Textual Practice, Volume 6, Number 2 (Textual Practice Journal)

Editor Terence Hawkes, University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, ...

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Editor Terence Hawkes, University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. Reviews editor Christopher Norris University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: as above U.S. associate editor Jean E.Howard Columbia University Postal address: Department of English and Comparative Literature, 602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York N.Y. 10027, USA Editorial board Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Terry Eagleton Linacre College, Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Mary Jacobus Cornell University, USA Francis Mulhern Middlesex Polytechnic Editorial Assistant Tamsin Spargo

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University of Wales College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to Christopher Norris at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. Advertisements. Enquiries to David Polley, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £50.00; UK personal: £28.00; Rest of World full: £52.00; Rest of World personal: £30.00; USA full: $85.00; USA personal: $55.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP10 5BE. ISSN 0950–236X © Routledge 1992

ISBN 0-203-99091-9 Master e-book ISBN

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 6 NUMBER 2 SUMMER 1992

Contents

Articles The politics of text and commentary BOB HODGE AND ALEC MCHOUL

189

Language games and justice ALEX SEGAL

209

The body as pictogram: rethinking Hélène Cixous’s écriture feminine PAMELA BANTING

223

Shakespeare and heritage GRAHAM HOLDERNESS

245

Son of Bashing the bourgeois subject RICHARD LEVIN

261

Interviewed by Rebecca Deaton KATHY ACKER

267

Interviewed by Antony Easthope MICHAEL WESTLAKE

281

Letter Laura Riding JOHN NOLAN

299

Reviews Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism. A Marxist Critique DAN LATIMER

303

Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other SIMON CRITCHLEY

311

Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy Eric Cheyfitz, The Politics of Imperialism Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn LAWRENCE VENUTI

321

v

Richard Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama WILLY MALEY

329

Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader EDWARD NEILL

333

Pretexts: Studies in Literature and Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 MPALIVE-HANGSON MSISKA

337

Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism DAVID AMIGONI

339

Regina Schwartz (ed.), The Book and the Text Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign KEVIN MILLS

345

Janet Todd (ed.), Dictionary of British Women Writers Maureen Bell, George Parfitt and Simon Shepherd (eds), A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers 1580–1720 Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English TINA KRONTIRIS

355

Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism STEVEN CONNOR

361

Colin Falck, Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism ROY SELLARS

371

Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture Andrew Ross (ed.), Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism Philip Cooke, Back to the Future: Modernity, Postmodernity and Locality Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity BRIAN MCKENNA

379

David Murray (ed.), Literary Theory and Poetry: Extending the Canon GRAHAM ALLEN

389

John Paul Russo, I.A.Richards: His Life and Work ALAN DURANT

393

ANGELA CARTER (1940–1992) Angela Carter, novelist, was a member of the Editorial Board of Textual Practice from its beginning. Her death in London, on 16th February 1992, was an occasion of great sadness shared by fellow Board members, Routledge our publishers, and all our readers.

vi

The politics of text and commentary BOB HODGE AND ALEC MCHOUL

I INTRODUCTION This paper addresses the politics of the relations between texts in situations where one text offers a commentary on another. This is not to valorize a particular binary. Being a commentary and being an object of commentary are not essential properties of texts. However, at any given ‘empirical’ instant—in any event, if you like—it is possible to look at these relations in general between an object-text and the text which offers a commentary upon it (whatever their own intertextual lineages). We tried to start with what may be termed the ‘internal’ politics of this set of relations, but the opposition with ‘external’ politics proved difficult to sustain. We were obliged almost right away to take other things into account: drawing our attention away from the inside(s) of texts and towards the conditions of their circulation, providing an alternative to the confined politics of text-commentary relations. Within the domain of disciplinary formations, we want to hypothesize an array or continuum of possible political relations. The array can be characterized by its extremes—extremes which, to be sure, may never be actually realized, such that any given instance will be on the array but not necessarily at its limits. However, to characterize this array is to define a political domain by its limits—a process which, in the Kantian tradition, can be referred to as ‘critique’—though in the more recent work of Lyotard it becomes a strategy known as ‘paralogy’.1 In sections II and III below we explore two (ideal types of) disciplinary formations of the text-commentary relation. For convenience, we refer to them as ‘mastery’ and ‘liberty’. The first disciplinary formation coheres around the notion of commentarial dominance over, and colonization of, the object text. The second formation is characterized by a more ‘humble’ gesture by which the commentary allows the object text the position of dominance—to ‘speak for itself’. Since the overall site of our concern is the politics of various forms of textual analysis, we necessarily make reference to how these disciplinary formations operate in particular contexts such as teacher—student relations, relations between anthropologists/ colonists and ‘natives’, and between analysts and patients.

190 TEXTUAL PRACTICE

II MASTERY At one extreme of the array of disciplinary formations is the political position that can be characterized as ‘mastery’. One well-known instance of this is the Leavisite approach to literary texts. The commentary of mastery presumes to dominate and colonize its text. Access to the text is presumed to be adequated by the commentary. That is, the only possible ‘intrinsic’ feature of the text-as-such is its ‘mystery’. The text cannot be understood, as it were, without the key to it, offered by the commentary. As it stands, the text is inaccessible. For example, its poetic principle may remain hidden—immanent in the text but unavailable to any ordinary insight, including that of its composer. The discourse of the commentary, however, assumes the gift of special insight, which might be offered in the name of the text itself, the author’s unconscious intentions, a ‘true’ knowledge of the history and circumstances of its production, and so on—via a whole range of familiar discursive functions. What is paradoxically interesting about this approach (text as mystery, commentary as mastery) is that it flatters the text equally with itself. The two, as it were, look as if they are in a position of conspiracy to defraud ‘ordinary’ readers. The text’s meaning is ‘deep’—but the commentary’s skill is more than equal to that depth. This is the characteristic mode of explanation and owes some allegiances to traditional (Baconian) natural science models. The text, like nature, is an infinite mystery. But the commentary, like the mathematical gesture, presumes to unlock that mystery, privileging, in one move, both itself and, to a lesser extent, its object. It is no accident that Leavisism dominated English departments of the White settler colonies of Britain (Australia, South Africa, Canada) in the decades between 1930 and 1970, as the Empire was being dismantled. Its forms repeat the strategies that Edward Said has called ‘orientalism’, the quintessential imperialist strategy of reading which appropriates the texts of the colonized Other as inexhaustibly significant to the dominant culture; containing the enigma of its lack, yet in a form that by definition could not be understood by the natives in their own words, in their own right.2 As with any form of colonization, it is naturally the colonizing discourse (the discourse of commentary) which receives the greatest valorization. With Leavis, it could work upon the credited as well as the discredited text within the canon: on Pope as well as Milton. It matters little whether the colonized ‘culture’ of the text is a noble savage or a barbaric brute: the gesture of the commentary remains the same—to explain what ‘lesser minds’ might not grasp. Thus, despite the possibility of enormous flattery (akin to the anthropological gesture of hailing the native culture as superior to the Western), the commentarial discourse of mastery establishes itself as the superior analyst or professor (benevolent or malevolent) facing the text as patient or student. The text is moved into an institutional space (like the psychoanalytic encounter or the scene of teaching) which involves a technology of exclusion. What is excluded is precisely any alterior meaning which the text might have, upon another reading or a fortiori ‘in its own terms’. The text is brought into a position of discipleship: of being an accomplice to the discourse of the commentary, whether willing or unwilling. It adopts a position akin to that of the university student as described by Foucault:

THE POLITICS OF TEXT AND COMMENTARY 191

The student is put outside of society, on a campus. Furthermore, he is excluded while being transmitted a knowledge traditional in nature, obsolete, ‘academic’ and not directly tied to the needs and problems of today. This exclusion is underscored by the organization, around the student, of social mechanisms which are fictitious, artificial and quasitheatrical (hierarchic relationships, academic exercises, the ‘court’ of examination, evaluation). Finally, the student is given a gamelike way of life; he is offered a kind of distraction, amusement, freedom which, again, has nothing to do with real life; it is this kind of artificial, theatrical society, a society of cardboard, that is being built around him; and thanks to this, young people…are thus, as it were, neutralized by and for society, rendered safe, ineffective, socially and politically castrated.3 The ‘freedom’ thus granted the text/student is a false one, confined as it is to an obsolete and historically retrograde ‘tradition’ (of which the literary ‘canon’ is but one avatar). It is cut off from the domain of politics beyond the institution of commentary by this appropriative gesture: free to be as political as it likes, but only within the terms permitted by the colonist. At the same time, an overtly political act is being carried on in the form of the submission of student texts to examination, as the ultimate instance of the commentary of mastery. The student is transformed into a small set of texts produced under certain artificial conditions, which is then put under scrutiny in its micrological detail. It is also thereby ‘tested’ for its value as a member or non-member of the tradition established by the commentary—just as early anthropological expeditions were charged with discovering whether or not particular groups of primitive peoples could be deemed eventually suitable for civilization. There is indeed a sham involved in this technique, as Foucault suggests, but the pretence of the apolitical is, as ever, a wellknown political position. And its object is the neutralization of the text/student: a setting free within such a limited and fake politics as to rule out wider political forces. The technique of examination-by-the-master remains the same whether one comes out of it covered in roses or stinking of shit, with first-class honours or with an exclusion from the faculty. III LIBERTY Against the overt moralism of the discourse of mastery one can discern a related counter-trend in certain techniques of commentary. This position is characterized by its text-libertarian stance. We all know, by now, the catch-phrase of ‘letting the text speak for itself’. The position is particularly well advanced in certain of the social sciences where the discourse of commentary deliberately, in a self-denying and self-sacrificing move, comes to privilege the epistemic (rather than just the moral/ ‘qualitative’) placing of the text. The moral domain is, apparently, elided by the commentator’s seeming abstention from judgement: precisely in order to


let the text speak for itself. The presentation is one of montaging aspects of the text rather than intervening in it. This tendency of libertarian commentary is characterized by von Wright as the move to ‘understanding’ (Verstehen) or ‘description’ in reaction to ‘explanation’ (Erklä-rung) or ‘examination’ which would be associated with the tactics of mastery.4 An example is the deliberate policy known as ‘ethnomethodological indifference’. According to this policy, the analyst seeks to describe members’ accounts of formal structure ‘while abstaining from all judgements of their adequacy, value, importance, necessity, practicality, success, or consequentiality’.5 Translated into practice, the policy leads to statements such as the following from the same article: If, whenever housewives were let into a room, each one on her own went to some same spot and started to clean it, one might conclude that the spot surely needed cleaning. On the other hand, one might conclude that there is something about the spot and about the housewives that makes the encounter of one by the other an occasion for cleaning, in which case the fact of the cleaning, instead of being evidence of dirt, would be itself a phenomenon.6 In this tradition, Garfinkel and Sacks strongly insist that the analyst be on guard against establishing a position of ‘irony’ with regard to the text. The obvious butt of the policy is marxist ideology-critique wherein, so the story goes, marxist analysts can access the political, social, economic and historical ‘truth’ of a text while participants in it (speakers, writers, readers, etc.) are unaware of this and so are cast into a position of a merely ideological (as opposed to scientific) understanding of what it is they are doing. (The fact that this may be an ironical version of marxism appears to be beside the point.) Instead of this, some ethnomethodologists claim that the ‘doing’ of the situation/text and the ‘knowing about’ it are identical. Knowledge (and this stems from Ryle and Wittgenstein, by and large) is not a ghostly presence lurking behind the situation which it is the privilege of the gifted analyst to appropriate. Rather, in actual social events, a kind of knowing-how overrides any such notion of knowing-that. In so far as participants in a text (a conversation for example) do actually do what they do, then they must know how to do it. The knowing and the doing, as the phrase goes, are reflexively bound: each elaborates the other. On this model, texts and/or social affairs emerge as kinds of bootstrapping phenomena. There is no underlying basis or ground (no disguised ‘truth’) which authorizes what social members do. In Norman Malcolm’s words ‘nothing is hidden’: everything is available on the surface of the object text or scene itself.7 Because it’s available to the participants (because it’s only, and always already, an overtly audio-visual phenomenon), then it is available to analysts by virtue of their joint membership in such mundane knowledge. Is there in this a legacy of the Enlightenment and particularly of Kant for whom categories of knowledge and ‘moral’ action were at the same time an artefact of philosophical inquiry and also, as it


were, within (a/the property of) the human subject(s) considered by the analyst? This suggestion is an incorporation into our text of a critical commentary by Ian Hunter on another text—by Alec McHoul on the ground rules of social practice.8 We reproduce the salient paragraph:

My general worry is that I think it’s a mistake to identify the mundanity of rule formulations with their (in principle) accessibility to ‘practitioners’, ordinary members etc. (p. 36). This actually strikes me as quite transcendental. It is a version of the Kantian desire to both formulate rules and have them be selfmanifesting/self-evident. As if one can transparently represent foundations by having their human bearers speak them. But what do they say and who listens?9 An example of the libertarian tendency would be the wave of ‘non-intrusive measures’ used by sociologists throughout the twentieth century, but particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here the idea was that an actual stretch of lived social reality (a ‘text’) was so sacrosanct that any intrusion of the sociologist’s presence (a ‘commentary’) upon it would alter and distort its naturalness. However, as the example below clearly shows, this ‘libertarian’ strategy is, in effect, a panopticism by another name. The sociologist was entreated to arrive after the fact in order to glean from the traces what had happened. He might employ an erosion method such as the relative degree of carpet or floor-tile wear in front of each painting [in a gallery]. Or, more elaborately, he might install invisible photoelectric timers and counters. Such an approach must also take into account irrelevant habits which affect traffic flow. There is, for example, a general right-turn bias upon entering a building or room. When this is combined with time deadlines and fatigue… there probably is a predictably biased response tendency.10 Similarly, the ‘garbology’ tradition involved poring through people’s rubbish in order to reveal to the archaeologist their modes of consumption and lifestyle. While the text is supposed to speak for itself, untouched by sociological hands, it is nevertheless the case that the commentary— coming after the moment of action and data-collection—gives the character of truth to its text. Just as much as any (intrusive) technique of mastery, this approach presumes the ‘original’ text to be mute and mysterious to the extent that it can only be revealed in its plenitude by the commentator. The primacy ascribed to the text is also, and not coincidentally, a way of silencing non-expert speakers. There are more libertarian models than either ‘non-intrusive’ sociology or ethnomethodology (which, to be fair, never strictly takes up the ‘standpoint of the actor’ to the extent of other phenomenologically derived social sciences), and these often claim to invert the analyst/patient or professor/student positions. The text becomes the master: it ‘teaches’ the analyst. And the commentary becomes the


pupil and is taught by the text. This tendency can be noticed particularly in certain tensions within what is now called ‘critical anthropology’ and in so-called ‘clientcentred therapy’. Here the analyst is ‘backgrounded’: the crux of the cultural matter, or the ‘cure’, is held to be within the subject cultural group or within the patient all along. The analyst merely acts as a medium through which this emerges to full consciousness: and the technique for its emergence is not imposed—it too resides within. ‘Natives’ give their own accounts: they joint-author the ethnographic work, hand-in-hand with the anthropologist (with perplexing consequences for higher degree committees). The therapeutic encounter is led by the patient: sometimes in a group therapy session from which the analyst has been absented (or included only by the democratic consensus of the group). If case-notes are written up (by therapists, of course, not patients), they are designed as nonintrusive and ‘literal’. No effort is made to clean them up or even to suggest what the subject ‘really meant all along’. The point is not to explain the underlying cultural structures or neuroses: rather it is to understand the surface as if the professional could somehow be a co-member or a co-patient. It is no accident that this tendency emerged in the 1960s. However, the silence of the analyst is far from innocent and is in fact part of a very effective strategy of power. Taking the case of classical psychoanalysis: silence here is always a ‘strategic and principled silence’.11 If the analyst is silent while the patient speaks, this leaves the patient’s text always open to an absent inspection and a commentary which is known to exist, secretly to the analyst, but which can never be made available for contestation on the scene of analysis. The only space of emergence for the psychoanalyst’s commentary is in any later case histories or published analyses—precisely for the inspection of anyone but the patient. Such, usually professional, readers in turn, however, have no access to the patient’s text except via the analyst’s commentary. The reader’s (further) commentary on the case history, moreover, cannot impinge on the original analytic encounter. Hence there is an absence of dialogue at all three points of the patient-analyst-reader triangle. Despite this, the publication of the analyst’s commentary is not obligatory and, when it occurs, exposes the analytic text to considerable risk. For instance, although the patient, Dora, in Freud’s celebrated example, can never hear it, later feminists can read Freud’s analysis of hysteria, reappropriating it for their own projects.12 The complex politics of radical libertarianism can be seen in the so-called antipsychiatric movement of Laing, Cooper and Szasz. These writers claimed to find a new order of rationality in the discourse of the mad, but typically they did not simply allow the texts of the insane to ‘speak for themselves’. They either did not quote, but gestured at the ineffable meanings of these holy others in the best anthropological tradition, or else they surrounded selected fragments of text with extensive commentary. Their own will-to-power over the experiences of patients can be discerned despite (or perhaps because of) the apparent privilege given (in theory) to such primary experiences. For all the apparent contradictions, this group seemed to achieve a spectacular triumph over repressive structures when the deinstitutionalization movement swept America’s mental patients out of hospitals and into the alleys and subways of cities like New York. But this outcome raises further interesting political questions: why did the policy-makers in mental health choose to listen to the radical libertarians on this matter? (Perhaps because it was cheaper to do


so?) And why were the political texts of the mad (ex-patients organizations, reform organizations) not listened to (treated as text for commentary) in the same way? Libertarianists who self-consciously take the side of the victim, still face the dilemma of which particular victim to choose (or for that matter, which victims they would like to be chosen by). For example, one ethnomethodologist recently appeared to take the side of a man who was about to be carted off to a mental hospital against his will.13 Thereupon, another two ethnomethodologists responded with the following commentary:

In essence, McHoul appears to be advancing a sort of civil (or perhaps ‘conversational’) libertarianism which would not distinguish between, say, the transgressions of a ‘reluctant victim’ being shipped off to mental hospital and the transgressions of a ‘recalcitrant witness’ testifying before Joint Committees of Congress concerning his role in ‘U.S. covert operations’.14 It remains unclear whether or not McHoul is willing to accept the libertarian implications of his own arguments.15 Politically, the libertarian technique is ultimately parasitic, even in its ideal form of leaving the text as a self-explicating phenomenon. In the name of ‘liberty’, the text is asked to do the work of analysis itself. And indeed many a commentary which has refused to appropriate or master its object/subject of investigation, has done little but repeat that text word-for-word. An example in the work of Foucault is the study of Pierre Rivière.16 Here Foucault and his students almost totally refrain from offering an interpretation of the multiple murderer’s confessional text. The problem, they argue, is that the interpretations made of it, in the nineteenth century—by the legal and medical professions, and also by the popular networks of gossip and the broadsheets—sought out the ‘truth’ behind the events of the murders and the text which narrates them. In this way Rivière is supposedly ‘robbed’ of his authorship of both the deed and the text. For modern analysts to offer anything like this same kind of examination would be for them to be complicit with the ‘disciplines’ (in both senses) which ‘treated’ Rivière’s actions and writings. No judgement must be made or even implied. As Hepworth and Turner note, ‘to subject the text to psychiatric or psychoanalytic commentary would be an exercise of power against Rivière’s authorship of the memoir’.17 But in cases of parasitic repetition, the possibilities for critique are all but absent. What is the difference between abstaining from judgements about Rivière and abstaining (equally) from judgements about nineteenth-century legal and medical codes? Why one and not the other? How, in the case of a libertarian politics of text and commentary, do we decide what is to be subject to critique and what not? For to include one text as its own analyst is to exclude others. Without the latter the former would have no meaning. But on what basis could an abstaining Foucauldian decide which is to go where? Would all cases of multiple murders be included and all cases of ‘scientific’ practice excluded from this ‘hands off’ gesture? Would we want to act the same way in the case of the forensic techniques used to detect the Yorkshire Ripper? And if so: how should we feel about the Lindy Chamberlain


case? To remain indifferent in such cases is to run the risk of what de Lauretis calls ‘paradoxical conservatism’, which

is a very appropriate phrase for a major theoretician of social history who writes of power and resistance, bodies and pleasures and sexuality as if the ideological structures and effects of patriarchy and sexual differentiation had nothing to do with history, indeed as if they had no discursive status or political implications. The rape and sexual extortion performed on little girls by young and adult males is a ‘bit of theatre’, a petty ‘everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality’, purely ‘inconsequential bucolic pleasures’.18 What really matters to the historian is the power of institutions, the mechanisms by which these bits of theatre become, presumably, pleasurable for the individuals involved, the men and the women—former little girls, proletarianized or not—who then become complicit with those institutional apparati. Here is where, despite Foucault’s elegant rhetoric and radical politics (his interventions in issues of capital punishment, prison revolts, psychiatric clinics, judiciary scandals, etc.), his efforts to define political resistance and theoretical negativity sink like a paper boat in a street puddle.19 It seems that underlying libertarian techniques of abstention from judgement are ‘deeper’ judgements about what is and what is not to get this treatment. A certain problem returns: one which the men of mastery solved by simply and overtly incorporating a brash moralism into their textual politics; but one which the libertarians cannot avoid by rejecting that ‘up front’ positioning. At least one knew where one stood with Leavis. Indeed is there not a paradox in the fact that many a libertarian form of analysis (in the words of the symbolic interactionists) ‘takes the position of the underdog’—workers over bosses, students over teachers, patients over medical staff, natives over colonizers and so on? For one must then ask: what is done with the knowledge and information that is produced; what is its extratextual function? Writing, for example, on the exact details of workers’ culture hands over those exact details not only to benign and caring, liberal academic sociologists but also to proponents of scientific management and time-and-motion experts. Paul Willis’s classic study of working-class ‘lads’ as successfully ‘resisting’ the dominant ideology through the education system could be used by a Tory government to justify cutting funds to these implacable resisters.20 On the other hand, an ethnography of boardroom practices or of the everyday life of management would make the ethnographer (in her or his own terms) complicit with (or ‘on the side of’) a repressive social force. The paradoxes seem unresolvable. Libertarian modes of commentary as components of a disciplinary formation are ineluctably different from the texts they analyse; they must adopt a degree of mastery or else self-efface. They may speak for ‘underdogs’ but they cannot control the question of whom they speak to. This paradox, however—at the risk of invoking a further romanticist evasion of control—opens up the space of an imaginary politics which


would go beyond the interior of the bi-textual couple (text-plus-commentary) to an indefinitely bifurcating series of comments on comments which may at times have unpredictable trajectories, a discursive process that would be a primary target of disciplinary systems. IV TEXT AS SPECTACLE In Discipline and Punish Foucault proposes two primary strategies of discursive control: a monarchical regime which was organized around spectacles of punishment, and a bourgeois regime which mobilized sub-regimes of surveillance.21 In the first, the punishment-text, carefully constructed by a state which rigorously maintained its monopoly over textual production, was so ‘obvious’ that the commentary process could be left to take care of itself. In the second, control was managed through systems of surveillance: that is to say, through control at the level of commentary, attached to the banal texts of everyday life. Foucault’s book describes the breakdown of the spectacle regime towards the end of the eighteenth century, as the meaning of the spectacle text became less obvious, refracted by undisciplined commentaries. But the era of surveillance still deploys and can be disrupted by regimes of spectacle. In 1988 Eric Michaels, anthropologist, activist, gay, died of AIDS. In 1990 the journal of his last year, Unbecoming: An Aids Diary was published posthumously.22 Inside the front cover, a photograph was reproduced showing the author two months before his death, with the page opposite containing only the comment: ‘Eric Michaels, Brisbane, 26 June 1988 (this image is reproduced by permission of the author)’. We cannot reproduce that image here, in the pages of Textual Practice. It is not that we do not wish to; nor that its owner refuses us copyright; he has simply asked us not to. It is that the photograph was taken for its location in one specific context: as an accompaniment to what was known by the living author to be an eventually posthumous work. Paul Foss, the writer of the foreword to Unbecoming, in his final conversation with Michaels was entrusted to publish the photo, in the face of (and perhaps because of) its political effectivity; that is, its effect as a unique commentary on the diary which it prefaces, or else as a unique text to be commented on by the diary (which is which is undecidable): unique, then, but politically ambivalent, as we shall see. In not reproducing the image, then, we have endorsed the complex textual politics of Michaels’ request. ‘AIDS’ is an acronym from medical discourse which legitimates a punitive apparatus of surveillance of an exemplary kind (recorded meticulously in Michaels’ diary). It is also the site of a return of the spectacle regime to the repertoire of discursive systems. AIDS is the overwhelming and obvious judgement on homosexuality, promiscuity and licence, the eighth plague. The moral reform campaign might make good use of the Michaels photograph: so for what purpose might he be providing it to the enemy? Or to adopt a more strategic form of politics: why is he taking this risk, and what might it achieve (or lose)? The photograph shows Michaels bare from the waist up, with large ulcers on his body and face and tongue, which he sticks out towards the camera. The lesions are


like a commentary on his passive body, the protruding tongue like a commentary on the commentary—a gesture of defiance? Or offering another lesion to medical scrutiny (and to his readers occupying the site of the medical gaze)? The photograph is obscene, asking for censorship not commentary, or for a commentary that will clothe the image, displace its force, reduce and control its all too obvious meaning. This text has no mystery. The brief comment heads off one comment (who is responsible for this error of taste?) but provokes others (how can a dead author give permission?). Then there is the journal itself, an extended commentary that is reassuringly verbal and loquacious, so that it is a shock to open the book again, and stare once more at the intransigent spectacle. It refuses Michaels’ own discourse as much as the moralistic discourse of moral reform: the spectacle becomes scandalous, its political effect to be found in this double refusal that nullifies the otherwise irresistible nexus between text and commentary. What would the Leavisite tradition say about such a text? Easy—declare it outside the canon, too lacking in mystery to allow a commentary: to be controlled by exclusion, by a prohibition on all commentary, as obscene, insane, inelegant. This seems to be a text that can be left to ‘speak for itself’ (Michaels as an anthropologist came out of the liber tarian tradition of the 1960s). But Michaels evidently didn’t think it could so speak: he added his own commentary (the diary itself), to which was appended a foreword by Paul Foss and an introduction by Simon Watney, beginning the endless sequence of commentaries (of which this is one) whose place is inscribed in Michaels’ text in advance. As a further mark of his consciousness of the dangers of his text, he issued his request to his literary executor that he withhold permission for the image to be reproduced in any other context. The politics of a text-commentary relationship cannot simply be read off from its position on the mastery-libertarian axis, independently of a particlar context and its risks, dangers and opportunities as these are seen by participants.

V THE DIFFÉREND As a provisional attempt to deal with what appears now to be a paradoxical situation for any text analyst, let us endeavour to drop a certain moral connotation from our investigation (though, of course, if we are right, this may not be possible in any absolute way). Regardless of whether we are discussing the tendency to mastery or the tendency to liberty, we can construct a general relation for text and commentary common to both. We could represent the discourse of the text as D1 and that of the commentary as D2. Then remembering that both discourses must contain certain units (which we can roughly designate as ‘utterances’, U1, U2, etc.) and that they must, in turn, have a certain content (which we can even more roughly designate as ‘events’, E1, E2, etc.), we can construct a general model in which two discourses work over or through ‘the same’ event. (And, for the purposes of this argument, we can neglect the nominalism/realism debate—leaving to one side for the moment the question of whether ‘an event’ exists prediscursively, let alone remains the same when it is represented by different discourses.) Any given discourse, as we have said in section I above, can


empirically occupy either position of text or commentary; but once a specific relation of this kind has been established as a material case, it can be understood as having the following more general properties: We can call these two (arrowed) relations R1 and R2 respectively. Hence: In the work of Lyotard the notion of différend can be understood in terms of this model in the following way.23 Différend occurs in circumstances when there is an extreme agonistic24 relation between discourses, D1 and D2, resulting in a relation (say, R3) of absolute difference between the relations R1 and R2. In such a case, the discourses will always remain on the same logical level—but the point is that questions of power (rather than logic) arise in terms of distinctions between relations of utterance to event. One of Lyotard’s examples is the worker’s (as against the capitalist’s) available discourses (D1/D2) on the worker’s labour (E1). U1—the worker’s statement about his labour—may consist of such things as personal fulfilment, a sense of being in the world, a membership of a community of workers, questions of dignity and so on. However, U2—the capitalist’s statement— may simply construct E1 as a commodity, as something to be bought and sold at the cheapest going rate in order to maximize profit. In this case R3 is a case of différend. The situation that we are concerned with is one in which the systems of discursive control are sufficiently powerful to ensure that U1 can never be uttered— sensibly, competently, with any meaning—in D2. In these circumstances U1 is not a ‘grammatical’ utterance in D2. This is because its relation (R1) to its event is semantically antithetical to U2’s relation (R2) to that event. Furthermore: the différend itself, in abstract terms, the fact that R1 and R2 are non-identical, cannot be meaningfully uttered within D2. The différend exists as a structural condition, but the utterance which speaks it (tentatively U3, a kind of meta-communication) is asemantic in D2. It would be tempting to say that the existence of a radical difference of this kind of itself constitutes a relation of power. But need this be the case? For it could be equally true that U2 (a commentary utterance) was asemantic in discourse D1 (the discourse of the analysed text). A further assumption is needed to constitute a différend: namely that, in any opposition between discourses, the discourses are not equal and opposite. As Irigaray points out, this is no more clearly shown than in the


case of gender oppositions in patriarchal societies.25 The relation m/f, in such circumstances, may look like a technical or neutral pair (such as 0/1, perhaps) but it is in fact the case that each cannot be simply defined as the negation of its opposite. The feminine may indeed be defined as the absence of the dominant masculine, but the reverse is not so—again in some kind of classically patriarchal regime. In cases of discursive agonism, then, we can speculate that pro-unitary, linearist modes of thought, associated with the Western metaphysical tradition, will tend, in cases of such discursive oppositionally, ‘naturally’ to allot a position of dominance and privilege to one discourse in a pair over the other. Another of Lyotard’s examples demonstrates this. He takes the case of a plaintiff seeking redress in a law court where the very nature of the complaint is not expressible (is not grammatically or semantically competent) within the discourse of legal proceedings. For the plaintiff to ‘explain’ is for the complaint to be neutralized by his or her technical incompetence at law:

The plaintiff brings [a] complaint before the tribunal; the accused argues in such a way as to show the inanity of the accusation. Litigation takes place. I would like to call the différend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes on that account a victim. If the addresser, the addressee, and the meaning of the testimony are neutralized, everything takes place as if there were no injury. A case of différend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict which opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the injustice suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.26 Hence the very fact of a situation of différend requires that one discourse (or ‘idiom’) be the dominant. The non-translatability of a legal event into, let us say, the ‘common sense’ of the plaintiff is a non-event. It is not a matter which can even be raised: it has no practical consequence. However, the non-translatability of the plaintiff’s complaint into formal legal discourse is an event which produces real effects: the neutralization of the complaint. This (we could almost say ‘logical’) relation is what produces and defines discursive dominance: the question of which side of the différend has real material consequences. VI THE DIFFÉREND AND THE PROBLEM OF TEXTUAL COMMENTARY Returning now to the limiting case of the desire for total mastery over, or appropriation of, a text by a commentarial discourse: here we could say that the ultimately desired outcome of the latter (D2) is to take as its event (E1) the entirety of the text’s discourse itself (D1). D1 becomes E1 in the extreme case. Of course this extreme limit can never be reached in practice. For example, it is very weak in so-called ‘encyclopaedic’ criticism: where the commentator attempts to find ‘real historical’ equivalents for events within the text’s diegetic space (locating


distinctions between the historical record of the failed Napoleonic Moscow campaign and its representation in War and Peace, for example; or comparing nautical and whaling techniques in Moby-Dick against those which prevailed in the US in the nineteenth century). Here, one can say that two distinct discourses work through some event (E1) in a relatively straightforward way. The commentary’s historical version (U2) and that of, say, the novel (U1) are put into contention, to be sure, but there is no attempt to appropriate the whole of D2 as D1’s event. However, in the case of Leavisism (to return to an example closer to the limits), the différend is so acute that U1 all but disappears as a viable utterance. It has its begrudged privilege, to be sure, as a kind of mystery. But that mystery renders it asemantic in the absence of its translation into the discourse of criticism/ commentary. This, then, is a tendency towards a total neutralization of D1— regardless of judgements of its aesthetic value. But the broader political value of this move should be obvious by now. For Leavisism to allow a space for U1 (that is, what a libertarian reading might call ‘the text in itself’ or ‘on its own terms’) would be to acknowledge the very possibility of a différend; and to acknowledge this would be to encounter heterology—the ultimate non-translatability of one discourse into another. Without that translatability, the whole of the appropriative politics of textual mastery would self-efface. Thus, the text can be allowed no selfunderstanding. Or else, in weaker forms of this technique, the text’s selfunderstanding is necessarily confused and nebulous (whether through ‘genius’ or ‘literary failure’). It is the effect of a kind of textual pathology which the master discourse can analyse, clarify and cure. By contrast, the textual liberation movement (marked, to a small extent, by the reaction to Leavis known as ‘the New Criticism’ which attempted to work from the text and nothing but the text as a privileged site) acknowledges—indeed it is launched from the acknowledgement of—heterology. For it, the text’s selfunderstanding is the very goal of the critical quest: but one which can never be completely satisfied if the text is to be given its dignity. Going much further along this axis of libertarianism: the ‘new’ critical ethnographer, for example, ‘knows’ (and celebrates his knowledge of the fact) that to ‘write’ another culture is to colonize it; that its mysteries are only available to members; that anthropological writings ‘of it’ are not ‘of it’ but only artefacts of the culture of the anthropologist and no more.27 The reading strategies of the Yale deconstructionists, the heirs to New Criticism, give a similar frank dominance to the commentary text as a writing with its own autonomous rights. But in these particular forms of postmodernism, the discourse of the text (D1) is again neutralized. For here the totalizing gesture of mastery has simply been inverted. Pushing this technique to its logical limit, nothing could be said about D1 at all; a firm barrier of extreme heterology would be placed between the ‘levels’ of text and commentary. D2 confines itself to the repetition of utterances within its own domain. It constructs itself as never reaching over into any real or genuine repetition of U1. Here the relation between R1 and R2 constitutes an extreme version of the différend equal to (but technically distinct from) that of the discourse of mastery. By starting with the notion of ‘letting the text speak for itself’, one soon realizes that there is a differential between text and commentary. Then the necessary privilege accorded to the text becomes something which one dare not intrude upon at any cost. It, literally, speaks for itself, and to itself. The


discourse of commentary ‘learns its place’: confines its own writing to its own domain; cuts itself off from any ultimate, genuine or authentic relation with the text. Each, in the extreme, goes its own way: along parallel lines which (according to classical geometry, at least) never meet. The politics of mastery superimposes its ‘line’ over that of the object text, obliterating it. This is one form of différend. The politics of liberation refuses this gesture: the two ‘lines’ never come into contact for fear of colonization, irony or contamination. This is a second form of différend. Is there another geometry which could be used to begin to indicate a different politics of text and commentary outside the array constituted by these two extremes? Somewhere, in another space…(a wall in a men’s toilet at Murdoch University, to be precise). A graffitist has written: ‘I am conscious of being conscious of something being something—Bob Hodge.’ Bob Hodge denies that he ever said this (like all good commentaries this constructs its own text, or rather inscribes its commentary in a pseudo-text) but he hesitates to scrawl on the wall beneath it ‘I deny I ever said this—signed, the real Bob Hodge.’ He knows that this ‘real’ will seem pathetically unreal when written in this site, claiming to come ‘from below’. It is reproduced in the present paper (complete with neutralizing commentary) but its repetition is a weak form of control, since the traducer cannot be made to read this paper, or given a low grade for his false commentary. Within its sphere as a ‘text from below’, the graffito is an effective instance of counter-discourse, the discourse of counter-mastery, even if its effect is contained by its discursive conditions. The political point of this is worth stressing: no bi-textual form (textplus-commentary) can control all forms of possible commentary, but some forms, embedded in specific conditions and strategies, cause much more trouble to dominant disciplinary forms than others do.

VII OFF THE SCALE/AROUND THE RIDGES/WHERE? At this stage we are faced with a number of problems and paradoxes which appear to block the path of any definitive reconstitution of the relations between text and commentary. The problems with disciplinary formations of mastery are, to some extent, self-evident and unarguable. They rely on a basic assumption of epistemic and moral privilege over the texts they analyse but rarely inspect their own grounding in this respect. The position, politically, is one of arrogance; and we cannot even imagine what kinds of arguments could justify such a grounding assumption. In very simple terms: one does not have to be a rabid relativist to see the problems of, and reject, overtly masterly paradigms. But on the other hand, the libertarian position cannot escape the same politics absolutely—the politics of the processing of object texts. We have already seen how a complete ‘inversion’ of the différend cannot work without logically self-effacing the libertarian position of commentary itself. Moreover, the moral problems facing libertarian approaches are even greater than those facing masterly approaches. The question of which texts to valorize and which not arises more forcefully here—since modern libertarian discourses seem to assume that the commentary must always speak ‘on the side of’


the text it comments on, while, at the same time, letting it speak for itself. Also, the commentary, remaining invisible, is not so available for resistance, reappropriation or rewriting. In extremis, this could mean that texts which are obviously and unarguably repressive at a macropolitical level (racist texts, sexist texts, fascist texts) would escape all critique. In the case of these types of texts, it would seem that a masterly approach would be much more suitable (and this may be why a number of marxisms have taken this option). But then, the commentary faces the problem of repeating (at the level of analysis) the very political troubles that the object text is being attacked for. At every turn, then, we are confronted by problems of this kind.28 No one is going to pretend that these basic disciplinary formations (mastery and liberty, to continue the shorthand) are going to go away overnight. And neither are the problems associated with them and with the choices between and within them that textual analysts must always face. And we have absolutely no doubt that the problems we are trying to bring to the surface here have plagued (or will plague) our own discussion so far (and yet to come), through and through and without any pleas for exemption. What we offer in the following discussion, then, are some tentative possibilities for rethinking the politics of text and commentary. Some of them will have familiar resonances—will map on to (more or less) strategies which have already been tried in a number of disciplines. Others, we hope, will open up some new areas and new possibilities. It may be possible for analysts to discern particular kinds of text which are already beginning to cope with commentarial problems in their own right. A number of recent literary works appear to be deliberately constructed so as to resist commentary by incorporating it to a high level of sophistication. We may term this the textual strategy of counter-mastery, since in these cases the text itself claims authority over all legitimate forms of commentary on them. The names of Pynchon, De Lillo, Auster and so on come to mind here—though this hasn’t stopped interpretational industries forming around them, in the search for ‘final keys’ to their enigmas.29 But the question of ‘what to do’ in the face of texts which consciously de-authorize the work of commentary remains open. There are two broad strategies, corresponding roughly to the two basic types of disciplinary commentary. One strategy (the post-libertarian) would be for commentators to write in such a way as to advance the complexities they open up—rather than resolving them—taking these texts as instances of the very analytic problems commentators face today, some of which are described in the present paper. Or else the strategy of anti-mastery: it might be a question of turning to those commentaries which have tried to resolve their enigmas, paradoxes and indeterminacies and magisterially showing how such masterly commentaries must always fail in the face of their object texts. In either case, the very gesture of commentary might be put aside in favour of a kind of interventional strategy—one which works along with and through its ‘object texts’ (such that this term itself begins to have little value)—rather than making those texts over. This would mean having to take seriously some recent rethinkings of the concept of writing advanced by Derrida and the later Barthes. According to such a position, the ‘truth’ of texts remains forever unavailable in any absolute form —meaning is not available by an inspection of the level of the textual signifier (such


that the excessive and transcendental signified is made clear upon analysis). Instead, textual meaning is always tied to a writing (a writing-in-general which includes all forms of the trace, including speech) which is radically severed from fixed origins and destinations. If both masterly and libertarian modes of commentary attempted to be, in different ways, the ultimate destination of texts’ meanings by, in the same gesture, elaborating their ultimate origins, then the practice we are suggesting here would argue that commentarial destinations/meanings would be, in themselves, writings and rewritings which could do no more than continually display the unavailability of any ultimate commentary. In this sense, we would be asking for a more self-conscious mode of textual commentary (where the term ‘commentary’ itself might now be shown under erasure—as a negation of commentary in which the problems of commentary necessarily persist). The problems of commentary would be always already present along with (and as a necessary part and parcel of) any statement on any text. Of course, this would mean risking falling into the well-defined spaces of mastery and libertarianism. Those grooves would always be beckoning to either side of the space or spacing between them. But it remains the case that any such pair of grooves (if they are in any way distinct, and we think they are) must, as it were, throw up a ridge between them. It is this ridge that we would be wanting to try to negotiate (almost in the topographical sense). And here we are reminded of the poststructuralist ‘doctrine’ that any binary is always a triplet, consisting as it does of a first and a second element plus the relation of difference (the slash or ridge) between them. This in turn sets up an indeterminate and indefinite set of relations. For each of the three elements can have a further set of relations between them. Using the further shorthand, then, where ‘m’ stands for mastery and ‘l’ for libertarianism, if there is a relation m/l, then there is also a relation between m and /, and between l and /. If those further relations are marked thus: ‘’, the formula becomes: ml Logically (if not in practice) this could be proliferated to a point where the binary no longer operates at all but is instead disseminated, cast to the limits of a rapidly expanding series of ‘chaotic’ points (almost in the technical sense). It would seem to us to be one strategy for post-commentarial critique to begin the long trek of this deconstruction. And if this risks incorporating (working from the premises of the very existence of) mastery and libertarianism, then so this must be. This kind of strategy (writing in the spacing of differences, compounding textual enigmas and indeterminacies) might open up the space of a positive and selfreflective politics—even though some would say that it runs the further risks of nihilism. But that nihilism could be headed off quite easily by a strategy of remembering (in the Nietzschean sense): remembering the always already negative political spaces which mastery and libertarianism constitute, remembering that one is working, first and foremost (perhaps even regardless of the specific texts analysed) in opposition to them by critically repeating their own surfaces which, as we have seen, are full of cracks and fissures to be exploited and opened up.


If one were to read this as nihilism, that could only mean that one was taking mastery and libertarianism as the only legitimate possibilities, such that anything outside them was beyond the limits, approaching nothingness. But that reading could be headed off by remembering that these two traditional disciplinary formations are always formed in and as techniques within specific institutional spaces. They do not exist in the abstract, but only as effects of quite piecemeal and locally specific institutional techniques. For example, the politics of how it is that some texts (and also students, patients, indigenous persons) come to be put under the gaze of mastery would be up for grabs here. If the two problematic discursive formations we are critiquing here consider themselves as relatively intratextual practices, what we have seen is that they have a particular (though not always prespecifiable) extratextual politics which involves both moral judgements and epistemic evaluations. Thus we would be saying that a critique of institutional spaces is as least as important as any intratextual moves one can make under the aegis of either mastery or liberty. And then we would have to ask what kinds of critical, post-commentarial, texts could emerge from this kind of rethinking. One recent possibility, here, would be work within the domain of so-called fictocriticism—by which term we mean any and every attempt, in the space of a single text, or in a broader format, to break down not just the divisions between critical theory and writerly practice but also those more general distinctions between the academic and the popular. Reading the Country by Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe weaves together texts and commentaries of different types, including meticulously transcribed narratives by the Aboriginal Paddy Roe (served faithfully by his libertarian editor) with the lavish illustrations and fine artwork of a coffee-table book surrounding its libertarian core.30 Such work, it seems to us, explicitly declares the work of the commentary itself to be, at the same time, another ‘object text’ for commentary—thereby starting to dissolve the rigid binary between the two. The self-reflexive work of fiction is perhaps too readily accommodated within the texts colonized by Literature as an institution, so that it loses some of its capacity to disrupt the dominant disciplinary practices. In some sections of popular culture there is a similar level of self-reflexivity—in the pages of correspondence in Marvel and DC Comics, for instance, in the complex allusions of a film like Batman, or in self-conscious self-commentaries such as the scene in Gremlins 2, where a pretentious Gremlin (somewhat reminiscent of Leavis) interrupts a parody interview on the theme of ‘civilization’ to shoot a yobbo-Gremlin who wanders on to the set wearing a propeller-hat: and then continues on his theme without a break. It’s difficult to resist the temptation of Gremlinizing Leavis by remembering him at his most magisterial, on the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell: ‘his seriousness is the finer wisdom of a ripe civilisation’.31 The juxtaposition, in some institutional contexts, would present the Leavisite tradition of mastery as itself a text that can be subjected to irreverent commentary: leaving it at a disadvantage, when stripped of enabling resources (proselytizing teachers with control over the full arsenal of means of educational control) as compared to the more open and engaging popular bitext. Quite often in ficto-criticism and critical fiction, a number of quite distinct writing positions (or voices) are at play, working through and across one another, delving into registers and genres which (as it were ‘in their own terms’) they would


not normally reach. In such work, a single position or narratorial voice is destabilized, such that readers cannot clearly tell which of the often contradictory positions is supposed to represent the text’s own truth or self-understanding. If the traditional commentarial disciplines do have institutional functions, these types of texts seem to us to play with those functions, to realign them and rethink them, to try to write and deliberately critique the extratextual conditions of possibility which enable and constrain all writing. Masterly and libertarian commentaries as disciplinary strategies unite in sharing the premises of the différend: that the difference between text and commentary should be absolute, non-negotiable, asymmetrical and asemantic. Both strategies are disrupted by the insertion of texts and practices of commentary that challenge the différend itself. Such challenges are of course always at risk from successful counter-moves from the dominant disciplinary formation, but this fact only confirms the view that we have argued in this paper: that the key issues in the politics of text and commentary are ultimately played out in contests over the différend. Murdoch University, Australia

NOTES 1 J-F.Lyotard, ‘The différend, the referent, and the proper name’, Diacritics, 14, 3 (1984), pp. 4–14. 2 E.Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 3 M.Foucault, ‘Rituals of exclusion’, in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966–84, trans. J.Johnston, ed. S.Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1989), pp. 63–72. This quotation, pp. 65–6. 4 G.H.von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). 5 H.Garfinkel and H.Sacks, ‘On formal structures of practical actions’, in J.C.McKinney and E.A.Tiryakian (eds), Theoretical Sociology (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1970), pp. 337–66. This quotation, p. 345. 6 Garfinkel and Sacks, p. 347. 7 N.Malcolm, Nothing is Hidden (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 8 A.McHoul, ‘Can philosophy tell us what is social?’, Manchester Sociology Occasional Papers, 25 (1990), pp. 1–44. 9 I.Hunter, personal communication to A.McHoul, 29 July 1990. 10 E.J.Webb, D.T.Campbell, R.D.Schwartz and L.Sechrest, Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreactive Research in the Social Sciences (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966), p. 20. 11 J.Frow, personal communication to the present authors, 12 April 1991. We would like to thank John Frow for this phrasing and other helpful comments on our work. 12 S.Anderson, ‘Desire, Dora and the divine: towards a theory of positive hysteria’ (Honours dissertation, School of Humanities, Murdoch University, 1991). 13 A.McHoul, ‘Language and the sociology of mind: a critical introduction to the work of Jeff Coulter’, Journal of Pragmatics, 12, 3 (1988), pp. 339–86. 14 See D.Bogen and M.Lynch, ‘Taking account of the hostile native: plausible deniability and the production of conventional history in the Iran-Contra hearings’, Social Problems, 36, 3 (1989), pp. 197–224.


15 D.Bogen and M.Lynch, ‘Social critique and the logic of description’, Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 3 (1990), pp. 505–21. 16 M.Foucault (ed.), I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother…: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (London: Peregrine Books, 1978). 17 M.Hepworth and B.S.Turner, Confession: Studies in Deviance and Religion (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). The closest we get to an ‘analysis’ is Foucault’s account of the multiple possible sequencings of the murders and the confession; and this could in itself be the basis for an extended analysis of the temporal politics of textcommentary relations. See ‘Text and murder’ in Pierre Rivière, pp. 201–2. 18 See M.Foucault, The History of Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1984). 19 T.de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 94. 20 P.Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (London: Saxon House, 1977). 21 M.Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977). 22 E.Michaels, Unbecoming: An Aids Diary (Sydney: EMPress Publications, 1990). 23 Lyotard, ‘The différend’. 24 M.Pècheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious, trans. H.Naqpal (London: Macmillan, 1982). 25 L.Irigaray, That Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Speculum: Of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 26 Lyotard, ‘The différend’, p. 5. 27 J.Clifford and G.E.Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 28 One such problem which we don’t try to address (since it suggests another agenda) is the multiplicity of different acts of reading within different domains of institutionalized textual analysis as these constrain the different possibilities of uptake. We are grateful to Alison Lee for this and other comments on our work. 29 A.McHoul and D.Wills, Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1990). 30 K.Benterrak, S.Muecke and P.Roe, Reading the Country (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984). 31 F.R.Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936), p. 31.

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Language games and justice ALEX SEGAL

The last half-decade or so has seen an intensification of interest (precipitated amongst other things by the revelations concerning Paul de Man’s wartime writings) in the ethical purport of poststructuralist and postmodernist literary criticism and theory. In relation to this concern, the work of Jean-François Lyotard is particularly pertinent.1 For in Lyotard’s work the poststructuralist gestures (for instance, the displacement of the categories of the subject and the person) that many regard as inimical to ethics, are explicitly presented as arising in response to an ethical demand. Hence he implies that to criticize these gestures on ethical grounds itself involves a certain ethical blindness. More particularly, he contends that the privileging of the subject and the person is tied to a specifically Western thought, a thought which by no means exhausts ethics. Lyotard’s thematization of the ethical is indebted to the work of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas—a debt he shares with many other contemporary French thinkers including Derrida. It is from Levinas that Lyotard’s ethically motivated denial of the primacy of the category of the person derives: ‘Modern antihumanism, which denies the primacy that the human person, free and for itself, would have for the signification of being…clears the place for subjectivity positing itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, in a substitution which precedes the will.’2 Levinas’s thought accords primacy to the ethical relationship, the asymmetrical relationship between self and other in which I demand more of myself than I demand of others —an event to which philosophy, he argues, has failed to attend.3 Poststructuralism and postmodernism follow Levinas in his refusal to privilege symmetry and reciprocity, but not in his thinking ethics as first philosophy. In considering how Lyotard broaches the question of ethics we shall need, then, to take account of more than what he inherits from Levinas. Precisely because Lyotard is concerned with what Derrida describes as a ‘law which would not answer to Western concepts of ethics, right, or politics’,4 his thematization of ethics—with its insistence on the importance of Old Testament narratives—may well appear bizarre in a culture in which the Western concepts are taken for granted. Yet to dismiss his work on this basis would of course be questionbegging. It would appear to repeat the repressive gesture that he seeks to expose. Lyotard’s most detailed and careful treatment of the ethical to date is Le Différend (translated as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute). In the present paper however I shall focus on Au Juste (translated Just Gaming), an earlier work which is more readily treated within the confines of an essay-length discussion. Much of the analysis of the


ethical in The Differend is an elaboration of arguments that are broached less formally in Just Gaming. Moreover, it is Just Gaming which is the target of one of the most virulent—and potentially most influential—of recent critiques of poststructuralism from within literary theory. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton argues that Just Gaming is symptomatic of the political and ethical bankruptcy of poststructuralism and postmodernism in general. Much of my analysis of Lyotard will be directed toward formulating a response to Eagleton’s critique. As with poststructuralist theory in general, Lyotard’s thematization of the ethical does not steer away from tension, undecidability, even paradox. Just Gaming seems to work with at least two distinct conceptions of justice—conceptions which are by no means obviously reconcilable.5 The relationship between these conceptions will be a central concern of this paper. I begin however by considering the first conception—which derives from Levinas—on its own terms.

I According to the first conception, justice is a matter of a particular kind of language game, a notion Lyotard uses to indicate an affiliation with the later Wittgenstein. Lyotard analyses language games in terms of what he calls ‘the pragmatic triangle’: ‘[w]hen language games are said to be different, it means that, in the pragmatic triangle…a given pole will be forgotten, for example, or completely neutralized, taken to be superfluous.’6 The poles are those of the addresser (or sender), the addressee (or receiver) and the referent. A game occludes a pole if in playing the game I do not find myself situated upon the pole. Thus ‘the speculative game of the West’ neutralizes both the addressee pole—‘the only listener tolerated by the speculative philosopher is the disciple…[s]omeone who can become an author, who will be able to take the master’s place’ (p. 72)—and the referent pole: in this game it is not the case that I speak only inasmuch as I am spoken about. It is in non-Western language games that the addressee and referent poles are not denigrated as poles of bondage and passivity. Thus in the narratives of the Cashinahua Indians—which are for Lyotard typical of paganism—the narrator presents himself as ‘at once the addressee…and as the subject matter’; ‘in saying at the beginning, “I am going to tell you what I have always heard”, and at the end, “My name is so-and-so”, he situates himself in…the poles where one is the recipient of a narrative in which one is narrated [that is, on the referent pole], and where one receives a narrative that has been narrated to one [that is, on the addressee pole]’: ‘the one who speaks is someone who has been “spoken”’ and ‘is someone who has been spoken to’ (pp. 32–3). The phrase ‘My name is so-and-so’ situates the speaker on the referent pole because the proper name that the speaker gives is an esoteric one that allows the localization of the speaker in an extremely exact, and far more formal than real, network of kinship relations. So that, when he gives his proper name, the teller designates himself as someone who has been narrated by the social body. (p. 32)


The proper name here classifies—describes—the teller. Even the pagan gods— when they have the position of first speaker—‘are themselves narrated in narratives that tell what they are telling…the one who speaks is at the same time the hero of a story in which he is narrated himself’ (p. 39). It is in another non-Western game—the Judaic game—that Lyotard locates justice. This game neutralizes the addresser and referent instances: it situates me always and only on the addressee pole: ‘we are never more than the addressees of prescriptions’ (p. 17). At the point of ‘God’s initial statement to Moses: “Let them obey me!”…there is [only] this prescription to place myself in a prescriptive situation:…in a condition of listening to a discourse…that prescribes an activity, a doing’ (p. 22). ‘[O]ne speaks only inasmuch as one listens, that is, one speaks as a listener, and not as an author…one of the basic rules is..that the position of sender must remain empty. No one may put herself or himself there; no one may be the authority’ (pp. 71–2). Moreover, not only must I occupy only the addressee pole but only I can occupy it—I occupy this pole uniquely: ‘Abraham hears: That Isaac die, that is my law, and he obeys. The Lord speaks at this moment only to Abraham, and Abraham is answerable only to the Lord.’7 The command is addressed to Abraham uniquely. In Wittgenstein’s words, ‘[y]ou can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed.’8 It is because only I can occupy the addressee pole that the game of the just occludes the referent pole. If God speaks only to me, if I can hear him only if I am being addressed, then the obligation under which I am placed cannot be ascribed to me by another; I cannot be the object of description or classification from the thirdperson point of view. When I say ‘Here I am’ in response to God’s call, the term ‘I’ has no reference in common with the terms—‘you’, ‘he’—that someone else may use to refer to me. To the extent that reference is something that may be shared by the terms ‘I’ and ‘you’, then the term ‘I’ in the phrase ‘Here I am’ has no reference. The ‘speaker’—who speaks only inasmuch as she or he is the addressee—in the game of the just could not be localized in any formal network of relations. Nor does the Judaic game situate God on the referent pole when he speaks; unlike the pagan gods Yahweh does not speak ‘only inasmuch as he is spoken’ (p. 38). Lyotard’s taxonomy of language games encounters what may seem to be insuperable difficulties. We have just seen for instance that the occlusion of the referent pole in the game of the just is tied to the fact that neither I nor God are spoken of within it. Yet this would seem to imply a commensurability, an equivalence between myself and God—an equivalence ultimately between self and other—which is precisely what the game of the just excludes. The incommensurability, the ineffability, the transcendence of the Jewish God seem to amount to his not being situated on the referent pole. If I too am displaced from the referent pole, and am therefore transcendent, the notion of transcendence becomes incoherent. To maintain that the sense in which I am situated on the referent pole is incommensurable with the sense in which God is situated on this pole, would seem to abandon the very idea of a pragmatic triangle—instead of three poles we would now have four—and with it Lyotard’s taxonomy of language games. The pragmatic triangle is threatened in another way. Lyotard’s taxonomy implies in effect that the games of the just and of the Cashinahua have in common an insistence upon the addressee pole. Yet in the game of the just but not in the game


of the Cashinahua, being situated on the addressee pole is tied to not being situated on the referent pole. If what differentiates the two games is the fact that the game of the just neutralizes whereas the game of the Cashinahua insists upon the referent pole, then the difference between the games already marks their common feature. The solidarity in the game of the just between the occlusion of the addresser pole and the occlusion of the referent pole suggests that here there are two poles only— an insisted-upon addressee pole and an occluded addresser/referent pole. The incommensurability between the addressee pole in the game of the just and the ‘same’ pole in the game of the Cashinahua would also seem to divide the I that is situated on the pole in the two games: for only in the game of the Cashinahua can the I be referred to. Thus ‘my’ being situated on the addressee instance would seem not to be a common feature of the two games. Yet the taxonomy seems to posit an identity between the speaker who occupies the addresser pole in the speculative game, the speaker who occupies the addressee pole in the game of the just, and the speaker who occupies the addressee and referent poles in the game of the Cashinahua. Differentiating language games in terms of which pole or poles of the pragmatic triangle the speaker occupies seems to presuppose the speaker has an identity independent of any particular language game. Lyotard actually affirms the kind of incommensurability that I am suggesting threatens his taxonomy. The Differend rejects the view that we are identifiable individuals who exist prior to genres of discourse and phrase regimens: the

addressor and addressee are instances, either marked or unmarked, presented by a phrase. The latter is not a message passing from an addressor to an addressee both of whom are independent of it. They are situated in the universe the phrase presents, as are its referent and its sense…phrases or silences take place…presenting universes in which individuals x, y, you, me are situated.9 If ‘individuals x, y, you, me’ only find ourselves as situated as addressors—and also as addressees and referents—of phrases, phrases which are tied to language games, then the notion of the individual language user cannot be invoked in differentiating language games. And Just Gaming, even more radically, declares that from game to game, for the ‘same’ position, there is incommensurability: it is not the same thing to be the recipient of a narrative, and to be the recipient of a denotative discourse with a function of truthfulness, or to be the recipient of a command. (p. 94) Lyotard perhaps intends to shatter the taxonomy that he at least initially made use of. The incommensurability of the ‘same’ position from game to game, he argues, implies ‘an absence of unity, an absence of totality. All of this’, he says, referring to what the taxonomy is intended to classify, ‘does not make up a body.’ ‘[T]here is’, he says, ‘not even a weaving, because a weaving requires a unity of thread but a


patchwork of language pragmatics that vibrate at all times’ (p. 94). If the pragmatic triangle did enable the neat plotting of the profiles of the various language games, then this would seem to limit the vibrations of the language pragmatics. For these vibrations to occur without limit, any feature that is common from game to game must be marked by what differentiates the game. if there is no unity of thread, no weaving, the opposition identity/difference cannot command the field totally. Thus no taxonomy of language games is possible in the final instance. Yet the taxonomy—which Lyotard never explicitly questions himself—is essential to Lyotard’s project. He argues that ‘the poles where one is the recipient of a narrative in which one is narrated, and where one receives a narrative that has been narrated to one’ are ‘the two forgotten poles—actively forgottten, repressed—of Western thought’ (p. 33), and that ‘the West’s way of repressing, rejecting, and smearing, the privilege granted to the pole of the addressee’ is ‘quite in keeping with the West’s way of spitting on the Jews. It is roughly the same thing’ (pp. 37– 8). Now unless what is repressed were common to both paganism and Judaism, Western repression would appear less monolithic, less extreme, less neurotic and repressive than Lyotard suggests. Hence the emphasis on the continuity between Judaism and paganism. The characteristic of the game of the Cashinahua that ‘someone speaks to me…places me under an obligation,’ Lyotard says, ‘is precisely what Levinas [the chief exponent of the pragmatics of Judaism] has been thinking’ (p. 35). He seems here to deny any essential incommensurability between the addressee pole in the Cashinahua game and the ‘same’ pole in the game of the just. In examining the relationship between Lyotard’s first kind of justice— that which is tied to the pragmatics of Judaism—and his second kind of justice, I shall in effect be indicating how he might take account of these difficulties. The examination should also enable us to put into perspective two of the most controversial traits of the first justice. The first is the ungroundedness of prescription, the unbridgeable gulf between it and description. Within the game of the just, ‘one does not know why what is said is said. When Abraham hears that he has to sacrifice Isaac, he sets out to do it, but he does not say, “it is for my good,” or “it is for the good of Israel”’ (p. 64). To ‘ground the passage’ from the true to the just would mean that a prescriptive statement would constitute an obligation only if the one who receives it…is able to put himself in the position of the sender…in order to work out all over again the theoretical discourse that legitimates, in the eyes of this sender, the command that he is issuing. (p. 23) It is proper to prescription to be left hanging in midair…in…a derivation, or deduction, of prescriptions, what is derived or deduced is not the prescriptive itself but the citation of the prescriptive, that is, the image, the presentation, in the linguistic sense, of the prescriptive: it is not ‘you must’, it is the ‘you must’, that there be some ‘you must’. But the proper of the prescriptive is that it…anticipates or at least precedes its own image. (p. 45)


Secondly, Lyotard marginalizes the content of the command that comes to me from the other. One needs to be sensitive only to the fact that a prescription or an obligation prescribes or obligates, not to ‘what it is, …[nor] even to what it says’ (p. 71). [God] commands obedience, that is, that one place oneself in the position of the pragmatic genre of obligation…. What is proper to Judaism is to say: Well, God himself we know nothing about…. We merely say: There is a law. And when we say ‘law’, it does not mean that the law is defined…. There is a law, but we do not know what this law says. (p. 52) Of God’s initial statement to Moses (‘Let them obey me!’), Lyotard argues that ‘it is not known what is to be the content of the act of obedience’; the discourse Moses must listen to ‘does not describe something’ (p. 22). And Abraham ‘obeys “because” God is the one giving the order’.10 Vis-à-vis its content, any command in the game of the just must be circumstantial. Thus for the Jews ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is circumstantial: ‘there are cases in which one can kill.’ Christians, in seeking to make this command categorical, an ‘absolute’ law of love, situate themselves on the addresser pole and cease to play the game of the just (pp. 63–4). It may appear that Lyotard is here consigning ethics to the realm of the irrational, the realm of the arbitrary. But before embracing the ethical critique of poststructuralism and postmodernism, we should recall that we have as yet considered only one of Lyotard’s conceptions of justice. II Lyotard’s second justice—a matter of respect for the plurality of language games (p. 98)—can perhaps best be approached through what he says about injustice. What he calls injustice ‘in the immediate sense’ (p. 98) seems to correlate with the first justice. It is a matter of playing the game of the just but of not playing it well. In playing this game I seem peculiarly liable to error. For in order to test how well I play I would need to occupy the position of the prescription’s sender, a move the game prohibits. The possibility of injustice seems then to be tied to the game whose stakes are justice in a way that the possibility of falsehood is not tied to the game whose stakes are truth. ‘Judaism’, Lyotard says, ‘teach[es] us how to be suspicious of prescriptions’—a suspicion which is all the greater because it is insufficient to prevent one from being taken in: on occasion the honest and just rabbi himself is deceived (p. 66). A different kind of injustice—one which is for Lyotard much more heinous and which he is much more concerned to attack—seems to be involved in the West’s active forgetting of the addressee pole. This forgetting, which is linked to antiSemitism, is a matter not of playing the language game that neutralizes the pole upon which Judaism insists, but of attempting to make this game the model for language in general. As ‘one can play simultaneously several games’ (p. 54), the fact


that different language games neutralize different poles does not in itself mean the games are in conflict. Injustice (in the second sense) arises only with such conflict. In speaking (on occasion) as if the attempt to neutralize a language game is undertaken by, is internal to, some other language game (see for instance pp. 97–8), Lyotard departs from the notion of language games—as occluding not other games but merely poles of the pragmatic triangle—that is in question when he defines justice as respect for the plurality of language games. Is there a connection between the first conception of justice and the second? What we may call the Judaic strand of Lyotard’s argument suggests that to be just in the second sense—to respect the incommensurability between language games—I need do no more and must do no less than play the game of the just—the game in which incommensurability (between addresser and addressee) is extreme (p. 94). The Hassidim’s suspicion of the addresser pole seems for Lyotard to imply respect for the plurality of language games. For the Hassidim ‘language cannot be mastered…it comes to me from elsewhere;…their question [What does language want of me?]… means that there are forms of language that are not forms of statements’ (p. 98). It is this question that the Hassidim ask in discerning Robespierre’s injustice—which for Lyotard is a case of injustice in the second sense (pp. 97–8). Now if the game of the just is connected in this way to the second justice, the attempt to privilege it above other games must be at odds with itself. The Idea of justice consists ‘in preserving the purity of each game, that is, for example, in insuring that the discourse of truth be considered as a “specific” language game, that narration be played by its “specific” rules’ (p. 96). To attempt ‘to extend the sway of the Idea of justice to the totality of discourses and conducts’ is to attempt ‘to place oneself in the position of enunciator of the universal prescription’ (p. 99). In attempting to turn a game in which I am situated on the addressee pole into a kind of master game, I am no longer situated on that pole. A failure to respect the plurality of language games would seem then to exclude the possiblity of continuing to play the game of the just. Another strand to Lyotard’s argument—a pagan strand—emerges when he declares his ‘betrayal’ of Levinas:

In his view, it is the transcendent character of the other in the prescriptive relation, in the pragmatics of prescription…that is truth itself…. Whereas for me it cannot be truth. There is as much truth in a narrative…privileging a language game above others…would be like saying: The only important game, the only true one, is chess. That is absurd. What is pagan is the acceptance of the fact that one can play several games. (pp. 60–1)11 Here Lyotard seems to deny a connection between the game of the just and the second justice. Nor does he always picture deciding on the second justice as a matter of being situated on the addressee pole. Amongst cases of the second injustice is


that which prohibits that the question of the just and the unjust be, and remain, raised. Thus, obviously, all terror, annihilation, massacre, etc, or their threat, are, by definition, unjust…moreover, any decision that takes away…from one’s partner in a current pragmatics, the possibility of playing or replaying a pragmatics of obligation…is necessarily unjust. (p. 67; my emphasis) In judging such necessary injustice one seems to be obligated by a categorical prescription. I cannot then be situated on the addressee pole, the pole from which all decisions are circumstantial. In the game of the just, definitions, and talk of what is ‘obviously’ unjust, would seem to have no place; here prescriptions ‘always refer one back to responsibility, to the responsibility of listening, of lending oneself to obligation’ (p. 67). The pagan strand of the argument would seem to divide the second injustice in two. On the one hand is that in which the game of the just is repressed, in which the raising of the question of the just and the unjust is prohibited—this is what is unjust by definition, necessarily unjust. Such ‘absolute injustice’ (p. 66) is that which Lyotard regards as most serious. On the other hand is the injustice of privileging the game of the just above all other games. Lyotard seems to think this is absurd but not particularly vicious. It seems no more vicious than injustice in the ‘immediate sense’: in failing to attain to the justice that is reserved for pagans like Lyotard, Levinas is perhaps like the honest and just rabbi who is nevertheless deceived. Both strands seem to be essential to Lyotard’s account. On the one hand, unless the game of the just is in solidarity with respect for the plurality of language games, the double use of the term ‘justice’—a use crucial to the coherence of his account— would be wilful and arbitrary. The force of Lyotard’s critique of anti-Semitism presupposes that repressing the game of the just is more profoundly disrespectful of plurality of language games than is repressing any other language game. On the other hand, if respecting the plurality of language games has a special connection to one of those games that one game would be privileged, which contradicts the insistence on the originality and diversity of games. Yet the two strands seem to be quite incompatible. Thus the Judaic strand accepts Levinas’s contention that ‘being, and hypotheses about being’ are ‘without interest’ (p. 53) while the pagan strand rejects his privileging of prescription; yet Levinas’s contention is—in the context in which it occurs—nothing other than a privileging of prescription. Taken together the strands seem to yield the violence that Lyotard condemns. The pagan strand pictures Judaism as privileging the language game that privileges the addressee pole, as seeking to repress games that privilege the addresser and referent poles, and as thereby failing to respect plurality. Now the Judaic strand implies that a failure to respect the plurality of language games excludes the possibility of playing the game in which language comes to me from elsewhere. And the pagan strand characterizes this exclusion as absolute injustice. All this seems to yield the conclusion—which sits oddly with Lyotard’s desire to combat antiSemitism—that Judaism is absolute injustice.


The account then both demands and prohibits that there be a connection between the two justices. As we have seen, Lyotard himself acknowledges the incommensurability that renders his taxonomy of language games impossible; his response to the double bind to which his account gives rise is equally disarming. He concedes that Levinas is obligated by one categorical prescription, ‘a kind of law of laws,…a metalaw that says: “Be just”’ (p. 52): ‘[i]t is rare for [the Jews] to issue categorical prescriptions, except for “listen!”’ (p. 63). Such a categorical prescription cannot be other than paradoxical: in question is a categorical command not to issue categorical commands, a universal prescription in relation to which I must occupy the pole from which the issuing and receiving of universal prescriptions is impossible —if I receive a universal command then I must also be able to issue that command myself, and Judaism prohibits such passing from addressee to addresser poles.12 That Lyotard acknowledges this paradox—he says that ‘the justice of multiplicity…is assured, paradoxically enough, by a prescription of universal value’ (p. 100)— suggests that he does not think of it as an inconsistency, a logical contradiction, in his argument. At issue seems rather to be what might be described as a non-self-identity in justice itself—a non-presence which has been thematized by Levinas. For Levinas ethics is a matter of a relationship—which he calls the trace—‘with a past that is on the hither side of every present and every representable’, a past that ‘can not be recuperated by reminiscence’. He posits himself responsible even for the acts of others; and these acts arise out of the other’s freedom, a freedom which he says ‘could never begin in my freedom, that is, abide in the same present, be contemporary, be representable to me…. The unlimited responsibility in which I find myself comes from the hither side of my freedom, from a “prior to every memory”.’13 In his turn, Lyotard argues that the discursive position that God chooses for the Jews in choosing them

is not that of the present instance of speech…. In the Hebrew experience,… a radical disequilibrium means that I the people cannot hand back the word to god, and that thou, oh Lord, cannot speak with me; thou hast spoken to me, and thou wilt speak to me, without thy word and my word ever being two similar and interchangeable aspects of a single discourse which is passed from mouth to mouth.14 What this seems to call into question is the very idea of Judaism as a single discourse, a single language game. Justice is not something that can ever be made simply present. When Lyotard says that ‘thou hast spoken to me, and thou wilt speak to me’ he evokes a past that was never a present, that is always already past and a future that will never arrive, that is always about to be. Now Derrida has argued that Levinas’s thematization of the trace is at odds with his privileging of speech—which is for Levinas the locus of the face-to-face encounter with the other—over writing: ‘The thematic of the trace…should lead to a certain rehabilitation of writing. Is not the “He” whom transcendence and generous absence uniquely announce in the trace more readily the author of writing than of speech?’15 Derrida argues moreover that not only speech and writing but


also asymmetry and symmetry are effects of the kind of play that is at issue in the thematic of the trace: ‘That I am also essentially the other’s other, and that I know I am, is the evidence of a strange symmetry whose trace appears nowhere in Levinas’s descriptions. Without this evidence, I could not desire (or) respect the other in ethical dissymmetry.’16 Whereas for Levinas the trace and ethical dissymmetry coincide, for Derrida the trace (a term which functions in his work at the same level as such terms as différance, supplementarity, arche-writing and iterability) breaches and broaches ethical dissymmetry. Now it is precisely the primacy that Levinas accords to ethical dissymmetry which occasions Lyotard’s ‘betrayal’ of him. The parallel with Derrida here suggests the possibility of thinking the relationship between Lyotard’s first and second justices —between Judaism and paganism—in terms of the play, the irreducible complexity, of différance. Doing this would imply that the relationship cannot be categorized as either intrinsic or extrinsic; for the opposition intrinsic/extrinsic is itself one that différance displaces. The displacement would extend of course to the oppositions between the categorical and the circumstantial, between the universal and the particular, between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and between the addresser instance and the addressee instance. We have in effect already witnessed such displacement in Lyotard’s rejection of a ‘unity of thread’: if ‘it is not the same thing to be the recipient of a narrative, and to be the recipient of a denotative discourse with a function of truthfulness, or to be a recipient of a command’, then there can be no basic opposition between recipient and sender poles. If what we have in the last instance is ‘a patchwork of language pragmatics that vibrate at all times’, then there is no last instance; such a patchwork cannot be mastered by oppositional thinking. Lyotard’s pragmatic triangle and his taxonomy of language games—like the oppositions to which he has recourse—must be seen as functioning only at a certain level of analysis. What all this suggests is that in question is not a choice between Judaism and paganism. Situating these terms within the play of différance means that in the final instance we find neither Judaism nor paganism but a becoming-pagan-of-Judaism. Paganism is a future that will never arrive, a future like that which Lyotard’s account of the Judaic genre evokes. Judaism does seem then to have a special relationship with paganism; but it is a relationship that cannot be totalized. What seems to emerge is that it is not merely Levinas who does not attain the justice that I stated earlier was reserved for pagans like Lyotard; Lyotard does not attain it either. Geoff Bennington—on the basis of The Differend—argues that for Lyotard ‘justice is not an achieved state, nor a state that ever could be achieved’.17 What Derrida says about true friendship would seem to apply also to true respect for the plurality of language games: it ‘is never a given in the present. It belongs to the experience of waiting, of promise, or of commitment.’18 The experience that Derrida evokes here seems to have a Judaic tonality. Robert Bernasconi has analysed Derrida’s relationship to Levinas in terms of the radical ingratitude that Levinas sees as constitutive of the ethical relationship:

To give thanks in return is to destroy transcendence and return an apparently gratuitous act to the order of the same…to let the Other be as Other, to preserve the alterity of the Other, to be grateful, I must be


ungrateful…. As the gift is preserved as gift only in a radical ingratitude, so the text is only preserved as text when one is in a certain way unfaithful to it. The text is not to be returned to its author.19 Lyotard’s relationship to Levinas can perhaps be understood in similar terms: his ‘betrayal’ of Levinas is perhaps more a matter of the disequilibrium, the nonexchange, that he sees as structural to the game of the just, than of any merely empirical disagreement. The disagreement would then take place only to the extent that Levinas may be said to have already betrayed himself. Levinas’s position —as it appears in Lyotard’s account—is one that lacks self-identity; hence there can be no question of a simple agreement, a simple concurrence, with him. In this connection it is worth noting that Derrida wishes not to ‘“yield to the pathos” (of agreement)’ with Lyotard.20 III In view of the complexity of Lyotard’s account, it is surprising to find that Eagleton thinks that it is straightforward. He contends that the belief that it is ‘impermissible to derive the prescriptive from the descriptive’ leads Lyotard into a ‘straightforward espousal of intuitionism’—a ‘dogmatic intuitionism’; and that it amounts moreover ‘to a rigorous delimitation between fact and value, the antithetical language games of description and prescription’. Eagleton argues that this ‘rigid duality of discourses’ is ‘a curious move for a post-structuralist to make’, and one which involves ‘a travesty of the later Wittgenstein’: Lyotard claims that each language game must be conducted in its autonomous singularity, its ‘purity’ scrupulously preserved…. There is no recollection here of Wittgenstein’s insistence on those complex ‘family resemblances’ which, like the overlapping fibres of a rope, interweave our various language games in real but non-essentialist ways. Nor does Lyotard seem to appreciate that all prescriptions necessarily implicate claims about the way the world is. There is no point in my clamouring for the overthrow of capitalism if the system sank without trace a good century ago.21 What is remarkable about this is the extent to which it ignores Lyotard. How for instance can Lyotard posit a rigid duality of discourses when he affirms ‘a patchwork of language pragmatics that vibrate at all times’? And surely this patchwork does recall Wittgenstein’s ‘complex “family resemblances” which… interweave our various language games in real but non-essentialist ways’. (The denial that there is even a weaving rejects not ‘family resemblances’ that are like the overlapping fibres of a rope, but single fibres that travel the length of the whole rope.) Lyotard’s appeals to the need to preserve the purity of language games occur in a context that calls into question the rigour of the notion of purity. To show that description and prescription are not incommensurable it is not enough to


point out that there would be no reason to seek the end of capitalism if it had already sunk. The kind of thing one would need to show is that the persistence of capitalism in itself entails that we ought to be clamouring for its overthrow. In accusing Lyotard of ‘dogmatic intuitionism’, Eagleton ignores Lyotard’s account of what is unjust necessarily, unjust by definition—a kind of injustice which is clearly not decided upon by mere intuition. Moreover, intuitionism holds that the object of moral intuition is what is self-evidently good; to the extent that Lyotard argues that in deciding on the just, I am situated on the addressee pole, he rejects this appeal to self-evidence, mounting a radical critique of intuitionism and of the notion of the subject that intuitionism implies. Eagleton contends that the philosophical failure of Lyotard’s project is at the same time a political and ethical failure. He argues that Lyotard, in rejecting the autonomous subject, ‘has come to discard the political goal of self-management. The post-structuralist decentring of the subject, in other words, results here in a dismissal of the belief that men and women in society should so far as possible control their own conditions of life.’22 And Lyotard’s respect for the plurality and purity of language games is according to Eagleton merely a ‘highly traditional liberal pluralism’ under which ‘a minority of socialists would not be permitted to persuade the majority of society to forbid a minority of anti-Semites from stirring up religious hatred’.23 Again Eagleton completely misses his target. As we have seen, Lyotard appeals to the purity of language games in a context such that the rigour of the notion of purity is called into question. The plurality he respects moreover is that of language games that are characterized by their insistence on one or other pole of the pragmatic triangle not by their repression of other language games. Anti-Semitism is not a language game in this sense; for it seeks to repress a game. Hence respect for the plurality of language games implies no respect for anti-Semitism. Lyotard rejects the primacy of the autonomous subject in order not to repress language games that situate me on the addressee or referent poles. He wishes to respect the incommensurability between self and other that demands that I posit myself as responsible for the other. Such responsibility may well not be a matter of seeking the political goal of self-management in general. But it surely demands that I seek a situation in which others can control as far as possible their own conditions of life, that I seek freedom for the other. Levinas seeks peace for the other not peace per se.24 But to accuse him of warmongering would be grotesque. Eagleton’s inability to understand Lyotard’s critique of anti-Semitism—his refusal to take this critique seriously—seems to be linked to a contempt for the pragmatics of Judaism, a Judaism he characterizes in terms of ‘empty transcendence’.25 Lyotard would no doubt see Eagleton’s attack as complicit with the West’s spitting on the Jews. Indeed the attack—with its violence and confusion—seems to be a reaction to a threat, an instance perhaps of the very repression of which Lyotard speaks. The fear is of ‘a law which would not answer to Western concepts of ethics, right, or politics’ and also of poststructuralist/postmodernist thought, thought which seeks to take account of this law. Eagleton vainly attempts to resist the displacement—which is undertaken by poststructuralism—of oppositional thinking. He seeks to master Lyotard’s text by recourse to precisely the oppositions—oppositions between intuition and reason, between activity and passivity, between freedom and


oppression—that the text calls into question. Not surprisingly he ends up ascribing contradictory positions to Lyotard—for instance intuitionism and the decentring of the subject (which he mistakenly reduces to an annihilation of the individual’s freedom)—without this ever leading him to question whether Lyotard’s text is as straightforward as he wishes to believe. It is of course to Eagleton that the contradictions should be ascribed. As is often the case with anti-poststructuralist polemic, Eagleton’s attack on Lyotard ends up being read and undone by the text at which it aims. The charge of ethical irresponsibility returns like a boomerang. University of Western Australia

NOTES 1 The importance of Lyotard’s thematization of the ethical is widely acknowledged by poststructuralist thinkers. J.Hillis Miller sees in it ‘an attempt to avoid the totalitarian tyranny of the one in a theory of judging and of justice’, an attempt which Miller argues is found—in a less overtly philosophical context—in Paul de Man’s work (‘“Reading” part of a paragraph in Allegories of Reading’, in Reading de Man Reading, ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 170). Geoffrey Bennington—the author of an important study of Lyotard’s thought—while positing a certain rapport between Lyotard and de Man, sees a more essential link between Lyotard and Derrida (Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 141). Derrida himself, responding to a talk by Lyotard on Auschwitz, stated ‘that he finds himself in agreement’ albeit without wishing to ‘“yield to the pathos” [of agreement]’ (The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 386). 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 127. 3 See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as first philosophy’, trans. Sean Hand and Michael Temple, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 75–87. 4 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 122. 5 Geoff Bennington’s analysis (‘August: double justice’, Diacritics, 14 (Fall 1984), pp. 64–71) of the ‘double justice’ in Just Gaming is perceptive but does not seek to explain how Lyotard is responsive to ethical demands. 6 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Samuel Weber (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 71. All further references to this work shall be included in the text. 7 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), §162. 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G.E.M.Anscombe and G.H.von Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), §717. Lyotard quotes this passage in The Differend, §145. 9 The Differend, §18. 10 The Differend, §166.


11 In Just Gaming there is a doubling not only of justice but of paganism. It thematizes paganism both as a matter of a single language game (that of the Cashinahua) and as a matter of accepting that one can play several games, that no one game is privileged. 12 The ‘paradox’ of Just Gaming is discussed in Bennington, ‘August: double justice’. 13 Otherwise than Being, pp. 10–11. 14 The Lyotard Reader, pp. 97–8. 15 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 102. 16 ibid., p. 128. 17 Lyotard: Writing the Event, p. 160. 18 Jacques Derrida, ‘The politics of friendship’, The Journal of Philosophy, 85 (1988), pp. 632–49 (p. 636). 19 Robert Bernasconi, ‘Deconstruction and the possibility of ethics’, in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 126. 20 See note 1 above. 21 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 396–8. 22 ibid., p. 398. 23 ibid., pp. 399–400. 24 Richard Kearney (ed.), Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 67. 25 The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 399.

The body as pictogram: rethinking Hélène Cixous’s écriture feminine PAMELA BANTING

Diverse avant-garde signifying practices—theatre, sculpture, painting, writing, music—of this century have shown us to what point flat and linear representation, founded upon unicity and identity—aristotelian representation—was restrictive and censuring and how it was necessary to transgress the borders unceasingly in order to find beyond its limits new and heterogeneous languages. (Josette Féral, pp. 58–9) Throughout the 1980s, the debate among American, British and Canadian feminist theorists has largely taken the form of a strenuous working out, followed by a stringent critique, of the French feminists—principally Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. With several notable exceptions, a consensus has been growing among many anglophone feminists in the United States, Britain and Canada that the French feminists are entangled in webs of essentialism. Domna C.Stanton, for instance, discards the ‘maternal metaphor’ in French feminism as a recuperation of the phallic mother. Claiming that the French feminists’ wish is to keep ‘both the symbolic baby and the bathwater’ (p. 169), Stanton throws out the mother. In a torrent of naming and labelling, Pamela McCallum dismisses the evocation of a ‘mother tongue’ in French feminism as a utopian return to origins, a ‘textually fervent biologistic mysticism’ with a tendency toward ‘an uncritical and non-problematic gynomorphic naturalism’ (pp. 131–2). Complaining that ‘the French feminists make of the female body too unproblematically pleasurable and totalized an entity’ (p. 254), Ann Rosalind Jones then reverses herself and grants a priori status to the very belief of which she is most critical. In purging the jouissance (and, along with it, difference and différance) from her own implicit version of the body, she herself reduces the body to unmediated nature and a small assortment of purely sexual organs. Although they take the position that bodies are socially and linguistically constructed, Jones, Stanton, McCallum, and, as we shall see, Toril Moi, assume there can be no exchange of signs between body and text. Each of these theorists is convinced that the body is imprinted upon. Each dutifully explicates the social constructionist view of the subject, all the while neglecting that other material basis


of the subject, the body. Because her social constructionist analysis is premised upon a representational theory of signs, she is at a loss to account for how bodies imprint texts. Not one of these theorists is therefore able to extend her discursive analysis to skin level. She stops short of the limits of the flesh. At this juncture of the failed encounter with the body, she recoils into Cartesian dualism and jettisons the material body as mute, passive and non-signifying. Naomi Schor comments on how the imprecision and confusion surrounding the term ‘biological’ in anti-essentialist critiques results in the body’s excision from theoretical consideration:

But because of the red flag (when it is not a red herring) of essentialism, the question of Irigaray’s mater-ialism is never really addressed. It is as though certain feminists were more comfortable evacuating the body from the precincts of high theory—thereby, of course, reinforcing the very hierarchies they would dismantle—than carefully separating out what belongs to the body and what to the world of matter. (‘This essentialism which is not one’, p. 50) While I would suggest that these webs and flags are largely of the anti-essentialists’ own manufacture, nevertheless, thus tainted by accusations of essentialism, the influence of the French feminists is on the wane. Within the context of feminist work, the word ‘essentialism’, ‘the prime idiom of intellectual terrorism and the privileged instrument of political orthodoxy’, according to Schor, has been endowed ‘with the power to reduce to silence, to excommunicate, to consign to oblivion’ (p. 40). As if the mother’s Otherness were unthinkable or intolerable, the letter ‘m’ has been dropped, and the mother replaced by the Other as the proper object of our theoretical contemplation and concern for the lean and stripped-down nineties. Thus we remain at an impasse to thinking through the problem of how bodies get into and mark written texts. How do texts and bodies permeate one another’s membranes? How could a ‘mother tongue’ wind up on the printed page? Parallel to this shift in theoretical focus from ‘mother’ to ‘Other’, however, emerges a new spate of linguistic play, as if despite themselves the anti-essentialists cannot resist mothering a rival, if less exuberant, tongue of their own. Together with the substitution of Other for mother, anti-essentialists are scrupulous about changing the ‘a’ of ‘woman’ to the ‘e’ of ‘women’ and about politicizing and pluralizing their critical practice by adding an ‘s’ to words such as ‘body,’ ‘feminism,’ ‘gender,’ and ‘history.’ These English-language moves are, ostensibly, much easier to execute than the fancy French manoeuvres of crossing out, placing under erasure, deconstructing, feminizing language, hystericizing discourse, and so on.1 Unfortunately, as Diana Fuss observes, by rendering terms into their plural forms ‘The essentialism at stake is not countered so muchas displaced.’ As she demonstrates: The plural category ‘women’, for instance, though conceptually signal ing heterogeneity nonetheless semantically marks a collectivity; constructed or


not, ‘women’ still occupies the space of a linguistic unity. It is for this reason that a statement like ‘American women are “x”’ is no less essentializing than its formulation in the singular, ‘The American woman is “x”.’ (p. 4) In such nominal pluralizing, I would contend, essentialism is neither countered nor displaced but simply spelled off or spelled ‘differently’. Perhaps all we end up with, ironically, are ‘essentialisms’. In her well-known anti-essentialist analysis of Cixous in Sexual/Textual Politics, Toril Moi commits several essentialist errors of the kind Fuss highlights in her book. It is worth looking briefly, though closely, at a few of them not only in order to spot the essentialism within anti-essentialism but so as to clarify the nature of antiessentialist misreadings of language and corporeality, to clear some ground for a rethinking of écriture féminine and to propose an alternative model of signification that would allow us to begin to think about the exchanges between bodies and texts. In a strangely hierarchical and possibly sexist move, Moi takes it as a given that because Cixous’s work is in some measure indebted to that of Jacques Derrida it is therefore surpassed by or subordinate to his. Initially detecting an ‘anti-essentialist vein’ in Cixous, Moi tentatively concludes that ‘So far, then, Cixous’s position would seem to constitute a forceful feminist appropriation of Derridean theory’ (p. 110). However, after noting points of identity between Derrida and Cixous such as, for example, that ‘Cixous’s concept of feminine writing is crucially related to Derrida’s analysis of writing as différance’ (p. 108), Moi (in a very un-Derridean move on her own part) proceeds to locate points where, in her opinion, Cixous’s texts diverge from his. On the basis of these divergences, she charges Cixous with essentialism. Without herself analysing the fitness of Derrida’s anti-essentialism to the project of women’s writing or drawing on the analyses of others who have performed this work,2 Moi cautions the reader that ‘Cixous’s theory is riddled with contradictions: every time a Derridean idea is evoked, it is opposed and undercut by a vision of woman’s writing steeped in the very metaphysics of presence she claims she is out to unmask’ (p. 110). She argues that Cixous’s ‘slippage away from Derridean antiessentialism’ (p. 110) results in ‘a textbook illustration of Derrida’s “metaphysics of presence”’ (p. 112). Throughout her chapter on Cixous, Moi consistently positions Derrida as the master or original and Cixous as his failed disciple, a poor copy.3 Paradoxically, in terms of anti-essentialism, it is the points of identity between Cixous and Derrida which she labels non-essentialist and the points of difference between them which she designates essentialist. It is particularly striking, therefore, that in the section immediately following this discussion of convergence and divergence, Moi again departs from Derridean thinking, this time with regard not to différance but to grammatology. That is, she interprets Cixous’s use of the word ‘writing’ in its common, ordinary sense, an interpretation which Derrida explicitly and assiduously avoids. Moreover, in spite of her earlier statement that Cixous’s concept of ‘feminine writing’ (as Moi problematically translates écriture féminine)4 is ‘crucially related to Derrida’s analysis of writing as différance’,5 in the second section of her Cixous chapter, where she deals specifically with écriture féminine, she reverses her previous


position, claiming that the French feminist’s use of the terms ‘voice’ and ‘writing’ is allied with phallogocentrism. That is, Moi first mistakenly identifies her own departure from Derridean use of the words ‘voice’ and ‘writing’ as Cixous’s. Then she chastises Cixous for naïvely privileging ‘voice’ as the origin or source of women’s writing. Although she cites a passage from Verena Andermatt Conley’s interview with Cixous in which the latter speaks to both the similarities and the differences between Derrida’s and her own concept of ‘writing’ (Conley, pp. 150–1; cited in Moi, p. 119), for Moi the only conceivable usage of the terms ‘voice’ and ‘writing’, if not rigorously Derridean, is, by default, phallogocentric.6 Moi contends that Cixous locates the mark of the feminine in writing as a privileging of the voice. Such an a priori assumption that femininity can be a property of writing is itself a highly problematical notion: that ‘feminine’ is an adjective modifying the noun ‘writing’ begs the question. Furthermore, the two quotations she cites from Cixous to defend her claim do not at all support it and in fact suggest something else altogether. Moi consistently misreads the body in Cixous. She states, for instance, that when Cixous writes ‘writing and voice…are woven together’ she is privileging the voice, and when she writes ‘She physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body’ she means that the speaking woman is entirely her voice (Moi, p. 114). But if writing and voice are woven together, how is it that the voice is privileged? And if women physically materialize their thought, signifying it with their bodies, then how can it be that in this act they are reduced to one single region of their physiologies, namely, the vocal apparatus? Moi fails to grasp one of Cixous’s most important contributions to poststructuralist feminist thought, namely, her project to sign the body back into semiosis, from which it has been exiled by dualist, metaphysical philosophies and theories of representation. While Cixous’s critics have taken her to task for what they see as her reduction of women to a ‘feminine’ body, the majority of them either overlook or otherwise fail adequately to integrate the fact that the bodies her fiction-theory often invokes are those of the hysterical patients of Charcot, Breuer and Freud’s clinical investigations. They misread the figure of the hysteric in Cixous as a representative figure, representative of woman or women, and misconstrue her ‘mother tongue’ as an innate, gender-specific ‘women’s language’. It is not my purpose in what follows either to mount a paean to mothers’ or hysterics’ bodies or to duplicate previous work on strategic essentialism. Rather I wish to challenge these kinds of misconceptions about Cixous’s writing by re-examining her deployment of the hysterical body as a glyph or pictogram in her essay ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ and by rethinking écriture féminine within a theory of signification based not upon representation but, alternatively, upon translation. Cixous’s recourse to the body is not a return to a natural, speechless or prelinguistic body but rather to a signifying body continually networking with its own flesh and the surfaces and particularities of the world. She claims that women’s self-censorship, their silently holding their tongues, has either killed them or led them to be ‘more familiar with their tongues and their mouths than anyone else’ (p. 257). In the following controversial passage from ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ she states, restates, modifies, shifts direction, risks contradiction, revises, and generally mimes in her own writing the process she suggests takes place when a woman speaks:


[A woman speaking at a public gathering] doesn’t ‘speak’, she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the ‘logic’ of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she’s saying, because she doesn’t deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when ‘theoretical’ or political, is never simple or linear or ‘objectified’, generalized: she draws her story into history. (p. 251) Like an hysteric, a woman speaking does not simply reproduce the rhetoric of public speaking but instead projects her body forward, dramatically, theatrically, theoretically.7 She doubly inscribes her story: in flesh and in speech. That is not to say that in her bodily gestures she underwrites or pictorially illustrates the logic of her spoken and/or written text. Neither body nor text is represented, and so neither is absorbed or subsumed by the other. She inscribes what she is thinking, but, although close, these two ‘she’s’ are not necessarily identical. The speaking subject is not completely merged with the thinking subject. Drives, passions, flesh, logic, nerves, the tissues of her throat, the slip of syllables and words on her tongue, the sound waves lapping her inner ear, the qualities of the public space, even her trembling knees—all enter into the play of subjectivity and signification. Thus her speaking body cannot be reduced to phallogocentric vocality. Her body cannot be corralled by speech. Nor can it be coerced into controlling her speech. A woman’s body, in other words, does not represent her speech. Her body does not assume either the posture or the position of rhetorical mastery over the process of signification. To suggest that ‘she physically materializes what she’s thinking’ is not to say that a woman speaking represents her thoughts physically instead of linguistically, but rather that she does not censor the bonds between language and her body. Materialization cannot be wholly equated with representation. Her body’s différance interrupts the logocentric mechanism of simultaneously hearing and understanding oneself speak. It prevents her from automatically reducing materiality to ideality and thereby effacing the sensible bodies of signifiers—both language and limbs. For Cixous, what takes place between a woman’s body and her words is not representation but a fluctuating process of intersemiotic translation. As linguist Roman Jakobson distinguishes it from interlingual and intralingual translation, intersemiotic translation is ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ (p. 261). He cites examples, including the transposition from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting, but he does not elaborate on intersemiotic translation. However, in his article Toward the understanding of translation in psychoanalysis’ Patrick Mahony extends Jakobson’s term. In order to demonstrate Freud’s contribution to translation theory, Mahony draws on Jakobson’s tripartite typology of translation, arguing that ‘Freud’s contribution is especially outstanding with respect to Jakobson’s third category of intermedium or


intersemiotic translation’ (pp. 467–8). He retains Jakobson’s term ‘intersemiotic’ but broadens its interpretation to include, among other psychic processes, hysteria. Mahony calls the interaction in hysteria of gesture and word ‘intersemiotic symptomatology’ (p. 469). He remarks that ‘hysteric and linguistic practice take their material from a common origin’ (p. 468). The hysterical body does not represent its symptoms; it translates intersemiotically between language and flesh. In translation, of course, the transfer of meaning is never totally efficient. Signification escapes, meaning leaches away, and extraneous meaning seeps in during the transfer between source language/source text and target language/target text. While such leakages signal the so-called ‘failure’ of traditional interlingual translation, they also function as fissures in constituted meaning, faults and crevices in which previously repressed heterogeneity and difference may appear. As Nicole Ward Jouve explains:

For many bilingual women…translation is an activity by means of which the ‘natural’ bond ‘meaning-language’ can be transgressed. It is a state of continued suspension—a living process, ever beginning anew, allowing, in Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘the post-maturation of the foreign speech, the birth throes of one’s own speech’. The process, therefore, is eminently ‘feminine’. When you translate, the absolute status of nouns, the ‘Name-ofthe-Father’, is shaken. Exchanges between words are no longer ‘full’, that is, guaranteed by the law of the Father, the law of significance. Identities cease to be stable. You escape from definition, from the law which rules and partitions women, which prevents femininity from coming into being. (p. 28) Although the body is discursively and socially constructed, its materiality allows it also to elude in some measure the totalizing effects of such meaning, which in Western culture is almost always already constituted by phallogocentrism. As material substance, that is, as non-name and nonsense, the body resists and displaces the official order which it acquires along with its native tongue. It is, after all, its fleshly substance and the material conditions of its life which permit the body to be imprinted in the first place. As flesh, the body is both vulnerable and resistant to languages, discourses and social constructions. And in both its vulnerability and its resistance, the body writes back. That is, it is not only in its resistance but in its very susceptibility to inscription that the body preserves some measure of agency or signifying capabilities. Otherwise, for instance, many more women and men would actually have bodies by Calvin Klein. But the body protests. The body goes on strike. The body has other agendas. This is perhaps most strikingly evident in hysteria. Even in the crippling illness of hysteria, thought to be a reaction to the overwhelming impositions of phallogocentric constraints and repression, the body retains its ability to sign for itself, sometimes in cases where even linguistic signmaking breaks down. In hysteria, the body’s signifying potential returns with a graphic insurgence.


From these two variables of the body’s material excess and the surpluses of signification Hélène Cixous postulates a literal, corporeal grammatology: ‘More body, hence more writing.’ Like Freud, who compared hysteria to pictography,8 Cixous treats the hysterical body as a signifying unit, a pictogram. She praises the famous hysterics for their ‘aphonic revolts’ (p. 256) and ‘carnal and passionate body words’ (p. 257). She addresses Freud’s patient Dora as ‘You, Dora,…the poetic body, you are the true “mistress” of the Signifier.’ For Cixous, the hysterical or ‘poetic’ body inscribes the outlines of a signifying practice that is neither logocentric nor strictly Derridean. The poetic body, the body as pictogram, allows her to hypothesize women’s writing as, in part, translation between language and corporeality. Contrary to Toril Moi’s allegations, Cixous does distinguish between the logocentric and the grammatological versions of speech and writing. In fact she goes further than this binary distinction to delineate the relationships, as she sees them, among speech, writing and the body. She states, for instance, that in women’s writing

There is not that scission, that division made by the common man between the logic of oral speech and the logic of the text, bound as he is by his antiquated relation—servile, calculating—to mastery. From which proceeds the niggardly lip service which engages only the tiniest part of the body, plus the mask. (p. 251) Women have a ‘privileged relationship with the voice’ because they do not stockpile ‘as many defenses for countering the drives as does a man’. However, Cixous’s corporeal grammatology does not only reverse the phallogocentric hierarchy to locate lack within mastery and masculinity. Factoring the body into the grammatological equation is a much more complex operation than merely aligning women with the body and men with speech and writing. Here, for example, is the introductory paragraph of ‘The laugh of the Medusa’: I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement. (p. 245) This is only one of many instances in which Cixous entangles the terms speech, writing and body.9 In the above passage, she proposes to speak about women’s writing. She promises, in writing, to address, in speech, the matter of women’s writing. Or, alternatively, she promises in speech to speak about women’s writing, and this promise is transcribed, written down. Therefore, as she writes, and we


read, her promise to speak is simultaneously fulfilled and deferred—to the next sentence and the next and the one after that. That is to say, if the text of ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ is comprehended as a mere transcription of her speech, then Cixous’s promise to speak about women’s writing is fulfilled by this record of her speaking. As in a performative utterance, her promise is fulfilled in promising. On the other hand, if writing and speech are considered as having each their own different economy, and if the promise to speak is produced in writing, then that same promise is deferred in the very act of promising. In other words, by simultaneously distinguishing between and blurring speech and writing, Cixous, impossibly, inserts into a single utterance (‘I shall speak about women’s writing’) an element of deferral and différance. Her promise is both accomplished and postponed. She promises in writing to promise in speech. She promises, in effect, to promise. Such is the nature of the deferred ‘promise’ of women’s writing, ‘what it will do’ and what it will have done in the future perfect. Ecriture féminine is not a utopian practice nostalgic for a perfect future or perfect past. On the contrary, by looking to the future perfect, écriture féminine transforms both the future and the present. The present is inserted into history. The present will have arrived. And Cixous will have spoken about women’s writing. Furthermore, two paragraphs later, Cixous pointedly marks herself as a woman writing about women’s writing: ‘I write this as a woman, toward women’ (p. 245). She proposes to report from the inside, from the camp of the Other. She implies that there will be no gap between signifier and signified: she, a woman, will write toward other women about women’s writing. She will unite signifier and signified, as if she were operating from a logocentric subject position in which the gap between the subject and his or her words is as small as possible. How ever, she also immediately qualifies this identification of woman with women, stressing both the commonality of women and their inexhaustible heterogeneity. As Naomi Schor observes, Cixous deconstructs and constructs femininity at the same time (‘Introducing feminism’, pp. 98–9). The paradoxical effect of Cixous’s promises to narrow the gaps between speech and writing, and between herself as an individual woman and women in general, is to widen them. In promising, she introduces a non-coincidence or spacing into (and among) writing, speech and women’s bodies. By simultaneously marking and effacing the fissure between the two radically different economies of speech and writing, constructing and deconstructing at the same time, Cixous clears the way for another kind of grammatological practice. Such writing, neither strictly logocentric nor Derridean, embraces new possibilities of inscription, signification, gesture, rhythm, orality, performance, pregnancy, tattoo, and translation. Referring obliquely to Charcot’s hysterical patients, Cixous states her belief that ‘By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display…. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.’ She adjures women to ‘Write your self. Your body must be heard’ (p. 250). Cixous’s corporeal grammatology, inspired by but not confined to the hysterical body as pictogram, blends and combines the picto-ideo-phonographic resources of the body, writing and speech. Cixous’s sense of the ‘voice’ also differs radically from both the defensive ‘lip service’ of logocentrism and Derrida’s deconstruction of speech. For Cixous ‘voice’


is not associated with the Name of the Father but rather with ‘the first voice of love which is alive in every woman’, namely, the ‘voice’ of her mother, audible but also encoded semiotically in the flesh of both mother and daughter. ‘Voice’ and ‘mother’ both undergo transformation in Cixous’s text. Just as she refuses to restrict ‘voice’ to reason and the logocentric confirmation of hearing and understanding oneself speak, so too she refuses to confine ‘mother’ to patriarchal or biological femininity. ‘Mother’, as non-name and as source of goods, is she who initializes and forever textualizes one’s body. It is she who

touches you, the equivoice that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force: the rhythm that laughs you; the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable; body (body? bodies?), no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other; that part of you that leaves a space between yourself and urges you to inscribe in language your woman’s style. (p. 252) A mother calls her child to language not as a replacement for contact between their two bodies but as a supplement to that sonorous and tactile envelope of vocalization, exchange of pressures and fluids, contact, friction, and movement. Words do not replace her body or the baby’s. The differentiations that distinguish one word from any other word—‘cat’ from ‘bat’ from ‘hat’—mime the differences between bodies. The sound of a phoneme differs only sensuously from the impression of a touch, and in fact hearing is accomplished through the contact of sound waves with the delicate mechanisms and membranes in our ears. Bodies are never outside of signification. Writing about the mind-body problem in Cixous, Barbara Freeman argues that The woman’s body is not an original term which, prior to or outside of language, functions to ground a feminine identity which is subsequently captured in and by writing, but is rather defined as that point at which the difference between text and sex is effaced, marking their collision. (pp. 63–4) ‘Mother’ or ‘the feminine body’ is a non-name, a floating signifier, which not only resists referentiality (and essentialism) but settles and unsettles that of other signifiers as well. Positing the mother in this context as a ‘source of goods’ (Cixous, p. 252) does not designate her as an originary site but rather as ‘the locus for the Other’. Contrary to what many anti-essentialists believe, simply using the word ‘source’ does not lead inescapably to a representational economy of signs, nor does it necessarily recuperate all of logocentrism. For instance, the ‘source’ text for a given translation is not itself, as we have come to understand, ‘original’ or ‘originary’ but a complex intertextual tissue. Although the terminology of translation theory is


problematically imbued with the secondary status traditionally assigned to it by an aesthetic based on representation, nevertheless we may have recourse to such theory in order to shift away from binary thinking. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, describes the interrelation of the mother’s body and language in terms of translation. He writes:

Speech…is our mother speaking. Thus while speech puts the child in a more profound relation to she who names everything and puts being into words, it also translates this relation into a more general order. The mother opens the child to circuits which from the very beginning flow out from the maternal surrounding which he will never again find through them. (pp. 21–2). The mother as non-name names everything. The child in learning fluency in her or his mother tongue learns, in effect, two languages—an idiolect initially shared only with the mother and then a more general order into which the idiolect is translated. The child who has acquired a mother tongue has therefore already performed at least one act of translation—from idiolect to communolect. In entering the communolect, however, the child has not renounced or abandoned the idiolect of a shared language with his or her mother, since idiolect and communolect overlap. Translation takes place between them. The fact that both idiolect and communolect are typically subsumed under the single rubric of ‘mother tongue’ need not blind us to their individual existence. Moreover, signification has always already been constituted in the sonorous envelope, the eye contact and the gestural hieroglyphs of the relation between child and mother. Just as the word ‘mother’ needs to be reinterpreted in order to break the monopoly that patriarchy has over the practices of mothering, so too, in the phrase ‘mother tongue’, the word ‘tongue’ becomes inadequate, as this domestic vernacular pervades the entire body and in fact simultaneously marks, and blurs, the boundaries between two bodies. Furthermore, this bond with the mother (and, within the present shifting economy of signs, with the ‘feminine’) or intimate bonds between any bodies need not and in fact cannot be irretrievably forfeited or signed away in negotiating the social contract—unless, of course, the body is signed away at the same time, as is the tendency in current strains of anti-essentialism. Cixous does not advocate the development of a language with its source in the body, the pre-Oedipal semiotic or the hysteric. Women’s hysterical gestures, contortions, babble, even their silences—all these ‘body words’ (p. 257) can and must be translated into speech and writing. It is time, Cixous announces, for woman to seize patriarchal discourse, to take it ‘in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of’ (p. 257).10 Time to give language a literal and aggressive ‘French kiss’. This new, invented language is neither a previously unheard, newly minted, virginal mother tongue, nor an ancient language recoverable only through suppressed and forgotten etymological roots and branches and utopian rememorization. New languages are always invented, gradually, through speech, writing and translation from already existing languages. For Cixous, the extant source language is not some single ancient matriarchal


tongue, nor a purified language of women’s desires, but patriarchal discourse itself. Patriarchal discourse is the source language which she exhorts women to dislocate, explode, turn around, seize, appropriate, contain, write, kiss, put into their mouths. Even to bite. To translate, in short. As the basis for the development of alternative signifying practices, the graphic, gestural and audible/inaudible language of hysteria, playing upon the seen and the unseen, the seen and not heard, is not, as Mary Poovey suggests, ‘a feminine language “based on” the female body’ (p. 55). After all, the symptoms of hysteria speak in the vernacular. It is the ordinary meanings of words and common expressions which, in hysteria, are translated intersemiotically into a visual, physical, graphic language, into pantomime and theatre.11 Summarizing Freud’s report on his internship with Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital, Monique David-Ménard shows how a distinction between the physiological or medical body and the erotogenic body arises from the hysteric’s deployment of the vernacular:

the visible features of hysterical paralysis do not correspond to any known or knowable organic cause. What can be seen is not necessarily defined by a physiological substratum or mechanism. Instead, in its configuration and in the problems that affect it, a hysteric’s body conforms to everyday language. Hysteria is not acquainted with the anatomy of the nervous system. ‘It takes the organs in the ordinary, popular sense of the names they bear: the leg is the leg as far as its insertion into the hip; the arm is the upper limb as it is visible under the clothing.’ For a part of the body to be affected as popular speech would have it, and not as anatomy requires, the body must in some sense belong to the order of language. (pp. 2–3) Demonstrating the ways in which Freud’s interpretation of ‘hysterical conversion’ is imbued with dualist thinking, David-Ménard clarifies how, for him, the word ‘pain’ is a kind of cartouche which brings the orders of ‘soul’ and ‘body’ into communication. As she explains, ‘hysterical conversion’ transforms a soul conflict into physical pain. For Freud, ‘A single word, “pain” (Schmerz), has the function of rendering the two independent orders homogeneous so that the passage from one to the other may occur. This passage is no longer merely an associative link but becomes a sort of transsubstantiation’ (p. 27). On the other hand, if we wish to implement the vocabulary of translation theory, for ‘hysterial conversion’ and ‘transsubstantiation’ we can substitute ‘intersemiotic translation’ between language and the body. In the same way that hysteria translates between the vernacular and the body, écriture féminine uses the vernacular—that is, patriarchal discourse—as its source text. Contrary to what her critics contend, what Cixous advocates is not the invention of a new and exclusive women’s language but rather the creation of new ‘interlanguages’. A translation effect, interlanguages come into being only in the process of learning a new language. The term ‘interlanguage’ refers to the linguistic interference from the source language (SL) which results from a second-language learner’s attempted production of the target


language (TL). An interlanguage is intermediate between SL and TL (Toury, p. 71). As Jane Gallop insists, because, for example,

The masculine is inscribed in motherhood; patriarchal discourse structures the institution and the experience of motherhood as we know it…. The question of language must be inserted as the wedge to break the hold of the figure of the mother. Ecriture féminine must not be arrested by the plenitude of the mother tongue, but must try to be always and also an other tongue. Gallop sees écriture féminine as a composite that is no one’s mother tongue and can only be comprehended in two or more languages simultaneously (‘Reading the mother tongue’, pp. 328–9). Cixous’s écriture féminine composes an interlanguage located somewhere between patriarchal discourse (SL) and an as-yet-unknown language spoken by no one (TL). Cixous models écriture féminine, in part, on the translations and interlanguages produced by hysterics such as Bertha Pappenheim, who, Dianne Hunter has shown, rejected the cultural identity offered her and ‘tried to translate herself into another idiom. She regressed from the symbolic order of articulate German to the semiotic level of the body and the unintelligibility of foreign tongues’ (Hunter, p. 474). That is, in her hysterical illness she practised three forms of translation: interlingual translation between German and other languages; intralingual translation between the symbolic and the semiotic; and the intersemiotic translation of the ‘talking cure’ she invented. As Hunter puts it, ‘In the process of talking herself out to Breuer, Pappenheim converted a nonverbal message, expressed in body language or pantomime and called an hysterical symptom, into a verbal language. That is, her narratives converted or translated a message from one language into another’ (p. 476).12 Ecriture féminine generates interlanguages not only between two discrete languages but also within a single language and between different forms of semiosis. Such writing foregrounds both the possibility and the necessity to translate. Translation acts as a cure for translation. If the hysterical body is neither identical nor reducible to the physiological or organic body, then hysterical symptoms cannot be understood as material, physiological representations of psychic pain. The intersemiotic translation of hysteria must not be construed as a return, via illness, to the dualist body. The hysterical body does not practice translation modelled upon representation. And for Cixous, translation between and among different signifying systems, both verbal and nonverbal—speech, writing, image, song, gesture, caress, and flesh—is not only possible but provides a way out of the problematics of representation. Traditionally, translation has been thought of as an operation subservient to representation. If the productions of the poet are, according to the representational aesthetic inaugurated by Plato, twice removed from reality, then those of the translator are considered to be three times removed. But the kind of writing as translation which I am outlining here is not a revival of representation or dualism. Against logocentric models of writing, Cixous posits writing as translation between speech and script, body and text, the One and the Other. She sees writing as


working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death—to admit this is first to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of the one and the other, not fixed in sequences of struggle and expulsion or some other form of death but infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another. (p. 254) This model of writing as translation is very different from writing as representation. For example, writing as translation is no longer implicated with just two texts and two languages. Derrida muses on the deficiencies of translation theory and speculates about difficult questions to be confronted: all too often [translation theories] treat the passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently consider the possibility for languages to be implicated more than two in a text. How is a text written in several languages at a time to be translated? How is the effect of plurality to be ‘rendered’? And what of translating with several languages at a time, will that be called translating? (‘Des Tours de Babel’, p. 171) Rethinking the body within an economy of representation is out of the question since representation is, by definition, essentialist.13 Theories of the body which are based, consciously or unconsciously, on representation cannot escape from the premise that the body exists outside of signification, prior to language, only susceptible to meaning through representation in language. Anti-essentialist feminist critics of Cixous forget that Freud called for the necessity to translate the pictographic script of hysteria. They misread ‘translate’ metaphorically as ‘interpret’ and thus import and thereby reduce his insights about the body and its translative capacities back into a hermeneutic, representational economy. Under phallogocentrism, man has been the model and woman the copy, man the source text and woman the imperfectly translated text.14 Anti-essentialism is misdirected against Cixous and others who invoke the figure of the hysterical body. Cixous does not posit this poorly translated woman, her body and its restricted drives, as the original or aboriginal source of a newly representative women’s language. On the contrary, her project is to translate from women’s always already translated bodies in the direction of Babel. As she writes: She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. When it is ambiguously uttered—the wonder of being several—she doesn’t defend


herself against these unknown women whom she’s surprised at becoming, but derives pleasure from this gift of alterability. I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but alive because of transformation. (p. 260) In écriture féminine the body is neither more nor less a source than the text. ‘A woman’s body,’ Cixous writes, ‘with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor— once, by smashing yokes and censors, she lets it articulate the profusion of meanings that run through it in every direction—will make the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate with more than one language’ (p. 256). The material body is no longer to be thought of as the raw or natural material for representation but rather as a signifying material and practice in its own right. If, as Derrida observes, we can no longer continue to think of translation as an image or a copy (‘Des Tours de Babel’, p. 180), similarly we cannot persist in thinking of the body as mute, passive, imprinted by language but without any capacity for reply. It is the body’s properties of materiality and signification which enable it to function as a translator. Unlike representation, which is believed to function as a material transcription in, say, words or images of an idea or an abstract ideal, translation can only ever pass through the material world, from body to body. Thus it is that what is commonly referred to as the ‘failure’ of translation is a failure not so much of translation as of representation of the source text by the target text. The ideal, perfect transcription of the source text is bound to fail since signifiers carry their own associations, their own worldliness and bodily initiatives, their own sound and look and relative density in the mouth. As a site of the failure of representation then, translation is a semiotic operation within which different bodies can be constructed. Translation generates the necessary heterogeneity and spillage of signs to counter the normalizing and regulatory forces of representation. Moreover, intersemiotic translation provides a process by which the body can insert its signs into language. The problem for feminist theory has been an inability to accept terms such as ‘body’, ‘woman’ and ‘women’, or ‘mother’ both as determined and as floating signifiers engaged in processes of interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic translation. The history of the word ‘body’, for example, with all of its Cartesian fat, weighs heavily upon analysis with its preference for the lean. Anti-essentialists assume that the Cartesian referent is the only one for ‘the body’, the logocentric referent the only one for ‘the voice’. But, as Gallop reminds us, ‘Belief in simple referentiality is not only unpoetic but also ultimately politically conservative, because it cannot recognize that the reality to which it appeals is a traditional ideological construction, whether one terms it phallomorphic, or metaphysical, or bourgeois, or something else’ (Thinking Through the Body, pp. 98–9). Feminists such as Cixous are trying to unname the Cartesian body. Not back to a natural or maternal source or to a body prior to Descartes or prior to language but toward a new conception of the body. Indeed, as Rosi Braidotti claims in ‘The politics of ontological difference’, the hypothesis of sexual difference has already produced the consequence that


the body meant as the bodily roots of subjectivity becomes a problematic notion, not a prescriptive or pre-defined one. The ‘body’ in question is the threshold of subjectivity: as such it is neither the sum of its organs—a fixed biological essence—nor the result of social conditioning—a historical entity. The ‘body’ is rather to be thought of as the point of intersection, as the interface between the biological and the social, that is to say between the socio-political field of the microphysics of power and the subjective dimension. (p. 97)15 It is a question of retaining the body’s name, since we have no other, but of translating and inscribing it differently. If we wish to accept that the body is discursively constructed, then we must be prepared to push language toward accommodating rather than rejecting this post-Cartesian concept of the body as sign. Concurrently, we must revise radically our ideas about representation, writing and translation. Thus reconceptualized not in terms of representation but rather as a translation project, Cixous’s écriture féminine is compatible with, though not identifical to, Derrida’s project to nurture a grammatological or picto-ideo-phonographic writing. If Derrida’s task is to restore speech to a more balanced relation with such nonphonetic elements as the pictogram and the Chinese ideogram, Cixous’s equally important mandate is to incorporate the body into signification. Deconstructing, blurring and spacing both logocentrism and Derridean grammatology, taking what she needs from each, refusing nothing with use-value, she factors the pictogrammic body into the intervals she thereby creates in the pictoideo-phonographic equation. Deploying the body as pictogram, she invents a writing practice modelled upon the classical hysterics’ intersemiotic translation between language and flesh. Because Cixous’s corporeal and gendered grammatology begins to make it possible to translate between bodies and texts, it circumvents (even though it cannot totally elude) the mechanisms of representation and allows her therefore not to write ‘in the feminine’ but rather to write the feminine in. But Cixous does not restrict écriture féminine to translation between language and the body. She invites us also to translate from the patriarchal vernaculars toward languages more amenable to women and others and to let such acts of translation work to reinscribe and reorganize our bodies. The compositional strategies of écriture féminine move beyond the confines of the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate and beyond the politeness of the kind of ‘pluralization’ which merely adds s’s to the ends of a few controversial nouns. The translation poetics of écriture féminine involves changing more than a single letter. Such writing calls for us to change language; to trespass between different discourses, languages and semiotic systems; and to try other tongues. Thinking of the body as a pictogram opens up ways of theorizing how bodies and texts circulate between and within one another’s economies. Just as translation, acting as both symptom and cure, composes the hysterical body, so the intersemiotic, interlingual and intralingual translations of écriture féminine compose the body poetic. University of Western Ontario


NOTES I would like to thank Gerald Hill and Shirley Neuman for their thoughtful readings of earlier drafts of this article, and Chris Wiesenthal for sharing with me materials gleaned from her research on hysteria in the nineteenth century. I am also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the financial assistance which made the research and writing possible. 1 Nicole Ward Jouve, criticizing Ann Rosalind Jones’s article, touches humorously and tellingly on both the translation effects and the nationalism implicated in the response to écriture féminine in the United States. After quoting a lengthy passage from Jones, she quips: There is something touching in the goodwill. Something comically pious too in the way in which the body and jouissance are written about: strange foreign goods that after due scrutiny, and customs approval, must be allowed on the supermarket shelves if ‘American women’ are to have the best of all worlds. Neo-colonialist almost. (p. 54)

By her own description, Ward Jouve is a French woman who has lived half her life in England and recently emigrated to the United States. She also confesses, parenthetically, to having lived in western Canada for a while, from which experience she says she derived the title of her book. However, she includes her Canadian stint as time dwelling in England or, more accurately, in English (p. 18). Most western Canadians would experience the parenthetical nature of her reference as a neo-colonizing erasure of their language’s différance from British English. 2 While the extent to which Derrida’s work is directly applicable to feminist projects has not yet been established, there have been a number of investigations of this question. I am thinking most particularly of Gayatri Spivak’s essay ‘Displacement and the discourse of woman’. Since its publication in 1983, other essays and texts have appeared. Mary F. Robertson’s ‘Deconstructive “contortion” and women’s historical practice’, Linda Kintz’s ‘In-different criticism: the deconstructive “parole”’ and Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (eds), Men in Feminism are three such examples. Rosi Braidotti notes that ‘With a few notable exceptions little feminist criticism has been devoted to the essentialization of the feminine as a sign of becoming in the work of such masters of deconstruction as Derrida. On the other hand, Irigaray’s essentialist side has been the object of intense criticism’ (‘The politics of ontological difference’, p. 99). She cites Spivak’s essay as one of the exceptions and Moi’s book as an instance of the general rule. 3 The undeclared implication is that Derrida’s work is more comprehensive, more totalizing, than that of Cixous. However, from the mere fact that he does not write as a feminist it does not necessarily follow that Derrida’s work is more general in its scope and application. While it would be absurd to reverse Moi’s hierarchy and


claim that feminism is the master discourse in relation to deconstruction or poststructuralism, it is similarly distorting to treat French feminism as a kind of ladies’ auxiliary to French poststructuralism. 4 Although she cites the appendix, ‘An exchange with Hélène Cixous’, of Conley’s book, in translating écriture féminine as feminine writing Moi overlooks Cixous’s strong statement there that: True, it is simple to say ‘feminine writing’. The use of the word ‘feminine’…is one of the curses of our times. First of all, words like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ that circulate everywhere and that are completely distorted by everyday usage,—words which refer, of course, to a classical vision of sexual opposition between men and women—are our burden, that is what burdens us…. Instead of saying feminine writing or masculine writing, I ended up by saying a writing said to be feminine or masculine, in order to mark the distance. (p. 129)

In dialogues with the other members of the editorial collective for the Canadian feminist writing and theory journal Tessera, Gail Scott muses about the terms écriture féminine and fiction theory. She prefers l’écriture au féminin to feminist writing. She says: ‘I just wish I could find a good English translation for the former—writing-in-the-feminine seems to dilute it somehow…’ (Marlatt et al., p. 9). Because écriture féminine has been the subject of so much controversy, my reply to the anti-essentialists also employs the term. Moreover, since not all writing by women writers attempts the kinds of feats Cixous outlines, I am reluctant to adopt the term ‘women’s writing’. However, in places where I specifically discuss the relations between speech and writing, I have followed the lead of Cixous’s translators and used the translation ‘women’s writing’. These are only provisional tactics and do not solve the problem of naming, as I hope to demonstrate. 5 It is noteworthy that Moi chooses to translate the French term écriture féminine into feminine writing but preserves Derridean différance in the original French. Clearly, Moi feels that she can assimilate Cixous whereas the master, Derrida, either cannot be assimilated or merits the privilege of not being translated. She retains the italicization of the term feminine writing as if it were a foreign expression but translates it into English nonetheless. Moreover, it is curious that Moi draws a connection between what she calls Cixous’s concept of feminine writing and Derrida’s notion of writing as différance. That is, she neither connects Cixous’s écriture with Derrida’s écriture nor comments on disjunctions between them. 6 Significantly, in this same interview passage, Cixous deals with the relation between her own poetic writing and the writing of philosophy. Despite repeatedly mentioning Cixous’s ‘theoretico-poetic style’ (p. 120), Moi declines to take genre into account. With the possible exception of Morag Shiach, very few critics have taken into consideration the fact that in ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ Cixous is writing fiction-theory.


In the special issue of Tessera devoted to fiction-theory, Gail Scott comments that in French the term is ‘fiction théorique or théoretique (both terms are used in French). By the way, in French, the emphasis is on fiction, not theory. That is, the noun in French is fiction, the adjective théorique is what qualifies it’ (Godard et al., p. 8). The poetic prose and the different uses of language licensed by that genre (as opposed to doing straight theory, if such a genre exists) must not be elided but taken into account. 7 The shared etymology of ‘theatre’ and ‘theory’ is by now well known. 8 Writing about the treatment by Freud and Breuer of ‘Anna O.’ [Bertha Pappenheim] and the forms of her multilingual symptomatology, Mary Jacobus summarizes Freud’s interpretation of hysteria as follows: Breuer and Freud observe again and again that hysterical language attempts to recover a lost, literal dimension in language (as if literalness too were not a metaphor); they compare hysterical symptoms to ‘a pictographic script which has become intelligible after the discovery of a few bilingual inscriptions. In that alphabet being sick means disgust.’ Facial neuralgia may result (so to speak) from a ‘slap in the face’; a ‘piercing look’ may produce a headache; difficulty in standing may enact such phrases as ‘not being able to take a single step forward’ and ‘not having anything to lean upon’; pain in walking may reproduce the fear of not finding oneself ‘on a right footing’; and so on. As the absence of speech acquires new meaning in the pictographic script of hysteria, so the carryover into another language (translation) means what it says, to the letter. (p. 209)

Jacobus’s summary would seem to suggest that Freud’s theory of hysteria is grounded in intralingual translation alone. This contrasts with Mahony’s contention that for Freud hysteria is an instance of intersemiotic translation. In fact, hysteria utilizes all three of Jakobson’s forms of translation. 9 For example, Cixous acknowledges that a ‘woman without a body’ cannot simply return to ‘her’ body. It is through writing that she will regain ‘her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal’, under written decree. Through the research, analysis and illumination of writing, a woman will emancipate ‘the marvellous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak’ (p. 250). ‘It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language.’ ‘In women’s speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating…is the song’ (p. 251), which doubly derives from her mother’s voice and from her own relationship to the bodily drives. This body song of mother and daughter is written in ‘white ink’. Though it is intimately connected with these two women’s bodies, white ink is not breast milk. White ink, presumably invisible on the written page, suggests that woman is always already writing, though her work, like her bodily desires and territories, may not be discernible or readable. White ink must first be translated into speech and writing. 10 It could be objected that, in passages such as this and ones I cited earlier (not to mention my own usage, which follows hers grammatically), Cixous’s address to the


11

12 13

14

15

singular form of ‘woman’ rather than to the plural ‘women’ is indicative of a belief in an inherent femaleness. However, as Naomi Schor suggests with regard to the work of Luce Irigaray, when Irigaray ‘projects women as speaking a sexually marked language, a “parler femme”, she is, I believe, ultimately less concerned with theorizing feminine specificity than with debunking the oppressive fiction of a universal subject. To speak woman is above all not to “speak ‘universal’”’ (This essentialism which is not one’, p. 45). A similar case could be made with regard to Cixous. Moreover, Cixous’s multiple uses of ‘woman’ in each of the first-, second- and third-persons singular and plural would need to be adequately considered. This process of intersemiotic translation from verbal signs to body signs is similar to the interlingual translations of the schizophrenic Louis Wolfson, who finds his mother tongue, English, so painful that he must constantly translate into other languages, deflecting English interlingually. See Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s essay ‘Louis Wolfson and the philosophy of translation’. Hunter considers various ways in which psychoanalysis is itself a translation into theory of the language of hysteria. See pp. 484–6 of her essay. In her essay ‘Realism and hysteria: toward a feminist mimesis’, Elin Diamond executes a lengthy two-pronged analysis of how realism co-opts hysterical practice for its own ends and of how realism is itself hysterical. Like David-Ménard, who unfolds the dualist elements of Freud’s thoughts on hysteria, Diamond shows that Freud’s theory of hysteria is imbued with representationalist aesthetics. She argues that in much realist drama that focuses on hysteria, such as that of Ibsen, the figure of the female hysteric is used to underwrite the truth and validity of realist aesthetics. In the dramatic, as in the psychoanalytic, treatment of hysteria, the performance of hysteria must be ‘a truthful performance, otherwise there can be no catharsis’. Precipitated by an act of intersemiotic translation between words and body— Freud’s words or the pressure of his hand on her forehead—the hysteric is expected to produce both a verbal and a visual, bodily reply: ‘The verbal revelation is obviously vital, but the word must be verified by the body’s visible mimesis.’ With such mimetic verification, a successful etiology, epistemology, therapeutic practice and curtain call are achieved: ‘The result of [the hysteric’s] performance is cathartic climax and denouement, no more words, no more pains’ (p. 67). In her analysis of the critique of realism and representation mounted by hysteria, Diamond assimilates translation to representation and overlooks its creative potential. She describes ‘a different mimesis’, a ‘mimesis gone wild’, whereby the ‘untranslatability of a woman’s (body) language’ produces a realism without truth and how this disturbs ‘the solid geometry of representation’ (pp. 86–7). As intriguing as the possibilities of a wild mimesis are, those of a wild translation, I would suggest, are even more intriguing and more consistent with the signifying practice that hysteria itself is. See Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud for an historical account of how the masculine body has served as the single anatomical prototype for both masculinity and femininity. In ‘Organs without bodies’ Braidotti, in a writerly moment of the kind I am advocating, refers to language as ‘the ultimate prosthesis’ (p. 149).


WORKS CITED Braidotti, Rosi, ‘Organs without bodies’, Differences, 1, 1 (1989), pp. 147–61. —‘The politics of ontological difference’, in Brennan (below), pp. 89–105. Brennan, Teresa (ed.), Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Cixous, Hélène, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), pp. 245–64. Conley, Verena Andermatt, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln, Neb. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). David-Ménard, Monique, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Catherine Porter, foreword Ned Lukacher (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 165–207. Diamond, Elin, ‘Realism and hysteria: toward a feminist mimesis’, Discourse, 13, 1 (1990–1), pp. 59–92. Féral, Josette, ‘Towards a theory of displacement’, Sub-Stance, 32 (1981), pp. 52–64. Freeman, Barbara, ‘Plus corps donc plus écriture: Hélène Cixous and the mind-body problem’, Paragraph, 11, 1 (1988), pp. 58–70. Fuss, Diana, Essentially speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Gallop, Jane, ‘Reading the mother tongue: psychoanalytic feminist criticism’, Critical Inquiry, 13, 2 (1987), pp. 314–29. —Thinking Through the Body, Gender and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Godard, Barbara, Marlatt, Daphne, Mezei, Kathy and Gail Scott, ‘Theorizing fiction theory’, Tessera 3/Canadian Fiction Magazine, 57 (1986), pp. 6–12. Hunter, Dianne, ‘Hysteria, psychoanalysis, and feminism: the case of Anna O’, Feminist Studies, 9, 3 (1983), pp. 464–88. Jacobus, Mary, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism, Gender and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Jakobson, Roman, ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’, vol. 2 of Selected Writings, Word and Language (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), pp. 260–6. Jardine, Alice and Smith, Paul (eds), Men in Feminism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987). Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘Writing the body: toward an understanding of l’ecriture feminine’, Feminist Studies, 7, 2 (1981), pp. 247–63. Kintz, Linda, ‘In-different criticism: the deconstructive “parole”’, in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 113–35. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1990). Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, ‘Louis Wolfson and the philosophy of translation’, The Oxford Literary Review, 11, 1/2 (1989), pp. 103–20.


McCallum, Pamela, ‘New feminist readings: woman as ecriture or woman as Other?’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 9, 1/2 (1985), pp. 127–32. Mahony, Patrick, ‘Toward the understanding of translation in psycho-analysis’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 28, 2 (1980), pp. 461–75. Marlatt, Daphne, Mezei, Kathy, Scott, Gail, Knutson, Susan and Barbara Godard, ‘In conversation’, Tessera, 5 (1988), pp. 7–12. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, New Accents (London and New York: Methuen, 1985). Poovey, Mary, ‘Feminism and deconstruction’, Feminist Studies, 14, 1 (1988), pp. 51–65. Robertson, Mary F., ‘Deconstructive “contortion” and women’s historical practice’, Poetics Today, 7, 4 (1986), pp. 705–28. Schiach, Morag, ‘Their “symbolic” exists, it holds power—we, the sowers of disorder, know it only too well,’ in Brennan, op. cit., pp. 153–67. Schor, Naomi, ‘Introducing feminism’, Paragraph, 8 (1986), pp. 94–101. —‘This essentialism which is not one: coming to grips with Irigaray’, Differences, 1, 2 (1989), pp. 38–58. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Displacement and the discourse of woman’, in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. and intro. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 169–95. Stanton, Domna C., ‘Difference on trial: a critique of the maternal metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva’, in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 156–79. Toury, Gideon, ‘Interlanguage and its manifestations in translation’, in In Search of a Theory of Translation (Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1980), pp. 71–8. Ward Jouve, Nicole, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

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Shakespeare and heritage GRAHAM HOLDERNESS

I What is ‘heritage’? It is not the past, but that which survives from the past, and is ‘inherited’ in the present. It is not history, but the traces of a vanished existence, the footprint that marks the passing of an earlier age. But heritage is a very selective processing of history, a structured abstraction from the past. As individuals we can inherit desirable goods such as money and houses; we can also inherit syphilis and sickle-cell anaemia. When undesirable realities, such as poor housing and disease, survive from the past into the social present, no one refers to these as part of ‘our’ heritage. So a more precise definition of heritage, still within the metaphor of personal inheritance, would be those things which we ought to be pleased to have left to us. At this point historical intention or accident becomes moral obligation: since we ought, having inherited these things, also to be prepared to look after and ‘conserve’ them. This of course raises the crucial question of ownership. A concept like ‘the national heritage’ may include things in public ownership, but may well consist much more substantially of things owned (and inherited) by private individuals and families. One of the first strategies of the ‘heritage’ movement, enacted through the National Trust, was the Country House Act of 1937, by means of which the costs of maintaining such houses could become the responsibility of the state, in return for limited rights of public access, while the owners could continue to occupy the house and bequeath it to their heirs. Public access to the ‘national heritage’ often consists not in ownership but visiting rights. Millions of people do however exercise those rights: statistics suggest that more people visit museums and country houses than patronize theatres, dance and opera houses.1 ‘Heritage’ remains curiously undefined at the level of government policy and legislative framework, despite two Acts of Parliament centred on the concept (the National Heritage Acts, 1980 and 1983, which established respectively the National Heritage Memorial Fund and English Heritage). In their first annual report, the trustees of the National Heritage Memorial Fund declared that they ‘could no more define heritage than…beauty or art’. At the theoretical level the term is therefore open, both for arbitrary definition and for contestation.2 One of the most significant shifts, enabled by this absence of theoretical focus, in the practical application of the


term over recent years has been an adjustment in the relationship between heritage and ownership. There is now for example a recognition of the industrial past (which may of course be of relatively recent origin) as subject to considerably more rapid processes of decay and disappearance than the Georgian country house, and therefore in equally urgent need (if worth preserving) of conservation. Industrial archaeology thus becomes as legitimate a conservationist cause as the excavation of Roman or medieval remains; and its results equally deserving of exhibition. At the same time, an application of modern social history to the concept of heritage produces a positive evaluation of the everyday domestic lives of millions over against the public lives of a few: so it becomes feasible to construct a ‘heritage centre’ or exhibition around, say, regional working-class life in the early twentieth century. Alongside the national museums in London arise the Wigan Pier Heritage Centre, the Beamish Open Air Museum, and countless similar commemorative displays and enactments of ‘ordinary living’ in the past. Patrick Wright has written of

the post-war expansion which has widened out the repertoire of the National Heritage, establishing the ordinary street alongside the mansion and the industrial relic alongside the great artistic masterpiece. In this way conflicting cultures may well come to be combined in a bland celebration of mere diversity, but one should never forget that this expansion has often followed an active claiming of national significance in the name of previously excluded cultures and interests.3 Museums too have changed their emphasis from the acquisition, curation and exhibition of objects to an investment in ‘hands-on’ activities, simulated displays, audio-visual performances. The most popular of the London museums is the Museum of the Moving Image, which commemorates the far from remote history of cinema and broadcasting in a virtual reality of high-tech, user-friendly client participation. Though mostly state-subsidized in one way or another, these new ‘heritage’ enterprises are market-led, commercial operations. Their commercial context is the leisure and services industry; their direct market, tourism. They often represent a form of damage-containment recuperation, when for example industrial plants and communities, rendered obsolete by the rapidity of economic change, are reconstructed as industrial museums. In the key works of cultural analysis addressed to these developments,4 they are perceived as evidence of a process of economic and cultural decline: a systematic substitution of replica for reality, simulation for experience, enactment for lived history. II The village of Avebury in Wiltshire is not especially well known as the site of a ring of megalithic stones. Like Stonehenge, these objects are genuine survivors, veterans of the long struggle against time. They derive therefore (unlike for example the many traces of Roman occupation) from a remote historical past about which


very little is known. They are for this reason mysterious in a literal sense: nobody knows the reason or purpose of their erection. Far less well known than Stonehenge, they are not particularly firmly positioned on a tourist itinerary, not normally reached via any ritual passage to a site heavily sacralized by the liturgies of the heritage industry. Most people see them, if at all, by accident: probably driving along a back road to avoid arterial congestion. The stones are strange because they are not normal occupants of a modern agricultural field; though this need have no connection with antiquity, applying equally to the famous concrete cows of Milton Keynes. They are strange because they are inexplicable, and therefore present no impediment to the free imagination of the observer. They are sources of historical knowledge only in very limited sense, because there is so little information to contextualize them into a framework of reasonable hypothesis. We encounter them as alien, as strangers from another world: we don’t understand their language, their customs, their culture. They are, to use a term of Walter Benjamin’s, adapted and applied to the analysis of heritage by Donald Horne, ‘auratic’:5 capable of stimulating, or of being constituted within, a response of mysterious emotional affectivity. The ‘aura’ (which we will meet again later in the form of a curious phenomenon known as the ‘tingle factor’) is clearly dependent on some frame of cultural competence. It does not consist of some mysterious potency lurking within the stones, but rather of a kind of dislocation in normal habits of perception, the shock of coming up against historical difference. Here the past can be encountered by chance as an alien power which has come and gone, leaving behind these strange, inscrutable messengers holding an unintelligible secret. They impress without communicating; they provoke curiosity without supplying knowledge; they stimulate interest without satisfying understanding.6 Close to the stones is Avebury Manor, a Tudor dwelling-house that had fallen into disuse and decay: unoccupied, dilapidated, crumbling. W. Benyon, Tory MP for Buckingham, during the second reading of the National Heritage Bill (1980), concisely defined heritage as ‘that which moulders’. This is of course exactly what time does to buildings and other cultural objects: it rots them. Historicity is defined as much by a propensity to rot as by a persistence in surviving. Buildings made to last have a history different from buildings designed to obsolesce. The dwellings of Saxon farmers, and some of the tower-blocks of 1960s urban development, fell down, while the castles of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy survived, all for fairly substantial historical reasons. If the history of a Tudor manor-house (or of a Stratford-uponAvon town-house) is a history of dilapidation, then that is its history, the story it has to tell us about relations between past and present. If no one goes to look at it, if it is effectively non-existent, then that absence from public conscious ness is also a historical reality. Robert Hewison distinguishes between ‘preservation’ and ‘conservation’: Preservation means the maintenance of an object or building, or such of it as remains, in a condition defined by its historic context, and in such a form that it can be studied with a view to revealing its original meaning. Conservation, on the other hand, creates a new context and a new use. (Hewison 1987, p. 98)


In 1989 a London builder and small businessman, Ken King, bought Avebury Manor with a determination to reverse the inexorable judgement of time. For Ken (who presents himself as an Arthur Dailey figure, describes himself as a ‘Jack-thelad-entrepreneur’) the crumbling building no longer represented a real history. To look at an empty, decaying ruin gives the observer no sense at all of what such a house would have been in its earlier centuries of existence—a busy, populous centre of social and administrative life on an estate, a centre of social, cultural, commercial, productive activity. Ken’s scheme was to restore the Manor to its original character by converting it into a kind of Elizabethan theme-park. The circulation of people and traffic which would have made the Manor a lively and populous place can be replaced by the circulation of tourists and school parties; the vanished inhabitants of the house simulated by attendants and guides in period costume; the house itself could be virtually rebuilt (by, for example, temporarily removing the roof in order to restructure the walls) to restore it to its former fortunes. An ‘Elizabethan experience’ would become available in a ‘living museum’. In the TV programme devoted to this instance of heritage recuperation, comments were sought from a cross-section of local inhabitants. The broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy, who lives nearby as a weekend villager, found it difficult to walk his bearded collie in peace among the bulldozers, and felt that the Manor should be left as it was for the enjoyment of people like himself. An extremely plummy local lady shrilly objected to the despoliation of ‘her’ heritage, and to the undesirable types of people who would be drawn into the area. An elderly man from a local council estate thought it a very good scheme which might bring employment to the area: after all, the house wasn’t doing anyone any good as it was. III The megalithic stones and the Tudor manor house of Avebury represent the parameters within which the heritage industry transacts its commercial and ideological business: preservation and conservation, the monument and the themepark, the reality and the replica, the surviving historical trace and the re-enactment of history as ‘living museum’. Precisely the same binary opposition constituted one of the strange cultural and political relationships formed as a consequence of the emergence, into daylight and public consciousness, of the foundations of the Rose Thea tre, excavated by Museum of London archaeologists early in 1989: the relationship between the International Shakespeare Globe Trust’s replica Elizabethan theatre, under construction on Bankside, and the ‘real foundations’ on which such reconstructions must superstructurally rest. Sam Wanamaker’s project of ‘rebuilding’ the Globe Theatre was challenged and compromised in interesting ways through the turning up, by an archaeologist’s trowel, of an old competitor, the Rose. Although modelled, both in its conception and its techniques of fundraising and administration, on similar American ventures, the London Globe reconstruction project can of course claim a unique and unchallengeable advantage: its replica of


‘Shakespeare’s theatre’ stands near to the site of the original theatre (now also rediscovered and partially excavated). The relationship between project and place, traced in John Drakakis’s essay ‘Shakespeare and the Roadsweepers’,7 involves more than history: initially the Globe project was formulated both as a ‘popular theatre’, and as a community enterprise; the revival of a democratic drama, and the renewal of a local culture; the resurrection of the Globe, and the restoration of cultural and economic vitality to a depressed urban locality. Once the Globe Trust had in 1986 emerged victorious from its legal battle over use of the land with Southwark Council, there appeared a marked shift in its public position, from attachment to an unsympathetic local authority and an unsupportive local community, to dependence on local business, the Royal family and the Tory government. Aspirations to represent a revival of popular theatre and the rehabilitation of an economically derelict area became subordinated to the commercial and touristic components of the enterprise.8 It thus became clear that for the Globe project, the support of a ‘local community’ was, as John Drakakis observed, ‘a conveniently variable factor in the equation’ (Drakakis 1988, p. 28). The demographic and social justifications of the Globe’s location virtually dispensed with, the relationship between project and site then resolved itself into an apparently simpler question of historical continuity. The fact that the theatre had been destroyed three centuries previously was not considered an insurmountable objection to the project of its relocation: if a historical monument is no longer there to be seen, all you have to do is build a replica on the original site and you recapture not only the appearance but the ‘spirit’ of the original. This is certainly Sam Wanamaker’s view:

To visit a place or site for its historical associations is to acquire an experience. To visit the ruins of an important historical centre is to acquire an experience. To visit a replica or reconstruction is not quite the same, yet such places can acquire the patina of the original…a reconstructed Globe… will absorb the spirit of the original theatre. People who come to it— whether in superficial curiosity, reverential love or deep appreciation—will experience something of the past. (quoted in Holderness (ed.) 1988, p. 23) The term ‘patina’ denotes an interesting semantic process: initially the encrusted corruption of oxidization on the surface of bronze, it became descriptive first of the real texture of age on any other material surface, and then of the appearance of such a texture as it can be simulated when works of art are ‘antiqued’. Art-critic Waldemar Januszczak described this transition:9 The texture of poverty used to be called ‘patina’. It is the appearance of old age, a kind of spurious spirituality endowed upon the art work by the passage of time. When ‘patina’ becomes something to add to a new object to make it look old, it is


that warm, worn, safe, familiar feeling worshipped by immature societies shellshocked from progress. Post-modern collectors buy new art covered in patina for the same reason as post-modern architects build Neo-Georgian buildings, to gain a respite from the decision-making processes of the present. They are literally buying second-hand time. By a mysterious osmotic process the new Globe will acquire, according to Wanamaker, from the site of the old an authentic veneer of antiquity. A moment’s observation of the site in question would produce a certain scepticism on this score. It is however a characteristic strategy of ‘heritage’ to affirm the contiguity of present and past. An old world can be ‘entered’ simply by stepping off the present on to a plane of imaginative reality continuous with the past. In one of the ‘Shakespeare in Perspective’ broadcasts introductory to a BBC Shakespeare series production, George Melly stood in the middle of Shrewsbury and remarked: ‘the city traffic may roar past outside…but here for a moment the real estate agent from Dallas, the insurance clerk from South-east London may enjoy an hour or two in a simpler, more gay world.’ Patrick Wright comments: A national heritage site must be sufficiently of this world to be accessible by car or camera, but it must also encourage access to that other ‘simpler’ world when the tourist or viewer finally gets there…this publicly instituted transformation between prosaic reality and the imagination of a deep past is central to the operation of the national heritage…these sites exist only to provide that momentary experience of utopian gratification in which the grey torpor of everyday life in contemporary Britain lifts and the simpler, more radiant measures of Albion declare themselves again. (Wright 1985, p. 76) The relationship between this contemporary experience of ‘transformation’ and the past itself can be complex. It may involve the presence of ancient buildings, monuments, objects: though these may not necessarily occupy their original places. The Beamish Open Air Museum near Newcastle contains a railway station, miners’ cottages, a Co-operative store, colliery workings—all of which have been transported from somewhere else and rebuilt on a single site. Or it may, as in the case of the Globe, involve total replication, using conjecturally ‘authentic’ materials from the present, but nothing that survives from the past. This contradictory balance of considerations could obviously be thrown into serious disequilibrium by the emergence, literally next door to the Globe’s ‘heritage’ site, of a material heritage consisting of actual relics from the past, surviving, physical objects such as the foundations of the Rose theatre.


IV The site of the Rose theatre, built around 1587, clearly marked on nineteenthcentury Ordnance Survey maps of the area, was built over in 1957 by Southbridge House. This building, ironically an element in the ‘urban renewal’ of Bankside (inaugurated by the Festival of Britain10 in 1951, which in turn was intended to herald a ‘Second Elizabethan Age’), was constructed by driving foundation posts right through the buried site of the theatre. Thirty years later it had become, according to the standards of modern property developers and the current value of land, ‘obsolete’. Planning permission was granted by Southwark Council to the Heron group for the building of an office block, subject to the condition that archaeologists must be allowed access to excavate any remains. Under a Voluntary Code of Practice drawn up in 1986 by the British Archaeological Trust and the Developers Liaison Group, developers are obliged to pay for archaeological work designed to excavate any significant sites to be built on, in exchange for the archaeologists’ agreement not to hold up development work unnecessarily, not to campaign publicly against the interests of the developer, and so on. The Heron group had offered the Museum of London eight weeks for site evaluation, and a further unspecified period to be negotiated, when it sold the site to developers Imry Merchant. New plans appeared for a bigger office block, and for all required archaeological work only the eight weeks already offered for site evaluation alone. In the event, the developer’s optimistic timetable was held up by the discovery of the Rose foundations, and by the public campaign that followed. The campaign itself was part local community action (it was led by Southwark and Bermondsey MP Simon Hughes), part agitation of the conservation lobby, part histrionic militancy on the part of leading members of the theatrical and entertainment profession, and part intelligible (indeed, highly laudable) routine resistance to absolutely anything a London property developer wishes to undertake. The principal objective of the campaign in the first instance was to persuade the Department of the Environment to ‘schedule’ the remains of the Rose so that development would be prevented. To ‘schedule’ an ancient monument is the equivalent of ‘listing’ a building: in each case, the site acquires protection from potentially destructive development. Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley, true to form on such matters, declined to schedule the Rose. Bowing to media pressure and posing as conservationists, Imry Merchant agreed to redesign their office block so that the Rose remains would be preserved for further excavation and eventual display: their design became known as the ‘office on stilts’. The ‘Save the Rose’ campaign insisted from the outset that the site should be left undeveloped, with the Rose preserved and presented for public display (this strategy was poetically termed the ‘Blue Skies’ option). The advice of English Heritage,11 a supposedly independent body which in this case appeared ably to represent the interests of government and developers, was that in view of the development timetable (which under the Voluntary Code should not be disturbed) the Rose site should be ‘back-filled’, to be excavated at a later date (i.e. when the office block was demolished). In the end it was the developer’s option that was implemented; the Rose was submerged in concrete to be subsequently re-excavated, and the office-block redesigned to permit building at an elevation over the site, and


the drilling of its concrete piles around rather than through the foundations of the theatre. The International Shakespeare Globe Centre (ISGC) participated in the Save the Rose campaign, took due cognizance of its significance in contradicting many suppositions about Elizabethan playhouses (when the Globe foundations were later excavated, the ISGC stopped their own building work to assimilate any surprising archaeological discoveries into its design), incorporated much discussion of the Rose excavation into its own publicity, and constructed an exhibition about the Rose in the Bear Gardens Museum. None the less there were severe political tensions between the two campaigns, ranging from the predictable to the bizarre. Sam Wanamaker, with a great deal of his own fund-raising target still to achieve, obviously didn’t think the charitable economy could sustain two campaigns: ‘If they [the Save the Rose campaign] start a public fund-raising drive it could be damaging to our campaign.’ The fear of competition entailed a comparative evaluation of reality and replica: ‘Of course I’m worried that they want to raise millions of pounds for the Rose. People can only look at the site for five minutes, and that’s it.’12 The ISGC clearly regarded itself, rather than the Rose campaign, as the appropriate custodian of the foundations: the ISGC plan proposed incorporating a preserved Rose into their own Bear Gardens Museum. This somewhat high-handed assumption of natural stewardship even extended to the ISGC’s blocking of a Rose Campaign plan to use, as their logo, the ‘universal’ image of Shakespeare! When in July 1989 Southwark Council’s Planning Committee considered the various options proposed for the future of the Rose, beside the Rose Campaign Committee’s persistent adherence to the ‘Blue Skies’ option (that the foundations should be preserved and exhibited without being built over) there was a letter from Sam Wanamaker on behalf of the ISGC, advocating acceptance of the property developer’s plan (the ‘office on stilts’):12

The issue of the Rose has been protracted over many months and has caused some confusion and a serious deflection of effort from our own fund-raising and educational activities. With the additional revisions now proposed, we strongly urge your committee to act decisively to approve the Imry application so that we can move on to the many urgent issues regarding the future development of Bankside. This position approximates closely to that of Ken King, Lord of Avebury Manor. By a peculiar reversal the replica Globe becomes the ‘real thing’, while the ‘real foundations’ of the Rose become a mere distraction. Sam Wanamaker’s ‘five minutes’ is compatible with other equally dismissive definitions like Bernard Levin’s ‘a hole in the ground’, Terry Dicks’s ‘a pile of bricks and rubble’, Joan Bakewell’s ‘not even a building’. The Globe and the Rose were constituted within this discourse into a series of classic binary oppositions: centre and margin, high and low priority, senior and junior partner, Shakespearean and not-really-Shakespearean, mature Shakespearean and early Shakespearean, even male and female. Frequently in both supportive and


dismissive public comment, the Rose was implicitly gendered as conventionally female: a ‘sleeping beauty’, awoken and put to sleep again by technological enchantment; a fragile body, in need of chivalric protection; then a Juliet, dead in her tomb, buried by an ‘impermeable membrane’, a restored virginity in concrete. The developer’s building work was imagined as a kind of rape, as Imry Merchant threatened to drive hugh 8-foot-thick concrete piles through ‘the very heart of the Rose’. Others stressed the pointlessness of a ‘hole in the ground’, a no-thing about which it seemed fatuous to conduct too much ado. The Globe in the discursive strategy was implicitly male, but could easily be transformed into an image of legitimate feminity, approved because properly occupied—the site of a ‘Wooden O’ into which so manly a character as Prince Philip was prepared to drive his ancient oaken post.14 It is initially tempting simply to invert this initial binary opposition, and to claim the Rose as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ against the ‘simulated reality’ of the Globe. In some basic physical sense this is obviously the case. The excavation of the Rose conferred on its remains the power of evidence, a capacity to controvert speculative assumptions about the nature of Elizabethan theatres. The Rose, with its shallow stage facing the wrong way, its sloping yard, its most un-Vitruvian 13-sided irregular polygonal structure, was able to inform scholarship, to challenge opinion and to change minds. ‘The Rose’, said C.Walter Hodges, ‘has thrown all our established working premises and assumptions into disarray’ (quoted in Eccles 1990, p. 146). The Globe, of course, for all the ISGC’s concern with accuracy in imitation and authenticity of detail, occupies quite a different order of ‘reality’. To reconstruct a building using ‘original’ materials and ‘authentic’ construction techniques still gives you a modern building, however imitative of earlier models. Further, the design concept within which the Globe will be incorporated is enthusiastically postmodern in its eclecti cism, pastiche, quotations of antique styles. ‘The Centre will be a collection of interconnected buildings, each separately expressed with its own character. Although not copies of older buildings, they will use clues such as original materials and proportions to evoke memories of past techniques’ (my italics).15

V But can we rest the argument on a basis as tenuous as a binary opposition between ‘reality’ and the ‘unreal’? The chalk pillars, mortar, lath, plaster and hazelnut shells of the Rose excavation provide a kind of scientific knowledge. They offer an alternative configuration of data on which basis new speculation, like the original building, can be founded. That scientific knowledge is, by definition, a concern of specialists. The evidence could not even be produced for observation except by the professional expertise of archaeologists. Further archaeological analysis is then needed for evaluation and explanation of the physical objects and traces disclosed. Historical scholarship can then set to work on the task of interpretation. All this is clear and uncontroversial. But this is history, not heritage; for the few, not for the many. The information gathered from an archaeological excavation takes on general meaning and value only when translated on to paper or computer screen,


only when circulated and mobilized in the service of a scientific or educational programme. Archaeological sites are in themselves often unintelligible to a nonspecialist. The strikingly clear photographs of the Rose foundations in outline were taken from the top of a tower-block: only distance and aerial perspective could contextualize the remains so as to render them generally intelligible. If what we are interested in is historical knowledge, initially for the interpretation of specialists, then this has nothing to do with the conservation and display of an archaeological excavation.16 To gather the maximum of information from an archaeological site, it is necessary to destroy it: to remove every piece of evidence, in order the more effectively to analyse and test it. Only in this way can all the data be recovered. ‘Rescue archaeology’ is often thought of as the melodramatic snatching of some fragile remains from the path of the developer’s bulldozer, rather like the chivalric untying of a heroine from under the advancing wheels of a train. But archaeological remains often need rescuing from an enemy even more powerful than the property developer. The physical nature of the object in this case actually made ‘rescue archaeology’ the most sensible option: the Rose was built of materials which decay quickly once exposed to the air, preserved in the first place only by burial and the dampness of the soil. Once exhumed and exposed, they begin to decay rapidly, requiring special covering and continual watering. Does it make sense to conserve something primarily of interest to specialists, if those interests would best be served by ‘rescue archaeology’, the total excavation of the site? If a site is presented for a broader constituency who might wish or be persuaded to visit and observe, can it be left in a form meaningful to archaeologists, but indecipherable to anyone else? Doesn’t the site require what is known as ‘enhancement’, or what Donald Horne has called ‘exposition’—which at the level of minimal interference means little explanatory signs for the convenience of the visitor’s orientation; but at the maximal level means the construction of something like Yorvik, the excavated site of a Viking settlement in York which has become the ultimate heritage train-ride. The Save the Rose campaign committee have in fact commissioned a feasibility study for the representation of the Rose once reexcavated from Heritage Projects, the consultants who created Yorvik. The Save the Rose campaign was of course conducted around an unenhanced, un-exposited site: so as far as its members and supporters were concerned, the remains were evidently valuable and worth conserving in themselves. The campaign took a clearly principled stand on this, fighting continuously for conservation without development (which would have been possible only if the Secretary of State had agreed to schedule the Rose as an ancient monument, or if his negative ruling could have been successfully tested in law). In what did its value consist? The Rose was firmly identified as part of the national cultural heritage: in a message transmitted from Lord Olivier to the crowds on the site, ‘part of one’s heritage’, which should not be ‘swept under the concrete as if it had never existed’ (quoted in Eccles 1990, p. 175). The famous actors and entertainers who drew the cameras and journalists to the site testified to a direct apprehension of heritage through physical proximity to the Rose site. ‘I belong to the Rose’ said Ian McKellen, ‘and that’s where my voice should be heard’ (quoted in Eccles 1990, p. 200). Judi Dench took off her shoes and stood barefoot on the stage, to get as close as possible to the recuperated past. There was much experiencing of the ‘tingle factor’, that


communication of aura, that mysterious emotional vibration shared by many of the Rose’s visitors. Philip Ormond of the theatre publicity firm Theatre Dispatch described the process exactly:

—a patch of damp mud with some stones sticking out; an archaeologist’s plan stapled to the hoarding, some cold minutes of cross-referencing the plan to the stones—an intellectual exercise, then suddenly, the site of the theatre clicked into place and I was standing where the best seats had been, looking down on the stage where Shakespeare had probably acted—a unique emotional experience. (quoted in Eccles 1990, p. 169) These appeals to a universal possession (‘our heritage’) are of course in actuality culturally specific. They derive from a particular cultural and ideological discourse, and when in operation they demonstrate the cultural competence of the speaker. This problematic could be considered the inversion of the theme-park version of heritage, since it thrives on the meanness of the opportunities history affords; draws not on historical detail, but imaginative liberty; flourishes not on the solidity of physical evidence, but the active exercise of well-informed fantasy. The less there is in the way of physical evidence, the more authentic the sensibility of the observer. Here is David Garrick on Shakespeare’s birthplace—then of course a dilapidated building,17 not the restored original you see today: the humble shed, in which the immortal bard first drew that breath which gladdened all the isle, is still existing; and all who have a heart to feel, and a mind to admire the truth of nature and the splendour of genius, will rush thither to behold it, as a pilgrim would to the shrine of some loved saint; will deem it holy ground, and dwell with sweet though pensive rapture on the natal habitation of the poet.18 The humbler the ‘shed’ (semantically confused here with the birthplace of another ‘immortal’) the more feeling the heart, the more admiring the mind of the observer. If however this invocation of a universal national culture is nothing more than an attempt on the part of a cultural elite to exercise and demonstrate its influence (a kind of power which can of course be used in many different ways) then where does that leave the less cultivated witness—the contemporary observer, with a heart less capable of feeling, a mind less tuned to admiration, a sensibility less capable of conjuring from mud and rubble visions of the past, than Garrick or any of his successors who filled the site of the Rose with similarly apposite quotations? Once the actors have gone back to work, and the media circus has moved on, isn’t the subject of this natural consensus ‘our national heritage’ left rather forlorn beside that ‘hole in the ground’, that ‘pile of bricks and rubble’?


VI This leaves us stranded interestingly between an empty hole and a crowded themepark. The Save the Rose campaign clearly intends that the secrets of that now once again far-off, secret, most inviolate Rose should ultimately be revealed: not exclusively held for specialists, but presented to the public as a national monument to a common cultural heritage. But how can you show the true historical nature of that monument (an educational as well as a commercial aspiration) to that public, except by ‘exposition’ and ‘enhancement’? The argument, and the longterm strategy of the Rose campaign, point inexorably towards the themepark. The ‘enhanced’ site could, within the discourse of heritage, lay claim, like Yorvik, to greater authenticity by virtue of its resting on ‘real foundations’. But so too, as we have seen, can a patently simulated reconstruction like the Globe. Since the process of enhancement is never less than a contemporary processing and appropriation of the past, subject to whatever ideological determinants may currently be in operation, are not such acts of recuperation and exposition always heritage rather than history? Once the Rose site has given up its being in the form of scientific knowledge, is there any essential difference, for public access and appreciation, between an enhanced Rose and a simulated Globe? The claim to ‘authenticity’ in this particular context of heritage recuperation is inevitably spurious, since that which is authentic is likely to be incommunicable in heritage terms. If we are interested in promoting an unillusioned grasp of historical difference, then claims to historical originality and authenticity through the significance of place are a distraction, since they systematically blur the distinctions between past and present, history and heritage. This is a much more complex matter than simple fraud or imposture. When visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon enter a Tudor-looking building with the sign ‘New Place’ above the door, they are not necessarily being duped into believing that this structure is the original house occupied by Shakespeare and demolished in 1759. Appropriate and responsible ‘exposition’ informs them of the facts. But the historical distinction between the ‘original’ garden and the reconstructed building is systematically elided both by the physical homogeneity of reconstruction, and by the ideological deep structure of the tourist occasion itself, which entails precisely a quest for the interface between present and past.19 A new Globe theatre on the South Bank of the Thames is of course a very different matter. Rising in extraordinary architectural isolation among the dereliction and tower-blocks, a reproduced Elizabethan theatre could represent a triumph of postmodern style, capable by its pastiche and quotation of calling attention simultaneously to present and past, a contradictory synthesis of modernity and the antique. The relationship between building and location would be one of shocking incongruity rather than any smooth absorption of a distinctive local patina. Stripped of all pretensions to authenticity, could not such a building offer the spectator a critical consciousness of cultural appropriation? One of the most striking developments in heritage presentation, with the movement towards simulation by theme-park and living museum, is the presence of live performers: not actors performing drama on a theatrical stage, but performers


enacting a drama of everyday life in the theatre of a reconstructed history. The public representation of history has moved from the simple exhibition of objects, to static tableaux using dummies and waxwork effigies, through technologically mobilized active displays, to the enactment by living people of a historical drama. The intention may well have been to secure more ‘lifelike’ effects; the result however is performance, a new kind of theatre, and the essence of theatre is that it can simultaneously foster illusion and secure demystification. When a redundant South Wales miner plays the role of a miner in a pit-turned-colliery-theme-park, the distinction between the actor and his former role is as sharply significant as the continuity. In the more populist and democratic forms of heritage enterprise (as in new forms of community theatre)20 the relationship between past and present is problematized by the paradox of connection in discontinuity: there is an implicit estrangement-effect in the fact that the live performer is very much not the person impersonated. The continued use in heritage attractions of dummies, together with more sophisticated forms of display technology, can thus be seen to possess virtues beyond those of cheapness and contractual simplicity. Possibly because a waxwork is in reality rather more like a dead than a living person, the effigy has a power of illusion beyond that of the live performer. A tourist centre in Stratford, previously ‘The World of Shakespeare’, and now renamed ‘Heritage Theatre’, contains a sonetlumière display, using moving dummies, special effects and recorded sound, dramatizing the ‘Shakespeare’s England’ of Tillyard and Dover Wilson. The audience occupies a circular auditorium, darkened during the performance, and the spectacle takes place all around. The method is one of ‘total theatre’, with the spectator completely encircled by sound and vision; the performance culminates in an audio-visual simulation of a court masque. The vast and potent illusion of the Elizabethan World Picture is conveyed to the spectator through these theatrical resources far more completely than they could be communicated by any live performance. Ideological complicity, unresisted by an existing critical consciousness, can be guaranteed. The same spectators, confronted in South-wark Bridge Road by a figure clad in doublet and hose, would experience the pleasant, disorientating absurdity of all street theatre: but would be under no illusion as to the authenticity of the historical personage enacted.

VII One of the key theoretical difficulties in our current address to heritage, is the foundation of all the major theoretical works in certain critical writings of the Frankfurt school, particularly Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). From that seminal essay derives the very term ‘the culture industry’, within which conceptual framework the developments I have been discussing became available for analysis. Yet the structure of the Adorno-Horkheimer argument is framed by a set of extremely reactionary propositions: the ideological crisis created by the decline of traditional social institutions such as the family; the total reification of culture into a manipulative industry; the destruction of the autonomous individual, the degeneracy of the mass media, and the critical value of


high culture.21 It has proved difficult even for a socialist writer such as Patrick Wright to acknowledge from within this totalizing problematic any possibilities for resistance within the cultural activities of heritage. Yet clearly there are possibilities, visible even in some of the existing enterprises, for the production of an alternative heritage, a living theatre of the past capable of producing a grasp of historical difference. Robert Hewison’s work, with its general distinction between the reality of the past and the attenuated imitations of the present, maps the space of popular culture as the unmitigated triumph of the culture industry. Both writers frequently employ metaphors from theatre, invariably used to identify the artificial, the simulation, the illusion, the deception. Yet it is surely in performance that an unillusioned grasp of history might still be found, even within the heritage industry. And it is surely within popular culture that any possibilities of such a transformation lie most readily available. Or are we content to dismiss the millions who patronize ‘the heritage’ as helplessly manipulated subjects of the culture industry, one-dimensional replicants tastelessly consuming the commodified products of a reified society, to be redeemed from cultural degeneracy only by the critical potency of high culture? At one time the Southwark Globe might have represented such a possibility; but current developments suggest otherwise. One of the ‘Mid-summer (1991) Events’ arranged to advance the ISGC’s fund-raising appeal is a performance on the Globe site of The Tempest by Phoebus Cart, a company established by RSC actor Mark Rylance.22 The production is part of a series of three performances, programmed to take place at three significant sites: Rollright Stones, a megalithic ring in Oxfordshire; Corfe Castle, a National Trust property in Dorset; and the site of the Globe reconstruction. The connection between the three sites is far from fortuitous. ‘Why’, asks the programme, ‘were the Globe, the Rose, and the Hope all built in a straight line opposite Ludgate Hill with a design that some say was fashioned on Stonehenge?’ The purpose of linking the sites through Shakespeare’s play is also candidly described: ‘With the help of Shakespeare’s gentle magic we hope to rekindle one of the original functions of these mysterious sites; a celebration of marriage between ourselves and the sky and land we live in’ (Rylance himself was married—to a woman—in the centre of the Rollright Ring at a Winter Solstice). The programme conveniently supplies, for cross-reference with the dates of performance, the phases of the moon and the date (11 July) of the ‘midsummer festival of joy’. The performances of the play are linked with a series of seminars, given by Rylance’s philosophical mentor Peter Dawkins (‘a specialist and consultant on the Temple Science, which includes a practical knowledge of earth energies, cosmology, geomancy and sacred architecture’) with such titles as ‘The Freemasonic and Rosicrucian Mysteries in The Tempest’, and ‘St Alban, Rosicrucian Founder of Modern Freemasonry’. Earth energies are a key concern of Rylance himself: ‘Some kinds of activity at these spots helps restore the balance of the earth…I wanted some kind of ceremonial ritual or event that would draw a community to the circle again.’23 Between Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, ley-lines, the phases of the moon, sacred sites and Shakespeare, the International Shakespeare Globe Centre clearly holds our heritage in safe hands. Hatfield Polytechnic


NOTES Versions of this paper have been presented to the London Renaissance Seminar (1989), to the MA course in ‘The Sociology and Anthropology of Tourism and Travel’ at Roehampton Institute (1990), and to a conference on ‘Theatre and the Discourses of Power’ at the University of Exeter (1991). I am grateful to all those who have helped to improve it. 1 Facts About the Arts 2 (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1986), estimated 213 million sight-seeing visits in 1985, 67 million of these to historic buildings. The audience for the live arts in the same period is estimated at 39 million. Visits to galleries and museums in 1985 numbered 58 million, by contrast with 53 million visits to the cinema. On the other hand, visiting ‘the heritage’ is much cheaper: in 1987, £367 million was spent on the theatre and live entertainment (of which £129.6 million went on the West End theatres alone), while ‘the heritage’ took only £44.9 million of consumer spending. See ‘Financing the Arts and Heritage’, Cultural Trends, 1 (January 1989), p. 30. 2 This lack of conceptual definition coexists however at the administrative level with a clear computation of the ‘heritage’ costs and responsibilities of such organizations as the National Trust, the Historic Buildings and Monuments commissions for Scotland and Wales, English Heritage and the Department of the Environment; see Cultural Trends (1989). 3 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), p. 183. 4 Robert Hewison, The Culture Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987); and Patrick Wright’s book, cited above. 5 Donald Horne, The Great Museum: The Re-presentation of History (London: Pluto Press, 1985). 6 There is of course no doubt as to the ‘authenticity’ of the stones themselves, though it should be added that contemporary Avebury is in itself to some degree a reconstruction. ‘Little more than 300 years ago, the Wessex downland was littered with so many massive stones that it was difficult to identify a prehistoric monument at Avebury. And even when the presence of great stone settings was recognised, it was hard to comprehend their ground plan with so much modern activity taking place among them. Parts of the great circle seem to have been cultivated, and the stones themselves were overthrown and buried to remove obstacles to the plough. Other stones were broken up by using a combination of fire and water to provide building material for the local inhabitants. Much of the modern village is constructed from the remains of the prehistoric monument. Now that Avebury is so familiar from films and photographs, it is difficult to realise how little of it is original’ (Richard Bradley, ‘No stones left unturned’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 5 July 1991, p. 22). See also Avebury Reconsidered: from the 1660s to the 1990s, ed. Peter J.Ucko, Michael Hunter, Alan J.Clark and Andrew David (London: Harper Collins, 1990). 7 John Drakakis, ‘Theatre, ideology and institution: Shakespeare and the Roadsweepers’, in The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).


8 See Graham Holderness, ‘A spear carrier’s charter’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 29 April 1988, p. 13. 9 Waldemar Januszczak, ‘Shine of steel’, The Guardian (17 September 1986). 10 For the Festival of Britain in general, see Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture and the Cold War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981); and for Shakespeare’s role within it see Graham Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). 11 English Heritage was established by the National Heritage Act, 1983, and launched in April 1984, taking over the functions of the Directorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, the Historic Buildings Council and the Ancient Monuments Board. It is the responsibility of English Heritage to advise on the listing of buildings and the scheduling of monuments, and to dispense grants for rescue archaeology and building conservation. 12 Quoted in the London Evening Standard (12 June 1989). 13 Quoted in Christine Eccles, The Rose Theatre (London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), p. 231. 14 One possible precedent for this spontaneous feminization was the recovery in 1982 of the wreck of the Tudor ship the Mary Rose. Inviting comparison with Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, this female vessel chickened out of Anglo-French hostilities by sinking in Portsmouth Harbour. The raising of the wreck was imagined as the conquest and legitimization of a coy and wayward female by the masculine powers of maritime archaeology, engineering and conservation technology. See Patrick Wright, op. cit., and Simon Barker, ‘Images of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a history of the present’, in Literature, Politics and Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iverson and Diana Loxley (London: Methuen, 1986). For Prince Philip’s oak see the Southwark Globe (Spring 1987), p. 1. 15 The Globe (Autumn 1989), p. 2. 16 Stonehenge is the best-known example of a heritage site being destroyed more effectively by tourism than by the processes of time. The ancient hilltop fort of Navan in Co. Armagh, once the seat of the kings of Ulster, is also threatened by the Northern Ireland DOE’s granting of outline planning permission for a visitors’ centre 300 metres below the outlying ramparts. Archaeologists claim the projected centre would lead to destruction of the monument. See Guardian (8 May 1991). 17 See Graham Holderness, ‘Bardolotry: the cultural-materialist’s guide to Stratfordupon-Avon’, in The Shakespeare Myth, pp. 4–5. 18 See F.C.Halliday, The Cult of Shakespeare (London, 1957), pp. 67–8. 19 See Holderness, ‘Bardolotry’, p. 3. 20 See Peter Reynolds, ‘Community theatre: carnival or camp?’, in The Politics of Theatre and Drama, ed. Graham Holderness (London: Macmillan, 1991). 21 See Alan Swingewood, The Myth of Mass Culture (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 12–18. 22 Details from publicity leaflet, The Tempest, Phoebus Cart in association with The Scottish Ballet. 23 Quoted in the London Evening Standard (7 June 1991).

Son of Bashing the bourgeois subject RICHARD LEVIN

The appearance in these pages (Textual Practice, 3, 1 (1989)) of the article in which I reluctantly rose to the defence of the Bourgeois or Humanist Subject (abbreviated as BHS) against its bashers among the new historicists, cultural materialists, and some feminist critics associated with them, has produced such a widespread popular demand for a sequel that I have finally bowed to this pressure and agreed, again with considerable reluctance, to take on the task.1 Since that article dealt only with the bashers’ account of how the BHS views itself, I have focused here on the view of the world, especially the socio-economic system, that they attribute to the BHS or to its ideology of ‘liberal humanism’. And since new historicists do not have much to say on this subject, I had to limit my cast of characters to the new Marxists, but I tried wherever possible to use the same ones who starred in the first version, which I assume is what the fans crying out for a sequel would want. It will be useful to begin here, as in the original article, with some representative quotations from the bashers themselves that define the alleged beliefs of the BHS in this area. One of them comes, appropriately, from Catherine Belsey’s response to that article, where she asserts that ‘the first imperative of bourgeois ideology is to proclaim itself natural and universal’. A similar account of bourgeois ‘ideological formations’ is given by Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, who state that ‘capitalist societies have always presupposed the naturalness and universality of their own structures’. In one of the ‘fundamental mystifications of bourgeois ideology’, Alan Sinfield explains, ‘the power relations which are peculiar to market society are seen as how things have always been’, as ‘universal [and] unchangeable’. Malcolm Evans finds that this ideology ‘assumes unchanging essences’ and ‘propose[s] a world…of the apparently universal and perfectly natural’. Our ‘social formation or power structure’, Jonathan Dollimore says, ‘is itself represented by that ideology as eternally or naturally given—i.e. as inevitable, immutable’. According to James Kavanagh, bourgeois ‘literary ideology’ assumes ‘an eternal, natural and transcendent, cultural reality’. And Tony Bennett refers to ‘the bourgeois myths’ of ‘a frozen world of idealist and essentialist categories’, which are ‘myths of…eternality and universality’.2 Although more quotations of this sort could be produced, I think these are enough to make my point, which is that the bashers all insist that the BHS believes the socio-economic arrangements of its own world are natural, universal, and unchanging since they are based on essential aspects of human nature. This alleged


view of the external world, therefore, is of a very different order from the BHS’s alleged view of itself that was scrutinized in the original article. I argued there that the beliefs about itself attributed by these bashers to the BHS (that it is self-created, free to act without any constraints, completely independent of all other persons, etc.) were never held by anyone outside a mental institution; but this belief about the world has been held by a great many sane people. The trouble is that they are not BHSs. It is an extreme form of ethnocentrism, of our tendency to assume that everyone in the world must be like us, which is corrected when we learn about people and cultures that are different. That is why it is such a common trait in very young children, and why among adults it is usually limited to those who live in very isolated and static societies. We would therefore expect to find it in the caves of a mesolithic tribe or in the serfs’ hovels on a medieval manor, but not in the cities inhabited by the BHS. Indeed many of the major projects of the bourgeoisie, such as exploration, commerce, colonialism, secularization, urbanization, the spread of literacy and education, the development of mass media of communication, and research in anthropology and other social sciences (often in the service of commerce and colonialism), have worked against this ethnocentrism. Far from being part of bourgeois ideology, it seems to be the antithesis of BHSdom, which is responsible for the virtual elimination of this world view that must have been widespread in earlier eras. It is this kind of discrepancy between their descriptions and the actual facts that led me to suggest in my original article that these bashers have never seen a real live BHS. Have they ever met a person who believes capitalism is natural or universal or unchanging? Surely anyone with the slightest knowledge of history would be aware that it is a relatively recent development and so cannot be natural; and anyone who watches the television news would know that many societies have other economic systems, so it cannot be universal; and only a little more sophistication is required to realize that capitalism operates today in a very different way than it did two hundred or even fifty years ago, which means it cannot be unchanging. The idea itself is absurd, and it is just as absurd to claim that any significant number of people today believe it. (I should add that the belief that the gender arrangements of one’s own world are natural, universal, and unchanging, which the bashers also attribute to the BHS, is still held by very many people, indicating that, contrary to orthodox Marxist teaching, the attitudes in this area are separate from and more deeply embedded than those integral to the ideology of capitalism. But this belief too has no necessary connection to BHSdom, since it is much more pervasive and powerful in pre-BHS societies.) The bashers’ description of the BHS’s ideology, moreover, contradicts not only these obvious facts but also the account given to us by the founders of their own ideology. In my original article I paraphrased a section near the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that characterizes the bourgeoisie as the destroyers of any faith in a natural, universal, and unchanging social order—as drowning chivalrous sentiment in the icy waters of egotistical calculation, tearing asunder all earlier human ties, and so on. And this is followed by an even more dramatic passage where their continual disruptions within the superstructure are emphasized and connected to the changes in the material base:


The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society…. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new formed ones beome antiquated before they can ossify.3 How can we explain the startling difference—indeed the direct contradiction— between this description and the one presented by the new Marxists, which even extends to the opposite uses of the same metaphor in Bennett’s statement, where the bourgeoisie do the freezing, and in the Manifesto, where they are the defrosters? One possibility is that the BHS (along with its ideology) has changed— that, like a person, it started out full of energy and daring but then grew old and stodgy. This analogy is implicit in the older Marxist histories, which find that the bourgeoisie was once a ‘progressive’ force and later became ‘reactionary’; but the new Marxists think differently. Belsey assures us that, even though it has undergone some ‘development’, the ideology of ‘liberal humanism, laying claim to be both natural and universal’ is essentially the same today as when it ‘was produced…in the second half of the seventeenth century’,4 so even in its most ‘progressive’ stage the BHS supposedly believed this ‘reactionary’ doctrine; and none of the other accounts of the BHS’s view of the world cited earlier suggests that it altered over the years. Furthermore, the bourgeois ‘agitation’ recorded by Marx and Engels has not slowed down but has accelerated continually to affect more aspects of life in more radical ways at a more rapid pace. Anyone now over forty has seen during her lifetime profound changes in industry, finance, politics, the family, science, the arts, and criticism, for the new approaches, including those practised by BHS-bashers, are part of this ‘constant revolutionizing’ generated and sustained by the BHS. It is therefore hard to see how the BHS could be a less dynamic agent of change now than in Marx’s day, or how it could have frozen itself into this belief in a frozen, unchanging world. If the striking difference between these two descriptions of the bourgeoisie cannot be accounted for by changes in bourgeois behaviour or ideology, then it seems reasonable to look for an explanation, as I did in the earlier article, in the lesson taught to us by the new Marxists themselves, who insist that descriptions of this sort are never objective or impartial but are always ‘fabricated’ or ‘fictioned’ to serve someone’s ‘interest’.5 The interests served here are obviously those of the authors of these descriptions, the original Marxists and the new ones, and they seem to be basically the same interest—to bash the bourgeoise; but this bashing takes place in very different situations calling for very different rhetorics. It is easy to understand why Marx and Engels were more impressed by the ‘revolutionizing’ effects of the bourgeoisie than we are, for they were closer to the old world that was revolutionized and were less accustomed to the kind of rapid change we take for granted. They could also assume that the public they wrote for shared this


impression of bourgeois activity and its threat to traditional values, and they emphasized these aspects of the bourgeoisie that would seem most pernicious to this public. That does not mean they were insincere; I am sure they believed their description, which is nearer the truth than the one presented by the new Marxists, and they may even have felt a nostalgic admiration for the dying old order.6 The new Marxists, however, are writing in a world that has grown used to change, and for a small group of academics who, like themselves, have already been poststructuralized. Neither they nor their readers would be disturbed by a threat to traditional values, which they have rejected, and so these new bashers accuse the BHS of the opposite crime, of asserting that our social arrangements are natural, universal, and unchanging, and hence of promoting what they and their readers regard as the most pernicious of all heresies—essentialism. This again does not mean that they do not believe their description or do not share the attitudes they appeal to. Like Marx and Engels, they ‘see’ the bourgeoise in what to them and their audience is the worst possible light. Thus the difference between these two descriptions can be explained by their authors’ common ‘interest’ in demonizing this enemy. The enemy itself has not changed that much, but the definition of the demonic has undergone a major transformation. Further evidence that the new bashers are demonizing the BHS can be found in some of the other beliefs that they attribute to it and to ‘liberal humanism’, which are always bad but are often contradictory, and so demonstrate what I referred to in my original article as the Marxists’ inability to count past two, which means that all beliefs that are not on their side—i.e. all the wrong ones—are lumped together on the enemy’s side. I cited there as an example Belsey’s claim that the view of history as a decline from a lost Eden and the view of it as an ascent toward a better world, while they seem to be exact opposites, are really ‘counterpart[s]’ and are both ‘characteristic of liberal humanism’.7 A more common example is the notion that liberal humanism is both ‘idealist’ and ‘empiricist’, a highly unlikely combination, one would think, but since Marxists are against each of them, the BHS is charged with both.8 This same operation where contradictory ideas are yoked by violence together has been carried over to their attack on critical approaches that they want to associate with the BHS. Drakakis argues that the older historical criticism and the New Criticism, though ‘ostensibly opposed’, are both forms of bourgeois ‘essentialism’; and Kavanagh that the approach to Shakespeare’s plays as poetry and the ‘ostensibly alternative’ approach to them as stagecraft both belong to bourgeois ‘ideological discourse’; and Sinfield that Tillyard’s reading of Shakespeare and Kott’s, which is ‘apparently…the opposite’, are ‘really two sides of the same conservative coin’.9 (Note that in his statement liberal humanism has become ‘conservative’, which is yet another example of the Marxists’ inability to count past two. Some of them even conflate liberals and ‘reactionaries’,10 since in this polarized dialectic all non-Marxist positions, whatever their ostensible or apparent differences, turn out to be the same enemy.) This also confirms the conclusion I reached in the original article that the BHS was produced, not by the bourgeois Ideological State Apparatus in the seventeenth century, as the bashers maintain, but by the bashers themselves in our own day to serve as a target for their bashing. It gives them an empty and infinitely expansible discursive space into which they can dump everything that they disapprove of.


Of course this ‘interest’ in bashing the bourgeoisie is itself supposed to serve a further ‘interest’, also shared by the old and new Marxists, which is, as Sinfield puts it, to ‘bring down capitalism’.11 But there is again an important difference here. Marx and Engels went about it by trying to organize the workers to overthrow the capitalist power structure; but the new Marxists instead try to refute capitalism in their literary criticism. Therefore, just as they created an imaginary BHS that is very easy to bash, so they have created an imaginary case for capitalism that they attribute to this BHS and that is very easy to refute—the claim that it is natural, universal, and unchanging. They seem to think that by accusing the BHS of this claim, and then proving it is fallacious, they are hastening the demise of capitalism. (They also seem to think they are hastening its demise by referring to it as ‘late-capitalism’, which in their discourse has become a single word like ‘unresolvablecontradictions’.) Unfortunately for them, however, the most convincing case for capitalism rests, not on this alleged belief of the BHS or liberal-humanist ideology or any theoretical argument, but on the observable fact that it has so far proved to be much more efficient than any other economic system, including socialism, in the production and distribution of goods and services, which can readily be demonstrated by comparing the per capita incomes in East and West Germany, or North and South Korea, or the USSR and any ‘late-capitalist’ country.12 It was the observation of this fact that led large numbers of people to flee from the socialist to the capitalist world, which can scarcely be explained by their clandestine interpellation into the ideology of BHSdom before they fled. They did not believe capitalism was natural, universal, and unchanging; they just saw it was much better than what they had. And this same observation is now leading many socialist countries to abandon the system completely and others to begin dismantling it by introducing elements of a market economy. To adapt an old American advertising slogan, among the people who know socialism best, it’s capitalism ten to one. But the new Marxist critics in the universities of Britain and America cannot hear the voices of these people because they are too busy listening to and echoing each other, convincing themselves of the imminent collapse of ‘late-capitalism’ as a result of its ‘unresolvable-contradictions’ and of their own ‘intervention’ through the project I call Bashing the Bourgeois Subject. State University of New York, Stony Brook

NOTES 1 I considered calling it the ‘child’ or ‘daughter’ of the original article but settled on ‘son’ to foreground the BHS’s well-known proclivity for phallocentrism, patriarchy, and primogeniture. 2 Catherine Belsey, ‘The subject in danger: a reply to Richard Levin’, Textual Practice, 3, 1 (1989), p. 88; Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: the discursive con-texts of The Tempest’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 194; Alan Sinfield, ‘Give an account of Shakespeare and education’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 138, 141 (in part quoted from Rachel Sharp, Knowledge, Ideology and the Politics of Schooling (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 109); Malcolm Evans,


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Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakespeare’s Text (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 35; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), p. 9; James Kavanagh, ‘Shakespeare in ideology’, in Drakakis, op. cit., p. 164; Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 169–70. The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 83. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 7. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 15, 68; Catherine Belsey, ‘Literature, history, politics’, Literature and History, 9 (1983), pp. 22, 26; Evans, op. cit., pp. 83, 253; Graham Holderness, Shakespeare’s History (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1985), pp. 22–3. This is discussed by Paul Delany, a pre-poststructuralist Marxist, in ‘King Lear and the decline of feudalism’, PMLA, 92 (1977), p. 430. Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, p. 223. See Kavanagh, op. cit., pp. 163, 234; Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 7, 14, 19, 20, 26, 28, 32; Evans, op. cit., pp. 34, 246; and Dollimore, op. cit., p. 259. Drakakis, ‘Introduction’, in Drakakis, op. cit., p. 18; Kavanagh, op. cit., p. 147; Sinfield, ‘Introduction: reproductions, interventions’, in Dollimore and Sinfield, op. cit., p. 131. Holderness, op. cit., p. 148; and Toril Moi, ‘Sexual/Textual Politics’, in Francis Barker et al. (eds), The Politics of Theory (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), pp. 10–11. Sinfield, ‘Shakespeare and education’, p. 154. He acknowledges that ‘teaching Shakespeare’s plays and writing books about them is unlikely’ to achieve this, ‘but it is a point for intervention’. The standard Marxist move for explaining this away is to claim that what those countries have, despite their socialization of the land and means of production and elimination of the profit motive, is not real socialism but an aberration—state capitalism, Stalinism, or whatever—and so does not count. Thus while any problem in any capitalist country can be blamed on capitalism, no problem in avowedly socialist countries can be blamed on socialism.

Kathy Acker interviewed by Rebecca Deaton KATHY ACKER

What fascinated me about Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations were the endless contradictions—why should one read a book that claims to be ‘un-knowledge’? I didn’t expect Acker to resolve these contradictions, but the interview I arranged with her did give me an opportunity to ask her to elaborate on them. What were her feelings on postmodernism and feminism? Why was she teaching when she had professed to loathe the academy? How would her writing be affected if her books became more widely read? The interview took place at Acker’s apartment in San Francisco, on 18 February 1991. REBECCA DEATON: I want to ask you about the fact that you’re teaching now. That’s interesting. I realize that it’s largely a moneymaking venture. KATHY ACKER: Largely. There’s not much for me either, I must say. I’m amazingly broke. R.D.: In a previous interview in The Review of Contemporary Fiction1 you talked fairly scathingly about the academy. I wonder what you try to teach your students. K.A.: I’ve taught at the Art Institute before—it’s really different than a normal university. I don’t know about normal universities—students on the whole are badly educated. R.D.: You’re teaching writing. K.A.: I’m making them read books. R.D.: This is analytical writing as opposed to creative writing. K.A.: No, they’re doing creative writing. They’re not doing any analytic writing. I have a very strange course. They loaded me down with courses. I had a third of a course on Performance video—I had graduate students, and worked with them one on one on the tutorial level. And then I have this writing and reading course which is my design. One day a week we read—it’s sort of American literature 101, the radical side of the tradition. It’s not Joyce Carol Oates. And the other day we do writing, well, actually we tend to do writing both days—


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I’m sure it’s unusual. I’m sure I’d get kicked out of any university. So you’re teaching them to write as you write then? No, I’m not actually. What I want to do is loosen them up so they can learn to have fun. It’s very hard to describe. For those who have had writing courses, they have to be diseducated. They have to learn how to find areas in themselves, how writing can connect to themselves, how it’s not an academic…you know how it’s not apart from them, but is more something that has a great deal to do with them. For instance, one early assignment…. I just wanted to test them out, so I had them do an environment that was fairly realistic, and it wasn’t very interesting writing, so I said ‘all right, now you’re a mass murderer, I want a monologue’, and they couldn’t handle that at all. There were a great deal of problems—problems dealing with anything but the self. I mean this is really basic stuff, I’m not even starting on why there are different techniques. We’re starting with a little surrealism now, but it’s taken a long time. And so, I realized I had to loosen them up, the next time I made them…. (I sound like a dominatrix) I said very kindly, ‘would you please imagine you all had lovers’ (I presumed they’d all had lovers). ‘Your lover has died, would you please write a monologue’ and then I said, ‘OK, it’s George Romero time, and your lover has just risen from the dead, and talks back to you’ and then I put on the heavy metal music, as loud as I could, and that’s when the fun began. And now we’ve been doing a lot of surrealist ploys…a lot with going from first person self to third person other and taking that imaginative leap. It’s very hard, there’s no theory behind it yet, I’m not dealing with people who’ve been writing for a while. And even the people in my class who’ve been writing for a while need some work…they’re very tight. I don’t think there’s another course like it. So where did you learn to write then? Well, I guess my hatred of the academy is that I was very highly trained in literature and that sort of thing. And I don’t think I learned anything from it. I learnt something from my Latin classes—I went to Brandeis and was studying under a guy who was himself studying under Roman Jacobsen. I guess I mostly learned to write….


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When I was fourteen I would sneak away from home. I had a boyfriend named P. Adams Sitney.2 He teaches at Princeton now. P.Adams? My God! Well once upon a time he was a skinny little thing. He’s large, and has a long beard. Yes, so I’ve heard. So you were saying you learned to write…. I hung out with poets, and other artists. I learnt a lot from the art community, because after I knew P.Adams, I had gone to Brandeis, and gotten out of academia, and I ended up in the art community. I tried to do in writing what a lot of my friends were trying to do in other media. And that was really interesting to do. I don’t tend to hang out with writers very much. I also think it’s interesting that you moved to San Francisco. It seems that London was a more accepting community than New York. When did you move here? I had to get out of London. I don’t know whether I was right to leave or not. Now, I mean the dollar is worth so little, I wouldn’t have had much choice. But who knows? I had a very nice life in London. Very easy. So why did you leave then? Oh, it was personal. I had a bad affair, and it broke up, and then there was a kind of cock-up suit with Harold Robbins. I freaked out, just said I’ll get the hell out of here. I had some idea of going back home, but I went back to New York, and that was a nightmare. I’ll never go back to New York again. I really hate New York. Life is so hard there, that all my old friends are very desperate about their careers, and that’s a desperation I’ve felt. It just seemed to me a dreadful place, I guess I had changed quite a bit. You seemed to have a choice in New York between being very popular and writing screenplays, or being poverty-stricken. In London there was some way to negotiate. Is it the same here? No. My income has quite dropped. I lost a lot of money by leaving England. It’s not the same sort of thing here. In England I was on TV all the time, I wrote for journals continually. The magazines here…Vogue for instance… you can’t write anything decent for them…they don’t want it. If you write for them, you really have to write


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garbage. That’s not true in England. I mean I still write for English magazines—I write for the New Statesman. In terms of your writing, what kind of effect has the move had, or will have? San Francisco’s a very strange place, sort of outside the rest of the United States. I don’t know how long I’ll remain here. How long have you been here? Since the summer. It’s very protective. It’s very nice. What can I do, what I’m doing with the new book, is that I can become more experimental than I’ve been lately. I can really not be influenced by anybody, do what I want, be left alone, not have any pressures on me. So I’m a bit out of the world, which is good…gets you a bit apolitical, but on the other hand…the isolation. It seems to me that Great Expectations3 is pretty experimental. Great Expectations was written here. It’s the sort of thing I can do in San Francisco because there’s no pressure. Say you did become very popular. Say a lot of people started reading your books. I’d get rich. Would that make it harder to be experimental? One critic wrote that she thought your work would lose its force as graffiti if you became popular.4 Would society have somehow changed for the better, or would you have become assimilated into it? All right, I don’t see it, honestly. I mean you are becoming more widely read. I can see the trajectory of the books as similar to William Burroughs. And I don’t see it getting much larger than that. And I mean William’s never been bothered by anything. I mean I can see that in Europe there might be a fairly large popularity, but I just can’t see it in this country. Not unless things change politically. You mean real popularity? Well, say like Joyce Carol Oates. I mean even that you are read in the academy. Well, it’s better to deal with issues, and if you’re really isolated from society you don’t deal with issues, you become very much in a baby crib. I think it was very good for me to be popular in England because I was forced to deal with political issues. I was forced to be very


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clear about political positions, and to be very analytic. Whereas when you’re very isolated and you say ‘Well, I hate Bush’ you don’t have to think about it very much. Well, if the point is to subvert everything, how can you do that if…. You just subvert on a larger scale. I don’t see why not. Take a David Lynch who wasn’t tending to the right. Of course he wouldn’t be accepted if he didn’t tend to the right. So the way you are, and the way things are now, you wouldn’t be accepted in this country? Well, I don’t think Bush and Co. would exactly Well I guess I’m a little more tolerant of the academy, not that they’re so wonderful, but they can represent…a bit like the monastery in the Dark Ages. I mean they’re illiterate out there. Accepted by who? Mr and Mrs Swedunkel of Ohio? I think you are accepted in the academy. Which is kind of strange since you have this hatred of them. Well I used to, and I guess I’m still funny about them, but now I’ve seen how bad it is outside the academy. People read in the academy. Exactly. A lot of the stuff you’ve read, they read too. Yeah, they don’t read out there. I mean if you’re a woman without a baby and your husband’s not waiting for chemical warfare, you just don’t exist in their society. What about feminism? Clearly you’re not politically correct. At the very least doesn’t feminism offer a vision for the future, a way to become empowered? I think that’s a very old kind of feminism to tell you the truth. I think the conjuncture of feminism and postmodernism is something that’s going to be developing…very interesting. There was a division in the feminist movement that evolved around the issue of power. You had very proper feminists who talked about equality…. A lot of feminists don’t think postmodernism is a good thing. Yes I know. That’s what I mean about the split between postmodern feminists and the more social realist literary kind of feminism that proclaims the strength of women. But people think of Margaret Atwood as a postmodern feminist writer.


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Good God. She uses bourgeois novelistic structure. I think basically the fight against centralization, either on the level of the ego or political power—that meeting with feminism, structurally, is very powerful in the fight against the centralized phallic figure. I think feminists realize…how can I say this, that terms have to be renegotiated. I have a lot of female friends, we talk about this a lot. I’m sorry this is a much larger discussion than we have time for, so I’m being simplistic about it. The old terms about equality no longer really make sense, and it no longer makes sense to approach victimization so simply. Also, I think the issue of incest is very important, and that’s going to make a big difference. We’re finding out more and more that the Freudian model just isn’t true. That it isn’t true that most daughters desire their fathers, but that most fathers desire their daughters. A lot of visions about power, and about the relation of the will to sexuality, are going to have to be thought through and re-negotiated. Simple things like the division between gay and straight—it’s just not operative. It seems the Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of schizophrenia5 ties into feminism by redefining ‘madness’. Is this what you’re talking about? Sure. For me, schizophrenia is a great description of postmodernism. I’m wondering if you consciously think about writing in a schizophrenic style. Absolutely. I didn’t at first, because when I started writing I hadn’t read any postmodernist theory at all. It wasn’t until after Great Expectations, right before I wrote the Pasolini book6 that I started reading postmodernist theory. And once I did, I thought about it a lot, but now not so much, now I’m interested in something else. Deleuze and Guattari’s work and Foucault helped me understand what I was writing. So schizophrenia, instead of being a capitulation to madness, becomes a strategy of resistance? Well, everything’s strategy. There’s the two terms: the body without organs, and then the body in the perpetual motion machine. Is the schizophrenia a big point of connection with Burroughs?


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No. The connection with Burroughs was about the interest in language and power. When I started to write, most novelists in America had not stopped to consider why they wrote the way they did. It seemed that American fiction writers just sat down and wrote however they wrote, and were only interested in content. And I think the old time literary feminist theorists…that’s really my opposition to them, when they discuss a book, they’ll discuss like ‘Chris is a very strong woman, but she hasn’t evolved to the stage in her life where she’s not male-identified’ or whatever the hell they write. They won’t look at the structure of the novel. I was very influenced by Barthes’ book, Writing Degree Zero.7 And I think William Burroughs was really looking at language, and how it operated in the world. That was my connection to him. You’ve said before that it was only when the punk movement came along that you found a context in which to discuss your work. One of the things that was so threatening about them was that they weren’t understood —they took meaning out of its original context. Like they’d have a symbol of a swastika. Once they were understood, whatever meaning they had was taken away from them. So I’m wondering if to read your books at all is possible. Does it defeat the purpose of your books to do a reading of them? What book are you talking about? Great Expectations. I actually never meant to shock. Yes I did. One book, Blood and Guts,8 I was really out to shock. In Great Expectations I was really interested in doing a literary counterpart to Bob Ashley’s music. He does environmental music that has no centre—it’s just like mood music. And I was trying to do a mood book where there would be no centralized characters, no centralized action, it was all just like a tapestry. So you don’t imagine that would shock people? I had no idea of a reading audience. Now I do. Now I know there’s an audience there, whereas in the early days I didn’t even know that. I guess a ‘reading’ is a loaded term, a ‘reading’ implies coherency to me—sort of a fallacy now. But what would


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you like people to get out of Great Expectations? Just a feeling? I guess I feel like I construct a book. The same way one approaches a work of art, you approach a construction, and you look at the construction. So are you saying it’s about the way you feel when you read this book, the sensations of it? Rather than trying to analyse it? No, the structure of the book. That’s really what interests me. I mean there are people who read my books and look at the sex scenes, and that’s it, and that’s fine. The best thing would be a journey…someone would have the same preoccupations, and take the journey I took when I wrote it. But that’s the ideal reader, I think there are some readers like that, but I don’t think there are many, I can’t expect many. When I think of a book, I usually have a question. For example, with Empire9 there were three questions. Firstly, what is the police structure that governs our society? What would a society look like that wasn’t governed by this myth? And since we can’t live in a society that isn’t governed by this myth, how is it possible to live in our society? And there are other people who’ve looked at these questions, and so they would look at the text. I think it’s rather analytic to read the book, I don’t think you read the books by empathizing. Do you think it’s possible for someone to identify those questions from reading the book? Oh yeah, people have. What about Great Expectations? The big question is about my mother’s suicide. I was very curious about various scenarios of victimization. When I first read the book, I thought it was mostly about sex. Now I think it’s much more about writing. Do you write consciously about sex, or does it come as an afterthought? I like writing about sex. But you wouldn’t call yourself an erotic writer. No. No. It’s just a preoccupation. I don’t find it shocking. You certainly break with a tradition of other women writers in terms of writing about sex. You don’t deal with it in a genteel way. Yeah.


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We were talking about postmodernism before. Do you identify yourself as a postmodern writer? Are you typical of anything? I’ve been identified as a postmodern writer. Am I typical? I don’t think there are many postmodern writers. There are postmodern theorists, and I’m told there are European novelists, although I’ve never seen any translations. Do you consider yourself a novelist? Oh yeah. I consider a novel a form of so many words put together in pages. Then you’re breaking with a tradition that equates novel with narrative? Wait, the novel started in England, way before the bourgeois novel. It started with letters and pornography… and journals. Pornography was the French form. I don’t see that I’ve broken with that form at all. My novels are as episodic as…Tom Jones hardly holds together at all if you analyse it…it might seem to, but it doesn’t really. Well maybe I’m talking about the way the novel is currently conceived. Yeah, from Samuel Richardson on. But that’s what Roland Barthes analyses and says is dead…is based on bourgeois traditions. I mean, I don’t like the bourgeois world, and I’ll be damned if I’ll write a novel that promotes the bourgeois world, and I don’t. But I don’t think that means I’m not a novelist. I don’t write a commercial novel. Going back to feminism. French feminists talk about ‘writing the body’ as a mode of empowerment, whereas for you, the body seems to be, like language, oppressive. Well I think it’s both. In the new work, it’s something other than social control. One thing about Great Expectations that made me think it is schizophrenic is the division between the mind and the body. The mind saying one thing, and the body doing another. I think that’s true of Great Expectations. I think in Empire and the new one the relation to the body is quite different. It’s more primitive. I think Don Quixote10 ended something for me…pure interest in certain postmodern techniques, such as deconstruction. Which are very reactionary techniques…. I mean they’re always reactions to things. And I suddenly became interested in what


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techniques wouldn’t be reactionary, that wouldn’t be bourgeois. And that’s really the way I’ve been working. Is sex an easier mode of communication? Yeah, sex is easy. What I’m thinking of is a couple passages in Great Expectations in which you basically say ‘I should have made this straight pornography’, that you can say a lot more than you can through words, that it’s easier to communicate through sex. Even though the body may be conscripted to society, somehow through sex, communication becomes pre-social. There is that thing, though of course in the book you’re still going through language—it’s not just sex. Does the sex establish a connection with the reader? Yeah, that’s what pornography does, it’s very interesting. Most writing is manipulation—newspaper writing is manipulating information. So at least you don’t give the reader any illusions about manipulation. Yeah, you don’t know how you’re manipulated when you read a newspaper, yet pornography is very direct, you know exactly what the manipulation is. It’s made for this very quick pleasure…it’s almost like meaningless language…and that’s interesting. I was reading a study of schizophrenia—and apparently schizophrenics talk a lot of nonsense. They try to fool the psychiatrist by mixing nonsense with the important things. Sometimes I feel that when I’m reading Great Expectations—that a lot of it might just be nonsense. It’s been a while since I wrote Great Expectations, so it’s hard to talk about an older text—that’s where I was just beginning to do what I do. I think the theory of schizophrenia as another model of identity is very different than dealing with actual schizophrenics. An actual schizophrenic is someone who can’t quite deal with normal reality. I don’t want to romanticize schizophrenia. Yes, but your text can’t deal with reality—traditonal realism in the sense that Barthes talks about. Now look, if you look at a text that’s there to express something to you the reader, then what you’re saying is correct—there are times where I’m not interested in expressing something to you the reader. However, what I’m interested in doing is using language the way a


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painter would use paint. I use other texts—that’s how I write. And sometimes I use other texts for the sounds, for the fun of it…to throw something in…to make a tapestry where a red would be next to a blue. And it’s not always for the purpose of expressing. It’s the structure—as you said before. Yeah, it’s also sensual pleasure. Would you say that what’s real is the effect, the sensation, what the reader feels, rather than pretence of being a mirror image of ‘reality’? The word ‘narrative’, I presume, rather than ‘story’, is just a route from A to B. Every book is a narrative. I guess when I’m talking about narrative, I’m thinking of literary realism. No, I am not interested in literary realism. I understand. What I’m saying is that I think you’re subverting that conception of reality, that pretends to be unbiased. So what is realism for you? It’s the text. It’s the body, it’s the real body, which is language, the text. The actual words, that’s what’s real. Then there’s the reality of the reader reading it…the reality of the writer writing it. It’s a triangular situation, a text is not a dead thing. A text can be seen as two triangles that come on top of each other. One triangle is the reader’s reaction to the text, the writing of the text, and the text itself. And the text itself is playing with meaning, you know language plays with meaning…you know language is kind of guerrilla warfare between meaning and non-meaning. A sign is signifying something, but it also has its own aspects of sound, sight—its own materiality. It’s always negotiating between its materiality and what it signifies. A word itself is balancing between meaning and non-meaning. The language poets have been working with this stuff for years. Would you like to take the meaning out of the word? No, I love the meaning. I love playing with the meaning. If I had no meaning, then I wouldn’t have my play. That’s what the early language poets did, I didn’t really… we would have disagreements. They said I was too narrative, and playing with meaning too much. But if you still have meaning…aren’t you constrained to the language that everyone else speaks?


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If there was no meaning in my novels, then nobody would read them. You wouldn’t have any questions to ask. But you say you write by using other texts. So you’re taking meaning out of its original context. But just because I change the context doesn’t mean there’s no meaning. We’re at war with Iraq. You take that out of the context of being on CNN [Cable News Network], and put it in a cowboy novel. Doesn’t have no meaning, just changes the sentence. I see what you mean, I guess it’s just been suggested that you completely subvert meaning. When I first read Great Expectations I was shocked…I didn’t know how to make sense of it. Therefore, it’s sometimes easier to say that the text doesn’t mean anything…that plagiarism is rebelling against other texts but has no inherent meaning of its own. I mean Great Expectations was the first one that I did. So I can’t really do an analysis…. Not the first book. The first book of that type that I did. Kathy Goes to Haiti11 was before that. That’s a parody of a porn novel. I tried to write the dumbest book I could. The problem is that I’ve never written one book twice, so every book’s different. Great Expectations was the first one where I tried to use other texts purely, and I really didn’t know yet what I wanted to do and what I was doing—I just knew I was interested in plagiarism, and I was interested in this approach to narrative. But I didn’t have any theory. It’s incredibly helpful for me to read theory to figure out what’s going on. Not until the next book did I have theory. Do you consciously try to be humorous? Oh yeah…lots of times. I have a very black sense of humour. Parts of Great Expectations struck me as being a parody of a Harlequin romance. There is a parody of a Harlequin romance. I forget which section it is. Not of Daphne du Maurier, but that kind of writer. Oh, so it’s a specific book? Yeah, I took one and tore it to shreds.


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There’s a very funny line about the trees, rather than a man inspiring passion in the woman. You said that Kathy Goes to Haiti was a parody of a porn, but it seems that the subject of the novel (if such a thing exists) is developed in Great Expectations. The tone of that novel, at least, is a lot more defiant than Kathy Goes to Haiti. It’s a joke…to call it Kathy first of all. I wrote the novel really to make money—they were buying porn novels at the time. So I took the formula of the porn novel, and I made a structure, a mathematical structure. In this chapter we have psychology, and here we have this happen…and then I wrote it according to this structure. It was the most boring thing in the world to write. I tried to make the characters as dumb as possible, and I basically tried to make nothing happen, and yet—the conventional novel people were saying, ‘you write the way you do because you don’t know how to write a conventional novel.’ I thought ‘OK, I’ll write a conventional novel—it’ll have unity of character and action, you know, time and blabitty blah, and it’ll be so dumb. All it will do is make a convention, and there will be nothing else in this novel.’ I would say you succeeded. The New York Times12 reviewed it like these were real characters…what a laugh! They went on about ‘well, that’s the way she has orgasms’, and I thought ‘that’s not me!’ Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University NOTES

1 Ellen G.Friedman, ‘A conversation with Kathy Acker’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 9, 3 (Fall 1989): pp. 12–22. 2 cf. P.Adams Sitney (ed.), Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981). 3 Kathy Acker, Great Expectations, in Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two (London: Picador Pan, 1984). 4 Kathleen Hulley, ‘Transgressing genre: Kathy Acker’s intertext’, in Inter-textuality and American Fiction, eds Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R.Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983). 6 Kathy Acker, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Literal Madness (New York: Grove Press, 1987).


7 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953). 8 Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove Press, 1978). 9 Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove Press, 1988). 10 Kathy Acker, Don Quixote (New York: Grove Press, 1986). 11 Kathy Acker, Kathy Goes to Haiti, in Literal Madness (New York: Grove Press, 1987). 12 Michiko Kakutani, review of Literal Madness, by Kathy Acker, New York Times, 30 December 1987, C20.

Many thanks to Kathy Acker, Ann R.Jones and Jasmine Alinder.

Michael Westlake interviewed by Antony Easthope MICHAEL WESTLAKE

Born in 1942 in Surrey, Michael Westlake has so far published four novels and a book of theory. One Zero and the Night Controller (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) consists of two first-person discourses belonging to a minicab driver, One Zero, and Angelica, his night controller (who comes on duty when the day controller goes off). One Zero is enlisted by a customer, Mr Machiavelli, in a quest to find his missing girlfriend, Kaffee; One Zero succeeds, but also finds his way to (or back to) a relationship with Angelica. The Utopian (Carcanet, 1989) also consists of a two discourses, that of Mesmer Partridge, a young man living both in Stockport in 1979 and in a communist matriarchy in 2411, and that of Dr Reed, a Harley Street psychoanalyst who is trying to cure Mesmer of his utopian delusions. Although written after The Utopian, Westlake’s third novel appeared before it, Imaginary Women (Carcanet, 1987, with a paperback from Paladin in 1989). It is structured into three ‘Thirds’ each consisting of thirteen short units in parallel to each other. Thus number seven in each Third is a graph, number two in each extends the tale reported by a cat, the penultimate concerns Gropius, the lover of six women, and so on. From these thirty-nine sections, six, the first and last of each Third, carry forward the narrative of a woman called Mac**ash (so named throughout though she discovers her identity—and the missing phonemes—by the end of the novel). 51 Soko to the Islands on the Other Side of the World (Polygon, 1990) consists of fifty-one letters. Forty-eight are written by four Japanese men to various addressees in England, some real, some imaginary, some actual, some merely possible (there are, for example, letters to four Barbaras—Hepworth, Windsor, Castle and Cartland). The addressers are Mr Okinomoto, a fugu-chef, Jo Wakizashi, a futures dealer, Prince Genji (hero of the ancient Japanese romance), and Mishima Oshima, a composite political figure containing both right and left. The letters concern eight topics, listed as such: Food, Money, Bodies, Nature, War, Buildings, Writing, The Unfigured. Another three letters form a Bridge section, with three indexes to the rest of the novel, making up 51 soko (‘drafts’ or ‘writings’) in all. In addition to his published novels, Michael Westlake is the co-author with Rob Lapsley of Film Theory: An Introduction (Manchester University Press, 1988). The interview took place in Paris on 6 November 1990. ANTONY EASTHOPE: A lot of people, especially in England, tend to think literary practice is one thing and literary theory is another, that it actually kills literature to know ideas.


One reason I particularly wanted to talk to you for Textual Practice was that you do not see theory, including post-structuralist theory, and your own literary practice as opposed at all. MICHAEL WESTLAKE: In their different ways each of my novels has been concerned with a particular cluster of ideas, drawn from the theoretical discourses I was currently concerned with. In One Zero it was language and the subject, rendered through a Lacanian perspective, hence lots of wordplay and punning. The Utopian addressed the relation betwen private discontent and the utopian imagination. In Imaginary Women it was narrative and representation, especially in relation to women within classical Hollywood. In all of them there has been a superordinate concern with language and discourse, the sense that it’s a matter of producing new meanings rather than reproducing existing ones. For this reason I’m a little wary of aligning myself with any given theoretical position, even those associated with poststructuralist critical theory. While I personally find myself sympathetic to much of what falls within that perspective, my writings are perhaps more resistant to incorporation. Even though I can subsequently identify a number of motifs or themes that might be called theoretical, I definitely do not set out to demonstrate or illustrate this or that theoretical position. It’s rather a matter of disclosing the productive discourses around a personal pattern of fascination that’ll give a sufficient sense of ‘rightness’ to let me off the hook of having to rewrite yet again. Lots of trial and error. A.E.: Post-structuralism aside for the moment, what ideas and theory have you found influential in your work? M.W.: Marxism, culminating in a study group within an Althusserian framework where we read Capital and a lot of Lenin. This was in the late sixties and early seventies when it really did seem that the Revolution was a possibility in the West. It all re-emerged, got worked through in The Utopian. Then came a shift towards film studies, as the site for a particular theoretical intervention, as we then liked to suppose, challenging dominant cinema and providing alternatives that would offer new subject positions. In a way this is what I still believe and at one level am providing in my novels.


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Again it was a matter of working within a reading group, and from this emerged Imaginary Women which was written concurrently with Film Theory. The most consistently and long-term theoretical commitment, apart from philosophy, has been to psychoanalysis. Both in terms of a personal and intellectual involvement from an early age—a passage from Jung to Freud to Lacan—and for the play, the linguistic openness, that critical listening for the voices of the Other, which for me underlie and so undermine straight realistic narrative. For instance, in One Zero the autodidact hero is attempting to find a way of saying it all. He’s got a System, the last of the grand narrators. But he’s constantly tripping up, encountering events and meanings that resist his totalization. His dream of mastery finally comes to grief in a grotesque way. But before that it’s been needled by the voice of the woman, Angelica, who asks the awkward questions. No metalanguage, I can now read it as saying, though at the time of writing it in the late seventies I wasn’t familiar with that particular concept. If you like it was a way of arriving at a similar conclusion through a route that probably had more to do with the discourse of the analysand than that of the theoretician. I’m suspicious of belief, even of belief in theory, hence my scepticism towards it. But you have to be aware of theory to have a scepticism towards it? Not necessarily—there’s the endemic suspicion of the Anglo-Saxon empiricist, this is a stone, kick it and see, towards anything that might be called thought. Which I decisively do not share. In my case it would be a scepticism born of my previous unqualified support for totalizing theories that I’ve since come to reject. At the same time there’s no escaping theory, there’s nowhere else to be than in the symbolic, there’s no Other of the Other. And there’s an undeniable anti-detotalization sense to all this: for instance, my scepticism does not, and indeed should not, extend to the point where I question, say, the Darwinian synthesis in favour of a pluralism that would include creationism. Scepticism itself risks becoming a totalization. More generally I would want to insist that all facts are theory-impregnated,


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there is no truth unmediated by discourse, and that discourses which propose themselves as transparent windows on reality are those particularly to question. That view is unusual in writers, particularly English writers. How did you come to that position? Through philosophy. More precisely a trajectory that moved from Popper and Lakatos—who were both my teachers at LSE in the early sixties—through Althusser and Marx to the neo-Nietzscheanism of poststructuralism. My work as a novelist—once I’d got the obligatory semi-biographical first novel out of the way, unpublished incidentally and it’ll remain so—began as a consciously philosophical project. I saw writing fiction as a way of attempting to solve certain philosophical problems that the theoretical discourse of philosophy barred. In fact in one of my last attempts to actually do philosophy I had introduced fictional elements into the article to help solve certain theoretical problems. When you were thinking about this were you reading literature or what? Literature with a big L, the canon, has never been what I read for pleasure, only subsequently out of a sense of cultural obligation. Having missed out on Beowulf to Lawrence is not something I regret. It positions me differently to most ‘serious’ writers in Britain, who have their Oxbridge literature degree course sitting forever on their shoulder, the voice of the literary superego, and I’m thankful for that. What did you read instead? Within fiction, mostly genre, especially detective, crime, science fiction, and the supernatural. All of it solely for pleasure, no concern about literary value and still less anything by way of analysis. At university and after I read, like most people, on the basis of recommendations —Waugh, Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Laurence Durrell, Doris Lessing, Graham Greene. Lots of American writers—Vonnegut, Burroughs, Mailer, Gore Vidal, Pynchon, late Nabokov—these last two I especially admire. Later still I came across the experimental work of Christine Brooke-Rose, Borges, Calvino, Perec. And Beckett’s novels. Outside of fiction I read and continue to read the sort of books that don’t


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get reviewed in the Sunday Times—critical theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics, art and literary criticism, general history and sociology, science for the non-specialist—very much the kind of mix that most readers of this journal would be reading, the formative discourses of our time. If you don’t see theoretical questions as an inhibition on what you’re trying to do, can you think of ways they have positively been an encouragement? Clearly much of my writing is informed in terms of content and reference with theoretical notions. Currently, for instance, I’m working on a novel about painting, which grew out of a projected critical book on the discourses around art. It’ll contain many of the ideas that would have gone into the critical book. That’s one area where theory leaves its trace, providing some expression, in a non-theoretical context, of the more interesting theoretical discourses of our time. The other is in terms of form and discourse, the actual construction of the text, its plays, devices, foils and so on. Here the route into experimental writing, if you want to call it that, has been accompanied by theory. But as I said before it isn’t a case of writing fiction as an adjunct or demonstration of theory. In this sense the whole theory issue is somewhat misleading. Each novel gestates slowly—it took five years to complete Imaginary Women—and has its own internal structure and dynamic that doesn’t exist outside of that context. It’s a matter of finding a specific solution to a problem, a literary problem, that exists only in the construction of the solution. In the course of finding this solution I’ll draw on anything, of which theory is only a small part. 51 Soko has no obvious theoretical component—it draws on the varieties of Japanese and English culture (some Irish and Scottish too), a lot of it concerned with the marginal or everyday. Clearly the book is a long way from mainstream fiction, not least in the absence of narrative, but I’d say that it’s working within a literary framework (if one can say that while avoiding the connotations of literariness) rather than a theoretical one. In The Utopian Mesmer Partridge actually swallows the aerial of the television set, ingests it right through his


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body and plugs it back into the set, so that he becomes a bead on the airwaves—all the discourses of his time pass through him. Well, that’s not a sign of a healthy mind. When you talk about the discourses of our time, what is your sense of their possibilities? Mesmer’s problem was that he couldn’t select, couldn’t filter out what he didn’t want. He was like the moisteroyster in his Utopia, a universal index, and Mesmer was especially sensitive to pain, hence his Blue Prints comprise everything wrong with the world of 1979. He was constituted as a subject, the clinically insane subject, by all the discursive fragments impacting on him. Because he couldn’t bracket out, couldn’t switch them off, he went crazy. The more general question then is what do you ignore, how do you decide what is irrelevant, or trivial, or false. Evidently to stay sane one must. But equally, it seems to me, the writer must be prepared to risk Mesmer’s fate; or maybe it’s a matter of finding the literary Utopia that each text is, a solution to the intolerable diversity and quantity of information coming in. Consciously working outside of the conventions of a given genre—and genre for me includes the conventional morally serious literary novel as a specific genre too—means that one is reliant upon the unconscious to a far greater degree. What it says, or gives, determines what can be written; and since most of what it brings forth is dull or repellent, there’s a constant return to the text-in-progress, finding and developing those fragments that appear promising. If your sense is that there is nothing within the large Other of our time that a writer can separate themselves from, the question is going to be how do you select? If, as you say, you wanted to avoid a metalanguage in One Zero, isn’t there a technical problem about what you give place to, how you organize a novel? In One Zero there was in fact very little structure. It was largely dialogic in form, alternating between the firstperson voices of One Zero and Angelica, and meandered, in a double stream of consciousness, towards a narrative conclusion. Too little structure, not a novel I would write now.


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So one way to deal with the endless plurality was to select the two voices in dialogical relationship with each other. What about in The Utopian? That again was dialogic, but decentred in that the firstperson narration of the psychoanalyst Dr Reed was opposed to the third-person narration of Mesmer’s Utopia. The two worlds were thereby skewed in relation to each other, they couldn’t be taken as simply mutual mirror images. But nor are they unrelated; each is contained within the other, though in a different way. Mesmer’s 2411 is comprehended within Dr Reed’s discourse as a symptom of his present-day neurosis, whereas for the world of 2411 the ‘prehistorical’ past irrupts diegetically as a rogue intrusion. But you moved on from the dialogic form, feeling there was more you could do in, if you like, keeping a coherence in relation to the many discourses of the time which you felt had to go in there? I’m thinking of Imaginary Women. Yes, Imaginary Women uses a narrative thread—in fact it is Ariadne’s thread, the way through the discursive labyrinth—from which is spun a plurality of voices, stories, jokes, cinematic references, images, diagrams, quotations, variously drawing upon film and art criticism, film genres, science, mathematics, the I Ching, snooker, poker, superpower relations, Manchester, you name it. The proliferation is held in place, prevented from becoming chaos, first by Mac**ash’s narrative, secondly by the formal organizational schema and lastly by the repetition and variation of particular elements— something you’ve referred to in the commentary on it in British Post-structuralism. By the time you got to Imaginary Women you’re programmatically fairly clear that you have to open the text as much as possible. Without wanting to get into complex definitions of the word, aren’t we talking about a postmodern form of writing? If you wish, though the term doesn’t seem terribly helpful in this context except as a kind of shorthand generic gesturing. I suppose one can say that if modernism betrays an anxiety about the absence of a metalanguage, postmodernism tends to be jubilant about that absence. On that basis, you could call One


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Zero and The Utopian modernist texts, since characters in each manifest anxiety about the absence of the totalizing metalanguage, while Imaginary Women and 51 Soko are postmodernist. Are we talking about the postmodernism as it’s usually attacked as a kind of sliding absolute relativism— anything can mean anything? I hope we’re not, because that would seem to evacuate meaning altogether. Obviously it depends on the context of reception—and some contexts are more conducive to polysemy than others. But absolute polysemy is a limit situation, an asymptote, which doesn’t happen in practice, even in reading novels where the signifier is, as it were, pre-lubricated. But a novel has a great deal of room for manoeuvre in setting up where the ‘hold’ should be? Certainly. Mine are deliberately written to give plenty of play. Which is not to say that some readers don’t take them far higher up the ‘hold’ axis than they are intended. There is this desire for fixity, even when you’ve opened the text up in the direction of increased polysemy—the true meaning the critic or reviewer perceives. Arthur Kroker has argued that you have to write as a postmodernist because otherwise, for example, you cannot bring together (as he has done) the establishment of some very high-altitude telescopes for the study of astonomy in Chile with the use of surveillance techniques and torture by the Chilean secret police. That juxtaposition is only possible if you accept a dispersed, postmodern perspective. How would you feel about a sense of postmodernism which says, ‘This opens everything up and means I can explore possibilities and juxtapositions which otherwise I might not be allowed even to think about’? I’m not convinced it takes postmodernism to juxtapose astronomy and torture in Chile. The thriller genre could do it very adequately, for example. But I agree that writing—call it postmodernist if you wish—which is able to draw upon discourses without having to integrate them into a plausible diegesis and narrative does have certain obvious advantages in terms of thinking contemporary social reality.


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Let me give a reason why the point is worth raising. In 51 Soko there is a sequence in which pots cooking in a kiln—the rather beautiful idea of pottery as the raw being turned into the cooked, clay turned into solid porcelain—is a metaphor for talking about Japanese bodies being cooked in Tokyo during the devastating fire-storms imposed by the American Air Force in 1945. Now, I find this a deeply unanticipated juxtaposition, but it is exactly the kind of juxtaposition of which people will say, ‘Well, that’s postmodernism’. Until some other term is cooked up. The reason why I hesitate is twofold. One is that there are many postmodernisms, and the term is more likely to amalgamate than discriminate. If post-structuralism is about difference, then the use of the term postmodernism is in practice anti-post-structuralist. The other reason I’ve already mentioned—the fact that my own practice as a writer involves a certain specificity and, I think, inner logic of development. True, I write very different novels from, say, Iris Murdoch or William Golding, but then so do I from writers such as Richard Brautigan or John Fowles, who get termed postmodernist. Can I try the same question from another point of view and without the word ‘postmodern’ in there? The idea that there is no metalanguage, that there is no privileged discourse, has been widely condemned (relativism and so on). But at the same time the idea that there is no absolute fixity, that there is no privileged signifier, has been welcomed and endorsed by feminists. There may be that other sense in which your espousal or rejection of metalanguage has an implication. I’m not a feminist. I say this largely because I do not and perhaps could not write as a feminist. At the same time my novels, Imaginary Women and The Utopian especially, express a preoccupation with feminism, an engagement with it, a working around it. Not to produce a feminist novel, whatever that might be from a man, but as a response to one of the major political and cultural movements of recent years in the West. This I think leads on to the larger question of politics and the novel. Here I would like to tread a very narrow line. On the one hand I would want to insist that my writing


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is not political in that it’s not programmatic, it doesn’t set out to convince readers of the rightness of a particular position established elsewhere and within quite different discursive and social practices. On the other it is not ‘apolitical’, which usually means reactionary. It does engage with politics, with the political subject, with discourses around which politics tends to coalesce—representation, sexuality, power, madness, national identity (my concern in 51 Soko), currently art and money in the work in progress. But engagement is not enforcement—not that texts can enforce readings anyway, that was one of the lessons of the demise of structuralism. Not least of the trouble with the attempt to do so is that it functions as a block on the freeplay of the unconscious. Writing with the superego acting as a policeman (or policewoman) checking one’s moral credentials is a recipe for disaster, or certainly for dull and predictable texts. The important thing is to take the risk of it coming out at odds with prevailing enlightened opinion. You mention a logic of development in your writing, and you’ve already discussed the shift from the dialogic earlier novels to the multidiscursive Imaginary Women. In 51 Soko something different seems to be happening again. How do you see the formal progression from Imaginary Women to 51 Soko? In 51 Soko the linking narrative which held Imaginary Women together goes. Instead two other features of Imaginary Women are made more explicit and generally strengthened—the organizational schema and the recurrent elements. Here the organizational schema is constructed out of a combination of the dominant Japanese verse forms haiku and renga and a geometric algorithm (which is explained in the course of the text), producing a rotation of the four voices, the Japanese men who are sending the soko, that is in one respect symmetrical and in another asymmetrical. Also the recurrent elements are formalized in the three indexes in the central Bridge section of the novel. One of these lists instances within certain categories that occur throughout the novel— some seventy-five separate names of islands, for instance, or ‘colours named after things’. Next comes an index of significant numbers,


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among them 17 (the number of syllables in the haiku), 31 (likewise for the renga) and 51. Finally there’s an index of what are called ‘charged particles’, words or syllables that recur in a whole series of morphemic or phonemic contexts throughout the book. The idea is that these recurrent elements should act as points de capiton, pre-semantic anchoring points that hold the text together while leaving meaning open. There is a sense in which Imaginary Women is structured around the number 13. Yes, it’s structured around the opposition between the numbers 12 and 13. The idea is that 13, prime as opposed to the multi-factorizable 12, expresses a feminine other to masculinist culture with its instrumental preference for 12-based systems. You’re thinking of the twelve hours in the day, the twelve members of the jury, the twelve inches to the ruler…. …the twelve apostles, the twelve months of the year, the twelve signs of the zodiac…. To which you added a thirteenth if I recall? What I discovered towards the end of writing the novel —was told by a student of mine, in fact—was that there used to be a thirteenth sign of the Zodiac, Arachne, the Spider, that was subsequently repressed. Arachne equals Ariadne, and this gave me the solution to the problem set at the outset of the book—the figure Mac**ash had been hired to trace, the thirteenth woman as it turned out, was herself. In retrospect it seems obvious, but I’d not drawn this conclusion until the book was all but finished. Mac**ash’s discovery of her identity was also my discovery of how to conclude the narrative. And 51 Soko is structured around the number 51. It’s raising the stakes, isn’t it? I began with a title plus a general idea. I had ‘Letters from the islands on the other side of the world’—the substitution of ‘to’ for ‘from’ came later, turning the UK into the Other—and wanted a qualifier for letters. Fiftyone sounded right somehow, and I liked it as a number because it lay between the already significant numbers 50 (half century) and 52 (weeks in a year, cards in pack) and seemed to mean nothing. In the course of reading about Japan, really at random, I began to come across a


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surprising, even unnerving recurrence of 51, including the fact that there are 51 ‘syllable sounds’ in the Japanese language, the constituent elements of the Japanese Other. It also provided the structuring principle for the organizational schema. So the most arbitrary number, chosen on the basis of its sound in a putative title, turned out to have major textual implications. I like that. Recently I was at a meeting where somebody had to announce the results of a raffle which consisted of blue tickets, pink tickets, and red tickets in numbers between 1 and 70, and the audience had to sit and listen to this for ten minutes because some of them had won tickets in the raffle. All of the numbers (most of them), particularly in association with colours, became charged (I have to report that ‘Pink 69’ brought the house down). So even numbers are not beyond being charged. Numbers, phonemes, part words—all those seemingly non-significant elements. It’s the old point that the unconscious operates through the signifier rather than the signified, precisely what Freud showed in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. My feeling is that by consciously enlisting (or even listing) such things—and they are things before they acquire meanings, and after —the unconscious is given the opportunity to speak more freely. At its most productive the unconscious seems to me to coincide with the world, past, present and future. Textualization of reality, reality as everything that is the case. Under such a view the discovery that there were 51 attendant bearers of the Emperor Hirohito’s coffin comes as no shock. 51 Soko appeared in 1990. Would you like to say anything about where you feel you’re going now? I’ve already mentioned the fact it involves a selection of paintings—twelve in fact, though the numerology is less to the fore than in 51 Soko—and that these provide the structure for the narrative. Without going into detail, which is liable to change, it seems to me that this is again an arbitrary choice, though obviously determined by my particular patterns of fascination, which then lays down a framework for the narrative.


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These arbitrary elements speak, they open out towards the Other. Could I ask you about your sense of what it has been like to have grown up in English culture and to be concerned with writing in the kind of way which you’ve talked about. Have you found England a nurturing and encouraging culture? Complicated. One thing is that I left the south of England, London more precisely, in 1975 and lived in Manchester. So I was writing outside of the dominant London-based literary culture, which I’m sure helped in terms of writing, while possibly disadvantaging me in terms of publication and critical exposure. Another would be that the English culture I moved in, and wrote and thought within, was an oppositional one, broadly left intelligentsia. So there’s been a double remove from prevailing English literary culture, one by virtue of place, being in the North, the other in a broad sense politically. Both of these have shaped my writing. I’d like to say something about place, which is I think very important, not just geographically but socially and culturally. One way I now see The Utopian is as a response to northern landscape—this also recurs in Imaginary Women as ‘the hills to the east of our city’—so much bigger and less domestic than southern landscape. Mesmer and Reed would then be expressive of the North/South opposition—the one damaged by the dominant social economic formation but resistant and open to the future, the other decadently bourgeois with nowhere to go. Similarly Imaginary Women is a version of a northern industrial city, that incidentally breaks with all the clichés that people in the South maintain about the North. The novel’s Manchester has more in common with Los Angeles and Leningrad (with which it’s twinned) than with London. 51 Soko was written during a year I spent on the north coast of Cornwall, which I think helped me think Japan—a Japanese woman I met in Redruth gave me the word ‘soko’ incidentally. I have subsequently moved to Paris, with the sense that I wanted to get out of England altogether, partly for literary reasons, feeling that I couldn’t write another novel there. It’s a matter of putting both cultures behind me—not only the


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dominant establishment culture, but also the left oppositional one, which was undeniably a source of support and creative nourishment but finally was perhaps too comfortable, too familiar. What about the people who are still left in England, who’ve got to contend with the literary culture as England’s got it? I think what’s happened in terms of criticism, the emergence of the synthesis of theory and cultural materialism, is very encouraging. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of literature itself. The very fact that theory, criticism, commands a certain kind of reader while contemporary English fiction does not implies that the novel form has failed to provide the intellectual and cognitive excitement of non-fictional writing. In literary terms England largely remains an offshore island —and one that doesn’t extend north of Watford. Some people would disagree with you completely there. They’d say ‘Look, people do read a huge amount of fiction in England—they read the novels of Margaret Drabble.’ I have no quarrel with readers. If someone wants to read Margaret Drabble or Barbara Cartland or Clive Barker or Martin Amis, that’s fine by me. What I’m concerned about is that for possibly quite a high proportion of people who read books, intellectuals if you like, the English novel does not figure in their reading. My question would be why. Either you say that the novel tout court has ceased to be of interest, say in comparison with cinema or TV, or else it’s a matter of an ambient conservatism that has failed to generate or anyway support texts comparable to those coming from other parts of the world. We’ve actually come round to what we started with, the relationship between (post-structuralist) theory and literary practice. You’re saying we read theory instead of the novel because the novels are dull. Some people might argue the other way round—that theory is murdering creative talents. What I’m not saying is that writers should be reading Derrida to write more interesting novels—though I don’t believe it would do them any harm either. It’s not a matter of writing ‘post-structuralist’ novels, but


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rather of helping the novel form develop in ways say that have occurred in other art forms—and indeed have occurred in literature in other countries. Obviously this is not solely a matter of writers writing, but of readers reading—and that involves a complex series of moves by publishers, reviewers, bookstores and so on. It also involves institutions like the Arts Council and literary prizes. By and large I’m dismayed by the conservatism of English fiction, and that includes writers who are heralded as innovative. The English novel is still largely Hardyesque—and so are the dominant forms of English poetry. And so the only way you could introduce, say, mathematics into a novel of this kind would be to put some mathematical ideas into the mouth of characters, making it ‘the novel of ideas’. My own concern with formal experimentation is not formalist in inspiration, experiment for its own sake, but has been to achieve certain consequences that could not have occurred within traditional formal frameworks, the standard mix of diegetic plausibility, narrative closure, hierarchization of discourses and—since we’re talking about the English novel—a pervasive moralism. In a recent polemic in England Frank Kermode criticized post-structuralist theory for killing off writing, and Andrew Clifford argued back that it was the other way round, that ‘Britain, refusing to allow theory to become popular, now produces little of international literary worth.’ I think they both probably overestimate the relationship between the two. For example, American innovative writing of the sixties and seventies I suspect owed relatively little to conscious appropriation of theory. Of course it may be that certain writers are aware of new critical theory and make conscious use of it—John Barth would be a case in point. But it’s not a necessary condition and certainly not a sufficient one for innovation. Writers reading Textual Practice would not provide the solution to the backwardness of the English novel. Nevertheless you might agree that the lack of interest in theory in the dominant levels of our culture is symptomatic?


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Yes, but dominants change, and although the TLS may be broadly Leavisite it’s certainly not the case that students emerging from university or polytechnic English departments are. It’s a case of uneven development—rapid discursive change in certain sectors, utter stagnation in others. How much this is likely to change I really don’t know. If it did change, if for instance the commanding heights of literary publishing, editing, reviewing, TV chat shows, etc. were occupied by post-structuralists, it would no doubt encourage writers of non-mainstream fiction and would also to an extent help shape readers. However I’m a strong believer in the pleasure text, rather than the one people are persuaded to buy because they think they ought to—witness the annual spectacle of Booker Prize induced sales. I suppose what I would like to see would be a literary culture where a substantial proportion of readers get pleasure from innovative fiction. In fact my own primary concern is to do just that. If it’s not pleasurable, however complexly so, then in my opinion it’s not worth reading. There’s nothing intrinsically good about any form of writing, beyond its capacity to provide pleasure for readers. Part of that pleasure may well stem from a sense that this text gives one a better, larger understanding of the world we live in—epistemophilia is a powerful component drive, certainly for me. One reason I write as I do is in order to get hold of, find a form that will be adequate to, the world as it is now, not as it was when the dominant novel form emerged in the nineteenth century. In this sense I’m a realist writer, and I think that new forms of writing are far better equipped to comprehend social reality than is the traditional closed narrative. It’s not, however, a matter of correspondence, of representation. Rather I’d say it’s much more a case of augmenting the existent with an object that rings true. More of a Heideggerian notion of truth. A clearing in the forest of being? Disclosure. Dis-closure. Manchester Polytechnic/Paris

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LAURA RIDING

Sir, Since Professor Ruthven in his article on Laura (Riding) Jackson (Textual Practice, 5, 2 (Summer 1991) acknowledges himself indebted to my criticisms, I need to dissociate myself from it, and to make clear what the gist of the criticisms was: namely, that the blindspot in his attempt to recuperate her work by and for theory, by constructing a theory-relevant Riding phenomenon, was his refusal to address theory’s being itself a target of the moral criticism the work articulates. John Nolan London

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• Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism. A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), x+ 207 pp., £7.95 So bewildering is the term ‘postmodern’ that even Michel Foucault once had to ask what it meant (Callinicos, p. 5). The same question is often still asked, whether out of malevolent irony or naïveté is sometimes hard to tell. For many of us the meaning of the term was seared unforgettably into the memory on 30 June 1983, by Fredric Jameson at the University of Illinois’ Institute for Marxist Interpretation of Culture, where Jameson gave a version of that dark aria, later published by New Left Review, 146 (1984) under the title ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’. Central to Jameson’s elaborate analysis of the 1980s (taken up by Callinicos in his chapter ‘The spectre of Hegel’) was a sense that a whole culture, the one at the time most directly exposed to the frantic energies of capital, was experiencing a transformation into schizophrenia. There was a general loss of traditional coordinates and natural rhythms. What passed for consciousness consisted now of artificial moments of hallucinatory intensity without connection to each other, without discernible pattern or coherent sequence, without a sense of the past or of any project over time, without a clear notion of individual identity except as a locus for these delirious libidinal events of the perpetual present. Jameson made it clear that these developments resulted from capital’s drive to colonize the last spidery corners of resistance in the psyche, just as it was pushing inexorably into the last, ever more faintly resisting corners of the globe. Old High Modernist alienation, the last remaining stronghold of the self, was under relentless siege and would soon fall. The analysis was made all the more feverishly plausible, not only by the many comparisons and examples that Jameson brought to bear from the avant-garde to support his thesis, but by the character of our own lives and the lives of our students, as we had come to know them in the classroom and elsewhere. From the perspective of almost ten years now, it seems undeniable that Jameson maximized the shock of that moment by seeming not to be shocked, by not condemning, like some Jeremiah, what we were presumably going through, but by refusing all normative judgements, refusing to say that the postmodern was bad and that capital had just reached a horrendous new plateau of evil. Indeed he insisted without obvious regret that there would be no return to some ‘more traditional and

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reassuring perspectival…enclave’. The absence of this amniotic enclave he left for Allan Bloom, Hilton Kramer, and the rest of the New Right to bewail when they arrived late on the scene at the end of the decade. Meanwhile we were given to understand that within the current moment there was hope for future years, that there could even be seeds of a new communality as yet untheorized and unforeseen, that in any case we had now to ‘hold to the truth of postmodernism’, after all simply the cultural emanation of the huge multinational dynamo of capital, and that someday perhaps, ‘with new cognitive mapping’, we might regain our orientation, and with it a renewed capacity ‘to act and struggle’. It was a performance worthy of the Father of the American Left, because it put the young comrades in the position of chiding their hoary prophet for being too hip. That hasn’t happened nearly enough. But we can rely on Alex Callinicos, who is made of sterner stuff than we, the tripped-out denizens of the simulacrum. He admits only to being irritated, rather than filled with mortal terror, when he hears the term ‘postmodern’. Perhaps we can thank his colleagues in the Socialist Workers Party (p. x) who kept his feet planted firmly in the industrial base so that he didn’t get carried away by the various ‘postindustrial’ hypotheses of Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine (pp. 3, 121ff). What Callinicos seems to want to do in his ‘Marxist critique’ of postmodernism is to acknowledge postmodernism only as a kind of aberrant phenomenon of the superstructure, one due largely to disillusioned graduates of the Days of May, 1968, people like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, whose charismatic piping has brought all manner of treasonous minor clercs scampering along in their wake (pp. 3–4, 144ff, 168). The horrors of 1968 are of course a perennial theme of the New Right as well, from Bloom to Saul Bellow, who see America as an unredeemable ‘moronic inferno’ (p. 144), populated by selfindulgent ecstasy addicts who treat their sexual partners with the same depth of commitment they show to breakfast cereals or to television shows, as they swing through scores of cable channels, their fingers twitching maniacally on the remote control. Callinicos tells us that the likes of Bloom and John Silber have now been joined by most of the socialist camp, Régis Debray and Gilles Lipovetsky, for instance, who go along with the thesis of the malign significance of the 1960s. A lonely exception seems to be Henri Weber, who continued to defend the Promethean and communitarian character of the period (p. 167). Or one could venture to mention Jameson again here, whose ‘Periodizing the 60s’ in The 60s Without Apology (1984) makes a characteristically dialectical impact, according to which, for example, ‘the sense of freedom and possibility’ of the period is both ‘a momentarily objective reality’ and a ‘historical illusion’. It is the less equivocal theory of Debray and Lipovetsky, in any case, that the decade of the 1960s was essentially the war fought by capital to make the world safe for narcissistic individu alism, the salient characteristic of the new middle class of upper-level, white-collar workers, the imminent emergence of whom capital, in its diabolical wisdom, already sensed. Its enemies of those days were the Puritans and utilitarians, and their final defeat opened the population up for the sort of hysterical, spectral consumerism prevalent today. In short, we are to imagine that the free-love, hedonistic character of the Yippie revolt turned, by the ruse of history, into Yuppie hyper-consumption and dissipation (p. 166). Callinicos would want to qualify these ideas, I think, only by pushing the origins of rootless narcissism back to a somewhat earlier moment, to the erosion of public

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life in nineteenth-century Europe (p. 148). The 1960s were bad, he would seem to say, if only because they gave birth to Lyotard, but they started earlier than is generally acknowledged. Callinicos quotes Richard Sennett’s theory that the ferocious impact of early industrial capitalism drove the whipped and trembling masses to take refuge in the nuclear family. Meanwhile in public life, anonymity became the rule. In public, people were determined to ‘remain strangers to one another’ (p. 149). The rhythms of the day were shattered into isolated moments ruled by the ‘code of the immanent’, which made each moment a law unto itself, interpretable by no pre-existent, overarching scheme. These moments of immanence, presumably, are the distant ancestors of postmodernism’s hallucinatory, orgasmic present. The strategy that Callinicos employs to push back the origins of our current problems to earlier times is part of his general resistance to Jameson’s apocalyptic pronouncement that we live in an unprecedented, and as yet unrepresentable, historical moment, in the ‘new times’ of multinational capital, as different from the stages of market capitalism and imperialism (monopoly capitalism) as the dysynchronous television screens of Nam June Paik are from the compositions of Balzac (realism) or Thomas Mann (modernism). Postmodernism is not in fact a break from modernism, says Callinicos, since all the celebrated characteristics of the postmodern have long been celebrated as features of modernism. The preferred definition of modernism comes from Eugene Lunn (pp. 12ff). Modernism is (1) aesthetic self-reflexiveness. That is, the subject of art is the making of art. Proust is the most obvious example. (2) In modernism, organic form disappears and is replaced by montage and metonymy. We are to think of Cubism and Bely or Eisenstein. (3) The coherent structure of the world collapses into paradox and aporia. Pirandello could be cited here, or Nietzsche. (4) The integrated self shatters into fragments or separates into mutually hostile layers. Consequently we see Rimbaud’s pronouncement that ‘JE est un autre’, or Eliot’s escape from personality into a cacophony of voices, or Freud’s ego, which is not at home in its own house. Callinicos attempts to answer the charge that the modern cannot be the postmodern because the latter is the conflation of high and mass culture and modernism is an elitist escape from popular culture into hermeticism. He mentions Stravinsky’s use of ragtime in L’Histoire du soldat, or Eliot’s fondness for the music-hall, or the various avant-garde attempts—by Dada, Constructivism, or Surrealism—to employ modernist techniques to overcome the split between art and life and to revolutionize society at large (p. 16), examples of the non-elitist tendencies within modernism. To make the point that the postmodern is not new is, of course, not to go very far in abolishing it, though one gets the impression early on that Callinicos would like to do just that. To call it by a different name takes away perhaps some of its apocalyptic panache (p. 16). The awkwardness comes a few pages later when, after we have denied modernism its elitist aesthetic escape (pp. 15–16), we go on to connect it with postmodern aesthetic self-invention and perspectivism (pp. 65ff). At that point we have to accept the point of the modernist escape into aestheticism after all (pp. 49ff) in order to thunder against the elitist life-as-art theories of Nietzsche (p. 66) and the ‘textual’ reality of Saussure (p. 73), Derrida (p. 76) and Lyotard (pp. 86, 145). Actually, it may not be quite right to identify both Derrida and Lyotard as proponents of the same kind of irrationalist textuality. Callinicos has

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spent time at the Cardiff Critical Theory Seminar (p. ix), so he is aware of Christopher Norris’s arguments in What’s Wrong with Postmodernism (1990) that there are compatibilities between deconstruction and the Enlightenment Project. What ‘enlightenment’ means here is essentially the commitment to reason and to reason’s capacity to dispel superstition and move us gradually closer to the truth. This ‘project’ is loudly rejected by Lyotard and Baudrillard, as well as by Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, all of whom are reluctant to distinguish doxa from episteme, Plato’s terms for ‘what people say is true’ and ‘Truth’ (see Callinicos, pp. 10, 25, 62– 3, 103, 110). To support his attempts to save some aspects of deconstruction for the Enlightenment, Norris cites Derrida’s comments in ‘The principle of reason: the university in the eyes of its pupils’, which appeared in Diacritics (1983), and also the later work of the recently much excoriated Paul de Man, who, aside from writing Blindness and Insight (1971), did in fact insist that there were joint interests between the language philosophers, so averse to Heidegger, and deconstruction. This affinity was one reason that de Man regretted Derrida’s refusal to talk seriously to Searle during their famous debates. But the main point is that not everyone assumed here to be postmodern would be honoured to be so. Moreover, there are features of Callinicos’s own agenda that make his blanket condemnation of postmodernism at times surprising. For someone who approves of non-elitist tendencies within modernism (see above) and is so solicitous about the working class as Callinicos is, it is a wonder that the populist features of postmodernism don’t hold some interest. The path of populism is the one taken by John McGowan in his Postmodernism and its Critics (1991), a book as impatient with the ivory-tower brand of ‘negative freedom’ typically cherished by intellectuals as it is with their illusions that theory is political activism. He cherishes the common people for their relentless ineducability and for their contempt for intellectuals, presumably not including himself. McGowan is similarly tolerant of postmodernism, even claiming that its ‘cultural recidivism’ reveals an ‘implicit ethic of democratic egalitarianism’ (p. 29). Such good old Welcome Wagon citizenship can direct intellectuals not only to concrete, ‘positively free’ political negotiations, for which they are often all too grand, but also to engagement with the social whole, to which they are often all too hostile (p. 280). Callinicos’s own hero of the social whole, dogged champion of reason and the Enlightenment Project, is Jürgen Habermas. The problem for Habermas is not that there is too much reason; there is not enough. And it is through Habermas rather than Norris that Callinicos prefers to read postmodernism. Habermas’s great fear is a resurgence of irrationalism (p. 93). After the murder of Hans-Martin Schleyer, Germany came close to the end of its liberal democracy. Habermas also regrets the wholesale abduction of French intellectual life by Nietzsche and Heidegger, both proponents of irrationalism, as he sees them. He regrets the condemnation of reason by Horkheimer and Adorno, who diagnose the end of Enlightenment in the apprenticeship of ‘instrumental’ reason to a diabolical technology, which is busy deploying capital’s money-making projects and ravaging nature. These critics of ideology come dangerously close in Habermas’s view to being swallowed up by the gnome of Todtnauberg. Between the ‘mindfulness (Eingedenken) of nature’ and the ‘recollection (Andenken) of being’, there is not a great deal of difference (p. 97). But the solution is not to abandon reason because it has allied itself with the instrumentalities of technology and money-making. The only cure for the


aberrations of Zweckrationalität is more rationality (pp. 92, 95). Habermas insists on the saving role of reason in the modern state. The instrumentalization of reason took place while capitalism was following the predatory laws of its own early development. Capital detached itself from social integration. The state has detached itself from the fabric of everyday life, the ‘lifeworld’, as well. These detachments, forms of specialization and labour division deplored by Marx, are inevitable and necessary, but at the same time they cause certain pathologies of modern society— pauperization of the disadvantaged or general psychic anomie. These pathologies can be regulated consensually by good will and communicative action. For such communication, reason is essential. By means of its good offices, pauperization is regulated by state intervention. Class conflict is defused by the welfare state, which induces the proletariat to legitimize the status quo (p. 116). History is a gradual enrichment of normative structures, of morality and decency, through communication. ‘Language is the sphere where we treat each other as ends’ (p. 106). In fact, ‘the Utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the conditions for the communicative sociation of individuals’ (p. 98). One can only wish that the rare benevolence and humanity of Habermas would take deeper root in current political discourse and political practice. Perhaps a moderation of those stylistic features, so stirring to the heart of philosophers, so forbidding to the ordinary reader, would help to advance his ends. Where Callinicos, who writes well, seems to pull away from Habermas is at the point where Habermas’s compassionate dialogue begins to seem monologic. Callinicos, who admits to being charged with mono-perspectivism himself at times, with an intolerance for a plurality of perspectives (p. 85), wonders why conversation should necessarily be underwritten by ‘rationally motivated agreement’ (p. 105). He doesn’t like the idea of the speaker offering, and the listener accepting, the speaker’s offering (p. 106). Thus Callinicos’s theory of communication seems to thrive more on conflict, as one might expect of a proponent of the dialectic. But both Callinicos and Habermas are clearly closer to the linguistic theories of the Bakhtin Circle (language is a bridge to the other) than either is to Saussure (language is a selfenclosed, self-referential sphere). Nor can Callinicos be entirely ruled by the ‘angelism’ of Habermas’s attitudes toward liberal democracy. Callinicos can’t overcome his revulsion at the degeneration of communicative action into the selfish squabbling of interest groups, and the forging of democratic ‘consensus’ by means of an imbecilic propaganda apparatus which short-circuits discussion by raising the flag and intoning the national anthem. When he is outlining the ideas of Habermas’s great opponent, Carl Schmitt, Callinicos is hard put to keep from sliding into Schmitt’s contempt for democracy (p. 118). Indeed the most powerful pages of Callinicos’s book are perhaps ‘The children of Marx and Coca-Cola’, in which he denounces the hedonistic, gum-popping, over-consumption characteristic of the lifestyle of modern democracies. His anger suggests that not all Puritans were exterminated by the 1960s. It is important to point out, says Callinicos, that the postmodern lifestyle of incessant travel, eclectic cuisine, labyrinthine gallerias groaning with wares, vacation homes, trendy clothes and automobiles is not available to everyone (p. 162); that the growth of the architect-designed suburbs, with their swimming pools and sunken hot tubs, manages to concentrate capital in one blessed spot only by draining it from another. The new white-collar class, intrepid veterans of the 1960s

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barricades, have made their peace with the bloody ulcer of the Inner City, and with the increasingly unrelieved impoverishment of the working class, essentially by ignoring both. This is a strategy made easier in the US by the regular superimposition of race on to the glaring fact of class difference. Such residual notions make it that much more acceptable for a president to insist that a fat cat is fat and a bum is a bum for deeply ontological reasons, reasons unamendable by good will or social engineering. Meanwhile the intimate relationship of government and private business means intervention in the economy for the benefit of the chosen few. Neil Bush—to choose a name at random—can use taxpayer funds from federally licensed small (!) business investment corporations to underwrite his attempts in Wyoming to become a natural gas mogul (The Nation, 10 June 1991). Clark Clifford, former ‘counsel’ to presi dents, and his colleague, Robert Altman, husband of Wonder Woman, can grow rich advancing the interests of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International among other political insiders in Washington, while the life savings of Pakistani and Indian investors go up in smoke. Paul Mozer, government securities trader for Salomon Brothers on Wall Street, can make ten million dollars in three years by submitting non-existent bids, and yet consider himself miserably under-compensated (Kurt Eichenwald, ‘Salomon trader in scandal’, New York Times, 11 September 1991). George Bush, Jr, director of Harken Energy Corporation, owner of the exclusive rights to offshore oil development for Bahrain, an island just off the coast of Kuwait, can be reasonably sure his investments will be protected by the US military, should they ever be endangered by some rogue elephant leader from Iraq (Texas Observer, 26 July 1991). And so on. It seems to me quite right to say, as Callinicos does, that the society of the spectacle, despite such privileges of the few and the mystifications promoted in their interests by government propaganda, remains penetrable by Ideologiekritik, that the world of the simulacrum, despite Baudrillard, does not extend all the way down. Otherwise, as Callinicos points out, how could Baudrillard pontificate about its differences from the real (pp. 147–8)? And it seems right for Callinicos to insist that for the simulacrum to be generated at all, material objects, made by working men and women, have first to be there for any transmission to take place. For the president to lead the nation in the pledge of allegiance, there first have to be cameras and television sets, wires and satellites. Meanwhile all these hardware-generating labourers continue to have needs beyond the ecstatic instants of Bush’s pledge or of MTV. They need shelter, food, and clothing as much as ever, which fact emphasizes not only the primacy of the real over the hyperreal but the further fact that ‘organization and control of production’ is ‘still the major determinant of the nature of our societies’ (p. 148). For these reasons Callinicos would deny that the ‘baroque melancholy and romantic irony’ of Walter Benjamin in his messianic Jewish phase, a mood of which the systems of Lyotard and Baudrillard are only a shallow pastiche (p. 174), needs to be our proper attitude in these dark times. Benjamin eventually came to see redemption in the more secular terms of a socialist revolution, and it is for just such a global transformation of social priorities that, Callinicos says, we have to hope and work (pp. 173–4). The apparent collapse of ‘already-existing socialism’ in eastern Europe does not make such a transformation less necessary or less urgent. The alarming concentration of wealth in a few hands in a few, mostly first-world countries continues apace, as does the parallel pauperization and despair of vast numbers of people elsewhere, Sudanese and


Somalis who, in Cairo and Tripoli, now sell the organs of their own body since their labour-power is not enough any more (Chris Hedges, ‘Egypt’s desperate trade: body parts for sale’, New York Times, 23 September 1991). The planet is being plundered and poisoned at such a rate that even the most callous capitalist will soon realize that the ‘window of environmental tolerance’, as Robert Heilbroner calls it, will soon be closed, and that ‘some of the institutions of capitalism…must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final social order capitalism’ (‘Reflections—after Communism’, New Yorker, 10 September 1990, p. 100). André Gorz, not necessarily a Callinicos favourite (p. 122), has recently said much the same thing (in ‘What way is Left?’, in Grand Street, 38, p. 162ff). There is admittedly no other way to run a business enterprise, he says, than by the logic of capital, by the pursuit of maximum profit. But that does not mean that ‘pure economic rationality’ needs to take priority over all other considerations forever. When such considerations win out over the ‘criterion of measurable productivity’ in public decision making, then ‘we shall have gotten beyond capitalism to a different society’. Gorz goes on to suggest that the class Marx envisioned as bringing capital to that socially responsible point is in no position to do so any more. Even Callinicos admits that working-class consciousness is currently so bamboozled that no ‘comprehensive perspective on society as a whole’ can develop properly (p. 116). For Gorz that leaves the capitalists in a peculiar position. ‘Each of us knows some capitalist or other, a top manager in the chemical industry, for example, who is racked with doubt about what he is doing.’ Gorz sanguinely imagines them as ‘relieved and even prepared to cooperate’ when they are asked to serve goals other than the maximization of profit. Capitalism as the vanguard party—that would be a ruse of history worth contemplating! Presumably Friedrich Engels would be a precedent for such a person. Engels was both a capitalist and the champion of working men and women, for which difficult and contradictory class position he received the homage due him, as everyone knows, in the 1867 preface to Capital. Perhaps he was the wave of the future after all. Auburn University, Alabama

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• Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds), The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 194 pp., £35.00. As David Wood points out in his introduction to this volume, philosophers in the Continental tradition ‘who once focussed their attention on Heidegger, Nietzsche and Sartre are now being forced to consider Levinas as a figure of comparable status’ (p. 1). The same might also be said of readers of Derrida who have come to recognize the importance of Levinas’s work through a reading of the former’s ‘Violence and Metaphysics’,1 an essay that is determinant for the development of deconstructive reading. As a response to the growing interest in Levinas’s work, it is therefore pleasing that Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature have published this collection of essays on and by Levinas, which follows the appearance of similar collections in France and the United States.2 However, what distinguishes this volume is the fact that it is the first book to give evidence of the intense interest in Levinas’s work that has flowered in Britain during recent years, particularly at Essex and Warwick Universities. The volume contains nine essays on Levinas which, although reflecting a variety of positions, are united by the theme of rethinking the Other that is at the centre of Levinas’s work. Many of the essays are comparative, offering a series of dialogues between Levinas and thinkers as diverse as Heidegger (Boothroyd, Llewelyn), Foucault (O’Connor), Kristeva (Ainley), Pontalis (Gans), Sartre (Howells), Buber (Bernasconi) and Derrida (Llewelyn). Such comparative essays might hopefully serve as points of access to Levinas for readers familiar with one of the above authors but unfamiliar with Levinas’s work. The volume is also significant for its discussion of the crucial relation of feminism to Levinas’s work, in the essays of Chanter, O’Connor and Ainley, and its exploration of the links between Levinasian ethics and psychoanalysis, in the essays of Heaton and Gans. To be judgemental, and from the point of view of Levinasian research and scholarship, I would particularly recommend the essays of Boothroyd, Chanter, Bernasconi and Llewelyn. The volume continues with Richard Cohen’s welcome translation of Levinas’s 1982 essay ‘Useless suffering’, which is both fascinating and lucid, and an interview, ‘The Paradox of Morality’, that Levinas gave to Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes and Alison Ainley in 1986. I shall not give a detailed account of the interview, except to say that it successfully investigates many of the questions and objections that tend to

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arise from a reading of Totality and Infinity, and is therefore particularly useful for people who have studied that work. Amongst the subjects discussed are the precise meaning of the face (le visage) and its relation to language, whether the human face is to be rigorously distinguished from that of the animal and in what sense we have ethical obligations to animals, the role of the phenomenological method in Levinas’s work, the question of the dependence of an ethics of the Other’s face upon Judaism and the relation of Levinas’s writings to ‘Greek’ thinking, the relation between ethics and politics, Levinas’s thoughts on Derrida’s ‘Violence and metaphysics’ and, finally, whether Levinas’s account of eros applies only to heterosexual relationships. The book concludes with an English bibliography of Levinas’s work compiled by Robert Bernasconi which is an invaluable piece of scholarship for all serious English-speaking readers of Levinas. My only complaint about the book is its exorbitant price (£35.00), which successfully puts it beyond the reach of most of its prospective readers. The book opens with John Heaton’s ‘The Other and psychotherapy’, which broaches the important issue of how Levinasian ethics provides a novel and sceptical approach to the often rationalistic discourse of psychotherapy. If the problem of the Other, the patient, is somehow ‘covered over’ (p. 5) by psychoanalytic discourse, then Levinas’s rethinking of the Other may provide a way of both uncovering this concealment and locating a basis for a different approach to the Other in psychotherapy, one that would recognize his or her irreducible alterity. The essay is composed of short evocative paraphrases of Levinas interspersed by transcriptions of patients’ discourse. My only criticism is that Heaton does not probe deeply enough into the problem he sets himself, and is content with a paraphrase rather than a reading of Levinas. The same criticism certainly cannot be made of David Boothroyd’s ‘Responding to Levinas’, which is distinguished by a nuanced comparison of Levinas and Heidegger. Boothroyd recognizes the limitations of Levinas’s reading (or rather, misreading) of Heidegger, where the latter is often employed as a straw man in the former’s arguments, and where, ironically, Levinas’s reading ‘makes Heidegger preHeideggerian’ (p. 18). However, as well as pointing out this misreading and offering certain corrections from Heidegger’s texts, Boothroyd recognizes its necessity; he writes, ‘by following him [Levinas] on a wrong bus we may learn something about its route which will lead us to reconsider its destination’ (p. 19, my italics—my only stylistic criticism of Boothroyd’s essay lies in its persistent use of the first person plural pronoun, for example ‘we who are not religious’, p. 15). However, where this essay really excels is in the quality of its reading of Levinas, and its recognition that any response to the provocation of Levinas’s work must proceed by way of a suspension or postponement of logocentric critique in the name of a reading that maintains an ethical interruption within logocentric textuality. As Boothroyd points out, such a response situates the philosophical logos on a crossroads with the other of philosophy, whether it be the ology, mysticism or what Derrida calls ‘empiricism’.3 Indeed, the problems involved in situating a reading at this crossroads are, as Boothroyd is well aware, the main concern of Derrida’s reading of Levinas in ‘Violence and metaphysics’; namely, that the latter’s work is placed at the limit of a logocentric closure which it rigorously both maintains and interrupts. For Boothroyd, the fact that Levinas’s texts occupy a crossroads between philosophy and non-philosophy, between coherence and incoherence, does not entail that


Levinasian ethics can be dismissed as mysticism or Judaic idiosyncrasy, and he concludes by alluding to the notion of ‘the fullness of life’ (pp. 28, 29), which would transcend the distinction between the mystical and the conceptual basing itself in the living datum that ‘It is I who am being called to responsibility and not merely to engage myself in a philosophical discourse on ethics’ (p. 29). The tone of debate on the relevance of Levinas’s work for feminism, and indeed whether Levinas is anti-feminist, was very much set by Simone de Beauvoir’s remark in The Second Sex, where she judges that he ‘deliberately takes a man’s point of view’ by categorizing the woman as Other in opposition and subordination to the male subject.4 In an important essay that will be particularly useful for those acquainted with feminism but approaching Levinas for the first time, Tina Chanter shows the inadequacy of de Beauvoir’s remark. She convincingly argues that once one understands Levinas’s statement that alterity accomplishes itself in the feminine in the context of the priority that he gives to the Other, then ‘we cannot say Levinas is simply keeping the woman at home, in her traditional place’ (p. 53). After giving a subtle and detailed exposition of Levinas’s account of the feminine in Totality and Infinity, Chanter goes on to assess the uses of that account for feminism. She argues that a Levinasian approach to the feminine neither reinforces traditional sexual values nor determines femininity in terms of biology. Thus: ‘I think Levinas’s account of femininity can apply to gays, just as I think it can apply to heterosexuals of either sex’ (p. 46). For Levinas—and this is a point he makes again at the end of the interview (pp. 179–80)—gender is not limited by a biologically determined sexual identity. One might say that the bottom line of Levinas’s work is the maintenance of the otherness of the Other (autrui), of an alterity that cannot be reduced to identity, unity or totality. In terms of gender, what must consistently be refused is the dissolution of alterity in the claims to equality and neutrality, the voice of an Enlightenment humanity that would always attest to an implicit priority of the masculine (qua neutral rationality) over the feminine (qua sexually differentiated irrationality). In her conclusion Chanter writes, ‘I have only been able to suggest that Levinas’s account of the Other provides feminism with a voice that many feminists have already begun to seek: the voice of the radically Other’ (p. 52). Although this is undoubtedly the case, the question that feminism must address to Levinas, of which Chanter is well aware, concerns the privilege of ethical difference over sexual difference in his work. It is precisely this question that has been at the centre of Irigaray’s and Derrida’s most recent writings on Levinas.5 The theme of Levinas’s relation to feminism is continued in the next two essays. In ‘The personal is political: discursive practice of the face-to-face’, Noreen O’Connor engages in a timely comparison of Levinas and Foucault, which asks the question, ‘what use are the analyses of Levinas and Foucault for the Women’s Movement—a movement of discursive practices of sex/gender distinctions?’ (p. 64). However, after reading the essay one feels that the question exceeds the response given and that O’Connor tends to leave the issue hanging in the air somewhat. She argues that both Foucauldian archaeology and Levinasian ethics provide a critique of instituted sexual power relations, but that their analyses need to be supplemented. Unfortunately, the brevity of the essay militates against a detailed exploration of the relation of this supplementarity to feminism. The essay consists largely of tightly organized exegesis—I am particularly appreciative of her analysis of respiration and the notion of the ‘self’ in Levinas—which risks becoming a little

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fragmentary and can leave the reader mystified as to the precise direction that the essay is taking. As its title suggests, Alison Ainley’s ‘Amorous discourses: “The Phenomenology of Eros” and “Love Stories”’, offers a rapprochement of Levinas and Kristeva, which argues that the former’s work may prove significant to theoretical feminism and that ‘he may be conscripted into the struggle for a critique of “identity thinking” and essentialism’ (p. 71). Whilst implicitly subverting Irigaray’s reading of Levinas, Ainley tries to salvage Levinas’s secondarization of sexual difference from the claim that it consequently secondarizes women to men. She identifies a double gesture with respect to Levinas’s relation to feminism, where he both engages in a critique of the virility and supposed neutrality of the male philosophical logos by giving a privilege to feminine alterity, whilst, at the same moment, writing as a man for whom woman is other and where Levinas continually risks falling back within patriarchal structures. It is, I believe, precisely the undecidability of this double gesture that makes Levinas’s work so significant for feminism and Ainley’s essay so compelling. However, despite her bold approach to the question of the relation of sexual difference to ethical difference in Levinas, Ainley points out that the rapprochement of Levinas and Kristeva can only be taken so far, because—and here she disagrees with Chanter’s conclusion—the analyses of fecundity and filiality that Levinas undertakes in Totality and Infinity ‘must face the charge that the continuity of identity via fecundity expresses not only the continuity of the Law of the Father, but also a presupposition of a heterosexual relation, albeit symbolically rather than biologically expressed’ (p. 78). The relation between psychoanalysis and Levinas’s work reappears in Steve Gans’s ‘Levinas and Pontalis: meeting the Other as in a dream’. Gans’s aim is to show that Levinasian ethics provides ‘an indispensable foundation for therapeutic practice, a practice which seeks to overcome neurosis by moving the client from self-involvement to relatedness with the Other’ (p. 85). However, although this is an interesting thesis, the essay is in many ways the weakest in the volume and is marred by a cloying, clever tone and some rather lightweight generalities about Levinas’s work. I would also want to question the extent of Levinas’s use for psychoanalysis as given in Gans’s account; I doubt whether the move from the separation of the egoism to the ethical relation with the Other, described in Totality and Infinity, can be paralleled with the overcoming of neurosis in the move from suffering self-involvement to relatedness with the Other (Cf. pp. 83, 85, 86 and 87). For is not separation and egoism always equated with jouissance in Totality and Infinity? Is not being-for-the-Other precisely a suffering, a suffering for the Other’s suffering? To confirm the latter one need only glance at the metaphors with which Levinas describes the passivity of ethical selfhood in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: ‘hostage’, ‘persecution’, ‘obsession’, ‘traumatism’, ‘mal dans sa peau’.6 Is not the relation with the Other, the lesion of the psyche, precisely a form of madness? In addition, Gans also claims that, ‘Love is the culmination of Levinas’s discourse with the Other, as well as the culmination of the psychoanalytic process’ (p. 88). To my mind, this claim for what Gans calls ‘an ethics of love’ (p. 89) ignores both the function of fecundity and filiality as the result of the erotic relation in Totality and Infinity and the distinction of the ethical, which is found in the face of the Other, from the erotic, which goes beyond the face (TeI 242, TI 264). Strangely, and perhaps unbeknownst to Gans, Levinas does discuss the relation with the Other in


terms of love in both the article and interview contained in the same volume (Cf. pp. 164, 176–7). In a brief but fascinating essay, Christina Howells offers what is, for me, a muchneeded comparison of Levinas and Sartre. Indeed, I would claim that Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is one of the dominant, if almost silent, subtexts of Totality and Infinity (cf. TeI 280, TI 303). Howells offers a series of parallels between Levinas’s and Sartre’s descriptions of the relation with the Other and then goes on to discuss their differing evaluations of this relation in the above-mentioned works. However, the originality of the essay consists in Howells’s exposition of Sartre’s reappraisal of the relation with the Other in his posthumously published Cahiers pour une morale. Howells demonstrates convincingly that the latter work marks a break with the negative assessment of the relation with the Other outlined in Being and Nothingness, arguing that Sartre even adopts a ‘quasi-“Levinasian” stance’ (p. 95). My only hesitation would be to ask whether Sartre’s reappraisal of the relation with the Other is ‘Levinasian’ in the sense in which it is developed in Otherwise than Being. As I mentioned above, in the latter work the self (le soi) is presented as being a hostage to an Other who threatens me with ‘persecuting hatred’ (‘haine persécutrice’, AE 141, OB 111), and addresses me in the accusative. Levinas compares the Other to the tunic of Nessus, the blood-stained garment infected by the poisoned arrow with which Achilles shot the Centaur and whose poison seeped through Achilles’ skin, causing his death (AE 139, OB 109). In the light of remarks like this, I fear it might be necessary to reappraise Howells’s assessment of the relation with the Other in Levinas as ‘affirmative’ or as embracing ‘optimism’ (p. 91). Might not the later Levinas be more Sartrean than one would at first imagine? Robert Bernasconi’s ‘“Failure of communication” as a surplus: dialogue and lack of dialogue between Buber and Levinas’ offers a detailed and valuable comparison of the latter thinkers, which is extraordinary, as always, for its mine of scholarship and is worth reading for its footnotes alone. By far the longest essay in the volume, its scope is twofold: first, to borrow Bernasconi’s words, it gives ‘an exemplary reading’ (p. 128) of all the primary and secondary sources pertaining to the relation betwen Levinas and Buber. Second, it employs those sources in order to produce a Heideggerian ‘dialogue between thinkers’ which ultimately tries to show how Levinas’s relation to Buber ‘took the form of an ethical relation’ (p. 123) by giving a ‘double reading’ (p. 128) of the latter (indeed, the notion of double reading that is developed in Derrida’s work, although only referred to in passing (cf. pp. 104, 107, 112, 114, 115, 128) is determinant for the ultimate ambition and horizon of the essay: the relation between dialogue, ethics and deconstructive reading). However, as Bernasconi points out (p. 131), the essential characteristic of this dialogue is precisely a lack of dialogue and a failure of communication between Levinas and Buber. Levinas’s initial ‘criticisms’ of Buber in a 1958 essay are misunderstood by Buber and the latter’s written response is, in turn, misunderstood by Levinas. But, as Bernasconi meticulously demonstrates, Levinas goes on to reread Buber in a series of essays dating from the late 1970s and early 1980s, where he reformulates his earlier criticism and acknowledges Buber as ‘an ethical thinker’ (p. 117). Briefly, what Levinas discovers in this rereading is an element of transcendence in Buberian ‘thou-saying’ which can be interpreted, in Levinasian terms, as the ethical interruption of ontology or the Saying (le Dire) that breaks through the Said (le Dit). Thus, Levinas’s reading of Buber demonstrates both a failure of communication, in

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reciprocal misunderstanding, and a surplus of communication, where an ethical interruption is maintained. Bernasconi’s implicit thesis is that it is precisely this failure of communication that produces the surplus of alterity and which characterizes both the dialogue between thinkers and double reading. Whilst not having what Levinas would call the ‘ridiculous pretention of “correcting”’ (TeI 40, TI 69) Bernasconi, I would like to raise two queries: first, the detour into the discussion of Theunissen’s Der Andere (cf. pp. 124–5) occurs precisely at the moment when one would like to see Bernasconi put his cards on the table, and one might perhaps argue that at that point the essay is too exegetical. Second, I am concerned by the equivalence between texts and the proper names of their authors that occurs throughout the essay. I would want to stress the fact that the dialogue between Levinas and Buber and the ethical relation of the former to the latter are textual events. Can and should the textuality of this encounter be reduced to or circumscribed by the proper names of thinkers? What are ‘thinkers’? Are they not texts or effects of textuality? After Derrida, should not the interpersonal model of ethics be replaced by that of intertextuality? I first read John Llewelyn’s ‘Levinas, Derrida and Others vis-à-vis’ in the version that appeared in his Beyond Metaphysics?7 and I believe that essay easily justifies rereading. As one has come to expect from Llewelyn, the style is compact, rigorous and rich with wide-ranging philosophical scholarship—although one sometimes has to work hard to excavate the many philosphical nuggets embedded in the text. At the level of exegesis, the essay is notable for its discussion of the structure of ethical selfhood in Otherwise than Being. Llewelyn discusses the heteronomy and heteroaffection of the ethical self (cf. p. 141), and recognizes in Levinas’s analyses of inspiration and passivity the articulation of the otherwise than Being that permits the interruption of the ontological tradition. Indeed, Llewelyn’s essay is the only one in the volume which engages in a reading of Otherwise than Being, the book which, I believe, represents Levinas’s most important and radical philosophical work. Also notable are Llewelyn’s discussions of the positive conception of infinity in Levinas and Descartes (cf. pp. 142–3, 147), the demonstration of the double gesture that governs Derrida’s reading of Husserl (pp. 145–6) and the persistent manner in which Llewelyn grounds his discussion of Levinas in Heidegger’s thought of ontological difference—I shall return to this last point. However, Llewelyn’s principal thesis concerns the status of the Levinasian claim for an ethics beyond ontology, and whether the metaphor of ‘beyondness’ merely describes one arc of Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, the trajectory of which will always return inside the ontology it sought to exceed. Llewelyn discusses the ‘paralogical’ (p. 147) status of the face-to-face relation, a discursive relation which—and here Llewelyn leaps from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being; I shall also return to this point —produces the ethical Saying of the ‘beyond’ of Being. Llewelyn writes, ‘Perhaps there is little that can be said about this, and what one succeeds in saying appears to leave out what is important’ (p. 148). In the final section of the essay, Llewelyn analyses the contradiction implicit in articulating the beyond of Being in the language of Being, the philosophical language with which Levinas describes the ethical relation in his texts. Llewelyn appears to argue, with Derrida in ‘Violence and metaphysics’,8 that it is only upon the basis of a certain forgetfulness of the ontological difference that Levinas is able to postulate an ethics irreducible to ontology. The metaphor of an ethical Saying that would go ‘beyond’ the


ontological Said presupposes both a beyondness and a metaphoricity that are irreducibly ontic (cf. pp. 150, 152). Thus Llewelyn returns Levinas to Heidegger by the intermediary of Derrida. Without, in this context, having the space to explore this argument, I will provisionally say that Llewelyn’s argument itself presupposes that there is only one reading of Derrida’s ‘Violence and metaphys ics’, that which returns Levinas to Heidegger. If one considers Derrida’s essay to be a double reading, then might it not be necessary to complicate Llewelyn’s conclusion by arguing that another reading of Levinas is offered by Derrida, one that would return Heidegger to Levinas? Returning to Bernasconi, a sketch of such a reading of ‘Violence and metaphysics’ is given in his ‘Deconstruction and the possibility of ethics’, where he also argues that Levinas introduces the pairing of the Saying and the Said as a response to and a circumvention of that portion of Derrida’s reading taken up by Llewelyn.9 Indeed, if a criticism could be made of Llewelyn’s reading, then it would be that he tends to conflate all of Levinas’s work together, particularly Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, employing phrases from the former (‘Being is exteriority’, TeI, 266, TI 290, cited p. 151) to refute the gesture of the latter (‘Not being otherwise, but otherwise than Being’, AE 3, OB 3). For example, Llewelyn writes,

What the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas says seems unable to take the step beyond Being and beyond Heidegger announced in the title of the book Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence and previously in a title of a section near the end of Totality and Infinity [cf. TeI 278, TI 301–2; my insertion]. If the words just cited from the first section of Totality and Infinity can be taken at their face value, how can these titles be taken at theirs? This raises the important and thorny problem of whether Levinas’s work can be treated as a unity or even as a unified development. To escape from the genuine dilemma posed by Llewelyn, might it not be necessary to develop a more interrupted, differentiated and sceptical reading of Levinas, where, for example in the case of ‘Violence and metaphysics’, one could read Levinas’s work after the latter as an attempt to respond to Derrida’s deconstruction of Being as presence. That Levinas himself recognizes deficiencies in the ontological language employed in Totality and Infinity is openly revealed in a remark from the interview: Totality and Infinity was my first book. I find it very difficult to tell you, in a few words, in what way it is different from what I’ve said afterwards. There is the ontological terminology: I spoke of being. I have since tried to get away from that language. (pp. 170–1; my italics) As Llewelyn is well aware, the key text in the deployment of such a differentiated and sceptical reading would be Levinas’s text on Derrida, ‘Wholly otherwise’.10 Following the critical and comparative discussions of Levinas, one comes to the latter’s own essay ‘Useless suffering’ (‘La souffrance inutile’)11 which analyses the phenomenon of suffering from philosophical, theological and political perspectives.

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If a guiding thread might be picked from the essay, it is that ‘the justification of the neighbour’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality’ (p. 336/163). Levinas offers an ethical phenomenology of suffering which sees the Other’s pain as neither useless nor justifiable and which leads to a recognition of the priority of responsibility for the suffering Other. Phenomenologically speaking, suffering is a given in consciousness which, Levinas claims, has the function of an excess that is refractory to consciousness’s synthesizing activity. Suffering produces a ‘backwards consciousness’ (conscience à rebours’, p. 329/156), whose pain induces a passivity, a vulnerability, an evil (‘un mal’, p. 330/157—it should be noted that the predicates with which Levinas describes a suffering consciousness are similar to those which express the structure of ethical selfhood in Otherwise than Being). Suffering is an evil which rends the humanity of the sufferer, and this is why Levinas argues that suffering is useless, it is good for nothing. Suffering simply happens to the sufferer and its occurrence exceeds and subverts the criteria for utility and sense. Shifting the phenomenological focus, Levinas then moves from a description of suffering consciousness to the relation of the Other’s suffering to me, to my suffering for the Other’s suffering, what Levinas calls ‘la souffrance de la souffrance’ (p. 332/159). In a description that is strongly reminiscent of the first part of Rousseau’s Second Discourse, Levinas asks,

Is not the evil of suffering…the possibility that wherever a moan, a cry, a groan or a sigh happen there is the original call for aid (appel originel à l’aide), for curative help, for help from the other ego whose alterity, whose exteriority promises salvation. (p. 331/158) In this original call for aid (aidez-moi), the site of the origin of language for Rousseau in ‘le cri de la nature’, Levinas sees an ‘original opening’ (‘ouverture originelle’, p. 331/158) or ‘half-opening’ (‘entrouverture’, ibid.) onto ethical transcendence. The opening or origin of language occurs in the approach of the suffering Other, the movement of pitié. The argument here is that although my own suffering is useless and senseless, my relation to the Other’s suffering is meaningful, and furthermore the relation to the suffering Other can be postulated as ‘a supreme ethical principle’ (p. 332/159). Moving towards the theological perspective, Levinas claims that the ethical obligation revealed in the Other’s suffering has the consequence of making the idea of God both more difficult and more necessary because it makes one lose confidence in the concept of theodicy. Why theodicy? Levinas broadens the Leibnizian notion of theodicy and claims that ‘Western humanity’ (p. 333/160) has attempted to render suffering and evil meaningful by either postulating a God (theos) of justice (dik ), or through a belief in a providential Nature or History. For Levinas, the events of the twentieth century—‘Hitlerism and Stalinism, the Gulag and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia’ (p. 334/162)—are evidence of an end of the possibility of belief in theodicy. Unsurprisingly, Levinas sees the ‘Holocaust’ or Shoah of the Jewish people as being paradigmatic of both gratuitous human suffering and the inevitable short- coming of a belief in theodicy; he writes,


‘Did not the word of Nietzsche on the death of God take on, in the extermination camps, the signification of a quasi-empirical fact?’ (p. 335/162). However, the end of theodicy does not result in the suffering of the ‘Holocaust’ being rendered useless; rather it reveals the unjustifiability of the Other’s suffering. The suffering of the Jewish people was not useless. If Auschwitz somehow occasions the death of a belief in a God of theodicy, a childlike faith in a God of power and punishment, then this should not lead to a renunciation of Judaism, becaue, paradoxically, such a renunciation ‘would amount to finishing the criminal enterprise of NationalSocialism’ (p. 336/163). Perhaps God was silent at Auschwitz because God could only be silent, as Levinas remarks in the interview, ‘in the last analysis, he cannot do anything at all’ (p. 169). Although Levinas does not clearly demarcate his own ideas from those of Emil Fackenheim whom he is expounding, it would seem that a ‘faithfulness to Judaism’ (p. 337/164) is precisely a fidelity to the material and ‘even political’ (ibid.) conditions of its existence, that is, a pledge to the unjustifiable but non-useless suffering of the Other. Levinas concludes his argument by offering an alternative between abandoning the world to its useless suffering, what he calls ‘the political fatality’ (‘la fatalité politique’, p. 337/164—or the fatality inherent in politics), or being responsible for the non-useless suffering of the Other, having a faith without theodicy. Obviously, Levinas decides in favour of the second term of this alternative, which is always to privilege ethics over politics. He writes, bringing Rousseau to mind once again and in particular the latter’s critique of Hobbes in the Second Discourse,

The order of politics—post-ethical or pre-ethical—which inaugurates the ‘social contract’ is neither the sufficient condition nor the necessary outcome of ethics. In its ethical position, the self (le moi) is distinct from the citizen born of the City (la Cité), and from the individual who precedes all order in his natural egoism, but from whom political philosophy since Hobbes tries to derive—or succeeds in deriving—the social or political order of the City. (p. 338/165) For Levinas, like Antigone, the divine law precedes and takes precedence over the law of the City, of the polis. The relation with the Other is ethical before it is political. I believe that the most pressing issue in the reading of Levinas consists in the investigation of the meaning and implications of this before. University of Essex ABBREVIATIONS OF WORKS BY LEVINAS AE — Autrement qu’être ou au-delá de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). OB— Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). TeI — Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). TI — Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

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NOTES 1 In L’écriture et la difference (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 117–228. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 79–153. 2 (i) Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. François Laruelle (Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1980). (ii) Cahiers de la nuit surveillée, Numéro 3, Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jacques Rolland (Lagrasse: Editions Verdier, 1984). (iii) Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 3 ‘Violence and metaphysics’, op. cit., p. 224/151. 4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M.Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 16n. 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici’, in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 21–60. Translated by Ruben Berezdivin as ‘At this very moment in this work here I am’, in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Luce Irigaray, ‘La fecondité de la caresse’, in Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984), pp. 173–99. Translated by Carolyn Burke in Face to Face with Levinas, pp. 231–56. See also her more directly critical reading of Levinas, ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas. On the divinity of love’, in Re-Reading Levinas, pp. 109–18. 6 See Otherwise than Being, Chapter IV, ‘Substitution’ (AE 125–66, OB 99–129). 7 Beyond Metaphysics? The Hermeneutic Circle in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 185–206. 8 See the section entitled ‘Of ontological violence’, pp. 196–224/134–51. 9 Robert Bernasconi, ‘Deconstruction and the possibility of ethics’, in Deconstruction and Philosphy, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 122–39. See especially footnote 9, pp. 137–8. 10 ‘Tout autrement’, in Noms Propres, (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976), pp. 81–9. Translated by Simon Critchley in Re-Reading Levinas, pp. 3–10. Llewelyn gives an extensive quotation from this text on pp. 152–3. 11 The French text appears in Cahiers de la nuit surveillée, pp. 329–38. All subsequent page references to the text are given together with references to the translation.

LAWRENCE VENUTI

• Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words (London: Routledge, 1989), 224 pp., £50.00 (hardback), £14.95 (paperback) • Eric Cheyfitz, The Politics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1991), xx+202 pp., £22.50 (hardback) • Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), xviii+318 pp., £30.00 (hardback), £10. 50 (paperback) Translation, long banished to the more remote fringes of the intellectual world— scientistic speculation about language, machine translation, Bible translation, belletristic prefaces to poetry translations—is now moving toward the centre of thinking about culture, particularly in the English-speaking countries. The influx of poststructuralism has done much to bring about this development, with its unmooring of the concepts (semantic unity, originality, authorship, copyright) that have always served to stigmatize translation, even in translation theory and commentary produced by translators themselves. These days, however, Englishlanguage readers in and out of academic institutions are inclined to think more about translation because they’ve been made more aware of the foreign, especially as a variable that can carry unpredictable consequences—the cultural and social changes wrought by Third World immigration to metropolitan centres like London, New York, Los Angeles, the economic ascendancy of Japan, the dismantling of state socialism in Eastern Europe, the call for Salman Rushdie’s death by Islamic fundamentalists, the Persian Gulf War. As the hegemonic Englishlanguage nations experience deeply unsettling trends and events that challenge the international domination of Anglo-American culture, translation is emerging as an ideal site on which to study any encounter with a cultural other, to explore its multiple reverberations at home and abroad, even to join in the challenge through resistance and contestation, playing havoc with cultural canons, disciplinary boundaries and national values in English. The nascent power of translation to redirect cultural thinking across disciplines can be glimpsed in the three books under review, published in very different areas —‘philosophy’, ‘American Studies’, ‘literary theory’ —but similar in their reliance

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on poststructuralist styles of thinking to address the fraught issue of translation. Together they construe translation as the epitome of difference, linguistic, cultural, ideological, using it to examine and question metaphysics, nationalism, imperialism, the global political economy which the English language still commands. None the less, this collective view of the books can be misleading. It assimilates them to their ‘common topic’ a bit excessively and with too much enthusiasm, minimizing the fact that they pursue their proper, discipline-specific discourses with sufficient tenacity to be put in separate categories for marketing and library cataloguing, none labelled ‘translation theory’, ‘translation studies’, or ‘translation politics’. The specialized niches these books occupy in the division of cultural labour can only leave a translator wondering about their impact on the practice of translation itself (not to mention the likelihood that they haven’t even circulated among the three academics who’ve written them). Translation remains very much on the fringes of the largely academic community that is newly taken with it, in the trade publishing industry or the missionary work of Bible translation, with translators still exiled by copyright law and tenure criteria, squeezed by exploitative contracts, trapped in publishing patterns built on unequal cross-cultural exchanges that underwrite the international domination of Anglo-American culture, of English. As an Englishlangauge translator active since the mid-1970s, I can review these books only from a point that seems late in the history of this domination, asking how they intervene in its currently embattled situation, evaluating the role each marks out for the theory and practice of translation, looking for signs that what they have to offer contributes to a democratic cultural politics. Following Derrida’s claim that ‘With the problem of translation we are dealing with nothing less than the problem of the passage to philosophy’, Andrew Benjamin aims to reinvent the philosophical enterprise by considering its relation to ‘translation’, defined here not merely as a movement across languages, but as a cognitive activity, as ‘understanding’ or ‘interpretation’. The main line of argument travels contra Plato, Heidegger, Seneca and Donald Davidson, pro Walter Benjamin and Freud. In a sequence of carefully ordered and elegantly nuanced discussions, Benjamin critiques the ‘Christian Platonic’ concept of meaning as a unified essence that entails the hopeless pursuit of a one-to-one correspondence between interpretation and its object, between translation and foreign text. ‘Semantic unity can never be other than a site of differential meanings in which potential and actual meanings are present as well as allusions or reattributions that are themselves the result of the process of history’ (p. 35). The Christian Platonic tradition acknowledges an ‘an-original differential plurality’, but only ‘in the attempt to establish an original and archaic site of meaning, in the presence of self-referring and therefore self-inclusive structures of signification, and finally in the desire for an unmediated access to the world’ (pp. 178–9). In Davidson’s essay ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, for example, ‘translation and the overcoming of disagreement are possible to the extent that divergence and difference are themselves grounded in identity of sameness’, revealing his fundamental assumption of ‘a universalist rationalist anthropology giving rise to a generalized and universal conception of self’ (pp. 73, 64). The Christian Platonic tradition fails to negotiate the sheer alterity of the other in any act of understanding, interpretation, translation because it is unable to think difference except on the transcendental ground of a prior unity.


Benjamin’s ‘new theory of words’ displaces the metaphysic of the origin with a pragmatic of the originary, what he terms the ‘pragma’, a ‘primordial’ semantic potential that can be fixed only provisionally, on the basis of varying assumptions and interpretive needs, in specific cultural situations, at different historical moments. The Greek term ‘pragma’, used by Plato in the Cratylus to describe ‘things’ in their relation to ‘names’, is Benjamin’s inspired way of rewriting the Western metaphysical tradition with the poststructuralist concept of textuality. The pragma projects an ‘ontologico-temporal’ scheme which blocks the reduction of any particular translation to the foreign text, of any particular interpretation to the truth, any particular understanding to reality. This releases translation from mathematicsbased concepts of semantic equivalence—‘fidelity’ and ‘freedom’ become historically determined categories—and makes possible an ethical reflection (raised but not pursued in Benjamin’s book) that requires the conditions of any translation theory or practice to be figured into its formation. Indeed, to translate with Benjamin’s ‘affirmative thinking of this semantic and interpretive potential’ doesn’t mean abandoning the foreign text, but rather practising translation self-consciously, realizing that ‘positing an original is both problematic and unproblematic’ (p. 169), that appeals to the foreign text cannot finally adjudicate competing translations in the absence of linguistic error, that the viability of the translation ‘has to be argued for outside of the actual translation itself’ (p. 173). Translators, in other words, must become more philosophical if they are to understand the manifold potentialities of their work. But philosophers too must recognize their thinking as a translation process and become more active translators, preoccupied not with the concepts of totality and universality that have dominated Western philosophy since its beginnings, but with the semantic differential plurality that constitutes the historical existence of every text, its unpredictably varied afterlife. Benjamin’s systematic analyses offer a postmodern reorientation of philosophy that has much to say to translators in the Christian Platonic tradition—i.e. most translators in the Englishspeaking world. Here the prevalent view, among both translators and their readers, is that translation establishes a true semantic equivalence, when it necessarily imprints the foreign text with a partial interpretation, partial to target-language cultural values, blinded by a metaphysical concept of meaning that excludes the very difference translation is called on to convey. The depth of Benjamin’s reflection on translation depends partly on his shrewd decision to begin with an interrogation of that perennial topos of translation theory, the ‘literal’ and the ‘figurative’. Treating the meaning of any text as always already differential and plural ‘denies to the literal the possibility of being prior and of having priority’ (p. 38). Hence, there can be no such thing as a ‘literal’ translation which is somehow closer or more faithful to the foreign text. The literal ‘is never semantically pure’, but ‘a secondary effect’, an illusionistic reduction of an actual polysemy. Eric Cheyfitz also approaches translation by interrogating this effect of literality, but he examines its ideological significance at crucial moments of geopolitical confrontation in the history of the West. ‘To sever the literal from the figurative absolutely’, he argues, ‘is to naturalize it, in that such severance denies or represses the figurative basis of the literal—its constitution as an ideologically or culturally specific formation’ (p. 14). Sketching a conceptual genealogy through readings of Aristotle, George Puttenham, Locke and Blackstone, Cheyfitz shows that the concept of literal

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translation pursues what is ‘proper’ to the foreign text, its essential semantic unity, its univocality, and thus contradicts the very function of translation as a trope, translatio, metaphor, repressing the ‘figurative, equivocal, or conflictive play’ of language (p. 38), concealing the appropriative movement that domesticates the cultural other by coding it with target-language values. For Cheyfitz, this is ‘monologic’ translation, and he finds it operating most decisively in texts that document, enforce, or otherwise reflect Anglo-American imperialism, from the English colonization of the New World in the early modern period to US expansion into Indian lands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to current US foreign policy in the Third World and elsewhere. Very much aware that this concept of translation locates an appropriative movement in any crosscultural encounter, including his own complex textual analyses, Cheyfitz asserts that ‘I am not writing to understand Native American cultures but to critique the violence of my own culture, specifically the violence of my own language’ (p. xv). His descriptions of this violence are lucid and persuasive. ‘The other is translated into the terms of the self in order to be alienated from those terms’ (p. 15). ‘The early voyagers…knew virtually nothing of the native languages of the Americas, even as they freely translated them’ (p. xv), inscribing native social relations based on kinship and communal ownership into English class hierarchies based on feudal aristocracy or emergent capitalism, on status, title, possession.

This process of translation, initiated by Columbus and perpetuated by the European voyagers who follow him, prepares the way for and is forever involved in the dispossession by which Native American land was translated (the term is used in English common law to refer to transfers of real estate) into the European identity of property. (p. 43) The imperialism that translation enacts abroad answers to the dominance of possessive individualism and nationalism at home. ‘To think metaphorically within the confines of the translatio is to think imperialistically: to appropriate the other in the name of a national propriety that conceives of itself as universal, as absolutely proper’ (p. 142). Some of the texts Cheyfitz discusses have recently received considerable attention, notably The Tempest, to which he devotes a minutely detailed reading dispersed throughout the book. Yet what quickly emerges here is that translation, which should be the foundation of any treatment of imperialism, is so marginalized in the academy that it has been over-looked by most theorists and critics. Cheyfitz’s effort to redress this neglect enables him to comment incisively on a wide range of texts, English and American, elite and popular, literary and legal, and to bring them to bear on contemporary political issues, like US foreign policy. Neither Tarzan of the Apes nor the concept of ‘eloquence’ developed by Tudor rhetoricians will ever look the same. This is American Studies that aspires to be a white paper for the State Department in the presidency of a (yet to appear) left Democrat. It demonstrates that the antecendents of American imperialism under Ronald Reagan and George Bush lie not only in Teddy Roosevelt, but in John Smith, or more precisely in ‘the


historical relationship in the New World between translation, translatio, and the translatio imperii et studii, between, that is, a theory of communication, a theory of figurative language, and a theory of the transmission of power’ (p. xx). The blind spot in Cheyfitz’s project lies in the area of imagining the foreign, restraining the self’s domestication of the other, inventing alternative methods of interpretation and translation that work to counter the appropriative movement he describes so well. His concept of ‘kinship’—which here functions as the distinguishing feature of the foreign, of native American society—relies on Eric Wolf’s reformulation of Marxist ‘modes of production’ in Europe and the People without History (‘kin-ordered’, ‘tributary’, ‘capitalist’); and since, in Cheyfitz’s own ideologically charged construction, the concept is polemically pitched against capitalism, against the American present, it is treated much too optimistically, without enough recognition that it is also implicated in hierarchies, relations of domination based along different lines than wealth—namely, age, gender, family, tribe. More provocatively, he speaks of the ‘dialogic, democratic force’ of language and a ‘dialogic’ method of translation, arguing that ‘this would mean to ironize, or denaturalize, the proper, to see it for what it is, as a figure itself’ (p. 142): translation as a demystification of dominant values in the target-language culture. This is a promising methodological move, but it gets derailed by the text chosen to exemplify it: Montaigne’s essay on cannibals. Cheyfitz offers a rather monologic reading of Montaigne’s text, one that stresses only those passages wherein European values are decentred, usually through indications that the cannibals are similar or superior to Europeans. ‘Montaigne himself, like a true cannibal, writes to equivocate: to blur the frontier between the proper and figurative meanings of an essential ethnological vocabulary’, but only by valorizing ‘an equivocal, or kinbased, relationship, where mastery is impossible’ (p. 155). It would seem that all becomes ‘equivocal’, even the obvious signs of mastery in Montaigne’s representation of the cannibals: warfare is described as the privileged activity in cannibal society, and only men engage in it, whereas women are restricted to the domestic sphere, notably the task of fixing the men’s drink. Furthermore, Montaigne praises the cannibals for a peculiarly knightly value, courage in battle, an ideological justification of feudal aristocracy. His essay definitely criticizes European culture, but the criticism is profoundly Eurocentric, unable to think the foreign except as alternately the negation and epitome of Europe, traced with a nostalgia for a seemingly less complicated medieval past. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that any encounter with a cultural other contains a surplus that speaks primarily to the self’s needs and interests. Indeed, it is this surplus that makes intelligible the ‘equivocal’ translator’s effort to bend the domestic culture toward a foreign likeness. Cheyfitz’s idea that translation can challenge target-language cultural values is an important contribution that merits further attention. Any attempt to develop this challenge, however, must include but go beyond the invention of dialogic translation strategies to consider the selection of foreign texts to be translated and the reception of translations by reviewers, scholars and teachers. Douglas Robinson’s book takes a step in this direction. He ambitiously seeks to reorient the practice of translation by unhinging it from the Christian Platonic

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tradition of translation theory. His critique of this ‘mainstream’ resembles Benjamin’s and Cheyfitz’s problematizing of literality:

Typically, indeed prescriptively, the single element to which texts have been reduced in Western translation norms is meaning, sense, the transcendental ‘content’ or ‘signified’ that is posited as standing above or beyond the actual spoken or written words and unifying them—unifying both the words of a single text (‘coherence’) and the corresponding words of two texts (‘equivalence’). (p. 141) Augustine is cited as the first of the ‘three great ideologues’ of this theory: translation in the service of Christian theology, modelled on Bibilical exegesis, communicating the Logos in transparent language. Luther’s Protestant revision proceeds from a proselytizing impulse, making translation at once propagandistic and nationalist: the Lutheran paradigm stresses the importance of translating into the everyday language of all men and women, not just of a small, scholarly (Latin- or jargon-speaking) elite, and seeks to control the everyday language of ordinary people through education in the mechanics and the ideology of reading and writing. (p. 67) Finally, in the romantic paradigm instituted by Goethe and others (Herder, Schleiermacher, etc.)…the translator remains a tool, but no longer of stable truth (as for Augustine) or of conversion (as for Luther); rather, of the imagination that the romantics imagine to be the messianic savior, the liberator from internal oppression. (p. 67) Here ‘perfect equivalence becomes the putative vehicle of salvation’, and the translator is the privileged agent through whom it is enacted, endowed now with the individualism and cultural elitism of romantic genius theory (pp. 68, xv). Relying mainly on Bahktin, Robinson wants to replace the Christian Platonic tradition with a ‘dialogic’ theory of translation, in which the translator exploits ‘the dialogized communicative (expressive and interpretive) possibilities of two or more speech communities’ (p. 108). Fully half of his book describes how a translator can engage in a dialogue with the source-language text and the target-language audience, developing strategies for the former based on six ‘master tropes’ (from ‘metaphor’ to ‘metalepsis’) and proposing eight ‘ethical’ positions toward the latter (‘introversion’, ‘conversion’, ‘subversion’, et al.). This summary stresses what seems to me to be of value in Robinson’s project. His reconstruction of the Christian Platonic tradition is reductive, as he is aware,


oversimplifying the ‘mainstream’ by ignoring the provocative deviations that appear even in its proponents (to which Benjamin is sensitive) and historicizing theoretical statements only in the most schematic ways (in contrast to Cheyfitz’s detailed historical narratives). But Robinson’s critique is none the less useful as a genealogy of contemporary translation theory and practice, where the prolific and influential Eugene Nida, for example, translation consultant to the American Bible Society, can be seen as the successor of Augustine and Luther. Similarly, Robinson’s taxonomic mania, as he is also aware, does not distinguish clearly among the tropes and ethical positions a translator can adopt, mainly because they are weakly illustrated with examples drawn mostly from his own limited experience as a translator and sometimes seem little more than thought experiments, not reflective of actual translation situations. Robinson’s willingness to revise foreign texts, for instance, by interpolating his own comments in his translations of them or by substituting his own very different terms for those used in existing translations, ignores the real legal constraints under which translators work and could get him sued for copyright infringement. All the same, conceiving the relations between source- and target-language texts and between translator and reader as a range of ‘turns’ makes clear the appropriative movement in translation and effectively militates against the trope and ethics that prevail in the Christian Platonic tradition— metaphor and introversion (or the translator’s self-effacement). Robinson’s book is unique in its desire to speak to translators, to ‘liberate’ them from this tradition by recommending alternative theories and practices. Unfortunately, it is also vitiated by theoretical assumptions that I have so far omitted from my description, but that are central to his arguments. Because the Christian Platonic tradition is shot through with mind/body dualism, Robinson argues that it is necessary to free ‘the body’ from the cultural and social restrictions on language use that have limited translation to the questionable pursuit of semantic equivalence. With a glance at ‘current neurophysiological theories’ (p. xvi) and a somewhat confused synthesis of William James and the later Wittgenstein, Robinson asserts that ‘meaning and its interpretation are motivated and guided by, feeling, or, more broadly, by body or somatic response; but that guidance is both contextually and personally variable (the flexibility and uniqueness of the individual speaking subject) and ideologically controlled (the shaping force of the speech community)’ (p. 10). The ‘body response’ is ‘a mixture of ideosomatic programming and unprogrammed (idiosomatic) response’ (p. 36). Translators need ‘to find the rotten spots in the floor of Western ideology and crash through to new experience, to deprogrammed idiosomatic experience’ (p. 64). At times, Robinson seems to realize that ‘nobody can break free, nobody can shake off the ideosomatic programming that makes frustration seem inevitable’ (p. 63), and that translators should rather see their work as an intervention into an ideological cultural struggle, requiring a different ‘theory’ in order ‘to dismantle the old restrictive theories and to free ourselves to engage people and ideas situationally’ (p. 119). More often than not, however, he assumes the existence of ‘an unprogrammed experience, an unpredestined truth’ at the ‘idiosomatic’ level (p. 249) and therefore advises translators to ‘learn to feel what you do when you translate’, to stop ‘allowing translation theorists and teachers to direct your attention away from your own somatic sense of appropriateness into the abstract realm of rules and structures’ (p. 34). ‘I want to insist on some tiny hidden guarantee of individuality, of uniqueness,

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maybe even of autonomy’ (p. 87). In the end, Robinson replaces a Christian Platonic metaphysics with a metaphysics of the body, a biological mysticism, equally transcendental and assimilable to the individualism, nationalism and imperialism that variously characterize the tradition he criticizes. The worst consequence of Robinson’s biologism is his recommendation that translators abandon cognition for intuition. This contradicts the assumption on which much of his book is based, that translators are ideosomatically programmed to follow the principles of the Christian Platonic tradition, which is to say that these principles are now being applied intuitively. Valorizing intuition is a reactionary move that discourages precisely what is urgently needed today—critical reflection on the conditions of translation by translators, among others. English-language translators will begin to contest, not just their own marginality, but the global domination of Anglo-American culture in which they are implicated, only when they are theoretically equipped to evaluate the cultural materials and procedures at their disposal vis-à-vis the social situations where they do their work. The more sophisticated attention that translation is receiving in the academy can certainly illuminate its real cultural political costs, hitherto unperceived by translators and readers alike. The question that remains, however, is whether this attention can move translators toward a more progressive rethinking of their work. Temple University, Philadelphia

WILLY MALEY

• Richard Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 260 pp., £25.00 (hardback), £9.99 (paperback) As a critic who is concerned first and foremost with the ways in which Ireland is read, written about, and represented, I was grateful to have the opportunity to review a book which takes a key figure in Irish cultural politics as its subjectmatter.1 As a playwright who is committed to the kind of political theatre— probing rather than polemical—for which Brian Friel is known, I was looking forward to learning something about the stagecraft that separates script from performance.2 I was ultimately disappointed both as a reviewer and as a dramatist. Pine’s book is divided into three sections, ‘Private conversation’, ‘Public address’ and ‘Politics’, and much of what is wrong with his methodology can be gauged from the arbitrary way in which the text is parcelled out. The politics of private and public address, the dialectic between the two, is ignored or overlooked. Instead we are left with an unsatisfying polarization. Pine is not unaware of the problems implicit in his neat compartmentalization, and he asks in the ‘Introduction’ ‘Are these “privacies”…anything more than ghosts within our public personae?’ (p. 3). This initial display of doubt does not exorcise these ghosts, nor does it deter Pine from constructing his text in a way that deprives Friel, a writer who transgresses and traverses such metaphysical divisions as public and private, of some of his sophistication. Pine commits acts of privacy and piracy which come back to haunt him at the end of the book. The most decisive aspect of Pine’s presentation of Friel’s politics is the question of how Irish history is staged. This is where all sorts of issues revolving around the representation of violence and the violence of representation are touched upon only to exit stage left. One has the lingering suspicion that Friel’s confrontations with the misnamed ‘Irish Problem’ are more forthright than Pine will allow. Pine’s constant references to ‘post-imperial’ and ‘post-colonial’ Ireland begin to smack of an urgent desire to avoid any direct appraisal of the British Problem. Friel could be accused of no such prevarication. His linguistic violence does not quite square with Pine’s critical pacifism. At least one Irish historian has challenged Friel’s claim to be doing something different, as a dramatist, with historical material, from the reconstructions of professional historians. Hiram Morgan’s critique of Friel’s Making History (1988), a play about the life of Hugh O’Neill based largely on the bogus biography by Sean O’Faoláin, takes issue with the author’s naïve notion of what historians actually do:

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Friel may think that he is imparting new ideas about the writing of history to the theatre-going public but this is all old hat to the professional historian. Paradoxically or perversely, he is himself imposing a pattern on past events whilst criticising historians for their lack of integrity. Friel claims in the programme accompanying the play: ‘I have tried to be objective and faithful —after my artistic fashion—to the empirical method.’ By his own standards then he is writing a history; putting his own gloss on the past…Making History—is part of an historiographical tradition.3 Both Friel and Pine appear to be oblivious to the changing face of Irish historiography.4 My own feeling is that so-called Literary Theory, and New Historicism in particular, has to accept responsibility for misrepresenting both the history and the variety of historical criticism, as though all historiography was English and conservative until Stephen Greenblatt came along. Pine’s book is an exercise in self-fashioning as well as a framing of Friel. There are elements of autobiography in the short ‘Afterword’ which suggest that the susceptibility of early modern planters to become Hiberniores ipsis Hibernis5—more Irish than the Irish themselves—still persists in modern Ireland. Pine, an Englishman, finally emerges as a latter-day Edmund Spenser, denationalized, deracinated and displaced, pining for a home and a self: I have tried to reconcile my absence from post-imperial England with my strangeness in post-colonial Ireland: and to develop a voice which might adequately serve that predicament. To quote Yeats, I believe ‘I have found all myself’. (p. 230) One is tempted here to play the part of Devil’s advocate—or the role of Terry Eagleton—and ask what Pine’s voyage of self-discovery has to say to the young Irish squatters and homeless residents of London’s Cardboard City? Theirs is a different exile, a crueller displacement, and a greater loss. What Pine has produced, in the final analysis, is a highly entertaining biography, well written, well reasoned, and well referenced. Chapters 5 and 6, entitled ‘Plays of language’ and ‘A field day’, are especially reward ing, full of intriguing insights into the work and workings of Friel. This is above all a sympathetic account, if somewhat uncritical. There is a tendency to psychologize, and constantly to personalize the political when the reverse might have proved more intellectually engaging. If theoretically deficient, the book is none the less a useful guide to the career of a major Irish dramatist. At a time when an anglocentric theatrical establishment is calling for a return to the classics and berating the poverty of new writing, Pine’s book is a timely reminder of the richness and variety of Irish drama. Programme in Literary Linguistics, University of Strathclyde


NOTES 1 Work-in-progress includes Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds), English Alternatives: Representing Ireland, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 2 For a recent play dealing with anti-Irish racism in the West of Scotland during the Industrial Revolution, first performed at Mayfest 1991 and the Strathclyde Irish Festival, June 1991, see John and Willy Maley, Gallowglass: The Story of the Springburn Railway Murder of 1840 (Glasgow: Clyside Press, 1992). 3 Hiram Morgan, ‘Making history: a criticism and a manifesto’, Text & Context, 4 (1990), pp. 61–5; p. 62. 4 See for example Tom Dunne, ‘The “morbid anatomy” of Anglo-Ireland: new approaches in literary history’, Irish Economic and Social History, 14 (1987), pp. 71–9; Tom Dunne (ed.), The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence, Historical Studies, 16 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987). 5 On the colonial context of this metamorphosis see Art Cosgrove, ‘Hiberniores ipsis Hibernis’, in Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (eds), Studies in Irish History Presented to R.Dudley Edwards (Dublin: University College Dublin, 1979), pp. 1–14.

332

EDWARD NEILL

• Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds), Modern Literary Theory. A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 286 pp., £9.95 (paperback) This book has genuine claims to attention and offers itself as a serious rival to the (actually quite numerous) anthologies of its mode, ilk and genus. It provides brisk editorial introductions and brief, useful bibliographic aids as it moves about its priest-like task of selecting for the usual sections on ‘Saussure’, ‘Russian Formalism’, ‘Structuralism,’ ‘Althusserian Marxism’, ‘Reception Theory’ and ‘Aestheticism’. ‘The usual’ is intended to sound a warning note here, since it is of course essential for such topics to maintain a war with accepted wisdom, received ideas. Barthes was alert to the notion that in the very scene of his triumph, the defeat of the received idea, he was doomed to fail if, or even as, he succeeded, rather in the spirit of Robert Lowell’s ‘each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain.’ Paradoxa iself dries into doxa. Countering this, the anthology under review has added sections on ‘The Subject’, ‘Language nad Textuality’ and ‘Discourse and the Social’, which help to bring things up to date (or what was so at point of compilation). Here at any rate the Gallic triumvirate of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault still bestride this by no means narrow world, but, as Robert Young says, they do so as the names of problems rather than as the authors of doctrine. The theoretical ictus is finally here on language in its relation to ‘the sociocultural formation in which it appears, and hence to the exercise of power’, as an absolute roll-call of names from Bakhtin and Bennett to BhaBha and Said might serve to indicate. And all this is useful, with the final juddering exception of the last section, horribly entitled ‘Postmodernism/Postcriticism?’, which consists entirely of the thin rhetoric of Dick Hebdige as he flirts with the pop and fashion industries. ‘Radical chic’ used to be the name for this particular form of trahison, as indeed a passing swipe at Hebdige in a brilliantly effective polemic against Baudrillard by Christopher Norris (Textual Practice, 3, 3 (1989)) also served to indicate. There, in a nutshell, you have it. It’s just that a nutshell is a terribly inadequate receptacle in a case like this, with so many distinguished contestants with plausible claims to more than perfunctory notice, and about whom it is difficult to generalize. One might pick up the story with David Lodge on narratology. He always writes as a guest in the house of theory as a brilliantly concise summarizer and bricoleur type,

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and in relation to ‘realist fiction’ he plays Coleridge to Belsey’s Bentham, in J.S.Mill’s familiar idiom, using Hemingway’s ‘Cat in the Rain’ to considerable effect. Modest and perceptive after his fashion, he is perhaps the Dryden of theory, who makes some commentators impatient for a more overtly political motive, or nervous about what the apparent lack of one might appear to conceal. Barthes follows with his familiar defamiliarizing paper from the ‘Macksey and Donato’ conference of 1966 (since, even here, the Derrida sample is, yet again, ‘Structure, sign and play’ from The Structuralist Controversy, the Book of the Conference, we can either award an accolade for the most successful conference ever, or perhaps note grimly the difficulty of ‘recuperating’ Derrida for professing literarists (the propriety of the title of this book is very much in doubt). The ‘Marxist’ section rightly picks up Althusser’s unforgettable, if somewhat crude and apodictic account of ‘ideology’ and ‘interpellation’, well followed-up with Balibar and Macherey, although I wonder if their assault on the ‘bourgeois institution of literature’ doesn’t have the net result of giving aid and comfort to Debray’s ‘mediocracy’. Dr Terry Eagleton is then seen to assault Lawrence with this Althusserian weaponry. Brilliantly aggressive, if tendentious, in flushing out ideological contradiction in Lawrence, his account makes one wish for something in a subtler and, if one may hazard the phrase, more ‘recuperative’ style—or is this phrase unusable except as a pejorative label? In ‘Reader Theory’ Wolfgang Iser deals firmly with what Lawrence might have called the ‘classiosity’ of R.Ingarden, while himself remaining married to a certain hermeneutic complacency in a remorselessly unspecific invocation of ‘the text’ which might make some readers wish to intone the famous Wallace Stevens line ‘Where was it that one first heard of the truth? The the.’ Jauss, by contrast, talks turkey, especially in a culminating contrast of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Feydeau’s Fanny, which powerfully essays a rehabilitation of ‘historicism’ (a word admittedly difficult to deploy without insidious ambiguity). Elaine Showalter on ‘gynocritics’, a sound if predictable choice in the ‘Feminist’ section, wishes women authors to look beyond the kind of female writing figured in the pseudonym ‘Holme Lee’, but also Muriel Spark’s dismaying ‘select-apsychopath’ option (in The Driver’s Seat (1970)). But of course it is one thing for critique to postulate directions for creative writers to move in, another for those writers to comply (I have in mind the propriety rather than the possibility of compliance). The ‘Marxist-feminist collective’, also in this section, those anonymous semantic block-haulers, make pyramids of meaning about Jane Eyre, although one could imagine the less sympathetic murmuring Robert Lowell’s phrase about Merrill Moore’s sonnets—‘scattered pearls, some true’. Barthes, writing about ‘the death of the author’ in terms of the birth of the reader is already a ‘classic text’ which, in invoking J-P.Vernant on Greek tragedy, looks forward to Pêcheux, Bakhtin and Bennett in their sense of the ineluctably political struggle for meaning. In the section on ‘The Subject’, the editors helpfully mediate Lacan with Althusser, whom he influenced, but a sliver of Lacan is sometimes a little like an unsilvered mirror. Kristeva, again, is a good choice, but the sample chosen, an interview with Susan Sellers, perhaps not of the most cogent—a little Lacan-lookalike here and there, and perhaps slightly depressing in its use for literature as an anti-depressant. Colin McCabe familiarly assaults Classic Realism and


pursues his quest for contradictory ways of articulating reality into the reel world of Rosselini, while rightly defining the deep unradicality of a film like Klute. Catherine Belsey quotes the little-known Mary Astell to such good effect as to compel assent to the prima facie-ally startling claim that ‘it is not obvious that Swift belongs on an English syllabus if Astell does not’, in a musing which contrives to darken the culminating proposition that ‘women as subjects find a position in the discourses about them’. Then there’s Roland Barthes as born-again poststructuralist in work which itself achieves the ‘stereographic plurality’ in its ‘weave of signifiers’ it attributes to the ‘textuality’ it desiderates, although there may be an element of mystification which defers the differentiation ‘from work to text’ it postulates even as it seems magisterially to tease it out. Dr Terry Eagleton inter alios has taught us to tilt at morphologies of ‘formalism’ and ‘idealism’, and this perhaps cues a relatively unsympathetic response to the following items, in which J.Hillis Miller’s ‘American deconstruction’ enters into a ‘war embrace’, in Coleridge’s phrase, with Israeli critic Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan over the ‘figure’ in Henry James’s carpet. In fact this becomes so much more an ‘embrace’ than a ‘war’ as to be less a ‘Möbius strip’ (Miller uses this figure) than an intellectual beast with two backs, possibly a double helix. Of course, on what might be called a Glasperlenspiel level it is possible to enjoy and to admire the adroitness of the combatants here, as they weave in and out of structuralist and deconstructionist discourses. If the latest ‘phase’ of the book, labelled ‘Discourse and the Social’ asks most importunately for comment, Textual Practice readers will surely find the Bakhtin extract from ‘Discourse in the novel’ familiar enough. In the Tony Bennett article, the drift, strongly adumbrated in Formalism and Marxism, is perhaps, to traduce the Henry James phrase, that ‘really, reading relations stop nowhere’. The ‘text itself’, here distinguished by a plenitude of lack, has ‘no meanings that can be traduced’. Menocchio, a sixteenth-century miller hauled before the Inquisition for his belief that God and the Angels were the products of maggots emanating from some vast primordial cheese, had read the Bible in his fashion; at once lunatic and figural of much modern thinking, Menocchio makes sense of a kind which makes the most of Tony Bennett’s case, cogent as you read, which in retrospect can sound like a Pickwickian sense established en route to proving that the text has none. His communication here is consistent with the extract which follows (somewhat unadventurously lifted from Robert Young’s Untying the Text) to the effect that ‘one is “in the true” only by obeying the rules of a discursive policing which one has to reactivate in each of one’s discourses.’ In a follow-through of the Barthesian idea of the death of the author, he refers delightfully to the ‘author who is indeed perhaps a little fictitious’. I like this for its studied hesitation and lightness of touch. If the utterance does turn out to ‘hide a policeman with a club’, he must surely be in plain clothes: no intimations of a Foucauldian panopticon here, no custodial sentences in sight. Imperialism might be seen as, in intention at least, a kind of ‘last word’ in panopticons. It is interesting that this creditably ‘political’ selection begins with an extract from the resolutely apolitical Saussure (which the series of selections which follow might then be held, as it were, to ‘subtend’). Yet to speak of Homi BhaBha’s development here of theV. S.Naipaul concept of ‘mimic men’ is to speak of ‘differences without positive terms’, with colonialism as a ‘differential’ concept

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which ‘defers’ self-determination, in which ‘brothers under the skin’ are doomed endlessly to personate what might be called something completely simular which ‘purloins them from themselves’, in Tom Paine’s haunting phrase. Yet BhaBha might also have pursued the obvious corollary, that the ‘Mother Country’ is herself nothing if not a great nurse of ‘mimic men’. We are all mimic men now, it might be said. The final contribution of consequence here, by Edward Said, familiarly (but still uncomfortably) pursues a sense of ‘the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other’, and the charge is painfully pressed with reference to an inherent ‘democracy’ in the old New Criticism which is then played off against insinuations of arcane, involute practices in contemporary discourse. One might transpose this, perhaps illegitimately, into the complaint that there’s no pleasing some people: no sooner, you might say, has one tried to place one’s discourse ‘very exactly behind the limit of the doxa’ (received idea, general opinion, call it what you will), in Barthes’s slightly hackneyed phrasing, than one is promptly hit on the knuckles for doing so. Middlesex Polytechnic

MPALIVE-HANGSON MSISKA

• Pretexts: Studies in Literature and Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 1989), 95 pp. Editorial and Business Address: John Higgins and David Schalkwyk, University of Capetown, Private Bag, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa. There has been a growing interest in contemporary critical theory in Southern Africa as is evident from the general shift in the critical register of the wellestablished journals in the region. Thus the launching of Pretexts, a journal wholly devoted to the study of all signifying practices, by the department of English at the University of Capetown should be seen as a major step in the further development of literary and cultural theory in Southern Africa. The first issue, ‘Boundaries and Race’, displays a wide-ranging engagement with diverse positions in critical theory. Three of the articles focus on the questions of race and colonialism. In his essay, ‘Race as science, race as language’, Gareth Cornwell examines the genealogy of race in the manner of Michel Foucault’s critique in The Birth of the Clinic. He argues that the so-called science of race, with its roots in the nineteenth century, is far from being the kind of objective science that it purports to be: it is a language and as such it partakes of the metaphoricity and arbitrariness characteristic of all languages. Cornwell offers a helpful summary of the current state of the debate on the subject and also demonstrates the value of Foucauldian epistemological strategies in the study of race and colonialism. John Noyes’s essay, ‘The capture of space’ uses aspects of the theoretical framework developed by Deleuze and Guattari in order to interrogate the ideological implications of an episode in a short story by the colonial German writer, Hans Grimm. He shows how, by employing the devices of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the colonist ensures that the ‘native’ is transformed into and inscribed in Western writing. Taking the theme further, Njabulo Ndebele’s essay, ‘Redefining relevance’, presents us with a science of resistance based on the strategic use of the norms of literary production. He argues that hitherto Black South African literature has been dominated by a paradigm of protest which is no longer supported by the objective conditions of the struggle in the country. He calls for a literature which probes beneath the surface of oppression and represents the invisible and perhaps more insidious forms of ideological interpellation. The other three articles address the question of gender and women’s emancipation. Christine Barsby rereads Olive Schreiner in order to reconcile the contradictions which characterize her work. She shows how the radicalism of Schreiner’s Woman and Labour is compromised by a valorization of women’s

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domestic life and the acceptance of the inevitability of women’s dependency on men in her fiction. She argues that the ambivalence in Schreiner’s work has to do with a more profound contradiction in feminism itself: the opposition between the assertion of female separateness on the one hand and of equality/similarity on the other. In her opinion, these are not competing claims but rather parts of a bifurcated united discourse. The question of female separateness is the central concern of Peter Horn’s exercise in écriture féminine. Writing in a style similar to that of Hélène Cixous, Horn argues that the attempt to produce a distinctly female language necessarily uses phallocentric terms such as those of authority and position. As far as he is concerned, the only way a genuine form of gender egalitarianism can be produced is by founding a mode of symbolic representation which speaks of diversity, transaction, and non-positionality. The question of transcending gender differences informs Ingrid Fiske’s meditation on the desirability of putting the personal lyric at the service of political and cultural emancipation in South Africa. She is critical of the extent to which women have been marginalized in both the radical and conservative discourses within the country. She argues for increased participation of women in the production of this genre as well as for the transformation of the genre into a political discourse. The review of Denis Riley’s ‘Am I that Name: Feminism and the Category of “Women in History”’ (Macmillan, 1988) by Chesca Long-Innes provides a useful summary of the dominant and unresolved questions on women and feminism. John Higgins offers a thoughtful and interrogative tribute to Raymond Williams which succinctly traces the major landmarks in Williams’s intellectual development. Excerpts from the interview Higgins had with him in 1987 bring out the warm and domestic side of ‘our best man’, as Edward Thompson once described him, and those from Stuart Hall, Juliet Mitchell, Edward Said and Cornel West speak of the silences in Williams’s work: Juliet Mitchell laments the absence of women in his fictional work, West complains about Williams’s Eurocentrism and Stuart Hall cryptically describes Williams’s work as embodying ‘a number of cultural and political tensions’. The tribute is accompanied by an excellent bibliography which should prove helpful to anyone interested in reading up on one of the greatest thinkers on the British Left this century. Nearly all the articles are thought-provoking. One could query the reification of race into a dehistoricized mode of signification to which Cornwell’s complex argument succumbs in the final analysis; that John Noyes’s use of Deleuze and Guattari turns specific and historically determinate moments of colonialism into elements of a universal psychoanalytical mental geography. Indeed, one could accuse Njabulo Ndebele of merely replacing one inflexible aesthetic paradigm with another. It may also be wondered whether the imitation of écriture féminine by Peter Horn, a man, is not in fact a near parody of the legitimate attempt by women to provide other ways of speaking. That such questions and many others can be raised about the contributions bespeaks the overall boldness and intellectual liveliness of the first issue of Pretexts. Pretexts represents an impressive attempt to offer a forum for the development of an egalitarian cultural arbitrary in Southern Africa. Bath College of Higher Education

DAVID AMIGONI

• Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, edited by Robin Gable, Introduction by Robin Blackburn (London: Verso 1989), xxiii+334 pp., £34.95 (hardback), £11.95 (paperback) In an interview with Raymond Williams conducted in 1987, which forms the final piece of this collection, Terry Eagleton the interviewer quips that it would have been nice to have marked Williams’s retirement from the chair of drama at Cambridge (1983) not with the presentation of a gold clock, but with a socialist society. Williams of course died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1988 still without, we can only assume, having received his gold clock. His failure to be presented with the more desirable gift proposed by Eagleton remains depressingly evident and closed to speculation. However, in the face of a decade that has seemed to bring little but reversal and disillusionment for socialist ideas and practices, Williams posthumously offers Resources of Hope in a volume of previously uncollected writings spanning the thirty years from 1958 (the year that Culture and Society was published) to 1987. Where did Williams see signs of hopefulness, and by which analytical processes did he strive to enable others to see them? The style of Williams’s analysis can be considered by thinking about the multiple signifieds of the word that figures in the title of the book: ‘resources’. For it became Williams’s methodological startingpoint to focus on a keyword whose meaning has been inflected differently by the many language formations that have appropriated it. Accordingly these essays invite us to think about the way in which the concept of resourcefulness figures in a range of social, economic and political domains: they focus on the resources derived from class and community alignments; the struggle over the material resources from which such structures of feeling have been produced (see for instance the essay of 1985, ‘Mining the meaning: key words in the Miners Strike’); and the organizational resources of British Labour and socialist politics. At the same time, it is characteristic that Williams should seek to draw attention to a powerful semantic constant in a word; if ‘resources’ means the materials, ideas and practices that are either residually present or emerging to satisfy demands, desires and needs, then what Williams sees in all cultural formations is this residual or emergent potential to develop a socialist society. As such the resources of hope for a socialist future that Williams wants us to recognize reside more in past and present forms of culture and politics than they do in utopia.

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In an introduction to the collection, Robin Blackburn indicates that these writings should be seen as a ‘complement’ to Politics and Letters (1979), Problems in Culture and Materialism (1980), and Writing in Society (1984). However, unlike the remarkable Politics and Letters, there is less debate here of literature and literary theory, and more on questions of political strategy. Of course, it would be wrong to try to fit Williams’s work into such boxes, for as the essays ‘The writer: commitment and alignment’, and ‘Art: freedom as duty’ suggest, he saw no absolute dividing line between matters of artistic and theoretical speculation and questions of political strategy. However, as the editor Robin Gable admits, there is a tendency for the contents of the volume to be—for Williams at any rate—rather narrowly focused, and to become a bit repetitive. Gable’s rather apologetic justification for this—that Williams was addressing his message to different audiences through different mediums for thirty years—can in fact be turned positively into one of the most interesting features of the collection; namely, the way in which Williams was able to transform the texture of his discourse depending on his audience. It is not only through the 1961 essay ‘Communications and community’ that Williams demonstrates an understanding of communicative politics that would be relevant to the broadcasting revolution of the late 1980s; the way in which an assumed socialist audience is instructed as to its ‘duties’ contrasts with the mode of address to an audience of more uncertain composition, who are courted through Williams’s more gentle autobiographical mode. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that the message remains untransformed; indeed the editor has for the most part thoughtfully arranged the writings in sections. (Though the interesting essay on the politics of the Arts Council is an exception: it stands in its own section, out on a limb.) These sections are designed to suggest a developmental dynamic in Williams’s thought, constantly redefining the relationship between culture, democracy and socialism in the face of new historical circumstances. The collection begins with the 1958 essay ‘Culture is ordinary’ which condenses some of the thinking that emerged from Culture and Society: that ‘culture’ is not simply confined to the practices given by its restricted definition—‘the arts and learning’—but is rather a whole way of life; that in being a whole way of life, a culture is traversed by tensions between traditional and creative forces; and that the relationship between this tension has to be negotiated by the voices that urge movement in different directions—‘this need for many voices is a condition of the cultural health of any complex society’ (p. 89). In the section entitled ‘Solidarity and Commitment’, Williams makes clear the direction in which his own voice urged movement; the essay ‘“You’re a Marxist, aren’t you?”’ (1975) indicates the extent to which his voice increasingly aligned itself with the radical European left, in contrast to the earlier essays where Marx was part of a triumvirate consisting also of Leavis and Eliot. From these essays on the nature of cultural alignment, the opening of one piece in particular is characteristic of Williams’s perception of the position from which the work of intellectual elaboration begins; in ‘Why do I demonstrate?’, Williams records his presence at the 1968 Easter Monday demonstration against nuclear weapons and Vietnam ‘from the point of view of a participant, not an observer’ (p. 59). In projecting his voice as that of a participant, Williams is renouncing the look-no-strings tradition of English social commentary, exemplified by Orwell, whose textual voice was always on the spot, but coming from an observer who was in no way a committed or co-operative part of it.


Williams’s point is that to possess a culturally aligned voice is necessarily both to urge movement and to seek to participate in a democratic process. However, to seek to participate has not historically guaranteed participation on equal terms. Securing a foothold in this democratic process has involved the working class and its communities in a long revolution whose aim has been to elevate excluded voices into a position where they could argue for the direction in which society should move. It is in this sense that the essays in the section entitled ‘Beyond Labourism’ are concerned with the concept and practice of a Labour movement, rather than just a set of bureaucratic institutions (p. 142). Although Williams recognizes the fundamental historic importance of the Labour movement to the long revolution, the point of his critical analysis is that it has ceased to be a movement in the original directional sense of the term; rather, it has become a set of institutions that have reconciled themselves to the existing capitalist order. Regenerating Labour as a movement will involve creating an education and research base (not a market research base) which should work to ‘change the ways in which we see the world’ (p. 150) by elaborating and disseminating new theoretical perspectives and ideas. This solution is articulated in essays from as far apart as the midsixties and the early eighties, and it distances Williams from a still pervasive ideology of Labourist pragmatism that has denigrated ideas as a diversion from the hard-nosed electoral struggle for ‘real power’, an opposition that can be broken down if Williams’s definition of ‘ideas’— ‘representations of things people are actually doing or feel themselves prevented from doing’—is accepted (p. 77). In the section entitled ‘The Challenge of the New Social Movements’, a set of essays are grouped which individually explore the constituencies supporting nuclear disarmament, the ecological and green movement, and the various progressive nationalist and local movements arguing for political decentralization. In so far as these movements are striving to promote a politics of change, they represent challenges to the once hegemonic radicalism of the Labour movement; what is more, they are genuine movements that have gathered collective interests around ideas that are seeking to reorganize social values. Williams responds positively to these movements which traditional Labourism has greeted sometimes with wariness, and sometimes with marked hostility. It is in the relationship between these essays dealing with the challenge of the new social movements, and the group of essays that form the final section of the book, that the significance of Resources of Hope as a contemporary textual intervention comes to the fore. The final essays seek to redefine the nature of the agencies that will promote a socialist democracy, and the processes by which such a culture might emerge. For Williams, the long revolution promises the gradual development of a complex form of democratic socialism, envisioned as the emergence of a polity that will enable debate between different but equally evaluated cultural voices over questions of the allocation of material resources and the direction of society. As such, the new social movements represent models of decentralized participatory democracy that might advance this development. To lean towards these new social movements is however necessarily to redefine the traditional social and political goals of the nation-based Left; these may be broadly defined as the rationalization of the economy and the expansion of production, effected and supported by a political command structure which will redistribute fairly the resulting wealth throughout a class-divided society. Faith in the universal rationality of this strategy has to be

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relinquished, and in its place, acceptance of a strategy founded on difference and multiple perspectives. In the important essays ‘Towards many socialisms’, ‘Walking backwards into the future’ (1985) and ‘Hesitations before socialism’ (1986), Williams admits that a democratic socialist culture will have to recognize the existence of multiple rationalities as a principle of its very formation. It is here that the cultural problematic that Resources of Hope addresses can be felt most acutely. It is only in ‘The Practice of Possibility’, the interview which closes the volume, that this cultural problematic explicitly emerges as ‘postmodernist fragmentation’, here named and identified by the interviewer Terry Eagleton (p. 317). From this basis, it is tempting to see the problem of postmodernity as being met by Resources of Hope in a style which some readings of Williams’s work have taken to be the distinctive value of his cultural project. One such reading of Williams’s cultural project has been advanced in a recent essay by Graham Pechey.1 Pechey argues in detail that the first phase of Williams’s work (Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961)) crucially kept alive the unresolved dialogue between the Scrutiny Movement and English Marxism, left over from the 1930s; more tentatively, he concludes by seeing in Marxism and Literature (1977) the English reenactment of a continental dialogue between structuralism and neo-Hegelian Marxism. The interview that Eagleton conducts with Williams could be said to be framed by such a contextual reading of Williams’s work; in that Williams’s position, with its consistently suspicious attitude towards closed systems and its call for a socialism respecting plurality and difference, promises to act as a foundation for a fruitful dialogue between a postmodern political theory and a more traditional commitment to the politics of Marxist class-analysis. Although it is tempting to see Resources of Hope initiating such a dialogue, this perspective should be taken on board critically. It has to be asked whether Williams’s project can advance this dialogue; and it could be argued that Williams is speaking a different discourse altogether to that of postmodernism. It is useful to begin by registering some distinctions between Williams’s strategies for handling the diversification of cultural politics that has been in momentum since the late 1960s, and strategies proposed by celebrants of the postmodern condition. As Michael Ryan has argued in his survey of postmodernist political theory, theorists such as Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri stress that in any alliance between the new social movements, difference within unity should be maintained, and they see ‘no reason why different movements should be collapsible into each other in order to work together’.2 By contrast, it could be argued that Williams is often seeking to collapse proliferating perspectives into a unified way of seeing; it is significant that he should stress as extraordinary the moment ‘when we come to that wonderful although at first terrible realization…that what we are seeing is what a lot of other people have seen, that is an extraordinary experience’ (p. 87). This impulse towards a unification of perspectives can lead to assertions that postmodern discourse might feel uncomfortable with. To take one example, the question of racial difference is only briefly acknowledged in order to be explained away; to say that there are presently a ‘further set of issues now simplified to “race”, which in a socialist perspective are actually problems of practical social relations and of culture’ (p. 294) is in one sense accurate, but at the same time difficult to reconcile with those cultural analysts who, while being materialists and socialists, still seek to reserve a complex significance for


racial difference which is not completely overdetermined and explained by master categories. This is a significant divergence of strategy which can be traced to a very fundamental theoretical gulf between Williams’s project and the discourse of postmodernist cultural analysis. For Williams is a philosophical and historical realist. Thus, if as Ryan asserts ‘postmodernism as a movement has discovered…that what were thought to be effects in the classic theory of representation can be causes’,3 then for Williams ‘good rhetoric’ can still be ‘bad intelligence’ (p. 141). That is to say, Williams’s analytical posture always claims to have in its sight an objective, nondiscursive material order that no amount of discourse or representation can structurally transform. It follows from this that Williams is an historical realist as defined by Gregor McLennan in Marxism and the Methodologies of History (1981); history is certainly complex and multidimensional, but it is still knowable because it is a unitary process structured by the logic of capitalism. In the light of this, one might ask how many rationalities Williams would have been prepared to admit were really coexisting in his complex world view if pushed; in any event, Williams’s sense of history is nothing like a Foucauldian genealogy of chance and random events. In pointing to this fundamental gulf, I am suggesting that the promise of dialogue between Williams and the discourse of postmodernist analysis is likely to end in frustration; in any event Williams’s part in the dialogue would most likely be confined to the role of the sceptical antagonist. The answers to questions of political strategy broached by Resources of Hope would have a limited role to play in furthering a dialogue between Marxist analysis and postmodernist cultural theory, especially where the latter sought to emerge as a coherent basis for political intervention, and a credible agent of political change. The critical insights developed in Resources of Hope are however pertinent to socialist polemical engagements with the problem of postmodernity. If socialist journals such as Marxism Today have embraced the postmodern condition, seen it as an irrepressible logic of the new times, and determined to make it work for socialism through the strategy of a politics of identity, then Williams critically develops some of the potential dangers attached to this move. It is conceivable that a politics of identity might very well become organ ized around Williams’s ambivalent concept of ‘mobile privatization’, as sketched in the essay ‘Problems of the coming period’ (1983) (pp. 171–2). ‘Mobile privatization’ envisages a politics founded on a private subjectivity, which comes to identify and express itself with and through the limits of a private domestic space; this private space, stocked with consumer products representing a lifestyle, is mobile, and can be moved with the subject wherever s/he travels. Williams is not dismissive of this phenomenon, which, he admits, offers to people a striking sense of freedom. But this freedom comes at a price, because ‘mobile privatization’ implies a hostility to interferences and interventions from Others who threaten to disrupt its patterns of consumption and mobility. A postmodern politics of identity might hold in store some resources of hope; equally though, it might just mean that a lot of individually owned gold clocks will pile up behind closed doors, and now and again move to the out-of-season Costa Brava with their retired owners when the cost of privatized

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electricity drives them from their mantelpieces in the winter. And we still might be waiting for the presentation of our socialist society. Sunderland Polytechnic

NOTES 1 Graham Pechey, ‘Scrutiny, English Marxism and the work of Raymond Williams’, Literature and History, 11, 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 65–76. 2 Michael Ryan, ‘Postmodern politics’, Theory, Culture and Society, 5 (1988), pp. 559–76; p. 573. 3 ibid., p. 560.

KEVIN MILLS

• Regina Schwartz (ed.), The Book and the Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 303 pp., £35.00 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback) • Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), xiii+129 pp. n.p. • Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xii+ 269 pp., £27.50 (hardback) I Regina Schwartz, in her introduction to The Book and the Text, suggests that this collection of essays offers ‘the complementary strain’ of interpretive work to that found in Alter and Kermode’s Literary Guide to the Bible, ‘for its essays are deliberately engaged in a dialogue between currents in contemporary theory’. The critical approaches represented vary considerably, almost to the extent of rendering their proximity a kind of category mistake. James C.Nohrnberg’s essay focuses attention on its biblical text, as does Mary Ann Tolbert’s. Others are concerned with political, cultural and theoretical issues as exemplified by biblical problematics. There is a long and impressive essay by Meir Sternberg which treats of narrative chronology and the techniques of handling time employed by biblical writers. Schwartz’s introduction ranges over the history of Bible interpretation, but ponders rabbinic exegesis at more length than any other hermeneutic school. A brief quotation makes clear why this should be so: In rabbinic exegesis the impulse was less to delimit meanings than to justify their poliferation. (p. 5) ‘Justifying proliferation’ could well have been the subtitle of this volume with its plurality of interpretive concerns and strategies. Justification is sought along two axes: the diachronic and the synchronic. Little need be said about the contemporary scene in terms of the profusion of techniques of reading and interpreting texts, and in this regard the book bears witness to itself and the

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legitimacy of its own project. Historically such ‘simultaneity of conflicting interpretations’ is justified by the rabbinic precedent, especially the debates between the houses of Hillel and Shammai: the former taught the precepts of the latter as well as their own, conflicting, interpretations. This proliferation of meanings sits uneasily in its allotted place as complement to a work that offers itself as guide to the Bible. Totalization of any kind is not to be expected where Eagleton and Ricoeur sit together like Hillel and Shammai. It is difficult to imagine how the product of such conflict can offer a ‘complementary strain’, a term which, suggesting as it does some kind of completion, undermines the plurivocity which both justifies and would be justified by the project. In his essay ‘Interpretative narrative’ Paul Ricoeur deals with narrative techniques as they can be read with regard to ‘the hermeneutical problem of the collusion between the inevitable divine plan and the unpredictability of human contingency’ (p. 239). A narrative technique, being a species of just such unpredictable human contingency, represents an ordering mythos which places the narrator in a position of authority, textually, as the creator of a divine plan. The hermeneutics of narrative begin to peer down into an abyss of self-authentication that Ricoeur places within the ungroundable depths of narratives about God. (Who comes first, the author or the Author?) Terry Eagleton’s essay (‘J.L.Austin and the Book of Jonah’) immediately precedes Ricoeur’s. Here the question is in reverse. He reads the book of Jonah as human plan confronted with divine contingency. God, in Eagleton’s joke, is the source of meaninglessness—an excess of signifying practices that bewilders the prophet with the tricks of unreferring signs. But this takes place within human contingency, within, that is, the invisible borders of a narrative technique. That technique is interpretive. Ricoeur wants to ask how a narrative can also be an interpretation of its own content. He uses Mark’s gospel, reading the relationship between divine plan and human contingency in that between ‘narrativized kerygma’ and ‘kerygmatized narrative’. He sees Mark’s kerygma in the phrase ‘the Son of Man had to be betrayed’ (divine plan), and the story of ‘denial, abandonment and flight’ as the narrative configuration of that kerygma (human contingency). This can be applied to the book of Jonah. Jonah may have set out, as Eagleton says, knowing full well that there was no prospect of seeing Nineveh go up in smoke, and God may have known that he knew, but the word was both instituting and preventive of judgement. In terms of kerygma we have to replace judgement with repentance. The story (again one of denial, abandonment and flight) is a narrative configuration that raises a question mark against human contingency rather than divine plan. That is what is at stake in both of these essays. There is a question of history here, or at least of historiography, that the tendentiousness of Eagleton’s irreverence renders joky and anecdotal. It is just this problematic that a Ricoeurian hermeneutic is able to take on by questioning the relationship between kerygma and narrative. Homologues of this relationship are found throughout the book, and may be traceable to Spinoza’s distinction between truth and meaning. It is this distinction that makes Jonah’s flight, as a function of the narrative, meaningful in itself. The narrative is, for the reader, more important than the message borne by the prophet, for that message is given little attention in the text. What Eagleton perceives as the futility of the book folds back into


meaningfulness precisely along this line. Eagleton’s reading is wilfully blind to the historical imperatives that inform Jonah’s action and his anger. Nineveh, the capital of the then gathering Assyrian empire, was bound to be the focus of a desire for God to act in judgement. Jonah’s anger can, therefore, be read as political as much as theological. The hermeneutic that seeks to understand the possibility of an interpretation of narrative interpretation must have this political perspective which Eagleton can simply ignore. Jonah’s action is interpretive of the prophetic message, and in the narration the authorial voice can keep this interpretation open by separating its kerygma from the message borne by Jonah, by keeping reader and Ninevites apart. We have already problematized this distinction by placing narrative technique within human contingency as it writes the divine plan. The repression of the ideology of narrativity returns as a neurosis in the justification of proliferation—the excess of signification that spells meaninglessness. The placing together of essays like those discussed may only serve to demonstrate the inadequacy of certain kinds of approach when compared to certain others, as the example of Hillel and Shammai indicates. Without some kind of ascendancy being established proliferation is at the expense of the sacrifice of meaning.

II Meaning is the price that Boyarin is not prepared to pay. He aims to delineate a new theory of midrash which will reveal it as an interpretive discourse working within certain constraints. These constraints are not imported but are seen to be set up by the interpreted text itself. The Bible is read as ‘self-glossing text’, a heterogeneous fabric, the intertextuality of which provides rich possibilities for the production of meaning. Meaning is preserved (from a freeplay which would render it untenable) by ideology: the majority of the community which holds cultural hegemony controls interpretation. To put it another way: correctness of interpretation is a function of the ideology of the interpretive community. (pp. 35–6) Both the production of meaning by intertextuality and its preservation by ideology are problematical as Boyarin writes them. Let us take first the problem of ideology as an interpretive safeguard. Boyarin contends that the consensus ruled midrashic interpretation. This consensus must refer to a majority within the interpretive community (itself a restricted body). Within the community there is a political expedient which not only democratizes the processes of reading but also textualizes politics: Our story is the story of a community in which interpretation was the central, definitive act of religion and therefore of culture. Misinterpretation (from the perspective of that culture’s practice) was perhaps analogous to the

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violation of ritual and taboo in other cultures and led therefore to the removal of the misinterpreter from the society. (p. 36) The cultural hegemony of consensus interpretation is seen here to be a kind of totalizing of the text, both of the Bible and the culture in which interpretation took place as the ‘central, definitive act’. Interpretation becomes a political shibboleth which, far from showing midrash ‘as a liberating force from the tyranny of “correct interpretation”’ (p. 37) gives it a potentially oppressive force. Nor is this force disarmed by the inversion of authorial intention as controlling voice in interpretation: R.Eliezer, the one who literally has God on his side, was excommunicated and exiled for his insistence that the Author controls the reading of his text, while R.Yehoshua, the hermeneutic radical, ended up by inevitably supporting the institutional claim over meaning and reading-practice. (p. 36) Boyarin’s claim here is that the Torah’s survival depended upon its being ‘renewed’ by interpretive practice and kept free from final statements of Authorial intent. Such appeals to intent would threaten the continuing of interpretation, which, as ‘central, definitive act of religion and therefore of culture’ must be perpetuated for that religion and culture to survive. Where the author is God, the affirmation of consensus rule in matters of meaning must involve the defeat of God by His text, and this is exactly what Boyarin shows in the Mekilta (midrash on Exodus from the Tannaitic period, and Boyarin’s working text). But the removal (or bracketing) of one author(ity) is not necessarily a liberating move, as many coups and revolutions have shown. The problem remains one of limiting freeplay, and where authorial intention is disallowed then interpretive hegemony, however ‘democratic’, takes its place and excludes the misreader. Ideology becomes a substitute theology. Boyarin describes a dialectic of interpretation and ideology in which midrashic readings are both constrained by and formative of the cultural practice. This does not loosen the hold of the dominant but legitimizes its claim, renders it inexorable. We are faced then with the interweaving of originary text and its interpretant. The constraint upon meaning has been given political valency, but Boyarin does not allow the political expedient to keep unchecked control. If God has been defeated by His own text, that text is called upon to regulate itself by means of intertextual strategies. The book of Exodus is interpreted in the Mekilta by a thematizing of its interpretation in the ‘prophets and writings’. In some jouissant close-readings Boyarin builds a convincing case for understanding the Bible intertextually. Indeed, the technique of midrash, as exemplified by the Mekilta, is claimed to be a doubling of the heterogeneity of the Biblical text, and a revelation of its ‘self-glossing’ quality. The midrash is held up against the higher criticism as a way of reading more amenable to postmodern sensibilities, and is claimed to


‘provide support for the project of deconstructing [that] metaphysics’ (p. 37). In his introduction Boyarin places his work as undertaken in ‘the theoretical context’ of what he calls ‘the philosophical project of Jacques Derrida’ (p. x). (In a note Boyarin also thanks Derrida for reading ‘a very early version’.) It is not clear how Boyarin perceives the relation between midrash and deconstruction, or in what way intertextual strategies can be used to unsettle metaphysics. If it simply means that midrash offers ‘An alternative tradition to that of Europe’s metaphysics’ (p. 37), then the simple opposition between Judaic and Greco-Christian thought is being made to bear the weight of deconstruction entirely. It seems implausible that Derridean deconstruction should acknowledge ‘An alternative tradition’, which is a reification of the dialectical process that produced ‘European metaphysics’ out of JudeoChristian-Greek thought, into a binary opposition: ‘that metaphysics’ v. ‘an alternative tradition’. It can never be feasible to oppose Judaic thought to GrecoChristian thought as if there were two entirely separate traditions. Christian hermeneutics emerged as much from Judaic as from Greek antecedents. Nor does Boyarin escape from the ‘logocentrism’ which he ascribes to metaphysical interpretation of texts. In a recent article in Critical Inquiry he defines hermeneutics

ideally a practice in which the original moments of the unmediated vision of God’s presence can be recovered.1 (My emphasis) and proceeds to cite an example of midrash which conforms to this model —‘recovering the originary moment of Revelation itself’. The recovery of presence, of God’s presence, is ultimately an appeal to a transcendental signified that will end the play of signification. Thus Derrida: I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified.2 Boyarin, in seeking to delineate a theory of midrash which will place it among postmodern theories of reading, has located the vexed question of interpretation in the conflict between reason and freeplay. In attempting to limit the damage of this agonistic he has turned back towards a metaphysics and reinstituted the claim of reason over the reading process. Midrash offers a plurivocal and heterogeneous discourse but only within the limits of an ideology. Justifying those limits returns the interpreter to logocentrism and a theology of the text. Here it is not proliferation which requires justification but its control. As we move to Kevin Hart’s The Trespass of the Sign, the question is still one of limiting proliferation and of justifying such limits. III Hart wants to transgress a limit and justify its replacement. The limit in question is the circle drawn around deconstruction to keep it from theology. More

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particularly Hart is concerned to ‘bring deconstruction into conversation with Christian theology’ (p. x). He argues that deconstruction is not anti-Christian, despite its framing in Spivak’s ‘Translator’s preface’ to the English edition of Of Grammatology, and insists that ‘deconstruction’s target is metaphysics, not theology as such’ (p. x). The three parts which constitute The Trespass of the Sign involve three stages of an argument towards a ‘non-metaphysical theology’ (bold claim!). The work begins by confronting the atheism of the majority of deconstructive writing, while the subsequent two parts involve examinations of the scope and status of deconstruction, and the delineation of what is dubbed ‘the economy of mysticism’. The question of deconstruction and atheism locates a continuing dilemma for the practitioners of poststructuralist theory: does deconstruc tion involve a system of values to which its advocates must subscribe? Hart’s answer; predictably, is ‘no’. He states baldly: Upon my reading deconstruction possesses no assertive power; it is, quite simply, a way of seeing how a particular edifice, a general theory or a specific text, is constituted and deconstituted. (p. 75) This both establishes and calls into question the project of overstepping the boundaries of what has, so far, passed for ‘deconstruction’. Derrida has issued the caveat that ‘All sentences of the type “deconstruction is x” or “deconstruction is not x”, a priori, miss the point.’3 (It is tempting to add that to say ‘deconstruction is quite simply x’ is to miss the point by an even wider margin.) The argument here is directed against the totalizing of deconstruction by Derrida’s deployment of it. The uses to which Derrida puts deconstruction are neither here nor there in terms of its structural potentialities: A theory of supplementation, deconstruction is itself always open to be supplemented: it cannot be formalised without remainder. (p. 117) So we cannot expect to find reassuring restrictions upon the uses of deconstruction in Derrida’s writing, or anywhere else. Again the problem seems to be one of the imposition of limits. Hart is keen to disclaim that he is advocating a free-for-all of signifying practices under the aegis of the deconstructive angel. He does not want us to think that ‘deconstruction can be pressed into the service of any position’ (p. 67; my emphasis). What keeps misappropriation at bay, however, is less than clear. Appeal is made to Paul de Man’s complaint about the misrepresentation of deconstruction and what he refers to as ‘aberrations’, but this is not sufficient to set up an exclusion zone around it. Resorting to a distinction between the ‘word’ deconstruction and the ‘concept’ deconstruction Hart concludes:


the word ‘deconstruction’ at once describes a particular process of selfsubversion within an interpretation of a text and names the philosophical position which seeks to identify and trace this process. (p. 70) This simply begs the question: what can this ‘philosophical position’ be if such a critique can be successfully lodged against any text’s interpretant? The political dimension of deconstructive practice restates the question as one of choice. Hart has argued that deconstruction is not totalized by Derrida’s deployment of it, and cannot be said to be structurally atheistic. He admits that Derrida’s use of deconstruction can be read as atheistic, but also connects this orientation with the latter’s selection of the texts subjected to close-reading: if Derrida deliberately elects to exempt Marxism from deconstruction at the present time for local reasons of French politics, he is engaging in a choice of some sort and is plainly not attending to the apparent necessity of the ‘lines of force’ which doubtless occur in the text of Marx and in the Leninist reading of Marx. What interests me here is not so much the choice that Derrida makes…but at what level the issue of choice takes root in deconstruction. (pp. 167–8) What is in question here is the framing of deconstruction. Hart is concerned to unsettle the sediment of a certain chosen reaction, or set of reactions, by pointing out that the experimentation with intertextuality has not been exhaustive. Joyce has been made to unsettle Husserl, and Nietzsche Rousseau, but ‘we could examine the following couples: St Augustine and St Gregory Nazianzus; Aquinas and Eckhart; Descartes and Pascal; Kant and Hamann; Hegel and Kierkegaard’ (p. 168). The choice is tactical and, we are told, depends upon one’s understanding of philosophy: Derrida’s deconstruction is in terms of the oppositions philosophy/ literature and philosophy/politics; ours, however, is by way of philosophy/theology. (p. 170) Some of the theological uses to which deconstruction has been put are effectively called into question as Hart attempts to show that it is not open to arbitrary appropriation, but what actually emerges from this argument is not deconstruction as a ‘philosophical position’ so much as deconstruction as a methodology which has been misunderstood. This, however, does not limit its usage once ‘properly’ understood, even if we grant, for argument’s sake, a ‘proper’ understanding of deconstruction is a legitimate possibility. It is difficult to do other than de Man does (according to Hart’s reading) in conflating the views that deconstruction is identified by its various usages, and that all usages are equally valid (p. 67). Hart

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tries to keep these views apart by legitimating a deconstruction along the philosophy/theology axis. He wishes to remove a tactical, perceived constraint and justify reclosing the gap around his own project without allowing a damaging haemorrhage of power from deconstructive practice. Working with ‘the economy of mysticism’ (which he defines as the desire traced in commentaries on mysticism to establish a link between negative theology, allegorical hermeneutic and mystical experience), Hart seeks to place a blind-spot in Derrida’s account of negative theology in his reading of Bataille on Hegel.4 Bataille understands Hegel as restricting the scope of negativity by failing to see it as general as well as restricted economy, but falls back within the dialectic through a failure to think the relation that holds between what Hegel excludes and what enables the dialectic—he simply overturns its values. Just as Bataille convicts Hegel, and Derrida Bataille, so Hart wants to convict Derrida, in that he sees the latter as reading Pseudo-Dionysius through Aquinas—a reading which, it is argued, is inadequate precisely in terms of the distinction between positive and negative theologies. Negative theology, for Hart, is not simply a restricted economy framed by positive theology, which is how, he claims, Derrida sees it. It is also a general economy which underwrites positive theology. Negative theology, then, ‘performs the deconstruction of positive theology’. One could take this as an example of a deconstructive discourse in that a simple binary opposition between negative and positive theologies is shown to be undone by demonstrating that the positive is a modification of a prior radical negative. It may also be acknowledged that Hart has shown, in this limited sense, that negative theology is a form of deconstruction, but this does not realy illumine the relationship between deconstruction, theology and philosophy. As Rorty says in his exchange with Norris: ‘Practically anything can be seen, with a bit of imagination and contrivance, as a special case of practically anything else.’5 The Rorty/Norris exchange is of particular moment here, in fact, because the status of argument in deconstruction, which they contest, is evoked specifically by Hart in his examination of the status and scope of deconstruction. He sees Norris as maintaining that deconstruction proceeds ‘by more or less agreed rules of argumentation’, and Rorty as claiming the opposite (p. 115). Between these two ‘Derrida understands both modes of criticism, the grounded and the groundless, to be irreducibly entwined’ (p. 115). Despite Hart’s insistence that this is contrary to both Rorty and Norris there must be a sense in which the force of a critical imperative confronts the question of ‘ungrounded’ discourse and will not ‘entwine’ with it. That an exchange takes place at all presupposes some kind of ground, and Rorty takes on Norris ‘by more or less agreed rules of argumentation’. Moreover, in the delineating of a radical negativity Hart further problematizes Rorty’s view of Derridean deconstruction. Thus Rorty: A philosopher cannot, as Derrida does, set his face against totalization, insist that the possibilities of recontextualization are boundless, and nonetheless offer transcendental arguments. For how could he hope to grasp the conditions of possibility of all possible contexts? What context would he be putting the potential infinity of contexts in when he did so? How can Derrida’s ‘trace’, ‘différance’, and the rest of what Gasché calls ‘infrastructures’


be more than the vacuous nonexplanations characteristic of a negative theology?6 The so-called ‘vacuous nonexplanations’ are precisely what Hart is calling upon to place a non-metaphysical theology in relation to deconstruction, and in order to do so he is mounting a kind of transcendental argument: what are the conditions of possibility for ‘a theology that resists the illusions of metaphysics’? Those conditions of possibility are inescapably bound up with the justifying of a new boundary around deconstructive practice which enfolds that theology but will not have been erased by it. IV For both Boyarin and Hart deconstruction seems to represent the trace of a new orthodoxy. Discourses of faith are struggling for access to its privileged places as if, historically, the moment of their exclusion is a vanishing point without eschatological fulfilment. The desire for a share of the text, for a handhold on the sliding surface of poststructuralist debate, is forcing a rereading of the Book, a translation into text. This is not without a sense of loss. A displacement of theological discourse by means of the techniques of intertextuality, or under the sign of a radical negativity, will not shift poststructuralism into calibration with the economies of faith. Nor will those economies be shifted. The agonistic of textual practices, arising out of the exigent pluralism of multiplying theories of language, has won us the right to play for appropriation, a right which is calling forth these justifications of faith. Schwartz and the theorists of proliferation have not only presented us with a conflict of interpretations but have placed the processes of meaning in jeopardy. Meaning is only held in place by faith because language itself is only held in place by faith. The metaphor of currency is apposite. In ‘White mythology’7 Derrida calls to remembrance the process of effacement at work in language, wearing tokens into valued objects, erasing the conventional imprint that gives value to expressions until those expressions seem to be of value in their own right, rather than of worth only within a given economy. This changes the nature of linguistic faith from a matter of deliberate and conscious acceptance for the sake of communication to the violence of ideology. Being aware of the process of effacement is one thing, expending the currency in a linguistic potlatch is quite another. What Boyarin and Hart do is to join the discourses of faith to those of suspicion, presumably as an act of reappropriation, forgetting, it seems, that their currency has no purchase upon the text other than by virtue of the faith thus effaced. Faith will not be justified by being reread within the economies of poststructuralism. Faith will not be justified. Faith justifies. Itself. University of Wales College of Cardiff

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NOTES 1 Daniel Boyarin, The eye in the Torah: ocular desire in midrashic hermeneutic’, Critical Inquiry, 16, 3 (1990), pp. 532–50. 2 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.C.Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese friend’, in Derrida and Differance, ed. David Wood (University of Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985). 4 Jacques Derrida, ‘From restricted to general economy’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 251–77. 5 Richard Rorty, ‘Two meanings of “logocentrism”: a reply to Norris’, in R.W.Dasenbrock (ed.), Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 204–16. 6 ibid. 7 Jacques Derrida, ‘White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 207–71.

TINA KRONTIRIS

• Janet Todd (ed.), Dictionary of British Women Writers (London: Routledge, 1989), 762 pp., £45.00 (hardback) • Maureen Bell, George Parfitt and Simon Shepherd (eds), A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers 1580–1720 (London: Harvester, 1990), 298 pp., £55.00, (hardback) • Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: Batsford, 1990), 1231 pp., £35. 00 (hardback) Until very recently, the lack of information sources on women writers was strongly felt. The situation was especially deplorable for the earlier periods, since the standard reference volumes (bibliographic, biographical, literary) rarely included women who wrote before the nineteenth century. The Dictionary of National Biography, for example, either excludes women authors, or more usually places them under the names of their fathers, husbands and brothers. So a modern researcher in women’s writing before, say, Jane Austen has had to use detective skills and methods in order to establish even basic facts. Information has often turned up in the most unlikely places. Things have been better for the twentieth century, but even here coverage is elliptical since women who wrote in uncanonical genres have been largely left out. In the last ten years much has been done by dedicated feminists to fill this great gap. The first wave of work in this area (1982–5) produced three dictionaries—The Macmillan Dictionary of Women’s Biography (1982), edited by Jennifer Uglow and Frances Hinton; The Europa Biographical Dictionary of British Women (1983), edited by Anne Crawford et al.; and Dictionary of British and American Women Writers (1985), edited by Janet Todd. A second, more recent wave of productivity in the field has brought out the three volumes under review here. The Dictionary of British Women Writers (DBWW), Janet Todd’s second major reference work, apparently grew out of the need created by her first volume, which covered a wider ground and therefore left many gaps. As its title indicates, DBWW focuses on women writers who were born or were intellectually active in Britain, and covers a chronological span from the middle ages to modern times. It includes mainly women who wrote and published in traditional genres, though it also gives space to several who dealt in more marginal forms like the letter of advice or the polemical pamphlet. It is very comprehensive for the authors it treats. Each of the

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445-plus entries, written by some recognized scholar, accomplishes mainly these tasks: classifies the author according to the genres she wrote in; gives a short biographical account, including a list of the works produced; offers a brief discussion of the works in relation to themes, genres and the author’s life; and finally provides a relatively complete list of primary and secondary sources. The comprehensiveness of the entries usually makes them quite long. The average entry length is about 800 words but it rises to as much as 2,500 for well-known and prolific authors like George Eliot. The information offered in each entry is the result of fresh research, and relatively updated, considering the delays in the publication process nowadays. Overall, it is an impressive piece of work: scholarly, well researched, and informative. Like any good reference volume, it provides the basic tools for further study. The bibliographic lists of sources at the end of each entry will undoubtedly prove invaluable to students and teachers alike. Yet, however appreciative one feels of the hard work that made this dictionary possible, one cannot at the same time overlook its tendency to reproduce in some ways certain underlying principles of traditional dictionaries. The interpretive/analytical type essay that DBWW employs often leads to subjective evaluation of a work, and leaves great room for accommodating the biases of the contributor. Each contributor stresses necessarily those works she has read, or those she believes to be superior in merit, leaving the impression (through sheer space and emphasis) that the other works the author produced are not equally important. Such is the case with Tyler’s Mirrour and Mary Sidney’s Psalms. Because the contributor discounts translation as copy work and considers it inferior, she spends very little time on the Psalms, a very important work that shows precisely the Countess’s skill as a poet in comparison to her brother, and elaborates instead on a small conventional pastoral poem, the ‘Dialogue between Two Shepherds’, which, in my opinion, is a very insignificant composition in comparison. What this kind of interpretation does is to frame or limit the reader’s view—by guiding her/him into certain works—rather than to suggest possible directions of enquiry. Furthermore, the entry essays are written by a wide diversity of contributors who express a variety of political and theoretical positions. While this diversity could be seen as a healthy sign, reflecting the divergent theories and feminisms currently in practice, in this volume it creates inconsistency, despite Todd’s careful editing. Because they involve interpretation, the essay entries in DBWW are not simply (nor do they purport to be) descriptive accounts, but they express views and opinions. This leads to various subjective evaluations, not to be desired in a dictionary. The inconsistency is seen mainly in the amount of contextualizing done. Sometimes the various sections of the entry are schematically divided, while in other cases everything is interwoven, reflecting a more theoretically informed approach. These kinds of problems may be connected to an overall lack of theoretical positioning. Employing apparently the strategy of accommodation (i.e. of various feminist views), the editor avoids clear definition of her project. In her brief introduction she states her principle of selection but carefully excludes a statement on methodology. Yet too sharp a theoretical focus does not guarantee that all will go well. The second volume under review here, Bell, Parfitt and Shepherd’s A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers 1580–1720 (BDEWW), is a very different type of dictionary from Todd’s or indeed from other dictionaries. BDEWW’s innovation


is first in its inclusiveness: it encompasses women who wrote anything at all, regardless of length or type of writing, and devotes equal space to all, at least theoretically. Focusing on the years 1580–1720 and especially on the period of the Civil War and the Interregnum, it includes many writers of testimonies, prophesies, letters and petitions, as well as writers in more orthodox genres. The second innovation, a stated challenge to the traditional dictionary form and literary canon, is in the format. Unlike other dictionaries, BDEWW presents the dictionary section as only one part of the entire volume, which consists of: an introduction that spells out the scope and methodology; the dictionary section, with alphabetically arranged, relatively short entries (c. 200 words); and seven critical appendices, which situate the dictionary material historically and comment on specific categories of women’s writing (e.g. letters, petitions, prophesies) or discuss related topics (e.g. the role of men as ‘gate-keepers’, women in the book trade). Viewed as a study of seventeenth-century women, BDEWW is certainly a welcome contribution to women’s intellectual history, especially in an area which was obviously in need of investigation. Indeed the special value of the dictionary is in presenting new information. Many of the women it includes would be unknown not only to the general reader but also to many feminist historians. By bringing to light the diverse experiences of women in a period of intense religious and political questioning, BDEWW helps to demonstrate that when given the opportunity women both do and act, as the editors correctly remark in their critical appendices. But viewed as a reference volume, an aid to further research, BDEWW is unfortunately lacking. References for individual writers are unsystem atic or altogether missing. With occasional exceptions (as in the entries for Esther Kello and Queen Anne of England), neither location of manuscript nor critical sources, where they exist, are given. Descriptions of women’s works are also scarce, so one cannot always tell what they are about. The reason for this is, as the editors admit, that they have not looked at every work they cite. Furthermore, there is a very limited use of the rich research already available for the years before 1640. These are practical problems which show that the demands of the job were greater than the time and energy afforded by the editors, who recognize this but seem to make a virtue of their shortcomings by regarding them as work for future researchers. There are still a couple of other, more complex problems. One has to do with the presentation of the material: sometimes it appears to have been slanted. Facts have been slightly bent, to make women appear more rebellious or subversive than they actually were. This is a methodological problem present to varying degrees in all three volumes, but it is perhaps more noticeable in this one. For example, on Elizabeth Cary (and it is Cary, not Carew/Carey), BDEWW says that ‘she separated from her husband in 1625, when she announced her conversion to Catholicism’, when in fact it was her husband who found out about her secret act, isolated her, and cut off all supplies; she wished to be reconciled to him. Sometimes the slanted view results from the editors’ policy of presenting women ‘naked’, without information about their men. As a corrective measure, this policy may be good practice. But in an age when women were unfortunately defined by men in almost every area, such practice sometimes leads to misrepresentation. Finally, there is a problem, I find, which relates to the editors’ definition of writing and their selection principle. In their introduction they declare: ‘In our definition of “writing” we have been unashamedly and consistently inclusive. Any

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writing by a woman merits her entry in the dictionary or appendices. This means in some cases the inclusion of a woman whose only writing is a single surviving manuscript letter’ (p. xiv). Citing Raymond Williams, they go on to state that the modern definition of ‘literary’ is a post-eighteenth-century product and hence inapplicable to the seventeenth century. The editors are surely right to refuse to include only women who wrote in the privileged forms. One shouldn’t have to justify the fact that women expressed themselves in genres that were accessible to them or more appropriate for their experiences. But to eliminate all criteria of selection is to conflate the issues of relevance and status. Especially when compiling a dictionary and when space is a limiting factor, the sensible thing to do, it seems, is to ask how useful and relevant the encountered material is. A ‘single surviving manuscript letter’ can indeed be quite relevant, but it is not apparent to me how it is relevant if only its title and the name of its author are given. Nor is it apparent how authorship is established. Elizabeth Albemarle, for example, is listed as a writer in this dictionary, but did she write the court case that concerned her and her husband? Mary Aston, we are told, ‘wrote a letter to Gertrude ASTON in Louvain on the death of her aunt Winefrid THIMELBY’. Does this information alone entitle her to being in a dictionary of women writers? The Feminist Companion to Literature in English combines the virtues of the above two volumes while avoiding their pitfalls. It is undoubtedly the most comprehensive, most informative, best-researched dictionary of its kind to date. Wide in scope, the Companion spreads over a large area and in many directions, covering a variety of writings, backgrounds, nationalities, races, and classes. Chronologically it extends from the middle ages to the present (c. 1980), while geographically it encompasses nearly all parts of the English-speaking world, including the Caribbean and the South Pacific. In its some 400 entries it includes women who wrote in English and some who wrote in other languages and whose work was translated into English. Theoretically, the Companion is rightly based on the idea that women have historically possessed much less power and space than men, that they have been excluded, crowded out or dismissed from areas where they have made a contribution, and that a reference work on women is not simply a form of cataloguing but a reconstitution of the relations of many factors (race, class, gender, religion, etc.) which have affected the living conditions and literary output of women. The editors are aware of ‘writing about knowledge and power, and history, and against omission and exclusion’ (p. viii). Practically, the Companion manages to put into compact form the collective value of much feminist research of recent years while combining usefulness and relevance with wide representation. The entries are biographically cast. Each entry sketches the specific woman author’s life, emphasizing events, relationships, facts and ideas which are important in understanding her position both as a female subject and as a writer. Within each entry the specific author’s literary works are cited and briefly described where they occur chronologically in the biographical narrative. In addition to the name entries, which constitute the bulk of the dictionary, there are also some forty topic entries (institutions, events, genres, etc.) which are important to understanding women’s writing historically. Apart from giving visual evidence to the idea of contextualizing women’s writing, these also prove very useful in providing the reader with a


convenient source of information for topics s/he would find differently treated in other reference sources, if at all. The Companion reflects an awareness of space both as a site of representation (visibility power) and as practical limitation. Its attempt to strike a balance between fairness and economy is apparent. Thus while it repudiates traditional criteria of selection, it does not indiscriminately include every woman who used pen and paper but makes evident each writer’s contribution or interesting aspects. It privileges the unknown by wisely cutting short the space usually accorded to famous women writers like Austen or the Brontës, who have been canonized and have received much critical commentary. It keeps the same maximum for all (famous and unknown alike) and cites secondary sources only for those who have been just recently tapped. Thus the reader is spared a long list of sources which could easily be found in a card catalogue, and space is saved for primary and secondary sources on women who have been left in obscurity. (Jane Austen gets no references, for example, while two or three are given for Mary Wroth.) Consideration of space combines with usefulness, something one senses in this volume frequently. The location of rare material (books or manuscripts) at the conclusion of each entry, and the chronological list of names at the end of the volume are likely to prove particularly useful to researchers interested in individual writers or chronological periods. The entries are compactly written, giving the most relevant information. The works of each author are briefly described, if they are unknown, so that the reader gets some idea of what they are about, and updated bibliographic references are given at the conclusion of each entry for completely unknown or less known authors. One of the delightful aspects of an international dictionary like the Companion is that it invites interesting comparisons between women writers of different historical periods and cultures. (In this respect an index of authors by country would have been very useful.) The Companion’s international character also helps to dispel the monopolistic impression that English studies means mainly England and America. Especially now that geographical borders have opened, particularly but not solely in Europe, the need for broadening the boundaries of a dictionary as well as the definitions of native speaking and writing is imperative. What becomes clear from these volumes is that oppressive conditions (cultural, economic, familial) profoundly influenced the sort of writing women produced. The influence takes various forms and, seen diachronically, it changes direction, depending on the economic, political and religious situation as well as on the theoretical status of women and the family in the specific historical period. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there seems to be a great tendency for women to go into religious writing. This is not surprising. Religion was considered a ‘modest’ subject, dissociated from sexuality, and devotion to God could legitimate the female voice. In its dissident or sectarian form, religion could and did provide an opportunity for women to participate in meaningful collective action (meetings, petitions, demonstrations) that was normally absent from their lives. In later centuries women depend much more on secular marginal genres—the memoir, the diary, the letter, the travelogue, the children’s story. Apparently these forms, which are largely private and appropriate for treating daily, personal experiences, are especially suitable to the lives of women. The diary is a case in point. As a private form, it has been especially appropriate for the woman’s intense

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family experiences (such as child births, child deaths, marital conflicts). Indeed a woman’s intellec tual development is historically inextricable from her family experience. The diary has given the woman an opportunity to reflect on and recreate her experiences within the limited space of the home and in the midst of family turmoils, without requiring her to break cultural barriers. The same can be said of the memoir, which has also been a favourite form among women. What is particularly noteworthy here is the fact that women sometimes appropriate private forms to express views on public events. Writers like Dorothy Sunderland and Mary Montague used the private letter extensively for socio-political commentary. (The relationship between men’s public essay in the eighteenth century and women’s private letters would be an interesting study.) Yet what also becomes clear when one looks at the vast volume of women’s work is that women did act. They did not remain passive victims of patriarchal indoctrination. And as socio-economic conditions changed and new opportunities turned up in the course of history (in areas like journalism and travelling), women took advantage of these. That women did act does not necessarily mean that they directly opposed or challenged cultural norms. It is in fact reductionist, I believe, to bend the facts, however slightly, so as to attribute an oppositional character to their actions. The cultural construction of subjectivity is a complex process; and what is more interesting, because more telling, than the story of a rebellious woman is the way women acted by trying to maintain the cultural values they inherited and possibly internalized alongside their own personal desire for self-expression. An analysis of this attempt, which often takes the form of conflict, can reveal many things about culture, subjectivity, and desire. Aristotle University, Thessaloniki

STEVEN CONNOR

• Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), x +246 pp. n.p. Tobin Siebers’ The Ethics of Criticism may be said to have anticipated the extraordinary ‘ethical turn’ which has taken place over the last few years in contemporary criticism and theory. Everywhere, it seems, questions of value and normativity are reasserting themselves with the notorious force of the return of the repressed. Such a move is anticipated in Foucault’s late work on ethics, and is currently embodied in neo-pragma tist work such as that of Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Contingencies of Value, in the concern with questions of normative force in a work such as J.Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading, in the renewed concern with ethics and value in contemporary feminism and Marxism and in the oddly persistent concern with justice which characterizes the work of Jean-François Lyotard during the 1980s.1 Tobin Siebers attempts to analyse the (often unacknowledged) force of the ethical as it stubbornly persists in contemporary linguistic criticism, in the New Criticism which precedes and partially legitimates it, in the work of Derrida and de Man, of Nietzsche and René Girard, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in feminism and in contemporary ‘nuclear criticism’. Siebers’ claim that all these forms of criticism are ethical, whether they know it or not, resembles and obviously to some degree jumps together with the more regularly advanced claim that all interpretation is political. Both ethics and politics have to do with questions of goodness, justice and right and wrong actions. But for Siebers the ethical is to be distinguished from the political in that it inevitably coheres round and depends upon a notion of human character, or, to put it another way, upon a notion of the subject. Siebers asks us to take seriously the derivation of the word ‘ethics’ from the Greek ethos (which he translates as ‘moral character’), since he believes that ethical questions are always questions of goodness and right for the moral individual. All criticism, even that criticism which attempts to deny the integrity of the subject, has ethical orientations and investments which imply some ideal of ethical character. One of the most ingenious demonstrations of this that Siebers offers is his account of the norm of poetic autonomy maintained by the New Criticism. At first sight, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s doctrine of the intentional fallacy might seem like an attempt to deprive texts of their origins in individual authorial acts, and to deprive authors of authority over their texts, thereby removing the ethical category of the

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subject from critical discussion. But Siebers believes that this view fails to remark the deeper ethical purpose of the cutting of the link between author and text in New Criticism, namely the desire to protect the author from that kind of aggressive misreading that would falsely identify him or her entirely with his or her work. The non-ethical ideal of poetic autonomy therefore conceals an ethical impulse to protect the sanctity of the authorial person against that ‘“judicial” criticism in which the poet is judged not merely for eccentricities but for a faulty character and criminal intentions’ (p. 49). This is an unconventional view of the New Criticism, to put it mildly, and Siebers seems for a moment almost to surprise himself with it; but he nevertheless succeeds in offering substance to his account of the deep bond between anti-intentionalist theories of the text and the protection of the authorial person from interpretative violence, or the violence of interpretation as such. Thus he can conclude that ‘the ideal of poetic autonomy is fused inextricably with the ethics of human autonomy’ (p. 66). In the end, however, the problem with New Criticism is the same as that of much contemporary literary theory, namely that it conceals its ethical impulses from itself too efficiently. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it displaces those impulses into the question of language. Siebers’ analysis of the way in which this works is extremely acute. In one sense, the replacement of intending human subjects with the objective facts of language actually betrays the ethical impulse, since this does indeed banish from critical consideration the human subject who is supposed to be protected. In another sense, however, this replacement is really only a displacement, since, in New Critical writing, language itself is steadily given the characteristics (one might almost say, the character) of human agency and intentionality. But the partition of the realms of literature and the human for which this anthropomorphism of language acts as partial compensation means that the ethics of this kind of criticism remain ghostly, residual and ineffectual, since, as Siebers believes, ‘the ethics of criticism cannot endure when it abandons the world of human meaning and questioning’ (p. 68). Hence the ethical mistaking of the New Criticism, in the dual sense of a mistake in the sphere of ethics, and a mistake driven by an ethical motivation. Siebers has already shown in his second chapter, ‘The ethics of criticism’ how this particular mistake is repeated in poststructuralism and a certain variety of deconstructive theory. Julia Kristeva’s influential defence of the ‘ethics of linguistics’ in her essay of that title, refuses every system of ethics based upon the coercive gathering and maintenance of social identity and embraces a linguistic ethics that is attentive to the oblique, the deranged and the heterogeneous.2 Siebers associates Kristeva’s espousal of the disaggregative forces of language with the deconstructive ethics of J.Hillis Miller. In The Ethics of Reading, Miller argues for the ethical necessity of surrendering to the compulsive self-disorderings of literary language. Where Kristeva sees the choice of poetic language as a choice of freedom over false necessity. Miller represents ethical reading as an alternative form of necessity, that linguistic imperative that compels attention to the self-unravelling forces of textuality. But both Kristeva and Miller choose language, whether as emancipation or coercion, over ethics as traditionally constituted, and it is this which strikes Siebers as dangerous. Both strategies create ‘an isolated linguistic morality [which] robs ethical theory of its social context and renders ethics ineffectual’ (p. 39). This shared characteristic of poststructuralist and New Critical theories of poetic language is, for Siebers, the most recent recurrence of a tendency within Western


thought since Plato to separate ethics and (literary) language. Brilliantly, Siebers shows how the segregation of literature from politics instanced allegorically in the Platonic expulsion of poets from the ideal republic inaugurates a pattern of thought which continues to influence even the most committedly anti-Platonic thinking. Siebers argues, for example, that Kant’s attempts in his third Critique to heal the breach between the aesthetic and the moral depend upon first partitioning the aesthetic from the moral. Siebers brings out well the paradox that results from Kant’s attempt to maintain simultaneously the incommensurability and commensurability of the moral and aesthetic realms. The ethical force of the aesthetic for Kant lies in the analogy between aesthetic disinterest and moral freedom, but the theory of the disinterestedness of the aesthetic continues to require that the aesthetic be held apart from the ethical. The aesthetic can only be ethical in so far as it refuses all partialities and ethical interests altogether, which means that the very form of the hypothetical correlation between the ethical and the aesthetic proposed by Kant is what forbids that correlation. As Siebers puts it: ‘Literature represents the image and conditions of possibility for the ethical, but it must be isolated from morality in practice to remain the image of the ethical’ (p. 26). In a curious way, therefore, Kant’s work both repeats and reverses the Platonic expulsion of the aesthetic from politics. Where Plato expels poetry because of its delinquent refusal to knuckle under to the ethicopolitical demands of the state, Kant identifies the moral superiority of poetry in its very autonomy from the ethicopolitical. Thus, where Plato’s political criticism expels poetry, for Kant, ‘literary criticism must expel morality to guarantee the ethical purity of literature’ (p. 26). In Siebers’ view, this inverted Platonism has been the bequest of Kantian aesthetics to critical theory. One of the most important legatees of this Romantic claim about the ethical superiority of the aesthetic over the ethical is Nietzsche, who accepts the Platonic doctrine that literature is immoral, but finds in this precisely its strength. This yields another of the elegantly concocted conundrums which characterize Siebers’ style of reasoning: for Nietzsche, ‘literature expresses, by virtue of its immorality, the only truth possible, that is, the untruth of ethical language. Thus literature frees itself from ethics at last by discounting ethics as mere literature’ (p. 31). Although they resist and invert the values attached to ethics and aesthetics, therefore, both Kant and Nietzsche disastrously preserve and repeat the Platonic split between the aesthetic and the ethical. For Siebers, those forms of modernist and postmodernist theory which maintain the Romantic belief in the potent marginality of literature and the aesthetic (and here he would presumably include New Criticism and poststructuralism), depend upon just such a split. Against this, Siebers urges throughout his book the role of criticism in mediating ethics and aesthetics, life and literature:

Literary criticism best evolves by installing itself in the space between literature and life not to hold them apart, but to bridge the gap. The conflicts that arise between life and literature, and between rival interpretations, comprise the dialogue in which it is the business of criticism to engage. Criticism properly understood means an end to the Platonic and Romantic belief in the marginality of literature, for it accepts the task of

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examining to what extent literature and life contribute to the nature and knowledge of each other. (p. 42) This is not to imply that Siebers sees any possibility of easy reconcili ation of these two realms. The reason for this is given early on in the second chapter of The Ethics of Criticism, in some densely argued pages whose import only really grows clear as the book develops. There, Siebers argues against the idea of the autonomy of literature from ethics, and the concomitant idea that literary criticism ought never itself to be subordinated to narrowly ethical concerns. The tried and tested way to counter this Romantic and modernist argument is to assert the identity of the ethical and aesthetic realms, or the subordination of the aesthetic to the ethical; in both cases, the critic who persists in treating literature as autonomous is condemned as immoral. But Siebers resists this Platonic strategy of expulsion, and adopts instead a much subtler line of argument. The aesthetic cannot be reduced or assimilated to the ethical, but the aesthetic impulse to be free of the narrow codes and doxas of the ethical is nevertheless always itself an ethical impulse; since the idea of freedom is a central and enduring part of the ethical tradition, the desire to be free of the ethical tradition can only ever arise from and preserve that tradition. The criticism that aligns itself with the Romantic view of literature and art as independent is twisted into a similar helix of reaction and return: To understand the crisis of criticism, one must ask from what criticism seeks to be liberated. If it seeks freedom from ethics, what is it about ethics that is so disturbing? And if modern ethics exists to guarantee freedom, equality, and nonviolence, should not ethics pit itself against the very elements that literary criticism finds disturbing in ethics? It grows apparent that the critical act does not lead to an exit from ethics at all. (p. 17) The extraordinary and powerful insight that this leads to, the idea that ‘the rebellion of criticism against ethics belongs to the struggle of ethics with itself’, powers Siebers’ analysis throughout the rest of his book, which aims to show simultaneously the irreducible force and ethical responsibility of criticism of any kind, and the dangers of evading or denying this force and responsibility. This dual analysis requires Siebers to focus closely on the relation between criticism and violence. This is probably the moment to identify the rather unusual view of the ethical which governs the whole of Siebers’ argument: namely, that ethics is concerned principally, not with the aspiration towards the good life, nor with the attainment of justice, but rather with the avoidance of violence. Siebers shows throughout his account the remarkable persistence of this conscientious objection to violence throughout modern criticism, an objection which often takes the form of a suspicion of the violence embodied within ethical norms and systems themselves. The problem Siebers identifies in a number of different areas of


contemporary critical theory, especially deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism and ‘nuclear criticism’, is that of how criticism is to cope with the forms of violence apparently involved in every instance of the critical act, and how criticism is to abate all its dominative impulses to detail, dissever and discriminate, without in the process denying itself. The first of these investigations concerns the question of the violence of writing, as explored in Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss and in Derrida’s accounts of them both in Of Grammatology. Siebers’ argument is that Derrida and Lévi-Strauss are profoundly ethical writers because, like Rousseau, they deplore the violence inherent in writing. But Derrida has a particular problem in this respect, since he also seems not to believe that there was ever any time, ever any culture, which existed prior to this violent writing. For Rousseau and perhaps also for Lévi-Strauss, the belief in primal non-violence is what guarantees the aspiration towards civilized non-violence, via the social contract. Derrida’s suspicion is that this view of the primitive is in fact deeply ethnocentric, and consequently is itself a kind of violence. But Derrida’s disbelief in primal non-violence fatally compromises the ethics of deconstruction, which then denies itself any ethical reason for preferring, or prospect of achieving, equality rather than violence. In effect, Siebers is asking the question, if there is never any innocence, then what does violence violate in the first place? However, it is plain to Siebers, as it is increasingly to many, that deconstruction is nevertheless largely, perhaps even constitutively, an ethics of writing. Siebers believes that this has to do with a residual and unanalysed Rousseauism in Derrida’s own writing; with the fact, for example, that Derrida continues to depend covertly upon the idea of writing as a violence inflicted upon some originary innocence: Despite his attempts to break free of Rousseau’s hold by disrupting the nature—culture opposition, Derrida cannot escape the sensation that writing is violent simply because it creates differences. To some extent, therefore, the nature-culture division remains intact, even though Derrida refuses to mark the origin of its separation. (pp. 81–2) One of the best insights of Siebers’ book concerns the utopian impulse enacted in Derrida’s theory of différance. If it is impossible to anticipate or escape the originary violence of writing—the violence, that is to say, of spacing, articulation and the incising of differences—then différance holds out the prospect of an infinite deterrence of the violence of difference. Siebers believes that it is just this desire for the maintenance of difference under conditions of equality which marks Derrida as at bottom still a Rousseauesque thinker. The theory of différance is ‘a return of Rousseau’s belief in the tendency of nature to guarantee the equality of individual differences [and]…revives Rousseau’s hypothesis at the very point where his radical disciples have most threatened its existence’ (p. 97). But I think that the Rousseauism insisted on here is in fact Siebers’ own, rather than Derrida’s. It is Siebers who assumes the impossibility of an ethical thought which is not founded upon the actuality of primal peace or solidarity. Derrida’s

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position is indeed distinct from Rousseau’s on this question, but this does not invalidate the possibility of an ethics of non-violence. For why should anyone need to believe in the actuality of natural equality in order to validate the desire to bring it about, or to lessen infinitely the effects of violence? Derrida makes it clear in his essay on Levinas that he believes that there is no possibility of eliminating violence altogether, since the very ethical relation between beings must always embody a kind of virtual violence; ‘within history…’, he writes, ‘every philosophy of nonviolence can only choose the lesser violence within an economy of violence’.3 Furthermore, to argue that Derrida’s critique of Rousseau is incomplete or in bad faith because it fails to do away entirely with the nature-culture opposition (‘To some extent, therefore, the nature—culture division remains intact’) is to fall into the usual all-or-nothing error about deconstruction, that it is concerned simply to liquidate or have done with the ideas that are its objects. For it is not only true that the nature—culture division indeed remains intact to some degree in deconstruction, but it is also necessary to deconstruction that it should be so, since, as Derrida has tirelessly contended, at least since the essay on ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’, the dream of doing away with metaphysical thinking can only ever serve as its guarantee and augmentation. Siebers’ argument with regard to Derrida is consonant with the claim advanced repeatedly throughout his book that contemporary theory is ethical without knowing it. This is good, since it is good to be ethical, but also bad, since it is bad not to know the basis of one’s ethics. Siebers’ desire is to make criticism acknowledge its investment in the ethical by bringing the ethical impulse to consciousness. This ambition is to be applauded, except, I think, where it goes along with the assumption that acknowledgement and bringing to consciousness necessarily mean the smoothing out of contradictions. In the case of Derrida, the contradictory ethics of différance are not in fact due to Derrida’s failure to recognize and acknowledge his own Rousseauism. It arises rather from what Derrida sees as the contradictory ethical structure of writing itself. In a passage from Of Grammatology that Siebers in fact quotes, Derrida declares: ‘The arche-writing is the origin of morality as of immorality. The nonethical opening of ethics. A violent opening.’4 In other words, Derrida acknowledges openly and repeatedly what Siebers believes much contemporary criticism cannot acknowledge, namely that criticism as krinein, meaning to cut, separate and distinguish, must accept its own potential implication in violence. Siebers’ strongest arguments on this question are to be found in the discussions in which he identifies various forms of the ethic of clean hands in contemporary theory, that ethic that depends upon the hallucinatory denial of all implication in or contamination by power and violence. Siebers shows how the late work of Paul de Man, with its systematized suspicion of the will-to-system in all theory, aspires to a condition of ‘martyrdom’, the glorious self-annihilation of one who wishes (but can never achieve) the purity of absolute non-violence. The value of martyrdom lies in refusal of the ‘aggressive and exclusionary impulses’ (p. 104) of systematic thought and of the violently self-identical subject. The problems come when martyrdom becomes a system in its own right, since the absolute dissolution of the self’s authority ironically yields it absolute immunity from any ethical charge. In the system of martyrdom, whoever loses wins, for the ego has always got its (non) retaliation in first. Siebers cunningly demonstrates the residual egoism involved in


this extreme of negative capability (an egoism that de Man had himself previously identified in his 1966 introduction to the New American Library edition of Keats):

Expelling the self for ethical reasons leads to a mendacious form of egoism and a voracious paradox. First, it martyrs the self to give it greater luminosity and power. Secondly, it leads to an ethics that may seem impeccable but that achieves its faultless nature not by solving problems but by disavowing them. A moral philosophy that does not include the self may seem faultless, but its perfection rests in reality on the enormous void left by its rejection of the human. (p. 110) In a later chapter, Siebers extends this critique to those forms of contemporary feminism which overvalue marginality, suffering and victimage. The embrace of such conditions in Cixous, Irigaray and Kofman guarantees immunity from the guilt of phallic violence only to the degree that it seems to fortify that violence. The most effective image of this duality occurs in Siebers’ discussion of the anatomical trope in Irigaray and Kofman. Both of them condemn the male fantasy of the female genitals as the mark of a wounding, or a lack, and yet in viewing heterosexual penetration as an interruption of female self-communing (Irigaray), or in celebrating the castrating power of the vagina, ‘that “pus-filled cavity” which threatens to contaminate and infect man’ (Kofman), they prolong the very vengeful male fantasies they wish to resist (pp. 206–9).5 More generally, Siebers is unhappy with the rejection of the ideals of consensus, community and equality that he finds in the work of Irigaray, precisely because this rejection seems to kick away any ethical basis for the feminist critique of violence and oppression. Irigaray can represent the ideal of equality as a male ruse to reduce the difference of women to the sameness of the patriarchal order only because her too narrow interpretation of equality fails to grasp it as the very principle necessary to protect difference (p. 202). Here, as elsewhere, Siebers’ purpose is to demonstrate the necessary and inescapable commitment to ideals of character and community in all criticism, especially criticism of the politically adversary kind, and to urge that these commitments be openly acknowledged rather than merely exerting a subliminal force. I think that Siebers makes a very important point here, and one that might be extended to all forms of difference or identity politics. At the same time, however, it must be said that Siebers has a rather pinched perspective on contemporary feminism, since he fails to note or discuss the substantial contributions of those recent forms of feminist ethical theory which have attempted to think through the demands of difference and ethical universalism simultaneously.6 The final chapter in Siebers’ careful, probing study considers what is perhaps the newest genre of critical writing—‘nuclear criticism’, which he defines as critical writing that attempts to explore the discursive powers and effects of nuclear arms. His focus here is almost entirely upon a 1984 issue of Diacritics which gathered together

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several examples of the genre and, as a result, his discussion often gives a sense of premature generalization.7 Given the solemnity of this chapter’s theme, Siebers’ inability to resist the smart inversion or the bobby-dazzler aphorism (‘literary theory begins to resemble nuclear war in its assault on literature’ (p. 228)) can seem offensive where previously it had been witty or intriguing. But at the same time, nuclear criticism provides the most convincing final example of the ethical paradox of contemporary theory which is Siebers’ constant theme. On the one hand, the fabulous, proliferating textuality of nuclear discourse provides a perfect mirror image of much contemporary theory, and the complexly deferred death instinct which Siebers believes it serves in its orientation towards the inhumanly sublime, the ‘negative freedom of suicide’, or ‘the stale grandeur of annihilation’ (pp. 236, 239). On the other hand, the response to the nuclear crisis evidences the irreducibly ethical force of the commitment to the human and consequently ‘a means of reading the ethical preoccupation of those literary artists and critics who declare most zealously their antagonism to ethics’ (p. 237). Here Siebers comes down firmly on the side of those ideals of character, community and humanity, which, he believes, cannot be jettisoned without abandoning existence altogether. As such the discussion of this issue forms a fitting culmination to The Ethics of Criticism, which attends throughout with such meticulous, impassioned insight to the convoluted relationships of ethics, literature and criticism, of language, violence and love. Siebers’ book is a rich, exacting and, from now on, wholly uncircumventable contribution to the question of the ethics of criticism.

NOTES 1 See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1988); J.Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) and Jean-François Lyotard and JeanLoup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). The following provide more general evidence of the ‘ethical turn’: Wayne C.Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988); John Rajchman, ‘Lacan and the ethics of modernity’, Representations, 15 (1986), pp. 42– 56; Michel Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress’ in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H.Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 229–52, and John Rajchman, ‘Ethics after Foucault’, Social Text, 13/14 (1986), pp. 165–83. See too Martha Nussbaum, ‘Perceptive equilibrium: literary theory and ethical theory’, in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 58–85 and Andrei Plesu, ‘Elements for a restoration of ethics’, Cahiers roumains d’études littéraires: Revue trimestrielle de critique, d’esthétique et d’histoire littéraires, 1 (1987), pp. 110–17. 2 Julia Kristeva, ‘The ethics of linguistics’, in Desire in Language, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S.Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 23–35.


3 ‘Violence and metaphysics: an essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), n. 21, p. 313. 4 Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 139–40. 5 Siebers is here referring to Luce Irigaray, L’Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984), pp. 24–5 and Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 36. 6 I have in mind here the ‘Habermasian’ feminism (though it is really as concerned to criticize and diversify Habermas as to apply his work) of the essays in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) and Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (London: Hutchinson/Radius, 1989). In fact, the view of Irigaray as a theorist of difference rather than a theorist of ethical collectivity itself fails to respond to a recurrent emphasis in her work on the need for difference in order to bring about intersubjective exchange between male and female. I argue at more length in my Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992) that this might provide the grounds for an otherwise conspicuously ill-augured rapprochement between feminisms derived from French and German traditions of critique. 7 See Diacritics 14 (1984), special issue on ‘Nuclear Criticism’.

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• Colin Falck, Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xvi+173 pp., £25.00 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback) …the series has not stopped growing, and there is still the same refusal or inability in respect to a first task, the most elementary of tasks: that of reading. Jacques Derrida Myth, Truth and Literature is a further instance of the ‘series’ outlined by Derrida, in which the resistance to literary theory becomes an explicit hostility.1 ‘Antitheoretical’ publications continue to proliferate, particularly those seeking to oppose, denigrate, or travesty the work of what has become known as ‘deconstruction’.2 In so far as these publications imply a prior refusal or inability to read what they attack, their argument tends to remain limited to a kind of propaganda. But the temptation to respond to such instances of aggression with further aggression, or indeed with silence, ought nevertheless to be avoided. Analysis of the defensive misunderstandings involved here could shed considerable light on the practice of literary theory itself. Whatever the deficiencies of the book under review, it has to be said that there is no transcendental point of reference from which its misrepresentations could be definitively corrected. It is rather a question of trying to read more carefully than Falck, trying to give an impression of what has been distorted and ignored in Falck’s account of modern literary theory. Dame Helen Gardner, surfacing after an intense period of scholarly work to discover that the literary-critical field around her had changed beyond recognition, described herself as ‘a kind of literary Rip Van Winkle in a strange, disturbing world’.3 Falck apparently shares Dame Helen’s sense of bewilderment. He proceeds to attack elements of the modern literary-theoretical ‘world’, whose perversity he takes to be self-evident. The blurb for Falck’s book makes breathtaking claims—‘a theoretical book which aims to prove the superfluousness of literary theory’—and leads the reader to expect a detailed refutation of particular theorists (p. i). But Falck’s new heresiology reduces his highly varied group of theoretical ‘heretics’ to a spurious homogeneity. Instead of offering the reader a critical survey, supported by

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thorough references for further study, Falck makes generalizations and simplifications which would hardly survive a reading of the ‘heretical’ works at stake. It is ironic that Falck chooses an injunction from St Teresa as the epigraph for his concluding chapter, entitled ‘Towards a true post-modernism’: ‘I require of you only to look’ (p. 147). Precisely by not looking at the theoretical texts which he opposes, Falck confuses the reader as to his own criticisms and objectives. ‘Structuralism’ is conflated with ‘post-structuralism’, for example (p. xii and p. 123 n18). Falck’s parenthetical explanation of the movement from the former to the latter cannot possibly do justice to the complexity of this issue (p. 27). Derrida’s work, problematizing the teleological thought which Falck takes for granted, cannot be reduced to a determinate stage in the history of ideas. Falck also conflates ‘Saussurianism’ with ‘post-Saussurianism’, which does not help even if we grant the validity of these convenient but simplistic labels (pp. 8, 18, 26). It is by no means self-evident that the heterogeneous theoretical movements of the past thirty years can meaningfully be traced back to Saussure’s linguistics as their point of origin (pp. 4, 42). According to Falck, the differences between Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and others count for little in comparison with their allegedly shared heresies, which he attempts to enumerate (pp. 23–4). To some extent, indeed, Falck’s book is an intellectual witch-hunt. As with all such policing exercises, the object of persecution has to be invented if it does not exist, and so the ‘heresies’ of Falck’s theoretical opponents are often tendentious constructs. If we are to believe Falck, Michel Foucault makes the absurd claim that man will shortly disappear into linguistic structure (pp. 101–2).4 But Foucault’s argument concerns epistemology and the conceptual construction of ‘Man’ in anthropology and the human sciences, not man as such. Foucault has a basic sensitivity to the materiality of language which Falck appears to lack. Falck assumes that poststructuralism has an identifiable paradigm, a view of the essential nature of language, which is mistaken and which needs to be corrected by means of a basic ‘paradigm-shift’ (pp. xii and 5–6; see p. 17). However, this assumption ignores the questioning of essences and paradigms as such which is an unavoidable feature of Derrida’s project. While drawing a distinction between ‘the premises of post-structuralism’ and the practice of ‘post-structuralist critics’ (p. 97), Falck does not pursue the consequences of this distinction, failing to acknowledge Derrida’s far-reaching awareness that ‘no practice is ever totally faithful to its principle’.5 Furthermore, Falck seems to be unaware of Paul de Man’s crucial work on the problematic status of ‘theory’, on totalization in the reading process, and on the relationship between blindness and critical insight. De Man is generally conspicuous by his absence here. For Falck to attack the ‘official categorizings of literary theory’ and the ‘systematizing’ of ‘the literary theorist’, without specifying the object of his attack, itself shows a vagueness amounting to categorization (p. 88). Falck adds a few remarks directed against Northrop Frye, but this is no substitute for serious analysis of systematizing tendencies in formalist, structuralist, archetypal and other criticism (p. 89). Who are the ‘certain commentators’ who use ‘post-Saussurian’ theory in their approach to literature in order to suppress ‘the unknown’, ‘the disorderly’, and so on (p. 22)? This criticism might be made of aspects of structuralism. But what


does it mean to claim that ‘For [Jonathan] Culler and other poststructuralists, all mystery is mystification’ (p. 152 n11)? To propose a mystification of one’s own, as Falck does, does not explain why poststructuralist theory—marked by its respect for the waywardness and otherness of textuality—first needs to be rejected. When attacking Derrida, it is inadequate to speak of ‘the foundations of his philosophical position’ without acknowledging that Derrida has brought positionality itself into question (p. 20; cf. p. 27). Derrida’s strategy of deploying terms under erasure, without subscribing to the positions they may imply, is rejected as absurd by Falck—but he does not explain why it is absurd (pp. 27–8). At least one sentence from Falck’s book should be quoted in full, since his convoluted style causes problems of its own:

Any doctrine of the complete ‘deconstruction’ of the human subject into the sign-systems which constitute him [sic] must be simply fallacious—a shift from a wrong (essentially Cartesian) concept of the self to (despite various post-structuralist protests to the contrary) no concept of the self as such (in the sense in which Kant’s system-transcending subject was an attempt to provide a concept of the self as such) at all. (p. 29) A footnote in the middle of this sentence refers us to Derrida’s insistence that he does not annihilate the subject—an insistence which Falck nevertheless dismisses as ‘disingenuous’ (p. 29 n72). And poststructuralism does not have a ‘doctrine’, despite Falck’s reductive projections. But Falck remains deaf to what he calls ‘poststructuralist protests’. It is also worth pointing out that he makes no reference to the various poststructuralist studies of Kant, who himself makes frequent appearances in Myth, Truth and Literature. Falck complains that poststructuralist critics have nothing positive to say on the issue of subjectivity, but he ignores Derrida’s work on the signature and de Man’s work on autobiography and prosopopeia.6 Falck does not register the fact that Derridean ‘writing’ is not writing in the empirical sense (pp. 19, 42). Nor does he manage to explain Derrida’s use of the term ‘textuality’ (p. 18). Falck enshrines as ‘necessary truth’ the assumption that it is possible to have ‘situations’ without ‘(either spoken or written) texts’, ignoring the fact that Derridean textuality cannot be limited to the spoken and the written (pp. 19–20). Moreover, it is false to claim that Derrida, following Saussure, rejects the signified (p. 18) and substitutes for it a so-called megalomania of the signifier (p. 166).7 Falck reduces the poststructuralist theory of differential meaning to a statement that ‘every thing or item which forms a part of the world we live in must therefore in the end be understood to be a part of everything else’ (p. 101). This provides a neat illustration of de Man’s argument that the trope—in this case, synecdoche—has an inherent and misleading tendency towards totalization. But Falck’s homogenizing reduction tells us nothing about poststructuralism as such: heterogeneous and conflictual difference cannot be reduced to relational unity. None the less, on the basis of his travestied version of poststructuralism, Falck claims that poststructuralist theory is itself a misguided travesty of conventional

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religious doctrines, which he finds more assimilable for his project. His final chapter thus begins by translating the concept of relational signification into the truth that ‘the world is One’, and by translating the deconstruction of the self into the truth that ‘we are members one of another’ (p. 147). Given the importance of Truth in his argument, it is unfortunate that Falck assumes that ‘“logocentric” in Derrida means “erroneous” (p. 21), since Derrida makes it clear that these terms are not synonymous. At one point, Falck even associates ‘“otherness”’ with ‘“presence”’ (p. 20), which makes one wonder how he reads Derrida’s essay ‘Différance’—the French version of which is cited in a footnote (p. 18 n30). Poststructuralism cannot be reduced to an irresponsible game, a free play in which ‘argument’ supposedly does not count (p. 28). Whatever the practice of some self-styled ‘deconstructive’ critics, it is equally inaccurate to treat ‘critique’ and ‘deconstruction’ as synonymous (p. 27; cf. p. 33). Falck assumes that literary texts will ‘by definition’ resist the deconstructive process the most (p. 78 n44), but this ignores de Man, for whom literary texts deconstruct themselves in a way which is irreducible to the intervention of an agent.8 Had Falck consulted Rodolphe Gasché, for instance, he might have been clearer about the complex and crucial differences between Derridean, de Manian, and ‘literary-critical’ deconstruction. All writing is guilty of sins of omission, but Falck’s omissions matter because of the generality of his criticisms. The reader is given a very selective view of contemporary theory. Falck mentions hardly any work on poststructuralism—a rapidly moving field, if it is a field at all—published later than 1983. No works of Derrida are mentioned later than 1972, which leaves the majority of his output untouched. Falck does not discuss the new historicism, or even the new pragmatism, even though his own argument has some ‘pragmatic’ affinities (see p. 50, n30).9 References to J.L.Austin and John Searle are scarce (pp. 9, 17 n24, and 18 n29), even though a section discussing speech act theory—and its critique by Derrida— might have helped to clarify Falck’s vague statements about linguistic performance and presence (pp. 108, 164). There is no feminist theory here; Falck merely points out that he uses ‘the philosophical “he”’ (p. xv; see p. 133). Falck makes occasional reference to Marxist theorists (pp. 87 n2, 113 n63), and his increasingly gnomic final chapter ends with a puzzling allusion to Marx (p. 170), but Falck suspends discussion of ideological questions (p. 145 n60, pp. 168–9). This resistance becomes more understandable when it is realized that Falck’s work is itself ideology, in Paul de Man’s sense of the term. ‘What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism’, as de Man puts it.10 Predictably, Falck dismisses the mode of allegory (pp. 151–2 and n11), while misunderstanding de Man’s work on allegory (p. 24 and n53),11 since Falck’s presentation of meaning in literature relies on what he takes to be the organic self-presence of the symbol (pp. 52–3, 78–9). The premises of his stance prevent him from admitting the incommensurability between ‘linguistic’ and ‘natural’ reality which allegory temporalizes and reinforces. For similar reasons, irony also has to be dismissed here as a kind of poetic disease (pp. 164–5 n36). Myth, Truth and Literature makes no reference to Jean-François Lyotard, perhaps the most important theorist of the postmodern. This is a surprising omission, in view of Falck’s aim of displacing postmodernism in general with his neo-realist, neo-humanist


outlook (see pp. 94, 151). He dismisses Freud (pp. 49, 122), while ignoring Lacan, Abraham and Torok, Samuel Weber, and the various other theorists who have decisively altered how Freud can be approached by readers and literary critics. Falck reduces psychoanalysis to an inadequate form of hermeneutics, without considering Freud’s work on resistance, transference, and the unconscious— all essential to psychoanalytic interpretation (p. 98). Some attention to Freud might have helped in Falck’s tentative approach to the question of preconsciousness (pp. xiii, 14, 48), although an analysis of the Freudian symptom, for example—with its radical breaks and deferrals of meaning—would disrupt Falck’s hypostasis of ‘our embodied selves and their unbroken inherence in reality’ (p. 25; see p. 16). Falck finds the transcendental mysticism of Jung more congenial (p. 61 n12 and p. 140 n51). Falck gives no examples of poststructuralist critical practice (see p. 24 n49).12 His own citations of poetry are not accompanied by critical analysis (pp. 106, 108–9, 111, 153–5), so his objections and alternatives to poststructuralist practice remain unclear. For him, literature is human and authentic in so far as it is somehow able to grasp truth (pp. xii and 99), defined as ‘the capacity of our modes of articulation themselves to reveal reality’ (p. 46). Falck has to acknowledge that the potential for error, blindness, and self-deception is built into such articulation (pp. 48–9): ‘it must always be open to us to misread…’ (p. 71). Avoiding investigation of misreading itself, though, Falck becomes entrapped in a circular subjectivism which he then calls ‘a necessary part of the human condition’ (p. 50). Work on misreading by Paul de Man and by Harold Bloom is dismissed, within the same parenthesis—thus collapsing the differences between these two vital theorists (p. 24).

All language, subject to the openness or authenticity of its users’ dispositions… has an inherent tendency to try to attain a more truthful or expressive articulation of reality as we extra-linguistically sense it to be. (p. 61) Falck asserts this ‘tendency’ towards truthful articulation—upon which his theory of literature relies—without explanation. Why should language strive to express reality (see p. 74)? Must we mean what we say? How can we recognize a ‘truthful’ representation? Having assumed that language-use is open and authentic, Falck is nevertheless driven to admit that much everyday language-use is mechanical or inauthentic. The task of literature is then to redeem language from inauthenticity (p. 78). But Bloom has cogently argued that literature itself is vital to the precise extent that it constitutes a mode of lying. For Falck, truth is closely associated with reality, here understood in ontological terms. Literature must show us ‘how things are’ (p. 33). Hence the critic or reader should respond to ‘what is really there’ (p. 32). But these aspirations constitute a weak kind of idealism when compared to Bloom’s description of the critic’s task, after Pater, Wilde and Stevens: to see the object as in itself it really is not. Bloom’s description involves a complex theory of poetry, in which things as they are will always already be distorted by the non-mimetic movements of the poetic trope (see Falck, p. 144 n58). There is no literary ‘object’ in the first place, as Falck himself

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implies (pp. 72, 75, 87, 97, 111). However, Falck prefers F.R.Leavis to Bloom (p. 82 n55). Literature ‘gives us an immediate presence or presentation of ontological meaning’ (p. 122). For Falck, then, literary presence will tolerate no deferral along the paths and detours of (re-)presentation. Given the centrality of (phantasmic) presence in Falck’s work, it is not surprising that he is outraged by the so-called Abolition of Reality in contemporary literary theory. He repeats what he takes to be a Derridean axiom, that there is ‘“nothing outside of the text”’, three times—without giving its source in Derrida, and without explaining that the statement is not as straightforward as it might seem (pp. xii, 31, 151).13 Poststructuralist theory allegedly reduces literature to a nihilistic game, having forgotten about the exigencies of reference and reality (p. 8). Falck often complains that the philosophical ‘picture’ of poststructuralism excludes reality, nature, experience, and so on (pp. 10, 20, 29, 30). But he fails to consider what Derrida calls parergonality, or framing as such—that is, the question of how a text is framed as if it were an inside, in arbitrary relation to a context as an outside, as a measure of the text’s readability and authority (see p. 21 and n35). As if anticipating Falck’s critique, de Man points out that ‘the referential function of language is not being denied—far from it; what is in question is its authority as a model for natural or phenomenal cognition.’14 Despite its epistemological unreliability, however, language is assumed by Falck to be a cognitive model firmly rooted in the natural world. In his understanding of language, Falck insists on what he obscurely calls ‘the necessities of physical incarnation’ (p. 20; see p. 13 n17). He holds an incarnationist theory of language, in which linguistic contingency and temporality have to be recuperated as effects of embodied and supposedly prelinguistic human experience (pp. 11, 19, 26). But Falck is repeatedly driven to mere assertions of shared experience in order to support his theory (pp. 7, 12, 20–2, 25, 34, 40–1, 50, 68, 115, 134, 138). The body is not a presence which can be detached from representation in order to function as an epistemological anchor for representation (see p. 13). Falck takes Yeats’s poem ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ to be a confessional expression (pp. 154–5). Alluding to the end of this poem, he then advocates a poetry which would be truly enlightened and ‘postmodern’ because it ‘stays loyal to its origins in the ordinary experiential world where all our ladders start’ (p. 167), achieving a cure for our spiritual ills through ‘an elemental directness’ and ‘a certain firmness’ of language (p. 168). But Bloom has argued that the ending of Yeats’s poem is another antithetical gesture which cannot be collapsed into primary or natural phenomenalism. It is noticeable that, on the page which proposes directness and firmness in poetry, Falck also uses the term ‘misprision’ and rejects ‘our living among the echoes of older literature’—as if defending against Bloom. The avoidance of Bloom is all the more striking in that Falck takes mythopoeia to be the basis of poetic knowledge (see pp. 37 and 51), arguing for poetry as a displaced form of religion, a religion of meaning (pp. xii, 144). Falck assumes that meaning is a natural aspect of human life itself (pp. 81, 132). His view of the atavistic potential of the poetic symbol, offering the reader a reconnection to primal unities, even echoes Maud Bodkin (p. 123; cf. p. 60).15 In contrast to Bloom, who also takes poetry to be a vital form of mythopeia, Falck proposes a kind of humanist mysticism (see pp. 36, 169). A corollary of this is that he has little place in his theory


for metaphor and tropes in general—without which poetry for Bloom is quite unthinkable. Falck sometimes appears to devalue metaphor (see p. 14 n20); or at least, he values metaphor only in so far as it is said to embody truth, reality, or life itself (pp. 79–80). He attaches great importance to what he calls extralinguistic or intuitive factors in the production of meaning, but it seems that it is the problem of metaphoric transgressiveness which is implicitly at stake in his argument (pp. 23, 35, 48; see p. 67). Falck’s thought is arrested at this intriguing stage, though, because he does not consider figuration as such. He gives one of Bloom’s favourite quotations, a passage from Shelley on the metaphoric origins of language (p. 55), but then vaguely describes language as ‘expressive’ instead of attempting to analyse its metaphoric structure and movements (p. 56). An equally remarkable passage from Emerson is treated in the same limiting way (p. 120). In the end, the book under review amounts to an exercise in intellectual policing, in which the reader is supposed to make a choice—against the monstrous regiment of theorists. Poststructuralists are said to be guilty of hubris (pp. 33, 148), diagnosed as spiritually disordered (pp. 160, 165), and found wanting when weighed in ‘the moral balance’ (p. 167). They must redeem themselves, we are told, by recognizing ‘the demands of human spirituality’ (p. 98). Falck’s book may be representative of a wider defensiveness towards reading contemporary literary theory in general.16 Returning to the text by Derrida from which the epigraph to this review was drawn, it should be clear enough that the refusal or inability to read ‘must be taken seriously’.17 Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Postmodernism must be taken seriously, for its contents may be used to prevent students from engaging with the dangerous texts of ‘post-modernism’ themselves. For those who prefer Derrida and de Man to mysticism and Zen,18 and who are thus unable to follow Falck on his transcendental course through literature, the burdens of reading will remain inevitable and irreducible. Philipps-Universität, Marburg

NOTES I would like to acknowledge the financial assistance of The Leverhulme Trust in preparing this review. 1 The epigraph is taken from Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 41 n5. This passage was also cited as an opening gesture in a review of Mémoires by Christopher Norris. See ‘The rhetoric of remembrance: Derrida on de Man’, Textual Practice, 1: 2 (1987), p. 154. Falck mentions neither Mémoires nor the work of Norris. 2 For a relevant example of criticism as travesty and insult, see Cedric Watts, ‘Bottom’s children: the fallacies of structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist literary theory’, in Reconstructing Literature, ed. Laurence Lerner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 20–35 and 208. Roger Scruton’s essay ‘Public text and common reader’, which belongs to roughly the same genre and is acknowledged by Falck, can be found in this collection (pp. 36–59 and 208–10; see Falck, p. 110 n51).

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3 Helen Gardner, In Defence of the Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 2. Her book is an often ill-informed polemic. 4 Falck quotes in English—loosely—from Foucault’s The Order of Things, but then gives a reference only to the French edition in his footnote (p. 101 n32). Falck’s quotations are sometimes paraphrases, and he causes further confusion by drawing citations from both English and French editions (for example, see p. 13 nn16–17 and p. 16 n22). Falck’s footnotes are supposed to generate discussion (p. xiii), but they are often uninformative. 5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 39. 6 Falck’s assumption that another person has to be seen as ‘already inhabited by mind or spirit’ (p. 13) should be read in conjunction with de Man’s essay ‘Autobiography as de-facement’, reprinted in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 67–81, which analyses the tropological movement involved in such naturalized prosopopeia. 7 See Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 324 n9, for a clear rebuttal of Falck’s claim. 8 See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 17 and 298–9. Falck avoids mentioning this book, even though he refers to an essay on Nietzsche collected in it (p. 24 n44). For students to read de Man for themselves would indeed be dangerous. 9 Falck ignores the arguments over literary theory collected in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W.J.T.Mitchell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 10 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 11. 11 Students should be informed that this essay is collected in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 187–228. 12 Falck might have referred to some of the readers available—Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston and London: Routledge, 1981), or Post-structuralist Readings of English Poetry, ed. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 13 See Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158. 14 de Man, Resistance to Theory, p. 11. 15 See Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1934). 16 cf. de Man, Resistance to Theory, pp. 22–3. 17 Derrida, Mémoires, p. 42 n5. 18 Falck’s final acknowledgement is to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (p. 170 n43; see p. 38).

BRIAN McKENNA

• Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 274 pp., £30.00 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback) • Andrew Ross (ed.), Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1989), 300 pp., £25.00 (hardback), £9.95 (paperback) • Philip Cooke, Back to the Future: Modernity, Postmodernity and Locality (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 205 pp., £17.95 (hardback) • Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 146 pp., £30.00 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback) What kind of politics is implicated by postmodernism? Or encoded by the ‘postmodern condition’? Or generated by postmodernist cultural practices? The impulse to reformulate here betrays some of the problems entailed by thinking the ‘political’ (the naïve?) and the ‘postmodern’ (the cynical?) simultaneously. There is, nevertheless, an imperative to do so which impinges on radical cultural criticism in a variety of ways and which is variously made manifest in each of the four books here under review. Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture has by now established itself as a lucid and wide-ranging introduction to the debates around the theory and practice of postmodernism. Of the myriad array of expository books available on this hyperseminal subject, Connor’s is among those ‘most likely to succeed’ in making it on to reading lists. This is partly because of the usefulness of Part II of the book, which begins by anatomizing the analyses of the specificity of our fin-de-siècle moment propounded by Lyotard, Jameson, and Baudrillard. Connor demonstrates that for all three of these Big Names, ‘postmodernity may be defined as those plural conditions in which the social and the cultural become indistinguishable’ (p. 61)—in which theory ineluctably collapses into its object. The remainder of Part II then narrates the emergence of postmodernism across the regions of architecture, the visual arts, drama, TV, video, cinema, pop music, and fashion. The section preliminary to this impressively multifarious display of critical exposition announces the specific project of Postmodernist Cul ture, which is to lay bare the function of the debates set in train by the concept of postmodernity by situating them in the context of the redisposition of the power relations within and

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between the cultural and academic apparatuses of the advanced capitalist states in recent years. Connor contends that the critical discourses sporting the adjective ‘postmodernist’ have accrued significance less by virtue of the cultural fields they supposedly address than by the forms they take and the ways they work. He stresses that ‘we must look at the form as well as the content of [the postmodern] debate, must try to understand the priorities and questions which it produces as its own mode of self-understanding alongside the questions with which it seems to be dealing’ (p. 5). This attention to the form and function of the disputation around ‘postmodernism’ enables Connor to foreground the incorrigible paradoxicality of the beast: indeed, the elucidation of its contradictory conundrums would seem to be his forté. Tenaciously he points out, again and again, the paradox inherent in the putative valorization of heterogeneity and difference by a discourse which is actually hair-raisingly global and totalizing:

If postmodern theory insists on the irreducibility of the difference between different areas of cultural and critical practice, it is ironically the conceptual language of postmodern theory which flows into the trenches that it itself gouges between incommensurabilities and there becomes solid enough to bear the might of an entirely new conceptual apparatus of comparative study. (p. 10) He is also alert to the often bizarre consequences generated by the ‘dual allegiance’ typical of some writers on this subject to the populism of postmodernist culture, on the one hand, and to the intellectual vanguardism of modernist theory (whether Marxist or poststructuralist), on the other. By way of illustration, he cites (p. 166) Jameson’s celebration of contemporary video-art as an avatar of postmodernity in his essay, ‘Reading without interpretation: postmodernism and the video-text’ (1987). Another example of this spectacle of the high-powered humanities academic trying to ‘provoke flares of resistance or subversive potential out of the fading coals of contemporary culture’ (p. 167) would be John Fiske’s Television Culture (1987), which extols the carnivalesque brio of the tawdriest of game shows, vaunts the viewer appropriability of transnational soaps, and exults in that form of urban guerrilla warfare known as ‘zapping’.1 Connor is also alive to the ironically conservative effects which the postmodern deconstruction of the theory/practice distinction can induce. In the context of a discussion of the visual arts, he poses the awkward question of ‘whether this merging of distinct realms, along with the abandonment of the avant-garde dream of the critical space ‘outside’ traditions and formations of power, might not serve in the end as a strategic alliance to consolidate rather than to threaten the paradigms of art and art criticism’ (pp. 99–100). Here, an aspect of postmodernism is unmasked as a possible survival strategy for High Art. Similarly, in the field of ‘Literature’, Connor exposes a dangerous liaison between poststructuralist theory and postmodernist fiction, the effect of which is to ‘concentrate radical or sceptical theory into an institutionally usable form, allowing the business of the literary academy…to go on as usual’ (p. 128). (This is sharp, although it is surely more


usual for poststructuralism to service ‘Eng. Lit.’ by ceaselessly repackaging the same old Anglo-American modernist canon). Postmodernist Culture also bristles with shafts of insight into contemporary critical theory other than those deriving from the teasing out of its contradictions. For instance, central to Connor’s ultimate case concerning the elaboration of a new discourse on ‘ethics’ is his trenchant suggestion that the origins of the ‘culturecide’ imprecated by Lyotard ought to be located in the failure to develop systemic relations which underwrite the sovereignty of minority groups, rather than in the fictitious success of allegedly tyrannical universalist principles (p. 39). Another valuable aperçu resides in his mockery of the overestimation of the importance of language as a site of power in Derridean criticism, and its pat ‘repeatable gestures’ (p. 218). As he correctly emphasizes:

There is nothing in such rhetorical ultra-leftism to suggest the likelihood of any shift or complication in the institutional-economic structures of academic research, communication and publication, or the massively powerful apparatus of exclusion, hierarchy, and certification which is higher education in advanced Western countries. (ibid.) Cogent also is his judgement that the reductive ‘conceptual map of centre and margin’ (p. 231) has served largely to remarginalize women as ‘Other’ in much postmodern discussion. (There may well be an analogy here with the obfuscation of the relations of class exploitation inside ‘Third World’ countries wrought by the centre/periphery school of theories of imperialism in the 1970s propounded by André Gunder Frank et al.)2 Less valuable, in my view, is Connor’s lampooning of Michel Pêcheux’s concept of revolutionary ‘disidentification’—as opposed to both conformist ‘identification’ and nay-saying ‘counter-identification’. This is how he illustrates Pêcheux’s triad: One might instance an industrial conflict in which a workforce would identify with the conventions of labour relations if they accepted no pay rise in the interest of increased productivity, would counter-identify if they struck for higher wages and then negotiated a settlement, and would disidentify if they demanded that the factory be turned into a cultural centre, in the interests of overcoming the ideological separation of work and leisure. (p. 237) More consonant with Pêcheux’s third term than Connor’s sarcastic misconstruction would be the occupation of the factory by the workers and the germination of an alternative plan of production linked to the struggles of other workers for economic and political power. As Diane Macdonell put it in her book Theories of Discourse (published in the year before her untimely death in 1987): ‘disidentification is brought about through working on and against the dominant

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forms of ideological subjection’3—that is, not by some utopian leap into the ‘kingdom of freedom’ heedless of the ‘kingdom of necessity’. Although Connor’s dismissal of ‘disidentification’ would seem to be motivated by a desire to privilege the reformist moment of ‘counter-identification’, there is elsewhere evident a haughty dismissal of mere rebelliousness. For example, Connor takes issue with the claims for the subversiveness of ‘marginal rock [sic] music’ (p. 189) made by the likes of Dick Hebdidge and Angela MacRobbie, contending that: ‘Far from decentring or undermining the structures of the rock industry, each eruption of cultural difference only serves to stabilize this culture, by spreading and diversifying its boundaries’ (pp. 189–90). This scanting of the (of course evanescent) energies of musical youth culture bespeaks a certain excess of scepticism in Connor’s position. It is as if the percipience of his analysis of the totalizing proclivities of postmodernism has jaundiced his view with a smidgen of cynicism. Ironically, this note of disparagement is not irreconcilable with a certain consensualist deference to the prominenti of the postmodern debate (witness, for example, the punch-pulling phrase, ‘brutally shorn of its argumentative detail’ (p. 219), used to sugar the pill of a critical summary of Baudrillard’s Forget Foucault). It is not then too surprising to find Connor still positively accentuating the ‘p’-word, in the incongruous context of a laudable appeal to ‘forge new and more inclusive forms of ethical collectivity’ (p. 244), at the end of Postmodernist Culture. The repudiation of any such discourse of universals is that which lies at the troubled heart of Universal Abandon, an eclectic gatherum of essays edited by Andrew Ross for the Social Text Collective. In his introduction, Ross relays the founding condition of the collection—viz. a perception that ‘we are faced again with the big questions that the last two decades of cultural and sexual politics had taught to regard with suspicion’ (p. vii). The question foregrounded by this recrudescence is italicized thus in the introduction: ‘In whose interests is it, exactly, to declare the abandonment of universals?’ (p. xiv). (A cynical response might be: ‘Fortysomething ex-Marxists’, but that would be too cruel.) The forswearing of universality would seem not to apply, however, to postmodernism itself. And indeed, Steven Connor’s thesis that postmodern theory is paradoxically driven by a strong totalizing impulse would seem to be borne out by Ross’s contention that— with regard to the specially oppressed—anti-essentialist refusals of ghettoization can be happily combined with essentialist valorizations of imposed identities, thanks to the politics of postmodernism: ‘such a politics’, he writes, ‘must accept essentialism itself as one of the many subject positions that inform its “radical pluralism”’ (p. xi). Unfortunately this latitudinarianism cannot, it would seem, be extended to one poor old superannuated ‘essentialism’, classical Marxism: ‘it is clear that we can no longer envisage a grand tug-of-war between Capital and Labour’ (p. xiv). Quel dommage! Admittedly, Universal Abandon is a stimulating collection of essays with something for everyone. The limits of the review mode entail, however, that I confine my discussion to a mere handful of the contributions. The opening ‘turn’ is an interview with Fredric Jameson, conducted by Anders Stephanson. Highlighted in this piece is the former’s preoccupation with the development of a genre of cultural politics devolving from the constitution of a new kind of collective subject in relation to a postmodern set of cognitive mappings on


to global space. Jameson’s injunction is to ‘undo postmodernism homeopathically’ (p. 17) and produce thereby a third term political subject, ‘decentred but not schizophrenic’ (p. 21). Concretely, this seems to translate (in one form) into a species of Third Worldism which leans on ‘development of underdevelopment’ ideas which valorize marginality, and are perhaps rather démodé. Nevertheless, his validation (against Stephanson) of the importance of preventing imperialist ‘interventions in the third world’ is one which has a great deal of resonance in the context of the US-led ‘postmodern’ pulverization of Iraq. Stanley Aranowitz’s essay, ‘Postmodernism and politics’, is a plugged-in, but rather baffling, piece which criticizes the political limitations of the agenda posited by ‘modernity’ described as follows:

Political and economic modernity…has to do with growth-oriented planning and production, with a pluralist political system in which class politics is replaced with interest-group struggles, and with a strong bureaucracy that can regulate relations among and between, money and human capital. (p. 46) In other words, social democratic capitalism in the context of a liberal-democratic state. Aranowitz also identifies (what he terms) ‘revolutionary societies such as China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe’ (p. 57) as implicated in the project of modernity (as defined above). To the social democratic and Communist offspring of modernity Aranowitz cannily counterposes the independent workers’ movements which have burgeoned in countries such as Poland, South Africa and Brazil in recent decades. Lest this seem to a British reader to be identical with the celebration of Solidarnosc, COSATU, and the Brazilian PT commonplace in the journals of the Trotskyist press over the last decade, it should be stressed that Aranowitz is keen to assimilate these organizations (which he describes, rather oddly, as ‘new social movements’ (p. 61)) to his own ‘localist’ discourse on postmodernism. He advocates a pragmatic ‘case study’ (p. 56) approach to the political, and asserts of the independent workers’ movements that they: speak in postmodern voices; they enter the national and international political arena speaking a language of localism and regionalism, a discourse that although internationalist, does not appeal to traditional class solidarity as its primary line of attack, but addresses power itself as an antagonist. (p. 61) Were the word ‘solidarity’ in the above passage to be replaced with the word ‘sectionalism’ then Aranowitz would, I think, be nearer the mark—but still offtarget. Just as Stan Aranowitz tries to cast COSATU in the unlikely role of an archetypally postmodern political actor, so Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson endeavour to script this part for the American women’s movement. Their essay,

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‘Social criticism without philosophy: an encounter between feminism and postmodernism’, is subtended by a fashionable a priori commitment to antifoundationalism, to a rejection of philosophy tout court as a master discourse with totalitarian pretensions. The anti-essentialism accordingly avowed betokens an explicitly limited and reformist brand of politics: ‘No longer anchored philosophically, the very shape or character of social criticism changes; it becomes more pragmatic, ad hoc, contextual, and local’ (p. 85). The troubling question concomitant upon this genre of postmodern criticism is the perhaps impertinent one of, ‘why bother?’ After all, if you have merrily abjured all the tedious old grand narratives of human emancipation, then why continue to propagate a revolutionary feminist or socialist critique at all? It seems to me that the answer to this essay’s question, ‘How can we combine a postmodernist incredulity towards metanarratives with the social-critical power of feminism?’ (p. 100) is, bluntly, ‘you can’t’. Ultimately, what Fraser and Nicholson’s contribution to this volume seems to do is to derive a restricted, pragmatic feminism from the actuality of the gamut of specific studies currently under way in the Women’s Studies region of the US Academy—which is a bit like a Marxist historian rejecting the concept of socialist revolution because History as an academic discipline involves a myriad of particular empirical studies. It is possible, however, that this is a Britocentric misconstruction which betrays its ignorance of the oppositional energy generated by the heterogeneity of radical America—always-already in a postmodern condition. In the fascinating interview with the Black American scholar, Cornell West, which terminates Universal Abandon, the specificity of ‘Usonian’ political culture is foregrounded. Professor West emphasizes that, in the States, ‘the revolt against the center by those constitued as marginals is an oppositional difference in a way that post-structuralist notions of difference are not’ (p. 273)—since Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard et al. have constituted their various celebrations of ‘difference’ against a strongly embedded (and repressive) national Marxist tradition. The fact that British political culture can boast neither the presence of a dynamic tradition of rainbow coalitionism, nor a puissant indigenous tradition of mass-scale Marxism, explains why the conjuration here of the doxa of postmodern political discourse often sounds rather strange. Its title notwithstanding, Philip Cooke’s book, Back to the Future, constitutes an intervention into the postmodern debate from a ‘Ukanian’ perspective. The central contention of this work is that ‘postmodernism in its many guises is more of an internal critique of modernism, and the interpretation of reason embodied in modernity, than an attempt totally to subvert it’ (p. x). Its position of address is that of GLC-type municipal socialism and its ideal audience would, I suppose, include two of the groups recently identified by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques as the ‘dynamic’ opinion-formers of the 1990s—viz. ‘the highly-skilled, highly-educated salariat…in both the network of small companies and the research centres of international firms’, and the prolocutors for the ‘emergent, increasingly selfconfident regional identities in the north’.4 The book is divided into two parts—the first of which interrogates ‘modernity’ and the second of which examines ‘postmodernity’, construing the latter as a tonic for the former. The case which Cooke makes is strongly inflected with a ‘localist’ accent and is sustained by convictions both political and economic. Its twin pillars are the notion that ‘local differences are expanding and that local consciousness and


social innovation centred upon a renewed idea of citizenship are pressing hard against the modern forms of centralist political control’ (p. xiii), and the idea that the ‘postFordist era signifies a recognition of the growing importance of local-global economic relations as some of the traditional powers of the modern nation state weaken somewhat’ (pp. xiii—xiv). The book’s reliance on the ‘Fordism/post-Fordism’ paradigm in the economic sphere make it vulnerable to the criticism of twofold false homogenization which that model often attracts. And indeed, the first half of Back to the Future does tend to cram together phenomena which are historically disparate—such as ‘Fordism’, ‘Keynesianism’, and ‘Modernity’. However, the particularity of the book does not reside in a mere rehash of old Marxism Today lines. Cooke has a specific case to propound which derives from his ‘modernist’ recuperation of the micropolitical elements of postmodern thought. The project which emerges from this assimilation—and it is a great merit of the book that it has an unfashionably coherent agenda for social change to propose— sounds sensible and positive. Basically, Cooke advocates a renewal of the itinerary of modernity through a return to the grassroots of society in the localities. The parameters of his argument are accepted as given by capitalism, and he dismisses out of hand any possibility of a systemic supercession of the latter by socialism: ‘without simultaneous world revolution that would be simply impossible’ (p. 139), he contends. To me, however, it seems that Cooke’s project (making capitalism work for the workers, essentially) is just as ‘utopian’ as some hypothetical ‘simultaneous world revolution’ position. To some extent, the ‘irony’ he unearths, that ‘as community fades in the social world, locality has been discovered in the economic world’ (p. 143) simply restates an age-old aspect of wage-labour: for example, unemployed steelworkers tend to miss their mates rather than the blast-furnaces they used to work at. But Cooke’s thesis goes further. He draws great comfort from

the co-operative tendencies found in post-Fordist business organization, the initiatives being taken in many localities to try to create employment opportunities, and the as yet pre-figurative possibilities regarding the preFordist methods of delivering local welfare services. (p. 180) This benign image of Benetton-type businesses dovetailing with Living-stonite local councils to the harmonious benefit of all and sundry is surely a mirage? Even in the (now re-named) PCI’s industrial zones, unpaid surplus labour is still pumped out of working people under the regime of wage-slavery. Moreover, it is still by virtue of the structural capital/wage-labour relationship that workers are endowed with the collective capacity to effect seismic social transformation. And if they don’t? Then, exploitation and oppression will continue to endure. Iain Chambers’s Border Dialogues also repudiates the notion of systemic revolution in favour of a ‘modest’ politics of social reform. It is, nevertheless, the most attractive of the four volumes reviewed here, evincing, as it does, an admirable sprezzatura of execution. The Italian loan-word just used is appropriate in this instance because Chambers’s reflections on postmodernity are written from a

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position between the contemporary national cultures of Britain and Italy. Indeed, much of the interest of the book for Anglophone readers resides in its deployment of Italian ‘weak thought’, particularly the work of Gianni Vattimo. Border Dialogues is grounded—if one may use such a terrestrial word of such a deterritorialized book—in a valorization of the process of engagement at the frontiers of bodies of discourse. It extols a mode of interchange which eschews resolution and domination in favour of undecidability and betweenness. In so far as it harks after some kind of authenticity, then it does so by constructing it according to ‘a particular set of historical circumstances and possibilities’ rather than cleaving to ‘a single point of origin, explanation or metaphysical action’ (p. 6). Chambers’s interstitial self-positioning is conducive to insightful cultural analysis. For example, the second chapter of the book, ‘An island life’, constitutes a superb interrogation of Britishness, and effects a lambent but judicious critique of that ‘alternative’ nationalist tradition of the Freeborn (Protestant) Englishman so dear to the literary intelligentsia of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the two decades following the Seventh (Popular Frontist) Congress of the Comintern in 1935. Despite overlooking that notorious issue of the journal Arena entitled The USA Threat to British Culture—a veritable gem of English Communist patriotism— Chambers manages to make some telling points about that mindset. Of the CPGB’s Historians’ Group he comments unerringly:

The historians may well have successfully challenged the literary domination of the question of ‘English’, but that moral economy that lay behind that domination, including much of its ethnic and gendered assumptions, was not only unchallenged but even amplified in their appropriation. (p. 40) The hysterical Cold War demonization of Americana by the British CP in the 1950s is convincingly castigated as conservative and short-sighted in Border Dialogues.5 Moreover, Chambers’s argument that the American-led massmediatization of national cultural spaces, from the late 1940s onwards, has provided ‘a set of languages’, in which ‘other traces, accents and dialects…find voice and the opportunity to transmit it across [a] shared network’ (p. 42) strikes me (as someone of working-class Glaswegian provenance—think of John Byrne’s work) as containing at least a grain of truth. Where, for me, Border Dialogues begins to go seriously awry is at that point where Chambers conflates ‘nostalgic appeals to an imaginary past’ (p. 48) with the politics of global human emancipation. The text begins to slide from a deconstruction of a particular variety of Marxism to an attempted comminution of the entire tradition. This pulverization leaves us with ‘an important residue’ (p. 66), Chambers concedes, since Marx’s insight that capitalism ‘involves not only repression but also the announcement of new forms of living and previously inconceivable forms of liberation’ (ibid.), retains a certain—authenticity? This Marxian ray of illumination begins to gain in intensity, however, when one realizes that ‘announcement’ and ‘arrival’ are not coterminous. The carapace of capitalism is no more susceptible to dissolution by the rhetoric of postmodernism than it has been by the placebos of


social democracy over the last century. Moreover, if one admits—as Chambers, ventriloquizing through Alessandro dal Logo, does—that ‘it is probably true that we are alienated, divided from ourselves, and expropriated’ (ibid.), then one must needs accept the implication that there is some (altruistic, co-operative) potential in human beings that is being stymied by capitalism—and that, therefore, ought to be unfettered. No prelapsarian myth of ‘Paradise Lost’, no patently absurd belief in an all-reconciliatory ‘end’ of History, is necessary to the peculiarly Marxist ‘teleology’ encoded in Capital. Of course, one is fully entitled to abjure Marx’s belief in the unrealized potential of human beings for a freely associated, fully democratic, mode of economic life. But in that case, it is difficult to discern the reason why one should go to the effort of approving residues of Marx, or deploring ‘alienation’, at all. And indeed, to be fair, the dominant tendency of Border Dialogues is to insist that there is ‘no possibility of “going beyond”…our present’ (p. 96). In the final analysis, what the book leaves us with is an agenda of ‘modest proposals’ subserved by a deliberate attenuation of the grandeur of ‘dialectical thought’ (p. 118), and presented with a coruscatingly Nietzschean sense of bravura: humdrum reformism can hardly have been rendered more glamorously. Wadham College, Oxford

NOTES 1 J.Fiske, Television Culture (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), passim. 2 For a lucid exposition and critique of ‘centre/periphery’ theory, see R. Brenner, ‘The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, 104 (July-August 1977), pp. 25–92. 3 D.Macdonell, Theories of Discourse: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 128. 4 S.Hall and M.Jacques, ‘March without vision’, Marxism Today (December 1990), p. 31. 5 This section of the book resonated strongly with me because of my familiarity with the (unpublished) correspondence of the bourgeois-Communist novelist and playwright, Patrick Hamilton (the subject of my doctoral thesis). In the late 1950s, Hamilton was particularly vexed by what he called in one letter to his brother (dated 5 August 1959) the ‘Teddy Boy menace’.

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• David Murray (ed.), Literary Theory and Poetry: Extending the Canon (London: Batsford, 1989), 216 pp., £7.95 (paperback) There is a moment in Shamoon Zamir’s reading of the poetry of Ishmael Reed (see Chapter 7 of this collection), which seems to encapsulate the underlying motivation of the collection as a whole. Juxtaposing Reed’s ‘I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra’ to the Rituale Romanum, particularly the following injunction: The devil must be forced to reveal any such physical evil (potions, charms, fetishes, etc.) still outside the body and these must be burned’, Zamir writes: ‘I am a cowboy…’ takes up the challenge of the Rituale Romanum and traces the immanent return of all that would be excorcized or repressed. Around the governing motif of the myth of the return of Horus ‘vamoosed from the temple’, and his war against Set, are organized a multiplicity of histories excluded from the ‘singular’ version of History installed by the ‘Egyptologists who do not know their trips’, and the ‘School marms with halitosis’. (pp. 131–2) A version of this celebration of a general return of the repressed can be said to characterize each of the nine essays collected in this varied, wide-ranging book. Intended as ‘an introduction to some contemporary theoretical issues by showing them in application’ and as a demonstration both of ‘the range of available poetry, and the similarities of concern between recent developments of criticism and poetry’ (p. 1), the essays in this book rarely divert their focus from the social, political and ideological possibilities contained within such a two-pronged extension of the canon (the critical canon, formerly dominated by the New Critical shibboleths of ‘unity’ and ‘coherence’, and the poetic canon, formerly dominated, or perceived to be dominated, by those poetic texts which best suited such critical values). The various applications of ‘theory’, indeed, all appear to be striving towards some form of accommodation with poststructuralist approaches to language and ‘meaning’ and an ideological or social application of theoretical techniques. The effect, at its best, does indeed begin to provide an effective advocacy of plurality: both on the textual and the societal level. Thus David

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Murray, summarizing the collective focus of the essays, writes of the general attempt to reflect ‘the play of meanings within poetic texts, to which recent criticism has tried to be responsive, while at the same time demonstrating the various social discourses in which they are inevitably involved’ (p. 3). Most of the contributors to this volume have been members of the Critical Theory Group at the University of Nottingham, and this fact is reflected not only in the general concerns of the essays but equally in the particular theorists engaged. In the essays by Patrick Williams on Yeats and Mick Burton on T.S.Eliot the work of Bakhtin is utilized in order to prize open the cultural, colonial and gender assumptions of these ‘central’ examples of modernist poetics. Elaine Millard and Sarah Mills employ significantly critical versions of the work of Julia Kristeva (moving away from potentially deterministic theories of the linguistic foundations of subjectivity to an attention on the reception of textual and intertextual strategies) in their examination of the work of women writers of poetry. Patrick Williams, writing on ‘Black British women’s poetry’, and Shamoon Zamir on Ishmael Reed, both transform Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of ‘minor literature’ written in a ‘major language’ into a powerful theoretical principle upon which to base an account of the problems, intentions and significances of modern Black writers. Finally, Hazel Smith’s essay on ‘Inter-artistic relationships in contemporary poetry’ and Bernard McGuirk’s use of Bloom’s theory of inter-poetic revisionism in his reading of the poetry of Ruben Dario and Cesar Vellejo, bring the collection to a stimulating conclusion. Each essay, therefore, can be read as responding to the currently vital question of the political implications of the kind of deconstructive approach to textual significance inaugurated by Derrida. David Murray, in his essay on the concepts of unity and difference in poetry and criticism, provides a paraphrase of Derrida’s reading of Saussure which expresses this issue in an admirably cogent manner: If within a system…there are, as Saussure insisted, no positive terms, that is, no elements that are self-sufficient in meaning, and do not take their meaning from the other elements with which they are connected in a relation of difference, then the question of where the centre or essence of the text is becomes a difficult one. (p. 9) ‘Extending the canon’ (qua ‘centre’) to include the previously ‘de-centred’ work of women, Black, or non-Western poets has, as these essays illustrate, the effect of deconstructing the very concept of the canon (the ‘centre’). Indeed, the interpretations of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ishmael Reed, Mina Loy, and others help to remind us that such a de-centring or deconstructive project is an integral part of the textual strategies developed by these figures from the margin. However, one issue that threatens to problematize the project of this collection as a whole is the underlying tension between the concepts of ‘extension’ and ‘decentring’. One begins to wonder whether what is being ‘extended’ is a single canon, once excessively, and indeed repressively, exclusive, now repossessed and


turned inclusive. Indeed, one begins to wonder just how elastic such a single canon can be expected to be. On the other hand, is the underlying vision of the essays in this collection, a total deconstruction of the singular canon in favour of a variety of interested perspectives and positions, a number of self-consciously engineered canons? What is perhaps missing from this volume, then, is a direct theoretical engagement with the concept of canonicity. What do we mean by the canon? What happens when we try to extend it? What is the relationship between canonformation and the various structures and agencies of power active at any particular moment in society? The list of questions is very long. Yet, it is perhaps not so much a criticism of this volume as an example of the challenges it offers, that the reader is forced into such speculations. Indeed, if there is a ‘central’ figure in the collection it is not one unavoidable poet or indispensable theorist, but rather the image of an ideal reader: active, demystified, adaptable, concerned, conscious of his or her ‘position’ as reader and the various ‘positions’ taken by and available to the author being read. To quote the concluding sentence of Mick Burton’s essay: ‘As readers they [such poems as The Waste Land and The Four Quartets] address us, urging us to produce their meaning; as readers in the world we must reply, and interrogate, through dialogue, not reverence’ (p. 61). The various ‘dialogues’ pursued in this collection are persuasive illustrations of the current ‘centrality’, within literary studies, of the problem concerning canons. Dundee University

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• John Paul Russo, I.A.Richards: His Life and Work (London: Routledge, 1989), 843 pp., £50.00 In his Clark lectures of October 1974—at the age of 81, and having returned to Cambridge, England, after over forty years away (mostly spent in China and the USA)—I.A.Richards addressed the question of biography and biographers once more. ‘If half of Shakespeare’s correspondence were discovered,’ he is reported as saying, ‘I’d burn it— unread’ (p. 667). This is a familiar cameo of I.A.Richards (1893–1979): the polemically antihistorical critic, keen on the meaning and value of words on the page, but apparently uninterested in the social context of literary works or the actual human experiences which produced them. But the image is of course a stereotype, as simplified as any other; and it has become a slightly dangerous stereotype, in so far as it circulates not only in casual conversation but sometimes also in serious academic debate. One of the many values of John Paul Russo’s lengthy and detailed account of Richards’ life, therefore, is that it sets the stereotypical image in a much fuller historical and intellectual context than is common in projections of Richards which are made backwards from the partial vantage point of modern literary theory. Before considering Russo’s enrichment of and frequent correction to the familiar image of Richards—and before assessing why it might still be interesting to reflect on Richards’ work now—it is worth recalling what the main components of the common image of Richards are. There are several: Richards the founder of practical criticism; Richards the analyst of metaphor; and Richards the ardent but slightly eccentric investigator of meaning. Perhaps the most well-known aspect of the familiar image of Richards is that of Richards the author of Practical Criticism and founder of practical criticism. Despite gradual replacement of the words ‘practical criticism’ on syllabuses by formulations such as ‘commentary and analysis’ or ‘textual analysis’, the term still powerfully evokes the practice of close reading of texts not ascribed to an author. In the seminar room, the practice branches off into any (combination) of three directions: impressionistic response and discussion; informal and unguided stylistic analysis; and (now much less commonly) speculative dating on the basis of generic, thematic and period clues. In each of the variant forms, the practice is focused on close analysis of a text without recourse to what is known of its context or history of reception; and it is this focus on ‘the words on the page’, rather than on a text’s circumstantial connections or affiliations, which shaped so much New Critical thinking, and

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which underwrites the image of Richards as concerned in an exemplary fashion with the conditions of textual interpretation rather than with the circulation of social meanings. Even to this well-established image, Russo brings interesting additional material. He describes how, when the experiment which became Practical Criticism (1929) is first mentioned in A.C.Benson’s diary in October 1923, Richards is reported as having wanted to give out poems with no authors’ names attached as a puzzle about value (rather than, as is sometimes believed, as a test of ways of reading). What remains well known is that Richards’ experiment involved analysing hundreds of readers’ reports on texts they had been given to work on during the week between lectures; the readers’ written comments make up the famous ‘protocols’ on thirteen poems written by 120 undergraduates (plus T.S. Eliot and Mansfield Forbes) which revealed to Richards that students at a prestigious university were, in his own sense at least, seriously misreading. Russo reports how Richards held courses along roughly ‘practical criticism’ lines in 1925, 1927 and 1928—with the young F.R.Leavis going along each year to listen to almost exactly the same lectures. Russo also records how ‘practical criticism’ was incorporated as an exam question in the Cambridge English Tripos from as early as 1926; and points out that Richards re-ran his Cambridge experiment at Harvard in 1931, and then again at Bryn Mawr, to test the possibility that Cambridge students had particular problems in reading—only to arrive at similar results (which W.K.Wimsatt thought the makings of a ‘modern Dunciad’). While the exposure of received opinion and complacent reading was certainly part of Richards’ concern, he seems to have been more interested in classifying the reading problems he identified in the protocols, so analysing the general practice of close reading. It is in the analytic section of Practical Criticism (Part III) that Richards most clearly outlines his views on sincerity, stock responses, mnemonic and irrelevant associations, truth and other issues in literary interpretation; it is also as much there as previously in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) that he develops his concepts of rhythm, tone, form, intention, attitude and irony, before going on to conclude Practical Criticism, in Part IV, with general recommendations regarding the teaching of English. Slightly less well-known than his involvement with practical criticism is Richards’ contribution to the analysis of metaphor. He is often recognized as an origin for the terms ‘tenor’, ‘vehicle’ and ‘ground’ (which are defined in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), and which have been much used in later stylistic analysis). But what is less often acknowledged is how far the analysis of figurative language is a theme which runs through all Richards’ work, from his first published essay—on the relative merits of artistic and scientific paradigms in education (an argument which links much of Richards’ thinking on English in education back to Matthew Arnold and beyond)—through his arguments with G. E.Moore on topics in philosophy and psychology, into the more cele brated and specific analysis of The Philosophy of Rhetoric. For Richards, reacting against general approaches in the 1920s and 1930s to representation and symbolic thought, metaphor is not a local device or literary ornament, but—and in this respect he anticipates more recent work in linguistics and philosophy—a central mode of perception and thought, which allows interaction, or ‘interanimation’, between different cognitive contexts. It is because metaphor functions in this way that it became central to Richards’ speculations about meaning; and it is why questions of figurative language feature in


his work across the full range from semantic and psychological theorizing through to analysis of individual poems. Often less at first-hand than the other two images, the third component of the established image of Richards derives from his work on meaning and communication with C.K.Ogden. That collaboration—which began, almost accidentally, on Armistice Day 1918, as Ogden was asking his tenant, Richards, if he could identify anyone involved in local Armistice Day disturbances—developed into the writing of The Meaning of Meaning (1923), a work now probably more often cited than read. In The Meaning of Meaning, which was over 500 pages long when first published but then greatly shortened in later editions, Ogden and Richards tackled a number of foundational questions for linguistics and psychology. They offered definitions of signs (and in doing so incidentally promoted, in the book’s Appendix D, the work of C.S.Peirce); they formulated versions of linguistic functions (and so contributed to functionalist traditions in linguistics, mainly associated in literary structuralism with Jakobson’s description of six functions in his ‘Closing statement: linguistics and poetics’); they offered critiques of established theories of meaning, language and beauty; and they energetically argued that words only take on meanings in actual circumstances of use (and so drew attention to linguistic context as a necessary part of analyses of word-meaning). As well as summarizing thoroughly many of the book’s main arguments, Russo records more anecdotally how the frequent colds which Richards and Ogden caught while working on the manuscript led them to refer to the book between themselves as The Beadig of Beadig’. What remains slightly surprising about the extent to which The Meaning of Meaning goes unread today is that, although questions of reference have become increasingly central to—and difficult for—literary theory, the important divergence between Saussure’s concepts of signifier and signified, and Ogden and Richards’ triangle of ‘symbol’ (the signifier), ‘thought or reference’, and ‘referent’ (with its clear discrepancy with Saussure but affinities with Frege) rarely receives serious discussion. These three strands in Richards’ work—all concerned, in different ways, with specific aspects of the process of making meaning, and each filled in with interesting detail in Russo’s account—are often embedded, in modern representations of Richards, in a more general picture. Richards is commonly viewed as a mix of slightly dated psychological theories (such as those of James Ward, G.F.Stout or William James) with a cultural philosophy largely derived from Matthew Arnold. That view of culture centrally addressed the question how the study of poetry might save modern societies from the threat to moral and cultural values posed by scientific critiques of religion, by seditious political dogmas, and by sensationalist forms of popular culture (what Richards refers to at one point as the ‘more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loudspeaker’). Very often, when Richards is discussed, the portrait is painted of a critic circumscribed by an earlier period but also strangely prefigurative of current literary debate; of someone central to the development of English studies (by way of his influence on New Criticism and personal inspiration of Leavis and Empson) but at the same time someone marginal to the development of criticism (because of his unusually theoretical interest in the psychological mechanisms of interpretation, and his belief that positivistic scientific procedures might offer leverage on questions of social order and value).

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II The image of Richards which is a composite of the elements described above is substantially correct. But it is also drastically incomplete. Ironically, it survives in its slightly odd, limited form partly because of a lack of interest in Richards’ life which has sometimes been justified on the basis of his own pronounced lack of interest in the lives of other writers. What makes a fuller picture worth developing —and so what justifies the enormous labour involved in the composition of Russo’s massive biography—is the broad and changing definitions of English studies Richards himself habitually worked with. The areas which came to interest him— for example, issues of media technology; literacy and language learning; the international influence of English; or connections between criticism and creative writing—are not only evidence that he was an interesting and wide-ranging thinker. More importantly, they can act as a forceful reminder that some of the intellectual directions in which Richards was a pioneer have been largely lost to contemporary English studies. Richards’ writing in this respect (like Empson’s) can still allow fresh insights into roads taken and not taken in literary criticism and related studies. Russo’s biography, quite properly, subordinates comment on large questions of the development of twentieth-century literary studies to the detailed treatment of Richards’ own life and work. In conventional biography form, Russo offers a detailed and devoted account of Richards’ life, based on such extensive access to Richards (Russo was a frequent house-guest during the process of the biography’s composition) that it is reasonable to consider the biography loosely guided by its subject. Russo appears to stand in relation to Richards roughly as John Haffenden does to William Empson: not exactly a keeper of the holy flame, but a scholar with a partisan attention to detail that rules out the kind of critical distance which characterizes so much contemporary commentary. The evident loss of critical distance which the biographical approach inevitably involves has to be set against the fascination of much of the detail Russo presents, if the book is to be judged fairly —detail that has been simply unavailable until Russo’s biography came out. Russo organizes I.A.Richards: His Life and Work around an obvious, three-part chronological division in Richards’ professional life: his work on literary interpretation at Cambridge during the 1920s; his promotion of Basic English and literacy programmes around the world during the 1930s and early 1940s; and his later emphasis on lecturing and creative writing after the Second World War, through into his exceptionally active old age. Particularly striking, nevertheless, within each of these stages, is the diversity of Richards’ interests, and the energy of his attempts at integrating different academic involvements (moral science, psychology, anthropology) with other areas of his life, especially travel. Possibly still more striking to modern academics than the polyglot spread of Richards’ intellectual interests—given the high seriousness and professionalism which characterize contemporary literary study—is his subordination of all areas of academic work to other enthusiasms. According to Richards in an interview in 1973, it was mountaineering which provided ‘what my wife and I have both given up most of our lives to…we’ve been in the service of high mountaineering. And that


stands first.’ That passion began early, and developed as Richards recuperated from one of his attacks of tuberculosis in the mountains of North Wales, missing a year at Cambridge, 1912–13, and later missing active service in the First World War. After Richards met his wife, Dorothea Pilley, in Snowdonia in 1917, the two climbed avidly throughout their lives, virtually every summer in the Alps for four decades, into their seventies. Indeed Richards reorganized academic lecture visits and tours in different parts of the world around particular mountains to be climbed. Some of this is recorded in Dorothea’s book Climbing Days, which tells not only of her own achievements as one of the foremost climbers among women of her generation but also of the exploits of the man she refers to throughout as ‘IAR’. Russo adds to this strand in their lives other touches: Richards’ photos of mountains everywhere around his study; his habit of carrying around books and manuscripts in a climber’s rucksack; his tendency to cook at home in billy-cans, as if in mid-expedition, and how Richards’ ashes were finally scattered over the Welsh mountains after his death in September 1979. The most thought-provoking episode, however, as regards the relation between mountaineering and Richards’ academic work, is the story of how he became involved in the teaching of English literature in the first place: how in 1919 he approached Mansfield Forbes for a reference, and Scottish contacts, to help him find employment as a climbing guide in the Cuillin mountains of Skye. At the end of a conversation which turned from mountains to representations of mountains (and so to Wordsworth’s Lake District and Alps), Forbes persuaded Richards to become a freelance tutor (or ‘recognized lecturer’) in the new Cambridge English school. In retelling this story, Russo offers in passing useful background detail on the settingup of Cambridge English. But what is especially thought-provoking about the story is the way it fits with its sequel: how only ten years after this largely accidental introduction to the profession of literature, Richards declared that he wished to back out of literary criticism, as a discipline, altogether—and did so, leaving Cambridge more or less immediately after completing Practical Criticism in 1929. Whenever Richards is cited as the ‘father’ of modern literary criticism, accordingly, he needs to be thought of as something of an absent father. Arguably Richards’ contribution to literary studies during this first period of his work lies as much in his influence on New Criticism, and on Leavis (who was two years younger than himself, and became one of his freelance tutors after completing a PhD under Sir Arthur QuillerCouch) as in the substance of his own work. During that same period, Richards also had sustained personal contact with, and influence on, William Empson, who was his student for weekly supervisions in 1928–9, after Empson had switched from studying mathematics. The supervisions cemented a relationship which lasted through the Cambridge years into their work on behalf of Basic English in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, and beyond. But it is largely to Richards’ own writings that the initial concern with so-called ‘objective criticism’, or close textual analysis isolated from context, can be traced, with its implied opposition not only to older, irrelevantly biographical and amateurish literary conversation, but also to developing forms of ‘genetic criticism’ (e.g. psychoanalytic, sociological, historical) or ‘affective criticism’, such as reader response. Alongside the substance of Richards’ critical approach—the emphasis on emotive language and irony; the invocation to use only dictionaries in reading texts, not

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historical or other ‘background’ materials; or the belief that poems involve ‘pseudostatements’, rather than, as Empson maintained, paraphrasable propositional meanings—can be found many more idiosyncratic developments from these basic ideas, which Russo also records. There are fanciful notions such as Richards’ early belief that novels, at often 400 pages long, are generally too long to be worth studying; and there is his response, when asked at a meeting of Harvard graduates in 1969 what graduate programmes should be like, that graduate programmes should be dropped altogether (evidently, Richards only had one formally assigned research student throughout his twenty-four years at Harvard). Details such as these offer an image of a more iconoclastic and reflective intelligence than the one Terry Eagleton briefly presents in Literary Theory: an Introduction; in Eagleton’s account, Richards appears merely to dissect student scripts naïvely, and fails to recognize the distorting effect on his analysis of the socially decadent interpretive community of middle-class males in which his protocols originate.

III Any significance Richards’ work might continue to have, however, beyond whatever is secured for it by its role in establishing later directions of New Criticism, is now obscured by the fact that the ‘practical criticism’ and ‘poetry can save us’ Richards has become detached from the later Richards of Basic, literacy and communication. Arguably as many current issues in English studies can be associated with Richards’ failures of influence, after the 1920s, as can be connected with the scale of his influence during that decade. During the 1930s, for instance, Richards was actively engaged in promoting ‘Basic’ English (British American Scientific International Commercial), a version of English developed by Ogden from about 1925 onwards, and first publicized in a word-list of 1929 which distilled the roughly half-a-million words of large dictionaries of English into a mere 850. This simplified English was thought to be especially simple to learn, and was promoted as a suitable international language, more likely to gain adherents than competing, artificially constructed languages such as Esperanto, Ido or Novial. Roughly two-thirds of the words which make up Basic are of only one syllable, resulting in few word-stress problems among learners; and the derivation from English was assumed to be a particular recommendation, given English’s alphabetic script and relative lack of inflection. Russo describes how by 1939 there were offices promoting instruction in Basic in twenty-five countries; and how Basic was actively supported by an assortment of people, including F.D.Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound. Gradually Basic was adopted in education programmes, including a large project in China; and Richards travelled from conference to conference promoting it, as well as working on publications and setting up teaching programmes. In 1940, Ogden directed production of the General Basic English Dictionary, which defined 20,000 words in terms of the Basic 850. But although interest in Basic survived until the Second World War, the war—and questions of the appropriacy of English as an international language in a period of incipient decolonization—forced it into rapid decline. Indeed, Richards himself finally fell out with Ogden over Basic in 1947, over Richards’ stated willingness at a UNESCO


gathering to allow an ancillary role for French, if French representatives at the session would support Basic English as the primary international language. While the aspiration towards achieving for English the role of international language has gained ground, Basic itself is now just a footnote in the history of language planning. But Richards’ interest in it was part of a broader concern with language in education, in which cultural dimensions of ‘literacy’ in particular preoccupied him. Sketching out paths which have since been explored by McLuhan, Eisenstein, Ong, Goody and others, Ogden and Richards were already interested in the 1920s in ‘great divide’ arguments about orality and literacy; and later, during the 1940s, Richards gave radio lectures on the transition from oral to literate cultures. Richards believed that extensive use of sound and audio-visual media would lead to what has since been called ‘secondary orality’; and that this might bring together the social advantages of writing with those of earlier oral communities. Electronic media would be, for Richards, ‘technology’s long-delayed reply to writing’, and would make it possible to harness the specialized imaginative representations of literature to a potential for world-wide communication. At no point in his life did Richards himself ever own a television. But he was greatly impressed by the emerging technologies of communication and their possible uses. He energetically promoted a hand-operated phonograph, for example, for use in language teaching in places with no electricity supply; and he spent part of 1942 at Walt Disney Studios in California learning how to draw cartoons, in an effort to design films and television programmes to teach English more effectively. During the 1950s and 1960s, Richards had his own television programmes, analysing poetry and teaching English; and in 1965 he drew up plans (unrealized, as it turned out) to dramatize Plato’s Republic for television in twentytwo episodes. He even incorporated a diagram from Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication—part of their work on the structures of electronic telecommunication—in the introduction to his 1950 translation of the Iliad. Inevitably, much of Richards’ interest in new media involved fundamental revision to the worried attitudes towards communication technologies he had adopted in his early work. He gradually came to see in the new media a range of distinct opportunities: the opportunity to inject a role for sound back into reading, especially reading poetry; an opportunity for developing new kinds of media ‘literacy’, effecting a social revolution on the scale he knew from anthropological work is brought about in the history of societies by the advent of writing; and a major opportunity for new kinds of pedagogy. But his lectures and writing also remained concerned with questions of commercial and state control of media, and with problems of propaganda and trivialization, especially in advertising, political discourse and popular entertainment. It is clear that Richards never fully grasped the rapidly emerging issues of modern communications technologies, and that he veered sometimes wildly between vaguely McLuhanite optimism and deep anxiety about the future. But those uncertainties have to be seen in the context that he was working several decades ahead of formal studies of media and communication, yet was able—within historically limited horizons—not only to investigate the relationship between creativity, technology and value, but also to connect those questions with the study of canonical literature and with problems of writing as, in Goody’s term, a material

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‘technology of the intellect’. Predictably, perhaps, English departments of the time turned their backs on the kind of work in which Richards became increasingly interested. His new interests had made him a maverick and an outsider. So little is now read of Richards’ creative writing, produced in the last two decades of his life, that it is difficult to see what influence, if any, it has had. By contrast with Empson, who gave up creative writing early, Richards only began as he approached the age of 60 (by which time he had already written fifteen critical books). Combining writing with lecturing and climbing during the following years, he produced four collections of poetry and four plays, including one called Why so, Socrates, which in production starred Richards himself as Socrates. (A further three plays remained unpublished at his death.) Alongside repeated use of images from mountaineering as organizing devices for analysing thought, Richards investigated philosophical and ethical questions in poetic and dramatic form, drawing extensively for scenarios on his wide reading. In what appears to have been a deliberate ‘last work’, Richards produced Beyond, a dialogue reviewing many of his earlier concerns. Russo offers extended readings of many of these texts. But in doing so, he fails to achieve any insight into the significance Richards sought for this last phase of his work, by comparison with the perceptiveness of his commentary on the earlier achievements, or his grasp of how the early concern with the process of reading fed into the later process of writing.

IV It would be easy to dismiss interest in a biography of Richards now as retrograde: mere enthusiasm for a life beyond the work, constructing ‘unity’ in a figure who might then provide coherence for the set of contradictions which have shaped English studies; Richards as an embodiment of what English was ‘in the beginning’, or might be, or might have been. That would be to ignore contradictions in Richards’ own experience, and in the process of construction involved in representing that experience in a biography. It is possible, even so, to trace in Russo’s account of Richards at least four historical fault-lines in the formation and current dynamics of English. 1 Richards’ work confirms, if it is ever doubted, that clear distinction between traditional, ‘pre-theoretical’ critics and modern theoreticians is simplistic. This is not only because even a straightforwardly assertive critical work involves theoretical premises and constructions; it is also because ‘transitional’ or ‘prefigurative’ figures in the history of modern literary criticism, such as Richards or Empson, can be shown to have been fully engaged with both specific and general questions of theory, even if their analyses were limited by subordination of a theoretical approach finally to a prevailing, masculinist, rational English liberalism. (Richards himself, of course, dismissively suggested that theories ‘make us much more stupid than we would be without them’, and characteristically only valued theory when it made possible individual acts of interpretation which went beyond doctrine.)


2 Richards’ work stands as a clear case for integrating different areas of practical work on English, especially regarding what has become the binary dividing line of ‘language’ and ‘literature’. Richards’ involvement in teaching English as a foreign language, his regard for the sociology of English as an international language, and his interest in teaching student composition, all show a concern with social facts of the history, structure and conditions of use of English which is now relatively uncommon in work that is at the same time committed to literature. 3 Especially in Mencius on the Mind (1932), Richards showed considerable interest in questions of cross-cultural misunderstandings, which has not been much advanced since (except in work on incommensurability, in philosophy and anthropology, and in work in cross-cultural pragmatics, in linguistics). Questions of the role of cultural difference in communication were triggered for Richards most concretely by incidents such as his Chinese students’ applause at the ‘punishment’ of Tess at the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles; but the theoretical questions raised lead into still unresolved issues of the interrelationship between coded meanings, inferential interpretation, and ideology. 4 Richards’ consideration of media serves as a reminder of the prematurely suspended debate over how far media and communication studies should be specialized and separate fields from English. For Richards, understanding the role and social significance of media had to be constantly related to understanding how language works in other contexts of communication, within an extremely long history of forms of representation. While this perspective can be found, since Richards, in the work of Raymond Williams, it is a view of literature and media which has largely been overtaken by disciplinary separation—arguably leaving merely an unfocused residue in English studies, and an absence of close attention to language (e.g. dialogue) in media studies themselves. V Undoubtedly, Richards’ own intellectual horizons were limited, often by the strength of his commitment to particular methodologies and concepts of knowledge and value. There would thus be little point in trying to reverse the extensive critiques which have been made of his work, first to clear ground for structuralist and then for a range of poststructuralist arguments. Richards gave insufficient attention to the complex politics of English as a world language, for instance; he used the concept of ‘value’ artificially to resolve contradictions inherent in a heterogeneity of cultural forms which are nevertheless structured around a hierarchy between ‘high’ culture and ‘popular’ culture; he seemed more or less oblivious to critiques of the British educated literary readership, such as those from Marxism or feminism; and Richards’ individualism led him into a sort of apolitical anarchism, exemplified in his claim that he was only interested in

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‘world politics’, and then only on a long time-scale. Commenting on Richards’ work in Culture and Society in 1958, Raymond Williams appropriately summed Richards up as a writer who, for all his achievements, damagingly saw himself pitted against an abstract world, rather than as someone actively involved in a network of specific and changeable social relationships. All the same, Russo’s biography, more than any previous work on Richards, allows important interconnections between the different areas of his work to be seen. Occasionally, the summaries offered of critical works (including books by writers other than Richards), of other lives (such as the mini-biography of G.E.Moore) and of critical fields or approaches (such as the outline of deconstruction embedded in the New Criticism chapter) are far too long; in this respect, Russo’s study is caught in its own efforts to combine two split perspectives, blending description of the relevant intellectual, academic and social contexts with a narrative offered of Richards’ life in particular. As a whole, however, Russo’s biography clearly signals a reason for continued interest in Richards, in its focus on the connections Richards tried to establish between two strands in the world of English letters (litterae): his concern with issues of literacy (the development of reading skills and habits, based on broad education and understanding of the systems and social conditions of English); and his attention to literature (textual forms in which representations—especially public representations of private experience— circulate, and in doing so create social values). In tackling the dialectic between these two kinds of potential in language, Richards’ work deserves to be studied as something more than merely an unsuccessful attempt to reunite general social meanings and specialized artistic meanings, following the deep divisions between them created by the Industrial Revolution and by Romantic conceptions of art. Goldsmiths’ College, University of London

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