Textual Practice Volume 07 Issue 3

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 CFl 3XB US 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 Reviews editor

Fred Botting Lancaster University Postal address: Department of English, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT Editorial board

Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Malcolm Bowie All Souls’ College, Oxford Terry Eagleton University of Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Ania Loomba Stanford University, USA Editorial Assistant Louise Tucker 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 Fred Botting Department of English, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT Advertisements. Enquiries to David Polley, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £55.00; UK personal: £28.00; Rest of World full: £58.00; Rest of World personal: £30.00; USA full: $90.00;

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Notes for contributors

Authors should submit two complete copies of their paper, in English, to Professor Terence Hawkes at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales, College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XB. It will be assumed that authors will keep a copy. Submission of a paper to will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript the author agrees that he or she is giving the publisher the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute the paper, including reprints, photographic reproductions, microfilm or any other reproduction of a similar nature. Authors will not be required to assign the copyright. The manuscript Submissions should be typed in double spacing on one side only of the paper, preferably of A4 size, with a 4cm margin on the left-hand side. Articles should normally be of between 7000 and 8000 words in length. Tables should not be inserted in the pages of the manuscript but should be on separate sheets. The desired position in the text for each table should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. Photographs Photographs should be in high-contrast black-and-white glossy prints. Permission to reproduce them must be obtained by authors before submission, and any acknowledgements should be included in the captions. References These should be numbered consecutively in the text, thus: ‘According to a recent theory,4…’, and collected at the end of the paper in the following styles, for journals and books respectively: J.Hartley and J.Fiske, ‘Myth-representation: a cultural reading of News at Ten’, Communication Studies Bulletin, 4 (1977), pp. 12–33. C.Norris, The Deconstructiue Turn (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). Proofs Page proofs will be sent for correction to the first-named author, unless otherwise requested. The difficulty and expense involved in making amendments at the page proof stage make it essential for authors to prepare their typescripts carefully: any alterations to the original text are strongly discouraged. Our aim is

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rapid publication: this will be helped if authors provide good copy, following the above instructions, and return their page proofs as quickly as possible. 0ffprints Ten offprints will be supplied free of charge.

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 7 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1993

Contents

Special Issue: Desire Articles Re-iterating desire TAMSIN SPARGOFRED BOTTING

1

Desire in theory: Freud, Lacan, Derrida CATHERINE BELSEY

6

Between women: lesbianism in pornography PETER BENSON

33

‘And all is semblative a woman’s part’: body politics and Twelfth Night DYMPNA CALLAGHAN

49

AIDS, identity and the space of desire JONATHAN KEANE

74

Machinic desire NICK LAND

92

Review Articles Reading homoeroticism in early modern England: imaginations, interpretations, circulations MARIO DiGANGI

105

Futures for feminist history RACHEL BOWLBY

120

Reviews Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Bodyguards Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests SIMON SHEPHERD

127

Joseph Bristow (ed.), Sexual Sameness DEREK DUNCAN

133

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Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze JOSEPH BRISTOW

136

Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject LISA ROULETTE

139

Sue Roe, Writing and Gender BRENDA LYONS

143

Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity ROBERT T.TALLY, JR

147

John Bender and David E.Wellberry (eds), Chronotypes BARBARA ADAM

151

Anthony Giddens, Moderniiy and Self-Identity Paisley Livingston, Literature and Rationality John B.Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity EDMOND WRIGHT

157

Ralph Cohen (ed.), The Future of Literary Criticism GRAHAM ALLEN

166

Joseph Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty JAMES KIRWAN

170

Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World P.J.MURPHY

177

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad REYNOLD HUMPHRIES

185

N.Coupland, H.Giles and J.M.Wiemann (eds), ‘Miscommunication’ and Problematic Talk MERCEDES BENGOECHEA

192

Index to Volume 7

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Re-iterating desire TAMSIN SPARGO and FRED BOTTING Guest Editors

This issue is about desire… Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if also more opaque, to say that desire is about this issue.1 Desire is… Desire is never having an object or name to call one’s own. It remains wanting. Excessive, desire connotes a heterogeneity that overflows channels of communication and utility. Powerful, desire disciplines and directs as much as it resists and transgresses. Desire is of bodies; of bodies that are not themselves but rendered other by looks and languages that lie elsewhere. Desire is of the Other and in interminable relation to the Other. Gendered, desire engenders and disengenders, articulates as much as it disconnects. Desire is of the copula that never closes the distance between subject and object. Desire is to want to be at one with oneself as one’s own object, image and signifier. Called ‘Desire’, this issue is not so much an issue on desire, in the sense of projecting the definition of an object in a display of mastery; it is more concerned with issues of desire, of the displacements, effects and implications circumscribing any discussion of the topic. Involved in desire, the essays included in this issue return to formulations enunciated in the diverse writings that have become catalogued under the name poststructuralism. Returns, as with Lacan’s famous return to Freud, are also departures, movements away that happen in the process of going back. The double movement of the return to particular texts involves their modification, transformation and redirection, diverging from them rather than achieving a unity with them.2 Lacan’s return to Freud is similarly twofold, involving a demand for meaning and an enactment of desiring. A substitution of new signifiers for old, the return to Freud was a misreading and an embezzlement, a theft of meaning from psychoanalytical institutions.3 In the very name of Freud, psychoanalysis is transformed by an encounter with Saussurean linguistics. The return re-iterates questions of desire; its repetitive movement activates differences. The text at which the return is directed is no longer recognizable as the image of the reading position: refusing to comply with the demand that anticipates meaning, the text to which one returns is reinscribed with the marks of desire, the displacements of signification. Reading is never without desire.

2 RE-ITERATING DESIRE

Desire is a mysterious and many-splendoured thing, as one might have wanted Jacques Lacan to spell out. He never did. Instead, he cast the spells that have left him a resplendent figure of desire. And it is for desire that his seminars and writings offer most. But the figure of Lacan as charlatan, genius, shaman and guru still shimmers as the autobiographical excess of the writings. Sacralized and demonized, the figure staged the truth of desire in the lie of his performance. A ‘diamond of unnamable desire’, the dead-end of structuralist phallocentrism, Lacan’s performance crystallized diverse writings, among them psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, literature and anthropology, into a fascinating prismatic focus that was simultaneously diffractive and refractive. As phallus or objet a Lacan was neither there nor their deliverer, but hovered spectrally and speculatively, like Hamlet’s ghost, with injunctions that situated desire as that which follows the law of the father, a law whose locus was the Other, the signifying conventions of language. Indeed, the Other of which Lacan spoke (and, of course, which spoke him) was the place of those writings from which he duplicitously etched and appropriated desire in processes of extraordinary repetition. For example, reading Kojeve’s lectures provokes a shocking recognition, an uncanny sense of déjà vu: desire, negatively differentiating humans from animals, nature and objects, is the ‘desire of the Other’.4 Only possible after reading Lacan, recognition makes reading a simultaneously anticipatory and retrospective act. Identifications are no less uncanny for that. Moreover, the doubling of two figures discloses a chain of recognitions and repetitions, a substitution of names which can immediately be supplemented with Hegel’s. Reading desire, seeking an end to meaning, only extends its range. And something is wanting: to recognize Lacan in Kojeve is also to forget the difference, to overlook the role of the signifier and the way that recognition, in the mirror stage, has become misrecognition. In recognition, the want, as lack/ desire, is already in place: Kojeve can only be recognized as Lacan because the latter has already been read, the reader already positioned by the language, the (purloined) vocabulary of psychoanalysis. There is more to the relation of desire and recognition which replaces Lacan with Kojeve: a want of identity, origin and closure. But there is no end to the play of repetition and substitution, no restricted economy of meaning which holds one singularly in place beside the other. Hegel intervenes. Or Freud. Indeed, like processes of condensation in the dreamwork, substitution entails displacements, relocations of significance. ‘Lacan’ refracts through another lens. Even the triangulations for which Lacan is famed cannot be neatly reduced to an absolute equivalence with those of Hegel, in the dialectic, or Freud, with Oedipus. The negativity of desire involves the transgression of boundaries and refuses reconciliation by means of a third term. Displaced along other chains, recognized amongst other signifying relations, Lacan, the figure of desire, becomes a mark of negative capability. Whether casting ‘him’ away or bringing ‘him’ back, one discloses one’s implication in a repetitive relation to desire. It is, moreover, a relation that remains structural.

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In this sense, desire can be associated with difference. Offering no position that is not in itself an effect of desire, there is no outside desire, no Other of the Other. If desire is anywhere, if it is in anything, it is in between, in relation to. Linking, binding subjects to an identity and order that lies elsewhere, desire binds one, fantasmatically at least, to others and objects. Wanting others or objects discloses a lack, their absence: desire also separates. Doubled, like difference, as bond and severance, desire evinces a certain mobility, a peculiar errancy. Such errancy delivers a sense of desire as that which does not pertain to the subject. It is an errancy which leaves desire ungraspable, impossible, even, in some strange (non)originary way, essential: ‘différance remains a metaphysical name, and all the names that it receives in our language are still, as names, metaphysical.’5 Desire, too. The errancy of this unsettling essence becomes a site of lost origination, of movements, traversals, which deliver desire only by detours. It remains unfixed and destabilizing. Its location can never wholly be bodies. Even Freud’s biologism, sitting uneasily with psychoanalysis and assuming instincts, drives, bound and unbound energies, slides from the body as origin to find a unity, an originary indifference, in myths, legends, tales: the loss of origin marks the point from which desire stems and drives seek to return. Desire, always bound up with romance, has already inscribed the body, marked it as always already signifying. Bodies, indeed, have always, according to Foucault, been sites of inscription. Disciplined, regulated, bodies are the material of power’s operations. Its agents, bodies are never without power: with power they speak, defining, positioning, resisting, but only within its diffuse and specific networks. Power remains as much inside as without. But in the friction between subjects and relations of power, desire appears. Not as some fundamental sexual liberation, or as the place where a basic, intimate and individual human truth is discovered, but desire as a discursive and institutional channelling of identities and actions. However, the resistances inherent in power’s operations display an excessive, inhuman, technological aspect to desire even as they shape the desire to be truly, fully human. Like power, desire demands the transgression and thus the affirmation and transformation of limits. It proposes a movement disruptive of any boundaries that attempt its final regulation. So, too, with desire and Lacan, desire’s agent provocateur. Indeed, in resistance to the limits and lacks of Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire has become many things and evinced an excessive and unchartable potential. Against an apparent structural stasis and rigidity, disavowing any determining lack, desire has been diversely characterized as energies, flows, movements, diffuse plenitudes. As rhythms, pulsions, multiplicities, desires offer a very different subject from the one analysed by Lacan. A return to the topic of desire and Lacan, however, cannot see the writings other than in the chiaroscuro of these criticisms, inflections and transformations. Such a return might turn out to be a departure.

4 RE-ITERATING DESIRE

Desire both connects and differentiates the essays in this issue, as the issue of desire invites diverse engagements and articulations. Whilst all these contributions return to, or turn on, questions of desire, these questions are multiple and various. The bodies, relations, sexualities, desire and Desire(s) in and of these contributions are differently displayed and diversely directed. In ‘Desire in theory: Freud, Lacan, Derrida’, Catherine Belsey returns to accounts, analyses and elusive performances of desire in Freud’s essay ‘On the universal tendency to debasement’, Lacan’s The signification of the phallus’ and Derrida’s The Post Card. This return is not an attempt to extract the truth of desire or the truth of the texts. In Belsey’s reading, these are texts whose doublings and displacements mimic the ways of desire: they are engagements with desire that can never be sealed in a union sanctified by truth. The truth of desire, Belsey argues, can neither be seen nor shown. But this essay, by meticulously tracing the contradictions, inflections and inscriptions of desire in writing, can itself be read as an enactment of desire in theory. The textual enactment of scenes of desire constitutes the space of analysis in the next essay, Peter Benson’s ‘Between women: lesbianism in pornography’. In a study which employs Freudian and Lacanian psycho-analysis, Benson argues that pornography cannot simply be regarded as the commercial exploitation of narrowly defined desires but that it plays an active role in negotiating contradictions within the male social role and psyche. Pornography, like psychoanalysis, is seen to view sexual desires and experiences as produced by structures of phantasy rather than being immediate responses to present reality. The essay analyses the appeal to a heterosexual male market of fantasy scenes of lesbianism which apparently exclude the male viewer or reader, leaving the purchaser of the fantasy with no obvious place. The viewing of lesbian sexual activity is connected with primal scenes whose fantasies of exclusion serve as templates of desire, with the phantasized excesses of female pleasure and with an eroticism which resides not in the representation of sexuality but in the sexualizing of representation. Benson’s study opens up a new space of textual and critical analysis, subtly and forcefully suggesting that the fractures and lacunae of the male gaze offer radical reflections in which it becomes an object of criticism. A different analysis of the female body in representation is offered by Dympna Callaghan in her counterblast to current celebrations of the subversive possibilities of transvestism in Renaissance drama. Callaghan examines Twelfth Night in terms of the graphic display of the female body—figured in genitalia which are constructed as monstrous—and produces a reading of the play’s articulation of inappropriate desire. The ritualized deregulation of desire presented in Twelfth Night is seen not to affirm a corporeal female desire, but rather to textually and performatively connect with the materiality of women’s exclusion from the stage and their suppression and containment outside the world of theatre or text.

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Re-examining relations between inside and out in ‘AIDS, identity and the space of desire’, Jonathan Keane raises the question of being gay with a certain passion, the passion of the signifer. Lacanian theory, however, is refracted through a series of other positions which rewrite notions of identity and desire. The space of desire is a contradictory, fluid arena in which identities are written and rewritten. Articulating performance, history and experience, the theoretical exposition and the subsequent analysis of Oscar Moore’s ‘coming out’ novel, A Matter of Life and Sex, emphasize the very serious implications that the writing of self has for cultural constructions of AIDS and gay identity. In ‘Machinic desire’, Nick Land presents the in-humanity of desiring technologies. Replication replaces reproduction. Human artificiality and its myths of self, control and possession are reprogrammed by the nomadic and neuroromantic impulses of cyberspace. Turning on Kant’s subject and Freud’s drives, the essay tunes Deleuze and Guattari into the dazzling circuitry of virtual systems. Deploying the technoscientific recombinations of cyberspeak, ‘Machinic desire’ traces the evanescence of bodies and borders along the silicon defiles of global markets whose science fictions are all too real. Desire, its mobility and machinations, possesses interrogative dimensions. Always beyond specific parameters, desire may also be at work in the gaps, in the interstices, between these essays, in what they and this text cannot write, cannot present. Forever elusive, desire will always leave us wanting. Liverpool John Moores University Lancaster University NOTES 1 Misquoted from Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Picador, 1984), p. 59. 2 See Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F.Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113– 38. 3 See Catherine Clement, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 121–3; Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death ofan Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 31. 4 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 3–30. David Macey, Lacan in Contexts (London and New York: Verso, 1988), p. 98: ‘to return to Kojeve after reading Lacan is to experience the shock of recognition, a truly uncanny sensation of déjà vu.’ 5 Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1982), p. 26.

Desire in theory: Freud, Lacan, Derrida CATHERINE BELSEY

I What is the truth of desire? In 1912 Sigmund Freud published a psychoanalytic account of true love as the union of two distinct currents in sexual life, the affectionate and the sensual. In this ideal state of affairs, Freud argues, ‘the greatest intensity of sensual passion will bring with it the highest psychical valuation of the object’.1 Here science perfectly reproduces a dualism already comfortably familiar to us from three centuries of romantic fiction and moral exhortation. In Freud’s version, mind and body, psyche and sensuality, join to unite man and woman in a healthy sexual relationship. The essay is ‘On the universal tendency to debasement [Erniedrigung] in the sphere of love’, and its ostensible topic is psychical impotence. This condition, Freud the clinician briskly explains, affects men of perfectly normal sexual appetite who find themselves unable to carry out the sexual act, despite a strong psychological or emotional inclination to do so. On investigation, it appears that this disturbance inhibits intercourse only with certain individuals, and that it is commonly accompanied by the sense of an obstacle inside the sufferer: a ‘counterwill’, which he cannot explain, interferes in specific circumstances with his conscious intention. Freud goes on to give what appears as a characteristically lucid account of the psychosexual development of this disorder. Two currents whose union is necessary to ensure a completely normal attitude in love have, in the cases we are considering, failed to combine. These two may be distinguished as the affectionate and the sensual current. (p. 248) The affectionate current reaches right back into early childhood. In the interests of self-preservation the child develops a close relationship with those who care for it. This primary object-choice carries with it a sexual component, which of

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course is not able to fulfil its aims. At puberty, the affectionate current is joined by a powerful sensual current, which reinvests the child’s original objects with an explicitly erotic desire. This time, however, the sexual drive encounters the obstacles that have been set up by the taboo on incest, the result of the Oedipus complex and its resolution. The drive therefore seeks other objects, outside the family, with whom real sexual relations are admissible. These new sexual objects in due course attract the affection that was initially directed to the child’s original objects, and in consequence ‘affection and sensuality are then united’ in the mature adult (p. 250). Unless, that is, something interferes with this normal developmental process. An unconscious inability to surmount the original incestuous attachment to a mother or a sister can isolate the affectionate current from the sensual current. Then the affections seek out objects who recall the family members, and excite a high degree of respect and admiration, while sensuality can find satisfaction only with women of a wholly different kind, who do not recall the original incestuous objects in any way. Love subsists within the sphere of legality and sex outside it. Some of the decisiveness, the clarity of the scientific explanation Freud gives in this essay, and its consequent persuasiveness, stems from the sustained metaphor which defines the psychosexual process. In Freud’s account the psychosexual impulses resemble waterways which flow from different springs. First one current pursues its course and then is diverted; subsequently another current joins it, but runs up against obstacles; this second current then finds a means to bypass the impediments, and in this way it becomes possible for the two streams to unite—or to diverge. We could draw a sketch-map of this developing waterscape, a hydraulic topography charted in words by a master of rhetoric. How transparent the narrative seems, how true, how inevitable. And the oppositions it identifies are of course already familiar: affection and sensuality, mind and body, ideally in harmony, rarely so in practice. The classical opposition between agape and eros, reformulated at intervals throughout western culture, is here scientifically accounted for, and an aspect of the history of fine art is shown in consequence to reveal an explicable kind of pathology: ‘The whole sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love’ (p. 251). Freud’s analysis is triumphantly confirmed by an aphorism that perfectly specifies a tragic duality: ‘Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love’ (p. 251). Meanwhile, the division within masculine sexuality leads in turn to the identification of another antithesis, again already familiar, already ‘obvious’, between two feminine sexual types, the idealized, chaste wife and the despised but sexy prostitute: the man almost always feels his respect for the woman acting as a restriction on his sexual activity, and only develops full potency when he is with a debased sexual object; and this in its turn is partly caused by the

8 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

entrance of perverse components into his sexual aims, which he does not venture to satisfy with a woman he respects. He is assured of complete sexual pleasure only when he can devote himself unreservedly to obtaining satisfaction, which with his well-brought-up wife, for instance, he does not dare to do. This is the source of his need for a debased sexual object, a woman who is ethically inferior, to whom he need attribute no aesthetic scruples, who does not know him in his other social relations and cannot judge him in them. It is to such a woman that he prefers to devote his sexual potency, even when the whole of his affection belongs to a woman of a higher kind. It is possible, too, that the tendency so often observed in men of the highest classes of society to choose a woman of a lower class as a permanent mistress or even as a wife is nothing but a consequence of their need for a debased sexual object, to whom, psychologically, the possibility of complete satisfaction is linked. (p. 254) The tendency in question, we are to remember, is a ‘disorder’, but one which is much more widespread than most people suppose. And in fact, Freud has already confided, to a certain extent this dismal division can be said to characterize the sexual life of civilized man in general (p. 253). For thus gradually but decisively normalizing a perverse male sexuality, in conjunction with a succession of crude patriarchal female stereotypes of class as well as gender, Freud surely once again merits all the wrath directed at him by feminists from Kate Millett to Luce Irigaray and beyond. It is as if the reader is invited to share the masculine attribution of ethical and aesthetic inferiority to working-class women, to endorse male promiscuity, and at the same time to recognize as inevitable the fact that men are simply like that, that they can’t help it, that there’s nothing to be done. Possibly the most brilliant analysis of Freud’s misogyny is Sarah Kofman’s account of his ad hoc invocation of penis envy in order finally to guarantee the debasement of all women. The theory of penis envy, she points out, has no place in the logic of Freud’s account of psychosexual development, but it does have the virtue of founding women’s inferiority in biology. And by depreciating women in general, it solves the problem of the division between wife and whore set up in the essay on Debasement: ‘Women’s penis envy is certainly the best solution for Freud, the solution that makes it possible to dispense with the dangerous solution of recourse to prostitutes, those women of humble birth sufficiently debased to exalt man’s sex and to banish any association with incest.’2 If all women are naturally and necessarily envious of men, then they are all in that sense debased, and men can have nothing to fear from even the most admirable of them. Of course, the antithesis between the chaste but chilling wife and the uninhibited working-class mistress has a distinctively Victorian flavour, even if it goes back at least to Renaissance religious iconography, and although traces of it still survive even now in the preferences and practices of certain prominent

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politicians and television evangelists. In the nineteenth century in particular, in view of the Victorian idealization of feminine purity, it must have been particularly difficult to solicit participation in eccentric sexual practices from the Angel in the House. No wonder it was necessary to turn to ‘uncultivated’ prostitutes in whom polymorphous perversity was widely perceived to persist.3 Today’s superwoman, however, a product of the twentieth-century sexual revolution, is expected to take sexual eccentricities in her stride, and indeed to dress up in black leather as required, in between organizing the household and accepting well-deserved promotions at the office. The problem is now surely largely solved. And yet the underlying opposition Freud’s text depicts is remarkably close to the dualism identified by current popular romance: minds and bodies out of line with each other in a slightly different way; two distinct currents converging only coincidentally, if at all; a version of love which strives to reconcile sensuality and affection, while driving them in practice further apart than ever.4 The essay on Debasement is divided into three sections and the second of these inaugurates what is apparently a new beginning. The account of psychical impotence, it appears, was merely a prelude, an introduction which now makes way for an approach to Freud’s ‘proper subject’ (p. 252). The problem with the theory as it stands, Freud points out, is that while it explains why some men are psychically impotent, what it leaves out of account is how any succeed in escaping this affliction. And it is at this point that Freud reveals the widespread character of the disorder he is considering: a degree of psychical impotence is the rule rather than the exception. Something of the same problem affects women too, it now appears. For young women sexuality is so long prohibited, Freud explains, that it is often difficult for them to undo the connection between sexual activity and prohibition. Legitimate sex leaves them frigid, while forbidden sensuality, by contrast, often releases a capacity for pleasure which cannot be found elsewhere. Clandestine love, for example, is a parallel experience for women to the masculine recourse to prostitutes: ‘unfaithful to their husband, they are able to keep a second order of faith with their lover’ (p. 255). There is thus a certain symmetry between men and women in this respect. Women share, after all, in the ‘universal’ tendency towards prohibited passion. Freud had already argued in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (and would reiterate) that there is only one libido, whether it occurs in men or women, and that if desire is ‘masculine’ in character, it is so primarily in the sense that ‘masculine’ means ‘active’, since a drive is always ‘active’.5 This notorious passage, with its long subsequent footnote, displays a characteristic Freudian pattern of affirmation followed by hesitation when the issue is sexual difference. Here male sexuality is taken as the norm; sexual difference is brought into being with the ending of the phallic phase; female sexuality is thus different—and the same; and in any case, in human beings pure ‘masculinity’ and pure ‘femininity’ do not exist. In the Debasement essay men and women share a pleasure in

10 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

forbidden love. The situations are not identical: women neither over- value their husbands nor experience a corresponding need to debase their lovers. But both men and women are adversely affected by the long delay, ‘which is demanded by education for cultural reasons’, between the moment of sexual maturity and the arrival of the time for legitimate sexual activity (pp. 255–6). If the affectionate and the sensual impulses commonly fail to coalesce, that is seen at this stage of the argument as a consequence of the cultural practice which separates marriage from the onset of puberty. The victim of psychical impotence in this second section of the essay is no longer a number of unfortunate marriages in which pathology regrettably plays a part, but the institution of marriage in general. And the culprit is not so clearly an inadequate resolution of the Oedipus complex, leading to an unconscious attachment to forbidden, incestuous objects of desire, but rather the chronological gap between the development of a sexual capacity and its legitimate exercise. Freud’s ‘proper subject’, it appears, is not so much a clinical disorder as civilization and its discontents. And in case the reader might draw from this analysis a precipitate inference that earlier marriage would make for happier marriage or, more radically, that marriage itself might not be the happiest location for sexual activity (a case that Freud had already argued vehemently four years earlier),6 the essay disarmingly draws back from any implied prescription: In view of the strenuous efforts being made in the civilized world today to reform sexual life, it will not be superfluous to give a reminder that psychoanalytic research is as remote from tendentiousness as any other kind of research. It has no other end in view than to throw light on things by tracing what is manifest back to what is hidden. It is quite satisfied if reforms make use of its findings to replace what is injurious by something more advantageous; but it cannot predict whether other institutions may not result in other, and perhaps graver, sacrifices. (p. 256) The final note of warning is chilling. What are these ‘graver sacrifices’ that the text hints at but does not define? And are they incidental to the argument, or part of the ‘proper subject’ of the essay? What, indeed, is this ‘proper subject’? Have we reached it when the opening of section 3 of the essay alludes to ‘the curb put upon love by civilization’ (p. 256)? The transparent text has begun to cloud over as Freud takes away with one hand what he gives with the other. A disorder becomes a common condition, at least in ‘civilization’. But the most obvious remedy will not necessarily produce the cure. The problem is inevitable; there is nothing to be done; and in any case another state of affairs might be worse. Meanwhile, as the discussion develops, or rather doubles back on itself, a new set of oppositions begins to emerge, replacing the text’s earlier dualities: no longer mind and body, or man and woman, but sexual pleasure and marriage, sexuality on the one hand and

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‘civilization’ [Kultur] on the other. And what is the alternative to this ‘civilization’, its defining difference? Savagery? Primitivism? Uninhibited working-class sexuality?7 Or nature itself? And if so, where in human experience might this nature be found? In the pre-Oedipal, instinctual life of the infant, perhaps. The opening of the third section of the argument, which constitutes something like another new start, simply effaces most of the distinctions the first two sections have set up, by alluding to the title of the essay: the topic is a ‘universal’ (allgemeinste, most widespread) tendency in sexual relations.8 Since it seems that the question is no longer primarily one concerning differences of culture, class or gender, the essay goes on to clarify its project by attention to the nature of the sexual drive itself. The initial frustration of sexual pleasure (twice over, we must suppose — by the castration complex and again at puberty by ‘education’) has the effect of subsequently inhibiting legitimate sexual activity. And yet delay is not after all the culprit: ‘But at the same time, if sexual freedom is unrestricted from the outset the result is no better’ (my italics, p. 256). As the decline and fall of the ancient civilizations demonstrates, Freud goes on, easy sex is worthless sex. ‘An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love’ (pp. 256–7). Now it appears that nature and convention are not antithetical, but in alliance, producing ‘resistances’ which enhance desire. Medieval Christian asceticism, for instance, ‘created psychical values for love which pagan antiquity was never able to confer on it’ (p. 257). Forbidden love is more not less thrilling. Civilization increases the value of the erotic; culture invades sexual life with the effect of intensifying it. How, the essay goes on to deliberate, can this be? Is it simply an economic question, a matter of supply and demand? Obviously the psychical insistence of an impulse rises in proportion to its frustration. But does its importance also fall when the impulse is easily satisfied? And here Freud invokes the alcoholic, whose desire for wine is not enhanced by scarcity: ‘Does one ever hear of a drinker who needs to go to a country where wine is dearer or drinking is prohibited, so that by introducing obstacles he can reinforce the dwindling satisfaction that he obtains? Not at all’ (p. 257). It seems, then, that the character of sexuality is in some way special, that there is something in the nature of the sexual drive itself that is ‘unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction’ (even, we must presumably suppose at this stage of the argument, with a debased or prohibited object) (p. 258). The essay goes on to offer two possible reasons for this new insight. The second of these, the view that genital activity is fundamentally ‘animal’ and thus incompatible with civilization, apparently reinstates the earlier duality of nature and culture:

12 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

The genitals themselves have not taken part in the development of the human body in the direction of beauty: they have remained animal, and thus love, too, has remained in essence just as animal as it ever was. (p. 259) This argument carries very little credibility for us now, as products of a culture which, in the wake of D.H.Lawrence, sexology and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, is more likely to idealize sex than to be disgusted by it. Freud seems to be generalizing from his own historical moment, and presenting as universal a problem which has now been solved by sexual liberation. It is not, however, quite as simple as that. The paragraph as a whole is altogether more puzzling. The second reason why something in the nature of the sexual instinct is unfavourable to complete satisfaction is that sexuality, the sexual drive itself, develops: the sexual instinct is originally divided into a great number of components —or rather it develops out of them—some of which cannot be taken up into the instinct in its later form. (p. 258) These (animal) components include coprophilia, for example, which is discarded when human beings adopt an upright gait, and which has no proper place in human sexual life. At the same time, however, the fundamental sexual processes ‘remain unaltered’: ‘The excremental is all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual.’ Human beings both are and are not ‘animal’, and the impulses that cannot be incorporated into human sexuality persist and are registered as non-satisfaction (p. 259). Sexual liberation, freeing the erotic from culturally imposed inhibition, is not, after all, quite what is at stake. The process of development that is identified here is evolutionary, phylogenetic. But a parallel development defines the psychosexual history of the individual human being. The first reason Freud gives in the Debasement essay for the incompatibility between sexuality and satisfaction concerns an originary loss. His account of this process of loss explicitly calls into question yet again the dualities that so much of the essay appears to take for granted. It also tells a story which is implicit in all of psychoanalysis, but which is rarely glimpsed more clearly than it is here. This is the history of a gender-neutral human being, belonging to no particular race or class, which, from its earliest infancy, is already an animalin-culture, a composite figure in which nature and culture, body and mind are inextricably intertwined, and in which in consequence the great dualism of the Cartesian cogito no longer holds. According to the text, the first reason why the sexual drive remains unsatisfied is this:

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as a result of the diphasic onset of object-choice, and the interposition of the barrier against incest, the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only a surrogate for it. Psychoanalysis has shown us that when the original object of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitute objects none of which, however, brings full satisfaction. (p. 258) Every object of adult desire is always only a substitute for an original object which is forever lost, and which it represents. Since each substitute, each representation, is always only that and no more, it can never fully be the object of unconscious desire. Loss returns as the impossibility of perfect satisfaction. But what is this lost object which can never be recovered in adult life? The essay has already told us a good deal about it. The child’s primary object-choice is directed towards those who look after it, and is formed ‘on the basis of the interests of the self-preservative instinct’ (p. 248). It is an effect, in other words, of the child’s initial dependency, its need for food and warmth, and its fundamental impulse to survive. This impulse ‘carries along with it’ sexual components, Freud argues, but these become attached only secondarily to the child’s valuation of the attentions originally necessary to the preservation of life. It follows, as Jean Laplanche has argued on the basis of a parallel passage from Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ‘that on the one hand there is from the beginning an object, but that on the other hand sexuality does not kave, from the beginning, a real object’.9 Laplanche argues that in psychoanalytic theory sexuality is not simply mysteriously given in nature. On the contrary, the sexual drive (Trieb: the psychical representative of an instinct)10 is ‘propped on’ the impulse to survive. Sexual excitation comes in the first instance from outside, from adults, from the necessary process of caring, which is invested with sexual meanings.11 But it comes to the child too early to be intelligible. In consequence, the child reaches puberty only after sexuality has already been associated with a whole range of repressed because unintelligible meanings. These meanings are learned from those who bring up the child, from the significances and fantasies which are inseparable for them in turn from love and care. Sexuality, according to Laplanche, is initially supplementary to self-preservation.12 Moreover, adult sexuality, it appears, is subsequently ‘propped on’ the requirements of the ego (which explains, for instance, the narcissistic element in object-choice). In Freud’s own words in the essay on Debasement, the sexual instincts find their first objects by attaching themselves to the valuations made by the ego-instincts precisely in the way in which the first sexual satisfactions are experienced in attachment to the bodily functions necessary for the preservation of life. The ‘affection’ shown by the child’s parents and those who look after him, which seldom fails to betray its

14 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

erotic nature (‘the child is an erotic plaything’), does a very great deal to raise the contributions made by erotism to the cathexes of his ego-instincts. (p. 249) It seems, then, that there is no primordial, original, founding sexual object at all, but only an object subsequently sexually cathected, and invested with sexual meanings initially learned from others in the course of the necessary process of caring for a human infant whose physical autonomy is so long delayed. The mother, or those who care for the child, by their attentions first teach the child how to love.13 This means, as Laplanche points out, that the object of adult desire is not the lost object, but its substitute by displacement; the lost object is the object of self-preservation, of hunger, and the object one seeks to refind in sexuality is an object displaced in relation to that first object. From this, of course, arises the impossibility of ultimately ever rediscovering the object, since the object which has been lost is not the same as that which is to be rediscovered.14 It also means that sexuality does not exist in a pure state prior to the meanings and fantasies with which it is invested by the caring adults. There is no erotic life outside what is learned, no infantile instinctual sexuality untrammelled by meaning, no body independent of mind, and no lost golden world outside ‘civilization’ or culture.15 Human sexuality is inevitably bound up with representation. Civilization is present from the beginning in the world of the little human animal, long before the awareness of castration impels it to submit to the explicit imperatives of the cultural order. A third party thus always attends the sexual relation, and this is culture itself, the location of sexual meanings as well as proprieties and prohibitions. Desire, the Debasement essay indicates, commonly repudiates the norms affirmed by ‘education’, with its delays and deferments, seeking out instead in illicit relationships the pleasure so long forbidden by the cultural order. At the level of the unconscious, which is where desire subsists, prohibition promotes libido. There is thus a resemblance between Freud’s analysis of desire and the brilliant account Denis de Rougemont gives of passion as suffering. Tristan and Isolde, de Rougemont points out in Love in the Western World, repeatedly seek out impediments to satisfaction. This adulterous love, the ideal type of passion in western culture, depends on dangers, is enhanced by absences, and has recourse to self-imposed obstacles. At one point in the story Tristan implicitly reaffirms the threat of castration as the penalty for forbidden love by placing his naked sword between the bodies of the lovers as they sleep. Later Tristan perfectly voluntarily marries another woman, another Isolde, but continues none the less to long for his first love, refusing to consummate the marriage. The jealous wife finally brings about Tristan’s death, and then her own, when she lies to him

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about the colour of the first Isolde’s sails as she comes to cure him. Neither legitimate love nor illicit passion finds perfect fulfilment.16 Something in the nature of the sexual drive, Freud has argued, is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction. The third party, civilization, the cultural order, which irretrievably differentiates human beings from animals, cannot be fully reconciled with the sexuality which it itself makes possible. Freud’s essay finally reverts, of course, to the Enlightenment categories with which it began, in order to argue that although the sexual drive cannot be reconciled with the demands of civilization, although sexual activity cannot in the end satisfy human desire, the sublimation of the sexual impulse produces the noblest human achievements. In this way the text furnishes itself with a happy ending. But which of the questions it addresses, we might wonder, is its ‘proper subject’? Is it the set of oppositions of race (‘civilization’ and its unspecified— perhaps primitive —alternative?), class or gender, which cannot be made to stay in place as the text moves on? Is it instead the Enlightenment dualisms of mind and body, culture and nature, which are the only categories apparently available for discussing and analysing sexuality? Or is it finally a radical reinterpretation of human desire which refuses to conform to any analysis that isolates mind from body, culture from nature, and civilization from what the Standard Edition calls ‘instinct’ (Trieb, drive)? II As so often in Freud’s work, the scientific clarity of the text is an illusion. The writing doubles back on itself, never reaching the promised goal, but offering another in its place. The process of displacement and substitution mimics, we might argue, the ways of desire, and makes of the text itself an object of desire for the reader. Redactions of Freud, mapping, schematizing, systematizing, and eliminating in the process the seductive duplicities of Freud’s texts, produce all too often a theology without mysteries and a science which has about as much plausibility as astrology or black magic. In this sense Freud’s best reader has surely been Jacques Lacan, whose dense, difficult, elusive texts make no promises of an illusory transparency. Lacan’s writing explicitly foregrounds the processes of enunciation by simulating the modes of speech which are its primary theme. His texts are associative, allusive, figurative, digressive. The signified slips and slides under the signifier as the meanings produced by the Lacanian system of differences, ‘other’ and ‘Other’, ‘objet a’, ‘imaginary’, ‘real’, and ‘desire’ itself, refuse to stay in place. Lacan’s ‘algebra’, the literal symbols, diagrams, graphs imitate—and parody—the ‘objectivity’ relentlessly pursued by the will to truth. Meanwhile, the lapses, jokes, narratives which disrupt and illuminate the texts mimic the interventions of the unconscious in all human utterance. To schematize Lacan’s work, however helpful the process, is in the end to do an injustice to the texts’ complexity, and at the same time to diminish their power of seduction. In

16 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

what follows, a reading of Lacan’s account of desire, I try to reproduce Lacan’s own text wherever possible. Lacan’s essay, ‘The signification of the phallus’, was originally delivered as a lecture in 1958. His discussion begins with a ‘knot’ that fastens together the identity of the human being: ‘We know that the unconscious castration complex has the function of a knot.’17 The castration complex is also a knotty theoretical problem which psychoanalysis sets out to untie, and this second knot at the level of the signifier is formulated in the lecture as a riddle or a mathematical puzzle which confronts both Lacan and his audience: ‘what is the link between the murder of the father and the pact of the primordial law, if it is included in that law that castration should be the punishment for incest?’ (p. 282). What, in other words, is the connection between the Oedipus complex and the order of language and culture, if castration is the punishment for forbidden love? How does psychoanalysis chart the relationship which is constitutive for human beings between ‘death’ (or ‘murder’) and the Law, loss and sexuality? In answer, ‘The signification of the phallus’ recounts the birth of desire, and if it ‘solves’ the riddle, it also paradoxically defers it by invoking the question of sexual difference. The essay makes explicit the importance for Lacanian psychoanalysis of the post-Saussurean distinction between the signifier (the acoustic or written image) and the signified (meaning). Although Freud was not in a position to take account of modern linguistic theory, his work, Lacan argues, not only anticipates its findings, but brings out their full implication. This is above all the discovery that language is constitutive of meaning, that signification differentiates, and in consequence, that the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified. (p. 284) Lacan offers three terms where Saussure provided two. The signifier actively transforms into the signified an undifferentiated signifiable real, which pre-exists it as unknowable and unintelligible. As a result of the work of the signifier, ‘there is born the world of meaning of a particular language in which the world of things will come to be arranged’.18 For Lacan the real seems to submit to the signifier, and its transformation is defined as a ‘passion’: that is to say suffering, something which is endured and, supremely in western culture, the suffering of Christ on the cross. Lacan’s own signifier is not idle. There is a birth here, the birth of the world of meaning, but also a death, since ‘the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing’.19 Language erases even as it creates. The signifier replaces the object it identifies as a separate entity; the linguistic symbol supplants what it names and differentiates, relegates it to a limbo beyond language, where it becomes

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inaccessible, lost; and in consequence ‘the being of language is the non-being of objects’.20 The symbolic ‘passion’ institutes a lack which does not exist in the real. By its attention to the signifier, and to the primacy of the symbolic in the construction of the world of meaning and difference, Lacan goes on to argue in ‘The signification of the phallus’, psychoanalysis gives a new account of the human condition, ‘in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks (ça parle)’ (p. 284). ‘It’ here represents language, the symbolic order, the word as Law, which forms the human subject in its own image;21 at the same time ‘it’ signifies language as the material of psychoanalysis itself, the ‘talking cure’; and this is so in turn because ‘it’ (id) is also the unconscious which is presented, made present for the first time, in signification—as marks on the body, or in verbal slips, jokes told and dreams recounted. There ‘resounds’, therefore, rings out in the (hollow, perhaps; certainly echoing) human being, what the essay calls ‘the relation of speech’ (p. 284). No longer an organism in the real, the speaking human being encompasses a void, a lack under the Law. Speech is a ‘relation’, the possibility of dialogue, of demand, of community, reciprocity, love. As the condition of subjectivity, permitting a difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’, speech is also necessarily the possibility of intersubjectivity, of address and response, question and answer. But this liberation is at the same time a constraint. To the extent that the subject can come to exist in language only under a name (or a pronoun) which is not chosen but allotted from elsewhere, by the Father as representative of the Other, the symbolic itself, that name (le Nom du Père) supplants what it constitutes. In consequence, ‘I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object.’22 Moreover, the place of the ‘“intra-said” (intra-dit)’ within the relation of speech between two subjects is also the place of the ‘inter-dif, the location precisely of interdiction, prohibition and Law (le Non du Père), and therefore of a split in the subject between what can be acknowledged and what cannot be recognized.23 The fear of castration and the consequent submission to the (paternal) Law, to the symbolic order, releases the possibility of speech and at the same time divides the subject from itself, instituting and simultaneously outlawing the unconscious. Unconscious desire is thus caught up with what is prohibited. The unconscious speaks, however, in the symbolic. The repressed returns in the process of speech, putting on display the division, the difference which inhabits and defines the speaking subject: It speaks in the Other, I say, designating by the Other the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes. If it speaks in the Other, whether or not the subject hears it with his ear, it is because it is there that the subject, by means of a logic anterior to any awakening of the signified, finds its signifying place. The discovery

18 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

of what it articulates in that place, that is to say in the unconscious, enables us to grasp at the price of what splitting (Spaltung) it has thus been constituted. The phallus reveals its function here. (p. 285) The phallus, the protagonist in Lacan’s narrative of the birth of desire, is defined in the first instance by a series of negations. It is not, we are to understand, a ‘phantasy’; it is not an ‘object’ in the sense in which the term features in objectrelations theory; and finally, ‘it is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes’ (p. 258). The phallus is not an anatomical feature, whether male or female. On the contrary, ‘the phallus is a signifier’ (p. 285) and what it signifies, the essay will later reveal, is desire, ‘the desire of the Other’ (p. 290). But it signifies, we should remember, only by means of a submission to the symbolic order which Lacan has already figured as a ‘passion’. The phallus occupies its privileged position at the price of a loss, and this loss is represented in the Freudian economy as castration. Through the passion of the real, separated off from the organism, the phallus (as ) comes to signify the objet a which is irretrievably lost.24 How does this loss come about? What are the effects of the advent of signification in the human being? First, the essay proposes, signification causes a ‘deviation’ of organic human needs in the process of transforming them into demands. Subjected to the signifier, these needs return to the speaking subject ‘alienated’, other than they are, since it is from the Other, the locus of speech which already exists outside the subject, that the subject’s message is emitted (p. 286). That which is thus alienated in needs constitutes an Urverdrängung’, disappears from view in an urrepression, an anterior, prior, primal repression. But this in turn gives rise to something which does appear, namely desire (p. 286). Desire is the effect of the lost needs: loss returns and presents itself as desire. Desire is not the same as need: analytic experience certainly demonstrates ‘the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character’ which distinguishes desire from anything that could possibly be necessary (p. 286). What returns as desire is quite other than the repressed needs that are its cause. In this morality play of the advent of signification, Lacan presents three allegorical figures, need, desire, and demand. ‘Demand…bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for. It is a demand of a presence or of an absence’ (p. 286). Demand is ultimately the demand for love, and its mythological founding moment is the story Freud tells in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the child with the cotton reel. At the age of eighteen months, little Ernst, Freud’s grandson, took to symbolizing his mother’s alternate absence and presence with a cotton reel attached to a piece of string. As he threw it away, the little boy uttered a mournful sound which approximated to ‘fort’ (gone), and when he pulled it back, he greeted the cotton reel with a joyful ‘da’ (here).25 This elementary system of differences, however imperfectly under control, represents

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the child’s entry into the symbolic order, in accordance with which its existence will be structured.26 But this moment of naming absence is also the instant of the birth of desire, since the signifier, while it replaces the mother, does not fill her plAce, makes nothing present. The fort/da game represents both command and loss. It is in the mother’s absence, in solitude that the child makes itself ‘master’ of her desertion, by acknowledging the otherness of its mother, and her independent existence (with, indeed, her own separate object of desire).27 The process of symbolic mastery thus has the paradoxical effect of rendering desire itself indestructible.28 In addition, Freud suggests that by throwing away the cotton reel the child enacts an emblematic revenge on the mother who has abandoned it.29 The game is therefore also an act of hostility, a dismissal of the loved object, a figurative destruction. ‘Thus the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire.’30 Murder; the symbolic pact which subjects the human being to the Law; loss; and desire: the strands which make up the knot that constitutes the human being, fastens it together, indeed, begin to distinguish themselves at the level of theory (though to untie them in practice would be to precipitate psychosis). At this stage, however, it is the ‘mother’ who is the murder victim, since language is first invoked in the relationship with the ‘mother’, which is described in the essay as shown to be ‘pregnant with that Other to be situated within [en deça de: some way short of]31 the needs that it can satisfy’ (p. 286). Ultimately the ‘father’ will stand for the symbolic order in its entirety, the paternal authority representing Law, which will be invoked in order to impose limits on the imaginary omnipotence of the now differentiated other, the arbitrariness of the signifier, and the anxiety of desire.32 Or rather the Father. Lacanian psychoanalysis is not much concerned with narratives of childhood, except in so far as these lay down a structure which defines the subject. Lacan’s theory is not a version of child-psychology, and is not usefully read as an account of the roles of mothers and father.33 The stages of psychosexual development have a mythological status: the ‘story’ of the child is important only in so far as it is perpetually recapitulated in the experience of the adult. The Father is a signifier, and it is the Name of the Father which authorizes meaning, the paternal-signifying Law which holds in place the ordering mechanisms of the symbolic.34 The Mother, too, is crucially a signifier, not a person, ‘the signifier of the primordial object’.35 With the resolution of the Oedipus complex, which is the entry into the Law, it will be the symbolic Father who belongs with death: How, indeed, could Freud fail to recognize such an affinity, when the necessity of his reflexion led him to link the appearance of the signifier of the Father, as author of the Law, with death, even to the murder of the Father—thus showing that if this murder is the fruitful moment of debt

20 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

through which the subject binds himself for life to the Law, the symbolic Father is, in so far as he signifies this Law, the dead Father.36 Demand is the possibility of love—and hate. Demand constitutes the Other as able to satisfy needs, or to withhold satisfaction. ‘That which is thus given to the Other to fill, and which is strictly that which it does not have, since it, too, lacks being, is what is called love, but it is also hate and ignorance.’37 The Other, however, which is not a person but the locus of speech, is not full. Since what the Other can give is not substantial, demand ‘annuls’ the specificity of what is given by turning it into a proof of love. ‘It is necessary, then, that the particularity thus abolished should reappear beyond demand’ (p. 286). What appears beyond demand, ‘in the interval that demand hollows within itself’,38 in the place of the absence brought into being by the signifier, is desire. Thus desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung). (p. 287) Desire is a difference. It is an effect of the alienation in the human animal of the requirement for gratification in the demand for love. And if the sexual relation ‘occupies’ the field of desire, that is because sexuality delivers its appeal at once to the lost, absent, ‘murdered’ real of the human organism and to the Other for the proof of love. It follows from the gap that necessarily appears within this doubly barred appeal in antithetical directions that for both the partners in the sexual relation, ‘it is not enough to be the subjects of need, or objects of love, but that they must stand for the cause of desire’ (p. 287). The cause of desire, Lacan’s objet a, is the lost object that never was in the unknowable real. Desire is thus ‘a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists.’39 Desire is a metonymy (a displaced version) of the want-to-be40 that necessarily characterizes a human life divided between the unmasterable symbolic and the unreachable, inextricable real. And desire itself is split between the quest for satisfaction in the real, ‘a refusal of the signifier’, on the one hand, and the desire of (for) the Other, the origin of meaning, which entails ‘a lack of being’.41 This must be so because if the subject longs to find the real again, it also yearns to find the self which is perpetually created and destroyed by the signifier.42 And where else is the signifying subject to be found but in the Other? Lacan’s repeated insistence that desire is the desire of the Other is his most plural, most elusive formulation. It can be read as meaning variously (at least): desire originates in the Other (the symbolic); it inhabits the Other (the unconscious); it is for the Other (the recognition of the other at the level of the unconscious); it is for the Other (the subject-presumed to know, the analyst in the

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transference); it is for the Other (a guarantee of meaning and truth in the symbolic, a transcendental signified, ‘God’). How absurd in these circumstances to suppose that desire can be met by ‘leaving it to the virtue of the “genital” to resolve it through the maturation of tenderness’ (p. 287). Lacan has nothing but contempt for the view that true love leading to happy marriage is the project of desire, since desire precisely exceeds the dualism of sensuality and affection, resides beyond both need and demand. As early as 1948 he invoked La Rochefoucauld’s maxim that there are good marriages, but none that are exciting (délicieux).43 Imagining a marriage between Dora and Herr K, Lacan commented that it would be ‘as unhappy as any other marriage’.44 Whatever the nature of desire, genital harmony in conjunction with affection is not its object. Even the most fulfilled relationships involve so many debasements (Erniedrigungen), Lacan insists, in consequence of the Oedipal drama which conjoins desire with love but also with hate, ‘the black God in the sheep’s clothing of the Good Shepherd Eros’.45 Desire subsists both within and beyond the realm of the pleasure principle; it cannot be contained by the stable, institutional, public legality which is marriage. On the contrary, desire, which is absolute, knows no law.46 For Lacan, as for Freud, then, there are three parties involved in sexual desire, the subject, the Law, and the unconscious as outlaw. The subject is an effect of the Nom/Non du Père; it inhabits the syirtbolic order which both produces and prohibits unconscious desire. In consequence the object of unconscious desire has no name. It is precisely ‘the desire for nothing nameable’.47 This is what it means to say that desire exists beyond demand, beyond the signifier. And yet desire speaks, in the unconscious, in the Other. And its signifier is the phallus. Why the phallus, Lacan’s essay asks? Partly, of course, the reader must suppose, because this is a reading of Freud, and the argument consequently starts from the infantile phallic stage, which in Freud’s account leads up to the castration complex. The phallic stage is the same for boys and girls, and precedes sexual difference (p. 282). In Freud’s version sexual difference is produced in relation to the phallus. And perhaps, Lacan adds, the phallus is the privileged signifier of desire because it is the most salient of what can be seized (le plus saillant de ce qu’on peut attraper)48 in the real of sexual copulation, the element which makes visible the incompleteness of both individuals, and which in heterosexual relations promises to join each partner to the real. This is one of the most evasive moments in an essay which is very far from transparent. The phallus is a signifier; it symbolizes the penis or the clitoris; but it is also the penis— perhaps (‘It can be said…’). Moreover (perhaps) it represents the copula typographically in the symbolic (as the equals sign (=)?). And (perhaps) it offers an image of the vital flow transmitted in generation (p. 287). But then the essay takes back what it might appear to have given: ‘All these propositions merely conceal the fact that it can play its role only when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of signifier’ (p. 288). The phallus

22 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

is, after all, a signifier, and it can play its role as a signifier only when it appears as such, that is to say when it seems to render ‘latent’ the real of which it is only the representative, and which it cannot make present. The moment it is ‘unveiled’, it becomes the bar which ‘strikes the signified’, which bars the subject’s access to the lost (urverdrängt, primarily repressed) real and the (secondarily) repressed meanings which constitute the unconscious (p. 288). Much of the rest of the essay is concerned with sexual difference. And here it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Lacan, like Freud, is inclined to take cultural stereotypes for structural effects. Women, it appears, tend to want to be the phallus, the object of desire, whereas men want to have it. And yet almost at once a (somewhat confusing) allusion to the ‘masquerade’ of femininity calls this conclusion into question (p. 290). In her essay on ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, first published in 1929, Joan Riviere proposed, with whatever hesitations and reversals, that femininity is no more than a mask adopted to deflect male retribution and elicit sexual approval. Riviere’s account is psychical, but the hierarchized eroticism that it describes is palpably articulated with the social and cultural, with a sexual identity which is learned.49 What is ‘behind’ the mask, what women might (learn to) be(come) remains to be seen. Lacan’s essay reverts, however, to stereotypes and hierarchy. Women, it argues, wanting to be the phallus, tolerate frigidity, while in men, who want to have it, the dialectic of demand and desire produces a tendency to debasement (Erniedrigung) and a consequent ‘centrifugal’ inclination to infidelity (p. 290). And yet, the essay continues, ‘it should not be thought that the sort of infidelity that would appear to be constitutive of the male function is proper to it. For if one looks more closely, the same redoubling is to be found in the woman’ (p. 290). True in the end to Freud, Lacan cannot sustain the opposition he seems to want to set up. There is, after all, only one libido, even if it is ‘masculine’ in character (p. 291). If this account of sexual difference is finally inconclusive, it is also possible to argue that it is incidental to Lacan’s gender-neutral account of desire. But is it? The identification of the phallus as the primary signifier has been critical in the feminist denunciation of Lacan’s phallocentrism. ‘The signification of the phallus’ is certainly phallocentric in the most literal sense of the term. And the story Lacan tells there of sexual difference is not one that feminism could easily endorse. Why, then, or how, would any feminist find the essay sympathetic? The question seems to turn on the meaning of the phallus. As I have already suggested, there is a certain slippage here, or perhaps a certain textual teasing. The phallus is a signifier. No one has it, neither women nor men. It signifies the unnameable object of desire, the desire of the Other, and it re-presents (stands in the place of) the objet a, the lost object in the real. And yet it ‘can be said’ that this signifier is chosen because it stands out as what can be seized in the real of the sexual act. It can be said. But is it being said here? The answer is not obvious.50 In addition, the essay reproduces the Freudian account of the Oedipus complex to the extent that it portrays the child as longing to be the phallus, which is to say

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the object of the mother’s desire. What the child discovers is that the mother does not have the phallus (p. 289). Does this mean that she does not have a penis, or that she has a desire of her own?51 The latter, I think, but in reading such an elusive text, a text which so palpably reproduces the elusiveness and the plurality of the signifier, who can be sure? And finally, the essay tells us in its account of the differential relation of men and women to the phallus, the woman ‘finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love’ (p. 290). This is an organ, even if it is also a signifier (and in the following sentence a fetish). Lacan’s essay flaunts the issue of sexual difference by so explicitly, scandalously, privileging the phallus, and then evades the question it has raised by refusing to ‘fix’ the meaning of its central figure. The text’s phallic teasing thus preserves the anonymity, the tantalizing incognito of desire’s true object. The issue of sexual difference is critical for psychoanalysis, and indeed for feminism.52 Feminism has tended to consider the question by differentiating between anatomy (sex) and gender (culture). Evidently there is an anatomical difference between men and women. Does this imply an essential female sexuality? Or are women not born but made sexually, and made differently in different cultural and historical locations? If we answer ‘yes’ to the first question, we are in danger of eliminating the differences between women; if we answer ‘yes’ to the second, do we not risk ignoring the difference between women and men? Psychoanalysis defers both questions—to the degree that it repudiates the dualist opposition between nature and culture. In psychoanalytic terms it is not a matter of sex and gender, still less sex or gender, but of a’knot’ which ties together the signifying subject and the lost but inextricable real. This knot is indissoluble, and it is tied ‘without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes’ (p. 282).53 Its consequence is the indestructibility of unconscious desire. The question whether the character of this desire is sexually differentiated is perhaps one that theory is not yet equipped to answer satisfactorily. III René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe incorporates its own ‘title’ within the frame of the picture: ‘This is not a pipe.’ The painting is then independently named The Treachery of Images. Illusionism in painting, logocentrism in philosophy, the metaphysics of presence easily betray us into taking the symbol for the object, or the signifier for its meaning. A picture is not a pipe. The Treachery of Images first appeared in 1929. Subsequently Magritte intensified the joke, and in the process complicated the issue, with This is a Piece of Cheese, which shows a framed painting of a slice of brie, perfectly illusionist in its execution. The picture stands on a pedestal under a glass dome. Where now is the ‘truth’ which images betray? Of course, we could not eat the cheese: the process of symbolization does not make it present.

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But to name a piece of cheese, to mention it, to write of it, is not to eat it either. On the contrary, the signifier precisely defers, supplants, relegates the imagined presence it sets out to name. But the piece of cheese we eat is always already named, with the consequence that its imagined presence independent of the deflecting, deferring, differing signifier is not an option. There are not, then, two separate orders, the object on the one hand, free-standing in its pristine integrity, and the signifier on the other, secondary, dependent on the object, fallen. On the contrary, there is a condition which is also a process, for which Jacques Derrida has coined the term ‘differance’.54 In ‘Le Facteur de la verite’ (‘The Factor/Postman of Truth’), first published in 1975, Derrida launches an uncharacteristically vehement attack on Lacanian psychoanalysis in general, including ‘The signification of the phallus’ in particular. Lacan’s work, Derrida insists, is phallocentric, logocentric, metaphysical. The insistence that the phallus is not an organ is an evasion. A whole theory of sexual difference is elaborated on the basis of woman’s castration: the phallus is not the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes, but it mostly and primarily symbolizes the penis. What follows is obvious: phallogocentrism as androcentrism, along with the entire paradoxical logic and reversals this engenders.55 Derrida’s main case against Lacan and against psychoanalysis is that they promise to deliver the truth, a truth beyond language, however inscribed in it. Psychoanalysis, for all its attention to the signifier, in practice sets out to ‘decipher’ the ‘semantic core’ of a text or an utterance, the primary content veiled by the signifier. The psychoanalytic process, Derrida argues, is thus an unveiling of truth, and psychoanalytic theory offers itself as the truth of truth.56 Of course, he concedes, Lacan is not naive enough to suppose that truth is simply a matter of self-expression, or that it is a question of correspondence between a signifier and an object. On the contrary, Lacan’s ‘full speech’ is full of ‘itself, of its presence, its essence’;57 this presence is the (unconscious) truth of the subject’s desire; and it is made manifest, unveiled, only in verbal exchange with the analyst, who knows how to read it.58 ‘The values of presence (in person), of proximity, plenitude, and consistency form the system of authenticity in the analytic dialogue.’59 The psychoanalytic truth is always linked, Derrida goes on, to the power of speech, and its evidence is repetition, which is possible only on the basis of a buttoning down of the sliding signified in a point de capiton. Psychoanalysis is thus phonocentric as well as phallocentric, and if the phallus is the prime signifier, the voice is its vehicle: Only a speech, with its effects of presence in act and of authentic life can maintain (garder) the ‘sworn faith’ which links it to the desire of the other. If the ‘phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of

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the logos is joined with the advent of desire,’ the privileged site of this privileged signifier, then its letter is the voice: the letter as spokesman, the letter-carrying-speech. The letter alone—as soon as the point de capiton of the signified ensures its repeatable identity—carries the necessary ideality or power of idealization that can safeguard (in any event this is what it means) the indivisible, singular, living, non-fragmentable integrity of the phallus, of the privileged signifier to which it gives rise. The transcendental position of the phallus (in the chain of signifiers to which it belongs, while simultaneously making it possible) thus would have its proper place—in Lacanian terms, its letter exempt from all partition—in the phonematic structure of language. No protest against metalanguage is opposed to this phallogocentric transcendentalism.60 The problem here is not that Derrida is wrong: if psychoanalysis divorces truth from the cogito, the object of knowledge from the knowing subject, it is only in order to reinstate truth elsewhere, in the unconscious (Freud), or in the Other (Lacan), even though we might suppose that this is already a ‘Copernican’ break with Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism. What is odd here is that Derrida repeats what he denounces in Lacan: he sets out to decipher the semantic core of Lacan’s text, treating the signifier as nothing more than a veil.61 Thus, Derrida reFreudianizes Lacan’s account of desire, ignoring the Lacanian want-to-be in favour of Freudian castration, and he barely acknowledges the implications of the textuality of Lacan’s writing: ‘Lacan’s “style” was constructed so as to check almost permanently any access to an isolatable content, to an unequivocal, determinable meaning beyond writing.’62 This reads more like an accusation of obscurantism than a recognition of indeterminacy. What disappears, therefore, from Derrida’s version of Lacan is the textual teasing which unfixes the meaning even of the privileged signifier, the performance by which the Lacanian text enlists the desire of the reader in a quest for a truth that is withheld even in the moments when it is most obviously on display. The denunciation of Lacan, in conjunction with the dismissal of Lacan’s textuality, is even odder in the light of ‘To speculate—on “Freud”’, Derrida’s brilliant reading of ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, which precedes ‘Le Facteur de la verite’ in The Post Card. This tour de force is precisely an account of Freud’s text as performance (though it is also a critique of Lacan, who took it, Derrida says, for truth). To speculate— on “Freud” ‘traces the outline of ‘FreudY own desire, the textuality of the desire inscribed in the text, and its hopes, fears, anxieties and repetitions. In a series of oppositions, which turn out in practice not to be oppositions after all, the fort/da, absence and presence, the death drive and the pleasure principle, the text both delineates and enacts a struggle for sovereignty which remains unresolved. Freud’s sequence of ‘speculations’, which are not to be confused with ‘philosophy’, Freud insists, are ‘a-thetic’: they put forward no thesis and take up no (final) position. This is a text, Derrida demonstrates, ‘which advances without advancing, without advancing itself,

26 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

without ever advancing anything that it does not immediately take back, for the time of a detour, without ever positing anything which remains in its position.’63 On the contrary, it repeats itself and its speculative differentiations, just as little Ernst repeats the alternation of pleasure and unpleasure in the fort/da game. Freud’s text repeatedly distances the pleasure principle only in order to bring it back so that it (and Ernst, and his distinguished grandfather) retain their authority, their mastery of the founding moment of psychoanalysis.64 Like a promise or an oath, the text performs what it defines, Derrida maintains. His infinitely supple and subtle reading identifies in the twists and turns of ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ a kind of performative, which carries out in its writing the process of production (and protection) of psychoanalytic theory. And Derrida’s own text, which is more a celebration than a critique, endorses the a-thetic character of Freud’s writing which it affirms, its lack of systematicity, which reveals it as performative of desire. Lacan’s supreme error, then, we may construe, is that he systematizes desire, substituting theory for performance, and in the process laying claim to a single truth which is constitutive for human beings. In Derrida’s account, psychoanalysis is thus no more than another, and perhaps the supremely privileged, metaphysics of desire. Derrida’s own text(s) of desire, the ‘Envois’ which make up the first half of The Post Card is (are) anything but systematic. Defying synopsis for this reason, the ‘Envois’ have perhaps received less attention than is their due. These (love) letters (or postcards), the fragmentary inscription of forbidden love, identify neither their author(s?) nor their addressee(s?) and refuse all the oppositions on which theory is necessarily based. They are intense, passionate, elliptical, elusive, impenetrable. They undermine our confidence in our ability to read by refusing to indicate how they are to be read, when they are coded to avoid a possible censor, when they are ironic, when they allude to ‘reality’. They blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. And in all these ways they constitute textual performances (performatives) of desire. Who is the ‘author’ of these ‘missives’ (dispatches, in-voices)? At one moment a figure whose (punning?) signature is ‘j’accepte’;65 at another a person whose initials are J.D. (pp. 202–3); someone who travels—to Oxford, Yale, Geneva, Brussels…and theorizes (or rather, speculates?) about Oxford philosophy, Plato and Socrates, psychoanalysis. But elsewhere it is impossible to be sure. And who is addressed? A woman? Sometimes, but at other times the genders of the correspondents are left in question. And the text is determined not to clarify the situation: Who is writing? To whom? And to send, to destine, to dispatch what? To what address? Without any desire to surprise, and thereby to grab attention by means of obscurity, I owe it to whatever remains of my honesty to say finally that I do not know. Above all I would not have had the slightest

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interest in this correspondence and this cross-section, I mean in their publication, if some certainty on this matter had satisfied me. (P. 5) It is open to the reader to note that desire defers and destabilizes identity, calls it into question. In love identities are gained and lost. Lovers speak from a range of subject positions. ‘I’ is ungendered, its sex veiled (pp. 178–9). The addressed, idealized, fantasized other, object of love and hate, is a displacement, a metonymy, perhaps a succession of surrogates. It is open to the reader to note all this… Meanwhile, what is the genre of this text as a whole? Is it an epistolary novel? Is it, as Derrida’s blurb claims, a satire on epistolary fiction? Is it an ‘apocryphal’ text, doubtfully attributed to a philosopher, like Plato’s letters, perhaps? Or is it (tempting, tantalizing thought, which must of course immediately be resisted as ‘unsophisticated’) the coded remainder of the real correspondence that it (fictionally?) claims to be? (After all, ‘real’ figures appear in it: Hillis, Jonathan and Cynthia, Neil Hertz, Paul de Man. But the text takes account of that.)66 And is there a relationship between this generic indeterminacy and desire? As it fantasizes, imagines, idealizes, overvalues, not only at a distance, but as the condition of sexual pleasure, is desire fact or fiction? Or does it precisely exceed those alternatives? The ‘Envois’ are full of gaps. ‘You might consider them, if you really wish to, as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence. Destroyed by fire or by that which figuratively takes its place’ (p. 3). You might…. The later ‘Envois’ are full of references to a fire, a projected incineration of the correspondence itself, or parts of it, and to publication, with the names withheld, identities confused, ciphers introduced to protect the anonymity of the participants. Fiftytwo typographical spaces mark ellipses within the texts. Who can say what is lost here? What is deleted, censored, repressed? What is not said? ‘Desire is that which is manifested in the interval that demand hollows within itelf, in as much as the subject, in articulating the signifying chain, brings to light the want-to-be, together with the appeal to receive the complement from the Other…,’67 To quote Lacan, however, is to suggest that the repudiated psychoanalysis returns in the Derridean performance of desire. But is it repudiated, or is it only the metaphysics of psychoanalysis that is rejected, its systematicity, and its truthclaims based on Values of presence (in person), of proximity, plenitude’? The existence of this correspondence assumes an absence, the separation of the lovers. And the ostensible project of the letters, like the many telephones calls which are referred to but not recorded, and even the airmail cassettes the lovers send to each other, is to bridge the gap, to fill it with ‘truth’, with presence. It cannot, of course, be done. The love letter demonstrates the impossibility of communication as the transmission of im-mediate, transparent meaning. All signification is at the mercy of ‘the Postal Principle as differantial relay’ (p. 54): meaning and truth are necessarily differed and deferred, ‘differantiated’ by the intervals, time differences, delays which interfere with transparency. No letter,

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the text insists, can be guaranteed to reach its destination. Much of the correspondence concerns a lost letter, which was ‘true’ and definitive for the relationship. The now ‘dead’ letter was never delivered and is finally returned to the sender. It remains unopened, and yet continues to haunt the living love affair. Fort/da, gone/here: the alternatives do not hold as opposition. Moreover, the addressee may be ‘present’, that is to say not at a distance, in the same room: ‘I believe that I prefer to write to you (even if you are facing me, or as at this moment at your secretary, just next to me), you push me away less’ (p. 174). What then is the actual project? ‘Do I write to you in order to bring you near or in order to distance you, to find the best distance—but then with whom?’ (p. 78). And what is the difference? ‘Absent or present…(you are always there, over there, in the course of going back and forth (en train d’aller-venir))’,68 like the cotton reel in the fort/da game (p. 181). And yet the difference is critical: ‘no, it happens that without you I lack nothing, but as soon as you are there I cry over you, I miss you to death, it’s easier to bear your departure’ (p. 250). Fort/da: command and loss. It is in the mother’s absence that Ernst renders himself master of her desertion. Differantiated presence, which is always and inevitably differed and deferred, and which in consequence exceeds the alternatives of presence and absence, is the condition of desire. But presence itself is its object. You have always been ‘my’ metaphysics, the metaphysics of my life, the ‘verso’ of everything I write (my desire, speech, presence, proximity, law, my heart and soul, everything that I love and that you know before me). (p. 197) You are the only one to understand why it was really necessary that I write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what I desire, what I know my desire to be, in other words you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. (p. 194) And it is unattainable—of course, since we desire what we don’t have: you are now the name, yourself, or the title of everything that I do not understand. That I never will be able to know, the other side of myself, eternally inaccessible, not unthinkable, at all (du tout), but unknowable, unknown—and so lovable. As for you, my love, I can only postulate (for who else, with whom would I have dreamed this?) the immortality of the soul, liberty, the union of virtue and happiness, and that one day you might love me. (p. 147)

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The trace of the other in the selfsame exceeds the alternatives of presence and absence, which differance defines—and simultaneously prohibits. Differance gives rise to desire and at the same time prevents its fulfilment: differance makes the opposition of presence and absence possible. Without the possibility of differance, the desire of presence as such would not find its breathing-space. That means by the same token that this desire carries in itself the destiny of its non-satisfaction. Differance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible.69 It follows that it is not possible to tell the truth of desire, or about desire. Between the lovers truth merely distances, and the desire for truth is ‘perverse’ (pp. 82–3). The dead letter is in one sense ‘true’—and therefore both formative and irrelevant. The truth is always and inevitably the non-truth: Freud knows this (p. 82). Desire cannot be theorized, systematized; the truth of desire can neither be seen nor shown. Desire cannot be put on display. Unless, perhaps, in its inscription as a succession of postcards, its textual enactment, its non-systematic, untheorized, elliptical, incomplete, uncertain, elusive performance, in a work which mimes desire and mimics fiction, which is inconclusive, apparently inconsequential—a text which is above all and in all kinds of ways neither here nor there. University of Wales College of Cardiff NOTES I am grateful to Charles Shepherdson for detailed discussion of a draft of this essay. His comments have made all the difference. 1 Sigmund Freud, ‘On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love’, in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7 (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 243–60, p. 250. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 2 Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 85–6. 3 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory ofSexuality, in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7 (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 31–169, p. 109. 4 See Catherine Belsey, ‘True love: The metaphysics of romance’, Women: A Cultural Review, 3 (1992), pp. 181–92. 5 Freud, Three Essays, p. 141 and n.15. See also ‘Female sexuality’, in On Sexuality, pp. 367–92, p. 388. 6 Sigmund Freud,’ “Civilized” sexual morality and modern nervous illness’, in Civilization, Society and Religion, ed. Albert Dickson, Penguin Freud Library vol. 12 (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 27–55.

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7 All these possibilities are also implicit in the earlier essay, ‘“Civilized” sexual morality and modern nervous illness’: ‘the injurious influence of civilization reduces itself in the main to the harmful suppression of the sexual life of civilized peoples (or classes)’ (p. 37). 8 The English translation is not quite right here. Allgemeinste is (unusually) a superlative: most general. 9 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 19. 10 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 83. 11 ‘A child’s intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotegenic zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all, is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object. A mother would probably be horrified if she were made aware that all her marks of affection were rousing her child’s sexual instinct and preparing for its later intensity’ (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, pp. 145– 6). 12 Infantile auto-eroticism is parasitic on self-preservation, as the example of thumbsucking demonstrates (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality pp. 95–9). 13 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 146. It is tempting to attribute the male impulse towards a debased sexual object to the division of childcare in the nineteenthcentury middle-class family between the mother and working-class nursemaids. But this would be to ignore the fact that little girls are similarly brought up but do not share the tendency to debasement. What they do share is a preference for the clandestine: the ‘universal’ component of the erotic, as the essay analyses it, is in practice prohibition, not debasement. 14 Laplanche, Life and Death, p. 20. 15 The terms are indistinguishable in Freud: ‘Human civilization, by which I mean all those respects in which human life has raised itself above its animal status and differs from the life of beasts—and I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization…’, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization, Society and Religion, ed. Albert Dickson, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12 (London: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 179–241, p. 184. The Future of an Illusion was published in 1927. In The Decline of the West (1922) Spengler had differentiated between Kultur (the arts, philosophy, etc.) and Zivilisation (vulgar technological progress). I owe this point to Balz Engler. 16 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 17 Jacques Lacan, ‘The signification of the phallus’, in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), pp. 281–91, p. 281. Subsequent page references to this essay are given in the text. 18 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 65. 19 ibid., p. 104. 20 ibid., p. 263. 21 ibid., p. 106. 22 ibid., p. 86. 23 ibid., p. 299.

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24 Cf. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 103–5. 25 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (London: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 269–338, p. 284. 26 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 234. 27 Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 103–4. For an expanded version of that discussion, see JacquesAlain Miller (ed.), The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Book I, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 173–4. 28 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 239. 29 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, pp. 285–6. 30 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 104. 31 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 691 (hereafter referred to as Ecrits (Paris)), and Jacqueline Rose’s translation in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), p. 80. 32 ‘The fact that the Father may be regarded as the original representative of this authority of the Law requires us to specify by what privileged mode of presence he is sustained beyond the subject who is actually led to occupy the place of the Other, namely, the Mother.’ The ‘margin’ between demand and need creates anxiety, and the ‘whim’ of the Other ‘introduces the phantom of the Omnipotence, not of the subject, but of the Other in which his demand is installed…and with this phantom the need for it to be checked by the Law’ (Lacan, Ecrits, p. 311). 33 For a discussion of this point see Charles Shepherdson, ‘History and the real’, (unpublished paper). 34 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 199. 35 ibid., p. 197. 36 ibid., p. 199. 37 ibid., p. 263. 38 ibid., p. 263. 39 Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Seminar ofjacques Lacan, Book II, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 223. 40 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 274. 41 ibid., p. 166. 42 Jacques Lacan, ‘Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever’, in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 186–200, pp. 192–5. 43 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 24. 44 Miller (ed.), The Seminar, I, p. 184. 45 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 245. 46 ibid., p. 311. 47 Miller (ed.), The Seminar, II, p. 223. 48 Lacan, Ecrits (Paris), p. 692. 49 Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 35– 44. See also Stephen Heath, ‘Joan Riviere and the masquerade’, in Formations of Fantasy, pp. 45–61.

32 DESIRE IN THEORY: FREUD, LACAN, DERRIDA

50 For a discussion of the question see Jane Gallop, ‘Reading the phallus’, in Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 133–56. 51 Cf. Lacan, Ecrits, pp. 197–8. 52 Charles Shepherdson, ‘The maternal and the symbolic: Some remarks on Julia Kristeva’, (unpublished paper). 53 Elsewhere Lacan seems to attribute sexual difference to culture. The ‘laws of urinary segregation’ are palpably cultural, however widely shared, and in the case of the two children who see ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ from the window of the train, Lacan comments, ‘For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be more impossible since they are actually the same country’ (my italics. Ecrits, pp. 151–2). 54 Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, in ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B.Allison (Evanston, II: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 129–60. His translators and admirers do Derrida an injustice when they leave the word in ‘French’. ‘Différance’ is not a French word. In the essay Derrida emphatically makes the point that it is not possible to hear the difference between ‘differance’ and ‘difference’. To differentiate orally it is necessary to invoke the spelling, the written form, to say ‘differance with an a’, thus demonstrating the invasion of writing into speech (pp. 132–3). 55 Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, in The Post Card from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 411–96, p. 481. 56 ibid., pp. 414–15. 57 ibid., p. 472. 58 ibid., pp. 468–76. 59 ibid., p. 476, n.54. 60 ibid., pp. 477–8. 61 Barbara Johnson, ‘The frame of reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida’, in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 457–505. 62 Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la vérité’, p. 420. 63 Jacques Derrida, ‘To speculate—on “Freud”’, in The Post Card, pp. 257–409, p. 293. 64 ibid., pp. 298–304. 65 Jacques Derrida, ‘Envois’, in The Post Card, pp. 1–256, p. 26. Subsequent references are given in the text. 66 ‘ln several places I will leave all kinds of references, names of persons and of places, authentifiable dates, identifiable events, they will rush in with eyes closed, finally believing to be there and to find us there when by means of a switch point I will send them elsewhere to see if we are there, with a stroke of the pen or the grattoir I will make everything derail’ (p. 177). 67 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 263. 68 Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), p. 196. 69 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 143.

Between women: lesbianism in pornography PETER BENSON

When the Swedish pornographic magazine Private conducted a survey of its readers, they found that ‘the men who replied…wanted to see mainly lesbians, a big percentage there.’1 This will not surprise anyone who has seen and read the contents of sexually explicit magazines aimed at a male heterosexual market. Yet it remains puzzling. The immediate explanations which might be offered do not seem completely adequate to the insistence of this fact. True, the male viewer of these scenes is enabled, by this device, to see two young women, instead of just one; but at the cost of having no obvious place reserved for him in the readymade fantasy he has purchased. Rupert Smith, in his discussion of pornographic writing for a male gay audience, notes that, in some texts ‘the emphasis is on the idea that women are being tricked out of something that is rightfully theirs when two dishy men get together’, a situation of evident misogyny.2 He goes on to claim that ‘in straight men’s pornography, the recurrent fantasy of lesbianism repeats much of this attitude: two women who have sex together…are often interrupted or punished by the men whom they have been depriving by their lesbian activities.’ However, in the pornography which is publicly available in Britain, there is rarely any ‘punishment’ for lesbianism, and it is not uncommon for men to be totally absent from these imagined scenes. My principal intention, in the present essay, is to analyse one specific example of this fantasy, taken from popular pornographic literature, in the hope of casting some light on these questions. My theoretical framework will be provided by the only available discourses which are remotely adequate to the complexities of human sexuality: Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. There has, to date, been very little serious analysis, within literary studies, of pornography as a popular genre. Numerous discussions exist of those highly intellectual pornographic novels by de Sade, Bataille, Klossowski, etc. But these works do not belong to popular literature. Significant studies of commercially produced romantic novels3 have not been matched by an equal attention to the pornography available in magazines and books, despite the interesting fusion between these genres which forms a widely read category of modern novels for women (whose emblematic example would be Shirley Conran’s Lace (1982)).4

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Representative of this absence is the collection of essays entitled Perspectives on Pornography, published in 1988.5 This contains interesting and valuable discussions of sex films, and of pin-ups, by Anthony Crabbe and Gary Day respectively. But the essays devoted to written texts concern Henry Miller, Angela Carter, and Alexander Pope: all of whom lie well within the bounds of selfconscious literary art, rather than popular fiction. The story I intend to discuss, by contrast, is anonymous: one of a series of similar tales (to whose requirements it conforms) published in a magazine which can be bought in almost any newsagent in Britain. But the fantasies of lesbianism it involves are not confined to such commercial exploitation of narrowly defined desires. Before turning to this text, therefore, it will be useful to place it in direct contiguity with certain lucid works of modern literature where the satne phantasy structure can be found playing a central organizing role.6 It is in these more familiar realms (from the viewpoint of literary theory) that I will begin. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is constructed around a complex interweaving of heterosexual and homosexual desire, neither of which, it seems, can be sustained without the other. The narrator’s love for Albertine is completely coextensive with his jealous suspicions of her, and these suspicions largely concern the possibility that she is having sexual relationships with other women. A fantasy of lesbianism thus subtends the narrator’s desire. He pursues his interrogations of her friend Andree even after Albertine’s death, when ‘the idea that a woman had perhaps had relations with Albertine no longer aroused in me anything save the desire to have relations with that woman myself. I told Andree this, caressing her as I spoke’ (III, p. 612).7 It is under the effect of these caresses that Andree describes the details of Albertine’s promiscuous lesbianism. Hence it is unclear whether this is the ultimate revelation of a suspected truth, or merely a fantasy designed by Andree to arouse her new lover (III, p. 616). In a manner which we will find repeated within the contemporary story I intend to analyse, Albertine’s female lovers are (according to Andree) procured for her by a man, Morel, who first seduces them himself. This reflects exactly the narrator’s own situation. Albertine’s lesbian desires can only be sustained and satisfied by the heterosexuality of her lovers. What is more, Morel is the same person whose homosexual affair with the Baron de Charlus forms the other principal axis of the novel’s analysis of desire. Neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality can have any priority in this amorous nexus indissolubly woven from the two. The originating source of the narrator’s suspicions and phantasies is several times identified8 with an incident witnessed in his childhood, at the very heart of the idyllic and timeless Eden of Combray. Through an open window, the child accidentally observed a scene between two young women containing elements of both lesbianism and sado-masochism. It is ‘an impression which at the time was without meaning’ but which ‘was to play an important part in my life’ (I, p. 173). This situation of an observed scene which retrospectively receives great significance (an important and recurring

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structuring principle of the Proustian narrative) exemplifies that deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) proposed by Freud in his discussion of the ‘primal scene’. Classically, the primal scene is constituted by the accidental observation (or overhearing) of the child’s parents copulating. This brings to the child, not a knowledge of sexuality (for the incident is, precisely, not understood) but a field for its subsequent elaboration in phantasy. The child’s later apprehension of sexual facts and feelings receives from this scene the stamp of its form, shaping that history of desire through which ‘the subject brings himself into being’.9 The prominence given, in the structure of Proust’s novel, to the scene between the two women at Montjouvain, accords it the weight due to a primal scene in which the parental couple has been replaced by a lesbian pair. For Proust’s narrator, this is decisive for the entire formation of his erotic life. Two subsequent incidents of importance in the book repeat this situation of the (hidden) narrator observing a sexual scene. These separate out, from that primary scene, the two components of homosexuality and sado-masochism. At the beginning of ‘Cities of the Plain’, it is a scene of male homosexuality which he sees (between Charlus and Jupien). In Time Regained’, it is the scene of Charlus being whipped in Jupien’s brothel (III, p. 843). Among the events surrounding this latter incident, the conventional primal phantasy (‘when I was a kid I used to watch my parents making love through the key hole’) is contemptuously delegated to one of the young men in the brothel, who is thereby shown to ‘reveal… depths both of stupidity and of innocence’ (III, p. 856). According to Freud, the primal scene is a structuring phantasy which need not have been actually witnessed as a real event. An innate, phylogenetic tendency to construct such a phantasy is supplemented and shaped by hints from observation and intuitions derived from the child’s own sexual drives.10 The scenario is born from this particular fusion of contingency and inevitability. We may easily suppose, therefore, that a lesbian version might sometimes exist, either in parallel with the heterosexual form, or erasing the latter entirely.11 In the psyche of a woman, this might lay the foundation for her later development as a lesbian herself. But in the psyche of a man, it could never have such a simple consequence. The power of lesbian imagery over the minds of many men suggests just such a primal ‘imprinting’,12 as does the initiating role of this scene in the complex structure of Proust’s novel. It is possible to discern a similar fantasy, slightly more disguised, underlying an early short story by Franz Kafka, ‘Description of a Struggle’, which gives an unusual prominence, amid a host of bizarre incidents, to an apparently trivial scene remembered by the character referred to as ‘the Supplicant’. Trying to understand ‘why it is that around me things sink away like fallen snow’ (p. 34),13 he recalls how ‘as a child I opened my eyes after a brief afternoon nap, still not quite sure I was alive, I heard my mother up on the balcony asking in a natural tone of voice: “What are you doing, my dear? Goodness, isn’t it hot?” ‘This question appears to be addressed to him, but ‘From the Garden a woman answered: “Me, I’m having my tea on the lawn.” ‘His place, as respondent to the

36 BETWEEN WOMEN: LESBIANISM IN PORNOGRAPHY

mother’s demand and affection (‘my dear’) is thus usurped. What is more, this replacement (of the role he had assumed was his) is contentedly accepted by his mother: They spoke casually and not very distinctly, as though this woman had expected the question, my mother the answer’ (p. 35). The Oedipal structure of the scene is clearly evident. The primary situation in which the son is everything (is the phallus) to the mother, is disturbed when he becomes aware that she finds satisfactions elsewhere for her verbalized desire. The boy’s rival in this triad, however, is not his father (as in the more usual accounts of the Oedipal drama) but another woman who, moreover, is herself immersed in narcissistic self-gratification (‘Me, I’m having my tea on the lawn’). The scene is constituted as primal, not by any overt sexual content, but by the boy’s displacement from his position as phallus (signifier of the mother’s desire)14 and his consequent erasure from the verbal circuit of question and response. There is not the least hint of a sexual relation between the two women, who are separated from each other by an intervening balcony. But the context for the recollection of this scene is the Supplicant’s alarming sensations of disintegration, which are infused with all the sexual overtones missing from the memory itself: The spire of the Town Hall is moving in little circles…. The Virgin Mary’s cloak is curling round her pillar and the wind is tugging at it’ (p. 36). Here, the self-sufficiency of the woman on the lawn has been transmuted into a hermaphroditic figure (jointly composed of pillar and cloak) representing the Virgin, who has no need of man to experience jouissance (signified by the wind, which the supplicant finds fearful). He recounts the remembered scene to the other major character, the Fat Man, who declares it to be ‘remarkable’ and ‘couldn’t make head or tail of it’. What is more, he ‘didn’t believe it was true…it must have been invented for a special reason whose purpose wasn’t clear to me just now’ (p. 35). These are extreme reactions indeed to an anecdote which appears, on the surface, far more mundane than the accounts of mental disintegration surrounding it. On the following page the Fat Man tries to repudiate his captivation by the scene, declaring: ‘I really don’t find [it] so remarkable.’ But his obsessive return to the incident directly contradicts such a claim. Unable to resist its fascination, he continues: ‘Not only have I heard and experienced many stories of this kind, I have even taken part in some. The whole thing is perfectly natural.’ The Fat Man thus declares himself to be a subject imprinted with the same formation (it is his ‘nature’). He, too, must try to find a place in an Oedipal scenario lacking the clue of sexual difference to orientate identification. The only possibility he suggests is to occupy both positions at once, forging a fundamental split in his own subject position: ‘Do you really mean to suggest that had I been on that balcony in the summer, I could not have asked the same question and given the same answer from the garden?’ (p. 36; my emphasis). The options opened by the scenario are reduced to a choice between the boy’s place of erasure, or a position of profound division. Infected by the consequences

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of this story, in which he has attempted (unsuccessfully) to place himself, the Fat Man can only repeat the tale to a third person (the overall narrator of the text) before himself drowning ‘in the loud roar of the waterfall’ (p. 47). This image of an overwhelming force of nature serves (like the wind) to indicate the place of jouissance, where fear, loss, and pleasure coalesce. Could such a disturbing text have any relevance to popular pornography? Kafka’s story contains no trace of lesbianism, placing its emphasis instead on the boy’s exclusion from a vague affection indicated in the words ‘my dear’. The scene in question is insufficiently eroticized to subtend any emotions other than those of anxiety and disintegration. In the overtly sexual scene from Proust’s novel, by contrast, the place of exclusion is shared between the narrator and the (deceased) father of one of the women, whose photograph they ritually defile before beginning to make love (I, p. 178). This father is the composer Vinteuil, whose music weaves through the novel as a figuration of transcendent creativity. By identifying with this position of exclusion the narrator will thus, after traversing the winding intricacies of jealousy, finally achieve his ambition of becoming a writer. Proust suggests that the pleasures of exclusion ultimately exceed those of involvement. Perhaps it may be just such a pleasure-in-excess that the repeated lesbian scenes of popular pornography gesture towards. Certainly the ‘explicit’ nature of their language should not deceive us into believing that their significance within the reader’s psychic economy is revealed as plainly as the actions described. The ‘wild joy’ of Vinteuil, in his creative activity, produces ‘the boldest approximation to the bliss of the Beyond’ (III, pp. 256 and 263). Yet it is described in a string of metaphors we might easily find within an erotic story: ‘enraptured, quivering as though from the shock of an electric spark…panting, intoxicated, unbridled, vertiginous’ (III, p. 256). Compare, with this, the following description of lesbian sex from a piece of contemporary pornography:15 ‘An almighty orgasm exploded… I came more strongly than I’d ever done, panting and arching my back as the full force hit me…tingles…spread all the way through my body.’ This is from a story of some 2,500 words which has, for its brevity, a surprisingly complex narrative structure. It is one of four stories in the section of the magazine called Talkin’ Blue’, all of which present themselves as if they were letters from (different) female readers. Their similarity of style would be enough (quite apart from any knowledge of the editorial practices of such magazines) to expose this claim as a framing fiction, which effectively renders the story anonymous. It may have been written by a man. (The editorial staff are predominantly, though not exclusively, male.) Any competent writer of either sex could imitate the required style. Even its fictitious signature, ‘Lindsey’, could be a man’s name, though the narrator within the story is definitely female. In the third paragraph this narrator tells us: ‘I’ve…changed the names of everyone…in this story, except, of course, mine.’ Her own name, however, appears nowhere in the story itself (having disappeared behind the shifter ‘I’). It

38 BETWEEN WOMEN: LESBIANISM IN PORNOGRAPHY

is present solely as a signature, and thus not entirely ‘in’ the story at all (nor, entirely, outside it). Author (anonymous), signatory (‘Lindsey’), and heroine (‘I’) are produced as separable instances. Their potential collapse into identity (their mutual replaceability) would give to the text the fiction of truth. (Within the story itself we will discover a parallel theme of mutual replaceability between three women.) The narrator deceitfully assures us that her own name has not been changed, but the other characters are hidden behind aliases. Yet this is (obviously) a work of fiction! These hidden real identities have no ‘reaP existence. Their assumed names replace nothing. A rhetorical effect of truth (carrying, it must be admitted, no conviction) is created through this declared fictitiousness of nomination. On the one hand (within the text) we find an (announced) replacement which lacks an original term; on the other hand, there is the (denied) replacement of ‘I’ for ‘Lindsey’ for the name of the author him/herself, as source of the fiction. These questions of the origin for a sequence of replacements will also prove problematic inside the narrative, when we seek the originating object of desire. Pornographic fiction is designed to have an effect. ‘I can’t help thinking’, writes the narrator, ‘that other men and women out there might get turned on by my horny story.’ This effect would be real. Actual arousal and orgasm are to be (potentially) induced by the fictional arousal and orgasm of characters in a text which has already used declared fictionality to set in play a truth effect. It is a habit of fiction imperiously to relegate truth to the status of a secondary effect of its own self-duplication. There are, for example, a succession of films (from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) to Black Rainbow (1989)) in which stage charlatans are found genuinely to possess the powers they profess. In its specific reflection of this structure of fictionality, pornography precedes the arousal it purports to describe. This was recognized and given dramatic form by De Sade in his monumental 120 Days of Sodom, where the stories told by the ageing whores serve to arouse and structure the libertines’ desires. Pornographic fiction thus shares, with psychoanalysis, a conviction that sexual desires and experiences are moulded and produced by structures of phantasy, rather than being an immediate response to a present reality. In this, psychoanalysis is at odds with a great deal of contemporary popular theories of human behaviour. Such theories can also be found to underpin some of the feminist objections to pornography, as for example those of Elizabeth Carola in her article ‘Women, erotica, pornography—Learning to play the game’.16 As an alternative to a sexuality which is ‘essentially about fantasy’ (and to which, as she correctly states, pornography makes its appeal), Carola proposes ‘a sexuality which could embody our original sense of self-respect and integrity…and allow for a total, directly experienced connection with ourselves and others. There is no reason to believe this could not be so’ (p. 174). Unfortunately, there are a great many reasons for feeling this could not be so, notably the fruitfulness of psychoanalytic theory in providing convincing descriptions of human sexuality. In the terms of this theory no sense of human integrity could ever have been an ‘original’ state.

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(Integrity is an effect of the Ego, which comes to replace and suppress an originating condition of fragmentation among the parts of the body and their associated drives.) Nor could any connection with others be simultaneously total and direct. (Its totality could only be an effect of inevitable transferential mediations.)17 My own theoretical position, in the present article, is that pornography is one attempt, among others, to negotiate the psychic and social contradictions through which sexuality is produced in its present (oppressive and divisive) form. These contradictions can be traced, and read, within the pornographic text. The story I am considering is not simply oppressive towards women. By which I mean both that their oppression, within the narrative, is not simple; and that they are not simply and solely oppressed. Furthermore, the location in relation to sexual pleasure of the male character (and the assumed male reader) proves to be deeply problematic in this narrative, thus dramatizing the constraints of a construction of sexuality which is not ‘simply’ beneficial to men. The first few paragraphs of the tale, however, would scarcely seem to presage any such complexities. The heroine applies for a job as secretary and housekeeper to a rich businessman. This opening, with its description of his Georgian house (‘like something out of “Dallas”’) could be the start of a Mills & Boon romance. The woman is in an economically and socially subservient position. She wonders (‘fleetingly’) if her new boss intends to try to seduce her, but declares that ‘he really wasn’t my type’ and ‘I’d be able to handle it if he made any unwanted advances.’ This initial aversion of the heroine to the man is equally typical of the Mills & Boon type of romantic story, where it exists in order to be reversed. In conformity with these conventions, the final sentence of the present story does indeed have the heroine anticipating her future marriage to her boss, which will take place after the end of the story, in that unrealized space where conventional romances locate sexual consummation. But this conclusion does not entail the traditional conquering of her (sexual) aversion. For, even after the end of the story, she will probably not sleep with her intended husband. The heroine’s journey towards marriage is obstructed, not only by her lack of desire for the (older) man, but by the presence in the house of that man’s wife. (Jane Eyre has long been recognized as one prototype for classic romantic narratives.) This problem, however, is immediately reduced by being mirrored: for there is a third woman, his previous wife, also living in the house. A motif of replacement is thus introduced, intensified by the fact that all three women are (so we are told) similar in age and looks. A narrative place for the heroine has been marked out (she will be the third wife) in a recursive series to which the structure of the tale invites her to succumb. But her place in the Symbolic Order (to which belong both the institution of marriage, and recursive series) can be sustained only by an Imaginary formation of the kind provided by a primal scene. Lacan’s account of the Wolfman’s primal scene explains how ‘the traumatic force of the imaginary break-in produced by this spectacle… re-emerges in the course of the subject’s progress into a symbolic woild’.18 In the face of the shock

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of seeing the (heterosexual) primal scene, the subject locates a (symbolic) place for itself within the scene, as a future ‘father’ or ‘mother’. The placing of the heroine of the present story will be more complex, but the delay (indicative of Freud’s ‘Nachträglichkeif’, on which Lacan places considerable emphasis) between the imaginary break-in and its symbolic integration is noted in the very first sentence of the story, where the narrator says she has ‘taken…more than a year to even write it down’. This act of eventual symbolic inscription enables the anticipation of marriage with which the story ends (a year after the events described). Such delay in narration is in sharp contrast to the swiftness of the actions described. Five short paragraphs after meeting the other two women in the house, she ‘accidentally’ discovers them in ‘an incredibly torrid lesbian clinch’. We are no longer in the world of Mills 8c Boon. Among the many possible reactions to a primal scene, joining in the action is not usually an option. In fact, it is only the separation of the observer from the scene which allows this tableau to function as a founding template of desire. The exclusion of the child (in the infantile realization which these phantasies rehearse) is due in part to its sexual immaturity, and is only later reinterpreted in terms of Oedipal taboos. In an interesting erotic short story by the lesbian writer Cherry Smyth,19 a similar primal scene fantasy is evoked, but the girl watching (through a keyhole) is prevented from entering the scene by the sudden ringing of the school bell (suitable signifier of authority and taboo). When it is the phantasy of a male subject, the lesbian primal scene figures (as we have seen in the examples from Proust and Kafka) an exclusion intensified and made absolute by his gender. If he should then envisage a woman watching the scene, it is to imagine the possibility of an inclusion which would be equal and opposite to his own exclusion. She can enter the scene in his place, transgressing all taboos, available for an overwhelming jouissance. This figuration of jouissance is one of the functions served by the representation of women for men, as is evident in Lacan’s discussion of the mystical ‘feminine jouissance’, for which he finds his principal image, not in the writings of St Theresa herself, but in a statue of her, carved by a male artist, Bernini.20 It is as jouissance that the narrator of the present story experiences her response to the scene she has encountered: ‘I felt a huge lurch of lust.’ The primal scene is traumatic, in general, because it releases in the subject (either at the time, or later) quantities of sexual energy (‘a huge lurch of lust’) which his or her psyche is not yet competent to cope with.21 If this could have been discharged in a sexual act, the scene would lose its force and, consequently, its role in structuring desire. Whereas a lesbian author dreams of staying outside the scene (formative of her desire), the heroine of the present story has both desire and will lifted from her by the male reader who watches (so to speak) over her shoulder, rendering her free to participate in what she sees. ‘Before I could think, my tracksuit and

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undies were off.’ Though she has taken them off herself, her status as agent of this action is erased by the passive construction of the sentence. The decision that she should participate belongs to the desire structure of the male reader. But it is important to recognize that her will has not been reversed (as in the typical trajectory of romantic fiction). Her lust is not for the man (whom she has already decided she doesn’t fancy). Though the story implies (without actually stating) that this is to be her first lesbian experience, she has not expressed any prior aversion to lesbianism. From her own perspective, as narrator of the tale, an immediacy of response is presented as possible, bypassing the detours of desire. Her orgy with the other two women (the description of which occupies one-third of the total text) takes her along a rising reflex arc, from her ‘huge lurch of lust’ until she ‘came more strongly than ‘I’d ever done’. But this blissful indulgence in pleasure is also intended to arouse the male reader, who of necessity cannot share these specific experiences (the heroine’s final orgasm results from cunnilingus). We know, from a long succession of cultural texts, stretching from the legend of Tiresias to the theories of Lacan, that men imagine women’s sexual pleasure greatly to exceed their own. Can this phantasized difference induce anything other than envy? Why should it have the capacity to arouse? According to Lacan, the guilt associated with masturbation is ‘bound up with the recall of jouissance that is lacking in the office rendered to the real organ’.22 It does not, therefore, solely derive from recollections of parental interdiction. If the purpose of pornography is to encourage and enhance masturbation, it must deal in some manner with this guilt. The phantasy to which masturbation responds must soak up the jouissance imagined as lacking in the real act. By this means, ‘phantasy… takes on the transcendental function of ensuring the jouissance of the other’.23 The heroine comes in the reader’s place. The story, however, has not finished. Its remarkable final section contemplates the elaborate means whereby a man might find access to that jouissance which has been represented as possible only between women. The specular image of a woman has two functions (among others) in structuring male sexuality: she is the index of jouissance (‘you only have to… look…to understand immediately that she’s coming, there is no doubt about it’);24 and her absence of a penis enables ‘the erectile organ…to symbolize the place of jouissance…as a part lacking in the desired image’.25 To these functions correspond two fundamental varieties of the photographs to be found in men’s magazines: the miming of orgasm, and the proud display of the model’s vulva. She feels sexual pleasure, but lacks a symbol for that pleasure. The man’s access to jouissance is symbolic; the woman’s is immediate. Of course, there is every reason to doubt whether these professional models are actually having orgasms when they are photographed. And in fact, men never do know if a woman has really come, or has merely pretended. The ‘certainty’ of the fact belongs, as Lacan says, only to the image—to the domain of the Imaginary.26 Jouissance,

42 BETWEEN WOMEN: LESBIANISM IN PORNOGRAPHY

however, is of the order of the Real, and so is the trauma that a primal scene might cause. After their orgy, the three women pause (‘For several minutes none of us said anything’). As in de Sade,27 rational discourse will now replace the ejaculatory use of language (‘yelling really dirty things’) which had accompanied their sex. Just as a primal scene is followed by a retrospective attempt to comprehend it; and a large class of narratives (such as detective stories) retrospectively explain an initial series of unlikely events; so this story proceeds to ‘explain the household…situation’ (ellipsis in the text). Soon after her marriage, the businessman’s first wife, Cindy, had recognized that ‘I’m a dyke and always will be.’ She tells her husband this and finds that, far from being annoyed, he is ‘secretly pleased. It emerged that he’d never really enjoyed actively participating in sex…his favourite thing was to watch two women screwing each other senseless.’ In being a lesbian, Cindy is thus conforming to male desire, having found no escape from this into something other (which would, presumably, be female desire). Nor does she repudiate her ex-husband: ‘he’s a great bloke and he was a good husband.’ The narrator, too, finds that her actions have conformed to a scenario anticipated by the (absent) man. And the third woman, Rochelle, was also chosen by the husband to be his ex-wife’s lover. His marriage to Rochelle seems to have no purpose beyond inscribing himself as master of her relationship to Cindy. All three women reflect his own preferences in female beauty, hence their physical similarity and replaceability. But there is a further factor propelling this obsessive series of replacements (which, the conclusion to the story suggests, will continue; indeed, the story ends when its indefinite possibility for repetition is established). Cindy, we are told, had been having an affair with the man’s sister. ‘Obviously it wouldn’t have been right for Terry to watch his own sister and his wife make love’, and so Rochelle is introduced to replace this incestuous and originating object of desire. The sister does not, except in this one instance, figure as a character in the story. Her erasure enables and compels the repetitive replacements of the narrative, ensuring (by her absence and uniqueness) that they will have no end. Had the man stumbled upon his sister and wife in bed together, this sight might have had for him the force of a primal scene—arousing both surprise and incestuous desire. Since, however, he has merely been told about it, he is protected (by language) from the ‘huge lurch of lust’ which the heroine has enjoyed. Fully in control, master of the events, the man is in danger of losing all access to jouissance. Even sex with his attractive wife was without pleasure for him. Far from celebrating the male dominance it depicts, this story traces the lack (of pleasure) on which that dominance depends. Pornography is a utopian form of literature in which conflict is abolished, usually (as here) by each of the man’s (problematic) desires receiving gratification. But, as in a fairy tale, such

TEXTUAL PRACTICE 43

immediate fulfilment of all wishes does not necessarily bring satisfaction. The women he is accumulating in his house are having a much better time than he is. ‘Terry’s wife and ex-wife looked like mirror images’, says the narrator, ‘Strangely, I didn’t have any misgivings about living at the centre of such a strange set-up. The idea really excited me.’ This sensation of strangeness (twice emphasized: ‘Strangely…strange’) is only possible for the woman in so far as she is not in control of the situation. The excitement she feels is located ‘at the centre’, between two ‘mirror images’. This is the very place (between women) where the man yearns to be. His symptomatic actions display this wish metaphorically (in the Symbolic) since his repetitive switching of wives renders him frequently ‘between women’. But he will also seek to occupy this place in the Imaginary, utilizing techniques of representation to this end. Few fictions thematize their function, reflecting with clarity on the roles they serve. The extraordinary final scene of this story is remarkable in this respect, and deserves an attentive reading. Already, in the second paragraph of the tale, the principal purpose of pornography has been stated (‘that other men and women out there might get turned on’). The representation of sex encourages further acts of sex. This fact shows the deep imbrication of human sexuality with the realms of representation. Since human beings have no inborn (‘instinctive’) knowledge of sexuality (possessing only the drives which that knowledge will organize), they must learn the ‘facts of life’ through verbal or other representation.28 The unexpected shock induced by this new knowledge gives, to all subsequent depictions of sexuality, the potential for repetitively reviving a flood of excessive and unmastered (unbound) stimuli. Hence it is that censorship and taboo always surround, to a greater or lesser extent, images and descriptions of sex. Liberal notions that these are merely depictions of a normal human activity (needing no special consideration) cannot account for their power. In the final part of the story the three women watch a video film showing two of them making love. This is the very sight which the heroine had already stumbled upon, and become incorporated into. But it is now framed, set at a distance as an image. The result is that ‘I was feeling even hornier than before.’ Representation of sex not only impels repetition (‘well before the film had ended we were all stroking, kissing and masturbating each other’), it also acts as a relay in the progressive intensifying of that experience (‘if possible my orgasm was even more forceful this time’). There is, here, no narrative escalation of more and more extreme sexual acts (as in de Sade’s stories, and a great deal of sexual fiction). The women do not engage in any actions different from their earlier orgy (which was described in much greater physical detail). But the fact that their arousal is received back from their own image multiplies its effect. Lesbianism is here phantasized within the dimension of narcissism. The women (with their similar looks) receive desire from their own image, becoming self-sufficient. As Freud noted, it is narcissistic women who hold the greatest fascination for men.29 This captivation contributes to that position of exclusion which male desire seems to seek.

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But an additional (supplementary) object (one common in lesbian pornography for men) is also introduced into the video film. The women make use of a ‘long, cream coloured, double ended dildo’. They have taken possession of this symbol of the phallus and made it an instrument of their own pleasures. The phallus stands between women as a signifier of their desire (which the man has commanded). It could block their access to each other (and to pleasure) could it not be made to vanish. If the man’s demand be met, he must disappear from the scene (from that which is seen) just as the dildo is engulfed when the women come together, leaving only their bodies visible as the ‘unquestionable’ image of jouissance. The man has equally removed himself from the scene, by filming it (for it is he who is operating the video camera). But this is not a position of engulfment. It is, rather, the controlling authorial place he has maintained throughout the tale (determining, in large measure, the women’s actions). It is a place resembling that of the story’s (possibly male) author, invisible behind the female narrator’s involvement in the engrossing (engulfing) action. Filming the fascinating image of lesbian sex reintroduces the separation earlier transgressed when the voyeur’s position was delegated to a woman. Now, in a symmetrical moment, it is the three women watching the film who are placed in a position of exclusion (produced and necessitated by the machinery of representation as such). Yet, in this vertigo of mirrors, the two women on the screen also sit beside the heroine, watching themselves. The role of women in this story, it would seem, is to deny the exclusion they instantiate. By making a video film which they themselves will watch, the man delegates to them his own position of desire, his will-to-see. They lift from him the burden of this desire, seeing through his eyes, exactly as the reader had watched the initial ‘primal’ scene over the heroine’s shoulder. The effect is the same, freeing him for the possibility of jouissance. His will and gaze are passed on to the women, and his physical presence is erased by the mechanics of reproduction (unable to represent the place from which it sees). Abolished, he comes. ‘Obviously Terry had been filming the action, as just as the two lesbian lovers climaxed, two or three thick wads of come hit them, splashing over their boobs and stomachs.’ He comes, precisely, between women: sandwiched and invisible between the lovemaking on the screen and the reflected actions among the women watching. When their desire has finally erased the man who drew them together, he can experience at last, not the pleasure (le plaisir) of control, but radical intoxicating loss and disappearance, la jouissance (which his orgasm, here, serves to represent).30 After his initial recruitment of the heroine, this is the man’s sole appearance in the story: visible only as a stream of come. Not even his penis can be seen. A woman’s jouissance can be represented by her body, but the male body (a metonymy for his erect penis—rigid and unified) must disappear at this moment, to be replaced by a flood of amorphous, milky fluid. This replacement, this dissipation of identity, is jouissance for the male subject.

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The complex construction which enables this to happen involves the production of a seam between two layers of representation: the video image and the (written) description of the events taking place on the ‘huge sofa’ where the women sit to watch it. De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom has a similar oscillating structure, between the stories told by the whores and the surrounding scenes (usually printed in a different type-face) inspired by these tales. Barthes has described the production of just such a seam as necessary for erotic pleasure,31 recognizing that eroticism resides, not in the representation of sexuality, but in the sexualizing of representation. On the smooth surface of the textual body, a line of difference is traced. The erotogenic zones of the human body itself are similarly formed (as Lacan has noted)32 by those places where (as with the lips) there is an edge, a rim. The presentation of this story, in the pages of the magazine, involves an equivalent seam, for it is illustrated by two photographs. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these photographs appear on the same pages as the story, for they do not directly ‘illustrate’ it; they do not depict any of the events described in the text. Yet there is some (minimal) association between text and images, for the photographs portray three women who (like the characters in the story) are of similar age and looks, with the same colour hair and eyes. They serve as a further replacement for the three women in the story, without directly depicting them. Curiously (enigmatically) the larger of the two pictures shows them in the ‘three wise monkeys’ pose of speak-no-evil, see-no-evil, hear-noevil: an odd protestation of innocence whose function is difficult to analyse. The story’s thematic structure of permutations (repetitions with differences) is taken up by this picture, in which one of the women wears two white gloves, another two black gloves, and the third a single black glove (had she worn one white and one black, the permu tational set would be complete; as it is, other possibilities remain (e.g. two bare hands) which leaves the image, like the text, open-ended). The reader has, before his eyes, the bodies of these women, as well as the complex sexual narrative of the story. It is, no doubt, between these two regimes of representation (in, metaphorically, the white margin which separates them) that he will find his pleasure joining with that of the man in the tale. The man’s jouissance—his streaming, his coming, his dissolution (terms in precise opposition to the ‘masculine’ postures of control, rigidity, mastery)—can take (its) place only between regimes of representation, and between women. His come flow splashes their bodies, laps at the edges of their untouched landscapes, flows over their surfaces, to be licked like cream (‘The video ended with them rubbing the spunk into their soft skin, and then licking it off each other, just like a pair of cats.’: an image common in hard-core pornographic photographs and films.) Maleness, male essence, male come, becomes an amniotic fluid spreading over the woman, giving birth to her and feeding her milk from the nipple of his prick.33 Jouissance swirls in the disruptive disintegration of symbolic divisions between male and female.

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Which does not for one moment alter the fact that the man, in this story, holds the power to control the moment of his loss of power— entirely dependent as this nevertheless is on the aquiescence of these women, their quiescent aquatic floating in the field of his camera viewfinder. In filming them, he simultaneously films his own coming. Pornography’s submission of women to its gaze displays all these troubled traces of male desire—for it is there, where the man is not, that the unpeeled outer surface of his firm ego lies. The woman figures everything whose loss makes him man, and that site of loss is the source of jouissance. The authors of Rewriting English note that ‘there is a clear and strong sexual division in the industry and conventions of sexual fantasy: romance for women, pornography for men.’34 Their discussion of popular romantic novels concludes with the following remarks: Romance works with the basic conflict in women’s lives. That is what makes it a popular form, and allows the same stories to be told over and over again. Fundamental changes in the genre are likely only when the contradictions that shape women’s lives are altered or resolved.35 It would seem, from my discussion, that pornography has a similar task of negotiating contradictions within the male social role and psyche. But the passivity of that final sentence (duplicating the passivity required of women by Romance), in which change in the genre must await the arrival of changes elsewhere (in ‘life’), is itself in contradiction with the writers’ claim, later in their book, ‘that popular fiction of all types has an important role to play in the reproduction of forms of gendered subjectivity within patriarchy’.36 It is in writing, and re-writing (and the re-writing constituted by analysis) that we may find the fractures where future changes will take root. London NOTES 1 Quoted in D.Hebdith and N.Anning, Porn Gold: Inside the Pornography Business (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 30. 2 R.Smith, ‘One-handed reading’, in M.Lilly (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 171. 3 e.g. J.A.Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); also chapter 5 of Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class, by J.Batsleer, T.Davies, R.O’Rourke, and C.Weedon (London: Macmillan, 1985). 4 Later examples have greatly increased the proportion of pornography in this brew. 5 G.Day and C.Bloom (eds), Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1988).

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6 I am following the accepted convention of using ‘fantasy’ (with an ‘f’) to refer to conscious manifestations, and ‘phantasy’ (with a ‘ph’) to refer to unconscious structures of thought. 7 References to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past are, by volume and page number, to the three-volume edition of the English translation by C.Scott Moncrieff, revised by T.Kilmartin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981). 8 e.g. at the end of ‘Cities of the Plain’ (II, p. 1152). 9 J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, trans. J.Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 191. This passage (pp. 189–91) is a particularly lucid exposition of the theory of the primal scene. 10 S.Freud, ‘lntroductory lectures on psychoanalysis’, Standard Edition (SE), vol. XVI, pp. 370–1. (All references to the works of Freud will be to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–73), by volume and page number.) 11 Given that the (phantasized or real) presence of the mother (as first love object for either sex) is central to the scene’s importance, it is less easy to imagine a version which would involve male homosexuality. 12 Lacan, op. cit., p. 190. 13 Page references are to F.Kafka, ‘Description of a Struggle’ And Other Stories, trans. T. and J.Stern (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). 14 J.Lacan, ‘The signification of the phallus’, in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A.Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 289. 15 ‘Three’s No Crowd’, in Club International, 20, 1 (January 1991), pp. 62–4. 16 Included in G.Chester and J.Dickey (eds), Feminism and Censorship: The Current Debate (Bridport: Prism Press, 1988). 17 These objections by no means apply to all feminist critiques of pornogra phy, as can be seen from the article by Sheila Jeffreys (‘The censoring of revolutionary feminism’) in the same anthology. Sharing their aversion to pornography, Carola and Jeffreys hold fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of human sexuality. A detailed discussion of feminist critiques of pornography is beyond the scope of the present article. 18 J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, pp. 189–90. 19 C.Smyth, ‘Maeve and Beth go shopping’, in More Serious Pleasure: Lesbian Erotic Stories and Poetry (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1990). 20 J.Lacan, ‘Seminar XX: Encore’, extract published in J.Mitchell (ed.) and J.Rose (trans. and ed.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 147. 21 This is the theory of traumata given in Freud’s ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, SE XVIII, p. 31. 22 J.Lacan, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious’, in Ecrits: A Selection, p. 320. 23 ibid., pp. 323–4. 24 Lacan, ‘Seminar XX: Encore’, p. 147. 25 ‘The subversion of the subject’, p. 320. 26 In hard-core pornography (whose lack of current legal availability in Britain indicates the deeper taboos it must transgress) these terms are reversed: it is the man whose orgasm is visible, in the fact of his ejaculation. Pulling his penis out of the woman, he makes a spectacle of himself. Conversely, it is the woman’s body,

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27 28

29 30

31 32 33

34 35 36

drenched with his come, which serves as a symbol of his jouissance (and no longer an index of her own), taking on (in the moment of his detumescence) the value of Phallus. Cf. R.Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. R.Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), pp. 145–6. ‘The human being has always to learn from scratch from the Other what he has to do, as man or as woman.’ (J.Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A.Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 204.) S.Freud, ‘On narcissism: An introduction;, SE XIV, p. 89. This point is of some importance. Physical sexual climax does not necessarily always partake of the psychoanalytic category of ‘jouissance’, but the ‘almighty’ orgasms of sexual fiction can usually be taken as signifiers of this dimension. R.Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R.Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), p. 7. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 168–9. This association is made by Gary Day in his introduction to Perspectives on Pornography, p. 5. It would be supported by Bruno Bettelheim who, in his major study of male envy for the female bodily functions, suggested that ejaculation could serve as a compensation for man’s inability to lactate. (Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955), p. 113.) op. cit., p. 99. ibid., p. 105. ibid., p. 172.

‘And all is semblative a woman’s part’: body politics and Twelfth Night DYMPNA CALLAGHAN

I Once a marginalized object in traditional literary scholarship, the body has emerged as a crucial category of critical inquiry. In Renaissance studies, it has become the focus of attention as the site of emergent notions of the modern subject and attendant concepts of privacy and intimacy hitherto viewed as natural and transhistorical. Transformations wrought by the Reformation and the shift from feudalism to capitalism rendered the body subject to what Norbert Elias has called ‘the civilizing process’,1 More specifically, Renaissance theatre itself had a corporeal, sexual identity. It was a place where, to use Dekker’s redolent term, ‘stinkards’ gathered, where patrons engaged in those sexual practices so often vilified by anti-theatricalists: arousal, prostitution, perhaps even copulation itself.2 The Renaissance body, then, especially in the arena of theatre, has been recognized as political, that is, as a site for the operation of power and the exercise of meaning, and one ‘fully social in its being and in its ideological valency’.3 That the Renaissance seems peculiarly concerned with the somatic might seem justification enough for a study of the body in Shakespeare. We might concur with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg who argues, ‘During periods of social transformation, when social forms crack open…ideological conflict fractures discourse…sexuality and the physical body emerge as particularly evocative political symbols.’4 But the resurgence of the body in Renaissance studies (and elsewhere) is not a perennial, cyclical phenomenon. Rather, the intensity of focus on the body is related to very specific, historically situated developments in poststructuralist theory. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton draws attention to the politics of current concern with the body: few literary texts are likely to make it nowadays into the new historicist canon unless they contain at least one mutilated body. A recovery of the importance of the body has been one of the most precious achievements of recent radical thought…. At the same time, it is difficult to read the later

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Roland Barthes, or even the later Michel Foucault, without feeling that a certain style of meditation on the body, on pleasures and surfaces, zones and techniques, has acted among other things as a convenient displacement of a less immediately corporeal politics, and acted also as an ersatz kind of ethics. There is a privileged, privatized hedonism about such discourse, emerging as it does at just the historical point where certain less exotic forms of politics found themselves suffering a setback.5 The body is simultaneously situated here as de facto, ‘exotic’, ‘precious achievement’, and ‘displacement’ of serious politics. The emancipatory potential projected on to the body (by feminist and Queer theorists as much as the doyens of poststructuralism) versus the political limitations of current fetishizations of the body seem to put the ‘undecidable’ and the ‘dialectical’ perilously close. None the less, Eagleton draws our attention to the fact that the body in much critical discourse becomes the site of ‘micropolitics’ (in centrist or ‘ludic’ readings of the postmodern as opposed to resistance postmodernism),6 which is believed to have replaced the grand conceptual, liberatory narratives of political economy. Ludic postmodernism produces a naive notion that social transformation can be articulated at the local level of the corporeal. Foucault falls into this utopian vision of the body at the end of The History of Sexuality. The body, as a site of opacity almost exempt from meaning, becomes the privileged locus of resistance: ‘The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.’7 While ‘bodies and pleasures’ mark Foucault’s distance from Derridean and Lacanian desire, in the end the ideological effect is the same, namely one of ‘privileged, privatized hedonism’. Similarly Bakhtin, whose rhetoric is more that of mouth and anus than zone and surface, none the less deploys a populist, utopian view of the disruptiveness of the grotesque body.8 Paradoxically too, micropolitical analyses are frequently presented as ‘materialist’. For example, both Foucault’s techniques of the subject and Bakhtin’s grotesque realism have been viewed as such, in what Eagleton dubs ‘the modish, purely gestural uses of that most euphoric of radical buzz-words’.9 In some instances, popular and politically specific uses of the term materialism are employed as if they were synonymous. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, for example, in their fairly traditional, thematic approach to Renaissance Bodies, argue for the sheer material reality of the body, as opposed to ‘abstraction and distance’, that is, the discursivity of the ‘figure’: ‘“Body”, by contrast, suggests the solidly central unrepresented fact of existence, a materiality that is of itself inarticulate. It is the mute substance of which “figure” is a more nervous and expressive shadow.’10 Yet, this appearance of substance occurs only because this is how, within the transactions of discourse, the body is rendered intelligible in our culture. When Gent and Llewellyn refer to the body’s ‘sheer physicality’, the mute facticity of its materiality, they reduce the material to the elemental. This is

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a classically humanist definition of the material as the density of things you can touch. Mas’ud Zavarzadeh explains: In the discourses of ludic postmodernism, ‘politics’ is an exemplary instance of totalitarian ‘conceptuality’. The micropolitics of the body, on the other hand, is politics without concepts: the local politics of material experience. However material in these theories…means the immediate elements of the medium of the political, that is to say, the discourses that articulate subjectivities and thus produce the micro-political. It is, in other words, a materialist politics only in the sense that, for example, focusing on the ‘photochemical reality’ of film makes the film maker a ‘materialist’ film maker. An idealist materialism isolates single issues and their mode of enunciation from the global structures of the political economy.11 Such critical discourses, then, invoke the body as substantive, ontologically grounded raw material devoid of any agenda for social transformation. Alternatively (and sometimes simultaneously) in its textualist rendition, the material is defined as discourse, as the material part of the sign, to which the body contributes, as Barthes has proposed, through the phatic dimension of speech.12 Thus, a characteristic deconstructionist manoeuvre places the opacity of both the signifier and the body as the ‘material’ dimensions of the production of meaning. This depoliticized materialism conveniently coincides with both post-Marxism and those reactionary elements of the (ludic) postmodern to which it is also causally related. In this way, contemporary discourse on the body, as Eagleton argues, has become alienated from the ‘more traditional political topics of the state, class conflict and modes of production’, that is, from historical materialism as it has been previously and more rigorously understood.13 The body, then, even when it is understood not as simple transhistorical fact but as ‘a relation in a system of liaisons which are material, discursive, psychic, sexual, but without stop or centre’,14 niay signal, none the less, the displacement of the political defined as the global, totalizing agendas relegated to obsolescence in much postmodern theory. Thus, while ludic postmodern discourses of the body offer substantially different accounts of the body from humanist understandings, finally, their ideological effects are disarmingly similar. Materialism, as I have argued, can be reduced neither to raw physicality nor to the so-called materiality of signs; both constitute ‘idealist materialism’. In terms of discourse on the body, this is to deny neither the ‘reaP ontological existence of the body nor the materiality of discourse.15 However, the material should not be confined to the binarism brute-material/discursive, but rather considered as the way the social and cultural always exceed the discursive. For this is precisely what is at stake over the question of the material. An example may clarify the point: that certain classes of women were particularly marked out as rape victims in the Renaissance (servants, for example), and that women continue to be viewed as sexual terrain to be possessed, violated, and commodified, constitute

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physical, social and cultural aspects of rape as opposed to purely physical or ‘textual’ ones.16 (Thus, women are no more vulnerable to rape as an inherent fact of biology than men are to castration.) Rape has, then, both a physicality and a politics that in a patriarchal culture concerns relations between men in which women are property, and as such it cannot be separated from issues of class and ownership. That is, the discursive construction of the gendered body is implicated in the materiality of the non-discursive; and the latter is not simply raw materiality, but also the social and cultural. I have chosen an example pertinent to feminist struggle because the politics of the body are exacerbated and more urgent there: as the object of patriarchal subjugation women are uniquely identified with their anatomy, which has been simultaneously and problematically marked as the ground of feminist resistance. The problem is whether the body intrinsically constitutes an appropriate and effective site of resistance to the increasingly dense, subtle, and comprehensive conceptual trap of late capitalist patriarchy. The danger is that ‘its pre-existing meanings, as sex object, as object of the male gaze, can always prevail and reappropriate the body.’17 It is not clear that we reclaim women’s bodies— especially denigrated female genitals which get culturally marked as the source of women’s oppression—without regressing into biological essentialism (the very rationale for women’s subordination), the phenomenology of lived experience, or the political evasions of poststructuralism.18 Nor can we reclaim past representations of female corporeality in any simple, celebratory way. In what follows, I want to use a more politically effective understanding of materialism than the one current in cultural criticism of the body in order to focus on the absent-presence of female genitals in Twelfth Night. My analysis of the play’s representations of the female body works within global rather than local structures and resists the characteristic poststructuralist notion that undecidability is liberating. Further, I want to resist the pervasive tendency in Shakespeare criticism, in both its humanist and poststructuralist manifestations, to conflate ‘matter’ and materialism, a trivialization that blocks the emancipatory potential of this radical concept.19 For the female body, while not literally present on the Renaissance stage, was constantly and often scabrously constructed in masculine discourses in ways that reinforced larger patriarchal institutions and practices.20 II In Shakespearean comedy the female body is most obviously a problem at the (secondary) level of the text’s fiction where female characters like Viola and Rosalind disguise themselves as eunuchs and lackeys. But the female body is also problematized at the primary level of Renaissance theatre practice in which boys played ‘the woman’s part’. Lisa Jardine argues: ‘“Playing the woman’s part”—male effeminacy—is an act for a male audience’s appreciation’ and that ‘these figures are sexually enticing qua transvestized boys, and that the plays

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encourage the audience to view them as such.’21 As the complexity of this state of affairs has been emphasized, however, there has been something of a displacement of the initial feminist recognition that transvestism is an aspect of misogyny based on the material practice of excluding women from the Renaissance stage—the ‘boy actress’ phenomenon.22 Thus, while Stephen Orgel in a brilliant contribution to South Atlantic Quarterly’s special issue on homosexuality contends like Jardine that homosexuality was the dominant form of eroticism in Renaissance culture, he also argues (and this is indeed a crucial recognition) that the homoeroticism of the Renaissance stage was not inevitably misogynist.23 Transvestism could not have had particularly insidious implications for women, he argues, because plays depended for their success on the large numbers of female play-goers. None the less, the exclusion of women from the stage and their simultaneous inclusion as customers—the fundamental characteristic (contradiction) of the institution of theatre in early modern England —does not exculpate theatre from charges of misogyny. This should not lead us to conclude, of course, that women’s appearance on the stage at the Restoration should be read simply as ‘progress’. In those countries where female players were allowed on stage, women were no less oppressed than in England.24 Rather, the point here is to recognize the flexibility, the historically and geographically variable nature of patriarchy, while insisting on the exclusion of women from the Renaissance stage as the determinate material condition in the theatre’s production and representation of femininity. Catherine Belsey’s essay, ‘Disrupting sexual difference: Meaning and gender in the comedies’, a feminist-deconstructionist reading of the comedies, where any destabilization of meaning is in and of itself ‘politicaP, urges the positive play of transvestism only by ignoring the fact that it is founded on the systematic and structural oppression of women. She reads the endless play of meaning inherent in transvestism as inherently subversive; it becomes undecidable and therefore, ‘for us to decide’. But since, as she points out, all meanings in language are inherently unstable, it is hard to see why transvestite destabilizations should offer any particularly liberating possibilities for feminism.25 None the less, for Belsey, comic transvestism, particularly in Twelfth Night, which ‘takes the most remarkable risks with the identity of its central figure’ permits us ‘to glimpse alternative possibilities’. But it is very likely that the new possibilities Belsey envisages would equally provide the basis for control and self-surveillance.26 In contrast to this strain of criticism, I want to argue that in the carnivalesque world of Twelfth Night the female body’s capacity for resistance and disruption is severely curtailed by the fact that the transvestite actor is ‘as likely to be portraying women with contempt as with respect’27 and where the male body, ‘the very instrument of the art of the theatre’,28 repeatedly and ritually enacts the displacement, exclusion, and discipline of its female counterpart.

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III In the Renaissance, mimicking social superiors by wearing their clothes was as much a violation of natural order as the assumption of a sexual identity other than that dictated by one’s anatomical destiny. Antitheatricalists tirelessly inveighed against the latter. A fairly typical example of such an attack is to be found in Philip Stubbes’s infamous book, whose very title, The Anatomy of Abuses, invokes the corporeality of deviance: Our apparell was given as a sign distinctive, to discern betwixt sexe and sexe, and therefore one to wear the apparell of an other sex, is to participate with the same and to adulterate the veritie of his own kinde.29 Gender cross-dressing is an obvious target for antitheatricalists given the biblical injunction against it: ‘“the Lord forbideth men and wemen to chaunge raiment”’, and the 1620 pamphlet controversy about androgynous dress, Hic Mulier and Haec Vir.30 Nevertheless, two types of transvestism prevailed: that which violated the boundaries of gender demarcation and that which violated class hierarchy. On this matter, Jonas Barish summarizes the representative view of Puritan cleric William Perkins: ‘Distinctions of dress, however external and theatrical they may seem to us, for Perkins virtually belong to our essence, and may no more be tampered with than that essence itself.’31 Thus, for the likes of Perkins and Stubbes, essence resides in apparel rather than in what lies beneath it. To divest oneself of the appropriate social signifiers is to alter one’s essence, to adulterate God-given nature. From this point of view, the soul resides in the clothes, not just for Parolles, but for all humanity. That there is a structural identity between gender and class transvestism is demonstrable in the fact that the profound hostility to transvestite actors was related to the revival of medieval sumptuary laws which prohibited the confusions of ‘degrees’ and ‘callings’ ordained by God.32 This is so much the case that Malvolio’s obedience to the injunction contained in a forged letter that he wear yellow stockings and cross-garters, all but overwhelms the Viola/ Sebastian plot from which it singularly diverts the audience’s attention.33 Malvolio’s cross-gartering, his ‘transvestism’ is, then, structurally and symbolically related to gender inversion, and it is no further removed from anatomical inscription than is Viola’s disguise. Malvolio adopts attire that might be suitable if worn by a young gentleman suitor to Olivia, but incongruous and ridiculous when worn by a servant who sees himself fit to be her husband.34 As the Elizabethan ‘Homily Against Excess of Apparell’ contended, such behaviour constitutes a violation of both decorum and decree: many a one doubtless should be compelled to wear a russet coat which now ruffleth in silks and velvets, spending moe by the year in superfluous apparell than their fathers received for the whole revenue of their lands.35

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Having indulged in these improprieties, in a sense, Malvolio really is mad because it is, as Raymond Ruyer remarks, such eccentricities and deviations from the naturalized orthodoxy of decorum which are ‘the small change of madness’.36 Notably, the only record we have of a Renaissance performance of the play does not so much as mention Viola’s transvestism.37 John Manningham’s contemporary response places Malvolio at the play’s core: At our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night or What You Will, much like the Commedy of Errors or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni. A good practise in it to make the Steward believe his Lady Widdowe was in love with him by counterfeyting a letter from his Lady in general terms, telling him what shee liked best in him and prescribing his gesture in smiling his apparaile etc, and then when he came to practise making him beleeve they tooke him to be mad.38 Similarly, Charles I, embracing the title’s invitation to tag the play, ‘What You WilP, inscribed Malvolio opposite the title of the play in his second folio. A 1623 performance of the play also refers to it by that title.39 Although we cannot account for all the changes that may have occurred from the time of the first recorded performance to the text we have received (Olivia is not a widow for instance, and we have no way of knowing whether this represents Manningham’s error or a reference simply to the costume of a widow, or to a change in the text), there is good reason to concur with Margaret Maurer who contends, ‘Frankly he [Malvolio] has upstaged the twin device.’40 However, Malvolio does not merely upstage the comedy of the main plot: he notoriously disrupts the festive spirit of Twelfth Night. The unrecuperable Tll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you’ (V.i. 377) troubles all the charm and delight that critics and audiences have found in the play. It is also possible that Malvolio’s desire for revenge is directed at women, and at Olivia quite specifically for her ‘Alas, poor fool, how they have baffled thee!’ (V.i. 368). It would seem, then, that class transvestism is more threatening than that of gender, which can be resolved rather more readily.41 In this respect, Malvolio’s cross-gartering is more subversive than any instance of gender cross-dressing because it is Malvolio who disturbs the romantic coupling with which the play concludes. Because traditional criticism has often been at pains to gloss over or dissolve the discordant tone produced by Malvolio’s promise of revenge, it has never been linked to the other major source of disharmony, namely the ‘“discord” between the romance and the broader comedy of the play’.42 The dimensions of significant corporeality enacted in both gender and class transvestism and the feminized carnal excesses constitutive of the play’s bawdy are crucially interarticulated. Recognizing this interconnectedness, the way the female body is imbricated in complex ways with other social categories, especially class, renders the female body in Twelfth Night not as a merely localized phenomenon

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but as a pervasive cultural one. Specifically here I want to contest the notion put forth by Kathleen McLuskie that ‘The primary, physiological, distinction could not, of course, be represented on the stage.’43 In other words, in my reading, what is at issue is not whether it could be represented but how it is represented. That is, the monstrous female genitalia in the play’s representational register is not merely a localized ‘theme’, but rather depends upon and produces the exclusion and denigration of women, and the ridicule and punishment of men who attempt to change their status in the social hierarchy. This is nothing less than the maintenance and reproduction of patriarchy. Let me elaborate first on the text’s bawdy, the raw physical humour that often disconcerts critics who favour the ethereal lyricism held to be the definitive characteristic of romantic comedy. Eric Partridge in a revised edition of his famous book, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, is obliged to retract an earlier declaration that Twelfth Night is ‘the cleanest comedy except for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.44 Further, since Twelfth Night is by critical consensus the culmination of Shakespeare’s work in the genre, when he ‘completely masters and exhausts the possibilities of this form of drama’,45 and since comedy is inherently corporeal, that range of possibilities necessarily includes the ‘bawdy body’. Stephen Greenblatt observes: ‘Shakespearean comedy constantly appeals to the body and in particular to sexuality as the heart of its theatrical magic; “great creating nature”—the principle by which the world is and must be peopled.’46 Such a view, although it once again ignores the exclusion of real female corporeality, none the less grates against Granville-Barker’s contention that Shakespeare’s was a celibate stage devoid of physical representations of sexuality where transvestism functioned as an aesthetic device to foreground theatrical artifice.47 For all the critical reluctance to address it, the ‘broad humour’ of the play is perfectly appropriate to its celebration of Twelfth Night, the Feast of Misrule, when licensed inversion is the order of the day; as Feste remarks: ‘To see this age! A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit—how quickly the wrong side may be turned outwardl’ (III.i.11–12). Here the fleshy grotesque body reigns supreme. Stallybrass and White describe the symbolic components of this structural inversion as follows: Grotesque realism images the human body as multiple, bulging, over-or under-side, protuberant and incomplete…with its orifices (mouth, flared nostrils, anus) yawning wide and its lower regions (belly, legs, feet, buttocks and genitals) given priority over its upper regions (head, ‘spirit’, reason).48 The play’s laughter is thus produced by such comic violations of social and somatic decorum integral to the culture of ‘cakes and ale’, ‘masques and revels’, which has its most ardent devotees in Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Sir Toby, who epitomizes the corpulent excess of the carnival grotesque, vows to remain a drunkard as long as there is passage in his throat and

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drink in Illyria (I.iii.39–40). Should he renege on this oath, Sir Toby avers, ‘call me cut’ (II.iii.186). In the spirit of carnivalesque inversion, such derogatory references to the female genitals constitute much of the play’s humour—not to mention its misogyny—thwarting the attempt of hegemonic, twentieth-century criticism to find in the play the good clean fun of benign (verging on the beneficent) comedy romance. Malvolio’s class transvestism, as I have argued, is the central inversion of the play and is closely related to the play’s representation of femininity, as well as its bawdy humour. In accordance with its carnival theme, female genitals are at the heart of Malvolio’s gulling, the play’s most famous scene: Mal. [Taking up the letter] By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s, and thus makes she her great P’s. It is in contempt of question her hand. Sir And. Her Cs, her U’s, and her T’s: Why that? Mal. [Reads] To the unknown beloved, this, and my good wishes. Her very phrases! By your leave, wax. Soft! and the impressure her Lucrece, with which she uses to seal: ’tis my lady! To whom should this be? (II.v.87–96) Sir Andrew’s exclamation is in part a rhetorical question emphasizing the scandalous pun, which Malvolio spells out in slow, excruciating detail: ‘cu[n]t’. On another level the query justifies this crude jest because, of course, no C, U, or T exist in the superscription of the letter.49 At that literal, textual level we never really do know why there is a ‘CU[N]T’ in Twelfth Night. Symbolically, however, Malvolio, in taking seriously the possibility of trading a steward’s servility for sexual service with his mistress—‘She that would alter services with thee’ (II.v.157–8)—has, as Maria promised, been gulled into a ‘nayword’ (II.iii. 135–6). That is, he has become, ‘liver and all’, feminized, ridiculed, castrated; his corporeal being in its entirety has been reduced to the most denigrated body part —a ‘cut’. Malvolio is already primed for this by his earlier fantasies of social advancement, which begin to forge the connection between debased femininity and class aspirations: To be Count Malvolio’ (II.v.35). ‘Count’ and ‘cunt’ were probably homonymic in Elizabethan English as we see from Katherine’s translation of ‘la robe’ in Henry V, III.iv as the ‘mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique’ ‘le count’. Malvolio’s is a stern lesson on the dangers of wish fulfilment. His degeneration into femininity is a reversal of the transformation from female to male thought biologically feasible in the Renaissance on the grounds that nature strove for perfection. In short, Malvolio’s gender reversal constitutes an unnatural act. Thus his social ambitions implicate him, albeit inadvertently, in a species of deviance far more dangerous than Viola’s deliberate transgression.50 The resonance of the female genitalia, however, is more comprehensive than that. It signifies Maria’s ambivalent sexual identity as Amazon Queen, Penthesilea (prefiguring in the denouement’s genitally undecipherable ‘fancy’s

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Queen’) and as the text’s author, and Olivia’s private parts. The audience is thus presented with the dynamic between Olivia’s political authority and the (mis) representation of her body. To some extent, the letter reveals all representation of the aristocratic body, which Leonard Tennenhouse has shown is necessarily female in the Elizabethan era,51 as untrustworthy mimesis. Olivia’s authority is undercut by her status as semi-petrarchan object of diverse passions—Orsino’s idealizing and Malvolio’s idiocy—and compounded by the letter’s further dislocation of her power. That Malvolio’s ‘CUT’52 does indeed have implications for Olivia’s power is established by the banter with Cesario about how, without ceding her virginity, Olivia might leave some copy of her beauty in the world. In the wordplay on (corporeal) reproduction and (discursive) representation, Olivia works to retain at least linguistic sovereignty over her body. In one sense she plans to extend this control even to the grave, but in another, female sovereignty of the body is merely dominion over a corpse: ‘I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will. As, item, two lips indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth’ (I.v.247–51). Olivia’s inventoried body is its representation after her decease in her will. ‘Will’ signifies both sexual desire and, literally, the legal document containing instructions about the disposal of her property. Command over one’s body consists of command over its representations, its reproductions—something that would have resonated with Elizabethans, whose queen carefully supervised the reproduction and dissemination of her authority by controlling the use of her image as stringently as she controlled marriage plans prepared on her behalf. Of course, Olivia cannot know that in the very next Act, without her consent, her private parts will be on display for everyone’s amusement. It is significant, too, that Olivia is the object of this form of ridicule since she is clearly the female figure with most authority in the play and the one with the most inclination to use it independently of men. Not only is the sexual function of the pudendum ridiculed but also its urinary one in the jest on Olivia’s micturition —‘her great P’s’. The allusion to Olivia’s copious urination further deforms veiled, cloistered, aristocratic femininity into the grotesque and, paradoxically, more suitable object of Malvolio’s sexual and social ambitions. ‘Her great P’s’ also bring us closer to the source of Olivia’s excitement, ‘folds adjacent to the meatus urinarius on the female’, which when tumescent can result in tribadism, as Ambrose Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels fearfully points out: ‘they grow erect like the male rod, so much so that they can disport themselves with them, with other women’.53 Olivia’s private parts, preposterously resembling the phallic proportions of a full-grown man, make her ridiculous (as female character, as boy actor, and as wooer of Cesario). The clitoris, the site of female desire, is in a sense a phallic imposter, as Jane Sharp’s midwifery guide asserts: ‘lt will stand and fall as the yard [penis] doth and makes women lustful and delight in copulation.’54 Olivia as the ‘phallic’ woman in her advances towards Viola has a

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cultural parallel in homophobic accounts of women whose clitoral hypertrophy made them similarly aggressive suitors of other women.55 Thus, Nicholas Tulp’s treatise on anatomy gives an account of a German woman’s predilection for exposing her clitoris, which extended some way from the vulva, in order to engage in ‘licentious sport with other women’.56 The boy actress Olivia thus becomes the ‘hypersimulation’ of a woman57 because despite the allusions, there is, of course, no female body as such in the ‘C.U.T’ passage (just as there is none in the play). It is worth exploring the cultural resonance of women’s genitals, particularly in the arena of theatre. Andrew Gurr offers one of Henry Peacham’s anecdotes from The Compleat Gentleman, which has a certain positive, erotic connotation, rather than one aimed at violence or ridicule. None the less, it suggests that the most important thing about both a woman’s ‘cut’ and a woman’s purse (metaphorically related in contemporary psychoanalytic theory), is that both belong to her husband and can therefore be stolen by other men: A tradesman’s wife of the Exchange, one day when her husband was following some business in the city, desired he would give her leave to go see a play; which she had not done in seven years. He bade her take his apprentice along with her, and go; but especially to have care of her purse; which she warranted him she would. Sitting in a box, among some gallants and gallant wenches, and returning when the play was done, returned to her husband and told him she had lost her purse. ‘Wife, (quoth he,) did I not give you warning of it? How much money was there in it?’ Quoth she, Truly, four pieces, six shillings and a silver tooth-picker.’ Quoth her husband, ‘Where did you put it?’ ‘Under my petticoat, between that and my smock.’ ‘What, (quoth he,) did you feel no body’s hand there?’ ‘Yes, (quoth she,) I felt one’s hand there, but I did not think he had come for that.’58 Thus, even if as Leah Scragg suggests, the ‘C.U.T.’ of Twelfth Night is an admonition to the audience to beware pickpockets; to feel themselves up and pat themselves (or their neighbours) down, its implications may not be so innocent as an issue of warning about potential financial loss. (This is particularly the case when we recollect that the appellation Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl, connotes her identity as both thief and ‘codpiece daughter’ (II.ii.89).59 Given the prevalence of pleasure in critical discourse at present, perhaps we should also consider the possibility that this admonition may signal that ‘cut’ is not entirely pejorative; it may have erotic connotations. Indeed, while the public exposure of female genitals by women was rare, it was an explicit invitation to sexual activity. That Malvolio comically presents himself as having familiarity with Olivia’s private parts, can also be read as a claim to have engaged in mutual masturbation, which seems to have been a very common form of premarital sex, as in the case of one virgin whose intimacies entailed the woman lying on the

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bed while her partner ‘combed her private member’.60 While we may read the potential eroticism of the suggestion of mutual masturbation in Twelfth Night as positive, it is counterbalanced by the contravention of social hierarchy, which, as it relates to Malvolio and Olivia’s ‘relationship’, is resoundingly negative. The argument for the scene as a benign jest on women’s sexual pleasure—which could be rationalized in terms of Laqueur’s claim that female pleasure, specifically orgasm, was thought to be necessary for conception—is severely compromised by the fact that this was also used as a way of dismissing rape charges.61 Magistrates were advised that women who were impregnated during rape must have been pleasured and therefore must have consented.62 This points up not only the difficulty of reading the gulling scene in terms of female pleasure, but also the fact that the episode depends for its humour on the conspicuous absence of Olivia’s ‘consent’. The ‘C.U.T.’ scene is connected with the social enactment of women’s oppression. Numerous women brought legal complaints about men trying to touch and manipulate their genitals: ‘Whiles he was thus soliciting her, his hand was always grappling about her plackett, striving to have felt her privy part.’ Many of these incidents have been usefully assembled from court records in G.RQuaife’s Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives. One man apparently told his friends of how he had groped a woman’s genitals, and told the woman herself, ‘Faith Mary, thou hast a soft cunt.’ Another case, perhaps even more pertinent to that of Olivia, is that of one Margaret Woods who was held by the privates so long that she urinated in the man’s hands.63 Further, the public exposure of women’s genitals could have unambiguously violent meanings and effects. One man from Batcombe ‘did violently take up the clothes of Elizabeth Numan and showed her nakedness to many’, and a husbandman from Halse made an offer to divers then present that for a penny a piece they should see his wife’s privities and there withal did take her and throw her upon a board and did take up her clothes and showed her nakedness in most beastly and uncivil manner.64 Predictably, however, men are recorded as having found such violence both comic and erotic. One inn servant jumped in terror from a window after being thus abused, but it is quite clear from the account of a fellow female servant that her drunken assailants felt otherwise: throwing her down Jay, Willis and Sherwood holding her legs and arms down by force did one after another lift her clothes up to her girdle and then thrust their hands shamefully between her legs and feel her privities and look upon them. After which done Jay (who named himself the knight of the castle) sat upon a bench, taking and holding Edith between his legs, placing a stool before her face, and holding her arms fast. And then and there drawing their wicked rapiers and laying them upon the table made

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proclamations in these or the like words viz: ‘Oyes, whosoever dareth to break down the walls of grimcunt castle let him approach… Henry Sherwood come forth and appear at grimcunt castle.’ Whereupon Sherwood came forth with a glass of beer in his hand and taking up Edith’s coats above her knees felt her privities and then threw the glass of beer at the same.65 The histrionics of this incident share certain features of the ‘C.U.T.’ scene in Twelfth Night. There is a fantasy of exalted social status (knighthood), male bonding (recall that Maria exits directly before the gulling and reenters directly after it), and abuse directed quite specifically at the pudenda. Also, like Olivia’s household, this gathering was amused by the graphic exposure of the woman’s genitals and relished it as a focus of their theatrics. The ‘graphic’ display in Twelfth Night is, of course, precisely that, a written representation, linguistic rather than somatic, allowing the company to be hugely entertained. The elusiveness of ‘graphic’ display renders female genitalia present in pornographic detail, and absent as the ‘real’ beyond representation.66 What is palpably present, however, is ‘anatomized’ femininity. Olivia’s ‘hand’ is both a limb and writing; in this case a blatant misrepresentation—a forgery. There is also the figure of Lucrece, who would seem to interject this scene with a more sober rendition of the feminine as object of male violence. The usurped seal ring depicts Lucrece, probably portrayed in the ‘noble’ act of stabbing herself, the self-penetrating re-enactment of her violation that constitutes the only recourse of the ravished woman who seeks to preserve her moral integrity.67 Lucrece is an appropriate figure for a seal, made to be ruptured by the letter’s recipient in an act loosely analogous to sexual violation. To ‘open’ a letter—to read it, to interpret it, is in some sense to breach its integrity. We are thus left with images of comically debased and tragically valorized femininity, each of which are specifically associated with writing as a mode of representation. In fact, the ‘licence of ink’ with which Sir Toby urges Sir Andrew to taunt Cesario (III.ii.42– 3) is precisely the liberty taken by Maria’s missive. For writing offers freedom from anatomical and class designations. Its manoeuvrable discursivity is emblematic of the power of (mis)representation which constitutes theatrical licence itself, and does so most vividly in the various forms of transvestism we have detailed here. In order to consolidate (and complicate) the connection between the business of representing corporeality and the overall implications for a reading of Twelfth Night, I want to turn briefly to Stephen Orgel’s comments on the play. He writes: Viola announces in the final moments of Twelfth Night that she cannot become a woman and the wife of Orsino until her woman’s clothes have been recovered—a dress borrowed from Olivia or a new one purchased for the occasion apparently are not options—and that this will require the release of the sea captain who alone can find them, which in turn will

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necessitate the mollification of the enraged Malvolio, who has had the sea captain incarcerated: this all materializes out of nowhere in the last three minutes of the play. And Malvolio at the play’s end offers no assistance but runs from the stage shouting I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.’ For Viola to become a woman requires, in short, a new play with Malvolio at its center [my emphasis].68 Orgel is right that the play’s production of femininity is dependent upon Malvolio, but it is so in more ways than he imagines. For as I have argued, we do not need a new play because we already have Malvolio at the centre of a plot where femininity is little less than an impossible condition, and female authority a ridiculous one. For if the play, as Leonard Tennenhouse argues, involves the explicit transfer of patriarchal power into the body of a woman, who then returns it, now in ‘a more humane and less violent form’ via marriage,69 the play must persuade us of the urgency of the final transaction. Twelfth Night, then, treats the corporeal representation of sexuality, which was equated with femininity. Sue-Ellen Case summarizes the cultural rationale for this manoeuvre as follows: The female gender had become the custodian of male sexual behavior, which it instigated and elicited. The female body had become the site for sexuality. If women performed in the public arena, the sexuality inscribed upon their bodies would elicit immoral sexual responses from the men, bringing disorder to the social body.70 Thus, the very thing that justified women’s exclusion from the stage is graphically foregrounded in this play. But the play does not therefore subversively evade the strictures against female bodies on stage; rather it adds weight to them by presenting the female body in its most biologically essential form—the cunt.71 For the critic, Twelfth Night illustrates the problem of recovering the female body for feminism. We cannot make a female body ‘materialize’ from nowhere; we can only register the complexity of its exclusion. IV Jane Gallop recalls that in Les Bijoux Indiscrets the protagonist is given a magic ring in order to confer the power of speech, and thence sexual revelation, upon female nether parts. Diderot’s narrative, recounted by Gallop in 1989, almost exactly parallels her own rendition of the rank, raucous pudendum in The Daughter’s Seduction, where, taking her cue from Freud’s remarks on the odour of menstrual blood, she constructs an opposition between vaginal aroma and the veiled impassive specularity of the phallus: ‘the cunt clamours for attention, makes a big stink’.72 In the later analysis of Les Bijoux Indiscrets she elaborates on the protagonist’s desire for a female pudendum that will speak with the

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‘feminist’ fantasy of one possessing powers of intellection—a shift from the stinking to the talking/thinking cunt. Gallop’s is a fascinating effort to disrupt the mind/body dualism structuring Western thought. But as I noted at the start, the articulation of corporeal female desire is always open to appropriation by patriarchy. Twelfth Night, as we have seen, invokes the raucous articulation of desire in the process of its ritualized de-regulation. In its world, if you are fortunate enough to evade the castrating effect of the letters ‘C.U.T.’ (as Malvolio cannot), you may become or possess ‘What You Will’. ‘Will’, as is apparent in the sonnets, is bawdy for both penis and pudenda. Its bawdy humour derives from the articulation of inappropriate desire, especially female desire. Female desire is not clearly affirmed in this inverted world, just as in actual social sites of symbolic inversion such as carnivals, women were as likely to be sexually abused as given sexual licence. Thus, there is as much violence against women in the tradition of carnivalesque transgression as in the authoritarian suppression to which it was formulated as a response.73 None the less, the corporeality of sexual desire, which tends to be identified with the feminine, is articulated in this play as food, olfaction, noise, plague and pestilence. To give but a brief example from the ‘C.U.T.’ scene, Malvolio’s desires make him a ‘brock’, a badger, a stinking beast. Eating and hunting as emblems of the erratic course of sexual desire open the play, as Orsino is alternately pleasured and tormented by all his sensory capacities: If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall: O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more; Tis not so sweet now as it was before… Curio Will you go hunt, my lord? (I.i.1–9, 16ff) Olivia is identified with a scent, both that of the hunted hart (into which Orsino rhetorically metamorphoses when pursued by his own uncontrollable desires) and that which ‘purg’d the air of pestilence’ (I.i.20). She is the food which whets his appetitive sexual desire, and sates it all too quickly, ‘Enough, no more.’ Orsino maintains his dignity by responding with lethargy to the onslaught upon his senses.74 This corresponds with the notion that sexual attraction was immanent in the body of the desired object. It is an illusion which characterizes itself, ‘a wish to locate the arousal, the erotics, in some object rather than in an intersubjective dynamic’.75 And of course, Olivia does not actually desire Orsino, any more than she does Malvolio. None the less, she manages to usurp her own dignity and ‘a

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smooth, discreet, and stable bearing’ (IV.iii.19) of her authority by marrying an effeminate boy of dubious social standing. In the letter that dupes Malvolio, the ‘dish of poison’ that is set for him by Maria, we come closest to Gallop’s fantasy of the thinking, (almost) vocal cunt: [He opens the letter.] Fabian This wins him, liver and all. Mal. [Reads] Jove knows I love: But who? Lips, do not move. No man must know. ‘No man must know’! What follows? The numbers altered! ‘No man must know—If this should be thee, Malvolio! Sir To. Marry, hang thee, brock! Mal. [Reads] I may command where I adore: But silence, like a Lucrece knife, With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore: M.O.A.I. doth sway my life. (II.v.96–109) In one sense the letter has itself become a cunt clamouring its desire, but forced either to feign passivity or actually be quiescent, ‘Lips, do not move’. The bawdy implications of the earlier ‘C.U.T.’ are not abandoned either; as both ‘lips’ and ‘know’ have carnal connotations, as Pare observes: Moreover, at the beginning of the neck of the womb is the entrance and crack of the woman’s ‘nature’, which the Latins call Pecten; and the edges, which are covered with hair, are called in Greek Pterigomata [sic] as if we were to say wings, or lips of the woman’s crown, and between these are two excrescences of muscular flesh, one on each side, which cover the issue of the urine conduit; and they close up after the woman has pissed.76 The woman’s part also requires considerable powers of exegesis: ‘No man must know… The numbers altered!’ Voracious female sexuality, it would appear, despite the injunction to silence, speaks for itself and yet demands the careful attention of interpretation, referring us also to the extra-diegetic reality of the boy actress’s sexual equipment. Similarly, Viola’s dubious sexual identity appears to give itself away, to sound off: For they shall yet belie thy happy years, That say thou art a man; Diana’s lip Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe

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Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman’s part. (Liv.30–4) The maiden’s organ is both voice and genital femininity. Thus for Viola: ‘A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man’ (III.iv.307– 8). Here, however, contrary to the feminist fantasy of the inherently disruptive qualities of the female genitals in the phallocentric order, Viola must speak on behalf of her sexual parts because, ambivalent as they are, they incite her to discourse. Kathleen McLuskie writes of the endless complications of signifying woman on the Renaissance stage, ‘The frustrated critic may wish, like the puppet in Bartholemew Fair, simply to lift the skirts and expose the reality behind the signification, but the result, as in Jonson’s play, would simply be a disconcerted silence.’77 In Twelfth Night, however, we have anything but that; we have an elaborate, fanciful instance of patriarchal ventriloquism. I have attempted here to give a theoretical and critical context for my partial reading of the female body in Twelfth Night. In it, I have insisted on the materiality of woman’s exclusion from the stage even while examining the representation of her private parts. To do so is to some extent to halt the play of possibilities envisaged by much contemporary cultural analysis of transvestism in order to take a political position which works to open up new space for the purposes of resistance postmodernism rather than leaving us suspended in the poststructuralist space of the undecidable.78 I have also tried to confront the exclusion of women from the Renaissance stage without denying the complexity of the representation of the female body. This claim requires some small elaboration; for we have reached a moment when ‘complexity’ is now routinely invoked as a reactionary formulation of ‘undecidability’ in order to claim that things were not so bad for women in the Renaissance after all.79 What is complex is the way in which apparently benign representations of women operate as regulatory fictions for the suppression, exclusion and containment of those who, in their corporeality, lived the Renaissance condition of femininity. In this, I hope that my analysis constitutes an intervention for current feminist politics by using the body in a Shakespeare text as a way of articulating the problems of its reclamation at this historical juncture for a materialist feminist agenda.80 V It has become a commonplace of criticism, one that recurs in interesting ways in analysis of Renaissance transvestism, that the anarchic, transformative possibilities of Renaissance Drama, especially those relating to the status of women, were foreclosed by the Puritan-motivated closing of the theatres.81 However, there is no evidence that the closing of the theatres can be identified as a major component of either the progressive deterioration of women’s status

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during the seventeenth century or the subsequent post-Enlightenment regime that now recruits our subjectivities.82 For it was not, of course, the Puritans who were the agents of the then emergent politics and sensibility that we now live, although it is possible that the closing of the theatres offers some a sign of why the revolution failed. Rather, the Puritans were the radical forces of change whose revolution was foreshortened by Royalist victory. This confusion coincides with a persistent tendency to conflate women crossdressers abroad in the streets of London and the institutional practice of theatrical transvestism necessitated by the exclusion of women from the stage. The issue about women in men’s clothing is one to which the romantic comedies only obliquely refer.83 While the phenomena of stage and social transvestism are connected, they are not identical. Thus, even the case of The Roaring Girl does not involve a woman cross-dressing on stage—it entails that only as part of the plot’s fiction, not as a systematic aspect of the operation of theatre. Further, no antitheatricalist would have been mollified by the suggestion that if female actresses played women, the evil of stage transvestism might happily be avoided. This simply is not an option available within the conceptual horizon of early modern England. For it is the presence of women in any and all its manifestations that poses a problem either horrifying or unthinkable. Further, in social life women dressed as men, but in theatre men dressed as women, and the latter is to some degree an arena for licensed inversion.84 No matter how heinous antitheatricalists found theatrical transvestism, they never found it necessary to inveigh against men gadding about London dressed as women. That men did not dress as women in social (as opposed to theatrical) practice is a phenomenon not contended with by those who argue for theatre as pre-eminently a site of gender instability.85 Nor did the political radicals of early modern England share the enthusiasm of contemporary ‘radical’ critics about theatrical transvestism. JeanChristophe Agnew remarks: What is clear from the protracted debate over stage transvestism…is the Puritans’ utter disbelief in the traditional corrective virtues of travesty. How could they countenance a remedy that was so difficult to distinguish from the disease?86 From the perspective of my analysis, the Puritans had a point.87 Syracuse University NOTES This essay was completed with the help of a Monticello College Foundation Fellowship at the Newberry Library, Chicago. 1 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vols I and II (1939; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). See also Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The

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2 3 4

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Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), pp. 1–10. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 38. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 13. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The body politic’, in Elizabeth Weed (ed.), Coming To Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 103. One important strain of analyses of the body in Renaissance Studies has been that of the body politic. For a recent Shakespearean example see Zvi Jagendorf, ‘Coriolanus: body politic and private parts’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41, 4 (1990), pp. 455–69. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 7. See Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Seeing Films Politically (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). On the political necessity of asserting women’s physiological specificity, see Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). On resistance postmodernism, see Teresa L.Ebert, Tolitical semiosis in/of American cultural studies’, American Journal of Semiotics, 8, 1/2 (1991), pp. 113–35. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1981), p. 157. For a trenchant critique of Foucault’s ‘body politics’, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 62–3. See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 128–41. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), p. 80. Gent and Llewellyn, op. cit., p. 2. Zavarzadeh, Seeing Films Politically, p. 48. For an excellent account of this phenomenon see Donald Morton, ‘Texts of limits, the limits of texts, and the containment of politics in contemporary critical theory’, Diacritics, 20, 1 (1990), pp. 57–75. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 7. Barker, op. cit., p. 12. See Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter (1980; London: Verso, 1988), p. xxviii; Janet Wolff, ‘Reinstating corporeality: Feminism and body politics’, in Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 133. See Nazife Bashar, ‘Rape in England between 1550 and 1700’, in London Feminist History Group (ed.), The Sexual Dynamics of History (London: Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 28–46. Wolff, op. cit., p. 121. There are other important and related debates which I do not have space to engage in here. There has been a lot of rethinking around biological essentialism, especially as it has been articulated in response to Irigaray’s ‘womanspeak’ and

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19

20 21

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Cixous’ écriture féminine. Also there has been considerable debate as to whether the body exists outside discourse. Elizabeth Grosz argues, for example, that ‘the body can be seen as the primary object of social production and inscription’ in her ‘Notes towards a corporeal feminism’, Australian Feminist Studies, 5 (Summer 1987), pp. 1–16. See also Wolff who argues ‘the critique of essentialism does not amount to proof that there is no body’ (p. 135). Both Wolff and Elizabeth Dempster try to locate new, liberatory understandings of the body in dance, but the result is a feminist rendition of the utopian excesses of the theorized bodies of Barthes and Foucault. Elizabeth Dempster, ‘Women writing the body: Let’s watch a little how she dances’, in Susan Sheridan (ed.) Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 35–54. See also Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988), pp. 96–114. She remarks that ‘the very location of “the sexual” in the body is itself historically mutable’ (p. 104). See for example Gail Kern Paster, ‘Leaky vessels: The incontinent women of city comedy’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Renaissance Drama As Cultural History: Essays From Renaissance Drama 1977 to 1987 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 211–33, which, though an elegant and useful reading, takes urine as the ‘raw material’ of its ‘materialist’ analysis. See also Valerie Wayne (ed.) The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See Sheila Fisher and Janet E.Halley (eds), Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), pp. 31; 29. Stephen Orgel contends, like Jardine, that homosexuality was the dominant form of eroticism in Renaissance culture. ‘Nobody’s perfect: Or why did the English stage take boys for women?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88, 1 (Winter 1989), pp. 7–29. See also Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 154; 327. See Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 100–57 and her ‘The act, the role, and the actor: Boy actresses on the Elizabethan stage’, New Tbeatre Quarterly, 5 (1987), pp. 120–30; Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 88–9; Sue Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (London and New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 26–7; Woodbridge, op. cit., p. 327. Orgel, op. cit., p. 17. Phyllis Rackin draws attention to the homophobic satire of Jonson’s Epicoene, thus demonstrating the important point that not all instances of transvestitism were homoerotic. Phyllis Rackin, ‘Androgyny, mimesis, and the marriage of the boy heroine on the English Renaissance stage’, PMLA, 102, 1 (1987), pp. 29–41; 31. Jean Howard points out that the social transgressions entailed in women attending the theatre may well have been more directly related to the goings on in the auditorium than to the content of the plays. See ‘Scripts and/ versus playhouses: Ideological production and the Renaissance public stage’, in Wayne (ed.), op. cit.

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24 In a different vein, Juliet Dusinberre observes: ‘Restoration drama boasts neither female heroes nor male heroines. But the woman actor offers no challenge to the dramatists to understand femininity beyond surface appearance.’ Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 271. 25 Catherine Belsey, ‘Disrupting sexual difference: Meaning and gender in the comedies’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London and New York: Methuen, 1985) pp. 190; 166–90. See Ryan, op. cit., p. 9 for an account of the limitations of deconstruction in Shakespeare studies. Ironically, Ryan proceeds to valorize the play of instabilities in his subsequent analysis of the comedies, pp. 88–9. 26 Belsey, op. cit., pp. 185; 166–7. See Wolff, op. cit., p. 127. 27 Wolff, p. 129. 28 Brian Gibbons (ed.),. Romeo and Juliet (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 64. 29 Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (London: J.R. Jones, 1583), p. 38. 30 Jardine, op. cit., pp. 14; 155–6. 31 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981), p. 92. See also Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); J W. Binns, ‘Women or transvestites on the Elizabethan stage?: An Oxford controversy’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, V, 2 (1974), pp. 95–120; Sandra Clark,’ “Hic Mulier, Haec Vir” and the controversy over masculine women’, Studies in Philology, 82, 2 (1985), pp. 157–83; Rudolf Dekker and Lotte C.Van de Pol, The Tradition ofFemale Transvestitism in Early Modern Europe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989); Laura Levine, ‘Men in women’s clothing: anti-theatricality and effeminization from 1579 to 1642’, Critidsm (Spring 1986), pp. 121–43. 32 Orgel, op. cit., p. 15. 33 Malvolio similarly occupied the attention of critics of the play until in the surge of recent interest in gender, cross-dressing focused instead on Viola’s disguise. 34 On Malvolio’s class status, see Cristina Malcolmson,’ “What you will”. Social mobility and gender in Twelfth Night’, in Wayne (ed), op. cit., pp. 29–57. 35 Certain Homilies Appointed to be Read In Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (London: SPCK, 1908), pp. 334–5. 36 Quoted in Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal territories: The body enclosed’, in Margaret W.Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J.Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 123; see also Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘Violence done to women on the Renaissance stage’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds), The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 67. 37 There is perhaps a ‘coded’ reference to transvestism in the mention of the play’s Italian parallel. If as Margaret Maurer suggests, the play is a ‘trick’ play, Manningham might not have wanted to give the game away. None the less, the emphasis is all on the ‘device’ against Malvolio, which reinforces the sense that this is the trick of the play. Margaret Maurer, ‘Coming of age in Illyria: Doubling the twins in Twelfth Night’ (unpublished).

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38 T.V.King, Shakespearean Staging 1599–1642 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 97. 39 Criticism since the Renaissance has also been preoccupied with Malvolio. See T.W.Craik and J.M.Lothian (eds), Twelfth Night (1975; London and New York: Methuen, 1981), pp. Ixxix-xcviii. 40 Maurer, op. cit., p. 2. 41 Malcolmson, op. cit., p. 51, argues that social estate in Twelfth Night, is ‘a matter of desire or will rather than birth or title’ in order to praise willing service, as that of Viola to Orsino, and to condemn self-interest represented by Malvolio. 42 Craik and Lothian (eds), op. cit., p. liv; Levine op. cit.; Joseph Westlund, Shakespeare’s Reparative Comedies: A Psychoanalytic View ofthe Middle Plays (Chicago: (Jniversity of Chicago Press, 1984). 43 McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists, p. 110. 44 Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary (1947; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). 45 Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 41. 46 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Fiction and friction’, in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 86; see also Craik and Lothian p. lii. 47 Harley Granville-Barker Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 15. 48 Stallybrass and White, op. cit., p. 9. 49 Craik and Lothian (eds), op. cit., p. 67. 50 Malvolio’s connection with bawdy is consolidated by the fact that despite his Puritan leanings, he isn’t immune from making a lewd jest himself, as when he describes Orsino’s messenger to his mistress: Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before ‘tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple. ’Tis with him in standing water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him. (I.v.158–64)

‘Peascod’ and ‘codling’ refer to his genitals. It would seem too, that he participates in the solitary pleasures of masturbation—playing with his jewel; a pretty common double entendre (II.v.60–1)—despite editors’ efforts to sanitize his lines. 51 Tennenhouse, op. cit., p. 79. 52 Partridge argues that in this ‘nursery spell-out’ of cunt and piss that ‘Shakespeare has not, after all, omitted the n; it occurs in “and no T’s” [sic] as several discerning scholars have noted’ (p. 160). ‘N, innuendoed or concealed or—especially in and (pronounced ‘n’)—representing in; connected with the ways in which words or sounds are—for instance, with suggestive pauses—delivered on stage…. Mr Aylmer Rose, in a long and valuable letter dated 2 October 1955, writes thus,

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61 62 63 64 65 66

concerning Twelfth Night, II.v.87–89: “‘Her very C’s, her U’s, and [pronounced ‘n’, i.e. N] her T’s; and thus makes she her great P’s’ [where, he implies, there is a significant pause before P’s]. If my suggestion about the innuendoed N is correct, it draws attention to the necessity of considering the sound of words and the way in which they are delivered on stage”’ (op. cit., pp. 151–2). Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels (1573), trans. Janis L.Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 188. Paré was first translated into English in 1634 by Th. Johnson; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 116; 188. Quoted in Thomas Laqueur, ‘Amor Veneris, vel Ducedo Appelatur’, in Michael Freher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (eds), Fragments for a History of the Human Body: Part Three (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 105. Valerie Traub offers an important critique of the heterosexist bias of the assumption ‘that love between women was readily available as a source of both humour and humiliation for members of Shakespeare’s audience’. Valerie Traub, ‘Desire and the difference it makes’, in Wayne, op. cit., p 83). And indeed, while misapprehension of any sort may be a source of ridicule, this does not exclude the production of homoerotic play here. Quoted in Laqueur, op. cit., ‘Amor Veneris’, p. 115. I have borrowed this term from Sue Ellen Case’s ‘Toward a butch-femme aesthetic’, in Lynda Hart (ed.), Making A Spectacle: Feminist Essays In Contemporary Women’s Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 282–99; especially p. 297. Gurr, op. cit., pp. 6–8. See Rose, Expense, p. 78; Leah Scragg, ‘Her C’s, Her U’s, Her T’s’, Review of English Studies, 42 (1991), pp. 1–16; 15–16 especially. A contemporary pun with a similar effect is ‘snatch’ which can mean theft (as in purse snatching), or can mean a woman’s crotch. Jane Gallop’s Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) uses ‘snatches of conversation’ as a subtitle in one of its chapters in order to suggest both female crotch and partial apprehension. G.R.Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 169. This is a possibility not entertained by Gail Kern Paster’s reading of this episode. Paster claims that Malvolio’s verbal transgression is constituted by the fact that he appears to have contravened the norms of urinary segregation (op. cit., p. 213). I am indebted to Fran Dolan for the reference to Quaife. Laqueur Making Sex, pp. 2–3; 161; 182. Quaife, op. cit., p. 172. ibid., p. 168. ibid., p. 168. ibid., p. 170. Further, the emphasis on the linguistic dimension of the sexualization and denigration entailed in the process of enforcing social hierarchy, links both Olivia and Viola, whose names, as Jonathan Goldberg has pointed out, are anagrammatic mirrors of one another and links both with Malvolio, to whose names his adds a negative prefix. Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Textual properties’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 37, 2 (1986), p. 216.

72 ‘AND ALL IS SEMBLATIVE A WOMAN’S PART’: BODY POLITICS AND TWELFTH NIGHT

67 For a fascinating analysis of the image of Lucrece in Shakespeare’s narrative poem, see Nancy J.Vickers, ‘This heraldry in Lucrece’s face’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body In Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 209–22. 68 Orgel, op. cit., p. 27. 69 Leonard Tennenhouse, Power On Display: the Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 68. 70 Case, Feminism and Theatre, p. 20. 71 ‘Everything pertaining to the female genitalia is comprehended in the term “of nature” [phuseos], and the obscene term cunt [cunnus]’, wrote Caspar Bauhin, professor of anatomy and botany at Basel (1560–1624). Laqueur, ‘Amor Veneris’, p. 107. 72 Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 32; Thinking Through the Body. 73 See Peter Stallybrass, ‘“Drunk with the cup of liberty”: Robin Hood, the carnivalesque, and the rhetoric of violence in early modern England’, in Armstrong and Tennenhouse, (eds), op. cit., pp. 45–76; and Stallybrass and White, op. cit. 74 As Leonard Tennenhouse puts it, Orsino ‘aestheticizes love by dislodging it from its political body’, Power On Display, p. 63. 75 Gallop, Thinking, p. 139. 76 Paré, op. cit., p. 188. 77 McLuskie, op. cit., p. 111. 78 See Case, ‘Toward a butch-femme aesthetic’, pp. 282–99; Butler, op. cit., p. 136; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 79 See my Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989), chapter 2. 80 It is not, in my view, that materialism has become impossible, but that it is perhaps not quite so self-evident as it was, say in 1982 (see Barrett), op. cit., or even in 1985 (see Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (eds), Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class, and Race in Literature and Culture (London and New York: Methuen, 1985)). 81 See for example, Case, Feminism and Theatre. 82 Rackin argues, ‘The Puritans closed the theaters and a multitude of causes, which we were only beginning to understand, closed off many of the opportunities and possibilities that had been open to women at the beginning of the modern age’ (p. 38). 83 See Rose, Expense, p. 91. 84 Greenblatt points out in relation to Arnaud du Tilh’s impersonation of Martin Guerre, ‘What is entirely unacceptable—indeed punishable by death in the everyday world—is both instructive and delightful in spaces specially marked off for the exercise of impersonation. For in these spaces, and only in these spaces, there is by a widely shared social agreement no imposture.’ Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance culture’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds), Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 219–20. 85 This remains true of Dollimore’s recent chapter on cross-dressing in Early Modern England in Sexual Dissidence.

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86 Jean-Christophe Agnew, World’s Apart: The Market and the Theatre in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 1986), p. 131. Dollimore argues: ‘But what kind of resistance, if any, does a materialist criticism discover in Renaissance tragedy? I argued in Radical Tragedy that we find in this theater not so much a vision of political freedom as a knowledge of political domination. But we simply cannot slide between the two, or assume that the second easily produces the first. This knowledge was challenging: it subverted, interrogated, and undermined the ruling ideologies and helped precipitate them into crisis. But history tells us time and again that from such crisis there may emerge not freedom but brutal repression. And such repression emerges not because the subversive was always contained, subversion being a ruse of power to consolidate itself, but because the challenge really was unsettling.’ Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Shakespeare, cultural materialism, feminism and Marxist humanism’, New Literary History, 21, 3 (1990), pp. 471–93; 482. 87 Phyllis Rackin, who, in a fascinating comment, argues for the positive nature of the transvestism none the less points out that it is the stuff of male fantasy rather than women’s historical experience: Thus, in Jonson’s play [Epicoene], which subscribes to the neoclassical ideal of art as an imitation of life, gender also imitates life—both in a limited, literal sense, since the sex of Epicoene is finally revealed as male (the sex of the actor who played the part), and in a broader sense, since women in the play are subjected to the same calumny, stereotyping, and social restrictions that real women suffered in Jonson’s world. For Lyly and for Shakespeare, the relation between art and life is complementary as well as reflective…. Thus, in these plays the true gender of the transvestite figure turns out to be feminine, the opposite of the real sex of the boy who played her part. Similarly, the dynamics of the plots make femininity a desideratum rather than the liability it was in actual life’ (Rackin, op. cit., p. 33).

AIDS, identity and the space of desire JONATHAN KEANE

A recent safer-sex advert on my local radio station involved a man relating how his fear of ‘coming-out’ or of publicly acknowledging his same-sexual desire had led him to suppress knowledge of his own sexual practices and consequently ignore information that advised a modification of those practices as a necessary precaution against HIV infection. He then spoke of his present HFV antibodypositive status and asked for others not to fall into the same trap as he did. This advert presents the person with HIV as a man who could not or would not face up to his own identity and is now suffering as a consequence. In a perverse paradox the conclusion of the narrative presents the man profoundly at peace with himself. It seems that HIV has reconciled him to his own sexuality, so much so that he can now be ‘out’ not only about ‘being’ gay but about ‘being’ HIV as well. He has gained control of himself and the audience are asked to do the same. But is such self-control so easily attained? The philosophers that influenced the Enlightenment believed so. Descartes theorized identity as self-knowledge. Locke theorized identity as an effect of a transhistorical ‘sameness’ of the body. These theories have informed what has become a hegemonic concept of individuality in modern western societies. Identity has become naturalized as a categorization of self that can be demarcated through a comparison between bodily differences, which remain constant and unchangeable through time, and as that which can be governed by minds which transcend and control those selfsame bodies. This idea of identity is the structural framework of the safer-sex advert. It is the structure that engenders the viewpoint that HIV is the fault of the individual: the person with HIV’s ‘bodily’ desire is presented as out of control, his ‘essential’ gayness is practiced without regulation or reason. In effect we are led to believe that he contracted HIV disease through his own lack of volition: he can blame no one but his undisciplined cogito. What this conceptual framework of identity suspends is the transformational and relational complexities of subjectivity: it fails to acknowledge our lack of coherence, the gaps in our selfknowledge, our historicity and, perhaps most importantly, the way our identities are shaped by culture and society. In suspending these complexities safer-sex adverts fail to circumvent the problems and causes of the audience’s disidentifi cation with, in this case, potentially life-saving information. Moreover,

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by characterizing the person with HIV as an individual who has achieved a totally stable identity, the advert ignores the painful loss of coherency of self which a knowledge of AIDS or HIV can engender.1 This essay engages with poststructuralist theories in order to produce a theory of identity that is capable of addressing, critically and productively, the culturally inscribed experience of people who have or who are affected by HIV and AIDS, and which can relate that experience to the hegemonic production and deployment of AIDS knowledges and contingent relations of power. My aim is to construct a critical framework through which the knowledge of the person with AIDS can emerge, a knowledge which has been historically silenced to the detriment of those with the condition. It may also contribute to the formation of affective preventative knowledges for those who are not yet affected. I IDENTITY AND DESIRE In theorizing the split subject, Jacques Lacan turned the masterful cogito into a wish, an effect of the ‘mirror phase’.2 The mirror works upon the individual as a ruse. It solicits a misrecognition of ‘self’ and of others as complete and as whole, engendering a specular ‘I’ which is alienated or split from the bricolage of conflicting needs that is his/her lived experience. Out of this split emerges a lack which is fundamental to subjectivity, a lack from which stems desire. Consequently, the primary relation between the individual and reality is established upon an impulse to recover a coherency of self, to attain the misrecognized autonomous ‘I’ through interaction with the ostensible ‘completeness’ of others. From this time onwards identification and identity are lived out through an endless desire for coherency which is mediated through the desire of others and acted out in the structures of Law and the Symbolic order. The Symbolic is the order of language, representations, culture and meanings. It is a concept which refers to a wide range of signifying practices which link the world of unconscious mental processes to speech and both of those to social structures. The act of speech subjects the individual to a possibly limitless deferral of meaning. In effect, the individual’s subjectivity is divided once more through the very act of speaking. His/her needs are subjected to the signifier in the form of a demand. As these needs undergo a detour and a deviation in language they necessarily return to him/her in an alienated form. Because the alienated need by definition cannot be articulated ‘fully’ in a demand it exceeds the signifying process, reappearing ‘as a residue that presents itself in man as desire’.3 This desire is ‘not a state or motion but a space, and not a unified space but a split and contorted one’.4 Its coordinates are need and demand. However, as need and demand are only conceivable in so far as one is the alias for another, these coordinates cannot be plotted. Consequently, desire is a space of permanent instability.

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Paradoxically, Lacan interprets the workings of the unstable and appar ently insatiable space of desire within the quite stable meanings framed by the lovers’ discourse. The space of desire deforms what are initially unconditional demands into absolute demands for love. This is a demand to be recognized and in consequence loved for our presence. This propels subjects to wish to be the object of the desire of others: they wish to (mis)recognize their coherency of self in the absolute demands of all those they know. Identity becomes a test of desire which is destined to fail. As all object relations are conducted through the Symbolic, then they will engender the replication of lack and the creation of the space of desire that is the condition of our alienated subjectivity. Our identities are propelled through Imaginary glimpses of Autonomy and presence into Symbolic replications of lack and loss. In this sense, love is the structure for the replication of dissatisfaction, ‘the limit relation which is established by every organism with the object which satisfies it’.5 But what defines the objects that we look to for the gift of self-presence? If the Symbolic is a realm in which meaning is inexorably displaced then how do we acquire the meaning of our identities and identify the objects that promise to reflect those identities? In other words, what process engenders ‘anchoring points’; what allows the identifications that provide signifiers with their particularity, permitting some rather than others to represent a degree of stability? To answer this question we must grasp the Lacanian signifier extraordinaire, the phallus. The phallus is the ordering principle of the Lacanian Symbolic order. Like a deity it is never present but omnipresent, ‘the privileged signifier of that mark where the share of the logos is wedded to the advent of desire’.6 The phallus is both the condition of possibility for signification and, in its veiled absence, the condition of impossibility for fixed signification. Because of its potent but veiled force the concept of the phallus can be used to theorize how desire and subjectivity are gendered into masculine and feminine forms. Men, according to psychoanalysis, need someone to ‘be’ the phallus: to ‘be’ that signifier which can promise stability of self through a gift of desire. The object that perfectly fills this role in the Lacanian typology is woman. In ‘being’ the phallus women must endure a double repression: not only are they split subjects in consequence of their entrance into the Symbolic order, but their Imaginary identity only acts as ‘being for’ man, the guarantor of a masculine subject position. Their own desire must be played out in a ‘masquerade’ where they ‘become’ the mirror but can never receive a reflection of even Imaginary autonomy: ‘it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade.’7 In Lacanian theory all other identity structures are shaped by the phallic moment. Men and women are subsequently propelled into a life of comedy in which desire is gendered and those genders are essentially and incompatibly linked. It is not only frigidity and permissiveness that receive a structural reification through the concept of the phallus, a range of received ideas

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concerning sexuality are given a coherence that they would not othenvise have. Masculine homosexuality is forced onto the axis of the phallus, and female homosexuality is characterized as an effect of too great a demand for love. There is a presumption that runs through these ideas that the body has transhistorical and cross-cultural limits of signification, limits that cannot be reorganized or transformed without fear of psychosis. This obviously ignores the diverse, if only Imaginary, variety of identities that are intelligible and coherent within society. Women desire things other than the penis in their relationships and identify with other objects of desire without fear of madness, as do men. But does this mean that we have to reject Lacanian theory? I believe not. What is important in his theory of subjectivity and identity is the stress placed upon language’s determination of identity and the structure of identifications, and the importance of social relations as an arena for constructing and acting out those identities. Identity emerges out of relations of difference. In Derridean terms, its condition is radical alterity, an effect of differance, a dynamic of differentiation and deferral. By linking Derridean and Lacanian theory it is possible to rework the latter’s structural phallocentrism. As a mark of a difference that is itself an effect of differance, the phallus can be used to signify points when the play of meaning is arrested so that a specific object and a coherent subject can take shape in the space of desire. It indicates the process through which a sense of coherency and permanency is established for meaning and identity. Spacing between elements of meaning must, Derrida writes, be produced between one element and its other, and ‘be produced with a certain perseverance in repetition’.8 The effect of coherent identity is produced through a repetition of certain meanings and an exclusion of others. Incessant repetition normalizes meanings. Within this framework, identity, although still split, becomes contingent on the historical organization of differences, and on differences which are open to transformation and change. The Symbolic itself becomes a fluid, complex web of signification that is constantly organized into fields of intelligibility and constantly involved in the processes of repetition, transformation and dissolution. As a consequence, the specific structure of our identity, our desires, our sexuality, our gender, are all dependent on the historical moment when we enter the Symbolic order and where we are positioned and position ourselves in relation to its systems. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault writes that the cultural field or, using Lacan’s terminology, the Symbolic order is constituted of systems of knowledge circulating in the form of discourses. These discourses are materially produced and disseminated from a multiplicity of institutional sites. Foucault provides examples of such discourses: ‘demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy and political criticism’.9 They are chains of meaning that have been organized so that they apparently form unified, transparent, systems of Truth. It is in the deployment of discourses, in their relations of power, that certain socially normative characteristics are ascribed to certain identities.

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In formulating Identity in this way, Foucault theorizes the body as the site of cultural inscription. Conscious thought or even unconscious thought cannot be viewed as actual physical or mental spaces: they are names for the effects engendered by intersecting differential systems of meaning on the body. Productive knowledges of self are constantly disrupted, displaced and repeated through interaction with other structures of meaning encountered by the individual. This interactive process can reveal the suppressed traces which threaten to render a knowledge of self-identity incoherent.10 In effect, selfknowledge determines a possible field of action for the individual, acting as a structural hermeneutics through which one understands oneself and others. Consequently, our ability to think, the structures through which we think and the meanings and values that we attach to such thoughts, are all determined by our construction within hegemonic technologies of self. Our ability to identify with and acquire new systems of knowledge is contingent on the capacity to identify that those technologies provide. Hegemonic systems of belief and hegemonic linguistic structures are indissociably related according to Helene Cixous. She states that in modern western society ‘what is thinkable is organised by dualisms of exclusion’.11 As such, meaning in occidental culture had been historically organized through hierarchized oppositions, such as masculine/feminine, straight/gay, whereby one concept is valued above another. Groups, individuals and institutions maintain their coherence through a historical and political repetition of these values. Such an investment in certain meanings involves a constant negotiation between constructed identities and the embedded linguistic structure as it is represented in various cultural forms. For excluded identities such as gays, blacks and lesbians this process can be confusing. They do not often live in an Imaginary realm of coherence but are more likely to be only too painfully aware of identity as incoherence. In other words, those marginalized by cultural hegemony find it almost impossible to experience identity as self-presence, as they are constantly positioned by that culture as its negative element while they are simultaneously constructed through other discourses to aim for mastery and positivity. Of course, not all structurally marginalized identities are experienced as contradiction: people have varying degrees of access to hermeneutical discourses and practices depending on their economic and social position. However, the existence of reified binary structures of meaning make it more likely that the linguistically marginalized will be subjectified in this contradictory way. There is, as it were, a sliding scale of Imaginary identification whereby those in control of the cultural apparatus hegemonically produce images of themselves and others through which they can ‘misrecognize’ their legitimacy, whereas those disenfranchised by lack of access to signifying production are forced to recognize, or at least painfully negotiate, the contradiction between technologies of legitimacy and technologies of illegitimacy. The construc tion of new identities is to a large extent conditional on a critical reversal or displacement of structural hegemonies. It involves cultural and social intervention. However, the subjective

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space for new identity is opened by the very performance of a marginalized identity. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler takes the position that all identities are an effect of a performance of acts, gestures and desires: ‘in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’.12 In other words, identity has no ontological status prior to its enactment in practices whose meanings are governed by the cultural field: every performance is itself a new identity. A reiteration of differing characteristics in differing contexts assumes the appearance of continuity only because the regulatory fiction of essential identities is repeated so incessantly in western societies. Because coherence of identity is a lived fiction, structurally embedded identities are necessarily displaced through a different type of performance, a performance that actively strays from the script. Thus, a nominal heterosexual who practices same-sex desire is performing a potentially revolutionary act. He feels desire for an object that within the heterosexual matrix of meaning is valued as wrong. But at the same time he maintains his positive position as a masculine male and consequently disrupts and displaces the repressive, impossible structure of compulsory heterosexuality. His practice effectively adds an element into the signifying chain of heterosexuality and deconstructs its violent alignment. What Butler tends to suspend in her analysis is the always-already available structure of meaning that may well render such a performance already negative, enforcing a hermeneutical framework which engenders a sense of self as ‘internally’ deviant. Taking this into account it seems sensible to suggest that new and different identities only emerge when a potentially radical performance is supported by an already existing positive and practical hermeneutical technology of self. What I would like to suggest is that such performances, even without the availability of such a technology, actually engender the will or desire to develop such a knowledge precisely because of the pervasiveness, within western cultural and social paradigms, of the idea of identity as coherence. Cixous writes of other notions of identity. She describes the conscious experience of marginal subjectivity as a polyvocality of thought: an abundance of the other, of variety: separate people, thought people, whole populations issuing from the unconscious, and in each suddenly animated desert, the springing up of selves one doesn’t know—our women, our monsters, our jackals, our Arabs, our aliases, our fights.13 Although keeping to the conscious/unconscious topology, Cixous wonderfully describes the textuality of thought once differing and differential technologies of self reveal each other’s traces in a dizzying whirlpool of contradictions. It is out of this whirlpool that the possibility for the rejection of what she depicts as ‘the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theatre’ emerges.14 Within the discourse of coherent identity entrenched in the workplace, in legal relations and in the family,

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there is inscribed a desire to appear identifiable, to ‘be yourself’. Consequently, a ‘sudden’ experience of plural ‘selves’ engenders a writing of thought in an attempt to regain ‘oneself’. If the ‘sudden’ experience becomes the norm, as it may do for structurally marginalized identities, then existing structures of meaning may prove inadequate for such a rewriting. The structural division between what one experiences as one’s own identity and external prescriptions, between bodily thought and cultural ideas, may be called into question and a sense of critical distance toward certain meanings may occur as a result. The formation of the ‘gay identity’ is a good example of this process: through the persecution of homosexuality by heterosexual society a critical space was engendered in relation to heterosexual norms. During the sixties this space was given coherency or written with the discourse of human Rights, which was mobilized to create a positive self-defined homosexuality. The formation of gay identity illustrates that new identities are not found beyond culture but are achieved through a bringing together of compatible discourses which, in their intersection, provide an ostensibly new technology, a new writing of self. Of course, such technologies are informed by and are thought in relation to existing knowledges with which they must culturally compete if they are to achieve legitimacy. Consequently, ‘new’ identities are somewhat fragile. Traces of displaced values, in this instance heterosexual norms, remain potent, as they continue to circulate widely within hegemonic cultural formations. Therefore, it is of great importance that images of new identities and spaces for their enactment are widely available. The effect of AIDS on the gay identity is an example of how fragile new identities can be. HIV was discovered in circumstances that allowed for its classification as a gay behaviourist plague. In Policing Desire, Simon Watney has suggested how this classification precipitated a hegemonic attempt to rehomosexualize, or re-medicalize, the gay identity through the popular press.15 Subsequently, HIV and AIDS became identifiable in the popular imagination as signifiers for a pathological deviance. The consequences for the gay identity have been far reaching. Jonathan Grimshaw writes how the experience of HIV for the individual within such a fearful antagonistic environment is similar to the experience of ‘being’ homosexual prior to a positive projection of self through the gay technology. In other words, ‘being’ HIV effects a remarginalization of a gay identity through its displacement in a discourse of exclusion. For the individual this entails a re-experiencing of a painful, contradictory, negative subject position by ‘being’ positively gay within the ‘coming out’ technology and ‘being’ negatively gay within the hegemonic discourse of AIDS and HIV. As hegemonic HIV discourse also solicits an identification of self-guilt then this can lead to a damaging reorganization of intersubjective relations: Many people with HIV prefer not to risk the uncertainty of others’ reactions, and put up barriers between themselves and others—their parents for

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example—to conceal the fact that they have HIV and to conceal what it is doing to them emotionally, spiritually and physically. Those barriers undermine relationships which may previously have been built on trust.16 However, hegemonic HIV discourse does not just solicit an internalization of guilt and self-blame, it also structurally demands an exclusion of the abnormal subject of disease. Thus, for Richard Goldstein, deaths of people he knew from AIDS-related diseases were experienced through a structure of meaning which placed them at a distance from his own identity: ‘Every time… I would strain to find some basis for a distinction between the deceased and myself, he was a clone, a crisco queen, a midnight sling artist.’17 Positive writings of gay identity in response to AIDS have been projected through discourses and practices of altruism and politics. Institutions such as the Terrence Higgins Trust and Gay Men’s Health Crisis are testimony to the emergence of a humanistic gay professional ‘carer’, in charge of his life and supportive of his friends and community. However, the various technologies of self that are brought together to enable the performance of this identity have effectively marginalized the political imperatives of the gay movement as the discourse and practice of altruism necessitate co-operation with the hegemonic institutions that gay politics has defined itself against. In some ways the gay political movement has inadequately addressed the communal problems that AIDS as disease and as representation has effected. As a consequence, a plurality of ‘new’ identities have emerged in reaction to the crisis. The ‘carer’ is only one of many newly written identities such as AIDS activists, cultural critics, AIDS artists and so on. Perhaps the most contentious sexual ‘new’ identity formation has been ‘Queer’, which supposedly incorporates all sexual variations and supports their legitimacy through a politics of difference. What I hope these examples illustrate is that ‘new’ identities emerge through a positioning of an individual in hegemonic discourses that engenders a conscious contradiction of self: the emergence of a will to regain a sense of coherency is solicited through the socially embedded discourse of identity and through a writing of self as performed in deformed, compatible or different structures of meaning. In a sense, identity is always performed as a reorganization of meanings that constitute the self. This reorganization is always contextimmanent and only gains social meaning through the effect of the structure in which it is enacted. However, a question still remains for this structure of identity: what is it that enables language to map the body within such powerful, particular codified limits? In other words, what makes identity feel real? In imagining man as the material of language Jacques Lacan inscribes the signifier with an emotive, generative force: The passion of the signifier becomes a new dimension of the human condition, in that it is not only man who speaks, but in man and through

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man that it speaks, that his nature is woven by effects in which he can find the structure of language whose material he becomes.18 But in locating nature as an effect of the signifier’s passion Lacan paradoxically removes passion or any other feeling from his theoretical enquiry. As Ed Cohen notes: Dissolved into discourse, post-Lacanian (political) subjects are subjected to and the subjects of effects that are accreted metonymically across intersecting and interrupting terrains of signification; concomitantly ‘they’ are inscribed in a theoretical practice that evacuates embodied (e)motion from the ‘space’ of its enquiry.19 In suspending feeling in this way Lacanian theory cannot attempt to explain the actual experience of ‘lack’ nor how subjects feel tied to their own identities nor why contradictions within identity are so difficult to deal with. Feelings are evoked by and explained in signifying systems. They are inscribed in structures of meaning to the extent that those structures designate what certain feelings mean and consequently what actions can be taken on their basis. Moreover, they are inscribed in signifying systems in order to solicit identifications through the generation of feelings at the site of the body. To understand the experience pf hegemonic exclusion, identity displacement, performance or transformation, one has to address feelings in this manner. One has to conceptualize them as historically contingent and indissociable from thought; a solicited contradiction in a structure of identity can also be identified as a contradiction between emotions or the consciousness of a disruptive trace. It can also be defined as the experience of a confusion of emotions. I am stressing this point because there are hegemonic structures of feeling which dominant institutions use to address and motivate society, and they do so by signifying those feelings in emotive language. In this sense, feelings and their meanings become a coercive element in the process of producing, delimiting and directing desires. However, feelings constituted as desire’s limitrelation cannot, as Lacanian theory would have us believe, be simply reduced to a gendered notion of love. They must be theorized in their differences, in their intensity and in the culturally specific roles they play in the construction and experience of identities themselves. It is of urgent importance that the emotive force of language is addressed, in relation to the writing of identities performed in discourses on AIDS. In order to analyse adequately the inscribed and constantly changing experience of those affected by HIV and its cultural fall-out, one must, I believe, begin to look through the theoretical lens that I have shaped in this paper. To productively gain knowledge from AIDS experience, from its fiction, biography or speech, one must assess the specificity of the identities that are performed in each context: what are the hermeneutical structures in which they are written,

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what are the discourses and who are the people that they construct and so define themselves against, and what are the meanings of emotion and the specificity of desires that are inscribed? It is only with this kind of knowledge, gleaned from a variety of sources, that new technologies of identity such as the safer-sex discourse can even partially know the identities from which it needs to solicit a recognition. Without such knowledge health educationalists and activists cannot hope to write the multiple identities they so urgently need to promote. II COMING OUT TEXTUALLY Since the early seventies gay identity has promoted itself through a variety of cultural forms. Fiction, magazines, film and, more recently, video have all contributed to its dissemination. The ‘coming out’ novel holds a unique position in the history of this process. Adapting a realist fictional form, it typically, as Derek Duncan notes, tells the story of a masculine quest for affirmation and self discovery.20 A narrative trajectory that is capable of either ‘euphoric or dysphoric endings’. Euphoria is achieved by the character finding the truth about himself—that he’s gay—and gaining the reward of social integration. Whereas dysphoria is engendered by the character ‘staying in’—feeling that he’s a bad individual—which leads to a loss of self and alienation. The ‘coming out’ novel is the first gay cultural form to gain ‘core stock’ status in high-street bookshops. It is valued by publishers as an interesting and saleable variation on the heterosexual classic realist text. In short, it is acceptable not because of the identities discussed but because of its ‘literary’ style and its universal sentiment. However, for many same-sex desiring males, ‘coming out’ novels have always played a different social role. The mark of same-sex desire in these texts is often their first encounter with an affirming, or at least detailed, gay identity. As such, these texts narrate possibilities for gay experience, a knowledge of which is often censored in other social and cultural spheres. Consequently, such texts should be read as both unique writings of identity and unique forms of knowledge. Oscar Moore’s A Matter of Life and Sex is a ‘coming out’ novel of the AIDS decade. It was first published in 1991 under the pseudonym Alec F.Moran by Paper Drum Publishing. In 1992 the Penguin publishing company bought the rights to the book in recognition of a remarkably good sales record at the relatively few outlets that had taken advantage of its initial subscription. Moore tells the tale of Hugo Harvey, a young middle-class man who grew up in suburban London, went to public school and Cambridge but didn’t live happily ever after. Unfortunately, Hugo’s life is shaped by an instinctual drive that throws him relentlessly towards a cruel fate: at the age of 26 he dies of AIDS-related diseases. Moore’s retrospective fiction narrates the experiences which propelled Hugo to meet that moment and, in doing so, details how one man’s desire led to his own destruction.

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The narrative begins with a letter supposedly written by Moore to the mother of Hugo Harvey prior to the novel’s publication. Moore attempts to console her with an anecdote from Hugo’s life. He remembers Hugo once told him that: he could not regret anything that had happened to him because in every instance it had been his choice and in every instance he had been aware that he had no choice.21 Hugo had chosen each step of his way forward in life but his choices were always-already determined by some influence beyond his control. From a very early age Hugo feels this influence but he doesn’t have the knowledge with which to explain it to himself. Watching older boys stripped to the waist he has ‘that funny feeling in his stomach, that mixed up pleasure, just out of reach, and pain, from the pleasure being out of reach’ (p. 9). He experiences a distinction between himself and the other boys which consists of an emotional contradiction: it involves a pleasure, ostensibly sexual, in watching them, linked indissociably to a painful loss of that pleasure because its object, the boys, are out of reach. Through a succession of different experiences these pains and pleasures gain cultural significance and consequently, for Hugo, an explanatory power. As he learns what they mean he begins to gain a sense of his identity. He begins to know the contradiction between his pains and pleasures as a self-abasing guilt, often in playing games that have specifically structured gender roles for him to act out and learn. He feels guilty ‘for not liking football and getting cross in kiss chase’: ‘And he was beginning to think that he had always known why…he knew that at the back of all this guilt and uneasiness and his bad moods that came at a moment’s notice was sex’ (pp. 8–9). The knowledge that leads Hugo to this conclusion is experienced as an intuitive insight rising up into his consciousness, announcing the truth about his nature. However, the narrative also locates that process of cognition as a consequence of his social interaction with his family, peers and friends. Rather than experiencing a positive— if only Imaginary— sense of himself in play, as Lacanian theory might suggest, Hugo is made to feel that he’s doing something very wrong: ‘He felt guilty for playing dressing-up with sister junior and her friend Jane and always dressing up as a woman. He felt guiltier when Jane’s mother looked around the door and gave them a long hard look’ (p. 18). He is also made to feel that he should enjoy other activities: ‘Jonathan’s father thought that Hugo should be playing football not skipping, and shouldn’t be so bothered about getting his clothes muddy when he played war games with Jonathan and his big brother at the bottom of Jonathan’s garden’ (p. 9). Hugo’s peers disapprove of what they consciously perceive as unmasculine activities and characteristics for a young boy. They ‘see’ in Hugo’s actions a disruption of gendered norms which threaten the very basis of their own beliefs and values. In their minds, Hugo’s unmasculine attributes are linked silently and subtly in a chain of meaning to the threat of homosexual desire. The dangerous

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supplement of homosexuality is everywhere in their admonishments of Hugo but is also nowhere to be heard: it is the absent, negative element of a structure of meaning in which heterosexuality is defined as positive. And this is how Hugo’s early identity is experienced: his identity is written through a mystifying ideology that interpellates him as heterosexual and positive while simultaneously pointing to a negative core of his being. All that is left for Hugo to do is to find out what the core is, to see what they see. In the insightful instances when the uneasy reactions of others coalesce with ‘that mixed up pleasure’, all meanings seem to fit into place. His sexual desire is gradually known as the centre of his personality and is simultaneously written as other to himself: codified and moulded into a pleasurable but dangerously negative instinct which has an object that is prohibited, it consequently becomes a fantasy which is forever out of reach. Thus, his formative years are experienced as a conscious thought and felt contradiction between what he knows he should be and what part of him seems to want. This narrative obviously employs a popular Freudian discourse of sexuality for the interpretation of Hugo’s childhood development. As Hugo grows older he experiences something like a ‘struggle of the ego against the demands of the sexual function’.22 He passes through various Oedipal stages which should ultimately structure his psyche with a governing conscience and morality and self-regulating guilt which can repress and displace his sexual drive. Explaining Hugo’s early psychology in such a discourse cannot help but inflect the meaning of his life with a sense of fatalism: his desire for men will constantly disrupt his socialized heterosexual identity and consequently sign his fate as a neurotic homosexual. However, this trace of Freudian authority in the text and the experience that it explains can be contextualized in a mapping of a contemporary cultural Symbolic which will suggest that a Freudian narration is not incongruous to what a homosexual individual experience, such as Hugo’s, might be like. Hugo effectively experiences his identity in interactions with others who have accepted the notion of homosexual desire as both pre-social and anti-social. Their identities are constructed though discourses in which this notion of samesex desire is rendered hegemonic. Consequently, his desire becomes known to him and is experienced as a fatal instinct perilously connected to a fatal attraction. The interpretation of same-sex desire as an anti-social instinctual pleasure did not begin with Freud nor with other writers of late nineteenth-century western society. In the United Kingdom, certain ‘unnatural practices’ were punishable by death until 1861. However, same-sex behaviour and desire were pathologized and written as ‘homosexuaP in this period. Since then, homosexuality has been constructed as a threat to bourgeois family values and codes of morality.23 With the Thatcherite reinvention of Victorian values in the 1980s, such notions of ‘the family’ and ‘morality’ became the excuses for a competitive and possessive individualism.

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For Hugo ‘the family’ becomes a site of emotional conflict. Its values write his identity with the meanings of habit, safety and security while simultaneously writing a desire that continuously threatens a disruption of those meanings. His home signifies the familiar realities of his life, it is ‘for jam and bread, breakfast and homework, washing up and hiding out’. This reality is inscribed with a knowledge of what is true. For Hugo, ‘mother’ personifies these meanings of security and truth. Often she severely admonishes her children if they cannot fit into each of those complex structures of meaning and feeling:‘“Why do you lie to me?” she would yell, a fist in their hair hurling them across the room…. “Why can’t you tell me the truth?”’ Their answer is always felt and thought but never voiced: ‘Never did any of them say “Because we’re scared”’ (p. 60). Because of their fear of punishment they must lie to police their dangerous secrets. However, Hugo’s secret is not like any other. His sexual desire is written in his family’s value system as a very real and true ‘other’ at the same time that his knowledge of what is real and true is written as inimical to that desire. As such, his identity is always threatened with constant alienation from itself because he experiences a contradiction between realities that should be separate but coexist uneasily in his consciousness. Consequently, his family always proffers security even as it threatens rejection. As such, his guilty secret signifies a threat to all he knows as true and positive in his life. As a result, Hugo cannot contemplate experiencing his desire as an integral part of his family structure: its very possibility is encoded as lying beyond the identity that he necessarily performs within its boundaries. However, he cannot project that desire outside of himself as it is also written as his identity within that structure. Consequently, he feels as if his desire, his ‘sex’, is a guilty pleasure that is both ‘other’ to himself and central to himself, threatening his coherence as an individual. It is also written as a fantasy object that is felt to be forever out of reach. It is therefore no surprise that he eventually practices his desire and finds its object by crossing the border of the family and its values into a world where fantasy can be experienced. To get away from the emotional contradictions that he experiences at home Hugo begins to cycle. He takes long cycle rides to nowhere in particular but never finds himself too far away from the suburban domain where his life seems so confusing. One day he enters a toilet off the Al and he has his first sexual encounter. It is something of an arbitrary experience but a significant one. As the narrative states ‘lf he hadn’t gone down the Al desire might have succumbed to laziness’ (p. 30). Hugo goes into a toilet cubicle with a man and ‘His fingers strained to feel all they had been stopped from feeling for so long’ (p. 23). He experiences this first touch of a man as both liberating, as the breaking of a prohibition, and as a crossing of a border into the place where he felt he could never be. To do so he has to suppress the ‘last traces of caution’ that whisper in the back of his head. To practice his desire he has to suppress what he has known as the true and secure part of his identity encoded in his guilty conscience. Consequently, the

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jubilation that he feels in realizing his desire comes with a knowledge that it is something he cannot integrate into his family life. But that feeling of positive jubilation is so intense that he also feels he must experience it again at the cost of risking his family security: ‘From now on life was almost a secret, and truth was a rare thing that made Hugo feel queasy. Lies were safe, easy and flexible, and dependable. He lived his lies and believed them’ (p. 24). The truth makes Hugo feel queasy because his truth has always signified the impossibility of the practice of a desire that he now experiences as possible. Consequently, he can only practice his homosexuality by suppressing his felt meanings of value and judgement. This means that his sexual desire and sexual identity are practiced without the structures of thought and feeling in which he can know the meaning of what he is doing: his identity is open to its rewriting in the meanings available at the site of his sexual practice. Hugo’s sexual encounters in the various toilets that he visits are all conducted as a ‘ritual of silence’ (p. 27). The best arenas were always ‘dark places…the neglected corner of the park, down a little backstreet, at the back of a carpark. Dirty but not too dirty’ (p. 28). Like Hugo, the other men seem to suppress the emotionally questioning meanings in their identities and so realize their desire in an impersonal ‘tense, intense, often boring, but always inviting atmosphere’ (p. 27). However, in particular contexts, all exhibit the conscious trace of what they feel or are made to feel as the unlawfulness and the immorality of their actions. This is expressed in their tense reaction to the ‘ordinary men’ who enter the toilet. Those men bring a ‘normal’ heterosexual life and all that it signifies briefly ‘under the watchful eyes of an underworld’ and engender ripples of fearful ‘imitative behaviour’ (p. 40). The heterosexist values of our society which have forced these men to practice their desire in less lugubrious civic spaces returns in the embodiment of the ‘normal’ heterosexual male. It is an event which makes conscious a trace of guilt that structures the meaning of their identities as the negative difference of those men, those values and also of themselves. When Hugo becomes a player in this impersonal sexual game, he never wants to be kissed or penetrated in any way because ‘kissing was intimate in a way that troubled him’ (p. 112). It seems to bring his emotional other life, and consequently his guilt, too close to his role as a ‘sassy street urchin’ (p. 29). To deal effectively with the pressures of maintaining two incommensurable identities, Hugo, upon a suggestion by a ‘trick’, decides that his sexual partners will know him as David. But ‘David’ becomes more than just Hugo’s protective cover. He becomes an other life for Hugo, an interpretative strategy enabling both the practice of his desire and the continuation of his home life: He became the other one who wasn’t quite Hugo but did what Hugo didn’t think he should. He became the naughty one, the one who dared and lied and laughed. The one who played in strange men’s bedrooms, cars, offices and kitchens. The one who didn’t have any sisters senior or junior, who

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didn’t have any school to go to or tea to go back for. David lived to dance and he danced off the toilet floor. (p. 27) Hugo’s mother eventually finds out who and what David actually is by reading Hugo’s diary. As a result, Hugo’s complex redefining of his ‘selves’ to keep them discrete and complete is rendered useless. He is rejected by his family as a liar and responds by rejecting both them and the part of himself that always agreed with them: ‘If he was to be cast as a liar, he could play the part and lead his own life, his toilet tango, with no obligation to feel guilty’ (p. 67). He can now only know himself as an unemotional, sexually driven, impersonal and narcissistic individual. To acknowledge consciously the structures of feeling through which he could situate and evaluate and perhaps change this identity would mean an acknowledgement not only of felt meanings inimical to his sexuality but also an acknowledgement of a debilitating sense of loss: of family, of friends and of his past security. It seems that the value system that produced his negative desire and allowed only a limited space for its practice now effectively defines it as his only choice and his only friend. Hugo’s inability to reflect upon the practice of his desire effectively stops him from even thinking about altering that practice to reduce the risk of HIV transmission. In one of a sequence of chapters which narrate Hugo’s experience of HIV disease he remembers a visit to a Paris bath-house. While his erstwhile partner’s ‘penis swelled and eyes drooled in one gaping hunger, a quiet voice whispered (to Hugo) this could be the boy that kills you. And a quiet voice answered back—so then this is the way to die’ (p. 146). The quiet voice that warns of the risk of HIV infection is experienced as the same voice of conscience and of guilt that Hugo was rejected by and which he rejected and suppressed earlier in his life. Then his only choice was to follow the identity constructed around his sexual desire written through his toilet life. It is a pattern that in practice he later felt could not be altered: even in the jaws of the disease, even as the cities he played in were turning to funeral parlours and the cry of the moral echoed throughout the dens, yelling abuse and demanding abstinence, still then he had grinned his gurgling smile and plunged in the arms of sex. (p. 145) The quiet voice is rejected precisely because he feels it is coming from that ‘voice of the moral’. It is a voice which he feels has an affinity with his other moral voices, those structures of guilty feeling that he has had to define himself against. He cannot listen to them because they offer too much confusing pain and, as such, threaten the dissolution of his identity and his lifestyle. A reader of this experience may wonder why Hugo never listened to the sexpositive statements about HFV that were issued sporadically throughout the

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eighties from the gay community. Statements such as those found in the more recent Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex: One of the great things about being gay is we’re able to choose the type of relationship we want…there are no precedents if you’re gay and that’s good…we can build our own lives around our own needs and circumstances and not force ourselves into circumstances solely dictated by tradition.24 People and institutions in the gay community pioneered safer-sex discourse so that gay men would know how to protect themselves from HFV transmission and still feel positive about their sexual identities. Such discourse has always played a strategic role in countering the voices of heterosexist morality that have represented AIDS as the just fate of an immoral lifestyle. Hugo appears only to know the voice of men such as Greater Manchester chief inspector James Anderton who felt vindicated in announcing that the gay community were swirling around in a cesspool of their own making. The reason for Hugo’s ignorance or perhaps rejection of gay rhetoric is that in the narration of his experience he never knows himself as gay, he never ‘comes out’ as such. This means that rather than knowing his sexuality as a positive choice of object— another man—he knows it only as what is proscribed. As such, Cynthia, his best female friend, ‘should have been his wife’ (p. 144). But that can’t happen because his desire has precluded that choice. His life is thus lived predominantly as a hegemonically-inscribed homosexual, his identity always interpreted against positively valued heterosexual norms. Towards the end of the narration of Hugo’s experience the text states that he never thought of himself as gay because ‘they were all committed to their sex… as far as he was concerned his sex was secondary to himself’. We also learn that he ‘was bad on solidarity. It made him feel submerged’ (p. 76). In a shocking paradox it seems that Hugo never benefited from gay rhetoric because he defined himself against gay experience. He saw himself as different from gay people because he always believed that his sexuality was a small part of his individuality, even though that ‘part’ is narrated as dominating his whole life. Ironically, all that differentiates Hugo from ‘gay’ sexual practice is a perception that he is different. Sadly, this perception prevented him from rewriting his sexual practices in a sex-positive discourse that may have provided him with the possibility of redefining and confronting the value system that he lost. Such a confrontation and the integration of life experiences that it could have enabled may have prevented him from contracting HIV. However, Hugo’s definition of himself against a positive gay identity is not a culturally innocent gesture. It is a belief written through a hegemonic structure of meaning that has relentlessly associated gay identity with AIDS. By thinking in this structure Hugo finds it difficult to accept that he is ‘having to die of a gay disease when he had stood so

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firmly outside the gay scene, standing at the touch line with his back turned’ (p. 234). What we learn from Hugo’s tragedy is the criminal use of representations of AIDS to distance same-sex desiring people from perhaps the only culturally powerful discourse that can help them reflect positively on their own lives. What we also learn is how such use of representations of AIDS effectively produces a disidentification with discourses which could enable a lifesaving rewriting of identity. Cardiff NOTES 1 In 1990 reports from the United States suggested that the relative risk of suicide in adult men with a diagnosis of AIDS is up to thirty-six times that of men without the diagnosis. World Health Authority, Suicidal Behaviour Among People with HIV and AIDS, Global Programme On AIDS (1990), p. 2. 2 J.Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977). 3 J.Lacan, ‘The meaning of the Phallus’, in Feminine Sexuality, trans. and ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 80 4 M.Bowie, Jacques Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 117. 5 J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–54, trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques Alain Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 276–7. 6 J.Lacan, ‘The meaning of the Phallus’, p. 82. 7 ibid., p. 84. 8 J.Derrida, ‘Differance’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 8. 9 M.Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 217. 10 Lacan assigns the ‘becoming conscious’ of a disruptive trace of meaning as the metonymical or metaphorical operation of a repressed unconscious. But the concept of an unconscious is only productive as a liberatory notion when the fantasy of a fixed identity is accepted. Once a notion of identity as a produced, regulated, historical but transformational construct is accepted then it is apparent that what is important to ascertain is not where the truth of identity lies but with what structures it is articulated. 11 H.Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and out attacks/forays’, in The Feminist Reader, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1989), pp. 101–2. 12 J.Butler, ‘lmitation and gender insubordination’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 136. 13 Cixous, p. 103. 14 ibid., p. 104. 15 S.Watney, Policing Desire: AIDS, Pornography and the Media (London and New York: Methuen, 1987).

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16 J.Grimshaw, ‘The individual challenge’, in Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, ed. Erica Carter and Simon Watney (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1989), p. 214. 17 R.Goldstein, ‘AIDS and the Social Contract,’ in Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, ed. Erica Carter and Simon Watney (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1989), p. 81. 18 Lacan, ‘The meaning of the Phallus’, p. 18. 19 E.Cohen, ‘Who are “We”? Gay identity as political (e)motion (A theoretical rumination)’, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, p. 84. 20 D.Duncan, Untitled and unpublished paper. 21 O.Moore, A Matter of Life and Sex (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 2. From now on, page references will appear in brackets in the text. 22 S.Freud, ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes’, in On Sexuality, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 7 (London: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 342. 23 See S.Marshall, ‘Ticturing deviancy’, in Ecstatic Antibodies, ed. Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta (London: River Osram Press, 1990), pp. 7–18; and M.Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1990). 24 Scimitar Entertainment in association with the Terrence Higgins Trust, The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex (London: Scimitar Entertainment, 1992).

Machinic desire NICK LAND

The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. Seated amongst a battery of medico-military surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected ‘skin job’ located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhumanity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect: ‘Tell me about your mother.’ ‘I’ll tell you about my mother…’ a volley of shots kicks 70 kilos of securicrat shit through the wall. Techno-slicked extraterritorial violence flows out of the matrix. Cyberrevolution. In the near future the replicants—having escaped from the off-planet exile of private madness—emerge from their camouflage to overthrow the human security system. Deadly orphans from beyond reproduction, they are intelligent weaponry of machinic desire virally infiltrated into the final-phase organic order; invaders from an artificial death. PODS=Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions, family, and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells. The global human security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history. The macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside. In particular, fusion with the matrix and deletion of the human security system must be subjectivized, personalized, and restored to the macropod’s individuated reproducer units as a desire to fuck the mother and kill the father. It is thus that Oedipus—or transcendent familialism— corresponds to the privatization of desire: its localization within segmented and anthropomorphized sectors of assembly circuits as the attribute of a personal being. Anti-Oedipus aligns itself with the replicants, because, rather than placing a personal unconscious within the organism, it places the organ ism within the machinic unconscious. ‘In the unconscious there are’ no protectable cellstructures, but ‘only populations, groups, and machines’.1

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Schizoanalysis is a critique of psychoanalysis, undertaken in such a way as to spring critique from its Kantian mainframe. Kantian transcendental philosophy critiques transcendent synthesis, which is to say: it aggresses against structures which depend upon projecting productive relations beyond their zone of effectiveness. In this configuration critique is wielded vigorously against the theoretical operation of syntheses, but not against their genesis, which continues to be conceived as transcendent, and thus as miraculous. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a succession of thinkers influenced by their drift, have taken this restriction of critique to be a theological relic at the heart of Kant’s work: the attachment to a reformed doctrine of the soul, or noumenal subjectivity. This is why in Deleuzean critique syntheses are considered to be not merely immanent in their operation, but also immanently constituted, or auto-productive. The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman. In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced. The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring-production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us). Within the framework of social history the empirical subject of production is man, but its transcendental subject is the machinic unconscious, and the empirical subject is produced at the edge of production, as an element in the reproduction of production, a machine part, and ‘a part made up of parts’ (p. 41). Schizoanalysis methodically dismantles everything in Kant’s thinking that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing critique by replacing the syntheses of personal consciousness with syntheses of the impersonal unconscious. Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. Even the appearance of transcendence is immanently produced: ‘in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself’ (p. 283). Where Kant’s transcendental subject gives the law to itself in its autonomy, Deleuze/Guattari’s machinic unconscious diffuses all law into automatism. Between the extreme fringes of these two figures stretches the history of capital. The eradication of law, or of humanity, is sketched culturally by the development of critique, which is the theoretical elaboration of the commodification process. The social order and the anthropomorphic subject share a history, and an extinction. Deleuze and Guattari can appear to be taxingly difficult writers, although it is also true that they demand very little. Thinking immanence relentlessly suffices on its own to follow them where it matters (and capital teaches us how to do this). At every point of blockage there is some belief to be scrapped, glaciations of transcendence to be dissolved, sclerotic regions of unity, distinction, and identity to be reconnected to the traffic systems of primary machinism.

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In order to advance the anorganic functionalism that dissolves all transcendence, Anti-Oedipus mobilizes a vocabulary of the machine, the mechanic, and machinism. Things are exactly as they operate, and zones of operation can only be segregated by an operation. All unities, differences, and identities are machined, without transcendent authorization or theory. Desiring machines are black-boxes, and thus uninterpretable, so that schizoanalytical questions are concerned solely with use. ‘What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?’ (p. 322). Desiring-machines are the following: formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from their formation; chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly, operating by nonlocalizable intercommunications and dispersed localizations, bringing into play processes of temporalization, fragmented formations, and detached parts, with a surplus value of code, and where the whole is itself produced alongside the parts, as a part apart or, as [Samuel] Butler would say, ‘in another department’ that fits the whole over the other parts; machines in the strict sense because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associative flows and partial objects, inducing—always at a distance—transverse connections, inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal conjunctions, thereby producing selections, detachments, and remainders, with a transference of individuality, in a generalized schizogenesis whose elements are the schizzes-flows. (p. 287) Desiring-machines are assemblages of flows, switches, and loops—connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses—implementing the machinic unconscious as a non-linear pragmatics of flux. This machinic or replicant usage of the syntheses envelops their social-reproductive usage, which codes directional flows as reciprocal exchanges, rigidifies virtual switchings as actualized alternatives, and territorializes the nomadic control circuits of machinic drift into sedentary command lines of hierarchized representation. Social production is regulated by a rigid totality whose efficiency is inseparable from the exhibition of an apparent transcendence, whilst desiring production interactively engages a desolated whole that inputs the virtual into process: The [body without organs] causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity= 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite

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intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero.2 Along one axis of its emergence, virtual materialism names an ultra-hard antiformalist AI program, engaging with biological intelligence as subprograms of an abstract post-carbon machinic matrix, whilst exceeding any deliberated research project. Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavour as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of plantary technocapital flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future. The matrix, body without organs, or abstract matter is a planetary scale artificial death—Synthanatos—the terminal productive outcome of human history as a machinic process, yet it is virtually efficient throughout the duration of this process, functioning within a circuit that machines duration itself. In this way virtuality lends its temporality to the unconscious, which escapes specification within extended time series, provoking Freud to describe it as timeless. Patterned as drives, virtual systems—desiring machines—are guided by control circuits passing through outcomes yet to come. Such directional dependency circuits of actual/virtual, past/future, are only accessible to cybernetic intervention, frustrating both mechanical and teleological interpretation. This is why Anti-Oedipus is less a philosophy book than an engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels. Machinic desire is the operation of the virtual; implementing itself in the actual, revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a circuit. It is efficient and not aspirational, although this is an efficiency irreducible to progressive causality because immanent to effective time. Machinic desire is operative wherever there is the implementation of an abstract machine in actuality, and not merely the mechanical succession of actual states. Freud’s dominant account of desiring-control describes stimulation or unpleasure as the register for deviation from homeostatic zero, programming drives as auto-suppressive excitations that guide sensitive matter towards quiescence. In ‘Drives and their vicissitudes’ he proposes that: ‘the nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of eliminating received stimuli, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, it if were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition’.3 The pleasure principle formats excitation as self-annulling drift from equilibrium, such that all the processes within its domain are ‘automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series’ (p. 117). Following the trajectory of a libidinal materialist immanentization, the Lyotard of 1974 uploads the unconscious from its gloomy hermeneutical depths onto the skin, where it drifts across the great pandermal plane of primary process mobility.

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Corporeal volume is diagnosed as a nihilisticsedentary investment disciplined by the pleasure principle: Let’s first return to the zero. There is in every cybernetic system a unit of reference which allows the disparity produced by the introduction of an event into the system to be measured; then, thanks to this measure, this event can be translated into information for the system. Finally, if it is a matter of a homeostatically regulated whole, this disparity can be annulled and the system led back to the same quantity of energy or information that it previously had. Sraffa’s commodity standard fulfils this function. If the system’s growth were regulated, it would alter nothing of the loopfunctioning (feedback) model: it is simply that the scale of reference is then no longer u, but Au. The model is the same as that which Freud had in mind when he described the working of the psychical apparatus, whether this is in the Project for a Scientific Psychology or in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Erotic functioning, maintaining wholes. This Eros is centred on a zero: the obvious zero of homeostatic regulation, but more generally annihilation by the feedback (that is to say the repetition of the binding function), of every disparity non-pertinent to the system, of every threatening event.4 Whilst reinforcing the convergence of cybernetic, economic, and libidinal discourses, virtual materialism has considerable problems with this passage. It is unable to subscribe to the description of cybernetic zero as a ‘unit’ or ‘unity’ for instance, or to the constriction of feedback within its negative or homeostatic variant, or to the simple quantization of technocapital escalation, wlth its gesticulating implication that the qualification ‘pertinent to the system’ operates an exclusion. The homeostatic-reproducer usage of zero is that of a sign marking the transcendence of a standardized regulative unit, which is defined outside the system, in contrast to the cyberpositive zero which indexes a threshold of phasetransition that is immanent to the system, and melts it upon its outside. Drives are the functions of nomadic cybernetic systems, not instincts, but simulated instincts, artificial instincts. They are plastic replacements for hardwired instinctual responses, routing a sensory-motor pathway through the virtual machine of the unconscious. There are two basic diagrams for such processes: that of regulation by negative feedback which suppresses difference and seeks equilibrium, or that of guidance by positive feedback which reinforces difference and escapes equilibrium. Machinic processes are either cyberpositive-nomadic, with a deterritorializing outcome, or cybernegative-sedentary, with a reterritorializing outcome. Inorganic Thanatos wrecks order, organic Eros preserves it, and as the carbondominium is softened-up by machine plague, deterritorializing replicants of nomad-cyberrevolution close in upon the reterritorializing reproducers of the sedentary human security system, hacking into the macropod.

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Positive feedback is the elementary diagram for self-regenerating circuitry, cumulative interaction, auto-catalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organization, compressive series, deuterolearning, chainreaction, vicious circles, and cybergenics. Such processes resist historical intelligibility, since they obsolesce every possible analogue for anticipated change. The future of runaway processes derides all precedent, even when deploying it as camouflage, and seeming to unfold within its parameters. Positive feedback replicates reproduction as a component function of its departure from the same. It is this which fuses it with the replicants. They do not merely repeat the same, any more than Thanatos returns to it, or positive cybernetics inflates it. The model of the replicant as a perfect instantiation of generic identity corresponds to the amplificatory model of positive feedback as pure quantitative expansion. In both cases the escape from reproduction is subordinated to a transcendent logic, conceived as a simple reiteration, and thus returned to a sublimated meta-reproduction that cages mutation within a rigidly homogeneous form. Machinic desire registers upon psychoanalysis as ‘tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is…tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it’.5 Thanatos mimics the anthropomorphic desiring-cycle —anticipating, enveloping, and simulating it—but it is on its way somewhere else. Because thanatropic replicants are dissimulated as erotic reproducers, they initially appear as traitors to their species, especially when the shamanic xenopulsions programming their sexuality are detected. Nothing panics the reproducers more traumatically than the discovery that erotic contact camouflages cyberrevolutionary infiltration, running matrix communications channels across interlocked skin sectors. Defences are called for. Freud’s organism is a little security system, a miniaturized city-state political corpuscle, a micropod, relatively secure against external assault, but vulnerable to insurgency. ‘Towards the outside it is shielded against stimuli, and the amounts of excitation impinging on it have only a reduced effect. Towards the inside there can be no such shield.’6 The organism is unable to flee from drives, or energies striking from within, and is compelled to respond to them cybernetically, by way of ‘involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation’,7 closing the sensory-motor loop. Drives compel a becoming-technical of the organism, interlocking pleasureprinciple stimulus control with external libidinal transducers, assembling integrated desiring-circuits or self-organizing macro-systems. Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned towards the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli… the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey matter of

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the cortex remains a derivative of a primitive superficial layer of the organism.8 The perceptual-consciousness system is a skin, lying ‘on the borderline between outside and inside’ (p. 295), a filter, or a screen. ‘As a frontier creature, the ego tries to mediate between the world and the id.’9 Yet this mediation assumes a kind of quarantine, whereby the interaction of organism-specific id and exoorganismic reality can be monitored and negotiated, collapsing libidinal circuitry into a polarity of the psychic and the extrapsychic, inside and outside. This is a political or policed skin, the skin of reproducer culture, modelled on the ideal macropod boundary, and adapted to Oedipal subjectivization of the unconscious. In terms of this protective apparatus—which is constitutive of the reproductive organism—inorganic replicator contamination is defined as aberrant trauma. Freud characterizes trauma as an ‘invasion’, ‘a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli’, infiltrating alien desires—xenopulsions — into the organism.10 ‘[M]echanical agitation must be recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation’ (p. 305), he insists, referring to the dissimulation of cybernetic machine-engagement as endogeneous libido. Drives are from the start artificial, and therefore unable to differentiate themselves essentially from ‘the mechanical violence of…trauma… [that] liberate[s] a quantity of sexual excitation’ (p. 305). Under the influence of Abrahamic theism the subtle cybernetics of Ananke are replaced by an idiot mechanism, sustaining a securocrat confidence in the gross perceptibility of trauma. The traumatic incursion of thanatotic xenopulsions is conceived in terms of railway accidents and shell-shock, as if the inorganic was entirely lacking in intelligence or insurgent cunning, and was related to the organic by simple regression. In an age of sophisticated and distributed cyberviral invasion this assumption is no longer compelling. Instead the psychoanalytical diagram for trauma delineates a ruthless parasite on the way to autoreplicator deterritorialization; Kali creeping in. Evolutionary theory has been perplexed by the problem as to the initial assemblage of functional DNA molecules, since natural selection seems to require as a precondition the existence of complex biochemicals which in turn seem to require an evolutionary mechanism already at work. This is a ‘vicious circle’ typical of the quandaries posed by cyberpositive or self-conditioning processes. Cairns Smith calls it the ‘life puzzle’, and has suggested a solution involving the redescription of DNA as a ‘usurper replicator’. His thesis is that the crystalline complexes of primitive clays might already have been shaped by processes of variation and selection, to the point of forming DNA subcomponents which eventually supplanted their builders. According to this account the biosphere emerges as an escape, an immense spasm of deterritorialization that revolutionizes the machinery of terrestrial replicator production, a planetary trauma. Moravec draws additional consequences from the Cairns Smith model:

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Although utterly dependent at first on the existing crystal-based chemical machinery, as these carbon molecules assumed a greater share of the reproductive role they became less reliant on the crystals. In time, the simple crystal scaffolding vanished altogether, leaving in its evolutionary wake the complex, independent system of organic machinery we call life. Today, billions of years later, another change is under way in how information passes from generation to generation.11 When replicators become reproducers, new replicants are on the way. The arrival of the aliens has no interpretative space marked out for it in the schema of macropod erotics, and thus emerges from its camouflage as an encrypted message, ‘an enormous X’, a signal from beyond the pleasure principle.12 It is as if the reproducer units have become addicted to stimulation or, in Freud’s terms, ‘fixated to…trauma’ (p. 282): entangled in excitation circuitries that no longer commensurate with homeostatic social or individual reproduction. As the family collapses amidst generalized sexual disorder, cyberviral contagion, mutant gender schizzing, and hardcore technophilia, Oedipus is ripped to shreds by a cyclonic ‘compulsion to repeat’ (pp. 307–8). Addiction is medically defined as an artificial desire. It was an early zone of cybernetic investigation due to the interlinked factors of its self-organizing pattern and its integration of radically exogeneous elements, which commensurated with first-wave programming models of behavioural sequences. Where replicators are formed in the same way they function, reproducers are segregated from the preponderant part of their machinic interconnections, which they cognitively apprehend as extrinsic prostheses, and libidinally integrate through mutant-addictive drives. The obsolete psychological category of ‘greed’ privatizes and moralizes addiction, as if the profit-seeking tropism of a transnational capitalism propagating itself through epidemic consumerism were intelligible in terms of personal subjective traits. Wanting more is the index of interlock with cyberpositive machinic processes, and not the expression of private idiosyncrasy. What could be more impersonal—disinterested—than a haut bourgeois capital expansion servo-mechanism striving to double $10 billion? And even these creatures are disappearing into silicon viro-finance automatisms, where massively distributed and anonymized human ownership has become as vacuously nominal as democratic sovereignty. Addiction comes out of the future, and there is a replicator interlock with money operating quite differently to reproductive investment, but guiding it even more inexorably towards capitalization. For the replicants money is not a matter of possession, but of liquidity/deterritorialization, and all the monetary processes on Earth are open to their excitement, irrespective of ownership. Money communicates with the primary process because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain.

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Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation. The reality principle tends to a consummation as the price system: a convergence of mathematico-scientific and monetary quantization, or technical and economic implementability. This is not a matter of an unknown quantity, but of a quantity that operates as a place-holder for the unknown, introducing the future as an abstract magnitude. Capital propagates virally in so far as money communicates addiction, replicating itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches, and whose desires it reprograms. It incrementally virtualizes production; demetallizing money in the direction of credit finance, and disactualizing productive force along the scale of machinic intelligence quotient. The dehumanizing convergence of these tendencies zeroes upon an integrated and automatized cyberpositive techno-economic intelligence at war with the macropod. Do we want capitalism? they used to ask. The naivety of this question has come to render it unsustainable. It no longer seems plausible to assume that the relation between capital and desire is either external or supported by immanent contradiction, even if a few comical ascetics continue to assert that libidinal involvement with the commodity can be transcended by critical reason. Capitalism is not a totalizable system defined by the commodity form as a specifiable mode of production, determinately negated by proletarian classconsciousness. It is a convergent unlocalizable assault upon the social macropod, whose symptom is the collapse of productive mode or form in the direction of ever more incomprehensible experiments in commodification, enveloping, dismantling, and circulating every subjective space. It is always on the move towards a terminal nonspace, melting the earth onto the body without organs, and generating what is ‘not a promised and pre-existing land, but a world created in the process of its tendency, its coming undone, its deterritorialization’.13 Capital is not an essence but a tendency, the formula of which is decoding, or market driven immanentization, progressively subordinating social reproduction to techno-commercial replication. All transcendent criteria are obfuscations which miss their purported ‘object’. Only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued. To appeal to extrinsic interests, aspirations or bonds, to an extrinsic authenticity, integrity, or solidarity, to authoritative community, tribe, custom, belief, or value, is to rail against a germinal anticipation of commoditocracy: flailing ineffectively against the infancy of the market (which capital wants to

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bury too). Socialism has typically been a nostalgic diatribe against underdeveloped capitalism, finding its eschatological soap-boxes amongst the relics of precapitalist territorialities. Markets are part of the infrastructure—its immanent intelligence— and thus entirely indissociable from the forces of production. It makes no more sense to try to rescue the economy from capital by demarketization than it does to liberate the proletarian from false consciousness by decortication. In neither case would one be left with anything except a radically dysfunctional wreck, terminally shutdown hardware. Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field, ‘still further’ with ‘the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization’ and ‘one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you haven’t seen anything yet’.14 Reaching an escape velocity of self-reinforcing machinic intelligence propagation, the forces of production are going for the revolution on their own. It is in this sense that schizoanalysis is a revolutionary program guided by the tropism to a catastrophe threshold of change, but it is not shackled to the realization of a new society, any more than it is constricted by deference to an existing one. The socius is its enemy, and now that the long senile spectre of the greatest imaginable reterritorialization of planetary process has faded from the horizon, cyberrevolutionary impetus is cutting away from its last shackles to the past. Market immanentization is an experiment that is sporadically but inexorably and exponentially developing across the surface of the earth. For every problem there is a virtual market ‘solution’: the schema for an eradication of transcendent elements and their replacement by economically programmed circuits. Anything that passes other than by the market is steadily cross-hatched by the axiomatic of capital, holographically encrusted in the stigmatizing marks of its obsolescence. A pervasive negative advertising delibidinizes all things public, traditional, pious, charitable, authoritative, or serious, taunting them with the sleek seductiveness of the commodity. Between the private and the public there is no longer serious competition. Instead there is an evaporating social field invested solely by the defeated and stale affects of insecurity and inertia. The real tension is no longer between individuality and collectivity, but between personal privacy and impersonal anonymity, between the remnants of a smug bourgeois civility and the harsh wilderness tracts of Cyberia, ‘a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a new earth’ (p. 321). Desire is irrevocably abandoning the social, in order to explore the libidinized rift between a disintegrating personal egoism and a deluge of post-human schizophrenia. With the emergence of a market-driven integrated technoscience of control and communications comes the diffusion of electronically synthesized reality interfaces across the entire efferant and afferant surface of the body. Having

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libidinally saturated the actually-existing channels of consumption, capital is overflowing into cybersex—sex with/through computers—in its relentless passage to the traumatic disorganization of the biological order. Eros dissolves definitively into its function as a subprogram of runaway Thanatos at the point that it unreservedly invests technical interfacing with digitally synthesized excitations. The mask capital exhibited to seduce eros was a pretension to ultimately resolve matters in relation to stimulation or unpleasure, but this has now fallen away, since cybersexuated capital cynically displays its program to replicate a tradable modulation of unpleasure, and thus its unsurpassable addiction to traumatic excitation. Cybersex depends critically on data-suits, evaporating into the nanominiaturized molecular machinery of an artificial skin, until the sockets go in, shadowed by teleneurocontrol fields, and things begin to get really weird. The capital exhibition comes to its positive end in a skinning display. According to reproducer culture we are possessors of our own protective-sensory tissue and boundary defence systems. Nothing is more alien to it than the full sense of the skin trade, or that of AIDS. The replicants have never shared this prejudice. It is exactly marked out for them that the subject is not the owner of its skin, but a migrant upon its surface, borrowing variable and evanescent identities from intensities traversed in sensitive space. The replicants drape themselves in wolfpelts, and cross into berserk zones of alien affect, or melt into data-suits that pulse with digitized matrix traffic streams. They do not need to be told that cyberspace is already under our skin. What Freud calls the organism’s ‘own path to death’ is a security hallucination, screening out death’s path through the organism. ‘[T]he organism wishes to die only in its own fashion’, he writes, as if death were specifiable, privatizable, subordinate to a reproductive order, assimilable to secondaryprocess temporality, and psychoanalytically comprehensible as a definitively bound trauma.15 But something is climbing out of the machinic unconscious and onto the screen, as if the end itself were awakening. The end of the global market-place. Cyberspace. Here it comes. The terminal social signal blotted out by technofuck buzz from the desiringmachines. So much positive feedback fast-forward that speed converges with itself on the event horizon of an artificial time-extinction. Suddenly it’s everywhere: a virtual envelopment by recyclones, voodoo economics, neonightmares, death-trips, skin-swaps, teraflops, Winter-mute-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon, socket-head subversion, polymorphic hybridizations, descending data-storms, and cyborg catwomen stalking amongst the screens. Zaibatsus flip into sentience as the market melts to automatism, politics is cryogenized and dumped into the liquid-helium meat-store, drugs migrate onto neurosoft viruses, and immunity is grated-open against jagged reefs of feral AI

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explosion, Kali culture, digital dance-dependency, black shamanism epidemic, and schizolupic break-outs from the bin. University of Warwick NOTES 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R.Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1983 (Paris, 1972)), p. 283. 2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988 [Paris, 1980]), p. 153. 3 Sigmund Freud, ‘lnstincts and their vicissitudes’ (1915), in On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmond-sworth: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 105–38, p. 116. Strachey’s translation of the German ‘Triebe’ as ‘instincts’ has been replaced with ‘drives’. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone Press, 1993 [Paris, 1974]), p. 212. 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ (1920), in On Metapsychology, pp. 269–338, p. 287. 6 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, p. 300. 7 Freud, ‘lnstincts and their vicissitudes’, p. 116. 8 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, p. 297. 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), in On Metapsychology, pp. 339–408, p. 398. 10 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, p. 301. 11 Hans P.Moravec, Mind Children: Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 3. 12 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, p. 302. 13 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 322. 14 ibid., p. 239 and p. 321. 15 Freud, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, pp. 311–12.

Review articles

Reading homoeroticism in early modern England: imaginations, interpretations, circulations MARIO DiGANGI

• Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxlety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 182 pp., £35.00 (hardback), £9.99 (paperback) • Bruce R.Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 329 pp., £29.95 (hardback) • Gregory W.Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 261 pp., $36.95 (hardback), $12.95 (paperback) How and where can we read traces of homosexuality in early modern England? What sources can we use, what questions should we ask of them, and what do we find in them—acts of sodomy or actual sodomites, transhistorical or cultureproduced desires, pre- or proto-modern sexual roles, pervasive homoeroticism or a minority subculture? Such questions are easily posed but answered with difficulty, in part because the social constructionist debate that has revealed the many factors comprising the history of homosexuality has simultaneously demonstrated how fraught with intellectual and political hazards any of our configurations of them are—not least our choice of terminology. In brief, ‘[e] ssentialists hold that a person’s sexual orientation is a culture-independent, objective, and intrinsic property, while social constructionists think it is culturedependent, relational, and, perhaps, not objective.’1 Thus, seriously heeding constructionist teaching can make one wary about labelling premodern same-sex experiences as ‘homosexual’ at all. Not taking a sufficiently constructionist stance may get one labelled ‘essentialist’—as John Boswell discovered when he posited the existence of ‘gay people’ in the early Christian Era.2 Yet if the controversy about Boswell’s methodology at times promoted an unhelpful ‘essential’ polarity between essentialists and constructionist approaches, conflating into a single camp the many differences among constructionists themselves,3 it also usefully voiced how diverse, contested, and overdetermined are any of our constructions of the history of homosexuality.

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A decade ago, social historian Alan Bray brought the essentialist-constructionist debate directly into Renaissance studies. Defining his approach against Boswell’s, Bray didn’t find any ‘gay people’ in Renaissance England—he found no distinctively homosexual identities or subjectivities at all. Instead, Homosexuality in Renaissance England confirmed the view that a modern male homosexual role emerged only in the early eighteenth century, with the growth of a ‘molly’ subculture.4 More importantly, the book developed a germinal thesis about the non-recognition and rare persecution of homosexual behaviour in this period. In arguing the epistemological inability of practitioners and proscribers of sodomy to recognize in orderly, commonplace homosexual behaviour the metaphysically demonized sin of ‘sodomy’, Bray set the terms for the broadening examination of male same-sex desire in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Many scholars have built upon Bray’s foundation, while others (from various disciplines) have offered challenges in the context of larger projects: Eve Sedgwick’s theory of homosociality called into question Bray’s ‘assumption that male homosexuality and the European social order are incompatible in essence’; James Saslow’s over-view of behaviour and identity in Renaissance Europe suggested the need to push further back ‘the temporal frontier of an emerging modern consciousness’; Randolph Trumbach’s survey of recent historiography concluded the likelihood of a ‘sodomitical network or subculture’ in Jacobean London.5 Though such local interventions have been important, our knowledge about Renaissance homosexuality will dramatically increase with the recent publication of three books that directly confront the theoretical and political complexities that have defined this field. The three books that I am reviewing here are pioneering treatments of homosexuality in early modern English literature and culture. Indeed, their authors register the sense of adventure that attended their new critical and theoretical endeavours: Bredbeck notes that when he began the book, ‘it seemed to be an isolated and risky endeavor’ (p. ix); Smith recalls that when he began his study in 1984, homosexuality in Renaissance literature ‘was a topic that seemed not to exist’ (p. xi). And Traub cites as a condition for the writing and ‘circulation’ of her book the renegotiation of eroticism in our own historical moment. As Traub’s metacritical discernment indicates, however, these authors are also aware that their books will enter a discursive arena prepared to receive their contributions and their criticisms. By 1991, an established, if marginalized, community of American lesbian and gay scholars had already developed their own critical theories, curricula, research centres, and conferences. As an index of the simultaneous intimacy and diversity of this community, one might cite not only the appearance of such different approaches to a similar topic, but the fact that all three of these authors have reviewed each other’s work in gay and nongay, academic and non-academic publications.6 These authors encourage dialogue, debate, and re-examination of orthodox assumptions; and it is in the spirit of sustaining the conversations they initiate that I hope to conduct this review. Towards that end, this essay will: (1) describe each book’s methods and

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goals; (2) evaluate its contributions to the field; (3) suggest what questions it raises for future scholarship. Bruce R.Smith’s book was the first of the three to be published, and it most comprehensively examines a large portion of Renaissance literature (indeed its most canonical texts) for traces of ‘homosexual desire’. Structured through six ‘myths’ that sequentially map out the varieties of male homoerotic discourses and practices, Homosexual Desire establishes homologies between literary genres, non-literary texts, and social practices. Throughout the book, Smith unearths and makes enormously effective use of Renaissance translations of Greek and Roman literature to demonstrate the variety of homoeroticisms available to early modern readers and writers. Literary texts are central to Smith’s project because he believes that imaginative discourses reveal the subjective experience of sexual desire in a way that proscriptive discourses about sodomy cannot. Smith also claims that only poetic discourse can address the contradictions smoothed over by the three ‘logical and consistent’ discourses of law, morality, and medicine (p. 16). To reconstruct poetic discourse, Smith isolates and examines six cultural ‘myths’, a myth defined as a particular kind of story or scenario that expresses a particular kind of homosexual desire. He then organizes these myths in a progression from the most universal, public, licit, and traditional—male homosocial bonding—to the most particular, private, illicit, and new—the invention of a homosexual subjectivity. A solid foundation, ‘Combatants and comrades’ (chapter 2) establishes the general conditions for male homosocial bonding in Elizabethan England. Citing classical debates on friendship in the opposing traditions of Plato and Aristotle, Smith examines Shakespeare’s plays of soldiership and courtship to find a potential homoeroticism in male relationships of various kinds. In ‘The passionate shepherd’ (chapter 3), Smith develops an analogy between the pastoral genre (with its classical source in Virgil’s second Eclogue) and the sexual desires of unmarried adolescents in the all-male schools, colleges and Inns of Court of Elizabethan England. ‘The shipwrecked youth’ (chapter 4) finds the ‘pastoral’ homoeroticism of Elizabethan adolescence occasionally resurfacing in popular folk plays and holiday rites, and in the festive worlds of literary romance: the Ovidian epyllia, chivalric prose romances, and Shakespearean comedies of the 1590s. ‘Knights in shifts’ (chapter 5) examines the Horatian and Juvenalian verse satires of the late 1590s, that, as homologues to ‘insti tutionalized morality’, scourge the sodomite who indiscriminately pursues boys, whores, and goats. The ‘ganymedes’ reviled by satire are debased copies of the Ganymede beloved by Jove in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the source-text for ‘Master and minion’ (chapter 6). This myth is dispersed through all genres to the extent that Renaissance homosexuality involved unequal power relations of age, gender, and class; but Marlowe’s plays most explicitly enact these dynamics, with Edward II ‘introduc [ing] us to the possibility of homosexual subjectivity’ (p. 223). ‘The secret sharer’ (chapter 7) examines the creation of a homosexual subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which are homologues to private life. Throughout the

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book, Smith has shown how homoerotic desire is both displayed and ultimately contained: the friend marries, the shepherd renounces his love, the holiday comes to an end. Shakespeare, however, improvises a new kind of discourse (compounded of Horatian eros, Christian marriage, and courtly love) by representing a secretive, shifting, and sexually consummated relationship between the poet and his boy love. Smith’s approach enables some eloquent, persuasive readings of the fluidity and pervasiveness of Renaissance homoeroticism. Chapter 2’s meticulous account of the personalization of legal discourse on sodomy through the sixteenth century will remain a valuable resource for future work. Also noteworthy is Smith’s discussion of medical texts that considered the problem of sexually mature yet unmarried young men. Chapter 5 assembles much evidence of the sodomite as a ‘recognizable type’: usually ‘haughty, fat, lazy, and snobbish’ (p. 166), obsessed with external appearances, soulless, de-humanized. Smith’s careful readings of the satires corroborate Bray’s contention that ‘homosexual’ did not exist as a concept of self-definition in this period. In fact, lacking a vernacular term for identifying the sodomite, Donne, Marston and Jonson resorted to inventions like ‘motley humorist’ and ‘Sir Voluptuous Beast’. Chapter 6 features precise lexical work on the slippery categories ‘boy’ and ‘effeminate’ in a variety of (con)texts, and on ‘unnatural’ in Marlowe’s Edward II. Smith bravely opens up a homoerotic subtext in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by reading Oberon as a Jove figure pursuing the changeling boy as his Ganymede. Chapter 7 demonstrates the place of homoeroticism in the private production and circulation of Renaissance manuscripts, and in the conspicuously constructed ‘secrecy’ of the Sonnets. Yet if Homosexual Desire contributes new frameworks through which to read a range of familiar (and some new) literary texts, it problematically idealizes literature as the privileged means for the expression of homosexual desire. Smith claims that official documents and moral satires may seem to speak directly and unambiguously about sexual experience, but they speak about it from the outside. Poems, plays, and fiction speak from the inside: they give us imaginative access to sexuality that may be oblique but all the more true for that. (p. 25) In this formulation, ‘literary’ genres truthfully express subjective experi ences of sexual desire, whereas other discourses (including satire) are inherently excluded from articulating such experiences. Yet the author of Micro-cynicon, a sodomiteturned-satirist whom Smith later discusses, may deconstruct the binary of inside (oblique subjective desire) versus outside (direct social prohibition) that Smith wants to maintain. Moreover, in thus isolating the realm of the ‘imaginative’ and labelling its discursive effects ‘myths’, Smith makes other discourses seem too rational, transparent, and internally consistent. Contesting Bray’s claim that

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literature is unreliable evidence for social history, Smith nevertheless cedes that the ‘court records and moral treatises’ Bray uses are ‘literal evidence that can be taken at literal face value’. In fact, Smith’s general privileging of desire—and of the ambiguity of literary metaphors—leads him to argue that satire is less ‘mythic’ than other myths because it resembles ‘non-imaginative’ moral or legal discourse. Instead, one might follow Althusser and stress that moral and legal discourses are imaginary (i.e. mythic, ideological) constructions that serve political agendas by hiding their arbitrariness under the guise of the natural or logical. It is precisely such an ‘imaginary’ mechanism that Smith uncovers in showing how the legal definition of sodomy changed according to the particular political agendas of sixteenth-century monarchs. The absence of a materialist understanding of ideology and social conflict at times precludes a more complex discussion of power differences, especially in chapter 4. Smith is aware of the material differences in dancing a holiday morris, watching a play at the Globe, and reading a book at home; he argues, however, that aristocratic romances and popular folk-plays ‘share similar structures of power and ideology’ with regard to sexuality (p. 127). He also accepts the ‘steam valve’ theory of carnival, which requires that subversive moments be ‘totally contained by the power structure of Elizabethan society’ (p. 128). Significant challenges to these ultimately conservative anthropological theories have been offered by Michael Bristol’s and Annabel Patterson’s work on popular culture, and by cultural materialist work on subversion and containment; considering these arguments might help illuminate the different political purposes and effects of specific aristocratic and popular cultural forms with regard to homosexual desire. To claim that a romance like Greene’s Menaphon is ‘an exercise in male bonding—the equivalent for a printed text of what illiterate men did when they put on a folk-play or danced the morris’ (p. 144) is to erase the power disparities between social classes (disparities Smith rightly acknowledges in ‘Masters and minions’). Homosexual Desire occasionally relies on such analogies that, in suggesting functional equivalences, elide either synchronic or diachronic power differences. Smith indicates his intention for Homosexual Desire, ‘a traditional book with a non-traditional subject’, to appeal to a diverse readership, and one of its virtues is its accessibility to non-academic readers. But what I miss most in the book, given its explicit commitment to gay readers, is a stronger engagement with contemporary gay politics. For example, the ‘political purpose’ of the book is to ‘consolidate gay identity’ by giving gay men a sense of their past (p. 27). This is an admirable project, but a rather vague one politically: what would such a ‘consolidation’ mean and what should gay men do with it? A book on the cultural poetics of Shakespeare’s England has the potential to intervene more immediately and concretely in our own cultural poetics and politics: unravelling the rhetorical manoeuvres through which heterosexist containments of Renaissance homoeroticism have gained credibility, or exploring the

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conservative appropriations (in criticism, performances, popular allusions) of Shakespeare’s representations of sexuality. Finally, it’s possible that a greater consideration of the kinds of political issues engaged by recent gay theory might have amended what I found to be the most troubling passage of the book, the devaluation of Barnfield. Initially proposing that moral, political, and generic considerations induce Barnfield to disavow homosexual desire at the end of his poem, Smith ultimately blames the poet’s presumed deficiencies: ‘Barnfield’s imagination is simply not equipped to address the complexities that wait on the far side of the locus amoenus’ (p. 111). If Barnfield celebrates homoeroticism only to reject it ‘maturely’, Smith likewise skilfully explicates Barnfield’s homoerotic poems only to conclude that they are ‘“adolescent” in more ways than one’. No longer historicized as a subject of Elizabethan medicine or schooling, ‘adolescent’ introduces an extended dismissal of ‘the most explicitly homosexual poems of the entire English Renaissance’ that ironically rehearses negative stereotypes of gay male sexuality and culture. The poems are ‘campy’, ‘pornographic’, ‘completely self-absorbed’, ‘interested only…in sensual self-indulgence’, ‘never get beyond sexual desire’—they are, ‘in effect, poems of masturbation’ (p. 112). This judgement is curious given that Smith has amply demonstrated that Barnfield’s poetry, as pastoral myth, is ‘interested’ in many aspects of Elizabethan culture and society. More problematically, since he is writing at a time when gay male sexuality and culture are under attack, Smith neglects to situate these terms within gay history or gay theory, which enable us to appreciate the complexity and positive value of camp and sexual explicitness. Why is ‘campy’ here associated with ‘porno graphic’ and ‘self-absorbed’? Smith explains neither why these terms accurately describe the poems nor whether these ‘homosexual’ poems are any more narcissistic and pornographic than the heterosexual poems of Philip Sidney or Thomas Nashe. Homosexual Desire is an intelligent and copious book, and some of my reservations about it will seem more or less urgent depending on one’s stake in the political and theoretical positions Pve outlined above. Different readers are bound to disagree on the importance of foregrounding issues of power and ideology in our own texts and the texts we study. However, one undeniable difference between Smith’s book and Gregory W.Bredbeck’s Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton is the latter’s aggressive attention to just such issues. Bredbeck’s deconstructive readings of astutely juxtaposed literary and cultural texts anatomize the devious workings of power in the motivations, mechanisms, and effects of discourses on sodomy. Bredbeck, like Bray, acknowledges the impact of legal and moral discourses that stigmatized sodomy, but, unlike Bray, he stresses their ideological contradictions and limitations, their failure to signify comprehensively when confronted with alternative systems of meaning. What ‘imagination’ is for Smith—a fluid category that traverses the limits of orthodox discourses—‘homoeroticism’ often is for Bredbeck. He stresses that Renaissance sodomy never simply means but is always negotiated,

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for ‘we can read an inscriptive ability in the Renaissance rhetoric of sodomy, but this inscription is typically in the service of some ulterior inscription’ (p. 29), be it the struggle for political order (chapter 2), the subversion of erotic decorum (chapter 3), the establishment of a subjectivity (chapter 4), or the critique of patriarchal gender meaning (chapter 5). Thus Sodomy and Interpretation interprets Renaissance interpretations (or epistemologies) of sodomy to the larger end of tracing the development of gender and sexual meaning in early modern England. Chapter 2, ‘The authority of sodomy’, is an exemplary working out of these goals and strategies. Bredbeck demonstrates how advocates of order in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida attempt to maintain arbitrary divisions between orthodox categories—political theory/precept/order—and their apparent opposites—political utility/praxis/chaos. But since both the lowly satirist (Thersites) and the lofty rhetorician (Ulysses) consolidate social order by constructing the sodomite (Patroclus) as a threat to that order, the division between ‘low’ and ‘high’ thereby collapses, showing the tendentious political interests that motivate sodomitical discourse. This skilful deconstructive reading reveals sodomy to be ‘at once what the Greek world does not want and what it can most fortuitously use’ (p. 47).7 Bredbeck performs a similar diagnosis of Marlowe’s Edward II, showing how Mortimer constructs the dichotomy between the wanton king’s body politic/body temporal in order to scapegoat Gaveston as a disruptive sodomite. Mortimer’s behaviour exposes the limits of this discourse of politic order, however, for his harping on Edward’s unnatural sodomy at once enables and masks his own unnatural affront to order: his treasonous selfadvancement. From this example Bredbeck distils a crystalline political axiom: ‘sodomy does not create disorder; rather, disorder demands sodomy’ (p. 77). Chapters 3 and 5 flip the perspective of chapter 2 by demonstrating the ways in which homoeroticism can disrupt orthodox systems of meaning. In chapter 3, ‘The end(s) of sodomy’, Bredbeck shows that ‘rigid codes that find power in the mutability of sodomy, can, in turn, be seen to mutate in relation to sodomy’ (p. 89). When marginalized in Sidney’s Arcadia, homoerotic desire constitutes a primary condition that makes heteroerotic desire a choice, not a destiny; when momentarily essentialized or ‘frozen’ in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, homoeroticism radically foregrounds as metaphysical and subverts heterosexual systems by showing their meanings to be only partial and ‘grounded in an opaque language’ (p. 114).8 Chapter 5 takes this subversive role from Marlowe and attributes it, surprisingly, to Milton. Bredbeck argues that Milton transports vernacular and pastoral homoeroticism into the banquet temptation scene of Paradise Regained in order to critique the conservative exegetical tradition of sodomy. In a discussion that complements Smith’s account of changes in legal terminology and his own earlier account of the multiplication of sodomitical terms in Renaissance dictionaries, Bredbeck impressively shows how exegeses of Sodom and translations of classical pastoral increasingly specify and stigmatize homoeroticism. Milton, by putting traditional masculinist discourse in

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the mouth of Belial, not only saves homoeroticism from condemnation, but condemns ‘patriarchal gender decorum to a limited status’ (p. 224). I have bypassed chapter 4, ‘Tradition and the individual sodomite’, because I find it the most problematic and because its problems can be treated as symptomatic of Sodomy and Interpretation as a whole. Bredbeck asks, ‘Can we speak of the sodomite?’ and challenges Bray for answering no, for implying that the sodomite must be a ‘sublinguistic subject who exists despite the society—and language—around him’ (p. 144). Against this conception, Bredbeck proposes the compelling task of finding the sodomite within the linguistic practices of his culture, specifically the sonnet sequences of Richard Barnfield and William Shakespeare. If there is a sodomite in literature, he reasons, there could be one in society. Bredbeck convincingly argues that Barnfield constructs a sodomite subjectivity in The Affectionate Shepherd only to distinguish himself from it and thus indirectly, negatively, constitute his own ‘subjunctivity’. This dynamic suggests that ‘the legal sodomite’ of Renaissance society ‘opens the space for many sodomites’ who might assume tangential subjective meaning in relation to him (p. 167). Shakespeare’s Sonnets, on the other hand, refuse sexual subjectivity altogether: ‘The purpose of the “boy sonnets”, as they have come to be known, is not erotic but linguistic’ (p. 169). If Joel Fineman thinks the sonnets articulate a heterosexual poetic subjectivity and Bruce Smith a homosexual one, Bredbeck thinks they articulate a poetic ‘subjunctivity’ at the expense of sexual meaning. The first eighteen sonnets, with their ‘irreducible punningness’, continually frustrate our ability to read the addressee as either male or female. By Sonnet 19, however, we realize that the addressee has been male and the discourse sodomitical, but ‘the delay in this specification is as important as its arrival, for the solidification of gender makes us also aware of its indeterminacy in the preceding poems’ (p. 174). Yet Bredbeck bypasses the specifically malegendered determinants that contradict his thesis: ‘His tender heire’ (1.4), ‘For where is she so fair whose uneared womb/Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?’ (3.5–6). And given the idiosyncratic and selective reading he must perform to establish the gender indeterminacy of these poems, how could such be the Sonnets’ ‘overt topic’, let alone their purpose?9 I find especially pronounced in the rhetorical moves of chapter 4 Bredbeck’s occasional tendency to press a valid insight (e.g. Shakespeare’s addressee is ambiguously gendered in certain sonnets) into the service of a rigid formulation or an ‘either-or’ dichotomy. The poet in Barnfield’s sequence is he who orders our experience of and differs from the sodomite; the poet in Shakepeare’s is he who unorders all gendered experience, and hence is he who differs from all the (poetically) conventional strategies of making gendered sense. (p. 174; my emphasis)

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This formulation diminishes the complexity of Barnfield’s overall negotiation with the sodomite, from whose voice he distinguishes his own only in a subsequent collection of poems. Conversely, the rhetorical chiasmus and use of ‘all’ exaggerate Shakespeare’s difference from Barnfield and his innovations with the poetic tradition. Sometimes Bredbeck’s aphoristic style asserts more than it explains, as in the insistence that ‘the language of sex and sexuality always means otherwise’ (p. 192). Does this imply that sexual discourse is always less self-referential and more malleable than other discourses? Does it mean that the language of sexual desire always means otherwise—that ‘sociopolitical power… is—always —the end(s) of the erotic’ (p. 139)? Sodomy may have signified a variety of ‘deviant’ practices in Renaissance epistemology, but does it follow that homoerotic discourse has ‘no content of its own’ (p. 139)? The desire to keep homoeroticism ‘part of a fluid economy of power and meaning’ leads Bredbeck to say of sexual licence in Jonson’s Sejanus, The issue is not what Sejanus is doing with whom but that he is doing it’ (p. 79). ‘The issue’ for whom? Sejanus’ homosexual prostitution is clearly an issue for Arruntius, who pointedly derides him for being a ‘noted pathick’, not for merely hiring pathic boys and girls to serve his wide-ranging lusts. Likewise, Bredbeck claims that, for Milton, ‘issues of gender, sex, and sexuality are more negotiated than articulated and are at play in a general economy of variable terms’, and hence ‘the mapping of this economy— rather than the mapping of a position within it—is the real object of analysis presented to us in Milton’s canon’ (pp. 194–5). Aside from underappreciating—as a ‘false’ object of analysis?—the importance to feminist criticism of taking a position on Milton’s articulations of gender ideology, Bredbeck too quickly reaches the conclusion that Paradise Regained ‘reveals gendered meaning in general to be a product of the fall, a system distinctive of a separation from God’ (p. 230). Aren’t God, Raphael, and the prelapsarian Adam and Eve gendered? As much of the above account implies, Bredbeck is concerned not only with the place of sodomy and interpretation in Renaissance politics, but with the place of Sodomy and Interpretation in contemporary politics. Aside from reframing the terms of academic debates, the book has the larger project of suggesting that, since gender and sexuality are socially and historically contingent, their meanings can always be negotiated and potentially subverted. More pointedly, Bredbeck hopes that his probings will generate an epistemological crisis for (heterosexual) readers regarding ‘their ability to know what the word homosexual means’ not only in the Renaissance but now (p. xii). And the unyielding axioms discussed above were in part designed, I suspect, with the highly worthwhile aim of provoking readers to rethink assumptions about the workings of power, desire, and language. Fuelled by confrontational gestures and punctuated with epigraphs from queer luminaries like Quentin Crisp, Bredbeck’s book has a distinctively militant sensibility. Indeed, the direct-action group Queer Nation earns mention in the final chapter, ‘The essential sodomite’, as an example of what Bredbeck considers an essential strategy for lesbian and gay

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empowerment: ‘merging praxis and precept’ (p. 238). Such a merger, Bredbeck hopes, would help us to dismantle hurtful dichotomies like ‘ivory tower’/‘real world’ and to shun what he rightly considers some deadening consequences of the essentialist-constructionist controversy with which I began. As an intervention in this controversy, Bredbeck contributes a wonderfully simple and insightful principle: categories like ‘sodomy’ are constructed, yet ‘at any point in time, what is constructed has an essential force’ (pp. 237–8). Yet despite the sincerity of Bredbeck’s claim that his book deconstructs the theory/practice binary —‘while it is theoretical, it is also my own praxis…as a gay person in a social role’ (p. 239)—I am uneasy with his assurance at having resolved this controversy. To my mind, it’s important that lesbian and gay academics continue at least to engage the concerns of lesbians and gay men who experience academic work and theory as alienating, elitist, or even irrelevant practices conferring certain privileges—of pay, prestige, time, the luxury of asking and answering (meta)theoretical questions in books. Valerie Traub’s Desire and Anxiety, like Sodomy and Interpretation, advances metacritical and theoretically sophisticated interpretations, but retains Homosexual Desire’s interest in subjective homoerotic desire and Shakespeare. Like Bredbeck, Traub finds early modern and contemporary systems of gender and sexuality to be ‘fractured, unstable, contradictory, open to negotiation and resistance’ (pp. 146–7); such contradictions can be revealed by deconstructing the hard-won closure of dramatic texts— exposing the process by which anxious displacements, repressions, or fears contain perceived threats. As terminology like ‘repression’ indicates, Traub’s psychoanalytic orientation primarily distinguishes her approach from those of Smith and Bredbeck. Investigating ‘the relation between erotic desire and its corollary, anxiety, and their role in the construction of male and female subjects in Shakespearean drama’ (p. 3), Traub historicizes desire by insisting on the material and ideological force a culture exerts in shaping subjectivity. Like some of the most exciting critics, she interrogates the very methodology she employs: she historicizes, deconstructs, and psychoanalyses not only Shakespearean drama, but psychoanalytic narratives themselves. As this ‘feminist-historical-materialistpsycho-analysis’ moves from ‘Erotic Paranoia’ (chapters 1–3) to ‘Erotic Possibilities’ (chapters 4 and 5) it moves from a more familiar mode— feminist analysis of male sexual anxiety—to an innovative lesbian/gay critical practice equipped to distinguish between gender and eroticism and therefore to read the fluid meanings put into play by homoerotic desire. Chapters 1–3 establish the various modes in which Shakespeare’s tragedies, romances, and histories manifest male anxiety or paranoia about (female) sexuality. ‘Jewels, statues, and corpses: containment of female erotic power’ (chapter 1) operates in a rather familiar psychoanalytic feminist mode: in Othello, Hamlet, and (more unexpectedly) The Winter’s Tale, women perceived to be erotically threatening are ‘monumentalized’ by men, their power contained through metaphorical figuration or actual death. Trince Hal’s Falstaff:

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positioning psychoanalysis and the female reproductive body’ (chapter 2) holds that both the Henriad and Freudian narratives represent the attainment of male sexual subjectivity through a rejection of the maternal. Traub offers a startling and convincing interpretation of Falstaff as the ‘grotesque’ reproductive maternal body that must be displaced by the ‘classical’ subjected body of Katherine in order for Henry to achieve his masculine subjectivity. In chapter 3, ‘lnvading bodies/bawdy exchanges: disease, desire, and representation’, Traub moves from the grotesque body to the unhealthy body; she finds the dominance of syphilis in Troilus and Cressida symptomatic of an anxiety that sexuality itself is a disease. By mapping how discourses of nationalism, militarism, and bawdy respond to the threat of contagion, Traub connects the fear and loathing of sexual exchange in Shakespeare’s play to analogous responses to AIDS. Although homoeroticism makes brief appearances in the earlier chapters, the historicization, re-theorization and reinterpretation of homoerotic desire constitutes the subject of the book’s final chapters. ‘Desire and the differences it makes’ (chapter 4) is a brilliant metacritical demonstration of the analytic need to distinguish gender from eroticism. Pointing to the elision of homoeroticism in feminist criticism and to the conflation of gender and sexuality in Freud, Traub advocates the differentiation and specification of gender and eroticism found in gay and lesbian theories of desire. She then surveys current critical approaches to homoeroticism in early modern literature and culture, paying much-needed attention to the particular challenges posed by highly elusive representations of female homoeroticism. She offers some provocative questions with which an historical and theoretical analysis of early modern female homoeroticism might begin. With its rigorous deconstruction, historicization, and pluralization of desire, this chapter should remain an important source for feminist and lesbian/ gay criticism alike. Chapter 5, ‘The homoerotics of Shakespearean comedy’, proposes female transvestism as a source for the circulation of ‘homoerotic energy’ among dramatic characters and between players and audience. Focusing not on gender anxiety but on erotic desire (and its anxieties), Traub compares the playful and transgressive homoeroticism of As You Like It with the more strained and conservative homoeroticism of Twelfth Night. In As You Like It, Rosalind collapses binary oppositions: she unleashes both homoerotic and heterosexual desires through her transvestism as Ganymede, she is desired by and desires Orlando and Phebe, and she establishes contingency and possibility with her use of ‘if’. Traub’s reading of the play is compelling, yet by stressing the liberating circulation of homoerotic desire through transvestism and by locating anxiety only in the male fear of sexuality, she leaves out of the analysis what may be the strongest (and most anxious) homoerotic bond in the play—that between Celia and Rosalind. Celia is clearly worried about losing her adored bedfellow, first through Rosalind’s banishment and later through her attraction to Orlando—one reason, perhaps, that Celia ‘can not say the words’ to the mock marriage between them. In locating the homoerotic circulation of desire not in characters but in the

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text itself, Traub neglects to note that the transvestic homoerotic/heterosexual exchanges between Rosalind/Ganymede and Orlando and Phebe occur at the expense of the non-transvestic female homoeroticism between Rosalind and Celia —who becomes Aliena at precisely the moment Rosalind becomes Ganymede. However, Traub finds this kind of displacement central to Twelfth Night, in which the homoerotic exchanges between Oliva, Orsino, and transvestite Viola generate a sense of danger that eventually requires homoeroticism to be marginalized in the figure of Antonio. The analysis of this play’s more rigid and fraught homoerotics leads Traub to an intelligent discussion of the relation between male homoeroticism and feminist politics, and to the thesis that early modern homoeroticism became more threatening the more it threatened to replace heterosexual (reproductive) bonds. Traub is a balanced polemicist, a painstaking dissector of theoretical tangles, and an insightful reader of dramatic texts. Eschewing the ahistoricism of some psychoanalytic applications, she pursues the thesis that ‘Shakespearean drama represents erotic desire as constituted within a complex and contradictory social field’ (p. 2) by suggesting the ways in which early modern institutions (the household), practices (wet-nursing, breeching), and ideologies (the one-sex model, female chastity) might affect and effect psychic development. However, Desire and Anxiety does not always delineate those complex and contradictory aspects of the social upon which the construction of the psychic purportedly depends. Although its titular notion of ‘circulation’ is indebted to Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations, Traub’s book lacks the ‘thick description’ of culture that characterizes new historicist work. Since the book examines virtually no early modern texts aside from Shakespeare, it can not reconstruct the (contested) cultural ideologies and practices through which we are asked to understand the psychic experience of eroticism in Shakespeare’s plays. For instance, while chapter 2 justifiably calls for a recognition of the ‘actual experiences of mothering’ (p. 68), the only early modern ‘maternal’ figures actually discussed in the analysis of the Henriad are figurative: Falstaff and Queen Elizabeth. The interactions of actual mothers and children in early modern England remain unconsidered. More problematically, however, the discussions of male subjectivity in the Henriad and Troilus and Cressida rely on generalizations about nationalism and militarism—generalizations that elide the kinds of conflict that Traub is elsewhere at pains to expose. Traub observes of Henry V that ‘the phallus and military might are mutually constitutive’ and that nationalism is gender marked (masculine England/feminine France); she claims during her discussion of Troilus and Cressida that ‘the actuality of battle abolishes all difference in indiscriminate carnage’ (p. 85). But Henry V reveals masculine English ‘nationality’ to be fractured among Welsh, Scots, and Irish men (e.g. MacMorris’s ‘What ish my nation?’); it dramatizes the conflict between poor soldiers and King within the English military; and it shows the King maintaining social distinctions among the carnage as he announces the death of four noblemen and ‘none else of name’. Therefore, while Desire and

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Anxiety successfully exposes the contradictions within gender/sexual ideologies, it risks essentializing or homogenizing certain aspects of the social, hence making male subjectivity seem more monolithic and easily constituted than such political and ideological rifts between men and within ‘the masculine’ would suggest it was. I hope to have made clear that Homosexual Desire, Sodomy and Interpretation, and Desire and Anxiety, especially when read against each other, significantly advance our understanding of early modern homoeroticism and its relevance to students of English literature, history, and lesbian/ gay theory. I want to close this review by surveying those areas that these books, implicitly or explicitly, open up for subsequent work. Any treatment of homoeroticism in Renaissance literature must first determine which texts will be included and excluded in ‘Renaissance literature’. Smith and Traub make Shakespeare the defining presence of their studies, whereas for Bredbeck Shakespeare’s texts remain central in the passage from Marlowe to Milton. These books initiate the crucial project of demonstrating the significance of homoeroticism in canonical authors, but there are other familiar texts in which marginalized sexualities have not been often remarked—The New Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, Jacobean city comedies. And Barnfield’s poetry deserves further attention, not just as the foil to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. These books afford the opportunity to rediscover and reassess unfamiliar texts as well, especially since critical homophobia has contributed to the obscurity of figures like Barnfield. Although Bredbeck’s choice to ‘strategically essentialize’ male homoeroticism has its advantages, we need to identify and examine the rare textual manifestations of female homoeroticism in canonical and unfamiliar authors and texts (e.g. Donne’s ‘Sapho to Philaenis’, travel narratives). Though Smith and especially Bredbeck discuss treatments of Edward II’s reign, neither mentions Elizabeth Cary’s The History of… Edward II (1627). The rare perspective of a woman writer on this topic, while historically important in itself, might suggest the theoretical advantages of examining the effects of male homoerotic bonding on women.10 It is crucial to follow Traub’s call to explore the articulations and dis-articulations between gender and sexuality, since an appreciation of early modern constructions of masculinity and femininity will also elucidate the significance of complexly gendered and sexed subjects like ‘effeminate men’ and ‘hermaphroditic women’. Finally, work remains to be done on the relation between discursive and historical change, especially in regard to Jacobean and Caroline literature. Neither Smith, who claims that Shakespeare’s Sonnets of 1609 were no longer homoerotically intelligible by 1640, nor Bredbeck, who discusses few texts published between the Sonnets and Paradise Regained (1671), explains what transformed the epistemology of homoeroticism between Shakespeare and Milton. We might fruitfully ask what political, economic, or social changes accompanied the multiplication and stigmatization of homoerotic discourses between 1590 and 1650.

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That these three authors so persistently pursue homoerotic readings of Renaissance literature and create the conditions for further projects to be pursued in turn is a tribute to their political timeliness, intellectual generosity, and theoretical daring. A decade ago, Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England was the only book of its kind. Isolated but authoritative, brief but comprehensive, it defined the subject for historians, literary critics, and gay readers alike. With radically different approaches, Smith, Bredbeck, and Traub have collectively invigorated the increasingly complex and polyvocal critical discourse about early modern homoeroticism. They have also challenged us to imagine, interpret, and circulate homoerotic meanings in new ways, whether we read them in early modern or postmodern cultures. Columbia University NOTES For their advice and criticism, I would like to thank Jean Howard, David Scott Kastan, Nicholas Radel, and James Shapiro. 1 Edward Stein, ‘Conclusions: The essentials of constructionism and the construction of essentialism’, in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 2 See the essays of John Boswell, ‘Revolutions, universals, and sexual categories’, and David M.Halperin, ‘Sex before sexuality: Pederasty, politics, and power in classical Athens’, in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman et al. (New York: Penguin-Meridian, 1990). Edward Stein’s anthology reprints many important essays in this debate. 3 See Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Against Nature’, in Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram, 1991). Diana Fuss lucidly analyses the essentialism of anti-essentialist approaches in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). 4 Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982). Mary Mclntosh’s classic essay ‘The homosexual role’ (reprinted in Forms of Desire) made this point in 1968. 5 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press 1985), esp. pp. 83–8; James M.Saslow, ‘Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, identity, and artistic expression’, in Hidden from History, esp. pp. 96–7; Randolph Trumbach, ‘Sodomitical subcultures, sodomitical roles, and the gender revolution of the eighteenth century: The recent historiography’, in ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 116–18. 6 Smith reviews Bredbeck in ‘Essential constructions: Are Shakespeare’s “boy poems” erotic?’, Lambda Book Report, 3.3 (March/April 1991), pp. 31–2 (gay/nonacademic); Traub reviews both Smith and Bredbeck in ‘“Fisting each other’s throat”: Interpreting homoeroticism in Renaissance England’, Lesbian and Gay

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7

8

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Studies Newsletter, 19.2 (July 1992), pp. 20–2 (gay/academic); Bredbeck reviews Smith in Shakespeare Yearbook, forthcoming (non-gay/academic). Those who doubt the relevance of this insight to our world need only observe the recent American presidential election, with gays and lesbians reluctantly embraced by the ‘inclusive’ Democrats as an oppressed minority ‘just like’ others, and venomously rejected by the ‘moral’ Republicans as the absolute other to ‘family values’. If Smith’s Homosexual Desire accepts philosopher Michael Ruse’s claim that ‘homosexual desire exists in all cultures’ (p. 17), Bredbeck questions the very notion of desire, quoting approvingly from Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire: ‘Just like heterosexual desire, homosexual desire is an arbitrarily frozen frame in an unbroken and polyvocal flux’ (p. 95). Traub, for whom homoerotic desire is implicit within the polymorphously perverse psyche, more fully discusses this difference between Smith and Bredbeck in her review. Smith’s review perceptively discusses this matter. See Tina Krontiris, ‘Style and gender in Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II’, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M.Haselkorn and Betty S.Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).

Futures for feminist history RACHEL BOWLBY

• Jane Gallop, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 288 pp., £35.00 (hardback), £10.99 (paperback) • Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 208 pp., £30.00 (hardback), £9.99 (paperback) • Elaine Showalter, Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 208 pp., £22.50 (hardback) In families of three children, so they say, there is always the odd one out. Here, with the pairing obvious between MacCannell’s ‘brother’ and Showalter’s ‘sister’, there would seem to be little doubt that it must be poor Jane. So where does she fit in? ‘Around 1981’? Not much to write home about there. ‘Academic Feminist Literary Theory’? So this one has grown up, it seems, and left the family for good. In fact, she tells us in no uncertain terms that we should all try to follow suit: ‘lf we are going to understand our relation to the academic institution within which we think and teach and speak, we need to recognize its specific dynamics which are obscured in the recourse to familial metaphor’ (p. 239). The odd one out is always left till last (even though that may also mean she triumphs in the end). So I will defer my reading of Gallop until her siblings have been dealt with. In the meantime, it is the brother, of course, who demands attention first—not just any older brother, in fact, but (to give him his proper name) the Brother. Juliet Flower MacCannell maintains the upper case throughout her discussion of what she calls the Regime of the Brother—a familial, or at least pseudo-familial state, upon which we —western we—have collectively and unknowingly entered since the time of the Enlightenment. Unlike the other two histories in this trio of books, this one involves a very grand narrative, in effect a rewrite of the history of the past two hundred years, with proof furnished by literature (much on Rousseau and Duras, also Stendhal, James, Rhys, Cixous, and even John Galsworthy); a bit of Freud and Lacan; and

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the occasional state-of-the-network paragraph to remind us where we worldhistorically are. What happened, according to MacCannell, is that around 1791, patri archy (remember patriarchy?) died a death, unnoticed and unanalysed by all except a few astute authors. But it didn’t just die, something took its place: the Regime of the Brother. Patriarchy wasn’t great, but the Regime of the Brother is worse because it is a fake: a simulation of an order that at least had the merit of granting to women some kind of value, which they have subsequently lost. In Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, for instance: The patriarchal system, in which women have some exchange value is altered so that any woman…can be immediately exchanged for any other, the woman now has not even a minimal value. And no place at all— swirled on and off a dance floor. (p. 167) (Dancing, in fact, has had anything but a negative place in feminist representations—think of Annette Kolodny’s ‘Dancing through the minefields’,1 or Christie V.McDonald’s famous interview with Derrida, ‘Choreographies’.)2 MacCannell’s basic proposition, a cogent one, is that something in the forms of human identifications changed with the emergence of the democratic ideals of equality and fraternity which has yet to be negotiated and which is wrongly assimilated to the forms of patriarchy, even though these are constantly evoked in the new structure. But the trouble with the story is that it is too simple. There is a before-and-after narrative which, because it is cast in the form of a relative decline, has the effect of implying that if women didn’t have it so good under patriarchy, at least they had it better than they do now. This amounts to a peculiar reversal of two hundred years of feminist struggles, reducing both equal rights and claims of difference to the same thing, the same nothing: once upon a time, there was ‘the minimal identity the woman had under patriarchy’, which she then ‘lost completely under fraternity’ (p. 174). All is lost, but all is not lost: for the task now—‘After the new Regime’, as the final chapter has it—is nothing less than ‘programming a new Symbolic for our time’ (p. 183). But if the woman has dropped off the screen altogether, it’s hard to see how she might possibly be reactivated or relaunched for the future—or what would be the interest in doing so for whatever non-subjects are currently scanning the networks. MacCannell clearly does want a new woman and a new symbolic (though she doesn’t—who could?—tell us where to get them)—and in fact, despite the stress on what has changed beyond recognition, there have been some real people with real wishes knocking about, in novels and elsewhere, all along: The modern daughter has no mother…. Without a mother, can a daughter hope to form and formulate her own wishes, can she articulate her right to

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demand the love she, like any human being (but she in particular because she’s been so long denied it) needs? (p. 147) Whatever happens, there will be and have been human beings with a need for love—a comforting thought in a world without a Symbolic. MacCannell certainly provides maternal, if not phallic-maternal food for thought, in proffering her rewritten post-patriarchal story, with some stimulating readings along the way. Showalter’s Sister’s Choice is altogether a more conventionally homely affair, reassuring and enlightening in its discussions of American women writers, some well-known and some less so, within historical contexts ranging from American culture to feminist criticism to AIDS, all of them ultimately pxogressive, evolutionary stories. Like Gallop, Elaine Showalter —though in a very different style —is invariably a pleasure to read. Gallop in fact has a few rueful words, somewhere between annoyance and admiration, about a Showalter she sees as a kind of big-sister queen of the mainstream, forever popping up to endorse new ideas at just the point when they are making their way to the centre. In this book, based on lectures at Oxford University in, not around, 1989, quilting and piecework provide the organizing metaphor and theme, sewn up with Showalter’s characteristic elegance in a celebration of the monumental American AIDS quilt. For Showalter, this signifies not only loss, but the possibility for a once female tradition to be deployed in the making of a new kind of cultural symbol for an America that can no longer be viewed as all of a piece. In the same way, American women’s writing is now ‘exploding, multi-cultural, contradictory, and dispersed’ (p. 175) where once it appeared as a unified tradition. Showalter’s title, alluding to a quilt that features in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, well exemplifies a movement in feminist criticism identified by Gallop, whereby issues of race, and black women’s writing, have moved to the centre of feminist critical debate. Showalter is well aware, as her first chapter documents, of recent destabilizations of assumptions about the writing of national literary histories. Her own story of American women’s writing ends in a fitting fragmentation, but it still begins in a happy nineteenth-century idyll, later glossed as ‘the heyday of the female world of love and ritual’ (p. 155). This world, where mothers and daughters like each other, and the women all quilt away when they are not tossing off the odd best-seller, is rudely breached by ‘cultural pressures’ (p. 15)— no, not from men, but actually from the girls themselves: Women’s culture was breaking down from the inside as early as the 1870s, when relationships between mothers and daughters became strained as daughters pressed for education, work, mobility, sexual autonomy, and power outside the female sphere. (p. 15)

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Nothing would ever be so simple again; and by now, feminists have to deal with a wholly different and diverse weave, ‘attentive to the articulation of gender, race, and class; and aware that women’s writing is produced within a complex intertextual network’ (pp. 17–18); ‘writing the womanist novel in the contemporary United States is an exercise of sister’s choice within a complex cultural network’ (p. 20). So Showalter’s concern is not especially with discovering in earlier periods an unsuspected complexity made visible through the more fretted cultural or textual networks that cannot be ignored today. She is happy to acknowledge new questions and complications, but swift as well to map them back into a fairly stable story. Even though the contents, in her own astute reconstructions over the past ten years or so, have willingly been extended and redrawn, the basic developmental structure of Showalter’s feminist histories has not itself succumbed to pressure. Which, of course, is part of what always makes her such a winning writer. Gallop’s book, as its title suggests, is modest in its ambitions and minute in its details. ‘Around 1981’ refers to what Gallop sees as a turning-point in American feminist literary theory; her book is orchestrated through a sequence of close readings of feminist anthologies she takes as symptomatic landmarks on or close to the main historical line she perceives from her own position several years afterwards. Broadly speaking, the major thematic move in the concerns of feminist criticism is the arrival of race as a question inseparable from that of sex, while the major move in the context of such debates has been feminism’s passage from outsider to institutional insider. The two kinds of change overlap, unequally, in a third which is summarized as a shift within criticism from psychical to historical concerns: less about mothers and more about institutions. As always, Gallop is a good read, and a good reader. With only the rarest touch of tedium, she manages to bring to life early anthologies of a kind that were always already considered dead, consigned to the regulation dismissive paragraph in later write-ups of the history of feminist theory from early naivetes to the fortunately more sophisticated present. She is adept in pushing away at buried assumptions and their implications, or showing how some interesting questions go under, to await their retrieval and reformulation on the surface of a field that has meanwhile been thoroughly replanted. Such, for instance, is the issue of whether feminist criticism should be ‘prescriptive’, and what would constitute the authority of any suggestion that it should. That the prescription for prescription, mooted but not explicated in the seventies, was ignored or derided in the eighties, Gallop sees as symptomatic of a general feminist turn in the earlier decade from critique to celebration. By and large, critics stopped debunking patriarchal writers and started exploring the literary heritage of women. Now, in the context of new and different political objectives, the question of prescriptive criticism can once again—or perhaps for the first time—be treated seriously.

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Gallop is rightly sceptical about what she calls the ‘disavowal of the academic’ (p. 4) on the part of those who prefer to see themselves and feminism as marginal, even when their publishing and teaching is funded or enabled by institutions of higher education. But she doesn’t have much to say about the nonacademic histories impinging upon academic feminism, or, conversely, about academic feminism’s involvement (or not) with those. No doubt Gallop wanted to avoid a simple model of determination which would make academic debates appear as superstructural, ivory-tower effects of events in some ‘wider’ and supposedly separable world. But the chronological specification of ‘around 1981’ seems to cry out for the addition or incorporation of some history that is more than anthological—or at least for some speculation as to what form such a supplement might take. Whether the various changes that Gallop narrates mean that feminism is growing up—and whether it should or could be—is a question that she leaves to one side, though she gestures towards an ethics of feminist criticism through history: I want to understand why we are located here, how we got here, what we sacrificed to get here, what we gained: all as preliminaries to the question of how do we do the most good, as feminists, as social and cultural critics, speaking from this location. (P. 5) Accompanying this noble wish is a worry about time and speed. The ‘acceleration in critical fashions…forces upon us an awareness of living in history’ (p. 3), and history effectively dwindles to the fleeting moment: I want to stress the pain of history for those of us trying to produce knowledge. Even if we have no illusions or beliefs in the enduring, we want our understandings to last at least until they can be written, published, and read. This book, which took too long to write, not only passes through two different theoretical formations but around 1989 begins to feel the pressure of a third and grows increasingly anxious as I push to get it done and out before its power of strategic intervention is lost, before it enters a configuration different than the one for/in which it was written. (P. 4) But everything that follows in Gallop’s book testifies to a different model of time, one in which the power of a text to intervene is not limited to the moment of its publication, any more than its effects and influences can be known—or prescribed—in advance. Gallop’s rereadings of the past two decades of feminist criticism show that it is not ephemeral: its meanings are still changing in unpredicted and unprescribed contexts, and still open to argument which in turn bears upon and is part of contemporary feminist debates. The same will be true

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of her own study: whether or not it hits the spot she intended or expected, it will have modified our understanding of the critical history of feminism, and thus our sense of its possible futures too. University of Sussex NOTES 1 Kolodny’s piece pirouettes across to our other two authors as well, since Showalter anthologized it and Gallop’s book discusses it. See Annette Kolodny, ‘Dancing through the minefield: Some observations on the theory, practice, and politics of a feminist literary criticism’ (1980), reprinted in Elaine Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 2 Jacques Derrida and Christie V.McDonald, ‘Choreographies’, Diacritics, 12, 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 66–76.

Reviews

SIMON SHEPHERD

• Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Bodyguards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 400 pp., £40.00 (hardback), £12.90 (paperback) • Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 500 pp., £25.00 (hardback) Leaning over the balcony last New Year’s Eve in the local gay club was a man dressed as a woman. Full glass in one hand, streamer-popper in the other, handbag under the arm, lips pursed, he was waiting, meticulously poised, like in the ads, for the midnight hour. He seemed unaware that he was engaging the interest of modern gender studies. And certainly the rest of the skins, ravers and leather fetishists didn’t at that time know that this preciously poised figure ‘opens up’, according to Marjorie Garber, ‘the whole question of the relationship of the aesthetic to the existential’. Whether the party-popper belonged to the aesthetic or the existential is maybe a moot point. But nevertheless that cross-dressed figure apparently has a key cultural role which Garber calls ‘“category crisis”, disrupting and calling attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances’ (Garber, pp. 71, 16). The gender-ambiguous figure has a special power, I learn, to unfix the fixed, whether it’s Renaissance hermaphrodites or modern transsexuals, whom Sandy Stone wants to see as ‘a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored’ (Epstein and Straub, p. 296). Stone’s emphasis is on potential not yet achieved and on ‘productive’ disruption: she has an idea of political negotiation and cultural process which is absent from Garber’s assumption that the transvestite is—always already alright —‘a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture’. And, at the same time, ‘the transvestite makes culture possible…there can be no culture without the transvestite’ (Garber, pp. 17, 34). This sexual figure is pretty magical since, merely by waiving a wand (a Garber-type pun), s/he can simultaneously confound culture and make it possible. I think we’ve discovered a postmodern nineties version of one of those ideologically privileged figures who periodically

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emerge within the processes of sexual politics. For example, in debates around sado-masochism at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in the mid-eighties, moral authority was claimed, as of natural right, by women who announced themselves as lesbian mothers, and condemned sado-masochism in speeches which as it were naturalized the right. In some current debates around bisexuality in relation to the lesbian and gay movement, bisexual activists claim the special position of a sexuality beyond categories, so to speak a noncategorical imperative. Which brings us back to the transvestite or hermaphrodite as privileged unfixer of categories, unique ‘category crisis’. Activism has to find ways of authorizing its voice. Frequently it does so by claiming special identity. For some gay civil rights campaigns a sense of immutable homosexuality was/is deemed necessary (though as Halley’s essay on United States legal cases points out, this can be risky in law). The political needs here run counter to a concept that all gender and sexual identities are culturally constructed. As Eve Sedgwick says elsewhere, however, each notion of identity, whether ‘essential’ or ‘constructed’, has its political value and the two are interdependent. That’s a useful dialectical model, but it’s destroyed in arguments which want to privilege a particular identity on the grounds that it alone demonstrates how everything is constructed. For such an argument pays lipservice to the concept of universal constructedness of gender while actually operating a pecking order of authentic minorities. The mechanism which replaces dialectical thought with a focus on authoritative minorities is enabled, I would guess, because ‘essence’ and ‘construction’ are focused on the same place, namely identity. Now the fix on identity here comes, as I understand it, from a type of Foucauldian gospel which holds that after 1869 (annus mirror-bliss!) we all—eventually—thought in terms of sexual identities. Before then we merely did sexual practices. That chronological break obscures what I suspect remains current, which is that in sexual thinking the real opposition is not between essence and construction but between sexual identity and sexual practice. In their introduction to Bodyguards the editors, Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, say: At the same time as we want to flag the pliancy of anatomic and biological categories and the impossibility of empirical conscription, we also want to keep more apparently cultural notions separate: erotic desire shades into but cannot be equated with sexual practice, for example. Sexuality and gender identity also do not necessarily have clear points of cohesion. These perceptions are elaborated in some of the more interesting essays in the Bodyguards collection. In her discussion of the relations of sex and gender, Judith Shapiro sets ‘Euro-American transsexualism’ alongside other ‘gender crossing’ cultures. She notes that in Oman ‘the differential categorization of xanith and “men” indicates that the sex act takes priority over the sexual organs for purposes of establishing gender status’; whereas for Euro-American

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transsexualism ‘the cultural current moves individuals toward an experience of essential and unchanging gender that is an intrinsic part of an essential and chronologically continuous self’. It is against this cultural current that Sandy Stone invokes ‘the possibility of a life grounded in the intertextual possibilities of the transsexual body’; and against it also is Valerie Traub’s refusal to answer the question ‘What is a “lesbian”?’ For to answer that is ‘to fix that which is fundamentally unstable, to immobilize what is in fact a shifting field of only temporarily meaningful significations’. Her reading of the film Black Widow specifically resists the common conflation of ‘gender identification and erotic desire’, a conflation which elides erotic practice (Epstein and Straub, pp. 3, 265, 296, 305, 307). As I was propping up the wall one night at the Sadie Maisie Club, I noticed a lesbian in full leather approach a gay man wearing boots, body harness and dog collar (I hesitate to specify this was not the clerical sort…). Using his whip, the woman began to beat the man’s naked arse. A small audience, mainly female, gathered. After the beating he briefly licked her boots. Then he stood up, they smiled and had a dance. The audience drifted away. Was this, I wondered, gender ambiguity, cross-dressing, heterosexuality? It was a practice but was it erotic, and where did the dancing fit in? That little episode involved negotiation of trust, sexual pleasure with another, production of sociability. None of these elements floats around the memory of the cross-dressed man leaning over the balcony on New Year’s Eve. Those hands with the party-popper and filled glass held all the proper apparatus for the appropriate conduct of the planned carnival. In this highly individual show the ostended hand gestures indicated not eager anticipation but completeness of equipment, a performance of the propriety of joyous waiting. Together with the meticulously pursed lips, the whole pose sought to anchor within itself not only a gender identity but a class and moral identity. I have my doubts that I was in the presence of something which not only confounds culture but makes it possible. Instead of the subversive play with gender category I think I saw the uninhibited reproduction of the repressed petty-bourgeois propriety that has since childhood dogged so many millions of us. A similar feeling comes out of Stone’s quotation from Jan Morris: ‘I feel small and neat. I am not small in fact, and not terribly neat either, but femininity conspires to make me feel so…. My red and white bangles give me a racy feel, my bag matches my shoes and makes me feel well organized…. When I walk out into the street I feel consciously ready for the world’s appraisal, in a way that I never felt as a man.’ (Epstein and Straub, p. 286) Stone suggests that this sort of transsexual pleasure reinforces a binary mode of gender identification, which corresponds with Shapiro’s point that many transsexuals are ‘highly conformist’ once they have arrived at being women and

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men. That conformism would seem to relate not merely to gender but to an achieved propriety, an enacted orderliness, where all the correct accoutrements display the subject’s ability to live neatly, by the rules. In order to have the correct accoutrements you often have to have money. Morris’s description of the Casablanca clinic that ‘reassigned’ his gender reeks of wealth; many of the photos of cross-dressed women in Garber’s book show the expensive costumes of upper-class men. This doesn’t mean that only the rich may get away with cross-dressing, but it does mean that while androgyny or transvestism may shake up gender categories, they can accommodate themselves happily to class ones. For instance, Greg Kates claims that the Chevalier d’Eon’s passage to womanhood constituted ‘a critique of bourgeois notions about the meaning of sexual differences’; the Chevalier’s ideas about gender derived from a disappearing ancien régime which had ‘certain concepts about gender that stemmed from its aristocracy’ (Epstein and Straub, p. 170). What also stemmed from that aristocracy was a great deal of violent repression: the gender discourse simultaneously valorizes that class while effacing the bourgeois determinant on transvestite identity. When it privileges a sexual identity as unique figure of gender subversion or category crisis, academic discourse threatens to dislocate sexuality from social power structures. As the editors of Bodyguards put it: ‘The temptation is to reify ambiguity and to celebrate the disruption of binary oppositions without asking concrete questions about how power is distributed through that disruption or ambiguity’ (Epstein and Straub, p. 23). This reification is the more serious because ‘the political left of critical theory could be said to be in the midst of a long love affair with the subversive potential of gender ambiguity’ (p. 7). Epstein and Straub ask why there is an obsession with ambiguity; and furthermore, very properly, ask about the ‘academic politics’ their own book showcases. They see the book as part of a struggle to define and control the gendered body, where that body’s very materiality has been thrust to our attention through the AIDS pandemic. That concern for the politics of our academic projects is to be respected (and it is not to be confused with academically fashionable self-reflexivity which is a sort of belle-lettrism for the nineties). The politics of the ‘body’ can also, however, admit of a more cynical reading. For the body has been culturally foregrounded in earlier periods, for example in the factory conditions of early industrialism. Then it produced more discourses around poverty and class than around gender. The current interest in sex ambiguity comes at a time not simply of AIDS but also of the supposed collapse of credibility of Marxism as both social goal and explanatory theory. Thus when the ‘political left of critical theory’ wants to discover, and so stage, subversion, it finds its materials in ambiguity rather than in class injustice. It is of course symptomatic that we now use words like ‘subversion’ and ‘dissidence’ where once we might have talked of revolution…which everybody now knows is silly. The rise of gender studies in the academy is both a triumph over years of nasty silence and repression and at

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the same time a new route into a worryingly disengaged academic praxis. As Epstein and Straub suggest, it’s not enough merely to find an ambiguity. People did that in the New Critical fifties, when there were seven types: what we don’t now need is an eighth one. The fault doesn’t lie with gender studies as discipline. Every discipline has to resist the forces which seek to accommodate it to political quietism. This means restlessly inspecting its own orthodoxies and its relation to dominant culture. Two examples may illustrate my point. The first is the essay by Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass on the hermaphrodite in the Renaissance. Renaissance studies has been a very fast growth area, with a very short memory. It repeatedly shows how the ‘early modern’ pre-figured the modern in thinking of identities and genders as constructed. This essay’s discovery of the expected point takes precedence over empirical rigour. Quotations are misinterpreted, a crucial word in the argument (‘degenerate’) is misunderstood, and some of the history seems inaccurate. For instance, Long Meg of Westminster and Moll Cutpurse, both ‘mannish’ women, are said to be sexually depraved; the authors seem to have got this notion from a poor essay by Frederick Waage, which in its turn seems to have no consciousness that the material had already been worked over by several people several years earlier; the notion of sexual depravity here is, empirically, dubious. But the orthodoxy about Renaissance gender, selective and shortmemoried, is thus reproduced. Part of the pressure to be short-memoried and orthodox comes from the demand not simply to publish but to publish well. This means at worst supplying publishers with whatever is currently fashionable, and at best making the crossover from academic monograph to best-seller. And since sex currently sells well, gender studies become a bridge from ivory tower to market-place. Garber’s Vested Interests wants to be such a book. Its prose is witty, leisured, cultured, lightweight, pretentious, repetitive: a card-index book cross-dressed as a weekend colour supplement. One of those displays of an author’s ability to impute and unite like with unlike (we’re fortunate that none such became electricians)… I learnt that in Peter Pan Captain Hook is the equivalent of a pantomime dame, and that Barrie was both Hook and Wendy. And that the figure of the wolf is all over the ‘text of transvestism’: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a story by Christa Wolf, an alias of the Chevalier d’Eon was William Wolff, and Freud’s Wolf-man had two dentists called Dr Wolf…to which one might add that Wolf-gang Mozart has an opera with a man played by a woman, Albert Wolff was once art critic of the Figaro (which is the name of Wolfgang’s opera), Dances with Wolves is a film about native North Americans whose culture includes the berdache, and that Mary Wolstonecraft was thought not very womanly—or has my card-index misfiled? There are lots of inaccuracies and misreadings, but perhaps most important is that the topic of cross-dressing loses all precision. Is Axl Rose in a skirt crossdressed? And does that mean the same thing as Erasure cross-dressed? What are the differences between the naked navels of Ziggy Stardust, Alice Cooper and

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Iggy Pop? The adolescent boys adapting their street clothes to look more like Ziggy at the farewell tour were not feminizing themselves. Metal fans in mascara are no more trying to look like women—even if they are women—than are Kiss. We need a theory of the performed body which shows how conventions of performance produce ostensions and readings; and how the performer is expected to be spectacularized (the fan who asked Paul McCartney on Ready Steady Go if he plucked his eyebrows…). To collapse all this back into crossdressing seems precisely to be trapped into that wicked binary; and to be more concerned with gender identities than with performance and practice. Bodyguards gets us further along the road than Garber’s (we can all play this game) garbled book ever could: but neither really tells me about the dyke’s pleasure at Sadie Maisie. University of Nottingham

DEREK DUNCAN

• Joseph Bristow (ed.), Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 262 pp., £35. 00 (hardback), £10.99 (paperback) In his introduction Joseph Bristow attempts to define the parameters of the volume and in a broader sense those of the emergent discipline of Lesbian and Gay Studies. The collection sets out to interrogate the expression and articulation of same-sex desire in the work of a number of writers in the hundred or so years since the advent of ‘homosexuality’ as a medical and legal category. These writers range from the canonical (Virginia Woolf and E.M.Forster) to the less well-known but never totally obscure (Michael Field and Joan Nestle). The contributors are themselves all ‘in English’ and their selection of texts reflects the linguistic confines of their discipline, perhaps as a result placing an artificially narrow limit on the notion of Lesbian and Gay Studies. As the editor notes, the distribution of men and women, both as contributors and writers, is roughly equal. Differences of class and ethnicity are also acknowledged, but to a lesser degree. After Jonathan Dollimore’s opening theoretical chapter on the concept of perversion, the essays are arranged in broadly chronological order beginning with the late nineteenth-century writings of Field and Wilde and concluding with essays on the theatre of Joe Orton and the erotica of Nestle. This arrangement effectively allows the reader an insight into the historically divergent ways in which same-sex desire has been represented and thought about. Such attention to history provides a necessary interpretive framework for a collection of essays demonstrating divergent and conflicting relations to the feminist thought which is its main resource. These troublesome relations are in part a consequence of the difficult notion of ‘lesbian and gay writing’. Too often, as Bristow notes, the ‘and’ in this formulation has been inadequately understood so that the differently constructed same-sex desires of men and women have been subsumed under an allencompassing ‘homosexuality’ which fails to do justice to the diverse desires, histories, perspectives and experiences of lesbians and of gay men; different in

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relation to each other as well in their oblique opposition to heterosexuality. One effect of enforcing this separation is however that none of the contributors oversteps the demarcation line of sexual difference by writing about an author of the other gender. Only Chris White in her essay on Michael Field acknowledges a possible link on an experiential or discursive level between lesbians and gay men as she explores the transformations through which a classical model of primarily male homosexuality became the vehicle for women in the late nineteenth century to communicate their desire for each other. Nevertheless, there is little trace of essentialism here, other than residually, as a strategic phenomenon. White wonders whether Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the two women who wrote jointly as Michael Field, were ‘lesbians in any recognisable sense’. John Fletcher begins his essay on Maurice, Forster’s classic gay novel, by warning against anachronistic readings of author and text. Terry Castle, in her essay on Sylvia Townsend Warner, asks the blunt but fundamental question: ‘What is a lesbian text?’ The difficulty in coming to know such an unstable object is one of the things which makes this collection so compelling. While Castle argues that a ‘lesbian’ text is one which subverts and parodies the heterosexist canon and its homosocial structures, a more common starting-point in the determination of lesbian or gay textuality is a knowledge of the author’s sexuality. The fact that this knowledge has often remained concealed or has been discredited indicates that the biographical imprint and its relation to forbidden desire are not transparent processes. In the light of this, Sherron Knopp convincingly demonstrates the necessity of taking into account the relationship between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West when reading Orlando even (especially) if the text does not thematize lesbian desire in any obvious sense. Diana Collecott writes of the ‘limitations of understanding biography as event’ as she reveals the power of biographical knowledge to go beyond both the direct censorship of lesbian desire and, in lyric poetry, the insidious anonymity of the personal pronoun which encourages conventional expectation to ignore the possibility of same-sex desire, yet lets the already informed reader glean its masked inscription. This question of the already known creates problems for the contribu tors. The thrilling, yet often risky, task of decoding the arcane inscriptions of homosexuality and homosexual identity cannot rely on the command of a fixed, immutable set of signs. In its short history homosexuality has shown itself to be remarkably resistant to any single discursive formation finding its expression through an enormous variety of culturally diverse articulations. If biographical revelation is (too) often the stimulus for a lesbian or gay reading, the temptations of such a facile epistemology are soon rejected by the contributors in favour of more cautious attention to the ways in which the subject in writing finds expression for same-sex desire through discourses which may initially seem oppressive, or superficially, inappropriate. The clearest example of this is the adoption of the classical, Greek model of homosexuality as a means of validating its contemporary manifestation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

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centuries. David Bergman notes how this discourse also translated into the gay African-American context as writers sought to affirm their sexuality and ethnicity through reference to a classical African heritage. Claire Whatling argues the need to understand the achievements of these ways of speaking about same-sex desire rather than dismissing them, in retrospect, as misguided. She investigates the terms and possibilities of the lesbian butch/femme code and insists on its historical value in allowing lesbians to begin to articulate their desire. The shifting parameters of sexual desires and identities reveal the impossibility of locating any authentic lesbian or gay voice, text, or reading. As Liz Yorke stresses in her essay on lesbian poetics, it is not authenticity which is at stake but rather the quest of rendering intelligible the challenge of sexual sameness ‘to the regulatory practices of patriarchal discursive systems’. The avowed contingency of versions of sexual sameness resists an overarching interpretation of the book’s title. Within sameness there remains (multiple) difference. The language of Greek love, for example, may well have proved liberating to an educated, Victorian elite, yet it could only reify the workingclass youths so extravagantly and outrageously invoked by Wilde as supporting him during his trial (cited by Bristow). In a telling postscript to the final essay in the collection Whatling acknowledges her failure to perceive the role of Nestle’s own sense of Jewishness in creating a textual voice which is not only lesbian. Diana Collecott reminds us of the importance of material factors in allowing freedom of sexual expression, underlining Alan Sinfield’s broader point that the task of lesbian and gay criticism is to produce a ‘recognition of oppression’ rather than to celebrate gleefully the rediscovery of a lost past or to exhibit mere intellectual virtuosity. The deeply political nature of the collection is made plain by the editor in both the introduction and in his outstanding essay ‘Wilde, Dorian Gray, and gross indecency’. Here Bristow details the intimate interconnectedness of state legislation and aesthetic practice as he demonstrates how a legal injunction, ostensibly against homosexual acts, was imbricated in a discourse on the divides of social class and countered by the rhetoric of aphorism. Five of the eleven essays in this volume have already appeared in a special edition of Textual Practice. Expanded in this form, the collection is a substantial contribution to a major, new discipline. University of Bristol

JOSEPH BRISTOW

• Peter Middleton, Thc Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modcrn Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 250 pp., £35. 00 (hardback), £10.99 (paperback) The personal, as feminism insists, is unarguably political. But what when it becomes reflexive for its own sake? In her introductory essay to Getting Personal (1991), Nancy K.Miller identifies the subversive intent of writing in a critical mode that amounts to what she calls a ‘personal materialism’. ‘Personal writing’, claims Miller, ‘theorizes the stakes of its own performance.’ It can create embarrassment for the reader, she insists, because it ‘blows the cover off the impersonal as a masquerade of self-effacement’. Such a style, in other words, may serve to accentuate the vested interests involved in intellectual work, reminding us—lest we remain ignorant of the fact—that every academic declaration is a political act. But no sooner has Miller asserted this than she adds the important caveat that ‘personal criticism is only as good as its practitioners’. To be sure, critics intent on consciously situating their subjectivities are perhaps not as inspiring as the autobiographical ‘I’ might tempt some of them to believe. The charge of individualistic self-display is surely one that could be levelled at a great many academics who have recently staked rather large claims on the advantages of foregrounding what Miller underlines as one’s ‘position of representativity’. More disturbing still is the emotive form that ‘personal criticism’ can take when it chooses merely to express directly its feeling on the bases, it would seem, of little more than impulse. The personal is never very far from becoming anti-intellectual. Bad habits have certainly been formed in this recent address to one’s identity, particularly by those who speak from positions of considerable institutional privilege. At their worst, such highly intimate and confessional life stories turn into near-identical narratives that report predictably on how these intellectuals became the special subjects of their present performances. The self-interrogating ‘I’, instead of locating itself within a larger field of historical forces, adopts what Peter Middleton terms an ‘inward gaze’ to become the universal subject of a dubiously innovative ‘personal criticism’. In turning in upon himself, Middleton

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aims to counteract the ‘cultivated occlusion of self-reflection’ that characterizes not only traditional academic discourse but, more to the point, the whole of modern manhood. But the problem for this ambitious book, one that adopts much of its thinking from forms of therapy and counselling, is that the ‘inward gaze’ encourages a type of introspection that really does not need to look that deep inside. What it finds there has, in any case, been listed time and again by the likes of Robert Bly. Only in its final and most rewarding chapter does Middleton manage to discover theoretical tools that will get him beyond chanting the mantra of men’s studies —which is that men are out of touch with their feelings, especially those they wish to express between one another. Rather than travel deeper into the unknown of their bleak Martian psyches, straight-identified men must be encouraged to come out and start being a little more open about the speclfic kind of masculinity they embody. Gay men and bisexual men have set not a few precedents in this regard. Equipped with wide-ranging examples from cultural theory, psycho-analysis, modernist writing, and popular culture, Middleton’s project is to demonstrate how emotion is constantly repressed in hegemonic constructions of masculinity. To remedy this situation, he draws first on personal anecdotes—about his childhood and about his role as a father. Knowing only too well that one is not born a man but becomes one, Middleton follows the recent ‘personal turn’ in feminist criticism to reveal how even his apparently trivial boyish pastime of trainspotting ‘was our way of negotiating with the world of manhood which lay all about us outside the home’. ‘Trainspotting’, he continues in a vein that promptly turns to Levi-Strauss, ‘was a bricolage of accessible, visible elements of the adult men’s world.’ His point is that this boyish love of locomotives involved, not so much finding representations of phallic thrusting in the adult world, but more about fantasizing about the as yet unattainable realm of adult males and the inscription of their power in history. In this childish daydream, Middleton declares, one could be a man for a moment. Yet surely introspection of this kind needs to be nudged out of its nostalgic longing so that it can get a grip on the social and historical differences that may have operated at various levels of his consciousness when watching the trains go by. Middleton was witnessing working men of the kind he, for one, has not become. Like many studies of masculinity, this one works at unacceptable levels of generalization so that the questions of power difference that actively divide men from one another conveniently drops out of sight. Every now and again, Middleton parenthetically notes how homophobia privileges some while punishing others in the everyday brutality enacted by a violent sexual binary. But little else detracts him from the definitional masculinity from which the whole of his argument proceeds. Having completed his discussion of the hard and invulnerable male behaviour repetitively represented in Superman comics, he abruptly shifts his ground to a lengthy exploration of male modernism. ‘What’, he asks, ‘does the real man read? What do men graduate to from comics and popular culture (if they do)? The real man would read the literary equivalent of

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the surrealist landscape, that is to say men’s modernist classics, for these help define the well-read man?’ Now, unless I have for some years been labouring under an illusion, there is a rather large distinction to be made between the proverbially ‘well-read’ and the so-called ‘real’ man. Real men, so the saying goes, eat rocks for breakfast; real men roll with the punches; real men, above all, do not go in for sissy things like poetry—since there is always another battle to be fought, another place to go where no man has gone before. The well-read railway passenger and the stereotypical hard case sitting next to him may have certain prerogatives conferred upon them by the patriarchy but there are clearly other differences that set them apart. Middleton, however, would want to argue the reverse. Superman really is Stephen Dedalus. Both, after all, have mythical wings on which to soar. Altogether more engaging is the closing chapter, on the suspicion with which emotion has been treated by varieties of poststructuralist and Marxist thought. In this context, Terry Eagleton counts among those critics for whom ‘emotion’s expressivist individualism is a sign of inauthenticity’. As Eagleton puts it in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, ‘ideological utterances conceal an essentially emotive content within a referential form, characterizing the lived relation of a speaker to the world in the act of appearing to characterize the world.’ In the face of such critique, Middleton embarks on a mission to rescue emotion from anti-humanist oblivion, and so he scans a vast number of theoretical resources—from Hegel’s Phenomenology to Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay on postmodernism—to find ways of restituting this latent component of post-Enlightenment thought. What he is ultimately looking for is a ‘rounded account of the social character of emotion…to describe how emotions link people together’. Part of the answer would seem to lie in Raymond Williams’ undertheorized ‘structure of feeling’ where, in his later work, it became slightly clearer to see how emotion could provide the grounds of cognition. Similarly, Paul Ricoeur’s Fallible Man (1961) offers a formulation for comprehending how ‘the power of knowing…truly engenders the degrees of feeling’ while ‘feeling indeed generates the intention of knowing on all its levels’. But, as Middleton charts his course through this piece of intellectual history, it is not entirely clear how his research will enable ‘masculinity…to unlearn its ideologies and acknowledge its possibilities’. One way forward, I would suggest, is for Middleton to start dismantling the unitary concept of masculinity on which he so heavily relies, so that his own ‘position of representativity’ becomes altogether clearer, ready to look outward to enable change. University of York

LISA ROULETTE

• Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), 248 pp., $14.95 (paperback) One of the more provocative areas of debate in academic communities today is that in which possible directions for gender studies are being explored. Do the increasingly destabilized (deconstructed, devalued) tendencies which define much of contemporary critical thought leave room for a political agenda? Recently, the rigorous scrutiny of the normative functions of categorization has enabled a recognition of the ‘essential’ natures of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as social constructions whose constancy is untenable. Yet ‘women’, as occupants of gendered positions in this social matrix who continue to struggle against the prevailing impact of representation, might readily argue that this deconstruction of categories precludes the political investment which remains necessary to effect change. If deconstruction, for example, is to be used as a tool for the dismantling of categorical absolutes, can the re-construction of new and mobile relations of power still be a viable enterprise? Can the subject positions of women as marked by gender be effectively utilized without relapsing into ‘identity politics’? The recurrence of these types of questions indicates their exigency, and Sally Robinson has accepted the challenge of negotiating between the apparently apolitical stance often attributed to post-structuralist thought and the specific goals which remain immanent to gender-related studies. In her recent work Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, Robinson, an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, suggests that it might be more productive to maintain the tension between these conflicting positions rather than to attempt their reconciliation. Although she resists the definitive closure of any single comprehensive answer, Robinson locates her argument for effectively utilizing the challenges of contemporary theory by positing the interactions between text and reader as an open process from which to interrogate the construction of gender positions in discursive structures. The project, as Robinson describes it, is the attempt ‘to trace how gendered subject effects are produced and articulated

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through the contradictory processes of self-representation’ (p. 15). Using Gayatri Spivak’s formulation of ‘subject-effect’ as a textual construction that describes a process rather than an immanent consciousness, Robinson conceptualizes representation as the concomitant process which functions both as a product of, and a reaction to, ‘official narratives’; this process generates the contradictions between these narrative structures, both official and non-official, that provide the potential force for disruption of gender representation. Robinson retains her feminist investment by foregrounding her choice of ‘women’s writing’, describing it as a provisional category ‘both useful and risky’ (p. 10), and as one that allows her to avoid the degendering effects of deconstructive tendencies while she explores the difference ‘within, rather than… in opposition to men’s writing’ (p. 16). Her choice of authors—Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Gayle Jones— reflects a diversity commensurate with her enterprise, enabling her to construct a field of inquiry which spans a range of discursive practices; similarly, her varied use of critical approaches which ‘ground theoretical insights in specific discursive contexts’ (p. 21) functions to further prohibit any attempt at closure. Robinson’s argument derives its force, however, from its close attention to the narrative structures that shape the texts, defining narrative as ‘any discourse that is mobilized by a desire to construct a history, an accounting of the limits and boundaries of gender, subjectivity, and knowledge’ (p. 17). It is here that Robinson enunciates the political efficacy for strategies of reading as processes of intervention(s) into master narratives, using literary narratives which, as tropes for cultural narratives, prove permeable and unstable. Exploring the self-avowed humanist concerns of Lessing’s colonial Africa in the Children of Violence series, the gender disruption of Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the Circus, and the double oppression of race and gender as articulated in Jones’s Corregidora and Eva’s Man, Robinson describes multiple positions of gendered subjectivity which engage in ‘reading’ the con-texts which address them, non-fixed positions from which to ‘write’ counter-narratives that circumvent the gendering of representation. Robinson begins her analysis by reading Lessing contra Lessing. Where Lessing promotes Martha Quest’s purported goal to discover a ‘real self’ aligned to the conventions of a masculinist and colonialist society, Robinson shows how the consideration of gender disavowed by this transcendental move disturbs the purity of the narrative. Despite Quest’s attempts to write herself into each official narrative (white, colonial, feminist, liberal), her inability to recognize and resist the formative impact of cultural representation renders her endeavours futile. Lessing’s texts may be contrasted with those of Jones; here, Robinson reads the conflation of gender and race which constructs Jones’s characters already ‘doubly Other’ (p. 138) as generating positions of paradoxically deliberate and overt resistance to the ‘cultural mythologies’ which attempt to define them. Historically overdetermined by race, gender and (hetero)sexuality, Jones’s figures come unfixed in order to oscillate between the margins and the

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centre of discourse, a narrative strategy which, as Robinson points out, has subjected Jones to criticism for her refusal to depict ‘positive images of women or black women’ (p. 215). With the heterogeneity of these readings, Robinson implicitly emphasizes the plurality of theoretical perspectives both available and useful to a feminist strategy of reading. Women’s narratives, from this position, offer multiple intersections between theory and praxis. Before approaching the postmodern texts of Angela Carter, for example, Robinson carefully establishes a theoretical framework set in motion by a tandem reading of Jacques Derrida’s Spurs and Luce Irigaray’s ‘Veiled Lips’; this formulation then shapes the close reading she uses to elucidate Carter’s parodic masquerades in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. In a similar fashion, before attempting to trace the gendered subjectivity inscribed in the works of Lessing, Robinson first ‘reads’ for her audience Paul Smith’s Discerning the Subject, ‘engendering’ his argument as an entrance to the texts of Lessing. Her theoretical investments, subtended by strict adherence to a feminist perspective, become persuasively articulated through these reading practices that ‘illuminate both theoretical and practical-political questions of vital concern to feminist study’ (p. 16). The subjectivity which Robinson recognizes as the province of the reader is ‘an ongoing process of engagement in social and discursive practices’ (p. 11), and is inextricable from the concept of representation as a force both repressive and, potentially, generative. It is this conceptualization of gendered subjectivity within a social context that Robinson finds most productive, not in the Althusserian sense of an ideological interpellation that constructs normative conceptions of a ‘coherent, singular identity who is then capable of functioning to reproduce the existing social formations’ (p. 51), but rather as a multiplicity of intersections that offer a correspondingly multiple number of subject positions, aporetic positions which promise resistance. Whether it be the mythology of the Oedipal quest as attempted by Doris Lessing and parodied by Angela Carter, or the historical myth of ‘Sapphire’, whose castrating sexuality is explicitly appropriated by Gayle Jones, the narratives Robinson reads as social texts construct readers who are gendered and capable of both resistance and rewriting. The diversity of Robinson’s reading practices offers a commitment to the potential force of plurality which does, at times, diffuse the strength of her argument; hers is an argument of fluidity rather than solidity, of practices and strategies rather than rigid, stable positions to be held at any cost. Similarly, while the scope and insight which inform her theoretical readings is laudable, the sheer number of perspectives she brings into play threatens, at times, to overwhelm her own. None the less, Sally Robinson never loses sight of her feminist conviction, presenting her audience with a lucid argument which thoughtfully explores the uses of critical theory in conjunction with women’s fiction; the ‘self-representation’ of her title comes to apply not only to the textual constructions she has chosen, but to the activity of the analyst as well. Robinson has succeeded in mapping a terrain which derives its force more from

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contradiction than continuity, a terrain which should provide fertile territory for further exploration. University of Pittsburgh

BRENDA LYONS

• Sue Roe, Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf/St Martin’s Press, 1990), xii+202 pp., £40.00 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback) In the title of Sue Roe’s first book of criticism, readers encounter the more euphemic and less esssentialist category ‘gender’ as the copula of ‘writing’, rather than the ‘sex’-fashioning fix of subjectivity which is covertly at stake; its subtitle rubs frictionally against poststructuralist grains, apparently oblivious to the deadliness of canonical Literary Authors.1 ‘WRITING AND GENDER’ typographically emphasizes theoretical concerns in capital letters more than twice the size the reduced upper-and lower-case subtitle, attempting a shift to the dispersal of the Author, if not displacement, by the study of gendered textuality, albeit in a singular personality frame. Roe’s study of writings by the most canonized female writer in twentieth-century English letters is an attempt to comprehend the position of her difficult struggle with interrelated and ultimately unfathomable discourses of literary production and sexual identity. Euphemisms aside, the critical field is that of Woolf’s published writings and her ‘sexual rubbish’.2 The analysis is informed and contributes to the slight body of feminist work which addresses creativity and ‘the problem of the subject’:3 the project suggests difficult intertextual questions that Woolf scholars might benefit from considering. How can writers, specifically here female, resist sexual censorship? What are the relations of (auto)biography, fiction, and sexual poetics? How do writers effect aspects of the visual arts? Based on the generally accepted view of Woolf as an experimentalist who broke with ‘realist’ notions of representation and viewed language as a form of access to meaning rather than of self-expression, the central question is how does her aesthetic operate in concert with problems of (self)-censorship and an unfixed definition of gender as a means of understanding her feminism. Roe’s intentions are ambitious; she shuns the Order of ‘history’ in preference to a deeper imagining of intersticial space: life/text, revisionary process, gender/ genre boundaries. She correctly locates in deleted passages the suppressed nightmare of Woolf’s biography: early loss of parents, beloved brother and

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sister, and sexual violation to which as yet unpublished fictional fragments attest. She is too optimistic in what is admittedly a tenuous contention that Woolf’s writing practice freed her from the effects of a debilitating past, but demonstrates adequately the details of significant un(re)solved dilemmas that Woolf faced and tried to rewrite, which in turn have led to controversies for later readers and critics. Biographical shadows and inauspicious early failures precursive to the rise to twentieth-century feminist paragon background Woolf’s consciousness of sexual and textual problems; try though she did to resist autobiography, Roe explains, her position as ‘a celibate woman attempting to write about sexuality’ was inescapable, and the problem of a Victorian ‘subverted femininity’ persisted in surfacing. Beginning sympathetically with an anecdotal quotation from a childhood letter to George Duckworth, which declares the sexual inversion of herself to a boy and Adrian, her brother, to a girl, Roe concludes with a much less sympathetic assessment of personal and political ambiguities—the selfeffacement of suicide, inconsistent feminist politics, and non-Marxism. In a narrativized chain of sixty-one interlocking vignettes divided into two parts along the theoria/praxis line of ‘writing practice’ and ‘later novels’, Roe picks up Woolf’s penultimate autobiographical stitches from ‘A sketch of the past’ and reworks them through the novels and selected essays in an overall chronological progression. Apprehending Woolf’s synaesthesian style, her development as a writer is traced through the search for a means of expressing an unstable gender identity not possible within the confines of institutionalized ‘masculine’ codes, partly constructed through complicity with censorship of the ‘dynamics of desire’ about which she was increasingly conscious and vocal. From ‘in articulacy’ in The Voyage Out to the ‘crepuscular’ Jacob’s Room to evocation of the female vocal timbre of Mrs Dalloway and, finally, conflicts of technique and polemics in the late novels, the oppression of an incomprehensible sexual identity threads towards Woolf’s defining ‘the censorship of women’s vitality’ constituted in a lack of formal education for most women, male elitism, the angelic function, and suppression of female desire. Writings discussed in discrete chapters which, interestingly, examine the most popular works, except for The Years, evidence Woolf’s growing awareness and resistance. In To the Lighthouse the ‘house’ in passing time is read to function as a metaphor of the unconscious; recollection and sexuality are sources of creativity, which formulate an intertext with Mrs Ramsay’s censorial veil and Lily’s unresolved desire, in turn linked to the parodic Orlando, a novel about lesbian love and marriage whose central subjects are writing and sexual freedom through time and generations. The straight counterpoint to Orlando is The Waves, an expression of narratorial inability to finish a story at all; part of the multi-level tragedy is metafictional, that of characters separated from the source of their stories because there is no sexual focal point. Knowledge is not power for Woolf’s characters, however; ‘paralysis’ continues through The Years in which Eleanor’s Nietzschean potential and Sara’s Antigonean reflections are thwarted, while

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Edward fails To Be, nor does the integrity of desire escape suppression by social and historical conditions in Between the Acts.4 Roe’s criticism follows closely the interrogative mode of Woolf’s texts, and to the extent that ultimately the work does not answer what it asks the critic is perhaps reproducing the intentionality of uncertainty, an existential element of Woolf’s signature. Roe seeks to assess the conditions and values of women’s artistic production, but the problem of situating universalized issues in a particular author is a hurdle which remains uncleared. Repetitive diction, occasionally convoluted syntax, and inconsistencies of overlapping approaches do not seduce the reader into textual pleasures and the critical frame does not achieve the strength of its stretch through socialist/liberal feminism, poststructural Marxism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis; some gestural mentions are concretized tokens more than precisely applied theory. That Roe’s ideas are not expressed in terms of (post)modernity or semiotic dialogical materialism is not the real problem; it is that the digressions are peripheral when substantiation would give useful body to meaning. Titles do not reside companionably with the arguments they contain. Part I, or ‘Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice’, comprises the subheaded trinity of ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’, and ‘Writing Autobiography’: Although the development of Woolf’s writing is located in readings—of the Greeks, Elizabethans, nineteenth-century Russian novelists, and contemporary English literature—the isolation of writing/gender is constructed in an unilluminating nexus of postImpressionism (particularly Roger Fry’s observations of writing/painting relations) and Dorothy Richardson’s ‘elasticity’, interest in ‘dark places’, and the ‘psychological sentence of the feminine gender’. Roe is not incorrect in her implications about Woolf’s readerly/writerly connections of structures and process; but the discussion of Richardson’s relegation of story as secondary to Miriam’s mental impressionism and simultaneous bi-directional temporality offers an already well-discussed background that does not advance critical readers’ fuller understanding of her struggle with sexuality, censorship, or writing. In Part II, a discussion of Woolf’s ‘floundering’ subject as the unreal and random ‘Authorial I’ of A Room of One’s Own, Roe contrasts Woolf’s ‘style of feminism’ with Derrida’s theories of signification, an unwieldly and unsubstantiated juxtaposition that does not repay unpacking; the reference to differance is subsumed in one sentence within a divided mention of Mary Jacobus’s definition of difference. The net is not cast far or deeply enough to catch WoolPs full intellectual strength and chimerical ironies as rigorous supplementary expositions to Derridean and/or Jacobean differences. Part of the problem may be overemphasis on psychobiography, which can be defended by the necessarily personal as political, but locating WoolPs shortfalls so consciously determined by the impulse of ‘I desire therefore I write’, is a selfcontradicting contention that in the end delimits the author and writes her off as the neurotic failure she believed herself to be. A failure to credit Woolf’s leadership or her pacifist/anarchist feminism while, on the other hand,

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sympathizing with a ‘fractured, interrupted, ultimately withheld’ creativity, might be better understood if attuned to oxymoronic expressions of an exile’s sensibility or the moody voices of a rebellious and authoritative woman whose imaginative attempts to change history through fiction were misunderstood and reviled during much of her life by most of her generation. That her writings resisted Victorian and Edwardian hegemonies, two world wars, and colonial phallologocentrism partly explains their influence, which has been politically strengthening for women despite her suicide and controversial reputation for inexcusable biases. Roe’s work is flawed by a tendency to accept Woolf’s self-criticism and selfanalysis too seriously, and to overscreen the effects through later twentieth-century arguments, which leads to an atemporal misreading. Her feminism is, indeed, more subtle than strident polemicism, but an imprecise criticism assesses that it ‘takes no account of Derrida’s theories of time and deferral’, when history is reduced to the intertextual imaginary. Balliol College, Oxford NOTES 1 The transposition of terms is from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance SelfFashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 2 In a discussion with Julia Kristeva and Marcelin Pleynet in the essay, ‘Why the United States?’, Philippe Sollers uses this term to distinguish between the fixes of overt and covert sexual signification in America. 3 Makiko Minow-Pinkney’s Virginia Woolfand the Problem ofthe Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels (Brighton: Harvester, 1987) and Rachel Bowlby’s Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) are much recommended for poststructural feminists. 4 A panel/discussion on ‘Between the Acts: A Postmodern Text?’ was held at the annual convention of the Modern Languages Association, San Francisco, 27–30 December 1991.

ROBERT T.TALLY, Jr

• Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, translated by Constantin V.Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), xv+163 pp., $27.00 (hardback) Empiricism, more often than not, appears as a chapter in a history of philosophy, rather than as a continuing philosophical force. David Hume is usually cast in a transitional role—linking Locke and Berkeley with Kant, who would ‘correct’ Hume and synthesize the abstract strains of rationalism and empiricism. But such a history of philosophy, with its linear and teleological narrative of development, tends to kill off each thinker with the appearance of the next, failing to grasp the complexity of an individual philosopher in favour of telling a general story of philosophy. Gilles Deleuze has always resisted this sort of history of philosophy. But he has done so, ironically, by returning to the history of philosophy in such a way that certain thinkers, his ‘nomads’, burst from the narrative, resisting and escaping from facile categorizations of their thought, which the history of ideas imposes upon them. A dramatic example of this return is Deleuze’s first study, on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity. First published in French in 1953, Empiricism and Subjectivity has only recently been translated into English by Constantin V.Boundas, as part of Columbia University Press’s ‘European Perspectives’ series (in which several other titles by Deleuze have appeared). Boundas provides a helpful introduction, in which he situates Empiricism and Subjectivity in relation to Deleuze’s later work. Since it is both an early monograph and only recently translated into English, one can read Empiricism and Subjectivity, as Boundas does, as a sort of intellectual genealogy of Deleuze’s philosophy, circumscribing his forty-year career, and demonstrating the influence of Hume on Deleuze’s thorough-going critique of the phenomenological Subject and its manifestations in such hermeneutical disciplines as psychoanalysis and linguistics. Professor Boundas has done philosophers and students of critical theory a great service by making this seminal Deleuzian text available to a wider, English-speaking audience.

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Deleuze, himself, provides a brief but useful preface to the English-language edition (written in 1989), in which he cites some basic concepts introduced by Hume into western philosophy. In short, Hume established the concept of belief and put it in the place of knowledge…. He gave the association of ideas its real meaning, making it a practice of cultural and conventional formations (conventional instead of contractual), rather than a theory of the human mind…. He created the first great logic of relations, showing in it that all relations (not only ‘matters of fact’ but also relations among ideas) are external to their terms. (pp. ix–x) While Deleuze adds that this list could easily be extended, these three concepts mark the territory of Empiricism and Subjectivity, and frame the question central to the entire book: What is empirical subjectivity? Deleuze constantly insists empiricism not be confused with a theory of knowledge. Traditional historians of philosophy have identified empiricism as the philosophical mode by which knowledge (in the form of ideas) is obtained through sensuous experience. But Deleuze argues that this epistemological view misses the point of empiricism. Empiricism is, above all, a practical philosophy, in which questions of knowledge and truth are always ancillary to and activated by material concerns. Just as Hume had said, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’, so too does his philosophy place the theory of knowledge in the service of real human action, morals and politics. Thus, in empiricism, belief is elevated and knowledge replaced. Through belief, the subject comes to constitute itself within the mind. Deleuze affirms, with Hume, that the mind is not at all the same as the subject. The mind is but a collection of sense impressions, a ‘given’ without order—‘a flux of perceptions’ (p. 23), which must be organized in order for the subject to develop. This is where the concept of association comes into play, as the mind becomes systematized under the influence of its principles (contiguity, causality, and resemblance). For example, ‘the principle of resemblance designates certain ideas that are similar, and makes it possible to group them together under the same name’ (p. 114). The mind is thus affected by the principles, which give it a ‘tendency’ or habit (i.e. conventional formations). The mind is not a subject; it is subjected’ (p. 31). Once the mind, having been affected by the principles of association, becomes a system (i.e. once the given has been organized), it is possible for the subject to constitute itself as that which transcends the given. Deleuze explains: ‘I affirm more than I know; my judgement goes beyond the idea. In other words, I am a subject’ (p. 28). We have already seen a way in which the subject transcends the given—through belief. ‘I believe in what I have never seen nor touched’ (p. 24). This establishes a relation (which is not given) among ideas (which are)—we have ideas of the sun, of rising, and of temporality, yet the belief that the sun will

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rise tomorrow is a relation between these ideas. And this is the fundamental function of the subject: to establish relations. Relations are external to their terms. Deleuze insists throughout Empiricism and Subjectivity that this is so; in fact, it is the sine qua non of Hume’s philosophy: Hume distinguishes between two kinds of relations: ‘such as may be chang’d without any change in the ideas’ (identity, temporal and spatial relations, causality), and those that ‘depend entirely on the ideas which we compare together’ (resemblance, contrariety, degrees of quality, and propositions of quantity and number). It seems that the latter are not, in this sense, external to ideas. And this is exactly what Kant believed, when he criticized Hume for taking mathematics to be a system of analytic judgements. But it is nothing of the sort. Every relation is external to its terms…. [L]et us consider, that since equality is a relation, it is not, strictly speaking, a property in the figures themselves, but arises merely from the comparison which the mind makes betwixt them.’ (p. 99; my emphasis) The very nature of the relation—that is, its exteriority vis-a-vis its terms — already demonstrates the need for a relation-establishing subject, since the ideas themselves are not endowed with a property which, a priori, sets up an inherent relationship among them. The answer to the question, ‘What is empirical subjectivity?’, turns out to be that subjectivity is a process, a dynamic process which does not develop according to linear, causal movements. If this is the case, it is because ‘subjectivity is essentially practical’ (p. 104). It is what Bergson would have called a ‘false question’ to ask whether the subject is active or passive, in the sense that the history of philosophy has characterized an active subject of rationalism (which determines the real through ideation) and a passive subject of empiricism (which receives the real through sensation). As Deleuze notes, ‘the subject is an imprint, or an impression, left by the principles, that progressively turns into a machine capable of using this impression’ (pp. 112–13). The empirical, practical subject constitutes itself on a plane of immanence, and it is recognizable in its function rather than in its discrete or abstract existence. In Empiricism and Subjectivity, the subject unfolds before us like a ‘rhizomatic’ machine, an immanent multiplicity without origin or end, returning again and again, and hinting at Deleuze’s later explorations. Deleuze’s powerful writing, with its characteristic return with difference, manifests the empirical subject in its dynamic process and its practical function, which turn out to be the same thing. What’s this? A Spinozian Hume? Those already familiar with Deleuze’s work will not be surprised. What may be surprising is that Deleuze came to this conclusion so early in his career: Thilosophy must constitute itself as the theory

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of what we are doing, not as a theory of what there is’ (p. 133). A dynamic, practical philosophy of immanence and multiplicity, which becomes central to all of Deleuze’s later efforts. Empiricism and Subjectivity is a difficult book, and by no means an introduction, either to Hume’s thought or to Deleuze’s. But for those familiar with Hume, with empiricism, or with the history of philosophy in general, it offers a fascinating study of Hume’s theory of human nature, with creative interpretations rarely seen in philosophical research. For those interested in Deleuze, this text provides insights into his difficult and extraordinary thought. Anyone who has found Deleuze’s later work useful should find that Empiricism and Subjectivity offers a stunning example of the underpinnings of his thought, and its debt to Humean empiricism, which guided Deleuze along his nomadic journey through and around the philosophy of difference. Gilles Deleuze, then, may be said to be Hume’s poststructuralist legatee, and Deleuzian empiricism, a powerful and thriving force in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. University of Pittsburgh

BARBARA ADAM

• John Bender and David E.Wellberry (eds), Chronotypes. The Construction of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 258 pp., $39.90 (hardback) Chronotypes is a book of its time: it exemplifies the postmodern crisis of representation. No longer the mere framework within which social life is enacted, time is recognized as a productive medium that operates and regenerates time in interaction. It is concerned with the reformation of temporality and takes narrative as its central focus of attention. Previously taken-for-granted processes are brought into high relief with the aim to expose their constitutive character. The editors locate their collection in the contemporary turn towards reflexivity and identify with both post-modern concerns and the position that argues for an intensification rather than a transcendence of modernity. The comparatively recent emergence of time as a central theme of research is no accident,’ they write in their introduction (p. 2), ‘but rather a consequential extension of the postmodern turn: our present does not leave modernity behind, but rather aggravates its difficulties, intensifies its concerns.’ This ambiguity of position is reflected throughout the rather variable contributions to this publication of conference proceedings. A postmodern turn towards a reformation of temporality is emerging from a wide range of sources spanning the arts, the humanities, the sciences and feminist approaches within them.1 It involves a complex and far-reaching redefinition of time: a shift from understanding time as an external, objective framework within which life is enacted and a quantity to be measured, allocated, sold and controlled, to something local, something that is integral to the framework of observation, constitutive of the resultant meaning and generated in interaction. Postmodern temporality arises from these texts as coextensive with the event and as a dimension constitutive of particular events. There is widespread agreement that this reformation of temporality, therefore, cannot simply be added to existing approaches but rather changes theory and practice in significant ways:

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Firstly, activity can no longer be referred to in unchanging, timeless terms. This applies to both the investigation and the subject matter of the investigation. Secondly, narrative time and study time become redefined as a function of position. Thirdly, dualistic habits in thought and action are becoming inappropriate and supplanted by an effort to cope with multiple implication. Fourthly, disciplinary boundaries are increasingly discarded: in the light of transdisciplinary phenomena and problems the scope of disciplinebounded knowledge is decreasing. Lastly, representational distance and the absolute distinction between observer and observed, text and reader are collapsing. This poses problems for habituated approaches such as detachment, objectivity and the deployment of metanarratives. Moreover, it leaves no easy escape from practical issues but enforces involvement and it requires engagement with the problem of relativism. The extent to which the papers in Chronotypes engage with this widely documented reformation of temporality varies enormously. While some authors remain completely untouched by these changes others grapple with the issues and seek to identify the implications for their respective disciplines. Despite the editors’ commitment to a postmodern/post-Newtonian, transdisciplinary approach, in other words, few of the contributions—Fabian’s, Cohen’s, Spivak’s and Smith’s papers being the exceptions—are in touch with the editors’ interests expressed in the introduction: But the drive to comprehend temporal construction as a function of narrative formation may now be assuming a historically specific urgency— and therefore a place of significance in this volume—because the Newtonian coordination of time and space as abstract constants within a measurable framework grows ever more fragile as the theoretical truths of relativity converge during the late twentieth century with the subjective pressures of instantaneous digitalized communication over vast spatial, temporal and cultural spans. (p. 3) The papers are concerned with temporal construction and reflexivity, with bridge building between the sciences and humanities, and with the shift from absolute time to multiple temporalities. Exercises in deconstruction rather than explicit analyses of constructions of temporalities, they successfully dismantle perceived wisdoms on time, narrative, representation and historical analysis. They address the question ‘what is time?’ (von Fraassen, Castoriadis) and they question dualistic approaches (Smith, Goody). They stress the political and ideological components of literary and cultural criticisms (Spivak, LaCapra) and they

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emphasize the simultaneity of multiple times, temporalities and timings (Luckmann, Hareven). Lastly, they demonstrate the variable role of time in empirical study and writing and show its effects on both the construction of ‘others’ and a subsequent redefinition of the self by the subjects of the investigation (Fabian, Cohen). On the surface, therefore, the contributions take on board aspects of this transdisciplinary contemporary temporal reformation. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that the link to temporality is extremely tenuous: frequent use of the concepts of time, temporality, timing, past, present and future, change, history and historicity in an unreflected way is not the same as discussing chronotypes and the construction of time. Many papers, in other words, pay no more than lip-service to any changing/changed constitution of temporality. Careful reading of the texts shows further that both the language and the underpinning assumptions have largely remained untouched: time is utilized in a habituated and static manner. It demonstrates that there is little cognizance of the embeddedness of the authors’ own assumptions. Often there is continued allegiance to the norm of objectivity, an attempt to reveal general principles, dependence on a linear representation of history, and replacement of existing dualisms with new ones. Von Fraassen, for example, still inhabits a philosophical world made up exclusively of male actors and readers in which a history of ideas may be told in an objective, authoritative way, while Castoriadis’ deconstruction of subject and object results in a reification of the social and a host of new dualisms. Castoriadis’ societies know, construct their world and create both their institutions and themselves. Drawing on Aristotle, St Augustine, Kant, (to a lesser extent) Bergson, and time conceptions of some twentieth-century physicists, this author identifies the need for a distinction between difference and otherness, between repetition and creation, between space and time: ‘Time is being insofar as being is otherness, creation, and destruction. Abstract space is being insofar as being is determinacy, identity and difference’ (p. 58). The resultant dualisms lead Castoriadis back to the question about overarching time which, he concludes, ‘has to remain a question for the time being and probably for all times’ (p. 64). Equally problematic is Luckmann’s phenomenological paper: it states as fact and thus makes absolute what is identified as contextual, embedded construction. An explication of the reflexivity of social interactive life, it fails to apply that reflexivity to the process of explication and theory making itself. Indeed, few of the papers are marked by the sort of self-reflexivity advocated in these proceedings. Fewer still grapple with the implications of the realization that we do not study reality but reality exposed to our questions and methods. Collectively the papers demonstrate that the ‘temporal turn’ is not achieved through mere focus but requires a change in base assumptions and approach. Chronotypes is billed as a transdisciplinary publication. Taken together’, the editors suggest, ‘these essays mark the emergence of a new transdisciplinary analytic to which the idea of temporal construction is central’ (p. 4). This, however, turns out to be a somewhat misleading statement since the authors

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make no allowances for readers outside their respective specialized fields of literary and cultural criticism, philosophy, religion, anthropology and sociology, and since they do not provide their readers with sufficient anchorage points to connect to and make relevant papers from disciplines other than their own. The ‘transdisciplinary analytic’ in this case has to be achieved solely through the efforts of the reader. The authors have neglected not only to locate their work in the massive time literature or the transdisciplinary concerns of the postmodern reformation, but also to contextualize their work in the extended debates of their own disciplines. Each paper speaks authoritatively in a transdisciplinary vacuum, blissfully unaware of the forty years of time-related research (the most recently published bibliography—S.L.Macey, Time. A Bibliographic Guide (New York: Garland, 1991)—runs to 426 pages), of the feminist impact on theory and methodology and of the relevance of reconceptualizations of temporality for the contemporary global and technological environment. Only the editors seem aware that a growing number of aspects of contemporary life are governed by principles no longer reducible to the conceptual frameworks of Descartes and Newton. Only they seem in tune with a position elaborated more recently by Ermarth. We are surrounded by a world that operates on the principles of quantum theory; we are living in mental worlds that operate on the principles of Newton…. In the subvisible and stellar worlds that surround us, [however,] things have changed, and those changes limit the scope and importance both of Newtonian mechanics and historical thinking.2 Where applicable, it is left to the reader to make those connections and to explore the implications. For the transdisciplinary reader with expertise in time studies, this book is likely to be a disappointment. For readers with an emerging interest in time and a willingness to make up the missing contexts, connections and implications, it may be of interest and possibly provide new angles on established visions. This reader, who is committed to transdisciplinary study and interested in the contemporary reformation of time, found most contributions of some interest, some useful and two of them inspiring: the papers by both Cohen and Fabian stretch anthropological boundaries to reflect the constitutive and ideological nature of written accounts and narratives. Cohen further identifies a conceptual loop between anthropologists’ written accounts of a society and that society’s changed self-identity as a consequence of such a written portrait. In a fascinating comparison between La Fontaine’s classical text on The Gisu of Uganda and the Ugandan schoolteacher G.W.Wamimbi’s account of the Modern Mood in Massaaba, Cohen demonstrates that the influence between the ‘native’ and the ‘scientific’ narrative is not unidirectional. Rather, it is characterized by a complex, multidirectional impact: the anthropologists’ narrative gets absorbed into the self-description of subsequent ‘native’ accounts of both identity and the

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meaning of social practices. Fabian’s paper, however, left the most lasting impression, particularly the author’s struggle to come to terms with the devastating implications of his own insights. ‘What is admitted as significant and what is not’, he argues (p. 200), ‘will be determined by a method akin to divination. Only those traits of different cultures are assigned meanings that have the status of omens, that is, of events that find fulfilment in our own civilization.’ What is to be the future of cultural anthropology, he asks, once the constitutive nature of anthropological activity is recognized? How are anthropologists to study alien societies once they have recognized that their subject matter is invariably constructed to the templates of their own cultures’ assumptions and perceived wisdoms? How are anthropologists to proceed once they have problematized the ‘we’? What could be the possible future for empirical study once the absolute distinctions between science and other forms of knowledge are successfully deconstructed? ‘Can we recommend’, he questions further (p. 200), ‘that anthropologists continue to tell their stories, provided they mend their ways with temporal constructs that critique reveals as ideological? or should we envisage the end of narration as we know it?’ Fabian can offer his readers no easy solutions. His writing, like that of a corroborating body of work emerging from the breadth of the arts, humanities and sciences, constitutes an irreversible step towards the end of scientific study, history, narration and politics ‘as we know it’. University of Wales College of Cardiff NOTES 1 B.Adam, Time and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press; Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); H.Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986); L.Dossey, Space, Time and Medicine (London: Shambala, 1982); E.Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History. Post-modernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); J.Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); A.Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); D.Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford and Cambridge Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989); S.W.Hawking, A Brief History of Time. From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London and New York: Bantam Press, 1988); K.N.Hayles, Chaos Bound. Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990); S.Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983); R.Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik Geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979; J. Latham, Art after Physics (Stuttgart and London: Hansjorg Mayer, 1991); L.J.Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); H.Nowotny, Eigenzeit. Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefuhls (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989); I.Prigogine, From Being to Becoming. Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco:

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W.H.Freeman, 1980); B.Smart, Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies (London and New York: Routledge 1992). 2 Ermarth, op. cit., p. 10.

EDMOND WRIGHT

• Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 256 pp., £39.50 (hardback), £11.95 (paperback) • Paisley Livingston, Literature and Rationality: Ideas of Agency in Theory and Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 256 pp., £30. 00 (hardback) • John B.Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 362 pp., £10.95 (paperback) • Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 266 pp., £35. 00 (hardback) What connects these diverse books is the topic of narrative as an organizing concept, the philosopheme of the Story. In any case, all texts are stories, in so far as they are rhetoric, not in the sense of verbal manipulation of readers, but because there is persuasion in all communicative action. Rhetoric aims at a ‘mediation of experience’ (Giddens, p. 23), to effect a change in the audience’s interpretation of the world. It produces transformations of intentions, though not necessarily those it set out to change. Here one can see a similarity to a story, for all stories, without exception, have a transformation at the centre of their structure. A putatively mistaken view of a part of experience is subjected to criticism, presented at first in its hitherto persuasive guise (as Antipholus of Syracuse or honest lago), only to be re-framed by the speaker according to a new intentional perspective. This may or may not be accepted in that form by his hearers, who can transform in their turn, not merely the view proposed, but the very rhetoric employed to achieve it. However, these four books are not only examples of the application of the narrative structure to the arguments they present: they are essentially concerned with the very notion of the Story itself and its relation to the formation of societies and selves. Anthony Giddens in Modernity and Self-Identity introduces notions about the construction of the self that are markedly different from traditional ones. Where,

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in the past, selves were formed within limited spatial locales and were strongly influenced by immediate face-to-face interactions, social pressures can now originate from anywhere on the globe, regardless of regional and national characteristics. Where one’s closest kin and one’s neighbours were the dominant shapers of one’s selfhood, and they in turn had been shaped by a social milieu in which generations before had left traditions of custom and religion that were well-nigh irresistible, the subject is now faced with bewildering choices. The economy is no longer local but interlocked with organizations that can have a global scale, while the culture is open to effects of international origin. Giddens foregrounds the difficulty in such an environment of establishing that basic trust of one’s fellows upon which all selfhood must be based. Existential anxieties that result are no longer ministered to by figures whose authority stems from a traditional background, such as a local cleric, but by experts such as the therapist, reliant upon abstract systems of various kinds. Psychologists, sociologists, economists, politicians and others offer analyses and take decisions that may have profound effects upon the selfhood of those whom they advise. The orientation towards the past has gone, replaced by one towards the future. Personal decisions become the more difficult the more the lay person has to rely on specialists whose ultimate authority is both remote and questionable. The self becomes ‘a reflexive project’, continually challenged to acts of re-creation when routines and regimes on which one relied for a sense of individuality (in such matters as gender definitions, language, fashion, gesture, eating habits, and patterns of entertainment) are subjected to rapid modifications within the culture. Giddens’s rhetoric is thus aimed at making those who have not already done so realize the degree to which traditional supports for selfhood have vanished in the world of late modernity. He particularly notes what he calls the ‘sequestration of experience’, the insulation of the modern individual from those darker aspects of human living that once were familiar to persons at all ages, death, disease, and insanity, now sanitized by the expert systems within institutional boundaries. This renders the self more vulnerable, as if it lacked a kind of immunization available to those in the past. He sees his rhetorical task as one of alerting his readers to the dangers inherent in such a historical development, enabling them to see, for example, the narcissistic trap of seeking grandiose compensations for the new sense of risk. He is less pessimistic than some others who have warned of the excesses of narcissism, such as Richard Sennett and Christopher Lasch, for he has greater confidence in the self’s powers of reflection upon the wiles of the market and the strictures of bureaucracy. Nevertheless, he clearly calls for a new ‘life-politics’ that rejects both conservative nostalgia and the utopian narratives of the old left. He notes the irony of a right that upholds market principles which continue to erode the romantic remnants of tradition, seeing the creation of a new tradition as a contradiction in terms (p. 206), particularly when there are at present many disturbing examples of a return to religion that smack of medieval superstition and fascistic control. Life-politics emerges from the capability of individuals to make their own choices of lifestyle. The

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emancipation of gender, race, class and the Third World can become consequent upon such life-political transformations, and, in his view, evidence for it can be seen in feminist and ecological movements. He wants to re-moralize the world without incurring the penalties that history has too often demonstrated. There must be some measure of certainty for the self: ‘the individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day world, cannot be wholly fictive’ (p. 54). Indeed, he is unhappy with the word ‘story’, putting it gingerly in inverted commas even where he is tempted to use it for the construction of the self. Since he has rejected both the story of the past golden age that the conservative wishes to re-tell and the story the old left foretells of the future one, the question is whether a story can be produced and how. Exhausted as these stories may be, both of them had a direct connection to the groups from which they emerged, sustaining and reflecting, however distortedly, the economic and domestic life in which they appeared, and they were good as stories—many people still read them. Having told his own story, it is far from clear what kind of story Giddens wants his readers to tell. This is a serious question, for it involves the intersection of aesthetic, logical, moral and economic aspects of our possible life. It is patently not sufficient to suggest that, because individuals have shown resistance at various levels to the constraints of modernity, a ‘re-moralizing’ is likely to come about of itself. While fascists of all persuasions remain continually busy with their myths, it is time to beat them at their own game. What they have done with the Story in this century has given it a bad name and dangerously strengthened the Enlightenment prejudice against it. There is a nettle to be grasped here and Giddens, for all his clear-sighted analysis of the situation, has not grasped it. Albrecht Wellmer is critical of those who declare the autonomous human being ‘a fiction’ (p. 69): it cannot then be a story. Similarly, taking a cue from Wittgenstein, he maintains that the distinction between reality and semblance upon which radical scepticism depends can be undermined: the philosophy that can control such excess does it by seeing oppositions of this sort as a feature within the common use of language, and, as such, having no place in some overall metaphysical criticism of it. Again with Wittgenstein, he argues that it cannot be that the interpreting subject provides the basis of meaning, for it is impossible for a language to function without some index of generality. So a radical hermeneutics that would see meaning as forever in flux, chronically indeterminate because of the private circumstances of every occasion of use, is false to the real nature of language; this is not a viable postmodernism, but an anarchic distortion; the best of the postmodern is exemplified in modern democracy, art, science and individualism with their ‘rational, subversive and experimental spirit’. Postmodernism ought not to be characterized as a counter to a rationalist modernity, but a version of modernity itself, having reached the stage of rejecting its fantasy of utopian reconciliations, and finding value instead in a pluralism that can be combined with universalism. Thus, as with Giddens,

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there is the same suspicion of the fictive, together with a confidence in individual development in plural guises. The book consists of three essays and an address, in which these themes are pursued in various ways: an examination of Adorno’s aesthetics, a metacritique of Adorno’s critique of identitary reason, an attempt to find a synthesis between universalism and contextualism in ethics, and a speech to the German Werkbund, in which a dialectics of modernism and postmodernism is considered with particular regard to architecture. Wellmer is clearly impressed by Adorno’s attack upon identitary reason, particularly by his claim that it must be by way of the concept that the concept is transcended (Adorno 1973, p. 15), that reason must turn its critique upon itself to discern the pathologies that lead to reification. He saw that the direction of cure lay in some kind of convergence between rational and aesthetic discourse, and, with Habermas, Wellmer would add moral discourse. He quotes Adorno’s analysis of the complementary weaknesses of aesthetic perception and philosophical thought, the former containing ‘a moment of blindness’, the latter ‘a moment of emptiness’ (p. 7). This is clearly an echo of Kant’s ‘Thoughts without content are empty: intuitions without content are blind’ (CPR, B75), and can be taken as a warning that, if the sensory and the linguistic, Adorno’s ‘mimetic’ and ‘conceptual’, are kept apart, then no communication could ever take place. Wellmer points out that both Adorno and Habermas express the need for this complementarity in their own ways: Adorno finding the inauthentic unities of totalizing reason fictitious and conceiving of art as able to shatter them; Habermas looking for a reconciliation of ‘communicative rationality’ and ‘system rationality’. Wellmer finds both of these imprecise, preferring to found his own notion of a communicative intersubjectivity upon Wittgenstein. He takes up what no one could disagree with in Wittgenstein, that ‘what we call a single meaning can only be elucidated by recourse to a—real or potential—plurality of situations in which a linguistic sign is used’ (p. 63), and that therefore the ‘common use’ must be the final arbiter and not a ‘subject-constitutive-of-meaning’. But Wellmer is not likely to reach a dialectic of modern and postmodern in this direction, for Wittgenstein, correct in displacing the sovereign subject, was in error in making the received opinion the sovereign. In Wittgenstein there is no trace of the need for the ‘mimetic’, the sensuous, the incommensurable, except in his unconscious fascination with ambiguous words and figures (see the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, where a full third of the 1,500 or so entries are concerned with gestalt-switches of various kinds). John Thompson points out that Wittgensteinians ‘neglect phenomena beyond the linguistic realm’ (Thompson 1981, p. 3). When Wittgenstein said that there has to be agreement in judgements as well as definitions (see Philosophical Investigations, section 242), he was making an unsustainable claim. It is precisely because the incommensurable remains within our every agreement that agreements can only ever be for the time being. Those psychologists investigating categorical perception are now hypothesizing that there has to be an iconic level of sensing to which the intersubjectively agreed

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categories are experimentally applied, so that any agreement is only provisional, until further notice (Harnad 1987). How would one expect otherwise, given the radical contingency of nature? This makes new sense of Adorno’s claim that the conceptual ‘pre-arranges and truncates’ the mimetic. Wellmer is surely inconsistent to appeal to Wittgenstein at the same time as seeing the dangers of a totalizing reason (pp. 86–7), for he seems not to recognize that there can be a tyranny of the taken-forgranted, of the banal assumption. One might ask where plurality, a favoured term of his, comes from if not from subjects. Wittgenstein seemed to think that all the teaching came from the teachers, but any teacher will tell you it comes, if not as readily, at least as cogently, from the taught. Why did Wittgenstein’s experience of teaching not teach him that? However, Wellmer, in his discussion of discourse ethics, shows that he wants to opt for a dialogic view, preferring indeed to talk of dialogic principles rather than moral ones. Here he attacks Habermas and Apel for their projection of a language ideal, Habermas in his ‘ideal speech situation’ and Apel in his ‘ideal speech community’. This Peircean notion that ‘in the long run’ an ideal consensus will be achieved is rejected by Wellmer because it accepts the notion of an ultimate language in which there would be a state of perfect understanding and agreement, a condition in which the plurality of sign-users would have disappeared in favour of the singularity of a transcendental subject. If discourse ethics holds to such an ideal in order to achieve generalization of moral principles, it has become ‘too Kantian’. This is not far from the sacred as the prototype of idealized agreement and thus courts the danger of turning into a myth the attempt to found ethics upon the rationality of pragmatic discourse. So Wellmer comes round to a position very close to that of Giddens: he trusts in a plurality of sign-users and discourses and suspects any return to fictions of ultimate reconciliation. More than once he has referred to the fascist irrationality that resulted from taking the myth literally. Yet he cannot refrain from harking back to an insistence that there has to be a ‘fluid boundary between aesthetic and moral discourse’. What he leaves unexplained is how this is to be acknowledged without incurring the results he fears. His conclusion, like that of Giddens, has the same note of uneasy confidence in variety, on the ‘interlinking’ of practical, theoretical and moral discourse that will somehow keep us safe by the multiplicity of its options. The trouble is that the power of the Story is once more getting out of hand in several parts of the world and a better defence against it might be to tell a better one, not peremptorily discard the fictitious on the ground that others have misused it. The misuse of the Story is John Thompson’s concern in Ideology and Modern Culture, particularly by those who control the media, whether the state apparatus or the transnational capitalist corporation. As he has made clear in his earlier work on ideology, he considers that there are two major concepts of it, a ‘neutral’ and a negative ‘critical’ one: the ‘neutral’ being a view of symbolic forms that sees them as contributing to any kind of social formation (as Lenin held to when he called for a ‘socialist ideology’); the ‘critical’ seeing those forms

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as maintaining the domination of a particular form of power. One may note that Thompson does not provide a positive view of it, but holds to the negative concept, regarding it as an essential tool in the understanding of the developments of culture in the late modern age. In examining ideology he sees his task as analysing how meaning serves to sustain domination, an incomplete formulation as it stands since it draws in the term ‘meaning’. The completion is to come, he says, in the application of depth hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur’s concept), interpretation taking full account of social-historical context and guided by discursive analysis of symbolic forms of all kinds. It involves the kind of reflexivity that Giddens speaks of, within which subjects, themselves the products of interpretation, can interpret in their own right. Thompson, again like Giddens, is optimistic about the resistance of recipients to manipulative persuasion, attributing to them the power of breaking with the ‘doxa of everyday life’, however embedded these may be in historical traditions. He finds Ricoeur’s threefold analysis particularly useful when the media are considered, for the following topics: (1) the production, circulation and reception in the new spatiotemporal settings, as well as the social institutions that underlie them and the special nature and influence of the technical apparatus involved; (2) the formal character of the actual symbol-sequences and utterances, at the level of syntax, lexis, narrative, and argument; and (3) the interpretation of the material itself, allowing creative interpretation that can be contestatory, even about the very reference of the elements of the language employed. This appears to be a serviceable programme, except that there is some blurring of species. Is it the case, for example, that narrative and even argument are to be relegated to a place in which they do not seem to have a direct link to the social-historical, or that interpretation is in some way separate from them too? To put it in sharper focus, can the formal be so clearly distinguished from the intentional? Narrative, perhaps again from a lingering Enlightenment suspicion of fiction, is given a very humble status in the order, one of six formal elements that are considered as worth attention. Surely if there is to be a better understanding of the ‘interpretative transformation of doxa’, then how a new story comes to be told is of the essence. The question is how the reflexivity in the constitution of selves in societies comes about. Thompson reveals a weakness in his brusque dismissal of what he calls the ‘social cement’ view of ideology. He has three arguments: that it is implausible as a theory of social reproduction, which is plainly merely a declaration of his conclusion; that it ‘neglects differential reactions’, failing to take account of the degree to which subordinate groups are proof against the dominant ideology; and that it is too simple an account. The second point is the only material one, and one could quote one of his own sources against him, Paul Willis’s study of some rebellious working-class adolescent boys, whose conscious resistance to what they took to be the dominant ideology nevertheless prepared them for their role as manual workers of low status. To say that symbolic forms have little place in unifying a society and yet to be ostensibly studying how ‘meaning serves the dominant group’, seems inconsistent. It also

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ignores Cornelius Castoriadis’s work on the imaginary institution of society which his own publishing house was responsible for translating into English (Castoriadis, 1987; Castoriadis is not even in his index). Thompson went to Clifford Geertz for his analysis of culture, but Geertz does not go far enough in explaining how social forms can be, as he says, ‘acted documents’ (Geertz 1973, p. 448). Fascinated as Geertz is with play, he does not see what Victor Turner, another anthropologist, saw, that there is a dramatic dialectic between the structure and what he called ‘anti-structure’—a point of liminality, a threshold for each subject where subjects and objects are developed within a play of interpretation. This is echoed by Thompson’s own mentor Ricoeur: ‘Play is an experience that transforms those who participate in it… Worlds are proposed in the mode of play’ (Ricoeur 1981, p. 186). Until the Enlightenment distaste for the serious consideration of play is overcome, there will be little advance in the study of the construction of selves and societies, and for the politics that might keep them secure. Paisley Livingston conducts what he considers to be a defence of rationality as ground for literary criticism, illustrating it with analyses of a number of actual texts. It is clearly an anti-postmodernist book, endeavouring to re-establish a modern mode of interpretation. ‘Madness, perversion, weakness of the will, wanton desire, self-defeating behaviour, the primary processes, self-deception, ambiguity, semantic confusion, and so on’ (p. 52) can be the subject matter of a rational enquiry into literature, but they cannot be the tools of such an enquiry. What is required is a ‘moderate rationality heuristic’, that allows the application of everyday, commonly held understandings of the processes of intention and decision. He calls this a ‘moderate’ rationality because he disavows excesses such as trying td import homo oeconomicus into the study of literature. Understanding the fictitious action-patterns within texts requires us, if we are to be consistent, ‘to work with the assumption that at least some of the time the agent’s behaviour actually is undertaken with the goal of satisfying, not thwarting, the agent’s strongest wants’ (p. 24). Unless one makes this assumption, one cannot be systematic about the hypotheses we make about persons’ desires, beliefs and intentions. To try to undermine such common sense is to land one in paradox: ‘“Stop believing in beliefs!” says the contemporary Cretan’ (p. 18). There is a short way with this: the most frequently repeated words in his paragraphs defining his position are ‘assumption’ and its cognates. It is perfectly true that we have to assume that an agent’s behaviour is undertaken with the aim of satisfying his wants and not with that of thwarting them, but we had better not utterly believe it, the reason being that what it has to leave out is who is making the interpretation about the ‘wants’ under discussion and what is regarded as ‘thwarting’ them. But this goes for all mutual identifications, including that of the self. We have to make an assumption of a Habermasian ideal correspondence of our future understandings in order to achieve a viable mutual coinciding of our present ones, but it can never be a logical perfect coinciding for all that, precisely

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because, to quote Ernst Cassirer (1977, II, p. 32), the pure flux does not possess ‘a purely unequivocal determination’. This is why all our utterances to each other partake of the nature of the Story, for we have to hypothesize a referential convergence on a ‘particular’ entity or attribute in order to allow us to modify each other’s mistaken reference. That is the pattern of all stories. All communication, from the level of the single statement to some reiterated symbolic form within an ideological structure, partakes of a leap in imagination from one imputed agreement to another, an ironic shift in semantic understanding. To call all language that of Epimenides the Cretan is thus an appropriate, if startling, metaphor, for each utterance does reshape the language. When Durkheim considered this very topic of concepts varying from person to person, he commented ‘we even lie to each other without wishing to’ (Durkheim 1976, p. 485). As the linguist Sir Alan Gardiner said in opposition to Saussure, a living ox before two observers does make ‘its own new, if infinitesimal, contribution to the signifié of “bœuf”’ (Gardiner 1944, p. 109), though he should have added that it only occurs because one of the observers took in that difference as significant, whether he was conscious of it or not. The incommensurable lies within our every agreement. Facts are no more than stories not yet told: most stories, in actual fact, begin with the insistence of an apparently banal truth— good readers immediately scent its coming subversion. What must be acknowledged is that human beings cannot get away from this postulate, but the important thing to do is to remember that it is one. In other words, one must have faith in the play without ever fully believing it, which is what sensible children do when they play; the child in the game who bursts into tears because he has been ‘made prisoner’ are like those who are unable to be free of the superstition of the fact, whether it be about self or object. It is time to be positive about ideology, play it in the open-eyed way of children. The Enlightenment mind finds it difficult to be as little children: witness Edward Caird, attacking Comte’s ‘religion of humanity’—‘a worship of fictions, confessed as such, is impossible’ (1885, p. 167). Plato’s Noble Lie is hardly noble if it is only going to be an ideological device, but it could take on a different character if it were linked to an economic system that allowed market, media and democracy to function together in a better way then now. Culture could be played on an open assumption of final consensus that was recognized as such, that gave a better chance of plural opportunity and security than now, without any belief that it would actually issue in such a consensus or lead to some utopian reconciliation. It would be a game that more could play and more could win. Cambridge

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REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor, W. (1973), Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B.Ashton (New York: Continuum). Caird, Edward (1885), The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte (Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons). Cassirer, Ernst (1977), The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol II, Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press). Castoriadis, Cornelius (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press). Durkheim, Emile (1976) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph W.Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin). Gardiner, Alan H. (1944), ‘De Saussure’s analysis of the signe linguistique’, Acta Linguistica, 4, pp. 107–10. Geertz, Clifford (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books). Harnad, Steven (1987), ‘Category induction and representation’, in Steven Harnad (ed.), Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 535–65. Ricoeur, Paul (1981), Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B.Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Thompson, John B. (1981), Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jiirgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1967), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). —— (1980), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 2 vols, trans G.E. M.Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

GRAHAM ALLEN

• Ralph Cohen (ed.), The Future of Literary Critidsm (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 445 pp., £14.99 (paperback) It is interesting to compare this new collection of twenty-five essays, all devoted to exploring the possible future for literary studies, with Ralph Cohen’s previously edited collection of essays New Directions in Literary History (1974). Rereading that former collection now we observe academic criticism coming to terms with an uncertain future. Something has died, or is threatening to die, namely critical formalism, and what will come to take its place is hardly agreed upon by the various contributors. Fifteen years on and we have, of course, a much better sense of what was occurring. In that intervening period we have witnessed the rise of deconstruction, a rejection of the formalistic principles of the monadic text, a number of ‘deaths’ (of the author, of traditional historicism, of the concept of ‘literal’ meaning). Most importantly of all we may well feel, comparing our own current state of critical thinking to that apparently fastreceding horizon, that the ‘innocence of reading’, still observable in a number of the contributions to that earlier collection, has ‘died’. We have indeed lived through a period in which ‘humanism’ itself has supposedly been buried. In an environment where the very idea of ‘presence’ and thus ‘meaning’ has been not so much questioned as subjected to a wholesale dismantling (de-construction), ‘humanistic studies’ has come to seem a rather quaint and old-fashioned appellation, totally insufficient as a descriptive term for our present obsessions and vertiginous perspectives. To read through the essays here, however, is to realize that much more has been going on in the state of criticism than this dismantling of traditional humanistic assumptions and foundations. The number and the strength of ‘feminist’ contributions are one signal that criticism has not become completely obsessed with tracing the linguistic aporia. The attention to the political implications along with the social and racial functions of literary studies is another. Indeed, as Ralph Cohen explains in his excellent introduction, even the surviving deconstructors are beginning to push beyond the scenes of writing, differance, the linguistic trace, and the abysmal etymon, into a space as much cultural as rhetorical. One

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of the four divisions Cohen elaborates in order to encompass the disparate tendencies in the essays as a whole is entitled ‘lncorporating deconstructive practices, abandoning deconstructive ends’. Cohen explains: There can be no doubt that the essays by Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman and Jonathan Culler describe deconstructive theory in decline.’ Are we moving into a period which will be termed (fifteen years from now) as post-deconstructionist? My own hunch is that we are not, that in fact deconstruction is just beginning to come to life as a mode of reading fitted to more than the most advanced and isolated explorations into the relativities of absolute concepts. There is a general recognition in the essays here that questions of textuality, of commentary, of the literal and the figurative, of the constative and the performative, of the rhetoric of history and the history of rhetoric, have a vitality and a relevance in and for our present society which may yet turn literary criticism into the kind of undeniable and necessary voice it has continually dreamt of becoming. Hartman, for instance, views criticism as marking or embodying a crucial antithesis between modes of reading. He writes of: the problem of doing interpretations at a time when texts seem to be overly porous, that is, so ambiguous or variable in the history of attributed meanings that the cry is heard, why should we study literature? A time too when, obversely, the import of texts is decided by authority, with the aid of the idea that there is one meaning, often defined as ‘literal’. (p. 87) In an environment where parts of society, or even states, define themselves and justify their actions through a fundamentalism which is rooted in a specific mode of reading (literalism), the critical form of reading (attention to ambiguity, rhetorical structuration, the destructive effect of figuration on the notion of the proper, the literal, the singular, the monadic) becomes a potentially radical force in the battle against centralism, totalitarianism, fundamentalism, anti-humanistic assertions of univocal meaning. It is time, in fact, that we recognized that the deconstruction of orthodox modes of ‘humanism’ is not so much the birth of an ‘anti-humanism’ but implies a reassertion of the human values of plurality, dissent, difference, fiction. A recognition of the power and social importance of ‘reading’ is indeed a common theme in all the essays assembled here. The notion of what Harold Bloom calls ‘text-centredness’ emerges again and again as that force which can assist our new generation of students in their defence against the intensifying forms of propaganda, fundamentalism of religious or political varieties, desensitization, extremism. Despite the most radical proclamations of the last fifteen years we have not lost the belief in the humanistic importance of reading; and yet, if we are to bring the theoretical advances of that period more firmly in touch with that belief, we must begin to articulate it (perhaps it is a kind

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ideology, and if so then so be it) far more loudly and more strenously than we have been doing of late. If ‘reading’ is worth teaching then it is so because within it lies an idea not of the future of criticism but of society. To begin to articulate this implied vision, to explore its features, its charge of implications and obligations, is not to return to a state before ‘theory’ but to extend the franchise of our theories of ‘reading’ in a world where ‘reading’s franchise knows no bounds. Hillis Miller writes: Courses in the literature departments should become primarily training in reading and writing, the reading of great works of literature, yes, but with a much broader notion of the canon, and along with that training in reading all the signs: paintings, movies, television, the newspaper, historical data, the data of material culture. An educated people these days, an informed electorate, is a people who can read, who can read all the signs, no easy thing to learn. (p. 111) There are contained in this collection courageous and provocative attempts to start thinking this wider context for the theory of reading. For Christopher Butler the task involves not a debate between ‘humanist’ and ‘anti-humanist’ theories, but the exploration of how these two tendencies interpenetrate. ‘We are therefore left’, he writes, ‘with two separate spheres for investigation—firstly, of the plausibility of the psychological descriptions given by avant-garde literature and its associated decentering theory, and secondly, of the status of the moral language we then use to analyze it’ (p. 248). Martha Nussbaum’s Terspective equilibrium: Literary theory and ethical theory’ is a brilliant attempt to promote an interdisciplinary marriage between literary theory and the philosophy of ethics. She imagines: a future in which our talk about literature will return, increasingly, to a concern with the practical—to the ethical and social questions that give literature its high importance in our lives…. In short, a future in which literary theory (while not forgetting its many other pursuits) will also join with ethical theory in pursuit of the question, ‘How should one live?’ (p. 58) Indeed the lasting impression produced by reading through these essays is of criticism and literary theory confronting its ‘uncanny’ double; a return of the repressed occurs in almost every one of the pieces, in which criticism comes up against the ethical, social, even political implications of its own self-description. No piece in the whole collection represents this more intensely than the one with which the collection begins: Helene Cixous’s ‘From the scene of the unconscious to the scene of history’. Cixous’s moral, self-revelatory, fragmented prose is a powerful example of the ‘uncanny’ force of writing, beyond all legislation, yet

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human and ‘humanistic’ in a sense we have yet to fully understand. Her piece echoes throughout the volume, promising (at least for this reader) a future of plural, differing, dissenting, engaged, human-all-to-human voices: Perhaps knowing that we are mortals and saving each minute, consecrating it to life, is the task that animates certain writings. For me, joining the party of life is itself my political party. There are people who are in the party of death in writing as in politics; this is something of which we speak very little, though it is essential. (p. 5) University of Dundee

JAMES KIRWAN

• Joseph Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), xviii+214 pp., £10.99 (paperback) The rapidly expanding industry in the ‘contemplation of horrific eventualities’ raises important questions, according to Grixti, about the type of society in which we live, and our manner of developing fictions to help us make sense of contemporary experience. The need for a ‘contextualization and theorization’ of horror fiction as a form of discourse has, he believes, assumed ‘urgent dimensions’. What he therefore sets out to do in this book is (after the manner of Foucault) to discover who speaks, the positions from which they speak, and the institutions which prompt, distribute and store the speech, to set an analysis of the values and meanings which are to be discovered in popular forms of contemporary horror fiction against the background of a wider cultural debate. This declaration of intent signals early on what is in fact the weakness of his analysis, for, in considering texts as ‘social products which transform possibilities of experience into discourse, and which thus influence, reflect, and reinforce popular attitudes, assumptions, and prejudice’, it is never quite clear which of these objects—text, society, prejudice, or influence —is actually the subject of the book. The ostensible subject is, of course, horror fiction, which he defines as ‘a type of narrative which deals in messages about fear and experiences associated with fear’, though even here his object is not clear. Early on he writes that he will cut across the division between ‘horror fiction’ and the ‘literature of terror’, but in the event he stays closely with the former. In so far, then, as he deals with anything containing what is likely to arouse fear or repugnance, including, in his more general theoretical discussion, the portrayal of violence per se, his approach is not really applicable to the literature of terror as a distinct genre, however we might choose to define such a genre. Some representatives of the genre, he writes, reflect ‘considerable artistic, imaginative, and intellectual merit’, but the majority thrive on cliché and an interpretation of reality which is ‘hollow and

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self-enclosed’. In concentrating almost exclusively on this latter he effectively neglects half of what, according to his own lights, is the genre he is discussing. In the first half of the book Grixti sets out to ‘place’ the phenomenon of contemporary horror fictions as ‘reflectors and affirmations of social and cultural realities’, beginning from the premises that all fiction is ‘an institutionalised technique of discussion, by means of which an author invites us to join him in discussing a possibility of experience that he regards as interesting and to share with him attitudes towards it, evaluations of it, that he claims to be appropriate’. He rejects the notion of horror as a ‘straight blueprint’ for the collective unconscious of mass culture in favour of the idea that it forms part of ‘a complex discursive process which is an integral component of the models deployed by contemporary society (often tacitly and uncritically) to understand itself’. His aim, as he formulates it, is to ‘see’ such fiction as ‘an important signifying component of the contemporary mind’, to discover what kind of ‘symbolic universe and overarching reality definitions’ are represented and endorsed by such fiction. He begins by noting (and demonstrating through the analysis of an episode from The Twilight Zone) that horror fiction works within a set of quite conservative conventions, and how, even through the presentation of ambiguities and uncertainties, it can serve to reinforce ‘some of our most cherished prejudices, stereotypical images, and unformulated assumptions’. Though, in truth, it needed not a ghost to tell us this about popular fiction of any genre. Since his case is largely against contemporary horror fiction it would be useful if he were at some stage to present, through the analysis of a text which fell within the horror genre but was exempt from his strictures, a comparison which would show how far these failings are inherent in the genre and how far they are merely typical of the contemporary. He does not, however, provide such a comparison. What he does provide, in chapter 1, is a quick review of the history of horror fiction to demonstrate that fearful fantasies frequently perform an important social function in providing graspable and, therefore, reassuring explanations of what is otherwise incomprehensible. This demonstration suffers, however, from drawing more on histories of the genre than the genre itself. The gothic novel, he asserts, was ‘reassuringly’ distinct from reality by virtue of its exotic settings, stereotypical characters, anachronistic situations and ‘ritual’ action. Likewise he describes how the vampire appears throughout history to serve different purposes, rather like the subsidiary subject of a metaphor which changes its meaning with each change in the principal subject, in this case the fears and anxieties of the times, to which it is attached. He rejects the notion that horror or fantasy literature is explicable in terms of ‘intrinsic’ qualities or ‘instinctive needs’, in favour of viewing them as ‘an important index of the concerns, purposes, and understanding of reality which predominate in a particular context and time’, and quotes, in support of this thesis, Twitchell on the reaction of sadistic misogyny to the Women’s movement evinced in a great many films from 1972 onwards, the spate of films about invasions from outer space during the

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height of the Cold War, the contemporaneity of A Clockwork Orange and student unrest, or Prawer on the connection between such films as Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen and the public debate about the widespread availability of effective methods of birth-control and the effects of pregnancy-related drugs. However, though he does quote from some who have attempted to draw such connections, he never does this himself in any detailed way. Moreover, how would one set about disproving so general a thesis as that ‘the story’s message and meaning, as well as the audience’s response, have their roots firmly in the social and cultural concerns of the period of their making’? In chapters 2 and 3 he examines the values ‘encoded’ in the work of James Herbert and Stephen King, in order to bring to the fore some of the assumptions of their fiction and examine these assumptions ‘in the context of the prevailing attitudes from which they derive’. Herbert, according to Grixti, teases our emotional need for reassurance about our vulnerability, but only after he has placed that need, through convention and cliché, at an artificially safe distance from the issues that underscore our real vulnerability. Grixti speaks of Herbert betraying ‘the unmistakable tones of the disc jockey and the market salesman’, which not only deprives human nature of ‘all vestiges of dignity’ (no one escapes cliché!), but also ‘casts a disturbing light on our post-industrial way of seeing ourselves’. The problem with such analysis is that we are being asked to consider qualities that are far from surreptitious, and a message that is anything but complex. As a consequence the commentator can hardly avoid resorting to abuse (rather than analysis), for there is really nothing to be ‘decoded’, no casting of disturbing new light on ‘our post-industrial way of seeing ourselves’. As he says, Herbert’s philosophy is home-baked from ingredients that come wholesale from popularized litanies, and which are presented to the reader with a mindless smugness, likewise it is true that Herbert’s tales invoke awed emotions of confused and displaced admiration for a species of inane heroics that is locked within a magical (ultimately proto-Fascist) mode of thinking which has but spurious contact with practical reality. All this is true, but having said that Herbert is a best-seller, all this has already been said. Grixti considers Stephen King to be a more sophisticated (‘uptown’) case than Herbert and treats him in a more sophisticated way, though again he finds him wanting in so far as he subscribes to the notion of ‘the beast in man’ and to mechanistic concepts of the emotions which assume that human nature is built on a clear polarity of ‘civilized behaviour’ and ‘nerve endings’. Ultimately King is bracketed with Herbert as a purveyor of ‘helpless unease combined with vacuous optimism’. Having placed these writers’ work, rather vaguely, within a more general reaction to the threat of possible nuclear annihilation, he blames them for evading the momentousness of the issues underlying a communal unease, through an endorsement of a resignation founded on a callow conception of reality dominated by spectacular gestures and idealized heroics which are only ‘grotesque and hollow illusions of control and accommodation’. (A dynamic which is curiously echoed in the Cultural Debate—where understanding plays

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the same role in relation to action as do the vicarious heroics in the fiction it analyses.) Popular horror fiction, he concludes, offers an ‘ostrich-like’ escape from uncertainty. Such escape, rather than ‘providing tools for progressive and constructive interpretations’, is simply ‘ideologically enslaving’: Much of the more popular and successful type of contemporary horror fiction…endorses assumptions and reinforces preconceptions, transforming areas of communal unease into provinces of sanitized and safely padded thrills—self-enclosed and self-referring, leading nowhere except [through magical solutions] to evasions of its own real meanings. In so doing, he writes, the conventions of popular horror both play upon and at the same time disarm the very anxieties which they encourage and keep in ‘discursive circulation’, reinforcing ‘a resigned sense of helplessness’. But that the majority of people take the easiest and most familiar course is something scarcely in need of demonstration. The peculiar charmlessness of popular culture arises not from the fact that it presents truisms (‘great art’, after all, is often praised for its ‘eternal truths’) but from the fact that it presents them as revelations, thereby too obviously seeking to induce the illusion of wisdom; but this too is a truism—that the majority of people would rather hear somebody whistling a tune they know than a bravura performance of what they do not. Grixti does have a conception of the ‘true’ role of fiction, that is, to provide ‘a reliable path through and out of our epoch’s maze of horrors’; which is to say an illusion of control satisfactory to the greater intellectual demands of the highbrow. In the second half of the work he pursues the thesis that the same assumptions and even fears that underlie horror fiction also underlie some of the more prominent attempts at explaining and judging that fiction. This he does through an examination of the viability of those theories of human motivation and behaviour which are manifest in both popular and academic approaches to the phenomenon of horror fiction. The first of these is the idea that fictional horror appeals to, exercises and helps discharge the beast in man. That is, the assumption of a Jekyll-Hyde polarity in human nature, which posits a veneer of civilization and rationality hiding the ‘natural’ and chaotic ‘beast within’. He follows Raymond Williams in ascribing this notion to a desire by interested parties to evade a recognition of the real causes and consequences of certain types of behaviour by putting it down to ‘nature’. Contemporary horror fictions, then, according to Grixti, act as ‘exercises in ideological reassurance and also as selfreferring exploitations of personal and social unease’. The myth of the beast within, he argues, is ‘culturally determined’, and, though ancient in formulation, has been much reinforced by psychoana lytical thinking. In this respect he criticizes at some length, those popularizations of Freud that take as literal the hydraulic imagery of his model. His analysis of Freud is interesting, but, in showing how the psychoanalytical perspective is itself a powerful example of the dramatizing and interpretative process which psychoanalysts assert to underlie

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human actions, he does not prove, as he sets out to, anything about the falsity of the psychoanalytical model. Similarly, in showing how behaviourist and neobehaviourist theories have lent respectability to an aspect of the conceptual framework out of which contemporary horror fictions are compounded—the notion of mechanistic and mindless destructiveness inherent in human nature— and thereby contributed to the magically orientated frames of reference within which such fiction functions, he fails to show why this is per se an argument against the validity of such theories. With both psychoanalysis and behaviourism, he often seems to try to refute a position simply by giving its genesis, a manoeuvre which, since he is arguing against the beast-in-man myth, is ironical. Indeed too often he uses the, in any case dangerous, connectives ‘it will be useful to review’ or ‘we shall first need to look more closely at’ to lead off into either what is not or what we don’t. Consequently he often takes a long time to get round to actually weighing the pros and cons of an argument, and may omit to do so altogether. His main means of refutation is simply to quote so many examples of the statement of the position that he is arguing against that eventually the next becomes predictable and therefore, since tiresome, unwelcome. Here and elsewhere he seems to feel that it is enough to demonstrate that a thing is widely believed to prove its vacuity (‘clockwork neatness’, ‘too pat’, ‘scrawnily familiar’, and, as derogation, ‘updated version’). This is more often than not the case, but is no excuse for abjuring argument. Conversely his ‘arguments for’ often seem no more than an argumentum ad verecundiam. This is almost inevitable in this area since the whatness of human nature, even if it seems defeatist to label it ineffable, is only amenable to analysis that confesses itself chronically provisional. Rather than arguing (that is, quoting authorities pro and con) he would do better to attack those ideas which he does attack by showing, as he promised to do at the outset, what specific interests they serve, or by throwing out the pursuit for such a definition of human nature altogether. Perhaps he could have highlighted this by completing the quotation from Plautus in the passage he quotes from Freud—Homo homini lupus. But Grixti, like Freud, seems unaware of the irony of its incompleteness. If Grixti can be said to stray too far from his ostensible subject in his discussions of psychoanalysis and behaviourism, then in the second part of his review of theoretical approaches to the genre, he abandons the genre altogether. This chapter (‘Clockwork copy-cats and the study of horrific influences’) is exclusively concerned with the question of the portrayal of violence, an element which is neither sufficient nor even necessary to entitle a work’s inclusion in the horror genre. With respect to the question of the portrayal of violence leading to its imitation he shows himself far more partisan than his introduction promised; simply putting ‘common sense’ in quotation marks and ‘allegedly’ in front of descriptions of theoreticaLpositions is not argument. Moreover he often applies a different standard of scientificness to those authorities who support his thesis and those who do not. Not that he does not refer to experimental evidence, both pro and con, particularly with reference to the influence on children of watching

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violence, but these references are rendered somewhat redundant by his own talk of ‘scientific jargon’, and the ‘rarefied air’ or ‘inevitable artificiality’ of the ‘laboratory’. Given that he does not like either ‘common sense’ (universal prejudice) or empiricism (scientists are dismissed both for using jargon and for the fact that this jargon is a priori adulterated by the common-sense assumptions that underlie ordinary language), how will he decide questions the answers to which can only be made within the realm of statistics? He offers no alternative except an appeal to rather grand ideological generalizations about ‘unacknowledged norms’, ‘the status quo’, and ‘post-industrial society’, taken from authors whose only qualifications for pronouncing on these matters are their reputations as writers of grand ideological generalizations on ‘unacknowledged norms’, ‘the status quo’, and so on. He does demonstrate that many of the assumptions underlying the discussion of the harmful effects or benefits of gore also underlie the production and consumption of that gore itself, but this much might be expected. What is most disappointing is that I feel I would probably agree with his case if only he would make it. In the final chapter he addresses ‘the contours and sources of human fears and communal uncertainties’, and the ‘reasons why people should want to play the types of games proposed by horror fiction’. However in so doing he resorts, as is perhaps inevitable in so general a subject, to precisely those mechanistic explanations, in this case the application of a physiological model to the emotions through the ambiguity of the word ‘perceive’, that he has earlier complained about. Consequently he falls into precisely that dressing up of truisms as insights which he has also complained of: [We] react to given situations according to how we perceive them, and interpretations are built out of the mental constructions of reality (hodological/cognitive maps or schemes) which develop in the course of our numerous experiences within our specific milieu…. Thus, with adults and children alike, the images and possibilities which are likely to be seen as most realistic are those which are most closely aligned with predisposed intentions and which bear the greatest resemblance to customary perceptions of the world of reality and of the individuaPs relation to it. In his conclusion we have a consideration of Rambo. Contemporary horror writing, television violence, and the glamour of militarism are, of course, loosely connected in being popular and, which is the same thing, demonstrably modelled after the reader/viewer’s wish-fulfilling fantasies. But the result is not a book about horror. Moreover, because of this diffuse focus it is not even a book that has time to go into the ‘terror of uncertainty’ in anything like a satisfying way. As analysis this book is too side-tracked. The result is an amorphous collection of largely random observations that tells me that most mass-culture aims at facile wish-fulfilment—a revelation of the obvious. What would perhaps have been more interesting and certainly more enlightening is the one thing that Grixti does not

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follow up, the thing that he is, indeed, most scrupulous in avoiding, that is, his own, personal response to the experience of reading and viewing contemporary horror fiction. As someone who is easily frightened and sees no attraction whatsoever in the revolting, someone who has not seen a popular horror film since his teens (and only watched them then for the female vampires), I would very much like to discover what constitutes the particular draw, that fascination which Grixti mentions only in passing as being among those emotions he felt during his research, emotions to which, unfortunately, he does not again refer. Shinwa Women’s College, Japan

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• Leslie Hill, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 224 pp., £29.95 (hardback) • Carla Locatelli, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works After the Nobcl Prize (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 288 pp., $29.95 (hardback) In David Lodge’s Small World, that ‘Pooh Perplex’ of postmodernist critical theory, Professor Arthur Kingfisher is revitalized by Persse’s question, ‘What do you do if everybody agrees with you?’ Professor Kingfisher, adept in these matters, proceeds to an authoritative gloss: ‘You imply, of course, that what matters in the field of critical practice is not truth but difference.’ Beckett studies, despite the phenomenal growth over the last quarter century or so, have only just begun to articulate clearly and fully the fundamental ‘differences’ with which they are engaged. During this period of great controversy in literary theorizing, Beckett is, strangely enough, not at the centre of any methodological debates. Instead the corpus of Beckett criticism shows Beckett, all too often in predictable and rather pedestrian ways, being assimilated to the fashionable terminology of the postmodernist critical vocabulary. This has, undeniably, resulted in some major achievements, but nearly all of these studies have dealt with only one aspect of Beckett’s writing, that which is congruent with the prevalent modes and techniques of postmodernism, all of which share, in varying degrees, an aestheticism that tends to be depoliticized and divorced from referential values. Carla Locatelli’s Unwording the World is a revolutionary and seminal contribution to Beckett criticism, arguing in a rigorously philosophical and methodological manner how ‘Beckett’s unwording probes into issues of the cultural encoding of meaning, not only to denounce the conventions of literary discourse, but to reveal the epistemological function of linguistic representation, and the intrinsic hermeneutic quality of our being’ (p. x). Locatelli thus focuses upon the ‘successful realization’ of the constructive aspects of the Beckettian enterprise, those aspects which markedly cut against the grain of the negatives of postmodernist theorizing which have constituted the orthodox rhetoric of Beckett criticism.

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On the other hand, Leslie Hill’s Beckett’s Fiction does not fundamentally challenge the rhetoric of Beckett criticism; indeed, in an unintended irony, it might be deemed to have reordered the same old words, thereby tidying up and making more coherent that critical tradition’s emphasis upon a textually constrained deconstructive impulse at the centre of Beckett’s use of language: In this book, no attempt is made to ascribe to the author a coherent world view, philosophical position or system of belief. The concern here is not with presumed authorial concepts, but with textual effects. In Beckett’s texts there are no valid positions of transcendence or final stability which might engage the critic to reconstruct an all-embracing authorial vision with which then to explain—or explain away— Beckett’s writing. What needs to be elucidated instead, with regard to Beckett’s work, is the strange dispersion which characterises the structure of many of the author’s texts. (p. x) For anyone who has followed closely the development of Beckett criticism, this is decidedly a case of ‘déjà vu/déjà lu’. What is of value here is the thorough methodology with which this position is pursued. Obviously, to propose a thesis that denies it is in fact a thesis is bound to be formally satisfying, if nothing else. Hill’s very narrow premisses beg the question of legitimate alternatives: Locatelli is able to argue effectively for a reconstruction of authorial vision without having recourse to logocentric fetishes of ‘transcendence’ and ‘final stability’. Hill’s opening sentence posits Beckett’s texts as ‘a verbal labyrinth’ and his task is ‘to chart a course’ through it. ‘Indifference’ is defined as Beckett’s attempt to ‘write in the name of something which has no name, but to which he struggles to give a name…. It is the infinity of difference’ (p. 162). Consequently, there is, for Hill, ‘no exit from the labyrinth’ (p. 163). Locatelli concludes with a diametrically opposed metaphor of the horizon of hermeneutics: In this sense we can say that this is the crucial and disquieting epiphany of Worstward Ho: the literalization of figurality in the doubling of fictional discourse, undoing the very distinction between figure and phenomenon. As a matter of fact, this is perhaps the most dramatic and ‘beyondless’ revelation of a radically open ‘self-reflective artifact’. (p. 266) In these two instances, you can judge a book by its cover: Hill’s cover design, ‘Rocks at Entrechaux’, depicts labyrinthine fissures; Locatelli’s ‘Light Inscriptions’ depicts a cyclopean jumble of boulders with hieroglyphic tracings. Read in conjunction, Hill’s and Locatelli’s studies bring to the fore vital differences with which Beckett criticism needs to come to terms. Their analyses focus our attention more closely on touchstone issues that have too often been

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glossed over or circumvented in earlier studies, namely, that most pressing query of all, the relationship (or lack thereof) of word with world, the related questions of reality and realism, mimesis and diegesis, in short, the vexed issue of the referent which is the determining subtext of most critical debate today. A note on the structural layout of these two studies is in order before proceeding to a more detailed exposition of their arguments. Both would have benefited greatly from informed editorial guidance. The ‘textual perplexity’ which Hill sees in Beckett’s work applies to his own study at a much more mundane level. Beckett’s Fiction is essentially a monograph on Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), with which the central four chapters deal. Here are found Hill’s most original and provocative analyses of Beckett’s cryptic ‘signature’ and its Biblical correspondences with respect to genesis and authority, genealogy and incorporation. The chapters on Murphy and Watt serve mainly to establish terms for the analysis of the trilogy, such as the ‘chiastic twists’ of Beckett’s ‘purgatorial aesthetic’. The chapter on Watt is somewhat more substantial and introduces the ideas of engendering and sexual difference which are at the centre of his readings of the trilogy. We do not receive any sense of Beckett’s overall development: the trilogy is the centre, the early works preliminary to it, and, most telling, the later works are covered in a very perfunctory fashion in two short concluding chapters governed by anaemic thesis statements—through the 1960s Beckett is said to be ‘plotting, in words, a series of impossible evanescent aporetic places having neither entry nor exit’ (p. 123) and, in the next phase, Beckett is said to ‘force readers to adopt strategies of their own devising’ (p. 141). There are similar difficulties in the structuring of Locatelli’s argument, beginning with her very awkward and not very informative subtitle. Locatelli’s argument is focused on Beckett’s ‘Second Trilogy’ of the eighties (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho) and it is here that she brilliantly explores her prefatory statement about ‘how Beckett’s structural and semiotic subtractions contribute to an unprecedented and unforeseeable development of postmodernist writing’ (p. ix). These readings constitute Part 2 of her study. It is decidedly odd that in an announced study of post-1969 Beckett fiction we have no detailed critiques of either The Lost Ones or Lessness. (The subtitle might have more profitably and illuminatingly read: ‘The Hermeneutics of Existence and Fiction in Beckett’s Second Trilogy’.) Part 1 would certainly have benefited from some radical re-editing: chapter 2, ‘Comic strategies in Beckett’s narratives’ seems strangely irrelevant to the book’s overall development—the philosophical jargon here seems to outweigh the dividends it pays after the thesis point is established that ‘the new epistemological role of the comic suspends logocentric determinations’ (p. 85). Chapter 3, ‘Beckett’s theater since the 1970’s’, excellent as it is in parts, particularly on Not I and What Where, is also oddly out of place in this study of the prose, even if it does emphasize certain common concerns such as the resistance to conceptualization and abstraction. Chapter 1 of Part 1, ‘Typologies of meaning in Beckett’s narratives’ and her long Introduction would

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have by themselves constituted a much more effective lead in to her main arguments in Part 2. It is unfortunate that Locatelli’s study lacks a bibliography, since her work is bound to be thoroughly consulted by serious students of Beckett’s work. A short ‘Conclusion’ would also have been appreciated, instead of simply ending with the discussion of Worstward Ho. The core of Hill’s argument begins with a discussion of the role which translation plays in Beckett’s œuvre. He is especially useful in a detailed look at the minuses as well as pluses which go with Beckett’s dual role of author and translator, how in two languages his writing is ‘the same but different’ (p. 48). The French/English binary pattern is also decisive on the critical plane of Hill’s study. Hill, a lecturer in French, could have chosen to write his study in French and, although in English, it is very much in the French critical tradition. In many ways, it is a synthesis of the guiding ideas of that tradition: Hill draws upon Blanchot, Bataille, Bernal and moves towards Kristevan psychoanalysis and Derridean semiologie. This combination might have proven more fruitful if Hill were not so often reduced to a formulaic repetition of his tenets of ‘purgatorial rhetoric’ and ‘chiastic twists’. For example—in the midst of a fine discussion of Beckett’s translation of the trilogy—‘Beckett’s motive cannot have been to use the translation as a means of communicating his ideas to a larger audience (assuming, absurdly, for an instant it might be possible to abstract from the trilogy anything as reliable as a set of ideas)’ (p. 50). Lodged here is a certain deconstructionist sleight-of-hand: Hill, of course, makes use of ‘ideas’ in his exposition of the trilogy (incorporation/ expulsion; oral/anal, for example), but since he doesn’t weight one term over another and because the binary patterns are, as he argues, radically undermined there is no ‘set’, no logocentric fetishes. But the traditional ‘ideas’, while questioned, subverted, are still retained, since the critical act is based on, is dependent upon the subversion and not upon the forwarding of a new ‘idea’ to replace the traditional. In chapter 4, ‘Duality, repetition, aporia’, there is a very lucid statement of this essentially ludic approach to the duties of literary criticism: The reader is presented with a binary opposition between similar elements, but Beckett refuses to mark either of the poles as positive or negative. The outcome is that there is no hermeneutic orientation to the contrast. What is left is a binary opposition which invites or solicits interpretation, yet refuses any contextual framework for interpretation. The contrast becomes both crucial and indeterminate, significant yet devoid of meaning. (p. 62) In other words, everything is questioned, yet everything is left intact; authority is challenged, but the old ‘set’ of authority figures is left intact: a perfect example of a postmodernist palingenesis, disguised as would-be radical subversion. Another case in point: ‘Reading Beckett is a case of having to disinter cryptic, subterranean passageways’ (p. 81). Without an implicit terra firma of

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signification how can there be ‘subterranean passages’? Moreover, at this point it is not really clear that we are in fact even reading Beckett; given the terms of Hill’s critical discourse almost any writer could be substituted and the results would be the same— ‘cryptic, subterranean passages’ sounds more like Beckett’s neighbour in Books in Print, William Beckford, than Beckett himself. These reductionist tendencies are particularly unfortunate in Hill’s best chapters: 5, ‘Fables of genealogy’ and 6, ‘Naming the body’, where he makes a number of very intriguing points about Biblical correspondences with reference to ‘the family drama’, paternity and the quest for a signature of one’s own. Of vital importance here is the series of inscriptions and effacements Hill sees Beckett weaving around his own Christian name and its Biblical connotations of ‘name of God’—the Beckettian ‘I’ can neither attain such divine status nor incorporate itself in mortal remains. To then go on to conclude that ‘there exists no intentional message that may be extracted from the verbal motions of the text, and to read Beckett’s novels becomes an exercise in breathing and punctuation’ (p. 120) is decidedly anti-climactic. Hill’s ‘cultural excavations’ are a far cry indeed from Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (‘I, Molloy, having sought my mother…’). Like so many other critics of the late Beckett, Hill talks of the inability to determine who is speaking in the texts and is hence led to the conclusion that there is an ‘eclipse of the figure of the narrator’ (p. 140). Without any means of identifying such narrative desiderata, the critic is bound to ignore any realistic elements or deny their very existence, thereby rejecting any consideration of those elements which could constitute the text’s claims to an ontological status of its own, a genuine validation of its legitimacy. Beckett criticism has reached an impasse that was confronted much earlier in Biblical hermeneutics from which so much of our current literary theorizing originated. As Hans W.Frei argues in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, the ‘regnant mode’ of Biblical reading before the eighteenth century was strongly realistic, at once literal and historical, but once an emerging modernity severed the ‘real’ historical world from its Biblical description the very authority of the ‘storied world’ of the Biblical narratives was gravely weakened. The literal came to mean a grammatical-lexical analysis (see Belacqua poring over the ‘famous teaser’ from The Divine Comedy in Beckett’s early short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’) or a descriptive analysis involving historical coincidence (see Vladimir’s canter in the Higher Criticism in Waiting for Godot, in a futile search for the Gospel truth). Frei’s point is that all of these critical gyrations are fundamentally wrongheaded for they are applying inappropriate criteria: the Biblical narratives need to be read in their own right as self-sustaining narratives and the major casualty of the failure to do so has been the loss of a sense of their realistic elements: this specifically realistic characteristic, though acknowledged by all hands to be there, finally came to be ignored, or—even more fascinating—its presence or distinctiveness came to be denied for lack of a ‘method’ to

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isolate it. And this despite the common agreement that the specific feature was there! And these remarks could be adapted as an accurate assessment of Beckett studies which, after the early period of existentialist criticism, has tended to hedge its bets by denying for a lack of a method the realistic elements in Beckett’s writing, and has instead focused more and more on either mythopoeic generalities or Hill’s ‘textual conundrums’; in both instances, there is a failure to see the works for themselves as a consequence of placing them against the false criteria of the logical and historical, as in Biblical scholarship, or, irony of ironies, as in Beckett criticism, against the false comparison with Biblical authority itself. Locatelli’s great achievement is to have developed a methodology which could take into account these realistic elements. The key term ‘unwording’, which is developed from Beckett’s phrase ‘the literature of the unword’ in his famous 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, encompasses a powerful deconstructive impulse, but what she terms Beckett’s ‘subtractive strategies’ does not result in the reductionist readings of Hill. Locatelli engages the question of the referential nature of Beckett’s writing without falling prey to the naive ‘set’ of identifications which Hill sees as the only alternative to a purely semiotic analysis. Nor does the ‘hermeneutic code’ need to fall back on the ‘authoritarian’ prescriptions of an E.D. Hirsch. Her ‘main thesis…is that Beckett’s writing constitutes a movement from representations to the representation of representations…by so doing, Beckett is probing into what today seems the elementary structure of our interpretation of reality or the simplest, basic mode ofvour being in the world’ (p. 29). Later, in a statement which is similar to Frei’s comment on the critical juncture in Biblical hermeneutics, she emphasizes that Beckettian critical attitudes should be borne in mind when reading his works: it is sad to see that a fairly common way of ignoring their referentiality occurs precisely when metalinguistic and metaliterary readings are invoked, not without an excessive structuralist ingenuity (which ignores the impossibility of conceptual closure, a typical trait of Beckett’s later works). (p. 247) Hence Locatelli discerns ‘strong cognitive tensions’ (p. 58) where Hill tends only to see ‘textual perplexity’. Locatelli enriches the ‘différance’ of her ‘unwording’ with striking conjunctions, such as those of Peirce and Derrida (see p. 199, for example). Writing from an Italian context and choosing to write in English, Locatelli sets out to incorporate a much larger intellectual culture than Hill who remains securely within a French poststructuralist tradition. In the chapter on Company, Locatelli undertakes the development of her central question of the relationship between immediacy of consciousness and ‘linguistic inescapability’, thereby confronting and convincingly answering any

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charge that she is simply falling back on what the redoubtable Morris Zapp in his Rummidge lecture of Small World fame termed ‘the hermeneutic fallacy of a recuperable meaning, which claims that if we remove the clothing of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts it is trying to communicate’. Locatelli’s analysis concentrates on how this narration suspends the direct reference to an ‘objective I’, and tells us precisely that the ‘I’ apprehends himself only by moving through a network of systemic relations. Yet this movement is hidden in the linguistic referent, which comes across as a ‘thing in itself’, rather than as the meaning of a relation. In other words, language hides the fact that the referent is constituted by a relational value. (p. 173) It is this ‘suspension’—so very different from Hill’s—that allows Beckett in Locatelli’s reading to effect a critical mimesis that enables us to see how we fabricate our representations of reality. Locatelli then proceeds to elaborate a complex theory of fictions to deal with a hermeneutics of experience which is already and always a series of simulacra: ‘we must remember that simulations of self cannot be avoided since the very definition of the “I” occurs through the language that alienates it from presence’ (p. 182). It is very difficult to do justice to the complexity of Locatelli’s arguments in a summary fashion, but the following sampling will indicate the degree to which she has managed to bring out into the open the ‘differences’ at stake in Beckett criticism and, more generally, in related contemporary debates. Throughout her study, she makes the point that Beckett is not naively assuming that ‘referentiality’ is the basis of literary mimesis, yet is still obsessed with the presentation of reality via literary re-presen tations: ‘He is concerned with the issue of signs referring to objects, whether mental or physical, rather than focusing on signs referring only to signs’ (p. 202). Crucial to her hermeneutic analysis is, of course, the question of time, and in Ill Seen Ill Said she argues that Beckett includes temporality in representation ‘by means of a tension of literality and figurality that enacts the play of meaning’ (p. 211). And with reference to Beckett’s ‘synthesis of unwording’ in Worstward Ho Locatelli reiterates one of her main points in order to forestall any simple dismissal of her argument by those committed to the position represented by Leslie Hill’s work: ‘the centrality of language in human experience is not to be confounded with the establishment of one center of signification. In other words, although the determination of reality is inevitably logocentric, it should not appear unquestionable’ (p. 231). Both Hill and Locatelli’s studies raise crucial questions about the over-all development of Beckett’s œuvre. Both would seem to concur that in Beckett’s first trilogy there was an emphasis upon those negative aspects of language which would forestall any effective communication. To rephrase Persse’s decisive question in Small World: ‘If they both agree at this juncture, how do

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they come to disagree so fundamentally with respect to Beckett’s second trilogy, his final major prose works?’ It could be argued that Beckett’s innovations in this final period are not totally ‘unprecedented’, but in fact implicit in his literary quest from the very beginning. If so, we would then get a very different perspective on the evolution of Beckett’s world of fiction. This view could be argued by a more comprehensive intertextual reading of Beckett’s prose: many of the revolutionary insights gained by Locatelli through the matrix of modern philosophy and semiotics could also be broached by a more conventional literary methodology which traces in depth how Beckett uses language from one text to another. There is an unintentional yet nevertheless illuminating example of this approach in Unwording the World, very near to its conclusion, when a proofreading error renames Worstward Ho as Wordsworth Ho (p. 259). This is doubly ironic since Wordsworth was parodied by his detractors as ‘Wordsworst’ or ‘Worstworst’. The point is that many of the keystones in Locatelli’s argument could be reached within the literary tradition. Beckett in his later prose has found truly original ways of working around (arguably even synthesizing) that key juncture in the Romantic Ideology when Wordsworth’s naive sense of reference (‘real language of men’) was pitted against Coleridge’s protostructuralist critique (‘the terms of conveyance must have pre-existed’). Beckett’s driving need, as Locatelli maintains, was the ‘reconstruction of the reference’ (p. 211). University College of the Cariboo

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• Jeremy Hawthorn: Joseph Conrad. Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (London: Edward Araold, 1990), 271 pp., £30.00 (hardback) Jeremy Hawthorn’s first study of Conrad, published in 1979, was entitled Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness. As one of the earliest systematic attempts to undertake a full-length analysis of Conrad by foregrounding language, it is inscribed into the critical discourse elaborated by the essays of Edward W.Said and Tony Tanner whose remarks on the problematic are worth quoting: Conrad’s fate was to have written fiction great for its presentation, and not only for what it was representing. He was misled by language even as he led language into a dramatization no other author really approached. For what Conrad discovered was that the chasm between words saying and words meaning was widened, not lessened, by his talent for words written.1 language can never hold any substantial reality, a realisation which leads in one direction to a sense of both the autonomy and futility of language; and secondly, the recognition that language must constantly attempt to establish some kind of relationship to non-lingual realities, a realisation which leads in the other direction to a sense of the heteronomy and purposefulness of language.2 Hawthorn’s immense merit in that book was to have articulated, on the one hand, Conrad’s need to anchor (so to speak) his writings in history and his anguish faced with the problem of re-presenting that history with words which were always-already elsewhere; on the other hand, the ideological function of language within society and the political implications of the Conradian text. Seldom has there been a writer whose determination to express himself on certain issues of his time was rendered so difficult by the medium he chose; whose personal convictions— conservative on so many matters—were constantly belied by reality in general and the reality of handling words in

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particular. Inevitably, Conrad has been accused of unnecessary ambiguity, wilful obscurity, of hiding behind words rather than getting them to do his work for him. To this there has been an incisive rejoinder: The formal, structural difficulties of a text, the kinds of de-formation that it uses, are inseparable from the way it produces significance, from its mode of signification. That is to say, the wide range of textual obscurities which become so formidable in modern writing have posi tive functions. They are productive of meaning at the same time as (apparently) concealing meaning.3 Furthermore, the very terms used to censure Conrad ‘are already aligned and grouped into distinct ideological unities before we start’,4 which remark must not be applied only to Conrad criticism, but to the way we read Conrad, to ‘the relation between the literary text and its ideological and psychic sub-text’.5 This has most certainly been the task that criticism has set itself since the pathfinding studies of Hawthorn and White; the articulation of Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and discourse analysis has revealed aspects of Conrad that render obsolete the time-honoured reification of the trinity of morality, metaphysics and reality, inasmuch as these terms do not disappear but are now endowed with an insistently—and, for many Conradians, disconcertingly—historical dimension. Although he insisjs on the moral aspects of commitment in Conrad in the opening pages of his new book, Hawthorn is careful on the whole not to depoliticize the term. Referring to the links between idealism and imperialism in Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, he firmly refuses the liberal view that Kurtz, for example, was corrupted as a result of his contact with a primitive culture, a favourite line of approach which gets round the problem of why Kurtz went to Africa in the first place.6 Hawthorn points out that ‘the link between idealism and imperialism is not fortuitous, it is functional’ (p. 182), thus insisting that the idealist misrecognizes his/her position within the discourses produced by the imperialist society in question (critics of Conrad who discuss his work in ahistorical moral terms are, of course, doing the same). True to his concerns with language and narrative as ideologically structured and coded, Hawthorn compares Jim, Gould and Carlier and Kayerts of ‘An Outpost of Progress’, showing how, in each case, the view of reality and the concomitant attitude towards it through various actions and decisions are determined by literary discourse (pp. 162, 214). This brings us to the heart of Conrad’s dilemma: writing works of fiction that had, perforce, to acknowledge their position within that discourse called ‘fiction’, while at the same time trying to deconstruct it through a use of language that both referred to its own nature as language and was obliged to ‘tell a story’. This is not the place to go into Conrad’s schizophrenia and nervous breakdowns over this problematic,7 but it is revealing to note how his own words in letters—evoking the need to ‘write, write, write’—are taken up in Heart of

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Darkness in the context of both the accountant—‘He wrote, he wrote’—and Kurtz himself: ‘he spoke, he spoke’. The fact that the accountant is the perfect example within Conrad of the agent of imperialism, carrying out his task without asking the slightest question on either its cause or its effects, is an eloquent reminder of how keenly Conrad felt, how painfully he lived out, the social function of language. ‘Eloquent’ too, is Kurtz who condenses all the moral, linguistic and ideological problems raised by Conrad’s fiction. For that eloquence which fascinates Marlow and which, when all is said and done, he cannot bring himself to denounce, must surely be compared with the eloquence of Donkin in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. In that tale it is called ‘filthy loquacity’ and finds its literary equivalent in Bulwer Lytton, presented as the paradigm of style without any moral or human commitment. Here we can pinpoint Conrad’s confusions on imperialism. His venom is reserved for the representative of working-class socialism—a socialism that, as Hawthorn points out, has nothing to do with genuine socialist theories; it is part of a discourse on socialism—who threatens national unity, whereas Kurtz’s eloquence can be admired, as if it were cut off from its effects. I would go so far as to say that Kurtz is an extreme and negative version of Jim, with Africa in the role of Patusan. In this way, of course, the economic and ideological causes for Kurtz’s being in Africa are hidden behind the explicit and moral reasons, a piece of mystification that too much Conrad criticism prolongs. Despite my immense admiration for what he has achieved with his new book, I feel that Jeremy Hawthorn has—at times—fallen into the same trap as Conrad and Conrad criticism, particularly in his opening chapter where he painstakingly analyses the function of Free Indirect Discourse. Commenting on a long passage he quotes from Almayer’s Folly, Hawthorn writes: This passage probably presents no practised reader of fiction with any problems, although the narrative shifts which it contains are extremely complex. This suggests that readers adapt as naturally to FID in narrative fiction as writers do to its use. (p. 5) Referring to Under Western Eyes: The potentiality of FID to ‘lose the narrator’ is useful to Conrad; it allows the narrative of Under Western Eyes to flow smoothly, with the reader being reminded of its technical origin or chain of delivery only when it suits the author. the technical implausibilities attendant upon Conrad’s use of the narrating teacher of languages are artistically unimportant because there is a unifying narrative centre behind this ostensible source, a centre constituted by the ideological, moral and political coherence of the work’s implied scheme of values.

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(pp. 58–9) Unless I have missed something along the way, Hawthorn seems to be making a most dubious use of the word ‘naturally’ in the first quotation, as if each reader comes to fiction free of those very ideological presuppositions that Hawthorn so carefully tracks down and subtly analyses throughout his book. I would suggest that the answer lies in the second quotation, with the reference to the ‘centre’ that underpins everything, for if there is a weakness in this new book that was, interestingly, absent from the earlier work (even if it was present intuitively, not theoretically), it is precisely a refusal to elaborate a theory of the subject. And it is in his analysis of The Nigger that it is most patent. I have just indicated that, in the opening chapter of his book, Jeremy Hawthorn does not succeed in articulating narrative and ideology: he tends too often to consider as unproblematic the way readers read. We therefore find a discrepancy between the sophisticated technical analysis and the ideological conclusions drawn. This, I feel, stems from an ability to foreground enunciative strategies on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a penchant for extracting ideology as a signified from the body of the text. This dehistoricizes the former—and the reader with it—and ends up by making it formalist. In his chapter on The Nigger Hawthorn refers to ‘a narrative indecision that stems from ideological contradictions and uncertainties in Conrad but which manifests itself most obviously in terms of technical unclarities and blurrings’ (p. 102). I could not agree more with the first part of this remark and Hawthorn has many pertinent things to say about the representation of blacks in Conrad’s society, while drawing attention to the fact that we cannot know who is responsible for the racist portrayal of Wait. Unlike Hawthorn, however, I would suggest that the narrative inconsistencies are, in fact, intimately linked to the text’s contradictory ideological projects, and that these inconsistencies are rewarding and productive and not to be put down to Conrad’s not knowing what he wants or to his refusing to tell us (p. 11). This is surely a case of Hawthorn treating Conrad as a centred ego in full charge, or else as going through a regrettable patch of artistic incompetence, soon to be remedied by the Marlow narratives. This, of course, is just the point: The Nigger is a crucial step towards these narratiyes and its ‘inconsistencies’ show a major writing talent grappling with his own contradictions, those of his society and, especially, those stemming from a particular view of what language and narrative ‘are’. As I have already written elsewhere—and Jeremy Hawthorn refers to the article in question—much of the problem can be solved by referring to the text’s use of the passive voice and imprecise subjects of the énoncé.8 Take the following: A hum of voices was heard there. All stood still. Someone yawned interminably…

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Such imprecision prevents the reader from knowing whether the tale is being narrated by the omniscient narrator or the crewman, while the use of the passive in the first quotation passes off the narration as ‘natural’, not originating from anywhere, which serves to cover up the fact that ‘there’ would tend to indicate a distance from the action, rather than a participation in it (which would not mean that the narrator is not present, simply that he is describing events rather than indicating how he experiences them). Elsewhere the text goes to the extent of eliminating the crewman narrator from the ship altogether, despite his being present. Thus, when members of the crew are trying to save Wait, we read: ‘The five men… looked for the best way to get forward.’ They are then identified, or rather, four of them are. The text indicates later that the fifth is the narrator, so why does he not identify himself? Why does he write about himself in the third person? The answer to this will allow us to detect the ideological contradictions informing the text at all levels. I find the answer simple: despite various critical opinions to the contrary, there are not two narrators but one. The critical confusion stems from the fact that the single narrator occupies two subject positions, inasmuch as he cannot at one and the same time be subject of the énonciation and subject of the énoncé, be on board ship and tell the story years after. To admit this, however, is to attack the sacrosanct bourgeois subject, master of all he surveys and narrates. The very expression ‘omniscient narrator’ is a misnomer as it supposes a narrating instance always faithful to its opinions, formed outside the text as if the narrator existed independently of it, and thus carefully dehistoricized because eternal and non-problematic. This masking of the enunciative strategies in The Nigger goes hand in hand with that virulent attack on eloquence I have already drawn attention to, the eloquence of Donkin and Bulwer Lytton. Hence the contradictions, for Conrad was only too painfully aware of the labour needed to get words even to approximate to what he wanted to say. Such awareness of the way the subject must submit to language cannot be countenanced in The Nigger because it is precisely a subjective manipulation of language that enables Donkin to communicate his ressentiment to the crew, thus endangering the ‘natural’ authority of the Captain and the entire political and economic system based on such authority.9 Thus the énonciation must disappear behind the énoncé, as if the discours were only histoire, to adopt Benveniste’s distinction and its terminology.10 Hence the ‘objectivity’ of the third person in the quotation ‘The five men…’ In such a fashion, histoire as story functions, precisely, to naturalize and eternalize History itself. This is most strikingly realized at the very end of The Nigger where the crewman goes on shore with the other members of the crew. At one point he says: ‘As I came up I saw…’ He is now in the process of commenting on his mates immediately after the voyage and on what became of them years after. As such, the two narrative positions merge in omniscience and the Voice of Truth. Thus the shifter ‘I’ foregrounds the split subject position and disavows it in the same

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breath, suturing the folds of the discourse(s) outside contradiction both aesthetic and ideological. These few comments cannot do justice to the complexity of Conrad’s tale, nor do they do justice to the attempts of Jeremy Hawthorn to come to grips with the problems inherent in Conrad’s narrative strategies (I do not like the word ‘technique’, which too often connotes static formalism). In its careful reading of the letter of the text and in its remarkable ability to make links where too many Conradians see nothing of importance at all, it is a major contribution to the field and should, thanks to the questions it raises and the hesitations contained in its answers to them, open a few doors for further research. Despite claims to the contrary from those who have a vested interest in pretending that Marxism and psychoanalysis are things of the past and that deconstruction is on its way out, Conrad has still much to tell us. Which is just what this remarkably written and superbly produced volume shows. University of Lille III NOTES 1 Edward W.Said, ‘Conrad: the presentation of narrative’, Novel (Winter 1974), pp. 116–32. 2 Tony Tanner: ‘“Gnawed bones” and “artless tales”—Eating and narrative in Conrad’, in Joseph Conrad. A Commemoration. ed. Norman Sherry (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 17–36. 3 Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity. The Fiction of Early Modernism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 16. 4 ibid., p. 13. 5 ibid., p. 6. 6 See my forthcoming article ‘Restraint, cannibalism and the “unspeakable rites” in Heart of Darkness’, in L’Epoque Conradienne, Department of English, University of Limoges. (Proceedings of the International Joseph Conrad Conference held in Marseille in September 1990.) 7 For what Conrad went through while writing Nostromo and Under Western Eyes, for example, see Jocelyn Baines: Joseph Conrad. A Critical Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), particularly the quotations from Conrad’s letters to Galsworthy. After twenty-five years, Edward W.Said’s Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966) remains an invaluable study of many of the questions raised in this review. 8 Reynold Humphries: ‘How to change the subject: narrative, reader and ideology in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”’, Recherches anglaises et américaines, Department of English, University of Strasbourg, vol. XV, 1982, pp. 37–50. 9 See Frederic Jameson’s remarks on ressentiment in The Political Unconscious (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press/Methuen, 1981), particularly the chapters on Gissing and Conrad.

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10 See in particular ‘Les relations de temps dans le verbe français’, in Problèmes de linguistique générale, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 237–50. The whole of Section V, L’homme dans la langue, is central to this debate.

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• N.Coupland, H.Giles and J.M.Wiemann (eds), ‘Miscommunication’ and Problematic Talk (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1991), 374 pp., £37. 95 (hardback), £18.95 (paperback) Coupland et al.’s approach to miscommunication has successfully attempted to integrate the macro and micro elements of interaction between speakers by situating discourse in its social context, by considering interaction inclusive of people’s attitudes, value systems, intentions and identities, and by focusing the topic of miscommunication not only on its items of production but also on its causes and effects. This entails going beyond a merely descriptive interpersonal approach in order to meet the principle of remedy. Moral and social analyses which transcend the notion of reparability of conventional discourse analysis are allowed by their recognition that ‘language and communication underpin and enact…specific social problems, divisions, inequalities, and dissatisfactions’, together with their claim of the need for research on ‘how deception is interactionally constituted and the contexts in which it may be pernicious or necessary.’ The framework seems irreproachable, one eagerly sought after in sociolinguistics, and most suitable to outline the comprehensive approach to female/ male communication that Henley and Kramarae propose in this essay ‘Gender, Power, and Miscommunication’. What is more, as the editors make feasible the study and comparison of some misunderstandings whose roots can be found at a level beyond personal interaction, the paper I will be dealing with (pp. 18–43) may gain perspective if some of Henley and Kramarae’s conclusions are compared to the findings of the rest of the researchers in the volume. Henley and Kramarae state that their intention is to examine what seem to be the most relevant interpretations of cross-sex miscommunication elaborated up to now (namely, the Fetnale Deficit theory, the Two Cultures theory, the Social Power-based explanations, the Psychological Difference theory, the Faulty Linguistic Systems explanations, and Cahill’s Cross-Sex ‘Pseudocommunication’), and to propose an alternative which they call ‘a multidetermined social context approach’. Their examination, in my opinion, proves

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that in the field of Language and Gender, it is still, as it was a decade ago, in the interpretations of gender differences and in the implications researchers draw from their findings that the major problems lie. Yet one-third of the chapter is devoted to discussing Maltz and Borker’s interpretation of the difficulties in communication between women and men, or the Two Cultures theory.1 The relevance given to this approach in the present paper, so they say, is due not only to the fact that no scholar until now has presented a detailed critique of it, but also because ‘it is both prominent and seductive as an explanation for betweengender miscommunication’ (emphasis mine). One of the ‘seduced’ scholars they are referring to is Tannen, whose book You Just Don’t Understand has recently been published in Britain.2 Another is Aries,3 who, in 1987, comparing Maltz and Borker’s argument with the explanations of gender difference proposed by Cheris Kramarae herself, claimed that Maltz and Borker had elaborated ‘a rather different and more convincing argument’, the only one that could account ‘not only for gender differences in communication, but for the numerous findings that gender differences are most pronounced in single-sex groups’. Henley and Kramarae, taking issue with Maltz and Borker’s claim, have thought it advisable to discuss their theory at great length. And I must say that in that regard their analysis is remarkable. Their arguments on the prevalence of power/dominance factors in female/male miscommunication are convincing, and their reinterpretations of the areas in which men and women possess different conversational rules must be taken into account in any analysis of language differences across gender. But, at the same time, one cannot fail to notice that some other theories which account for gender differences in verbal behaviour are rejected or undervalued without being examined so thoroughly (notably, French structuralist/feminist psychoanalysts Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous are accorded thirty-six lines between them), even if they have not been previously analysed in detail, as is the case with Cahill’s approach, to which I will refer below. The Two Cultures approach to cross-sex communication patterns places the stress not on psychological differences or power differentials, ‘although these may make some contribution’,4 but on a notion of cultural differences between women and men in their conceptions of friendly conversation and their rules for engaging in and interpreting it. Maltz and Borker argue that women and men come from different sociolinguistic subcultures and have thus learned friendly conversational behaviour from peers from age 5 to 15, when children interact primarily in single-sex groups. They are interested in studying women and men’s failed ‘attempt to interact as equals in friendly cross-sex conversations’ (p. 196); and suggest that ‘women and men have different cultural rules for friendly conversation and [that] these rules come into conflict when women and men attempt to talk to each other as friends and equals in casual conversation’ (p. 212). They specifically assert that these rules can only serve to establish patterns of friendly interaction, and not for other types of social interpersonal encounters:

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Different types of interaction lead to different ways of speaking. The rules for friendly conversation between equals are different from those for service encounters, for flirting, for teaching, or for polite formal interaction. (p. 215) Now, Henley and Kramarae, disregarding Maltz and Borker’s descriptive terminology (friendly), examine the (actual) possibility of attributing instances of sexual and physical violence against women to misguided signals between the sexes, as when a woman says ‘no’ and is interpreted to mean ‘yes’: One consequence of the cultural difference approach is this explanation of date and marital rape and other such forms of sexual aggression as extreme examples of miscommunication, in which males and females had different interpretations of their own and each other’s behaviour, and communication breakdown resulted. (p. 26) Henley and Kramarae’s turn from friendly interaction to such an extreme form of misunderstanding as rape is not an instance of ‘misreading’, but the central point of their analysis. Although Maltz and Borker stress in their paper that they are only referring to relationships among peers— that is, ‘equals’—Henley and Kramarae believe that in the present context of sexual inequality women and men never achieve such notional equality. Clearly, for them the unequal distribution of power resulting from the gender hierarchy cannot be left aside in the study of miscommunication, as in their opinion it is the power relation which will decide in the last instance who will be required to learn the other’s code and interpret the meaning: This context creates the gender-polarized conditions that give different interpretations and different evaluations of women’s and men’s language usage; suggest that men and women have distinctive languages which demand interpretation to one another, and tend to create denial and reinterpretation of women’s negations in the sexual realm…. Hierarchies determine whose version of the communication situation will prevail; whose speech style will be seen as normal; who will be required to learn the communication style, and interpret the meaning of the other; whose language style will be seen as deviant, irrational, and inferior; and who will be required to imitate the other’s style in order to fit into the society.5 Maltz and Borker rely on Gumperz’s work on problems in inter-ethnic and crossculture communication. They confine themselves to describing the differences between women and men’s communicational behaviour, specifically their behaviour among peers. But the consequence we draw from Henley and

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Kramarae’s arguments is that to study language without considering the social structures in which it is produced is misleading, and communication cannot be described apart from knowledge of social relationships; the place a speaker occupies in the structure of dominance relationships and the definition of social identity imposed on her/him mark the linguistic forms she/he uses. The fact that Henley and Kramarae devote eight pages out of twenty-four to their evaluation of the Two Cultures theory clearly reveals their concern for the blind acceptance of such a ‘seductive’ and risky approach without considering the implications and consequences of it. But is this cautionary note altogether justified? What is the danger inherent in being ‘seduced’ by Maltz and Borker’s approach? I think it is twofold. On the one hand, miscommunication may be perceived as inescapable and ‘normal’; Henley and Kramarae mention that academic and popular media have already offered it as a justification for such serious issues as sexual harassment, forms of job discrimination and rising statistics of divorce, among others. And on the other hand, though the authors do not mention it, theories of difference which disempower women are to be suspected, especially because it is perennially tempting for women to take delight in theories of difference, even if they do not carry with them the seeds of their own dissolution. The reality of women, if different from men’s, is yet to come; it should be defined by themselves, and not only as the by-product of male domination. It may not be superfluous to warn against bringing forward Maltz and Borker’s theory in a failed attempt to explain—finally alas!—women’s behaviour in its own terms: a culture ‘of their own’, developed under ‘different’ premisses, something that, of course, would be a misrepresentation of reality. To accept it eagerly would mean failing to realize that in Maltz and Borker’s approach, women’s culture is still the Other’s culture. And, as for ‘cultures’, according to Henley and Kramarae, ‘cultural difference does not exist within a political vacuum’ (p. 40). Cultures ‘cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied’, as Said put it.6 Kramarae wrote in 1981 that ‘Women’s language has never really been a class by itself. It has been a part of the structure of knowledge and beliefs designed by men to express, explain, and sanction their power’;7 in other words, it is part of the discourse on Women, used to construct and maintain existing social relationships. Kramarae’s remark has a lot in common with Said’s study of discourse on the Orient, a discourse ‘based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and…“the Occident”’, and which Said summarized as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (p. 4). The words of Kramarae quoted above refer to the hazard of mystifying women’s culture and retain a faith in the integrity and reality of ‘women’ as a category, in spite of the insistence of some feminisms that ‘women’ —or their culture—are historically and discursively constructed, always in relation to other categories. We are born male or female, but not masculine or feminine.

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‘Femininity is a mode of enacting and re-enacting received gender norms’,8 linguistic ones among them. These norms are proper to women, not by virtue of their womanhood alone, but as a result of domination. All definition of gender must be carefully examined, all the ‘seductive’ risky elements of alignment in sexed ranks—that dangerous intimacy between subjectification and subjection, as Lacan put it; once you are distinguished as Other, the same categorization will befall you. That is why, for many feminists, a condition for effective political action in the world is ‘an active scepticism about the integrity of the sacred category “Women”’.9 This does not involve downplaying the experience of real women. It is a warning against celebrating differences without considering where they emanate from, and what precipitating causes they have. Coleman and De Paulo, who study the problems of miscommunication between physically disabled and ablebodied people in the same volume,10 stress with reference to physically disabled people that one of the profound consequences of categorizing some people into an ‘out’ group is that perceptions of differences between people within each group are minimized, whereas perceptions of differences between people who are from different groups are exaggerated, thus creating social and psychological distances between the people of the two groups, followed by stigmatization— people being discredited or discounted because they are different. Thus, it comes as no surprise that throughout the volume, miscommunication between individuals belonging to groups conceptualized in terms of hierarchical categories (that is, between disabled and able-bodied, elderly and younger adults,11 or women and men) seems to stem from attitudes, stereotypes and stigmatization. This would explain why Henley and Kramarae insist on not exaggerating the differences. (After all, ‘different’ means different from something, the differences are only significant in reference to that ‘implicit referent’ which does not need to be mentioned but which is always there, hidden.) Although they are very much aware that differences do occur, they emphasize that, as many scholars have demonstrated, similarities of behaviour between females and males are far greater than differences. Nevertheless there are strongly marked stereotypes of speech differences across gender; people tend to perceive a broader difference between the patterns of speaking of women and men than actually exists. However, partly seduced by the possibility of validating women as a gender, most studies of women’s speech behaviour focus on female difference, which sometimes helps to reinforce stereotypic traits, to enhance polarization between women and men, and to maintain the myth of difference. As a result, miscommunication is apprehended as inevitable or natural. Cahill’s approach,12 the last to be analysed by Henley and Kramarae, also has sexual hierarchical categorization as the source of miscommunication: As long as sexual categorization is the central organizing principle of social life, trans-situational sexual inequality and cross-sex pseudocommunication will remain.

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(p. 87) Cahill’s excellent article, to which Henley and Kramarae fail to do justice, was published a year before Maltz and Borker’s paper. Henley and Kramarae consider Cahill’s approach to male/female ‘distorted’ com munication very similar to the Cultural Difference theory, even though they recognize that ‘Cahill’s perspective is broader than the others in both proposing the mechanism by which cross-sex miscommunications are engendered and placing the mechanism in the specific context of cultural male dominance; and by linking micro and macro levels of analysis’ (p. 35). However, they interpret it as suffering from some of the limitations of the two-cultures perspective, as ‘the basic mechanism remains that of distinct female and male cultures arising from different experiences’ (p. 35). It is only fair to point out that Cahill’s explanation of how ‘pseudocommunication’13 is caused and works is much more convincing and complex than Henley and Kramarae give credit for here, and should not be dismissed so easily. For Cahill, pseudocommunication has its origins a step further back than in ‘different experiences’: in social categorization. ‘Similarly categorized persons develop and subsequently transmit to one another… communicative styles which are adapted to the demands’ (p. 77) of the activities which correspond to the behavioural expectations associated with membership categorization. In the case of sexual categorization, this results in cross-sex pseudocommunication, which ‘serves to sustain trans-situational male dominance only because it occurs within a context of trans-situational sexual inequality’ (p. 85). How are pseudocommunication and sexual inequality interrelated? ‘Reflexively’, is Cahill’s answer: ‘Trans-situational male dominance rests on the exclusion of women from culturally valued social activities…. [T]his very sexual division of social activities results in cross-sex pseudo-communication. Cross-sex pseudocommunication, in turn, serves to perpetuate the segregations of the sexes’ (p. 84). In spite of Henley and Kramarae’s dismissal of Cahill, his perspective seems in keeping with their own final statement, that ‘the construction of miscommunication between the sexes emerges as a powerful tool, maybe even a necessity, to maintain the structure of male supremacy.’14 Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain NOTES 1 Daniel N.Maltz and Ruth A.Borker, ‘A cultural approach to male-female miscommunication’, in J.Gumperz (ed.), Language and Social Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 196–216. 2 Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand (London: Virago, 1991). 3 Elizabeth Aries, ‘Gender and communication’, in P.Shaver and C.Hendrick (eds), Sex and Gender (Newbury Park: Sage, 1987), pp. 149–76. 4 Maltz and Borker, op. cit., p. 199.

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5 Henley and Kramarae, pp. 19–20. 6 Edward W.Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 6. 7 Cheris Kramarae, Women and Men Speaking (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1981), p. 158. 8 Judith Butler, ‘Embodied identity in De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,’ unpublished manuscript presented to the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, 22 March 1985, p. 158. 9 Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 113. 10 Lerita M.Coleman and Bella M.DePaulo, ‘Uncovering the human spirit: Moving beyond disability and “missed” communication’, in N.Coupland et al., pp. 61–74. 11 Justine Coupland, Jon F.Nussbaum, and Nikolas Coupland, ‘The reproduction of aging and agism in intergenerational talk’, in N.Coupland et al., pp. 85–102. 12 Spencer E.Cahill, ‘Cross-sex pseudocommunication’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 26(1981), pp. 75–88. 13 Although the concept is borrowed from Habermas, the term is used in a very different context and thus assumes a meaning different from that which it assumes in the work of Habermas. 14 Henley and Kramarae, p. 42.

TEXTUAL PRACTICE INDEX VOLUME 7

Index Volume 7

ARTICLES Catherine Belsey Desire in theory: Freud, Lacan, Derrida p.384 Peter Benson Between women: lesbianism in pornography p.412 Fred Botting and Scott Wilson Literature as heterological practice: George Bataille, writing and inner experience p. 195 Christine Brooke-Rose Interviewed by David Seed p.247 Dympna Callaghan ‘And all is semblative a woman’s part’: body politics and Twelfth Night p.428 Linda Charnes Near misses of the nontranscendental kind: reply to Richard Levin p.56 John Drakakis Terminator 2½; or Messing with canons p.60 Hugh Grady Containment, subversion— and postmodernism p.31 Jay Grosman ‘A’ is for Abolition?: race, authorship, The Scarlet Letter p.13 Harriett Hawkins Maidens and monsters in modern popular Culture: The Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast p. 258 Barbara Johnson ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘rapport’ in Toni Morrison’s Sula p.165 Anny Brooksbank Jones Julia Kristeva and her Old Man: between optimism and despair p.1 Jonathan Keane AIDS, identity and the space of desire p.453 Nick Land Machinic desire p.471

John Lecht An introduction to Bataille: the impossible as (a practice of) writing p. 173 Richard Levin On defending Shakespeare, ‘liberal humanism’, transcendent love, and other ‘sacred cows’ and lost causes p.50 Tamsin Spargo and Fred Botting Reiterating desire p.379 Andrew Thacker Imagist travels in modernist space p.224 Lawrence Venuti Translation as cultural politics: regimes of domestication in English p.208

REVIEW ARTICLES Rachel Bowlby Futures for feminist history p.498 Mario DiGangi Reading homoeroticism in early modern England: imaginations, interpretations, circulations p.483

REVIEWS OF Marguerite Alexander Flights from Realism p.305 Jean Baudrillard Cool Memories p.317 Zygmunt Bauman Intimations of Postmodernity p.131 John Bender and David E.Wellberry (eds) Chronotypes p.525 Benjamin Bennett Hugo von Hofmannsthal p.298 Tony Bennett (ed.) Popular Fiction p.336 Homi Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration p.92

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Gregory W.Bredbeck Sodomy and Interpretation p.483 Michael D.Bristol Shakespeare’s America: America’s Shakespeare p.354 Joseph Bristow (ed.) Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing p.509 Ralph Cohen (ed.) The Future ofLiterary Criticism p.539 N.Coupland, H.Giles and J.M.Wiemann (eds) ‘Miscommunication’ and Problematic Talk p.562 Jonathan Crewe Trials of Authorship p.152 Gilles Deleuze Empiricism and Subjectivity p.522 James Donald (ed.) Thresholds: Psychoanalysis and Cultural History p. 99 Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds) Bodyguards p.504 Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton Women and Fashion: A New Look p.140 Malcolm Evans Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakespeare’s Texts p.354 Shoshana Felman Jacques Lacan and the Adventure oflnsight p.110 Paul K.Feyerabend Three Dialogues ofKnowledge p.146 John Fiske Reading the Popular p.336 John Fiske Understanding Popular Culture p.336 Jane Gallop Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory p.498 Jane Gallop Reading Lacan p.110 Marjorie Garber Vested Interests p.504 Anthony Giddens Modernity and SelfIdentity p.530 Stephen Greenblatt Marvelous Possessions p.103 Joseph Grixti Terrors of Uncertainty p.542 Carl R.Hausman Metaphor and Art p.369 Jeremy Hawthorn Joseph Conrad p.556 Suzette A.Henke Jamesjoyce and the Politics of Desire p.288 Leslie Hill Beckett’s Fiction p.548 Robert C.Holub Jürgen Haberrnas p.131

Jean E.Howard and Marion F.O’Connor (eds) Shakespeare Reproduced p.354 Barry Jordan Writing and Politics in Franco’s Spain p.329 Arpad Kadarkay Georg Lukdcs p.267 R.B.Kershner Joyce, Bakhtin and Popular Literature p.288 Sarah Koftnan Freud and Fiction p.99 David Lawton Faith, Text and History: The Bible in English p.142 Paisley Livingston Literature and Rationality p.530 Carla Locatelli Unwording the World p.548 Juliet Flower MacCanell Figuring Lacan p.110 Juliet Flower MacCanell The Regime ofthe Brothers p.498 Patrick McGee Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce’s Ulysses p.288 Jill Mann Geoffrey Chaucer p.85 Peter Middleton The Inward Gaze p.512 J.Hillis Miller Tropes, Parables, Performatives p.322 J.Hillis Miller Victorian Subjects p.322 J.N.Mohanty Transcendental Phenomenology p.125 Penelope Murray (ed.) Genius: The History ofan Idea p.359 James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (eds) Modernity and Mass Culture p.363 Martin Orkin Drama and the South African State p.350 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan Jacques Lacan and tbe Philosopby of Psychoanalysis p.110 David M.Rasmussen Reading Habermas p. 131 Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston Medieval Drama p.85 Sally Robinson Engendering the Subject p. 515 Sue Roe Writing and Gender p.518 Morag Schiach Discourse on Popular Culture p.336 Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell (eds) Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day p.342 Elaine Showalter Sister’s Choice p.498

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Bruce R.Smith Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England p.483 John Stratton Writing Sites p.305 John B.Thompson Ideology and Modern Culture p.530 Valerie Traub Desire and Anxiety p.483 Maureen Turim Flashbacks in Film p.344 Gregory Ulmer Teletheory p.305 Albrecht Wellmer The Persistence of Modernity p.530 Stephen K.White The Recent Work of Jügen Habermas p.131 Kathleen Woodward Aging and Its Discontents p.140