mutually occluded

The Mashup and the Remix: Fetishizing the Fragment

2008-03-24T13:19:00.000-07:00

From Soviet montage to the Memorex mix tape, leftist Western thinkers have proudly declared their membership to a "sample culture." Remix theory, the latest version, keeps the candle burning bright. Like its predecessors, it attempts to found an aesthetic regime on the claim that the explicit selection of texts – sampling in music, collage in art, montage in film, citation in literature – is political and disruptive (by virtue of breaking-up and recombining old, "reified" things), but unlike its forebears remix (or mashup) theory takes its inspiration from a digitized, musical (rather than pictorial, avant-garde) provenance.

As a formal technique first and foremost, "sampling" insists on discovering an intrinsic subversive effect in the re-contextualizing of other texts. In fact, this kind of operation increasingly defines "subversion" itself -- which now means, simply, an ironic or against-the-grain "re-presentation" of something else.

But what, exactly, of sampling -- as an operation or technique -- is so disruptive (and therefore political)? (Or, for that matter, according to what criteria are disruptive effects political effects by default?) These questions appear all the more urgently in that, historically speaking, the mix (or collage or montage) has been known to surreptitiously alternate allegiance, so to speak -- between the oppressive logic of the commodity, on the one hand, and a liberating, subversive ironism, on the other ...

And yet, in spite of our culture's having found the "fragment" a tired register for understanding the commodity or the artwork, new publications like Remix Theory and Vague Terrain Journal continue to promote this philosophy (in a novel way, admittedly), while a more general Surrealist inheritance maintains steady influence in academic circles, primarily through a Frankfurt School/Benjaminian tradition. Thus, in the following commentary, I will review Eduardo Navas' "Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture," a heavily-circulated semi-theoretical text that seems to unfold at the nexus of the major academic and popular strains of (what could be called) 'montage politics'.

'Sample Recognition' in Remix Theory

According to Navas, there are three kinds of remixes: extended, selective, and reflexive. Each is anchored in the "original" work (off which it's based): the extended remix is a "longer version of the original song," the selective remix "consists of adding or subtracting material from the original song," while the reflexive remix 'maximizes and combines' both strategies. Whereas the extended or selective remix is a "reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the 'aura' of the original will be dominant in the remixed version," the reflexive remix

"allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original. In Reflexive Remixes material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact in order to be recognizable. An example of this is Mad Professor's famous dub/trip hop album No Protection, a remix of Massive Attack's Protection. In this case both albums, the original and the remixed versions, are considered works on their own, yet the remixed version is completely dependent on Massive’s original production for validation. The fact that both albums were released at the same time in 1994 further complicates Mad Professor’s allegory. It is worth noting that Mad Professor’s production is part of the tradition of Jamaica’s dub, where the term 'version' was often used to refer to 'remixes' which due to their extensive manipulation in the studio pushed for autonomy."

Navas' unorthodox appropriation of Benjaminian concepts (aura, allegory, fragment) deserves pause here. For, while Benjamin refers to the aura -- which he defines as the importance of "presence" to the traditional work of art, i.e. its actual, singular location (in a museum, for instance) -- as precisely what is lost in the arts of 'technological reproducibility' (e.g. cinema, photography, radio, etc.), Navas suggests that the aura is increasingly dominant with each remix of the original fragment. Or rather by tearing a fragment out of an original work, and sampling it, the aura increases, "always maintaining the 'essence' of the song intact." The reflexive remix, by contrast, challenges the "aura" by, in a sense, growing a second work off of the first and achieving relative autonomy 'alongside' the original.

As such, the reflexive remix -- and its more sophisticated subspecies, the megamix -- functions as the revolutionary turn in the mashup taxonomy, which ambitiously spans, as I further discuss below, all the arts, architecture, software, advertising -- in short, all of culture. The reflexive remix is thus the privileged moment where the fragment, or sample, breaks away from the tradition to which it is otherwise attached and assumes contrary, politicized meaning. "The foundation of musical mashups can be found in a special kind of Reflexive Remix known as the megamix, which is composed of intricate music and sound samples." The intricacy -- which is at least partly an effect of the quantity of samples -- produces a new text that is not simply a homage to, or affirmation of, other, prior tracks.

Now if it's the quantity and complexity of samples that overcomes the aura of origins, then one would think that the megamix -- and allegory itself -- depends on a certain loss of recognition of the samples' origins. (The megamix would thus fast approach a non-mixed, run-of-the-mill work, ripe with allusions but not explicitly composed from samples of the alluded.) Here, indeed, is where Navas' methodology breaks down. For, if subversion depends on the subject's recognition of the samples' sources, then "intricacy" will necessarily or inevitably threaten this communication. Likewise (or conversely), if the logic of the commodity requires the subject to recognize mashup homages to other commodities, then how will this recognition be distinguished from its opposite, subversion?

On this difficult matter Navas expresses a clear ambivalence over the status of "recognition." At one point, he claims that advanced reflexive remixes prevent recognition of the samples, with the exception of the title, while at another point he claims the exact opposite, namely that the megamix (which is a form of the reflexive remix) is founded on an extended, complex recognition of fragments.

"Allegory is often deconstructed in more advanced remixes following this third form, and quickly moves to be a reflexive exercise that at times leads to a 'remix' in which the only thing that is recognizable from the original is the title."
"The creative power of all these megamixes and mashups lies in the fact that even when they extend, select from, or reflect upon many recordings, much like the Extended, Selective and Reflexive Remixes, their authority is allegorical – their effectiveness depends on the recognition of pre-existing recordings."
"A megamix is built upon the same principle of the medley but instead of having a single band playing the compositions, the DJ producer relies strictly on sampling brief sections of songs (often just a few bars enough for the song to be recognized) that are sequenced to create what is in essence an extended collage: an electronic medley consisting of samples from pre-existing sources. Unlike the Extended or the Selective Remixes, the megamix does not allegorize one particular song but many. Its purpose is to present a musical collage riding on a uniting groove to create a type of pastiche that allows the listener to recall a whole time period and not necessarily one single artist or composition."

How important is the moment of recognition to sampling? Further, would the "uniting groove" necessarily have to have a real-world thematic correlation -- e.g. a time period -- or could it conceivably sample, combine, produce along altogether different lines? Needless to say, I don't think it would take us very long to find that neither the audience member's recognition of the sample sources, nor the song's fealty to a pregiven theme, are required for a work to be -- intentionally or unintentionally -- a "mashup". Which leads us to the question: why take the sample -- a literal replication from a song -- as the aesthetic unit proper? Why take a fragment -- or, rather, the intentional, perhaps manual citation of another work -- as the most fundamental and effective unit of an artwork, especially when, technically speaking, in these cases the sample itself is not really even recognized by the audience member?

Let us, then, for a moment appreciate the mashup taxonomy's accidental but inevitable production of this paradox: In taking the "sample" as the basic unit of meaning, "recognition" is paramount. Without it, the sample is only a sample in principle and not in practice: on the one hand, if the work's reception is not as dependent on the sample as the artist's is, then the sample devolves into an arbitrary stricture on creativity, but on the other hand, if the ideal remix work is simply a play or string of source recognitions then it can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from certain commodity forms -- e.g. the promotional medley -- and so would slide into the lowly genre of homage, virtuosity, and clever manipulation. (The megamix would here categorically approach the dangerous, border territory of the "novelty.") Thus, to avoid this pitfall, the remix must be complex -- a task that almost becomes a matter of quantity of sources -- but not so complex as to lose audience recognition; although, again, the moment of recognition still depends on affirming rather than subverting the source, a possibility that likewise can only grow with the intricacy of sampling, an intricacy that at some point threatens to simply make use of sources for reasons that cannot be contained so easily.

The easiest way to rid ourselves of this paradox, while at the same time avoiding a tedious game of dialectics, is to simply dispose of (or at least severely limit) the concept "sample." This move is perhaps already suggested by the taxonomy itself, which finds, within the category of the megamix, an exception to the aura and a hesitant departure from the importance of recognition. To be sure, if the manipulation of a sample is extreme enough, does it really matter if it was literally extracted? Navas' vocabulary of manipulation -- extend, add, subtract -- will at some point have to become superfluous. Simple, if tedious, hypotheticals are easy to produce. For example, what if two artists, both working off the same original, produce an identical text, only the first artist begins with a copied sample, manipulating it beyond recognition, while the second artist works from ear or bar or by some other means: what purpose would be served by deeming one a "sample" and the other an "allusion"?

In fact, the closer we look at contemporary aesthetic usages of the "fragment," the more its deployment seems designed to overtake the "allusion" as a critical referent. Where the latter remains a fairly open concept for describing intertextuality -- it is as happily undefined as "trope" or "symbol" -- the latter introduces a definite "unit" as the basis of textual relations. Functionalist and literalist in impulse, the fragment or sample in this sense insists on a finitude and exactitude that can all too easily become the crudest of critical instruments. Like the so-called "indexical image" in film studies, the sample attempts to ground the text in a relative faithfulness between documents, which, in this case, amounts to an arbitrary fetishizing of digital reproduction.

The first crudity of this dogma is perhaps measured by the disappearance of questions and textual forms it necessitates. For instance: what happened to the musical "cover"? --In not referencing or critiquing other texts "directly" (so to speak), with literal "samples" (although we have already determined that the qualification "literal" is problematic), are the songs that 'merely' engage in rich allusion, genre play, or "covering" all the less intertextual? Why is copying a text suddenly the only way to reference or engage with a text? This is, perhaps, an historical rather than analytic question, so, to answer it, we will have to take a short detour through the 'totalizing character' of Navas' concept "mashup".

"Mashups are everywhere": "Sample Culture" as Zeitgeist

The first effect of a functionalist typology of "sampling" is to draw into proximity cultural practices that otherwise have little in common, or at least don't intuitively bear the relations attributed to them by the taxonomy. Nothing could justify the comparison of music sampling and software mashups, or for that matter 2.0 mashups and RSS aggregators, other than a deeper, perhaps metaphysical concept of the fragment (which even finds a place for "cut/copy & paste"). But objections like these are accommodated in advance by the taxonomy form itself, which explicitly strives to establish a proper name and apply it to all of culture, across distant and highly specialized practices.

"Tall buildings in major cities are often covered with advertisements selling products from bubble gum to cell phone services, or promoting the latest blockbuster film. The building turns into a giant billboard: advertising is mashed up with architecture. A more specific example; cigarette companies in Santiago de Chile have been pushed to include on their cigarette packs images and statements of people who have cancer due to smoking: two cultural codes that in the past were separated on purpose are mashed up as a political compromise to try to keep people from smoking, while accommodating their desires. The Hulk and Spiderman have been smashed up to become the Spider-Hulk. In this case, the hybrid character has the shape of the Hulk with Spiderman’s costume on top. It is neither but both – simultaneously. Mashups are everywhere. They have moved beyond music to other areas of culture. Such move is dependent on running signifiers relying on the spectacular repetition of media. And repetition had meddled with computer culture since the middle of the twentieth century."

A wild totalization. One would think there is a Platonic Form "Mashup", a great combinatory power governing anything that can be forced to admit of at least one discernible accoutrement. But what holds these diverse examples together, as species of the same general operation, remains largely unclear.

It is thus important to attend to the distinctions between the examples Navas offers as self-evident: for example, the cigarettes and the hybrid. One invokes an image of grafting -- e.g. two otherwise discrete forms suddenly attached to each other (the billboard and the building, the warning label and the cigarette pack) -- while the other suggests a conflation of features within the same indivisible entity (Spider-Hulk). The former speaks well to the concept of mashup that Navas has so far described; but the latter, upon closer inspection, clearly undermines the functionalist, literalist impulse behind the fragment, the sample, and the "uniting groove".

Let me explain: the megamix, which corresponds to the 'inappropriate' combination of billboard and building – "two cultural codes that in the past were separated on purpose are mashed up as a political compromise" -- does not itself correspond to the hybrid, in that the latter is more an "admixture" -- a single entity -- than a collage or montage of discrete "samples". The hybrid, in this sense, would correspond to a work of art – a song, say – that does not take as its project the manipulation of units, samples, or extractions of other works.

Or does it? Let us, for a moment, seriously entertain this idea. Does every work ultimately only sample, with or without the intention? Can one not help but be a megamixer? There is, of course, a long aesthetic history to this position -- from the Stoics to the Scholastics (who perceived a 'combinatory' mental operation at the heart of imagination) to the British Empiricists, like Hume, who claimed there was no such thing as creation proper, only a creative combining of other things (through a variety of 'syntactic' rules), to the early Modernists, who obviously took great interest in the fragment (Joyce, Benjamin, Picasso), and, finally, to Deleuze, who recovered something of this project with his concept of the "assemblage". --Hume's well-known example of the dragon perhaps best expresses this position. In his view, the fictional entity 'dragon' was not so much an 'invention' as it was an imaginative composition of different 'real' animal anatomies. Though clearly informed by a hard Epicurean epistemology that bases knowledge in "experience," Hume's argument nonetheless radically transformed or extended this notion, from the intellect to cultural forms themselves, and in this respect bears relevance to the art object that Navas seems to have in mind.

But is a hybrid a megamix? Is the distinction (if there is one) important?

What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of a critical unit, a discrete 'cultural atom' of meaning. In this vein, there are at least two problems with the concept of "sample". First, with respect to the hybrid, determining what actually qualifies as a sample quickly becomes problematic. What were once allegedly fragments are here characteristically conflated in a single feature; they are not 'attached' to each other -- the model Navas' architecture example is most available to -- any more than they are sustained as distinct within their new, singular appearance. Second, what is to prevent the discovery, within a fragment, of still further fragments? Spider-Hulk is a succinct example of this problem, for isn't the Hulk himself a hybrid of, say, Frankenstein and King Kong, morose Romantic monster and frightful oversized beast? The exactitude of the fragment quickly gives way to the ambiguity of the allusion.

In this sense, then, the concept of fragment attempts to put a stop -- an arbitrary stop -- to a potentially infinite regress (of features within features), the tracing of which would no doubt quickly require the abandoning of the unit itself, which automatically implies contour, edge, finitude, and a posterior combination (while somehow maintaining that contour through each subsequent remixing).

In this way, the fragment or sample becomes a structural instrument for discerning, but in fact drawing, all sorts of analogous relations. For Navas, the mashup indeed appears as a kind of contagious operation "moving" from one domain to another: "Mashups are everywhere. They have moved beyond music to other areas of culture." Passing over the avant-garde movements that Benjamin often had in mind, Navas takes as his origin the early 1980s, no doubt to raise the remix genre to a spiritual locus for the age, and from there conceives of a kind of 'nework cascade' across the rest of culture. He includes the "desktop" as an early infection, although "This conceptual model has been extended to web application mashups." Little wonder, then, that the management of historically disconnected phenomena becomes difficult without some serious revisions of definitions already in play.

"Mashups as a conceptual model, however, take on a different role in software. For example, the purpose of a typical Web 2.0 mashup is not to allegorize particular applications, but rather, by selectively sampling in dynamic fashion, to subvert applications to perform something they could not do otherwise by themselves. Such mashups are developed with an interest to extend the functionality of software for specific purposes. [...] What these examples show is that web application mashups function differently from music mashups. Music mashups are developed for entertainment; they are supposed to be consumed for pleasure, while web application mashups, like Pipes by Yahoo!, actually are validated if they have a practical purpose. This means that the concept and cultural role of mashups change drastically when they move from the music realm to a more open media space such as the Web. We must now examine this crucial difference. [...] As previously defined, the Reflexive Remix demands that the viewer or user question everything that is presented, but this questioning stays in the aesthetic realm. The notion of reflexivity in a mashup implies that the user must be aware as to why such mashup is being accessed. This reflexivity in action in web applications moves beyond basic sampling to find its most efficiency with constant updating . So a Reflexive Mashup does not necessarily demand critical reflection, but rather practical awareness."

If the mashup functions completely differently between music and web 2.0 applications, then why compare them at all? If the purpose of the latter isn't to allegorize the fragment, then how is it still a mashup? The use of the word "subvert" seems more than a little forced, as if Navas is struggling to maintain a revolutionary vocabulary that is already stretched thin. And yet, what we perceive as the problems, gaps, incongruities bound to bubble up from a broken method, for Navas becomes impetus to further explore -- "We must now examine this crucial difference". This kind of structural or structuring method produces problems and questions by default; it inaugurates a whole domain of thought simply by virtue of working within a technical, unitary register. Sample theory is in this sense closely affiliated with network theory, on account of its easy transformation of anything into nodes, units, loci, an operation that then invariably necessitates the question of what connects these points together other than the question itself.

The Consumer-Subject of "Sample Culture"

Having discussed the importance of "source recognition" to Navas' concept of the sample, and having discussed the totalizing character of the fragment/sample/mashup methodology, we have to wonder where the subject fits into this expansive world view. For, on the one hand, the subject seems tightly defined -- existing only to the extent that intertextual messages are recognized -- but on the other hand seems universal and mindless, insofar as nearly everything is a mashup (copy & paste, desktop, web apps, music, architecture, product packaging). But, in either case, the subject is deeply associated with a capitalist, consumerist function -- which, for Navas, becomes at certain points explicit.

"Let’s take the music mashups considered so far. Their power lies in their spectacular aura; meaning that they are not validated by a particular function that they are supposed to deliver, but rather by the desires and wants that are brought out of the consumer who loves to be reminded of two or more songs for his/her enjoyment in leisure. Music has this power because it is marketed as a form of mass escapism. According to political economist Jacques Attali, the average person consumes music in order to wind down and find delight in the few spare moments of the everyday."

In this view, the mashup is a particular kind of nostalgiac event: that is, as a marketing program -- the listener is in fact referred to as a "consumer" -- the mashup recycles previous commodities and re-circulates them to emminently happy effect. Why this simple, formal operation should prove so effective or fundamental is left unexplained, but, either way, the commodity's 'fascination with itself' is taken as not only 'in itself' disproportionately affective over the consumer -- is this what, for Navas, makes the consumer a consumer and not, say, a subject? -- but as also, and this point is expressed in the same move, programmatically satisfactory for the consumer's "desires and wants". Which is to say, when the commodity constitutes itself explicitly as a commodity, as composed of prior commodities -- this whole model depends on the subject's so-called nostalgiac "recognition" of the samples -- then the subject's desires achieve an exceptional, almost mystical fulfillment. Now, while Navas is certainly not saying that this is the only art and the only desire, it is nonetheless clear that this model is the dominant form of the age, extending itself across nearly every domain -- architecture, computers, objects.

In any event, one would think that Navas is referring exclusively to "regressive remixes," and not "reflexive remixes," for while both depend on the recognition of the samples, only the former affirms the aura. But, again, we return to the double face of the concept "reflexive." On the one hand, you will recall, it distinguishes musical from application mashups (referring to the latter), but on the other hand it appears as the third kind of remix within the Regressive category. It is thus both inside and outside the Regressive.

"The third remix is reflexive; it allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original. In Reflexive Remixes material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact in order to be recognizable. An example of this is Mad Professor’s famous dub/trip hop album No Protection, a remix of Massive Attack’s Protection. In this case both albums, the original and the remixed versions, are considered works on their own, yet the remixed version is completely dependent on Massive’s original production for validation."

What is remarkable about the reflexive remix is that it both replicates a former work and creates a new one. It is not only a sample. Which is to say, though it materially works on and off a fragment from a former work, the fragment's status as fragment is compromised, or rendered incidental by, the radically new use or interpretation to which it is lent. This kink in Navas' taxonomy likewise reveals the problematic notion of the aura at work in the piece; for, if the material fragment is just as present in the reflexive remix as in the extended remix, how could the aura be less (or, for that matter, more) dominant? Wouldn't we then have to conclude that the aura is not in fact associated with a literal, material fragment in any instance? Either way, the escape from the aura in the reflexive remix is entirely ellided by Navas' later need to associate the "recognition" of the sample with a deep, structuring commodity/consumer model. Now, rather suddenly, the "power" of the musical mashup lies -- without exception -- in the "spectacular aura" of the sample.

In theoretical terms, Navas is trying to circle back to a Frankfurt School-oriented concept of the culture industry, the commodity, "mass escapism," entertainment as distraction, perhaps to underpin or legitimize so unwieldy and ambitious a taxonomy. The subject -- or rather the consumer -- is accordingly quickly disposed of: "their elation will help them cope with whatever stress they may have had throughout the day". (Is it only a coincidence that Navas here refers to neo-liberal economist Jacques Attali?) The earlier references to allegory, with its hints of a revolutionary subjectivity, are here completely dispelled (as a parable, of sorts, warning against mixing Benjamin's aesthetics with Adorno's politics). Perhaps we would be better off returning to the "allusion," as a critical concept, and restricting our notion of politics to explicit content (instead of 'syntactic operations').

Death's Pose in "America's Next Top Model"

2008-02-29T08:54:00.000-08:00

A post and discussion over at Sparkle*Matrix, entitled "'even dead women can look sexy ...'", expresses the requisite horror and indignation over the America's Next Top Model photo shoot where the contestants were tasked to simulate dead, but sexy, poses. Sparklematrix links to a slideshow matched with the judges' comments, to swiftly expel any doubts as to the extremity of the theme. Suggestions of brutal rape are indeed unambiguously the subject of at least one scene (--with murder, suicide, and otherwise ghastly indeterminate deaths dominating the spread).

There is no denying that these photos are reprehensible in theme; but what is perhaps more important to recognize, especially since such themes will not be making their exit any time soon, is their particular mode of expression. For, and this is the essential point to grasp, the photograph is not actually their proper or original form of occurrence. Which is easily overlooked since the photos -- which sparklematrix reproduces as such -- are, ostensibly, the purpose or culmination of the episode, when, in fact, they are merely the terminal result, or excuse of sorts, for an entirely different procedure -- namely, their discussion.

The discussion, or critique, of the photos is, after all, the true force and focus of the episode -- and, arguably, of the impetus behind the show itself. One does not watch the show to see real models perform, but rather to see real models criticize provincial non-models who attempt to simulate, or emulate, the judges who critique them. The show, in this sense, both affirms and closes the gap between star and stargazer (if by extracting out from a banal crowd the one who just might be able to cross the line). So, this has to be kept in mind when the photograph -- which is only one moment in a long process --is extracted from the show and cited alone, as if the show itself is a magazine.

Now, despite even the star industry's genuine attempts to manufacture itself, to systematically produce a star, the winner usually can't actually cross that line. However, in attempting to do so, the question is posed of what distinguishes the performer from the audience. Is the distinction as absolute as it would otherwise seem? Are stars really and truly exceptional, or can anyone (within obvious strictures of course) become one with the right training, will, and opportunity? No show that poses this question ever offers a solution, but it is a profound problematic, and one that is otherwise raised in television and media studies, from the outside, so to speak. In any event, one is left suspended within a meaningful host of questions. For instance, one might otherwise think -- rather naively and with too strong a sense of a 'culture industry' that willfully distracts and manipulates an easily-read public -- that stars are really not too unlike stargazers, they lack talent, have always had privilege, and, well, anyone could do what they do if they only had the chance. Or, conversely, one might think that stars are in fact utterly talented and deserving of their station when, in fact, a good percentage of everyone could make it in their world and in the end it's mostly a matter of who you know, getting the right training, and stumbling into the right opportunities. Shows like America's Next Top Model permanently fail to answer this question while at the same time exploring it, however unintentionally.

In this vein, the photos in question ought to be the critical point of arrival rather than the point of departure. As the judges' commentary can attest, the focus of the episode is the photographs' production and subsequent critique. Indeed, it would be one thing to encounter these photographs in a magazine, and another thing to view the process -- however catered and sullied by industry logic -- that produces them. The remarks at Sparkle*Matrix do not, unfortunately, distinguish between the two. Which is to say, the point is that the aesthetic object is not, in this case, the art object proper (the photograph) but rather the procedures and customs informing its creation. The judgments and criticisms that usually follow a work, or at least remain to a certain extent detached from it, are here intermingled with it, as a guiding force informing the work itself at every step of the way. Criticism, in this sense, overshadows the work, rendering it comparably incidental -- which has the effect, moreover, of casting the photographs as delicate contrivances and effects of a critical procedure. Importantly, this procedure is split between the shoot itself -- the photographer's instructions and intercut commentary -- and the judges' later discussion, which by and large authorizes the earlier one, summons it, and cites it authoritatively. Likewise, as an audience, we are meant to take delight in the critique's expression, and even suspend judgment of the work until later, in order to hear the judges themselves, who are in many ways the true work itself.

If the production, criticism, discussion of the photographs is the true work, then what role, in terms of the artwork, do the photographs play? There is no easy answer to this question, because, simply, there is no center to the work. Instead, the photos and their judgment face-off, with variable respective importance, vis a vis the other. (This format applies to so many shows: Top Chef, Project Runway, Make Me a Supermodel, American Idol, the list could go on.) The work, in all of these shows, only achieves commodity form in the final moments, with the greater bulk of the programming alotted to the contingencies of production. Which is to say, in this format the traditional work (the photograph) assumes a different function: instead of being the object of a detached, focused attention, it organizes the criticisms themselves and serves as the alibi or motivation for their deployment. In formal terms, the work gathers up different strands of the aesthetic world in question and unites them in a sustained revelation. It would indeed be facile and naive to think that the purpose or essence of the show is simply to put a group of youthful naifs through improper tribulations, to then take delight in their predictably strenuous short-comings. It is much more complicated. Guest designers, guest judges, product placements, featured photographers, sponsoring publications, and even slyly wardrobed 'off-set' contestants all meet up and cohere around the photograph which is, hence, of both little and massive importance.

In this respect, the death poses and photos in question are particularly interesting -- primarily because, well, death literally has no pose. Death is the only position without pose; it is the opposite of pose. You 'lay as you fall', as they say. (It should also be noted that, contrary to a discussant at Sparkle*Matrix, masculine sexuality does find correspond form, in the war film, which aestheticizes death and corpses in all sorts of ways, most of which cannot be divorced from sexuality, atheticism, and the body.) To pose death is therefore the culmination of contrivance. To call one who attempts to do so a marionette is insulting, yes, but also astute. There is a long aesthetic history of stringing up corpses and playing them like a marionette (and this cannot be confined to feminine subjcts); which is also why death, the corpse, can be invoked as the condition, rather than opposite, of posing -- it is, after all, the ultimate, most pliant relaxation, a formlessness and laxity open to any rearrangement. 'Holding' difficult poses may, in the right descriptive register, suggest as much. And yet ... this generally innocent history -- a phrase I use with great reservation -- must be reconciled with the specific, contemporary implications of the photos -- which are easily connected, through genres that casually mix feminine sexuality and death, to cultural perceptions of women that produce real events and, statistically speaking, contribute to general, oppressive conditions.

But what I find ameliorative or tempering or difficult in the America's Next Top Model episode in question is the way in which the poses themselves are discussed as explicitly constructed and a matter of convention. Let's not forget that comparable documents are frequently publicized without the least suggestion that the image or message is less than natural, obvious, or authored. The America's Next Top Model format, by contrast, tediously discusses the crooks of arms, the awkward poses, the failures and deviations from the ideal image that is, hence, completely denaturalized and torn away from an aura of self-evidence or naturalism. From set to photo to judgment these images are rendered toothless in a way that can not be said for reproductions or citations of the image alone.

Which is not to say that the resultant portrait is by any means good or progressively deconstructive. On the contrary, it introduces a new technique of oppression, one that accomodates criticism, makes it its own, and puts it in the service of a more expansive apparatus -- a whole industry and milieu of actors (most of which seem to 'hide' behind the photo). Accordingly, these kinds of shows call for a new form of critique that must look beyond traditional forms and works -- here, the photograph -- and see behind them a more complicated expression. Still, it remains an open and largely unanswered question to what extent these formats' self-demystifications introduce new, perhaps more sinister forms of mystification, and to what extent these self-demystifications do manage to temper or dismantle the violence they choose to depict.

"Kenosis" in Bloom, De Man, Gregory, Hegel

2008-02-20T07:12:00.000-08:00

Paul De Man notes Harold Bloom’s insight that with respect to one poet’s influence on a later one,

“the encounter must take place and that it takes precedence over any other events, biographical or historical, in the poet’s experience. This means that texts originate in contact with other texts rather than in contact with the events or the agents of life (unless, of course, these agents or events are themselves treated as texts). To say that literature is based on influence is to say that it is intratextual. And intratextual relationships necessarily contain a moment that is interpretative. […] The main insight of The Anxiety of Influence is the categorical assertion that this reading be a misreading or, as Bloom calls it, a ‘misprision.’” (Paul De Man, “Review: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom,” Comparative Literature 26, no. 3 (1974), 269–275: 273)

De Man then briefly observes that Bloom’s six “revisionary ratios” (clinamen, tessera, apophrades, askesis, daemonization, kenosis), for describing the temporal/historical relations between texts, are not only paradigmatic rhetorical structures but explicitly concern substitution, metonymy, misreading, impropriety, etc. (Tessera, for instance, refers to the “potentially misleading totalization from part to whole of synecdoche” (De Man 274).) De Man’s greater point, however, is to demonstrate that Bloom’s influence model depends on a linguistic and intratextual, rather than temporal and psychological, schema.

“If the substantial emphasis is temporal, the structural stress entirely falls on substitution as a key concept. And from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are governed by linguistic rather than by natural or psychological models: one can always substitute one word for another but one cannot, by a mere act of the will, substitute night for day or bliss for gloom. However, the very ease with which the linguistic substitution, or trope, can be carried out hides the fact that it is epistemologically unreliable. It remains something of a mystery how rhetorical figures have been so minutely described and classified over the centuries with relatively little attention paid to their mischievous powers over the truth and falsehood of statements.” (De Man 274)

But lest we consider De Man’s attempts to render Bloom’s work compatible with or intelligible through a deconstructionist lens, it should first be noted that Bloom was always less subject to this gesture than receptively considerate of it. In “Emerson and Ammons: A Coda”, for instance, Bloom appears happy to include deconstruction in the list of ‘revisionary ratios’ between one text and another. So while De Man is surely right to indicate the intratextual fundament of these ratios, this point should not obscure the manner in which these ratios are performed and executed. They assume, that is, a decidedly topological, extended figure:

“When the latecomer initially swerves (clinamen) from his poetic father, he brings about a contraction or withdrawal of meaning from the father, and makes/breaks his own false creation (fresh wandering or error-about-poetry). The answering movement, antithetical to this primary, is the one I have called tessera, a completion that is also an opposition, or restorer of some of the degrees-of-difference between ancestral text and the new poem.” (Harold Bloom, “Emerson and Ammons: A Coda,” Diacritics 3, no. 4 (1973), 45–46: 46)

For Bloom, the relation between texts is a relation between poets and this relation is in effect a repetitive career-long struggle with influence and dependence, on the one hand, and originality and freedom, on the other. A Kabbalistic dialectic of fragmentation and reconstitution, fall and resurrection, is directly imposed on this oedipal anxiety. “Applying the Lurianic dialectics to my own litany of evasions, one could say that a breaking-of-the-vessels always intervenes between every primary and every antithetical movement that a latecomer’s poem makes in relation to a precursor’s text” (Bloom, “Emerson and Ammons,” 46). Further, insofar as the original shattering and final reconstitution are ‘stages’ marking a creative career – rather than, say, textual moments occurring haphazardly across a body of work, a single text, or within the same feature – the oscillations between primary and antithetical movements are governed by a much larger, programmatic arc that draws the ‘latecomer’ (much like, say, a satellite colliding with the planet that ‘gave’ it its orbit) back home to his father-predecessor.

The figuration of this relation is accomplished through the “dialectical pair of ratios, kenosis (or undoing as discontinuity) and daemonization [return, restitution]” (46). Bloom, for instance, reserves the first for describing the “wildest, finest, and freest” (46) series of Ammons’ texts – that is, with respect to their distant anchor in Emerson (“Kenosis is the particular mark of an astonishing series of poems […]” (46)). Whereas, the “answering voice in Ammons, his daemonization or Tikkun for this contraction of the self, begins in ‘Saliences’ and continues […]” (46) until the arc has traced its widest possible ambit of freedom. Bloom then predicts “an even more strenuous pattern of contraction, catastrophe, restitution, a dialectical alternation of a severer self-curtailment (askesis) and an answering return of lost voices and almost-abandoned meanings (apophrades)” (46). But while this model can certainly be seen to reflect a real relation or impetus between certain texts or authors, the explanation of why an economy of wandering and return should exclusively be ‘catastrophic’ (or for that matter for the same reason define the highest value) remains largely undeveloped. As De Man notes, “It would take only one small step, without having to change the premise, to make the same statement in a jovial rather than a saturnine mood, and to replace the anxiety by a serene, pre-Johnsonian theory of decorous imitation” (De Man 273).

Bloom, to be sure, locates at the nexus of kenosis and daemonization a mediating self-discipline (askesis) that ‘at the last moment’ curtails the betrayal and returns the son to his almost-abandoned father (apophrades). But why prize “contraction” when, before ‘return’ is imminent or inevitable, kenosis, the undoing, is so ‘wild, fine, and free’? It is at this point that the economy of disavowal and return becomes truly an ‘economy’; for, rather explicitly, the poet’s return is compelled and enforced – requiring self-discipline, producing anxiety – by an inner need to settle a debt. It is a “restitution” of ‘property’ to its proper owner, a returning of what was borrowed and almost stolen. The dialectic of kenosis and daemonization is thus at heart an ethical circle – (or rather it is ethical only because it is circular) – motored by an internal dialectic of guilt and reluctance, one that tightens, moreover, with each turn of the gyre (–with each “answering return” a “severer self-curtailment”). And though for Bloom influence can only be ‘misprision’ (that is, improper and always already without allegiance), the ‘precursor’ nonetheless shines through as the formal cause and origin of even its faintest, or most abusive, employment.

The value of kenosis is likewise in large measure dependent on the subsequent contraction (daemonization) that revokes it or makes it justifiable; a poet’s wild departures from a predecessor are only acceptable to the extent that the poet returns and renews allegiance. The career and corpus – and so the future historian looking back – thus define a posthumous structure that descends (backwards, often) on particular texts and weighs each, conspicuously, against a totality that can only seem arbitrary or unfair from too many angles. Indeed, Coleridge’s kenosis with respect to Milton receives none of the fanfare of Ammons’, if only because it was not completed afterwards with a complementary return. Bloom first observes:

“But the next revisionary ratio, the kenosis or self-emptying, seems to me almost obsessive in Coleridge’s poetry, for what is the total situation of the Ancient Mariner but a repetition-compulsion, which his poet breaks for himself only by the writing of the poem, and then breaks only momentarily. Coleridge has contemplated an Epic on the Origin of Evil, but we may ask: where would Coleridge, if pressed, have located the origin of evil in himself? His Mariner is neither depraved in will nor even disobedient, but is merely ignorant, and the spiritual machinery his crime sets in motion is so ambiguously presented as to be finally beyond analysis. […] (Harold Bloom, “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” Diacritics 2, no. 1 (1972), 36–41: 40)

Passing over the question of why “ignorance” is unworthy of thematic treatment, Bloom asks, rhetorically, “what was Coleridge the poet trying to do for himself as a poet? To which I would answer: trying to free himself from the inhibitions of Miltonic influence, by humbling his poetic self, and so humbling the Miltonic in the process. The Mariner does not empty himself out; he starts empty and acquires a Primary Imagination through his suffering. But, for Coleridge, the poem is a kenosis, and what is being humbled is the Miltonic Sublime’s account of the Origin of Evil.” (40)

II.

If one poet is complicatedly ‘indebted’ to another poet, that is one thing, but if criticism theoretically privileges that textual relation over any other, or excessively isolates that aspect of a text as the essential feature, then the critique has turned the corner from explication to aesthetic regime. However, the converse argument can just as easily be made with respect to the criticism that, in critiquing the privileging of these features, declares them applied, enforced, invented – an ‘effect’, in short, of the overextension itself. Indeed, in practicing ‘wild, free’ kenosis one is quickly rendered eligible for the counterpart error: the defining of ‘curtailment’ as supervenient. This error (or naïveté) substitutes the ‘influences’ imposed on the creative subject for a ‘raw material’ to mince and meld with freedom and without repercussion. Does not undoing and discontinuity somehow frequently manage to promise reconstitution just when we think it most free, detached, and clear in the open? Behind De Man’s hapless wonder over Bloom’s totalizing anxiety can we not discern the disingenuousness of a ‘calculation’ that is always, in its peculiar mixture of rigor and evasion, 'helplessly' right?

Indeed, De Man, in a remarkable turn, isolates Bloom’s kenosis as a figure of de-construction itself:

“Kenosis is a more complex case, because it is the only class in which a figure is used to undo systematically the substantial claim implied in the use of another figure; it is the figure of a figure, in which one de-constructs the universe produced by the other. As opposed to tessera, kenosis breaks up a totality into discontinuous fragments: it substitutes a contiguity (in temporal terms, a repetition) for an analogy or resemblance (in temporal terms, a genesis) and thus rediscovers, in its turn, the familiar metaphor–metonymy opposition, though with an epistemological twist that was lacking in Jakobson’s version.” (De Man 274–275)

This remark, for our purposes, opens onto two substantial lines of thought: Heidegger’s concept of destruktion and Jakobson’s concept of metonymy. Both, in their own way, discover and expose the concealed contingency of what otherwise appears self-evident, universal, timeless. The former deals with tradition and the obscuring of its own sources, an epistemological logic, while the latter deals more with signification, language, and the provisional accrual of ‘associations’ (opposed to the elucidation of ‘definitions’ and ‘proper’ meanings). Heidegger’s destruktion, the prototype of De Man’s de-construction, thus stresses the ‘ossification’ of knowledge, with an insistence on the difficulty of even determining its nature or relative value: that is, tradition, by virtue of being tradition, conceals its criteria (for being traditional) behind a self-evidence that resists easy interrogation:

“When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Row, 1962), 43.)

As readers and subjects we are thus confronted with only the terminal result of a long critical process; the actual (one would think, historical) production of what now appears self-evident thereby remains, in effect, forgotten for its product. Therefore, “this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved” (Heidegger 44). Now, while this perspective, which is resumed later in Being and Time under the sign of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, has of course found divisive heritage in Gadamer’s ‘hermeneutics’ (Truth and Method), on the one hand, and Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’, on the other, for our purposes it will suffice to say that the former stresses retrieval, recovery, tradition, drawing close to a ‘proper’ or centered meaning, while the latter stresses play, difference, a plurality of irreducibly dissonant positions. (It is nonetheless clear that for Heidegger destruktion involves less an anarchic dispersal of tradition than a critique of its ‘ossified’ contents; after all, there is the explicit promise that some of the concepts 'handed down' will prove to have been “genuinely drawn” from the “primordial ‘sources’”.)

Our interest in this general problematic is however for the most part confined to Bloom’s kenosis, De Man’s de-construction, and the dialectic of flight and return at stake between them. Let us turn, then, keeping Heidegger’s destruktion in mind, to the literary and epistemological history of kenosis.

Kenosis, as it were, refers specifically to a limited and relatively exceptional characterization of the relation between Jesus and God (or, rather, the formation of the relation itself). The term is almost exclusively associated with the hymn reproduced by Paul in Philippians 2:5–11, wherein God’s incarnation as Jesus is described as a loss or “self-emptying” of divine qualities:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form

of God

did not regard equality with

God

as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself,

taking the form of a slave,

being born in human

likeness.

And being found in human

form,

he humbled himself

and became obedient to the

point of death–

even on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted

him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and

under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

(Philippians 2:5–11, New Revised Standard Version)

This is also the passage to which Bloom makes explicit reference in his use of the term kenosis:

“Kenosis, which is a breaking-device similar to the defence mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition-compulsions; kenosis then is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor. I take the word from St. Paul, where it means the humbling or emptying-out of Jesus by himself, when he accepts reduction from Divine to human status. The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he ceased to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor's poem-of-ebbing, that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems.” (Bloom, “Coleridge,” 39)

But with respect to De Man's tradition, kenosis occupies a profound place in poststructuralist conceptions of identity and difference, at least to the extent that they have been formulated out of the writings of Hegel and perhaps Levinas. But first, a brief explication of the passage.

Generally speaking, debate over the passage has focused on its reference to “the preëxistent state of Christ, the emptying himself of some measure of that preëxistent glory and his subsequent exaltation to the right hand of God” (Milton S. Terry, “The Great Kenotic Text (Phil. 2:5–11.),” The Biblical World 17, no. 4 (1901), 292–296: 292–293). Contestation has accordingly arisen over the nature of this formation of one identity out of another, a difference in self that is also somehow between selves, but two selves destined to reunite, if not literally as one – in that Jesus will remain at the “right hand” – then theoretically or spiritually. And while the literature on the relation between Jesus and God is in effect endless, the kenotic passage characteristically expresses this relation as one where Jesus preexists his body and literally emerges out of God. It therefore suggests an enclosure to this difference, a difference ‘within’ as well as ‘without’, and such that the redemption is a return or circle.

Theological and textual questions concerned with this passage likewise encounter symptomatic difficulties in interpreting relations between Jesus and God, if only because relations between them must always already be ‘within’ them/him. Terry, for instance, concludes that if “God highly exalted him” then this exaltation must not only be a “consequence of his humiliation” but also a “reward or recompense” (Terry 293). But if “Nothing in the whole passage is plainer than the explicit distinction between God and Christ” (Terry 293) is not this distinction itself pursuant to the act in question? It is Christ’s/God’s self-emptying, after all, that renders the dissociation between Christ and God explicit. (Indeed, we cannot simply say ‘Christ emptied himself’ without observing the proleptic redundancy – in the sense, that is, of ‘the poison hung in the sick air’ – enforced upon the sentence. This is no small ‘communicative’ problem, but, rather, the force of the question.)

Thus, if the exaltation is indeed “the meritorious result of the self-humiliation” (Terry 293), then Christ’s resurrection, which is a return to where he started, is also the collecting of a debt. But is this to suggest that Christ humbles himself in stooping to human form in order to receive reward? This reading would, again, have to belie the fact that it was his descent that produced not only a debt but, in one and the same move, both the debtor and the creditor ‘within’ a circumscribed identity. In this view, God would, in effect, split himself into one who owes the other. Indeed, it would appear that the identity paradox posed by kenosis specifically works to render the usual sense of debt and credit, reward and consequence, cause and effect, especially immaterial (in both senses of the term).

But if the specific textual event of kenosis (Phil. 2:5–11) describes a particular abstract relation that resists explication and visual description, how might it inform readings of relations between Jesus and God elsewhere in the New Testament? For, if the difference between them is circumscribed by the affirmation of their identity in the kenotic moment, what could possibly serve to renew, apply, or affirm this circumscription in passages where Jesus is for all intents and purposes narratively alone? Can the kenotic passage form a criterion for reading the character of Jesus as a difference within God -- or, by virtue of the scene or moment in question, is this relative within/without always a matter of context? It is in this sense that difference within identity, or identity as difference from itself – especially between the limited human Jesus and the objective omniscient God (who are not simply different but in a certain sense opposite) – gives rise to a textual ‘dialectic’ – which is to say, the categorization of acts of Jesus according to whichever of his split persona appears most prevalent.

“One clear instance is Gregory’s response to the kenotic motif found in Philippians 2:7. At one point in the Theological Orations Gregory [of Nazianzus] interprets this metaphor as indicating that the Son of God assumed ‘what he was not’ [page] while at the same time continuing to be ‘what he was.’ Yet later, in a passage emphasizing the condescension of the incarnate life, he asserts that the Son put aside ‘what he was’ and assumed ‘what he was not.’ / Such Christological ambiguity on Gregory’s part forms the background for the specific example chosen, namely, his exegesis of Jon 11:33 and 43 as it occurs in the Third Theological Oration. This is the familiar story of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ Such a question undoubtedly implies ignorance on Jesus’ part. Hence Gregory’s comment: ‘He asks where Lazarus was laid for he was a man (anthrōpos gar ēn).’ Subsequently Jesus commanded, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ Such a command unmistakably suggests divine power. So Gregory’s assertion: ‘He raises Lazarus for he was God (theos gar ēn).’” (Oration 29.19; J. Barbel, ed., Gregor von Nazians: Die fünf theologischen Reden (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1963), op. cit., p. 160; cited in David F. Winslow, “Christology and Exegesis in the Cappadocians,” Church History 40, no. 4 (1971), 389–396: 390–391)

In this view, a more or less strict alternation would govern the Jesus/God difference. They are exclusive to, if continuous with, each other. The oscillation (in Jesus) between God and himself would therefore only nominally recover the identity that circumscribes both, while in effect interpreting kenotic ‘difference within identity’ as a division ‘against’ oneself more than a difference ‘as’ oneself. And while the relations described by Gregory certainly characterize given moments, they are by no means representative of, nor wholly consistent with, other kenotic moments, much less the kenotic passage itself.

I only introduce the possibility of deriving, from Phil. 2:5–11, a ‘dialectic’ characterization of Jesus in order to draw in greater contrast contemporary philosophical interest in God’s subjectivity. This turn, as it were, is for the most part due to Hegel. Indeed, where much of the scholarship on kenosis has focused on Jesus’ interiority, Hegel focused on God’s exteriority. Following Luther’s well-known translation of Paul’s kenosis as Entäußerung (‘the separation of the Self through an externalization’), Hegel likewise discerned in this double movement of externalization and reconciliation a model for subjectivity (and history, art, language, etc.). Thomas Altizer, who has written much on Hegel’s relation to kenosis, describes it in Hegelian terms as such: “The true God who can be known as being ‘in-itself’ (in sich), can only actually be so known by the negative movement of God’s being ‘for-itself’ (für sich), and that is a self-negating or self-emptying movement, a movement in which Spirit realizes itself as Subject only by abandoning itself as Substance, and that itself is the life or movement of Trieb or kenosis” (Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Hegel and the Christian God,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 1 (1991), 71–91: 75).

It is in this sense that kenosis became, for Hegel, a generic philosophic concept capable of diverse application. For the Hegelian subject, kenosis is both an incarnation of form – an outwardizing or utterance (Äusserung) – and an externalization of something otherwise interior and self-identical. One is constituted through a detour through ‘the other’. One ‘abandons’ oneself through speech, through desire, through perception, to external effects that in turn reply and contribute to the one abandoned to them, not as simple projections of an inner life, but as investments of the self in external phenomena. Derrida thus describes the relation between kenosis, Hegel, and what he agrees to be the force behind definitions of modern subjectivity.

“The process which assures a ‘mutual fashioning’ (this is a deliberate plastic expression) of the two instances of kenosis, the divine and the human, that of God and that of the ‘modern subjectivity’, would be a process inherent to the Vorstellung, that is, a representation which at the same time exteriorizes and interiorizes (Entäußerung/Erinnerung). In exteriorizing, in extra-posing its object, it alienates and empties itself, it sacrifices itself, according to a movement which already belongs to the Being of God and hence is in this way represented. The representation effectively represents it and not as a simple figurative projection.” (Jacques Derrida, “A time for farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou,” preface to The future of Hegel: plasticity, temporality, and dialectic, by Catherine Malabou, tr. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2004), vii–xlvii: xliv)

In Levinas, as well, a kenotic self-emptying opens the subject to ‘the other’, experience, God, etc. It is the touch of the Infinite that renders it specific, real, and accessible. As an evacuation of the self to 'make way' for the other, Levinas’ kenosis is an “expulsion of self outside of itself … the self emptying itself of itself” (Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 110–111, quoted in Paul Ricoeur, “Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence,’” tr. Matthew Escobar, Yale French Studies 104 (2004), 82–99: 92. Originally published as Autrement: Lecture d’Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence d’Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).) A similar reading is performed by Hélène Cixous, albeit with respect to reading: for her, kenosis is a relentless process of ‘de-selfing’ and ‘de-egoization’ to find the proper distance from which to hear the other.

III.

Thus, to return full circle, how might these appropriations of kenosis relate to De Man’s critique of Bloom?

First, a few general observations: in Bloom’s kenotic schema, the precursor (in the above examples, Emerson and Milton) functions as God externalizing himself as, respectively, Ammons and Coleridge (Jesus). But, since a “breaking-of-the-vessels” intervenes, externalization is not necessarily also internalization (daemonization). Ammons completes the circuit, while Coleridge does not.

Different strands of the poststructural tradition likewise take up different aspects of the kenotic passage. (1) The de-construction or ‘undoing’ of tradition: kenosis, at least in De Man’s usage, here refers to Bloom’s figure but not necessarily to the New Testament kenosis that implies a return. (2) Hegelian subjectivity, externalization/internalization of desire, language, perception, the constitution of the self through the other. (3) Self-emptying to clear a space for 'the other', a form of receptivity and reading, the precondition of immersion.

De Man’s remarks thus attempt to relate the first to the second. The ‘undoing’ of tradition is identified as specifically kenotic. But what, then, relates ‘undoing’ to ‘externalization/internalization’, especially when De Man seems to reject the countermovement of daemonization, return, reconstitution? Which is to ask: Can we in any way speak of a kenotic ‘undoing’ (of tradition or of a text) that does not ‘always already’ promise (or threaten) this movement with return, reconstitution?

The key perhaps lies in ‘where’ De Man and Bloom respectively identify this return. For the former, the misreading (which he relates to Bloom’s ‘misprision’) is already a return. In this view, which he elaborates on elsewhere (e.g. Paul De Man, “‘Conclusions’ Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ Messenger Lecture, Cornell University Lecture, March 4, 1983,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985), 25–46), the ‘original’ reading is just another misreading. Ammons thus redefines Emerson and does not simply return to him. Bloom would likely agree, but with the qualification that not every reading redefines another and that this is precisely what is at stake. Ammons achieved a redefinition (of Emerson), while Coleridge (of Milton) did not. Hence, the breaking of the vessels. Or, as Cixous stresses in a slightly different vein, the subjective process of gaining access to a text implies everywhere the threat of failure, breakage. Textual kenosis, if conceived as a self-emptying for something/someone else, cannot help but approach the hermeneutic.

But we have already mixed models. We are speaking of the relation between texts as if they are enclosed by a representation that circumscribes their externality (as some kind of internality), as if there is something that always ensures a bond or fealty between readings. And this, I suspect, is the treachery of the kenosis figure’s displacement from theology to philosophy. On that subject, Levinas would appear to have something entirely different to say, though I have not yet read the key essay in quesion -- Emmanuel Lévinas, “Judaism and Kenosis,” in In the Time of Nations, tr. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1994). Although I think it is safe to say that his take on kenosis, hermeneutics, and the 'breaking of the vessels' will be much less Christian in model and spirit.

A Grunge Dirge

2008-02-09T13:49:00.001-08:00

Covers of songs can tell you alot about the band or artist doing the covering and the band or artist being covered. Like a good translation of a poem, the covered song stands on its own as a song. And like every good translation, it propels the listener to find the original and listen to it anew.

Though I have memories of seeing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" the first time it hit MTV, I was only 9 or 10 at the time, and well, I was only 9 or 10. By the time I was 16 (1998), we had so-called "alternative" rock. WAAF and WBCN (the two rock stations in Boston where I grew up), seemed to play only two bands: Creed and Limp Bizkit. "Grunge" music was too close in time for it yet to be nostalgically mythologized, and the next new thing hadn't happened yet. So we had "alternative," which at the time meant Christian rock and rock-rap hybridity (which we've always had in rock and so wasnt really "new"--see the Beastie Boys, "Walk this Way" by Aerosmith & Run DMC, The Clash, Blondie doing rap songs, etc in the 1980's). 1998 sucked, in other words, so kids my age were forced to listen to the earlier, initial grunge thrust. Alot of us grew up listening to Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pumpkins, just 5 years behind the curve. Alot of us stretched further back, to 70's era stuff like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. Some of us went for more 80's rock: The Smiths, The Cure, Husker Du (maybe just me, dunno). This is what happens when you're stuck with Collective Soul and Third Eye Blind.

But not all was lost: no, far from it. Bands emerged from that time and many of them stay with me. One of the bands that emerged and really hit in the late 90's and early 00's was Staind, a band from the North Shore of Boston. Their sound was more metal than grungy, but the lyrics took their subject and tone from Nirvana. Tender and aggressive: that is their sound

Aaron Lewis's acoustic solo album came out recently, and I was pleasantly surprised to find him covering early 90's staples by Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. His cover of Pearl Jam's "Black" is exceptional in that Lewis displays a vocal range Eddie Vedder just doesn't have. Take this verse, at once the highest point of the song followed by the lowest. The speaker of the song, deeply fucked up over a breakup, is momentarily cheered up by a walk outside and a glimpse of laughing children at play. First, the original Pearl Jam:

http://media1.podbean.com/3369/u/Vedder1real.mp3

Note how his voice trails off after the rush. There is a poignancy at this moment, for the speaker's momentary rejuvenation must come crashing down the minute he is brought back to his own being-in-the-world and realizes he is not, after all, a child. The song turns on the line "All the love gone bad," and hits its peak (nadir?) with the lines:

I know someday you'll have a beautiful life
I know you'll be a sun--
in somebody else's sky.
But why
Why
Can't it be
Mine?

Lewis's version makes this turn even more poignant than the Pearl Jam song:

http://media1.podbean.com/3369/u/staind.mp3

Have to include the end of the original PJ song as well, for good sake, which Lewis doesnt attempt to emulate:

http://media1.podbean.com/3369/u/Vedder2.mp3

4 Translation Theories

2008-02-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

Translation studies: a traditional theory stretching back to Schliermacher and still very much with us, frames the central question as: if all translation is "bringing over," what is being translated and where is it going? Does the translator bring the "target" language to the "source" language, or vice versa? Whats at stake in any given "bringing over"--whats gained, lost, and what does that mean in any given context?

Hugo Friedrich called translation "enrichment." That he is still working within the Schliermachian idea can be seen in Friedrich's idea that the flow of translation is always one way: something is being enriched in either the target or source language at the expense of exactitude in the other. Translation is imperfect, and one side must always suffer.

Levinas and Benjamin have slightly different takes on this, both of which I think are more dynamic and thus harder to put in practice unless you're a gifted linguist (George Steiner comes to mind as a fruitful example of the Benjaminian style).

Benjamin's The Task of the Translator is noteworthy in its celebration and indeed ennobling of the oft-neglected art of translation, here raised (in his mystical Marxist manner) to the level of "task." The task of the translator, it turns out, is a central task for humanity: it is one of the only acts (maybe the only?) through which one gets a glimpse of "pure language." Benjamin thinks translation strips language down from the physical husk that covers it (all the physical stuff we do with our voice box, mouth, and lips; all the physicality of the written word on the page) in order to reveal the pure essence at its core: MEANING. Benjamin's ideal translation, as he says at the end, would be an interlinear version of the Bible in every human language, lined up one on top of the other.

For Levinas, translation is necessary for both the translated text and the culture doing the translating. There is no one-way enrichment like there is in Schliermacher and Friedrich. In fact, translation is only the site "around" which different periods of history communicate--translation is where two periods interface. What they communicate are "thinkable meanings." Here is Levinas's idea of "exegesis" in Nine Talmudic Readings:

To evoke freedom and non-dogmatism in exegesis today means one of two things. Either it means being a proponent of the historical method...or to engage in structuralist analysis. No one can refuse the insights of history. But we do not think they are sufficient for everything...Our first task is therefore to read in a way that respects [the text's] givens and conventions, without mixing in the questions arising for a philologist or historian to the meaning that derives from its juxtapositions. Did audiences in Shakespeare's theatre spend their time showing off their critical sense by pointing out that there were only wooden boards where the stage sign indicated a palace or a forest? It is only after this initial task of reading the text within its own conventions that we will try to translate the meaning suggested by its particulars into a modern language...Our approach assumes that the different periods of history can communicate around thinkable meanings, whatever the variations in the signifying material which suggests them.

Note the phrase "thinkable meanings": if things are capable of being thought they are just as capable of not being thought. Meaning is not always there, hidden, waiting to be found, as for Benjamin. The process of translation is central for Levinas, for it is in that process where both sides start talking to one another.

The Milieu of Resistances in "Children of Men"

2008-01-26T16:18:00.000-08:00

While Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón) does in some sense offer a peaceful, hopeful, and politically progressive message, its expression is nonetheless complicated by a utopian, transcendental vision – namely that 'bare life' – the 'miracle of life' – transcends politics and partisanship alike. This is made iconically clear in the dramatic scene where Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) disrobes, and reveals to Theo Faron (Clive Owen) that she is ('miraculously') pregnant. Framed by rows of cows hooked-up to milking machines, she becomes, in an instant, the inviolate exception to a world that can no longer reproduce life on account of its skill at exploiting it. Thus, 'bare life', which here of course identifies itself (rather traditionally, ideologically) with the female pregnant form, assumes the mantle of the transcendental signifier. Neither politics nor armed resistance will rescue this world, only 'life itself'.

The ubiquitous oppression against which this message of peace is expressed is of course the state in all its familiar manifestations (e.g. bureaucracy, workforce regulation, media control & message saturation, the various military occupations, the torture of 'detainees', pseudo-public executions, the incarceration of 'illegal immigrants', and so on.) Indeed, as a stylistic principle of sorts, the frame is regularly crammed with all the iconic references and allusions to contemporary and twentieth century horrors required to overwhelm the observer with a permanent, unfocused sense of hell on earth. Nothing escapes this overbearing visuality; detention centers are built right into public spaces, horrific things seem to carry on in the background (while passersby continue in the manner of 'business as usual'), stray cops regularly amble past the lens, and perhaps most brutally, certain tracking shots focused on characters in the foreground are tightly choreographed to leave in its wake, and to our imagination, something awful, like an imminent execution (as when they are forced to leave behind Miriam [Pam Ferris], Kee's midwife, in the refugee camp).

Less obvious, though just as integral to the film's conception of the state, is its inclusion of 'political resistance' as a component thereof. Fanatical religious groups, militants, and political organizations casually mix memberships and bleed into one another as so many symptoms, or extensions, of the condition resisted. What would otherwise be mistaken for the Left is here presented as a collage of historical forms, each a mask or incarnation of the same frenzied, futile periphery. This is less the liberating vision of a 'carnival' of performances, identities, and new forms of subjectivity than its most cynical counter-image, a kind of purgatory for anachronistic factions to bitterly mix and meld. The resistance groups form a sort of desperate milieu, of insanity, disillusionment, and escape: there are the old hippies (represented by Jasper [Michael Caine]), the young Communist chic guerilla (Julian [Julianne Moore]), the IRA-esque militants (led by Luke [Chiwetel Ejiofor], with their iconic country hideout), Hamas-like martyrs, punk anarchists (one part Libertarian, two parts Mad Max, e.g. Patric [Charlie Hunnam]); but, in spite of their tactical opposition, they are each revealed, one after the other (with the exception of Julian), as secretly plotting to exploit for their own purposes the life of the newborn child. Indeed, to the extent that they are all united in this task, they acquire a deeper, almost metaphysical unity on account of it. It is an old formula. They claim to protect the child from the state, who they are sure will never let a foreign woman publicly hold the role of miracle mother, but then attempt to expedite mother and child via wheelchair to the Palestinian-esque martyr march to rally them in the midst of a ferocious battle. Luke even has long-term plans for the child: 'he', though Theo quickly corrects the presumption of gender, will presumably one day lead them.

Each political position blends into the other, as species of a general exploitation. History flattens, politics falls away. At one point, Theo, Kee and babe head with difficulty against the martyr march, in the opposite direction, and we are meant to feel, it seems, as though they are moving against history itself, which crawls past them in one massive photogenic rush.

Nevertheless, there is a strength in the general point to be made by the film, namely that there is only one kind of violence and whoever claims otherwise is secretly allied, through a more subtle pact, to the thing they claim to resist. But at the same time, I do not think this point can ever be made in 'universal form': obviously, it will always comes down to 'how' you say it. Which is to say, in the final analysis, the film offers what could be called a literalist view of politics: that is, instead of attempting to make visible the more subtle or less apparent workings of imperial politics in 'daily life', it defines as politics whatever of it is most eligible for being made visible – cops, soldiers, war, camps. Likewise, headlines, tickers, and televisions multiply everywhere in this film, but there is little to be said for the more pervasive and violent (if relatively unspectacular) apparatuses of empire, most of which belong less to the military, than to policy, less to law than to custom.

Furthermore, by deferring our greatest horrors to an imaginary future, as is proper to the apocalypse genre (though I do not think this genre is by any means categorically reductive), it buries or whisks away the extant hell of the present. To be sure, one could easily watch this film and leave with the feeling that 'at least it's not that bad just yet', or, worse, conclude that the empire, the factions, the resistances are all variations of each other and so in siding with one you with them all. (In principle, the film is comparable to Citizen Ruth, which follows, to like effect, a pregnant Ruth Stoops (Laura Dern) through a pro-life/pro-choice battle over her PR value. The end result is a general equalizing of positions, in the name of a force that submits 'life' to processes of 'instrumentalization' that differ only in rhetoric.) Indeed, as a Hollywood action film first and foremost, it is just as well fully available to the pleasure of those it would otherwise seem to critique. Much like the fate of Apocalypse Now, it's not too hard to imagine the soldiers of the future screening it to get pumped-up for battle.

Rhetorical Devices, Death, The Usual

2008-01-24T11:54:00.000-08:00

“Do they die? Blake saw a fairy's funeral;
but in Ireland we say they are immortal.”
-W.B. Yeats, Folktales of the Irish Peasantry

Mood is a fickle goddess; at turns, She inspires us to drink the wine to the lees and take to the streets in libidinous revelry and, yet, as readily compels us to draw the shades to the sill and sit in silence as the gloaming steals the last bits of sun and nothing but the silver of the moon steals in upon the room in the slivers of window which the shades can never seem to seal. Then the teapot boils and hisses. And there it is: the boiling, hissing pot, namely sibilance.

All words and sense and sentence and sentience and sentitiousness serve but one master: rhetorical roundness, at which men's hearts gladden and ears prick. I share a sentence for illustration from a master, Billy Butler (in his native Sligo, he was better known as W.B. Yeats—I think he owned an office supply company, but I may be wrong on that front). Here, in his Folktales of the Irish Peasantry, he describes an old man, Paddy Flynn, from whom he learnt many stories:

"In the triple solitude of age and eccentricity and partial deafness he goes about much pestered by children."

The "triple solitude" anticipates the tricolon of descriptive attributes, enhanced by the dancing, subtly tippling joy of the assonance in "age and...and partial...about" and the guttural traipse through the tripping shorts of "eccentricity," "deafness" and "pestered." In addition to these sound elements, he achieves much in delaying the subject and predicate, giving Paddy's condition a gravitas and presence which grabs us by the ear and brain, forcing us to hear and think. It is a glorious sentence which gives one a sense of the paradox of that occasional cortège of children which attends or mocks an old man's solitude—that Greek chorus provides the bas relief against which the tragedy of age plays out.

Earlier in the same work, he argues for the reality of myth and legend which lies deep within our breasts, obfuscated by the seeming oppression of what we take for "here" and "now," symbolized best by that endlessly ephemeral mirror of such ideas—the newspaper:

"The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much—indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are averse to sitting down to dine thirteen at table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, or seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tail. There are, of course, children of light who have set their faces against all this, though even a newspaper man, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching."

Having segued successfuly from rhetoric to myth and legend, I would like to underscore the fundamental truth Billy Butler is driving at: the Celt—with all his belief in myth and superstition—knows something about death, confronted as he is by his megalithic cromlechs, which he cannot easily ignore. Joyce was onto something when he linked the Greeks and the Irish. Do not the Greeks have their cromlechs? They do; in Hellas, though, the tombs rise like great beehives and are known as such, i.e. qoloi. We must all serve the queen bee, boys. The queen is death and her hive is where we shall find our eternal employment. Get your working papers in order...soon your recollections will fade and with them your relationships will become like dust long ago trod across and scattered upon the floor of time. The tetra/palaispodih or "the dust of four ages of ago"—to which Callimachos consigned poor Heraclitos' Nightingales in his moving elegy for the Hallicanassian—is that to which we all are consigned.

Still, all myth and legend need not leave us in the doldrums. Maiming will suffice—a maiming which results from pure joy. Again, Yeats:

"Do not think the fairies are always little. Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what size or shape pleases them. Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun—the shoemaker. Perhaps they wear their shoes out with dancing. Near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven years. When she came home she had no toes—she had danced them off."

by Columbanus Bestrode

Donald Culross Peattie, A Friend in the Green Dusk

2008-01-21T12:26:00.000-08:00

"Our books and our schoolmasters all attune us to a primrose by the river’s brim, but we have no primroses, no nightingales, no skylarks. We are taught to think of Nature in terms not native here. And that Wordsworthian Nature is delicate, subtle, subdued to live with men. … I will not blame anyone who for his vespers prefers a nightingale to the whippoorwill. But there you are. That is the language that is spoken by the North American forest in the night, in the soft, heavy, hot darkness of our Junes. Call it guttural; call it savage; that is our accent, that is the hardness of the forest’s naked limbs, the texture of the continent’s coarse, vital hair like the high-grass of primeval prairie.”
Donald Culross Peattie, Green Laurels: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists

I do not know how to account for the divine and delicate glory thrumming, glistering in the words above nor what of it I should parse for praise. Surely, I could linger among the letters, their rhythms, collocations and effects, coruscating and crackling in that endless alternative assonantal arrangement: “all attune us to a primrose by the river’s brim” or “soft, heavy, hot darkness of our Junes.” Else, I could underscore the care and attention to the grace and glory of rhetoric, word play and trope: the elegance of the illustrative and antipodal asyndeton—“delicate, subtle, subdued” and “no primroses, no nightingales, no skylarks”; the polyptotonic “Nature in terms not native here”; the somehow apt inversion of the figurative for the literal in the concluding simile: “the continent’s coarse, vital hair like the high-grass of the primeval prairie”; the breathy and abbreviated syntax of his call for our confrontation with the truth: “Call it guttural; call it savage” … but this vein is rich and, still, I have said nothing of the sentiment or sense of our sage!

At the core, we hear the call to arms (the insistent “our”) and common sense: “Learn to lean upon the trunks of the trees that are real and here before you; build your houses of them; write your elegies upon them and in their shade, with their shape and strength for image! Take account of the world about you as it is, not as it was or as is ideal. Accept and hymn your land, your America,” he seems to cry to us -- all without denigrating or dismissing the past, the golden and marmoreal European past, for clearly his pen draws from that well, decked out so balancedly, so decidedly, so measuredly as his prose is. Yet, despite the heighths of Parnassus his prose may climb, he does not deem it unseemly to stoop to the vernacular and declare in plain American: “But [here we] are.”

I came across Green Laurels: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists by Donald Culross Peattie at MacIntyre & Moore’s antiquarian bookshop in Davis Square, Somerville on the discount table among a number of horrible books on race and gender in religion in America during the civil rights era which were obviously dated and out of fashion and thus not selling. (Mac & Moore’s is a used bookstore specializing in academic and scholarly books and it seems that the personal library of any professor who has the misfortune of dying or going senile before educating his caretakers as to the value of his shelves ends up on theirs.) As most books in the store are rather pricey for a used bookshop (owing to the academic focus), when I have the leisure to stop in, I make a quick survey of the bargain table hoping I might find something interesting or useful. Past scavenges have been felicitous: three volumes of a four volume complete edition of Addison and Steele’s The Spectator; The Baseball Encyclopedia; an exhaustive collection of North Carolina folklore, superstitions and idioms (who knew that, according to Jessie Hauser of Pfafftown in Forsyth county, that “An amputated limb, if buried crooked (in a cramped position), will cause the patient pain until it is taken up and straightened”?); and a collection of the great A. C. Bradley’s Oxford Lectures on Poetry. This night and this find was no less felicitous—in fact, it was moreso: these other books leapt off the table and into my arms, obvious buys, either for their importance (Bradley, The Spectator) or their relation to my native interests (baseball, American ruralism), while Peattie was an author unknown to me and were it not for the mention of “Naturalists” and the promise of a discussion of some unknown quality therefore on naturalism, I might have let the book lie for some other soul to have the benefit of opening and never again forgetting.

Donald Culross Peattie was the pre-eminent Naturalist of his day. After leaving University of Chicago and French Poetry for Harvard and Botany, he worked for the Department of Agriculture and produced several works of mostly scientific value—his A Natural History of North American Trees is indispensable, authoritative and exhaustive. Later, he married the novelist Louise Redfield, and turned to nature writing as a career, for which he is most remembered. Through the 30’s and 40’s he published a dozen or so books directed to the general reader which were, owing to his popularity, distributed through many book clubs; he also wrote for Reader’s Digest and produced columns for the Washington Post and Chicago Daily News.

Despite his peerless, lyrical and poetic writing style, his populist appeals and his humanist perspective, never forgetting the long view or cackling rhymes of a history too often repeated, there is no doubt of his scientific pedigree, trained as he was by Merritt Lyndon Fernald. Yet, his prose never fails to caution the over-reliance on the machinery of the modern age (science, theory and philosophy, industry and reason, “progress”) as cultural shibboleths or remind us of the primacy and importance of the physical and natural world about us, cycling and recycling through age after age, indifferent to our foolish imaginings that mapping the gene or the ocean floor or the celestial plains will bring us any closer to or further from wherever it is we are going.

I think we owe the man and his words some time and consideration, not only to amend for our great error in forgetting him, but to account for what his life, his work, and the circumstances and suggestions of them in this age of America, the period in history.

As a writer, there is no popular prose stylist as subtle or grand, as beautiful or direct, as poetic or colloquial in turns as he. His pen-pictures of great naturalists, his descriptions of biological processes, his pronouncements on human nature and scientific folly, his summaries of botanical, ornithological or entomological properties are all gilded, given lyrical ballast and romantic sweep, and finally left before the reader dangling from its place within the great and golden chain.

On the discovery of fossils which would open avenues for evolution as a concept to be imagined more fully and accepted more broadly:

“Time, suddenly, seemed to give way at the back, and what had been thought the ultimate horizon of this dimension was found to be nothing but a painted backdrop; lifted, it revealed a wild and unfamiliar landscape, fabulously populated and receding into a perspective unbelievably deep.” Green Laurels

On Evolution:

"It has developed from the simple to the complex, it has had offshoots that led nowhere, it is, in its history, at once the most erratic, wandering and chancy performance, and as a concept the most unified, deified and profound fact.” Green Laurels

On the impediments to the acceptance of Evolution:

“[Lamarck] seems to have sensed that a logical explanation would not do; no one could have predicted in advance the course that life would take or indeed have imagined, in the delirium of fever anything so hideous as a hippopotamus, so exquisite as some of the sea worms, so sheerly mental, naked and ungainly as a man.” Green Laurels

Again, as above, I am tempted to continue in this endless vein of iteration and exaltation. Yet, notice how in each passage the great chain, the long view, the mystery never fades from view. Almost perversely for a man of science he speaks of evolution, the great idea which today we hail as freeing us from the delusions of the past, as a phenomenon of and bound up in the past and the past’s conceptions of life and man.

Such sentiments are rare among science writers and though there is a great history of Naturalists cum Litterateurs (Thoreau, Berry, The Twelve Southerners), they have been more men of letters than science. No so with Peattie, who produced serious scientific tracts and did work for the scientific community. Yet, no description of any biological process or biologist is not accompanied with something of poetry to it, both in sound and sense, observation and echo.

On primitive man’s bestial competition in pre-historic Europe:

“Yet the impartial stars showed him to be a pitiful antagonist to set against the lion. The beast outweighed him many times; its reach and its punch could end the combat in an instant. In cunning the lion is deeper than thought; his instincts and reflexes act for him like coiled springs released. His roar shakes the earth. His eyes can see in the night.” Immortal Village

On his arrival in Vence, a village of France, where he lived for several years and in his youth wrote a history of the village from Pre-history to modern times:

"From above blew down the sound of a woman singing among the vines. The song, with a minor refrain, was old and unhappy. But the singer, her children around her skirts, was young and ripely contented. Scythe and singer and cricket in the stubble raised a harvest choral in the autumnal air and let the two minutes pass unheeded as bubbles might slip over the race of an old mill. … It was then that I realized that for Provence the first World War was only one of the wars. That in her sod lie rusting the Templar’s two-handed blade and Arab’s scimitar. That Vence, scarred by the sword under her roses, had an epic to tell.” Immortal Village

If you can hear poetry in his words—“ripely contented”; “in the stubble raised a harvest choral in the autumnal air”; “His roar shakes the earth. His eyes see in the night.”—it is because there is poetry here. As the rusticity of the autumn song falls to the earth and our sight and sense suddenly becomes subterranean, seeing the roses now scarred by the scimitars and swords below and imagining epics, I cannot help but picture Vergilius’ horrid and wild bitch Allecto, rising again in all her hellish fury, as she has for ages, from the centers of our cities: ‘est locus Italiae medio sub montibus altis… .’

Poetry thrives throughout Peattie’s work and hardly a chapter or page goes by where some reference to a poet or quotation of a favorite verse does not stand. For him, it seems, Nature is where science and poetry meet:

“The creation of art is a familiar idea, but science too is a creation. It is not Nature itself, it is what we make of Nature, an arrangement, a pattern, an interpretation.” Foreword to Green Laurels

Nature is the plain on which all humanity must meet and thus too much is at stake for but only the microscope to be our lens upon the world. Science is as indebted to art, as art to science, one cannot thrive—or, rather, thrive healthfully to ensure its preservation—without the other. Though he often grinds his angst against the frightening prevalence and pride of the rationalist and scientific view of the world—

"So confident of progress is science that in our triumphs lurks the danger that we will think too poorly of the eras which held views no longer ours. … The old ideas are the ancestors of our own; we build upon the sunken piers of obsolete wisdom.” Green Laurels

—he just as frequently asks pointedly, insistently, exasperatedly about our literature and our poetry and its relationship to nature:

“A gifted lyricist of Mississippi writes of a sort of Graeco-Oxonian Nature, when he lives in a state where Nature is lush and violent, where the earth is black as all hell, and the bayous are rust-red and the people talk a rich idiom all their own, an idiom that is never allowed to intrude into the chaste stanzas of this poet.” Preface to The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley

And one has to wonder if here he has not pinpointed one of the causes of poetry’s soft diminuendo into the symphonies of the past for which we do not have an ear: it no longer reflects the world we inhabit. Only when Peattie arrives in France for the first time can he finally look out upon the lush valleys and find

"every least flower encrusted with legends and with names … closest of all to the Classic Latin by which Virgil and Horace called their roses, their laurel bush and myrtle and fig, olive and pine anemone.”

So why do we poets of the New World blather on of our “Graeco-Oxonian Nature” when nothing of it grows or sings upon our shores?

But let us return to the now, this age sadly absent our Peattie. The modern age, dominated and driven by science, has in many ways freed itself from the past by nurturing the illusions of a future secured by and with nothing in fact but a future of illusions where machines and medicine, electronics and economies will make religions and literatures, arts and disciplines commercial products at best and useless redundancies at worst. The age is now truly iron and iron too is our tongue, forever clashing against each other proclaiming either this idea or that dead or corrosive. Our writing about science has become combat, where no idea or approach is allowed to stand while another casts a different shadow and there is precious little effort to synthesize what is with what came before, let alone what would wish to sing with what would wish to speak plainly.

The scientists of our age would wish reason alone be out guide along the path to wisdom. Yet, wisdom is not reason and thus we will need something more of much else along the way, if the road to wisdom is the way we wish to wend. Little good will be accomplished in attempting to humiliate and debunk religion or spirituality as delusion and little else by engaging in endless political antagonizing or argument. It is little wonder, then, that when these über-rationalists, after engaging in a lifetime of tongue-lashings and partisan devotion to the altars of anger, their appeals to behave humanly and humanely in honor of the mystery and wonder fall on deaf ears and no bands march behind their gallant calls to action.

Wendell Berry once summed up the problems facing the modern age in one of the grandest paragraphs I have ever read:

"Contemporaneity, in the sense of being ‘up with the times,’ is of no value. Wakefulness to experience -- as well as to instruction and example -- is another matter. But what we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often, the real world, and there is no virtue in being up-to-date with it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical -- a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints, and the work necessary to support human life, and have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will again be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having.” Standing By Words

Sadly, there are too few of us up for “the job now,” too few Peatties among us. Too few of our scientists look long enough away from their petrie dishes to look through the poetic lens for to see whence their endeavors and knowledge have come or toward what light or darkness they will take us. An entirely rationalist reality is one which will be hostile to human life: life belongs to Nature and there is little reason in her workings or wonder. This realization and reality requires a humanist perspective, and Peattie knew it:

"Poets have always been preoccupied with Nature, but there are two schools of Nature poets, those who find in Nature a reflection of their own moods or a sermon for human betterment, like Wordsworth, and the rare sort that tries to echo Nature with her own voice. It is a comparatively easy and pleasant thing to talk about one’s self; apparently it is harder, as the naturalists already know, to report Nature.” Preface to The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley

Yet, little of Peattie’s vision has come to life and little else of his work has been either celebrated after his life or else carried on in the same vein. Literature and language are the only manner man has in keeping present what is past or passing to ensure that what will come will not be horrid or violent, madly divorced from those principles and ideas which have allowed for the continuity of human creation within the mystery.

Sadly, though, as science has waxed, literature is on the wane and few voices have the attention of the crowd or the honor of the laurel. Peattie likely believed in the immortality of the bard’s song as surely as the nightingale’s. In the end, he must have had deep faith in his own prose, crafted in the manner of the great writers and after their mold, and the promise of later generations of works following his example to serve as correctives to the arrogance of reason and the bully-cry of progress. Above, I have quoted Peattie’s fears of a “lurking danger” that scientific triumphs and progress will obliterate our necessary past. What is elided out of the quote is this faith in the honesty of his message and the immortality of its vessel: “But the history of science will correct such juvenile vanity.” But for the science historians … Amen.

by Columbanus Bestrode

Ramon Llull's affatus: Language as a Sense

2008-01-17T18:30:00.000-08:00

Clicking through the available portions of Mark David Johnston's The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull: Lay Learning and Piety in the Christian West (London: Oxford University Press, 1996) I stumbled onto Llull's concept of affatus, which makes the unusual claim that language is a 'sense', a sixth sense. Now, while I can't say that I'm familiar with 'Scholastic physiological and psychological doctrines', Llull's theory nonetheless strikes me as remarkable for its close identification of language with the body. (Compare this to more modern theories where language and speech are either disembodied, 'emitted' productions of the mind, rationality, consciousness, etc. or 'expressive' translations of feeling, emotion, affect, soul.) Generally speaking, eloquence, oration, delivery are typically considered secondary characteristics 'attached' to an otherwise abstract, signaletic material.

With the exception of Derrida's text On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, I can think of no recent work that rigorously conceives of language – in particular, speech – as quite literally a form of contact, touch, or 'interface' (and not simply as reductively material or physical, of which there are many examples from the analytics). Nevertheless, for Llull it would seem that language is more an interior than social sense; it is primarily a relation formed within the self, as the self. Trading in some of the 'spontaneity' typically associated with language production (in more 'naturalist' theories), Llull's affatus stresses a willful, inwardly turned dialectic between the rational faculty and the body. (Speaking here approaches singing, and involves a kind of muscular training, of the voice.) This dialectic, or discipline, is accordingly cast as extra-representational, in that this form of language is not produced solely in terms of its ability to signify but in terms of eloquence and oration. Prefiguring Nietzsche's 'phenomenology of the mind', Llull even describes the sixth sense as working upon a representational order existing entirely within the subject. “Where touch, taste, vision, hearing, and smell are all ‘exteroceptive’ (i.e., they apprehend objects outside the mind), Llull’s sixth sense is ‘interoceptive’ (i.e., it apprehends objects within the mind.” (Johnston 67). Needless to say, much could be made of this concept; but for now two passages from Johnston will have to do.

“The Libre de contemplació, the Rethorica nova, and the Liber de praedicatione all offer psychological and epistemological explanations of eloquence that rely on the same basic strategy, namely, rectifying the exercise of language by making the exercise of language serve as closely as possible the moral finality of human existence. Around 1294, Llull attempted to seek this same rectification through a different tactic, the integration of language into human nature itself. The result is his extraordinary proposal to classify speech as a sixth sense, which he calls affatus. Some modern scholars have sought ancient or medieval sources for Llull’s unusual theory, but these efforts must ignore his own insistence that affatus is a new discovery. In fact, careful review of Llull’s discussions of language prior to 1294 show that his new theory largely arises through his own revision of received doctrines. Affatus especially results from his conflation of Scholastic physiological and psychological doctrines regarding the apprehensive and motive powers. Llull treats these very freely because he rarely includes them in his model of human nature. As Vincent of Beauvais’s compilation (Spec. nat. 25.104) shows, various authorities associate the production of vocal sounds with the sensitive motive power. Among Llull’s Scholastic contemporaries, Robert Grosseteste derives this expressive power from the combined action of the sensual motive power’s control of voice and the rational faculty. Llull especially exploits this connection in classifying speech as a sense. At the same time, his explanations of affatus still appeal to his preferred epistemological and psychological doctrines: the division of the soul into sensitive, imaginative, and intellective powers; the explanation of cognition through resemblance and of intellection as interpretation; and the distinction between oral and mental language. Llull’s attempt to make the operation of affatus parallel the functioning of the other [page] five senses creates some especially difficult and confused arguments.” (Johnston 66–67)

“Thanks to its interoceptive nature, affatus functions chiefly as a means of communication among the powers of the soul. It performs an intrasubjective, rather than an intersubjective function. In this regard, affatus extends (and perhaps replaces) the mental language mentioned so often in Llull’s earlier writings. In its communication with the higher faculties, affatus plays an instrumental role. That is, affatus serves as a mediator, conceiving imaginable or intelligible concepts and manifesting them in speech (Liber de affatu 294). Indeed, the operation of the Imagination is better manifested through affatus than any other sense (Liber de affatu 290). The Liber de praedicatione (2.B.1.26.1) explains that affatus also represents ‘corporeal delights’ to the Imagination, which in turn represents them to the soul; touch likewise ‘manifests’ its sensations to the Imagination (Liber de affatu 294). One of the most quintessentially Lullian arguments of the entire Liber de affatu explains this function of affatus in the following sequence of propositions (289). First, there is greater Concord (the Lullian Relative Principle) between a sense and an intellectual power than between two sense powers, because the intellectual power predominates in the union of body and soul (this Concord is evidently a relationship of necessary dependence). Second, only affatus manifests the operations of Memory, which is a [page] faculty of the rational soul that informs the body (this seems to be special pleading, since it is hard to understand how another Sense like touch or taste could ‘express’ memories).” (Johnston 67–68)

* See also: Johnston, M. D. “Affatus: Natural Science as Moral Theology.” Estudios Lulianos 30, No. 1 (1990): 3-30; 30, No. 2 (1990) 130-159.

Žižek, Names, and Lacan's Couteau de Jeannot

2008-01-11T17:57:00.000-08:00

Cesarotti’s essay on Macpherson, Ossian, and the construction of the folk compilation foregrounds the proleptic – i.e. historically retroactive – effects of the relation between a 'cultural production' and the identities produced. My review of Cesarotti’s narrative to this extent concluded with the observation that though Ossian was assembled according to problematic and by no means self-evident criteria the principal effect nevertheless was of having discovered (in the past) that which was in fact created (in the present). This effect was tentatively attributed to the institutional function of the ‘author’ and the adjustments required to accommodate the folk text to the proper format; but what was not stressed enough was that it was Macpherson’s project of compiling a true Ossian that necessitated, from the start, both the assembling of texts and the subsequent concealment of their sources beneath an author-ized proper name.

In this sense, then, the folk text was less hijacked by the ‘author function’ than summoned by it. After all, before accusations of inauthenticity could become possible, it was Macpherson’s self-devised project to track down, archive, select, and assemble texts under a configuration that was, for all intents and purposes, decidedly alien to them. The goal, from the very beginning, was to extract from their distribution an apparent unity and resolve the difference with the cohesion of a bound book. (Should the oddity of this project be now lost upon us – indeed, it had not been attempted before Macpherson, and when it was, it found sure resistance – it is only because it has proved so enduring.) The eventual review of the logic of the compilation furthermore revealed, and quickly naturalized, the political and racial conditions determining its configuration. Thus, as I noted before, neither the compilation of the text nor the construction of the bard as its representative can be considered an unmediated, organic expression of a people; on the contrary, both the project in its conception and the subsequent legitimizing of its criteria effected a concealment of the popular sources through the very process of their compiling.

Two seemingly paradoxical effects can accordingly be distilled from this archival operation: on the one hand, a proleptic image of the archetype as antedating its production; on the other hand, the concealment or exclusion of popular sources previously associated with the personage (and the folk works bound loosely through it). Together, these two, general effects exalted one people’s past at the direct expense of the other’s. –The compilation, in other words, applied to existent peoples, through the figure of the past, an imaginary segregation of genealogies; which is to also say, it applied to the past, through the figuring of the present, decidedly contemporary tensions and oppositions. With the same stroke that assembled Ossian, his history was made to unroll behind him.

This is not to suggest, however, that the pasts of the peoples in question were simply in a state of idyllic indisturbance before Macpherson’s intrusion; nor is it to suggest that the popular genealogies concealed by the compilation suffered an intractable obfuscation. On the contrary, Macpherson’s compilation served to expose history as the effect of extant transformations’ resistance to new ones. Indeed, the Hibernian Ossian, as the problematic case or insufferable exception, took on an impossible, and symptomatic, qualification: namely, ‘the counterfeit of an alteration’. –But even so, it received a name. And these names, with their determinate features (counterfeit, forgery, imitation) and resolute untimeliness (that is, coming always before or after the ‘proper’ era), compile (according to altogether different rules) a ‘counter-archive’ of sorts.

II.

The purpose of the following explication is thus to extend the configuration of the compilation to types other than the text or poetic personage; for, as will soon become clear, the archetype over which Macpherson labored for so long bears roots, as a method, in domains extraneous to his own. With respect to the literary archetype, Duns Scotus comes to mind; also, the pragmatist Charles Pierce, who, as a self-declared “Scotistic realist,” conceived of personages, and perhaps language in general, as a field of ‘assemblages’. But what holds these assembled elements together has always proved difficult to identify. For Scotus and Pierce, a final touch, of sorts, is all that’s needed – a ‘contraction’ or ‘concretion’, respectively. For Pierce, “The multiple formalities of an entity are contracted in a process of individuation, which seals the haecceitas [‘thisness’] of the individual. ‘The formality of man,’ then, ‘is not a whole being or res. It is a complex formality joined with a principle of individuation and a host of accidents, all of which are formalities. Socrates … is not a formality. He is a res, composed of many formalities, each distinct from the other with some higher formalities containing some lower ones in composed formalities’” (James I. Wimsatt, “John Duns Scotus, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Chaucer’s Portrayal of the Canterbury Pilgrims,” Speculum 71, No. 3 (July 1996), 633–645: 636, quoting Robert P. Godwin, “Charles Sanders Peirce: A Modern Scotist?” New Scholasticism 35 (1961), 48–509: 490-491). But what is the principle or force that gathers particular features into/as an entity? “Contraction,” after all, “leaves an unresolved entity” and “it is this that makes Charles Peirce complain that ‘even Scotus is too nominalistic’ [quoted in Jeffrey R. DiLeo, “Peirce’s Haecceitism,” Transactions 27 (1991), 79-109: 83] in his theory of contraction,” (Wimsatt 641) meaning that Scotus, though ostensibly a realist, in the end resorts to the nominalist creed of withholding from universals and abstract concepts an existence other than that imbued by a name.

“But Peirce does subscribe to a version of haecceitas. For Scotus, haecceity ‘is the final or ultimate reality of the being …[It] restricts the specific form, matter, or composite thing and completes it by sealing the being as “this” being.’ [DiLeo, “Peirce’s Haecceitism,” p. 91] Peirce comments approvingly that according to Scotus haecceitas ‘is a peculiar element, a blind insistency, by which the nature crowds itself into a place in the world’ [quoted in DiLeo, 92]. However, Peirce presents this haecceity not as a formality but as experience, reactive event, with ‘hereness and nowness its essence’ [quoted in DiLeo, 93]. Peirce states variously that ‘existence (not reality) and individuality are essentially the same thing,’ that ‘[e]verything whose identity consists in a continuity of reaction is an individual,’ and that haecceity is the ‘element of existence which … by an inward force of identity, manifesting itself in the continuity of its reactions through time and space, is distinct from everything else’ [quoted in DiLeo, 95, 96]. Rejecting static formalities, he sees in bare event the essence of existence (to be distinguished from reality) and therefore of individuality” (Wimsatt 641).

Leaving aside the question of whether Pierce has simply “replaced the mysterious notion of contraction by an equally mysterious process of concretion” (John Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce’s Relation to John Duns Scotus (Seattle, Wash., 1963), p. 142, quoted in Wimsatt, 643), for Peirce, the concretion (a “complex formality joined with a principle of individuation and a host of accidents, all of which are formalities”) is ultimately in the service of “an inward force of identity.” However, insofar as identity is given as identical to its persistence, the inward ‘vitalist’ force – which replaces the (nominalist) name or (Scotist) seal as the concreting principle – renders moot the possibility of an identity persisting across changing features. Indeed, once ‘continuity of reaction’ defines ‘individuality’ (‘distinction from everything else’), the ‘formalities’ previously comprising the ‘formality’ now appear more as features attached to an inexplicable essence – a force – that admits little determination of its own. Likewise, if it is inward force that determines individuality, then the features that ostensibly differentiate one individuality from another must become, in effect, either interchangeable or, paradoxically, immaterial.

In other words, we must look elsewhere for a solution to the nominalist/concretion dilemma. This solution, moreover, must take into account the kinds of effects identified in the Ossian compilation: that is, it must be able to theorize identity – though not necessarily the subject – as a ‘process’ or malleable configuration. Žižek, as it were, treats a similar question, in relation to the more contemporary doctrine of descriptivism (which in many ways extends or rethinks the nominalist position). Indeed, for Žižek, “The basic problem of antidescriptivism is to determine what constitutes the identity of the designated object beyond the ever-changing cluster of descriptive features – what makes an object identical-to-itself even if all its properties have changed” (Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1999), 94).

His approach to this question, though informed by a combination of Hegelian and Lacanian theories concerning the ‘universal’ and the ‘signifier’, respectively, is nonetheless unique in its attempt to incorporate a theory of power. What constitutes identity, if only in the domain of ideology, he claims, is the point de capiton, “the ‘rigid designator’, which totalizes an ideology by bringing to a halt the metonymic sliding of its signified” (Žižek 99). This point or rigid designator, however, is “not a point of supreme density of Meaning, a kind of Guarantee which, by being itself excepted from the differential interplay of elements, would serve as a stable and fixed point of reference. On the contrary, it is the element which represents the agency of the signifier within the field of the signified” (Žižek 99). What he means by this, presumably, is that the rigid designator is not external to the set of features it represents, nor is it excepted from the metonymic play to which all designators are subject. Therefore, it is an element to the same extent as those it binds together: it is, thus, “to put it in Hegelian terms, the species which is its own universal kind” (Žižek 89). Žižek, moreover, attributes this ‘fold’ in the set to an act of sheer force, a (Schmittian-Agambenian) sovereign decision: “The crucial step in the analysis of an ideological edifice is thus to detect, behind the dazzling splendour of the element which holds it together (‘God’, ‘Country’, ‘Party’, ‘Class’ …) this self-referential, tautological, performative operation” (Žižek 99).

The element holding the edifice together does not, of course, consider itself a mere element; rather, it conceives of itself as having produced the set of which it is a part. In this sense, then, a temporal or historical dimension is integral to its claim to exception. As we saw with respect to the Ossian compilation, features appear as symptoms of a past that preexist its construction. Indeed, working off of Lacan’s well known claim that “The symptom initially appears to us a trace, which will only ever be a trace” (Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, Cambridge, 1988, p. 159, quoted in Žižek 55), Žižek writes:

“Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively – the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives the symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier’s network. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way” (Žižek 55–56).

Thus, with respect to the Ossian compilation, not only were its features given as preexistent to it, but also the text itself was presented as the compilation of all true Ossians. To be sure, Macpherson’s compilation was not presented as just another folk transformation, but as the authoritative archive of those transformations. Indeed, though Žižek applies the following observation to the subject (which is for him homologous to a master-signifier anyway), for our purposes it may just as well describe the archive in its relation to the elements it commands: namely, that its “initial ‘illusion’ […] consists in simply forgetting to include in the scene […its] own act – that is, to overlook how ‘it counts, it is counted, and the one who counts is already included in the account’” (Žižek 58, quoting Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 26). In short, “we overlook the way our act is already part of the state of things we are looking at” (Žižek 59).

Žižek’s theory of the retention of identity across a complete, if gradual, transformation of the referent’s descriptive features may also be inspired by Lacan’s theory of “metamorphism in which the formulation of their [instincts’] organ, direction, and object is a Jeannot knife with infinitely exchangeable parts” (Jacques Lacan, “A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology,” in Écrits, tr. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, 102-122 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 121). Lacan’s Couteau de Jeannot refers, in turn, to the well-known fable of the French peasant who alternately replaced the handle and the blade enough times such that it was no longer the same material knife though it retained its identity all the same. Lacan, however, applied this identity persistence model to the drives to indicate their general apparatus as one formed of ‘relations’ rather than constitutive ‘elements’.

“The Triebe (drives) that are identified in this theory simply constitute a system of energetic equivalences to which we relate psychical exchanges, not insofar as they become subordinate to some entirely set behavior, whether natural or learned, but insofar as they symbolize, nay dialectically incorporate [intègrent], the functions of the organs in which these natural exchanges appear – that is, the oral, anal, and genito-urinary orifices.
These drives appear to us only through highly complex links; we cannot prejudge their original intensity on the basis of sheer deflection. It is meaningless to speak of an excess of libido” (Lacan 121).

Leaving aside, for now, the relative validity of this statement, for our purposes it will suffice to observe the unique deployment of the model of ‘interchangeable parts’ and the particular attention to the ‘links’ between them. Indeed, for Lacan, the drives are relations, ‘energetic equivalences’, not forces preexisting law or restriction: in fact, to the same extent that the drives are ‘subordinated’ to a posterior law or restriction, they ‘dialectically incorporate’ the ‘functions of the organs’ – i.e. the body ‘itself’ – in which these ‘natural exchanges appear’. Thus, the drives, as such, only appear through ‘links’, in a complex configuration – on the body, and so in no way preexist their conditioning. They are always already conditioned. If we ‘cannot prejudge their original intensity’ it is because they don’t have any: intensity is not any more revealed in the moment of ‘deflection’ than in the moment of ‘subordination’, and for this reason, presumably, the drives are said to ‘dialectically’ incorporate changes in the forms of subordination themselves. Thus, since both the deflection and subordination of the drives constitute the drives themselves, one cannot speak of an ‘excess of libido’.

The specific formulation of the drives’ organ, direction, and object is for this reason a “Jeannot knife with infinitely exchangeable parts”: that is, the components of the apparatus are able to change while the general relational configuration does not. Bracketing the question of whether this view of the subject admits an essential formalism – namely, an organizing principle that exists nowhere and which cannot be reduced to the configurations that manifest it – our interest, you will recall, is confined to Žižek’s use of this model in explaining descriptive features and the master-signifiers that bind them together. To be sure, in Žižek, this model obtains, at least with respect to Lacan, a much more historical province. While ‘the subject’, in a sense, brings with it, for better or for worse, a readymade contour – the individual – a comparable point of departure would seem to be for the most part unavailable to ‘the name’. Indeed, the question we are dealing with is precisely ‘what’ grounds or binds features together in nominal entities.

To begin to answer this question, we will have to circle back to the kinds of historical problems – e.g. the ‘author function’ and the political conditions at work in the Ossian compilation – that provoked this inquiry to begin with. Our cue may thus be taken from Bruce Fink, who, in a note to the Lacan passage cited above, observes that “Freud refers to something similar with the term ‘Lichtenberg knife’ in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud VIII, 60, fn1, and SE XIV, 66” (Fink, in Lacan 779n147). The phrase indeed appears at the end of his “On the history of the psychoanalytic movement” (1914), in searing reference to Jung’s perceived threat to his psychoanalytic empire. –But first, a retelling of the context of Freud’s formulation is in order.

Homer and Genesis, the subjunctive and the indicative

2008-01-09T17:13:00.000-08:00

David asked me to talk about the first 10 chapters of the Bible, and I’ll try to lay some things out, think a little about Leela’s discussion last week, and end by thinking a little about Auerbach. First I want to start with the core violations in this opening section of the Bible—primarily the fall and Cain’s murder of Abel. These are clearly sites of pain and regret and, as far as aetiological stories go, they help to explain why the basic functions of life (working for food and giving birth to other humans ) cause so much pain, why man fights nature, why man fights man, why there isn’t seamless crossover between our desires and the results of our actions, why your will is always necessarily compromised by virtue of just being a human.

All this, it seems to me, is a matter of fact to the Homeric mind in the Iliad. This is just the way it is—the beginning of the poem is indeed a post-fall world, with a complicated system of relations marked by self-interest, conflict, force, negotiation, compromise, refusal. In there we have human appeals to the supernatural, human appeals to other humans, supernatural appeal to humans. This is the Homeric indicative, in other words—the way things are. It seems to me that one of the crucial problems for the characters in the Iliad is: what are you going to do about all this, how are you going to see your way through this? If you’re Paris, you maybe chill out with Helen in bed, if you’re Diomedes you put your head down and just keep fighting, if you’re Agamemnon you seek your own glory and honor, if you’re Hector you seek other-directed forms of glory and honor, if you’re one of the various Gods you try desperately, through negotiation and systems of indebtedness, to try to get as much as you can given the realistic constraints of fate and the other powers that surround you. And, perhaps most interestingly, if you’re Achilles you leave the fray, contemplate leaving for good, but eventually return. Book 9 is one of his great get-me-off-this-ride moments, his subjunctive moment if you will, when he lays out his options:

If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
My journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
My pride, my glory dies… True but the life that’s left me will be long,
The stroke of death will not come on me quickly. (Book 9, 500-505)

This is only, crucially, an imagined possibility, a subjunctive that stays a subjunctive. Because Achilles does come back, because, in some sense, he must come back, the poem seems to really want to know what’s recoverable about having to be involved in this agonistic, compromised, self-interested, indicative world. And, what’s great about the poem, is that to a large extent those things are found, as we discussed—sympathy through identification and recognition of shared pain (as we discussed regarding Priam and Achilles, Diomedes and Glaucus), respect for the body and the realization of shared bodily limitations—as in the beautiful moment when Priam and Achilles realize they have to stop their negotiations for Hector’s body because they both have to eat. They both need food.

So the Iliad spends a lot of time thinking about what it might mean to be subjunctive, and what you get when you eventually return to the indicative of your embedded world, which you must do.

So much of the force of the stories in the Bible, however, turn upon the lack of a subjunctive option; so much of the stories are about not what you get when you join the indicative world, but of what you lose and give up. Substituting necessity for “indicative” here perhaps puts a finer point on it. Necessity ends up being benign or at last recoverable in the Iliad—Achilles and Priam must eat, Achilles must give Hector’s body back, we all must die--but in the Bible necessity is always painful and occasionally monstrously horrific. Compare Abraham and Achilles as decision makers. They are a good pair to think of together because both are involved in events that are imagined and planned for but which actually don’t happen-- Abraham doesn’t kill his son, Achilles doesn’t leave Troy. When God tells Abraham to kill Isaac, here's a moment where some thinking out of the box, Achilles style, may be good. But the horror of the story lies in the fact that this isn’t even an option. In some sense, the story confuses or perhaps reverses the subjunctive and indicative. That is, if I’m an ancient Near Eastern patriarch, shouldn’t I definitely not kill my son? God wants him to do the unthinkable, which, of course he ends up not having to do. But no matter—God’s point has been proven. A lot of the work the Bible does in Genesis is of course to wrench the indicative away from its traditional bounds: family, custom, old religious systems, and towards one and only one: God. Reconciliation between God’s ways and man’s happen more fully in Exodus with the Ten Commandments, when, in some root sense, the two become interlinked. The Law is a sanctified ethical system that allows man access to God largely through just action towards man. But this hasn’t yet been figured out, though there are key prefigurements of that Law in the early covenants between God and Noah, God and Abraham.

It oftentimes feels to me that the Patriarchs and Matriarchs float in a flux where everything is being renegotiated. I mentioned one—the story of Abraham and Isaac and the renegotiation of father/son ties; any others could be used here; some which stick in my mind are the renegotiation of custom and family, as when Rebecca and Jacob plot successfully to steal the birthright of the first born son; another is basic bodily intactness, which too must be compromised, as when Abraham agrees to circumcision as part of the terms of God’s covenant. Now I skirted around about Adam and Eve earlier and said that after them the subjunctive hero is not possible. But what about them? Adam and Eve are a really special case, because it is their subjunctive desire—what if we did what God told us not to do?—that actually creates the conditions for the human indicative that stays indicative, even after the old customs and ways that I mentioned before leave the scene. Adam’s curse, in other words:

3:15 And I will put enmity between thee [the serpent] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed, it shall bruise they head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
3:17 And unto Adam he said, because thou has hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

In this sense, the Bible imagines the subjunctive of desire as something that caused the human indicative, that is, the life we find ourselves in—a life of pain, enmity between man and nature, labor, sorrow. The next core violation, is man against man, Cain and Abel. Another core violation we meet early is the Tower of Babel: why vast groups of people don’t get along and can’t communicate. But every violation is meant to recall the primary violation, because each is really a violation against God.

This idea of primary or core violation is instructive to compare to Book I of the Iliad. It too presents itself as an origin story, albeit one of a specific event and not a metaphysical reality (our cursedness). The Iliad is obsessed with causes and explanations—take Book I. We are met with a quite complicated set of causal questions—what first drove Achilles and Agamemnon to clash? Achilles was mad because Agamemnon stole his girl, Agamemnon stole his girl to make up for the loss of Chriseis, Agamemnon lost Chriseis because Apollo started slaughtering Greeks, Apollo started slaughtering Greeks because Chryses appealed to him, Chryses appealed to him because Agamemnon took Chriseis and wouldn’t give her back. You start to get the sense that this has no end--we can go deeper into this, back to the abduction of Helen, back to the judgment of Paris. Homer is obsessed with causation, with explanations, here and throughout the Iliad—hence his favoring of the elaborative style—every object, every soldier, has a backstory, has a reason that got them to where they are. This elaborative style is compared unfavorably to the elliptical style of the Hebrew Bible by Auerbach. He thinks the elliptical style of the Bible—its sparseness, its lack of explicit psychological investigation—is part of its psychological richness as opposed to the shallowness of the Homeric mind, concerned with surface and objects. But if we think about this less in terms of style and more in terms of issues of causality, Homer may not come out so bad. If you are a character in the Bible, at any point, and you ask: why are things the way they are? You can, it seems, always hit bedrock at the core violation of the fall. If you are a Homeric character, however, and you ask the same question which indeed Homer does at the beginning, you sink into quicksand—if you go back far enough into human relations you find more tangled webs of causes and effects; if you go upwards to the Gods for answers you just find a mirror of the conflicts you yourself are trying to resolve and figure out. So much for Homer’s psychological shallowness.

Cesarotti, Ossian, and the folk compilation

2008-01-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

Review: Cesarotti, Melchiore. “Historical and Critical Dissertation, Respecting the Controversy on the Authenticity of Ossian’s Poems.” Translated by John M’Arthur. In The Poems of Ossian. Vol. 3, 293–331. New York: AMS Press Inc, 1975. Originally published in Robert MacFarlan, trans., The Poems of Ossian (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1807).

“Blackwell uses a special term to designate the auspicious combination of forces that produced the great epic writer:

"‘Since it is absolutely the Conjuncture, and Manners of the Times, that produce Poets, How comes it to pass that we have but one Homer?’” (Robert T. Clark Jr., “Herder, Cesarotti and Vico.” Studies in Philology 44 (1947), 645-671: 651), quoting Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, 2^nd ed. (London, 1736), 71)

Interpreting folk works or figures as spontaneous, 'epigenetic' products of a people would therefore, presumably, prove incongruous; for, as Blackwell seems to suggest, the ‘historical conjuncture’ expressed in the form of a mythical poet figure is perhaps less an intrinsic feature of history proper than a limited historical phenomenon. And yet, the cultural process that assembles this figure is precisely what has for the most part been neglected in the texts inspired by this question. Both Vico and Herder, for instance, tended to confine the poetic personage to an organic expression of the people (Volk), admitting little room for discerning a more limited, institutional commission. Thus, while “it would be a serious mistake to deny the importance of the Enquiry [into the Life and Writings of Homer] for Herder, especially insofar as it prepared the young Herder for an acceptance of Vichian ideas” (Clark 653) – indeed, as “Hermann Hettner long ago pointed out [Hermann Hettner, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Witkowski (Leipzig: Paul List, 1929), III, 23.], the book made a deep impression on the youthful Herder, who used it as the basis for his first literary-historical study, Versuch einer Geschichte der lyrischen Dichtkunst (written in 1764, but never published by the author)” (Clark 653) – the conjuncture nonetheless remained for Herder a deep structuring principal, rather than, as I hope to demonstrate below, a limited cultural development that resists ‘comparative’ analysis.

Some time in 1768, for review in his journal (the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek), Friedrich Nicolai sent Herder a copy of Michael Denis’ Die Gedichte Ossians, eines alten celtischen Dichters (1768), which contained, in addition to its translation of Macpherson’s Ossian, an extensive apparatus of notes, most of which were not by Denis, but by Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730–1808) – who, according to Croce, was one of the first Italians to discuss Vico’s theory of Homer [Benedetto Croce, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Bari: Laterza, 1928; first ed. 1901), p. 205.]. Denis appropriated from Cesarotti's translation of Macpherson the accompanying notes, added them to his own (in addition to Macpherson’s), and translated each page by page (Clark 657–658). “The astonishing thing, then, is the fact that although Cesarotti mentions the Scienza Nuova twice and Vico four times, Herder does not mention Vico in any published work before 1797. The simplest explanation of this is the one to be accepted, in spite of the violence caused by it to our sense of values. For Herder, Cesarotti was a much more important writer than Vico” (Clark 669).

In this author's opinion, however, the mode of historical analysis to be found in Cesarotti's treatment of the controversy surrounding the publication of Ossian's poems deserves study in its own right. One of the first modern texts to sustain a lengthy meditation on an assembled, ‘author-less’, folk work, the “Historical and Critical Dissertation” specifically deals with the contemporary controversy over conceiving of a work as such. Further, with respect to publication and authorship, Cesarotti's text attempts to discern the 'archetypes' at work in the present rather than the past, and through this gesture announces the critical project of elaborating the practices that describe one's own time rather than another's. It is, in effect, an application of Vico's historical methods to a contemporary problematic.

II. The Ossian Compilation

Despite his having “not the least knowledge of the Erse language, or Caledonian dialect, and that he can only speak of it by what he has heard,” (Cesarotti 305) Samuel Johnson, along with others, argued against the poems’ authenticity on account of the universal laws governing the developmental stages of a culture (of which the quality of the poems were in clear violation). “When a language begins to teem with books, it is tending to refinement; […] speech becomes embodied and permanent; different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtains an establishment. By degrees, one age improves upon another. Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books” (quoted in Cesarotti 306–307).

However, reaching the opposite conclusion, if with the same logic, Doctor Hugh Blair, a celebrated professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at the University of Edinburgh, whose dissertation examined the character of the poems, entertained not the slightest doubt of their authenticity. Indeed, for Blair, the linguistic structure and cultural simplicity of the poems could only be the image and product of a less refined era of the past. “The heroes show refinement of sentiment indeed on several occasions, but none of manners. They speak of their past actions with freedom, and sing their own praise. A rape, a private insult, was the cause of war among their tribes. They had no expedient for giving the military alarms, but striking a shield, or raising a loud cry” (Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), quoted in Cesarotti 295). “The manner of the poetical composition bears all the marks of the greatest antiquity. No artful transitions, nor full and extended connection of parts, such as we find among the poets of later times, when order and regularity of composition were more studied and known” (Blair, quoted in Cesarotti 295–296).

The logic of universal development was closely followed by one of forgery, which Cesarotti himself considered, but eventually rejected, for two reasons: first, because the idea of rejecting fame is universally unimaginable, and second, because the task of composing a wholly consistent historical narrative of such intricacy is, simply, impossible (although if such a feat were, in fact, possible, he surmises, it would only make the fame deserving of it all the more alluring). “To suppose that two or three hundred years ago, when we well know the Highlands to have been in a state of gross ignorance and barbarity, there should have arisen in that country a poet, of such exquisite genius, and of such deep knowledge of mankind and of history, as to divest himself of the ideas and manners of his own age, and to give us a just and natural picture of a state of society ancienter by a thousand years; one, who could support this counterfeited antiquity through such a large collection of poems, without the least inconsistency; and who, possessed of all this genius and art, had, at the same time, the self-denial of concealing himself, and of ascribing his own works to an antiquated bard, without the imposture being detected; is a supposition that transcends all credibility” (Cesarotti 297). Even so, “it does not prove the impossibility of there being an ingenious forgery of a more modern writer,” although, despite his membership to a more clever age, he would also have “to be possessed of so much self-denial as to renounce his own glory in favour of an unknown person” (Cesarotti 298). But nonetheless, all reservations aside, the work is exceptional, whoever wrote it, and this, for Cesarotti, becomes the principal matter. After all, “To imitate Ossian to that degree, one must be another Ossian” (Cesarotti 313).

But with John Smith’s publication of the Gaelic originals in 1787, the question of authenticity gave way to questions concerning the relations between texts of variant status. “Is Ossian quite an imaginary being of Macpherson’s creation? or a traditional hero of the Caledonians? […] Are the ancient songs and poems, ascribed to Ossian, respecting the history of his family, really existing among the Caledonians? Did Macpherson translate from the originals the poems which he published under his name? […] But are these poems exactly corresponding to those of Macpherson’s Ossian?” (Cesarotti 322-323) Questions concerning the authorship of the text were thus quickly overtaken by questions concerning its generation. The figure of the genius (and his opposite, the forger) gave way to a sprawling genealogy of textual and oral transformations. The ‘poem’ as creative expression was replaced by the ‘compilation’ as index of popular forms.

“Ossian’s poems, whether recited or in manuscript, are subject, as we have mentioned before, to great variations in the different districts of the Highlands of Scotland; not only from the difference of dialects, but from the disunion, alterations, curtailments, additions, and miscellaneous matter introduced into them by reciters or transcribers, in various places, and at different times. The poems of that bard, it appears, were recited in fragments irregularly, and were blended by the vulgar with popular fables and other pieces on similar subjects, composed by posterior bards and senachies, of a genius style different from that of Ossian, as might be naturally expected in poems which pass through the mouths of the vulgar, and are successively transmitted by memory; and it is probable, that here and there various collections and compilations of them might be made, most of them indigested, without selection or judgment, by inexperienced and ignorant persons. It is therefore reasonable to think, that Macpherson and Smith, having collected together the greatest number they could of such manuscripts […] put together the fragments in the most rational order, and according to the natural connection of the subjects; thence had it in their power to compile and publish a genuine translation, worthy of the name of the author. Smith candidly confessed both for himself and for his colleague, that such had been their conduct.” (Cesarotti 323–324)

Ossian in this sense merely functioned as the Vichian type or personage representing (or typifying) the compilation. This development, however, was neither organic nor expressive of a people. In fact, the obverse fact of the institutional demand for an author to represent the texts was the concealment of the popular genealogies that comprised it – which, in effect, rendered the rationale of the compilation self-evident and, as it were, unavailable to scrutiny. But this was neither Macpherson’s fault nor intention. With the definition of ‘poet’ restricted to an ‘individual’ in a particular economy of literary production, the interrogation of authenticity and the general inquisition surrounding Macpherson’s publication could only be expected to discover, if the methods of its production were revealed, an inauthentic, and therefore illegitimate, work.

“In this place it is proper to observe, that the very system of Macpherson’s work may perhaps demonstrate his shyness in showing freely the original. He had in his possession several manuscripts of Ossian, and he had among them the genuine poems of Ossian, which were not to be found in any other edition though dispersed in all. But the true Ossian, as published in English, was only to be found in the compilation made by himself, and transcribed by his own hand. Whatever manuscripts therefore he might have offered to the public, the incredulous and malicious, on comparing the translation with the text, and finding them strictly uniform, would have said, that Macpherson had counterfeited the original, with a view to deceive the unwary.” (Cesarotti 324–325)

Hence the double bind imposed on Macpherson: in the hostile environment that greeted his text, the process of assembling and indexing a popular archetype could not be expected to withstand the attacks from an institutional model that prized translation over compilation, original over case. But at the same time, if the compilation was to exist at all, it would have to be presented under the aegis of an author. Macpherson was thus for some time forced to conceal the popular, assembled character of his translation.

When the transcriptions and notes were finally revealed, however, scholarship turned to legitimizing the logic of the compilation itself. As Cesarotti unquestioningly observed, Macpherson and Smith “put together the fragments in the most rational order, and according to the natural connection of the subjects.” Cesarotti, citing ‘contradictory’ historical facts as the criteria for distinction, thus affirmed Macpherson’s exclusion of the Irish songs that (hence) only ‘resemble’ Ossian’s works. “Nay we have a threatened invasion of Ireland by France mentioned, and such like absurdities, which are in constant contradiction with chronology, and the history of Ossian.” Macpherson accordingly identified the Irish songs, the Hibernian Ossian, as appearing ‘after’ Ossian.

Through operations like these, the folk compilation acquired new, if familiar, standards for determining a modified authenticity. Political and racial criteria, for instance, were able to recover, in the texts excluded from the ‘proper’ group, a comparable form of forgery: though the texts comprising the Ossian compilation were each a 'version' without an 'original', the Irish texts nonetheless qualified as “altering and counterfeiting them so as to suit their purpose, and the predominant ideas of the people of that country” (Cesarotti 330). Where there could only be alteration and counterfeiting, transformation and imitation, the racially motivated exclusion of texts recovered the category of the forgery through an act of force and assertion. In similar fashion, Ossian gained an era, if indirectly, through the placing of the Hibernian texts after the 'originals'. Cesarotti, for his part, agreed with this editorial decision. “The same author believes he can assign the epoch of this novelty, and the circumstances that influenced the public credulity” (Cesarotti 330). In this way, the compilation format came to affirm both an imaginary historical era of a people and a concept of an original, authentic work expressing that people. Indeed, after suffering only a momentary disturbance, the former criteria for interrogating the work of an individual shifted or extended its dominion to that of the population. Though presented as an organic expression of an historical people, the compilation in fact worked to proleptically produce this illusion, in the past – if with the stipulation that they, the compilers, were its future.

Indeed, the first corollary to the assembling of an archetype is the retroactive effect of its having already existed. In being forced to conceal the poem’s complex sourcing, Macpherson promoted the impression of having reproduced through translation a more coherent and intact text (and author) than in fact existed. The Ossian he fashioned was imaged as having already existed. Then, when the text’s true production was revealed, the logic of its compilation was legitimized and presented as antedating its ‘discovery’. Even now, with an understanding of the text’s compilation and a critique of its logic underway, its integrity and habitual self-evidence remain implacable.

Review: "Confessions of an Ex-Protester"

2008-01-01T12:22:00.000-08:00

Review: Emily Deprang, "Confessions of an Ex-Protester," Texas Observer, 16 November 2007.

* Has 'political resistance' ever so openly reveled in its own naivety – or, for that matter, mistaken it for a form of critique?

"When I said I was willing to be arrested, what I really meant was, 'arrested.' Arrested for the experience, arrested as a sociological experiment, arrested in theory. Arrested in retrospect. What I did not calculate was that in spite of being a white, middle-class college girl making the decision to get arrested, once I was in jail, I was actually in jail. I was not 'in jail.' The guards and I were not in on some joke, wherein they knew we weren’t real prisoners and so it was not really like we were in jail. Once your cell phone is with your clothes in a paper bag somewhere, and you’re alone in a room whose door you cannot open, you realize this is no concurrent, analogous pseudo-jail you’re in. Your ass is in jail. On purpose. You are a very, very stupid girl."

The big surprise for Deprang was that her arrest was not also a performance, was not as half-hearted and distracted as she was. It was, in a word, 'sincere' (and not without some personal danger). But what did she expect? --I mean, because she, alone, was for some reason unable to understand what imprisonment meant, are we to then conclude, somewhat paradoxically, that the actions that in fact dispelled her disillusions were therefore also the source of that disillusionment? It is as if Deprang's naivety and ironic detachment from her own political actions is precisely what prepared the trauma that later dispelled her politics altogether. In other words, what Deprang presents as a break, a turn, a rethinking of her position is, rather, the obvious conclusion, the final detachment. Indeed, even though she was arrested for protesting torture, 'rendition', murder, the displacing of millions of people, she was nonetheless able to be surprised -- and traumatized -- by a night in a cell -- traumatized enough, in fact, to rethink her life, become an "ex-protester", write an article. That's all it took, really, to shut her down (from the perspective of the state, at least). Which is perhaps not a small part of their general intention. Arrest, shake up a bit, release, deter.

The scene in the paddywagon is particularly interesting. "The other protesters and I responded with silence. I felt much less connected to these people in the forced intimacy of the paddy wagon, hands behind our backs. We kept our eyes down." –But that's just not everyone's experience (nor is it merely a useless 'gesture'). For some, it is a moment of solidarity, for others nothing, for still others, a routine -- but for Deprang, who seems intent on representing the movement, it is cathartic, revelatory, disturbing on the deepest level. The confinement really makes her think things over. And isn't that the purpose and highest goal of confinements of this type (the brief, 'send you a message' type)? –Needless to say, at every turn Deprang is 'surprised'. A whole paragraph is reserved for: "This was a surprise" [that she is put in her own cell, when she was expecting a post-protest party in a more cinematic environment] .

Her naivety is bottomless, a little insulting. "The toothpaste was gritty and bitter. I thought about Martin Luther King Jr. writing his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. I’d loved that piece when I’d read it in high school. I’d imagined jail as a kind of interesting time-out, a time for reflection, of mental quiet. I’d thought that if you knew that being there did something for some cause you believed in, that it would be easy to be there, knowing that you were helping. I’d guessed that it would be a good place to read and write, like a retreat. I’d never imagined that each time MLK went to jail, he’d have to wonder if, this time, he’d get out again." For Deprang, so it seems, the world of violence keeps failing to live up to its romanticization.

What was billed as a mature abandoning of ideality ends in its greatest extension: pure aimlessness, or rather, an 'aimless activism' that does nothing but encompasses everything. It's all about the 'little acts of daily life' – which is to say, a complete surrendering of the power to exact a larger, communal change. "My circle of influence stops at my friends and family and co-workers, but I have a circle." At least I have a circle. (At least I exist?) One would be hard-pressed to imagine a more twisted version of the call to 'resist locally'. The solipsism is explicit: her own body replaces the 'governing body' of the state, as site of effect and change ("The only governing body I control is my own"), free speech is reinterpreted as "listening respectfully," and any encounter with the government previously resisted now takes place exclusively through voting.

"I know I cannot stop the war. I cannot stop even one bullet, not by shouting, not by surrendering my freedom, not even if I martyred myself. But if it’s peace I want, I can create peace, here. My circle of influence stops at my friends and family and co-workers, but I have a circle. The only governing body I control is my own, but I control it completely. I have no mechanism at my disposal by which I can know I am stopping war. But I can fight ignorance by learning. I can fight apathy by voting. I can defend free speech by listening respectfully. And I can champion human rights by suppressing my own impulse to treat others callously."

It is, then, only natural that Deprang's 'resistance' should widen to encompass everything. The last line, "every day is a barricade," means nothing, practically speaking. It is at best a poetic turn of phrase for an otherwise evacuated politics, a complete disavowal of one's capacity to participate in a political movement.

If we had the time, we could rigorously compare this position to Zizek's, as recently expressed in the London Review of Books. In "Resistance is Surrender," he notes, as many have, that the millions of people who marched against the invasion of Iraq did nothing to attempt to stop it, but rather only marched -- 'for the record', as Deprang rightly says. But for Zizek, as for others, this does not become reason for a total abdication, but rather for a determined reversal. In Italy, for instance, our counterparts interrupt the shipment of munitions by crowding the railroad tracks at strategic points. This is beyond protesting. It is intervention. In the States, by contrast, one would think the war immaterial, exacted without machines, soldiers, or equipment; with so many protesting the war, one would assume they had already tried interrupting it.