The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory 9780748693405

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The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory

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The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory

edited by stuart sim

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Stuart Sim, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9339 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9340 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9341 2 (epub) The right of Stuart Sim to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Preface Stuart Sim I: Marxism Introduction: Marxism 1 Marxism: Philosophy and Social Theory Stuart Sim 2 Western Marxism Stuart Sim 3 Post-Marxism Stuart Sim II: Structuralism Introduction: Structuralism 4 Structuralism and Semiotics Georges Van Den Abbeele 5 Genetic Structuralism Marcel Danesi III: Poststructuralism Introduction: Poststructuralism 6 Phenomenology and Poststructuralism Derek M. Robbins 7 Deconstruction Nikolai Duffy 8 Discourse Theory Georges Van Den Abbeele IV: Postmodernism Introduction: Postmodernism

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9 Philosophical Postmodernism: From Adorno and Derrida to Foucault Philip Goldstein 10 Postmodern Aesthetics Nikolai Duffy V: Postcolonialism Introduction: Postcolonialism 11 Postcolonial Theory and Criticism Claire Nally 12 Black Studies Bella Adams 13 Critical Race Theory Bella Adams VI: Gender Introduction: Gender 14 Queer Theory Gareth Longstaff 15 Men, Masculinity and Critical Studies Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill VII: Feminism Introduction: Feminism 16 First and Second Wave Feminism Claire Nally 17 After de Beauvoir: ‘French’ Feminism and Sexual Difference Carole Sweeney 18 Postfeminism Stéphanie Genz VIII: Historicism Introduction: Historicism 19 Reception and Reader-Response Theory Bruce Harding 20 New Historicism Bruce Harding 21 Cultural Materialism Neema Parvini IX: Formalism Introduction: Formalism 22 Russian Formalism and Narratology Georges Van Den Abbeele 23 New Criticism Graham Allen

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contents X: Science and Critical Theory Introduction: Science and Critical Theory 24 Critical Theory and Paradigm Shift Arkady Plotnitsky 25 Critical Theory and Mathematics and Science Arkady Plotnitsky 26 Cognitive Science and Critical Theory Peter Garratt XI: Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory 27 Freudian Psychoanalysis Geoffrey Boucher 28 Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory Matthew Sharpe Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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y thanks go to The Companion’s nineteen contributors for all their work in the writing of this volume; to Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for all her help and advice during the planning and compiling of the volume; and to Dr Helene Brandon. Special thanks go to Christine Barton for doing such an excellent job of copy-editing on such a large and complex volume.

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PREFACE Stuart Sim

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hy do so many critical theorists turn to science to find reinforcement for their theories? Can the cognitive sciences provide a new direction for critical theory? Can Marxism still contribute to theoretical debate after the fall of communism and the Soviet empire that was founded on it? Has postmodernism run its course and become a dead end? Is there any value left in structuralist principles? These are just some of the questions posed by this Companion, in which an international team of academic specialists on the topic considers the changing role of critical theory in the new century, demonstrating its continuing importance across disciplines ranging from the arts and social sciences through to the hard sciences, as well as the new directions, ideas and theorists emerging in each of the fields. Taking note of the many new theoretical and socio-political developments in recent years, the Companion provides readers with an opportunity to reorient themselves within the history and role of critical theory in its many forms.

Structure and Format of the Companion The volume is divided into eleven sections comprising twenty-eight chapters overall, with each covering a particular branch of critical theory from Marxism through to present-day developments. Every chapter will consider the historical development of the theory in question, outlining the main concepts and thinkers involved, and then move on to assess its relevance to current academic and socio-political concerns and debates, paying particular attention to recent advances in the area and the emergence of new voices. The advent of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, for example, has led to a reassessment of the foundational bases of critical theories in general that is still very much ongoing. The changing fortunes of Marxism in the last few decades have had a dramatic impact on the entire field of critical theory, given its widespread influence as a body of thought throughout the twentieth century, that is still in process. Feminism continues to evolve, positioning itself

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against new developments in the field and generating many of these itself in turn. Cognitive science is opening up exciting possibilities for the creation of new lines of critical enquiry. Indeed science in general is doing so, as theories about the nature of the universe keep appearing and competing with each other for our attention. Few theorists can be unaffected by how this is altering our perspectives about the nature of human culture, science being the primary source of metaphysical ideas these days (appropriately enough, physics being the leading player). Even theories that have been around for a long time have not been immune from such changes, and the volume therefore will provide a comprehensive overview of all the main areas of critical theory to determine where they stand now in relation to these. The book’s sections comprise: I) II) III) IV) V) VI) VII) VIII) IX) X) XI)

Marxism Structuralism Poststructuralism Postmodernism Postcolonialism Gender Feminism Historicism Formalism Science and Critical Theory Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory.

Inevitably, there are often overlapping themes and concerns in these chapters, with theories and theorists appearing in a different perspective each time around to indicate the need to be aware of what is being discussed across the entire field. Theories are not produced in isolation, but within a dynamic context of debate, where ideas are constantly being tested, refined and extended. The volume’s chapters cross-reference in such a way as to make this interactive quality of critical theory constantly apparent. In each chapter, textual citation will be given briefly in brackets to the particular edition being used, with full publication details (including original publication dates for older texts) to be found in the master bibliography at the end of the book.

The Scope and Range of Critical Theory Critical theories have proliferated over the course of the modern era and on into the postmodern, and are now extensively deployed in pretty well every area of intellectual enquiry. Academic life is all but unimaginable without critical theory, where it forms the basis of textual interpretation and discourse

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construction – as it notably does in such areas as literary studies, media studies, philosophy, sociology and politics. Theories come and go, however, and their fortunes can fluctuate markedly according to the fashion of the age. Structuralism can become one of the leading methods for a few decades from the mid-twentieth century onwards and then decline sharply in popularity after the rise of poststructuralism. Feminism keeps branching out in new directions, each with its own set of concerns that can to some extent supersede older versions of the theory: the ‘second wave’ challenging many of the assumptions and goals of the ‘first wave’, for example, and now a ‘third wave’ of postfeminism making its mark in the discourse as well. New theories keep emerging as science progresses and the socio-political landscape changes. Equally, older theories can be adapted to current developments and continue to have an impact on debate, rather than just remaining as historical curiosities – the fate, for example, of most older scientific theories. Despite the critiques put forward by poststructuralists, and these are by no means accepted by all other theorists, there are still insights to be yielded by structuralism. Structure is always a critical factor in the analysis of narratives – taking the word ‘narrative’ in its broadest sense, as Roland Barthes does when he declares that ‘[t]he narratives of the world are numberless’ (Barthes 1977: 79). New Criticism is still a useful teaching tool to help students of literary studies understand the inner design, and the effect it can make on readers, of texts, particularly poetic texts.

Applying Critical Theory Critical theory tends to be used in a fairly eclectic manner these days, with elements of various theories often being combined in the art of analysis. A synthetic approach is probably now the norm, with textual analysts each putting together their own model, drawing freely on the range of theories available to them. That is one of the key reasons to be aware of what the field as a whole has to offer us. It is inconceivable to engage with any field in the humanities and social sciences (and increasingly, even the hard sciences), without the facility of critical theory with which to position yourself against existing interpretations and construct your own in turn. Once you construct a reading of a text, then you enter into the wider critical debate, and are contributing to how the field is developing. Being theoretically informed is not an optional part of study any more; it is instead a necessary, central, part. This volume is designed to bring you up to date with what is happening right across the spectrum of critical theory, so that you can become a part of that wider debate.

The Future of Critical Theory There has been speculation of late that we have reached the ‘end’ of theory, that its ‘moment’ has now passed and it is now of no more than historical

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interest – conferences even get held on this issue. In the sense of so-called ‘high theory’ and the academically divisive ‘theory wars’ that it spawned back in the 1980s and 90s, when new ‘isms’ seemed to be coming on stream with bewildering rapidity, that is probably the case. It is not likely that theories of society will cease to be devised, however, and these cannot avoid having implications for all aspects of society, including criticism and cultural commentary in general. Neither can textual interpretation avoid projecting a world view that will relate to a particular social theory, even if only implicitly, giving it an ideological significance: in that respect, no interpretation can be apolitical. Texts, of all kinds, will continue to be reinterpreted by each new generation, and to acquire different meanings within a changing society. That is the task of critical theory, and the more we are aware of its history, then the more resonant our textual interpretations will become within society at large.

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INTRODUCTION: MARXISM

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n Part I, Stuart Sim examines three different traditions of Marxist thought: Marxism as a Philosophy and Social Theory, Western Marxism and postMarxism respectively. These represent very distinctive strains of Marxism, indicating how it began to develop away from the authoritarian style that had come to mark out its communist interpretation, until eventually thinkers on the left were critiquing some of its most basic assumptions. This was to come to a head with the publication in 1985 of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s highly controversial book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which launched a sustained attack on classical Marxism’s refusal to acknowledge the failure of some of its theoretically based political projections. The authors’ call for a much more pluralistic approach to politics resonated widely on the left, changing the terms of debate within the subject quite substantially. Yet despite the many setbacks that Marxism has gone through in the political realm (the collapse of the Soviet empire particularly standing out), it continues to be a vibrant area of intellectual enquiry, eliciting contributions from across the spectrum of disciplines, as it always has done. Its strong sense of historical and social context stands sharply opposed to the more formalistically inclined theories, such as structuralism and New Criticism, and it has maintained a significant presence in aesthetic debate.

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1 MARXISM: PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY Stuart Sim

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arxism has been a source of controversy ever since it first emerged as a theory in the mid-nineteenth century. Heavily based on Hegelian dialectical philosophy, it developed into an enormously influential social theory that was instrumental in shaping the course of twentieth-century global politics, inspiring various revolutions and challenging the validity of all other existing social and political systems. Its most far-reaching effect was to provide the underlying principles for the communist movement, which, through the agency of the Soviet Union and China, became an extremely powerful geopolitical force. Although we are now adjudged to live in post-communist times, the major regimes having either collapsed or reconciled themselves with the capitalist system that for so long was their avowed enemy, Marxism has not disappeared as a factor in global culture. It has even been experiencing something of a revival of interest in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the 2007–8 credit crisis, which has raised serious doubts about the viability of the current capitalist order. Marx’s assessment of the weaknesses of capitalism as a socio-economic system still holds up surprisingly well after all this time, even if his projected solutions have largely lost their credibility given communism’s turbulent history and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet empire. In this first of three chapters on Marxism’s legacy, the emphasis will be on its development as a philosophy and social theory into what is referred to as either ‘classical’ or ‘orthodox’ Marxism (the terms will be used interchangeably here), where Karl Marx’s original ideas are taken to be sacrosanct, and the role of critical theory is to show how these ideas can be implemented as faithfully as possible in the world around us. In practice, classical Marxism means Marx’s thought as filtered through such later thinkers as V. I. Lenin and the Soviet movement in Russia – Marxism-Leninism as it came to be known in that context. Classical Marxism can be very rigid in its application and it does demand that Marx’s ideas are approached pretty much as gospel truth, as they were within the Soviet empire until the appearance of glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s, events which effectively heralded the end of Soviet MarxismLeninism. Chapters 2 and 3 will deal with Marxism in its nonclassical guise,

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as Western Marxism and post-Marxism respectively, although brief reference will be made to some of the key aspects of those phenomena here in order to set the scene for the later chapters.

Marx, Hegel and Dialectical Materialism Marxism’s roots lie in G. W. F. Hegel and his system of dialectical philosophy, as outlined in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Hegel conceived of the dialectic as a force working within history that determined how cultures would evolve: a ‘World-Spirit’ as he conceived of it. We were to think of the World-Spirit as a ‘self-supporting, absolute real being’ (Hegel 1977: 266) that revealed itself to us through human consciousness. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel mapped out human history as a series of stages by which the World-Spirit progressed to its highest possible level of development: ‘The History of the World begins with its general aim – the realization of the Idea of Spirit’ (Hegel 1956: 25). It was a sequence running from the Oriental World, through the Greek and the Roman, up to modern times in the German – that is, from East to West. Each stage, or ‘thesis’, generated a contradiction, its ‘antithesis’; the latter then combining with the former to create a ‘synthesis’ constituting a more advanced stage of the process. This dialectical interaction kept recurring until such time as the World-Spirit eventually came to its full realisation. As Peter Singer has summed it up: ‘In the Philosophy of History, one immense dialectical movement dominates world history from the Greek world to the present’ (Singer 1983: 77). The theory is idealistic in conception, as well as highly abstract (Hegel presents a formidable challenge to his translators), and Marx’s contribution to dialectical philosophy was to locate it more firmly within the material world, where it was the actions of human agents that brought about change and cultural development. More specifically, it was the actions of particular classes of people determined to impose their own set of values on society in order to rule. Nevertheless, for Marx too, if for somewhat different reasons, there was an ‘immense dialectical movement’ underlying human history that he sought to articulate to us. The basic core of Marx’s ideas are laid out in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, co-authored with his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels. The major premise is that history proceeds primarily by means of class struggles, whereby one class exerts power over all the others in its society until it is overtaken by a new emerging class, as Marx contended had happened when the bourgeoisie had gained enough power to supersede the feudal order that had reigned in Europe for several centuries beforehand. For Marx the next, and last, step to occur would be the eclipse of the bourgeoisie by the industrial proletariat that was growing so rapidly in nineteenth-century Western Europe and America, forming the workforce in the factories that manufactured the products craved by the bourgeoisie. Then, ‘[i]n place of the old bourgeois society, with its

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classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx and Engels 1975–2005: 6. 506), and the socio-economic exploitation that had marked out all other previous stages would cease. Marx’s historical vision is modelled closely on the operation of the Hegelian dialectic, with the class in power (the thesis) giving rise to its antithesis (one of the dominated classes), which in time will create the conditions for the rise of yet another antithesis – ‘its own grave-diggers’, as Marx pithily put it (Marx 1975–2005: 6. 496). This is a process that will continue until the proletariat gains power, at which point we will have reached the end of history; the resultant ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Marx and Engels 1968: 327), representing the apex of human development in Marx’s view. What Marx and Engels offer is a blueprint for human progress that will escape the mass economic exploitation on which industrialised society is based – a phenomenon that was all too apparent in nineteenth-century Western Europe, when disparities in wealth between social classes were steadily increasing. Once the proletariat are in control of the means of production, then it will be used for the public good rather than primarily for the benefit of the capitalist class who rake off its excess profits – gained from the ‘surplus’ labour in effect stolen from the workers. So rather than an amorphous, metaphysically oriented World-Spirit seeking out full realisation, there is a real-world conflict with precise goals that have the capacity to exert mass appeal. The Hegelian dialectic has been brought down to an everyday level and given an altogether more human, as well as overtly political, dimension. As one of Marx’s most famous sayings has it: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx 1975–2005: 6. 5). Marx’s monumental Capital (three volumes, two of them published posthumously) went on to outline precisely how the economic exploitation of the proletariat operated, thus showing the material conditions that underpinned, and directed, the Hegelian-derived dialectic. In Marxist parlance, it was the economic base that dictated the nature of the social superstructure, and in Volume I (the most read and consulted of the three) Marx painstakingly works out theories of money and value that were to guide the communist movement for over a century. Although a densely structured work, in dialogue with a wide range of contemporary political and economic theories, the message of Capital is easy enough to grasp: that the means of production must be taken over and controlled by the workers if their contribution to human progress is to be maximised. Marx was very much a champion of progress, more than willing to acknowledge the bourgeoisie’s contribution to this in recent history, but there was for him an ineluctable logic about their dominance being overcome: this was simply the way that class struggle worked. Society, as he put it, ‘is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing’ (Marx and Engels 1968: 230), and for him all the signs pointed in

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the direction of a change in favour of the proletariat. Overtaking the bourgeoisie was to be the driving force behind communism as a socio-political movement, its method of creating a new social order where all would share in the success of technological advance, not just capitalist businessmen and shareholders.

Marxism as a Critical Theory: Politics Marxism’s great selling point as a critical theory is its comprehensiveness: it really does provide an analytical method, as well as specific guidelines for action, for every conceivable area of human existence. This was held to be the case even through into the world of science as far as its adherents were concerned: scientific research and findings that contradicted Marxist principles were subject to suppression by the party, and any that appeared to vindicate them (such as Trofim Lysenko’s controversial, later discredited, work on genetics) was met with official approval. Science, in common with all areas of Soviet life, was to be ideology-led and politically accountable. Marxism’s rationale is clear and the critical theorist always knows exactly what is supposed to be achieved by its application, and, arguably even more importantly, why. From the starting assumption that all history is the history of class struggle, it then becomes a matter of identifying how this manifested itself at any one point, and of cataloguing the methods by which the ruling class maintained its position of superiority over the mass of the population – that is, what form the exploitation took. The theory will then indicate what should be done to overcome this state of affairs and bring about the end of class struggle; the ultimate objective being to show the way towards the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Detractors (such as poststructuralists and postmodernists, for example) will also claim that these features demonstrate precisely what is wrong with the theory: that it lacks flexibility, and in a very real sense determines what the outcome of analysis will be beforehand. Marxists seek evidence to support their theory, not evidence that problematises it. But Marxism’s apparent universality proved a powerful attraction to several generations of critical theorists, and nowhere more so than in the sphere of politics. One of the first, and most successful, of those to apply Marxist theory to politics was Lenin, whose contribution to Marxism essentially lies in the field of political strategy. Lenin emphasised the role of the party in the creation of a communist state, regarding it as the vanguard of the proletariat and tasked with showing it how to achieve its objective of ending class struggle once and for all. The stranglehold that the Communist Party came to exercise over Soviet life can be traced back to Lenin’s interpretation of what was necessary to overturn the bourgeois state. His strategic vision was outlined well in advance of the Russian Revolution of 1917 in What Is To Be Done? (1902), which attacks Russian Social-Democracy as having become too diffuse a movement to be

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relied on any longer to lead to successful revolution. Lenin calls instead for ‘the consolidation of militant Marxism’ (Lenin 1988: 239) that would mark out the Soviet Communist Party throughout its regime. Militant Marxists would form ‘the genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class’ (Lenin 1988: 239), as the Soviet Communist Party then proceeded to conceive of itself from the Revolution onwards. Having identified three main ‘periods’ of the Russian Social-Democracy movement up until the time of writing, Lenin’s rather chilling conclusion as to what has to be done now is: ‘Liquidate the third period’ (Lenin 1988: 239). The work’s savage opening broadside against proponents of the concept of ‘freedom of criticism’ (Lenin 1988: 74) gives a clear pointer as to how the ‘fourth period’ of militant Marxism will develop. Although Russia was one of the least developed countries in Europe at the time, having a relatively small industrial base and a far larger peasantry than proletariat, Lenin nevertheless regarded it as a prime candidate for a communist revolution on the grounds of it being the weak link in the capitalist system, the point where its contradictions became most glaring (as in the contrast between rich and poor). Russia could become an inspiration for the rest of Europe, therefore, in the vanguard of the more widespread revolution that Lenin was convinced had to happen, given the increasingly exploitative nature of imperialist capitalism and the social tensions this was unleashing. Communism became the main channel by which Marxism was put into practice as a political system, and it was implemented in many countries around the globe in the twentieth century, generally closely allied to the Soviet axis (although disagreements did exist between its members on occasion). In the Soviet Union its reign lasted for seventy-odd years, until the pressure for change that had been building up in the 1980s led to the creation of a notably more open society that to some extent embraced Western democratic principles (although vestiges of the old regime’s authoritarianism still remain right through into our own time). In the aftermath of World War I there were abortive communist uprisings in Germany and Hungary – the latter involving the young Georg Lukács, later to become the inspiration for the emergence of a distinctively ‘Western’ style of Marxism, as a Deputy Commissar in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Then after World War II most of Eastern Europe turned into satellite states of the Soviet Union. China, too, instituted a communist regime under Chairman Mao Zedong from the late 1940s onwards, with similar systems taking root elsewhere in South East Asia in North Vietnam and North Korea. Cuba was a latter-day addition to the communist bloc after the success of Fidel Castro’s revolution there in the later 1950s. The bloc as a whole grew to be an extremely important and powerful presence in global politics, with the Cold War between it and the West dominating affairs on that scene between the 1940s and the 1980s (even today, relations between the US and Russia, the major powers on either side of the Cold War divide, can be very prickly and conspicuously deficient in mutual respect).

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Although there were some local variations in practice to be noted, communist regimes tended to follow a very similar model overall, with a one-party state controlling the means of production, running all the media, and admitting no political opposition. It was an authoritarian, totalitarian system, which severely curbed individual rights, the state organising pretty well all aspects of human existence right down to the most basic of levels. An extensive surveillance system run by an aggressive secret police force (backed up by a network of civilian informers) ensured that the party’s power went largely unchallenged. Given Marxism’s obsession with the economic domain, it was perhaps ironic that this ultimately proved to be its weakest point, and communist regimes signally failed to match the economic success of the West – or even provide basic necessities for all of their citizens in a dependable manner. Shortages were rife in most areas of everyday life, as are still evident in the remaining communist regimes (Cuba and North Korea particularly), and communism’s reputation has never really recovered from such embarrassing failings. There seems little appetite in the twenty-first century for any return to the communist model, with even China having largely turned its back on its classic formulation. Marxism’s capacity to continue developing as a critical theory may well hinge on its ability to detach itself from its communist history, which can make quite depressing reading, even for sympathisers. One of the major problems that Marxism has had to face as a theory is why its predictions do not always work out. The inherent contradictions of capitalism were confidently expected by Marx to lead to economic crisis, at which point support for the system would collapse and the proletariat would be in a position to step in and seize power: The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society are most conspicuous to the practical bourgeois in the vicissitudes of the periodic cycles to which modern industry is subject, and in the culminating point of these cycles, a universal crisis. Such a crisis is once more approaching, although as yet in its preliminary stages. By its universality and its intensity, it will drum dialectics into the heads even of the upstarts of the New, Holy, Prussian-German Empire. (Marx 1972: lx) Capitalism has been regularly hit by economic crises since Marx’s time, with the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s, a sustained period of mass unemployment and plummeting living standards for the majority of the population, seeming to be a textbook case that ought to have generated global revolution in line with the Marxist schema. Yet these crises have not led to the wholesale rejection of the capitalist system that Marxism was geared towards, and capitalism has been surprisingly resilient, continually rebuilding itself in the absence of any wholesale revolution by the masses (although for the more fundamentalist Marxists, the final crisis is always just approaching). One of the first Marxists

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to address this problem in detail was the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, who used the concept of hegemony as an explanation for Marxism’s apparent forecasting failures. Hegemony was the condition in which a dominant group, with a controlling position in a society’s system of production, was able to impose its values on others without necessarily having to use force. In fact, it could even appear to have the consent of the mass of the population to do so. This could be achieved by indoctrinating the population with its social and political values and beliefs through the range of institutions and systems that a society contained other than the means of production as such – education, the arts, and the media, for example. What these latter were passing on was the belief system of the ruling class, presented as if it was the natural way to live, the common-sense set of values to espouse, rather than something that was ideologically determined. However, this was also backed up by the ‘coercive power’ of the state, which could be brought to bear ‘on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively’ (Gramsci 1973: 12) if circumstances ever necessitated this. As long as a delicate balance could be maintained between consensus and force (with intellectuals and creative artists heavily involved in sending out the ‘right’ message to the masses to keep them in line), then such circumstances could be kept at bay, thus securing the hegemonic power of the ruling group. If it was to be successful as a revolutionary theory then Marxism had somehow to disrupt that consensus, to show that its apparent spontaneity was actually artfully contrived. That ultimately proved to be an even more difficult task than the original theory had implied it would be, the determined efforts of a whole series of hegemony theorists notwithstanding. The method Gramsci puts forward to counter hegemonic power is the ‘philosophy of praxis’, the union of theory and practice. This differs from the way Marxism was hereafter to develop in the West; that is, with a bias towards philosophy in its academic form (see Chapter 2, ‘Western Marxism’), rather than as an actual everyday political practice, as it remained in the Soviet Union. Gramsci was always very much oriented towards political life and the need for class struggle to break the hold that capitalist hegemony had on Western society, taking seriously Marx’s injunction to thinkers to concern themselves with changing rather than merely interpreting the world. Marxism’s doctrines increasingly came under attack from the Western left as the twentieth century progressed, and ‘Western Marxism’ began to develop in a different, generally less doctrinaire, form than its Soviet counterpart. The upshot was the emergence of a post-Marxist movement in the later twentieth century, concerned to break free from what it considered to be the theory’s totalitarian, deterministic ethos, while still retaining the spirit and left-wing orientation of the original. Chapter 3 will cover this latter movement in detail, but it is important to note that there was still a commitment to Marxist ideals amongst many prominent post-Marxists. At the heart of the work of figures

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like the writing team of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, key advocates of a post-Marxist temperament to break with the mistakes of the past, lay a desire for reform rather than demolition of Marxism (see in particular their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy), even if their more traditionally minded detractors did not see it that way and accused them of betraying the cause. Although it would have to be said that Marxists quite frequently make such a charge amongst themselves, their sectarian groupings rarely having much tolerance towards interpretations of Marx’s ideas other than their own: schism has proved to be only too common in Marxist circles. One of the aspects of Marxist thought that has created the greatest difficulties in its application as a political theory has been its totalising bias. Marxism insists on a one-party state system, led by the communists, and demands strict adherence to the party line by followers in order to ensure the party’s continuing dominance; hence Lenin’s rejection of ‘freedom of criticism’. The assumption is that the party really will be able to exercise complete control over human affairs as long as it is given a free hand. Dissent therefore tends to be quashed in Marxist states and this runs counter to the spirit of democracy as it has been practiced in the West in modern times, which at least in theory allows open opposition to be expressed on social and political issues (although always within certain prescribed limits). Marxism is traditionally associated in the West with dictatorship, and this has meant it has been viewed with considerable suspicion by many in terms of its political ambitions: dictatorship is a hard sell to any society with a history of commitment to individualism, and dictatorship plus economic inefficiency even more so. Some areas of human affairs, however, have proved notoriously difficult to incorporate within Marxism’s totalising vision, with the feminist movement a case in point. Feminism has had an interesting dialogue with Marxism over the years. On the face of it there is much in common between the two movements, with each seeking to overcome exploitation and traditional hierarchies of power – in feminism’s case, that exercised by patriarchy for most of human history. What Marxism can provide feminism with is evidence of the economic basis of women’s exploitation, as well as a policy for overturning this through revolutionary action, and a school of Marxist feminism did duly emerge. As many feminists have come to recognise, however, Marxism can be a very patriarchal theory itself, and they have not always been happy with their goals being subsumed within the wider context of class struggle. In practice this has often led to feminist goals being downgraded in importance beneath those of the working class, who are always deemed to take precedence in the Marxist scheme. What feminist theorists are concerned about is the exploitation that women suffer across the social scale, not just within the working class, and classical Marxists can struggle with this. Ultimately, the two sides have different conceptions of what constitutes politics.

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Disagreement between Marxist and feminist theorists dramatically came to a head in an essay by Heidi Hartmann entitled ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism’. Hartman’s argument was that feminism historically was very much in a subsidiary position as regards Marxism, and that this was holding back the feminist cause: ‘Many Marxists argue that feminism is at best less important than class conflict and at worse divisive of the working class’ (Hartman 1981: 2). In Hartmann’s view, therefore, Marxism and feminism at present were locked in an ‘unhappy marriage’ – and unless the incompatibilities between the two movements and their objectives were addressed honestly, then the only solution would have to be divorce. Feminism saw politics in operation at the level of the personal (‘the personal is political’ as the slogan went), whereas for Marxists it was a collective, class issue. Hartmann was still optimistic about overcoming such incompatibilities, suggesting that the campaign against both patriarchy and capitalism should be given equal importance, but the two movements have essentially followed divergent paths since her intervention. Post-Marxists are far more likely to be in sympathy with, and offer support for, feminist ideals than their classical counterparts are. Powerful though it was, the Leninist tradition was not the only one within Marxism to have a significant political impact: both Trotskyism and Maoism deserve to be considered as well. Leon Trotsky was one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution and a noted theorist himself, in the area of the arts as well as politics: he was a highly regarded literary critic and historian, for example. After the rise of Stalin, Trotsky, a critic of the Stalinist bureaucratic approach to the organisation of a workers’ state, was forced into exile. There, he was to become an alternative voice to official communism, providing a focus for opposition in that respect until his assassination in Mexico in 1940. Trotsky devised a theory of ‘permanent revolution’ that attracted a lot of interest on the left, being designed as a method to prevent the slide into authoritarianism and bureaucratisation that had taken place in the Soviet Union under Stalin. As the title of his last book had it, Stalinism was a case of The Revolution Betrayed and it had only succeeded in creating an all-powerful state bureaucracy rather than a true workers’ state of the kind envisaged by Marx, thereby setting an extremely bad example for the international socialist cause. How the Soviet system might have developed under Trotsky rather than Stalin is one of Marxism’s most intriguing mysteries, and Trotskyism did continue to attract supporters around the world throughout the days of Soviet dominance. Many fringe socialist parties in the West were Trotskyist in orientation, with some still active to this day – although rarely having much impact on mainstream national or international politics, constituting more of a protest movement on the far left than anything else. Maoism represented an attempt to rethink Marxism for a very different kind of culture than the Western model that Marx had been dealing with in Capital. China was essentially a peasant-based society (far more so than even

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Russia had been in 1917 when compared to advanced European economies like Britain and Germany), and lagged far behind the West in terms of its economic development. Mao was very aware of this discrepancy and spoke on the eve of the Chinese Revolution’s success of the need to address ‘the contradiction between China and the imperialist countries’ (Mao 1972: 36). His interpretation of Marxist theory was therefore geared towards the needs of a developing country, where the bulk of the population was living at or close to subsistence level – ‘poor and blank’ in his words (Mao 1972: 36): Lenin’s theory of the ‘weak link’ simply did not work in this context. Maoism therefore proved to be an attractive option for communist movements in other similar developing countries. Mao did attempt to speed up the industrialisation process in China in order to close the gap with the developed world, through the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the later 1950s, but this was signally unsuccessful. In its aftermath Mao instituted the ‘Cultural Revolution’ in 1966, which was inspired by the notion of ‘permanent revolution’. Its impact, driven by the notorious ‘Gang of Four’, proved to be socially and economically disastrous for the nation, which took years to recover from its disruptive policies. Many intellectuals and professionals lost their posts in the cities and were forced into menial occupations, often in remote parts of the country: the notion being that this would remove the distinction between various kinds of labour, and prevent the re-emergence of a class system. After Mao’s death in 1976, however, the political climate in China changed quite dramatically. The Communist Party turned its back on concepts such as ‘permanent revolution’, as well as most of the Maoist tradition in real terms, and shifted away quite deliberately from classical Marxist policies, embracing instead a form of state-controlled capitalism that many see as a betrayal of the theory’s ideals (another ‘degenerated’ workers’ state in Trotskyist terms). This is a policy still being followed to this day. One can well imagine the reaction of such as Marx and Lenin to officially sanctioned campaigns exhorting citizens to strive to accrue wealth (‘to get rich is glorious’), that indeed this was almost their patriotic duty. The Chinese economy is now very much integrated with that of the West, and it has produced its own class of rich entrepreneurs – not to mention generally very poor working conditions, and wages, for the urban proletariat that has grown up in the wake of its massive industrial expansion designed to service the needs of Western consumers. China’s Communist Party is now heavily dependent on the outsourcing of production from the West to the developed world in order to maintain its power over the populace – yet another irony for Marxists to ponder upon.

Marxism as a Critical Theory: Aesthetics Marxism has had particular success in the area of aesthetics, inspiring several generations of both critics and creative artists internationally. The arts were

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always viewed as a very important aspect of cultural development by Marxist theorists, a powerful and highly effective method of instilling communist values in the general populace (the mirror image of how hegemony theorists like Gramsci identified it as working in the capitalist system). Various aesthetic theories were devised to explain how this process worked, both of a prescriptive and descriptive kind. Reflection theory was an early example of the descriptive type of aesthetic theory in Marxist thought. Thus for Georgi Plekhanov works of art reflected the ideological concerns of their age, and were valuable to study on that basis. Marx put forward similar ideas in his brief forays in this area of discourse, suggesting that we view classical Greek art and literature as representing the ‘historical childhood of humanity’ (Marx 1975–2005: 28. 48) and as therefore providing us with something like a window into the past. Plekhanov could be judgemental as well, however, condemning what for him was the decadent art of the Cubist movement as a reflection of a similarly decadent age that a Marxist could only oppose. Echoes of reflection theory will turn up in other Marxist aesthetic theories, although it will be modified quite substantially over the years. Instead of a straightforward process of reflection, a much more complex relationship will be posited as in operation between artworks and their ideological context. For succeeding generations of Marxist aestheticians, artworks are deeply implicated in how ideology develops, often being instrumental in shaping ideological attitudes amongst the general public: the interaction is not just one way, as Plekhanov seems to imply. Even so, reflection theory does succeed in establishing what becomes the primary concern of Marxist aesthetics: the ideological role of art. Socialist realism, on the other hand, which held sway in the Soviet Union for many years from the 1930s onwards, turned out to be a highly prescriptive aesthetic. It decreed that works of art above all should serve the interests of the state, and it operated a strict programme of censorship to ensure that creative artists complied with this dictate. There was a strongly didactic quality to the socialist realist ethic, insisted upon by the Stalinist regime’s infamous cultural commissar A. A. Zhdanov in the 1930s, which saw the arts as a way of promoting the virtues of socialism amongst the citizenry in a post-revolutionary age. Writers for Zhdanov, as a case in point, should take on the role of ‘engineer of human souls’ (Zhdanov 1977: 21) on the state’s behalf. Criticism of the state’s policies was expressly forbidden, as many authors found to their cost, and anything that hinted at sympathy for the bourgeoisie or capitalists was taken to be little short of treasonous and harshly dealt with by the authorities. Avant-garde experimentation was particularly frowned upon, with artists being forced to adopt fairly old-fashioned styles in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. In consequence modernism, for much of the twentieth century the dominant aesthetic in artistic practice in the West, was outlawed in the Soviet Union, being criticised as elitist in spirit and alienating to the public; anything along the lines of abstract expressionism or twelve-tone music, for

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example, was definitely ruled out. Significantly enough, Trotsky took a very different approach to the arts, arguing that any artwork ‘should be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art’ (Trotsky 1960: 178). Socialist realism, however, was to judge artworks almost solely by political criteria – very much to the detriment of the Soviet artistic community, who struggled to satisfy Zhdanov’s demands on this score, especially after the upsurge of experimentalism in the arts that took place in the Revolution’s early years (constructivist art, for example, which flourished in the early 1920s). Modernism was often accused of being elitist and alienating in the West as well, but at least artists were not banned from producing work in that mode, although of course that did not guarantee that their efforts would achieve much in the way of performance or public exposure. There was in fact rarely much of a mass audience for modernist experimentation. The Frankfurt School theorist Theodor W. Adorno did defend modernism from the Marxist side (although as will be discussed in Chapter 2, Adorno was anything but doctrinaire in his support of Marxism as a philosophical or political system), particularly with regard to music; although the defence he offered was of a very selective kind. Adorno championed the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers – much disliked by socialist realists – as opposed to the work of Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky was considered a modernist too, but his early ballet scores, such as Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, were sending out the wrong message about the human condition as far as Adorno was concerned. The protagonists of both ballets ended up being crushed by the conformist demands of their society – reactionary sentiments according to Adorno, for whom what the ballet’s narrative was saying was that individuals had no chance against the forces of tradition. Adorno railed against the turn to neoclassicism by so many composers (Stravinsky and a host of others) in the post-World War I period, regarding such a reappropriation of past styles as amounting to a ‘new conformism’ (Adorno 1973: 5) on the part of those involved. Schoenberg, however, with his invention of a twelve-tone, atonal method of composition, which broke distinctively with past practices, represented ‘progress’. By abandoning Western music’s seven-tone scales in favour of twelve-tone sequences of notes which are then reworked in a variety of ways over the course of the composition, the individual notes are, Adorno believes, set free, since they are no longer under the sway of any scale’s tonal centre (C in the key of C major, for instance). In consequence, for Adorno: ‘Twelve-tone technique is truly the fate of music. It enchains music by liberating it’ (Adorno 1973: 67–8) – a typically Adornian paradox. Adorno was eventually to move in a recognisably post-Marxist direction in his thought. Apart from anything else he had a particular dislike of mass culture that made it difficult for him to identify completely with a movement so committed to mass social conformism as orthodox Marxism on the Soviet

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model clearly was. But the socialist realism aesthetic drew criticism even from more committed Marxist thinkers in the West, as in the notable case of Bertolt Brecht and his theory of epic theatre. Brecht’s line, prefiguring that of Adorno after him, was that the new kind of society which communism was committed to promoting required a new kind of art, and that it would be regressive to follow older models of artistic practice. Socialist realism was guilty of just such a sin in Brecht’s view, as in its preference for a nineteenth-century style of realism in literature. Epic theatre was designed to break with what for Brecht was a hackneyed, outdated style of drama that was inappropriate for addressing the pressing social issues of the post-World War I situation in Europe. As outlined by Brecht’s associate, the critic and theorist Walter Benjamin, epic theatre was to be regarded as a revolutionary style of theatre that would openly confront the values of the ruling class. It was conceived of as an essentially didactic form, the primary concern being to make the audience aware of the many injustices of their society and the implication of the ruling class in these. Above all, epic theatre was supposed to make the audience think, rather than merely entertain them. Nineteenth-century realism was simply no longer adequate to that task and had to be abandoned; for Brecht and Benjamin it promoted basically bourgeois values, since what counted as realism ‘then’ could not qualify as realism ‘now’. As Benjamin put it, to continue to produce work in that manner, as many creative artists were doing, was simply to ‘supply material for an apparatus which is obsolete’ (Benjamin 1973: 1). Something far more radical was required in order to make the audience recognise the extent of the changes that had occurred in the socio-political landscape in the interim, and it should be left to the creative artist to decide what form this should take. Nevertheless, the doctrine of realism was defended by such eminent Marxist theorists as Georg Lukács – even if he did not accept all the tenets of socialist realism. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism Lukács was in fact deeply critical of the socialist realist aesthetic, while putting forward a case for realism that could even include bourgeois authors (‘critical realism’ as he dubbed it). Lukács did not demand direct identification with the communist cause, as socialist realism did; his only requirement being that the work in question laid bare the social relations of its society so that its inequalities were made apparent to the reader. Thus an author like Thomas Mann could be useful to the communist cause, whereas an author like Franz Kafka was detrimental. In works like The Trial and The Castle Kafka saw us as the victims of nameless forces that controlled our lives and could not be opposed, which to Lukács was tantamount to saying that revolution or social change would never be possible – and that was a message very obviously to the benefit of the ruling class, helping to dampen down any revolutionary sentiments that might arise. Mann, on the other hand, although clearly bourgeois in his sympathies, showed social relations as they actually were, which served to reinforce the case for the revolutionary change that communists were advocating.

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New schools of Marxist aesthetic theories were being developed into the 1960s, as in the structural Marxist movement, which proved to be very influential in academic circles into the 70s and 80s. Its technique of literary analysis was known as ‘reading against the grain’, and it involved identifying what the narrative under review was hiding from us about the real nature of social relations in the world it was picturing. The theory developed out of the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser, primarily through the work of his follower Pierre Macherey, whose book A Theory of Literary Production outlined its analytical principles. Althusser had argued that artworks such as texts could show us the workings of ideology ‘in some sense from the inside’ (Althusser 1971: 204), and that is what reading against the grain was designed to bring out. Ideology was for Macherey, ‘the false resolution of a real debate’ (Macherey 1978: 131), and it was the duty of the Marxist critic to reveal how that process was functioning in literature. So for Macherey, ‘the text explores ideology . . . puts it to the test of the written word’ (Macherey 1978: 132); in other words, it exposes ideology for what it really is. In the English academic world, Terry Eagleton followed on from Macherey’s lead to develop a system of ‘categories for a materialist criticism’, whereby we could come to recognise the ways in which the literary text was ‘a certain production of ideology’ (Eagleton 1976: 44, 64), encouraging us to understand the world from a particular biased perspective. Literary criticism on the structural Marxist model was therefore to be thought of a ‘science of the text’ (Eagleton 1976: 64) complementing the Marxist project’s social critique. As usual in Marxist aesthetics, the point of the exercise was to further Marxism’s political ambitions in general. For any Marxist thinker, working in any medium, politics will always take precedence.

Marxism in the Twenty-First Century Despite the rise of post-Marxism, and the collapse of communism’s credibility as a socio-political system with the demise of the Soviet empire, Marxist ideas continue to inform both political theory and the world of critical theory. As noted before, the attractiveness of such a comprehensive form of critical theory on practitioners should never be underestimated: Marxism covers all eventualities. Studies of Marx are still regularly being published – most recently Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber, 2013. The tendency now is to present him, as Sperber does, as a man of his time, an antidote to his somewhat hagiographic treatment throughout most of Marxism’s history as a universally applicable theorist who had uncovered the secret of human society, with Marxism seen as the ‘science of society’ that consigned all other social theories to historical oblivion. Yet it is true of all thinkers that they are always historically situated, and cannot avoid responding to, and becoming embroiled in, to at least some extent, the issues and concerns of their period,

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and that does not prevent Marx from having a role to play in cultural debate in our own time and on into the future. As long as there are significant economic inequalities to be found in the world, especially between the West and the developing world, then Marxist ideas are likely to stay in circulation and find an audience. Indeed, the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom end of most Western societies, under the prevailing regime of neoliberal economics with its tireless advocacy of market fundamentalism as humankind’s new destiny (or even ‘World-Spirit’), would be enough on its own to keep Marxism alive there. In that latter respect, the credit crisis has given a new lease of life to the Marxist community in the West, seeming to provide undeniable proof of the underlying instability of capitalism as an economic system. The system’s structural weaknesses are now only too evident – even to many of its supporters, who are divided as to how to resuscitate it. As the theorist David Harvey has put it, we are now at ‘an inflexion point in the history of capitalism’ (Harvey 2010: 217) that constitutes an open invitation for a mass movement to be marshalled against it to bring it down. Marxism is still an extremely powerful method of analysis of economic systems therefore, even if you do not agree with the solutions that classical Marxism calls for, and Harvey feels that it could even now provide the inspiration for the development of a mass movement against the current socio-economic paradigm. Whether that ever occurs is more of a moot point, but it does seem likely that Marxism, with its high ideals and theoretical depth and comprehensiveness, will constitute a fertile source of ideas for counter-capitalist movements well into the foreseeable future. Indeed, undaunted by communism’s decline, some theorists like Slavoj Žižek are still advocating the virtues of violent revolution in order to overthrow the current socio-economic order, arguing that it might after all work better next time around than it ever has done in the past (see Chapter 3 for more on Žižek). Again, that is a contentious point, but it is proof that Marxism’s aura has not yet disappeared, nor its ability to inspire radically minded dissent against the status quo: its appeal defiantly lingers on. While it is highly unlikely that Marxism will ever again wield power on the global scale that it once did in the heyday of communism, it cannot be written off altogether quite yet either: it forms too large a part of modern Western history for that to happen. How that body of material was expanded, and taken in a nonclassical direction, by the work of Western Marxists and postMarxists forms the topic of the next two chapters.

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2 WESTERN MARXISM Stuart Sim

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he establishment of the Soviet Union meant that Marxism became a major player on the world stage, transforming it from a philosophy with socio-political pretensions into a fully-fledged socio-political theory that could be judged by the effect of its policies. Russia effectively turned into a test case for the Marxist project, becoming highly symbolic for the socialist cause internationally, which could now monitor its progress towards the desired condition of a workers’ state and assess the methods that it used. Given the need to build a new kind of society with a completely different set of values to the old Tsarist one in Russia, Soviet communism tended to develop into a doctrinaire theory which prized, indeed demanded, adherence to the party line rather than philosophical debate about the validity or otherwise of its principles. Marxism was the ‘science of history’ and the ‘science of society’, and that was the end of the argument. Under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, Marxist theory became canonised, to the extent that any opposition to it was quickly stifled by the Soviet authorities – often with extreme brutality, as Stalin’s regime amply demonstrated with its numerous gulags full of political prisoners. Classical, orthodox Marxism, that based on a fairly literal reading of Marx’s oeuvre, was taken to be beyond criticism in the Soviet system, and when its predictions failed, or when its application did not have the expected effect, then some excuse had to be found outside the theory to explain why this was not really the case (to be fair, a not uncommon response within belief systems in general). Hence the development of the concept of hegemony, which exercised so many Marxist theorists over the course of the twentieth century until Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe mounted their concerted attack on it in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the work which more than any other established post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right. Not all Marxists outside the Soviet Union were happy to accept the rigidly enforced dogmatism of Soviet Marxism, however, and a tradition grew up of what came to be described as Western Marxism, an approach which, as Perry Anderson pointed out in the 1970s in Considerations on Western Marxism, maintained a more philosophical orientation than the economics-inclined Soviet interpretation. Western Marxism is generally considered to date from the early

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work of Georg Lukács, particularly his History and Class Consciousness of 1923, which brought him into considerable difficulties with the Soviet authorities, who demanded that he publicly renounce the views he expressed there. While Lukács subsequently did so, proceeding to change his orientation as a writer in an attempt to placate the Soviet establishment, History and Class Consciousness nevertheless succeeding in influencing a new generation of Marxist thinkers in the West, most notably the Frankfurt School. How that tradition of Marxism developed, and its relationship to Soviet orthodoxy, forms the subject of this chapter.

Perry Anderson: Mapping Western Marxism Anderson identified ‘a common intellectual tradition’ that could go under the heading of ‘Western Marxism’ (Anderson 1976: 1), seeing it as comprising various figures and movements running from Georg Lukács through Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School to more recent theorists such as Louis Althusser. For Anderson, Western Marxism was a ‘displacement’ of the concerns of the classical Marxist tradition as it had developed in the pre-World War I era, a displacement whose main distinguishing feature is its ‘structural divorce . . . from political practice’ (Anderson 1976: 25, 29). Western Marxism proceeds from a different kind of intellectual tradition than that of Russia, one that did not have the same political orientation and that was more interested in Marxism as a subject of academic study. Figures like V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, for example, could hardly think of Marxism in anything but political terms, treating it as a putative political practice awaiting implementation. Anderson notes that, with a few notable exceptions such as Antonio Gramsci, economic matters are generally avoided in Western Marxism, as well as practical political issues about how to prosecute the class struggle against the bourgeois state – again, the latter being the major concern of the likes of Lenin and Trotsky. The result was ‘a basic shift in the whole centre of gravity of European Marxism towards philosophy’ (Anderson 1976: 49), that very much set it apart from its Soviet counterpart, rendering it a primarily intellectual pursuit, more at home in the academy than in the rough-and-tumble world of daily politics. And it is true to say that Marxism’s greatest impact in Western Europe was in the university world; politically, its appeal rapidly diminished. The French and Italian communist parties did maintain some influence for a while, particularly in the post-World War II period, but this gradually dissipated until they became little more than fringe movements in their country’s national politics. Anderson points out that a seminal event for this more academic approach to Marxist thought was the discovery and publication in Russia in the 1930s of Marx’s ‘Paris Manuscripts’ from 1844, which were regarded as emphasising the philosophical foundations of his concept of historical

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materialism. The Manuscripts are often claimed to reveal a more humanistic side to Marx’s thought than is to be found in his post-Communist Manifesto writings, and they made relatively little impression in the Soviet Union itself, where the later, economics-focused Marx was to stay in favour. In Anderson’s neatly turned phrase, the Manuscripts were to generate a series of works by a variety of Western theorists over the next few decades that were ‘on Marxism, rather than in Marxism’ (Anderson 1976: 53). This was Marx for a very different kind of audience than the classical tradition had envisaged, and the Soviet regime was actually working with on a daily basis, with a very different set of concerns and interests than the encouragement of a popular revolution. In part, this academic turn to the study of Marx’s thought helps explain the resurgence of interest in figures like G. W. F. Hegel, as the Western academy sought to explore Marx’s philosophical roots and situate him more fully in philosophical history and previous explorations in the nature of the dialectic. This was to lead in the later twentieth century to an increase in interest amongst Western Marxists in the work of Immanuel Kant along with Hegel, ‘Kant before Marx’ as it came to be referred to in French intellectual circles. The reasoning behind this shift of focus was that Kant gave us a more openended form of the dialectic than Hegel did, one that never reached completion. For classical Marxists, who believed that Marx’s thought had radically broken with the past, this was a largely unnecessary exercise to undertake, however, and a distraction from Marxism’s real business. Louis Althusser’s notion of the ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s thought (see below), was an attempt to revive this view of Marx in the Western academy; but although it was in vogue for a while, it was going against the intellectual current of Western Marxism in general. Neither was the Western tradition all that interested in the work of Friedrich Engels, whom it treated as an unimpressive thinker. Anderson is critical of the way that Western Marxism retreated into the academy, which he considered to be a retrograde step with defeatist overtones, merely generating yet more philosophical interpretations rather than the change in socio-political practices that Marx had urged. In that respect it has nothing much to contribute to the cause of revolution, and for Anderson that is still a live possibility. Noting encouraging signs of the growth of a revolutionary consciousness around the world in the mid-1970s, his verdict on Western Marxism is fairly damning: ‘All that can be said is that when the masses themselves speak, theoreticians – of the sort the West has produced for fifty years – will necessarily be silent’ (Anderson 1976: 106). Not long afterwards, however (as will be seen in Chapter 3), the same kind of signs would suggest to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe that it was time to transcend classical Marxist thought and become post-Marxist instead.

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Georg Lukács and Western Marxism Lukács remains one of the most impressive theorists within the Marxist canon, a thinker whose contributions to philosophy, literary criticism and literary theory still resonate in our own day. History and Class Consciousness, written in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, took a very pragmatic attitude towards Marxist doctrine, claiming that Marxism should be treated as a method rather than a set of doctrinal principles – and a method that would hold true even if it were the case that ‘research . . . disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses’ (Lukács 1971a: 1). Marxism was not to be approached as ‘the “belief” in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a “sacred” book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method’ (Lukács 1971a: 1). In many ways Lukács was opening up the door to postMarxism by taking up this position, moving away from the quasi-religious interpretation of Marxism that was already beginning to be such a potent factor in Soviet life, the belief that Marxism constituted received truth and should be followed to the letter. Neither did Lukács agree with the deterministic interpretation of Marx’s theses that was turning into Soviet orthodoxy, arguing that: it is dangerous for the revolution to overestimate the element of inevitability and to assume that the choice of any particular tactic might unleash even a series of actions . . . and trigger off a chain reaction leading to even more distant goals by some ineluctable process. (Lukács 1971a: 330) This was to raise questions over Marxism’s forecasts, as well as its teleological orientation, an unpopular line to take in the aftermath of an apparently successful communist revolution that saw itself as a model for the rest of the world. An attack on Engels’ work was further proof of Lukács’ anti-dogmatic attitude (and as noted above, Engels would never find much favour among Western Marxists). Soviet Marxism did not follow up such lines of thought, however, and it would be left to Western Marxists to carry on Lukács’ critique of the Marxist canon. Lukács may well be considered the founder of Western Marxism, but much of his work after History and Class Consciousness was consciously directed towards restoring his reputation with the Soviet authorities, who had reacted with such hostility to that work and what they perceived to be its overly Hegelian bias. Hegelianism was viewed with considerable suspicion in the Soviet camp, being regarded as not rooted enough in material concerns in comparison to Marx, who was held to have ‘corrected’ this failing in Hegel by developing dialectical materialism. Lukács accordingly went on to write a defence of the Leninist interpretation of Marxism (Lenin: A Study

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on the Unity of his Thought); then a doctoral thesis on Hegel in the Soviet Union (later published as The Young Hegel), which made a case for Hegel’s early work as more aware of economic issues than it had been thought, and thus a suitable subject for a materialist-minded Marxist to address after all. Yet despite this attempt at rehabilitation, Hegel proved to be far more of a subject of interest to Western Marxists than to their Soviet counterparts. Lukács increasingly turned back to literary studies after this point in his career, however, constructing a theory of ‘critical realism’ by which to read narratives from a Marxist standpoint. Works such as The Historical Novel are still highly regarded in the field of literary studies, and The Meaning of Contemporary Realism continues to stir up controversy for its essentially negative interpretation of modernism.

Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School History and Class Consciousness made a notable impact on the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose approach to Marxism was to be characterised by a very critical, non-doctrinal stance that was against the grain of Marxist thought in the period. Any Marxist who did critique the Marxist theoretical model soon found themselves, like Lukács, at the receiving end of condemnation by the Soviet authorities. Written during World War II, when the School was in exile in the USA after fleeing the Nazi takeover in Germany, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment took a jaundiced view of both Western democracy and Soviet communism, criticising both for being dogmatic and assuming that theirs was the only possible way of running a society. Neither system could deal with dissent or internal critique of its beliefs, and expected uncritical obedience on the part of its citizens: ‘The choice by an individual citizen of the Communist or Fascist ticket is determined by the influence which the Red Army or the laboratories of the West have on him’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 205), being the authors’ rather despairing judgement. Even more critically, Adorno’s later Negative Dialectics constitutes a broadside against the very foundations of Marxism, arguing that the theory’s conception of the dialectic is misguided and does not hold up to any sustained philosophical scrutiny. His main point is that the notion of totality on which Marxism is based is not tenable, that it is in the nature of the operation of the dialectic that there will always be something that escapes any attempt at totalisation. That will become a recurrent theme amongst post-Marxists, particularly those of a poststructuralist orientation, that totality is an unrealisable condition, invalidating any theory dependent on this as a premise. Adorno’s concern is to create instead an ‘anti-system’ which will ‘substitute for the unity principle’ on which Marxism depends, ‘the idea of what would be outside the sway of such unity’ (Adorno 1973: xx). Given Marxism’s obsessive need to

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exercise complete control over human affairs, that can only be interpreted as an attempt to undermine its authority: the theory cannot accept that anything at all could be ‘outside the sway’ of its main concepts, comprehensiveness of coverage being one of its major claims. For Adorno, however, it is only through ‘the insertion of some wretched cover concepts’ (Adorno 1973: 152) that Marxism can keep up the claim to be in possession of the universal truth on which its authority rests. Another product of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, remained in America after the School moved back to Germany when World War II ended, and developed his own rather freewheeling brand of Marxist-influenced thought, as in works like One-Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation. Marcuse contends that Marxism’s emphasis on the experience of the working class misses the point that capitalist exploitation applies to other classes too. Even the middle class in a country like America is being exploited, through various ‘new forms of control’ (Marcuse 1964: 1) that have been introduced, which collectively have the effect of creating a compliant and largely docile workforce of ‘one-dimensional men’ (American society can be quite surprisingly socially conformist in that respect). Such ideas proved to be very influential in the countercultural movement that developed in the country from the 1960s onwards, offering a challenge to its ideological belief-system with its obsessional commitment to economic success. The gradual decline in middleclass income, and fringe benefits, that has been so evident in American society over the last few decades bears witness to the power that the corporate sector wields over employees in general, not just the traditional working class. Class in the European sense of the term has always been a rather dubious concept in the American context anyway, presenting a significant obstacle to the application of Marxist schemes in that country, where individuals are harder to pin down in terms of their social position. The work of the Frankfurt School was carried on by a new generation of theorists after Adorno et al., most notably in the work of Jürgen Habermas, who was Adorno’s research assistant for a period in the 1950s. Habermas deployed the interdisciplinary approach so characteristic of the School’s work, but was notably less pessimistic in outlook than either Adorno or Horkheimer, who often sounded as if they had given up entirely on the way that the culture around them was developing. Despite a general sympathy towards Marxist theory, Habermas was increasingly drawn to liberal democracy over the years, becoming a noted champion of that system – if in an idealised form, which he admitted could not be found in any of its current manifestations in Western culture. He was a champion, too, of the Enlightenment and modernity, although emphasising that they represented an ideal which had often gone badly wrong and been used to justify socially and politically problematical actions. Nevertheless, he thought that modernity was a concept well worth fighting for, and this was to bring him into conflict with the burgeoning postmodernist-poststructuralist movement of

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the later twentieth century. Habermas was a bitter critic of the latter, arguing that the work of its major French theorists, such as Jean-François Lyotard, represented a form of neoconservatism, thus foregrounding his own commitment to a more traditional form of left-ish politics. Habermas’s emphasis on the need for a consensus in socio-political relations, and on continuing the project of modernity, went very much against the grain of Lyotard’s own political beliefs, which were grounded on ‘dissensus’ – constant opposition to the dominant ideology of one’s society – as well as a rejection of all that modernity stood for. Habermas, on the other hand, regarded modernity as an ‘unfinished project’ (Habermas 1996: 38–55), which, depending on exactly how you define modernity, is a position that could be defended by either Marxists or neoliberals. Habermas wanted to refine modernity, but he remained a firm supporter of ‘Enlightenment Project’ values, expressing a generally optimistic view of the future if these were aspired to with a greater sense of commitment. Another more recent thinker to challenge standard Marxist conceptions of the dialectic has been Roy Bhaskar, whose researches, like Adorno’s, lead him to posit a much more open form of the process. Once again we find the notion of a graspable totality being dismissed: ‘Reality is a potential infinite totality, of which we know something but not how much’ (Bhaskar 1993: 15). For Bhaskar, a closed totality was an unfortunate legacy that Hegel had bequeathed Marxism and it had been highly detrimental to Marxism’s subsequent development, particularly in terms of communism. Bhaskar’s anti-Hegelianism differentiates him from many of his Western Marxist peers.

Nicos Poulantzas and ‘Fractions’ Theory Pinning down class status was becoming increasingly difficult in the modern European context too, as Nicos Poulantzas’s work points out. The homogeneous classes that classical Marxism requires for its theories to work properly, are in reality becoming very diffuse in Poulantzas’s view. He suggests that we need to start thinking instead in terms of class ‘fractions’ that can be made up of individuals from a wide range of social positions, whereby classes can become ‘dissolved and fused with other classes, as groups’ (Poulantzas 1973: 77) that sometimes (but not always) share the same outlook – that will depend on the particular socio-political circumstances obtaining at the time. It is a much more fluid scenario than Marx had imagined, one in which individuals’ ‘structural class determination is not reducible to their class position’ (Poulantzas 1975: 15), and it does raise questions about the validity of the Marxist notion of totality once again. Whether we can ever really grasp this in its entirety at any given moment, given the various conflicting currents at work within a society like ours, becomes highly doubtful. (The concept of ‘rainbow politics’ is built on much the same kind of principles, with various classes fusing together over some pressing social or political issue.)

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Poulantzas is still in agreement with classical Marxism’s overall aims, but his theory of fractions means that there is a need for constant revision of Marxist concepts to cope with a world where ideological positions are not permanently fixed (Poulantzas’s revisions take account of the structuralist theory so popular at the time, for example). Class struggle is by no means as straightforward a process as many Marxists choose to think, nor class consciousness as easily identifiable: we need to remain aware that there is always the ‘possibility of contamination of working class ideology by the dominant and petty-bourgeois ideologies’ (Poulantzas 1975: 205). It is a point that all hegemony theorists repeatedly will make in their various ways, but Poulantzas draws more a radical conclusion from it than most.

Adapting Marxism: Jean-Paul Sartre On the face of it, existentialism would seem to be a particularly difficult theory to reconcile with Marxism, but Jean-Paul Sartre did try to do so, an indication of Marxism’s strong presence in twentieth-century French intellectual life (destined to wane dramatically after the événements of 1968). Existentialism pictured individuals as being alienated, and treated alienation as an ontological rather than an ideological condition. For Marxists, of course, the reverse was true, and any sense of alienation that we experienced came from being exploited and oppressed by the political system under which we lived. In an industrialised society under the control of the bourgeoisie as owners of the means of production, we were alienated from the fruits of our labour, since the profits they created were very unequally shared – and that was to be considered a class, rather than an individual, issue. Sartre, on the other hand, saw our alienation as the product of our coming into existence in a world that had no transcendental meaning, and the focus was on how this affected the individual and what could be done to render us able to function in the face of the considerable personal anxiety created by that condition. Sartre had a complicated relationship with Marxism, and could be very critical of the French Communist Party, as he was in What is Literature? (1948), where he attacked its treatment of dissent against the party line. Opponents, he complained, were never really debated with by party officials but instead just ‘discredited’ on a personal level (Sartre 1967: 190), a reaction which revealed the Party’s basic authoritarianism and refusal to entertain the possibility of internal critique – precisely what Western Marxism came above all to stand for. His most substantial engagement with Marxist theory comes in later career in the Critique of Dialectical Reason of 1960. There, he attempts to bridge the gap between the world views of existentialism and Marxism. Sartre complains about the way that Marxism has turned into a deterministically minded doctrine, which for him amounts to a denial of human freedom, freedom being one of the cornerstones of the existentialist ethos. As far as Sartre is concerned,

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individuals always have freedom of choice, no matter how limited this may be on occasion, and this enables us to live an ‘authentic’ life if we make the right choices and avoid getting into situations where we are prevented from following those up. His solution to achieving an accommodation between Marxist and existentialist objectives is that the dialectic ‘must proceed from individuals and not from some kind of supra-individual ensemble’ (Sartre 1991: 36). This means that any revolutionary action that occurs, no matter how widespread this may prove to be, must have its roots in a freely arrived at decision by the individual. Class consciousness does not figure in the equation from the existentialist perspective, and neither is the individual to be thought of as a mere puppet in the communist party’s hands as part of the collective will.

Preserving Marxism: The Concept of Hegemony As it became apparent that capitalism was not necessarily going to collapse once its internal contradictions were revealed, recurrent socio-economic crises failing to trigger this event, theorists began to cast around for ways to explain how it could be that the capitalist system continued to inspire support, even if only tacit, under such adverse circumstances. The concept of hegemony came to play a key role in this process, showing how the ruling class could maintain its position of power by making its code of values seem to be entirely natural rather than imposed, thus preventing the build-up of revolutionary ideas within those sectors of society that it was actively exploiting. As discussed in Chapter 1, Antonio Gramsci was a major proponent of this notion, and he became a critical influence on various generations of Marxist theorists. Hegemony was progressively refined by Gramsci’s successors, whose objective was to make it fit into the development of the capitalist system over the course of the twentieth century with its various economic and political crises. One of the most important voices in Western Marxism was Louis Althusser, who developed an interpretation of Marx’s work that came to be known as ‘structural Marxism’ (although Althusser himself did not like the term, and denied the link with structuralist theory). Structural Marxism had a particular vogue in the 1960s and 70s, and, as was noted in Chapter 1, generated an influential school of criticism based on the principle of ‘reading against the grain’ of what literary narratives appeared to be telling us about the nature of social relations in our world (as in the work of Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton et al.). Althusser and his followers produced a particularly influential book entitled Reading Capital, which represented an attempt to answer the various criticisms that Marxist theory had attracted over the years (although the English edition only includes the contributions of Althusser and Étienne Balibar). The notion behind the project – based on a seminar held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris to reaffirm Marx’s significance in contemporary life – was that many of the apparent problems in the theory could be resolved

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by much closer reading of the classic texts themselves; Althusser insisting that ‘it is essential to read Capital to the letter’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 13) to prevent such errors from creeping in. That becomes a common refrain of Western Marxism: that Marx will only fail us through misinterpretation of what he actually says. Althusser takes seriously Marxism’s claim to be the definitive ‘science of society’, identifying an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work (from the mid-1840s onwards); this being the point at which it is transformed from mere philosophical speculations based on Hegelian principles into a powerful science giving us a blueprint on how to change society radically for the better. Althusser went on to put forward his own interpretation of how hegemony functioned in an advanced society. His contention was that societies were controlled by two principal sets of forces: the Institutional State Apparatus (ISA) and the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA). The former equates to the Gramscian vision of hegemony, comprising the educational system, the arts and the media that spread the ‘correct’ values and beliefs throughout the population – almost by stealth, as it were. These put in place the ‘capitalist relations of exploitation’ (Althusser 1971: 146), that dictate the character of everyday life, the rules we live by and largely take for granted. This is the process defined as ‘interpellation’ by Althusser. Whereas the RSA – made up of the police, the army and the security forces – is what the state ultimately depends upon to enforce its power if the ISA ever loses its credibility and begins seriously to be called into question, perhaps even to the point of open defiance and popular revolution (examples of which continue to proliferate in our own time, as in the Middle East in the last few years with the phenomenon of the ‘Arab Spring’, and the governing authorities’ uncompromising reaction to such mass uprisings). In its role as the science of society, Marxism enables us to see through the system of ideology which we are schooled into by the ISA to the real ‘lived relation between men and their world’ (Althusser 1977: 233), and so to a realisation of the oppression and exploitation that it invariably involves. Étienne Balibar’s contribution to Reading Capital addresses the issue of whether there is enough of a theory of history in Marx’s work to substantiate the claim that Marxism is to be considered the only true ‘science of history’. While conceding that Marx’s references on this topic are of an ‘elliptical nature’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 202), he does not think that this invalidates the claim; rather, this is held to ‘demand the production of new theoretical concepts’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 208) by his followers to bring out what is latent in Marx’s analyses. From this perspective, Marx’s work is not complete, instead we are asked to recognise that ‘Capital . . . founds a new discipline: i.e., opens up a new field for scientific investigation’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 308): as good a justification for the Western Marxist enterprise as you are likely to find.

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Althusser can be regarded as very much representative of the Western Marxist tradition in his attempt to rehabilitate Marx for an audience which was beginning to have considerable doubts as to what his theories were being used to justify. The shift towards a more philosophical bias in analysing Marx’s work turns attention away from the socio-political problems thrown up by the introduction of the communist system in the Soviet empire and China, and by implication is exonerating Marx from any blame in these. Explaining what Marx ‘really said’ becomes the point of the exercise, and for the Western Marxist community in general this need not lead to the excesses of communism as it has been practised in the twentieth century. Marx should not be seen as the villain of the piece, nor as at all responsible for the disjunction that had grown up between theory and practice. This can become a rather tired argument after a while, however, and it is one that rarely satisfies its critics. The effect of hegemony is to keep postponing the predicted collapse of capitalism and the arrival of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ into the future, and as far as some Marxists like the American critical theorist Fredric Jameson is concerned, almost indefinitely so. Even Jameson is beginning to doubt the validity of the classical Marxist template for how class war will be waged, envisaging that the struggle ultimately will involve ‘forms we cannot yet imagine’ (Jameson 1991: 417). None of these conclusions is exactly comforting to would-be Marxist activists, who can only see their hopes of revolution and a new social order fading away as any kind of imminent prospect. It can make challenging capitalism seem a somewhat thankless task – almost like the plight of Sisyphus as pictured by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Jameson and many other Marxists may choose to believe that we are now going through ‘late capitalism’ (as argued so persuasively by Ernest Mandel in his 1972 book of that name), but the system’s continued, and stubborn, resilience can make this seem more of a hope than a reality: late capitalism is proving to be a particularly stubborn beast. Another solution to the resilience of capitalism was Eurocommunism, which took its inspiration mainly from the work of Gramsci. Eurocommunism chose to operate within the existing multi-party set-up of Western democracy, and tried to present a much softer image to Western voters than communism had done in the past. The idea was to make the party representative of a much wider cross section of the population, and to appear less of a threat to the existing Western way of life. Eurocommunists were quite willing to operate within the existing system as it was constituted. Although it did attract a certain amount of popular support in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in Italy, Eurocommunism did not really survive the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire, which seemed to suggest the ultimate unworkability of communism as a political system. Whether it would have preserved Western democratic institutions if it had ever gained a parliamentary majority, or reverted to type instead, would have to remain an open question.

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After Althusser Many other young Marxists contributed to Althusser’s seminar series at the École Normale Supérieure, such as Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. Macherey has already been considered in Chapter 1 in the context of Marxist aesthetics, but both Rancière and Badiou are also worth exploring in terms of the intellectual trajectories each pursued in the aftermath of Althusser – right into the current century, demonstrating that Western Marxism is still a factor in our culture. Both theorists were to distance themselves from Althusserian Marxism after the 1968 événements, with Rancière arguing that Althusser’s scheme failed to allow for spontaneous action on the lines of the événements, while Badiou’s initial reaction was to turn to Maoism (although eventually he is to sound quite post-Marxist in outlook). The conduct of the French Communist Party during the événements, where it eventually sided with the De Gaulle government in its suppression of the uprising, shook the belief of the French intellectual community in classical Marxism quite profoundly. Many turned away from it altogether, joining the ranks of poststructuralism and postmodernism instead (as Lyotard for one did), identifying strongly with those movements’ sceptical attitude towards universal theories in general. Others like Badiou went in the opposite direction, embracing Maoism as a purer form of the Marxist project that could transform political life in the West. In Maoist theory practice takes precedence over theoretical abstraction, and there is no distinction to be made between intellectual and manual labour, rendering the class struggle, right down to the level of the peasantry, of even greater importance than in the Marxist-Leninist tradition (which was capable of theoretical abstraction in its own way). Badiou’s philosophical development, however, features the kind of complexity that has come to be associated with Western Marxism rather than the more down-to-earth approach found in Maoism, being heavily based on mathematics and in particular set theory: another case of seeming to be ‘on’ rather than ‘in’ Marxism. Set theory is a fairly abstruse form of mathematics that underpins the discipline in modern times, leaving Badiou open to the same charge of academicism that Anderson makes about the Western Marxist movement in general. It is just such attempts to link philosophy and the hard sciences that Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont will go on to be so critical of in Intellectual Impostures, where Badiou’s is summarily dismissed as merely another example of the ‘abuse’ of Gödel’s set theory at the hands of contemporary French philosophers (see Sokal and Bricmont 1998, Chapter 11). For Badiou, on the other hand, set theory provides the basis of the ‘foundational style’ (Badiou 2003: 50) that he seeks to reintroduce into contemporary philosophical discourse. Badiou’s books have only been translated into English in quite recent years, meaning that his wider impact on critical theory came well after that of Althusser and Macherey.

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Badiou develops a theory of the ‘event’ that, despite his pronounced antipathy to poststructuralism and postmodernism, is nevertheless quite close in spirit to that put forward by Lyotard (to be discussed in Chapter 3). For Badiou the event is to be understood as the product of a particular ‘encounter’; as happens, for example, when two people fall in love. That encounter then becomes a significant event that alters and structures their lives, whether for good or ill, from that point onwards: it creates a new ‘situation’. Unless such an event occurs, individual human beings do not really turn into proper ‘subjects’, although it is crucial that they continue to recognise the significance the resultant situation holds for them in order for this process to unfold. In Badiou’s terminology, somewhat recalling the existentialist notion of authenticity, individuals so affected are required to maintain a sense of ‘fidelity’ towards the event in question. Two translators of Badiou’s work, Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens, have suggested that fidelity should be treated ‘as a remodeling of the Marxist concept of praxis’ (Badiou 2003: 31) in that it demands an active response to the situation generated – as in the case of a politically significant event. The fact that Badiou conceives of such responses as being more like shots in the dark undertaken by ‘singular’ individuals than coordinated collective action, however, is unlikely to satisfy classical Marxists; nor would they be able to accept Badiou’s claim that nowadays ‘there is neither progress, nor proletariat’ (Badiou 2003: 54). Badiou’s journey from Althusserian Marxism through Maoism to a defence of the value of ‘singular’ actions, is symptomatic of the intellectual contortions that the French left felt itself forced into making in the later twentieth century, in the wake of first the événements in 1968 and then the collapse of the Soviet empire in the 1980s. Revolutionary communism did indeed appear to have terminally lost its way by then, and even to have been a deeply misguided project in the first place. In a 1997 interview, when asked to describe how his political outlook had changed since his Maoist period in the 1970s, Badiou revealingly replies that whereas earlier he had believed that ‘an emancipatory politics presumed some kind of political party’, what he is now promoting instead is ‘politics without [a] party’ (Badiou 2001: 95). This would seem largely to negate the Marxist concept of class consciousness, yet Badiou can also still define himself as a Marxist, claiming that many of ‘Marx’s fundamental intuitions’ have proved to be correct, and that there is therefore ‘no need for a revision of Marxism itself’ (Badiou 2001: 97). To most classical Marxists, with their firm belief in both class consciousness and a centralised party, this would look distinctly post-Marxist in orientation, and not necessarily all that far from the position earlier outlined by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their post-Marxist ‘primer’ Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. As his interviewer, Peter Hallward, goes on to remark: ‘It’s a little strange to run into a Marxist philosopher who rarely refers to the mode of production and some kind of economic determinism, however attenuated’ (Badiou 2001: 105). But

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these aspects are the least defensible aspects of the Marxist project after the Soviet Union’s collapse, as well as China’s move towards state-controlled capitalism. Félix Guattari, co-author with Gilles Deleuze of texts in the 1970s and 80s with a post-Marxist slant (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus), similarly felt the need to reconfirm his Marxist beliefs in later career, evidence of the emotional pull that Marxism is capable of exerting. Rancière’s turn away from Althusser led him to question many of the concepts and principles at work in Marxism, such as whether there is a working class as Marxists understand the term – a theme also taken up by André Gorz (see Chapter 3). His work post-Althusser makes a point of denying there is any great difference between the abilities and intelligence of intellectuals and the so-called proletariat (another term that Rancière questions), emphasising their essential equality – a position echoing French thought’s flirtation with Maoism. Commentators have struggled to place his work overall, however, since it tends to move freely between disciplines and schools of thought and to become increasingly critical of orthodox Marxism, with its conception of the party as the dominant power in society. The Leninist notion of the party as a ‘vanguard’ movement that the masses must follow obediently, certainly clashes with Rancière’s commitment to equality. As Giuseppina Mecchia has argued, Marxism constitutes for Rancière, at best, ‘only one of the many foundation stones on which to build a startlingly original conceptual framework’ (Mecchia 2010: 39). New ‘conceptual frameworks’ are exactly what Western Marxists specialise in of course, although not all will go to the lengths of Rancière.

The New Left The ‘New Left’ that began to emerge in the later decades of the twentieth century in Britain can also be seen as part of the Western Marxist project, with the journal New Left Review (still active today) as its flagship. Prominent New Left thinkers were figures such as Stuart Hall, a highly influential voice in the development of cultural studies as a discipline in the English-speaking academy. Hall contributed regularly to the journal Marxism Today, which offered a challenge to Marxist orthodoxies in the later twentieth century, calling for a re-thinking of the Marxist project in the face of cultural change. One of the most important legacies of Hall for the development of cultural studies was its emphasis on how audiences consumed media, etc., insisting that this was a far more active process than had previously been thought. Cultural hegemony, in other words, was not just a matter of the uncritical consumption by the mass of the ruling class’s ideas – these were not necessarily accepted wholesale or passively, as theorists like Gramsci appeared to be implying. Such ideas do seem to be gesturing in the direction of post-Marxism.

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Hall’s critiques of the left, as in his controversial volume of collected essays entitled The Hard Road to Renewal, summed up the dilemma faced by socialism in the later decades of the twentieth century, with the Soviet project now discredited and neoliberal market forces seemingly taking over control of political life in the West. He was particularly scathing of those who felt that Marxism still provided the solution to the Thatcherite ‘revolution’ as it was unfolding in the UK from the late 1970s onwards, complaining that ‘the left is not convinced that it cannot continue in the old way’ (Hall 1988: 11). Hall insists that, like it or not, the left will have to ‘[s]ubmit everything to the discipline of the present reality, to our understanding of the forces which are really shaping and changing the world’ (Hall 1988: 14), rather than taking refuge in the theories of a Marxism that for him has been eclipsed by events. He remains confident, however, that the left can reform itself, and feels no need to draw the radical conclusions that Laclau and Mouffe do in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The fact that the left is still struggling to counter neoliberalism into the second decade of the new century, however, indicates that the road to renewal has been even harder to negotiate than Hall had imagined. Marxism has also been subjected to ongoing scrutiny in the pages of other British journals such as Radical Philosophy, now into its fifth decade of publication, which has featured a roll call of the British left as contributors or editors (Peter Osborne and Jonathan Ree, for example). The heated debate over Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas in the 1980s, involving such figures as Norman Geras, is an indication of just how much Marx’s ideas still matter to those on the left, even if, like Geras, they tend in the main to be fairly liberal rather than orthodox in outlook. Geras’s career is worth reflecting on in this respect. He uncompromisingly rejected Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist sentiments, but was never an uncritical defender of the Marxist tradition, writing a very popular blog (Normblog) in his retirement years until his death in 2013. Normblog made him many enemies on the left for its defence of Israel, as well as consistent criticism of the kind of theocratic, authoritarian regimes that many on the left supported as long as they were anti-American in attitude. Geras’s non-doctrinaire approach is evident in his support for a Palestinian state to be created alongside Israel (hence his criticism of Israel’s settlement of the West Bank), and his willingness to be as critical of Western policies towards tyrannical regimes in the developing world as of those regimes themselves. Geras’s continuing commitment to Marxism, but his equally principled refusal to fall back into uncritical acquiescence of the theory and its history, can be seen in a late piece of writing of his, a contribution to a volume of essays exploring Marxism’s meaning in the twenty-first century entitled The Legacy of Marxism (derived from a 2011 conference run by the journal Global Discourse). The essay, ‘What does it mean to be a Marxist?’, identifies ‘personal, intellectual and socio-political ways of being a Marxist’ (Geras 2012: 13), and proceeds to examine the validity of each in our time.

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The uncompromising conclusion constitutes a direct challenge to the Marxist community to resist the lure of the doctrinaire approach that has sullied the movement’s history: [U]nless a Marxism of personal belief and a Marxism of creative intellectual work both thoroughly renewed and wrested once and for all from the grip of anti-democratic and illiberal themes and concepts – unless such a Marxism can come to animate the Marxist political left, Marxism as a political force might just as well be dead and buried. (Geras 2012: 22) For Geras, that is the proper way to arrest what was for him the fatal slide towards post-Marxism, which from his perspective effectively announced the death and burial of the theory.

Conclusion Western Marxism did introduce a new dimension to the study of the theory, and the subject remains one of substantial interest in the academy right through into our own century. Throughout the humanities and the social sciences, Marxism’s place in the history and development of cultural and critical theory in modern times has to be acknowledged, and it is generally the Western tradition that is considered in greatest detail. Neither the Leninist nor the Maoist side has generated anything like the same amount of interest (for all the latter’s brief flourish on the French scene in the 1970s), nor proved to be such a fertile source of ideas in the Western academy. Yet despite the ingenuity shown by so many Western Marxists in opening up new perspectives and constructing new ‘conceptual frameworks’ on Marxist theory, thereby seeking to distance it from an increasingly problematic communist system and its history of social repression (‘these terrorist States’ as Alain Badiou described the socialist bloc, post-collapse (Badiou 2003: 76)), it was not enough to prevent a more radical critique of the discourse’s past from emerging in the West. Post-Marxism was to adopt a notably more iconoclastic attitude towards the whole corpus of Marxist thought and its history than its Western Marxist forbears, one that saw no need to keep exonerating the original theory from any blame for the abuses committed in its name, and that is what will now be considered in Chapter 3.

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3 POST-MARXISM Stuart Sim

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y the later twentieth century Marxism was increasingly being called into question by left-wing thinkers in the West, who could not reconcile such a doctrinaire theory with the changes they saw taking place all around them in global culture. There was a general move towards a more libertarian society to be noted, and that was very much out of kilter with Marxism’s authoritarian approach to politics and the notion of central control – the ‘command economy’ concept that held sway throughout the Soviet empire and Maoist China. For many thinkers in the West, communism’s historical record since the 1917 Russian Revolution was becoming a source of considerable embarrassment, and the eventual upshot was the gradual emergence of post-Marxism as a theoretical position standing in opposition to most of what classical Marxism and the Marxist-Leninist tradition had stood for – as well as the bulk of Western Marxism for that matter. Post-Marxism drew heavily on poststructuralist thought, which in its turn drew considerable inspiration from the work of the later Theodor W. Adorno, particularly his Negative Dialectics with its sustained attack on Marxism’s totalising bias. Poststructuralism rejected totalising thought in general, regarding totality as an unachievable state, and Marxism became one of its main targets. The various currents that go to make up post-Marxism will now be explored.

Challenging the Foundational Concepts Although it is not always straightforward to differentiate between Western Marxism and post-Marxism, certain recurrent features do begin to come to the fore in the work of various theorists that merit grouping them under a post-Marxist tag that did not become a commonplace until the 1980s. After that stage, post-Marxism takes on a specific identity that moves it out of the Western Marxist orbit – although still largely within the academic world that had fostered the development of the latter. While there was criticism of aspects of Marxism from its supporters both before and after the establishment of the Soviet system (right back to pre-Russian Revolution figures like Rosa Luxemburg, who took issue with the orthodox conception of class unity and its importance in creating a revolutionary situation), it would not be until

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the later twentieth century that it gradually took on a systematic character in terms of questioning its founding concepts. This questioning could be to the point of outright rejection, or to a revision that made those concepts all but unrecognisable to a classical Marxist – not to mention most Western Marxists as well. Amongst the first theorists to engage in this kind of searching analysis were Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, as in their books Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production and Mode of Production and Social Formation in the 1970s. Hindess and Hirst firmly position themselves against the doctrinaire approach to Marx’s work, and in that respect they could hardly be more explicit in their challenge to classical Marxism in declaring that ‘Marxism is not a “science of history” and Marxist theoretical work has no necessary connection with the practice of the historian’ (Hindess and Hirst 1975: 308). It is the teleological bias of Marxist theory, apparent throughout its history in the work of a succession of thinkers, that Hindess and Hirst cannot accept. To emphasise this factor is to downgrade the importance of human agency, which to them is not in the spirit of Marxism as a revolutionary theory. They are not afraid to identify gaps and loose ends in Marx’s work, which to them argue against treating it as a series of almost sacred texts in the manner of the Soviet tradition: Lukács had, of course, already warned against such an approach as early as 1923 in his highly controversial History and Class Consciousness. Hindess and Hirst’s line is that Marxist theory has to be continually revised and reformed if it is to go on meaning anything significant in the global political arena, and it will never reach its potential unless it is being subjected to the kind of scrutiny that they feel they are undertaking. In consequence, they conclude that there is an urgent need in Marxist circles for a ‘radical change in concepts and problems . . . if we are to be able to deal with the social relations and current political problems that confront us’ (Hindess and Hirst 1977: 12). Laclau and Mouffe will proceed to push that demand much further in just a few years in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, when they signal the need to adopt a postMarxist attitude on the left. Another nail in the coffin of Marxism’s theoretical credibility was supplied by the French theorist André Gorz, who argued that the working class, the very focus of the entire Marxist project, was in fact fast disappearing by the later twentieth century: ‘The traditional working class is now no more than a privileged minority. The majority of the population now belong to the postindustrial neoproletariat, which, with no job security or definite class identity, fills the area of probationary, contracted, casual, temporary and part-time employment’ (Gorz 1982: 69). (The term ‘precariat’ has recently been put forward to describe this fairly amorphous mass (see Standing 2011).) Gorz was writing in 1980, but the situation is considerably more advanced in the West in our own day, especially now that so much of our product manufacture has been outsourced to the developing world – China and South East Asia in the

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main. If there is a proletariat left then it is to be found there, rather in its traditional heartland of the West, where white-collar and service-based employment have steadily been increasing at the expense of that in manufacturing and heavy industry. Casualisation and the trend towards ‘zero-hours’ contracts in the West in recent years, have been further fragmenting any residual sense of class identity that may have been left in the ‘neoproletariat’ identified by Gorz. Union membership has also been in sharp decline for quite some time now, exacerbating the process. Remove the working class from the equation and there would appear to be little point at all to the continuation of the Marxist project. Gorz also argues that the homogenous proletariat as perceived by Marx and his followers was always a particularly woolly concept anyway, since individuals differ so much (psychologically, if nothing else), and we are much more than the sum of our working existence. The latter can only ever partially define us for this thinker: ‘The proletariat is no more than a vague area made up of constantly changing individuals’, and ‘it is impossible that individuals should totally coincide with their social being’ (Gorz 1982: 75, 90). This is to cast doubt on Marx’s economistic bias, with its insistence that it is the economy alone that forms society and human consciousness; in other words, that base always determines superstructure, one of the foundations of Marxist theory. Guy Standing, too, calls into question the old notions of class structure, highlighting the emergence of a new, socially far more diffuse grouping than orthodox Marxists posit, called the precariat (the notion of ‘precarity’ itself, can be traced back to the work of such thinkers in the French tradition as Gorz). For Standing, although the precariat has certain ‘class characteristics’, it should be regarded as ‘a class-in-the-making, if not yet a class-for-itself, in the Marxian sense of that term’ (Standing 2011: 8, 7). It is to be seen as the product of a culture in which wealth disparity is rapidly growing; a culture where those at the top end, such as bankers and company executives, are being awarded huge annual bonuses, while more and more of the population is being forced into casual employment with little or no job security and minimal prospects. Standing identifies ‘a lot of anger out there and a lot of anxiety’, that is creating a dangerous situation that all too easily ‘could lead society towards a politics of inferno’ (Standing 2011: vii) if it is not addressed with care – and addressed as a matter of urgency. The classical Marxist interpretation of this state of affairs would be to treat it as a pre-revolutionary condition that could be worked on by party members, active in areas like the union movement, to develop into a full-blown proletarian revolution at some later date; but Standing argues that it is far more complicated than that, far less receptive to the standard Marxist analysis. ‘It is not right to equate the precariat with the working poor or with just insecure employment, although these dimensions are correlated with it’ (Standing 2011: 9), he cautions us. Instead, the precariat is a jumble of interests, skills and occupations that,

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viewing it in the most positive light, ‘can be a harbinger of the Good Society of the twenty-first century’ (Standing 2011: vii). At present, however, the precariat is at the bottom end of the new hierarchy of four classes that Standing feels has replaced the Marxist conception based on a nineteenth-century model of society arranged into lower, middle and upper classes. Now we have a mega-rich elite, a ‘salariat’ with stable, salaried employment (civil servants, for example), and then a group of ‘proficians’ (those with highly marketable professional, technical, skills), all ranged above the precariat. Everyone ranked higher than the precariat level has a sense of security in their lives that those below them can only dream about – the precariat being left effectively bereft of career prospects. Critically for Marxists, the precariat is all but impossible to unionise and thus turn into a force that could be mobilised on ideological lines – a traditional method whereby Marxists established a power base within a society. The sheer diffuseness of the precariat defeats such an exercise. Marxism is for thinkers like Standing stuck in an old-fashioned ‘labourist’ vision of society and working life, leaving it in consequence unable to deal with the phenomenon of precarity – action which he believes is urgently needed to prevent it being prey for demagogues of both the right and the left. As a stab at what that ‘Good Society’ feasibly might involve and would make it thrive, Standing suggests the implementation of a basic income for all, provided by the state, which could then be added to by individuals through the marketing of their individual skills. If that could be achieved then we would have what Standing describes as a ‘politics of paradise’ (Standing 2011: vii); but while Marxists would no doubt agree with the egalitarian principle of an equal basic income, they would not be likely to perceive enough sense of a centralised state in allowing individuals to profit in an unpredictable way by the utilisation of their own particular talents. The dialogue with Marxism reaches an impasse. As for the right, the very notion of a state-controlled basic income would be anathema to them: merely the welfare state by another route and so to be vociferously opposed. What Standing comes to exemplify is the dilemma of the socially conscious thinker caught between the fundamentalisms of right and left. Neither of these positions would appear to have much to offer to the majority of the population, each being oppressive in its own particular way, as well as anti-democratic in their bias towards an elite – with neoliberal bankers and market traders on the one side, communist party officials and theoreticians on the other.

Laclau and Mouffe and the Critique of Hegemony The most sustained attack on the concept of hegemony was launched by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their provocative study Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985. Heavily influenced by poststructuralist thought,

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Laclau and Mouffe set out to dismantle the concept of hegemony, arguing that it was preventing the left from addressing the inherent flaws of Marxist theory, flaws which were inhibiting the natural growth of a revolutionary consciousness. Laclau and Mouffe saw evidence of that revolutionary consciousness emerging in a fairly diffuse manner in the form of various new social movements that were beginning to make their presence felt around the globe, generally campaigning for very specific causes with a very specific agenda. Classical Marxism, with its well-known dislike of anything that hints remotely of spontaneity, found these movements extremely difficult to deal with as they did not fit its schema as to how revolution should arise – that is, through the agency of class struggle prosecuted by the proletariat (preferably under the direction of the communist party). It could only view social movements based on special interests – such as ethnic, sexual or ecological, for example – as a distraction from the real business; the classical tradition’s rigidity coming to the fore once again. For Laclau and Mouffe, however, such movements were well worth cultivating in order to generate change in the world, and if that meant breaking with classical Marxist doctrine then they were quite prepared to do so, although they considered themselves still to be motivated by Marxist ideals: to be ‘post-Marxist’ as well as ‘post-Marxist’, as they defined their position (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 5). The goal was to bring Marxism up to date to fit a changing world which no longer fitted the model of Marxism-Leninism with its essentially nineteenth-century outlook: ‘a question-mark has fallen more and more heavily over a whole way of conceiving both socialism and the roads that should lead to it’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 1), as they put it, hence the need to reassess the entire history of Marxist thought and practice. Laclau and Mouffe’s critics on the other hand, and there were no lack of these on the left in the aftermath of the publication of Hegemony & Socialist Strategy, adjudged them to be more anti-Marxist than post-Marxist: sad symbols of ‘an intellectual malady’ that was afflicting the European left, as Norman Geras saw it (Geras 1987: 43). In effect, that ‘malady’ was to be seen as a failure of nerve concerning the validity of Marxism’s claims. Hegemony theorists put forward various reasons as to why Marx’s forecasts did not work out as planned, but for Laclau and Mouffe this line of argument amounted to little more than an intellectual cheat; an ad hoc method of covering over a theory’s failures so as to protect that theory’s supposed universal authority. Hegemony was in fact a prime example of the ‘wretched cover concepts’ that Adorno was so contemptuous of in Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1973: 152). The more that ‘cover’ concept is applied, and developed by later generations of theorists, then the more glaring the gap between theoretical prediction and socio-political reality has to become. Laclau and Mouffe make what to them seems to be the obvious move after such repeated disappointment, and start querying the credibility of the theory itself. Behind their project lies the same distrust of totalisation that had generated ‘negative

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dialectics’: a scepticism that any theory could cover all eventualities and never be in need of revision no matter what happened in the wider world. From such a perspective classical Marxism could only appear a dinosaur of a theory by the later twentieth century, one sadly out of touch with cultural change. Laclau and Mouffe advocated replacing a hegemony-led Marxism with ‘radical democracy’, a concept that the two of them have continued to refine in their writings, collectively and individually, since Hegemony and Socialist Strategy came out. Radical democracy was designed to provide an alternative to both the one-party system promoted by Marxism, and what for Laclau and Mouffe was the deeply compromised system of parliamentary democracy practised throughout most of the West, in which a consensus of the participating political parties left a significant section of the population without any effective political outlet. In both cases minority voices were drowned out, and for these theorists that meant neither system could claim to be truly representative. The point of radical democracy was to ensure that the excluded were brought into the political process, and given a platform from which to make their grievances heard. Jean-François Lyotard argued that this ought to be one of the major roles of philosophers, to enable the vulnerable to resist the power of the establishment – a practice he describes as ‘philosophical politics’ (Lyotard 1988: xiii). For all its idealistic intent, radical democracy has some serious gaps as a theory. It has had to address the issue of what it would do if any political grouping failed to abide by its ground rules, and the answer given by Mouffe sounds surprisingly like the solution reached by both Marxism and parliamentary democracy: that it would have to ban such a dissenting group from the political process (how this could be enforced is an altogether trickier issue). Mouffe’s line of argument takes on a noticeably moralistic tone at such points: ‘A democratic society cannot treat those who put its basic institutions into question as legitimate adversaries’, and radical democracy ‘does not pretend to encompass all differences and to overcome all forms of exclusion’ (Mouffe 2000: 120). But any political system at all could put forward that defence of its own hegemony – including totalitarian ones such as communism, which had no qualms at all about imprisoning or even killing any opponents to its policies: legitimacy can be an extremely elastic concept (as of course can democracy, which all communist states claimed to be). We seem to be no further forward as to how to reorganise society after such a judgement. Critics have also pointed out that radical democracy provides little substantial guidance as to what the institutional infrastructure for such a projected system would be, or how it would operate to keep a radical democratic society functioning efficiently. David Howarth, for example, complains that the theory has some glaring ‘deficits’ in that respect, and that these have to cast some doubt on its viability in the political arena as it is currently constituted. We need to be aware of the many ‘economic, material and institutional obstacles’

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(Howarth 2008: 189) that lie in the way of radical democracy’s planned project. Classical Marxism, of course, knows exactly what to do when faced with such obstacles, enabling decisive action to be taken: whether or not you agree with its programme, it does at least have the virtue of clarity. Clarity and the decisive action it sanctioned could, however, have some nasty downsides. Reflecting on the vast schemes undertaken in Soviet Russia to alter the natural environment to fit the totalising vision of a command economy, Zygmunt Bauman notes how these so often ended in disaster: ‘Deserts were irrigated (but they turned into salinated bogs); marshlands were dried (but they turned into deserts); massive gas-pipes criss-crossed the land to remedy nature’s whims in distributing its resources (but they kept exploding with a force unequalled by the natural disasters of yore)’ (Bauman 1992: 179). For yet another thinker, therefore, it was a case of ‘the project of total order’ (Bauman 1992: 178) failing to match reality.

The Postmodern and Poststructural Critique of Marxism Postmodernists in general were highly critical of Marxism, which for them was a relic of the past that society had outgrown any need for. Arguably the most vicious attack on Marx and the Marxist tradition from this perspective is to be found in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, an intemperate and impassioned work which came out in the aftermath of the 1968 événements in Paris. Essentially, this is an attack on Marx’s totalising method and everything that it is forced to marginalise in order to make the theory viable; phenomena such as chance and the emotions – the latter always posing a problem for rationalist-based theories, Marxist or otherwise. The world simply does not operate in the predictable way that Marxism assumes, Lyotard contends (Michel Foucault had earlier reached much the same conclusion). History is a much more chaotic affair than Marxists are ever willing to admit, meaning that it cannot be engineered to fit any pre-existing scheme, no matter how sophisticated or apparently ‘scientific’ in character it might appear to be. Lyotard emphasises the importance of the ‘event’ in his philosophy (as we have seen his compatriot Alain Badiou also does), by which he means the unpredictable, and that is precisely what Marxism cannot encompass within its philosophy of history. Events cannot be planned, only responded to, and they always signal the limits of totalising theories. Our libidinal drives similarly resist being incorporated neatly within a preexisting scheme of how human affairs unfold, and Lyotard has some provocative asides to make about Marx for that reason: ‘We have no plan to be true, to give the truth of Marx, we wonder what there is of the libido in Marx, and “in Marx” means in his text or in his interpretations, mainly in practices’ (Lyotard 1993: 96). It is a rather Freudian point that is being made here: that the emotions and our subconscious drives can never be

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completely suppressed and will resurface in some form or other (the ‘return of the repressed’), no matter how much theories like Marxism try to write them out of human history. Marxism is for Lyotard one of the prime examples of a ‘grand narrative’; that is, a theory claiming to have universal application, to be in possession of the ultimate truth – as, for example, most major religions traditionally have done. Thus, as Lyotard sums it up: ‘A Marxist political practice is an interpretation of a text, just as a social or Christian spiritual practice is the interpretation of a text’ (Lyotard 1993: 95–6). There is a clear contrast with Louis Althusser at this point, that thinker arguing that Marx does not need so much to be interpreted as read very closely so that his intended meaning becomes transparent to the reader. It is precisely over-interpretation of Marx’s texts, as is occurring repeatedly in Western Marxist circles, that Althusser is complaining causes confusion as to Marx’s message. Lyotard, however, is a deeply sceptical thinker when it comes to belief systems in general, regarding them as responsible for most of the ills of our culture in their refusal to admit the validity of positions other than their own – that is, to admit the fact of difference, a phenomenon that all poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers are keen to make us acknowledge and support (see also Jacques Derrida and Foucault, for example). A commitment to diversity is one of the hallmarks of these movements. Lyotard’s own preference is for ‘little narratives’; small, temporary movements which work to achieve delimited ends and then are dissolved once their particular objective is realised. The goal is to prevent the build-up of monolithic political parties (not to mention monolithic political leaders on the Joseph Stalin model) mainly interested in holding on to power for its own sake. When that happens, parties soon become authoritarian and abuse their power, as the history of communism only too amply demonstrates to a confirmed post-Marxist such as Lyotard. Lyotard had been in his early life an active member of a reform-minded group within the French Marxist community entitled socialisme ou barbarie, which could be very critical indeed of the Marxist establishment (the Communist Party, PCF, being a major factor in French politics of the time). In his writings for the group’s newspaper in the 1950s Lyotard was already expressing doubts about basic Marxist doctrinal principles, complaining that the situation in Algeria, where there was an armed revolution taking place against French colonial rule, did not really fit the classic Marxist schema and in consequence needed a very different approach taken to it. As Lyotard pointed out, Algeria was a mainly peasant-based society where a theory devised for an advanced industrialised society simply would not work, the proletariat there being minuscule (echoing the point made by Mao Zedong in the early days of communist rule in China). He could already detect the growth of a self-interested, power-conscious, party machine that would not be in Algerian society’s best interests in the longer term.

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Another of Lyotard’s colleagues in socialisme ou barbarie, Cornelius Castoriadis, was similarly dismissive of Marxism’s all-embracing approach to each and every political situation: ‘As for a rigorously rigorous theory, there is none in mathematics; how could there be one in politics?’, going on to conclude that ‘the very idea of a complete and definitive theory is a pipe dream’ (Castoriadis 1987: 4, 71). This could only mean to Castoriadis that ‘Marxism is dead as a theory’ (Castoriadis 1987: 63), an eminently post-Marxist sentiment to express. Foucault and Jean Baudrillard also both turned against Marxism, being just as critical in their own way as Lyotard of its ‘grand narrative’ pretensions. Foucault’s work rejects the notion of there being a dialectic of history, seeing no inevitability whatsoever to the rise to power of the dominant class in any age. Ideological dominance to Foucault is a matter of constructing a discourse with its own internal rules on what can and cannot be done within its sphere of operation, and managing to engineer its general acceptance; but he does not consider any discourse as being inherently superior and insists that its power can always be contested. Much of his writing is concerned with how particular discourses exert their control over the population at large, and the changes in attitudes and behaviour this brings about in a given society. Thus the discourse of ancient Greece included open tolerance of homosexuality, but this activity eventually was outlawed in later Roman and early Christian society, with heterosexuality becoming the sexual norm and homosexuality being classified as deviant behaviour. Although homosexuality continued to be practised in the Christian world, it had to do so more or less underground until very recent times. For Foucault, however, there was no moral issue involved; this was simply a matter of power being enforced on behalf of a dominant belief system. In a similar fashion, the mentally ill came to be considered behaviourally deviant and were increasingly confined to asylums in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. Another dominant group was enforcing its standards of conduct on the population at large, but there was no reason why we should accept it had any right to do so – there was no underlying dialectic at work necessitating the emergence of this discourse, therefore no obligation to abide by its rules. Just to make his opposition to dialectical materialism as clear as possible, Foucault even went so far as to insist in an interview that ‘I have never been a Marxist’ (Foucault 1988: 22). Baudrillard explicitly attacks Marxism in The Mirror of Production, particularly its obsession with production. In his view this does not, and cannot, lead to our collective liberation as Marxist theory firmly believes it will, rather it turns us into slaves of the system: ‘Revolutionary hope is based . . . hopelessly on this claim’ (Baudrillard 1975: 59), being his uncompromising judgement. This constitutes a direct attack on Marxism’s vision of human progress, which was based on a belief that it needed only a change in the ownership of the means of production, from the capitalist class over to the proletariat, to realise

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its objectives. To Baudrillard, this makes no difference – we are still trapped in a system of production for its own sake. What is also being called into question is Marxism’s economistic bias: the notion that it will only be through improving the economy that real human progress can be made. Marxism is skewed towards quantitative change at the expense of the qualitative, or at the very least assuming that the latter will automatically arise from the former. Taking the Soviet system from 1917 onwards as a test case, that becomes an increasingly difficult position to defend. Derrida’s Specters of Marx represented an intriguing contribution to the development of post-Marxism. Derrida’s anti-totalising orientation – much influenced by Adornian ‘negative dialectics’ – could hardly dispose him towards the Marxist method. His reputation was established in the first place by his critique of the totalising pretensions of structuralist theory (see Writing and Difference, for example), which he set about ‘deconstructing’ – that is, drawing attention to the various unsubstantiated assumptions on which structuralism was based. One could certainly say that Marxism was guilty of much the same sin: that there is a dialectic working through history, as a case in point. Nevertheless, Derrida was careful to acknowledge Marx’s critical role in modern culture, and there is not the note of irritation in his reassessment of Marx that can be found in so many post-Marxist thinkers (Lyotard most notoriously). We could not, Derrida argued, escape the legacy of Marx’s thought, and he remained an extremely powerful presence in contemporary political and philosophical debate – even if his status was now that of a ‘spectre’, a part of our collective ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 1994: 10). It was all a matter of how we interpreted that legacy, however, with Derrida arguing that The Communist Manifesto could be regarded as one of the most ‘urgent’ texts around today, just as long as we ‘take into account what Marx and Engels themselves say . . . about their own possible “aging” and their intrinsically irreducible historicity’ (Derrida 1994: 13). This opens the way for Marxist theory to be refashioned to meet contemporary socio-political circumstances. But ‘aging’ and ‘irreducible historicity’ are precisely what communism and classical Marxism deny applies to this body of thought: universal theories do not need to be refashioned, they hold for all time. It is over that crucial issue of historicity where the divide between classical and post-Marxists mainly lies. Derrida actively campaigns for multiple interpretations of Marx’s thought, arguing that there is no one true reading of this body of material; instead, ‘there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them’ (Derrida 1994: 13). While this is firmly in line with the poststructuralist commitment to pluralism, it can only appear unacceptable to the more orthodox Marxist with his or her belief in the essential unity of the Marxist message. Further attempts have been made to ‘postmodernise’ Marx, as in Terrell Carver’s The Postmodern Marx, where he posits ‘multiple Marxes’ (Carver 1998: 234) to replace the interpretative model of the classical tradition, with

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its assumption of a unified body of thought which demands a communist system in order to be properly realised (Carver 1998: 5). The Marx that emerges from any engagement with his work then becomes simply the ‘product’ of a particular ‘reading strategy’ (Carver 1998: 5) that happened to be adopted at that time: so Marx can be postmodern, or poststructural, or deconstructive, or feminist, and so on, depending on the reader. Again, the idea is to open Marx up to contemporary developments, rather than being trapped into trying to explain why the theory has been systematically misinterpreted by so many of its adherents in the political arena. Although Marxism then loses its prized quality of comprehensiveness, the positive aspect is that its insights and analytical power are being brought into current cultural debates, so it can be argued that it is still meeting its original objective of helping to change the world. Piecemeal change of this kind, however, would not be radical enough to satisfy the demands of hard-line Marxists, for whom anything short of revolution and the creation of a new social order would count as failure. Adapting Marxism in such a fashion would be to them fatally to weaken the theory. After running through this selection of postmodern and poststructural thinkers it becomes clear that the major objection to Marxism is its totalising imperative. Postmodernism and poststructuralism (which overlap quite considerably with each other) are proceeding from a very different world view, one based on difference, diversity and the general incompleteness of things. From this kind of perspective Marxism appears to be a form of fundamentalism, demanding adherence to its basic principles much in the way that religious faiths do: either you take these on board uncritically or you run the risk of being dubbed a heretic – regardless of how much of Marx’s scheme you are convinced by otherwise. For the true believer there is no middle path: you are either with us, and totally so, or you are against us. The sceptical temperament associated with postmodern and poststructural thought cannot accept such restrictive terms of rerefence, and can only be thought of as post-Marxist – with the emphasis very definitely on the ‘post’ in this instance.

Slavoj Žižek: Leninist, Western or Post-Marxist? Although very often classified under the heading of postmodernism or poststructuralism, Slavoj Žižek is notoriously difficult to pin down quite that precisely, being more than something of a maverick thinker, and as such he occupies an oddly ambivalent position in the development of a post-Marxist consciousness. In The Sublime Object of Ideology he provides what is effectively a striking new interpretation of false consciousness, based on Lacanian psychiatry, which works to undermine its credibility as a key concept in the Marxist canon. Marxist theory held that it was only because they were in a state of false consciousness that the working class did not rise up against their capitalist oppressors, and that once they came to recognise this fully then

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they would take the appropriate action of revolution with the goal of seizing power for themselves. Hegemony explained how this false consciousness was propagated. Žižek, however, argued that there was a quite natural disposition to refuse to face up to what we as individuals took to be unpalatable facts: a condition he described as ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (Žižek 1989: 29). As Žižek saw it, in such cases we both knew and did not know what the real state of affairs was, simultaneously. That we were being oppressed by a far superior, utterly ruthless power could qualify as just such an unpalatable fact, and enlightened false consciousness could be considered an entirely rational response under the circumstances – a recipe for personal survival in trying times. This was not an argument that classical Marxists could accept at all, in that it appears to bypass class consciousness altogether. Žižek also takes more direct aim at Marxism when he questions the assumptions of discourse in communist systems: ‘the People always support the Party because any member of the People who opposes Party rule automatically excludes himself from the People’ (Žižek 1989: 147). Unity from such a perspective therefore amounts to little more than a sham: in such cases we can note, yet again, that ‘legitimacy’ is being used in a highly questionable manner. Žižek is also capable, however, of defending Marxism’s Leninist tradition in quite a provocative fashion – putting the case for the return of revolutionary terrorism, for example, in his later book In Defence of Lost Causes. We should be seeking to ‘reinvent’ rather than ‘reject terror’, we are told there, with Žižek arguing that Leninist pragmatism ‘implied a vision of state and society totally incompatible with the Stalinist perspective’ (Žižek 2008: 7, 232). Stalinism represents for Žižek a perversion of the revolution’s ideals (as Trotsky had believed before him), and we should not judge communism on the basis of that. Universal emancipation was the inspiration behind the communist movement, and it is a cause that Žižek feels still very much committed to carrying on. In Defence of Lost Causes is worth dwelling on, because it seems to sum up the quandary that both Western and post-Marxist thinkers in the twenty-first century find themselves caught in: can Marxism be detached from communism’s bloody history, or does that merely constitute a defence of the indefensible? To his credit, Žižek does not shy away from the challenge this poses but attacks it head on, relishing the opportunity to defend ‘lost causes’ on the grounds that the current socio-political situation demands that such a choice has to be made. Postmodern accommodations with the new socio-political order are to be deplored, and Žižek opts to put the case for revolutionary idealism instead: that will be his way of remaining true to Marx, rather than the route taken by such as Laclau and Mouffe with their essentially non-violent ‘radical democracy’. He has no time for any ‘softer’ (Žižek 2008: 6) methods of trying to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat: what is needed is a return to revolutionary basics, even if it involves a measure of terrorism to undermine the status quo and bring about real, and hopefully lasting, change.

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Postmodernism is to be regarded as giving in to the enemy, with Žižek very deliberately going against the grain of the prevailing intellectual currents on the left, with their attempts to come to terms with the doctrines of the market, and enthusiastic advocacy of greater pluralism in the ideological arena. The cause may have been lost, repeatedly and systematically, but in Žižek’s opinion not irretrievably so. Yet that is an argument unlikely to convince much outside the ranks of the hardline left, for whom the next time around is always going to be the lucky one when everything falls into place and goes according to plan. Žižek himself is quite blasé about assuming this attitude, almost gleefully informing us that, ‘the truth is that I don’t give a damn about my opponent’ (Žižek 2008: 8). Žižek works hard to distance himself from Stalinism, referring to it right at the book’s outset as ‘a nightmare which caused perhaps even more human suffering than fascism’ (Žižek 2008: 7), which is a strong statement for anyone of the far left to make. Marx is not to be held responsible for such a ghastly misinterpretation of the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that certainly did nothing for the cause of universal emancipation. Therein lies the rub, however, as Stalin was by no means the only dictatorial leader that worldwide communism managed to produce. Mao’s crimes against humanity are well documented, too; and North Korea still labours under a tyrannical regime that could hardly be further from emancipatory ideals. The question does need to be asked as to why communism has so often fallen into this trap, and whether there is something in Marxism itself that promotes the development of such behaviour. For thinkers like Adorno it is the totalising imperative within Marxism that gives rises to totalitarian-minded regimes on the Soviet or Maoist model, and far from being a perversion of Marxist theory it is instead intrinsic to it. As long as that imperative is adhered to, and acts as a guide to political conduct, dictatorship in its most negative sense will be the likeliest result. From this standpoint, attempts to separate Marx from Marxism as it has been practised over the course of the twentieth century – Stalinism, Maoism and all – are simply doomed to failure. Žižek, however, begs to disagree, and is dismissive of Adornian-style pessimism. Žižek’s call for a return to Marxist revolutionary idealism despite communism’s largely depressing historical record, is at once both admirable and somewhat desperate. Admirable, in the sense that he is not afraid to face up to that record and adopt an unfashionable position: few contemporary Marxist theorists are willing to be quite as explicit in their support of anything that promises widespread terror and violence. Desperate, in being apparently stuck in what is now a very outmoded form of thinking that no longer has any significant resonance with the general public, and is likely to fall on deaf ears. It is as if Marxism has learned no new tactics even with over a century of at best problematical socio-political impact to contemplate: under the circumstances, going back to terror can come across as just plain

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nihilistic. For all Žižek’s impassioned pleading, it still registers as yet another exercise in revisionism: it wasn’t Marx’s fault; it wasn’t Lenin’s fault; most Marxist critics are deeply misguided, or haven’t really understood what is at stake, etc., etc. While Žižek is right to point up how increasingly unequal and tension-riven a society we are living in at present (neoliberalism remaining the prevailing economic orthodoxy, despite the painful austerity that has come in the wake of the economic mess it left behind after its latest ‘boom’), reaching back to a tradition of terror – however ‘reinvented’ – hardly seems a viable, long-term solution to that malaise.

Conclusion Post-Marxism has performed a very valuable service in providing a sustained left wing-oriented critique of classical Marxism, which has more weight to it than any similar critique by Marxism’s traditional enemies on the right ever could have, in not coming from a prejudiced position. Marxism’s failings in terms of its intolerance of internal criticism are only too well documented, and have succeeded in giving the theory a very negative image: there is no doubt that it can be both authoritarian and totalitarian in operation, as even a cursory glance at Soviet or Maoist history will quickly reveal. What postMarxism suggests is that Marxism can be reformed and still play an important role in global politics, as long as it is interpreted in a freer and more open-ended manner than it has been for the bulk of its history: insisting on the maintenance of doctrinal purity and absolute allegiance to a party line is unlikely to win much in the way of support in contemporary culture. From a post-Marxist perspective, thinkers like Althusser only succeed in leading us into a dead end. Perhaps Žižek’s later work is a recognition of the pressing need to break out of this impasse, hence his growing impatience with most of both Western and post-Marxist thought. Even more moderate Marxists agree that we have to change direction, with David Harvey, for example, arguing that we should now consider the possibility of putting together a general movement with all those who feel themselves to be ‘anti-capitalist’, suggesting that we call it ‘the Party of Indignation’ and drop our concern with divisive doctrinal differences (Harvey 2010: 260). Whether post-Marxism itself can develop much further as a theoretical position is a more questionable issue. Laclau and Mouffe have certainly tried their best to do so through their concept of radical democracy, but this remains at best a somewhat abstract notion, difficult to put into practice in the current political climate. Nevertheless, radical democracy has succeeded in pointing up the shortcomings of liberal democracy in the West, and Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis of this system is never less than extremely thought-provoking. Politics in liberal democracies does tend towards a rather cosy consensus of the main parties involved that works to exclude marginal voices, and it can be very

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hard to effect any significant degree of change under such a system, which it suits those parties to maintain. Yet outside that political bubble of entrenched interests there is quite a high level of disenchantment about the system to note in recent times. This manifests itself in several ways, some of which radical democracy could approve of and incorporate within its project: the ecology movement, the anti-globalisation movement, and Occupy all spring readily to mind. Some of them it patently could not, however: namely, right-wing nationalism, neo-Nazism, or anti-government movements like the Tea Party in the USA with its almost mystical belief in the power of individualism (the ‘frontier’ spirit, as was, being applied in a totally alien socio-political context). Derrida’s description of Marx as a spectral presence in post-communist times very neatly captures where we are now with his legacy. As Derrida also points out, ghosts can be very persistent, and critical theorists still feel the need to take account of Marxism in their work given that it forms such a large part of the West’s modern cultural history. Marxism always seems to be lurking somewhere in the background of the debates in the field, a body of work that theorists must orient themselves against, both politically and theoretically. One might say that the ghost of Marx lies behind the notion of the precariat, for example; particularly when it is suggested by such analysts as Standing that it has as-yet untapped revolutionary potential that might eventually pose considerable problems for the currently dominant neoliberal economic order. Certainly, no one on the left can avoid engaging with Marxism in some fashion, as post-Marxism in all its formulations so clearly demonstrates, and those at the other end of the political spectrum will have to take note of the conclusions reached, generating yet more dialogue in turn. Marxism is still a valuable resource, therefore, if no longer the ultimate authority that so many once took it to be. Summing up on the bloc of three chapters on Marxism, it is worth noting that many of the topics and concepts developed by classical Marxists, Western Marxists and post-Marxists have now become part of the common currency of critical debate. There are few critical theorists around nowadays who will not pay close attention to the socio-political implications of their theories and objects of study, or to the overall ideological context within which their work takes place. Marxism has been instrumental in bringing the issue of ideology right to the forefront of critical analysis, and that may well prove to be its most lasting, and by no means to be underestimated, contribution to the field of critical theory.

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tructuralism was very much the theory in vogue in critical circles during the mid-twentieth century, especially with the development of semiology, the theory of signs, and most especially in French thought. Ferdinand de Saussure had pointed the way to semiology in his famous Course in General Linguistics decades earlier, and Roland Barthes was to popularise the ‘linguistic model’ as the basis for theoretical enquiry, conceiving of the world of discourse as a series of narratives each with its own underlying grammar. Georges Van Den Abbeele traces the history of structuralism from its linguistic roots through to more recent work in the field of semiology from Umberto Eco onwards. Often criticised for its overly formalistic method and concerns, Lucien Goldmann was to add a more political orientation in his so-called ‘genetic structuralism’, and this variant is the topic of Marcel Danesi’s chapter. Danesi insists that genetic structuralism has become unfairly neglected, and that it still has much to contribute to contemporary intellectual enquiry, particularly through its commitment to ‘dialectic method’ in the social sciences. It is one of several theories covered in the volume which are clearly ripe for reappraisal. After the critique mounted by several ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers like Jacques Derrida from the 1960s onwards, structuralism’s influence declined sharply, but many of its techniques survive in critical analysis, and semiology is still actively developing as a field.

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4 STRUCTURALISM AND SEMIOTICS Georges Van Den Abbeele

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hile commonly thought in combination with each other, structuralism and semiotics arose from fundamentally different concerns and objects of study. Semiotics is a theory of signs with roots dating back to antiquity but reformulated in the modern era by Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, working independently from each other and to significantly different ends. Structuralism is basically a methodological model based in Boolean algebra and group theory but deployed in varying ways across the extent of the human and social sciences. The two come together first in Saussure’s early twentieth-century development of a ‘structural linguistics’ based on a conceptualisation of the linguistic sign as necessarily arbitrary and conventional, and then, most dramatically, in mid-century with the ‘structural anthropology’ of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose work creatively and brilliantly applies the Saussurian ‘linguistic model’ to kinship relations and other social and cultural phenomena. Lévi-Strauss is also to be credited as the first to use the work ‘structuralism’ per se to describe his work and that of like-minded researchers, such as Roland Barthes and Algirdas Julien Greimas. After the heyday of classic structuralism and semiology in the 1950s and 60s, the split between the two emerged in the form of poststructuralisms of various kinds, on the one hand (including deconstruction, discourse theory and postcolonialism), and a more properly cognitive semiotics, on the other (with eventual links to cognitive science, informatics, and some forms of visual studies and cultural studies). The classic premise of sign theory is that of something standing for something else (aliquid stat pro aliquo), a formula found variously throughout ancient and medieval philosophy, but perhaps best captured by Augustine’s definition of a sign as ‘a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses [Signum est enim res praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire]’ (Augustine 1995: II. 56–7). For Saussure, coming out of this tradition, signs are twofold or ‘Janus-like’ entities with a signifying aspect that stands for something signified. The resulting signifier/signified dyad, however, is not simply reducible to an opposition between words and things. Prioritising the linguistic sign over other semiotic manifestations, Saussure describes the

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relation between signifier and signified as that between a concept and a soundimage. By the latter, Saussure insists that it is ‘not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses’ (Saussure 1960: 66), a definition that closely recalls the Augustinian formulation above. The signified, by the same token, is not the referent or physical object per se but what is ‘signified’ about it in the form of a conventionalised concept or meaning: Whether we try to find the meaning of the Latin word arbor or the word that Latin uses to designate the concept ‘tree’, it is clear that only the associations sanctioned by that language appear to us to conform to reality, and we disregard whatever others might be imagined. (Saussure 1960: 66–7) To boot, the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary and conventional, that is to say, there is no natural or motivated relation between soundimage and the concept it signifies: the sounds t-r-i have nothing at all to do with the plant form indicated. Saussure thus rejects any form of cratylism, or the idea that there is a ‘natural’ relation between signs and what they signify, a position traditionally associated with the Greek philosopher, Cratylus, as portrayed in Plato’s dialogue by the same name. But Saussure’s contribution, as the title to his work suggests, Course in General Linguistics (edited posthumously by his students in 1916), goes far beyond the classic theory of the sign in two parts to elaborate an entirely new theory of language in opposition to the classic philology of the time that remained primarily interested in charting the historical derivation of individual words and etymologies as atomised units. Instead, the ‘structural’ theory of language, or ‘structural linguistics’, proposed by Saussure posits language as an arbitrarily constructed system of signs whose value lies not in their identity as positive terms but in their difference from each other. Saussure’s emphasis is on a ‘synchronic’ rather than ‘diachronic’ view of language, and on its implicit structure (what he calls ‘langue’) rather than any particular uses or utterances (parole). Concomitantly, Saussure’s approach underscores an understanding of language in terms of its code rather than any specific message that might be communicated by the code. The arbitrariness of the sign is key to Saussure’s larger project, to the extent that meaning or signification is not about a relation of identities but about oppositions and differences. What this means is that signs (and their component parts) cannot be thought in isolation but only in relation to other signs. This is where Saussure’s contribution to the development of semiotics is decisive. By way of example, it is not simply that the red colour of the stop signal has an arbitrary relation to its signification (a relation of difference, one might add here), nor is it simply that red in this context is conventionally understood to mean ‘stop’, but that it is not so much the red that matters per se as that it is not green, or yellow, which would alternatively

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indicate ‘go’ or ‘caution’. For this reason, it doesn’t matter what shade of red (pinkish or purplish or whatever) it is, just as long as it is not confused for yellow, or green. Signs exist, then, as a function of their difference, not only internally as per the arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and signified but also externally in terms of their opposition to other signs. These differences can be charted along two axes: 1) the paradigmatic, or the relation between the actual sign deployed at a given time and all its potential alternatives (‘the cat on the mat’ rather than ‘the dog on the mat’ or ‘the hat on the mat’); and 2) the syntagmatic, or the relation between signs in their sequence (‘the cat on the mat’ rather than ‘the mat on the cat’). The structuralist linguist, Roman Jakobson (1956), following up on Saussure would later correlate these two kinds of relation to those described by the classic rhetorical figures of metaphor (or relations of comparability/substitutability) and metonymy (or relations of contiguity/sequence). The sophistication and rigour of Saussurian structural linguistics would quickly enable linguistics to claim a kind of scientific prestige among the human sciences even while providing a useful model applicable not only to other obvious sign systems (the dream of a general semiology) but also to all kinds of other phenomena susceptible to such a structural or structuralist analysis. Before turning to ways in which the linguistic model is applied to other fields, however, it is worth considering alternative theories of the sign and their effects on the more specific area of semiotics per se. One alternative to the more properly semiotic dimension of Saussure’s work can be found in the somewhat earlier work of the American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce. As opposed to Saussure’s dyadic formulation of signifier and signified, Peirce proposes a tripartite theory of the sign that also channels Augustine: ‘A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ (Peirce 1985: 5). What the representamen stands for or represents Peirce calls the ‘object’ of the sign, but to the further extent that the sign ‘addresses somebody’, it also ‘creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign’ (Peirce 1985: 5). This resultant sign Peirce calls the ‘interpretant’. The interpretant, in turn, can serve as the representamen or even the object for another interpretant, and so forth. As opposed to Saussure’s code-like division between signifier and signified, Peirce’s sign theory thereby thinks toward a general production of signs and meaning, or semiosis. Part of the difference between Peirce and Saussure has also to do with their methodological aims. For Saussure, the theory of the sign is established with a view towards elaborating a general theory of linguistics and language-like systems, such as codes. Peirce, on the other hand, is a philosopher interested in more general questions of logic, epistemology and cognition, hence the question of the interpretant, or how we know not only what a sign signifies but that it signifies. Such an approach leads him to develop several topologies of the sign, including most famously, the triad of icon, index and symbol, which define differing kinds of relation between sign and object. Whereas the symbol corresponds to

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Saussure’s arbitrary and conventional relation between a sign and what it signifies, the icon posits a relation of similarity (such as pictures, diagrams, mimicry of all kinds) and the index one of contiguity between those terms (such as that between smoke and fire, or a weathervane and the wind). The latter two thus represent motivated relations within the sign. So, while Saussure’s work has contributed more directly to the structural analysis of systems, Peirce’s semiology, via the subsequent work of Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, Kalevi Kull and others, has often proven more useful to scholars interested in various forms of signification (especially visual or mixed textual/visual semiosis: pictoral representation, film, advertising, tourism, design, and so on), as well as non-human communication (zoosemiotics) and informatics. A different approach developed in the Soviet Union with the critique of Russian formalism led by the circle of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, published in 1929 under the name of Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (Voloshinov 1986), mounts a dialectical argument against both traditional historical philology and Saussurian linguistics, denounced as ‘abstract objectivism’. Further developed by Bakhtin himself, most specifically in his essay, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (in The Dialogic Imagination), the argument questions the validity of the distinction between a synchronic and a diachronic approach to language, specifically by criticising Saussure’s depiction of langue as the impersonal system of norms from which individual utterances or parole can be generated. For Volosinov/Bakhtin, all language is deeply socio-historical and embedded in dialogue. What this means is that there is in fact no such thing as an individual or monologic utterance. Utterances are by definition social and assume an interlocutor, if not multiple interlocutors, whose utterances both assume previous utterances and anticipated responses: the dialogic principle. Moreover, language is not ‘unitary’ but inherently multiple and stratified, diversified by differences of genre, social class, professional practice, age, region, even local clan or family organisation. To boot, there is even within the word, the weight of the multiple histories, references, connotations, accentuations and divergent meanings it necessarily bears as one uses it. This irreducible diversity of language, its necessary plurality as languages, Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. The socio-historical fact of dialogics and heteroglossia means that all signification is contextual and in struggle with other meanings and accents, with ‘alien words’. As such, all language partakes in ideology. What we call language is but the current composite of this ongoing social and historical clash between different languages, different ideologies, in constant dialogue. There is no self-standing langue or free, unencumbered parole, no fixed signified or signifier, only heteroglossia in dialogue: The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogue threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance, it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. (Bakhtin 1981: 276)

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Still another alternative to Saussure, specifically with reference to his semiotic theory, was the fourfold division of the sign proposed by the Danish linguist, Louis Hjelmslev. Recasting signifier and signified as expression and content, each of which can be ascribed its own form and substance, Hjelmslev like Peirce allows for a kind of analysis (which he terms glossematics) that exceeds the phonocentrism of an approach based primarily in spoken language. Expression can have the same form, for example, but with a very different material substance (speech, writing, gesture, etc.) to indicate a content, whose form (semantic presentation) is also to be differentiated from its immaterial substance (meaning). Finally, another linguist, A. J. Greimas, formulates his own fourfold model of the sign in purely abstract and differential terms as the ‘elementary structure of signification’, better known as the ‘semiotic square’. Refining the Saussurian insistence on the priority of oppositional difference by reintroducing the classic logical distinction between contradiction (or the negation of another term) and contrary (or antagonistically opposing terms, such as hot and cold), Greimas posits four ‘semes’, or minimal units of signification, two of which (a and ~a, or anti-a) are defined by their contrary relation to each other. Each of these two semes posits its own contradictory semes (non-a and non-~a), the two of which, at least in Greimas’s preliminary formulation, then form a parallel relation of contrariness to each other. Finally, one can draw vertical lines of implication between a and non-~a, on the one hand, and between ~a and non-~a, on the other hand, completing the quadralinear relation between the terms, readily visualised in the form of a square: a

~a

non ~a

non -a

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What Greimas proposes here is nothing less than a rigorously structuralist semantics, where what a seme or bit of meaning ‘is’ matters less than its relational constellation, the sum of the contrary and contradictory differences between and within signs. The added merits of Greimas’s model is both to posit a generative model of signification or semiosis and an impressive adaptability in terms of scale (from the mico-discursive level to large narrative sequences, or from sentence to novel) as well as range (texts, images, film, social and ideological formations of all kinds). In this way, Greimassian structural semantics emerges both in response to the application of the structural linguistics model to other domains of thought and as further incitation for that expansion into the broad intellectual movement understood as structuralism. One should note in this regard Greimas’s particular association with the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and with the literary and cultural critic, Roland Barthes. It is Lévi-Strauss, of course, who pioneered the first and most ambitious expansion of the Saussurian linguistic model into other fields, in particular that of anthropology. His 1948 doctoral dissertation on The Elementary Structures of Kinship loudly heralded this move, first by its overt parody of Durkheim’s classic Elementary Forms of Religious Beliefs, replacing ‘form’ by ‘structure’, and then by its analysis of kinship relations not in terms of the family as an isolatable unit but as defined precisely in terms of its relation to other families and potential family members within a larger social organisation, such as a clan. Within such a social order and following the imperative of the incest taboo, men and women are expected to marry outside their kinship unit according to a culturally defined set of rules, prohibitions, imperatives and obligations. In traditional societies such as the ones he studies, the basic unit of kinship may prescribe that the maternal uncle’s relation to the nephew is to that between brother and sister as the relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife. Such a society thus acts ‘like’ a language in the Saussurian sense with a stable underlying structure that simultaneously allows for an enormous variety of expression within the system of rules that define that structure. And as in the case of Saussurian structural linguistics, the key to understanding the underlying system or ‘structure’ is not by analysing the discrete units involved but rather by analysing the relations between the terms. Such a relational analysis is the classic determining move that defines structuralism as a mode of thought, such as in the complex four-way homology or ‘isotope’ proposed above by Lévi-Strauss to explain a socially defined set of kinship relations. As opposed to a simple analogy that describes a relation between two terms, the four-point homology indicates a relational structure that defines how multiple terms enter into a ongoing set of specific relations with each other: not just a is like b, but a is to b as c is to d. And although the metaphor of language is loudly proclaimed, the methodology actually deployed by Lévi-Strauss can be seen to owe as much to set theory and abstract algebra as it does to structural linguistics per se.

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In his work, Lévi-Strauss accordingly develops this structuralist analysis of traditional societies broadly and across innumerable examples not only with regard to kinship, but also in the cases of ritual, mythology, and the wide range of intellectual/creative practices he refers to as the ‘savage mind’. The latter is characterised, in opposition to the ‘modern’ scientist/engineer’s instrumentalised organisation of knowledge, by what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘bricolage’, or making do with the materials one has to hand, repurposing them as needed to meet a particular need or objective. And just as there are modern ‘bricoleurs’ who tinker to find solutions, so the so-called ‘savage mind’ is to be understood not as a lesser or ‘primitive’ form of intelligence but rather as the universal prototype for human behaviour as it structures our relation with the natural world, including our tendency to classify the world in different ways and reorganise it according to varying similarities and oppositions. This belief in a deep, universal structure of the human mind defines the fundamental humanism of LéviStrauss and his impassioned insistence, most notably in his autobiographical Tristes Tropiques (1955) as well as in the essays that make up The Savage Mind (1962), that traditional cultures and societies have as much or more to teach us about contemporary challenges as our vaunted modernity. This universalist impulse of structuralism is found elsewhere, and especially in the very conceptualisation of what we mean by structure. Quoting the Czech structural linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Lévi-Strauss defines the four key elements of structuralist analysis as follows. First, the aim is to move from the study of ‘conscious phenomena’ to that of their ‘unconscious infrastructure’. Second, this aim is realised by analysis of the relation between terms rather than the terms in themselves. Third, this relational analysis should show the concrete ‘system’ organising those relations, ‘elucidating their structure’, and thus, fourthly, ‘discovering general laws’ of an ‘absolute character’ (LéviStrauss 1963: 33). While methodologically useful as a proposed mode or procedure of analysis, the problem here is that we are still left a bit unclear as to what exactly a structure is, a problem compounded by the use of the word, ‘structure’, or its close cousin, ‘system’, within the very attempt to define it. A more cogent definition is the one proposed by the psychologist Jean Piaget, who elaborates three conditions for something to meet a strong definition of structure as an analytic concept spanning many disciplines from mathematics to the human sciences. Drawing overtly from group theory and abstract algebra rather than Saussurian linguistics, Piaget defines a structure, firstly, as a ‘totality’, or an entity whose properties distinguish it as a whole from the mere set of its elements. Secondly, a structure must bear within itself a transformational capacity; and thirdly, it must be self-regulating (Piaget 1971a). Language, kinship and other systems of social behaviour clearly qualify as structures under this definition, which strives to differentiate the concept from the Platonic idealism of structure as a stable form by insisting rather on a structure’s internal logic as both consistent and self-transforming.

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This dynamic or ‘constructivist’ concept of structure can also be applied, as does Piaget himself in his radical revision of Gestalt psychology, to the various (synchronic) stages in the (diachronic) process of child development, each of which logically but also predictably leads into another as the child interacts with a necessarily unstable environment. For Piaget, the self-regulating perceptual/intellectual stage also contains within itself the wherewithal to overcome any cognitive dissonances that emerge in the encounter with one’s experiential environment by suddenly and wholly recasting itself at a higher, more complex stage of development, with an entirely different set of operational rules and internal logic. This notion of a sequence of synchronic stages superseding each other by the sudden disruption of an epistemic crisis enables a kind of diachronic or historicising structuralism whose echoes can be found in the work of Thomas Kuhn and the early Michel Foucault of The Order of Things, but also in Louis Althusser’s revisionist Marxist concept of the ‘epistemological break’ and in Jacques Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror stage’. Elsewhere, however, structuralism designates more specifically the application of the Saussurian linguistic model to other fields of study and, perhaps most dramatically, to the area of literary analysis. The key figure in this regard is Roman Jakobson, whose early association with the Russian formalists, and subsequent role in founding of the Prague Linguistic Circle, make him a prime articulator of the relation between linguistics and ‘poetics’, broadly understood in the wake of Russian formalism as the scientific study of literature, or more precisely, ‘literariness’, as a specific use of language with definable (formal) features (Shklovsky 1965a, Eichenbaum 1965). Expanding upon the code/message distinction, for example, within the communicational situation of a sender and a receiver, Jakobson delineates six functions, each of which dominates and inflects the communication in profoundly different ways. The emotive function, for example, focuses on the expressiveness of the sender; while the conative function is directed toward persuading or moving the receiver. The referential function directs us to the context; the phatic function is concerned with assuring the channel of communication; and the metalinguistic function highlights the code. Finally, the poetic function, for Jakobson, dominates when the emphasis is on the message itself, as is the case not only in poetry per se but whenever the focus of attention and self-reflection is on the very statement of what is said. Further drawing upon the Saussurian differentiation between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions of language, Jakobson defines the poetic function as the projection of ‘the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection [paradigmatic] into the axis of combination [syntagmatic]’ (Jakobson 1960: 358). In other work, Jakobson also correlates this primacy of the paradigmatic in poetic language with metaphor (or similarity), and the concomitant dominion of the syntagmatic with metonymy (or contiguity), thus reconnecting the new terminology of structural linguistics with the classic rhetorical categories of tropes (‘Two Aspects of Language and

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Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, 1956). This powerful convergence of linguistic terms and literary concepts has proven irresistible to generations of literary critics and theorists. In terms of its subsequent development, structuralist literary analysis can thus be observed in three different ways. First, there is a kind of reinvigorated mode of textual explication, making use of all the terms and concepts of structural linguistics, but otherwise strikingly similar to Anglo-American New Criticism with its emphasis on laboriously unpacking the presupposed coherence or unity of an aesthetic object, in other words, its underlying unity of form and content, the exposition of which is the fundamental task of the interpreter. A prime example of this kind of work in a structuralist context is the infamous and elaborately detailed explication of Charles Baudelaire’s poem, ‘The Cats’, by the superstar structuralist duo of Roman Jakobson and Claude LéviStrauss. To the extent, however, that structuralism is really a mode of analysis rather than an interpretive or hermeneutic method per se, the results of structuralist textual exegesis often appear somewhat underwhelming, and all the more so given the laborious and painstakingly precise deployment of technical linguistic terminology. To say that the phonetics of Baudelaire’s poem (or any other text) underscores its symbolic content, or that the key to the poem lies in the word situated at its formal centre (middle word in the middle line), hardly contributes to an understanding of that poem beyond the methodologically presupposed convergence of form and content in a great work penned by a culturally acknowledged ‘genius’ in the craft. On the other hand, the topological exposition of the systemic elements in a group or corpus of works is where the linguistically and mathematically inspired sources of structuralist literary analysis find a much stronger and more intellectually enriching outcome. This is the second of the three levels mentioned above. In this case, one chooses a corpus of related works (by the same writer, in the same genre, same period, etc.) and studies them as one might a language with each work being a kind of parole that helps us infer the langue or systemic structure that generates the different works in question but with unsuspected (or unconscious) similarities between them. Key works in this mode include Roland Barthes’s On Racine (1962), Tzvetan Todorov’s Grammaire du Décameron (1969), or Umberto Eco’s ‘James Bond: a narrative combinatorics’, which itself appears among other important contributions by Barthes, Todorov, Greimas and others, in a defining special issue of the journal, Communications, in 1966 on ‘the structural analysis of narrative’. Eco’s study, in particular, is noteworthy for its systematic unravelling of the sexist, racist and xenophobic stereotypes that form the underlying structural basis for Ian Fleming’s popular novels, a critical move that clearly anticipates the later emergence of cultural studies. In terms of scale, the most ambitious undertaking in this second level of structuralist literary analysis is the massive four-volume Mythologiques (1964–71) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, where the

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anthropologist details the oppositional structures, combinations and permutations that define the vast corpus of Amerindian myth. In the preface to the first volume, The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss further elaborates on the linguistic metaphor by proposing a more extended analogy between myth and music as representing ‘common mental structures’ that both exist in time as linear sequences yet suspend time by their fundamental repeatability. At the same time, though, myths and musical compositions allow, and may even encourage, a stunning set of differing expressions, or variations on a theme. It does not matter, insists Lévi-Strauss in a key corollary to his structuralist approach, with which variation, or which specific myth one chooses to begin the analysis since the presupposition is that the same underlying structure will eventually be revealed no matter where the starting point. In addition to these two levels of structuralist literary analysis that proceed either to verify the formal unity of a single work or to locate the common core of a given set of works, a third level proceeds to grasp a text within a larger system of signs. Such a analysis is more properly semiotic than structuralist in orientation and is most capaciously and exhaustively outlined by Umberto Eco in his A Theory of Semiotics, but its exemplary figure in both theory and practice is Roland Barthes, whose abiding interests in all kinds of signs and systems of signification clearly exceed his more narrowly structuralist works, just as his critical engagement with all kinds of cultural and popular cultural forms casts a much wider net than his nonetheless highly original and field transformative achievements in the specific area of literary criticism. But Barthes’s initial point of departure is in a Brechtian-inspired form of ideology critique whereby the overt designation of artifice as artifice reveals the ideological motivations behind its production and reception. The critical work of showing how signs operate as signs thus subtends a demystifying project to reveal the constructed, ideologically motivated basis behind what would otherwise pass as natural, or what ‘goes without saying’. Writing Degree Zero (1953) already begins this project by designating a level of signification, which he calls ‘writing’, situated between the normative and impersonal strictures of language, on the one hand, and the personal idiosyncrasies of style, on the other. Writing, in terms that also recall Bakhtin’s dialogics, is ‘both form and value’ as it locates, or more precisely, signals the writer’s engagement with a given historical and literary conjuncture. From the liberal use of obscenities as the sign of a radical political stance in periodicals from the French Revolution to the deliberately neutral or blank writing deployed by post-World War II writers such as Albert Camus or Maurice Blanchot (the ‘writing degree zero’ of the title), Barthes traces how these overt signs of literariness translate certain ideological or political positions. As such, they represent a second order of signification propped onto the primary signifying level of signifiers and signifieds, whereby the signifieds in turn serve as the signifiers for a second-order signified. Barthes pursues this approach in his groundbreaking study of mass culture, Mythologies (1957), constructed as

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a series of very short analyses of a stunning variety of specific cultural phenomena (sports, cuisine, travel guides, celebrity news, household products, political ads, etc.) followed by a long, theoretical essay which elaborates the concept of a second-order signification as the key to revealing the ideological mystifications at work. One of the most memorable essays in Mythologies, ‘Wine and Milk’, lyrically unpacks the beloved cultural signification of wine in France as the quintessential signifier of Frenchness to the point that efforts to introduce milk as a healthy alternative by President Mendès-France or through American movies were doomed to failure and ridicule: ‘milk remains an exotic substance; it is wine which is part of the nation’ (Barthes 1973: 68). To which Barthes appends one of his most damning conclusions: The mythology of wine can in fact help us to understand the usual ambiguity of our daily life. For it is true that wine is a good and fine substance, but it is no less true that its production is deeply involved in French capitalism, whether it is that of the private vintners or that of the big settlers in Algeria who impose on the Muslims, on the very land of which they have been dispossessed, a crop of which they have no need, while they lack even bread. There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent. And the characteristic of our current alienation is precisely that wine cannot be an unalloyedly blissful substance, except if we wrongfully forget that it is also the product of an expropriation. (Barthes 1973: 68, trans. modified) But Barthes’s semiological pursuit of such multiple layers of signification, where each signified in turn becomes the signifier for a higher-order signified, eventually leads to his breaking away from classic structuralism toward what would be called poststructuralism. This break is signalled by the publication of S/Z in 1970 as well as several contemporaneous articles, in particular, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), and ‘From Work to Text’ (1971). In a sense, S/Z represents the high watermark of structuralism, beginning as a massive textual explication of a single short story by Honoré de Balzac, Sarrasine, rather arbitrarily divided into myriad small units of analysis (typically a single sentence, or even just a clause, but sometimes a couple of sentences), which are then each subjected to the full toolbox of structural and semiotic analysis, organised by Barthes into five codes: hermeneutic, semantic, action, symbolic, and reference. The result is a reading of the Balzac story that dwarfs the original in size, some 200 pages of analysis for a mere thirty pages of text. More significantly, what is revealed by this marathon interpretation is precisely not the isolation of a common infrastructural core that would effectively be the blueprint for all other Balzac stories, all other examples of nineteenth-century prose fiction, or for that matter, all narrative form itself as a fundamental category of the human mind. Contradicting

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the Lévi-Straussian reduction of a large narrative corpus to a single ur-myth, Barthes’s intense analysis of a single short story instead powerfully reveals the specific ways in which that text is in fact different from other narratives. Moreover, this focus on textual difference rather than structural identity with other works also opens the text up to a much vaster network of significations. ‘From Work to Text’ details this process as one of unlimited difference and semiosis, whereby what seems at first to be a self-standing work of art unravels as an infinite chain of signs and signification that endlessly refers to and rejoins other texts, an indefinite and horizonless intertext. Within this web of (inter) textuality that necessarily both precedes and succeeds us, the ‘author’ can no longer be considered the sole source and origin of a work for whom he or she would stand as its ultimate authority and guarantor of the text’s meaning. This is what Barthes means by his celebrated, provocative and often misunderstood announcement of the ‘death of the author’. This does not mean that there are no authors in the sense of writers who take their material and fashion it out of other texts, only that writers can no longer be considered to create and control godlike the texts they write, that as soon as they are written, readers will make what they may out of them, becoming in turn ‘writerly’ rather than simply ‘readerly’ in their reception, understanding and retransmittal of texts. This concept of textuality then drives a host of ‘post’-structuralist concerns, most notably those of the circle of scholars around the journal Tel Quel, for whom textual semiotics became the basis for a revolutionary (and at times, explicitly Maoist) politics that linked the ‘liberation of the signifier’ to that of the unconscious and of exploited labour (thus summarily collapsing Saussure with Freud and Marx). This amalgamation is most striking in the early work of Julia Kristeva (Semeiotikè, 1969; The Revolution of Poetic Language, 1974), who redefines the ‘semiotic’ to refer to the pre-Oedipal stage of the child immersed in a maternal realm of inchoate, undifferentiated sense as opposed to the subsequent ‘symbolic’ order of language, meaning and (paternal) law. Other critics and thinkers inspired by Barthes’s approach to textuality, such as Gérard Genette, Jonathan Culler or Michael Riffaterre, focused more particularly on concomitant questions of literary interpretation, such as the complex role of rhetorical figures or tropes, paratexts or framing material (such as book covers, title pages, prefaces, postfaces, appendices, etc.), presuppositional or inferential structures, and hypo- or intertexts. Still others, such as Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch dramatically expanded the field of textuality to include visual, cinematic or other cultural material. Barthes himself contributed to the expanded concept of text with his later work on photography, fashion, Japanese culture (Empire of Signs, 1970), amorous behaviour (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1977), and perhaps most scandalously, textual pleasure itself (The Pleasure of the Text, 1973). And coming from a completely different direction and training but likewise expanding a concept of text and interpretation against the tenets of classic

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structuralism, Clifford Geertz’s 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures marked a reorientation of the field of anthropology away from the abstract structural modelling of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘view from afar’ and back toward an ethnographic practice steeped in interpretation and participant-observation. For Geertz, it is not the deep structure of a culture that matters (in its putative similarity with other human cultures as per Lévi-Strauss) so much as the specific ways the inhabitants of that culture interpret its manifestations. Those manifestations are not to be discounted as superficial signs of hidden structure but treated as texts in their own right. The ethnographer’s task, then, as per Geertz’s famous depiction of a ‘Balinese Cockfight’, is to engage in what Geertz terms after Gilbert Ryle a ‘thick description’ of that cultural text, thoroughly bringing to bear everything of note to explicate the meaning the event has for the participants themselves, that is, ‘the story they tell themselves about themselves’ (Geertz 1973: 448), even going so far as to allow that participant-observer, the ethnographer him- or herself, to be written into the scene of that description (as opposed to the classic pose of feigned absence). What has thus come to be called interpretive or symbolic anthropology studies culture as a set of texts to be interpreted much like the work a literary critic does, an analogy Geertz repeatedly makes. But just as a literary critic faces an endless task of interpretation as a text continually opens itself up, so too is the kind of cultural analysis Geertz proposes ‘intrinsically incomplete’, so that no thick description can ever be thick enough: ‘And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is’ (Geertz 1973: 29). Far from abstracting a deep structure independent of context and universally common to the human mind, Geertz reasserts the particularity of specific cultures and contexts, in a way not unlike Barthes’s rejection in S/Z of a structure that would make that story like all others and concomitant emphasis on textual difference and interpretation. This ‘post’-structuralist turn is most identified, however, with the deconstructive approach taken by Jacques Derrida, most notably in his early works, Of Grammatology (1967) and Writing and Difference (1967). His essay, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, anthologised in the latter volume and read at the landmark 1966 Johns Hopkins University conference on ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ (published as The Structuralist Controversy (Macksey and Donato 1972)), explicitly takes on the concept of structure itself with particular reference to Lévi-Strauss. Derrida argues that a structure insofar as it is an entity that is by definition ‘structured’ presupposes some kind of centre that organises it either as a defining, originating or teleological principle that structures it qua structure. The centre is both part of the structure and not part of it, it stands at its very core and yet outside it, as something hidden, both present and absent. In semiotic terms, the presupposition is that of an ultimate or transcendental signified that brings the process of interpretation to a close in the form of some final (or originary) meaning that transcends the chain of signification. Derrida deconstructs the underlying ‘metaphysics of presence’ in

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structuralism that strives to limit or forestall the limitless work of difference in undermining all forms of identity. Difference is both the necessary condition of possibility for identity, yet it is at the same time what undoes identity formation. In the case of the concept of structure, its identity further depends upon some kind of ‘free play’ in the structure (what Piaget terms ‘transformational capacity’), yet that same free play necessarily threatens the self-sameness of the structure in its restructuration. For a structuralist such as Lévi-Strauss dedicated to synchronic analysis and explanation, a major stumbling block occurs with the effect of time or history, upon synchronic organisation, hence his recourse to the concept of ‘breaks’ to explain temporal difference. History too, Derrida maintains, is equally bound by the metaphysics of presence and the positing of some transcendental signified, such as an origin or endpoint that gives history meaning, and therefore being as presence. To this conundrum of différance (the neologism Derrida coins to indicate the temporal as well as spatial play of difference), one could either follow a Rousseauist nostalgia for an origin that never was (as does Lévi-Strauss in his ‘primitivist’ ethnology of the savage mind as essential humanity) or embrace a Nietzschean delight in the endless freeplay of an ‘active interpretation’ with no horizon of truth. In Of Grammatology, Derrida expands his deconstructive reading of Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau to include Saussure’s ‘logocentric’ privileging of oral speech over writing in his modelling of semiology and structural linguistics. Writing, however, is the operator of difference within the Saussurian model, both undermining the presumed plenitude of speech as the repository of meaning by revealing the play of writing and différance within speech itself as the very principle that underlies structural linguistics, i.e. the difference between terms as what defines them, not any inherent qualities in those terms, as Saussure famously illustrates by the example of the letter ‘t’ written in various different ways all nonetheless recognisable as that letter because it is not confused with any other. Writing emerges, then, not as the secondary reproduction or degraded, imperfect ‘copy’ of oral speech but as the very arche-principle that makes the differential meaning of speech possible in the first place. Derrida’s writing informs the general theory of textuality as interpretive deconstruction, as a poststructuralism that continues nonetheless to rely on the fundamental principles of structuralism and semiotics not in order to reveal patterns of common identity and universal meaning but rather to underscore the deconstructive work of difference and of interpretation as unlimited semiosis. Various structuralist approaches persist through poststructuralism, then, less to locate or extrapolate the identity of deep structure as the endpoint of analysis than to question the epistemological value of that uncovered structure. Structure can emerge as repressive, or as a suspect form of transcendentalism, or as metaphysics of presence. For poststructuralists, the analysis continues by a focus on what is not said, on what is left missing or unaccounted for, what the gaps tell us, or even the redundancies or excesses of a given text.

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Significance may lie precisely in what eludes or points beyond structure (Marin 1973), or even a sequence of structures (Van Den Abbeele 1986). Another path for semiotics, more particularly, is opened by moving beyond the structural linguistics of Saussure, with its founding distinction between langue and parole toward the generative grammar of Chomsky and its parallel concepts of linguistic competence and performance. Whereas the Saussurian paradigm posits an abstract, underlying structure of language for which individual utterances (parole) are mere tokens, Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965) posits an innate human capacity for language, and linguistic competence, therefore, as the ability for the native speaker of any given language to ‘generate’ an infinite number of grammatically correct utterances from a finite set of rules. Like Saussure, however, competence for Chomsky is in fact an idealised capacity to be distinguished from any actual linguistic performance, which may be marked by all kinds of ‘grammatically irrelevant’ features such as mistakes or forgetfulness. The earliest and strongest attempt to adapt the generative model to a traditional area of structuralist inquiry is Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975), the second part of which elaborates a theory of ‘literary competence’ less as a method to explicate any given literary text than as a metacritical approach to understanding the act of interpretation itself. The task of a structuralist poetics, then, would be to elaborate the system of rules and conventions that define literary competence as it is put to work in the interpretation of given texts. And while Culler’s subsequent work aligns him more closely with deconstruction, others have pursued an approach inspired by generative grammar but also tempted by various forms of cognitive science. The cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We Live By, 1980) looms large in this development by their radical reframing of the Chomskyan ideal of innate human competence into the concept of the ‘embodied mind’, whereby cognition, as biologically determined by the sensory and motor capacities of the human body, structures even our most abstract reasoning on the basis of metaphors drawn from our preconceptual lived experience. Since Thomas Daddesio (1994) first proposed a possible alignment between such cognitive theories with the classic tenets of semiotics as a meaning-making activity based in sign, structure and code, efforts to bridge the two in the name of a specifically cognitive semiotics have come into existence in various locations and with differing practitioners. Like cognitive science itself, however, the term cognitive semiotics covers an impossibly widespread range of concerns and practices across an array of disciplines from neuroscience and artificial intelligence to more traditional work in literature, visual studies and anthropology (as per classic structuralism). Given such disparity, it should not be surprising to find that much of the work so far is of uneven quality, with a tendency to ‘borrow’ concepts uncritically across disciplines, or to fall back on less sophisticated, empirical notions of rational subjectivity (Warren Buckland, The Cognitive

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Semiotics of Film, 2000). The challenge will be to define semiotic cognition, or even the cognition of semiotic activity, in such a way as to enable an interpretive practice that can build on recent advances in embodied cognition without losing the critical, foundational rigour of Peirce, Saussure and their ablest, most consequential followers.

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5 GENETIC STRUCTURALISM Marcel Danesi

Introduction

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tarting in the late 1950s, Lucien Goldmann, a French philosopher of Jewish-Romanian origins, put forward a theory of literature and culture that he designated genetic structuralism (see Goldmann, The Hidden God [1955], 1964; Recherches dialectiques, 1959; The Human Sciences and Philosophy [1966], 1973; Epistemologie et philosophie 1970; Towards a Sociology of the Novel [1973], 1975; Lukács and Heidegger [1973], 2009). Synthesising Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s four-stage model of childhood development, known as genetic epistemology (Piaget 1964, 1971b), with a basic Marxist interpretation of social evolution, genetic structuralism seemed at first to be a powerful new mode of inquiry into the origins and functions of literary texts. However, it has rarely been used as a framework for conducting such an inquiry or for the analysis of texts, with only a few exceptions (Mayrl 1978, Cohen 1994, Zimmerman 2006). The reason may well be that Piagetian psychology and rigid ideological Marxism were beginning to fall into disfavour in the era when Goldmann started developing his theoretical approach. Moreover, the words genetic and structuralism have different nuances of meaning in his framework than their usual designations, likely causing confusion among social scientists and literary theorists alike. But if not the framework itself, at least some of Goldmann’s ideas deserve much more attention than they have received, given that, unlike many other critical approaches today, genetic structuralism (henceforward GS) puts forward several key principles that allow for the connection of literature to deeper unconscious processes in the human psyche. Perhaps the main strength of GS lies in how it portrays a literary text not as a singular, inspired work of verbal art – a viewpoint inherited largely from Romanticism – but as a small, but meaningful, part of a totality of human psychic effort across time and space. Goldmann saw literature (and culture) not as a repository of single works invented through the efforts of different individuals, but as the result of those individuals reacting to genetic (unconscious) processes that characterise the history of collectivities. In some ways, GS recalls the historicism of Giambattista Vico and his four-phase theory of cultural

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evolution (see The New Science [1744], 1999), each of which is mirrored by specific linguistic tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. Each of these tropes reflects a different form of consciousness. Similarly, French sociologist Émile Durkheim saw expressive artefacts as reflexes of a ‘collective conscious’. Thus, the early forms of literature – such as the myths – stem from this mindset, sustaining meaning-making in collectivities and keeping people within them bound emotionally to each other: The collective conscious is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousness. Being placed outside and above all individual and local contingencies, it sees things in this permanent and essential aspect, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas . . . [It] alone can furnish the mind with the molds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them. (Durkheim 1912: 12) The ‘genetic’ aspects of GS, therefore, allude more to imaginative mental processes, rather than are not purely biological ones. They are part of a ‘phylogenesis’ of thought and expression that is governed by historical forces and the forms of consciousness that different time periods generate.

Early Influences As mentioned, Goldmann was influenced by two primary intellectual sources, Marxism and Piagetian psychology. According to those who have written on Goldmann, the literary critic and Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács (1962, 1963, 1964, 1968, 1971a, 1971b) is identified as a major influence as well. But a comparative reading of Lukács and Goldmann produces analogies rather than evidence of a direct influence of one on the other. Goldmann broke away, actually, from Lukács’s adoption of rigid Marxism, preferring instead to develop a flexible dialectical method for the study of literature and the human condition in general. Essentially, Marxism, the ideas of Lukács, and GS all have their roots in nineteenth-century German idealism as exemplified by Hegel (see The Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], 1977) and Kant (see Critique of Pure Reason [1781, 1787], 1997). Hegel emphasised the importance of historical processes in the study of philosophy, art, religion, science and politics. He wanted to comprehend why something came into being as it did and why, over the course of history, it came to be replaced by its opposite. He also sought to know why an equilibrium between the two opposed forces emerges spontaneously to instill a psychic balance. Hegel saw creative forms of culture as part of an unconscious impetus for gaining the equilibrium. Kant believed that we cannot understand anything beyond our actual experience of something. Thus, the mind and its objects are not separate things, as Cartesians have always maintained. On the contrary, for Kant the mind is actively

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involved in interpreting objects it experiences, organising them into categories, and thus constructing knowledge. From constructivist conceptions such as these comes the basic premise of general structuralism that a human phenomenon (language, art, and so on) cannot be understood in isolation, but as part of a totality that crystallises from historical (genetic) processes. Mayrl explains this aspect of Goldmann’s conception as follows: ‘The historical aspect of the totality involves the methodological mandate that, in addition to being grasped in its structural context, a phenomenon must be understood as the totality of its moments of change and development’ Mayrl (1978: 20). Goldmann referred to change as ‘structuration’ and development as ‘destructuration’. The implication is that any structured artefact or system (a work of literature, language and art) reflects a temporary state of equilibrium, which is destructured as time progresses; that is, it is decomposed into the components that make it up. Thus the flow of creativity starts from totality (wholeness) to specificity. Marxist critiques of modern societies stress the structural (or structuring) aspect of totality, given that the parts of any collectivity or system are seen as dependent upon the whole in order to function. On the other hand, in bourgeois, capitalist society, as Lukács emphasised throughout his writings, the opposite viewpoint is the rule. In such societies an abiding and destructive emphasis on individualism leads inevitably to alienation (Marx’s term) and on the separation of ideas into succinct and distinct categories. From the latter tendency, the different disciplines have arisen (starting in the Enlightenment), whereas a true genetic (Marxist) epistemology would amalgamate the disciplines into an overriding dialectic of knowledge. As a university student, Marx was heavily influenced by Hegel, especially Hegel’s idea that rational ideas were the driving force in history. In the early 1840s, however, Marx began to move away from a strictly Hegelian philosophy, rejecting the Hegelian notion that rational ideas determined events. Marx maintained the opposite, namely that material forces – the forces of nature and especially of human economic production – determined ideas (Marx 1867; English translation Marx and Engels 1975–2005). GS retains the Hegelian viewpoint that ideas are indeed the forces behind genetic processes. The Hegelian model led Goldmann to enunciate a view of the human condition based on three general maxims: 1. Humans have a tendency to adapt to the environment in which they live and, over time, to transform that environment in ways that make sense to them. 2. Humans have a tendency to be consistent and thus to create structured forms – theories, works of art, rituals, and so on, in response to their everchanging plight (structuration). 3. Humans have the tendency to modify and develop structures at their whim over time to produce derived forms (destructuration).

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Goldmann saw the manifestation of these three tendencies especially in literature. Specific works of literature arise from responses to a specific environmental situation, but nonetheless reflect the universal tendency to adapt to, and to understand, the situation. Structuration is thus both a subjective act and part of a collective consciousness. As the form of consciousness changes over time, the acts of structuration are destructured to produce derived and increasingly complex forms of art. This genetic process is universal and is the reason why literary works can easily be translated from one language to another because it is the result of interaction between collectivities (cultures) and their responses to situations. The individuals who create works of literature thus reveal the particular state of consciousness of the collectivity at the same time that they reveal a particular view of that form of consciousness. Goldmann’s Marxist stance is unlike that taken by Lúkacs, which is more reminiscent of the Frankfurt School philosophers’ view that culture is a product of economic forces, not just psychic ones. The School, founded in the 1920s, was the world’s first Marxist school of social research. Its aim was to understand the expressive and creative ways in which human groups produced meaning collectively under the impact of modern technology and capitalism. The scholars belonging to the School included Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Leo Lowenthal. In one way or another, they took a highly negative view of capitalist culture, with its stress on individualism and marketplace ideology. As Lukács often observed in his critical literary writings, literature and other forms of art in capitalist bourgeois societies are perceived as commodities that are literally sold in the marketplace by a ‘culture industry’ controlled by capitalist rulers. The exceptions to this pattern stand out considerably and implicitly reject the commodity culture mindset. For Lukács the perfect example of this was Thomas Mann. Adopting Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s (1929–34) concept of hegemony, at least as a subtext, Lukács claimed that the domination of society by the group in power occurs in large part through the control of the levers of mass expressivities. Gramsci had used the term in reference to his belief that the dominant class in a society used social ‘instruments’, which varied from outright coercion (incarceration, the use of secret police, threats, and so on) to gentler and more ‘managerial’ tactics (education, religion, control of the mass media), in order to gain the consent of common people. The Frankfurt School theorists were, overall, highly pessimistic about the possibility of genuine culture under modern capitalism, condemning most forms of popular culture as forms of propaganda designed to indoctrinate the masses and disguise social inequalities. Goldmann started with this kind of outlook, rejecting the bourgeois notion that cultural and literary texts should be considered in themselves, rather than as part of a genetic process. But he went well beyond this purely Marxist stance.

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Indeed, Goldmann was more influenced by Sigmund Freud’s (1913, 1919, 1956, 1962) ideas of development in childhood than by Lukács’ Marxist stance. Goldmann believed that development phases in childhood affected emotional and psychic outcomes in adulthood, seeing analogies with the origins and evolution of literary movements, from childlike myths to advanced ironic writings. Freud suggested that most of what is in our minds is not accessible to us; it is unconscious, but it shapes our behaviour. In his ‘structural hypothesis’, Freud claimed that there is a continual struggle going on in our brains among the id (body), the ego (subjectivity), and the superego (collectivity). The id is a cauldron of seething excitement – a concept that Goldmann applied to literary creation, which starts off as a highly emotional response to a situation. The id generates a lot of energy, but the energy cannot be used effectively because we are always being drawn by a desire to take care of our instinctual needs. It thus seeks expression constantly. One of these expressive outlets is writing. Opposing the id is the superego, which is essentially the moral conscience of a collectivity. As the id seeks gratification and has great energy, it must submit to the demands of the collectivity, and this tension can cause considerable mental anguish. The literary author gives expression to this oppositional tug within all of us. This is why we see ourselves in the text. And, in fact, the ego is an interpretant, to use Charles Peirce’s idea that we are constantly attempting to decipher signifying input (see Peirce 1931–58). The ego seeks to harness the energy of the id in socially constructive ways by using the superego to moderate behaviour – hence the rise and growth of literary expression as a social constructive process seeking equilibrium between opposing Hegelian forces. In other words, literature stems from this unconscious search for an equilibrium between genetic structuring and destructuring, although it never really achieves it. This need comes out as much in psychotherapy as it does in conversation and more broadly in human expressive activities. This is why we ‘understand’ all these. We already possess the understanding mechanisms inside of us. A similar kind of conceptualisation can be found in so-called phenomenology, originally developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early 1900s, to emphasise the importance of conscious experience in the construction of categories of expression, from literature to science. Husserl aimed to understand how consciousness – awareness of sensations and emotions – works in order to better understand how experience shapes the human brain. Modern-day phenomenology characterises the forms of consciousness (the things of which one is conscious) as phenomena, and the processes involved in consciousness-formation, such as perception and desiring, as acts. These are related to objects of consciousness and thus are also considered to be phenomena. This intrinsic relationship between phenomena and acts is called intentionality. Phenomenologists also claim that past experiences will limit people’s ability to understand phenomena and thus to act accordingly. One

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way to counteract this limiting tendency of past experience is through what they call ‘fantasy variations’, that is, through acts of imagining how the same experience might be perceived under varying circumstances. The features of the experience that remain constant, despite the variations, are thus seen to constitute its essence. Husserl has had a number of followers, even though it is not clear what the influence of phenomenology in the cognitive sciences has been, other than an emphasis on experience, which is now part and parcel of most psychological schools of thought. The followers include the French psychologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see The Structure of Behaviour [1942], 1965; and The Phenomenology of Perception [1945], 1962) and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (see ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, 1998). Both have argued that phenomenology should not be limited to an analysis of consciousness. Phenomenology has, however, had some impact on the study of intentionality across several disciplines, including literary theory.

Structuralist Background: Linguistics, Semiotics and Anthropology In order to grasp Goldmann’s scientific, rather than ideological, sources of influence, it is instructive to step back and take a cursory look at how structuralism emerged and the mindset it established in the social sciences generally, which certainly influenced psychology, and especially Piaget. Structuralism is the general term used to designate a specific approach to human expressivity and systems (language, art, and so on) based on several fundamental ideas, especially the idea that signs exhibit relational structure. In music, for example, the arrangement of tones into structures known as melodies is felt to be ‘musically correct’ only if this arrangement is consistent with harmonic relational structure, that is, flowing along on the basis of specific chord relations. In language, single words can only refer to things, but they take on meaning when combined into sentences and utterances according to rules of relation among them. Overall, there are two main types of relations – for example, in order to recognise something as a melody or a sentence, one must be: (1) able to differentiate it from other melodies and sentences; and (2) know how its component parts fit together. More technically, the former is called paradigmatic (differential) and the latter syntagmatic (combinatory) structure. Structuralism grew out of the work and ideas of the early founders of psychology, who attempted to give a scientific basis to the study of conscious experience by breaking it down into its specific relational structures. One of its main techniques came to be known as opposition. What keeps two words, such as cat and rat, recognisably distinct and, thus, meaning-bearing? A structuralist would say that it is, in part, the fact that the phonic difference between initial c and r is perceived as distinctive. This constitutes a paradigmatic feature

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of the sounds in a language, called phonemic. Similarly, a major and minor chord in the same key will be perceived as distinct on account of a half-tone difference in the middle note of the chords, called tonemic by structuralist musicologists. These examples demonstrate that structures (sounds, tones, and so on) acquire meaning in part through a perceivable difference built into some aspect of their physical constitution – a minimal opposition in sound, a minimal difference in tone, and so on. The psychological importance of opposition was noticed by the early psychologists, especially Wilhelm Wundt (1901) and Edward B. Titchener (1910). In his Course in General Linguistics (1916: English translation 1960), the philologist Ferdinand de Saussure called this feature of structured systems, différence, noting that it co-occurs with combination. When putting together a simple sentence, for example, we do not choose the words in a random fashion, but rather according to their relational properties. The choice of the noun brother in the subject slot of a sentence such as My brother loves maths is a paradigmatic one, because other nouns of the same kind – girl, man, woman, and so on – could have been chosen instead. But the choice of any one of these for that sentence slot constrains the type and form of the verb that can be chosen and combined with it. Co-occurrence is a syntagmatic feature of all systems. Structuralism was elaborated by a number of linguists who met regularly in Prague in the early 1920s. Word pairs such as cat-rat, for example, were called minimal pairs by Trubetzkoy (1936, 1968). Minimal-pair analysis was also used to examine higher-level oppositions such as synonymy (big-large), antonymy (big-little), taxonomy (rose-flower), part-whole relations (handlecup), and so on. As psychologist Charles K. Ogden claimed, ‘the theory of opposition offers a new method of approach not only in the case of all those words which can best be defined in terms of their opposites, or of the oppositional scale on which they appear, but also to any word’ Ogden (1932: 18). In the 1930s and 1940s, structuralists started noticing that oppositional structure cropped up in the analysis of non-verbal systems as well. For example, in the integer system of numbers, oppositions include positive vs negative, odd vs even, and prime vs composite. Claude Lévi-Strauss was probably the first anthropologist to explicitly study cultural systems with the tools of structuralism in the 1950s. In analysing kinship systems, he found that the elementary unit of kinship was made up of a set of four oppositions: brother vs sister, husband vs wife, father vs son, and mother’s brother vs sister’s son (see Structural Anthropology, 1958; English translation 1963). Lévi-Strauss suspected that similar relational sets characterised other cultural systems and, thus, that all social organisation had oppositional structure. Lévi-Strauss sought what he called ‘unsuspected harmonies’ of oppositions across the spectrum of human culture. His proposal was to look for pairs of opposites common to all human societies. His fieldwork among Amerindian tribes in the 1930s impressed upon him that those harmonies were

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present initially in founding myths (see The Savage Mind [1962], 1966; and Myth and Meaning, 1978). The purpose of a myth, he suggested, was to provide a logical theory that could explain inherent opposites or contradictions. One attempt at ‘harmonization’ can be seen in the relation between raw and cooked food (Lévi-Strauss 1964). Cooked food allows humans to leave the world of nature behind and to focus on their own adaptations to it on their own terms. Culture emerges the instant that cooked food does. This change from the raw to the cooked reflects a change in mentality from the human being as a ‘tinkler’ to the human being as a ‘thinker’ (Lévi-Strauss 1962). The ‘tinkler’ works with the hands to extract from the world what is necessary for survival; the ‘thinker’ is an engineer who has a more abstract approach to solving the same practical problems of existence. The thinker invents tools and materials that transcend the limitations imposed on humans by their bodies. The tinkler and the engineer face similar problems of survival; but they solve them in radically different ways. Since its introduction as a general philosophy in the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, structuralism has been criticised frequently as being artificial and not consistent with the facts of human development. However, the Prague School linguist Roman Jakobson (1942) argued that the notion of opposition could, actually, be used to explain the psychology of verbal ontogenesis (see Jakobson 1971). Jakobson showed empirically that sound oppositions that occur frequently are among the first ones learned by children. Nasal consonants – /n/ and /m/ – exist in all languages; and, significantly, they are among the earliest phonemes acquired by children. On the other hand, consonants pronounced near the back of the throat are relatively rare and are among the last sounds acquired by children. In other words, the theory of opposition predicts the sequence of sound acquisition in children. Another critique of opposition theory has been that it does not take into account associative (figurative) meaning and structure. The study of such structure came, actually, to the forefront starting in the 1970s within linguistics and psychology (Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio 1977, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The American linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson (1987) were leaders in this paradigm shift, claiming that a simple linguistic metaphor such as ‘My brother is a tiger’ cannot be analysed as a simple idiomatic replacement for some pre-existing literal form, but, rather, that it revealed a conceptual systematicity. They thus called it a manifestation of a conceptual metaphor, namely people are animals. This is why we can also interpret, say, Sam’s or Sarah’s personality in animal terms – a gorilla, snake, pig, puppy, and so on. Each specific linguistic metaphor (‘Sam is a gorilla’, ‘Sarah is a puppy’, and so on) is an instantiation of an abstract metaphorical concept – people are animals. Now, does the existence of such formulas in cognitive activity lead to an invalidation of opposition theory? As Lakoff and Johnson have cogently argued, conceptual metaphors are formed

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through image schemata. These are the source for the people are animals conceptual metaphor, which seems to be an unconscious image that human personalities and animal behaviours are linked in some way. In other words, it is the output of an ontological opposition: humans-as-animals. It constitutes, in other words, an example of how opposition might manifest itself as an associative phenomenon, not just a binary or multi-order one. In this case, the two poles in the opposition are not contrasted (as in night vs day), but equated: humans-as-animals. This suggests that oppositional structure operates in a quasi-contrastive way at the level of figurative meaning. The most severe critiques of opposition theory have revolved around the related notion of markedness (Andrews 1990, Battistella 1990). In oppositions such as night vs day, it can easily be seen that the ‘default’ pole is day – that is, day is the notion in the opposition that we perceive as culturally or psychologically more fundamental. This pole is called the unmarked pole, and the other pole, the marked one (since it is the one that stands out exceptionally). This analysis can be justified, arguably, because it has a source in human biology – we sleep at night and carry out conscious activities in the day. Needless to say, if a culture exists in which activities are carried out during night-time and sleeping during daytime, the markedness relation would be reversed. Now, the problem is deciding which pole is marked and unmarked in a socially problematic opposition such as the male vs female one. The answer seems to vary according to the social context to which the opposition is applied. In patrilineal societies the unmarked form is male; but in matrilineal ones, such as the Iroquois one (Alpher 1987), it appears to be female. Markedness, thus, seems to mirror social realities. Thus, its dismissal by various philosophers and semioticians, such as Michel Foucault (see The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972a and 1972b) and Jacques Derrida (see Of Grammatology, 1976), seems unwarranted. Their critiques led to the movement known as poststructuralism, which started in the late 1950s, gaining prominence in the 1970s. In poststructuralism, oppositions are to be ‘deconstructed’ (as Derrida put it), and exposed as resulting from an endemic logocentrism on the part of the analyst, not the result of some tendency present in the human brain. In contrast to Saussure’s idea of différence, Derrida coined the word différance (spelled with an ‘a’, but pronounced in the same way), to intentionally satirise Saussurian theory. With this term Derrida wanted to show that Saussure’s so-called discoveries could be deconstructed into the implicit biases that he brought to the analytical task at hand, because a science of language can never succeed since it must be carried out through language itself and thus will partake of the slippage (as he called it) it discovers. Poststructuralism had a temporary impact on various fields of knowledge. Because written language is the basis of knowledge-producing enterprises, such as science and philosophy, poststructuralists claimed that these ended up reflecting nothing more than the writing practices used to articulate them.

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But in hindsight, there was (and is) nothing particularly radical in this diatribe against structuralism. Already in the 1920s, Jakobson and Trubetzkoy started probing the ‘relativity’ of oppositions in the light of their social and psychological functions. Basing their ideas in part on the work of German psychologist Karl Bühler (1934), they claimed that language categories mirrored social ones. The goal of a true structuralist science, therefore, was to investigate the isomorphism that manifested itself between oppositions and social systems. In other words, opposition theory was the very technique that identified social inequalities, not masked them. There is no evidence in Goldmann’s writings that he was influenced directly by this kind of debate and by structuralism proper. But there is little doubt that the train of thought that is inherent in structuralism did. The idea that structures are meaningful only in relation to others is the basic tenet of structuralism, and this is exactly what GS assumes to be the guiding force in structuration and destructuration. However, nowhere in Goldmann’s analyses of literary texts do we find a direct use of opposition theory. But it is implicit everywhere. So, in a sense, the term ‘structuralism’ in ‘genetic structuralism’ has a generic epistemological sense, rather than a technical one.

Genetic Epistemology Probably influenced by Saussure who maintained that structures should be studied as they occur in a system, which he called synchronic, rather than how they developed to their current form, which he termed diachronic, structuralism emphasised the non-genetic (non-historical) features of systems. It was Piaget in psychology who applied structuralism to a genetic framework, calling it, as mentioned, genetic epistemology, claiming that to understand how the mind develops one needs to look at its genesis in childhood and thus at both synchronic and diachronic factors in the ontogenesis of thought. With his ingenious experiments on child subjects, Piaget was the first psychologist to document, empirically, that ontogenesis was a stage-based process. Piaget’s (1964) genetic epistemology posits that children pass through four distinct chronological periods of mental development: (1) the sensorimotor period, when they acquire a basic knowledge of objects through their senses, lasting until about age two; (2) the preoperational period, from about two to seven, during which children develop such skills as language and the ability to draw; (3) the concrete operations period, from about seven to eleven, when they begin to think logically (classifying objects, solving logical problems, and so on); (4) the formal operations period, which lasts from about eleven to fifteen, when children begin to reason realistically about the future and to deal with abstractions. It is not so much the chronological accuracy of the stages, nor the fact that culture may intervene to modify some of them and even obliterate them, but the idea of a structured ontogenesis of cognition that made Piagetian

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psychology a basic point-of-reference in all subsequent research within developmental psychology. Piaget’s genetic approach is still widely accepted as charting the primary psycho-biological milestones of cognitive development. Piaget has shown, in a phrase, that humans progress from a sensory and concrete stage of mind to a reflective and abstract one. Reactions to Piaget’s theory have criticised it for its determinism and its overemphasis on cognitive processes at the expense of affect and emotion. The work of Vygotsky (see Thought and Language, 1961) in particular has had a substantive impact on the general thrust of genetic epistemology today. Vygotsky proposed developmental stages that go from external (physical and social) actions to internal cognitive constructions and interior speech via the mind’s ability to construct images of external reality. His definition of speech as a ‘microcosm of consciousness’ is particularly characteristic of his approach. Action, imagination and abstract thought are the chronologically related stages through which each child passes on the way to mature thinking: that is, the child first employs non-verbal symbols (action, play, drawing, painting, music, and so on), then imaginative constructs (narratives, fables, dramatisations, and so on), and finally oral expression and creative writing on the way to the development of abstract thought. Thus, unlike Piaget, Vygostky gave subjective creativity in children a much larger role in determining how development unfolds. Nevertheless, the idea of genetic stages in development still remains a valid, albeit discussable, notion within psychology. From Piaget, Goldmann adopted genetic epistemology and modified it to produce a genetic view of literature as a stage-based developmental phenomenon – a view espoused as well by the Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye (see The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, 1981).

Genetic Structuralism As we have seen, GS is based in Hegelian epistemology and an amalgam of structuralism, historicism, psychology, Marxism, with touches of phenomenology. Its highly eclectic nature may well be the reason why it has really never caught on as a general movement in literary or culture theory, both of which have tended to seek uniform frameworks for understanding the phenomena of literature and culture. As Cohen (1994) has argued, Goldmann is hard to place in the history of ideas. While many Parisian leftists of his era staunchly upheld Marxism’s scientific validity, insisted that it was in a severe crisis and, thus, that it had to reinvent or reconstitute itself radically if it were to survive. He rejected the traditional Marxist view of the proletariat and contested its structuralist viewpoint, which he found to be too reductive, unlike the more general movement of structuralism in the human sciences. This, writes Cohen, is likely the main reason why Goldmann’s own name and

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work were eclipsed, despite the acclaim of thinkers such as Piaget. Goldmann refused to portray humanity’s future as a result of the blind force of historical laws and propensities. He saw the future, rather, as a wager akin to Pascal’s wager on the existence of God. As discussed, Piaget was the most important input into GS because, as Mayrl (1978) also points out, Piaget’s goal was to demonstrate that knowledge is constructed, not innate, and gained through direct experience. Our direct experience of gravity makes our knowledge of it more valid and understandable than our indirect experience with black holes. In GS, progress from one stage of development in childhood to another comes by way of assimilation, which occurs when the perception of a new event or object occurs to the child in an existing mental schema and is usually used in the context of self-motivation, and by way of accommodation, whereby experiences are accommodated by the child according to the outcome of the tasks. Thus, unwittingly, Goldmann adopted a Vygotskian view, projecting it onto a basic Piagetian epistemology. It might be the only ever attempt, albeit unwitting, to integrate Piaget and Vygotsky. The highest form of development is equilibration, which encompasses both assimilation and accommodation as children change their way of thinking in order to arrive at a correct understanding of phenomena. Goldmann also saw ‘cultural creation’ as being subject to the same laws of development as Piaget showed. Human behaviour is a response to a particular situation and tends, therefore, to create a balance between the subject of action and the object on which it bears. This tendency to equilibrium, using Piaget’s psychological notion, always has an unstable, provisional character. Thus, human realities inhere in two-sided processes: destructuration of old structuration and structuration of new totalities capable of creating equilibria vis-à-vis new demands of collectivities. Goldmann sought, therefore, to uncover the mechanisms underlying both the equilibria that humans destroy and those towards which they are moving. In his comprehensive study of GS, Zimmerman (2006) points out that Goldmann’s influences may have been two-edged swords, both providing him with deep insights into human nature and with all the faults of Marxism and Piagetianism. Goldmann emphasised the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of Lukács, stressing totality or collective consciousness, but hardly accepting any of the economic and political biases of Lukács’ work. His two-year apprenticeship with Jean Piaget in Zurich gave him a way out of Lukács’s rigid Marxist interpretations of how consciousness assimilates and adapts to material conditions. In a sense, GS is both a continuation of Lévi-Strauss with an implicit amalgamation of Vygotsky. It is this inherent aspect of GS that may have relevance for contemporary social science. If we have not yet reached a full understanding of Goldmann’s thought, the reason, Zimmerman argues, may well be that we do not yet understand our own situation. Thus, there are cogent reasons for a further study of Goldmann, reasons that are far from being purely academic.

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One lacuna in Goldmann’s GS is the theory of Vico, as mentioned, that the stages of culture and literature reflect different forms of consciousness. In The New Science Vico elaborated the notion of poetic logic – a universal form of imaginative thinking that allows humans to understand the world initially in sensory and bodily ways. Vico claimed that we can gain understanding of what poetic logic reveals about human thinking by studying one of its most luminous products – metaphorical language. The ancient names of the gods, for instance, were humanity’s first metaphorical models for explaining phenomenological events (such as weather phenomena). Jove was a metaphor for the thundering sky. Once the sky was called Jove, all other experiences of the same phenomenon could be ‘found again’ in the name. Jove is a conscious metaphorical separation of the sky from the earth, of the divine (or metaphysical) from the human world. From these metaphorical ideas, the first conscious humans learned to make sense together. The ideas so formed were the basis for the creation of the first human institutions, from marriage and the family to religion and economic systems. The Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman (1990) was similarly interested, fundamentally, in unravelling the raison d’être and origins of meaning structures in the origins of human institutions and in how these constituted the source of cultural cognition. Both Vico and Lotman saw the metaphorical imagination as the primary faculty of mind underlying the invention of these very structures. Vico argued that all creative artefacts, from literature to science, result from bodily and sensory experiences absorbed and transformed by the imagination into meaningful wholes. The transformations manifest themselves initially in metaphorical literature (myths). The innate universal capacity to think metaphorically is the most important feature of primordial consciousness. This is totally dependent on the images generated by bodily experiences as they are encoded and shaped by the imagination. From this ‘poetic’ state of mind the first human cultures took shape, establishing the first institutions, especially religious, burial and marriage rites. The organisation of early cultures is, thus, universally ‘poetic’; that is, it is based upon, and guided by, conscious bodily experiences that have been transformed into generalised ideas by metaphor. The distinguishing feature of the primordial form of human consciousness is that it allows us literally to ‘imagine’ stimuli that are no longer present for the sensory system to react to in its biologically programmed way. The thought units that result from these images are iconic signs – units of thought that stand for their referents in direct ways. These signs also allow humans to think about their referents away from their contexts of occurrence. The mythic imagination can thus ‘create’ new realities totally within the confines of mental space – hence the meaning of imagination as a creative faculty. By not being constrained to a stimulus-response environment, the imagination has bestowed upon humans the capacity to ‘imagine’ fictional (context-free) beings, objects and events. The imagination

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thus liberates human beings from the constraints imposed on all other organisms by biology. Lotman also saw the basic form of mentality as poetic – a form which he characterised as energeia, a kind of ‘creative potency’ that undergirds every act of meaning-making, from the simple invention of words to the creation of elaborate artistic texts. Culture is a product of this kind of creative semiosis (sign-making). Lotman called it the semiosphere. The semiosphere emerges as a response to a specific human need to model and interpret the dynamic flux of the world in the form of signs. Of all the systems that emanate from semiosis, no other is as powerful and as unique as language. Language is the ultimate achievement of semiosis. But language alone would not complete the picture of culture, which is also constituted and informed by drawings, music, artifacts and other non-verbal models of the world that people make and use routinely. Together with verbal models, they constitute one huge Text (Lotman 1990: 377). Given the role of the imagination in spurring the human mind to create its own world of thought, the question becomes: How does one go from imagining to actually producing signifying structure? For Vico, the answer is to be found in a second unique ability of human mentation – the ingegno ‘ingenuity’, ‘invention’, the faculty of the conscious mind that organises the poetic forms produced by the imagination into meaningful structures. The ingegno is, therefore, the source of syntax in language and of narrative structure in verbal discourse. It was at the creative nucleus of the earliest myths that humanity literally invented. This produces textuality in human affairs, an interconnected form of representation that bestows a sense of wholeness and unity upon signification. Vico also developed a theory of cultural stages and the cultural cycle, which is implicitly present in Goldmann. The corso of history unfolds in terms of the three ages – the ‘divine’, the ‘heroic’ and the ‘human’. Vico portrayed each age as manifesting its own particular kind of customs, laws, language, and even human nature. He did not, however, see this historical sequence as necessarily irreversible. So, he elaborated the idea of the ricorso, the return of an earlier age in the life of a culture. The course of humanity, according to Vico, goes from a poetical nature, through a heroic one, to a rationalistic one. Each age has its own kind of mentality and language. The poetic mentality, for instance, generates myths; the heroic one, legends; and the rational one, narrative history. Rationality, according to Vico is humanity’s greatest achievement. But, unlike Cartesian philosophers, he did not see it as an innate ‘given’. He considered it to be a point of arrival that was achievable only in a social ambiance. Human beings do not inherit rationality from their biological legacy. Stripped of culture, which is a collective memoria, human beings would be forced to resort to their poetic, or corporeal, imaginations to make sense of the world all over again.

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This general train of thought, of change (structuration through language) and development (destructuration) is implicit in Vico and explicit in Goldmann. The key to understanding cultural evolution, in both, is language and its literary products, because it constitutes the primary expressive means by which humans encode their thoughts and, therefore, can come together in order to think collectively – as a species. By studying the language of the people living during a specific age, Vico claimed, the scientist should be able to reconstruct the forma mentis of that people. This was Goldmann’s view as well. GS is thus an implicit adoption of Vico, with sprinklings from the sources mentioned above. Clearly, Goldmann made no reference to the Vichian paradigm, but it is nonetheless there and that is what makes GS potentially a powerful analytical tool today. But Goldmann’s view of scientific inquiry still creates problems among Western scientists for the simple reason that, in Western culture, the term science has always been synonymous with the ‘objective’ knowledge of ‘facts’ of the natural world, gained and verified by exact observation, experiment and ordered thinking. The model of language moving through tropological stages – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony – to produce the various literary genres, however, is now a principle of literary criticism, put forward initially by Northrop Frye in The Great Code, who admitted explicitly his reliance on Vico. In other words, GS is potentially a very powerful model for understanding the origins and evolution of conscious cognition – a goal that is being pursued today through cognitive science, neuroscience and other such sciences of the brain. These would be better informed by even a cursory understanding of genetic structuralism in its general outline form as a theory of human consciousness – a theory that relates the parts (human subjectivities) to the whole (human collectivities) through historical (genetic) forces, which play out in tandem with, but also separately from, biological forces.

Conclusion In order to have a comprehensive understanding about literary works, Goldmann called his model a dialectic method, that is, literary analysis method that mainly focuses on coherency, on how a literary study results in a single comprehensively coherent meaning. The term dialectic was used in this way by Hegel and elaborated later by Marx. But it seems to have retained its original Platonic sense of inquiry through logical and questioning procedure. This may be Goldmann’s most significant insight – the revival of dialectic method in the social sciences, which rely too much on empirical methods alone. But because of the advent of conceptual metaphor theory, the spread of Peircean semiotics throughout the social scientific landscape (see Peirce 1931–58), Goldmann is destined to remain largely at the margins of literary theory and the history of ideas – a fate suffered largely by Vico. Peirce’s views of the threefold nature of

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semiosis, from iconicity (sensoriality), to indexicality (relation), and symbolicity (cultural meaning-making) have many of the same elements implicit in GS. The fundamental dialectical principles that Goldmann elaborated, which revolve around his notion that human behaviour and agency can be seen as meaningful responses to particular situations and needs, and that human creativity is a reification of internal unconscious stages of change, are still fascinating and should be revisited if a true theory of literature is to be constructed, especially in an age where the very notion of literature itself is under discussion. Of particular relevance is the Hegelian notion of equilibrium, a force that comes about in response to specific contextual needs. This would lead to a whole series of speculations that are highly relevant today across various disciplines, such as: Is knowing a result of destructuring thought and action? Is there more to creation than subjectivity of expression? Is the sense of collectivity more primal than individualism? Can there be a truly new text? All this has significance for literary studies, cognitive science, anthropology and semiotics. In the latter case, GS might shed light on what Peirce called ‘hyposemiosis’ – the production of meaning that is culture-specific, yet universally accessible through inference.

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INTRODUCTION: POSTSTRUCTURALISM

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oststructuralism is a fairly loose term used to cover a range of thinkers, all of whom shared a common interest in challenging the status quo in their fields, particularly the basis for authority in each case and the criteria lying behind value judgements. Jacques Derrida initiated a thoroughgoing critique of the assumptions behind structuralism from the 1960s onwards, arguing that these were questionable when subjected to close scrutiny. Phenomenology had earlier challenged some of the basic assumptions behind Western philosophical thought, and poststructuralists drew heavily on this tradition, as Derek Robbins goes on to show in Chapter 6. A very influential school of thought, called ‘deconstruction’ grew out of Derrida’s work, and had a notable impact in fields such as literary studies, philosophy and feminist theory – eventually even in legal studies. Nikolai Duffy explores this in Chapter 7, arguing that although it has been widely demonised by the left (Marxists especially), its thoroughgoing scepticism is still of great value in analysing the claims made by the various systems of our culture. In Chapter 8, Georges Van Den Abbeele looks at how discourse theory developed from the linguistic researches of Émile Benveniste through to its most notable exponent, Michel Foucault, and then more recently to the ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ of Norman Fairclough. The many cross-references Van Den Abbeele makes in this chapter indicate just how central the concept of ‘discourse’ has become to the critical theory enterprise.

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6 PHENOMENOLOGY AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM Derek M. Robbins

Introduction

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y reference to articles published by Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss in the journal Word at the end of World War II, I first try to situate ‘structuralism’ philosophically prior to considering the subsequent function of the phenomenological movement in enabling an intellectual transition to ‘poststructuralism’ in France during the 1960s. I first consider the specific interpretation of Husserl offered by Merleau-Ponty and I then give brief accounts of the logic of Lyotard’s conceptualisation of ‘postmodernism’ and of Derrida’s development of ‘deconstructionism’ in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s version of Husserl’s work. I next consider the relationship of Bourdieu’s reflexive, ‘poststructuralist’ sociology to that interpretation of Husserl and, finally, I examine Diana Coole’s use of the work of Merleau-Ponty to ground a contemporary critical theory.

Ernst Cassirer Ernst Cassirer gave a paper on 10 February 1945, just a few days before his death, to the Linguistic Circle of New York. It was subsequently published in August of the same year in the first number of a new journal – Word – with the title: ‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’. Cassirer traced the history of the development of modern linguistics and he attempted to place that development in its philosophical context. During the nineteenth century, he argued, the emerging science of linguistics looked to physics and psychology for its models and, in each case, this meant operating with the prevailing materialism of those disciplines. The corollary was that the ‘logical’ dimension of language was neglected. It was Husserl who reversed this tendency. His Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations] (Husserl 1900, 1922) insisted, in Cassirer’s words, that ‘logical truth is formal, not material, truth’ and: ‘It does not depend on special empirical conditions, it is universal and necessary’ (Cassirer 1945: 103). Cassirer argued that Husserl’s attack on

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psychologism and his dismissal of John Stuart Mill’s attempt to establish a ‘system of logic’ empirically necessarily caused difficulties for the development of the science of linguistics which depended on some relationship with empirical psychology. Cassirer referred to Leibniz’s familiar distinction between ‘truths of logic’ and ‘truths of fact’ and he suggested, however, that ‘If the adherents and defenders of the program of linguistic structuralism are right, then we must say that in the realm of language there is no opposition between what is “formal” and what is merely “factual” ’ (Cassirer 1945: 104). He referred specifically to de Saussure, Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson, and other members of the ‘Cercle Linguistique de Prague’, as major proponents of this view. Cassirer proceeded to digress slightly to consider the ‘morphological idealism’ which he found in the biological work of Goethe, Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, in order to pose the question whether contemporary linguistics was in a situation which was analoguous with that of comparative anatomy in the mid-nineteenth century. There seemed to be two critical questions: ‘The first is, Is language an organism?; the second, Is linguistics a natural science or is it a Geisteswissenschaft?’ [science of the mind/spirit] (Cassirer 1945: 109). Cassirer found the first question to be based on a ‘mere metaphor’ and he concluded succinctly that ‘we may say that language is “organic”, but that it is not an “organism” ’ (Cassirer 1945: 110). The second question re-opened the fin-de-siècle debate between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaft. Cassirer expressed surprise that two of the main contributors to this debate – Dilthey and Rickert – had not reflected on the status of language. His view was that linguistics should be considered a Geisteswissenschaft as long as we do not regard ‘Geist’ as a substance which is opposite to ‘matter’. Cassirer reiterated his early rejection of substantialismin order to insist that ‘Geist’ should be used ‘in a functional sense as a comprehensive name for all those functions which constitute and build up the world of culture’ (see Cassirer 1923). He also related this view to the notion of ‘symbolic form’ which had become the key to his philosophical orientation (see Cassirer 1953–7): ‘Language is a “symbolic form”. It consists of symbols, and symbols are no part of our physical world. They belong to an entirely different universe of discourse’ (Cassirer 1945: 114). Cassirer’s paper was a slightly inconclusive, although enlightening, ramble around the topic. He recommended the work of von Humboldt and discussed the meaning of ‘Gestalt’ before concluding: What I wished to make clear in this paper is the fact that structuralism is no isolated phenomenon; it is, rather, the expression of a general tendency of thought that, in these last decades, has become more and more prominent in almost all fields of scientific research. (Cassirer 1945: 120) The key point, in other words, was that, in Cassirer’s view, the development of structuralist linguistics simply raised in acute form the problem of

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the relationship between descriptive language and phenomena that had been endemic in Western European epistemology in respect of all science since the emergence of the Scientific Revolution.

Claude Lévi-Strauss Less than a year before, in May, 1944, Claude Lévi-Strauss had delivered a paper to the same Linguistic Circle of New York entitled: ‘Application des méthodes de la linguistique moderne à l’anthropologie, particulièrement aux systèmes de parenté’ [‘Application of the methods of modern linguistics to anthropology, particularly to kinship systems’]. This must have been the basis of the article which was published in the second number of Word (August 1945) as ‘L’analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie’ [‘Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology’] (Lévi-Strauss 1945). There is no evidence of direct dialogue between Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss, but some degree of cross-reference must have been in the minds of the editors of Word. Lévi-Strauss’s article would become one of the most important contributions to the collection of essays which he published in 1958 as Anthropologie structurale – a book which, translated into English in 1963 (Structural Anthropology), dominated the structuralist vogue in the 1960s both in France and in the English-speaking intellectual world. From the outset, Lévi-Strauss insisted that the scientific success of linguistics should not be confined to linguistics. He said of the journal Word that, ‘It must also welcome psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists eager to learn from modern linguistics the road which leads to the empirical knowledge of social phenomena’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 31). In respect of anthropology, it should now no longer be the case that linguists and anthropologists might ‘occasionally communicate’ but, instead, that they should acknowledge that their operations formally resemble each other. As Lévi-Strauss commented: ‘Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 34). As Lévi-Strauss pursues his argument, however, it becomes increasingly clear that he was attempting to associate linguistics with the social sciences with a view to refining their analyses rather than with a view to advancing ‘the empirical knowledge of social phenomena’. He argued that previous work which had tried to bring linguistics and anthropology together had analysed speech and vocabulary and had not yet understood that ‘structural analysis cannot be applied to words directly, but only to words previously broken down into phonemes’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 36). The article proceeded to discuss the way in which structural analysis can operate in relation to kinship systems. Lévi-Strauss first differentiated between systems of ‘terminology’ and systems of ‘attitudes’, insisting that there is a ‘profound difference’ between the two. He argued against Radcliffe-Brown’s supposed view that attitudes ‘are nothing but the expression or transposition of terms on the affective level’ (Lévi-Strauss

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1963: 38), and he proceeded to consider in detail Radcliffe-Brown’s discussion of the ‘avunculate’ as expressed in his article on the maternal uncle in South Africa (see Radcliffe-Brown 1941). Radcliffe-Brown had concluded that there were two opposed sets of systems of attitudes in operation in the situation which he had observed and that the determinant in choosing between them was ‘descent’ – that is to say the historically diffused dispositions inherent in the particular situation. By contrast, Lévi-Strauss proceeded to offer additional evidence of the same avunculate phenomenon derived from completely different societies – the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia, Tonga in Polynesia, and Lake Kutubu in New Guinea – in order to falsify the ‘descent’ interpretation. He concluded that ‘in order to understand the avunculate we must treat it as one relationship within a system, while the system itself must be considered as a whole in order to grasp its structure’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 46). Lévi-Strauss anticipated some objections to his conclusion and, in particular, he tried to counter the objection that his structural analysis would suppose that the avunculate should be present at all times and in all places. Lévi-Strauss’s response was to argue that kinship systems do not have the same importance in all cultures and hence that the first task of the structuralist anthropologist is to ask, in relation to the observation of any culture, the preliminary question: ‘Is the system systematic?’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 48). In this defence, LéviStrauss appears to have renounced the ambition of cultural anthropology in pursuit, instead, of the more circumscribed interest in analysing the intrinsic systematicity of systems. The article ends with a clear confrontation with the research tradition associated with Radcliffe-Brown. Lévi-Strauss cites a passage from Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘The Study of Kinship Systems’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1941) in which he argued that kinship systems are constructed genealogically, and Lévi-Strauss argues in opposition: 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. (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 50) He comments, finally, that we must ‘never lose sight of the fact that, in both anthropological and linguistic research, we are dealing strictly with symbolism’ and we must recognise that ‘any concession to naturalism might jeopardize the immense progress already made in linguistics, which is also beginning to characterize the study of family structure, and might drive the sociology of the family toward a sterile empiricism, devoid of inspiration’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 51).

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty Lévi-Strauss returned to France from the United States in 1948. Refugees from Nazi Germany had already imported phenomenological thinking to the United States and social philosophers such as Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch had made attempts to assimilate the legacy of Husserl to indigenous American pragmatism. Marvin Farber was instrumental in managing this process of intellectual assimilation, editing, in 1940, Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (Farber 1940), and then, in 1943, The Foundation of Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the Quest for a Rigorous Philosophy (Farber 1943). Most of this first American reception was of ‘early’ Husserl. There is no evidence that Lévi-Strauss engaged philosophically with this work and it is clear from Cassirer’s article that he still regarded Husserl primarily as an idealist critic of psychologism who contributed beneficially to the rejection of the influence of materialism on linguistic theory in the nineteenth century. On returning to France, Lévi-Strauss would have found that there was already great and increasing interest in the work of Husserl and that there were several competing strands of interpretations of phenomenology – in part a consequence of the posthumous publication of his texts from the archive established during World War II at Louvain. Merleau-Ponty had been one of the first to take advantage of the archive at Louvain. He went to Louvain first in April 1939, and retained access to unpublished material all through the 1940s. We know from H. L. van Breda’s account (1962), precisely what kind of access Merleau-Ponty had to the Husserl archives which had been moved to Louvain after Husserl’s death in 1938. Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du comportement [The Structure of Behaviour] had been published in 1942 and his Phénoménologie de Perception [The Phenomenology of Perception] in 1945. As well as Ideen I [Ideas I] (Husserl 1983) this cited other early works of Husserl; late published works such as Erfahrung und Urteil [Experience and Judgement], ed. Landgrebe [1948] (1973) and Part I of Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie [The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology] (Husserl 1970b); and unpublished works, including Parts II and III of Die Krisis [The Crisis] which had been consulted at Louvain. Merleau-Ponty’s course of general psychology at the Sorbonne in 1950/1 was on Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie [Human Sciences and Phenomenology], reissued in 1958. In April 1951, he gave a paper entitled ‘Sur la phénoménologie du langage’ [‘On the phenomenology of language’] to the first international colloque of phenomenology which was published in 1952 in Problèmes actuels de la phénoménologie [Contemporary Problems of Phenomenology] and subsequently reprinted in his Signes [Signs] in 1960. In July 1951, the Cahiers internationaux de sociologie published his ‘Le philosophe et la sociologie’ [‘The philosopher and sociology’], which was also reprinted in Signes. In

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‘Sur la phénoménologie du langage’, Merleau-Ponty made the important distinction between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Husserl, suggesting that in the former period Husserl had regarded ‘les langues empiriques comme des réalisations “brouillées” du langage essentiel’ [‘empirical languages as “muddled” realisations of essential language’] (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 137). By contrast, MerleauPonty argued that in his late period Husserl represented language comme une manière originale de viser certains objets, comme le corps de la pensée (Formale und transzendentale Logik) . . . ou même comme l’opération par laquelle des pensées qui, sans lui, resteraient phénomènes privés, acquièrent valeur intersubjective et finalement existence idéale (Ursprung der Geometrie) [as an original way of targeting certain objects, like the body of thought (Formal and Transcendental Logic) . . . or even like the operation whereby thoughts which, without it, would remain private phenomena, acquire intersubjective value and, ultimately, ideal existence (Origin of Geometry)]. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 137) Husserl had begun, in Logical Investigations, by opposing the view that our knowledge is dependent on our psychological make-up and by seeking to emphasise instead the importance of logic. This was what still seemed to Cassirer to be the essence of Husserl’s a priori idealism or transcendental phenomenology. The influence on Husserl of his pupil Heidegger was that Husserl gradually seemed increasingly to countenance an emphasis on historically situated Being (Dasein). In the posthumously published ‘late’ Husserl texts (especially The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1970b), and Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (Husserl 1973)), he seemed to emphasise that logic is grounded in our experience of the social world, or what he called the ‘life-world’. This impression may have been the consequence of the editorial work of his assistant Ludwig Landgrebe who had carried out his doctoral research on Wilhelm Dilthey and was subsequently to indicate his attachment to Heidegger’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty was among the first of Husserl’s followers to appreciate the significance of this apparent shift. In the passages quoted above, Merleau-Ponty referred to Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, published in 1929, and to his Origin of Geometry, first published posthumously in 1939 (see Landgrebe’s Introduction to Husserl 1973, for the circumstances in which Husserl wrote Formal and Transcendental Logic and its relation to Experience and Judgement). Merleau-Ponty’s contention was that Husserl had moved away from an emphasis of a pre-existing, a priori, ideal, or essential language form towards the view that linguistic expression is a material, bodily function within the world, an instrument of behavioural adaptation, an activity of corporeal interaction or inter-subjectivity, which

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has the effect of constructing the ideal. In the specialist terminology of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty advanced the view that Husserl had moved from transcendental to constitutive phenomenology or, better, to a phenomenology in which transcendentalism is constituted. For Merleau-Ponty, wrestling with his relationship to Marxism at the time of the death of Stalin (1953), this interpretation of Husserl enabled him to render dialectical materialism compatible with idealism rather than antagonistic towards it. It also enabled him to distinguish his position from that of Sartre, whose L’Étre et le Néant [Being and Nothingness] (Sartre, 1958), subtitled ‘an essay in phenomenological ontology’ still presupposed the view of the primacy of the individual ego that he had outlined in his first publication which appeared in 1936 as Un essai sur la transcendance de l’Ego [An Essay on the Transcendence of the Ego] (Sartre, 1972).

The Post-War Generation in France Jean-François Lyotard Merleau-Ponty had been influenced by the lectures which Aron Gurwitsch had given in France during the period at the end of the 1930s after he had left Germany and before his emigration to the United States in 1940. In an essay entitled ‘The Perceptual World and the Rationalized Universe’, probably written in 1953, Gurwitsch wrote: In the final period of his life, Husserl did, more and more, call attention to the perceptual world, such as the latter plays a role in everyday, natural life. That is the world in which we find ourselves, in which we act, react, and work. It is in that world that we encounter our fellow human beings, to whom we are bound by the most diverse relationships. All our desires and hopes, all our apprehensions and fears, all our pleasures and sufferings (in short, all our affective and emotional life) are related to that world; all our intellectual activities, both practical and theoretical, also refer to it. In describing and analysing the perceptual world, one must take it such as it, in actual fact, offers itself to the natural consciousness of everyday life, such as it appears prior to the idealizations entailed by scientific interpretation and explanation. The world is conceived by modern civilized human beings in the perspective of the physical sciences, such as they have been established since the seventeenth century. Even when we happen not to be physicists, or when we are not very familiar with the theories of physics and with the results arrived at by it, we conceive and interpret the world in relation to the very existence of physics. (Gurwitsch, ed. J. Garcia-Gomez 2009: 411–12)

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Following late Husserl, Gurwitsch argues that we all go about our lives in a perceptual world and that the explanations of the sciences are rationalisations or idealisations which are superimposed on our everyday perceptions. However, Gurwitsch does not suppose that our perceptions remain experiential in an unchanging way. The second paragraph in the quoted passage indicates that, historically, past rationalisations become incorporated into taken-for-granted present perceptions. This can be described as an acceptance that, trans-culturally and trans-historically, primary perception is susceptible to rational modification. The essential emphasis of constitutive phenomenology, therefore, is that, in every generation, the process of constituting understandings of the world remains the same in deriving rational explanation from primary experience, but that, historically, newly constituted meanings redefine primary experience for every succeeding generation. This is not to say that the historical constitution of meaning is inevitably ‘progressive’ or cumulative. On the contrary, every generation has the capacity inter-subjectively to construct understandings which are valid for itself by manipulating those which it inherits. Rationalisations have no absolute referential value. Explanations do not develop autonomously in differentiated discourses but are mediated by continuous reference to primary experience but, equally, that primary experience is not grounded humanistically in a transcendent ego. Primary experience is continuously collective or inter-subjective rather than individualistic or egoistic. The title of a 1941 article of Gurwitsch – ‘A non-egological conception of consciousness’ (Gurwitsch 1941) – highlights the differentiation of constitutive phenomenology from Sartrean existentialism. Although Sartre advanced the view that existence precedes essence, he did so by presupposing that all individual human beings constitute themselves in absolute freedom rather than by supposing that constituting ‘individuals’ are already systemically pre-constituted – saturated with inherited or socially mediated attitudes and dispositions. This is the background to the situation in which Lyotard, Derrida and Bourdieu began their intellectual careers. Lyotard was the oldest of the three (born in 1924) and graduated from the Sorbonne at the end of the 1940s. Derrida and Bourdieu were both born in 1930 and both entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1950. Shortly after completing a Master’s thesis on ‘Indifference’, Lyotard taught in Algeria for two years, returning to France in 1952. In 1954, he published his short introduction to phenomenology in the ‘Que Sais-je’ series of the Presses Universitaires de France (Lyotard 1991). Importantly, Lyotard recognised that any response to phenomenology demanded that it should be understood as a movement rather than as a fixed philosophical position. He tried to outline the ‘common style’ of phenomenology after ‘having rendered to Husserl that which is Husserl’s: having begun’ (Lyotard 1991: 34). The first part of the book, devoted to Husserl, was followed by a short ‘Note on Husserl and

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Hegel’. Lyotard acknowledged that it was Hegel who had originally given ‘phenomenology’ its meaning, but he argued that the crucial distinction between the two thinkers was that ‘Hegelian phenomenology closes the system’ while ‘Husserlian description inaugurates the grasping of the “thing-itself” before all predication’ (Lyotard 1991: 68). In other words, to use Lyotard’s later terminology, Hegel’s dialectic was wrongly subordinated to a historical grand narrative. In this early text, therefore, we can find Lyotard’s latent hostility to totalising systems of thought. The second part of the book is devoted to discussion of ‘Phenomenology and the Human Sciences’ which offers, first, a general discussion of the relationship and then subsequent chapters considering phenomenology and psychology, sociology, and history. Lyotard accurately contended that Phenomenology constitutes at the same time both a ‘logical’ introduction to the human sciences, in seeking to define the object eidetically prior to all experimentation; and a philosophical ‘reprise’ of the results of experimentation, insofar as it seeks to retrieve fundamental meaning, particularly in proceeding to the critical analysis of the intellectual apparatus used. (Lyotard 1991: 76) What was missing from Lyotard’s discussion in 1954, however, was any critique of the status of cognition. He had absorbed Husserl’s commitment to the development of ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’ (to use the title of a text of Husserl of 1911) and explored the consequences of this position for the human sciences. In the late 1960s, Lyotard studied at Nanterre and came under the influence there of Mikel Dufrenne whose Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique [Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience] had been published in 1953 (Dufrenne 1953). The influence was apparent in the thesis which Lyotard wrote at that time which was published in 1971 as Discours, figure [Discourse, Figuration] (Lyotard 1971). Whereas Lyotard’s La Phénoménologie quotes Merleau-Ponty’s La phénoménologie de la perception favourably, Discours, figure considers the shortcomings of Merleau-Ponty’s posthumously published (1961) reflections on the work of Cézanne: L’oeil et l’esprit [Eye and Mind]. Merleau-Ponty rightly maintained his opposition to the dualism of Descartes’s Dioptrique [Dioptrics] but, in Lyotard’s view, he remained trapped within a commitment still to the primacy of cognition and consciousness. In the reflections of these two early texts of Lyotard on Husserl, mediated in part by Merleau-Ponty, we find, therefore, most of the ingredients of what he was to articulate briefly in La condition postmoderne [The Postmodern Condition] (Lyotard 1984) and in more detail in Le différend [The Differend] (Lyotard 1988). This is not the place to explore the development of Lyotard’s thinking in detail, but I simply suggest that some of the main characteristics of ‘postmodernism’ – scepticism about the grand narrative of history, opposition

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to the repression of art by rational analysis, espousal of small narratives as modes of individual communication – derive from his reading of Husserl.

Jacques Derrida By 1957, Derrida was planning a state doctorate on ‘The Ideality of the Literary Object’. This was never completed but, instead, he gave a paper in July 1959, on ‘ “Genèse et structure” et la phénoménologie’ at a conference held at Cerisy-la-Salle which was subsequently published in revised form (de Gandillac 1965). This paper was followed, in 1962, by Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry (which was one of the ‘late’ Husserl texts cited by Merleau-Ponty) (Derrida 1989). In his paper of 1959, Derrida argued strongly against the prevailing tendency of the time to differentiate the ‘late’ from the ‘early’ Husserl. He juxtaposed passages from Husserl’s first work – Philosophy of Arithmetic of 1891 – and his Formal and Transcendental Logic of 1929, and then analysed the argument of Ideen I (1913) so as to suggest that Husserl would never throughout his career have recognised any choice between ‘structural’ and ‘genetic’ analysis, and would never have considered that genetic analysis superseded structural. On the contrary, Husserl’s constant quest was, in his own words, to identify ‘the structural aprioris . . . of genesis itself’ (Derrida in de Gandillac 1965: 245). In so far as Husserl did move towards ‘constitutive’ phenomenology, this seemed to cause him, according to Derrida: to renounce the purely descriptive space and the transcendental pretention of his research in favour of a metaphysic of history where the solid structure of a Telos would allow him to recover . . . a primitive genesis which became more and more invasive and which seemed to accommodate phenomenological apriorism and transcendental idealism less and less. (Derrida in de Gandillac 1965: 246) In short, Derrida suggested that Husserl, perhaps under the influence of Heidegger, had succumbed to a self-betrayal. Derrida was, therefore, intent on restoring the dialectic which he believed informed Husserl’s procedure, from ‘early’ to ‘late’, a dialectic, however, which emphasised the primacy of structures as a prioristically present as preconditions for experience. From the very beginning, in his Philosophy of Arithmetic, Derrida argues, Husserl refused to locate the origin of the universality of arithmetic discourse in any ‘heavenly sphere’. This necessarily seemed to push him towards locating the discourse empirically as grounded psychologically, but it was ‘psychologism’ that he sought to combat and, unlike some of his contemporary philosophical psychologists, such as Wundt, he never went as far as suggesting that the recognition of the genetic constitution of ideality amounted to its ‘epistemological

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validation’ (Derrida in de Gandillac 1965: 247). Derrida proceeded to clarify his reading of Husserl by differentiating Husserl’s approach from those separately taken by Wilhelm Dilthey and the Gestalt psychologists. My use of the word ‘ideality’ in respect of Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl’s view of arithmetical language indicates the relationship between Derrida’s paper and his proposed doctoral thesis. Derrida was interested in the philosophical grounds for claiming that literary discourse might transcend the particular conditions of its production. Derrida pursued the same implicit enquiry in his subsequent introduction to Husserl’s last text, emphasising the affinity between Husserl’s earliest discussion of arithmetic and his latest discussion of geometry. He argues that ‘the origin of arithmetic was described in terms of psychological genesis’ in the early text – specifically not as a history of arithmetic, while in the late text, Husserl repeated the same project in respect of the origin of geometry ‘under the species of a phenomenological history’ (Derrida [1962] 1989: 28), that is to say, under the species of a non-empirical history. Underlying this endeavour over a period of fifty years lay Husserl’s attempt to deploy history categorally rather than empirically, and Derrida devotes much of his introduction to the Origin of Geometry to consideration of the validity of Husserl’s understanding of history. Derrida’s conclusion is that Husserl made a shift towards an emphasis on language which is a ‘historical incarnation’ which ‘sets free the transcendental, instead of binding it’ (Derrida [1962] 1989: 77). Again, this is not the place to explore Derrida’s work in further detail. My point is simply to illustrate that Derrida’s response to Husserl was anti-empirical in form and content. He operated within philosophical discourse and emphasised the quest for a non-empirically defined notion of genesis. His discussion of speech and writing in the introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry anticipated the development of his own ‘deconstructionist’ thinking.

Pierre Bourdieu Bourdieu made some cryptic remarks about his thinking during his student years at the École Normale Supérieure (1950–4) in an interview of 1985 with, amongst others, Axel Honneth. Asked whether he had never been interested in existentialism, Bourdieu replied: I read Heidegger, I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especially the analyses in Sein und Zeit of public time, history, and so on, which, together with Husserl’s analyses in Ideen II, helped me a great deal – as was later the case with Schütz – in my efforts to analyse the ordinary experience of the social. But I never really got into the existentialist mood. Merleau-Ponty was something different, at least in my view. He was interested in the human sciences and in biology, and he gave you an idea of what thinking about immediate present-day concerns can be

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like when it doesn’t fall into the sectarian over-simplifications of political discussion . . . he seemed to represent one potential way out of the philosophical babble found in academic institutions . . . (Bourdieu 1990: 5) Unlike Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard and Derrida, all of whom were inclined to offer their thinking as ‘philosophy’, Bourdieu, by contrast, was always disposed to take the view, as he later expressed it, that ‘tout est social’ [‘everything is social’] (Bourdieu 1992), including the foundations of philosophical discourse. Merleau-Ponty’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France was ‘In praise of philosophy’ (Merleau-Ponty 1963) even though traditional philosophers thought that his contribution was an aberration (see Robbins 2012). In spite of their positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the experimental university centre at Vincennes, respectively, Derrida and Lyotard were also instrumental in the establishment in 1983 of the ‘Collège International de Philosophie’ which, although opposed to the ‘state-philosophical’ model of institutionalised philosophy, nevertheless sought to revive acts of philosophising. In the year that the college opened, Bourdieu made a contribution entitled ‘The Philosophical Establishment’ to a collection of essays on Philosophy in France Today (Bourdieu 1983). Bourdieu took the view that philosophical discourse operates with its own rules within socially constructed institutional contexts. Its value was dependent on its practical relevance and it is significant that he gave ‘Fieldwork in philosophy’ as the title for the interview of 1985 quoted above. Bourdieu’s position-taking in respect of philosophy was consistent with the interpretation of the work of Husserl which always lay at the back of his thinking. It was consistent with Lyotard’s recognition that phenomenology established an open movement rather than a species of institutional philosophy, but Bourdieu chose to pursue the implications of this perception in his social scientific research whereas Lyotard sought to actualise his view of the potential of non-cognitive artistic activity. Bourdieu’s poststructuralist social science developed out of his awareness of constitutive phenomenology and, as suggested in the quote above taken from Gurwitsch, it was completely logical that his poststructuralist position should emerge gradually after he had assimilated a structuralist approach, that, in other words, his poststructuralism was never an anti-structuralism but, rather, a position consciously constituted from what it superseded. Bourdieu was conscripted to serve in the French army in Algeria in 1956. After demobilisation in 1958, he taught at the University of Algiers for two years during which time he wrote Sociologie de l’algérie and carried out the research which led to the publication of Travail et travailleurs en algérie (Bourdieu, Darbel, Rivet and Seibel 1963) and Le déracinement, la crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en algérie (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964). The first two publications were elements of a combined ‘acculturation’ project. Trained as

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a philosopher, Bourdieu absorbed the methodology of acculturation studies developed in the United States by, among others, Melville Herskovits. This involved an attempt to measure cultural adaptation by assessing attitudinal changes in relation to baseline characteristics, but Bourdieu approached a task which was intrinsically defined in social psychological and cultural anthropology terms with his own particular phenomenological orientation. He was confronted with the problem of how to communicate his findings within the accepted intellectual frameworks of existing discipline discourses. Sociologie de l’algérie was translated into English in 1962 as The Algerians (Bourdieu 1962). Bourdieu took the opportunity to elaborate his original account of the traditional social organisation of Algerian tribes by introducing a series of diagrams which represented genealogical practices structurally. In short, Bourdieu adopted the descriptive procedures which had become dominant in France as a consequence of Lévi-Strauss’s publication of his Structural Anthropology (1958). Bourdieu was invited back to France in 1960 by Raymond Aron who had established a research centre and was in need of active young researchers to pursue sociological enquiries related to the positions which he had outlined in his courses of lectures since his appointment to the chair of sociology at the Sorbonne in 1955. In other words, Bourdieu was constrained in the 1960s both by the domination of structuralism within the field of anthropology and by the circumscribed parameters assigned to sociology by the anti-Durkheimian Aron. Bourdieu worked within, and then beyond, these ‘censures’. After publishing several books arising from his Algerian research, Bourdieu then directed three major research projects – on student culture, on museum and art gallery attendance, and on photography. These projects generated texts which seemed to have involved detailed empirical work and they were quickly categorised as contributions to the sociology of education and culture. However, the meticulous way in which the procedures adopted in these projects was always specified in appendices suggested that Bourdieu was seeking to articulate his sense that his findings were not comprehensive representations of social reality but logical consequences of those ‘problems’ which corresponded with his own attitudinal dispositions. His objectifications were grounded subjectively, although he also argued that his ‘subjectivity’ itself was systemically generated. In the second half of the 1960s Bourdieu wrote several key articles which show that he was exploring the relationship between forms of explanation and forms of prior experience. The first of these – ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’ [‘Intellectual field and creative project’] (Bourdieu 1971) – was published in a special number of Les Temps Modernes (1966) devoted to the ‘problems of structuralism’, edited by Jean Pouillon. In his ‘presentation’ of the special number, entitled ‘un essai de définition’ [‘An attempt at definition’], Pouillon, an anthropologist who shortly afterwards was to edit a collection of articles in honour of Lévi-Strauss on his sixtieth birthday, articulated the fact that ‘structure’ was being used in two different ways. As he puts it: ‘En fait, la

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structure est à la fois une réalité – cette configuration que l’analyse découvre – et un outil intellectuel – la loi de sa variabilité.’ [‘In fact, the structure is at the same time a reality – that configuration which analysis uncovers – and an intellectual tool – the law of its variability.’] He usefully argued that French has two adjectives which are spelled differently: ‘ “Structural” renvoie à la structure comme syntaxe, “structurel” renvoie à la structure comme réalité’ [‘ “structural” relates to structure as syntax, “structurel” relates to structure as reality’] (Pouillon 1966: 779–80). This differentiation corresponds with the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘factual’ structuralism to which Cassirer referred. I argued that Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Radcliffe-Brown and of diffusionism in anthropology suggested that he was primarily concerned with ‘formal’ structuralism. Bourdieu’s article introduced the concept of ‘field’ as a way of securing a dialectical relationship between the formal and the factual. In doing this, Bourdieu began to deploy constitutive phenomenology and, perhaps quite specifically, the concept developed by Gurwitsch in his Théorie du champ de la conscience (Gurwitsch 1957), translated as The Field of Consciousness (Gurwitsch 1964). In his first paragraph, Bourdieu announced that all products of intellectual creativity – whether of art, literature, science or theatre – derive their meaning within an exchange system of values – ‘fields’ – rather than as expressions of individual intention. He deployed a factual structuralism to try to discredit subjectivist individualism. Lévi-Strauss had suggested that the validity of this kind of factual structuralism depended on the intrinsic susceptibility of observed phenomena to be analysed systematically, whereas, in his second paragraph, Bourdieu hinted that the validity of factual structuralism rather depended on the artificial construction of past fields of reality by present structuralists disposed to impose a meaningful system on inchoate facts. There was a structuralism in fact in historical situations but this was the immanent construct of historical agents. There is no necessary connection between the factual structuralism of the past and the interpretive impositions on that past of present formal structuralists. Present-day formal structuration just happens to be the strategic activity of a minority of structuralist linguists exchanging their interpretations within the constituted and circumscribed field of structural linguistics. Even while he was, in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron, preparing the publication of La reproduction [Reproduction], subtitled ‘Éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement’ [‘Elements for a theory of the educational system’] (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), Bourdieu continued to explore the nature of the correlation between factual and formal structuration. His ‘Condition de classe et position de classe’ [‘Class condition and class position’] (Bourdieu 1966a) implied that explanations of social phenomena, such as peasantry, in terms of unitary, universal class condition are formal impositions on the factual constitution of class relations through position-taking practised immanently by social agents in diverse contexts. His ‘Sociology and

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Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject’, written with Jean-Claude Passeron (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967), suggested both that the humanist tendency of Sartrean existentialism was historically constituted in some kind of systemic, structural affinity with the Resistance and the subsequent Liberation, and that, fallaciously, American neo-positivism contrived in response to be a-philosophically objective. For Bourdieu, constitutive phenomenology opened up the possibility that there could be an ongoing dialectic between subjective and objective social perceptions, whereby there might be recognition that all subjects differentially objectify experience and that all objectifications are grounded in subjective experience. Knowledge and experience constitute each other bi-directionally. Differentiation between the two is not a matter of kind, but of relative power. Bourdieu’s orientation towards acceptance of a constitutive dialectic was reinforced by his reading of Cassirer at the time, stimulated by his work on Cassirer’s pupil, Erwin Panofsky (see Bourdieu’s Postface to his translation of Panofsky 1967). In his ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’ (Bourdieu 1968), Bourdieu began by acknowledging that the influence of structuralism had been beneficial in exorcising subjectivist or social psychological interpretation from social scientific explanation, but this negative achievement was not sufficient. Bourdieu cites Cassirer’s article in Word in making his case for a theory of sociological knowledge which would assimilate formal structuralism by situating it within the practice of social agents. Bourdieu’s attachment to constitutive phenomenology enabled him to articulate a poststructuralist position which, by definition, had to be advanced through sociological engagement with the social rather than through philosophical detachment. It was in the 1970s that Bourdieu consolidated his scepticism in respect of ‘natural attitude’ social sciences in favour of constitutive assumptions which would finally lead to his commitments to ‘reflexive sociology’ and to ‘socio-analytic encounter’. The transition from his Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972) to its ‘translation’ as Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) is indicative of Bourdieu’s crucial advance towards a poststructuralist position. The first text offered three ‘structuralist’ articles about Algeria written in the early 1960s (one of which – ‘La maison kabyle ou le monde renversé’ [‘The Berber House or the World Reversed’] – was included in Pouillon’s publication in honour of Lévi-Strauss: Pouillon and Maranda 1970). Bourdieu then proceeded to provide a critique of the shortcomings of his earlier, structuralist articles. By contrast, Bourdieu took the opportunity provided by an English translation to reorganise the text. The new book incorporated the three articles into the discussion in such a way that it offered a positive blueprint for future research rather than a rejection of earlier achievement. One crucial section of the changing text was published in English in 1973 as ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’ (Bourdieu 1973). Here Bourdieu outlined his view that social research requires two ‘epistemological

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breaks’. To become constituted as ‘science’, the unarticulated primary experiences of people have to be re-presented objectively according to the socially constructed rules of relatively autonomous discourses. In order that this necessary break should not privilege objective understanding as absolutely valid or superior, there has to be a second break whereby the social conditions of production of objective explanation are subjected to scrutiny. As he was to put this in 1973 in ‘Sur le pouvoir symbolique’ [‘On symbolic power’], there are ‘structuring structures’ (‘factual structuralism’) and there are ‘structured structures’ (‘formal structuralism’) (in Bourdieu 1991). Bourdieu’s poststructuralism represented an attempt to retain a dialectical relationship between the two kinds of structures. It was not simply that Bourdieu was adopting a constitutive methodology in his projected researches. The essence of Bourdieu’s poststructuralism was that he accepted that his new research orientation had been constituted cumulatively from his earlier research. Bourdieu wrote several articles in which he explored the ‘structure’ and ‘genesis’ of his thoughts or those of others. Unlike Derrida, however, Bourdieu was not drawn to philosophical deconstruction, but, rather, to an acceptance of a continuing process of social historical construction to which his own work was just one socially motivated contribution. He does not appear to have had reservations about ‘empirical history’ in part because, like Merleau-Ponty, he saw it more as a process of corporeal inter-generational transmission in which cognitive behaviour is an instrument of adaptation than as an intellectual progression.

Poststructuralism after Bourdieu Constitutive phenomenology entails constant re-constitution. Poststructuralism was the product of a particular historical moment when structuralism was re-constituted. During his lifetime, Bourdieu was able to sustain a correlation between his contributions to structured discourses, such as those of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, literary and art criticism, and the structuring social conditions of his personal trajectory. The short autobiography which he wrote in the last few months of his life (Bourdieu 2008) attempted to remain true to the anti-humanist orientation of ‘Intellectual field and creative project’ in that he presented his self and his intellectual work as the products of the social systems in which he had participated. The phenomenologically constitutive dimension underlying his reflexivity has been hard to preserve and his poststructuralism has been absorbed, as methodology, into resurgently autonomous discourses. Apart from attempts to counter this trend in relation to the post-mortem appropriation of Bourdieu’s work, one of the most promising reconstitutions of the phenomenological basis of poststructuralism has emerged in the work of Diana Coole. She concluded her first book on Women in Political Theory, published in 1988 when she was a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Leeds, with a chapter discussing ‘Contemporary Feminism

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and Political Thought’. She argued that there was a need for feminist thinking to transcend the supposed duality of gender characteristics – the supposition by which male domination had perpetuated itself. She recommended that feminists ‘need to engage in the demystification and deconstruction of patriarchal culture’ (Coole 1988: 276), but she insisted that recourse to genetic differentiation would be a mistake. As she put it: To the extent that (the contribution of women) is defined in terms of an essential female corporeality and psychology, however, the opportunity to emancipate women while redefining the world in which they live, will be lost. For then they will simply come full circle, voluntarily embracing those qualities which the earliest expressions of Western culture imposed upon them, when it structured its thinking in terms of sexual polarity in which the male principle was superior and central. (Coole 1988: 276–7) In short, women need to become engaged in an ongoing, poststructuralist reconstitution of their social roles. It was only in her Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (Coole 2007) that her indebtedness to MerleauPonty became explicit even though she mentioned in her acknowledgements that she had ‘had an abiding interest in Merleau-Ponty’s work ever since I discovered it as a doctoral student in Toronto (Coole 2007: vii). She justified her detailed study by submitting that Merleau-Ponty’s politics ‘suggests a way of returning to politics after poststructuralism, anti-humanism, and the demise of the subject’ (Coole 2007: 1). She also asked early in her study whether Merleau-Ponty should be viewed as ‘a thinker who combined phenomenology with poststructuralist sensitivity or, alternatively, a poststructuralist avant la lettre’ (Coole 2007: 10), preferring herself to take the former approach. These comments suggest that Coole’s perspective was shaped by the forms of poststructuralism which she wanted to oppose – forms which operated on the assumption that poststructuralism, anti-humanism, and the demise (death) of the subject were mutually reinforcing positions. My view is that Bourdieu ‘combined phenomenology with poststructuralist sensitivity’ and it was this that defined his poststructuralism – achieved perhaps on the basis of the way in which he effected an operational coexistence of formal and factual structuralisms. The consequence is that I concur with Coole’s representation of Merleau-Ponty’s position and think that Bourdieu’s work and political activism manifested precisely what it was she wanted to celebrate in the achievement of Merleau-Ponty. In her discussion of the development of the work of Judith Butler, Coole has cautiously welcomed Butler’s apparent recognition, in her Undoing Gender (Butler 2004), that agency suggests a relational process which is at odds with her ‘earlier emphasis on subjectivity as the constituted effect of power’ (Coole 2008: 27). Coole comments that this shift in Butler’s position, restoring some of the original phenomenological characteristics of

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her thinking, has important implications. She says of Butler’s reference to phenomenological apprehension that: It is the careful analysis of unfolding events and social trajectories this entails, together with the sociological sense of a complex social field on which it relies, that suggests a more engaged politics than poststructuralism is able to sustain. (Coole 2008: 27) For me, it was the phenomenological apprehension underpinning his sociological work that defined the alternative poststructuralism which Bourdieu offered.

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7 DECONSTRUCTION Nikolai Duffy

D

econstruction is arguably one of the most important and influential schools of modern thought, with its influence stretching across several different disciplines and fields, ranging from philosophy, critical theory and literary studies, to ethics, political science, historicism and jurisprudence. Yet despite the scale and range of influence deconstruction has had over the years, it is remarkably hard to pin down with any single or unifying definition. It is also hard to date. Deconstruction does not ‘begin’ with Derrida but, as Derrida has so often shown, was rather something that was always already at play throughout the entire history of Western metaphysics. The act of deconstruction is to engage reactively, to intervene, with this history. Far from being a hindrance, however, these problems of definition actually reveal something fundamentally important about deconstruction itself. To begin with, deconstruction is not a philosophy. Derrida is very clear on this point. Deconstruction does not present a system of thinking, and nor does it seek the foundational philosophical principles of ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’ (‘philosophy’, from the Greek, philosophia, meaning ‘the love of wisdom’: philo meaning ‘loving’, and sophia, knowledge). Yet nor is deconstruction, strictly speaking, a theory. It is not a set of rules, regulations or even assumptions that might be applied to a particular text or situation in order that they might be understood or interpreted. Deconstruction may well be put in service of elucidation but explaining things is not its primary motivation. On the contrary, deconstructive criticism argues that all systems of communication (literary, philosophical, cultural, political, legal, and so on) are governed by an inherent instability. One of deconstruction’s principle tasks is to demonstrate the ways in which this instability calls the regulation and habit of those systems into question. Deconstruction pulls the carpet out from under our feet. This in itself is a challenging position to hold, but deconstruction’s challenge – and critical importance – goes further than this. Deconstruction dismantles but does not offer any alternatives; in so doing, deconstruction challenges us to live in what we might think of as ‘deconstructed space’, that is, in a position of uncertainty in which we interrogate and question everything around us. For Derrida, this is the ethical vigilance of deconstruction; for its detractors, it is the anarchic and irrational consequence of deconstruction.

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Deconstruction first came to prominence in 1966 when Jacques Derrida published the lecture, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’. One of Derrida’s central arguments in the lecture was that the modern period – since at least the time of Nietzsche, and then developing via the work of Heidegger and Freud – is characterised by an essential breakdown of traditional ways of thinking. From the Renaissance onwards, ‘man’ had been placed at the centre of intellectual conceptions of the world; everything stemmed from and came back to the central position of the human. Starting with Nietzsche’s avowal of modern nihilism, however, Derrida argued that the foundational position of the human in intellectual conceptions of the universe had been eroded. Derrida cites three principle reasons for this breakdown of fixed notions of the world: world historical events (the two World Wars; the Holocaust as the mark of the collapse of Europe as the centre of the world order); science (including Werner Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ and the relativity of Einstein, both of which collapsed notions of time and space as fixed and absolute); and the modernist experimentation in literature, music and the visual arts. For Derrida, the world lacks fixity; it is decentred and premised not on fixed absolutes but on ‘play’. As Derrida writes: before becoming a discourse, an organised practice that resembles a philosophy, a theory, a method, which it is not, in regard to those unstable stabilities or this destabilization that it makes its principal theme, ‘deconstruction’ is firstly this destabilization on the move in, if one could speak thus, ‘the things themselves’. (Derrida 1988: 147) At its heart, deconstruction articulates a profound scepticism towards any claim to knowledge, even its own, such that rather than replacing one world view with another, deconstruction seeks to render all claims to knowledge equivocal. In 1967 Derrida developed these ideas at length in three landmark volumes: La Voix et la Phenomene (Speech and Phenomena), L’Ecriture et Difference (Writing and Difference), and De la Grammatologie (Of Grammatology). In Speech and Phenomena Derrida argued for the fundamental role of difference in language and thought, structuring his argument around a detailed close reading of the work of the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl. In Writing and Difference Derrida collected a series of essays in which he began to develop the particularities of his position in relation to contemporaneous debates about psychoanalysis, the human sciences and ethics. The third and final book, Of Grammatology, caused arguably the greatest interest and controversy (at least in the English-speaking world after the translation by Gayatri Spivak that was published in 1976), especially in terms of his elaborations about the notions of ‘text’ and what would come to be termed ‘différance’. After an introductory discussion in which Derrida argued that ‘grammatology’, the theory of written signs, could point the way to an understanding of language freed from

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the myth of presence and open to the work of différance, Derrida then began a painstaking ‘deconstruction’ of the accounts of language given by, among others, the Swiss semiotician, Ferdinand de Saussure, the French anthropologist and ethnologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Swiss political philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ One of Derrida’s key statements in Of Grammatology was the much-quoted ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’. It is a problematic phrase to translate into English, literally meaning ‘there is nothing outside-text’ but most commonly translated as ‘there is nothing outside of text’. In a book that runs to just over 350 pages it might seem a little perverse to focus so much attention on a single sentence, yet much of the force and complexity of deconstruction as a whole is concentrated in this pronouncement. At its most basic, the phrase simply means that everything around us is textually constructed. More acutely, it is to say that our apprehension of the world and all that constitutes it actually depends on these textual constructions. There is no world without these texts; our understanding of things, as well as our primary experience of them, depends upon their being in language. Without language, there is no world; the word gives us the world. In this regard, deconstruction can be understood as a process akin to literary reading, whereby the task of the deconstructionist is to study and decipher both what it is said and how it is said. This is also, in part, the reason why deconstruction had its first major impact on the academy in literary studies. Deconstruction reads both closely and widely, making every effort to point out contradictions and inconsistencies in a text, to show how those texts work and how they fall down, to show what the words on the page carry within themselves, sometimes even despite themselves, unconsciously. It is only by paying close attention to the words on the page that these other factors become objects of textual commentary and critical focus. Approaching philosophy from a literary or textual perspective invites us not to take philosophy at its word – whereby the evidence of understanding would correspond to an ability to paraphrase that which is being argued – but to think about how its argument is presented, how this problematises or deepens our understanding of both texts and contexts.

Destruktion One of the seminal influences on the early development of deconstruction was the work of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. The very term ‘deconstruction’ originated from Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s notion of destruktion. The common German word for destruction is Zerstörung; Heidegger’s term is a deliberate attempt to shift the emphasis of destruction from ‘destroy’ to ‘dismantle’ (‘abbau’ means ‘dismantling’). For Derrida Heidegger’s sense of ‘destruktion’ means a particular mode of critical thinking in

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which ‘the elucidating speech must each time shatter itself and what it had attempted to do’ (Heidegger 2000: 22). As Barbara Johnson put it in a muchquoted passage from her book, The Critical Difference: Deconstruction is not synonymous with ‘destruction’. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’, which etymologically means ‘to undo’ [. . .] The deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text. (Johnson 1980: 5) This is a radical proposition, not least because it also requires a manner of expression that renders every assertion equivocal. This is why Derrida’s method of philosophical exposition can appear so unorthodox. His frequently convoluted style, with its complex syntax, long sentences, digressions, paradoxes and quibbles is not meant to be deliberately difficult but remarks, rather, the manner in which, throughout his work he was constantly at pains to match content with form. In Of Grammatology Derrida puts it in the following terms: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain ways falls prey to its own work. (Derrida 1976: 24)

‘Différance’ Derrida repeatedly emphasised this sense of deconstruction, writing in 1988 how: [i]t is a question [. . .] of producing a new concept of writing. This concept can be called gram or différance. The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each ‘element’ [. . .] being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of other elements of the chain or system [. . .] Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. (Derrida 1981a: 26)

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In this passage Derrida references and draws attention to arguably the most important term within deconstruction, a term that might be considered a synonym for deconstruction itself: ‘différance’. First outlined in 1972 in Marges de la Philosophie (Margins of Philosophy), Derrida declares that ‘différance’ is neither word nor concept. It is not so much a term as a non-term at work – at play – in the margins of each and every text, philosophical or otherwise. With its silent ‘a’ différance cannot be expressed phonetically, but only graphically. In this sense, différance is not presentable as such; it cannot appear in and as itself because it is never self-identical, it always exceeds itself in the instant of its inscription; in différance there is always an excess remainder outside of presence that is both yet to end and yet to begin, and which thus puts into question the very idea of presence. Différance is not, it is not of the order of what ‘is’, which is to say that it is neither itself, nor of the order of presence, but rather, that which ‘makes possible the presentation of the being-present’ (Derrida 1982: 6). Thus, différance is not meaning but the condition of possibility of meaning, of sense, of communication. Différance is neither end nor origin, but rather the possibility of each. Yet this is also why différance can never become a name. To regard it as a name, which is to say, to make it present, to realise it, would be to contradict precisely that which makes naming, presence and realisation possible. Différance is this double bind of that which ‘is’ taking place in the same instant that what ‘is’ – Being – is erased. In his essay on Derrida, ‘Elliptical Sense’, Jean-Luc Nancy characterises Derrida’s sense of différance as a ‘lightening of meaning’ (Nancy 1992: 41). As Nancy writes, ‘the lightening of meaning’ refers, like différance, to the ‘knowledge of a condition of possibility that gives nothing to know’ (Nancy 1992: 41). As such, ‘[m]eaning lightens itself [. . .] as meaning, at the cutting edge of its appeal and its repeated demand for meaning’ (Nancy 1992: 42). Nancy underscores an important point here. Différance does not seek to suggest that meaning does not exist but that it only exists in the movement of play. Of course, one of the problems that arises here concerns the question of how one is to speak of différance at all. If, as Derrida asks, ‘[i]t goes without saying that it cannot be exposed,’ what is one to do in order to speak of it? (Derrida 1982: 5). Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the response is twofold. On the one hand, it is not possible to speak of it. But on the other hand, each time there is speech – or what Derrida would call writing – différance has always already been spoken. As Derrida explains, and from its etymological roots in the Latin differre, différance is polysemic, it simultaneously incorporates within itself the two meanings of to defer and to differ. In this sense, it inscribes – and, at the same time, is inscribed by – both temporalisation and spatialisation. And yet the space-time thus named by différance never actually takes place – once again it is neither begun nor complete but is rather in that non-space and non-time of the always already which, in the absence of a beginning or an end, remains

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undecidable and thus can ever only repeat itself. In certain senses, this character of the ‘always already’ resembles Heidegger’s notion of ontological difference, in which the presence of Being is always deferred due to the fact that beings discover themselves always already in the world. The difference, however, is that, as Derrida explains, différance would be ‘ “older” than . . . ontological difference and the truth of Being’ for the very reason that it is that which makes the question of Being possible (Derrida 1982: 22). In other words, in order to ask the question of Being that question must necessarily be always inscribed within language, but that which makes language possible is différance. Thus, différance is the silent thought behind the ontological question of Being that puts that question of Being into play. For Derrida, it is precisely this play of différance – of difference and deferral – that makes the question of Being, of meaning, of sense, in short, of language, audible. Différance does not deny the possibility of Being but rather exposes the noncoincidence of Being with its question: the question of Being always already defers Being because it is always already otherwise than Being. The ‘always already’ space-time of différance situates différance at once both within the past and within the future. That which ‘is’ always already necessarily must have been there yesterday and will be there still tomorrow. At the same time, however, as it is ‘always already’ this is a past that, strictly speaking, has never taken place, which is to say, has never been present, and a future which can never become ‘modalised or modified into the form of the present, which allows itself to be neither foreseen nor pro-grammed’ (Derrida 1992a: 200). Time here is no longer linear but a twisted mist, the time of waiting. Différance is out of joint and out of place, neither a ‘who’ nor a ‘what,’ but a certain possibility of each and either awaiting itself. In Specters of Marx Derrida writes that ‘[o]ne question is not yet posed. Not as such. It is hidden rather by the philosophical, we will say more precisely ontological response’ (Derrida 1994: 29). Différance is this ‘not yet,’ which is to say that différance is not, not yet, not quite, not now, behind philosophy, and also therefore, before it. But as différance is irreducible from the question of the condition of possibility of Being and of language, by which I also mean, because the question of Being and of language always already find themselves within the condition of différance, then both Being and language are themselves out of joint and out of place, neither yet nor now.

The Influence of Deconstruction: Literary Studies and Feminist Theory Two of the areas on which deconstruction has arguably had its greatest influence are literary studies and feminist theory.

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Although Derrida’s early work was concerned primarily with rereading the history of Western metaphysics, it was actually his application of deconstructivist practices to literature that first made deconstruction internationally infamous. In particular, the take-up of deconstruction within English departments in American universities marked a seismic foundational shift in literary studies that would last a generation, and whose implications and consequences continue to count within literary studies to this day. The most pronounced, if short-lived, instance of the influence of deconstruction on literary studies was on the so-called ‘Yale School’, particularly in relation to the work of Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman and, perhaps most significantly if most controversially, Paul de Man. Collectively, these scholars published jointly the volume Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) but it was de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1971) and Allegories of Reading (1979a), together with Hillis Miller’s Fiction and Repetition (1982) and The Linguistic Moment (1985) that brought the widest attention to the influence of deconstruction on literary criticism, and that spawned a revolution in literary critical practice. Of critical importance to the Yale School was Derrida’s early analysis of language and his sense of the inherent play of signifiers. The inherent undecidability Derrida identified within all discourses came to dominate the ways in which literary texts would be read. More than this, though, literary texts came to be seen as exemplary expressions of the very undecidability and equivocation deconstruction was at pains to expose in all discourses. In an interview, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, conducted with Derek Attridge and published in Acts of Literature (1992b), Derrida remarks that one of the essential features of literature is its freedom to say anything. Yet such freedom, Derrida argues, comes with the caveat that what literature says can be written off as ‘fiction’. ‘In the end’, Derrida comments, ‘the critico-political function of literature, in the West, remains very ambiguous. The freedom to say everything is a very powerful political weapon, but one which might immediately let itself be neutralized as a fiction’ (Derrida 1992b: 38). It is the doubleness of literature that most interests Derrida. Literature can say things, but it does not necessarily claim authenticity for what it says. Literature may well reflect a recognisable world but at the same time, literature transforms that world, reframes it, relocates it into a context and landscape that, before anything, is linguistic, textual. As such, literature comes to exemplify the very means by which, Derrida argues repeatedly, the world appears to us, or knowledge is derived, and so forth. In Derrida’s terms, in other words, literature is writing par excellence. It is important to remember that deconstruction’s emphasis on the différance of meaning isn’t about saying that meaning doesn’t exist but that it only exists in the movement of play. In this way, différance articulates the manner in which meaning is never here but always somewhere else.

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Much of Derrida’s argument here picks up on the work of his nearcontemporary, Maurice Blanchot. ‘Everyday language calls a cat a cat, as if the living cat and its name were identical’ (Blanchot 1995: 325). Yet for Blanchot language is not a direct or transparent medium. In other words, units of language are abstractions used to refer to objects that are not present, such that each word actually circulates within ambiguity and dissimulation. What this points to, then, is that for Blanchot literature takes place as a site of irreducible strangeness that is at all times resistant to the parameters of conceptual thought. If literature does anything, Blanchot argues, it can only be said to dissolve any foundation upon which certainty and definiteness could be grounded. In this sense, we can say that literature functions for Blanchot and Derrida within the form of an essential equivocation. As the Blanchot scholar Leslie Hill puts it, literature transgresses or exceeds philosophy ‘not because it confronts the law of representation from a position of greater authority, but because it turns aside from representation in order to affirm the other law [. . .] that interrupts all representation’ (Hill 1997: 102). In this regard, deconstruction corresponds to this sense of literary fluidity of showing where the assumptions that underpin all structures are premised on an originary gap or rupture. This is why one of Derrida’s primary aims was to create a new form of writing that really formed itself out of this paradox of word and rupture and was formally reflective of the condition of l’avenir of différance. It was also this emphasis on new forms of writing that gave deconstruction its primary applicability to a new wave of primarily French feminist discourse, marked in particular by the work of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, and their elaboration of a form of feminist critique premised on what they call ‘écriture feminine’. Much of the feminist deconstructive project stems from the publication of Cixous’s 1976 essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, and subsequently Irigaray’s piece ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ (1980) and ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other’ (1981). Employing the deconstructive strategy of breaking down the distinction between binary opposites, Cixous and Irigaray argued that woman was oppressed and hidden by linguistic conventions that are patriarchal, latently if not always manifestly. In this regard, French feminists argue that this binary logic tends to group with masculinity such qualities as light, thought, activity, reason, head, and so on. In this way, French feminists argue that structure of language is what they term phallocentric – it privileges masculinity in general by associating it with things and values more appreciated by the masculine-dominated culture. For French feminists, then, the binary oppositions that structure language represent the world from the male point of view. In this way, they argue, women are systematically forced to choose – either they can imagine and represent themselves as men imagine and represent them (in which case, women can speak but they will speak as men) or they can choose silence, thus becoming what the

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critic Ann Rosalind Jones terms ‘the invisible and unheard sex’ (Jones 1986: 83). Or, as Mary Poovey puts it: By definition of this ‘economy of the same’ (the phrase is Irigaray’s), woman is not-man; as such, she is ‘other’ to that which is the norm. As one example of this, woman’s sexuality has been theorised as lack because it has been conceptualised in terms of male sexuality; in keeping with this, woman has been rendered semantically passive because she has been relegated to the position of the object, not the subject of desire. (Poovey 1988: 55) In opposition to this, French feminism sets out the case for the particularity of an écriture feminine. The influential theorist Julia Kristeva has argued that feminine language is semiotic rather than symbolic. What she means by this distinction is that rather than opposing and ranking elements of language, rather than constructing a hierarchical order between two terms – in the sense that the head would be preferable to the heart, light to dark, and so on – instead of arranging these binary oppositions into a particular order, feminine language is rhythmic and unifying. According to Kristeva, feminine language is derived from the pre-Oedipal period of fusion between mother and child. In this way, by being associated with the maternal, Kristeva argues that feminine language isn’t simply threatening to culture – which would be patriarchal – but also a medium through which women might be creative in new, innovative, transformative ways. Yet although there would appear to be something essentially affirmative and liberating in Kristeva’s understanding of feminine language, of the semiotic over the symbolic, it’s important to bear in mind that Kristeva, in a move akin to the deconstructive insistence on aporia and paradox, also argues that we need to be a little hesitant before prematurely celebrating the creative liberation of women. In other words, Kristeva argues that if a feminist language refuses to participate in the dominant, masculine discourse, then it actually risks being marginalised as an activity by men. If we put that another way, essentially for Kristeva the risk is that feminine language might become relegated to political insignificance. Taking up this mantle Cixous argues that in order to escape the discourse of mastery – that is, patriarchal discourse – it is necessary for women to write the body. For Cixous, sexuality and the language in which we communicate are inextricably linked so that to be free also involves the freedom of the other. In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ Cixous argues that writing is structured by a ‘sexual opposition’ favouring men, one that ‘has always worked for man’s profit to the point of reducing writing . . . to his laws’ (Cixous 1981: 253). In this context, for Cixous, the invention of a new critical writing will allow women to, as she puts it, transform their history and seize the occasion to speak. Cixous then issues the following challenge: ‘Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

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Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth’ (Cixous 1981: 250). In this context, for Cixous, the practice of écriture féminine is part of an ongoing concern with exclusion, with the transformation of subjectivity, and the struggle for identity. Cixous wants to establish a mode of writing that is poetic, that uses excessive imagery, and that therefore can’t quite be pinned down by the main, dominant or male notions of language. If we just take one example here of Cixous’ own practice of writing, from ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous writes: ‘We the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies – we are black and we are beautiful’ (Cixous 1981: 248). Cixous’s style is deliberately excessive and hyperbolic: ‘our lovely mouths gagged with pollen [. . .] we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces’, and so on. There is a conscious indirectness to Cixous’s style, a refusal to state things minimally, clearly, but through repetitions, metaphors, figurative language. It is also for this reason that Cixous privileges things such as laughter, contradiction, paradox and parody – things that essentially spill over, that common sense can’t quite work out what to do with. A crucial thing to remember, however, is that the main reason that Cixous employs such a style is because she argues that the dominant culture does not really know what to do with such language. It cannot bracket it off, dismiss it, because it cannot grasp all of it. There is always a turn of phrase, an image, a metaphor that escapes, that can’t quite be brought to heel. In this way, for Cixous, part of the value of feminist writing is actually the way it persists in the margins and gaps (as the repressed, the unconscious) of a male-dominated culture.

Deconstruction and Politics: Democracy to Come In his later writings Derrida began increasingly to focus on the importance of the endlessly deferred future of différance (that came to be termed, l’avenir, to come), applying it in particular to a re-evaluation of the notion of democracy, and subsequently applying it to ethical, political and legal scenarios more generally. The widening of Derrida’s frame of critical engagement also accounts for the increased influence of deconstructive practices on fields as diverse as Critical International Relations and Critical Legal Studies. In an interview conducted in the wake of the attacks on 11 September 2001, Derrida defines democracy – and justice – not as existing in the present but as ‘to come’. Democracy, Derrida argues, issues a promise to the future, ‘a promise that risks and must always risk being perverted into a threat’ (Derrida 2003: 120). For Derrida, the common manifestation of so-called democracy is little more than a form of governance, of political administration and decisionmaking. Derrida’s invocation of the ‘not yet’, however, relocates democracy – and the political more generally – away from administration towards the

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promise of its idea. To think the idea of a democracy to come is to remember the promise of the Enlightenment yet to be fulfilled, which is to say, no doubt somewhat simply, emancipation for all, which would mean for everyone. It is also, therefore, to remember the injunction of this promise, to welcome it, and by so doing to attend to the task of trying – and failing – to bring it into the present. The critical point is that the non-arrival of the promise of democracy decentres political structures and foundations precisely because it inscribes a hiatus, an element of uncertainty that destabilises the authority of each and every political system. Derrida is not suggesting that things grind to a halt; administrative decisions, he argues, must still be taken, of course. His point, rather, is simply that it is also necessary that those decisions should be contested in turn. Derrida’s point is that in order for the political to remain not only faithful to this specifically ethical responsibility of the future, but also to make it politically active, the political can never possess, neither today nor tomorrow, a pre-given programme or course of action. ‘Democracy to come’ fails, but this failure is necessary: failure reignites the need to try again. In rather reduced terms, Derrida’s point is that it is necessary to decide, but that it is also necessary to critique, that we simultaneously perform both tasks, and that we do so without authority, from the displacement and dispossession of the time of l’avenir. For Derrida, such a condition corresponds to an ethical imperative and it has justice at its core.

Deconstruction and Critical Legal Studies: The Force of Law ‘Justice’ is, and has always been, a key term within deconstruction, beginning with the early paper discussing the American Declaration of Independence. Yet it was only when Derrida began, from the 1990s onwards, to devote more and more time to analysing the nature of justice that deconstruction became closely associated with jurisprudence and legal theory. Although embedded in much of his later writing on ethics, hospitality, forgiveness and justice, the particularity of Derrida’s notion of law is most clearly set out in the two papers ‘Before the Law’ and ‘Force of Law’. In each essay, Derrida’s principle interest lies in interrogating the conceptual foundations upon which both legal theory and practice rest. As with all elements of deconstructive analysis, in other words, the primary interest lies in the interrogation of sources; Derrida is interested in the idea of law more than its administration. In ‘Force of Law’ Derrida asserts that the law, as with all systems, is founded on an aporia. As with his sense of the political, Derrida’s primary aim in the essay is to establish the ways in which the administration of law does not necessarily correspond to what law is commonly understood to mete out, namely the administration of justice. ‘Law’, Derrida writes, ‘is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable’

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(Derrida 1990: 947). The lexical distinction here between law and justice is paramount. Law may well be guided by a notion of justice, but law must calculate, weigh up, set out rules and regulations, maintain boundaries and make decisions as to whether the terms of the law have been upheld. Justice, on the other hand, is both an abstract noun and an abstract quality; it is hard to pin down. It guides and yet, at the same time, it eludes definition. This is why Derrida describes justice as incalculable. As with democracy, Derrida maintains that justice is ‘to come’. It must guide decisions but every decision must also be cognisant of its own limitations, its own ‘unfoundedness’. Again, failure functions as a barometer. It is the persistence of failure, combined with the requirement always to try again, that establishes the ethical impulse of both justice and deconstruction. Indeed, it is precisely this correlation between failure and repetition that justice and deconstruction share in principle that leads Derrida to declare, somewhat controversially, that ‘deconstruction is justice’ (Derrida 1990: 949). In every situation, statement and declaration something misses, escapes; something falls through the cracks. There is a humility to this notion of deconstruction (and justice) in the form of a repeated – and repeatable – admission of limitations.

Critiques of Deconstruction For all that, though, Derrida’s propensity for writing such seemingly overblown and headline-grabbing soundbites has led to much derision and criticism of deconstruction as a practice. From the very beginning, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ and the wider claims of deconstruction it was taken to represent very quickly became one of the principle targets of deconstruction’s detractors, who held it up as symptomatic of the folly of the deconstructive project as a whole. One of main reasons Derrida’s statement aroused not just suspicion but often outright hostility was because it was seen to turn the assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition on its head. It is an absurd notion, so the criticism goes, to hold that there is nothing outside text. Text may well be a method of representation but, in an argument that dominates Western metaphysics and that stretches back at least as far as Plato, it is the world that prefigures the word, and not the other way around. One of the tasks of philosophy, traditionally conceived, is to bring things into light rather than to demonstrate that everything is premised on the plays of shadow. This, after all, was why Plato famously denounced poets and believed they should be banished from the ideal Republic. Poetry, Plato argues, is inauthentic and irrational. It deals not with truth but with illusion. Derrida would not disagree but the value accorded the inauthentic is very different in each philosopher’s hands. A similar argument against deconstruction – couched in curiously personal terms against Derrida himself – was staged by a group of philosophers who were opposed to Cambridge University’s decision to award Derrida an

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honorary degree. Writing in an open letter published in The Times, the signatories declared ‘In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour’ (Smith 1992: 13). As the letter continued, ‘M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets’ (Smith 1992: 13). One of the particularly interesting elements of this attack on deconstruction and Derrida is the fact that the principle point of concern is the linguistic trickery so central to Derrida’s analyses. For Derrida, deconstruction is about paying attention to what he terms ‘the play of differences’ but for its detractors these differences become representative of the fact that deconstruction is little more than a ‘play of surfaces’, a question of style over substance (Derrida 1981a: 26). Despite the personal nature of many of these criticisms, on one level the signatories are not incorrect in their sense of deconstruction. Far from being a point of illegitimacy, however, for Derrida this concern with differences and linguistic complexities is about establishing a discourse and a mode of thinking that is authentic, that both responds to and reflects the way things are. It is important to remember that deconstruction is part of the wider late twentieth-century movement known as poststructuralism that holds that the structures that constitute the world are not natural but constructed and that, as such, they can be reconstructed in myriad different ways. It is not so much that deconstruction makes the literal suggestion that there is nothing outside of text, but that one of its central tenets is that there can be no sense of things unless those things are conceptualised in language. This, again, is why deconstruction suggests not simply that there is no world without the word, but that the word is precisely that which gives us – in the sense of establishes, institutes – the world. As Derrida elaborated, this sentence means ‘there is nothing outside context’ (Derrida 1988: 136). If Derrida appears to strike a defensive tone it is not accidental. Limited Inc was Derrida’s response to a series of criticisms levelled at his notion of deconstruction by analytic philosophers who regarded deconstruction as little more than pseudo-philosophy or sophistry. Prior to the letter published in The Times, in the 1980s several prominent philosophers publicly were claiming that deconstruction was ‘not philosophy’. One of the main criticisms of deconstruction was vented in 1977 by the American philosopher, John Searle. Responding to Derrida’s essay from 1972 on speech act theory, ‘Signature Event Context’, Searle contended that Derrida demonstrated no engagement with, if not awareness of, contemporary philosophy of language. Searle argued that Derrida’s approach was naïve and concerned with issues that analytic philosophy had already resolved in one form or another. As Searle put it in The New York Review of Books, Derrida’s work is characterised by ‘the low level

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of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial’ (Searle 1983: 75). As with the ‘Cambridge affair’, the irony of such criticisms is that they actually articulate one of the basic tenets of deconstruction, ‘I do not seek to establish any kind of authenticity’, Derrida writes, because all authenticity – or, more specifically, any claim of authenticity – is itself always already inauthentic (Derrida 1988: 55). To claim not to establish authenticity does not do away with the idea of the authentic, but refigures or affirms the authentic within the non-space of this ‘not’. Truth belongs to the charlatan. Charlatanry is a counter-signature, but it is also, Derrida argues, the only ‘type’ of signature possible, a signature that does not in fact ‘sign’ but that sets forth both the potentiality of signing and the experience of the signature outside itself, in its non-self-identity. The counter-signature is the experience of inexperience, the absence of the signature, the signature deferred and different from itself. In other words, the counter-signature is the experience par excellence of ‘différance’, this term, non-term, around which deconstruction revolves. At around the same time as these debates, deconstruction also found further critique from the newly formed literary critical movement, New Historicism. New Historicism, or ‘cultural poetics’ as Stephen Greenblatt prefers to call it, first came to prominence in the 1980s and holds that ‘history cannot be divorced from textuality’ (Greenblatt 2005: 1). As such, New Historicism has tended to view deconstruction with suspicion, claiming that deconstruction relies upon a profoundly ahistorical textualism. It is a rather reductive understanding of deconstruction and one that unnecessarily polarises the relationship between textualism and context. Derrida’s own writings on politics, law, hospitality and the ethical imperative to decide or calculate point, even if only indirectly, to the misreading of deconstruction implied by New Historicism’s reaction to it. Deconstruction is not, strictly speaking, ahistorical. The difference, as Nicholas Royle has pointed out, is that deconstruction conceives of history as being less about the past than the future (Royle 1995: 13–38). Derrida’s sense of l’avenir, even of the futurity of the deferred temporality of différance, are about the manifestation of the future from the past. Walter Benn Michaels offers a more prosaic defence of the New Historicist critique of deconstruction, arguing that [i]t is often said that the ‘new historicism’ opposes deconstruction, in the sense that deconstructive critics are ‘against’ history and new historicists are ‘for’ it. Neither of these descriptions seems to me to have much content. In any event, the deconstructive interest in the problematic of the materiality in signification is not intrinsically ahistorical. (Michaels 1987: 28)

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Michaels’ point is well supported by Derrida’s frequent analyses and invocations of the archive, the work of mourning, and his sense of ‘hauntology’. Such aspects of Derrida’s writing, however, drew specific critique from various prominent Marxist thinkers, including the translator of the work that first brought Derrida notoriety in the English-speaking world, Gayatri Spivak. Much of this criticism stems from a sense that deconstruction either misreads or fails to confront adequately Marxist thinking. Such criticism coalesced after Derrida’s attempt to broach the question of the relation between deconstruction and Marxism, recorded in his 1993 book, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, in which Derrida, in a much-quoted passage, made the following claim: ‘Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism’ (Derrida 1994: 92). In response, Spivak published an article called ‘Ghostwriting’ in which she argued that Derrida’s response to the question of the relation between deconstruction and Marxism was often vague and lacked the rigour of analysis that was one of the principle characteristics of deconstructive practice. Spivak figured this omission as a blind spot in Derrida’s thinking about ‘Capital’ (Spivak 1995). For Spivak, Derrida’s text fails to address the manifold ways in which capital operates transnationally. Spivak also criticises Derrida’s inability to conceive any means by which the omniscience of capital might be challenged. This lack of alternative positions, if not solutions, echoes a familiar charge levelled against deconstruction, particularly in terms of the relevance of deconstruction to political theory. Deconstruction may well critique and dismantle but, so the argument goes, once the process of dismantling is complete, deconstruction is unable to imagine other, alternative positions from which counter-hegemonic thinking might be considered. The Marxist response to Specters of Marx culminated in a symposium on Derrida’s text, the proceedings of which were published in the rejoinder volume, Ghostly Demarcations, edited by Michael Sprinker, and comprising several prominent Marxist intellectuals, including Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey. As Sprinker puts it in his introduction, the symposium arose because of a disappointment with the lack of clarity still in Derrida’s writing on the question of the relation between deconstruction and Marxism. Antonio Negri’s critique, in particular, declared that deconstruction had exhausted itself, arguing that deconstruction was haunted by ‘an aura of nostalgia’ (Negri 1999: 8). For Negri, deconstruction’s methodology is marked by its historical appearance. The world, Negri argues, is no longer the same as that out of which deconstruction emerged; the world is no longer demarcated by binary oppositions but by flows and fluidity, of capital, labour, culture, and so on. In this regard, global capitalism has co-opted deconstruction and actually shares an affinity with it – or at least with its methodological practices and general critique of essentialism and totalisation – rather than an

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aversion to it. After all, marketing and brand analysis agencies make a specific career out of applying deconstructive theory to consumerism, analysing the ‘coding’ and ‘signification’ of products and brands in order to better tailor them towards ever-evolving consumer taste and desire. It is a state of affairs far removed indeed from the critical rigour of deconstruction as originally conceived by Derrida. Yet perhaps this present state of affairs is also where the force of deconstruction reappears. Deconstruction takes nothing for granted, and it demands that we too subject ourselves – our actions, habits and attitudes – to a similar scrutiny. In this, deconstruction has been, and will always be, a force of critique and an act of resistance, of intervention. Whether such resistance is understood as a source of infinite possibility or ineffectuality is, no doubt, a question of what deconstruction is understood to do. The complicity deconstruction uncovers within every system might be valorised as a strategic imperative to respond and to question, but it might just as easily be written off as the groundless absence of an answer that does not meet, to quote once more from the letter to The Times, ‘accepted [and acceptable] standards of clarity and rigour’. This is the inescapable risk of hesitancy, but it is also the promise and the possibility of thresholds.

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8 DISCOURSE THEORY Georges Van Den Abbeele

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he concept of discourse as an object of critical analysis dates to a series of articles written by the structural linguist, Émile Benveniste, between 1946 and 1958, later regrouped and republished as the section, ‘Man in Language’, in his Problems in General Linguistics (1971). In the course of analysing the role of personal pronouns, verb tenses and spatial-temporal markers (deixis), Benveniste delineates a dimension of language that operates outside the classic Saussurian paradigm of signifiers and signifieds. What he accordingly calls ‘instances of discourse’ do not designate determinable concepts – there is no conceptual definition of the pronoun ‘I’, for example, on a par with that of a noun like ‘tree’ or ‘table’ – but rather the interface between language and subjectivity. Thus, ‘I’ refers to rather than signifies the meaning of whoever is making the utterance, the subject of the enunciation, just as the pronoun ‘you’ refers not to some semantic concept but only to whoever is being addressed by the utterance. Similarly, indicators of space and time, such as ‘here’ or ‘now’, take their sense only in reference to the current situation of enunciation rather than holding spatio-temporal meaning in any absolute way (such as the impersonality of a calendar date). These so-called deictic markers, like the instances of discourse, position the subject within discourse, as opposed to other kinds of language such as historical narrative, where the third-person pronoun, preterite verb form, and calendric/geographical indicators predominate, to the point that, as Benveniste puts it, ‘the events seem to tell themselves’ (Benveniste 1971: 208) without the overt intrusion of human agency in the form of discursive instances. Ultimately, however, the question raised by such linguistically determined markers of subjectivity is whether the subject is not actually formed by its very positioning within this preinscribed set of possibilities rather than existing prior to language in some autonomous way that would allow it to ‘use’ language as a tool and with no consequences for whatever it means to be a subject. Of course, Benveniste’s work reinforces the classic structuralist tenet that subjectivity exists only in, or is formed by, language. As such, Benveniste’s theory of discourse had a profound influence on developments in structuralism and poststructuralism, especially on Barthesian literary and cultural critique, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the Tel Quel group.

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Discourse theory would have its greatest elaboration and most consequent development, however, in the work of Michel Foucault, whose early works (The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge) develop the concept of discourse, or discourses, to designate the field of practices that determine relations between differing kinds of knowledge, on the one hand, and correspondingly different forms of subjectivity, or subjection, on the other. What passes for knowledge at any given time in any given society is defined by institutionalised practices of inclusion and exclusion. So, for example, with regard to his magisterial study on Madness and Civilization (1961), while folly may have been perceived in earlier times as a blessed form of insight, the so-called age of reason beginning in the seventeenth century proceeded to criminalise all nonconforming expressions of ‘unreason’, or madness, which were then subjected to specific practices of exclusion by way of incarceration, hospitalisation, revocation of rights, and so on. The ‘mad’ find themselves dispossessed even of the right to speak on their own behalf, but the historian who would try to speak on their behalf, or ‘in their place’, merely compounds the injustice steeped as he or she is within the discourse of reason by usurping the speech of those dispossessed others. Instead, what Foucault proposes is ‘the archaeology of a silence’, the uncovering of what remains unsaid behind what he terms the discursive practices of knowledge understood as reason. To inhabit discourse as a ‘subject’ within the so-called ‘age of reason’ presupposes one’s rationality and sanity, just as when Descartes must exclude the possibility of his own madness to arrive at the foundational proposition of rational subjectivity, ‘I think, therefore I am’. The book’s second ‘postface’, added in 1972, ‘This body, this paper, this fire’, conjures up a plethora of Benvenistian deictics in response to Derrida’s blistering deconstructive critique of Foucault’s reading of Descartes. Working closely with the texts of Descartes, Derrida questions whether the very rejection of one’s own madness is not in effect the height of folly itself within this supposedly foundational moment of reason as the exclusion of folly. Foucault’s acerbic response is to denounce Derrida’s textualist approach and differentiate it from his own mode of analysing specifically discursive practices. The distinction, telegraphed rather obscurely in the essay, refers to Foucault’s more sustained discussions of his methodology in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, published as ‘The Discourse on Language’ (delivered 1970; 1972b), the preface to Birth of the Clinic (1963), and most extensively in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In these texts and elsewhere, Foucault inventories the ways in which discourses are systematically controlled and limited in society. These procedures include both ‘external limitations’ (which exclude discourses based on taboo subjects, madness, or falsity) and ’internal’ restrictions (among which we find both commentary and the author-function) whose task it is to master the ‘element of chance’ in language. Among the latter, Foucault lists such practices as the ‘author function’ by which we limit

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the potential meaning of language by attributing a given set of utterances to the ‘authority’ of an author. But language has not always been understood in other times and places as a function of its author, and even in our times, not all utterances are assumed even to have an author (such as impersonalised information, legal documents, signposts, and so on). Similarly, grasping or organising utterances in terms of objectified categories such as a ‘book’ or a ‘work’ is a discursive practice, which despite its apparent convenience or air of common sense in limiting the infinity of language, is not by any means the only way to proceed (think only of the Internet). ‘Commentary’ is another internal restriction that limits discourse by establishing it as an ongoing relation between a primary text that is commented on and a secondary text that comments on the primary text. This relationship between primary and secondary texts is nonetheless complicated, according to Foucault, in two ways. The first concerns the ‘top-heaviness’ of the primary text or the attribution of a certain ‘wealth of meaning’ to it so that there are endless things to say about it. The second (which seems to contradict the first) is that ‘whatever the techniques employed, commentary’s only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down’ (Foucault 1972a: 221; Foucault’s emphasis). ‘The novelty’, states Foucault, ‘lies no longer in what is said, but in its reappearance.’ The ‘everchanging and inescapable’ paradox of commentary is that it must ‘say, for the first time what has already been said, and repeat tirelessly what was, nevertheless, never said’ (Foucault 1972a: 221). This formulation of commentary as a rather paradoxical discursive practice is also Foucault’s way of dismissing the kind of textual approach he associates most negatively with Derrida. Rather than proposing a strategy of deep or ‘close’ reading, Foucault invites an analytical approach that would seek not to uncover the ‘wealth’ of a text but to discover the ‘law of its poverty’ (Foucault 1972a: 120), or alternatively, not to provide an interpretation but to elaborate a description. No longer would it be a question of discovering new layers of profundity in a text but of analysing discourses according to their ‘exterior’ dimensions, of formalising the rules of their organisation as ‘surface’ phenomena, a project he describes as a kind of ‘archaeology’. Foucault’s most ambitious project in this regard is his monumental The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), where the analysis of discursive practices that guide the formation of various ‘disciplines’ of thought issue in the uncovering of larger-scale epistemic structures that in turn define or frame entire historical epochs in terms of what can and what cannot be considered knowledge. Departing entirely from Marxist dialectical history or even traditional positivist or developmental historiography, Foucault describes these epistemes as essentially arbitrary formations of knowledge that can last for a century or two, before a sudden, inexplicable break that ushers in some completely different episteme with concomitantly different disciplines and different ways of constituting what passes for knowledge. Even the concept of ‘man’, so apparently obvious and essential

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to the ‘human sciences’ that define the modern episteme, can just as easily wash away, to quote the book’s inimitable and provocative last words, ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 1994: 387). What the archaeology of discursive practices reveals is the stunning otherness of the past, not the past as a less developed version of the present but as something completely and inalterably different. Nevertheless, such a conclusion does not necessarily render historiography an antiquarian exercise (which it certainly can be). On the contrary, the exploration of the past as other conversely puts into sharp relief the very historicity of the current moment, its irredeemable contingency and potential for unsuspected and radical change. Foucault will accordingly come to describe his project as a ‘history of the present’ (Foucault 1979: 31). It should be noted, though, that the epistemic formation of distinct discursive practices within a limited space and time do not merely reflect neutral ways to master the limitlessness of language. Rather, epistemes are constituted as dynamic structures of inclusion and exclusion that determine who can speak, about what, and under what circumstances; they determine what passes for knowledge and stupidity, reason and madness, truth and falsehood; in short they determine forms of subjectivity and subjection within systems of power. That relation, between subjectivity and power, underpins Discipline and Punish, whose ostensible subject is the history of criminal justice and the penal system. What makes the book remarkable is less the study of different forms of criminological thought and the ‘birth of the prison’ per se, than the explication of the insidious ways what Foucault calls ‘power/knowledge’ operates as a kind of technology that disciplines bodies through specific modes of subjectivisation and objectivisation that blur the conventional distinction between external coercion and internal accommodation. The central metaphor of Jeremy Bentham’s model of the prison as a panopticon concretises this fundamental insight: a single watchtower at the prison’s centre can survey and control the entire prison population, not because the guard can see everything that is happening but because each inmate cannot at any time escape the possibility of being the object of the watchman’s gaze and therefore is led to internalise that gaze as self-correction. As such, this is much more than a book about the penitentiary system. The prison appears as but one example among others of a broader disciplinary society where power is exerted not through some readily identifiable central authority like a monarch but through a diffusion of discourses that define who we are, what we are and what we can or cannot do, what we can know or not know, and what we can say or cannot say. In short, power and knowledge work intimately together at the very level of our subjectivity and of our very bodies, or our ‘subjection’ as Foucault felicitously puts it. This formulation substantively revises and expands the earlier concept of discursive practices by understanding discourse, not merely as a set of

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linguistic possibilities, but as a structured relation of power, knowledge and subjection. Stated otherwise, the disciplines of knowledge whose archaeology Foucault traced in The Order of Things are also disciplines in the correctional or punitive sense as they function to police the borders of what can and cannot be accepted as allowable knowledge, speech and behaviour. The disciplines of knowledge are thus also technologies of power, hence the conjoining of power/knowledge as discourse. And while this notion of discourse recalls in some respect the concept of ideology, it differs markedly in several key ways. Discourse is at once much more specific and much more generalised than ideology to the extent that it permeates and pervades lived experience as what we can know, think or do. It is not false consciousness, since the only kind of consciousness we can know is already embedded in the discourse of power/ knowledge. Nor is it simply the mirror reflection of economic determinism or the economically driven interests of a particular class. Rather, discourse instantiates power/knowledge at every social level and in myriad complex material practices. The combination of analytic rigour and flexibility in turn made this concept of discourse attractive to a wide range of post-Marxist and postcolonialist thinkers. Most notably, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) expanded and applied the concept of discourse to the critical analysis of institutionalised forms of racism, colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, it is precisely as an exercise in discourse theory that Orientalism far exceeds the chronicling and critical debunking of the derogatory stereotypes that have long characterised the West’s perception of the ‘Orient’. Nor is Said content with deconstructing the demeaning European representation of a geographical entity, the Orient, out of the extraordinarily complex and diverse peoples and cultures that make up the vast expanse of the Middle East. Rather, Said persuasively links the mythic construction of ‘the East’ to its perpetuation in institutionalised forms of knowledge production that are themselves ratified and reproduced through Western imperial domination of the Arab and/or Islamic world. And it is in this way, as Said notes, that certain kinds of ‘texts’ to which ‘expertise is attributed’ by the ‘authority of academics, institutions, and governments . . . can create not only knowledge but the very reality they appear to describe’ (Said 1995: 94). Said concludes: ‘in time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it’ (Said 1995: 94). ‘Orientalism’ is a discourse to the extent that it takes place as an ongoing and self-perpetuating relation of knowledge and power that is supported by the apparatus of political as well as educational institutions. This institutionally embedded status of discourse also reinforces the instantiation of concomitant forms of subjectivity and subjection: the selfperpetuating and internalised subjectivity of the racialised other but also the entitled subjectivity of the government official, foreign officer or ‘Orientalist’

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scholar, who can presume a certain authoritativeness of knowledge and power thanks to his situation within the discourse. True to Foucault’s critique of textual commentary, the point of discourse analysis is not primarily to interpret a given text or author but to disclose that text or author’s embeddedness in a discourse that always already writes him. When Said reads Gustave Flaubert or Sir Richard Burton, his interest is less in elucidating those writers qua writers than in reading out their implication in the discourse of Orientalism. It is the discourse itself that is the object of critical analysis; hence the thematic organisation of a book that treats multiple authors, as opposed to the extended readings of individual works that is the hallmark of textualist approaches. Discourse theory as thus developed by Foucault and Said, to the extent that it engages an analysis of the relations between knowledge and power, has experienced widespread adoption and success in the hands of critics interested in the critique of modes of domination and subjection not readily subsumed under the classic Marxist paradigms of economic determinism and capitalist modes of production. Hence, its notable adoption and adaptation after Said by postcolonialism, critical race theory and cultural and historical studies. And, of course, the development of post-Marxism itself is deeply indebted to discourse theory. In particular, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), borrow heavily from Foucault’s theory of discourse as part and parcel of an overtly Gramscian rearticulation of the socialist political project ‘towards a radical democratic politics’ (the book’s subtitle). Specifically and in opposition to the classic Marxian theory of society as a dialectic of class struggle based in relations of production, a conceptualisation they view as ‘essentialism’, Laclau and Mouffe propose a model of the social as the hegemonic articulation of subject positions defined not by identity but by the relationality of their differences. Society as a structured field of differential positions sounds like the very definition of discourse, and indeed that is the term Laclau and Mouffe use to describe it, while also expanding the definition of discourse well beyond Foucault by rejecting any distinction between ‘discursive and non-discursive practices’ or between ‘what are usually called the linguistic and behavioural aspects of a social practice’ to the extent that ‘every object is constituted as an object of discourse, insofar as no object is given outside every discursive condition of emergence’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 107). For Laclau and Mouffe, it is not just (for example, medical or criminological) discourse defined in linguistic terms that structures the relations between differently positioned subjectivities (doctors and patients, or police and prisoners) in the context of various (clinical or judicial/penal) institutions but rather the complex articulation of those institutions and subjects that is discourse. Support for this conceptual expansion of the term discourse is found via recourse to Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, which eschews any difference between the ‘mental’ and ‘material’ character of what

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we are calling discourse, to the extent that language games ‘include within an indissoluble totality both language and the actions interconnected with it’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 108). The example given is that of a team of builders, one of whom calls out for various materials (blocks, pillars, slabs, beams, etc.) in the order they are needed for the building’s construction, and another who passes the construction materials when prompted by the other’s call. The ‘language game’ is not merely the communication system between the builders (whether verbal, written, gestural or even just professional force of habit) or even just the actions implied in the communication calling for this rather than that piece of material, but also and most importantly the materials themselves in their specific and differentiated use as blocks, slabs, pillars, and so on. It is the organisational practice of building a building, or for that matter, setting up a clinic, or maintaining colonial rule, that according to Laclau and Mouffe ‘constitutes a differential and structured system of positions – that is, a discourse’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 108). The articulation of elements that make up a discourse is no longer mere ideas, or ideology, or even ‘discursive practices’ in a narrowly linguistic sense, but embedded in and through all kinds of institutions, political organisations, social and cultural rituals. What we can accordingly call ‘politics’, or the hegemonic articulations of power and domination as ‘discourse’, can no longer be restricted to the classic Marxist binary of conflict between classes, understood in essentialising and unitary terms as sole agents of economic self-interest. Rather, politics as discourse opens onto a much broader set of subject positions, not only those conventionally based in gender, race, ethnicity, nationality or other socially marked ‘identities’, but also their multiple, unstable, often contradictory, even antagonistic intersections. In addition to previously marginalised or excluded subjectivities, new and, even heretofore unpredictable, forms of subjectivity can emerge as political agents in discourse. Feminist theory and queer theory go even further beyond this kind of post-Marxist revision by radically questioning the very basis of identity in its presumably most biologically determined and most inflexible form, that of gender. Judith Butler, most famously, deconstructed the difference between (biological) sex and (cultural) gender in her 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity to argue that the sexed body itself is a cultural construction, whose coherence is established and reinforced through coerced repetitive acts that within contemporary society align the subject within the regulative, naturalising discourses of heteronormativity, or compulsory heterosexuality. Sex/gender thus occurs as culturally framed performance rather than the expression of some pre-existing core essence, whether biological or cultural. As Butler is keen to clarify, however, in her subsequent Bodies that Matter (1993), that ‘performance’ is not the free choice of a self-standing subject, it is not a wilful ‘act’, but a repetitive and constrained normative process, a disciplinary practice, that in turn actually constitutes the subject as sexed/

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gendered and polices that subject within existing norms. That said, the very iterability (or implicit difference within repetition) of gender performance also enables potential deviations from or revisions of normative identity, or what later theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis will term, a ‘queering’ of identities that underscores or affirms the free-floating basis of identity itself. The concept of gender as performance, or as ‘technology’ to use de Lauretis’s alternative expression in her 1987 Technologies of Gender, situates queer theory as both analysis of and resistance to the normative regulation of sex, gender and sexuality. To the extent that the disciplinary practices informed by those norms are themselves embedded in institutions of power/knowledge, we can see queer theory’s indebtedness to the concept of discourse as elaborated by Foucault, and most cogently in his final three-volume work on The History of Sexuality (1976–84). The first volume of that series, The Will to Know, explicitly returns us to the discursive construction of sexuality. Specifically refuting the commonly held assumption that the Victorian era ushered in a climate of sexual repression, Foucault argues instead the modern era (dating back to the seventeenth century) exhibits a marked proliferation of discourse about sex and sexuality, the urgency of speaking about it, indeed, a coercion to tell all (most notably in the mode of the confession). All this talk, however, served less to repress or to empower specific forms of sexual behaviour than to consolidate institutionalised knowledge about sex, what Foucault terms a scientia sexualis, whose function in turn became the management of sex, its policing, even criminalisation. Sexuality thus emerges as a discourse through the interaction of those institutions (church, government, school, and so on) whose concern with acquiring knowledge about sex dovetailed with the extension of their power. Ultimately, this power is about exercising a sweeping governance over life itself, what Foucault thus calls ‘bio-power’. Unlike traditional power which is concentrated in the hands of a single sovereign, who holds the power of life and death over any given subject, biopower is diffused and dispersed throughout the interlocking array of institutions, practices and discourses that claim authority over the biological welfare either of individuals or of the species. To the extent that sexuality bridges the concern of both individuals (pleasure) and species (propagation), it has assumed the privilege accorded to it by modern societies as the key to human understanding. As such, sexuality operates both as an apparently free and expressive mode of individual self-stylisation and as a self-regulating subjectivation to an external form of social coercion. Such simultaneously internal and external ‘technologies of the self’ are the subject of the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. Studying, respectively, ancient Greece and imperial Latinity, Foucault again surprises us by revealing two moments in antiquity where forms of sexual behaviour appear not as self-standing objects of disciplinary knowledge, be it liberatory or repressive, but rather are situated variously within a range

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of other discourses that prescribe certain ideals of domestic or public selfstyling. The (self)cultivation in classical Athens of a dominant and respected public figure is achieved precisely through an ethos of self-domination and the wise apportionment of pleasures, be they alimentary, economic, medicinal or sexual. Likewise, the discourse of self-care in imperial Roman culture encompasses a wide set of concerns within which sexuality is but one among many activities which need to be inflected according to the most caring ‘work of oneself on oneself’ (Foucault 1990: 51). At the same time, these ‘stylistics of existence’ (Foucault 1990: 71) were hardly solipsistic exercises in autarky but, as Foucault argues, ‘a true social practice’ that ‘took form within more or less institutionalized structures’ (Foucault 1990: 51) such as schools, political organisations and married life, where the relation to others is mirrored in the relation to self, and vice versa. But this also means that these and other such technologies of the self both enable one’s self-objectification and self-subjectivisation as a subject and subjects or subjugates that self to certain forms and practices of power. The process of subjectivisation is both internal and external, idiosyncratic ‘self-styling’ and conformist submission to rules, all in the same gesture. Another way of understanding this is that subjectivity occurs in and out of pre-existing discourses and practices, and no matter how freely self-fashioned the subject thinks itself to be it is always already embedded in the technologies of power that frame its possibilities, rule its modalities and condition its very existence as such. In the modern era of bio-power, these technologies extend to life itself, not merely as in the sovereign’s exclusive and traditional right to make die or let live but rather in the generalised capacity to make live or let die. This capacity plays along two axes: (1) a kind of ‘political anatomy of the human body’ that deploys a set of disciplinary procedures exerted on individual bodies to mould, bend and manipulate them into docile machine-like forces in the service of efficiency and economy; and (2) a ‘population bio-politics’ that takes hold of the species-body in terms of regulating its proliferation and continuation through births and deaths, levels of health, life expectancies, and so on. At the confluence of these two axes is sex as what gives access at one and the same time to the life of the body and to the life of the species, hence its value as a ‘crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death’ (Foucault 1998: 147). In the context of bio-power, sex then takes the place held in traditional society by blood, both literally, as what the sovereign’s blow is empowered to shed, and symbolically, as the consanguinity of familial castes and hereditary social hierarchy. This archaic symbolics of blood is replaced under the regime of bio-power by sexuality as the point of convergence of the individual body with the species body, a situation whereby the notion of sex can serve as the artificial unity for all kinds of behaviours, biological functions, sensations and pleasures. Foucault concludes, ‘sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified’, ‘a sort

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of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected’ (Foucault 1998: 154, 157), hence its discursive primacy as both the cause for discourse in the form of the scientia sexualis and as its ultimate meaning. Nonetheless, we should not be blinded by this mirage of sex in ignorance of the vaster workings of biopower and the proliferation of discourses that seek to govern and regulate life itself, in short the indefinite politicisation of life itself in all its forms, including necessarily the manifold ways of death and dying. Foucault views the advent of bio-power in its myriad manifestations as a relatively recent phenomenon, roughly dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, he notes that the contemporaneous advent and growth of capitalism itself is indebted to the crucial role played by bio-power in the development and spread of those disciplinary technologies that produced ever more ‘docile’ bodies such as those needed, for example, in repetitive factory work. More importantly, bio-power marks a certain threshold of modernity at the point where the abiding interests of the state moves from being merely territorial to being population-based and where the living body, or even just living matter, becomes the object of political strategy and contestation. Concomitant to this shift is the move from power being principally located in political/juridical institutions to its being diffusely imposed through norms and cultural practices. As Foucault summarises: ‘For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’ (Foucault 1998: 143). One need look no further than the rancour of contemporary political debate around such issues as abortion, euthanasia, even disease prevention to gauge the validity of Foucault’s claims. The historical relation, however, between bio-power and modernity has been vigorously contested by Giorgio Agamben, who locates the former at the very origin of political existence in antiquity; parsing the difference in ancient Greek between the term, zoe, as the mere fact of life as shared by all living beings, and bios, as ‘a qualified life, a particular way of life’ such as the ‘form or way of life proper to an individual or group’ (Agamben 1998: 1). Bios thus channels the realm of what we can call political existence, while zoe indicates a status of what Agamben calls ‘bare life’ which stands before or outside the political, outside discussions of what is meant by the good life or the way to live within a society according to various norms or expectations. Bare life stands to political qualified life Agamben argues, channelling Carl Schmitt, as the sovereign does to the existence of the polis itself. Just as the sovereign rules not only by holding the right of life or death over its subjects, but also by being the literal exception to the rule, being both inside and outside the law and so able at any time (but classically only under emergency or exceptional conditions) to suspend the law, so too is bare life paradoxically included as it is excluded from political subjectivisation. Agamben’s image for both the

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sovereign exception and the included/excluded status of bare life is that of the Roman law category of homo sacer, literally ‘sacred man’ but legally defined as one who is no longer a political being (citizen or subject). The homo sacer is the individual reduced to ‘bare life’, someone ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (Agamben 1998: 8), a curious turn of phrase which is Agamben’s major task to explicate in the course of a broader argument that what Foucault sees as the advent of modern bio-power is actually the extension of the sovereign exception into the ongoing state of affairs, the State of exception, that increasingly reduces all life to that of ‘bare’ or ‘sacred’ life. To be in the sacred zone where one can be neither killed nor sacrificed means being removed from under the jurisdiction of all laws, human as well as divine, being excluded from political existence entirely, dead to society but not biologically dead. It is to be at the very whim of the sovereign exception, which can dispose of the sacred person with impunity as it so wishes. For Agamben, the very image of modern sacrality is the camp, not only the Nazi extermination camps but also those of the Gulag and of mass deportations, refugee camps and centres for displaced persons of all kinds, airport detention facilities, and so on. Inscribed within the territory of the State as a zone outside it, the camp spatially and literally reproduces the included exclusion of bare life. ‘The camp’, writes Agamben, ‘is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (Agamben 1998: 168–9), such as in modern totalitarian states, but also increasingly and disturbingly so, in democracies as well, where the increasing decline of official politics into entertainment and ‘public relations’ is matched by the seemingly relentless growth of secrecy, corruption, mass surveillance and incarceration. What Agamben calls the camp is the ‘materialization of the state of exception’ as the ‘creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction’ (Agamben 1998: 174). As such, ‘the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself’ (Agamben 1998: 174): It is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the care of the nation’s biological life as one of its proper tasks. (Agamben 1998: 174–5) The State’s ownership of the nation’s biological life also means, however, and by the same stroke, the extension of its sovereign power to mete out death, whether to ‘protect’ the life of the nation’s species by the death of specified individuals or groups within that nation (albeit preliminarily reduced to

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bare life status in order to justify their being killed with impunity), or because certain forms of life are considered ‘not worth living’, or by another conceivable justification under the State of exception. The ultimate consolidation of bio-power is utterly coterminous with an unparalleled extension of the right to kill, so that in effect such a bio-politics is at one and the same time a ‘necro-politics’, as Achille Mbembe has coined the term. Mbembe follows up on Foucault and Agamben’s claim that: the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. . . . [a state that] made the management, protection and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. . . . In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state. (Mbembe 2004: 17) Resituating this analysis of Nazism within a postcolonial and global historical frame, Mbembe describes the wider context of necropolitics and necropower in the development of the ‘terror formation’ constituted by the institution of slavery and the sovereign exception of colonial occupation, settlement and administration. Unlike the European situation, sovereign power in the colonial world is not at all exceptional and its lethal ability to dispose of its subjects is an unquestioned norm buttressed by the reduction of entire populations to bare life status through the discourse of race and its embedded institutions of slavery, the plantation, the ghetto and, of course, the camp, in all its invidious and nefarious manifestations. Even the distinction between war and peace disappears (Mbembe 2004: 25) as the confluence of disciplinary power, biopower and necropower generates an endless cycle of slaughter and extraction of resources. Such unrestrained necropolitics continues unabated in massive if dispersed sectors of the postmodern, postcolonial world where ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe 2004: 40). Studying the particular forms of both repression and resistance in such lethal environments from the ‘collateral damage’ of drones and cluster bombs, to the coercive and socially disaggregating ‘war machines’ of unrestrained urban militias, private armies and mercenary contractors, to the conundrum of resistance as self-destruction that drives the suicide bomber, Mbembe further concludes that ‘under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred’ (Mbembe 2004: 40). If we think of discourse as a structured articulation of language, subjectivity and power embedded in and articulated through institutions, then necropolitics clearly puts us before a limit case, one where power exists only through and for the eradication of its

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subjects and where language ceases to have any say at all, except perhaps in the inchoate gesture of self-annihilation. How can one speak truth to a power whose murderous regime entails the destruction of the one who would speak, truth or no truth? Truly, the lines between any conceptual or semantic pair seem inalterably ‘blurred’. The problem of meaning and language within any given socio-political or cultural formation, not merely the extreme case of necropolitics, leads us back again to that vexed question of the relationship between discourse and context. It also raises the question between, for example, necropower (or bio-power) as discourse and the discourse about necropower. If necropower implies an unrestrained regime of murder, it also must include discourse itself within the list of entities to be killed. Concomitantly, the discourse about necropower is thus not merely an analytical moment but also an act of resistance to that power, a ‘speaking truth to power’, but from a standpoint outside, or so it would seem, the institutional reach of necropower. Of course, all discourse – even the most critical! – is, whether it acknowledges it or not, caught within its own webs of power/knowledge, implicated within its own institutional structures and subject positions, within its own discursive formations. Rather than existing prior to discourse, subjectivity – and subjection – emerge from our always already being in discourse. How exactly to analyse the discourses within which one speaks and lives is the purview of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as developed most methodically by Norman Fairclough in a series of key works from Language and Power (1989), through Discourse and Social Change (1992), Critical Discourse Analysis (1995), New Labour, New Language (2000), Analyzing Discourse: Text Analysis for Social Research (2003), and Language and Globalization (2006). Basically, Fairclough’s approach grounds social analysis (more traditionally Marxian than Foucauldian) in linguistics. As opposed to Foucault’s external analysis of discourse, Fairclough hearkens back to a more explicitly text-based approach with a concomitant commitment to textual interpretation per se. Discourse analysis breaks down for him into three distinct moments: first, a ‘normative’ or immanent critique of sample texts that explicates them on their own terms according to their specific rhetorical, grammatical and argumentative structure, including internal and logical contradictions. The second moment in critical discourse analysis involves an ‘explanatory’ critique that explicates the findings of the normative critique in terms of the social and political forces that shape the discursive features of the sample texts. These include what he terms the ‘power in discourse’ which refers to the forces that dominate the production and dissemination of the discourse, that is, who can speak and when and how. There is also the ‘power behind discourse’ or the social forces that shape the ‘order of discourse’, that generate, operationalise and make possible the distribution and widespread adoption of specific discourses. In many ways, Fairclough’s analysis of power

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structures and social forces ‘behind’ discourse resembles the classic Marxian critique of ideology as a set of ideas that support the dominant class structure through their widespread acceptance and acquiescence as ‘common sense’, even by individuals whose interests run counter to the social/political hierarchy. Much of the work of making ideology acceptable as common sense stems from a variety of techniques described in specific terms by Fairclough, such as the ‘decontextualization’ and ‘recontextualization’ of given textual tokens and the role not merely of intertextuality in the classic sense but also what Fairclough terms ‘interdiscursivity’, to name the ways in which a given discourse can call on other discourses to advance its persuasive aims. For example, the neoliberal reform of universities calls upon a discourse of ‘marketization’ in which students are rebranded as ‘consumers’ and courses as ‘product’ or commodities to be sold, ‘marketed’, through successful advertisement within an environment where education ceases to be a state-supported public good but a revenue dependent business (‘Critical Discourse Analysis and the Marketisation of Public Discourse: The Universities’, in Fairclough 2010: 91–125). Similarly, but in a different vein, the rise of the ‘New Labour’ movement in the UK reabsorbed and channelled various elements from other, pre-existing discourses (New Labour, New Language). In principle, then, the first two moments of critical discourse analysis (the normative and the explanatory) can lead to a third moment, namely ‘praxis’ or ‘transformative human action’, which those disabused by the first two moments of critique would undertake not as a discursive revision of the discourse but as a form of social action that would take on the very ‘powers behind discourse’ whose ideology is masked as common sense. Fairclough admits to some conceptual challenges in formulating exactly how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can lead to actual social change: ‘There is a disjuncture between CDA and transformative action. CDA is directed at and motivated by action to make social life better, but there is not a direct line from CDA to transformative action’ (Fairclough 2015: 14). Nonetheless his tenaciousness regarding the socially transformative potential of CDA says less about the limits of his methodology than it underscores his ongoing commitment to an Enlightenment view that fervently associates critical learning with social emancipation. Hence too, his interest in the crucial role played by education in developing a critical awareness of language as a first stage toward civic engagement and social improvement. Nor is it surprising that the primary focus of Fairclough’s practical analyses has been on examples of overtly political discourse (speeches, slogans, advertisement) and the possible ways of resisting or revamping them in the interest of social and political betterment. One notes how this Enlightenment stance contrasts with Foucault or Agamben or Mbembe’s more general scepticism toward the legacy of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, there is the claim that knowledge will

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overcome unjust power; on the other hand, the deep suspicion that knowledge is at every stage implicated in and complicit with the very structures, institutions and regimes of power. Correlatively speaking, Fairclough’s practical methodology brings us back to the linguistic rigour and specificity of Benveniste’s initial conceptualisation of the term, discourse, while at the same time mitigating, justly or unjustly, the powerful critique of rationality undertaken by Foucault in his development of discourse theory as an entire field of critical inquiry.

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INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM

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ostmodernism is a very wide-ranging set of theories, under which poststructuralism arguably could be placed. Initially, it came to prominence in the field of architecture as a reaction against modernism, the dominant style in twentieth-century architectural practice around the globe (the international style’ as it came to be referred to). A theory of postmodernism began to emerge from the work of the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, in which modernist ‘brutalism’ was challenged by a style mixing old and new elements, or ‘double-coding’. The creative arts were to incorporate such ideas enthusiastically, and a distinctive, pastiche-based, postmodernist style soon developed. Nikolai Duffy deals with postmodernism’s aesthetic dimension in Chapter 10, emphasising the socio-political importance of its commitment to pluralism and hybridity. Jean-François Lyotard’s work was more specifically politically oriented, attacking the underlying ideological assumptions of modernity. His book The Postmodern Condition with its vigorous attack on ‘grand narratives’, as found in universalising theories such as Marxism, was extremely influential in later twentieth-century thought. Whereas grand narratives claimed to be in possession of the ‘truth’, philosophical postmodernism was to take a relativistic attitude, challenging institutional authority in general. The critique of Marxism’s totalising tendencies had started as far back as the work of Theodor W. Adorno, and in Chapter 9 Philip Goldstein considers how this was developed by several of Lyotard’s contemporaries, such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, concluding with Alain Badiou’s assessment of where we are now with postmodern theory.

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9 PHILOSOPHICAL POSTMODERNISM: FROM ADORNO AND DERRIDA TO FOUCAULT Philip Goldstein

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ohn frow has suggested that the term ‘postmodern’ has acquired so many meanings that it is not a useful term (Frow 1997: 21). Two meanings have, however, gained importance. One is the notion that postmodernism breaks with the high modernist division between great art and popular culture (see, for example, Huyssen 1984, in which he credits the women’s movement and experimental art for overcoming the modernist ‘feminization’ of mass culture by creating a postmodernism which draws on mass culture’s forms and genres; see also Polan 1988: 50). Another, more philosophical definition explains postmodernism as a critique of Enlightenment rationality. Steven Best and Doug Kellner, for example, describe postmodernism in this way: ‘the philosophical project of Descartes, through the Enlightenment . . . is criticized for its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, for its hubris to supply apodictic truth, and for its allegedly fallacious rationalism’ (Best and Kellner 1991: 4). In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson also describes postmodernism as a critique of Enlightenment rationality. He adds, however, that the ‘psychic dispersal, fragmentations, . . . temporal discontinuities’ resulting from this critique imply a ‘dissolution of an essentially bourgeois ideology of the subject’ (Jameson 1981: 124–5). Although he claims that only the ‘post-individualistic social world of the future’, not the postmodernists’ ‘schizophrenic ideal’ of desire, intensity or fragmentation can genuinely fragment or decentre the bourgeois subject, he aptly characterises the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment as a dissolution of the middle class or ‘bourgeois’ subject. Certainly the notions of difference, repetition, singularity and historical truth of Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault accord with this characterisation. To an extent, the work of Theodor Adorno also accords with this view. He critiques the Enlightenment in the postmodern fashion but inconsistently preserves the realism and truth of critical theory.

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Theodor Adorno and Postmodern Theory In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer show, for example, that the ‘instrumental reason’ of the Enlightenment opposes mythological outlooks at the same time that it imposes an equally mythological faith in modern science. As they say: ‘Just as the myths already realize enlightenment, so enlightenment with every step becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 11–12). Contrary to mythology, science maintains that humanity, not the gods, rules nature, yet ‘myths already realize enlightenment’ because both mythology and science presuppose that knowledge enables knowers to dominate nature and people, but requires them to sacrifice themselves and repress their desires. In the name of facts and laws, the Enlightenment dismisses the magic and fantasy of myth but enlightenment still ‘becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology’ by exacting sacrifices from the enlightened and endowing established social structures with a mythical inevitability. This critique of Enlightenment reason gives Adorno’s views postmodern import. The critique derives, however, from the Marxist Georg Lukács, who argues that capitalism extends the commodity’s domination to all social institutions (See Buck-Morss 1977: 25, and Bernstein 1984: 82). He shows that, as a result, an instrumental rationality, which calculates means, not ends, evaluates techniques, not values, and seeks autonomy, not community, governs the social and the economic institutions of bourgeois society. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer also maintain that this instrumental rationality dominates bourgeois social life; they claim, however, that instrumental rationality does not begin with the capitalist system, as Lukács says; rather, it begins with the classical Greeks. They show, for example, that Homer’s Odysseus describes Ulysses resisting the sirens in order to underline the Greek mastery of nature: ‘Measures such as those taken on Odysseus’ ship in regard to the Sirens form presentient allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 34). The mastery of nature, along with opposition to mythology, characterises the propositional logic and conceptual discourse of both the Greeks and the modern Enlightenment. Not only does Adorno maintain, unlike Lukács, that the equipmental or instrumental rationality has dominated society since ancient times, he also refutes Marx’s belief that at the end of history communism overcomes the opposition of capitalists and workers and establishes a classless society. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Adorno claims that, ‘[p]urely conceptual’, this reconciliation represents the domination of Enlightenment reason because it imposes an abstract identity denying the subject’s concrete particularity or its historical individuality (Adorno 1984: 113). Faced with what he aptly termed ‘life after Auschwitz’, Adorno defends the non-identity of subject and object because this non-identity of subject and object limits theory, whose classifications,

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types and conceptual constructs fail to grasp concrete experience (see Brunkhorst 1999: 126). Both this critique of Marxism and of instrumental or Enlightenment reason give his theory postmodern import; however, he also accepts the Hegelian realism whereby the concrete textual object implicitly overcomes the reification imposed by instrumental reason and reveals the objective truths mediating between it and society. Despite his criticism of Marxist theory, he argues that art can, by virtue of its unresolved oppositions, resist its commodified character and reveal the divisions and conflicts characterising social life. As Adorno says, by ‘exposing the irrationality and absurdity of the status quo’, art resists its reified character and reveals the underlying truth of a divided society (Adorno 1984: 78).

Jacques Derrida as Postmodernist In the postmodern manner, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault also break with Marxist theory and Enlightenment reason, but they reject this socio-historical realism and consistently defend the value of difference or singularity. Consider, for example, the influential essay ‘Difference’, in which Derrida criticises Martin Heidegger’s realist notion of being. On the one hand, Heidegger and Derrida share the onto-theological tradition according to which language serves the ends of thought. While traditional phenomenology treats speech as the expression of consciousness and writing as a mere supplement of speech, both Heidegger and Derrida deny speech expresses consciousness and that writing supplements speech. Heidegger maintains, however, that language reveals the presence of ‘being’. In Poetry, Language, Thought, for example, he tells us that art brings ‘what is’ ‘into the Open’, but it does so as a ‘happening’, revelation, or ‘unconcealment’ (Heidegger 2001: 45, 35). To let truth be, the artistic text overcomes its technological ‘enframing’ and reveals and conceals Being, disclosing and hiding truth. Derrida grants that writing purports to reveal Being or Truth, as Heidegger says, but, instead of doing so, writing generates it as a discursive effect or differs it indefinitely. As the inaudible ‘a’ in différance suggests, writing generates textual effects which Heidegger (mis)construes as the venerable presence of ‘Being’. In short, both Heidegger and Derrida consider language or writing more fundamental than conventional rationality; however, while Heidegger assures us that language brings back the presence of metaphysical realities (‘being’) obliterated by modern rationality, Derrida undercuts that faith in being. A positive notion, writing generates only the illusion of presence, producing the effects of it. Derrida also critiques the realist ‘onto-theology’ of Marxism. For example, he argues that, in the name of science, Marx condemns the spiritual or spectral other in terms of which Hegel explains history. Derrida argues, however,

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that Marx fails to exclude this spectral other, whose presence reasserts itself as the revolution’s spirit (Derrida 1994: 106–9). Derrida maintains that Marx’s critique, which includes not only the spirit or spectre of dialectics but also the bourgeois ideology and commodity fetishism of capitalist society, opposes but fails to exclude these spectral others because they are already within Marxism, part of Marx’s revolutionary spirit or communist movement. Derrida goes on to claim, however, that true communism requires an absolute hospitality to a religious or messianic other always already part of us. As the ‘undeconstructible condition of any deconstruction’ and the vital ‘legacy’ of Marx (Derrida 1994: 28), this messianism affirms a transcendent sense of an other, including the dead.

Difference and Repetition: The Postmodernism of Gilles Deleuze Giles Deleuze does not defend a utopian messianism, but, in a number of works on Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and other philosophers as well as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, which set forth his own views, Deleuze also examines notions of difference and faults the theories of Heidegger and Marx. In Difference and Repetition (1968), which expounds his own views most fully, he goes on to make the notion of difference and repetition the foundation of a creative ontology presenting new ways of experiencing life or engaging in political action. He argues that the notions of difference and repetition undermine conventional or common sense beliefs in representations, models, propositions, contradictions, facts, dialectics, laws of nature, objects and causes. These beliefs form what he terms ‘the dogmatic image of thought’ because they ‘crush thought under an image which is that of the Same and the Similar in representation’, which ‘profoundly betrays what it means to think, and alienates the two powers of difference and repetition’ (Deleuze 1993a: 167). Since we do not, as a result, employ concepts or representations of objects or use propositions to refer to them, how we can experience the world becomes an issue. To explain this experience, he argues, as David Hume does, that thought is based on habit. Deleuze objects that Hume’s notion of the habitual association or, as Hume says, the ‘constant conjunction’ of ideas and impressions denies difference because his notion allows the contemplation of contradiction, but Deleuze still bases thought on habit. That is, unlike consciousness, thought is characteristic of animals and humans insofar as both function by habit or memory, what Deleuze calls the passive synthesis of impressions or intensities. The passive synthesis moves from past to future and lies in the spirit which contemplates an object – a general form of difference. Our 1,000 habits – contractions, contemplations, pretentions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues – form the basis of passive syntheses. As Deleuze says, ‘[T]he world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self . . . but it is the system of a dissolved self’ (Deleuze 1993a: 78).

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To explain the experience of time, he elaborates this notion of habit or passive synthesis. It establishes the foundation of time, but the memory, which is based on a second passive synthesis distinct from habit, also forms the basis of time. As he says: The first synthesis, that of habit, constituted time as a living present by means of a passive foundation on which past and future depended. The second synthesis, that of memory, constituted time as a pure past, from the point of view of a ground which causes the passing of one present and the arrival of another. (Deleuze 1993a: 93–4) Consciousness, by contrast, engages in what he calls an active synthesis of memory, which has a double principle of representation: a production of the past present and a reflection of the actual present. From the viewpoint of consciousness or active synthesis, we experience empirically a succession of different presents, which are also the coexistence of always growing levels of the past in passive synthesis. This combination of forms of repetition, including these active and passive syntheses, explain memory, perception, sensation, instinct, heredity, and so on. Central to this ontology of difference and repetition is the work of Nietzsche, whose notions of the eternal return of the same and of the death of God and dissolution of the self justify, Deleuze claims, making the notions of difference and repetition fundamental dimensions of experience. In the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche shows that the strong man resists the conventional, Christian morality of the group in order to assert his own values or perspectives, whereas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche explains the eternal return of the same as the fateful experience of what one has already been or experienced. Deleuze argues, however, that the strong man or overman central to Thus Spoke Zarathustra ensures that difference replaces identity in the eternal return of the same: ‘Nietzsche’s leading idea is to ground the repetition in eternal return on both the death of God and the dissolution of the self’ (Deleuze 1993a: 111). On the one hand, Deleuze faults traditional philosophy because it takes for granted what Deleuze calls the dogmatic Image of Thought, in which philosophy seeks what is true and everyone know what it is to think. On the other, he interprets the traditional philosophies of Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Kant, Hegel and others in terms of this Nietzschean view of difference and repetition. For instance, Deleuze argues that in The Republic and several dialogues, Plato means to distinguish the one, true idea from the many false versions of it. In the famous parable of the cave, Plato shows that without such truth people are subject to misleading impressions and are unable to experience the ‘light’ of truth. Deleuze grants that in Plato everything culminates in the affinity of thought with the true, grounded in the analogy of

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thought with the good. Deleuze argues, however, that to reverse Platonism is not to deny the primacy of the true over the impression, the original over the copy, the model over the image. In Plato the idea or being (the one) is actually difference because non-being is not the contradiction of being. Nonbeing or the many is also difference: ‘Being is difference itself’ but ‘non-being is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is difference’ (Deleuze 1993a: 64). Moreover, in many of Plato’s dialogues, the problem is to measure the rivals, select the pretenders, distinguish the thing and its imitations, and in the ancient fashion, that of myth and epics, to destroy the false pretenders. Such dialogues make difference a matter of truth vs rhetoric – true or false lovers, poets, priests and sophists. Similarly, Deleuze reinterprets and faults Aristotle’s claim that thought reflects reality. Aristotle explains the genres of art in terms of such reflection. Hence tragedy can show the unexpected consequences of the hero’s choices because the plot of a tragedy shows the mysterious nature of the universe. Deleuze objects, however, that the Aristotelian concept of genre reduces it to a form of identity, which destroys it. In addition to Plato and Aristotle, Deleuze faults the views of Kant even though Deleuze remains Kantian. In the Critique of Pure Reason and other works, Kant shows that space and time are not objective features of experience but constructs of the mind. By indicating what the conditions of possibility of experience are, what Kant calls the unity of apperception explains such constructs of experience. Deleuze also explains what makes experience possible, but he rejects the unity of apperception because it is based on common sense or empirical fact. The criticism of ‘this image of thought is’, he says, ‘precisely that it has based its supposed principle upon extrapolation from certain facts[.] . . . Kant traces the so-called transcendental structures from the empirical acts of a psychological consciousness: the transcendental synthesis of apprehension is directly induced from an empirical apprehension’ (Deleuze 1993a: 135). Deleuze also indicates how we construct experience or what its conditions of possibility are, rather than its causes or objects, but his creative ontology provides new ways of constructing experience, instead of conforming to empirical fact. Lastly, like Adorno and Derrida, Deleuze faults the dialectical philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, who argues that the contradictions which society evolves explain its evolution and show the workings of spirit, which anticipates the whole from history’s origins. Deleuze objects that the Hegelian dialectic preserves the whole only as a gigantic memory. Moreover, Hegelian contradiction, which treats non-contradiction as existing, makes identity the explanation of existence. ‘Hegelian contradiction does not deny identity or non-contradiction; on the contrary, it consists in inscribing non-contradiction within the existent in such a way that identity . . . is sufficient to think existence as such’ (Deleuze 1993a: 49). In this way the dialectical opposition betrays difference.

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Anti-Oedipus: The Postmodernism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A product of the rebellions of the 1960s, the collaboration of Deleuze and Guattari produced Anti-Oepidus, which preserves Deleuze’s creative, Kantian ontology explaining experience and his critique of traditional philosophy, including the rejection of representations, models, propositions, contradictions, facts, dialectics, laws of nature, objects and causes. Anti-Oepidus goes on, however, to engage in an extended critique of the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. It is well-known that in Freud’s view the repression of a (male) child’s incestuous desire to possess the mother and to kill the father explains the child’s unconscious mind. Drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus, the Greek tragedy in which Oedipus kills his father and seduces his mother, Freud called this state of a child’s mind the Oedipal complex. Deleuze and Guattari grant that Oedipus is an important figure in modern capitalist society, but they reject both Freud’s and Lacan’s accounts of the unconscious, because they believe that it is really social, not private. Like Adorno and Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari also fault Marxism, especially Marx’s belief that capitalists exploit their workers, who must sell their labour power to survive, and appropriate the surplus value, which is the value above and beyond the cost of the labour and machines. Deleuze and Guattari grant that capitalism exploits its workers and appropriates surplus value, as Marx says, but they argue that it is not the struggle of workers and capitalists which explains this exploitation; on the contrary, society’s norms and conventions, what they call the socius, imbues workers (and women and minorities) with a desire to be exploited. What resists repression and exploitation is not the revolutionary working class or its political parties; what resists them is what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘schizophrenic’ flows of desire because they break with the socius. To justify these critiques of Marx and Freud, Deleuze and Guattari reject a number of conventional distinctions. They deny, for example, that production and consumption are different. Marx considers this distinction central to a capitalist economy, but they argue that everything is production, which they also speak of as kinds of machines. They deny the distinction of body and mind or man and nature, which they consider different ways of experiencing life. As they say, ‘[M]an and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other . . . They are one and the same producer-product’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 4–5). They deny that subject and object are different on the grounds that there is no subject behind the experiences of life. They deny the distinction of life and death. Desire, which includes them, is more fundamental. They argue, then, that a ‘materialist’ psychiatry introduces desire into the psychological mechanism and production into desire, which they call desiring machines. In the terms of Difference and Repetition, desire is the passive

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synthesis that engineers partial objects, bodies and flows. They grant that psychoanalysis discovers this production of desire or the desiring machine but complain that it buries the discovery under a new idealism, which is what they consider the Oedipal complex to be. In general, what they term the socius, which is society’s conventions and norms, regulates the flows of desire. It, not the Oedipal complex, explains the repression of desire in the unconscious. More importantly, they claim that workers favour their own exploitation not because they neglect their rational interests but because psychic repression makes social repression desirable. It is not the worker, then, that resists the system; it is the schizophrenic, whom they call the ‘schizo’ and whom they distinguish from those ill with schizophrenia. The schizo resists this repression because he or she acts as a desiring machine. Freud assumes, by contrast, that the individual forms an unconscious in the context of the private family. Deleuze and Guattari grant that psychic repression is caused by the family, but they say that it, not the individual’s ‘drives’, makes desire incestuous. Similarly, Lacan situates the unconscious in the family, but he treats unconscious desire as a lack, which means, they say, that it produces fantasies, not flows. What’s more, the production of a lack does not, they argue, come from the unconscious but from the socius or ruling class, which organises needs and wants amidst an abundance of production. Deleuze and Guattari deny, in other words, that the repressed desires of the child in the private family explain the Oedipal complex: ‘[b]y boxing the life of the child up within the Oedipus complex, by making familial relations the universal mediation of childhood, we . . . fail to understand the production of the unconscious itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 48–9). They grant that the Oedipal complex is important, but they claim that capitalism, not the private individual’s repressed desires, situates it in the family. Moreover, to show that it is capitalism, not the universal human nature presupposed by Freud, which situates the Oedipal complex in the family, they explain how primitive, feudal or despotic, and capitalist societies have evolved. In a primitive society, the earth, which Deleuze and Guattari consider a territorial machine, is the first socius. Because encampments are necessary, the nomad cannot simply drift with flows of desire and direct sexual filiations; the socius dominates. In general, a social machine sets apart flows of desire and distributes parts of a task, thereby using men and forming memory. If desire acts for its own sake or in excess of any needs, Deleuze and Guattari characterise it as the surplus value of code. In a primitive society, the surplus value of code operates the territorial machine, organising selections of tasks or goods and allocating portions to each person. As a result, the territorial machine excludes the exchange, commerce and industry of capitalism as well as its classes, which evolve much later. Moreover, in primitive societies, debt is like a gift, not an economic exchange. The giver is like one who is robbed or punished. In addition, kinship is dominant, not classes. Incest

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does not already exist, as the Freudians claim, because myths prohibit incest between father and daughter and mother and son; instead, through marriage, men exchange women from different families, establishing what Deleuze and Guattari call their filiations, which are homosexual arrangements. ‘Wherever men meet to take wives for themselves, to negotiate for them, to share them, etc., one recognizes the perverse tie of a primary homosexuality between local groups, between brothers-in-law, co-husbands, childhood partners’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 164–5). In place of capitalist economic exchange, there are ties of economic and political alliance between tribes, which combine with these relations of filiation within tribes. Deleuze and Guattari also explain how in feudal society the despotic or ‘megamachine’ of the state replaces the territorial machine of primitive society. This megamachine, which opposes the codes of the primitive territorial machine, is hierarchic, with the despot at the top, the bureaucratic apparatus below the despot, and the villagers at the bottom. Establishing empire, the despot pursues vengeance and incites ‘ressentiment’, which brings about bad conscience. Moreover, to become the despot, the prince marries the princess-sister and the mother-queen. This incestuous practice codes or ‘overcodes’ the coded flows of desire so that the megamachine can regulate them. The despot becomes what Deleuze and Guattari term the body without organs (or organisation), but the overcoding produced by incest makes all of the organs of all the subjects part of the despot’s body. As Deleuze and Guattari say: For what is at stake in the overcoding effected by incest is . . . that all of the organs of all the subjects, all the eyes, all the mouths, all the penises, all the vaginas, all the ears, and all the anuses become attached to the full body of the despot. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 210) With the growth of capitalism, the organs of the subjects rebel, detaching themselves from the despot and becoming those of the private man. The decoded flows making the despotic state feudal are not enough to bring about capitalism. Neither is the development of commodity production, which reinforces the feudal state. Capitalism emerges from the coming together or the conjunction of decoded flows of property, money, production, means of production and deterritorialised workers, who are workers expelled from the land which they worked and forced to move to the city. In fully developed capitalism, which includes merchant, finance and industrial capital, the process of deterritorialisation moves to the peripheries (the Third World), where the underdeveloped countries become part of the capitalist machine. The ‘politico-military-industrial-economic complex’ established by developed capitalism extracts human surplus value in the periphery, engenders enormous surplus value from automated or ‘machinic’ production, and absorbs the surplus value produced.

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To critique Freudian theory, Deleuze and Guattari argue that in capitalism, the family does not dominate economic production, as it did in despotic regimes; rather, the family is subordinated to economic production and it is privatised, with father, mother and child becoming the representatives or ‘simulacrum’ of capital. In this privatised family, capitalism inserts the Oedipal complex, with the mother the simulacrum of territoriality, and the father, of despotic law. In other words, contrary to psychoanalysis, the socius or social field of capitalism forms the unconscious, not the family. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the ‘communication of the unconscious does not by any means take the family as its principle; it takes as its principle the commonality of the social field insofar as it is the object of the investment of desire . . . the family is never determining but is always determined’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 276).

The Postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard In The Postmodern Condition, which is subtitled A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard adopts a very different perspective: instead of developing a creative ontology which critiques Freudian accounts of desire and the unconscious, Lyotard engages in a positive historical study which explains postmodernism as the result of changes which the last few centuries have produced in the character of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge. Commissioned by the President of the Conseil des Universities of the government of Quebec, this report argues that the modern era employs grand narratives or ‘metadiscourses’ to justify or legitimate knowledge in the face of religious or political oppression. As Lyotard says: I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectic of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. (Lyotard 1984: xxiii) He defines the postmodern as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). Beginning in the 1950s, the postmodern is, then, the era in which scientific knowledge can no longer be legitimated by traditional or ‘grand’ narratives but instead finds legitimation in its little narratives or immanent practices. In Wittgenstein’s analytic terms, he argues that in the postmodern era the cognitive, prescriptive and evaluative ‘forms of life’ or ‘language games’ of the sciences expect their performance or competence, not the grand narratives, to legitimate them. Moreover, formally incommensurate, the cognitive, prescriptive and evaluative language games of the specialised sciences or disciplines must provide their own legitimating ‘ideological’ rationales because the traditional grand narratives can no longer justify them. As Lyotard says, ‘[t]he little

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narrative [petit récit] remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention, most particularly in science’ (Lyotard 1984: 60). Unlike Deleuze, Derrida and other postmodernists, Lyotard, moved by the Algerian war, initially defended Marxist theory; however, in Libidinal Economy and other earlier works, he critiques the Marxist theory which he had previously defended, and, as scholars point out, the critique anticipates this account of postmodernism (see, for example, Sim 1996: 28). Responding to the political upheavals of the 1960s, he grants that the scientific theory discovered by Karl Marx establishes its formal independence of its socio-historical context, as the influential Marxist Louis Althusser argued. Moreover, Lyotard admits that the capitalist economy and its state bureacracy allow science the formal autonomy defended by Althusser. Lyotard argues, however, that in Marx’s account the state and the economy work together to circulate and reproduce capital. He maintains that, as a result, science does not resist ideology, as Althusser says; science fosters and defends the reproduction of capital and the exploitation of workers, teachers and students. In the former USSR and in the Western world the growth of economic exploitation and of the technocratic state bureaucracy gave the sciences, including Marxism, a conservative function: they justify the capitalist economic enterprises and the state bureaucracy and alienate both workers and students (see Lyotard 1973: 78–166). In The Postmodern Condition, which restates and extends this critique of Marxism to other ‘grand’ narratives, Lyotard argues that the emergence of post-industrial society explains why the grand narratives can no longer legitimate knowledge. In general, to legitimate knowledge, a legislator must be authorised to prescribe the conditions in which a statement becomes part of a scientific discourse. Legitimating knowledge involves, then, political and scientific statements. This makes the question of scientific knowledge a question of government as well. The problem is, however, the legitimacy of scientific knowledge, not just knowledge, which involves, Lyotard says, not only truth but also competence with regard to efficiency, justice, happiness, beauty. More importantly, Lyotard notes that knowledge has traditionally had a narrative form because popular histories, with heroes, successes, and so on, gave institutions legitimacy. In such traditional narratives, which involve a triple competence: speaking, understanding and doing, what made the narrator authoritative is his having heard the story himself. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave shows that people want stories, Plato’s dialogues legitimate narrative knowledge. They mean to legitimate science but are not scientific because they tell a story of scientific legitimation. Unlike the narrative knowledge of traditional culture, a scientist like Copernicus is, by contrast, supposed to both speak the truth and defend his assertions. Since the scientist can prove what he says, we consider his statements true. Moreover, one teaches scientific statements only if they are verifiable by argumentation and proof.

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Once the bourgeoisie emancipates itself from traditional authorities, it legitimates itself by bringing back stories in which the hero is the people and progress is the result. In these stories, all people have a right to science, so with the universities the professors and the administration require the nation to spread the new scientific knowledge to the people. Lyotard’s example is Humboldt University in Germany, which was expected to use science in the nation’s spiritual formation. Bringing together ‘is’ and ‘ought’ statements, the Humboldt project forms a subject legitimated by knowledge and the nation. In this way, the speculative philosophy of the schools unites different sciences in the formation of spirit. Lyotard shows, then, that knowledge found its historical legitimacy both in a practical subject, humanity, and in an epic version in which the concrete subject emancipates itself. He argues, moreover, that the crisis of knowledge comes from an internal erosion of the principle of the legitimacy of knowledge. As a language game, science cannot legitimate itself because it lacks a universal metalanguage enabling it to regulate practical affairs. The only metalanguage explaining the axioms of science is that of logic. As a result, humanist or speculative philosophy annuls its function as legitimation and studies logic or the history of ideas. More importantly, in the late eighteenth century, when science becomes a force for production, capitalism creates foundations of private research in which the laboratories engage in applied research and act like businesses. In post-industrial society, information and other new technologies also influence knowledge, which is then broken into quantities and produced to be sold. Moreover, it develops new types, including knowledge exchanged in order to maintain ordinary life as well as credits of knowledge aimed at optimising the performances of a programme. Scientific knowledge also produces many different discourses, including linguistics, cybernetics, computers and translation. The changes in knowledge affect universities as well. The demand for experts grows, so universities are asked to form competencies, not ideas – a version of delegitimation. As Lyotard explains, the world of postmodern knowledge is regulated by a play of information accessible to experts. The students are either professionals or technical intelligentsia, and the universities devoted to producing technical cadre are divided from those devoted to promoting imaginative spirits. The technocrats produced in these institutions do not consider what society calls its needs because they are not independent of the new technologies. In other words, no scientist worries about science or society as a whole. As a consequence in its pragmatic aspects, science is contrary to a stable system. Scientific statements give rise to ideas, which indicate an open or unstable system. Lyotard characterises this evolution of postmodern science as discontinuous, catastrophic and paradoxical, what he terms paralogical. It explains the unknown, not the known.

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Jürgen Habermas has argued that one can establish a consensus among the proponents of different disciplines if the proponents rise above their disciplines and engage in rational debate. Lyotard denies, however, that such a consensus is possible because it mistakenly presupposes that the grand narratives, especially that of speculative philosophy, have not lost their validity. Without consensus, there is no way to resolve the disputes between different disciplines. As he argues in The Differend, without a metalanguage, the resolution of disputes is inherently unfair to one of the parties because its rules differ from the other party’s rules.

Michel Foucault as a Postmodernist Like Lyotard, Foucault examines the positive, factual history of disciplinary knowledge, rather than the conditions of possible experience described by Deleuze and Guattari or the differed presence of Derrida. He does not speak of grand or metanarratives or of scientific knowledge, but in a postmodern fashion he does suggest that the discourses of the disciplines or, as he says, power/ knowledge impose ideals of normality and thereby reproduce themselves and/ or the subject, rather than foundational, humanist ideals. In the early The History of Madness (originally published in English in abridged form as Madness and Civilization), Foucault, like Nietzsche, who preserves the ancient view that Dionysiac madness is a tragic experience, claims that madness readily transgresses the ethical precepts of ‘bourgeois’ morality, but he maintains the changing historical contexts of madness explain this transgression. He says, for example, that in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries madness replaces leprosy as a spiritual condition revealing signs of God’s wisdom. Like the lepers, the mad, who are on a voyage, a quest or a journey, remain within the community, where madness shows the tragic abyss of life, its existential emptiness; however, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the rationalists condemn madness as error and exclude it from social life. ‘Reason’ excludes madness from itself and from society because the mad can always overcome their insanity and think rationally. The many hospitals and workhouses built in the seventeenth century grouped together sexual libertines, debauchers, alchemists, victims of venereal disease, impious disbelievers, homosexuals and the mad on the grounds that all such abnormal activities simply violated ethical and theological norms. Foucault suggests that it was not scientific critique or outraged humanity but institutional changes which ended the practice of interning the mad with the criminals, vagabonds and profligates. For example, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, psychopathology returned the mad to human realms, but only because in this era the mad acquire human rights. Moreover, once economics becomes a distinct discipline, poverty loses its status as a moral fault. Since economics shows that the poor work to make the rich rich,

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society admits that it is obligated to help the labouring poor, and the poor and the mad are separated. Liberated from internment, the mad become free to enter asylums, where psychoanalysis, which becomes an absolute wisdom, gives it the power to speak, to end its silence, and to recognise itself. In The Order of Things, Foucault also shows that changing historical conditions, not universal or foundational norms, explain the changing forms of discourse, but he adopts Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem’s belief that evolving paradigms explain the historical development of a discipline, not the Nietzschean view that madness itself undermines the ethical norms of the rationality excluding it. Foucault assumes that such a paradigm or episteme underlies an era’s disciplines or expert knowledges and explains their cognitive force. Modes of positive knowledge, these epistemes rupture and break with each other. The Renaissance, the classical era and the modern era constitute sets of assumptions or epistemes establishing the disciplines which subsequently undermine them. Foucault claims, moreover, that in the twentieth century the modern disciplines fracture the unified figure of human being in terms of which in the nineteenth century phenomenology grounds them. As Lyotard also suggests, the modern episteme divides into the mathematical sciences, the social sciences and philosophical disciplines, and thereby undermines the phenomenological project – to establish the human foundation of the sciences. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault goes on to argue that, as a strategy with dispositions and techniques, discourse forms a complex of power/knowledge organising diverse institutions including the family. He still assumes that such complexes undermine foundational norms, but he produces what he terms a genealogy of a discourse’s divisions and influence, rather than an archaeology explaining an era’s discourses about criminals, the insane or knowledge. For instance, he points out that to determine the culpability of the accused, judges require the expertise of psychiatrists, anthropologists and criminologists, all of whom enable the judge to determine what the criminal can be, not just what he did. Exercised not only on the accused or the guilty but also on the insane, children, students, prisoners, workers and ex-convicts, this scientific-juridical complex engages in political tactics and strategies producing what Foucault terms a technology of the body. Foucault still situates this genealogy in distinct historical periods whose socio-historical changes explain its evolution, but the genealogy examines the emergence and extension of the technology, not the episteme underlying various discourses. Foucault argues, moreover, that, impersonal and autonomous, a discipline is not a form of ideological hegemony but an ‘anatomy of power’ used by different institutions, including the family, to impose conceptions of normality ensuring ruling-class domination. While eighteenth-century philosophers and jurists seek in the legal pact the model on which to construct social life, the technicians of discipline elaborate techniques of individual and collective coercion of bodies.

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The eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, which becomes the dominant class, imposes a juridical code of formal equality and a parliamentary form of regime. Disciplines are the other side of these processes. Essentially inegalitarian and hierarchic, disciplinary systems of micropower underpin the general juridical form which guarantees an egalitarian system of rights. The rewards and the penalties of this disciplinary surveillance impose standards of normality on docile bodies. Disciplines adjust a ‘multiplicity’ of people to the multiplying apparatuses of production, including the production of knowledge and of aptitudes at school, of health in hospitals, and of destructive force in the army. One cannot, Foucault argues, separate the accumulation of capital from the accumulation of people – the techniques which make the ‘cumulative multiplicity’ of people useful accelerate the accumulation of capital. In other words, he suggests that, while the bourgeoisie imposes formal or legal equality, this ‘microphysics’ of power, coercive, not persuasive, explains the underpinning of eighteenth-century social life. Moreover, this power dominates larger and larger areas of social life. Schools, hospitals, prisons, armies and factories employ these technologies, which organise spaces, time and bodies. As in the earlier works, Foucault claims here too that in the eighteenthcentury hospital, school, factory and prison, where the technologies ensure objectivation and subjugation, disciplinary procedures or mechanisms enable knowledge and power to reinforce each other. In other words, while the disciplines making up the human sciences seem to oppose and to change schools or factories, the disciplines actually make the technology more effective. Indeed, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these technologies spread to so many different institutions that Foucault speaks of a whole carceral society, not just prisons. Moreover, he points out that even though the prison fails to reform criminals, the prison remains the central form of punishment. The carceral society perpetuates the delinquency the prisons mean to reduce because this society uses delinquency to survey the population and to direct and exploit tolerated illegalities. In The History of Sexuality (vol. I), Foucault also shows that, as strategies of power, disciplinary knowledge has a constitutive or ‘subjectivizing’ force whereby it enables or ‘interpellates’ the subject, including its unconscious. In this case, he claims, as Deleuze and Guattari do, that sexual desire is not repressed or subversive, as Freudians and Marxists say; it is a normal construct of modern discourses, which incessantly promote talk about sex. Modern society talks so obsessively about sex not because sexuality has been repressed but because it evolves a will to knowledge about sexual matters. In The History of Madness, the Nietzschean will to power transgressed bourgeois morality, while, in the History of Sexuality, the will to knowledge is embedded in institutional practices, especially the confession. Foucault points out, for example, that in the medieval era, the church demanded very detailed confessions of sexual acts, whereas in the seventeenth

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century confession shifts from such explicit acts to more private thoughts and intentions. More importantly, he shows that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governmental policies which regulate population, birth control, sexual hygiene and education, explain sexual activities and thereby produce discussions of sex at the same time that they police the activities of the population. In this postmodern fashion Foucault once again critiques theoretical ideals, for it is the normalising practices established in the family or other institutions, not in the law nor in scientific or humanist theory, which explain the changes in social life. This time, however, he claims, as Deleuze and Guattari do, that power both proliferates pleasure and multiplies perversions or misconducts. He shows, for instance, that power produces the figures of the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple and the perverse adult. Similarly, psychology, medicine, and so on, give the middle class its own body, while welfare, birth control, poverty, and so on, give the working class a different body. Moreover, the working class develops its own sexuality because it finds bourgeois sexuality oppressive. Lastly, medical discourse claimed that pure blood ties excluded mixed marriages – no miscegenation, while perversion stemmed from degenerate family lines – an insane parent, for example. Since racism stems from this nineteenth-century union of pure blood and bourgeois sexuality, Foucault’s account of sexuality ultimately explains the Nazis’ anti-semitism, including the Holocaust. Unlike Foucault’s archaeological accounts of madness and knowledge, his genealogical studies of punishment and sexuality examine the nexus of power/ knowledge and radically critique the normative import of theoretical ideals; still, both his archaeological and his genealogical studies indicate that, as postmodern theory suggests, discourse undermines the humanist’s ideals of rational norms and universal truth and evolves distinct historical configurations which regulate the body, institutions and even society.

Conclusion: Alain Badiou and Postmodernism Alain Badiou emerged as a major, new French philosopher with the publication of Being and Event (1988). Unlike Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and other postmodern philosophers, he preserves rationalism by identifying mathematics with ontology and defends Marxism by making it a matter of personal commitment or ‘fidelity’, not science or historical truth; nonetheless, in ‘The Adventure of French Philosophy’, Badiou aptly characterises postmodern philosophy as, in general, an attempt ‘to displace the relation between the concept and its external environment by developing new relations to existence, to thought, to action, and to the movement of forms’ (Badiou 2005: 70). What’s more, except for the work of Adorno, whose realist treatment of postmodern themes falls outside his scope, he fully summarises the main philosophical tendencies in terms of which I have explained postmodern theory. For

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instance, he says that one tendency is, as the work of Deleuze, Lyotard and Foucault indicates, the French appropriation of German philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger, who were transformed into ‘something completely new’ (Badiou 2005: 69). The second tendency, evident especially in Deleuze and Guattari’s work as well as Lyotard’s, is, as I suggested, to construe science as a practice of creative thought and not an object of conceptual truth. The third tendency, which characterises not only Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, but Derrida and Foucault as well, is the engagement in action or politics but not political parties, showing thereby that philosophy is not just for philosophers. The fourth and last tendency, which characterises Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard more than Foucault or Derrida, is to modernise philosophy by creating new ‘forms of life’ (Badiou 2005: 70).

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10 POSTMODERN AESTHETICS Nikolai Duffy

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he nuclear physicist David Bohm once remarked how ‘revolutionary changes in physics have always involved the perception of a new order and attention to the development of new ways of using language that are appropriate to the communication of such order’ (Bohm 1972: 249). Similarly, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, first published in 1927, states how it is not possible to know the exact position and motion of something at the same time. For Heisenberg, the subatomic world of quantum mechanics goes against the grain of common sense. Throwing into question classical concepts such as mass, location and velocity, it demands a departure from the standard language and imagery of physics. Heisenberg likened the uncertainty principle to the ‘observer effect’, noting how any observation alters – and therefore affects – the thing being measured. There is no detached point from which impartial and precise measurement can be made such that each measurement, inevitably, is and will always be imprecise (Heisenberg 1949: 20). Speaking in interview thirty years after the publication of his paper on the uncertainty principle, Heisenberg repeated his sense that the so-called new physics required a new conception of language, one that registered uncertainty by rendering the seemingly precise language of science equivocal (Peat and Buckley 1996: 5). In 2002, the then United States Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, gave a news briefing to the US Department of Defence, concerning the evidence linking the state of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction, and asserted that: ‘as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know’ (Rumsfeld 2002). Writing in response to Rumsfeld’s speech two years later, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek asserted that there is a fourth category of knowledge, overlooked by Rumsfeld, namely the ‘things we don’t know we know’. This, Žižek argued, is the realm of the Freudian unconscious, ‘the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself”, as Jacques Lacan used to say. In many ways, these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to,

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may pose an even greater threat’ (Žižek 2004). There is, Žižek is suggesting, beyond our control, something we cannot quite reach or understand, something, perhaps, that we do not wish to know, or something that we never know directly but only imprecisely, that, like dreams, we only know through disguises and subterfuges. Despite their great differences, what is crucial about Heisenberg’s notion of uncertainty or imprecision and Žižek’s sense of the unknown knowns is that both theories point to one of the most significant elements of postmodern aesthetics, in all its various guises, namely, a concern with representation, with what appears, as well as with what fails to appear, what falls through the cracks. Some of the most influential elements of postmodern aesthetics have been concerned with placing border zones or the liminal at the centre of things. Postmodern aesthetics has to do with a sense that language is not always adequate to the task, that things do not quite come to light, and that this shadowy element is an integral and constitutive element of the postmodern age in general, and of postmodernism in particular. In his highly influential book, The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha noted that, [i]t is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond [. . .] Our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the ‘present’, for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix ‘post’: postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism. (Bhabha 1994: 1) Bhabha goes on to argue that: The ‘beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past. . . . Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but in the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond’: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delà – here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth. (Bhabha 1994: 1) Postmodern aesthetics engages this question of oscillation as theoretical question and practical constraint. In other words, postmodern aesthetics is interested in asking the question of how to stage this imprecise border zone, that is, how represent it as oscillation. For this reason, postmodern aesthetics is an eclectic and often contradictory field encompassing visual art, architecture, film, literature, dance, music and

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film. It is a mode of being in the world, as well as a formal and philosophical response to the particular conditions of late capitalism in the West. It blends a concern with aesthetics with contemporary debates in questions surrounding geography, urban planning, situationism, ideology, psychology, mathematics, physics and philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard famously categorised the postmodern as ‘the end of grand narratives’ and the postmodern age as the age of eclecticism. ‘Eclecticism’, Lyotard wrote: is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae; you watch a western; you eat McDonald’s at midday and local cuisine at night; you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in Hong Kong; knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows. . . . Together, artist, gallery owner, critic, and public indulge one another in the Anything Goes – it is time to relax. But this realism of Anything Goes is the realism of money: in the absence of aesthetic criteria it is still possible to measure the value of works of art by the profits they realise. (Lyotard 1992: 8) In aesthetic terms, disciplinary boundaries merge; aesthetic practices proliferate, as do the various theories underpinning them. In contradistinction to the traditional emphasis on notions of aesthetics ‘depth’, there is an increased concern with surfaces, particularly in terms of what such surfaces simultaneously reveal and veil. Epistemology becomes less a science of knowledge as indeterminacy; clarity becomes incredulity; lacuna becomes both structural and organising principle. Chance replaces certainty. As the American writer, Paul Auster, puts it: Chance is a part of reality: we are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence [. . .] What I’m talking about is the presence of the unpredictable, the utterly bewildering nature of human experience. Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. In philosophical terms, I’m talking about the powers of contingency. (Auster 1995: 278–9) What is at stake is a form of language, a form of making and living, that privileges openness, difference and uncertainty. Contingency renders structures and systems equivocal; it destabilises authority, promotes flux over fixity. In any artistic discipline postmodern aesthetics achieve this effect most commonly through fragmentation, syntactic disruption, collage, deviation, digression, polyphony, a hybridisation of genre, simultaneous multiple plot lines (more often than not, left unresolved), an overload of both information and symbols, a valorisation of surface over depth. As the American poet, Rosmarie Waldrop, writes:

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Vertigo. The terms shift. The relation of the terms shifts. The richness undermines itself. If everything is like something else, no one likeness means anything [. . .] we are left with ‘pure’ analogy, the gesture of it rather than any one specific analogy. A gesture that makes the terms transparent for the very structure of language, of signification [. . .] Transparency for the structure of signification – and for its limits: the silence, the infinite, the nothing, all it is not able to hold. (Waldrop 2002: 96) The trouble is that, often against their best intentions, artistic forms have a tendency to produce fixed representations of the world: a literary text becomes a finished product contained by the physical wrappers of the book; an architectural drawing becomes a rigid structure. The aesthetic question of how to keep equivocation mobile has taken many different forms, some more successful than others, but none that has formulated a definitive practice. The quest for openness and for plurality will always fail. Contingency evades control, and equivocation can never be brought to term. Failure is an integral element of postmodern aesthetics. In the words of Samuel Beckett’s 1983 text, Worstward Ho, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett 1983: 89).

Postmodern Architecture: Double Coding and Radical Eclecticism Postmodern aesthetics first gained currency in the field of architecture, particularly through the work of Kenneth Frampton, Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks. Jencks has been one of the most prolific and ardent exponents of postmodern aesthetics, beginning, in 1977, with the publication of his book, The Language of Postmodern Architecture, going up to the 2011 publication, The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture. Following Lyotard’s sense of postmodernism as synonymous with the end of so-called grand narratives, and his subsequent declaration that a war should be waged against any attempt at or form of totality, Jencks conceives postmodern architecture as a system of pluralities. Postmodern designs are hybrids, incorporating diversity of material and style, cultural pluralism and historical reference. Jencks was reacting against a particular reading of modernist architecture that began to dominate architectural thinking in the 1970s. Modernist architecture was criticised for its utilitarianism, particularly its valorisation of function over style, together with the importance attached to geometrical simplicity, uniformity, monumentality and standardisation. In the words of one of the principal modernist architects, Le Corbusier, without the clean and clear lines of geometrical design, ‘we have the sensation, so insupportable to man, of shapelessness, of poverty, of disorder, of wilfulness’ (Le Corbusier 1931: 48).

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Arguably, Jencks’s greatest elaboration of this notion of postmodern aesthetics is best encapsulated by his notion of ‘double-coding’. For Jencks, PostModernism (as he writes it) is ‘that paradoxical dualism, or double coding, which its hybrid name entails: the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence’ (Jencks 1986: 10). ‘A Post-Modern building’, Jencks argued, is [. . .] one which speaks on at least two levels at once: to other architects and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meaning, and to the public at large, or the local inhabitants, who care about other issues concerned with comfort, traditional building and a way of life. (Jencks 2002: 3) On this model, postmodernism fuses the vanguard and the popular, speaking to both – frequently mutually exclusive – audiences at once. Buildings are understood to function as a language or a discourse. In other words, buildings communicate; they suggest symbolic, metaphorical and cultural meanings, correspondences and connotations. They reference the historical and the cultural moment of their design and construction. They echo, develop and amalgamate. It is the self-consciousness of a building of its own double-coding that renders it postmodern. Indeed, this is one of the central double discourses of postmodern aesthetics, in any guise. It is self-reflexive, ironic, open and plural. The novelist and critic, Umberto Eco, usefully develops what is at stake here when he writes: I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. (Eco 1984: 67) Here authenticity is achieved via a self-reflexive irony. The sincere declaration of love is only possible by ironising its expression. In the postmodern age, in other words, sincerity becomes most sincere when it becomes a parody of pastiche of itself. One of the other main exponents of postmodern architecture was Robert Venturi, whose most important books were Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972). In opposition to what he perceived as modernism’s ‘easy unity of exclusion’, in the former book Venturi argued for a ‘complex and contradictory architecture based on the

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richness and ambiguity of modern experience’ (Venturi 1966: 16). For Venturi and his wife and collaborator, Denise Scott Brown, the interest lay in combining a commercial or ‘pop’ sensibility with postmodern notions of hybridity that characterised the untidy sprawl of mass-built suburbs and the growing commercial and urban importance of automobile strips (for more on this, see Scott Brown 1984). For Venturi and Scott Brown this postmodern sensibility found its exemplary expression in Las Vegas where, they argued, in a typically postmodern attitude influenced by semiotics, ‘the sign was more important than the architecture’, and that architecture, more than anything else, should be a ‘communications over space’ (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1972: 8). It exemplifies what Jameson calls ‘the heterogeneous fabric of the commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape of the postsuperhighway American city’ (Jameson 1992: 63). It is about blending the theories of the fine arts with the materials and modes of the mass media. All buildings are symbols, Venturi suggests; all buildings function as signs. Las Vegas does this to an exemplary level, Venturi argues, because the Strip comprises a variety of styles and references, many of which ‘blend and clash’, and all of which are prefaced (announced, advertised) by large-scale billboards competing to entice drivers of cars to stop and enter. The appeal of Las Vegas is its non-hierarchical inclusiveness. The ordinary becomes decorative. The Strip, Venturi and Brown argue, ‘is not an order dominated by the expert and made easy for the eye. The moving eye in the moving body must work to pick out and interpret a variety of changing, juxtaposed orders’ (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1972: 135). In some respects, this is the idiom of commercialism, or what Frederic Jameson would refer to as ‘late capitalism’. Yet the key point for Venturi is that Las Vegas embodies the ‘commercial vernacular vocabularies of the highway environment and urban sprawl’ and, as such, becomes ‘an appropriate symbolic architecture of our time’ (Venturi 1984: 109). It is the example par excellence because: Allusion and comment, on the past or present or on our great commonplaces or old clichés, and inclusion of the everyday in the environment, sacred and profane – these are what are lacking in present-day Modern architecture. We can learn about them from Las Vegas as have other artists from their own profane and stylistic sources. (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1972: 53) Elaborating on many of the ideas suggested or implied by Venturi, Jencks’s other key term for determining the scope of postmodern architecture is ‘radical eclecticism’. Such an aesthetic, Jencks argues, resists cultural uniformity and rejects the idea of a dominant centre. In other parlance, it employs juxtaposition, oxymorons and contradiction, and connotes a smorgasbord aesthetic, combining both a freedom to choose and an opportunity to amalgamate or

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blend references and allusions drawn from a variety of cultural and historical periods. In this regard, a very helpful way of understanding what is at stake in postmodern architecture is to conceive it along similar lines to the notion of the palimpsest/palimtext central to most theories on literary postmodernism. As Michael Davidson puts it: The palimtext is neither object but a writing-in-process. As its name implies, the palimtext retains vestiges of prior inscriptions out of which it emerges. Or, more accurately, it is the still-visible record of its responses to those earlier writings. The palimtext is a kind of ruin that emerges in an era when ruins no longer signify lost plenitude. The modern ruin, as Walter Benjamin points out, is immanent in mass-produced commodities, an allegory of modern materiality’s impermanence and ephemerality. (Davidson 1997: 68) Radical eclecticism is about creativity and reinvention. Richard Kearney describes radical eclecticism as a ‘creative pluralism’, arguing that ‘one of the goals of this “radical eclecticism” is to rid us of the illusion of some englobing national or imperial ideology which contrives to erode cultural differences’ (Kearney 1992: 584). As Kearney continues, postmodernism conceives history as a collage, and so: resists the naïve belief in history as demonstrating inevitable progress or regress, and suggests that we draw from the old and the new in a recreative and nondogmatic way. The ‘post’ in postmodern refers not just to what comes after modernity. It signals another way of seeing things, one which transforms the linear model of historical time into a series of multiple perspectives. (Kearney 1992: 585) In relation to this, it is important to stress that such a postmodern aesthetic does not propagate a caustic cultural relativism but rather demands an active engagement with non-resolvable difference. The creative task concerns the ways in which such differences might be combined without any of those differences being collapsed into the same. In design terms, it concerns the ways in which different, and sometimes acutely conflicting, references and styles can co-exist without synthesis.

Lyotard – The Differend, the Sublime? Jean-François Lyotard explored the philosophical and aesthetic implications of this notion of difference in arguably his most important philosophical book, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983). In legalistic terms, by ‘differend’ Lyotard means a conflict between parties that cannot be decided or

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resolved because the parties cannot agree on a rule of judgement. One way of understanding what is at issue here is via an account of refugee law and postmodernism given by Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington. In their paper, ‘A Well-Founded Idea of Justice’, Douzinas and Warrington cite a case for asylum in Britain by Sri Lankan refugees. The claim for asylum was made on the basis that the refugees feared persecution and death if they were returned to Sri Lanka. The claim for asylum was rejected on the grounds that the plaintiffs were unable to demonstrate reasonable grounds for their fear of persecution in the homeland. The rejection of the asylum claim came down to a double bind. On the one hand, the judgement stated that fear of persecution is a subjective state and, as such, the plaintiffs were required to articulate their fear in a clear and rational manner in order for their case to be heard clearly and properly. On the other hand, it was argued that fear, particularly an acute fear for one’s life, if genuine, would exceed the bounds of rational speech such that the plaintiff would struggle to articulate the grounds of their fear. The trouble was that, in such a scenario, the case would not be able to be heard because the plaintiffs were unable to articulate their case for asylum. The double bind leads to an infinite circularity. As Douzinas and Warrington write, here the differend refers to ‘an extreme form of injustice in which the injury suffered by the victim is accompanied by a deprivation of the means to prove it’ (Douzinas and Warrington 1995: 209). Lyotard calls this sense of the differend an ‘ethical tort’. As Lyotard writes: Should the victim seek to [. . .] testify anyway to the wrong done to her, she comes up against the following argumentation, either the damage you complain about never took place, and your testimony is false; or else they took place, and since you are able to testify to them, it is not an ethical tort that has been done to you. (Lyotard 1988: 5) There is an absurdity in such a judgement, but also a violence. In either case, the point is that the differend, as one of the prime emblems of postmodernism, foregrounds the notion of incommensurability. Although Lyotard’s key areas of focus in The Differend are the legal and the linguistic, in subsequent work he aligned the notion of the incommensurable to postmodern aesthetics, particularly in respect of his use of the term the ‘sublime’. First articulated in the eighteenth century by the British philosopher, Edmund Burke, and subsequently – and arguably more famously – developed by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant – the aesthetics of the sublime refers to an aesthetic of the wild, the untamed, the raw, the savage. It is an aesthetic term distinguished from notions of the ‘beautiful’ or of ‘taste’. Most frequently, the sublime is associated with large-scale natural phenomena, such as waterfalls, mountains and thunderstorms. In this, the sublime is understood to be that which is awe-inspiring, that combines experiences of wonder with

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terror. One ever feels one’s smallness. In this respect, the sublime is an eccentric or extravagant aesthetic. Becoming eccentric, getting outside our own limits, and trying to transcend the narrowness of our own experience can give us the vision of larger life, of some life ‘pasturing freely where we never wander’ in Thoreau’s phrase (Thoreau 2005: 146). The exploration of life by means of analogy possesses a spiritual dimension that logic does not. To be extravagant means to wander outside the limits of everything we have learned as received knowledge, prescribed feelings, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to think. In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard defines the sublime as that which is ‘subjectively felt by thought as differend’ (Lyotard 1994: 131). The sublime interrupts teleological judgement, pointing to a realm that resists both complete conceptualisation and categorisation. The sublime renders thinking reflexive but not categorical. Lyotard’s most decisive understanding of the sublime, then, is that it points to a fundamental aporia of knowledge; it names – or, perhaps better, implies – the limits of conceptualisation. And in this sense, the sublime occasions the differend. It leads to an impasse such that every representation of it, at least to a degree, fails. This is why Lyotard famously claims that the sublime is the presentation of the unpresentable. As Andrew Slade notes, ‘art is sublime where and when it strains to disclose the Idea – it is sublime where its object is absent’ (Slade 2007: 22).

Deleuze, Guattari and Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari notably characterised such an aesthetic ‘minor literature’. In their book, Kakfa: Towards a Minor Literature, they outline three constitutive features of minor literature: ‘Its language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’; everything in minor literature ‘is political’; and in it ‘everything takes on a collective value’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16). In other terms, minor literature refers to: a minor literary movement within a larger literary tradition; literature written by minority groups within a larger cultural, linguistic and/or national environment; and experimental literature which, they argue, ‘minorizes’ a dominant or ‘major’ language. In a theory not without its detractors, particularly from the perspective of postcolonial studies, in their book, Deleuze and Guattari’s primary example was high modernism in general, and the work of Franz Kafka in particular (for a critical account of Deleuze and Guattari’s argument, see Kaplan 1996: 65–100). Deleuze and Guattari define Kafka as a ‘minor’ writer on two grounds: firstly; Kafka represents an ethnic and linguistic minority working within the confines of a foreign empire; secondly, Kafka’s experimentation with form and theme were both a consequence of and challenge to the social and political environment in which he lived. The wider application of these ideas into postmodern aesthetics has revolved around Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of minor literature as ‘deterritorialising’

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language by intensifying or exaggerating features within it. As Ronald Bogue observes, ‘what is crucial about a minor usage of language is that it deterritorializes sound, “detaches” it from its designated objects and therefore neutralizes sense. The word ceases to mean and becomes instead an arbitrary sonic vibration’ (Bogue 2003: 104). One of Deleuze’s central adjectives for elaborating this sense of deterritorialisation is ‘schizophrenic’ and much critical literature has been written on this aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy (for an introduction to this subject, see Colman 2014). In a much more self-contained essay on the nineteenth-century American writer, Hermann Melville, however, Deleuze discusses this effect in terms of ‘stuttering’. One of the primary functions of literary, cinematic, musical and artistic aesthetic experimentation, Deleuze argues in that essay, is to destabilise ‘language’ by disrupting any and every attempt to move towards sequentiality, continuity and coherence. ‘When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer’, Deleuze writes, ‘[. . .] then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. When a language is strained in this way, language in its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent’ (Deleuze 1993b: 113 [emphasis in original]). For Deleuze, language is heterogeneous. The stutter accentuates this conception of language by emphasising its anti-representational and ‘agrammatical’ qualities, in the strongest postmodern senses of those terms (Deleuze 1993b: 68). From this perspective, the function of the postmodern aesthetic, for Deleuze, becomes nothing other than its own constant self-contestation and shifting translation. To put it another way, aesthetic experimentation becomes identical not with itself but with a critical imperative of disruption.

Literary Postmodernism Experimenting with ways of presenting the unpresentable has been one of the most important, and long lasting, elements of postmodern fiction. In Britain, postmodern aesthetics first came to critical attention thanks to Peter Ackroyd’s self-described ‘polemic’, Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism, published in 1974 (at the time of publication the term ‘postmodernism’ had not been universally accepted and was sometimes, as here, thought of as contemporary modernism). In that work Ackroyd critiqued the sense of literature as a moral force that, following the influence of F. R. Leavis and New Criticism, had come to dominate literary studies. Modernism, Ackroyd argued, did away with universalist conceptions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘experience’, replacing it instead with a ‘movement in which created form began to interrogate itself, and to move toward an impossible union with itself in self-identity. . . . Language is seen to constitute meaning only within itself, and to excise the external references of subjectivity and its corollary, Man’ (Ackroyd 1976: 145).

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Ackroyd’s own early fiction is an exemplary example of postmodern aesthetics in practice. His 1985 novel, Hawksmoor, was one of the first novels to be set simultaneously both in the past (the early eighteenth century) and the present (1980s). It tells the dual narratives of the eighteenth-century architect, Nicholas Dyer, and the 1980s detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor. Under the supervision of Christopher Wren, Dyer builds several churches in the East End of London, while also engaging in occultist practices directly opposed to Enlightenment notions of rationality and human progress. In the 1980s Hawksmoor investigates, unsuccessfully, a series of murders committed in the churches built by Dyer. The novel demonstrates a series of postmodern techniques, particularly in regard to its use of temporal dislocation, intertextuality, pastiche, parody, irony, scepticism, self-reflexivity, metafiction and indeterminacy. Nothing of note in the novel is resolved. Indeed, in terms of this latter narratological conceit, Hawksmoor is one of the earliest examples of ‘anti-detective fiction’ that came to be seen as a central genre within postmodern fiction. In the United States the postmodern anti-detective genre is synonymous with the work of Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster. Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is a short but labyrinthine narrative in which narrative control and order are deliberately subverted. Red herring and dead end are layered one on top of the other; possible signs and meanings are everywhere. The novel explodes with possibility, including the possibility that none of it means anything at all. As Peter Barry notes, ‘In postmodernism, the distinction between what is real and what is simulated collapses: everything is a model or an image, all is surface without depth’ (Barry 2002: 89). In Auster’s The New York Trilogy, a wrong number launches a catalyst of events that ends in a self-reflexive cul-de-sac: I lost my way after the first word, and from then on I could only grope ahead, faltering in the darkness, blinded by the book that had been written for me. And yet, under this confusion, I felt there was something too willed, something too perfect, as though in the end the only thing he had really wanted was to fail – even to the point of failing himself. I could be wrong, however. I was hardly in a condition to be reading anything at that moment, and my judgement is possibly askew. (Auster 1987: 314) Other notable postmodern novels that incorporate the frustration of narrative resolution include J R by William Gaddis, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, In the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. In the latter, the narrative self-reflexivity is pushed to the limit by incorporating the reader as the chief protagonist within the novel. False starts lead to new beginnings, digressions, deviations, puzzles and unresolved mysteries. Given the interest of postmodern aesthetics in trying to find

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a form that ‘presents the unpresentable’, the subversion of the detective genre gained large currency precisely because the generic conventions of detective fiction presuppose precisely the world view that is challenged by postmodernism. As William Spanos famously puts it, detective stories: demand the kind of social and political organisation of the well-made world of the totalitarian state, where investigation or inquisition in behalf of the achievement of a total, that is, preordained or teleological determined structure – a ‘final solution’ – is the defining activity. It is, therefore, no accident that the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination is the anti-detective story . . . the formal purpose of which is to evoke the impulse to ‘detect’ and/or psychoanalyse in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime. (Spanos 1987: 24) Such aesthetic concerns also feature predominantly in postmodern poetry, in which the poem is no longer seen as an artefact but rather an open-ended process. Along with the crossover work of John Ashbery, this mode of poetic practice arguably received its fullest – or at least, most vocal – expression from the group known as L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E poets. Headed by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, the L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E poets were intent on disrupting the sense of language as a transparent and authentic reflection of experience. In Lyn Hejinian’s phrase, it was about formulating an aesthetic that rejects closure (see Hejinian 2000: 40–58). The motivation was political. As Andrews and Bernstein wrote: ‘It is our sense that the project of poetry does not involve turning language into a commodity for consumption; instead, it involves repossessing the sign through close attention to, and active participation in, its production’ (Bernstein and Andrews 1984: x). Most often this repossession of the sign was attempted via the simultaneously combinatory and disruptive compositional modes of intertextuality and collage. Fragments from other texts or discourses (literary, pop cultural, political, and so on) recur and alter, ‘blend and clash’ in Roland Barthes’s famous phrase (Barthes 1977: 147). As Walter Benjamin once remarked, collage is a progressive form because it ‘interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ and so ‘counteracts illusion’ (quoted in Buck-Morrs 1991: 77). The American poet Pierre Joris comments how painterly collages make discrete elements visible whereas literary collage bury their borrowings, ‘deriving [an] essential fracture from the seams that make clear the fact of heterogeneous elements being brought together’ (Joris 2003: 84). Bernstein reinforces this sense of collage, writing how collage is ‘the use of different textual elements without recourse to an overall unifying idea’ and contrasting this notion of collage with the practice of montage which is defined as ‘the use of contrasting images toward the goal of one unifying theme’ (quoted in Joris 2003: 87).

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Tracing the citational technique of collage back to the ancient patchwork practice of cento, Marko Juvan similarly outlines the ways in which collage ‘defiantly undermines its own stylistic harmony and semantic coherence’ (Juvan 2008: 170). According to Marjorie Perloff, ‘collage has been the most important mode for representing a “reality” no longer quite believed in and therefore all the more challenging’ (Perloff 1998: 385). Or, as the authors of the 1978 Group Mu manifesto put it: ‘Each cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality’ (Group Mu 1978: 34–5). As a collage work takes shape, much textual movement is towards an equivocation between building and tearing; collage is the form, perhaps more than any other, of the art of the between or the differend. In the words of the French poet, Emmanuel Hocquard, collage corresponds to a ‘surfing on pre-existing writings, passing between, creating other movements and other meanings from pre-existing materials’ (Hocquard 2003: 17). Collage is a form of relation but it is one where such relation is premised on and by an ‘epistemology of incompleteness’ and the ‘limits of knowing’ (Retallack 1999: 341).

Postmodern Music and Art Such aesthetic practices were not only confined to literary postmodernism, however. In music, John Cage extended these ideas, suggesting that collage is exemplary because it correlates to a contemporary mode of living in the world. ‘A great deal of our experiences’, Cage commented in interview, ‘come from the large use of glass in our architecture, so that our experience is one of reflection, collage, and transparency’ (Cage 1987: 6). Cage developed these ideas in his own work, particularly in terms of his contribution to ‘indeterminate music’. Here chance in composition and performance becomes a primary factor. In terms of performance, for instance, the composer produces a score but the arrangement of its performance is decided by the performer during the performance. Morton Feldman’s Intersection 3 (1953) is one of the most wellknown examples of this type of composition. As with literary postmodernism, much of the point here lies in the author or composer giving up the illusion of control over their text. Chance procedures lead to chance happenings. Cage’s own 4’33” (1952) is a case in point. Composed in three movements for any instrument, the score instructs the performer not to play for the duration of the piece. The composition, then, may comprise four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but more commonly it comprises the noises and sounds of the environment in which the piece is being performed. What happens during each performance cannot be determined in advance. Cage’s stated aim was to ‘approach imperceptibility’, although the failure to achieve this aim is also an integral element of its aesthetic (Pritchett 1993: 138).

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The same aesthetic aim characterises the early work of the American composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, both of whom engaged in what came to be classified as ‘minimalist’ music. Steve Reich’s Piano Phase (1967), for instance, involves a 12-note melody played simultaneously by two pianos. As the piece progresses, however, the pianos slowly become out of phase when one of the pianists plays their phase slightly faster until each piano line is separated by one note. The two pianos then synchronise their speed again so that, while they are playing at the same time, they are playing different notes. In a categorically postmodern turn, the synchronic becomes diachronic. Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts (1974) develops this method by elongating the duration of repetition and juxtaposition to about four hours across eleven instruments. Patterns change and meld (‘clash and blend’) constantly but their shifts and changes are almost imperceptible. Such attempts at imperceptibility also characterise much of postmodern art, particularly in terms of video art. Andy Warhol’s films from the 1960s are a striking and highly influential early example. In a manner similar to Cage’s sense of music, Warhol produced a series of films in which nothing happened: a static image of the Empire State Building that lasts for eight hours (Empire, 1964), a six-hour film recording the image of a man sleeping (Sleep, 1963). As the conceptual artist, Kenneth Goldsmith puts it: Warhol often claimed that his films were better thought about than seen. He also said that the films were catalysts for other types of actions: conversation that took place in the theatre during the screening, the audience walking in and out, and thoughts that happened in the heads of the moviegoers. Warhol conceived of his films as staging a performance. (Goldsmith http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/goldsmith_boring.html) More recently the British artist, Douglas Gordon has blended these visual and musical postmodern strategies of phasing, repetition and imperceptibility, most notably in his 1993 work, 24 Hour Psycho, in which Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is rendered silent and slowed down to two frames per second so that the screening of the film lasts for twenty-four hours. The famous shower scene in which Marion is stabbed and dies, for instance, lasts for just over half an hour, rather than the two and a half minutes in the original film. In Gordon’s work, the familiar is defamiliarised. The accumulation of phasing, repetition and duration leads to a sense in which something is at once visually recognisable but experientially altered or out of place. Gordon’s attention is focused on the example of an aesthetic practice that flouts traditional notions of the duration of the artwork, as well as of the close relation between duration and ‘value’. Here Gordon serves as a precursor to the conceptual artist and writer, Kenneth Goldsmith, who advocates an artistic practice premised on elongation and boredom. Typing out, scanning or cutting and pasting the

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entire contents of one edition of the New York Times (Day, 2003) or transcribing local weather reports (The Weather, 2005) or traffic news (Traffic, 2007), Goldsmith repeatedly emphasises that his notion of boredom exists only in a situation in which the reader or viewer has the opportunity to walk away, to do something else. The work’s effect, in other words, lies less in its relentlessness than in the way it opens itself to being ignored, in the sense that its effect equates to the way in which it can be discarded, just as a television set can be switched off at the simple push of a button. At stake here, then, is a provocation to see how long it takes for someone to grow distracted or irritated, to demand something in return for the time they have invested in the artwork. As such, one of the principle challenges of such art is its ongoing critique of value in the contemporary world. Specifically, it challenges the commodification not simply of art but of private life as well in which a measurable or quantifiable return (financial, entertainment) is expected from any form of temporal investment. Even more provocative, however, is the argument that such works are themselves actually assemblage products of contemporary capitalism, in which their ‘valueless’ content is symptomatic of the contemporary cultural and political landscape. In other words, these artists repackage the world around them in order to point to its arbitrary plasticity. That such works are dependent on modern technology is no coincidence. These artists and writers rely on technological ability not so much because they want to hold up a mirror to the world around them but because they actually want to perform the banalities of capitalist labour in order to make it visible: to present the unpresentable. Postmodern aesthetics identifies both a conundrum and an opportunity. It conceives impossibility as provocation. It is the idiom and product of late capitalism, all surface and mirror, but it is also a challenging and radical critique of late capitalism. This plurality is an essential feature of postmodern aesthetics; hybridity its most important legacy for developments in contemporary aesthetics.

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INTRODUCTION: POSTCOLONIALISM

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ostcolonialist theory and criticism concerns itself with the position of colonised peoples and the legacy this has left in their culture. Edward Said has memorably portrayed what this meant in terms of the Middle East, defined as the ‘Orient’, and therefore the ‘other’, to the technologically more advanced West. The colonisers invariably treated colonised cultures as inferior to their own, and the effects of this experience have dogged the latter long after the end of colonial rule. Postcolonial theory has also come to include how race and culture have been represented in Western societies, and how this has affected the experience of their minority racial communities. In Chapter 11, Claire Nally explores the various facets of postcolonial thought, as it has evolved from the work of such key figures as Frantz Fanon, Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Homi K. Bhabha, through to more recent developments like glocalisation and altermodernism. It is a history that has seen significant changes in emphasis from nationalist and linguistic concerns to the impact of globalised capital and consumerism on non-Western societies, and the ecological and gender issues this has been generating. In Chapters 12 and 13, Bella Adams considers the growth of Black Studies and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the USA as a reaction to the unequal treatment of the African American community at the hands of the white majority. Despite the advances made in the field of civil rights, race still remains a critical factor in America, and Black Studies and CRT theorists are committed to drawing attention to the injustices to be found across all sectors of their nation’s life.

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11 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND CRITICISM Claire Nally

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ostcolonial readings of cultural documents address the issues of colonial history and literary constructions of native communities, as well as rendering visible the traumatic discourses implicit in representations of the colonial experience. Colonialism itself might be described most usefully as ‘the settlement of territory, the exploitation or development of resources, and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitants of occupied lands’ (Boehmer 1995: 2). This practice has occurred throughout history (the Anglo-Normans colonised Ireland in the twelfth century, the Spanish and the Portuguese explored the Americas in the fifteenth century), but is most clearly articulated in the nineteenth century with the ‘Scramble for Africa’, as portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Postcolonial theory emerged as a field of criticism in the 1990s, although, as this chapter will detail below, figures such as Frantz Fanon and Chinua Achebe were challenging notions of colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, as was Edward Said in the 1970s. Postcolonialism seeks to account for Western representations of race and culture, while exploring the potential for cultural resistance to such negative images of specific racial communities. While colonialism by its very nature undervalues the colonised nation’s past, the postcolonialist seeks to recuperate indigenous experiences and the concrete specificity of local knowledges. Postcolonialism also deconstructs those binary oppositions at the basis of colonialism which characterise black as negative and white as positive. However, precise definitions of postcolonial critical practice are somewhat contested. Critics agree that postcolonialism is concerned with challenging a Eurocentric and metropolitan perspective, but Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin maintain in The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 1–2) that it is not just about a study of cultures after the departure of the colonial power, but rather a study of the historical process from the moment of external intervention to the present day. The evolution of postcolonial theory marks the ways in which critics have interrogated ideas of representation (Fanon and Said) cultural mixing (Homi Bhabha), the issue of language and communication

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(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Edward Braithwaite) and the ways in which postcolonialism has engaged with other fields of cultural critique (for instance, the relationship between feminism and postcolonialism in Spivak’s work). In more recent developments, postcolonialism has offered opportunities of fruitful research in links with altermodernism (Bourriaud), and ‘glocalisation’, (a portmanteau word signifiying the interaction of the global and the local) which Ashcroft et al. characterise as ‘the ways in which the global is transformed at the local level’ (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 218).

Early Postcolonial Thought: Frantz Fanon and Edward Said Fanon’s contributions to the history of postcolonial studies are enshrined in his two major works, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Fanon’s own experience as a black middle-class intellectual born in the French colony of Martinique, in a world which normalises whiteness, provided material for his developing analysis. Fanon’s initial objective is to address the ways in which colonialism has eroded the black man’s sense of self. He establishes that ‘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 all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect’ (Fanon 1986: 12). He then catalogues the ways in which the black community has essentially internalised the discourse of colonialism, which portrays the black experience as something negative and degraded (Fanon 1986: 13). White culture becomes something which black men seek to emulate, through wearing European clothes, employing European languages or privileging European ideas above those of the native community (Fanon 1986: 25). Indeed, one of Fanon’s targets is the black woman who he believes is complicit in colonial discourses: ‘I know a great number of girls from Martinique, students in France, who admitted to me with complete candour – that they would find it impossible to marry black men’ (Fanon 1986: 47–8). Later postcolonial and feminist critics have considered such a portrayal of women rather unsympathetic, although his theories do relate to earlier figures such as Langston Hughes (a central figure in The Harlem Renaissance) who similarly identified in his essay ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ (1926) that the black community valorises marriage to paler spouses. Thus, as Ania Loomba suggests, ‘For the white subject, the black other is everything that lies outside of the self. For the black subject, however, the white other serves to define everything that is desirable, everything that the self desires’ (Loomba 2005: 123). Underpinning Fanon’s idea of the black other is a hierarchical power structure: the white man is ‘the master, whether real or imaginary’ (Fanon 1986: 138). This construction of blackness signifying negativity is also articulated in Edward Said’s work, as discussed below. Fanon identifies how visible difference, through black skin colour, constructs the colonised subject’s very existence: ‘Ontology – once it

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has finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside – does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (Fanon 1986: 110). It becomes impossible for the black man to identify with his own culture, as this has been debased, but it also suggests how colonialism has pushed to the periphery any uncomfortable aspects of civilisation: sensuality, laziness, criminality, violence and irresponsibility are all attributes which are used to illustrate ‘blackness’. Thus Fanon identifies the ways in which colonialism functions in binary oppositions of white/black and positive/negative, which has itself been internalised by the community: ‘the Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly’ (Fanon 1986: 113). Fanon also establishes that language is one of the most crucial means of resistance and decolonisation: ‘To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization’ (Fanon 1986: 17–18). By adopting European languages, the colonised subject ‘is elevated above his jungle status’ (Fanon 1986: 18), but obviously loses a central part of his identity; a subject also discussed by later scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Edward Braithwaite. Therefore, the burden of decolonisation falls on the colonised subject to articulate his identity positively, in part through cultural affiliation, and overturn the binary opposition of colour and representation: ‘I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN’ (Fanon 1986: 115). In discussing Fanon’s later text, The Wretched of the Earth, Edward Said maintains that Fanon’s argument ‘represent[s] colonialism and nationalism in their Manichean contest, then to enact the birth of an independence movement, finally to transfigure that movement into what is in effect a trans-personal and transnational force’ (Said 1993: 325). In naming and labelling the ways in which colonial discourses function to denigrate native experience, Fanon might be hailed as a crucial figure in early postcolonial studies. Edward Said’s own contribution to postcolonialism through Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) also marks him as one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century. Said’s theory of ‘Orientalism’ centres on the ways in which Europe has discursively represented and fixed the East. In his introduction, Said states it is ‘one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’ (Said 1995: 1). Moreover, this imaginative space is correlated with a material instantiation. The Orient is a place of ‘European material civilization and culture’ (Said 1995: 2). It represents institutions, ideologies, scholarship and imagery which in every instance is in direct opposition, ‘the Occident’: ‘Orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 1995: 3). Said identifies how Orientalism is mainly, but not exclusively,

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British and French, taking in India, biblical texts and lands, the spice trade, colonial institutions such as armies and administrators, as well as scholarship and various constructions of sensuality, cruelty and exoticism. From the somewhat incongruent selection of cultural practices arises a body of texts which Said suggests are based ‘on a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony’ (Said 1995: 5). It is less about ‘ascertaining’ the attributes of the Orient and more about ‘constructing’ it: ‘The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made Oriental’ (Said 1995: 5–6). It was also a means for establishing collectivity: European cultures and peoples become cohesive and superior by contrast with, and proximity to, their Oriental counterpart (we might think of Oriental backwardness versus European development for instance). However, Orientalism also presents a ‘challenge [to] the rational Western mind’ (Said 1995: 57) insofar as it destabilises rationality by its own excesses, and in turn taxes the Occidental with new means of control and the exercise of power. Thereby, Orientalism is quite clearly another construction of the Other, having much in common with Fanon’s articulation of this phenomenon. However, the effect of this is not simply to demonise or control the East: rather it is a set of discourses including history, sociology, aesthetics, philology which reflects ‘a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world’ (Said 1995: 12). Indeed, Said dates the evolution of Orientalism to the traditions of nineteenth-century scholarship: the text’s discussion of figures such as the philologist Ernest Renan (1823–1922), suggests how and in what ways a form of Orientalism was institutionalised. It simultaneously lauded the East as an escape from European conventions, but also perceived it as a backward and barbaric entity (Said 1995: 150). In many ways, in the post 9/11 climate, very little has changed in the West’s relationship with the East, and especially with Islam: ‘One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced information into more and more standardized molds’ (Said 1995: 26). This correlation between the culture of the academy and that of the state is particularly important. Ania Loomba notes how ‘one of Edward Said’s most valuable achievements in Orientialism was not simply to establish the connection between scholarship and state power in the colonial period, but to indicate its afterlife in a “post-colonial” global formation with the US at its epicentre’ (Loomba, 2005: 228). Our own historical moment, with specific reference to the globalisation of US discourses on the East, is still determined by Orientalism. However, the ways in which some of these ideas might be countered are located in developments in postcolonial theory, such as ‘glocalisation’, which will be discussed further below.

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Decolonising Africa: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Language Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Decolonising the Mind (1986) presents a highly combative account of the colonised subject’s relationship with the colonial language (English, French, Portuguese, for instance). The polemic centres on whether it is more strategic in terms of cultural identity to reject the colonial language and embrace native culture. Ultimately, Ngũgĩ himself dispensed with writing in English, preferring to communicate primarily in one of Kenya’s national languages, Gĩkũyũ, as ‘his gesture towards redistributing power and subverting neo-colonialism’ (Himmelmann 2008: 473). Taking African literature as his focus, Ngũgĩ maintains the effect of colonialism is the internalisation of the value of English. For Ngũgĩ, language constructs social reality, and in turn, represents an affiliation to a particular culture: ‘The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 4). He evaluates how African literature can be defined: is it literature about Africa, by Africans, or are African languages the criteria? One of the major problems is of course audience. Ngũgĩ notes that European languages have often been employed as a nationalist and decolonising stratagem to unite disparate tribes (each with different languages) against white oppression. He goes on to explain how English acquires a form of linguistic capital in Bourdieu’s definition: ‘all linguistic practices are measured against the legitimate practices, i.e. the practices of those who are dominant’ (Bourdieu 1991: 53). The foundation of this linguistic capital is the colonial school system. Ngũgĩ offers a critique of the use of colonial language in an African context, suggesting that the teaching of English also devalued the native language and produced something of a split identity in African children (Ngũgĩ, 1986: 11). Kenyan languages became associated with ‘negative qualities of backwardness, underdevelopment, humiliation and punishment’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 28), and therefore were rejected by the community. However, the effect of this is ultimately quite traumatic: Ngũgĩ identifies how the oral tradition (orature) became obsolete, ‘taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 12). For Ngũgĩ, language testifies to who we are, where we are from, and what our place is in the world, as well as our relationship to each other, and what cultural affiliations we have. It is all about our understanding of our surroundings and in this way, language becomes a marker of identity. In this argument, the colonial language results in alienation and the only way to circumvent such an effect is to restore an ‘authentic’ culture, simultaneously erasing the colonial past. Thereby, language as a cultural system is of especial relevance to postcolonial analysis. Ngũgĩ also characterises English as the literature of the petty bourgeois (Ngũgĩ 1986: 20). It generates divisions, not in tribal terms, but on class lines. Simultaneously, the psychological effect of the imposition of colonial language is ‘a vacillating psychological make-up’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 22).

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The African middle class experiences a greater crisis of identity than those who retain the native language. However, there is also a problem with the use of native languages in relation to modernisation: ‘the use of English and French was a temporary historical necessity’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 25). However, this also means imperialist culture is able to conquer the masses more effectively, as ideas of modernisation and progression expressed in English cannot be communicated adequately to the working class or the peasantry. By contrast, colonial governors have ensured ‘the Christian bible is available in unlimited quantities in even the tiniest African language’ (Ngũgĩ, 1986: 26). Therefore, in order to decolonise the minds of the masses, it becomes increasingly important to speak in native language. Ngũgĩ also highlights the effect of this complex relationship between the African community and English language: ‘What we have produced is another hybrid tradition, a tradition in transition, a minority tradition that can only be termed as Afro-European literature; that is, the literature written by Africans in European languages’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 26–7). Plainly, he sees this as deleterious and problematic, a dilution of ‘authentic’ African experience. However, in his theorisation of hybridity, Homi Bhabha detects the possibility of radicalism as well as colonial trauma. Similarly, Edouard Glissant perceives the related idea of ‘créolisation’ as a foundational part of Caribbean life.

Appropriation and Caribbean Culture: Edward Kamau Braithwaite Edward Braithwaite’s argument in The History of the Voice (1984) focuses on the Caribbean context and by contrast to Ngũgĩ, valorises the appropriation of English rather than suggests the need to reject it. In many ways, his articulation of creolisation suggests the need to recover folk culture and the importance of ancestral heritage, but at the same time, it is impossible to deny the influence of European cultural models in Caribbean communities. Notably, as well as being cross-cultural, the idea of creolisation reflects the reality of Caribbean society: formulated through the ways in which colonial and colonised subject interact as a mixed population, and is constantly in process, ‘incorporating aspects of both acculturation and interculturation’ (Ashcroft et al. 2013: 69). Acculturation signifies how one culture is absorbed into another, while interculturation relates to a reciprocal relationship where cultures mix and influence each other. Braithwaite sees Caribbean English as something which has been shaped to fit local experience: he describes the use of the English language as being different from standard English (Braithwaite 1984: 5). He describes this language as follows: ‘nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors’

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(Braithwaite 1984: 5–6). In common with Ngũgĩ, Braithwaite highlights the significance of colonial education in promoting the devaluation of folk cultures and especially the native language: ‘the educational system of the Caribbean did not recognize the presence of these various languages. What our education system did was to recognize and maintain the language of the conquistador – the language of the planter, the language of the official, the language of the Anglican preacher’ (Braithwaite 1984: 8). He explains that English literature, incarnated through canonical works such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen and George Eliot, had little relevance to the colonised community: he famously relates how Caribbean children negotiated poetic descriptions of snow, mapping such alien experiences onto their own landscape in a form of creolisation: ‘the snow was falling on the canefields’ (Braithwaite 1984: 9). This is important, given his focus on the relationship of people to their geographical reality, and how they articulate that through language. Similarly, he explains that English has given the Caribbean a rhythm which is influenced by poetic models, including the pentameter. Braithwaite explains that ‘nation language’ breaks down the pentameter, and instead, employs dactyls, using a different stress pattern in order to map an alternative environmental experience. Nation language is English, but not official or standard language, due to the influence of African paradigms in Caribbean heritage: ‘in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions, it is not English, even though the words as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree’ (Braithwaite 1984: 13). Nation language is also a strategic gesture, just as much as Ngũgĩ’s rejection of English in preference for Gĩkũyũ. It can promise resistance and radicalism through fracturing the official discourse: ‘can English be a revolutionary language? And the lovely answer that came back was: it is not English that is the agent. It is not language, but people, who make revolutions’ (Braithwaite 1984: 13). Essentially, breaking down standardised language and rendering it fit for an alternative, colonised experience destabilises the very authority of the English word. Indeed, Braithwaite explains that nation language, as the mode of communication for the enslaved individual, can be used ‘to disguise himself, to disguise his personality and to retain his culture’ (Braithwaite 1984: 16). It is closely linked to the blues, the calypso, to ‘native musical structures’ (Braithwaite 1984: 16). It is also emphatically related to the oral tradition, based on sound and rhythm more than the arrangement of words on a page. Rejecting the designation of this hybrid speech and writing as ‘dialect’ (which has pejorative connotations of ‘bad English’), Braithwaite asserts the role of nation language in revealing the submerged experience of the colonised subject.

Homi Bhabha and the Theory of Hybridity In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha provides an account of hybridity, which is basically the effect of mixing cultures, languages and societies, as a result of colonial intervention. As detailed in Ngũgĩ’s account, this

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is often quite traumatic: in terms of the hybrid subject, it can result in a fragmented or fractured psyche. Bhabha notes that hybridity ‘is a separate space, a space of separation – less than one and double – which has been systematically denied by both colonialists and nationalists who have sought authority in the authenticity of origins’ (Bhabha 1994: 120). In many ways, Ngũgĩ articulates faith in this sense of authenticity. Through hybridity, the colonised community is not English or French, nor is it entirely ‘native’. Such people are situated in between colonial representations of human and savage, periphery and metropolitan centre, self and other. Colonial intervention produces ambivalence, uncertainty and a complex identity politics, resulting in a lack of belonging and alienation from one’s culture. However, hybridity can also produce a number of decolonising practices. Daniel Boyarin carefully summarises this double bind of hybridity as the problems encountered on the borders of cultures and states: ‘Bhabha focuses on the fault lines, on the border situations and thresholds, as sites where identities are performed and contested. Borders are also places where people are strip-searched, detained, imprisoned, and sometimes shot’ (Loomba et al. 2005: 343). In common with Edward Said, Bhabha maintains that colonialism is underpinned by racial discourses which function to legitimate the conquest of land and people. Bhabha deems this to be ‘an apparatus of power’ (Bhabha 1994: 70) and hinges on the construction of difference: ‘the objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin’ (Bhabha 1994: 70). He identifies particularly the ways in which governmental systems operate through the premise of othering. Referring directly to Said, Bhabha suggests that this is not a static procedure, but rather one which is ‘continually under threat from diachronic forms of history and narrative, signs of instability’ (Bhabha 1994: 71). What Bhabha is claiming here is that colonial discourses are ‘ambivalent’, by which he means they address two somewhat conflicting concerns simultaneously: through othering, the colonised subject is rendered infantile, sensual, lazy, strange and alien, but at the same time, the colonised is incorporated into Western logic, through the ultimate objective of colonialism, which is to civilise. Bhabha notes how ‘the black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar’ (Bhabha 1994: 82). These essentially contradictory discourses are characteristic of ambivalence, difficult to pin down or indeed to fix the colonised subject in a particular stereotype. Because of this, there is a somewhat neurotic reiteration (Bhabha terms this ‘repetition’) at the root of colonial stereotypes, an anxiety about meaning and fixity which always comes to a dead end. In correlation with the idea of ambivalence, Bhabha draws attention to one of the key ways that the colonised community can challenge or destabilise

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colonial authority: he describes this as ‘mimicry’, which is in the simplest terms, how the native community performs deference and Englishness: ‘He is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicised is emphatically not to be English’ (Bhabha 1994: 87). In many ways, this is a rearticulation of Fanon’s idea of the ‘mimic men’, but Bhabha’s theory here hinges on uncertainty, the partial and the incomplete – a flawed copy. One of Bhabha’s most famous examples of minicry is derived from Macauley’s ‘Minute’ from 1835, in which the latter discusses the education of the Indian community and how the effect of colonialism should produce a class of people who are racially Indian, but who are educated in English sensibilities: ‘the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha 1994: 88). It achieves this disruption through the problematisation of the notion of origins, the partial nature of colonial power: ‘Its threat . . . comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory “identity effects” in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no “itself” ’ (Bhabha 1994: 90). As Ania Loomba suggests, ‘it is the failure of colonial authority to reproduce itself that allows for anti-colonial subversion’ (Loomba 2005: 80). In his discussion of ‘sly civility’, Bhabha begins by interrogating nineteenthcentury writings on the subject of colonialism: he suggests these are founded on ‘an agonistic uncertainty contained in the incompatibility of empire and nation; it puts on trial the very discourse of civility within which representative government claims its liberty and empire its ethics’ (Bhabha 1994: 96). At this point he cites John Stuart Mill who argued for democracy and liberty, with the exception of the colonies, where ‘a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government’ (Mill, cited in Bhabha 1994: 96). These narratives also suggest how colonial systems insistently require definition from subjugated peoples, which Bhabha describes as follows: it is ‘the narcissistic, colonialist demand that it should be addressed correctly, that the Other should authorize the self, recognize its priority, fulfill its outlines, replete, indeed repeat, its references and still its fractured gaze’ (Bhabha 1994: 98). When the native subject refuses to answer this demand directly, he radically destabilises colonial authority. This idea of ‘sly civility’ is a phrase which Bhabha borrows from the 1818 sermon of Archdeacon Potts: ‘If you urge them with their gross and unworthy misconceptions of the nature and the will of God, or the monstrous follies of their fabulous theology, they will turn it off with a sly civility perhaps, or with a popular and careless proverb’ (Potts, cited in Bhabha 1994: 99). This becomes ‘the native refusal to satisfy the colonizer’s narrative demand’ (Bhabha 1994: 99), but it is also a repudiation couched as politeness, and subservience. It is an evasive tactic which suggests acquiescence while plainly denoting resistance to the colonial authorities. Again, the problem of representing and fixing the colonised subject becomes apparent. Bhabha describes this ‘incalculable native’ as one who ‘produces a problem for civil representation in the discourses of

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literature and legality’ (Bhabha 1994: 99). Of course, this subject is both resistant and obedient, questioning the logic of Western civility even as he or she impersonates it. Ultimately, Bhabha’s figuration of hybridity and its related identity effects produces a critique of monolithic nationalisms. Despite Fanon’s deep-rooted desire to recover an ‘authentic’ culture as a counter to colonialism, Bhabha insists this form of unity is impossible, due to the very same logic that threatens colonial discourses. He explains that the concept of a ‘people’ is ultimately elusive: it is on the one hand, in the present and constantly in process, a speech act and a performance which defeats any originary point, while it also gives the impression of a ‘pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past’ (Bhabha 1994: 145). As such, postcolonial theory in the 1990s, while acknowledging its debt to earlier theorists, quite clearly dissociates itself from prior instantiations of unitary culture.

Creolisation: Edouard Glissant and Decentred Culture One of Glissant’s major contributions to the study of postcolonialism is the reevaulation of myths of origin. As opposed to other postcolonialists who privilege the recovery of the indigenous or aboriginal cultures, Glissant forgrounds the potential inherent in the collision of different cultures. He maintains that the ‘periphery’, in this case the Martinican Caribbean, has reconfigured the colonial centre, even as much as the ‘metropolitan centre’ changed the cultural and geographical landscape of the Caribbean itself. In Glissant’s analysis, Creole is radical because it has no fixity, and is readily adaptable. Because it emerged from the confrontation of several cultures, ‘it has no singular, organic origin . . . there is a logical connection between, on the one hand, the rejection of the Western values of origin and filiation and, on the other, the positive value attached to mixed, composite cultures’ (Britton 1999: 15–16). In Le Discours Antillais (1981), Glissant hails this as ‘the worldwide experience of Relation. It is literally the result of links between different cultures and did not preexist these links. It is not a language of essence, it is a language of the Related’ (Glissant 1989: 241). Such a defeat of essentialism is crucial in reconfiguring the binary discourses which earlier figures like Fanon maintained were central to colonial oppression. In his later texts, Glissant characterises creolisation as ‘a self-conscious principle extended to human society in general and generating the same kind of dynamic multiplicity that characterizes the chaosworld’ (Britton 1999: 16). This closely relates to the ways in which theories of globalisation influenced postcolonial studies.

Spivak and Feminist Postcolonialism While critics such as Frantz Fanon saw women as complicit in colonial discourses, several feminist critics, including bell hooks, Audrey Lorde and

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, have addressed the intersections between the native experience and the women’s movement. The importance of Spivak’s analysis to debates in postcolonial studies is difficult to underestimate. In the seminal article, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) Spivak considers whether it is ever possible to recover the narratives of the oppressed, without descending into essentialism. Guha suggests Subaltern Studies addresses ‘the politics of the people’ against the indigenous elite (Ashcroft 1995 et al.: 26). However, for Spivak, this very definition of ‘the people’ is problematic. For her, the colonised subject is ‘irretrievably heterogeneous’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 26). She also notes how far Guha’s model is based on a fairly traditional schema of ‘a deviation from an ideal – the people or subaltern . . . [are themselves] defined as a difference from the elite’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 27). In this way, the idea of the subaltern normalises the elite culture, and presents the silenced colonised subject as Other: ‘because of the violence of imperialist epistemic, social, and disciplinary inscription’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 27). ‘Subaltern’ simply means one of inferior rank, who is subject to the dominant class. It is a term originally derived from Antonio Gramsci’s work, relating to peasants and oppressed workers (he derived it from the military term for an officer under the rank of captain), but it has been reconfigured in postcolonial studies to discuss forms of colonial subordination, ‘whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way’ (Guha 1982: vii). Subaltern Studies evolved into a discrete group of historians and theorists who sought to raise the profile of South Asian cultures which were outside the elite. The project also sought to locate oppressed groups in relation to dominant ones, and recover the voice of those peoples silenced in the academic community and the wider world. Indeed, the Subaltern Studies project accords in many ways to Said’s ‘permission to narrate’, a gesture which seeks to challenge and correct official versions of history and colonialism (Kennedy 2013: 51). However, Spivak’s essay offers a critique of Subaltern Studies. She argues that however sympathetic and good willing such a project may be, it will ultimately devolve into essentialist constructions. She suggests that such critics have no experience of the extent of colonial subjugation, and especially, the way in which patriarchy and colonial oppression combined. Similarly, in terms of representation, to speak for a woman is ultimately fraught with difficulty. Spivak articulates the problem of depiction (speaking about) and delegation (speaking for or instead of). For Spivak, to claim to have access to a privileged knowledge base re-enacts a patriarchy rather than establishing a radical gesture. In generalising about the ‘subaltern’ experience, gender-specific knowledges are eroded: ‘For the “figure” of woman, the relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race and class differences are subsumed under that charge’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 28). In this

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way, colonised women are doubly disenfranchised due to race and to gender, something which the broader category of ‘subaltern’ fails to identify. Indeed, she takes the experience of sati (where an Indian widow immolates herself on her husband’s funeral pyre) as an example of how impossible it is for such a subject to be heard. As Ania Loomba has commented: ‘[in] the lengthy debates and discussions that surrounded the British government’s legislation against the practice of sati, the women who were burnt on their husband’s pyres are absent as subjects’ (Loomba 2005: 195). As such, they are spoken for, constructed even in absence. This is exactly what Spivak felt the broader project of Subaltern Studies was re-enacting. More generally, the project of recovering lost voices, while laudable, is impossible: in the constitution of the Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary – not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 24) Indeed, by attempting to speak for such communities, Spivak identifies that the intellectual is complicit in such discourses of oppression.

Postcolonial Futures: The Altermodernism of Bourriaud and Enwezor In his groundbreaking account of the theory underpinning the Altermodern Exhibition at Tate Britain in 2009, Nicola Bourriaud discusses the death of postmodernism and posits the unification of modernism and postcolonialism. He explains that contemporary culture has been characterised by a ‘fastburn’ culture, characterised most clearly in humanity’s rampant consumerism through the squandering of natural resources. Since the 1973 oil crisis, however, Bourriaud claims that our ‘superabundance’ has become finite. By 2008 and the collapse of the global financial system, it became apparent for Bourriaud that there was a turning point in history. He signifies this moment as the death of postmodernism and the birth of the altermodern. Addressing the ways in which the altermodern intersects with postcolonialism, Okwui Enwezor addresses the conditions of modernity in various parts of the world. He suggests there are four categories of economic and social experience: (1) Supermodernity, which is essentially the way in which European and Western cultures have developed. It relates to the idea of the centre and the ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ system which is fundamental to capitalism. (2) Andromodernity is a characteristic which refers to parts of Asia, such as China, India and South Korea: it is marked by an acceleration of development, but also devises alternative models of modernisation. Enwezor sees this as a lesser modernity, insofar

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as it lacks the same level of global power structures, economies, technologies and politics. (3) Speciousmodernity relates to countries such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Turkey. In part because of theocracies and dictatorships, they are often viewed as demonstrating superficial modernity: evolving secularisation and reform of Muslim society is not seen as sufficient to allow for modernisation. However, Enwezor also suggests that such models can be a form of postcolonial resistance, especially in terms of Islamic radicalism as an alternative to Western capitalist decadence. (4) The Aftermodern is characterised by the African experience, insofar as it is constructed as being removed from the persuasions of supermodernity, and rooted in tribal ethnocentrism. Bourriaud explains that altermodernism is an attempt to ‘delimit the void beyond postmodernism’ (Bourriaud 2009: 11) and suggests that it ‘has its roots in the idea of “otherness” (Latin: alter, with the added English connotation of “different”) and suggests a multitude of possibilities, of alternatives to a single route’ (Bourriaud 2009: 12). He deploys the metaphor of the archipelago to define altermodern practice. As a geographical entity, the archipelago is an often quite large group of islands scattered offshore and suggesting localised identities networked within a broader sea. It is a rejection of monolithic culture, and instead, focuses on ‘the plurality of local oppositions to the economic standardization imposed by globalisation’ (Bourriaud 2009: 12). The effects of this mean dispensing with ideas of nationalism, of fixed identity and indeed ‘mainstream reification’ in favour of a multiplicity of global cultures. Bourriaud is also keen to suggest that altermodernism discards notions of multiculturalism, in so far as these are frequently rooted in an essentialist model of identity: ‘there are no longer cultural roots to sustain forms, no exact cultural base to serve as a benchmark for variations, no nucleus, no boundaries for artistic language’ (Bourriaud 2009: 14). The idea of origins, the identification of ethnic affiliation, once quite strategically useful (see Fanon), has been reduced to ‘a system of allotting meanings and assigning individuals their position in the hierarchy of social demands’ (Bourriaud 2009: 19). Interrogating the myth of origins, Bourriaud maintains that instead, we need a model of ‘heterochrony’: ‘a vision of human history as constituted of multiple temporalities, disdaining the nostalgia for the avant-garde and indeed for any era – a positive vision of chaos and complexity’ (Bourriaud 2009: 13). It is a celebration of diaspora, migration and exodus, and hence, takes as its image the ‘trans-cultural nomad’: one who explores the present from all locations of time and space. As an example, we might think about how ‘displacement’ produces meaning: the idea of translation from one culture to another, or one time frame to another, becomes of the greatest importance. For instance, Joachim Koester’s ‘From the Travels of Jonathan Harker’ (2003), retraces the protagonist of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This takes him through the Borgo Pass, and a confrontation with a modern landscape ill-suited to the literary Transylvania, which is itself a place of otherness: he visits a tourist hotel called ‘Castle

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Dracula’ (built in 1982), and perceives suburban sprawl and illegal logging. Koester’s work both translates cultures (the Irish literary text and the contemporary Bargau Valley), situates disparate local experiences and ecological sensitivity: Koester notes that: the landscape showed signs of the logging industry in the form of treeless spots. Spots that did add a post-historic touch to the surroundings, but also pointed to something familiar from the past and present, the transformation of a landscape by the forces of market economy. (Koester n.d.) Okwui Enwezor addresses the altermodern in his article, ‘Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence’, where he discusses the notion of ‘grand modernity’, which is essentially the idea of European reason, progress and rationality. These ideas of universality, as Enwezor suggests, have been distorted in the service of imperialism (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 27). By contrast, ‘petit modernities’ do not signify an overarching or universalising narrative. Also known as ‘provincialities’, they are ‘premised on finding a way to render the divergent experiences and uses of modernity’ (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 27). As an example, Enwezor looks at China and South Korea, which ‘bring alive to our very eyes brand new urban conditions and cultural spheres that were not remotely imaginable a generation ago’ (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 28). The development of these countries rests on a sizeable export economy, but it nonetheless unites local, concrete specificities: ‘[China and South Korea] are both undergoing modernization based on the acquisition of instruments and institutions of Western modernity . . . without the wholesale discarding of local values that modify the importations’ (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 29). Rather than convert native cultures into models of sameness, as per colonial methodology, this instance of altermodernism ‘articulates the shift to off-centre structures of production and dissemination; the dispersal of the universal, the refusal of the monolithic, a rebellion against monoculturalism’ (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 31). This ‘off-centre’ or ‘off-shore’ image clearly represents the notion of the archipelago which Bourriaud identifies as part of the altermodern project. In many ways, as Enwezor himself suggests, the altermodern owes much to Glissant’s theory of ‘the poetics of relocation’, offering links and constellations of meaning rather than fixity or a binary opposition. More broadly, the altermodern reinterprets what Roland Robertson has described as ‘glocalisation’. He suggests that globalisation need not refer to macro-level perspectives exclusively, but can account for the micro-culture. Therefore, glocalisation addresses the trans-local, or the super-local: ‘the contemporary assertion of ethnicity and/or nationality is made within the global terms of identity and particularity’ (Featherstone et al. 1995: 26). This model most obviously blends ‘global’ plus ‘local’ (or ‘critical regionalism’, to deploy

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a synonymous term), and is related to the Japanese dochakuka (from dochaku meaning ‘living on one’s own land’) and is defined as the way farmers used generalised techniques to fit local conditions. In business and advertising, this relates to the personalisation of a product to fit a region, and an acknowledgement of the differing perspectives of local markets, orientating between the particular and the universal. This dialectic implies a two-way relationship (rather than the multiplicity which altermodernism espouses) and obviously, theories of glocalisation still retain a degree of focus on ethnicity, something which Bourriaud and Enwezor seek to resist. However, this engagement with global capitalism, the developing economic statuses of East and West Asia, and the decentralised practices of altermodernism, all suggest the ways in which postcolonial theory has sought to account for new fields of interest.

Conclusion As the preceding discussion has demonstrated, postcolonialism has a number of themes and concerns which pervade instances of theoretical discussion. In the early articulation of cultural resistance to colonial regimes, through figures like Frantz Fanon, the desire for an ‘authentic’ culture and sense of communal belonging becomes apparent. Similarly the recovery of indigenous language and cultural specificity becomes increasingly important. By contrast, other postcolonialists such as Braithwaite and Glissant celebrate the effects of creolisation as a strategy which can challenge official languages and fracture their authority, making the colonial language speak for the native community. This trend continues through Bhabha’s discussion of hybridity, an identity effect which is both traumatic and empowering. Through the intervention of feminism, however, it is possible to locate colonised women as doubly disenfranchised: subjected to the oppressions of imperialism and also patriarchy. Finally, in the cross-cultural currents of altermodernism and the increased focus on global communities (including the role of the ‘glocal’), more recent postcolonial theories can address the issues of consumerism and capitalism; the development of ecology; and the ways in which formerly colonial societies engage with modernity.

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12 BLACK STUDIES Bella Adams

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UPPORT THE STUDENT STRIKE, STOP POLICE TERROR, SMASH RACISM’ and ‘STOP THE HATE EDUCATE’ are just two of the slogans featured on banners in American student-led campaigns for Black Studies and Ethnic Studies. Crucially, however, these slogans appeared in not one but two campaigns considered vital to the study of race in the US, despite being decades apart: the first is from the longest student strike in American history at San Francisco State College between November 1968 and March 1969 (Whitson 1999), the last, from student protests to House Bill 2281, an anti-Ethnic Studies act introduced in Arizona in 2010 and upheld in 2013 (Letson 2012). When viewed side by side, these (and other) student-led campaigns for curricula diversity consistent with an anti-racist and social justice agenda serve to highlight the political dimension of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies, or their ‘Black radical origins and subversive leanings’ (Fenderson et al. 2012: 10) in an American education system closely aligned to law and politics. Under slavery and segregation, African Americans were excluded from and marginalised in/by mainstream education, at least until civil rights lawsuits, most notably, Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Brown decision overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) supporting racial segregation. Although enabled by the Civil Rights Movement, black student activists were frustrated by its slow progress on and off university campuses and so turned in the late 1960s to the more radical Black Power Movement and its ‘sister’ the Black Arts Movement. Acknowledging that the university is ‘a political thing, and it provides identity, purpose, and direction’ (Karenga, quoted by Marable 2000: 23), Black cultural nationalist scholars insisted that university curricula ‘speak . . . directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America’ and ‘relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for selfdetermination and nationhood’ (Neal 1968: 29). Although Black America has a long history dating back to the 1600s with the arrival of the first Africans to the Americas, or, for some, even further back to the ancient Nile Valley civilisations, the academic study of this history mainly gets going at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, in the work of W. E. B. DuBois, Alaine Locke, Arthur A. Schomburg and Carter G.

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Wilson. Building on the work of these men, later black scholars insist ‘Black Studies is not merely the study of black people’ (Asante 1986: 255). According to cultural nationalist and Afrocentric scholar, Molefi Kete Asante, ‘teaching about blacks in history or the sociology of blacks is not enough’ because these traditional disciplines privilege ‘eurocentric cultural icons’ such as ‘universality’ or ‘objectivity’ (Asante 1986: 259, 257). Anthropologist St. Clair Drake also argues, ‘what we have called “objective” intellectual activities were actually white studies in perspective and content’ (quoted by Marable 2000: 21). Compared to these traditional disciplines and, for that matter, the ‘white’ discipline of Negro Studies (Drake 2007: 339), Black Studies provided new perspectives on, by and for Black America. Whether delivered by Black Studies, Afro-American Studies, African American Studies, Africana Studies or Africology, each term having its own specific history and politics, these new perspectives spoke more directly than ever before to black students’ needs and aspirations by focusing on black texts, theories and methodologies beyond Eurocentrism. Black Studies offers relevant education, mainly in the humanities and social sciences across disciplines and genres, including slave narratives, black vernacular texts such as spirituals, blues and hip hop, Afrocentric methodologies, analyses and philosophies, Black Women’s Studies, Critical Race Theory, the Racial Justice Movement and the Environmental Justice Movement. Analyses of these and other black cultural forms also involve exploring the conditions of their production and reproduction, typically but not exclusively inside the US in order to promote race-consciousness and black self-empowerment against white privilege. This dual emphasis on scholarly critique and social corrective is as necessary now in the colour-blind twenty-first century, as it was in the colour-conscious 1960s and 1970s because the US remains a racially unequal society. As law professor Michelle Alexander observes, ‘We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it’ by implementing new systems of ‘racialized social control’ such as mass incarceration to replace the older systems of slavery and segregation (Alexander 2012: 2, 4). Although prison cells and university classrooms seem worlds apart, there is nevertheless a point of convergence between them, not least in Arizona where HB2281 is part of ‘a disturbing pattern of legislative activity hostile to ethnic minorities and immigrants’ (UN report, quoted by Cha-Jua 2010: 10). By re-presenting Ethnic Studies as ‘reverse racism’, ‘politicalization of history’, ‘anger’ and ‘anti-American terrorism’ (Cha-Jua 2010: 11), the right designates it and associated behaviours illegal, for example, race-conscious ways of reading blacklisted books. On the list of books that apparently threaten both government and society are Bill Bigelow’s Rethinking Columbus, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory, Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Cambium Audit, 2 May 2011: 116–20).

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Between the San Francisco State strike and the Arizona protests, Black Studies has developed in ways scholars assessing its history describe as ‘uncertain’ (Huggins 1985: 73), ‘precarious’ (Miller 1990: 96), ‘ironic’ (Rooks 2006) and ‘ambiguous’ (Rojas 2007: 2). In spite (and arguably because) of this volatile history, or, in Dianne M. Pinderhughes and Richard Yarbourough’s words, ‘tradition of struggle’ (Pinderhughes and Yarbourough 2000: 171), Black Studies remains intellectually and socially compelling, innovative and transformative – all qualities this chapter seeks to emphasise in its interpretation of Black Studies’ near fifty-year history into three roughly periodised parts: it begins by recounting what until recently was regarded as ‘a glaring hole in the historiography of Black Studies’ (Rogers 2012: 22), specifically the drive for Black Studies beyond the San Francisco State strike; the second part concentrates on the institutionalisation and professionalisation of Black Studies in the 1980s and 1990s as the right-wing offensive in American politics gained widespread legitimacy, and black scholars debated cultural nationalism’s significance in relation to newly emerging and often highly theorised areas of study such as multiculturalism and globalism; the third part explores Black Studies’ more recent developments, as the right-wing offensive mutated into contemporary colour-blind racial politics that maintain dominant hierarchies across American society in institutions as seemingly diverse as universities and prisons, right down to physical environments.

Expanding the History of Black Studies, 1960s–70s In From Black Power to Black Studies, Fabio Rojas notes that the San Francisco State strike ‘stand[s] out in the popular imagination as black studies’ defining moment’ (Rojas 2007: 1). At the time, the 133-day strike certainly attracted a lot of media attention for its mass rallies and anti-racist demands. Of particular interest was the spectacle of violence, with American newspapers typically endorsing the right-wing views of College President, S. I. Hayakawa, and California Governor, Ronald Reagan, who considered police brutality an appropriate response to misuse of university property. Today, the strike is celebrated in and beyond San Francisco State for ‘paving the way for equity and social justice on campuses nationwide’ (Nance 2008). It is widely recognised as contributing not only to the institutionalisation of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies but also to educational affirmative-action programmes across the US. Expanding Black Studies’ history beyond the San Francisco State strike and other protests in the 1968–9 academic year depends as much on oral histories and other acts of recuperation, as it does on scholarly research. In an editorial celebrating the fortieth anniversary of San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies, SFGate columnist Sam Whiting observes: The first and still the only academic department of its kind in the country . . . came out of the black studies department, which came out of the famed student strike of 1968–69, which came out of the BSU [Black

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Student Union], which came out of a wager made in Los Angeles shortly after the Watts Riots of 1965 . . . [about starting in BSU leader James Garrett’s words] ‘a black student movement in a predominantly white campus’. (Whiting 2010) Needless to say, Garrett won the bet, and with colleagues like Jerry Varnado and Nathan Hare at San Francisco State, alongside many other black scholars elsewhere, helped to ensure a national future for Black Studies – although, admittedly, not always in line with ‘the recycled narrative that Black Studies moved from “protest to program to department” on each and every campus’ (Fenderson et al. 2012: 10). In a recent special issue of Journal of African American Studies, the editors and contributors seek to complicate this recycled narrative by focusing on a range of defining moments in the history of Black Studies, beyond the San Francisco State strike. For example, Ibram H. Rogers argues that the death in April 1968 of Martin Luther King Jr, ‘gave life to Black Studies . . . more than any other historical incident’, although the mass student protests across the US on ‘Diversity Thursday’ in February 1969, swiftly followed by the fourth anniversary of Malcolm X’s death do come close, too (Rogers 2012: 26, 50). Rogers explains that Malcolm X helped to politicise students, as did cultural nationalist politics more generally in the 1960s with regard to institutional racism, thus providing a background for the Black Campus Movement, 1965– 72. Near the point when this movement disbanded, mainly because, as Rogers argues, black student activists became more concerned with off-campus racial injustices, and ‘the offensive phase of the movement’ shifted to a defensive phase seeking to preserve Black Studies – black professors, for example, Cornell University’s James Turner became the focus of institution building (Rogers 2012: 34–5). Central to the Black Studies Movement, Turner’s experiences challenge the protest-to-programme paradigm since he was involved in the different stages of Black Studies in Harlem (as an informal student of black nationalism), Central Michigan (as an undergraduate student), Northwestern (as a graduate assistant at the African Studies Center) and Cornell (as Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center). In his interview for the special issue of Journal of African American Studies, Turner identifies other defining moments in Black Studies’ history, most notably student activism before 1968 at historically Black universities and colleges, or HBUCs. He also references the role of academic conferences, particularly Howard University’s ‘Toward A Black University’ in the autumn of 1968. This conference attracted between 1,500 and 1,900 delegates from across the US, many of whom criticised the development of HBUCs as ‘replica . . . dominant white institutions’ that were demographically black but remained institutionally white, especially in terms of the curriculum (Turner, quoted in Fenderson and Katungi 2012: 127).

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In addition to advocating a strong curriculum by, for and about African Americans delivered by black professors with long-term commitments to the discipline at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, Turner argued that Black Studies requires institutional autonomy, or its own budget and buildings (Fenderson and Katungi 2012: 133–5). A key tenet of Black Power, namely self-determination thus fed into the institutionalisation of Black Studies at Cornell and other, but by no means all, universities and colleges. While Turner advocated the development of Black Studies as an autonomous discipline, other scholars acknowledged problems with this model. For instance, cultural historian C. L. R. James said, ‘I do not recognize any distinctive nature of black studies – not today, 1969’, because he could not ‘separate black studies from white studies in any theoretical point of view. Nevertheless, there are certain things about black studies that need to be studied today’ (James 1969: 390, 404). Here, James’s politics override his theory, particularly in view of American history, although his peer, economist Arthur Lewis, doubted the efficacy of such a politics by insisting, ‘The Road to the Top is through Higher Education – Not Black Studies’ (quoted by James 1969: 390). This warning (and others like it, for example, Kilson et al. 1969) failed to stem Black Studies’ rapid growth. According to Rogers, 1968–9 saw the formation of over ‘650 Black Studies courses, programs, or departments’, rising to nearly a thousand in 1970 (2012: 35). Interest may have decreased in Black Studies in 1972, but this was also the year that The Chronicle of Higher Education announced, ‘black studies programs . . . now fill a standard, if insecure, niche in the curriculum’ (Janssen, quoted by Rogers 2012: 35). Despite this insecurity, Drake observed, ‘the rate of institutionalization accelerated after 1974’ (Drake 1979: 340), with many programmes surviving into the late 1970s when some were made financially and intellectually stronger through grants, mainly from the Ford Foundation (Griffin 2007), publications such as The Western Journal for Black Studies and A Scholarly Journal of Black Studies, and the formation of professional organisations, for example, the National Council for Black Studies, the African Heritage Studies Association and the Institute of the Black World. Over a period of just ten years, argues Drake, ‘black studies programs have brought a highly visible superficial “blackening” of academia. The black presence has become inescapable and legitimized’ (Drake 1979: 344). However, with institutionalisation and legitimisation came what Drake describes as ‘a trade-off’ (Drake 1979: 340). Black Studies may have helped to transform the idea of the university, as ‘multi-ethnic, with ethnicity permitted some institutional expression, and with black studies being one of the sanctioned forms’, but in the process ‘Black studies became depoliticized and deradicalized’ (Drake 1979: 340). For Drake, this deradicalisation represents ‘a change in style of expressing “blackness”. . . . Repudiation of “blackness” was not demanded as the price for survival’ (Drake 1979: 341), although

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for more radical scholars deradicalisation involves denationalisation and by extension deracialisation. Whether viewed as selling out, or, in Rojas’s words, ‘chilling out’ (Rojas 2007: 215), Black Studies’ institutionalisation and professionalisation generated a series of interrelated debates about its future direction and goals. The most influential of these debates was between cultural nationalists who espoused Black Power and Afrocentric principles and their more liberal and often integrationist counterparts. Between these two dominant perspectives, or ‘The Black Studies War: Multiculturalism Vs. Afrocentricity’ (Thomas 1995), a third ideological position emerged, sometimes formulated in terms of a ‘synthesis’ (Thomas 1995), at other times, a rejection of self-separation and integration in favour of a ‘transformationist or radical perspective’ focused on ‘transform[ing] the existing power relationships and the racist institutions of the state, the economy, and the society’ (Marable 2000: 31). For practical and political reasons, Black Studies emerged in the 1980s and later predominantly as a liberal interdiscipline, most successfully at elite American universities where Rojas estimates 40 to 50 per cent offer formalised units in Black Studies, for example, Harvard’s ‘interdisciplinary unit that appeals to both black and liberal white audiences’. Elsewhere, the numbers are significantly lower, below 10 per cent (Rojas 2007: 169–72, 218). From these figures, it is clear that Black Studies survives as a dynamic interdisciplinary site with changing ideological functions. In the 1970s, it may have been seen as a way to promote racial harmony, mainly between blacks and whites for reasons ranging from social justice to corporate multiculturalism, but today, as black feminist Noliwe Rooks notes, Black Studies is ‘key to understanding shifting realities of diversity among black people’, beyond racial dualism and is ‘a vital tool to foster broader discussions of the nature, makeup, and meaning of race, diversity, integration, and desegregation’ (Rooks 2006). Black Studies thus looks set to persist, at least until 3 March 2095, when cultural historian Robin D. G. Kelley imagines two possible futures for it in his semi-fictional, time-travelling tale, ‘Looking B(l)ackward: African-American Studies in the Age of Identity Politics’.

Black Studies in the 1980s and 1990s Prior to its publication, Kelley presented ‘Looking B(l)ackward’ as the keynote address at a conference at Princeton University in 1995. This piece offers a darkly satirical account of Black Studies at the end of the twentieth century, although there is some movement back and forth from this era befitting Kelley’s time-travelling protagonist, Dr Kelley. Attending a conference on postraciality that includes discussions of the bell curve wars and the theory wars, Dr Kelley falls into a coma in the panel, ‘Deconstruct to Reconstruct, That’s All We Do’ (Kelley 1997: 2). A century later, he wakes up to see the balkanised future

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of Black Studies at Community College University (CCU) and across the US, each programme struggling to survive against the Hard Right and from Black Studies wars, mainly between, in Kelley’s account, ‘Asante Hall, the home of the Center for Africological Thought and Practice’, ‘Stuart Hall, where the Program in Antiessentialist Black World Studies was housed’ including Black Culture/Gender Studies, and the extraordinarily successful ‘Urban Underclass Institute’ in W. J. Wilson Hall (Kelley 1997: 4, 7–8, 12). On witnessing the horrors of this last Black Studies programme, Dr Kelley loses consciousness and returns to 1995 where he (or Kelley) with obvious relief sees before him ‘an endless sea of faces whose contributions to our work have been invaluable’, and who have contributed to the ‘various schools of thought within this larger matrix we call Black Studies’ (Kelley 1997: 15–16). Dr Kelley’s travels serve as a microcosm for a series of interrelated Black Studies debates in the 1980s and 1990s taken to their seemingly logical conclusions in the 2090s, not only the bell curve wars and the theory wars, but also the war between Afrocentric cultural nationalism and multiculturalism (including black feminism and black Marxism). Beyond academia, Dr Kelley’s time travels provide insight into the American government’s wars on welfare, street violence, illegal drugs and other behaviours it associated with poor, black people, especially those born between 1965 and 1984, or ‘the hip hop generation’ (Kitwana 2003: xiii). With the rise of the right at the century’s end, there is an obvious sense of irony about falling into a coma at a conference on postraciality. Here, Kelley suggests that postraciality signals the end of neither Black Studies nor racism, but a desensitised condition akin to colour-blindness that not only affects whites but also black middle-class professionals who are privy to ‘relatively good times . . . if you never left the auditorium, conference room, or movie theaters’ (Kelley 1997: 9). Just prior to losing his consciousness and history, presumably in (for some) Eurocentric academia, Dr Kelley loses his way en route to the bell curve debate. These losses provide Kelley’s Murray with ‘his only evidence’ for a follow-up book to The Bell Curve (1994) in which he questions the racial advances brought about by affirmative action by arguing that ‘members of racial groups with lower average IQ scores who make it into the ranks of the cognitive elite are incapable of processing such knowledge’ so fake it, suffer from mental health problems, or fall into a coma (Kelley 1997: 3). Fundamental to the right-wing offensive of the 1980s and 1990s, this interpretation of affirmative action allows ‘less qualified’ blacks privileged access to higher education, to their detriment and the wider society’s: ‘Something about’ it is, ‘fundamentally unfair – un-American – no matter how admirable the ultimate goal’ (Murray 1994: 221). For the long-time beneficiaries of white affirmative action, the colour-conscious version of the policy also undermines the supposedly race-neutral goals of American education for universal knowledge, best delivered, according to William Bennett, Allan Bloom and other

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conservatives by the Western canon rather than a multicultural curriculum geared towards identity politics. Bennett and his reactionary peers proclaim the existence of, if not the need for, a common culture that passes itself off as such despite white/European (and other) biases and privileges. As critical race scholar David Theo Goldberg explains: ‘monoculturalism not only purports to universalize the presuppositions and terms of a single culture, it likewise denies as culture – as embodying and reflecting worthy value(s) – any expression that fails to fit its mold’, specifically ‘The Voice of America – confident, perhaps even brash, uncritically unself-conscious, and overwhelmingly white’ (Goldberg 1994: 5). In the history of American monoculturalism, from Republican resistance to European colonialism and imperialism to ‘Keeping America White’ and ‘The Voice of America’ (Goldberg 1994: 3–5), as the latter also circulate in the contemporary colour-blind era, the multiculturalist challenge to the ideal of a common culture is uneven in its implementation. ‘Our multicultural, multilingual, multiracial population’ may be ‘a Manifest New Destiny’ (June Jordan, quoted by Lee 2004: xvi), with whites becoming a minority in the US by the middle of the twenty-first century, and multiculturalism may circulate as a mainstream discourse in education and popular culture, but these multicultural facts by themselves do not signal the end of the war against white monoculturalism. In its latest formulation, white monoculturalism promotes its own multicultural project, or corporate multiculturalism, a racist anti-racist discourse, so to speak, which ultimately supports the white privilege it claims to counter because its primary concern is reforming not transforming institutional structures, for example, race awareness week in a colour-blind era. Whether anti-racist or racist, anti-Eurocentric or neo-Eurocentric, grassroots or corporate, political/practical or cultural/theoretical (Gordon and Newfield 1996: 3–6), multiculturalism’s conflicting projects render it too risky for cultural nationalist scholars in particular. In ‘The Black Studies War: Multiculturalism versus Afrocentricity’, Greg Thomas focuses on the work of two men who for him best ‘personify the ideological poles’: Harvard’s acculturationist and prolific literary scholar and premier multiculturalist’, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Temple’s liberationist and ‘champion of Afrocentricity’, Asante (Thomas 1995). In Kelley’s future, too, Afrocentricity is opposed to multiculturalism, albeit by way of Anti-Essentialist Black World Studies, including Black Culture/Gender Studies. Kelley emphasises the ideological or theoretical nature of this opposition in the names he gives to the Black Studies programmes delivered from Asante Hall and Stuart Hall, the Center for Africological Thought and Practice, criticising the separation of thought and practice or culture and politics that poststructuralists/multiculturalists in Anti-Essentialist Black World Studies seem to advocate when highlighting the discursive construction of race against biological and cultural essentialisms.

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At stake in this Black Studies war is the definition of blackness, or, in Gates’s terms, the ‘blackness of blackness’ (Gates 1983: 685), which for Afrocentric critics means ‘Africans’ (Asante 2009), whereas for poststructuralist/ multiculturalist critics like Hall and Gates it means ‘everyone in the family of blackness’ (Kelley 1997: 8). Each side charges the other with race denial, if not a denial of racism – at the expense of black feminists in particular. Kelley’s Dr Patricia Post offers an insight into the burden of Africanness as it affects a majority of black people who fail to conform to ‘one way to be black’, typically ‘black male’ (Christian 1987: 58, 60). According to Dr Post, Africology’s attacks on black feminism leave women like her institutionally insecure and with little choice but to join Anti-Essentialist Black World Studies. Even here, however, Dr Post is threatened by ‘the black British invaders – they were men for the most part’ (Kelley 1997: 9), most notably, Hall, Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer. The term ‘invaders’ suggests a link to British colonialism and imperialism, an ironic link for a critic like Hall given that he originated from Jamaica, a former British colony and a Commonwealth country; at the same time, however, ‘invaders’ does help to articulate experiences of displacement felt by Black Studies scholars in the 1990s with the rise of Postcolonial Studies and, to a lesser extent, Diaspora or Pan-African Studies. As postcolonial critic Ella Shohat explains: [I]f the rising institutional endorsement of the term postcolonial is, on the one hand a success story for the PCs (politically correct), is it not also a partial containment of the POCs (people of color)? . . . One has the impression that the postcolonial is privileged because it seems safely distant from ‘the belly of the beast,’ the United States. (Shohat 2000: 135) In particular, corporate multiculturalists committed to political correctness can rest assured that postcolonial intellectuals from the UK and its former colonies demonstrate diversity in the American higher education system, although not necessarily in a radical way: If it’s about getting black faces at Harvard, then you’re doing fine. If it’s about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you’re not doing well. And if it’s about having diversity that includes African-Americans from the South or from inner-city high schools, then you’re not doing well, either. (Mary C. Waters, quoted by Rimer and Arensen 2004) With multiculturalism and globalism seeming to threaten Black Studies from within and without, and with poststructuralism seeming to deny race and racism through emphases on diversity and language, or linguistic play, Afrocentric

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resistance seems understandable. Importantly, however, this resistance does not make Afrocentricity the polar opposite of these other theories since it too insists that ‘culture is learned, it isn’t biological’ (Kelley 1997: 6). Indeed, Asante understands Afrocentricity as ‘a constructural adjustment to black disorientation, decenteredness, and lack of agency’, primarily via the act of ‘marking’, which is when ‘a person delineates a cultural boundary around a particular cultural space in human time’ (Asante 2009). Asante’s references to culture suggest a point of correspondence with poststructuralism, perhaps even the influence of the African and African American tradition of ‘signifyin[g]’ beyond European theory (Gates 1983: 685, 687–9). By the same token, Gates’s understanding of signifyin(g) emerges in relation to the Signifying Monkey, ‘a trickster figure, of the order of the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology’ (Gates 1983: 687). Gates also insists ‘our generation must record, codify, and disseminate the assembled data about African and African-American culture’ (Gates 1992: 123). In Kelley’s nightmarish future, these points of correspondence are perhaps part of the reason both Asante Hall and Stuart Hall are small buildings in disrepair, with few staff and students who are forced to share the same photocopier. In his analysis of the Asante-Gates dynamic, Abdul Alkalimat notes a further point of correspondence: ‘Both represent an ideological retreat by a new black middle class that has been unable to find the courage to link up with the masses of Black people fighting to survive’ (quoted by Marable 2000: 31). Following Alkalimat, Marable also argues that Gates’s integrationism and Asante’s separatism represent their retreat from ‘power relationships and the racist institutions of the state, the economy, and society’ (Marable 2000: 31). Increasingly, other black scholars argue that this opposition is overdrawn, particularly for the younger generation who see that ‘nationalist versus integrationist have moderated from their polar extremes’, arguably to the point of ‘fusion’ (Kitwana 2002: 149). For this generation, Bakari Kitwana adds, ‘even those wrapped in the most radical political perspective feel entitled to their piece of the American pie. At the same time, even the most reformist/integrationist orientated hip hop generationer recognizes the disparate treatment of African Americans and realizes that change is necessary’ (Kitwana 2002: 150). Where this change is most clearly necessary, and where the black masses are most obviously at the centre of critique is in Kelley’s W. J. Wilson Hall at the Urban Underclass Institute, the most (financially) successful Black Studies programme at CCU. Directed by Dr Souless Thomas, the Institute is staffed by criminologists and genetic engineers intent on transforming a multiracial underclass through a combination of ‘Behaviour Adjustment Technology’ (BAT) and ‘chemical warfare’: ‘This method has turned the coldest homeboy into a model citizen – a better gentleman than myself’, remarks Dr Thomas (Kelley 1997: 14). The BAT racial project is not designed to eliminate poverty, as Dr Kelley believes, only certain behaviours, for example, violence, nihilism, unemployment and dysfunctional welfare families (Kelley 1997: 14). Although

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racialised as black, the fact that these behaviours are exhibited by a multiracial underclass suggests to conservatives and some liberals the declining significance of race in American society at the end of the twentieth century. Against right-wing interpretations of The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (2012), William Julius Wilson argues that ‘historic’ racism is not in decline, only that ‘non-racial factors . . . impacted significantly on the black community’ (Wilson 1997). These nonracial factors include ‘the computer revolution, changes in scale-based technology [and] . . . internationalization of economic activity’, which, together, reduce the demand for low-skilled workers, a disproportionate number of whom are black (Wilson 1997). For Wilson, national and international economic changes impact unequally on ‘The Two Nations of Black America’, of which the hardest hit are black inner-city communities, their disadvantages emphasised by the rise of a black middle class of highly trained and educated professionals (Wilson 1997). The disparities between these two classes provide the right with further opportunity to blame welfare-reliant blacks for their own poverty and related behaviours rather than historic racism, deindustrialisation and globalisation. Prior to The Bell Curve about black biological inferiority, Murray espoused in Losing Ground (1994) an equally controversial thesis about social policy and race. According to him, social policy, for example, affirmative action is ‘monumentally ironic’ since it fosters rather than prohibits the emergence of a ‘black’ underclass, ‘the object of the most unremitting sympathy’ and ‘condescension’ that sees ‘whites . . . tolerate and make excuses for behavior among blacks that whites would disdain in themselves or their children’ (Murray 1994: 222–3). Equally, however, if not more so, are the disdainful economic behaviours underpinning white tolerance, at least in 2095: the Urban Underclass Institute and associated private industries depend for their future on young black men (and increasingly women) from deprived neighbourhoods, the vast majority of whom are not in education, nor are they ever likely to be. At this prospect, Dr Kelley loses consciousness and returns to 1995, his timetravelling experiences informing Kelley’s insistence on the value of ‘looking b(l)ackward’ in order to understand how ‘the new crises in African American culture’, including ‘racial profiling, environmental justice, electoral politics, youth issues, parenting, globalization’ (Kitwana 2002: 1, 149) have a longer history derived from, as Eric Michael Dyson observes, ‘the historical legacy of slavery, which continues to assert its brutal presence in the untold suffering of millions of everyday black folk’ (Dyson 2004: 138).

Black Studies Now, 2000s– Throughout the history of Black Studies, from the social movement stage in the 1960s and 1970s and the academic profession stage in the 1980s and 1990s,

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right through to the twenty-first century there has been a concern with social justice within and beyond the American education system. Even recent developments in Black Studies, not just globalism and multiculturalism, but also racial justice and environmental justice are originary and ongoing concerns. In 1970, for example, San Francisco State’s Black Student Union demanded the academic institutionalisation of the ‘cultural heritage of Third World people, specifically black people’ for educational and political purposes, ultimately, ‘to redistribute the wealth; the knowledge, the technology, the natural resources, the food, land, housing, and all the material resources necessary for a society and its people to function’ (quoted by Umemoto 2000: 63). In The African American Studies Reader, Nathaniel Norment argues that ‘the central goal in the years ahead should be for African Americans Studies to have an impact on the quality of life for all African American people’ (Norment 2007: xl), including those most at risk from ‘the New Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2012: 2). For Alexander, the new Jim Crow is evidenced in the mass incarceration of young black men (and increasingly women), although, for other critical race scholars, it exceeds the Western ‘military-carceral ring’ and includes the Eastern ‘ring of poverty’ (Lee 2004: 15) and in the South and ‘Up South’, as Robert D. Bullard observes, ‘a disproportionately large amount of pollution and other environmental stresses in [black] neighborhoods as well as in their workplaces’ (Bullard 2000: xiii, 1). For African Americans confined to these toxic environments, and for new social movements focused on racial justice and environmental justice, neither race nor racism is declining in significance. As legacies of the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes critically so, these new movements have developed in tandem with increasing academic interest in Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory and Environmental/Ecocritical Studies, particularly from the late 1990s onwards. Fundamental to these new social movements is recognition of the ways in which historic racism continues to reproduce racial inequalities, which at their worst resemble Kelley’s nightmarish future and the ‘chemical warfare on the worst neighborhoods in the country’ (1997: 14) involving illegal drugs and il/legal toxins, and their devastating impact on young black people in particular. In his analysis of The Hip Hop Generation, Kitwana explains how young black men often have few choices when it comes to ‘the informal economy’ involving gangs and related criminal activities (Kitwana 2002: 35). For them, as Dyson also explains, ‘low level educational achievement’ and ‘structural unemployment of . . . virtually epidemic proportions’ mean their lives are at ‘a low premium’ that only this informal economy seems to relieve with its promise of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘material gratification’ (Dyson 2004: 138, 141). Most lucrative is the drugs trade, particularly after crack-cocaine emerged in the mid-1980s. The government responded with the War on Drugs typified by criminal and civil penalties for selling crack that were so severe that they were ‘unprecedented in the federal system’, and provided a legal way for the Right

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to discriminate against blacks-as-felons (Alexander 2012: 53–4). Racial profiling and ‘paramilitary policing’ (Kitwana 2002: 64–5), when coupled with new laws enforcing mandatory minimum sentences for crack and for a third crime helped to give the US ‘the world’s largest prison population and the world’s largest second highest per capita incarceration rate’, particularly among black youth (Kitwana 2002: 56–7). Of the crack epidemic, one senator observed that ‘if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it’ (quoted by Alexander 2012: 53), probably someone like Kelley’s Dr Thomas at the Urban Underclass Institute and affiliated private industries. The privatised prison industry has profited from mass incarceration for illegal drug offences, especially after the War on Drugs ensured ‘prison admissions from African Americans skyrocketed, nearly quadrupling in three years, and then increasing steadily until it reached in 2000 a level more than twentysix times the level in 1983’ (Alexander 2012: 98). Disproportionately incarcerated, especially compared to whites, which over this same period saw its prison population increase eight times (Alexander 2012: 98), young black (and brown) men provide ‘virtual slave labour’ for the government and increasingly private companies because ‘a captive, non-unionized labor pool, where benefits, vacation time, unemployment compensation, minimum wages, payroll and Social Security taxes, and even human rights and anti-sweatshop activists are non-issues’ (Kitwana 2002: 73). Where civil and human rights are most obviously an issue, however, is in poor black neighbourhoods, if not, as should be the case, in a wider democratic society. Kitwana and other black scholars observe how mass incarceration negatively impacts on black families, increasingly already tenuous gender and intergenerational relationships, with the ‘sexual terror’ in prisons exacerbating rising rates of AIDS among young blacks who are already struggling with ‘the mental and physical strain demanded by prison’s survival-at-all-costs culture’ (Kitwana 2002: 76–81). By the mid-2000s, young black men were fast disappearing into the prison industrial complex, so much so that Ebony magazine in 2006 posed but did not answer the question, ‘Where Have All the Black Men Gone?’ (Alexander 2012: 179). Although not in their families or communities, black men are only too visible in the global cultural phenomenon of hip hop, most notably, gangsta rap, which combines ‘prison culture, street culture, and Black youth culture’ in an apparent glorification of the worst racial stereotypes, for example, ‘young, don’t give a fuck, and black’ (Kitwana 2002: 77, 121). Black Studies debates about hip hop culture and gangsta rap, or ‘the hip hop wars’ (Rose 2008) divide along class, gender and generational lines. Although this musical form and related phenomena, including styles of language, dress and dance are criticised for causing urban violence and sexual misconduct, or, a little more critically, contemporary minstrelsy, these criticisms, often from older and/

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or middle-class blacks fail to engage its complexity and the historical forces underpinnings its emergence (Dyson 2004: 401–40). For Kitwana, Dyson and other scholars, hip hop culture is social criticism, a product of historic racism, or the new Jim Crow that it seeks to expose and, ideally, counter. But illegal drugs (and concomitant mass incarceration) represent just one arsenal in the Right’s ‘chemical warfare’. In a 1987 report by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ; also see the 2007 report by Bullard et al.), race represented ‘the leading factor in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities and determined that poor and people of color communities suffer disproportionate health risk’, between 50 and 60 per cent of them living in locations with ‘one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites’ (Adamson et al. 2002: 4). For UCC-CRJ director, Reverend Benjamin Chavis, these facts and figures demonstrate ‘environmental racism’, specifically: racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the lifethreatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and history of excluding people of color from leadership in the environmental movement. (Quoted by Adamson et al. 2002: 4) While environmental racism affects black (and other non-white) communities across the US, the South, as Bullard explains in Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, proved particularly appealing to chemical and other polluting industries. Typically viewed as ‘a socially and economically “backward” region’, which as late as 1982 suffered ‘service deficiencies’, alongside deficient labour, business and environmental regulations, the South seemed the ideal location for these polluting industries, the air contamination from them re-presented as ‘the sweet smell of prosperity’, if not, ‘a panacea for the decades of neglect and second-class status accorded the region’ (Bullard 2000: 23, 5, 29, 27). Agribusiness, too, played its part in this neglect, with Spencer D. Wood and Jess Gilbert estimating ‘a 98 percent loss of black farm operations between 1900 and 1997’ to large-scale corporate farms (Green et al. 2011: 55). The opportunities that the polluting industries seem to offer in terms of jobs gained widespread support from public officials, and even, as Bullard highlights, civil rights leaders committed to social justice and the provision of decent public services, for example, better schools and houses apparently made possible by increased investment and employment. However, the argument that ‘jobs were real; environmental risks were unknown’ (Bullard 2000: 27) does not necessarily hold up, since white middleclass communities already had jobs and a sense of the environmental risks so they pursued with some success not-in-my-backyard or NIMBY policies. Historically, environmentalism is predominantly a white discourse and geared

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towards white interests, for example, nature conservation. According to Bullard, NIMBY-ism and conservationism result in ‘the place-in-blacks’-backyard (PIBBY) principle’ (2000: 4), with white environmentalists and white industrialists regarding poor black communities in particular as ‘pushover[s] lacking community organization, environmental consciousness, and with strong and blind pro-business politics’ (Bullard 2000: 27). Following the PIBBY principle, white trees may have been saved but black housing and workplaces suffered from industrial pollution. Environmental justice and social justice were increasingly recognised by black activists as interrelated issues, or, in the words of one UCC-CRJ director, ‘yet another breach of civil rights. . . . The depositing of toxic wastes within the black community is no less than attempted genocide’ (Bullard 2000: 31). Such powerful rhetoric helped to mobilise grassroots campaigns during the 1980s against environmental degradation of predominantly black areas. By the 1990s, links between environmental and social justice were increasingly recognised, at least enough for the American government to establish the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) in 1993 and, a year later, Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898. In the aftermath of large-scale events such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 it is impossible not to see how social and environmental justice are linked, as unnatural disasters (see, for example, Deming and Savoy 2011: 3–4). In grassroots environmental justice organisations, black working-class women often assume central roles, for example, ‘African American Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Memphis, Tennessee’ (Simpson 2002: 82–104), African American author Barbara Neely’s re-presentation of the Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative in Blanche Cleans Up (Neeley 1998; also see Stein 2002), and ‘Sustaining the “Urban Forest” and Creating Landscapes of Hope’ in Baltimore, Maryland (Di Chiro 2002). The influence of black feminism is apparent at Syracuse University’s Department of African American Studies, which launched the Gender and Environmental Justice project in 2007, mainly in ‘an effort to convert Africana intellectual thought into a tool for social transformation’ (Mugo 2007). Although ‘ “hot” topics’ for black social scientists (Bullard 2000: xvii), environmental racism and environmental justice took longer to influence the humanities, mainly because of, as Ursula Heise explains, the influence of theory and its ‘overarching project of denaturalization’ (Heise 2006: 505). This project may have worked against conservative efforts to legitimate social hierarchies via appeals to nature, but it proved problematic for social movements that needed ‘to reground human cultures in natural systems and whose primary pragmatic goal was to rescue a sense of the reality of environmental degradation from the obfuscations of political discourse’ (Heise 2006: 505). Experiencing its own theory war, albeit in colour-blind terms, environmental criticism or ecocriticism seems to offer little to Black Studies because its

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standard assumptions are white. For example, white ecocriticism typically privileges idealised natural environments, which in African American history are often associated with oppression, for instance, slavery plantations, prison farms and lynching sites, or exceed predominantly urban black experiences. Not until Cheryl Glotfelty’s call in 1996 for diversification of its standards in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) did mainstream ecocriticism start to take more seriously ‘a diversity of voices’ (quoted by Adamson and Slovic 2009: 6) that had long been there. As environmental justice cultural studies critic T.V. Reed argues, there is a long history of black and other non-white writers engaging with environmental racism, to which ‘the field still needs to catch up’ (quoted by Adamson and Slovic 2009: 12): from African representations of nature in the literature of slavery (Finseth 2009) and the Harlem Renaissance (Outka 2008) to concerns about water (Wardi 2011) and food (Witt 1999), including the lack thereof in ‘food deserts’ (McClintock 2011: 89). Perhaps if mainstream ecocritics had spent more time thinking about this history, or, at the very least, the contents of their morning cup of coffee, as suggested by Martin Luther King and reiterated by Soenke Zehle, then they would have seen how it contains ‘the history of slavery’ and other systems of human and non-human exploitation and oppression against which black (and other nonwhite) activists and artists have protested (Zehle 2002: 341). While environmental justice politics dominates the movement, the editors of and contributors to The Environmental Justice Reader argue that poetics and pedagogy, or ‘teaching and making art are intrinsically political acts’ (Adamson et al. 2002: 7). In the pedagogy section of the Reader, four professors discuss their experiences of teaching environmental studies, typically as an interdisciplinary subject focused on environmental racism, and each with a strong sense of the ways ‘environmental justice education taps the intellectual and organizational resources of previous (minority) social movements’ (Zehle 2002: 337). For these and other environmental justice scholars, radical pedagogy has its roots in the Black Studies Movement and other related movements that almost fifty years before recognised the role of the scholar-activist in bringing about ‘a cultural revolution in art and ideas’ (Neal 1968), and, by extension, ideologies and institutions. Understood in this context, Black Studies is, as Rooks notes, ‘a successful example of the pursuit of social [and environmental] justice and democratic reform, [and] a harbinger of widespread institutional and cultural change’ (2006). Its history may be marked by all sorts of conflicts – from the race war in the 1960s and 1970s, as it continues today in new colour-blind forms, to the culture wars, bell curve wars, theory wars, the war between Afrocentricity and multiculturalism, right up to contemporary chemical wars – but socialenvironmental justice requires nothing less. So, rather than reading conflict as a sign of Black Studies’ failure, is it not better to understand it in terms of the discipline’s ‘on-going and profound critique and corrective’, summarised

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by Maulana Karenga as a compulsion ‘to practice internally what it demands externally, i.e., self criticism and self-correction . . . and an intellectual rigor and relevance which both disarms its severest critics and honors its original academic and social mission’ (quoted by Norment 2007: xlvi)? Conflict-as-self-critique certainly underpins Kelley’s vision in ‘Looking B(l)ackward’ for the future of ‘the larger matrix we call Black Studies’, peopled by ‘sane, committed, brilliant intellectuals’ fully able ‘to put up a good fight against the right-wing racist onslaught we now face’ at the century’s end – 1995 and, presumably, 2095 (1997: 15), if not all the years before, between and after. ‘Looking b(l)ackward’ over Black Studies’ history to the San Francisco State Strike, right up the contemporary colour-blind era of ‘the new Jim Crow’ in institutional settings as varied as classrooms, prison cells and chemical plants, sometimes less than a mile apart, particularly in black neighbourhoods, makes only too clear the continuing need for Black Studies: Though it has never been as easy topic of conversation for Americans, race is still a central feature of American culture and society. But America is not well practiced in confronting its complexities. That is why we need African-American studies more, not less, than ever before. It is an essential place for helping us understand and discuss the nature of blackness, the efficacy of affirmative action for African-American students, and the meaning of racial progress in the 21st century. (Rooks 2006)

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13 CRITICAL RACE THEORY Bella Adams

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ow . . . critical race Theory has gone mainstream’, at least that is what law professor Dorothy Brown imagined CRT founder Derrick Bell would have said had he been alive in March 2012 to witness the furore in certain sections of the American media following the release of footage from 1991 of Bell and Barack Obama embracing (Hadro 2012). The video shows Obama warmly introducing his former teacher to fellow Harvard law students with the phrase, ‘open your hearts and minds to the words of Derrick Bell’ (Shapiro 2012). According to right-wing columnists, Obama’s words evidence his radical politics in the past and, more worryingly for J. Christian Adams, in the present: ‘Bell’s racial world view is now manifesting in the policies of the Obama administration’ (Adams 2012). In Adams’s estimation, this worldview sanctions ‘a counter-American, collectivist idea. Reparations, race-based hiring and excusing New Black Panther voter intimidation are some of the evil fruits of Critical Race Theory’ (Adams 2012). Other evil fruits, or, less emotively, CRT’s most controversial tenets, as enacted in, for example, the O. J. Simpson trial and gangsta rap have further contributed to its mainstreaming. As Jeffrey Rosen remarks in his 1996 article, ‘The Bloods and the Crits’, ‘the rhetoric of the [CRT] movement is already reverberating beyond the lecture hall and seminar room. It is finding echoes in the courtroom, too, and in popular culture’ (Rosen 2000: 584). There are various reasons for CRT’s mainstreaming, beyond quite regular appearances in the American media. For example, Rosen offers a liberal explanation to do with its popularity amongst respected individuals of the American bar who, for him, ‘soften its more unsettling conclusions’ (Rosen 2000: 585). At once supporting and undermining this sort of explanation, the American Right from the 1980s onwards took a hard-line approach to individuals and policies variously connected to ‘a nasty racialist theory’ (Adams 2012) informed in part by black counterstories or, as Rosen proposes, ‘conspiracy theories, that are widely accepted in the black community, even though they are factually untrue’ (Rosen 2000: 584). ‘Get real’ is arguably the most appropriate response to these sorts of liberal-conservative explanations, not least because, as Bell observed in his

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1990 article ‘After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Postracial Epoch’, ‘statistics on poverty, unemployment, and income support the growing concern that the slow racial advances of the 1960s and 1970s have ended, and retrogression is well under way’ (Bell 2013: 9). It was well under way in the 1990s when ‘one-third of black Americans continue[d] to live in poverty, and the ghetto poor continue[d] to be the victims of modern “progress” ’ and ‘vicious economic conditions that make their lives hell’ (Dyson 1993: 147). And, it is well under way in the twenty-first century: ‘white family wealth in the U.S. is nine times that of African American family wealth and black young men are seven times more likely as whites to be incarcerated’ (Roediger 2008). Moreover, ‘the diseases of the poor in the U.S. are the diseases of people of color. 75 percent of all active tuberculosis cases afflict them’ (Roediger 2008). Finally, ‘host neighbourhoods of commercial hazardous waste facilities are 56% people of color whereas non-host areas are 30% people of color’ (Bullard 2007: x). Such statistics demonstrate that race matters, and for a significant number of black Americans that nothing has changed regarding contemporary race relations. However, this sort of argument meets with one of its greatest challenges in the election and re-election of the first black American president (although black political advances do have a longer history going back to 1870; see, for example, Parks and Rachlinski 2013: 198–200). Indeed, Obama’s victories seem to some to indicate everything has changed regarding race, with commentators on the Left and Right both interpreting his successes as a sign of the nation’s racial advances, if not ‘the end of race-thinking’ (Roediger 2008). For Thomas Holt, however, these ‘all or nothing’ arguments are as ‘wrong and shortsighted’ as each other, and they prevent us from understanding ‘the contradictions and incoherence . . . in contemporary racial phenomena’ (Holt 2002: 6). In political and popular cultures, one notable contradiction is black celebrity, with Holt citing Colin Powell and Michael Jackson as cases in point, and David Roediger, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods and Obama. Other notable examples are O. J. Simpson, the late rapper Tupac Shakur, described by Michael Eric Dyson as ‘the first black icon to join the pantheon of the posthumously alive, people who defeat their own death through episodic appearances in the mythological landscape’ (Dyson 2004: 482), and other artists, producers and entrepreneurs associated with hip hop. Both Holt and Roediger ask how black celebrities can prove so popular among whites when more everyday experiences tend towards hostility and violence. How is it, asks Holt, that a white crowd screams with excitement for Jackson, but for other black men ‘it screams for blood’ (Holt 2002: 7). Or, as Roediger asks, how does Obama attract the support of white racist voters, and his election victories represent to the right-wing press ‘a triumph for the nation, even while opposing his election’ (Roediger 2008). Such ironies are most powerfully felt by young black

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men, or the hip hop generation, who are ‘murdered, maimed and imprisoned in record numbers, [just as] their styles have become disproportionately influential in shaping popular culture’ (Cornel West, quoted by Kitwana 2002: 10). These contradictions and ironies necessitate rethinking about race and racism from an historical point of view. Increasingly, race scholars emphasise the dynamic nature of race and racism, often talking about racisms and ‘social formations’ (Holt 2002: 22) or ‘racial formation[s]’ (Omi and Winant 1994: 50). For instance, Dyson insists ‘we must account for the differences between racism in the nineties and racism in the sixties, and then present a progressive race theory that addresses racism’s cruel persistence’ (Dyson 1993: 147), particularly for those most at risk from ‘the New Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2012: 2). CRT scholar Patricia Williams also recognises ‘racism’s hardy persistence and immense adaptability’ (Williams 1998: 14), with Holt adding that although ‘racism . . . is never entirely new’, this does not discount the need for a theory that understands how ‘race is . . . constructed differently at different historical moments and in different social contexts’ (Holt 2002: 1–2). Holt argues for understanding ‘historically specific “racisms” and not a singular ahistorical racism’ in relation to other social phenomena’, for example, the US political economy and the globalised economy (Holt 2002: 21–2). Dyson, too, and race scholars more overtly committed to CRT also insist on the importance of taking into account ‘new-age global economics’ (Williams 1998: 12) and other experiences like class, gender, sex, religion and geography that intersect with race (Dyson 1993: 154). Although the racial formation of the United States is dynamic, the continuation of racial double standards beyond the civil rights era into a supposedly postracial epoch provides a more realistic explanation for the current popularity of CRT. It has gone mainstream not because a black and/or leftist elite promoted and misrepresented it, as Rosen contends, but because CRT offers persuasive descriptions of the complicated relationships between race and power in American society. CRT also offers various strategies for racial justice and, increasingly, other social and environmental justices, some of which, as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic propose in their discussion of the future of race in America may become ‘the New Civil Rights Orthodoxy’, while others may be ignored, rejected or partially incorporated (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 148–9). Unlike Bell’s imagined future in ‘After We’ve Gone’, a satirical piece that depicts white America agreeing to sell its black population to aliens to alleviate the national debt, Delgado and Stefancic’s imaginings over two decades later represent a future where blacks and other non-whites have not gone. If anything, they outnumber whites, with this demographic change offering, so Delgado and Stefancic hope, the possibility of a third Reconstruction against further retrogression; if not, in their worst case scenario, race war and

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neocolonialism (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 145–6). More or less from Bell onwards, CRT has asked important questions about the limited outcomes of the first and second Reconstructions in and after the 1860s and 1960s respectively. CRT also demands a third Reconstruction and ways to bring it about, not so much slowly perhaps, since gradualism in matters of racial justice was a main cause of concern for Bell and his peers, as ‘surely’ and ‘irreversibly’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 145). This chapter is organised into thematic sections identifying the key tenets of critical race theory at the point of their emergence and in more recent formulations. As should be clear already, the mainstreaming of CRT is a new development, whether in and by the American media or in the work of race scholars, often as these two fields intersect, for instance, Williams’s articles for The Nation and her madwomanprofessor blog. The fact that CRT has been so influential on race-thinking in the US also makes it mainstream, with race scholars not explicitly associated with this field taking on board a number of its insights as standard, most notably, the critique of liberalism, which, together with an analysis of CRT’s beginnings and influences, is the focus of section one. Sections two and three explore other standardised ideas, specifically the narrative turn, with CRT scholars using literary terms, for example, ‘melodrama’ (Bell 2004: 6), ‘pantomime’ (Williams 1998: 15), ‘STORYTELLING, COUNTERSTORYTELLING, AND “NAMING ONE’S OWN REALITY” ’, (Delgado and Stefancic 2013: 61) to emphasise that race is performed or narrativised, most powerfully in contemporary postracial or colour-blind discourses that maintain white privilege. Section four discusses how CRT has moved beyond the black/white binary, to, in William’s words ‘a more complex hybridising of racial stereotypes with the fundamentalisms of gender, class, ethnicity, religion’ (Williams 1998: 12).

Beginnings, Influences, and the Critique of Liberalism Much critical race scholarship emerges in relation to high-profile race cases, both past and present, because the majority of its key figures, for example, Bell, Delgado, Stefancic, Williams, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and so on are law professors. CRT began in American university law departments, particularly those influenced by Critical Legal Studies, or CLS, a leftist ideological movement that disputed the liberal Enlightenment assumption that ‘law was . . . distinguished from politics because politics was open-ended, subjective, discretionary, and ideological, whereas law was determinate, objective, bounded, and neutral’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xiv). Deconstructing this distinction along the lines of CLS founder, Alan Freeman, who stated that ‘I cannot regard the court as autonomous and separate from the society that orchestrates it’ (Freeman 1995: 45), critical legal scholars argue that the law is discursive and so operates within

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dominant power structures. As such, it is marked by indeterminacy and contradiction, along with serving a legitimating function vis-à-vis these structures, enough for cultural theorist Cornell West to describe the twentieth century as ‘barbaric . . . for the legal academy, which has, wittingly or not, constructed for the justificatory framework . . . shameful social practices that continue to this day’ (West 1995: xii). The ‘critical’ in CLS (and CRT) derives in part from European theories, including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critical theory, Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony theory, and some versions of postmodernism that challenge Enlightenment ideals from a perspective focused on self-critique and ultimately social liberation. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘The Enlightenment must examine itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed’, an examination focused on ‘the destructive aspect of progress’, or the ways in which modern political economic systems, so capable of promoting social justice, in fact do the opposite, as was made especially clear to them by European fascism and, increasingly, American capitalism (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: xv, xiii). World War II also helped to highlight the irony of fighting fascism abroad when black Americans experienced fascism at home under Jim Crow, not remedied in any substantial way by laws for racial reconstruction. The failure of laws such as the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to secure little more than symbolic equality represents a further irony, summed up in the title of Freeman’s article, ‘Legitimizing Racial Discrimination in Antidiscrimination Laws’. Brown arguably serves as an originary case for critical legal and race scholars, not least because they experienced or witnessed its impact first hand, from its promising beginnings, as, in Bell’s terms, ‘the Holy Grail of racial justice’ that ‘energized the law, encouraged most black people, enraged a great many white people’ (Bell 2004: 3–4), to its transformation into policies that legitimated the dominant racial hierarchy. Preoccupied with how this transformation was able to occur, Freeman accounts for it in terms of ‘the perpetrator perspective’ (Freeman 1995: 29), whereas Bell analyses it according to ‘the interest-convergence theory’ (Bell 2004: 4). Although different, each of these explanations offers a critique of liberal discourses on race in America, specifically the determination to see ‘racial discrimination not as conditions but as actions . . . inflicted on the victim by the perpetrator’, the remedy to which is the neutralisation of the perpetrator’s inappropriate actions, rather than the victim’s inappropriate conditions (Freeman 1995: 29), unless, of course, as Bell argues, these conditions, most notably slavery and segregation threaten national interests. According to him, ‘black rights are recognized and protected when and only so long as policymakers perceive that such advances will further [dominant white] interests that are their primary concern’ (Bell 2004: 49). For some, Bell’s rereading of Brown constitutes sacrilege, perhaps making it the first in a series of CRT’s so-called

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evil fruits, but interest-convergence theory does have its basis in American history and culture. ‘One need not look far’, insists Mary Dudziak, ‘to find vintage ’50s Cold War ideology in primary historical documents relating to Brown. For example, the amicus brief filed in Brown by the U.S. Justice Department argued that desegregation was in the national interest in part due to foreign policy concerns’ (Dudziak 2013: 137). Moreover, one need not look far to find further support for critical analyses of liberal discourses on race by black Americans who have provided a wealth of commentary, or counterstories on the limits of American liberalism under various racial formations, from slavery and segregation, as evidenced in W. E. B. DuBois’s question, ‘What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? . . . To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, unholy licence’ (DuBois 1998: 14), and Malcolm X’s question, ‘What do you call a black man with a PhD? And . . . the answer is “nigger” ’ (Dalton 1995: 80), through to a postracial colour-blind epoch in which certain laws, for example, California’s Proposition 209 (1996) and Michigan’s Proposal 2 (2006) serve to undermine affirmative action. These laws ‘prohibit their state governments from discriminating or granting “preferential treatment . . . on the basis of race” ’, even as a way to alleviate historic racism (Carbado and Harris 2013: 25). These examples help to show that African Americans were really already critical, and that the influences of CRT exceed European critical theories and Critical Legal Studies. For Delgado and others, moreover, these theories seem too closely aligned to ‘imperial scholarship’ (Delgado 2013b: 53), a Eurocentric or white tradition that utilises various silencing mechanisms, most commonly, as Harlon L. Dalton notes, speaking for and about blacks to ensure ‘our absence’ when ‘we do have a hell of a lot to offer’ that ‘we learned from life as well as from books’ (Dalton 1995: 80–1).

Learning from Life and Books, or the Importance of Experience and Narrative CRT breaks with CLS mainly on the issues of experience and by extension rights, with, for example, Anthony Cook, Crenshaw, Dalton and Matsuda arguing that CLS is too abstract and too dismissive of liberalism. Instead, CRT seeks to offer more thorough analyses of liberalism and postmodernism based on black and other non-white experiences, or, respectively, ‘engaging in [liberal] rights discourse . . . as an act of self-defence’ (Crenshaw 1995a: 117) and ‘more contextual experiential deconstruction’ (Cook 1995: 101). In this way, CRT seeks to resolve racial discrimination in ways palpable, even and especially to those located at the very bottom of American society. As Delgado and Stefancic put it, ‘If laws do not relieve the distress of the poorest group – or, worse, if they compound it, we should reject them’, or, at the very least, treat them with suspicion (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 27).

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Bell did precisely this when he saw that Brown ‘no longer meshed’ with the requirements of black schoolchildren (2004: 4), as do judges who sentence young black men to shorter and, for them, fairer prison sentences in order to circumvent police racial profiling. Another form of circumvention also occurs among black jurors via jury nullification, which privileges, as Paul Butler explains, justice and conscience over the law, and recognises the importance of developing ‘noncriminal ways of addressing antisocial [non-violent] conduct’ such as theft, perjury and drugs offences that are often ‘a predictable response to oppression’ (Butler 2013a: 283). Butler also proposes ‘a hip-hop theory of punishment’ delivered by black communities that promotes respect, sorely lacking in the conventional system of criminal justice involving mass incarceration (Butler 2013b: 533). These examples represent CRT’s ‘call to context’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2013: 3) and they demonstrate the importance of, in Matsuda’s words, ‘looking to the bottom’, to ‘the actual experience, history, culture, and intellectual tradition of people of color in America’ as the basis for new and valuable sources of knowledge, power and politics (Matsuda 1995: 63). Importantly, however, looking to the bottom also entails representing it, and this process risks ‘cooptation’ and ‘utopianism’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: 61), or potentially repeating the mistakes of imperial scholarship. CRT thus devises certain strategies for limiting appropriation, all of which involve self-critique and the reformulation of categories underlying philosophical and political liberalisms. A good many of these strategies criticise ’the implied objective, neutral, and impersonal voice of mainstream scholarship’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: 314), and in so doing render the scholar something of a Gramscian ’organic intellectual’ (Matsuda 1995: 63; Cook 1995: 90) grounded in specifically black and other non-white traditions and experiences that are understood in their diversity. Fundamental to the articulation of this diversity is storytelling and counterstorytelling, or the narrative turn. Autobiography, biography, chronicle, parable, satire and other overtly rhetorical forms resist a single meaning or interpretation, thereby reducing the risk of total co-optation, and they also highlight the ways in which dominant views of race are narrativised. More precisely, as Delgado explains in ‘Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative’, stories and storytelling have become increasingly important to CRT because they are a means by which social reality is constructed. In short, stories have ‘reality-creating potential’, some, the dominant stories of the ‘in-group’, more so than others because they produce and reproduce ‘the prevailing mindset by means of which members of the dominant group justify the world as it is, that is, with whites on top and browns and blacks at the bottom’ (Delgado 2013c: 71–2). Delgado’s emphasis on mindset, or ‘thinking, mental categorization, attitude, and discourse’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 21) as a powerful means of racial discrimination ties him to the idealist school of CRT, which gained prominence over the realist school that dominated early CRT and emphasised the material and economic bases for

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racial discrimination. The differences between these two schools notwithstanding, Delgado and other critical race scholars have negotiated between them and established a middle ground that recognises ‘words . . . wound’, with racial/racist insults having psychological, sociological and political effects (Delgado 2013a: 179). While in-group words and stories wound, out-group counterstories can function in creative and destructive ways: they can ‘build consensus, a common culture of shared understandings, and a deeper, more vital ethics’, which also draw on a long history of black and other non-white storytelling traditions in order to render visible and ultimately destroy the taken-for-granted authority of the dominant mindset (Delgado 2013c: 72). Storytelling thus serves to highlight the narrative and ideological underpinnings of dominant racial hierarchies that once destabilised help to reveal how experiences and events generate multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings, as well as offering insights into alternative and typically silenced or invisible realities. The narrative turn is sometimes understood as CRT’s second ‘evil fruit’, as evidenced in, for example, the O. J. Simpson double-murder trial (1994), specifically Johnnie L. Cochran’s defence strategy of legal storytelling in which, as Rosen reads it, black jury members were instructed to ignore the evidence and instead respond to ‘group solidarity and racial essentialism’ in order to ‘ “send a message” to the racist police that letting a murderer go free was an appropriate payback for a legacy of state-sponsored oppression’ (Rosen 2000: 587–8). This legacy was clearly evidenced in the Rodney King trial in 1992, which saw his attackers acquitted despite video evidence against them. This outcome made clear to blacks that ‘even when they played by the rules, they could expect nothing in return – when the evidence was clear as day, it could be explained away’ (Dyson 2004: 62). While this explaining away of evidence did generate outrage, for example, the LA riots, it was not generally considered to distort the facts. By way of contrast, Cochran’s distortion of Simpson as a ‘White Man’s Negro’ into ‘blackness-as-oppression’ (Dyson 2004: 51–2) received widespread criticism. In Rosen’s view, ‘Cochran refused to let facts get in the way of his fiction’ (Rosen 2000: 586). Simpson’s racial ambiguity worked to his legal but perhaps not personal benefit, although, as Dyson contends, it was key prosecution witness police detective Mark Fuhrman’s racism and incompetence that ultimately set him free. These race trials help to show that ‘stories can . . . deceive’, which is why CRT scholars Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry insist that legal ‘storytelling must include efforts to ensure the truthfulness and typicality of the story’ (Farber and Sherry 2013: 723).

CRT’s Counterstory: Everyday Racism, White Privilege and Colour-Blindness A persistent theme in CRT is that ‘racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2013; 2), whether in macro or micro forms

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such as structural racism, right down to everyday encounters in ‘subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are “put downs” of blacks by offenders’ (C. Pierce, quoted in Davis 2013: 190). CRT has contributed to changes in the ways racism(s) is understood, from individualised actions, or ‘a matter of prejudiced attitudes or bigotry on the one hand, and discriminatory practices on the other’, to an understanding of racial inequality as a condition, or, in Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s words, ‘a structural feature of U.S. society, the product of centuries of systematic exclusion, exploitation, and disregard of racially defined minorities’ (Omi and Winant 1994: 69). Challenging the liberal ideal of historical and political progress, structural racism renders the US a white supremacist state, despite some civil rights advances and re-election of a black president. While early CRT texts used ‘white supremacy’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xiii), it is arguably more common to see ‘white privilege’, ‘normative whiteness’ (Williams 1998: 4) or ‘white-over-color ascendancy’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 7) in more recent CRT texts. Although white supremacy is only too noticeable, typically because of its association with the Ku Klux Klan or explicitly fascist groups, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, neo-fascist groups concerned about white victimisation and white rights such as the National Association for the Advancement of White People, white privilege in contrast seems almost unnoticeable, if not invisible – at least to dominant whites who tend to understand racism in terms of colour-consciousness and a problem for blacks and other non-whites. For dominant whites, there is little understanding that they, too, are coloured or raced, and that their whiteness has a history, starting officially in 1790 when ‘Congress limited naturalization to “white persons” ’ and retained a racial requirement for citizenship until 1952 (Haney López 2013: 75–81). Such a requirement also suggests that racism is a white problem, albeit one that is most powerfully felt by blacks and other non-whites. While Critical White Studies, which emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s, is often considered responsible for this new emphasis on whiteness, there is no shortage of examples of blacks writing about whites in critical ways well before this date. In 1935 DuBois discussed white privilege in public institutions, even as it applies to working-class whites: ‘It must be remembered’, insists DuBois, ‘that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white’ (DuBois 1998: 700). Also commenting on her public and psychological wages, albeit in 1988, Peggy McIntosh identifies fifty advantages she has as a white over non-whites, including ‘being told that people of her color made American heritage or civilization what it is; not needing to educate her children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily protection; and never being asked to speak for all people of her racial group’ (Wildman and Davis 2013: 797). In fact, McIntosh

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does not even need to be told that history, civilisation, the media, the retail and service industries, figurative language and imagery, and so on, are white since, as she says, ‘I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social’ (McIntosh 1988). Whiteness is so normal that it does not even need to be named, or ‘marked in the indicative there! there!’, this ‘exnomination of whiteness’, as Williams phrases it, representing ‘the beginning of an imbalance from which so much, so much else flowed’ (Williams 1998: 5). These strategies of not noticing race and not naming whiteness demonstrate white privilege, as well as being fundamental to colour-blindness, as this ideology differently circulates in a range of conservative and liberal racial projects. For critical race scholars, colour-blindness is both impossible and undesirable, if not ‘perverse’, notwithstanding a few noteworthy moments in American history, namely, Justice John Harlan’s (1896) and Martin Luther King’s (1963) calls for equality regardless of race consistent with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 26). Such moments may be ‘well-chosen temporal slice[s]’, as Williams admits, but they do at the same time allow her to dream of a colour-blind future of racial equality, beyond idealist and universalist appropriations of colour-blindness – ‘I don’t think about color, therefore your problems don’t exist’ and ‘We are the world! We are the children!’ (Williams 1998: 11, 2–3, 6). Rather perversely, these appropriations are blind to the reality of race and racism in contemporary American society. More so than the 1960s and 1970s, a period of race-consciousness in the sense that race and racism were discussed out loud by racists, cultural nationalists and in Executive Orders 10925 (1961) and 11246 (1965) promoting affirmative action, the contemporary period is marked by the sense that ‘race is something about which we dare not speak in polite social company’ (Williams 1998: 15). While Williams compares race to a ‘public secret’ (Williams 1998: 9) that only those not yet educated into dominant racial etiquette dare to speak, Lawrence says it is a ‘forbidden conversation’ and alongside words like ‘segregation’, ‘racism, stigma, or white flight . . . rarely appears in public policy discussions or private conversations’ (Lawrence 2013: 49). Williams’s reference to polite society, reinforced by Lawrence’s assertion that ‘people of good will’ often feel offended by, or fearful of, such conversations (Lawrence 2013: 49), introduces a class element to silence about race and racism. Yet, not naming, not noticing and, in its latest formulation, ‘noticing but not considering race’ are for Neil Gotanda and other CRT scholars ‘self-contradictory because it is impossible not to think about a subject without having first thought about it at least a little’ (Gotanda 2013: 35–6). Gotanda goes on to add that colour-blind non-recognition and non-consideration of race and, by extension, racial subordination invariably reinforce white privilege against

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the assumption of moral and legal superiority of so-called (race-)neutrality as it occurs in everyday American life, through to education, employment and the law. Following this logic, colour-blindness is not anti-racist, as liberal whites believe, and neither is it opposed to colour-consciousness. The debate about affirmative action helps to highlight the similarities between these seemingly conflicting discourses, which share a commitment to racial diversity while simultaneously maintaining white privilege. On a literal level, ‘blindness’ and ‘consciousness’ or ‘sightedness’ are opposed, an opposition that the Right reinforces when it argues that race-conscious affirmative action is a form of reverse racism that is unconstitutional, un-American and contrary to the goals of the Civil Rights Movement in its unequal privileging of supposedly less qualified blacks and non-whites in jobs and education. For liberals and conservatives alike, Charles Murray among them, ‘race is not a morally admissible reason for treating one person differently from another. Period’ (Murray 1994: 223). Such (race-)thinking underpins efforts to eliminate affirmative action, most recently, Michigan’s Proposal 2 and California’s Proposition 209, whose advocates regard ‘affirmative action [a]s the quintessential example of a preference on the basis of race; the policy benefits blacks and Latinos and burdens whites and, in some formulations, Asian Americans’ (Carbado and Harris 2013: 25). Legal cases, for example, in education, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), Hopwood v. Texas (1996) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), turn on this racial preferencing of blacks and Latinos and burdening of whites. In ‘The New Racial Preferences’, Devon Carbado and Harris conduct ‘a thought experiment’ with regard to Proposal 2 and Proposition 209, focused on whether or not colour-blindness can be properly put into practice in the education admissions process. An important part of this process is the personal statement, with Carbado and Harris asking, ‘what do antipreference mandates require with respect to personal statements?’ (Carbado and Harris 2013: 25). For their imaginary student, Maria Hernadez from East Los Angeles, these mandates require her to remove her name, her address and any direct references to her race from her personal statement, although with or without these racial signifiers, Carbado and Harris argue, race remains fundamental to the admissions process as either ‘an elephant in [the admission officer’s] mind’ or as a ‘default presumption . . . that the applicant is white’ (Carbado and Harris 2013: 26). While Maria can choose whether to remove racial signifiers from her personal statement, making her ‘racial identity essential or inessential, salient or insignificant’, possibly regardless of her own experiences that may help to make her statement intelligible to the admissions officer, Carbado and Harris point out that this choice does not exert the same pressures on a white applicant (Carbado and Harris 2013: 26). Although a ‘racially cleansed’ statement may make it unintelligible and unrecognisable, there is also a strong chance that adherence to colour-blindness may also be rewarded. For these

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reasons, Carbado and Harris conclude, ‘Proposition 209 and Proposal 2 neither eliminate race from admissions, nor make admissions processes racially neutral. Both initiatives produce a new racial preference that has gone largely unnoticed’ (Carbado and Harris 2013: 27). Colour-blind discourses, from the New Right’s use of supposedly raceneutral code words in the 1980s and 1990s, most notably, (black) ‘welfare queens’, (black) ‘career criminals’ and (Asian/Latino) ‘immigrants’ and neoconservative efforts at this time and after to endorse universalism and liberalism in the value accorded to ‘merit’ and ‘excellence’, through to the new racial preferences, serve to render affirmative action as either undeserved or unnecessary. Under the closely related liberal racial project, emphasis is also placed on securing racial advances socially and economically as part of ‘a transracial political agenda’ that recognises the interrelationship between class and race, albeit in hierarchical terms (Winant 2004: 63). This complicated set of responses to colour-conscious affirmative action that regard it as racist helps to explain the shift towards (race-)neutral policies, including, as of late, colour-blind affirmative action on moral and, perhaps more tellingly, on legal grounds, arguably consistent with Bell’s interest-convergence theory. In his discussions of affirmative action, Delgado argues that the neutralisation or at the very least the minimisation of race so that it informs only a small part of educational and employment selection processes is primarily for reasons of white self-interest and ‘social utility, not reparations or rights’ (Delgado 1991: 398). As such, ‘the beneficiaries of history’s largest affirmative action program’ can feel good about themselves. ‘Well’, says Delgado, ‘if you were a member of the majority group and invented something that cut down the competition, made you feel good and virtuous, made minorities grateful and humble’, as well as ‘guilty, undeserving, and stigmatized . . . you would feel pretty pleased with yourself’ (Delgado 2000a: 398). Similarly, for Bell, this form of affirmative action is ‘affirmative discrimination’ since it implies ‘noblesse oblige, not legal duty, and suggests the dispensation of charity rather than the granting of much-deserved relief’ (Bell 2004: 140). Thus understood, affirmative discrimination reeks of paternalism, and it leaves black and other non-white ‘beneficiaries’ feeling stigmatised, so much so that (appropriated) colour-conscious and colour-blind public policies can divert attention from the complicated ways race and power intersect in American society as a system of disadvantage and advantage that ‘no amount of hand-waving and obfuscation can eliminate’ (Gotanda 1991: 37). This long history of white affirmative action that most whites, both conservative and liberal, seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone renounce has led a number of radical race scholars to demand the abolition of whiteness. Following Roediger’s argument that ‘whiteness is not merely oppressive and false, it is nothing but oppressive and false. . . . It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom

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one can hold back’ (Roediger 1994: 13), Noel Ignatiev and fellow ‘race traitors’ insist, ‘treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity’ (‘What We Believe’). White abolitionism seeks to abolish whiteness as a socio-economic position, not white people per se, only those whites who think and act white by not recognising, opposing and disrupting white privilege as it operates in both macro and micro forms in institutions and in everyday encounters. Obviously, white abolitionism has its critics, mainly whites, but the black scholar Winant also doubts whether whiteness can be abolished because of its relational and dynamic relationship to blackness. At the same time, he does recognise that Critical White Studies and white abolitionism have helped to ensure that whites and whiteness ‘can no longer be exempted from the comprehensive racialization process that is the hallmark of U.S. history and social structure’ (Winant 2004: 65).

Counterstories to CRT’s Counterstory: Beyond the Black/White Binary, Intersectionality and Interconnectivity In its mainstreaming, CRT is increasingly marked by interdisciplinarity, with race scholars using a CRT perspective to understand how race matters beyond the law, for example, in education, the social sciences, and, more recently, the humanities. Gloria Ladson-Billings’s question, ‘Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?’ (Ladson-Billings 1998: 7) can arguably be extended to other disciplines such as Cultural Studies. In their contributions to the 2013 edition of Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, andré douglas pond cummings and Butler both discuss hip hop. Noting ‘a furious kinship’ between CRT and hip hop, specifically in the work of Bell and Public Enemy, and Crenshaw and Queen Latifah, cummings details how each movement privileges narrative and shares ‘a deep desire to give voice to a discontent brewed by silence [or colour-blindness], and a dedication to the continuing struggle for race equality in the United States’ (cummings 2013: 107). Although identified by Public Enemy’s Chuck D as the ‘black CNN’ (quoted by cummings 2010: 115 and Butler 2013b: 533), a phrase that highlights hip hop’s pedagogical function, hip hop, like CRT, repeatedly meets with criticism, which at its most vitriolic is held responsible for the ‘nastiness’ it represents. Rather than understanding CRT and hip hop in terms of ‘nasty racialis[ms]’ (Adams 2012), cummings and Butler regard them as counterstories, sometimes, as with Crenshaw and Queen Latifah, feminist counterstories to a maledominated counterstory: ‘Who said the ladies couldn’t make it?, you must be blind / If you don’t believe, well here, listen to this’ (Queen Latifah’s ‘Ladies First’, quoted by cummings 2010: 117). Representations of misogyny, typically in gangsta rap, with its references to ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’, are a main point of focus in ‘the hip hop generation’s war of the sexes’, although, as Bakari Kitwana notes, this war is increasingly recognised as a product of white racism,

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economic deprivation and the dehumanising experiences of mass incarceration of young black men (Kitwana 2002: 90). In addition to representing these conditions, at their most dismal in the criminal justice system, Butler argues that hip hop may also offer a more effective theory of punishment based on community justice and respect, as opposed to ‘sleeping on the floor in cages . . . / The system ain’t reformatory, it’s only purgatory’ (Immortal Technique, quoted by Butler 2013b: 543). CRT’s mainstreaming has also influenced the development of subgroups such as Critical Whiteness Studies, LatCrit, AsianCrit and, more recently, BritCrit that focus on racialisation, predominantly in Western multicultural societies. Delgado and Stefancic use the phrase ‘differential racialization’ to refer to ‘the ways the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market’ or foreign policy (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 9). For example, LatCrit scholar George A. Martinez observes these differences with regard to the racialisation of Mexican Americans, who at different times in their history have been defined as ‘cowhites when this suited the dominant group – and non-white when necessary to protect Anglo privilege and supremacy’ (Martinez 2013: 491). Most recently, the racialisation of Arab Americans has seen them move ‘between zones of whiteness, Otherness, and color’ (Shryock 2008: 111–12), typically to their disadvantage with regard to civil rights and racial profiling, especially (but not exclusively) since the 9/11 terrorist attacks: ‘The logic of post-September 11 profiling turns on equating being a Muslim (or Arab or Middle Eastern [or South Asian]) with being a terrorist’ (Ahmad 2013: 496). Moreover, this event has further undermined legal efforts to challenge racial profiling, which following 9/11 was regarded as justifiable in and beyond the popular imagination for reasons of national security. As Muneer I. Ahmad notes, ‘Whereas 80 percent of Americans opposed racial profiling before September 11, after the attacks almost the same percentage favoured it for those assumed to be Arab or Muslim’ (Ahmad 2013: 494). Differential racialisation represents an attempt to move beyond the dominant black/white racial paradigm in a multicultural American society. In his analysis of this paradigm, LatCrit scholar Juan F. Perea discusses the role of leading textbooks on race, specifically Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992) and Cornel West’s Race Matters (1993) in perpetuating the black/white binary in ahistorical and politically indifferent ways. According to Perea, this paradigm suggests that the US has ‘only a single race problem’ between whites and blacks, ‘rather than a more complex set of racisms’ as experienced by other non-white, nonblack Americans, who seem to function for Hacker, West and other leading writers on race as little more than ‘unexplained analogies to Blacks’ (Perea 2013: 463–4). While there are similarities between non-white experiences of racism, as evidenced in, for example, Jim Crow signs such as ‘NO DOGS

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and CHINESE ALLOWED’ or ‘NO DOGS, NEGROES, MEXICANS’, this analogous relationship is reductive. Not only does it risk hierarchising racisms, even to the point that Latino/a, Asian American, Arab Americans and American Indians are not considered ‘subject to real racism’, but it also marginalises the fact ‘racism is much more systemic and pervasive than is usually admitted’ (Perea 2013: 464). For these reasons, Perea argues that the dominant black/white paradigm disrupts all non-white efforts for racial justice, and does little to challenge non-white, non-black stereotyping and silence. ‘It is time’, he says, ‘to ask hard questions of our leading writers on race’, and ‘to demand better answers to these questions about inclusion, exclusion, and racial presence’ consistent with historical and demographic facts (Perea 2013: 464). While differential racialisation responds to the racial complexity of American society, the CRT concept of intersectionality explores, in Williams’s words, ‘the hybridising of racial stereotypes with the fundamentalisms of gender, class, ethnicity, religion’, alongside globalised labour and environmental issues (Williams 1998: 12). Taking issue with binary thinking in ways similar to nonblack non-white CRT scholars, feminists and, more recently, queer theorists have also complicated CRT’s counterstory with their own counterstories arguably as a way of challenging the hierarchical arrangement of competing social oppressions that forces ‘divided loyalties’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: 354), ultimately to the advantage of the dominant whites. While it is possible to see these counterstories to CRT’s counterstory as new developments, in the sense that the US is understood as more multicultural today relative to its formation in the 1960s and 1970s in mainstream and identity politics discourses, it is also the case that the intersectionality, specifically the intersection of race and gender was already really vital to early CRT scholarship. The emergence of CLS and CRT cannot be separated from feminist legal theory, specifically ‘fem-crit’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxiii) and the insights of, for example, Crenshaw in ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’. Emphasising the importance of understanding intraracial differences that are typically overlooked in traditional identity politics, Crenshaw writes that when these political discourses ‘expound identity as “woman” or “person of color” as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling’ (Crenshaw 1995b: 357). Other fem-crits such as Williams, Taunya Lovell Banks, Dorothy Roberts and Regina Austin, also describe the experience of being asked to fit into an either/or paradigm: ‘I am categorized as being part of a black world, or a white world, or a female world, or a world of poverty and cultural deprivation’ (Lovell Banks 1995: 331). In his analysis of intersectionality, Delgado notes in one of his imaginary dialogues with his student Rodrigo that this pressure to conform to one paradigm, and, moreover, to ‘define who is “divisive” ’ reveals a power dynamic between addresser and

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addressee in favour of the former (Delgado 2000b: 255). Fem-crits challenge this dynamic by highlighting how ‘racism and sexism are interlocking, mutually reinforcing components of a system of dominance rooted in [white] patriarchy’ (Caldwell 2013: 364). Most at risk from this system are black female rape and drug victims who are treated as ‘less believable or less important’ and less human than their white female peers (Crenshaw 1995b: 369; Roberts 1995: 405). Beyond fem-crit analyses of stereotypes of black female sexuality are those addressing the intersection of sexuality and race from a queer CRT perspective. In ‘Out Yet Unseen: A Racial Critique of Gay and Lesbian Legal Theory and Political Discourse’, Darren Lenard Hutchinson focuses on the brutal murder in 1990 of Julio Rivera by three white supremacists, one of whom later admitted he killed this working-class Latino because he was gay. Yet Rivera’s sexuality and how it intersected with issues of race and class were, as Hutchinson explains, ‘largely omitted from political discourse’, with the police and the media failing to recognise Rivera as ‘gay and the victim of antigay violence’ (Hutchinson 2000: 326–7). Utilising race and class stereotypes of Latin machismo and violence, the police and the media reinforced heterosexism and homophobia, even making Rivera ‘responsible for his own murder’ (Hutchinson 2000: 328). According to Hutchinson, the determination by the police and media, on the one hand, and gay and lesbian legal theorists, on the other, to privilege either race/class or sexuality ultimately ‘denies the benefits of freedom – life – to persons who suffer multiple forms of oppression’ (Hutchinson 2000: 332). Queer theorist Francisco Valdes uses the concept of ‘queer interconnectivity’ (Valdes 2000: 339) as a means to address the ways in which heterosexism, homophobia, racism and classism work together. These fem-crits and queer-crits both emphasise that intersectionality and interconnectivity are not intended to divide and hierarchise groups but rather to build coalitions. For them, intersectionality and interconnectivity ‘provide a basis for reconceptualizing race as a coalition between men and women’ (Crenshaw 1995b: 377) in their diversity, including those most at risk from personal and public acts of violence because of their class, gender, sexuality, religion and race. For Valdes and these CRT scholars, ‘inclusionary perspectives and projects are not only necessary, but infinitely more enlightening and empowering than their opposites. This is because particularity provides specific but only partial insight’ of intersecting, interconnecting and mutually reinforcing structures of domination and subordination that are ultimately detrimental to ‘all of us’ (Valdes 2000: 337). Whether they emerge in relation to legal cases such as Brown, Bakke and Grutter, trials involving black celebrities (Simpson, Mike Tyson, Tupac Shakur) and black teenagers, for example, Trayvon Martin, Obama’s substitute self and son, futuristic fantasies of a postracial epoch brought about by

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deportation (Bell 2013; Delagado 2013d), or hip hop culture, CRT counterstories, in all their diversity, serve both pedagogical and political functions inside the legal academy and beyond. CRT counterstories equip people with a critical understanding of the complicated ways power structures operate in American society, enough to usher in, so CRT scholars hope, a third Reconstruction, if not a properly colour-blind future.

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INTRODUCTION: GENDER

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areth Longstaff deals with the rapidly developing and increasingly important field of queer theory in Chapter 14, noting how it has radically problematised accepted notions of gender and sexual identity. Queer theory, he argues, has been a source of striking new readings of both media and cultural texts that continue to inspire commentators, and its influence can be felt right across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. A consciously interdisciplinary project, queer theory has drawn extensively on deconstruction and poststructuralist thought, as well as LGBT and second wave feminism. As Longstaff makes clear, queer theory represents a concerted challenge to many of the cultural certainties on which our society is based, and goes on finding new ways of doing so. In Chapter 15, Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill investigate the growing interest in Masculinity Studies, a field that also has notable interdisciplinary implications. They consider the various critiques that have been constructed of the concept of hegemonic masculinity, and how these have impacted on areas such as queer and trans theory in recent years. Given the inequalities that still exist, and are in some senses becoming even more pronounced, between men and women in the wake of recent socio-political crises, they conclude that there is a greater urgency than ever to understand what lies behind men’s practices.

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14 QUEER THEORY Gareth Longstaff

Introduction

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he origins of queer theory can only be grasped if the paradoxes which precariously outline its meaning, purpose and use in the field of critical theory are examined. In a variety of cultural and critical settings queer theory has come to be associated with how queer bodies and queer identities are expressed as well as attending to how and why gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, cross-dressing, inter-sexual and pan-sexual subjects articulate their ‘queerness’ as queer. In this way gendered bodies and sexual identities which inform and invert how bodily identity is articulated have also become crucial to queer theorisation and the means by which queer can also be outlined as a way of thinking or producing critical responses to several paradigms of critical theory. Additionally, we may also suggest that the origins and foundations of queer theory can be seen in deconstruction and poststructuralist theory, the radical and liberationist LGBT politics from the 1960s onwards, branches of second wave feminism, gay male studies, and more complexly in aspects of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis. As well as this and since its inception from the late 1980s and into the early 1990s it is apparent that queer theory may be most productively understood as a concept that has been formed less in relation to an ontological identity or cogent epistemology and more in terms of an indeterminate position or identification. Key texts which summarise and in some respects canonise queer theory, such as Anne-Marie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996) and Donald E. Hall’s Queer Theories (2003), have given rise to a critical trajectory of queer that has been employed as a methodology, a scholarly discipline and a way of thinking critically about gender, sexuality, the body and identity. As Jagose notes, it resists ‘that model of stability – which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effects – queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire’ (Jagose 1996: 3). These overlaps and inconsistencies which circulate in relation to identity are also the point of entry for critical theory which employs queer theory to read and reread media and cultural texts as queer.

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In light of this queer theory is a self-consciously difficult theoretical discipline to position and use because it ‘describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire’ (Jagose 1996: 3). In so doing it deliberately addresses this disjointedness as both a theoretical and methodological tool of intervention and interrogation to understand its own value and purpose. It is also a discipline that examines the prevailing intersections that occur between desire and language, to (re)situate marginalised identities allied to sexual and gendered modes of cultural or political resistance based on hegemonic and heterosexual modes of surveillance and regulation. This chapter will examine how those knowingly incoherent discourses of desire and language relate to the production, reception and future of queer theory as intentionally unstable, multiple and volatile. In this way queer theory is in itself linked to desire as an unpredictable and impulsive force; one which, like queer theory, seems to be imbued with the intersections of liminal, schismatic and dissident longing. In the last half century we have also seen that queer as a critical and theoretical paradigm is almost akin to desire in that it is ‘something in language but not [in] itself linguistic’ (Dean 2000: 203). In this vein queer is a trope and paradigm in language that is riven by the paradoxes of that language. It is also something that can and cannot be spoken of, can and cannot be seen, and a lot like desire, queer theory is a critical discourse that is always open to unpredictable means of expression, often tethered to impulsive, precarious and impermeable practices. It may be that queer is a way of thinking rather than a way of acting. As we will also see, once it is subject to modes of queer embodiment and the politics of a distinctly queer act then its power to subvert and undermine hegemonic modes of domination and normalisation are somehow extinguished. The chronological qualification of coherent dates, events and representational images which act as dividing lines has determined a precarious ‘history of queer’ through aspects of heterosexual definition and containment. Since the late 1960s projects associated with Western gay male liberation have constructed and examined homosexual subcultures in an attempt to displace the position of heterosexual masculinity as an oppressive regulator and subjugator of identity. This has not been done via one direct and sweeping narrative but through a range of subversive and assimilatory processes that have resulted in homo/heterosexual culture and desire operating through ambiguity and doubt. It is the aim of this chapter to ask how these epistemological discourses established in the mid- to late nineteenth century have been used in the formation of homosexual identity as resolute, and why work in the late twentieth century in the fields of feminist and gay studies and then queer theory concerned with identity, representation and subjectivity render it irresolute. There is a now well-established field of enquiry concerned with chronological and canonical histories of non-heterosexual desire in Western cultures

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of capitalism, identity politics and self-defined visibility – three fields which seem to inform and inflect queer theory. As well as this, the ambiguities which are often positioned as binaries between the historical markers of gender (as ‘femininity’/‘masculinity’), sexuality (‘heterosexuality’/‘homosexuality’) and identity (as ‘gay’/’straight’) are pulled apart by ‘queer’ and its power to facilitate dialogues concerned with the gaps between how epistemological discourse has formed a powerful illusion of ontological specificity. This in turn distils and inhibits queerness through a politics of visibility so that the (in)visibilised, pathologised and criminalised category of homosexuality as perverse, ‘unspeakable’ and closeted set out in the nineteenth century and sustained until the late 1960s is primarily allied to socially specific and gay-male oriented definitions of selfhood, pride and sensibility before, during and after the period problematically referred to as Stonewall. The term ‘queer theory’ is thought to derive from the feminist and psychoanalytic scholar Teresa de Lauretis. Although she would later refute this claim as something of a queer urban myth there are several historical accounts of queer theory that claim the term was first used by her during a conference on lesbian and gay sexualities held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in February 1990. A more reliable foundation to the term and the academic discourse itself and what it has come to encompass, can be seen in the year following this conference in a special edition of the journal differences: A journal of feminist cultural studies entitled ‘Queer Theory’ in which de Lauretis stated that: the terms lesbian and gay designate distinct kinds of life-styles, sexualities, sexual practices, communities, issues, publications, and discourses; on the other hand the phrase gay and lesbian or, more and more frequently, lesbian and gay (ladies first), has become standard currency [. . .] In contrast to this ‘Queer Theory’ was arrived at in the effort to avoid all of these fine distinctions in our discursive protocols, not to adhere to any one of the given terms, not to assume their ideological liabilities but instead to both transgress and transcend them – or at the very least to problematize them. (de Lauretis 1991: v) As well as this, queer theory addresses how and why socially constructed identities which define our ideas about sexuality do so. It also interrogates and questions how notions of homosexuality (or indeed any sexual identity outside of a heterosexual model) have historically been defined – and of course, in doing so, looks at how heterosexuality has been differentiated from its homosexual ‘other’ and/or counterpart. The focus of queer theory is often on issues which examine how sexuality is framed in culture and the powerful ideological implications this has on individuals. It also asks how identities which are formed through epistemological regimes of heterosexual knowledge and oppression are also those identities that produce the power to queer and

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to query sexual norms. In this way, both as a politically informed and theoretically daring technique, queer theory was also formed as a radical response to heterosexual forms of social regulation and heterosexist orthodoxy in strands of academic output.

Situating a Queer Past . . . Accounting for this sort of uneven and precarious setting, it is clear that both the intellectual and political development of queer theory still proves challenging because it has been formed through divergent threads of critical thought and ambiguous theoretical intersections rather than historically cogent or classifiable legacies. As Donald E. Hall observes in Queer Theories, ‘the concept of “a” queer history is [. . .] a problematic one’ and like the concept of ‘history’ itself is subject to ‘an artificial construct, one that depends upon numerous acts of interpretation, exclusion, and information shaping that reflect inevitably and indelibly the beliefs of the historian or critic’ (Hall 2003: 21). This view of history and historiography as a cultural and textual construction is embedded in the beginnings of queer theory and its primary allegiance to theories of deconstruction and poststructuralism. Adam Isiah Green uses the work of Derrida and Foucault to locate queer theory’s relationship to sociology, and does so by recognising that ‘queer theory has a very specific deconstructionist raison d’être’ which marks a departure from sociological thinking (and to an extent the work of Michel Foucault examined in this section), and ‘moves queer theory away from the analysis of self and subject position [. . .] and toward a conception of the self radically disarticulated from the social’ (Green 2007: 27). Here it is useful to remark that queer might be more productively positioned as a symbolic identification as opposed to a bodily identity. We see this in Leo Bersani’s Homos and his approach to ‘homo-ness’ in which he suggests a ‘redefinition of [queer] sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself’ (Bersani 1995: 7). In his example Bersani suggests that by pulling away from queer identity sexually marginalised subjects will begin to cultivate a form of what he terms ’homoness [that] offers an anti-identitarian identity’ (Bersani 1995: 101) in which identity is refuted, displaced and dissolved in favour of something non-ontological and epistemologically precarious where only a series of identifications remain. This conceptual notion of ‘homo-ness’ uses aspects of psychoanalysis to sophisticate the broader nature of queerness to indicate that sexuality and desire are infused with ‘an impersonal sameness ontologically incompatible with analysable egos’ (Bersani 1995: 101), which in this instance intentionally energises and eradicates the possibility of gay male personality, identity and self-hood. To grasp something of this turn towards queer identification rather than queer identity it may be useful to explore how both deconstructionist and poststructural trajectories inform and precede queer theoretical positions

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as ones that are ensnared and understood through language, power and discourse. In relation to the emergence of queer theory we see that deconstruction alerts queer theorisation to the error of an identity, a discourse or a text, and uses this as a way to interrogate, unravel and undo it. Deconstruction is predominantly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and is concerned with the simultaneous reinforcement and dissolution of binary opposition as both ‘the condition and the effect of all interpretation’ (Namaste 1994: 223). Deconstruction is central to queer theory because it is concerned with ‘the illustration of the implicit underpinnings of a particular binary opposition’ which are reliant upon ‘the play between presence and absence’ as ‘the condition for interpretation, insofar as each term depends upon the other for its meaning’ (Namaste 1994: 223). Theories of deconstruction examine how binary oppositions in language and representation are dependent and reciprocal rather than oppositional and conflictual. This informs the strategies that queer theorists such as Bersani picked up upon in attempts to undermine the claim that meaning is established in pure opposition to something or someone. In this way Derridean deconstruction is intrinsic to queer theory because it goes some way towards exposing and examining how ‘that which appears to be outside a given system is always already fully inside of it’ (Namaste 1994: 222). Namaste suggests that the Derridean concept of ‘supplementarity’ also forms a queer framework or even bedrock as it is allied to ‘the effect of interpretation because binary oppositions, such as that of speech and writing, are actualised and reinforced in every act of meaning-making’ (Namaste 1994: 223). In this way the intersections of queer identity, subjectivity, language and desire are simultaneously trapped inside a binary, yet yield the potential to break free. The stronghold of a binary can be transgressed but that is only possible because it ensnares us through the transgression ‘we reinscribe [at] its very basis’ (Namaste 1994: 223). This emphasises and ‘refers to ways of thinking about how meanings are established’ (Namaste 1994: 222) and how in this way queer meaning as supplementarity is organised and distributed through the production and exchange of presence and absence, or in Derrida’s own words, ‘the play or presence and absence, the opening of this play that no metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend’ (Derrida 1976, in Namaste 1994: 222). Through deconstruction and its relation to sexual identity we begin to see that homosexuality and heterosexuality are integral and dependent upon one another in queer theoretical interventions. In Sexual Dissidence (1991) Jonathan Dollimore observes that there may be little opportunity for an effective oppositional form of transgressive queer resistance as the outsider (the queer subject) is already integral to dominant power rather than in direct conflict with it. From this sort of assertion and also from the fields of deconstruction and poststructuralism there emerges within queer theory a complex

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interplay of power and resistance in which queer identity and criticality is both reinforced and undermined. If, as Dollimore also recognises, that by moving back and forth from the margins to the centre, the queer subject may also become ‘a challenging presence via containment’ (Dollimore 1991: 224), then queer theory vis-à-vis deconstruction ascertains that queerness is an equally necessary appropriation and negation of those dominant notions of sexual identity and human nature, by which it has been initially excluded and defined. An example of this can be seen in how camp and effeminate homosexual identities are marked out as certain ‘types’ through processes of definitional construction in something like soap opera or reality TV media. Yet in turn these ‘types’ are simultaneously negated or eradicated of their campiness or effeminacy if they are aligned to gay male sexual desire in discourses like pornographic media. In other words, while gay men have the capacity to subvert the discursive terms of definition allied to them as socio-sexual subjects they often reconstruct the tropes responsible for this categorisation and subordination by valorising them as desirable. A further instance of how this is represented can be seen in the ambiguous and sexually explicit semiotics of gay male porn. Much of it utilises spaces such as the prison, the army and the gym changing room to invoke discourses of gay male fantasy which rely upon hypermale heterosexual identity. This could also be seen in the contemporary practice of ‘selfies’ in which gay men are choosing to self-objectify and selfrepresent themselves as ‘straight-acting’. If we take this further and use queer theoretical paradigms to unpack these claims then we could suggest that campness, effeminacy and its ambivalent alignment to gay male desire is rooted in how and why dominant cultural discourses towards the end of the nineteenth century converge around the fundamental binaries of male and female. These modes equated masculinity and femininity within a gendered matrix whereby masculinity and femininity were both subject to and subjectivised by gender. As Judith Butler observes, this polarisation ‘does not do away with the subject’ but rather forms questions around ‘the conditions of its operation and making’ (Butler 1993: 7) so that any confusion about gender and sexuality was subject to ideologically specific forms of regulation. As the Victorian era progressed, the politics of visibility associated with the tropes of masculinity and femininity began to intersect and contradict around discourses of the homosexual body and self as effeminate. This in turn meant that gendered and sexualised representations associated with effeminate masculinity and masculine effeminacy began to problematise their discursive meaning. As Alan Sinfield also observes, ‘although there was a tendency to perceive same-sex passion as effeminate, effeminacy still did not necessarily signal same-sex passion’ (Sinfield 1994: 45) and the boundaries between masculinised and feminised behaviour were deployed for a number of diverse and incongruent reasons, but primarily as a method to challenge

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normative assumptions of what heterosexuality was. If effeminacy is considered as an identity, the claims that it involves sexual desire and sexualised representation become problematic. Epistemological discourses which define elements of heterosexual masculinity as ‘hyper-male/macho’ and aspects of homosexuality as ‘camp effeminacy’ locate and dislocate the meanings and interpretations of these discourses via two oppositional yet overlapping areas of tension, which we may suggest draw us nearer to the purpose of queer theory as an attempt to articulate these complexities. Taking this kind of queer reading into account, Michel Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality Volume I: The Will to Knowledge allied to ‘the tactical polyvalence of discourses’ also allows queer theorists the means to conceptualise how strategies of resistance in which ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged’ (Foucault 1998: 100–2, 101) also relied upon ‘the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (Foucault 1998: 101). Foucault uses the example of how ‘nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality’ facilitated the ‘formation of a “reverse” discourse’ (Foucault 1998: 101) and in so doing gave rise to many of the tropes and signifiers that are allied to queer identities and identifications. Just as the term ‘queer’ was once a marker of degradation and discrimination, through the reversal of its own cultural discursivity it systematically follows Foucault’s rubric of the sexually and socially marginal subject taking the elements responsible for their categorisation and strategically reinscribing deviance in terms of desire. Through their inherent instability and incoherence, discourses can effectively become a productively queer ‘hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy’ (Foucault 1998: 101). Foucault isolates the publication of Carl Westphal’s article of 1870 ‘On Contrary Sexual Sensations’ as the point from which homosexuality (as deviance) could be identified as a social and sexual category. Homosexuality was defined here in terms of its relation to the conventionally inferior category of femininity, and how the medical and legal categories of the sexual ‘deviant’ and discourses established after this point sought to position and thus control homosexuality as a constituent part of sexual aberration. This dialogue between normality and deviance is at the crux of the queer theoretical project and is also the kernel of Foucault’s intellectual project. It is also apposite to queer theory because it is alert to how and why hegemonic and ‘normal’ identities have been formed and sustained on the basis of identities which have been constructed and understood as ‘deviant’. Accounts of queer subjectivity which use queer theory to critique how non-heterosexual subjects are positioned and articulated in opposition to heterosexuality can be unearthed here. Like Derrida, Foucault’s accounts consider how the construction of homosexual and

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heterosexual identities attempt to account for yet also fall outside of the conventions of binary specificity. Investigating his trajectories of sexuality and also allowing for other conceptual paradigms he identified in this volume of work such as the ‘ “repressive hypothesis” ’ (Foucault 1998: 10–12) and the ‘perverse implantation’ (Foucault 1998: 36–51), it is also important to note that heterosexual discourse as imperceptibly ‘normal’ has constructed homosexuality as a visibly oppositional ‘deviant’ type in conflict with what it means to be both homosexual and heterosexual. Building on the example of camp and effeminate tendencies mentioned earlier we perhaps see this instilled in the gay/queer processes and metaphors of the ‘closet’ and ‘coming out’ which simultaneously situate marginalised sexual identities as resistant and defiant while subjugating them to expectations to ‘straight-act’, ‘pass’, or assimilate into heterosexual/ heterosexist culture. It is later and more specifically in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Between Men (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), that the emphasis towards the potential of dialogues which could (and now have) occurred between the binary of homo and hetero allow for the divisions and overlaps which inform queer theory and its position between the hypotheses of essentialist-constructionist debates to occur. A key feature in both debates is the examination of why the construction of same-sex desire is located beyond the terms which define what also lies at the precarious root of queer theory. Queer theorists such as Sedgwick critically engage with Foucault to examine how homosexuality has been formed as both an epistemology, and a discourse, which in turn overdetermines homosexual identity and in so doing a homosexual self. The epistemology of the homosexual has shored up its own ontology and kept it powerfully entrenched in heterosexual culture both as an identity but also a gap between the coexistent yet imprecise modes of identification, history and strategy we now comprehend as queer. Sedgwick observes that by stating when there is a birth of the modern homosexual, Foucault entangles homosexuality in a paradigm shift so that ‘knowledge itself constitutes that sexuality’ (Sedgwick 1990: 44). If, as Foucault states, through the process of discourse the ‘homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology [. . .] the homosexual was now a species’ (Sedgwick 1998: 43) Sedgwick uses his argument to situate how the ‘homosexual’ simultaneously naturalises and denaturalises the epistemological locus of identification so that heterosexual/ homosexual power is not distributed hierarchically but through reciprocal and contingent exchange. Here binary functions of knowledge and power traverse beyond the specificities of the sexual identity, so that rather than trying to locate and isolate the homosexual, and thus render the identity as ontologically coherent, discourses unravel the identity in question rather than tether it via modes of repression, transgression or subjection.

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The paradoxes that intensify these questions of homosexual epistemology as definitional, and its ontological concealment as revelatory, are instilled in Sedgwick’s discussion of the ‘closet’ which underscore ‘the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/hetero definition’ (Sedgwick 1990: 3), which also become a fundamental feature in queer theory. By examining how homosexuality has been constituted and identified through processes of negation and incitement of both homo and hetero sexuality, Sedgwick identifies how the ‘necessarily assignable [. . .] homo- or hetero-sexuality’ which is then mapped onto a ‘binarised identity [. . .] full of implication’ for that ‘sexual identity’ (Sedgwick 1990: 2) is at the essence of how queer theory and consequently queer identity is represented and read. These ‘binary identities’ which refer to essentialist and constructionist positions raise questions in relation to the representation of each sexual category and the ways in which queer theory attempts to interrogate how they are positioned in discourse and representation. The essentialist (ontological) debate, upholds that homo- and heterosexuality are universally constant, independent of cultural and historical contingency and thus an invariable feature of identity, and the constructionist (epistemological), suggests that hetero- and homosexuality are formed relationally through historically and culturally variable discourses bound to the politics of identity and identification (see Chambers in Barker and Clark 2002: 165–80). By emphasising historical ambivalence between the two positions of an epistemological knowledge and ontological ‘being’, Sedgwick returns Foucault’s reversal or inversion of discourse and the paradox that while ‘medical, legal, literary, [and] psychological’ (Sedgwick 1990: 2) factors linked to contours of knowledge and power attempt to polarise any non-heterosexual sexuality in an either/or binary, these discourses actually expedite a space where uncertainty and inconsistency between models of heterosexual normality / homosexual deviance, as well as visibility/invisibility, are negated and negotiated at the same time. It may be that this space is the location of queer theory. By questioning how essentialism and constructionism propagate an ambiguously foreclosed identity politics, which always remains queer (that is in between homosexual and heterosexual identity) yet also constitutes knowledge, we see that this ‘queer knowledge’ can never offer a fully transparent view of a transgressive or new realm of sexuality because it also attempts to constitute and commodify that sexuality as ‘queer’. In this way queer theory begins to catalyse an ambiguous relationship to both heterosexual and homosexual authority and dominance. More specifically, it may be that queer theory is crucial to the construction of straight and gay masculine tropes of dominance through the very fact that it is seen to be ‘at once culturally marginal and discursively central’ (Dollimore 1991: 222). In the wake of this, the signifier ‘queer’ is anchored in a politics of empowerment and recognition which always relies upon the homophobic nuances of degradation from both inside

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and outside of contemporary gay and straight culture as its trigger. If, as Foucault maintained, that discourse must not be conceived of as being ‘divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one’ (Foucault 1998: 100), there are also political and cultural uses and interpretations that queer theory has proliferated where we begin to see that the term itself may be insufficient to account for the diverse strategies of resistance previously grouped together as examples of the reversal or inversion of discourse. In addition to this, and since its inception, queer theory has also been allied to politicised modes of resistance, activism and interference that have imbued queer texts and modes of expression with a recognisable form of purpose and intent. Ironically, this is also linked to the mainstreaming and commodification of queer identity since its moment of inception in the 1990s.

The Queer Moment As early as 1972 and in his work Homosexual Desire the radical gay scholar and activist Guy Hocquenghem claimed that all desire (but more so gay/ queer desire) was moving towards a moment of dehumanisation. Hocquenghem suggested that gay culture (or more specifically the gay movement) ‘pushes capitalist decoding to the limit and corresponds to the dissolution of the human; from this point of view, the gay movement undertakes the necessary gay dehumanisation’ (Hocquenghem 1993: 145). What Hocquenghem seemed to be getting at here was how powerfully capitalism had affected politically dissident identities and desire so that even twenty years before it was termed ‘queer’, queer identity, politics and theory was ‘only divisible a posteriori, according to how we manipulate it’ (Hocquenghem 1993: 50). These dehumanising practices that Hocquenghem recognised are drilled down into the core of capitalism’s drive to commodify queer identity to the extent that it is ‘condensed into a cultural signifier’, so that ‘the [queer-self] as commodity remains securely fetishised’ (Hennessey 2000: 128) and is reduced through repetition and signification to an image of itself. In other words, when the queer body as a signifier is signified as a sign of queer personality, then queer identity itself is assembled as nothing more than a commodified trace of the politicised and subversive acts and strategies of resistance that came before. Before this shift the development of queer theory in the 1990s also stemmed from the impact of politically radical movements like ActUp and Outrage. As well as this in the key years of 1990–1 non-assimilationist movements such as Queer Nation were also formed through modes of queer separatism, extremism and activism. These radical groupings were in response to the violently right-wing discrimination implicit in the Thatcher/Reagan era and during the AIDS crisis. They were not only formed as ways to contest oppressive threats

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but were also platforms for resisting the mechanisms of heterosexist stability and institutionalisation as well as the problematic notions of how ‘queer liberation’ vs ‘queer equality’ related to queer politics. These movements instilled queer theory with a politically vigorous dimension that many argue has dissipated. For example, and particularly in light of the legalisation of civil partnerships and gay marriage, it could be claimed that the queer radicalism of the 1990s has been eroded away in support of queer assimilation. Yet because queer theory and these earlier political causes evolve from the AIDS crisis they also emphasise how theoretical interrogation through a renewed form of activism is the catalyst for social change during a particular cultural moment. For instance, texts such as Simon Watney’s Policing Desire (1987), Leo Bersani’s seminal essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987), and Douglas Crimp’s AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1987), all address the AIDS crisis through the rhetoric and experiences of gay men in the mid- to late 1980s by examining how and indeed why the gay male AIDS victim was positioned and controlled against a backdrop of homophobic settings that regulated and defined them as ‘perverse’. In his work Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994) Lee Edelman is concerned with how this sort of rhetoric of (homo) sexuality is configured in cultural and literary texts. This rhetoric is referring to an indeterminate series of psychic and social operations in relation to what has been represented and categorised as ‘gay’. Edelman works through a dense and complex range of theories and theorists to try and understand what the gay male body means and how it has come to perpetuate a false ontological identity. He is committed to interrogating the conditions that have constituted this, and by critiquing the social, ideological, linguistic and textual practices produced in relation to gay male sexuality he isolates the inherent anxiety at work in gay representation and its relation to the rhetorical structures of dominance which produce and control how sexuality is understood culturally. This way of unpacking a text could now be considered ‘queer’ inasmuch that this mode of querying recognises that there is always a double bind functioning so that homosexuality (or indeed any sexual identity) cannot be understood outside of the cultural and textual artefacts through which it has been produced. This then points towards the notion of gay identity operating on a paradoxical plane whereby it must always be readable and visible to the dominant heterosexual order, yet this readability is in part produced by the non-heterosexual subject who wants to be read. In this way any queer or non-heterosexual sexuality is identified by Edelman as that which must be ‘ignored, repressed, or violently disavowed in order to represent representation itself as natural and unmediated’ (Edelman 1994: xvi). In other words the legibility and legitimacy of heterosexuality is determined by queer sexualities, and these queers are both enabled and subjugated by a continuous system of representation so that heterosexual authenticity can maintain dominance.

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Queer work such as Edelman’s may also belong to the discipline of ‘gay male studies’ which along with second wave feminism has also contributed to another aspect of queer theory. Work which emerged from the second wave of feminist politics and activism became crucial to the foundations of queer theory. More specifically second wave feminism influence could be allied to queer theory via the discourse of lesbian feminism and its ‘range of sometimes contradictory political and theoretical positions’ (Jagose 1996: 56). Here the problematic factions which stemmed from the lesbian feminine/gay male binary of power in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s can be seen in a work such as Marilyn Frye’s ‘Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement: Another View of Male Supremacy, Another Separatism’ (1983), where the notion of lesbian/gay affinity is undermined and the reification of conflict between gay men and their lesbian counterparts is amplified. As well as this a theoretically ambitious body of work including that of Adrienne Rich, Monique Wittig, Gloria Anzaldua, Diana Fuss and most famously Judith Butler’s influential Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993), carves out a relationship between disciplines that may (or may not) be grouped together as second wave feminist, lesbian feminist, or ‘women’s studies’ and their association or negation of queer politics and theory. Some of these concerns are instilled in some radical second wave feminist work often referred to as ‘anti-porn’ which investigated the nature of pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights in capitalist societies. Andrea Dworkin, in work such as Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), groups pornographic output through the production of masculine power and discourse. Dworkin argues that it is only in the fundamental abjuration and disavowal of masculine power, oppression and dominance (disguised as the eroticisation of capitalist and patriarchal power in pornography) that women can realise their own subjective sexual liberation. By following both moral and ethical approaches and aligning them to an anti-masculine rhetoric enforced through the activist group Women against Pornography (WAP) (and more specifically Dworkin’s and Catherine MacKinnon’s anti-pornography civil rights ordinance of the city of Minneapolis (1988)), many of these debates could be contingently reframed as queer. Just as Dworkin positioned these concerns as central to a masculine domination over women, what also becomes clear is that if they are transposed and repositioned in terms of queer theoretical critique allied to the construction of hetero-sexual (and in conjunction hetero-sexist) representations in pornography, they can be redefined and reread through the trajectories of queer identity politics and a queer theoretical position predicated by tangible forms of ideological oppression, misogyny and violence. During the 1990s these modes of queering or querying a text were sophisticated into forms of methodological technique and modes of critical enquiry in fields as diverse as sociology, media and film studies, geography, English

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Literature and cultural studies. As well as this, the trajectory of queer theory has now been applied to the emergent fields of new and social media, race, belief, class and disability theory so that queer theoretical analysis is now itself embedded in textual analysis. A collection such as Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research (Browne and Nash 2010) sets out to question and address how the divergent nature of queer epistemologies and ontologies can be interpreted and applied to social scientific research. In this way and while ‘queerness’ as a methodological tool of investigation still holds the potential to undercut and subvert hegemonic identity types, it also exists as something that Sedgwick claims ‘now counts as knowledge’ and, as such, this ‘ “knowledge” can scarcely be a transparent window onto a separate realm of sexuality, but, rather, itself constitutes that sexuality’ (Sedgwick 1990: 44). Here there is yet another paradox at work, in that on the one hand a distinctly queer methodology, discursive praxis and also epistemology undercuts the transgressive and/or subversive potential of queer theory, while on the other paradoxically developing it as innovative, necessary and valuable. In addition, journals such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture and Sexualities rely upon scholarly work which addresses how popular media texts and queerness intersect. In this way queer theory as both a methodological and empirical field of inquiry has the capacity to infiltrate and influence almost every paradigm of mediated and cultural life, and queer theory as a method of textual analysis has generated critical responses that have transformed the meanings of those texts. Queer theory as a textual and methodological tool has also proliferated in areas of critical and theoretical investigation which are predicated by ‘queer’ in fields as diverse as English literature, film, TV, Sci-Fi music, geography, online identity and identification, self-representation, self-expression and any other number of interdisciplinary approaches to cultural studies which seem to embody something allied to the uneven nature of queer theoretical work. For example, the convergence of queer theory and the discourse of online media are, in part, simultaneously concerned with the contradictory, obtuse or eccentric dimensions of identity and sexuality. Output that has dealt with the analysis of queer identity and sexuality and online media either emphasises and/or valorises how identity and the body are marked by fluidity, ambiguity and confusion. Yet in their examination of online/queer identity it also seems that many of the critical issues related to the formation of queer bodies, identities and discourses are increasingly prone to accounts of queer desire in which identities are reciprocated and not complicated by the very terms they have set out to undermine. This contention has been a critical thread of responses to queer theory over the last decade or so and the emergence of terms such as ‘post-queer’ (Ruffolo 2009; Halley and Parker 2011), now offer a way of reconsidering how queer

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identities are relational, differentiated and excluded in both conventional and incoherent ways; yet ultimately ways that function perfectly in capitalist societies of consumption that ‘manufacture[s] homosexuals’ (Hocquenghem 1993: 50) through modes of textual representation. It may now be more apt to locate the concluding parts of this chapter in line with post-queer theorists (Ahmed 2006, Munoz 2009, Halperin and Traub 2010, Halley and Parker 2011, Halberstam 2011, McGlotten 2013, Penney 2014) who seek a way out of queer theoretical landscape where queer identity and politics are conventional, acceptable and convenient. In so doing they attempt to draw on a vocabulary which allows for a way to move beyond a politics of identity, gender and the body as ‘queer’ by addressing how modes of affect, failure and desire as ‘post’ or ‘after’ queer may now allow for a mode of queer theorising that probes the terms that seem to locate, define and confine its future as queer.

A Queer Future? It may be that the abstruse and contingent nature of queer theory makes it almost impossible for the queer subject to actually ‘be queer’. If this queer subject is one that is always vulnerable to the fractured nature of its poststructural and deconstructionist origins, then is it possible to speak of queer identity and/ or a discourse of queer theory through representational texts and in cultural life at all? In this way it may be that queer theory’s preoccupation with the transgressive nuances of a manifestly queer sexuality, gender and identity has also been its undoing. The centrality of the queer body seems to have abated the potentiality of queer theory allied to desire and subjectivity, yet in doing so forced it into new and often disparate directions which have been now been allied to the term ‘post-queer’. Post-queer theory acknowledges that queer theory has been called into question as a critical trajectory because it renders the queer subject ‘subjectless’. As well as this, work which might be considered as post-queer acknowledges that ‘queer theory is less an ongoing event than a periodisable moment, a relatively defunct agenda that can be safely syllabised and packaged for digestion through a shrink-wrapped assortment of contained debates (essentialism vs. social construction, the politics of outing, transgendering etc.)’ (Shapiro 2004: 77). In this setting, queer theory has offered no consistent way to analyse the queer self and in so doing it has led queer subjects into simultaneously seductive and injurious forms of self-expression. While it is still clear that queer theory cannot be neatly mapped or appropriated, the post-queer is inflected by ways to consider and negotiate the discourse of ‘after’ queer and in so doing also acknowledges the question of a whether a queer future is possible or even necessary. In the introduction to the post-queer collection After Sex? On Writing Since Queer theory (2011) Janet Halley and Andrew Parker cite Sharon Marcus’s

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work which argues that ‘if everyone is queer, then no one is – and while this is exactly the point that queer theorists want to make, reducing the term’s pejorative sting by universalising the meaning of queer also depletes its explanatory power’ (Marcus 2005: 196 in Halley and Parker 2011: 7). Taking this into account we might also suggest and address the issue that queer subjects of this post-queer environment are still largely gay and lesbian subjects that have been assimilated into hetero-normative practices of normality and regulation. In addition we see through discourses such as gay marriage how queer identity has been assimilated into popular media and culture and also in filmic representations which have sought to commodify queer life as an integral part of neoliberal capitalism. In the range of popular filmic texts which examine paradigms of queer desire, lifestyle, history and assimilation such as Brokeback Mountain (2006), The Kids are All Right (2010) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013), there has been the cultivation of what James Penney understands as a ‘brand of queer pseudo-politics’, underpinned by the claim ‘that queer theory has run its course’ through the counter-intuitive fact that an Anglo-American queering and ‘subversion of sexual identity has turned the sexually marginal inward’ (Penney 2014: 15, 1, 2). In this way queer theories have also been criticised for their failure to take into account non-Western discourses of class, race and ethnicity. In a postqueer sense it is this limitation which may also serve as the potential for the future of queer theorisation in transnational/cross-cultural discourses. Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is an example of this and contends that its main aim is to address ‘the management of queer life at the expense of sexually and racially perverse death in relation to the contemporary politics of securitization, Orientalism, terrorism, torture, and the articulation of Muslim, Arab, Sikh and South Asian sexualities’ (Puar 2007: xiii). Aligning neoliberal queer subjects to discourses of life, marriage and reproductive patterns of family, Puar contends that there has been a shift away from the disruptive construction of the queer dissident and in its place an orientalisation of the terrorist as an ‘otherly’ threat. Other works being circulated under the term ‘post-queer’ include the intersectional and bold manoeuvres to connect Marxism to queer theory (see Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism (2009), and Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011)) which considers and conceptualises how notions of productive failure or the ‘ “rejection of pragmatism” ’ should be considered as an intrinsic feature of queer theory and its capacity to cultivate new forms of ‘nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive lifestyles, negativity and critique’ (Halberstam 2011: 89). The discourses of affect and emotion are also important in light of how queer theoretical work has shifted its emphasis from that of specifically queer bodies and identities towards more abstract notions of queer subjectivities, responses and identifications. In Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), her assimilation of the

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phenomenological implications of emotion and trauma seem to suggest that queer theory’s apparent implosion and its contradictory limits lead to a new position or possibility which is simultaneously queer and post-queer, here and there, tangible yet intangible. A feature which seems to thread through and mark these post-queer texts is the discourse of the future. Not only in terms of whether or not a queer future is possible but in relation to the question of a queer futurity that undermines the cultural and discursive predispositions of certainty, hegemony and legacy. In Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2006) he discusses the figure of the child that haunts hegemonic and normative representations which only queer theory has the power to undermine and overcome. Queer has the capacity to thwart and subvert the innocence and powerful construction of the child in culture and in this ways allies itself to a future that José Esteban Munoz imagines as ‘a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’ (Munoz 2009: 1). This way of superseding the confines of the queer present, or indeed queer moment, can also be seen in Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington (1997) and Cruel Optimism (2011), which are concerned with the politics of how queer citizenship and more so queer theory itself is underpinned by ‘the realisation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy or too possible, and toxic’ (Berlant 2011: 24). If we understand the post-queer as cruelly optimistic, as strategically failing and precariously allied to a futurity without a clear ‘future’, then we see that it acknowledges ‘the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object’ (Berlants 2011: 24) while retaining what Munoz terms ‘the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’ (Munoz 2009: 1). Fittingly, it is the intersectionality of a queer past, present and future which attest to the impossibility of queer theory and the seditious pleasure it takes in not knowing what comes next.

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15 MEN, MASCULINITY AND CRITICAL STUDIES Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill

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he study of men is nothing new. Critical theory has often placed men at the centre of their arguments and in attempts to explore the nature of social, economic and cultural worlds, they have examined meanings, attitudes and behaviours. By default, men have often been at the centre of such analysis. However, more recently critical theorists began to scrutinise men as men. This shift of focus on men as an area of critical inquiry has a number of political and conceptual implications. One of these is to recognise that men and what is understood as men is often shaped by common sense and taken-for-granted assumptions. A recent example of this can be found in media reports of shootings taking place in European schools. Although the majority of such crimes are undertaken by young men, the gendered nature of these crimes remains invisible and unspoken. Klein and Chancer (2000) highlight that the main narratives surrounding such crimes focus on gun control, exposure to violent media and family backgrounds. In contrast, crimes committed by women are not only reducible to social deviancy but also their femininities. As such the institutional and cultural production of men’s gendered meanings, emotions and practices often go unnoticed and often result in hidden and insidious articulations of power. The issue here is that the (in) visibility of the socially constructed nature of masculinity reduces men’s emotions, meanings and practices as unproblematic and self-evident. Thus one of the main themes underpinning this chapter and broader the study of men, is to question how and why men are gendered. A common sense account of the study of masculinity might be to position it as a response to Women’s Studies or even to think of it as an anti-feminist project. However, as Michael Kimmel has pointed out: ‘Masculinity studies is not necessarily the reactionary defensive rage of the men’s rights groups, the mythic cross-cultural nostalgia of mythopoetry, nor even the theologically informed nostalgic yearning for separate spheres of promise keepers’ (Kimmel 2002: ix). In fact, Kimmel suggests that Masculinity Studies can support and further the political aims of a feminist approaches. The difficulty with the terminology in this area is that there is not a coherent body of work or theoretical

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approach that can be identified as ‘Masculinity Studies’, Men’s Studies’, ‘Male Studies’ or ‘Critical Masculinity Studies’. Rather the term has been used to coalesce a wide range of diverse and sometimes contradictory philosophical, disciplinary, political and methodological positions. For example, the study of masculinity can be found in Sex Role theory, Film Studies, Poststructuralism, Marxism, Queer theory, Historical Studies, Symbolic Interactionism, Literary Studies and Feminism (see Gottzén and Mellstrõm 2014). Given the breadth of the field, this chapter focuses on the more prevalent approaches to men and masculinity that are currently being developed by European scholars. It does this first, by providing a brief historical overview of the disparate political movements that have underpinned the study of masculinity, including the men’s movement and anti-sexism. The chapter then develops this historical approach by examining one of the most popular approaches to the study of men, that of hegemonic masculinity. By highlighting a number of critiques of hegemonic masculinity, the chapter explores more recent developments in the field that include: queer theory, trans theory and post-masculinity theorising.

Men, Gender and Equality An important area for the development of the study of men and masculinity emerged in response to women’s calls for equal rights and fairness. Men and women began to highlight that the same issue of sexism that feminists were identifying, was also affecting men (Farrell 1974; Nichols 1975). One of the initial areas that was identified as particularly important was the emotional damage that was being caused by the social roles that were determining how men should live in society. As a result, men were claiming that they were also being oppressed by normatively sanctioned social expectations. As Bob Pease points out: ‘They saw consciousness-raising groups as vehicles by which men could get in touch with their feelings, free themselves from sex-role stereotyping, learn to be more caring for other men and struggle together against the imposition of the socially oppressive male role’ (Pease 2000: 124). One of the implications of this position is that it challenged the assumption that all men are the same. More specifically, it argued that men were also subject to the power relations and could experience domination and subordination by other men. If the category of men becomes fractured, or if there are various versions of being a man, then the link between gender and biology becomes troubled. The implications of this is that the ways that men behave are subject to change and challenge pervasive social and cultural assumptions that ascribe traits such as aggression, competitiveness, fear of intimacy and emotional stoicism to masculinity. Politically, it can be argued that strategic alliances can be formed between men and women that enable a working together to challenge and remove gender based inequalities that are embedded in traditional sex roles. It is suggested that in the past such alliances included: implementing

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equal opportunities initiatives within public institutions, developing anti-sexist educational material, co-parenting, and developing anti-discrimination laws at a local state level (European Commission Network on Childcare, 1993). Alongside this, men’s activism in challenging gender inequalities was to ask governments across Europe to recognise the importance of safeguarding men’s rights, in terms of paternity pay, access to their children and broader health and welfare rights. At the same time, a far more conservatively orientated approach, often named as pro-male, anti-women and anti-feminist, can also be traced. Raewyn Connell has described an element of this approach as ‘masculinity therapy’. She traces its movement from an early 1970s association with countercultural therapy and a pro-liberal feminist focus on the removal of the traditional male role, to a 1980s emphasis on a search for the ‘deep masculine’. An example of this can be found in the US text, Robert Bly’s (1990) Iron John. Drawing upon ‘mytho-poetic’ concepts, he argues for the restoration of a lost, traditional masculinity – for the urgent need to encounter ‘the hairy man’. Strategies to reclaim an authentic masculinity can be found in emotional self-exploration, male bonding and recovering damaged relationships with fathers. Located within the context of an emotional architecture of a pre-social man, returning to an original authentic masculinity enabled men to celebrate becoming a ‘hard warrior’ rather than a ‘soft wimp’. As a consequence, such an approach has the tendency to reinforce gender inequalities rather than dismantle them. For example, Men’s Studies groups were arguing that feminisation of society is deemed to be disturbing men’s natural self-identities and must be resisted. Such a view is still evident in discussion on boys’ socialisation. For example, discussions about boys’ perceived underachievement in school are often couched in terms of a feminised curriculum and teaching practice. As such, it is argued that a curriculum and a teaching practice that promotes gender equality restrict boys from being their true selves. In response, educators are suggesting a number of ‘boy-friendly’ initiatives that include single-sex classes and boy-friendly reading material in the belief that the masculinising of the curriculum will lead to higher levels of male achievement. One of the embryonic moments in the emergence of a critical study of masculinity focused on moving away from searching for an authentic masculinity towards men challenging the social norms and values that underpinned oppressive practices. Central to this position was the claim that alternative forms of masculinities could be developed, cultivated and learned. The emergence of pro-feminist men shifted a political activism less in terms of creating equality but more focused on challenging the social and economic structuring of men’s power. These pro-feminist men often made their gender and sexuality a subject of self-reflexive political inquiry. In the 1970s and 1980s, Achilles Heal in the UK emerged as a journal that brought together writings that highlighted pro-feminist men as complicit in patriarchal power and broader structures

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of oppression. Importantly, the biographies of male authors became a point of critical inquiry and a source of inspiration for a wide range of interventions around sexuality, violence and pornography. This began to signal a more empirically led theoretical understanding of masculinity. For example, Victor Seidler’s work unpacks the emotional dynamics of masculinity that were often premised on a Cartesian division of rationality and emotion (Seidler 1989). The implication here is that it is the masculine that is configured through rationality that leads to emotional oppression of women and men themselves. The innovative aspect of Seidler’s work is that it begins to frame the experiential within the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis. According to Seidler, the rigid straightjacket of masculinity needs to be carefully unpacked to reveal how masculinity is formed and practised; psychoanalytical readings were one theoretical strategy to achieve this. Other critical approaches to understanding men could be seen in the early work of Jeff Hearn, who began to position masculinity within a gendered economy. He used Marxist political economy to understand gender as part of a class dichotomy. Masculinity was seen as operating as an ideological template, used to link men’s relationship to (re) production. As Hearn pointed out: ‘While men persist in the base of reproduction, masculinities persist in the “ideology” of production’ (Hearn 1987: 98). As such, the structural location of masculinity could be positioned within a Hegelian dialectic with masculinity understood as a structured ideology maintaining men’s patriarchal privilege. Importantly for Hearn, male power can be explained by an analysis which takes into consideration the specific conditions that give rise to it. One way of doing this has been to consider men and women as ‘sexual classes’, structurally located within the relationships of patriarchy and capitalism. Earlier masculinity studies became pivotal to studies of men as it began to understand how social and cultural definitions of masculinity were embedded within relations of power. In summary, the first part of the development of a critical study of men and masculinity was to recognise the socially constructed nature of men’s meanings and behaviours. However, the shift towards an understanding of how the social, economic and cultural context shapes men’s experiences contributed to the emergence of a study of men and masculinity that made their voices, their relationships and their lives more central to the analysis. One of the most prevalent concepts that has been developed in European work on masculinity has been that of hegemonic masculinity.

Critical Theory, Men and Hegemonic Masculinity From the 1980s to the 1990s, studies of men and masculinity demonstrated a shift from understanding men and women through fixed categories of material difference, towards an understanding of gender relations based on local contexts. In short, such studies began to question the basis of masculinity not

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simply by challenging the epistemological assumptions that underpinned it, but also by questioning the institutional and cultural practices that authorised them (Traister 2000). Thus, accounts of men positioned within dialectical relationships with women began to move towards understanding men and masculinity through institutionally and culturally specific social relationships. These texts argued for the need to rethink categorical theories that suggest that gender/sexual relations are shaped by a single overarching factor. More specifically, studies of men and masculinity began to disaggregate overinflated concepts, such as patriarchy, maintaining that these relations are multidimensional and differentially experienced. This shift was captured by a move from understanding men’s attitudes and behaviours through a ‘masculinity’, and instead began to recognise that men were engaging in different ‘masculinities’. Central to the new emphasis on masculinities was the work of Raewyn Connell. Her research began to suggest a more complex understanding of how masculinity is experienced by men and women in a variety of different ways. For Connell, masculinity becomes articulated through a series of relationships and in order to explain the nature of these relationships she moves from a concept of masculinity to masculinities. Crucially, the move to a more plural framing of masculinity results in a redistribution of power that is no longer contained by a logic of the powerful/powerless couplet based on sexual difference. Rather, men become subject to the power of other men and repressive regimes of masculinity. Instead of using a Hegelian dialectic that frames gendered difference, Connell uses Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (Connell 1987). More specifically, Connell understands masculinities as shaped by specific social contexts and as a result, some masculinities become more influential over other masculinities. As some masculinities occupy privileged positions, other masculinities are subordinated and marginalised. In different contexts, it is argued that some men will occupy more powerful positions than others and they achieve this through winning the consent of other men and women, in order to do so. Connell’s earlier work operationalised the concept of hegemonic masculinity in the context of schooling. Her focus on ‘Cool Guys, Swots and Wimps’ signalled that different ways of being a young man were placed within a hierarchy of social power (1989). Thus the ‘Cool boys’, from labouring classes with low academic ability were viewed as ‘trouble makers’ and took part in resisting school authority structures. In this context, masculinities were organised in relation to hierarchies of the institutional knowledge of the school. So, in the school, academic knowledge became the most legitimate and institutionally sanctioned knowledge. With the ‘Cools Boys’ working against this institutional sanctioning through forms of resistance, other boys aligned themselves to the school. As a result, some boys became hegemonic, while others became marginalised. For example, men occupying hegemonic masculinity would often ‘other’ different groups of men, such as gay men, black men or disabled men, to sustain the legitimacy and normalisation of their own

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masculinity. Michael Kimmel’s work on the formation of masculinity suggests that masculine subjectivities are constituted through the rejection by that which is culturally deemed as feminine. An example of this is how men objectify heterosexuality in order to validate their identities as masculine. As a result, masculine identities are structured through a heterosexuality that creates its stability through the rejection of that which is feminine (read as homosexual): ‘that the reigning definition of masculinity is a defensive effort to prevent being emasculated’ (Kimmel 2007: 80). It should be added that rather than displacing feminist politics, Connell’s hegemony of masculinity creates the possibilities for a more comprehensive understanding of patriarchy. Sofia Aboim points out that although hegemonic masculinity is underpinned by men’s domination of women, it also serves to oppress men who may be from a lower class, identified through particular racial or ethnic categories or through sexuality. In short, hegemonic masculinity sustains: ‘a gender order that segregates men in accordance with how far removed they are from the hegemonic norm: white, heterosexual, professionally successful’ (Aboim 2010: 3). Thus, why men are involved in the hegemony and why some men accept subordination is due to the patriarchal privilege that is accrued by being in power or being complicit in such powerful positions. The hegemonic template for masculinities was further developed by Connell to include masculinities that were complicit, subordinated and marginalised. Connell suggests that ‘masculinities constructed in ways that realized the patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline troops of patriarchy, are complicit in this sense’ (Connell 1995: 79). Complicit masculinities would be lived out by men who may not be part of the hegemony, but benefit from its presence. Another relationship within hegemonic masculinity is that of marginalised masculinities, that refers to those masculine styles that are positioned as ‘outcasts’ (Phillips 2005). As indicated above, such men are often named as different from those men who take up hegemonic masculinities. The final aspect of Connell’s model of masculinity explored here is that of ‘protest masculinity’. Raewyn Connell and James Messerschmidt suggest that protest masculinity is ‘a pattern of masculinity constructed in local workingclass settings, sometimes among ethnically marginalised men, which embodies the claim to power typical of regional hegemonic masculinities in Western countries, but which lacks the economic resources and institutional authority that underpins the regional and global patterns’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 848). Therefore, a hegemony of masculinity tries to understand and map out the nature of relationships that take place between different men. The concept of hegemonic masculinity has had a global reach and is now a major influence on the study of men and masculinity. Through an analysis of over 128 English-speaking articles that used hegemonic masculinity as the core concept, Messerschmidt identifies how hegemonic masculinity has been used in various ways (2012). He identifies how hegemonic masculinity has been

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used at a local level. For example, how masculinities operate within particular institutions such as schools, the workplace, in spaces of leisure and also to describe how masculinity operates at regional level and global levels. However, Messerschmidt suggests that ‘Within the core articles examined, there remains a fundamental collective intellectual tendency by numerous editors, reviewers, and authors to read “hegemonic masculinity” as a static character type, i.e. to psychologise the idea and ignore the whole question of gender dynamic’ (Messerschmidt 2012: 245).

Developing Hegemonic Masculinity Messerschmidt suggests that one of the difficulties of hegemonic masculinity is that it is conflated with all forms of masculinity. More specifically, he argues that we need to begin to unpack hegemonic masculinity into two distinct forms, that of dominant and dominating. Dominant masculinities refer to the most popular forms of masculinity that are celebrated or culturally commended. Dominating masculinities have power and control in specific situations. Messerschmidt suggests that although these masculinities may be prevalent in particular contexts, they are not necessarily central to unequal relationships between men and women. In essence, he is arguing that there is slippage between hegemonic masculinities and other prominent masculinities where power does not necessarily have to be patriarchal. As Messerschmidt argues: ‘this distinction between hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities further facilitates the discovery and identification of “equality masculinities” ’: ‘those that legitimate an egalitarian relationship between men and women, between masculinity and femininity, and among men’ (Messerschmidt 2012: 673). This notion of ‘equality masculinities’ can be seen in the work of Thomas Johansson and Andreas Ottemo who argue that we need to focus on how power is exercised and how masculinities are subject to ‘change, transformations and contradictions’ (Johansson and Ottemo 2013: 5). They recognise, through the work of Paul Ricoeur, that ideology has a range of legitimating, distorting and integrating functions. In effect, rather than unpack hegemonic masculinity, Johansson and Ottemo explore hegemony itself. As a result, they suggest that hegemony and ideology in the field of masculinity studies have been elided. More specifically, they suggest that studies of hegemonic masculinity tend to reinforce an ideology that is often too structured and non-negotiable and, as a result, the possibilities for change, transgression and transformation are restricted. In response, Johansson and Ottemo use Laclau and Moufe (1985) to build into their discussion of masculinities more scope for change and transformation. In order to recognise the dynamic nature of masculinities, they argue that we need to examine the instability of meaning. The implication of meaning never being fixed is that it is impossible to achieve a fully formed and constituted subject. This means that hegemony is in the process of continually making and establishing its authority. A key aspect of this

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is antagonism. The centrality of antagonism to an understanding of hegemony enables an understanding of social relations that are perpetually in conflict and that are continually destabilised by the play of differences. By interpreting hegemony as unstable and in a constant rearticulation of differences, the possibility of a range of subject positions facilitates not only the questioning of fixed identities but also the possibility of new ones. Thus, they argue that existing approaches to masculinity interpret change within the dynamics of patriarchal distribution, rather than as a space for the emergence of new possibilities of which power can be articulated. European scholars have considered other ways of developing hegemonic masculinity. Ann-Dorte Christensen and Sune Qvotrup Jensen elaborate on the unpacking of hegemonic masculinity by suggesting that there are three areas that need clarifying. First, they suggest that the relationship between the concept at a macro-level and the concept at a micro-level needs to be addressed. More specifically, they argue that it is important to understand how broader social configurations of hegemonic masculinity are manifest in everyday practice. Alongside this, Christensen and Jensen, like Johansson and Ottemo, suggest that hegemonic masculinity needs to be understood in relation to the antagonisms and slippages between categorisations of men’s practices. The final point that they identify and develop further is the notion of hegemony in terms of the dual processes of the oppression of women and the oppression of men. For example they argue that ‘The concept of hegemonic masculinity is thus fundamentally based on two interrelated and inseparable dimensions: (a) male dominance and oppression of women, and (b) hierarchical classification of masculinities’ (Christensen and Jensen 2014: 8). It is through the separation of men’s practices that masculinities can be understood as patriarchal and nonpatriarchal. Therefore, it is possible to have masculinities that operate outside of hegemonic relationships and this can lead to the separating of masculinities that support gender equality and those that support patriarchy. They also suggest that there needs to be an acknowledgment that change in masculinities is possible and that such change can facilitate feminist interventions. It is by treating these dimensions separately that an understanding of how different categories intersect with other forms of social power such as age, race/ethnicity and sexuality can be realised. They suggest that: This approach makes possible multifaceted and process-centered analyses, where different social categories are understood as mutually constitutive. Forms of social differentiations other than gender (class, race/ ethnicity, age, sexuality etc.) will thus influence, shape and construct masculinities. The focus will be on the dynamic power relations, and this focus can sharpen the grasp of changes within and overlaps between different masculinities rather than localizing fixed categories and power relations. (Christensen and Jensen 2014: 24)

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Christensen and Jensen recognise that separating the hegemonic from the non-hegemonic may be a too simplistic response and point to the need to understand how masculinities simultaneously ‘strengthen or weaken patriarchy’. As highlighted above, their emphasis is on the intersectionality of social relations and understanding how people can be located within simultaneous positions. Such categories operate to mutually constitute one another and as a result, according to Christensen and Jensen, other forms of power mediated across different social categories can support or undermine hegemonic masculinity. Finally, a recent development in the field of masculinity studies has been to critically explore how masculinity is constituted. Rather than think of masculinity as being formed through relationships of opposition, Eric Anderson usefully argues that we need to rethink the internal constituents of masculinity itself (Anderson 2009). He engages with theories of masculinity that suggest that heterosexual masculine subjectivities are constituted through homophobia. Instead he argues that the constitution of masculinity is changing. This means that masculinity and homophobia can be viewed as conceptually discrete. In other words, heterosexual masculinities can be constituted without relying on homophobia as a constituent factor. Therefore, unlike Kimmel’s proposal that masculinity is based on homophobia, Anderson argues that at a cultural level there is less homophobia. This, it is argued, is leading to a more inclusive masculinity that recognises and affirms homosexual otherness rather than using such otherness to sustain a masculinity. One of the reasons for this is that the political landscape has changed, where the acceptance and inclusion of gays and lesbians has increased. As a consequence of this, ‘a culture of homophobia, femphobia, and compulsory heterosexuality’ (Anderson 2009: 7) otherwise known as ‘homohysteria’, is decreasing. The interesting aspect of Anderson’s work is that it highlights how masculinity can be constituted differently. While recognising the positive potential of Anderson’s work, Tristan Bridges suggests that the reconstruction of masculine subjectivities could be understood as a characteristic of a privilege afforded by groups of white heterosexual men. More specifically, Bridges highlights how men who take on gay aesthetics to distance themselves from a traditional stereotypical masculinity may not necessarily mean a lessening sexual or gendered inequality. For example, in Bridges’ study of pro-men’s rights groups, he argues that some men in this study used gay aesthetics in order to distance themselves from a traditional stereotypical heterosexuality. However, as a consequence, the identification of heterosexual identities, in pro-homosexual and feminist ways, rearticulated sexual inequalities. He suggests that: ‘men’s behaviors are best understood as reinvigorating symbolic sexual boundaries and recuperating gender and sexual privilege in historically novel ways’ (Bridges 2014: 78). Furthermore, by representing themselves through gay aesthetics, these men reinforce traditional sexual categories and the historical privileges that accompany them. Thus,

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according to Bridges, it is the dis-identification with traditional masculinities that can enable existing structures of gender inequalities to reproduce. Hence, the lack of homophobia in the constitution of masculinity does not mean the erasure of sexual and gendered difference. The debate as to how the internal dynamics configure masculinity continues to have a major impact on the development of masculinity studies in European contexts. However, another direction of analysis that has had less influence is a more radical challenging approach to understanding masculinity. This approach calls into question the epistemological foundations of masculinity studies by scrutinising fixed notions of male and female and the ascription of binary gender categories of masculinity and femininity. This approach is usually associated with queer and trans theory.

The Queering of Masculinity Queer and transgender theorists have productively explored the destabilisation of biological categorisations of sex. One of the aims of studies of men and masculinities has been to denaturalise sex, gender and desire, and to emphasise the active cultural production of masculinities. This aim has also been facilitated by work with a wide range of sexual minorities, including lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals and transgendered groups. At the same time, there continues to be a range of popular ascriptions that link sexual choice and gender with an assumed association of homosexuality with femininity and lesbianism with masculinity. This association serves to deny the validity of same-sex desire, while producing heterosexuality as conceptually inescapable (Pringle 1992). Early work by Diane Richardson suggested that ‘Historically, lesbians have been portrayed as virtual men trapped in the space of women’s bodies: “mannish” in appearance and masculine in their thoughts, feelings and desires, rendering their existence compatible with the logic of gender and heteronormativity’ (Richardson 1996: 4). Emerging decentred female and male gay subjectivities provide concrete evidence that femininity and masculinity is not something one is born with or an inherent possession, but rather an active process of achievement, performance and enactment (Plummer 1981; Weeks 1977). In short, gay and lesbian scholars and activists have been among the most dynamic contributors to recent sexual theorising in destabilising sociological and common-sense connections between men/women and masculinity/femininity within the broader structure of gender relations (Bristow and Wilson 1993; Kirsch 2000). One of the productive contributions of gay and lesbian movements has been to deconstruct these connections. Early gender theorists usefully questioned the social construction of the biological categories of male and female (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Gatens 1996; Laqueur 1990) and highlighted that ‘either sex is privileged as a biological

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attribute upon which a gender ideology is imposed, or sex is denied as merely the ideological mystification that obscures cultural facts about gender’ (Elam 2000: 267). One way to demonstrate the social construction of biology has been through the queering of gender/sex categories. For example, Halberstam in her discussion of female masculinities suggested that female bodies are able to take on and live out particular masculinities, just as male bodies are able to take on femininities (1998). In other words, the study of masculinity from Halberstam’s approach is not directly focused on the biological category of men. Hence, female masculinities become a means of understanding how bodies are read through particular social and cultural codes of maleness. In many ways masculinity becomes dis-embodied and operates precisely because the material evidence (biology, chromosomes, genetics, hormones) in which masculinity has been traditionally fixed becomes unanchored. Myra Hird situates the relationship between sex and gender as political in the sense that ‘the authenticity of gender resides not on, or in the body’, but by a ‘particular system of knowledge, power and truth’ (Hird 2000: 353). This suggests that the relationship between sex and gender is held together by particular ways of conceptualising the body. As a result, biological sex is a historical construct and is thus materialised through its application to the body. As a result, masculinity in this approach is not something that is associated with culturally defined bodies but can also operate across a range of bodies. Importantly, a critical masculinity studies has the potential to turn in on itself and question the viability of what makes masculinity and whether a masculinity is or should be associated with culturally coded maleness. One of the implications of the understanding of the discursive formation of biology is an emerging question of the epistemological status of the ‘real’ body. More specifically, genital difference becomes framed as a discursive regime that facilitates the existence of coherent stable biologies. This prompts the possibility, as Judith Butler has pointed out, of an inversion where the coherency of biological sex exists primarily through the discursive reiteration of gender (2004). Thus, gender is performative in the sense that it provides the conceptual possibilities of biological sex to exist. Performance is not used in a theatrical sense but rather as a form of citation. This means that the actual citing of gender produces the possibility of biological sex. In this way, the citational operates as a material presence that secures and establishes the existence of gender. This means that the idea of the social construction of masculinity as opposed to the biology of man, become destabilised. With its roots in Foucauldian analysis, biological maleness becomes understood as a social historical framing of ideas where: ‘western ideology takes biology as the cause, and behaviour and social statuses as the effects, and then proceeds to construct biological dichotomies to justify the “naturalness” of gendered behaviours and gendered social status’ (Lorber 1993: 568). In this way, biology operates as ideology that constructs maleness. In other words, the designation of bodies

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exists as a context where discourses of maleness and femaleness are written. This gender binarism presupposes the nature of male and female through an appeal to ‘biology as ideology’. As Kevin Floyd remarks: Is gender a ‘destination’? Is this a useful way of putting it? Is gender a location? A place? A space? Is the line separating masculinity from femininity a border one can cross like a wall or a fence? What about the region between these two territories, which transgender and intersex studies have begun to map for us? The metaphors brought to bear in the effort to identify differently gendered bodies, in the struggle to find language that can push the limits of available vocabularies, can themselves be revealing. (Floyd 2011: 45) Transgender Studies and its awareness of the normalisation of biology provide a new context for the study of men and masculinity. One of the reasons for this is that studies of masculinity tend to situate and locate their arguments through a gendered intelligibility that is based upon masculinity and femininity. Transgender and intersex research disrupts the often neat segregation of culturally ascribed male and female categories. Thus, transgender theory highlights the social and cultural deployment of gender dimorphism by state institutions. Masculinity Studies has nervously recognised and acknowledged transgender and intersexuality, not simply because of the (dis) location of men, but because of the challenge to the intelligibility of gender. If gender begins to operate outside of dimorphic frames of understanding, then the epistemological traction achieved by naming social relations as masculinity (and femininity) becomes limited. Medical surgeries that on the one hand curtail and seek to position bodies within male/female binaries begin on the other: to make available all kinds of embodied subject positions that seem to inhabit an outside of the very distinction between male and female, the way in which human beings are now able to inhabit some space that seems irreducible to received gender vocabularies – precisely as a result of this rapidly changing technology. (Floyd 2011: 46) One way in which we can begin to think outside gender is by using Kath Weston’s concept of the ‘unsexed’. She uses this idea to open up a space of gendered ambiguity. This ambiguity occurs at times where gender becomes undefined. She also draws upon examples of transgender or queer episodes where sex remains unknown and it is difficult to assign male/female sex. This moment, she argues, is not about the emergence of another gender type, for example, a ‘third sex’ or intersex, it is a moment that disrupts the gender categorisation based upon masculinity and femininity. ‘Unsexed

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refers to that passing glimmer of an instant just before an acceleration into meaning gives way to what is commonly called “gender” ’ (Weston 2002: 33). Thus, the disruption of gender norms is a temporal disruption – an interval of meaning – where difference itself becomes displaced. It is precisely through researching moments of gendered ambiguity that can enable us to think outside masculinity and femininity. In other words: By attending to fleeting moments when gender zeros out and bodies become unsexed, the discussion can go beyond the business of identifying the referent or exposing the nonexistence of the referent, whether you want to locate gender’s referentiality in the genes, or in the domain of history and culture, or nowhere at all. Zero allows for movement in and out of gender-soaked categories, a movement that depends upon the possibility of gender’s short-lived dissolution. By holding open the ‘place’ of unsexed before giving way to a gendered classification, zero is the sign that makes that subtle movement apparent. (Weston and Helmreich 2006: 117) As Weston points out, it is the moment between the first glance, and the second glance, before whatever gender category is being used, that we need to explore in more detail (2002). It is suggested that the process of gender transitivity can be found in everyday situations. This is not the same as performativity, where repetition congeals to form ontologies; the unsexed is the moment within the spaces of its repetition. As queer theory and Transgender Studies begin to break down and challenge the binary structures of gender and masculinity they enable us: ‘to imagine, to try to think, an outside to the very distinction between masculinity and femininity, to aid the development of categories, concepts, and knowledges adequate to such an outside’ (Floyd 2011: 46). The next section begins to think about what a study of men’s gender outside masculinity might begin to look like.

Gender Without Masculinity The final area that this chapter addresses is to consider the refusal to frame gendered attitudes, affects and behaviours through masculinity categories. This section takes its point of departure from Weston’s approach that highlights a moment prior to the ascription of gender categories to bodies, where existing frames of recognition are no longer useful. It is suggested by Seth Mirsky that studies of masculinities tend to treat men’s lives as co-extensive with masculinity (Mirsky 1996). The consequence of this is that the institutional and cultural authorising of men’s practices can only be understood through the concept of masculinity. This prompts a number of epistemological questions that include: is the focus of enquiry for gender theorists the study of masculinity or men?

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Can we study men without recourse to gender? Can masculinity exist without gender? As Floyd suggests: It is one thing to deconstruct or defamiliarize masculinity in some new way or to insist that, ultimately, there is no such thing as masculinity in the singular but only a dizzying range of masculinities in the plural, as so much scholarship has done so powerfully for so long now. But it seems quite another thing to push the conceptual limits of masculinity studies itself, to try to think an outside to masculinity that does not immediately and predictably reveal itself to be femininity. (Floyd 2011: 46) One common theme that frames these questions is that: men’s lives might not be contained through particular masculinities; that there may be areas or moments in men’s lives where by explaining those moments though masculinity might be irrelevant: such possibilities are not comprehended in a men’s studies approach which, against its stated intentions, theorizes masculinity as a necessary attribute of human males. (Floyd 2011: 30) Mirsky usefully suggests that if men’s practices can only be understood or explained through the concept of masculinity, then the concept loses its analytical traction. According to Mirsky, masculinity is constituted in two key ways. First, masculinity is often defined in opposition to women and second, men are positioned as being in a more dominant position to women. This approach appears similar to early pro-feminist men’s projects, where gender interventions involve a political strategy that requires a radical rejection of their masculinity, which was seen as essentially tied up with a relationship of power. In this way, approaches to the study of men need to think not simply about identifying the range of masculinities, but moments where masculinity is resisted and the implications of this. One way to think about this is through the notion of post-masculinity (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2012). A post-masculinity position might align itself with queer or trans theory by thinking about a theory of gender that is not dependent upon masculinity and femininity identities. For example, Judith Butler explains how gender can be understood as a regulatory concept that operates to link masculine and feminine attributes to culturally designated bodies. In her account of gender, masculinity and femininity do not necessarily have to be reducible to gender, and gender does not have to be reducible to masculinity or femininity. The result of this is that a conceptual space can exist between masculinity and femininity on the one hand and gender on the other: ‘To keep the term gender apart from both masculinity and femininity is to safeguard a theoretical perspective by which one might offer an account of how the binary

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of masculine and feminine comes to exhaust the semantic field of gender’ (Butler 2004: 42). It is interesting to consider what might emerge from this conceptual space once the semantic possibilities of gender have been exhausted. According to Butler, this entails thinking about the ways that gender has become proliferated, where gender operates beyond the binaries of the feminine and the masculine. For Butler, the conceptual de-linking of masculinity from gender is a productive possibility. As a consequence, male behaviours, attitudes and practices can no longer be simple indicators of masculinity (or even gender). This resonates with European poststructural readings of representation that question the presumption of self-evident and fixed meaning. In the context of studying men, there is currently a compunction that male subjectivities and practices have to be explained by a concept of masculinity. The consequences of resisting the regulatory regime of dyadic gender theory is that a move beyond ‘masculinity’ as a conceptual and empirical default position is required. Queer theorists enable an understanding of how the regulatory basis of a dyadic notion of gender as masculinity and femininity requires a conceptual frame whereby subjectivities and practices have to be incorporated within that system. In short, there can be no space outside masculinity, where men’s subjectivities and practices can be explained. This is the basis of one of Jean Bobby Noble’s critiques of female masculinities, where the ascription of female masculinities leads to the re-inscription of an existing gendered signification, albeit via new representational strategies. More specifically, Noble argues that: ‘by gender I mean the sets of cultural meanings and technologies that, in the case of masculinity, have allowed power, an imaginary construction of the male body, and masculinity to all function as synonyms for each other’ (Noble 2006: 33). She goes on to argue that masculinity and the male body are not reducible to each other, but each is articulated through the other (Noble 2006: 35). One of the difficulties of this approach is that it is hard to provide empirical examples. However, Noble achieves this is by understanding the relationship between men, boys and masculinity. She highlights how contemporary culture is now fascinated with the notion of the boy – from Hollywood films through to music and boy bands. In the UK concerns over boys’ underachievement in education highlights how culturally precious boys have become. The appeal, according to Noble, is that boys have become understood in opposition to men. The cultural fascination with ‘boys’, if we agree with Noble, is that being a boy both promises a phallic power, but also eludes a hetero-normativity that often constitutes masculinities. Therefore, boys are required to participate in a cultural refusal, as part of a broader resistive moment to adult masculinity and its attendant symbolic weight and cultural expectation. It is therefore suggested that social and cultural notions of masculinity are premised on the rejection of boyhood and boyhood becomes a ‘productive failure’ of manhood (Noble 2006).

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An example of this can be found in recent media reports on boys and sexual activities with their female teachers. One of the patterns found in media accounts is that female teacher and boy-pupil sexual relations are not simplistically reported as sexual abuse. Rather, boys’ sexual activity is at one moment explained through their status as children, while at another moment becomes configured through epithets of adult hetero-normative masculinity. One headline that is used repeatedly when reporting on female teachers and male pupils is that of the ‘Miss Kiss’. By positioning teacher and pupil behaviours through this language, the sexual activity shifts from that of attack and abuse to one of childlike playground activities. For example, a report on a teacher who was convicted of ‘kissing a 15-year old boy in a school cupboard’ highlights that the judge warned the teacher about her ‘immature and romantic nonsense’ (Wainwright 2005). Other reports refer to ‘teen romps’, ‘groping’, ‘flirting’ ‘snogging’ and ‘Miss sacked over kisses’ (Higgins 2005). The language reflects boys’ underdeveloped sexual competency and inexperience. But rather than position the boys as innocent, they occupy a space of an active sexuality. Although news reports draw upon a ‘too young’ discourse as a means of textualising their moral and legal concern, their sexual practices that are ‘falling outside the heterosexualist continuum are effectively rendered unintelligible by mainstream narratives, including (and especially) those focused on boyhood and emergent masculinity’ (Quint 2005: 42). Thus, what appears as sexual practice of men, has to be re-signified. From this perspective, desire can only legally and morally exist within the possibilities of the category of childhood and at that point is re-coded as an ineffectual and immature childhood desire. However, these sexual practices stand outside the childhood discourse but cannot be contained within an adult masculinity. As a result, the gender of boys cannot be cohered through the concept of masculinity or childhood. As yet, we have not developed our gendered theory sufficiently to accommodate this gendered liminality.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted a number of different theories of masculinity that are being used across Europe to study and research men and masculinity. It began with a discussion of the historical foundations of masculinity studies, primarily in relation to feminism. The chapter then moved to explore how the disconnection between sex and gender could be thought of in relation to hegemony and hegemonic masculinities. The limitations of this approach were explored especially in relation to hegemonic masculinity. The chapter also highlighted the importance of queer theory and the implications of collapsing the dyadic notion of gender. Finally the chapter examined the possibility of understanding male genders outside of a masculinity identity. In summary, popular culture is awash with men’s issues crammed with discussions about

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the difficulties and problems associated with being a man. Television talk shows, magazines and editorials, and government press releases discuss not simply ‘problem men’, but also the problem of being a man. At the same time, social democratic projects across Europe are unravelling as the inequalities between men and women are appearing to widen. The need to make sense of men’s practices, how we describe them and how we understand what men do is a project that continues to be of key importance.

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INTRODUCTION: FEMINISM

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eminism constitutes one of the most important theoretical developments of modern times, and it has evolved in a number of directions, which are investigated in turn by Claire Nally, Carole Sweeney, and Stéphanie Genz in Chapters 16 to 18. Nally looks at first and second wave feminism from the rise of modern feminist thought in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, outlining how second wave feminists felt motivated both to react against and revise the themes and concerns of their first wave predecessors. She regards feminism as ‘a constantly evolving discourse’ that, for all the wide disparities in attitudes taken towards such issues as pornography, nevertheless features broad agreement about the need for social justice that forms a basis for feminism’s continued development. Sweeney’s topic is so-called ‘French’ feminism, and how it differs from the mainstream Anglo-American tradition of feminist thought. Often criticised for a bias towards biological essentialism, this style of feminism has been deeply influenced by French poststructuralism, particularly deconstruction and its insistence on the cultural importance of ‘difference’. Sweeney traces the radical shift in approach that occurs between Simone de Beauvoir and such controversial figures as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Genz covers the rise of postfeminism as a reaction to certain aspects of both first and second wave feminist thought, pointing out the many different, and often conflicting, meanings and connotations the term has come to have. Certainly, postfeminism has been a source of much controversy within feminist circles, but Genz nevertheless finds considerable value in its thoughtprovoking nature.

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16 FIRST AND SECOND WAVE FEMINISM Claire Nally

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eminism is a highly contested political and literary theory, marked by pluralities in the approach to sexuality and pornography; the role of Eurocentrism and women of colour; how we theorise biology and the body, alongside whether separatism is a viable and indeed useful perspective for a revolution in society at large. The following chapter will address the origins of feminism, through Mary Wollstonecraft and her precursors, then the major features of first wave feminist theory in figures like Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as how second wave feminists like Toril Moi, Shulamith Firestone and women from the Anglo-American tradition like Kate Millett sought to engage with and revise their predecessors. The tensions in feminism(s) in the late 1970s and 1980s, with Audrey Lorde’s analysis of the erotic in ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ (1984) and the exclusion of black women in feminist discourses in ‘I am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities’ (1988), as well as Andrea Dworkin’s articulation of anti-pornography feminism and separatism, reveal a highly complex body of critical thought. Finally, more recent critics, such as Donna Haraway in her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991), have staged an intervention in traditionally ‘masculine’ discourses such as science and technology, while gesturing towards the complexities of postmodern feminism. There have been recent challenges to the notion of ‘the oceanography of the feminist movement’ (Siegel 1997: 52), or wave theory, that is, the standard linear chronology dating from the very late eighteenth century with a first wave high point in the early twentieth century, followed by a second wave in the 1960s and 1970s. As Ruth Lewis and Susan Marine note (2015), the notion of feminist ‘waves’ is problematic for several reasons. In dividing feminist history in these terms, we fail to draw analogies between generations of women; their influence on each other, and how feminist inheritance is used and negotiated. The ‘wave’ metaphor suggests ‘homogenous bodies of thought that are distinct from one another and, within each wave, feminists acting in agreement with one another – each a droplet in a wave’ (Lewis and

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Marine 2015: 131). Mindful of this, the current chapter will use the idea of the tapestry, as articulated by Lewis and Marine: In this version, feminism borrows from generations past but insists on its own values, priorities, and forms of agency. A tapestry is constituted by its history – the history of tapestry traditions, skills, techniques, materials, and the weavers who create the tapestry – so that the history is woven into the present. So with feminism; its history is present in contemporary feminism, its precursors are woven into the very fabric of the debate, politics and practices. (Lewis and Marine 2015: 132) Feminism becomes a constantly evolving discourse, rather than a series of discrete historical moments. Thus, while identifying the major theories of key feminists, this chapter will also set out the ways in which congruencies and parallels emerge in feminisms across the centuries.

Early Feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft In conventional analyses, feminism’s emergence is usually established with the first wave of writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, revealing antecedents in the Enlightenment’s focus on reason and egalitarianism as the cornerstone of modern society. Wollstonecraft published her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and it angered many readers: Horace Walpole famously commented of Wollstonecraft that she was ‘a hyena in petticoats’ (Johnson 2002: 1), and the gradual revelation of her bohemian personal life provided ample evidence for the dangers of feminism to her detractors. Her greatest contribution to early feminist politics is her challenge to women’s ‘innate’ weakness, in which she tackles Rousseau’s hypotheses that women are naturally dependent on men and ill-suited to learning (Wollstonecraft 1992: 108). In theology, women were universally held to be morally and physically inferior, after their biblical mother, Eve. Such constructions of femininity thereby contributed to the notion that women were unfit for public life, civil responsibility or any real employment beyond the home. Wollstonecraft disputes this position by maintaining ignorance only fosters weakness, while giving women access to education would promote active, vital and morally responsible citizens. Thus Wollstonecraft takes issue with stereotypes of femininity, and maintains that women’s inferiority (which she actually does not dispute) is caused by social environment rather than Nature. She maintains that ‘difference’ is not innate, but rather propagated by a society which denies women access to knowledge: ‘All the difference I can discern arises from the superior advantage of liberty which enables [men] to see more of life’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 105–6). She identifies that women are frequently rendered more ‘artificial, weak characters than they would

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otherwise have been; and consequently, more useless members of society’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 103), because through their lack of education, they suffer from a deficiency of Reason. The centrality of the use of Reason arises from the well-rehearsed arguments of Enlightenment philosophy, such as Kant’s ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784). This positions Reason as a cornerstone of humanity, alongside a hostility to authority which was eventually to culminate in the French Revolution (1789), and a confidence in the reform of modern civilisation along more egalitarian principles (Wollstonecraft 1992: 91–9). While A Vindication does not strike a modern reader as especially radical, given that Wollstonecraft doesn’t seek the vote, for instance, she nonetheless articulates a number of comparatively innovative ideas for her time. She asserts the need for financial independence and the ability to pursue a career: ‘How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty’ and notes that women only concern themselves with their appearance because patriarchy has encouraged female vanity through the necessity of competing in the marriage market (Wollstonecraft 1992: 268, 319). She also maintains that in cases of common-law marriage, a man should be compelled to provide for any children, and that ‘the [unmarried] woman who is faithful to the father of her children demands respect, and should not be treated like a prostitute’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 167). She also refers to ‘the absurd unit of a man and his wife’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 263), where in common law, a woman’s legal existence was deferred to her husband. This argument continued throughout the nineteenth century, until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 and 1882, which allowed women to own property and retain any money they earned in their own right. She characterises the reading of novels as ‘sentimental’, and asserts that due to a confined education, women pursue ‘trifling employments’: they naturally imbibe opinions which the only kind of reading calculated to interest an innocent frivolous mind inspires. Unable to grasp anything great, is it surprising that they find the reading of history a very dry task, and disquisitions addressed to the understanding intolerably tedious, and almost unintelligible? (Wollstonecraft 1992: 314) In order to foster female autonomy and intellectual ability, Wollstonecraft suggests that education should be founded on co-educational principles (Wollstonecraft 1992: 192), where girls and boys study from five to nine years of age, for free and across all social classes. She advocates the study of both the arts and sciences. While she doesn’t challenge a woman’s role as maternal caregiver and wife, she does imply a renegotiation of the public and private spheres through her advocacy of women’s potential contribution to society:

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Women might certainly study the art of healing and be physicians as well as nurses. . . . They might also study politics, and settle their benevolence on the broadest basis. . . . [I]s not that Government then very defective, and very unmindful of the happiness of one-half of its members, that does not provide for honest, independent women, by encouraging them to fill respectable stations? But in order to render their private virtue a public benefit, they must have a civil existence in the state, married or single. (Wollstonecraft 1992: 266–7) One of the major problems with A Vindication, and this is also the case with criticisms levelled at Virginia Woolf and first wave feminism generally, is that Wollstonecraft addresses herself to the plight of the middle-class, implicitly white, woman (Wollstonecraft 1992: 81). While she was sympathetic to the poor, the focus of her polemic in A Vindication does not concern them directly (in contradistinction to her other writings, such as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 1796). She maintains that women should be ‘raised sufficiently above abject poverty not to be obliged to weigh the consequences of every farthing they spend, and having sufficient to prevent their attending to a frigid system of economy which narrows both heart and mind’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 260). Conversely, the aristocratic lady is incapable of redemption by education, due to the luxurious nature of her existence, and will have no place in a reformed society (Wollstonecraft 1992: 81). Middle-class women are in the envious position of being neither stupefied by opulence or excessive toil, and are thereby well placed to effect potential change.

Virginia Woolf – Writing and Education for Women Along with her predecessors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and the Langham Place circle (a group of middle-class women meeting in the mid-nineteenth century) (Sanders 2001: 23), the focus of Virginia Woolf’s feminism was the provision of education and economic independence: ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (Woolf 1945: 6). She argued for a specifically female literary tradition, and articulated the concept of ‘androgyny’ in writing, while also celebrating lesbianism. These are the major themes of A Room of One’s Own (1929) while Three Guineas (1938) marks a departure in its seeming advocacy of separatism. While she had some brief participation in suffragist activism in the 1910s, her main objective was the intellectual life of women: suffrage and the right to vote were valuable causes, but for Woolf, insufficiently broad in its scope (Marcus 2000: 211). Woolf’s initial focus is on education targeted the inequalities of the system: while women-only colleges such as Girton and Newnham were founded in the late nineteenth century, women were only allowed to gain degrees equal

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to men from Cambridge University in 1948. In her famous and incensed story of women’s experience in Oxbridge, Woolf details how a Beadle provided a literal and physical barrier to her learning: she wasn’t allowed to walk on the grass (not being a Fellow or Scholar), and couldn’t gain access in the library unaccompanied or without a letter of introduction. For Woolf, the inequality of access to education is one of the reasons women do not have a literary tradition (feminism’s incursion into literary studies has at least recovered a part of a female lineage, but in Woolf’s time this was less visible). The solution is material: her independent income allows her the freedom to write. The denied access to writing is the substance of Woolf’s polemic about Shakespeare’s fictitious sister: a woman could not have written like Shakespeare, not because of intellectual failing, but material and societal limitations. A woman in the period would be forced into marriage. If she sought to avoid such a fate, she might seek solace in acting. But this too was debarred to her as a proper role for a woman. Ultimately, Shakespeare’s sister is seduced by a theatre manager and kills herself. As Woolf explains, ‘any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at’ (Woolf 1945: 51). Lacking the opportunity to deploy her gifts like her brother, her voice absent and silenced in the historical record. Viewing the paucity of women in the English literary tradition until Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, Woolf noted each of these female writers composed novels. Such middle-class women would have to write in the sitting room, and as Woolf suggested, it would be easier to write a novel than poetry or a play in such conditions: it also means their focus is on character and social relations, which is the very material before them. Woolf notes, in common with Wollstonecraft in this respect, that few women had ‘the right to possess what money they earned[,] . . . for all the centuries before that it would have been her husband’s property’ (Woolf 1945: 24). Even worse is the patriarchal ideology which secures aspirational women writers in their place: the world is indifferent to a poverty-stricken poet such as Keats, but openly hostile to a woman writing (Woolf 1945: 54). Woolf also identifies, with the absence of a female tradition, how women in literary texts are constructed purely in relation to men, rather than same-sex friendships or female solidarity – women do not write women, they are written about. In reference to lesbianism, Woolf states: ‘ “Chloe liked Olivia. . . .” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women’ (Woolf 1945: 81). She suggests Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra would be a very different text if Cleopatra liked Octavia: rather than constructing women through patriarchal logic (women in relation to men, women as lesser and other), women might write about themselves, and thus would be seen to be infinitely more complex:

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‘it is becoming evident that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity’ (Woolf 1945: 83). In this, Woolf also articulates the inherent difference between men and women: ‘it is obvious the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail’ (Woolf 1945: 74). While generations of male writers have written about women, their experience is incommensurate to living life as a woman: how little can a man know [of a woman’s life] when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goddess and hellish depravity. (Woolf 1945: 82) Notably, Woolf had taken issue with the Madonna-Whore dichotomy in her deconstruction of the ‘Angel in the House’ (‘Professions for Women’), flagging up such characterisations of women as patriarchal constructions. In order to counter this, Woolf maintained women must write about their own experiences, different entirely from men’s perspective: ‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help’ (Woolf 1945: 76). She references the problem of biologism which would become a key focus for later feminisms (see Luce Irigaray for instance): The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits them[,] . . . doing something but something that is different; and what should that difference be? All this should be discussed and discovered. (Woolf 1945: 78) Here, Woolf primarily maintains that the roles of men and women in society determine the type of writing they produce. There is also an issue of language, insofar as Woolf’s feminism is fundamentally modernist. Her enterprise was to fracture language, as the female writer found ‘there is no common sentence ready for her use’ (Woolf 1945: 77). Woolf advocates breaking up the established structure of sentences and sequences, as she was to practise in her own novels, such as Mrs Dalloway (1925) and even more radically, The Waves (1931). Additionally, she mounts an eminently modernist critique of the notion of the humanist unified self, which she characterises as a monolithic, masculine and phallic ‘I’:

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It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one always hailed to the letter ‘I’. (Woolf 1945: 98) In contrast to this perspective, Woolf identified the need for a plurality of experience: if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. (Woolf 1945: 96) Woolf theorised such a shift in consciousness as ‘androgyny’, whereby she means writing takes on a multiplicity of viewpoints: ‘that the mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment that it is naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided’ (Woolf 1945: 97). In articulating how this would work in feminist practice, Woolf references the ideal woman novelist: she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when she is unconscious of itself. . . . [I]t is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. (Woolf 1945: 92, 102) It is also this issue of androgyny with which second wave feminists took issue. In A Literature of Their Own (1977), Elaine Showalter suggests Woolf’s notion of androgyny reveals how uneasy she was with femaleness, while Toril Moi maintains ‘Through her conscious exploitation of the sportive, sensual nature of language, Woolf rejects the metaphysical essentialism underlying patriarchal ideology’ (Moi 1985: 9). Equally problematic for some later feminists was Three Guineas, a text which aligns hypermasculinity, patriotism and fascism, in which Woolf rejects the notion of nationhood, explaining ‘as a woman I need no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (Woolf 1993: 234). This privileging of a white, middle-class feminism became central to some of the major debates in the second wave: how can the liberal perspective of the white woman equate with the doubly disenfranchised black woman’s experience? Several critics, including Audrey Lorde, would challenge feminism’s partiality in this respect.

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Simone de Beauvoir – The Other and Existential Feminism Initially published in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is foundational in terms of feminist discourses. However, de Beauvoir’s own political position was rooted in socialism, not feminism: At the end of The Second Sex I said that I was not a feminist because I believed that the problems of women would resolve themselves automatically in the context of socialist development. By feminist, I meant fighting on specifically feminine issues independently of the class struggle. (Schwarzer, 1984: 32) Despite this claim, in 1972 she declared herself feminist because she believed the radicalism of the second wave could institute the changes she had sought in The Second Sex. The ‘embroidery’ metaphor for the history of feminism, rather than the notions of ‘first’ and ‘second’ wave, might be reiterated here, as de Beauvoir’s positioning in the twentieth century does not suggest a break with prior theories, as much as sympathetic incorporation and renegotiation. The alliance of feminism and socialist politics is more uneasy than it might first appear. In literary theory, the Marxist-Feminist Collective sought to read Victorian texts through Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey, while Cora Kaplan has used Althusser to consider Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Despite this, as Terry Eagleton noted in his Introduction to the Second Edition of Myths of Power, traditional Marxism has suffered from an ‘infamous “gender blindness” ’ (Eagleton 2005: xxvi) in its strategic partiality towards class. In some ways, de Beauvoir’s early position on feminism might be seen to collaborate with this perspective: ‘A truly socialist ethics, concerned to uphold justice without suppressing liberty and to impose duties on individuals without abolishing individuality, will find most embarrassing the problems posed by the condition of woman’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 89–90). Both traditional Marxism and de Beauvoir hoped that in a Marxist society, equality (including that of the sexes) would be a natural progression (there were figures who simultaneously sought to embrace feminism and leftist politics, such as the anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman). Despite this stance, she also offers a criticism of Engels, suggesting women’s oppression did not begin with capitalism (Tong 1992: 204). Ultimately, in this later work, she prioritises feminism above the class war: ‘I am a feminist today, because I realized that we must fight for the situation of women, here and now, before our dreams of socialism come true’ (Schwarzer 1984: 32). Despite her obvious allegiance with socialism, de Beauvoir’s major philosophical influence was not Marxism, but rather existentialist philosophy. She famously began her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929, and his work was influential in the background to The Second Sex. Following G. W.

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F. Hegel, who theorised that consciousness is alienated from itself, producing a fracture he described as the transcendent self (the observing ego) and the immanent self (the observed ego), Sartre saw the divided psyche as ‘Beingfor-Itself’ (pour-soi), and ‘Being-in-Itself’ (en-soi). Each Being-in-Itself locates itself as a subject, and locates all other social beings as objects, or Others. In acquiring self-definition and subjectivity, the psyche constantly asserts ascendancy over other beings: ‘In establishing all other beings as Others, each self describes and conceives of itself as transcendent and free and views the Other as immanent and enslaved’ (Tong 1989: 197). For de Beauvoir, this foundational tenet of existentialism also impacted on women’s experiences (de Beauvoir 1972: 96–7). She argued that man has designated woman as the Other, while retaining the ontological category of Self or the One for the male: The individual who is a subject, who is himself, if he has the courageous inclination towards transcendence, endeavours to extend his grasp on the world: he is ambitious, he acts. But an inessential creature is incapable of sensing the absolute at the heart of her subjectivity; a being doomed to immanence cannot find self-realization in acts. [She is] shut up in the sphere of the relative, destined to the male from childhood, habituated to seeing in him a superb being whom she cannot possibly equal. (de Beauvoir 1972: 653) In articulating this position, de Beauvoir rejected the idea of essentialism. She carefully delineates how reproductive sexuality is often characterised in terms of active (male) and passive (female), and how ‘[t]he ovule has sometimes been likened to immanence, the sperm to transcendence’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 44), but rather than resorting to biologism, she maintains that reproductive discourses of medicine and science view empirical data according to social constructs and with patriarchal ideology at the root of its theorisation: ‘On the respective functions of the two sexes man has entertained a great variety of beliefs. At first they had no scientific basis, simply reflecting social myths. . . . With the advent of patriarchal institutions, the male laid eager claim to his posterity’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 39). Indeed she expressly counters essentialism as follows: ‘I deny that [biological facts] establish for her a fixed and inevitable destiny’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 65). This engagement with scientific discourses is replicated in Donna Haraway’s exploration of the gendering of biology in Primate Visions (1989) and her evasion of this essentialism in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (discussed further below). The most famous declaration of The Second Sex: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 295) is of a piece with de Beauvoir’s anti-essentialism. Indeed, in common with second wave feminist Shulamith Firestone, de Beauvoir resisted the idea that maternity was a high point of a

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woman’s life (de Beauvoir 1972: 62–3), but rather saw childbearing as another way in which women can be objectified and alienated from themselves. She also highlighted that the independent woman with a career, who might nonetheless be married, does not exempt herself from the duties society apportions her as a woman: ‘She does not want to feel that her husband is deprived of advantages he would have obtained if he had married a “true woman”; she wants to be presentable, a good housekeeper, a devoted mother, such as wives traditionally are’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 703). In ascertaining the ways in which women are encouraged to manage working life, home life, conventional femininity, beauty, marriage and children, de Beauvoir identifies similar issues that would later concern third wave feminists: in short, the ways in which contemporary popular culture suggests women can ‘have it all’.

Feminism’s Second Wave As Lewis and Marine have identified (2015), in the attempt to portray the history of feminism chronologically, the fissures in feminism are often emphasised, alongside departures from one’s predecessors, rather than the nature of inheritance and common ground. Imelda Whelehan also iterates that in historicising feminism, we must note that, ‘Modern liberal feminists have reaped the benefits of two centuries of liberal feminist writings, and in a sense, all current feminist positions derive impetus and inspiration from such writers’ (Whelehan 1995: 34). This is not to overlook the tensions and different perspectives which cohere under feminism, but rather to address the commonality as well as generational shifts in women’s emancipatory political thought. Following the success of the first wave, US agitation for liberation had several strands: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, which contested the role of the housewife and mother as the only legitimate lifestyle choice for women. Indeed she identified that women’s magazines in the 1950s and 1960s bolstered such an ideology, with editorial decisions made chiefly by men. Women had less access to the workplace due to internal and societal pressures to forsake their careers for marriage and a family. Freidan founded NOW (National Organization for Women) in 1966, to campaign against sex discrimination, in response to the US Equal Opportunity Commission’s failure to respond to appeals for equal rights. On a smaller but more radical scale, the idea of the collective had great influence in later feminisms: women’s liberation in the US and in the UK had strong allegiances with civil rights groups, trade unions and anti-war campaigns. In September 1968, a demonstration against Miss America beauty pageant included a ‘Freedom Trash Can’, into which campaigners threw heels, bras, girdles and dishcloths as symbols of women’s enslavement (Thornham 2001: 31). In America, there were links between feminism, anti-Vietnam and student crusades, while in the UK, feminism often aligned itself with working-class militancy, industrial

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disaffection and most prominently, activism like Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. In 1981, ‘Women for Life on Earth’ began a long-standing campaign against the storage of American nuclear weapons at RAF Greenham, and in December 1982, 30,000 women held hands around the perimeter fencing. Such radical politics also required a theoretical reinforcement: the rise in radical feminism, including lesbian activism, became a major thread in the feminist tapestry. We only need look to figures such as Audrey Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig for evidence of this in the second wave. However, it is also a strong feature of earlier feminisms: both Woolf and de Beauvoir evaded conventional heterosexuality in theory and in practice (Meese 1992, Simons 1992), testifying to the ways in which feminism overlaps and influences each generation of women. In literary theory specifically, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) is a feminist classic. She addresses the importance of gendered power dynamics, alongside the progress of first wave feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how these ‘sexual politics’ have influenced the writings of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Jean Genet. Millet established a model of feminist literary criticism as ‘a critical force to be reckoned with. Its impact makes it the “mother” and precursor of all later works of feminism criticism in the Anglo-American tradition’ (Moi 1985: 24). In contradistinction to the New Critical model’s focus on the literary text, Millett argued for the importance of political and social contextualisation: ‘I operate on the premise that there is room for a criticism which takes into account the larger cultural context in which literature is conceived and produced’ (Millett 2000: xx). One of the major problems with Millett, however, is the way in which her own feminist legacies are startlingly absent. For instance, as Moi notes, Millett is clearly indebted to Simone de Beauvoir, but she makes only a fleeting appearance in Sexual Politics (Moi 1985: 25). Despite this, the radical agenda of the book is still current. Sheila Jeffreys reads Millett in tandem with the pornography industry: ‘ideas about women and sex in the 1960s novels by Norman Mailer and Henry Miller which Millett scrutinises so incisively lie at the foundation of today’s industry, and contemporary feminist campaigns against pornography will be enriched by the knowledge of her work’ (Jeffreys 2011: 76). As such, Millett’s currency to later debates can be identified, especially given Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon’s work, or more broadly, the ‘Porn Wars’ of feminism.

Feminist Biologies – Shulamith Firestone In her radical feminist discussion in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Firestone engaged with a number of key issues which had been occupying feminist theories for centuries: reproduction and the nuclear family, the construction of women as caregivers, as well as how to locate socialism within feminism (this

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was fundamental to de Beauvoir and later to Haraway, the former of which Firestone references at several intervals). Firestone maintains that ‘sex class is so deep as to be invisible’ (in Nicholson 1997: 19), by which she means sexual difference underpins every form of social organisation. She castigated Marx and Engels for overlooking this in their analysis of inequality. Her discussion of historical materialism, therefore, has an emphatically gendered perspective: historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another; in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction and childcare created by these struggles; in the connected development of other physically-differentiated classes [castes]; and in the first division of labor based on sex which developed into the [economic-cultural] class system. (in Nicholson 1997: 25–6) She targets the idea of ‘Nature’ as a stable category which predetermines our behaviour: ‘Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature’ (in Nicholson 1997: 20). Biological contingencies, such as a woman’s capacity for childbirth, is not actually celebrated (unlike in other feminisms such as Mary O’Brien and Adrienne Rich, who saw female reproductive capacity as a source of strength), and here it is rather an instance of oppression. In rephrasing Engels, she shifts our focus from economic to biological conditions: ‘relations of reproduction rather than of production [are] the driving force in history’ (Tong 1992: 72). Rather than differentiating between the sexes, Firestone maintained that if men and women could abandon their designated roles in reproduction, it would be one step towards dismissing sexual roles entirely. In some ways, this involves a complete reconsideration of scientific discourses: Evelyn Fox Heller has identified how far discussions of biology are predicated on metaphors of active and passive which in turn shore up cultural determinants of gendered behaviour and construct these as entirely natural. She notes that the narrative of reproduction often figures the egg as a passive and feminine receiver of the active masculine sperm. Alternative scientific discussions have narrated the idea of fertilisation that involves a process where cells ‘find each other and fuse’ (Heller 1995: 34). While Firestone certainly sees ‘the basic reproductive unit of male/female/infant’ as immutable fact (in Nicholson 1997: 23), she nonetheless maintains the nuclear family is a comparatively recent development in human relations, and one which we can circumvent through the intervention of science: while she cautions that ‘new technology, especially fertility control’ (in Nicholson 1997: 24) may be used against women to reinforce exploitation, she nonetheless explores the ways in which ‘artificial

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reproduction’ would thwart a child’s dependence on the mother, resulting in a fairer division of labour in the home and the public sphere. It would also mean that ‘genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally (a reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality . . . would probably supercede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality)’ (in Nicholson 1997: 25). In her evaluation of biology as something from which we need to be freed, Firestone might be located alongside other feminists such as Donna Haraway.

Porn Wars – Feminism, Separatism and the Sexualisation of Women The issue of pornography and the sexualisation of women’s bodies in the service of pleasure, is one of the most contested and fraught areas of feminist theory. Drucilla Cornell’s Feminism and Pornography helpfully reframes tensions and what she calls ‘the divisive “which side are you on” mentality’ (Cornell 2000: 1) in preference for representation of the challenges surrounding the theorisation of sexual explicitness. The academic journal Porn Studies was launched in 2013, provoking outrage from some sections of the feminist community (Cadwalladr 2013). Similarly, narratives which affirm sexual emancipation from figures like Brooke Magnanti (the writer of the Belle du Jour diaries from the early 2000s) and campaigns for the rights of sex workers reveal the problems surrounding the cultural representations of sexually explicit material: we can see the tensions from the 1970s and 1980s are still current today. Feona Attwood, one of the editors of Porn Studies, has identified the myriad ways in which pornographic material has been mainstreamed (Attwood 2010) and Brian McNair has theorised how the ‘pornosphere’ functions in modern society (McNair 2002). Equally campaigns such as ‘No More Page Three’ and the criticisms levelled at fitness regimes such as pole dancing and burlesque reveal how there is still little consensus about women and sexuality. Germaine Greer summarises this point in lucid, cautionary terms as follows: ‘To deny a woman her sexuality is certainly to oppress her but to portray her as nothing but a sexual being is equally to oppress her’ (Greer 2007: 410–11). The tensions within second wave feminism about the state-sponsored prohibition of pornography centred on Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon’s Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance campaign of 1983. Essentially, they maintained that pornography was a violation of women’s civil rights and an instrument of patriarchal oppression. One of the major problems was that of definition: what exactly constitutes pornography? Dworkin and MacKinnon identified it as ‘the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women whether in picture or words’ (Cornell 2000: 29), but they also identified it should include one or more of the following representations of women: dehumanisation as sexual objects, things or commodities; enjoyment of pain or humiliation; sexual pleasure in being raped, tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised

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or physically hurt; postures of sexual submission; body parts are exhibited so that women are objectified and reduced to those parts; penetration by objects or animals; scenes of degradation, injury, abasement, torture, shown as filthy or interior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual (Cornell 2000: 29). The problem is that by its very nature, women are constructed as victims, sexuality is enacted upon them rather than by them: ‘pornography is the institution of male dominance that sexualizes hierarchy, objectification, submission, and violence’ (Cornell 2000: 32). Despite the liberal defence (including from feminists) that the sexual imagination should not be policed by the state, Dworkin and MacKinnon maintained (in common with the feminist adage) that ‘the personal is political’, identifying that most pornography is produced through sexual and economic inequality: women are subjected to coercion, abuse, exploitation, while the conditions of production are related to poverty and homelessness: ‘these conditions constrain choice rather than offering freedom’ (Cornell 2000: 103). One of the ways in which anti-pornography crusades achieved a politicisation of sexuality was to draw a clear alignment between pornography, rape, male violence and the murder of women. In a speech from a ‘Take Back the Night’ March in 1978, Dworkin suggested that: erotic pleasure for men is derived from and predicated on the savage destruction of women. . . . The fact is that the process of killing – and both rape and battery are steps in that process – is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination. . . . [P]ornography functions to perpetuate male supremacy and crimes of violence against women because it trains, educates and inspires men to despise women, to use women, to hurt women. (Cornell 2000: 41–2) We might note a number of issues which complicate this representation. Dworkin’s opponents have questioned whether the link between pornography and male violence was as predetermined as she suggested (Cornell 2000: 258), and speculated whether it might be preferable to deconstruct pornography, rather than prohibit it entirely. This leads us to a careful and situated critique about the nature of sexualised visual culture. As with all discursive practices, pornography is not a static formation which functions in a singular cultural context: consumption and audience, representation, production conditions all plainly influence the marketable product. While Laura Mulvey usefully theorised how women are constructed by the male gaze in cinematographic techniques (Mulvey 1975), a female gaze might have a very different discursive effect. One of the major interrogations of Dworkin and McKinnon’s theoretical stance was the nature of gay pornography (produced by the community and for the community), which articulates (at least ideally) alternative sexualities and institutes a

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reconsideration of heteronormativity. As Frug suggests: ‘Not all pornography is simply about women being fucked. There are some pornographic works in which women fuck, for example . . . and many works in which the subjectivity of a female character is a dominant and successful thematic concern’ (Cornell 2000: 262–3). For instance, there might be a perceptible difference in the ideology, production values and marketing of an SM pornographic film created by lesbian women for a female audience. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s critique is clearly based on a model of heterosexuality: something that men enact on women. By contrast, lesbian and socialist feminists felt that censorship would merely codify already stringent laws against repressed groups, and indeed, many gay and lesbians articulate that pornography produced for them and by them is actually empowering (Whelehan 1995: 78). Related to this, Adrienne Rich claimed that there is ‘a nascent feminist political content in choosing a woman lover or life partner, in the face of institutionalized heterosexuality’, although she doubts whether even lesbian pornography is created for anything other than ‘the male voyeuristic eye’ (Rich 1980: 659, 641). The advantage of lesbian sexuality is that its very nature circumvents, excludes and destabilises patriarchy, and therefore some commentators maintain that its expression in pornography is a radical gesture. The ‘porn wars’, as they came to be known, produced fissures in second wave feminism, but as we will see in Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg, it is possible to renegotiate instances of essentialised identities which caused so much contention in the second wave feminist community.

Cyborg Studies and Postmodernism – Donna Haraway and Technological Feminism In some ways, posthumanism has presented one of the most pertinent interventions in feminist discourses. In her book, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Katharine Hayles identifies that posthumanism deconstructs our privileging of the body. Materiality is ‘an accident of history’ (Hayles 1999: 2) and one which can be successfully renegotiated through the process of hybridisation with the machine: ‘in the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals’ (Hayles 1999: 3). Thus the idea of ‘Nature’ itself, with all the gender determinants this implies, can be rendered null and void. One of the clearest ways in which posthumanism functions is through technological development (and indeed, we might note how the emergence of ‘fourth wave’ feminism in the twenty-first century, with its emphasis on Web 2.0 and Internet activism owes something to a dialogue with Haraway and posthumanism), including various medical interventions in the performance and treatment of the physical body, augmentation

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through prosthesis, and perhaps more unusually, the role of gaming in popular culture. In 2013, one of the clearest articulations of this was the development of the Android game ‘Ingress’ (https://www.ingress.com/), closely linked to the geo-caching phenomenon which uses GPS systems and navigational devices to locate real-world objects. In games which employ geo-caching, the online environment overlaps with the real world, conflating the public and the private in an entirely new way. Theoretically, the conflation of human and machine opens up new possibilities for thinking about the performance of identity, despite the visibility of gendered and frequently misogynistic discourses online (for instance, see @EverdaySexism on Twitter). What is real/artificial, the self/ the other is no longer a particularly relevant demarcation, and in this way, the traditional humanist perspective of selfhood is revised. Enlightenment universality predicated on the white, middle-class privileged male becomes redundant in the face of the plural, multiple and shifting identities of the posthuman, undermining binary discourses and opening up the possibility of defeating Lyotardian grand narratives (see the ‘Postmodernism’ section of this volume), including origin myths, biology and even the Garden of Eden itself: It is certainly true that post-modernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (e.g. the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature – a source of insight and a promise of innocence – is undermined, probably fatally. (Haraway 2004: 11) In ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Donna Haraway presents one of the earliest articulations of posthumanism, and anticipates technological revolutions by several decades. Haraway’s theory might be correlated with Shulamith Firestone’s in some respects, especially given the ways in which the interaction between science and feminism has produced new freedoms for women (IVF, surrogacy, contraception). Certainly this is one of the developments Haraway underscores when she claims, ‘Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality’ (Haraway 2004: 7). Rather than being constructed by, or indeed subjected to, biological and material instantiations (of which the second wave was paradoxically as guilty as traditional patriarchy), the cyborg allows for the combination of the organic and the manufactured: it is a hybrid involved in combining informational simulations and the ‘natural’ body: [C]ertain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. . . . High-tech

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culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices. (Haraway 2004: 35) Haraway’s suspicion of second wave biological essentialism provokes this postmodern interrogation of ‘nature’ and the Real, the celebration of multiplicity and the composite body. More broadly, her celebration of cultural difference (race, gender or class) offers a way to negotiate future feminisms and inclusivity.

Conclusion Feminism (or more properly, feminisms) can be seen to convey a complex set of theoretical positions. In broad agreement about social justice for women, the achievement of this goal is approached in a multifaceted way: sexuality and pornography, femininities, biology and the usefulness of separatism have all been touchstones for debates, renegotiations and contestations. Despite this, the overwhelming narrative of feminism is one of consolidation: the influence of women’s voices from history are still heard in the present. If we consider Caroline Criado-Perez’s campaign in 2013 to ensure Jane Austen featured on an English banknote, or the ways in which women have recently taken to the streets again in the revival of grassroots protests such as ‘Reclaim the Night’, as well as Internet campaigns such as The Everyday Sexism Project (Cochrane 2013), we can see that the legacies of first and second wave feminisms are essential as we progress further into the twenty-first century.

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17 AFTER DE BEAUVOIR: ‘FRENCH’ FEMINISM AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Carole Sweeney

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ew would deny, notes Teresa de Lauretis, that feminism has been ‘all about an essential difference’ (de Lauretis 1990a: 255). How sexual difference, rather than ethnic, national or economic difference, is defined, deployed or denied has been one of the central concerns of second and third wave feminisms. In Britain and the USA at the beginning of feminism’s second wave in the 1960s, the question of sexual difference was secondary to more pressing material questions of social, juridical and political discrimination against women in their everyday lives. This kind of feminism, broadly termed equality or liberal feminism, was activist and pragmatic in orientation, depending on a working definition of woman for political efficacy. While it was strategically expedient for liberal feminism’s project to posit ‘woman’ as a universal category, the solidity of this definition began to be challenged by the insights of a different kind of feminism, informed by Continental philosophy, that focused less on the conditions of material oppression than on the psycho-symbolic structures of patriarchal thought that subordinated women in less visible, but no less injurious, ways. As it split between its Anglo-American and Continental versions, the methodological fault line running through second wave feminism was the definition of sexual difference, and two seemingly opposing strands of feminism developed in the late 1960s and 70s. Generally, Anglo-American feminism was concerned with the politics of class and ethnicity, focusing on lived experience and women’s oppression in the widest sense, while ‘French’ feminism, heavily influenced by poststructuralism, philosophy and psychoanalysis, was more interested in the naturalising operations of patriarchal language and systems of thought that constructed woman as ontological otherness For Julia Kristeva, sexual difference is at once biological and physiological, and this initial difference is translated into ‘the symbolic contract – that is, the social contract’, a ‘difference between men and women as concerns their relationships to power, language, and meaning’. This translation results in, as she

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notes in ‘Women’s Time’, the ‘interiorization of the fundamental separation of the socio-symbolic contract’ (Kristeva 1995: 210, 223). In its ‘French’ mode then, feminism pulled away from the concerns of Anglo-American liberal feminism and the quest for political and economic equality to explore how sexual difference is constructed by the universalism underpinning Western thought that can only conceive of femininity as man’s negative copy and thus, eternally, radically other. This exploration turned to psychoanalysis, first to Freud, then to Lacan, in order to question the psychic economy of sameness inscribing woman both as unknowable alterity and an overdetermined signifier. Freud’s concepts of sexual difference and the ‘riddle of femininity’ had been rejected by earlier feminists who objected to his theories of castration and penis envy that seemed to assert, unproblematically, the primacy of the masculine subject. However, as Juliet Mitchell argues in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Freud’s theorisation of sexual difference is symptomatic rather than prescriptive: ‘Psychoanalysis’, she says, ‘does not describe what a woman is far less what she should be; it can only try to comprehend how psychological femininity comes about’ (Mitchell 1974: 338). For Mitchell, and feminist work influenced by the French Lacanian school, such as Jacqueline Rose’s Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986) and Shoshana Felman’s Literature and Psychoanalysis (1977), Freud’s concepts are not so much concerned with the real, anatomical organ of the penis than its socially constituted symbolic power and ‘the ideas of it that people hold and live by within the general culture’ (Mitchell 1974: xvi). At the centre of what became known as French feminism then, is the importance of the symbolic power of the phallus as it is operates, often imperceptibly, in language and thought. Influenced by the poststructuralist scepticism towards the idea of a unified subject, French feminism turned its attention to the phallocentric systems of thought that sustain the logic of patriarchy through a dissemination of an economy of ‘the problematics of sameness’ (Irigaray 1985a: 26–7). Roused by the changed intellectual currents after May 1968, this type of feminism emerged out of a post-Nietzschean Continental tradition and, accordingly, had particular views on the construction of subjectivity. Rather than assuming the stable subject that was central (even crucial) to the Anglo-American tradition of social and materialist feminism, French feminism was informed by the concept of the divided subject that was integral to post-Freudian psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. Whereas Anglo-American feminism tended towards a more ethically orientated egalitarianism, focused on the communality amongst women and their agency in the world, French feminism was, as de Lauretis notes, characterised by ‘pleasure, danger, radical difference, subversion’ (de Lauretis 1990b: 29). These two strands then, often in productive but sometimes antagonistic relation, form the bifurcated trajectory of feminist critical thought – between equality and difference feminism – in both its second and third waves.

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In the American tradition, difference feminism, exemplified by works such as Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989) and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982), posited some essential biological differences between men and women. Focusing on the outcomes and effects of difference rather than on its origins, they were more interested in psychology than psychoanalysis in their identification of ‘feminine’ difference. A notable exception was Nancy Chodorow’s extremely influential examination of object-relation theories, The Reproduction of Mothering, in which she writes of the ‘centrality of sex and gender’ in psychoanalysis, and that sexually differentiated gender roles are the result of ‘social structurally induced psychological processes’ (Chodorow 1978: 7). Elsewhere, there was an emphasis on pointing up women’s invisibility in literature in a new type of feminist literary criticism, often described as gynocentric, that included, for example, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), Ellen Moer’s Literary Women (1976), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1970) and Adrienne Rich’s ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (1972). At first glance these two strands of feminism appear wholly incompatible; the former devoted to fighting social, political and economic discrimination against women based on their sexual difference, arguing that women are not different but rather equal to men, while the latter uncovers the deep workings of sexual difference in philosophy and culture and asserts the centrality of this difference, suggesting that this very marginality can work to inscribe women more powerfully in culture. However, across these two positions (and in particular in earlier difference feminism) there was often a convergence of interests as both versions sought to defy the patriarchal idea that women were inferior because of their difference to men and thus each version of these two feminisms sought to endow sexual difference with positive rather than negative values. In very different ways, then, both types of feminism were involved in establishing an affirmative notion of sexual difference. For most forms of feminism, the question of sexual difference demanded a new interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture, opening up new questions for feminism: is sexual difference biologically ‘natural’ and therefore immutable? Or, rather, do cultural and ideological forces wholly construct difference? If sexual difference is produced by biology and physiology how do these, then, affect ontology and epistemology? And if sexual difference does exist, should the attributes of femininity always be seen as positive in relation to a negatively defined masculinity? While each version of feminism, French and Anglo-American, was committed, albeit in different ways, to describing and condemning women’s oppression, the question of sexual difference began to assume a more central place in debates across feminism, often structured around questions of equality versus difference, and of essentialism versus nonessentialism (for the equality-difference debate see Joan W. Scott 1990). As the question of sexual difference became central to feminist critical theory in the

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1970s and 80s, the role of language began to take up a more important position in these debates. However, many of these questions, concerning language and philosophy as well as the material conditions of women’s oppression, were first suggested in a much earlier feminist work that for the first time addressed the question of sexual difference in both philosophical and material contexts. The bridge between first and second wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) opens with the now-famous statement, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 295), suggesting for the first time that sexual difference, specifically femininity, was culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. In meticulous detail, over two volumes, de Beauvoir analysed the idea of a ‘natural’ essence of femininity versus the cultural constructedness of femininity, suggesting a distinction between the categories of sex and gender in the production of woman as a cultural signifier. After accounting for the concept of essence in an existential sense, that is, woman presented as immanence and man as transcendence, de Beauvoir argued that whether understood culturally or physiologically, sexual difference for women, is almost exclusively located in her body: ‘Woman, like man’, she says, ‘is her body; but her body is something other than herself’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 61). For de Beauvoir, it is in the discrepant spaces between the body and the self, between biology and ontology, that women experience a sense of alienation and alterity. For the most part underappreciated, even ignored, at the time of its publication, The Second Sex represented an important moment for feminist thought in that it proposed, for the first time, a difference between the categories of sex and gender. This distinction, however, was sometimes less than clear-cut in her explanations and, as Toril Moi notes, de Beauvoir’s dilemma is that she argues that ‘Woman both is and is not her body’ (Moi 1994: 90). This dilemma is produced by the tensions between de Beauvoir’s feminism that is characterised by the complex materiality and overdetermined nature of the female body and a Sartrean existentialism that requires the existence of a free subject. On the one hand, de Beauvoir notes that there are few significant and abiding biological differences between males and females and those that appear in humans, particularly post-puberty, are the result of social and cultural conditioning and habituation rather than any physiological factors. On the other hand, however, in the chapter ‘The Data of Biology’ she offers a description of women’s sexual difference as predominantly biological: ‘From puberty to menopause woman is the theatre of a play that unfolds within her and in which she is not personally concerned’, and elsewhere she states that from ‘birth the species seems to have taken possession of woman and tends to tighten its grasp’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 60, 58). In this oscillation between two seemingly incompatible positions, de Beauvoir alights upon a complex situation in which biology is not extricable from culture and her work reaches, what Moi calls, a productive ‘double impasse’ (Moi 1994: 91).

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In many ways ahead of its time, de Beauvoir’s work problematised the question of sexual difference suggesting that the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ are so complexly intertwined that it is often difficult to separate them out into distinct components: ‘it is not upon physiology that values can be based; rather the facts of biology take on the values that the existent bestows upon them’, and also ‘we must view the facts of biology in the light of an ontological, economic, social and psychological context’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 68–9, 69). Presciently, de Beauvoir noted the degree of women’s acculturation into patriarchy is so acute as to ‘produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 26). Thus, sexual difference, is posited here as a complex configuration that cannot be easily separated into distinct biological or cultural factors and that the effects of the latter are so profound and yet so undetectable that they appear as ‘natural’. For de Beauvoir then, sexual difference, whether understood as innate and biological or constructed and cultural, was central to an understanding of women’s social, economic and cultural oppression. In this way, The Second Sex laid important foundations for second wave feminism, both in Europe and the USA. However, the insights in de Beauvoir’s work would stand in a complex and often fraught relationship with the next generation of feminism in France much of which was influenced by the psychoanalysis she had roundly denounced. In the gauchiste setting of post-’68 France, with its new intellectual and political energies, a new type of feminism was emerging in France in which the demand for appreciable material equality played little part. As the memory of les evénéments began to fade, this generation of soixant-huitard feminists ‘took the question of sexual difference in new, and often controversial, directions’ (Fraser and Bartky 1992: 2). Influenced by Derridean poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in literary studies, this new type of theoretical feminism seemed to take issue with, on the surface at least, many of the insights of The Second Sex. Particularly hostile to de Beauvoir’s aversion to psychoanalysis and an emphasis on sexual equality, this feminism was not, however, a wholesale repudiation of her work. Indeed, as Moi has noted, the relationship between French feminism and Beauvoir has sometimes been a vexed one but one that, despite different theoretical orientations and ideological concerns, shares some common ground. In fact, in 1976 de Beauvoir distanced herself from what she regarded as the injurious essentialism of French feminism by refusing to assert the superiority of women over men. Summarising the concerns of ‘French’ feminism and its focus on the ‘symbolic contract’ of sexual difference, Kristeva avoids such questions of inferiority and superiority, rather pointing up the importance of the ways in which the symbolic contact, as invisible as it is powerful, determines a woman in the social domain so forcefully that it appears as if she were naturally this way or that:

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Sexual, biological, physiological, and reproductive difference reflects a difference in the relation between subjects and the symbolic contract – that is, the social contract. It is a matter of clarifying the difference between men and women as concerns their respective relationships to power, language, and meaning. The most subtle aspects of the new generation’s feminist subversion will be directed towards this issue in the future. This focus will combine the sexual with the symbolic in order to discover first the specificity of the feminine . . . and then the specificity of each woman. (Kristeva 1995: 210) A label invented largely outside of France, ‘French’ feminism is a term that many feminists in France have subsequently disputed, and even, in some case, derided. Less a movement than a loosely aligned intellectual affinity between a few poststructural theorists, many of whom were linguisticians and psychoanalysts, this feminism grew in importance and reach from the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s, but in many ways has eclipsed other varieties of feminism. As Christine Delphy has noted, ‘French feminism’ ‘is not feminism in France’ (Delphy 1995: 166; see also Gambaudo 2007; other notable proponents of ‘French’ feminism are Catherine Clément and Sarah Kofman). Although its critical legacy and influence continues to be felt to the present, in reality, French feminism was a small, if disproportionately influential, component of a much wider feminism in France. Feminists in France who were not part of ‘French’ feminism include Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin and Nicole-Claude Mathieu. Unconcerned with civil disobedience and the juridical reformation of a broader activist feminism in France that sought equality and political change, French feminism focused on psycholinguistics, poetics and philosophy, producing theoretical writing often condemned for its abstraction and sibylline obfuscation. De Beauvoir objected vehemently to what she regarded as the mystifying writing style of ‘French’ feminism, claiming that Hélène Cixous’s work in particular was virtually impossible to read. The work of ‘French’ feminism challenged American humanist, liberal feminism as well as the more socialist, materialist orientations of British feminism. While both of these kinds of feminism had largely discredited psychoanalysis, in particular Freud’s accounts of female sexuality, ‘French’ feminists looked to psychoanalysis, and in particular to Lacan’s reworking of Freud and his notion of language and the symbolic order, for different explanations of sexual difference. Originating in the disciplinary tradition of Politique et Psychoanalyse, a group founded by Antoinette Fouque that Delphy has condemned as an ‘antifeminist political trend’ (Delphy 1995: 167), they reversed the hierarchy of these terms to ‘psych et po’ in order to emphasise psychoanalysis over politics. Indeed, as Delphy points out, two out of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of French feminists, Luce Irigaray (1930–), Hélène Cixous (1937–), and Julia Kristeva (1941–), positioned themselves very explicitly as non-feminists

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even to the alarm of the MLF (Mouvement de Libération de la femme) taking to the streets of Paris to protest against the term feminism (Delphy 1995: 192). Other feminist groups in France were adamant that the psychoanalytical insistence of these ‘non-feminists’ on the primacy of the female body was a serious flaw that ignored the fact that, according to them, women were a distinct social class rather than biologically defined entities. In 1977 the Questions féministes collective published a written denunciation of the Psych et Po position: ‘We believe that there is no such thing as a direct relationship with the body; to say there is, is not subversive, because its denies the existence and power of social forces – the very forces that oppress us, oppress our bodies’ (Duchen 1986: 41). A third, and lesser-known, French feminist theorist, Monique Wittig (1935–2003), whose work would have a profound influence on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1999) had a more temperate engagement with poststructuralist thought. In her essay ‘One is Not Born a Woman’, she picks up where Beauvoir left off, arguing that women ‘have been compelled in [their] bodies and in [their] minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for [them]’ (Wittig 1997: 309). ‘French’, or perhaps more properly French poststructural psychoanalytical feminists were all, in different ways, concerned with a psycholinguistic and philosophical understanding of Beauvoir’s dilemma in The Second Sex: what might it mean to be both born and become a woman? Although significantly different in many ways, what unites the work of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva is the shared view that ‘woman’ as a signifier is a deeply problematic category; one simultaneously overdetermined and yet invisible within a patriarchal system that has, as Lisa Walsh notes ‘always figured subjectivity on a masculine model of identity’, one which has systematically refused to ‘acknowledge that which lies outside the parameters of an unified, thoroughly self-conscious subjectivity’ (Oliver and Walsh 2004: 4). Thus, the work of ‘French’ feminism examined both the state of being and the processes of becoming a woman imbricated in an economy of phallocentric sameness that consigns femininity to a negatively inscribed margin of body and matter. Further, they explored the sense of an otherness that might exist in a subject that is freed from, or at least made aware of, the false binary of male-female. Unlike much of AngloAmerican feminism, these writers broadly agreed on the non-identity of the subject and its ‘in process’ status. For Cixous, the subject is a ‘non-closed off mix of self/s and others’ (Cixous 1994: xvii); while for Kristeva, the ‘subject never is’ but ‘only the signifying process’ (Kristeva 1984: 215). Strongly informed by Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive method and the concept of différance first proposed in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ (1966), French feminism drew particularly upon a specific aspect of deconstruction that interrogated the ‘natural’ binaries underlying Western ontology. Arguing that the binaries organising thought are not neutral pairings but structured by

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a privileging of presence and identity in the first term, we must recognise, says Derrida, that in ‘a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy’ (Derrida 1981a: 41). Drawing out the repercussions of Saussure’s notion of language as a system of ‘difference without positive presence’, Derrida thus challenges the authority of the binary logic structuring Western thought and the idea of a transcendent centre holding all in place and in so doing dismantles, or at least undermines, the grand narratives of what Spivak calls ‘the millennially cherished excellences of Western metaphysics’ (Spivak 1981: 157). ‘One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand’ and one must ‘overturn the hierarchy’ in order to expose the ‘conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition’ (Derrida 1981a: 41). Deconstruction’s aim, says Barbara Johnson, is ‘not an annihilation of all values or differences’ rather it is ‘an attempt to follow the subtle, powerful effects of differences already at work within the illusion of a binary opposition’ (Johnson 1980: xii). For feminism, then, this Derridean methodology was useful as a way of thinking about the legitimacy of the binaries structuring the symbolic economies of sexual difference and the ways in which women are conceived as the second, inferior term in these violent hierarchies that exerted powerful naturalising effects on the subject marked as feminine. Intellectually shaped by deconstruction, ‘French’ feminism examined how language positions women as pure difference, as not-man, and how this difference marks them as always already essentially inferior. Asserting that sexual difference does exist, although not in any straightforward denotative way, their arguments about language and subjectivity broke with Beauvoir’s feminism and with a philosophical humanism that had predominated in Sartrean existentialism. Drawing on the wider insights and energies of poststructuralism, at its intellectual apogee at this time, the ‘Big Three’ of ‘French’ feminism: Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray, differed in approach and focus but shared some concerns around the ontological and psycholinguistic idea of ‘woman’ as negative otherness that had become deeply entrenched in the female psyche as ‘natural’ essence. For these thinkers, then, sexual difference is not biological, but constructed in what Cixous calls the ‘ideological theatre of representation’ and always bound up with ontological foreclosure that can only represent woman as not-man.

Hélène Cixous Perhaps the French feminist most influenced by deconstruction, Hélène Cixous echoes Derrida explicitly in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ when she says that ‘thought has always operated through opposition’. In The Newly Born Woman she observes that all logocentrism reduces thought to a hierarchal binary system:

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Through dual hierarchical oppositions. Superior/Inferior. Myths, legends, books. Philosophical systems. Everywhere (where) ordering intervenes, where a law organizes what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical). And all these pairs of oppositions are couples. Does that mean something? Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought – all concepts, codes and values – to a binary system, related to ‘the’ couple, man/woman? (Cixous and Clément 1986: 64) Sexual difference is understood as caught up in these violent hierarchies: ‘Male privilege [is] 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. . . . Moreover, woman is always associated with passivity in philosophy’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 64). Clearly drawing on Derridean thinking in ‘Sorties’ Cixous sets out the now well-known set of binaries and suggests, via Derrida, that philosophy can only think in binaries and thus ‘orders and reproduces all thought’. She argues that of all the binaries that have structured Western philosophy the most abiding one is male/female which has become a ‘theory of society’ and of ‘all symbolic systems in general’: Activity/passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night Father/Mother Head/Heart Intelligible/Palpable Logos/Pathos. [. . .] Man/Woman (Cixous and Clément 1986: 63) The categories of male and female, translated as nature-culture, are rigidly hierarchical with the ‘cultural’ male privileged over the inferior ‘natural’ female, reigned over by a phallocentricism that always returns to a male source, ‘to the Father’, with the phallus as the ‘transcendental signifier’. Questioning the ‘solidarity between phallocentrism and logocentrism’, Cixous exposes what she calls the ‘burial’ of women in language and thought, and that death is always at work in these binary oppositions in which women have been forced ‘between two terrifying myths’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 65, 68). In a phallocentric system of meaning, women are positioned, she argues, outside of meaning and defined only as man’s negative; they are absence, ‘not-the same’ and therefore are outside of representation. Outside of singularity, identity, rationality woman can only be conceived of as radical alterity

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and in philosophical terms regarded as non-existent, Crucially though, this non-existence is not the same as a Lacanian lack but rather an impasse of representability in existing language. Cixous recognises this fundamental unrepresentability of woman: ‘Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex’ (Cixous 1981: 255), a view echoed by Kristeva when she notes ‘[i]n “woman” I see something that cannot be represented’ (Kristeva 1981: 137). Deconstruction does not seek to reposition woman as the second sex to the first but rather, as Françoise Collin notes, to transform ‘alienation to otherness’ and simultaneously to disseminate this otherness as a valid subjectivity in its own right (Collin 2004: 28). In this way, deconstruction reveals the symbolic violence done to women that has produced them as non-identity, where we ‘can no more speak of “woman” than of “man” without being trapped within an ideological theater where the proliferation of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications, transform, deform, constantly change everyone’s Imaginary and invalidate in advance any conceptualization’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 83). For Cixous, then, making lived experience more egalitarian for women was not the aim of her feminism, rather she sought to expose the working of sexual difference in language and thought: namely, that woman was so deeply inscribed as absence and as non-identity within Western thought that there was no space in language to describe her other than as the repository of difference. Using deconstruction, Cixous undoes the violent hierarchy of sexual difference to reveal phallogocentricism – the invisible rule of the phallus in language – thus sabotaging a notion of subjectivity conceived of as unmarked, that is, as masculine (see Poovey 1988 and Spivak 1981). Moreover, she points up the double bind inherent in this predicament, suggesting that the binaries constructing sexual difference also foreclose speaking about sexual difference and thus imposes a muteness on women’s voices; women have been silenced, literally and figuratively, by patriarchy. When deconstruction is applied to these binaries it results in the disruption of subject-object relation, creating what Derrida calls a ‘middle voice’ that produces the space and practice of the ‘new insurgent writing’ that is écriture féminine (Cixous 1981: 250). For much of ‘French’ feminism, then, the aim was twofold: firstly, to reveal the ontological bias of a philosophical tradition based on masculine concepts of presence and form, and then to give a subjective language back to women ‘silenced by the cultures of the past’ (Kristeva 1995: 208) and to allow them to revel subversively in their alterity. First used by Cixous in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, écriture féminine is marked neither by the organising principle of the Freudian nor the Lacanian phallus and thus seeks a different language, one that is bisexual, with which to tell different stories: ‘If we continue to speak the same language to each other’, said Irigaray, ‘we will reproduce the same stories’ (Irigaray 1980: 69). Écriture féminine dissolves the hierarchy of same-different and speaks

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from the ‘in-between’ and is ‘infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another’ marked by its ‘transformation of the same into the other’ (Cixous 1981: 254). One of the most well-known concepts in French feminism, écriture féminine means not women’s writing but rather writing marked as feminine, an important distinction. Cixous is clear that, despite the label ‘feminine’, this writing practice is not ‘natural’ to women; it is not the sex of the authors that matters, but the kind of writing he or she writes. Based in the gendered experience of the body, the body as non-identity and alterity, écriture féminine exhorts women to write with their bodies: ‘By writing her self, woman will return to the body what has been more than confiscated from her’ (Cixous 1981: 250). It is vital, says Cixous that ‘Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies’ (Cixous 1981: 245). Cixous argues that language is inseparable from phallocentrism: ‘the logocentric plan had always, inadmissibly, been to create a foundation (to found and fund), phallocentrism’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 65). Écriture féminine celebrates writing as bodily jouissance but in doing so ascribes the female body and its inscription in writing a centrality that seems, on the face of it at least, to suggest a return to a biological essentialism. Clearly, there is a risk in returning women to such a close relationship with their bodies, one recognised by Monique Wittig when she notes that women ‘have been compelled in [their] bodies and in [their] minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for [them]’ (Wittig 1997: 309). The concept, or category of woman then, began to be interrogated in ways that, by and large, took sexual difference in all its forms as a given, an ontological fact, necessitating psychoanalytic scrutiny rather than empirical denial. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this position has provoked charges of essentialism, particularly from Anglo-American feminists, as they saw it as an assertion of the very biological determinism that had imprisoned women in their biology. Indeed, many critics of ‘French’ feminism have noted the political dangers inherent in what appears to be an endorsement of essentialist biological determinism, warning of the hazards of such an approach in the real world where ‘writing the body’, the slogan most associated with French feminism, appears to be contiguous with, at best, sexism and patriarchy and, at worse, misogyny. Seen in this way, both Cixous’s écriture féminine and Irigaray’s parler femme seemed to be returning women to their bodies and its inescapable biological difference thus coming dangerously close to repeating the discourses of patriarchy. Seen otherwise, one might regard this as a tactical or strategic essentialism that operates tactically, provocatively, pushing for a revaluation of what a female body or femininity more broadly might mean in a changed economy of sexual difference. Noting the distinctly idealistic, even utopian strain in French feminism of this time, Nancy Miller has observed that this type of feminism has exclusively privileged ‘a textuality of the avant garde’

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and as such functioned as a ‘hope, if not a blueprint’ of an imagined future (Miller 1976: 339–60). Similarly, in ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, Elaine Showalter acknowledges that French feminism ‘describes a utopian possibility rather than a literary practice’ (Showalter 1981: 185).

Luce Irigaray Of the Holy Trinity of ‘French’ feminists, Luce Irigaray is the writer whose work has been most frequently labelled essentialist. However, many of her ideas around sexual difference have often been oversimplified, even misunderstood. Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference resembles that of Cixous in its emphasis, not on biological differences, but rather on the fact that culture has insisted upon these differences (conceived of only as negativity) to such an extent that they have become naturalised. Although primarily concerned with psycholinguistic and philosophical structures of sexual difference, Irigaray was working towards a vision of society, again in many ways a utopian one, in which the exchange of women as commodities between men ‘would no longer be the basis for the constitution of a cultural order’ (Irigaray 1996: 45). In her doctoral dissertation, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974; English translation 1985a), for which she was sacked from the École Freudienne, Irigaray was critical of both Freud and Lacan, both of whom, she argued, were trapped within the logic of the dominant phallic economy and thus unable to think of difference outside of this. Departing from a position broadly similar to that of Cixous regarding the ontological invisibility of women within culture but with the accent on philosophy rather than psychoanalysis, Irigaray sees the history of Western thought as one based upon a univocal masculine subjectivity; a discourse of sameness in which women cannot really be said to have any real ontological existence save for that of a negative copy of man. If women cannot be anything more than man’s negative then they cannot truly be said to exist at all. Irigaray argues that according to Freud, female sexuality is ‘graphed along the axes of visibility’ that is only ever shaped by a masculine sexual economy within which ‘the little girl must immediately become a little boy . . . THERE NEVER IS (OR WILL BE) A LITTLE GIRL’ (Irigaray 1985a: 48). Thus, for Irigaray there is no such thing as femininity as it simply has no place to exist and thus the only sexual identity ascribable to women in such a system is a bodily one. This is not a desirable scenario for Irigaray but one that must be the starting place for reconceiving the female subject. Irigaray’s first works, Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One, focus on how masculine subjectivity has not only ‘constructed the world’ but had also interpreted this world from its own ‘single perspective’ (Hirsch and Olson 1996: 346). In Speculum she takes on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel, as well as Freud, in order to demonstrate, like Cixous, the ways in which philosophy has been unable to conceive of the idea of women. In

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the violently sexed hierarchy of male-female, women are the non-thinkable of thought which functions through ‘the exploitation of the body-matter of women’ (Irigaray 1985b: 85). Speculum reads a range of texts as exemplary of the phallocentric economy of masculinity that can only conceive of woman as a second-rate copy of man, showing that as a consequence of a phallogocentric metaphysical discourse underpinning all of Western thought man is defined as the ‘one and only’ (both mind and body/matter) and woman not just as the opposite and negative of body/matter, but as completely outside language and representation: ‘It is indeed precisely philosophical discourse that we have to challenge, and disrupt, inasmuch as this discourse sets forth the law for all others’ (Irigaray 1985b: 74). Again, like Cixous, Irigaray reveals the ways in which women have been negated or elided from culture into a zone of nonmeaning that can only conceive of woman as ‘non-man’; that is, as ontological and metaphysical absence. The non-existence of femininity does not, however, preclude a purely feminine-marked space for pleasure, one that Irigaray calls, after Lacan, jouissance, and women’s speech, what she calls ‘parler femme’. Women’s language which is a little ‘mad’, she says, comes from the body which has ‘sex organs more or less everywhere’ and centred particularly on the two lips instead of the phallus (Irigaray 1985b: 29, 28). Prone to incoherence and ‘inaudible’ to men who listen with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand’, women’s language seems to be tied ineluctably to women’s anatomical difference (Irigaray 1985b: 29). It is this kind of yoking of women’s being to their bodies and the insistence that their language is inherently diffuse and unintelligible that has prompted the harshest criticism of Irigaray’s work. Carolyn Burke wonders, ‘Does her writing manage to avoid construction of another idealism to replace the “phallogocentric” systems that she dismantles? Do her representations of parler femme . . . avoid the centralizing idealism with which she taxes Western conceptual systems?’ (Burke 1981: 302). These criticisms sometimes, however, miss the broader point made by Irigaray which is a polemical one that often exaggerates the relationship of exact correspondence between woman and her body in order to provoke new ways of thinking about patriarchal notions of biological difference that has cast women as lack and weakness. Hers is not so much a lifelike or realistic depiction of the relationship between women’s bodies and their language, rather it is a reimagining or, as Jane Gallop says, a ‘re-metaphorisation’ of the possibilities of an alternative kind of economy of meaning (Gallop 1983: 83). In defence of Irigaray’s perceived essentialism, Diana Fuss has argued that despite its inconsistency across her entire oeuvre, Irigaray’s work is a necessary corrective to Lacan’s powerfully influential concept of woman as lack, seen in his infamous pronouncement that ‘woman is not’; she is lack, absence, the void and completely outside of and therefore unrepresentable in language. Better then, suggests Irigaray, in the first place at least, women can speak through and about their bodies than not at all.

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Thus, in both Speculum and This Sex, Irigaray finds it vital to acknowledge a strategic kind of sexual difference, one which is not to be taken as if it were real, in order to identify precisely what this difference is and how it operates in culture and thought. Beginning with Freud’s theories of femininity, she says that there is little point asking ‘What is woman?’ but rather, we need to examine the ways in which ‘within discourse, the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject, they should signify that with respect to this logic a disruptive excess is possible on the feminine side’ (Irigaray 1985b: 78). Moreover, she rejects the idea that there needs to be another concept of woman saying that this is returning to a masculine system of representation that can function as a ‘more or less obliging prop for the enactment of men’s fantasies’ (Irigaray 1985b: 25). Irigaray thus develops the criticism of phallogocentrism that is central to all of ‘French’ feminism, asserting that in a masculinist philosophical system women are forced back into their bodies from where their only recourse is a form of subversive mimesis or hysteria. Charges of essentialism are focused, for the most part, on Irigaray’s early work and on very particular passages of This Sex and tend to neglect the politically strategic nature of her essentialism that is not an insistence on sexual difference itself but recognition of how it has been imagined and articulated across history. Her later work entails a different kind of engagement with the question of sexual difference which for some critics seems to advocate a position of less than strategic essentialism in which she asserts the ‘natural’ division of the world, a balancing out of gender privilege and giving ‘rights for women appropriate to their sexed bodies’ (Irigaray 1993: 80). In this work and elsewhere, Irigaray argues that the ‘exploitation of women is based upon sexual difference and can only be resolved through sexual difference’ (Lotringer 2000: 146).

Julia Kristeva A leading member of the Tel Quel group, Julia Kristeva’s work is thematically close to that of Cixous and Irigaray in some ways. She agrees with them that women are excluded from culture by their inscription as radical otherness, but departs from them both in a number of important ways on questions of identity and difference. Her understanding of sexual difference and its relationship to subjectivity is not, however, straightforward. On the one hand, she describes sexual difference as ‘foremost and irreducible’ while on the other she regards it as a part of a wider marginality and otherness: ‘Call it “woman” or “oppressed classes of society”, it is the same struggle, and never one without the other’ (Kristeva, quoted in Moi 1985: 164). Kristeva’s work offers less a conceptualisation of a graphic sexual difference than a theory of the ‘poetic’ maternal space of the semiotic that she sees erupting into the paternal symbolic order through the subversive poetics of avant-garde writing.

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Taking on the Lacanian notion of the symbolic and the imaginary orders to reveal the limits of this model and the ways in which it excludes women from culture, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) suggests a new, less phallocentric model of psychosexual identity wherein the maternal assumes a more central role. For Kristeva, sexual difference only begins with the entry of the child into the symbolic system. Reworking some key Lacanian concepts of the symbolic order and the law of the Father, Kristeva suggests that males and females each stand in very different relation to their entry into the symbolic order. As the child enters the patriarchal symbolic order of language, it must conform to its rules and thus to the law of the Father. Kristeva argues that this entry is predicated upon a separation from and repudiation of the semiotic maternal. In her model, Lacan’s imaginary becomes the semiotic ‘chora’, a pre-Oedipal pre-linguistic space of bodily pulsions and plenitude marked by flow, rhythm and continuity. The primary libidinal space of the chora, named after Plato’s concept, a space of ‘mixing, of contradiction, of movement’ (Kristeva 1977: 57), is repressed by the symbolic order that governs meaning and intelligibility in culture, but, Kristeva argues, always threatens to disrupt this order. In artistic terms, this disruption takes the form of poetry and avant-garde writing, spaces of non-closure and multiplicity of affective meaning that pose a threat to the paternal law governing the symbolic order. In the space of the chora, there is no separation between signifier and signified that upholds the binaries of difference; rather it is made up of semiotic ‘pulsions’ that have been marginalised by the patriarchal symbolic order that enforces a thetic homogeneity of meaning. However, Kristeva does not unequivocally link the semiotic chora, or avantgarde writing, with a concept of sexual difference and frequently rejected comparisons of her work with theories of écriture féminine; ‘Nothing in women’s past or present publications seems to allow us to affirm that there is a feminine writing’ (Kristeva, quoted in Moi 1985: 163). Coining the term the ‘subject in process’ (sujet en procès), Kristeva was apprehensive of any kind of closed, fixed identity: ‘All identities are unstable: the identity of linguistic signs, the identity of meaning and, as a result, the identity of the speaker’ (Kristeva 1980: 19). Wary of any kind of politics based on a collective sense of identity, she distanced herself from Cixous and Irigaray warning of the dangers of a ‘hysterical obsession’ with the ‘essentialist cult of Woman’: ‘If the feminine exists’, she argued, this is ‘only in the order of significance or in the signifying process’ (Kristeva 1980: 19). Later, she states, in a similar way to Cixous, that ‘a woman cannot “be” . . . in “woman” I see something that cannot be represented, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies . . . [C]ertain feminist demands revive a kind of naive romanticism, a belief in identity’ (Kristeva 1981: 137, 138). The space of avant-garde writing is one which ‘dissolves identity, even sexual identities’ and as such allows a way out of the obsessive focus on sexual difference. For Kristeva then, a truly feminist practice can ‘only be negative, at odds with what already exists’ (Kristeva 1981: 138, 137).

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This ostensible repudiation of feminism as a political force and her insistence that the phallocentric symbolic order is more or less unchangeable made her work vulnerable to charges of political pessimism, as does her aversion to any kind of systematic sexual difference. In later work, Kristeva demonstrates a longer view of feminism as a series of necessarily complex engagements with the question of sexual difference. In ‘Women’s Time’, she adumbrates her responses to ‘three generations’ of feminism and examines the genealogical development of feminism and its attempts to tackle the question of sexual difference. Criticising liberal feminism for its emphasis on universalism and denial of sexual difference, she nonetheless praised this generation for making it possible for women ‘to attain positions of leadership in the worlds of business, industry, and culture’ (Kristeva 1995: 214). The second generation of feminism, to which ‘French’ feminism belongs, closely attended to the question of sexual difference examining the ‘psychosymbolic’ structures of patriarchy and the ways in which it excludes women by making it ‘difficult, if not impossible, for women to adhere to the sacrificial logic of separation and syntactic links upon which language and the social code are based’ (Kristeva 1995: 213). The challenge for the third stage of feminism is to find a language for women’s ‘corporeal and intersubjective experiences’ (Kristeva 1995: 208). This feminism will, Kristeva presciently claims, ‘combine the sexual with the symbolic in order to discover first the specificity of the feminine . . . and then the specificity of each woman’ (Kristeva 1995: 210). In this way, then, Kristeva anticipates the focus on gender that will become central to feminism’s third wave in the 1990s and, in particular, to the work of Judith Butler. The body will continue to have an important place in third wave feminism but the discussion over the sex-gender divide will take on a new direction seen for the first time in ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’. In this essay, in many important ways a sweeping away of essentialism, Butler uses Foucault to examine the ways in which French feminism has often regarded the body as a natural ‘thing’, that we can somehow get back to, and which pre-exists the prison-house of language. In a move that will define debates around sexual difference for the next decade or so, Butler argues, via Foucault, that sex is ‘a fictitious category’ and the body only becomes only ‘sexed’ within discourse that invests it with the status of the ‘natural’. Butler focuses on how subversion is possible only when the ‘culturally constructed body’ is recognised as such and that any subversion will come from ‘within the terms of the law’ rather than looking for liberation in any normative idea of the female body (Butler 1992: 172–5).

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18 POSTFEMINISM Stéphanie Genz

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ostfeminism is a prominent yet disputed concept in the lexicon of cultural/media studies and, to a lesser degree, political and social sciences. While the term emerged as early as 1919 after the vote for women had been won by the suffrage movement (Cott 1987), it is fair to say that this initial mention of postfeminism – understood in evolutionary terms as a progression of feminist ideas – did not materialise in any concrete way, cut short as it was by momentous historical developments such as the outbreaks of the two World Wars. It was not until the 1980s that postfeminism gained prominence, first as a journalistic buzzword and then in wider cultural and academic circles (see Bolotin 1982). Many of these early manifestations of postfeminism tended to invoke a narrative of progression that insists on a time ‘after’ feminism, as was (and still is) the case with frequent media obituaries that announce if not the death but at least the redundancy of feminism – Harper’s Magazine, for instance, publishing a ‘requiem for the women’s movement’ as early as 1976. In this context, postfeminism signalled the ‘pastness’ of feminism – or, at any rate the end of a particular stage in feminist history that can broadly be referred to as feminism’s ‘second wave’, a common designation for the increased feminist activity in North America and Europe from the 1960s onwards (Nicholson 1997). Since then, the term has acquired a number of different meanings and discursive connotations. In popular culture, it is used as a descriptive marker for a number of (particularly) female characters that have emerged from the 1990s onwards, with Helen Fielding’s chick-lit heroine Bridget Jones and the Spice Girls often held up as the poster girls of postfeminism (Genz and Brabon 2009). In academic writings, it sits alongside other ‘post-’ discourses – including postmodernism – and refers to changing constructions of identity and gender categories (like ‘woman’, ‘man’ and ‘feminist’) (Brooks 1997). Likewise, in political philosophy and social theory, postfeminism has been read as symptomatic of a posttraditional era characterised by dramatic changes in social relationships, role stereotyping and conceptions of agency (Mann 1994). More recently, postfeminism has been anchored within neoliberal society and consumer culture that cultivates individualistic, competitive and entrepreneurial behaviour

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in its construction of a self-regulating and enterprising subject whose consumption patterns come to be seen as a source of power and choice. At this juncture, we might also want to investigate how current political changes and the end of a boom-and-bust economic model have affected the larger cultural climate and ethos of postfeminism. Certainly, if late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century postfeminism was marked by optimism, entitlement and the opportunity of prosperity, then indisputably such articulations have become more doubtful and less celebratory in a post-2008 recessionary environment where the neoliberal mantra of choice and self-determination is still present but becomes inflected with the experiences of precarity and risk and the insistence on self-responsibilisation (Gilbert 2013). One of the first critical examinations was provided by American journalist Susan Faludi who describes postfeminism in terms of a ‘backlash’ – which also serves as the title of her 1992 bestseller – a devastating reaction against the ground gained by the feminist movement (Faludi 1992: 15). This largely pessimistic account links postfeminism to anti-feminist and media-driven attempts to turn the clock back to pre-feminist times, fuelled by the conservative governments that defined 1980s Reaganite America and Thatcherite Britain. For Faludi, postfeminism as backlash works hand in hand with right-wing political ideologies to launch an attack on the core beliefs and politics of the women’s movement (enfranchisement, equal pay, sexual liberation, and so on) and to rearticulate conventional versions of femininity and domesticity, with 1980s films like Fatal Attraction (1987) depicting backlash fears and ‘new traditionalist’ rhetoric (Probyn 1990). Following Faludi, some writers have interpreted postfeminism as a backlash and hence primarily a polemical tool with limited critical and analytical value (Whelehan 2000). However, these readings have been superseded increasingly from the 1990s onwards – a decade marked in political terms by ‘Third Way’ philosophy and rationale underlying the governments of US ‘New Democrats’ and UK ‘New Labour’ (Genz 2006) – in favour of more complex accounts that argue for a nuanced understanding of postfeminism that takes into account the term’s diverse entanglements with feminism and other cultural and political theories. For Ann Brooks, for example, postfeminism is indicative of feminism’s ‘maturity into a confident body of theory and politics, representing pluralism and difference’ (Brooks 1997: 1). Her rearticulation of postfeminism as ‘feminism’s “coming of age”’ situates the term within the theoretical frameworks of anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist movements – like postmodernism and poststructuralism – thereby rendering it capable of contesting modernist, imperialist and patriarchal structures (Brooks 1997: 4). Similarly, in Patricia Mann’s account of micro-political forms of agency and activism, postfeminism emerges as the ‘postmodern offspring of feminism’ that signals the end of the ‘amazingly enduring normative identification of humanity with men and masculinity’ (Mann 1994: 2). Here, postfeminism comes to be seen as a ‘frontier discourse’ that engages with the

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breakdown of social organising structures and effects a shift within feminism from debates around ‘equality’ to a focus on ‘difference’ (Mann 1994: 208). This deconstructive move implies the disintegration of the tenets of dominant culture along with an attack on universalist and essentialist thinking – importantly, involving a critique of the foundationalist premises of both patriarchy and feminism, as well as the deconstruction of their relevant subject categories, ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘feminist’. Roughly at the same time, a similar commitment to diversity was echoed in other, less academic and more journalistic, quarters by a group of young, ‘new’ feminists who adopted a generational logic to differentiate themselves from the second wave of feminist activist campaigning. Coming to the fore in the mid-1990s, the most prominent advocates of this standpoint – Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, Natasha Walter and Rene Denfeld – supported an individualistic and liberal agenda that relies on a rhetoric of choice/agency and established a critical as well as temporal distance from what they saw as uptight, establishment feminism, dismissed for instance by Denfeld as the ‘New Victorianism’ that is totalitarian in its upholding of views reminiscent of an earlier age (1995). Mostly taking the form of popular polemic, these accounts were often cast in familial terms as mother-daughter conflicts, a pertinent example being Rebecca Walker’s – daughter of Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple – collection of essays To Be Real: ‘young women coming of age today wrestle with the term [feminist] because we have a very different vantage point on the world than that of our foremothers’ (Walker 1995: xxxiii). Beyond the generational divide, young women growing up in a post-second-wave environment were also reacting against negative images and stereotypes of ‘the women’s libber’ that had been propagated by the popular press since the 1970s and that are most vividly depicted by the iconic figure of the humourless and drab ‘bra-burner’ (Genz 2009). In these circumstances, postfeminism with its emphasis on female individuality and selfdetermination came to be seen as ‘more rewarding but also as a lot more fun’ (Budgeon 2001: 60). Unsurprisingly perhaps, such evaluations of postfeminism as the new ‘improved’ feminism free from the dictates of the second wave motherhood were short lived, as a range of critics started to undo the ‘illusions of postfeminism’ (Coppock et al. 1995) – most prominently led by feminist ‘foremothers’ who attacked their ‘daughters’ for their historical amnesia, misappropriations of the feminist/familial legacy and uncritical adherence to media stereotypes. According to Lynne Segal, the breed of ‘new feminists’ ‘were able to launch themselves and court media via scathing attacks on other feminists’, depleting the radical spirit of feminist politics in the service of a managerial elite (Segal 2003: 152). A concerted and rigorous critique of postfeminism was mounted from the early 2000s onwards, chiefly by feminist media and cultural scholars who focus on popular culture as the

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natural habitat of postfeminist images and rhetoric – undercutting in some ways theoretical investigations of ‘academic’ postfeminism, so that by now, there is little doubt that media-based analyses have taken precedence over other, anti-foundationalist readings. As a popular idiom, postfeminism is deployed mainly outside the academy – denoting a wider cultural space and atmosphere, what Rosalind Gill calls ‘a postfeminist sensibility’ (Gill 2007: 254) – and it is criticised for lacking intellectual rigour and promoting an exclusive and exclusionist viewpoint that is white, middle-class and heterosexual by default (Tasker and Negra 2007). For many feminist media critics, postfeminism’s relationship with feminism – as a critical and political paradigm – is paramount and they focus on how, to varying degrees, postfeminist culture incorporates, commodifies, depoliticises and parodies feminist ideas and terminology, resulting in the worst case in an ‘undoing’ and ‘othering’ of feminism. Angela McRobbie (2009) has described this discursive process as a ‘double movement’ that takes feminism ‘into account’ only to dismiss it as dated and old-fashioned and thus repudiate it. A more inclusive interpretation is provided by Genz and Brabon (2009) who problematise the understanding of postfeminism as ‘a ritualistic denunciation’ of feminism (McRobbie 2004: 258) in favour of a contextualising approach that demarcates an interdiscursive ‘postfeminist landscape’. Taking as a starting point the semantic confusion over the directionality and meaning of the ‘post’ prefix, postfeminism is discussed as a ‘junction’ made up of an array of relationships and connections within/between social, cultural, academic and political arenas. Here, the term addresses the paradoxes of a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century setting in which feminist concerns have entered society and culture at large and are articulated in (politically) contradictory ways. While Western popular culture remains a key site for critical investigations (see for example Harzewski 2011; Gwynne and Muller 2013), recent additions to the postfeminist canon have sought to discuss postfeminist identities in relation to intersecting politics of sexuality, race, class and location – for example through the experiences of young female migrants and ‘mail order brides’ (Gill and Scharff 2013) – or engage with psychosocial negotiations of postfeminist sentiment. Ringrose (2013), for example, focuses on ‘postfeminist education’ to investigate how young girls and women are located within a range of ‘assemblages’ in a school environment, embodied by the cultural figures of the ‘successful girl’, the ‘mean girl’ and the ‘sexy girl’. These symbols of postfeminist education are part of a broader context of what she calls ‘postfeminist panics’, for instance in the growing concerns over the sexualisation of children. Other consumer-orientated critiques have interpreted postfeminism as part of contemporary brand culture that shapes not only consumer habits but wider political, cultural and civic practices (Banet-Weiser 2012). Postfeminism is discussed as a ‘particularly rich context’ for ‘self-branded girls’ who use

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self-presentation techniques – linked to social media and other online spaces – to craft a self-as-brand that is ostensibly empowered and enterprising within consumer culture, for example through public bodily performances and the production of user-generated content (Banet-Weiser 2012: 56, 64). As Genz notes, beyond considerations of what postfeminist self-hood entails, we also need to investigate how postfeminism – as a ‘gendered brand space’ – engages these subjects and taps into emotion and affect as crucial elements in the construction, marketing and consumption of (female) subjectivity (Genz 2015). Here, postfeminism acquires ‘affective relational qualities’ (Banet-Weiser 2012: 9), usually associated with brand culture and emblematic of contemporary ‘experience economies’ where consumers no longer merely consume goods and services but they are looking for memorable events that engage them in a personal way (Pine and Gilmore 1999). These current developments highlight that though postfeminism – in its current late twentieth- and twenty-first-century manifestation – might still be considered an emergent critical concept, it has had over thirty years to solidify into a conceptual category and develop a critical history in its own right that spans the backlash years of the 1980s, the ‘Third Way’ 1990s and the uncertain, post–9/11 and recessionary years of the new millennium. At this point it is also worth reminding ourselves that, as Nancy Whittier puts it, the ‘postfeminist generation is not a homogeneous, unified group’ (1995: 228). The term continues to be divisive and contradictory, causing some critics to reject it because, as Susan Douglas notes, ‘it has gotten gummed up by too many conflicting definitions’ (2010: 10). At the same time, the cultural presence and resonance of postfeminism has become hard to ignore, specifically as it continues to evolve with changes in the political, cultural and economic environment.

Points of Contention While debates surrounding postfeminism are varied and depend to a large extent on the critical positioning and background of commentators, we can identify distinctive postfeminist strands that connect feminist notions of gendered empowerment and choice with cultural practices of commodification and individualism. This thread also brings postfeminism into close political alliance with neoliberal ideas and tendencies that promote competitive individualism and entrepreneurship in consumer-citizens – proposing, as David Harvey notes, that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free-trade’ (Harvey 2005: 2). This section will lay out specific areas of conflict that have riddled the critical and cultural terrain of postfeminism and that can broadly be constructed around a set of operative

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trends of entrepreneurial femininity, commodity/corporate feminism and neoliberal individualism. One particular point of contention that has been brought to critical attention revolves around the relationship between feminism – as a political activist stance – and femininity as a gendered identity that has historically been imprinted on the female body. As Joanne Hollows has commented, feminist critiques have often been ‘dependent on creating an opposition between “bad” feminine identities and “good” feminist identities’ (Hollows 2000: 9), with the result that femininity has been associated in much feminist writing with negative associations of female oppression and inferiority – famously denounced for example by feminist veteran Betty Friedan as ‘the problem that has no name’ (Friedan 1992: 54). Focusing on media representations as a particularly visible location for a broader range of postfeminist discourses, a number of critics have argued for a modernisation of femininity that reconfigures existing victim/power dualities (Genz 2009; Gill and Scharff 2013). Popular culture has proven a fertile ground for the examination of postfeminist subjects who engage in expressions – or fantasies – of feminine agency and sexual empowerment. In this context, postfeminism has been linked with the publishing phenomenon of ‘chick-lit’, a highly lucrative and femaleoriented form of fiction that emerged in the 1990s. Frequently characterised by ubiquitous pastel-coloured, fashion-conscious covers, chick-lit has attracted a devoted readership as well as the disdain of critics who have dismissed it as trashy fiction. In these narratives, young urban women (also known as ‘chicks’ or ‘singletons’) re-address femininity – and its traditional, heterosexual trappings (beauty and body practices, sexiness, domesticity) – and balance private and public success. Epitomised by Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones and the main protagonists of the American television series Sex and the City (1998–2004), the female characters spend much of their time in pursuit of heterosexual enjoyment and designer commodities, while debating problems – mostly related to their single lives and dating habits – within their network of friends. The 1990s chick has been seen as exemplary of the controversies and contradictions surrounding postfeminism, particularly in its construction of a post-second-wave working heroine who is financially independent, selfreliant, sexually assertive and pleasure-seeking, yet troubled by personal neurosis and body-consciousness. In this scenario, sexual knowledge and feminine embodiment are central for the expression of modern female power, promoting in Harris’s words the ‘can-do girl’ as the ideal postfeminist subject who is ‘flexible, individualised, resilient, self-driven, and self-made’ (Harris 2004: 16). While postfeminist subjectivity clearly functions within the confines of compulsory and normative heterosexuality – what Radner calls a ‘technology of sexiness’ (1999: 15) – it has also allowed critical forays into unfamiliar and contradictory subject/ agency positions. Scholarship on the postfeminist subject has focused on the

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breakdown of dichotomies – feminism/femininity, subject/object, complicity/ critique, false/enlightened consciousness, emancipation/empowerment – to discuss the complex identity positions that become available in the context of politically distinct, neoliberal modes of governmentality that construct the self as both freely choosing and self-regulating (Gill 2008; Genz 2009). Critics have struggled to reconcile the affective and entrepreneurial dimensions of postfeminist culture with its confining and disciplinary aspects giving rise to a range of Foucaultian- and Butlerian-inspired concepts that seek to capture the postfeminist dialectic of agency and control, self-actualisation and normalisation. For example, in her examination of gender representations in the media, Gill discusses postfeminism in terms of a ‘shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification’ to describe highly sexualised contemporary women who are not ‘straightforwardly objectified but are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects’ (Gill 2007: 258). Genz’s model of ‘postfemininity’ similarly investigates the paradoxes of contemporary femininity that references both traditional narratives of feminine passivity and more progressive scripts of feminine agency (2009). Here, the Foucaultian notion of assujetissement (or, ‘subjectivation’), later developed by Judith Butler, is drawn on to explain the process of post-feminine subject formation as involving ‘both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection’ (Butler 1997: 83). In this oxymoronic formulation, the subject is instituted through constraint and inhabits a contradictory site that is constraining and liberating, productive and oppressive. The long-standing opposition between subject and object – transferable to some extent to the categories of feminism and femininity – is re-examined to account for the varying degrees of freedom and boundedness that circumscribe postfeminist, neoliberal agents. The gender implications of this conceptual turn are clear as it is predominantly women who are called upon by postfeminist neoliberal economies to articulate their self-hood in terms of preset scripts of femininity, beauty and sexiness. In addition, a thorny issue has been the obvious limitations and exclusions of postfeminist subjectivity in identity terms of class, age, race and sexuality as well as in relation to political and economic positioning. In Genz’s account, post-femininity displays an internal reflexivity and awareness of feminist values and principles, yet at the same time cannot avoid heteronormative, phallocentric, misogynist and consumerist significations (Genz 2009). A specific point of debate has been postfeminism’s commercial appeal and its consumerist implications that are viewed as a ‘selling out’ of feminist principles and their co-option as a marketing device. As Banet-Weiser notes, feminism is ‘rescripted’ so as to allow its ‘smooth incorporation into the world of commerce and corporate culture’ (Banet-Weiser 2007: 209). In this context, advertising has been investigated as a key site that incorporates and appropriates feminist ideas and values, mostly through the use of feminist-informed rhetoric (‘emancipation’, ‘liberation’ and perhaps most

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prominently, ‘choice’) – evidenced for instance by L’Oréal’s long-standing ‘I’m/You’re Worth It’ campaign to sell cosmetic and hair products (Lazar 2009). This exemplifies what Goldman (1992) calls ‘commodity feminism’ (a play on Marx’s commodity fetishism) whereby female consumers can achieve ‘freedom’, self-empowerment and agency through the consumption of massmarketed products. As such, the emphasis on feminism as commodity can be seen as part of a broader cultural and marketing move towards consumer empowerment and activism that reconfigures existing relationships between seller and buyer and transforms practices of social (and political) activism into marketable commodities (Cova and Dalli 2009; Banet-Weiser and Lapsansky 2008). Postfeminist culture provides a distinctly gendered focus to these debates in its promotion of an entrepreneurial feminine identity – what Lazar labels ‘entitled femininity’ – that encourages women to ‘take care and pamper themselves, enjoy autonomous sensual pleasure, and have access to an exclusive public space’ (Lazar 2009: 380). Yet, as Lazar reveals, the ‘key to unlocking these entitlements is through consumption’ (Lazar 2009: 380), indicating that what we are witnessing here is a mutation of conventional definitions of empowerment – and on a larger scale, citizenship (BanetWeiser and Lapsansky 2008) – into market strategies only possible within the confines of a capitalist system. This anchors postfeminism within a consumerist ideology that ties the notion of freedom and the production of the self directly to the ability to purchase, with individual agency premised upon and enabled by the consumption of products and services. The end result of this commoditisation and branding – it is feared – is a ‘free market feminism’ that works ‘through capitalism’ and is based on ‘competitive choices in spite of social conditions being stacked against women as a whole’ (Whelehan 2005: 15). Postfeminism’s commodification of feminism via the figure of the empowered female consumer also highlights its adherence to entrepreneurial forms of individualism that eschew collective, activist politics in favour of a selfgoverning individual who embraces (consumer) choice and self-rule as guiding principles. Postfeminist subjects often pit sexual, feminine and consumer pleasures against political participation, epitomised for example by the communal idea of ‘sisterhood’ central to many expressions of collective feminist politics. Of course, the idea of a united feminist ‘we’ – and, related to this a collective politics of engagement – has become problematic for a number of reasons, not least feminism’s ‘turn to culture’ whereby ‘there has been an increasing tendency in feminism to think about politics through the medium of cultural debate’ (Barrett 1990: 22). This move towards the cultural arena has created a more critical and reflexive feminism whose initial ‘consensus and confidence around issues of “patriarchy”, distinctions along sex/gender lines, as well as issues of “subject” positioning and sexuality’ are cast into doubt by the emphasis on deconstruction and difference (Brooks 1997: 38).

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This emergence of ‘cultural politics’ has been interpreted as a ‘crisis of activism’ within feminism and its dissolution as theory and practice. As Andrea Stuart asks, how do feminists now go about changing oppressive situations ‘without some sort of campaigning “movement”’ (Stuart 1990: 40)? Postfeminism appears at the centre of the discussions on the state of contemporary feminisms and politics where it is said to effect a de-collectivisation of the feminist movement, transforming feminist politics and its collective programme of equal opportunity into a set of atomised, personal attitudes and lifestyle choices (Douglas 1995). The individualist thread that runs through much of postfeminist culture undercuts feminist politics to the extent that, as Nancy Cott notes, as much as feminism asserts the female individual, ‘pure individualism negates feminism because it removes the basis for women’s collective self-understanding or action’ (Cott 1987: 6). The problem here lies not with postfeminism’s celebration of personal struggles and triumphs but rather with a tokenist and meritocratic agenda that redefines oppression and structural disadvantage as personal suffering while reframing success as an individual accomplishment, competitive drive and self-determination – whereby, whatever social position, those with enough ambition, talent, effort or skills will rise to the top. According to Angela McRobbie (2007), this amounts to a ‘new sexual contract’ that places young women – or ‘top girls’ – at the heart of a meritocratic economic system that incites them to become wage-earning subjects while locking them in a kind of prison of activity, without that entailing real political involvement. Postfeminism’s individualist discourse and meritocratic ethos also locate it more broadly within a neoliberal political and cultural field that mobilises self-responsibilisation and self-reliance and promotes, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, that there are only ‘individual solutions to socially produced problems’ (Bauman 2007: 14). The next section will engage in more detail with political positionings of postfeminism and debate the viability of a ‘postfeminist politics’.

Postfeminism and/in Politics In some ways, the heading of this section might be considered controversial by some critics who define postfeminism in non-activist terms, being at best self-absorbed and self-policing narcissism (Douglas 1995) and at worst, a retrogressive and reactionary backlash that undermines the gains of the feminist movement/politics and returns women (and men) to the limited gender roles of a bygone era (Faludi 1992). Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, for example, take the distinction between ‘feminist politics’ and ‘postfeminist culture’ as the starting point for their investigation, suggesting that ‘the transition to a postfeminist culture involves an evident erasure of feminist politics from the popular, even as aspects of feminism seem to be incorporated within that

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culture’ (Tasker and Negra 2007: 5). Here, postfeminism is conceived as inherently ‘middle of the road’ and works to ‘invalidate systematic critique’ by transforming the postfeminist subject into a ‘silent’ consumer (Tasker and Negra 2007: 19, 3). Other critics have been more open to the possibility and potential of postfeminist politics by expanding the vocabulary of political actions to include instances of individual agency and consumer empowerment. Taking as her starting point the premise that changing gender relations are the most significant social phenomenon of our time, Patricia Mann formulates a theory of ‘micro-politics’ that takes into account the ‘multiple agency positions of individuals today’ (Mann 1994: 160). ‘Like it or not’, she writes, ‘ours is an era that will be remembered for dramatic changes in basic social relationships, within families, workplaces, schools, and other public spheres of interaction’ (Mann 1994: 1). If currently fewer people are willing to connect ideologically with any political movement and communal forms of political action are on the wane, then feminism should be regarded less ‘an identifying political uniform’ than a ‘theoretical and psychological resource’ (Mann 1994: 100). For her, taking up a postfeminist position involves an endeavour to capture the changing quality of social, cultural and political experiences in the context of a more general process of women’s social enfranchisement and unmooring from patriarchal relations (Mann 1994: 114). Following Mann, Genz and Brabon maintain that postfeminism should not be seen as ‘an alternative to feminism and its political struggle’ as it does not give rise to a ‘bounded philosophy’ and ‘an organized political movement that gains its force through activist lobbying at grass-roots level’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 34). By contrast, postfeminist modes of critique seek to accommodate the complicated entanglements that characterise gender, culture and politics in late modernity by adopting a ‘politically “impure” practice’ that effects ‘a double movement of exploitation and contestation, use and abuse, rupture and continuity’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 171, 40) – amounting to what Butler in a different context calls a ‘politics of discomfort’ that encourages us to ‘liv[e] the political in medias res’ (Butler 1995: 131). In this sense, postfeminism is emblematic of the paradoxes of modern-day politics and culture, seeking to reconcile feminist ideas of (female) emancipation and equality, consumerist demands of capitalist societies and neoliberal tenets of individual empowerment. A key place to start this process of rethinking is the concept of the individual itself that has always been at the heart of feminist activism and politics, exemplified by the well-known second wave feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ that implies that everyday interactions between men and women (sex, family life, household chores) are no longer simply private matters but implicated in the exercise of institutionalised power (Genz 2009). As we have seen, postfeminism has been criticised for severing the link between individual women and collective activism by embracing a singular, self-centred and

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competitive form of agency that undermines the communal aspects of feminism and its distinct social and political goals. In Angela McRobbie’s words, postfeminist women – also labelled ‘TV blondes’ – are characterised by ‘ruthless . . . individualism’ and present a fantasy of female omnipotence which ‘on the longer term . . . may prove fatal’ as it means ‘living without feminism’ (McRobbie 2001: 363, 370, 372). By contrast, Mann’s notion of ‘gendered micro-politics’ relies on a model of ‘engaged individualism’ that allows individual actors to combine ‘economic and interpersonal forms of agency’, and experiment with ‘various identities as well as diverse familial and community relationships’ (Mann 1994: 124). In these circumstances, the micro-political agent comes to be seen as a ‘conflicted actor’ capable of operating within ‘various institutional discourses without ever being fully inscribed within any of the . . . frames of reference that engage us’ (Mann 1994: 31). This allows for a more dynamic and flexible model of political agency that arises from ‘a struggle that is not only without a unitary political subject but also without a unitary political opponent’ (Mann 1994: 159). As Mann admits, the rules of postfeminist micro-politics are ‘not clearly defined’ as the playing fields of these contemporary gendered conflicts are still ‘under construction’ (Mann 1994: 186). Undoubtedly, postfeminism attributes a central position to the individual which also aligns it more broadly with examinations of the conditions of (self-)identity in post-industrial Western liberal democracies in which men and women are thought to be progressively unfettered by the roles and constrictions associated with previous habitual practices and institutions (Beck 1992; Giddens 1992). This line of thought is associated with the work of Anthony Giddens who formulates a theory of the self as reflexively made by the individual. Giddens suggests that with the decline of traditions – what he designates the ‘post-traditional order of modernity’ (Giddens 2008: 5) – people’s lives are less shaped by certainties and more by the self-construction of personal biographies that allows individuals to engage in the reflexive ‘project of the self’ and become authors of their own life scripts. In this account, the more society is modernised, the more subjects acquire the ability to reflect upon their social conditions and prescribed life story and change them – a particularly appealing proposition for women who historically have been disadvantaged and excluded from social and political power. This construction is not optional but an ongoing project that demands the active participation of the subject (Beck 1992: 135). As Shelley Budgeon notes, this might especially be relevant for young women in contemporary society as ‘processes of individualisation and detraditionalisation mean that not only are a wide range of options available to them in terms of their self-definition, but that an active negotiation of positions which are potentially intersecting and contradictory is necessary’ (Budgeon 2001: 10). Here, individualisation operates as a social process that, instead of separating the self from a collective identity, increases

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the capacity for agency while also accommodating a rethinking of the individual as an active agent. The concept of the agentic individual brings into play heightened levels of personal choice and self-care as well as more entrepreneurial and corporate conceptualisations of the ‘self as enterprise’ prominent in some political quarters (du Gay 1996: 156). In particular, the privileging of the individual is facilitated by the pervasive ideology of neoliberalism that extends and disseminates market values to social and individual action at large. As Nikolas Rose proposes, today’s ‘enterprise culture’ accords a vital political value to the self who aspires to autonomy and interprets its reality and destiny as matters of individual responsibility (Rose 1992: 141–2). The enterprising self is motivated by a desire to maximise its own powers, happiness and quality of life as well as releasing its market potential through the promotion of a ‘go-ahead’ mentality, efficiency, competition and high performance. In the 1990s for example, this ideology of competitive individualism – itself a contemporary manifestation of ‘possessive individualism’ as discussed by C. B. Macpherson in the 1960s (see Gilbert 2013) – was a prominent feature of ‘Third Way’ philosophy adopted by centre-left governments in Europe and the United States as a middle course between right and left ideology. Propagated at the time by US President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as the rationale underlying the governments of the New Democrats, New Labour and die Neue Mitte (the New Centre) respectively, Third Way political philosophy saw human and economic interests as interdependent, endorsing that ‘the most important task of modernisation is to invest in human capital: to make the individual and businesses fit for the knowledge-based economy of the future’ (Blair and Schroeder, quoted in Genz 2006: 334). The equivalence of human values and needs with those of the marketplace has been criticised as an abandonment of traditional socialist ideals in its creation of a market society in which human beings become an element of a market economy (see Genz 2006). At the same time, neoliberalism’s rational and entrepreneurial actors function within an affective economy whereby as Lois McNay argues, ‘individual autonomy becomes not the opposite of, or limit to, neoliberal governance, rather it lies at the heart of its disciplinary control’ (McNay 2009: 62). Neoliberal subjects are legitimised as self-governing citizens through discourses of choice and free will, with freedom itself being manufactured by their ability to compete in the ‘game of enterprises’ (Foucault 2010: 173). In this regime, freedom is not a given but an obligation and responsibility – as Foucault puts it succinctly in The Birth of Biopolitics, ‘liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free’ (Foucault 2010: 63). Here, we can clearly detect conceptual and rhetorical links with postfeminism’s individualist and commoditised understanding of empowerment and

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agency. As Gill highlights in her examination of contemporary media and gender, at the heart of both neoliberalism and postfeminism is ‘the notion of the “choice biography” and the contemporary injunction to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy’ (Gill 2007: 260, 262). She is sceptical of this neoliberal/postfeminist junction that emphasises the individual as an ‘entirely free agent’ and she criticises the postfeminist subject for the return to normative gender roles and ‘reprivatization of issues that have only relatively recently become politicized’ (Gill 2007: 259–60). For Gill, this amounts to a ‘higher or deeper form of exploitation’ that implicates women in their own subjugation and objectification, imposing (male) power not ‘from above or from the outside’ but from within their ‘very subjectivity’ (Gill 2007: 258). Genz also locates postfeminism within a neoliberal political frame, specifically in relation to 1990s Third Way political economies that ‘encourage women to concentrate on their private lives and consumer capacities as the sites for self-expression and agency’ (Genz 2006: 337–8). Genz admits that engaging in postfeminist neoliberal practices is politically messy and risky but, in her view, it also allows for a more flexible understanding and construction of political agency and identity. Her discussion of ‘fashion feminism’ – exemplified for instance by the provocative T-shirt campaigns (‘The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own’) by the American designer/writer/women’s rights activist Periel Aschenbrand – is circumscribed by the caveat that such micro-political actions might not be replicated at a macro-political level (Genz 2006: 346). Furthermore, a more currently pressing issue relates to the ‘intensified neoliberalism’ that has emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and ensuing austerity agenda adopted by a number of Western economies (Gilbert 2013: 19). If pre-recession neoliberal postfeminism thrived on an entrepreneurial individualism/femininity and consumer mentality underpinned by a logic of entitlement and the opportunity of prosperity, then the experiences of precarity and individualised impotence in the midst of growing economic and social hardship have led to a sense of resignation and austere self-restraint that cast doubt on neoliberalism’s aspirational promises. The following section will underline a range of new postfeminist complexities that are tied to a changing economic, cultural and political climate that defines the ‘new age of austerity’ as invoked by British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2009.

Austerity Postfeminism and Post-Sexism ‘We live in a time of deep foreboding, one that haunts any discourse about justice, democracy, and the future’, Henry Giroux asserts in his account of the ‘Disimagination Machine’, highlighting that ‘market discipline now regulates all aspects of social life and the regressive economic rationality that drives it sacrifices the public good, public values, and social responsibility to a tawdry

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consumerist dream’ (Giroux 2013: 257). Giroux is uncompromisingly scathing in his attack on free-market fundamentalism and neoliberalism that in his eyes support deregulated ‘casino capitalism’ and give rise to a pseudoDarwinist, survival-of-the-fittest world in which freedom and equality have become unaffordable luxuries for the vast majority of the population (Giroux 2013: 258). He is adamant that what we are seeing in the harsh climate of the post-2008 economic downturn amounts to a breakdown of democracy symptomised by the disappearance of critical thought, the realm of the social, public values and any consideration of the common good. Instead, the recessionary era is characterised by predatory corporatism, obsessive investment with selfinterest and a ‘narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a new sociopathic lack of interest in others’ (Giroux 2013: 260). In this new culture of greed, social relations are remodelled as retail transactions – whereby ‘consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship’ (Giroux 2013: 264) – and those regarded as ‘failed consumers, workers, and critics’ fall prey to a ‘politics of disposability’ (Giroux 2011: 592). The post-millennium has undoubtedly been troubled by a seemingly interminable economic crisis and the ensuing atmosphere of austerity and anger at corporate greed, the rollback of opportunities and transfer of risk to culture at large. The current political and cultural moment is also complexly gendered, fears abounding that we are witnessing ‘the end of men’ and a concomitant ‘rise of women’, a trend not borne out by economic reality and rising numbers of unemployed women (Barrow 2012; Rosin 2010). The interplay of economic insecurity and gender further intensifies a number of (post-)feminist dilemmas and points of contentions, specifically in relation to postfeminist notions of entitlement and micro-politics, and the corporatisation of feminism. For example, Lazar’s suggestion that ‘the postfeminist subject . . . is entitled to be pampered and pleasured’ needs to be problematised in the context of a post-recession environment that no longer guarantees (economic) success and reward to even the most hard-working individuals (Lazar 2009: 372). This also has a more general effect on postfeminist popular culture and its depiction of female characters: where for example in the case of late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury heroines, failing might have been conceived as a ‘virtue’ (McRobbie 2009) – epitomised by the professional ineptness and persistent blundering of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones – such underachievement and incompetence are no longer held up as endearing signs of female identification and imperfection but now turn out to be equivalent to economic suicide as countless, qualified professionals compete in an ever more aggressive and merciless job market. In this sense, the prospect of prosperity and entrepreneurship that may have been viewed with confidence in the pre-recession decades appears less as an individual entitlement than a corporate obligation in times of austerity that masks the rollback of opportunities under the rhetorical guise of necessity, self-restraint and self-responsibility. In these circumstances, the affective state under neoliberal

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culture might be described at best as a ‘cruel optimism’ whereby we are encouraged to believe in the idea of a brighter future while ‘such attachments are, simultaneously, “actively impeded” by the harsh precarities and instabilities of neoliberalism’ (Littler 2013: 62). Moreover, the unfolding of contemporary neoliberal hegemony has also impacted on feminism that, as Angela McRobbie notes, has become ‘an active force-field of political values’ (McRobbie 2013: 120). In fact, in order to deeper embed ‘as a new kind of common-sense’, neoliberalism enters into a ‘symbiotic relationship with liberal feminism’ (McRobbie 2013: 124). Focusing on the figure of the professional middle-class mother, McRobbie detects ‘something of a feminist endorsement’ specifically in a British political context that sees the animosity and repudiation of feminism that were ‘feature[s] of the Blair government’ recede (McRobbie 2013: 121). In its place, there emerges a new neoliberal ‘corporate feminism’ that is more ‘branded and personalised’ and champions women who ‘will enter the labour market and stay in it’ (McRobbie 2013: 133, 121). In some ways, this line of criticism echoes well-rehearsed arguments about postfeminism as a constitutive component of neoliberal rationality, most notably in the context of the ‘New Economy’ of the 1990s and ‘the displacement of democratic imperatives by free market ones’ (Tasker and Negra 2007: 6). While neoliberal (post)feminism is unquestionably politicised in its inclusion of a ‘distinctly gendered dimension to the mantra of individualism’ (McRobbie 2013: 121), the exact politics of this stance remain as problematic as ever. For critics like Giroux, for example, the regime of ‘economic Darwinism’ under neoliberalism relies on an ethos of anti-intellectualism and ignorance to both ‘depoliticise the larger public while simultaneously producing the individual and collective subjects necessary and willing to participate in their own oppression’ (Giroux 2011: 165). In this reading, the ‘cheerful robot’ comes to be seen as a metaphor for the systemic construction of ‘a new mode of depoliticised and thoughtless form of agency’ that reduces civic responsibility to banal acts of consumption (Giroux 2011: 165). Gilbert as well posits that neoliberal ideology works to ‘secure consent and generate political inertia’ in its bid to convince and console austerity-weary citizens that the sense of perpetual competition and insecurity that pervades recessionary cultures is natural and that frankly, there is no point in fighting the inevitable (2013: 15). Here, survival – or, in Gilbert’s words, ‘feeding one’s children and keeping them out of relative poverty’ (Gilbert 2013: 14) – becomes an achievable but highly demanding task that keeps most social actors too busy to engage in any substantive political challenge to the norms. The general cultural mood is encapsulated by the notions of ‘disaffected consent’ and ‘resigned compliance’ where consent is conditional and grudging rather than enthusiastic (Gilbert 2013: 13, 18). This has led to an amplification of neoliberal enterprise culture where citizens are called upon to share sacrifice, bear the burden of economic downturn and the responsibility for economic uplift and (self-)improvement.

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While our current era might thus be perceived as ‘post-political’ in some ways – characterised by self-responsibilisation rather than social responsibility – it has nonetheless produced distinct forms of social and political action that re-engage with critical thinking and the language of reform and activism. Against the backdrop of global cutbacks, bailouts and austerity measures, macropolitical protests are growing, not just pursuing an anti-capitalist vein that highlights the self-serving and avaricious practices of the ‘masters of capital’, typified by the widely reviled image of the ‘greedy banker’. The present climate of global crisis and uncertainty has also generated a range of specifically gendered revolts that adopt a ‘boob and bust’ politics to address a range of gender inequalities. From Femen’s ‘topless Jihad’ against sex tourism and religious institutions in the Ukraine to the now worldwide ‘SlutWalk’ movement to challenge sexual violence, sexualised feminist politics have erupted in many different locations, re-appropriating the topless female body as a means for political expression and activism. These bare-chested protests employ the body as gendered political capital to unmask distinctively female crises in the context of an increasingly imbalanced global society. The reasoning that underlies these gendered forms of political resistance can clearly be traced back to a postfeminist logic that argues for the subjectifying potential of the (post)feminine body and makes a case for ‘sexual micro-politics’ that allows individual women who express their sexuality in a politically relevant manner (Genz 2006). The SlutWalk movement in particular has magnified these postfeminist debates on a macro-political scale, spreading around the globe from its original manifestation in Toronto in 2011 where the ill-advised comments of a Canadian police officer during a routine ‘personal safety’ visit to a University campus – suggesting that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’ – galvanised local women to organise an activist protest against ‘slut-blaming’ ideology that implicates the victim of sexual violence (see Ringrose and Renold 2012). This kind of sexualised activism seeks to effect a positive re-evaluation of sexual promiscuity and/ or sex work through a mobilisation of the ‘slut’ persona – connected with a whole category of words associated with female sexuality (‘tart’, ‘slag’, ‘whore’, and so on) – in an effort to produce what in theoretical terms Judith Butler refers to as ‘resignification’, a ‘subversive citation from within’ (Butler 1995: 135). As Ringrose and Renold explain, one of the goals of the SlutWalk as a collective movement is to ‘push the gaze off the dress and behaviour of the victim of sexual violence back upon the perpetrator, questioning the normalisation and legitimisation of male sexual aggression’ (Ringrose and Renold 2012: 334). In this sense, this postfeminist politics of resignification is not unlike other kinds of sexual politics that centre on the reclamation of words, the term ‘queer’ as an emblem of pride and visibility being the most notable in this respect. Yet, the trust in sexual resignification as a political postfeminist tool needs to be tempered by the awareness that these are also extraordinarily sexist times in which sexism is at once hyper-visible but not seen. Of course, critics have

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long highlighted postfeminism’s inherently sexist and politically conservative dimensions – whereby it is criticised for engendering not the eradication of sexism but its transformation into a more indirect and insidious form (Genz and Brabon 2009). The post-recession years in particular have seen a reinvigoration of new types of sexism – ‘new sexism’ (Benwell 2007); ‘enlightened sexism’ (Douglas 2010); ‘postfeminist sexism’ (Gill 2011); ‘critical sexism’ (Ahmed 2013) – that belie assumptions of gender equality and sexual freedom. The range and meanings of these variously named contemporary sexist positions bear clear resemblances to wider postfeminist debates that have been explored in this chapter: Benwell (2007) and Douglas (2010) for example examine contemporary sexism in terms of its ironic tone and postmodern reflexivity, allowing in Douglas’s words for an ‘enlightened’ sexist stance that wears ‘a knowing smirk’, is immune from criticism and ‘feminist in its outward appearance’ (Douglas 2010: 14, 10). Focusing on retro-stylish television series like PanAm (2011–12) and Mad Men (2007–), Lynn Spigel (2013) on the other hand discusses postfeminist nostalgia as a key operative device that allows the audience to frame sexism in period images and thereby lock it in the past – a move, we might add, that is also replicated more broadly in austerity cultures of thrift that consume the past in a ‘nostalgia mode’, markedly represented by the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Most recently, Genz’s analysis of ‘sexist liberalism’ and ‘liberal sexism’ has raised a number of issues in relation to neoliberal postfeminism’s politics of resignification and articulations of (female) entitlement and empowerment (2016). According to Genz, the postfeminist confidence around resignification – that a history of patriarchal domination and sexual victimisation could be reclaimed and given a new meaning – is wavering in the context of our contemporary age of uncertainty riddled with debt, doubt and destitution. Popular culture in particular has witnessed a shift towards sexual licentiousness and aggressive physicality that reflects the immediacy of our times with citizens sharply divided by their rank/class and access to capital. The sexual sensationalism on show for example in historical/fantasy television series like Game of Thrones (2011–), The Borgias (2011–13) and The Tudors (2007–10) speaks to the stark realities of a post-2008 world in which well-being and security are no longer guaranteed by the neoliberal mantra of a free-market economy that is meant to provide everyone with the right and potential to make profits and amass personal wealth. At the same time, popular television series such as these do not deny or refute sexism – by rendering it ‘imperceptible’ as some second wave feminists in the 1970s argued (see Frye 1983) – in their unapologetic and humourless depiction of hetero-sexist norms and sexual violence. This raises interesting questions about the nature of visibility itself and its relation to critique whereby making a political issue ‘visible’ or ‘speakable’ might not be enough as an act of emancipation and political awareness. These final ramifications around notions of ‘post-sexism’ highlight the compound

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effects of recessionary rationality on gendered postfeminist culture and more generally point towards an intensification and complexification of postfeminist ideologies. As this chapter has outlined, postfeminism as an analytical category is now an intricate part of current critical debates around (self-) empowerment, subjectivity and agency. Perplexing and troubling for some, postfeminism is also a compelling and provocative feature of contemporary culture, society, academia and politics that demands critical attention and provides an opportunity to practise conflict constructively.

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INTRODUCTION: HISTORICISM

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aking a historicist view of texts involves being sensitive to factors outside the text itself, such as readers and their socio-cultural context. It lies at the opposite pole to formalist criticism, with its conception of texts as almost self-contained entities. Reception and reader-response theory, as Bruce Harding outlines in Chapter 19, places the emphasis firmly on the reader and the exchange that takes place between each reader and the text. Harding considers the work of the main advocates of this position, such as Georges Poulet, Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser, and their insistence on treating textual-reception as a humanistic, rather than a mechanistic process, as implied by formalism. Harding then proceeds in Chapter 20 to consider New Historicism, which operates on the principle that historical traces are to be found in texts and that we must always be aware of the world that lies outside the text itself. As formulated by Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism had a significant impact on literary studies from the 1980s onwards. For many literary scholars in the period, it formed an antidote to deconstruction and its firmly anti-historicist approach to texts. Cultural materialism, as Neema Parvini goes on to discuss in Chapter 21, also took issue with the anti-historicist bias of deconstructive thought, building on the legacy of the English cultural commentator Raymond Williams. It had particular influence in the field of Shakespeare studies, where the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, amongst others, gave rise to the notion of ‘political Shakespeare’. The conflict between historicist and formalist analysis continues to be central to critical theory.

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19 RECEPTION AND READER-RESPONSE THEORY Bruce Harding

New Critical Anti-Affectivism

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nterest in the phenomenology and psychology of reading and the benefits and drawbacks of transactional subjectivism arose from the 1940s onwards in the wake of the harsh New Critical, objectivist attacks on the intentional (genetic) and affective fallacies. As W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley stated: The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does) . . . [which] begins by trying to derive the standards of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. 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. (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1949: 31) Andrew Bennett argued that the prime purpose of this polemic was ‘the desire to purge literary criticism of the indiscipline of the alleged “femininity” of gossip’ and muddled indulgence in the motley, in favour of disciplining the discipline and making it ‘austerely literary, rigorously linguistic, and astringently intellectual’ (Bennett 2005: 75, 76). Beardsley and Wimsatt were not denying the patent fact that authors have intentions and authority (auctoritas) but, rather, were: (1) attempting to emphasise the prime importance of exploring what I call ‘textual intentionality’, or the poet’s intrinsically focused intentions as the text expresses them, and (2) piously insisting that the ‘best’ texts are autonomous, self-referential ‘verbal icons’ capturing sensuous and non-rational experience. Furthermore, deep fears about accepting ‘irrelevant’ emotive responses by ‘ideal readers’ as validating an undisciplined affectivism led very thoughtful, experientially minded critics in France, Germany and the Anglo-American world to reconceive the dynamics of a reader-oriented form of criticism. Even the normally cautious George Steiner noted that ‘the relation of the true reader to the book is creative’ (Steiner 1996: 17) and empirically constitutive of the text’s ongoing life. Similarly, Steiner argued: ‘No ascription of meaning is ever

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final, no associative sequence or field of possible resonance ever end-stopped’, for ‘meanings’ and ‘the psychic energies which enunciate, or, more exactly, which encode them, are in perpetual motion’ (Steiner 1996: 22). Reader-response criticism sought to restore reality to literary and cultural studies by reminding us that inert paper-bound objects need to be activated by real, and imperfect, biological people. Some theorists (notably Norman Holland) took Freudian ideas into overdrive and postulated a literary self-analysis using texts to mirror individual reader’s neuroses which discredited a legitimate movement, and this is why his fellow Americans Stanley Fish and Wayne C. Booth insisted on a more communal sense of reading space: to avoid overblown psycho-therapeutic claims while accepting the insights of European phenomenologists (Poulet and Iser especially) as they forced a recognition of texts as humanistic and not mechanistic entities. In 1929, a reviewer of I. A. Richards’s books noted with alarm that Richards had rather positivistically identified ‘ten difficulties which arise in the reading of poetry’, and described these items, from Practical Criticism (1929), as ‘a terrifying list of possible misdemeanours’, illustrated by hair-raising accounts of the ‘most nightmarish quality’ in student responses to unnamed and anonymised texts (Twitchett 1929: 602). The besetting sin to Richards was ‘Doctrinal Adhesion’, as an impediment to a notionally ‘pure’ (non-ideological, non-referential), intrinsically focused aesthetic reading, as this directed attention away from the pristine, self-sufficient text towards extrinsic, prosaic and distracting concerns (politics, social ethics, the new psychology, and so on). However, this commendable zeal to uncover the unmediated ‘textual unconscious’ (or preconscious) often degenerated, in practice, into a crude literary-critical positivism purging ideas from texts and foregrounding aesthetics, as when Cleanth Brooks, an American New Critic, attempted to impose a false division between ‘the work itself’ and ‘[s]peculation on the mental processes of the author’ (Brooks 1951: 74). This is the very troubling dyad which Georges Poulet later theorised and vaporised. Indeed, the whole reception aesthetics movement placed priority not on the author or the text, but on the criticality of readers and the mental exchanges which can subsist between them, authors and texts, banishing socio-historical contextualisation. Poulet embraced critical practice as a dynamic process of reciprocity, insisting that ‘the ideal act of criticism must seize (and reproduce) that certain relationship between an object and a mind which is the work itself’ (Poulet 1969: 65) – or between the text and the delivery vehicle (physical form) which transmits that expressed and ongoingly expressive mind (subject, or the interactable content of inner experience and intentional consciousness). Poulet’s account of the processual evolution of the ‘read’ text is compelling: At this point, no object [play, poem, novel] can any longer express it, no structure can any longer define it; [the text] is exposed in its ineffability and in its fundamental indeterminacy. Such is perhaps the reason why

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the critic, in his [sic] elucidation of works, is haunted by this transcendence of mind. It seems then that criticism . . . needs to annihilate, or at least momentarily to forget, the objective elements of the work, and to elevate itself to the apprehension of a subjectivity without objectivity. (Poulet 1969: 68) It is arguable that the chief flaw of a strongly centred affective criticism of this type lies in its dynamically ‘presentist’ emphasis – namely, that it valorises the solitary cogito encountering les plaisirs du texte in a solipsistic mode, without recourse to examining the wider structural, thematic, ideological and contextual issues which may animate and vivify that text, both from outside and within. The truly interesting aspect of this is how the concerns of the reception aesthetes correspond to core dicta made by Jacob Bronowski, the philosopher of science and purveyor of scientific humanism. In his lectures at MIT in 1953, Dr Bronowski (a poet as well as a noted biologist) forcefully rebutted naïve ideas of the scientist ‘fixing by some mechanical process the facts of nature’ (Bronowski 1972: 11) and not engaging in any human filtering. Bronowski articulated a dynamic, post-Heisenbergian recognition that: There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. (Bronowski 1972: 20) This ‘Two World Systems’ debate is vital and confirms the value of response theory as a valid heuristic illuminating receptivity and subjectivity as an unavoidable paired datum of human experience and knowledge-creation.

‘Death of the Author’ Criticism (Barthes), Fish, Booth, Holland and Bleich Roland Barthes’ famous essay ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ (‘The Death of the Author’) emerged in the midst of the 1968 Parisian evenements and totally put paid to the New Critics’ ‘genetic heresy’. Barthes’s classic – and highly seductive postmodern thesis was that: ‘Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ (Barthes 1977: 147). Alvin Kernan wittily described this as ‘the literary sansculottes’ dethroning and driving out ‘the rentier authors’ as dominant authorities and despatching them (Kernan 1990: 73), but Geoffrey Hartman contributed the

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more pregnant idea that ‘if there is a key, the author has locked the text and, as it were, thrown the key away – into the text’ (in Atkins 1983: 55). As Paris was the home to French New Wave cinema and auteurisme (the valorisation of ‘authorial’ directors), it was arguably quite an odd place for the project of ‘deauthor-ization’ to emerge, yet Barthes’s principle of affectless, depersonalised critique (which shuns identity-politics) had been to a degree anticipated when the objectivist New Critics Wimsatt and Bearsdley rejected the existentialist doctrine of emotive and personal meaning in texts: ‘Emotion, it is true, has a well-known capacity to fortify opinion, to inflame cognition, and to grow upon itself in surprising proportions to grains of reason. We have mob psychology, psychosis, and neurosis’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 26–7). Yet while it was one thing to espouse a principled rejection of authorial opinions as a putatively reliable guide in interpreting literary texts, it was quite another to totally decentre authorship in a movement which parallels Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ discourse of a century earlier. The generic GodAuthor was now fully dethroned as an existential ‘trace’ in light of the deconstructionists’ assertions of the radical contingency and lack of any ‘metaphysics of presence’ inherent in all textuality per se. This mode of regard negates the exploration of anterior and framing concerns, as which cultural and social identities are being given ‘voice’ in texts, as in David Bleich’s assertion that in the act of reading literature, ‘the author is not speaking to me, and I am not speaking to him. I am reconstructing a piece of language whose origin is permanently inaccessible to me’ (Bleich 1978: 238). This is potentially a very asocial and anti-historical, decontextualising reading strategy. Wimsatt and Beardsley led the charge for a cognitive criticism of ‘classical objectivity’ as against an affective ‘romantic reader psychology’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 34) and Bleich reminds us that the New Critics were waging a defensive war in a hyper-technological world that valued hard, physical evidence, so that they tried to ‘hypostatize a literary text as a document with an internally coherent objective meaning’ (Bleich 1978: 33). Bleich’s ‘Americanist’ mode of personal self-exploration is not what Poulet and the Geneva School sought, but its therapeutic cast does recall Holland’s Freudianised recycling, in egopsychology, of the Aristotelian notion of health via the katharsis of art, by his insistence that literary response has a potentially therapeutic function in helping to burn off readers’ inexpressible and intrapsychically repressed anxieties. Holland believed his method was broadly therapeutic, exposing the originary (and Freudian) ‘core-fantasy’ shared by an author and a reader, up-thrusting and introjecting repressed unconscious wishes into a safely aestheticised form of conscious response to text – literacy wittily slated by Steiner as ‘transient Narcissism’ (Steiner 1996: 35). Holland revised his 1968 postulates, in 1975 publishing his ‘transactive’ hypothesis (Five Readers Reading), in which readers can ward off anxiety in the act of reading by ‘the projection of a safe fantasy into the work’ (Wright 1984: 65). This is a more humanist and liberatory

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view of reading-as-transference, in which readers (‘analysands’, or patients in transference) use texts (as de facto analysts) to transact and work through their own value sets and identity issues, transforming these into identified and highly charged ‘themes’ in literary works. Yet for all that they can remain solipsistic rhapsodes. A traditional word for this – without the chic psychoanalytic theorising – was eisogesis. Elizabeth Wright justly queried why such practitioners ‘fail to ask why readings should be communicated’ (Wright 1984: 68) at all to a wider critical audience of readers and scholars. Victor Erlich observed that Stanley Fish (see Fish 1970: 123–62) viewed ‘the reading experience as hardly safe’ (Erlich 1975: 767), being liable to expose self-inadequacies to readerly view and so, possibly, transforming our minds and values negatively instead of reassuring us. In the reading experience charted by Fish (Surprised by Sin [1967]), ‘we are roped into committing ourselves to positions we must later give up’ (Erlich 1975: 767) in a contestable mental and ideological space; for the Fishian approach of meaning-construction eschews simple retrieval-construal and ultimately ‘focuses on the reader rather than the artifact’ (Fish 1970: 139). Fish well appreciated that a key issue with affective criticism is that it ‘leads away from “the thing itself” in all its solidity to the inchoate impressions of a variable and various reader’ (Fish 1970: 139); yet he insisted that literary meaning-making is a valid activity engaged in by competent ‘informed readers’ as they participate kinetically in decoding and translating abstruse sentences (which, once activated, are events which generate effects, and are not inert objects) centred in ‘the temporal flow of the reading experience’, to create a living event, a holistic gestalt (Fish 1970: 127). The notion of ‘meaning as event’ recalled for Fish a slow-motion camera as the reader’s actualising participation is predicated upon ‘something that is happening between the words and in the reader’s mind’ (Fish 1970: 128). Reading, in Fish’s view, is an affective experience which ‘makes us do something’, so ‘[t]he objectivity of the text is an illusion, and moreover, a dangerous illusion, because it is so physically convincing’ (Fish 1970: 131, 140). Where, for objectivist critics, reading is an extractive process, for Fish and the receptor-critics it is an event, ‘the actualization of meaning’ via the ‘activating consciousness of the reader’ (Fish 1970: 144, 141). For Fish, the search for determinable ‘messages’ is pointless, as the meaning of an utterance is the experience it projects. He celebrates this analytical ‘method’ as self-sharpening – ‘and what it sharpens is you. In short, it does not organize materials, but transforms minds’ (Fish 1970: 161). Fish later espoused the idea of ‘reading communities’, emphasising the power of a collectivity who share a set of common assumptions and values, so that ‘[w]hat will, at any time, be recognized as literature is a function of a communal decision as to what will count as literature’ and one that ‘will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers continues to abide by it’ (Fish 1980: 10, 11). Wayne Booth added an extra dimension of

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stringent responsibility when he espoused an ethical criticism which matches the storyteller’s ethos with that of implied receptors who acknowledge ‘an ethics of readers – [of] their responsibilities to stories’ (Booth 1988: 9). This is what Booth meant by his rhetorical query about the kind of ‘company we have kept’ in forging a communal conversation which he calls ‘coductive’ (coduction being a drawing or bringing out together). Booth offers a neat elaboration and advancement upon Fish’s rather relativistic and unfocused construct of ‘interpretive communities’, even as he concedes its approximative shape: ‘Coduction can never be “demonstrative”, apodeictic: it will not persuade those who lack the experience required to perform a similar coduction. The validity of our coductions must always be corrected in [critical] conversations about the coductions of others whom we trust’ (Booth 1988: 73). The key orientation that devalued reception studies, and the social structures forming the context of reception processes themselves, was the astonishingly naïve New Critical dictum that texts are autonomous and exempt from socially determined representational and communicative systems. David Bleich rejected social or primarily programmatic readings in his subjectivist paradigm of ‘personal self-exploration’, for he noted rather timidly and defensively that knowledge ‘is the subjective construction of our minds, which are, after all, more accessible to us than anything else’ (Bleich 1978: 8, 35). In Bleich’s assertion about ‘the desire to create knowledge on one’s own behalf and on behalf of one’s community from the subjective knowledge of the work of art’ (Bleich 1978: 93) we discern the seeds of Fish’s interpretive communities of intersubjectively negotiating and linked readers. Bleich was sanguine in taking from all this an enhanced reliability of literary knowledge, ‘because it allows each community [of literary concern] to authorize its own knowledge with its own experiences’ (Bleich 1978: 126). Bleich defended his loose notion of subjective response as scientia on the hopeful proviso that readers consciously articulate their ‘motives for knowledge as the rationale for [their] declaration of knowledge’ while accepting ‘the subjective principle that the observer is part of the observed while the observed is defined by the observer’ (Bleich 1978: 100, 122). Here critical theory is catching up with the core insights of modern particle physics, but is running off the road into unrestricted interpretive relativism. Murray Schwarz and Norman Holland’s seminar welcomed and affirmed subjectivity of response and expressly rejected the ‘professional avoidance techniques’ (Schwarz 1975: 756) of literary objectivism. In their ‘Delphi Seminars’, it was found that ‘readers take in literary works by shaping them to meet their characteristic adaptive and defensive strategies’ (Holland and Schwarz 1975: 789), which certainly sounds like a neo-Freudian therapeutic model of ‘literary creation and re-creation’. But it is difficult, empirically, to fault Holland and Schwarz for their concern ‘to discover how the distinctive character of each of our minds affects the literary transactions we engage in and the

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critical statements we make’ (Holland and Schwarz 1975: 790), especially as Fish has articulated the Heisenberg point that the observer is ineluctably part of the observed while trying to define it.

D. W. Harding and Georges Poulet: The Act of Affective Reading Theorised Foucault’s theorisation of the ‘author function’ utilised a broader concept of authorising discourse (e.g. Freudian analysis), but nonetheless it remained one which denominates and authenticates notions of subjectivity as a discursive formation. The modern ‘subject’ was born from the Renaissance onwards with the advent of a revived Greek humanism and was an offshoot of the heroic artist trope, granting the artist-subject a discrete and communicable subjectivity to share with a wider public. Andrew Bennett has analysed the text-terrorists’ attack on ‘the “capitalist” hegemony of authorcentric, bourgeois, humanist ideology’ (Bennett 2005: 18). A clear instance of that genteel ideology came in D. W. Harding’s essay ‘The Bond with the Author’, in which Harding asserted that ‘Any but the most naïve kind of reading puts us into implicit relation with an author’ (Harding 1971: 307). Harding did important empirical work on the psychology of the reading act and research into reader response, as de facto communication with a projected authorial persona, and he avoids a naïve intentionalist reading, strenuously arguing that ‘Not what the author intended, and not what he [sic] was aware analytically of having created, but the work as he consented to leave it is the thing that concerns the reader’, for ‘critical analysis may be no part of his creative strength’ (Harding 1971: 309). Harding’s credo is impressive: ‘More important is the fact that much of the author’s intention exists in no form separable from what he achieves; it is only in the course of writing that his intention defines itself in full detail’ even though the quality of that achievement may well elude the author, for ‘What he intended and what he noticed are less important than what he did’ (Harding 1971: 309). Harding suggests that if we are not to eliminate the putative authorial persona totally from the reading, then we must embrace the dual ‘necessity for the author to exercise . . . control over the reader’s response’ and for ‘the reader to submit to [such] control’, for Harding values a ‘quasi-social relation’ with the author ‘even if he [sic] is dead or totally inaccessible’ (Harding 1971: 311). He argues that some degree of direction by the author is a legitimate working assumption in criticism so as to determine and limit acts of misprision, for otherwise ‘we treat reading as a purely individual creative or projective activity’ (314). This is a cardinal point for a disciplined critical practice. I. A. Richards confidently distinguished between genuine variant readings and arrant misreadings, yet Harding more thoughtfully allowed that variance is an inevitable given, ‘knowing that the full effect of any writing, at least any emotive writing, must depend in part on the unique structure of personality

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and experience to which it is assimilated by each reader’ (Harding 1971: 314). Harding focused on devising practical critical strategies to bridge this cognitive gap, but he was right to exclude variances which merely indulge our own moods, reinforce our prejudices and confirm ‘a narcissistic reflection of our self’ (Harding 1971: 319); for responding adequately to a great work ‘means becoming something different from your previous self’ (Harding 1971: 325). Significantly, Harding’s notion of a disciplined subjectivism resonates with Georges Poulet’s ‘take-over’ theory: And this process of entering into another person’s pattern of growth is an essential difference between real literary experience and free imaginative response to a barely intelligible or completely ambiguous piece of writing, however suggestive and stimulating to our own latent creativeness that may be. (Harding 1971: 325) In 1978 DeMaria lamented that ‘[i]n the newest practical criticism the role of the reader is more prominent than the performance of the writer or the independent harmony of the text’ and envisaged an Iserian ‘interpenetration of created work and creating reader’ (DeMaria 463, 467). But surely all this shadow-boxing is concerned properly with locating the uniquely ‘purposive’ intention of the published work, which confidently intends its own meaning and, as such, is light years away from the despised ‘biographical fallacy’ excoriated by Wimsatt and Beardsley. The deconstructionists – whom Lehman memorably termed the purveyors of ‘harmless pseudoradicalism’ and ‘critical terrorism’, as their ‘invincible skepticism blunts its force as an instrument of dissent’ (Lehman 1991: 74, 76) – wage ideological war against such patrician and Platonic conceptions of well-wrought poetic urns, and, like Geoffrey Hartman, assert the parity of the reader-critic with the creative writer as a co-creator of meaning. The conflict is ultimately framed around ‘readerly’ epitexts and occurs between the graphi-readers who believe in autotelic meaning and the solidity and ontological autonomy of texts and refuse to countenance any notion of an antecedent and authorial voice (New Critics and Barthes), and the existentialising epi-readers who willingly try to recall and recreate the uniquely valenced ‘voice’ (of the silent/ced author) which ‘speaks’ the texts they are reading (Poulet and the phenomenologists). The philosopher-critic Georges Poulet published his first key manifestoes of an experiential critique de la conscience (‘criticism of consciousness’) reading position in 1949 (his Edinburgh essays), 1954 and 1959, when he asserted that literature encodes subjective (and inter-subjective) perceptions of realities that transcend history and simple-minded ‘biographism’. For Poulet, the attuned reader must be prepared to subject him- or herself to foreign experiences and perceptions that allow them to explore the work’s expression of a conscious,

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perceiving being and, as such, to be ‘inhabited’ by thought through a ‘strange displacement of myself by the work’ (Poulet 1969: 59): to be taken over by the symbolic author. As Lawall paraphrases this, the literary thought ‘is a motivating impulse, an original birth which must be resurrected by the reader as he rethinks and re-creates the author’s own expression’ (Lawall 1968: 78) in his or her psyche. In this way, textually embedded thought is born anew in a malleable, biophysical form, and this is Poulet’s miracle of transactional exchange and a living and transitive exercise in a shared inter-subjective phenomenology. Poulet insists on texts as actualisable identities: that while made of paper and ink, books ‘lie where they are put, until the moment someone shows an interest in them’; that while they are inert physical objects made of paper and ink, books ‘wait for someone to come and deliver them from their materiality, their immobility’, for ‘books are not just objects among others’ (Poulet 1969: 53). Poulet writes of a literary, mentalistic interpenetration between books and their readers which retains cogency, especially so in the age of Kindle and e-books: On the other hand, take a book, and you will find it offering, opening itself. It is this openness of the book which I find so moving. A book is not shut in by its contours, is not walled-up as a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside of itself, or to let you exist in it. In short, the extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer outside or inside. (Poulet 1969: 54) Poulet defined fictional works as ‘subjectified objects’ which allow one to think ‘the thoughts of another . . . as my very own’ in ‘my innermost self’ (Poulet 1969: 55, 56, 54). This experiential reification of ‘a second self’ which ‘thinks and feels for me’ may seem to engender passivity and what Poulet called the ‘annexation of my consciousness by another (which is the work)’ (Poulet 1969: 57, 59). Yet it does facilitate an active sense of mutuality and sharing that ‘in no way implies that I am the victim of any deprivation of consciousness’, but, rather, that ‘I begin to share the use of my consciousness with this being whom I have tried to define and who is the conscious subject ensconsed at the heart of the work’ (Poulet 1969: 59). One may be forgiven for wondering if Poulet is unintentionally hypothesising communication with the immanent self and the ‘mental entities’ (Poulet 1969: 54) of an historical author. That said, Poulet preferred Jean-Pierre Richard’s extroverted vision (see Richard 1954), from which the subjective consciousness embraces an extrinsic world that extends well beyond the confines of the expressive, textually vocalising self. Yet, contradictorily, the experiential literary critic is not permitted to reference psychology, sociology or metaphysics. For Poulet, books are not aloof and resistant, self-sufficient exterior objects (e.g. sculptures). They

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are, conversely, potentially ‘interior’ entities ‘condemned to change their very nature, condemned to lose their materiality’ (Poulet 1969: 55), being subsumed in the consciousness of humans, the best of whom will merge their selfhood with texts and deploy an intuitive Einfuhlungsgabe (extreme empathy of experiential response). This premise is clearly closely akin to the New Criticism (and to Derrida’s intrinsic focus on a crafted and coded linguistic solipsism) yet Poulet firmly rejected any pretence of critical distance or objectivity of response. Indeed, Poulet romantically insisted that once readers replace ‘a direct perception of reality for the words of a book’ they deliver themselves, ‘bound hand and foot to the omnipotence of fiction’ in an inescapable ‘takeover’, when they become ‘the prey of language’ (Poulet 1969: 55). Lawall asserts that in Poulet’s Christianised existentialism, formal literary qualities (style, diction, structure) must be subordinated in order to ‘discover in the text the overall, non-objective reality of the author as subject’ (Lawall 1968: 81) yet not claiming to have sourced any definitive authorial intention. The expression of a ‘voice’ as an intense record of consciousness (as in a CD awaiting being played) is the origin, point and destination of Pouletian identitarianism that is linked to the Cartesian formula of the cogito (thinking self) of each ‘author’ working out his expressive identity. To the effect that the author opens a window on his or her view of the phenomenal world, critics-readers may entertain and explore these themes, but Poulet will not permit the reader to independently set the authorial-interpretive agenda by recourse to external standards and models, in order to conduct any extra-literary external appraisal/audit of the text(s) being encountered. Poulet deduced a vexing consequence: I am someone who happens to have as objects of his own thought, thoughts which are part of a book I am reading, and which are therefore the cogitations of another. They are the thoughts of another, and yet it is I who am their subject. . . . I am thinking the thoughts of another. (Poulet 1969: 55) This cognitive surrender is surely vastly overstated (in what precise sense can a notional reader think another’s thoughts without a skerrick of qualification or critical distanciation?). Poulet may view a given thought, or given literary expression, as a datum about which he urges: ‘I think it as my own’ (Poulet 1969: 56); but this is surely an expression of his own readerly idiosyncrasy, not to mention the assertion of an astonishing phenomenological naïvety. ‘My consciousness behaves as though it were the consciousness of another’ (Poulet 1969: 56) is a statement fundamentally misconceiving metaphor for reality (adducing a temporary state of mind for something more substantial) and is ultimately expressive of a worrisome abdication of the sovereign cogito. Furthermore, Poulet advanced very strong affective claims, insisting that if we read ‘without mental reservation’ our comprehension ‘becomes intuitive’ and

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hyper-responsive to feeling, that astonishing facility with which we ‘not only understand but even feel what [we] read’ (Poulet 1969: 57). Poulet’s naïve (but immensely attractive) psychologism draws attention to the reader being ‘on loan to another’ who ‘thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me’, as a ‘second self takes over, a self which thinks and feels for me’ (Poulet 1969: 57). Does such abject affective-cognitive surrender actually occur or only in Poulet’s musings about a phantom ‘Ideal Reader’ succumbing to what he calls the ‘total commitment required of any reader’ (Poulet 1969: 57)? Poulet theorises the resurrection of Barthes’s despised author, naming this literary doppelgänger as the incarnated spirit of the historical author cheating death and acting as a post-mortem Svengali, performing astonishing acts of ventriloquism: When I read Baudelaire or Racine, it is really Baudelaire and Racine who thinks, feels, allows himself to be read within me. Thus a book is not only a book [i.e. decomposable printed matter], it is the means by which an author actually preserves his ideas, his feelings, his modes of dreaming and living. It is his means of saving his identity from death. . . . [This] seems to justify what is commonly called the biographical explication of literary texts. Indeed every word of literature is impregnated with the mind of the one who wrote it. As he makes us read it, he awakens in us the analogue of what he thought or felt. To understand a literary work, then, is to let the individual who wrote it reveal himself [sic] to us in us. (Poulet 1969: 58) If we read this with a metaphorical mindset, it starts to make impressive sense, positing the book as a partial transcription of the psychic configuration of its creator with the receptive reader acting as a kind of willing palimpsest or playing-machine, or mode of post-authorial articulation, but surely also a receptor who may play with the controls and share in the co-production of textual meaning and developing a temporary common consciousness. Poulet draws back from any crude and foolish literalisation of the departed or physically remote bio-physical author, arguing that in the reading experience we remake (resurrect) the work in a ‘vital inbreathing’, a kind of mental pregnancy that enables a work of literature to become ‘(at the expense of the reader whose life it suspends) a sort of human being’, or ‘a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects’ (Poulet 1969: 59); or, I would prefer to say, of its own otherwise inert, unarticulated objectivity. So instead of an act of psychic vampirism, we are confronted instead with the challenge of actualising a past and alteric sensibility encoded in webs of words, tropes and coded perceptions. It is a stunning model of mirrored perception-reception of ‘the conscious subject ensconsed at the heart of the work’ which Poulet termed ‘the apperceptual world of the author’ (Poulet 1969: 59, 61).

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Poulet described his radical theory of response to René Wellek (6 October 1956) as based on the premise that ‘criticism has for its primordial goal our comprehension of a work, that is to say to situate us in a thinking and feeling consciousness, a subject in connection with its objects. . . . The literary work is not a flower or a fruit. It is the creature smelling the flower and tasting the fruit’ or discovering ‘a consciousness that is substituted for our own’ (cited in Lawall 1968: 129), and thus accessing a purported preverbal human experience of another. This is incarnated reading, but an approach which risks homogenising authorial discourse into the expression of simple monolinear, monoplanar themes, thereby short-changing the existential complexity encoded in the fates of several characters. As Lawall so cogently reminds us: ‘the critic must analyze all aspects of the author’s expression if he is to represent adequately the author’s existential identity’, in that the effort ‘to represent a mental universe requires the complexity of a game of three-dimensional chess’ (Lawall 1968: 133). The text as an active art-object awaiting literary apperception is premised on an almost absolute identity and lack of distance between the text and the reader by which Poulet sought a criticism of comprehension by union, but contended that literature is by definition ‘already a transportation of the real into the unreality of verbal conception’ (Poulet 1969: 62). In this austerely objectivist and non-mimetic schema, the best critical act ‘will constitute a transposition of this transposition, thus raising to the second power the “de-realization” of being through language’ by cognitive blasting, deploying the most lucid language to push texts to a kind of annihilative vanishing point of analytical clarity (Poulet 1969: 62). Clearly this hypercriticism is closer to the literary chills of New Criticism than to Poulet’s highly proximate, intellectually sensuous and personalist dicta and diktats but Poulet sought to fuse subjectivism with a more distanced form of textual appraisal in which: Sensuous thought is privileged to move at once to the heart of the work and to share its own life; clear thought is privileged to confer on its objects the highest degree of intelligibility. Two sorts of insight are here distinguishable and mutually exclusive: there is penetration by the senses and penetration by the reflective consciousness. (Poulet 1969: 63) Stanley Fish (1980), clearly influenced by Poulet, the Geneva School, Iser et al., powerfully explored the illusion of objective reading and the vacuous maps of potential misreading by inept (or ‘un-ideal’) individual readers in context of the more important, overarching collective construction of textuality signalled by their often unconscious membership of ‘interpretive communities’ that reflect a diachronically framed and experientially valenced zeitgeist. For Fish was clear that symbolising a symbolic object as a ‘real’ one (New Criticism) is illusory and argued feistily (Fish 1970: 146). Fish moved on to dissolve any heuristically valid distinction between ‘ordinary’

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and ‘literary’ language codes, noting that communal forces of taste formation must operate: All aesthetics are . . . local and conventional, reflecting a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers (it is very much an act of faith) continues to abide by it. (Fish 1973: 52) As Bleich put it, there is no objective authority and, furthermore, that ‘no existing standards are necessarily right or wrong’, for ‘[b]oth the interpretive judgments and their criteria of viability are intersubjectively renegotiated when they are proposed anew’ through critical dialogue (Bleich 1978: 159). All canons of taste are finally arbitrary as are legal fictions (e.g. Parliamentary Sovereignty) and strict distinctions in court judgments between ratio decidendi and obiter dicta, so that it is small wonder that Fish’s academic journey came to encompass the textual politics articulated in postmodern legal theory (Fish 1989). The interpretive community discourse is akin to Dworkin’s notion of legal and literary-critical practice as ‘chain enterprises’ in which interpretation is sourced in institutional affiliations of agreed reading practice (Dworkin 1982). In his earliest theorisations, Fish the anti-formalist promoted a self-aware, reader-centric focus that clearly built upon Poulet’s textual internalisation strategy (internalising the textual ‘Other’), but where, with Poulet, the ‘author’ re-existed by being internalised in the reader and not in any pre-textual entity, with Fish the text speaks through the reader, provided it is recognised that each text is read by its own rules and signifying system and we concede that ‘we live in a rhetorical world’ in which notions of ‘intention’ ‘must be interpretively established . . . through persuasion’ (Fish 1989: 25). This affective critique, leading to ‘human self-interpretation through literature’, was also advocated and later greatly developed by Wolfgang Iser of the University of Konstanz (1993: xiii) as a proponent of a metacritical subjectivity that is profoundly anthropomorphic and impressively humanistic.

The Staying Power of Wolfgang Iser Iser’s earliest theory of Wirkungstheorie was a neo-Pouletian heuristic which postulated that the implied reader responds to a network of response-inviting text structures (e.g. patterns, shifts in point of view, blanks in the text) which impel the reader to engage and grapple with the inchoate text, filling lexical gaps along the way and so creatively constructing the otherwise inert, unrealised text in an activity comprising ‘a sort of kaleidoscope of perspectives, preintentions, recollections’ (Iser 1972: 284). In a powerful essay, Iser addressed the need to cognise the ‘realization accomplished by the reader’, as a convergence of text and reader is essential, for bringing ‘the literary work into

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existence’ (Iser 1972: 279). ‘Dynamic reading’ for Iser is not to be confused with ‘the individual disposition of the reader’ (Iser 1972: 279) but, rather, with a contact zone of experiential and adventurous transactional liminality that rewards active and creative reading and yields new insights. Iser cited Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962) as proclaiming how texts may parallel life and asserted that the best authors challenge readers, for ‘it is only by activating the reader’s imagination that the author can hope to involve him and so realize the intentions of his text’, to bring the text ‘to fruition’ (Iser 1972: 286, 282). From this Iser moved to a radical interpretive stance about multivalent meanings: that as expectations are rarely fulfilled ‘in truly literary texts . . . we feel that any confirmative effect’ of the kind sought in denotative and expository texts ‘is a defect in a literary text’ (Iser 1972: 283). Iser’s nuanced but open approach yields deep insights: One might simplify by saying that each intentional sentence correlative opens up a particular horizon, which is modified, if not completely changed, by succeeding sentences. While these expectations arouse interest in what is to come, the subsequent modification of them will also have a retrospective effect on what has already been read. This may now take on a different significance from that which it had at the moment of reading. Whatever we have read sinks into our memory and is foreshortened. It may later be evoked again and set against a different background with the result that the reader is enabled to develop hitherto unforeseeable connections. (Iser 1972: 283) Iser’s key insight is that divergent readings of the same text provide ‘ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written’ (Iser 1972: 283). The processes of prediction, predication and retrospection, as discussed, lead to ‘the “gestalt” of a literary text’, as individual readers attempt ‘to fit everything together in a consistent pattern’ that will accord with ‘and must inevitably be colored by our own characteristic selection process’ (Iser 1972: 288, 289). Iser argues for an unusual but dynamic oscillation between the polysemantic/indeterminable nature of texts and the creative and dynamic illusionmaking activity of readers who impose our own systems of order on texts, such that if we cannot do so, ‘sooner or later we will put the text down’ (Iser 1972: 290). Not being able to score a perfect balance in decoding, backtracking and wrestling with the text keeps the reading process going. Iser’s phenomenological research suggests that our shattered (‘defamiliarized’) expectations are ‘integral to the aesthetic experience’ (Iser 1972: 292). ‘The moment we try to impose a consistent pattern on the text, discrepancies are bound to arise’, Iser observed, drawing us into texts and ‘compelling us to conduct a creative examination not only of the text, but also of ourselves’ (Iser 1972: 295). Iser

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believes that ‘[t]he efficacy of a literary text is brought about by the apparent evocation and subsequent negation of the familiar’ (Iser 1972: 295) as takenfor-granted realities are contested and even confuted as our preconceptions are put to flight. Iser explains that this interrogative praxis is what Poulet meant by his arresting conception that ‘in reading the reader becomes the subject that does the thinking’ (Iser 1972: 297). From this premise Iser concluded that the text must needs be viewed as a substantialist node of consciousness upon which dialectical acts or transactions of inter-subjectivity can occur — ‘a relationship that can only come about through the negation of the author’s own life-story and the reader’s own disposition’ (Iser 1972: 298). Out of this transaction, Iser suggested, readers may clarify their own values and better formulate ‘ourselves and what had previously seemed to elude our consciousness’ (Iser 1972: 299). Texts as resistant, even dangerous, mental grinders would be an apt metaphor for this conception of the reading experience. Many years later, Iser theorised the ‘text game’ as one which also transmutes ‘its representational worlds’ (Iser 1993: 281). His notions of textual performativity (as engaged in by active readers) embraces the extra-textual, the intra- and inter-textual, as fictions ‘perform’ to solve problems and, in modern times, ‘to extend the human mind’ even as we re/cognise the fact that such texts are transparent illusions in their playful acts of ‘aesthetic semblance’, using ‘phantasmatic figuration’ as a mode of anthropological inquiry (Iser 1993: 97, 293, 296). Iser propounds a Pirandellian idea that texts may assist human selves to ‘stage’ their evolving life plots (especially affectively) in phantasmatic terms, via a reciprocal transactional ‘doubling’ action between texts and lives. This is an intriguing conceptualisation of texts as rehearsal vehicles in the discovery of alternate selves or life-scenarios, and it is what Iser means by a possibilist ‘literary anthropology’ of ‘human self-exegesis’ (Iser 1993: 302) which moves beyond the dull Aristotelian obsession with mimesis and certainly takes the old dated notion of ‘reader response’ to new existential heights, even as it is a consonant outgrowth of that transactional paradigm of the reading act. In its openness to existential novelty Iser proposed that ‘staging is always a simulacrum that does not even pretend to be copying anything pregiven’ because it is clearly oriented towards models of futurity for the experiencing and plastic, indeterminable reader-self that Iser cryptically terms ‘a fractured “holophrase”’(Iser 1993: 302). Iser takes it as a given that human beings are neither fixed monads nor ‘transcendental egos’, so that literary play is, ipso facto, a liberating experiential activity and ‘mechanism’ which ‘allows us to keep changing in the mirror of our possibilities’ (Iser 1993: 302). ‘Playing away’ what we appear to be, Iser argues, opens up ‘the plenum of our possibilities’ that never reaches ‘a final determinacy’ (Iser 1993: 303) of the self. Continual play at ‘otherness’ is liberating and Iser suggests that it may even be ‘the root from which aesthetic pleasure springs’ as

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well as provisioning self-transpositional acts, shifting in and out of ‘ourselves’ (Iser 1993: 303). Such staging ‘allows us – at least in our fantasy – to lead an ecstatic life by stepping out of what we are caught up in, in order to open up for ourselves what we are otherwise barred from’ (Iser 1993: 303). Iser’s is a fascinating and beguiling hypothesis (in Popperian terms) which accounts for literary pleasure and the possibility of shared self-disclosure. Iser is a literary eminence who has kept the faith with reception aesthetics during an era of remarkable upheaval in critical theory, and whose creative insights and hypotheses have reinvigorated and maintained the relevance of an affective stylistics of reader response into the 1990s and beyond so that this episteme is now a critical commonplace that retains some vibrancy, refusing to lie down and be overtaken by newer and more extrinsically focused critical theories.

Envoi As Bleich noted, ‘subjectivity is an epistemological condition of every human being’, and the whole project of reader-response criticism has been broadly predicated on the concept of ‘the subjective authorization of knowledge’ (Bleich 1978: 264, 295) which replaces any pretence of absolute human truth by deploying inter-subjective (or what I call ‘transactional’) negotiation on the path to shared knowledge construction amongst defined communities of interest: It is not possible to ‘have’ an interpretation of a work of literature in isolation from a community. Even though one can read a poem, decide what it means, and then keep it a secret, such an interpretation has the same epistemological status as an unremembered dream. Its lack of negotiative presence renders it functionally nonexistent. . . . The degree to which knowledge is not part of a community is the degree to which it is not knowledge at all. (Bleich 1978: 296) Linguistic re-symbolisation by disciplined and shared textual exchanges about literary works which generates consequential knowledge is the powerhouse of an informed, interconnected reception aesthetics. Even as we concede that reader-oriented critique is no longer avant-garde, one can do no better than summon Bleich for one final burst of lucidity: ‘The distinction . . . between real objects, symbolic objects, and people, suggests that in English, the “real” objects are words and texts; the symbolic objects are language and literature. The subject is people, who speak, read, and write’ (Bleich 1978: 298).

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20 NEW HISTORICISM Bruce Harding

The Lexicon of ‘Historicism’: The Literary Variant

T

he term ‘new historicism’ (NH) can be a site of confusion. It signifies an exercise in the historically grounded (diachronic) imagination, a deviant offshoot of traditional historical criticism and a soft American New Left academic offspring of contextual criticism that ‘covers a broad range of overlapping critical enterprises’ but which is largely beholden to ‘the sons of Karl’ Marx and ‘the sons (and daughters)’ of the transgressive postmodern theorist and historian Michel Foucault (Abrams 1989: 364, 365). It effects a mode of socially resonant, anti-humanist interpretive unmasking called ‘defamilarization’ (after the work of Russian Formalists) that is central to the ‘New History’/ nouvelle histoire notably associated with the Annales school in France. The ‘movement’ also owes an unconscious debt to the ‘sociology of knowledge’ writings of Max Scheler, Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, as well as to Vico and Herder, the noted Romantic era scholars who insisted on the historicity of all knowledge. New Historicists insist that historical traces inhere in the very fabric of texts rather than as stable and distantly external ‘events’, thus contesting the deconstructionists and urging that there is plenty of reality (and a textinforming reality at that) outside the text. Indeed, texts mediate social reality. Ideally, the movement articulates the mutual interpellation of the literary with ‘historic’ events and texts: that art is embedded in a complex cultural-historical matrix and so may produce social knowledge. Edward Said has expressed the core tenet of New Historicism: that there is no privileged, purely objective Archimedean standing-ground in creating and interpreting literature: ‘there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality’ (Said 2002: 299). Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt are unhappy with an Old Marxist view of artworks conceived as mere superstructural epiphenomena of an economic system, and they have defended the ‘hermeneutical aggression’ of their readings (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 9).

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Following Geertzian anthropology, New Historicists tend to view whole distinct cultures as ‘texts’ and pursue a democratising focus which is open to exploring marginalised literary genres. In keeping with this, there is a focus on ‘body history’ and even a tendency to desacralise works deemed products of ‘genius’, being appropriately sceptical of the New Critical view of the literary text as ‘a sacred, self-enclosed, and self-justifying miracle’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 12). Gallagher and Greenblatt (leading practitioners-founders) express the unexceptionable wish ‘to imagine that the writers we love did not spring up from nowhere and that their achievements must draw upon a whole life-world [which] has undoubtedly left other traces of itself’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 12–13). Inspired by the Old Historicist Erich Auerbach in latching on to exemplary text units found within the cultural archive, and seeking Ezra Pound’s ‘method of Luminous Detail’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 15) to explore the real and the messily particular, Gallagher and Greenblatt deploy the ‘new historical anecdote’, or fragment, ‘to produce the effect of a historical real’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 19). They assert that the anecdote disrupts ‘history as usual’ and is ‘irritatingly antithetical to historical discourse’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 50), presumably meaning idealised positivist (objective) ‘history’-making. Gallagher and Greenblatt freely concede that New Historicism ‘is not a repeatable methodology or a literary critical program’ and ‘sincerely hope’ that their readers ‘will not be able to say what it all adds up to’, for ‘if you could, we would have failed’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 19). Louis Montrose has reminded us that there is no monolithic ‘New Historicism’ in the singular, but, rather, a range of ‘New Historicisms’ (Montrose 1992: 392–418), and it is worth attending to the varied work of such impressive practitioners as Joel Fineman, Jonathan Goldberg, Marjorie Levinson, Jerome McGann, Louis Montrose, Louis Mink, Wesley Morris, J. H. Robinson and Brook Thomas. George Steiner has justified critics attending to authorial and societal contexts, where these are available to us, ‘to help elucidate the author’s intentions and field of assumed echo’ yet all the while strenuously avoiding a naïve intentionalism (Steiner 1996: 27, 29). Steiner insisted that textual hermeneutics are cumulative and recursive, so that semantic ‘substantiation grows’ over time, assisting in the construal of lexis in a rational, disciplined and demonstrable frame (Steiner 1996: 27). And the American judge and legal scholar Richard Posner, in rebuking positivist doctrinal legal scholarship for its fundamentalist approach to legal texts of all kinds, has noted that an overdue ‘hermeneutical turn’ among ‘the legal professoriat’ has forced a recognition of ‘the social and in some versions the political construction of reality’, which has exposed ‘the epistemic shallowness of the enterprise’ of orthodox doctrinal scholarship and ‘the naivete of legal interpretation’ as practised by academic legal doctrinalists (Posner 1995: 85, 88). Such transformations have surely

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not been unaffected by the rise of New Historicism (an essentially American movement) as it pioneered the notion of a contextualising reading in which ‘interpretation is as much creation as discovery’ (Posner 1995: 174), which Stanley Fish has latterly demonstrated in his insightful anti-foundationalist, anti-positivistic deconstruction of regimes of a literalising (pre-Saussurian) judicial rhetoric in favour of strongly socio-culturally situated and self-aware readings of texts (see Fish 1989). At its finest, New Historicism is a species of critique which attempts to demystify dominant ideologies and the reification of Marxian ‘false consciousness’, which is why Harold Bloom cynically labelled it as a variant of ‘school of resentment’ criticism (Bloom 1988; cited in Lehman 1991: 27), or neoMarxist victimology, because Foucault led the way and rather schematically and eclectically diagnosed the often insidious mechanisms of social power in post-Enlightenment Western societies and their self-legitimising disciplinary regimes of ‘truth’ (l’ordre du discours) as a means of asserting statist macropower over minorities. Foucault strove to historicise several ideas of truth, knowledge (epistemes, or representational stages), rationality and reason in a more labile mode than orthodox Marxist or phenomenology’s essentialistic frames. Foucault favoured a context-driven conception of knowledge-making and his notion of epistemes (discrete periods of history defined by world-views which morph, or are refurbished, into new epistemes) made him a formidable legatee to the evolution of New Historicist thinking, and its project of arousing the historical imagination, as a frame-breaker; and his frequently random collections of sources struck an echo in the later ‘anecdotal’ praxis of Greenblatt and Gallagher. New Historicist criticism notably dominated Shakespeare studies from the 1980s as it allied textual analysis with historical contextualisation, yet the ‘movement’ has been attacked for an insufficiency of theorising and its self-confessed refusal of systematisation (‘new historicism is not a coherent, close-knit school in which one might be enrolled or from which one might be expelled’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 2)). Of course, a key issue is that one can equally overcontextualise (rigidify into historical matrix) as well as undercontextualise texts, thereby inhibiting and shackling interpretive responses from less frozen modes of apprehension. David Scott Kastan has insisted that a simple realist and unrigorous view of ‘history’ has shackled the NH project, with ‘New Historians’ failing to explore aesthetic and ahistorical (formalistic) questions which, for instance, the work of Shakespeare posed; rather, being yoked to trying to locate truths of the past and spinning faux gold out of thin material. Certainly Greenblatt’s Shakepeare biography, Will in the World (2004), is an instance of subjunctive history, being peppered with suppositious phrases such as ‘may’, ‘could have’, ‘might’ and ‘perhaps’, which become seriously annoying. Kastan (1999) has asserted that NH has failed to explore its own methodological assumptions

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and procedures, but this may seem a small failing for a movement which at least tried to interrogate the idea that both standard history and academic criticism are discursively incapable of delivering fully objective judgement and, as such, are unable to escape being netted within ideological frameworks. However Betteridge assails Greenblatt for, de facto, decrying purely aesthetic criteria and then linking his telling micro-anecdotes to ‘some grand historical narrative, for example the death of feudalism’, and then excavating these ideas via ‘a detailed analysis of a literary text’ that is accomplished with ‘great wit and skill’ yet often also with an unreflective aesthetic simplesse (Betteridge 2005: 3). This amounts to a charge of academic ‘bad faith’ for a mode of analysis which avoids: explicitly justifying itself as a form of literary criticism by making a number of claims about its validity that refer beyond its objects of study. It validates itself by referring to history and in the process becomes a kind of history-lite – history without the burden of producing a truth of the past since in the end the truths it produces are based on the close textual analysis of works of canonical literature. (Betteridge 2005: 3) This is a valid ground of critique, yet Betteridge seems to hark back to a disconcerting and naïve melange of positivistic old historicism and New Criticism in advocating an ethical-aesthetic critical discourse which proposes that ‘works of literature produce truths that can be critiqued on the basis of their truthfulness’ (Betteridge 2005: 3). Peter Uwe Hohendahl has argued that NH: de-emphasises aesthetic differences through thick description of cultural details. Since the art-work is no longer guaranteed a special status (aesthetic theory has been discarded as ideology), it can be rescued from indifference only through linking and weaving. (Hohendahl 1992: 103) Foucault’s historicising and denaturalising practice insisted that knowledge and truth cannot be essential or ahistorical (as viewed within the ‘old historicism’) but, rather, reflect ineradicable power struggles; and while his analyses could be circular and self-predictive, Foucault usefully rejected the essentialising theories of Marxism and phenomenology in conducting crafted historiographical investigations and vignettes, which he likened to genealogy and archaeology as he deconstructed discursive formations to make space for histories of the present (The Archaeology of Knowledge 1969, 1972). The critical point surely is that as human beings are biologically and situationally located, it makes full sense to conduct historicised and ironised evaluations of

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all their cultural products. And this work is vital in an age of gleeful, apolitical deconstruction (the ‘new formalism’) in which texts are viewed ‘both as selfreferential and self-disseminative into an open set of undecidable meanings’ (Abrams 1989: 366). New Historicism applies, with suppleness, the Marxist materialist interpretation of history, which Harold Laski once described as ‘the insistence that the material conditions of life, taken as a whole, primarily determine the changes in human thought. It is not some indwelling idea, Providence, the World-Spirit, or Natural Reason, which secures the changes that occur’, for ‘[t]he colour and connotation of our ideas is always given by, and shaped from, the manner in which men [sic] have to gain the means of life’ (Laski 1927: 58, 59). This materialist focus perhaps explains why M. H. Abrams derisively labelled the school ‘a radically political criticism’ and ‘the New Politicalism’ (Abrams 1989: 364, 365), but we surely cannot follow Abrams in his raw assertion that the ‘New Political Readers’ always set out to aggressively subvert and replace plain meanings, to ‘convert manifest meanings into a mask, or displacement’ to uncover hidden political meanings (Abrams 1989: 366–7). For example, Jerome McGann is surely justified in asserting that literary texts are infused with abstract overarching ideologies which they concretise and that their representations cannot but host periodised (thus straightjacketed) assumptions and values. While this may sound toxic to an orthodox humanist scholar, it merely invites responsive critics to recognise ‘that the critical study of such products must be grounded in a socio-historical analytic’ that invites ‘deconstructive materialist’ critics to conduct analyses in that illusion-making ground of masked ideology (McGann 1983: 11). The alarm bells should ring with the risk of eisogesis if the ‘Newreaders’ do not subject their own methods to strict self-ironisation, and to the extent that some do not, Abrams has made a cogent Popperian point. He concedes that this radicalised stance can yield ‘credible political discoveries about a literary work’ if done in a non-triumphalist spirit of the working hypothesis ‘instead of a ruling hypothesis’, and if the NH canons ‘are applied in a way that permits the author’s text some empirical possibility of countering a proposed political reading so as to adjudge it probable, or forced, or even dead wrong’ (Abrams 1989: 369). Such hermeneutical humility avoids self-confirming and ‘empirically incorrigible’ findings and ‘a critical authoritarianism’ and intolerance ‘that brooks no opposition’. Failure to adhere to that positive norm can become a foolish method which can lock in new forms of ‘false consciousness’ by rejecting falsifiability and never querying the ‘conversion, by this apparatus, into an ideological cover-up, or displacement, or rationalization of political or social reality’, and even reductively risking ‘cancelling the imaginative delights that works of literature, in their diversity, have yielded to readers of all eras’ (Abrams 1989: 370).

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‘Historical’ Historicism Defined The traditional term ‘historicism’ relates to a quasi-Romantic view of historiography as a search for ‘ideal types’ of theory and underlying metaphysical laws of historical evolution (a Geist, or ‘Master Spirit’ of World History), which arose out of scientific positivism, progressivist optimism, German Idealism and Central European cultural concerns after the Enlightenment. Traditional historicism was fixated upon the genetic method as it tracked actualised textual meanings as they conformed to given historical periods. G. W. F. Hegel argued in his treatise The Philosophy of History (1824) that: the truly good – the universal divine reason – is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself. This Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God. God governs the world; the actual working of his government – the carrying out of his plan – is the History of the World. . . . Before the pure light of this divine Idea – which is no mere Ideal – the phantom of a world whose events are an incoherent concourse of fortuitous circumstances, utterly vanishes. (Hegel 1956: 36) As a philosopher noted, Hegelianism is saturated in viewing the world as ‘a development of thought’ (Falckenberg 1895: 489). One can see how, a century on, Hegel’s theological vision was crudely distorted by National Socialist dogma and Hitler’s fervid belief that Providence was shaping Germany’s ends toward a ‘Thousand Year Reich’. A severe critic of this quasi-fascist paradigm (prophecies based on inexorable laws of hypostatised historical ‘destiny’) was Sir Karl Popper, the Viennese philosopher of science, who analysed Nazism and Soviet Communism as outgrowths of a deterministic, increasingly rationalistic and non-empirical belief system, loosely based on Plato’s concepts of essential supra-mundane entities (the Forms) while seeking a wholly secular transcendence. Popper insisted that Hegel, the positivists, the ‘historists’ (Historismus men) and the Marxists were all implicated under a deterministic and teleological ‘historicism’ (Historizismus) that he firmly rejected as totalitarian and anti-human: Hegel and Marx replaced the goddess Nature in its turn by the goddess History. So we get laws of History: powers, forces, tendencies, designs, and plans, of History; and the omnipotence and omniscience of historical determinism. Sinners against God are replaced by ‘criminals who vainly resist the march of History’; and we learn that not God but History (the History of ‘Nations’ or of ‘Classes’) will be our judge. (Popper 1972: 346)

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A far tamer variant of this kind of historicist analysis in Neoplatonist ethical terms arose in literary study and was vaguely associated with the New Criticism of I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis and others from the 1920s onwards (i.e. before the clear rise of Nazism) as these scholars sought some ethical anchoring in a secularising age. The ‘Southern Agrarians’ (Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Yvor Winters, Robert Penn Warren, etc.) promoted a conservative and genteel American variant of British New Criticism. After World War II, progressive scholars eschewed Platonist concepts as rarefied and false, for focusing solely on the intrinsic nature of texts and their self-drives to meaning (‘autotelism’, or an aesthetic teleology), just as fascist regimes focused narrowly on the single nation state and drew meaning from their own myths and displayed an associated and profound ignorance of peoples outside an imagined national community of interest (der Volksstaat). Indeed, even the worst excesses of the American neoconservative movement under President Reagan (1981–8) and the two Presidents Bush (1989–93, 2001–9) reflected the Platonic and quasi-Hegelian historicist teachings of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago (see Fukuyama 1992 and 2006). These ‘neocons’ justified an American imperium and ‘New World Order’ with hegemonistic theories that were unconsciously grounded in a traditional historicist socio-political teleology (the unstoppable march of liberal capitalist ‘democracy’ which ended history as a site of struggle). Critics disenchanted with the Neoplatonic, ahistoricising tendencies of traditional ‘New Critical’ practice began, from the 1970s, to envision more nuanced ways of seeking to access the wider socio-cultural and historically located contexts surrounding the genesis of literary texts, as enriching aids to interpretation. In E. D. Hirsch’s words, those schooled within formalism (the humanistic and aesthetic orientation of literary studies) believed that their mission was ‘to give our students the same humanistic insights that we had received’ (Hirsch 1984: 369), but any more embracing and extrinsically grounded text exploration will necessarily eschew notions of political and cultural neutrality and require a reconstructive imagination – what Giambattista Vico called fantasia (‘man’s unique capacity for imaginative insight and reconstruction’ (Berlin 2000: 131)). This cultural dreaming must be coupled with J. G. Herder’s pregnant concept of Einfuhlen (a sympathetic attempt to ‘feel into’ the records of a past era in an empathic spirit). This is important, because many decades later the New Critics fell over themselves defensively in trying to impress non-humanities academicians that the universities’ newly accredited branch of literary (as against philological) study could successfully ape, at some level, the rigorous quantitative methods of the traditional physical sciences. Hirsch has noted that literary mandarins ‘long operated under the unsupported thesis that literature is an autonomous intellectual subject’ sealed off from other forms and fields of inquiry:

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Autonomous literary study has been predominantly formal and aesthetic, just as composition study has been formal and psychological. Statistics on one side, stylistics on the other: formalism has encouraged the separation of the two fields, and that is yet another of its insidious institutional attractions. (Hirsch 1984: 377)

Moving Towards ‘New Historicist’ Critical Practice In 1920 Bertrand Russell, writing after a visit to Soviet Russia, pertinently described Bolshevism as a revolutionary movement combining ‘the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam’ (Russell 1920: 5). This summary of the latent fascism in Marxist ideology (‘economism’) and prophecy inevitably recalls the post-Hegelian historicism of some German and Continental philosophers and men of culture, among whom the German-American critic Erich Auerbach springs readily to mind. His magisterial essay in comparative literary criticism, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), examined the textual structuring of ‘reality’ within grand narratives in great detail and expansiveness of reach, from Homer to the Modernists. In exploring the disjunction between Hellenic and biblical traditions, Auerbach held to positivist dicta about the production of cultural artefacts (here, literary texts, tropes and traditions) which owed much, in its superstructure, to nineteenth-century historicist Volksgeist premises. That kind of supra-rational intellectualising about trans-historical unity and national identity was understandably suspect after the defeat of militant fascism (Mussolini and Hitler) a year before Mimesis was first published, given its anchoring in the Weltanschauung of German Romantic longing. A suspicion of all higher-order systems made such theorising suspect to post-war progressives also escaping the straightjacketing of confining Marxian doctrine. More importantly, the normative outlook of old-fashioned deterministic historicism (Auguste Comte, Hegel, J. S. Mill, Marx and Spengler) was fatalistic, promoting a social psychology which emphasised passivity – except in the revolutionary Marxist version – over human plasticity. A belief in inexorable laws of social stages (Comte) and historical development (Hegel) was, de facto, a romantic revival of medieval-feudal super-state and universalising tendencies, but bravely and brilliantly rejected in the synoptical morphology of world-history paradigm of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), which stressed that ‘every thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in the common destiny of mortality’ (Spengler 1999: 41). Spengler broadly anticipated the thrust of the later New Historicism when arguing that the notion of history he was idealistically seeking to promote

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is independent of the accident of standpoint – independent too of the personality of the observer himself, who as an interested member of his own Culture is tempted, by its religious, intellectual, political and social tendencies, to order the material of history according to a perspective that is limited as to both space and time. (Spengler 1999: 93) Spengler was strongly resistant to the periodised subdivision of history with ‘its simple rectilinear progression and its meaningless proportions’, as in ‘Ancient’, ‘Mediaeval’ and ‘Modern’, which he rated ‘an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme’ (Spengler 1999: 16) devised by the West European-American scholarly elites. Spengler was bracing in his high overview that humanity ‘has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids’, but, instead, the incredible diversity and richness of cultural forms evolving over millennia: a multiplicity of histories that cannot be captured by any simplifying ‘dryasdust’ schemes (Spengler 1999: 21). The compelling case about the ‘pastness’, or the strange ‘otherness’, of the past had been made by the post-Enlightenment thinkers Vico and Hegel as they emphasised the radical dissimilarity of past and present, and as static conceptions were replaced by a dynamic notion of historiography as a record of change of culture (Kulturgeschichte). This focus on genetic-historical development is vital because, as Berlin incisively noted, ‘[i]t is not the same past upon which nationalists and Marxists, clericals and liberals, appear to be gazing’ and because ‘[i]deas are not born in a vacuum, nor by a process of parthogenesis’ (Berlin 2000: 5, 7). This new stringent form of historicism rejects simple and arrant Volkstamm notions of statist nationalism and also the inanities of a Marxist revival of Sturm und Drang, in favour of non-foundationalism, an anti-determinist spirit, and a frank recognition of the radical contingency of human life. In his two-volume polemic, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper usefully detonated full-blown philosophical historicism (with its arrogant and vacuous prediction claims based on deploying the laws of historical evolution [Historizismus]), as a sclerotic and empirically wayward concept built on fraudulently conceptualised inexorable ‘laws’ of historical development that were merely forms of social fantasy and faux ‘prophecy’. Nazi genocide and Stalinist barbarism were rogue outgrowths of traditional historicism, yet classical Marxism was Popper’s main target for such nonempirical and teleological-religiose thinking, which he even found in the mild Marxism of the sociology of knowledge practised by Karl Mannheim. However, while Popper’s anti-historicist blasts had nothing to do with the ‘New Historicism’ of literary studies, his own dialectical concept of historicisation is cognate with it. A compelling desire to historicise works of literature (and to query canonmaking and approved exegeses which analogised ‘High Literature’ to scriptural forms enshrining absolute universal values) emerged with profound

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force after the collapse of empires, and notably the British retreat from India in 1947 (de-dominionisation). A ‘post-colonial’ politics and apologetics of culture demanded that attention be given to material realities and forces which produced and legitimated colonial regimes. In such contexts of often raw exploitation and injustice, the genteel treatment of literary works as de facto secular scriptures, free-floating and existing tranquilly and autotelically above the messiness and tawdriness of regimes of subjugation and anti-humanistic values, held no credence after the ruinous, war-torn 1940s. Further, the wars of African and Asian liberation (e.g. Algeria, Maoist China and the Vietnam War) and the UN’s principled embrace of a decolonisation agenda (14 December 1962) gave added push to historically laminated assessments of cultural products. Additionally, the accelerating secularisation of Western societies augmented a sense of alienation, disjuncture and retreat from normative and reified theologies and metaphysical systems in favour of various varieties of philosophic materialism. Here Russell’s description of Hegel ‘appealing to historic necessity’ with his view of ‘human beings as puppets in the grip of omnipotent material forces’ (Russell 1920: 5) and spiritual ones (such as a transcendent and overmastering destinarian Geist), draws the battle lines which provoked a New Historicism to arise, de novo, as an interpretive practice for sceptical postmodern times, now purged of the old triumphalist assumptions heretofore associated with traditional and philological historicism in literary study. It was in this precise context – of contesting ‘Master Narratives’ – that Greenblatt’s humanistic strategy of the telling ‘anecdote’ took on such radical pungency in a world increasingly being viewed as a contingent sphere of action and creative production. In Brook Thomas’s words: ‘Just when we used to conclude by tying all the threads of the text together and demonstrating its organic unity, we need to unwind a loose thread to open it to its historical situation. To do so is to alter what it means to read closely’ (Thomas 1987: 515). Here the heuristically pregnant deconstructive concept of the textual impasse (aporia) can be harnessed positively and aformalistically. As David Lehman once wittily observed, it is ‘possible to describe a “New Historicist” as a Marxist who has read Derrida’ (Lehman 1991: 28), surely meaning Foucault; for the whole thrust of the movement was to strenuously subject various texts (creative or explanatory) to historical contextualisation in reaction against the new (now nihilistic) formalism of deconstruction which Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man introduced into American academic literary discourse from 1966. Lehman has carefully analysed the fallout when de Man was exposed in 1987 for appalling acts of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and the likely reasons why de Man privileged a literary theory which excised ‘the very categories that seek to render the past available – politics, history, and biography’ (Lehman 1991: 201; see Goode 1991). The Nazi Holocaust was, after all, not a textual system nor an annoying linguistic predicament for millions who perished in the death

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camps. This is the terrible endgame of a genteel and formalist New Critical fetish for texts as pure art constructs: neutral, self-referential, autotelic (innerdirected) and floating in an ideational (or at least ideological) vacuum. Contra the New Critics, the key rationale of the New Historicism is to interrelate (interpellate) history and literature as an enrichment strategy and hermeneutic. More obviously, New Historicism made an effective fightback response to the educational formalism and fundamentalism of the Reaganite neoconservative backlash led by such figures as Allan Bloom (‘neocon’ disciple of Strauss at the University of Chicago and author of The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, 1987). Bloom asserted that the Foucauldians and their New Historicist successors (‘canonical insurrectionists’) market the cynical view that ‘books are just ideologies, mythologies or political tools of different parties’, and as such cannot impart important ideas to the next generation of elites (Bloom 1988). However, in this mode of practice the New Historicists reject the total free-play of signification and loss of homo significans inherent in deconstructionism and embrace the best legacy of the progressive British, neo-Marxian/Gramscian school of cultural studies (‘culturalism’) that descended, in the 1950s, from E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, as they attended to various manifestations of a subalternised working-class ‘structure of feeling’. Here Foucault’s valid concentration on subjugated knowledges and the dividing practices (binary taxonomies) endemic to colonialism and imperial regimes comes into play. In sharply avoiding any belief in old historicism’s totalising histories, Foucauldians value contesting histories and plural realities. Multiple ‘speaking positions’ about history empower colonised peoples who have suffered the technological onslaught of industrial man and who have been relegated to passivity and objectification (or even commodification, as in slavery). It may be suggested that Edward Said’s critiques of ‘Orientalizing’ the ethnic ‘Other’ and the imperious, imperialist appropriation of ‘culture’ were acts of ‘applied Foucault’, even though Said would have rejected this claim (while conceding that he admired and learned from Foucault). Nonetheless Said’s major works may legitimately claim to have affinities with New Historicist premises, and Orientalism (1978), in its insurgent thrust, is what Perry Meisel has called ‘the father text, if I may be a little ironic, of postcolonialism’ (Meisel 2000: 27), as Said’s book Culture and Imperialism (1993) shows how the Eurocentric imperial project was reified, reflected and finally resisted in cultural products wrestling with the imperial dynamic, with ‘its separating, essentializing, dominating and reactive tendencies’ (Said 1993: 42). Said transcended Foucault’s resigned fatalism about radical resistance and change and the value of counter-discourse, to explore the Eurocentric notion of ‘Westering’, in which Romantic poets viewed ‘the Orient as ceding its historical preeminence and importance to the world spirit moving westward away from

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Asia and toward Europe’, making Orientalism ‘a science of imperialism’ (Said 2002: 203). Said tartly dismissed the New Historicists’ poster boy, Clifford Geertz, for his blindness to sharp colonialist asymmetries of power and for his ‘standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory clichés about hermeneutic circles’ when discoursing about ethnographers and their constituted objects of study (Said 2002: 203). Indeed, Said articulated his conviction that the Orientalist project had as its epistemological foundation old historicism (Vico, Hegel, Marx, von Ranke, Dilthey et al.) as a homogenising and essentialising discourse of power and Western normality: where ‘historicism meant that the one human history uniting humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of Europe or the West’ (Said 2002: 209) as invariantly normative, self-validating and a ‘universalizing historicism’ (Said 2002: 211). For Said was an unconscious disciple of Spengler in his insistence on acknowledging and exploring intertwined histories of ‘imperial intercourse’ (Said 1993: xvii) and exploring historiographies that are ‘contrapuntal and often nomadic’, in preference to the linear and subsuming ‘Master Narratives’ of colonising powers (Said 1993: xxix). In Said’s crisp phrase, ‘all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic’ (Said 1993: xxix). Said noted the reactionary and racist ‘old historicist’ underpinnings of this dominative urge (‘will to overseas dominion’ (Said 1993: 225)) and paid warm tribute to the pioneering work of Raymond Williams but pushed for a wider recognition of the imbrication of textuality and its ‘structures of feeling’ inside insidious structures of power: that ‘literature itself makes constant references to itself as somehow participating in Europe’s overseas expansion and imperium, and therefore creates what Williams calls “structures of feeling” that support, elaborate, and consolidate the practice of empire’ (Said 1993: 14). Consequently, the task of an informed criticism (such as New Historicism) is to explore the dynamic and complex interactions and linkages between culture and the practices of imperialism. Said noted the fact of the overarching mega-asymmetries of power between metropolitan and ex-colonised spaces, and for this reason promoted a comparative literary method in which different experiences may be viewed and appraised contrapuntally as a set of intertwined and overlapping histories, as a sane ‘alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility’ (Said 1993: 19). It must, however, be stated that a notable flaw even in New Historicism, as practised to date, is that, contra Spengler, it has been an embarrassingly Eurocentric and Europhilic enterprise in which none of its key exponents have engaged with indigenous epistemologies (see, for instance, Barker 2005, Pihama 2010 and Mercier et al. 2012). This damning lacuna is, however, not a feature of the methodology per se but only of its culturally blinkered practitioners and flagship purveyors. Said parted company with Foucault on such issues, noting that the new focus

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on dissecting local issues and games of ‘the local micro-power that surround the individual’ (Said 1993: 29) vitiate any emancipatory study of larger realities that is enriched by the counterpoint of countervailing macro-values and forces. In citing critics including Raymond Williams, Eric Hobsbawm and the Subaltern Studies group (attached to Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha), Said approved the contestation of monistic views and monocausal theories in favour of a bracing recognition of complexity, ‘a plurality of terrains, multiple experiences, and different constituencies’ (Said 1993: 214). From this more decentred and decentering stance, Said posited his ‘contrapuntal’ reading programme (Culture and Imperialism), which took account of imperialism and resistance thereto and matched New Historicism with a greater political grip as it interacted with the ‘new planes of activity and praxis, rather than one topography [Master Discourse] commanded by a geographical and historical vision locatable in a known center of metropolitan power’ (Said 1993: 214). Said’s work challenged early exercises in the New Historicism in this advocacy of multiple, non-metropolitan sources of consciousness and also in his building on Franz F. Fanon’s idea of forcing the European-Western metropolis ‘to think its history together with the history of colonies awakening from the cruel stupor and abused immobility of imperial domination’ (Said 2002: 314): the contrapuntal method of confluent readings. While it is true that Said offered more of a methodology than express theory (beyond inchoate refractions of Foucault), certainly Said’s method of analysing the structure of attitude and reference encoded in literature decries any concept of a privileged ‘Archimedean perspective’ and follows the logic of dialectical juxtaposition, acknowledging ‘the massively knotted and complex histories of special but nevertheless overlapping and interconnected experiences – of women, of Westerners, of Blacks, of national states and cultures’ and yet denying ‘each and all of them an ideal and essentially separate status’ (Said 1993: 37, 36). The dominative superiority underlying the polemics of Francis Fukuyama or Bernard Lewis holds no place in this dynamic and contestatory approach to intercultural histories of encounter which Said applauds for attacking ‘a highly inflated sense of Western exclusivity in cultural accomplishment’ coupled usually to ‘a tremendously limited, almost hysterically antagonistic view of the rest of the world’ (Said 1993: 43). However, Said equally rejected its indigenised opposite, which he dubbed activist and reductive ‘nativism’, an ‘especially besetting hobble of most post-colonial work’ (Said 1993: 49). What is strenuously desired is moving ‘beyond insularity and provincialism . . . to see several cultures and literatures together, contrapuntally’, with various themes playing off one another and ‘only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one’ (Said 1993: 49, 59). Said’s concept of local, ‘self-convicted’ and ‘anti-dominant critiques’ (Said 1993: 215) gives precise expression to the new vistas that a politicised postcolonialism has launched. His summation of the

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premises involved brilliantly articulates what can drive the highest aspirations of New Historical endeavour: A need for greater crossing of boundaries, for greater intervention in cross-disciplinary activity, a concentrated awareness of the situation – political, methodological, social, historical – in which intellectual and cultural work is carried out. A clarified political and methodological commitment to the dismantling of systems of domination which since they are collectively maintained must, to adopt and transform some of Gramsci’s phrases, be collectively fought, by mutual siege, war of maneuver, and war of position. (Said 1993: 215) Influenced partly by Foucault, Said acidly rejected the neo-New Critical formalism of Derrida and the ‘boa-deconstructors’ for its total impotence in unmasking political and imperial excesses upon subalternised peoples: ‘it is but one among many ironies of modern critical theory that it has rarely been explored by investigators of the aporias and impossibilities of reading’. Indeed, Said went so far as to indict the ‘hip’ new theories: All the energies poured into critical theory, into novel and demystifying theoretical praxes like the new historicism and deconstructionism and Marxism have avoided the major, I would say determining, political horizon of modern Western culture, namely imperialism. (Said 1993: 70) An unexpected proponent of such nuanced reading is Barack Obama, whose highly reflective 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, contains a kind of informal New Historicist analysis of the legacy of British colonialism in Kenya which certainly seems to bear the imprint of Critical Legal Studies teaching that he would likely have encountered at Harvard Law School (where he was the first African-American President of the Harvard Law Review). Obama’s account in Part Three (Chapters 15–19) of his first visit to his paternal homeland, Kenya, is a clear-sighted indictment of the overarching disempowerment and mental enslavement that British imperialism bequeathed to that empire’s black charges, as personified in his own father’s tragic struggle as a ‘nowhere man’ caught between a tribal upbringing, Western education and a tragic return to his newly decolonising (and disintegrating) country. The whole memoir delivers a searing exploration of what Obama called ‘the desperation and disorder of the powerless’ (Obama 2008: x), but the Obama analysis really kicks in in Chapter 19 when, in deploying a Greenblatt-style anecdote, he learns the story of his proud and defiant paternal grandfather, Onyango of Olego, and is taken to talk to his grandmother, who explains the sad story of Barack Senior to his questing and confused son (Obama 2008: 394–429). That account is augmented by a rich coda from Obama’s conversation with a Kenyan historian

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of Luo extraction, Dr Rukia Odero (Obama 2008: 432–5), which provides the wise and calm overarching conceptual framework and critique of colonialism and its multiple offerings (globalism) and betrayals (deracination and loss of indigenous cultural capital). Obama concedes that Dr Odero helped to bring ‘into focus my own memories, my own lingering questions’ (Obama 2008: 436) so that afterward at Harvard (1988–91), the future forty-fourth President brooded with acute discomfiture about customary legal practice: applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power – and that all too often serves to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. (Obama 2008: 437) This is a New Historicist insight. Arguably too much New Historicist critical work has had that same privileged and sheltered (even precious), European haute bourgeois inflection (‘Chardonnay socialism’). However, legal scholarship is a ripe arena for New Historical excavation: Richard Posner has used a broad New Historicist approach in legal analysis, as in his richly described evaluation of the Clinton political crisis (‘Lewinskygate’) and Critical Legal Studies scholars have excavated legal doctrines and fictions in a similar spirit. As a matter of intellectual lineage, New Historicism is loosely derived from R. G. Moulton’s 1888 appeal for an inductive, extrinsically sensitive and investigatory literary-critical praxis, in preference to a priori criticism founded on fixed canons of taste and lofty discrimination and notions of literary texts as organic, autonomous wholes sufficient unto themselves as verbal icons. It chimed in well with James Harvey Robinson’s democratic and expansively focused New History (1912) and away from the premises of Absolute Idealism and totalised world systems which Berlin pungently defined as ‘universal and immutable Platonic forms in a super-sensible, timeless, crystalline heaven’ (Berlin 2000: 16). As such, the New Historicism constitutes an untheorised practice of a ‘historical hermeneutics’ (Berlin 2000: 8). Brook Thomas summarised the appeal of New Historicism to instructors of ahistorical American students suffering from cultural amnesia: ‘Alienated from history, our students are confined to a series of fragmented, directionless presents’ (Thomas 1987: 510). But New Historicist practice is not using history as an add-on; rather, it encourages ‘grounded’, historically aware teaching and research on literature after decades of New Critical formalism which smugly welcomed and celebrated the disjunct, believing that ‘literature transcends the confines of history’ as a timeless space of order, because to them ‘the humanizing experience comes in the reading of individual works, not in relating one work to something outside of itself’ (Thomas 1987: 512). New Historical practice builds bridges between text and context and is open to

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multi- or interdisciplinarity and to considering the interplay of ‘extrinsic’ factors such as social, economic and intellectual history. Even Northrop Frye once argued that criticism must ‘always have two aspects’: the text and its informing context/environment: Together, they balance each other; when one is worked on to the exclusion of the other, the critical perspective goes out of focus. If criticism is in proper balance, the ‘centrifugal’ tendency of critics to move from critical to larger social issues becomes more intelligible. (Frye 1973: 57) When noting the formalist trap of separating literature from its groundedness in historicity to determine a transcendent sense of litteraturnost, Thomas made the critical point that this ‘did not provide more solid ground for judgment but led to the deconstruction of all ground for judgment’, for if students ‘have no historical position from which to judge, [they] cannot start a dialogue with a text that allows their position in turn to be judged and altered’ (Thomas 1987: 521).

Enter Professor Greenblatt et al. The literary historians Gallagher and Greenblatt have produced a working manifesto of their new discursive field in Practicing New Historicism (2000) and, in particular, using seemingly random case studies to support their challenge to mainstream, positivist historical discourse via the antithetical use of telling (epiphanic) anecdotes, which they designate as ‘outlandish and irregular’ and even ‘eccentric’ attempts to defamiliarise, and to destabilise and betray ‘the incompleteness and formality of historical narrative’ and to preserve ‘the radical strangeness of the past’. Greenblatt and Gallagher seek out minor events and marginal texts to destabilise grand narratives: chapters on anecdotes, on Eucharistic doctrine in the quattrocentro and on nineteenth-century materialist philosophy – or, in their witty words, ‘two chapters on anecdotes, and four on bread, potatoes, and the dead’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 1). To be fair, they have characterised NH as ‘only a few words gesturing toward a new interpretive practice’ (Greenblatt and Gallagher 2000: 1) grounded in a respect for the singular and particular rather than being derived from grand, overarching and abstract (trans-historical) dicta (grands recits). New Historicist practitioners share J. H. Plumb’s concern that by writing history we destroy the past as a living reality, distancing it, submitting it to a form of vivisection and causing a ‘death of the past’ (Plumb 2004). The chosen micro-narratives are intended to provide a window to larger and dominant macro and metanarratives in a movement inspired by Geertz’s anthropological field studies (his famous ‘thick description’) of life in Indonesia. These critics assert that ‘[t]he desired anecdotes would not, as in the

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old historicism, epitomize epochal truths, but would instead undermine them’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 51), but this is a style of literary analysis, at best a pseudo-method, which refuses to ossify into a closely defined reading practice, save its dissent from American New Criticism and deconstruction and in its affinity to British cultural materialism in the leftist way in which it reintroduces the category of the historic into literary study. Yet there is surely something of an absurd presumed homology, but actual disconnect, between studying the kinds of observed contemporary rituals of everyday life in an Asian or Pacific culture (à la Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Geertz) and the more diachronic and archival literary-historical investigations into past and exclusively textualised mentalities (for example, Elizabethan English social-cultural life as textualised). Andrew Bennett has broadly alighted on this adoption of Louis Montrose’s flip description of ‘the historicity of texts and the textuality of history’ (Montrose 1998: 781). The cultural poetics here do not constitute a proper sociology of literature and culture (Laurenson and Swingewood 1972), and Bennett has traced in New Historicist practice a lingering nostalgia for the bourgeois cogito even as it tries to demarcate ‘the subjectivities of autonomous individuals and the subjectivities of social beings’ (Bennett 2005: 90). Gallagher and Greenblatt seem to wish to emphasise the constructedness of both literary and historical/historicising narratives, arguing that their idiosyncratic praxis ‘betrays the incompleteness and formality of historical narrative’ and that their resonantly weird anecdotes would spring to view ‘the radical strangeness of the past by gathering heterogeneous elements – seemingly ephemeral details, overlooked anomalies, suppressed anachronisms – into an ensemble where ground and figure, “history” and “text” continually shifted’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 51). Thus these anecdotes ‘would not, as in the old historicism, epitomize epochal truths, but would instead undermine them’, placing ‘history’ askew ‘so that literary texts could find new points of insertion’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 51). A penetrating criticism of this method is that it seems post-theoretical and time-bound to archaic forms of diachrony, and that such an operational philosophy falters when handling much more recent historical material which is not so distant in time yet which also needs strenuous ideological interrogation. Further, Andrew Bennett rightly draws attention to the valorisation, if not quite ‘bardolatry’, involved in Greenblatt’s focus on the textual exceptionalism surrounding Shakespeare in a manner at times worthy of Bloom’s overstretched rhetorical claims for the Bard of Avon as ‘the inventor of the human’ (1998). In his essay ‘Resonance and Wonder’, Greenblatt celebrates Shakespeare as a signal example of individualised agency which also happens to signify the multitude, in which ‘the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social energy’ (Greenblatt 1990: 164). Such an author may well be a textual effect ‘submerged within or embraced by the circulation of social and political energies and the discourses and structures of

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power’ (Bennett 2005: 93); but New Historical praxis nonetheless yearns, subtextually, to trace the ‘figures of the carpet’ of the bio-historical author as textualised Other in a manner recalling the attractions of Pouletian reader-response methodology, while doing so from a stance which Diana Laurenson (in a different context) dubbed as ‘romantic-Marxist-flavoured crusadism’ (Laurenson and Swingewood 1972: 157). New Historicism is, finally, a melange or ensemble of discrete, neo-Foucaldian insights blended with the shards of New Left thinking and its liberationist hopes.

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21 CULTURAL MATERIALISM Neema Parvini

C

‘

ultural materialism’ is a term which sometimes causes confusion, partly because commentators have often (and erroneously) elided it with New Historicism, and partly because there is an inadequate understanding of its theoretical genesis. We can see this in many accounts, for example when Edward Pechter sneeringly describes it as Jonathan Dollimore’s and Alan Sinfield’s ‘phrase for the new historicism’ (Pechter 1987: 299) or when Jeremy Hawthorn calls it the ‘British name’ for new historicism (Hawthorn 1996: 4). Witness also Robert Young’s rather flippant claim that cultural materialism ‘really only amounts to a way of describing British ex-Marxists’ (Young 1990: 88). While it is true that New Historicists and cultural materialists were engaged with each other, often within a single volume of collected essays, there are crucial ‘differences of tradition and emphasis’ (Colebrook 1997: 139). In Britain, there had always been less of an aversion to politics and history. Leavisites, as I will explain, did not object to matters external to the text and were essentially moralists. Liberal humanist studies from the 1960s and 1970s often demonstrate great learning and scholarship in their historical awareness. And, of course, there had been a stronger tradition of critical thought from the radical left, especially the New Left Review circle (which included Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson), than in the USA. Accordingly, cultural materialism takes on a much more confrontational tone and radical character than New Historicism. Broadly speaking, New Historicism concerns itself with better understanding the past for the sake of academic interest; cultural materialism concerns itself with better understanding the political present as mediated through the past for the sake of changing that present. In this chapter, I will flesh out theoretical genesis of cultural materialism, chiefly in the work of Raymond Williams, in order to outline its central tenets. I will then turn look over some exemplars of its practice before briefly considering its future.

Liberal Humanism and F. R. Leavis Clive James begins his magnum opus, Cultural Amnesia, as follows:

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In this book can be heard the merest outside edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room. Or perhaps they are on a terrace, under the stars. They are wearing name tags in case they don’t recognize each other. Some of them recognize each other all too well, but they avoid eye contact. Thomas Mann, with the family poodle sniffing petulantly at his knee, would rather not talk to Brecht, and Sartre is keen to avoid Solzhenitsyn. (James 2007: xxv) It is a supreme statement of the liberal humanism that James wears proudly on his sleeve in the book that follows. Liberal humanism imagined that, because human nature is fundamentally unchanging, all of the great men and women in history were engaged in such an ‘enormous conversation’. The vicissitudes of history can come and go like so many catwalk fashions, but the great minds of the past – united by their common humanity, and by the great enduring themes of love, war, hope and struggle – can engage each other across the artificial boundaries of nationality and time. It was a nice idea. In many ways, it still is. But since the advent of cultural materialism in the early 1980s, one would be hard pressed to find an academic literary critic writing as James does. Clive James studied English literature at Cambridge in the 1960s. His liberal humanist outlook is undoubtedly the product of his higher education. Although cultural materialism would go on to be most closely associated with the University of Sussex, it is at Cambridge where its story begins in earnest. There are two reasons for this: first, it was where Raymond Williams, the literary critic and cultural theorist who first coined the phrase ‘cultural materialism’, was based for most of his career; and second, it was the site of one of the most public and notorious academic disputes to take place in England during the late twentieth century, the so-called ‘MacCabe affair’ of 1980–1. I will not dwell too long on the latter; it is an episode more important for its symbolic value than for what actually took place. In short, Colin MacCabe, a young lecturer much influenced by French Theory, especially that of Louis Althusser, was denied a permanent post at Cambridge. His supporters – Raymond Williams and Frank Kermode among them – argued that an injustice had been done and that he had been denied the job for political reasons owing to the faculty’s distrust of Theory. His detractors, most notably Christopher Ricks, who at first resigned his post in protest at the proposed appointment (only and perhaps farcically to be persuaded to come back), argued that MacCabe’s publications and teaching practices fell below the standards required at Cambridge. This story captured the imagination of the British press and MacCabe became a poster boy for the newfangled, radical, theory-driven approach to literature at odds with a dusty and fundamentally conservative status quo. While that story made for tantalising column inches for the chattering classes, they are not too far from the truth. Ricks’s comments in The Guardian around

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this time are revealing: ‘Obviously no one objects to the presence of structuralists and theorists of film and linguistics in the English Faculty. But there is a question of proportion. It is our job to teach and uphold the canon of English Literature’ (Ricks 1981). These sentiments read in hindsight, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, seem impossibly old-fashioned. MacCabe was turned down for the post, but while the battle was lost, it is safe to say that the war was won. The MacCabe affair marks a turning point in the history of the discipline after which, much to Ricks’s chagrin, structuralist and Marxist Theory could no longer be ignored. It signalled the first warning shot to the liberal humanist old guard that their days of representing the dominant and orthodox approach to literature were numbered. However, before moving on to developments after 1981, we must first consider what had been at stake, still at Cambridge, before then. Raymond Williams is undoubtedly the most important figure in the development of cultural materialist theory and in order to understand his project, we must first develop an understanding of the pervading set of attitudes against which he was writing. During the 1960s, when Clive James would have been studying there, F. R. Leavis was the most influential literary critic at Cambridge – and arguably anywhere in the world, certainly in the United Kingdom. Like the New Critics who dominated literature departments in North America from the 1950s to the 1970s, Leavis’s approach to literature was primarily formalist: he was concerned above all else with textual specificity. However, he differed from New Critics in three crucial respects: first, he did not, as they did, seek to isolate texts from their historical moments, for him there was no distinction between art and life; second, he did not feel the need to assert the fundamental unity of literary texts; and third – unlike, for example, Cleanth Brooks for whom ‘the purpose of literature was not to point a moral’ (Brooks 1951: 72) – Leavis believed the greatest writers showed an intense moral interest in the world and that, therefore, engagement with the very best works of English literature was ‘good’ for you. Leavis was resolutely anti-theory, because he believed that theories when applied to literature take away from their ‘concrete’ specificity, which is morally compromising. In Leavis’s rejection of Marxist approaches to literature he accuses them of seizing on “‘structural symbols” . . . and overstress[ing] their function, paying little attention to the essential organization’, which belies ‘their shamelessly uncritical use of vague abstractions and verbal counters’ (Leavis 1932: 211– 12). For Leavis, theory, Marxist or otherwise, almost always leads to generality and vagueness. And these are bad things because, above all else, he values ‘concreteness’ in literature. Christopher Ricks and other liberal humanists, who continued to decry the influence of Theory well into the 2000s, echoed many of these sentiments again and again. For Leavis, this ‘concrete’ specificity was the quality which distinguished literature from other forms of writing:

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‘The reading demanded by poetry is of a different kind from that demanded by philosophy. . . . Philosophy, we say, is “abstract”, and poetry “concrete”. . . . My whole effort was to work in terms of concrete judgement and particular analyses’ (Leavis 1952: 212, 215). Like his criticism in general, this insistence on the particular had a moral foundation. He objected to ‘misconceived attempts to transpose . . . models’ derived from the sciences ‘into the domain of culture’ as being ‘among the greatest threats posed . . . to human integrity’ (Mulhern 1979: 170). For Leavis, therefore, to take theories that posit general principles, derived empirically or otherwise, and then parachute them onto a literary text is to obfuscate their intrinsic humanity. A ‘great’ writer such as Henry James gives us trenchant moral insights into the human condition, so to subordinate his texts to a particular theory is to flatten what is essentially valuable in them as if by steamroller. It is in the context of reacting to Leavis’s ideas that we might best understand the Raymond Williams corpus. However, it would be a mistake to suggest that Williams rejected Leavis entirely. If one turns to his earlier work, such as Culture and Society, and considers, for example, his critique of Christopher Caudwell, an early twentieth-century British Marxist literary critic, one detects echoes of Leavis’s own repudiation of Marxist approaches to literature quoted above. For Leavis, Caudwell ‘has little to say, of actual literature, that is even interesting. . . . [F]or the most part his discussion [of literature] is not even specific enough to be wrong’. Williams accuses Caudwell’s ‘interpretative method’ of leading to ‘abstraction and unreality’ and surrendering ‘reality to a formula’ (Williams 1958: 277, 281–2). And this, I think, is important to remember: that no matter how much he disagreed with Leavis, Williams never lost this commitment to specificity and what he would come to call ‘experience’. In fact, one might argue that his whole endeavour was to develop a theory of culture that would avoid falling into the Marxist trap of meaningless generality and abstraction.

Raymond Williams vs Louis Althusser: On Base and Superstructure Raymond Williams most succinctly summarised his ideas in Marxism and Literature (1977), in which he seeks to develop a satisfactory account of ‘culture’, ‘the general process of the production of meaning and ideas’ (Williams 1977: 55). Williams is plainly taking on Leavis when he writes: It is common to see ‘literature’ defined as ‘full, central immediate human experience’, usually with an associated reference to ‘minute particulars’. By contrast, ‘society’ is often seen as essentially general and abstract: the summaries and averages, rather than the direct substance, of human living. . . . Arguments from theory or from history are simply evidence of

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the incurable abstraction and generality of those who are putting them forward. They can be contemptuously rejected, often without specific reply, which would only be to fall to their level. (Williams 1977: 45) For Williams, this aloof rejection of theory and history will not do, not least because it is blind to the facts of the world in which we live. However, Williams does not, as many did in the late 1970s, turn to Louis Althusser and other structural Marxists as providing a more accurate portrait. Indeed, much of Marxism and Literature is concerned with ironing out problems that he sees in Althusser and his followers. This is worth bearing in mind when we come to consider cultural materialist practice that appears to combine Williams and Althusser later; it is a nuance that is often missed in accounts of the development of cultural materialism. Williams was not blind to developments in the 1970s and mentions both Ferdinand de Saussure and Althusser by name. He notes ‘the attempted synthesis of Marxism and structural linguistics’. For him structural Marxism ‘repeats . . . the assertion of a controlling “social” system which is a priori inaccessible to “individual” acts of will and intelligence’ (Williams 1977: 28). The problem is that Althusser’s theory of ideology strips individuals of consciousness, making them passive receptors of the official state ideology apparently lacking any free will of their own. According to Williams, the heart of the problem lies in the Marxist commitment to the notion of (economic) base and (ideological) superstructure, which still subsists, albeit latently, in Althusser. Much of his project concerns rooting out base and superstructure from Marxist theory. Despite this, there are times when Williams and Althusser are strikingly similar, especially in their views on art and literature in which ‘the grip of ideology is or can be loosened’ (Williams 1984: 208) so they can “‘make us see”, “make us perceive”, “make us feel” something which alludes to reality!’ (Althusser 2001: 152). Williams speaks of the materiality of the social and political order: ‘From castles and palaces and churches to prisons and workhouses and schools; from weapons of war to a controlled press’ (Williams 1984: 93); describes the Ideological State Apparatuses as ‘Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers, cultural ventures, etc., etc.’ (Althusser 2001: 87). In both Williams and Althusser, ‘the general process of the production of meaning and ideas’ has what Althusser would call ‘a material existence’. On the face of it, both theorists appear to be making the same move: collapsing the binary between base and superstructure; what was once assumed to be ‘superstructural’ (i.e. ideology, social and political struggles, the private realm of thoughts and ideas) is in fact part of the economic, material base. However, as I have hoped to have shown elsewhere (see Parvini 2012b: 83–6), Althusser never truly breaks with base and superstructure in two important respects: first, by maintaining that, as per Marx, the base ultimately determines everything, in his famously enigmatic phrase, ‘in the last instance’

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(Althusser 1977: 111). Let us pause here for a moment: ‘in the last instance’, what on earth is Althusser talking about? I have not come across a better explanation than the one provided by one of Williams’s foremost students, Terry Eagleton, here: The ‘base’ is that outer horizon or final obstacle against which a transformative politics continually presses up . . . whatever other achievements or concessions may occur . . . ‘nothing has really changed’. The ‘base’ on this model, is not so much an answer to the question ‘What in the end causes everything?’ as an answer to the question ‘What in the end do you want?’ (Eagleton 1989: 175) In other words, when all is said and done, it goes back to the most fundamental Marxist questions of all: who owns the means of production? Who controls the capital? Who owns the land? Who has all the guns? You can have as many mental ‘ideological’ revolutions as you want, if you don’t control those things, you are not overthrowing anything! The second important respect in which Althusser does not break with base and superstructure is by the fact that he continues to speak of ideology as the representation of something that is imagined and therefore ultimately illusory. This second point rests almost entirely on Althusser’s distinction between true ‘scientific knowledge’ – derived mainly from theoretical rigour – which pertains to the real conditions and false ‘ideological knowledge’ which pertains only to the illusory world of imagined ideological relations (see Althusser 1977: 233). It is exactly these two Althusserian insistences on maintaining the distinction between base and superstructure from which Williams takes his departure: [T]he language of ‘reflexes’, ‘echoes’, ‘phantoms’, and ‘sublimates’ is simplistic, and has in repetition been disastrous. It belongs to the naive dualism of ‘mechanical materialism’, in which the idealist separation of ‘ideas’ and ‘material reality’ has been repeated, but with its priorities reversed. The emphasis on consciousness as inseparable from conscious existence, and then on conscious existence as inseparable from material social process, is in effect lost in the use of this deliberately degrading vocabulary. (Williams 1977: 59) In essence, Althusser does not go far enough for Williams. By continuing to talk of ideology as some great deception or ‘duping’ of the masses, Althusser recreates the idealist dualism that, ironically, he had sought to root out of Marx in the first place. And this, I think, is a crucial difference between Williams and Althusser that is not always grasped or remarked upon: for Williams, ideology, or rather ‘culture’ as he prefers, is not just an insidious all-pervasive force tricking people into serving the state, but what he calls the whole ‘way of life’

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(Williams 1961: 47). In this respect, Williams’s view of culture can be seen as deriving from an older British tradition that includes T. S. Eliot who famously remarked that culture includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelve of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensley-dale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list. (Eliot 1948: 27–8) No doubt Althusser would see the dark underside of all of these activities and interests: mere ideological distractions further to hoodwink individuals into thinking that they are autonomous and free agents, when in fact they are simply serving the interests of the state by not rebelling in arms or otherwise causing a fuss. For Williams, it appears that this take is not only too pessimistic but also simply not accurate: [Society] is always . . . a constitutive process with very powerful pressures which are both expressed in political economic and cultural formations and, to take the full weight of ‘constitutive’, are internalised and become ‘individual wills’. Determination of this whole kind – a complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures – is in the whole social process itself and nowhere else; not in an abstracted ‘mode of production’ or in an abstracted psychology. Any abstraction of determinism, based on the isolation of autonomous categories, which are seen as controlling or which can be used for prediction, is then a mystification of the specific and always related determinants which are the real social process – an active and conscious as well as, by default, a passive and objectified historical existence. (Williams 1977: 87–8) This is Williams at his most dense and difficult. He articulates this again in a later book, Problems in Materialism and Culture: The short-cut solution, in one powerful variant of Marxism, has been to unify these theories within a theory of Ideology; but the only thing right about this is the realization that the theoretically separated ‘areas’ have to be brought within a single discourse. The main error of this solution is that it substitutes Ideology (a general, coherent and monopolizing practical consciousness, with its operative functions in institutions, codes and texts), for the complex social relations within which a significant (including alternative and oppositional) range of activities, in a significant (including dominating and subordinated but also contesting)

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range of situations, were being at once expressed, produced and altered, in practice in contradictory as well as in coherent, directive ways. (Williams 1980: 245) In both of these quotations, he is saying, in short, that it is a mistake – as Althusser and others do – always to privilege the state or one set of ideas as being constitutive of the whole of a given society, or to assume that ideology is so powerful that it succeeds in giving the whole any fundamental coherence. Culture does not just have one set of ideological forces bearing down on it from above, but is in fact an entire mess of competing forces in a ‘real social process’. And all of them have some agency because, unlike Althusser, Williams does not make any distinction between the (true) material world and the (false) imagined, ideological one. For Williams, culture is always real, irreducibly complex, messy, contradictory and subject to change. Eagleton questions whether, in doing away with the distinction between base and superstructure, Williams actually loses something that is useful for Marxists (see Eagleton 1989: 168–9). Eagleton sees in the base/superstructure distinction the prospect for real political change: presumably because, using Althusser’s terms, once the proletariat realise that they are being coerced by ideology, they can throw off their shackles and overthrow their bourgeois capitalist masters. For Eagleton, despite his talk of the ‘real social process’, Williams ironically loses this real-world radical impact because his contention is chiefly ‘philosophical’. I am not sure that I fully agree with Eagleton’s assessment. It seems to me that this is where it becomes clear that Williams – unlike many of his Marxist counterparts – is not a revolutionary thinker, but rather one whose work is best seen within the British tradition of gradual socialist reform.

Raymond Williams: Dominant, Residual and Emergent Cultures The model Williams puts forward, unlike Althusser’s, is not one of epistemic breaks or seismic shifts, but of gradual change. He borrows from Antonio Gramsci the notion of ‘hegemony’ and perpetual struggle. For Gramsci: Germinated ideologies become ‘party’, come into confrontation and conflict, until only one of them tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself throughout society – bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a ‘universal’ plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups. (Gramsci 1973: 181–2)

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It is important to remember that in Gramsci’s theoretical system these ‘subordinate groups’ are not powerless, and in a sense keep the hegemonic group in check. As Gramsci goes on to say: ‘The general interests of the subordinate groups’ hold the dominant group in perpetual states of ‘equilibria’; hegemony prevails but ‘only up to a certain point’ (Gramsci 1973: 182). From this, Williams develops his famous notion of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ cultures (see Williams 1977: 123–4). At any given moment, within a given culture, there may be many different cultures. These cultures may be complicit with hegemony (‘dominant’), part of an older, outmoded order but still affecting events in the present (‘residual’), or working towards establishing a new dominant group (‘emergent’). Williams provides some examples: bourgeois culture is ‘dominant’ because it has hegemony; socialist culture is ‘emergent’, because it is still being created and perhaps may one day become dominant; and feudal culture is ‘residual’ because it is the remnant of a bygone era, essentially an anachronism, but crucially it is still ‘active in the cultural process . . . as an effective element of the present’ (Williams 1977: 124). While Williams is much admired for outlining these three categories for culture, I would like to return to Eagleton’s contention that he is sometimes overly philosophical and ponder for a moment if this might have any practical real-world application. The groupings in the examples that Williams provides are very wide and general. What constitutes ‘bourgeois’ culture, or ‘socialist’ culture, or ‘feudal’ culture? This does seem to be dealing with society at a very abstract level. This is the 10,000-feet view. So does the theory still work if we come down to earth and start trying to deal with the more mundane, everyday ‘whole way of life’ elements of culture that T. S. Eliot might have listed? I would like to try by listing some things I can see in my office here: an empty can of Pepsi Max; a giant ‘Winnie the Pooh’; a place mat with a picture of Batman on it, on this is a mug with the phrase ‘Go Away, I’m thinking’ written on it; another place mat made out of slate in the shape of a heart; posters bearing images of Batman, Superman and various other characters from DC comics; an iPod; board games of all sorts; a copy of Walter Whiter’s A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare (1794); a copy of The RZA’s The Wu-Tang Manual (2005); a set of car keys; Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1947) directed by David Lean and starring Rex Harrison on DVD . . . I might have gone on, but that will do. Is it possible to sort all of these items into ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’? Is it even possible to say ‘to which culture’ each of these items belongs? Immediately we run into all sorts of complications. For example, how do we deal with items such as the Wu-Tang Clan book that are clearly from another country and culture? How do we categorise such ‘foreign’ items as these? Winnie the Pooh originates from A. A. Milne stories written in the 1920s, but this giant teddy staring at me is the product of The Walt Disney Company who first acquired the rights

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to the character in the 1960s. The Walt Disney Company still produce Pooh merchandise – such as this giant teddy bear – and they still produce television shows and films based on the character. Pooh is a figure from the past who seems, at least for my lifetime, to have existed in the perpetual present. Pooh is at once the product of a British playwright from the 1920s; an American entertainment magnate from the 1960s; and exists simply as merchandise as the product of a huge multinational conglomerate corporation. So do we say he belongs to ‘bourgeois’ capitalist culture? Or does he, as a product of and symbol of the past belong to a ‘residual’ culture? We might do the same thing for Batman or Superman, or for the Blithe Spirit DVD. Does everything in my office ultimately belong to the dominant, capitalist bourgeois culture because most of its contents exist as mass-produced, mass-sold products? Is there anything here that doesn’t belong, in some way, to that culture? The Walter Whiter book looks like a leading candidate to be ‘residual’ in some small way owing to its age, but in truth, he is pretty bourgeois too. The slate heartshaped place mat also seems to stand out as being an item that you couldn’t buy in any supermarket – but, then again, just having such a place mat seems ‘pretty bourgeois’ in itself. So what is the conclusion to draw from this little exercise, other than seemingly to prove just how ‘bourgeois’ the owner of this office really is? On the one hand, it bears out both Williams’s point that culture is very complex and is made up at all times by competing elements, and Gramsci’s point that ‘only one of [these elements] tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself throughout society’. But on the other hand, it has revealed a difficult tension between the material objects themselves and what they represent. Williams’s argument all along has been that you cannot separate these two things. They are together all at once and this awareness of materiality – simply thinking about how the object that you are looking at came to be there – ‘within the actual means and conditions of their production’ (Eldridge and Eldridge 1994: 32) – lies at the heart of cultural materialism. In short, we cannot look at the Winnie the Pooh teddy and think only of A. A. Milne, we must also think of Disney, of the manufacturing process, the system of exchanges – that is, ‘the whole social process’ – by which it came to be sitting here. And in a sense this is what cultural materialists ‘do’: they seek to recover how and why the various aspects of our culture came to be the way that they are. So, for example, in books such as Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence (1991) or Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century (1994), they seek to come to an understanding of how categories such as homophobia and or modern ‘gay identity’ have come about in the forms they have. In this way, cultural materialism combines the ‘big questions’ – how and why the world is like it is; how and why people are like they are – as manifested in the ‘little questions’ about the texts, objects and minutiae of every day culture.

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Raymond Williams: In Summary To this point we have been developing an understanding of Raymond Williams’s theory of ‘cultural materialism’, let me summarise it as follows: 1. Accounts of history, culture and literature should aim to be specific and concrete rather than general and abstract lest it risks surrendering ‘reality to a formula’. 2. We should do away with the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure, or ‘true’ materiality and ‘false’ ideology, because culture is always inextricably material and bound up in material and social processes. 3. Culture is also irreducibly complex, despite the fact that there may be ruling powers; it has, finally, no fundamental coherence. It is a site of constant struggle and change. 4. Within this struggle, some cultural groups are dominant, while others are residual or emergent. However, they all form part of the complex set of social processes known as culture. 5. When analysing cultural objects it is important to be aware always of the material and social processes that made them. 6. Within this cultural milieu, individuals still maintain a degree of consciousness and individual agency. We should avoid the structural Marxist trap of making people mere ‘superstructural effects’. 7. Literature offers us access to some of the sites of ideological incoherence and struggle in the culture in which it was produced. It may be helpful to refer back to this list when considering cultural materialist practice in the section that follows.

Cultural Materialism in Practice While the MacCabe debacle was going on at Cambridge, other developments were afoot in the discipline. In the 1970s, various new approaches derived from Theory started becoming ever more prominent in both Britain and America including deconstruction, feminism and what came to be known as ‘the new historicism’. While nineteenth-century studies got deconstruction (largely Paul de Man’s take on Jacques Derrida) and Gilbert and Gubar’s landmark feminist study The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979), and John Milton and the mid-seventeenth century got Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory, New Historicism landed in the early modern period, and most significantly in Shakespeare studies, with the publication of Stephen Greeblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). All of these developments, one should note, took place in the USA, which had been dominated by New Criticism for about three decades during the years of the Cold War.

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Whereas Greenblatt’s theoretical progenitors are Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault, the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield is more firmly rooted in Marxist theory, particularly that of Raymond Williams and Louis Althusser, both of whom we have considered at length. Like Greenblatt, at least initially, they set their stall out in the early modern period. Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy (1984) and the collection of essays that he edited with Sinfield, Political Shakespeare (1985), after the works by Williams I have outlined, are the foundational texts of cultural materialism. Much of the early cultural materialist work can be read specifically as reacting to New Historicism. Dollimore points out the most crucial difference between the two approaches: ‘Did [Shakespeare’s] plays reinforce the dominant order, or do they interrogate it to the point of subversion? According to a rough and ready division, New Historicists have inclined to the first view, cultural materialists to the second’ (Dollimore 1990: 414). Greenblatt, taking his cues from Foucault, tended to see power everywhere and the scope for genuine subversion as being very difficult, albeit he always maintained not impossible. Cultural materialists on the other hand, armed with a pair of twin guns – Althusser’s ideology critique in one hand and Williams’s more fluid notions of a fundamentally unstable, contradictory and ever-changing culture in the other – tended instead to see dissidence. However, I think too much is made of this difference in many accounts of New Historicism and cultural materialism, not because it isn’t true, but because it doesn’t strike me as the most glaring difference. Much less acknowledged is the fact that, often, New Historicists and cultural materialists are not even playing the same ball game. New Historicist readings tend to anchor themselves in historical anecdotes and to make connections between texts and the official ruling ideologies of their day. While cultural materialists do that (often, as Dollimore said, arguing contra New Historicism that texts are undermining said official ideologies, rather than upholding them), they spend a great deal more time and space dismantling and repudiating previous criticism and scholarship to date as being both humanist and ideological. In much the same way as Althusser tried to purge Marx of Hegel, cultural materialists have tried to purge the study of early modern literature of liberal humanism and ‘the sort of criticism which privileges an idealized, context-free “literature” and, as part of it, constructs [for example] a heroically transcendent “Shakespeare”, whose works deal in truths that are true for all time’ (Hawkes 1992: 8). Mark Robson puts it well: ‘the declared purpose of such criticism is not to produce more readings of texts, but, instead, to counter traditional readings through a materialist approach to culture’ (Robson 2007: 27). In a sense then, cultural materialism is often a kind of metacritical exercise that acknowledges that a text always already comes to us as being ‘already read’. As Terence Hawkes argues, ‘Shakespeare’s plays have become one of the central agencies through which our culture performs this operation. . . . Shakespeare

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doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare’ (Hawkes 1992: 3). Hawkes thus shifts focus from the plays themselves to what people have made of them because ‘it is precisely how and why Shakespeare is read, invoked, praised and affirmed that tell us what has value’ (Wilson 1995: 86). The play becomes a site of ideological and cultural struggle. I’d like to cite two examples of cultural materialists doing this sort of metacritical work. First, John Drakakis’s searing introduction to Alternative Shakespeares (1985) which puts to the sword Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘account of a thoroughly romanticized Shakespeare’ and A. C. Bradley’s ‘thorough domestication of the Coleridgean position’ (Drakakis 1985: 6). Few names escape repudiation as Drakakis claims a kind of ‘ground zero’ for the essays that are to follow. Ernest Jones, J. I. M. Stewart, Kenneth Muir, John Bayley, Frank Kermode, M. C. Bradbrook, E. E. Stoll, Alfred Harbage, S. L. Bethell, E. M. W. Tillyard, Wilbur Sanders, Helen Gardner, G. Wilson Knight, L. C. Knights: Drakakis leaves virtually no stone unturned as one by one the traditional critics are uprooted and set to one side. He calls time on them and their entire world view as being outmoded, conservative, idealistic and romanticised. The other example is Graham Holderness’s, now standard, debunking of E. M. W. Tillyard’s books The Elizabethan World Picture (1942) and Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) which drew ‘from a highly selective range of sources, arbitrarily privileged and tendentiously assembled’ (Holderness 1992: 4). Holderness argues that Tillyard had done a hatchet job on the history, mistaking the official Tudor ideology for everyday belief, and set about his task to paint a more accurate portrait. Holderness’s reading of Tillyard is famous though not only for pointing out what Tillyard got wrong, but also how his work is imbued – albeit in a hidden way – with his own personal prejudices and politics. In fact, not just Tillyard, but J. Dover Wilson and several other leading scholars from the 1940s: They all derive from a common problematic: the ideological crisis of British nationalism precipitated by the events of the 1930s and 1940s: the Depression, the crisis of Empire and particularly of course the Second World War. What these critics said of ‘order’ in Elizabethan England can easily be read at this distance as a coded address to immediate problems of political authority in their contemporary Britain. (Holderness 1992: 22) This contextual and political ‘exposure’ of old scholarship and criticism for what it was is a classic cultural materialist move. Perhaps the most representative cultural materialist book-length study is Alan Sinfield’s Faultlines (1992), a tour de force of ‘dissident reading’, during which he tells us that it is the ‘task’ of ‘oppositional criticism . . . to work across the grain of customary assumptions, and, if necessary, across the grain of the

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text, as it is customarily perceived’ (Sinfield 1992: 108). Sinfield is plainly working with some of Raymond Williams’s ideas in this book. Here he is on Macbeth: ‘Even if we believe that Shakespeare was trying to smooth over difficulties in absolutist ideology . . . he must deal with the issues that resist convenient inclusion’ (Sinfield 1992: 104). You can see in this Williams’s ideas of ideological contradiction and cultural incoherence. Even if Shakespeare did want to advocate an absolutist ideology, the reality on the ground is more complex and he can’t avoid grappling with that complexity. Sinfield concludes Faultlines with a provocative reading of The Merchant of Venice in which he urges us to resist ‘the standard liberal move . . . to try to soften it by making Shylock as “human”, as “sympathetic”, as much “like the rest of us as possible”’ (Sinfield 1992: 300). He recalls a production he once saw in which Shylock was depicted as being very stereotypically Jewish, an outsider in a city that was openly hostile to him: In the court scene, there was Shylock enduring the hostility of the Venetian upper class, and they did not seem quite like the usual version of Man: they were openly arrogant, scornful, snobbish, rich, and generally nasty. But, for once, it looked as though one of the underdogs was going to bite back. Just for once, the stigmatized other seemed to have the drop on the rest of them: their prized mercantile and legal system, which was designed to keep the Jews in servility, had allowed him a loophole (as sometimes it must), and he was going to turn the tables. Of course, the Venetians were all for the quality of mercy now, since one of them was under threat. But I thought: Right on, Shylock, now’s your chance, don’t take any notice of their tricks, stick on in there and get your pound of flesh . . . I have to admit that this is a high-risk strategy, with the Merchant and in culture generally. Some people in the audience were manifestly, and unpleasantly, delighted when Shylock was defeated. Perhaps we cannot afford presentations that might be used to legitimize such attitudes; but then, one the other hand, we cannot afford to orient cultural work so as to accommodate hostile attitudes at every point, especially at the expense of opportunities to develop dissident insight and commitment. Of course, it was high-risk for Shylock as well. He, and we, should have known they wouldn’t let him get away with it. The entire apparatus of the state lines up against him; the judge does not try to conceal his bias; they can afford to buy all the cleverest lawyers; they’ve even got a doubly transvestite lawyer! – and of course s/he is better. Well, there you are, that’s how they get you; but he had a go. (Sinfield 1992: 301–2)

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This passage encapsulates cultural materialism’s spirit of dissident resistance. It disturbs the ‘comfortable’ liberal humanist sensibilities while at the same time refusing the New Historicist temptation simply to say that Shakespeare’s play conservatively aligns itself with Venetian society. This is the essence of cultural materialism: politically committed reading ‘against the grain’.

Conclusion Before closing, I’d like to touch on one last point. In 2012, I published two books which are at times strongly critical of cultural materialist theory and practice (see Parvini 2012a and Parvini 2012b). My chief problem is that in my view cultural materialists too readily accepted the tenets of anti-humanism inherited from Althusser and this led them – wrongly in my view – to write individuals out of history and to limit the scope of personal agency almost to naught. In a recent review of these books, Jonathan Dollimore reacted angrily (see Dollimore 2013) to my characterisation of cultural materialism as being dogmatically anti-humanist. My charge is that, in their combining Althusser and Williams into a kind of theoretical potpourri during the 1980s, they ended up losing what is dynamic in both thinkers, especially Williams. As I hope to have shown in this chapter, Althusser and Williams were at odds in many crucial respects, and much of Williams’s project can be seen as divesting the notion of culture from Althusser’s more monolithic and antihumanist ideology. Althusser’s entire project was explicitly anti-humanist. Humanism, whatever the variety, posits two crucial ideas: first, that there is such a thing as a human nature, whatever characteristics and traits that might entail, and second, that individuals have agency, that is some self-conscious ability to make decisions and take actions that affect the world. Althusser rejects all of this: ‘For the corollary of theoretical Marxist anti-humanism is the recognition and knowledge of humanism itself: as an ideology’ (Althusser 1977: 230). For him, humanism is just another ideology through which the dominant class subordinates its subjects: of course they want you to believe that human needs and wants are essentially unchanging and universal – it makes it easier to sell you stuff! Of course, they want you to believe that you have the potential to change the world – it makes you better at doing your job and serving the state like a good little citizen! However, for Williams, Althusser and other Marxists go too far down this road. As Jon Gorak notes: ‘Althusser’s bold binary oppositions . . . could not have pleased Williams, who had always grounded his radicalism in the possibilities for liberty the estranged consciousness could entertain and the institutions it could establish to make those possibilities real’ (Gorak 1988: 79). Williams voiced his displeasure with anti-humanism in a memorable passage from a lecture he gave in 1981, in which he was ostensibly meant to be addressing ‘Recent events in Cambridge’ (i.e. the MacCabe affair). Ideology, he says, ‘is where the deep structures of

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the society actually reproduce themselves as conscious life. . . . [In this account, ideology is] so pervasive and so impenetrable . . . that you wonder who is ever going to be able to analyse it . . . ’ (Williams 1984: 207). Williams, then, never abandoned humanism; he ‘argued consistently against those who would construe the mechanisms of social reproduction in any way which reduced people to the status of mere “bearers” of social relations, the dupes of ideology. He argued consistently for a better understanding of the situational complexity of human agency’ (Higgins 1999: 124). This is an important aspect of Williams’s thinking: that human beings are not passive receptors but active agents in the complex social process of culture. But in turning back to Althusser in the mid–1980s, the cultural materialists undid much of that work. In short, I think that Williams put individual agency back into the mix only for Dollimore, Sinfield and company to take it back out. It was in vogue at the time to criticise Williams precisely for his humanism. Even Terry Eagleton got in on the act when he stated flatly in 1976 that William’s work has been ‘flawed . . . by “humanism” and idealism’ (Eagleton 1976: 44). From the vantage point of the mid–2010s, now that Althusser is much less trendy, I can see why Dollimore might wish to retroactively alter cultural materialism as never having been so influenced by him in the first place. But the examples of cultural materialists in the 1980s engaged in straightforwardedly Althusserian and baldly antihumanist readings of literary texts are too many to cite here. Terry Eagleton commented on ‘the appeal’ of Althusser’s work back in 1986: [I]t seemed on the one hand in its concerns with ideology and the ‘relative autonomy’ of superstructures to offer key theoretical concepts to those engaged in the socialist analysis of culture, it presented itself simultaneously, in its rehabilitation of the ‘scientific’ Marx, Leninism and in its vigorous anti-humanism, as in some sense politically revolutionary. . . . Althussurianism, in short, offered a way of cutting the link between politics and theoretical labour on the one hand, and reformism on the other; its theoretical richness and intricacy, and its trenchant defence of the centrality of theoretical enquiry as such, were coupled with a political abrasiveness and apparent rupture with idealism (summarizable in its steady anti-Hegelianism) which was not, in the British context at least, the customary concomitant of a discourse of culture and theory. In this dual structure lay much of the secret of Althussurian Marxism’s appeal to radical intellectuals of that period. (Eagleton 1986: 1–2) I have another explanation: Althusser – or rather his much-disseminated essay on Ideology – is easy to summarise and understand. Much easier, at any rate, than the work of Raymond Williams, as this chapter might attest, and easier than Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, the writings of Fredric Jameson or, indeed, even the bulk of Eagleton’s own work beyond Literary Theory:

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An Introduction. It is easy to believe that everybody had read the shortish Althusser essay. I do not believe that everybody had read Marxism and Literature or Problems in Materialism and Culture. I do not doubt that Dollimote and Sinfield are assiduous readers of both Althusser and Williams (notwithstanding the aforementioned problems of blending them), but they do not represent the entire field of cultural materialism. And as practice becomes separated from theoretical commitment, oft-repeated mantras become commonplace, accepted without much questioning, and substitute for serious thinking. My view is that this is what happened with cultural materialism as it became replicated, watered down and subsequently rolled out as the new orthodoxy for literary studies in the United Kingdom. However, the chief consequence of this institutionalisation of a once radical movement has not been to intensify its anti-humanism, but rather, simply, to sideline Theory and subordinate critical thinking to plain historicism. In the process, the radicalism and political commitment slipped away to be replaced by historical acuity and staid professionalism – Dollimore himself has complained of this tendency recently (see Dollimore 2012). In the 2000s, splinter groups such as the presentists (see Grady and Hawkes 2007) emerged to make explicit the rift between those who wished to remain committed to cultural materialism’s original radical aims and those who were producing, what they felt, merely leaden literary history. And this remains the central question that cultural materialism faces today: can it even remain as a live force within the discipline amid the relentless and crushing onslaught of what I have called elsewhere ‘the “new” old antiquarianism’ (Parvini 2013: 1)? If it remains unchecked, as Andrew Hadfield warns, we are ‘running the risk of transforming the discipline of English into a branch of History’ (Hadfield 2012: 32). There are no easy answers, but anti-humanism is a theoretical dead end and one that has now been almost totally mined out. I propose that a return to and reassessment of what was at stake in the work that inspired cultural materialism in the first place – that of Raymond Williams – might be the first step towards rehabilitating cultural materialism’s ailing vitality.

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INTRODUCTION: FORMALISM

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ormalist criticism focuses attention on the text rather than its context, and was one of the main styles of critical theory in the twentieth century, with the narratological approach initiated by the Russian Formalists, pre- and postthe 1917 Revolution, proving influential in the development of structuralism. Contemporaneous to this was the rise of New Criticism, which became particularly powerful in the English-speaking world. New Critics regarded texts as largely self-contained artefacts, holding that it was unnecessary to go outside the text in order to make it yield up its meaning. Georges Van Den Abbeele traces the emergence of narratology in the work of Russian scholars like Viktor Shklovsky in Chapter 22. Vladimir Propp was to put forward an even more detailed approach to the study of narrative in his Morphology of the Folktale (1968), his ideas playing an important role in the evolution of structuralist methodology. As Van Den Abbeele points out, narratology is still a dynamic area of study, which has been open to the influence of rapidly growing fields such as cognitive science. Graham Allen discusses the factors behind the rise of New Criticism in Chapter 23. From I. A. Richards’s method of ‘practical criticism’ in the 1920s, through to W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s attack on the ‘Intentional Fallacy’ (that the point of criticism was to reveal the author’s intentions as realised in the text), New Critics took a vigorously anti-historicist stance to critical interpretation. New Criticism became something of a whipping boy to many later twentieth-century theorists, but Allen offers a spirited defence of its pedagogical utility, arguing that we can still learn from the method’s founding motivations.

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22 RUSSIAN FORMALISM AND NARRATOLOGY Georges Van Den Abbeele

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he roots of narrative theory, or narratology, lie in the Russian formalist movement of the early twentieth century. Flourishing during the years leading up to and immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution before facing severe political oppression with the rise of Stalinism, Russian formalism emerged from two groups of scholars primarily interested in linguistics and its applicability to literary analysis: OPOJAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language) based in St Petersburg, and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Key contributors included Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eichenbaum and Roman Jakobson (who later left to found the Prague Linguistic Circle before his subsequent role as a major figure in French structuralism). Others scholars, such as Bakhtin and his group, took more distance from these discussions, criticising their lack of attention to social and historical factors while also acknowledging a profound influence on their own thinking about literary and cultural form (see Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship). While no single document can be said to resume these diverse tendencies, Viktor Shklovsky’s ‘Art as Technique’ (Shklovsky 1965a), perhaps comes the closest, not only for its insistence on defining the formal or technical features that make literature what it is (‘literariness’), and not only for its subsequent far-reaching influence, even decades later, on structuralism and poststructuralism, but also for proposing an underlying philosophical justification of literature in terms of its ability to make us see the world differently. Specifically, Shklovsky argues for art’s capacity to counter what he sees as the habituating effects of perception that end up diminishing our very sense of what we repeatedly perceive. We no longer even note what we observe on an everyday basis. A renewal of perception can be achieved, nonetheless, by a set of devices or techniques whose general effect is that of ‘defamiliarisation’ (ostraneniye), in other words, making the usual seem unusual, the familiar look strange: ‘Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways . . . describ[ing] an object as if . . . seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for

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the first time’ (Shklovsky 1965a: 13). Defamiliarisation is an idea that would have a long career, not only in terms of subsequent developments in literary theory but also as a core tenet of avant-garde aesthetics throughout the twentieth century from Dada and surrealism all the way through to pop art and postmodernism. In fact, the correlation between the success of this idea as both a critical, theoretical instrument of analysis and an aesthetic imperative has also occasioned criticism of the idea on both accounts (see, for example, Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 1983). For Shklovsky and his colleagues, the concept of defamiliarisation offers a way to begin to define the scientific study of literature as a special kind of language with its own internal qualities and conditions that set it apart from other kinds of language. The primary purpose of literary criticism, then, is to isolate, inventory and analyse what these specific features of literature are and have been, that is, the constituent elements of ‘literariness’. The Russian formalists accordingly downplayed traditional historical and biographical approaches to the study of literary works and their authors and focused on internally focused forms of analysis based in pre-existing linguistic or rhetorical categories (grammar, syntax, phonology, tropes, figures of speech) or in newly developed concepts or functions to describe recurring elements found in literary production. While the label of formalism has stuck to the work of these innovative scholars, the term they tended to prefer for the kind of activity they were engaged in was ‘poetics’, as opposed to the positivist historical or ‘genetic’ approach they rejected: ‘The study of literary genetics can clarify only the origins of a device, nothing more: poetics must explain its literary function’ (Eichenbaum 1965: 117). Surprisingly, for an approach at least superficially concerned with the synchrony of form, an extraordinarily rich area for the development of new concepts to explain the specifically literary function was found in the internal diachrony of narrative, with Shklovsky again opening the way with his important distinction between fabula and sjuzhet, conventionally translated into English as story and plot, and building upon the classical Aristotelian distinction between diegesis and mimesis. The ‘story’, in Shklovsky’s definition, refers simply to the putative events in terms of how they would have occurred sequentially in time, stripped down to their ‘causal-chronological order’ (Tomashevsky 1965: 68). ‘Plot’, on the other hand, indicates the entire set of devices by which the story is organised, presented, and narrated. Many narratives, in point of fact, do not simply proceed by following the exact sequence of events as per the classic Aristotelian injunction of a beginning, a middle and an end. Many, including classical ones, begin in medias res, with the middle and work backwards or forwards with a variety of devices, such as flashbacks, premonitions and foreshadowings, digressions, parallel development and leitmotifs. More than just the order of presentation, though, plot in the Shklovskian sense can also refer to everything that takes the basic story

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material (essentially events and characters) and turns its telling, its narration, into a comprehensible work of art. Plot is the properly fictive dimension of storytelling, what fashions or shapes the story as something more than a mere sequence of events and gives it both meaning and a sense of completion. The role of narrators, whether omniscient or limited, is obviously crucial to the workings of plot, as is the specifically informative role of characters and setting, and anything else with respect to how the elements of the story are fictively arranged and presented. Beyond the simple sequence of events, plot enables us to recognise a plausible beginning and end, as well as the ways in which the end is prefigured in the beginning and resolves it in a satisfactory or meaningful way. Shklovsky’s terminology, however, has often been applied in confusing or misleading ways. Plot and story often end up being used interchangeably (as when one speaks of the ‘poetics of plot’ to describe ‘story structure’). Alternative translations, such as story and discourse, create other confusions and misapplications, for example with discourse theory or with the technical linguistic understanding of discourse analysis, neither of which are concerned specifically with the becoming narrative of a presumably prior sequence of story events. (Likewise, French translations tend to move uneasily among the three terms of histoire, récit, and discours to designate fabula and sjuzet.) A better but little used rendering might be be narrative and narration, which could more clearly distinguish between the level of the events, on the one hand, and that of the telling or fictive presentation of the events, on the other hand, which is Shklovsky’s primary and heuristic concern in developing his terminology, as when he famously characterises Tristram Shandy as ‘the most typical novel in world literature’ for its extreme emphasis of plot over story (Shklovsky 1965b: 57). Vladimir Propp’s 1928 Morphology of the Folktale (Propp 1968) greatly expanded the study of narrative by using a ‘morphological’ approach to identify the defining features of the Russian folk tale. Taking issue with classificatory schemes based on subject matter (manners or marvels) or character types (human or beast), Propp instead analyses a large corpus of tales as consistently organised by the same sequence of what he terms ‘character functions’, definable as specific actions involving specific kinds of characters in terms of advancing the action. As such, Propp can be said to situate his analysis at the level of story rather than discourse. He identifies thirty-one character functions starting from an initial situation disrupted by a misdeed perpetrated by a villain or merely by some lack or desire that motivate the character(s) to leave or change their initial situation. Who or what the villain (dragon, witch, jealous neighbour) or need (for a bride, for food, for some coveted object) is matters less than the fact of the event in launching the action of the story to restore or resolve that initial situation, action which is in turn defined by the sequence of subsequent character functions, which follow an invariant order, according to Propp. These include, among others, the actions of a hero, who

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aided by various helpers and/or donors (of gifts or magic powers) eventually defeats the villain in combat or successfully overcomes a series of challenging tasks/obstacles to repair the original misdeed/lack such as in the end to become transfigured through marriage and wealth (marrying the princess, inheriting the kingdom, and so on). In a sense, Propp could be said to define the underlying ‘structure’ of the folk tale (just as Lévi-Strauss, deploying his own ‘structuralist’ methodology, would later identify an ur-myth underlying the extant corpus of Native American mythology). On the other hand, Propp’s subsequent research, unlike that of Lévi-Strauss, became focused on the historical and social sources for the variants within that structure, for example, why a flying horse in one tale is replaced by an eagle in another tale, and by a boat in still another. It is not inconsequential that Propp would follow up Morphology of the Tale in 1946 with The Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale. In terms of Propp’s influence on the later rise of narratology per se as a field of literary and critical theory, the large number of ‘functions’ inventoried by him limits both its range and methodological applicability (to a wider corpus of tales or prose fiction generally, as written in a variety of times and places). While Propp is insistent on the invariant nature of his findings for the corpus of the works he studies, and ready parallels can be found with many works of prose fiction, it has also proven to be difficult to manipulate in any practical way the full set of thirty-one functions for the purpose of analysing other texts and traditions. Indeed, the subsequent development of narratology could be said to be defined by two general tendencies. One has been the theoretical aim of reducing the set of functions to a smaller, more practical number so as to enable the formal or structural analysis of particular narrative elements as story, to recall Shklovsky’s insight. The second tendency, concomitantly, has been to focus on the specific workings of discourse, including its extension to other subject matter such as other art forms or non-fiction writing. Russian formalism, and Propp’s work in particular, re-emerged most dramatically in the French structuralist milieu of the 1960s thanks to the migrations of Roman Jakobson, A. J. Greimas and Tzvetan Todorov, and their subsequent interactions with the likes of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. A watershed moment in the development of narrative theory was the 1966 special issue of the journal, Communications, edited by Roland Barthes and dedicated to ‘the structural analysis of narrative’. In his introduction to the volume, Barthes rearticulates the formalist project within the model of structural linguistics by describing literary discourse, and narrative in particular, as a second-order system of signification or secondary language propped onto the primary level of language that is the specific object of linguistics per se (Barthes 1977: 79–124). The structural analysis of narrative then relies on the linguistic model to deal with a level of discourse beyond that of the individual sentence by deductively dividing narrative into a set of minimal units, like

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the ‘mythemes’ in Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth, whose combinations and permutations both enable higher-order articulated meaning and define the distinctiveness of any particular narrative. Consequently, Barthes recalibrates the Shklovskian dyad into three categories of analysis: (1) functions, or the basic elements of a story whose sequential organisation defines a kind of narrative syntax; (2) actions, or the role of characters as the paradigmatic agents of the narrated events; and (3) narration, or the principled elaboration, enunciation, and implicit reception of the plot as the discursive presentation of the story, that is, as fiction. The subsequent structuralist analysis of functions takes up Propp’s conceptualisation and finds its most consequential theoretical reformulation with Claude Bremond, whose ‘Logic of narrative possibilities’ (Bremond 1980: 387–411) revises the sequential determinism of Propp’s model in two ways. First, Bremond proposes a model of narrative as constructed from ‘elementary sequences’, each of which contains three functions. These are defined, more abstractly than does Propp, as a ‘triad’ that: corresponds to the three obligatory phases of any process: a function which opens the process in the form of an act to be carried out or of an event which is foreseen; a function which achieves this virtuality in the form of an actual act or event; and a function which closes the process in the form of an attained result. (Bremond 1980: 387) Second, in contradistinction to Propp’s apparent determinism where one function necessarily and sequentially leads to the next, Bremond insists on the contingent set of ‘choices’ that lead from one function to another: the virtuality of an act to be carried out may or may not be actualised, and that actualisation may or may not succeed in obtaining the sought-for result. This elementary sequence may be combined, again under similarly variable contingencies, with others to make ‘complex sequences’ that in turn make up an entire narrative cycle. At any given point, however, a decision must be made whether and how a functionally determined act will be successful or not. Faced with a challenge, for example, crossing a swollen river, a character may shrink from undertaking that task, or attempt to cross only to drown or be driven back to the starting shore, or succeed in crossing the water by brute force, or perhaps by some stealth, or the use of a magical device (a ring, a flying chariot) previously received from a donor character. This is the set of choices that Bremond calls a ‘logic of narrative possibilities’, and which he views as crucial to the meaningfulness of narrative as a ‘structured temporal sequence’ organised in relation to human agency (be that a failed agency or one superseded by other forces). Bremond’s attempt both to simplify and render more flexible Propp’s morphology into an interpretive as well as analytical method for unpacking

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narrative structures receives a further theoretical adjustment with Thomas Pavel’s development of ‘narrative syntax’ (1976; 1985). Pavel effectively reduces the Proppian functions down to two (transgression and mediation) in relation to an initial situation and a final outcome, or denouement, an ensemble he refers to as a ‘narrative structure’ (as opposed to Bremond’s elementary sequence). Transgression, within a narrative structure, corresponds to any change of that initial situation which thus launches the action as the attempted mediation of that transgression, which of course may succeed or fail. By adopting the tree-like schema of Chomskian generative grammar to visualise this narrative structure in a way that reaffirms the decision points of Bremond’s narrative logic, Pavel’s innovation is then to conceive of narrative structures not merely as sequential but as being logically embedded in one another, allowing the critic to chart complex hierarchies of action and resolution within a given narrative. The resolution achieved in one narrative structure may in turn affect the possible resolution of another. For example, a helper character’s inability to accomplish a task (such as retrieving a magic weapon) may in turn endanger the hero’s struggle to overcome an opponent. Such complications and ‘subplots’ are, of course, the stuff of many narratives and Pavel’s work has the signal merit of enabling an analysis of this common narrative practice. With Pavel, we thus arrive at a fundamental point in the development of narratology, namely the synchronic analysis of diegetic events to reveal the logic underlying the plot and manifesting itself in the narration, the ultimate undoing of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that conflates cause with mere temporal progression. If we can therefore succeed at understanding narrative as a set of nodes or decision points between various transgressive and mediational possibilities, one still needs to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the actors (be they active or passive) who are engaged in and by the actions of the story, or more colloquially, those entities in a narrative we refer to as characters. To recall Propp’s initial insight as well as Bremond’s concern with the meaningfulness of human agency, the functions were developed not as mere actions but as ‘character functions’, definable as specific actions that involve specific kinds of characters in terms of advancing the story. One of Propp’s major findings was his rigorous reduction of the set of characters in the Russian folk tale down to seven: the villain, the hero, the dispatcher (who sends the hero out on the quest), the donor (of magic), the helper, the false hero or traitor, and the princess/bride. Building on this restricted, functional definition of character, Algirdas Julius Greimas (Du sens, 1970) significantly revises the question by his concept of the ‘actant’, which is both more and less than a character in the traditional sense. An actant is basically a plot agent linked to a function. It need not be human nor even animate (it could be a meteorological event, for example) as long as it has a discernible plot function. Greimas thus reduces the Proppian set down to three pairs: subject (hero) and object (of quest), helper

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and opponent, sender and receiver. Given this extreme reduction of character from persona to function, Greimas can further argue that a given character or ‘actor’ in the traditional sense can in principle occupy more than one actantial function in any given narrative, be the helper at one point and the opponent at another, for example. There is no unity of character per se (except perhaps at the level of the narration and under the appellation of a single proper name), only different actantial positions at the level of story. Todorov follows a similar line in his Grammaire du Décaméron but offers a significant revision in his essay, ‘Narrative-Men’, in The Poetics of Prose (Todorov 1977: 66–79), where he proposes a concept of character not only as function in story but also as embedded narrative (or function in discourse). In other words, a character who appears in the course of a narrative may have a whole other story to tell, another narrative, which can remain unsaid and implied, or explicitly recounted, as for example, in early modern frame narrations (The Canterbury Tales, A Thousand and One Nights, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa). Alternatively, Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse argues against such functional reductions to mere plot agents by insisting on the crucial importance of what he calls ‘existents’ as fundamental elements of a story without which we would not find narrative to be the compelling form that it is. While existents include such elements as setting and background, Chatman is primarily concerned with developing a structural theory of character that allows for the sense of psychological depth we do find in characters (most particularly in modern novels rather than the pre-modern folk tales, epics or early modern narratives favoured by formalist and structuralist analysis) without reverting to a naïve psychologism which the structuralists rightly reject. Chatman proposes a theory of ‘traits’ that function as minimal units of fictional characterisation, or as he puts it: ‘a trait may be said to be a narrative adjective out of the vernacular labeling a personal quality of a character, as it persists over part or whole of the story’ (Chatman 1978: 125). By ‘vernacular’, Chatman means the culturally coded set of traits (‘trait-code’) relied on by readers to make sense of a given character’s behaviour. In structural linguistical terms, this insight suggests a ‘paradigmatic view of character’ which would chart ‘the set of traits, metaphorically, as a vertical assemblage intersecting the syntagmatic chain of events that comprise the plot’ (Chatman 1978: 127). Thus, character is a semiologically driven process whereby readers construct the meaning of a fictive persona on the basis of the ‘evidence’ provided implicitly or explicitly through the accumulation of ‘adjectives’ or traits linked to that character’s proper name. Accumulation, however, does not necessarily mean consistency, since a fuller or ‘rounder’ sense of character can be established by inconsistent or even contradictory traits that signal the compelling sense of human complexity that we find, for example, in the modern psychological novel. But complexity of character also readily bleeds into the other side of narratological analysis, namely the study of narrative process rather than the eventful

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infrastructure of story, to the extent that complex character development relies as much on how the narrative is presented and from whose point of view as it does in terms of the character’s overt reaction to or direct involvement in the events of the story. How and why the character behaves is as important to our narrative understanding as what that character does, but that calibration typically depends on the mediating function of narration itself. The realm of narration, or the ‘narrative discourse’ as Gérard Genette calls it with admirable precision (Genette 1972), requires a different set of methodological tools and approaches. These include, first of all, the varying kinds of relation between the temporality of the narration and that of the events narrated. We’ve already seen that the events of the story need not be told in the same order as they would have taken place chronologically through the use of flashbacks, flashforwards or even by more ambitious ways of telling the events completely out of sequence (Cortázar’s Hopscotch or Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala). But there can also be all sorts of creative dissonances between story and narration in terms of duration, the most obvious one being the time it takes to tell (or read) the story as opposed to the length of time recounted, the former being a matter of hours while the latter might take place over an entire lifetime (or even multiple generations, such as in Buddenbrooks or The Dream of the Red Chamber). On the other hand, it is thoroughly possible to slow the narration down so that events are depicted as taking longer than they would (the slow-motion technique popular in film but also found to great effect in Proust and Beckett, among others). And, of course, the rhythm of the duration can itself be varied such as in Flaubert’s famously disruptive line in The Sentimental Education, ‘years went by’, that dramatically and unexpectedly jumps the story ahead to its conclusion. Finally, frequency or iterability can play a part in how a story is told. Canonically, of course, a single event is told once but one could also tell an event more than once (The Sound and the Fury, Rashomon), or retell an event that took place more than once for each time it took place, or more commonly, tell only once an event that occurred more than once, or habitually (Marcel’s childhood insomnia at the beginning of Combray). A second set of concerns addressed by Genette is that of the modality of the narration in terms of how information about the events is mediated or filtered. If the zero degree of narrative would be something along the lines of Émile Benveniste’s definition of narrative as ‘events telling themselves’ (Benveniste 1966: 241), even assuming that these may be told in any given order, then narrative discourse must account for the ways in which we recognise questions of perspective, point of view, and credibility in the narration of the story, the ‘who’ or even the ‘what’ that lies behind the events being told and why. These questions inevitably circle around the implicit or explicit presence of a narrator who is a character functionally responsible for the way the story is told (as opposed to the historical author of the work or even the ‘implied author’

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as a kind of organisational principle behind the narrative (Chatman 1978: 148; Booth 1961). At this point, narratology rejoins that very large current of literary criticism and theory concerned with narrators (omniscient, limited in perspective, incompetent, or unreliable) and concomitantly with varying kinds of reader responses, such as the concept of an ‘implied reader’ as the intended audience for the work, or of the ‘narratee’ as the structural homologue of the narrator, a definable character whom the narrator addresses as an interlocutor (Prince 1971: 100–5; Ray 1977). Various schools of reader-response criticism or reception theory have been further developed by Umberto Eco, Stanley Fish, Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Likewise, studies of first-person narration join the vast literature on autobiographical styles of writing along with the key distinction between the narrating ‘I’, on the one hand, and the I’ who appears as a character in the story, on the other hand. Perhaps the most important work has been done on so-called third-person forms of narration (a misnomer since by definition all narration implies a first-person narrator), which both occlude and reveal narrative voice through such devices as the classic style indirect libre and various kinds of reported speech. Genette introduces the category of ‘focalisation’ or ‘focus of narration’ as a more rigorous term for what is classically subsumed under varying concepts of narrative voice and point of view. Focalisation analyses more precisely how, regardless of voice, narrative information is filtered through the perception of a given narrator or through a character, or even a place. It can be internal, as limited to what that entity knows (The Stranger, The Sound and the Fury), or external where we are guided through the narrative by a character, such as the kind of ‘hardboiled’ detective popularised by Dashiell Hammett, without our having any insight into that character’s inner thoughts or world, or it can move between internal and external focalisation or even focalise the narration in and out through various characters (as in Madame Bovary). While the full-blown development of narratology thus revises many of the concerns and concepts of Anglo-American New Criticism, it also enables an impressive expansion of its theoretical model into other media and cultural phenomena susceptible of being analytically treated as forms of narrative. First among these was the application of narratology to cinema by Christian Metz in his contribution to the landmark Communications volume by his essay on the ‘grand syntagmatic’ of filmic narrative, and later, more fully developed in Film Language (Metz 1974). In applying the structural linguistics model to the cinema, Metz posits different kinds of syntagmatic units that render film narrative meaningful beyond the cutting and editing of individual shots. The organisation of shots into recognisable scenes and sequences (typically punctuated or demarcated by fade-dissolves) gives film a recognisable diegetic structure as well as a set of narrative possibilities peculiar to the cinematic media. In particular, Metz is intrigued by the use of alternating sequences (to show various kinds of consecutiveness, simultaneity or symbolic opposition by

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cross-cutting between two sets of shots) and frequentative sequences (to show a coherent action or set of actions over time or space via multiple shots that blend into each other). Further advances in film theory have clarified questions of narrative point of view or focalisation by linking these concretely to the specific location and movement of the camera. Stephen Heath, in particular, moves beyond the classic shot/reverse-shot pattern traditionally used to film dialogue between characters to show how the same alternating pattern between a shot of a character’s face and something else implies a kind of reverse-shot where we assume what we see in that intervening shot is what the character sees from her or his point of view, creating an effect of narration whereby we understand the events through the specific, indeed technically and precisely delimited, point of view of that character. Heath calls this narrational effect, ‘suture’; a term he borrows from Lacanian psychoanalysis, to name a key element of film narration (Heath 1981: 76–112). Finally, the distinction between story and plot/ discourse in film requires an added attention to the use of sounds and images as either intradiegetic (taking place within the fictive world of the characters) or extradiegetic (occurring outside that world, such as voice-over narration, descriptive subtitles or background music). While the principles of narratology have been applied to many other media and cultural forms, including rituals, music and even the implicit narrative organisation of spatial structures and painting (Marin 1973, 1987, 1994), perhaps the most significant contribution of narratology has been in coming to terms with the narrative dimension of non-literary forms of discourse. In particular, the work of Hayden White has been decisive in leading this transformation, less as an application or adaptation of narratology per se to the specific field of historiography in Metahistory (White 1973) and later works than as a revolutionary transformation of narrative theory itself, occasioned by the analysis of the particular problems raised by the role of narrative in history writing. White reconfigures the story/plot distinction inherited from Russian formalism by arguing that narrative is not only a mode of representation but one of cognition as well, not simply a way to present a set of events but also a way to explain them. Below the level of story there is what White calls mere chronicle, which is no more than the diachronic listing of events, with no meaningful beginning or end: the record simply stops. And an even more rudimentary level can be found in texts such as the Annals of Saint Gall that merely indicate a list of years sometimes but not always paired with indications of events (White 1987: 6–25). As opposed to literary fiction, which can pursue an entirely imaginative story construction, history writing presumably tells a story based upon the documentary record of chronicled events, as contested or disputed as they may be. As such, historical storytelling or narrative proceeds by and as an interpretation of that evidentiary archive:

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The historian arranges the events in the chronicle into a hierarchy of significance by assigning events different functions as story elements in such a way as to disclose the formal coherence of a whole set of events considered as a comprehensible process with a discernible beginning, middle, and end. (White 1973: 7) The subsequent organisation of the story into plot, what White terms with admirable precision and clarity ‘emplotment’, also endows that story with meaning by telling it as a certain kind of story. Far from there being only one (true) story that can told about any set of events in the past, how the story is narratively recounted is also a way of understanding or explaining it, and these can be multiple or even contradictory while based on the same set of events. Even the most ‘fact’ based of narratives is fundamentally and incontrovertibly an interpretive act. On the other hand, and in a departure from the universalising impulse of Proppian and of structuralist narratology, White argues that there is in any given ‘cultural endowment’ a limited but variable set of cognitively authorised plot structures to which historians have recourse ‘for the provision of real events with a distinctive kind of story meaning’ (White 1973: 7). In his study of nineteenth-century European historiography, Metahistory, White discerns, for example, four such plot structures or modes of ‘emplotment’ which he draws from Northrop Frye’s archetypal categories in Anatomy of Criticism (Frye 1957): romance, tragedy, comedy and satire (irony). The choice of plot structure, as in Michelet’s recourse to romance or Burckhardt’s to satire, is not an innocent decision, however; but one linked in turn to differing forms of argumentative explanation and ideological implication. As White later reformulates this thesis, ‘the ideological content of a specific historical account can be said to consist not so much in the discursive mode in which it is cast as in the dominant plot-structure chosen to endow the events spoken of with the form of a recognizable story-type’ (White 2010: 283). If narrative is as much a mode of cognition as it is a mode of representation, then plot supplies meaning to the story form. A fortiori: when the reader recognizes the story being told in a historical narrative as a specific kind of story – for example, as an epic, romance, tragedy, comedy or farce, – he can be said to have comprehended the meaning produced by the discourse. This comprehension is nothing other than the recognition of the form of the narrative. (White 1987: 43) Plot is the content of the (story) form, and the ‘substance’ of that content, to recall the Hjelmslevian terminology, describes the ‘general notion of the nature of historical reality’ for which the emplotted representation of given historical events is a ‘special case’ (White 2010: 290). That general notion implicitly or explicitly channels a philosophy of history whose ideological or critical dimensions drive the specific narrative we read.

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White’s work on historical narrative leads him in two other directions, one towards macrological issues of context and the social function of narrative, the second toward more micrological questions of tropology and formal rhetoric. To the extent that in expanding his inquiry beyond the nineteenthcentury Europe of Metahistory, White refers repeatedly to the ‘dominant plot-structures’ within a ‘given cultural endowment’ and its reserve of ‘recognizable story forms’, the question inevitably arises as to what this endowment is and why certain kinds of narratives are favoured and others not, not in any specific case since that would presumably be the work of individual metahistorians but in general, theoretical terms, a meta-metahistory so to speak. One answer is provided by recourse to the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope, which White explicates as follows: ‘a socially structured domain of the natural world that defines the horizon of possible events, actions, agents, agencies, social roles, and so forth of all imaginative fiction – and all real ones, too’ (White 1999: 183n.). Within a defined chronotope, ‘a dominant plot type determines the classes of things perceivable, the modes of their relationships, the periodicities of their development, and the possible meanings they can reveal’ (White 1999: 183n.). Concludes White, ‘every generic plot type presupposes a chronotope, and every chronotope presumes a limited number of the kinds of story that can be told about events within its horizon’ (White 1999: 183n.). The temporal and regional variability of chronotopes then reconfigures the kinds of plots and stories available and authorised for narrative purposes, but this also raises the question of the need for varying kinds of narrative in differing social, political and cultural organisations. White turns to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, where the rise of history and the need for ‘an enduring record’ are coterminous with the establishment of a State ‘cognizant of Laws’ (White 1987: 12). White construes Hegel’s argument to mean that ‘the reality that lends itself to narrative representation is the conflict between desire and the law. Where there is no rule of law, there can be neither a subject nor the kind of event that lends itself to narrative representation’ (White 1987: 12). White’s ‘suspicion’ is that ‘narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized “history”, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority’ (White 1987: 12). Between Hegel and Bakhtin is also where White’s ‘formalism’ engages with Fredric Jameson’s dialectical historical concept of narrative as a ‘socially symbolic act’ (Jameson 1981). But while Jameson laments the turn away from history that would accompany the shift from nineteenth-century realism to twentieth-century modernism and postmodernism, White precisely argues for the relevance of modernist literary forms as our best attempt to address a different kind of historical reality and events ‘whose nature, scope, and implications no prior age could have imagined’ (White 1999: 69) and for which realist modes of representation are simply ‘inadequate’ (White 1999: 49).

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It is in this same context but at the micrological level that White also charts the stylistic and conceptual bases of historical interpretation at a level prior, ‘precognitive and precritical’ (White 1973: 31), to that of emplotment yet irredeemably linked to it. In Metahistory, he links the four tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony to the plot structures of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, respectively. White subsequently enlarges this implicit allegorisation of plot structure per se to the wider thesis of the ‘necessarily figurative nature of all descriptions of historical objects and their contexts’, which he views as stem[ming] from the particularity with which they have to be invested in order to qualify as historical’ (White 1999: 51). What he calls ‘figural realism’ addresses the conundrum of grasping ‘time- and space-specific entities’, whose attributes are in point of fact ‘so numerous’ that they can only be constituted as objects of knowledge tropologically, that is, through figurative means (White 1999: 52). Figural description does not deny the reality of what it references, only that its complexity cannot be referenced directly or literally. White calls this process, after Paul Ricoeur, ‘con-figuration’ or a conceptual grasping together that further recalls the workings of metaphor (White 1999: 52). Moreover, the narrativisation of these historically constituted objects also depends on the figural or tropological elements that enable their emplotment into a discernible and recognisable narrative form. As such, ‘a narrative account is always a figurative account, an allegory’ (White 1987: 48), not merely because like all indirect or figurative discourse it says something more and something other than what it says, something beyond what would be expressed in a mere chronicle, but also because as narrative it figuratively recounts, allegorises, the human experience of being within time. At this point, White’s formalism engages another critical interlocutor, the phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, who takes ‘temporality to be the structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent’ (Ricoeur 1980: 169), a ‘reciprocal relationship’ whose implications are exhaustively pursued in Ricoeur’s three volume Time and Narrative (1983–5). Time, for Ricoeur is a metaphysical ground of being, whose enigma we can only address through processes of symbolic meaning. To the extent that we live within a structure of temporality, the temporal construction that is narrative not only recounts a set of events (whether putatively real as in historiography or imagined as in fiction) but allegorises our predicament as creatures living within time as the secondary meaning or ‘ultimate referent’ of any narrative, which as a discursive form, is also precisely where the structure of temporality ‘reaches language’. Understanding ourselves, moreover, within the kind of plot structures that propose a defined beginning, middle and end moves us from the experience of ‘being-within-time’ – as a kind of incomprehensive serialness of one moment leading to the next – to the deeper understanding that Ricoeur

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calls ‘historicality’. This historical way of being in the world leads, as White presciently notes in his reading of Ricoeur (White 1987: 177ff.), not only to a dissolution of the boundary between history and fiction (as allegories of the ‘distinctly human’ experience of time) but also between the founding Aristotelian categories of mimesis and diegesis, to the extent that narrative imitates the very way human beings try to make meaning out of their lives as if they were emplotted stories. In other words, we live our lives narratively by imagining ourselves within the temporality of a distinct past, present and future. Narrative then replicates that diegetic way of being in a discursive form, whose content is the enigmatic structure of temporality itself. At this point, what we can call narratology expands into a fundamental metaphysics of all human existence. White’s answer is to reaffirm the figurality of narrative, its tropological work in coming to terms, necessarily indirectly and symbolically, with this ‘mimesis effect’ (the subtitle of his 1999 ‘Figural Realism’). Whereas Ricoeur recalls a Heideggerian philosophical frame, White returns to the literary history of Erich Auerbach, whose Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1968) follows what he calls a ‘double articulation’ whereby each literary historical figure both recalls or ‘fulfils’ prior figures and prefigures later ones (just as in the tropological relation between ground and figure, where the figural sense fulfils that of the ground). The relations between these figures are not causal but genealogical in the Nietzschean sense, to the extent that an earlier event or figure, which is fully meaningful at the time of its occurrence, can nonetheless bear a different meaning which is only revealed or fulfilled by a later event or figure. The present can thus reconfigure a past that is then figurally fulfilled by its meaningfulness in the present. Concludes White, channelling Auerbach: Indeed, if, in many respects, Mimesis is ultimately the story of how Western literature came to grasp historicity as humanity’s distinctive mode of being in the world, this mode of being in the world is represented as one in which individuals, events, institutions, and (obviously) discourses are apprehended as bearing a distinctively figural relationship to one another. Unlike other natural things, which are related to one another only by material causality, historical things are related to one another as elements of structures of figuration (Figuralstrukturen). This means that things historical can be apprehended in their historicity only insofar as they can be grasped as elements of wholes that, in both their synchronic and diachronic dimensions, are related as linguistic figures are related to their fulfilments. (White 1999: 99) White thus recasts Ricoeur’s phenomenological approach to the ‘distinctly human’ experience of being-within-time and of historicality as a fundamentally

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figural mode of cognition, a ‘con-figuration’ that grasps the meaning of things across time. Narrative emerges as a basic tropology that defines the human experience and whose formal, structural and ideological modalities crucially matter in shaping how we live in the world. Such a genealogical view of narrative as figural fulfilment necessarily implies, however, a rethinking of the fabula/sjuzhet distinction that inaugurated the formalist study of narrative to the extent that the sjuzhet (whether we consider it to be the structure of emplotment and/or the discursive level of narration) can no longer be viewed simply as a way to re-present the fabula or story as if it were a real or imaginarily pre-existing set of events (as a kind of narrative Ding an sich). What we recognise as ‘the story’ is a necessary effect of its narrativisation and cannot be said to exist in the absence of its telling. Moreover, how the story is told, its sjuzhet, can sometimes affect the very plausibility and even the kind of events recounted under the pressure of plot expectations and after-the-fact understandings (Culler 1981: 169–87). More recent narratologists, such as James Phelan, have proposed concepts like ‘narrative progression’ to get around these limitations of the fabula/sjuzhet distinction (Phelan 1989; 2007). Others dispute what they see as the ‘mimetic bias’ of the distinction’s basis in the Aristotelian categories of diegesis and mimesis, arguing instead for the long tradition of ‘unnatural narratives’ as well as more recent postmodern narratives whose very organisation or discursive presentation precludes any reconstruction of some prior set of events filtered through a narrative voice (Brian Richardson 2006). Similar issues are raised with regards to the kinds of narrative possibilities arising from new media and digital technology (Ryan 2001, 2006; Hayles 2008). By far the most prevalent development in recent narratology has been the turn to cognitive approaches that likewise exceed the fabula/sjuzhet distinction in ways, however, that oddly rejoin the earlier formalist and structuralist project to locate invariants at the level of human cognition. This still rather disparate field of cognitive narratology applies with varying degrees of sophistication concepts borrowed from cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and neuroscience to the analysis of narrative, on the one hand, and studies narrative practices with a view to contributing to the general understanding of the human mind and how it works, on the other hand. And while this development in narratology decisively moves the field away from Saussurian linguistics as its founding methodology, much of the work done in cognitive narratology, true to its major inspiration in cognitive psychology, ends up focusing primarily on the cognitive experiences of readers in being able to infer text-based cues to understand a narrative account. As such, the cognitive study of narrative often resembles more traditionally phenomenological forms of reader-response criticism with the added project of wanting to falsify the claims of such analysis through the experiences of real readers captured in the form of empirical and statistical studies that run

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the gamut from low-tech questionnaires to eye-tracking devices. The difficulty of reconciling empirical with theoretical approaches and the resultant charges of eclecticism and reductionism are further compounded by the attempt to model the cognitive behaviours of characters and narrators upon that of readers. But even in the statistical data mode generated from countless individual readers, the model proposed invariably gets reduced to a new abstraction and idealisation of ‘the reader’ as a single entity, who can be further reduced to ‘the workings of a human mind keyed to information processing’ (Bernaerts et al. 2013: 8). A more sophisticated and promising approach is taken by David Herman (Herman 2013), who develops a broad-based theory of narrative based in contemporary philosophy of mind and its literary interpreters (Pavel 1986; Dolezel 1998) as a cognitive practice of fictional ‘worldmaking’ by which humans can make sense of themselves and their environments. Narration can thus be construed as a meaning-making activity, ‘an instrument of mind’. In addition to the sheer explanatory power of the stories we tell about the world (‘storying the world’), we can also take on ‘imaginative residence’ in the worlds others tell (‘worlding the story’): ‘Through acts of narration, creators of stories produce blueprints for world construction. These blueprints, the complexity of whose design varies, prompt interpreters to construct worlds marked by a particular spatiotemporal profile, a patterned sequence of situations and events, and an inventory of inhabitants’ (Herman et al. 2012: 17). The interactive construction of such ‘storyworlds’ through successive framing or ‘scaffolding’ not only proposes a bridge between the study of mind and that of narrative as it points to the ubiquity of narratives across the broad spectrum of both media and modes of interpretation (down to very stories we tell in our daily conversation), but it also provides a conceptual framework for the interactive storytelling or narrative design protocols that underlie the contemporary development of video games and digital environments. At the same time, the adaptive function of narrative as cognitive practice in the constructing or modelling of worlds, whether fictional or real, points us back to Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation as the essential ‘literary’ device, an artfully produced cognitive dissonance that provokes the making of a world, ‘seeing it for the first time’ (Shklovsky 1965a: 13; also Bernaerts et al. 2013: 7), even as what is left of the classic fabula disappears into a mere after-effect of the all-pervasive work of sjuzhet.

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23 NEW CRITICISM Graham Allen

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he story of the rise and fall of the New Criticism is in many ways the story of the emergence of Anglo-American literature studies as an academic discipline and especially within that the emergence of something we nowadays call literary theory. Stemming largely from non-academic cultural contexts, by the 1940s and 1950s the New Criticism became the dominant form of critical methodology within Anglo-American universities. This period saw what has proved to be a lasting influence on the manner in which literary texts are studied within educational institutions and systems. The possibility that the New Critical approach to reading and evaluation did not completely pass away into history will have to engage us in the later parts of this chapter. It is necessary to begin, however, with the still current historical model which presents a story of emergence in the 1920s and 1930s, of dominance in the 1940s and 1950s, and then of decisive critique and rejection in the 1960s. By the 1970s New Criticism had been soundly displaced by newer modes of literary theory, profoundly influenced as they were by developments in semiotics, linguistics, philosophy and aesthetics in Continental Europe. By the 1970s the New Criticism had become the favourite whipping boy in a fight over the heart of literary studies between poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories of language and textuality and more overtly politically and historically oriented modes. As the former trends revelled in demonstrating the fallacies contained within standard New Critical accounts of the poetic text, literary meaning and the possibilities for critical evaluation, the political and historicist groupings used the obvious associations between deconstruction and New Critical formalism to debunk its claims to radicality and relevance. At times, for example, in Frank Lentricchia’s seminal 1980s book, After The New Criticism, it appears all that is necessary to decisively puncture the arguments and practices of the new American deconstructionist theorists, such as Paul de Man and Harold Bloom, is to mention a possible connection to the New Criticism from whom they were supposed to have liberated themselves and their readers. Discussing de Man’s essay ‘Lyric and Modernity’, for example, Lentricchia finds within the essay’s argument ‘one more brand of formalism, another attempt . . . to defend literature as a whole and literary study as an autonomous institution’ (Lentricchia 1980: 309). Here,

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drawing a comparison with New Critical formalism is equivalent to carrying through a decisive theoretical refutation. By the beginning of the 1980s, then, New Criticism, along with ‘formalism’, were dirty words to most Anglo-American literary theorists, particularly those who would reverse the perceived downplaying of literature’s socio-political contexts contained in New Criticism’s mode of aesthetic formalism. That return to historical understandings of literary texts and literary meaning, which commenced in a generational burying of the paternal figure of New Critical formalism, has led to our current epoch in which historicist modes of criticism are just as hegemonic as New Criticism had been in the classrooms and the bookshops of 1940s and 1950s America. The New Criticism, then, still plays a key role in any attempt we might undertake to make sense of the 100-year-old story of literary theory within the Anglo-American world. In providing a dominant theory and critical approach and then later an almost universal scapegoat, New Criticism provides also an intellectual vantage point upon which to observe a conflict between historicist and formalist modes of criticism and aesthetics which has played itself out in a fight for dominance within the Anglo-American domain of literary studies. More particularly, rethinking our relation to New Criticism, the discredited grandfather of modern Anglo-American literary and cultural studies, can also refocus our minds on particular questions of still vital relevance concerning the relation between aesthetic form and the socio-cultural situatedness of the literary and the cultural text.

Diverse Beginnings As various reappraisals of the history of New Criticism have made plain in recent years, the story of its formation is far more varied and diverse than the hegemonic image of the New Critical movement would lead us to believe. William E. Cain, for example, in his contribution to Volume 5 of The Cambridge History of American Literature, has reminded readers of the socially committed modes of Agrarian protest against northern modernity and industrialisation to be found in the Southern founders of New Criticism, such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. The key texts in this early, admittedly doomed, movement for agrarian forms of social and cultural life, which contained ‘bracing criticisms of American society and culture with reactionary proposals for change’, was published in 1930 as I’ll Take My Stand, a text edited by Ransom and including vital contributions by Warren, Tate and Brooks (Cain 2003: 490). Musing on the failure of this text to ignite Agrarian protest, Cain writes: ‘the Agrarians misunderstood the drift of the South to which they preached: they did not perceive that their audience had already converted to industrialism and to the materialism of the New South creed’ (Cain 2003: 490). As they moved their focus towards theories of literature which argue for a critical evaluation freed from socio-political contexts, an appreciation of literature for and in itself,

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the Southern New Critics perhaps displayed their disappointment with a reactionary social project which quickly faded away in the wake of the economic and then global crises of the 1930s and 1940s. A similarly reactionary impulse might be said to have helped establish the critical essays of T. S. Eliot as a major influence over the emergence of New Critical doctrine. Eliot’s major essays, published at the height of European Modernism’s period of creativity, made him what Louis Menand and Lawrence Rainey have called a ‘key figure in the conventional assimilation of modernism and the New Criticism’ (Menand and Rainey 2000: 7). Certainly one can see in essays such as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and the famous review of James Joyce’s Ulysses a view of great literature as somehow compensating and providing meaning in an otherwise chaotic, alienated and meaningless modern world. However, as Menand and Rainey also remind us, the influence of Eliot comes down to the New Criticism through various routes, and perhaps one of the key routes is through the work of the Cambridge critic and theorist I. A. Richards. Richards’s motives for developing a theoretical method were less in reaction to the socio-cultural effects of modernity than the intellectual and critical condition of his students, particularly their struggle to deal with complex literary texts. Richards is a key figure for us, because in his work in the 1920s we see a clear beginning of the desire to reform literary studies into something more rigorously objective than the elitist modes of philology, historicism and complacent humanism which dominated Cambridge, Oxford and other traditional universities at the beginning of the twentieth century. Richards’s 1920s works, such as Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), developed a pedagogical approach to studying literary texts which would provide the New Criticism of the next three decades with an operational focus in which the literary text is reduced down to its own linguistic properties, rather like a butterfly might be taken out of its external setting and pinned up for examination in a laboratory. The student is not expected to know the historical contexts of the text under analysis, not even the author’s biography. In Practical Criticism Richards’s students, like countless other students in the succeeding decades, were presented with texts stripped even of their author’s names. The point was that the traditional focus on contextual knowledge had meant students were underdeveloped in their sense of the aesthetic complexities of literature itself. Richards’s students were to learn to successfully examine and explore the poem as poem, in all its aesthetic complexities, rather than the poem as a document and example of its author, its age, its moment in linguistic or intellectual history.

Formalism and Modernism Richards’s work was a good example of how a move away from the historical and contextual study of literature towards what René Wellek and

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Austin Warren (Wellek and Warren 1949) call the intrinsic (as opposed to extrinsic) study of literary works could be associated with a move towards greater critical rigour and even objectivity. Richards added to this a number of complementary arguments, including one definition of literary texts as based in ‘pseudo-statement’ (connotation) rather than scientific (literal or denotative) ‘statement’, which influenced his student William Empson, as well as the American New Critics. The latter went on to mount a series of arguments associating an ‘objective’ mode of critical analysis with a dehistoricised account of literary meaning. It should be remembered, however, that the emergence of the New Criticism in the Anglo-American environments of the first three decades of the twentieth century goes hand in hand with a wider flourishing of formalism in Europe. As Vincent B. Leitch reminds us, ‘the Russian formalist movement consisted of two groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, active from 1915 to 1920’, which included Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik and Boris Tomashevsky, ‘and the Petersburg Society for the Study of Poetic Language (the so-called Opyaz group), at work from 1916 to 1930’, which included Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum and Yury Tynjanov (Leitch 1988: 46). Jakobson forms one link between the Moscow School and the Prague School of the 1920s, which included Jan Mukařovský and René Wellek. Wellek himself became a major link between these European formalist movements and the American New Critical scene to which he moved at the beginning of World War II. It should be remembered that while these Russian and then Czech formalists and proto-structuralists were often explicitly or implicitly against the brands of vulgar Marxist criticism promoted by the Soviet regime in this period, their work, unlike the work of their Anglo-American counterparts, is not at all reactionary. The comparison is best registered in terms of the respective attitudes to the ‘literature versus science’ motif that runs throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Anglo-American New Critics, whether they be Southern Agrarians and Fugitives or Cambridge dons such as Richards, Empson and F. R. Leavis, tend to see literature as opposed to or in some way an alternative to a scientific view of the world and tend to strive for a criticism equally tilted against science and positivism. As Leitch states, on the contrary, ‘most of the Moscow and Petersburg critics devoted themselves to a neo-positivist program of descriptive poetics based on faith in scientific methodology and in a science of literature’ (Leitch 1988: 46). And yet it remains true to say and important to remember that these different modes of formalism are all responding to a modernist revolution in art, literature and music in which, increasingly, attention to form is questioning or even replacing traditional representational styles and practices. Despite the rhetoric of New Historical rebels such as Lentricchia, there is nothing essentially reactionary in formalism itself. Indeed formalism might be said to remain an important critical contribution to the analysis of twenty-first century cultures which continue in various ways to demonstrate and celebrate

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a- or even anti-representational ways of seeing and ways of saying. We will need to return to the question of form and formalism later.

Main Principles Because of the diversity of its roots and of its major players it is not an easy task to settle on a list of core critical principles the summation of which would deliver us the New Critical credo. However, if we are forced to enumerate some core concepts we might do so by dividing these up into a set of interdictions and, after running through them, enunciating one central positive vision with perhaps still unfolding consequences. The former group of interdictions are best understood by attending to the famous essays by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (which warns the student of literature against basing interpretation of texts on the putative ‘intentions’ of the author) and the accompanying ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (which warns the literature student against basing interpretation on their own subjective responses to the text). In both cases pursuit of the fallacious way of reading commits the cardinal New Critical sin of not basing critical analysis on the literary text in itself (see Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 2–18; 20–39). Similarly, Cleanth Brooks in his essay ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’ from his book The Well-Wrought Urn argues against the idea of extracting a core paraphrastic content from the text, as if content and form were ultimately separable. As Brooks puts it: ‘The unity [of the poem] is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents an equilibrium of forces not a formula’ (Brooks 1949: 189). It is the duty of the New Critical reader to analyse that ‘unity’, not in terms of anything extrinsic to it (and here a host of interdictions rain down, aimed at clearing the fusty traditions of reading literature in terms of its historical, linguistic, biographical, intellectual contexts) but in its own terms, that is to say intrinsically. The common phrase cited within New Critical works which sums up this intrinsic approach (with its series of taboos) is the idea of the poem as poem. The New Critical injunctions against intentionalism, affectivity, subjectivity and paraphrase, like all their accompanying negations, are designed to move criticism back to a study of the poem as poem, the novel as novel, the dramatic text as dramatic text. As Brooks puts it: ‘Obviously, if we can make no judgements about a poem as a poem, the concept of poetry as distinct from other kinds of discourse which employ words becomes meaningless’ (Brooks 1949: 198). New Criticism was such a powerful force because its emergence ran parallel with the emergence of literature studies as a major academic discipline, at least beginning in these early decades of the twentieth century to displace the traditional disciplines of Classics and Philology. In this context, the New Critical concern to return to an aesthetic definition of literature itself was a powerful tool in the establishment of its institutional study and dissemination. As John

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Crowe Ransom puts it in his ‘Criticism, Inc.’ essay: ‘It is really atrocious policy for a department to abdicate its own self-respecting identity. The department of English is charged with the understanding and the communication of literature’, and yet, Ransom goes on, it has over the years become ‘a branch of the department of history’. In an argument which lets us measure the rhetorical as well as the professional power of the New Critical insistence on literature as literature, Ransom adds: ‘Presumably the departments of English exist in order to communicate the understanding of the literary art’ (Ransom 2001: 1112). The logic of this appears self-evident, and it helped the major New Critics gain powerful professorial positions within the Departments of English throughout the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1940s major books were being produced by New Critical authors which would distribute this definition of literature among the new class of literary teachers and students, first at university level and eventually amongst the vast school system in the United States and the United Kingdom. The most influential of these books were a series inaugurated in 1938 by Brooks and Warren with their Understanding Poetry, and followed in the succeeding decade by Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Fiction (1943) and Brooks and Heilman’s Understanding Drama (1945). Beyond all other key terms in the increasingly dominant theory of literature stemming from the New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950s is the word ‘unity’. The poem as poem presents its reader with a ‘unity’ which must be realised (traced, explored, imaginatively comprehended) through a reading practice which does not reach for external crutches and external frameworks to rationalise itself and its findings. The ‘unity’ exists in the great poem (obviously lesser poems have less ‘unity’ and so the concept allows for an evaluation of relative success amongst texts) and must be realised by a sensitive reader whose concerns are with the texts themselves and not with extraneous agendas. Any assessment of the history of New Criticism or of its potential contemporary relevance or influence must account for this theory of literary ‘unity’.

The Powers of Metaphor The New Critics were fond of citing the last two lines of Archibald MacLeish’s Ars Poetica: ‘A poem should not mean/But be’. As Wimsatt states, at the end of his essay ‘The Concrete Universal’, ‘It is an epigram worth quoting in every essay on poetry. . . . Every real poem is a complex one, and only in virtue of its complexity does it have artistic unity’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 81). The poem or literary text, that is, achieves its ‘unity’ through a complex process that involves all the favourite New Critical figures, including paradox, ambiguity, tension, contradiction, stress and irony. It is little wonder, following the aesthetic preferences of figures such as T. S. Eliot, that the New Criticism effected a wholesale re-evaluation of the literary canon in literature written in English. The metaphysical poets, and within that grouping John Donne’s work

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in particular, were seen as exemplifying the idea of the poem as a ‘unified’ world, a verbal icon or well-wrought urn to employ two book titles we have already mentioned. As Brooks and Warren explain in Understanding Poetry: The total relationship among all the elements in a poem is what is all important; it is not a mechanical relationship but one that is far more intimate and fundamental. If we must compare a poem to the make up of some physical object, it ought to be not to a wall but to something organic like a plant. (Brooks and Warren 1976: 11) The statement fits Eliot’s metaphysical-inspired modernist aesthetic, but it is equally reminiscent, perhaps even more so, of the kind of Romantic poetry which New Criticism, following the lead of Eliot, Pound and other modernists, are usually thought to have relegated to the second and third ranks of the literary hierarchy. In fact, New Criticism displays consistent influence from certain modes of Romantic literature, nowhere more so than in its theory of literary ‘unity’ which is thoroughly infused with Coleridge’s theory, from Biographia Literaria and elsewhere, of the esemplastic imagination and its basis in the figure of metaphor. As profoundly, the concept of the ‘unity’ of the poem as poem rearticulates a German Romantic emphasis on the indifference (to socio-political, historical realities) and, ultimately, the autonomy of the authentic aesthetic object, normally associated with the name of Immanuel Kant. Virgil Nemoianu has argued that this specially Kantian influence does not exist in New Criticism prior to the appearance of European critics such as René Wellek at the commencement of the 1940s. He states: ‘the movement, while fully developed and already influenced, had showed few signs that it was aware of its own philosophical pedigree and context’ (Nemoianu 2000: 44). This argument, however, seriously underestimates the role of a figure such as Coleridge in mediating contemporary German Romantic aesthetics to his British and later American fellow poets and critics. Early New Criticism may get its Kantian aesthetics mediated through British Romanticism, what is beyond doubt is the presence of what Jerome J. McGann and many others calls the Romantic ideology of the autonomy of literature and art more generally. A metaphor does not simply draw dissimilar things together and compare them, Coleridge tells us, it finds a fundamental link between those previously unassociated things, and in doing so it creates something new in the world. To cite part of the famous passage on the ‘Primary’ and ‘Secondary’ ‘Imagination’, as opposed to ‘Fancy’, from Chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria: It [the ‘Imagination’, ‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception’] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (Coleridge 1965: 167)

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The passage reads like a New Critical explanation of the ‘powers’ of metaphor. Metaphor, then, becomes the figure of all figures, in that it embodies within itself the processes of organic unity the New Critics wished to argue formed the basis of all good poetry, and by extension all good literature. As Brooks puts it, in his essay on the heresy of paraphrase: ‘The essential structure of a poem . . . resembles that of architecture or painting; it is a pattern of resolved stresses’ (Brooks 1949: 186). Such an understanding of the ‘organic’ ‘unity’ of the literary text reinforces the sense of its autonomy, its cognitive difficulty, its structural and figurative complexity, along with the idea that the task of the critic is to explore, engage with and then represent that ‘resolved’ in the sense of ‘unified’ object to the reader and/or the student. It emphasises, in other words, that the task of the critic is close reading, rather than the pursuit of extraneous contexts, and assumes, given that nothing is being exported into the semantic and figurative domain of the text, that the close reading can itself be ‘scientific’ in the sense at least of ‘objective’. It is a commonplace of literary theoretical history that the New Criticism downplayed the importance and the value of the Romantic poetic tradition. As Mark Jancovich argues: ‘the New Critical definition of literature was not only inapplicable to other periods and movements’ ‘such as Romanticism’, ‘but it was often deliberately defined in order to exclude them’ (Jancovich 2000: 216–7). This impression needs to be qualified, however, as we have seen, since a good portion of the foundational New Critical definition of literature can be said to have derived directly from Romantic poetics and aesthetics. As Leitch states: What the New Critics owed to Kant was an aesthetic rooted in a theory of imagination that privileged, above all, poetic unity, inclusiveness, and harmony. . . . Properly speaking, the true object of attention for aesthetic criteria was the purposive and magical ‘internal form’ typical of singular poetic works. (Leitch 1988: 28) There are also, it should be added, numerous readings of Romantic poetry within the New Critical canon of books and essays. The picture contained within them of what Romantic literature is, however, would be unrecognisable to contemporary students of English Literature, indicating how far the critical and theoretical map has changed since the heyday of New Critical ‘organic unity’ and metaphorically ‘resolved stress’.

The Fall of New Criticism The period from the mid-1960s through at least to the 1990s is frequently depicted in terms of a narrative of the invasion into Anglo-American criticism and theory of European theory and philosophy. Alongside that rise of ‘theory’

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is usually figured a reassertion of historical and political critical perspectives (Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism) which culminates in the emergence in the 1980s of the New Historicism. Because New Criticism became such a dominant part of the critical scene by the 1950s, discussing this narrative of its decline can, rather dauntingly, present us with the task of mapping the entire changing field of critical and cultural studies in these decades. To focus somewhat, and to develop the Romantic inflexed terms of the history of New Criticism just presented, we can say that a common thread in these wildly competing theoretical movements and countermovements are ultimately different varieties of critical dismantling of the theory of literature in terms of organic unity and aesthetic autonomy we have just rehearsed. The Marxist and historicist inspired movements, themselves deeply immersed in Continental theory and philosophy, frequently commenced their critique of New Critical principles by reaffirming the ideological nature of the Romantic ideology of the autonomous text. Part of this critique is a reassertion of the inescapably ideological nature of all aesthetic form. McGann, rather memorably, writes: ‘The polemic of Romantic poetry . . . is that it will not be polemical; its doctrine, that it is non-doctrinal; and its ideology, that it transcends ideology’ (McGann 1983: 70). Interestingly, for the influential British critic Terry Eagleton, the intensity of the New Critical insistence on the separation of literature from history was to increase before being finally ruptured in a general ‘theory’-inspired ideology critique. This deepening of New Critical organicism, exposing its ultimate conservative and religious basis, was to be found in the work of the Canadian critic and theorist Northrop Frye, whose emphasis in Anatomy of Criticism on an autonomous literary universe of archetypes is seen by Eagleton as an expansion of the New Critical position (see Eagleton 1983: 91–4). Ultimately, Eagleton argues, Frye’s Blakean-inspired work exposed New Criticism as limited and eventually inadequate for a post-war critical industry which required a wider vision of the nature of the literary universe than that made possible by any series of rigorous explorations of the organic unity of individual, decontextualised literary texts. Eagleton writes: New Criticism had done its job well, but it was in a sense too modest and particularist to qualify as a hard-nosed academic discipline. In its obsessive concentration on the isolated literary text, its delicate nurturings of sensibility, it had tended to leave aside the broader, more structural aspects of literature. What had happened to literary history? . . . The answer arrived in . . . the shape of . . . Frye’s mighty ‘totalization’ of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism. (Eagleton 1983: 91) Eagleton’s point here, however, worked ultimately against Frye himself, whose work strives to present a ‘science’ but one cut off from the material and

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socio-historical world. It is a point that can also, perhaps, gain us an insight into an Anglo-American professional critical environment which, by the 1960s, was ready for far greater levels of philosophical and critical rigour. The conference, ‘The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,’ held at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Centre, on 18–21 October 1966, is frequently cited as the pivotal moment in this story of ‘the rise of theory and the decline of the New Criticism in America’. The list of imminent European philosophers and theorists present (including Georges Poulet, Lucien Goldmann, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Jean Hyppolite) makes the event appear like a rescue mission of experts airlifted into a failing and vision-free commercial company. The address with which the conference is remembered and by which it was turned into an event is unanimously held to be the one entitled ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, presented by the little-known young philosopher Jacques Derrida. This text, as every student of theory now knows, was the herald of the rise of American deconstruction, or what Wlad Godzich has called ‘The Domestication of Derrida’. With its deconstruction of the idea of ‘centred structure’ and its arguments about difference and supplementarity, Derrida’s groundbreaking essay could be read as a direct deconstruction of the New Critical principles of unity and organic form. The influence of Derrida and deconstruction led many influential critics and theorists of the 1960s and 1970s, including the so-called Yale Critics (Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom), to dismantle the whole array of residual New Critical assumptions still present within American university departments of English and Comparative Literature. Paul de Man’s deconstructive readings of literary and non-literary texts, notably his analysis of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, demonstrate how radically this approach has reversed the idea of the well-wrought urn, the autonomous, organically resolved Romantic icon-poem. By the end of his famous reading, in which irreconcilability after irreconcilability has been exposed by de Man’s scrupulous pursuit of the poem’s language, de Man is ready to announce what might be read as the obituary note to New Critical aesthetics: The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. (de Man 1979b: 69) The ‘organic’ ‘unity’ of the poem as poem is blown apart here, leaving us only the inability to fully live with knowledge of its destruction: ‘It also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy’ (de Man 1979b: 69). New Criticism could be considered to be that

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‘system of recuperation’, a necessary fiction of aesthetic ‘unity’ and meaning, but one in which after de Manian deconstruction we can no longer believe. All the Yale critics, each in their own way, advertise the fact that their brand of deconstructive criticism has taken them beyond formalism, to use the title of Geoffrey Hartman’s 1970 collection. It is true enough to reflect, however, that each of them found this move harder than they had imagined. Despite his earlier title, Hartman opens his 1975 book, The Fate of Reading, by reflecting on, ‘how hard it is to advance “beyond formalism” in the understanding of literature’ (Hartman 1975: vii). De Man’s scrupulous dissection of the myth of ‘unity’ and the aesthetic resolution of difference relies so heavily on close reading of the text in question that it can be read, as we have seen in Frank Lentricchia’s work, as a simple inversion of New Critical preoccupations, without any opening of the text to the various breezes and whirlwinds of history. The New Historicism is radically informed by Continental theory and philosophy, and in its early phases at least was eager to retain an engagement with form viewed as redolent with and generative of ideological meaning. It tends, however, to position itself as a correction to the closed formalism of deconstruction. To quote H. Aram Veeser’s introduction to the collection, The New Historicism: ‘The New Historicists combat every empty formalism by pulling historical considerations to the center stage of literary analysis’ (Veeser 1989: xi). It is a common observation of the current state of the critical environment in a period apparently ‘after theory’ that when such a realignment is effected, and historical considerations are brought to the fore of interpretation, formalism instead of becoming somehow ‘full’ (rather than ‘empty’) tends to vanish altogether. Contemporary British Romantic Studies, after the New Historicism, for example, is being shaped by a concern with what Gillian Russell and Claire Tuite call Romantic Sociability. This concern with literary and nonliterary authors’ private and public immersion in social and cultural spaces of discourse and debate overturns almost completely any of the traditional images of the autonomous artist and the autonomous artwork associated with the Romantic aesthetic ideology. It is a critical perspective which is deeply influenced by the social theories of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose work on the public sphere has reinvigorated discussions of the role of publishers, journals, coffee houses, and all the vast array of social networks expanding and indeed exploding in that crucial moment of history. The picture of the Romantic literary and cultural scene presented by and to most scholars currently working within the field is, compared to the picture inherited from the New Critical epoch, unrecognisably diverse, multilayered, heterogeneous, and in many cases, multiracial. The ‘Habermasian Turn’ of Romantic Studies, however, often encourages critical studies of authors or whole literary groups, which do not contain anything amounting to a single critical analysis of a single literary text. To put the situation succinctly, in the wake of the death of New Criticism and the rise to dominance of the New Historicism criticism

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itself, including anything resembling close reading, has been replaced by something more closely resembling modes of Sociology. To cite John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas: ‘Notions such as aesthetic independence, artistic genius, the cultural and historical universality of a text or work . . . have been successfully challenged by successive investigations into the historical and political bases of art’s material production and transmission’ (Joughin and Malpas 2003: 1). The cost, however, they argue, is as evident as the rewards: ‘What has frequently been lost in this process, however, is the sense of art’s specificity as an object of analysis – or, more accurately, its specificity as an aesthetic phenomenon’ (Joughin and Malpas 2003: 1). There is another loss not mentioned by Joughin and Malpas, that is the growing divide between the variously oriented historical approaches which shape contemporary academic literary and cultural research and the realities of the pedagogical experience of today’s students of literary studies. Although the rise of theory and the New Historicism has positively contributed to a more sophisticated teaching of literary traditions, particularly at university level, it remains true to say that pre-university literary studies, and indeed much of university level itself, including crucially the manner of assessment still relied upon to generate class and year divisions, are still based on training in and insistence on close reading and analysis of discrete texts, practices which bear significant marks of the New Critical past. Our teaching in many ways remains New Critical, even if our critical and theoretical disciplines have long since deconstructed and demolished New Critical institutional power. John Guillory’s point, that New Criticism retained an elitist notion of ‘difficulty’ even as it was adopted into secondary schools and the expanding university sector, need not be refuted here (Guillory 1993: 167–75). The point here is that concentration on close reading of texts isolated from their contexts for the purposes of such analysis remains, despite the state of literary studies, a hugely influential pedagogical model. The influence of the principles of I. A. Richards, especially the virtues of close reading, are in evidence throughout Anglo-American school and university modules and examinations, for example. If New Criticism lives on, or at least if modes of formalism continue, they do so in the classroom, the lecture hall, and perhaps especially the examination hall where analysis of one or a small number of texts remains a stable and valued mode of evaluation of student capability and knowledge. To leave this tension between theory and research and professional pedagogical practice unexamined, remains, at best, a matter of bad faith, and, at worst, a grave threat to the very disciplines of cultural and particularly literary studies.

A New Formalism? We might wish to explain the gap between theory and pedagogy by recourse to the kind of apprenticeship model recently discussed by Stefan Collini (Collini

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2012: 81). A far better prospect for literary studies would surely be to reconsider the role of form and formalism within its theoretical and methodological models. That there are distinct signs of such a reconsideration within the Anglo-American environment is encouraging. In a recent article, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, Marjorie Levinson reminds her readers that the New Historicism was, in its inception, partly ‘new’ because it determined to attend to the role of form in its historical investigations of literature and culture. Levinson’s own New Historicist work within Romantic Studies would be an obvious and a good example. However, it is just as clear, as we have already remarked, that in many instances of the New Historicism the question of form is left as a minor concern or simply ignored. On this basis Levinson distinguishes between two kinds of New Formalism: (a) those who want to restore to today’s reductive reinscription of historical reading its original focus on form . . . and (b) those who campaign to bring back a sharp demarcation between history and art, discourse and literature, with form (regarded as the condition of aesthetic experience as traced to Kant – i.e., disinterested, autotelic, playful, pleasurable, consensus-gathering, and therefore both individually liberating and conducive to affective social cohesion) the prerogative of art. (Levinson 2007: 559) The former would return us to the best examples of the New Historicism, the latter sounds as if it might return us to something close to New Critical orthodoxy. Levinson adds, however, that despite their differences both trends share a focus on and a privileging of close reading: ‘Reading, understood in traditional terms as multi-layered and integrative responsiveness to every element of the textual dimension, quite simply produces the basic materials that form the subject matter of even the most historical investigation’ (Levinson 2007: 560). We might add that it remains the foundational skill of any teaching of literary or cultural texts. One of the defining features of what is being called the New Formalism in criticism, as opposed to the New Formalist movement in post-war poetry (see McPhillips 2005), appears to be this concern to rearticulate the centrality of reading, even close reading, within literary studies and cultural studies. In a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly dedicated to new ideas about form and formalism, later republished as Reading for Form (2006), Susan J. Wolfson joins Ellen Rooney in lamenting the manner in which the recent turn away from an attention to form produces ‘an erosion of reading ability’ (Wolfson 2000: 16). Wolfson adds: ‘Whether the textual object is literary, non-literary, aural, visual, or broadly social, the ability to read is essential for discovering forms that are not known and judged in advance’ (Wolfson 2000: 16). This argument, that reading for form retains with it the

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possibility of surprise for the reader, as opposed to a hunt for paraphrasable content associated with more traditional or ‘reductive’ historical modes, sounds uncannily like a New Critical statement about literature’s enlivening ‘difficulty’. As does, in its grand scope and sense of immediate crisis, the following state of the art statement from Rooney’s ‘Form and Contentment’: ‘The wide-spread disavowal, in literary and cultural studies, of a panoply of formalist approaches, and of the category of the formal itself, has left literary studies methodologically impoverished, cultural studies at sea, and theoretical practice stalled – all three robbed of authority, influence, and innovation’ (Rooney 2000: 26). Again, for Rooney, a reassertion of the importance of form (conceived in complex and diverse ways) involves a necessary reassertion of the centrality of reading in literary and cultural studies: ‘A renewal of the category of form can thus lend a new impetus and cogency to the critical work of reading, beyond and between the disciplines and their privileged texts’ (Rooney 2000: 36). Theorists like Levinson, Wolfson and Rooney are keen to point out the political, historical and cultural nature of textual ‘form’, and so in that way distance their versions of the new from the older Anglo-American formalism. Their versions of ‘form’ see it as the medium within which ideological work is communicated, perpetuated and critiqued. It is, in this important sense, an anti-New Critical view of form. It is a vision of form, in this sense, that for someone like Levinson reanimates the New Historical arguments about history and form made in the 1980s and 1990s by pioneers such as Jerome J. McGann, Terry Eagleton and Stephen Greenblatt. As Wolfson puts it: ‘To read for form was to read against formalism: no longer New Critical explication, the project was now New Historicist critique’ (Wolfson 2000: 3). As we have just seen, however, and as Wolfson demonstrates, the New Formalism could be said to be interrogating the implied and perhaps seriously faulty opposition between ‘explication’ and ‘critique’ in that statement. Levinson remarks on a certain revival of interest in the New Criticism: With remarkable regularity, one reads that New Criticism was more historical and more activist in its notions of form than reputation has it and that new historicism’s notion of form was both more formalist and more agential in its working ideas of form than the current practice suggests. In other words, the sharp antithesis between the two isms falsifies them both. (Levinson 2007: 563) In an increasingly hostile and technocratic environment, in which the literary arts and indeed the humanities are under great pressure to meet and measure up against instrumentalist accounts of learning and education, this discernible return to the question of reading (its centrality and its value) seems wholly opportune. If there is to be, as no doubt there needs to be, a general turn to

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reading, then it is no doubt inevitable that the New Criticism, which has perhaps never left our more unexamined and institutionalised pedagogical practices, should re-enter our theoretical line of vision. Staunch defences of the New Criticism, such as one may find at the end of William E. Cain’s contribution to The Cambridge History of American Literature, are perhaps ill-advised and rhetorical at best (Cain 2003: 572–5). Those who would go back to a vision of literary and aesthetic autonomy are involved in an attempt to collectively forget an age (of theory) in a way that is reminiscent of the doomed-from-thebeginning nature of 1920s Southern Agrarianism. On the other hand, it can be objected that a too literal burial of the New Criticism is what led to reductive modes of historicism devoid of all ability to engage with form and to mount a critical analysis. New Criticism plays a hugely significant role in the history of the development of the professional study of literature, and as we find ourselves in a new cultural crisis and period of radical re-evaluation, remembering its lessons as well as its failures seems both wise and necessary.

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INTRODUCTION: SCIENCE AND CRITICAL THEORY

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ritical theory has drawn extensively on scientific theory throughout modern times, and there is no doubt that science is one of the most stimulating areas of intellectual enquiry of our day. The adoption of scientific concepts into philosophical thought and critical theory has not been without its critics, however, as Arkady Plotnitsky reveals in Chapters 24 and 25. Poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists in particular were to find themselves under attack from both their philosophical contemporaries as well as assorted scientists, most notably perhaps by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their ill-tempered book Intellectual Impostures. The objection seemed to be that critical theorists simply had misunderstood the scientific principles they were incorporating so readily into their own enquiries, in a misguided effort to enhance their intellectual credibility. Plotnitsky, however, makes a spirited case for the importance of continuing to develop the links established between science and critical theory. More recently, the rapidly developing field of cognitive science has come to provide much inspiration for critical theorists, as Peter Garratt goes on to discuss in Chapter 26. Garratt considers its intellectual history, and the various stands of enquiry that this has generated, regarding the ‘cognitive turn’ as a fertile source for interdisciplinary collaboration. Given the advances being made in the field of neuroscience, cognitive theory promises to be a particularly fruitful area of critical theory over the next few years.

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24 CRITICAL THEORY AND PARADIGM SHIFT Arkady Plotnitsky

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he concept of paradigm shift, as it currently functions in scholarly discourse and beyond, is primarily due to Thomas Kuhn, especially his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, originally published in 1962 (Kuhn 1996). The concept is Kuhn’s most famous and most influential contribution. The language has been ubiquitous across our culture, for example, in political discourse, where the talk of ‘new paradigms’ is still current, although (fashions change!) it has subsided more recently. Beyond its fame and widespread circulation, the concept is Kuhn’s most significant philosophical contribution, although his more controversial concept of incommensurability is a close competitor. Incommensurability has also played a more significant role in the humanities and social sciences during the last decades. (It rarely figures beyond the academy, apart from, on occasion, in the popular press, which uniformly treats it with resentment and hostility.) In effect, however, Kuhn’s concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift include that of incommensurability, which gives them a greater complexity and richness, often lost in appropriations of Kuhn’s language, and sometimes adopted by thinking that Kuhn aimed to counter by means of his concepts. It is true, and Kuhn himself admits as much, that his own use of these concepts fluctuates as well, and the number of different uses of the term paradigm by Kuhn or again concepts so designated in his works is quite large. On the other hand, these fluctuations are not random or mutually inconsistent. To some degree, such fluctuations are unavoidable and sometimes are necessary in order to keep a term in play in one’s own discourse and beyond. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, ‘paradigms’ are first defined as ‘models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research’ (Kuhn 1996: 10). Then the concept is given a broader definition, reciprocal with the functioning of scientific communities: a paradigm is ‘what the members of a scientific community share’, while ‘conversely, a scientific community consists of men [and women] who share a paradigm’ (Kuhn 1996: 176). The book, however, also gives the term more narrow but, for Kuhn’s argument, equally

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important meanings, such as that of a ‘constellation of group’s commitments’, ‘disciplinary matrix’, or a shared example through which one’s ‘paradigmatic’ scientific understanding and practice develop in a given field. Kuhn actually sees this last sense of the term as the book’s most significant and yet the least appreciated or even understood contribution (Kuhn 1996: 187–91). As I said, Kuhn also consistently brings his concept of incommensurability, defined as the irreducibly incompatible nature of two or more paradigms, to bear on and integrates them into his concepts of paradigm and paradigm shift, thereby also giving them richer and more radical meanings. Kuhn’s arguably most significant philosophical and historical contribution is his analysis of how incommensurability works in, or inhibits, scientific practice, persuasion, paradigm shifts, and so forth. It is also this analysis that links Kuhn’s work to that of several other key figures that have changed – a major paradigm shift in its own right! – our understanding of how knowledge works in science and beyond, although throughout modernity scientific knowledge has functioned as paradigmatic of all rigorous knowledge. Among these figures are Kuhn’s fellow radical philosophers and historians of science, such as Ludwik Fleck, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, and as well several equally radical thinkers elsewhere, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard and, more recently, Alain Badiou. Before the work of these figures (and a few other contemporaries and earlier precursors), the dominant view of the history of science or of knowledge in general, or of history itself, was based on the idea of an underlying, if hidden, continuous dynamics, usually also seen as enabling the progressive nature of this history. The concept of continuity in question is not straightforward and requires a proper delineation, which I shall offer now. According to this concept, in the course of history as defined by it, scientific facts, theories, and methods are presumed to be in Kuhn’s words, ‘added, singly or in combination, to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge’ (Kuhn 1996: 2). This description also corresponds (within a different overall view of history) to what, in more limited domains of practice, Kuhn calls a ‘normal science’, in contrast to a ‘revolutionary science’, which leads to a paradigm shift. Theories or their parts could be corrected or discarded, for example, in accordance with Karl Popper’s argument concerning falsifiability of scientific theories by experiments, sometimes expressed by statements to the effect that our scientific theories can only be proved to be wrong but can never be guaranteed to be right (for example, Popper 2002). Popper’s argument is one of the more sophisticated versions of the philosophy under discussion at the moment, and it should not be seen as advocating a single inevitable rational method of science, sometimes referred to as naïve falsificationism, a version of the same philosophy, though it may be. Popper’s argument was actually a paradigm shift when introduced by Popper, specifically

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as against the verificationism of the Vienna circle, and it is still valid within certain limits, but questioned by Kuhn and others as concerns the extent of these limits. As a result of the failure of a given theory, the continuity of the process would be interrupted by a discontinuity, possibly even revolutionary in its perceived effect, but only in order for this continuity to be restored by a new theory, in the absence of real incommensurability, which implies the ultimately unbridgeable discontinuity between trajectories of knowledge. Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift also implies irreducible discontinuities arising within some of these trajectories. Each such discontinuity, however, entails a switch to a new trajectory, incommensurable with the previous one, but possibly, even necessarily, connected to some exterior trajectories. Thus, one still deals with incommensurably discontinuous trajectories of knowledge. By contrast, the previous view or paradigm of the history of science under discussion at the moment presumes an underlying, if, again, hidden, architecture of potential commensurability that governs this process. This architecture may be seen, in Gilles Deleuze’s terms, as a kind of continuous and causal virtual, guiding the actual, although this concept of the virtual is closer to Hegel than Deleuze, whose view of the virtual is different and is aimed to undermine this picture of the underlying continuum of knowledge. Within this picture, while incorrect theories would ultimately be discarded, correct or better theories or paradigms would, at least ideally or in principle, be converging toward this commensurability, responding to and gradually making more manifest the underlying continuous virtual of the history of science or knowledge in general, or again, history itself. I adopt Lyotard’s ‘performative’ understanding of knowledge, with scientific knowledge as its ultimate manifestation, in The Postmodern Condition, subtitled ‘a report on knowledge’, in its postmodern paradigm or after the postmodern paradigm shift. According to Lyotard: What is meant by the term knowledge is not only a set of denotative statements, far from it. It also includes notions of ‘knowledge,’ ‘knowing how,’ ‘knowing how to live,’ ‘how to listen’ . . . etc. Knowledge, then, is a question of competence that goes beyond the simple determination and application of criteria of efficiency (technical qualifications), of justice or happiness (ethical wisdom), of the beauty of a sound or color (auditory and visual sensibility), but also ‘good’ prescriptive and ‘good’ evaluative utterances. . . . [Knowledge] is not a competence relative to a particular class of statements (for example, cognitive ones) to the exclusion of all others. On the contrary, it makes ‘good’ performances in relation to a variety of objects of discourse possible: objects to be known, decided on, evaluated, transformed. . . . From this derives one of the principal features of knowledge: it coincides with an extensive array of competencebuilding measures and is the only form embodied in a subject constituted by the various areas of competence composing it. (Lyotard 1984: 18–19)

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The understanding of the history of science and knowledge, or, again, of history itself, as defined by the continuous virtual, as outlined above, is a manifestation of the Enlightenment programme or paradigm, considered by Lyotard via the metanarrative of modernity as a grand narrative. In this grand narrative science plays a leading role, also in the literal sense, as the main hero of the triumphant march of enlightened knowledge and culture (Lyotard 1984). This understanding could be traced, as it is by Lyotard, to Hegel’s concept of history and the history of Spirit [Geist]. This concept, as defined by Hegel himself, has further complexities, which need not be addressed here, because at stake here is not so much this concept as such but certain appropriations of this concept. To put it another way, at stake is a certain form or certain forms of Hegelianism (such as that of Popper, for example) rather than Hegel’s own thought (much more complex and subtle than that of Popper, for example). Lyotard juxtaposes this Hegelianist paradigm to a more Kantian or Kantianist one (again, not the same as Kant’s own), which he sees as closer to the postmodern sense of knowledge, in his definition of the postmodern (Lyotard 1984: 73–4). I shall return to this juxtaposition presently. Foucault would speak in this connection of the ‘modern episteme’, and his concept of episteme may be seen as a generalisation of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm, and was likely influenced by it (Foucault 1994). While, a broader cognitive and cultural formation, an episteme also manifests itself as a manifold of parallel paradigms and paradigm shifts found in the preceding episteme, for example, Marx’s political economy and Darwin’s evolutionary theory as such parallel (developmental or historical) paradigms and as paradigm shifts from, respectively, Adam Smith’s economic and Karl Linnaeus’s biological systems (both lacking historical dimensions). The more manifested complexities in the workings of an episteme also help to understand the complexities, often more hidden, of the workings of more contained paradigms. The (overtly) broader or more complex reveals the nature, or is a better model for understanding of what is presumed to be more narrow or simple, in this case in the multiplicity and fluctuations of multiple trends, indeed multiple paradigms, and multiple historical rhythms within each paradigm and in the architecture of each paradigm shift. I shall discuss these complexities in more detail below. Lyotard adds an intriguing wrinkle on the modern thinking, perhaps in counter-distinction from the Enlightenment thinking. What defines the modern is not belief in the underlying unifying architecture of knowledge, no longer assumed to be possible. Instead the modern is defined by the nostalgia for the loss of the belief in this architecture, as against the postmodern (in Lyotard’s definition), which affirms this loss and welcomes a radical heterogeneity of knowledge and, in Lyotard’s Wittgensteinian idiom, its language games, which are sometimes also paradigm games (Lyotard 1984: 81). The belief in the continuous progress of knowledge, as enabled by an underlying continuous virtual process, as considered above, persists and remains dominant in our ‘episteme’,

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more overtly multiple as it may be (underneath every episteme is multiple). Even the modern view of knowledge on Lyotard’s definition, a view defined by the nostalgia for the loss of the Enlightenment paradigm, is rare, as is reflected in Lyotard’s debate with Jürgen Habermas, a firm believer in the Enlightenment but not modern paradigm, as was, again, Popper (Lyotard 1984: 73–4). This type of belief, it may be added, has never stopped those who hold this view from speaking of paradigm shifts, although more recently, especially in literary and cultural studies, there is a renewed emphasis of continuity vs discontinuity or even vs the multi-rhythmic interplay of the continuous and discontinuous that one finds in Kuhn and others noted above. The question, then, is not so much that of the importance of paradigm shifts, widely assumed, in the wake of Kuhn’s work, to define the transformation of science and other fields, or of broader cultural formations. Instead, the question is what is the character of such shifts and how they are governed, in particular whether one assumes a global underlying (overt or hidden) architecture of the Enlightenment type, as just described, or not. As against many appropriations of Kuhn’s idiom and, in some respects, even against Kuhn’s own grain, Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift arises from a more multiple and more dynamic view of the history of scientific knowledge and hence of the emergence and shifts of plural and often incommensurable paradigms comprising any given scientific field. This history is no longer assumed to be that of a unified totality of knowledge or (these are, again, usually correlative) to represent a teleologically defined progress towards a single goal (in the case of science, for example, defined by the presumed ultimate correspondence between our scientific theories and the truth of nature). Nature may play its role in this history, for example and in particular, insofar as it unpredictably affects the outcomes of experiments (hence, the concept of falsification or even that of verification would still apply within certain limits). This situation makes it difficult to sustain unconditional or unqualified forms of social or cultural constructivism and requires more subtle forms of constructivist thinking. Nevertheless, rather than being defeated by nature, discarded paradigms are much more abandoned by culture, whether the culture of science or culture at large, which always affects any culture within science. It is a more complex question how much nostalgia there is on Kuhn’s part (there appears to be some nostalgic residue in his writings) for the loss of the Enlightenment picture of scientific knowledge and its grand narrative, a narrative that extends the role of science as the main guide of the general progress of knowledge and culture. Most practising scientists, who would consider the situation philosophically, would still presume the strictly Enlightenment picture; exceptions are few. The history of science comprises multiple commensurable and incommensurable paradigms, and multiple continuous and discontinuous developments, in the absence of a single underlying architecture that governs and unifies the process. What defines this view instead is the assumption that the heterogeneity

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within this manifold is irreducible in principle (rather than only in practice), which, however, leaves space for the commensurable interactions between some (not all!) paradigms and historical trajectories involved. It is not only that we have multiple paradigms even in relatively contained domains, as, for example, in quantum theory, where, instead of a single paradigm shift from classical physics, one finds multiple and sometimes incommensurable interpretations of quantum mechanics, on the one hand, and continuities with classical physics, on the other. More radically, each paradigm, no matter how overtly contained, arises from and retains a multiple network of patterns and historical trajectories. The history of a given theory, field, discipline, or knowledge in general has multiple rhythms (plural), in which continuities and discontinuities, causality and chance, homogeneous and heterogeneous, and so forth are all, interactively, at work. While this complexity may be more apparent in the case of broader historical formations, such as those of Foucault’s episteme, and shifts between them, the same complexity, as I said, also defines the structure of smaller historical formations, even relatively contained paradigms. The broader and more complex precedes (logically, rather than ontologically) that which is more narrow and seemingly simpler, which prevents the reduction of the complex to the simple underlying constituents, as Lakatos argued in the case of mathematics, in view of Gõdel’s findings (Lakatos 1983: 3–23) and Derrida, more generally and more radically, throughout his works. (Lakatos still remains too close to the Enlightenment view and even to Popper.) It is also in an analogous logical (rather than ontological or historical) sense that the postmodern, as the irreducibly heterogeneous, precedes the modern for Lyotard. There is always the postmodern underneath the modern. It follows, then, that while part of a broader culture or episteme and history, science or any given field, such as philosophy or literature or art, is also structured as this broader culture and history in the multiplicity of its stratifications of the old and the new, the continuous and the discontinuous, the marginal and the central, and so forth. Thus, as analysed expressly by Kuhn and others, such as Lakatos and, ‘beyond [both] Popper and Kuhn’ by Feyerabend (Feyerabend 2010), in the case of mathematics and science, or by others in the case of literature and art, this type of multifaceted and multi-rhythmic architecture is found in all famous, paradigmatic, paradigm shifts, such as: • the Copernican revolution (both a scientific and broader cultural paradigm shift); • the Galilean or Newtonian revolution (which is more scientific but not entirely so either); • the quantum revolution (the paradigm shift from classical to quantum physics);

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• the Darwinian revolution (in part as a shift from Linnaeus’s classification, but only in part, given the much broader biological, philosophical and cultural scope of this revolution); • the modernist revolution in literature and art. One could also see the same complexity in the case of various paradigm shifts in literary criticism and theory, such as from structuralism to poststructuralism, and then from poststructuralism to more historical paradigms, such as New Historicism. Indeed, the names of these movements, events and histories are highly provisional and reflect more the previous than current understanding of them, at least in scholarly and academic discussions and debates, where we have experienced a major paradigm shift in this regard in the last thirty years or so. The appeal to both names, ‘Galilean’ and ‘Newtonian’, in considering the rise of classical physics as a mathematical science of nature, is one of the reflections of this situation, because this joint appeal masks two different paradigms of doing classical physics, which, moreover, underwent still further changes later on. The modernist revolution in literature and art is multiply named as well, even within each field – literature, visual arts or music. Equally significant here is the interplay of continuities and discontinuities in the processes (plural) defining any paradigm shift, even though some paradigms do die along the way. Some of them may also be resurrected, however, usually with a different network. Understanding this interplay moves us beyond Kuhn’s initial conception of paradigm shift but reflects his later view, as in his 1969 postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or in his 1987 The Black Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity. According to Kuhn and his fellow thinkers invoked here, some of whom took more radical views concerning the subject, the main reason for this heterogeneous multiplicity and accompanying features of the history of science and beyond, such as the role of chance in the rise of and shifts between paradigms, is the constructivist as against the realist understanding of knowledge. The first sees all knowledge as irreducibly constructed by the situation within which it is produced or, again, constructed, while the second sees at least some knowledge, but usually the most essential one, as the disclosure of that which is there independently in the situation that enables this disclosure, an independent reality. The concept of constructiveness at stake has, however, a complex and multilayered architecture, which, moreover, implies (although Kuhn does not appear to go as far) that the ultimate nature of that which makes the construction of knowledge possible is beyond knowledge or even thought, and hence is, or must be constructed as, irreducibly unconstructible. The concept of realism or, especially, reality (which can be retained in constructivist thinking) is far from simple either. I shall now outline both concepts and, again, that of reality, using science as my main example, while

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keeping in mind the broader scope of the concept of constructiveness in question, a scope ultimately extending to all knowledge. I take as a starting point the role of scientific theories in the determination, construction, of experimentally observed scientific phenomena, or what may so appear. This role is recognised within both realist and the constructivist paradigms, but is argued to be irreducible to any specifiable independent reality by the constructivists. Thus, this role was emphasised, from the realist side, by Einstein, who criticised what he saw as the empiricist or positivist ‘philosophical prejudice’, found, for example, in Ernst Mach’s philosophy. This prejudice ‘consists in the belief that facts by themselves can and should yield scientific knowledge without free conceptual construction’. ‘Such a misconception’, Einstein added, ‘is possible because one does not easily become aware of the free choice of such concepts, which, through success and long usage, appear to be immediately connected with the empirical material’ (Einstein 1991: 47; emphasis added). His emphasis on the free choice of concepts in describing reality notwithstanding, Einstein’s position was realist, insofar as our free conceptual construction constructs or approximates reality that exists independently of this construction. He argued that ‘there is such a thing as a real state of a physical system, which exists objectively, independently of any observation or measurement, and can in principle be described by the methods of expression of physics’, especially mathematical methods (George 1953: 7; cited in Pauli 1994: 131; emphasis added). Similar statements are found throughout his philosophical reflections. It follows, however, that insofar as Einstein believed that a description of physical reality is not possible apart from a free choice of concepts, Einstein was not a naïve realist. It is true that ‘the methods of expression in physics’ and inventing or using these methods involve elements other than concepts, such as mathematics, logic, general phenomenal intuition, and so forth, in short, a kind of broad phenomenality, inevitably shaping our concepts and our paradigms in any domain. I shall address the social and cultural aspects of this process presently. Einstein’s assumption applies and the type of description he wants is possible in classical physics or relativity, where we can, in principle, dispense with the interference of observational technology, as in considering, paradigmatically, the motion of planets around the Sun in classical mechanics. Relativity introduced certain complexities as concerns the concept of motion, but it is still a realist and causal theory. Einstein also believed that this is also the case in quantum physics, as against Niels Bohr, who argued the interference of observational technology to be as irreducible there as was the role of concepts, on which point Bohr agreed with Einstein. Bohr thought, on constructivist lines, that reality, as that which is ultimately responsible for what we observe in this technology, might preclude such a description and hence realism, because of the constructive role of observational technology, alongside the constructive role of mathematical technology, in quantum physics and its

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conceptual construction. This experimental situation that obtains in quantum physics and Bohr’s argument concerning it were well familiar to Kuhn, who, among other things, conducted the final interview with Bohr concerning Bohr’s views and the history of quantum theory (Bohr 1962). I would further contend that Bohr’s argument, developed over several decades, roughly from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s (Bohr 1987), had a major impact on Kuhn’s thinking, and those of other constructivists, in various fields, an impact sometimes indirect but powerful all the same. It is worth noting in this connection that Popper was very close to Einstein in his thinking and a strong and vocal opponent of Bohr. One can see this situation through the prism of the Kantian vs the Hegelian position, still, arguably, the dominant philosophical paradigm of understanding the nature of the world and knowledge – a paradigm split and yet interactive, because Kant persists in Hegel, and Hegel was already present in Kant. Roughly (it would be difficult to be more detailed here), Bohr’s view is closer to Kant’s epistemology of phenomena vs noumena: the first are appearances, which we can know, and the second are things-in-themselves (material or mental), which, in general, we cannot know. Bohr, if not quite Kuhn, moves beyond Kant because, while unknowable, Kant’s noumena are still thinkable, specifically by means of the faculty of reason [Vernunft], as opposed to understanding [Verstand], which is only sufficient for thinking phenomena (Kant 1997: 115). In Bohr’s epistemology, the ultimate (quantum) constitution of nature is not only beyond knowledge but also beyond thought. By making noumena thinkable and by allowing this thinking at least a chance to be correct, Kant creates an opening for Hegel’s philosophy, in which the ultimate nature of things, the ultimate ontology, may be available to reason. The latter understood by Hegel as thinking by means of concepts in his sense or concept of concept, Begriff, which is not the same as Kant’s concept of concept, especially insofar as Hegel’s concept of concept conceives of concepts as arising through and embodying the mediation [Vermittlung] of history. (This is also true about their respective concepts of reason.) It would take this essay too far afield to discuss Hegel’s concept of concept and its difference from that of Kant, and it is not necessary here. Suffice it to say that Einstein’s view is Hegelian, insofar as he, as just explained, assumes that the nature of physical reality, again, beyond our interference with it by means of measuring technology (that of our bodies included) could, at least ideally or in principle, be grasped by means of the mathematical expression of physics. Both Bohr and Einstein follow Hegel insofar as they argue for an essential, irreducible role of mediation in any knowledge. In Einstein’s view, however, on the surface closer to that of Hegel, this mediation is enacted only by means of concepts, without giving any role to technology (I shall explain the emphasised qualification momentarily), while in Bohr, this mediation is enacted equally by means of both technology and concepts. As will be seen presently, this quantum-theoretical situation also

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provides, in particular for Kuhn (if, again, not to the radical limits found in Bohr’s understanding of quantum phenomena), a paradigmatic constructivist model, yet another case of a metonymy or synecdoche, insofar as quantum theory is subject to a broader, and specifically, cultural constructivist treatment, is also a metaphor or paradigm. First, however, I shall consider how this broader constructivist paradigm expands, along Hegelian lines but also ultimately breaking with Hegelianism, especially as concerns the unity and continuity underlying the historical development of knowledge. The reasons for my qualification above concerning only a surface proximity of Einstein to Hegel is that the architecture of Hegel’s concept of concept in effect involves both technological and cultural mediation, along the lines about to be considered, except that in Hegel there is no irreducibly unthinkable of the type one finds in Bohr. This brings Kant back into the picture, albeit, as I explained, extending Kant’s epistemology to a more radical form of the irreducibly unthinkable rather than only irreducibly unknowable. Both (metaphorically) in parallel with and (metonymically) extending the situation just described, defining the relationships, either realist or constructivist, between physical or natural reality and scientific theory, one can consider the relationships between scientific theories and broader social or cultural formations, to which these theories belong. On the constructivist view, thus expanded, broader social and cultural, including political, and other extra-scientific (phenomenological, philosophical, psychological, and so forth) forces and formations play shaping, constructing roles in the determination of scientific knowledge, rather than being seen as added to scientific knowledge, as would be the case in the realist or narrow constructivist view. In the latter case, constructiveness is, again, defined by theories or, at most, theories and technology, although, under these assumptions, culture or politics may be seen as being shaped by human thought and action, individual or collective. This difference between the relationships between us and nature, on the one hand, and the relationships between us and culture, on the other, is, according to Latour, characteristic of modernity, and defines what he calls ‘the constitution’ (the legislation) of modernity (see Latour 1993: 39–43). (Latour’s concept of the modern is somewhat different from that of Lyotard, but this difference is not germane here.) It is worth stressing that this expanded constructivism (including in Latour’s later work, in contrast to his earlier work) is never only social or only cultural (a broader category). Kuhn’s combination of his reluctant realism and reluctant constructivism brings him closer to more recent conceptions of constructivism that depart from the social constructivism of the 1970s–80s, such as that of David Bloor’s (Edinburgh) school and related trends, developed in the wake of the work of Kuhn or such figures, mentioned earlier, as Fleck, Feyerabend and Lakatos. The views of these earlier thinkers, just as that of Kuhn, are suspended between realism and constructivism, even the case of Fleck, the earliest and yet, arguably, most constructivist among them, rather than are expressly

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constructivist, as in the case of Bloor’s school (Latour’s earlier work is close and indebted to Bloor’s school). The balance of both is different in each of these cases, shifted more towards realism in Kuhn and Lakatos, and toward constructivism in Fleck and Feyerabend. On the positive side, this balance allows one to read these earlier figures against the unconditional social or even cultural constructivism. On the other hand, their attachment to realism, residual as it may be in some of these figures, also prevents them from reaching the more radical epistemological position as concerns our understanding of the nature and history of science, or of other fields and ultimately the history of knowledge, advocated here. This position, thus, represents a more radical form of constructivism, even though, as will be seen presently, this view implies that certain, arguably the most essential, things may need to be seen as ultimately unconstructible, as constructed as ultimately unconstructible. That said, during a certain period of the history of constructivism, including at the time of Kuhn’s work on paradigm shift, social (the dominant rubric then) and cultural constructivism have played a particularly important role in the change of or paradigm shift in our understanding of the history of science and knowledge. They still do, even though and because this role does not uniquely determine a given construction or, it follows, paradigm that is defined by and defines such a construction, or a shift from one construction or paradigm to another. Accordingly, while keeping the qualifications just given in mind, one might see cultural constructiveness as the most powerful force enabling more radical forms of constructivism, especially in the context of paradigm shift. As indicated above, the constructed rather than pre-given character of the phenomena considered, with nature seen as constructed by scientific theories (or by broader phenomenalities) and technology, and then of science and technology as constructed by culture, is parallel to the constitutive rather than auxiliary role of observational technology in the constitution of quantum phenomena in quantum physics. This, as I explained, still makes quantum physics, as science, subject to being constructed by culture, thus giving the quantum-theoretical situation, considered as constructed by broader cultural and other forces, a kind of doubling, dedoublement. It is, I argue, this broader constructiveness of scientific or other phenomena that gives Kuhn’s and related matrices of paradigm shift their radical features – discontinuity and (they are linked) chance, heterogeneity, incommensurability, and so forth. It is, thus, also this broader constructiveness that necessitates the departure, a paradigm shift, from the preceding, post-Enlightenment, paradigm of scientific knowledge and knowledge in general, although one could also argue that there is no modernity or Enlightenment other than scientific. In the latter paradigm these elements are present, too, but, as explained earlier, they are in principle reducible to the underlying continuity, causality, commensurability, and so forth. Just as these elements, a concept of paradigm shift is possible within the Enlightenment paradigm as well, and as I said, many and

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even most such concepts, including some arising by way of misreadings of Kuhn, do belong to the Enlightenment paradigm. According to the Kuhnian or post-Kuhnian understanding of the concept, however, no paradigm shift or no paradigm itself, no matter how narrow, could be possible apart from its constitutive, constructing field of cultural forces. There may be more narrowly scientific (theoretical or experimental) or otherwise field-specific (such as literary, for example, in view of certain more formal experiments) reasons for a paradigm shift, but neither the old nor the new paradigm, nor the transition between them, involved could be fully determined by these reasons alone. It is conceivable that (again, analogously to the case of quantum phenomena) the ultimate efficacity of effects in question, and specifically those of paradigm shifts is beyond the possibility of description or even conception. That does not mean that which is responsible for this efficacity, say, quantum objects (electrons, photons, quarks, and so forth, or what we name by these names), does not exist, or is not real, but only that we can provide no description or form no conception of how it exists. This reality is, it follows, uncircumventably unconstructible or, putting it more rigorously, is constructed as uncircumventably unconstructible. In this regard, one might speak of ‘reality without realism’, albeit using the term ‘reality’ provisionally insofar as there is no concept of it that we can possibly form, a possibility that defines realism most generally. ‘Reality without realism’ would be close to what Jacques Lacan calls ‘the Real’ (for example, Lacan 1982: 53–5). This conception of reality (just as does Lacan’s understanding of the Real) also implies that the role of chance in the emergence of an event, such as that of a paradigm shift is unavoidable, and moreover, that chance is irreducible to any underlying or hidden causal history, again, on the model of classical physics, so dominant throughout modernity. I shall return to this point presently. The radical epistemology just sketched may not be ultimately that of Kuhn, who, as noted above, while he had always been a qualified or reluctant realist, was also a qualified or reluctant constructivist. This combination is, as also noted above, a useful position as concerns a critique of the unconditional social constructivism, but may also prevent one from reaching the idea of ‘reality without realism’, which precludes an unconditional social constructivism automatically. It may, however, be suggested that Kuhn sometimes comes close in this position, even if reluctantly and against his own grain. At such points, his thinking establishes epistemological affinities with that of such figures as Nietzsche, Bataille, Bohr, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, de Man, Lyotard and Badiou, whose eruptive concept of ‘event’ as ‘an event of trans-Being’ is influenced by Lacan’s concept of the Real and has strong affinities with the idea of event in Derrida and de Man (Badiou 2006: 59). Indeed, it might have been influenced by Kuhn as well. For the moment, this type of understanding of the Real establishes a paradigm, which enables us to think of (the event of) paradigm shift accordingly, especially, and indeed, I argue, unavoidably, in

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connection with the role of chance in this process, although our understanding of chance becomes different as well under these conditions. This is the juncture at which Kuhn comes closest to this thinking, in part on the models of post-Darwinian evolutionary biology and quantum theory, both of which were among Kuhn’s main inspirations. As I said, the history and philosophy of quantum theory was also his primary field of research, the area that also led him to the complexities of the workings of paradigm shifts under discussion, some of which he discovered and explored after his 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (for example, Kuhn 1987). In closing the book, Kuhn invokes Darwin’s theory of evolution, itself one of the great paradigm shifts in biological sciences, as a ‘nearly perfect analogy’ or model, or a paradigm, for ‘the evolution of scientific ideas’, although he also cautions that the analogy ‘can be pushed too far’ (Kuhn 1996: 172). The analogy and Kuhn’s argument concerning it re-emerge at an important commentary of relativism in the 1969 ‘Postscript’, to which I shall return below (Kuhn 1996: 205–6). Kuhn notes that ‘the most significant’ and, to many, ‘the least palatable’ of Darwin’s suggestions is that concerning ‘the abolition of [the] teleological kind of evolution’, insofar as ‘the Origin of Species recognizes no goal set either by God or nature’ (Kuhn 1996: 172). While adopting a similar, albeit more multiple (there is only one life but no single history), view of the history of scientific or other knowledge, or history in general, Kuhn or others considered here do not deny that there may be progress in science or in other historical developments, although the situation is more complicated in this regard in the case of literature and art. What they question and indeed deny is that this progress is towards a particular single goal, either within a given field or discipline or more generally, a view that is, arguably, even more disturbing to the proponents of the traditional view of the history of science and knowledge than an outright denial of progress. The evolution of science or knowledge in general, and the emergence and change of paradigms are defined by a complex interplay of continuities and discontinuities, and (correlatively) of causal sequence and chance events, in which discontinuity and chance are irreducible in principle, rather than only in practice, while hiding the underlying causality and continuity governing the process, as explained above. Just as in the case of biological evolution, it is this interplay that precludes, in principle, teleology. This view also irreducibly localises the determination of the structure of all historical sequences (short or extended) of science and knowledge and, hence, the narratives concerning both, in accordance with Lyotard’s understanding of postmodern sensibilities defined by the incredulity toward all totalising grand narratives or metanarratives. Ultimately, this view entails a radical understanding of chance, correlative to the suspension of realism, which, as explained earlier, is defined most generally by our capacity to form, at least ideally and in principle, a conception of reality. This, as Wittgenstein noted, would imply causality, for that which is

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not causal cannot in principle be conceived (Wittgenstein 1985: 179). I understand ‘causality’ as an ontological category (part of reality) relating to the behaviour of physical objects or systems whose evolution is defined by the fact that the state of a given object or a system of objects is determined at all times by their state at a particular moment of time, indeed at any given moment of time. I understand ‘determinism’ as an epistemological category (part of our knowledge of reality) that denotes our ability to predict the state of an object or a system, at least as defined by an idealised model, exactly (rather than probabilistically) at any time once we know its state at a given moment of time. Accordingly, a given process may be causal without being deterministic. On the realist view, then, the appearance of chance is seen as arising from our insufficient and perhaps in practice unavailable knowledge of the ultimate (always presumed) architecture of reality, an architecture that may and in general is assumed to be temporal. This insufficiency is why our knowledge of reality is in general not deterministic. Were this architecture to become available, the chance character of the event would disappear, and what appears as a chance event would reveal itself as a product of a causal process that is in principle calculable, at least by God. This would also make any paradigm shift in principle calculable. The alternative understanding of chance or, in the first place, reality, as ‘reality without realism’ or, to return to Lacan’s idiom, the Real, that emerges and shapes the radical constructivism under discussion here presumes chance to be irreducible not only in practice but in principle. By this I do not mean only or primarily that there is no knowledge that is or could ever be available to us and that would allow us to get access to or presume an underlying causality behind chance events, which may be the case in the realist conception of chance, as just described. Instead, I mean that one cannot assume such an underlying causality or, again, in the first place, reality as merely unknowable but nevertheless as independently existing, and thus, perhaps, in principle thinkable and, if we are lucky – very lucky! – even thinkable correctly, as Kant thought, in principle, possible (Kant 1997: 115). In other words, this nonrealist view of the Real makes chance irreducible to any causality, knowable or unknowable, because it places the Real itself beyond any possible description or conception, even though the Real does affect and indeed shapes what we can conceive, represent, describe or know. This understanding is in accordance with Lacan’s ‘conception’ of the Real, as that which cannot be given any conception, or related conceptions in Derrida (différance), de Man (allegory), Badiou (trans-Being), or Bohr’s view of the nature of reality and chance in quantum physics. As Bohr says: It is most important to realize that the recourse to probability under such circumstances is essentially different in aim from the familiar application of statistical considerations as practical means of accounting for the

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properties of [causal] mechanical systems of great structural complexity. In fact in quantum physics, we are not presented with intricacies of this kind, but with the inability of the classical frame of concepts [ultimately any concepts] to comprise the peculiar features . . . characterizing [quantum] processes. (Bohr 1987: II. 34) This is because, in considering quantum phenomena, we, in the first place, encounter ‘an essential inadequacy of the customary [we are in 1935] viewpoint of natural philosophy for a rational account of physical phenomena with which we are concerned in quantum mechanics’, phenomena that ultimately entails ‘the necessity of a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality’ (Bohr 1987: 697). While, thus, advocating ‘a final renunciation of the classical idea of causality’ (all causality is, by definition, classical insofar as it is, as explained above, correlative to realism), Bohr leaves some space for the possibility of the concept of reality, as, I argue here, reality, the Real, which disallows realism. Kuhn, who was aware of Bohr’s statement, expresses a similar sentiment, if perhaps ultimately short of Bohr’s radical position, in his Rothschild Lecture at Harvard in 1992: I am not suggesting, let me emphasize, that there is a reality which science fails to get at. My point is rather that no sense can be made of the notion of reality as it has ordinarily functioned in the philosophy of science [essentially a realist notion of reality]. (Kuhn 1992) My argument, then, is that, in the case of the history of science or knowledge, including when it comes to paradigm shifts, the radical suspension of realism, due to the unthinkable nature of reality, makes both chance and, as considered earlier, heterogeneity unavoidable in principle, rather than only in practice. In other words, chance and heterogeneity are the effects of the unthinkable, and as the effects of the unthinkable they are unavoidable in principle rather than only in practice. However, in parallel with the irreducible role of observation technology in defining quantum phenomena, this whole historical situation, including, again, the corresponding nature of the rise and shifts of paradigms is due to the irreducible role of cultural and other shaping, constitutive determinations of this history. Our understanding, scientific or other, of the world, the world of nature or the world of mind or (indeed, in dealing with mind, unavoidably) culture, or changes of this understanding, paradigm shifts, are always defined by our particular interactions with the world and by our negotiations (or the impossibility thereof) with those who have different views of the world. The world that we share with others is the outcome of these negotiations. This understanding, however, leaves space for alternative and even incommensurable views of

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the world and the corresponding paradigms. As explained earlier, this does not mean that one denies that the world or, rather, something that makes what we experience as the world, exists or is real. History goes on, when our views, paradigms, of history (even though it makes this concept possible) or we ourselves are no longer there. One of Kuhn’s major insights is, as I said, that paradigms may as often or more often die (sometimes because those who held them die or no longer have energy to defend them) than are defeated by reality, especially (but not exclusively) when the latter is conceived on a realist model. Nor do those who adopt this understanding deny that there is a certain material world – the world of matter or nature – that has existed when we were not there to interact with it or that would continue to exist when we are no longer there. They do question and some of them deny the realist claim that we can attribute to the world specific properties that could be claimed to be fully independent of such interactions with the world and negotiations between such interactions, because any such attribution would be ineluctably shaped by these interactions and negotiations between paradigms. This shaping, this constructiveness may and sometimes must result in paradigm shifts. It follows that such concepts as world, matter, nature or reality, or any concepts that we can form, including those concepts, such as that of reality as unavailable to any conceptualisation, are themselves the products of these negotiations and interactions. As Bohr once said: ‘the new [quantum-mechanical] situation in physics has . . . forcefully reminded us of the old truth that we are both spectators and actors in the great drama of existence’ (Bohr 1987: I. 119). We can never merely observe the world; we always shape, create the world we observe and, even more so, we shape our view and sense of the world if even merely by virtue of the fact of our existence. One of the most radical paradigm shifts in the history of physics, or even intellectual history in general, quantum mechanics, is still not without confirming an old truth. And yet it also gives this old truth a new, more radical meaning. This meaning which is, again, a reflection of the fact that quantum theory, too, is not only a new theory of nature, but, as, among others, Kuhn has shown, is a product of our interactions with the world and negotiations with others who interact with it, both in the same way and differently, in physics and beyond. What makes quantum mechanics different is, again, that the structure of the theory is not only a metonymic example of this situation but is also a metaphoric representation of it in the way quantum phenomena and quantum theory are defined by our interactions with the world by means of our observational technology. It might be tempting to assume that it is nature itself that directs us to a radical view of human history, including the birth and death of our paradigms. It would, however, be naïve to think that this particular concept of nature is not something that is constructed by us.

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In this regard it is no different than any other particular concept of nature, even though this concept is special because there is no conceptual architecture that could be assigned to it, given that it constructs nature as ultimately inconstructible. As such, this concept is a shaping force in a radical paradigm shift from all realism hitherto, and in our understanding of the nature of paradigm shift.

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25 CRITICAL THEORY AND MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE Arkady Plotnitsky

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he connections between mathematics and science, especially physics, a paradigmatic and paradigmatically mathematical science, and literature or literary criticism and theory are long standing, reaching back as far as the preSocratics. These connections were central to Plato, who positioned his philosophy in relation to both poetry and mathematics (in juxtaposition to the former and in affinity with the latter), and grounded his theory of poetry, accordingly. They were equally important for Aristotle, the author of both Physics and Poetics, subtly interlinked philosophically. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, too, the relationships between literature or critical theory and mathematics and science have been reciprocal, and this chapter assumes and addresses this reciprocity throughout. At stake in these relationships are not only historical influences between theories or ways of thinking in different fields. More significant is that literary authors or critics or theorists of literature confront problems analogous to those previously encountered in mathematics and science, or vice versa. As Niels Bohr argued in the case of quantum physics, but with a broader network of interconnections in mind: We are not dealing here with more or less vague analogies, but with an investigation of the conditions for the proper use of our conceptual means shared by different fields. Such considerations not only aim at making us familiar with the novel situation in physical science, but might . . . be helpful in clarifying the conditions of logical relations which, in different contexts, are met with in wider fields. (Bohr 1987: II. 2; III. 7) This statement equally pertains to the relationships between literature or critical theory and mathematics and science. It follows that, while explicit engagements with mathematics and science on the part of literature and critical theory are important and will be noted here, such engagements are not always the most decisive aspect of the relationships between them. A few preliminary considerations and qualifications are in order before I proceed.

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First, this chapter deals primarily with the relationships between mathematics and science and literary or critical theory, rather than literature or criticism (an engagement with particular literary works), except when literature takes on the role of, enacts, critical theory, and it could use mathematics and science in this enactment. Considering this role or its reversal (which would bring critical theory closer to literary practice) has been a prominent aspect in poststructuralist and deconstructive theory in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes using mathematics and science to implement this strategy. Jacques Derrida’s reading (combining criticism, literary theory and philosophy) of Stéphane Mallarmé and Phillippe Sollers, via Kurt Gõdel’s mathematical-logical concept of undecidability, offers a paradigmatic example (Derrida 1981b). Second, while engaging with literature, critical theory may extend to cultural theory, as it has manifestly done in recent decades, although this has been the case since the mid-nineteenth century, as in Friedrich Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, and to some degree, always, as Plato’s and Aristotle’s works would show. This extension, assumed in referring to ‘critical theory’ throughout this essay, bears significantly on the relationships between critical theory and mathematics and science, or technology. ‘Literary theory’ will be used in its more direct sense of theoretical understanding of literature. For historical reasons, I shall sometimes also speak of aesthetics or aesthetic theory. Third, modern, post-Galilean, science, is fundamentally mathematical, as concerns not only its theoretical character but also experimental character, because it deals with measurement, rather than only observation, as does Aristotle’s physics. The main mathematical-experimental science of the ancient Greeks was geometry, geo-metry (the measurement of the Earth), although one finds, even in Aristotle and, especially, Archimedes, the extension of geometry to physics, as in their proof of the law of the lever. Fourth, while for the most of Western intellectual history, the science that occupied a dominant position in culture was physics, in recent decades, physics was largely supplanted in this role by biological and informational sciences, sometimes in their combination, as in modern genomic, neuroscience, or cognitive psychology. This shift is also found in critical theory’s engagement with science, for example, in the currently prominent role of cognitive and neural sciences, or digital and information science and technology, for example, in posthumanist critical theory and literary studies (for example, Hayles 1999). Fifth, finally, my historical discussion will be primarily limited to the history of modernity, coextensive with and in part defined by the rise of modern mathematical physics and astronomy with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, and culminating, in our own time, with postmodernity, which emerged from the second scientific and industrial revolution, that of information science and technology. The reasons for this are as follows. First, it is modern mathematics and science, extending to their ‘postmodern’ incarnations, such as quantum theory, that are often at stake in the engagement with mathematics and science

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on the part of contemporary critical theory. Secondly, the latter is arguably best seen from the perspective of postmodernity, even though this theory itself is not always postmodern. Of course, the relationships between literature or theories of literature (or art) and mathematics and science are found throughout the intervening history from the ancient Greece to modernity. However, modern (mathematical) physics was a major paradigm shift or an ensemble of such shifts, which crucially shaped modernity and, with it, literature, philosophy, criticism, and literary and aesthetic theory. It would be difficult to speak of modernity otherwise than scientific, even though it is defined by a more complex play of different forces, cultural, political, economical, aesthetical, and so forth, which have, reciprocally, shaped modern science. The initial form of modern science, which for the reasons explained below, I shall term ‘classical science’, emerged, reciprocally with modernity itself, roughly, in the sixteenth century and crystallised, with the Enlightenment, by the end of the eighteenth century. One of the reasons for using the term ‘classical’ is that the first modern mathematical science, apart from mathematics itself, was classical Newtonian physics, although the term ‘classical physics’ was introduced in the early twentieth century, in juxtaposition to Einstein’s relativity and quantum theory. The same type of thinking, ‘modern classical thinking’ (found, qua thinking, already in ancient Greece), was equally important elsewhere, sometimes inspired by classical physics, as in the case of John Locke or Immanuel Kant. This concept of ‘modern classical thinking’ is more in accord with Bruno Latour’s concept of the modern (Latour 1993) or Michel Foucault’s concept of the classical (Foucault 1994) than with Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of ‘the modern’, defined more by its attitude toward postmodern epistemology than by its classical epistemology (Lyotard 1984: 81). I shall henceforth speak of the classical as an epistemological concept, while reserving the modern for Lyotard’s concept of it. The crystallisation of modern classical thinking manifested itself in several major developments in mathematics and science, philosophy, literature and aesthetic theory. Four of these developments are especially important here. The first was modern mathematical physics, which begins with Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century, and grows into a fully fledged scientific discipline in the eighteenth century. The second was the rise of probability theory, one of the most remarkable developments in the history of mathematics, with major implications for science, philosophy and culture. Indeed, the role of chance and probability proved to be decisive in questioning classical thinking and gave rise to a new thinking, in science, especially in quantum mechanics. The third was the advent of a new type of philosophical thinking in Hume’s and then Kant’s philosophy. The fourth was the emergence of the scientific understanding of the brain. It was, it is true, far less developed than other areas of science just mentioned but it was important, nevertheless, especially for Romanticism (Richardson 2010).

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These developments had an extraordinary impact on Romantic literary and philosophical, including literary-theoretical, thinking, such as that of Kleist, Hölderlin, Shelley and Keats, and, to some degree, Friedrich Schlegel (LacoueLabarthe and Nancy 1988). These developments, however, compelled the Romantics, in their literary practice and their theories of literature alike, to question the key assumptions underlying classical thinking, which questioning resulted in what I shall call nonclassical thinking concerning nature and mind, and their relationships. It is true that some ingredients of nonclassical thinking are found earlier. Hölderlin associated this thinking with the ancient Greek thinking in tragedy and pre-Socratic philosophy, which is to say, his interpretation of the ancient Greek thinking (Hölderlin 2009). It is also true that Romantic thinking, as nonclassical thinking, emerged in response to Hume’s and then Kant’s philosophy, by taking it to the limit that Hume and Kant perceived but had been reluctant to accept. I would argue, however, that Romantic literary theory and practice, and even its ability to explore Hume’s and Kant’s philosophy against its own grain, were equally shaped by contemporary scientific developments, arguably, especially by probability theory, which Kant shunned, although he admitted its practical utility (Kant 1997: 661–2). A more sceptical Hume was more open to probability, although he ultimately adopted the classical position, according to which the ultimate nature of the world is causal. This causality, however, is beyond human reach, which ultimately limits us to ascertaining only probable rather than determinate connections between events. Chance and probability played a key role in Romantic thinking and their theory and practice of literature (Campe 2013; Plotnitsky 2015). It was literature and literary theory that stood at the origin of new, nonclassical, thinking, even though they were influenced by classical mathematics and science. I shall explain the concepts of classical and nonclassical thinking in more detail below, limiting myself for the moment to the summary definition of each. Classical thought is defined by its belief in, and nonclassical thought by its scepticism towards, realism (the possibility of describing or even conceiving the ultimate nature of things) and, in part correlatively, causality (the assumption that a given state of a system considered determines all its future states). It is this nonclassical scepticism towards realism and causality that led to the acceptance of the essential role of randomness and probability in our interactions with the world. This role becomes rigorously irreducible in the absence of causality, which the Romantics accepted, against Kant, as possible and even likely in the human world, and which, as quantum theory discovered, is likely to be equally irreducible in nature at the ultimate level of its constitution. Nonclassical thinking extends across the subsequent intellectual history to our own time. Eventually, it came to play a major role in the rise of poststructuralist, especially deconstructive, critical theory in 1970s, shaped its engagement with Romanticism, which is in part why the latter is given additional prominence in this chapter (for example, Hartman 1979; de Man 1984).

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However, it is only a small part of the impact of Romantic thinking, as nonclassical thinking, including on several major developments in mathematics and science. Defined, again, more by the similar nature of problems posed than by historical borrowing, these connections might have been only from the preceding history of scientific thinking – important as this history has been. While the Romantics, in their overt theoretical treatment of literature, were sometimes hesitant to follow their argumentation to nonclassical limits, Romantic literature enacted nonclassical thinking and, thus, became nonclassical theory, similarly to the way modernist literature or art, according to Lyotard, enacted postmodernist theoretical thinking, as nonclassical thinking (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988, de Man 1984, Lyotard 1984). ‘Modernist’ is not the same as modern, understood here as a historical and cultural category. (In Lyotard, ‘the modern’ is defined, differently, as an attitude toward nonclassical epistemology different from the postmodern attitude toward it.) ‘Modernism’ is an aesthetic category that refers to literature and art, such that of James Joyce or Pablo Picasso, that emerged in the early twentieth century. This is not say that nonclassical thinking has not acquired new dimensions with the development of the fields that define twentieth- and by now twentyfirst century mathematics and science. Among these fields are post-Riemannian geometry, topology, set theory and mathematical logic in mathematics; relativity and quantum theory, and more recently chaos and complexity theory in physics; evolutionary theory, genetics and neuroscience in biology; psychology and cognitive sciences; and computer and information sciences. Again, by the law of reciprocity stressed here, these developments influenced, sequentially or in parallel, philosophy (beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche, C. S. Peirce, William James and Martin Heidegger), modernist literature, and from around 1960 on, critical theory, in this case in conjunction with the preceding literary and philosophical thought. Several major figures, who had a wide-ranging impact on critical theory during the last four decades, followed nonclassical thinking, in general and in their use of mathematics and science. The use of topology by Jacques Lacan, set theory and category theory by Alain Badiou, Gödelian mathematical logic (undecidability) by Derrida are among the most famous and influential examples of this kind. Nearly all of the theories mentioned above were engaged with by Gilles Deleuze (also in his collaborations with Félix Guattari) and by Lyotard, who also reflected on postmodern (nonclassical) mathematics and science in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard 1984). Given, on the one hand, the radical nature of nonclassical theories, and, on the other, a long history of the successful use of classical theories, especially in mathematics and science, it is not surprising that nonclassical theories have met with considerable resistance. The resistance to the fundamental role of chance in Darwin’s evolutionary theory was, arguably, the first example of this resistance, still exemplary, although it has been overshadowed by the

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resistance, on the same grounds, to quantum theory. More recently, several postmodernist figures, including those mentioned above, were accused not only on the account of the unsound or even fraudulent nature of their theories, but also of misusing or abusing mathematics and science to advance their radical agendas. These types of attack on postmodern or nonclassical thinking led to the so-called ‘Science Wars’ from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, opened by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstitions: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Gross and Levitt 1997) and Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures (Sokal and Bricmont 1998). Both books also attacked recent parallel trends in the philosophy, history and sociology of science. It is, again, true that scientific theories with nonclassical orientations or implications, most especially quantum theory, and the related philosophical thinking, including by scientific figures, encountered much resistance throughout their history. It is equally true that the work of most key philosophical figures mentioned above and targeted during the Science Wars encountered similar resistance throughout the history of their reception in the humanities. Although most famous, Einstein’s discontent with quantum mechanics, expressed by his often cited ‘God does not play dice’, is only one example of this resistance, a rather restrained example, because Einstein acknowledged that quantum mechanics discovered ‘a beautiful element of the truth about nature’, but only an element. Einstein’s discontent, moreover, reflected profound philosophical stakes, manifested especially in his famous debate with Bohr concerning quantum theory (Bohr 1987: II. 32–66). The resistance to nonclassical or postmodernist aspects of mathematics and science or ‘postmodernist’ views of them by some mathematicians and scientists appears in hardly restrained and often hostile form. It rarely, if ever, exhibits the level of philosophical acumen found in Einstein’s or other earlier critics, scientists or philosophers. For that reasons, I shall bypass the ‘Science Wars’ debates, and shall refer to fully fledged responses to it (see Latour 1999, Plotnitsky 2002). Regardless of possible problems with the work of postmodernist authors under criticism, arguments against them by Gross and Levitt, Sokal and Bricmont, and most other critics in the scientific community can hardly be seen as scholarly, intellectually or ethically sound. Nor are these arguments in accord with the spirit of scientific inquiry, which, one presumes, these scientists respect in their scientific work. Let me stress that I only refer to most of the ‘Science Wars’ criticism, and not to the views concerning these subjects of the scientific community in general. Indeed, it is my view that such critics as Gross and Levitt or Sokal and Bricmont do not represent science or scientists. The criticism of these authors is disabled by: (1) their lack of necessary familiarity with specific subject matter, arguments, idiom and context of most works they criticise; (2) their inattentiveness to the historical circumstances of using mathematical and scientific ideas in these works; (3) their lack of the philosophical acumen

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necessary for understanding most of the works in question; and (4) their manifestly insufficient expertise in the history and philosophy of mathematics and science. The ‘postmodernist’ statements and arguments in question are parts of complex conceptual architectures and textual and contextual networks. They make little, if any, sense without taking the latter into account, or without translating these statements and argument into more accessible idioms. The philosophical substance of these arguments requires no mathematics or science as such, which one can ‘decouple’ from these arguments by ‘translating’ their statements containing mathematical and scientific references into statements free from them. The reverse, however, cannot be done: one cannot decouple ‘Lacan’, ‘Deleuze’, ‘Derrida’, ‘Irigaray’, or ‘Badiou’, from the ‘mathematics’ or ‘science’ they use. While the more egregious excesses of the Science Wars have subsided by now, their detrimental effects have been palpable throughout the last two decades. It is especially regrettable that these attacks were welcomed by some, and not in negligible numbers, on the humanist side, especially public intellectuals, which reveals a general resistance to postmodernist thinking. This resistance is a reflection of the fact that classical thought continues to shape our thinking and culture. Classical thought can be effective and is, within certain limits, unavoidable. It is also found and is unavoidable in nonclassical thought. In other words, it is not classical thought that is a problem for nonclassical thought, but the claims concerning the unlimited validity of classical thought, which are common, at least as claims in principle (practical limitations are readily acknowledged). On the other hand, nonclassical thought is a problem for classical thought, because nonclassical thought is incompatible with some of the imperatives of classical thought, especially if these imperatives are applied unconditionally and without limits. In Bohr’s words, capturing the essence of nonclassical thought in quantum theory, ‘we are not dealing with an arbitrary renunciation of a more detailed analysis of atomic [quantum] phenomena, but with a recognition that such an analysis is in principle excluded’ beyond a certain point (Bohr 1987: II. 62; emphasis added). This statement reflects the following situation. Quantum objects, which are responsible for what we macroscopically observe in measuring instruments as quantum phenomena, do exist; they are real. There is, however, no possibility, at least as things stand now, to represent or even conceive of their existence, which possibility defines what is commonly called realism. Similarly to what Lacan calls ‘the Real’, quantum reality is ‘reality without realism’, whether, to continue with Lacan’s idiom, this realism is imaginary, symbolic, or other. Quantum theory in this type of interpretation (there are competing interpretations) must advance thinking and knowledge while accepting uncircumventable limits upon how far they could in principle reach. The same is true in the practice of nonclassical or postmodern thought elsewhere. Classical thought, by contrast, only admits practical and ever-diminishing limitations upon its power. Modern thought, as defined by Lyotard, is characterised by

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a different attitude toward nonclassical epistemology, rather than by classical epistemology. While modern thought de facto accepts the nonclassical or postmodern epistemological situation as a possibility or even actuality, it has nostalgia for the belief in the classical world (Lyotard 1984: 81). The presence of the uncircumventable limits of thought and knowledge in nonclassical or postmodern theories need not mean that they can no longer advance thinking and knowledge; on the contrary, these limits are the conditions of new thinking and knowledge, which would be impossible otherwise. Before I explain Lyotard’s argument concerning the postmodern, I would like to comment on a few alternative conceptions of the postmodern to give a better picture of the tangled landscape of contemporary critical theory, and the role of mathematics and science in it. Fredric Jameson’s theorising of postmodernism as, in his well-known title phrase, ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ (Jameson 1992), has been arguably most prominent in critical theory. While indebted to Lyotard (Jameson wrote a foreword to The Postmodern Condition), Jameson’s ‘postmodernism’ is different from that of Lyotard, first, because of the fundamental role of base-superstructure relationships between capitalism and postmodernism in Jameson’s Marxist argument, which Lyotard does not see as fundamental. Secondly, and most importantly in the present context, mathematics and science play no role in Jameson’s argument. These are, however, mathematics and science, in combination with the role of narrative, narrative in general and postmodern narrative, defined by the irreducible multiplicity of narratives (against the single governing grand narrative of modernity), and thus in combination with a literary category, that define the radical, nonclassical nature of postmodern knowledge in Lyotard. Mathematics and science and critical theory work together in Lyotard in enabling him and us to understand and define the postmodern, and reciprocally, science, literature and critical theory, including when it comes to narrative and its role in mathematics and science, which recently received new attention in critical theory and beyond (Doxiades and Mazur 2012). Both Lyotard’s work and that of Jameson have been influential in literary studies from the 1980s on. One might mention such scholars as Brian McHale (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction) and Linda Hutcheon (Hutcheon 1988), both more indebted to Lyotard and related poststructralist trends than to Jameson. It may be added that Thomas Pynchon’s novels, used as a paradigmatic example of postmodern literature by McHale, and their pointed engagement with mathematics and science have been especially prominent in recent criticism and critical theory, and have been also discussed by mathematicians and scientists. Proceeding, again, along the lines of exploring analogous problems arising in different domains, Pynchon’s engagement with science is different from that of depicting science in a given work or using it metaphorically, as, for the most part, in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and most discussions of them, including by mathematicians and scientists.

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The term ‘postmodern literature’ had been in circulation by the early 1970s, and thus before Lyotard injected the language of the postmodern into contemporary theoretical and cultural debates. The term has, for example, been used to refer to certain works of contemporary literature, roughly, from the 1950s on, thus often connoting, more literally, literature that comes after modernism, rather than certain specifically postmodern works of the last four decades, as discussed by Jameson, for example. Postmodern thinking and knowledge has, Lyotard argues, emerged as part of the transformation, sometimes referred to as the second industrial revolution, defined by the rise of new, especially digital, information technologies. While at the time of Lyotard’s ‘report’ (in 1979) these technologies (still in their infant stages from today’s vantage point) were becoming dominant in the so-called industrialised societies, by now, thirty-five years later, they have spread and became ubiquitous globally. In this respect, postmodernism may be seen in relation to late capitalism, which was largely responsible for the development and use of these technologies, and as such postmodernism may be connected to the cultural logic of this (‘late’) global capitalism. This, however, is not the same as being identified with this logic, as in Jameson. Besides, as Lyotard argues, many key aspects of postmodern thought had emerged in philosophy, art, and mathematics and science, much earlier, some of them, again, traceable, to the 1900s, especially quantum theory, or even earlier. Lyotard does not consider works of literature and art, from the late 1970s on, such as those that attracted Jameson’s attention as postmodernist. This is not surprising, given that these works are characterised by postmodernist features, such as their emphasis, à la Jean Baudrillard, on ‘simulacra’ and ‘appropriation’, or their overt critique of post-industrial capitalism, that are different from those at the core of Lyotard’s argument concerning the postmodern. Literature and art, such as that of Joyce, the Cubists, Duchamp and Barnett Newman, which Lyotard considers in conjunction with postmodernism, have been more customarily seen as ‘modernist’. The postmodern is, it may be added, doubly defined by Lyotard in two companion works, more narratively, in The Postmodern Condition, dealing with science, and more epistemologically (in terms of the unrepresentable in presentation) in ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ (Appendix to Lyotard 1984), dealing with literature and art. This doubling, accompanied by the fact that Lyotard uses a literary category in considering science, makes this definition paradigmatic of the postmodern, beyond ‘the two cultures’, relationships between science and the humanities. For Lyotard, or myself, the postmodern, is not primarily a matter of history, although history, specifically that of postmodern culture, is important. At stake rather, as stressed from the outset, is the character of thought in all these fields and their interactions. Some ingredients of postmodern thought could be traced throughout modernity, for example, as explained above, to Romantic thought and related mathematics and science, and Lyotard’s argument pursues

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this longer history. Postmodern or nonclassical thought is a particular way of thinking concerning certain phenomena, a rigorous understanding of which indeed requires this thought. Postmodern or, again, nonclassical thinking and knowledge, is defined by interactively: (1) irreducible multiplicity; (2) the irreducible unthinkable in thought; (3) irreducible randomness or chance and probability; (4) the irreducible materiality of all objects and (as the irreducibly underlying efficacity) of all phenomena considered, although qua phenomena all such phenomena are mental. The irreducible character of each is essential, because philosophy, science, or literature and art have been concerned with multiplicity, the unthinkable, or randomness and probability long before postmodernism. The question is how we conceive of them. Consider the case of multiplicity, a concept arguably most commonly associated with postmodernism, in particular, by Lyotard, and arguably most central to the current stage of critical theory, especially in its multidisciplinary and multicultural aspects. There have been important instances of denying the necessity or even the possibility of maintaining the idea of multiplicity at the ultimate level of existence, beginning with Parmenides’ concept of the One, as defining the ultimate reality of things, and Plato’s extension of this concept. Difference, multiplicity and change, or nature (physis), were in his view illusions of senses, to be overcome by philosophical thought. (While I primarily refer to the multiple because of its role in the postmodern, my argument extends to the concepts of difference and change.) The idea has found its arguably most prominent recent reincarnation in the twentieth-century ‘mathematical Platonism’, still widespread among mathematicians. However, throughout history, our understanding of nature and mind was more commonly shaped by considering the role of difference, multiplicity and change in their workings, even when assuming the underlying Oneness. What has been primarily at stake, from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger and beyond, is not so much the undifferentiated Oneness, even if one assumes this Oneness as the ultimate nature of reality, but how the play of difference, multiplicity or chance is contained or controlled. Classical thought sees the multiple as, in Badiou’s idiom, the multiple-One, which is to say, it assumes that, at the ultimate level, this multiple-One dissolves into the One-without-multiple, as in Plato (Badiou 2007: 29). Heidegger offers arguably the culminating conception of the multiple-One: ‘The [multiple] meaningfulness is based on a play [Spiel] which, the more richly it unfolds, the more strictly it is held . . . by a hidden rule. . . . This is why what is said remains bound into the highest law’ (Heidegger 1958: 104–5). By contrast, the nonclassical or postmodern multiple is the multiple-without-One, or, to push the concept beyond Badiou, even the multiple of multiples-without-One, a form of multiplicity that cannot be subsumed by any unity or even in principle containable multiplicity, in other words, be bound

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by any single rule or law. Lyotard’s argument concerning the postmodern and narrative in The Postmodern Condition can be seen in terms of the narrative multiple-without-One, the multiple that cannot be governed by any single narrative, or in Lyotard’s terms by a grand narrative or metanarrative. Postmodern thinking, according to Lyotard, is characterised by its scepticism (‘incredulity’) towards grand narratives, in particular those of scientific progress, which have defined modernity or modernity’s view of itself. The same view of the multiple as the multiple-without-One defines Lyotard’s argument, via Ludwig Wittgenstein, concerning heteromorphous language games of postmodernity, games that cannot be fully coordinated, let alone governed by a single language game. Some of them cannot be positively related at all: they are ‘incommensurable’. These two multiplicities, that of narratives and that of language games, are interactive, and postmodern thinking and life are shaped by both and by still other multiplicities, and thus by the multiple of multiples. Nonclassical and postmodern thought relates the irreducibly multiple to the irreducibly unthinkable, which makes all knowledge irreducibly incomplete insofar as a complete analysis of the phenomena considered is, to return to Bohr’s phrase, ‘in principle excluded’, and, by the same token, irreducibly probabilistic, which is not the same as random (Bohr 1987: II. 62). The term ‘incompleteness’ is only used here in juxtaposition to the classical concept of completeness rather than aimed to imply that a more complete thinking or knowledge is possible under these conditions. Lyotard comes closest to this conception in his definition of the postmodern, offered in the context of literature and art but extendable to all postmodern thought, thus, confirming the principle of reciprocity between science and literature or art, or critical theory. He says: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the un-presentable in presentation itself; that 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; [the postmodern is] that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. (Lyotard 1984: 81) As I explained, this nostalgia for the unattainable is, in general, not found in classical thought, thus defining the difference between the classical, as understood here, and the modern in Lyotard’s sense. One encounters parallel conceptions of the un-presentable in Lacan (the Real), Derrida (différance), de Man (on allegory), and Badiou (the event as trans-being), keeping in mind the differences between these thinkers and different degrees of unthinkability that they pursue. Ultimately, one can think of this un-presentable as being beyond thought altogether, as being unthinkable even as unthinkable. At the same time, these unthinkable strata are efficacious in the sense of being responsible

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for what we think and know, which, again, means that postmodern or nonclassical thinking unavoidably involves classical thinking. Accordingly, Lyotard is right to speak of the un-presentable in presentation, in the sense that it is made necessary because of its effects on what is presented. Classical thought is, again, defined by the possibility, at least ideally or in principle, of the completeness of knowledge, and thus also by the possibility of containing, at least in principle, the multiplicity of their practice. In part occasioning Lyotard’s reflections on postmodernity, Jürgen Habermas lamented our inability or lack of determination to pursue the project of the Enlightenment grounded in this possibility (Lyotard 1984: 66–7, 72–3). More accurately, one should speak of a certain project of the Enlightenment, since, as Foucault reminded us in ‘What is the Enlightenment?’ (Foucault 1984), the Enlightenment has other projects and other, sometimes nearly postmodern, ways of thought. One of Lyotard’s points was that twentieth-century (and even earlier) mathematics and science appear to direct us towards nonclassical and postmodern thought and knowledge. His argument concerning science, made throughout in The Postmodern Condition, is as follows. If we want, as the Enlightenment thinkers did at the time, to model our thinking on mathematics and science, we should not perhaps use for these purposes the eighteenth-century mathematics and science or conceptual philosophical models that ground them. Instead, we should consider first what mathematics and physics, in particular quantum theory (Lyotard 1984: 55–8), or biology and neuroscience, tell us now. And what they appear to tell us may allow for, and even require, postmodern thought. In other words, postmodern thought is closer to contemporary mathematics and science than Enlightenment-like thinking is, and literature, in part helped by mathematics and science (just as mathematics and science were helped by literature), teaches us the same lesson, and shapes critical theory and its relations to mathematics and science accordingly. Randomness or chance and probability play major roles in postmodern or nonclassical thinking – scientific, literary, philosophical or cultural, including political. Some brief definitions are in order. A chance event is an unpredictable, random event. By contrast, probability, which measures our expectations concerning events whose occurrence (say, how a tossed coin will fall) cannot be predicted with certainty, introduces an element of order in our interactions with randomness and chance. Randomness and chance are not quite the same either, but the difference between then is not germane here. I would like, however, to distinguish causality and determinism. As indicated earlier, I use ‘causality’ as an ontological category relating to the behaviour of systems whose evolution is defined by the fact that the state of the system is determined at all points by its state at a given point. I use ‘determinism’ as an epistemological category having to do with our ability to predict exactly the state of a system at any and all points once we know its state at a given point, at least in idealised

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cases. The main question is whether randomness or chance is a manifestation of causality, however hidden, or not. These two alternatives define the two corresponding concepts of chance – classical, which entails a hidden causality behind chance, and nonclassical, which is also postmodern, in which case we do not or cannot assume any causality behind chance. In classical physics, randomness and probability result from insufficient information concerning systems that are at bottom causal. It is their complexity (due, say, to the large numbers of their individual constituents) that prevents us from accessing their causal behaviour and making deterministic predictions concerning it. Thus, classical mechanics deals deterministically with causal systems; classical statistical physics deals with causal systems, but only statistically; and chaos and complexity theories deal, probabilistically (which also refers to individual processes and events, rather than, as statistics, to collective ones), with systems that are causal, but whose behaviour cannot be predicted exactly in view of its highly non-linear character, also known as their sensitivity to the initial conditions. The causal character of chaos and complexity theories is not always realised in literary studies, where both enjoyed some prominence during the recent decades (for example, Hayles 1991, Clarke and Rossini 2012). By contrast, quantum mechanics offers predictions, in general probabilistic, concerning quantum events, observed in measuring instruments, without explaining the physical processes through which these events come about. Even though the probabilistic predictions of quantum mechanics are subject to rigorous mathematical laws, randomness and probability do not appear to arise, as in classical physics, merely in view of our inability to access the underlying causal dynamics determining the behaviour of quantum systems. For technical reasons that I cannot discuss here, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assume quantum behaviour to be causal or, to begin with, see it in realist terms, that is, to assign this behaviour a specifiable classical-like ontology (Plotnitsky 2002: 12–21, 313–52). Indeed, the character of the existence of quantum objects is such that it may disallow us not only to describe this existence but also to form a conception of it. That this type of epistemology is possible and may even be necessary in one scientific theory is a crucial point. It tells us that this epistemology is not merely an invention of (postmodern) imagination, for example, a literary one, such as that of Kafka, Joyce, Beckett or Pynchon, into whose works and thinking this epistemology came from quantum physics. In science, nonclassical thought came into prominence, with the help of nature and technology, from remarkable, previously unknown or even unimaginable, phenomena, such as those discovered in quantum physics in the early twentieth century. Previous developments in mathematics and science that had nonclassical features or implications have not received much attention, apart from Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which, however, allows for classical interpretations. By then, classical thinking had become a form of ideology, which

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defined our culture itself as classical and then modern. Romantic thinking is an exception, but its nonclassical character was never widely acknowledged, let alone followed, until the twentieth century. The classical or modern view of chance, as ultimately grounded in causality, most famously expressed by Laplace (who nevertheless made a major contribution to probability theory), has been part of the dominant scientific and philosophical ideology, and it has had the backing of many major figures in science, from physics to evolutionary theory. Einstein, again, led the way in his criticism of quantum theory. Einstein’s hope for a classical-like fundamental theory has not materialised thus far, although the search for classical-like alternatives to quantum mechanics has never stopped and still ongoing, and may be expected to continue indefinitely. Literature has been much more open to the nonclassical view of chance or in the first place reality, ‘reality without realism’, and to the corresponding scientific theories, such as evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics. On the other hand, one should be careful not to misread some of those among earlier authors, who, while giving prominence to randomness or chance, ultimately see it as underlined by classical-like reality. The Romantics are, again, an exception in this regard. Generally, however, the nonclassical view of chance and probability becomes prominent in modernism, in part under the impact of quantum theory. The situation in science is peculiar, and, unsurprisingly, it finds a partial parallel in philosophy or critical theory, which both advances and resists the nonclassical and the postmodern, sometimes appealing to science for either type of arguments, and science, being diverse enough, is always ready to oblige in helping either argument. On the one hand, quantum theory and other scientific theories that, at least, allow for postmodern interpretations are among the most effective theories we have, and this effectiveness is recognised by all parties concerned. (The case is more complex in philosophy or critical theory, where this type of effectiveness has often been denied, even in the absence of rigorous evidence, in part because what constitutes evidence is a more complex matter than in science.) On the other hand, the nonclassical epistemological aspects of these theories compel many to look for classical-like alternatives. Such alternatives cannot be excluded, because our fundamental theories, as they stand now, are incomplete. At present, however, there are no signs that such alternatives are any more likely than nonclassical or yet more radical ones. According to Anton Zeilinger, one of the leading quantum physicists in the world, and co-authors: We suggest that these [classical alternatives] are simply attempts to keep, in one way or other, a realistic view of the world. It may well be that in the future, quantum physics will be superseded by a new theory, but it is likely that this will be much more radical than anything we have today. (Zeilinger et al. 2005: 236–7)

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The argument just sketched extends to recent developments in information science and technology, and more recent, let us call them, bio-technological debates, which affect and even directly enter critical theory as well. As JeanPierre Dupuy notes, in commenting on the prominent and even dominant ideology found in nanotechnology, a frequent subject in current discussion in critical theory (Clarke and Rossini 2012): An expression in the form of an oxymoron sums up all this [ideology] very well: nature has become artificial nature. . . . The next stage obviously consists in asking whether the mind could not take over from nature in order to carry out its creative task more intelligently and efficiently. Damien Broderick asks: ‘Is it likely that nanosystems, designed by human minds, will bypass this Darwinian wandering, and leap straight to design success?’ [Broderick 2001: 118]. In a comparative cultural studies perspective, it is fascinating to see American science, which has to carry on an epic struggle to root out of public education every trace of creationism, including its most recent avatar, intelligent design, return to the design paradigm through the intermediary of the nanotechnology program, the only difference being that man now assumes the role of the demiurge. (Dupuy 2010: 158) One might, following Heidegger and Derrida, call such materialist, rather than theological (as the conventional intelligent design is), conceptions of design and its grand narratives ‘ontotheological’. For the present purposes, ontotheology can be defined as that which is modelled on theology without being theological. The difference between theology and materialist ontotheology is not insignificant and may merit more emphasis than Dupuy’s ‘only’ might suggest. Nevertheless, it is striking that the proponents of nanotechnological or other biotechnological design theories aims to give them the metaphysical basis that, while materialist, is structurally the same as that of the intelligentdesign theory in evolutionary biology. The paradigm of design in these new fields originates in cybernetics and subsequent developments in computer science and information theory. These developments contributed to and were even largely responsible technologically for ‘the postmodern condition(s)’ that led to the rise of postmodern thought, knowledge and culture. They have also played an important role in the development of postmodern thinking by helping to dislocate modernity’s concept of subjectivity, defined in part by bracketing, from the opposite sides, both concepts, the ‘animal’ and the ‘machine’, from their conceptions of the constitution of the human subject. This problematic was addressed by critical theory throughout its postmodern phase, in part under the impact of French theorists discussed above, for example Derrida (Derrida 1982: 109–36). At the same time, some of these developments have exhibited strong ontotheological and, specifically, intelligent-design-like traits,

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similar to those found in nanotechnology, as Dupuy indicates as well (Dupuy 2010: 155–6). One example would be the field of artificial-intelligence (AI) programmes, especially the so-called strong AI, which, roughly, assumes that human or human-like intelligence and consciousness can be enacted by a digital computer. This kind of double and even schizophrenic attitude – the postmodern decentering of subjectivity or post-subjectivity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ontotheology of the post-human ‘intelligent design’ – also defines certain recent (‘posthumanist’) trends in critical theory and elsewhere in the humanities. In this domain, too, critical theory, especially in its relation to science, is confronting the situation discussed throughout this chapter: that of the conflict between classical and nonclassical or postmodern ways of understanding literature or culture and science, and their relationships, with what Lyotard called the modern anxiously and nostalgically suspended between them. But why should it matter, and to whom? I think it does matter and not only in academic debates, where the rigour of our argumentation (which, again, does not compel us to negate classical thinking but only to redelimit it), but also beyond them, and this ‘beyond’ in turn matters in academic debates and shapes them. The question is whether our aspirations for a better, more just society may be more effectively served if one understands the world in terms of classical-like ideologies and grand narratives, even if competing ones, for example, those of the scientific Enlightenment vs those governed by other forms of ontotheology or even theology, or if one understands the world by means of postmodern thinking. Our possible actions in the world would be shaped, even if not necessarily fully determined, differently as a result. I am willing to grant such aspirations to critics of postmodernism, such as Habermas, whom Lyotard, too, credits with having a good aspiration – that for a more just society – but not with a good argument concerning how to achieve it or a good concept of justice to begin with (Lyotard 1984: 66–7). First, then, when it comes to conceiving of a more just society is the ontotheological scientific Enlightenment better than theological understanding of the world? Perhaps and perhaps even likely! In fairness, however, theology has made its contributions to the advancement of thought and knowledge, including in mathematics and science, and justice, while science and the ideology of scientific progress have sometimes been used without much regard for justice and for purposes that are hardly just by almost any criteria. Secondly, however, and more crucially, will the ideology and grand ontotheological narratives of the Enlightenment help justice better than postmodernism? While this cannot be excluded, it appears to be at best uncertain that they will, dominant as they may be. But then, if one thinks of the world today, theology and its grant narratives are more dominant than any materialist Enlightenment grand narratives. This brings me to the case Lyotard makes concerning justice, a case that ultimately drives the argument of The Postmodern Condition, which, as I noted, proceeds, at least in part, from the nonclassical or postmodern epistemology of

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physics, and specifically atomic or quantum physics, to the postmodern epistemology of justice (Lyotard 1984: 55–8). First, Lyotard argues that while Habermas’s cause, justice, is good, his conceptions of consensus and of the unity of knowledge and culture, which underlies the idea of consensus, are ‘outmoded and suspect values’. They are unlikely to survive ‘that severe reexamination that postmodernity imposes on the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and a subject’. ‘But’, Lyotard says, ‘justice is a value that is neither outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus’ (Lyotard 1984: 73). Lyotard then offers a brief manifesto-like outline of postmodern politics, ‘that would respect both the desire for justice and the desire for the unknown’, and, I would add, the desire for the (irreducibly) unknowable and the (irreducibly) unthinkable (Lyotard 1984: 67). It also follows that this desire is the desire for the irreducibly multiple and for irreducible chance and probabilistic thinking – akin to amor fati, invoked by Nietzsche, a love of fate, but a ‘fate’ defined by uncertainty without underlying causality (Nietzsche 1989: 258). Is this type of justice possible? At least, it appears no more impossible, and may prove to be more likely to work in practice, than justice based on the idea of consensus or other ontotheological (or outright theological) principles, which have at best a questionable record in this regards. But, perhaps against Lyotard, who appears to have been more optimistic on this point, the possibility of justice retains and even entails an irreducible chance and even not negligible probability of injustice. I am not suggesting that we cannot or should not try to minimise this probability. My point instead is that we cannot eliminate the chance for injustice, even ideally, that is, if we want our ideals to meaningfully relate to the real world. Nor can this justice be justice for all: one justice for all or the same justice forever. It cannot be one justice or (which amounts to the same thing) a multiple justice determined by a hidden single justice. One justice for all is a fiction, with which, defined as a monotheistic theological justice, Socrates, the enemy of tragedy, wanted to replace the Dionysian vision of the world offered by Greek tragedy, according to Nietzsche, the first postmodern thinker and, as he saw himself, the first Dionysian philosopher (Nietzsche 1967). In this view, there has never been other justice than the irreducibly uncertain and inconstant, multiple justice. There can be only a possible or at most probable justice, each time different. No court of law and no other form of dispensing justice gives us more than a chance of justice; in all our ethical acts, acts aimed at justice, we always make our bets, however certain we might believe ourselves to be in what is just. More often than not it is no more than a blind chance, and in the present view of chance, there is no ultimate underlying causal architecture beneath this chance. Our knowledge and thought may help us. But they only can help us to make a more likely bet, and then only sometimes. Besides, we cannot count, but, again, can only bet, on what will be defined as just in the future, even a very near future. Not

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only are people inconstant, justice itself is inconstant, because it is never itself, never in itself, never apart from people, who, however, cannot be completely in control of justice. In Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus gives us a powerful image of a Heraclitean river of justice, into which we can never step twice or perhaps even once: ‘What a City [polis] approves as just [dikae] changes with changing times’ (Aeschylus 2009: I. 1048). This is not a comforting picture of justice, which is, however, fitting in the tragic scene of Thebes. But there may be no scene of justice that is much different. It is true that Aeschylus’s, or rather (this difference should not be overlooked) the chorus’s, contention as such does necessarily not mean that there is no other, more permanent, justice human or divine, that a city (polis) does not perceive or does not want to, or cannot, maintain, for example, by surrendering the demands of this justice to political interests. But the statement poses a question that has continued to reverberate throughout the subsequent history and still reverberates in our, as Joyce would have it, chaosmic world (Joyce 2012: 118). Justice is not divine, but it is not completely human either, insofar as it is never fully in our hands, in our control. This is one of the great lessons of both the ancient Greek tragedy and postmodern literature, or postmodern science, such as quantum theory, the history of which still originates in the atomism of the ancient Greek philosophers and also, and even more so in the ancient Greek tragedy. It is not entirely impossible to think of Aeschylus, the Joyce of the Dionysian tragedy, as a quantum theorist, at least, avant la lettre. Joyce was manifestly influenced by quantum physics. In any event, the relationships between critical theory, which is our way of understanding literature, and science, help us to learn this lesson; and this is why these relationships are so important.

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26 COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND CRITICAL THEORY Peter Garratt

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orris zapp, david lodge’s memorable invention from Changing Places (1975) and other campus novels, imagines he can write a comprehensive study of the works of Jane Austen by embracing every possible critical and theoretical perspective in the field of modern literary studies. Conceived with Faustian relish, this eccentric magnum opus will be, he predicts, literally the last word on Austen: Some years ago he had embarked with great enthusiasm on an ambitious critical project: a series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about them. The idea was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it; so that when each commentary was written there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question. . . . After Zapp, the rest would be silence. (Lodge 1989: 37)

Zapp’s dream, zany though it is, captures more than the exaggerated vanity of a fictional literature professor: it curates an earlier moment in the institutional development of literary theory and criticism, one notable for its decidedly different methods and agendas (largely formalist, partly political) and for its very openness to the sort of satire Lodge intends, where the disciplinary unity of English Literature can be taken for granted despite an evident proliferation of theoretically excited styles of reading. Today, in contrast, if Lodge’s joke still faintly succeeds, Zapp’s ambition no longer makes sense. ‘Theory’ cannot be pointed to in the way that it once was, as if some neatly bounded field of activity or a series of static methodological preferences, as its gestures and incursions rarely assume such an instrumental form. Being ‘exhaustive’, too, fails

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to resonate with the pluralist development of literary-critical discourse, now a complex entanglement of varied intellectual traditions, conceptual models, idioms, frameworks and ideological commitments that no vantage point would ever want to contain. Lodge’s joke referenced its era: Zapp does not mention postcolonialism or feminism, never mind foresee the ‘turn to affect’ or the emergence of posthumanism; he could not have predicted something like critical animal studies, far less the appearance of a serious scholarly book on Jane Austen and the question of human-animal relationships – though Jane Austen and Animals has now been written (Seeber 2013). Meanwhile, some of his earlier priorities have come to resemble ‘lost causes’, to use Slavoj Žižek’s phrase, especially the metanarratives of psychoanalysis and Marxism (Žižek 2008). In addition, Zapp might be surprised to learn that the heyday of high theory – or Theory, associated with the likes of Althusser, Lacan and Derrida – is widely agreed to be over and lately superseded by less easily defined ‘post-theoretical’ orientations in the humanities (Eagleton 2003). One further development that Zapp could probably not have imagined (though David Lodge did come to write about it quite extensively) is the turn by literary academics and others in the humanities towards the cognitive sciences. The relatively recent rise of cognitive theory, or ‘cognitivism’, in disciplines such as literary studies, film, art history and others, describes an incredibly varied uptake of ideas from cognitive science and neuroscience – including both theoretical models and empirical research into mind and brain – and the ways in which that knowledge has been recruited and deployed as an approach to language, meaning, culture and aesthetic representation. This ‘cognitive turn’, as some coin it, has its roots in several twentieth-century schools such as Russian formalism and structuralism, as well as cognitive science itself, which began in the 1950s as an amalgam of post-behavioural psychology, Chomsky’s linguistics, and early research in computer science and artificial intelligence. As a development within cultural and critical theory, its first statements of intellectual method appeared in the 1980s. It has since gone from being an alternative way of theorising culture to a flourishing part of the intellectual mainstream. Nowadays, talk of the cognitive turn usually references more recent, and currently burgeoning, exchanges with knowledge in contemporary mental science, itself a rapidly changing area. This has been a marked trend of the last decade or more, with steadily increasing numbers of research articles and monographs being published with an explicit cognitivist orientation. Within this growing body of work, it must be said that attitudes, positions and methods differ considerably, and the relationship between cognitive approaches and other kinds of critical theory often varies significantly. Consequently it may not be possible to say, reliably and definitively, what species of thinking or interpretative method go by the name of the ‘cognitive turn’ or ‘cognitive studies’. Furthermore, the influence of cognitive science on theory and criticism has been far from uncontentious, with some quarters perceiving

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it as a shift towards the empirical that serves as an ideological counterweight to the relativism of postmodernity. This chapter will outline some of the key areas, concepts, debates and thinkers to have shaped the cognitive turn so far, including some noteworthy resistance to it, and briefly assess the current state of the field. As already mentioned, the capacious – and no doubt contestable – nature of an expression like the ‘cognitive turn’ means that different positions grouped under the label can, and do, operate with drastically different methods and goals, even with contradictory premises. Some make extensive use of empirical data or involve new experimental research, for example, while others are conducted mostly as philosophical arguments. Some work is focused exclusively on literary language or on the study of cinema, say, with a more or less formalist emphasis, while other cognitivists may sample a much wider body of cultural representations and navigate flexibly between the abstract and the materially concrete domains. Others, meanwhile, strongly emphasise the constraints of our evolved cognitive architecture on all forms of theoretical explanation, while some proceed along lines close to those associated with New Historicism, which is to say, by paying attention to the historical, social and contextual factors in human cognition through artefacts such as printed texts and made objects, and by asking in turn how cognitive processes interact with different cultural contexts, environments and technologies. In contrast, there are those – a minority, it must be said – who assume the humanities should be placed on a more credible footing by squaring its practices with scientific normativity (a move termed consilience), on the grounds that ‘high-level phenomena emerge out of and depend upon lower-level phenomena’ (Slingerland and Collard 2012: 12). But many others either deeply suspect this view or think the humanities can support the critique of, say, modern neuroscience. It should be acknowledged that some endeavours, such as cognitive poetics, for instance, already constitute well-established subfields, with correspondingly advanced institutional infrastructure (scholarly associations, journals, textbooks, syllabi) and formally codified concepts and methodologies, and so on. This chapter stands further back, taking in the cognitive turn from a rather broader perspective, and in doing so surveys a number of related developments in a necessarily provisional way. The first part sketches some intellectual history that forms the background to this flourishing of cognitive theories, followed by a survey of the most significant models and their implications for theory.

The Cognitive Revolution and After It makes sense to ask, first of all, what body of knowledge – what science – is being referred to when the cognitive turn is invoked. What is meant precisely by cognitive science, and what appeal has it had for the humanities? Cognitive science derives from a major shift in our understanding of what the human

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mind is and how it works that took place in the second half of the twentieth century – a shift so compelling, influential and extensive that intellectual history usually couches it as a revolution. The cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 60s (some argue there have been subsequent revolutions) saw computational models of mind overtake the then dominant behaviourist tradition in psychology, which had examined mind and consciousness not from the perspective of inner experience, as the Victorians had liked to do, but rather from the outside by studying mental stimuli and resulting observable behaviours. Things stayed fixed in this groove into the 1950s, until the cognitive revolution shifted matters back inside the head, as it were, by renewing interest in mental representations and the rules that govern them, influenced by the dawning age of computer science. Mental states and operations were suddenly brought back to centre stage. But this was the consequence of a crucial conceptual leap: seeing the mind as essentially an information processing system, or, more simply, as a computer. A more sophisticated version of the metaphor likened the mind to software running on the hardware of the brain. What the founders of cognitive science achieved was a break with the behaviourists’ aversion to topics such as consciousness, and they did this in a distinctive way. Put simply, cognitive science began as a form of what philosophers call mental representationalism (a very old view that the mind deals in small units – mental representations – that encode experiences of the world) and married to it a computational account of cognition (the claim that thinking is a form of computation). Groundbreaking though this was, for some the computational theory of mind came to seem too concerned with the machinelike quality of the thinker’s internal world, which was limitation for cognitive science. As Nancy Easterlin puts it, ‘a movement intended to move psychology away from a dehumanizing and mechanistic theory of mind soon capitulated to a new permutation of those assumptions’ (Easterlin 2012: 154). Nowadays, ‘cognitivism’ is sometimes used to label theories influenced by the strongly computational work that typified the field in its infancy, as distinct from subsequent trends that have departed from this classical orientation in various ways (Alan Richardson 2006: 544). The classical tradition, and variants such as connectionism, assumed that the best way to understand how the mind works was to model it artificially by coming up with designs for non-organic information processing systems. These empirical advances were expected to help tackle traditional problems in philosophy of mind, including the question of what sort of thing a mind really is. For this reason, artificial intelligence (AI) was in many ways the driving force of the cognitive revolution, and its methods presupposed an epistemological shift towards scientific explanation. But AI also required some underlying theory of cognitive architecture. That is to say, it required input from linguistics, philosophy of mind, mathematics. For the classical model, this meant treating the mind as a structure similar to the structure of language, with symbols and syntax. Noam Chomsky’s

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non-behaviourist linguistic theory was especially significant here, even if later cognitive science mostly rejected it, as Chomsky argued that language acquisition depends on an innate capacity for understanding tacit formal rules and structures (‘universal grammar’). Jerry Fodor and Hilary Putnam, two philosophers in the classical camp, built on Chomsky’s arguments in their work during the 1960s and 70s, developing the computational-representational theory of mind. The title of Fodor’s The Language of Thought (1975) distils his view that we think in private mental language, a mentalese, which precedes expression in any particular natural language such as English. On this view, thought is comprised of primitive units (mental representations), which, like words, can be joined together and manipulated into more complex rule-bound combinations, just like grammatical expressions in spoken or written utterance. As with verbal phrases, thinking uses complex structures made up of individual parts and organised by governing principles of syntax, an analogy that helps to account for the productivity and systematicity of cognition generally (respectively, the mind’s ability to make and understand seemingly endless new thoughts out of finite resources, and the larger ‘grammar’ or system within which they function). This theory and variants of it were computational, not merely representational, due to the way they ascribed formal syntactical properties to mental representations, unlike earlier philosophers such as Locke and Hume who had thought of mental representations (‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’) as essentially imagistic – inward visual copies of external states. For classical cognitive science, mental representations are not semantic in the same way as visual or verbal symbols, but rather abstract entities upon which particular operations (i.e. computation) can act. Individual thoughts, then, are manipulations of pre-semantic formal symbols. This was not the only way to define computation, however. Connectionists in the 1980s took a different approach to the one modelled by the likes of Fodor, while still proposing a form of computationalism (and, accordingly, representationalism). An important difference was that connectionism based its cognitive architecture on the biology of the brain, not on the structure of language. The architectural model developed by connectionists was the neural network, an abstraction from the brain’s own structure of neurons and neuronal intersections (synapses). Neural networks were appealing for at least two reasons: first, while the network model was only based on a pared-down structural analogy with neurobiology and the nervous system, it had the advantage of seeming to resemble the actual biology of human intelligence, or ‘biological plausibility’ (Churchland 1992: 159–61); and second, it could do things that classical AI could not, particularly in ways that made its processing of information seem less mechanistic. In his influential Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett observes that ‘connectionism blazes the first remotely plausible trails of unification in the huge terra incognita lying between the mind sciences and the brain sciences’ (Dennett 1991: 269). But connectionism was still a

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computational account of cognition, with inputs and outputs and algorithmic procedures, however different it seemed to the classical symbol-manipulation theory. Its computational strategy can be roughly sketched as follows. Just as we think of neurons ‘firing’ in the brain, so units in the neural network – a vast number of functionally interconnected and interactive units – can be activated in response to inputs. They can either be excited or inhibited, in varying degrees. Units also communicate by transmitting activation or inhibition instructions to other units, creating connections of varying strengths. This happens in parallel, crucially. The outcome is a spreading or distributed activation pattern, and it is these patterns rather than individual units that have representational significance; that is, connectionism posits distributed representations rather than representations that function as tokens or symbols with syntactical properties. Cognition is equivalent to modifications in the state of the network. The non-linear complexity of this type of computation gives rise to the term parallel distributed processing (PDP). What can this brief account of two early trends in cognitive science tell us about critical theory? In one sense, not very much. Few in the humanities outside analytic philosophy and linguistics have engaged with computational approaches to the human mind specifically. The literary critic and theorist Patrick Colm Hogan is one notable exception; Hogan has seriously considered how connectionism, for example, might inform or improve the analysis of literature, which he has illustrated by interpreting a passage from King Lear using a PDP model (Hogan 2003: 57–8). Ellen Spolsky, too, discusses PDP in Gaps in Nature, a study inspired by Fodor’s later work on the modularity of mind, and she does so in the context of critiquing the mindas-computer (Spolsky 1993: 32–4). But, perhaps for fairly obvious reasons, first generation cognitivism does not have a strong legacy in critical theory, apart from playing into debates over technology, agency and subjectivity within humanism and posthumanism, which have only intensified in the era of bio-engineering and nanotechnology (see Dupuy 2009). Moreover, some uneasiness towards cognitive theory and criticism in the humanities seems partly attributable to a perception that cognitivism – in the narrow, computational sense – lingers on. This may be unfair, as much recent work in the field draws on theories of the embodied mind and a phenomenological turn in cognitive science, as we shall see. But the analogy of minds and machines has been a sticking point. For liberal humanists, cognitivism never looked like getting at the subjective richness of individual life; its proponents prized the subtle textures of thought and feeling, and above all the exceptionalism of the human self, which seemed more than the sum of its neural parts and operations. David Lodge, once again, captured this attitude in fiction. In his novel Thinks. . ., a muted extramarital affair between a cognitive scientist, Ralph Messenger, and university creative writing instructor, Helen Reed, leads to something like this

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clash of perspectives. Messenger (as his informational surname predicts) is a strident cognitivist. Over the course of the plot, he introduces the mildly sentimental Helen to tenets of the cognitive revolution, describing the rudiments of AI and famous thought experiments such as John Searle’s Chinese Room. Helen, in turn, rehearses opposing liberal humanist arguments in favour of literature’s special access to the mind, and against the reducibility of the self to functional processes. The situation is repeatedly ironised by both characters’ limited self-knowledge, and by the literary status of the fiction in which it all unfolds. Ralph eventually softens somewhat, but in the end completes a study called Machine Living that attracts ‘wide media coverage, and . . . gratifying sales’ (Lodge 2002: 340). Helen, meanwhile, having learned about the Turing Test, neuronal activity and much besides, remains unconvinced by neurobiological and computational explanations of mind: consciousness is just too richly inward, and, in a sense, too literary, to persuade her out of an instinctive dualism – ‘there is a tragic dimension to consciousness [too],’ she protests (Lodge 2002: 319). So-called high theory was no more sympathetic to cognitivism. Jacques Derrida may have referred to his conception of grammatology as a ‘positive science’ (Derrida 1976: 74), but poststructuralism in general instantiated the attempt to read against the ‘metaphysics of presence’ manifest in modernity’s claims to truth, reason, referential grounding, and so on. In this sense, science was its object. In common with later critical idioms that it influenced, such as queer theory, poststructuralism demonstrated a relentlessly critical impetus, in a way that distinguishes it from the procedures of science (including cognitive science) as ordinarily defined. Under the sign of deconstruction, Derrida sought to read scientific epistemology against itself, locating its own ‘counterscientific tendencies for making metaphysical claims’ (Sheehan 2013: 50). Theory of this kind was markedly ironic, self-reflexive, sceptical, relativist; cognitivism was empirical and explanatory. There were, of course, crossover concerns. Language and the self were important categories for both cognitivism and high theory, for instance – but in quite different respects. While Fodor was formulating his language of thought hypothesis, deconstructionists were spearheading the ‘linguistic turn’ in Anglo-American English departments, animated by Derridean claims that meaning, reference and identity are produced from within language itself, by means of its internal play of difference, without unmediated access to whatever lies outside it (precisely because no such pure extra-linguistic realm exists in the way that the metaphor of ‘outside’ implies). Unlike for Fodor, poststructuralist theory regarded language as an impersonal field of differences that precedes the individual subject, rather than as a directed functional attribute of the mind. Language does not originate in the head; it speaks through us. These contrasting commitments signalled a deep incompatibility, famously encapsulated by the Derrida-Searle debate of the late 1970s (see Culler 2007: 110–34).

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So, from the perspective of intellectual history, early cognitive science and the mind-as-computer analogy grew up outside critical theory’s orbit, and were virtually antithetical to its styles of psychoanalytical and deconstructive critique. Spolsky’s Gaps in Nature was a rare attempt to communicate across these two traditions (see below). But the cognitive revolution of the 1950s did something important and lasting that went beyond arguments over the architecture of information processing: it transformed approaches to the mind and brain by being interdisciplinary through and through. As noted, its roots were in linguistics, analytic philosophy, computer science and AI. What has become known as cognitive science – or the cognitive sciences, plural – has been an even wider endeavour drawing on fields such as neuroscience, robotics, post-Chomskyan linguistics, experimental psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology and phenomenology. Its interdisciplinary constitution announced that it sought multifaceted knowledge and that its object requires the resources of more than one discipline or intellectual tradition to describe it. It is just this hybridity and dynamism, harnessed to increasingly powerful models and findings, that have helped make the cognitive sciences (and cognitive neuroscience) such flourishing fields. The scope of these fields continues to broaden and, accordingly, new emphases have emerged. One significant change has been a shift away from abstract formal computation and its Cartesian underpinnings. In Mark Rowlands’s phrase, a ‘new science of the mind’ has started to form around a ‘non-Cartesian’ cognitive science, which rejects the assumption common to both classical and connectionist accounts that says ‘cognitive processes are, ultimately, brain processes (or more abstract functional roles realized exclusively by brain processes)’ (Rowlands 2010: 3–6). This will be made clearer below. For now, it will suffice to say that post-Cartesian cognitive science has challenged the identification of thinking with what goes on inside the head alone. This has triggered interest in a range of topics that intersect much more closely with some important concerns of critical and cultural theory – embodiment, emotion, other minds and social minds, for example – and, in the last decade, that work has drawn on familiar thinkers in Continental philosophy, especially phenomenologists such as Husserl, MerleauPonty and Heidegger. Before describing this recent stage in cognitive science, it will be valuable to sketch in an interim turn to biological models which superseded the first cognitive revolution.

Narrative, Biology, Evolution The idea that cognitive operations are revealed through the workings of language is a legacy of the emphasis placed on abstract symbol processing by pioneers of the cognitive revolution. A related development has been to treat the mind as deeply narrative in character. Versions of this argument have been made by a number of influential psychologists, cognitive scientists,

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philosophers, anthropologists and literary theorists since the 1990s. Daniel Dennett, to take a well-known example, has suggested that there is no executive centre to the overall cognitive system, no organising self, but rather a kind of relentless narrative energy that produces both a presentable story about experience and the sense of a self who expresses it: Our fundamental [human] tactic of self-protection, self-control, and selfdefinition is not spinning webs or building dams [like spiders or beavers], but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others – and ourselves – about who we are. . . . These strings or streams of narrative issue forth as if from a single source – not just in the obvious physical sense of flowing from just one mouth, or one pencil or pen, but in a more subtle sense: their effect on any audience is to encourage them to (try to) posit a unified agent whose words they are: in short, to posit a center of narrative gravity. (Dennett 1991: 418) If this erosion of the ground of the self seems reminiscent of poststructuralist attempts to decentre the humanist subject, it is important to note the superficial quality of this resemblance. Dennett takes the mind to be, at root, a spinner of narratives, for that is the kind of computational work the mind does. It is a sophisticated parallel processor that operates in what seems like a novelistic fashion, producing effects such as consciousness and ‘narrative selfhood’ (Dennett 1991: 418). In a further literary parallel, thoughts are constructed by the creation of multiple drafts, which are unconsciously revised and edited. While this means that Dennett shifts the self onto a virtual footing, the terms in which he does so cash out quite differently to the relativist textual premises of Derridean deconstruction. ‘Narrative’ in this context provides a way of describing strategies for binding together, that is, unifying, multiple different sources of sensory input and centres of information processing, one that supports empirical evidence of the distributed functioning of the brain. An appeal to narrative thereby supports Dennett’s physicalist standpoint (which says nothing exceeds physical explanation), whereas poststructuralism has often been construed as a form of linguistic idealism, often derived from a pantextual interpretation/(mis)translation of Derrida’s notorious line il n’y a pas d’hors texte from Of Grammatology (Glendinning 2011: 43–5). In contemporary cognitive science, Dennett is not alone in stressing the foundational role played by narrative in human cognition. In The Feeling of What Happens (1999), the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio argues that storytelling is a primitive condition of conscious experience: Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple power I must add, of telling a story without words, the story that there is life ticking away in an organism, and that the states of the living organism,

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within body bounds, are continuously being altered by encounters with objects or events in its environment, or, for that matter by thoughts and by internal adjustments of the life process. (Damasio 2000: 30) Such ‘primordial narratives of consciousness’ are preverbal, though subsequently converted imperceptibly into language: ‘In addition to the story that signifies the act of knowing and attributes it to the newly minted core self, the human brain also generates an automatic verbal version of the story’ (Damasio 2000: 184–5). As for Dennett, there is neither some Cartesian inner theatre nor a central puppeteer pulling the strings. Narrative is what brings multiple processes together, producing the impression of an executive perspectival origin, a self telling the story. It is significant that Damasio theorises this at the level of the living organism: narrative is a primitive neurobiological process of structuration and sense-making, rather than a literary performance in the usual sense. The cognitive scientist Mark Turner offers a related thesis, though with a difference, in The Literary Mind (1996). Turner, again, argues for the primacy of storytelling. But he does so by taking qualities found commonly in works of literature, namely story, projection and parable, and identifies them as constituents and strategic organisers of almost all kinds of thinking, literary or otherwise. Reasoning, evaluating, goal-setting, planning, explaining, and so on, rely on narrative understanding. For the mind to think in commonplace ways – for it to navigate its world, recognise agency and action, predict outcomes, move forwards and backwards in time, and so on – it has to enlist principles of literary comprehension. The literary mind should be seen as exemplary, not extraordinary. As Turner puts it: Although cognitive science is associated with mechanical technologies like robots and computer instruments that seem unliterary, the central issues for cognitive science are in fact the issues of the literary mind. Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. (Turner 1996: v) A turn from machine-like to biological templates for cognition can clearly be discerned in these different theorists. Staking a claim on narrative as an underlying cognitive instrument appears in neo-Darwinist philosophers and critics, too. Brian Boyd offers one such account in On the Origin of Stories, in which he develops an anthropological and psychological explanation of the evolutionary advantages conferred by storytelling: Narrative arises from the advantages of communication in social species. It benefits audiences, who can choose better what course of action to take on the basis of strategic information, and it benefits tellers, who earn credit in the social information exchange and gain in terms of

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attention and status. That combination of benefits, for the teller and the told, and the intensity of social monitoring in our species, explain why narrative has become so central to human life. . . . It develops our capacity to see from different perspectives, and this capacity in turn both arises from and aids the evolution of cooperation and the growth of human mental flexibility. (Boyd 2009: 176) Even among non-verbal animal species such as dolphins and certain primates, effective communication demonstrably leads to cooperative advantage, Boyd notes. Group interests are served by the sharing of crucial environmental information, such as the presence of threat or the detection of food sources, and so on. From this picture of empathic and social benefit, Boyd scales up to human narrative competence: literature, or the inclination toward story, corresponds to an innate adaptation of mind. This ‘deep-rooted human disposition to engage in narrative’ (Boyd 2009: 403) emerged in response to environmental selection pressures in the Pleistocene period; like bipedal locomotion, the claim goes, a dedicated cognitive module evolved for story in the ancestral past, making it species-typical and constitutively human. Boyd and other ‘Literary Darwinists’, such as Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, write from a consciously marginal position, both within the humanities and within the loosely associated initiatives that make up the cognitive turn in theory and criticism. Many would not recognise their versions of evolutionary determinism as being part of the mainstream cognitive enterprise. Further afield, their work has attracted, maybe even knowingly sought out, visible controversy. Jonathan Kramnick has returned the most impressive, extensive and fine-grained critique of the evolutionary argument for literary competence to date, which he shows to rest on dubious science (Kramnick 2011). For one thing, even if we accept the fact of the universality of stories – that is, their invariant role in all human cultures, oral and literate – it remains unproved that this corresponds to a specific neural adaptation. Literary Darwinism says it does, on grounds that blend empirical sampling of diverse human groups with theoretical convictions that help to lend the data coherence. But this way of presenting human universals, resting as it does on a particular version of evolutionary psychology (particularly the ideas of E. O. Wilson), looks to be challenged by recent work in the philosophy of biology and cognitive science that demonstrates how looping causal interactions between species and their environments continually reshape neural structures. As Olaf Sporns summarises, the ‘architecture of the brain, and the statistics of the environment [are] not fixed. Rather, brain-connectivity is subject to a broad spectrum of input-, experience-, and activity-dependent processes which shape and structure its patterning and strengths’ (quoted in Wheeler and Clark 2008: 3564). To think of the brain as a Swiss Army knife of innate adaptive modules, including a story module, which have remained

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unchanged since the Pleistocene, does not take account of important recent research in related scientific fields. Moreover, as Kramnick points out, a nonadaptationist explanation of narrative’s cognitive work might instead open new ways of ‘identify[ing] connections between certain features of mind and certain kinds of texts’ (Kramnick 2011: 347), rather than predicting commonality across cultural time and space. Some neo-Darwinist cultural theory has tried to explain the origins and adaptive advantages of aesthetic and fictive experience, not just narrative per se. Boyd, for instance, argues that at the developmental level, fictional stories (a subset of narrative, i.e. what he calls story) derive from imaginative play. Infants can be witnessed at play – playing with each other, with objects, with pretend objects, with invented friends, and without adult prompting – in ways that reinforce abilities in scenario building and environmental reasoning. This evolved human ability to create, falsify and playfully manipulate representational capacities pays off in terms of, say, mimicry’s advantages in real-world problem-solving, since such simulation promotes resourcefulness and mental flexibility. ‘Art as kind of cognitive play’, Boyd speculates, ‘stimulates our brains more than does routine processing of the environment’ (Boyd 2009: 94). Sympathetic viewpoints can be found in the work of evolutionary and anthropological studies of art (for example, Dissanayake 1995; Dutton 2009). Evolutionary approaches to literary and visual aesthetics have been contentious, for appearing to license an ideologically pernicious move to re-naturalise culture, the undoing of which has been a defining objective of theoretical projects as diverse as cultural studies, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonialism and queer theory. Additionally, they appear to cede epistemological ground to science. E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience is increasingly invoked by the likes of Carroll to signal an ideal integration of the arts and humanities with the sciences, where consilience forms a demand for ‘humanists [to] be aware of whether their explanations are compatible with the findings of neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, and other relevant sciences’ (Slingerland and Collard 2012: 17). Accepting a unifying vertical hierarchy of knowledge adjusted to the foundational rightness of evolutionary principles leads to arresting problems, however. As Kramnick points out, there is the error of taking seamless continuity in the fabric of the physical world as a justification for explanatory continuity. Consilience runs the risk of mistaking ontology for epistemology. Then there is the problematic assumption of finding smooth consistency and coherence across different domains of knowledge. Ellen Spolsky, in Gaps in Nature, demonstrates how gaps and fuzziness typify both the ontological and epistemological domains, as can be understood from the dynamics of the cognitive system itself. Because of its modular nature, Spolsky argues, the brain processes environmental inputs in different dedicated modules, for instance in modules for vision or hearing or taste, which may result in intermodular inconsistencies

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(gaps) which need to be creatively overcome. Relatedly, mental judgments about categories and category membership – a fundamental strategy of knowing the world – are always fuzzy and unstable, for ‘categorization is both permanently necessary and permanently open to reformulation’ (Spolsky 1993: 59). Incommensurability stimulates change, affording creative opportunities for minds natively ‘open to novelty’ (Spolsky 1993: 190), in ways that ensure experience and environment are not merely seamlessly assimilated. There is no smooth fit between organism and environment, biology and culture. Spolsky’s position is materialist, based to a large extent on the evolved biology of the brain, yet her conclusions stress the friction, flexibility and contingency of human cognition. Elsewhere, she finds it possible to read the logic of Darwinian adaptation and Derridean deconstruction as surprisingly harmonious procedures (Spolsky 2002). As Spolsky shows, taking biological and neural systems into account need not pave the way towards consilience.

Embodied and Extended Cognition If, as we have said, narrative has become one defining feature of mind and brain for evolutionary critics, anthropologists, cognitive linguists and philosophers of consciousness, then it may come as little surprise to learn that academic specialists in narratology have had something of their own to add to the configuration of this debate. After all, once narrative is judged to be a main engine of thought, those who best understand how narrative discourse works – how it achieves sense and meaning, how it emplots actions, organises time, frames persons, produces perspective, and so on – might be said to have a particularly privileged vantage point on the nature of mind in a more general sense. Certainly an unresolved question is ‘how to situate the relationship between narrative theory and the cognitive sciences’ (Alan Richardson 2006: 549). In a two-way dynamic, the study of narrative has been seen as open to enrichment by findings in cognitive psychology and related areas, and also itself advanced as part of the cognitive sciences. In the words of David Herman, one of the most influential theorists in the area, narrative may be approached ‘as a target of interpretation as well as a means for making sense of the world’, using the resources of several disciplines that ‘converge on the mind-narrative nexus’ (Herman 2013: 311). In common with 1960s structuralists such as Roland Barthes (so-called ‘classical’ narratologists), Herman and others take narrative in a wide sense to mean pervasive and varied practices of verbal (and graphic) representation, sense-making, and world-building, rather than a sheltered canon of highly prized literature. But their approach is reoriented by discursive psychology and discourse analysis. The key claim here is that ‘cognitive processes exist, but that they are immanent in – that they emerge from – discourse practices’ (Herman 2010: 160). Signalled by this, too, is a post-Cartesian shift

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away from focusing on internal mental representations to seeing cognition as embedded in situated acts and shared practices of meaning. One should note that this does not lead cognitive narratology so far out of the head, as it were, as to revive problems associated with behaviourism. However, it does mark a move away from the traditional definition of cognition found in Descartes and in first wave cognitivism, which pictures the cogniser as an autonomous and solitary problem-solver, an abstract intelligence lacking any meaningful dependency on other agents, on the physical body, or on environmental context. For Herman, cognitive narratology helps to show how ‘minds are spread out among participants in discourse, their speech acts, and the objects in their material environment’, and how cognition ‘in its most basic form is grounded in particular situations, socially distributed, and domain specific’ (Herman 2010: 166). These challenges to the Cartesian orientation of early cognitive science and, one could add, Anglo-American philosophy of mind, are symptomatic of present trends that reach far beyond narratology. Notions of the cognitive today encompass much more than abstract information processing, and they challenge the internalist view that cognition just happens in the brain (or even purely inside the boundary of the skull and skin). Cognition means more than bounded rationality: a long-standing distinction between thinking and feeling, or between cognition and affect, is no longer accepted by many leading cognitive scientists, and the body and bodily placement have been shown to be instrumental in concept-formation. The world beyond the cogniser’s mind, brain and body is also increasingly recognised as being part of the cognitive process (for example, memory can be temporarily offloaded onto suitable objects in the environment, as when we pick up a pen and paper to do longhand arithmetic or store numbers on a personal mobile phone rather than in our neural memory). For the sake of simplicity, and for reasons of limited space, we can point to pertinent aspects of post-Cartesian cognitive science using the terms embodied mind and extended mind, both of which have been deployed in recent literary and cultural theory. First, then, the embodied mind. Embodiment has become a key dimension of cognitive theory, fed by several sources. One way to gloss the general claim would be as follows: cognition has a profoundly embodied character, which is to say, it depends on the enabling bodily structures of the (biological) agent doing the cognising. These supporting structures in the biological body involve more than the neurobiology of the brain itself, and the role they play is not merely contextual, but causal or constitutive. One such view holds that the sensorimotor system deeply collaborates in the production of the agent’s world. The physical experience of the environment, and our engagement with it as physically situated, moving, proportioned beings, grounds cognitive processes; for instance, physical movement shapes processes such as visual perception. Cognition, on this view, is always a form of action

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(or ‘enactive’), as opposed to being mirror-like: ‘cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs’ (Varela et al. 1991: 9). Other versions of embodied mind stress how the body both constrains and distributes the processes of cognition, which are treated as systemic (or dynamic) in nature, rather than brain-specific or neurally localised. Whence the emphasis on embodied mind? The history and import of these issues, from both a philosophical and scientific perspective, are discussed vividly and extensively by Michael Wheeler in Reconstructing the Cognitive World, in which he proposes returning to Heidegger to formulate an idea of what he calls ‘embodied-embedded’ cognitive science (Wheeler 2005). This is not some eccentric foray into Continental philosophy. The mingling of AI, robotics and analytic philosophy with twentieth-century phenomenology may seem striking, but it extends, for Wheeler, the ‘largely implicit way’ in which embodied cognitive science has already ‘taken up a conceptual profile that reflects a distinctively Heideggerian approach to psychological phenomena’ (Wheeler 2005: 16). One could further observe that the phenomenological dimension is not supported by Heidegger alone: other theorists have discussed Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre in this context (see Varela et al. 1991, and Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). At stake is a recognition of the primary ways in which the body shapes the mind, as Sean Gallagher puts it, and the implications of this wide-reaching insight for a science of cognitive experience (see Gallagher 2005). Drawing on phenomenology helps to show, for example, that the human capacity to stand upright structures perception and action. The world made present to the cogniser is one organised by the way an erect being navigates its rich environment, by the height and dimensions of the human frame, by the capacity of limbs to bend, move, reach, touch, and so forth, and by both conscious and non-conscious experience of the body’s position in space and spatial acting (body image and body schema, respectively, roughly speaking). Because the world discloses itself in this way, knowing is grounded in our lived corporeal relation with it. Posture provides us with the notions of front and back, and up and down, for instance. This phenomenological view finds further support from what has become known as cognitive rhetoric, a subfield inaugurated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, whose pioneering study The Metaphors We Live By (1980) shows that linguistic concepts correlate strongly to bodily changes. So, the mental concept of UP originates from the fact of the body’s physical bearing in space and its gravitational environment, and so on. Furthermore, embodied concepts can be grafted onto emotional states, say, to create emergent conceptual metaphors, such as HAPPY IS UP or PASSION IS HEAT (capitalising conceptual metaphors is a convention of the literature). As Lakoff and Johnson explain it:

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Since there are systematic correlates between our emotions (like happiness) and our sensory-motor experiences (like erect posture), these form the basis of orientational metaphorical concepts (such as HAPPY IS UP). Such metaphors allow us to conceptualize our emotions in more sharply defined terms and also to relate them to other concepts having to do with our general well-being (e.g. HEALTH, LIFE, CONTROL, etc.). In this sense, we can speak of emergent metaphors and emergent concepts. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 58) Conceptual metaphor theory works against the Cartesian dualism of mind and body while also showing the language system to be deeply metaphorical (the use of ‘deeply’ in this very sentence exemplifies the point). From their own cognitive perspective, Lakoff and Johnson might be said to revive Nietzsche’s proclamation that the ‘drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive’, as illustrated by the endless, if often stale or residual, metaphoricity of ordinary language (Nietzsche 2006: 121). Embodied metaphor, and embodied cognition more widely, have led to fertile forms of enquiry, particularly in literary studies. One legacy has been the theory of conceptual blending devised by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, which seeks to account for the neural ability to generate new concepts out of the resources of old ones (see Turner 1996). Creativity of this sort is explored at length in Turner’s most recent work, The Origin of Ideas (2014). This work has turned Turner into a formative figure in cognitive poetics and cognitive literary studies (see Richardson 2004). Secondly, embodied views have been supplemented by theoretical and empirical studies of feeling and the emotions. Here the work of Antonio Damasio has been widely referenced, as it seeks to establish the cognitive work performed by the affective body and mind, and the primacy of feeling (Damasio 1996, 2000, 2003). Notable studies that pursue the implications of the embodied, living, affective mind in literature include Guillemette Bolens’s The Style of Gestures (2012) and Emily Troscianko’s Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (2014), while research on embodied cognition and drama has become a growth area of its own – see, for example, Nicola Shaughnessy’s Affective Performance and Cognitive Science (2014). Extended cognition, or the extended mind, refers to a philosophical argument that takes for granted complex interactions across mind-brain-bodyworld, as described above, but – in what may seem a counter-intuitive move – further hypothesises that there are well-founded reasons not to draw the boundary of cognitive experience at the skin of the cognising agent. That is to say, thinking goes on outside the head. According to the theory of extended cognition, non-biological parts of the environment may be (and indeed regularly are) brought into the event of thinking in non-trivial ways in order for cognitive ends to be met. In the most cited thought experiment, Otto, a man who has memory impairment memory due to Alzheimer’s disease, agrees to

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meet his friend Inga at the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street. In order to walk there, Inga accesses its address from her ordinary biological memory. Otto, however, cannot recall this information in the same way. But, because he writes down useful information habitually in a notebook wherever he goes, and permanently carries it with him, Otto is able to find the right address in his notebook and duly walk to the museum, just like Inga. The contention, then, is that these cases are identical: Otto and Inga each have a belief that shapes desire and action (that the museum is on 53rd Street); it just so happens that in one case the information constituting this belief ‘lies beyond the skin’ (Clark and Chalmers 1998: 13). The rightness of this view has been debated by philosophers vigorously and in considerable technical detail, but this should not occlude its more general significance. Otto’s notebook – a material artefact which functions like an internal cognitive resource – shows, broadly speaking, how externalist and non-Cartesian cognitive theory has been and may yet become. We are ‘natural-born cyborgs’, to use the phrase coined by the philosopher Andy Clark, always already constituted by that which surrounds us (Clark 2003) – even, we must suppose, before the advent of digital posthumanism. To put it another way, cognition inhabits a world and uses the resources of that world to rebuild it beneficially, establishing micro-ecologies, or niches for thinking, in which complex feedback loops reciprocally connect the cogniser’s body, mind and environment. Critical theory might oppose this style of argument, as Claire Colebrook has ventured, for the reason that the turn towards embodiment and extension, even in Clark’s technological version, imply the dawning of a larger post-theoretical organic vitalism. Vitalism, Colebrook says, takes mind and cognition to be emergent aspects of life, fully integrated in the dynamism of the lifeworld, as evidenced by a phenomenological turn in cognitive science that attempts to put reason, intellection, reflection, critique, and so on, back into world, as if healing the rift caused by their modern separation from lived experience (Colebrook 2013). In addition, the embodied/extended view, by enmeshing mind and world, may reinforce the idea that the cognitive turn supplies scientific or philosophical templates for distributed or networked subjectivity, in ways that coincide with the acclaimed plasticity of global capitalism. Certainly, something like this has been levelled at the ideological embeddedness of neuroscience, for example. As Jan Slaby puts it: ‘The human brain as a self-organizing, adaptive nonhierarchical network exhibiting developmental and regenerative plasticity seems to resemble the modern company’ (Slaby 2010: 405). But the state of the field of cognitive theory and it applications in cultural interpretation is just too varied, too undisciplined, to be read as a whole in this way. As stated at the outset, the cognitive turn does not describe a single method, school, discipline, ethos or ethics. It is an ungainly umbrella term intended to capture several related directions of contemporary thought, manifested as multiple, contradictory, contentious, and

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often, above all, interesting intellectual positions. Some of these look likely to influence what we know about reading and the mental processes that underlie aesthetic experience, whether or not they are taken up into formal methods of appreciation, and also to provide momentum for future research collaborations across fields. At the very least, the cognitive turn looks set to supplement existing ways of thinking about thinking, and ways of thinking about cultural representations of mind, self, and other, and to that extent it is increasingly entering the orbit of what we call theory.

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INTRODUCTION: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CRITICAL THEORY

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igmund Freud’s work has had a profound influence on the development of intellectual enquiry over the course of the twentieth century and on into our own, and critical theory has been no exception as Geoffrey Boucher discusses in Chapter 27. Psychoanalytically inclined criticism has been around for some time now, with many Freudian concepts and principles being enthusiastically adopted by critics and commentators across the arts. After assessing its major ideas, Boucher explores the impact of Freudian theory on cultural commentary, social theory and feminism, as well as the controversies that it has generated and how these led many theorists to develop a distinctively post-Freudian position. The work of the post-Freudian theorist Jacques Lacan has led to a renewed interest in the potential of psychoanalysis amongst critical theorists, and Matthew Sharpe considers the implications of such ideas for that community in Chapter 28. Contemporary Marxist thought from Louis Althusser onwards has adapted many Lacanian notions into its theorising, with theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, one of the most radical thinkers of his generation, making very creative use of Lacan’s ideas to analyse the workings of political ideologies, and coming up with some controversial conclusions that are still stimulating debate.

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27 FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS Geoffrey Boucher

F

reudian psychoanalysis is at once an integral part of modern culture and a regular source of controversy. This chapter outlines Freud’s theory and then looks at the contribution of Freudian psychoanalysis to cultural commentary, social theory and feminist critique. Freud maintained that ‘the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious – what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied’ (Freud reported in MacIntyre 2004: 47). For present purposes, psychoanalysis begins with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and its claim to have ‘revealed the secret of dreams’, by virtue of the hypothesis that ‘a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish’ (Freud 1953–74: 4. 121, 160). Specifically, Freud holds that dreams combine the residues of the past day’s experiences with nocturnal stimuli, including bodily urges, together with a repressed wish of some kind. The dream represents the wish as fulfilled, thereby providing a hallucinatory experience of satisfaction, but it evades the censorship of the ego – known as ‘resistance’ – by presenting potentially disturbing desires in a masked form. Repressed wishes are thoughts that, although they are not necessarily sexual, on account of their unacceptability to the conscious part of the ego, have been forced into the unconscious, which Freud describes as the ‘primary process’, regulated by the ‘pleasure principle’. The pleasure principle is not the idea that all pleasure is sexual, but that sex is pleasurable; all successful action leads to the pleasurable release of instinctually derived energy that has been built up as psychological tension, so that human beings are motivated by the ‘pleasure-unpleasure series’. Unconscious thoughts regulated by the pleasure principle are infantile and amoral, pressing for satisfaction right now, indifferent to the constraints of reality or the restraints of civilisation, and characterised by the absence of negation, temporality or doubt. It is therefore hardly astounding that upon waking, the dreamer generally repudiates the unconscious thoughts contained in his or her dream, for these contain perverse and incestuous sexuality, ferocious resentment of one’s children or siblings, desires for revenge upon friends, death-wishes aimed at others, and so forth.

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The dream report stated by the patient (or ‘analysand’) is a mutilated text that is the result of the cooperation of censorship with the peculiar disguises of dream imagery, leading to the presentation of what Freud calls the ‘manifest content’ of the dream in the form of a rebus, or picture puzzle. It is important to note that psychoanalytic decipherment of the manifest content in terms of the original unconscious thoughts, or ‘latent content’, is possible because dreams are assembled piecemeal. This is why the practice of ‘free association’, where the analysand associates experiences and meanings with the elements of the dream report taken one by one, successfully recreates the latent content, for free association duplicates the process of formation, or ‘dream work’, in reverse. Freud holds that the dynamic character of the unconscious, with its tendency for repressed material to freely propagate to proxies along chains of association, means that the ‘return of the repressed’ eludes translation by the stereotypical forms of any dictionary of dreams. Freud maintains that ‘the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’ (Freud 1953–74: 5. 608). He eventually proposes that three processes (condensation, displacement and considerations of representation) characterise the dream work, that is, the process of the transformation of unconscious thoughts in the latent content into conscious images present in the manifest content of the dream report. Condensation describes the ‘many-to-one’ process of the formation of images (including acoustic images of words) from elements springing from a multiplicity of sources. Freud, for instance, analyses the invented work ‘Autodidasker’ in one of his own dreams as condensing the word ‘autodidact’ with two literary figures, Lassalle and Lasker, whose tragic destinies are linked to unfortunate loves. Displacement describes the one-to-one substitution of thoughts related by association, so that an apparently unrelated image can appear in the manifest content as proxy for a latent thought. In the ‘Dream of Irma’s Injection’, Freud gives the example of the shift of bad diagnoses from himself to his colleagues, while Irma’s symptoms are shifted onto new locations. Displacement can also involve a shift of emphasis, so that marginal elements carry a disproportionate burden of affect or significance. ‘Considerations of representation’ refers to the transformation of thoughts into plastic images (and sometimes into word sounds) and might be called ‘figuration’. Freud’s example is a woman who dreams she has been handed a burning coal, which is a representation of the discomfort she feels about her secret love. By contrast with the primary process, the ‘secondary process’ of conscious thinking forms in close connection with the perceptual apparatus, on the basis of what Freud calls the ‘reality testing’ executed by the ego regulated by the ‘reality principle’. Although Freud’s perspective throughout is that of the experimental falsification of scientific hypotheses in light of empirical evidence, his concept of reality must not be mistaken for a naïve empiricism, for

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the reality in question is what turns out to satisfy an instinctual impulse, not some kind of pre-cultural brute fact. The reality principle, then, is actually a principle of delayed gratification based on the learning processes that happen in socialisation and experimentation, or, as Freud states, it involves the ‘postponement of satisfaction’. Freud adds that: the pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to ‘educate’, and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole. (Freud 1953–74: 18. 10)

Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex Freud extends sexuality beyond reproduction into generalised erotics and deepens its history into infancy, based on a fundamental conviction that it is intrinsically bisexual and inherently plastic. The component drives of the sexual instinct, characterised by links acquired through experience between erogenous zones and part objects, mature through a sequence of stages to genital – but not necessarily heterosexual – sexuality. These stages – oral, anal, phallic and genital – represent moments in the gradual unification of the component drives under the dominance of genital sexuality and therefore present possible points of fixation beyond which some individuals do not successfully mature. Freud then proposes a controversial theory of how these maturational stages relate to potential love objects, for the paternal and maternal figures in the nuclear family provide the targets and the template for a learning process that leads to extra-familial relationships. The Oedipus complex is the idea that the transition from the phallic stage to genital sexuality is mediated by an intense internal struggle, between an incestuous and murderous wish to have one parent and eliminate the other, on the one hand, and anxiety about punishment for this wish that is represented psychologically as sexual deprivation of the phallus, or ‘castration’ (Freud 1953–74: 19. 171–80). The phallus has a somewhat equivocal status in Freud’s thinking: it is a representation of the penis that the infant believes both sexes possess; but, at the same time, it is not restrictively the male genital. According to Freud, the Oedipus complex is resolved by the repression of sexual attachments, or libidinal cathexes, to the parents, and an intensification of non-sexual affection backed by identification with parental figures, so that eventually genital sexuality is mediated by the desire to be something like one parent and to have a sexual partner who is effectively a substitute for the other parent. Now, Freud initially thinks that the love objects of the maturing ego are symmetrical for masculine and feminine development. Specifically, Freud

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thinks that masculine subjects originally love their mothers and therefore regard their fathers as rivals, and that in consequence of the incestuous wish towards the mother and the parricidal wish towards the father, they feel threatened by the possibility of paternal revenge. In infantile phantasy, vengeance is imagined as ‘castration’, meaning loss of the phallus, but this is counterbalanced by love for the father, reinforced by the ‘negative’ (or inverted) Oedipus complex, springing from the bisexual constitution of human beings, in which the masculine subject loves the father and hates the mother as a rival. Either way, paternal revenge or the adoption of a feminine position towards the father will lead to castration, something that suffuses the ego with sufficient anxiety to motivate repression of the Oedipal wishes, and which is helped along by the perception that females, such as mother or sister, lack a penis and must therefore have been castrated. Accordingly, the young boy resolves the Oedipus complex by shifting from object-cathexis to identification, that is, by renouncing the mother for a substitute love object and by identification with paternal ideals. Freud proposes that for normal individuals, the Oedipus complex is thereby ‘abolished’ and ‘destroyed’, although for neurotics, all that is achieved is its repression, signifying that the core of obsessional neurosis in masculine subjects is a refusal to renounce the maternal object and a failure to resolve aggressive rivalry with the paternal figure or ideal. Subsequently, Freud acknowledges that the pathways into feminine sexuality must involve the paradox of beginning from love for the mother and resentment of the father, but must then get turned into a reversed (or ‘negative’) set of positions. The Oedipal configuration for feminine heterosexuals must involve love for the father and resentment of the mother, if the castration complex is to be resolved through identification with the maternal role and acceptance of a substitute for the father as love object. Freud’s explanation is as ingenious as it is controversial: upon noticing that the female genitals appear castrated by contrast with the male genitals, the young girl turns from love for the mother to resentment of her for lacking a penis. Then, he proposes, after prefatory apologies and a swipe at ‘the feminists’, that young girls ‘feel seriously wronged [and] often declare that they want to “have something like it too”, and fall victim to “envy for the penis”’ (Freud 1953–74: 22. 125). This ‘first instalment of penis envy in the phallic phase’ ruins her phallic sexuality, transforms love for the mother into hate, and turns her towards the father, from whom she expects, if not a penis, then, according to an ‘ancient symbolic equivalence’, a baby as a penile substitute (Freud 1953–74: 22. 128). From this point, Oedipal developments transpire symmetrically with the masculine case, although Freud asserts that the libidinal dynamics of the development of feminine sexuality impair the formation of the superego, with corresponding atrophy of moral ideals and hypertrophy of envious rivalry towards other women.

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Notice that Freud equivocates in this theory. On the one hand, there is the claim that young boys and girls enter the Oedipus complex from the phallic phase, a phase of an imaginary anatomy in which the penis and the clitoris are entirely equivalent. On the other hand, Freud also claims that what is decisive in resolving the Oedipus complex is the perception that the female lacks the phallus and is castrated. The girl is said to desire a phallus and indeed turns aside in dismay from the mother as castrated, but the castration complex, a fear of losing the phallus, is then supposed to be the motor of the repression of Oedipal desires. Freud makes this fragile construction work by equating the phallus with the penis while asserting that this is not exclusively the male genital.

The Superego, the Id and the Ego Freud thinks that the resolution of the Oedipus complex is crucial to the formation of the ‘superego’, a special agency in the psyche whose initial role is to guard against the return of repressed infantile sexuality. Speaking of an ‘intensification of identifications with his parents’ towards the conclusion of the Oedipal drama, Freud proposes that the child’s emotional attachment to beloved images of parental authority becomes a locus where in subsequent phases of maturation, moral conscience develops and internalised social ideals accrete. As initial identification with the parents is supplemented by social ideals and role models, the superego becomes increasingly impersonal, but it retains from its dramatic inception a characteristic that explains the paradox of ‘moral masochism’, that is, the tendency for highly ethical persons to punish themselves excessively for their supposed moral failures. Freud thinks that this phenomenon demonstrates not only that the bulk of the superego is unconscious, but also that the superego draws on the energy of aggressive impulses for its repression of libidinal inclinations. Its roots in the unconscious mean that the superego, as it were, knows more about the individual’s secret desires than the ego does, and its sadistic reproaches to the ego, which seem so disproportionate to the moral facts, in actuality reflect the truth of those strong unconscious impulses that have been turned aside by the forces of repression. Thus, for many individuals, entry into the social world as a morally responsible being is ballasted with guilt, and Freud warns that the superego can quickly become a ‘pure culture of the death instinct’ (Freud 1953–74: 19. 53). The ‘id’ is entirely unconscious and consists of drive representatives, that is, ideational delegates of the sexual and non-sexual instincts that are connected to quantities of affect and linked, through displacement of affect, condensation of images, the unity of opposites and indifference to reality, to other unconscious thoughts. Freud maintains that this ‘dark, inaccessible part of our personality’ is akin to a ‘cauldron full of seething excitations’, as although

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it ‘is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle’ (Freud 1953–74: 22. 73). Freud by no means claims that sexuality is the only instinct – he recognises, for instance, hunger and thirst – and it may be supposed that the id is in general filled with a variety of instinctual impulses. The part of the id created by repression, however, is libidinous, while another part is taken up with derivatives of impulses to aggression, for which Freud has a complex explanation. Freud held that the ultimate explanation for repression must be an instinctual conflict. Initially, the opposition in question was between self-preservation, concentrated in the ego, and sexuality, in which light aggression is not original, but appears as a result of the frustration of one or both instincts. Alongside the discovery of narcissism, which implies that self-preservation of the ego is actually a result of desexualised libido, the phenomenon of masochism, the question of anxiety dreams and the compulsion to repeat disturbing experiences eventually led to Freud’s speculations concerning another principle ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, which he baptised the ‘death drive’. According to the grand metapsychological schema worked out in connection with the opposition between Eros (the pleasure principle) and Thanatos (the death drive, or nirvana principle), a ‘deathly’ instinct exists to return the organism to the tranquillity of inorganic matter. The striking concept of a nirvana principle indicates a striving to eliminate tension that is initially turned inward as selfdestruction, and only turns outward as aggression once frustrated. Freud’s conception of the ego has three noteworthy aspects. First the ego is a ‘precipitate of abandoned cathexes’, the result of a formative process and not an original datum or primordial unity (Freud 1953–74: 19. 29). Second is that the ego is an imagined love object, ‘foremost a bodily ego . . . the projection of a surface’ that is like a corporeal map of the erogenous zones (Freud 1953–74: 19. 26). Third ‘the ego is not the master in its own house’, because, like a ‘constitutional monarch’, it reigns by veto, but does not govern the id (Freud 1953–74: 19. 55). The weakest of the three agencies (ego, id and superego), it is unaware of the dynamic processes of the unconscious, especially repression, and itself includes major unconscious components. These are its investment with desexualised libido in the form of narcissistic auto-affection and its formation through identification with significant others. Although Freud argues that the ego balances between three demands – the id, the superego and reality – this is best grasped as the mediation of the demands of the id by the internalised restraints of social mores and the external constraints of the natural environment. The ego subjects the objects of satisfaction proposed by the pleasure principle to reality testing, because it is linked to the perceptual and motor apparatus of the human organism and is responsible for seeking objects that can satisfy instinctual impulses. But it also

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registers as anxiety the danger signals emanating from the superego about the social acceptability of the proposed objects and experiences the after-pressure of guilt when it ‘forgets’, through repression, these forbidden wishes.

Formations of the Unconscious and Mechanisms of Defence We are now in a position to bring together the main ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis to clarify his distinctively dynamic conception of the unconscious, with its inherent link between repression and the return of the repressed in symptoms. The mechanism of repression is central to neurosis and forms the prototype for defence mechanisms in general as it is ‘the cornerstone upon which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests’ (Freud 1953–74: 14. 16). What is ‘repressed’ is the ideational representative of a drive, that is, an idea representing an object of satisfaction for a component of the sexual instinct. According to Freud’s metapsychological article on ‘Repression’, primary repression involves the exclusion from consciousness of the ideational representative of the drive that a component instinct is fixated to. This idea forms an unconscious ‘nucleus of crystallization’ capable of forming proxies by association, enabling a transference of the affective charge of the sexual instinct to pass to these derivatives. Confronted by an upsurge towards consciousness of one or several of these libidinally invested ideas, secondary repression, coordinated through the joint action of the ego with the superego, exercises an ‘after-pressure’ upon the instinctual derivatives, returning them to the unconscious. The final stage of repression is the ‘return of the repressed’ in symptoms, anxieties, inhibitions, dreams and other formations of the unconscious. In dreams, for instance, disguised wish fulfilments slide past the relaxed vigilance of the sleeping ego, although some excisions and revisions are still demanded by the ego’s censorship. Although jokes contain repressed wishes, they deflect censorship by expressing these cryptically or playfully. The Freudian slip, or ‘parapraxis’, which includes acts of forgetting, slips of the tongue and bungled actions, does not generally contain repressed wishes but rather material inhibited from its open social expression. Nonetheless, parapraxes sometimes do contain repressed wishes, and it is Freud’s case study of his own forgetting the name of a painter that provides a striking example of how the unconscious works. Freud records that in a casual conversation, while travelling back from viewing the frescos of Signorelli at Orvieto (but all the time disturbed by news received in Trafoi of the suicide of a former analysand), he finds it impossible to correctly recall the painter’s name. Seeking to reply to an innocent question from his chance companion, Freud manages ‘Botticelli’ and ‘Boltraffio’ before confessing his perplexity. Freud provides a celebrated diagram of the unconscious thoughts active in this event (Freud 1953–74: 6. 5):

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SIGNOR

elli

BO

BO

elli

BO

ltraffio

snia

and HER(R)

Trafoi

zegovina

HERR (repressed thoughts) Death and sexuality On his analysis, ‘Signorelli’ has been broken into ‘Signor’ (mister – in German, Herr) and ‘-elli’, and the first half of it repressed, for the very good reason that a chain of unconscious associations proceeds from ‘Signor’ to the linked topics of sex and death, about which Freud has no inclination to speak with a stranger. For Freud, signor/herr is linked to Herzegovina and Bosnia by the association between the disease-caused impotence of his ex-patient and the supposed problems of that region, and at this point an unconscious displacement proceeds via the link from ‘Herr-zegovina’ to ‘Bo-snia’, leading to the insertion of ‘Bo-tticelli’ and ‘Bo-ltraffio’ into the conversation. While ‘Botticelli’, famous for his celebration of decaying sexuality in Primavera [Spring] is getting warm, ‘Boltraffio’ is a condensation that hits so close to the mark – the problems of ‘Bosnia’ plus the news from ‘Trafoi’ – that Freud breaks off his speech, flustered. But why should there be a connection between signor, herr and the whole complex of sexuality and suicide? Freud links herr with death and ‘repressed thoughts’, and it is worth noting that signor/herr is not just ‘mister’ but also ‘the Lord’. And the frescos at Orvieto concern the ‘last judgement of the Lord God’ upon naked sinners whose bestial embraces are captured with all of the perverse delight of a Boschian portrait of Hell. Freud’s instance of forgetting is not too distant from the mechanism of repression itself. In the case of ‘Dora’ (Freud 1953–74: 7. 1–122), for instance, when a figure she has apparently been infatuated with, Herr K, forces a kiss

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upon the young woman – making her recall another occasion in which this was accompanied by pushing his erection against her – this triggers a major disturbance. In question is not whether she has been assaulted, nor whether she risks entrapment. Indeed, Freud has no doubt that she is right to suppose that her father intends to turn a blind eye to Herr K’s advances in return for unrestricted access to Frau K. What is at stake is how Dora’s sexuality is impacted by this event, which, for her, dredges up Oedipal fixations that she has not resolved. Her symptoms include a nervous cough that she connects to the thought of the kiss, but which she eventually associates with her forgotten (repressed) arousal, and connects with the idea of oral sex. On Freud’s interpretation, the nervous cough, at once an irritation and stimulation at the back of the throat, is an unconscious formation that compromises between the desire to have oral sex, and her rejection of the man’s advances. Dora confirms this with her linked symptom of loss of voice, the periodicity of which corresponds exactly to the presence (she speaks) or absence (she writes) of Herr K. But the complex sets of love triangles involved mean that Dora, as a key accomplice of her father’s affair with the hypochondriacal Frau K, develops her own psychosomatic ailments in ways whose meaning is an identification with Frau K and whose implication is that these express a desire to attract her father’s love to her. According to the late Freudian perspective of ‘ego psychology’ outlined in An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, the ego in general protects itself from the demands of the id using a set of ‘mechanisms of defense’. The ego makes use not just of repression, but of a panoply of methods, some of which are highly pathological. The aim of psychoanalysis is the integration of split-off instinctual derivatives into the complex whole of the psyche, through the remembrance of repressed material and the working through of infantile fixations, enabling suffering individuals to liberate themselves from their attachment to misery.

Anthropology, Religion and Politics Freud’s inquiries into the origins of social institutions, political authority, cultural formations and religious doctrines have proven extraordinarily influential. Freud followed his sources in making an equation between ‘primitive mentalities’ and ‘infantile thinking’, probably because the implied parallel developmental trajectory linking ‘advanced civilization’ to the mature ego resonated with his lifelong conviction that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. It should therefore be no surprise that although he never stated it in these terms, the ‘master key’ to Freud’s anthropological speculations is the idea that human history rehearses the major stages of the Oedipus complex. In Totem and Taboo (T&T), Freud examines the first stage of this process. Since the totem defines a rule for exogamy and provides a set of ethical

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guidelines for the tribal moiety, Freud’s identification of it with the paternal imago is reasonable against the background of his theoretical assumptions. This interpretation of the totem as a representation of paternal authority is reinforced by the taboos surrounding it, for the anxiety surrounding the totemic figure and its cultic objects represent reaction formations against the wish to commit parricide. Following his sources – Darwin and Frazer – Freud also thinks that the murder of the father of the horde actually happened as real events in the founding of every tribe, and that the genesis of the totem lies in the subsequent guilt and idealisation of the paternal figure as a defence against the return of the parricidal wish. In the late work, Moses and Monotheism (M&M), Freud exemplifies this matrix in relation to Judaism and Yahweh. According to Freud, Moses was actually a religious reformer and a disciple of the Egyptian monotheistic cult of Aton (set up by the ill-fated pharaoh Akhenaton), whom the ancient Hebrews murdered in the desert. The Mosaic revelation about the sole divinity of Yahweh is then set up against the background of guilty repression of the fulfilled parricidal wish. What is intriguing about this claim is that it transforms religion into a kind of Oedipal guilt-cult, reversing Freud’s earlier judgement, in The Future of an Illusion, that religion originates in pre-Oedipal infantile helplessness and the turn to the father as protector. In that work, somewhat more plausibly than in T&T and M&M, Freud proposes that: the gods [have a] threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them. (Freud 1953–74: 21. 18) The claim here is that human helplessness thrusts upon us an atavistic return to an infantile mentality, a position that Freud’s acknowledgement that religious experience sometimes takes the form of an ‘oceanic feeling’ of oneness with the universe hardly disposes him to change. At the same time, it is important to note that what is being defended against in religion is not only sexual: religions form around compulsive rituals that ward off internal and external dangers. Religious rituals are to the antisocial potentials of aggression as neurotic symptoms are to the sexual drives, so that religion is the ‘universal [equivalent to] obsessional neurosis’ (Freud 1953–74: 9. 127). Yet Freud also thinks that the transition to monotheism is a crucial advance because it marks the shift to identification with the paternal ideal (Freud 1953–74: 23. 113). This unifies the polytheistic plurality of totemic gods into a single representation of divine authority, while also providing the basis for the unification of the (for instance, twelve) tribes (of the Hebrews) into hierarchical civilisations (such as the kingdoms of Israel and Judea). For

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Freud, the historical space between ancient civilisation and modern society is filled up mainly with progress in repression. The distance between, for instance, the ancient drama of Oedipus Rex – where the Oedipal crime is openly enacted and then terribly punished with symbolic castration, in the form of blinding – and the modern tragedy of Hamlet, where the protagonist no longer knows why he hesitates endlessly in a situation that triggers Oedipal longings, is evidence for this view. What this implies is that, in a historical sense, the Oedipal complex has not been ‘dissolved’, only repressed, so that religion is an illusion with a future rather than something that belongs in the dustbin of history. Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud’s effort to sum up this research under the shadow of fascist totalitarianism and impending war. Because morality is the main instrument of the civilisational process, and the internalisation of morality flows from the formation of the superego, morality – and its carrier doctrines, such as religion – opposes the death drive to the erotic instincts. Civilisational history, Freud maintains, ‘must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species’ (Freud 1953–74: 21. 122). Contemporary society, he warns darkly, is freighted with a libidinally charged resentment against civilisation’s both reasonable and unreasonable demands for the ‘renunciation of instinctual satisfactions’ (Freud 1953–74: 21. 127). ‘The fateful question for the human species’, Freud concludes, ‘seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction’ (Freud 1953–74: 21. 145). Possibly thinking of political mass rallies and nationalist hysteria, but referring to the church and the army, Freud maintains that the psychology of groups, including national collectivities, is therefore attained through a supplementary identification. When individuals with relatively insecure egos and underdeveloped ego ideals support their egos by identification with all of the other egos, insofar as each of them has buttressed their ego ideal with identification with a leader figure, a kind of lock-step unification is produced. Freud’s counter-proposal is the replacement of the leader figure and Oedipal socialisation with the rational ideals of the Enlightenment and a socialisation into frank sexuality. But he immediately adds that he is sceptical about social revolution (because human nature contains significant aggression) and suspects (based on the hostility towards psychoanalysis itself) that only a minority ever dissolves their Oedipal complexes.

Freudian Pyschoanalysis and Cultural Commentary While Freud’s grim vision of unmastered aggression leading to collective selfdestruction was penned on the eve of Word War II, after the war, with the

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defeat of fascism and the rise of the welfare state, sunnier vistas presented themselves to psychoanalytic visionaries. In the work of Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, Freud’s great metaphysical arch of human history as the struggle of life against death was garlanded with theoretical revisions, designed to improve the prospects for utopia without abandoning the underlying architecture of instinctual strife. Brown’s triumphant announcement that he had reconciled Eros with Thanatos in Life against Death (1959) became the first of several works to prophesy a step beyond repressive civilisation, while advocating a return to pre-Oedipal sexuality as the key to the doors of utopia. In America, this created a stir by proposing that the ‘primeval happiness’ of polymorphous perversity involves an undifferentiated sexuality in which the entire body becomes an erogenous zone involved in a fusional unity with the maternal body. By contrast with Brown’s mystical romanticism, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis are serious efforts to historicise psychoanalysis while psychoanalysing history, which we examine in a moment. In Germany, meanwhile, many sexual radicals sought to synthesise Freudianism with Marxism or anthropology (Jacoby 1986; Robinson 1972). Linking anti-democratic politics with ego weakness, however, these figures all proposed that the ego formation of individuals in a just and rational society would be post-Oedipal and non-neurotic. In post-war Germany, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich sparked a major debate when they analysed the reluctance of Germans to acknowledge responsibility for the Holocaust, in terms of melancholic attachment to a beloved yet forbidden leader figure, whom Germans could neither mourn nor renounce (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1975). In such a context, however, exemplified by the findings of Klaus Theweleit concerning the psychotic dispositions of fascist shock-troop commanders (Theweleit 1987; 1988), it is hardly surprising that the Mitscherlichs called for greater ego maturity amongst Germans rather than advocating something resembling infantile regression. The post-war era also witnessed the emergence of the consumer society, eventually accompanied by momentous changes to familial structures and by a new ethic of expressive authenticity. These were developments that many psychoanalytic cultural critics, from both right and left, felt had generated a new and distinctive personality structure. But it was one whose fault lines led not to classical hysteria, as in Freud’s late-Victorian culture, rather to a form of pathological narcissism consistent with what many of these figures felt was hedonistic consumerism, sexual promiscuity and dispersed kinship networks. While most conservative commentators have been hostile to psychoanalysis because of its critique of religion, Allan Bloom and Harold Bloom have both, in different yet ambivalent ways, had time for it. Philip Rieff and Lionel Trilling used psychoanalysis as a diagnostic instrument for detecting the rise of modern post-religious ‘nihilism’, while simultaneously accusing it of contributing to

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the problem (Rieff 1979: 321; 1987: 57–8). According to Rieff, once ‘political Man’ of antiquity and ‘religious Man’ of the medieval world were replaced by ‘economic Man’ of the Enlightenment and modern ‘psychological Man’, a form of personality emerged that had no standard beyond selfish preferences. The culture of therapy completes the historical counter-revolution that evacuates community and spirituality, resulting in the ‘symbolic impoverishment of Western communities’ (Rieff 1987: 245). In Rieff’s lapidary phrase, ‘religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased’, and psychoanalysis is his or her highest expression, ‘self-concern as the highest science’ (Rieff 1987: 25; 1979: 355). Progressive cultural commentators have also been ambivalent about the decline of public religion and the rise of consumer capitalism. For Erik Erikson, modern childhood had finally emerged from totemic figures and religious ideals into a risky space where moral independence can be explored, with ego maturation happening through a series of identity crises no longer contained by the instrumental manipulation of collective values (Erikson 1963). But, building on studies of the authoritarian personality in interwar Germany, Erich Fromm emphasised the anxiogenerative aspect of the loss of an authoritative tradition, proposing that authentic freedom only results from successful rebellion against parental figures, not from the abolition of authority (Fromm 1960). What is at stake here is not nostalgia for the authority of the father, or for traditional religion – Erikson, Fromm and Marcuse all wrote highly critical psychobiographies of Martin Luther’s ‘anal character’ – but the disturbing possibility that consumer society undermines superego ideals without enhancing the maturity of the ego. With the development of post-Freudian clinical perspectives around objectrelations psychology, Christopher Lasch was able to draw on the theoretical work of Otto Kernberg to propose an influential, if controversial, model of contemporary pathological narcissism. According to Lasch, the ‘permissive society’ of late capitalism has turned decisively aside from the work ethic to adopt consumerist hedonism. A new anti-authoritarian attitude of the late capitalist individual has become the norm in a society that can no longer tolerate delayed gratification, and which actually requires the desire for instant satisfaction as the driving mechanism of consumer culture. Instead of liberation, these individuals find themselves enslaved to a new and infinitely more demanding authority, one that refuses to acknowledge the binding character of rules and reigns by coercive force (Lasch 1978: 177). The problem with Lasch’s analysis is that these social developments are slated home to feminism, because feminism allegedly combines youth movement anti-authoritarianism with an attack on the commanding heights of the work ethic: the father who lays down the rules. Blaming feminism for consumer capitalism, however, as opposed to, for instance, transnational corporations and pro-market governments, simply lacks social-theoretical plausibility.

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Freudian Psychoanalysis and Social Theory The mainstream of Marxism has generally criticised Freud’s theory as a pessimistic anthropology that is really an ideological naturalisation of capitalist individualism (Lukács 1980). By contrast, for the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis was regarded as a crucial part of any analysis of society as individual psychology provided a conceptual corridor between ideological formations and social structure (Held 1980: 110–47; Jay 1973: 86–112). In ‘The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man’, Marcuse summed up the Frankfurt School case that classical Freudian theory had falsely eternalised the historically relative conditions of liberal capitalism and the nuclear family as a fixed ‘human nature’. Locating changes to the structure of modern society as recent fluctuations on a vast timeline, Marcuse proposed, in line with Marxist theory, to connect the human struggle to overcome material scarcity to Freud’s conception of increasing instinctual renunciation (Marcuse 1966: 4). With the society of abundance on the horizon, the instinctual renunciations necessary to drag humanity into the modern world can be progressively relaxed (Marcuse 1966: 78–126). Marcuse believes that human needs that potentially transcend the capitalist system have been mainly replaced by false needs generated by the culture industries. Accordingly ‘the revolution involves a radical transformation of the needs and aspirations themselves, cultural as well as material’ (Marcuse 1972: 33). To do this requires the overthrow of the connection between social domination and the reality principle in late capitalism, which Marcuse describes as the ‘performance principle’. Consequently, a key task of socialist construction is the replacement of the performance principle, the reality principle adapted to capitalist discipline, with a ‘non-repressive reality principle’ (Marcuse 1966: 129). In a key section, entitled ‘Beyond the Reality Principle’ (Marcuse 1966: 172–96), Marcuse argues that repression is unnecessary under socialism and that his proposed non-repressive reality principle would involve the release into society of the pleasures hitherto dammed up within authentic artworks. The revolution combines political with psychological liberation, in order to free the erotic impulses of the individual from the narrow scope of sexual expression alone. Arduous work will become pleasurable play. Subsequent developments and arguments led Marcuse to clarify and correct the hypotheses presented in Eros and Civilization. In An Essay on Liberation (1969) and Counter-revolution and Revolt (1972), Marcuse accepts that some repression is necessary to any form of civilisation whatsoever (for example, the repression of impulses to incest and murder) and that the real problem is what he calls ‘surplus repression’, the repression needed to sustain the performance principle (Marcuse 1969: 33). Where Marcuse tried to synthesise Freud’s instinctual strife with Marx’s dialectics of production, Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests aims

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to draw on the psychoanalytic conception of the ego as the social result of a formative process in order to replace the idealist notion of the transcendental subject. Where universal and necessary conditions of possibility for experience were, there shall materialist anthropology be; in place of the Kantian schema, Habermas sets up a series of pragmatic self-reflections on the grounds of knowledge in species interests. Human beings have knowledge-constitutive interests in adaptation to the environment (a cognitive interest in scientific knowledge), in social coordination (a practical interest in moral knowledge) and in free selfrealisation (an emancipatory interest in social-theoretical knowledge). Wary of the metaphysical excesses of Marcuse’s philosophical history (Habermas 1983: 165–70), Habermas nonetheless also regards the psychoanalytic process of working through repression as exemplary for liberation, so that the paradigm for the emancipatory interest is Freud, rather than Marx. What attracts Habermas is the consensual character of the psychoanalytic dialogue, as an alternative to the Marxist theoretician’s declaration to the proletariat that it is trapped in false consciousness. Psychoanalysis depends upon a critique of distorted self-representations as part of a maturational process, in which unresolved infantile fixations are transcended while a morally autonomous relationship to authority is worked out, but this happens through intersubjective agreement between analyst and analysand. Rejecting the classical theses on drive theory and the Oedipus complex as untenable metaphysics, Habermas proposes a highly general linguistic interpretation of the unconscious that is not entirely unlike that of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Dews 1995). Habermas argues against the instinctual interpretation of the unconscious and for the ‘linguistification’ of inner nature, proposing that repression involves a splitting in communication, between publically communicable need-interpretations, and those desires and feelings that have become ‘ex-communicated’ into a repertoire of idiosyncratic symbols that stand for privatised interpretations of the individual’s needs. ‘Split-off symbols and defended against motives’, he writes, ‘unfold their force over the heads of subjects, compelling substitute-gratifications and substitute-symbolisations’, that is, symptomatic compromise-formations (Habermas 1972: 255). Following the post-Freudian ego psychologist, Alfred Lorenzer’s interpretation of psychoanalysis as a depth hermeneutic that employs explanatory mechanisms only in the interests of rendering plausible an analytic interpretation of an analysand’s symptomatology, Habermas suggests that the cure consists in reintegrating these excommunicated symbols into language. The interpretations of the analyst do not therefore represent a superior insight into the mind of the analysand, but instead are proposals for jointly working through a set of damaging fixations that have happened in an interrupted process of self-formation (Habermas 1972: 256–9). Nonetheless, the ‘metapsychologically founded and systematically generalised history of

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infantile development, with its typical developmental variants, puts the physician in a position to combine the fragmentary information obtained in analytic dialogue’ into a narrative framework capable of prompting interpretations that the analysand can confirm or reject (Habermas 1972: 260). From this perspective, the mythology of psychoanalysis – the Oedipus complex, drive theory and the quasi-natural id – are heuristic props, hermeneutic devices on the road to the discovery of a mutually acceptable dialogue in analysis aiming at filling out the censored chapters of that person’s developmental trajectory (Habermas 1972: 263–5). Through this lens, psychoanalytic theory is reconceptualised as a developmental sequence based on generalised interpretations of motivational dispositions, one that is relative to the social framework supplying the cultural need-interpretations in question. Habermas’s subsequent abandonment of psychoanalytic depth hermeneutics for the developmental psychology of Lawrence Kohlberg has everything to do with the fact that this understanding of psychoanalysis means that its ‘general interpretations do not make possible context-free explanations’ – and a social theory making universal emancipatory claims cannot rest on such a foundation (Habermas 1972: 273).

Feminism and Psychoanalysis in a Post-Freudian World The question of the universality of the claims of psychoanalysis is something that both feminism and female analysts in particular have addressed. This has been a process involving conceptual revision as well as challenges to classical positions. Karen Horney proposed that each sex has its own envy of the other, as ‘breast-envy’ and ‘womb envy’ are equivalents to ‘penis envy’ (Horney 1973). She also called for investigation of the social and cultural conditions promoting a masochistic disposition in neurotic women rather than accepting it as natural. More radically, Melanie Klein influentially proposed a shift in the concept of the ‘object’ from a psychological representation of an object of instinctual satisfaction to being the internalisation of a qualitative interpersonal or intersubjective relationship. The ‘depressive position’ is a fundamental existential attitude rather than a specific conflict and it represents the development of the self through dependence on object-relations to whole persons, as opposed to the ‘paranoid position’, which seeks independence from others at cost of relating to them as part objects. The task of maturation is to build up a complex internal world consisting of responsible relations to concrete others who are in a balanced connection with the self. The individual thereby transcends infantile efforts to objectify the other in order to attain a phantasmatic (paranoid) independence, and the failure to mourn separation from the mother in (depressive) dependence (Klein 1935). This begins with the relation to the mother, for, against Freud’s insistence that the ego formed before the superego, Klein maintains that the superego forms around the maternal imago through the internalisation of ethical relations of caring affection (Klein 1940).

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The revision of classical positions has been accompanied by a critique of Freud’s analyses. Leading feminists have claimed that Freud naturalises the developmental logic constituted within masculine domination through the reference to the phallus, and the concept of the ‘negative Oedipus’ involved in the feminine trajectory is based on the questionable assumption of the normative status of masculine sexuation (de Beauvoir 1972: 35–69; Millett 2000: 176–202). Ernest Jones relates Freud’s perplexity at the question ‘what does a woman want’ (Freud 1953–74: 2. 108, 244) and notion of women’s sexuality as akin to a ‘dark continent’ (Freud 1953–74: 20. 212), along with the implicit connection between ‘penis envy’ and ‘anatomy is destiny’, to his own confessed problems in transferential relation to women (Freud 1953–74: 21. 223). Extending the Freudian psychoanalysis of Freud himself, Sarah Kofman connects this to Freud’s anxieties about his own masculinity (Kofman 1985), springing from his difficult relationship to his father and his tendency to be somewhat in awe of his mother. Dismissal of psychoanalysis is not always the intention in these critiques, for they often highlight Freud’s limitations rather than rejecting everything. The dialectical reversal of woman as lack (or castrated) into a critique of the cultural lack of a signifier for femininity is one possible approach. One of the most closely argued feminist readings of Freud is Juliet Mitchell’s Lacan-influenced Psychoanalysis and Feminism, which famously opens with the claim that ‘psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but rather an analysis of one’ (Mitchell 1974: xv). Mitchell draws attention to the problems in Freud’s theorisation of feminine sexuality and the castration complex, but interpreting the classical texts after Lacan, she understands the phallus to be a cultural interpretation of sexual needs – a phallic signifier – and the castration complex to be an existential division between corporeality and language (Mitchell 1974: 95–104). Through detailed close reading, she shows that, although Freud was not always completely consistent on this point, there is considerable textual support in the Standard Edition for supposing that phallic symbolisation and human anatomy should, in fact, not be conflated. Reading the phallic signifier through Freud’s anthropology and the second topography, Mitchell characterises it as a representation of paternal authority formative of the superego (Mitchell 1974: 81) and she explains the cultural tendency to identify it with the male organ in terms of culturally prevalent narcissistic over-valuation of the penis (Mitchell 1974: 83). The point is not that the phallus is a neutral symbol for potency in general, but that it is a cultural signifier of masculine domination that instigates both asymmetry and inequality between masculine and feminine subjects. Another possible approach is to locate the Oedipus complex, as a limited form of subjectivity, within an expanded conception of subject formation. Jessica Benjamin’s innovative theory of intersubjectivity, influenced by both critical theory and object-relations psychoanalysis, combines intrapsychic

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conflict with the struggle for recognition in intersubjective space. She proposes that the balance between dependence and independence that founds self-identity is far from equilibrium in a culture based on the denigration of femininity and disrespect of women, but, challengingly, she rejects the idea of women as victims and suggests that complicity with domination is part of oppressed varieties of feminine identity (Benjamin 1988). Making use of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as a template for interpreting this politically oppressive cultural antagonism, she reads it psychoanalytically in terms of sadism and masochism. Benjamin argues that gender polarity supposedly based in biological difference leads to the perverse desires to dominate and to be subordinate, or to the formation of identities entirely shaped by an asymmetrical relation to a symbol of potency. To some extent, this interpretation resembles that of Mitchell, but it is more pointedly critical of Freud. In her discussion of ‘The Oedipal Riddle’, Benjamin argues that Freud’s model of the psyche depends on binary oppositions and has strong forms of independence as its model of maturity. Furthermore, Freud’s idealisation of the father has as its underside the notion of the incestuous mother as a regressive siren. From this perspective, it is not that the Oedipus complex is false, or non-existent: it is all too real, as a symptom of domination; but, ‘we can distinguish between a paternal and a maternal superego . . . [which] shows that the paternal principle of separation is not necessarily the royal road to selfhood’ (Benjamin 1988: 152). Both Mitchell and Benjamin illustrate the attractions of Freudian psychoanalysis for critical theory even as they make clear the necessity for postFreudian revisions of the classical theses, for psychoanalysis promises to provide a ground for the theoretical unification of the personal and the social.

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28 LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CRITICAL THEORY Matthew Sharpe

Introduction: Freudo-Marxism; Three Axes of Psychoanalytic Critical Theory

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f sigmund freud’s own intentions were taken as authoritative, the longstanding link between forms of progressive critical theory and psychoanalysis would seem to have been an exercise in misrecognition. As Max Horkheimer was to criticise, in Freud’s later works, the positing of an unchanging thanatos (death drive) repellent to civilisation, while theoretically radical, seemingly places Freud in line with a long heritage of reactionary critics of progressive political ideals and programmes (Horkheimer 1995). ‘I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system’, Freud reflects, ‘[b]ut I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the systems based are an untenable illusion’ (Freud 1962: 60). Freud then continues, echoing Carl Schmitt’s (Schmitt 2007: 61) declamations about human beings as ‘dynamic and dangerous beings’ always in need of strong authoritarian control: Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost before property had given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people. . . . If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike in the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. (Freud 1962: 60) Differently, Freud’s overwhelming focus on individual psychology, and the vicissitudes of psychic development within familial and social structures he leaves largely unquestioned, seems to rub against the critical directions central to Marxist, post-Marxist, feminist, and almost all schools of critical theorising over the last century. This is a criticism which Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser and others were all at times to level against Freud and predominant modes of his reception.

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Yet the founding step of psychoanalytic theory allows us to call into question the defining authority of individuals’ conscious intentions, in discerning the meaning of their words and deeds. For psychoanalysis as for Marxism, the sovereignty of the conscious ‘I’, even when it is a man as profound as Freud, is not ‘the centre of history’ (Althusser 1969: 18). And so it is, as Geoffrey Boucher examines in Chapter 27, that critical theorists in the Marxist, postMarxist and feminist lineages have repeatedly drawn upon psychoanalytic concepts to develop their work, well beyond the founder’s own intentions. ‘Freudo-Marxism’, the name conventionally given to the uses of Freud in the thinkers of the first generation of the Frankfurt School (notably Erich Fromm, Adorno, Marcuse and, to a lesser extent, Horkheimer), involved at least three different axes, which we will see also run through critical theorists’ uses of Lacanian theory (see, for example, Elliot 2002: 40–56; Žižek 1994a: 9–28). Firstly, Fromm et al. looked to Freudian theory to fill a yawning gap in Marxian theory, in explaining how it is that individual political subjects are socialised, from helpless infants to become functioning fathers, mothers, workers, bosses, and so on. Freudian theory furnishes a very powerful, historical or genetic account of the wishes, drives or desires that political orders must harness, repress, displace or sublimate if they are to retain the loyalty of their subjects. In Marxian terms, it thus promised to provide invaluable resources to theorise the cultural ‘superstructures’ built atop the forces and relations of production, and their shaping effects on men and women. In particular, in ways still predominant in the uptake of Lacanian theory, psychoanalysis was seized upon by Marxist thinkers as providing a royal road to the way political ‘ideologies’ work to win peoples’ consent, even though they very often misrepresent the world and facilitate subjects’ exploitation. Secondly, Fromm and the other Frankfurt School theorists came to look to psychoanalytic understandings of the subject to explain how, despite the continuing realities of capitalist exploitation, the masses in advanced European countries did not embrace communism. Instead, following 1930, they were drawn in large numbers to fascist regimes in Spain, Italy and Germany. These regimes, the Marxists argued, displaced economic grievances into nationalistic fervour, and substituted racist scapegoating and hatred of external enemies for class struggle within and across national boundaries. The Frankfurt School’s famous studies on authority and the family – which notably stressed that fascism, and the ‘authoritarian personality’, corresponded historically to a decline of the traditional, father-led family – belong in this attempt to understand ‘what went wrong’, and why global revolution has continually failed to occur. Differently, Adorno’s and Marcuse’s kindred notion of ‘repressive desublimation’ – of new forms of social control that work by stimulating and politically redirecting subjects’ unconscious sexual and aggressive drives, rather than denying them – represent in this vein a powerful (and as we shall see, continually fruitful) critical insight into the cultural logics of mass-mediatic societies.

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Thirdly, different critical theorists, up to and including Jürgen Habermas, have seen a deep kinship between psychoanalysis, as a theory which seeks to interpret individuals’ needs, desires and symptoms, in order to cure their malaises; and Marxism, as a theory whose goal is social emancipation. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism, that is, answer to Marx’s famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach: which suggests that while philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. In later work deeply influential in the student movements of the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse saw in Freud’s ambition to liberate desire from forms of damaging internal repression the model for a utopian form of politics: one of liberated libidinal energy and creativity (Marcuse 1966). The younger Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests, differently, saw in the Freudian therapeutic practice of trying to symbolise the unconscious conflicts which torment neurotics, and thus free them from their sway, the very model of the emancipatory mode of knowledge underlying all critical theory (Habermas 1972: 246–73).

Jacques Lacan’s ‘Return to the Meaning of Freud’: From Ego, Id, Superego, to Imaginary, Symbolic, Real As the Frankfurt School thinkers differently emphasised, Freud’s theoretical and practical work – for all its breakthroughs and insights – remained evolving, and riven by important theoretical and political tensions until the founder’s death. There are by now many introductory accounts of Lacan available, which will confirm and expand the general account given in what follows. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Lacan 1993) is arguably the most lucid introduction to Lacan, amongst his own texts. The reader may wish to consult Anthony Wilden, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Lacan’s The Language of the Self (1968); Matthew Sharpe, ‘Lacan, Jacques’, Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2005); Fredric Jameson, ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’ (Jameson 1977: 338–95); and for a more advanced, systematic reconstruction still, Dominic Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness (2007). Freud’s legacy within the international psychoanalytic movement he created very soon divided. Carl Jung, Freud’s appointed successor, moved after 1910 towards his own, divergent form of ‘depth psychology’, rooted in the hypotheses of a collective unconscious and archetypal symbols. Soon after Freud’s death, differently, the ‘ego psychology’ movement led by Kris, Hartmann and others became particularly prominent in the United States. This school took Freud’s sometime-defence of the ego as the site of conscious, rational reflection and reality testing – read through Anna Freud’s important work on the ego’s defences – as license for a redirection of psychoanalysis. Therapists and theorists in this school turned away from Freud’s great texts on the unconscious and its primary processes, led by The Interpretation of Dreams, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and The Psychopathology of Everyday

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Life. Instead, they conceived therapy as a process of normalising analysands, by prompting them to identify with the well-adjusted, rational figure of the analyst: a process in which the interpretation of dreams, slips and symptoms was increasingly deprioritised. It is fair to say that the revolutionary rethinking of psychoanalysis undertaken by Jacques Lacan turns around his trenchant critique of ego psychology. Importantly, Lacan’s earliest clinical work was on the psychoses: crushing mental illnesses in which Freud had recognised the predominant role played by forms of debilitating narcissism (Freud 2002). Against the ego psychologists, Lacan from the beginning highlighted the lineage of Freudian texts, including ‘On Narcissism’, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and ‘The Ego and the Id’, where Freud depicts the ego as an object of love. In these Freudian texts, the ego cannot be mistaken for the ideal outgrowth or expression of any rational, preformed ‘inner self’ to be strengthened. It instead embodies an artificial representation of the ‘I’ formed by the child’s historical identifications with the child’s significant others (the child’s attempts to ‘be like mummy . . . daddy . . .’) which wants to know nothing at all about the subjects’ own recalcitrant unconscious wishes. What is most often recognised as Lacan’s ‘breakthrough’ text, predating the celebrated seminars he ran from 1952, concerns the infantile genesis of this ego (Lacan 1977). According to Lacan, we ‘become who we are’ – or begin to take on a social identity – through a founding selfmisrecognition which Lacan traces back to the age of 6–18 months. This is the age when children can be observed for the first time, jubilantly recognising and experimenting with their own body image in mirrors, and by mimicking the behaviours of others. Yet, Lacan notes, the unified image the child glimpses here anticipates by some time its own, bodily motor control. For at this stage, a baby has barely begun to crawl, let alone speak or control bowel and urinary movements, and take on a gendered, social identity. ‘The I [or the ego] is an Other’, Lacan thus claims, adapting here German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel’s famous account of human desire as always a desire for recognition (Lacan 1977: 2). We attain our first anticipation of who we are through identification with imagos hailing from others, and outside ourselves. This can be seen clearly in infantile transitivism, and the striking propensity of children to desire what their siblings want, because this other desires it. Lacan thus calls this founding dimension of our subjectivity ‘the imaginary’, in contrast to ‘the symbolic’ and ‘Real orders’, on which more below. He does so, firstly, since in it seeing and visibility play such a leading role; and secondly, since the sense of self the child garners within the imaginary is false, untrue to what we are in the Real, because modelled on our perceptions of others. The second dimension to Lacan’s work, which emerges in full in the 1950s, is the attempt to solidify the still-contested status of psychoanalysis as a science of the subject by adapting structuralist linguistics as the key to recovering ‘the meaning of Freud’ suppressed by the ego psychologists. Freud had, from

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the start, sought to base his metapsychological hypotheses and therapeutic pursuits in a neurobiological, naturalistic account of the brain. Yet both psychoanalytic therapy, and Freud’s groundbreaking work elaborated on its basis, turned on what Freud (or Anna O.) dubbed the ‘talking cure’, and the analyst’s interpretation of unconscious wishes. Lacan’s venture in the 1950s was to argue that the epistemic status of psychoanalysis turned around the role of language in therapy. This was a role which Lacan saw as reflecting the profound, constitutive role of language – via the subject’s need to learn to speak in order to communicate personal desires, but also the words and ‘discourse’ Others have spoken concerning the subject from before birth – in shaping what he or she is, or desires. If we look closely at the great Freudian texts like the Interpretation of Dreams or The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan observed, it should strike us how many of Freud’s ‘interpretations’ turn on linguistic operations: bad puns, slips of the tongue, homophonies, metonymies and metaphors. The unconscious, with its irrational ‘primary processes’ and certainly its formations, is ‘structured like a language’, Lacan thus claimed. Far from being a repository of wildly untamed, mutely natural desires, it is just as if each of us carried around with us whole chapters of obscure ‘signifiers’ (like the ratman’s ‘rats’, etc.) drawn from the most libidinally charged moments of our earliest histories, whose meanings are alien to our conscious selves. Lacan’s radical wager in the first seminars, and in the pieces that make up his Écrits (1977), is then that psychoanalysis, in order to be credible as a science of the subject, must adapt the latest advances in structuralist linguistics championed by Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson and others. In contrast to the imaginary, Lacan calls the order of language – insofar as it plays a role in shaping individuals’ identities and desires – the symbolic order. As subjects, Lacan argues, we do not simply misrecognise ourselves in the imaginary register: we are doubly ‘alienated’ in the symbolic order. What this means is that even our sexual desire, the seemingly most ‘natural’ and intimate component of our identities, is shaped by what Lacan terms ‘the discourse of the Other’: the familial, then social and political languages which circulate around us, with which we identify or which we resist. The second key dimension to the symbolic order as Lacan comes at this time to conceive it, then, reflects a debt to the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Freud had famously posited the Oedipus complex as the decisive episode in the individual’s history, at whose resolution he or she should have taken on a gendered identity, and accepted the inadmissibility of incestuous desire. Using Lévi-Strauss to draw out insights glimpsed in Freud, Lacan reinterprets the Oedipus complex as involving the prohibition on incest (or ‘separation’ from the maternal ‘Thing’) at the foundation of any culture, and – per Lacan – of any individual’s accession to a place within the order of kinship exchange, structuring their society’s relations between the sexes and generations. In Lacan’s rewriting of the Oedipus complex, the decisive

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component is that the child comes to identify with the father – not as a fearsome rival, in the imaginary register, but as bearer of the impersonal, symbolic Law (the Non! of the father) whose foundation stone is the incest taboo. From hereon, all the ‘signifiers’ of the child’s infantile aggression towards his first others, and desire to usurp the mother’s attention in whatever ways, are repressed. They re-emerge only in symptoms, inhibitions, dreams or slips, and behind the subjects’ otherwise unaccountable free-floating guilt or anxieties. In exchange, he or she in effect goes from ‘little Johnny’ (‘his majesty the baby’, as Freud had put it) to the bearer of a ‘name [nom] of the father’ which marks out his place in the chain of generations (John Jones . . . Smith . . . Farthing). From hereon, he will be required by Law to redirect any burgeoning sexual desires at objects outside of the immediate familial milieu, so in time he can become a father of his own. The potentially ambiguous political valence of Lacan’s theoretical work focusing on the symbolic order in the 1950s has been noted, especially by feminist critics. As Jameson comments: if we recall that for Lacan ‘submission to the Law’ designates, not repression, but rather something quite different, namely alienation – in the ambiguous sense in which Hegel, as opposed to Marx, conceives of this phenomenon – then the more tragic character of Lacan’s thought . . . becomes evident. (Jameson 1977: 373) More than this, and despite Lacan’s insistence that the symbolic father may indeed be biologically female, Lacan’s rewriting of the Oedipus and castration complexes around the foundational drama of acceding to the ‘paternal function’ or ‘name of the father’, and identifying with the ‘phallus as signifier of the Law’ seem to secrete inescapably patriarchal, sexually conservative implications. Lacan’s infamous riposte to the student revolutionaries of May 1968 – ‘what you want as revolutionaries is a new master; don’t worry, you shall have one!’ – seems scarcely less encouraging than Freud’s later kulturpessimismus. It is important for this reason to note, as Slavoj Žižek has done most to stress since 1989, that from around 1960, Lacan’s attention moved away from the constitutive role of the symbolic – conceivable as a more or less unchangeable ‘big Other’ into which we are all ineluctably interpellated – towards a third order, that of the Real. As we shall see below, ‘the Real’ for Lacan represents everything about individual and group identity that resists symbolisation: in the first instance, traumatic encounters with things and events the child cannot ‘find words for’, including sexuality; but more deeply, limits and ruptures in the ‘big Other’ of the symbolic order into which the subject is initiated. As such, the Real has been taken to point towards a basis for again seeing in Lacanian theory a basis to conceive radical emancipatory politics which might challenge or overturn the existing symbolic orders of society.

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Structuralist Lacano-Marxism: From the Imaginary to the Symbolic As Joe Valente has commented in a valuable article on ‘Lacan’s Marxism, Marxism’s Lacan’, it is important to distinguish the different ways in which psychoanalysis has drawn on, and been drawn on by, Marxism and other species of critical theory (Valente 2003: 153–4). In fact, as per our interest here, Marxist and post-Marxist critical theorists have far more often drawn on Lacanian theory, than the other way around, with Slavoj Žižek standing somewhere in the middle. The touchstone of all Marxist and other critical theorists’ use of Lacan, in the first instance, is Lacan’s linguistic or symbolic reconception of the subject and the unconscious as a ‘discourse of the Other’. As Michael Clark comments concerning Fredric Jameson’s engagements with Lacan: Lacan’s transposing the ground of consciousness from what Freud calls the ‘other scene’ of the unconscious to the mechanisms of the symbolic structures opens the unconscious to the determination of history as it functions at the material and social levels on which symbolic structures exist for Marxism. (Clark 1984: 67; cf. Homer 1998: 48–50) This ‘linguistification’ of the subject, which is also its ‘decentering’ in the transpersonal symbolic codes of the society into which he or she is raised, lends itself to several different developments. It promises to overcome the anxiety that Freud’s theory of the individual subject is irreconcilable with Marx’s emphasis on the economic and social determinants of behaviour, and his normative collectivism – as well as Durkheim’s old stricture against transposing psychological categories to explain social structures. As Adrian Johnson explains: From a Lacanian perspective, there is no such thing as strictly individual psychology per se. The singular person scrutinized by psychoanalysis, in all the richness of his/her memories, identifications, fantasies, and patterns of comportment, is inherently intertwined with larger, enveloping matrices of mediation. That is to say, the individual is always transindividual. (Johnson 2007: 66) Several lines of theoretical development diverge from this premise. On one hand, as Lacan had proposed that for Freud, interpreting individuals’ symptoms was analogous to interpreting a linguistic text (‘Dora’-‘Torah,’ as it were), so Fredric Jameson has drawn on Lacanian categories to try to consolidate his own Marxist theory of literature. For Jameson, literary texts represent ‘imaginary resolutions of a real contradiction’ or contradictions in the economic and

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political societies in which their authors produce them (Jameson 1981: 77). We are to be attentive in these texts, then, to moments of formal hesitation, ambiguity and contradictions, as Jameson proposes that these are to be treated something like the literary equivalents of individuals’ symptoms in the psychoanalytic clinic. These formal distortions on the surface of a text, Jameson proposes, point us towards the ‘political unconscious’ of the text. This is an ‘unconscious’ associated with what he describes as ‘the Real’, again drawing on psychoanalytic, specifically Lacanian terminology. Yet, as Sean Homer and others have pointed out, Jameson’s account of the Real – ‘simply History itself’ as ‘what hurts’, the long chronicle of expropriations and conflicts disavowed in the accounts of victorious powers – bears little more than its name in common with Lacan’s Real. What it does share with the Lacanian idea is the claim that this ‘Real’ is not, directly, a subtext we could find in a work, so much as an ‘absent cause’ explaining the deformations in the text’s constructions. It must always ‘be reconstructed after the fact’ by the critic, again like the analyst facing a testifying analysand, rather than found in advance, or directly stated at the level of the author’s intention (cf. Homer 1998: 43–55). This notion of retrospective causality or what Freud had called nachtraglichkeit is also important in Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s use of Lacan, alongside deconstruction, to construct a theory of the logics of hegemonic (consensus-forming) political ideologies (Laclau and Mouffe 2001). These thinkers, followed by Žižek here in his earlier work, draw on Lacan’s ‘logic of the signifier’: the French psychoanalyst’s attempt to theorise how meaning can be generated from differential, in themselves meaningless marks. Whether Lacan’s ‘linguisterie’ was originally intended to explain how subjects progressively ‘make sense’ of what happens to them – and how analytic interpretations of symptoms can engender therapeutic transformations – Laclau and Mouffe use the theory to analyse the functioning of key terms in political ideologies. Subjects tend to hold that words like ‘democracy’, or ‘the Party’, or ‘justice’, or ‘socialism’ have stable, more or less unquestionable, meanings. Lacanian theory adapts the Saussurian, structuralist claim, allowing us to see how even such key political terms only gain what meaning they do have through their relation with other signifiers. ‘Justice’ for example takes on a different signification depending on whether it is adduced in a liberal democratic discourse (where it might mean ‘equality before the law, of opportunity to trade, fully consistent with the private appropriation of surpluses’) as against in a socialist discourse (where it will, by contrast, mean something like ‘equality of ownership of the means and fruits of production, the obligation of each to share the social surplus with all’, etc.). The meaning of the key ‘signifiers’ that political debates turn around, on this theory, thus is indeterminate or floating – until such time as they are ‘quilted’ by subjects’ acceptance of a particular ‘master signifier’, whether it be ‘communism’, ‘liberalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘fascism’, and so on. Such ‘master signifiers’ then function in stabilising

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political or ideological meanings as Lacan had argued that the ‘name of the father’ functions in stabilising subjects’ sense of their own gendered identity, and place in the normative orders of their societies. If we accept ‘communism’ as our master signifier, this retrospectively (and prospectively) affects the meaning of all the other political terms we use: ‘democracy’ (which will be ‘real, not merely formal or parliamentary’), ‘feminism’ (as ‘one struggle within the wider aegis of the truly determinant class struggle’), ‘identity politics’ (‘a potentially distracting, bourgeois redirection of class grievances’, etc.). The critical pay-off of this kind of anti-desciptivist, anti-essentialist post-Lacanian theory of ideological language, for Laclau and Mouffe, is to show the extent to which the political significations which people often take to be ‘set in stone’ are subject to contestation and change. Political and cultural struggle can lead to the emergence of new ‘master signifiers’ which will reframe the contested political field. As individuals in the clinic can be profoundly liberated by the analyst’s proffering of new interpretations of their hitherto obstinately immovable symptoms, so the promotion of such new political ‘master signifiers’ can reshape seemingly stable ideological legitimations of existing forms of power (see Žižek 1989: 87–100). If Lacanian theory has thus been called into the service of Marxist literary criticism (Jameson) and post-Marxist ideology critique (Laclau, Mouffe, Žižek), arguably its most famous and powerful use has been in developing Marxist or post-Marxist theories of subjectivity. Here, French structuralist Marxist and sometime-friend of Lacan’s Louis Althusser, and his use of the Lacanian theory of the imaginary to construct a new theory of what he termed ‘ideological interpellation’, has been hugely influential (Althusser 2001). As I commented above, one of the attractions of Freud for the earlier German critical theorists was the promise that psychoanalysis can provide a materialist theory of subjectivity. Such a theory needs to avoid both the idealistic liberal supposition that socialised adults are free, sovereign agents, and the implications of earlier Marxist economism which had deterministically sidelined any account of individual agency. Althusser was struck by the remarkable parallel between Marx’s famous image of ideology as a kind of inverted camera obscura image of social reality in The German Ideology and Lacan’s account of the formation of the ego on the basis of identification with the inverted, mirror images of the child’s own body. His ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’ asks us to understand ideologies as not simply false representations of political reality. Ideologies are rather, and first of all, false or imaginary misrepresentation of the subjects’ relations to that reality. Ideologies, Althusser stresses, are discourses with which individuals actively – or more or less passively – identify: and in whose terms they find a coherent account of who they are, and what it is and is not appropriate for them to do. Marxist ideology, for instance, involves a set of descriptive theoretical claims about the nature of human history and workings of

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capitalist economies. But it also positions us as addressees, prompting us to ‘take sides’ in the class struggle it posits as the key to history: whether as a bourgeois or proletarian, organic or traditional intellectual, etc. In a famous theoretical mise en scène, Althusser asks us to imagine – as a way of glimpsing how ideological ‘interpellation’ of individuals into subjects takes place – an individual responding almost automatically when a policeman hails him: ‘Hey you!’ Ideological discourses always say ‘Hey you’ to us, in Althusser’s picture. They put us in our normative and political places, allowing us thereby to imagine we ‘always’ were ‘meant’ for these roles, even at the cost of profoundly misrepresenting our functional roles in the wider social order. The Lacanian parallel Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation is drawing on here is with the mirror-struck infant mistaking the unity of its body image as proof, or promise, of its unified egoic identity. For Althusser, as a structuralist Marxist, a true account of a subject’s place in society can only be given by understanding the complex structural causality operating within and between the different structural ‘instances’ of the capitalist ‘conjuncture’, all overdetermined ‘in the last instance’ by the workings of the economy.

From the Symbolic to the Real: Slavoj Žižek and the Politics of Enjoyment Without doubt the individual who has done most to revive and develop Lacanian forms of critical theory from the mid-1980s is Slovenian-born thinker, Slavoj Žižek. Žižek’s texts range paratactically over nearly every imaginable subject field, from high culture to pornography, all the while drawing on Lacan to motivate striking rereadings of classical and contemporary philosophical texts (Žižek 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1993, 1994a, 1994b). At the heart of Žižek’s profuse oeuvre, however, there lies a theory of ideology which in many ways brings together, and transcends, both Laclau and Mouffe’s account of the logics of ideological discourse and Althusser’s account of ideological interpellation and the genesis of political subjectivity. Žižek’s originality in the history of Lacanian critical theory lies in the central recourse he makes to Lacan’s category of the Real, which we saw Jameson evoking in the section above but only in order to transform it in his own Marxist image. The Lacanian Real is what resists symbolisation by a subject, or seems ‘impossible’ within their current way of interpreting the world. Given that the symbolic order into which subjects are interpellated is also the order of norms and prohibitions, the Real also aligns itself with what is proscribed and forbidden. It paradigmatically recalls, in the individual’s history, the incestuous desires for the ‘maternal Thing’ categorically prohibited by the symbolic intervention of the father, and the resolution of the Oedipus complex. The Real, Lacan argues, exerts a kind of fatal attraction on subjects. It is at once horrifying and fascinating; a source of repulsion but also almost-involuntary enjoyment. The kind of enjoyment

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in play here is what Lacan terms jouissance, ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. In a series of compelling analyses, Žižek has argued that jouissance is a ‘political factor’ of the first importance, both in understanding political ideologies – beyond Laclau and Mouffe; and why subjects identify with them – beyond Althusser (Žižek 1989, 1993, 1997, 1999). Think back to Laclau and Mouffe’s ‘discourse analysis’ and Lacan-informed critique of ideologies in the section above. This critique turns on the ‘quilting’ role of key ideological terms. If we ask, concerning these terms, what signification a term like ‘communism,’ ‘the nation’, or ‘capitalism’ has, or what underlies its ability to ‘quilt’ the other signifiers, Laclau and Mouffe will explain that these terms, by themselves, name no pre-existing essence or thing. Their entire signification just is the way that they reinscribe or quilt the other political signifiers. Žižek disagrees, or rather argues that, in order at least to explain the Althusserian issue of how subjects are moved by these terms – coming indeed to base their political identities around them – we need to see how these terms relate to the Real and enjoyment. His claim is that these master signifiers, for subjects interpellated by them, name ‘sublime objects of ideology’ (Žižek 1989: 100–29). These ‘objects’ are on one hand almost ineffable. Yet they name what is most vital to a given community: something outsiders ‘can’t get’, or else are disgusted by – like what is in play when an American states, hand on heart, ‘In God We Trust’ or a Muslim intones that ‘God is Great’. Žižek’s typical illustrative examples range over the kinds of things politicians aim at when they invoke ‘our way of life’: the specific way a certain community organises courtship and sexual relations, initiation rituals, religious beliefs, sports, the way ‘they’ prepare food, jingoistic ribaldry and humour, etc. But what are these things, Žižek asks, if not what he terms with reference to nationalism, each nation’s ‘national Thing’? – namely, his adapted Lacanian term for a political community’s particular, idiosyncratic forms of jouissance (see especially Žižek 1993: 200–38). Žižek’s supplementation of Althusser’s theory of how subjects are drawn into identifying with ideologies thus also involves recourse to the idea of political jouissance. Žižek argues for the validity of the term ‘political disidentification’ to describe his meaning. This meaning turns around the claim that ideologies simply could never interpellate subjects if they were solely formal, symbolic discourses – even discourses which promise comfortingly to represent to individuals ‘how they fit in’ to the wider world. Indeed, following Lacan (and Laclau and Mouffe), Žižek argues that the ‘big Other’ that ideologies present to individuals for their identification and belonging (in images of a wholly coherent, functioning and more or less permanent regime of one kind or another) ‘does not exist’. For reasons which are ultimately ontological in Žižek’s work, his claim is that no political system is ever as wholly consistent, rational, functional and just as its ideologies present it as being. Political regimes are always finite and imperfect, like parents – however often children take on the guilt

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for these sins as a self-sacrificing gift of love. In the same way, Žižek argues, when an individual identifies him- or herself with a particular ideological perspective, there is always something more than their pledging allegiance to a set of wholly impersonal, symbolic ideals going on. Instead, what Žižek terms the level of ‘ideological fantasies’ is also in play (see especially Žižek 1997: 3–44). A regime’s ideological fantasies conceal from subjects the inconsistences and problems facing the ‘big Other’. In their place, they promise subjects those forms of political enjoyment which they will risk losing should they be tainted as ‘unAustralian’, ‘unChristian’, etc.; and which involve the sometimes-violent or obscene flipside of a community’s professed symbolic ideals (Žižek 1993: 200–38). To see this further, we will look in the next section at some of Žižek’s distinctive claims concerning contemporary consumerism.

Cynical Ideology and the Society of Enjoyment: The Lacanian ‘Culture Industry’ We noted at the beginning of this chapter the three uses to which Freud was put by the Frankfurt School critical theorists: first, for a theory of the subject and its historical genesis; second, for a theory of fascism, explaining why the revolution did not occur, and the European masses were widely drawn to fascism between the wars; and third, as modelling a kind of emancipatory theoretical practice capable of contributing to the Marxian aim of transforming the world. In this section, we will look at one of the applications of Žižek’s Lacanian critical theory, in explaining contemporary forms of subjectivity and culture in consumerist capitalism – akin to this second use the Frankfurt School put psychoanalysis to, in order to come to terms with fascism and the ‘culture industry’ in the post-war capitalist nations. We close by posing some issues that critics have raised about the ability of Lacanian theory to contribute to emancipatory, post-Marxist politics. Žižek first developed his unique Lacanian theory of ideology as turning on jouissance as a political factor (see above) in order to explain a seeming paradox which he reports about life in the former Soviet bloc (Žižek 1989: 27–49). This paradox was that it was almost an open secret, for a long time, that the communist regimes had become corrupt. No one any longer believed in the utopian promises of socialist ideology. Yet, this conscious cynicism did not seem to matter. People continued acting exactly as they might have been expected to act if they did still ‘truly believe’. The ideology here, Žižek thus quips, lay in their actions, not in their words or beliefs. Increasingly exposed to life in the West after the mid-1980s, Žižek – again like the earlier Frankfurt School Freudo-Marxists coming to America, fleeing fascist Europe – was struck by the similarities in the way Western liberal-capitalist subjects relate to authorities. While we can suppose that there are a minority of economics majors and financial cadres who truly believe that this system is ‘the best of

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all possible worlds’, the majority of people – and much of public culture – is pervaded by a worldly-wise, conscious cynicism. We know ‘the awful truth’ about growing inequalities, increasing economic instability, the corruption of parliamentary politics by big money and vested interests, the partiality of the corporate media, etc., but we act just as if we did not know these things. For Žižek, this type of cynical subjectivity only represents a paradox to the extent that we take it that subjects’ truest motivations should be based on their conscious self-assessments, and that ideologies must operate only at the level of conscious beliefs. But psychoanalysis has always challenged such notions. Žižek’s argument is that cynical disavowal of direct belief in the ideological promises of our political regimes today represents a prime form of ‘ideological disidentification’. Our true allegiances operate by way of our unconscious investments in the forms of jouissance the system allows us, beneath the glittering public ideals we are invited to defend, but no longer seem moved by. Indeed, such conscious cynicism allows us to reconcile ourselves to the unprecedented level of our conformism in a period when, per Margaret Thatcher, there seems ‘no alternative’ to the reign of globalising capital – a little like so many comic characters, already in love, who protest their continuing indifference to their beloveds too much. If we look at the way that the capitalist economy works on the ‘demand’ side in postmodern capitalism, meanwhile, we see that this system’s pre-eminent ideological apparatus – the culture industry, fuelled by a hypertrophied marketing sector – has completely internalised this ideological cynicism. Rather than advertising products by trying to associate them with the great ideals of yesteryear – such as the nuclear family, national unity, religious piety, group solidarity – advertisers more often compete in prompting us to identify their products with the promise of unlimited erotic and other jouissance. A series of advertisements for a brand of potato crisps in the author’s native Australia well illustrates the force of Žižek’s kind of analysis. A handsome, fit young man, bearing these crisps, comes upon a ravishing young beauty besides a deserted waterhole. After teasingly inviting him to come close to her, she prompts him to undress and take a swim with her. But as he eagerly complies, stumbling to take off his clothes and plunge in, she simply takes his bike and lasciviously savours the crisps – all suggesting, in a way that is definitively perverse, that eating the chips (this oral delight) will be better than genital consummation and heterosexual love. In such advertisements (and multitudes might be cited), we see how contemporary consumerism instantiates on a mass scale the old idea of ‘repressive desublimation’. Just as fascism offered subjects a channelled set of releases for their hatred and destructive impulses – directing these onto designated enemies – contemporary capitalism offers subjects an almost infinite array of titillating part objects and incitements to jouissance: exotic travel, extreme sport, endless television, cinema, internet, porn, fine food, ever-newer cars, computers, mobile phones, and so on.

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There is a dark side to this, Žižek however argues, in line with other Lacanian critical theorists like Todd McGowan in The End of Dissatisfaction? (McGowan 2004). The decline of the ‘paternal function’ which regulated relations between the sexes and wider social norms through the symbolic proscription of enjoyment is an ambiguous development. As disturbing statistics about dependency on antidepressant and related medicines across the developed world attests, the injunction to Enjoy! exerts its own heavy price on psychic lives, inciting melancholic anxieties that individuals have not enjoyed enough. Marketing stimulates rivalrous envy between individuals, not simply in the capitalist workplace and between capitals, but also now in the private realm of consumption. Meanwhile, the breakdown of symbolic identification – predicated on the deferral of satisfaction and relatively widely accepted, traditional norms of conduct – does not equip subjects well to respond to the increasing visibility of strangers and other ways of life within multicultural societies. Žižek has argued in several works that forms of religious and political fundamentalism, together with the forms of racist reaction against immigrants that have flourished over the last few decades represent the symptomatic flipside of the decline of this paternal function in the West. In the absence of a strong symbolic order, subjects try violently to reassert a sense of absent normative limits or symbolic boundaries, keeping the Others and their disturbing jouissance at a distance. In a milder form, the proliferating cycles of ‘health warnings’ Western consumers are asked to internalise – ‘sex, but make sure it is safe sex’; ‘coffee, but decaff’; ‘coke, but diet or low sugar please’, ‘smoking, but only outside, and not in public places’ – attest for Žižek to a similar cultural need to establish lost normative boundaries.

The End of the Cure and Emancipatory Politics Once again, with the criticism of the contemporary ‘society of enjoyment’, the reader may note the parallels between Lacanian critical theory and neoconservative cultural criticism associated with figures like Christopher Lasch or Daniel Bell (see Bell 2008; Lasch 1978). Žižek’s own work has taken a critical path through a defence of radical democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, towards some form of revolutionary communism after 1995. For Laclau and Mouffe, and following them Yannis Stavrakakis (Stavrakakis 2007), the Lacanian account of the logic of the signifier shows how political ideologies’ appearance of uncontestable legitimacy is imaginary. What we must strive to do, they suggest, is implement a political system which would reflectively take into account in advance the inconsistency, or contingency, of all ideological, legitimating discourses. The Lacanian critique of ideologies here is taken to point towards a kind of radical democracy in which, in Claude Lefort’s language, ‘the place of power remains empty’, and a space is kept open for the emergence of new counter-hegemonic perspectives (Laclau and Mouffe

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2001). The earlier Žižek agrees that, once subjects have ‘traversed the fantasy’ which has bound them to an ideological position – by promising them those forms of enjoyment we saw above – they will be able to see what was they have previously been blind to (Žižek 1989). The revelation that then awaits them is the Lacanian version of the old idea that the emperor has no clothes (or, as Lacan puts it, that beneath his clothes, he is naked): in the idea we have skirted that ‘the big Other does not exist’. After 1995, Žižek has come – contra Laclau, Mouffe et al. – to increasingly see this kind of therapeutic or emancipatory insight as pointing beyond the horizon of a radical, open and contestatory democracy. The model he draws on to imagine radical political change is instead Lacan’s notion, hailing from the mid-1960s, that the end of the psychoanalytic cure involves not merely the symbolic interpretation of symptoms; it requires the traversing of an individual’s own deepest fantasies concerning the loss of pre-Oedipal jouissance, in a radically transformative subjective act. The political corollary of traversing the fantasy, for Žižek, involves the kind of radical refusal of the claims of the predominant ideological system we can see figured in the eponymous heroine’s refusal of Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone (Žižek 2000), but which Žižek has increasingly identified with some form of vanguardist Leninism or Stalinism bold enough to take on some of the most controversial components of the Marxist legacy (Žižek 2008). It is worth underlining that Žižek’s own political reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot be taken as the incontestable horizon of Lacanian critical theory. We close by noting that, unlike in the Frankfurt School (or Althusserian) tradition, wherein the Marxist uptake of psychoanalysis was often questioned, alongside its limits as a means to theorise the subject and ideology; similar epistemological debates about the role and limits of Lacanian psychoanalysis for a ‘Lacanian Left’ have arguably only begun (Stavrakakis 2007). From a Marxist perspective, for example, Valente has persuasively argued that Lacan’s greatest critical contributions echo those of Freudo-Marxism, in showing how subjects’ symptoms, and jouissance bind them despite themselves to existing symbolic structures. Contra Žižek in particular, however, this kind of insight – so useful in explaining why social change does not occur, as a neurotic remains morbidly attached to his own symptoms – stands in contrast to Marx’s analysis of the ‘symptomatic’ need for capitalism to extract ever more surplus-value in order to reproduce itself (see Žižek 1989: 10–27). This constitutive imbalance in capitalism, from a Marxist perspective, creates the conditions for periodic crises, and a revolutionary transformation of this economic order to a new system, free of such pathological ‘symptoms’. In Valente’s words, ‘whereas the logic of contradiction’ between means and relations of production, according to Marx, ‘charts a cycle of dissolution and reconstruction’, Lacanian theory ‘does not entertain a revolution (as insurgency) that will not also be a revolution (as repetition and return)’ (Valente 2003: 157). If all political ‘Others’ do not exist, and each can equally only garner our support through regimes of

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symptomatic enjoyment which supplement its constitutive lacks, any future regimes can only exhibit different varieties of the same ‘political economy of jouissance’ Lacanian ideology critique decries in the present order. Differently, there is an inescapable problem with the inference from the Lacanian premise, that the subject’s individual symbolic and fantasmatic identity is shaped by identifications with transpersonal norms and discourses, to the implied conclusion in some Lacanian social theory. This is that Lacanian psychoanalysis by itself, beyond being what Althusser called a ‘regional theory’ within an interdisciplinary suite of different critical inquiries, can provide us with an allpurpose method to explain all cultural, economic, political and institutional realities. ‘The key question that Lacanian psychoanalysis enables to be both asked and answered with regard to sociality is . . . How must the subject conceive of his/her surrounding collective milieu in order to accept conforming to its strictures?’, Adrian Johnson, a leading Žižekian theorist, has observed. But by the same token, ‘Freudian-Lacanian theory doesn’t concern itself directly and in the same way with the objects linked to fields such as history, politics, economics, sociology, etc.’ (Johnson 2007: 70). We finish by underlining that making such a criticism does not detract either from the extraordinary power of Lacanian theory as an account of subjectivity, desire and enjoyment, or as a way of understanding the appeal of political ideologies, and the cultural logics of the contemporary world.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Bella Adams is Lecturer in American Literature and Director of the American Studies Resource Centre, Liverpool John Moores University. Publications include: Amy Tan (2005); Asian American Literature (2008). Graham Allen is Professor of English, University College Cork. Publications include: Roland Barthes (2003); Reader’s Guide to Shelley’s Frankenstein (2008); Intertextuality (2nd edn, 2011). Geoffrey Boucher is Senior Lecturer, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University. Publications include: The Charmed Circle of Ideology (2008); with Matthew Sharpe, The Times Will Suit Them: Postmodern Conservatism in Australia (2008); with Matthew Sharpe, Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (2010). Marcel Danesi is Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, University of Toronto. Publications include: Popular Culture: Introductory Perspectives (2007); The Quest for Meaning: A Guide to Semiotic Theory and Practice (2007); Why It Sells: Decoding the Meanings of Brand Names, Logos, Ads, and Other Marketing and Advertising Ploys (2008). Nikolai Duffy is Senior Lecturer in American Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University. Publications include: ‘Without Location: Rosmarie Waldrop and the Poetics of the Neuter’, in Kornelia Freitag (ed.), Another Language: Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America (2009); ‘Among Other Things or, Sculpture Beyond Identity’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature (2010); Relative Strangers: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop (2013). Peter Garratt is Lecturer in English Studies, Durham University. Publications include: Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer and George Eliot (2010).

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Stéphanie Genz is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Nottingham Trent University. Publications include: Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture (2007), Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (2009); Postfemininities in Popular Culture (2009). Philip Goldstein is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Delaware. Publications include: Communities of Cultural Value: Reception Study, Political Differences and Literary History (2001); Post-Marxist Theory: An Introduction (2005); American Reading Practices: Between Aesthetics and Politics (2009). Bruce Harding is Research Associate, Ngai Tahu Research Centre, University of Canterbury. Publications include: articles on New Zealand literary mythographers (Keri Hulme, Alan Duff, Janet Frame, Bruce Mason, Jane Campion, Ngaio Marsh), and postcolonial issues concerning the construction of cultural identity. Chris Haywood is Senior Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies, Newcastle University. Publications include: with Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, Gender, Culture and Society: Contemporary Femininities and Masculinities (2006); with Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, ‘The Queer in Masculinity: Schooling, Boys and Identity Formation’, in N. Rodriguez and N. Landreau (eds), Queer Masculinities: A Critical Reader in Education (2011); with Mairtin Mac an Ghaill, Education and Masculinities: Social, Cultural and Global Transformations (2013). Gareth Longstaff is Teaching Fellow in Media and Cultural Studies, Newcastle University. Publications include: ‘From Reality to Fantasy, Celebrity, Reality TV, and Pornography’, in The Journal of Celebrity Studies. Special Issue: Sex and Celebrity (2013). Mairtin Mac an Ghaill is Professor of Multi-professional Education, and the Director of the Children, Young People and Family Research Centre, Newman University, Birmingham. Publications include: The Making of Men: Masculinities, Sexuality and Schooling (1994); with Chris Haywood, Gender, Culture and Society: Contemporary Femininities and Masculinities (2006); with Chris Haywood, Education and Masculinities: Social, Cultural and Global Transformations (2013). Claire Nally is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature, Northumbria University. Publications include: Envisioning Ireland: W. B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism (2009); with John Strachan, Selling Ireland: Advertising, Literature and Irish Print Culture, 1891–1922 (2012). Neema Parvini is Lecturer in English, University of Surrey. Publications include: Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (2012); Shakespeare’s History Plays: Rethinking Historicism (2012).

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Arkady Plotnitsky is Professor of English and Theory and Cultural Studies, Purdue University. Publications include: Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy (2006); Epistemology and Probability: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and the Nature of Quantum-Theoretical Thinking (2009); Niels Bohr and Complementarity: An Introduction (2012). Derek M. Robbins is retired Professor of International Social Theory, University of East London. Publications include: Bourdieu and Culture (2000); On Bourdieu, Education and Society (2006); French Post-War Social Theory: International Knowledge Transfer (2011). Matthew Sharpe is Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University. Publications include: Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real (2005); Understanding Psychoanalysis (2008); with Geoffrey Boucher, Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (2010). Stuart Sim is retired Professor of Critical Theory and Long Eighteenth-Century English Literature, Northumbria University. Publications include: Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (2000); Irony & Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (2002); Fifty Key Thinkers on Postmodernism (2013). Carole Sweeney is Lecturer in Modern Literature, Goldsmiths College. Publications include: From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919–1939 (2004); ‘Edouard Glissant, History and Haiti’, Journal of Atlantic Studies (2007); Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair (2013). Georges Van Den Abbeele is Dean of Humanities, University of California Irvine. Publications include: trans., Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988); Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (1992); with Tyler Stovall (eds), French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race (2003).

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INDEX

Aboim, Sofia, 256 Abrams, M. H., 349 abstract expressionism, 15 Achebe, Chinua, 181 Ackroyd, Peter, 171–2 Adams, J. Christian, 213 Adorno, Theodor W., 16, 17, 24–5, 26, 36, 40, 45, 48, 74, 143, 145, 146–7, 150, 151, 160, 217, 497, 498 Aeschylus, 455 Agamben, Giorgio, 134–6, 138 Ahmad, Muneer I., 226 Ahmed, Sara, 249 AIDS, 208, 235, 244, 245 Alexander, Michelle, 197 Alexie, Sherman, 197 Alkalimat, Abdul, 205 altermodernism, 179, 182, 192–5 Althusser, Louis, 18, 21, 22, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 43, 49, 62, 155, 280, 364, 367–70, 374, 377, 378, 379, 457, 477, 497, 505, 506, 507, 511, 512 American Declaration of Independence, 119, 222

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Anderson, Eric, 259 Anderson, Perry, 20, 21, 22, 31 Andrews, Bruce, 173 Annales school, 345 Anzaldua, Gloria, 246 Arab Spring, 29 Archimedes, 345, 357, 439 Aristotle, 134, 149, 150, 301, 332, 343, 386, 398, 399, 438, 439 Arnold, Matthew, 439 Aron, Raymond, 103 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 399, 453, 457, 459, 460, 462, 463, 470 Asante, Molefi Kete, 197, 202, 203, 205 Aschenbrand, Perea, 318 Ashbery, John, 173 Ashcroft, Bill, 181, 182 Attridge, Derek, 115 Attwood, Feona, 285 Auerbach, Erich, 346, 352, 398 Augustine, Saint, 55–6, 57 Auschwitz, 146

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562 Austen, Jane, 187, 277, 289, 456, 457 Auster, Paul, 164, 172 Austin, Regina, 227 Bachelard, Gaston, 158 Badiou, Alain, 31, 32, 35, 42, 143, 160–1, 422, 432, 434, 442, 444, 447, 448 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 58, 385, 396 Baldwin, James, 197 Balibar, Étienne, 28, 29 Balzac, Honoré de, 65 Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 312 Banks, Taunya Lovell, 227 Barry, Peter, 172 Barthes, Roland, xi, 53, 55, 60, 63, 64–6, 67, 125, 173, 331, 332, 336, 339, 388–9, 410, 468 Bataille, Georges, 432 Baudelaire, Charles, 63, 339 Baudrillard, Jean, 44, 45, 446 Bauman, Zygmunt, 42, 314 Bayley, John, 375 Beardsley, Monroe, 329, 332, 336, 383, 405 Beckett, Samuel, 165, 392, 450 Bell, Daniel, 510 Bell, Derrick, 213, 215, 216, 217, 219, 224 Benedict, Ruth, 361 Benjamin, Jessica, 495–6 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 74, 168, 173 Bennett, Andrew, 329, 335, 361

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index Bennett, William, 202–3 Bentham, Jeremy, 128 Benveniste, Émile, 89, 125, 126, 139, 392 Benwell, Bethan, 322 Berlant, Lauren, 250 Berlin, Isaiah, 359 Bernstein, Charles, 173 Bersani, Leo, 238, 239, 245 Best, Steven, 145 Bethel, S. L., 375 Betteridge, Thomas, 348 Bhabha, Homi K., 163, 179, 181, 185, 187–90, 195, 357 Bhaskar, Roy, 26 Bigelow, Bill, 197 bio-power, 132–4, 135 Black Panthers, 213 Black Power, 196, 200, 201 Black Studies, 179, 196–212 Blair, Prime Minister Tony, 317 Blake, William, 409 Blanchot, Maurice, 64, 116 Bleich, David, 332, 334, 341, 344 Bloom, Allan, 202, 355, 490 Bloom, Harold, 115, 347, 361, 401, 410, 490 Bloor, David, 430, 431 Bly, Robert, 253 Bogue, Ronald, 171 Bohm, David, 162 Bohr, Niels, 428–9, 430, 432, 434–5, 436, 438, 443, 444, 448 Bolens, Guillemette, 471 Bolshevism, 352, 385 Boole, George, 55

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index Booth, Wayne C., 330, 333–4 Botticelli, Sandro, 485–6 Boucher, Geoffrey, 498 Bourdieu, Pierre, 91, 98, 101–6, 107, 108, 185 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 182, 192–3, 194, 195 Boyarin, Daniel, 188 Boyd, Brian, 465–6, 467 Brabon, Benjamin, 309, 315 Bradbrook, M. C., 375 Bradley, A. C., 375 Braithwaite, Edward, 182, 183, 186–7, 195 Brecht, Bertolt, 17, 64, 364 Bremond, Claude, 389–90 Bricmont, Jean, 31, 419, 443 Bridges, Tristan, 259–60 Brik, Osip, 404 Broderick, Damien, 452 Bronowski, Jacob, 331 Brontë, Charlotte, 277 Brooks, Ann, 307 Brooks, Cleanth, 330, 351, 365, 402, 405, 406, 407, 408 Brown, Dorothy, 213 Browne, Norman O., 490 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 280 Budgeon, Shelley, 316 Bühler, Karl, 80 Bullard, Robert D., 207, 209, 210 Burckhardt, Jacob, 395 Burke, Carolyn, 302 Burke, Edmund, 169 Burton, Sir Richard, 130 Bush, President George, 351

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563

Bush, President George W., 351 Butler, Judith, 107–8, 131, 240, 246, 261, 264–5, 296, 305, 312, 315, 321 Butler, Paul, 219, 225, 226 Cage, John, 174, 175 Cain, William E., 402, 415 Calvino, Italo, 172 Cameron, Prime Minister David, 318 Camus, Albert, 30, 64 Canguilhem, Georges, 158 capitalism, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 25, 28, 29, 30, 33, 44, 46, 49, 65, 74, 123, 130, 146, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 164, 176, 179, 192, 193, 195, 217, 237, 244, 246, 248, 249, 254, 313, 315, 319, 321, 322, 335, 351, 368, 370, 372, 446, 491, 492, 498, 504, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511 Carbado, Devon W., 223–4 Carroll, Joseph, 466, 467 Cartland, Barbara, 166 Carver, Terrell, 45–6 Cassirer, Ernst, 91–3, 95, 96, 104, 105 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 44 Castro, Fidel, 9 Caudwell, Christopher, 366 Cézanne, Paul, 99 Chancer, L., 251 chaos theory, 450 Chatman, Seymour, 391

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564

index

Chavis, Reverend Benjamin, 209 Chiesa, Dominic, 499 Chinese Revolution (1949), 14 Chodorow, Nancy, 292 Chomsky, Noam, 69, 390, 457, 459–60, 463 Christensen, Ann-Dorte, 258–9 Civil Rights Movement, 196, 207, 223 Cixous, Hélène, 116, 117–18, 271, 295, 296, 297–301, 302, 303, 304 Clark, Andy, 472 Clark, Michael, 503 Clemens, Justin, 32 Clément, Catherine, 295 Clinton, President Bill, 317, 359 Cochran, Johnnie L., 220 cognitive science, ix, x, 55, 69, 76, 85, 86, 383, 399–400, 419, 439, 442, 456–73 Cohen, Mitchell, 81 Cold War, 9, 218, 373 Colebrook, Claire, 472 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 375, 407 Collin, Françoise, 299 Collini, Stefan, 412 communism, ix, 3, 5, 7, 8–9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 148, 350, 497, 498, 504, 505, 507, 508, 510 complexity theory, 450 Comte, Auguste, 352 connectionism, 459, 460, 461 Connell, Raewyn, 253, 255–6

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Conrad, Joseph, 181 consilience, 467, 468 Cook, Anthony, 218 Coole, Diana, 91, 106–8 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 155, 426, 439 Cornell, Drucilla, 285 Cortázar, Julio, 392 Cott, Nancy, 314 Coward, Noel, 371 Cratylus, 56 credit crash (2007–8), 5, 192, 318, 319, 322 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 216, 218, 225, 227 Criado-Perez, Caroline, 289 Crimp, Douglas, 245 critical race theory (CRT), 130, 179, 197, 213–29 critical realism, 17, 24 Cubism, 15, 446 Culler, Jonathan, 66, 69 cultural materialism, 361, 363–79 Cultural Revolution (1966), 14 cummings, andré douglas pond, 225 Cuvier, Georges, 92 cyborg, 273, 281, 287–8, 472 Dadaism, 121, 386 Daddesio, Thomas, 69 Dalton, Harlon L., 218 Damasio, Antonio, 464–5, 471 Damisch, Hubert, 66 Darwin, Charles, 319, 320, 424, 427, 433, 442, 450, 452, 465, 466, 467, 468, 488 Davidson, Michael, 168

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index de Beauvoir, Simone, 271, 273, 280–2, 283, 284, 293–4, 295, 296, 297 De Gaulle, Charles, 31 de Lauretis, Teresa, 132, 237, 290, 291 de Man, Paul, 115, 354, 373, 401, 410, 411, 422, 432, 434, 448 death of the author, 65, 66, 331 deconstruction, 45, 46, 55, 68, 79, 89, 91, 101, 107, 109–24, 129, 131, 148, 201, 216, 233, 235, 238, 239, 240, 248, 271, 286, 287, 296, 297, 299, 308, 313, 327, 332, 336, 345, 347, 348, 349, 354, 355, 358, 360, 361, 373, 401, 410, 411, 439, 441, 462, 464, 467, 468, 504 Deleuze, Gilles, 33, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148–54, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 170–1, 422, 423, 442, 444 Delgado, Richard, 197, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 224, 226, 227 Delphy, Christine, 295 DeMaria, Robert Jr., 336 Denfeld, Rene, 308 Dennett, Daniel, 460, 464, 465 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 45, 50, 53, 67, 68, 79, 89, 91, 98, 100–1, 102, 106, 109–16, 118–24, 126, 127, 143, 145, 147–8, 150, 151, 157, 161, 238, 239, 241, 294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 338, 354, 358, 373, 410, 422, 432, 434, 439, 442, 444, 448, 452, 457, 462, 464, 468

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565

Descartes, René, 84, 99, 126, 145, 254, 301, 338, 463, 465, 468, 469, 471, 472 dialectics, 5, 6, 7, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 40–1, 44, 45, 53, 58, 72, 73, 85, 86, 97, 99, 104, 105, 146, 148, 150, 151, 154, 195, 298, 353, 357, 495, 496 différance, 68, 79, 110–11, 112–14, 118, 122, 147, 296, 434, 448 differend, 157, 168–9, 170, 174 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 92, 96, 101, 356 discourse, discourse theory, xi, 35, 55, 89, 110, 125–39, 158, 160, 182, 187, 190, 192, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 274, 280, 288, 300, 302, 307, 316, 317, 318, 335, 340, 341, 348, 357, 360, 369, 378, 387, 388, 391, 392, 405, 410, 411, 421, 468, 501, 504, 506, 507, 512 Disney, Walt, 371–2 Dollimore, Jonathan, 239–40, 327, 363, 372, 374, 377, 378, 379 Donne, John, 406 double-coding, 143, 165–6 Douglas, Susan, 310, 322 Douzinas, Costas, 169 Drakakis, John, 375 Drake, St. Clair, 197, 200 DuBois, W. E. B., 196, 218, 221 Duchamp, Marcel, 446 Dudziak, Mary, 218

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566

index

Dufrenne, Mikel, 99 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 452, 453 Durkheim, Émile, 60, 72, 103, 503 Dworkin, Andrea, 246, 273, 283, 285, 286–7 Dyson, Eric Michael, 206, 207, 209, 214, 215 Eagleton, Terry, 18, 28, 123, 280, 368, 370, 371, 378, 409, 414 Easterlin, Nancy, 459 Eco, Umberto, 53, 63, 64, 166, 172, 393 ecocriticism, 210–11 écriture féminine, 118, 299–30 Edelman, Lee, 245, 246, 250 Eichenbaum, Boris, 385, 404 Einstein, Albert, 110, 428, 429, 430, 440, 443, 451 Elgar, Edward, 369 Eliot, George, 187, 277 Eliot, T. S., 369, 371, 403, 406, 407 Empson, William, 404 Engels, Friedrich, 6, 7, 22, 23, 45, 284 Enlightenment, 24, 25, 26, 73, 119, 138, 145, 146, 147, 216, 217, 274, 275, 288, 347, 350, 353, 424, 425, 426, 431–2, 440, 449, 453, 454, 489, 491 Enwezor, Okwui, 192–3, 194, 195 episteme, 127–8, 158, 344, 347, 424–5, 426 Erikson, Erik, 491 Erlich, Victor, 333 Eurocommunism, 30 événements (1968), 27, 31, 32, 42, 294, 331, 502

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 566

existentialism, 27–8, 32, 98, 101, 105, 280, 281, 297, 332, 336, 338, 340, 343, 456 Fairclough, Norman, 89, 137–9 Faludi, Susan, 307 Fanon, Frantz, 179, 181, 182–3, 184, 189, 190, 195, 357 Farber, Daniel A., 220 Farber, Marvin, 95 fascism, 24, 217, 221, 279, 350, 351, 352, 489, 490, 498, 504, 508, 509 Fauconnier, Gilles, 471 Feldman, Morton, 174 Felman, Shoshana, 291 Feltham, Oliver, 32 feminism, ix, xi, 12, 13, 89, 106–7, 114, 116–18, 131, 182, 190, 195, 202, 204, 210, 225, 227, 228, 233, 235, 246, 252, 253, 258, 259, 264, 266, 271, 273–323, 373, 409, 457, 467, 477, 479, 482, 491, 494–5, 497, 498, 505 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 499 Feyerabend, Paul, 422, 426, 430, 431 Fielding, Helen, 306, 311, 319 Fineman, Joel, 346 Firestone, Shulamith, 273, 281, 283–5, 288 Fish, Stanley, 327, 330, 333, 334, 335, 340–1, 347, 373, 393 Flaubert, Gustave, 130, 392 Fleck, Ludwik, 422, 430, 431 Fleming, Ian, 63

17/12/15 12:03 PM

index Floyd, Kevin, 262, 264 Fodor, Jerry, 460, 461, 462 formalism, 3, 53, 327, 341, 349, 351, 352, 355, 360, 365, 383, 385–415, 456, 458 Foucault, Michel, 42, 43, 44, 62, 79, 89, 126–9, 130, 132–4, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143, 145, 147, 157–60, 161, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244, 261, 305, 312, 317, 335, 345, 347, 348, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 362, 374, 422, 424, 426, 432, 440, 449 Fouque, Antoinette, 295 Frampton, Kenneth, 165 Frankfurt School, 16, 21, 24, 25, 74, 492, 498, 499, 508, 511 Frayn, Michael, 445 Frazer, James, 488 Freeman, Alan, 216, 217 French Revolution (1789), 64, 275, 352 Freud, Anna, 499 Freud, Sigmund, 42, 66, 75, 110, 151, 152, 153, 154, 159, 162, 291, 295, 299, 301, 303, 330, 332, 334, 335, 456, 477, 479–96, 497–504, 505, 508, 511, 512 Friedan, Betty, 282, 311 Fromm, Erich, 74, 491, 498 Frow, John, 145 Frug, Mary Joe, 287 Frye, Marilyn, 246, 409 Frye, Northrop, 81, 85, 360, 395 Fuhrman, Mark, 220 Fukuyama, Francis, 357

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 567

567

Fuss, Diana, 246, 302 Gaddis, William, 172 Galileo, 426, 427, 439, 440 Gallagher, Catherine, 345, 346, 347, 360–1 Gallagher, Sean, 470 Gallop, Jane, 302 Gardner, Helen, 375 Garrett, James, 199 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 203, 204, 205 Geertz, Clifford, 67, 346, 356, 360, 361, 374 Genet, Jean, 283 genetic structuralism, 53, 71–86 Genette, Gérard, 66, 392, 393 Geneva School, 332, 340 Genz, Stéphanie, 309, 310, 312, 315, 318, 322 Geras, Norman, 34–5, 40 Giddens, Anthony, 316 Gilbert, Jeremy, 320 Gilbert, Jess, 209 Gilbert, Sandra, 292, 373 Gill, Rosalind, 309, 312, 318 Gilligan, Carol, 292 Gilroy, Paul, 204 Giroux, Henry, 318–19, 320 Glass, Philip, 175 Glissant, Edouard, 186, 190, 194, 195 Glotfelty, Cheryl, 211, 426 Gödel, Kurt, 31, 426, 439, 442 Godzich, Wlad, 410 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 92 Goldberg, David Theo, 203

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568 Goldberg, Jonathan, 346 Goldman, Emma, 280 Goldman, Robert, 313 Goldmann, Lucien, 53, 71–86, 410 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 175–6 Gorak, Jon, 377 Gordon, Douglas, 175 Gorz, André, 33, 37, 38 Gotanda, Neil, 222 Gottschall, Jonathan, 466 Gramsci, Antonio, 11, 15, 21, 28, 29, 30, 33, 74, 130, 191, 217, 219, 255, 355, 358, 370, 371, 372, 378 grand narrative, 43, 44, 99, 143, 154, 155, 164, 297, 352, 354, 356, 360, 424, 425, 433, 445, 448, 452, 453, 457 Great Depression (1930s), 10, 375 Green, Adam Isiah, 238 Greenblatt, Stephen, 122, 327, 345, 346, 347, 348, 354, 358, 360–1, 373, 374, 414 Greer, Germaine, 285 Greimas, Algirdas Julien, 55, 59–60, 63, 388, 390–1 Griffiths, Gareth, 181 Gross, Paul, 443 Group Mu, 174 group theory, 55, 61 Guattari, Félix, 33, 145, 146, 151–4, 157, 159, 160, 161, 170, 442 Gubar, Susan, 292, 373 Guha, Ranajit, 191, 357 Guillaumin, Colette, 295

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 568

index Guillory, John, 412 Gurwitsch, Aron, 95, 97, 98, 102, 104 Habermas, Jürgen, 25, 26, 157, 411, 425, 449, 453, 454, 492–3, 494, 499 Hacker, Andrew, 226 Hadfield, Andrew, 379 Halberstam, Judith, 261 Hall, Donald E., 235, 238 Hall, Stuart, 33, 34, 202, 203, 204, 205, 355 Halley, Janet, 248 Hallward, Peter, 32 Hammett, Dashiell, 393 Haraway, Donna, 273, 282, 284, 285, 287–9 Harbage, Alfred, 375 Harding, D. W., 335–6 Hare, Nathan, 199 Harlan, Justice John, 222 Harlem Renaissance, 182, 211 Harris, Anita, 311 Harris, Cheryl L., 216, 223–4 Harrison, Rex, 371 Hartman, Geoffrey, 115, 331, 336, 410, 411 Hartmann, Heidi, 13 Hartmann, Heinz, 499 Harvey, David, 19, 49, 310 Hawkes, Terence, 374–5 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 363 Hayakawa, S. I., 198 Hayles, Katharine, 287 Hearn, Jeff, 254 Heath, Stephen, 66, 394

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index Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 6, 7, 22, 23, 24, 26, 29, 72, 73, 75, 81, 85, 86, 99, 147, 149, 150, 254, 255, 280–1, 301, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 356, 374, 378, 396, 423, 429, 496, 500, 502 hegemony, 11, 15, 20, 27, 28, 29, 39–41, 47, 74, 131, 233, 235, 236, 241, 250, 252, 256–9, 266, 320, 335, 351, 370, 371 Heidegger, Martin, 76, 96, 100, 101, 110, 111, 114, 147, 148, 161, 398, 424, 430, 442, 447, 452, 463, 470 Heilman, Robert B., 406 Heise, Ursula, 210 Heisenberg, Werner, 110, 162, 163, 331, 335 Hejinian, Lyn, 173 Heller, Evelyn Fox, 284 Heraclites, 455 Herder, J. G., 345, 351 Herman, David, 400, 468, 469 Herskovits, Melville, 103 Hill, Leslie, 116 Hindess, Barry, 37 Hird, Myra, 261 Hirsch, E. D., 351 Hirst, Paul Q., 37 historicism, 45, 62, 71, 81, 109, 327–79, 386, 401, 402, 403, 409, 490 Hitchcock, Alfred, 175 Hitler, Adolf, 350, 352 Hjelmslev, Louis, 59, 395 Hobsbawm, Eric, 357 Hocquard, Emmanuel, 174

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 569

569

Hocquenghem, Guy, 244 Hogan, Patrick Colm, 461 Hoggart, Richard, 355 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 348 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 441 Holderness, Graham, 375 Holland, Norman, 330, 332, 334 Hollows, Joanne, 311 Holocaust, 110, 160, 354, 490 Holt, Thomas, 214, 215 Homer, 146, 352 Homer, Sean, 504 Honneth, Axel, 101 hooks, bell, 190 Horkheimer, Max, 24, 25, 74, 146, 217, 497, 498 Horney, Karen, 494 Howarth, David, 41–2 Hughes, Langston, 182 Hume, David, 148, 149, 440, 441, 460 Hurricane Katrina, 210 Husserl, Edmund, 75, 76, 91, 95, 96–7, 98, 99, 100–1, 102, 110, 463, 470 Hutcheon, Linda, 445 Hutchinson, Darren Lenard, 228 Huyssen, Andreas, 145 hybridity, 167, 176, 186, 187–90, 195, 287, 288, 356, 463 Hyppolite, Jean, 410 Ignatiev, Noel, 225 intelligent design, 452, 453 Irigaray, Luce, 116, 117, 271, 278, 295, 296, 297, 299, 300, 301–3, 304, 444

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570 Iser, Wolfgang, 327, 330, 336, 341–4, 393 Jackson, Michael, 214 Jacobs, Jane, 165 Jagose, Anne-Marie, 235 Jakobson, Roman, 57, 62–3, 78, 80, 92, 385, 388, 404, 501 James, C. L. R., 200 James, Clive, 363–4, 365 James, Henry, 366 James, William, 442 Jameson, Fredric, 30, 123, 145, 167, 378, 396, 445, 446, 499, 502, 503–4, 505, 506 Jancovich, Mark, 408 Jauss, Hans Robert, 393 Jeffreys, Sheila, 283 Jencks, Charles, 143, 165, 166, 167 Jensen, Sune Qvotrup, 258–9 Johansson, Thomas, 257, 258 Johnson, Adrian, 503, 512 Johnson, Barbara, 112, 297 Johnson, Mark, 69, 78, 470–1 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 117 Jones, Ernest, 375, 495 Joris, Pierre, 173 Joughin, John J., 412 jouissance, 302, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512 Joyce, James, 403, 442, 446, 450, 455 Jung, Carl, 456, 499 Juvan, Marko, 174 Kafka, Franz, 17, 170, 450

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 570

index Kant, Immanuel, 22, 72, 148, 149, 150, 151, 169, 275, 301, 407, 408, 413, 424, 429, 430, 434, 440, 441, 493 Kaplan, Cora, 280 Karenga, Maulana, 212 Kastan, David Scott, 347 Kearney, Richard, 168 Keats, John, 277, 441 Kelley, Robin G. D., 201–2, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212 Kellner, Doug, 145 Kepler, Johannes, 439 Kermode, Frank, 364, 375 Kernan, Alvin, 331 Kernberg, Otto, 491 Kimmel, Michael, 251, 256, 259 King, Martin Luther, 199, 211, 222 King, Rodney, 220 Kitwana, Bakari, 205, 207, 208, 209, 225 Klein, J., 251 Klein, Melanie, 494 Kleist, Heinrich von, 441 Knight, G. Wilson, 375 Knights, L. C., 375 Koester, Joachim, 193–4 Kofman, Sarah, 295, 495 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 494 Kramnick, Jonathan, 466, 467 Kris, Ernst, 499 Kristeva, Julia, 66, 116, 117, 290, 294, 295, 296, 297, 299, 303–5 Kuhn, Thomas, 62, 421–2, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 429, 430, 431–3, 435, 436 Kull, Kalevi, 58

17/12/15 12:03 PM

index Lacan, Jacques, 46, 62, 125, 151, 152, 162, 291, 294, 295, 299, 301, 302, 304, 394, 410, 432, 434, 442, 444, 448, 457, 477, 493, 495, 497–512 Laclau, Ernesto, 3, 12, 20, 22, 32, 34, 37, 39–41, 47, 49, 130–1, 257, 504, 505, 506, 507, 510, 511 Ladson-Billings, Gloria, 225 Lakatos, Imre, 422, 426, 430, 431 Lakoff, George, 69, 78, 470–1 Landgrebe, Ludwig, 96 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 451 Lasch, Christopher, 491, 510 Laski, Harold, 349 late capitalism, 30, 164, 167, 176, 446 Latour, Bruno, 430, 431, 440 Laurenson, Diana, 362 Lawall, Sarah, 337, 338, 340 Lawrence, Charles, 216, 222 Lawrence, D. H., 283 Lazar, Michelle, M., 313, 319 Le Corbusier, 165 Lean, David, 371 Leavis, F. R., 171, 351, 363, 365–6, 404 Lefort, Claude, 510 Lehman, David, 336, 354 Leibniz, G. W., 92 Leitch, Vincent B., 404, 408 Lenin, V. I., 5, 8–9, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31, 33, 35, 36, 40, 47, 49, 378, 511 Lentricchia, Frank, 401, 404, 411 Levinson, Marjorie, 346, 413, 414

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 571

571

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 55, 60–1, 63–4, 66, 67, 78, 82, 91, 93–4, 95, 103, 104, 105, 111, 388, 389, 501 Levitt, Norman, 443 Lewis, Arthur, 200 Lewis, Bernard, 357 Lewis, Ruth, 273–4, 282 Linguistic Circle of New York, 91, 93 Linnaeus, Karl, 424, 427 Locke, Alaine, 196 Locke, John, 440, 460 Lodge, David, 456–7, 461–2 Loomba, Ania, 182, 184, 189, 192 Lorde, Audrey, 190, 273, 279, 283 Lorenzer, Alfred, 493 Lotman, Yuri, 83, 84 Lowenthal, Leo, 74 Lukács, Georg, 9, 17, 21, 23–4, 37, 72, 73, 74, 75, 82, 146 Luther, Martin, 491 Luxemburg, Rosa, 36 Lyotard, Jean-François, 26, 32, 41, 42–3, 45, 91, 97–9, 102, 143, 145, 147, 154–7, 158, 160, 161, 164, 168–70, 288, 422, 423–5, 426, 432, 433, 440, 442, 444–5, 446–7, 448, 449, 453, 454 Lysenko, Trofim, 8 Macauley, Thomas Babington, 189 MacCabe, Colin, 364, 365, 373, 377 McGann, Jerome J., 346, 349, 407, 409, 414 McGowan, Todd, 510 Mach, Ernst, 428 McHale, Brian, 445

17/12/15 12:03 PM

572

index

Macherey, Pierre, 18, 28, 31, 123, 280 McIntosh, Peggy, 221 MacKinnon, Catherine, 246, 283, 285, 286–7 MacLeish, Archibald, 406 McNair, Brian, 285 McNay, Lois, 317 Macpherson, C. B., 317 McRobbie, Angela, 309, 314, 316, 320 Magnanti, Brooke, 285 Mailer, Norman, 283 Malcolm X, 199, 218 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 439 Malpas, Simon, 412 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 160 Mandel, Ernest, 30 Mann, Patricia, 307, 315, 316 Mann, Thomas, 17, 74, 364 Mannheim, Karl, 345, 353 Mao Zedong, 9, 13, 14, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 43, 48, 49, 66, 354 Maranda, Pierre, 105 Marcus, Sharon, 248 Marcuse, Herbert, 25, 74, 490, 491, 492, 493, 497, 498, 499 Marin, Louis, 66 Marine, Susan, 273–4, 282 Martin, Trayvon, 228 Martinez, George A., 226 Marx, Karl, ix, 3, 5–50, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81, 82, 85, 97, 123, 127, 130, 131, 137, 138, 143, 146, 147–8, 151, 155, 159, 160, 202, 249, 252, 254, 280,

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 572

284, 313, 345, 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 358, 362, 363, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 373, 374, 377, 378, 404, 409, 424, 445, 456, 457, 477, 490, 492, 493, 497, 498, 499, 502, 503, 505, 506, 508, 511 Masculinity Studies, 233, 251–67 Mathieu, Nicole-Claude, 295 Matsuda, Mari, 216, 218, 219 Mayrl, William, 73, 82 Mbembe, Achille, 136, 138 Mead, Margaret, 361 Mecchia, Giuseppina, 33 Medvedev, Pavel, 385 Meisel, Perry, 355 Melville, Herman, 171 Menand, Louis, 403 Mendès-France, Pierre, 65 Mercer, Kobena, 204 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 76, 91, 95–7, 99, 101, 102, 106, 107, 342, 463, 470 Messerschmidt, James, 256–7 metanarrative see grand narrative Metz, Christian, 66, 393 Michaels, Walter Benn, 122–3 Michelet, Jules, 395 Mill, John Stuart, 92, 189, 352 Miller, Henry, 283 Miller, J. Hillis, 115, 410 Miller, Nancy, 300 Millett, Kate, 273, 283 Milne, A. A., 371, 372 Milton, John, 373 minimalism, 175

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index Mink, Louis, 346 Mirsky, Seth, 263–4 Mitchell, Juliet, 291, 495, 496 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 490 Mitscherlich, Margaret, 490 modernism, 15, 16, 24, 110, 143, 145, 165, 166, 171, 192, 396, 404, 407, 427, 442, 446, 451 Moers, Ellen, 292 Moi, Toril, 273, 278, 283, 293, 294 Montrose, Louis, 346, 361 Morris, Charles, 58 Morris, Wesley, 346 Moscow Linguistic Circle, 385, 404 Mouffe, Chantal, 3, 12, 20, 22, 32, 34, 37, 39–41, 47, 49, 130–1, 257, 504, 505, 506, 507, 510, 511 Moulton, R. G., 359 Muir, Kenneth, 375 Mukařovský, Jan, 404 Mulvey, Laura, 286 Munoz, José Esteban, 250 Murray, Charles, 202, 206, 223 Mussolini, Benito, 352 Nabokov, Vladimir, 172 Namaste, I., 239 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 113 narratology, 383, 385–400, 468, 469 Nazism, 24, 50, 95, 135, 136, 350, 351, 353, 354 Neely, Barbara, 210 Negra, Diane, 314 Negri, Antonio, 123 Nemoianu, Virgil, 407

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 573

573

neoliberalism, 19, 26, 34, 49, 50, 138, 249, 310–11, 312, 307, 314, 315, 317, 318, 319, 320, 322 Neoplatonism, 351 New Criticism, xi, 3, 63, 171, 283, 329, 330, 331, 332, 334, 336, 338, 340, 346, 348, 351, 355, 358, 361, 365, 373, 383, 393, 401–15 New Historicism, 122, 327, 345–62, 363, 373, 374, 377, 404, 409, 411, 412, 413, 414, 427, 458 New Left, 33, 345, 362, 363 Newman, Barnett, 446 Newton, Isaac, 426, 427, 439, 440 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 179, 182, 183, 185–6, 187 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 68, 110, 148, 149, 157, 158, 159, 161, 291, 332, 398, 422, 432, 439, 442, 454, 471 9/11, 184, 226, 310 Noble, Jean Bobby, 265 Norment, Nathaniel, 207 Obama, President Barack, 213, 214, 358–9 O’Brien, Mary, 284 Occupy, 50 Odero, Rukia, 359 Oedipus complex, 151, 152, 154, 304, 481–3, 487, 489, 490, 493, 494, 495, 496, 501, 502, 506, 511 Ogden, Charles K., 77 Omi, Michael, 221 OPOJAZ/Opyaz (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), 385, 404 Orientalism, 129–30, 183–4, 355–6

17/12/15 12:03 PM

574

index

Osborne, Peter, 34 Ottemo, Andreas, 257, 258 Panofsky, Erwin, 105 paradigm, 19, 69, 85, 130, 187, 226, 227, 235, 236, 240, 242, 247, 249, 309, 350, 352, 391, 421–37, 438, 439, 440, 445, 452, 493, 506 Parker, Andrew, 248 Parmenides, 447 Pascal, Blaise, 82 Passeron, Jean-Claude, 104, 105 Pavel, Thomas, 390 Pease, Bob, 252 Pechter, Edward, 363 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 55, 57–8, 59, 70, 75, 85, 86, 442 Penney, James, 249 Perea, Juan F., 226, 227 Perloff, Marjorie, 174 Pham, Andrew, 392 Phelan, James, 399 phenomenology, 75–6, 81, 89, 91–107, 147, 158, 249–50, 329, 330, 336, 338, 342, 347, 348, 398, 399, 430, 456, 461, 463, 470, 472 Piaget, Jean, 61–2, 68, 71, 72, 76, 80–1, 82 Picasso, Pablo, 442 Pinderhughes, Dianne M., 198 Pirandello, Luigi, 343 Plato, 56, 61, 85, 120, 149–50, 155, 301, 304, 336, 350, 351, 359, 438, 439, 447 Plekhanov, Georgi, 15 Plumb, J. H., 360

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 574

Poovey, Mary, 117 pop art, 386 Popper, Karl, 344, 349, 350, 353, 422, 424, 425, 426, 429 Posner, Richard, 346, 359 possessive individualism, 317 Post, Patricia, 204 postcolonialism, 55, 130, 136, 163, 179, 181–229, 354, 355, 357, 409, 457, 467 postfeminism, xi, 163, 271, 306–23 posthumanism, 287, 288, 439, 453, 457, 461, 472 post-industrialism, 316, 446 post-Marxism, 3, 6, 11–12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36–50, 130, 131, 497, 498, 503, 505, 508 postmodernism, ix, 8, 25, 31, 32, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 91, 99, 143, 145–76, 184, 217, 218, 273, 288, 306, 307, 331, 341, 354, 386, 396, 399, 419, 423, 424, 426, 433, 440, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 458 poststructuralism, ix, xi, 8, 24, 25, 31, 32, 36, 39, 43, 45, 46, 53, 65, 66, 67, 68, 79, 89, 91–139, 143, 203, 204, 205, 233, 235, 238, 239, 248, 252, 265, 271, 290, 291, 295, 296, 307, 345, 385, 401, 419, 427, 439, 441, 442, 445, 462, 464 Potts, Archdeacon, 189 Pouillon, Jean, 103, 105 Poulantzas, Nicos, 26–7

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index Poulet, Georges, 327, 330, 332, 336–40, 341, 343, 362, 410 Pound, Ezra, 346, 407 Powell, Colin, 214 Prague Linguistic Circle, 62, 78, 92, 385, 404 precariat, 37, 38–9, 50, 318, 320 presentism, 331, 379 Pre-Socratics, 438, 441, 447 Propp, Vladimir, 383, 387–8, 389, 390, 395 Proust, Marcel, 392 Psych et Po, 295, 296 Puar, Jasbir, 249 Public Enemy, 225 Putnam, Hilary, 460 Pynchon, Thomas, 172, 445, 450 quantum physics, 162, 426, 427, 428–9, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 438, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 446, 449, 450, 451, 454, 455 Queen Latifah, 225 queer theory, 131, 132, 228, 233, 235–50, 252, 260, 263, 321, 467 Racine, Jean, 339 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 93–4, 104 radical democracy, 41, 47, 49, 510 Radner, Hilary, 311 Rainey, Lawrence, 403 Rancière, Jacques, 31, 33 Ransom, John Crowe, 402, 405–6 reader-response theory, 327, 329–44, 362, 373, 393, 399

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 575

575

Reagan, President Ronald, 198, 244, 307, 351, 355 reception theory, 327, 329–44, 393 Ree, Jonathan, 34 Reed, T. V., 211 reflection theory, 15 Reich, Steve, 175 Reiff, Philip, 490–1 Reimann, Bernhard, 442 Renaissance, 110, 158, 335, 377 Renan, Ernest, 184 Renold, Emma, 321 Rich, Adrienne, 246, 283, 284, 289, 292 Richard, Jean-Pierre, 337 Richards, I. A., 330, 335, 351, 383, 403–4, 412 Richardson, Diane, 260 Rickert, Heinrich, 92 Ricks, Christopher, 364–5 Ricoeur, Paul, 257, 397–8 Riffaterre, Michael, 66 Ringrose, Jessica, 309, 321 Rivera, Julio, 228 Roberts, Dorothy, 227 Robertson, Roland, 194 Robinson, James Harvey, 346, 359 Robson, Mark, 374 Roediger, David, 214, 224 Rogers, Ibram H., 199, 200 Roiphe, Katie, 308 Rojas, Fabio, 198, 201 Romanticism, 71, 304, 332, 345, 350, 355, 362, 375, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 413, 440–1, 442, 446, 450, 490 Rooks, Noliwe, 201, 211

17/12/15 12:03 PM

576

index

Rooney, Ellen, 413, 414 Rose, Jacqueline, 291 Rose, Nikolas, 317 Rosen, Jeffrey, 213, 215, 220 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 68, 111, 274 Rowlands, Mark, 463 Royle, Nicholas, 122 Ruddick, Sara, 292 Rumsfeld, Donald, 162 Russell, Bertrand, 352, 354 Russell, Gillian, 411 Russian formalism, 58, 62, 345, 383, 385–400, 404 Russian Revolution (1917), 8, 9, 13, 16, 23, 36, 45, 385 Ryle, Gilbert, 67 Said, Edward, 129–30, 179, 181, 182, 183–4, 188, 191, 345, 355, 356, 357, 358 Saint-Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy, 92 Sanders, Wilbur, 375 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 27–8, 97, 98, 105, 280–1, 297, 364, 470 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 53, 55–8, 59, 60, 62, 66, 68, 69, 70, 77, 79, 80, 92, 111, 125, 297, 347, 367, 399, 501, 504 scepticism, 31, 41, 43, 46, 89, 99, 110, 138, 172, 291, 336, 346, 354, 441, 448, 489, 462 Scheler, Max, 345 Schlegel, Friedrich, 441 Schmitt, Carl, 134, 497 Schoenberg, Arnold, 16 Schomburg, Arthur A., 196

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 576

Schroeder, Chancellor Gerhard, 317 Schutz, Alfred, 95, 101 Schwarz, Murray, 334 Scott, Joan W., 292 Scott Brown, Denise, 167 Searle, John, 121–2, 462 Sebeok, Thomas, 58 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 242–3 Segal, Lynne, 308 Seidler, Victor, 254 semiotics, 53, 55–70, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 111, 117, 167, 240, 304, 391, 401 set theory, 31, 60, 442 Shakespeare, William, 187, 197, 277, 327, 347, 361, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377 Shakur, Tupac, 214, 228 Sharpe, Matthew, 499 Shaughnessy, Nicola, 471 Shelley, Percy, 410, 441 Sherry, Suzanna, 220 Shklovsky, Viktor, 383, 385, 386–7, 388, 389, 400, 404 Shohat, Ella, 204 Showalter, Elaine, 278, 292, 301 Signorelli, Luca, 485–6 Simpson, O. J., 213, 214, 220, 227 Sinfield, Alan, 240, 327, 363, 372, 374, 375, 376, 378 Singer, Peter, 6 situationism, 164 Slaby, Jan, 472 Smith, Adam, 424 socialism, 13, 15, 20, 34, 35, 40, 280, 283, 287, 317, 359, 371, 378, 492, 504, 508

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index socialisme ou barbarie, 43–4 socialist realism, 15, 16, 17 Socrates, 454 Sokal, Alan, 31, 419, 443 Sollers, Phillippe, 439 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 364 Sophocles, 151, 511 Southern Agrarians, 351, 402, 404, 415 Spanos, William, 173 Spengler, Oswald, 352–3, 356 Sperber, Jonathan, 18 Spice Girls, 306 Spigel, Lynn, 322 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 110, 123, 182, 190–2, 297, 357 Spolsky, Ellen, 461, 463, 467–8 Sporns, Olaf, 466 Sprinker, Michael, 123 Stalin, Joseph, 13, 15, 20, 43, 47, 48, 353, 385, 511 Standing, Guy, 38–9 Stavrakakis, Yannis, 510 Stefancic, Jean, 197, 215, 218, 226 Steiner, George, 329, 332, 346 Stewart, J. M., 375 Stoker, Bram, 193 Stoll, E. E., 375 Stonewall, 237 Stoppard, Tom, 445 Strauss, Leo, 351, 355 Stravinsky, Igor, 16 structural Marxism, 18, 28, 367, 373, 505, 506 structuralism, ix, xi, 3, 27, 28, 45, 53, 55–70, 73, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 91, 92, 94, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105,

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 577

577

106, 125, 365, 367, 383, 385, 388, 389, 391, 393, 395, 399, 404, 427, 456, 457, 468, 500, 501, 504 Stuart, Andrea, 314 Subaltern Studies, 191–2, 355, 357, 358 surrealism, 386 Tasker, Yvonne, 314 Tate, Allen, 351, 402 Tel Quel, 66, 125, 303 Thatcher, Prime Minister Margaret, 34, 244, 307, 509 Theweleit, Klaus, 490 thick description, 67, 348, 360 Thomas, Brook, 346, 354, 359–60 Thomas, Greg, 203 Thompson, E. P., 355, 363 Thoreau, Henry David, 170 Tiffin, Helen, 181 Tillyard, E. M. W., 375 Titchener, Edward B., 77 Todorov, Tzvetan, 63, 388, 391, 410 Tomashevsky, Boris, 385, 404 trans theory, transgender, 233, 248, 252, 260, 262, 263 Trilling, Lionel, 490 Troscianko, Emily, 471 Trotsky, Leon, 13, 14, 16, 21, 47 Trubetzkoy, Nikolai, 61, 77, 80, 92 Tuite, Claire, 411 Turner, James, 199–200 Turner, Mark, 465, 471 Tynjanov, Yury, 404 Tyson, Mike, 228

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578

index

Valdes, Francisco, 228 Valente, Joe, 503, 511 van Breda, H. L., 95 Varnado, Jerry, 199 Veeser, J. Aram, 411 Venturi, Robert, 165, 166–7 verificationism, 423, 425 Vico, Giambattista, 71, 83, 84, 85, 345, 351, 353, 356 Vietnam War, 282, 354 Voloshinov, Nikolaevich, 58 von Humboldt, Alexander, 92 von Ranke, Leopold, 356 Vygotsky, Lev S., 81, 82 Waldrop, Rosmarie, 164 Walker, Alice, 308 Walker, Rebecca, 308 Walpole, Horace, 274 Walsh, Lisa, 296 Walter, Natasha, 308 Warhol, Andy, 175 Warren Austin, 404, 406, 407 Warren, Robert Penn, 351, 402 Warrington, Ronnie, 169 Waters, Mary C., 204 Watney, Simon, 245 Weber, Max, 345 Wellek, René, 340, 403, 404, 407 West, Cornell, 217, 226 Western Marxism, 3, 6, 11, 19, 20–35, 36, 37, 43, 49, 50 Weston, Kath, 262–3 Westphal, Carl, 241 Wheeler, Michael, 470 Whelehan, Imelda, 282

4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 578

White, Hayden, 394–8 Whiter, Walter, 371, 372 Whiting, Sam, 198 Whittier, Nancy, 310 Wilde, Oscar, 439 Wilden, Anthony, 499 Williams, Patricia, 215, 216, 222, 227 Williams, Raymond, 327, 355, 356, 357, 363, 364, 365, 366–73, 374, 376, 377, 378, 379 Wilson, Carter G., 196–7 Wilson, E. O., 466, 467 Wilson, J. Dover, 375 Wilson, William Julius, 202, 205, 206 Wimsatt, W. K., 329, 332, 336, 383, 405, 406 Winant, Howard, 221, 225 Winfrey, Oprah, 214 Winters, Yvor, 351 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 130, 154, 424, 433, 448 Wittig, Monique, 246, 283, 296, 300 Wolf, Naomi, 308 Wolfson, Susan J., 413, 414 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 271, 273, 274, 275–6, 277 Wood, Spencer D., 209 Woods, Tiger, 214 Woolf, Virginia, 273, 276–9 World War I, 17, 21, 110, 306 World War II, 9, 21, 24, 25, 64, 91, 95, 110, 217, 306, 351, 375, 404, 489

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index Wren, Christopher, 172 Wright, Elizabeth, 333 Wundt, Wilhelm, 77, 100 Wu-Tang Clan, 371 Yale Critics, 115, 410 Yarbourough, Richard, 198 Young, Robert, 363

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579

Zehle, Soenke, 211 Zeilinger, Anton, 451 Zhdanov, A. A., 15, 16 Zimmerman, Marc A., 82 Žižek, Slavoj, 19, 46–9, 162–3, 457, 477, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506–10

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4891_Sim_The Edinburgh Companion to Critcal Theory-02.indd 580

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