Louis Althusser
"Ideology"
Christian Buss
Louis Althusser's essay "Ideology" starts
with the premise that there is a fundamental flaw in the Marxist determination
of ideology, namely its establishment as a "representation of the real
conditions of existence in an imaginary form." In this critique of late
60's orthodox Marxism, Althusser goes on to win back the materiality of the
ideological by asserting that Ideology is not a means of representing not the
real condition of man's existence, but rather the imaginary relationships of
individuals to their conditions. This
implies that these imaginary relationships are in truth constituted within
primary practices and apparatuses, and not merely reinforced by them. An example: A believer in god, he goes to
mass, gets on his knees, prays, does pennance, and must do so if he is to
"follow his beliefs and ideas". As such, the ideology must exist
within the actions, practices, and rituals of daily life. With this reordering,
the primacy of the idea is thrown to the wolves and replaced by the fundamental
status of all individuals as subjects inserted into ideology by practices and
rituals. This insertion is accomplished
by an individuals being constituted through an act of hailing of interpellating
by the ideological apparatuses, whether they be the state, a friend, or even a
dog barking for attention. A further example:
A friend sees you across the street, but you do not apprehend his
presence. He shouts out “Hey there, you.” In Althusser’s world, nine times out
of ten the correct individual turns looks to the friend and within that instant
of turning has been hailed, located and locked in as a subject of an
ideological relationship, in this case the primary ideology of “friend”. However, this moment is not a moment of
becoming locked, as for Althusser there is no outside of this particular
ideology. You are never outside of this ideological relationship, you are
“Always already” ideologically locked down by the sheer force of the
ideological binary that the Ideology itself establishes. Whether you accept or
reject the hailing of the friend, the friend has himself already addressed you
as a friend, and in the act of hailing not only expects, but demands a
particular response, a response within the binary of friend or perhaps in this
case not friend.
This
always already-ness, however is grounded by reference to Freud’s conception of
the happy birth and the expectations of parents, friends and
family in the period leading up to the birth, which when said child pops out of
the womb, are constituted by the particular clothing, training and toys that
fully enframe and limit what kind of subject the little ankle-biter is. Similarly adult subjects are themselves
completely enclosed by the Ideological state apparatuses of the tax collector,
the police, and whatever other functions are used by the state to placate the
individual and let him exclaim “Amen-So be it.” This amen, this so be it are unavoidable and must
be adopted and accepted within the consciousness of the individual. This “must” and its limiting of the
individuals potential as subject to the monad, to the singular capital S
Subject establishes a stagnancy, a lack of movement and a permanence that is
the greatest limitation of Althusser’s argument.
Let
us envision an alternative to this singular interpellatory placement of the
individual. Scene: Two individuals walk down the street, six feet apart. One, a
banker has only his lunch on his mind and his briefcase by his side. The other,
a thief, has just snatched a purse and is coolly, and briskly walking along the
street away from the scene of the crime.
Again, an old friend spies the banker walking down the street, calls out
“Hey, you” and waits for a response. The thief, already recently established as
a particular subject “thief,” reacts to the “hey you” not as the potential
subject intended, ie. friend, but rather as a man about to be booked as a
third-striker and soon-to-be guest at the local pokey, and breaks into a
heavy-breathing run, shocking passersby and caller-out alike. The hungry banker
on the other hand, has a hot pastrami on the mind, and is searching for the
best deli south of 52nd street on 5th avenue. With
visions of hot meat and spicy mustard, the sine waves may reach his cochlea and
forming a “hey you” in his ear drum, but sadly be subsumed by the growling of
his stomach and his own pre-existent status as a subject out for a good meal.
Quickly we see that a
nine-times-out-of-ten correct response to the friendly “hey you” breaks apart
under the practical possibility of individuals not already constituted as
capital S subject, but rather existing within any moment as one of a thousand
possible subjects. The question then is
not one of how the individual is interpellated as a subject, but rather
one of which subject one is to become. No longer are we all an
“always-already” subject then, but rather an “always-becoming” subject,
constantly being reconstituted and re-interpellated, by sometimes more and
sometimes less successful attempts at hailing. Now we can speak of ideologies,
battling for primacy at the location of the individual. Critical research is
therefore not designed to expose how “recognition is indeed, in the last
resort, the reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations
deriving from them” (Althusser, Ideology, p.303) but rather how the
moment of recognition is the primary instant when the establishment of hegemony
is contested
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics[3]
(1916)
Rob Schechtman
In the lives of individuals and societies,
language is a factor of greater
importance than any other.
Saussure (7)
Few books in the twentieth century
have impacted intellectual thought as broadly as the Course in General
Linguistics by the Swiss Professor of Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913). First published
posthumously in 1916 as the Cours de Linguistique Générale by two of
Saussure’s students from assembled course notes, the book sparked the creation
of structuralist movements in linguistics, anthropology, and literary
criticism, and it laid the foundation for later poststructuralist
critique.
This review focuses on the first
half of the book, which has the greatest relevance to literary theory. The first section discusses the field of
linguistics and its object of study. The
next two parts lay out Saussure’s principles of synchronic linguistics and
discuss the nature of the linguistic sign.
The remaining three parts of the book discuss diachronic
(“retrospective”) and geographical linguistics, and were themselves enormously
influential in shifting the focus of linguistics from a primarily
historical-comparative approach in the nineteenth century to an almost
exclusively synchronic approach in the twentieth century.
His first principle regarding the
nature of the linguistic sign is that the sign is arbitrary. The association between the sound pattern,
called the signifiant (‘signifier’ or ‘signal’), and the concept, called
the signifié (‘signified’ or ‘signification’), can vary infinitely
across languages.[4] He later tempers this principle, allowing for
the fact that some signs may be motivated “to a certain extent” (cf.
130f.). Nevertheless, the arbitrary
nature of the sign is the foundation of his analysis.[5]
The signs in a language are
arranged in a system of structures: “[…] it is linguistic structure
which gives language the unity it has.” (11)
The system in general he calls langage. A specific system of signs, such as English,
he refers to as a langue. (Although both terms are often translated as
‘language’ or ‘Sprache’, the distinction between the general capacity and the
specific instance is crucial.) The
system of structures or rules is collective and social: “[…] the language is
never complete in any single individual, but exists perfectly only in the
collectivity.” (13) He contrasts this
with parole, speech produced using the language, which is
individual The langue/parole
distinction is a second crucial duality in Saussure’s theory.
Meaning arises within the language
system through relations of association and opposition: “Two signs, each
comprising a signification and a signal, are not different from each other, but
only distinct. They are simply in opposition
to each other. The entire mechanism of
language […] is based upon oppositions of this kind […].” (119) The two types of relations are syntagmatic
and paradigmatic. The former
relation operates through linear ordering and restriction (e.g., in the phrase
‘The department chair’, the syntagmatic association of ‘department’ restricts
the possible interpretations of ‘chair’).
The latter relation expresses similarities of sound or meaning between
signs. Signs acquire their meanings only
through these structural relations: “A language is a system in which all the
elements fit together, and in which the value of any one element depends on the
simultaneous coexistence of all the others. […] In a given language, all the
words which express neighboring ideas help define one another’s meaning.”
(113f.) This, he goes on to say, applies
not only to words but also to sounds and to more complex structures such as
grammatical units.
Saussure uses the analogy of a
chess game several times to explain his view of language:
A game of chess is like an artificial form of languages present in a natural form. [...] The
value of the chess pieces depends on their position upon the chessboard just as in the language each term has its value through its contrast with all the other terms. [...] It is true that the values also depend ultimately upon one invariable set of conventions, the rules of the game, which exist before the beginning of the game and remain in force after each move. These rules, fixed once and for all, also exists in the linguistic a case: There the unchanging principles
of Semiology.
(87f.)
The arbitrary sign
is paralleled by the arbitrary form of the chess pieces; it is irrelevant how
exactly the pieces are shaped, or even what they are made of, as long as
certain recurring forms are used in rule-bound ways within the game. The primacy of synchronic analysis over the
diachronic is shown in that the players of the game are unaware of, and indeed
probably not interested in, how the game developed or how it may have been
played in the past. What matters in
playing the game today is simply the set of meaningful relations governing the
movements of the pieces.[6]
How does one perform a
structuralist analysis? First, by
isolating the distinctive, meaningful units within a particular system, and
then by determining the relationships of association and opposition which
govern those units. Structuralist theory
was applied to literature most notably by the Prague School (cf.
Jakobsen). Structuralism is not without
its limitations, however. Its focus on
binary oppositions reflects a very limited conceptualization scheme. The analyses are typically purely formalist,
concerned with the form and not the content of elements – in some ways similar
to New Criticism. Structuralist
linguistics traditionally focused on the phonetics and syntax of languages,
neglecting discourse and the pragmatic, communicative use of language. The strict emphasis on synchronic study
effectively stopped all diachronic scholarship on languages for nearly a
century. Nevertheless, structuralism led
to enormous advances in language sciences.
Poststructuralism arose when
Derrida took the structuralist notion of meaning to its extreme. The Course
writes: “In the language itself [langue], there are only differences. Even more important than that is the fact
that, although in general a difference presupposes positive terms between which
the difference holds, in a language there are only differences, and no
positive terms.” Here Derrida saw a
necessary end to the age-old, yet futile, search for positive, transcendental
grounds for meaning external to the language.
The poststructuralist critique is based on the pervasiveness of différance,
of differing and deferral through chains of syntagmatic and paradigmatic
relations, of endlessly partial significations and misreadings.
Poststructuralism has been called
anti-humanist due to the power attributed to language as a system (Heidegger’s
remark that “language speaks man” became a motto for
poststructuralistists). Saussure might
have differed; responding to the animist tendencies of nineteenth century
linguistics, he wrote: “[…] it became unacceptable to say ‘the language does
this or that’, to speak of the ‘life of the language’, and so on, because a
language is not an entity, and exists only in its users.” (5, footnote 1) Yet the subtly subversive nature of language
is presaged in Saussure’s statement, “For the sign always to some extent eludes
control by the will, whether of the individual or of society: that is its
essential nature, even thought it may be by no means obvious at first sight.”
(16) The ramifications of Saussure’s
structuralism are themselves not obvious at first sight and are still shaping
intellectual thought today.
Winfried
Kudszus „Literature und Schizophrenie“
Azadeh
Yamini-Hamedani
Before receiving his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1968, Winfried
Kudszus studied literature, philosophy, and psychology at the Universities of
Zurich, Freiburg, and Munich. In 1968 he joined the Berkeley faculty, and
became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1984. His writings explore questions and
interrelationships of literature, psychology, philosophy, semiotics, culture,
and psychoanalysis.
Kudszus’s Literature und Schizophrenie (1977) is a
compilation of several essays, to which he offers an introduction and an essay.
The compilation includes essays by Peter Gorsen, Gotthart Wunberg, Gerhard
Irle, Leo Navratil, and a talk by Walter Vogt. In his introduction, Kudszus
offers a reading of complex linguistic structures, evident in the
schizophrenic’s verbal communication and in modern literature’s language.
Literary works by Hoelderlin, Celan, Nietzsche, Nerval, and Artaud contain
linguistic structures, set against the world of norm.
The study of literature
and the difficulty of modern linguistic structures create for the reader and
the literary theorist a puzzle to be solved; along with the schizophrenic they
all face a linguistic Grenzgebiet. Trying to solve this puzzle, literary theory
itself falls into a complex linguistics, deemed incomprehensible. Literary
studies and Schizophrenieforschung share a common quest and similar
problematic area, mainly the understanding of “dunkler Sprachstrukturen” (2),
and the development of methodological insights to establish a unity where none
comes to mind.
Modern literature leads
to a Grenzgebiet where reality’s known images transform into the
abnormal and unknown. The breaking of linguistic structures extends itself to
the breaking of social norms. Mediums of
speech contain normative thought, and schizoid linguistic structures expose the
naiveté of traditional categories and laws.
Kudszus addresses the
socialization of language, and the development of literature and schizophrenia
as productive opposition. Kudszsus refers to R.D. Laing’s notion of the
double-bind. According to this theory the individual is set in a system of opposites,
which allows the social structure to better control and manipulate him. The
double-bind contains contradictory signals, which are brought to light in
schizophrenia’s language and modern literature. The creative and the insane
converge in the moment of their breaking away from social/cultural norms and
pre-determinations.
In his talk “Die Schizophrenie der Kunst” Walter Vogt
addresses the social suppression of creativity, because creativity rises out of
questioning. The poet who turns his back to the play of powers thus posses a
greater danger than a politically-engaged literature, and the harmless
schizophrenic, who closes the door to society, makes a more profound political
statement, than the dictator. In the modern context, Wahnsinn and poetry
take an oppositional stance to a society of production and consumption.
According to Vogt language, poetry, and Wahn all occupy the empty space
between signifier and signified. Language represents a system of signs and
their obligatory (when you say sky, you think blue). The child however
experiences the world differently than what he is taught. In the contradiction
of experience and the linguistic world order lies the birth of the poet or the
schizophrenic.
Modern literature agrees with
anti-psychiatric perspectives, and Kudzsus refers to the anti-oedipal
schizoid-analysis of Deleuze and Guattari (the fathers of anti-psychiatry): “Im
literarischen gestalteten Wahn des familiaeren und- eng damit verbunden- des
gesellschaftlichen Normensystems kommt die Erkenntnis des “Schizo” zum
Durchbuch, dass der Oedipus-Komplex Vorurteile verschleiert, die auf die
systematische Destruktion des Subjekts zum Zweck seiner Maniepulierbarkeit in
einer patriachalisch struktuierten Gesellschaftsordnung abzielen” (5). The schizoid embodies the anti-oedipal, and stands in opposition to
the subject’s systematic destruction into society’s patriarchal structure.
Schizophrenia thus functions as a breakthrough experience,
questioning civilization’s structures and bringing to light a realm, which
would otherwise remain in darkness. The schizoid does not fall victim to
schizophrenia but rather uses it as an exit for new creative grounds. Deleuze
and Guattari refer to the work of Kafka as an example of the schizoid energies
within literature, asserting that it displays signs of the double-bind and the
oedipal, and grotesque family structures and patriarchal repression mechanisms.
Psychopathology and the creative process build upon the
same principles of meaning, mainly “Physiogonomisierung, Formalisierung, und
Symbolbildung” (9); they contain the same components of literary development.
Although the aesthetics of being other may not serve as an expansion of “the
beautiful,” it nevertheless acts as a source for literary and artistic self-understanding.
Schizophrenic disturbances contain creative potentiality, and the creativity of
the ill posses a healthy norm, unbreakable in the face of traditional
aesthetics.
Kudzsus refers to the
work of Gerhard Irle, who addresses the emancipating function of schizoid
episodes. Irle argues toward the positive aspects of depersonalization: in the
falling apart of the self lies the chance for self-finding, a self beyond the
repressive elements of culture and society. Our age finds the structure of its
thoughts, its visions, and fears in a great schizophrenia.
Kudszus in agreement with Gorsen, who
points to the self-alienating element in modern literature and art, proposes
the negation of traditional categorical systems for new possibilities of
communication and understanding: “So treffen sich im Spannungsfeld von
Literatur, Kunst und Psychopathologie eine Aesthetic und eine Psychiatrie, die
ihre jeweiligen Kategoriensysteme negieren und im Versagen ‘normaler’
Kommunikation neue unverfaelschte Verstaendnismoeglichkeiten zu erschliessen
suchen” (11). Kudzsus brings his introduction to a close asserting: “Es gibt
sich hier…eine Wechselbeziehung von systemkritischer Theorie
Interpretationspraxis, die im Grenzgebiet von Literature und Schizophrenie
Kommunikationsformen zu verstehen erlaubt, deren Sinn in ihrer ‘Abnormalitaet’
liegt” (11).
Kudszsus takes
as his model literary works by Hoelderlin, Celan, Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal,
Nerval, Kafka, and Artaud. Kudszus’s project offers an interesting reading of
the linguistically abnormal, and reflects the poststructuralist project of
critiquing orthodox habits of mind, culture, and language. The work takes an
oppositional stance against traditional intellectual categories, and
concentrates on the decentered subject. In this respect, Kudsuzs’s work can
thus be read in dialogue with Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and
Guattari, de Man, Greenblat, and Kristeva.
Kudszus’s work could potentially be of interest to the
feminist project, in studying psychopathology and linguistic structures in the
feminine. For a future project the reception of Hoelderlin’s works could be of
interest. Why do Hoelderlin’s writings appeal to two completely different
projects: Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung and Kudszus’s Literatur
und Schizophrenie? While Dilthey receives the works of Hoelderlin as a
reflection of das Geistesgeschichtliche, Kudszus interprets Hoelderlin’s
use of abnormal linguistic structures as a stance against the social fabric.
For Dilthey Hoelderlin stands as a central figure of German national identity,
and for Kudszus his writings reflect the margins of social norm.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)[11]
Richard Ascarate
Born in Poitiers, France, Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
studied philosophy and psychology at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), was
head of the philosophy departments at the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand and
Vincennes, and elected in 1970 to the Collège de France. Other works include Mental Illness and
Psychology (1954/trans. 1976), Madness and Civilization (1961/65), The Birth of
the Clinic (1963/1973), The History of Sexuality [Vol. I: An Introduction (1976/78); Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure (1984/85); Vol. III: The Care of the Self (1984/86)].
Foucault opens with a description of the grisly quartering
of attempted regicide Damiens in 1757.
Penalties of such severe form no longer prevailing, he argues that the
body as locus poenae has been replaced by the soul (16), observing that the
modern criminal justice system no longer partakes of the directness represented
by Damiens’s execution. The crime,
committed against the tangible person of the king (which included his
property: “L’état, c’ést moi!’”), was
then punished by the king’s tangible
representatives upon the equally tangible body of the accused. Today, however, the criminal justice system
“functions and justifies itself only by […] perpetual reference to something
other than itself, by […] unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems”
(22). The “something other than itself”
includes psychiatric and psychological experts, educationalists, parole
officers, pathologists and other scientific investigators (21). The king has been replaced by the nebulous
body of society. Crime is redefined so
as to exert control over that society.
The author’s purpose, then, is to offer a “correlative
history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge” (23), to argue that
punishment of the offense has been superseded by supervision, or discipline, of
the individual (18). Such supervision
(in essence, a means of control, of enforcing normativity) extends beyond the
penal system, however, and can be seen in “factories, schools, barracks,
hospitals, which all resemble prisons” (228).
To carry out his analysis, Foucault makes the following
assumptions: 1) Punishment is a “complex
social function,” not merely a mechanism of repression; 2) Punishment is a
political tactic, a means of exercising power; 3) The “technology of power [is]
the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the
knowledge of man”; and 4) Replacement of the body by the soul in penal justice
(and the insertion of ‘scientific’ knowledge into legal practice) represents a “transformation of the way in which the
body itself is invested by power relations” (23-4). Thus, Foucault’s study reaches beyond the
economics of crime and punishment and into the “mode of subjection” by which
man becomes an “object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status”
(24).
Foucault notes that the development of capitalist society
itself brought about a restructuring of the “economy of illegalities”
(87). Thus, the “right to punish […]
shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society”
(90). The need arose not only to make
the punishment fit the crime (differentiation), but also to re-form the
criminal: “A body is docile that may be
subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136).[12] Foucault examines the rise of
disciplinary methods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seeing in
them “general formulas of domination” (137).
Among these were new and highly-detailed ordinances delineating exact
positions of the soldier’s body parts when standing at attention or presenting
arms, strict time-tables (articulated to the minute) to govern the activities
of elementary school children, the examination (which both reasserts the power
of the instructor and transforms the individual student into a “case” for
evaluation), and Bentham’s Panopticon.
Still widely used in prisons and hospitals (and in the department store
security camera), the scheme allows a minimum investment of power while
providing a maximum perception of observation.
In each of the formulae domini listed above, those being “dominated”
became ever more susceptible to observation and evaluation. The arrangement of school children in neat
rows, for example, not only reinforces the teacher/student power relation but
also allows the teacher to instantly examine the status of all students and to
make comparisons among them. The
Panopticon enables control to be exerted even without the presence of an
authority figure, for one can never be sure when one is being observed. Here, too, one sees the transference of the
visible (through ceremonies, rituals, costumes) power of the king to an
anonymous, unlocatable authority: “There
is a machine that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who
exercises power” (202).
Foucault goes on to claim that delinquency, spawned by the
penal system’s failure, is used by that very system to infiltrate society, to
provide information about further illicit activities, to supervise the “whole
social field” (281). He concludes that
the carceral system has been transferred to institutions not ordinarily
associated with punishment (i.e., education and medicine): “The judges of normality are present
everywhere” (304).
Commentary/Associations
The author is versed in the Saussurean vocabulary of
“sign,” “signifier,” and “signifying system” (128), repeatedly invoking the
terms to describe various power relations and events. In seeing the infiltration of society by the
systems and agents of the normative power, he is also in dialog with himself.[13] He suggests a restructuring of
illegalities with the rise of the capitalist system, and the reader would
benefit from at least a passing familiarity with Marx.
Absent from Foucault’s study is an examination of the role
of religion in normalizing social behavior.
The author early on dismisses the Christian soul (“illusion of
theologians” [30]) as something born for punishment, seeing the secular one
instead as the “effect and instrument of a political anatomy” (30), something born
out of punishment. He thus forgoes the
opportunity to examine an invisible, omnipresent (and conceptually more ancient
than any of the sources he cites) God as the ultimate Panopticon. He thereby also elides the Judaeo-Christian
tradition of inscribing power relations both on the body (the mark of Cain,
circumcision, Samson’s hair, the Crucifixion) and on the soul (Matt. 6:6, Rom.
1:9).
Walter Benjamin, “The Origin of the German Tragic Drama”
Julie Koser
First conceived in
1916 and composed between 1924 and 1925 (Steiner 7), Benjamin’s (1892-1940) Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel
was turned down as Habilitationsschrift
for the University of Frankfurt, but did appear in book form in 1928.[16] Influenced not only by his reading of Marx
and Georg Lukács, Benjamin was also directly influenced by his relationship
with Theodor W. Adorno, whom he first met in 1923 (Hopkins).[17] In addition, Benjamin’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy were to have direct
impact on his own ideas regarding the German Baroque Trauerspiel as well as Franz Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung (1921) and his theory of tragedy contributed
to the models Benjamin sets out in his own work (Steiner 13).
Divided into three
parts, The Origin of the German Tragic
Drama, begins with the “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” in which are attempts
to establish his philosophical and critical approach to uncovering the nature
of the German baroque Trauerspiel. He begins by setting forth his thoughts on
the role of philosophy, ideas, and truth.
For Benjamin, Plato’s notion of “ideas”
is “something linguistic, it is that element of the symbolic in the
essence of any word” (36). This is important
because for Benjamin, “the Trauerspiel
is an idea” (38). For that reason, it is
left up to philosophers to “restore, by representation, the primacy of the
symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness,
and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication” (36). This call for the restoration of
representation arises out of what Benjamin sees as the misrepresentation of the
baroque tragic drama by historians, who “seek through ‘substitution’ to
insinuate [themselves] into the place of the creator” (53). He attacks modern literary criticism and its
practice of appropriating the past for its own agenda. “So it is that the spirit of the present age
seizes on the manifestations of past or distant spiritual worlds, in order to
take possession of them and unfeelingly incorporate them into its own
self-absorbed fantasizing” (53).
However, Benjamin sees the baroque as having implications for and
connections to the expressionist movement.
“For like expressionism, the baroque is not so much an age of genuine
artistic achievement as an age possessed of an unremitting artistic will” (55).
In the second part of
the book, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,”
addresses academia’s neglect and underestimation of the baroque tragic
drama, particularly by German literary studies, and here attempts to redeem the
baroque drama from the injustice and overly harsh criticism. Benjamin’s project in this work, as
summarized by Steiner, was to “[map] the hitherto blurred distinction between
‘tragedy’ and Trauerspiel. A clear demarcation between these two terms
was essential not only to a grasp of baroque drama and the baroque world-view,
but also to that of certain aspects of German literature in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries” (Steiner 14).
Thus, Benjamin’s investigation of the baroque drama draws a
constellation to his previous interest and work on Romantic literature. While
the German baroque tragic drama, in the eyes of Benjamin, is far inferior to
the Spanish dramas of Calderón and as well as an unsuccessful attempt to
implement the principles of Greek tragedy, it is still worthy of examination,
due to the artistic will characteristic of this period.
Benjamin seeks to
distinguish between the Greek notion of tragedy and the baroque concept of Trauerspiel. Tragedy for Benjamin, drawing on Nietzsche,
rejects historical-philosophical categorization, instead placing it in close
relation to legend and myth (102).
Tragedy is also characterized by the notion of sacrifice, in which the
hero offers himself for the benefit of the “national community” (107). The act of sacrifice also serves to
“[invalidate] the ancient rights of the Olympians, and it offers up the hero to
the unknown god as the first fruits of a new harvest of humanity” (107). On the other hand, Benjamin places the
origin of the Trauerspiel in history,
and is, as Steiner refers to it, “couter-transcendental,” i.e. bound to the
earthly world. The tragic drama is
caught up in ideas of intrigue, guilt, martyrdom, melancholy, guild and
fate.
Regardless of its
shortcomings, Benjamin still believes in the relevance and importance of the
lesson baroque tragic drama has to offer.
“The ‘modern tragedy’, whose deduction from ancient tragedy is the
object of these sentences, bears – it hardly needs saying – far from
insignificant name: Trauerspiel. With this the reflections which conclude the
above passage transcend the theoretical nature of the problem. The Trauerspiel
is confirmed as a form of the tragedy of the saint by means of the
martyr-drama. And if one only learns to
recognize its characteristics in many different styles of drama from Calderón
to Strindberg it must become clear that this form, a form of the mystery play,
still has a future” (113).
Benjamin’s
The Origin of the German Tragic Drama
is an extremeley dense and opaque text.
Benjamin’s organization of the text, rather haphazard in nature, only
serves to confuse the reader. His
constant back and forth reference to tragedy, Trauerspiel, Counter-Reformation, Spanish drama, baroque, and even
expressionism leaves one wondering just which genre he is handling. While extremely challenging, this text would
most certainly prove of interest to anyone investigating the history of the
German Trauerspiel, baroque or otherwise,
and would also be well-served to brush-up on Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer and Rosenzweig before commencing with this text. I would also suggest works by Erich Schmidt
and Franz Mehring regarding the German Trauerspiel
(specifically their work on the Enlightenment and Lessing) for comparison.
Sources:
Steiner, George. “Introduction” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
New York: Verso, 1998.
Groden, Michael and Martin
Kreiswirth (eds.) The Johns Hopkins
Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Walter Benjamin „Ursprung des
deutschen Trauerspiels „
David
Gramling
“Dreifach ist
zwischen der barocken und mittelalterlichen Christlichkeit die sachliche
Verwandschaft. Der Kampf gegen die Heidengötter, der Triumph der Allegorie, das
Martyrium der Lieblichkeit gilt Ihnen gleichermaβen notwendig.” (UdDT, 250)
While developing his
reconception of German tragic drama, Benjamin came into contact with the work
of the early twentieth century allegory scholar Karl Giehlow, who suggested a
connection between the baroque interest in the hieroglyphic codes of the
ancient Egytians and allegory’s supremacy as baroque representational tool.
In
stark contradistinction to the Classic and Romantic form of the symbol, within
allegory “jede Person, jedwedes Ding, jedes Verhältnis kann ein beliebiges
anderes bedeuten.” (UdDT, 193) “Mehrdeutigkeit ist der Grundzug der
Allegorie; auf dem Reichtum von Bedeutungen ist die Allegorie, ist der Barock
stolz.” (196) One
thing could be the signifier of virtue or vice; the status of its signified was
within a constant tension between “Konvention
und Ausdruck, und beide sind von Haus aus widerstreitend.” 194)
Benjmain
conceptualized and wrote this text during and after World War I, and this
context emerges prominently via Benjamin’s allegorical illustration of allegory
as ruin or corpse. “Allegorien sind im Reiche der Gedanken was
Ruinen im Reiche der Dinge.” (197) Though writing on the allegorical in Winckelmann’s “Beschreibung des Torso des
Hercules im Belvedere zu Rom”, it appears he could be equally dealing with the
body of a war casualty: “Er [Winckelmann] geht “Stück für Stück, Glied für
Glied in unklassischem Sinne ih durch. Nicht umsonst vollzieht sich
das am Torso. Das Bild im Feld der allegorischen Intuition ist Bruchstück,
Ruine... Der falsche Schein der Totalität geht aus.” (195)
Thus baroque allegory for Benjamin is
the material exposition of history as “Leidensgeschichte der Welt; bedeutend
ist sie nur in den Stationen ihres Verfalls.” Allegorical signification accrues for a thing in
proportion to its falling into decay.
Allegory is germane to, indeed “at
home” in, the world of sinfulness and fallenness. (266) It is interesting to
note here that for Marx ruins have no exchange value, thus the allegorical
sign, in its state of semiotic decay, may be said to stray outside of
capitalist relations.
Benjamin’s attempt,
after Giehlow, to revive the status of allegory met with a nineteenth century
tradition staunchly disposed to reject such a project. Neo-Classicism generally
disavowed Baroque drama as exaggerated and incapable of authenticity For Goethe, for whom poetry’s primary task
was to create symbols, or to perceive the macro within the micro, allegory’s
irrevocable failure to grant access to the general was grounds for its demotion
in the canon of representational tools. Allegory (speaking of the other) became
marked as a deviate representational form, obsessive, pathological.
For Benjamin, the
crucial move is to debunk the appearance of totality, and allow allegory to
assume its robust representational function of “speaking for what is not there”
rather than the symbolic “speaking for the universal”. He describes
this result as follows: “Aus dem mystischen “Nu” wird das aktuelle “Jetzt”; das
Symbolische wird ins Allegorische verzerrt.... Aus dem heilsgeschichtlichen
Geschehen sondert man das Ewige ab und was bleibt, ist ein allen Korrekturen
der Regie erreichbares lebendes Bild.”” (203)
Benjamin also theorizes a tension
between the spoken word and writing in the Baroque tragic drama by which “Das
Wort, so darf man sagen, ist die Ekstase der Kreatur, ist Bloβstellung,
Vermessenheit, Ohnmacht vor Gott, die Schrift ist ihre Sammlung, ist Würde,
Uberlegenheit, Allmacht über die Dinge der Welt.” (227) Thus
the collector or allegorist’s power arises within writing, collecting objects
with various levels of decayed, metamorphized signifieds. Benjamin’s work in
this area will be particularly useful for trauma studies as it posits a mode of
non-commodified memory inscription as an activity of historiographic rescue.
The overarching claim of this text is
that the Baroque period and modernity resonate with similar signifying
traditions, while the Classic and Romantic periods strayed towards the primacy
of the symbol. Benjamin thus reverses the romantic formulation and describes
the manifest obsolescence of the symbol and its signifying role. This reversal
leads ineluctably into theories of difference/deferral and bricolage.
Wilhelm Dilthey „Die Dichtung und das
Erlebnis“
David Gramling
"To be sure, despite the affirmation of life's
interiority in relation to itself, the self is essentially an opening onto the
world, and its relation to the world is indeed, as Brague says, a relation of
total concern: everything concerns me."
Paul Ricoeur
Inspired by Rousseau’s opposition
of the world of inner experinece to that of Enlightenment rationalism, Dilthey
theorized a distinction between
“Erlebnis” as a personal life experience and “Erfahrung” as an experience of social
interaction. In an effort to defend the legitimacy of the
Geisteswissenschaften, Dilthey espoused “Erlebnis” as a scientific category
against Hegel's "Spirit,"
which comes to consciousness of its freedom in history, or Schleiermacher's
"Reason," which permeates and shapes nature. These two categories
present for Dilthey “an abstract substance which condenses the historical world
process in a colorless abstraction, a subject outside space and time.” (Einleitung
in die Geisteswissenschaften 1883)
Erlebnis is
distinguishable from phenomenological perception in its reliance on a
hermeneutic part-whole matrix in which the nature of a thing comes into itself
only in its Wirkungszusammenhang.
“Each thing or each person receives a particular
force and coloring from its relations to my life... in everything surrounding
me, I re-experience that which I myself have experienced. The life I find in my
own self, my situations, and the people and things around me constitutes their
life-value, in contrast to the values they receive through their effects. It is
this life-value that the literary work shows first of all.” (DE, 238)
Thus, reflective
understanding (Verstehen) supercedes historical reason and the interconnectedness
of “life” is preferred to telos-prescribed dialectical progression. However, this empiricist reorientation of
critical concepts is forged in counterdistinction to the natural sciences. For
Dilthey the interconnectedness of the world of value takes place in a
psycholologically-anchored, value-producing dynamic system Wirkungszusammenhang not in a causal
system Kausalzusammenhang of
nature. Because of this distinction,
Dilthey charged philosophy with the responsibility of defending the Geisteswissenschaften as "no less
fundamental, comprehensive, and objective" than the Naturwissenschaften.
Dilthey’s writings in Die
Dichtung und das Erlebnis additionally seeks to situate the literary
imagination within the Geisteswissenschaften as one of its premier empirical
practices. There is no distinction between life and literary work, because the
“restless creative drive changes everything around [the writer] into form and
image.” (DE, 238) The literary genius is always within the romantic hermeneutic
triad Leben-Bilden-Dichten and transforms and purifies “the hard, jagged raw
material of events in the process of being formed by the imagination.” (DE,
293) For geisteswissenschaftliche literary sciences, this process of genial
imagination is the sine qua non of literature.
“The poet’s imagination... is central to all literary history.” (DE,
235) Consequently, an assembly of exemplary poets is essential to the
scientific rigor which Dilthey suggests. “The poet is not to be measured by
some average standard for the normal man.” (DE, 244)
Thus in ”Goethe and
the Poetic Imagination” (1910), Dilthey suggests that in Goethe’s poetic
imagination “power of life” overcomes “abstract thought” since Goethe evinces an extraordinary energy
of scientifically lived experiences.
“In Goethe, the processes of living, forming, and
producing peotry (Leben, BIlden, und dichten) achieve a new unity based on the
scientifi c study of nature. This unity has established a model of
truthfulness, of pure naturalness, of clear vision, and of unprejudiced
interpretation of our existence.” (DE, 254)
“Goethe’s peculiar
gift is to express the states of his soul, the world of ideas and ideals within
him. [He] looks ever into himself, and he ultimately wants to use what the
world teaches him in order to heighten and deepen his sense of self.” (264)
Dilthey’s terms for literary and
historical study are most prominently taken up by Gadamer in Truth and
Method: "What we call an Erlebnis in this emphatic sense thus means
something unforgettable and irreplaceable, something whose meaning cannot be
exhausted by conceptual determination" (TM, 67).
Dilthey’s
hermeneutics of experience is similar to contemporary theories of the ecology
of identity, i.e. that the experiences of individuals are interconnected across
identity-lines. The idea of the genial imagination of the poet reappears in
confessional literature of the seventies with its primacy on “having been
there” and the richness of lived experience. Ones lived experience becomes in
this genre the credentialing criterion for writing, and one cannot write what
one has not experienced. A genealogy for this empirical credentialing mechanism
in modern literature then be said to trace back to Dilthey and Rousseau.
Martin Heidegger,
„Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks“
Katra Byram
Martin
Heidegger's treatise on the origin of the work of art was first published in
1950 as part of the collection entitled Holzwege. He wrote it in 1936, however, and lectured on
it at the University of Freiburg, where he was a professor, the same year. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, these
lectures by Germany's young "revolutionäre Genie" of philosophy were
a "philosophische Sensation," both for the light they cast on Heidegger's
previously published seminal work, Sein und Zeit (1927), and for their
statements about the nature of art (94, 98).
Considering the historical context, I believe the finished text also
reflects his implication in Nazi ideology.
Heidegger's ostensible purpose in this
work is to establish the origin of the work of art, but throughout the text it
becomes ever more clear that he is more interested in defining the nature of
truth and in asking what role art plays in determining historical
being(s). He begins his project quite
innocuously by inquiring into the nature of artwork as a physical object and
distinguishing the "Werk" from the "Ding" and the
"Zeug." To determine the
characteristic nature of a "Zeug," he contemplates Van Gogh's
painting of a farmer's shoes. Thus, when
this process distills the "truth" of the "Zeug," he
concludes that "im Werk der Kunst hat sich die Wahrheit des Seienden ins
Werk gesetzt. . . So wäre denn das Wesen der Kunst
dieses: das Sich-ins-Werk Setzen der
Wahrheit des Seienden" (30).
This being
established, Heidegger spends most of the next two sections investigating what
truth is, and how it is that it occurs in the work of art. To do so, he distinguishes between
"Welt," the open area in which human decisions and history take
place, and "Erde," which is marked by closedness. Art, Heidegger
maintains, "stellt als Werk eine Welt auf.
Das Werk hält das Offene der Welt offen," and at the same time
realizes the earth as it places it "ins Offene . . . als das sich
Verschließende" (41, 44). The artwork,
therefore, creates and captures the moment of balance and peace within the
constant struggle between the openness of the world and the closedness of the
earth. This battle between revealedness
and hiddenness is, however, the nature of truth itself. For truth is
"Unverborgenheit," but it contains within itself also a
hiddenness: "Die Wahrheit [as
Unverborgenheit] ist in ihrem Wesen Un-Wahrheit [i.e. Verborgenheit]"
(53). Truth, essentially, is not
something which exists, but something which happens. And one of the places it happens is in the
work of art.
Heidegger downplays the role of the
individual artist; the miracle of the artwork's "Geschaffensein" lies
not here, but in the occurrence of truth.
He emphasizes that "Geschaffensein" alone does not make a
work, however, for the work's workness resides also in its
"Bewahrung": someone must see it and "das Werk ein Werk sein
lassen" (76). Reception is crucial
to truth happening. Finally, Heidegger
approaches his final, and central, claim.
All art, he says, is essentially "Dichtung," where
"Dichtung" is not poetry, but "die Stiftung der Wahrheit"
(77, 80). Art is historical, not only
because it occurs in history, but because it makes history. Therefore, he goes
on to say, art is the origin, "des Kunstwerkes, d.h. der Schaffenden und
Bewahrenden, das sagt des geschichtlichen Daseins eines Volkes" (80). He ends by asking whether
"we" want to consider art as something to study from the past, or if
we are "in unserem Dasein geschichtlich am Ursprung" (81). In the last sentence, he cites Hölderlin and
speaks of "den Deutschen" for the first time.
Such an ending cannot help but evoke
the Nazi discourse of the time, and similar terminology appears throughout the
text; the idea of "Volk" arises several times, and Heidegger lists
"die staatsgründende Tat" as another space in which truth occurs
(62). Christopher Long also cites other
phrases, such as "Geschick eines geschichtlichen Volkes" and
"heimatliche Grund" [sic], that resonate with the Nazi propaganda and
ideology of the time (104). He asserts
that Heidegger's project to establish art as "the site for the
rejuvenation of the historical Dasein of the German people" represents
exactly the type of "originary metaphysics" against which Benjamin
argues in his "Kunst im Zeitalter der technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit," written at nearly the same time (109).
Interestingly, Heidegger's claim that
the work of art only retains its status as work as long as it inhabits the
world that it has opened, and that it becomes a mere object when preserved in a
cathedral or museum, has currency in relation to contemporary debates about
museums. In these debates, the value of
preserving museums and their artwork for the passive consumption of art
(Heidegger's "Kunstbetrieb") (36)) is questioned. Hans Belting thus suggests that museums
feature contemporary art that would provoke discussion of issues and provide a
forum for this debate. Artwork in its
"own time" would thus participate in the "Heranbildung einer
neuen Öffentlichkeit," not because it contains the open space of truth (or
the "geschichtlichen Dasein eines Volkes"), but because it promotes
discussion about how the community should construct itself (662).
WORKS CITED
Belting, Hans. "Das
Museum: Ort der Reflexion, nicht der
Sensation." Merkur 56 (2002): 649-662.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Einführung. Der
Ursprung des Kunstwerks. By Martin
Heidegger. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2960.
93-114.
Heidegger, Martin. Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerks. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960.
Long, Christopher. "Art's Fateful Hour: Benjamin, Heidegger, Art and
Politics." New German Critique 83 (2001): 89-115.
Siegfried Kracauer was
born February 8, 1889, in Frankfurt am Main.
A versatile intellect, he was writer, philosopher, and film
theorist. Forced into exile in 1933, he
lived first in Paris, then, after the Nazi occupation, in the United
States. Commissioned in 1942 to study
Nazi film propaganda, he published his observations as From Caligari to Hitler: A
Psychological Study of the German Film (1947). He died November 26, 1966, in New
York. Other works include Die Angestellten: eine Schrift vom Ende der Weimarer Republik
(1959), Pariser Leben: Jacques Offenbach und seine Zeit, eine
Gesellschaftsbiographie (1962), Der
Detektiv-Roman: Ein philosophischer
Traktat (1971).
Kracauer begins with
the socio-psychoanalytic observation that the “position […] an epoch occupies
in the historical process can be determined […] from an analysis of its
surface-level expressions” because these, “by virtue of their unconscious
nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of
things” (75). He then evokes the image
of the then-new entertainment phenomenon known as the Tiller Girls.[19] These “indissoluble girl clusters whose
movements [were] demonstrations of mathematics” (76) illustrate the modern
taste toward abstraction, toward the construction of geometrical patterns, or
mass ornaments, having “no meaning beyond themselves” (77). The author suggests that the mass ornament
reflects the capitalist production process in that the latter “must destroy the
natural organisms that it regards either as means or as a resistance” and is
“an end in itself” (78). Specifically,
production occurs simply to expand production rather than to satisfy genuine
need. The worker on a conveyor belt is
no more cognizant of his or her position in the total framework than is the
Tiller Girl in hers.
Enlarging the scope
of his argument, Kracauer sees the reification of rationalism, or Ratio, of the capitalist system as the
agent of modern demystification, or Entzauberung
(80). This Ratio, however, promotes abstraction that drives the capitalist
system yet further from the socio-economic organization for which it was
originally designed: ”Once past a
certain point, it abandons the truth in which it participates. It does
not encompass man” (81). The mass
ornament as expression of Ratio also
drives man from the natural, from the “lush organic splendor and the
constitution of individuality toward the realm of anonymity to which it
relinquishes itself when it stands in truth and when the knowledge radiating
from the basis of man dissolves the contours of visible natural form”
(83). The author’s prognosis is bleak
for he sees no activity that might simultaneously accommodate both Ratio and a higher sphere of life and
development. Previous attempts (Kracauer
mentions rhythmic gymnastics) lead only to Romantic delusions, to “exalting the
body by assigning it meanings which emanate from it and may indeed be spiritual
but which do not contain the slightest trace of reason” (86). America’s modern “distraction factories” (75)
offer only pane et circensis.
Commentary/Associations
Kracauer examines a
cultural propensity, fragmentation, that had already begun with the Industrial
Revolution through the division of labor in factories and the redistribution of
the rural populace into dense urban environments. This splitting of the self acquired aesthetic
expression with the Modernist Revolution around 1910 and afterwards in the
works of Picasso and Bracque (Cubism), Brecht (Mann ist Mann), and in the psychoanalytic dissections of Freud. Though he does not explicitly concern himself
with film in the essay, Kracauer’s criticism of Tiller Girls’ industrially
rational aesthetics (“The more the
coherence of the figure is relinquished in favor of mere linearity, the more
distant it becomes from the immanent consciousness of those constituting it”
[77]) echoes Benjamin’s assessment of film construction: “The camera that presents the performance of
the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral
whole.”[20] Instead of the spatial linearity of the
Tiller Girl formations, film offers the temporal linearity (at least, in those
products most consumed by the masses) of narrative. In both cases, however, the performer/actor
is subsumed within the structure, unable to determine her place within the
larger structure.
Kracauer also
anticipates the aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (1935).
In this film documentary, one sees countless tens of thousands of
Germans channeled into geometrical patterns and configurations, all in a
romantic effort to achieve a higher purpose and identity within the Nazi state.
Eight years before the Nazi Party rally depicted in Triumph, Kracauer writes:
“Reason can gain entrance only with difficulty when the masses it ought
to pervade yield to sensations afforded by the godless mythological cult” (85),
a fact that Hitler seemed intuitively to understand. The only consistently identifiable face
during the more than two hour celebration of power is his own.
Still, the dividing
up of historical periods can rarely be done with scientific precision. Traces often manifest themselves long before
they are recognized. While the
Kracauer’s thesis and example are compelling, the particularization of man (á
la the Tiller Girls) and re-insertion into the mass ornament may be traced
further back in history. Analyzing a 1974 critical treatment of a 1582 ballet,
for example, Theweleit observes that the dancers “group[ed] themselves into
squares, circles, even triangles, symbolizing the new forms that [were] working
to dominate nature, with the help of the ‘natural sciences’” (Theweleit 316/7).[21] While not necessarily the predominant
sixteenth-century aesthetic expression, such assemblies also served to suppress
the individual identity of participants within the linear social formation
leading from peasant to king.
Georg Lukács “The Theory of the
Novel” David
Gramling
Project: evaluating the prospect of the
modern novel’s sublation into a renewed epic form
Critical traditions: Geisteswissenschaft, Marxist
historicism, vitalism
Historical context: The European Left in World War I
Still one of Georg Lukacs’ earlier
theoretical works, Theorie des Romans was completed by February 1915 and
first published in book in Berlin in 1920. The Enlightenment “narrowing of the
spirit” which Lukacs posits in rather geisteswissenschaftliche mode,
responds to European leftists’ and Social Democrats’ failure to effectively
protest the war outbreak. The novel form is an exemplar of the productive,
dysphoric homelessness of the modern hero.
“The novel is the form of the epoch of absolute sinfulness, as Fichte
said, and it must remain the dominant form as long as the world is ruled by the
same stars. In Tolstoy, intimations of a breakthrough into a new epoch are
visible, but they remain polemical nostalgic and abstract.” (152)
Societies of absolute
truth from the Greek to the Middle Ages lived life rather than form. Since the
Early Modern Period, “we have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is
why the primeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for
us... We have invented the creation of
forms.” Thus literature has become a sign of the incongruence between the self
and the world, between the soul and the deed,
between the questing interiority of the subject and the life-value of
the world. Lukacs opposes the modern productivity of forms with epic life: “The
“should be” kills life, and every concept expresses a “should-be” of its
object, that is why thought can never arrive at a real definition of life...”
(48)
In epic writing from
the Greeks to the Middle Ages, “the world at any given moment is an ultimate
principle, it is empirical at its deepest, most decisive... base.” Thus any plot or narrative including a search
or quest is only the semblance of search or quest, since the action or the
searching hero is always already steeped in the utmost epistemic stability
ensured by an absolute belief in god. Any action the hero embarks upon takes
place in “the safe, rounded irrationality of the entire cosmos” (102) The
modern quest, such as the emergent European war during which Lukacs’ wrote, has
no such divine certainty by which to measure its decisions. The War is the
antithesis to Lukacs’ formulation: “When the divinity that rules the world...is
familiar and close to him as a father... then every action is only a
well-fitting garment for the world.”
Pre-modern society
was, projects Lukacs, blessed by its lack of productivity of forms, and by an
ontological hegemony by which its “answers came before [the] questions.” These
pre-modern subjects, however they may have suffered, were always “at home,” as
opposed to the modern homeless quest(ion)er. Lukacs claims that the epic state
of human being is closest to human nature: “Humans are less individual and more
“general, more philosophic, closer and more akin to the archetypal home: love, the family, the state. “ Yet
amongst the nostalgia for the epic, Lukacs denies the validity of neo-Classicism’s
reintroduction of Greek aesthetic principles for modern life: “Any resurrection
of the Greek world is a more or less conscious hypostasy of aesthetics into
metaphysics.” (38)
Once again, Lukacs’ geisteswissenschaftliche
formulation about the contradictory obsessions of the modern novelistic
hero resonates with the World War: “The narrowing of the soul of which we speak
is brought about by its demonic obsession by an existing idea which it posits
as the only, the most ordinary reality. The context and intensity of the action
which follows from this obsession therefore elevate the soul into the most
genuinely sublime regions whilst at the same time accentuating and confirming
the grotesque contradictions between the imagined and the real. And this is the
action of the novel.” (99) This contradictory
nature of the modern narrative is a formal product of abstract idealism in
German drama, and thus “lost even the
most inadequate relationship to life, in order to come out of its
subjectivity.” (105) Lukacs in part owes his use of the ontological category
“life” to Dilthey’s “Erlebnis”.
Theory of the Novel
posits two types
of interiority, distinguishable by how they relate to the world of phenomena.
Subjective interiority proceeds as an “arbitrary conquerer, snatches fragments
out of the atomized chaos which is the outside world and melts them down,
causing all origins to be forgotten, into a newly created lyrical cosmos of
pure interiority.” In contrast, epic interiority “is always reflexive, it
realises itself in a conscious distantiated way. therefore its means of
expression are secondary ones—mood and reflexion.” (114) The modern novel
proceeds by way of the former “arbitrary conquerer” model, unable to allow the
world to enter the novel as raw, unassimilated material.
The novel voluntarily and
gradually reveals its own tendency towards unraveling, its inability to
maintain the purity of its ideal form in the face of a world of materiality.
“The abstract basis of the novel assumes form as a result of the abstraction
seeing through itself, the immanence of meaning required by the form is
attained precisely when the author goes all the way, ruthlessly, towards
exposing its absence.” (72)
For Lukacs, the
dialectic movement of modern novels towards a renewed epic is to be evaluated
on the basis of each novel’s relationship to “essential life substance,” rather
than abstract forms. Lukacs suggests several exemplars. Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre represents an “ideal of free humanity which comprehends and
affirms the structures of social life as necessary forms of human community
[professions, classes, ranks, etc] yet at the same time, only sees them as an
occasion for the active expression of the essential life substance.” 133)
Nineteenth-century Russian literature expresses an unparalleled closeness to
certain organic natural conditions, thus allowing them greater access to
non-abstracted epic creativity.
Although firmly
steeped in Geistesgeschichte, Lukacs strays from the concern with the genius of
the poet (a la Dilthey) and focuses on the genre as that which irrevocably
structures certain meta-events, such as quests, wandering,, and “being lost”. A
fruitful project would be to compare Benjamin’s ideal storyteller with Lukacs’
vision of a renewed epic, and historicize these visions in terms of post-World
War I social formations. In the twenty years between Lukacs’ writing and
Benjamin’s in “Der Erzähler”, how has the vision of a renewed epic been
appropriated (Brecht vs. Reactionary Modernism), changed (Neue Sachlichkeit und
Döblin), or vanished (National Socialism)
Robert Musil, “Die Nation als Ideal
und Wirklichkeit,”
M.Huffmaster
With the memory of the cataclysm
of war still painfully fresh and the disastrous consequences of defeat for the
body politic of Austria felt acutely, Musil acknowledges at the outset of his
essay the objection that might be raised: that at such a vulnerable time one
really ought not question the sanctity of the nation. Musil’s own description of the postwar
political order reveals the widespread sense of resentment: “…den Betrug…, der
an uns beim Kriegsende durch Wilson und sein trojanisches Pferd der vierzehn
Punkte begangen worden ist…”(1061) Yet he maintains that precisely at such a
critical point, it is crucial to rethink and clarify the concept of nation.
The
individual seeks a scapegoat for the horrors of the war and its aftermath: “Wir
haben’s getan, sie haben’s getan; das ist keiner, das ist ‘Es’.” (1062) But a people consists of the sum of its
individuals plus their organization, so it is vital, Musil says, to examine the
ideological clothing worn by this “Es.”
After discussing the relationship of the individual to the collective,
Musil interrogates three common conceptions of the nation: as a race, as a
state, and as Geist. Each of
these he dismisses in succession. He
points out how thinking of the nation in terms of race can lead one to accept
as natural the most absurd declarations, so that when Bismarck, for example,
says that felling trees is a characteristically Slavic but not a Germanic
trait, it would seem perfectly obvious.
Such a way of thinking Musil calls a “lasterhafte Denkgewohnheit” and a
“Denkkrankheit”(1064), and he says a good deal of national idealism derives
from this kind of delusion.
As to the state, though he
recognizes its significance, Musil insists that seeing it as the highest common
good, as institutionalized human perfection, is simply another delusion
contrary to fact. When he comes to the
idea of the nation as Geist, he seems almost to revel in how facile this
one is, asking, “Welcher Geist ist denn etwa einer Üniversität mit einem
Zuchthaus gemeinsam...? Welcher Geist
Herrn Anton Wildgans mit Nietzsche?”(1069)
A German peasant has more in common, in peacetime, with a French peasant
than with a German city-dweller, he says.
But on a more incriminatory note, he
remarks that “…ein sonderbares und äußerst
gefährliches Verhältnis entstanden [ist]: die Respektlosigkeit vor dem Geist im
Namen des deutschen Geistes”(1065), almost as a premonition of
the pernicious ends Geistesgeschichte would be made to serve.
His contemporaries’ notion of a
collective “we” is false, Musil claims; it does not correspond to reality. His precociously post-modern conclusion is
that the nation is a construct: “Gerade gesprochen, ist die Nation eine Einbildung,
in allen Fassungen, die man ihr gab.”(1071) This does not mean, however, that
the nation doesn’t exist; those who think so “machen es sich zu
leicht.”(1060) The point is that human
society can be structured differently.
Musil pleads for its radical
reorganization, abandoning outmoded notions of nation and state (and this just
one year after the founding of the League of Nations!):
Einer
natürlichen Gliederung der menschlichen Gesellschaft steht aber nichts im Weg
als die Überhebung der beiden Ideale Nation und Staat über den Menschen. Es
bleibt nichts übrig, als an der Verstärkung des an ihnen sich vorbei
Entwickelnden zu arbeiten und den Gedanken an ihrer Überholtheit zu wecken und
wach zu erhalten.(1074)
Ironically, in his enthusiasm for
this progressive society he seems to have replaced, almost inadvertently, one,
or rather, three notions of the collective with yet another, no less
ideologically laden:
Das Volk,
welches am frühsten beginnt, aus der Sackgasse des Imperial-Nationalismus
herauszufinden zu einer neuen möglichen Weltordnung und allen seinen Maßnahmen
diesen Atem der Zukunft zu leihen vermag, wird bald die Führung der Welt haben
und seine berechtigten Wünsche durchsetzen können.(1075)
This sentence is the second to the
last in the essay. Musil’s agenda is not
to champion the Volk; that is not his focus. Yet tacitly present throughout his
deconstructions of the collective concepts of race, state, and Geist
there rests the assumption that the collective notion of Volk somehow
has a “real” ontological status.
Paradoxically, it was precisely such a conception of the collective that
not all that much later became implicated in the return into the “Sackgasse des
Imperial-Sozialismus,” in the form of National Socialism (assuming, that is, that
any “Volk” ever actually found its way out).
Despite the progressive ring, this penultimate sentence clearly reveals
a vision of the future that still involves domination: the “neue mögliche
Weltordnung” consists in the “Führung der Welt” by one certain, unspecified
(but implied?) “Volk.” In fact, Musil’s
choice of words here and the connection made between the general feeling of
resentment (evident in the phrase “seine berechtigten Wünsche durchsetzen
können,”) and aspirations to world hegemony seem almost to forebode the
discursive practices of Nazi propagandists.
Musil’s
1921 essay is of particular interest when read in the context of postcolonial
studies, in dialogue with the more recent work of thinkers concerned with the
rise of the nation, such as Benedict Anderson, Homi K. Bhabha, or Etienne
Balibar. In fact, Musil’s concluding
sentence expresses sentiments surprisingly similar to Balibar’s justification
for his 1998 essay, “The Borders of Europe”:
Heute
kann niemand noch den Weg dahin im einzelnen vorzeichnen;
wohl aber gilt es, die Gesinnung zu schaffen, die auf den Weg führt. (1075)
Georg Simmel “Die Großstädte und das
Geistesleben” (1903)
Katra Byram
Georg Simmel’s observations about
the metropolis are grounded in experience; he was born in Berlin in 1858 and
remained there until attaining a professorship at the University of Strasbourg
in 1914. This appointment had been
delayed, despite his intellectual influence and stature, because in addition to
being a Jew, he was a sociologist before sociology’s recognition as an academic
discipline. At the dawn of his field,
Simmel worked to link fledgling sociological theories and knowledge to
observations about the everyday and historical world, a project that reveals
itself clearly in his essay on the metropolis.
In
this essay, Simmel presents the metropolis as the space where opposing 18th and
19th century ideals of the individual battle to determine her “Rolle innerhalb
der Gesamtheit” (131). On the one hand,
the 18th century notion of liberty and equality for all, born during the battle
to win individual rights and freedoms, grows beyond its original bounds in the
city, where tempo and economy conspire to level all differences. On the other, the 19th century drive to
establish an individual identity, intensified by the industrial revolution and
its accompanying division of labor, leads city inhabitants to combat the city’s
leveling tendencies by asserting their personal and economic individuality and
indispensability in ever more exaggerated ways.
According
to Simmel, the city conspires to erase difference by assaulting the individual
with an overwhelming and never-ending stream of visual stimuli. The individual cannot internalize all that
she sees, and so begins to distance herself from the whirl by processing
perceptions only with the “Verstand,” and not with the more central
“Gemüt.” Unable to react to all
occurances with the attention and energy they deserve, she becomes blasé toward
them all. The same kind of overload
affects her relationships with other city-dwellers; the inability to know them
all leads to reserve, distance, and distaste and distrust. All people and perceptions become equally
unimportant. This psychological leveling
corresponds closely to the money economy’s leveling as it reduces all
qualitative difference to simple differences in quantitative exchange
value. Finally, the life of the city,
its bustle of thousands coming and going, meeting and doing business, makes everyone
equal in their subjection to the objective constraints of money and time.
Precisely
because conditions conspire to destroy difference, however, the individual
feels herself driven to cultivate uniqueness and have it noticed. In one sense, the city is the ideal location
for such personal development, for it demands no social cohesion and, thus,
leaves the individual great personal freedom.
Expressing one’s personality in this context is, however, exceedingly
difficult. In a society where reserve
causes even neighbors to be strangers, the individual enjoys her freedom only
while she suffers isolation. In order to
make others notice her personality in this distanced world, she must find ever
more striking ways of expressing it, and this in a place where everyone else is
doing the same. Once again, the economic
structure both reinforces and drives this tendency toward ostentatious
showmanship, for the division of labor dictates that each individual create a
need for the product of her specialized work.
In this culture dominated by objective concerns, the individual becomes
increasingly specialized and narrow. In
Simmel’s words, “dem Überwuchern der objectiven Kultur ist das Individuum
weniger und weniger gewachsen,” and “die Atrophie der individuellen durch die
Hypertrophie der objektiven Kultur” is the result (129, 130).
Simmel is not clear here about
whether economic or psychological factors act as the primary driving force in
these developements, and in fact alludes to the question of “which came first,
the chicken or the egg.” In respect to
this issue, then, it would be interesting to see how he deals with Marx in his Philosophie des Geldes--whether he
refutes, accepts, or modifies and tempers Marx’s ideas on the “Basis” and
“Überbau.” In addition, given that one
might argue that today’s metropolis, information superhighway, and media
saturation far exceed the sensory overload of Simmel’s 1903 Berlin, it would be
interesting to consult current theories about the psychology of city life in
order to compare their perspectives, judgments, and conclusions with his. Simmel claims not to be able to judge these
developments, so refrains from calling the situation a “problem” or offering a
“solution.” Do current critics assume
this same stance, and might there be a cultural historical reason for their
differing or similar attitude?
Simmel,
Georg. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 7.
Otthein von Rammstedt, ed.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995.
116-131.
Walter Sokel
“Writer in Extremis”
Christian
Buss
While many critics of modern art have traditionally focused on purely
formal developments within the art world, and with the rise of the formalist
and structuralist critics, greatly developed our understanding of the
functioning of language, image and speech in articstic production, Walter
Sokel, in Writer in Extremis is
interested in the development of the institution of art. In looking at art as a
cultural institution, Sokel intends to examing the role that these artists and
their work have in the generation f social values and norm, ie. He is primarily
concerned with the ways in which art was viewed by the society and the artists
of their time. To do this, he does not expose the artists explicit judgements
of their status in their texts, but rather explores how form becomes a part of
the contect within these author’s works.
Sokel’s examination of Kant’s Critique
of Pure reason in The Writer in
Extremis explores this development and the rise of the avant-garde. In
Kant’s formulation of knowledge, Nature is our construction upon and of phenomena. Nature, and hence reality,
therefore cannot exist beyond man’s subjective interpretation of them. Thereby
the seeds of a total subjectivism are laid in the formation of the natural as
the inherently unknowable. Nature, is represented in this work as something permanently beyond the reach of the
conceivable. The extension of this thesis within the artistic realm is that the
artist is no longer bound by what had until thenm been considered the
“objective” criterion of reality. In the resultant new world, art cannot reveal
the absolute truth, and hence as Sokel states it “The artist’s arbitrary
freedom to creat according to his intentions” is the prime foundation fo Kant’s
aesthetics, (Sokel, 1959, p. 9). Furthhermore, in Kant’s critique of Judgement,
the primary aim of the self-chosen form of the artist’s work was not to impart
truth, but rather to evoke unexpected associations, associations that could not
be expressed of formulated otherwise. In such a manner form becomes a part of
content not as the formalists demanded “became content.”
Sokel’s reading of Schiller’s Letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Man, which posits that words are in and of
themselves only instruments used to convey concept and that unexpected
associations are the only way to find the unknowable within language. Hence,
the sum of all the parts of a work of art and not the individual words explored
within it are the primary means by which individuals can convey true meaning.
What results are three fundamental premises of modern art:
1) The sovereignty of the artist to
follow his own rules.
2) The separation of aesthetic from
logical ideals
3) The absorption of content into
organic form.
For Sokel, these three premises are ultimately integrated only in the
twentieth century, the consequence of which is that the art of the twentieth
century had to remove itself entirely from the practical, from representation
in short in order to become true art. However, for Sokel, this retreat to the
formal and to a self-described sovereignty led to an alienation of the artist
from her social place, a shift that was ultimately embraced by the artists (the
three premises in action).
This positioning of the artist as an “underground” member of society
exposes one of the fundamental problems of the artist in 20th century
society, that of her desire to transform and change the structures of the world
around her, but unable to do so because her self-determined exile. Within this
map of the artist, the project of literary production, and literary criticism
is left in a fox-hole, engaging in a trench war on an abandoned battle field.
As such, Sokel’s work explores the fundamental impotence of the artist, much As
Adorno does in his Dialektik of Enlightenment, whereby the art and artist are
threatened by the appropriating effects of capitalist and mass culture, leading
to a “critique of a system system that reduces heterogeneity in favor of
exchangeable homogeneity.” The artist and art therefore retreat to an ivory
tower, and thereby avoid the negation of social agency that occurs under the
capitalist system.
An alternative that has followed from the work of Shulte-Sasse and
August Burger explodes the myth of the ivory tower, and suggests a role for
cultural production and for critical inquiry that has the potential to be more
productive. Rather than art living on the fringes, the borderlines of social
agency, artists engage in a form of radical assault on the dominant means of
communication within society, language and semiotics. As such, the artist is in a privileged position
to expose ruptures in the system of language and visual culture. The role of
the artist is not therefore to expose how the artist is in effect ghettoized,
but to see what happens when the artist is able to step out of the ghetto in
the products of their works.
Clifford Geertz, The
Interpretation of Cultures, 1973
Mike Huffmaster
The fruit of ethnographic work
undertaken from the late fifties to the early seventies, mainly in Morocco and
Indonesia, the essays compiled in this volume all deal explicitly with the
concept of culture. Written during the
heyday of structuralism à la Lévi-Strauss and cultural materialism, both of
which for different reasons conceived of culture as something located in the
mind, these essays insist on an alternative view, that of culture as something
embodied in public symbols. Though most
of the pieces are empirical studies of specific social phenomena in various
locations (in keeping with Geertz’s general skepticism towards grand
theoretical schemas), taken as a whole they all promote the author’s view of
what culture is and, consequently, of what the proper object of study for the
discipline of anthropology should be.
Focusing on the actions of real people in society, Geertz claims that
anthropology must seek to understand the ways in which symbols shape actors’
understanding of their world and influence their actions. He pleads for an interpretive science of
meaning rather than an empirical one of laws.
The
topics covered by the articles in this volume span quite a broad range: from
the evolution of the human mind to religious rituals and symbols in Indonesian
societies, from the politics of emergent nation states to the famous cockfights
of Bali.
One critique that may be made concerns the lack of
history in Geertz’s conceptual world. To
continue with the author’s own favored metaphor of culture as a text, his focus
is often on the text as a product, rather than on the production of that text,
as something written rather than as writing.
In fact, in the early eighties, concomitant with the rise of new
historicism, Geertz’s work became the object of precisely such criticism. But avoiding the baby-and-bathwater mistake,
Stephen Greenblatt and other new historicists adopted many of the hallmarks of
Geertzian ethnography: the focus on social context, on how public symbols, in
their case written texts, influence actors’ comprehension of the world and thus
inform their actions; the eschewal of grand narratives in favor of the locally
contingent; and of course, the emphasis on “thick description.”[22]
Seen in this context,
Geertz’s seminal contribution to contemporary thought becomes apparent. Later developments in the theory and
practice, and thus the self-definition, of both the discipline of anthropology
and the field of studies formerly concerned exclusively with literature and
language, would seem to answer his call for a semiotics of
culture. Cultural studies, while not
exactly a merger or symbiosis of the two, represents a fertile meeting ground.
works consulted:
Roseberry, William. Anthropologies
and Histories. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989.
Niklaus Largier, Lob der
Peitsche. Eine Kulturgeschichte der
Erregung (2001)[23]
Professor Largier
studied German, Russian, and Philosophy in Zurich and Paris, receiving his
Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 1989.
An internationally recognized expert on mystical traditions in German
literature and thought, his research explores relations among literature,
philosophy, and theology. He has
published essays on Eckhart, Tauler, Seuse, Mechthild of Magdburg, Hadewijch,
Rudolf of Biberach, and Czepko, as well as co-edited essay collections on
spirituality and literature (1995, 1999) and a medieval collection of
vernacular sermons (1998). Professor
Largier is currently a member of the German faculty at UC Berkeley.[24]
Beginning from the
proposition that the body is a stage “auf der sich eine rituelle Handlung
abspielt” (9), Professor Largier examines the multitudinous forms – ascetic,
erotic, therapeutic – of self-flagellation practiced since the earliest known
manifestation by St. Pardulf († 737).
Marshaling an exhaustive array of literary, historical, and pictographic
sources in this “Anthologie der Flagellationsliteratur” (23), he offers neither
systematic history nor psycho-historical analysis (14), but rather “eine
Montage der Erzählungen und Anekdoten, auf denen ein historiographischer
Versuch beruht” (24). Professor Largier
sees as common among self-flagellants, whatever their ostensible motives may
be, the need to achieve a certain “Erregung der Phantasie” (381). Among the first practitioners, this “state of
excitation” led to transcendence from the physical body into a perceived
“Einheit mit Gott” (46). Over time,
self-flagellation became systematized, a culture arising around and sustaining
a “Mathematisierung des spirituellen Lebens” (69). Professor Largier then locates the perception of divergence of the practice
from the spiritual realm in Abbé Jacques Boileau’s influential Historia flagellantium (1700), wherein
the Abbé cites historical examples that could also have been construed as pornographic stimuli. Thereafter self-flagellation would be
“nicht mehr primär als spirituelle Praxis verstanden, sondern immer öfter als
Form der Askese, die eine erotische Ambivalenz verbirgt und bewußt zu verbergen
sucht” (179-180).
But the
cat-o’-nine-tails was not to be put back into the bag. Girard and Cadière’s Thérèse philosophe (1748) presented a
“Kontrafaktur der Vita der heiligen Teresa von Avila und anderer Heiligenleben”
(242). Passions aroused by either could
then, at the reader’s newly enlightened discretion, be applied “zur Apotheose,
zur göttlichen Freiheit oder zum erotischen Rausch” (251). Professor Largier closes his comprehensive study by seeing
in the work of writers like Proust and Joyce and in performance artists like
Bob Flanagan and Ron Athey “eine
Fragmentierung,
Aufsplitterung und Desintegration, die das Moment der affektiv-imaginativen
Erregung aus seiner teleologischen Verbindlichkeit löst, in die es der Diskurs
der ‘Sexualität’ verbannt” (375).
Commentary/Associations
In historical sweep
and attention to detail (where else would one find a complete list of the
various whips employed for self-flagellation?), Professor Largier’s study
follows stylistically those of Michel Foucault, whose History of Sexuality (1976-84) he several times cites while
maintaining his own independent argument.
Specifically, the two theoretical approaches most clearly resemble each
other as both cultural critics assign to the physical body the role of locus inscriptionis (“Bühne” in
Professor Largier’s phraseology) for the working out of extra-corporal issues
and power negotiations. Foucault’s work
posits anonymous political forces at play beneath various practices of bodily
control (see his Discipline and
Punish). Lob der Peitsche, on the
other hand, while placing self-flagellation within its different respective
social frameworks, emphasizes the point of view of its practitioners. What is the spiritual or sexual significance
of the act to those who engage in it?
Professor Largier traces the codification of the cultural practice from
ascetic to sexual exercise using Selbstzeugnisse
in the form of diaries, memoirs, vita, and confessions, works that in
themselves conflate the edifying with the prurient. The reader of such material thus joins
vicariously the self-flagellant’s ever-growing audience; first one’s God, then
one’s abbott or abbess, then one’s doctor, culminating nowadays in
ticket-buying audiences. The author
concludes his study, for example, with passing mention of performance artist
Ron Athey, whose act transcends self-flagellation, as the following description
of a recent performance indicates:
1997¹s DELIVERANCE examined faith
healing and the Filipino phenomenon of
psychic surgery. On a stage covered in hundreds of pounds of dirt, three
men on crutches come to see the Healer. They end up suspended on meat hooks and
bled, undergo simulated surgical castration via genital stapling, are mummified
and eventually buried. Throughout the performance, images are culled from
Santeria, Buddhism, Catholicism, and the Jewish Faith. Even Kali makes an
appearance. In a light hearted scene of double sodomy, she uses a pair of
garden shears to sever the offending dildo in half.[25]
Athey’s gestures are not always
“simulated,” as when he pierces (onstage) his arms or face with six-gauge
needles. Furthermore, he has tattooed his flesh in patterns to ornament and
offset various bodily insertions. (See website below.) Professor Largier notes that the observer of
such is “doch gezwungen, sich realen Schmerz und wirkliche Tortur anzuschauen”
(375). Yet, there may be more than zuschauen at work. One might compose another historical study
concentrating on the erotic effects of pure, tainted, or torn skin, and the
need to shed blood to validate one’s spiritual stature. Wolfram’s Parzival
comes to mind, the eponymous hero repeatedly recognized because of the clear
patches of flesh showing through garments torn and soiled from countless
bouts. His half-brother, Feirefiz,
possesses a sexual charisma emanating from his variegated skin. Both are immediately recognized for their
physical/sexual prowess.
Lev Manovich “The Language of New Media”
Christian Buss
In his book The Language of New Media Lev Manovich
presents one of the first attempts at a systematic theory of new media. The
primary approach of this study is to places new media within the histories of
visual and media cultures of the 20th century. The theory and history of cinema
play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich
discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital
cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties
between avant-garde film and new media.
The main
thrust of the book is to explore the parallels between cinema history and the
history of new media while also attempting to define the fundamental principles
of new media. In doing the former he develops the relationship between
multimedia and the experience of the proto-cinematic in the late nineteenth century,
the historical ties between new media and avant-garde film and in particular
grounds the language of new media within the discourse of film that has
developed a synthetic and precise means of communication. An example: Manovich
explores the role of montage in the creation of new media, showing how new
media consciously and consistently rejects the early twentieth-century
techniques to create unified space through the use of temporal montage. Whereas
Eisensteinian montage explored the relationality of objects in a temporal
dimension as a means of conveying a sense of place, new media and computerized
film editing techniques allow the imaginary director to align objects not only
in a temporal fashion but also relationally in two-dimensional space,
composition and not montage. With this extension of the possibilities of sequencing
and organizing, the temporal loses its status as a privileged dimension in
editing, while the spatial gains primacy as a means of creating the magical “ah
ha” of an illusory reality.
Accomplishing the latter task of
developing principles of new media that stand outside the matrix of film
terminology, Manovich manages to forward five tenets of New media:
1)
All
new media objects are composed of digital code
2)
New
Media objects are modular, they are a collection of discrete elements that are
assembled into larger-scale objects.
3)
Modularity
and digitization allow for the automation of many functions involved in media
creation
4)
All
new media has the potential to be changed and transformed, it is variable and
not static. Closely tied to this is the status of a new media object’s
existence within a Database.
5)
New
media objects can be transcoded, ie.-its format in transformable to render on
smaller or larger screens, to appear on different operating systems, to appear
in different media.
While this list’s constitutive
parts is fundamentally sound, this by no means creates the self-stated
comprehensively differentiating language of new media that he set out to. The end-result is a piecemeal language of new
media hobbled by the limitations of the discourse Manovich has attempted to
frame his discussion within. As in the previous example, Montage is a concept
exploded by new media as it is commonly practices, similarly concepts of the
primary signifier of the camera, the screen, and the avant-garde find
themselves artificially limiting the possibilities of how to view new media.
This extends from the base level of production all the way to the psychical
relationship a work of new media has to the viewer(s). Developing a theory of
new media that is airtight would require the study to explore how each level
within the computer system extends or limits the realm of possibility within
the viewing experience. The status of a work of new media in digital format is
therein not enough to differentiate a system, but its status as a product of an
Intel-based architecture, residing in a relational database that communicates
with a host computer using XML, presented in a BeOS presentation layer running
the Opera Internet explorer would in fact allow researchers to expose the
significance of the deep complexity of today’s New Media.
For example, a comprehensive study
of the networking potential of a particular new media piece, say Lynn
Hershmann’s Agent Ruby(www.agentruby.com)
or Axel Heide’s Unmovie
(www.unmovie.org) would explore the workings of each piece of the the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model,
a seven-layer model that outlines how computers communicate with one another
and within an end-user (see diagram 1 below). This is a task that cannot be
reduced to the piece’s modularity, digitality, transformability, or
transcodability. Rather the particular
ways in which this piece manipulate standard practices of communication with
others, and its injection of non-human communication on the level, not of the
application, but on the level of the session, making it impossible to tell
whether one’s response is a result of the individual one has been trying to
communicate with or with a fictive construct reveal the true “novelty” and
radical potential of these works of new media.
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (1988)
Katra Byram
Stephen Greenblatt
completed his Ph.D. in English at Yale in 1969.
He spent most of career at Berkeley (1969-1997), then took a position at
Harvard. He published Shakespearean Negotiations in 1988,
eight years after Renaissance
Self-Fashioning, the book many regard as the beginning of New
Historicism. I include this information
because, although some might argue that it has no particular significance for
his approach to literary criticism, Greenblatt would insist that it must.
For Greenblatt’s
central argument is that “works of art, [however intensely marked by the
creative intelligence and private obsessions of individuals,] are the products
of collective negotiation and exchange,” and works of criticism are no
different (vii). In this book, he
presents this argument in five chapters.
The first provides the theoretical underpinnings, and the next four use
these ideas to explore how plays in each of Shakespeare’s four major genres
(history, comedy, tragedy, and romance) succeed in making us believe in their
world, and in their world as one apart from ours. They do so, Greenblatt argues, by acquiring,
transforming, and returning to their audience “social energy,” and his goal is
“to understand the negotiations through which works of art obtain and amplify
such powerful energy” (7). He identifies
three principle modes of exchange through which art acquires this energy: appropriation, purchase, and symbolic acquisition. In literary works, the most common mode is
symbolic acquisition, where the work may either simulate a social performance
already seen as theatrical, use metaphors to indirectly invoke social practices
and their energy, or stage unrepresentable acts through metonymy. (10-11)
In considering
Shakespeare’s plays, then, Greenblatt foregrounds the ways in which they
participate in the social discourses of his time, not only borrowing from other
kinds of texts, but also shaping the theater and transforming and, sometimes,
undermining discourses of power. For
example, he uses King Lear to
illustrate how the tragedies transform a staging of religious ritual into
religious power. He begins by
considering the sacred’s character as the center of 16th century England’s
struggle to redefine social values. In
this context, supporters of the Anglican church sought to discredit exorcism,
for this ritual appropriated religious charisma, which rightly belonged to the
monarch, for its practitioners. They did
so by revealing exorcism as scripted, staged theater and by demonizing those
who presented these staged events as real.
In King Lear, Shakespeare
participates in this debunking of exorcism by having Edgar feign his own
possession and the exorcism of his father’s demons. At the same time, however, he undermines the
official position, for Edgar puts on these acts in the interest of good. The play “empties out” the ritual of exorcism,
but it also awakens the audience’s need for the release such a ritual provides. Therefore, it also “empties out” the church
officials’ position, leaving the audience feeling that “evacuated rituals,
drained of their original meaning, are preferable to no ritual at all” (127). In so doing, Shakespeare strengthens the need
for his theater’s rituals and the “spectacular impostures” it provides
(128). The social energy bound in
religious ritual is appropriated and transformed through its reproduction on
the stage.
The result of such
participation in social discourses is, according to Greenblatt, the “unresolved
and unresolvable doubleness” of “the aesthetic space . . . constituted by the
simultaneous appropriation of and swerving from the discourse of power”
(158-159). As a manifestation of
“mimetic economy,” the theater produces an object that both takes its value
from outside discourses, consuming their energy in the process, and separates
itself from the the world of exchange, maintaining that it arises from excess
and “uses up” nothing. (159-160) This
doubleness allows him, then, to maintain his belief that “sustained, scrupulous
attention to formal and linguistic design will remain at the center of literary
teaching and study” while still insisting on the necessity of exploring how the
text’s “borders” interact with the world that surrounds them (3).
In this book,
Greenblatt rejects both old historicism and new criticism; history cannot be
“stable antithesis or stable background” any more than aesthetic texts can
exist in isolation (95). As his
extensive citations from other types of texts reveal, he grounds his argument
on the idea of intertextuality, but his intertextuality operates primarily on
the level of discourse, rather than on the level of language itself. He is, for instance, relatively uninterested
in The Tempest’s verbal echoings of a
contemporary colonial text, but is vitally concerned with the discourse of
managed anxiety that both reveal and employ.
Finally, as he indicates in “Toward a Poetics of Culture” in his 1990 book
Learning to Curse, his ideas have developed in conversation with Michel
Foucault; they rest on the idea of cultural discourses that shape the forms
that history and its products (literary or otherwise) take. And the two seem to share the same discourse
to a great extent; Greenblatt’s work and language echo Foucault’s statement
that “discourses are objects of appropriation” (108), and his discussions of
Shakespeare as an author within the context of the 16th century joint-stock
theater company seem to answer Foucault’s call for the author to be considered
as a discursive property, the origins, conditions, and limitations of which can
be investigated.
I find it difficult to
evaluate Greenblatt’s approach because it has become the dominant paradigm for
textual analysis and corresponds to many of my own assumptions about and modes
of considering a text. What seems
crucial for my own use of it, however, is the underlying belief that it does
not constitute a doctrine, but is rather a practice. This fact makes it open to what I think is an
essential combination with other forms of criticism, for I do not believe it
can explain or address all issues alone.
For example, in 1992 Sara Lennox offered a feminist critique of the new
historicism in which she questioned its ability to consider discourses’ varying
coercive power and lamented the limits of its concept of agency, in which
action is limited “to that which is already discursively constituted”
(163). While these charges may be true,
if one can supplement it with the recent insights of other critical approaches,
such as speech act theory or gender studies, then such sticking points can be
addressed. And such combination is in
the spirit of the practice. For if, as
Greenblatt argues, the discourse of the Renaissance drama cannot be separated
from the discourses outside the theater, how could we expect contemporary
approaches to literary criticism to remain cleanly separate from each other?
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean
Negotiations: The Circulation of Social
Energy in Renaissance
England. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. “What is an
Author?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon,
1984. 101-120.
Lennox, Sarah. “Feminism and
New Historicism.” Monatshefte 84 (1992): 159-170.
Louis Montrose “Professing the
Rennaissance”
Christian Buss
This essay is primarily concerned with establishing a
renewed emphasis on the historical, social and political conditions and
consequences of literary production. Ultimately, it is an essay that tries to
delimitate the importance of how social discourses are linked with the
production of literature. Montrose’s fundamental, and given the time period
radical assertion is that there is an inherent reciprocity and mutual
consitutution of the linguistic and social.
For Montrose, deconstructive reading provides a deeply effective tool
for ideological analysis. Inherent in the discourse of literature there is a
problematization of which the translation of social norms and values takes
place within the production of literature. Thereby the representation of the
world in written discourse shapes the very world it is trying to reflect and
interpret.
This holds for the analyzer as well as the producer of a literary
work. As such, conditions must be placed on the individual’s ability to reflect
that allow for imprinting and transformation. As such, there must be a
replacement for the diachronic text of an autonomus literary history with the
delineation of a synchronic text of a cultural system. This implies that formal
and historical concerns are inseparable. What are wanted are histories that
have not been “abstracted from their historical matrices” (Montrose,
“Professing the Renaissance”).
Some of the key problems to be addressed in this new form of critical
production are that there are a number of possible configurations of the
relationships between cultural practice and literature, as well as there being
a question of what histories we use to define the social and the literary
discourses. Is it enough to examine the political discourse of the period in
question, or must we also look at the medical, the historical, the legal or
even the journalistic? As such, the structuralist’s laser-focus that has
removed the author from his or her own works is exploded to now include the
potential for a lens that casts too wide a glance and paints too broad a brush,
making meaningful analysis a Sisyphean task. The imperfection of a historical
record further problematizes such inquiry, as our primary record of the past
has itself, until recently, been literary, bringing into question how one can
delineate an outside to the literary and artistically productive discourses of
the time. But this in and of itself is the fundamental question of literary
analysis for Montrose and the source of his assertion that critical study is
the study of the dynamic of “the Historiciy of texts and the textuality of
history” and that by its very nature it is dynamic, unstable, and above all
else reciprocal.
Given this dynamism,
the meaning of a text cannot be stabilized, its interpreted meaning is always
conditional, is always socially productive and shaping/shaped by the
subjectivity of society. And this is what makes the text so powerful and
important. The Werther that we read today is a different Werther than that read
by members of DDR Germany, because the social and economic conditions of their
existence was fundamentally different from that of students living in 2002
America. As such, Montrose’s text is a call to arms, not only for the author to
be brought back into the text, for concept of the autonomy of the text to be
thrown to the wolves, but moreover for the researcher or critic to make sure to
incorporate and be aware of their own positionality within a text.
Gender Theory/ Feminist Studies
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992)
Katra Byram
Elizabeth
Bronfen was born in 1959 and educated at Munich and Harvard, where she studied
theory of drama and philology. Judging
from the titles of her books and articles, most of her work seems to be heavily
psychoanalytic, and this book, which she wrote as her Habilitationsschrift, presents no exception. She has been an English professor at the
university in Zurich since 1993.
In
this book, Bronfen investigates the plethora of aesthetic representations of
feminine death in order to inquire into the origins of such images’ power to
fascinate, as well as to expose the possible danger they possess as cultural
icons. Although she claims a range of
theoretical influences, psychoanalytic theory (primarily Lacanian) is by far
the dominant paradigm for her analysis.
Her underlying assumption is that “[Representations] repress by
localizing death away from the self, at the body of a beautiful woman, at the same
time that this representation lets the repressed return, albeit in a disguised
manner” (xi). The image of a dead woman
joins western culture’s two fundamental incarnations of the radical Other and
fixes them in the stability of signs, mitigating the threat each poses to the
(implicitly masculine) author and/or spectator.
The
book is divided into five parts: a
theoretical introduction, three sections that use textual analyses to develop
arguments about the functions images of feminine death fulfill, and a
conclusion that considers how some late 20th century women writers have
negotiated these tropes. The first of
the textual analysis sections presents images of feminine death as metaphoric,
where the text comes to represent the deanimated female body. To support her argument, Bronfen cites
narratives in which male protagonists kill the physical female body as they
attempt to represent it. They do so in
order to reduce the threat the female body poses, by reducing a sexual body to
a textual portrait, for instance. Such
representations affirm the “survivor’s ability to translate an ephemeral object
of sight into stable signs, which . . . will carry his own signature” (8). The threatening Other is safely dead and the
self intact and reassured. Bronfen also
cites texts in which the woman writes and stages her own death. As the woman destroys her oppressed and
passive female body, she is “writing
with her body,” the only means of “self-textualization” available to women
(141).
In
the second section, the figure of feminine death acts as an allegory that
neutralizes a threat to social stability.
These deaths are not “authored” like those in the first section, but
serve the same function of reducing the ambiguity that woman, who represents
both unity and truth and the impossibility of attaining either, embodies. The third section problematizes the
“solutions” these deaths offer and questions whether they might sometimes
reveal “not the triumph over femininity as
death, but the subversion of life by
death as femininity” (249). In other
words, the feminine corpse, while it neutralizes the threat of female sexuality
and death, also recalls their existence by its presence. The representation acts like a band-aid over
a “crack” to the real; it may shield one from having to look at the mess, but
it is a constant reminder that there is a wound underneath. Here Bronfen writes of texts in which dead
women cannot be satisfactorily categorized, uncanny doubles appear, or the dead
beloved functions as muse. She also
considers women’s implication in such social constructions and introduces the
idea of the “hysteric” who, recognizing that “she is alive only when spurred on
by the gaze of male recognition,” participates in forming herself as an object
of it (289).
Bronfen
assigns such a hysterical position to the women writers in the conclusion. She holds that “writing as a woman transpires
into an act of reading cultural texts . . . critically, so as to enact the
implied contradiction” (404). The women
writers she cites are complicit with masculine cultural texts, but they
undermine them through excess and parody.
In Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, for example,
the protagonist kills herself socially (through disappearance) and physically
(through plastic surgery) in order to “castrate her husband, and with him the
cultural formations he represents” (415).
Seeing the woman writer as subversive within her complicity is crucial
for Bronfen, who believes such a stance to be one of the only possibilities for
critical femininst writing.
This
book is important for two reasons.
First, while it seems to grow from the French feminist tradition, whose
writings rarely address specific texts, it applies this tradition’s ideas to
perceptive close readings of many well-known (mostly 19th century) literary
works, providing a concrete example of how they can be applied to textul
analysis. Second, it addresses a central
issue of psychoanalytic theory, the conflation of Woman/femininity and
death. Third, it examines a prominent
iconic and textual tradition which had been largely overlooked.
Still,
I recommend it only to those very interested in feminist and psychoanalytic
theory. The book is long (435 pages),
and its readability suffers due to convoluted sentences, psychoanalytic jargon,
and repetitious explications. Also,
Bronfen seems not to have made the jump from feminist concerns to questions of
gender. When she notes that a woman acts
in an hysteric mode because “she can design her self-representation only from
within her cultural image repertoire” and that writing from such a complicit
position may be her only means of contesting this repertoire, for instance, she
seems close to Butler’s assertion that one can only gain subject status through
a certain complicity (Bronfen 288, 406; Butler 15). Unlike Butler, however, she cites this
complicity as a problem only for women, and while her topic justifies a focus
on the female, it is not clear whether she considers such complicity to be a
problem for men at all. In addition,
much of her analysis seems to assume a relative identity of women with
femininity, tying psychoanalytic ideas about femininity exclusively and
automatically to all women and, hence, reinforcing the idea of essential
difference based on biological sex.
Although these asepects reduce the book’s value, they by no means negate
it, and anyone pursuing its topics should be aware of the book’s existence and
read at least part of it.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech:
A Politics of the Performative (1997)
Katra Byram
Judith
Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in 1984, and taught at both
Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins before coming to Berkeley, where she is Professor of
Comparative Literature and Rhetoric. She
is best known for her books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter,
both of which sparked a great deal of criticism and controversy on the way to
becoming immensely influential in gender studies and other fields.
In
Excitable Speech, Butler re-frames and, perhaps in response to
criticism, explicitly politicizes some of the central concepts of Bodies
that Matter as she addresses three contemporary political debates related
to the question of free speech:
regulation of hate speech and of pornography, and self-declarations of
homosexuality by members of the military.
All three of these debates are concerned with the way that speech
constructs identity, and all revolve around the question of whether the speech
act in question “only speaks,” or whether it actually does that which it
speaks--that is, whether it is perlocutionary or illocutionary. For illocutionary speech that does cannot claim protection under the
First Amendment and can be regulated.
While
Butler holds that since bodies become subjects through a linguistic process of
interpellation, words can wound these bodies materially, she argues against
state regulation of speech. Although
language as a whole shapes us, she argues against classifying any kind of
speech as inherently illocutionary, for she maintains that speech does not
always effectively do what its speaker intends it to do. Indeed, she says that “speech is always in
some ways out of our control,” and no speaker has sovereign control of his or
her speech (15).
Speakers
lack sovereignty not only because their intended effects may fail, but also
because their speech is borrowed from the start; in speaking, we necessarily
cite others, and others may in turn cite us.
Although this iterative quality of language constrains what we can say
and makes us complicit in the social structure of language, Butler argues that
it also provides the condition for subverting and changing language and
society. For “that the utterance can be
turned, untethered from its origin, is one way to shift the locus of authority
in relation to the utterance” (93).
Thus, activists can remove words from their origins in discourses of
hate and grant them new authority in new contexts; invectives such as “queer”
and “nigger” become tools for resistance.
Butler contends that this “gap between redundancy and repetition is the
space of agency,” for when we repeat others’ words without repeating their
meaning, we exercise our power to change language and the way it forms speaking
subjects (129).
We
cannot re-appropriate language that cannot be spoken, however. If “queer” becomes outlawed hate speech, it
must remain an invective forever, barred from possible recuperation through
subversive iteration. Moreover, when we
ask the state to regulate such speech, we give it the power to perform
illocutionary acts (enact laws) that will not only shape individual subjects,
as hate speech can, but will shape the context in which all future subjects
will form. Butler calls such acts
implicit censorship, for she holds that “to claim that certain speech is not
speech and, therefore, not subject to censorship [or protections against it] is
already to have exercised the censor” (128).
Entire categories of speech can thus lose their protected status and be
delegated to the realm of the unspeakable.
And this is dangerous, for the state does not always act impartially,
and political agendas often motivate such judgments. In presenting her case studies, for instance,
Butler claims that the Supreme Court of the early 90s ruled to curtail sexual
speech but to sanctify racist speech as a protected expression of opinion. In the end, then, we should prefer a world in
which we can change meaning, even if by choosing such a world, we expose
ourselves to the possibility of sometimes being wounded by words.
I
would recommend this book to anyone interested in considering how the work we
do as academics in the humanities might be related to the world beyond
campus. Not only does it make Butler’s
ideas about the performativity of speech politically relevant and illustrate
them in concrete ways, for example by analyzing Supreme Court decisions and
military policy, but it is fairly short and quite readable as compared to some
of Butler’s other writing. Throughout
the work, Butler also shows how her ideas derive from or arise in opposition to
the ideas of other scholars, including Austin, Foucault, Derrida, and Bordieu,
thus revealing her assumptions, providing the reader with a clear idea of where
she agrees with and how she differs from these others, and aiding further
investigations of the ideas presented. I
find her argument that those who would subvert linguistic structures must first
be complicit with them in order to achieve subject status particularly
interesting, especially given that it seems to echo in other recent theoretical
works (Elisabeth Bronfen, for instance).
Do these ideas have a common origin, and if so, what is it? Are there current opponents of such
instrumental complicity, and if so, who are they and what perspectives do they
represent? Finally, I heard a talk
yesterday in which a political scientist founded his approach to debates on
post-structuralism within political science on the assumption that individuals
possess agency, although not autonomy, which makes me wonder about Butler’s own
affirming of agency in this book (Mark Bevir, “Political Foundationalism and Post-Structuralism,”
12/2). Is this concern with preserving
(or resurrecting) agency within post-modernist and post-structuralist
frameworks particular to political science and law (fields to which Butler has
recently turned), or is it becoming a concern among post-modernists and
post-structuralists across the board?
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge,
1997.
Censorship is a productive form of
power: it is not merely privative, but
formative as well. I propose that
censorship seeks to produce subjects according to explicit and implicit norms,
and that the production of the subject has everything to do with the regulation
of speech. The subject’s production
takes place not only through the regulation of that subject’s speech, but
through the regulation of the social domain of speakable discourse. The question is not what it is I will be able
to say, but what will constitute the domain of the sayable within which I begin
to speak at all. To become a subject
means to be subjected to a set of implict and explict norms that govern the
kind of speech that will be legible as the speech of a subject. (133)
Michel Foucault, Madness and
Civilization
Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani
Michel Foucault (b.
October 15, 1926, Poitiers, France- d. June 25, 1984, Paris), the son of a
physician, studied philosophy and psychology at the Ecole Normale Superieure.
His major works include Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of
Things, The Birth of the Clinic, The History of Sexuality,
and Discipline and Punish.
In Madness and
Civilization Foucault explores the genealogy of madness. He traces its Entstehung
from the 17th century, to the medicine of solids and fluids, to
psychiatry, and psychology. Society defines itself through the exclusion of the
madman, and madness exists as an invention of discourse; it reflects
philosophical and historical constructs.
Foucault studies the
ruptures and discontinuities of madness, critically interpreting history rather
than accepting it as objective truth. He explores the system of rules leading
to the production of knowledge, and to social and institutional practices (18).
In Foucault’s own words: “We have yet to write the history of that other form
of madness, by which men in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbors
(ix)…we must speak of those actions re-examined in history, leaving in abeyance
all that may figure as a conclusion, as a refuge in truth” (x).
Madness forms a
necessary component in the establishment of reason and truth: “To put it in
another way, madness is the false punishment to a false solution, but by its
own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly
resolved. It conceals beneath error the secret enterprise of truth” (33).
Reason is born out of the shutting out and controlling of that which it deems
unreason. According to Foucault unreason carries the origin of all possible
reason, and with the beginning of the seventeenth century looses its
significance and instructive value. Unreason is the locus of madness’
possibilities and the threatening space of an absolute freedom.
Unreason forms the
body of the madman, and carries error, sin, non-truth, impurity, and evil.
Foucault thus explores the inscription of discourse on the body. As a figure
the madman represents the perversion, distortion, and compromise of the law. In
this respect, the Hospital General was not created as a medical institution but
rather as a juridical power structure, which decides, judges and executes (40).
The General Hospital contained the poor, the unemployed, the insane, and the
criminal; and “the struggle against the established powers, against the family,
against the Church, continues [in the eighteenth century] at the very heart of
confinement” (225).
With the birth of the
asylum, Foucault explores the role of judgment and guilt: “…by this guilt the
madman became an object of punishment always vulnerable to himself and the
Other” (247). A juridical microcosm of judge and executioner was to be present
in the madman’s own mind, and he was to recognize himself in that system.
Psychology furthermore organizes around a system of punishment: “A purely
psychological medicine was made possible only when madness was alienated in
guilt” (182-83). In the nineteenth century the figure of the physician
represents Father and Judge, Family and Law, Order, Authority and Punishment.
Foucault refers to Freud as follows: “he regrouped
[the asylum’s] powers, extended them to the maximum by uniting them in the
doctor’s hands…The doctor, as an alienating figure, remains a key to
psychoanalysis” (278). He goes on to say: “instead of making blindness the
condition for possibilities, it described madness, the blindness of madness, as
the psychological effect of moral fault. And thereby compromises what had been
essential in the experience of unreason. What had been blindness would become
unconsciousness, what had been error would become fault, and everything in
madness that designated the paradoxical manifestation of non-being would become
the natural punishment of a moral evil. In short, that whole vertical hierarchy
which constituted the vertical structure of unreason,…would now collapse and
spread over a domain which psychology and morality would soon occupy” (158). It
is through this system that the scientific psychiatry and psychology of the
nineteenth century became possible.
Foucault traces the history of confinement as
follows: “Before having the medical meaning we give it, or that at least we
like to suppose it has, confinement was required by something quite different
from any concern with curing the sick. What made it necessary was an imperative
of labor (46)…It constituted one of the answers the seventeenth century gave to
an economic crisis that affected the entire Western world: reduction of wages,
unemployment, scarcity of coin” (49). Beggars were arrested, confined, and put
to work, to prevent stealing, and social and political uprisings. Moral
requirement turned to an economic tactic. By trying to enforce morality,
institutions became immoral themselves.
With a new economy of thought in the eighteenth
century, the poor were no longer confined; madmen now replaced the poor:
“Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the
social order a figure which did not find its place within it… by confinement
madness is acknowledged to be nothing” (115-116). During the classical period
madness became the paradoxical manifestation of non-being: “Joining vision and
blindness, image and judgment, hallucination and language, sleep and waking,
day and night, madness is ultimately nothing, for it unites in them all that is
negative. But the paradox of this nothing is to manifest itself, to explode in
signs, in words, in gestures” (107).
Foucault refers to the writings of Sade, and goes
on to say that since the eighteenth century the voices of unreason can only be
heard in the works of Hoelderlin, Nerval, Artaud, and Nietzsche. The awareness
of madness accompanies an analysis of modernism, for in the modern world works
of art explode out of madness: “Nietzsche’s madness- that is the dissolution of
his thought- is that by which his thought opens out onto the modern world…This
does not mean it is the only language common to the work of art and the modern
world…but it means that, through madness, a work that seems to drown in the
world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the
features of pathology alone…; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art
opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach
without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself…; where
there is a work of art, there is no madness” (289).
Foucault’s writings not only
contain the structuralist and post-structuralist project, but also bear great
influence on gender studies, new historicism, and cultural theory. Foucualt’s
works have shifted the horizon of expectation, bringing to light a series of
new ways to approach and interpret text. Foucault’s approach can lead to many
interesting projects: why do Hoelderlin’s writings appeal to projects of Geistesgeschichte,
mainly Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung and to Foucaultdian
analysis? How come the Western world is filled with Eastern spirituality? How
come terrorism exists?
Sigmund Freud (b. May
6, 1856, Freiburg, Austria- d. September 23, 1939, London), Austrian
Neurologist and founder of Psychoanalysis, developed his psychoanalytic method,
between 1892-95, using the technique of free association. In 1908 Freud
published his article “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren,” the same year of the
establishment of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. In 1923 Freud was
diagnosed with cancer, and in 1938 moved to London due to the annexation of
Austria by the Nazis.
In his essay “Der
Dichter und das Phantasieren” Freud connects the playful world of the child
with the fantasy realm of the poet. The poet’s Kinderspiel lies in his
language and his artistic technique in the imaginary and unreal. In his
language the poet creates the tools with which he dreams, and transfigures
before his audience what in reality displeases into a source of pleasure.
According to Freud,
fantasies arise from dissatisfaction, vary with changing life impressions, and
remain specific to each subject: “Man darf sagen, der Glueckliche phantasiert
nie, nur der Unbefriedigte. Unbefriedigte Wuensche sind die
Triebkraefte der Phantasien, und jene einzelne Phantasie ist ein
Wunscherfuellung, eine Korrektur der unbefriedigenden Wirklichkeit” (216). Fantasy functions to correct an
unsatisfying reality, and consists of the erotic and Ehrgeizige, both
motives of concealment before the social fabric. While maturing the adult
begins to replace play with fantasy, and feeling embarrassed and ashamed, keeps
secret. While the playful world of the child lies exposed, the fantasy realm of
the adult remains concealed.
Fantasies of the adult reflect the desire to return to an early infantile
state: “Die seelische Arbeit knuepft an einen aktuellen Eindruck, einen Anlass
in der Gegenwart an, der imstande war, einen der grossen Wuensche der Person zu
wecken, greift von da aus auf die Erinnerung eines frueheren, meist infantilen,
Erlebnis zurueck, in dem jener Wunsch erfuellt war, und schaft nun eine auf die
Zukunft bezogene Situation, welche sich als die Erfuellung jenes Wunsches
darstellt, eben dem Tagtraum oder die Phantasie, die nun die Spuren ihrer
Herkunft vom Anlasse traegt” (217-218). Desires use their surroundings to reflect ideals of the
past upon an image of the future. In this respect, fantasy functions within
three different time frames: past, present, and future.
Freud furthermore
explores the relationship between daydreams and dreams at night. Daydreams play
before the eyes during waking life, veiling reality, while repressed desires
surface in dreams at night. Whether in light or darkness, in the conscious or
unconscious, both carry wish-fulfilling fantasies. Freud also refers to poetry
as a daydream, a Wunscherfuellung. In this light, individuals see their
repressed desires and fantasies at play in the work of the poet. “…Zwischen
jeden einzelnen Ich und den anderen erheben, liegt die Eigentliche Ars poetica”
(223). The art of
poetry lies in the relationship it creates between individual and poet, and
Freud explores elements of projection and identification during the writing and
reading process.
Although poetic creations do not all reflect daydreams, Freud nevertheless
believes they bear a connection to this model: “Ein starkes aktuelles Erlebnis
weckt im Dichter die Errinnerung an ein frueheres, meist der Kindheit
angehoeriges Erlebnis auf, von welchem nun der Wunsch ausgeht, der sich in der
Dichtung seine Erfuellung schaft; die Dichtung selbst laesst sowohl elemente
des frischen Anlasses als auch der alten Erinnerung erkennen” (221). Through his work the author brings to light the conflict
of his inner being. Thus in order to understand the poet and his work, it is
necessary to trace requiring fantasies in his text.
While the average daydreamer hides and represses his fantasies, the poet
liberates curiosities: “Man nennt einen solchen Lustgewinn, der uns geboten
wird, um mit ihm die Entbindung groesserer Lust aus tiefer reichenden
psychischen Quellen zu ermoeglichen, eine Verlockungspraemie oder eine Verlust.
Ich bin der Meinung, das alle aestetische Lust, die uns der Dichter verschafft,
den Character solcher Vorlust traegt, und das der eigentliche Genuss des
Dichtwerkes aus der Befreiung von Spannung in unserer Seele hervorgeht” (223). Although the poet’s work
represents the egotistical daydream, it nevertheless allows his audience to
enjoy their fantasies without shame. For Freud fantasies represent a
significant source of knowledge and insight into the human condition.
In Freud’s “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” the
author, unlike Foucault’s “What is an Author” and Roland Barthes’ “The Death of
the Author,” takes center stage. Foucault’s and Barthes’ perspective sets
itself against Freud’s notion of the author as a unified subject. Freud’s model
leaves out the social and historical context of the literary work, while purely
emphasizing the individual. Ironically, even though his work rests upon the
individual subject, he makes large-scale applications of psychoanalytic
concepts without taking into consideration differences evolving around time,
gender, culture, race, and historical and social conditions. The danger with
Freud’s theory is that it tries to fit everyone under the same psychoanalytic
umbrella.
When German literature and theory evolved around Geistesgeschichte,
Freud turned his attention towards the inner life of the individual. In
accordance with reception theory, Freud’s psychoanalytical perspective shifted
the horizon of expectation. It would be interesting to determine in which ways
and to what degree the horizon was shifted, and how our fantasies affect our
reception of art, literature, and film. From the perspective of colonialism and
post-colonialism one could study how individuals from different backgrounds
play a role in each other’s fantasies.
From a cultural
perspective, it would be appealing to look at fantasy as a practice, and to
trace it as such throughout history, from the creation of myths to film and
mass culture. From a feminist perspective one could see how poetry and male
fantasies construct the feminine, and how poetry written by women reflect
elements of feminine Wunscherfuellung. One could study how fantasies
function within and against the social norm and how linguistic structure reflects
this. One could also look at the linguistic nature of fantasy and poetry to
determine its monological and dialogical arrangement. From a Derridian
perspective it would be interesting to see the play of differance within the
signifying chain of language in poetic fantasy.
Sigrid
Weigel, Die Stimme der Medusa (1987)
Julie Koser
The title of Weigel’s
(1950-) 1987 critical work, Die Stimme
der Medusa, plays on the title of Hélène Cixous’ 1975 article, The Laugh of the Medusa. Borrowing heavily from both Cixous and Luce
Irigaray, Weigel presents here a kind of summary of her previous research on Frauenliteratur in an attempt to
construct a more complete image not only of its beginnings but also of its
future. Weigel specifically addresses
the issues of Sprachlosigkeit and the
inability of woman to place herself in the role of literary subject, i.e.
inability to say Ich. Indeed, the appropriation of the mythological
figure, Medusa, a recurring theme in feminist writing, has come to symbolize
the voiceless woman, silenced by the male dominant discourse. In this work, Weigel draws upon numerous
literary examples of “Frauenliteratur,”
most all from the 20th century, to better depict the evolution and
nature of women’s literature, specifically in the BRD, with the exception of
several works by Christa Wolf.
Before pursuing her
literary analysis, Weigel first establishes the paradox, which characterizes
feminist research, namely the attempt to construct historical images of women
who rarely appear in historical works. “Zudem
ist die Literaturgeschichtsschreibung von Frauen-Literatur eigentlich ein
Paradox, da die kritische Lektüre der Überlieferungen gezeigt hat, daß die
Konstitution von Geschichte, Entwicklung und Fortschritt stets über einem
Ausschluß des Weiblichen funktioniert” (11).
Rather than
pursuing the male literary representation of women, Weigel specifically
examines women’s role in literary production and the manner in which they
construct themselves in their texts.
Initially, Weigel
addresses the important distinction between “Frauenliteratur” and “Feministische
Literatur.” For her purposes, Weigel
is most interested in Frauenliteratur,
which has been identified by its lack of fiction (20). She then pursues the difficulty involved in
defining what exactly this kind of literature is, whether it is literature by
women, for women, about women, etc., in the end opting to avoid classifying it
and confining it to specific characteristics.
While Weigel does not directly mention Cixous here, we might be led to
wonder how this notion of “Frauenliteratur”,
which avoids all classification, simply because it would then omit some
writers, differs from the allusive nature of l’écriture feminine?
Weigel locates the
emergence of the Frauenbewegung,
which coincided with the student movement of the 1960s, prior to the appearance
of “Frauenliteratur.” Literature that appeared prior to the
established feminist discourse, does not necessarily address the issues which
became so central to the movement, “weil ihre Literatur traditionellen
Weiblichkeitskonzepten verhaftet oder dem männlichen Literaturbetrieb angepaßt
sei” (28). The need to establish a space
outside the “phallocentric” discourse in which women could write, unhindered by
dominant male language, became a central theme for both feminist authors and
theorists (31).[26]
Weibliche
Subjektivität becomes the central focus of “Frauenliteratur”
in the mid 70s when the women’s movement began to coincide more with women’s
literary production. Weigel cites the
role that the American feminist movement played in the development of both the
German women’s movement and its authors (48).
Weigel conceives of the subjective nature of women’s
writing in that the “Unausgesprochene Orientierung ist dabei der Entwurf eines
emanzipierten weiblichen Subjekts: selbständig, selbstbewußt und unabhängig von
tradierten Rollenmustern und männlichen Zuschreibungen und Bevormundungen”
(95). The form that most of these subjective works take
is either diary entries, journals or even letter writing[27]
all of which allow women to express their personal stories and experiences.
Weigel further examines the nature of women’s writing, addressing the
multiplicity of meaning and perspective, which characterizes the specific
literary examples she presents. She
explores the possibilities of autobiographical works and their implications for
“Frauenliteratur” but also addresses
the problem of perspective in the act of remembering. In addition, the transcendence from private
to public sphere is also directly related to the autobiographical style of
subjective writing.
Weigel points to the
overwhelming majority of literary images of women, constructed by men, and the
images women authors construct of themselves, stating that women have taken on
this prescribed roles instead of writing outside these constructs. However, she cites Julia Kristeva and her
theory that in order for women to overturn the rules and guidelines constructed
for them in the symbolic realm, they must master these rules to turn them to
their advantage (170).
What is perhaps most
interesting is Weigel and Irigaray’s acceptance of psychoanalysis, as proposed
by both Freund and even Lacan. Rather
than fully rejecting this psychoanalytic discourse, which clearly puts women at
a disadvantage from the beginning, both Irigaray and Weigel work from within
the discourse, to break it down and shake things up. For example, Weigel broaches the subject of
hysteria and women writing their bodies.
Here she draws on Irigaray to propose that women can take this medical
discourse, these notions of illness and hysteria and turn them into an
empowering means of expressing themselves, through their bodies, speaking in a
language not governed by man, “Ist die Hysterie nicht vielleicht ein
privilegierter Ort, wo das, was spricht, allerdings ‘latent’, ‘leidend’
aufbewahrt wird?” (116). However, Weigel
points out that Irigaray does not designate this as a positive means of
expression, but merely places it outside the symbolic, as an alternative to
male language. Weigel does however
introduce the critical work of Pola Veseken, who calls into question Freud’s
whole concept of the Urworte. “In einem programmatischen Kapitel
‘Auszug aus Ödipalien’ werden Ausbrüche aus dem klassischen System
angedeutet. Freuds Titel vom ‘Gegensinn
der Urworte’ ironisch aufnehmend, schreibt Veseken sozusagen den Gegen-Sinn der
psychoanalytischen Urworte, der in der Körper-Sprache der Frau darauf wartet,
zur Sprache gebracht zu werden” (134).
I believe Weigel’s
project can be briefly summarized in the following terms. Women have allowed themselves to write and
live within the terms constructed for them by men and that to break out of this
mold, women have recourse to the expression of their experiences and
perceptions as women. Their writing
cannot be easily defined and should not be limited in its scope. However, as Cixous proposes in Laugh of the Medusa, just because it
alludes definition does not mean that it doesn’t exist! Rather than pushing any real feminist agenda,
I feel like Weigel simply presents us with a wide scope of existing feminist
theory and the literary implications of this theoretical practice or rather the
theoretical implications of women’s writing.
Her text, while failing to implement any new ideas into the feminist
discourse, provides a good resource for an overview of “Frauenliteratur.”
Simone
de Beauvoir, Le Deuxieme Sexe (1949)
Julie
Koser
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) began developing this work
as early as 1935. Composition of the
text did not begin until 1946, at which point de Beauvoir had only intended to
write an essay on women by a woman. de
Beauvoir began work on the text at a time when her lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, had
come under attack for his philosophical and political leanings, from which her
reputation did not escape unscathed.
The importance of this work was compounded by the fact
that French women only first gained the right to vote in 1947, relatively late
in comparison to their German and American counterparts. Within an existentialist framework and
spanning more than 700 pages, de Beauvoir provides a female perspective to the
history and evolution of, as well as the emancipation from woman's historical
role in society. To achieve this goal,
de Beauvoir delves into the biological, historical, and mythical
representations of women in book one of Le
Deuxieme Sexe, Facts and Myths. In the second book, Woman's Life Today, de Beauvoir, explores how these established
discourses, concerning the nature of woman, play out in a modern context, i.e.
mid 20th century society. It is here
that de Beauvoir addresses the future of women and their impending yet
problematic liberation from oppression and initiation into society as man's
equal.
From the very beginning, de Beauvoir establishes that the
inferiority assigned to woman is not a biological fact, rather it is a social
construct. "One is not born, but
rather becomes, a woman…it is civilization as a whole that produces this
creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as
feminine" (267). As much as Thomas
of Aquinas and Aristotle might have argued that a woman merely a deformed or
incomplete male, de Beauvoir argues that "Society, being codified by man,
decrees that woman is inferior" (717) and that man perpetuates this myth
in order to serve his own goals and situation.
de Beauvoir claims that, "Few myths have been more advantageous to
the ruling caste than the myth of woman: it justifies all privileges and even
authorizes their abuse" (255).
While de Beauvoir does not deny the inherent biological differences
between the sexes, she locates the source of women's oppression as external,
with woman being acted upon. "But
that body is not enough to give an answer to the question that is before us:
why is woman the Other?"
(37) It is in search of the answer to
this question that de Beauvoir pursues for the majority of her book.
For de Beauvoir, man perceives himself as subject, as the
absolute, the center. In doing so he
casts woman in the role of the "Other," always that which he sees as
different from himself. "…the
Church, the Synagogue, the Republic, Humanity are women; so also are Peace,
War, Liberty, the Revolution, Victory, Man feminizes the ideal he sets up before
him as the essential Other, because woman is the material representation of
alterity; that is why almost all allegories, in language as in pictorial
representation, are women" (179).
However, the Other is not uncommonly depicted as the negative aspects of
man. In terms of Christianity, the man
as subject possesses all the moral and pious qualities, whereas woman, the
Other, constitutes original sins and sins of the flesh. "The Christian is divided within
himself; the separation of body and soul, of life and spirit, is complete;
original sin makes the body the enemy of the soul; all ties of the flesh seem
evil" (167). Rather than proposing
that men and women become identical, de Beauvoir encourages the view that women
develop and begin to define themselves as subject rather than Other.
Following this line of thought, gender as a social
construct codified by men, it comes then as no surprise that de Beauvoir
proposes the problem of women's inferiority not as a woman's problem, but
rather as man's problem. "Just as
in America there is no Negro problem, but rather a white problem; just as
'anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem: it is our problem'; so the woman
problem has always been a man's problem" (128). Here de Beauvoir draws on ideas expressed in
the works of Myrdal's The American
Dilemma and Sartre's Réflexions sur
la question juive. de Beauvoir
perceives the gradual liberties gained by women as progress in the right
direction, which have come about by a combination of action on the part of the
oppressed and a willingness to acquiesce on the part of the oppressor, even if
only to benefit himself. "The fact
is that oppressors cannot be expected to make a move of gratuitous generosity;
but at one time the revolt of the oppressed, at another time even the very
evolution of the privileged caste itself, creates new situations"
(729). Woman must, by slow gains,
steadily work to transcend her status as oppressed, exclusively as the other,
and to strive toward subjectivity and thus equality. Ideally, de Beauvoir sees woman's
emancipation resulting in both man and woman "mutually recognizing each
other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other" (731).
de Beauvoir, drawing on the theories of Marx, Engels, and
Bebel, claims that the roots of woman's oppression are closely tied to the practice
of capitalism and its fetish for private property. "Since the oppression of woman has its
cause in the will to perpetuate the family and to keep the patrimony intact,
woman escapes complete dependency to the degree in which she escapes from the
family; if a society that forbids private property also rejects the family, the
lot of woman it is found to be considerably ameliorated" (89). Here de Beauvoir draws upon the example of
life in Sparta, a communal regime, which rejected the principal of private
property. Later in her work, de Beauvoir
draws upon Marx and Engels' promise of woman's liberation through the
destruction of private property.
"Engels showed that the lot of woman has been closely tied to the
history of private property; a calamity put the patriarchate in place of the
matrilineal regime and enslaved woman to the patrimony. But the industrial revolution was the
counterpart of that loss of rights and would lead to feminine
emancipation" (113). But de
Beauvoir notes with disappointment the failure of this theory to become a
reality.
de Beauvoir later returns to the notion of the family as
oppressive instrument. However, she
draws a connection between ownership and sexual possession of woman by man,
particularly the role of virginity.
"But virginity is demanded for more immediate reasons when a man
regards his wife as his personal property…The surest way of asserting that
something is mine is to prevent others from using it. And nothing seems to a man to be more
desirable than what has never belonged to any human being: then the conquest
seems like a unique and absolute event" (154). To an extent, de Beauvoir proposes that the
role of women within the family, becomes that of reproductive machine for the
perpetuation of the patriarchal institution.
The reproductive emancipation of woman is due primarily to
the invention and increased practice of birth control. This frees woman from her reproductive
slavery, allowing her the opportunity, but not necessarily the realization of
complete independence and equality.
While civic equality might be a great advancement in the movement toward
the emancipation of women, it is meaningless without economic independence and
vice versa. "According to French
law, obedience is no longer included among the duties of a wife, and each woman
citizen has the right to vote; but these civil liberties remain theoretical as
long as they are unaccompanied by economic freedom" (679). A woman might achieve financial emancipation,
but this does not necessarily make her equal in the minds of men. "The woman who is economically
emancipated from man is not for all that in a moral, social, and psychological
situation identical with that of man" (682).
Women, for all their efforts, had never - at least at the
time this work was written - successfully managed to organize as a movement of
women. Therefore, de Beauvoir sees that
the fate of woman's complete emancipation lies in the hands of man. He must first be willing to give up control
before he can see woman in a different light.
For women to occupy a new role in society, man must first come to accept
this new situation. "What is
certain is that today it is very difficult for women to accept at the same time
their status as autonomous individuals and their womanly destiny; this is the
source of the blundering and restlessness which sometimes cause them to be
considered the lost sex…What must be hoped for is that men for their part will
unreservedly accept the situation that is coming into existence; only then will
women be able to live in that situation without anguish" (263).
The implications of de Beauvoir's ground-breaking work
still resonates within the Feminist community.
The Second Sex is still cited
and referred to by such Feminists as Sigrid Weigel, Luce Irigaray, as well as
Hélène Cixous. Her notion of woman as
the "Other" as always already taking second stage to the male subject
continues to have implications for gender studies today. A working knowledge of this work would prove
invaluable when reading the French feminist circle (Cixous, Kristeva, and
Irigaray) as well as other post-structuralist feminists.
Julie Rivkind and Michael Ryan,
“Contingencies of Gender”
Christian Buss
This essay attempts to describe the development of Gender
studies out of late sixties feminist studies. In the late 1960’s there was a
redefinition of sexual values, with gender identities outside of the
heterosexual beginning to be accepted. There was an endd to Adrienne Rich’s
“Compulsory heterosexuality”. With that the culture that viewed female
relationships as suspicious began to associate “other” males with a similar
questionining and suspicion. The work of the gay and lesbian movement coincided
with the work of the feminists, ultimately culminating in a feminist break.
This break came about from the definition/creation of two worlds by the
feminists, one of gender identity and the other of sexual identitiy. For
feminists, sexual identity was either male or female, with females exhibiting
masculine traits associated with the male, and vice versa.
For gender studies researchers, however, both categories
were fluid, with a wide variedy of gender and sexual relationships. Gay and
lesbian studies therefore began to peel away the layers of prejudice and
studied the distortions of gender roles of the non-straight. Paradigmatic was
Foucault’s work in the “History of Sexuality”, and his determination that
gender is a historically variable category. Foucalt’s basic argument was that
homosexuality was a social, medical and ontological category invented in the
late 19th century, that was deeply tied to modern heterocentric
gender cultures attempts to anathemize non-reproductive sexual alternatives. In
the 18th and 19th century, the increased discourse on sex
was therefore done with a purpose, the purpose to “expel from reality the form
off sexuality that were not amenable to reproduction.” With this sexual
irregularity became associated with mental illness, with a subsequent rise in
the multiple implantation of perversions to supplant the pre-existent judicial
limitations on sexuality that were marriage-centered but had broken down by the
late 18th century. As such, the medical discourses were called in to
help stigmatize the “non-organic” sexual practices. This medical examination
itself became a means of establishing power relationships that formed zones of
the illicit, saturation points of sexuality that extracted sexuality into
devices of power, witnessed in the rise of fetishism and the increasing
segregation of the sexes.
In the late
1970’s and 1980’s attention turned to all gender formations, moving away from
what Martha Vicinius has called the “Bi-polar opposition” model of sexuality.
In the 80’s the argument was advanced that heterosexuality if a “panic” flight
from homosexuality, brought about by Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men, an essay that claims that heterosexual desire is
always modeled on another male’s desire and always hasx a homosocial cast.
Underlying
all gender theory’s work is a post-structuralist paradigm that contends that
all axiomatic oppositions are contingent or false, and that rather than a polar
model of sexuality the concept of a spectrum or range of possible genders and
sexualities is more useful as an ontological category. With this newfound range
of possibilities within Gender studies, the primary task of the past decades
has been to explore the instability of all gender identity, with a subsequent
rise in queer, transgender and masculine studies. Post-colonial Studies
Julia Kristeva. Strangers to
Ourselves (1991)[28]
Raised in communist
Bulgaria, Kristeva arrived in Paris in 1964 to pursue doctoral studies on a
research fellowship. By 1967 her
articles had appeared in Critique and
Tel Quel. She worked closely with semiotician Roland
Barthes, studied Freud and Lacan, became a psychoanalyist as well as a
linguistic theorist. She became chair of
linguistics at University of Paris in 1974, with a visiting appointment at
Columbia University. In 1990 the French
government made her “chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres.” Other works (English translations)
include: About Chinese Women (1977),
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), Tales of Love (1987), In the
Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1987), Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy (1989), New Maladies of the Soul (1995).
Important throughout
to Kristeva’s argument is the concept of cosmopolitanism.[29] She finds foreignness and cosmopolitanism to
be related and traces them through literature proper as well as in political
and medical documents. By doing so, Kristeva enables the reader to witness the
historical development of the idea of the Other, culminating in her
interpretation/cooptation of Freud that man is a stranger to himself. She advances this theory by purporting that
the physical, exterior foreigner has a counterpart in the psychic, interior
Other. Specifically, she contends that
the “foreigner lives within us: he is the
hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which
understanding and affinity founder” (1).
The psychoanalytic conclusion to this argument is that by recognizing
the stranger within ourselves, “we are spared detesting him in himself” (1).
Kristeva begins with
the Greeks, whose word for a member of a given city-state, koinonia, expressed the “community of citizens as based on their
participation in political life, not on the basis of racial or social criteria”
(50). (Like Edward Said in Orientalism, Kristeva notes how
Aeschylus in The Persians used the
construction of a “barbaric” Orient to contrast with the Greek concept of
freedom: “[H]enceforth the barbarian was
to be identified as the enemy of democracy” (52). The Stoics also envisioned the far limits of
their world to be encompassed within the city-state (57/8). Nevertheless, their theory was not as
isolationist as it may sound, for it lay embedded within an overarching principle
of oikeiosis. The term implied both an interior, “permanent
taking hold of oneself” as well as a bond with ever-widening circles of
familiarity that extended from “close relatives and end[ed] up with the whole
of mankind” (57). The Hebrews of the Old
Testament granted the foreigner special status, for 1) they themselves had long
been sojourners in strange lands, and 2) the foreigner “might chance to be
God’s unwonted although inevitable unveiler” (66). According to Kristeva, this universalism
suffered under a fourth- and fifth-century dogmatic, exclusive Christian
cosmopolitanism that “bore in its womb the ostracism that excluded the other
belief and ended up with the Inquisition” (87).
The first clear
(legalistic) definition of the foreigner, as one who “does not belong to the
state in which we are, the one who does not have the same nationality,” was
ushered in by the establishment of modern nation-states (96). The foreigner then became a frightening,
indefinable being, posited somewhere between man and citizen (98): “The world of barbarity thus comes to a head
in a single world composed of states, in which only those people organized into
national residences are entitled to have rights” (151). Diderot, Montesquieu,
and Rousseau took up the question of what rights were to be granted to such an
interstitial creature. (Eventually, Nazism and ethnic cleansing would become
logical consequences of the Enlightenment.)
Kristeva’s original contribution to this discourse is in seeing the
Freudian involution of the strange within the psyche as a metaphor for the
Stranger within oneself. Thus, the
foreigner is placed not only within national borders but within the unconscious
as well. Some might find the
implications distressing: “Uncanny,
foreignness is within us: we are our own
foreigners, we are divided” (181). As
psychoanalyst, Kristeva believes that a “changed attitude of mind” (195) toward
the foreigner must prevail before any political/legal changes (voting rights,
responsibilities of dual citizenship) obtain.
Commentary/Associations
Kristeva begins her
argument proper in the second chapter, the first being taken up in a lyrical
psychological profile of her hypothesized Stranger: “Tearing oneself away from family, language,
and country in order to settle down elsewhere is a daring action accompanied by
sexual frenzy: no more prohibition,
everything is possible. It matters
little whether the crossing of the border is followed by debauchery or, on the
contrary, by fearful withdrawal” (30).
Yet, for what percentage of foreigners might this statement be
true? Such a generalization is amenable
to statistical verification, such as is done for sociological research. Might not “tearing oneself away” from one’s culture
instead reinforce inherited moral strictures, rather than result in “debauchery”
and “withdrawal”? Furthermore, her
proposed psychoanalytic remedy for xenophobia rests upon an argument by
absence: “If I am a foreigner, there are
no foreigners. Therefore Freud does not
talk about them” (192). Perhaps he
simply thought better of the idea.
Kristeva’s
theoretical construct of the Stranger may have an antecedent in Georg Simmel’s
essay, “The Stranger” (1908). Though a
good portion of his argument concerns the socio-economic reality of the
Stranger, it is given a new inflection by Kristeva’s work. For example, the Stranger is distinguished by
his objectivity, by the trust he engenders among others: “[H]e often receives the most surprising
revelations and confidences, at times reminiscent of a confessional, about
matters which are kept carefully hidden from everybody with whom one is close”
(Simmel 145).[30] Replacing the word “receives” with “imparts”
describes the function of the unconscious, the internal cosmopolitan who knows
no borders, no restrictions of domain.
Post-Colonial Studies
Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 1990
M.Huffmaster
By examining the ways in which
literary narratives participate in the construction of a nation, observing the
nation as it is written, so to speak, the contributors to this volume highlight
the partial, overdetermined nature of meaning in any such construct. The nation so viewed becomes problematical,
displaying a lack of closure, like every other linguistic sign. The essays collected here contest the
totality, or unity, of a national culture, showing how the array of meanings
and symbols connected with the nation is disseminated from widely disparate
sources. They thus seek simultaneously
to alter the object of their study, the way of conceiving of that object. Cultural difference and minority discourse
are two common threads throughout.
David
Simpson’s article on Walt Whitman, by way of example, points up how the
celebrated singer of American democracy essentially ignores social division,
subsuming plurality and difference into one voice, the poet’s. Nowhere in Whitman’s work is there record of
the policies of Indian removal that had been in effect since the 1830s. And on a linguistic level, his praising of
aboriginal words (in particular place names such as Mississippi, Connecticut,
or Ohio) amounts to their appropriation; instead of retaining a feeling of
otherness (as was more often the case with Fenimore Cooper’s representations of
Native American languages, by way of contemporary contrast), such words become
poetic English for Whitman, valued for their assonance, rhythm, or
onomatopoetic possibilities. Similarly,
the issue of slavery gets scant mention in his verse, as is true of interracial
conflict in general, and rather than admit of the tensions within white society
the bard opts to sing the praises of commerce.
The
first essay in the volume, a translation of Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture at the
Sorbonne, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” provides an interesting point of departure
from which to consider the other articles, which discuss literature from Latin
America, Australia, England, and the United States. One contribution that might be of particular
interest to Germanists is Martin Thom’s,
titled “Tribes within nations: the ancient Germans and the history of modern
France.”
Editor
Homi K. Bhabha’s essay, “DissemiNation:
time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation,” is more
explicitly theoretical than the other pieces in the collection. The word “DissemiNation” in the title, together with its peculiar punctuation,
reveals the author’s indebtedness to Derrida.
Here an excerpt that illustrates the text’s overall thrust, in style as
well as content:
In place of the polarity of a
prefigurative self-generating nation itself and extrinsic Other nations, the
performative introduces a temporality of the ‘in-between’ through the ‘gap’ or
‘emptiness’ of the signifier that punctuates linguistic difference. The
boundary that marks the nation’s selfhood interrupts the self-generating time
of national production with a space of representation that threatens binary
division with its difference. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from
its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal form of social representation, a
space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the
heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and
tense cultural locations. (299)
Whether or not such prose conforms
to one’s personal stylistic preferences, the centrality of this text – and of
its author’s works taken as a whole – to the field of postcolonial studies is
undeniable. Those interested in issues
of minority discourse and cultural difference in the construction of nations
will find the volume a worthwhile read.
Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question” (1994)[31]
Homi Bhabha (1949
– ) was born in Bombay, receiving his BA
from Bombay University, his MA, M.Phil., and D.Phil. from Christ Church, Oxford
University. He has been a visiting professor
at Princeton University and at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a
faculty fellow at Dartmouth. In fall
2001 he was lured from the departments of English and Art at the University of
Chicago to assume a position at Harvard University in the Africo-American
studies department. In 1998 he received
second place in the annual Bad Writing Contest (first place to Berkeley’s
Judith Butler) sponsored by the journal Philosophy
and Literature. Works include Nation and Narration (ed., 1990) and The Location of Culture (1994).
“The Other Question”
is the third chapter in The Location of
Culture but may stand on its own as an essay, the purport of which is to
explore and expand the traditional notion of stereotype “fixity” (relative to
cultural / historical / race differences) in colonial discourse (66). Bhabha locates a productive field for
exploration and representation in the ambivalence of such stereotypes, in the
“polymorphous and perverse […] articulation of multiple belief”; the black, for
example, who is simultaneously cannibal and food-bearing servant, sexual beast
and savage innocent (82). In a bow to
Derrida (the chapter opens with a quote from the theorist’s essay “Structure,
sign and play”), Bhabha suggests a shift from classifying images as either
positive or negative to an examination of the “processes of subjectification made possible […] through
stereotypical discourse” (67). He claims
that stereotypes are “complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode[s] of
representation” (70) and that once one looks past the boundaries of questions
of origin and identity, of desire and derision, a vast regime of truth opens
for inspection. Bhahba is continuing an argument from Nation and Narration (1990) whereby he
urges against the homogenization of Third World identities so as to accommodate
a colonizer/colonized binary paradigm.
What the author seems to be calling for, then, is a Nietzschean (á la Jenseits von Gut und Böse) approach to
postcolonial questions of identity, motivated by a Derridean willingness to
float in the space created by ambivalence in the dominant, normative
representations.
Thus,
Said’s use of Foucault’s concepts of discourse and power in Orientalism trouble Bhabha (72). Believing that the “closure and coherence
attributed to the unconscious pole of colonial discourse and the
unproblematized notion of the subject […] restrict the effectivity of both
power and knowledge” (72), he argues for a “reading of the stereotype in terms
of fetishism […], as the disavowal of difference” (74). The stereotype that repels (by racial
impurity or cultural inferiority) may also attract. Adopting a four-term strategy of stereotypes
(metaphoric / narcissistic, metonymic / aggessive), Bhabha provides a
“structure and process for the ‘subject’ of colonial discourse” (77/8). Every use of a stereotype recalls in the
colonizer a struggle between the metaphoric / narcissistic and the metonymic /
aggressive, between what the colonizer had thought was banished from his
prevailing culture and what actually stands stubbornly preserved before
him.
Bhabha maintains that
fetishizing the Other, while disavowing the Other’s identity, nevertheless
produces “knowledge value” (78). It is
precisely at the intersection of “enunciation and subjectification” (80) of the
fetishized stereotype that the colonial fantasy becomes most ambivalent, and so
most productive, lending itself to more fertile interpretation than more rigid
definitions allowed. Black skin, for
example, that once suggested darkness
may then simultaneously be seen to signify both birth and death (82). In a sort of psychoanalytic involution, the
Other something about the Master by acceding to his fantasy (82). The descriptive palette once offered by
stereotyping inevitably becomes more subtle and variegated, an “ambivalent text
of projection, introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement,
determination, guilt, aggressivity; the maskind and splitting of ‘official’ and
phantasmatic knowledges to construct the positionalities and oppositionalities
of racist discourse” (81/2).
Commentary/Associations
Bhabha’s treatment of
colonial stereotypes should be seen within his broader project of disturbing
the certainties of previous historical discourses. Ambivalence plays a key role in his analyses. As he states in the introduction to the
collection of essays Nation and Narration,
the “cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional
social reality” (NN 1).[32] The Stereotype treated in “The Other
Question” is merely a single manifestation of a nation’s uncertainty in
“‘composing’ its powerful image” (NN 3).
There can be political ramifications following such investigations, for
revealing “such a margin is […] to contest claims to cultural supremacy” (NN
4).
Perhaps
with wry intentionality, Bhabha’s rhetorical strategy suggests those of Derrida
and Kristeva and Anderson while maintaining a distance from, or perhaps between, them. For example, his contention that perceiving
the nation as a narration “will establish the cultural boundaries of the nation
so that they may be acknowledged as ‘containing’ thresholds of meaning that
must be crossed, erased, and translated in the process of cultural production”
(NN 4) invites comparison with Derrida’s struggles to find the center in a
field of infinitely substitutable signs.
One cannot establish permanently the definition of nation but can only
follow the multitudinous voices as they discursively play. For Bhahba, as for Kristeva (see Strangers to Ourselves), the Other (the
Stereotype) implies a de facto
interiorization and projection:
“The ‘other’ is never outside or
beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and
indigenously ‘between ourselves’” (NN 4).
Finally, this disruption of arbitrary interpersonal boundaries between
oneself and the Other finds a parallel on an international scale in Anderson’s Imagined Communities, wherein one reads
that “nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s
multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural
artefacts of a particular kind.”[33]
Edward Said, Orientalism
(1978)[34]
Richard Ascarate
Edward Said (1935 - )
was born in Jerusalem. He and his family
sought refuge in Cairo during the 1947 partition of Palestine. He attended several American schools,
mastering several languages and the piano along the way. After studies at the Julliard School, Said
obtained an MA from Princeton, a Ph.D. from Harvard (dissertation on Joseph
Conrad). He is currently professor of
comparative literature at Columbia. The
1967 Arab-Israeli war induced him to consider his Palestinian heritage. Thereafter he became involved in questions of
cultural scholarship and Palestinian rights.
Other works include: Beginnings (1975); National, Colonialism, and Literature (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); Literature and Society (1980); Covering
Islam (1981); The World, the Text,
and the Critic (1983); Blaming
Victims (1988); The Pen and the Sword
(1994); Representations of the
Intellectual (1994); The Politics of
Depression (1994); Out of Place
(1999); Reflections on Exile (2000).
Said attempts to
portray Orientalism – variously a cultural, historical, literary, and
linguistic discipline (for purposes of manageability, restricted in his work to
the Near and Middle East) – as a “Western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient” (3).
He freely admits a debt to Foucault (3, 23) for an approach whereby “ideas,
cultures, and histories” are examined with reference to their “force, or more
precisely their configurations of power” (5).
(He differs from Foucault, however, in ascribing agency and
responsibility to individual texts and authors rather than to anonymous
socio-historical forces [23].)
“Knowledge no longer requires application to reality” and scholarship
passes as a collection of idées reçues
from one uncritical generation of observers to the next (116). Said sees Orientalism as a “willed human work” (15), as a discourse
that allows the Occident to determine the “vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric, and
figures” (41) surrounding an imaginary Orient.
A long time in
development, this discourse may be traced as far back as in Aeschylus’s The Persians and Euripedes’s The Bacchae. In the former, Said contends, the Orient is
already mediated through the “European imagination, which is depicted as
victorious over Asia” (56). The East
speaks only in a voice provided by the West.
Centuries later, Dante depicts Mohammed in the eighth circle of Hell,
just behind the falsifiers and the treacherous (68), while placing other
Muslims within the first circle, among heathen philosophers, conflating the
punishments for both pre-Christian Greeks and post-Christian Muslims. Said objects to this disposition because the
Italian poet seems to ignore the Koranic designation of Christ as a prophet
(69).[35] Eighteenth and nineteenth century French
(Champollion, Sacy, Renan) and German (Schlegel) philologists strengthened the
position of the Occident vis-à-vis the Orient by producing a discursive field
that determined the scope and strictures of Orientalist investigations. The Occidental scholar mined the Orient for
works that he considered the Oriental himself incapable of deciphering,
interpreting, and presenting to the public.
Orientalism became nothing more than “what the Orientalist made of it”
(127), giving formal, academic sanction to the cultural appropriations that had
transpired for centuries. The hegemonic
mindset supporting such a gesture had a parallel in the stance of British
politicians like Balfour and Cromer who took for granted that Orientals were
not familiar enough with their own history and culture to be able either to
rule or to speak for themselves: “[K]nowledge
gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly
profitable dialectic of information and control” (36).
Said observes that
the Occidental’s self-appointed position of superiority yet obtains, offering
the two-volume, influential Cambridge
History of Islam (1970) as a “regular summa of Orientalist orthodoxy”
(302), as well as an essay by Henry Kissinger that places West and East in
binary opposition based on presumed development or lack thereof since the
Newtonian revolution in physics
Commentary/Associations
Because the Orient is
portrayed as a construct of Occidental thought, built upon ill-informed,
uninformed, and unquestioned assumptions by authors who themselves often had
never travelled to the East, Said’s book calls to mind Eliza Butler’s Tyranny of Greece over Germany (1935). Though the Germans exercised no political
hegemony over Greece ancient or modern, Winckelmann’s Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755)
inflected their aesthetic interpretations and representations of classical
Greek culture until Nietzsche. What Said
observes about the German Orient may serve equally well for the German Greece,
for the former was “almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical,
Orient: it was made the subject of
lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual” (19). One may be witnessing here a German, if not a
Western, propensity for imaginative flights endowed with intellectual
authority. Winckelmann, for example,
never set foot in Greece, nor did Lessing, whose Laocoon, or the Boundaries between Painting and Poetry [1766]
carried on the discourse begun in 1755.
By arguing that the Orient is a “constituted entity, and that […] there
are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically ‘different’ inhabitants who
can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence proper
to that geographical space is […] a highly debatable idea” (322), Said clears
the ground for Anderson’s Imagined
Communities (1983).
Said does offer a
convincing portrait of the Occident’s regime of truth surrounding the Orient
but offers little, except for a “re-reading of the canonical cultural works […]
to re-investigate some of their assumptions” (351) by way of remedy. Given the nature of any scientific or
humanistic institutionalized study, in which one inherits a discourse and must
write oneself into it with at least a nodding reference to predecessors, how is
one to escape the matrix of misinformation, of misinterpretation? Subaltern voices like that of Indian-born
Salman Rushdie (whose Midnight’s Children
Said cites [351]) will widen Orientalism’s discursive field, at least on the
Occidental side. Despite that particular
native son’s popularity among culturally hegemonic Western countries, his
acceptance among Islamic ones remains problematic.
Globalization
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)
Initially
motivated by the fighting in Indochina (1978-79) between Vietnam, China, and
Cambodia, Anderson (1936–) critically approaches the concept of nation and
nationalism (or nation-ness) in terms of post-colonial studies. Admittedly heavily influenced by both Walter
Benjamin and Erich Auerbach, Anderson establishes his project as an
undertaking, with an ultimate goal of creating a better understanding of what
is involved in the construction of nationalism, or as Anderson prefers to call
it, imagined community.
Anderson
seeks first to provide a “more satisfactory interpretation of the ‘anomaly’ of
nationalism” (4), finding fault with previous attempts by both Marxism and
liberal theory. Secondly, Anderson
suggests that nationality, nationalism, etc. are all artifacts, which need to
be placed within their historical framework, not unlike a New Historicist’s
approach to a literary text, in order to fully understand their origins and
competing discourses. “What I am
proposing is that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with
self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems
that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being”
(12). This sounds not unlike Benjamin’s
concept of Konstellationen and the
need to uncover the competing discourses which contributed to the construction
of these nations, as well as their relevancy as individual events, textual or
otherwise.[36] As Anderson notes early on, “since World War
II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms” (2).
The
anthropological definition of nation proposed by Anderson asks us to think in
terms of imagined community. The actual
construction and concrete nature of these communities, such as borders and
population, are not of importance. What Anderson
stresses is the way in which members of these communities imagine themselves to
be connected. “Communities are to be
distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they
are imagined” (6).
From
this theory, Anderson proceeds to address the historical development that has
made these imagined communities possible.
The first of these developments is the advent of print-language, which
evolved into the circulation of both newspapers and novels, resulting in what
Anderson calls the “mass ceremony” in which “each communicant is well aware
that the ceremony her performs [the reading of information] is being replicated
simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is
confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion” (35). Thus, print-language serves to close the gap
between members of these imagined communities, providing them all with similar
information and knowledge regarding that very same community. Inherently bound to the rise of
print-language was capitalism, which helped facilitate a “vernacular-based
nationalism in Europe” (139). The
ability to print thousands of copies, no longer dependent on monks and scribes,
expanded the audience of newspapers and thus reached more members of imagined
communities.
Another
important factor to the birth of the imagined community is the ability to think
in terms of simultaneity, what
Benjamin describes as “‘Messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an
instantaneous present’” (24). The
ability to perceive of time and events as a simultaneous process allows for the
ability to imagine that others can exist within the same community, without
ever having to come face-to-face with one another. “The idea of a sociological organism moving
calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea
of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily
down (or up) history” (26).
Anderson
sees the inevitable evolution of the nation,
facilitated by print-language, as a “blue print” to be appropriated and adopted
by any nation, a kind of interchangeable construction. He presents examples based on the Declaration
of Independence, whose principals were not considered specifically American,
rather universal principals. What
Anderson uncovers, is the earlier appearance of these imagined communities and
notions of nation, here a specific instance of South America, outside of Europe
and more specifically emerging out of the lower classes. Anderson proposes “that neither economic
interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community…. In accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim creole functionaries and provincial
creole printmen played the decisive historic role” (65). As Anderson further seeks to explain, the
role of print-language, while not critical to nobility’s sense of community
(they relied on such things as political marriage, kinship, etc.)
print-language provided the bourgeoisie to develop a sense of class identity,
“they [came] to visualize in a general way the existence of thousands and
thousands like themselves through print-language. For an illiterate bourgeoisie is scarcely
imaginable. Thus in world-historical
terms bourgeoisie were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an
essentially imagined basis” (77).
To
briefly summarize the crux of Anderson’s project, language and the idea of a
shared language play integral roles in the development of imagined
communities. “[Once] one starts thinking
about nationality in terms of continuity, few things seem as historically
deep-rooted as languages, for which no dated origins can ever be given”
(196). The development of these
communities would not and still cannot be accomplished without the aide of
print-language, which is unavoidable bound to capitalism (which from a Marxist
standpoint, can only lead to exploitation and an in balance of power).
Even
though Anderson’s work is a bit outdated, as he admits in the preface to the
second edition, his work on the construction of nationalism and community
building is still pertinent today, given the constant dissolution and
construction of new nations. His writing
and the comprehension of his ideas are not hindered by jargon and makes for an
enjoyable and informative read. From my
previous readings, I would have liked to see Anderson explore the notion of
imaginary community building, perhaps drawing connections between feminist
theory and his post-colonial approach (one idea that strikes me is Hélène
Cixous’ notion of the “dark continent” and the relationship shared by woman and
those oppressed by colonialism in her article “The Laugh of the Medusa”
(1975). Otherwise, I think this text is
essential for anyone pursuing the idea of the national, past, present, or
future.
M.Huffmaster
The author of numerous books and
essays on political philosophy, Etienne Balibar holds professorships at the
University of Paris X at Nanterre and, since 2000, at the University of
California, Irvine. The article reviewed
here was originally presented as a paper at a conference in France in December
of 1993, when the Balkan conflict was in full swing and the member states of
the newly-formed European Union (Maastricht, 1992) were meanwhile making
ever-greater progress towards political and economic integration.
Balibar
maintains the necessity of reconsidering the notion of borders at the present
moment in time in light of the fact that borders are vacillating, particularly
as this in turn means a vacillation in the consciousness of European identity. He proposes a radical shift in thinking about
the concept of borders, claiming that individuals and groups must try to
imagine being borders, and he justifies such a proposition by saying
that exercises in exploring the imagination’s possibilities can be
fruitful. Balibar discusses three
aspects of this variation in thinking he suggests and equates these three
aspects with a Lacanian schema of the “real,” the “symbolic,” and the
“imaginary” of the border.
The
first aspect he considers is that borders are vacillating. As a result of globalization, the
nation-state (in whose evolution the origin of borders lies) “is irreversibly
coming undone.”(218) Borders can no
longer be localized as before; they no longer indicate sovereignty as
institutions are increasingly transferred to the supranational level. The notion of a people, a Volk, is
thus also undergoing transformation as the modern equation of citizenship and
nationality, based on the concept of borders, breaks down. Balibar is careful to stress that none of
this means that borders are disappearing.
Rather, they are “being both multiplied and reduced in their
localization and their function, […] becoming border zones, regions, or
countries where one can reside or live.”(220)
They are being contested and simultaneously reinforced, notably in their
security function.
Another
aspect of borders Balibar discusses is their double nature, the fact that while
delineating and separating particular territories, they always also indicate
the world as a whole, by representing a given entity as a “part of the
world.” This characteristic of borders,
their idealization, makes possible their internalization and thus their ability
to function in forming identities.
Borders are idealized, Balibar says, because they are imagined as the
point where “worldviews” are “at stake,” where “one must choose, and choose
oneself.”(222)
Finally,
Balibar maintains that every border must be simultaneously political and
religious, in the sense of symbolic, “even when this religion is a lay,
secularized religion, a religion of language, school, and constitutional
principles.”(223) After discussing a
more traditional model of Europe as one side of a binary opposition (Occident
versus Orient, or North versus South), he sketches a preferred alternative
schema, which he calls the “triple point,” comprising an East, a West, and a
South. The term comes from the field of
thermodynamics (an endnote from the translator informs the reader) and indicates
the temperature and pressure at which the solid, liquid, and gas states coexist
in equilibrium. The most essential point in Balibar’s configuration,
consequently, is that the three elements are not conceived as separate regions,
but rather as coexistent, overlapping layers.
And it is this overlapping, he asserts, that makes up Europe’s
specificity.
In
conclusion, Balibar claims there are “advantages to working and playing with
representations of this sort, rather than allowing them to act on us
unperceived, outside our consciousness and our grasp, [t]he primary advantage
[being] to alert us to the significations that are at work in every tracing of
a border, beyond the immediate, apparently factual determinations of language,
religion, ideology, and power relations.”(226)
A
serious critique may be leveled at the underlying assumptions of Balibar’s line
of thought. From the very outset it is
clear we are dealing with a post-structuralist approach, as the author declares
his intention to move beyond worn-out models of binary oppositions. His own arguments, however, are riddled with
the very antithetical structures he seeks to overcome. And furthermore, in proposing an alternative
model, a triple-point schema, he essentially creates just one more opposition
himself, that of his trinary model versus previous binary ones.
I
would recommend the essay to someone interested in issues of nationality in
identity construction, or perhaps in borders in general, but with the
qualification that they not spend too much time on it, just enough to exercise
the imagination a little.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)[37]
Born
in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) received BA and MA
degrees from the University of Manitoba and a Ph.D. in English Literature from
Cambridge University. He taught at
several universities before settling at the University of Toronto
(1946-1979). Other works include The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), and The Medium is the Message (with Quentin
Fiore, 1967).[38]
McLuhan argues that “after more than a
century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system
itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet
is concerned” (3). He develops this thesis in various chapters devoted to,
among other things, writing (both script and print), roads, paper, clothing,
housing, money, comics, wheels, games, the telegraph, the telephone, the
typewriter, movies, radio, television, weapons, and automation, defining each
of these as a “hot” or a “cold” medium.
The first is one that “extends [a] single sense in ‘high definition’,”
where “high definition” is the “state of being well filled with data” (22); the
second, a medium of low definition, one in which the participant must fill in
the missing data (23). Photography, for
example, is a hot medium, the information in an image being highly defined. A comic strip, on the other hand, would be a
cool medium. He argues throughout that “all technologies are extensions of our
physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed” (90). That is, electric speed allows man to know of
events (sights, sounds) transpiring around the world almost instantly,
replicating on a global scale the nervous impulses traversing the individual
human organism. Hence McLuhan’s dictum,
“[T]he medium is the message,” because it “shapes and controls the scale and
form of human association” (9). Thus,
content assumes only secondary importance, suggesting the futility of efforts
to regulate television for sex and violence.
Time and space
having been electrically contracted by media extensions of ourselves, “the
globe is no more than a village” (5).
This light-speed extension comes with a certain existential price,
however, for by “continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to
them as servomechanisms” (46). That is,
immersion in a medium seduces one into the narcissistic stance of forgetting
that the technology is only an extension of one or more senses. As in the real world, the constant, virtual
rubbing together of citizens in the global village engenders anxiety: “[I]t is
not the increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with
population,” for example, but “that everybody in the world has to live in the
utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another’s lives”
(35). Narcissistic contemplation of
ourselves in the media cannot but result in distortion, for “[a]ll media exist
to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values”
(199). With this work, McLuhan attempts
to jar the reader from media-saturated impercipience.
Commentary/Associations
McLuhan may be seen as a
prophet of technological cosmopolitanism, taking the latter term to mean one
who is at home in all countries or places, unbound by national borders. (His
writing seems so premonitory that it is easy to forget he passed away before
the advent of personal computers and the Internet in the mid-80s, hence the
disappointing absence of their treatment in his book.) To what question was Understanding Media the answer?
The decade before the book’s publication had already witnessed the first
successful attempts to contract extraterrestrial space (Sputnik 1 and 2 in
1957) and a new sense of connection to and responsibility for distant others
(Kennedy’s inauguration of the Peace Corps in 1961). The ecology movement, too, the political
philosophy that argued for the unity of all life upon earth, followed closely if
not causally. McLuhan claims that his
age possessed a “faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being”
(5/6). One may read in this a Romantic
yearning to fuse with the cosmos (as in Eichendorff’s Mondnacht, perhaps?). He
could not have known his contention that man is “suddenly eager to have things
and people declare their beings totally” (5) through media might one day lead
to such phenomena as Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, Doctor Phil, “Reality
TV.”
McLuhan’s erudition
and ability to give fresh, unintended readings to various authors (see his
citations of Shakespeare [175-6] to demonstrate the processes of “quantification and fragmentation” caused by
print) recall Montaigne’s style. The
author observes: “Take off the dateline,
and one day’s paper is the same as the next” (212). Here, however, he seems to
have been anticipated by Thoreau: “And I
am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newpaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or
killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one
steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog
killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter – we never need read of
another.”[39]
His analysis of the
self-defensive reaction to superstimulation (“In the physical stress of
superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect
itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense,
or function” [42].) may also have a precedent in Simmel’s blasé attitude.[40] McLuhan’s use of the word involvement relative to the lives of
others also needs qualification, for merely partaking of an event through media
hardly constitutes holistic experience.
Whether hot or cool, a medium attenuates a real event, always incurring
loss of sensory information. (An image
of a hamburger, for example, can neither taste nor smell like one. Yet.)
Further, underlying his global village are the assumptions that all
potential Weltbürgers 1) have access to media, and 2) want to be part of the
village itself. Festering poverty in
much of the world undermines the growth of the electronic nervous system,
rendering hundreds of millions blind, deaf, and mute. This may have a physiological analog, for not
all parts of the human body are equally well-endowed with nerves endings. Fingertips are more sensitive than
elbows. In many countries, too, the
information superhighway suffers from governmental roadblocks. In China, for example, one cannot access
major Western newspapers on the Internet.
Even barring governmental or institutional proscriptions, can the
Internet really bring users closer together should they decide to remain
sequestered behind false identities within the confines of a comforting
self-isolation?
[3] Trans.
by Roy Harris.
[4] He notes as an example the French word boef in contrast to the German Ochs (‘ox’).
[5] “The principle stated above is the organizing principle for the whole of linguistics, considered as a science of language structure. The consequences which flow from this principle are innumerable.” (68)
[6] For a thought-provoking comparison of Saussure’s view of language as a game and Wittgenstein’s similar analogy, see Roy Harris, Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: how to play games with words. (London: Routledge 1988).
[11] Michel Foucault. Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
Vintage Books, 1977. Originally
published in France as Surveil-ler et
Punir: Naissance de la prison by
Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1975.
[12] One is reminded of the
transformation of Galy Gay in Brecht’s Mann
ist Mann.
[13] See, for example, his Power/Knowledge (1980).
[16] This was Benjamin’s only completed book (Schneider).
[17] Benjamin later became a member of the Frankfurter School.
[18] Siegfried Kracuauer. The
Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Trans. Thomas Y Levin. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995, 75-87.
[19] Antecedents of Busby
Berkeley showgirls or Las Vegas dancers.
[20] Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.” Illumination. Harry Zohn (trans). New York:
Schocken Books, 1968, 228.
[21] Klaus Theweleit. Male
Fantasies. Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Stephen Conway (trans). Minneapolis:
Univeristy of Minneapolis Press, 1987.
(German edition 1977)
[22] To his credit it should be noted that Geertz himself adapted his approach in the eighties, devoting added attention to the production side of public symbols, as already evident in the articles published in Local Knowledge in 1983.
[23] Niklaus Largier. Lob der Peitsche. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Erregung. München:
C. H. Beck Verlag, 2001.
[24] Further information about Professor Largier may be found in the UC Berkeley German Department website: http://german.berkeley.edu/people/profiles.html (bio) and http://german.berkeley.edu/news/faculty_pub.html#largier (biblio)
[26] Here
Weigel directly cites Cixous’ work, Weiblichkeit
in der Schrift.
[27] Letter writing was already defined in the 18th century as a form of women’s writing, which makes Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werther interesting in terms of gender and identity construction the female characteristics associated with letter writing.
[28]
Julia Kristeva. Strangers to Ourselves. Leon S. Roudiez (trans).
[29]
From cosmopolitan: “1. belonging to the whole world; not
national or local. 2. not bound by local
or national habits or prejudices; at home in all countries or places.” – Webster’s
[30]
Georg Simmel. “The Stranger.” On Individuality and Social Forms. Donald N Levine (ed.). Chicago/London:
[31]
Homi K. Bhabha. “The Other
Question.” The Location of Culture.
[32]
Homi K. Bhabha (ed). “Introduction: narrating the nation.” Nation
and Narration.
[33]
Benedict Anderson. Imagined
Communities.
[34] Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978.
[35] Said’s objection, however, is theologically unsound from a Christian viewpoint, which makes a distinction between a prophet like John the Baptist, to whom is ascribed no divinity, and to Christ, who is considered within the Christian paradigm to be the Son of God.
[36] Indeed earlier in his book, Anderson says explicitly, “To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy” (4).
[37]
Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The
Extensions of
[38] Though known primarily for his theories on global electr(on)ic culture, McLuhan also wrote extensively on English poets and novelists. See http://www.mcluhan.ca/biography.phtml for a more complete list of his literary studies. He was also possessed of enough self-irony to appear as himself in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1971).
[39]
Henry David Thoreau. Walden.
[40]
“[T]hrough the rapidity and contradictoriness of their changes, more harmless
impressions force such violent responses, tearing the nerves so brutally hither
and thither that their last reserves of strength are spent; and if one remains
in the same milieu they have no time to gather new strength. An incapacity thus emerges to react to new
sensations with the appropriate energy.
This constitutes the blasé attitude which, in fact every metropolitan
child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable
milieus.” - Georg Simmel. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” The
Sociology of Georg Simmel. Kurt H.
Wolff (trans).