitively, habitually, verbally, drawing on myth, aphorism, ritual,” that is to say, “a large part of themselves [is] just ‘not there’ ” when they engage with mass culture.12 For him, mass entertainment destroys working-class culture. “The strongest argument against modern mass entertainments,” writes Hoggart, “is not that they debase taste— debasement can be alive and active—but that they over-excite it, eventually dull it, and finally kill it.”13 In the final analysis, for Hoggart, art done for the people is bad, whereas art done by them is good. Works like Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961) and Culture and Society (1958) are sometimes called examples of “left-Leavisism.” Though uncomfortable with Leavis’s middle-class biases, they both break with and share some of Leavis’s doctrines. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class (1963), considered his own work as simply a version of Marxism, even if he broke with the mechanistic and economic forms of it. Nonetheless, neither the culturalist nor the culture and civilization movements are regarded as the beginning of the “cultural studies” movement; rather, it is Hoggart’s founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 that marks the beginning of cultural studies. Under the direction of Hoggart, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was an interdisciplinary mix of almost equal parts philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, and history. In 1968, Stuart Hall succeeded Hoggart as director of the Birmingham Centre, and increasingly emphasized sociology over the other disciplines. During Hall’s tenure, the members of the Birmingham Centre began to employ more and more Marxist continental philosophy, especially the hegemony theory of Gramsci, the ideology theory of Althusser, and the critical theory of Marcuse, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, and Löwenthal. Neglected aspects of contemporary culture, particularly popular culture and subcultures, gained prominence as the objects of cultural studies under Hall’s direction. Cultural studies in Britain would come to do a lot of work under the phrase “cultural materialism,” which we considered earlier, if you will recall, in the context of the New Historicism. Raymond

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957), intro. Andrew Goodwin (New York: Routledge, 2017), 17. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 17. 12 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 18. 13 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 149. 10 11

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Williams coined the phrase to show both a relation to Marxist versions of historical materialism, and a difference from them. He wanted to avoid the naive Marxist position that the economic base of society determines culture, but at the same time follow through on Marx and Engel’s statement from The German Ideology (1846), cited earlier, that “Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.”14 Cultural materialism takes as well its politically charged attitude towards the canon from Marx. In Grundrisse (1857), as we also noted earlier, Marx argues that Achilles is not possible in an age with powder and lead, nor the Iliad in the age of the printing press, not to mention the printing machine. “The difficulty,” writes Marx, “lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development.”15 “The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.”16 For Marx, to regard works of literature as timelessly canonical is dangerous and, worse yet, “childish.” “A man cannot become a child again,” writes Marx, “or he becomes childish.”17 All told, though, compared with cultural studies in Britain, cultural studies in the US is much more broadly conceived and practiced. While it has been influenced by the rich traditions of cultural studies in Britain, especially the work done at Birmingham University on popular culture, cultural studies in the US draws its institutional identity as well from multidisciplinary and multicultural work done on everything from race, class, gender, and sexual preference to the relationship between technology, science, and popular culture. The disciplinary liberty which it has enjoyed has resulted in not only an increased sense of the importance of the social or public dimensions of meaning, but also in more university programs supporting work and teaching in this area. In Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (1997), Cary Nelson, one of the leading proponents of cultural studies in the US, outlines in manifesto fashion what it is and is not: (1)

Cultural studies is not simply the close analysis of objects other than literary texts.

(2)

Cultural studies does not, as some people believe, require that every project involve the study of the artifacts of popular culture.

(3)

Cultural studies does not mean that we have to abandon the study of high culture.

(4)

Cultural studies is not simply the neutral study of semiotic systems.

(5)

Cultural studies is committed to studying the production, reception, and varied use of texts, not merely their internal characteristics.

(6)

Cultural studies conceives culture relationally, that is, in terms of competitive, reinforcing, and determining relations with other objects and cultural forces.

(7)

Cultural studies is not a fixed, repeatable methodology that can be learned and thereafter applied to any given cultural domain. It is the social and textual history of varying efforts to take up the problematic of the politics and meaning of culture.

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 112. Karl Marx, “Production. Means of Production and Relations of Production. Relations of Production and Relations of Circulation. Forms of the State and Forms of Consciousness in Relation to Relations of Production and Circulation. Legal Regulations. Family Relations” (1857), in Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973), 111. 16 Marx, Grundrisse, 111. 17 Marx, Grundrisse, 111. 14 15

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(8)

Cultural studies takes seriously the work of Marxism, feminism, and the politics of race.

(9)

Cultural studies is concerned with the social and political meaning and effects of its own analyses.

(10) Cultural studies seeks to empower students to understand the social and political meaning of what they learn throughout the university. (11) Cultural studies has a responsibility to continue interrogating and reflecting on its own commitments. (12) Cultural studies is properly an enterprise in which people can explore their race, ethnicity, or gender and articulate its relations within the larger culture. (13) Cultural studies has a historicizing impulse which is in dialogue with an awareness of the contemporary rearticulation of earlier texts, contexts, and social practices. (14) Cultural studies is often concerned with intervening in the present and with encouraging possible futures rather than others. (15) Cultural studies does not believe that it is possible to theorize for all times and places. Rather, it contends that theories are produced for the world in which we live. (16) Cultural studies is concerned with and critical of the politics of disciplinary knowledge. If it is to be institutionalized, cultural studies might be better served by a variety of programs outside of traditional departments (such as English, philosophy, or history departments).18 For Nelson, while not every work of cultural studies will fulfill all of these points, they nevertheless represent some of the key aims of cultural studies in the US and are “part of the cultural studies paradigm and part of the cultural studies challenge to the contemporary world.”19 There are, of course, other models, paradigms, and so on for cultural studies.20 John Frow describes them as consisting of “a heterogeneous and uneven plethora of . . . approaches” wherein none of them are regarded as the “received model of cultural studies.”21 Moreover, the same holds for the objects of cultural studies; that is, they too can be described as “a heterogeneous and uneven plethora.” Among the objects and approaches Frow lists as associable with cultural studies are many that have already been covered in this volume, including neoliberalism, disability, trans+, borders, as well as others. Even presentism is associable with cultural studies via some observations on this topic by Berlant. “Dedicated to engaging with and writing the history of the present,” writes Berlant, “cultural studies seeks to address and explicate the geopolitical specificity of cultural forms and practices.”22 In addition, for Berlant, cultural studies seeks “to describe not only the hierarchical mechanisms that produce identities of all kinds but also the contexts for agential practice, resistance, and experience articulated around those mechanisms; to track in particular people’s ordinary lives

Cary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 64–9; adapted. Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical, 69. 20 See, for example, Lawrence Grossberg, “The Formation(s) of Cultural Studies: An American Birmingham,” Strategies 2 (1989); Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980); Richard Johnson, “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text 6.1 (1987); Meaghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies,” Discourse 10.2 (1988); and Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution. 21 John Frow, “Cultural Studies,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 146. 22 Lauren Berlant, “Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies,” Profession (1998): 106. 18 19

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FIGURE 7: The Circuit of Culture. Source: Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 3.

the effects of discursive and institutional practices of domination, subordination, and hegemony; to appraise technologies of intimacy, longing, aversion, and ecstasy; and to historicize political spaces and forms like bodies, schools, cities, nations, and transnational corporations.”23 In general, however, all models of cultural studies emphasize in one way or another that culture (or, a cultural object) must be analyzed in the social and historical conditions of its production and consumption. One group of proponents of cultural studies that includes Hall proposes that we add identity, representation, and regulation to these conditions and view them as five process that together complete a kind of circuit of culture. By passing cultural artefacts through this circuit of culture and articulating these five processes— that is, “how it is represented, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced and consumed, and what mechanisms regulate its distribution and use”—one produces a sort of cultural “biography” of the artefact.24 Articulation is the “form of the connection that can make a unity of two or more different or distinct elements, under certain conditions.”25 This articulation is neither

23

Berlant, “Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies,” 106. Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 3. 25 Du Gay, et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 3. 24

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“necessary, determined, [nor] absolute for all time; rather it is a linkage whose conditions of existence or emergence need to be located in the contingencies of circumstance.”26 This circuit of culture, which is similar to one developed earlier by Richard Johnson,27 who, like Hall, was a former director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, contends that any analysis of a cultural text or artifact must pass through the circuit of culture if it is to be adequately studied. On this model of cultural studies, none of the processes are privileged—such as identity or representation—rather, in order to explain adequately the meaning an artifact comes to possess, the various combinations of these processes must be explored. The beginnings of an explanation of the meaning of cultural artifacts or texts are found in the articulation of these processes. However, the articulation of these processes can and does lead to variable and contingent outcomes. Finally, for many proponents of cultural studies, cultural texts and practices do not simply reflect processes; rather, they make (or constitute) them. This holds as well for economic and political processes. Hall and his colleagues write, Rather than being seen as merely reflective of other processes—economic or political—culture is now regarded as being as constitutive of the social world as economic or political processes. Not only this, in recent years “culture” has been promoted to an altogether more important role as theorists have begun to argue that because all social practices are meaningful practices, they are fundamentally cultural. In order to conduct a social practice we need to give it a certain meaning, have a conception of it, be able to think meaningfully about it. The production of social meanings is therefore a necessary precondition for the functioning of all social practices and an account of the cultural conditions of social practices must form part of the sociological explanation of how they work.28 Moreover, for Hall, media has a particularly important role in the constitution of the world: [W]hat cultural studies has helped me to understand is that the media play a part in the formation, in the constitution, of the things that they reflect. It is not that there is a world outside, “out there,” which exists free of the discourses of representation. What is out there is, in part, constituted by how it is represented.29 According to Hall, culture is also one of the principal sites where the divisions of society along racial, ethnic, generational, and class lines are established and contested. “The reality of race in any society is,” comments Hall, “to coin a phrase, ‘media-mediated.’ ” In this regard, the media studies discussed below (14.2) is always already concerned with the ways in which cultural processes establish and contest race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, ability, ethnicity, and age—among other matters.

Du Gay, et al., Doing Cultural Studies, 3. Richard Johnson, “The Story So Far: And for the Transformations,” in David Punter, Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Longman, 1986), 277–313. 28 Johnson, “The Story So Far,” 2. 29 Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies” (1992), in Rethinking Gramsci, ed. Marcus E. Green (London: Routledge, 2011), 15. 26 27

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14.2 MEDIA STUDIES Media studies was founded in the US a century ago. It was around the same time, that is, in the 1920s, that the now commonplace phrase the media started to be used. According to Toby Miller, today it might be said to constitute and to be constituted by the following: (1) Technologies—these technologies are the conditions of possibility of the media; (2) Policies—these policies determine the field in which the media operates; (3) Genres—the genres of media include drama, music, sports, and information, among others; (4) Workers—media workers are those who make texts through performance and recording; (5) Audiences—the audiences of media are those who receive its content; and, (6) Environment—the environment of media are the sites where its debris is housed.30 To be sure, what we term the media and what we study with respect to it covers an extremely wide range of communications and cultural processes, genres, and machines. Nevertheless, the field of media studies has its foundational roots in speech communication and rhetoric, which in the case of the latter topic of study can be traced back to antiquity. As noted earlier, rhetoric, the study of written and oral communication, which flourished in ancient Greece and Rome, has been studied and developed ever since, particularly in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a great amount of attention was given to it. Thus, depending on the genealogy one adopts, the history of media studies spans anywhere from 100 to 2,500 years. In the shorter version of its history, writes Miller, media studies was developed “to assist with the assimilation of white, non-English-speaking migrants into the emergent manufacturing workforce.”31 This was a “period of massively complex urbanization,” wherein “the spread of adult literacy, democratic rights, labor organization, and socialist ideas then gave rise to a social-science equivalent to the study of speech: mass communication.”32 “First radio,” continues Miller, “then cinema, then TV were simultaneously prized and damned for their demagogic qualities, which it was hoped and feared could turn people into consumers or communists alike.”33 After the two world wars, there was shift in media studies toward propaganda, that is, information disseminated to win people over to a given doctrine. Later, the meaning of communication was widened by theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, whom you will recall interprets kinship as a system of communication, a language, in which women are the messages exchanged between clans, lineages, or families. Additionally, the radio age elicited media studies interest in oral communication (and a concomitant consideration of its role in ancient Greece and the Middle Ages), while the dawn of the television age in the 1950s raised interest in visual communication. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke note that research into oral and visual communication resulted in an interdisciplinary approach to theorizing media. “Contributions were made from economics, history, literature, art, political

Toby Miller, “Media Studies,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 243. Miller, “Media Studies,” 244. 32 Miller, “Media Studies,” 244; my emphasis. 33 Miller, “Media Studies,” 244. 30 31

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science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology,” write Briggs and Burke, “and led to the emergence of academic departments of communication and cultural studies.”34 For Briggs and Burke, some of the key theorists of media in the twentieth century are Jack Goody, who traced the “domestication of the savage mind,” wherein he noted the tendency of oral cultures to acquire structural amnesia, that is, to forget the past or more precisely, to remember it as if it were the present, while in written cultures, the permanence of written records acts as an hindrance to this form of amnesia, and fosters a difference between present and the past;35 Harold Innis, who worked on bias in communication; Jürgen Habermas, who identified the public sphere as “a zone for ‘discourse’ in which ideas are explored and ‘a public view’ can be expressed”;36 and Marshall McLuhan, who spoke of the “global village” and coined the well-known phrase “the medium is the message,” which encapsulated his belief that the content of communication was not as important as the form it took. McLuhan, who trained as a literary critic, also made the distinction between hot media, such as print, photographs, radio, and cinema, which engages one sense completely and “spoon-feeds” the content to the user; and cool media, such as television, speech, cartoons, and the telephone, which engages several senses less completely, but in turn demands much more interaction by the user because it requires them to “fill-in” content gaps.37 McLuhan along with Innis, Eric Havelock, Susanne Langer, Neil Postman, Walter Ong (who was McLuhan’s student), and Lewis Mumford are representatives of media ecology, which is defined by Andrew Baerg as “the interdisciplinary theory of media studies that considers how communication media shapes the way we think, feel, and understand the world.”38 One of the consequences of this theoretical work on mass ecology is an ongoing debate between structure versus agency with respect to new mediums of communication. Briggs and Burke frame the structure versus agency debate well: On one side [namely, agency], there are those who claim that there are no consequences of computers as such, any more than there are consequences of literacy (including visual and computer literacy). There are only consequences for individuals using these tools. On the other hand [namely, structure], there are those who suggest that using a new medium of communication inevitably changes people’s views of the world, in the long term if not earlier. One side [namely, agency] accuses the other [namely, structure] of treating ordinary people as passive, as objects undergoing the impact of literacy or computerization. The reverse accusation is that of treating the media, including the press, as passive mirrors of culture and society rather than as agencies transforming culture and society.39

Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 2nd edition (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), 1. 35 Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 10. 36 Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 1. 37 Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 10. 38 Andrew Baerg, “Media Ecology,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 567. 39 Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 11–12. 34

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Still, according to Briggs and Burke, no single theory of media can account for the “ ‘high-definition, inter-drive, mutually convergent technologies of communication,’ where relationships, individual and social, local and global, are in continuous flux.”40 In one way, the conclusions of media studies regarding theory converge with those of cultural studies, namely, the view that no one theory can be utilized to study culture or media. However, the structure versus agency debate noted above is really not one that interests cultural studies. For many in cultural studies, this debate is a relic of structuralism that is rendered obsolete, dissolved, or complicated by models such as the circuit of culture or even the affective presentism of Berlant’s vision of cultural studies. Again, as Hall puts it, “What is out there is, in part, constituted by how it is represented,” whereas for Berlant, “the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect.” Still again, as if speaking directly to the structure–agency debate, Berlant says that cultural studies seeks “to describe not only the hierarchical mechanisms that produce identities of all kinds but also the contexts for agential practice, resistance, and experience articulated around those mechanisms.” Thus, for Hall and Berlant, media does not raise questions of structure or agency, but rather presents an opportunity to explore the mediation of both structure and agency. Be this as it may, media studies pursues three interrelated topics: (1) The Political Economy of Media—the political economy of the media concerns the ownership and control of its technology. Major theoretical approaches to the political economy of the media include neoliberalism, which favors limited regulation of the media in order to maximize entry into and competition within the market; Marxism, which critiques bourgeois media for controlling the socio-political agenda; and ecocriticism, which investigates the impact of media gadgetry on the environment, including the Anthropocene, climate change, and the oceans. (2) The Textuality of Media—the textuality of the media concerns its meaning. Major theoretical approaches to the textuality of the media include hermeneutics, which unearths the meaning of individual texts and links them with broader social formations and problems; and content analysis, which establishes patterns across a significant number of similar texts, rather than a close reading of individual texts. (3) The Audiences of Media—the audiences of the media concerns its public. Major theoretical approaches to the audiences of the media include social psychology, which explores correlations between social conduct and both genres of media, such as drama and sports, and technologies of media, such as television and computers; politico-economic critique, which examines texts that threaten national culture; and spectator interpretations, which celebrate the interpretations of spectators.41 Moreover, these three topics of media studies inquiry are each emphasized and addressed differently depending on their disciplinary home in the academy. Broadly speaking, in the humanities, media are judged for their representativeness and quality by means of history and cultural criticism, whereas in the social sciences, the focus of media studies are the languages, religions, customs, times, and spaces of different groups, which are explored statistically and ethnographically.42

Briggs and Burke, A Social History of the Media, 12. Miller, “Media Studies,” 244–5. 42 Miller, “Media Studies,” 245. 40 41

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In addition, as articulated through various academic disciplines, the focus of media studies tends to differ. For example, (1) Literature, Cinema Studies, Television Studies, Languages, and Cultural Studies—these disciplines tend to focus on evaluating representation in media, justifying protectionism, and calling for content provision; (2) Communication Studies—this discipline tends to focus on propaganda, marketing, and citizenship with respect to the media; (3) Economics—this discipline tends to focus on theorizing and policing doctrines of media scarcity as well as managing overproduction through overseas expansion; (4) Psychology—this discipline tends to focus on examining child development and social issues such as sexual violence and gender representation in relation to media exposure; (5) Sociology, Political Science, and the Law—these disciplines tend to focus on looking at media regulation, violence, contracts, and treaties; and, (6) Journalism, Film Schools, Engineering, and Computing—these disciplines tend to focus on creating and running media production and reception via business, the military, the community, and the public service.43 Furthermore, Miller cites a number of methodologies from these disciplines that have become important in media studies: (1) Ethnography—media studies utilizes the ethnographic methods of sociology and anthropology to investigate the experience of audiences; (2) Experimentation and Testing—media studies utilizes the experimentation and testing methods of psychology to establish cause-and-effect relations between media use and subsequent conduct; (3) Pattern Analysis—media studies adapts the content analysis of sociology and communication studies to evaluate texts in terms of generic patterns; (4) Ideological Analysis—media studies adopts the textual analysis of literary theory and linguistics to identify the ideological tenor of content; (5) Political Economy—media studies deploys political economy to examine ownership, control, regulation, and international exchange; and, (6) Historiography—media studies utilizes archival, curatorial, and historiographic methods to give the media a record of their past.44 Thus, through the topics it pursues (political economy, textuality, and audience), its articulation in various disciplines including literary and cultural studies, and the methodologies it draws upon from some of these disciplines, media studies is a thoroughly interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Moreover, in one way or another it draws upon and utilizes much of the literary and cultural theory

43 44

Miller, “Media Studies,” 245. Miller, “Media Studies,” 245–6.

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discussed in this book. From its formative relationship with rhetoric to its current relationship with cultural studies, media studies incorporates much of the work done by literary and cultural theory into the topics it pursues, its various disciplinary homes, and its wide range of methodologies. One of the more interesting connections links the semiotics of Umberto Eco to the cultural studies of Stuart Hall. Eco, like Barthes, made major theoretical contributions to the study of popular culture, with the application of his semiotics to a variety of media including visual communication. Among them were his notions of the open text, aberrant audience readings, and encoding-decoding, which together revealed the ways in which the meanings that were put into visual communication such as television programming were often subject to aberrant readings by their audiences. These ideas were in turn picked up by Hall, which in part explains Nelson’s desire to separate the work of semiotics from the work of cultural studies. It is also to say that the semiotics of Eco, Barthes, and others should be considered as a key theoretical dimension of both media studies and the study of popular culture—if not also, cultural studies. The notion of encoding-decoding marked a shift in thinking regarding media effects. Up until the middle of twentieth century, media studies “were understood through the metaphor of the hypodermic needle,” writes Baerg. “Media would presumably present a direct message,” he continues, “that would be uniformly internalized by audiences experiencing it.”45 But two versions of the notion of encoding-decoding changed the view of media effects. The first version, the uses and gratifications theory of media effects, focuses on fundamental psychological drives that define how people use the media to define themselves, and claims that audiences make active choices in their consumption of media. The second version, the ethnographic/cultural studies notion of media effects, show the limits of the view that audiences are woven into media by examining the interrelations between images, narrative, and dialogue in cultural artifacts. Both approaches to media effects challenge the metaphor of the hypodermic needle regarding media effects. Moreover, one of the more recent dimensions of media studies, namely, new media studies, also challenges notions that the media is all-powerful. For some, writes Miller, “new media represent the apex of modernity, the first time in history when central, political, and commercial organs and agendas became receptive to the popular classes.”46 On this view, rather than being an apparatus that exerts ultimate power over its audience, new media affords the public the opportunity to make “its own meanings, outwitting institutions of the state, academia, and capitalism that seek to measure and control it.”47 But then again, there is also Baudrillard’s claim that new media represents the apex of postmodernity, which leaves us in the “desert of the real” with no “dialectic stage” on the horizon to transition us to another critical stage of history. While new media is not the only reason for the postmodern predicament, with others ranging from the expansion of consumer society to the loss of a sense of use-value and history, its expansion is still an important aspect of Baudrillard’s theory. Finally, there is also global media studies, which combines work on international communication and comparative media systems in the social sciences with work on world cinema and national cinema in the humanities. In this area of media studies, the contributions of literary and cultural

Andrew Baerg, “Media Effects,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 568. Miller, “Media Studies,” 247. 47 Miller, “Media Studies,” 247. 45 46

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theorists on globalization since the 1990s have been just as formative as the work on rhetoric was to the nascent field of media studies in the 1920s.

14.3 SOUND STUDIES The composer John Cage once said, “Hearing sounds which are just sounds immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing.”48 Famous for his composition “4ʹ33ʹʹ,” a piece for piano wherein no keys are struck and no notes are played in its performance, Cage’s reflections on sound were part of a growing interest in the study of sound after World War II. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there was a great deal of philosophical reflection on sound by avant-garde artists, writers, and musicians including Cage, who is one of the most well known. His own reflections on sound, though, go back even further, when in his mid-twenties he delivered a talk in 1937 entitled “The Future of Music: Credo.” Here, he says, “If this word ‘music’ is sacred and reserved for eighteenthand nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.”49 Moreover, forty years before Jacques Attali’s Noise (1977), a landmark work of sound studies, Cage was already theorizing on noise. In “The Future of Music,” he writes: Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles an hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of “sound effects” recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.50 Whereas Cage was interested in theorizing sound as a philosophical complement to his work as a composer, his early comments here also connect the study of sound to media studies—as film technology is the condition of possibility of film sound-effects, and sound technology is the condition of possibility of the phonographic recordings that would be used in a composition for “four film phonographs.” Sound studies can be regarded as the academic discipline that aims to make sense of sound. According to John Mowitt, sound studies include a strong current that “treats sound empirically, that is, as the sort of object (whether physiological, physical or psychological) that can have a history, and that it is tied to the human ear and the faculty of hearing.”51 This empirical aspect of sound studies, continues Mowitt, “concentrates on detailing the facts of how hearing happens or doesn’t.”52 As

48 John Cage, “Experimental Music” (1957), in Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 10. 49 John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo” (1937),” in Silence, 3. 50 Cage, “The Future of Music,” 3. 51 John Mowitt, “Sound,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 691–2. 52 Mowitt, “Sound,” 692.

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such, work in this area of sound studies concerns hearing in both the presence and absence of listening, with work in the latter area concerning matters of deafness, hearing without the use of the inner ear (or, non-cochlear hearing), and noise abatement. But there is also much work in sound studies that does not approach it empirically, but rather focuses on analyzing “sonic practices, and the discourses and institutions that describe them.”53 Jonathan Sterne says that by taking “sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival,” sound studies of this type “redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world.”54 He uses the term redescribe rather than describe “because good scholarship always goes beyond the common-sense categories used in everyday descriptive language—it tells us what we don’t already know.”55 In the case of sound studies, scholarship in this area “reaches across registers, moments, and spaces, and it thinks across disciplines and traditions, some that have long considered sound, and some that have not done so until more recently.”56 But unlike media studies, a field that also emerged a hundred years ago, sound studies “exhibits a strong tendency to remain that way,” writes Michele Hilmes, “always emerging, never emerged.”57 Part of the reason for this is that most of the practitioners of sound studies only have one foot in the academic discipline. The other foot is in disciplines such as anthropology, art history, geography, history, literary criticism, musicology, and philosophy, or fields of study such as American studies, cinema studies, communication studies, disability studies, gender studies, media studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and science and technology studies. These latter areas, particularly the ones already discussed in this book, reveal the strong connection between sound studies and many of the areas of concern in literary and cultural theory. Jeffrey Di Leo’s work in sound studies is a good example of this. In Vinyl Theory (2020), he examines how the resurgence of vinyl records is connected to the political economy of music by drawing on the work of Adorno, Attali, Nietzsche, and others. One of Di Leo’s main theses is that the fall and resurrection of vinyl records over the course of the last twenty-five years is evidence of the resiliency of neoliberalism. He accomplishes this by examining the work of Nietzsche and Attali on music through the lens of Foucault’s biopolitics.58 With one foot in sound studies, the other is not just in one but several other areas, including his major academic disciplines (philosophy and English) as well as several areas of literary and cultural theory, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, and media studies. According to Sterne, sound studies as an academic discipline might be characterized as follows: (1) Sound Studies combines Object and Approach—sound studies is an academic field in the humanities and the social sciences defined by a combination of object and approach. However, not all scholarship about or with sound is “sound studies,” just as not all scholarship with a concept of culture is cultural studies.

Jonathan Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), 2. Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 2. 55 Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 2. 56 Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 2. 57 Michele Hilmes, “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter,” American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 249. 58 Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Vinyl Theory (Amherst, MA: Lever Press, 2020), 11–36. 53 54

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(2) Sound Studies is Interdisciplinary—sound studies contends that sound cuts across academic disciplines, methods, and objects. It can begin from obviously sonic phenomena like speech, hearing, sound technologies, architecture, art or music, but it does not have to. It may think sonically as it moves underwater, considers religions or nationalisms, explores cities, tarries with the history of philosophy, literature, or ideas, or critiques relations of power, property or intersubjectivity. The field’s institutional existence varies across different national university cultures. (3) Sound Studies is Reflexive—sound studies reflexively attends to its core concepts and objects. Following the theoretical methodology of Pierre Bourdieu and Donna Haraway, reflexivity refers to a process wherein knowers place themselves in relation to what it is they want to know: they must account for their own positions and prejudices, lest scholars misattribute them as qualities of the object of study. This reflexive knowledge production regarding sound includes cultural, political, environmental, and aesthetic considerations. (4) Sound Studies in its Historicity—sound studies is conscious of its own historicity. It is aware that it is part of an ongoing conversation about sound that spans eras, traditions, places, and disciplines. It is also aware of the specific histories of inquiring about and writing about sound in the various disciplines. (5) Sound Studies is Critique—sound studies has an essential critical element, in the broadest sense of critique. It may also take on characteristics of a producer, policy, technical, political, artistic or training discourse. But without critique, it is art, technical discourse, science, cultural production, or training practices “about sound,” and not sound studies—even if this non-critical work will be of great interest to students of sound studies.59 This latter point about critique is a particularly important one with regard to sound studies as it emphasizes that a distinction be made between the critical and non-critical study of sound. In short, critical sound studies (or what Sterne simply terms sound studies) utilizes critique, what Sussman and Groves broadly defined earlier (in the context of critical climate studies) as “the theoretically driven responsible and rigorous decoding and reprogramming of messages, motives, trends, performances, and systematic aberrations.” Without this theoretically driven responsible and rigorous decoding and reprogramming of sound, the study of sound is a non-critical endeavor more akin to a training manual than a theoretical discourse. Moreover, if sound studies were only the latter, that is, the study of sound without critique, it would have no place in a book dedicated to literary and cultural theory. Therefore, sometimes the adjective critical is used in conjunction with the term sound studies to distinguish between approaches to sound with and without critique. One of the things that critique brings to the study of sound is a challenge to the presumed differential attributes of hearing versus vision. Stern calls these presumed attributes the audiovisual litany, which include the following: (1)

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Subjectivity/Objectivity—hearing tends toward subjectivity, whereas vision tends toward objectivity;

Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 3–5; adapted.

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(2)

Life/Death—hearing brings you into the living world, whereas sight moves us toward atrophy and death;

(3)

Affect/Intellect—hearing is about affect, whereas vision is about intellect;

(4)

Spherical/Directional—hearing is spherical, whereas vision is directional;

(5)

Immersion/Perspective—hearing immerses its subject, whereas vision offers a perspective;

(6)

Coming/Going—sound comes to us, whereas vision goes to its object;

(7)

Contact/Distance—hearing involves physical contact with the outside world, whereas vision requires distance from it;

(8)

Inside/Outside—hearing places you inside an event, whereas seeing gives you a perspective on the event by placing you outside of it;

(9)

Temporal/Spatial—hearing is primarily a temporal sense, whereas vision is primarily a spatial sense; and,

(10) Worlding/Unworlding—hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, whereas vision removes us from the world, that is, unworlds us.60 One of the problems with these differential attributes is that though they are “cultural prenotions about the senses,” comments Sterne, for some, they have risen “to the level of theory.”61 Leigh Schmidt attributes this to the view of some that hearing is primitive, whereas vision is modern. This has been achieved through a process of othering, that is, by “the identification of visuality as supremely modern and Western . . . (most noticeably in the work of Marshall McLuhan) through the othering of the auditory as ‘primitive’ or even ‘African.’ ”62 Continues Schmidt, the gaze of modernity has “often upheld some of the most basic cultural oppositions of us and them,”63 like the one associated with the differential attributes of modern vision and primitive hearing. The critical work of sound studies strives to both identify the coding of these cultural messages regarding sound and to decode and reprogram them, whenever possible. To this end, literary and cultural theory developed outside of sound studies can and does play a central role, particularly when sound studies calls upon these complementary critical discourses to assist in this process. So, for example, with regard to challenging the audiovisual litany, work on biopolitics can lend critical assistance with regard to life/death sonic distinctions; affect theory with affect/intellect ones; world theory with worlding/unworlding ones; geocriticism with temporal/spatial ones; and poststructuralism with ones relating to subjectivity/objectivity.

14.4 GAME STUDIES Game studies is a field of study that focuses on games, particularly in their digital forms. Much like sound studies, it is a multidisciplinary field wherein, according to Frans Mäyrä, the majority of game

60

Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 9; adapted. Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations,” 9. 62 Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 7. 63 Schmidt, Hearing Things, 7. 61

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studies are “practiced by individuals who are nominally situated in some other field: in literary, film or media studies, or in departments of communication research, sociology, psychology, computer science, or in some other of the numerous fields where game studies is currently exercised.”64 In general, the academic study of games has existed for a long time, particularly in history and ethnography, where two of the classics of the field are ethnographer Stewart Culin’s Games of the North American Indians (1907) and historian Harold James Ruthven Murray’s A History of Chess (1913). Also, the study of simulation, that is, the imitation of the operations of a large system by another more simplified one, has a long history, which can be traced back to Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig’s adaptation of chess into a war game in 1780—and forward in literary and cultural theory through Baudrillard’s poststructuralist intervention.65 Interestingly, the oldest journal in game studies, Gaming and Simulation, which was established in 1970, has a genealogy that dates back to a group of war gamers that formed in the 1950s, the East Coast War Games Council.66 In addition, there is the study of play, which originated in 1974 with the Cultural Anthropology of Play Reprint Society and later became The Association for the Study of Play in 1987. Their journal, which has been called Play and Culture (1988–92), the Journal of Play Theory and Research (1993– 7), and Play and Culture Studies (1998 to date), gives a sense of the quickly developing scholarly character of game studies over the past fifty or so years.67 Then, in 1999, Gonzalo Frasca, proposed the term ludology for the “yet non-existent ‘discipline that studies game and play activities.’ ”68 This is important for our purposes because according to Mäyrä, many of these ludologists came to the field from literary studies in general, and narratology in particular.69 However, a “counter-narratology reaction” arose from those who regarded games as significantly different from any traditional narrative.70 As we shall see below, there are those who still link game studies to narratology, but there are also those who view games as distinct from the study of narrative. Hence, to some extent, while the ludology–narratology debate in game studies still exists, game studies has also moved in some other directions. In general, game studies, according to Simon Egenfelt-Nielsen and his colleagues, approaches the study of games from five major perspectives: (1) The Game—game studies from the perspective of the game focuses on subjecting one or more particular games to analysis. The point of this type of analysis is to look at games in themselves and to say something about their structure and how they employ certain techniques—of player reward, of player representation in the game world, and so on—to achieve the player experience aimed for by the game designer. The common methodology here is textual analysis, which is one often chosen by those with a background in comparative literature, film studies, and related disciplines. (2) The Players—game studies from the perspective of the players focuses on the activity of playing games. The point of this type of analysis is to explore how players use games as a

Frans Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture (London: Sage, 2008), 5. Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies, 7. 66 Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies, 7. 67 Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies, 8. 68 Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies, 8; Frasca cited by Mäyrä. 69 Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies, 8. 70 Mäyrä, An Introduction to Game Studies, 10. 64 65

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type of medium or social space. The common methodology here is observation, interviews, and surveys, which is one often chosen by those with a background in sociology, ethnography, and cultural studies. (3) The Culture—game studies from the perspective of the culture focuses on the wider culture of which games are a part. The point of this type of analysis is to understand how games and gaming interact with wider cultural patterns. For instance, some are interested in the subcultures that evolve around gaming. Others are interested in discourses surrounding gaming. The common methodology here is interviews and textual analysis, which is one often chosen by those with a background in sociology and cultural studies. (4) The Ontology—game studies from the perspective of ontology focuses on the philosophical foundations of games. The point of this type of analysis is to make general statements that apply to all games, which may enable us to understand things like the relationship between rules, fiction, and the player. The common methodology here is philosophical inquiry and logical analysis, which is one often chosen by those with a background in philosophy, literary and cultural theory, and cultural history. (5) The Metrics—game studies from the perspective of the metrics focuses on the data-driven design research. The point of this type of analysis is to understand through various metrics (e.g., quantitative measures of player behavior) the relationship between game design and player behavior (or sentiment). The common methodology here is statistical analysis of logged data, which is one often chosen by those with a background in software development and behavioral psychology.71 While these perspectives indicate major trends in game studies, actual studies do not always fall so neatly into these five areas. Like other areas that utilize the term studies, there is no predetermined methodology in game studies—even though some trends are identifiable. Additionally, within the field of game studies, two schools of thought can generally be identified: (1) Formalist—the formalist approach to game studies tends to use game analysis or ontological analysis. They represent a humanistic approach to media and focus on the works themselves or philosophical questions relating to the nature or use of those works. One group of formalists prioritize the study of representation and are associated with narratology. Another group of formalists prioritize the study of rules and are associated with ludology. (2) Situationist—the situationist approach to game studies tends to use culture analysis or player analysis. They tend to be interested in the analysis of game players or the culture at large. Situationalists search less for general patterns or laws and more for analysis and descriptions of specific social events or social practices.72 Furthermore, if cultural studies might be said to mark the closest literary and cultural theory context of the situationalists of game studies, then narratology might be regarded as one of the major literary and cultural theory contexts for formalists. So too might the perspective on speculative

Simon Egenfelt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2013), 10. 72 Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 11–12. 71

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realism noted earlier as object-oriented philosophy, which is also discussed below in the context of antitheory, be further associated with the work of formalists in game-studies. Regarding narrative, Henry Jenkins argues in “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” (2003) that games tell stories albeit in a unique way not found in the simplistic linear manner often found in films and novels. Rather, game stories are both spatial, that is, they tell of the travels of the protagonist; and environmental, that is, they are related to literary genres such as fantasy and science fiction, which focus on the depiction of worlds. Additionally, Jenkins identified four ways that narrative is located in games: (1) Evoked Narratives—evoked narratives are narratives that reproduce a world that is known to the players through other works of fiction. These narratives are part of an encompassing system of meanings. For example, the video game Blade Runner (1997) reproduces the world of the film and the novel such that players can “live out” the stories that exist in their imagination by visiting that world. (2) Enacted Narratives—enacted narratives are narratives where the story itself is structured around a character moving though space wherein features of the environment may speed up or slow down the trajectory of the plot. These narratives tend to favor spatial exploration over plot development. (3) Embedded Narratives—embedded narratives are narratives where the gamespace becomes a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot. These narratives are ones where the player finds a world of clues that they then utilize to detect the story that has already happened. An example of this is the video game Myst (1994). (4) Emergent Narratives—emergent narratives are narratives where the gamespace is rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-construction activity of the players. This process is also called object-oriented narration, wherein the gamespace is filled with objects with their own behaviors, so that the player interaction creates unique events that feel significant. An example of this is the video game The Sims (2000), which allows players to create their own stories.73 In addition, there is the notion of interactive narrative, which refers to “a sort of role-playing in which the computer can anticipate the player’s reactions and give an illusion of interactivity.”74 This form of storytelling is regarded as “an ideal form of digital storytelling, deeply engaging and immersive.”75 In Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997), Janet Murray, a proponent of interactive narrative, argues that the computer is the new medium of storytelling. For her, digital storytelling has four defining properties: (1) Procedural—this is the property of narrative that refers to the computer’s ability to execute rules in succession and thus generate behaviors. 73 Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 74 Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 219. 75 Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 219.

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(2) Participatory—this is the property of narrative that refers to the fact that humans can influence the production of behavior when interacting with a computer. (3) Spatial—this is the property of narrative that refers to the computer’s ability to represent navigable space. (4) Encyclopedic—this is the property of narrative that refers to the computer’s storage ability, that is, memory which can hold enormous amounts of information that provide us [with] the ability to interact with information-rich environments.76 For Murray, the procedural and participatory properties of digital environments “make up most of what we mean by the vaguely used word interactive,” while the spatial and encyclopedic properties “help to make digital creations seem as explorable and extensive as the actual world.”77 Together, for Murray, these four properties make up “much of what we mean when we say that cyberspace is immersive.”78 On the ludology (as opposed to the narratology) side of game studies, Roger Caillois’s sociology of play is one of the more influential notions of games. In Man, Play, and Games (1958), Caillois argues that games exist on a continuum between ludus (formal, rule-based behavior) and paidia (playfulness). In addition, games may be divided on the basis of their dominant features into four categories: (1) Ago–n (competition)—games wherein competition is central and skill determines whether the player is successful or not are said to have ago–n as their dominant feature. Examples here include chess, physical sports, and most video games of the action genre. (2) Alea (chance)—games wherein chance is central and determines whether the player is successful or not are said to have alea as their dominant feature. Examples here include the lottery and games using a die or dice. (3) Mimicry (imitation)—games wherein imitation is central are said to have mimicry as their dominant feature. In this type of play, the important experience centers on being someone else, that is, the ability to take on and play a role. Winning is usually not an important feature of this form of play. Examples here include role-playing games and adventure video games. (4) Ilinx (vertigo)—games wherein the chance of a pleasurable sensation is central are ones said to have ilinx as their dominant feature. Examples here include activities such as riding a roller coaster and video games that involve racing such as Stunt Car Racer (1988).79 When these categories are combined in game descriptions, the results are more complex forms of play. Moreover, each of these categories of play can be placed on a continuum (or, scale) involving greater and lesser degrees of ludus and paidia. For example, in terms of alea, playing “heads or tails” involves a high degree of paidia and a low degree of ludus, whereas playing the lottery

Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 219–20. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative on Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 71. 78 Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 71. 79 Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 31. 76 77

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involves a high degree of ludus and a low degree of paidia. In the middle, with equal degrees of ludus and paidia, is roulette. But whereas some, like Caillois, treat games as entirely separate from the outside world, others, like Marshall McLuhan, regard them as reflections of culture. For McLuhan, the most popular games in a culture are a reflection of its core values. In Understanding Media (1965), he writes: Games are popular art, collective, social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of culture.80 McLuhan applies Aristotle’s notion of catharsis to games as “our favorite games provide a release from the monopolistic tyranny of the social machine.”81 Consequently, the games that we enjoy the most are those “that mimic other situations in our work and social lives.”82 Ultimately, for McLuhan, “Aristotle’s idea of drama as a mimetic reenactment and relief from our besetting pressures”83 applies perfectly to games of all kinds. Gregory Bateson adds, however, that when playing games we engage in meta-communication (that is, communication about communication) about them, namely, that what we are doing through play should not be regarded as play and not taken at face value. In other words, we utilize a number of cues such as body language and tone of voice that we are, for example, play fighting, not really fighting. Finally, the notions of play as catharsis (McLuhan) and play as meta-communication (Bateson) mark a division between two more differing schools of thought in game studies. On one side, there is active media, which emphasizes that media activity involves mostly passive recipients;84 on the other, there is active user, which stresses the active filtering and interpretation of game players.85 Each is associated with several major theories: Active Media Theories (1) Catharsis Theory—a theory that our aggressive feelings are mirrored in media and that experiencing them will reduce internal tensions. (2) Cultivation Theory—a theory regarding the degree to which experiencing media leads to a distorted perception of social reality. (3) Social Learning Theory—a theory that says behavior is learned through imitation of attractive models with attached rewards. (4) General Arousal Theory—a theory that says games increase the player’s arousal level and thus increase their energy and the intensity of their actions. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 235. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 238. 82 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 238. 83 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 238. 84 Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 260–1. 85 Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 270–1. 80 81

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(5) Cognitive Neo-Association Theory of Aggression—a theory that contends that violent media lead to hostility and aggression due to reinforcement of related association nodes in the brain. (6) General Aggression Model—a theory that combines earlier work on aggression with cognitive schemata theory, the view that we order our experiences in different schemata that we use when we perceive new experiences. The general aggression model contends that violent media content causes aggressive behavior by influencing the person’s internal state, which is measured through cognitive, affective, and arousal variables.86 Active User Theories (1) Reader-Response and Reception Theory—a theory that says readers create meaning by engaging with texts in a variety of ways. The key figures here, Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish, all come from literary and cultural theory. (2) Play as Meta-Communication—a theory that says that humans are capable of communicating that actions should be interpreted based on their context. The key figure here, Gregory Bateson, is associated with systems theory. (3) The Children’s Perspective—the theory that children can construct a frame around their play and culture that is almost impenetrable by adults. A key work here is Flemming Mouritsen’s Childhood and Children’s Culture (2003).87 Overall, active media theory is theoretically associated with behaviorism, social psychology, and experimental psychology, which in terms of literary and cultural theory places it in opposition to the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, Guattari and Deleuze, and Žižek. Active user theory, however, is theoretically associated with anthropology, ethnography, semiotics, cultural studies, and media studies, which in terms of literary and cultural theory links it to a number of major areas of concern that also include systems theory, and reader-response and reception theory. Finally, Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that to understand what is common to all games we must not think about them, but rather look at them. Consider, for example, board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ”—but look and see whether there is anything common at all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!88 Wittgenstein goes on to characterize the similarities we find in games as “ ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait,

Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 260–1. Egenfelt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca, Understanding Video Games, 270–1. 88 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), §66; 31e. 86 87

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temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.”89 In short, for Wittgenstein, “ ‘games’ form a family.” These comments are part of an effort to explain “the essence of a language-game, and hence of language.”90 As such, his Philosophical Investigations (1953), the source of these quotes, offers yet one more way for game studies to look at games—an approach that allows it to seamlessly overlap board games, language games, video games, and so on in one philosophical inquiry.

14.5 CELEBRITY STUDIES With the release of the record album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972, David Bowie achieved the rock stardom he had worked so hard to attain. In a song on the album entitled “Star,” he sings directly of this aspiration: “I could make it all worthwhile as a rock & roll star.” By 1975, however, Bowie had teamed up with ex-Beatle John Lennon on the song “Fame,” where he bemoans the stardom he has only recently achieved. “Fame (fame) put you there where things are hollow,” he sings with Lennon. Fifteen years later he said that “fame is not a rewarding thing,” quipping “[t]he most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.”91 Finally, in December of 2015, less than a month before he died, Bowie released the single “Lazarus,” where he predicts that he will be even more famous after his death. “Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen / I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen,” starts the first verse, which concludes with the line, “Everybody knows me now.” Both Simon Critchley and John Mowitt have written books about Bowie where they take this song in very different directions. Mowitt’s Tracks from the Crypt (2019) proposes that “Lazarus” manages to communicate nothing. It is “the very sound, not of a failure to communicate, but of ‘speaking’ emptied of what protects it from mediation.”92 To make his case, Mowitt draws on Jacques Derrida’s “Fors” (1986), an essay on the topic of “What is a crypt?”93 Critchley’s Bowie (2016), however, takes “Lazarus” in a completely different direction by asking “Is Bowie Lazarus?”94 “Is this why he chooses to use this final persona,” asks Critchley, “in order to say goodbye to us?”95 “And in choosing the character of Lazarus as the one who is unable to die,” he concludes, “is Bowie even saying goodbye?”96 The work of Mowitt and Critchley offer two different approaches to the study of a work of popular culture. Whereas Mowitt’s work fits more closely with what we have termed sound studies, Critchley’s observations are a version of what has come to be known as celebrity studies, which, like all studies, can and do vary in the way they approach their topic. Critchley, begins with “a rather

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §67; 32e. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §65; 31e. 91 Paul Du Noyer, “Interview with David Bowie,” Q Magazine (April 1990), https://www.pauldunoyer.com/david-bowieinterview-1990/. 92 John Mowitt, Tracks from the Crypt (Lüneberg, Germany: Meson Press, 2019), 22. 93 Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xi. 94 Simon Critchley, Bowie (London: OR Books, 2016), 219. 95 Critchley, Bowie, 219. 96 Critchley, Bowie, 219. 89 90

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embarrassing confession: no person has given me greater pleasure throughout my life than David Bowie.”97 “It all began,” writes the well-known philosopher, “as it did for many other ordinary English boys and girls, with Bowie’s performance of “Starman” on BBC’s iconic Top of the Pops on July 6, 1972, which was viewed by more than a quarter of the British population.”98 And “Starman,” for those unfamiliar with Bowie’s work, was a track from Ziggy Stardust. Celebrity studies is a relatively recent field that considers the production and consumption of celebrity—and fame. Graeme Turner writes, with respect to production, that celebrity studies examines “the promotions and publicity industries that produce celebrity,” whereas with respect to consumption, it is interested in “the modes and purposes of the consumption of celebrity, ranging from the public reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to the attraction provided by celebrity websites” and other digital media environments such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.99 The case of Bowie, for example, provides prime material for the study of the consumption of the death of a celebrity in relation to digital environments, as the music video for “Lazarus” was released on January 7, 2016, three days before Bowie’s death on January 10. In the video, Bowie appears with his head wrapped by a cloth that has buttons taking the place of his eyes—as though he were risen from the dead like the biblical Lazarus. According to Turner, the “cultural functions served by celebrity emerge as highly varied and contingent, challenging any simple definition of what might constitute a celebrity culture.”100 These challenges extend as well to the term celebrity, which he defines as follows: Celebrity is a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by the promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a social function we can better understand . . . [Celebrity] is implicated in debates about how identities are constructed in contemporary cultures, and about how the individual self is culturally defined.101 For Turner, the celebrity industry is the sum of three processes: (1) The Popular Media Process—the process wherein the popular media tends to regard modern celebrity as a symptom of a shift towards a culture that privileges the momentary, the visual, and the sensational over the enduring, the written, and the rational. (2) The Talent Discovery Process—the process wherein those who consume and invest in celebrity tend to describe it as an innate or “natural” quality, which is possessed only by some extraordinary individuals and “discovered” by industry talent scouts. Celebrities here are said to possess qualities such as “presence,” “star quality,” and “charisma.” (3) The Cultural Production Process—the process wherein cultural studies and media studies has tended to focus on celebrity as the product of a number of cultural and economic processes. These include the commodification of the individual celebrity through promotion, publicity,

Critchley, Bowie, 9. Critchley, Bowie, 9–10. 99 Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 2nd edition (London: Sage, 2014), ix. 100 Turner, Understanding Celebrity, ix; my emphasis. 101 Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 10. 97 98

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and advertising; the implication of celebrities in the processes through which cultural identity is negotiated and formed; and most importantly, the representational strategies employed by the media in their treatment of prominent individuals.102 Of course, Turner’s use of the term celebrity industry immediately associates it with Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry, one wherein Hollywood films were associated with fascism, totalitarianism, and political propaganda. This is most evident in that aspect of Turner’s definition of celebrity as a commodity, “one that is produced, traded and marketed by the media and publicity industries.”103 Horkheimer and Adorno’s work on the culture industry creates a political cloud that must be addressed in any work focused on a related industry such as the celebrity industry. Moreover, this holds as well for any industries that can be connected to other concepts of public individuals such as the star, the hero, the leader, and so on. Celebrity is more of a general term, whereas star, leader, hero, and so on are more specific conceptions of public individuals as they relate to their functions in the public sphere.104 Adorno and Horkheimer discuss the celebrity in the context of the cult of the personality in Hollywood, wherein “personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.” For them, writes P. David Marshall, “the star is part of a system of false promise in the system of capital, which offers the reward of stardom to a random few in order to perpetuate the myth of potential universal success.”105 The masses identify with stars as the epitome of human potential under capitalism but do so only because they are psychologically immature. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, comments Marshall, they are “drawn to the magic of these larger than life personalities in the same way children identify with and implicitly trust their parents.”106 In Heavenly Bodies (1986), Richard Dyer develops the notion of how stars are connected to the interests of their audiences, and how the power of stars works in the public sphere. For Dyer, stars embody the cultural contradictions of identity. While we know that stars are only appearances, “the whole media construction of stars,” writes Dyer, “encourages us to think in terms of ‘really.’ ”107 This is particularly evident in the division between the public and private realms, which leads the star’s audience to constantly search for the real star (viz., their private self) as opposed to their screen image (viz., their public self). Moreover, Dyer identifies a number of aspects of stars that are important to understanding the construction of celebrity: (1) The Celebrity as Epitome of the Individual—the celebrity is the epitome of the individual for identification and idealization of society. (2) The Celebrity is not Completely Determined by the Culture Industry—the celebrity is not wholly determined by the culture industries and is therefore somewhat created and constructed by the audience’s reading of dominant cultural representations. Gramsci’s

Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 4; adapted. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 10. 104 P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7. 105 Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 9. 106 Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 9. 107 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 18. 102 103

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conception of hegemony best expresses this reworking of the dominant ideological images into social categories of class, gender, age, and so on. (3) The Celebrity as Commodity—the celebrity is a commodity and therefore expresses a form of valorization of the individual and personality that is coherent with capitalism and the associated consumer culture.108 For Dyer, the star provides a means of confirming the status of the power of the individual amidst its disintegration through the establishment of mass society. Individual freedom here is the freedom to choose what one consumes and to make money. For Dyer, the star ideologically bolsters this conception of the individual. Stars, says Dyer, “articulate the promise and the difficulty that the notion of the individual presents for all of us who live by it.”109 In Celebrity and Power (1997), Marshall draws upon the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, Dyer, and others regarding conceptions of the individual and the mass in modern consumer culture to offer an extensive analysis of celebrity as a form of cultural power. Marshall identifies the following functions of the celebrity and what he terms the celebrity system: (1) The Celebrity as a Human Agent—the celebrity is both a proxy for someone else and an actor in the public sphere. On one level, the proxy of the celebrity relates to their close proximity to the institutions of power and their dependence on those institutions for elevation to the public sphere. On another level, the celebrity expresses the more radical conception of human agency as it has developed in the Marxist tradition. Celebrities are proxies of change that often define the construction of change and transformation in contemporary culture, the very instability of social categories and hierarchies in contemporary culture. They are the active agents that in the public spectacle stand in for the people. (2) The Celebrity as a Stable Figure of Collective Formations—collectivities in contemporary culture are inherently unstable. Celebrities represent flags, markers, or buoys for the clustering of cultural significance through patterns of consumption. The celebrity operates like a brand name for the organization of production and consumption of cultural commodities. The celebrity functions as a semi-stable identity and cultural icon that runs through several cultural forms and establishes an identity through which an audience can estimate the cultural forms’ relative value. (3) The System of Celebrity as a Spectacle of Individuals—as a system, celebrities provide a spectacle of individuality in which human will itself can produce change and transformation. The spectacular quality of the code of individuality that is enacted by public personalities works ideologically to maintain the idea of continuity between wealth and the disenfranchised rest of society. Celebrities reinforce the conception that there are no barriers in contemporary culture that the individual cannot overcome. (4) Celebrity and the Defining of the Private and Public Spheres—celebrities represent the disintegration of the distinction between the private and the public. The private sphere is constructed through celebrities to be revelatory, the ultimate site of truth and meaning for

Adapted from Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 19. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 8.

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any representation in the public sphere. The representation of public action as a manifestation of private experience exemplifies a cultural pattern of psychologization of the public sphere. The celebration of affective attachment to events and moments is represented by the celebrity, where further cultural connections are dematerialized. The celebrity can be seen as instrumental in the organization of an affective economy.110 Marshall’s conclusion is that the affective economy “has become central to the way in which our politics and culture operate.”111 His analysis of this affective economy through the contributions made to it by celebrities, which include not only the stars of the entertainment industry but also political leaders, is a contribution to both celebrity studies and affect theory. In his introduction to the 2014 edition of Celebrity and Power, Marshall further elaborates on the disintegration of the distinction between the private and the public by declaring “we have become a culture that accepts what I call a new public intimacy.”112 Writes Marshall, Celebrity is a very public form of discourse about the dimensions of what is public and what is private and, ultimately, what is intimate. The level of exposure—the capacity of our technologies to record and to transmit images, text, and sound—and an online culture that has new expectations of exposure have helped expand our comfort with public intimacy.113 In many ways, Bowie’s turning his impending death into art through online technologies epitomizes this new public intimacy connected with celebrity. In sum, celebrity studies has emerged in the past decade or so as a field with a wide-angle lens on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of celebrity. The journal Celebrity Studies, launched in 2010, is the locus for much of this research, which includes: literary celebrity; celebrity activism; gender studies and celebrity; sport and celebrity; border studies and celebrity; law and celebrity, particularly in relation to privacy and intellectual property issues; and even academics and celebrity. Regarding the latter topic, in “The Star System in Literary Studies” (1997), David Shumway concludes that the “star system has given literary academics greater public visibility, but this celebrity has not made the knowledge that the stars produce any more widely known or given that knowledge great public authority.” “On the contrary,” says Shumway, “to the public academic stars are curiosities rather than intellectual leaders.”114 Relatedly, Jeffrey Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock argue that in “the age of late or neoliberal capital, society at large no longer affords its iconic or star public intellectuals much respect.”115 Arguably, this can be best understood through their celebrity status, that is, through their role in the celebrity system as it operates under neoliberal capital.

Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 243–7. Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 247. 112 P. David Marshall, “Introduction: Celebrity in the Digital Era—A New Public Intimacy,” in Celebrity and Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xii. 113 Marshall, “Introduction: Celebrity in the Digital Era—A New Public Intimacy,” xii. 114 David R. Shumway, “The Star System in Literary Studies,” PMLA 112 (January 1997): 98. 115 Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock, “Before the Beginning, After the End: Toward the New Public Intellectual,” in The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere, eds. Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), x. 110 111

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Against Theory 15.0 INTRODUCTION The case against theory goes hand in hand with the case for theory. “[A]lmost as quickly as they became known,” writes Robert Tally, “scholars and critics [start] pooh-poohing the various schools of theory.”1 The Pooh Perplex (1963) and Postmodern Pooh (2001) by Frederick Crews, for example, satirize New Criticism, Marxism, and Freudian theory, among others in 1963, and deconstruction, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory, among others in 2001. For Tally, a symbol of their co-dependency is the publication of “Against Theory” (1982) by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, and Literary Theory (1983) by Terry Eagleton within a year of each other. Whereas Eagleton’s book is the bestseller that has introduced generations of students to theory (including me), Knapp and Michaels’ article made the case four decades ago that, as Tally puts it, “literary criticism and scholarship would be better off without theory entirely.”2 Their neopragmatist argument that “meaning and intention, language and speech acts, and knowledge and belief were each inseparable” is described by Tally as “bizarre.”3 Even the editor of Critical Inquiry, the journal in which it was published, points out Tally, “noted with irony that nobody in practice, but only ‘in theory,’ could buy Knapp’s and Michaels’s conclusion, since, for example, ‘in practice, to say I believe something to be the case is tantamount to saying that I do not know it for a fact.’ ”4 Daniel T. O’Hara, however, argues that the “against theory” movement began with Michaels and Knapp’s essay. For him, it appears to be an institutional form of psychosis. O’Hara claims it is blind revisionism in the service of a new professional hierarchy of one-time theorists and/or their students who, under the guise of the latest interpretive community at the time, put a limit to theory and its certified pragmatic users. This self-serving and deceptive syndrome only ends, O’Hara claims, in the self-destructive repetition of the vicious cycle without end. Michaels and Knapp’s essay and O’Hara’s critical response, along with many others, including one from Stanley Fish, Michaels and Knapp’s teacher and at the time a widely-read theorist, are collected in Against Theory (1985), which was edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, the editor of Critical Inquiry noted above. Given these claims, there are at least two possible ways to approach the case against theory. The first involves looking at the material from the preceding chapters not as evidence of the case for theory but rather as refracted through its other, the case against theory including satires like those

Robert T. Tally, Jr., For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in the Age of Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2022), 71. 2 Tally, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists, 71. 3 Tally, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists, 73. 4 Tally, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists, 73. 1

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of Crews. Approached as such, that is, by listening only to the arguments against specific theories— as well as against theory in general—would be kind of like playing this book backwards. But practically speaking, this would be a different book: not an overview to contemporary literary and cultural theory, but rather an overview to contemporary literary and cultural antitheory. The second way to approach the case against theory is by examining the general concept of antitheory— and some of its contemporary instantiations. This is the approach we will take. It is also the one that was taken in What’s Wrong with Antitheory? (2020), which was edited by Jeffrey Di Leo. The first section of this chapter (15.1) is thus devoted to the concept of antitheory in the broad sense of the term. It provides a glimpse of how a volume devoted to contemporary literary and cultural antitheory might begin to make its case. The remaining sections discuss some contemporary work that has been described as against theory, or antitheory, if you will. Roughly speaking, these major areas of antitheory are each separated by a decade: if the neopragmatism of Knapp and Michaels was the dominant antitheory of the 1980s, then posttheory (15.2) was the dominant antitheory of the 1990s, object-oriented ontology (15.3) of the 2000s, and postcritique (15.4) of the 2010s. The final section, on the new new criticism (15.5), speculates on what might become of these versions of antitheory in the 2020s and thereafter.

15.1 ANTITHEORY Antitheory is nothing new. As long as there has been theory, there has also been antitheory. The two fit together in a co-dependent relationship that has served not to enervate the other, but rather to energize it. The rise then of antitheory coincides with the rise of literary and cultural theory in the 1970s. Moreover, just as theory in the new millennium is stronger and more robust than it has ever been in its roughly fifty-year history, so too is antitheory. New directions in antitheory arise on a regular basis, albeit with more or less the same mandate: to express discontentment with theory. At its most rudimentary level, antitheory takes the form of opposition to some of the major mandates of theory. For example, there is a faction of antitheory that opposes the use of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the analysis of literature and culture. There is another that rejects critique and calls for forms of criticism that do not involve ideological analysis. There is still another form of antitheory that rejects the epistemological and metaphysical project of structuralism and poststructuralism, and its so-called “social construction of knowledge.” In short, antitheory has a long and varied list of complaints about theory that can include but is not limited to the commitments of structuralism, poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and race, class, gender, and sexuality studies. But there are other complaints by antitheorists that really have nothing to do with specific theories. Rather, these complaints are directed at the general tenor of theory, which is viewed as replete with “inflated claims,” “facile slogans,” and “political pretensions.” There are also complaints from these antitheorists about the lack of “reason and science” in theory, its “paucity of evidence,” “the incoherence of certain theorists,” its “flagrant identity politics,” its neglect of aesthetics, its lack of logic, and its “fashionableness.” Of the last complaint, one wonders, though, if the zeal of antitheorists would wane if it were not for the fact that theory has a knack for eliciting critical interest and generating scholarly excitement in the humanities. Shiny objects are well known to attract attention. Still, perhaps the ultimate complaint of antitheorists is the alleged way in which theory impairs our appreciation of literature. “All [antitheorists] share an affection for literature,” write a couple

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of prominent antitheorists—share “a delight in the pleasure it brings, a respect for its ability to give memorable expression to the vast variety of human experience, and a keen sense that we must not fail in our duty to convey it unimpaired to future generations.”5 In short, theory destroys our appreciation of literature—and will continue to do so until it is cast out of the house of literary criticism. By eliminating theory from the academy, the valiant warriors of antitheory will have thereby rescued literature from appreciative peril. Antitheory, writes the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, “returns sanity and rationality to literary criticism,” rescuing it from the esotericism, jargon, and delusions under which it [has] been buried by the ‘theorizers’ ”—something he feels that “lovers of genuine literature and criticism” desperately desire.6 Nevertheless, to say there are central tenets to antitheory would be misguided. Though its discontentment is generally localized to what it regards as “theory,” just as there are many different types of theory, so too are there many different types of antitheory. Moreover, unlike other terms with the same prefix such as anti-foundationalism, which refers to a rejection of foundational beliefs or principles in philosophical inquiry, and anti-essentialism, which refers to the non-belief that things or ideas have essences, anti-theory does not necessarily imply the rejection of theory or a non-belief in theory. In fact, in many cases, antitheory simply means another type of theory. This is one of the things that makes antitheory not only a fascinating topic for consideration, but also an important topic for consideration in a volume of this type. Jeffrey Nealon, who self-professedly “has been toiling in the vineyards of anti-theory for more than twenty-five years,”7 well recognizes the theoretical nature of antitheory. “Anti-theory,” writes Nealon, “has long been a venerable brand of theory.”8 His comment might seem odd to those who view antitheory like antifoundationalism, that is, as a rejection of theory. But he is correct in his branding assessment. The only question is what “brand of theory” is antitheory? In Nealon’s case, antitheory was initially movements that offered theoretical alternatives to structuralism and poststructuralism such as cultural studies, globalization studies, feminism, race and gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism, Marxism, and New Historicism, but has now in its later stages of development moved on to some new brands of theory. Nealon’s assumption is that the “theory” in “antitheory” refers to “structuralism and poststructuralism,” which he describes as “a loose grab-bag of movements also dubbed ‘the linguisticturn.’ ”9 Antitheory then is not work that directly follows from the linguistic turn like the “farreaching revolutions in thinking about everything from the nature of kinship systems (Claude Lévi-Strauss) and historical events (Hayden White) to the workings of political power (Louis Althusser) or sex and gender (Judith Butler), all the way to the workings of African-American cultural production (Henry Louis Gates’s ‘signifyin’) and even the unconscious itself (Jacques

5 Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, “Introduction,” in Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, eds. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 14. All of the quoted descriptions in this paragraph and the one above come either from their introduction or from their description of the book on the back cover. 6 Back-cover blurb for Patai and Corral, Theory’s Empire. 7 Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Notes on Contributors,” in What’s Wrong with Antitheory?” ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), xi. 8 Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Antitheory 2.0: The Case of Derrida and the Question of Literature,” in What’s Wrong with Antitheory? 25. 9 Nealon, “Antitheory 2.0,” 26.

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Lacan’s famous dictum that the unconscious is structured like a language is specifically scaffolded on Saussure’s relation between the signifier and the signified).”10 Rather, antitheory is work that takes another “turn,” specifically one that is not linguistically-based. So, for Nealon, antitheory is theory that does not directly follow from the linguistic turn. Or, otherwise stated, antitheory is work that is more closely associated with the theoretical movements that are not considered part of the linguistic turn, which is, of course, not a small body of theory. What is interesting about this position is that antitheory is not the rejection of theory. Rather, on this view, antitheory is the multiplication of theories—a way to build out the house of theory beyond the constraints of the linguistic turn, or, if you will, beyond the parameters of structuralism and poststructuralism. In effect, then, antitheory from this perspective involves discontentment with only one form of theory, and offers in its stead, other forms of theory. This version of antitheory opens the path to regarding, for example, not only the very long list of “studies” today as antitheory (for example, subaltern studies, sound studies, surveillance studies, and so on) but also new materialism, object-oriented-ontology, and surface reading. On this view, the house of theory is large and regularly expanding through the multiplication of antitheories. Nevertheless, for some, the rejection of theory does not entail the adoption of another version of it. Rather, it is the simple and categorical rejection of theory—all theory, no exceptions. This rejection holds equally for structuralism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, globalization studies, feminism, race and gender studies, queer theory, postcolonialism, Marxism, New Historicism, and so on. Vincent Leitch, who, like Nealon, may also be described as having “toiled in the vineyards of antitheory for a very long time,” has said that this group of antitheorists includes “traditional literary critics; aesthetes; critical formalists; political conservatives; ethnic separatists; some literary stylisticians, philologists, and hermeneuticists; certain neopragmatists; champions of low and middlebrow literature; creative writers; defenders of common sense and plain style; plus some committed leftists.”11 I too have toiled in the vineyards of antitheory probably just as long as Nealon, and can say too from my professional experience in comparative literature and philosophy departments that some first-generation champions of “comparative literature” as well as most analytic philosophers need to be added to Leitch’s list. I know all too well their scorn for theory. But even so, this level of antitheory is perhaps easier claimed than accomplished. It assumes that these so-called “antitheorists” have no theoretical position of their own or that it is possible to regard them as theory “neutral.” Otherwise, they would be in the same boat that Nealon puts his antitheorists, though with one major difference: their “theory” would not be the “linguistic turn.” Rather, it would be one of a host of “earlier” alternatives such as philology, stylistics, formalism, aestheticism, hermeneutics, or, even, dare I say, some version of “philosophy” other than that found in the works of Saussure, Derrida, Richard Rorty, et al. So, for example, the proponent of “stylistics” as their preferred theory might argue that everything that comes after it is “antitheory.” Still, what if we posited that “theory” is not just the linguistic turn or the structuralism– poststructuralism dyad? And that one of the lessons of theory is that it is no longer possible to be theory neutral? Moreover, isn’t this just the assumption of folks who call themselves “antitheorists” only to brand their own work as another version of theory? The difference between those who

10 11

Nealon, “Antitheory 2.0,” 26. Vincent Leitch, “Antitheory,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, 373.

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formulate their theoretical positions in comparison to the work of structuralists and poststructuralists and those who do not is merely then a historical contingency. Just because the antitheoretical “New Historicists” happened to formulate their positions after the theoretical work of the structuralists and poststructuralists does not make their work any less theoretical than the philologists whose positions were established before the theoretical work of the structuralists and poststructuralists. There are parallels here too with the case of philosophy. Just as we do not believe that preSocratic thinkers such as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides were not philosophers because they “preceded” Socrates, the “father” of philosophy, by the same token we should also not contend that pre-Saussurean or pre-Derridean thinkers were not also theorists. Perhaps, as a concession to the formative powers of Socrates, Saussure, and Derrida, we might respectively then dub these thinkers “early philosophers” and “early theorists,” which is exactly what is done in Chapter 1 (“Early Theory”) of this book. Nevertheless, we surely would not dismiss any of them from philosophical or theoretical consideration. But the point regarding the history of philosophy goes forward too. For example, consider the case of Nietzsche, who was widely rejected as a “legitimate” philosopher by many twentieth-century American analytic philosophers because of his aphoristic style. Just as philosophy is not just Socratic philosophy or analytic philosophy, so too is theory not just Derridean theory and its variants. In addition, just because one does not self-identify as a philosopher or theorist does not mean that one should not be considered one. The same too applies with antitheorists. The discontents then of antitheory are many. First and foremost among them is an inability to escape or make a clean break from theory. This is especially true in the new millennium, where the reach of theory is greater now than at any time in history. Today there is arguably no non-theoretical position from which one can claim to read literature or study culture. Theory now consumes all possible approaches to literature and culture—or at least this is the belief of those who choose to observe the theoretical field as a whole, rather than merely view it from only their own position within it, which can lead to the mistaken view that one’s own approach is somehow “outside” of or “beyond” the purview of theory. Stepping back from our critical practices and reading positions to situate them within the theoretical field is one of the central tasks of those who are committed to a progressive future for the humanities. There are many things wrong with antitheory but perhaps the biggest one is that it promotes the illusion that it is possible for the humanities to consider literature and culture without theory. Fifty years ago, it was still possible for the humanities to consider literature without theory. Twenty-five years ago, it was still debatable whether this was possible. Today, however, it is not possible to be a legitimate proponent of the humanities and at the same time an antitheorist who categorically rejects theory. To attempt the impossible, that is, to claim to be a proponent of the humanities and categorically reject theory, is at this moment in history to place not only theory in jeopardy but also the future of the humanities. In short, antitheory of this ilk is wrong because it plays dice with both the future of theory and the humanities.

15.2 POSTTHEORY Posttheory is a term that was first used in the mid-1990s to reference a range of frustrations with the state of literary and cultural theory. At the time, there was growing resistance to deconstruction in particular, and poststructuralism in general. This work was pejoratively called at the time high

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theory or grand theory, and a bit later sky-high theory and theoreticism. The emerging wave of interest in cultural and other “studies” in the 1990s was one of the sources of this antagonism toward this “high” theory. But there were others including antitheorists who rejected both “theory” and “studies.” In peaceful moments, these various “studies” were defined in opposition to “high” theory as “low” theory. In more antagonistic moments, the term “theory” was entirely rejected in favor of “studies” or some other -ism, such as “New Historicism.” One of the major areas of contention was the allegation that “theory” could be reduced to a method, whereas “studies” could not. Another was over the alleged apolitical or non-political character of “high” theory. Still another was over its allegedly ahistorical or non-historical character. And textbooks at the time on “How to Do Theory” did not help the cause of theory as they furthered the belief that theory was as sort of game played by following a prescribed set of rules (or a fixed set of methods). In the introduction to this book, this process was described as a kind of theoretical recipe. In retrospect, the emergence of a multitude of studies in the 1990s, including race, class, ethnic, sexuality, and gender studies, was not the end of theory or the first chapter of a new posttheory generation as some speculated at the time, but rather a move toward a more robust and mature sense of theory. The fact that twenty-five years later there is still interest in what is “post-” or “after” theory is a testament to both the resolve of anti-theorists and the strength and efficacy of theory as a means to make sense not just of literature and culture but also many other aspects of the world including politics, society, and institutions. As such, the other meaning of “post-theory” is simply what is next for theory and theorists. Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru saw this back in the mid-1990s when they described posttheory as “a pragmatic approach to theory which leads [the posttheorist] to assess various theoretical models on the basis of the socio-cultural and political understanding that these models bring about.”12 Posttheory was described more as involving theorists who were much less obsessed with how they accomplished the study of the object or subject at hand than why they were pursuing it. In other words, method for the posttheorist took a back seat to things such as public interest, social and political activism, and ethics. Thus, posttheory is a trend in theory that continues to this day, namely, to do theory with an eye toward making the world a better place, rather than avoiding it or trying to deny its existence. It is seen, for example, in the progressive work of contemporary theorists like Butler, Henry Giroux, and Žižek.

15.3 OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY Object-oriented philosophy was inaugurated by Graham Harman with the publication of Tool-Being in 2002. Five years later it came to be entangled with speculative realism, which was discussed earlier. Thus, much of Harman’s work as a proponent of object-oriented philosophy has been to distinguish it from speculative realism, particularly the work of Quentin Meillassoux. In the process, Harman establishes, by his own acknowledgment, a reactionary form of literary and cultural theory, one that by some accounts is a prime example of antitheory.

12

Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru, “Posttheory Postscriptum,” symploke– 3.1 (1995): 120.

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In this section, however, rather than go back to the relationship of object-oriented philosophy to speculative realism, which we have already discussed, we will focus instead on the efforts of Harman to develop and defend his own version, which he generally terms, object-oriented ontology (OOO) and regards as a part of “the broader framework of speculative realism.”13 However, as we shall see, his so-called “object-oriented literary criticism,” that is, the application of OOO to literary criticism, is very closely related to the approach of the New Criticism, an early theory that has long been retired by contemporary literary and cultural theory. Like the New Criticism, which has been dubbed “the aesthetic view,” Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, as we noted earlier, regards aesthetics as the root of all philosophy. While one might be tempted to group OOO with what has come to be known as the radical aestheticism (or new aestheticism—as opposed to “older” forms of aestheticism, such as the ones discussed earlier), this would be inappropriate. Radical aesthetics is a straightforward return to the wheelhouse of the New Criticism, that is, the “aesthetic view.” Efforts to “rethink” the aesthetic and “remake” aesthetic discourse, such as Isobel Armstrong’s in The Radical Aesthetic (2000) and Terry Eagleton’s in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), are a return to a form of criticism rejected by proponents of a contemporary depiction of text as well as by the work done by cultural studies and the multitude of studies it spawned. Nevertheless, radical aestheticism does not simply reproduce the New Critical aesthetic of old, but rather often gives it a “political” twist, which in Armstrong’s case is referred to as a ludic feminism that is potentially disruptive and transgressive.14 In Eagleton’s case, a “conflict . . . between two opposing notions of the aesthetic” is identified: “one figuring as an image of emancipation, the other ratifying domination.”15 Nevertheless, the intrepid Eagleton continues to build his case for a radical materialist aesthetics in later work, albeit by both pointing out the flaws of the “high theory” in a new edition of Literary Theory (2008) (“a male-dominated high theory had austerely excluded: pleasure, experience, bodily life, the unconscious, the affective, autobiographical and interpersonal, questions of subjectivity and everyday practice”)16 and by pointing out the limits of cultural studies in After Theory (2003) (“It cannot afford simply to keep recounting the same narratives of class, race, and gender, indispensible as these topics are. It needs to chance its arm, break out of a rather stifling orthodoxy, and explore new topics, not least those which it has so far been unreasonably shy”)17 with a radical materialist aesthetics being one of those “new topics.” Understanding the ideology or performativity of the aesthetic and its historicity has a place in contemporary theoretical discourse regarding literary studies so long as it is not a return to the autonomous, organic wholes of the New Critical aesthetic—a task that is very difficult if not impossible to avoid when engaging the aesthetic. While OOO shares with Armstrong and Eagleton a radicalization of aesthetics by necessitating its “theatricality,” a move akin to the necessity of Armstrong’s performativity and Eagleton’s ideology to the aesthetic, unlike them, Harman rejects the use of any social, political, cultural, and biographical considerations in object-oriented criticism. By contrast, radical aestheticism uses

13

Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 186. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 214–15. 15 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 411. 16 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1st edition, 1983; 2nd edition, 1996; anniversary edition with a new preface (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 194. 17 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 222. 14

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social, political, and cultural considerations to radicalize the aesthetic. Object-oriented criticism, however, much like the New Criticism, aims to empty the aesthetic of all social, political, cultural, and biographical considerations, and focus purely on formal ones. Object-oriented criticism in the hands of Harman arguably tries to make the New Criticism “great again” by doubling-down on its most recognizable characteristics. In the case of the relationship of criticism to political concerns, for example, the New Criticism was wrought through its conservative and segregationist political vision, which although a failed one, still landed them positions as tenured conservatives at numerous colleges and universities across America. In the case of object-oriented criticism, however, we supposedly do not have to worry about it being a form of criticism wrought through a Heideggerian or any other political vision (a point, though, that some will surely want to contest). For Harman, not only are political concerns unrelated to literary criticism and theory (a view he shares with the New Criticism), but, additionally, “[t]here is no political knowledge”18 (a view he does not share with the New Criticism). “Political theory cannot be based on a claim to knowledge: whether it be the supposed knowledge of what the best polity is, or merely the cynical claim that it’s all just a struggle for power,” writes Harman.19 “Along with the need to recognize itself as a non-knowledge, political theory must give a much larger role to non-human entities than has previously been the case.”20 In this regard, Harman’s vision of the reinvention of aesthetics for the new millenium is very different from the highly politicized radical aesthetics of Armstrong and Eagleton. Harman’s work not only goes against the Marxist traditions in theory (and praxis) that both reject non-ideological criticism like the New Criticism, but also work against the tendencies of neoliberal aesthetics to erase the political from literary and cultural criticism. Nonetheless, it is really through Harman’s use of autonomy with regard to the text of objectoriented criticism that the association with the New Criticism is most apparent. While he realizes that the “deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things [at] the heart of object-oriented philosophy . . . will immediately sound deeply reactionary,” he nevertheless finds many different ways to defend the autonomy of texts.21 Moreover, Harman continues on this reactionary path in spite of being well aware that “most advances in the humanities pride themselves on having abandoned the notion of stale autonomous substances or individual human subjects in favor of networks, negotiations, relations, interactions, and dynamic fluctuations.”22 “This,” he continues, “has been the guiding theme of our time.”23 This theme is, of course, the contemporary depiction of text. Harman has no problem supporting the autonomy of the text but believes that certain conceptions of it are wrongheaded: “The problem with individual substances was never that they were autonomous or individual, but that they were wrongly conceived as eternal, unchanging, simple, or directly accessible by privileged observers.”24 He tries to distance his view of the autonomy of the

Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 260. Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 260. 20 Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, 260. 21 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 187. 22 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 187. 23 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 187. 24 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 188. 18 19

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text in object-oriented literary criticism from that of the New Criticism by at once recognizing the “obvious similarities between [OOO’s] relationless concept of objects . . . and the New Criticism’s long unfashionable model of poems as encapsulated machines cut off from all social and material context,”25 but also by citing his own doctrinal disagreements with the ontology at the heart of the New Criticism’s “heresy of paraphrase.” This heresy, as noted earlier, was posited by Cleanth Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn (1947). His thesis here, again, is that a poem cannot be paraphrased, that is, a poem cannot be rephrased into a series of statements or propositions. Writes Brooks, “any good poem sets up against all attempts to paraphrase it.”26 “For the imagery and the rhythm,” continues Brooks, “are not merely the instruments by which this fancied core-of-meaning-which-can-be-expressed-in-a-paraphrase is directly rendered.”27 Quoting William Marshall Urban’s Language and Reality (1939), Brooks brings home his point about the relationship of form and content to the “essential core of the poem itself ”: The general principle of the inseparability of intuition and expression holds with special force for the aesthetic intuition. Here it means that form and content, or content and medium, are inseparable. The artist does not first intuit his object and then find the appropriate medium. It is rather in and through his medium that he intuits the object.28 Generally speaking, this position is one wherein paraphrase, quotation, and translation necessarily alter the content of texts. It assumes, of course, a particular relationship between form and content, of which there are three basic variations wherein content is regarded as an autonomous object: monism, dualism, and pluralism. These three potential relationships between form and content have been widely discussed in literary studies and philosophy. Each, though, is founded upon a classical depiction of text. Monism regarding form and content, as Gustave Flaubert famously put it, “is like body and soul: form and content . . . are one.”29 Therefore, for monists (like Brooks), any change in form will result necessarily in a change in content. Dualism contends that form and content are separate entities and that there is no necessary connection between them. With respect to artworks, dualism entails that considerations of form (or style) are purely or simply matters of expression rather than content. Finally, pluralism is the position that there are many different functions that articulations of content may serve. Jakobson, for example, argued that there were six basic functions of verbal communication—referential, emotive, poetic, phatic, conative, and metalingual.30 As such, pluralism leaves open the possibility of an indefinite number of different relationships between form and content. Pluralism regards form as the characteristic or specific ways in which language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on. Content then for the pluralist is

25

Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 188. Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 196. 27 Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 197. 28 Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 199; Urban cited by Brooks. 29 Gustave Flaubert, “Letter to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie, 12 December 1857,” in Correspondance de Gustave Flaubert, Vol. 2, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1973), 785. 30 Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960): 350–77. 26

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determined only through a functional analysis of the characteristic or specific ways in which language is used. Now that we have established a broader context for understanding the relationship between form and content within the context of the classical depiction of text, let us turn to Harman’s effort to distance his own object-oriented literary criticism from the work of the New Criticism. Harman hopes to achieve this by leveling two criticisms against the New Criticism, specifically targeting “the heresy of paraphrase”: the first is that the New Criticism is guilty of what he calls “the taxonomic fallacy, which consists in the assumption that any ontological distinction must be embodied in specific kinds of entities”;31 the second criticism is that the New Criticism fails in its efforts to maintain the autonomy of the literary object.32 Let us now look at each of these criticisms in a bit more detail. Harman agrees with the fallacy of paraphrase to the extent that it means “The poem differs from any literal expression of its content just as Heidegger’s hammer itself differs from any broken, perceived, or cognized hammer.”33 However, because the New Critics were not object-oriented ontologists, the heresy of paraphrase needs to be adapted to the requirements of OOO. Here, the first order of business for Harman is to point out that the “irreducibility of reality to literal presence applies as much to the sciences as it does to poetry.”34 “The literal and the nonliteral cannot be apportioned to different zones of reality, but are two distinct sides of every point in the cosmos.”35 Therefore, because the New Critics “treat literature as a uniquely privileged zone standing outside the rest of space-time,” OOO must reject their taxonomically suspect ontological assumptions.36 For OOO, everything stands “partially outside” the cosmic network, and partially inside it. Ontological privilege leads the New Critics to assert a distinction between literary objects and nonliterary ones. Whereas, according to OOO, there is no ontological distinction that is embodied in specific kinds of entities—and those that believe as much, such as the New Critics, commit the “taxonomic fallacy.” So, while Harman agrees with aspects of the New Critics heresy of paraphrase (viz., primarily its general notion of the autonomy of objects), other aspects of it violate the principles of OOO (viz., primarily the taxonomical ontological assumptions it makes). To be clear where he stands on the ontology of the New Critical heresy of paraphrase, Harman writes, “we can accept Brook’s claim of an absolute gulf between literalized prose sense and the nonprose sense that it paraphrases or translates. Yet, it does not follow that there should be a division of labor in which poetry has all the non-prose sense while other disciplines have all the literal sense.”37 Moreover, Harman has a different problem with paraphrase than the one stated by Brooks. It is not that we should reject paraphrase in toto, but rather we should be aware of its limits. He makes this point through the example of Moby-Dick: “[W]hy not try shortening it to various degrees in order to discover the point at which it ceases to sound like Moby-Dick? Why not imagine it

31

Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 189. Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 190. 33 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 189. 34 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 190. 35 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 190. 36 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 190. 37 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 189. 32

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lengthened even further, or told by a third-person narrator rather than Ishmael, or involving a cruise in the opposite direction around the globe?”38 The point he is establishing here is that objects are “to some extent autonomous from even their own properties.”39 The phrase “to some extent autonomous” reveals the dualism between form and content at the heart of Harman’s objectoriented literary criticism. For him, form (viz., various expressions of Moby-Dick or “any broken, perceived, or cognized hammer”) and content (viz., Moby-Dick or Heidegger’s hammer) are separate entities, and while there are no necessary connections between form and content, they are connected in the sense that at some point changing the properties of Moby-Dick will result in “it [ceasing] to sound like Moby-Dick”—or more accurately, cease to be or express Moby-Dick. Consequently, while Harman and the New Critics agree on the autonomy of the literary object, they disagree about whether to posit a monist or dualist approach to the classical depiction of text at the center of their respective literary criticisms. Before closing, Harman’s second criticism of the New Criticism is worth mentioning as well, as it further confirms his commitment to ontological autonomy. For Harman, while the New Critics do a great job establishing “the poem as [existing] in pristine isolation from the rest of the cosmos,”40 they do a poor job maintaining this autonomy “once we have entered the gates of the poem,” where “nothing is autonomous at all according to Brooks: instead, we inhabit a holistic wonderland in which everything is defined solely by its interrelations with everything else.”41 For Harman, “by turning [the poem’s] interior into a relational wildfire in which all individual elements are consumed,” the New Critics again have failed to produce a model of literary criticism consistent with the principles of OOO. To be fair, though, the New Critics tended to find the coexistence of ambiguity and coherence in an object not to be contradictory characteristics. But rather than seeing these as tensions that could be resolved through close reading, Harman would rather that objectoriented literary criticism posit a non-relational literary-object, rather than a radically relational one. The exercise of altering senses of Moby-Dick is also meant to show “how each text resists internal holism by attempting various modifications of these texts and seeing what happens.”42 In sum, Harman’s approach is an effort to provide a proper ontology for the New Criticism and its classical depiction of text. By focusing on improving autonomy in literary criticism, it serves as both a rejection of the contemporary depiction of text and a reactionary form of anti-theory thoroughly grounded in aesthetics. “ ‘Everything is connected’ is one of those methods that has long since entered its decadence, and must be abandoned,”43 comments Harman. “The call for ‘the death of the author’ needs to be complemented by a new call for ‘the death of the culture.’ ”44 For his part, Harman has done a yeoman’s job in rehabilitating the New Criticism. “Instead of dissolving a text upward into its readings or downward into its cultural elements,” states Harman, “we should focus specifically on how it resists such dissolution.”45 The New Critics would be proud of him given all

38

Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 202. Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 202. 40 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 190. 41 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 190. 42 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 201–2. 43 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 201. 44 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 201. 45 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 200. 39

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the pounding they have taken from various contemporary views of text over the last quarter of the twentieth century and thereafter. Object-oriented literary criticism’s thoroughgoing commitment to the autonomy of the text is best viewed as New Criticism with an upgraded ontology and shiny new dualism. It also signals the complete reversal of OOO with regard to contemporary trends in the humanities that are based on the rejection of “stale autonomous substances.” As a form of antitheory, it is among the most widely recognized and debated today.

15.4 POSTCRITIQUE Vincent Leitch has humorously said that “theorists refer to antitheorists as the ‘I love literature crowd.’ ”46 And while some antitheorists tolerate theory, he continues, it is only as “a handmaiden to appreciation of literary texts.”47 For the others, they argue that literary criticism and scholarship does not need a handmaiden—and that the study of literature is better off without theory. Again, antitheory arguments like this go back to the institutional rise of theory in the 1970s. And while this line of thinking preceded Knapp and Michaels’s 1982 provocation “Against Theory,” antitheorists found in this essay an antitheory “argument” to rally around. Still, there has perhaps been no higher profile and higher funded antitheory movement ever than the one initiated by Rita Felski. The funding came in the form of a $4.2 million grant in 2016 from the Danish National Research Foundation. A press release from her university announcing the grant says that it stems from work done in her 2015 book, The Limits of Critique, which “encouraged her fellow scholars to explore alternatives to increasingly predictable and formulaic styles of ‘suspicious reading’ ”48—and codified postcritique. Felski, continues the release, says Literary scholars should spend less time looking behind a text for hidden causes and suspicious motives and more time placing themselves in front of it to reflect on what it suggests, unfolds or makes possible. What literary studies needs, she said, is less emphasis on “de” words – demystifying, debunking, deconstructing – and more emphasis on “re” words – literature’s potential to remake, reshape and recharge perception.49 Felski claims that she will use the grant to “develop new frameworks and methods for exploring the many social uses of literature,” something she has already begun in her course “Theories of Reading,” where “students first learn to become skeptical readers, drawing on ideas from Freud, Foucault or feminism to criticize the works of the canon or to challenge their assumptions of their favorite TV shows,” and then learn “to reflect on why they love certain novels or movies and to develop more sophisticated vocabularies for describing and justifying these feelings.”50 Felski’s comments betray the basic parameters of her antitheory. For her, theory has become “predicable and formulaic,” and she aims to provide it with “new frameworks and methods.” These

46

Leitch, “Antitheory,” 373. Leitch, “Antitheory,” 373. 48 Lorena Perez, “UVA English Professor Lands Large Danish Grant to Explore Literature’s Social Use,” UVAToday, May 25, 2016, https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-english-professor-lands-large-danish-grant-explore-literatures-social-use. 49 Perez, “UVA English Professor Lands Large Danish Grant to Explore Literature’s Social Use.” 50 Perez, “UVA English Professor Lands Large Danish Grant to Explore Literature’s Social Use.” 47

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new “frameworks and methods,” that is to say, antitheories, will establish “more sophisticated vocabularies for describing and justifying” why we “love certain novels and movies”—and, of course, television shows. Given this, perhaps we need to alter Leitch’s pronouncement to the “I love Netflix crowd.” Felski finds in Harman, whose antitheory we just discussed, a loyal ally in the rejection of critique. “I join a growing groundswell of voices,” says Felski in The Limits of Critique, “including scholars of feminist and queer studies as well as actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, and influential strands of political theory.”51 But his name only appears once in her book and there is no other discussion or mention of OOO aside from a long footnote to the above sentence, which after citing specific works of scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Toril Moi, Linda M. G. Zerilli, Stephen M. Best, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Jane Bennett, concludes with the sentence, “I have also learned much from the work of Graham Harman . . . .”52 Even more curiously, Felski finishes this sentence with “and of course am deeply influenced by the work of Bruno Latour.”53 In comparison to Latour, whose actor-network theory index entry has fifteen subheadings, and whose own entry has eleven subheadings, there is no entry in her index for Harman, and the only direct reference in the book to OOO is the one above. Why then does Latour get an “of course” from Felski but the “deep influence” of Harman is directly stated nowhere in her postcritical manifesto? It is because while Felski shares with Harman a passion for the classical depiction of text and the associated characteristic of textual autonomy, she hides behind the work of Latour in order to avoid any association through Harman with aesthetics and the New Criticism. Nonetheless, in spite of her cloaking devices, she too presents a version of antitheory indebted to aestheticism and the New Criticism, albeit by a different path from Harman. In her co-written introduction to Critique and Postcritique, a collection of essays on the postcritique moment that followed two years after the publication of The Limits of Critique, the editors, Elizabeth S. Anker and Felski, share what links together the disparate postcritical work of Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “these critics are all committed to treating texts with respect, care, and attention, emphasizing the visible rather than the concealed in a spirit of dialogue and constructiveness rather than dissection and diagnosis.”54 One would be hard-pressed to say that these same characteristics, that is, a commitment to “treating texts with respect, care, and attention, emphasizing the visible,” are not also characteristics of the New Criticism. But, more to the point, the autonomy of the text immediately begins to appear here as an important consideration of critics sympathetic to postcritique. This also comes out in the descriptions of the specific contributions of Best, Love, Marcus, and Sedgwick by Anker and Felski: Best and Marcus “urge greater attention to what lies on the surface [of a text]—the open to view, the transparent, and the literal,” that is, they urge the use of a method called surface reading, one that embraces a broad array of critical practices including old and new formalisms, cognitive science, affect studies, critical description, history of the book, and data-driven approaches; Love

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 195–6, n. 4. 53 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 195–6, n. 4. 54 Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Critique and Postcritique, eds. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 16. 51 52

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“calls for a model of what she calls ‘thin description’ and for renewed attention to empiricism ‘after the decline of the linguistic turn’ ”; Marcus “develops a model of ‘just reading’ that attends carefully to what is given by the text”; and Sedgwick’s “account of paranoid reading . . . culminates with an acknowledgement of the value of the reparative impulse that is ‘additive and accretive,’ aiming ‘to assemble and confer plenitude.’ ”55 In the same introduction, though separately discussed, Latour’s actor-network theory [ANT] is treated as an objection to literary critics who try “to reconcile the spheres of literature and politics, enlisting their expertise and training in close reading in the service of combatting social injustice.”56 For postcritics such as Anker and Felski, “it is not at all obvious that literary analysis offers a direct conduit to a sharper understanding of the social, or that individual texts can be seen as microcosms of broader ideological structures or cultural forces.”57 Actor-network theory scholars are then cited responding to this problem by “replac[ing] the notion of ‘society’ with an emphasis on networks of associations, conceiving of the artwork as embedded within multiple chains of mediation rather than serving a microcosm of a social totality.”58 On this view, ANT shares an affinity with the New Criticism by agreeing that social and political concerns are not determinable through the close reading of literary texts. “The politics of a text are not dictated by its form, structure, or internal dynamics,” conclude Anker and Felski regarding ANT. “Rather, they are forged in the history of its various diverse entanglements.”59 Many of the concerns then of postcritique are also those of the New Criticism. This is most obvious in its rejection of politics and ideology as relevant to textual criticism (viz., “The politics of a text are not dictated by its form, structure, or internal dynamics”), and its rejection of the contemporary depiction of a text (viz., the depiction that results from the “linguistic turn”). But the novelty of Felski’s version of New Criticism is felt most palpably in her desire that artworks be both “connected” and “autonomous.” For her, “works of art cannot help being social, sociable, connected, worldly, immanent—and yet they can also be felt, without contradiction, to be incandescent, extraordinary, sublime, utterly special.”60 That is to say, for Felski, “[t]heir singularity and their sociability are interconnected, not opposed.”61 How then does she resolve this apparent contradiction? Namely, the postcritical contradiction that artworks are both autonomous and nonautonomous? Social and non-social? That they exhibit singularity and plurality? For one thing, unlike Harman, she does not rely on aesthetics as the first principle of her postcritique, and unlike the new aestheticism, she does not use aesthetics to bring performativity or ideology into her postcritique. “This book,” writes Felski, “does not take up arms against social meanings under the stirring banner of . . . a ‘new aestheticism,’” nor does it “champion aesthetics over politics.”62 For her, the social aspects of literature cannot be “peeled away from its ‘purely literary’ ones.”63 “No more separate spheres!” she adds. But here again she appears to be going in the opposite direction to

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Anker and Felski, “Introduction,” 16. Anker and Felski, “Introduction,” 17. 57 Anker and Felski, “Introduction,” 17. 58 Anker and Felski, “Introduction,” 17. 59 Anker and Felski, “Introduction,” 17. 60 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 11. 61 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 11. 62 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 11. 63 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 11. 56

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Harman, whose object-oriented philosophy has a “deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things,” rejects “networks, negotiations, relations, interactions, and dynamic fluctuations,”64 and last, but not least, regards objects as “cut off from all social and material context.”65 If anything, Felski’s postcritique is an effort to provide a new type of relationship between text and context, that is, between the singularities of the text and the pluralities of context. “Refusing to stay cooped up in their containers, texts barge energetically across space and time,” opines Felski, “hooking up with other coactors in ways that are both predicable and puzzling.”66 By why do these autonomous, singular texts venture out into context? Because this allows them as agents (or actors, as Latour terms them) “to make a difference” in the network. “Only by making attachments and forging alliances [and ‘hooking up’],” claims Felski, “are they able to make a difference.”67 For her resolving the contradiction of the autonomy and non-autonomy of texts is merely a matter of “stress”: Rather than stressing their otherness, autonomy, nontransferability, we point out their portability, mobility, and translatability. Instead of asking “What does this text create, build, make possible? Against those who declare “The text is singular! It cannot be appropriated!” we intone our own mantra: “The text is singular! Of course it will be appropriated!”68 In the final analysis, what Felski offers in place of a hermeneutics of suspicion and the contemporary depiction of text has a lot more in common with reader-response criticism than object-oriented ontology: Reading is now conceived as an act of composition—of creative remaking—that binds text and reader in ongoing struggles, translations, and negotiations. The literary text is not a museum piece immured behind glass but a spirited and energetic participant in an exchange—one that may know as much as, or a great deal more than, the critic. This text impinges and bears on the reader across time and space; as a mood changer, a reconfigurer of perception, a plentitude of stylistic possibilities, an aid to thought . . . Don’t texts, after all, routinely transcend their circumstances of conception—straying into new networks that have little or nothing to do with their original meaning or purpose?69 For Felski, understanding how autonomous texts can “resonate” and “move across time” is the central problem of literary criticism in the new millenium.70 What puts her firmly under the influence of Latour is her adoption of his unorthodox position that “Literary texts can be usefully thought of as nonhuman actors,” and as such, exhibit a form of agency.71 In a way, by recalling the work of Stanley Fish (on textual autonomy), Felski’s postcritique might be seen as taking us back to the twentieth-century debate regarding the source of the identity of the 64

Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 187. Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 188. 66 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 182. 67 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 182. 68 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 182. 69 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 182–3. 70 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 154. 71 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 154. 65

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autonomous, stable, and coherent classical depiction of text as well as to the unique type of antitheory he advocates. For Fish, a reception theorist in the tradition of Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser, the identity of the text is not an inherent property of the object, but is rather bestowed upon it by its interpreter. Fish’s position that textual identity is a social construction implies, for example, that authorial intention plays little role in the identity of the text. It also implies that different interpretations entail different texts. For Fish there is no difference between explaining a text and changing it. His view then might be said to conflate questions of interpretation with those of identity. Nevertheless, Fish’s place among classical depictions of text is not as obvious as say the New Critics. Much the same holds for Felski, though her categorical rejection of the contemporary depiction of text à la the linguistic turn makes it easier to view her postcritique as a limit case (like Fish) of the classical depiction of text. Felski’s position in this respect affords her the opportunity to pursue some of the more extreme, relativistic, and speculative implications and possibilities of this depiction. For both Fish and Felski, texts are changing entities, though while the former claims that they are not definable outside of a perceptual awareness of them and do not exhibit agency, the latter locates the source of their change in their agency as non-human actors within networks. As with Fish, the key to situating Felski’s work within the tradition of the classical depiction of text is her repeated insistence that texts have autonomy and a determinate identity—two of the four main characteristics of a classical depiction of text. Whereas for Fish, texts are autonomous in the sense that they gain their identity by being isolated from the whole of signification either by a single interpreter or an entire interpretive community, for Felski, however, texts are autonomous in the sense that they gain their identity by being isolated from the whole of signification either by a single reader or by serving as a singular “actor” in a network. In the case of both Fish and Felski, the source of the identity and autonomy of the text is relative to something else (e.g., an interpreter, a reader, a network, an interpretive community) in spite of the fact that texts for both of them are basically also unstable and incoherent entities. Like OOO (and, relatedly, speculative realism), postcritique is not a cohesive philosophical or critical movement. If speculative realism is realism plus unorthodox speculation, then postcritique is the rejection of critique plus even more unorthodox speculation. One need not go much further than trying (speculatively) to imagine Felski’s image of the life of texts as “one text as an ‘actor’ ‘hooking up’ with other ‘coactor’ texts in ‘predicable and puzzling’ ways.” Still, OOO gave postcritique the philosophical, critical, and speculative courage to be confident in reasserting the authority of what Harman calls “stale autonomous substances”72—and, by doing so, put postcritique like OOO in immediate comparison with the once-celebrated form of criticism that championed “stale autonomous substances,” namely, the New Criticism. Ultimately, postcritique makes the same move as OOO regarding these autonomous substances by fundamentally agreeing with Harman that the “problem with individual substances was never that they were autonomous or individual, but that they were wrongly conceived as eternal, unchanging, simple, or directly accessible by privileged observers.”73 Nevertheless, OOO and postcritique disagree with how textual change occurs, with Harman following a path laid out by Heidegger, and Felski a path laid out by Fish and Latour.

72 73

Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 187. Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” 188.

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15.5 NEW NEW CRITICISM If the last quarter of the twentieth century was one of the most vibrant periods in the history of the humanities, then the first quarter of the new millenium is quickly becoming one of its most reactionary. The contemporary depiction of text brought with it exciting new ways of dismantling the autonomy of the text and replacing it with a myriad of energizing possibilities. The critical measure of the difference between the classical depiction of text as autonomous, stable, coherent, and of determinate identity, and the contemporary depiction of text as not autonomous, stable, coherent, and of determinate identity was often the New Criticism. For at least a twenty-five-year period, New Criticism often stood as the barometer of everything that contemporary depictions of text sought to undermine. But the reactionary winds of critical change started to gather force at the turn of the century through new forms of antitheory. While antitheory of the form that rejects the epistemological and metaphysical project of structuralism, poststructuralism, and the social construction of knowledge predates the new millenium, so too does antitheory that opposes the use of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the analysis of literature and culture. However, postcritique, a particularly virulent strain of antitheory, took root in the mid-2010s through the leadership of Felski. It was preceded by another strain of antitheory called object-oriented ontology, which has gained steam through the contributions of Harman. What these strains of antitheory share, that is, postcritique and object-oriented ontology, is a reverence for the classical depiction of text, one that exhibits autonomy as its paradigmatic feature. This has led many to call work in this area reactionary because of its reversal from the progressive criticism that stemmed from the contemporary depiction of text. Also caught up in the whirlwind of reactionary work on text was a return to aestheticism through both OOO and the radical (or new) aestheticism. This begs the question as to whether a new form of the New Criticism is in play through the antitheoretical interventions of postcritique, OOO, and the radical (or new) aestheticism. The only thing left to consider now is whether this new New Criticism is a cohesive movement or not. Given that we have said virtually the same thing about the New Criticism, OOO, and the radical (or new) aestheticism, namely that none of them was or is a monolith, it only seems fair to say the same about the new New Criticism. Still, the shared commitment of the different forms of the new New Criticism to the autonomy of the literary text is nothing less than a marvel given their epistemological and ontological variations. In conclusion, for those who are proponents of literary and cultural theory in one or more of its guises as depicted in this book, the hope will surely be that this current wave of reactionary criticism is short-lived. But then again, didn’t the first New Criticism hold court in the humanities for nearly fifty years? What is going to happen now that it has been made “great again” via a new New Criticism? Given the co-dependency of theory and antitheory, one might be led to conclude that this particularly virulent strain of antitheory is a sign of the power and promise of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Otherwise, why would anyone even be interested in them, let alone grant them millions of dollars of support?

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442

INDEX

Note: Figures are indicated by an italic f following the page numbers. ability studies 279 ableism 278–279 Abu-Lughod, Janet 299 actants 69 active media theories 393–394 active user theories 394 activists 348 actor-network theory 414 Adams, Abigail 175 Adams, John 175 Adler, Alfred 112 Adorno, Theodor 75, 397 debate with Benjamin on emancipatory potential of mass art 83–91 advertising 90 An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Spivak) 283 aesthetic function 52–53 aesthetic knowledge 33 aestheticism 30–33, 52, 417 affect studies 347–367 affect theory 347, 358 The Affect Theory Reader (Seigworth and Gregg) 347 affective atmospheres 359 affective economy 399 affective fallacy 350 affective labor 272, 348 affective multiplicities 229 affective narratology 349 Affective Narratology (Hogan) 71 affective politics 357 affective presentism 349, 358, 360 affects 347 approaching by turning away from linguistic approaches to 348–349 autonomy of 357 Deleuze and Guattari notions of 355 emotions and 356 positive and negative affects 347 queer affect 347, 350–353 Spinoza’s theory of 354–355

After Finitude (Meillassoux) 341 After Theory (Eagleton) 407 Against Theory (Mitchell) 401 Agamben, Giorgio 268–271 Ahmed, Sarah 352, 353 The Aims of Interpretation (Hirsch) 27 alt culture 212 Althusser, Louis 75, 76, 96–102 ancient Greece 11 androgyny 182–183 angel of history 84–85 Angelus Novus (Klee) 84–85, 86f Animal Liberation (Singer) 331 animal rights 330–332 animal studies 326, 329–334 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 55 Anthropocene 305, 313–316 antihumanism 12, 323 anti-essentialism 223, 245–246, 257, 279–280, 403 anti-identitarianism 291–220, 245, 281 anti-modernism 75 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 130, 134 anti-psychiatry 111 antitheory 402–405, 417 Apophrades 127 Appearance and Reality (Bradley) 344 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 242–243 Aquinas, Thomas 179 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault) 265 Arendt, Hannah 84, 277 Aristippus 17 Aristotle 15–16, 20, 67, 179, 265 beauty for 33 on rhetoric and philosophy 23–24 Armstrong, Isobel 407 Arnold, Matthew 34–35, 373 art 14, 15 as autonomous 31 politicization of 87 443

444

realism and romanticism views of 30 reproduction of works of 86–87 Tolstoy on 32 articulation 378–379 artists, Deleuze and Guattari on 355–356 Askesis 127 Athenaeum (journal) 163 Attali, Jacques 385 Augustine of Hippo 11, 18–19, 24–26, 28, 41, 179 autonomous self 173 autonomous text 173 autopoiesis 336–337 Azzarello, Robert 304 Bachelard, Gaston 317 Badmington, Neil 324 Baerg, Andrew 381 Bakhtin, Mikhail 42, 53, 75, 91–96, 154, 329 bare life (zo¯e), relationship between sovereign power and 270 Barthes, Roland 41, 42, 46, 56–61, 67, 145 Bassnett, Susan 295 Bates, Laura 197 Bateson, Gregory 334, 335–336, 393 Baudrillard, Jean 146, 163–168 Baumgardner, Jennifer 195–196 Baumgarten, Alexander 32–33 Beardsley, Monroe 38 beauty, in art and nature 33 Beauvoir, Simone de 175, 184–185 Bedeutung (denotation or reference), of a sign 49 Bell, Derrick 244, 245 Beloved (Morrison) 290 Benjamin, Walter 75 debate with Adorno on emancipatory potential of mass art 83–91 Bentham, Jeremy 266 Bergson, Henri 356 Berkeley, George 342–343 Berlant, Lauren 352, 358–359 Berlin Wall, fall of, in 1989 76 Bertelsmann (media company) 299 Between Men (Sedgwick) 229 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 117, 363 Bhabha, Homi 288, 296–297 Bible, the 25–26 Bilge, Sirma 255 biology 261 biopolitical control 273 biopolitical production 272 as reproduction 273

INDEX

biopolitics 146, 261–281 and world theory 300 The Biopolitics of Disability (Mitchell) 280 biopower 262, 263, 264, 265 biotheory 261 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 375 bisexuality 201–202, 214 Black Lives Matter movement 255 Black Orpheus (Sartre) 287 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 286 Blair, Tony 293 Bleich, David 7 Bloom, Harold 111, 124–129, 173, 239, 361 Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (Di Leo) 10 blue humanities 305, 319–321 blue theory 321 Boccaccio, Giovanni 70 body without organs 132 body-objectifying surveillance 278 Booth, Wayne 17, 68 border studies 284, 289–292, 318 Boswell, John 211 bourgeoisie 76–77 Bowie, David 395, 396 Bradley, F. H. 344 Braidotti, Rosi 323–325 Braunstein, Néstor 120 breast cancer 231 Brecht, Bertolt 75 Breuer, Josef 112 A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Harvey) 293, 294 Briggs, Asa 380–381 British Commonwealth 285–286 Brooks, Cleanth 34, 39, 409 Brown, Rita Mae 223 Brown v. Board of Education 245 Buchanan, Ian 321 Burke, Edmund 182 Burke, Kenneth 17, 33, 40, 308 Burke, Peter 380–381 Butler, Judith 225–229, 252 Cage, John 385 Caillois, Roger 392 Callistratus 21, 23 Capital, Volume One (Marx) 82 Capital, Volume Three (Marx) 79 capital punishment 265

INDEX

capitalism 73, 104 capitalist production 82 carbon dioxide, effects on the oceans 320 Cardozo, Benjamin 247–248 Carnap, Rudolf 47 carnival 92, 94 Carpenter, Edward 215 Carson, Rachel 321 Caruth, Cathy 360, 361–364 castration complex 201 Catastrophe and Higher Education (Di Leo) 294 causality 103 Celebrity and Power (Marshall) 398–399 celebrity culture 396 celebrity industry 396–397 celebrity studies 395–399 construction of celebrities 397–398 distinction between the private and the public 399 functions of celebrities 398 Celebrity Studies (journal) 399 celebrity system 398–399 Césaire, Aimé 286 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 315 characters, functions of 68–69 Chicago School of literary criticism 68 children, identification with own image in mirrors 119 christian rhetoric 18–19 Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Boswell) 211 Christine de Pisan 175 chronotopes 92 Chthulucene 325 Churchland, Paul 339 Cicero 18, 25 citizen orators 18 civil rights 251 civil rights movement, in the US 241 Cixous, Hélène 198–203 Clarke, Bruce 335 Clarke, Roger 275 class struggle, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat 73 climate change 305–306, 309–313 Clinamen 126, 127 Clinton, William “Bill” 293 Clynes, Manfred 326 Cochrane, Kira 197 codes 59 The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (Ingarden) 341

445

cognitive capitalism 272 cognitive criticism (cognitive literary studies) 326, 338–341 cognitive mapping 318 cognitive narratology 339–340 cognitive science 338 cognitivism 340 Cohen, Jeffrey 308 Cohen, Tom 310, 311, 312, 313 coincidentia oppositorum 204 Colebrook, Claire 315, 316 Collins, Patricia Hill 255 Collins, Sheila 304 colonialism, consequences of 285 Colonialism and Neocolonialism (Sartre) 287 Combahee River Collective 224–225 comedy 15 commodities 82–83 commodity fetishism 83 common, the 275 common culture 374 common memory 366 Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri) 274 commonwealth studies (commonwealth literary studies), 286 communication, structure verus agency in media studies 381 complementarity 108 The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey) 295 Confessions (Augustine of Hippo) 11 connectionism 338 consciousness 96 double 286 consensus 160 constructivism 206, 213–216 consumer objects 164 The Content of the Form (White) 71 contradiction 108 contrariety 108 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx) 78–79, 80 control society 263 Cookie-Cutter Theory 8 cool media 381 Corporate Humanities in Higher Education (Di Leo) 294 correlationism 341–342, 345 Course in General Linguistics (Saussure) 41, 43 Crane, Tim 338 Craps, Stef 360, 361 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 241, 255 Crews, Frederick 401

446

crip/queer 280 Critchley, Simon 395–396 critical border studies 291 border epistemology 291 border ontology 291–292 space-time of borders 292 critical climate change 305–306, 309–313 critical disability studies 279 anti-essentialism of 280 non-normative and anit-identitarian approaches to 281 critical distance 107 Critical Inquiry (journal) 401 critical legal studies 244 critical race theory 243, 244–247, 248, 255 as anti-essentialist and intersectional 245 differential racialization 245 idealist strand of 246 legal storytelling movement within 245 materialists/economic determinists 246 revisionist interpretations of history 247 structural determinism in 246 critical theory 83–84, 371 critical white studies 247 criticism extrinsic 34 intrinsic 33–34 Critique and Postcritique (Anker and Felski) 413 Crownshaw, Rick 367 Cruel Optimism (Berlant) 360 Cruikshank, Margaret 214 Crutzen, Paul 313–314 cultural dialetic 370 cultural forces, residual 105 Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Hirsch) 28 cultural materialism 170, 357, 375–376 cultural poetics 169 cultural studies 372, 373–379, 382 in the US 376–377 culturalism 374 culture circuit of 378f, 379 definitions of 106, 369, 373 mass culture 106 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold) 34, 373 Culture and Environment (Leavis and Thompson) 373, 374 culture industry 88–90, 397 cybernetics 327, 336 affect in 348 first-wave 336

INDEX

second-wave 336–337 third-wave 337 cyberspace 327, 392 cyborg cinema 327 “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Haraway) 325–326 cyborg theory 325, 326–329 cyborgs 326 Haraway’s concept of 327–329 in literary and cultural theory 327 Cynic philosophers 57–58 Daemonization 127 Dalai Lama 139 Damrosch, David 298–299 Daring to Be Bad (Echols) 223 dataveillance 275 date rape crisis 192 Davies, Jeremy 314 Davies, William 294 Davis, Lennard 278, 281 Dawes, James 254 De Lauretis, Teresa 213, 218–219, 222–223 De Man, Paul 143, 316, 361 death camp 367 death drive 141 death instinct 117 Death of a Discipline (Spivak) 312 “The Death of the Author” (Barthes) 58–59 The Decameron (Bocaccio) 70 Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Girard) 229 deconstruction 146, 151, 170, 231, 334, 337, 372 deep memory 366 defamiliarization 53, 54 Delbo, Charlotte 366 Deleuze, Gilles 111, 130–135, 334, 347, 356 Delgado, Richard 243, 244 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 304, 305 D’Emilio, John 209, 210 Derrida, Jacques 22, 34, 42, 43, 147–152, 307 and animal studies 329–330 assertion of human superiority 329 concept of center 144–145 definition of structure 145 on structuralism 143–144 Desai, A. R. 258 Descartes, René 19, 338–339, 354 descriptive phenomenology 152 desire, psychoanalytic concept of 131 desiring-machine 135 The Destruction of the European Jews (Hilberg) 364

INDEX

deterritorialization 133, 134 Di Leo, Jeffrey 294–295, 296, 299, 300, 386, 399, 406 dialectic 22 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 88 dialectical criticism 103 dialectical materialism 73, 74, 77 dialectician 24 dialogism 92–93 diegesis 67 The Differend (Lyotard) 162 différance 147, 150, 200 differends 162, 247 differing, and deferring 147, 150 digital storytelling, properties of 391–392 dilemma of law reform 246 Dilthey, Wilhelm 24, 26, 27 Dingwaney, Anuradha 296 disability, concept of 279 disability studies 278–281 disablism 278 disappearance 166–167 disciplinary society 272 disciplinary spaces 318 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 266 discourse 60, 158–159 Discourse, Figure (Lyotard) 158, 159 discourse analysts 246 “Discourse in the Novel” (Bakhtin) 93, 95 discursive formations 265–266 Dissemination (Derrida) 43 Donnan, Hastings 292 Donnelly, Jack 251 dramatism, theory of 40 dreams 113–114 dream-symbols 114 Du Bois, W. E. B. 286 dualism 338, 409 Duras, Marguerite 176 duration, of narrative events 71 Dworkin, Andrea 187 Dyer, Richard 397–398 dynamic objects 48–49 Eagleton, Mary 176 Eagleton, Terry 353, 354, 401, 407 Echols, Alice 223 Eckermann, Johann Peter 298 ecocriticism 303–321 ecofeminism 304, 307 ecological literary criticism see ecocriticism

447

economic contradictions, overdetermined 97 economic man (homo oeconomicus) 262 écriture féminine (female writing) 177, 201, 202, 203 educational apparatus 99 Egenfelt-Nielsen, Simon 389 ego, the 117 Eichenbaum, Boris 51 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 241 The Electronic Eye (Lyon) 275 The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Lévi-Strauss) 229 Elements of Semiology (Barthes) 46, 58 eliminative materialism 339 Eliot, T. S. 34, 35–36, 37, 128 Ellis, Havelock 215 Emanuel, Kerry 320 Emerson, Caryl 91 Emile (Rousseau) 180 emotions and affects 349, 356 literature and the 16 empathic fallacy 246 empire 273, 274 as a mode of sovereignty 271 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 271 Enforcing Normalcy (Davis) 279 Engels, Friedrich 74, 76–83 English literature, phases of female tradition in 191 enthymemes 23 environmental humanities 305 environmental racism 304 environmentalism, applications to literature 304 Epaminondas 21, 23 epistemology 13 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick) 230, 232 essentialism 206–208, 213–216, 223, 237, 245, 257, 279, 280, 288, 307, 351 Essentially Speaking (Fuss) 206 ethics animal 330, 333 inhuman 140 The Ethics (Spinoza) 347, 354 ethnography 383 everyday surveillance 278 external memory 366 external spaces 317 heterotopias 318 utopias 318

448

“F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity” (Halberstam) 235 factiality 345 false consciousness 80, 97–98, 142 Familiar Stranger (Hall) 257 Fanon, Frantz 215–216, 286 fascism 87, 133–134 Fear of a Queer Planet (Warner) 212 feeling 359 Feeling Backward (Love) 352 Felski, Rita 412–415 female masculinity 235–236 Female Masculinity (Halberstam) 235–236 feminine mystique 186 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan) 185–187 feminine sexuality 122 feminism first-wave 175, 176, 179–185 second-wave 176, 185–192 third-wave 177, 192–198 fourth-wave 197–198 fifth-wave 178 green theory and 307 keywords 178 and social media technology 197–198 without exclusion 196 without foundations 196 without women 196 Feminism Unmodified (MacKinnon) 187 feminist critique 191 feminist theory 175–208 feminists, intersectional 197 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 209 Feuerbach, Ludwig 77 Fictional Worlds (Pavel) 71 figures 158–159 film technology 385 First International 73 Fish, Stanley 7, 28–29, 38, 415, 416 Flaubert, Gustave 57, 67, 409 folk psychology 339 For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Baudrillard) 164 For They Know Not What They Do (Žižek) 138 form, and content 248 The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Medvedev) 91 formalism 50–51 Foster, Jeannette 215 Foucault, Michel 12, 97, 111, 134, 146, 210, 261–262, 263–267 on external spaces 318

INDEX

on neoliberalism 293–294 on shift in societies of sovereignty to disciplinary societies 276 Frank, Adam 350, 351 Frasca, Gonzalo 389 Freedman, B. 210 Freedman, Estelle 209 Freedman, Rosa 288 Freeman, Alan 244 freeplay 144 Frege, Gottlob 49 French feminism 177 second-wave 189 frequency, in a narrative 71 Freud, Sigmund 29, 109, 112–117, 156, 201, 214, 363 Freud and Philosophy (Ricoeur) 29 Freudianism (Vološinov) 91 Friedan, Betty 185–187, 220 Friedländer, Saul 365 Frow, John 377 Frye, Northrop 39 Fuss, Diana 206 Gabbard, D. Christopher 278–279 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 24, 26–27 Gallagher, Catherine 170–171 game studies 388–395 active media theories 393–394 active user theories 394 categories of games 392–393 formalist approach to 390 narratives in games 391 perspectives of 389–390 situationist approach to 390 Gaming and Simulation (journal) 389 Garcha, Amanpal 326–327 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 239 The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (Cruikshank) 214 Gay Liberation Front 220 Geertz, Clifford 170 gender, Butler’s concept of 226 gender identity 182 gender theory 211 Gender Trouble (Butler) 226 gendered behavior 225 gendered bodies 227 genealogy 267 Generation of Animals (Aristotle) 179 Generation X 195

INDEX

Genette, Gérard 70 genotext 154 geocriticism 305, 316–319 geography 319 The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson) 318 The German Ideology (Engels and Marx) 77, 79, 98, 376 Gibson, William 327 Giddens, Anthony 277–278 Gilbert, Neil 192 Gilbert, Sandra M. 189–190 Gilligan, Carol 176, 188–189 Gilman, Sander 364 Ginsberg, Allen 209 Girard, René 229 Giroux, Henry 294 Glikson, Andrew 314 global literature 298 see also world literature global media studies 384 globalization 283–301 beginnings of 283 post-1989 285 Glotfelty, Cheryll 303 Goclenius, Rudolf 110 God 204, 354 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 298, 300 Goffman, Erving 228 Goldhagen, Erich 364 González-Trueba, Juan José 321 Goodman, Robin 178 Gorgias (Plato) 20 Grady, Hugh 358 Grahn, Judy 211 grammar of language 69 Gramsci, Antonio 80–81, 258 grand theory 406 Gratton, Peter 342, 343 Great Books of the Western World 11 green theory 303, 306–309 see also ecocriticism Greenblatt, Stephen 169–170 Gregg, Melissa 347 Greimas, A. J. 69 semiotic square 107f, 108 Groves, Jason 310, 311 Grundrisse (Marx) 81–82, 376 Guattari, Félix 111, 130–135, 334, 356 Gubar, Susan 189–190 gynesis 202 gynocritics (gynocriticism) 192, 202

449

Habermas, Jürgen 140, 381 Halberstam, Jack 237, 238 Halberstam, Judith 235–236 Hall, Donald E. 219 Hall, Stuart 257, 369–370, 375, 379 Halle, Randall 280 Halsall, Francis 334 Hamlet on the Holodeck (Murray) 391 Handley, George 304, 305 happiness 352 The Happiness Industry (Davies) 294 happiness studies 111, 137–141 Haraway, Donna 327, 330, 332–333 Hardt, Michael 271–275, 348, 357 Harman, Graham 341, 346, 406, 407, 408–409, 410, 413 Harvey, David 293, 295 Hawkes, Terrence 358 Hayles, N. Katherine 324, 336, 337 Hays, Will H. 89 Heavenly Bodies (Dyer) 397 hedonism 17 Hegel, Georg W. F. 33, 76 hegemony 80–81 Heidegger, Martin 27, 300, 337 Heise, Ursula 304 “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (Brooks) 39 Herman, David 71 on cognitive narratology 339–340 hermeneutic circle 26, 27 hermeneutics 24–29, 152 heteroglossia 75, 93, 96, 329 heterosexuality hierarchical oppositions based on 199–200 normative 227 heterotopias 318 Heywood, Leslie 196 hierarchical oppositions, based on the heterosexual couple 199–200 high culture 212 high modernism 104, 105 high theories 372, 405–406 Higher Education under Late Capitalism (Di Leo) 294 The Highest Apple (Grahn) 211 Hilberg, Raul 364 Hill, Anita 194 Hilmes, Michele 386 Hirsch, E. D. 27, 28 Hirsch, Marianne 364 historical materialism 77, 170 historicism 26

450

history from above 260 in affective presentism 359 from below 258, 260 bourgeois-humanist model of 96 Foucault’s view of 267 Marxist notion of 102–103 meaning of history by way of phenomenology 158 science of 96 textuality of 171 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács) 80 The History of Sexuality (Foucault) 210, 264, 265 history writing, Eurocentrism of 259 Hitchcock, Peter 399 Hitler, Adolf, Nazi regime 270 Hjelmslev, Louis 42 Hobbes, Thomas 251 Hogan, Patrick Colm 71 Hogue, W. Lawrence 286 Hollywood 89 Holocaust studies 350, 364–367 Holocene 313, 314 Holquist, Michael 91 homeostasis 336 Homo Sacer (Agamben) 268 homosexuality 210 in late twentieth-century America 212 in non-Western cultures 216 homosociality 229 Horkheimer, Max 88, 397 hot media 381 How to Read Lacan (Žižek) 136 How We Became Posthuman (Hayles) 324, 336 Howl (Ginsberg) 209 Hughes, Athol 214 human rights 240, 250–255 international 254 universal 251 Human Rights, Inc. (Slaughter) 253 humanism 11, 12–17, 55, 96, 188 humanities, media studies in 382 Husserl, Edmund 27, 28, 147 Hutchins, Robert Maynard 11 hypnosis 109–110, 112–113 Hyppolite, Jean 144–145 hysteria (seduction theory) 110, 112, 114 hysterical sublime 106–107 icon 49 id, the 117 Ideal Objects 28

INDEX

idealism 342, 343 absolute 343, 344 vitalist 344–345 Ideas 13 identity, and identifications 257 identitarianism 238 identity politics 224, 226 identity theory 339 Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) 75, 99, 102 ideology 57, 75, 79–80, 81, 98–99 Althuser’s account of 98–100 relationship between literature and 101–102 The Image of the City (Lynch) 107 Imaginary Order, the 98, 119 imitation (mimesis) 15 immaterial labor 272 immaterialism 343 immediate object 48–49 impasse 359 Impasses of the Post-Global (Sussman and Groves) 310 In a Different Voice (Gilligan) 188, 189 In My Father’s House (Appiah) 243 index (sign) 49 India elite domain in 259 subaltern studies in 258–259 induction 23 industrial capitalism 272 Industrial Revolution 76 inner word 28 Innis, Harold 381 Institute of Critical Climate Change (IC3) 310–312 Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian) 22 interactive narrative 391 internal space 317 International Psychoanalytical Association 118 International Workingmen’s Association 73 interpellation 75, 100 interpretant 48 dynamical 48 final 48 immediate 48 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 113 intersectionality 241, 255–258 intertheoretic reduction 339 Intimate Matters (D’Emilio and Freedman) 209 Invisible Lives (Namaste) 237 Irigaray, Luce 203–208 Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Fish) 7

INDEX

Isocrates 18, 21 Ivanov, V. V. 91 Jagose, Annamarie 219 Jakobson, Roman 50, 51, 52, 53, 143 classification of translation 297 work on phonemes 61 James, Henry 68, 248 Jameson, Fredric 76, 102–108 Janet, Pierre 366 Jay, Karla 212 Jefferson, Thomas 251 Jeffery, Celina 321 Jeffreys, Sheila 222 Jenkins, Henry 391 Johnson, Keith 326 Johnson, Richard 379 Johnson, Samuel 129 jouissance 120 The Journal of Peasant Studies 258 Judeo-Christian tradition, inhuman dimension of Neighbor 140 Jung, Carl 112 Kacandes, Irene 364 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari) 135 Kant, Immanuel 19, 28, 331 beauty for 33 on education and place of women 179–180 Kennedy, John F. 241 Kenosis 126–127 Keynes, John Maynard 293 killjoy 353 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 241 Kinsey, Alfred 215 kinship systems 63 Klee, Paul 84 Klein, Melanie 215 Kline, Nathan 326 knowledge, and paranoia 233 Kohlberg, Lawrence 188 Kripke, Saul 160 Kristeva, Julia 42, 110, 145–146, 152–157, 349 Lacan, Jacques 110, 118–124, 130 signifier entering the signified 123f, 124 Lafontaine, Céline 327 language acquisition of 120, 155 ideological nature of 95 poetic 34

451

semiotic 153 symbolic 153 Language and Reality (Urban) 409 langue 46, 101 The Last Utopia (Moyn) 254 late capitalism 104 Late Capitalism (Mandel) 104 latent dream-thoughts 113 Latour, Bruno 168, 413, 414 Lavender Culture (Jay and Young) 212 lavender menace 220 law, and literature 241, 247–250 Law and Literature (Posner) 248 laying bare 109 Russian Formalist notion of 54–55 Lazzarato, Maurizio 293 Lear, Martha 185 Leavis, F. R. 373–374 Lectures on Ethics (Kant) 331 Leeds Revolutionary Feminists 221 Lefevere, André 295 The Legal Imagination (White) 248 legisign 49 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 167 Leitch, Vincent 404, 412 Lemay-Hébert, Nicolas 288 Lennon, John 395 Leopold, Aldo 306 lesbian and gay studies 217–218 The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Abelove et al) 217 lesbian and gay theory 213–220, 228 lesbian communities 220 lesbian culture 211 lesbian feminism 220–225 lesbian–feminist groups 220 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 42, 61–66, 118, 143, 144, 227 analysis of kinship systems 229 analysis of myths 63–66 principles of structural analysis 62 LGBTQ+ theory 209–238 liberal feminism 187 liberalism, critique of 247 Libidinal Economy (Lyotard) 159 libido 115, 159 life, Greek terms for 268 The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (Sterne) 54 limit Marxism 74 The Limits of Critique (Felski) 412–413 linguistic sign, structure of the 43–50

452

linguistic structure 43–44 linguistic turn 41 linguistics aims of 43 combination and selection of words in sentences 46 diachronic theoretical approach to 46 synchronic approach to 46 Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Feminist Narratology (Page) 71 literary history, male and female 189–190 literary studies historical 50 moral and social 50 philogical 50 literary texts, as nonhuman actors 415 Literary Theory (Eagleton) 407 The Literary Work of Art (Ingarden) 152 literature and the emotions 16 interpretation of 7 reader-response criticism 7 as a source of morality 16 as a source of pleasure 17 as a source of spirituality 17 as a source of truth 16 A Literature of Their Own (Showalter) 183, 191 Liu, Lydia 327 Llosa, Mario Vargas 403 The Location of Culture (Bhabha) 288 Locke, John 251, 342 logic 47 critical 47 logical positivism 88 logocentrism, of Western philosophy 147 The Long Revolution (Williams) 369 Lotman, Jurij 43 Love, Heather 352 Lovelock, James 320 low theories 372 ludology 389, 392 Lukács, Georg 74–75, 80 Lyell, Charles 314 Lynch, Kevin 107 Lyon, David 275, 278 Lyotard, Jean-François 146, 157–163 Lysias 21 machine, difference between a mind and 327 McIntosh, Mary 216, 228 MacKinnon, Catharine 187–189 McLuhan, Marshall 381, 393

INDEX

The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar) 189 The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson) 258, 375 The Making of the Indebted Man (Lazzarato) 293 Malabou, Catherine 367 male subjects, castration complex 121 Man, Play, and Games (Caillois) 392 Mandel, Ernest 104 Manichaeism 287 manifest dream-content 113 Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (Nelson) 376 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels) 74, 77, 274 Margaret Mead Made Me Gay (Newton) 224 market capitalism 104 Marsh, George Perkins 313 Marshall, P. David 397, 399 Marx, Karl 29, 73, 76–83, 376 Marx and Engels on Ecology (Parsons) 306 Marxism 73–108, 170–171 ecotheory and 306–307 general ideas of 73–74 post-1989 76 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Vološinov) 91 Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Leavis) 373–374 mass communication 380 Massumi, Brian 348, 356, 357 material world 13 materialism 347, 353–357 speculative 345 matter, existence of 343 Matter and Consciousness (Churchland) 339 Mäyrä, Frans 388 The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer) 284 meaning as an ideal object 28 as an intentional object 28 of text 27 media, and cultural studies 379 media ecology 381 media effects 384 media studies 380–385 audiences of media 382 focus of 383 methodologies in 383 political economy of media 382 textuality of media 382 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) 338–339 Medvedev, Pavel 75

INDEX

Meillassoux, Quentin 341–342, 345–346, 406 memory studies 367 mental states 340 metafiction 55 metanarratives 160 metaphysics 13 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 16 Mill, Harriet Taylor 182 Mill, John Stuart 182 Miller, J. Hillis 249, 254, 289 Miller, Toby 380 Millett, Kate 176 mimesis (imitation) 15, 67 minor literature 135 The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard) 165 mirror stage 119 Mitchell, David T. 280 Mitchell, W. J. T. 401 moderate androgynism 184 modern philosophy, as indistinguishable from science 20 modernist texts 105 Moi, Toril 183–184, 190–191, 198–199 Monahan, Torin 275 monism 409 monoandrogynism 184 monophonic text 92 monopoly capitalism 104 Montaigne, Michel de 163 Montrose, Louis 171–172 moods 70, 71 moral absolutism 251 moral development 188 morality literature as a source of 16 of men and women 188 role in law and literature 249 Moraru, Christian 285, 299, 406 The Morning After (Roiphe) 193 Morphology of the Folktale (Propp) 68 Morris, Charles 47, 48 Morrison, Toni 290 Morson, Gary Saul 91 motherhood 156–157 Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 89 Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) 89 movies 88 Mowitt, John 385, 395 Moyn, Samuel 254 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 55 multidirectional memory 367

453

multinational capitalism 104 Murray, Janet 391–392 Murray, Stuart 262 My Cousin Vinny (film) 249 mythemes 64 Mythologies (Barthes) 56, 58 myths 57–58, 66 Oedipus myth 63–65, 66 Namaste, Viviane 237 Name-of-the-Father 100–101, 121, 201 narrative adjectives 70 Narrative as Rhetoric (Phelan) 71 Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Genette) 70 narrative grammar 69 narrative perspective 71 narrative sequences, types of 69 Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Herman) 71 narrative verbs 70 narrative voice 71 narratology 42, 47, 52, 67–71, 247 cardinal functions (kernels) 67 functional catalyzers (satellites) 67 The Nation-State and Violence (Giddens) 278 natural history 261–262 natural rights 240, 251 nature, as sublime 315–316 nature writing 303, 306 Nealon, Jeffrey 403–404 Negri, Antonio 271–275, 348, 357 négritude movement 286–287 Nelson, Cary 376–377 Neocybernetics and Narrative (Clarke) 335 neoliberalism 283–284, 292–295 foundations of 293 higher education under 294–295 neuroses 114 New Criticism 33–40, 341, 350, 407, 408, 410–411, 417 new feminism (second-wave feminism) 176, 185–192 New Historicism 169–173, 357–358 new media studies 384 new presentism 358 The New Wounded (Malabou) 367 Newton, Esther 224 Nicholas of Cusa 204 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 16 Nietzsche, Friedrich 29, 126 nihilism 167–168

454

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 276 Nixon, Rob 320, 321 Noise (Attali) 385 nomadology 135 noumena (noumenal world) 28 novels definition of 93 polyphonic and heteroglossic 93 NOW (National Organization for Women) 185 Nussbaum, Martha 240, 249–250 object 48 object-oriented literary criticism 407, 408 object-oriented ontology 345, 406–412, 416, 417 object-oriented philosophy 406 obscenity laws 209 oceans, ecological catastrophes of 319–321 Oedipus complex 112, 115–116, 121, 130–131 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 147, 149, 151, 337 Off Our Backs (magazine) 223 O’Hara, Daniel T. 401 O’Keeffe, Brian 297 old feminism (first-wave feminism) 175, 176, 179–185 On Belief (Žižek) 138 On Christian Doctrine (Augustine) 24–25 On Our Backs (magazine) 223 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 126 ontology (being) 200 opposites, coincidence of 204 oral communication 380 oral cultures, structural amnesia in 381 The Order of Things (Foucault) 261 organismicism, (organismic biology) 261 Orientalism 288 Orientalism (Said) 287 Orwell, George 276 Other, the 120 outer word 28 Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (Zunshine) 340 Paasi, Anssi 290 Page, Ruth 71 Paglia, Camille 193–194 panopticon 266–267 pantheism 354 Parables for the Virtual (Massumi) 356 paralogism 162 paralogy 146, 160–161

INDEX

paranoia 232–235 parapraxes (Freudian slips) 113 Parker, Noel 291 Parks, Rosa 241 parole 46, 101 Parsons, Howard 306 Parts of Animals (Aristotle) 16 Patton, Cindy 212 Pavel, Thomas 71 The Peasant and the Raj (Stokes) 258 Peasant Struggles in India (Desai) 258 The Peasant Studies Newsletter 258 Peirce, Charles 25, 47, 48 Penguin Random House 299 penis envy 201 perception, general laws of 53 performativity, politics of 229 personality in Hollywood 397 Peterson, Jordan 137 Phaedrus (Plato) 20, 21, 22, 26, 147, 148, 150 phallocentrism 201 phallus 200–201 pharmakon 150 Phelan, James 71 phenomena (phenomenal world) 28 phenomenological interpretation 28, 151 see also hermeneutics phenomenology 27–28, 157–158, 348 Phenomenology (Lyotard) 157 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 152 phenotext 154 philologists 39 philology 43 philosopher-orator-statesmen 18 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 160, 395 philosophy relationship between rhetoric and 17–24 topical 19 The Philosophy of Literary Form (Burke) 40 phonemes 61 phonology 61 Physics (Aristotle) 16 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) 30 Plato 12–15, 16, 18, 23 arguments against rhetoric 20–21 beauty for 33 critique of writing 147–148 Ideal Objects 28 theory of dialectic 22

INDEX

“Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida) 147 play as catharsis 393 as meta-communication 393 study of 389 pleasure, literature as a source of 17 The Pleasure of the Text (Barthes) 59–60 pleasure principle 117 plot formation 68 pluralism 409 poems/poetry 15, 34–36 Bloom’s criticism of 124 emotion in 35 as green plants 304 structure and form of 39 poethics 250 Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (Weisberg) 250 Poetic Justice (Nussbaum) 240, 249–250 poetic language 51, 155 poetic meanings 40 poetic work aesthetic function 52–53 versus non-poetic work 52 Poetics (Aristotle) 16, 67 poets banishment from the ideal state 14 life cycle 126 poiesis 14 see also art political theory 408 The Political Unconscious (Jameson) 102, 103, 362 Political Writings (Lyotard) 159 Politics (Aristotle) 16 polyandrogynism 184 polyphony 92 pop culture 369–399 Popper, Karl 51 popular contemporary senses of 369–370 social and material meaning of 370 popular culture, definitions of 371 pornography 187, 188 positive psychology 111 positivism 88 Posner, Richard 248–249 Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Ryan) 71 postanthropocentrism 325 postclassical narratology 71 postcolonial ecology 305

455

postcolonial theory 260, 283, 285–289 hybridity 288–289 and literatures of the environment 304 mimicry 289 postcritique 412–416, 417 Poster, Mark 278 postfeminism 192, 193 The Posthuman (Braidotti) 323 posthumanism 323–346 analytic 324 critical 324, 325 reactive 324 Posthumanism (Badmington) 324 postmemory 366–367 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard) 146, 157, 159–160 postmodern texts 105, 106–107 postmodernism 104, 146, 273 poststructuralism 22, 143–173, 307, 327 posttheory 405–406 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 363 Pouvoir Ouvrier (Worker’s Party) 159 power 266 power relations 256 Practical Criticism (Richards) 37 pragmatics 47 Prague Linguistic Circle 50 Precarious Life (Butler) 252 preconscious 116 pregnancy 157 prejudice in interpretation 27 present, affective mapping of the 349 presentism 349, 357–360 primitive communism 73 Principles of Literary Criticism (Richards) 37, 341 Prismatic Ecology (Cohen) 308 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci) 80, 258 prison reform 266 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin) 91, 92 production forces of 78 modes of 78 relations of 78 proletariat 76–77 The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed) 352 propaganda 380 propositions 70 Propp, Vladimir 42, 64, 68 Protagoras 12, 17 Protagoras (Plato) 12

456

Proust, Marcel 57 psychoanalysis affect in 348 connection between capitalism and 131 psychoanalytic criticism 110–111 psychoanalytic theory 109–142 psychology 110, 348 psychosexual development 119 qualisign 49 queer affect 347, 350–353 queer cultures 212 queer identities 280 queer phenomenology 352 queer studies 217, 219 queer theory 213, 218, 219, 223, 237 and environmental studies 304 Quintilian 22 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 94 race 247 and justice 239–260 pseudo-science theories of 240 and racism 239 as socially constructed 245 racial discrimination 240 racialism 243 racism 239, 240 covert 241–242 environmental 242 extrinsic 243 institutional/structural 242 interest convergence/material determinism 245 intrinsic 243 as ordinary behavior 244 overt 241–242 overt institutional 242 unintentional 242 radical aesthetics 407, 417 Radicalesbians, The Woman[-]Identified Woman manifesto 220–221 radicalism, and materialism 353 rape 192–193 rationalism 13 Readerly text 59 reader-response criticism 38 reading 415 Readings and Feelings (Bleich) 7 Reagan, Ronald 293 Real, the 120–121, 363 Real Order, the 98, 101

INDEX

realism 75 naïve 344 speculative 344, 346 transcendental 344 reality television 278 reductionism 261 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 182 reflexivity 336, 387 reification 83 relativism 12 Renaissance 16 Renaissance studies 169 repression 125, 126 Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) 75, 99 The Republic (Plato) 13, 14 response-ability, in relations between humans and animals 332–333 reterritorialization 133 rheme 49 rhetoric 17–24, 380 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 16 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth) 68 rhetorician 24 rhizomes 134–135 Richards, I. A. 34, 37, 41–42, 341 Richardson, Alan 338 Richardson, Dorothy 191 Ricoeur, Paul 29, 71 Ritzer, George 284 Rivière, Joan 214–215 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 57 Roberts, Callum 319 Roiphe, Katie 192–193 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) 182 Rorty, Richard 20 Rose, Jacqueline 122 Roth, Michael 364 Rothberg, Michael 367 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 149, 180–181, 251 Rubin, Gayle 229 Ruddiman, William 314 Rueckert, William 303–304, 308, 309 Ruskin, John 30, 31 Russian Formalism 41–42, 50–55, 94 Ryan, Marie-Laure 71 Said, Edward 288, 304 same-sex desire 229 same-sex love 215 Sappho, poetry of 179 Sartre, Jean-Paul 56

INDEX

Saussure, Ferdinand de 25, 41, 43–45 “tree” 123 Scene of Instruction, the 126 Schiller, Friedrich 33 schizoanalysis 111, 131, 135 schizophrenia, time and affect 349 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 163 Schlegel, Friedrich 163 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 24, 26, 27 Schmitt, Carl 268–269 school of reminiscence 29 school of suspicion 29 science, and science studies 349 sea writing 321 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 184 Second Skins (Prosser) 237 The Second Stage (Friedan) 185 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 223, 229–235, 350, 351–352 seduction 165–166 Seduction (Baudrillard) 165 seduction theory 110 Seigworth, Gregory 347 Seligman, Martin 111 semanalysis 156, 349 semantics 47 semiology 44, 50, 58, 60 semiotic reduction see structural semantics semiotics 153, 371, 384 structuralism and 41–71 semiotic square 107f, 108 Sengupta, Mahasweta 296 sense memory 366 sequences, types of 70 serving two masters 246 Sewanee Review 38 sex 225 and sexuality 210–211, 213 sex discrimination 187, 241 sex/gender system 229 sexism 241 everyday 197 sexual boundaries 210 sexual difference 205 sexual harassment 194 Sexual Politics (Millett) 176 sexual revolution 176, 210 Sexual/Textual Politics (Moi) 183 Shakespeare, William, tragedies of 36 Shklovsky, Viktor 53–54, 55, 68, 109 Showalter, Elaine 183, 191–192 Shumway, David 399 significance, of text 27

457

signification primary signification (denotation) 57 secondary signification (connotation) 57 signified (thought image) 44 signifier (sound image) 44, 122 signs classes of 49–50 definition of, Peirce 47–49 definition of, Saussure 44–45 language and 25 Signifier–Referent 164 Simulacra and Simulations (Baudrillard) 166, 167 simulacrum (appearance), orders of 165 simulation 389 Simulations (Baudrillard) 146 Singer, Peter 331 Sinn (sense), of a sign 49 sinsign 49 sky-high theory 406 Slaughter, Joseph 253 slavery 252 slow violence 320 Snyder, R. Claire 196 social agents 225 social communication, modes of 61 social contexts 256 social contract theory, animals and 331–332 social control 263 social formation 97 social inequality 256 social justice 256 social sciences, media studies in 382 Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism), 159 Société Francaise de Psychanalyse (SFP) 118 society base of 78 civil society 80 history of 76 political 80 Socrates 11, 13, 17, 21, 147, 148 Sollers, Philippe 146 Sommers, Christina Hoff 193 Soper, Kate 307 sophist 24 Sophist (Plato) 22 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 286 sound pattern 44 sound studies 385–388 audiovisual litany 387–388 characteristics of 386–387 critical 387

458

hearing versus vision 387 non-critical 387 sound technology 385 sovereign power 265, 268 sovereignty concept of multitude that opposes imperial 274 definition of 269 space 318 Spanos, William 270, 300 speciesism 330 speculative grammar 47 speculative realism 326, 341–346, 406 speculative rhetoric 47 Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray) 203, 205, 207 speech, primacy over writing 149 Speech and Phenomena (Derrida) 147 speeches, tasks orator must attend to when preparing 25 Spinoza, Baruch 274, 347, 354 theory of affects 354–355 Spinozistic affect studies 348 spirituality, literature as a source of 17 Spivak, Gayatri 254, 283, 288, 296, 312 on subaltern groups 260 state of exception 270 State of Exception (Agamben) 270 Stefancic, Jean 243 Steinem, Gloria 182, 187 Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) 334, 335 Sterne, Jonathan 386, 387–388 Sterne, Laurence 54–55 Stoermer, Eugene 313–314 Stokes, Eric 258 Stoppani, Antonio 313 storytelling and narrative analysis 247 structural determinism 246 structural semantics 69 Structural Semantics (Greimas) 69 “The Structural Study of Myth” (Lévi-Strauss) 63 structuralism 61, 143 and semiotics 41–71 structuralist narrative see narratology The Structure of the Artistic Text (Lotman) 43 Studies in Hysteria (Freud and Breuer) 112 subaltern studies 243, 258–260, 286 subalternity 260 The Subjection of Women (Mill) 182 Subjective Criticism (Bleich) 7 sublimation 125 sublime, difference between modern and postmodern 162

INDEX

Sullivan, Nikki 220 superego, the 117 super-sensory world (world of “Ideas”) 13 surveillance studies 275–278 surveillance theory, modern and postmodern 277 Sussman, Henry 310, 311, 334, 335 syllogisms 23 symbol 49 Symbolic Exchange and Death (Baudrillard) 165 Symbolic Order, the 98, 101, 119–120 Symposium (Plato) 215 syntactics 47 syntagyms 69 The System of Objects (Baudrillard) 163 systems theory 326, 334–338 connection between narrative and 335 S/Z (Barthes) 59 Tally, Robert 316–317, 401 technology-based surveillance 278 Tel Quel (journal) 146 telemorphosis 311–312 teleology 335 tense 70–71 territorialization 133 The Terror of Neoliberalism (Giroux) 294 Tessera 126 texts 60 autonomy of 416 Bakhtin’s views on 94 classical depiction of 42 contemporary depiction of 42 historicity of 171 identity of 416 as productivity 154 thanatopolitics 262 That the World May Know (Dawes) 254 Thatcher, Margaret 293 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) 184 The Woman[-]Identified Woman manifesto 220–221 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin) 85 theoretical recipes 7–8, 406 theoreticism 406 theory approaching the study of 5–6 case against 401–407 as a community 4–5, 8 as cross- and multidisciplinary 4, 8 definition of 2 feminism associated with 177 as high theory 3, 8

INDEX

how to use 6–9 as methodology 3 as professional common sense 2–3, 8 rejection of 404 as a set of movements/schools 3, 8 shift to studies 372 strong 234 suspicion of 176 as a toolbox 4 as a way of life 4 ways of viewing 8 weak 234 Theory of Literature (Wellek and Warren) 53 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx) 78 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin) 84 Thomas, Clarence 194 Thompson, E. P. 258 Thomsen, Mads Rosendhal 325 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 135, 334, 348 Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 71 Timotheus 21, 23 To Be Real (Walker) 195 Todorov, Tzvetan 28, 69–70 Tolstoy, Leo 31–32, 54, 55 Tomkins, Silvan 234, 351 Tool-Being (Harman) 406 topography 319 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick) 351 trace, the 151, 200, 337 Tracks from the Crypt (Mowitt) 395 tragedy 15–16 trans theory 238 Trans* (Halberstam) 237 trans* bodies 238 trans* theory 235–238 transcultural memory 367 transhumanism 326 translatability 297 translation 295–298 images of 296 impact of globalization on 284 postcolonial approach to 297 proper (interlingual translation) 297 rewording (intralingual translation) 297 source text and target text 296 transmutation (intersemiotic translation) 297 transsexuals 235 transvestites, gender of 227 trauma, definition of 362 trauma theory 349, 360–364

459

traumatic dissociation theories 366 traumatic dreams 363 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Berkeley) 342 triangular desire, theory of infantile sexuality 229 truth, literature as a source of 16 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 26 Turner, Graeme 396 Turner, J. M. W. 30, 132 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 215 Unclaimed Experience (Bloom) 361 Understanding Media (McLuhan) 393 unhappiness 352 United Nations 271 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights 251 United States civil rights movement in the 241 racism in 240 universal grammar 69 universal surveillance 278 universe, as simulation 168 Unpacking Queer Politics (Jeffreys) 222 untranslatability 297–298 Urban, William Marshall 409 The Use of Pleasure (Foucault) 210 The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart) 375 Validity in Interpretation (Hirsch) 27, 152 value 82 Vaughan-Williams, Nick 291 Veeser, H. Aram 173 Vico, Giambattista 19 video games 391 Vienna Circle 88 A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft) 181, 182 vinyl records 386 Vinyl Theory (Di Leo) 386 virtuality 337 virtues 181 visual communication 380, 384 vitalism 261 voice 71 voices-of-color 245 Vološinov, Valentin 75, 95–96 vulgar Marxism 74, 97 vulnerability 252 Walker, Alice 195 Walker, Rebecca 194–195 Wallerstein, Immanuel 283

460

Wamberg, Jacob 325 Warner, Michael 212 Warren, Austin 53 Warren, Karen 307 Weisberg, Richard 250 The Well Wrought Urn (Brooks) 409 Wellek, Réne 50, 53 Westphal, Bertrand 316 What is Literature? (Sartre) 56 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 355 What’s Wrong with Antitheory? (Di Leo) 402 When Species Meet (Haraway) 330 White, Hayden 71, 172 White, James Boyd 248 White Mythologies (Young) 259 Whitehead, Alfred North 356 Who Stole Feminism? (Sommers) 193 Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (Baudrillard) 166–167 Wiener, Norbert 326, 337 Wilde, Oscar 30, 129 Williams, Raymond 105, 170, 359–360, 369, 375–376 Wilson, Thomas M. 292 Wimsatt, W. K. 38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 160, 394–395 Wolbring, Gregor 279 Wollstonecraft, Mary 179, 181–182 women education and place of 179–181 female phase, of the female tradition in English literature 191 feminine phase, of the female tradition in English literature 191

INDEX

feminist phase, of the female tradition in English literature 191 homosexual and bisexual development in 214 Lacan and the role of women 122 ontological status of 204 women’s studies 218 Wood, David Murakami 275 Woolf, Virginia 182–183 working-class culture, of the 1950s 375 works, texts and 60 world literature 284, 301 conceptions of 298 and global babble 300 and theory 298–301 see also global literature world theory 300, 301 Writerly text 59 writing feminine practice of 203 Plato’s critique of 147–148 primacy of speech over 149 Writing and Difference (Derrida) 147 Writing Degree Zero (Barthes) 56–57 written cultures, written records as hindrance to structural amnesia 381 Wuebben, Daniel 321 Wundt, Wilhelm 110 Young, Allen 212 Young, Robert 259 Žižek, Slavoj 110, 136–142 Zola, Émile 67

461

462