‘This collaborative book is a unique attempt at a synthesis of poststructuralist theories (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari) with more traditional interpretations of subjectivity in phenomenology and readerresponse theories. Based on a wide range of texts from Shakespeare and Montaigne to philosophical and architectural responses to 9/11, it convincingly argues for the importance and reconfiguration of subjectivity as an experiential process and reflexive power.’ – Martin Procházka, Professor of English, American and Comparative Literature, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic ‘Transversal Subjects takes on Félix Guattari’s claim that “among the fogs and miasmas which obscure out fin de millénaire, the question of subjectivity is now returning as a leitmotif” and pushes it deeply into our post 9/11 present. The book taps with equal sprezzatura into theoretical, historical and artistic reservoirs, its diverse voices and arguments held together by a deep commitment to the subjunctive as a means to ‘move’ subjects and send them off onto transversal trajectories. The intellectual energy and the adventurous spirit of Transversal Subjects takes your mind back to the pleasures and the excitement of the playground; the maybe most communal of heterotopias. If your body can follow, so much the better!’ – Hanjo Berressem, Professor of American Studies, University of Cologne, Germany ‘Like intricate fractals and other paradoxical or nonsensical worlds, the corpus of Bryan Reynolds evolves by expanding from within. In Transversal Subjects, the recursive, (re-)iterative itinerary of Reynolds’ work spreads tentacles into new territories, demonstrating once again that Reynolds’ collaborative means of production performatively enacts the singular conceptual (non-)logic of transversality. This is synthetic, transdisciplinary thought in its most supple form, providing a powerful tool for contemporary interventions, opening spaces for colleagues and students alike to step up, step into, and perform the next becoming. “WELCOME to the machine.”’ – Paul A. Harris, Loyola Marymount University, USA; Co-Editor, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism
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‘Bryan Reynolds and company have done it again. Here they use phenomenology, hermeneutics, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and “schizoanalysis” to cross various subjectivities. They explore gene-like (or virus-like) memes, unintentional mimicry, the “Shakespearean G-spot,” its antitheatrical critics, the “naming-function,” performance anxiety, hypochondria, masochism, cartography, panopticism, historiography, feral children, playground reforms, cannibalism, terrorism, civility, human rights, and more–in this wild ride through diverse theoretical frontiers.’ – Mark Pizzato, Professor of Theatre, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, USA
Also by Bryan Reynolds TRANSVERSAL ENTERPRISES IN THE DRAMA OF SHAKESPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES: Fugitive Explorations
BECOMING CRIMINAL: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England REMATERIALIZING SHAKESPEARE: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (co-editor with William West) SHAKESPEARE WITHOUT CLASS: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (co-editor with Donald Hedrick)
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PERFORMING TRANSVERSALLY: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future
Transversal Subjects Bryan Reynolds
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From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida
© Bryan Reynolds 2009
No portiion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG216XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00829–8 ISBN-10: 0–230–00829–1
hardback hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
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For my son Zephyr, Whose laughter percolates the lava Of mountains I hope to climb, And whose wisdom lights my way.
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List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Collaborators Introduction
1
ix x xiii xv
Subjective Affects: Surveying with Husserl, Shakespeare, and Derrida into the Twenty-first Century
1
Bryan Reynolds (with additional dialogue by George Light & Bryan Reynolds) Key twentieth-century contributions briefly described: subjectivity and reading Shakespearean excursion I: why we can’t get enough Key twentieth-century contributions briefly continued: différance and the proper name Shakespearean excursion II: what’s in a name?
2
The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Deleuze and Guattari to Transversal Poetics with(out) Baudrillard
4 19 39 51
83
Adam Bryx & Bryan Reynolds Making sense of desire Becoming a body without organs Never enough Performance anxiety Fugitive desires (or mirror, mirror on the wall . . .) Subject matters of perspective
3
The Cartographic Impulse: Certeau’s Transversality, Foucault’s Panoptic Discourse, Cusa’s Empiricism, and Google’s New World
87 94 97 101 110 118
124
Joseph Fitzpatrick & Bryan Reynolds Postmodern space: Certeau and Jameson Foucault and panopticism Places, spaces, and the evolution of maps Panopticism, cartography, and the “utopian” city Transversality and anamnesis
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Contents
viii Contents
4
Fugitive Rehearsals: The Ferality of Kaspar Hauser, Playground Performances, and the Transversality of Children
139 141 146 150
162
Bryan Reynolds & Donovan Sherman The emergence of Kasparspace What is it like to be yourself?: Kaspar as epistemic conundrum “The mere apparatus”: Peter of Hanover and the subjective properties of language Futile representations: Kaspar, Kaspar, and Kaspars “Exuberant play”: transversal potential of playground reformation The playground as orgy or Foucauldian theater Headless kings: the subjunctivity of playground songs The playground project: dialectical seeing and the resistance of nostalgia
5
Civilizing Subjects, or Not: Montaigne’s Guide to Modernity, Agamben’s Exception, and Human Rights after Derrida
165 169 175 181 182 187 192 194
203
Anna Kłosowska & Bryan Reynolds Hunt, Rancière, Agamben on rights of man Agamben trails Aristotle: “natural” slavery defined as deficit of logos Eaten, not conquered Montaigne, literacy/logos, poststructuralism Simon Marion’s literacy/logos, “discourse of reason” and Agamben’s “decision on the humanity of the living man” Effects of multimedia literacy in the expanding New World
Afterword: Subjects Matter
205 219 222 229 235 243
262
Gary Genosko
Glossary of Transversal Terms
272
Index
290
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Perspective and the panoptic gaze Transversal discourse Replanning the WTC The proposals
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
WTC proposal by Matt Phillips WTC proposal by William Bergmann WTC proposal by Somchay Sananikone WTC proposal by Michael P. Potts Burj al-Arab Hotel, Dubai, UAE WTC proposal by Aaron T. Harvey Marriott Marquis, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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List of Illustrations
My experiences during the years that it took to write this book testify to its subject matter. The investigative–expansive modes of transversal poetics that my collaborators and I employ throughout the following pages also came to reflect my own subjective processes. With each excursion into new territories of knowledge, subjectivity, and critical inquiry, intensified by the unpredictable challenges these pursuits precipitated, I sought more adventurous travel through spacetime to engage the phenomena this book explores. To varying degrees, this was an enthusiasm my collaborators and I shared with both each other and many of the thinkers whose theories of consciousness, subjectivity, desire, cognition, identity, interpretation, and compassion generate the currents along with and across which our trajectories of exploration progressed. What made this journey so remarkable was not just a matter of the connections that led us to experience radically strange dimensions together. It was also our simultaneously separate occupations of multiple dimensions occasioned by instances when our perspectives converged. The exhilaration of these coalescences, surprisingly, only made their fracturing more enjoyable, not because of any intrinsic value to the ruptures, but because in almost every instance the disjunction forged positively a threshold through which deeper intersubjectivity developed. Yet even better outcomes, more exhilarating and enjoyable as well as delightfully surprising, happened when the course of a specific line of exploration spiraled into an irreducible singularity, a pure event of symbiosis. I am most grateful to my collaborators for working successfully to make these events abundant. The list below of people to whom I am indebted in different ways for supporting me throughout the writing of this book is unfortunately literally short of its aspirations, yet I hope that its spirit reaches those people I have neglected to name. Much of this book is about proper naming, and while I have failed to do so properly, I hope that the naming I perform here speaks to the untranslatable importance of all my supporters for whom there are no substitutes. Robert Cohen deserves countless thank-you hugs, for it is through my collaborations with him and the other members of our Transversal Theater Company to produce two plays of mine, Railroad and Blue Shade (which we toured in Eastern Europe), that I was able to explore, in the laboratory of theater, the concerns of this book. Members of Transversal Theater and other people who gave me valuable feedback on my
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Acknowledgements
work-in-progress that I presented at different venues during our tours, include: Lonnie Alcaraz, Kevin Kreczko, Douglas-Scott Goheen, Mike Hooker, Joanna Klass, Karyn Lawrence, Mercedes Manning, Chris Marshall, Christa Mathis, Breanne Mowdy, Cipriana Petre, Laura Simms, Martin Swoverland, Vince Tycer, Greg Ungar, Krystyna KujawinskaCourtney, Lukasz Romanowski, Jerzy Limon, Jaroslaw Fret, David Livingstone, Jiˇrí Josek, Martin Procházka, Pavel Drábek, Mihaela Irimia, Mihai M˘ aniu¸tiu, Anca M˘ aniu¸tiu, and Eugen Wohl. While I held visiting professorships at the University of London, Queen Mary (2006) and at the University of Amsterdam (2007) I gave a number of presentations, participated in seminars and reading groups, and had some wonderful conversations from which this book greatly benefited. For these experiences, I am especially grateful to Josh Abrams, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Becca Schneider, Elaine Aston, Bridget Escolme, Nicholas Ridout, Adrian Kear, Jen Harvie, Sophie Nield, Ewan Fernie, Gerry Harris, Carl Lavery, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Marie Rutkoski, Patrice Pavis, Dragan Klaic, Lawrence Gunter, Kati Röttger, Erik Lint, Henriëtte Bitter, Henk Danner, Peter Eversmann, Mieke Kolk, Nienke Meeter, Bram van Oostveldt, Pieter Verstraete, Maaike Bleeker, Saskia Polderman, Oscar Seip, Suzanne Krip, Susanne Noortman, Crystal Lopez Ramirez, Norma Schiphof, Kristel Stekelenburg, and Anne Stoop. People elsewhere (from California to Calcutta to Brisbane) to whom I owe special thanks for their responses to my work-in-progress, include: Stephen Barker, Ian Munro, Tony Kubiak, Allison Crilly, Julia Lupton, Todd Barnes, Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay, Ann Pellegrini, Gary Taylor, John Gillies, Mark Burnett, Goran Stanivukovic, Don Hedrick, Sunita Sinha, Henry Turner, Mark Aune, Lloyd Kermode, Martine van Elk, Bruce Boehrer, Viviana Comensoli, Richard Burt, Marianne McDonald, Madhavi Menon, Will West, Gil Harris, Bruce Smith, Amy Cook, David Hawkes, Jim Creech, and my fellow members of the University of California Multi-Campus Research Group on International Performance and Culture: Janelle Reinelt, Patrick Anderson, Leo Cabranes-Grant, SueEllen Case, Catherine Cole, Susan Foster, Lynette Hunter, Shannon Jackson, Suk-Yun Kim, Daphne Lei, Peter Lichtenfels, Jon Rossini, John Rouse, Carol Sorgenfrei, Priya Srinivasan, Shannon Steen, and Frank Wilderson III. People not already listed who have been crucially supportive in other ˇ ways, include: Blanka Rezníèková, Don Hill, Cliff Faulkner, Jenny Jacobs, Ayanna Thompson, Kim Savelson, Karen Weber, Todd Wright, Dennis Lang, Joan Rasp, Scott Albertson, Matt Grant, James Intriligator, Rodney Byrd, David Razin, Shelley Razin, Barbara Thibodeau, Coco Williamson, Marcus Beeman, Lorna Cohen, Eli Simon, Alex Sacui, Donald Reynolds, Donna Reynolds, and Greg Reynolds.
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Acknowledgements xi
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the University of California, Irvine, and its Claire Trevor School of the Arts in particular, for its continuous support of my research. Paula Kennedy, my editor at Palgrave, and her assistant, Steven Hall, deserve extra special thanks, for they exemplify everything personable and efficient to which the publishing industry aspires. It is my greatest honor to name the people who tirelessly keep me smiling, laughing, and loving life, and thus for whom my gratitude exceeds measure; they are my daughter Sky, my son Zephyr, and my wife Kris. Portions of this book have appeared in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, Eds Kevin Jon Heller and Eleanor Kaufman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and diacritics 29:3 (Fall 1999); and are here reprinted by kind permission. The photo of Burj al-Arab Hotel is reproduced by permission of the Jumeirah Group.
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Adam Bryx is an Associate Instructor and doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine. He has co-authored with Gary Genosko articles on Gilles Deleuze, including “After Informatic Striation: The Resignification of Disc Numbers in Contemporary Inuit Popular Culture” in Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Space (2005). Also with Genosko, he has cotranslated interviews and articles by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. He is currently working on a dissertation on informatics in early modern England through various perspectives on transversality, from the work of Félix Guattari to Bryan Reynolds (
[email protected]). Joseph Fitzpatrick is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities. He has written articles on literature, translation, and theory, including two previous collaborations with Bryan Reynolds: “Venetian Ideology or Transversal Power?: Iago’s Motives and the Means by which Othello Falls” in Critical Essays on Othello, eds Philip Kolin (2002); and “The Transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault’s Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse,” which was published in diacritics (fall 1999) and revised for this book. He is currently working on a book-lenth study on the intertwined histories of information and translation in the twentieth century (
[email protected]). Anna Kłosowska is Associate Professor of French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Queer Love in the Middle Ages (2005), editor of Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (1998) and translator of a Renaissance poet she discovered, Madeleine de l’Aubespine, Selected Poems (2007). She is currently working on a book entitled Premodern Subjects and a critical edition of l’Aubespine (for Honoré Champion Editeur, Paris). She is the author of some twenty articles on queer theory, women, theater, and poetry in the premodern period; the most recent is “Erotica and Women in Early Modern France: Madeleine de l’Aubespine’s Queer Poems,” in the Journal of the History of Sexuality (2008) (
[email protected]). George Light has written about alehouses and theater, the multiple meanings of “out of,” 1990s noise rock, connections between punk rock and alt country, the Plastic People of the Universe, and fieldstones (literal and musical). He also reviews scholarly books and a variety of musical genres. Currently he works in the education industry xiii
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Notes on Collaborators
xiv
Notes on Collaborators
Bryan Reynolds is Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006), Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003), Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002), coeditor with Donald Hedrick of Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000), coeditor with William West of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005), and co-General Editor with Elaine Aston of Palgrave Macmillan’s book series, Performance Interventions. He is also a playwright, director of theater, and a founding member of the Transversal Theater Company, whose productions have recently toured the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland, and Netherlands, in addition to runs in California and New York (
[email protected]). Donovan Sherman is an Associate Instructor and doctoral student in the Joint Program in Drama and Theatre at University of California, Irvine and University of California, San Diego. His research deals with problems of sentience and subjectivity in early modern theater and rhetoric, across critical loci of acoustic theory, childhood studies, and animality. In addition to engaging with theater scholarship and pedagogy, he is also a playwright, dramaturg, and performer (
[email protected]). Additional contributor Gary Genosko is Canada Research Chair in Technoculture at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of The Party Without Bosses: Lessons on Anti-Capitalism from Félix Guattari and Luís Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003); Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (2002); McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion (1999); Contest: Essays on Sports, Culture and Politics (1999); Undisciplined Theory (1998); Baudrillard and Signs: Signification Ablaze (1994). He has edited Marshall McLuhan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Vols I, II & III (2005); The Uncollected Baudrillard (2001); Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vols I, II, & III (2001); The Guattari Reader (1996). He is he author of two forthcoming titles in 2009 (with Scott Thompson) Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Identity, and Surveillance in Ontario 1927–1975, and Félix Guattari: A Political Chaodyssey. He is General Editor of The Semiotic Review of Books and co-editor of Deleuze Studies. In 2007 Dr. Genosko appeared in two minor roles in social advertising campaigns designed to raise public awareness of prostate and colorectal health (
[email protected]).
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and presents a blues music show on community radio in Mississippi (
[email protected]).
. . . welcome to the machine. Where have you been? It’s alright we know where you’ve been. You’ve been in the pipeline, filling in time . . . Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here (1975) Hi, I’m Bryan Reynolds. These are my friends: George Light, Adam Bryx, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Donovan Sherman, Anna Kłosowska, and Gary Genosko. We’re delighted to meet you. Glad you’re here. Please, make yourselves at home. Whatever we have is yours. Oh, don’t mind this book: it is what it becomes.
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Introduction
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Subjective Affects: Surveying with Husserl, Shakespeare, and Derrida into the Twenty-first Century Bryan Reynolds (with additional dialogue by George Light & Bryan Reynolds)
Why subjects? Why should writing be another name for the constitution of subjects and, so to speak, of constitution itself? of a subject, that is to say of an individual held responsible (for) himself in front of a law and by the same token subject to that law? Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (281) The history of Western critical theory has been preoccupied with questions regarding subjectivities and subjects, about what constitutes and accounts for them: whether individual or collective consciousness, presence, embodiment, perspective, authority, simulacra, and so on; whether they are singularities within multiplicities, or vice versa, or some multidimensional combination: events, amalgams, or articulations. Concepts of subjectivity typically pertain to individuals, respectively, even if generally applied to all people, and are linked to theories of inwardness, selfhood, personal agency, and identity formation and maintenance; yet they often suggest or extend to something collective or indicative of a group. Accordingly, inquiries into subjectivity correspond with specific areas of investigation and experience; in other words, with subjects of critical inquiry and philosophy as well as of societies and cultures. These include the subject matters of psychology, sociology, phenomenology, metaphysics, neuroscience, and consciousness studies, but also of literary, cultural, theater, and performance studies. Perspectives on subjectivity within and among these areas are commonly divided, generally speaking, between humanist/essentialist and post-humanist/constructivist idea-fields. While defining and explaining 1
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1
Transversal Subjects
subjectivity have been primary to the objectives of various, often competing, discourses on the human condition, it is an argument of this book that subjectivity persists fugitively, enabling the condition to remain unfettered and subjective affects to be generative. In this book, with my collaborators, I move freely across humanist/ essentialist and post-humanist/constructivist idea-fields to hypothesize that subjectivity, as a composite of multifarious perceptions and identifications, is itself transversal to subjects inasmuch as reflexiveconsciousness, awareness of experiencing while experiencing, is requisite to its crystallizations, even if only fleeting or as passage to transcendence, ecstasy, or death (see Glossary of Transversal Terms for elaboration on concepts discussed throughout the book).1 Hence, subjectivity always actively reconfigures away from the delimiting procedures and pressures of subjectivation, even if absolute or sustained emancipation never occurs. Put differently, subjectivity emerges and is productively agential when a person or group is meta-aware and capable, exponentially by degree and kind, of: (1) willful subjunctivity in the modes of theorizing the “as-ifs” and “what-ifs” of past, present, and future events; (2) becomings-other identities, states, and things through deliberately initiated expansions and transformations; (3) negotiating and surmounting “the proper,” thereby trailblazing and mapping trajectories of maneuverability away from circumscription, reduction, and stasis; and (4) intentional transversality vis-à-vis forces of subjectivation and coherence: by wanderings, departures, and metamorphoses contrary to totalizing mechanisms and outside of conventions and systems. Subjectivity supersedes its foundational conditions irreducibly when a person or group negotiates, inspires, or engages in transversal movements beyond the margins and parameters of subjective territories, whether their own or those of others. As a multidimensional product of the society in which a person develops, subjective territory is the conceptual, emotional, and physical scope through which a person experiences. Transversal movements drive subjectivities in directions alternative to those aligned with prescribed subjective territories. In effect, the parameters of subjective territories expand and reconfigure along with those of the official territories they comprise and of which they are essential constituents. Official territories are organized singular but interrelated commonalities (qualia, values, beliefs, etc.) that together make up a society and culture that both support and constrain the subjective territories that in turn encompass the society’s infrastructure. Operating like subjective and official territories insofar as it coalesces singularities, but always both emergent and ephemeral as
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well as transversal to the subject, subjectivity itself is an amalgamating multiplicity of singularities, taking such forms as performance, feeling, and thought events, that often relationally connects to singularities comprising the presence and subjectivities of others. It achieves irreducibility and transcendence regardless of how it involutes, actualizes, and demonstrates, whether occupationally, ideationally, sensitively, neurologically, biologically, materially, and so forth. Subjectivity, and therefore the personal agency it can engender, is a processual fusion of various phenomena within, beyond, and irreducible to both official and subjective territories and the state machinery and societies to which they reciprocally contribute. Since antiquity, theories that define subjectivity idiosyncratically, statically, reducibly, or negatively through logics or taxonomies of antagonism, difference, absence, or as predicated on lack have dominated Western intellectual history. Alternative to this tradition, an overarching argument of this book is that subjectivity can be positively defined and experienced as a manifestation of ongoing relations among affecters and enablers of transversality for which there is a discernible, but not exclusive, mappable history of expression in the interstices, if not across the surfaces, of Western philosophical and critical discourses. Notwithstanding that this history, itself difficult to categorize, includes countless influential junctures that can be purposefully charted and delineated, my collaborators and I have identified several that we believe are significant to critical theory today, tomorrow, and so on, even if radically fugitive to the intellectual and social histories with which they are most commonly associated. Simply put, concepts central to these junctures that pertain to subjectivity and subjects that we discuss include the following: affects, reception, proper names (this Chapter); desire, well-being, expression (Chapter 2); cartography, space, travel (Chapter 3); play, education, theatricality (Chapter 4); and compassion, literacy, human rights (Chapter 5). From the influential junctures into which we hopscotch investigative-expansively throughout the following pages – in mobile pursuit of leads and connections across historical periods, cultures, literary genres, performance modes, and research fields – we offer the theory and methodology of transversal poetics as both byproducts and compasses by which to situate constructively the junctures themselves. The present chapter begins with a survey of twentieth-century Western philosophical and critical discourses in which conceptions of subjectivity and subjects are particularly significant to the ways these terms are currently used. Whereas the discourses themselves may not deal with subjectivity and subjects primarily or explicitly, they have been crucial
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Subjective Affects 3
Transversal Subjects
genealogically to recent investigations that concentrate on these topics. Given that everyday conversations in cafes and classrooms, at beaches and malls, and on playgrounds and tennis courts, etc. engage countless thinkers – from celebrities to philosophers to friends – representative of ideas about subjectivity, I chose to discuss thinkers most immediately relevant to both transversal poetics’ conceptual inheritance and to its continuing and future developments. As such, I found it unnecessary to account for every historical line of influence from Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, etc. all the way to antiquity. My intention in the first section, and throughout this chapter, is twofold: (1) to provide both background and contexts for the interventions my collaborators and I propose in the subsequent chapters; and (2) to provide expressions of transversal poetics as the discussion evokes its theories and interpretative modes. In the next section via analysis of the phenomena of Shakespeare’s enduring popularity, I extend the survey beyond the parameters of the philosophical and critical discourses to recent work in cognitive neuroscience and other fields outside the humanities. From here, I streamline the survey into a discussion on subjectivity through an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s treatment of the proper name. This leads to the chapter’s second Shakespearean excursion, an account of the proper name as it relates to the history of both the subject and subjectivity that I have been discussing up until that point. It is from here that the remainder of the book progresses.
Key twentieth-century contributions briefly described: subjectivity and reading Critical discussions on what is commonly referred to as “human identity,” a continuous state of being both oneself and human, have been predominantly psychodynamic or sociological and informed or intertwined by ideas often associated with subjectivity and subject position. The primary contributors to psychodynamic views on identity formation, also major influences on twentieth-century critical theory, are Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, D. W. Winnicott, Erik Erikson, and Nancy Chodorow.2 With varying perspectives and methodologies these theorists concentrate on the means by which people develop a cognitive sense of themselves as separate from the environments through which they experience, relate, and organize their lives. For any one person, until that divisional process begins, there is no subject-object distinction. This is to say that for the infant the world “out there” is indistinguishable from the world “in here.” The psychodynamic approaches of these theorists call for analyses of the processes by which
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subject-object separation and individuation occur – typically in structural, diachronic, and hierarchical terms – and define human identity as the privileged point from which the infant recognizes or understands the differences, both physically and mentally, between herself and other objects and people, especially the mother or primary caretaker. Each phase in the separation corresponds with a developmental stage (Freud’s genital stage, Lacan’s mirror stage, Winnicott’s transitional object, Erikson’s play age, etc.) in what the theorists posit as the natural course of identity formation, a course that normally culminates with the establishment of a selfconscious, self-governing social identity with individuated subjectivity. Sociological discussions on identity are usually informed by an understanding of human development that Herbert Blumer termed “symbolic interactionism.”3 Although not all of them refer to the approach by this name, other seminal proponents of symbolic interactionism are Charles Cooley, George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Peter Berger, and Erving Goffman.3,4 For these theorists, definition of an individual and, by extension, distinct social identities are fashioned interactively with one’s environment, so that the relationship with one’s environment and not the individual in isolation is the measure for understanding. Cooley and Mead describe a process of identity formation whereby the “I,” which is a kind of seer or knower, operates as the subjective, creative, and unknowable observer, while the “Me” is a known, knowable, social self in an interactive relationship with the “I” in conjunction with the environment. For Goffman and Berger, a sense of self, the “I,” and the socially-engaged “Me” are combined in a symbolic, performed, and socially-constructed entity. This “contingent individual” (my term) is what literary, cultural, and critical theorists, particularly those strongly influenced by Marxist-oriented intellectual, aesthetic, or political traditions, often mean when they talk about the “subject.” Beginning in the first half of the twentieth-century when Marxist philosophy achieved prominence in arts and academic circles, “subject” became a term favored by literary and cultural critics and theorists, particularly structuralists, as an alternative to “person,” “individual” or “agent.” In general, the work of important Marxist critics of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Granville Hicks and V.F. Calverton and those associated with the Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, shares the goals of uncovering both tenets of Marxism in art and literature and a materialist history of social life whereby art and literature, derived from material conditions and consciousness of them, reflects the conditions and the consciousnesses they influence, in other words, the production of subjects.5 For many structuralists,
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Transversal Subjects
and later poststructuralists in the second half of the twentieth century (Fredric Jameson, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe),6 use of the term subject indicates a disavowal of the humanist/essentialist perspective that the human condition is absolute or universal and therefore humans universally endorse the same interests and values. Instead, these Marxistinfluenced theorists maintain that human experience and ideology are relative to the subject’s position vis-à-vis the deep underlying structures of a given society’s social hierarchy, which are always culturally and historically determined. In conjunction, “subjectivity” refers to the experience-as-experienced by the socially-constructed subject. The location and formation of the subject, then, is based on how material relations and modes of production produce specific kinds of subjects, such as those that support a particular ideology and those that resist or rebel against it, even though these categories are not seen as mutually exclusive. Subject production and its manifestations reflect and uphold class differentials in a systematic dialectic that involves processes of struggle, disruption, transformation, and consolidation. The subject in all its exteriorizations is always determined by modes of production, material relations, and the societal need to maintain class divisions. This is because meaning, subjectivity, subject formation, performance, and identity are rooted in the socioeconomic structure that mutually creates these determinations and the ideology used to rationalize and enforce them. As a result, subject determinations and their specific symptoms and consequences are causally grounded in the relationships between humans and the physical properties through and by which they define and sustain themselves.7 The establishment in higher education of this reductive delineation of art and literature to manifestations of ideologically-informed socioeconomic conditions by early twentieth-century Marxists precipitated a great backlash in the literary-critical movement of the New Critics. Led by John Crowe Ransom, R.P. Blackmur, T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, William K. Wimsatt, Monroe C. Beardsley, René Wellek, and several others,8 the New Critics dominated critical literary practice and pedagogy from the 1930s through the 1960s, effectively institutionalizing their approach at every level of education from middle school to doctoral study. In contrast to Marxists, the New Critics declare their interpretive approach apolitical and objective; also, in reaction to impressionistic and neo-humanist criticism, they maintain that literary analysis must treat a work of literature as a self-sufficient organic entity completely independent and decontextualized from the environments from which it emerged and through which it travels, that
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is, without reference to history, culture, economics, authorial intention, biography, the sensibilities or subject position of the reader, or any factors outside the text. Wimsatt and Beardsley famously termed emphasis on an author’s intentions the “intentional fallacy” and emphasis on a reader’s (or spectator’s) perspective and visceral response in the deduction of meaning or quality of literature (and art) the “affective fallacy.”9 Thus, New Criticism is problematic for the concept of the subject because it insists that subjectivity does not determine meaning; meaning lives not in a subject position, whether of the author or reader, but in the objective “truth” of the text, which is deemed an aesthetic object in and of itself (an idea reminiscent of Walter Pater’s use of the slogan “art for art’s sake” to dismiss any connection between art and morality). For New Critics, meaning can only be accessed by the skilled reader through the “close-reading” of the ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies revealed in the words, images, symbols, and themes within the text rather than in its views, characters, or narrative. Although the reader with the analytic wherewithal to reveal the meaning of a text is privileged in the process of explication, a process that for some New Critics (like Harold Bloom) can only ever achieve an approximation of the true meaning because there is no perfect reader,10 both the subject engaging the text as the reader and the subject emergent through the text are not privileged. Instead, they are merely two among numerous horizontal variables adding up to an interpretation of the text’s meaning but are not themselves intrinsic to its actual meaning. The approach of the New Critics is similar to that of the Russian formalists, such as the Opoyaz Group (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Tomashevsky) and the Moscow Linguistic Circle (Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik, Grigory Vinokur), who also distinguish themselves from what they see as the “extrinsic” work of Marxist and social critics of literature.11 Russian formalists focus on literary objects as autonomous, thoroughly enclosed systems of signs. As with the New Critics, the meaning of a text derives from the form rather than, say, the reader’s reactions or author’s intentions. Formalists want to establish an autonomous ontological status for literature, especially poetry, as a unique form of language. Formalist methodology, like that of the New Critics, does not privilege the subject or subjectivity as an overriding or dominant variable in the interpretive enterprise. Early Marxist literary critics, like Leon Trotsky, defined their critical positions via their challenges to formalism.12 Trotsky espoused the political potential of art and demanded that its connection to the material conditions under which it is produced and interpreted be recognized and employed in
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Transversal Subjects
terms of ideology and politics. Later Marxist critics associated with the Bakhtin School took similarly predictable positions against Russian formalism, arguing that formalists leave too much important stuff out of their analyses of literary texts. For Mikhail Bakhtin, language is ideologically-informed material praxis; whether spoken or written, it is the means by which subjects are constituted relationally with other subjects and through which they articulate themselves (to others) in a continual struggle between monologic and heteroglossic forces in language, discourse, and the societies they serve that manifests in people’s expressions and experiences. The monologic forces work to singularize and totalize and the heteroglossic work to diversify and pluralize (Bakhtin 260–75). Moreover, for Bakhtinians, language can neither exist in a vacuum nor be judiciously considered or understood when relegated to a point exterior to culture and society. This is because language, like all speech acts, is invariably a social mechanism. It reflects interactions between monologic and heteroglossic constituents and pressures. It is always at least dialogic, grounded and created from a history, and therefore the proper subject of sociology.13 Hence, like phenomenologists, Bakhtin argues for the agency and centrality of the subject not only in the interpretation of art and literature but also for comprehending the dialogic/dialectic that informs the human condition for different people in different eras and cultures. Edmund Husserl’s philosophical–phenomenological project was to investigate and uproot the “essence” of the “natural world” as a means by which to uncover the rational structures of experience and the “transcendent” attributes that are “constituted” in consciousness through perceiving them. To do this, he argues for holding at bay (“bracketing”) assumptions and experience of an objective and fully present “fact-world” (“the natural standpoint”). Husserl explains this succinctly: We put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it includes respecting the nature of Being: this entire natural world therefore, which is continually “there for us,” “present to our hand,” and will ever remain there, is a “fact-world” of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to put it in brackets. (99–100) This bracketing is done so that the attributes can stand out from the intersubjective experience that relies on them as phenomenological meeting points and gateways to the empathetic relations between
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subjects that allow differentiated subjective perspectives to be achieved and explained. Put differently, the experiencing subject is reciprocally linked with outside objects and subjects insofar as a person’s subjectivity depends on interactions with objects and intersubjectivity through empathetic relations with other subjects to which we ascribe an intentional point of view that we must bracket to access objective reality. This is because, for Husserl, like many phenomenologists and theorists of consciousness after him, including in recent years Daniel Dennet, John Searle, and Peter Carruthers in their own ways,14 consciousness is an intentional (directed at) act; that is, to be conscious is to be conscious of some thing or person, an object: the world “out there” and the world “in here” are connected and crystallize in and as consciousness. Thus, Husserl’s phenomenological method of inquiry into Being and the ontological status of things-in-themselves insists on the subject’s role in determining existence and significance as a manifestation of consciousness. Consciousness is a spatiotemporal realm occupied by the subject; the subject is located in consciousness; and consciousness is comprised of “units” of intentional action directed outward into the world. For Husserl, removing the subject from the process of interpretation is not an option; it is subjects and the intersubjectivity they generate that enables the possibility of meaning and thus purpose (intentionality), and, in turn, the constitution of subjects. After Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Roman Ingarden, respectively, developed and spread the goals and methods of phenomenology beyond philosophy through the social sciences and literary criticism.15 Making a major impact as early as the 1930s, Ingarden was the most influential theorist of this movement during the early stages of phenomenological literary studies. He adapted the phenomenological method to a theory of literary criticism whereby the reader may “get at” the consciousness (the intentionality) of an author through the work. Whereas they all pursue access into the consciousness of the author, other phenomenologists further developed and expanded the phenomenological enterprise in their own ways. Among the more important are Paul Brodtkorb, William Spanos, Ihab Hassan, and those associated with the Geneva School, including J. Hillis Miller, Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Geoges Poulet, Jean Rousset, JeanPierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski. The Geneva School’s project, unlike that of the New Critics, although both interpretive approaches focus on the texts themselves without reference to anything historical, cultural, or biographical, etc. outside the texts, was neither disinterested nor detached.16 It moved beyond the phenomenological emphasis on
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Subjective Affects 9
the location and formation of the subject in a literary work as a means by which to access the consciousness of the author to a kind of transcendent identification. This is an occasion in which transversal theory should be discussed directly, since the Geneva School’s idea of accessing the consciousness of the author anticipates processes, material and/or abstract, that transversal theory seeks to explain. For instance, such transcendent identification would require the critic to both – in transversal terms – become and cometo-be at one with the consciousness of the author. The former refers to an agential process of becomings-x whereby the subject willfully aspires to embodiment or occupation of the real or imaginary properties and subjective territory of another person or thing. The latter refers to an involuntary process of comings-to-be-x, which often occurs when the properties of another’s subjective territory or chemical/molecular composition are too powerful to resist. Comings-to-be happen frequently as a symptom of becomings-other when one loses control of their subjectivity through processes of identification, empathy, and emulation and, in effect, the parameters of their own subjective territory significantly reconfigure. Accordingly, for the critics of the Geneva School, the subjectivities of the author and reader are of primary importance because intersubjectivity – and not simply subjunctive engagement – with the author is their goal. This is achieved predominantly through empathetic identification of thought-feeling structures of the author’s consciousness as projected into the work, which is to say, through the becomings-the-author and comings-to-be-the-author that deep engagement with the intricacies of the work can accomplish. In other words, the objective of the Geneva School was for the reader to go on a journey with the author, to get as much inside the motivations, ideals, background, and foreground of an author as possible. This enables the literary critic to project the author, as a channel for the author, into her own writing. In short, for the Geneva School critics the ultimate goal of the critic is to become the author – who they often heralded as a creative genius beyond their own capabilities – through a mutual comings-tobe-with this privileged subject in order to be able to write from the special phenomenological meeting point of one’s own subjectivity and the subjectivity of the author.17 In the 1960s, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was influenced more by Heidegger than Husserl (he was Heidegger’s student), morphed phenomenological approaches into hermeneutic analysis, borrowing a conjoining emphasis on language and experience from Wilhelm Dilthey and his formulation, following Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, of
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the “hermeneutic circle” in the study of lived experience.18 For Dilthey, one can only objectively apprehend the whole of an experience, whether a single linguistic expression, affective response, or physical action, by having an understanding of its parts; yet one can only have an understanding of the parts by having a sense of the meaning to the whole. Following this reasoning, parts and whole are circularly collocated visà-vis identified environmental structures for which the experience was preconditioned by referential “attitudinal stances”; the “inner” significance of an experience is accessed through investigation of “outer” – psychically external, objectively directed – sensory phenomena in light of established biases toward outside factors by “re-experiencing” the whole through a developing, progressive understanding of the parts that goes “forward” with current lived experience, in effect making historical knowledge possible (200–300 passim). One of Gadamer’s most influential students, Wolfgang Iser, eloquently sums up Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in terms that highlight the literary-critical foundations to Gadamer’s method which made it especially appealing to critics looking for a non-Marxist or non-socially oriented way out of the dehumanizing, purportedly disinterested aesthetics of the New Criticism: The circle of interlinking part/whole, grammar/psychology, and divination/comparison is the hallmark of hermeneutics. It highlights the fact that there is no longer a given authority that can validate what interpretation sets out to achieve. Furthermore, there is no authority dwelling in the text itself; therefore understanding is to be arrived at from within the text by means of manifold circular operations that provide a way of correcting and monitoring understanding. . . . The circle initiates an ever-widening coupling between parts and whole, not least as the whole is not given prior to the parts but has to be visualized through them. The notion of the whole is always relative and is expanded by the circle through multiple interconnections with evernew features of the parts, and this expansion in turn throws new light on the understanding of the parts involved. It is this broadening out of the circular movement that permits a controlled approximation to understanding. (The Range of Interpretation 53–4) Both moving away from Schleiermacher’s focus on individuals and extending his language-centered paradigm together with Dilthey’s focus on experience to consideration of Being and understanding of human phenomena in general, Gadamer argues that experience – all thought and feeling – consists in the coming into language as the horizon of
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Subjective Affects 11
both human ontology and the hermeneutics necessary to describe it: “Language is not its elaborated conventionalism, not the burden of pre-schematization with which it loads us, but the generative and creative power to unceasingly make this whole again fluent” (549). Hence, according to Gadamer, “Our starting point was that understanding is inseparable from language and that language is related to reason of every kind, and we can now see how the whole of our investigation is subsumed under this rubric” (474).19 Gadamer embarked on the dialectical undertaking of critically dissecting and strategically repositioning features of the hermeneutic tradition to formulate his own method in ways that heavily impacted literary theory over the next twenty years, especially through the emergence of derivative approaches. Driving Gadamer’s overarching philosophical project was his belief that certain forms of consciousness, inherited and acquired historically through our education in society, alienate us from our true historical being. This differs from Marx’s historical determinism, where false consciousness is a result of alienation from oneself through participation in capitalist modes of production. For Gadamer, the worst offenders are “aesthetic consciousness,” which encourages us to evaluate and thus experience art in light of questions overdetermined by interest in authorial intention rather than as pure expression, neither positively or negatively measured, and therefore received without adulteration or bias; and “historical consciousness,” also disallowing pure reception and true experience, which is epitomized by our ability to maintain a critical distance when encountering and digesting remnants and testimonies to the past life of others. Responding to this “problem,” Gadamer sought to discover if objective understanding was at all possible, particularly with regard to the relationship between an author’s intention (in the sense of will) and the meaning of a text. For Gadamer, the answer cannot be found in subjects or subjectivity, but in language where knowledge is possible: “Language is a medium where I and world meet or, rather, manifest their original belonging together,” and therefore the ontological state of “Being that can be understood is language. . . . For man’s relation to the world is absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature, and hence intelligible” (474–6). Following this logic, one can easily see how the subject was eventually subsumed by emphases on discourse in subsequent poststructuralist theory: as Gadamer puts it, “The hermeneutical reduction to the author’s meaning is just as inappropriate as the reduction of historical events to the intentions of their protagonists” (373). In the late 1960s, E. D. Hirsch, although a critic of Gadamer,20 helped to popularize the fundamental topics of Gadamerian phenomenological
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Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or situation, or indeed anything imaginable. Authors, who like everyone else change their attitudes, feelings, opinions, and value criteria in the course of time, will obviously in the course of time tend to view their own work in different contexts. Clearly what changes for them is not the meaning of the work, but rather their relationship to that meaning. Significance always implies a relationship, and one constant, unchanging pole of that relationship is what the text means. (8) In a neo-humanist move emphasizing human subjects as well as the texts themselves in the determination of meaning, Hirsch argues that the probable authorial meaning, while always indeterminable, is a matter of will, an exercise of agency by author and reader that must preside over interpretation: Almost any word sequence can, under the conventions of language, legitimately represent more than one complex of meaning. A word sequence means nothing in particular until somebody either means something by it or understands something from it. There is no magic land of meanings outside human consciousness. (4) Nevertheless, for Hirsch, the responsible pursuit of meaning finally stops with the author; an author wills the meaning in an exercise of subjective agency: “To banish the original author as the determiner of meaning was to reject the only compelling normative principle that could lend validity to an interpretation” (5). Despite Hirsch’s efforts, as we move into the 1970s, the focus of debate shifts even further away from authors and/or the immediate text as the privileged sources of meaning, that is, from the text that is the primary subject matter under investigation, to develop more complexly in relation to both the reader’s subject position and the text’s relationships to factors – textual, cultural, historical, and so on – beyond the text’s local borders. Contexts, situatedness, and positionality for expression and interpretation, particularly in terms of the power
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hermeneutics in the study of literature in the United States. His vehement critique of the New Criticism became a breeding ground for lively debate and alternative thinking. Most influential of Hirsch’s contributions is the distinction he made between “meaning” and “significance”:
associations and differentials that constrain them, came to supersede emphases on individual subjects and subjectivity in favor of discourses on the establishment and maintenance of meanings and authority.21 Although this battle was rigorously fought during what is commonly referred to as the “theory wars” of the 1970s, it became abundantly clear throughout the decade that there is plenty of room in literary studies for multiple approaches and that emphasis on authorial intention was not going to lose favor insofar as individual humans continue to hold each other accountable for their actions, whether rewarded or punished, in all modern societies. Much of this book discusses theory considered structuralist, poststructuralist, and post-Marxist with regard to concepts of the subject and subjectivity, so I will not summarize the different positions here. Instead, I want to conclude this section with an account of the influential juncture between approaches usually termed “reception theory” and “reader-response criticism,” both of which are in the tradition of Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics and anticipate developments in transversal poetics. I do this as a means by which to move investigative-expansively into the example of Shakespeare to consider what some recent groundbreaking work in the fields of consciousness studies and cognitive neuroscience might have to offer theories of interpretation and their positions with regard to the subject and subject matters. Initially associated with the Constance School of Reception Aesthetics and with the work of two of its founding members in particular, Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, the phenomenologicalhermeneutic shift in focus from texts to readers carved out a significant space in the academy. Although with much variation among their approaches, many literary critics became proponents of reception aesthetics in the United States, including David Bleich, Stephen Booth, Wayne Booth, Jonathan Culler, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, Wolfgang Iser, Walter Slatoff, Richard Palmer, Mary Louise Pratt, Michael Riffaterre, and William Spanos, with Fish and Iser becoming the most influential in regard to reception/reader-response criticism throughout the 1970s and beyond.22 For Fish, like Iser, meaning comes from a subjective interaction between text and reader. The reader, not the writer, is ultimately the author of the text. The form of the text is the form of the experience of a reader creating meaning while engaging with the text. That is, the text has no form independent of a reader’s experience of it. However, readers do not exist independently from a social world. They are always embedded in a community of interpreters which has its own predetermined
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The discovery of the “real point” is always what is claimed whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real one. This means that the space in which a critic works has been marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by the conventions of the institution to dislodge them. . . . This dependency, the reverse of the anxiety of influence, is reflected in the unwritten requirement that an interpretation present itself as remedying a deficiency in the interpretations that have come before it. (Fish 350) According to Fish, meanings are always shaped and accepted by and within an “interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can then agree” (338). Interpretive authority rests with the dominant reading strategies of the community, strategies that when commonly applied with respect to the strategies and readings of its counter-positioned predecessors should produce similar if not identical results. In other words, meaning is not fixed within the text independent of a reader; the reader is always “constrained” within at least one interpretive community, which limits the number and quality of possible meanings; a particular interpretation will be legitimated or found illegitimate by the community.23 The subject is central in Fish’s formulation, yet never an autonomous, meaning-giving agent: “Once one realizes that the conceptions that fill consciousness, including any conception of its own status, are culturally derived, the very notion of an unconstrained self, of a consciousness wholly and dangerously free, becomes incomprehensible” (335). Meaning for the subject is always determined according to evaluative rules and regulations set down by an interpretive community and the culture it mutually supports. Fish’s contribution marks one of the influential junctures whereby transversal poetics finds productive expression. In transversal terms, interpretive communities are byproducts of laminated commonalities – overlapping and thus reinforced shared sensibilities, beliefs, values, etc. – within subjective territories in the accumulated, exponential form of sociopolitical conductors: familial, educational, legal, religious, and
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set of interpretive, experiential strategies and histories of interpretation against which it disagrees and defines itself in the persistent interest of formulating and asserting new “facts” and the new “real point” (Fish 338–55):
governmental structures and their proxies and representatives. These operate under the hermeneutic jurisdiction of the corresponding official territories that are themselves the results of such lamination. In turn, these official territories are constituents of larger and overlapping official territories, also with strategies established through commonalities in perspectives across and cross-referencing types of social, cultural, ideological, and political investments. Official territories are caught up in state machinery, a networked web of the sociopolitical conductors operating under common rubrics and auspices which are fueled by state power, which is to say, the drive and power of coherence and sense-making for any variables within any environment. Put differently, sociopolitical conductors, whether individuals or groups, achieve authority through the reciprocal establishment of a self-serving interpretive community and the particular subjects, and therefore the subjective territories, that constitute the community’s phenomenological-hermeneutic infrastructure. This happens in the form of official territories that are organized through authoritative strategies, tactics, and laws – and the attendant feelings of joy, pride, guilt, shame, and anxiety that correspond with a subject and her prescribed subjective territory – to constrain, channel, and manufacture meanings proper to the sustainability of the official territories themselves. Nevertheless, contrary to Fish’s understanding of interpretive communities, transversal theory maintains that consciousness can break free of subjective and cognitive constraints. Such liberation can occur through consciousness’s suspension (paused consciousness), which can produce and further affect transversal movements inasmuch as mechanisms of surveillance and control are temporally shut down and such phenomena as becomings and comings-to-be are able to occur. More commonly, however inspired, transversal movements can enable reflexive-consciousness so as to advance emergences of subjectivity through efforts to regain stability and anchor subjective territory. Moreover, by uninterrupted extension, the reactive efforts to immobilize and prevent transversal movements through the crystallization and grounding of subjectivity can advance reflexive-consciousness itself to the vanishing point of pure referential equivalences (see discussion on simulacra in Chapter 2); that is, they can simultaneously stratify and destratify layers of consciousness, a positive feedback loop of reflexive-consciousness: an ongoing phenomenological transcendence. This brings us to Iser’s version of reception phenomenology. Even though Iser defines his theory through concepts of lack and negation, it comes closer than Fish’s as a positive predecessor to transversal poetics.
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16 Transversal Subjects
Iser maintains that in order for a reader to connect “intersubjectively [with] verifiable characteristics” with a work of literature through engaged “ideational activity,” that is, to have an experience of a signification process that draws the reader “inescapably into the world of the text” so that its meaning translates into the reader’s consciousness, the reader must become familiar with certain codes integral to the structure of the given text (The Act of Reading 36): In literary works, however, the message is transmitted in two ways, in that the reader “receives” it by composing it. There is no common code – at best one could say that a common code may arise in the course of the process. Starting with this assumption, we must search for structures that will enable us to describe basic conditions of interaction, for only then shall we be able to gain some insight into the potential effects inherent in the work. These structures must be of a complex nature, for although they are contained in the text, they do not fulfill their function until they have affected the reader. Practically every discernible structure in fiction has this two-sidedness: it is verbal and affective. The verbal aspect guides the reaction and prevents it from being arbitrary; the affective aspect is the fulfillment of that which has been prestructured by the language of the text. Any description of the interaction between the two must therefore incorporate both the structure of effects (the text) and that of response (the reader). (21) Concretizations of aesthetic comprehension result from convergences of textual structures with structured acts of reading: that is, while reading, “The text itself simply offers ‘schematized aspects’ through which the subject matter of the work can be produced, while the actual production takes place through an act of concretization” (The Act of Reading 21). The text “concretizes” as readers use familiar literary and social conventions to achieve a sense of meaning by filling in “gaps” or “blanks” in the narrative or thematic structure of a text, but also through the resolution of “negations which arise in the course of the reading” (Prospecting 34): Blanks and negations both control the process of communication in their own different ways: The blanks leave open the connection between textual perspectives, and so spur the reader into coordinating these perspectives and patterns – in other words, they induce the reader to perform basic operations within the text. The various types of negation invoke familiar and determinate elements or knowledge
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18 Transversal Subjects
For Iser, following Husserl, this process allows for the emergences of both the aesthetic object and the subject: The reader fills in the blank in the text, thereby bringing about a referential field; the blank arising in turn out of the referential field is filled in by way of the theme-and-background structure; and the vacancy arising from the juxtaposed themes in backgrounds is occupied by the reader’s standpoint, from which the various reciprocal transformations lead to the emergence of the aesthetic object. . . . If the blank is largely responsible for the activities described, then participation means that the reader is not simply called upon to “internalize” the positions given in the text, but he is induced to make them act upon and so transform each other, as a result of which the aesthetic object begins to emerge. The structure of the blank organizes this participation, revealing simultaneously the intimate connection between the structure and the reading subject. This interconnection completely conforms to a remark made by Piaget: “In a word, the subject is there and alive, because the basic quality of each structure is the structuring process itself.” The blank in the fictional text appears to be a paradigmatic structure; its function consists in initiating structured operations in the reader, the execution of which transmits the reciprocal interaction of textual positions into consciousness. (Prospecting 40) According to Iser, the best literature disallows, through the strategic imposition of blanks and negations, a smooth fit between signifying codes and their application; ideally, the more deeply we engage with the text’s structure, the more it challenges coding conventions and problematizes our relationships to them: “The more the reader is drawn into the proceedings by playing the game of the text, the more he or she is also played by the text” (Prospecting 258). Here, if we follow Iser’s logic apparently beyond the rewarding challenge he accounts for in the relationship between text and reader, he identifies a proposition of transversal theory that I elaborate on in the next section: that people enjoy transversal movement, even if they fear it, resist it, or suffer as a result of the conditions under which it occurs; although transversal movement is often perpetuating, it is rarely identical to its catalyst. Iser asks of literature that
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only to cancel them out. What is canceled, however, remains in view, and thus brings about modifications in the reader’s attitude toward what is familiar or determinate – that is, he is guided to adopt a position in relation to the text. (Prospecting 34)
it displaces us from prescribed interpretive stances within our subjective territory, that it disturbs our everyday modes of interpretation, and compels us to pursue embedded unity within the structural embroidery of the text through fulfilling exploration and of its narrative, thematic, signifying, etc. vacancies. Yet for Iser, not surprisingly because of his stress on blanks and negations, the reader’s hermeneutic enterprises are, in the final analysis, inspired by deprivation and deficiency: “The interplay between the fictional and imaginary provides the necessary heuristics for such an exploration. In its boundary-crossing capacity fictionality is first and foremost an extension of humankind which, like all operations of consciousness, is nothing but a pointer toward something other than itself. Basically it is devoid of any content and hence cries out to be filled” (Prospecting 283). Alternatively, transversal poetics welcomes affective presence, positively construed and situated, of readers, spectators, authors, actors, performances, texts, etc. as a premise from which to engage subjects and subject matters.
Shakespearean excursion I: why we can’t get enough I would very much like to read and write in a space or heritage of Shakespeare, in relation to whom I have infinite admiration and gratitude; I would like to become (alas, it’s pretty late) a “Shakespeare expert”; I know that everything is in Shakespeare: everything and the rest, so everything or nearly. Jacques Derrida, “Interview” (67) At this point, I want to turn briefly to the controversial topic of Shakespeare’s enduring and extraordinary popularity. This enables me to expand our discussion on subjects and subjectivity into areas of research not explicitly following in the critical traditions considered so far. Specifically, I want to turn to neurochemistry, memetics, and cognitive neuroscience to see if there are productive correlates to their predecessors in reception theory and phenomenology. In doing this, I want to see if a satisfactory explanation for Shakespeare’s status might indeed emerge, perhaps as a Husserlian aesthetic object, along with the reader/spectator-subject. Overall, I intend this excursion to be a vehicle for discussing reception phenomenology and aesthetics more generally, to continue with Iser’s concern with what people desire or hope to achieve by engaging with literary fiction, and, for my purposes, with theater and performance.24 I begin with the example of The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet since it is commonly considered not only Shakespeare’s most romantic play, but also the most
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Subjective Affects 19
romantic play of all time. The long traditions of psychoanalytic and psychological approaches in literary criticism from Freud and A.C. Bradley to the present, and to some extent in phenomenological approaches as well (as in the work of Norman Holland and Paul Brodtkorb),25 have treated characters, Romeo and Juliet in this case, as if they are real fleshand-blood humans with normally functioning bodies and brains. I also do this, but primarily to explore the empathetic relationships readers and audiences famously have with them, and thus, in conjunction, to extend discussions of narrative, representation, and consciousness that are fundamental to the literary-critical traditions I am following to consider material, chemical, and neural variables that have been less attended to or completely elided in these traditions. We’ve got chemistry A hapless Romeo is struck by the sight of Juliet: “What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand / Of yonder knight?” (1.5.41–2).26 With testosterone and adrenalin already darting through his veins because of the anticipated violent confrontation that would occur if discovered by the Capulets at their ball, as well as some molecular bonding hormones like oxytocin already released during his “love be rough” exchange with his longtime dear friend Mercutio on the way to the ball (1.1.27), Romeo’s body is highly predisposed to physiological changes that produce the sensation of “love.” This ready biochemical predisposition is further enhanced by the desperate “woes” symptomatic of his unrequited “love” of Rosaline (2.2.62–74), the love-obsession that leads him to crash the Capulet ball in the first place. Such love-obsession is a byproduct of depression combined with irrational behavior, both characteristic of abnormally low levels of serotonin in the bloodstream. Causing an explosion of phenylethylamine in Romeo’s brain, a chemical with pharmacological properties similar to amphetamine that speeds up the flow of information between nerve cells that is naturally released when anxious or sexually stimulated, Juliet’s astonishing image, indeed her extraordinary affective presence (the combined material, symbolic, and imaginary existence of a concept/object/subject/event and its multiplicities) fires up with tremendous impact a group of neurotransmitters (chemical messengers), called monoamines, which are necessary for the “chemistry” of love, the captivation, energy, and euphoria associated with “falling in love.” These monoamines are dopamine, which produces pleasurable feelings, especially as its release heightens motivation as a result of greater reward-anticipation (Romeo’s desires might be requited, even
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20 Transversal Subjects
consummated); norepinephrine, also known as adrenalin, which activates the sympathetic nervous system to increase heart rate, dopamine transmission, and focused attention; and serotonin, which plays an important role in the everyday regulation of mood, sleep, sexuality, and appetite. Moreover, when serotonin is released from brain cells in high doses so that it occupies the synapses longer, thereby delaying reuptake back into the nerves, it induces a general and possibly extraordinary sense of openness, empathy, energy, euphoria, and well-being. For comparison, consider that these effects occur when people ingest the popular recreational drug MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), commonly referred to as Ecstasy, E, and X, which is molecularly similar to the stimulant methamphetamine and the hallucinogen mescaline. (See Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 cinematic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet for an example of a pharmacological approach to love at first sight.) Hence, Romeo’s diminished serotonin production is suddenly superboosted, consequently infusing his receptors and synapses with serotonin, forging powerful, ineluctable connections, and therefore unforgettable memories. But this remarkable event intensifies. Romeo’s heart races, sweat crowds his pores, and he produces and secretes seductive chemicals called pheromones that send off enticing molecular messages to other humans, typically detected by the olfactory system, but also by the vomeronasal (chemoreceptor) organ, located in the vomer facial bone between the nose and the mouth. As these pheromones gush into the air, they are no less readily absorbed by Juliet than her presence captivated Romeo. As a result, similar biochemical fireworks overwhelm Juliet. The mutual effects are so great, so excessive, that they both reel transversally, which is to say, wildly beyond accepted subjective and societal parameters. Symbolic of this departure and indicative of their similar cognitive states, the shared concept of “sin” becomes a common ground by which they attempt to measure and control the ultimately uncontrollable phenomena that inspires them to transgress, and keep transgressing against mounting and unconquerable adversity, the social, moral, legal, and spiritual codes of the official society of Verona. Recall how their beautiful dialogue concludes: ROMEO: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take. [He kisses her.] Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purg’d. JULIET: Then have my lips the sin that they have took. ROMEO: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urg’d. Give me my sin again. [He kisses her.] (1.5.105–9)
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Subjective Affects 21
Dramatic increases in serotonin levels often precipitate schizothymic, schizoid or schizophrenic experiences, with hallucinations persistently superseding rationality (see Chapter 2 on schizoanalytic reading of Rousseau). To be sure, I can easily imagine a lover of Shakespeare’s poetry spending literally hundreds of sleep, food, and human-contact deprived hours investigating the meaning of a phrase like, “To be, or not to be,” without hope of this undertaking leading to prosperity of any kind, financial, societal, or otherwise, much less absolute knowledge or salvation. Recent studies, most notably by Donatella Marazziti and her collaborators, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare brain activity and levels of monoamines and hormones in people during the first few months of falling in love with those of people diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) have revealed comparable cognitive processes and neurochemistry.27 This is in connection with similar obsessive-compulsive behavior in their everyday lives, such as repetitive, distressing, intrusive thoughts and related compulsions, tasks, and rituals (think of that article you just have to write). Whereas this similarity suggests a firm correlation between the neurochemistry of people falling in love and those with OCD, it may be the product of convergent evolution or processes; there being one observable outcome but more than one way of getting there. Nevertheless, I want to explore a potentially corresponding “disorder” of sorts in terms of subject-to-subject-matter relations during reception-privileged experiences. The “disorder,” of course, is people’s sometimes obsessive, compulsive, excessive, devoted, tortured, blissful, idolatrous, spiritual, and so on, relationships to the cultural icon Shakespeare. In various ways, Shakespeareans (fans, aficionados, devoted students, scholars, directors, actors, theatergoers, etc.) share initiation into discourses commonly associated with Shakespeare (on authorship, poetry, love, sex, theatricality, philosophy, history, war, etc.) as well as degrees of expertise in their common interest-areas and subfields. Evidenced by the abundant space, time, and energy Shakespeareans commit to Shakespeare in their conversations, classrooms, research, writings, offices, homes, theater-going, theater-making, movie-going, vacations, purchasing of books and chotskies, etc. (some even like to dress up as Shakespeare), there is significant commonality and overlap among their relationships to Shakespeare. In effect, they comprise laminations of investment in aspects and ideas of what they believe, consciously or not, Shakespeare is or does. These laminations generate and necessitate institutions and discourses that protect their investments
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22 Transversal Subjects
and what they deem to be “legitimate” relationships to Shakespeare, the kinds of relationships that should be emulated in the interest of supporting the ideology of an official culture that “appropriately” values Shakespeare. The ideology, in turn, reinforces the official culture’s selfsupporting subjective territories, the prescribed emotional, conceptual, and material positions occupied by individuals living within a given society. In this case, the subjective territories incorporate within the specific societies that couch such a legitimated, officialized culture of Shakespearean appreciation. Nevertheless, all of this goes much deeper and wider. Whether in theater, music, film, literature, or all of these in the Shakespeare industry, the specific results of performing, experiencing, thinking, reading, and/or writing about any culturally dominant iconic subject and its myriad permutations are ambiguous. However, such interfacing with emulative authority engenders more profound willful becomings and inadvertent comings-to-be of alternative identities and their experiences than the quotidian activities of life without iconic contacts.28 As discussed above, becomings are desiring processes by which people purposely transform – physically, conceptually, and/or emotionally – into something or something different; and comingsto-be happen when people lose control and transform into more of/or something else than expected or preferred. If someone wants to become a Shakespeare scholar, she might memorize much of Shakespeare’s poetry in the process of writing her dissertation on Shakespeare as an active means by which to connect profoundly with her subject matter. Nevertheless, if she were to begin speaking, intentionally or otherwise, in Shakespearean verse (quoting lines from Shakespeare, perhaps in an Elizabethan dialect) during an interview for an academic job without both making her audience aware of the frame for this performance, and thereby keying the audience into the fact that they are observing a performance, she might seem crazy because of her apparent attempts to emulate Shakespeare in a context not appropriately framed for such unusual behavior. Her desire to become a Shakespeare scholar would likely be superseded and undermined by her more powerful and authentic comings-to-be Shakespearean.29 Curiously, the effects of neither memorization of texts nor the performative recitation in speech, writing, and/or other embodied expression and representation of memorized texts have been subjects of concern for reader-response and reception theorists, even when their focus is a work of dramatic literature. Is there something about the projected staging, if not the live performance itself, that causes reader-response and
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Subjective Affects 23
reception theorists to shy away from dramatic literature and, by extension, theater and performance? Perhaps this has to do with their idea of convergence – comings-to-be – with an author’s consciousness that is vastly complicated by the inclusion of multiple other authorial elements (directors, actors, designers, producers, etc.). The reason for this might relate to a Platonic notion of distance/removal from “truth” through degrees of separation via mediation and representation or additional hermeneutic challenges presented as a consequence of structural complexities specific to performance modes. Either way, this choice raises a crucial question that might be presuppositional to their apparent resistance to drama (and preference for prose fiction): What induces or permits comings-to-be to transpire? People both become and come-to-be situated as participants within articulatory spaces when they encounter or embody any media conceptually and/or materially imbued or manifested by an icon’s or iconic event’s affective presence. Articulatory spaces are where expressions and signs merge, layer, and blend in line with prominent themes in ways structurally similar to how subjective territories and their elements (conceptual, emotional, physical) are contained within other subjective territories. These are, in turn, contained within official territories with elements (subjective territories, sociopolitical conductors, state machinery) which are contained by other official territories, either partially or entirely, and so forth. Put differently, articulatory spaces, like subjective and official territories, can be understood in terms of subsets and their elements in mathematical set theories that allow the elements of a set (set A) to be simultaneously contained within another set (set B) or sets (B, C, D, etc.) even though all of the elements of set A are not necessarily contained within any of the other sets of which some number of its elements are constituent. In short, elemental containment within different articulatory spaces is not essentially mutually exclusive and can be partial and concurrent.30 For instance, powerfully employed by the sociopolitical conductors of various official territories, Shakespeare’s emulative authority and affective presence as – among other celebrated things – marvelous poet, cultural icon, and ideological symbol enables and affects our engagement with the phenomena of Shakespace. This is an articulatory space that encompasses the plurality of Shakespeare-related articulatory spaces and formations (such as theaterspace, lovespace, humanismspace, as well as the more specific Freudspace, Marxspace, and Hamletspace) and the time, speed, and force at which these articulatory spaces transmit, replicate, and reconfigure through places, cultures, and eras.31
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Subjective Affects 25
In my last book, Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations, I explain that assimilation into articulatory spaces, like those within, passing through, and surrounding a famous work of literature or art, typically requires at least ideational engagement in conjunction with intentional or unintentional observation, imitation, and/or emulation, that is, becomings and comings-to-be. This requires conceptual-emotional, cognitive, and/or material infusion of certain units of information, cultural substances, or, perhaps, what zoologist Richard Dawkins calls “memes” (192).32 I want to return to Dawkins’s neologism and theory here to continue my discussion on becomings and comings-to-be in relation to subjective affects that I explore with my collaborators in Transversal Enterprises. For Dawkins, “meme” is an amalgam of the words “memory,” “imitation,” and “gene,” and he gives as examples of memes, “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches” (192). According to Dawkins, “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (192). He explains that “imitation” refers to copy as in genetic “replication,” but as a result of cultural rather than natural selection: “If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it onto his colleagues and students. . . . If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain” (192). As a concrete example, Dawkins asks his readers to consider “the idea of God”: How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that “survival value” here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. . . . God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture. (192–3)33 Like genes within a given population’s evolutionary process, memes thrive or perish insofar as their qualities are advantageous and superior to other competing memes within a particular culture and societal
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Can you say what you meme?
environment. With far-reaching implications across a number of fields, Dawkins’s theory of memes as replicators residing in people’s brains that are able to replicate themselves in effect of socialization during information transmission through any media – whether reading novels or attending theater performances – between individuals offers an explanation for cultural evolution, or rather, the gene-meme co-evolutionary process. It could also elucidate how subjective and official territories become and come-to-be; how state power, manifesting in ideas and their steady articulation, achieves predominance in given fields; and how transversal power, which fuels transformations and expansions that exceed the limits of subjective and official territories, may emerge in the fields as the result of subversive memetic interventions.34 As we move along, I want to explore the question of Shakespeare’s affective presence in terms similar to Dawkins’s about God: However comprehended or experienced as subjective singularities within multiplicities or as phenomenological or hermeneutic conundrum (replete with narrative, grammatical, or semantic “blanks”) or organic or universalizing totality, why does “Shakespeare” have such high survival value? Why is Shakespeare – his poetry, plays, philosophy, mind, biography, image – so tremendously and persistently popular? The field of “memetics” proliferated since Dawkins launched his theory in 1976, and has become divided into the “meme-as-germ” and the “meme-as-gene” camps.35 In the first camp are the memeticists, like Aaron Lynch and Richard Brodie, who take an epidemiological approach and see memes as cultural microbes that disseminate information as “mind viruses” (Dawkins’ term) or “idea viruses” that get “sneezed” by people through various media into the brains of other people.36 They exist parasitically on human hosts, making them act in ways conducive to getting copies of their information into the brains of others. Curiously, while writing this chapter I sneezed (a sort of self-muffled sneeze as I was trying to not wake up my sleeping one year old son Zephyr), and it was during that sneeze that I realized that sneezes – like mine – often sound like the utterance “Shakespeare.” Thus, when people hear sneezes they may be hearing, consciously or not, the word Shakespeare too, and this may be contributing, especially logocentrically, to the widespread awareness of, if not familiarity with, Shakespeare. Moreover, given that sneezing usually involves the involuntary release of bodily fluid (mucus), it is curious that in West Bengal, India, as I learned at a Shakespeare conference in Calcutta in 2007, people pronounce Shakespeare “Sexspeare,” and so Shakespeare’s popularity there may have something to do with the titillation inspired by uttering his name as well. Simply put, whether
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26 Transversal Subjects
we are talking about thoughts and feelings associated with his name or cultural codes, etc. linked to Shakespace, following Dawkins, the Shakespeare meme is literally sneezed into or onto people. Alternative to the virus model, memeticists belonging to the meme-as-gene camp, like Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, argue that memes, as gene-like replicators, account for a process of cultural evolution. For them, memes account for the ways by which humans use language and media to circulate information that networks and substantiates societies as they develop cultural traits ever more rapidly and complexly that go beyond the common understanding of what genes are capable of doing.37 According to Dennett and Blackmore, the spread of ideas and memes, and therefore the occurrence of comings-to-be, are usually more powerful and less controllable the higher the level of the activity involved, whether through performance or cognition. This theory agrees, generally speaking, with phenomenological and reception theorists of the Geneva and Constance Schools who maintain that the reader can converge with the consciousness of the author or text, respectively, through achieving a profound understanding of the sophisticated patterns and codes of the text. The understanding enables the reader to experience intersubjectivity with the author (Geneva theorists) or subject-producing interiority in relation to the text (Constance theorists) and thereby articulate the text’s meaning. In Dennett’s and Blackmore’s terms, awareness of how to do something – knowledge of technique, instructions, patterns, and codes (such as those necessary to construct a Shakespearean sonnet) – is more deeply assimilated and more capable of programming behavior, thought, and feeling than simply copying the action. Learning how to act in the process of becoming a theater actor, for example, would likely instigate comings-to-be of a nature perhaps altogether different from how people commonly perceive the lifestyle of an actor insofar as the kinds of somatic knowledge required of actors may be beneficial to people in other fields, such as surfing or physics. Along these lines, circumstances may motivate someone to pursue a given activity for adaptive purposes that have little to do with the immediate or local benefits of the activity, but rather because knowledge of the codes requisite to the activity bestow advantages of greater value for other applications, such as for purposes of pleasure or survival. For memeticists, this scenario is ordinary and the obvious work of memes. Taking this back to issues of reception, consider that while attending a performance of a Shakespeare play a scholar or aficionado of Shakespeare will have, consciously or not, more intense engagement with Shakespearean codes and consequently deeper assimilation with greater personal significance than
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28 Transversal Subjects
The neurons made me do it This theory, that past relationships to stimuli directly influence present ones despite any etiological awareness, has found support in recent research in cognitive neuroscience by researchers studying mimicry, perception-behavioral links, and neurological modeling. There is also research in these studies showing that people react unintentionally and automatically to stimuli in similar ways notwithstanding the absence of related individual or shared experiences. Together, this research provides some very compelling explanations for the phenomena of empathy, comings-to-be, and intersubjectivity, and is suggestive of a number of strategies for becomings that individuals and groups may perform. I want to begin with the preponderance of data from research conducted over the last fifty years showing both that people unconsciously mimic others when observing them, whether for purposes of communication, bonding, survival, or for no apparent reason, and that the findings are often the same for people observing people in photographs, on television, when overheard, or in person. The ways in which unintentional mimicry occurs are numerous: facial expressions from the time people are born and throughout life (Field, Woodson, Greenberg, and Cohen 1982; Meltzoff and Moore 1977a,b, 1979, 1983), including joy and sadness (Termine and Izard 1988) and wincing because of pain (Bavelas et al. 1986, 1987); verbal, including rhythm and rate of speech, duration of pauses, and interruptions (Cappella and Panalp 1981; Webb 1969, 1972), words, clauses, and grammar (Bock 1986, 1989; Levelt and Kelter 1982), tones of voice (Neumann and Strack 2000), accents (Giles and Powesland 1975), laughing (Bush et al. 1989; Provine 1992), yawning (Provine 1986); and body movements, including mother-child posturing (Bernieri 1988), ducking (Bavelas et al. 1988), and various posturing that is influenced by the degree of rapport and liking between parties, in other words, emulative authority (Bernieri 1988; Charney 1966; Dabbs 1969; LaFrance 1982; LaFrance and Broadbent 1976; Maurer and Tindall 1983; Scheflen 1964). Unintentionally performed, whether functional or adaptive, all of the types of mimicry referenced here suggest non-conscious, impartial, non-forceful mechanisms involved in both becomings and
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someone who only occasionally attends performances of Shakespeare’s plays. Because of their different prior relationships with the subject matter, and thus different investments in it, they will have substantially different sets of expectations for and responses to encounters with Shakespace.
comings-to-be.38 Nonetheless, affects of rapport and liking on occurrences of mimicry indicates that social, cognitive, and subjective factors requiring higher levels of engagement are at work (such as during the collaborative processes of writing this book); that is, there are apparent emotional and conceptual as well as other neurophysiological variables encouraging, discouraging, and/or determining kinds and qualities of mimetic responses. According to Christopher Hsee et al., mimicry influences people through what they call “emotional contagion,” which is “the tendency to mimic the verbal, physiological, and/or behavioural aspects of another person’s emotional experience/expression, and thus to experience/ express the same emotions oneself”; people “catch” the emotions of others through observation and the corresponding mimicry (328), which enables and affects occurrences of intersubjectivity. With much corroborating documentation from related research, Elaine Hatfield et al., elaborate on this idea in their book on the topic: Emotional contagion, we believe, is best conceptualized as a multiple determined family of psychophysiological, behavioral, and social phenomena. Because emotional contagion can be produced by innate stimulus features (e.g., a mother’s nurturing expressions and actions toward an infant), acquired stimulus features, and/or mental stimulations or emotional imagery, we say it is multiple determined. Because it can manifest as responses that are either similar (e.g., as when smiles elicit smiles) or complementary (e.g., as when a fist raised in anger causes a timid person to shrink back in fear, a process sometimes called countercontagion), it represents a family of phenomena. Emotional contagion is also a multilevel phenomenon: The precipitating stimuli arise from one individual, act upon (i.e., are perceived and interpreted by) one or more other individuals, and yield corresponding or complementary emotions (conversant awareness; facial, vocal, and postural expression; neurophysiological and automatic nervous system activity; and gross emotional behavioral responses) in these individuals. Thus, an important consequence of emotional contagion is an attentional, emotional, and behavioral synchrony that has the same adaptive utility (and drawbacks) for social entities (dyads, groups) as has emotion for the individual. (4–5) In support of emotional contagion, subsequent research made possible by primarily functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but also by position emission tomography (PET) and more recently
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Subjective Affects 29
magentoencephalography (MEG), has shown a neurological link between performing an action and simply imagining the performance of that action. In fact, several studies have shown that the same neurological activity occurs when someone imagines complex actions, such as communicating with words and gestures, as when performing them (Paus, et al. 1993; Decety et al. 1991; Jeannerod, 1994, 1997). Other studies have demonstrated that the same neuron firing among brain cells called “mirror neurons” occurs when someone observes or thinks about an action, even a simple action like grabbing a glass, without actually performing the action herself (Di Pellegrino et al. 1992; Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998).39 According to one of the pioneers of this research, Vittorio Gallese, such neurological mirroring happens because of what he calls “embodied simulation” and “intentional attunement”; the former accounts for neural underpinnings and the latter for neurological mappings: The mirror neuron system for action is activated both by transitive, object-related and intransitive, communicative actions, regardless of the effectors performing them. When a given action is planned, its expected motor consequences are forecast. This means that when we are going to execute a given action we can also predict its consequences. The action model enables this prediction. Given the shared sub-personal neural mapping between what is acted and what is perceived – constituted by mirror neurons – the action model can also be used to predict the consequences of actions performed by others. Both predictions (of our actions and of others’ actions) are instantiations of embodied simulation, that is, modeling processes. . . . The same functional logic that presides over self-modeling is employed also to model the behavior of others: to perceive an action is equivalent to internally simulating it. This enables the observer to use her/his own resources to experientially penetrate the world of the other by means of a direct, automatic, and unconscious process of simulation. (“Intentional Attunement” 1) Unlike most of the other cognitive neuroscientists conducting research on non-conscious mimicry, Gallese theorizes his findings. Following Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who “emphasize the role of the acting body in perceiving,” he hypothesizes that since the mirror neuron system provides people with the ability to access the neurophysiological worlds of others, it is also the phenomenological mechanism that
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30 Transversal Subjects
enables both empathy and intersubjectivity (“The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis” 41–4).40 As a conceptual tool for analyzing these phenomena, he offers the “shared manifold of intersubjectivity,” whereby “we recognize other human beings as similar to us. It is just because of the shared manifold that intersubjective communication and mindreading become possible” (“The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis” 45). Gallese’s work has significant implications for our understanding of the subjective, empathetic, and intersubjective processes involved in both becomings and comings-to-be, and, by extension, in the development, maintenance, and changeability of subjective territories. Gallese’s hypothesis is strongly supported by the research of Tanya Chartrand, William Maddux, and Jessica Lakin and others working on perception-behavioral links who argue for adaptive functions and/or agential corollaries of non-conscious mimicry. Moreover, also consistent with Gallese’s hypothesis, Tanya Chartrand, et al. claim that thinking about a behavior (as neurologically modeled) leads to performing it: Today, we still carry the torch of our ancestral heritage. Merely perceiving another person saying, feeling, or doing something makes us more likely to say, feel, and do the same thing. Even in minimal circumstances, there is substantial evidence that social perception leads to automatic social behavior. . . . Having the same facial expressions, speech patterns, moods, emotions, and behaviors of others expresses similarity, which in turn builds empathy, liking, rapport, and affiliation. Accordingly, there are variables that serve to increase or decrease the amount of mimicry engaged in at any given time, such as rapport, individual differences in perspective taking, and attentional focus. . . . We also have presented preliminary evidence that having a goal to affiliate with others can increase non-conscious mimicry. This occurs regardless of whether the goal is temporary or chronic, consciously pursued or nonconsciously primed. . . . Although mimicking another person’s mannerisms may be a direct result of the perception-behavior link, we believe that the existence of motivational moderators of this tendency makes this a powerful tool in a person’s repertoire of affiliative behaviors. (356–7) In the cases of research on mirror neurons and perception-behavioral links, there is a causal emphasis placed on previous experiences, through their impact on neurological patterning, with regard to present and subsequent responses, regardless of their conscious or non-conscious
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qualities. In other words, the intensity of neuron firing along axons and through synapses, and therefore the neurochemical experience, differs depending on already established pathways for neuron firing specific to each individual. These pathways, and the patterns they form, are the result of the individual’s prior knowledge and experience with the action.41 Generally, an individual’s familiarity with the action corresponds to the rate and potency of neuron firing: the more familiar, the greater the rate and potency. But this does not account for why people pursue the unfamiliar; why they want to encounter the “blanks” so important to reception theorists; why they like to be surprised; why they want deviation from the commonplace patterns to their lives, whether at the simplest level, such as through humor (joking requires disruption of a recognized narrative or semiotic frame), or in potentially life-changing ways (new romance, travel to foreign cultures, etc.). If rate and potency of neuronal activity, but only according to the same patterns, corresponded with enjoyment, people would prefer regular, habitual engagement and experience. And some people do. However, as the overlapping research of several fields demonstrates, most people gravitate toward novelty and surprise.42 Computer scientists Laurent Itti and Pierre Baldi have developed a computational model for quantifying surprise based on the Bayesian principle that a state of knowledge reflects belief (formed through prior experiences). Their research shows that people both prefer surprising situations and that surprise facilitates adaptive learning: The concept of surprise is central to sensory processing, adaptation, learning, and attention. Yet, no widely-accepted mathematical theory currently exists to quantitatively characterize surprise elicited by a stimulus or event, for observers that range from single neurons to complex natural or engineered systems. We describe a formal Bayesian definition of surprise that is the only consistent formulation under minimal axiomatic assumptions. Surprise quantifies how data affects a natural or artificial observer, by measuring the difference between posterior and prior beliefs of the observer. Using this framework we measure the extent to which humans direct their gaze towards surprising items while watching television and video games. We find that subjects are strongly attracted towards surprising locations, with 72% of all human gaze shifts directed towards locations more surprising than the average, a figure which rises to 84% when considering only gaze targets simultaneously selected by all subjects. The resulting theory of surprise is applicable across different spatio-temporal
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According to Itti and Baldi, experiences of surprise are adaptive and advantageous. They teach people about situation coding, prediction error, and subjective recovery. Indeed, it is through experiences of surprise that people become equipped to deal with the unpredictable and changing world. But, surely, most people do not pursue surprises for these reasons, at least not intentionally. Typically, people feel exhilarated by surprise, and this is what motivates their novelty-seeking behavior. Great stories, whether told through prose, film or theater, always contain surprises, if not in the plot of the story itself, then as part of the language and structure of its expression. For a work in any of these creative media to be identified, for instance by readers or critics, as predictable is among the harshest of criticisms, right up there with, and usually connected to, unoriginal and boring. Not surprisingly, given the increasing interest in novelty-seeking behavior and surprise since the development of certain new technologies for the observation of brain activity (fMRI, PET, MEG), cognitive neuroscience offers valuable contributions to exploration of the exhilaration factor through its attempts to comprehend the neurochemistry involved. Further to the adaptive function of surprise delineated by Itti and Baldi, Hongjoo Lee et al., have discovered that “associative learning” accomplished through experiences of surprise releases dopamine. This means that people enjoy pleasurable euphoria (they “get high” as through drug use) as well as become smarter from experiences of surprise; or it is learning that induces pleasurable euphoria, and all learning involves an element of surprise: Coding of prediction error by midbrain dopamine neurons has been examined extensively in the framework of associative learning theory. Most of this research has focused on the role of prediction error in determining the reinforcement value of unconditioned stimuli: poorly predicted (“surprising”) outcomes are more effective reinforcers and produce a greater dopamine response than well predicted outcomes. However, surprise also enhances attention to cues that signal poorly predicted outcomes. (1)
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scales, modalities, and levels of abstraction. . . . Life is full of surprises, ranging from a great christmas gift or a new magic trick, to wardrobe malfunctions, reckless drivers, terrorist attacks, and tsunami waves. Key to survival is our ability to rapidly attend to, identify, and learn from surprising events, to decide on present and future courses of action. (1)
In terms of affinity with a premise to transversal theory, that people desire to undergo transversal movements (although they sometimes suffer from them), the scientific research we have been discussing suggests that people often expose themselves to stimuli with unfamiliar and unpredictable variables so that comings-to-be and transversality (continuous surprise) may occur. Whether this happens through encounters with “blanks,” meme transmission, mimicry, and/or neurological modeling, transversal movements are a primary outcome of novelty-seeking behavior and surprise, regardless of their duration. Moreover, because people can experience confusion, anxiety, and/or pleasure when neurons fire in drastically atypical or random ways, that is, when common thought patterns yaw or rupture, the quest for surprise can also be masochistic, cathartic, and ecstatic, a potentially monoamine-overload producing activity with a very appealing ratio of investment-to-pleasure: one only has to sit back and relax. Of course, thrill-seeking behavior (dangerous sports, illicit relationships, criminal activity, recreational drug use, etc.), might considerably up the ante, and certainly the risk of bodily harm to oneself and others increases even if neurochemical responses are similar while observing such behavior in others, whether virtually or actually. Hence, despite the specific medium of expression (prose, film, theater, visual art) and genre frame (comedy, tragedy, history, romance, post-drama, abstract, impressionist, and so on), the experience of art is most enjoyed or disliked when it exceeds our expectations, when it is more of something – “worse,” “better,” or “weirder” – than anticipated. Such excessive experience is most likely to prompt subjunctivity, comings-to-be, and transversal movements. Of course, a production’s context and frame contribute directly to the construction of our expectations and the conditions for their failings or successes. For instance, when Shakespeareans attend a production of a Shakespeare play, their expectations are simultaneously very low and very high. They are low because most productions cannot “live up to” – that is, satisfy – the inflated neurochemical needs of the Shakespearean, the Shakespearean who has “seen that, done that,” and knows the texts “like the palm of her hand” and “better” than most people. Their expectations are also very high because they know all too well how wonderful they can feel if Shakespeare is “done right,” or better, if done in such a way that they will feel the exuberance of lightning-fast neuron firings down familiar routes. But even better, more excessive, would be if the neuron firing rocket-ships down familiar routes, but then deviates, fracturing, scattering, burning down untapped axons, overloading synapses, creating new
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connections, establishing powerful memories, stimulating never before experienced or imagined neurochemical activity. In other words, like in much of human life, people expect to yawn, but hope to yaw, and when they yaw, they are exhilarated and elated. And if people yaw, I want to add, so that phenylethylamine lets loose a flood of the falling-inlove monoamines (dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin), they are also made vulnerable, moving transversally, becoming and coming-tobe alternative identities and things; they are magnificently, ecstatically alive at the heart of why we can’t get enough of Shakespeare. No, it was the Devil, or worse Just as this phenomenon is no secret to Shakespeareans today, and the desire for surprise that motivates it may be no surprise (on some level) to everyone else, audiences of Shakespeare’s plays in early modern England pursued “the yaw,” or a particular kind of yaw, perhaps a secret yaw, no less diligently. This is a secret whose effects are the lifeblood of theater, and only the modes of theater and the drama (the scripts) from which it emerges that have persevered most powerfully across history and cultures can be said to contain the ingredients requisite to its manifestation. Early modern England’s scholars of theater who were most aware of its influence were those most vehemently against the public theater. Although they could not name it, or were afraid to name it, these antitheatricalists – early modern reception theorists or empiricists – identified what I call the “ineffable sexiness” that can be so inescapably strong in theater, and is for Shakespeareans so essential to Shakespeare’s poetry – the Shakespearean G-spot – that they obsessively-compulsively, even co-dependently, maintain relationships with Shakespeare, and consequently live and die in Shakespace. Three passages, which figure prominently in my early works on transversal poetics (“The Devil’s House ‘or worse’” and Becoming Criminal) and are commonly discussed in studies of sexual-gender issues in early modern England, significantly reflect the ineffable sexiness.43 Specifically, my exploration of the implications to these passages on cognition, identity formation, and social performance was fundamental to my development of the transversal theory of subjectivity and subjects elaborated on throughout this book. Published over a thirty-two year period, the passages are from three representative antitheatricalist polemics: cultural chronicler Phillip Stubbes’s The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), renowned Oxford scholar John Rainoldes’s Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes (1600), and Cambridge scholar John Greene’s A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615). The remarkable similarity between the
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36 Transversal Subjects
Than, these goodly pageants being done, euery mate sorts to his mate, euery one bringes another homeward of their way verye freendly, and in their secret conclaues (couertly) they play the Sodomits, or worse. And these be the fruits of plays and Enterluds for the most part. (144–5)44 For Rainoldes, stage-plays must be “cutt off” “sooner” than later because they are, the means and occasions whereby men are transformed into dogges, the sooner, to cutt off all incitementes to that beastlie filthines, or rather more than beastlie. (11) Greene: Then these goodly pageants being done, euery one sorteth to his mate, each bring another home-ward of their way: then begin they to repeate the lasciuious acts and speeches they haue heard, and thereby infect their minde with wicked passions, so that in their secret conclaues they play the Sodomite, or worse. And these for the most part are the fruits of Plays. (61) The “or worse” and “or rather more than beastlie,” allegedly produced by the seeing, hearing, and feeling of “lasciuious acts and speeches” that “infect their minde with wicked passions,” point to the dangerous possibility of other immoral, heretical, or supernatural opportunities, opportunities so reprehensible, scary, or otherworldly that they apparently could not be given a proper name. In effect, the “or worse” and “or rather more than beastlie” signify one or more possible practices or identities alternative to those identifiable and namable, all of which are likely to be inspired by theater, whether as a result of memetic transmission, non-conscious mimicry, emotional contagion, neurochemical reactions, and/or something else. That something else is what I call transversal power: any force, whether physical, material, ideological, aesthetic, emotional, and/or conceptual, etc. that precipitates fugitive deviations from the norms and encodings of subjective and official territories and, by nature of the radicality to its interventions,
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passages of Stubbes and Greene, though Greene probably plagiarized from Stubbes, indicates the enduring topicality and pertinence of their assertions. Stubbes:
can generate subjectivities. For early modern England’s antitheatricalists, that something else, perhaps ideologically de facto vis-à-vis its incomprehensibility or ineffability, is the Devil. John Greene’s A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615), which rebuts playwright Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612), is representative of this antitheatricalist position. Greene presents an amazing account of “a Christian woman [who] went into the Theater to behold the plaies”: She entered in well and sound, but she returned and came forth possessed of the Diuell. Wherevpon certaine Godly brethren demanded Sathan how he durst be so bould, as to enter into her a Christian. Whereto he answered, that hee found her in his owne house, and therefore took possession of her as his own. (44) The “well and sound” Christian, exposed to a virulent iconoclastic force, was “enter[ed]” and “possessed of the Diuell.” If the church is the house of God, the public theater is the Devil’s “owne house”: it’s “Sathans Synagogue” (43). Like the Church, the Devil’s theater has its pulpits, priests, ceremonies, and congregations. Greene insists, “God hath set his holy Word and Ministers to instruct vs in the way of Life: the Diuell instituted Plaies and Actors to seduce vs into the way of Death” (60).45 Nevertheless, whatever the source of theater’s transversal power, the theatrical experiences most focused on, which have been the most successfully marketed in theater from the Greeks to the present, as exemplified by the popularity of Romeo and Juliet across history and cultures, are those that are both erotic and invoke the mysterious sensations of fear and falling in love. The neurochemical conditions for fear and falling in love are remarkably similar: what fear lacks in oxytocin it makes up with adrenalin, and what falling in love lacks in adrenalin, it makes up with serotonin, another chemical that makes people feel good, and possibly crazy. Once eroticism infuses these conditions, the neurochemical dynamic becomes, as arousal increases, exponentially complex and exciting. Jonesing for transversality I want to conclude this first Shakespearean excursion with another example from one of Shakespeare’s most beloved and frequently produced plays, Henry V. Unlike the case of Romeo and Juliet’s sudden falling in love, although more related to their subsequent downfall because their love exceeds the parameters of the official territory in which they live, this example perhaps penetrates further into the psychic source of people’s quest for excess, if not to yaw, in ways that may have little to do with
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surprise. Even though surprise is always excessive until posterior absorption through reconfiguration of consciousness occurs, excess does not always involve surprise, and may offer different or related explanations for Shakespeare’s staying power. In our essay, “‘A little touch of Harry in the night’: Translucency and Projective Transversality in the Sexual and National Politics of Henry V,”46 Donald Hedrick and I argue that Shakespeare’s Princess Catherine potentially undermines King Henry’s fantasized domination of her during sex by occupying antithetically the conceptual-emotional spacetime of Catherine’s blindness by “winking” (5.2.262), which means by closing the eyes (OED). This opportunity is created in Henry’s fantasy – that he shares with Burgundy – of Catherine closing her eyes during sex (“Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and enforces” [5.2.259]) so that he can enter her from behind (“and so I shall catch the fly, your cousin [Catherine], in the latter end, and she must be blind too” [5.2.270–1]). In the logic to which he imagines Catherine unawares and therefore accessible, Henry inadvertently makes room for Catherine, in her imagination because her eyes are closed, to disappear and thereby deceive Henry while sexually engaged with him. From the perspective of Henry’s fantasy, sex-without-seeing indicates a trajectory of male and national domination. But a transversal reading, focusing on winking, suggests a different possibility altogether, a key to the scene, if not to the entire play: by closing one’s eyes, one can “disappear” the other, or even transform the other into someone or something else, an excessive inclusion fantastically implemented. Instead of transversality as a becomings-other of one’s own subjectivity, becoming what one is not, transversality might be thought of in terms of transforming the other outside herself, a projective transversality which instigates comings-to-be, such as of the “or worse” and “or rather more than beastlie,” the unnamable. What Hedrick and I suggest is that transversality and translucency may act as mechanisms with an entirely different outcome or purpose for Catherine than for Henry in his performance of himself. Moreover, I want to suggest here that they serve us, the audience, differently as well. In Henry’s fantasy of anal sex with Catherine, with Catherine capable of fantasizing about having sex or not with someone or something else (or others), we become aligned not with Henry, but with Catherine. Shakespeare creates a powerful counter-hegemonic gateway, indeed a mobile Iserian “blank,” through which our own fantasies can be excited, exhilarated, manifested, and, perhaps most importantly, legitimated, sanctioned, even spiritualized insofar as they can be excessive without limits, because they are condoned in Shakespace. It is in these nitty-gritty nooks and crannies of perversity – the dramaturgical
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Key twentieth-century contributions briefly continued: différance and the proper name We can only prohibit that which we can name. George Steiner, After Babel (40) Early modern England’s antitheatricalists eventually prohibited what they could not name, that is, what I call the transversal power of theater, and what for them fell under the equivocal categories of the “or worse” and “or rather more than beastlie,” the ultimately unspeakable and unnamable. Although they were unable to name it, as noted above, they did decide, conveniently, on a name for its source, the Devil, with the public theater being “Sathans Synagogue.” This familiar referent made the mysterious identifiable and gave them the justification for closing the public theaters from 1642 to 1660, while their political party maintained control of the realm. We have seen that the relationship between subjective affects, like Shakespeare’s ineffable sexiness, and people’s ability to successfully articulate the phenomena through language, often endeavored via employment of a proper name that makes the name bearer – the thing – a subject of discourse, has been a primary concern of phenomenological hermeneutics, and especially of the Geneva School, inasmuch as a particular author (known by name) is identified as possessing the consciousness the reader aspires to converge with, share or co-inhabit. But this relationship, and the utility to naming, has not been a primary concern of twentieth-century literary criticism in general insofar as authorial intentions and affective responses have been deemphasized in the pursuit of meaning, such as by the New Critics, but even more radically by structuralists, whose influence has spanned a number of disciplines, including literary studies, history, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and sociology. Although their analyses of sociocultural systems and structures are often implicit or explicit in political inflection, structuralists typically share the New Critics’ disinterest in the material conditions under which art and literature are produced and consumed, but are paradoxically
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“gaps” from which reception theorists normally shy away – that Shakespeare prepares for us what we perhaps know as Shakespeare’s greatest gift. But this gift comes not without cost. It is a gift that our Shakespeare-loving culture must keep unwrapping – in classroom after classroom, critical essay after critical essay, book after book, and performance after performance – for we depend on it for a certain “fix.”
both more anti-humanist/essentialist and more interested in sociocultural determinants (in terms of semiotics rather than material means of production) than are the New Critics. Unlike the New Critics, structuralists insist that art and literature can only be properly understood as reflecting the communication and meaning-making systems of culture, and not the consciousness, intentions, sensibilities, or beliefs of individual authors. This is because art and literature are collectively produced, products of culture and society, and not the creative, willful expressions of nameable individuals (authors, designers, etc.). Like New Critics, however, structuralists perform “close-readings” of texts that involve comparing and contrasting linguistic, rhetorical, and poetic elements. But structuralism takes the interpretive enterprise much “deeper” and broader, especially as it “contextualizes” synchronically (but rarely also diachronically) and often relationally across cultures as well as within a given culture. This can be explained best in comparison with reception theory, which was developmentally contemporaneous to structuralism and comparably influential. Whereas reception theory addresses issues of articulation in the tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics, in which experiences abstractly cognized – for instance, intersubjectivity or comings-to-be-one with an author – are perfectly viable for legitimate interpretation, structuralism pursues explanation in terms of patterns, frameworks, and systems of rules and codes. For instance, unlike approaches that consider literature a medium for communication between authors and readers, structuralists would locate Shakespeare’s ineffable sexiness as a byproduct of an underlying relational system of cultural semiotic coding that Shakespeare’s poetry manipulates to significant effect. The author, or “subject,” is simply a constructed medium, a product of sociopolitical conduction, through which cultural grammar embroiders a text; and the ideal reader is an impersonal, non-affected decipherer of a text’s codes and deep, rather than immediate, structures. As Husserl maintains that we must “bracket” objective reality in order to better access the consciousness that relates to it, structuralists bracket off the referent from its signifier to better access the ideational foundations behind it; what is “obvious” invariably has a more profound register, such as in a narrative (a description of person drinking water may have more to do with an idea of removing fluid from the universe in the interest of solidifying meaning than with quenching that person’s thirst) or in a simple referential construction (the assembly of letters “tree,” which on the surface indicate plant with wooden trunk and branches, may tell us more about the cultural significance of the utterance “me” with which it rhymes). Structuralists
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analyze the structure to the signifier itself, which is arbitrary, in comparison with other signifiers and the codes that guide their meanings. The sources of the codes and structures are integral to the culture and society that produces the text, and so the structuralist reader analyzes the text in light of these codes and structures, but also disinters the underlying sociocultural network of codes and structures through the text. Thus, like literary texts, which are never merely the expressions of people through written language, meaning (of a text, for instance) is always a matter of differential relations between codes within a system of signification by which definitions are determined. Further to the point, meaning is a construct of sociocultural context just like a person, what structuralists refer to as the “subject.” For structuralists, subjects, subjectivity, and the relationally determined behavior of subjects are epiphenomena, the exterior, non-determinant manifestation of underlying structures. Just as it makes no sense, according to structuralism, to speak of an author’s agency in relationship to the content and function of literature, it is the same for the concept of “self”; this is never the willful product of an individual or subject. Not only is agency, as experienced, a linguistic construct, but the thing itself – “agency” – is a fictive product of clever linguistic relations. We might ask, if authors, like meaning, are merely culturally constructed, and their expressions merely effects of a culture’s semiotic-semantic system, and even their proper names are arbitrarily established, who is responsible for their actions, and how might this person, people, or culture be identified? Structuralism’s roots are in the early twentieth-century linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, anthropological works of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and cultural semiotics of Roland Barthes.47 Its continued popularity from the 1960s into the 1980s can be credited to, among others, Jonathan Culler, Roman Jakobson, Gerald Prince, Yuri Lotman, Samuel Levin, Robert Scholes, and Michael Riffaterre.48 The increasing popularity and dissemination of reception theory in the 1960s and 1970s happened alongside the emergence and growth of structuralism and semiotics until a new movement, poststructuralism, significantly derailed both. Although varied in its manifestations, a specific mode of poststructuralism, deconstruction, accumulated a large number of influential proponents as it came to pervade literary-critical discourse by the mid-1970s and into 1980s. Influential deconstructionist critics include its founder, Jacques Derrida, and Harold Bloom, Eugenio Donato, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Joseph Riddel.49 During the mid and later 1970s, a group of younger critics emerged on the scene, including Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson, Jeffrey Mehlman, and
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Gayatri Spivak.50 The key player throughout its ascent to prominence has been Derrida, and it is his discussion of the proper name in the 1980s that I am most concerned with here; specifically, I want to consider the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and ethical relationships between the concepts of the proper name and the subject. But first it is important to provide context for this issue. In 1966, Derrida delivered a sharp critique of structuralism at a conference dedicated to structuralism at Johns Hopkins University. His purpose was to debunk or “decenter” core-underlying principles of structuralism. The following year, in France, he published three decisive books, Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference, the last of which includes a version of the lecture he presented at Johns Hopkins.51 In the United States, however, deconstruction did not take off until the 1970s due to the unavailability of translations of Derrida’s written work. By the 1980s, deconstruction’s influence could be seen, significantly, across a number of fields, including literary studies, politics, theology, and pedagogy.52 According to Derrida, the Western philosophical, literary-critical, and linguistic traditions have been dominated by logos, or presence, and thus a logocentric system of thought, whereby speech is the exterior, extension of thought, and writing a further extension of the same (see Chapter 5 on logos). In effect of its immediacy, speech has been privileged over writing, with writing seen as a representation of speech that is external to it; the phonocentrism contributing directly to the logocentrism. In other words, according to the discourses Derrida identifies as logocentrist, speech has stronger affective presence, is a more convincing mode of meaning-making; possibly because of the liveness to its performance, it enables more opportunities for improvisation in direct response to changing conditions of reception. In contrast, writing has less affective presence because the conditions to its expression and reception, especially with regard to the distance between author and reader, is usually more tenuous, more remote, delayed by time and space. Nevertheless, for Derrida, this is actually a false distinction: speech and writing can be more, less, or mutually interior and exterior to each other because meaning, whether articulated through speech or writing, is always indeterminate, subject to the “play” of disparities. People “agree” on meaning through a slippery process of deferral and difference, concepts he combines into his famous coinage, “différance”: as Derrida puts it, “What we note as ‘différence’ will thus be the movement of play that ‘produces’ (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences, these effects of difference” (Speech and Phenomena 141).
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Therefore, unlike in Saussurean linguistics, where meaning is determined relationally and through negation (we know that the word “tree” refers to a type of plant because it does not refer to a cat, dog, car, and so on), for Derrida the defining process is intrinsically indefinite inasmuch as there is always interpretive play (also referred to as “space”) through which alternative significations and meanings are disseminated; this is the case for differences between both phonetic and written signifiers. Thus, within a given semiotic-semantic system, people are only able to decide (to agree), and only ever temporally, on the relationship between signifier and signified through the assertion of an overarching, grounding, indeed centering referent, what he calls a “transcendental signified,” which is usually taken for granted and implicit within societies and cultures because it is inculcated and naturalized through socialization. Common examples of such signifieds are ideas of an omniscient or omnipotent beings (like gods), determination (like biological determinism: “anatomy is destiny”), predestination (as in Calvinism), historical telos (as in Hegelianism and Marxism), or purpose (as in capitalism, the educational industry, or missionary work). Moreover, following Derrida’s logic, the author of a text or a performance, if authors are believed to be autonomous, self-conscious individuals or coherent subjects with identifiable intentions or free will, can also function as a transcendental or grounding signified under certain conditions, such as in discourse on artistic expression, within literary analysis, and in a court of law. Generally speaking, for Derrida, the author or “subject,” while often a meaning-giving entity under these conditions, is nonetheless just one of many structural elements within a logocentric system. According to Derrida, transcendental signifieds work to center discourse and interpretive play, providing a sense of cogency to semiotic, philosophical, or political (logocentric) systems, but they are only ever provisional, like all meanings. This is because the transcendental signified is itself a construct, and therefore replaceable by another one, through a process of “supplementarity”: each system, or structure, depends on an operative, conceptual/definitional center through which it is apparently grounded, but the center is only a supplement, itself constructed on the premises of other structures, which are themselves equally dependent on supplements. In this paradigm, there is no pure or absolute presence. There are only assertions of presence – continuums of supplements – predicated on “traces” of the alleged origin to that given “presence.” Hence, as an alternative to philosophy and critical theories and methodologies based on what Derrida famously – and ironically – calls the “metaphysics of presence” (Of Grammatology 49),
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his deconstructionist approach focuses on absent presences, the traces, since the underlying process of differences and deferrals that are typically employed to assert meaning are never fully present to us. Instead, this process is always absent, identifiable through traces, leaving an ineluctable space for play and consequently an undecidable, unresolvable, plurality of possible interpretations. In short, there are no past, present, or future concrete structures, whether textual, ideational, or subjective, to which we can turn for articulatable, interpretive stability or absolute meaning; all semiotic-semantic structures are constructed such that when put under the pressure of deconstructive analysis they come apart, or rather, work to take themselves apart. So far, I have summarized Derrida’s intervention with regard to structuralism and other theories he considers logocentric, phenomenological hermeneutics being among them. At this point, I want to turn to implications of deconstruction on our understanding of subjectivity and consciousness, which are also primary concerns of phenomenological hermeneutics, especially in reception theory and aesthetics, as a means by which to contextualize further and more specifically my subsequent discussion of the proper name (see Chapter 3 for discussion on the proper name and cartography). Derrida’s response to Husserl’s phenomenology, in particular, is the launch pad from which his critique of structuralism evolves, but it also constitutes crucial subject matter to which his theorization of the proper name in many ways importantly returns as his own critical response to his earlier work. I want to highlight an influential juncture in a trajectory of Derrida’s work that exemplifies his own reflexive-consciousness vis-à-vis certain ethical reflections with regard to his roles as a philosopher and educator. For Husserl, as discussed above, consciousness requires the presence of an object, even if that object exists only in the mind, whether a product of imagination or hallucination; in other words, the existence of the material object in the world, outside of consciousness itself, is not essential or necessary to the presence of the object in consciousness; it does not need to be empirically identifiable. To be conscious, one must be conscious of something (an image, idea – an object); it is one’s intentional stance towards this object-of-consciousness through which consciousness constitutes itself relationally in the process of making the object present in consciousness. To “get at” our pure consciousness, we must “bracket out” our assumptions and dependence on empirical evidence for reality (the realm of tangible objects) so that we can understand that the only “real” objects are those present to consciousness, within consciousness, despite the existence of objects
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outside of consciousness, such as in everyday communication or simply in the world. In substantiation of this phenomenon, Husserl identifies two modes of articulation: (1) “expression,” which enables direct access to the object-of-consciousness since it is present to consciousness without mediation (such as through language); and (2) “indication,” which refers to an object different from itself, as a signifier indicates a signified. The latter amounts to a substitution of the former, since expression refers to that present object-of-consciousness that is inaccessible in its pure form outside of consciousness because it is always absent to someone else; it is impossible to articulate the object-of-consciousness purely and thus it can only be referred to, that is, indicated through the language used to represent it. Hence, for Husserl, all language is indicative, and works by substitution, because it can only ever approximate through representation the pure idea or object present in consciousness. The expressive mode of communication occurs within consciousness; it is speaking to oneself not with words, but through imagination of them, as they surface in response to intentional acts of consciousness toward its given objects (images, ideas). For Derrida, the problem lies not just in the logocentrism of Husserl’s philosophy, but especially in the distinction between the expressive and indicative modes. He argues that imagining words is the same as using them, therefore there is no difference between the modes; they are both languages, both indicative, and both based, ultimately, on absence, a trace, of what they refer and do not refer to. In this respect, there can never be a pure relationship between consciousness and its object insofar as expression is repeatable, when imagined words are reused, drawn from the imaginary dictionary. The relationship is always contaminated by what are not there, the traces of its origins, the similarities with and differences from the words or symbols not chosen. This follows the logic outlined above, by which definition or agreement is provisionally reached through a relational, combinatory process of difference and deferral, with all the associations informing the process, both residual and persistent in the continuous play-space of signification. When this concept is extended to all meaning, as Derrida implies, there can be not only no determinate or absolute meaning, but also no presence of an object without traces of absence, and therefore no purely positive presence, consciousness, or being. As Derrida puts it, The unheard difference between the appearing and the appearance [l’apparaissant et l’apparaître] (between the “world” and “lived experience”) is the condition of all other differences, of all other
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traces, and it is already a trace. . . . The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the difference which opens appearance [l’apparaître] and signification. Articulating the living upon the nonliving in general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent signification than an opaque energy and no concept of metaphysics can describe it. (Of Grammatology 65) The traces that the differences between objects, signs, images, etc. constitute reveal the spaces between the differences, what allows for the play. For Derrida, it is precisely these spaces that Husserl’s phenomenology cannot account for and that comprise the conditions for presence through absence; they are the nothings from which somethings arise, by which objects, via indication, become present to consciousness, and thus subjectivity establishes in relation to or in effect of reference and representation. In an important discussion of Derrida’s understanding of the proper name in light of the controversy around his introductory text, titled “Racism’s Last Word,” for an exhibition held in 1983 by the Association of Artists of the World against Apartheid, David Schalkwyk, in passing, succinctly brings this intervention of Derrida’s to bear on the concept of subjectivity: This spacing, which is both a certain spatial distance and a temporal process informing both signs and experience, is what necessarily splits the interior of consciousness by an exteriority, and ensures that subjectivity is itself constituted through representation. This is because (1) language as spacing always pre-exists any individual speaker, and (2) spacing – being absolutely prior to all distinctions whatsoever – cannot be an object of consciousness. Consequently, no activity of consciousness can occur prior to its effects or command it. (74–5) It is precisely this concept of spacing, as Schalkwyk points out, that has been often overlooked or misunderstood both by people who have adopted Derrida’s theories and methodologies and by people who have responded critically to them with accusations of sophistry or nihilism, that is, that for Derrida nothing (no subject) can matter – everything is meaningless – because nothing (no meaning) is sustainable: we endlessly spin in a progressive quagmire of deferral and difference. The confusion around Derrida’s concepts of spacing and différance, however, seems to
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be symptomatic of the concepts themselves, his meanings slipping into the indeterminacy but also the potentialities they describe and advance. Nevertheless, there is another apparently problematic aspect to his use of these concepts in his critique of Husserl’s phenomenology: according to Derrida, “‘Différance’ is the nonfull, nonsimple ‘origin’; it is the structured and differing origin of differences” (Speech and Phenomena 141) and “Spacing designates nothing, nothing that is, no presence at a distance; it is the index of an irreducible exterior, and at the same time of a movement, a displacement that indicates an irreducible alterity” (Positions 81). The problematic aspect, reflected in these passages, to which I am referring, is that Derrida wants to have it both ways, absence/trace on the one hand, and originary/irreducible quality on the other hand; in other words, his term, “metaphysics of presence,” might aptly apply to his own approach. Nevertheless, I am far from the first person to recognize this, and I have nothing new to add to Jean-Louis Houdebine’s astute treatment of it in a 1971 issue of diacritics.53 Instead, my purpose here is to connect this fugitive element, this trace, common in discourses on Derrida and deconstruction, to Derrida’s position on the proper name, especially as articulated in his response to the critique of his consideration of the word apartheid as a proper name. When Derrida asserted, in a non-characteristically deconstructionist move, that the word apartheid can forever and uniquely serve, because of its nature as “untranslatable idiom” and “singularity” (there are no equivalences), the combined purpose of protesting against and remembering racism (“Racism’s Last Word” 292–3), Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon accused him, in light of his theory of différance, of reducing real historical atrocity to mere play in language, in effect reifying the word apartheid with “spurious autonomy and agency” (140). Rather than repeat the debate here,54 I turn to Derrida’s cogent response: Historical reality, dear comrades is that in spite of all the lexicological contortions you point out, those in power in South Africa have not managed to convince the world [that apartheid is “separate development” or “plural democracy”], and first of all because, still today, they have refused to change the real, effective, fundamental meaning of their watchword: apartheid. . . . The South Africans in power wanted to keep the concept and the reality while effacing the word, an evil word, their word. They have managed to do so in their official discourse, that’s all. Everywhere else in the world, and first of all among black South Africans, people have continued to think the word was indissolubly – and legitimately – welded to the concept and the reality.
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48 Transversal Subjects
Derrida’s commitment, under certain circumstances, to calling “a thing by its name,” might seem, at first glance, to contradict the main tenets of deconstruction. This is why his detractors were unable to comprehend the explicitly stated gist to his account of the word apartheid in “Racism’s Last Word.” The circumstances for declaring such an appellation, for Derrida, are both ethical and extreme, in this case because of “a violent arrest of the mark” (“Racism’s Last Word” 292); as he explains in his response to McClintock and Nixon: It was not a thesis on the genealogy of the word but an appeal, a call to action, as you put it, and first of all an ethical appeal, as indicated by that which, in both ethics and politics, passes by way of memory and promising, and thus by way of language and denomination. Besides (and here I am speaking as a historian, that is, in the indicative), whatever efforts the ideologues and official representatives of South Africa may have made to efface this embarrassing word from their discourse, whatever efforts you may make to keep track of their efforts, the failure is not in doubt and historians can attest to it: the word apartheid remains and, as I hope or expect, it will remain the “unique appellation” of this monstrous, unique, and unambiguous thing. (“But, beyond” 159) Derrida also emphasizes that such assertions of proper names (unique appellations), “in politics,” is what sociopolitical conductors do all the time to assert their ideology and consolidate their power: “a ‘watchword’ is not limited to a lexicon” (“But, beyond” 163). It is precisely this employment and reliance, especially within the logocentricism of Western culture, that deconstruction works to unhinge. This awareness on the part of Derrida takes on particular purport through his exploration of the proper name in relation to Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet that extends well beyond its focus. In this exploration, Derrida theorizes how the proper name, when assigned to people, functions to consolidate, in terms similar to that of sociopolitical conductors generally, the subjective territories of individuals within a given society, that is, within an official culture, in this case that of the patriarchal state of Verona: “The terrible lucidity of Juliet. She knows the two bonds of the law, the double bind, which ties a son to the name of his father” (“Aphorism Countertime” 430). Derrida’s focus
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And if you’re going to struggle against this historical reality, well, then you’ve got to call a thing by its name.” (“But, beyond” 163)
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Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name. . . “Tis but thy name that is my enemy: Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s a Montague? It is nor hand nor foot Nor arm nor face nor any other part Belonging to a man. O be some other name. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet; So Romeo would were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name, And for thy name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself. (2.2.33–49) According to Derrida, This analysis is implacable for it announces or denounces the inhumanity or ahumanity of the name. A proper name does not name anything which is human, which belongs to the human body, a human spirit, an essence of man. And yet this relation to the inhuman only befalls man, for him, to him, in the name of man. He alone gives himself this inhuman name. And Romeo would not be what he is, a stranger to his name, without his name. Juliet, then, pursues her analysis: the names of things do not belong to the things any more than the names of men belong to men, and yet they are quite differently separable. (“Aphorism Countertime” 427) Through her analysis, Juliet discovers that while Romeo’s name is not an inherent property of its bearer (“It is nor hand nor foot / Nor arm nor face nor any other part / Belonging to a man”), it is impossible for him to “doff” it. Schalkwyk sums up Juliet’s discovery: “One can call (to) someone in his absence only because the name is not a part of him. On the other hand, that one can call to him is an indication of the inseparability of his name from himself – not his hand or foot or face, but as a social human being” (99). Social humans, as members of a society, are named, and Romeo’s name, “Romeo Montague,” is integral to the subjective
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is what he refers to as Juliet’s “analysis” of Romeo’s proper name as the singular and “inhuman” obstacle standing between her and the person she loves:
territory prescribed for him by society through his father and made absolute in his title. Put differently, this is an example of what Louis Althusser describes as interpellation, the process of identification by which an individual is made a “concrete subject” of ideology, in this case Romeo is subjectified by Verona’s official society and ideology (174–5). He cannot escape his name, even while, as Derrida puts it, he is “a stranger to his name”: whereas, “A rose remains what it is without its name, Romeo is no longer what he is without his name” (“Aphorism Countertime” 427). This idea is exemplified in the play itself, at its conclusion, when Romeo’s father promises to memorialize Juliet: “For I will raise her statue in pure gold, / That whiles Verona by that name is known, / There shall no figure at such rate be set / As that of true and faithful Juliet” (5.3.297–301). In name, as a singularity that remains in history, despite Juliet’s death, Juliet lives on. Of paramount importance here, for the purposes of this book, is the relationship between the name, as indicator of subjectivation, and the possibility, if not the inevitability, of one’s estrangement from it, that is, through emergences of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, the kinds of which ride on the waves of the transversality of love. These emergences can become symptomatic in ways associated with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, manifest in dissidence and suicide, or develop into sustainable joy or ecstasy, and so on. Neither Romeo nor Juliet can adhere, respectively, to his or her subjective territory, the singularity within it inseparable from his or her name, because “Romeo and Juliet,” the bi-univocal (two-into-one) love-driven assemblage, the articulatory formation they are together in Shakespace, what Janna Segal and I have termed “R&Jspace,”55 must transcend or reconfigure state machinery to survive within the world of the play and beyond. On this point, with regard to Romeo, Derrida explains: He can only live if he asserts himself in a singular fashion, without his inherited name. But the writing of his name, which he has not written himself (“Had I it written, I would tear the word” [2.2.57]), constitutes him in his very being, without naming anything of him, and by denying it he can only wipe himself out. In sum, at the very most he can deny it, renounce it, he can neither efface it nor tear it up. (“Aphorism Countertime” 430) In this early modern English example, the text of Romeo and Juliet, we have seen an awareness of logocentrism, but also of Derrida’s notion of “absent presences” ( Juliet’s invocation of Romeo in his absence,
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articulated in his name); awareness of societal investment in names and their practical relationship to the establishment and maintenance of subjective territories, but also of the subjective affects for which names can be facilitating as well as delimiting (Romeo can “neither efface” his name “nor tear it up” because it is a property imposed on him, preceding him, and signifying in spite of him); and, perhaps most significantly, we have seen in Juliet’s analysis not just such areas of awareness, but also, when the above points are combined, a phenomenologically inflected theory of signification with regard to the function of the name. In an interview with Derrida, about Derrida’s reading of Romeo and Juliet, Derek Attridge asks, “Does a literary work as historically and culturally distant as this one pose any problems for your reading of it?” (“Interview” 62). To which Derrida responds, “Yes,” and states: “It would be necessary to reconstitute in the most informed and intelligible way, if necessary against the usual history of the historians, the historical element in a play like this,” that historical element being, in this case, the proper name (“Interview” 63). He continues: “I wanted to say that Romeo and Juliet is not the only example but that it’s a very good example. . . . And what goes for one work, one proper name, evidently goes for any work, in other words for any singularity and any proper name” (“Interview” 65). In the next and final section to this chapter, George Light and I pursue the historical reading Derrida requests. In doing so, as suggested by Juliet, we hope to show that certain signature theoretical contributions of structuralism and poststructuralism have definite precursors in the early modern English understanding of the proper name with regard to both semiotic-semantic systems and subject formation. Moreover, another aim of this final section is to establish more explicitly the historical trajectory of this book, which moves investigative-expansively between the premodern and the modern to graph the various lines of critical inquiry into subjects, subjectivity, and subject matters that inform the transversal theory and research methodologies demonstrated throughout its pages.
Shakespearean excursion II: what’s in a name? The survival of a theatrical work implies that, theatrically, it is saying something about theater itself, about its essential possibility. And that it does so, theatrically, then, through the play of uniqueness and repetition, by giving rise every time to the chance of an absolutely singular event as it does to the untranslatable idiom of a proper name,
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Shakespeare’s second historical tetralogy (1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, and Richard II) provides a “legitimate” touchstone – “legitimate” within a number of interpretive communities because it comes from Shakespeare – for discussions of sociopolitical division and hierarchy in Western history. This is exemplified from the tetralogy’s inauspicious beginnings in a royal deposition and its muddled but programmatic nationalism that starts with John of Gaunt’s “this England” yet concludes with Henry V’s reconstituted, polyvocal Anglo-Norman empire to 1 Henry IV’s class boundaries apparently dissipated in the Boar’s Head Tavern. In this section, with an investigation of sociopolitical structuring, we want to examine that singular element which lies behind the snobbery of the titled, their proper names, although here we focus on Christian names rather than family or geographical appellations because they are typically employed, and more importantly, often strategically deployed, independently of surnames in everyday social situations. Specifically, we examine how Hal’s obsession with getting his name “right,” calculated through his reflexive-consciousness with regard to his own sociopolitical positioning and aspirations, depicts clearly early modern concerns about order and degree, and implicitly conveys an understanding of the relationship between subjectivation and social identity that is fugitive and potentially transversal through deployments of the proper name.56 The man who knew too much: the name of the game Better to rule than be ruled by the route. William Camden, Remains (304) In 1 Henry IV, Hal proposes a leadership based upon his familiarity with both the proper “Christian names” of commoners and mastery of tavern language and performance: Sirrah, I am a sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can call them all by their Christian names, as Tom, Dick, and Francis. They take it already upon their salvation that, though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am king of courtesy, and tell me flatly I
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to its fatality (the “enemy” that “I hate”), to the fatality of the date and of a rendezvous [as in Romeo and Juliet].” Derrida, “Aphorism Countertime” (419)
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In this passage, our princely sociologist reinscribes the same problematic that Derrida in his 1966 Johns Hopkins lecture, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” locates in Lévi-Strauss’s “double intention: to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes” (284), pointing out that what Lévi-Strauss terms “bricolage” – “the continual reconstruction from the same materials, [in which] it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa” (Lévi-Strauss 21) – is after all a “mythopoetical virtue”: “In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of discourse is a stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archia” (Derrida, “Structure” 286). In other words, Hal may not favor the drawers’ mode of existence, but, with wherewithal at social performance akin to Lévi-Strauss’s “bricoleur” (“someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman” [16]), he recognizes its instrumentality as a means by which to consolidate his “command.” One of the ironies of the passage is that Hal’s cronies fail to understand the tension between play and language: that Hal is the true proud fellow and Falstaff simply plays at his pretentiousness; Jack is merely an egotist, the Prince an egoist. At Eastcheap, Hal boasts of his assimilation in a statement whose ulterior purpose is to proudly confess – for the more savvy audiences on and off the stage – his becomings-bricoleur: “To conclude, I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life” (2.4.16–18). In his rejection of Falstaff, he claims to have changed: “Presume not that I am the thing I was; / For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, / That I have turn’d away my former self” (2 Henry IV 5.5.56–8); and yet as king in moments of need he will resort to his old alehouse habits of playacting in a disguise and mingling with the common soldiers, where he wryly asserts, “I think the king is but a man. . . . His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man” (Henry V 4.1.99–103). The legal ceremonies at the end of 2 Henry IV may require the banishment of indecorous individuals, but, as Hal knows too well, the potential leavening qualities of popular culture have much use-value: the Boar’s Head Tavern is not closed.
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am no proud Jack like Falstaff, . . . when I am king of England I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap. (1 Henry IV 2.4.6–14)
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PRINCE: Before God I am exceeding weary. POINS: Is’t come to that? I had thought weariness durst not have attached one of so high blood. PRINCE: Faith it does me, though it discolours the complexion of my greatness to acknowledge it. Doth it not show vilely in me to desire small beer? (2 Henry IV 2.2.1–6) Hal parrots the class arrogance expressed by Queen Isabel about his own father in Richard II, where Bolingbroke becomes “an alehouse guest” as contrasted to Richard’s “most beauteous inn” (5.1.13–15).57 These fears represent the “populist energy” that Leonard Tennenhouse notes when claiming that “the various confrontations between licit and illicit authority comprising the Henriad more firmly draw the distinction between aristocracy and populace even as they appear to overturn this primary categorical distinction” (83). Yet, a notorious commoner trumps Hal in this respect. In 2 Henry VI, Jack Cade, parodying Thomas More’s Utopia, states, your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny; the three-hoop’d pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it a felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass and when I am king, as king I will be. (4.2.61–7) Cade despises the common touch that demarcates his role in the social order, seeking rather to ascend to the monarchy. Conversely, Hal despises the common touch that makes his success possible. Thus, his clever turn of phrase, “Tom, Dick, and Francis,” attempts to place his own baseness as a common Harry under erasure, perhaps explaining the unusual diminutive Hal as well (1 Henry IV 2.4.8).58 Ironically this forced familiarity also marks his role as an upper class gallant, for Thomas Dekker proposes in his self-help book for gallants, The Gvl’s Horne-booke, that the “first compliment” of a gallant in a tavern “shall be to grow most inwardly acquainted with the drawers, to learn their names, as Iack, and
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Nevertheless, with the crown nearer to his head, Hal becomes wary of his personal associations with this tavern world:
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Notorious: the game of the name HENRY, ger. in Latine Henricus. A name so famous since the yeare 920, when Henry the first was Emperour, that there have beene 7 Emperours, 8 Kings of England, 4 Kings of France, as many of Spaine of that name. . . . Howsoever it hath been an ominous good name in all respects of signification. Camden, Remains (56–7) Throughout the second tetralogy, the character who would become Henry V is called at least three different proper names: Henry, the familiar Harry, and the diminutive Hal.59 He is alluded to in Richard II but not mentioned by name. In 1 Henry IV, he is called Hal 37 times and in 2 Henry IV so named 5 times; the appellation does not appear in Henry V. Hence, Kristen Poole is not precisely correct in stating that “it is only through Falstaff that the audience comes to know the prince familiarly as ‘Hal’” (70); however, the only people who call him Hal are Falstaff and his cronies, specifically Poins (1 Henry IV 2.2.106; 2.4.3).60 By having Falstaff use both Hal and Harry, Shakespeare seems to be making a point about the social distinctions and implications informing each sobriquet. Falstaff calls his lordship Hal 40 times and Harry 8 times. In 1 Henry IV, Falstaff’s choice of Harry cluster around the lines in 2.4 where he and Henry alternatively play king and prince, that is King Henry says Harry and so too does Falstaff in playing the role (378–463); just prior to this banter, Falstaff calls the prince Hal (354), and he almost immediately returns to it after the “scene” ends (473). Moreover, only when Hal is on the verge of being crowned Henry V does Falstaff really dub him “Prince Harry” twice (2 Henry IV 4.3.115–16; 5.1.76). After the coronation, Falstaff reverts to his waggish ways, calling the new sovereign “thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!” (5.5.41); given Hal’s obsession with the power of proper naming to demarcate a subject, this affront to the royal dignity alone might be enough to garner banishment. Throughout the entire second tetralogy, the more common appellation for Henry actually is Harry: 60 citations to 42. Only the “vulgar company” use Hal (1 Henry IV 3.2.41). In substituting Francis for Harry in the proverb, “Tom, Dick, and Harry” (Apperson, 637), Hal clearly intends to deny the commonness
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Will, and Tom” (33). Having demonstrated that Hal is concerned with his position in the social hierarchy, we want to investigate further to what end Hal reconstitutes the familiar proverb “Tom, Dick, and Harry” as “Tom, Dick, and Francis.” Or to frame the issue as a question, just what is Hal’s trouble with being Harry?
associated with his name, the metaphysical meanness, as evidenced by his taste for “small beer,” from which he fears to suffer. In 1 Henry IV, Hal only speaks the name Harry once when role-playing his father at the Boar’s Head (2.4.424). In 2 Henry VI, Hal speaks the name once when reading a letter from Falstaff (2.2.114), but takes it up wholeheartedly only in his first public appearance as Harry the Fifth in order to claim his patrimonial right to the throne through patronymical relations (5.2.49 ff.). As a divine right monarch assured of his special status, Henry V finally accepts Harry for its hegemonic power over the common people, especially after he returns Harry (Henri) to its etymological roots in Normandy on the eve of St. Crispin’s Day: “Cry, ‘God for Harry! England and St. George!’” (Henry V 3.1.34). Here, he summons the troops to interpellate him as Harry in reverse Althusserian terms, reverse because it is the authority requiring the hailing of him by subjects and not the other way around. This confirms their subjectivation and affirms his subject position and affective presence. One irony, however, of the young and future Henry V’s earlier denial of Harry is that what is now considered to be the familiar or a “mere pet-form of Henry” was “the usual English form of the name until the 17th c,” as the French Henri “in English pronunciation became Herry or Harry” (Withycombe 149). This is a matter of pronunciation rather than translation, for as Derrida notes, “a proper name as such remains forever untranslatable, a fact that may lead one to conclude that it does not strictly belong, for the same reason as the other words, to the language, to the system of the language” (“Des Tours de Babel” 171). Along these lines, Charlotte Yonge goes so far as to propose a nationalist preference: “Its right native shape is Harry; the other form [Henry] is only an imitation of French spelling” (309). Conversely, Hal has always been the pet-form of Henry, following the standard substitution of -l for -r as in such derivatives as Tel for Terry (for example, El Tel of Barcelona and English national football fame and Tottenham Hotspur infamy) or Sally from Sarah (Hanks and Hodges 147). Hal’s denial of Harryness may mask deeper anxieties not so much about his commonness but rather his aristocratic nature; the affective presence of his name demonstrates how his subjective territory limits his opportunities for becomings. Calling himself Harry links him with not only with his father, “Harry of Herford, Lancaster, and Derby” (Richard II 1.3.35), but also with his nemesis, “young Harry Percy” (Richard II 2.2.53). He is caught between two undesirable forces of comings-to-be, both with strong emulative authority for others. Thus, the erasure of Harry can be seen as an act of both fratricidal and patricidal name-dropping in the most literal sense. But what exactly does this Harry have against
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Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him, See riot and dishonour stain the brow Of my young Harry. O that it could be proved That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged In cradle-clothes our children where they lay, And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet! Then would I have his Harry, and he mine. (1 Henry IV 1.1.83–9) Similarly, Hal despises Percy’s martial gallantry that contrasts “his vile participation” in the tavern world (3.2.87). In this manner, Hal is the petulant spoiled brat who gets away with everything but wants more. Nevertheless, in the positive sense, his disdain for those other Harrys also demonstrates his profound insight into their flawed characters. He understands that his own position as a future king will be undermined by how Henry IV achieved the throne, and he cannot forgive his father their illegitimacy brought on by vaunting ambition; recall his father’s deployment through formal invocation the consecrating power of a proper name with which he wants his own name to be legitimately endowed: “In God’s name, I’ll ascend the regal throne” (Richard II 4.1.113). Hal also understands that what makes Hotspur such a glorious warrior would make him a horrible ruler: “Percy is but my factor, good my lord, / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf” (1 Henry IV 3.2.147–8). With namesakes like these, who would want to be a Harry? In terms of history, Henry’s renaming of his own character is much like Gary Taylor’s editorial substitution of Oldcastle for Falstaff (330–1); Henry as Hal is equally guilty of stopping “history in the logos,” of failing “to remark the improprieties of the proper name” (Goldberg 83; 76). Unlike Taylor, however, Hal is critically successful: how often have you heard a Shakespearean speak of Harry when not directly quoting the plays? More to the point, Henry deploys the power of the proper name to navigate and transform his social identity; by extension, the proper name is his gateway for subjective becomings. The agential mode of identity construction and performance Henry demonstrates through the deployment of proper names is therefore very different from Stephen Greenblatt’s idea of “English Renaissance self-fashioning,”
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those Harrys, and why does he so insistently seek to distinguish himself from them? There are two basic answers: one negative in connotation, the other positive. In the negative sense, Hal’s disavowal of his “other” name displays a hatred of Henry IV’s disapproval and frequent odious comparisons to Hotspur:
which “involves submission to an absolute power or authority situated at least partially outside the self – God, a sacred book, an institution such as church, court, colonial or military administration” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning 9). Indeed, Hal blatantly defies or appropriates all such authorities, and since Harry apparently carries such a host of negative connotations for the future king, being the both crafty and powerful Hal means never having to say you are sorry, as Falstaff discovers to his rue. Having determined the trouble with Harry, we want to turn to the advantages and disadvantages of Francis. Spellbound: a little touch of Harry at the bar Harry, v.: 4. To worry, goad, torment, harass; to maltreat, ill-use, persecute; to worry mentally. Oxford English Dictionary Much of the difficulty in standard interpretations of 1 Henry IV lies with accepting either Falstaff or Hal as a legitimate voice for the alternative society of the tavern. These readings overlook the fact that their social class or “degree” in the play makes both of them outsiders to the tavern world. In this way, 1 Henry IV illustrates the difficulties involved both in representing a primarily oral popular culture in the early modern period, when literacy rates for the masses were low, and in recuperating this culture for later periods.61 Thus, we turn to the trace of that culture in the material and linguistic. Yet even here we have problems, as evinced in the Francis scene where Hal’s superior linguistic abilities render the tapster incapable of any response. Bahktin’s notion of heteroglossia as “an intense ideological battle” (470–1) models the problematic relationship of Hal, in his linguistic virtuosity, to the tavern world and uncovers an ideological struggle which continues throughout his royal career. The locus classicus for discussing this topic remains Hal and Poins” wordplay with the “under-skinker” Francis. Greenblatt claims: “Hal, with the connivance of Poins, reduces the puny tapster Francis to the mechanical repetition of the word ‘Anon’” (“Invisible Bullets” 31). Unwilling to reduce Hal’s character, he later concludes that “we are permitted for much of the play to take pleasure at least in Hal’s surprising skill, the proficiency he rightly celebrates in himself” (36). However, Greenblatt misses the point that Francis himself has at least two languages: everyday London vernacular (“O Lord, sir, who do you mean?” [2.4.69]) and the curiously concise cant of his commercial trade (“Anon”).62 Hal’s trick in effect ridicules the latter without ever silencing effectively the former. What concerns Hal the most is the power of the new urban commercial order, as he
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complains of such a phrase as “Eight shillings and sixpence” (23–4). His proposal that Francis “play the coward” with his indenture and “show it a fair pair of heels and run from it” (45–6) need not be read as a revolution against authority, but rather as a replacement of one authority by another: appropriated by Hal, the older monarchical order reasserts itself against the newer commercial classes. Francis could follow Hal both at the Boar’s Head and in Westminster. Of course, as a “revolted” tapster he is more likely to be pressed by Sir John. Therefore, we would qualify Steven Mullaney’s reading of this passage, in which he recommends reference to “country proverbs” and “idiomatic expressions drawn from local dialects” to make sense of it, by giving class differences pride of place over cultural or geographical difference (82). Family plot: what’s in a name Then since the names are in conflict, and some of them claim that they are like the truth, and others that they are, how can we decide, and upon what shall we base our decision. Plato, Cratylus (438D) The historically normative purpose of names and naming has been to establish social identity for an individual (Alford, Ewen, Yonge); however, as temporal poststructuralists, regardless of our own personal critical predilections, we realize that a crucial aporia lies between signifier and signified: as Derrida discusses with regard to Juliet’s analysis of Romeo’s name (“Aphorism Countertime” 427), while the name can stand in for the person, there is not some ontologically prior connection between them. We want to note that this insight is not an early twentieth-century creation of theorists in Paris or the Balkans, but has been made at least implicitly since Ancient Greece and Plato’s Cratylus, which provides this section’s epigraph and the two traditional naming philosophies: Cratylitic naturalism and Hermogeneam nominalism (Barton 7–15; Ferry 73). In fact, such Hermogenenan beliefs appear in the plays under consideration here. Lord Bardolph confides to his fellow conspirators: “We fortify in paper and in figures, / Using the names of men instead of men” (2 Henry IV 2.3.56–7). In other words, they do not fortify at all. If we can no longer think of names as valid markers of a singular identity, just what are they good for? Henry has already answered this question: the proper name is not just an instrument of stability within a semiotic-semantic system and therefore an instrument for the manufacturing and maintenance of subjects. It can also be a vehicle by which subjectivity can escape subjective territory in the interest or process of becomings-x.
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The OED definitions of “name” indicate that many connotations cluster around the paired terms “reputation” and “fame.” Whereas names might not have a one-to-one correspondence with the physical body to which they are attached, they still might provide some measure of relative rather than specific value to an individual. This sense of name as title of rank or dignity (OED, X, 2b, 201) can be seen in one of Shakespeare’s sources, Edward Hall’s Chronicle of Henry V, which mentions Charles the Dauphin being deprived “of all honores, names, dignities and preheminences, whiche he then had” (Fol. 75v). Sir Thomas Smith goes so far as to find the etymological root of “Gentlemen” in the Roman name: “The Etimologie of the name serveth the efficacie. Gens in Latine betokeneth the race and sirname” (26); however, the sense of belonging to a “good” family is really only added by later modern romance languages (OED, VI, “gentle” etymology, 450). This particular transition from specific to relative value, from natural relations to linguistic correspondence, is an example of Jean-Joseph Goux’s symbolic economy (or social exchange) as a semiotic representation of values created through replacement (9). Taking off from Goux, Linda Charnes notes that “the fetish of the name circulates in a symbolic economy” (158). She continues to posit “fetishizing names” (206) as a postmodern condition, and yet both Hal and Falstaff, like Juliet, seem perfectly adept at it. For instance, in 1 Henry IV 2.4 alone Hal “identifies” Falstaff as the following commodities: “woolsack,” “greasy tallow-keech,” “a tun of man,” “that huge bombard of sack,” and “that roasted Manningtree Ox.” What then accounts for this early or premodern dexterity with a supposedly postmodern phenomenon? Although names circulate in the symbolic economy, they have a fiscal reality as well, something that dates back at least to the early modern period in England.63 Shakespeare himself engaged upon literally purchasing a name not soon after completing 1 Henry IV (Scott-Giles 27–41). His father, John Shakespeare, is granted his coat of arms because he is propertied: he has “Landes & tenementes of good wealth, & substance 500li ” (Chambers, II, 20), and because he displays the properties or natural characteristics of a gentleman in the guise of having held the offices of “justice of the peace and bailiff, and a Queen’s officer” and having married the daughter of an “esquire” (Schoenbaum 228). Falstaff alludes to this economy: “I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought” (1 Henry IV 1.2.79–80). Given their “rude society” (3.2.14), Hal and Falstaff must purchase their reputation in the form of “good names” before reentering the world of court; or in a slight twist, they would purchase names to stand in for themselves
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and continue their “vile participation” elsewhere. Moreover, with this statement, Falstaff may be mirroring Bardolph’s previously mentioned strategy; as one of the only other two times he uses the word commodity (in something more like its modern sense of useful products rather than the specific Renaissance denotation of a usurer’s swindle), he refers specifically to filling up a roll or regiment of troops: “I press me none but . . . such a commodity of warm slaves as had as lief hear the devil as a drum” (1 Henry IV 4.2.14–18). To be sure, the significance of names here is confirmed when he actually fills his roll in 2 Henry IV (3.2); “names” in the form of the gentry have bought themselves out of service to be replaced by more common names like “Feeble,” “Mouldy,” “Shadow,” and “Wart”; “a commodity of good names” has been replaced literally by a “commodity of warm slaves.” In distinguishing proper naming in early modern England as a practice within a semiotic system based in cultural materia from its modern counterpart where signifier and signified are split, we want to propose, following Foucault, a “naming-function” by which to both comprehend proper naming and demonstrate how the potentialities of proper naming have and can be productively realized.64 Where Foucault replaces the outmoded category of the author with that of an “author-function” (102) which operates in certain discourses, we want to replace the problematic term “name” which typically evokes the aforementioned philosophical-linguistic debate with the naming-function, an adaptive and advantageous navigational mechanism that can be mobilized to transverse social, cultural, political, and economic registers and stratification. In the early modern period, we locate this within primarily a class bias.65 For instance, the naming-function encodes, eludes, and scrambles power relationships among the aristocracy much as the author-function admits ownership of texts yet obscures the state’s punishment of their transgressions. More precisely, the naming-function has a material base that is grounded in the possession of property. Here we follow the post-medieval belief that “economics constitutes a metalanguage to which even linguistics is subordinate” (Bloch 165). Some people’s names account and count for more than others, the monarch’s for the most and thus its fetishization as a singular Christian name.66 In this distribution within a divine-right power structure, however, we refer to a specific segment of the population, what Sir Thomas Smith so usefully calls “Gentlemen” (70), in a specific historical period. In England, we see this effect continuing into the early nineteenth century as the dominant naming paradigm (the modern paradigm emerges with Locke’s philosophy of human understanding) and identify its descent
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into the residual with either the Reform Bill of 1832, which eviscerated some of the propertied elite’s power by eliminating infamous “rotten boroughs” like Old Sarum, or the institution of universal suffrage in 1928.67 Through our examination of the cultural material basis of this namingfunction in English history, we offer an intervention into the totalizing isomorphisms of post-Marxist theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Goux who seek to find a sign-exchange value instead of an actual economy in the sign. In the synchronic instance that is our focus, there is a specifically economic foundation that is often literally grounded, as in the line, “Old John of Gaunt, time-honoured Lancaster” (Richard II 1.1.1). Gentry names are often tied to the land in a way that specifies status; for example, Michel de Montaigne complains, “it is an ill custome . . . to call every man by the name of his Towne, Mannor, Hamlet or Lordship” (150).68 Consider that upon his return from banishment, to Berkeley’s address, “My lord of Herford” (2.3.69), Bolingbroke responds: My lord, my answer is – to Lancaster, And I am come to seek that name in England, And I must find that title in your tongue, Before I make reply to aught you say. (2.3.70–3) Bolingbroke’s concern here is to be called by what he perceives to be his proper name in order to guarantee his rightful patrimony, possibly an effect of his proper name functioning as a meme working to ensure its survival. Often such proper names are surnames, but just as often in the early modern period, especially – as previously mentioned – in the case of the monarch, they are Christian names. Either way, the proper names are deployed to secure socioeconomic position. In discourse on the subject today, the classic philosophical text for proper names remains Locke’s An Essay on Human Understanding notwithstanding the fact that concerns over what constitutes a proper name are prominent in Renaissance etymologies, grammars, and poesies.69 In his Grammar, William Lily’s standard explains the distinction: “A Noune Substantive either is proper to the thinge it betokeneth: as Eduardus is my propre name, or else is common to mo: as Homo, is a common name to all men” (Avr). With regard to the phrase Cato est homo, Thomas Wilson explains: “Cato is the nowne propre which belongeth to one man only, and man, is the kinde, whiche is more large, and comprehendeth all men” (Bvi v).70 Hence George Puttenham, when describing “Catechresis,
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or the Figure of abuse,” notes that for “lacke of a naturall or proper terme or worde we take another” (190). In the early modern period, the term “proper” as used here had two connotations: one denoting property as physical possession, the other as defining group characteristics. In his obsession with names, Hal displays both. He is worried about Harry defining him characteristically as a common man. At the same time, patronymically, the name Henry reveals his monarchical destiny. Moreover, whereas moderns view names as revealing personal identity, in the early modern period the naming-function revealed power relations. Rather than knowing who someone is, one knew who they could rule. The name itself, fetishistically, was invested with power; thus the ritualized battle scene where combatants ask each other’s name as if to test their worthiness as an opponent. Consider the following examples from just the texts we have been discussing: “Marshal, demand of yonder champion / The cause of his arrival here in arms. / Ask him his name, and orderly proceed / To swear him in the justice of his cause” (Richard II 1.3.7–10); “What is thy name? And wherefore com’st thou hither” (Richard II 1.3.31); “What is thy name, that in the battle thus / Thou crossest me?” (1 Henry IV 5.3.1–2); “Thou speak’st as if I would deny my name” (1 Henry IV 5.4.59); “What’s your name, sir? Of what condition are you, and of what place?” (2 Henry IV 4.3.1–2); “Is thy name Coleville?” (2 Henry IV 4.3.59); “What is thy name? I know thy quality” (Henry V 3.6.136); “Art thou a gentleman? What is thy name? Discuss” (Henry V 4.4.5). The early modern naming-function not only differs greatly from the ways proper names are used today, but it is also very different from the medieval period, especially as depicted in romances, where names are not disclosed until after a battle or duel has been completed. For example, from Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain or, The Knight with the Lion (twelfth century): “Alas! What a tragedy! We’ve fought this combat in apalling ignorance, through not recognizing one another. . . . – “What?” says my lord Gawain. “Who are you, then?” – “I’m Yvain.” (366) From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (fourteenth century): “How runs your right name? – and let the rest go.” “That shall I give you gladly,” said the Green Knight then; “Bercilak de Hautdesert this barony I hold.” (Gawain 2443–5)
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From Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur (fifteenth century):
For these texts, it is knowledge of the name and not the name itself that emanates power. In this final section, we have seen that the assertion of proper names (Henry, Harry, Romeo, etc.) works to define and reinforce social identities, subjective territories, and societal structures. In contrast, we have seen that subjects can also deploy proper names via the naming-function to achieve agency and furnish themselves mobility of identity, thereby exposing the uncontainable nature of the subject vis-à-vis taxonomies that serve state machinery and for which proper naming is fundamental. These two operations of the proper name can be interpreted, perhaps more precisely, in phenomenological terms. Following Husserl’s philosophy, the proper name – the image or idea, and not a person or thing to which it refers – might function as the object, whether selfchosen or not, of an individual’s conscious reflection, that is, as the object of consciousness’s intentional stance in relation to which consciousness constitutes itself. Yet, following both Derrida’s critique of Husserl and his theory of the proper name, exemplified in his assertion that the proper name, as “untranslatable idiom,” exceeds grammar and thus does not belong like other words to the system of language, proper naming might also function to provide mobility to consciousness, thereby allowing for willful self-interpellation and consequently increased personal agency. For instance, one need only to name oneself in contradistinction to one’s social identity, publically change one’s name, or present a false name to others within a given society and culture to initiate becomings-other, a becomings-x, and/or comings-tobe-other through mobilizations of semiotic-semantic traces and spaces from which alternative identitarian properties can emerge, develop, and express. Deployments of proper names do not merely short-circuit the interpellative processes of state machinery when contrary to its objectives of order and transparency. Rather, they generate a massive feedback with the potential to shoot through society, enabling and affecting subjective singularities in conjunction with occurrences of proper naming, the naming-function becoming the catalysts for emergences of
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Then said Balin le Savage, “What knight art thou? For or now I found never no knight that matched me.” “My name is,” said he, “Balan brother unto the good knight, Balin.” “Alas,” said Balin, “that ever I should see this day.” (I, 88)
subjectivity and transversal movements. As a re-appropriation of proper naming from the linear agenda of state machinery, the naming-function thus demonstrates that interpellation does not operate simply in one direction, from sociopolitical conductors of state power to subjects, but also in reverse, differently, multi-directionally, and multi-dimensionally; interpellation does not just demarcate; it also liberates and mobilizes. Ironically, state machinery gives subjects a tool, the naming-function, that they can use to undermine and escape its semiotic-semantic systems and organizational structures.
Notes 1. Please see the Glossary of Transversal Terms at the end of this book for concise definitions of terms that have been coined to enable the development of the combined critical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology of transversal poetics. Since I have not highlighted them in any way to avoid clutter, confusion, and repetition (they are not italicized, in bold, marked by an asterisk, endnoted, etc.), I hope that their connection with transversal poetics will be clear from the contexts in which they are used. Also, for more elaborate definitions of the terms and other examples of their employment, see Bryan Reynolds, Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 2. See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962); Carl Jung, Psychiatric Studies. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Vol. 1. eds Michael Fordham (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953); Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 2005); Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psychoanalysis. 1921–1945. (London: Hogarth Press, 1948); Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963); and Nancy J. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 3. See Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 4. See Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1956) and Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Schocken, 1964); John Dewey, The School and Society & The Child and the Curriculum (New York: Dover Publications, 2001) and On Education: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology (New York: Anchor Books, 1963); and
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Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin Books, 1990) an Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986). 5. For these Marxists, as they interrogate the movement, impact, history, and accountability of large social systems, debate often revolves around the locations of art and the responsibilities of art production in the base/superstructure relationship. Subscribing to the base/superstructure dichotomy, Calverton argues that art emerges from a material base, but that social conditions are not frozen in material, bourgeois ideology. Rather, producers of art have a moral obligation to organize artistic creation around the revolutionary task of shifting social and economic structures to benefit the oppressed. Hicks holds that art comes from economics so thoroughly that there is no need to explore individual artistry or aesthetic agency. His focus is sociohistorical, focusing on economic, class, and political positions in the production of art and literature. The Frankfurt School followed Leon Trotsky in at least believing that art could produce social change. Later Marxists, such as Louis Althusser, argue that the ideological components of a society (religious, legal, political) are interrelated and have some autonomy; the power of the people to change social structures exists in material relations and not in collections of individuals. See Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957); Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Leah Levenson and Jerry Natterstad, Granville Hicks: The Intellectual in Mass Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature (New York: Scribner, 1932) and The Newer Spirit: A Sociological Criticism of Literature (New York: Boni and Livenight, 1925); Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002); Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2006); Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation)” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. (London: New Left Books, 1971): 127–86. 6. See, for example, the following groundbreaking books by Fredric Jameson: Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Chapter 3 in this book engages with some of Jameson’s later work. See also Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London and New York: Verso, 1990); and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialistic Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985). 7. If these early Marxist critics were to consider the terms of transversal poetics, they would say that performance of identity, subjective territories, official territories, and transversal movements can all be explained materially with regard to power differentials and an ideology that they work ultimately to maintain. The subjective territory of an individual, however alienated from
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8.
9.
10.
11.
12. 13.
14.
the individual’s awareness, is an interpretive and experiential realm grounded in material consciousness. Subjective territories and the official territories of which it is constituent are superstructural manifestations of relations among modes of production and the ideology behind it. Thus, subjective territory and the transversal movements through which subjectivity evades, compromises, and reconfigures its parameters are always appropriated and adapted to legitimize the interests of the ruling socioeconomic class. This model was adopted in the 1980s by critics identified or who self-identified with the literary-cultural approach known as the new historicism and its “subversion/containment paradigm,” which holds that official, state power encourages subversive or dissident activity only so that it can later suppress it in the interest of demonstrating its repressive power and thereby further consolidating its hegemonic government. For more on this, see Reynolds, Becoming Criminal and Performing Transversally. See Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947) and Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, eds, Understanding Poetry (New York: Holt, 1938); William Wimsatt, Jr, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1954) and Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky press, 1954); William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963); John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1941); I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (London: Routledge & Paul, 1964); R. P. Blackmur, Lectures in Criticism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949) and Form and Value in Modern Poetry (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1952); and Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956). W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy” Sewanee Review 1946, 1949, respectively; later published in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954). Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) and A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). See Roman Jakobson, “A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry” in diacritics 10:1 (1980): 21–35 and Language in Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1987); Boris Eichenbaum, Lermontov: A Study in Literary–Historical Evaluation, trans. Ray Parrott and Harry Weber (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981); Osip Maksimoviˇc Brik, Two Essays On Poetic Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964). See Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957). See Pavel N. Medvedev/Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (authorship unclear: people believe that Bahktin published a book under the name of his friend Medvedev to avoid censorship), The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. trans. Albert J. Wehrele (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially 140–55. See Peter Carruthers, Phenomenal Consciousness: A Naturalistic Theory (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Nature of the Mind: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004), Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order
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Perspective (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), and The Architecture of the Mind: Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 2006); Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. (London: Penguin, 1995) and Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1991); and John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge: Harbored University Press, 1984), The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), and The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: A New York Review Book, 1997). 15. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, Trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973) and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, Trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) and The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 16. See J. Hillis Miller, “The Antitheses of Criticism: Reflections on the Yale Colloquium” in Modern Language Notes LXXXI (1966), 557–71, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), “Geneva or Paris? The Recent Work of Georges Poulet” in University of Toronto Quarterly 39 (1970). 212–28, and “The Geneva School: The Criticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Beguin, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski” in The Critical Quarterly VIII (1966): 302–21; George Poulet, The Interior Distance. Trans. Elliott Coleman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), “The Dream of Descartes” in Studies in Human Time, Trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), and The Metamorphoses of the Circle. Trans. Carley Darwson and Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); and Sarah Lawall, Critics of Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). 17. Paul Brodtkorb, David Halliburton, Geoffrey Hartman, and Joseph Riddel, among others, broadened phenomenological inquiry differently but in ways similar to each other; they shifted the focus of the analysis from studying an author’s entire oeuvre to one particular, representative work. Representative of their common ground, Brodtkorb appropriated phenomenology to formalism by focusing on the work itself, and concentrates on revealing meaning, subjectivity, and consciousness by studying character rather than author. See Paul Brodtkorb, Jr, Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby Dick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965); David Halliburton Edgar Allan Poe: A Phenomenological View (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism; Literary Essays, 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), and A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–1998 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); and Joseph Riddel,
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68 Transversal Subjects
18.
19.
20. 21.
22.
23.
24.
The Clairvoyant Eye; The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens (Baton Rouge Louisiana State University Press, 1965). In addition to The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (cited in the text), see Wilhelm Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). Also, for Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher’s more literary-critical approach, see his Hermeneutics: The Hand-written Manuscripts, Trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman, eds Heinz Kimmerle (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977). In addition to Truth and Method, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Phenomenological Movement (1963),” in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976): 130–81. See E. D. Hirsch, Jr, “Gadamer’s Theory of Interpretation” in Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967): 245–64. Another influential follower of Heideggarian phenomenology and student of Gadamer, Richard Palmer, argues in the 1970s that the New Critics made important errors where they held history at abeyance, separating subject (reader) and object (text). For Palmer, a dependency on intentionality is vital for meaning; understanding, rather than objective knowledge, is the goal of criticism. An important account of hermeneutics also shows up in Richard Rorty. Responding particularly to Gadamer, Rorty’s hermeneutics focuses on a “willingness to view inquiry as muddling through, rather than conforming to canons of rationality, coping with people and things rather than corresponding to reality by discovering essences” (7). Influenced by Gadamer, Rorty’s hermeneutics eschews objective or impartial critique because it renders the subject into an ahistorical, non-agentic being. See Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). For some well-known examples not discussed here, see, David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism (Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1975); Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); Wayne Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981); Norman Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); William Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). See Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of SeventeenthCentury Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), and Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). In the section “Text Play” and in the epilogue “Mimesis and Performance” to The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns
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70 Transversal Subjects
If representation is phantasmic figuration, it becomes a means of staging that gives appearance to something that by nature is intangible. This applies above all to the decentered position of human beings, who are but do not “have” themselves. However, even such a split does not seem to be a well-established feature of the human condition merely to be taken up by literature. For if human beings cannot become present to themselves, this does not necessarily mean that they are driven to “have” themselves. Indeed, the insurmountable distance between “being” and “having” oneself is one of the discoveries of literature, highlighted by its explorations of the space between.” (296) 25. See A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992) and Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: Octagon Books, 1976). See note 16 for works by Paul Brodtkorb. 26. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. eds Brian Gibbons (London: Arden, 1980). All citations from this edition. 27. See Marazziti D., Akiskal H.S., Rossi A., Cassano G.B, “Alteration of the Serotonin Transporter in Romantic Love” in Psychological Medicine 29 (1999): 741–45; Marazziti D., Rucci P., Di Nasso E., Masala I., Baroni S., Rossi A., Giannaccini G., Mengali F., Lucachini A., Jealousy and Subthreshold Psychopathology: a Serotonergic Link” in Neuropsychobiology 47 (2003): 2003; Marazziti D., Di Nasso E., Masala I., Baroni S., Abelli M., Mengali F., Mungai F., Rucci P., “Normal and Obsessional Jealousy: a Study of a Population of Young Adults” in European Psychiatry 18 (2003): 106–111; and Marazziti D., Canale D., “Hormonal Changes When Falling in Love” in Psychoneuroendocrinology 29 (2004): 931–6. Donatella Marazziti summarizes in an email correspondence with me: A lower functionality of the serotonin transporter, as reflected by the decreased number of the transporter proteins themselves, is generally considered an index of reduced functionality of presynaptic serotonergic neurons, perhaps due to lower levels of intrasynaptic serotonin concentrations. The relationship between OCD and falling in love is mainly at cognitive level. The type of thought, which is obsessive, is shared by the two conditions, although it is egodistonic in the first and egosyntonic in the second. When the serotonin system does not work properly, given the fact that it is spread everywhere in the brain and controls different functions, a lot of disorders may emerge, even “irrationality” and falling in love. (31 August 2006) See also Eric Hollander, Current Insights in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (London: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1995) and Obsessive–Compulsive Disorders: Diagnosis, Etiology, Treatment (New York: Informa Healthcare, 1997).
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Hopkins University Press, 1993): 247–73; 281–303, Wolfgang Iser discussions of what he calls “play,” “text games,” and “staging” in literary fiction invoke issues related to performance both on and off the stage but he does not address them directly. For the most part, he limits his theories and claims to relationships between humans and literature, as represented in this passage:
28. For more on emulative authority, see Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises, 1–26 and Reynolds and Henry Turner, “From Homo Academicus to Poeta Publicus: Celebrity and Transversal Knowledge in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589),” in Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer, Eds Edward Gieskes and Kirk Melnikoff (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Press, 2008): 73–94. 29. To give a common example, consider that when someone in undergoing becomings-gang member and finds himself, surprisingly, affectionately addressing his mother as “homie,” “dawg,” or “bitch.” 30. See Reynolds, Becoming Criminal, 1–22; and Performing Transversally, 1–28. 31. See Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds, “Shakespace and Transversal Power,” Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, eds Hedrick and Reynolds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000): 3–47; and Reynolds, Performing Transversally, 1–28. 32. For an analysis of the major theories on memes, see Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think (New York: The Free Press, 2002). 33. On the “God meme” see also Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 34. On “state power” and “transversal power,” see Reynolds, Becoming Criminal, 1–22; Performing Transversally, 1–28; and Transversal Enterprises, 1–26. 35. For more on the two camps, see Aunger, 21. 36. See Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (Seattle: Integral Press, 1996); Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996); and Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus (New York: Do You Zoom, 2000). For an analysis of their positions, see Aunger, 7–32. Building on the two camps, Aunger, echoing Dawkins’s original position (Dawkins 323), offers a third, “electric” view on how replication of information may be both neurological and social. Aunger posits a model of what might be the physical properties of the as yet unobservable memes, which may give his theory more provable potential than those of the others. 37. See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), and Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). For an analysis of their views, see Aungar, 7–23. 38. In an early modern English antitheatrical tract, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), Stephan Gosson argues that “Stage Plaies are not to be suffred in a Christian comon weale” because they “are the doctrine and inuention of the Deuill” (B3). He concludes his argument with a representative (“daily bred by plaies”) account of a stage-play that was so moving that it compelled its audience to imitate automatically what they saw on the stage: When Bacchus rose up, tenderly lifting Ariadne from her seate, no small store of curtesie passing betwene them, the beholders rose up, every man stoode on tippe toe, and seemed to hover over the play. When they sware, the company sware, when they departed to bedde; the company presently was set on fire, they that were married posted home to their wives; they that were single, vowed very solemly, to be wedded. (G5)
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If Gosson’s account is true, this is a fascinating example of the power of theater to stimulate automatic mimicry. If untrue, it is a fascinating example of what people during Shakespeare’s time might have imagined as the power of theater. 39. In addition to Vittorio Gallese, “Intentional Attunement. The Mirror Neuron system and its role in interpersonal relations,” in Interdisciplines (European Science Foundation), http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror/papers/1, see also Maksim Stamenov and Vittorio Gallese, eds, Mirror Neurons in the Evolution of Brain and Language (London: John Benjamins Publishing, 2002); Gallese et al., “Hearing Sounds, Understanding Actions: Action Representation in Mirror Neurons,” Science 297 (2002): 846–8; and B. Calvo-Merino, D.E. Glaser, J. Grezes, R.E. Passingham, and P. Haggard, “Action observation and acquired motor skills: an FMRI study with expert dancers” in Cerebral Cortex (forthcoming). 40. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes the intersubjective aspect of action observation in similar terms: The sense of the gestures is not given, but understood, that is, recaptured by an act on the spectator’s part. The whole difficulty is to conceive this act clearly without confusing it with a cognitive operation. The communication or comprehension of gestures come about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his. (185) 41. Alternatively, or concurrently, this may have to do with the institution of what Antonio Damasio calls “somatic markers,” which are emotiongenerated mental markers that influence our decisions. See Damasio, Descartes’ Error (New York: Putnam, 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt, 2000). 42. Ranganath, C., and G. Rainer. “Neural mechanisms for detecting and remembering novel events.” National Review Neuroscience 4, no. 3 (March 2003): 193–202. 43. For analysis of these passages and similar ones with regard to antitheatricality, transvestism, and the transversal power of theater, see Bryan Reynolds, “The Devil’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England,” Theatre Journal 49.2 (1997): 143–67 and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002): 125–55. 44. For an almost identical passage, see John Greene, A Refutation of the Apology for Actors (London, 1615), 61. 45. In The Anatomie of Abuses, Phillip Stubbes also refers to the theater as “Sathan’s Synagogue” (143) and in A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theatres (London: 1580), Anthony Munday calls “the Theater” “the chappel of Satan” (quoted in Stubbes 302). 46. Performing Transversally, 175. 47. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London : P. Owen, 1961); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963); and Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text (New York: Hill, 1977).
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48. See Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978); Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics” in Thomas Sebeok eds, Style in Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960); Gerald Prince, A Grammar of Stories: An Introduction (The Hague: Mouton, 1973); Yuri Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976); and Samuel Levin, Linguistic Structures in Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). 49. See Eugenio Donato, The Script of Decadence: Essays on the Fictions of Flaubert and the Poetics of Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Joseph Riddel, The Turning Word: American Literary Modernism and Continental Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Paul de Man, Blindness & Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971); and Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 50. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition: Marx, Hugo, Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 51. Jacques Derrida. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978). 52. Sees Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Princeton: Cornell University Press, 1983); Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: New Accents, 1982); Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Jonathan Arac et al. (ed), The Yale Critics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983); Christopher Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Howard Felperin, Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Michael Fischer, Does Deconstruction Make Any Difference: Poststructuralism and the Defense of Poetry in Modern Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Mark Taylor, Deconstruction and Theology (New York: Scholars Press, 1982); Douglas Atkins, Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1983); Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson eds, Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (Kansas City: University Press of Kansas, 1985). 53. Jean-Louis Houdebine and Jacques Derrida, “Response,” in diacritics, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer, 1973): 57–9. For an elaborate discussion of this issue that provides much of its critical history up until 2005, see Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005): 49–54. See also Jeff Noonan, Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 54. See Schalkwyk for analysis of the debate.
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55. See Bryan Reynolds and Janna Segal, “Fugitive Explorations in Romeo and Juliet: Searching for Transversality inside the Goldmine of R&Jspace,” in Transversal Enterprises: 124–67. 56. Candido notices the same preoccupation, but rather than placing it in the context of contemporary concerns over the social order he links it to Hal’s “sense of the past, . . . its belief in the reality of universals, where a king’s name denotes him truly” (61). 57. The metaphorical contrast between Richard and Bolingbroke operates on two levels: class and drink. The inn was at the top of the hierarchy of drinking establishments; the alehouse the bottom. One of the key distinctions was that the former served ale, beer, and wine, the preferred drink of the aristocracy, while the latter served only ale and beer. Furthermore, the alehouse also was a site of material production, as its product generally was brewed in situ, implying the very economic relationships which would challenge traditional monarchical authority. For more on the tripartite distinction of inns, taverns, and alehouses, see “The returnes of the Innes, Alehouses and Taverns with in several shires in the realme 1577” (PRO, SP 12/96, f 405r). See also Clark, 5 and SP 12/98, 12/141/55, and 12/215 for returns from individual counties. 58. The early modern English alternate version of this proverbial phrase, “Tom, Dick and Will ( Jack)” (Tilley, 673, T376), works equally well for our analysis. Here Shakespeare, a socially ambitious playwright, who had just purchased a coat of arms for his paterfamilias and would soon buy the second largest house in his hometown, perhaps anxious about his baser nature, writes his own name out of the equation. The late sixteenth century was a period of much social upheaval; new men were made and long-established families failed. See Stone, 11, 36–40, and Wrightson, English Society 59–60, 130–1, 142, 149, 223. 59. Numerical information in this section was garnered using the Academic Text Service’s Searcher Software and the Oxford CD-rom Shakespeare (Reid). As Yonge states, “On the whole this [Henry] is one of the most universal of Tuetonic names and one of the most English in use, although not Anglian in origin” (311). Barton is mistaken when she claims that the “diminutive ‘Harry’ had . . . been employed, without any particular historical justification” (110); see Withycombe, 149. For more on the uncommon commonness of Henry, see Montaigne’s “Of Names,” where he notes “that in the genealogies of Princes, there are certaine names fatally affected as . . . Henries in England” (149). 60. This mistake is common; see Macisaac, 417. We cannot agree with Barton that Poins’ uses of “Hal” are either “glancing” or “parodic,” but she gets the numbers right (110). The first instance appears to point at Falstaff whom Poins almost immediately calls “Monsieur Remorse” (1.2.112); however, Jack has not yet arrived in 2.4 when Ned responds to Hal’s “lend me thy hand to laugh a little” (2). 61. For early modern literacy, see Cressy, 47, 72–5, 128–9 and Watt, 7, 260, 269; for recuperating oral cultures, see Burke, 1978, 1–89; Burke, 1984; Pris; and Sharpe. 62. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bahktin notes: “At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic), but
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63.
64.
65.
66. 67.
68. 69.
70.
also – and for us this is the essential – into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, ‘professional’ and ‘generic’ languages, languages of generations and so forth” (272). On cant, see Reynolds, Becoming Criminal. This early modern sense of “name(s)” continues to the present day. For a modern instance of the same, think of Lloyd’s of London’s “names,” so-called more for their ready capital than for their inherent social standing: “Starting in the mid-nineteen-seventies the graph of membership went Himalayan. . . . Both the nature of the members and the nature of the recruitment changed” (Barnes 78). Recall that Foucault begins his discussion of the problem of “the author” with the following statement: “the author’s name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names” (105). We understand the fraught nature of the term “class” with respect to early modern England; however, we follow Thompson in accepting the possibility of class “as a heuristic or analytic category to organize historical evidence which has very much less direct correspondence” (148). Furthermore, we find contemporary alternatives such as “degree,” “estate,” “order,” “rank,” or “sort” unsuitable for our discussion. For more on the problematic nature of discussing the English social order, see, respectively, Cressy and Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees.” For more on “class,” see Williams, 60–9. For modern examples of this phenomenon, consider celebrities such as Princess Diana, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe. Actually, according to Smith, there are three categories above “Gentlemen” including “Nobilitas major,” “Nobilitas minor,” and “Esquiers”; however, we take advantage of the fact that Smith also uses “Gentlemen” generally as in “the first part of gentlemen of englande called Nobilitas major” (20) and “the second sort of gentlemen which may be called Nobilitas minor” (21). We borrow the terminology, dominant, emergent, and residual, from Williams. For the importance of land to social standing, see Stone, 39–41, and Wrightson, English Society, 25, 27, 30. In this section, we draw heavily on Barton, Ferry, 69–70, Parker, 155–8, and 161–72. See also Jameson, 126–9. A standard starting point for the linguistic connections between proper and property is Marx’s The German Ideology, especially 79–81; 97–103. Unlike in modern grammars, Renaissance definitions of “proper names” focused on Christian rather than family names: Cato and Eduardus as opposed to say Douglas and Lincoln.
Works cited Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971: 127–86. Alford, Richard D. Naming and Identity: A Cross-Cultural Study of Personal Naming Practices. New Haven: HRAF Press, 1988. Apperson, G. L. English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: A Historical Dictionary. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1929
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Aunger, Robert. The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. New York: The Free Press, 2002. Austen, Jane. The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen. 6 vols. eds R. W. Chapman. 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933. Bahktin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryle Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press Slavic Series 1. eds Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barnes, Julian. “The Deficit Millionaires.” Letter from London. The New Yorker. 20 September 1993, 74–92. Barton, Anne. The Names of Comedy. The Alexander Lectures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Bavelas, J. B., Black, A.. Chovil, N., Lemery. C. R. & Mullett, J. “Form and Function in Motor Mimicry: Topographic Evidence That the Primary Function Is Communication.” Human Communication Research 14 (1988): 275–99. Bavelas, J. B., Black, A., Lemery, C. R. & Mullett, J. “Motor Mimicry as Primitive Empathy.” eds. N. Eisenberg & J. Strayer. Empathy and Its Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): 317–38. Bavelas, J. B., Black, A., Lemery, C. R. & Mullett, J. “‘I show how you feel’: Motor Mimicry as a Communicative Act.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50 (1986); 322–29. Bernieri, F. J. “Coordinated Movement and Rapport in Teacher-Student Interactions.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 12 (1988): 120–38. Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Bloch, R. Howard. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Bock, J. K. “Syntactic Persistence in Sentence Production.” Cognitive Psychology 18 (1986): 355–87. Bock, J. K. “Closed-Class Immanence in Sentence Production.” Cognition 31 (1989): 163–86. Brodie, Richard. Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Seattle: Integral Press, 1996. Brydall, John. Jus Imaginis apud Anglos; or The Law of England Relating to the Nobility & Gentry. London, 1675. Bulstrode, Edward. Reports. 2nd edn. London, 1688. Bush, L. K., Barr, C. L., McHugo, G. J. & Lanzetta, J. T. “The Effects of Facial Control and Facial Mimicry on Subjective with Reactions to Comedy Routines.” Motivation and Emotion 13 (1989): 31–52. Camden, William. Remains. London, 1614. Candido, Joseph. “The Name of King: Hal’s ‘Titles in the Henriad’.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 26 (1984): 61–73. Cappella, J. N. & Panalp, S. “Talk and Silence Sequences in Informal Conversations: Interspeaker Influence.” Human Communication Research 7 (1981): 117–32. Chamberlayne, Edward. The Present State of England. London, 1669. Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930. Charnes, Linda. Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. Charney, E. J. “Psychosomatic Manifestations of Rapport in Psychotherapy.” Psychosomatic Medicine 28 (1966): 305–15.
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Chartrand, Tanya L., William W. Maddux & Jessica L. Lakin. “Beyond the Perception-Behavior Link: The Ubiquitous Utility and Motivational Moderators of Nonconscious Mimicry” in Ran Hassin, James Uleman, and John Bargh eds, The New Unconscious. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004: 334–61. Clark, Peter. The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200–1830. London: Longman, 1983. Cleland, James. PROPAIDEIA, OR THE INSTITVTIONS OF A YOVNG NOBLE MAN. London, 1607. Cohen, Walter. Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Coke, Edward. The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, Knt. in English, in Thirteen Parts Complete. 7 vols. London, 1777. College of Arms Curia Militaris Boxes 16. Cooper, J. P. “Ideas of Gentility in Early-Modern England.” Land, Men and Beliefs: Studies in Early-Modern History. History Series 24. eds G. E. Aylmer and J. S. Morrill. London: Hambledon P, 1983, 43–77. Cressy, David. “Describing the social order of Elizabethan and Stuart England.” Literature and History 3 (1976): 29–44. Dabbs, J. M. “Similarity of Gestures and Interpersonal Influence.” Proceedings of the 77th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, 1969: 337–9. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Decety, J., Jeannerod, M., Germain, M. & Pastene, J. Vegetative Response During Imagined Movement Is Proportional to Mental Effort. Behavioural Brain Research 42 (1991): 1–5. Dekker, Thomas. The Gvl’s Horne-booke. London, 1609. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ——. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 1978. —— and Jean-Louis Houdebine. diacritics, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 1973): 57–9. ——. Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. ——. “Racism’s Last Word.” Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 290–9. ——. “Des Tours de Babel.” Difference in Translation. eds and trans. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. ——. “But, beyond . . . (open letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon).” Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 155–70. ——. “An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” eds Derek Attridge. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992: 33–75. ——. “Aphorism Countertime,” eds Derek Attridge. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992: 414–33. de Troyes, Chrétien. Arthurian Romances. The Everyman Library. eds and trans. D.D.R. Owen. London: J.M. Dent, 1995. Di Pellegrino, G., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., Gallese, V. & Rizzolatti, G. “Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study.” Experimental Brain Research 91 (1992): 176–80. Dodoredge, John. Honors Pedigree, or The Several Fountaines of Gentry. London, 1652.
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Marazziti, Donatella. Email correspondence with Bryan Reynolds (31 August 2006). March, John. Actions for Slaunder. London, 1647. Markham, Francis. The Booke of Honovr. London, 1625. Maurer, R. E. & Tindall, J. H. “Effect of Postural Congruence on Client’s Perception of Counselor Empathy.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 30 (1983): 158–63. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. eds C. J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers, 1978. McClintock, Anne and Rob Nixon. “No names apart: the separation of word and history in Derrida’s ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racism’.” Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 140–54. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1996. Meltzoff, A. N. & Moore, M. K. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.” Science 198 (1977): 75–8. ——. “Note responding to Anisfeld, Masters, and Jacobson and Kagan’s comments on Meltzoff and Moore (1977).” Science 205 (1979): 217–19. ——. “Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures.” Child Development 54 (1983): 702–9. Middleton, Anne. “William Langland’s ‘Kind Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late-Fourteenth Century England.” Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530. eds Lee Patterson. The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 8. Gen. eds Stephen Greenblatt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Montaigne, Michel de. The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses. Translated by John Florio. London, 1603. Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Neumann, R., & Strack, F. “‘Mood Contagion’: The Automatic Transfer of Mood Between Persons.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (2000): 211–23. Parker, Patricia. Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. ——. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. New York: Methuen, 1987. Paus, T., M. Petrides, A. C. Evans and E. Meyer. “Role of the Human Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Control of Oculomotor Manual and Speech Responses: A Positron Emission Tomography Study”. Journal of Neurophysiology 70 (1993): 453–69. Pilo Boyl1, Pietro, Alessia Di Nardo, Christophe Mulle, Marco Sassoè-Pognetto, Patrizia Panzanelli, Andrea Mele, Matthias Kneussel, Vivian Costantini, Emerald Perlas1, Marzia Massimi1, Hugo Vara, Maurizio Giustetto and Walter Witke. “Profilin2 Contributes to Synaptic Vesicle Exocytosis, Neuronal Excitability, and Novelty-Seeking Behavior.” The EMBO Journal (2007) 26: 2991–3002. Plato. Cratylus. Trans. H. N. Fowler. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Poole, Kristen. “Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 47–75. Provine, R. R. “Yawning as a Stereotyped Action Pattern and Releasing Stimulus.” Ethology 72 (1986): 109–22.
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——. “Contagious Laughter: Laughter is a Sufficient Stimulus for Laughs and Smiles.” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 30 (1992): 1–4. Public Record Office. State Papers 12. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie (1589). eds Gladys Dodge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936. Rackin, Phyllis. Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Rainoldes, John. Th’ Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1600). Reynolds, Bryan. Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Rizzolatti, G. and Arbib, M. A. “Language Within Our Group,” Trends in Newoscience 21; 188–94. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Schalkwyk, David. Literature and That Touch of the Real. Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004. Scheflen, A. E. “The Significance of Posture in Communication Systems.” Psychiatry 27 (1964): 316–31. Schoenbaum, Samuel. William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Scott-Giles, C. Wilfrid. Shakespeare’s Heraldry. London: Dent, 1950. Seaver, Paul. Letter to Author. January 20, 1996. Selden, John. The Titles of Honor. London, 1614. Shakespeare, William. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works. eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. ——. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd edn. Gen. eds G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ——. King Henry IV, Part I. eds A. R. Humphreys. London: Methuen, 1960. ——. King Henry IV, Part II. eds A. R. Humphreys. London: Methuen, 1966. ——. Romeo and Juliet. eds Brian Gibbons. London: Arden, 1980. ——. King Henry V. eds Andrew Gurr. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Sharpe, J. A. Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York. York: Borthwick Papers No. 58, 1980. Smith, Sir Thomas. De Republica Anglorum. London, 1583. Squibb, G. D. The High Court of Chivalry: A Study in Civil Law in England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Stubbes, Phillip. The Anatomie of Abuses. 1583, rpt. London: The New Shakespeare Society, 1877. Taylor, Gary and Stanley Wells. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Tennenhouse, Leonard. Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres. New York: Methuen, 1986. Termine, N. T. & Izard, C. E. “Infants” Response to their Mother’s Expressions of Joy and Sadness.” Developmental Psychology 24 (1988): 223–29.
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Thompson, E. P. “Eighteenth-century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?” Social History 3 (1978): 133–65. Tilley, Morris Palmer. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950. Wagner, Sir Anthony. Heralds of England: A History of the Office and College of Arms. HMSO: London, 1967. Webb, J. T. “Subject Speech Rates as a Function of Interviewer Behaviour.” Language and Speech 12 (1969): 54–67. Webb, J. T. “Interview Synchrony: An Investigation of Two Speech Rate Measures in an Automated Standardized Interview.” eds B. Pope & A. W. Siegman. Studies in Dyadic Communication. New York: Pergamon 1972: 115–33. Whigham, Frank. Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. eds New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Wilson, Thomas. The rule of Reason, conteinyng the Arte of Logique. London, 1551. Withycombe, E. G. The Oxford Book of English Christian Names. 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Wrightson, Keith. English Society: 1580–1680. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982. ——. “Estates, Degrees and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England.” History Today 37 ( January 1987): 17–22. Yonge, Charlotte M. History of Christian Names. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1966. Zagorin, Perez. The Court and The Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
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The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Deleuze and Guattari to Transversal Poetics with(out) Baudrillard Adam Bryx & Bryan Reynolds
It is pointless to insist on their [today’s theories’] coherence with some “reality,” whatever that might be. The system has removed every secure reference from theory as it has from any other labour power. Theory no longer has any use-value, the theoretical mirror of production has also cracked. So much the better. What I mean is that the very undecidability of theory is an effect of the code. Let there be no illusions: there is no schizophrenic “drift” about this flotation of theories, where flows pass freely over the body without organs (of what, capital?). It merely signifies that any theory can from now on be exchanged against any other according to variable exchange rates, but without any longer being invested anywhere, unless it is the mirror of their writing. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (44) Jean-Jacques Rousseau sweated, urinated, defecated, and ejaculated. He produced and reproduced. According to the “schizoanalytic” theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he was a desiring-machine, an autonomic process of production and more production that works, breaks down, and immediately starts up again. But we are inclined to postpone discussion of Rousseau’s production until after inspecting the factories. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire acts independently of, and from, social and economic demands: it is both subject and object of desire; it is processes of desiring-production, and not acquisition, creativity, or lack. One cannot define desire against something outside of its self-reactive system, for such a formulation would irrevocably subject desire to an internal-external organizational dualism. Although desiring-production functions in continual interaction with 83
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and contrary to forces of attraction and repulsion, it is constituted neither by an impulsive naturalism nor by a compulsive constructionism. Desiring-production is not directed toward a specific purpose predicated upon a natural organization of the cosmos; rather, it strives for intensive singular states. The ongoing production of desire, itself the constituting expression of desire, is machinically enabled through couplings, the bringing apart and together of more forces in the formation of assemblages, whether experienced positively and/or negatively. Deleuze and Guattari assert their understanding of desire vis-à-vis the desire-as-lack formulation that is fundamental to Freudian psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, psychological development, and identity formation. Whereas they concur with psychoanalysis’ view that one can feel the lack of a real object at which desire is directed, and that one can feel the absence of a real foundation at which desire is projected imaginarily, they see these pressured reactions holding sway in institutionally repressive settings. Ideally, however, desire is free from the demands of an absent, lacking, or needed object. To comprehend desire structurally in effect of the absent, the lacking, or the needed object is to disregard “the intrinsic power of desire to create its own object – if only in an unreal, hallucinatory, or delirious form – or from representing this causality as stemming from within desire itself” (Anti-Oedipus 25). For the myth of desire-as-lack to achieve axiomatic status as it has for the psychoanalytic theory against which Deleuze and Guattari define their own, we would have to believe that the material-psychic world is ordered by the interrelationalism of a privileged object, a paradoxically non-existent yet ostensibly known and missing real object that constitutes desire as lack. The object’s existence as real entity (in the mind) depends upon a developmentally-determined principle of lack, as explained by psychoanalysis, and thus desire would still have to produce, at some point, a fantasized or symbolic object that functions as a double of reality. Whereas transversal theory is reluctant to accept this line of argument because it requires unsupportable devotion to a reductionist, measured equation between reality and its double, it agrees with Deleuze and Guattari that feelings of lack for something or an imaginary object cannot be requisite to the inspiration, conception, and actuality of desire. Like Deleuze and Guattari, transversal theory maintains that the world and people are not governed according to principles of totalizing structures and privileged objects. Totalizing theoretical models, and their companion research methodologies (often manifesting what transversal theory refers to as dissective-cohesive modes of analysis), require a leap of faith in a privileged, extra-worldly object and its capacity to account
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for the desire and production of things not modeled on things already existent in this world. Transversal theory also does not support belief in structuralizing experiences or subjecting them to theoretically abstracted principles. This would entail a kind of solipsism, a willful disregard of creativity, inspiration, and motivation, which can be seen in the common inability of theoretical models to account for such phenomena as innovation, invention, and science fiction. According to transversal theory, as a vital mechanism of human life that operates together with other mechanisms and organs, desire ultimately searches and strives for more desire. Whether directed at acquiring, expelling, or producing, desire pursues more desire, the inspirational intensity of the phenomenon of desire; although always layered with other more readily apparent motivations and codes, this is the constant and foremost stance of desire. This view of desire is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s, but without their disinterested emphasis on the machinic, which is too often lacking in ethical awareness. For instance, consider becomings, which is a desiring process for both Deleuze and Guattari and transversal theory. For transversal theory, although possibly dependent on the involvement of living creatures with consciousness, processes of becomings are agential, importantly sustainable, and endlessly a mode of rejuvenation. For Deleuze and Guattari, although never sustainable, the end-objective of becomings is pure, nondirectional, nonproductive desire for-itself. Moving beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of desire, which successfully rehabilitates desire from absent, lacking, or needed object-based formulations of desire, transversal theory contends that desire functions (better) through the interrelatedness of phenomena which enable and affect becomings and reflexive-consciousness. This occurs through three premises/processes that significantly depart from Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization: 1. Whether manifest through becomings or subjunctive movements or a combination, desire, as the always already combusting fuel for a mobile and maneuverable vehicle, creates opportunities to willfully parameterize and guide exploratory trajectories. The exploratory trajectories can be purposefully calculated to foster conditions for comings-to-be (non-agential becomings) and transversal movements as well as further becomings and subjunctive movements. 2. Subjectivity emerges experientially, often out of mechanisms of subjectivation, and is always transversal to subjects and not, like Deleuze and Guattari argue, exclusively implicated with an aleatory outside and understood only via retrospective interpretation.1 However
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The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“properly” delineated by state machinery, either preemptively or retroactively, personal and group perceptions, explorations, and understandings cannot be reduced in aleatory and retroactive terms. This is because subjectivities crystallize in effect of transversal coefficients of experience that are themselves irreducible to official and subjective territories. Moreover, alternatively to Deleuze and Guattari, transversal theory does not see subjectivity as a product of interior/exterior and subject/object modes of permutation that are strictly catalyzed by aleatory sources (new, random, and/or uncertain concepts, becoming-other, desiring-production, the “war machine,” the schizoanalytic unconscious). According to transversal theory, there are identifiable clusters of phenomena with organizational elements nevertheless interconnected with other clusters despite the divisional characteristics that differentiate and define them. In addition, it is from the positive, comparative relations among them that subjectivities can crystallize and achieve affective presence for individuals or groups. Subjectivity proper is contiguous and often shifting, but the processual fusion of emergent phenomena that comprise it constantly diffuses directly within, alongside, and beyond surrounding elements. 3. For whatever duration, subjectivities, becomings, subjunctive movements, comings-to-be, and transversal movements are sustainable, and not vulnerable to the self-destructive imperative found in Deleuze and Guattari. For instance, transversal theory recognizes the capacity for negotiation between becomings and comings-to-be to transform into predominately becomings, comings-to-be, or unrelenting transversality; and although it also recognizes that such domination of movement is likely to be temporary, it maintains that this will not necessarily be the case. These departures from Deleuze and Guattari relate to transversal theory’s understanding of reflexive-consciousness and reflexive-enhancement. The former enables affirming desires through awareness of expressions while expressing; and the latter drives the former onto a subjunctive plane. The heightened lucidity integral to subjunctive thought is maximized through the positive potential of power-banding self-reflexivity (full throttle), taking exploration into hypothetical consciousnesses and subjectivities as one is able to take advantage of the available thrust of an engine. Transversal theory believes in the affirmation of individual and group creative desires, which is to say, unlike in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, that desire is not complicit in its own inevitable failure,
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but rather can be processually and reflexively interpreted, conducted, and enhanced so as to enable productive coefficients that transverse sustained modes of exploration.
Even though desire is not directly controlled by either an internal or external organization framework, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that desire is an autonomic and machinic process that produces production (desire produces more desire), a condition perpetuated by additional desiring-machines as the byproducts of the desire for production. Precluding the shifting perspectives enabled by reflexive-consciousness that transversal theory identifies, this process of desiring-production necessitates a series of desiring-machines that operate continuously and generatively on a plane of immanence. For Deleuze and Guattari, Rousseau was a desiring-machine, and he was comprised of various desiring-machines connected to other desiring-machines, both inside and outside of his own body: one machine is always coupled with another . . . . there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast – the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. (Anti-Oedipus 5) Desiring-machines never constitute an organic whole; otherwise desire would be necessarily coterminous with a transcendental field, which is a prerequisite for totalizing theories, such as psychoanalysis that opts to subordinate the human condition to a privileged object (defining desire as lack). Rather, each desiring-machine implicates within a field of immanence, a horizontal continuum of ceaseless production and consumption of always-coupled partial objects (breast ↔ mouth). In other words, as mentioned above, desire is a psychic force that is continuously connecting, interrupting, and breaking down by producing and consuming flows. The breast is a flow-producing machine and the mouth is a sucking machine that when coupled produces the production of the breast ↔ mouth desiring-machine. Desire is continuously compelled to connect to flow-producing machines to create/produce. In effect, it produces stimuli, real (progeny, dry goods, businesses) or unreal (fictions, dreams, hallucinations), which in turn stimulate its congenital yearning
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Making sense of desire
to create (desiring-production), causing it to create more stimuli, and so on. In this sense, symptomatically, Deleuze and Guattari’s desire works to subjectify accordingly, but is not itself a result of subjective or intersubjective processes (reflexive-consciousness/enhancement, subjunctive and transversal movements) even though it informs them. As parts of an autonomic psychic mechanism, desiring-machines are not merely thought-machines or dream-machines. They are machines that work to elevate, ultimately, the intensity of desiring-production, a process that experiments with new thresholds of potential as they relate to newly created states of becoming. Unless there is repression, desiring-machines have no fixed object of desire and simply work, are interrupted, and continue. If there is repression, which is almost always the case, desiring-machines become coherently organized so that consequently the slippery multidirectional experimentation of desiringproduction becomes blocked and fixated on a singular object. This causes impasses to overcoming repression through the achievement of new creative transformations. Thus, when subjectified desiring-machines pursue only specifically segmented desiring-production in the form of exterior, real, and most often, lacking objects, their subjects are other desiringmachines connected to the repressive institutional setting. In effect, the institutional setting traps the repressed desire within its narrow confines; for instance, the psychoanalytic edifice precludes validation of desire except vis-à-vis overly codified individual and social relations: the allknowing therapist, the oedipal family triangle, the forever-unattainable lacking object. Put another way, Deleuze and Guattari see desire of something, an object, whether real or imaginary, as a symptom of repression, which severely constrains flows in a unilateral direction, diverting the potential of new energy flows away from new processes of desiring-production.2 Repression is a paranoiac experience where desire is compelled to police itself. Assuming that the repressive setting is not the dominantly operative mode of desiring-production, desire is experimental but also indiscriminate: it produces in every way possible and with any available materials. Although desire is inexhaustible in its desire to produce, it is equally indiscriminate in how and what it produces to the extent that processes of production have no recourse to an ethical perspective through, for example, reflexive-consciousness that could urge or modify desire to formulate its expression in a certain way given particular circumstances. Reflexive-consciousness is the means by which one’s consciousness interprets itself in relation to its productive processes. This in turn facilitates tangential references for the connections between a
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subject and her subjective territory, thereby affecting considerations of subjectivity, subjunctivity, and subjectivation as consciousness simultaneously explores opportunities for experimentation and expands the field of desire. Alternatively, according to Deleuze and Guattari, one can only ever interpret the motivational scope of desire in hindsight, which is difficult to understand in any manner but as unproductive expressions of cognitive dissonance. Despite interpretation’s capacity to be an active force and although not necessarily barred from active content in their theory, Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless seclude interpretation to, at best, an unproductive supplement of the process of desiring-production. If interpretation is only supplementary, then it is unproductive to desire in a double sense. It is never integral to desiring processes; and, although it may find some qualitatively active comprehension in the analysis of past states of becoming, it is produced in the form of an unproductive byproduct that operates extraneously in the interstices of past and present states of becomings-other. This is because interpretation can never incorporate itself into the processes of desire. Even if it were to have an integrative functionality, which is not the case for Deleuze and Guattari, interpretation would always already be, so to speak, a step behind becomings-other. For example, when diagnosed in the context of human behavior and well-being, such as in Joel Bakan’s The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, transnational for-profit companies are seen to operate on the basis of producing more profit for its shareholders in a pathological manner.3 If an ethical standard were to be implemented or made essential to the profit-production of corporations, the implementation would fundamentally alter, if not sabotage altogether, its behavioral patterns. Production for-profit processes would no longer operate indiscriminately. Herein are significant tensions between transversal theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s position on desire and ethics, and, by extension, subjectivity. Succinctly describing the Deleuzeoguattarian position on subjectivity and personal accountability, Brain Massumi writes: A human subject in the broad sense is a superindividual composed of a multitude of subindividuals comparable to muck and sedimentary rock, but doubled by surplus-value layers of larval and fledgling selves . . . . In other words, there is no self-sufficient agency that can qualify as intentional. There are varying degrees of choice at successive threshold states. The “will” to change or to stay the same is not an act of determination on the part of a unified subject in simple response to self-reflection or an internal impulse. It is a state of
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Massumi’s commentary on the relevancy of an ethical standard as it relates to subjectivity and desire is useful. It illustrates the way in which critical theory oftentimes conveniently redeems critical thinkers – because they too are subjects in “a state of self-organized indeterminancy” – from complicity in the general poststructuralist standpoint that deprives the subject of agency and thus exonerates her from responsibility. Needless to say, Massumi’s attempt to distinguish Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the subject from those of others who insist on “self-sufficient agency” and “a unified subject” free of “complex causal constraints” sets up, unconvincingly, a straw man. He ignores the fact that awareness of societal constraints on the subject has pervaded discourse on human agency throughout history; one only has to look to moral and legal codes for its commonness (see Chapter 1 on subjective diversity and Chapter 5 on authority and ethics). Deployment of the overarching, hypothetical figure of the unified subject nevertheless structures Massumi’s revisionist effort at recovering a form of subjective tangibility in Deleuze and Guattari. It serves as the operative distinction to which he contrasts a limited vision of freedom as diffused in the interstices of the multiplicities of becoming in relation to “chance and determinacy.” Still, the central problematic faced by Massumi in attempting to recover a deprived ethical awareness in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is the primacy of the field of immanence, which in simple terms regulates all phenomena in the cosmos according to a scheme of maximal difference. Everything, like desire, is constantly differentiating. From this standpoint, we can see how for Deleuze and Guattari subjective phenomena (perceptions, thought, emotions, intention, etc.) are only ever emergent insofar as they are externally and contingently produced in the field of immanence.4 Whereas this view on immanence provides a powerful critique on the capability of representation to order the world according to stable transcendental images of truth, whether serving as privileged categories of knowledge or privileged criteria of truth, it undermines the power of reflexive-consciousness as a mode of agential, affective presence, whereby experience and expression can bring about more purposeful experience and expression. If modes of consciousness as they relate to experience are only ever
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self-organized indeterminancy in response to complex causal constraints. It constitutes a real degree of freedom, but the choice belongs to the overall dissipative system with its plurality of selves, and not to the person; it is objectively cocaused at the crossroads of chance and determinacy. (81)
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The first positive task [of schizoanalysis] consists of discovering in a subject the nature, the formation, or the functioning of his desiringmachines, independently of any interpretations. 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? The schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is solely functional. In this respect it cannot remain at the level of a still interpretative examination – interpretative from the point of view of the unconscious – of the social machines in which the subject is caught as a cog or as a user; nor of the technical machines that are his prized possession, or that he perfects or even produces through handiwork; nor of the subject’s use of his machines in his dreams and fantasies. (Anti-Oedipus 322) The importance of showing wholesale the supplemental value of interpretation, for Deleuze and Guattari, is motivated by their desire to liberate desiring-production and the unconscious from the overly codified realm of psychoanalytic analysis, which prefigures desire and the unconscious in line with transcendental categories of knowledge. Desire and the unconscious are always for Oedipus. This is the reason why readers of Anti-Oedipus repetitively encounter Deleuze and Guattari’s unwillingness to place value on questions regarding meaning and interpretation. It also explains why Deleuze and Guattari’s critique prefaces with questions regarding the particular function of processes. Despite the value in privileging the question How does it work? as opposed to What does it mean? while critiquing psychoanalysis, transversal theory, in its concern with subjectivity and ethics, questions this delimiting framework in which desire and the unconscious are critiqued in terms of processes (namely desiring-production, but also other psychic mechanisms) rather than significances and consequences. Moreover, this is especially the case when related to reflexive-consciousness, a meta-mode of self-awareness in the context of social interaction irreducible to immanent and transcendental distinctions. What we want to emphasize here is that reflexive-consciousness increases the probability of ethical selfaccountability in ways that directly relate to the lived world in practical as well as profound senses.
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byproducts of desiring-production, then the subject suffers permanently from cognitive dissonance, depending entirely upon the randomness of the aleatory, of which future experiences are extracted arbitrarily from within the field of immanence, or specifically in the case of schizoanalysis from a disinterested and disinvested, but immanently functioning unconscious. As Deleuze and Guattari put it:
Alternatively to Deleuze and Guattari, transversal theory asserts that desire can be both willfully directed in specific settings and that repression does not necessarily follow from the acquisition of objects. In other words, varying outcomes are always at stake when desire is directed towards both acquisition and production, even when primarily consumptive as manifested (through eating, reading, watching, etc.), with the attainment and expense of energy (caloric, libidinal, psychic, etc.) affecting and enabling further desire. The production of desire is unavoidable, but it can be channeled by willful parameterization – although degrees of intensity can vary tremendously – and/or by the force of what is most desired: desire that thrives on desire. For instance, physical exertion, such as during aerobic or sexual activity, releases chemicals in the brain that make people feel good, more alert, even euphoric (see Chapter 1). These chemicals include endorphins, named after morphine because they relieve pain, induce pleasurable feelings, and are physically addictive; phenylethylamine, which pleasurably stimulates like amphetamines, increases awareness, reduces depression, and is also addictive; and serotonin, which induces pleasurable feelings, reduces depression, and is addictive – if only indirectly through, say, cocaine use or excessive ingestion of carbohydrates. The work of these chemicals and many others with similar mood-boosting or antidepressant effects and addictive qualities demonstrates quite clearly, in the context of daily or monthly happenings, the implicative opportunity of choosing to parameterize behavior through reflexive-consciousness that directly influences the intensity of desire and its generative capacities. In turn, this biochemical, psychic dynamic outwardly expresses, such as through social activity, cultural traits, and material relations. In a move characteristic of the Marxist yet opposing the psychoanalytic trends in critical theory when writing Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari innovatively and purposefully extend their understanding of desire to account for the material industry in society, what they term “social-production.” In contrast, transversal theory is tentative, generally speaking, about asserting definitive, universally applied causal and structural connections between psychic processes of individuals and groups.5 This is because there appears to be much related phenomena in the form of emergent properties and activities that cannot be reduced inductively, deductively, dialectically or otherwise, such as consciousness, which is interrelationally constituted, and subjectivity, which is transversal to the subject (see Chapters 1, 3, and 4). Moreover, since desire often inspires subjunctive and transversal movements, its course from and through subjects is typically impossible to accurately chart or
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predict, although agential reasoning and subjunctivity can enable considerable navigation, especially when threshold potential is maximized through reflexive-enhancement. Alternatively, for Deleuze and Guattari, the connections are mappable schematically and expressive trajectories can be traced: put simply, repression of desires (sometimes caught up with previous experiences) leads desiring-machines to produce a reality of desiring-production that parallels the vast social, cultural, and material production, which are themselves a collective result of the similar desiring-machines of numerous individuals. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the causal relationship between repression and exterior modes of production highlights the derivation of need (and thus addiction) from desiring-machines. Need is the counterproduct within the real that is manufactured by desire; and lack manifests as counter-effect of desiring-production within this socially constructed real. Desiring-machines generate anti-productive intervals for which they need compensation. As a result, they search for the materials that their bodies and minds, the communal products of other bodies, have determined to be lacking. Both need and lack develop and operate in the social realm of the real created by desiring-machines. As a counter-product of the pressures of antiproductivity, the business of social-production, which includes cultural and material production, generates, designs, and institutes lack: This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy. (Anti-Oedipus 28) To illustrate their schizoanalytic theory, Deleuze and Guattari famously indict psychoanalysis, which they claim stifles and besmirches the favorable processes of desiring-production and social-production by speciously shunting them into a conception of unconscious representation and repression. No longer a productive unconscious that serves as a creative and inspirational source of desiring-production, the unconscious becomes scrutinized within a representational arena where all motivations, reactions, feelings, urges, and desires are necessarily associated, reduced, and comprehended according to a codified schemetization: “The unconscious ceases to be what it is – a factory,
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The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
a workshop – to become a theater, a scene and its staging” (Anti-Oedipus 55). The unconscious becomes a theatrical representation of the Oedipal familial romance, and, “The psychoanalyst becomes a director for a private theater, rather than the engineer or mechanic who sets up units of production, and grapples with collective agents of production and antiproduction” (Anti-Oedipus 55). This idea of the unconscious marks from the beginning psychoanalysis’s own bankruptcy or abnegation: an idle unconscious (or preconscious) content with reproducing the preestablished forms of psychoanalytic knowledge, the Oedipus complex, castration, repression, fixation, and desire-as-lack. Belief in the psychoanalytic edifice precludes new modes of experience and production. The unconscious believes in a theatrical law that determines all value in advance; this situation fundamentally conditions desire to scrutinize and police its own processes in order to reject ulterior states of intensity and becoming. Among the various sites where this occurs is psychoanalytic therapy, which Freud suggests is interminable (“On Beginning the Treatment” 367–71). The psychoanalytic patient is forever vulnerable to the uncertainty, guilt, shame, and anxiety instituted by Oedipalization.6
Becoming a body without organs Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the productive unconscious attempts to explain irregularities and unconventionalities in human thought and behavior in relation to the antiproductivity with which they are commonly associated. The Oedipal paradigm is displaced by a paradigm of constant struggle between the desire for the intensity of desiringproduction and the desire for the plane of consistency proper to desire on which desire is immanent and pure intensities flow free from the impulse to produce intensive states. Existing alongside the connective syntheses achieved by the continuous coupling of desiring-machines are the disjunctive syntheses on this plane. Deleuze and Guattari call these disjunctive syntheses “the Body without Organs (BwO).” The desiringmachines and the constituting but ultimately not constitutive BwO coexist as separate yet interrelated contributors to psychic processes of repulsion and attraction, antiproduction and production, deterritorialization and reterritorialization that extends beyond the individual and into the social world. Freud has a somewhat similar theory known as the “pleasure principle,” in which the “mental apparatus [which] endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant” in an effort to attenuate or avoid “unpleasurable tension” (“Pleasure Principle” 595). The main difference between Deleuze
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and Guattari’s and Freud’s theories rests in the greater degree to which the BwO theory is seen as critical to the interpretation of all psychic phenomena. Whereas desiring-production perpetually strives towards new intensive states of becoming by generating production through the attraction or connective synthesis of two machines, the BwO is at once an undifferentiated slippery surface that enables the production of production but is simultaneously a surface that refuses and rejects the constancy of determined or codified states of experience. One can best observe the tension between the connective syntheses of desiring-production and the disjunctive syntheses of the BwO, the attraction of coupling production with more production and the repulsion of that which seeks an organized and determined state of becoming. Unlike an organized organism, the BwO is ground zero, an undifferentiated and static mass of heterogeneous forces that serves as an intermediary phase between different states of becoming. The BwO theory maintains there is an ideal to which all humans continually aspire, whether consciously or not. This ideal is the psychic state in which we experience ourselves as nothing other than a deterritorialized, antiproductive, and uninterrupted continuum of excitant desire. In this state, desiring-machines are always transitioning between different states of intensive becoming: there is no production; there is only the electric fervor of desire. Simply put, all humans wish to become a Body without Organs: no brain, no ears, no eyes, no stomach, no heart, no lungs, no kidneys, no clitoris, no penis, and so forth: “The BwO is what remains when you take everything away” (Plateaus151). The totalized BwO, according to Deleuze and Guattari, does not possess awareness of needs or lacks or burdensome organs. To possess organs is, by nature of their accessibility, to attract persistent harassment from desiring-production; it is to be implicative in a biologically organized system, one that carries along with it the demands of unifying coherence and directionality. In the words of Antonin Artaud: “When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom” (Selected Writings 571). The interplay of the BwO and desiring-machines is a battlefield. The psychic mechanisms of desiring-production strive to cross over, break into, and utilize the always already desiring to be static BwO. In no way a docile body, the BwO repels and represses the desiring-machines since it experiences them as enemies of its ecstatic, antiproductive existence. According to Artaud, The body is the body it is all by itself
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However, the repulsion and repression of desiring-machines by the BwO is not enough to prevent desiring-production. The conflict between the desiring-machines and the BwO is an inherently uninterrupted one, unless, of course, intervened upon by an external system of repression, such as psychoanalysis. As mentioned above, the BwO’s repression of the desiring-machines encourages desiring-production as attention is deflected away from the BwO; this causes the designation of external objects of desire and creates the desire to produce these objects. Pursuit of these objects by the desiring-machines serves to defer a complete takeover of the BwO. Yet the BwO also limits its own potential of ever inhabiting fully the deterritorialized ideal. The strenuousness of the endless tussle between the desiring-machines and the BwO causes the BwO to respond paranoiacally to a counter-inside or counter-outside in the form of a persecuting organ or some exterior agent of persecution. In due course, both the BwO and the desiring-machines locate something external on which to demonstrate their redirected desires, misdirected retaliations, and persistent frustrations. The outside, outer-body world becomes the virtual battlefield and recording surface for the internal struggle. Hence, there is no certain or easy way to become a BwO. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari claim that: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit . . . . But you’re already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveler and nomad of the steppes” (Plateaus 150). Nevertheless, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic theory, at least five types of bodies can come close to realizing the BwO, even though their proximity to it can be encumbering, expensive, and perhaps fatal: (1) the hypochondriac body, which disorganizes and eventually destroys its own organs through neglect and drug-abuse; (2) the paranoid body, which though delightfully preoccupied, must always be under attack; (3) the schizophrenic body, waging its own personal war against the organs, at the cost of catatonia; (4) the drugged body, which is depressingly ephemeral and afflicted sporadically by withdrawal; and (5) the masochist body, which usually suffers unforeseen and frequently destabilizing side effects, and almost always requires the assistance of a sadist. Whereas for Deleuze and Guattari these five types of bodily approximations always ultimately fail in their attempts to achieve BwO
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and has no need of organs the body is never an organism organisms are the enemies of the body. (qtd in Anti-Oedipus 9)
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status, for transversal theory they are not “dead ends” but rather intensive threshold-crossing passageways to various becomings, opportunities by which the subject can transcend subjectivation to expand subjective territory and arrive elsewhere. In the following pages, we intend to perform a “schizoanalysis,” as coined by Deleuze and Guattari, as a means by which to both examine the masochistic, hypochondriac, and paranoiac Jean-Jacques Rousseau and delineate their approach. In doing this, to contextualize Deleuze and Guattari’s intervention in critical and clinical terms, we provide some comparison with both the psychoanalytic theory from which they differentiate schizoanalysis and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation that offers interpretive opportunities alternative to both schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis. In conjunction, we also relate, sometimes via Baudrillard, schizoanalysis to aspects of the theory and methodology of transversal poetics that has greatly benefited from Deleuze and Guattari’s work to show how schizoanalysis in particular has contributed to our understanding of subject formation and subjectivity. To be sure, intelligibly revealing Rousseau’s struggle to make himself a Body without Organs, and not yet muddled by the ideology and culture of psychoanalysis and capitalism, the exemplary self-conscious, autobiographical writings of Rousseau seem to invite a schizoanalytic investigation.
Never enough Rousseau discovered the joy of steady pain at the youthful age of eight. Deleuze and Guattari explain that this type of joy is fundamentally different from pleasure. They point out that it is commonly and erroneously asserted that the masochist, like everybody else, quests for pleasure, but can only attain it via pain and fantasized humiliations, which function to alleviate or deflect deep anxiety. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that: the masochist’s suffering is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffering; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from
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Rousseau’s description of his earliest encounter with pain, punitively inflicted upon him by his surrogate mother, Mlle Lambercier, illustrates Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the necessary postponement of pleasure.8 It shows how pleasure-postponement operates on both individual and social levels as a means of control and a way of approaching the BwO. Unlike Freud’s “reality principle,” which “does not abandon the intention of ultimately attaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (“Pleasure Principle” 596), Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of pleasure-postponement is not really about “toleration” or “unpleasure” or “postponement of satisfaction.” For the most part, it is about precisely the opposite. Postponing pleasure, say Deleuze and Guattari, strongly intensifies the joy of constant desire; and it is from this intensity of joyful desire, and not from the vitality of pleasure, that one experiences a profound satisfaction. Rousseau recalls that Mlle Lambercier initially “confined herself to threats, and the threat of a punishment entirely unknown to me frightened me sufficiently” (25). But what does Rousseau mean by “frightened me sufficiently”? Inasmuch as the terrorizing threats of a mysterious castigation did not prevent Rousseau from pursuing and eventually receiving this castigation, it is difficult to determine in what way he was sufficiently frightened or why he relates the circumstances in a positive tone. Rousseau further reveals his affirmative reading of the situation when he declares that he “earned,” rather than, say, “received” or “suffered,” the chastisements that were finally inflicted upon him. Rousseau seems to have found Mlle Lambercier’s threats sufficient because he actually enjoyed the terror affected and perpetuated by them. After all, his original experience with the intensity of this terror is what induced him to seek, consciously or not, the unknown punishment. It is not surprising, then, that Rousseau says, “when in the end I was beaten I found the experience less dreadful in fact than in anticipation; and the very strange thing was that this punishment increased my affection for the inflicter” (25). Rousseau’s comprehension of his “anticipation” is comparable to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the joy that is immanent to desire. That is, when “in anticipation,” Rousseau was in the impassioned
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being suffused by anxiety, shame and guilt. In short, a masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire. (Plateaus 155)7
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and uninterrupted state of desiring-alleviation from the terror, which, in his case, required the realization of the feared punishment. Yet, like in the case of pleasure, he needed to delay the punishment as long as possible since it would interrupt the continuous process of positive desire necessitated by the duration and intensity of the terror, unless, of course, Mlle Lambercier administered the punishment continuously. In this case, the joyful process of positive desire, the desire for alleviation from the punishment, would be ceaseless. Whereas, as Rousseau acknowledges, there might have been “some degree of precocious sexuality” in his increased affection for the inflicter (25), Deleuze and Guattari would assert that it was primarily the beating’s joyful effects that caused Rousseau to contemplate deliberately earning more beatings. Nevertheless, Rousseau did not intentionally earn more beatings: “It required all the strength of my devotion and all my natural gentleness to prevent me from deliberately earning another beating; I had discovered in the shame and pain of the punishment an admixture of sensuality which had left me rather eager than otherwise for a repetition by the same hand” (25). However unconsciously, Rousseau behaved in such a way as to keep himself on the verge of receiving punishment; he lingered on the very brink of punishment, and he did this to sustain the fervor of positive desire brought about by the terror and anticipation that such circumstances forced him to endure. However consciously, Rousseau avoided the blatantly masochistic joy of his population by intensities of what Deleuze and Guattari call “pain waves” (Plateaus 152): he declares, “if I refrained from earning a fresh punishment, it was only out of fear of annoying Mlle Lambercier” (26). Rousseau opted for the more socially acceptable joy that is immanent to the process of positive desire connected to his “fear of annoying Mlle Lambercier,” which is probably less intense than the joy connected to the corporeal punishment. Yet, he did not allow his masochistic quest for the supreme intensity of the BwO to be tempered or led astray so easily by societal pressure, at least not during this callow and eager stage of his life. After postponing it presumably for as long as possible to reap fully the benefits of the socially imposed terror (anxiety, shame, and guilt) induced by his conventionally aberrant and “strange taste” for pain-waves (27–8), Rousseau acquired another punishment. As he puts it, “The next occasion, which I postponed, although not through fear [of the punishment], occurred through no fault of mine – that is to say I did not act deliberately” (26). Rousseau was aware that this beating would probably be his last because he would not respond to it as Mlle Lambercier would expect, since “Mlle Lambercier had no doubt detected
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The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
signs that this punishment was not having the desired effect” (26). He enjoyed the beatings, therefore giving her no reason to persist with this kind of punishment. As a result, Rousseau chose to remain in the state of desiring-pain-waves (“I did not act deliberately”). In other words, because it was likely that Mlle Lambercier would discover that he enjoyed the beatings and thus cease to administer them, Rousseau avoided the beatings in order to prolong his painful craving for them; that is, he wanted to prolong the intense state of desiring-pain-waves caused by his desperate longing for the beatings. The intensity of this painful craving was potentially longer lasting, more economically painful, than the pain-intensities of any final beating. Insofar as the longevity of this desiring-condition would probably prove more rewarding than either the state of desiring-alleviation from the fear of punishment or the shortlived intensity of the punishment, the state of desiring-pain-waves (the painful craving) is most practical for the masochist striving to become a BwO. Rousseau admits of the situation without recognizing the full implications of his confession: “But I may say that I took advantage of it with an easy conscience” (26). Rousseau interpreted what, according to the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, was really a common and perfectly natural manifestation of the reaction of his desiring-machines to their repression, as an unfortunate and formative incident in the development of his psychology, one with which he would forever have to cope: Who could have supposed that this childish punishment, received at the age of eight at the hands of a woman of thirty, would determine my tastes and desires, my passions, my very self for the rest of my life, and in a sense diametrically opposed to the one in which they should normally have developed. (26) Freud seems to concur with Rousseau’s interpretation: Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, it has been well-known to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of the buttocks is one of the erotogenic zones of the passive instinct of cruelty (masochism). The conclusion has rightly been drawn by them that corporal punishment, which is usually applied to this part of the body, should not be inflicted upon any children whose libido is liable to be forced into collateral channels by the later demands of cultural education. (“Three Essays” 270)
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If the interpretations of Rousseau and Freud are compatible with popular conceptions of sexual normality and psychological development, should we passively accept their accuracy? Maybe we are ready to do so because such an act of acceptance is in conjunction with the teachings of official culture’s dominant sociopolitical conductors or because the common, passive, and masochistic acceptance of these traditionally informed perceptions contributes to the psychosexual frustration we all already (unconsciously) enjoy. Was Rousseau’s experience, as Deleuze and Guattari might argue, merely the result of an instinctive yet culturally repressed desire for pain-waves? If Freud is correct that the purportedly detrimental consequences of corporal punishment is common knowledge for educationalists, then this raises questions of why it is still a common form of punishment. On the conscious level, nevertheless, Rousseau’s experience does seem unfortunate for three major reasons: (1) the known and unknown ways in which it made his life more difficult at the time; (2) the various negative effects it may have had on him (such as contributing to his dread of women or by teaching him that violence is an appropriate tool for teaching children); and (3) because it acquainted him with a natural but socially unacceptable form of deriving pleasure, one which he was never again able to relish and thus ostensibly tormented him psychologically throughout his lifetime. As the product of a culture fashioned inadvertently to prevent the realization of any BwO, Rousseau could not help from misunderstanding his congenital inclination toward making himself one; he perceived himself as peculiarly adulterated by his newfangled masochism: “My morals might well have been impaired by these strange tastes, which persisted with a depraved and insane intensity” (26). What is curious, however, is that he was aware of the “insane intensity” of his desiring-condition; his apparent schizophrenia or schizothymia exposes itself more and more as his hypochondria and general paranoia increasingly overshadow his narrative. The blank pages on which Rousseau wrote his story, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic theory, were clearly the recording surfaces, the products of his desiring-production, the discursive representation of an intuitive intellect investigating retrospectively his own displaced struggle to totalize his BwO.
Performance anxiety When one is having difficulties performing or when one is not producing the prescribed quota for production, there must be something wrong.
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The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If the problem is not obvious, it must be invented. A problem must be produced from within, or one must be produced from without. In either case, something or someone else is inevitably to blame. Call the police! Bring in the psychoanalysts! Let’s begin the Oedipalization process! Who done it – mommy, daddy or me? Psychoanalysis informs us: if you do not internalize the Oedipus myth so that you can better rediscover it on the outside, in social authority, where it will be made to proliferate and be passed on to future generations; if you do not follow the demarcated configuration of differentiation – daddy(the law)-mommy-me – and the exclusive alternatives that delineate it and thereby “resolve” Oedipus; then you will be marginalized and bewildered in the neurotic darkness of the imaginary identifications of the undifferentiated (Anti-Oedipus 78–9). Freud designed the Oedipal theory to weed the bad eggs from the good; it must separate the “abnormal” and cryptic people from the “normal” and readily categorized. But it is just a theory, and for the last one-hundred years a very powerful and suspiciously allencompassing phallocentric theory founded primarily on conjecture and a false model (Sophocles’s Laius tried to kill Oedipus first, not the other way around).9 To avoid such neurotic categorization, Deleuze and Guattari argue that when attempting to construct a genealogy of one’s psychology we must refrain from relying on Freud’s Oedipal paradigm. Instead, we should follow Artaud: I don’t believe in father in mother, got no papamummy (Artaud Anthology 247) Indeed, according to Deleuze and Guattari, we must not attempt to construct a genealogy of one’s psychology in the language of psychoanalysis at all. We must not attempt, like psychoanalysis, to “understand BwO phenomena as regressions, progressions, phantasies, in terms of an image of the body . . . . [psychoanalysis] only grasps the flipside of the BwO and immediately substitutes family photos, childhood memories, and part-objects for a worldwide intensity map” (Plateaus 165). This does not mean that we should not analyze what appear to have been formative events in the development of an individual’s psychology, but that we must examine those events with respect to the underlying conflict between the BwO and the desiring-machines. There is no psychological chronology or narrative, but only arbitrary stratification and a road-map
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we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. (Plateaus 153) The egg, as principal of production, is the milieu of pure intensity and zero intensity. The BwO is the egg. The BwO does not exist before the organism; “it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself” (Plateaus 164). “My heart pounded with joy on the road,” exclaims Rousseau of his 1737 journey back to his beloved Madame de Warens (known to him as “Mamma”) (234). This summer, Rousseau says, was one of the happiest periods of his life. Again, as with his recollection of the beatings, it is peculiar and paradoxical that Rousseau has such a positive memory of what was really a very difficult period for him. This summer marked the culmination of Rousseau’s hypochondria: his exaggerated anxiety over his bodily health and the various psychosomatic manifestations of the anxiety. In conjunction with his hypochondria, either as sources or symptoms, Rousseau’s capacity for satisfying his own quota for selfproductivity and his standard for self-reliance were at an all-time low: Meanwhile my health was far from recovering; on the contrary I was visibly wasting away. I was deathly pale and as thin as a skeleton; the throbbing in my arteries was terrible, and my heart palpitations more frequent. I was continually short of breath, and finally I became so weak that I found it difficult to move . . . . I could not lift a small weight, and was reduced to an inactivity most painful to a man as restless as I am. No doubt there was a great deal of vapours [an eighteenth-century word meaning hypochondria or hysteria] mixed up in all this. The vapours, being the malady of happy people, was therefore mine. The tears that I often shed for no reason, my alarm at the fall of a leaf or the fluttering of a bird, my changes of mood amidst the calm of a most pleasing life . . . . When I might have been enjoying the delights of life, my decaying physique prevented
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rife with potholes and roadblocks. Simply put, Deleuze and Guattari assert that we must consider all psychological phenomena in relation to the egg:
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Did Rousseau approach the closest approximation of totalizing his BwO at this time more than at any other point during his life? On the one hand, it could be claimed that the intensities of pain-waves, zero productivity, and desiring-production expressed in this passage are emphatic and revealing. Rousseau’s maladies, all of which were symptoms allegedly caused by an unknown disease, practically immobilized him. Compelled to research the possible origins of his ailments, and after much investigation, Rousseau deduces: “Since I found in every disease some symptoms of my own, I believed I had them all” (235). According to schizoanalysis, Rousseau had unconsciously launched a full-scale, pro-BwO attack against his organs. On the other hand, however, is it not more likely that Rousseau found himself at an irresolvable impasse insofar as locating and determining the source and symptoms of his hypochondria? In this case, Jean Baudrillard would challenge the positive assertions made by schizoanalysis, since it is utterly unsupportable for him that non-conscious forces in the form of a BwO could place particular demands on Rousseau. As mentioned above, the hypochondriac period for Rousseau was one where his level of self-productivity and self-reliance was abysmally low, as he indeed had the physical symptoms which left him immobilized and, moreover, significantly distraught, yet by all indication there was no correlative to be found in actual sources of clinically diagnosed diseases. The jarring dissonance at stake between symptom and source according to Baudrillard frames Rousseau’s malady in the context of simulation: To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms” (Littré). (Simulacra and Simulation 3) As Rousseau makes clear in his account of his illness, there was any number of actual symptoms present, from the psychically abnormal artery and heart functions to the emotional paroxysms caused by seemingly mundane things (“fall of a leaf,” “fluttering of a bird”). According to
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me, though no one could make out the true seat or cause of the disease. (235)
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Baudrillard’s distinction between dissimulation and simulation, it follows that Rousseau was neither pretending to have an illness he really did not have, nor was he feigning not to have an illness that he really may have had. Both cases have to be true since Rousseau actively sought secondary opinions, presumably from other people as well as medical professionals, as to the causes of his physical and emotional state. The irresolvable impasse in effect of the non-correlation between symptoms and source, or alternatively between Rousseau’s actual state and clinical diagnostics, would seem to confirm Baudrillard’s stance on simulation. In other words, Rousseau was a simulator who simulated a disease by producing symptoms. The complication involved in simulated forms of behavior, as noted by Baudrillard (above), is its absolute foreignness to behavioral pretension (to pretending, alleging, or laying claim to some type of criteria of truth or knowledge): Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary.” Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces “true” symptoms? Objectively one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness’s henceforth undiscoverable truth. For if any symptom can be “produced,” and can no longer be taken as a fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat “real” illnesses according to their objective causes. (Simulacra and Simulation 3) Indeed, Rousseau was convinced not that he was suffering from a particular disease, but that in fact he was suffering from all the diseases known to him. In every disease of which he knew he found a symptom in himself: “Since I found in every disease some symptoms of my own, I believed I had them all” (235). There are no clear distinctions between origin and end, symptom and source, lived experience and clinical diagnosis. For Baudrillard, simulation leaves no traceable distinctions. From a semiotic perspective, representational signification collapses in a number of ways: the presence of actual symptoms that resist diagnosis and the absence of traceable sources. The radical component of Baudrillard’s concept of simulation is seen clearly in this instance, not merely in illustrating how representational modes of significations collapse from the Platonic theory of forms to Saussurian linguistics, but also to poststructuralist
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The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
semiotics. He makes a case for the fallibility, for example, of the Derridian concept of “play” (différance, supplemantarity, etc.). Although similar to the work of Jacques Derrida in exposing the principles of logocentricism (presence, the stability of a center, transcendental signification, etc.), Baudrillard, unlike Derrida, rejects the possibility of contingently produced meaning, except through the obligatory mechanics of symbolic exchange.10 For Baudrillard, simulated systems disavow semiotic distinction; the space and difference between signs (sign, the meaningness of combined signifier and signified) is radically negated through an implosive collapse of meaning. Signs become “irreferential” as they circulate within hermetic circuitry that precludes exterior perspectives.11 Gary Genosko aptly describes the state of simulation, or the code, for subjects as a post-perspectival space: Baudrillard thinks that the generalization of the sign from takes place through the process by which the code controls the production of meaning and difference through a “structural manipulation” that is irreducible to a conscious psychology of the use of signs for social differentiation, which is to say, for the sake of a lived distinction. (Masters of Implosion 114) For Rousseau it was not a case of being unable through conscious determination to isolate what disease had afflicted him, but rather, since his physical and emotional ailments lacked a clear source, it became a case of copying and thus simulating all the diseases of which he had become aware. Instead of socially differentiating himself from those around him in spite of his deteriorating bed-ridden state, distinctions collapse when he likens his state to the “vapours” inflicting, presumably, the average person: “The vapours, being the malady of happy people, was therefore mine” (235). That only a few lines later Rousseau describes how his bodily decay denied him the pleasures of an active life speaks strongly to his entrapment in a simulated discourse, without recourse to a conscious and/or rational perspective by which to ascertain knowledge of his condition. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic response to a Baudrillardian critique of simulation would take the form of illustrating how the immanent principles of the unconscious defy simple combinatorial modulation; it is never a question of producing minimally differentiated copies, but rather of producing maximally differentiated copies, which is to say, Deleuze’s version of simulacra (The Logic of Sense 253–65). In reference to Rousseau, Deleuze and Guattari explain how conscious processes are fundamentally different to those of the unconscious; and more
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But doesn’t one indeed lend to the unconscious horrors that could only be those of consciousness, and of a belief too sure of itself? Would it be an exaggeration to say that in the unconscious there is necessarily less cruelty and terror, and of a different type, than in the consciousness of an heir, a soldier, or a Chief of State? The unconscious has its horrors, but they are not anthropomorphic. It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality. The unconscious is Rousseauistic, being man-nature. And how much malice and ruse there are in Rousseau! (Anti-Oedipus 112) Was Rousseau really caught up in tautological simulation, or rather was he on the road to discovering the horrors of the unconscious through a form of “vigilant and insomniac rationality”? Was the uncertainty, paranoia, and hypochondria actual affects of Rousseau’s anxiety and his inner masochistic drive for desiring-pain-waves en route to becoming a totalized BwO? And does the dissonance between symptoms and clinical diagnosis speak most evocatively of the refusal of desiring-production to be absolutely categorized? Rousseau refers paranoiacally to the mysterious “vapours [hypochondria] mixed up in all this” (235). He even makes the meaningful Deleuzeoguattarian connection, albeit probably a slip of the pen, between the necessity for physical fitness and his body as an effective surface for recording the agonistic contention, as opposed to Baudrillardian hyper-lifeless simulation, between his desiring-machines and BwO; in other words, this is a matter of contention versus simulation, agony versus comfortable numbness. He does these things without questioning the rationale behind his suffering. He simply presupposes that he must suffer and takes pride in this idea: “Later, despite my declining years and very real and serious maladies, my body seems to have regained its strength, the better to feel my suffering; and now as I write this, weak and close upon sixty, and racked by pains of every description, I feel more strength and life in me with which to suffer than I had for enjoyment when I was in the flower of my youth and in the midst of genuine happiness” (235). For Rousseau, suffering was an ambiguous and unavoidable reality, or was it? Indeed, the schizoanalytic unconscious, as Deleuze and Guattari triumphantly proclaim, operates immanently and in a non-reductive manner. It is only through belief in the figure of the priest (most often the psychoanalytic one) through whom, according to Deleuze and Guattari,
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importantly, how the latter processes cannot be understood in terms of the constitutional arrangements of the former:
we lose faith in the affirmative functions of the unconscious and become “converted” to believing in, most likely, transcendental impositions on our immanent desiring-productions: “Doubtless there are many other forces besides psychoanalysis for oedipalizing the unconscious, rendering it guilty, castrating it. But psychoanalysis reinforces the movement, it invents a last priest. Oedipal analysis imposes a transcendent use on all the syntheses of the unconscious, ensuring their conversion” (AntiOedipus, 112). Of course, ultimately not knowing to whom or what to prostrate himself, Rousseau’s desiring-machines’s continual desire for desiring-production and the never-ending effort of his BwO to repress their desire and deterritorialize itself were unidentified and thus incomprehensible to Rousseau. However, the overall effects of the conflicts were not entirely removed from his conscious regulation. Evidently, his suffering could be lessened or averted, and this happened when his desiring-production subverted its repression by the BwO and was realized and encoded externally, like his pain-waves, on some object (such as his own body), in a creation of his (such as his writings) and/or by impregnating the complexities of a social situation. Freud observes: Hypochondria, like organic disease, manifests itself in distressing and painful bodily sensations, and it has the same effect as organic disease on the distribution of the libido. The hypochondriac withdraws both interest and libido – the latter specially markedly – from the objects of the external world and concentrates both of them upon the organ that is engaging his attention. (“On Narcissism” 551) Accordingly, Rousseau’s hypochondriac affliction and antiproductivity diminished as his libidinal energy augmented. For instance, when Mme de Larnage took an interest in him, Rousseau declares: “So she undertook my conquest, and it was good-bye to poor Jean-Jacques, or rather to his fever, his vapours, and his polypus. It was good-bye to everything when in her company, except certain palpitations which remained and of which she did not wish to cure me” (237). Rousseau’s desiring-production temporarily eclipsed or blocked the progress made by his BwO. “It was clear,” admits Rousseau, “that my doctors, who had discovered nothing about my illness, regarded me as a hypochondriac” (245). Freud, like Rousseau’s doctors, would have also considered him someone suffering from the “phenomena of hypochondria” (“On Narcissism” 552). Freud treats hypochondria as a slippery and obscure disorder, one that he could not easily explain or distinguish. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari offer a sensible explanation for hypochondria as a probable
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consequence of the BwO tussle: plagued by the nervous and often painful intensities of imaginary diseases, the hypochondriac body is one of the body-types capable of coming close to realizing the BwO; it is a common manifestation of any body desperately seeking BwO status. Therefore the schizoanalyst would not consider Rousseau’s hypochondria a mental disorder per se; Rousseau would not be perceived or treated as strange, abnormal, or enigmatic. Thus, under the influence of schizoanalytic theory, it is unlikely that Rousseau would have internalized the pejorative implications of these sentiments; it is less likely that his contemplation of the illness would have resulted in a negative self-concept. But, if the neurotically Janus-faced methodologies of psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis prove unconvincing, we still carry in our back pockets a copy of a Baudrillardian semiotext(e). If we move investigativeexpansively, act as fugitive dealers of the illicit in the same way that The Matrix’s Mr. Anderson (aka Neo) produces the coveted hacked software from within the hollowed out pages of his copy of Simulacra and Simulations, what emerges in our imaginations is a stucco figurine of the Baudrillardian priest (one of those Deleuzeoguattarian “other forces” of conversion), of what has become, according to Mike Gane, a familiar label with which to associate Baudrillard: “the high priest of postmodernism” (Symbolic Exchange and Death viii). Far from acknowledging involvement in the practice of converting, and moreover, repressing subjects, Baudrillard would claim, instead, that in critiquing Deleuze and Guattari, he is revealing the hallucinatory underpinnings of belief in the immanent principles of the schizoanalytic unconscious and the “Marxian” tension12 between the BwO and desiring-production: A whole liberatory phantasmagoria is drawn in opposition to the constraints of modern society, a representation of nature and of beasts as savagery, as the freedom to “fulfill all needs,” today “of realizing all his desires” – because modern Rousseauism has taken the form of the indeterminancy of drive, of the wandering of desire and of the nomadism of infinitude – but it is the same mystique of unleashed, noncoded forces with no finality other than their own eruption. Now, free, virgin nature, without limits or territories, where each wanders at will, never existed, except in the imaginary of the dominant order, of which this nature is the equivalent mirror. We project (nature, desire, animality, rhizome . . .) the very schema of deterritorialization that is that of the economic system and of capital as ideal savagery. (Simulacra and Simulation 140–1)
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The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
For Baudrillard, the “vigilant and insomniac rationality” (Anti-Oedipus 112) that Deleuze and Guattari locate in Rousseau is only a Rousseauianinspired romantic projection, but also a mirror on which to reflect their own Deleuzeoguattarian vocabulary, as parroted by Baudrillard: “indeterminancy of drive,” “wandering of desire,” “nomadism of infinitude,” “virgin nature, without limits or territories.” Unlike Rousseau’s historically-specific contributions to the tenets of Romanticism, the “modern Rousseauism” appropriated in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought no longer holds meaningfully explorative dimensions. Instead, it is absorbed, via ineluctably subsuming reification, in the economic forces of hegemonic capitalism and state machinery. Although not designed for clinical application like schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, transversal theory can offer a possible explanation for Rousseau’s hypochondria. Rousseau was extraordinarily aware of his affective presence and he was equipped with the sensibility, vocabulary, and eloquence with which to articulate his experience. This suggests that his level of reflexive-consciousness was also extraordinary, and clearly oscillating and escalating, sometimes exponentially with over-lucidity, as he became more obsessively introspective and self-critical vis-à-vis his pressurized belongings in a society of which he could not have been typical. He was a celebrity philosopher, political theorist, novelist, and composer with tremendous emulative authority. His experience interrogated the limits of reflexive-consciousness. It is unclear whether extreme reflexive-consciousness ultimately reaches a vanishing point of hyper-awareness where consciousness becomes paused or obliterated. Whatever the outcome, transversal theory can imagine an automatic or non-conscious defensive response in the form of fantastic somatic knowledge, in other words, imaginary comprehension of bodily intensity. Other than sexual stimulation, which is unfortunately normally too short-lived in comparison with disease, what could be more effective than hypochondria? The mind hunting for fugitive elements of an unidentified enemy surreptitiously plaguing the body through guerrilla warfare cannot afford to lose focus. It must be alert and ready to make a phenomenological intervention at any moment.
Fugitive desires (or mirror, mirror on the wall . . .) Rousseau’s encounter with the prostitute, Giulietta, is a conspicuous external, social manifestation of his internal predicament. Rousseau states that his rendezvous with Giulietta was the “one incident in my life which plainly reveals my character,” and that it will provide his
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readers with “complete knowledge of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (300). For him to recount this incident and accomplish “the purpose of my book” (300), which is, says Rousseau, “to reveal my inner thoughts exactly in all situations of my life” and give “a history of my soul” (262), Rousseau maintains that he “shall” possess the necessary “strength to despise the false modesty which might prevent my fulfilling it” (300). Once more, in his introduction to the incident, we are confronted with Rousseau’s pleasure-postponement: the repressive forces of his BwO emerge in what he terms his “false modesty,” that idiosyncrasy which still “might prevent” the pleasurable fulfillment of his self-proclaimed “purpose.” This “purpose,” according to Deleuze and Guattari, could have been predominantly inspired by: (1) Rousseau’s desiring-production; (2) the symptomatic paranoia of his BwO (the desire to rationalize publicly the nature of his character and thus defend himself and his BwO against their imaginary “enemies” – as Rousseau himself frequently calls them13 ); and/or (3) the desiring-recording inadvertently inaugurated by the fierceness of the war between Rousseau’s BwO and desiring-machines. Whether Rousseau’s “false modesty” was victorious in impeding or distorting his account of his meeting with Giulietta, even partially so, is something which we can never know for certain. As schizoanalytical material, however, the “two or three pages” (300) which Rousseau does proffer on the topic are very informative. “Never was such sweet pleasure offered to mortal heart and senses,” says Rousseau regretfully of his brief relationship with Giulietta: “Alas, had I only known how to enjoy it fully and completely for a single second . . . . I dulled all its delights. I killed them as if on purpose” (300). But why did Rousseau kill its delights “as if on purpose”? And if he did not do it on purpose, then how and why might he have done it? Rousseau himself divulges that he “has always had a disgust for prostitutes” (296). Yet if he truly had such a “disgust for prostitutes,” why did he visit them? According to a Freudian interpretation, Rousseau’s meetings with prostitutes could plausibly be explained as stemming from a common male precondition for loving. At an early age, claims Freud, the boy child “tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing”; they welcome the penis, they copulate (“A Special Type” 391–2). Inasmuch as the boy child combines traditionally antithetical stereotypes, and since conscious binary oppositions such as this Madonna/whore dichotomy often exist in the unconscious as a unity, Freud asserts that the prostitute is a likely “object-choice” for a man because she functions as a replacement for his now repressed childhood
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The Masochistic Quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
object of sexual desire: his mother (“A Special Type” 389–91). While for Freud, of course, this explanation relates directly to his theory of the Oedipus complex, Deleuze and Guattari would understand Rousseau’s motivation to visit prostitutes as predominately masochistic, as a psychological procedure for the realization of his suppressed masochism; his “disgust” would be considered a phobia, an aspect of his paranoia or hypochondria: his deep craving for anxiety-intensities. Psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic theories, and their corresponding methodologies, both overlook the framing mechanism Rousseau employs to describe his encounter with Guiletta. Both strive to give an account of the importance Rousseau attributes to this encounter primarily in terms of desire; that is, Freud perceives the encounter according to the regressive schema of the psycho-sexual development of persons, whereas Deleuze and Guattari perceive it according to a libratory schema of immanent desiring-production always already at stake in the development of persons. What follows from this comparison is the way both methodologies are unwavering in their reliance on the criteria that forms the development of sexual psychology and activity. Despite the encounter being an explicitly sexual one, Rousseau frames it retrospectively as the privileged experience that enables the completion of a totalizing account of himself to the extent that it is the “one incident in my life which plainly reveals my character” and allows for the “complete knowledge of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (300). At risk in the implicit tension of Rousseau’s expression is the presumed satisfaction of providing a totalized account of himself vis-à-vis the underlying traumatic exposure to a prostitute for whom he always had disgust (296). Baudrillard explains that such experiences are symptomatic of lingering on thresholds of simulation; trauma necessarily underlies subjective narration that depends upon historical intervention and manifests precisely when the pivotal moment of development renders itself as what he calls “irreferant”: One can explain it by evoking the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hypothesis). This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children, as serious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our “irreferential” era. (Simulacra and Simulation 44)
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To be sure, as mentioned above, Freud observes the figure of the prostitute as a supplementary “object-choice,” which stands in for an earlier sexual desire projected towards the mother (“A Special Type” 389–91). Thus, according to Baudrillard à la Freud, Rousseau’s relationship to Guiletta is indicative of Rousseau’s passage, at some point in his psychic development, into the “irreferential era” for which “fetishized history” is “serious,” “profound,” and “irreversible.” Consistent with this perspective, it is perhaps more evocative, however, that Rousseau finds Guilleta to possess the “secret flaw,” a mark that affirms Rousseau’s disgust for prostitutes, assuring him, as it were, that they are “some kind of monster, rejected by Nature, men and love” (301). When speaking of an earlier rendezvous with a different prostitute, Rousseau confesses: “I was so strangely stupid as to give in to her scruple,” and after the sexual interaction, “so certain that I had caught the pox that the first thing I did on my return was to send for the surgeon and ask for some medicines” (297). Not surprisingly, the medicines were apparently ineffective: “Nothing can equal the uneasiness I felt for a whole three weeks,” says Rousseau, “without any real discomfort or any obvious symptom to justify it” (297). If we follow Baudrillard, Rousseau’s intense dread of disease, his view of prostitutes as insidious transmitters of disease, and the subsequent anxiety he experienced after being with prostitutes together demonstrate that his engagements with them were not primarily motivated by masochistic desire as Freud and Deleuze and Guattari would speculate in their own ways. Instead, these thoughts and feelings are products of his desire to recuperate such masochism apparent through fetishized memories culminating in an irreferential period of his life. For Baudrillard, the loss of the referential is not a matter of lack, but of instantiation of a new state, affirmed magically through the fetishization of history. A medicinal wand is wielded in response to a loss, and when the fairy dust settles there stands an irreferant subject on the horizon of a fantastic era replete with, via the optic of transversal theory (as a possible appropriation of Baudrillard), unlimited opportunity for becomings through and as simulacra, and only simulacra. However fulfilled, the opportunity is shot through with nostalgia, a valuation mechanism of psychic preservation. The arc of Rousseau’s conscious thought process gains momentum from his reliance on that which has already past, the inevitably fetishized encounters with prostitutes. Unsurprisingly the momentum halts and achieves inertia in Rousseau’s inability to justify his account meaningfully. His dread of diseases dissipates without the legitimating appearance of any correlative symptoms. According to Baudrillard, Rousseau’s account is of precisely the era of simulation and the
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reign of irreferant semiotics when the power of augmenting personal narrative through historical intervention ceases to be productive, and fetishized history, eviscerated of the real, enables and affects further substantiations. Furthermore, the collapse of history as meaningful referent signals the conjunction of trauma and nostalgia: “Its reinjection has no value as conscious awareness but only as nostalgia for a lost referential” (Simulacra and Simulation 44). For the nostalgic Rousseau, the prostitutes constituted the female torturers or sadists for whom he had longed since childhood. His voluntary and repeated meetings with them caused him to suffer (albeit perhaps simulation too) from a variety of simulated ailments, as well as from a nostalgic sense of guilt and shame, all of which successfully tormented him for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. Rousseau was so overcome by the “value” of Giulietta’s “charms and caresses” that, “fearing to lose the fruit prematurely,” he “tried to make haste and pluck it” (300). Nevertheless, his venture was thwarted: “Suddenly,” recalls Rousseau, “I felt a deathly cold flow through my veins; my legs trembled; I sat down on the point of fainting, and wept like a child” (300). What happened to poor Jean-Jacques? “It is true,” acknowledges Freud, “that psychoanalysis puts forward absence of sexual satisfaction as the cause of nervous disorders” (“Wild” Psycho-Analysis’ 353). Central to this premise, and rather analogous to the nervous characteristics commonly stimulated by the contention between the desiring-machines and the BwO, is Freud’s claim that “nervous symptoms arise from a conflict between two forces – on the one hand, the libido (which has as a rule become excessive), and on the other, a rejection of sexuality, or a repression which is over-severe” (“Wild” Psycho-Analysis’ 353). In comparison to schizoanalytic theory, the “libido” of psychoanalysis functions similarly to desiring-production and psychoanalysis’s ideas of “rejection of sexuality” and “repression” could easily be seen as antiproductive symptoms and integral aspects of the BwO struggle. When psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis are applied, however, these parallels in their structures yield very different conclusions, especially when juxtaposed to Baudrillard’s work, since it is tantamount for both theories to analyze the play between conscious and unconscious forces. For psychoanalysis, Rousseau’s temporary breakdown, and later scrutiny of Giulietta’s body, are chiefly results of his nervous disorders: they are unconsciously motivated denunciations of Giulietta as a mother-replacement/love-object and thus as an acceptable commodity fetish; and, if Rousseau was suffering from a prolonged castration complex, they could represent his fear of castration by the terrifying and
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devouring female genitalia. Accordingly, Rousseau’s scrutiny necessarily discovers on Giulietta’s body the “secret flaw” (301) that confirms for him biologically that she is an inferior person of unworthy status, “some kind of monster, rejected by Nature, men and love” (301). Alternatively, schizoanalysis might perceive Rousseau’s breakdown as an obvious external manifestation of his BwO’s success in ephemerally vanquishing his conscious intention to mollify with sexual activity the consciously felt pressures of his desiring-production. Or, the breakdown itself could indicate that it was masochistic enough simply for Rousseau to have visited Giulietta (a prostitute) without ever needing to consummate the endeavor. In the long run, Rousseau’s obstruction of the presumed purpose of the meeting (copulation/orgasm), given his dread of disease, may have been even more masochistically rewarding for him than he anticipated, whether consciously or unconsciously. Unable to “repair my mistakes” during the next scheduled appointment because Giulietta did not show, laments Rousseau, “my insane regret has never left me” (302). Rousseau’s hypochondria and paranoia are explicitly illustrated in his representation of the encounter. Again a prostitute has become for him an infectious threat (“it did not so much as occur to me that the pox might have something to do with it” – her “secret flaw” [301]) and the administer of pain-waves, and now also the external object on which to project his internal conflict: on her breast he “perceived that she had a malformed nipple” (301). Among the theorists we have been discussing, including Baudrillard, there would be a relative degree of agreement concerning the privileged role the “secret flaw” plays in the development of Rousseau’s conscious reflections on sexual encounters, which stem from the locus of Freud’s theorizations regarding sexuality. For Freud, the “secret flaw” constitutes a fetish object integral to psycho-sexual regression. An objective for Deleuze and Guattari is to analyze the notion of object fixation through their concept of the self-sufficiency of desire, and the way in which partial objects constitute the linear series of desiring-production (mouth ↔ breast). Baudrillard also appropriates Freud’s theory of object fetishism to demonstrate how it espouses a sense of historical nostalgia. The main line of contention for these theorists, similarly drawn from the Freudian oeuvre, concerns the play of conscious and unconscious forces. The unconscious, for instance, is integral to the applications of psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic theories to Rousseau’s remarks concerning his sexual development. For Freud, again, the unconscious is indicative of repressed childhood complexes, and, possibly in Rousseau’s case, demonstrative of a castration complex, whereas for Deleuze and
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Guattari it evinces creative desiring-production that refuses to conform to the acceptable conventions of society. In contrast, Baudrillard’s response to both theories entails an outright denial of the existence of the unconscious. In general, despite the underside of consciousness that the unconscious presupposes (terror, violence, sexuality, etc.), the concept of the unconscious is only ever, for Baudrillard, a logical ploy aimed at graphing a sensible relationship between abnormal behavior and its foreign source in “madness.” He describes this schematic as follows: “The challenge of madness has historically been met by the hypothesis of the unconscious. The unconscious is this logistical mechanism that permits us to think madness (and more generally all strange and anomalous formations) in a system of meaning opened to nonmeaning, which will make room for the terrors of the nonsensical, now intelligible under the auspices of a certain discourse: psychic life, drive, repression, etc.” (Simulacra and Simulations 136). It is the procedure by which the unconscious is framed as an algorithmic function that enables, what Baudrillard surely considers, capricious assertions regarding human behavior: Rousseau keeping himself on the verge of receiving more punishment from Mlle Lambercier as evidence of pain waves, an unconscious and masochistic state of fervor that would maintain a heightened level of desire (“I refrained from earning a fresh punishment” [26]); Rousseau’s full-scale BwO’s attack on his organs during his period of immobilization, an unconscious attempt to sustain zero productivity and thus maximize the tension between desiring-production and anti-production (“I found in every disease some symptoms of my own” [235]); the Rousseauistic unconscious comprehending the underlying cruelty and horror that affects the individual (masochism, pain waves, the BwO) in such a way that is fundamentally foreign to conscious reflection and, consequently, forms a mode of understanding based in what Deleuze and Guattari call “vigilant and insomniac rationality” (Anti-Oedipus 112) (“The vapours, being the malady of happy people, was therefore mine” [235]); the unconscious unity of the Madonna/whore dichotomy that explains Rousseau’s fetishistic object-choice of prostitutes as replacement for a repressed Oedipal desire for his mother (“Never was such sweet pleasure offered to mortal heart and senses” [300]); and, as an alternative on this object-choice, Rousseau’s search for prostitutes as a way in which to liberate and realize his suppressed masochism in the form of anxiety-desire (he “always had a disgust for prostitutes” [296]). Moreover, for Baudrillard it is not very remarkable, and an obvious attempt to attract attention, that such theories propose the uncovering
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Theoretical production, like material production, loses its determinacy and begins to turn around itself, slipping abysmally [en abyme] towards a reality that cannot be found. This is where we are today: undecidibility, the era of floating theories, as much as floating money. No matter what perspective they come from (the psychoanalytic included), no matter with what violence they struggle and claim to rediscover an immanence, or a movement without systems of reference (Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.), all contemporary theories are floating and have no meaning other than to serve as signs for one another. (Symbolic Exchange and Death 44) “Theoretical production” parallels the way the “irreferant” subject stands on the horizon of simulation, precluded from a perspectival space like that speculated through Rousseau’s hypochondria that disabled deliberation over distinctions between the physical symptoms of the ailment and the medical diagnosis of the sources. In this sense, theoretical production loses itself through its incapacity to acquire a legitimate perspective on social, economic, and political manifestations, striving desperately, but ultimately failing, according to Baudrillard, to recover a stable relationship to extent phenomena. For Baudrillard, theories attempt to breach simulation through strategies of “violence” and “struggle” that aim to “rediscover an immanence” or “movement without systems of reference,” but such approaches, nevertheless, encounter the collapse and implosive folding together of the perspectival position and their object of scrutiny (the subject, social behavior, etc.). The consequence is that contemporary theoretical production becomes unable to generate meaning, except self-referentially, “to serve as signs for one another.” It follows, according to Baudrillard’s criticism of theoretical production, that although schizoanalysis feigns to recover immanent principles (the schizoanalytic unconscious and desiring-production, among others), conceptuality as such is delimited in its adherence to an already circumscribed logic of the semiotic exchange with other principles and structures. For instance, schizoanalytic desire proposes that the process of desiring-production operates exterior to a system of reference, as Baudrillard claims it presupposes, “a movement without systems of reference (Deleuze, Lyotard, etc.),” so that its self-sufficiency, its autonomic
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of radically foreign sources for subjective phenomena in the guise of psychic, behavioral, and social structures; and, to substantiate this enterprise inspirationally, they conjure for themselves a sense of urgent radicalism:
means of production, acquires its theoretical meaning by trading off on the psychoanalytic conception of desire being predicated on lack or, more generally, on the acquisition or loss of an object. For Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic unconscious is “a factory, a workshop” (Anti-Oedipus 55) that claims to “rediscover” a forward-looking production, one that operates immanently, violently, and cruelly for the Rousseaustic unconscious. The schizoanalytic unconscious, for Deleuze and Guattari, is radically opposed to, while for Baudrillard it merely exchanges on, the psychoanalytic unconscious that is “a theater, a scene and its staging” (Anti-Oedipus 55) that operates according to representational rather than immanent principles. Baudrillard may be correct that “Theory no longer has any use-value” (44; see epigraph to this chapter), and so whether we chose to ignore him or engage him depends on our level of agreement and investment. Needless to say, as a master of theoretical production himself (“the high priest of postmodernism”), his plea to us, implicitly, is either for us to refrain from our own theoretical production, thereby resigning the stage to him, or, and more likely, for us to implode with him.
Subject matters of perspective Having returned our stucco figurine of Baudrillard to our dashboard (until later in this book), yet fully energized by our brief conversation, we want to turn to some general differences between psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic theory which are apparent even within the confines of this application. Whereas psychoanalysis presupposes and privileges the libido as the biological origin and principal catalyst in the development of human psychology, schizoanalysis understands libidinal drive as only one of several primary side effects brought about by the interaction of two profound psychic processes (the desiring-machines and the BwO) that contribute capriciously and in a variety of ways to psychological formation. The libido is neither determined centrally nor centrally located by schizoanalysis, but seen as suffusing organically various assemblages of psychic and social forces within which we are caught up at different times; for instance, Rousseau was caught up in an assemblage with Giulietta. Libidinal assemblages invest and are invested by social fields, with all the machineries they bring into play, all the multiple love-subjects and love-objects. Any libidinal investment is necessarily a collective statement, since in any social field, “There are no individual statements, only statement-producing machinic assemblages” (Plateaus 36). For Freud, “the libido must be desexualized and sublimated in order to invest society
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and its flows,” but for Deleuze and Guattari, “it is love, desire, and their flows that manifest the directly social character of the nonsublimated libido and its sexual investments” (Anti-Oedipus 353). Every assemblage is fundamentally libidinal and unconsciously motivated, and every libido or unconscious is fundamentally associated with certain assemblages. Nothing exists independently. Everything is plugged in everywhere. Unlike an assemblage haphazardly put together, psychoanalysis is a sociopolitical conductor that typically operates in the service of state power, which is to say, that psychoanalysis strives for organizational unity through dissective-cohesive methods. As such it is often appropriated to support institutionalized forms of ideological investment in the distribution of power within the social and political fields. Legitimated by the official Freudian decoder ring, attainable in real and/or imaginary terms through many years of training at either a Psychoanalytic Institute (there are many worldwide) or in a doctoral program in literature (there are many more of these), we can imagine ourselves as master decoders and interpolators of psychological meaning, accounting for all conscious and unconscious processes. To accomplish this, psychoanalysis “subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the phallus-tree – not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation and treatment” and “bases its own dictatorial power on a dictatorial conception of the unconscious” (Plateaus 17). The psychoanalyst conveniently explains the unconscious in such a way that all psychological phenomena can be understood according to a phallocentric, patriarchal, heterosexist credo: in the final analysis, psychological whole(some)ness is an ideal only attainable for heterosexual men. The psychoanalyst does what it takes to perpetuate the order of things, simultaneously using and reinforcing the privileged position of psychoanalysis within that order: this entails molding the patient’s unconscious to the predetermined model; neuroticizing the thought patterns of the patient if necessary; subjugating the patient through a diagnostic process of classification. To be sure, psychoanalysis is a despotic theory: “there is always a general, always a leader (General Freud)” (Plateaus 18). This hermeneutic and authoritative arrangement, one that is reductive and absolute, circumscribes psychoanalysis’s potential, its maneuverability and scope. Like psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis is also a sociopolitical conductor with an ideological investment in the distribution of power within the social field. However, schizoanalysis strives to complicate, redefine, and equilibrate the existing order of things rather than consolidate it. To accomplish this, schizoanalysis reformulates the unconscious of
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The unconscious no longer designates the hidden principle of the transcendent plane of organization, but the process of the immanent plane of consistency as it appears on itself in the course of its construction. For the unconscious must be constructed, not rediscovered. There is no longer a conscious-unconscious dualism machine, because the unconscious is, or rather is produced, there where consciousness goes, carried by the plane. (Plateaus 284) Schizoanalysis comprehends the unconscious not as a symbolic structure, but as an informative process both multiple and particular and produced with new collective statements, different desires, etc. within an expanding range of historical determinations within which the related conscious operates. When considered as words and concepts, however analyzed, statements remain profound in the sense of enabling and affecting “construction” of new worlds for individuals and groups through rhizomatic sprawlings within and across social fields. Words have the power, even as proper names, to splinter off intensively to effect new molecular assemblages, and not remain merely at the level, as they do for psychoanalysis, of authoritative, transcendent, and unifying symbolic structures (the phallus → Oedipus → castration).14 Nevertheless, as we have demonstrated throughout this chapter, schizoanalysis still, contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that for them “the unconscious is, or rather is produced, there where consciousness goes, carried by the plane,” relies on the concept of a psychic structure (BwO ↔ desiringmachines) that operates unconsciously. Thus, both the unconscious and the psychic structure that couches it does require rediscovery (in opposition to the psychoanalysis’s model of “recapitulation”) in order for individuals to comprehend productively, and always retroactively, their desiring-condition as symptomatically caught up in social-production. “The task of schizoanalysis,” as Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, “therefore is to reach the investments of unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are differentiated from the preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they are not merely capable of counteracting them, but also of coexisting with them in opposite modes” (Anti-Oedipus 350). Instead of attempting, like psychoanalysis,
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psychoanalysis and transforms it into an acentered system, a machinic network that is interpretively irreducible to the logic of “arborescent structures.” Schizoanalysis’s unconscious is in no way an obstacle, a key, or a mysterious thing that we must reveal, reckon with, and adopt (on the couch, in the classroom, or in academic writing):
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to appropriate and solidify egos under the auspices of proper symbolic structures based on hierarchical scales of normality, schizoanalysis takes apart egos and their presuppositions. Like transversal theory, and the transversal poetics it informs, schizoanalysis strives to empower subjective singularities within multiplicities of consciousness that intersect and conjoin both individuals and groups – their subjective and official territories; it mobilizes the ideational and affective flows they inspire and transmit; it highlights the ambiguities, slippages, and fractures within conditions of identity. Unlike schizoanalysis, however, in which retrospection operates implicitly for understandings of subjectivity, becomings, and consciousness, transversal theory insists on positive recognition of interfaces, mutual, parallel, and disjunctive desires, assemblage-statements, the infinite network in which we all contribute in continuous spacetime. Continuing in the direction to which schizoanalysis points, transversal poetics accepts similarities and differences as affirmatively and reciprocally enabling and affecting reflexiveconsciousness, becomings, subjunctive and transversal movements, all of which encourage investigative-expansive exploration and participation in paradigm shifts, new universes of experience, and communities founded on positive differences. Use your transversal lube now!
Notes 1. For more on subjectivity, the aleatory, and the other, see the chapter on “Habit” in Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge: Swerve Editions, 1992): 47–92; the chapter on “Transcendental Empiricism” in Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002): 69–90; and Constantin Boundas’ entry on “Subjectivity” in The Deleuze Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005): 268–70. 2. Deleuze and Guattari explain that when desire is predicated on lack, it becomes fastened within an institutional regime of signification that demarcates expression and behavior according to dualistic lines of prohibition and transgression: From the moment lack is reintroduced into desire, all of desiringproduction is crushed, reduced to being no more than the production of fantasy; but the sign does not produce fantasies, it is a production of the real and a position of desire within reality. From the moment desire is welded again to the law – we needn’t point what is known since time began: that there is no desire without law – the eternal operation of eternal repression recommences, the operation that closes around the unconscious the circle of prohibition and transgression. (Anti-Oedipus 111)
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3. Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Canada: Penguin, 2004). For information on the book and the awardwinning documentary inspired by it, see http://www.thecorporation.com/. 4. For more on the primacy of immanent criteria to desiring-production, the unconscious, and in general shizoanalysis, see the section, “A Recapitulation of the Three Syntheses” in Anti-Oedipus (106–12). 5. See, for example, Deleuze and Guattari’s commentary on how libidinal desires are invested in the social field, not necessarily according to preconscious or ideological formulations, but implicated nevertheless as integral components in the formation of the infrastructure, expressed often in class antagonism (Anti-Oedipus 104). 6. See Anti-Oedipus, 296–322. 7. See Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, published with Leopold von SacherMasoch’s Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1991), for a discussion of masochism’s relationship to sadism and the law, that of psychoanalysis and the State. Central to this discussion is Deleuze’s assertion that: A close examination of masochistic fantasies or rites reveals that while they bring into play the very strictest application of the law, the result in every case is the opposite of what might be expected (thus whipping, far from punishing or preventing an erection, provokes and ensures it). It is a demonstration of the laws absurdity. The Masochist regards the law as a punitive process and therefore begins by having the punishment inflicted upon himself; once he has undergone the punishment, he feels that he is allowed or indeed commanded to experience the pleasure that the law was supposed to forbid. (88) For Deleuze, masochism becomes a process of subverting and mocking the law; masochism locates the masochist beyond the law. 8. In The Confessions, Rousseau does inform us that he did, at some earlier point in his life, “receive blows intended” for his brother, but does not mention any pain related to this incident. The Confessions, trans. and intro. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), 21. We are not including the original French since the English translation in no way problematizes our reading. All subsequent references to The Confessions will be included parenthetically in the text. 9. Psychoanalysis does not account for the fact that in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, the literary model from which Freud derived the name “Oedipus” for his fundamental complex/theory, Oedipus killed his father (Laius) only after Laius attempted to kill him: Oedipus killed his father in self-defense (see lines 885–98). Freud does indicate that a father might be jealous of his son’s close relationship with the mother, but, according to Freud, this jealousy does not necessarily imply that the father wants the son removed from the picture, nor does it occur at any regular period in the Oedipal process. 10. Symbolic exchange, for Baudrillard, is the counter-measure to simulation as it encompasses a chaotic force capable of interrupting and reversing, however temporarily, the closed-circuitry of simacularum. Based on Marcel Mauss’ anthropological theory of gift exchange, symbolic exchange operates on the basis of reciprocal obligation and sacrifice, which undermines post-industrial economics through both anti-ulititarian and destructive uses of goods.
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the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. (Simulacra and Simulation 6) 12. For Baudrillard’s position on Marxism, see his The Mirror of Production. 13. Confessions, 590 (for example). 14. See A Thousand Plateaus, 27–8.
Works cited Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. eds and intro. Susan Sontag. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. ——. Artaud Anthology. trans. F. Teri Wehn and Jack Hirschman. San Francisco: City Lights, 1965. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ——. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. Columbia University Press: New York, 1990. ——. Coldness and Cruelty, published with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. ——. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Genosko, Gary. McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” “Wild” Psycho-Analysis,” “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” “On Beginning the Treatment.” The Freud Reader. eds Peter Gay. New York: Norton, 1989. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. trans. W. D. Halls (London and New York: Norton, 1990). Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Cambridge: Swerve Editions, 1992. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Confessions. trans. and intro. J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1953.
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11. Baudrillard describes the negation of signs as follows:
The Cartographic Impulse: Certeau’s Transversality, Foucault’s Panoptic Discourse, Cusa’s Empiricism, and Google’s New World Joseph Fitzpatrick & Bryan Reynolds
Above all (and this is a corollary, but an important one), the phenomenological and praxiological analysis of cultural trajectories must allow to be grasped at once a composition of places and the innovation that modifies it by dint of moving and cutting across them. Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural (146) Through his rigorous examinations of the common, the quotidian, the personal, the plural practices that establish and continually transform societies, Michel de Certeau develops a conception of culture born of the perpetual transgression, however subtle or pronounced, of the boundaries imposed by all ordering and totalizing systems, whether theoretical or social. This view of culture as a “cutting across” of boundaries, which can be found in many forms throughout his work, achieves a special significance for the study of subjectification in his discussion of “Spatial Practices” that comprises the third section of The Practice of Everyday Life. In an important essay on Certeau’s theory of space, Ian Buchanan argues that “our understanding of culture must commence with an understanding of the formation of the subject,” and that the latter is addressed by Certeau through his essays on space (129–30). Following this assertion, we want to argue that Certeau’s analyses of spatial practices in Heterologies, “The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa,” and The Practice of Everyday Life (particularly the chapter “Walking in the City,” 91–110), outline a theory that explains subjectivity as what amounts to, as Certeau puts it in Culture in the Plural, “a composition of places and the innovation that modifies 124
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it by dint of moving and cutting across them” (146). By articulating the close relationships between Certeau’s spatial theory and our own work on transversal movement, we hope to show that the method of analysis Certeau employs in “Walking in the City” (and describes in several other works) is itself marked by the “transversal” tactics that his theory illustrates.1 Our primary focus will be Certeau’s critique of Michel Foucault’s methodology in The Practice of Everyday Life and Heterologies since it allows us to demonstrate the various ways in which Certeau moves theoretically and analytically beyond what transversal theory calls a dissective–cohesive mode to offer an investigative–expansive mode of analysis. As the field of inquiry gets broader and thicker, Certeau’s exploration also provides a transversal understanding of processes of subject formation with wide-ranging implications. Simply put, according to transversal theory, dissective–cohesive modes, which characterize most dialectical argumentation, divide their subject matter into constituent parts in order to examine those parts discretely with the goal of reassembling them into a unified and accountable whole – for instance, the city or the human subject in “Walking in the City.” Alternatively, investigative–expansive modes also divide their subject matter into parts, but instead of seeking wholeness they examine the relationships of the parts with the environments in which the subject matter and the parts are situated and associated, from which they came, where they are going to go, might go, or may never go.2 From our discussion of Certeau, moving investigative-expansively, we continue to explore questions of methodology, subjectivity, and cartography in relation to the sites and traces of the now destroyed World Trade Center, which, when standing, was paramount to Certeau’s argument in “Walking in the City.” This brings us to a consideration of architectural restoration, global mapping, cyber networking, and virtual tourism via the internet.
Postmodern space: Certeau and Jameson In “Heterophenomenology, or Certeau’s Theory of Space,” Ian Buchanan situates Certeau’s writings on the production of space within the postmodern debate over the autonomy of the subject, opposing Certeau’s view to Fredric Jameson’s “assumption that the subject takes his or her psychic bearings from the built environment and only has certain existence so long as he or she can cognitively ‘map’ this environment” (Buchanan 114). Citing the example of the Westin Bonaventure hotel
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in Los Angeles, Jameson argues that “this latest mutation in space – postmodern hyperspace – has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world” (44). The effect on cultural politics, according to Jameson, is that the subject “submerged” by this postmodern hyperspace is deprived of the “critical distance” that makes possible the “positioning of the cultural act outside of the massive Being of capital” (48). Buchanan finds in “Walking in the City” the basis for a critique of this view through a conception of space stemming from “heterophenomenology,” defined as “a phenomenology predicated by a heterogeneously constituted subject which does not take for granted the unity of the body” (112). Focusing on Certeau’s debt to Merleau-Ponty’s theories of perception (which can best be seen in Certeau’s essay “The Madness of Vision”), Buchanan argues that the “subject is not already constituted, thus he/she is able to adapt to new surroundings by forming new and nevertheless constitutive relations with them” (124). He goes on to argue (using Lacanian terms for the subject’s position in discourse) that while Jameson conceives of space as the discursive circumstances that precede and therefore constitute the subject, Certeau presents it instead as the product of the subject’s interaction with the existing environment, a paradigm that restores to the subject a level of agency and intentionality that Jameson’s analysis precludes. While this heterophenomenological approach to space proves useful within the context of Jameson’s discussion of the body’s confusion in postmodern hyperspace, its intense examination of perception as bodily phenomena and its constant reference to Merleau-Ponty lie, by Buchanan’s admission, beyond the scope of Certeau’s essay. We must not forget that the original object of Certeau’s critique was Foucault’s seemingly totalizing treatment of panopticism in his writings of the mid 1970s (starting with Discipline and Punish), and that the problems of vision and perspective that are the focus of Buchanan’s essay are, in Certeau’s writings, always viewed in relation to (and distinction from) the “god” of the panopticon. Following the opening image in “Walking in the City” of a person looking down on New York City from the top of the World Trade Center, Certeau writes: The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval
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The last phrase, “all-seeing power,” which is a quotation from Foucault’s introduction to a French translation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (16), and the reference to the creation of “gods” through the mechanical contrivance of an omniscient perspective (rather than a particular omniscient being), indicate that Certeau associates the “cartographic impulse,” as well as the “elevation” of the World Trade Center that “allows one . . . to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god” (92), with the panoptic practices Foucault describes. Unlike Buchanan, who places Certeau in direct opposition to Jameson, it is our contention that Certeau does not so much “renounce . . . the cartographic impulse” (Buchanan 115) as he in fact expands upon this impulse and the related Foucauldian reading of panopticism.
Foucault and panopticism In a response to Discipline and Punish entitled “Micro-techniques and Panoptic Discourse: A Quid pro Quo,”4 Certeau delineates the state of affairs produced through the development (in the army and in schools) of panoptic disciplinary techniques after the Enlightenment, which had seen the creation of these techniques as a reform of the vengeful and bloody displays of punishment inflicted on criminals by the ancien régime: The new techniques are refined and applied without recourse to any overt ideology: the development of a cellular grid (whether for students, soldiers, workers, criminals, or sick people) transforms space itself into an instrument that can be used to discipline, to program, and to keep under observation any social group. (186) While he performs a critique of Foucault’s analysis of panopticism and panoptic discourse, Certeau does not challenge the basic assertion that the technologies of discipline and surveillance spawned by the panoptic reforms of the Enlightenment have created a regulated and normalized space (a “cellular grid”) in which the modern subject exists. Certeau’s critique follows a characteristic method that is repeated throughout The Practice of Everyday Life: rather than attempting to master or surpass Foucault by searching for internal inconsistencies within his theory of the panoptic partitioning of space, Certeau expands the parameters of
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spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an “all-seeing power”?3 (The Practice of Everyday Life 92)
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What happened to all the other series of procedures that, in their unnoticed itineraries, failed to give rise either to a specific discursive configuration or to a technological systemization? There are many other procedures besides panoptical ones. These might well be looked on as an immense reserve containing the seeds or the traces of alternate developments. (188) In order to understand Certeau’s method, we must realize that this final mixed metaphor is not (simply) a stylistic infelicity, but (also) an intentionally heterogeneous cluster of figures – reserve, seeds, traces – that must be imagined in concert with one another as descriptors of forgotten procedures. Certeau claims that the problems with Foucault’s study stem from his employment of what we have described as a dissective–cohesive mode of analysis. According to Certeau, Foucault’s method is to “extract, and then turn over”: Foucault “isolates a design of some practices from a seamless web, in order to constitute these practices as a distinct and separate corpus, a coherent whole”; then he inverts this isolated and ostensibly unified group of practices (in this case, panoptic practices) so that, “What was obscure, unspoken, and culturally alien becomes the very element that throws light on the theory and upon which the discourse is founded” (190). In this process the “other series of procedures,” everything outside of the panoptic practices, are first separated from those procedures that comprise the object of investigation; then they are marginalized by the inversion that focuses on the “obscure” details capable of illuminating only the isolated group of procedures being studied. Those “other series of procedures” are therefore systematically marginalized and forgotten; their “unnoticed itineraries” lead them away from – or through, or across, or onto – the “cellular grid” of panoptic space like the pedestrians in Certeau’s description of New York. And insofar as Foucault’s panoptic discourse is itself “a narrative, a theoretical narrative, which obeys rules analogous to those panoptic procedures” (191), Certeau traces the itineraries of the forgotten (or ignored) procedures back onto the discourse from which they were originally removed: But we do not yet know what to make of other, equally infinitesimal procedures that have remained unprivileged by history yet which continue to flourish in the interstices of the institutional technologies.
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Foucault’s chosen area of investigation, making it more inclusive, to reveal the forces and “micro-techniques” omitted or elided by Foucault’s reading of panopticism as a strategy of enlightenment:
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This is most particularly the case of procedures that lack the essential precondition indicated by Foucault, namely the possession of a locus or specific space of their own on which the panoptical machinery can function. Such techniques, which are just as operative though without locus, are rhetorical “tactics.” I suggest that these secretly reorganize Foucault’s discourse, colonize his “panoptical” text, and transform it into a “trompe-l’œil.” (189) Certeau’s metaphors again demand attention. Foucault’s “discourse” tacitly assumes the position of the panoptic practices that it sets out to critique: it becomes the public discourse of theory that imposes on history a certain visible organization that is “secretly reorganize[d]” by the procedures it suppresses. While the possibility of tactical “colonization” of discourse forms the horizon of Certeau’s critique, the final image of a text transformed not into a palimpsest but into a “trompe-l’œil” illustrates a crucial transformation of words into image and discourse into space that is central to the argument of The Practice of Everyday Life.
Places, spaces, and the evolution of maps The function of “Walking in the City” (and of the section “Spatial Stories”) within The Practice of Everyday Life might be described as the mapping of Certeau’s central binary of strategies/tactics onto the more specifically spatial binary of place/space. “Strategies,” which Certeau associates with the discourse of panopticism, are defined in the book’s General Introduction as: the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment.” A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it . . . (xix) A “tactic,” by contrast, is “a calculus which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality” (xix). This distinction allows us to understand Foucault’s panoptic procedures as “strategies” that require, both by the definition given in The Practice of Everyday Life and by the implication of the passage from Heterologies quoted above, a “proper” place in which to exercise their authority. The importance of this notion
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of propriety to Certeau’s theory of spatial practices is most clearly evident in the discussion of “Spatial Stories” in The Practice of Everyday Life, where Certeau makes another crucial distinction between “place” (lieu) and “space” (espace) (115–30). The difference between these terms is to a large extent a matter of propriety: “The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place; the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines” (117). Because each element in a place rests in the position in which it belongs, place “implies an indication of stability” (117). Space, on the other hand, exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. . . . Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. . . . In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper.” (117) Space, then, cannot be “proper” because it is a product of action and movement. “In short,” writes Certeau, “space is a practiced place” (117). Almost as soon as he has made this distinction between “place” and “space,” Certeau proceeds to problematize it by considering the example of cartography. Regarding the “current geographical” map, he writes that, “in the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse (that is, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility” (120). The earliest kind of map was “not a ‘geographical map’ but a ‘history book.’ ” It recorded the experiences of a journey (usually a pilgrimage) pictorially: “This drawing outlines not the ‘route’ (there wasn’t one) but the ‘log’ of their journey on foot – an outline marked out by footprints with regular gaps between them and by pictures of the successive events that took place in the course of the journey.” Later maps, from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, “became more autonomous.” They gradually diminished the signs of their own creation, reducing them to the “figurations” of ships or monsters: “these figurations, like fragments of stories, mark on the map the historical operations from which it resulted. Thus, the sailing ship painted on the sea indicates the maritime expedition that made it possible to represent the coastlines” (121). But, according to Certeau, “the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonizes space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it.” The result is the map
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The organization that can be discerned in stories about space in everyday culture is inverted by the process that has isolated a system of geographical places. The difference between the two modes of description obviously does not consist in the presence or absence of practices (they are at work everywhere), but in the fact that maps, constituted as proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowledge, form tables of legible results. Stories about space exhibit on the contrary the operations that allow it, within a constraining and non-“proper” place, to mingle its elements anyway, as one apartment-dweller put it concerning the rooms in his flat: “One can mix them up.” (121) Certeau explicitly defines the distinction between “place” and “space” as a matter of the presence or absence of practices – “space is a practiced place” – yet in this passage he describes maps as if they represent places, even “proper places,” while at the same time he insists that they are the products of practices, and therefore should be considered to represent spaces. The resolution of this paradox rests in the last statement of the quoted passage, in the apartment-dweller’s conception of the multiplicity of possible configurations for his apartment. Certeau continues: In a pre-established geography, which extends (if we limit ourselves to the home) from bedrooms so small that “one can’t do anything in them” to the legendary, long-lost attic that “could be used for everything,” everyday stories tell us what one can do in it and make out of it. They are treatments of space. (122) Stories spatialize by enumerating possibilities, by demarcating the boundaries of what is possible within a given place. The stories that predicated the creation of a map, then, also gave some indication of what could be done in or with the places being mapped (for example, Certeau tells us that medieval “history book” maps would make note of “cities which one was to pass through, spend the night in, pray at, etc.” [120]). The omission of references to these stories from revised or subsequent maps eradicates the explicit assumptions that those stories make
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in its “current geographical form,” bereft (through a gradual process of forgetting) of the visible evidence of its own construction. This explanation of the origin of maps leads to a paradoxical complication of the original distinction between “place” and “space.” Certeau contrasts this process of creating maps to the everyday stories that people use to construct the space around them:
regarding the possibilities of a particular place; in doing so, those assumptions become implicit in the map itself. For example, one cartographer might see a group of rocks in a stream as a crossing point, and therefore note them on the map, while a second cartographer might not conceive of this possible use for the rocks, and thus omit them from the map. The two resulting maps would then implicitly present different ranges of possibility for the use of the rocks, insofar as the latter map would not even record their existence. In this sense we can understand how maps are “proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowledge” and “form tables of legible results,” for although they are presented as objective indicators of place, maps are founded on spatializing assumptions that affect the way that those mapped places are perceived. The forgetting of these original spatializations, their erasure from the increasingly geographical (and geometrical) maps,5 makes it possible for maps to become arbiters of what is “proper” – makes it possible, in short, for spatial constructions to be perceived as “places.”
Panopticism, cartography, and the “utopian” city In “Walking in the City,” Certeau writes that, “The ‘city’ founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation” (94). The first two elements of this operation can be considered abstractions of the processes that we have seen at work in both the discourse of panopticism and the formulation of maps: 1. The production of its own space (un espace propre): rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental, and political pollutions that would compromise it; 2. The substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions; univocal scientific strategies, made possible by the flattening out of all the data in a plane projection, must replace the tactics of users who take advantage of “opportunities” and who, through these trap-events, these lapses in visibility, reproduce the opacities of history everywhere. (94) We have seen the first of these processes at work both in the map itself and in the “cellular grid” into which panoptic disciplinary techniques compartmentalize the city. The second process describes the forgetting of the spatializing travels from which the map arose, or of the complex web of practices from which those of panopticism were originally extracted. The “utopian” city that these elements help to construct is presented by
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The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted.6 (92) This “totalizing” view of the city, in the medieval imagination as much as on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, produces a “panoramacity,” defined by Certeau as: a “theoretical” (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. The voyeur-god created by this fiction, who, like Schreber’s God, knows only cadavers, must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors and make himself alien to them.7 (93) In saying that this “voyeur-god” – established, like the god of the panopticon, through fictions – “knows only cadavers,” Certeau again equates the “cellular grid” of panopticism with the map’s transformation of space into “proper” places: in describing “the law of the place,” he writes that “from the pebble to the cadaver, an inert body always seems, in the West, to found a place” (Practice 118). At this point it is crucial that we pause for a moment, step back from our analysis, and view it transversally. In reference to the terminology mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, we have until now described Certeau’s analysis of spatial practices as tending toward the dissective–cohesive. In other words, we have treated the distinction between “place” and “space,” complicated as it might be, as the axiomatic dichotomy that engenders subsequent distinctions between “strategies” and “tactics,” panoptic practices and the “other procedures” that they repress, the presentation of a map (as place) and its tacit assumptions (as space), and the “voyeur god” and the pedestrian. This final distinction, though, more clearly than any of the others, belies the very idea of treating Certeau as a strictly dissective–cohesive thinker. Buchanan’s essay, which traces out the influence of Merleau-Ponty on Certeau’s theory of space, gives a very different reading of the “voyeur god”-pedestrian opposition. Buchanan bases his analysis on Certeau’s
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Certeau in the essay’s opening image of a view of New York City from the top of the World Trade Center, a view that actualizes the medieval desire (mentioned above) to perceive the whole city in a glimpse, from a “god’s” perspective:
explicit connection of this opposition with the distinction MerleauPonty makes between “geometrical” and “anthropological” space, a distinction that Buchanan claims is an “axiom” for Certeau (120). In the early pages of “Walking in the City,” Certeau states clearly his intention “to locate the practices that are foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions,” and defines these practices tentatively as constituting “an ‘anthropological,’ poetic and mythic experience of space” (193). Buchanan convincingly argues that on these terms Certeau rejects cartography because its assumption of a single, godlike, panoptic perspective is completely alien to the lived experiences of the numerous pedestrians whose individual perspectives give them each a unique spatial interaction with their surroundings (see especially 120–1). We must realize, however, that the terms “geometrical space” and “anthropological space” are not identical to Certeau’s own “place” and “space.” The two sets of terms are, in Certeau’s opinion, “analogous”; yet in the definition of “place” and “space” he gives in “Spatial Stories,” Certeau sets aside Merleau-Ponty’s terms by referring to them in the past tense and by following his discussion of their phenomenological significance with the statement that “the opposition between ‘place’ and ‘space’ will rather refer to two sorts of determination in stories” (Practice 117–18, our emphasis).8 These “analogous” sets of terms are distinguished in such a way that the place/space dichotomy cannot be defined using the terms “anthropological” and “geometrical,” a fact that by the definition of an axiom makes it impossible for Merleau-Ponty’s distinction to be “axiomatic” for Certeau. In “Walking in the City” Certeau mingles these terms, as in his reference to the “voyeur-god . . . who, like Schreber’s God, knows only cadavers,” which combines the omniscient perspective of “geometrical space” with the cadaver imagery that suggests the stasis of “place.” With an awareness of this coexistence of two distinct dissective– cohesive systems within Certeau’s analysis, we can begin to see how “Walking in the City” not only rejects the cartographic impulse of “geometrical space,” but moreover depicts the pedestrian’s daily reconceptualizations of proper “places.” In the context of Merleau-Ponty’s distinction, the voyeur-god’s “oblivion” and “misunderstanding of practices” denote the inauthenticity of the “geometrical” spatializing that is represented by the map or by the view from the top of the World Trade Center. When we think in terms of the place-space distinction, however, this “oblivion” and “misunderstanding” recall the historical evolution both of maps and of panoptic practices. To connect the voyeur-god’s “oblivion” with the view of what was – before the World Trade Center
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was destroyed – present-day New York from 110 stories up is to project those practices that are forgotten in the process of synchronization (the second element that constitutes the “utopian” city) onto the present. In this sense, the panorama-city – or, to use another of Certeau’s appellations, the “concept-city” – is created by forgetting these practices and can be maintained only by ignoring them. The “murky intertwining daily behaviors,” which Certeau spends the rest of the essay describing, continually disrupt the order of a system that, seen from above, appears to be ruled by the law of “place.” They make impossible the third element that Certeau claims is a precondition of the “utopian” city, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes’ State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects – groups, associations, or individuals. “The city,” like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties. (Practice 94) It is in their daily walks, the “intertwining” patterns that could not be discerned from the panoptic height of the World Trade Center’s 110th floor, that individuals continually transgress the “stable” and “isolatable” divisions through which the state attempts to co-opt their subjectivity.
Transversality and anamnesis This drive toward the creation of a universal subject connects the panoptic spatializations of the concept-city back to the idea of transversality. The “stable” and “isolatable” divisions mentioned above, the units of panopticism’s “cellular grid,” the “proper” places delineated by the map, constitute the multi-dimensional assemblage we refer to, in transversal terms, as subjective territory: the combined physical, conceptual, and emotional range through which people experience. Established through subjectification of individuals and groups by state machinery within any society or sub-society by means of its diverse ideological and repressive apparatuses (familial, religious, educational, and juridical structures and forces), in other words its sociopolitical conductors, subjective territories are delineated by physical, conceptual, and emotional boundaries that are normally defined by the prevailing science, morality, and ideology.9 In the interest of creating coherence, as a manifestation of state power,
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defined as any force that works to cohere and order, state machinery works to enclose each subject in a prescribed and regulated subjective territory, that, when overlapped with other subjective territories along similar trajectories and localities (conceptual, emotional, ideological, and so on), form official territories. Official territories develop authorities, what we call sociopolitical conductors, within a greater network of sociopolitical conductors that, in turn, become the state machinery that produces appropriate subjective territories, bringing the phenomena of societal production around. Thus, subjective territory is realized physically (geographically, bodily) as well as conceptually and emotionally; physical constraints influence the conceptual and emotional aspects of subjectivity just as they are symptoms and extensions of these aspects. For example, consider the constructed and monitored life experiences, the subjectivities, of people occupying specific social and class identities (male or female; rich or poor; Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim; and so on). In short, subjective territory is the existential and experiential realm in and from which a given subject of a society perceives and relates to the universe and his or her place in it. And, as we have already seen, maps, with their tacitly imposed spatializations, attempt to definitively mark out “what one can do in . . . and make out of” a space (Practice 122), that is, they direct how one perceives and performs in space, which are crucial acts of defining a subjective territory.10 Within the greater conceptual territory – that is, the realm of possible thought – represented by both known and unexplored worlds (Buchanan’s excellent example of British explorers sailing for the first time to Australia is here particularly apt), the spatial practices of cartographers map out a defined and “proper” system of places. This system contributes to the establishment of subjective territories with boundaries that limit access to as yet non-appropriated conceptual territory, outside of a particular official culture and the domain of its governing state machinery. Whereas the infinite possibilities of conceptual territory are powerfully constrained by the state machinery’s cartographically-implemented subjectification of the individual, we (like Certeau) do not believe that subjective territory is capable of fully containing the subject. Beyond the limits of subjective territory, we must remember, lies the nonsubjectified region of one’s conceptual territory, the open space of transversal territory.11 Relationally comprehended but not itself proper to anything, it contains all of the possibilities that are precluded or excluded by the practices that state machinery uses to enclose the subject and reduce him or her to the proper. Transversal territory can be
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reached by transgressing the boundaries that those practices impose. Put differently, people occupy transversal territory when they defy or surpass the conceptual, emotional, and physical boundaries of their prescribed subjective addresses. This “deviation,” this transgression of the boundaries of subjective territory, is generated by transversal power. Transversal power, which can be found in anything from criminal acts to natural catastrophes to the daily practice of walking in the city, induces people to transversally cut across the striated, organized space of the subject – of all subjective territory – and enter the disorganized yet infinite space of transversality. Recall that we have already seen the importance that Certeau attributes to such a “cutting across” in the production of culture. In “Walking in the City,” he focuses specifically on spatial practices within a panoptically and cartographically defined urban system, and keenly locates and makes visible transversal power in the everyday act of walking: The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). . . . Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other’s blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler, carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choices. (Practice 101) We have also seen that the construction of the “utopian” city through cartographic and panoptic procedures is contingent upon acts of forgetting. The act of walking – and the field of potentially transversal movements that it brings into play – must be forgotten in order to map the city: Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or “window shopping,” that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. (Practice 97) The transversal practice of walking is thus opposed to the forgetting principle of cartography, especially as it encourages subjunctive movement,
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contemplation of the “as-ifs” and “what-ifs” that enable the pedestrian to hypothesize the forgotten, or what was never accessible to the pedestrian, as well as the possible (see Chapter 4 on “shoppingmallspace”). This practice may even involve projective subjunctivity, an imagining of hypothetical scenarios into the history of the cartographer as a means, in this case, to recover the acts and perspectives that informed the mapmaking process. Any kind of “practicing” – a sparring boxer, a chess player struggling against a computer opponent, a musician working through a difficult piece – prevents the forgetting of the myriad tactics, moves, or stylistic subtleties that enable creativities in the sport, game, or concert hall. And just like anyone else who becomes “out of practice,” pedestrians are capable, through the activity of walking, through the triggering of neuron firing along established neurological patterns by which memories had been mapped, of remembering many things that have been forgotten. In both cases, through practices of subjunctivity and remembering, transversal power takes the form of anamnesis, a recollection of the actual (and imaginary) spatial practices that the creation of maps attempted to forget. This anamnesis can be seen clearly in Certeau’s account of traveling (as an extension of walking): Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different. What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, “an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,” the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the “discovery” of relics and legends . . . ?12 (Practice 106–7) Certeau finds similar “relics” lying behind the proper names used as labels throughout the city (as in Nevsky Prospect, Trafalgar Square, or the George Washington Bridge). Although the original referents of these proper names are often forgotten, “their ability to signify outlives [their] first definition” (Practice 104). As with the implicit spatializations of maps, pedestrians dismiss or forget the intended meanings of these proper names and replace those meanings with ones of their own: they appropriate the “ability to signify” with which the names were originally endowed as they exercise their own powers of imagination, of subjunctivity (see Chapter 1 for discussion on proper names and identity becomings). Certeau emphasizes that this deviation from the intended, “proper” meaning – these transversal movements vis-à-vis the actual
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People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers’ steps: names that have ceased precisely to be “proper.” (Practice 105) The remembering of forgotten practices and the subsequent reconstructing or imbuing of them with new meanings are, for Certeau, a means by which transversal power manifests itself. This is what occurs in Certeau’s analysis of Foucault’s theory of panopticism.
Perspective and the panoptic gaze In carrying out this examination of transversal tactics, Certeau repeatedly opposes practices to vision, associating the former with lived experience and the latter with panoptic organizations of space (see especially Practice 93, 97). While the concept-city realized in the view from the top of the World Trade Center is described as panoptic, “The ordinary practitioners of the city. . . . make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms” (Practice 93). Certeau is clear in his assessment of the panoptic perspective, but his association of the individual city dweller’s practice of space with “blindness” leaves his position on the individual’s visual perspective in doubt. For an account of the relationship of the individual’s perspective to the panoptic gaze, we must turn to Certeau’s theorizing of panopticism in “The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa.” In this essay, Certeau analyzes the “mystic theology” outlined in the fifteenth-century bishop Nicholas of Cusa’s treatise De visione Dei sive De icona. The preface to this treatise describes an empirical experiment for the readers to enact using a portrait “whose face is painted with an art so subtle that it seems to look at everything in the vicinity” (11). This portrait is to be hung on the northern wall of a room in which the readers (imagined as monks) are gathered. The monk in the eastern part of the room perceives the portrait staring at him and is surprised when he moves to the western part of the room and discovers that it is staring at him still. Cusa then suggests that the monk walk across the room while keeping his eyes fixed on those of the portrait. In doing so, the monk
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histories that originally generated the proper names – is once again the consequence of anamnesis:
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The voyages of the eye from East to West and from West to East ought to transform the perceived landscape: the spectator, modifying his “point of view,” the painting, as he perceives it, is subject to proportional anamorphoses in the successive places that he occupies. The landscape moves. But the gaze, for its part, does not obey the law of that visual reciprocity that defines a landscape. It “follows” the movements and it remains immutable. Its ubiquity unifies an immobile space where the displacements of the eye ceaselessly change the painting. The circulations of the spectator differentiate two types of space, that of the eye and that of the gaze, which contradict each other in the same space. (18) In this way, the individual’s awareness of the panoptic gaze begins in his own perceptions. But while the locus of panoptic organization is in this case identical with the portals of the gaze – which is to say, the portrait’s eyes are all-seeing because of the way in which the portrait’s eyes are constructed – the situation is different in “Walking in the City.” The panoptic view from the World Trade Center (despite its blindness to the activities of individuals behind and within buildings), according to Certeau, was made possible because of the way that the city itself is constructed. And the New York pedestrian who looks at the skyline or along one of the long straight streets as he walks will have the same experience as Nicholas of Cusa’s monks: the space in which he perceives the changing landscape of the buildings and people around him will coincide with the unchanging backdrop of the Manhattan grid as it was seen from the top of the World Trade Center. The city’s organization does not present itself as obviously as it did to the observer 1370 feet above the street, but it is there to be seen nonetheless. Of course, the appearance of the city’s panoptic organization to the pedestrian need not lead to that panopticism becoming “an operational concept” (Practice 94). The Cusan experiment continues with two monks walking across the room in opposite directions, their eyes fixed on the portrait’s eyes, so that they can finally convince themselves of the painting’s panoptic gaze by verbally reassuring each other that the gaze is simultaneously following the two of them in opposite directions. This
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will observe the eyes following him “continually” from one side of the room to the other and back. This second part of the experiment in which the monk watches the painting as he moves is crucial to our understanding of the individual’s perspective within a panoptic system. In his analysis of this part of the experiment, Certeau discerns two “contradicting” spaces being created:
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coincidence of opposites that mirrors and reinforces the appearance of two contradictory spaces (of the eye and of the gaze) that Certeau sees in the earlier part of the experiment. Analogously, Buchanan argues that the concept-city only forces itself on us through discourse. Because of this, he uses a heterophenomenological approach to find the “critical distance” allowed for by Certeau’s theory of space, from which point of view, “Discourse is a milieu that the emerging subject constitutes as a terrain” (Buchanan 130). We believe, though, that in “Walking in the City” Certeau avoids the visual aspect of the pedestrian’s daily experience (which becomes the starting point of Buchanan’s analysis) because the “critical distance” it provides need not in every case (or even in most cases) escape from the panoptic view available even to the individual’s perspective or vision. Instead, Certeau focuses on the practices that are daily – even perpetually – “cutting across” the existing panoptic arrangements of space.13 The “critical distance” he finds is a kind of transversal territory whose relationship to discourse is perhaps best described by Richard Terdiman in “The Response of the Other”: To respond is to be engaged with someone else; simultaneously it is to remain different or diverse. . . . To respond is to pursue further and yet to cross, to mesh but not to fuse, to be inside the interlocutor’s discourse and outside it at the same time. Not to be absorbed by the other’s voice, but not to cease hearing it either. (3)
Transversal discourse But we may consider the micro-techniques as building the theory, instead of being its object. The question no longer concerns the procedures organizing social surveillance and discipline, but the procedures producing Foucault’s text itself. In fact, the micro-techniques provide not only the content of the discourse but also the process of its construction. (Heterologies 189–90) In this passage from Heterologies, Certeau equates subject matter and method in Foucault, formulating a critique of panoptic discourse as well as Foucault’s theory of panopticism itself. He finds a similar process at work in Nicholas of Cusa’s De icona. The coincidence of opposites that marks the monks’ discovery of the panoptic gaze is portrayed in Certeau’s analysis as a central theme of Cusa’s treatise that is also fundamentally characteristic of his methodology: [Nicholas of Cusa] proceeds on the basis of theoretical excesses: conceptual “flashes” outrun, overflow, and disrupt the formal course
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Such “conceptual ‘flashes’ ” are the hallmarks of a transversality that, not surprisingly, permeates Certeau’s own methodology. To provide critical background for our discussion of this transversality, we want to illustrate briefly Certeau’s longstanding critique of the dissective–cohesive mode of analysis in his earlier writings on historiography, where he recalls the Western historiographical tradition. In The Writing of History, which is his critical account of the historiographical tradition, Certeau’s outlines his view of the ideal historian and the methodology he favors: The historian comes to circulate around acquired rationalizations. He or she works in the margins. In this respect the historian becomes a prowler. In a society gifted at generalization, endowed with powerful centralizing strategies, the historian moves in the direction of the frontiers of great regions already exploited. He or she “deviates” by going back to sorcery, madness, festival, popular literature, the forgotten world of the peasant, Occitania, etc., all these zones of silence. (79) For Certeau, the historian should be what we would call a fugitive explorer; he or she should be a marginal figure, someone who transgresses the boundaries of tradition, place, and spacetime, not in search of wholeness, but of elusive elements, forgotten and strange worlds, new trajectories to follow, even if this requires trespassing on the memories and histories of others. Certeau asserts that it is impossible for the historian to pursue wholeness and still maintain awareness of the heterogeneous nuances inherent both in any historical period and in any historiographical enterprise. To make his argument, Certeau elucidates the historiographical tradition’s dissective–cohesive mode of analysis: In history everything begins with the gesture of setting aside, of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into “documents.” This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality it consists in producing such documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or photographing these objects, simultaneously changing their locus and their status. This gesture consists in “isolating” a body – as in physics – and “denaturing” things in order to turn them into parts
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of the reasoning; they have the capacity of bringing surprise into the analysis and thus of renewing it; they do not obey the principle of non-contradiction and thus cannot be subject to a verification. (“Gaze” 10)
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The effort to break down, categorize, and reconstruct data as coherent and distinct accounts that has dominated Western historiography, Certeau claims, is irresponsible and hopeless. He maintains that, “Certainly, an ideology of ‘real’ or ‘true’ historical ‘facts’ still hovers in the air of our time; it even proliferates in a literature on history,” and this is why, “The transformation of ‘archivistic’ activity is the point of departure and the condition for a new history” (75). For this “new history,” that is always already interconnected and poly-univocal, to identify an independent or coherent event in spacetime would mean that the historian overlooked or forgot the simultaneous influences of and relationships among the event, the mercurial historical process, the particular project of the historian, and the historian’s own location in history. As he puts it, “In any event, reference to a ‘coherence’ that might embrace the totality of data from a period or of a country collides with the resistance of this raw material. From this point on, what these data call forth is no longer a change of the interpretive model, but rather the idea that it may be possible to think of them in the singular. Hence the impression that a single society advances a plurality of heterogeneous but combined developments” (121). To resolve this problem, Certeau argues: As current studies in the social sciences have shown, it appears that we have to conceive of the possibility of distinct and combined systems, without having to introduce into their analysis the support of an originary and unitary reality. This implies that we should be able to think of a plurality of systems specified through heterogeneous types and surfaces of functioning; that the very nature of these systems varies (the religious system, for example, has not always been either stable or distinct from what became a political system); that compatibilities, relations, and reciprocal compensations among different systems specify the units marked off by history; that finally the process by which these units are broken down or change in order to give way to others can be analyzed as the path these combinations follow toward thresholds of compatibility or tolerance among the elements that they are combining. . . . The identification of these systems is clearly relative to conditions and models of investigation. (122)
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which will fill the lacunae inside an a priori totality. It forms the “collection” of documents. In the words of Jean Baudrillard, it places things in a “marginal system.” It exiles them from practice in order to confer upon them the status of “abstract” objects of knowledge. Far from accepting “data,” this gesture forms them. (72–3)
Certeau’s writings on historiography are recollected and reflected in his own critical methodology; he takes into account the limitations of dissective–cohesive modes of analysis even as he employs, however provisionally, some of their tactics. His critical self-awareness and ability to cut transversally across a variety of dissective–cohesive methodologies are characteristics of an investigative–expansive mode of analysis. Unlike the dissective–cohesive mode that we have seen above, investigative– expansive modes insist that the subject matter under investigation be partitioned according to essentially ad hoc parameters. The internal connectedness (among themselves) and external connectedness (to other forces, such as the subject matter’s social history) of the partitioned units (which can be considered variables) are then examined with a readiness to reparameterizing as the analysis progresses – as unexpected problems, information, and ideas surface. Whereas the goal of a dissective–cohesive mode is, as we have mentioned, to (re)construct an accountable whole, an investigative–expansive mode seeks comprehension of the subject matter’s fluid and plural relationships to its own parts and to the greater environments of which it is a part. The extent to which Certeau’s methodology uses an investigative–expansive mode is particularly evident in the essay “Walking in the City,” in which his critique of the totalizing and systemizing techniques of panopticism and cartography avoids realization of these dissective–cohesive procedures, unfolding instead in a series of descriptive meditations that shift transversally into one another. The essay begins, as we have noted, with a view from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, placing the spectator in the center of the panopticon that systematizes and hierarchizes the city, although, as Certeau points out, the spectator nevertheless remains blind to certain activities. From this vantage, Manhattan unfolds before the eyes like a “wave of verticals” (Practice 91). His own position on the crest of this wave emphasizes the fact that Certeau has achieved this panoptic perspective through elevation, that is, through travel in the third spatial dimension. Ironically, expanding one’s range of motion beyond the twodimensional plane of the city streets is in fact an act of projection onto a plane. Moving upward 110 stories into a third spatial dimension renders the movements of pedestrians invisible; the temporal dimension disappears, transforming New York into a map of itself. The shift from the panoptic perspective to the street-level observance of pedestrians is thus not simply a movement through the third dimension, but an addition of the fourth: Certeau breaks out of the dissective–cohesive panoptic analysis by perceiving the city temporally. The result is a transversal
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shift par excellence, a movement into (literally) a new dimension that allows the panoptic viewpoint to be critiqued through a discourse other than its own. This transversal shift is followed by a perfectly-executed dissective– cohesive analysis of walking as a speech act. This analysis grounds the essay, establishing a sense of order and systematic understanding before the next transversal move. Starting from a comment by Roland Barthes,14 Certeau reads walking as an “enunciative” act and relates it to a number of topics in speech act theory. On this basis he then builds toward a “rhetoric of walking,” turning the speech act itself into an element in a larger system. Once he has established the existence of a rhetoric, Certeau proceeds to dissect this rhetoric by establishing its major tropes, synecdoche and asyndeton. The conclusion of this dissective–cohesive section is a brief foray into psychoanalysis. This move – specifically, the connection of rhetorical discourse and dreams – is not itself transversal since its results have been mapped out and systematized (as Certeau notes) by Sigmund Freud and Émile Benveniste, among others. This fact seems to inspire Certeau, though, as he moves on to the analysis of proper names that we discuss above. Drawing, perhaps, on the “relics” of the transversal power that moved Freud before his system was institutionalized,15 Certeau dramatically alters his investigation in two important ways. Into the “long poem of walking” he inserts the words written on street signs – “I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name” (Practice 105) – an act that eradicates the separation of verbal and pedestrian speech acts. Having devoted considerable energy toward demonstrating the similarity of these two forms of speech acts (toward the apparent end of assimilating the latter type to the cohesive system that describes the former), Certeau suddenly alludes to their difference by introducing the proper name as a foreign element in the “rhetoric of walking.” The “text” of the city becomes a blank page, a “great empty space” waiting to be filled. We are left unsure whether this overwriting produces a meta-discourse or a palimpsest: does the proper name designate a space (as it does a place), or is it simply a different aspect of spatialization? Fully absorbed now by the investigative–expansive mode of analysis, Certeau tacitly dismisses the prospect of forcing his study of pedestrian speech acts to systematically accommodate this introduction of words. He is interested instead in the second change that is brought to his investigation by this turn toward proper names. We have seen that Certeau’s focus on the process of walking introduced the dimension of time into the synchronic models of the map and the panopticon.
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Proper names carry his analysis further in this direction, beyond the brief moment of the speech act into the almost forgotten histories in the corners of memory. This extension of the temporal dimension is vast enough to induce a qualitative change in the investigation. Just as the laws of Newtonian physics must be radically revised for objects that are very small (subatomic) or moving very fast (any significant fraction of the speed of light), and just as the elevation in the World Trade Center beyond “the threshold at which visibility begins” (Practice 93) transforms the living city into a panoptic map, Certeau’s reach into the distant past here alters his investigation fundamentally. The transversal anamnesis associated with proper names initiates a mode of investigation similar to that which we found in the essay “Micro-techniques and Panoptic Discourse: A Quid pro Quo,” in which panopticism is seen not as the erasing of all practices (as the World Trade Center image postulates) but as the privileging, over time, of a chosen few. Certeau uses this approach only briefly, though, before retreating along the temporal axis to consider a third distinct time scale. Having examined both the brief instant of the utterance, in which memory has no time to act, and the far reaches of memory that extend back past the limits of personal experience, Certeau turns to the middle ground. In doing so, he opens an investigation similar in method to the essay “Spatial Stories,” taking as his subject personal (rather than panoptic) representations of space. These spatial stories and “local legends” are written in the memory instead of the “text” of the city. They shatter the panoptic perspective, not as a consequence of their unorganized motion or their remembrance of lost practices, but because of their ability to render space familiar and livable.
Replanning the WTC Up until this point, we have presented this chapter largely, with regard to the thesis and structure, as an expansion of the version published in 1999 in the journal diacritics. We were unsure at first what to do with the many references to the World Trade Center, which is the opening image of Certeau’s “Walking in the City” and a sort of leitmotif throughout our own essay. In the present moment, to mention the World Trade Center within a discussion of panopticism and anamnesis, the planning of cities and the erasures of history, is almost necessarily to focus attention on the complex of cultural, political, psychological, and military reactions to the events of September 11, 2001. Rereading our own essay in this light, we found in it a different network of associations and meanings from what we had remembered being there. The topography
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of the text had changed, with each incongruously casual mention of the World Trade Center seeming to rise up from its surroundings and demand further elaboration: Certeau’s anecdotal view of the panoptic city had become a lacuna around which our text was now revolving. To provide these elaborations in the places where they were necessary would have resulted in an almost total rewriting in which only the outline of the original essay remained. Such a rewriting would present itself as a reflection on September 11, written after the fact, obscuring or obliterating its own origin in the late 1990s, and presenting the reader an organizing principle that had nothing to do with the text’s original composition. We decided, though, to take another route. Having followed Certeau’s critique of the erasure of spatial stories in the construction of a proper place, we were hesitant to erase our own earlier work simply to produce a more readerly text. Certeau ends his preface to the English edition of The Practice of Everyday Life with the comment that the work of translation “may symbolize the object of my study: within the bounds imposed by another language and another culture, the art of translation smuggles in a thousand inventions which, before the author’s dazzled eyes, transform his book into a new creation” (x). Our own essay was no less profoundly altered by its translation through time into an historical moment in which the transversal ripples of September 11, are still felt, and we became convinced that it might equally symbolize the object of our study. How, then, to bring our analysis up to the present? In the decade since its first publication, two sets of problems have emerged that affect the way that we reread our work. The first, as we have just discussed, is the destruction of the World Trade Center. The second is the emergence of a new paradigm, and corresponding articulatory space, organizing the relationships between panopticism, cartography, and our everyday navigations of the city: the internet, and thus internetspace. Articulatory spaces are fluid, multifaceted, primarily abstract, spatiotemporal realms in which ideational streams, discourses, and performances negotiate and aggregate meanings, redefine their trajectories, boundaries, and strategies, while orbiting and informing subjects of critical speculation. Unlike other articulatory spaces, such as the ones discussed in this book (Shakespace, Kasparspace, playgroundspace, etc.), internetspace enjoys a reflexive quality that is almost of equivalences, for example, between form and content, abstraction and presence, dissemination and sitespecific experience, etc. By 1998, Paul Virilio was already describing the panoptic effects of the internet’s refiguring of information (including its on flows) in the then-emergent technology of webcams.16 Since then,
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the ways that we map and navigate the cities we inhabit have become progressively intertwined with online cartographic projects, from GPS devices and sites like MapQuest to the satellite imaging of Google Earth to the mobile access of the iPhone and the recent introduction of Google’s Street View. In returning to Certeau’s “Walking in the City,” then, we will bring these two problematic clusters together by looking at one particular instance in which a non-organized ad hoc online community performed the processes of both memorialization and reimagining the city after September 11, 2001. On July 16, 2002, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation unveiled six proposed designs for rebuilding the World Trade Center.17 Public reaction was generally negative, with complaints that the proposals were too conservative and practical, that they failed to adequately memorialize the dead and the event, and that they attended to pragmatic concerns of replacing lost office space rather than symbolic concerns of mourning and remembrance. As discontentment over the proposals became apparent, CNN’s website (CNN.com) invited its readers to send in their own proposals depicting what they would like to see done with the WTC site.18 Over the next five months (from July 30, 2002, through the first week of 2003), CNN.com posted these proposals regularly, collecting them into an archive that eventually included 3,360 entries, each consisting of an image and a brief explanatory text.19 The goal of this archive echoes the goal of Certeau’s text: the making-legible of readers’ (or walkers’) own imaginings of the city, the transformation of the symbol of panoptic organization into a site of heterogeneous enunciations, and the dissolution of the city-as-place into spatializing narratives of possible, livable cities. Although none of these thousands of designs will ever be realized, their production and circulation provide examples of the multiple and varied ideas of the city and create the possibility, through their subjunctive performances, for individual readers and walkers to disseminate their own narratives of the city, to transversally affect other readers’ spatial practices. Such, at least, are the hopes of those who view the internet as a technology of empowerment for Certeau’s “everyman”; yet we should not expect subjunctive and transversal movements to emerge quite so readily or quite so readably. Subjective and official territories form and laminate as strongly online as they do in the rest of experience, a fact that becomes apparent as we look through the 3,360 WTC proposals. The idiosyncrasies so apparent in the first few pages of proposals fade into the background as certain repeated characteristics begin to cluster around one bizarre though hardly unexpected theme: the blunt symbolism of
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a drawing board architecture that has absorbed the characteristics of painterly mimesis. Under the burden of a compulsion to memorialize, the designs take on the forms of a narrow range of images connected with the September 11 attacks, with tragedy or rebirth, peace or power. Over and over we find buildings shaped like the numbers “9 1 1” or the letters “U S A” or “N Y”; buildings shaped like American flags, crucifixes, pentagons, peace signs, angels, eagles, human hands folded in prayer or holding a globe, eyes and tears, stairways to heaven. Other characteristics repeat too, of course, but it is this peculiar mimetic impulse that stands out by its contrast to Certeau’s vision of walking in the city. For Certeau, as we have seen, the attempt to memorialize people and events by attaching their names to places in the city is an important example of how the official, intentional city is reimagined by its inhabitants. When the signified is forgotten, the signifier is adopted by the walkers in their composition of the city: “I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name” (“Walking in the City” 105). The CNN.com readers’ designs seem desperate to preempt this forgetting and appropriation. They insist upon the most direct, the most literal, the most unmediated symbolism. The readers and walkers, given the chance to reimagine the city, have become the city planners, creating a monosemic edifice emptied of the invisible practices described by Certeau. It is because these proposals fit so readily into a schematic understanding of ideological conformity that we want to use them as a test case for using Certeau to read some of the new complexities involved in mapping the city through the mediation of the internet. Mark Poster has recently argued (2006) that Certeau’s theorizations of consumer and user practices cannot provide us with a productive basis for understanding present-day information technologies, since Certeau (writing in the late 1970s) imagined media as comparable to any other capitalist system with regard to the incommensurate positionalities of production and consumption (236–49). The producers of information technology and media content would occupy, in Certeau’s terms, the role of “strategists” operating within a proper place, whereas consumers would be the tacticians practicing deterritorialized spaces. According to Poster, Certeau cannot account for the breaking down of distinctions between producers and consumers that is one of the most visible characteristics of the internet because he takes the difference in these to perspectives as axiomatic: we cannot be walking in the city if we are looking down on it from above. Rather than disagree with this reading, we prefer to see Certeau as a transversal thinker, working less through the dissective– cohesive mode of argument that Poster aptly traces than through a web
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of overlapping but occasionally divergent metaphors, parables, aphorisms, analogies, and stories. CNN.com’s readers do not quite fit into the categories Certeau gives us: they are neither walkers (since almost none of the proposals came from New York residents) nor city planners, neither strategists nor tacticians in any pure sense. But a transversal reading of Certeau can help us find our way through the archive of reader proposals in a manner that is attentive to that which is fugitive or invisible to the panoptic perspective of ideology.
The proposals We might begin by looking for signs of resistance, points at which the readers find some way of questioning the terms of this collective reimagining of the city. There are examples of outright parody, in which readers co-opt the website to make political statements that are out of step with the patriotic (even chauvinistic) tone of the neighboring designs. One drawing offers a novel combination of elements that had cropped up in many previous proposals: twin replicas of the St Louis Arch . . . in gold. The accompanying text hammers home the ironic intent of this less-than-subtle reference to the McDonald’s logo: My proposal balances the desire to restore scale to the lower Manhattan skyline with the need for such structures to have a small footprint, allowing a large memorial . . . park. The forms reflect our highest ideals and values, and our worldwide cultural influence. Matt Phillips in Richmond, Virginia (41.9) A more ambiguous example of possible irony depicts a cylindrical wisp, tapered at the top, brightly colored with repeating red, yellow, and blue bands. There is something whimsical and indeterminate about the design that is echoed in the accompanying text: Something other than gray, black, tan, etc., and not straight. William Bergmann (50.3) Could this final enigmatic phrase, “and not straight,” be a queering of the proposed WTC, transforming the symbolically charged structure into a rainbow banner in defiance of the social conservatives who were now beginning to consolidate their hold of American politics? Or does it simply mean that the building should not – for whatever unspecified reason – have a rectilinear frame? Here is a second sense in
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1. WTC proposal by Matt Phillips
2. WTC proposal by William Bergmann
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which one could view the reader proposals through the lens of Certeau’s theories of tactics and spatial practices. By participating in the public forum of the CNN.com website and yet refusing to engage in the collective desire for symbolic mourning, certain readers introduce into this location of collective urban imagination designs that in their idiosyncrasy seem out of place. Many of these are angular, abstract, modernist structures accompanied with little or no explanatory text (6.7; 11.13; 49.3; 93.16; 101.11). The readers simply present their own architectural projects without any explanation of how they might be relevant to the WTC site or to the necessities of remembrance and urban planning. We do not want to read this as some sort of Romantic self-expression of individualist subjects, but rather as a refusal to participate in the symbolic economy of mourning and a concomitant offering of texts that vacillate between nonsense and a sort of inexplicable surplus. One magnificent proposal, a jagged and colorful design that looks vaguely like a cross between Constructivism and Pop Art – and nothing like a feasible plan for a building – refuses to acknowledge its own impracticality: My design would cost $51.9 billion and take 3.9 years to construct. It would include a garden area, a visitor’s center, office buildings, a shopping center, places for guards, and a place where people can come and enjoy. Somchay Sananikone in Dublin, Ohio (34.24)
3. WTC proposal by Somchay Sananikone
The proposal appropriates the language of the official proposals by quoting the (presumably arbitrary) figures of “$51.9 billion” and “3.9 years.”
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Yet, despite the ludicrous cost, the design does not appear to be a satire. The visual collage gives it the feel of pastiche, and the obviously meaningless numbers seem to be gesturing toward some sort of reality effect, opening a space for free play in the visual field by addressing the practical concerns of time and money in the text. In other words, the proposal tactically redeploys the dry pragmatism that had been criticized in the official proposals in order to distract us from the design’s failure to address the symbolic functions of mourning and memorialization. This kind of borrowing and recontextualizing, of course, was theorized at length by those studying postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s, and then became central features of daily life with the rise of the internet and the coming of hyperlinking, Napster, Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr, etc. Several of the proposals exemplify this curious information-age balancing of citation and plagiarism. One reader suggests “a 1,760-foot tower in the style of the Chrysler Building . . . ”, and supplements this text with a picture of the Chrysler Building itself (2.11). Another reader sets his sights somewhat higher, taking the Empire State Building as the model for rebuilding each of the twin towers: “My idea is to build two modified Empire State Buildings with heliports at the top instead of a Zeppelin mooring mast” (18.19). After listing several of the practical advantages of his plan, the reader notes approvingly: As an added bonus, this proposal will restore the Empire State Building to its former status as the tallest building in New York City. I should note here, however, that if a consensus of opinion deems it desirable to have the buildings at the WTC site remain the tallest in NYC, the height of a modified Empire State Building with heliport could easily be adjusted to yield a one-floor advantage over the original Empire State building with mooring mast. Vince Page in Katy, Texas The heliport here seems emblematic of a postmodern refusal of history. The design whittles down the changes in the city and in architecture since the construction of the first Empire State Building into a technological advance in air travel from zeppelins to helicopters. It leaves us with a token of modernization attached to a nostalgic replica of the Manhattan skyline that has now replicated itself uncannily into triplets. This refusal of history can be linked to the panoptic imposition of a “nowhen” on the lived practices of the city. Yet the notion of adding a single floor to make the seeming replicas marginally taller than the original also undercuts the reliance on the symbolic gestures by those proposals. It calls for
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the new WTC to be the city’s tallest building: the perfunctory method of making these new Empire State Buildings the tallest in New York draws attention to the emptiness of the symbolic statement. There are also designs that are less obvious – or, at least, less open – in their borrowing from other cities to reimagine the WTC. One proposal, for instance, calls for a tall sail-shaped building surrounded by what appear to be reflecting pools and waterfalls: This design’s goal was to address the needs of the people of New York, the developers and those who lost loved ones in the attack. The 1,600 foot tower is elliptical in plan and unique in profile, offering premium office space and serving as the most prominent structure on the New York skyline . . . Michael P. Potts in Dallas, Texas (7.1)
4. WTC proposal by Michael P. Potts
While the profile of the proposed building would perhaps be new to Manhattan, it would hardly be “unique,” as it is a direct copy of the much-photographed Burj al-Arab (in English: “Tower of the Arabs”) hotel in Dubai, a 1,060-foot sail-shaped hotel that stands (like this design) on a private island surrounded by water. (It also has a heliport.)
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5. Burj al-Arab Hotel, Dubai, UAE
In fact, it is not too difficult to trace this “unique” outline through a number of the reader proposals (to give some examples: 95.1; 97.2; 108.15). One in particular stands out because of an oddity in the imagined design: The New World Trade Center would unite the surrounding boroughs of lower Manhattan with a central gathering place. The main tower would consist of offices, a subway station, cultural and community centers, a museum and the second largest atrium in the world. . . . Aaron T. Harvey in Los Angeles, California (10.1) Why imagine a building with the second largest atrium in the world? And which building has the largest? If the former question leaves us once again unable to situate the details of the proposal within a grid of symbolic values, the latter seems like it should be fairly simple to answer. A quick Google search for “largest atrium” returns a list of sites
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6. WTC proposal by Aaron T. Harvey
connected with Las Vegas boasting that the Luxor Casino’s atrium is the biggest in the world at 29 million cubic feet.20 But a little further along in the list of results, we find a BBC article awarding the title to none other than the Burj al-Arab.21 Further down still, we find a site called WorldArchitectureNews.com giving “the world’s largest atrium” to the Marriott Marquis in Atlanta, and providing a photo of the hotel’s newly installed lobby bar, the design of which “reflects” (according to World
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7. Marriott Marquis, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Determining which atrium is indeed the largest requires little effort, as there are any number of online sources that can tell us that the Luxor atrium is largest by volume, the Burj al-Arab by height, and the Mariott Marquis was the tallest when it opened in 1985, but was surpassed by the Burj al-Arab in 1999. The more difficult question is why, in
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Architecture News) the contours of the atrium itself – though we are perhaps primed to see something else in it:22
an historical moment when anti-Arab sentiment was high in the United States, in a collection of designs that are otherwise marked by an overwhelming American chauvinism, would this image of a recently built hotel in the United Arab Emirates keep popping up in so many unusual places?23 We do not have an answer for this question. Our goal has not been to assemble a cohesive narrative explaining these proposals, but to explore a methodology for making one’s way through them. We have been navigating the CNN.com archive of reader proposals in much the same way that Certeau’s walkers navigate the city, moving from one place to another based on our own sense of wanting them to be connected.24 If the ideologically legible desires for memorialization (the buildings shaped like American flags, etc.) are the visible manifestations of a collective unconscious trying to assimilate the events of September 11, into its subjective territory, we have sought out the collective transversalities that wander through alternative rewritings of ground zero. In effect, we have, for some duration, forgotten the law of place, drawing on the postmodern “Tower of the Arabs” to transform the monumental, landlocked skyscrapers into incongruous sailboats, spinning a tentative narrative of movement and exploration that has not yet ossified into symbolic meaning. We follow Certeau in imagining culture as “at once a composition of places and the innovation that modifies it by dint of moving and cutting across them”; that is, we move across both the gaudily visible collective unconscious that demands a semantically stable symbolism and the lessobvious instabilities that only become apparent in a virtual walk through the proposals. Subjunctively and investigative-expansively, we tour the potential and forgotten meanings that will interpolate future inhabitants of these proposed WTCs precisely as “unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts” (Practice xviii).
Notes 1. See Bryan Reynolds, “The Devil’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England” (Theatre Journal 49.2 [1997], 143–67); Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 1–22; Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–28; and Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 1–26. 2. Ibid. See also, zooz, “Transversal Poetics: I.E. Mode,” in Performing Transversely, 287–99.
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3. Certeau’s citation of “all-seeing power” is from Michel Foucault, “L’Oeil du pouvoir,” in Jeremy Bentham, Le Panoptique (Paris: Belfond, 1977), 16. 4. Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other: 185–92. At several points, this essay corresponds closely with the chapter “Foucault and Bourdieu” in The Practice of Everyday Life, 45–60. 5. The terms “geographical” and “geometrical,” which Certeau mentions in connection with Merleau-Ponty, in fact have a much more complex relation to maps and their spatializations than is implied here. We will discuss the importance of these terms in the next section of this essay. 6. Certeau continues: “The 1370 foot high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.” While Buchanan elaborates on Certeau’s implicit distinction here (as well as elsewhere in the essay) between the illusive “readerly text” of the city created by the panoptic perspective and the actual “writerly text” created by the pedestrians down below (see particularly 116–19 of Buchanan’s essay), we believe that the readerly/writerly dichotomy is a misleading analogy because it can imply a mutual exclusivity between its two elements. Although Certeau clearly opposes the panoptic or utopian view of the city to the daily practice of pedestrians, the quotation with which we opened this paper shows that he saw the two possibilities as forming an ongoing dialectic. The readerly/writerly dichotomy perceives the two kinds of texts primarily as separate: the writerly text, according to Roland Barthes, “is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages” (S/Z 5). For Certeau, “writerly” (quotidian) practices not only precede the systems that attempt to regulate them, but also continue to transgress the boundaries imposed by those systems. Whereas Certeau sees these transgressions as daily occurrences that help constitute culture, Barthes claims that the writerly can be found in structured readerly texts only “very rarely: by accident, fleetingly, obliquely in certain limit-works” (4–5). 7. The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 8. The Practice of Everyday Life, 117–18. 9. See texts by Reynolds referenced in note 1. 10. We should note that Certeau simultaneously presents the construction of subjective territory both through the discursive spatializations of maps and through panoptic practices that exist in “non- or pre-verbal domains” bereft of discourse (Heterologies 189). 11. See texts by Reynolds referenced in note 1. 12. Taken together with the previous quotation, this passage might be used as the basis for a reading of Ulysses that would invert many of the standard attitudes toward James Joyce’s use of myth. Here, Bloom’s wandering through the city is neither the comic/ironic modern parallel of Greek myth nor the construction of a new modernist mythopoetics; it would be, rather, both an externalized metaphor for the stream of consciousness and the means by which Bloom explores the “deserted places” of his own memory through the “exoticism” of window shopping and through the transversal movement of his unconscious reenactment of Odysseus’ travels.
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13. This distinction is similar to our argument in note 27 (above) that applying Barthes’ readerly/writerly distinction to “Walking in the City” does not adequately convey Certeau’s insistence that the practices he describes are constant and pervasive. 14. Barthes, Architecture d’aujourd’hui (No. 153, December 1970–January 1971), 11–13: “We speak our city . . . merely by inhabiting it, walking through it, looking at it.” Citation is from The Practice of Everyday Life, 219. 15. With Certeau’s comments on proper names in mind, it is amusing and perhaps even informative to note that Freud devoted most of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (perhaps a source for the English title of Certeau’s book?) to convincing his skeptical readers of the mere existence of a phenomenon (the “Freudian slip”) that now, with his name attached to it, is cited daily by people who have never read a word that he wrote. 16. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London: Verso, 2005), esp. ch. 7. 17. See http://www.renewnyc.com/ for current plans for the WTC site. 18. As far as we know, there is no widely-accepted general term for people who access a website. “Users,” “viewers,” and “readers” are all common, and the popular 1990’s term “surfers” still pops up here and there, but there is no term (yet) that can make any claim to designating specifically the activities of a website’s users. We have followed the practice of CNN.com in referring to them as “readers,” and we trust that our own readers will feel the inadequacy of this term throughout our writing. 19. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2002/wtc.ideas/. CNN.com orders the proposals chronologically by week and presents them in groups of 24 proposals per page spread over 140 pages. In referring to specific proposals below, we have parenthetically cited them according to the page they are on and their number on the page, in the following format: (page.number). 20. http://www.vegas.com/resorts/luxor/ 21. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/545499.stm 22. http: // www . worldarchitecturenews . com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln. projectview&upload_id=1374 23. In another bizarre twist, one of the proposals that we have not mentioned here specifically compares its architecture to the Jumaira Beach Hotel in Dubai (127.9), a wave-shaped building situated on the shore right across from the Burj al-Arab. 24. In our conscious effort to respond to and follow the paths suggested by the archive, we have perhaps been closer to Guy Debord’s dérive than to the improvisations Certeau describes in “Walking in the City.” See: Debord et al., Theory of the Dérive (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani, 1996).
Works cited Ahearne, Jeremy, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Barthes, Roland, Architecture d’aujourd’hui (No. 153, December 1970–January 1971), 11–13. ——. S/Z. Farrar Straus & Giroux: New York, 1974.
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Buchanan, Ian. “Heterophenomenology, or de Certeau’s Theory of Space,” Social Semiotics 6, 1 (1996): 111–32. Certeau, Michel de. “The Madness of Vision,” Enclitic 7.1, (1983): 24–31. ——. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ——. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986. ——. “The Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa,” diacritics 7.3 (Fall 1987): 2–37. ——. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. ——. Culture in the Plural. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel. “L’Oeil du pouvoir,” in Jeremy Bentham, Le Panoptique. Paris: Belfond, 1977. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Poster, Mark. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Bryan Reynolds, “The Devil’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England” (Theatre Journal 49.2 [1997], 143–67. ——. Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. ——. Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Terdiman, Richard. “The Response of the Other,” diacritics 22.2 (Summer 1992): 2–10.
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Fugitive Rehearsals: The Ferality of Kaspar Hauser, Playground Performances, and the Transversality of Children Bryan Reynolds & Donovan Sherman
Very brief analysis of childhood behavior shows that such combinations as histrionic play, bluff, playful threat, teasing play in response to threat, histrionic threat, and so on form together a single total complex of phenomena. And such adult phenomena as gambling and playing with risk have their roots in the combination of threat and play. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (181) The figure of the child, as paradigmatic trope of “child” or incarnation of “childhood,” poses an anxious contribution to theoretical discourses of subjectivity. The child embodies aspects of alterity, thereby delimiting possibilities with regard to sanctioned subjectivation. It also traces the potential for subjective growth, allowing on explicit or subterranean levels the capacity for transformative processes of subjectivation to occur. Michel de Certeau describes this paradoxical situation of childhood as “to be other and to move toward the other” (110). In this formula, the central contradiction of the child’s classification within official culture’s dominant systems becomes a result of negative formulations: youth must embody the non-subject while performing against the non-subject; it must be other while learning to create the other in its inception as human. As transversal theorists, we break away from the vagueness and negativity implicit in the term “other” and instead recover the mechanics of Certeau’s statement as enabling through its activation of unlimited opportunity and definitional fluidity as both agential and positive processual qualities. In our considerations, the child embodies the conditions of fugitivity, which is to say, elusive activity of resistance, change, and 162
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adaptation, capable of happily defying authoritative structures and altering established meanings and determinations. Our intervention is therefore to problematize the child’s societal entrapment as necessary transgression of and threat to the adult-dominating-child hierarchy foundational to most of today’s official cultures and the state machinery comprised of the cultures” sociopolitical conductors (familial, educational, juridical, and government structures). In doing so, we hope to generate spaces for subjunctive movements and transversal potentialities that encourage critical reassessments of the logic underlying the longstanding power structures integral to this pervasive paradigm. Contemporary cultural representations of childhood often reveal fissures in the logic and assumptive frameworks they reciprocally attempt to support. These frequently surface as spaces of threatening transgression; for instance, recent debates on children’s societal integration have tackled this problem with an array of appropriations, from bestselling books, such as the Dangerous Book for Boys and its companion Daring Book for Girls, to thriving urban youth gang subcultures to the conscription of children into Congolese tribal conflict. Without assuming an ethical position on children’s roles within this spectrum, we can observe that the possibility of rupturing dominant social systems accompanies the child’s cognitive, emotional, and physical development. However, simply put, every socially-sanctioned adult subject has at some point experienced childhood. To function in society, then, one must have spent time at least rehearsing, typically with much play, its possible unraveling. We want to argue that, rather than containing this notion as a spatiotemporally closed-off space in which alterity is stripped and adult subjects are created, childhood’s condition as necessarily subversive – a fugitive rehearsal within official culture – traces a space rich with alternative conceptions and fluctuations of subjectivity. Like in Gregory Bateson’s analogy between map-territory relations and children’s communication-play relations, we understand that this tracing, as when mapmaking, invokes the tenuous links and unfillable gaps between map and territory as signifiers and referents of the previous experiences of an explorer/cartographer (see Chapter 3 for analysis of the cartographic process). This situation is especially evocative when modes of communication are less standardized in official terms as they normally are in the cases of children, thereby further enhancing the inaccessibility of their experiences and precipitating amplified interpretive play for both participant and observer. Explorations of childhood, then, can prompt opportunities for affecting and enabling various conceptualizations of subjectivity vis-à-vis the amorphousness
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and permeability fugitively thriving in the interstices within programs for and discourses on the subjectivation of children and their potential to become civilized subjects. In transversal terms, then, the practice of child development offers a complex network of practices that act orthogonally to traditional notions of subjectivity that restrict themselves to the binary opposition between humanist/essentialist and post-humanist/constructivist idea-fields (see Chapter 1 on this division). As manifestations of potential and performers of play, the child presents continual openings of subjunctive space, prompting “what-if” and “as-if” considerations; as liminal occupant of social acclimation, the child becomes a fugitive subject that challenges cohesive individual formations; as representation of epistemological gaps, the child gestures toward absent-spaces that fracture the totalization of circulated knowledge. Crucially, childhood’s capacities for transversal movements are in fact encouraged by the very structures of teleology and state-machinery-sanctioned integration that they apparently challenge, so long as such fugitivity occurs within specifically bounded spaces. From the viewpoint of the state machinery, children’s potential for transversality is thus contained and supervised, always contextualized within the carefully monitored passageway into adulthood. “Children” and “adults” become negatively defined subjective formations, prompting tensions that become theatrical in their balances of observation and enactment. A specular gap installs itself between the authoritative structures that sculpt the experiences of childhood and the actors that threaten to break out of their prescribed journeys. This comprises a modality of pressurized belongings, in which the entrance and subsequent inclusion and/or assimilation of differences, such as from an outside individual’s or group’s abstract (ideological, ideational) and physical properties, into subjective and official territories – in this case, the absorption of children into adulthood – leads to expulsions, reconfigurations, and/or expansions of the borders of the effected territories. Hence, rather than remain inside a rigid model of development, each party involved in the subjectifying, spatiotemporal negotiation of childhood marks its complement as the apparatus of child development threatens constantly to break from its form. Instead of a mechanism endeavoring to dissuade anti-subjugating movements, we have pressurized belongings giving way to comings-to-be alternative subjectivities. Childhood becomes haunted with fugitivity at its every move. In addition, the carefully maintained otherness of development may provoke transversal movements on the part of its witnesses, such as parents, caretakers, or other children.
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This chapter focuses on historical sites of childhood that derail the prescribed course of official subjectivity’s calibrated theater and slip mercurially toward or into the unpredictable, metatheatrical realm of transversality. To this end, we look at three phenomena: (1) the feral child, as liminal and irritant to ontological and societal conceptions of subjective selves, contextualized in a perverted playground; (2) the common, site-specific, purpose-built playground as theatrical manifestation of imposed subjective territories vis-à-vis the permeability of its proscenium; and (3) the shopping mall as romanticized playground representing an alternative progression of the playground into modernity. In each site, we find within carefully constructed networks of subjective development transversal movements that both challenge modalities of official conceptions of experience and initiate over-compensatory responses by state machinery. We hope to show that these cases underscore the entangled mechanics of the human condition’s constant arbitration.
The emergence of Kasparspace And how long I had been playing I cannot describe because I did not know what was an hour, or a day, or a week. Kaspar Hauser, Autobiography (published in Masson 190) The popular mythology surrounding Kaspar Hauser operates like Biblical allegory: In May 1828, Kaspar, a pale, bedraggled sixteen-year old boy, wandered into a town square in Nuremberg at dusk; malnourished, weak, and mumbling incomprehensible statements to himself – “I want to be a rider, like my father was” – the emaciated and disturbed child fell into the care of various town officials, notably Anselm von Feuerbach, a successful jurist and president of the Bavarian Court of Appeals. As he learned German, Kaspar utilized his newfound language to relate the bizarre events of his background. Chained in a basement for years, given bread, water, and beaten by a mysterious stranger, he was set free with only a note suggesting his royal lineage. Five years later he was assassinated by a stranger whose identity remains a mystery to this day. This abbreviated version of Kaspar’s story amalgamates the conflicted and oftentimes illogical apocrypha surrounding his life. This swarm of narratives constitutes an articulatory space, the aggregate of discursive properties that symbolize, inform, and encapsulate subjects, we call “Kasparspace.” Feuerbach himself contributed a prominent and influential account to Kasparspace’s archive, entitled, with characteristic
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flourish, “Kaspar Hauser: An Account of an Individual Kept in a Dungeon, Separated From All Communication With the World, From Early Childhood to About the Age of Seventeen.” The document’s original name, however, helps to situate Feuerbach’s writing within a larger and more problematic telos of regimented subjective territory: “An Instance of a Crime against the Life of the Soul (the Development of all its intellectual, moral, and immortal parts) of Man” (283). Appropriately, the text incorporates this secondary title’s dual elements, acting as both an observed account of concerned fascination and a passionate screed against perceived illegality. We find in Feuerbach’s writings a crucial textual device that delimits and polices the articulatory space couching the notion of being a subjective individual in his contemporary sociocultural context. Diverting from traditional dissective–cohesive modes of analysis, which seek to synthesize evidential findings into totalizing interpretive packages, we embark here on an investigative–expansive exploration of Feurbach’s account, which seeks to generate translucent effects in Kasparspace as a means by which to chart its conflicting, imbricated codes and negotiated limits. Midway through Feuerbach’s book an affective and personal style abruptly takes over the narrative as the authorial voice changes from straightforward, if somewhat phlegmatic, storytelling to one of juridical schematism. After relating Kaspar’s discovery and various efforts to rehabilitate him, Feuerbach’s legal training emerges and the proceedings shift from exploring the after-effects of Kaspar’s discovery to demanding accountability for his aberrance. We see this shift denoting a focus on Feuerbach’s dissective–cohesive mode of writing, which fits Kaspar into the extant official territory of law, an enclosed hermeneutical system that values and depends on causation and explicability. In this section, the jurist lists the crimes committed against Kaspar, outlining two major areas of illegality, “imprisonment” and “exposure.” The passage relating to imprisonment moves with clipped efficiency and delimits the prosecution along concrete lines, taking into account “the brutish den and crippling position to which he was confined, and his coarse diet, which would scarcely have satisfied a dog” (310). In a similar vein, the section on exposure begins with a literal account of the corporeal harm undergone by Hauser, relating that “his situation, both in respect to his mind and his body, exposed him evidently to the danger, either of falling into the river Pzegnitz . . . or of being run down by carriages or horses” (310; italics in original). Thus far, Kaspar’s unseen and perhaps nonexistent tormenter faces culpability for incurring bodily damage and unlocking the potential for further immolation. Thus, Kaspar’s condition can be
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explained through commonplace dissective–cohesive sociopolitical systems of logical deduction which rely on physical and corporeal notions of “exposure” to danger. Rather than simply finishing the catalogue of injury with this conclusion, however, Feuerbach departs from the dissective–cohesive tonality and considers the metaphysical implications of Kaspar’s plight. He opens instead an abstract understanding of crimes beyond the tangible, or even articulatable. The theft of Kaspar’s “external liberty,” Feuerbach maintains, has “no comparison with the injury done to his unhappy being, by depriving him of the incalculable sum of inestimable benefits which can never be restored to him” (310). The mysterious antagonist has bereft Kaspar of normal development, making him instead the product of a perverted playground unfit for the production of normal children within which Feuerbach locates infinite possibility: the corruption literally “incalculable” and Kaspar’s chances of enjoying youth “miserably crippled for the remainder of his life” (310). Adding theological and cognitive dimensions, the accusation moves beyond “the external corporeal appearance of man” and considers the violation of “the inmost essence of his spiritual being” and “the murderous robbery perpetrated upon the very sanctuary of his rational nature” (311). In his struggle to elucidate a dissective–cohesive metric for Kaspar’s loss, Feuerbach settles on temporality; namely, the absence of childhood. In this maneuver, the text encounters the paradoxical notion of changing “human destiny” while affirming that “nature overleaps nothing” (311). Anxiously caught between breaking the course of predestination and obeying the axioms of nature, the account settles on a lyrical solution: the imagistic inauguration of Kaspar’s childhood as a ghost, an embodied nothingness that “follows him into his later years, not as a smiling genius, but as the affrighted spectre, which is constantly intruding upon him at an unseasonable hour” (311). The poetic device deftly, if elliptically, moves Feuerbach’s trajectory between the implacability of the natural world and the inhumanity of the crimes. Such a rhetorical maneuver echoes Constance, in Shakespeare’s King John, who laments her child’s absence by making it corporeal and active:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. (3.4.93–7)
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For both Constance and Feuerbach, inexplicability begets supernatural lyricism, which in turn attempts to make coherent and palatable the redefinition of subjective experience, in much the same way that theology seeks to mitigate challenges precipitated by mystery. The emergence of Kaspar’s ghost in Feuerbach’s narrative, like the body of grief in Constance’s, belies the fragility of the very subjective territory he wishes to maintain and preserve as official. But it also invokes Kaspar’s inhabitation of more than one role in history, especially as performed through his ghosting of future manifestations of and within Kasparspace, as will be revealed when Kasparspace intersects with playgroundspace and shoppingmallspace later in this chapter. Feuerbach stumbles in his role as sociopolitical conductor, attempting to cohere the dominant logics of his surrounding spacetime and reveals the urgency and effort needed for their upkeep. Conversely, Kaspar proves a distinct challenge to Feuerbach’s Enlightenment-era discursive production. The account ends with the jurist acknowledging Kaspar’s paradoxical dimensions. Seemingly aware of his desperate tone and rhetorical circularity, Feuerbach asks the reader to consider Kaspar’s singularity and illogical effrontery as evidence of his tragedy: No other being than one who has experienced and suffered what Kaspar has, can be what Kaspar is; and he whose being indicates what Kaspar does, must have lived in a state such as that in which Kaspar says that he lived. . . . whoever should doubt Kaspar’s narration, must doubt Kaspar’s person. (313–14) Kaspar’s very being acts as proof of the crimes committed against him. Feuerbach becomes enmeshed in hermeneutically circular reasoning: the only recourse to articulation that can be engaged and trusted as real evidence could only originate from Kaspar himself, yet to understand the articulation one would need to have “experienced and suffered what Kaspar has.” Moreover, as such, Kaspar would have to learn language in order to articulate the experience he has, apparently, never had, but that haunts him, awaiting an exorcism through inclusion into civilization. Crucially, Kaspar’s possible transversality – his disruptive capacity to alter the perceptual boundaries of Feuerbach’s subjective territory – is not destroyed but limned, noted and encircled by the sociopolitical conduction of Feuerbach’s discourse, an Iserian attempt at filling in the blanks and gaps in Kaspar’s developing narrative as interactive means by which to internalize Kaspar’s experience and further constitute Feuerbach’s own subject position (see Chapter 1 for elaboration on Wolfgang Iser’s
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reception theory). In effect, through his alterity, the child is made the exception to enveloping apparatuses of coherence within the dominant systemic structure of German society, a force of transversality adrift in sociopolitical conduction. The purpose of what follows is to locate Feuerbach’s anxiety, which encircles and suffuses his story of Kaspar, as a site where this formulation becomes realized. The chapter establishes a framework in the debates between extant dominant discourses on subjectivity, the “realist” and “epistemic relativist” philosophies, specifically addressing the problematic notion of reducible subjectivity that rests between these theoretical poles. However, rather than pitch Kasparspace as a negotiable subject of analysis on these axes, we then move to abandon the course toward attaining sum Kasparspace and consider the impossibility of encountering Kaspar within such discourse. His subjectivities elude contemplation inasmuch as the articulatory space of “Kaspar” as text reveals not a lucid and tangible sentience at its center but a fluctuating engine of sociopolitical conduction. Instead of seeking cohesion to Kaspar’s subjectivity, we are interested in the fugitive implications of Feuerbach’s rhetorical maneuverings of Kaspar’s “recovery” into civilization as he infers the communicability of the child’s consciousness while at the same time denying possible threats to empirical and ontological bases of humanity.
What is it like to be yourself?: Kaspar as epistemic conundrum In his book Fear of Knowledge, Paul Boghossian critiques various modes of reality-constructivism. He pays particular attention to epistemic relativism, the Foucauldian notion of knowledge production as determinant of the boundaries of discursive spaces. As an appropriator of Foucault’s ideas, Richard Rorty interprets the emblematic historical account of Galileo’s confrontation with Cardinal Bellarmine. The anecdote personifies Rorty’s relativist position in his attempts to illuminate contemporary epistemic limits by unpacking the seeming obviousness of Galileo’s correctness. Bellarmine (in)famously declined to peer through Galileo’s telescope to observe the facticity of space, preferring instead to accept the reality of his holy scripture. Rather than be labeled “incorrect,” Rorty claims, Bellarmine simply occupies a different system of knowledge. According to Rorty, for us, today, to “proclaim our loyalty to these distinctions is not to say there are “objective” and “rational” standards for adopting them” (Boghossian 60) but instead to mark a shift in the structures of our beliefs. Boghossian responds to Rorty’s claims by redefining
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the problem. Bellarmine does not embody an entirely separate epistemic system, but rather selectively decides what properties of that system he accepts as true. After all, inquires Boghossian, must the Cardinal “use his eyes to note that the sun is shining, or that the moon is half full, or that the clear night-time Roman sky is littered with stars” (105)? For Boghossian, the Bellarmine incident, canonized as dialectic of different views, in fact represents a single epistemic system filtered through one character’s obstinate myopia. We can view this allegorical model transversally as one of competing articulatory formations of the subjective and official territories that mutually support them. Galileospace and Bellarminespace create friction in their overlap and refusal to coincide or capitulate to the other. Boghossian sidesteps an examination of competing epistemic frameworks in his response to Rorty, though implicit in his criticism is the impossibility of such conflicts existing in totality. Boghossian asserts that an imbrication of system-values and perception must occur on some level. Both theorists, then, demonstrate a reluctance to admit to the possibility of translucent effects occurring, in which the infinite codes of Galileospace and Bellarminespace diaphanously overlap with similarity, contradiction, and play within the same spacetime. Thomas Nagel poses a possible gesture towards this notion: remove the overlap of species while retaining the subjunctive possibility of consciousness. In “What is it like to be a Bat?,” Nagel equates conscious experience as meaning “there is something it is like to be that organism” (435). The answer to the titular question would have to find a reductive form of subjective experience capable of objective understanding.1 In such a formulation, “the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account.” However, the irreducibility of a bat’s conscious experience, given the currently available powers of observation and deployable vocabulary, seemingly displaces the solution to the realm of the impossible, unless we had an “objective phenomenology” able to describe “the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences” (449). While Nagel grants phylogenetic similarities between bats and humans, he also identifies bats as “a fundamentally alien form of life” (437). In locating an epistemic conflict rooted in the alterity that Rorty presupposed of Galileo and Bellarmine, Nagel has created the process of its own undoing. If bats could relate their experiences, they would cease to be bats, and their proximity to human consciousness avoids the issue. The trick would be to find a blurring of the animal and human, other and self, in a brief moment of communicability before bat-ness became person-ness – a transversal
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movement of becomings-bat, prompted by “what-if” considerations that flourished into actions against dominant subjective borders. We focus on this act, whereby categorical subjectivities become confounded in relation to agential movements that implicitly and explicitly offer paradoxical challenges to dominant systems, as central to this chapter’s concerns. Feuerbach’s account presents an analogue to Nagel’s bat in Kaspar, an organism with human, mammalian form – allowing for identification to occur in analogizing the “common denominator” of human-ness – yet possessing a different mode of experience and consciousness. Thus we may view Feuerbach’s narrative as a potential response to Nagel’s paradox. Determining the exact parameters of Kaspar’s alterior consciousness presents a challenge, as the boy’s taxonomic status resists a simple conflation of the animal and human. Kaspar was not raised by animals; he was rather not raised by humans. The epistemic systems seem to be more temporal than zoological, not between “human” and “animal” but between “human” and “human without normative prehuman experience.” “Always locked up in a prison,” where he “never saw another person,” and had only “two wooden horses and a [toy] dog” with which he “always played” (Hauser cited in Masson 188; our insertion of “toy” follows Masson). Kaspar’s playtime can only have been, at best, a perversion of normalcy for which Feuerbach longs in the ghostly dissolve of his relationship with Kaspar. Such definition through both subtraction and otherness explains the popularity of Kaspar as a nexus of interpretive frameworks, a veritable tabula rasa for “what-if” considerations of ideologies and aesthetics. M. Read attributes this “cultural survival as legend” to Kaspar’s “applicability as proof of whatever preconceived notion one has about the nature of the human mind, consciousness, and the relationship between the individual and the natural and social world” (126). Kasparspace’s status as cultural-subjunctive Rorschach may have reached an apotheosis in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, which attempts both to recover Kaspar’s experience as a case of sexual abuse and privilege that story above other discourses. He asserts that “regardless of who he really was, here is somebody who was abused” (54). The persistent blankness of “Kaspar” himself, and the historical record he has left, challenges strategies of solidifying his subjective territory.2 Feuerbach wrestled with many conflicting methods of knowing what it was like to be Kaspar, finally admitting to Nagel’s paradox: Kaspar’s conscious experience was of not experiencing, at least not in a manner comprehensible through normative evaluative paradigms.
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For Feuerbach, an answer for his dilemma finally surfaced. Although it resides in a kind of compulsory self-reflexivity and contained subjunctivity rather than attempts at intersubjectivity, it anticipates the theories of later phenomenologists like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Iser for whom intersubjectivity is an objective and symptom of effective hermeneutics (see Chapter 1). About his phenomenological-hermeneutic method, Gadamer writes, Our starting point was that understanding is inseparable from language and that language is related to reason of every kind, and we can now see how the whole of our investigation is subsumed under this rubric . . . language is a medium where I and world meet or, rather, manifest their original belonging together. . . . For man’s relation to the world is absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature, and hence intelligible.3 (474–6) Along these lines, Feuerbach deduced that Kaspar needed to learn language and articulate his own experience so that he could learn what it is like to be himself. For Feuerbach, Kaspar had emulative authority, when an iconic subject causes becomings and comings-to-be due to its invested attention, which he then turned, reflexively, upon itself, creating a version of Kaspar that the boy himself must feel compelled to emulate. As a result, potential occurrences of intersubjectivity that could have manifested between Feuerbach and Kaspar become diverted, turned inwards, and entrapped within Kasparspace. Thus, according to popular accounts, including his own, Kaspar proceeded to learn German, lucidly detail the events of his upbringing, and author an account of his life, all within about five months of his discovery. The sheer rapidity of his inculcation rivals the assimilation itself in terms of incredulity; if modern psychological data are any indication, this acclimation launches the story out of the trappings of fiction and into the mythological. The language acquisition alone confounds psychological sense. For instance, cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Pinker’s survey of linguistic data on children indicates that “acquisition of a normal language is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rare thereafter” (293). Beyond the mechanics of learning language, however, Kaspar’s mythology defies a deeper, social pattern. Psychologist Harry Harlow’s seminal experiments on maternal deprivation in rhesus monkeys examined the phenomenon of childhood isolation by dividing newborn monkey infants into “semisocial isolation living cages” and
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“total social isolation chambers” for intervals of three, six, and twelve months, and then studied their social interaction in the “play room.” Many of the results reported in his findings, “Total Social Isolation in Monkeys,” match descriptions of Kaspar upon his discovery: monkeys in the three-month group suffered “emotional anorexia” and would not eat (92), just as Kaspar showed “marks of aversion” to food (Feuerbach 284); monkeys in the twelve-month group had been “almost obliterated socially,” with no attempts to interact with other monkeys and a total passivity (Harlow 94), just as Kaspar exhibited a “brutish dulness [sic] which either leaves external objects entirely unnoticed, or stares at them without thought” (Feuerbach 284). The infants were incapable of interaction, and in many cases were attacked by control-group monkeys, yet they showed no differences in responding to learning-set and delayed-response tasks. Prompted by these results, Harlow parses out social cognition from intellectual cognition, concluding that “the “intellectual mind” is far less crippled than the “social mind” by prolonged total social deprivation if adequate experience is provided subsequently” (95). Whereas Kaspar’s intellectual mind may have survived his apparent ordeals, what is truly remarkable about Feuerbach’s account, from a psychological standpoint, is Kaspar’s near-total recovery of not only language capacity but social intelligence. We recall Pinker’s and Harlow’s work not to judge Feuerbach’s narrative as “untrue,” and incur suspicion against one story or another. Rather, the rhesus monkey data indicate the speed by which Kaspar became socially adapted, learned proficiency in language, self-expression, and self narration – and furthermore applied these skills retroactively to his hitherto immanent life – after approximately twelve years in isolation. This seemingly impossible pace suggests a certain desperation in the stories orbiting and encapsulating Kaspar’s life to stress his sudden reintegration and avoidance of prolonged occupation within liminal subjective spaces. A rapid recovery minimizes the temporal window in which Kaspar is both animal and man, both sides of Nagel’s incommunicable and/or incommensurable duality collapsed into one humanoid body. In an age dominated by the inheritance of botanist/zoologist Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomical systems, one consciousness could not validly be categorized as within a state between species. Linnaeus himself unequivocally did not allow for newness outside his rigid divisions. As he wrote in Systema Naturae, “each living being is propagated by an egg and that every egg produces an offspring closely resembling the parent. Hence no new species are produced nowadays” (18). In her study of feral children, Julia Douthwaite identifies speech as the sole medium through
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which this categorical jump could occur, as “only through speech, people assumed, could the children learn to reason and to communicate their thoughts. Only through speech could they explain the mysteries of their real past and move squarely into civilization” (19).4 In order to avoid attacking his organizing subjective principles, Kaspar had to start narrating himself as close to instantaneously as possible to both create his own official territory and subjective space and resist the brief permeability of Kasparspace’s sociocultural borders. Feuerbach’s narrativizing of Kasparspace demonstrates a delicate and precise act of sociopolitical conduction: he allows for subjunctive space to flourish by giving Kaspar the possibility of being human, yet he relegates the possibilities of transversal movements back to Kaspar, resisting challenges to his own underlying borders of subjectivity. Underlining Linnaeus’s taxonomical concerns were issues of policing hierarchical control over other species; thus, if nomenclature becomes malleable that control becomes threatened. In her essay engaging Francis Bacon and the concept of ferality, “Calling Creatures by their True Names,” Erica Fudge describes Bacon’s scientism, a critical influence on Enlightenment-era discourse, as an act of placing the other through territorial categorization accompanied by a complementary elevation of the observer and organizer. For Bacon, according to Fudge, the power to name was the power “to call the creatures by their real names (as Adam did) is to understand – to “know” – them; to know the creatures is to wield power over them; and to wield power over them is to remove humans from their “infantile” place” and position them at “their original position of superiority on earth” (92). In short, through a circular syllogism, “power, in Bacon’s terms, means exploitation, and exploitation is proof of humanity” (Fudge 92). To take up a complementary project of de-naming creatures – of allowing subjunctive movement to deconstruct their subjective spaces – would, as such, de-power the observing, human class (for more on the roles of naming in this respect, see Chapter 1). Written nearly a century after Kaspar’s emergence, Dr A. F. Tredgold’s influential 1908 study entitled Mental Deficiency: Amentia articulated a similar fear of transversal subjectivity along generational lines. Dedicating the book to “All those Persons of Sound Mind, who are interested in the welfare of their less-fortunate fellow-creatures,” Tredgold considers the many environmental and hereditary factors of his subject matter. By subjecting children to such factors as “chronic alcoholism, tuberculosis, mental worry and anxiety, and the hurry and scurry, with all their attendant excesses and dissipations, of modern life,” he maintains that parents set the stage for transformation into a generation of the mentally deficient (362). In a startling turn of phrase, Tredgold
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concludes, “the environment of today will become the heredity of tomorrow” (68). Elsewhere, a similar line of thinking leads to a more eschatological prediction, in which, “as soon as the state is reached in which there is a preponderance of persons suffering from the diminished moral, intellectual, and bodily vigour, the community is inevitably doomed” (361). For both Bacon and Tredgold, the notion of a Nagelesque reducible yet vocabulary-dependent subjectivity construes Kaspar as merely a human without language; this in turn fashions humanity as merely Kaspar with language. In response to this potential subjective threat, which proposes an exposure of subjectivity’s fluctuation and arbitration, Feuerbach’s text condenses the habilitation process with preposterous speed, furiously acclimating Kaspar to the comprehensive articulations of his sociocultural environment. By examining the threat of epistemic violence along temporal lines, Tredgold identifies another possible terror in encountering feral children: the revelation of historical contingency. Ian Hacking locates contingency as a fundamental “sticking point” of constructivist ethos, defining it as “the recognition that X is highly contingent, the product of social history and forces,” while remaining “something we cannot, in our present lives, avoid treating as part of the universe in which we interact with other people, the material world, and ourselves” (20). By missing an integral part of childhood, Kaspar cannot simply be “human,” though the possibility of human status cannot be abnegated. The resultant threat of historical contradiction extends beyond mere cognitive dissonance and hints at a possible teleological reprisal of social reality, a revolution that John Searle equates with an “erosion of acceptance of large institutional structures” that can be “terrifying” in its reassessment of power (117). Feuerbach’s doubling of Kaspar into a spectral embodiment of lost youth represents a necessary device to maintain the timeline of “natural” progression and thus a shield against a categorical breakdown. The threat of contingency recalls Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s belief that “psychology always presupposes cosmology” (175). To accept Kaspar as a variation of “the human” would be to admit to the possibility of an unrealized, alternate nature. Feuerbach constructs multiple Kaspars in order to preserve one singularity: the normative subject.
“The mere apparatus”: Peter of Hanover and the subjective properties of language In the present state of things a man abandoned to himself in the midst of other men from birth would be the most disfigured of all. Prejudices, authority, necessity, example, all the social institutions in
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And herein lies the paradoxical move that most interests our inquiry. For Feuerbach and other caretakers, transversal subjects must become caged, encircled, and maintained yet not necessarily destroyed in order to retain a sense of subjective territory for dominant culture-systems. Rather than present a model in which this subversion becomes contained within the official culture, we maintain that the transversal movements provoked by Kasparspace add a certain threat, play, and fluctuation to environments it encompasses and through which it moves. No matter how closed-off from humanity Feuerbach attempts to make Kaspar, he must always allow for the threatening possibility of his return to humanity – and humanity’s return to Kasparspace – by the peculiar formulation of childhood, which, to rehearse Certeau’s claim, moves toward the other as it embodies it. We maintain that, rather than acquiring the label “other” the child becomes agential in its fugitive rehearsals, capable of exposing transversal possibilities. In response to Kasparspace in this regard, Feuerbach’s account turns Kantian in its rhetorical progression as it skirts between two equally threatening possibilities: total alterity or total empathy. The jurist demonstrates facility in accepting the possibility of Kaspar’s integration while skirting the implications of constructivist ideas to his worldview. Kaspar’s developmental rapidity avoids categorical blurring and hierarchical disabling, while his multiple role-playing avoids historical doubt. Simultaneously, though, Feuerbach must also explicate the actual process of Kaspar’s emergent consciousness without troubling those same concerns. By claiming that Kaspar’s self-narration is tantamount to his subjectivity – “whoever should doubt Kaspar’s narration, must doubt Kaspar’s person” – Feuerbach engages Immanuel Kant’s notion of understanding as determinant of human experience and, like many twentieth-century phenomenologists such as Gadamer and Iser, opens the possibility for consciousness to develop in the act of writing. For Kant, the “pure concept of understanding” unifies both presentations in judgment and presentations in intuition (294). As an influential juncture in Kant’s conception of conscious processes, the pure concept of understanding provides holistic form to both transcendental and empirical content
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which we find ourselves submerged would stifle nature in him and put nothing in its place. Nature there would be like a shrub that chance had caused to be born in the middle of a path and that the passers-by soon cause to perish by bumping into it from all sides and bending it in every direction. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (37)
and limns intuition and judgment into experience. The pure concept grants the ability to cohere appearances in the world with internal consciousness and provides, as Anthony Savile puts it, “our single experiences with their representational capacity” (42). By displacing the burden of narrative upon Kaspar, and denying that faculty to anyone else, Feuerbach allows for a Kantian inversion of experience: by learning the ability to predicate and judge – to understand – the external world, Kaspar crystallizes his selfhood, instantiating consciousness as he describes it (for more on the notion of subjectivity emerging through writing, see Chapter 5). Such inaugurating processes of subjectivity recall transversal theory’s concept of reflexive-consciousness, which operates through ongoing subjunctive contemplations of the “as-ifs” and “whatifs” that simultaneously situate and guide experiences in relation to spacetime. As “representational capacity,” writing becomes a vehicle for reflexiveconsciousness, creating slippery and inconstant subjective modalities that adventurously travel between territorializations. With this in mind, we turn to Kaspar’s own writings, as they exist today: a fragmented narrative of several pages that begin with the declaration, “I will write the story of Kaspar Hauser myself!” (Hauser in Masson 189). As constantive act, this statement demonstrates the transference of Kaspar-as-thirdperson to Kaspar-as-first: the phenomenological synthesis of observation to consciousness. This segment of his writings, the longest of only three in existence, is dated, “Beginning of November 1828,” which places it within five months of his discovery in Nuremberg (187). Masson’s introduction to his translation emphasizes the original’s grammatical errors and misspellings before his correction of them: “I have not attempted to maintain the spelling errors, nor have I kept Kaspar Hauser’s exact punctuation, although it probably indicates something of the rhythm of his thinking, or at least the mental pauses he was making” (187). As sociopolitical conductor and border patrol for Kasparspace, the act of translation seeks to fill Kaspar’s blankness with inferences as to mental processes, reenacting Feuerbach’s narrativization of Kaspar and elision of his subjectivity. We view Masson’s work not as conduit to an “original” Kaspar memoir; instead, we see it as a contribution to Kasparspace through its performance of authenticity. Masson’s dissective–cohesive tendencies reveal themselves in his introduction, whereupon he notes his “translation of the complete preserved fragment” (189). The only notion of “completeness” apparent in his writing is his construction of it as such; yet the text persists as fragment and incompletion. The notion of a “complete fragment” illuminates the processes by which Kaspar’s account,
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even in the critical theory of his time, becomes subjected to desires for cohesion and insularity. Understanding that Kaspar’s account, as presented by Masson, embodies the subjective processes of its translator, we view it still as a vital text that demonstrates the persistent belief in writing as Kantian synthetic processes of becomings-consciousness. Such an optic highlights the concretizing syntax of the fragment, which roots itself in self-observations of the tangible: The length of the prison was 6 to 7 feet, and 4 feet in width. There were two small windows which were 8 to 9 inches in height . . . I will tell you what I always did, and what I always had to eat, and how I spent the long period, and what I did . . . the water and bread, always come, when I woke up, the bread and water were there as they had been before the man came to see me. . . . When we were in the city, he put a letter in my hand, and said I should remain standing there until such a one as you will come, then you tell him he should take you to where this letter belongs. (Hauser in Masson 189–93) We recognize the apparent contradiction in this passage. Kaspar could not have understood the man’s directive to “remain standing there” unless he comprehended its semiotic coding; at the same time, Kaspar’s lack of literacy comprises a critical component of Feurbach’s narrativization. However, this seeming impossibility only further exemplifies the multiple subjectivities and transversal potential that Kasparspace contains, and highlights Feurbach’s need to emphasize Kaspar’s illiteracy in maintaining his alterity. The passage thus creates a new version of Kaspar, one whose literacy extends into his recollection, retroactively civilizing his own development. As it moves from description of his cell to outline of his narration to recollection of his deliverance, the language of Kaspar’s autobiography acts as its own subject; Kaspar’s twinned being dispels its mystery and fills its persistent blankness. The introduction of the second person (“such a one as you”) implicates the reader in its processes, the necessary audience that validates Kaspar’s existence through analogy. Kaspar’s ability to write laminates his selves with a societal lubricant, easing his pressurized belonging into the environment. Even with Kant’s synthetic notions in place, it was not enough for Kaspar to possess the means to become subjectively transferable through writing; he had to desire to do so.5 The role of desire in relating conscious experience recalls another celebrated feral child, Peter the “wild boy” of Hanover. The case of Peter, found in the woods near Hamelin in
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1725, has prompted various stories and theories of his state and relation to humanity. However, it is widely accepted that he attained celebrity status while living in the royal court, under the tutelage of Dr. John Arbuthnot. Peter, who unlike Kaspar died without ever learning language, drew attention from many luminaries, including Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Defoe’s account of Peter’s life, the pamphlet Mere Nature Delineated, provides an example of the pre-Rousseauist idea of the feral child without desire. Defoe’s thesis is that Peter lacks a soul, and exhibits only the bare Cartesian mechanics of nature; his lack of language provides the continuance of this plight. In contemplating this, Defoe ponders the precision with which facets of humanity must be balanced to construe the human. According to Defoe, Peter’s lack of speech assists very much to keep him just in the same State of Nature, that he was in when brought first among us. . . . This shews us, what a strange Machine the Body of a Man is, that any little Breach in the whole Contexture, interrupts the whole Motion. . . . the least Disorder of the Parts, even of the mere Apparatus, as it may be called, made by Nature for the Reception of a Soul, renders that Soul unhappily useless to itself. (qtd in Newton 202) While not admitting that Peter has a soul, Defoe endeavors to keep open a distant escape route from this imprisonment, marveling that any “little breach” or the “least disorder of the parts” may crowd out humanity closer to “Mere Nature.” Michael Newton theorizes that, in Defoe’s conundrum, Peter “must possess a soul in order to reinstate again the essential difference of human beings from animals,” while “his soul must actually be locked up, useless and unapparent, in order to maintain our difference from him” (207). In constructing a progression of nature to human, Defoe must incorporate essential blocks into the continuum so as not to infer the possibility of retrogression. Unlike Kaspar, the containment of Peterspace becomes more tightly sealed within the official culture surrounding it; Peter is an unhappy creature without the subjunctive capacities of writing to allow the dangerous passageway to subjectivity, that is, the kind of passageway that provoked a translucent effect both exciting and terrifying to Feuerbach (for more on literacy as criteria of subjectivity and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of exception, see Chapter 5). Without the transcendental agent of desire, the feral child becomes trapped in Newton’s double bind, “on the borderline between the linguistic and non-linguistic experience of the world” with a distant view of both possibilities (Read 126). Philipp Schmidt von Lubeck’s 1831 essay,
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“Uber Kaspar Hauser,” identifies this purgatorial situation in Kaspar, noting that he was initially “unable to give any explanations due to a lack of words or concepts,” but upon learning speech, the process remained “just as impossible due to a lack of pure and undistorted recollection” (qtd in Benzaquen 255). Feuerbach circumvents Lubeck’s conundrum by allowing desire into Kaspar’s consciousness; he accomplishes this by attributing Kaspar’s condition to a crime, implicitly absolving him of his natural state and vilifying the responsible party. Rather than Defoe’s frustrated accusation of Peter as his own tormenter, Feuerbach’s recourse to legality attributes the action to an unseen other. This allows Feuerbach to admire Kaspar’s untainted interest in learning language, his “thirst for knowledge” and “inflexible perseverance with which he fixed his attention to anything that he was determined to learn or comprehend, surpassed everything that can be conceived of them”; such desire verges on the romantic, as Kaspar exhibits tenacity in constant improvement; when von Feuerbach admiringly observes that although in the boy’s drawings “some improvements were distinctly visible,” Kaspar “was not satisfied” (319). The subtext to Feuerbach’s glowing description proposes a social contract to Kaspar as he exhibits fragments of human behavior; totalizing inclusion into society looms closer. And as the fault lies not with Kaspar but with his unknown tormenter, the child can retain a virginal sense of alterity without standing accused of keeping himself there, thereby absolving the more omnipresent captors of his society’s ideology. Throughout his text, Feuerbach makes Kaspar’s experience reducible and transferable while retaining essential distances between him and the constructivist notion of encroaching ferality. We maintain, however, in viewing the situation transversally, that Feuerbach’s narrative itself comprises an act of subjectivity-construction, a fashioning of ideology into a confluence of myth and history. The renewal of this story through generations indicates the potency of its apparent indexicality and condensation into officially territorialized fact, as, in Berger and Luckmann’s formulation, “the unity of history and biography” is restored through subsequent “explaining and justifying” (93). In each of these transferences and furtive reconstructions, “Kaspar,” as constructed and maintained by Feuerbach and his audiences, elides consideration of Kaspar, the actual boy who may or may not have enacted even a fraction of the actions that “Kaspar” has. By covering over this space, Feuerbach’s text lends a deeper understanding of the “crimes of exposure” committed against Kaspar; they have “exposed” not only corporeal injury and lost possibility, but also a potential challenge to extant official boundaries and sociopolitical conducting. Kaspar exposes the malleability of
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the teleological narrative to which Feuerbach ascribes his experience; he effects a chronological and ontological rift in what Jacques Derrida names “archeo-teleology”: the need to create a mythical placement of origin from which we have proceeded. In Of Grammatology, while commenting on Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, Derrida situates this illusory process as the pull of chronological temptation within systems of writing: As it is speech that has opened this endless movement of signification – thus constantly risking the loss of signification – it is tempting to return to an archeological moment, the first moment of a sign without speech, when passion, beyond need but short of articulation and difference, expresses itself in an unheard of way: an immediate sign. (234) Derrida’s enumeration of this desire for immediacy stems from his critique of Rousseau, who in Emile articulates modes of pedagogical reform that, for Derrida, rest on believing wholesale this deceptive presenceimmediacy as possibility. We see in Rousseau’s text an echo of the delicate, passionate technique that Feuerbach employs, as the jurist tries everything he can to leave Kaspar’s immediate sign intact and safely distant, all the while pressured by his humanistic endeavor to recover Kaspar to society. We want to employ Derrida’s technique of analysis but diverge on our conclusions: like Derrida, we see the seduction of the origin in Kasparspace, but unlike Derrida, we see multiplicities of Kaspars constantly fulfilling immediacy in their significations, fleeing both Feuerbach’s and Derrida’s repressive systems of textual placement. Neither purely natural nor impossibly archeological, animal nor human, other nor self, the “real” Kaspars-as-subjects thrive in their possibilities despite attempts of silencing and re-inscription as assimilated textual meme for posterity.
Futile representations: Kaspar, Kaspar, and Kaspars We close this consideration of Feuerbach’s narrative with a brief look at Peter Handke’s play Kaspar, a piece inspired by the Kaspar story, as a site that traces rather than defines the space of Kaspar’s subjectivity. In this sense, we see the theatricality of Handke as opening up transversal possibilities of Kaspar’s existence that Feuerbach’s re-narrativization attempts to close; these manifest as the principle of translucency: when a social or theatrical performances incorporate inconsistent and contradictory
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codes that in effect present mixed or simultaneous messages that jar spectators from established parameters of reception, discourse, and reason. The play’s mise-en-scène makes explicit the processes of Feuerbach’s textual machinery, with “prompters” teaching human language and physicality to the character of “Kaspar.” In the play’s beginning, Kaspar can only utter one line, a witty variant of Feuerbach’s account: “I want to be a person like somebody else was once” (66). Kaspar’s costume includes a mask designed to look exactly like the actor’s face, so that “only at the second or third glance should the audience realize that his face is a mask” (63). This visual trope of sheer generality evokes the impossibility of singular identity, an idea expressed more flamboyantly in the inclusion of five other Kaspars, all dressed alike, that enter near the close of the piece. As the play progresses, Kaspar no. 1 becomes more articulate and versatile in handling the physical objects on stage, explaining that “ever since I can speak I can put everything in order” (78). The show ends on a distressing note; as the curtain jerks towards the center, Kaspar’s language disintegrates, breaking semantic and phonetic patterns, as the five other Kaspars create a cacophony of irritating sounds, “the kind that drives one wild” (137). Suddenly, the sound cuts out, leaving only Kaspar no. 1 speaking; with each jolt of the curtain closing, he repeats the phrase “goats and monkeys” until it shuts, and the play ends (139). This final line cites Othello’s curse upon learning of Desdemona’s infidelity, lending a libidinal dimension to Kaspar’s frustration; it also reintroduces animality into Kaspar’s language, both in the words themselves and his urgent, Ionescan insistence on repetition. Most critically to our concerns, by separating Kaspar from the audience, the line alienates the audience’s sympathies from a mimetic catharsis and interrupts their expectations for resolution. By distancing Kaspar from our own dominant discourses of subjectivity, and removing the possibility of singularized integration, Handke has perhaps paradoxically found an accurate mode of subjective representation in making tangible the futility of representation itself in the perverted playground he stages.6
“Exuberant play”: transversal potential of playground reformation For humans, play is also surprisingly active in the shaping of one’s own inner private narratives (actual sense of self), and thus is directly related to mental health and elasticity. It is also the means by which we shape a model world. Stuart Brown, Director, National Institute for Play7
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We move now to another location that troubles processes of subjectivity in the human child: the common, site-specific, purpose-built playground. At once theatrical space of negotiated identity and pedagogical space of monitored and regulated behavior, the combination of which is set against forces of ferality, the playground presents anxieties of sociopolitical conduction. This is especially the case as it attempts to construct the adult as civilized subject, both abiding inhabitant of and affirming contributor to official culture. We maintain that, as with Kasparspace, the “normal” playground articulates not an investigative– expansive yet nevertheless teleological ordering and narrativization of the subject, but ultimately elusiveness to subjectifying processes. When discussed in light of Michel Foucault’s notions of reform in Discipline and Punish, the ways by which the playground dynamically enables and affects certain unpredictable variables despite its prescribed roles in the formation of subjective territories have extenuating implications for the societies it serves. Although traditionally read as proposing the futility of subjective resistance, we read Foucault’s genealogy of the chain gang as an emergence of possible subjective expansions and assertions beyond disciplinary systems.8 Analyzing both the contemporary American playground and its roots in fin-de-siècle reforms, we locate an influential juncture of performativity and visibility in this brief but critical section of Foucault’s work that is suggestive of the transversal power operative within and through playgrounds. The playground is an articulatory space of reflection and performance that unsettles the rigorous strictures of its reformatory design and initiates opportunities for transversal subjects who, like Kaspar, are capable of confounding boundaries of subjective and official territories. Playground reformers at the beginning of the twentieth century modulated their strategies between two concepts: (1) that the child should have a sense of free exploration; and (2) that his activities should be carefully structured to shape development along a precise narrative arc. Freedom from immediate tactics of subjectivation, while pedagogically valuable, must paradoxically always structure itself along teleological lines; the urban reformer Everett Mero noted that “there is play that grows like a weed and never goes beyond the weed state” but also “play that has careful cultivation so then it becomes a useful plant” (qtd in Lewis 184). Mero’s formulation rests on two illuminating assumptions. He implies that children, when left to their own devices, tend towards weed-like chaos, thus placing the role of the reformer-as-gardener as critical in disciplining the playful body with “careful cultivation.” More overtly, he sees the playground as a utilitarian training-ground for civilized subjects, with
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the “weed-like” state constantly looming as a threatening, potentially iconoclastic Petri dish for non-productive members of the polity. Joseph Lee, a key figure in the “playground movement,” similarly saw a division between the more “purposeful” version of play, in which a child learns modes of interaction with the environment, and what he glosses as “exuberant play,” which, while “not the most important kind” of activity, is nonetheless developmentally necessary (282). To share his belief that “child’s play should be to the individual spirit what the uninhibited sneeze is to the vocal chords,” Lee compares this abandon anecdotally to his observation of “some remnants of the Iroquois tribe doing a war dance.” Finding a purpose behind the alienating movements of this foreign culture, Lee muses that apparently, a psychological value of the experience consisted in somehow shrieking or agonizing out as near as might be the very ultimate ego of the man. Each was trying to body forth in one lucky spasm the crude material of his personality. It is in this same service that it is the special business of the shouting, leaping, exuberant play of children to perform. (283) We are less concerned with the underpinnings of racism that mark this passage,9 and would like to focus instead on Lee’s use of the word “perform.” Indeed, both Lee and Mero, with differing conclusions, articulate a symptomatic theatricality arising concurrent to their intended reforms, one that allows for potential slippages of personalities in the performances of the child. The language employed by Lee, with its “bodying” forth the “materiality” of the personality, finds a proto-Artaudian notion of theatrical metaphysics, an alchemical reaction of the spiritual and physical that strives to liberate itself from its own structuring. This phenomenon acts as a cathartic and positive version of Mero’s weed-state, a frenzy of overactive release. In transversal terms, we find in the child’s kinetic excess the catalyzing processes of Mero’s becomings-other blurring into the processes of Lee’s comings-tobe. The differences in these processes accord with their sanctioning by state machinery; if becomings are identified and normalized by a dominant force, then any change in them is becomings-other; alternatively, comings-to-be occur involuntarily when people lose control during processes of becomings-other and defy anticipated results; they may enter the dangerous exuberance located by Lee. Playground reformers calibrated the emerging subjectivity of the child in relation to enabled or suppressed chaotic and wildly transformative behavior.
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Both Lee and Mero thought childhood fundamentally incomprehensible to adult systems of logic. The primary “obstacle,” for Lee, “in interpreting the child to grown people is that we have no word which stands for the most important factor in the child’s life” (vii); his observations, then, are exactly that – observations, steeped in the visual. Lee finds himself an audience member to an anarchic theater of cruelty marked with possible transgressions but always under the rubric of reformation, an overarching transformation punctuated with smaller character assumptions. In her essay, “The Afterlife of the Romantic Child: Rousseau and Kant meet Deleuze and Guattari,” Frances Ferguson reads Lee’s concept of the playground as a space of isolation mediated with observation, and locates the roots of this position in Rousseau’s developmental philosophy. For Rousseau, according to Ferguson, childhood “became a space, and children came to have their own institutions and live in a world apart from adults” (216, emphasis added). Thus, the playground, in Rousseau’s formulation, represents tangibly the ontological difference extant in childhood, which limns youth as not only a separate chronological era but also a fundamentally different species; Mero’s horticultural analogy may be less figurative than at first blush. Indeed, in Emile, Rousseau expresses the distancing alterity of childhood in its extreme realization as alienating even the child from himself: The first developments of childhood occur almost all at once. The child learns to talk, to feed himself, to walk, at about the same time. This is, strictly speaking, the first period of his life. Before it he is nothing more than he was in his mother’s womb. He has no sentiment, no idea; hardly does he have sensations. He does not even sense his own existence. Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae. (“He lives, and does not know that he is alive.”) (74) The theater of the playground becomes a spatialization of childhood; the child becomes a condensation of the playground; the playground’s theatrical distancing replicates itself within the child’s own perceptions. In other words, the child becomes his own audience. The playground’s distance allows observation; it forges lines of perspective that permit the adult and child audience to become spectators through time and distance; they view the alienated beginnings of their own lives across physical bounds. The tension in the playground’s processes lies in the insistence of rendering childhood practical while maintaining such fundamental alienation; thus we have a process of dictating reform without empathic
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connection to the reformed. Such a lack of understanding may explain the omnipresence of the observational faculties during the playground reform movement. They insisted upon constantly monitoring even the most innocent seeming of activities. When the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association opened “sand gardens” for youths in the Boston Commons in the 1880’s, it maintained that “children were permitted free play on the swings and seesaws and in the sand pile, but volunteer “matrons” supervised singing games and exercised control as parental substitutes” (Lewis 192). The state machinery monitors its articulatory spaces, balancing mechanisms of subjectivization (ensuring pedagogical progress) with regulated attempts at fugitivity (the child’s often chaotic play). Teleology attached itself to every action that the child undertook in such an overheated space of surveillance; in the historian Robert Lewis’s succinct encapsulation, “even routine had its purpose” (192). These proceedings become densely theatrical, as the children’s every move becomes “purposed,” made indexical by the ideological pursuits of their supervisors. In a gendered designation that seems more wish-fulfillment than reality given the noninterventionist nurturing tendencies characteristic of mothers at playgrounds, the “matrons” are expected to act as audience and directors both, sculpting the nature of the activities while observing their execution. The outlined arena of the stage provides a clear physical division of actor/audience; this dynamic becomes cast in Brechtian alienation when combined with the otherness of the performers. The transversal capacity of “exuberance” identified by Lee hovers over the playing area, threatening the script with a comings-to-be mutation of character, the “chemical reaction” of play in which “the child’s nature leaps out toward its own and takes possession” (Lee 4). While Lee, with relative liberalism, believes these occurrences to fall within acceptable and necessary behavior as becomings-other, he leaves out a consideration of its theatricality and subsequent power to subvert his carefully plotted theoretical design as comings-to be. Such potency gives a double meaning to his summation of early development: “The question is not of learning, nor yet of power, but of character” (3). By invoking tropes of theater in his methodology, he considers its transformative properties, but relegates these to the realm of rehearsal, a Platonic inferior to his ultimate telos, the creation of the adult, civilized subject. Lee sums up his arguments as a description of “the process by which I believe the great achieving instincts build up the child,” naming “Man, the outcome of the process” as “the incarnation of these instincts” (480). “Man,” the intended subjective character that culminates from countless rehearsals of instincts, occupies vaunted status
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The playground as orgy or Foucauldian theater To find a source of such vital resistance to dominant culture, we turn to Foucault. The contradictory mediation of unreachable isolation, on the one hand, and hyper-attentive observation, on the other, recalls the genealogical project of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s work charts its titular arc in reverse, as explicit demonstrations of corporeal punishment give way, over time, to schematized systems of behavioral discipline; concomitant with this movement, the modes of performance change their scale, with events of gratuitous violence dissolving into the governance of the quotidian. The Rousseauian delimiting of space so clearly executed in public displays of torture and immolation becomes blurred; the constant surveillance of discipline acts to locate theater as all-present, de-spatialized. The theater, however, persists in an exchange of its elements: in Aristotelian terms, the spectacle of punishment gives way to the character of discipline. The book’s famous opening section details the prolonged execution of Damiens, a regicide, in 1757 (for further discussion of his execution, see Chapter 5). The event seeks not to reform Damiens into a productive member of society, as both the playground reformers and later modes of penal reform attempted to do, but to present him as spectacle. His character bears no chance of alteration, unless it occurs in the afterlife; his identity as criminal is imprinted with more force and boldness as the ritual continues. Even in this situation, mimesis lurks: It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not to exceed, in savagery of the crime itself, to accustom the spectators to a ferocity from which one wished to divert them, to show them the frequency of crime, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration. (5) Foucault’s scene presents a heightened level of theatricality that makes possible fundamental changes in its underlying belief-system. Judges
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as subject and participant in his society. We maintain the playground creates its own performance of rehearsal, in which the potency of mimesis is no less diluted. These “fugitive rehearsals” spark actual transversal movements with capacities for perceptual, experiential, and subjective transformations to take place; they subvert the dominant systems that hope to contain such movements as re-inscriptions of state machinery.
become murderers; executioners become criminals; the tortured body becomes a vessel for emotional connection. The very mechanisms of theater that seek to outline the execution as profoundly excluded from its surrounding world only blur its lines of demarcation. With Dionysian loss of individuality, the performers resemble Lee’s pleasurable and volatile “exuberance” with their savage “ferocity.” Foucault’s hallucinatory negotiations of selfhood recalls Lee’s description of children playing, which notes that “it is only as he thrills and vibrates to the structure of the whole, as the life of the social organism flows through him and compels him to his task and to his place, that the full life of the individual comes forth” (qtd in Lewis 195). For Lee, anticipating the philosophy of today’s National Institute for Play (run by a consortium of scholars, scientists, doctors, and advocates of play),10 play is always purposeful, adaptive, and pedagogical, an active nexus of personal development and sociopolitical conduction in which children and adults continuously negotiate subjective and official territories. Recall Bateson’s words that begin this chapter: “Very brief analysis of childhood behavior shows that such combinations as histrionic play, bluff, playful threat, teasing play in response to threat, histrionic threat, and so on form together a single total complex of phenomena.” The integral role of threat in play that Bateson elucidates, like in Lee’s comparison with the Iroquois war dance, connects with the threatening terror that Foucault identifies with the spectacular, which he cites as one of the impetuses for public punishment’s disappearance. Exuberance and threat, or exuberance stimulated by threat; in other words, following Lee and Bateson, the exhilaration, ecstasy, and ferocity that can accompany lingering on or crossing over the brink to loss of control, comings-to-be, and transversality (potential for playground perversion), these all remain endemic to play’s natural design. Nevertheless, Damiens’s punishment is not a wholly adequate parallel to the playground’s theatricality. And while discipline, the second major modality of Discipline and Punish’s penal reform, introduces a critical aspect of the playground’s operation, performativity, it loses a sense of the spectacular. Discipline’s performativity manifests itself within the rhetoric of redemption; Foucault uncovers a “curious substitution” in the penitentiary system that inserts an “other character” for the convicted offender, namely, the “delinquent” (251). Constituted through the application and creation of knowledge by the state apparatus, the delinquent serves as a diluted embodiment of Christian resurrection, attaining grace through the supple but ever-present determinations of discipline rather than the gratuitous demonstrations of the crucifix. The
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“curious substitution” of the playground outlines a different process than Foucault’s offender-to-delinquent maneuver. In its place, playground reformers impose a microcosmic narrative of historical change; they asserted that, “because of Puritan asceticism and the pressures of modern urban industrial life, traditional games had almost disappeared, and children did not know how to play” (Lewis 193). The playground operates as a site of re-learning, fashioning metonyms of a wider problematic that cuts diachronically from America’s supposed foundation to the ills of the present day.11 Curiously, this configuration situates playground reform as a process of both remembrance, in the face of urbanization’s newness, and amnesia, in reaction to the Puritan’s cultural austerity. This transformation would occur publicly, under observation but not partitioned, allowing – and in fact encouraging – interaction among its participants. In contrast, the disciplinary model of penality maintained invisibility; its “first principle,” according to Foucault, is “isolation of the convict from the external world, from everything that motivated the offence, from the complicities that facilitated it. The isolation of the prisoners from one another” (236). Hence, the playground mixes both the mimetic capability to become another person – Lee’s furtive economy of personalities “bodying” from one child to another – and the constant surveillance from parental or “matronly” supervision that transforms it into spectacle. As such, we find a model for the playground reformers’ anxiety in Discipline and Punish’s brief section on chain gangs, which Foucault identifies as the “transition from the public execution, with its spectacular rituals, its art mingled with the ceremony of pain, to the penalties of prisons buried in architectural masses and guarded by the secrecy of administrations” (257). The phenomenon becomes positioned as neither discipline nor punishment but both, “combined in a single manifestation the two modes” operating as “the way to detention unfolded as a ceremonial of torture” (257). The chain gang becomes a penal fulcrum, both public in its spectacle and performative in its emphasis on reformation. It becomes a theoretical echo of the playground. Although active violence has been removed, and the bodies of the condemned preserved for penitence, the publicly visible element of punishment persists; it is transposed into publicly displayed, societally enforced play (this is playtime) under subjectifying parameters; conversely, whereas discipline’s isolation has been removed, its potential for performativity remains. In Foucault’s genealogy, the results of this amalgamation proved volatile. The implicit theatricality embedded in Damiens’s execution, which allowed for the capacity of the audience to imagine potentially
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the performers” identities blurring together, was made explicit in the chain gang. Foucault recounts an emblematic situation where a condemned priest, Delacollange, goes unrecognized in his prisoner garb; the audience mistakes his nearby accomplice, François, for him. François in turn “entered into the spirit of the game and accepted the role,” performing a caricature of his peer, adding “prayers and broad gestures of blessing directed at the jeering crowd” (260). Like the multiplications of Kaspar, identities become parodically doubled as entertainment, prompting comings-to-be that serve as excursions from and violations of the overarching, state-machinery-sanctioned subjective transformations from offender to delinquent. This flurry of identity reassignment, which highlights transversality’s libratory potential, may have prompted the chain gang’s short lifespan. Foucault notes that by 1837, the procession remained, albeit with a wall between the prisoners and public: a curtain lowered over the proscenium. This new device, the prison carriage, allowed only for distribution of food and internal surveillance (Foucault 257–60). The theatricality of the chain gang, intended as the codification of the state machinery’s inscribed narrative, had instead scrambled its semiotic signals and forced its own cessation. The playground provides a modern expression of the chain gang’s brief historical phenomenon. The performance enacted by Delacollange’s assistant, who sensed in the moment the capacity for becomings-other and initiated comings-to-be, finds itself patterned in the behavior of children at play. Jon Swain’s ethnography of contemporary British schoolchildren during recess locates emulation as a primary component of self-presentation, observing that “it was the performance, rather than the result that counted: the taking part” (103). Swain finds theatricality in the ability for children to “have spent thousands of hours, almost in rehearsal, of trying to look like, and emulate, their professional heroes” (101). Swain’s findings display emulative authority; relying on the potency of a particular cluster of memes and affective presences to alter subjective territories and potentially prompt becomings and comings-to-be. In Swain’s case, we explicitly situate emulative authority’s efficacy within paradigms of cultural popularity. In the context of the playground, emulative authority presents Foucauldian visibility with a significant twist: rather than performing for the supervising powers, the children perform for each other.12 The guard tower, that central symbolic edifice to Foucault’s disciplinary prison, has collapsed; the Panopticon now operates on the assumption of constant observation by peers in relation to the ghosted presences of authoritative celebrities; the regulation of the body stems from lateralized pressure. The locus of visibilities of the
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chain gang remain, but within the social group of the monitored, as the children’s “networks themselves were saturated by, as well as structured through, divisions of power” that leave the group “policed by its own self-regulation” (Foucault 99). The theater condenses its scope to the self performing itself (or its selves) for others while maintaining fluctuation of its imitative power. The drama of the self-realizing processes of becoming occupies the stage as the constant rehearsal of subjectivity substituting for its actualization. But what of the adults? If the axes of observation and subjective territorialization in Foucault’s prison are now turned inward, do the supervisors experience, as if this is performed for them, properties of witness-functions? Do the playground’s theatrics implicate and challenge subjectively its observers? The gaze of the guardians may in fact elide the children altogether, contrary to their supposed purpose. Holly Blackford’s study of adult behavior at suburban playgrounds suggests that “the panoptic force” of the parental gaze “becomes a community that gazes at the children only to ultimately gaze at one another, seeing reflected in the children the parenting abilities of one another” (228). According to Blackford, who seems – from our own experiences at playgrounds – to exaggerate the intensity of evaluation and competition, the performances of motherhood, divorced from their essential ties to child-rearing, are tautological, with children acting as both cipher and empirical measurement; the mothers’ “self-monitoring through narrative practice thinly veils a heated competition between mothers vis-à-vis their children’s abilities and achievements. The discourse progresses to what a child can and cannot do, always measured against direct observation of the child” (238). As with the chain gang, the combination of visibility and mimesis unmoors reformatory structures and unleashes unintended perceptual consequences and becomings-other. The theatricality of penal systems is partitioned into two narcissistic engines of self-monitoring, with children watching children and adults watching adults. The intended lines of sight, from the adults to the children, become refracted, upbraiding the state machinery’s teleology with which the playgrounds were initially constructed. The urban reformer Henry Curtis, in persuading fellow planners to instantiate strict systems of surveillance in children’s recreational areas, inveighed against the prospect of unattended play, claiming that the playground supervisor “may do more than any other person in the city to determine the social spirit and morals of the next generation” (qtd in Lewis 197). If Swain and Blackford’s accounts of contemporary playground behavior can be seen as a portion of Curtis’s legacy, his goals have been
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subverted by the performativity of the space he helped to create. This same unhinging entropy dismantled the chain gang and erected its tangible barrier between its ever-changing stage and house; here, the curtain remains open. If theater realigns and reshapes the performativities of the contemporary playground in transversal modes that betray the reforms that birthed it, it also allows for movements within its current milieu. The nature of the “play” that is, ostensibly, given “ground” or “grounded” in its borders suggests that complex subversions and explorations of the taboo occur under the veneer of romanticized innocence. Returning to Lee, his opus Play in Education begins by asserting: “if you watch a child playing, I think the first thing you will be struck by is his seriousness”; the ensuing chapters reinforce this image of studious work (1). His model of the child falls squarely within the realm of necessary instinct, expressions of biological nature that serve as steps towards the ultimate goal of creating a responsible, functional civilized subject within capitalist society. As “play-built animals,” every child possesses a “way of making good” and engages with playfulness, which consists of “activities through which he is to make and hold a place in the world’s competition” (9–10). Even the fervor of the play-like performances of the “Iroquois,” with spastic bodies flinging personalities into materiality, receives a cool approval, as “there is much virtue in abandonment” (Lee 283). Oddly, Lee’s evidence rests in relating, “the orgy was a recognized feature of most early religions; and it still has its merits,” which leads him to the rather shocking conclusion that “children’s exuberant play has the advantages of the orgy without its drawbacks; it does not as a rule become hysterical” (283). From his Rousseauian distance, Lee finds no discernable danger in play, regardless of its apparent violence. His moral networks reveal their arbitration: children rehearse their processes of subjectivity in chaotic, sexualized entanglements that avoid hysterics, that is, they remain contained and coherent through theatricalization.
Headless kings: the subjunctivity of playground songs “Hysterics,” though, may still lie encoded within a form of play seemingly more civilized: playground songs and rhymes. The semiotic analyses of playground poetry conducted by Joseph T. Thomas, Jr find a site of rehearsed fugitivity encoded within the framework of acceptable practice. When viewed as a mode of oral tradition, the poetry “vexed privileging notions of the individual, authorial genius, while similarly complementing the adult, largely literary, poetic traditions” (155).
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Children render popular melodies, such as the popular hymn “Joy to the World,” by Isaac Watts and Lowell Mason, with scatology and violence: “Joy to the world/the teacher’s dead/I chopped right off his head.”13 This image of a student beheading an authoritative figure who may be standing nearby nicely responds to an oft-quoted quandary posited by Foucault when discussing the possibility of resistance within his power networks: “What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty or, therefore, around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head” (“Truth and Power” 133). Thomas believes the practice of playground song answers another theoretical question, that of Certeau, who, directly engaging with Foucault’s disciplinary apparatus, asks “what popular procedures (also “miniscule” and quotidian) manipulate the mechanism of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them?” (xiv). The simultaneous conformity and manipulation becomes evident in Thomas’s reading of “Miss Suzie,” one of the most prevalent of playground rhymes. Recall the lyrics, but now as commonly altered on the playground: “Miss Suzie had a steamboat / The steamboat had a bell / Ms. Suzie went to heaven and the steamboat went to / Hello operator, please give me number nine/and if you disconnect me I will chop off your / Behind the refrigerator . . .”. According to Thomas, the disparate and irrational images in the song vacillate between two topics, sex and punishment, sometimes suggesting sex is punishment. Formally, the poem foregrounds its awareness of and begrudging respect for appropriateness, decorum. It takes its interest in sexuality and violence only so far, and then pulls back, testing the flexibility of rules, instead of flagrantly breaking them. (171) Resistance to emulative authority emerges within the channels of dominant culture’s structure, testing its systems of power without actually breaking the membrane of its containment; people rehearse but refrain from performing criminality.14 Playing in the playground gains a double meaning, as the children stage themselves in the subjunctive realm of theater with their behavior. The plays engage with subjunctive space; they trouble lines between being and becoming. We maintain that this area presents the hypothetical space of both “as-ifs” and “what-ifs,” creating a space between subjective and transversal territory. Subjunctive space, as theatrical process, allows subjects to constantly flirt with the permeability of their imitation, both disguising and, perhaps, exorcising
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The playground project: dialectical seeing and the resistance of nostalgia We want to conclude this fugitive exploration of the playground’s anxious theatricality in terms of Walter Benjamin’s conception of “dialectical seeing” and flânerie in his unfinished theoretical opus, The Arcades Project, a vast, rhizomatic locus of texts left posthumously and consigned to incompletion. In this work, Benjamin accesses a complicated set of theories, impressions, and observations centering on imagistic movement through the Parisian arcades. In this romanticized playground, which is to say, a modern shopping mall, there was, according to Benjamin’s testimonies, spectacular demonstrations of capital’s excess, expressions of bourgeois conventions denuding spaces of interiority, and potential grounds for phenomenological rebirth. In short, an intense ambivalence underlies Benjamin’s arcades: they could deconstruct the very structures of capitalist reification that they apotheosize.17 We find in this potential activity hints of transversal movement vis-à-vis processes of subjective territorialization. For Benjamin, the process of flânerie itself becomes a corporealized mode of Marxist critique, an embodied double of Benjamin’s own textual procedures that animate and reconfigure spacetime as vital ontological awakening, in effect breaking capitalist codifications of subjective territory. This sense of awakening, for Benjamin, uncovers a repressed, fundamental understanding of childhood: The figure of the flâneur advances over the street of stone, with its double ground, as though driven by a clockwork mechanism. And within, where this mechanism is ensconced, a music box is palpitation like some toy of long ago. It plays a tune: “From days of youth, / from days of youth, / a song is with me still.” By this melody he recognizes what is around him; it is not a past coming from his own youth, from a recent youth, but a childhood lived before then that speaks to him, and it is all the same to him whether it is the childhood of an ancestor or his own. (880) The passage moves beyond sentimentality to an encounter with a primal sense of shared origins, an earlier “childhood” not of the individual
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a need to break their formal networks and enter “reality.” If violent play could realize, to whatever degree, Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty,15 could these songs realize a version of Augusto Boal’s rehearsals for revolution as proposed by his theater-of-the-oppressed movement?16
flâneur but of humanity itself. Benjamin makes sonic and palpable the pull of Derridean archeo-teleological desire, beckoning beyond the commodified world and gesturing towards the immediate sign of childhood regained. Critically, this desire awakens in a Proustian moment of epiphany, culled from the depths of shared experience by a seemingly quotidian catalyst, an old toy that has replaced the heart, that is, a humanist gasp from an internalized graveyard of commodities. Thus the trappings of capitalism undo themselves through the pull of their own insistent song. Susan Buck-Morss finds a “pedagogic” element to The Arcades Project epitomized in such interaction, whereby, in Benjamin’s words, he seeks “to educate the image-creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade” (109). Benjamin names the methodology of this education “dialectical seeing,” the praxis of critical ontological/historical theory.18 Max Pensky sees this activity as a kind of Brechtian surprise, “constituting a temporal shock of legibility” that “serves as a pinion around which present, past, fantasy and prehistory are collected into one focal point, one singularity” (115). This chronological condensation produces its synthesis whereby it “suddenly collapses, and the present, in a moment of awakening, presents itself with the graphic image of its own possibilities” (Pensky 115). The paradoxical “shock” of legibility has a reflexive motion that transversally renders the previously effable subject as dissonant and phantasmagoric. Yet, emphasizing positivity, the moment leads not to paralysis but to clarity and “possibility”: like a musical map still embodying spectral traces of the longed-for experiences that produced it, the song from one’s youth gestures nostalgically towards something vital and forgotten. Hence, dialectical seeing can become or come-to-be a mode of transversal praxis; the explorer moves outside of subjective territories and across spacetime to engage fugitive elements outside of prescribed, officialized trajectories. For Benjamin, the dynamics of fugitivity inherent to dialectical seeing arise from capital’s excess but also from profound perceptual ambivalence, prompted by ghosts haunting the ostensibly vacant. What childless playground is not always already inhabited by images and sounds of children exuberantly at play? Likewise, for Benjamin, the Parisian arcades imply “an ambiguity of space” that provokes, through its weird metaphysics, reflexive-consciousness on the part of the consumers and consumed: Nevertheless: though it [the arcades] may have many aspects, indeed infinitely many, it remains – in the sense of mirror world – ambiguous,
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Characteristically replete with mirrors through which space closes onto the reflexive gaze of the individual and expands beyond the materiality to structures, the shopping mall becomes simultaneously a conduit for nihilism, humanism, and transcendence. It is a playground where we are Kaspar Hausers uprooted and confronted with potential ironically for both blankness and unlimited becomings. Unlike Lee and his reformist peers, Benjamin accounts for the theatricality of pedagogic experience in theorizing – and actively wishes for – spatial practice. Theater generates new modes of perception and interaction through becomings-other, comings-to-be, and fugitivity; it ushers people into new – challenging or felicitous – phenomenological– hermeneutic processes and subjective reconfigurations. Rather than the tightened supervision of its inverted panopticon, the shopping mall, like the playground and chain gang, may recognize its capacity to transform its subjects along their own flâneries that occur haphazardly and unexpectedly. Benjamin urges his readers to “think of the arcade as a watering place” in which we “stumble upon an arcade myth, with a legendary source at its center – an asphalt wellspring arising in the heart of Paris” (409). This mythology, implied by the confusion of the arcade’s spectacle, provides not only a glimpse of the possible past but also a gateway within the present, as “the extent which healing is a rite de passage, a transition experience, becomes vividly clear in those classical corridors” (409). Benjamin’s shopping mall, like the individual subject enmeshed within it, is one of constant fluctuation. The result of its theatricality and transversality, through dialectical seeing and fugitive explorations, is a paradoxical self-realization not prescribed by the environment and authored by the individual. Benjamin finds a model for this alteration in Charles Baudelaire, who prized his capacity to remain mercurial through mimesis. Baudelaire declares his desire to “return to the dioramas, whose brutal and enormous magic has the power to impose on me a useful illusion” and “go to the theatre and feast my eyes on the scenery, in which I find my dearest dreams artistically expressed,” concluding that these sensations, “because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth” (qtd in Benjamin 536). The converse of Baudelaire’s declaration is that the supposed “reality” against which these illusions are pitched are, in fact,
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double-edged. It blinks, is always just this one – and never nothing – out of which another immediately arises. The space that transforms itself does so in the bosom of nothingness. In its tarnished, dirtied mirrors, things exchange a Kaspar–Hauser-look with the nothing: it is an utterly equivocal wink coming from nirvana. (878)
merely more reinforced illusions. Baudelaire and Benjamin, like Kaspar Hauser, discover self-realization and subjective inauguration as a paradoxical impossibility, arising from the conditions that attempt to contain and police it. This phenomenon seems more understandable to the children flâneurs of the normal playground, who welcome comings-to-be and becomings, than to the adults who, like Feuerbach, created it with the intention of making static and readable the individual subject. If Benjamin gives us a shopping mall as romanticized playground, the playground may become the shopping mall (or city it represents) in miniature, in other words, Baudelaire’s theater as pedagogic planning. We find in this site of unfolding realities a persistent contradiction left over from Rousseau’s writings and their resurrection at the dawn of the twentieth century: If children are alien to adult experience, how can adults be so firm in their theories of childhood? The proscenium arch must cut both ways, rendering the audience and actor both as ineffable other. Far more terrifying, though potentially transformative, is that there is no proscenium; that the children who occupy the playground bear the same capacities as their supervisors, grappling with the same permeability of reality, operating on the same systems of logic. Recall the fantastical conjurations of the chain gang that, like the games of the playground, take stock of themselves, part by part, in a rush of self-definition, living always on the border of ontological and subjective affirmation and cancellation. Benjamin cites the critic Gustave Geffroy’s encapsulation of this fluidity as art, the troubling agent that persists in overthrowing the determinations of both state and individual, that is, the “represented things which give to the viewer the possibility of dreaming them” (qtd in Benjamin 434). We propose this subjunctive opportunity for subjects as a means through which they can achieve the agency necessary to negotiate their own playground activities.
Notes 1. For more on Nagel’s non-dualist approach to the mind/body problem, see his book Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially ch. 18, “The Psychophysical Nexus.” This latter chapter comprised a contribution to New Essays on the A Priori, Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke, eds, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), which supplies a good overview of the problematic of multiple objectivities engaged here. 2. In addition to Masson’s assertion, various critical analyses of Kaspar abound, as he remains a fascinating subject across multiple interdisciplinary
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3.
4.
5.
6.
discourses. Among the many works that deal with Kaspar, see, for a psychoanalytic reading, Kaja Silverman, “Kaspar Hauser’s “Terrible Fall” into Narrative,” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 73–93; for a dissective–cohesive attempt to uncover the “real story” behind Kaspar, see Jan Bondeson, The Great Pretenders: The True Stories Behind Famous Historical Mysteries (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), esp. ch. 2; for an intriguing attempt at reconstructing Kaspar’s lineage through DNA analysis, see G.M. Weichhold, J.E. Bark, W. Korte, W. Eisenmenger and K.M. Sullivan, “DNA analysis in the case of Kaspar Hauser,” International Journal of Legal Medicine 111 (1998): 287–91. Also, two popular vehicles for Kasparspace’s integration into popular culture is Werner Herzog’s acclaimed film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Peter Sehr’s film, Kaspar Hauser (1993), which one the German Film Awards for best picture, best director, and best actor. For more on Herzog’s cinematic take, see Silverman, “Kaspar Hauser’s “Terrible Fall” into Narrative”; for a discussion of different filmic representations, including Herzog’s, see Ruth Perlmutter’s interview with Hungarian director Janos Szaz, “Ghosts of Germany: Kaspar Hauser and Woyzeck,” Literature/ Film Quarterly 25.3 (1997): 236–40; for a look at Herzog’s imbrication of Kasparspace with German Romanticism, see Matthew Gandy, “Visions of Darkness: The Representations of Nature in the Films of Werner Herzog,” Cultural Geographies 3.1 (1996): 1–21. In addition to Truth and Method, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Phenomenological Movement (1963),” in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976): 130–81. A resurgence of sorts in feral children studies seems to have occurred in the early 2000s. In addition to the works of Douthwaite, Benzaquen, and Fudge et al., see Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2002), and Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003). For a review of Fudge et al., Nash, Newton and Nussbaum, see James Steintrager, “Humanity Gone Wild,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38.4 (2005): 681–9. The role of desire in ontological determination is complicated; the influential eighteenth-century naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon suggests that animals and humans are separated fundamentally by their modality of desire, not the mere existence of it at all: according to Buffon, animals possess “only one mode for acquiring pleasure, the exercise of their sensations to gratify their desires . . .” whereas humans “are endowed with another source of pleasure, the exercise of the mind, the appetite of which is the desire of knowledge” (1:295). See Buffon, A Natural History, General and Particular, Containing the History and Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, the Brute Creation, Vegetables, Minerals, &C, &C; Translated from the French by William Smellie, (London: Printed for T. Kelly, 1862). For more on the figuration of desire with regard to Hegel, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Handke’s play knowingly demonstrates a facility with many linguistic theories; for an in-depth analysis of this engagement and citationality, see Jeffrey
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7. 8.
9.
10. 11.
12.
Herrick, “Peter Handke’s Kaspar: A Study of Linguistic Theory in Modern Drama,” Philological Quarterly 63:2 (Spring 1984): 205–221. About the National Institute for Play, see its website: http://www.nifplay.org/ about_us.html. Many theorists have appended, subverted, attacked, or otherwise engaged with Foucault’s controversial notions of the subject’s problematization within penal reform. For a contemporary critique of Discipline and Punish’s genealogical maneuverings, from the perspective of performance studies and critical legal studies, see Dwight Conquergood, “Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty,” Theatre Journal 54.3 (2002): 339–67. While Conquergood’s essay poses challenges to reading Foucault in a contemporary American culture that partially insists upon the death penalty, it also echoes Foucault’s notions of character and identities becoming negotiated or doubled in the public act of penal enforcement: reading the transcripts of the trial of Esther Rogers, a confessed murderer in early eighteenth-century New England, Conquergood asks, “Was she a walking palimpsest, the imprint of her harlot past shadowing and alternating with her Christian image?” (350). In a contemporary cybernetic age we can argue that Foucault’s genealogy has been complicated by unforeseen complexities in engines of surveillance and the resultant reconfiguration of the very notion of the subject. For a provocative prompt in thinking of such issues through and beyond Foucault’s theoretical apparatus, see Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. Deleuze identifies a third stage of “control” after the phases of discipline and punish that mark Foucault’s text, asserting that “We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure,” thus interrogating the very notions of visibility and interiority upon which Foucault’s shift rests (3–4). For a feminist and cultural materialist reading of Foucault’s theories of the Panopticon, see B. V. Olguín, “Mothers, Daughters, and Deities: Judy Lucero’s Gynocritical Prison Poetics and Materialist Chicana Politics,” Frontiers 22.2 (2001): 63–86. Olguín notes the burgeoning masculine symbolism of the central edifice to Bentham’s prison, the “phallic resonance of the panoptic penitentiary tower” (65). Such an “ethnographic” comparison was common in psychological tracts at the time; see Lilla Estelle Appleton, A Comparitive Study of the Play Activities of Adult Savages and Civilized Chilldren (New York: Arno Press, 1910). This consortium includes such luminaries as primatologist Jane Goodall and Joan Abrahamson, president of the Jonas Salk Foundation. For a brief consideration of the linguistic repercussions of playground activities, see Laurie Bauer and Ingrid Bauer, “Word Formation on the Playground,” American Speech 71.1 (Spring 1996): 111–12. For a study of the mimesis of playground games in relation to gender differences, see Anthony Pellegrini, Kentaro Kato, Peter Blatchford, and Ed Baines, “A Short-term Longitudinal Study of Playground Games Across the First Year of School: Implications for Social Competence and Adjustment to School,” American Educational Research Journal 39.4 (Winter 2002): 991–1015; for a historical account of playground reform, embodiment, and gender, see Elizabeth A. Gagen, “An example to us all: child development and identity construction in early 20th-century playground,” Environment and Planning A 32 (2000): 599–616.
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13. Other variations of this rhyme include: “Joy to the world, the school burned down/And all the teachers died/The principal is dead/We shot him in the head / The janitor is gone/We flushed him down the john/And heeeeaven, the school burned down” and “Joy to the world, the school burned down/And all the teachers died/Where is the principal?/He’s on the flag pole,/Swinging by his underwear,/Swinging by his underwear,/Swi-ing-ing by-y-y his under-wear.” Motifs that echo throughout these and other variations include decapitation, references to toilets, and specific bodily harm to the figure of the principal as school sovereign. 14. Foucault himself deals later with the problem of the subject’s resistance and reformulation against systems of discipline, a critique, as noted, often rehearsed in reading his work. See Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell, eds Frederic Gros (New York: Picador, 2001) for a careful reading of Platonic philosophy with regard to the famous tenet of “know thyself”; when read against the Hellenic notion of “master thyself” Foucault uncovers a phenomenological turn in the conception of the Western subject that perhaps opens a space of individuation and resistance in the face of disciplinary networks. In this work Foucault identifies in Hellenistic philosophy multiple “researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth” (15). Such a notion of selfmastery and the coalescence of the subject against external forces of subject formation echo the problems of the playground, especially in regard to their emphasis on performativity. For a recovery of the subject’s emergence in relation to Foucault’s conception of “biopower” specifically with regard to child development, see James Wong, “Sapere Aude: Critical Ontology and the Case of Child Development,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 37.4 (December 2004): 863–82. 15. See Antonin Artaud, Theater and its Double (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958). 16. See http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org, in addition to Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985) and Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics (New York: Routledge, 1998). 17. For a reading of the concept of “space” – material, epistemological, political – within The Arcades Project, see Henry Sussman, “Between the Registers: The Allegory of Space in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project” boundary 2 30.1 (Spring 2003): 169–90. 18. For a critical engagement of The Arcades Projects that develops the idea of “dialectical seeing” with regard to the semiotics of reading and “modes of signifying,” see Samuel Weber, “‘Streets, Squares, Theaters’: A City on the Move-Walter Benjamin’s Paris,” boundary 2 30.1 (Spring 2003): 17–30.
Works cited Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999.
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Benzaquen, Adrianna. Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature. Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books, 1967. Blackford, Holly. “Playground Panopticism: Ring Around the Children, a Pocketful of Women.” Childhood 11.2. (2004), 227–49. Boghossian, Paul. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Brown, Stewart. Interview with Touch the Future: http://ttfuture.org/services/ visionaries/Sbrown/index.html Buck-Moross, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (Autumn 1986), 99–140. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Douthwaite, Julia. The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Feuerbach, Anselm von. “Kaspar Hauser.” Wolf-Children and Feral Man. eds Rev. J. A. L. Singh. New York: Archon Books, 1966. Ferguson, Frances. “The Afterlife of the Romantic Child: Rousseau and Kant meet Deleuze and Guattari.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102.1 (Winter 2003). Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ——. “Truth and Power.” The Essential Foucault. eds Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: The New Press, 2003. Fudge, Erica. “Calling Creatures by their True Names.” eds Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman. At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies, and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad Publishing Corporation, 1989. Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Handke, Peter. “Kaspar.” Kaspar and Other Plays. Trans. Michael Roloff. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969. Harlow, Harry, Robert Dodsworth, and Margaret Harlow. “Total Social Isolation in Monkeys.” Procedures of the National Academy of Science, U.S.A. 54.1 ( July 1965), 90–7. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996. Lee, Joseph. Play in Education. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1915. Lewis, Robert. “‘Well-Directed Play’: Urban Recreation and Progressive Reform.” Impressions of a Gilded Age: The American Fin-de-siècle. eds Marc Chenetier and Rob Kroes. Amsterdam: Amerika Instituut, 1983.
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Linnaeus, Carl. Systema Naturae, facsimile of the first edition. Trans. M. S. J. EngelLedeboer and H. Engel. Nieuwkoop, The Netherlands: B. de Graaf, 1964. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Nagel, Thomas. “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review, 133.4 (October 1974). Newton, Michael. “Bodies Without Souls.” eds Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman. At the Borders of the Human: Beast, Bodies, and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Pinker, Stephen. The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994. Pinsky, Max. “Geheimmittel: Advertising and Dialectical Images in Benjamin’s Arcades Project.” Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. eds Beatrice Hanssen. New York: Continuum, 2006. Read, M. “Peter Handke’s “Kaspar” and the Power of Negative Thinking.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 29.2 (April 1993), 126–48. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or on Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1979. Savile, Anthony. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Shakespeare, William. King John. eds E. A. J. Honigmann. London: Arden, 1967. Swain, Jon. “‘The Money’s Good, the Fame’s Good, the Girls are Good’: The Role of Playground Football in the Construction of Young Boys’ Masculinity in a Junior School.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27.1 (February 2006), 95–101. Thomas, Joseph T., Jr “Child Poets and the Poetry of the Playground.” Children’s Literature 32 (2004), 152–77. Tredgold, A.F. Mental Deficiency (Amentia) London: Balliere, Tindall and Cox, 1908.
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Civilizing Subjects, or Not: Montaigne’s Guide to Modernity, Agamben’s Exception, and Human Rights after Derrida Anna Kłosowska & Bryan Reynolds
The Asmat [twentieth-century people of Southern New Guinea] commemorated death with feasts and rituals that both honored the dead and incited the living to avenge their deaths. . . . To the Asmat, death was never natural; it was always caused by an enemy, either through warfare or by more insidious processes such as malevolent magic. Each death created an imbalance that the living had to correct by taking the life of an enemy. . . . After a village suffered a number of deaths, it would hold a bis ceremony. Several bis poles were carved for the ceremony and displayed in front of the men’s house, where they formed the center of a mock battle between men and women. The poles were kept until a successful headhunt had been carried out. After a final feast, the villagers took the poles to the sago palm groves on which they depended for food. . . . The initial phases of the big ritual expressed the power of the Asmat to avenge their dead, thus restoring order to their world. The last phase symbolized the journey of the dead, who traveled in their canoes to the afterworld. Asmat memorial pole1 We would have subtitled this chapter, “Montaigne’s Guide to Modernity, Foucault’s Biopower, Agamben’s Exception, Rancière’s Dissensus, Boltanski’s Multiplicities, and Human Rights after Arendt, Habermas, and Derrida,” but we are not so expansive as to lose all concern for style or credibility. And yet, it is the desire to involve ourselves in the conversation with all these discourses on power, individuals, and politics that drives our analysis of two early modern texts on civilizing subjects: Simon Marion’s virtually unknown Pleas by Mister Simon Marion, 203
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lawyer of the Parliament . . ., (1587), compared to Michel de Montaigne’s extremely well-known “Of Cannibals” (Bordeaux 1580; Paris 1588, etc.). We take Marion’s plea to represent widespread consensus (were it otherwise, it would not have worked in support of his legal argument), while Montaigne’s text may well represent a possibly less widespread position at the time, and its popularity today is due to the fact that it appears uncannily to anticipate twentieth-century anthropological relativism. Epic frescoes start in medias res, and we begin ours at midpoint between 1587 and the present, in 1789, not because of any wish to create suspense, but quite the opposite, to cleave as closely as possible to the common ground of the twentieth- and twenty-first century texts we evoke. That common ground is the shared assumption that the legislation of “modern” human rights begun with the foundational documents of the American and French Revolutions, The Declaration of Independence (Congress of the United States of America, 4 July 1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (National Assembly of France, 26 August 1789). As Lynn Hunt points out, by their explicit insistence that human rights are “self-evident,” both Declarations attempt to obscure the too-obvious fact of specific rights’ historical and geographic constructedness, while affirming the existence of the universal ideal of human rights. The works on comparative law, such as Charles de Montesquieu’s influential (and banned) The Spirit of the Laws (1748), are among the relativist and pluralist foundations of the Declaration of 1789. There lies the fundamental problem: once the “natural” basis of sovereignty and law is historically and geographically located (as in the Spirit of the Laws), renegotiated and expanded (as in the American and French revolutions), the question is no longer (or not only) what are these rights? But rather: Who are those to whom the human rights apply? In other words, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man”?2 Or, as Hannah Arendt would reformulate this problem in the Origins of Totalitarianism, who are those who are so insignificant that human rights are not even denied to them? Rather than a definite, concrete, and bounded phenomenon, the “rights” of the Declaration of 1789 were an evolving object, a subject to interpretation, before and after that date. The paramount question of eligibility was raised, most notably by Maximilien Robespierre within the Assembly (October 1789) and by Olympe de Gouges, outside the Assembly (September 1791). Whereas Robespierre argues against the “distinction of wealth,”3 Gouges argues against the distinction of sex; given that women had the “right to the scaffold,” they too should enjoy
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equal rights as citizens.4 Other major interpretive moments concerned the rights of Jews, Calvinists, people of color, slaves, and members of “infamous” professions (actors, executioners). The typology of “exceptions” produced by these cases spans a well-recognizable spectrum: some of these constituencies were declared “special” and granted “special” rights, “equal, but different” (women); others (Jews) were severed from community-based practices but were, for the first time in French history, considered equal de iuro. These two complementary ideologies that could establish the extension of human rights can be characterized as (1) “federal,” based on warranting distinct individual and collective rights specific to particular communities; and (2) equal rights for all. The fallacies of either solution (when applied to a “special” constituency) are well known; in the case of women, equal rights became an even more distant object, prompting Gouges to declare that women were better off under the ancien régime (monarchy before 1789), to whose institutions they had adapted, and where they wielded considerable (though in Gouges’s view mostly informal) power; these institutions having been destroyed, women’s power base was eroded, and no new base of power arose in its place. As Françoise Parturier recalled in her 1968 Open Letter to Men,5 whereas Mme de Sévigné (a famous seventeenth-century author) had a seat in the parliament of Brittany, her republican women compatriots had no right to vote until 1944. Michel Foucault’s epistemic break that marks the rise of biopower and distinguishes between two different regimes of sexuality during and after the ancien régime follows the contours of the same landscape as that decried by Gouges. A complementary example was the impact, not devoid of collateral damage, of the political rights granted to French Jews in 1791. Although it created equality, it also erased the institutions and taxation specific to the Jewish community, effectively undermining it, as the financial, institutional, and emotional links in the social fabric of the community were drastically weakened if not broken.
Hunt, Rancière, Agamben on rights of man According to Hunt, the fulcrum of the paradigm shift of 1789 was empathy, especially the newly experienced empathy for commoners: the crucial importance of the concept of human rights at the time being a product of compassion for another human regardless of social status and, by extension, differences and similarities in “condition” or “state” (ancien régime terms of distinction between different social categories), gender, religion, ethnicity, and so forth. The discursive ascension of this
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nondiscriminatory compassion across popular and officialized modes of cultural expression corresponds with a transformation in the sociopolitical significance of empathetic identification and subjective affects in the eighteenth century. Hunt argues that the rise of the sentimental novel (Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s best-selling Julie, or the New Héloïse, 1761) and the public outcry against torture (Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance on the Occasion of the Death of Jean Calas, 1762) converged to generate a new culture where “imagined empathy” – like Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined community”6 – was experienced while “reading accounts of torture or epistolary novels had physical effects that translated into brain changes and came back as new concepts about the organization of social and political life” (33). “Imagined empathy,” according to Hunt, serves as the foundation of human rights rather than of nationalism. It is imagined, not in the sense of made up, but in the sense that empathy requires a leap of faith, of imagining that someone else is like you. Accounts of torture produced this imagined empathy through new views of pain. (32) Acknowledging that, “There is no easy or obvious way to prove or even measure the effect of new cultural experiences on eighteenth-century people, much less on the conceptions of rights” (32), Hunt nevertheless asserts her empathy-defined account of the history of human rights in Europe because “any account of historical change must in the end account for the alteration of individual minds” (34). (See Chapter 1 in this book on such effected “brain changes.”) Yet, in some respects, torture was a constant since Roman times, and at least in France the modalities of inflicting torture within some legal parameters were consistent for centuries. For instance (as discussed in Chapter 4), when Robert-François Damiens was executed in 1757 for an attempt against the life of King Louis XV of France, the authorities simply dusted off the centuries-old procedure for inflicting slow, spectacular death – a long process, culminating in drawing and quartering – on those guilty of lèse majesté, an assassination attempt at the king or treason. This procedure was also used in the execution of François Ravaillac, the perpetrator of France’s most recent successful regicide, that of Henry IV in 1610. One could argue that the state performed that type of torture so rarely that it was less likely to be subject to revision based on collective consciousness; or else, that the stability of the practice reflected consistency in popular attitudes towards torture, a hypothesis that would contradict Hunt’s. Further, Hunt maintains that
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torture was rejected in the late eighteenth century as new conditions of empathy prevailed after a long period when torture was accepted as a necessary evil, a period extending from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, but that does not seem to be the case. Rather, torture was used to extract confessions during that period in spite of vocal protests that argued it was useless, resulted in false confessions (if any at all), and should be abolished.7 Not only did European laws concerning torture differ by country and not cohere with the Catholic/Protestant divide, but some scholars who link the representation of torture on the stage to a rise of inwardness, intimacy, and privacy mark its heyday over a century before Hunt indicates.8 Hunt’s argument for the presence of a widespread and particular sensibility that led to the invention of natural, equal, and universal human rights9 in eighteenth-century Paris is germane to the generally accepted hypothesis of the emergence of the concept of the individual (human with individuated subjectivity) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Commonly given as evidence for this influential juncture in the history of the subject is the philosophy of René Descartes (Discourse on the Method 1637), especially his insistence on the right to doubt (in the interest of “reason”),10 and certain material phenomena, such as the wider distribution among different social, cultural, and economic classes of the “technologies of privacy.” For instance, people started using individual bedrooms instead of one communal room inhabited by the entire family. However, the dense historical studies that organize the material to test that hypothesis have produced ambiguous results. Consider Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun’s influential The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris, a vast study of three thousand Parisian households of the peuple (commoners) from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Pardailhé-Galabrun concludes that there were two major changes that demonstrate sociocultural shifts that allowed for greater access to individual privacy: (1) the replacement of the open hearth where one cooked while crouching on the floor by the upright stove; and (2) the creation of separate sleeping spaces for each person. Yet, Pardailhé-Galabrun also ties the partitioning of space to the skyrocketing rent-to-income ratio between 1715 and 1789, a result of the 50 per cent decrease in real wages combined with population growth fed by the “rural exodus.” It can be argued that rural exodus, like any economic migration, was related to the development of privacy in that it offered opportunities for individuals that were non existent in their communities of origin, but in the end, the inventory, count, and ratio of the devices used to foster privacy in newly expanded cities to those that
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But what is to be inferred from the finding that virtually every householder (depending on his purchasing power) had a remarkably large number of chairs in the bed chamber, or, if living in only one room, in that room? As many as twenty chairs are inventoried in well-to-do bedchambers. The quality and style of these chairs no doubt varied from stylish and expensive to out-of-date and almost worthless, but they are an important social-cultural continuity from the seventeenth century. Being able to receive and seat a large number of relatives and friends on important occasions such as the birth of a child or a death remained an important element in the self-esteem and dignity of a family. Privatization? The birth of intimacy? . . . the boundaries between the private and the public, the intimate and the promiscuous, remain important subjects for further research . . . (574) Were these chairs in constant use, de facto transforming the private sphere of the recently innovated bedroom into another version of its origins, the one-room household? Or, is the fact that chairs outnumbered people by a ratio of about five to one a testimony to the transversal nature of subjectivity and need to communicate? If chairs in bedrooms are any indication, the need to communicate publicly is as essential, persistent, and strong as the need to sleep; and it is not eradicated by the desire and opportunity to make intimate, individual sleeping arrangements (separate bedrooms). Rather, as separate bedrooms became more commonplace, chairs followed into the bedrooms as if to reassert the importance of the public sphere inside the very private space where the individual closeted herself. Last, but not least, were the chairs only functional, or were they symbolic as well? We imagine that the supernumerary chairs were the conceptual equivalent of the Victorian parlor or American formal dining room whose conspicuous impracticality betrays its symbolic purpose. The purpose of the formal dining room is to mark the household as possessed of a certain level of genteel living, of a disposable income so enormous as to render the actual use of rooms only a weak point in the decision to acquire them; or, perhaps, implying that the family lives in an imaginary equivalent of a castle. Similarly, as if to sustain that particular fantasy, as Pardailhé-Galabrun and Ranum point out, upper-class Parisians inhabited “vast unheated and unlighted residences” where “the rich groped around in darkness” (573). And if, in the eighteenth century, in the spaces of everyday existence, both the peuple
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strengthen bonds within the community do not resolve the question of their purpose. In a review of The Birth of Intimacy, Orest Ranum writes:
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and the elite strenuously enact a fantasy of public appearance (the former by adding to its inventory of chairs, the latter by groping around in the cold and dark), what can be said of the birth of intimacy, and the modes of subjectivity it engenders, as a specifically eighteenth-century phenomenon? The conditions of possibility that Hunt identifies as dominant in the eighteenth century, an overlapping of empathetic relations and intersubjective capacities across nodal points of subjective territories (as expressed in sentimental novels), sympathy for people of different social standings and genders, and revulsion at and rejection of torture, also characterized, as we hope to demonstrate, the late sixteenth century. The major precursor of the sentimental and epistolary novel of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ovid’s Heroides (fictional letters of legendary lovers), was one of the most popular texts of the sixteenth century (it was often translated by women as well as men). Of greater significance today, moreover, is that in his canonical essay, “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne famously argues that cannibals of the New World were as political and civil as and more humane than Europeans. This is because, unlike the Europeans, who torture their enemies, the cannibals eat theirs. Yet, to accept his essay as the point of origin of the modern idea of human rights is to ignore other contemporary conceptualizations of human rights, conceptualizations whose logical inconsistencies Montaigne’s essay manages to resolve. In conjunction with discussion on Montaigne, we want to consider that a contemporary legal text, in which the status of the indigenous inhabitants of the New World is one of the peripheral arguments identified to support a court plea regarding taxes on imported books, may more accurately reflect the prevalent mode of thinking about the bios politicos or civilized subject at the time. In 1587, Simon Marion, general counsel of the Parliament of Paris and the University, delivered this plea that has heretofore gone unnoticed. Compared to Montaigne’s fully evolved ethnographic relativism, Marion’s Pleas, as we want to argue, presents an intermediate stage in the early modern process of understanding what Giorgio Agamben calls “the humanity of living man” (8). If we judge from Marion’s Pleas, this understanding was based in a Platonic/phenomenological and transcendental model of natural reason (raison), a reflection of the divine inherent in all men, whether they are inflected by bios politicos or are mere homunculi (little men). Marion’s plea is closer in spirit not to Montaigne, who resolves its contradictions, but to another, famous legal debate culminating in Spain’s Valladolid Hearings in 1550–51, between the distinguished sixteenth-century Spanish
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Dominican theologians Bartolomé de Las Casas (advocate for the rights of indigenous peoples of the New World) and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (defender of the Spanish conquest). The Valladolid Hearings of 1550–51, which deliberated the legality of subjugating indigenous peoples of the New World through violence in order to convert them to Catholicism, and led to the Legislación de Indias, a foundational document for modern international law, may well be considered as important a date in the history of modern human rights as is the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Men. Just as the Declaration was pointedly limited to men (a fact quickly exploited in Gouges’s response, The Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens, 1791, whose notoriety may have cost de Gouges her life during the Terror of 1793), the Hearings document limitations in the early modern idea of human rights. Steeped in Aristotelian rhetoric, Sepúlveda uses the term homunculi for the inhabitants of the New World, whom he considers arrested at the level of zo¯e. To explain the implications of Sepúlveda’s logic on the developing understanding of humanity identified by Agamben, we will address Daniel Martin’s analysis of the relationship between Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” and the Valladolid Hearings. Thus, we are coming full circle: from the Valladolid Hearings and Marion to Montaigne who studied law in Spain and (as Martin suggests, based on that fact; Montaigne never makes this connection explicit) may have meant the “Cannibals” essay as a reaction to the main arguments circulated in that famous legal disputation. For us, Marion’s plea functions as a hermeneutic link in the chain that connects the idea of human rights grounded in Christianity (God endowed all humans, whom he treats equally, with a soul and inalienable right to compassion) to the secular/Aristotelian grounding of human rights in political life, a basis for compassion extended to all humans via proto-ethnographic relativism or pluralism that we see represented by Montaigne’s essay. By highlighting one year, 1587–88, and one place, Paris, we want to emphasize the coexistence of different stages of the evolution of the idea of human rights in the writings of two appreciably similar authors. Both Montaigne and Marion studied law, successfully held public office, and were moderate Catholics. And yet, Marion’s concept of human rights can be seen as an ancestor of Montaigne’s, an intermediate stage of an evolution of which Montaigne presents the developed form. In comparison with Hunt’s eighteenth-century examples, the premodern/early modern images of compassion are less univocal and strong in their condemnation of torture, yet they are significantly analogous. We would like to suggest that in the late sixteenth century and
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eighteenth century alike there is textual evidence for the existence of an inalienable, universal, egalitarian sense of compassion that is founded on reciprocal becomings-other achieved positively through empathetic subjunctivity, which is to say, real and/or imagined intersubjective experiences based on “what-if” and “as-if” impetuses and ventures. This occurred as an effect of, just as it precipitated, shared occupation within respective subjective and official territories of the tortured by both the immediate audiences of public displays of torture and the reading or listening audiences of accounts of torture already administered, whether far away in the New World or locally in a city’s central plaza. For instance, assassins issued from the ranks of the peuple elicit sympathy, publicly and widely admired, from one royal victim, King Henry IV of France, celebrated for his religious tolerance and compassion. As bourgeois memorialist Pierre de L’Estoile notes in his entry of 1594: Tuesday December 2, the king, returning from Picardy, came into the room of Mme de Liancourt [his current mistress] still in his boots, and bending down to pull up some lords who threw themselves at his knees, a young scholar, named Jean Chastel, stabbed him with a knife, fortunately not in the neck, but in the face, and only opened the King’s upper lip, breaking one of his teeth. It may have been dark in the room because: The King thought it was Mathurine, the girl, who wounded him in joking; but she, denying it, had the door of the room closed, and was the reason why they arrested that patricide, who threw the knife to the floor and confessed the deed. Whereupon, the King ordered that they let him leave, and that he pardons him, which was not done at all. . . . Chastel was tortured (mis à la question) and revealed nothing, afterwards he was quartered.11 (fo 24v-25r) This episode represents Henry IV as a heroic and politically perceptive leader: it would have occurred to him that the martyrdom of Chastel could spur the fanatical Catholic factions that so nearly prevented him from becoming the King of France. L’Estoile’s commentary continues in that direction, describing the events after Chastel was turned over to the law and tortured: Catholic unrest, the pro-Henry agitation, and the King putting a stop to it “with his usual clemency” because it went against his reconciliation policy. However, the monarch’s reaction to the assassination attempt is also particularly interesting for what it suggests about his
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subjective affects as an icon with tremendous emulative authority (he was widely referred to as “Henry the great” and “the good King”). After Chastel stabs Henry, Henry’s first thought is that a practical joke has gone awry; and when the murderer turns out to be a young student, he wants him released. Although among his celebrated features, his courage and compassion did not diminish his vulnerability. A later attempt against his life, by Ravaillac, was successful. Another example that illustrates early modern attitudes towards “excessive” or “sadistic” violence is memorialist Pierre Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantôme’s portrait of Filippo di Piero Strozzi, considered one of the greatest military leaders of the sixteenth century. Brantôme compares Strozzi to Count de Cossé de Brissac: I must say, here was a young man [Brissac] who equally liked to wield his sword and draw blood with it – a bit too much, as I have seen myself, and so did some of our other friends, who told him so; for he was too cruel in combat, and prompt to go there and kill, and he loved it to the point that he enjoyed falling upon a person with his dagger and striking him with it, until the blood spurted to his face. It was a strange case, however, because this brave Brissac looked so sweet in the face, beautiful, delicate, and feminine, and still his heart was so cruel and perverted by blood. It was the opposite with the valiant Strozzi, whose face seemed almost barbarian, scowling, and dark, but who was hardly cruel, whether in close combat or in administering punishment, as far as I knew him; and only rarely did I see him give orders for harsh punishments to his camp prefect. However, he ordered one that surpassed all those ever ordered by Brissac; for, after the third war and the third peace were concluded, when the king retired to Angers, and the troops which were in Guyenne had to cross the Loire river, the aforesaid Monsieur de Strozzi, seeing his divisions slowed down by too many camp followers and whores of the soldiers, and having made a number of proclamations [bandons] to chase them away, and seeing that none worked, when they were passing over the bridge of Cé, all at once had them thrown from the top down, more than eight hundred of these poor creatures, who, piteously crying for help, were all drowned, by too great cruelty, which was never considered beautiful by noble hearts, and even by the ladies of the court, who singularly abhorred him for it, and who for a long time looked at him askance. (283–5)
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The narrative of the massacre of the camp followers (1570) is part of Strozzi’s life in Brantôme’s Lives of the Illustrious Men and Great Captains of France.12 Brantôme served under Strozzi and was his close associate. He even hoped to enrich himself by planning a joint military expedition with Strozzi in Peru, which never materialized. Brantôme narrates the massacre as an example of extreme cruelty, and the comparison with Brissac is supposed to contrast Brissac’s sadism with Strozzi’s generosity. According to Brantôme, Strozzi was less severe than other leaders, with the one exception of the Pont de Cé massacre, which Strozzi later regretted. The reaction of the court ladies who “singularly abhorred [Strozzi] for it, and who for a long time looked at him askance” is a precious measure of the narrow extent of compassion and the relative valuation of human life according to social standing (“noble hearts” versus “poor creatures”). The experience of shared humanity (compassion, kindness, civility) generating commonality among subjective territories in a structure of pressurized belongings defined through the assimilation or expulsion of codes often crystallizes along empathetic lines of subjunctive engagement, becomings-other, and comings-to-be-other. The examples we have been discussing often reveal shared humanity combined with pressurized belongings in the context of the sadistic enjoyment of torture (Brissac) or its spectacle (Damiens), by a narcissistic investment, or by exigencies of warfare. Nevertheless, the intersubjective phenomenon of shared humanity emerges as the culminating point of Brantôme’s account of Strozzi. We purposely do not refer to this commonality as recognition or cognitive because the texts frequently represent it as a bodily condition or an impulse and not a mode of thought (see Chapter 1 for related discussion of non-conscious mimicry and neurological modeling). The concept of excessive cruelty and the climax of real or imaginary, empathetically-driven intersubjective experience vis-à-vis a spectacle of torture constitute two incompatible sites for the invention of human rights in the premodern or early modern period (distinctions between these period-categories remain unclear to us). Also, the two sites reflect the two complementary (but also sometimes contradictory) ideologies of human rights, “federal” and “equal/universal,” as mentioned above. Furthermore, like Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” Brantôme’s story also depends on a relativistic stance. His criticism of Strozzi’s “massacre of the bridge of Cé” (the label under which the episode is evoked in French historiography) concludes with a comparison between the French and the Spanish army, France’s natural ennemy. In the latter,
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Would it that Spanish camp masters did something like that to their Spanish! They, who allow them their camp followers without daring to say anything, otherwise everyone would revolt; for they love, treat, and cherish them like princesses, as I have written elsewhere . . . thus, they know how to govern themselves in that matter better and with more wisdom than we do. However, this cruelty of which I just told should have been better moderated. (283–5) Historians of the premodern seem always to want to undermine histories of ideas that begin the genealogy of modernity in the eighteenth century. As Bruce Holsinger says in The Premodern Condition, “Medievalists have long since grown weary of responding to glib narratives about the communal, collective, unbounded, public nature of pre-Renaissance egos and subjectivities, so much so that the putting of one’s name to such a response in print has to feel a bit embarrassing these days” (74). Without proposing a new epistemic model, we want to illuminate some counterexamples to the argument that the idea of the modern, that is, universal, all-inclusive, and natural human rights became popular only in the eighteenth century. At the same time, we want to bring into the discussion a few examples that counter Agamben’s theoretical intervention that places at the center of the Western idea of human rights not the birth of privacy and, by corollary, that of the individual, as per Hunt, but a related concept: the distinction between bare life and political subject. We say “related” because it, too, implies the categories of the public and the private, except that Agamben posits, as one of his signal achievements, the extension going as far as the Greek democracy of Foucault’s definition of the private as ineluctably political: the biopolitical, bios politicos (see later in this chapter, “Simon Marion’s plea”). Moreover, many issues in Hunt’s book work themselves out when seen through our post-Foucauldian, post-Agambenian, and post-Rancièrean optic. Jacques Rancière’s reading of Homo Sacer connects Agamben’s revelation about the Aristotelian genealogy of biopower in Western power structures and institutions with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Hannah Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).13 Burke, a supporter of the American revolution but, later, an opponent of the French revolution, whom Karl Marx called a “vulgar bourgeois,” is not exactly Arendt’s precursor; it looks like an inside joke on Rancière’s part to put the two together. But Burke’s concerns
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says Brantôme, camp followers are “loved, treated, and cherished like princesses”:
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about the French revolution are founded on the legitimacy of the new French state (as Rancière puts it, “the ‘man’ of the Rights of Man was a mere abstraction because the only real rights were the rights of citizens, rights attached to national community” [298]), are paradoxically echoed in Arendt’s concern that rights are inseparable from a political system that guarantees them. According to Rancière, Arendt arrives at this view because of her “maxi-political” stance, her “view of the political sphere as a specific sphere, separated from the realm of necessity,” where “abstract” (that is, a-political), “private” and “deprived” (of rights) are sliding signifiers: “‘private life,’ a life entrapped in its ‘idiocy,’ as opposed to the life of public action, speech, appearance” (298). This position, although it is compatible with Aristotelian distinctions, as Rancière contends, is also “new” in the sense that Arendt seems fully aware that “private” rights are vulnerable because they are private, part of the “dark background of mere givenness” (Rancière 299; citing Arendt 297). It is in recognizing “universal human rights” as weakened by their pretend self-evidence (by extension, meaning that they are severed from historical and geographic evidence, custom, practice), that Agamben echoes Arendt (Rancière 299). It is a Zionist argument, too: by implication, Arendt means, for Rancière, that, “the rights of man are the rights of the citizen . . . of a constitutional state. This means that they are the rights of those who have rights, a tautology” (302). Thus, Hunt’s question, “when and under what circumstance did Human Rights become self-evident?” goes to the center of the concerns of Rancière, Arendt, and Agamben. It is Rancière who points out that Arendt and Agamben have developed compatible theories that, in short, blame the rise of totalitarianism and the possibility of genocide not on the malfunctioning, but on the very functioning of Western political structures and networks: “Through the biopolitical conceptualization, what, in Arendt, was the flaw of modern democracy becomes in Agamben the positivity of a form of power. It becomes the complicity of democracy” (300). But, according to Rancière, in comparison with Arendt, Agamben extends the insight that Arendt first formulates: “From this point on, Agamben takes things a step further” (300). Here, it would seem that Agamben’s “extension” is not complementary to Arendt’s thinking, but rather is so drastic that it changes the fundamental terms of the description of the functioning of political systems in the West: “sovereign power is the same as biopower. Nor is there any opposition between absolute state power and the Rights of Man” (Rancière 300). However, instead of emphasizing the differences, Rancière insists on the identity between the two systems of thought, Arendt’s and Agamben’s, especially when he compares
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what Agamben calls the “nomos of modernity,” the extermination camps, with Arendt’s focus on refugees, “citizens of no country.” Here, Rancière goes back to thinking through the interpretive crutch of the linguistic distinction between the “rights of man and citizen” (the formulation of the title of the 1789 Revolutionary Declaration that establishes these rights), contrasted with the English formulation, “human rights,” that erase the link to any one individual (a man, a citizen). That subtle shift in the formulation can illustrate a crucial and, according to Rancière, Agamben, and Arendt, a devastating change in the functioning of the rights of man: “They make birth appear as the principle of sovereignty” (300). The equation between birth and human rights, and the elimination of an actual, individual, geographically, historically, and otherwise specific subject “would still be hidden . . . by the identification of birth – or nativity – with nationality” (Rancière 300), were it not for the too obvious presence, in the twentieth century, of the meta-national mass of subjects to the Rights of Man who are citizens of no country: the refugees (Rancière 300). The refugee, no longer endowed with the “Rights of Man and Citizen,” since she is the citizen of no country, demonstrates Agamben’s theorem: “the difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap” (301). For Rancière, the way out of this impasse is dissensus. The neologism sets apart Rancière’s emblematic contribution to the discussion on contemporary liberal democracies and their crises. Dissensus is a form of relation within the political system that does not smooth out differences between individuals and groups that participate. Imagining a dissensus creates a new, third term allowing us a way to think out of the “box” or the commonplace constituted by the oppositional binary consensus/conflict. As any binary, that one can be “deconstructed”; positing a third term (dissensus) reestablishes the politics’ meaning in the philosophical sense (not everything is relative in a three-term regime; yet in an oppositional binary regime, everything is). Dissensus as a “third term” creating a way out of the liberal democracy crisis or impasse may be assimilated to Anthony Giddens’s “third way,”14 although the actual, specific political parameters of the two (geopolitics, economy, specific issues) are completely different. In other words, Rancière’s dissensus is a “federal” form of a well-known political phenomenon with equally well-known fallacies, which is to say, consensus: “If we want to get out of this ontological trap, we have to rest the question of the Rights of Man – more precisely, the question of their subject – which is the subject of politics as well. This means setting the
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question of what politics is on a different footing” (302). The difference that Rancière insists on as constitutive of human rights in a new political context based no longer on consensus but on dissensus is founded on a combination of two elements: one, the existence of written rights “of the community as free and equal” (303), and two, the event when these rights are being claimed, exercised, or applied. It is not decisive whether the rights are being applied or not as a rule, Rancière makes it a clear that “though actual situations . . . may give them [the written rights] lie, they are not only an abstract ideal”: “What is given is not only a situation of inequality. It is also an inscription, a form of visibility of equality” (Rancière 303). As opposed to an insistence on the coherence between written law of the community and practice, Rancière insists on the event that is particular, perhaps even individual: “Second, the Rights of Man are the rights of those who make something of that inscription” (303). For Rancière, the implementation, verification, dispute (litige) of these rights are not situated, as in Arendt, in the sphere of the political discrete from the private, but on the border between the two. It appears that Rancière’s innovation specifically concerns the location of the implementation of human rights: “this is what I call dissensus: putting two worlds in one and the same world. A political subject, as I understand it, is a capacity for staging such scenes of dissensus” (304). Thus, man is not “the void term” of the phrase “man and citizen,” but rather the rights are implemented in the (biopolitical) location whose address, according to Rancière, is the conjunction “and” that links the two terms in the phrase Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen: “it is the opening of an interval for political subjectivation” (304). Further, as Rancière points out, Agamben forgets one form of government by the people (democracy) already present, indeed looming large in Aristotle, that does not require a prerequisite of logos or competence, and can be considered the precursor of modern democracy more convincingly than the distinction between zo¯e and bios politicos: the participation of those who have no part, that is, mere chance (drawing lots). Rancière calls this a political process (emphatically, not the political sphere), and he refers to the qualifications-based collective as police (305). Police is founded on entitlement (however justified). Political process is that which cannot be subsumed to police, and that “surplus” (what is not taken into account when entitlement is weighed) constitutes the unalienable source of the Rights of Man. That distinction allows Rancière to distance himself from consensus as the only possible or the optimal outcome of politics: “consensus is the reduction of democracy to the way of life of a society, to its ethos” (306); as in a zero-sum game,
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the more consensus (b) there is, the less political space (a). At the limits of that transformation of (a) into (b) a perfectly consensual society is a totalitarian society. Rancière then takes to task Jean-François Lyotard, who seeks a negative definition of the Rights (the Inhuman), a theoretical model that we would call transcendent, a model where totalitarianism is no longer the predictable result of a specific arrangement (“the specific effects of perverse ideologies”) and becomes instead an unrelated universal that cannot be theorized, only described: an “unthinkable and irredeemable evil” (307).15 Lyotard’s Inhuman is identified by Rancière as the return to an exception-based model (as in Aristotle, Arendt, and Agamben), and it is also compatible with Seneca’s model of “excessive cruelty,” no matter how finely Lyotard slices the category of the Inhuman. For Lyotard, the presence of the Inhuman – Other, God, Unconscious, Untamable – is not dangerous as long as it does not become the ruling principle. Rancière points out that this amounts to “infinitizing the wrong, substituting for the processing of a political wrong [i.e. dissensus] a sort of ontological destiny that allows only ‘resistance’” (308), and he categorically subsumes Lyotard to Agamben: “this ‘ethical’ trend is in fact the ‘state of exception’” (309). However, at some distance, Lyotard and Rancière seem identical in representing the political democratic system as harboring a healthy reserve of “something” (inhuman, other, particular) that cannot and should not be eradicated, absorbed, totalized, and that ensures there is always some tension or resistance. If we wanted to consider models that are truly alternative, we might look to Luc Boltanski’s descriptive pragmatic sociology that constructs a different theory of social interactions simply because of the greater number of variables taken into account.16 Or, to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which delivers a panoply of models, perhaps because it is an open-ended theory that programmatically rejects the possibility of forming a coherent system or simplification; they treat social interactions as literary or musical genres, and enjoy describing categories more than bringing them under a common denominator. In that, they seem closer to Montaigne’s encyclopedic efforts. According to Agamben, Western ethics is informed from its origins by the distinction between bare life (zo¯e) and political or civilized life (bios politicos, inflected by Greek polis, Latin civis, political community) defined by the social link and the social contract. Holocaust historians have criticized Agamben’s use of the figure of Muselmann in his argument,17 identifying it as an example of the reification of the camp experience, a reification the more ironic since Agamben’s work explicitly
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evokes the Holocaust as the key to understand modernity. In contrast, our examples have no comparable conceptual significance. We intend them as both warnings against and prodding to consider further some of Agamben’s uses of premodern phenomena. On the one hand, just because Agamben repositions the beginning of the modern, moving it from the eighteenth century to the fifth century BCE, does not mean that his theory describes the premodern period. On the other hand, Agamben’s theory itself is useful in the premodern context, especially insofar as it emphasizes the Aristotelian concepts that were importantly influential in premodern thought and are somewhat decommissioned in current theoretical approaches to premodernity that rely on gender, sex, and queerness to elicit a better understanding of the “premodern (human) condition.” Our intention is not to dislodge the invention of individual subjectivity and human rights from the classical period and the Enlightenment in order to locate it elsewhere, such as the 1580s or in the middle of the Hundred Years War. Instead, through looking at a handful of examples encountered in the process of research that often had other objectives in mind, in other words by developing our analysis investigative-expansively, we want to demonstrate the permanence of some interests and formulations concerning that which, in the modern period, are called subjects, subjectivity, and/or human rights. Our materialist emphasis here is not an anti-theoretical intervention, but rather one intended to facilitate theoretical approaches to premodernity.
Agamben trails Aristotle: “natural” slavery defined as deficit of logos Agamben reconfigures the Foucauldian historical paradigm that attributes the rise of biopolitics to the modern period. He does this by pointing out that the semantic distinctions of Greek vocabulary that imply a dialectical relationship between the body and politics – the distinction between bare life (zo¯e) and political or civilized life (bios politicos) – is active in Aristotle and Plato, as well as in archaic Roman law (homo sacer). The homo sacer of Agamben’s title is the emblematic figure of sovereign power, which Agamben conceives on the model of Hegelian master/slave dialectic; a structure also apparent in the paradox of sovereign power that Agamben denounces: “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law” (15). These two Greek and Roman examples point to the fact that the biopolitical was always already there, and that the two “periods” that Foucault posits
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In the “politicization” of bare life – the metaphysical task par excellence – the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this task, modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition. The fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zo¯e/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion. (8) The distinction between zo¯e and bios politicos that Agamben identifies as constitutive of sovereign power, a distinction that, as he illustrates, operated in the Greek language and predetermined Aristotle’s use in Ethics and Politics, did not necessarily correlate in medieval French. In medieval French the word corps and its variants (“body”) is used to signify “self,” especially in the Northeast, as in mon corps meaning “me.” In modern French, the word corps means body, unlike in English where the trace of the common Anglo-Norman corps only remains in the narrower sense of “corpse,” modern French cadavre. For instance, in the fourteenth-century monoscript (single manuscript witness) of the romance of Yde et Olive, there is a rather frequent usage of corps for “self,” more frequent than other contemporary texts, perhaps a regional feature, but perhaps also consonant with the emphasis on the body in this text that describes a woman disguised as a man who marries a princess and is enabled by God to procreate.18 Nevertheless, we do not subscribe to pure nominalism; we do not see the presence or absence of linguistic distinctions as the determining factor in the presence and absence of concepts that, at other times, in other places, people express by other means (see Chapter 1). Our goal is not to show that Agamben’s theory is inapplicable to fourteenth-century France or that subjectivity and biopolitics are anachronistic terms that do not apply there. Rather, we want to emphasize a different aspect of the history of ideas and institutions: the fact that language and legal traditions coexist in a wide variety of forms and traditions and are activated (either concealed or brought to the forefront) when there is a need to harness them to a historically situated political or ideological purpose. As an example of fashioning legal bases
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as historically distinct are conflated since the beginnings of Western civilization, in effect forming a “zone of irreducible indistinction” (9). According to Agamben:
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for exclusion, consider the resurrection of the Salic law that disregards the Christian traditions of women’s inheritance proudly touted by Saint Augustine (The City of God 3:1). It is because of this fourteenth-century reintroduction of a Germanic law to counter the English dynastic claim to the crown of France through the distaff line, that French law prohibits women from inheriting the French crown. Medieval and twentiethcentury historians (David Herlihy and others) have commented upon the Christian traditions as an improvement over the Roman law, which, like Salic law, denies women the right to inheritance and succession.19 A return to a doubly pagan (Frankish, and Roman-like) concept of individual rights in France at the time of the Hundred Years War shows that, at least in this one famous instance, not Christianity but pressing political concerns overrule and determine legal status of gendered bodies in French history. And yet, political expediency is not the most powerful force at work. Premodern French texts claim – as if they were claiming a higher moral ground – sympathy for tortured, abused, and victimized individuals across gender and social status divides and against narrow political interests. These expressions of pity are often framed in the context of war; and abuse is rejected as excessive cruelty and tyranny, two concepts that, according to Daniel Baraz, are absent or weak in medieval Eastern sources (for instance, Byzantine ones), but are repeatedly found in Western premodern texts across conventional period distinctions and national and geographical borders.20 Baraz traces the criteria for distinction between legitimate violence and excessive cruelty to Seneca, and notes that the distinction was used to differentiate between civilized Romans and barbarians; or, in the Middle Ages, it was applied mostly to those who attacked civilians and Christians, as well as being the alleged characteristic of “others,” for example heretics. The idea of violence in Eastern sources, according to Baraz, is not dualist but presupposes a continuum. Baraz ascribes the persistence of this (specifically Western?) “dualist concept” of violence to Seneca’s De clementia, in which “Seneca draws the following scheme for evaluating the morality of the exercise of judiciary power: misericordia ← clementia – severitas → crudelitas,” from irrational mitigation of punishment to irrational exaggeration, with mercy preferred over discipline because it is more likely to discourage cruelty; and notes that “as interest in Seneca’s writings grew, so did the preoccupation with cruelty” (“Seneca, Ethics, and the Body” 196–7). Alongside Aristotle and Plato, Seneca was a commonplace reference throughout the Middle Ages. The dualism (violence versus cruelty) seems compatible with Aristotle’s notion of natural slavery in that both are based on exception
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as in Agamben’s Homo Sacer. They offer a compromise rather than advocate a radical change; they tolerate certain forms of violence as a price for defining other forms as intolerable. For instance, Aristotle opines: “he is a slave by nature who is capable of belonging to another – which is also why he belongs to another – and who participates in reason [logos] only to the extent of perceiving it, but does not have it” (1254b23). Thus, the deficit of logos (reason and speech) is central to Aristotle’s naturalization of slavery. Seneca and others, as Baraz shows, often use the categories of cruelty and tyranny to differentiate between the civilized and the barbarian, and they impute the terms to the latter. These categories, cruelty and tyranny, are conceptual precursors of our torture, terrorism, and totalitarianism, not in terms of their technology or ideological content, but in the ways each can serve as a category that marks the perpetrator as uncivilized in an Agambenian sense, which is to say, one to whom “the humanity of the living man” is denied. But if the dichotomy described by Baraz as rooted in Seneca and uncharacteristic in the East was widespread in the West, Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” is an example of an early modern text that opposes the formation studied by Baraz and the one studied by Agamben, both founded on a mechanism of exception. If a slippery, syllogism-prone connection opens between the idea of civilized and foreign, the logic of exception based in the slippery syllogistic connection between cruel and foreign cannot operate; it is denied. There lies the radical (although perhaps not entirely intended) (post)modernity of Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals.”
Eaten, not conquered I think catch-and-release fishermen are heartless weenies. Putting a fish through agony for nothing more than your own entertainment is just plain cruel. I think if you’re going to torture a living thing; if you’re going to make it look into the eyes of its maker; face its own puny little place in the universe; then, for God’s sake, have the decency to eat it! Susannah Grant, Catch and Release (2007) Early modern relativism emerges in encounters with the New World as a critical reaction to the atrocities of the conquest. It elicits a characteristic discursive formation within the articulatory space of New World-related discourses and media that condemns European culture. Various writers contrast the peaceful, “natural” state of the inhabitants of the New World against the atrocities of the religious wars in Europe at the time, but Montaigne’s ethical ethnographic relativism on the subject proved to
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be especially influential because it is strikingly compatible, even apparently (though perhaps deceptively) identical with modern pluralism and relativism.21 During his country’s civil wars, Montaigne allied himself with the conciliatory position of the politiques, the party that denounced fanaticism on both sides, that is, both staunch Protestants and ultraCatholic ligueurs. We may locate an expression of this in “Of Cannibals,” where Montaigne presents New World cannibalism as ethically more acceptable than torture and other atrocities commonly inflicted by Europeans. At least the cannibals eat their enemies after they are dead, contends Montaigne, while Europeans torture theirs gratuitously – in a monstrous travesty of eating – while still alive: For I conceive, there is more Barbarity in Eating a Man Alive, than when he is Dead; in tearing a Body Limb from Limb, by Wracks and Torments, that is yet in perfect Sense, in Roasting it by degrees, causing it to be bit and worried by Dogs and Swine, (as we have not only read, but lately seen; not amongst inveterate and mortal Enemies, but Neighbours, and fellow Citizens, and which is worse, under colour of Piety and Religion,) than to Roast, and Eat him after he is Dead. (375) Several issues are at stake in Montaigne’s drastic reassignment of barbarity from the cannibals to the Europeans. Montaigne’s specific purpose is the condemnation of torture, such as in civil wars and in the conquest of the New World. However, scholars often refer to his essay as the exemplar of proto-ethnography and relativism in early modern thinking on the civilized subject. In view of the recent increase of acts of terrorism, which are now more than a theoretical concern, Montaigne’s abstract relativism severed from an engagement in reality has also been criticized.22 Montaigne could safely theorize about the civility of the Tupinambá, so the argument goes, since he was in no danger from them (and, conversely, in present danger from the European religious civil wars). Not so for those distant contemporaries in South-Eastern Europe who suffered the seasonal raids by the Ottoman allies. Their relation to the cultural and religious “other” allowed less relativism (if any); it was a matter of self-preservation. This argument, however, must be tempered by the observation of the evidence of Ottoman influence on that region’s dress, custom, weapons, cuisine, and other fields. Although the differences between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Europeans and their mostly Muslim Ottoman opponents were exacerbated by war rhetoric, their relation was not entirely antagonistic; shared values and exacerbated differences coexisted and coincided. Transversal theory can account for
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this flexible accommodation of logically incompatible positions within the subjective and official territories. According to transversal theory, although always performed under pressure and never absolutely implemented because subjectivity cannot be contained or subsumed by subjectivation, societies typically delineate their members along a linear identity-forming trajectory. The trajectory progresses from organic entity (a human) to individuated agent (an individual) to subjectified person (a subject) to civilized subject (a citizen). Each subsequent category indicates a greater degree of ideological inculcation, cultural assimilation, and performance of the dominant society’s official codes. In other words, the civilized subject lives according to the subjective territory prescribed for him within an official culture that abides by the laws of the official territory within which he lives and thus in line with the state machinery (networking sociopolitical conductors: dominant ideological and legal structures) of the corresponding society on which it mutually depends. Thus, rather than in opposition to polarized South-Eastern European voices, Montaigne’s relativism can be understood in transversal terms as being part of a continuum of varying degrees of tolerance and accommodation for pressure generated by the territories competing for the attention of a given subject or collective. Against the governing idea of the civilized subject in early modern French society, Montaigne privileges the cannibals over the Europeans both in his arguments and in the general logic of the essay, an explicit logic of sacrifice: “Is there any trophy dedicated to the Conquerors, which is not much more due to these who were overcome” (381). In this overall frame, as a conquered people whose military technology is inferior to that of the Europeans, the cannibals are nonetheless the exemplar of valor: “Valour is Stability, not of Legs, and Arms, but of the Courage, and the Soul; it does not lie in the Valour of our Horse, or our Arms” (Montaigne 379). In fact, Montaigne explicitly compares them with the most revered heroes of Antiquity, the Spartans at Thermopylae: “Neither durst those Four Sister-Victories, the fairest the Sun ever beheld, of Salamis, Platea, Mycall and Sycyly, ever oppose all their united Glories, to the single Glory of the Discomfiture of King Leonidas, and his Army, at the Pass of Thermopyle” (380). Like the Spartans, the cannibals exemplify the highest level of valor, consistent rather than incompatible with their low-level technology. As a corollary, coming as they did with overwhelming force and technological advantage, the Europeans could only serve as a measure of the cannibals’ exceptional valor. Montaigne introduces his relativist thesis from the outset, employing contemporary and classical examples to expose the culturally, socially,
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Now, to return to my Subject, I find, that there is nothing Barbarous and Savage in this Nation [of cannibals], by any thing that I can gather, excepting, That every one gives the Title of Barbarity to every thing that is not in use in his own Country: As indeed we have no other level of Truth and Reason, than the Example and Idea of the Opinions and Customs of the place wherein we Live. (366) Throughout the essay, the meaning of “barbarous” shifts from foreigner to ruthless to bearded, as Montaigne applies himself to demonstrate that Europeans are the barbarians and incomprehensibly foreign. He concludes his argument with the example of the Tupinambá from Brazil, whom he saw at the French court in Rouen in 1563. He notes that when the Tupinambá were queried about “what they found most admirable” in France: “They said, that in the first place they thought it very strange, that so many tall Men wearing Beards, strong, and well Arm’d, who were about the King, (’tis like they meant the Swiss of the Guard,) should submit to Obey a Child” (384–5), the child being the Charles IX who was twelve years old at the time. This dialogue may be fictional; that is, the Tupinambá are less the foreign catalysts of premodern European skepticism, than they are the supporting cast of a skeptic moment whose momentum comes from within. Yet the Tupinambá’s presence in France occurred under pressures of cultural difference that generated narratives showcasing the dynamic of colliding heads in strangeness (by emphasizing the production of narratives we admit that foreign presence did not necessarily generate the dynamic itself): in other words, this was a face-to-face encounter of incompatible subjective territories irreconcilably inhabiting the official territory of France’s court. (The situation recalls Kaspar Hauser’s caretakers trying, with much paradox, to make sense of his apparent “ferality” in relation to their own “civility,” as discussed in Chapter 4.) Strategically, Montaigne resorts to examples from Aristotle (363–4) and Plato (360; 367–8), which seems an obvious attempt to give officially legitimated, interpretive authority to his assertions. One of his gambits is to compare favorably the cannibal culture to Plato’s Republic: I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledg of them; for to my apprehension, what we now see in those Natives, does not only surpass all the Images with which the Poets have adorn’d the Golden
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and historically contingent assumptions underlying longstanding categorizations of human identity in European discourse and societies:
Age, and all their Inventions in feigning a Happy Estate of Man; but moreover, the Fancy, and even the Wish and Desire of Philosophy it self; so Native, and so pure a Simplicity, as we by Experience see to be in them, could never enter into their Imagination, nor could they ever believe that Humane Society could have been maintained with so little Artifice; should I tell Plato, that it is a Nation wherein there is no manner of Traffick, no knowledge of Letters, no science of Numbers, no name of Magistrate, nor Politick Superiority; no use of Service, Riches or Poverty, no Contracts, no Successions, no Dividents, no Proprieties, no Employments, but those of Leisure, no respect of Kindred, but common, no Cloathing, no Agriculture, no Mettal, no use of Corn or Wine, and where so much as the very words that signifie, Lying, Treachery, Dissimulation, Avarice, Envy, Detraction and Pardon, were never heard of: How much would he find his Imaginary Republick short of this Perfection? (368–9) “Of Cannibals” presents Montaigne as a relativist and skeptic who replaces a Eurocentric perspective with a playfully cannibal-centric one; we say playfully because Montaigne stages ironically abrupt reversals of values throughout the essay. The counterintuitive statement that constitutes the most memorable point of the text – that the cannibals are superior to Europeans because they eat their enemies – is so memorable precisely because it is not (or not only) a fruit of an abstract, theoretical reflection, but an emotionally compelling moment, an image-idea with affective presence. As humans consume each other sexually, digesting one another’s bodily fluids, an activity more often than not driven by positive desire and affection, here we have the possibility of total consumption of the other through primarily aggression, a potentially radical inversion of the sexual analogue, but no less humane or necessarily any less passionate. Alternatively, if we were to extend this paradigm to the Eucharist, the quality of the consumption reaches a transcendent level, associating cannibalism positively driven to a sacred ritual honoring God and his creatures in the interest of salvation. One may think here of Gordon Teskey’s argument that connects modern poet Arthur Rimbaud to John Milton, who “deliriously oscillated” between a theocentric and post-theological world. Teskey’s argument, that the nucleus of Milton’s and modern poetry is the delirium that the poet does not seek to reconcile but rather expresses, is germane to the idea that Montaigne’s statement that cannibalism is ethically preferable to torture is a paroxysm carrying an emotional impact rather than a conclusion of a dispassionate, theoretical reflection. To use Rimbaud’s phrases that Teskey applies to Milton,
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Montaigne was a poet of dérèglement raisonné (“reasoned disordering”), of delirium, that is, of coming out of bounds. Teskey notes that delirium comes from Latin lira, a furrow, a ridge of earth turned over by a plow, followed by the ploughman as a guide to his next pass. We may add that a related French loriot is a fringe, a small plot of land separating two fields, a liminal and potentially transversal space. As in Rimbaud’s modern poetic practice, the effect that Montaigne seeks out in “Of Cannibals” is producible by means of a dérèglement, “a disordering, a maladjustment, an excess,” by which the poet continually breaks through the frontiers of rational structure and common sense in order to discover what he called, simply, “the new.” But this breaking through is always temporary and always implies a return, even if what is returned to is changed and enriched, as well as destabilized, by that departure. (Teskey, Delirious Milton 4) Another emblematic moment that leads us to characterize Montaigne’s essay as playful, a concept/phenomenon that usually encompasses elements of fear as well as pleasure (see Chapter 4 on “play”), is its conclusion, the end of Montaigne’s report of his interview with the Tupinambá through an inept and nervous interpreter. The interview opens with the image of the Tupinambá embarking on war as the head of “Four or Five Thousand Men” (385). The last question recalled by Montaigne – “whether or not his Authority expir’d with the War?” – is one of the defining questions of the Roman republican tradition, whose emblematic hero Cincinnatus returns the fasces, the emblem of his power, and goes back to plow fields after saving his country as their appointed dictator.23 The Tupinambá answers that his authority “remain’d”: in peacetime, other people “plain’d him Paths through the thick of their Woods, through which he might pass at his ease” (386). Noble pathos arises from the distance between the question about “authority” in the sense of absolute, total power (such as the warlord wields) and the answer, in the affirmative, which substitutes fraying a path through the brush as if no other authority could be imagined. The “mistake” emphasizes Tupinambà’s “republicanism,” unquestioning, and perhaps also unsuspecting of alternatives: he does not conceive, or admit, of any other residual authority after the war than this limited one. Montaigne intervenes with a commentary: “All this does not sound very ill, and the last was not much amiss; for they wear no Breeches” (386), which explains the importance of that privilege in ethnocentric terms. But it now seems that the “Story” (381) was principally a buildup to the punchline, as the essay
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abruptly stops at the word “Breeches,” highlighting that essential piece of “civilizing” clothing that the Tupinambá do not have. Situated at the conclusion of the essay, this exchange marks the tone of Montaigne’s essay with wryness and pathos; having the underbrush removed seems a paltry recompense for leading the charge at the head of an enormous army. Moreover, it incites sexually tinted curiosity about courageous men with many wives (“The Men there have several Wives, and so much the greater number, by how much they have the greater Reputation and Valour” [382]), as Montaigne leaves us with the image of virile warriors with exposed genitalia and buttocks, like a vivid video for his European readers’ prurient and lascivious consumption. Montaigne’s proto-ethnographic play has serious consequences. Historically, scholars have typically identified the essay as an important testimony concerning early modern definitions of subjectivity, sovereignty, and civilization. By extension, “Of Cannibals” impacts our understanding of early modern foundations for human rights and international law. As in Agamben’s account of Aristotelian politics (and, somewhat differently, in Rousseau’s Social Contract, and in related models), only civilized subjects have human rights; if cannibals are civilized, as Montaigne argues, then implicitly they have human and political rights to immunity, sovereignty, and autonomy. In other words, within the impositions and constraints operative, they have the right of self-definition as subjects and self-determination as people. We could say that, paradoxically, one of the proofs that the cannibals are early modern subjects is that Montaigne painstakingly reconstructs their political life even as he empathetically makes himself a cannibal and makes them the “Subject” (matter) of his essay (366). Indeed, as he asserts, “I am myself the subject of my book” (“To the Reader” F2); thus, his detailed reconstruction of the cannibal mores is, reflexively, an exploration of the early modern European subject. Moreover, Montaigne’s argument on the cannibals constitutes what Agamben designates as “the ‘politicization’ of bare life – the metaphysical task par excellence – [through which] the humanity of living man is decided” (8). This makes Montaigne a precursor of modern anthropology and human rights legislation that applies without the usual exceptions (slaves, serfs, women, children, non-Europeans, “others” defined by religion, clothing, social structures, skin color, sexual preference, etc.). “Of Cannibals” is precursory in these ways possibly despite Montaigne’s intentions. For instance, Montaigne uses the name “French Antarctic” for South America, which may indicate that he did not mean to take the argument quite so far as to deny the French claim on the cannibal territory or, consequently, to assert native autonomy and
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Montaigne, literacy/logos, poststructuralism Traditionally, modern critics have considered Montaigne a humanist in pursuit of truth who reveals in his Essays a preexisting monolithic subject. More recently, however, as traced in a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur (2006) edited by Zahi Zalloua, devoted to the ethical turn in Montaigne studies since its domination by poststructuralism in the 1960s and 70s to its recent incarnation in postcolonial studies, critics have considered Montaigne the prototype of the postmodern author who constitutes himself as a subject through writing.24 Current interest in Montaigne as proto-ethnographer goes back to the early days of cultural studies (late 1970s and 1980s), as detailed in the work of Dalia Judovitz (Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity, 1988) and Stephen Toulmin (Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, 1990), who focus on Montaigne’s incertitude, as opposed to René Descartes’s Method.25 According to Judovitz and Toulmin, in his uncertainty and relativism, Montaigne is unlike the theoretical Cartesian subject. Instead, we could say that Montaigne is like the neo-Platonic poetic subject or, following the crucial distinction created by Judowitz, like Descartes’s colloquial, autobiographical self, and unlike his consolidated theoretical subject. Montaigne’s writings constitute the subject not as a discovery of a preexisting truth on a humanistic or humanist/essentialist model, or an elaboration of a new theory of subjectivity on a Cartesian model. As Montaigne insists, his subject constitutes in political, cultural, social, and corporal contexts that exert pressure on the subject, where, in transversal terms, pressurized belongings dynamically interact with sociopolitical conduction. However, this pressure need not ever be determining. Rather than shaping the subject, such pressure materializes as a springboard to unanticipated developments that testify to the excesses of the subject. Montaigne’s example is an articulation of the idea, dear to transversal poetics and an argument of this book, that subjectivity is transversal to subjects. To be sure, the neo-Stoical subject of the Essays is poised against these pressing conditions and utterly not subsumable by them. One can perceive Montaigne’s
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self-definitional rights. Notwithstanding this possible act or impulse of self-imposed restraint in light of the French official culture of which he is a product, it seems that Montaigne’s engagement with the subject matter initiated his own comings-to-be “modern,” his subjectivity in effect succumbing to the emulative authority of his own rhetoric, compassion, and ideals.
paradox of the cannibals as one of the characteristic figures of antagonism (common post-Marxist/poststructuralist position)26 or positive difference (transversal position, see Chapter 2) between the subject and its condition. The “deconstructive” modalities of antagonism (subjective struggle) or positive differences (emphases on presences through comparison with differences, and not absences per se) are paradox, irony, and provocation, and they are all powerfully present in the New World cannibal exemplum. In the 1980s and 1990s, the cultural context of Montaigne’s Essays, including the citation of the New World in “Of Cannibals,” came to the fore of the discussion in the work of Michel de Certeau and Franck Lestringant.27 Contributing to that historical turn, Daniel Martin associates the essay with the Valladolid Hearings of 1550–51, and the subsequent publication of the debate between Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The hearings centered on the question of the legitimacy of the conquest of the New World, and the reexamination of the crusade ideology: Does the end (conversion) justify the means? The New World’s claim to humanity, autonomy, and sovereignty emerged as the pivotal issue. One of a number of texts relating the Valladolid debate, the Tratado de Indias, examines the legitimacy of the conquest of the New World and establishes precedents. Las Casas’s Brevissima Relación de la Destruyción de las Yndias (1552) as well as a number of other books, such as Girolamo Benzoni’s History of the New World (1565) and Pierre Loyseleur’s An Apology or Defense of My Lord the Prince of Orange . . . Against the Proclamation and Edict Published by the King of Spaine (1580), were among the principal sources of the meta-narrative that early modern Europeans knew as the “black legend” of Spanish atrocities in the New World.28 The popularization of these books throughout Europe contributed to Protestant propaganda against the Catholic Church and the states aligned with it, with Spain as the main agent of the condemned conquest. In France, the propagation of the “black legend” fed anti-Spanish politics; as part of the expression of anti-Spanish sentiment, re-actualized by historical events in Europe unrelated the conquest of the New World, translations of Las Casas’s books continued to be reprinted until at least the 1640s. If the black legend, as Martin suggests (but only silently represented in Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”), and the harsh realities of the religious wars (explicitly represented in the essay) motivated Montaigne to extend the concept of civilized society to include the cannibals and exclude those who commit atrocities in Europe, the French preface to Las Casas’s account uses the “black legend” as a means to strengthen national
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heed this warning: if the Spaniard had over you the power he usurped over the poor Indians, you would not be treated more gently, and let this little book be an example for you. . . . Thus, serve faithfully your very Christian and very Just King, and pray to God that he grant him victory over his enemies. (no page number) According to Martin, Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” as structured rhetorically, offers proof that the cannibals possess a New World equivalent of European civilized society. Yet one crucial, conventional element of such proof is absent from Montaigne essay: literacy/logos. What stood for logos in the early modern era depended on the context. Famously, Erasmus created a scandal when he translated logos as sermo instead of the accepted Vulgate translation, verbum, in the second, 1519 Basel edition of his translation of the New Testament (John 1:1). Erasmus did not use oratio because it was a feminine noun. In the esoteric mystical tradition, logos is ratio or proportion (Pythagoras’s relationship between mathematics and music, that is, harmony; Heraclitus; Plato; Cicero and the Stoics); and so forth. Thus, defining what stands for logos in a particular author’s oeuvre also helps define her position. In the case of Simon Marion’s plea, two discursive moments stand out: his repeated references to le discours de la raison (“the discourse of reason”) and his description of writing, discussed below. Marion’s insistence on the importance of writing, unknown to the New World inhabitants, recalls Sepùlveda’s argument cited by Daniel Martin (see below). We submit that, in the specific context of Marion’s plea and Sepùlveda’s argument, logos and literacy stand in for each other, and we suggest that this is a specifically early modern situation. Although this is not the focus of his essay, Martin notes in passing that in the Valladolid Hearings, and international law stemming from them, the absence of literacy served as a particularly significant gauge of civilization that legitimated Europeans’ failure to recognize sovereign status of the New World: The first argument of Sepùlveda to justify the legality of war against the Indians is that they are barbarians: . . . [First argument: Because the
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allegiance to the French king. The preface implies that the French people should overcome divisive sectarian loyalties within France and identify the Spanish as the enemies of the French because of the atrocities they commit. It equates the French with the victims of the Spanish in the New World. “Dear reader, if you are a good Frenchman,” the Las Casas’s preface exhorts,
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Reflected in Martin’s analysis is an argument we hope to make: that a literacy-based definition of polis and its corollary, the predication of both the autonomy of subjects and the sovereignty of states on literacy/logos, concerns the role in bios politicos of what Simon Marion refers to as the “discourse of reason” in his plea concerning taxes on imported books (74v–75: 28). It is our contention that this relationship may have been a characteristic early modern structure. It is traceable to the Aristotelian distinction, discussed above, between “natural slaves” deficient in logos and their masters who devote the time, free of labor furnished by the slaves, to politics and philosophy. Notwithstanding that the context of Marion’s plea, book-tax law, would have prompted him to use literacy as an argument, this argument must have already carried weight independently of his purpose if it were to be employed effectively. By contrast with Marion’s case and Martin’s suggestion, however, when Montaigne catalogues signs of bios politicos that the cannibals do not possess, he does not limit them to literacy: “a Nation wherein there is no . . . Traffick . . . Letters . . . numbers, no name of Magistrate, nor Politick Superiority . . . Service, Riches or Poverty, no Contracts, no Successions, no Dividents, no Properties, no Employments . . . Kindred . . . no Cloathing, no Agriculture, no Mettal, no use of Corn or Wine . . . no words that signifie, Lying, Treachery, Dissimulation, Avarice, Envy, Detraction and Pardon” (369; full quotation above). Agamben’s Homo Sacer thesis – that exception is the nucleus of sovereign power – comes to mind in Montaigne’s coda: “Pardon.” If “Pardon” is thus rhetorically offset at the end, so is literacy, emphasized at the beginning of the list (Traffick . . . Letters . . . numbers). Montaigne’s longer list of nominal distinctions and cultural productions invite comparison with twentieth-century structural anthropology and semiology that, from its origins in structuralism as a branch of linguistics, evolved to encompass the study of other signifying systems, notably including fashion (Roland Barthes) and food (Claude Lévi-Strauss), and extending the notion of bios politicos and logos beyond literacy, language, or writing, and across the spectrum of cultural productions. Martin sees Montaigne as a precursor of this poststructuralist trend, his “Of Cannibals” as an attempt to establish a definition
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Indians are or at least were, before falling under the dominion of the Christians, all barbarians in their customs and most of them by nature without [any knowledge of] letters nor prudence and contaminated with many barbarian vices.] (Sepùlveda in Martin 585–6; brackets in the original)
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However, even though they do not read or write in the literal sense of the word, the Indians make organized and codified war among themselves. Montaigne, in his essay, describes the formalized rituals of war by the Indians including the formal taking of prisoners, their ritualistic executions and their highly structured forms of dismembering, cutting-up, cooking, sharing and consuming the victims. From a Derridean point of view – against Lévi-Strauss – those Cannibals possessed a highly organized form of “arche-writing.” (586) It is important to note, however, that Montaigne does not attempt to read culture like a language, although Martin does emphasize the cultural primacy of literacy in the Valladolid trials and in Montaigne. Rather, Montaigne stresses such a cultural primacy of literacy that, we contend, is specifically early modern. This, for us, is an important distinction. It separates our appreciation of the cultural significance of literacy as a characteristically late sixteenth-century litmus text of bios politicos, from 1990s fashion for describing a text’s poetics as compatible or identical with the operative structures it represented. For instance, in that fashion, critics have described Montaigne’s entire collection, Essays, as cannibalistic because of its recurring metaphors of digestion, ingurgitation, vomiting, and dismembering.29 Such images were common both in Montaigne and in other French texts, often as a metaphor of translatio studii, for instance from Greek and Latin classics to the new, national, French literature. The ingurgitation and digestion of cultures is often represented as cannibalistic because what is ingested are not texts but peoples, as noted in Du Bellay: “Imitating the best Greek authors, transforming ourselves into them, devouring them and, having well digested them, converting them into blood and food.”30 The metaphor of not only ingurgitation but also anthropophagy was accessible, no doubt thanks to partial acceptability of anthropophagy and use of human remains in the early modern period, which we would characterize as very similar (in its effects) compared to our own: medical and in extremis usage is, and was, accepted.31 In “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne groups cannibalism with such in extremis and medical uses: Chrysippus, and Zeno, the Two Heads of the Stoical Sect, were of Opinion, That there was no hurt in making use of our Dead Carcasses, in what kind soever, for our necessity, and in feeding upon them too;
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of civilization that provides an alternative to literacy in its limited sense:
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Montaigne conflates cannibalism with socially acceptable use of human remains, and prefers cannibalism to torture. The distinction between acceptable and inacceptable uses of human bodies is based on the intent and ethics of the event. Throughout the essay, Montaigne underscores the cannibals’ “valour” (371) and sacrifice: “great effusion of Blood” (373–4); “Grandeur of an invincible Courage” (377); “There is not a Man amongst them, who had not rather be Kill’d and Eaten, than so much as to open his Mouth to entreat he may not” (377–8). After citing a death song, a Mucius Scaevola-like example of cannibal fortitude, Montaigne ironically concludes: “In plain truth, these Men are very Savage in comparison to us, and of necessity, they must either be absolutely so, or else we are Savager; for there is a vast difference betwixt their Manners, and ours” (382).32 According to transversal theory, subjectivity emerges through crystallizations of experience. This happens when singularities have staying power, become identifiable within the multiplicities of potential through which they travel, and express powerfully enough to highlight their incompatibility with the corresponding subject, who is always under the pressure of the diminishing returns of subjectivation vis-à-vis emergent subjectivity. Put differently, the complete or totalized subject – however impossible to achieve – ultimately excludes subjectivity insofar as this state is pure singularity, that of an automaton without variation in perspective, thought, and emotion. Thus, the inevitability of subjective emergence insofar as the pure subject is an impossibility (consider evolutionary, complexity, and chaos theories) contributes to the continual negotiations of one’s borders to their subjective territory, a territory defined by the relationships among the immediate subject, emergences of its subjectivity, its intersubjective relations with others, and thus the subjective territories of other subjects. Subjectivity, then, is typically a matter of excess. Proliferating codes encourage activation of state power, that is, any organizational power, cognitive and/or material, that works in the interest of coherence, attempting to manufacture sense by which to consolidate the subject. But since sense and subjectivity are not necessarily related, but both require sustainable perception for some duration,
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as our Ancestors, who being Besieged by Caesar in the City Alexia, resolv’d to sustain the Famine of the Siege, with the Bodies of their Old Men, Women, and other Persons, who were incapable of bearing Arms. . . . And the Physicians make no Bones of employing it to all sorts of use, that is, either to apply it outwardly, or to give it inwardly for the health of the Patient. (375–6)
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the two forces often collide under the principle of translucency, when the variety of codes overwhelms an audience, which could be just the immediate subject, making them distracted and vulnerable, thereby allowing the most poignantly-felt code to connect and affect them. Hence, that which exceeds literacy in Montaigne’s subject can be understood historically as well as compared with our general understanding of the subject’s relationship to subjectivity, and therefore the intersubjectivity that subjectivity enables and affects, including experiences indicative of compassion and associated with human rights and civilized subjects. Montaigne’s use of the cannibals to substantiate his position on European barbarism offers just such a possibility for both transversal movements and (as a possible means by which to experience) intersubjective relations that are empathetic and compassionate. Montaigne historically anchors the cannibal exemplum and yet, inasmuch as it works as a rhetorical device, the exemplum summons emotions rather than a cool, reasoned argument. His approach reflects processes of subjective affects and reflexive-consciousness that are primary interests of transversal poetics. It does this insofar as the impact of the essay “Of Cannibals” hinges on eliciting emotions, and by extension radical reflexive-subjunctivity via real or imagined intersubjectivity – thinking about oneself thinking hypothetically in empathetic symbiosis with another – through an unexpected and shocking statement (cannibals are more valorous and civilized than Europeans) accompanied by an unflinching description of brutal atrocities perpetrated by Europeans.33
Simon Marion’s literacy/logos, “discourse of reason” and Agamben’s “decision on the humanity of the living man” If Montaigne writes himself in the Essays – “I am myself the subject of my book” (“To the Reader” F2) – as a mode of subjective becomings and crystallizations, “writing-as-becomings” can also take the form of legal action: amending legislation, securing or extending existing rights and privileges. We want to juxtapose Montaigne’s description of the cannibals with Marion’s book-tax plea. The two texts are nearly contemporary: Montaigne’s de luxe Parisian edition came out from Abel L’Angelier in 1588 (the first editions appeared in Bordeaux in the early 1580s). Marion pleaded his case on behalf of the University of Paris in 1587. And yet, they differ. Whereas Montaigne undermines it, Marion supports the main tenet of the Valladolid hearings: that literacy or, even more narrowly, writing is crucial to defining civilization and rationality,
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and thus determining the potential for autonomy, sovereignty, and subjectivity. (See Chapter 1 on this tenet with regard to phenomenological hermeneutics; and Chapter 4 with regard to feral children.) Marion’s focus on literacy is paramount in the context of this particular lawsuit, intended to eliminate the crown’s tax on foreign book imports. The connection between literacy and civilization is one of the satellite arguments. Despite the fact that neither Montaigne nor Marion explicitly or implicitly use Aristotle’s distinctions, it is useful to bring them into the discussion, enabling us to read these texts in the framework of Agamben’s Homo Sacer and his critique of Foucault’s emphasis on the historical transition between sovereign power (classical, before the French Revolution) and biopower (modernity).34 Foucault coins the term biopolitics to describe types of operations that sovereign power cannot categorically subsume. Unlike sovereign power that only affects individuals qua subjects of the law, biopower infiltrates lives, bodies, and desires. Foucault cautions that biopower’s direct contact with life structures both biopower and its object, the biopolitical subject, in insidious ways. He distinguishes two main avenues of biopower: (1) the conceptualization of the body as a machine (subject to norms, discipline, and medical pathologization of undesirable behaviors); and (2) the conceptualization of an individual as part of a collective entity (race, nation), subject to collective hygiene and other interventions (regulation of population) often focusing on sex. New trends of subjectivation, new avenues of creativity and resistance result from the pervasiveness of biopower, and the subject that emerges under the pressure from these vectors does not resemble the subject to whom only sovereign power applied. In Foucault’s formulation, “the old law of sovereignty – to make die or let live” was “completed” by the new, biopolitical one, a reversal of the first: “right of death and power over life,” where one is made to live in a certain prescribed way or allowed to die (26). For Foucault, one of the results of the post-French Revolution proliferation of biopower is the increasing impossibility to separate the subject from politics, unlike in the classical world, ruled by sovereign power, where that separation was still perceived as possible. The rising pervasiveness of biopower is of primary importance to Foucault as a historian of sexuality, a domain he construes as the key site of the operations of biopolitics. As mentioned above, in Homo Sacer, Agamben contends that the biopolitical subject was inherent to civilized society, forced into being by sovereign power. He discusses Greek semantic distinctions between the terms zo¯e (bare, animal life, “the mere fact of life”), bios (life of an
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individual or group, a “civilized” life inflected by logos, reason/language; Aristotle distinguishes between different forms of bios, including bios politicos, political life), and soma (corpse, physiological body, but also family, clan).35 In doing so, he extends to all forms of power the imbeddedness of power in individual life that Foucault attributed to the later, post-French Revolution operations of biopower. In short, Agamben argues that sovereign power is biopolitical, while Foucault sees the emergence of biopolitics as a post-French Revolution phenomenon the operations of which sovereign power cannot subsume or adequately account for. The title of Agamben’s work, Homo Sacer, comes from Roman law, where it signifies a person punished by banishment and denied all rights, including the right to be sacrificed. That person is “sacred” in a negative sense and can be killed by anyone, unless a sovereign’s mercy restores homo sacer to his citizen status. According to Agamben, the political system where a sovereign can strip an individual of rights or restore them pinpoints the individual basis of sovereign power and demonstrates its biopolitical character. By creating an exception (the outlaw), sovereign power demonstrates its ability to endow an individual with rights within the community or strip him of these rights, as in the proverb, “exception makes the rule.” Paradoxically, not bios politicos but zo¯e, the “state of exception,” is the foundation of sovereignty; sovereignty is a biopower that produces bios politicos out of its manipulation and mangling of zo¯e. As Agamben puts it, “the inclusion of bare life constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of the biopolitical body is the original activity of the sovereign power” (6). Agamben’s discussion not only productively encourages reconsideration of the historical paradigms attributed to Foucault, but it also, by extension, suggests inclusion of the early modern period within the framework of biopolitics. Nevertheless, Agamben is often critiqued for a tendency to reify his examples and make them fit his theoretical frame at the expense of their intrinsic meaning, most importantly when he speaks of the camp figure of Muselmann, which for him is the ultimate figure of “exception.”36 To make this argument, he maintains that the Nazis death camp, not the city ( polis), is the “nomos of modernity,” the emblematic site, “hidden matrix” and “organizing structure” of Occidental power (nomos: prefectures, law, the spirit of law; in sociology, a socially constructed ordering of experience). This critique is the more important because not only the Holocaust is central to Agamben’s theory, but also because current instances of genocide and torture are explicitly at stake in Agamben’s work. Without having such high ethical stakes
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As in Foucault’s, history in Agamben’s account is a means to diagnosing present social arrangements and envisioning future reconfigurations of the social. At the same time, if Agamben’s point is that sovereignty and biological life are historically intertwined – derived, as he puts it, “from a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic which one encounters in the most diverse spheres” – then part of our task as medievalists might be to provide further historical contextualization and nuance.38 (460) As if in answer to Mills’s postulate, Marion’s 1587 text links to literacy the object of the lawsuit and the modalities of its survival to our time. The plea, an oral argument (logos in the Greek sense of disputation and oral utterance) survived because it was circulated in print as a cheap pamphlet (logos in the sense of printed word, literacy, which to us are specifically early modern dimensions of logos, although we are not disregarding the fact that the change of technology does not warrant a change of ideology),39 and it was collected (perhaps in the nineteenth century) in a volume that bound together such brochures under a general heading of censorship and book trade laws. The preservation of the early modern legal argument is due to modern interest in the history of printing, and more specifically, censorship and prohibitions of certain books; an interest that fully depends on the confluence of political and economical events that made copyright and censorship an important, politicized issue in the nineteenth century. Turning back to the early modern period, the connection between literacy and legal standing of the subject (human rights, sovereignty) becomes more explicit when we realize that the argument on freeing book imports from tax is connected, via the medium of cheap pamphlets through which they are all publicized, with public announcements of book burnings, and prohibitions of university debates on delicate subjects such as legality of rule and sovereignty. Thus, the nineteenth-century collection of legal verdicts and famous court cases concerning the book trade connects some of the points that are linked in early modern discourses on subjectivity: literacy, printing, intellectual milieus, state sovereignty, and legitimate rule. These theories and technologies, and theories concerning the technologies, are linked materially (publicized through cheap pamphlets) and ideologically (by Sepùlveda, for instance, and by Marion).
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yet,37 medievalists, too, have critiqued Agamben, for instance Robert Mills, whose concerns this chapter shares:
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In addition to being the general counsel of the Parliament of Paris and the University, as well as counsel to the king and private counsel of the Montmorency family, through the marriage of his daughter to Antoine Arnauld, Marion has family ties to Port-Royal, a Cistercian convent patronized by the Arnaulds. The Port-Royal community was known for its Jansenist leanings (thus, anti-Jesuit), and was famous for the influence of its schools on important intellectuals of the second half of the seventeenth century, including Jean Racine and Blaise Pascal. A number of Marion’s legal arguments were published as ephemera; others were assembled in multivolume works.40 As already noted, legal historians cite him in the context of women’s succession law as well as modern intellectual property and copyright law that drastically breaks with the medieval tradition. Beginning in the fourteenth century, laws guaranteed that all book contents were public domain, an arrangement that allowed the flourishing of the system of copia and cheap book production in university centers. Revenue was derived from copying and not from monopoly on intellectual content (content such as pattern books, owned by illumination workshops, was protected by not sharing rather than by law). Printing, a drastic change in technology, lowered the cost and sped up the rate of copying. The revenues could no longer be based on the cost of copying; the concept of ownership was detached from the material object (a copy) and attached to the intellectual content. The age of print oversaw the reversal of intellectual property law (previously, all intellectual property was public domain) to tie profit not to the number of copies of the material object, the book, which with the invention of print, became practically limitless – but to its intellectual content. It was the printer’s investment in that content, not his actual production of copies, which the copyright safeguarded. The change of the law followed the transformation of the industry, but, in turn, it transformed the social standing of authors as sources of intellectual capital. The printers on whose behalf copyright laws were passed in the early modern period were securing a monopoly for the use of intellectual content they bought from the authors. Their revenues were eroded by what we would today see as piracy (printers copying books without agreement of the original publisher), to some extent a legal activity protected by the survival into the print age of the laws of the manuscript age. Printing privileges (bought for a limited amount of time and renewable) created a legal and business environment that made such copying illicit. Today, intellectual property laws are similarly intended to
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protect the revenue of the distributors of intellectual property who have secured contracts with the authors. The confluence of copyright law and women’s succession law in Marion’s practice is more than an idiosyncratic development of an individual’s legal career. Rather, Marion’s contributions highlight specifically the social elements that required legislation in the early modern period, that is, elements that have undergone changes or developments for which the existing laws and customs did not account. Marion’s interventions are the hallmarks of a transition, a paradigm break. Moreover, these elements maintained their importance and are relevant to us today. For example, Marion’s work in the area of copyright points to the fact that printing, for the first time a significant branch of industry and commerce, became a regulated trade, calling for new legislation on intellectual property within its specific technical parameters, that reversed the previous laws designed to foster manuscript trade. That also implies the growing economic importance of printing a century after it begun and, in turn, the existence of a wider reading audience. In other words, the fact that Marion’s legal work is considered as the origin of the contemporary concept of intellectual property indicates that the postmodern society with its engagement in the question of intellectual property originated in Marion’s time.41 In the 1587 book-tax case, Marion’s argument was threefold: (1) since becoming learned is difficult, the rich do not undertake it; (2) intellectuals are the pillar of the crown, warrants of peace, and should be cultivated (a timely argument at the height of the religious wars); and (3) civilization is more powerful than arms: Apollo wins over Mars. The crown is not the enemy, but rather the wealthy sponsor whom Marion wants to convince of the intellectuals’ utility. Marion contrasts intellectuals and civil war leaders through the metaphor of the fight between Apollo and Mars, a fight that Apollo wins. The conquest of the New World serves, in Marion’s plea, as a crucial proof of the superiority of the “discourse of reason” (74v–75: 28). One of the extensive examples of Apollo’s superiority recalls Sepùlveda’s statement, quoted above, from the Valladolid Hearings. Sepùlveda argues that literacy is the measure of civilization and a test of legal standing in international law, which is to say, that literacy is a test of civilization that warrants sovereignty and human rights: [First argument: Because the Indians are or at least were, before falling under the dominion of the Christians, all barbarians in their customs and most of them by nature without [any knowledge of] letters nor
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Marion presents a different incarnation of Sepùlveda’s argument: since writing transcends time and space insofar as words pronounced elsewhere can be heard here and now, the transcendent quality of writing associates literacy with the “Divine.” Faced with the mysterious powers of literacy, the inhabitants of the New World capitulate. It is the conquistadors’ most powerful arm. According to Marion, it is writing, “that inclined them, more than any other artifice, to bear the yoke imposed on them” (fo 75: 9).42 In contrast, Marion asserts that Europeans have forgotten this transcendental dimension of writing because it is “frequent” (in the original Latin sense: habitual, ordinary). By freshly encountering writing, the inhabitants of the New World afford us a new appreciation of its power. Their virgin enthusiasm inspires us to venerate literacy, vulgarized in Europe to the point of complete depreciation. Therefore, the inhabitants of the New World restore to literacy its sacred dimension. This is also the role Tupinambá play in Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”: a fresh appreciation of hoary dilemmas; a newfangled optic through which what we take for granted is absurd. Both Montaigne and Marion use the New World as an optical device to restore newness to the Old World. As we have mentioned, Montaigne and also, we now submit, Marion operate within the delirious economy of premodernity where the discourse of reason is demonstrated by means of dérèglement raisonné, reasoned delirium, to find the “new,” as in Baudelaire’s final line of the “Voyage,” a poem-precursor of Rimbaud’s “Drunken Ship”: “To the ends of Unknown / So we can find the new” (Au fond de l’Inconnu/ Pour trouver du nouveau). It is not a coincidence that a voyage, a ship, is the necessary vehicle of the discovery of the new, or that it passes through hysteria, death, and delirium (Rimbaud: “O let my hull blow up! O let me go to sea!” Ô que ma quille éclate! Ô que j’aille à la mer!). As in Montaigne, so in Marion, the delirium of the optic is matched by the transgression of the content: the topic is delirious, not just the way to look. The effect of literacy is supernatural, infused with powerful magic, spiritually transcendent, accessible not through theoretical reasoning but through spontaneous impulse, the innate, natural bent, the ecstatic shortcut to God: “instinct” leads the inhabitants of the New World to recognize in literacy an act of God and submit, since “it is natural to submit to the Divine opinion.” One must be reminded that logos is not just a Platonic and Aristotelian concept (in Aristotle underlying the privileged subjectivity of bios politicos), but it is also a key Christian concept: “In
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prudence and contaminated with many barbarian vices.] (Sepùlveda in Martin 585–6; brackets in the original)
the beginning was logos (verbum, sermo, word, discourse, reason, proportion)” ( John 1:1). It appears that the various and seemingly incompatible aspects of logos are conflated in Marion’s argument: biblical (word/God), Aristotelian (speech, discourse), that which we suggest is a specifically early modern dimension of logos (literacy/erudition) and also, importantly, the esoteric aspect of logos (proportion/ratio, the order of the universe). If this is true, then the relationship between these hugely incompatible terms can be described, again borrowing Teskey’s insights on Milton, as an oscillation between “the desire to be given over to the annihilating power of the other, the chaos of the sea, and the more secret desire to recover the ancient parapets of Europe, the symbols of cultural order” (5). Rather than a logical calming down, a resolution, a reduction to the lowest common denominator, Marion imagines and describes a euphoric and magical reasoning where the simple, everyday act of writing is transmogrified into a series of archetypal concepts, a barrage of oxymora – “paint the invisible voice,” “hold it there forever everywhere” – proffered so fast that the flickering of their contradiction clouds understanding and leaves us with an almost more physical than intellectual, instinctive understanding that something important (a miracle? a magical invocation? a prestidigitation?) just happened: the inward discourse of reason and the distinct tone that voices it, shine in man like signal traces of the image of God imprinted on his soul . . . the instinct of the savage peoples of the New World has amply testified to that which vulgarization makes us forget: seeing as they admired our other artifices as if they were cleverer than they were; but elevating this one beyond mankind [l’humanité], they venerated it as heavenly, and almost held for gods descended on earth those that they could not conceive of as conversing with each other in each other’s absence, otherwise than by infusing characters with spirit. So much so, that this conviction diminished their courage, which naturally yields to Divine opinion, and this has predisposed them, more than any other artifice, to yield to the yoke imposed on them . . . because the sound was imperceptible other than by hearing. . . . however, human industry transcends nature and paints the invisible voice, and by these means, in fact, can enclose it in a piece of paper, to hold it there forever and everywhere in the world that Writing can be carried. (fo74v–75: 28–9) The affective presence of the “invisible voice” embodies an otherwise absent-present-space, precipitating intersubjectivity with the ethereal
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subject of both real and imaginary past-present-spaces. This is where the authorial referent presumably once was, but is now phantasmagorically mobile insofar as the ink continues to occupy the “piece of paper” and the paper maintains its form “there forever and everywhere in the world that Writing” both carries us to and “can be carried” by us. Like a parallel universe, the “world that Writing” becomes for the reader and the writing-as-becomings (as for Montaigne) that inspire it are accessible only through literacy, as the “sound” of their awakenings becomes perceptible “other than by hearing.” A synesthetic binding of sight and hearing (“tone that voices it . . . shine[s] . . . like traces of the image”) is possible through writing, a synesthetic performance that “paints the invisible voice.” Just as Marion has argued, we do not perceive synesthesy in the expression “written word” – although Shakespeare seizes the opportunity to separate the two terms: “that in black ink my love may still shine bright” (Sonnet 65). Writing, a synesthetic performance, also collapses time and space (“forever . . . everywhere”), and embodies the ethereal voice in the humblest of material objects (“piece of paper”), paradoxically, even magically enabling the transcendence of the limits of the flesh (“conversing in each other’s absence”). Such infusion of “characters with spirit” effectively reverses the classical hierarchy of spoken communication over the written central to Plato and Derrida, with writing now enabling positive presence without diachronic and synchronic limitations.
Effects of multimedia literacy in the expanding New World Today, as Noam Chomsky has exemplified for nearly a half-century, intellectuals are disinclined to view the media’s role in the encounter between the “Old World” and the “New World” in such optimistic terms. To address this issue in our own time, we now turn to a published conversation between Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, as facilitated by Giovanna Borradori in her 2004 book on life, political, philosophical, and otherwise, after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The material from this book, Borradori’s dialogue with Derrida and Habermas, and Borradori’s own narrative and introduction, was published in English in 2003 as Philosophy in a Time of Terror (the citations in this chapter refer to the French source). Unlike Marion, Derrida expresses concern about “the effects of globalization on the dynamics of conflicts and war” (Derrida 49;183), and argues that media contributed to the rise of terrorism in the countries that were the victims of “unregulated modernization” (modernisation sauvage, Derrida 50). However, Derrida
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also notes that, “recent democratization movements owe a lot, perhaps all, to television, to the transfer of models, norms, images, information merchandise, etc.” (49, 181–2). He maintains that the effects of modernization enhance two incompatible developments: the rise of terrorism and democratization. Habermas, on his part, emphasizes mostly the negative effects. He sees terrorism and integrism (the conflation of spiritual faith with the means by which it is dogmatically expressed) as a “defensive reaction” to the “too rapid an imposition of modernity” (48). The media are not the exclusive property of democracy, and yet it is undeniable that terrorism is not only the result of the cultural shock facilitated by the media (Derrida’s “effects of globalization on the dynamics of conflicts and war”). Rather, the rise of terrorism is also, if not primarily, the result of the “primitive” technologies of propagation of ideas, such as religion. They are primitive in the chronological sense inasmuch as they are not current inventions. They are also primitive in the Habermasian sense of “pre-political” because of their content and modes of diffusion through various sociopolitical conductors and the codes they reinforce: religion, patriotism, allegiance to the clan and immediate family, anxieties about economic and spiritual well-being. Simply put, Habermas opposes the “republican constitution” to “political crutches such as nationality and community of fate” (Derrida 33). We contend that the label “primitive” reveals rather more than it is purported to signify in Habermas (“other than political,” “arche-political,” “ante-political,” “not modern,” “archaic”). For us, religion is a powerful force not because it preexists political systems, or because it partially subverts and infiltrates them, or because it is always political, but more importantly because it makes its primary object to summon areas of human (individual and collective) experience that politics sometimes fails to interpellate. We can identify some of the areas of human activity we take into account here: spiritual life, musical performance, ritualized engagements with the sublime, sensuality, transversality, pleasure, momentous life changes, idealism, sense of justice, compassion. They can be and often are experienced as powerful symptoms (tears, altered heartbeat, adrenaline rush, elation, lightness, ecstasy), emotions, and subjective emergences. Whereas political life can sometimes summon them, only a few of these related experiences whose bodily symptoms are so intense, are explicitly or directly the primary domain of politics, except in radical politics, where they are expressed individually or collectively (spontaneous rallies, civil disobedience, mass hysteria). In totalitarian politics, subjects fake these individual and collective events under threat. In using this label, “primitive,” Habermas responds to
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the hegemonic pressure of religion; the condescending label is both an acknowledgement of this pressure and a refusal to accept it without protest. We do not want to put into question the authenticity of Habermas’s theoretical labeling of religion as “pre-political”; we simply want to qualify the affective value of the epithet “primitive.” The difference between Habermas and Derrida concerning the role of global media in the rise of integrism can be understood in the context of relativism in general, and Derrida’s autobiographical preoccupations in particular. With possible similarities with Montaigne’s experience as a Frenchman of Jewish and Spanish descent,43 Derrida reveals the impact of the “fearful acculturation” (acculturation apeurée) from which he suffered as a French Algerian Jew: “more or less consciously, made of unspeakable episodes, felt as such, a secretly assumed circumcision” (qtd in Derrida 33–4).44 In Marion’s terms, in a modern universe where it is no longer “natural” to “always yield to Divine opinion,” the forces of “instinct” and reason can be opposite. The acculturation suffered by Derrida results in subjects yielding to the hegemony, but this yielding is experienced as painful, “unspeakable,” “secretly assumed.” It’s a matter of unhappy becomings when pressurized longings offer no other alternative, and the humiliating prospect of comings-to-be must be resisted at all costs. Whereas the individual can desire and pursue subjectivation, its parameters finally give way to the state machinery – and its processes of comings-to-be – to which the individual surrenders even as she imagines herself undergoing willful becomings. By contrast, in Marion’s plea, yielding is positive. The inhabitants of the New World instinctively yield to “discourse of reason,” directed “inward,” although this discourse guides them by faulty reasoning, causing them to mistakenly associate writing with magic: “they could not conceive of . . . conversing with each other in each other’s absence, otherwise than by infusing characters with spirit” (fo74v–75: 28–9). In agreement, Derrida and Habermas also share, respectively, their insight that integrism is not only the reaction to overwhelming modernization, but to terror as well. In the United States after the September 11 attacks of 2001, “to be terrorized” is “to adopt some of the laws, institutions and human rights standards of a totalitarian regime” (Derrida and Habermas 56). The Patriot Act authorized the application of elements of a totalitarian regime such as torture (prohibited by articles 5 and 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights),45 surveillance, politically motivated judicial appointments not confirmed by the Senate, and others, considered unacceptable and undemocratic before the terrorist attacks. In his reaction to the September 11, 2001 attacks, Habermas emphasizes
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Civilizing Subjects, or Not
that “pre-political crutches” were mobilized in response to the attacks, and denounced the patriotic and “cowboy” rhetoric, recalling Bertold Brecht’s phrase: “Woe to the country that needs heroes” (Brecht, Life of Galileo, scene 13; Derrida 78). According to Habermas, the events of September 11, 2001 authorized post facto the “superpower policy” of the United States that “fears nothing and no one” (Habermas, in Derrida 56). Terrorism authorizes hegemony as revolution authorizes terror; Islamic integrism and American integrism face each other. But “pre-political crutches” can authorize humanitarian as well as integrist efforts. In framing her dialogue with Derrida and Habermas, Borradori recalls Hannah Arendt’s position on terror, which “can only be achieved or preserved in a world of conditioned reflexes, of puppets bereft of a shadow of spontaneity. Because man has so many resources, he cannot be fully dominated unless he is reduced to an animal species” (Arendt, Origins 197, cited in Derrida 28). In her controversial texts on the legal process that led to Nazi Karl Adolf Eichmann’s execution for crimes against humanity, Arendt notes that Eichmann speaks “by clichés,” that he is a “citizen who respects the law,” an incarnation of the “banality of evil” (28).46 Borradori introduces Arendt because she sees in her a precursor of Derrida’s thought. For Arendt, “the essence of terror [is not] the physical elimination of whoever is seen as different, but . . . the eradication of difference . . . that is . . . of autonomy of action” (Derrida 28), an idea that is fundamental to Derrida. For Arendt, philosophy is an answer to the trauma of history (Derrida 24 n1) and the origin of totalitarianism is the atrophy of the concept of the civilized subject engaged in society and politics, replaced by the bourgeois whose only concern is the pursuit of riches. In his work, Derrida, too, posits idealism, that is the intrinsic “bent” of ideas (some ways of thinking and acting lead to oppression, some liberate from it). By contrast, in their post-May 68, pre-internet era masterwork A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari emphasize that there is no equivalence between subversive thought and revolutionary action or social progress. They also warn that rifts in modes of thinking or in social fabric do not necessarily enhance autonomy and democracy, but could provoke a “suicidal or cancerous” (628) reaction followed by a regrettable solidification. An ethical metastructure of subversion, supported intrinsically – we would add – by reflexive-consciousness among the dissidents, is necessary to ensure the subversive effects of dissident thought and revolutionary action. In other words, the distinction between a terrorist, a revolutionary, a philosopher, and a criminal is contingent and that contingency must be mobilized effectively in response
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to shifts in context. Terror follows social rules from which it claims to be exempt, as Borradori, Derrida and Habermas insist: “we don’t know on what terrorism founds its claim when it attributes a political content to its actions and wants to differentiate itself from ordinary crime” (13). As a counterpoint to speaking of terrorism as a form of political action, Derrida adopts the metaphor of an “autoimmune disorder” to talk about terrorism. This metaphor implies that the Western democracies have a similar relation to terrorism as a body has to cancer: they are hosts of terrorism; they bear no responsibility for it, and yet they present in and of themselves the conditions that allow terrorism to develop. Deleuze and Guattari also speak of the negative effects of subversion as a virulent illness attacking an organism, a cancer, but they attribute agency to the “organism” as they formulate this postulate: All attempts at destratification (for example, going beyond the organism, reaching towards a future) must first observe concrete rules of extreme prudence: all destratification that is too brutal risks being suicidal or cancerous, that is, either it opens out onto chaos, nothingness and destruction, or it closes upon us the strata that hardens even more, and lose even their degrees of diversity, differentiation, and mobility. (628) In speaking of terrorism as an autoimmune disorder, Derrida does not explicitly refer to Deleuze and Guattari. Rather, he refers to his belief that the West has unwittingly sponsored today’s terrorists by providing them with arms since the beginning of the Cold War. However, the similarity of the metaphors imply that there is more than a historical reason to turn to the metaphor of auto-immune disorder and cancer in describing terrorism (in Derrida’s case, there is also an autobiographical element: his struggle with cancer at the time). As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, there is an ontological mechanism that applies to an attempt of “destratification” or a revolutionary context: the destruction of institutions leads to terror, perhaps like “Poor taste leads to crime,” to use a famous turn of phrase, and not unlike (although far less ominous than) Maximilien Robespierre’s “Terror is an emanation of virtue.”47 According to Deleuze and Guattari, the “revolutionary moment” is prone to monstrous alliances between ideological opponents who, now, all have something to gain. In that limited context (“a short revolutionary instant, an experimental élan”), the state has “a problem with its own bodies”: “All of a sudden, it’s as if the corpus of notaries advanced disguised as Arabs or Indians, and then reformed, reorganized itself: an
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operetta leading no one knows where (sometimes the cry is even heard: ‘Police with us!’)” (454). On that burlesque stage, to think is not necessarily to subvert. What is, then, the role of the intellectual, as civilized subject or not? According to Borradori, it is a pacific role. Deleuze and Guattari offer a different perspective. They conceptualize interiority and exteriority as relative positions, functions, and not as ontologically determined characteristics. Any system can be defined in relation to its exterior and inversely there is no state in and of itself. What we call states are often, if we examine them closely, conglomerates of “fluxes and currents that only secondarily allow to be appropriated by States (commercial circuits, religious groups, technologies etc.)” (Deleuze and Guattari 445). This assertion is the conceptual focus of Deleuze and Guattari’s reexamination of “the old paradigm: ‘from clans to empires,’ or ‘from bands to kingdoms’. . . . But nothing indicates that there is an evolution in that direction, since bands and clans are not less organized [in our case: terrorist networks are not less capable and successful] than kingdoms/empires” (445). In order to understand the impact of terrorists on democracies, we should conceptualize terrorists as fugitive elements of a system, not as external to the system, as we normally do when we contrast religious fanaticism of terrorism with secular democracy. To achieve this changed perspective, it is useful to remember that it is not difficult to infiltrate, deviate or block the corrective mechanism of a democracy. The use of torture by the United States and the presidency of Sergio Berlusconi in Italy are two examples of infiltration. Deleuze and Guattari’s view was influenced by the fact that practical applications of communism were discredited during the demise of Stalinism and the Cold War, partly thanks to the media coverage of the crimes against humanity and the moral and economic foundering of the Eastern bloc countries. This postulate seems useful today: to conceptualize states as fluid systems “in a perpetual field of interaction” where “bands and kingdoms, megamachines and empires” cross and transform, “a complex situation where it is necessary to analyze in each case the tendencies and the foci of polarization [pôles], natures and movements” (Deleuze and Guattari 466; 454). The direct link articulated by Arendt between theoretical contours of a discourse and its political results has been definitely broken. Even the Habermasian system of differentiation between the primitive “political crutches” (nationality, religion) and the “republican constitution” may be a less useful framework in understanding terrorism, although it and similar conceptual frameworks are commonly used in postulating solutions to the problem of terrorism, as well as in guarding the institutions of democracy from being contaminated by prophylactic
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totalitarian measures (the Patriot Act) that, intended to fight terrorism, have already been misused against the political opponents of the ruling party. Consider the dismissal of eight US attorneys and their replacement by candidates directly appointed by the President and not approved by Congress.48 A similar pacifistic logic operates in Marion’s plea, where he expresses the contrast between reason and war in the metaphor of the struggle between Apollo and Mars. This is a contest that Apollo won: “to signify that civil wars cannot be ended by weapons, which would destroy both parties, but by the discourse of wise men, who know how to unite the disparate wills of all citizens” (fo 84v: 46). He adds: History teaches that in the beginning the populist States were more often changed into tyrannies than subsequently. As Aristotle beautifully explains, before the disciplines were perfected, only Captains had credibility among the people, and initially it was easy for them to pull everything to them, and use it immoderately. But when sciences became more common, and when the learned men speaking in public gained authority, in spite of their weak aptitude at arms, they had a means to seize power, and in spite of it held the military men in office. So much so that letters act as an arbiter between the multitudes and the warlords, to settle them by proper balance, and thereby to conserve the legitimate State, be it Monarchy, or another. (fo 83v–84: 46–7) In similar terms, Marion repeats this argument several times in the plea. To give just two more examples; he claims that “conspiracies against a good Prince enter only into uncivilized [sauvage] hearts, which have not absorbed any erudition” (fo 84v: 48); and that France “Is at present horribly worried by internecine wars that make her bloody and desolate in many places, and having erased the beautiful brightness of its first color, have tarnished it as if near death. . . . But the cultivation of letters has put into the hearts of the French a holy seed of loyalty to their legitimate Kings” (fo 85v: 49). Marion’s message could not be clearer: to manufacture good, loyal citizens (with “civilized hearts”), who will maintain prescribed subjective territories and the official territories they support, society needs to teach literacy to create access to the proper “erudition” that it must also supply in order to effectively institutionalize state-serving ideological inculcation through “discourse of reason.” Education is the means; civilized subjects are the ends.
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A moderate Catholic, and lawyer to the Montmorencys, Marion’s political affiliation was with the conciliatory “arbiters” of the civil war between the Protestant and the ultra-Catholic factions; he supported the monarchy that the ultra-Catholic League replaced, at one point, with its own candidates to the throne. But the University of Paris whom Marion served as counsel in the plea of 1587 discussed here could also play the role of the troublemaker, putting in question the theoretical bases of the idea of the monarchy itself. The following two examples concern ownership of books that the monarchy banned as seditious. Over a twenty-year period, a number of Parliament verdicts published in cheap brochure format similar to Marion’s 1587 plea (in-16o , ideal for quick distribution) condemn the book by the Jesuit Juan de Mariana De rege et regis institutione (On kings and the institution of monarchy) that “concerns the temporal sovereignty of the King and . . . the pernicious Doctrine of attacks on the sacred persons of Kings” (1615, fo 222v–223: 10–11). The prohibition is reissued in 1594 (the year of assassination attempt on Henry IV, cited above), 1610 (the year of the assassination of Henry IV) and 1615, as the pamphlets show. Another example is a ban dated 1626, “The Verdict Against Prerogativa Hispaniae de dignitate et preminentia Regum, by Jacobo Valdesio,” a book containing “false propositions and chapters”; whoever sells or owns it is “declared guilty of lèze-majesté [criminels de leze-Majesté]” (fo 307). These bans on political treatises are an exception among prohibited books, mostly theological. Our third example shows that the role of the intellectual community in the debate on the legitimacy of monarchy was more active than even the possession of prohibited books over a thirty-year period (1594–1626) implies. The 1615 prohibition against Mariana’s book is bound with an undated verdict against a university debate at the Sorbonne on the subject of the King’s sovereignty. The accused had “discussed the State and the Crown, and this Kingdom, as a vacillating and fluctuating things, and being in some doubt” (fo 222v–223: 10–11). The verdict evokes “the maxims always upheld in France, and born with the Crown. . . . However we were told that by discourse both private and public many people attribute themselves the license to put these maxims in doubt, discuss them, and consider them problematic, from which many inconveniences can arise” (fo 229r-v). This exercise of thought was stopped by a legal verdict. Our example shows that a university debate was considered not just theoretical but that it had, in the eyes of the Crown, implications for the stability of political institutions. The university debates were deemed subversive because they legitimated doubt through a series of linked events: the original event, “discourse both private and public,” leads “many people”
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to “attribute themselves,” that is, usurp, or incorrectly assume that they possess the “license” (privilege, right, permission, freedom) to “doubt” or put into question “these maxims,” that is, the immanent legitimacy of the monarchy expressed in ahistorical utterances (“maxims”). The university debate, par excellence an instance of logos (“discourse both private and public”) was thus condemned because it was deemed to create an environment where subjects usurped the right to doubt, and that subjunctive movement in turn could result in real-life implications (“inconveniences”). What is, then, the relationship between logos under the guise of theory of sovereignty and political legitimacy (a university exercise) versus social practice? According to Borradori, the French and American Revolutions were laboratories of a theory of the state, and revealed: that the present could offer the possibility of a true break with the past . . . reason could have an intrinsic moral and social responsibility and . . . it should, therefore, have a closer relationship to history. In spite of his conservative position, Kant admires the revolutionary spirit that gave the individual the feeling of his own independence from authority . . . for Kant and for other Enlightenment philosophers, it became evident that the self-affirmation of reason has historical consequences, for reason alone can show how to restructure the present in view of a better future. (Derrida 21–2) In theory, revolutionary extremism ends in a future of freedom. Its opposite, for Arendt, the bourgeois and mercantile self-interest, ends in sclerosis. But Deleuze and Guattari propose corrections to that principle. The correction is not surprising per se. French history in the nineteenth century – Revolution, Directoriat, Consulate, Empire, the restoration of the Monarchy, etc. – is a rollercoaster of revolutionary insurgences that quickly dissolve into Restorations. After 1956 and the revelation of Stalinist purges, most French intellectuals have qualified their communist positions by distinguishing between, on the one hand, a theoretical allegiance to communism and other left-wing ideologies and on the other hand, repudiation of the political entities such as the Eastern bloc that perverted rather than practiced the ideology. Deleuze and Guattari’s 1970s’ and 1980s’ critique of the intellectual status quo was not lost on the American audience, according to Semiotext(e)’s founding editor, Sylvère Lotringer: For me, this was the kind of phenomena that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari first mapped out in Anti-Oedipus (1972), which articulated
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the anarchy inherent in late capitalism, the multiplicity of its deterritorialized flows. The book directly registered the impact of the ideas of May ’68, upping the ante on Marx by observing that capital, far from being a purely repressive, ruthless mechanism meant to extract surplus-value, was constantly creating new values and new possibilities. And since capitalism absorbed everything, the trick was to counter it from within, redirecting its flows, ceaselessly moving ground. This created novel perspectives, more strategic than ideological: In order to examine more closely how late capitalism worked, Deleuze and Guattari abandoned traditional binary oppositions, class struggles, war machines, and party bureaucracies that were prone to fossilize. In France, of course, with its long history of overcentralization and bureaucracy, Deleuze and Guattari’s theories were pure science fiction. But on the other side of the Atlantic they were uncannily realistic: New York, as it moved toward the ’80s, was the laboratory of capital and natural destination for the two theorists, even though they’d never set foot in the city. All that was needed was a bridge. This is what I set out to provide by publishing a new magazine, called Semiotext(e) . . . [leading to] the 1975 “Schizo-Culture” conference on prisons (à la Foucault) and madness (Deleuze/Guattari), a gathering intended less to simply “debate” ideas than to reach out to the last vestiges of the ’60s counterculture in America. . . . But the conference unexpectedly escalated into the last-gasp “countercultural event” of the ’70s. Two thousand people attended what quickly devolved into a conflagration between Old and New Left: Activists, academics, feminists, and reconstructed Marxists argued for three days, sometimes violently. While Kovel was speaking, half the audience departed to listen to Foucault and Guattari; Atkinson chased Guattari from the podium. As for Deleuze, he managed to present an outline of his concept of the “rhizome,” which had not yet been discussed in print – but in French, very slowly, while drawing diagrams of root systems and crabgrass on a blackboard. Foucault, who was already known in America, looked on while his paper on infantile sexuality, an attack on radical academics who mistook their verbal pronouncements against repression for political action, was read aloud by a friend in English. When the lecture was over, members of Lyndon LaRouche’s Labor Committee instantly created havoc by denouncing Foucault (and Laing) as undercover CIA agents. In this climate, Semiotext(e) came into being as a cultural venture, and not just a semiotic outfit. (no page number)
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This all led Lotringer to Jean Baudrillard, who was soon to publish Forget Foucault. But Foucault would not be forgotten. And Deleuze and Guattari would not appreciate Baudrillard’s critique of them (see Chapter 2). American academia did not yet embrace Baudrillard; however, the art world did: “The artists’ homage to Baudrillard had been a hysterical demand for security; they had asked Baudrillard to assume on their behalf a power that they didn’t have.” This led, in effect, to increased interest in Baudrillard in the United States, but also led Lotringer to turn instead to American critiques of the hegemony of French philosophy, those designed to attack or address conglomerates of phenomena that did not apply in America. The authors of this chapter and this book may not be “radical academics,” the kind for whom Lotringer expresses nostalgia, yet our political investments and agendas are explicit in our work (it does not take much to be radical these days). Simply put, our purpose is to cultivate understanding of and for otherwise marginalized or elided fugitive elements (people, things, ideas, histories, etc.) and encourage investigative-expansiveness, becomings, and transversality as means by which to increase awareness, compassion, and thus more egalitarian human rights. Moreover, we have not “mistook” our “verbal pronouncements against repression for political action.” Rather, we know that our pronouncements are indeed political action for the reasons outlined in Marion’s discourse and exemplified by Montaigne.
Notes 1. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Memorial pole (bis), twentieth century, New Guinea, Irian Jaya, Faretsj River, Omadesep village, Asmat people, Wood, paint, fiber; H. 216 in. (548.6 cm): The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979, in description at http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/ocm/hod_1979.206.1611.htm (October 2006). 2. The title of Jacques Rancière’s article in the South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 297–310, to which we refer below. 3. “. . . all privileges, all distinctions, all exceptions must disappear. The Constitution establishes that sovereignty resides in the people, in all the individuals of the people. . . . It follows from all your decrees that every citizen has the right to participate in making the law and consequently that of being an elector or eligible for office without distinction of wealth” (Maximilien Robespierre, “Speech Denouncing the New Conditions of Eligibility” in Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights: 83). 4. “To be decreed by the National Assembly in its last sessions or by the next legislature. . . . 1. Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights.
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5.
6. 7.
8.
9.
10. 11.
12.
13.
14.
Social distinctions may be based only on common utility . . . woman has the right to mount the scaffold, so she should have the right equally to mount the rostrum” (Olympe de Gouges in Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights: 124–9). “Women, wake up . . . Oh women! Women, when will you cease to be blind? What advantages have you gathered in the revolution? A scorn more marked, a disdain more conspicuous. During the centuries of corruption you only reigned over the weakness of men. Your empire is destroyed; what is left to you then?” (Françoise Parturier). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). On the currency of the view that torture to extract confessions was useless and should be abolished (a view that did not necessarily correlate with skepticism concerning the existence of witchcraft), see Victoria Krause’s introduction to Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers (Geneva: Droz, forthcoming) (first published 1580). Incidentally, Bodin was also the author of Five Books on the Republic, an extensive investigation of sovereignty. In his case, an abiding interest in the legitimacy of the political system did not preclude his support for the use of torture, whose uses he carefully examined. We thank Professor Krause for these references. See Ayanna Thompson, Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2007) and Katharine Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). According to Hunt, “Human rights require three interlocking qualities: rights must be natural (inherent in human beings); equal (the same for everyone); and universal (applicable everywhere). For rights to be human rights, all humans everywhere in the world must possess them equally and only because of their status as human beings” (20). For a more general overview of human rights traditions worldwide, see Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). On the right to doubt during the early modern period, see Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises, chs 1, 4, and 5. A different variant of this event is edited in Pierre de l’Estoile, Mémoiresjournaux (Paris: Taillard, 1982, vol. 6, p. 247), where Mathurine is described, with more probability, as the king’s fool (folle), not girl (fille). “Would it that Spanish camp masters did something like that to their Spanish! They, who allow them their camp followers without daring to say anything, otherwise everyone would revolt; for they love, treat, and cherish them like princesses, as I have written elsewhere . . . thus, they know how to govern themselves in that matter better and with more wisdom than we do. However, this cruelty of which I just told should have been better moderated” (7, 283– 5). Rancière (298), citing Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, eds J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1987), and Hannah Arendt, On the Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace,1951), esp. the chapter on “The Perplexities of the Rights of Man.” Anthony Giddens, The Third Way. The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
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15. Rancière refers to Lyotard’s “The Other’s Rights,” in On Human Rights, eds S. Shute and S. Hurley (New York: Basic Books, 1994), originally presented in Oxford lectures on the Rights of Man, organized in 1993 by Amnesty International. 16. One theory that cannot be subsumed to a general model that comprises both Lyotard and Rancière is Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology, simply because instead of one type of relation (partial resistance, as in Lyotard and Rancière), Boltanski draws a finer-grained typology of relations, identifying within the same (social) sphere not one but six interconnected “regimes of identification” corresponding to six “orders” (civic, market, transcendence, fame, industrial, and domestic). The calculus of their interactions amounts to the seventh, “connectionist” regime. In The New Spirit of Capitalism he develops the notion that there are two types of conflicts (“trials” and “tests”), one legitimate and refereed, concerning internal hierarchies of the order (trials about rules) and others (tests of “force”), which do not possess these characteristics, and are played simultaneously on different fields with their specific timescales. A former student of Bourdieu (the idea of habitus, the gravitational pull of an originary social condition for an individual, is obviously present), Boltanski drastically departs from Bourdieu; he is more interested in adequate modeling of society than in engineering social change. 17. See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. (New York: Zone Books, 2002). For the critique, see Dominick Lacapra, History in Transit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 155–194, and Esther Norma Marion, “The Nazi Genocide and the Writing of the Holocaust Aporia: Ethics and Remnants of Auschwitz”: “Responding to the ethical exigency of ‘the aporia of Auschwitz,’ Agamben’s analysis . . . effaces the very historical constitution of this aporia, which he structurally appropriates for assimilation into his philosophical discourse. A weighty claim perhaps, but the burden of ‘a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements’ (12) makes weighty claims on the future to be safeguarded from theoretical evaporation and discursive sanctity” (1009). We thank Sven Erik Rose for the following, further references: Philippe Mensard and Claudine Kahan, Giorgio Agamben à l’épreuve d’Auschwitz (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2001), Robert Eaglestone, “On Giorgio Agamben’s Holocaust.” Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 25: 2 (2002): 52–67, Geoffrey Hartman, “Testimony and Authenticity,” in Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 85–99, Dominick LaCapra, “Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben,” in Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust, eds Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (Madision: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003): 262–304, Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory: Toward an Ethics of the Borderland,” Symploke: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship 11:1–2 (2003): 23–38, Sven Erik Rose, “Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, Surrealism, and the postmodern Archive,” forthcoming, Debarati Sanyal, “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism,” Representations 79 (Summer 2002): 1–27, J. M. Bernstein, “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘after Auschwitz’,” New German Critique 33:1 (Winter 2006): 31–52, and Bernstein’s
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18. 19.
20.
21.
22.
23. 24.
25.
“Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror,” Parallax 10:1 (2004): 2–16. See Anna Kłosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 106–111. See David Herlihy, Medieval Culture and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1968) and Women in Medieval Society (The Smith History Lectures) (St. Thomas University Press, 1971). See Daniel Baraz, “Violence or Cruelty? An Intellectual Perspective,” in eds Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery and Oren Falk, “A Great Effusion of Blood”?: Intepreting Medieval Violence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004): 164–89, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), and “Seneca, Ethics, and the Body: The Treatment of Cruelty in Medieval Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59:2 (April 1998): 195–219. Translations are ours unless otherwise indicated. Among those who have written about Montaigne’s essay “Of the Cannibals” and other essays in the context of the New World, cultural relativism, and religion, are Michel de Certeau, Oeuvres & Critiques: Revue Internationale d’Etude de la Reception Critique d’Etude des Oeuvres Litteraires de Langue, 8:1–2 (1983): 59–62; Franck Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage: l’Amérique et la controverse coloniale en France, au temps des guerres de religion (1555–1589) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999) and Le cannibale: grandeur et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1994), and his articles, “Le cannibalisme Des Cannibales,” Bulletin de la société des amis de Montaigne 9–10 (1982): 27–40 and “Le nom des Cannibales de Christophe Colomb à Michel de Montaigne,” Bulletin de la société des amis de Montaigne 17–18 (1984): 51–74; Carla Freccero, “Cannibalism, Homophobia, Women: Montaigne’s ‘De cannibales’ and ‘De l’amitié’” in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds, Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (New York: Routledge, 1994): 73–83; George Hoffman, “Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne’s ‘Cannibals,’” PMLA 117:2 (2002): 207–21; and Zahi Zalloua, Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 2005). From Michel de Certeau in the 1980s through Stephen Greenblatt’s anthology New World Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), to current discussions, Montaigne’s essay is among his most commonly discussed and taught texts. See Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo and Maureen Quilligan, eds, Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Livy, Ab urbe condita, 3: 26–9; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 10: 23–5. Editing a recent issue of L’Esprit Créateur (46:1, 2006) on “the ethical turn in Montaigne criticism,” Zahi Zalloua traces the evolution of the critical assessment of Montaigne, from a humanist “in pursuit of truths” who reveals a preexisting subject, to “a literary writer” who constitutes himself as a subject through writing (1960s and 70 s), to the current interest in Montaigne and the New World (cultural studies) (Zahi Zalloua, “Montaigne and the Levinaisian Other,” L’esprit créateur 46:1 (2006): 86–95, at 87. Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Stephen Toulmin,
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26.
27.
28.
29.
30. 31.
32.
33. 34.
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Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). For example, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialistic Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1985) and Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989). For a critique of their positions, see Bryan Reynolds, Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and HisContemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). See Michel de Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’” in his Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) and Franck Lestringant, Le cannibale, grandeur et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1994). See Charles Gibson, The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971); Eric Griffin, “Un-sainting James: Othello and the ‘Spanish Spirits’ of Shakespeare’s Globe” in Representations 62 (1998): 58–100 and “‘But wherefore blot I Bel-Imperia’s name?’: Ethos, Empire, and the Valiant Acts of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy” in English Literary Renaissance 31 (2001); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and William Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660. Durham: Duke University Press, 1971. These examples of cannibalistic metaphors of translatio are cited by: Dudley M. Marchi, “Montaigne and the New World: The Cannibalism of Cultural Production,” MLS (Modern Language Studies) 23:4 (Fall 1993): 35–54; Joachim Du Bellay, La deffence et Illustration de la langue francoyse, eds Henri Chaumard (Paris: Classiques Larousse, 1966), 42. Cited by Marchi, “Montaigne and the New World,” 36. The similarity between cannibalism and Catholicism was apparently explicitly criticized by Calvinist missionaries in the New World, and some anthropologists suggest that if not the practice, at least the rise of cannibalism is due to the European invasion. See Dudley Marchi (51 n12–13), citing R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1992); Ferguson, “Blood of the Leviathan: Western Contact and Warfare in Amazonia,” American Ethnologist (17:2): 237–57; and William Balée, “The Ecology of Ancient Tupi Warfare,” in Warfare, Culture, and Environment, eds R. Brian Ferguson (Orlando, Florida: Academic Press Inc., 1984), 241–66. Gaius Mucius Scaevola (“left-handed”) was a mythical Roman hero who, captured by the Etruscans in a failed assassination plot of their leader Porsenna, thrust his right hand into the fire when threatened with death by flames. In recognition of his bravery, Porsenna released him (Livy, Ab urbe condita, 2:12–13). We recognize that shock short-circuits reasoning (see our principle of translucency theory), and that it is always historically, geopolitically, etc. located. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I: Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), final chapter, 177–211, translated as “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in the History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
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35. 36. 37. 38.
39.
40.
41.
(London: Penguin, 1978), 135–59, and his course at the Collège de France, published as Il faut défendre la société (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1975–76). Aristotle, Politics, 1278b, 23–31; Agamben, pp. 1–2. See note 17 above. Agamben’s intervention could lead to a rethinking of queer history, for instance, making these stakes much higher. In “Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Poetry by François Villon,” Mills discusses Agamben’s incomplete reading of Marie de France’s Bisclavret (ca. 1275) and analyzes the uses of the outcast position in François Villon’s poetry (1431–60). Recently, the position that printing has not changed ideology but rather facilitated its spread via different means has been emphasized, for instance by Margaret Meserve, conference paper, “Oak and Ink: Sixtus IV and the Printing Press,” the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, 2008; see also Meserve, “Patronage and Propaganda at the First Paris Press: Guillaume Fichet and the First Edition of Bessarion’s Orations against the Turks,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 97 (2003): 521–88. The argument from the 1587 case, under discussion here, is one of the ephemera: Plaidoyez de M. Simon Marion, advocat en Parlement, baron de Druy. Avec Arrests donnez sur yceux. BnF ms fr 22071, collection Anisson-Duperron sur la librairie et l’imprimerie, vol. 11, privilèges et permissions 1417–1706, fo 61–92. The multivolume works are: Plaidoyes et advis sur plusieurs grands et importants affaires, de messire Simon Marion, Paris: Joseph Boüillerot, 1625. Similarly, women’s inheritance laws, another of Marion’s distinctive contributions, imply that at the time women were not constituted as subjects of the law in a manner that satisfied the social and family understanding of their position. This part of Marion’s heritage is also relevant in a more general sense to the discussion of early modern subjectivity, because it demonstrates how politically motivated legal action can with set a basis for discrimination (in this case, against women) while promoting the idea of sovereignty of the state. In other words, the development of nation-states and human rights can be in opposition for idiosyncratic historical reasons. French royal counsel resurrected the laws of the Salic Franks, ancestors of the French, during the Hundred Years War in order to prevent the English from succeeding to the French crown: they prohibited inheritance in the female line. Saint Augustine in the City of God (3:1) speaks out against the Voconian law of ancient Rome that denies inheritance to women, even to only daughters. According to Saint Augustine, Christians were superior to pagans, among others, because they recognized women’s rights to inheritance. The adoption of Salic law by the French in the second half of the fourteenth century went against that tradition of the Church. Ironically, the chief architect of the resurrection of Salic law, Charles V’s counsel Raoul de Presles, was also the author of the first French translation and commentary of the City of God into French. This translation was the first in a series commissioned by the king as part of a major project in cultural literacy intended, alongside Salic law, to legitimate his reign (in addition to sponsoring translations, Charles V also created the royal library). Doing double duty as an intellectual and as a lawyer, Raoul de Presles in his commentary to Saint Augustine’s City of God had to justify Salic law and exempt it from Augustine’s condemnation of Voconian law. He
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42. 43.
44. 45. 46.
259
accomplished that by positing the inheritance of the crown as distinct from private inheritance, a distinction that extends the dualism articulated in the concept of “the king’s two bodies”: a corporate body (the king as the head of state), distinct from the king’s body as an individual. Among others, Presles’s near contemporaries Christine de Pisan and Jean Gerson evoked the image of the king and his subjects as the head of the corporate state. As a matter of political expediency, it was necessary in the second half of the fourteenth century explicitly to constitute women as unfit for heads of state. The reference to Salic law was also enmeshed in the dynastic legend, anchoring the historical origins of the French nation in Frankish tribes. The necessity to protect French sovereignty endangered by English dynastic claims led the French to articulate the legal foundation of the sovereignty of the French state as an entity that belongs to its member individuals (the French people) rather than being private property of the king and an object of inheritance in the royal family. The law did not apply to regency. In effect, it may have contributed to the predominance of women regents in France, since it precluded women from extending regency into rule. France had four significant women regents in the early modern period: Marguerite de Navarre (who brokered the so-called “peace of the ladies” after Francis I’s imprisonment after the defeat of Pavia), Catherine de’ Medici (notoriously credited with initiating the massacres of Protestants by Catholics, St Bartholomew’s day, 1572), Maria de’ Medici (wife of Henry IV and mother of Louis XIII, who commissioned the Luxembourg Palace with Rubens’s triumphant, pictorial biography of her, and who was one of the most active if not the most astute regents, exiled twice by her son’s advisors and who died in exile from France) and Anne of Austria (mother of Louis XIV and object of the aristocracy’s revolt, the Fronde). Random political and historical forces determined outcomes in the regency process that produced the legal context for the early modern subject and state. Intellectuals such as Presles and Christine de Pisan (who wrote in praise of Charles V) worked to legitimate current political concerns by rediscovering and endowing with significance selected elements of national history. Intellectual and legal resources were harnessed to support a king’s claim to legitimacy. The result was the strengthening of the French nationstate and the weakening of women’s legal status. Anti-women legislation was not the goal but the collateral effect. The foliated brochure is now bound in a paginated anthology. In all citations, we will give folio numbers followed by page numbers. Montaigne was the son of Antoinette Louppes of a wealthy Jewish family that left Spain during the century before his birth to live in Toulouse. For discussion on Montaigne’s Jewish lineage, see Martin, 589. From G. Bennington and J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 72. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed on December 10, 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations. As Borradori notes, Arendt has been criticized for having brought up the question of Jewish collaboration that has not been addressed during Eichmann’s process (Borradori in Derrida, 28–9; 29n1). In view of the fact that so many Nazi genocide perpetrators have survived and lived unpunished, Arendt’s addressing the question of Jewish collaboration in that context can seem superfluous or wrong. This example is well known and often cited because it
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demonstrates Arendt’s commitment to the principle of humanity and justice that transcends other claims and ethical imperatives. 47. “Bad taste leads to crime” is a phrase often attributed to the novelist Stendhal, supposedly borrowed from his friend and correspondent, Baron Adolphe de Mareste (later his literary legatee), and repeated some 20 years after Stendhal’s death by the literary critic, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, 1862. 48. The dismissal was based on a reassessment of the attorneys’ loyalty to the Republican party line and, in some cases, on sexual orientation (one attorney, a loyal Republican with an “outstanding” record in the post, was dismissed after rumors circulated that she is lesbian).
Works cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ——, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Baraz, Daniel. “Seneca, Ethics, and the Body: The Treatment of Cruelty in Medieval Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 59:2 (April 1998): 195–219. Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Bourdeille, Pierre de (seigneur de Brantôme). Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, “De tous nos couronnels.” eds Prosper Mérimée and Louis Lacour. Paris: Paul Daffis, 1878. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980. Derrida, Jacques and Jürgen Habermas. Le “concept” du 11 septembre. Dialogues à New York, présentés et commentés par Giovanna Borradori. Paris: Galilée, 2004. Grant, Susannah (writer and director). Catch and Release. Columbia Pictures, 2006. Holsinger, Bruce. The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: Norton, 2007. Judowitz, Dalia. Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Kłosowska, Anna. Queer Love in the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. Histoire des Indes Occidentales où l’on reconnoit la bonté de ces païs, et de leurs peuples, et les cruautez Tyranniques des Espagnols. Décrite premierement en langue Castillane par Dom Barthelemy de las Casas, de l’Ordre de S. Dominique, et Evesque de Chappa; et depuis fidellement traduite en François. (Lyon: Jean Caffin et F. Plaignard, 1642). L’Estoile, Pierre de. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, ms1559, Extraits de journal de Pierre de l’Estoile, de l’année 1594 (mars) à l’année 1611 (mai), a nineteenthcentury handwritten copy. L’Estoile, Pierre de. Mémoires-Journaux, 1574–1611. Réproduction intégrale de l’édition Jouaust et Lemarre aomplétée des inédits découverts ultérieurement. 11 vols. Vol. 6, Journal de Henri IV, 1593–1594. Paris: Tallandier, 1982.
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Lotringer, Sylvère. “My ’80s: Better than Life.” Artforum, April 2003: www.semiotexte.com/docs/sylvere_lotringer_my_80s.pdf Marion, Esther Norma. “The Nazi Genocide and the Writing of the Holocaust Aporia: Ethics and Remnants of Auschwitz,” Modern Language Notes 121:4 (2006): 1009–22. Marion, Simon. Plaidoyez de M. Simon Marion, advocat en Parlement, baron de Druy. Avec Arrrests donnez sur yceux. BnF ms fr 22071, collection Anisson-Duperron sur la librairie et l’imprimerie, vol. 11, privilèges et permissions 1417–1706, fo 61–92. Martin, Daniel. “Cannibals and Kings: Montaigne and the Valladolid Hearings of 1550–1551.” History of European Ideas 20:1–3 (1995): 585–90. Mills, Robert. “Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Poetry by François Villon,” Exemplaria 17:2 (Fall 2005): 445–80. Montaigne, Michel de. “Of Cannibals” in Essays of Michael, Sieur de Montaigne in three books, with marginal notes and quotations of the cited authors, and an account of the author’s life. Trans. Charles Cotton, 3 vols, London: for T. Basset, M. Gilliflower and W. Hensman, 1685–6: 360–86. ——, “To the Reader” in Essais, eds Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier. 3 vols, 2nd edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. Pardailhé-Galabrun, Annik. The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris. Oxford: Polity Press, 1991. Rancière, Jacques, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103: 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 297–310. Ranum, Orest. Review of Annik Pardailhé-Galabrun, La naissance de l’intime: 3,000 foyers parisiens, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988) In The Journal of Modern History 63:3 (September 1991): 571–74. Teskey, Gordon. Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 Zalloua, Zahi. “Montaigne and the Levinaisian Other,” L’esprit créateur 46:1 (2006): 86–95.
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Afterword: Subjects Matter
To date, three phases of theoretical work on the concept of transversality are in evidence. In the first instance, transversal theory emerged in the work of Félix Guattari as a way to scramble existing organigrammes of power within institutional spaces and was set in motion by means of the application of tools forged for the specific situation at hand. Guattari set about experimenting with ways to heighten and maximize the “therapeutic coefficient” of the psychiatric clinic where he worked by unfixing rigid roles, thawing frozen hierarchies, and opening hitherto closed blinkers – vertical and horizontal impasses, professional privileges, specialist provisos.1 In this milieu, transversality has the goal of maximizing communication between all the levels and sectors of an institution, and travels in all directions. The application of transversal tools not only actualizes new institutional matters, but in addition transmits impulses of virtuality (the realm of potentiality) – this is transversality in Brian Massumi’s terms – that are not exhausted in and by selective actualizations (Massumi 42). Rather, these impulses skip along from one actualization to the next, releasing the potentiality of each, and enfolding the tool user, but also changing her, and allowing for adjustments to the tool as well with every application of it. Institutional matters, not all of which are well formed, envelope potential that transversal tools release; in collaborative settings, relationality is made dynamic. Along the way, constraints and awkward situations arise but they may be productive. No matter what happens, the idea is not to still the virtual; that is, make it appear but only fleetingly as the virtual is actualized and the actual is virtualized. In the second phase of the concept’s elaboration, Michel Foucault moved beyond institutional spaces and reflected on the key 262
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a. they are not confined to nations, specific types of economy, nor governments; b. they concern power effects (medical profession over the body); c. they are “immediate” in two senses: proximity to the power they criticize, and their choice of target; and belong to the present and not to the future of a revolution yet to arrive; d. importantly, such struggles resist individualization and its normopathic subjugations; e. are concerned with the effects of power linked to knowledge, as they expose “mystifying representations”; f. and regain singularities obscured and occluded by individualizing definitions and categorizations that make certain kinds of subjects to the exclusion of others. (211–12) Together, Foucault and Guattari moved the consideration of transversality into the realm of struggles aimed at transforming the production of subjectivity away from inherited models. The Guattarian and Foucauldian senses of transversality share the goal of transforming subjectivity without collapsing the subject onto a delimited monadic individual. Transversal struggles are resistant, not simply anti-authoritarian, Foucault specifies, but clearly exemplified in feminism, anti-psychiatry, and children’s rights, among many other social movements. Transversality is what they have in common: a transformation focused on the production of new forms of subjectivity. Unlike Guattari, however, Foucault’s transversal struggles were much more in the present and about immediate resistance (point c). Foucault’s points d. and f. directly concern subjectification: in constraints on the cultivation of difference and repairing linkages broken by the straitjacket of identity; and, in the bureaucratic inscriptions of identity that are the power effects of corporate and governmental categories and profiles, data generated through administrative surveillance, and subjugating informatic striations of all kinds. In Foucault’s estimation, transversal struggles have the goal of releasing individuals from subjection (what ties one to oneself) and from submissive forms of subjectivities (hegemonic capitalist–consumerist subjectivity). Guattari agreed wholeheartedly and called for “neuroleptic cloaks” to be thrown off because they stagnate exploration and experimentation and serve as prophylactics against encountering incomparable otherness and achieving a measure of creative, self-defined autonomy (The Three Ecologies 68–9).
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characteristics of transversal struggles:
Thirdly, we come to what may be called transversal critical praxis. In this Bryan Reynolds cuts a transversal figure in literary, theater, and performance criticism. Privileging spatial over temporal coordinates, Reynolds worked out the transversal in relation to two different kinds of territories.2 Subjective territory is the site of a normalized and socially determined “individual” who is subjectified by the “state machinery” through all of the agencies and discourses of socialization and executive power. Transversal territory is an “anti-subjective” domain and is reached by taking leave from normative subjective territory by means of transgressions of emotional, conceptual, and physical boundaries. With Guattari, Reynolds introduced transversality as a way to break from rigid roles, which in the former speaks to the introjections of new data that do not trigger repression, and for the latter displaces and re-routes the reinforcements of the “official territory” (that is, capitalistic subjectification) toward socially creative becomings. Reynolds would have us swerve upon departure, riding the “conductors of resistance,” or what Guattari wrote about as “catalysers of existential change.” Like Guattari, Reynolds often gives a sociohistorical specificity to transversality, as in his work on Elizabethan rogues, ruffians, vagabonds, prostitutes, cross-dressers, and gypsies, without confining them to an institutional setting, except to the extent that early modern English public theater serves as a “composite” for him of a conductor that induces transversal travel among a vast population. The “institution” is an expanded field of activity defined by the state machinery’s interventions by means of law, convention, and Christendom. And, in the spirit of Foucault, transversality is indexed to struggles against the status quo and to normopathic forms of subjectification. Reynolds’ theatrical poetics of transversality marks the concept’s passage into aesthetics, drawing him closer to Guattari’s linkage of art and politics via subjectification. This is an original contribution to transversality’s deployment and it advances the aesthetic reference considerably, allowing us to situate Reynolds on the forward rank of a long march that began with Japanese architects and photographers in the 1970s and 1980s, with painters of transversality, as Guattari put it, like JeanJacques Lebel, a colleague from the countercultural 1960s; with American activist-artists favored by Guattari, like David Wojnarowicz, and even avant-garde dramatists like Stanislav Witkiewicz.3 We not only look to Reynolds for leadership on advancing the much-neglected dimension of theater in Guattari’s elaboration of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, but note Guattari’s and Reynolds’ own artistic practices; we attest to Guattari’s ambition in the surviving outlines of
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a “Projet pour un film de Kafka”: “L’ambition de notre projet serait donc de faire non pas un film sur l’oeuvre de Kafka, ou un film sur Kafka, mais un film de Kafka; faire vivre la machine Kafka dans les coordonnées du cinema . . .” (Soixante-Cinq Rêves de Franz Kafka 43). In short, a film by Guattari made with Kafka (a collective cinematic enunciation), not a film about his work, nor a film on him. In contrast, the Foucauldian version of the concept has tended to gravitate toward global political theory concerning transversal struggles on the world stage that defy boundaries, break the state-centrism of international political theory, and cannot be spatially represented by the divisions typical to global politics (state behavior, national sovereignty, transnational relationality). There can be no doubt that the matter with which Guattari, Foucault, and Reynolds work is subjectivity. Reynolds’ accomplishment in Transversal Subjects is to pose the question of the subject against its territorial containments and find new refrains of passage, existential connectors of the most specialized and the most well known, between existing and new assemblages of transversalized subjects. To this end the book begins with the seminal distinction resulting from the transversalization of subjectivity: the subject is both not an individual and uncontainable: “subjectivity, as a composite of multifarious perceptions and identifications, is itself transversal to subjects inasmuch as reflexiveconsciousness, awareness of experiencing while experiencing, is requisite to its crystallizations . . . subjectivity always actively reconfigures away from the delimiting procedures and pressures of subjectivation . . .” (2). Transversal subjects wander, amalgamate multiplicities, emerge and drift (between assemblages like text and reader). This is not a meaningless interpretive drift but a guided breakthrough that negotiates actualizations in pursuit of enjoyment. Famous characters (Romeo and Juliet), too, “reel transversally” – under the influence of the catalysis of love – “wildly beyond accepted subjective and societal parameters” (21). Either purposively or in a loss of control, and perhaps something in-between through non-conscious mimicry, transversal passages just as strongly lift one into the familiar with an expectation of the unfamiliar, which is why, according to Reynolds, “we can’t get enough of Shakespeare” (35). The Guattarian subject, as articulated by Guattari (with Suely Rolnik), is not an individual, an individuated person, thinking and thus being; rather, it is an entangled assemblage of many components, a collective (heterogeneous, multiple) articulation of such components before and beyond the individual; the individual is like a transit station for changes, crossings, and switches (Molecular Revolution in Brazil 43–44). This subject is also polyphonic – of many relatively independent parts – because
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Afterword: Subjects Matter
it assembles components in order to posit itself in terms of some points of reference (body, social clusters, etc) in an existential territory, a field in which it is incarnated, but out of which it also ventures. Produced by mutual self-engenderings, the subject finds a certain existential consistency, without getting tied down to an identity once and for all, in the crossing points of components, in their intra- and inter-assemblage relations and passages. And subjectivity is a group phenomenon, but defined as an assemblage of heterogeneous types of components with varying existential consistencies undergoing certain kinds of transformations in self-generated fields with describable semiotic features and observable pragmatic consequences. Guattari introduced the machinic as a principle of productive connectivity irreducible to specific technologies; machines form assemblages of component parts whose molecular becomings the schizoanalyst then helps to facilitate. As Reynolds (with Adam Bryx) makes clear in his second chapter, he does not rely as heavily on “aleatory sources (new, random, and/or uncertain concepts)” (86) in his vision of transversal passage; after all, he turns to Shakespeare, Rousseau, Montaigne, among others. In addition, Reynolds downplays the implosive turns of deterritorialization of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and opts for a more sustainable and rejuvenating imperative. Indeed, the subject in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought remains a problem for Reynolds because its lacks phenomenological purchase on intentionality and reflexivity. In Reynolds’ hands, transversal theory has a grip on interpretation and experiences dissidence in the face of the Body-without-Organs and its anti-productive ethos. Still, by putting the emphasis on agency – desire’s “willful parametrization” (92) – Reynolds poses one of the most vexing questions in the reading of Deleuze and Guattari: to what extent is “agency” (for example, sobriety in the form, for Reynolds, of a necessary reflexive-consciousness) itself (anti)productive? Perhaps even “extreme reflexive-consciousness ultimately reaching a vanishing point of hyper-awareness” (110)? It, too, may be antiproductive; yet serve to “maximize the tension between desiring-production and anti-production” (116). The field of debate is a smooth Body-without-Organs, recording not producing (not connecting), and therefore reproducing satisfactions in relational terms, holding them up to one another in an unsystematic way. Whereas the desiring-machines produce desire in attaching themselves to the Body-without-Organs, giving texture to an otherwise smooth surface, interacting desiring-production and anti-production are quite productive, though subject to repetition and fixation on an organ (genital fixation), or maybe a perverse attachment; if the desiring-machines settle
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into the Body-without-Organs, a full catatonia may result, or perhaps just a mild neurosis. Gene Holland clarifies the place of the subject in this way: “the subject emerges only as an after-effect of the selection made by desire among various connectives and disjunctions, not as the agent of selection” in the conjunctive synthesis (33). Perverts are chosen rather than choose. The illusion of choice persists nonetheless and it is perfused with (dis)simulation, as Reynolds amply demonstrates, cycling through Baudrillard. The subject is for Deleuze and Guattari, as Reynolds remarks, a “retrospective operation” – Rousseau recalling his predilections, in the process gathering up his connections and disjunctions, writing them down in The Confessions. Enjoy your symptom, as Slavoj Žižek encourages.4 But the troublesome term is “your.” Reynolds wants to be rid of this kind of subject. Instead, Reynolds is leaning forward, expanding and investigating, rather than claiming ownership or “segregating” the subject in illegitimate ways like those found in the mythic dimension of psychoanalysis, and he is even – and this is a big step – expressing dissatisfaction with the interruptions of recording in favor of more lubricious, connective syntheses. The point at which Reynolds arrives (with Joseph Fitzpatrick) in Chapter 3 concerns Michel de Certeau’s resources for thinking transversal subjectivity. Here Reynolds opens up a methodological distinction that clarifies his approach: he shifts from a dissective-cohesive to an investigative-expansive mode of analysis; the former is dialectical, reassembling parts into wholes, while the latter takes parts without seeking to make them whole, instead probing relations between them in context and in terms of where and when they might next take one. Walking in the city – to which may be added – underground urban exploration, skateboarding, bike messengering, parkour, and no end of marginal practices bear “transversal power” to “cut across the striated, organized space of subjectivity,” argues Reynolds (137). Time, quality, and resignification (“remembering of forgotten practices” [139]) are regained from panoptic space and forgetting, enhancing transversal potential for fugitive actions and fortuitous connectedness: “investigative-expansive modes insist that the subject matter under investigation be partitioned according to essentially ad hoc parameters” (144). Reparameterize and don’t reconstruct; lotion rather than desiccate; seek heterogeneity and reduce homogeneity even in the most pedestrian circumstances, like the thousands of proposals received on CNN.com for rebuilding ground zero in Manhattan, which despite striations and laminations of nationalism and chauvinism, exude under Reynolds’ method “collective transversalities that wander through alternative rewritings” (158). This unsettling
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Afterword: Subjects Matter
“subjunctivity” – exploring “as-ifs” and “what-ifs” – may pan out in full-blown transversal flight. New incarnations of a transversalized subjectivity in partially formed existential territories not yet yoked to normalized extrinsic pillars, whether these are officialdom, respectability, religious or sexual fixations or aesthetic styles, are in Reynolds’s rich conceptual vocabulary fugitive, elusive, and “happily defiant” (163). This lack of fixity is fecund, abstract, and intense. In Chapter 4, Reynolds (with Donovan Sherman) locates in becomings-child “childhood’s condition as necessarily subversive – a fugitive rehearsal within official culture – [that] traces a space rich with alternative conceptions and fluctuations of subjectivity” (163). Yet the transversal potential of childhood is more often than not heavily surveilled or “supervised,” initiating tensions that provoke both “calibrated theatrical” breakaways (playground twists) and unpredictable, “metatheatrical” transversals (165). Reviewing and criticizing the capture devices deployed in narrativizations of feral children (Kaspar Hauser and Peter of Hanover), Reynolds finds that Peter Handke’s play Kaspar “open[s] up transversal possibilities of Kaspar’s existence” otherwise nailed shut by impositions of subjective normativity (181). What Reynolds appreciates in Handke is the animality of Kaspar’s language that does not mature into human speech but foils teleological expectations of maturation, confounding recovery and reintegration, by retaining the feral. Reynolds does much the same to the literature on playgrounds: a “symptomatic theatricality” (rehearsing adulthood) trapped by reformism that turns playspace into an observed site of manifest purpose by both children and adults (184). Writing against the grain of an alienated playstage, Reynolds valorizes “ ‘fugitive rehearsals’ [that] spark actual transversal movements with capacities for perceptual, experiential, and subjective transformations to take place; they subvert the dominant systems that hope to contain such movements as re-inscriptions of state machinery” (187). Forget the audience for a moment – children rehearse for and stage themselves and are their own audience and in the process “constant rehearsal” (often emulation of superheroes) resists actualization of subjectivity (191); likewise, adult audiences watch themselves as they watch their children. Reynolds seeks catalysts of existential change that neither completely break out of the confines of emulation – rather they are stretched beyond recognition – nor lapse into criminality or, at least, punishable behavior. Of course, this is where things can also go horribly right or wrong, or something in-between. Instead of summoning forth and assisting new traits of particularity, incomparable singularities breed banal imitations
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and we get another romantic myth of a return to innocence. Ever watchful for dissident vectors of transversal subjectivity, Reynolds rides the refrains of youthful tunes beyond the confines of “officialized trajectories” and faces both the “blankness and unlimited becomings” (196) in a playground full of Kaspar Hausers who have acquired for themselves the means to negotiate their activities (incorporating the phenomenological dimension upon which Reynolds insists throughout this book). Regaining and displacing into the pre-modern Montaigne’s “cannibalcentrism” (226) against a colonizing discursivity that would see Others as outside the categories of civilized subject with human rights, Reynolds (with Anna Kłosowska) probes the invention of individual subjects and offers a developmental chain rife with transversal potentialities: According to transversal theory, although always performed under pressure and never absolutely implemented because subjectivity cannot be contained or subsumed by subjectivation, societies typically delineate their members along a linear identity-forming trajectory. The trajectory progresses from organic entity (a human) to individuated agent (an individual) to subjectified person (a subject) to civilized subject (a citizen). Each subsequent category indicates a greater degree of ideological inculcation, cultural assimilation, and performance of the dominant society’s official codes. In other words, the civilized subject lives according to the subjective territory prescribed for him within an official culture that abides by the laws of the official territory within which he lives and thus in line with the state machinery (networking sociopolitical conductors: dominant ideological and legal structures) of the corresponding society on which it mutually depends. (224) This is what Reynolds’ Montaigne cracks in his ironic reversals of civilized versus barbarous – granting to cannibals the civil rights they were typically denied. This eminently transversal practice reveals a key theoretical point: “subjectivity is transversal to subjects” (229). The pressure to belong and conform in context is also an ongoing pressure that interactively breaks the subject outside of herself toward unanticipated becomings. Crystallized subjecthood must manage its emergent properties that resist stasis and completion. For Reynolds, “subjectivity is typically a matter of excess” (234). Reynolds theorizes, then, subjects with compassion and reflexiveconsciousness, weighing interiority and exteriority, cross- and extraterritorial fugitive elements, in a movement that enhances awareness,
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Afterword: Subjects Matter
deepens compassion, and widens the application of egalitarian human rights. Transversal Subjects is a work of collective enunciation. It is written by many hands with a large number of diverse contributors throughout history – engaged in many different ways with Reynolds – distributed across the chapters. This demonstrates subjectivity’s transversality to the author-subject and expands the book’s field beyond its actuality as it becomes something other through the connections it makes with readers and critics and performers. It is within this collective situation and its multiple, mutually fructuous becomings that Reynolds’ addition of a reflexive-consciousness – a navigator – may be understood as he adds an otherwise downplayed dimension of the Deleuzo–Guattarian assemblage as a self-channeling system. Indeed, one could say that Reynolds retains the provisionality and “larval” characteristics of the rhizomatic and nomadic subject, yet his sense of “self” is not as an after-effect retrospectively cobbled together and closed upon the family and patriarchy – Deleuze and Guattari’s point of criticism. Reynolds has it both ways and is in this sense fully transversal to the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject: variation with a view yoked not to a retrogressive past but to a future in which subjectivity is continuously and interactively involved in joyful and thoughtful stagings of its own reconfiguration.
Notes 1. See my entries “Guattari, Pierre-Félix (1930–92),” 117–19; “Transversality + Guattari,” 287–88; and (co-authored with Adam Bryx), “Transversality,” 285– 6, in The Deleuze Dictionary, eds Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). 2. I am relying on the theoretical discussions in Bryan Reynolds, Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 3. In my own editorial work on Deleuze and Guattari, I have tried to bring forward critical work on theater. See the contributions of Mohammad Kowsar, “Deleuze on Theatre: A Case Study of Carmelo Bene’s Richard III” and Anthony Uhlmann’s “To Have Done With Judgment: Beckett and Deleuze,” in my Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2001): 30–46 and 47–68. In my own writing, Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth has served as a site for the interrogations of the bestiary in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought; see my “A Bestiary of Territoriality and Expression: Poster Fish, Bower Birds, and Spiny Lobsters,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature XXIV/3 (1997): 529–42. Michael Goddard has written on Guattari’s elegant essay on Polish modernist Witkiewicz in “Diagram
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Works cited Foucault, Michel. “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow eds, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. London: The Athlone Press, 2000. ——. Soixante-Cinq Rêves de Franz Kafka. Clemency: Lignes, 2007. ——. and Suely Rolnik. Molecular Revolution in Brazil. Trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes. Original Portuguese 1986 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008. Holland, Eugene. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1999. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
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for a Transversal, Molecular Feminism? Guattari’s Refrain and the MachinicFeminine in Witkiewicz’s The Pragmatists,” in Women: A cultural review 16/3 (2005): 271–83. 4. See Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Absent-space: Areas unmarked by articulation or determination. The “absence” may be physical (existing on subterranean levels), historical (gaps or caesuras of archived narratives) or epistemological (the absent source from unexplained phenomena). Absent-spaces or traces thereof, often in relation to articulatory spaces, can spark investigations and travel, opening new avenues of experience, sensation, and thought. Affective presence: Although only recognizable when the level of intensity is high enough to make an observable impact on the environment, affective presence is the combined material, conceptual, emotional, ideological, and imaginary facets of an object, subject, event, or idea. “Affective,” here, refers to both feeling-thought and power-to-influence together with dynamic occupation of spacetime. This presence, then, radiates influentially through, around, engaging, and developing an environment or environments and their variables and substances. As a result, affective presence often brings otherwise disparate constituents and forces into play with each other both diachronically and synchronically, thereby fueling at least one prominent articulatory space. For example, the affective presence surrounding Shakespeare – as iconic poet, political figurehead, myth, or other authoritative conceptions – opens the potentials of Shakespace and its multiplicities to prompt and fuel agential, subjunctive, and transversal movements. Articulatory space: The fluid multifaceted, primarily abstract, spatiotemporal realm in which ideational streams, discourses, and performances negotiate and aggregate meanings, redefine their trajectories, boundaries, and strategies, while orbiting and informing subjects of critical speculation. Articulatory spaces furnish connectivity to otherwise disparate elements, generating clusters of coherence out of multiple 272
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ideas, events, feelings, subjects, and objects. The articulatory space around this book, for instance, consists of its manifold subjects, authors, editors, readers, and all actions, thoughts, and emotions sparked by its affective presence – the stimulation, joy, musings, discussions, praise, or critique elicited by engagement with its text, or through the opening, closing, shelving or disposing of its very materiality. Anything that can be thought of can have an articulatory space. Becomings: Desire-driven processes of transformation by which people, individually or in pairs or groups, change into something different from what they are (becomings-other) or continue to maintain a constitution and image of themselves that they already have (becomings-me). Either way, becomings alter people’s physical, social, conceptual, and/or emotional features. Becomings are achieved actively through identification and empathy with or emulation of other people, characters, creatures, things, or ideas (anything real or imaginary); that is, they are instigated by willful subjunctive or transversal movements. They can be multiple and overlapping, in other words, a becomings-bird can occur simultaneously with a becomings-fish, the outcome of which might be a flying fish or swimming bird; put differently, one can undergo becomings-surfer and becomings-golfer, and the two subjective and/or material processes can coexist. Intrinsically vulnerable, becomings are usually in continuous negotiation with forces of comings-to-be, and therefore can slip into domination by a particular or combinatory comings-to-be, whether of other or consistent with other personae, organic entities, objects, or concepts (anything real or imaginary) without the subject being aware of or ever recognizing the transition. Comedic law: Generating doubt and confusion in scenarios framed as performance, comedic law creates humor through opening up deceit conceits. In engaging with comedic law, the audience enters subjunctive space, considering “what-ifs” or “as-ifs” and thus either gains perspective that encourages contestation of established structures of thought or loses control of their subjective territory’s maintenance mechanisms through the comings-to-be and transversal movements that comedic law can enable or cause. Comings-to-be: The inadvertent phenomenon of transforming into more of or different from the expected, conceived, and/or desired (anything real or imaginary), often occurring as deviation from the desired outcome of becomings. While undergoing becomings, a willful enterprise, individuals, couples, and groups can passively experience comings-to-be through loss of awareness and/or control. This derails
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the teleology and determinism of the intended becomings-x and generates excessive or alternative identity codes and unexpected experiences and subjectivity. Such slippage and excess often happen in relation to figures with emulative authority. Comings-to-be are thus embedded as potentiality within all becomings; both processes are multiple and constant, layered throughout people’s experiences and expressions. For whatever duration, subjectivity instantiates emergently through negotiations between and among becomings and comings-to-be. Conceptual territory: An interstice of the wider span of cognitive experience across which subjective territories maneuver, conceptual territory refers to the domain of thought that is specific to a person or people. Like subjective territory, it occupies cross-sections of state machinery’s discursive ideological operations, as cognitive potentials are negotiated with forces external to the individual subject. Conceptual territories modulate in continuous dynamic with a subjective territory’s reconfiguring, state machinery’s operations, and the potentialities of transversal territory. Deceit conceits: When encountering unfamiliar subjective and official territories, people often react by grasping preconceived notions of their identity, behavior, and conceptual underpinnings, notions that define the particular subjective territory through which they presently experience. Performed by individuals, couples, or groups, deceit conceits dismantle these assumptions and predictions by performing a fictive enactment that appears to be something other than expected. In other words, deceit conceits are clever schemes involving artifice and fiction performed in order to fracture, transform, and/or expand the conceptualemotional range of an individual or individuals, which is to say, a targeted subjective territory or subjective territories. The efficacy of deceit conceits stems from the act of dissimulation itself, rather than from the specifics of the performed scheme. Deceitful imperative: If Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative posits the necessity to act ethically according to a capacity to universalize morality, this imperative offers an ironic reconfiguration: biology has programmed humans to be a priori deceitful, or to generate artifice, to perpetrate fictions, to be creative in fantastic ways. Especially when coupled with subjunctive movement and comings-to-be, this function frames one’s life, both aesthetically and ontologically, as always already theatrical. According to the deceitful imperative, life presents itself in the inner proscenium of consciousness as illusory fabrication; the totemic literary analogue of such behavior is Shakespeare’s character Hamlet.
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Dialectic of celebrity: Historically, the power to imbue a subject with the status of celebrity connotes a certain agency within public culture and public discourse. Two perspectival arcs operate within the occurrence of the phenomenon: (1) the subject conferred as celebrity becomes a nexus of discursive attention with affective presence and emulative authority; (2) the subject conferring the status of celebrity demonstrates his own authority, as a sociopolitical conductor, in the public sphere. The dialectic of celebrity emerges as the process continues. It inexorably moves to an autonomous field of power occupied by the celebrities both reciprocally conferring on each other and self-conferring the status of celebrity. They do this often in contradistinction to the individual or group sociopolitical conductors representing related or other cultural categories and institutions, possibly even the institutions that conferred the status of celebrity onto the subjects to begin with, subjects that now operate beyond the identificatory power of the institutions. Ironically, because of this transcendent quality and passage into public discourse, subjects with celebrity power commonly misunderstand their status as indispensable. It is rare that they achieve indispensability because the high demand and thus potentially extremely lucrative cultural and economic currency of the celebrity makes the market for icons irresistibly fertile; hence, sociopolitical conductors continually present viable candidates for celebritydom. Most societies must fill such a position with at least one political leader to consolidate their power structure hierarchically. Dissective–cohesive modes of analysis (d.c. modes): A method of analysis that, in contrast to investigative-expansive modes (i.e. modes), privileges reduction, totalizing conclusions, teleological progressions, and holistic narratives at the expense of considering various contingencies and prospects. To give a few examples, dissective-cohesive modes ignore or undervalue: (1) the radical interconnectedness of the subject matter under investigation to elements – apparently marginal, distant, abstract, and/or hypothetical – outside the parameters established for the analysis; (2) fugitive elements within the established parameters; and (3) emergent elements or properties irreducible to the combination of subject matter and terms, method, and projections for the analysis. In other words, both dissective-cohesive and investigative-expansive
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Transversal poetics is undecided with regard to the universalizing aspect of this view, but considers subjunctive engagement with it beneficial to critical inquiry, especially when analyzing modes of sociality and performance.
approaches separate categorically the subject matter into discrete segments in order to examine its details and the relationships among them (called “close-reading” in literary criticism). Yet, dissective-cohesive approaches reconfigure these parts, epistemologically or narratologically, into an explanatory whole or absolute conclusion at the expense of analyzing outlying or exceptional variables which become remaindered and elided for the sake of authorial intention, reduction, or closure. Simply put, dissective-cohesive modes always retain an idea of coherence and/or reduction in its occurrences, whereas investigative-expansive modes resolve on answers in the interest of economy and efficiency and never because they have exhausted all possible variables and avenues of exploration. Emergent activity: On the one hand, the notion of “emergent properties,” culled from scientific discourses, describes the phenomenon of entities arising from a set of other entities, yet becoming irreducible to that foundation. On the other hand, Raymond Williams’s definition of “emergent culture” positions such an intervention within a cultural realm, describing new practices and ideas that emerge from a dominant framework, but become autonomous to it. Emergent activity hybridizes these twin operations to propose critical enterprises simultaneously stemming from a subject of inquiry and distinctly redefining it. Emulative authority: In any given scenario involving people, myriad becomings and comings-to-be occur in continuous negotiation for emulative authority both consciously and inadvertently. Informed by sociopolitical conductors and clusters of codes – units of information, signifiers and signs, verbal and bodily indicators – that are always dynamically shifting in the environment, the becomings and comingsto-be repeatedly square off with each other for emulative authority, which, when attained, determines the dominant experiential and expressive modes subjects undertake. Emulative authority thus results from profound, durational engagements with specific alternative, identityinfluencing forces. For instance, when someone greatly admires another person often he wants to become like her. To this end, he may adopt certain interests, aesthetics, and sensibilities of the person with emulative authority, effectively incorporating them into his own consciousness, subjective territory, and therefore social performance. However, he may also discover that he has adopted characteristics of that person that he did not want to possess, and so comings-to-be occurred. In everyday conversation, people negotiate power over meaning and sway, commonly
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through effects of non-conscious mimicry and neurological modeling and mirroring. In this dynamic, the people involved negotiate emulative authority, and thus authority in general, in terms of becomings and comings-to-be. To varying degrees and significance given the context, this happens in every human interaction, although the more intense and longer the engagement, the deeper the impact on one’s subjective territory, consciousness, and subjectivity. Eventualizations: Events that force one to account for oneself in new ways are eventualizations. They pressure the subject with the event’s enduring affective presence, from its immediate impact through its subsequent effects, thereby placing demands on the individual in terms of response and recovery, which leads ultimately to reconfiguration. Put differently, eventualizations crystallize subjective experience in response to the persistence of a singularity or iteration of an event within countless possibilities. Eventualizations have a tendency to be fetishized (especially when obsessed over) and consequently have less to do with the circumstances of their production than they do with the methods by which people cope with them. Unlike events located in history that are necessarily codified, eventualizations have a fugitive relation of intensity to events, both unique and ephemeral. After an eventualization transpires, the echoes of its occurrence, like traces of events, may continue to influence the environment, possibly prompting further events and eventualizations, and so on. Fugitive elements: The elusive, marginal, or hidden objects – human, narrative, thematic, semiotic, etc. – of the subject matter under investigation and the environments in which it has been contextualized, particularly those that pressurize the authorities and, by extension, the communities necessary for the substantiation of the authorities’ power. Authoritative forces determine and parameterize textual and contextual boundaries. As fugitive explorations seek to unsettle and reconstitute those boundaries, they make visible and dynamic a set of elements previously elided in related discourses. These fugitive elements are always positively enabled, rather than negatively framed, as a result. Fugitive explorations: A transversal method of analysis formulated, as its primary function, to serve the interest of comprehending and empowering fugitive elements insofar as doing so generates positive experiences. This approach echoes tenets of deconstruction theory insofar as it seeks the dissolution of overarching interpretative frameworks. In other words, fugitive explorations also pursue slippages, loose threads,
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and latent signifiers in a chosen text as a means by which to undermine and unravel the text’s apparent meanings for a given interpretive community or communities. Unlike deconstruction, however, it does this deliberately as a gateway to other possible readings and, by extension, to other conceptual, emotional, and physical localities. Whereas deconstruction posits infinite supplementation of meaning and deferral of presence, fugitive explorations emphasize positivity, openly advocating an agenda of understanding and empowerment. Fugitive subjects: Breaking from semiotic-semantic systems dictated by state machinery, fugitive subjects elude static definitions of social identity and self through subjunctive or transversal movements. Due to the inherently chaotic nature of such actions, fugitive subjects may act without apparent motivation or guidance. Fugitive subjunctivity: Subjunctive movement may fuel fugitive exploration, in effect bypassing the potential quagmires of teleological assessment or an interpretive community’s authoritative demands by engaging critically with the “what-ifs” and “as-ifs” of a text. This specific modality of fugitivity releases fugitive elements that may be nonexistent in present “as-is” hermeneutic space, thus possibly generating new and positive readings and experiences. Fugitivity: The process of immersion in fugitive exploration. Fugitivity often provides an impetus for transversality, which in turn lends an element of cognitive, physical, and cultural disjuncture to the effects of fugitive explorations. By transforming – and thus defying – the parameters and codes of subjective territory, fugitivity is a dangerous process, radicalizing the possibilities within the future. Future-absent-spaces: When the imminence of certain possibilities is destabilized, and the future itself becomes unmoored in the narrativization of state machinery and other processes of subjectivation, future-absent-spaces appear prominently on the horizon. Without the markings of traditional analytical schema, future-absent-spaces contain new unknown possibilities nonexistent in normalized perception. They are what is conjectured, predicted, or anticipated, but with less probability of actualization than, say, vicissitudes in future-present-spaces. In contrast to future-absent-spaces, although also a somewhat arbitrary threshold, focus on future-present-spaces is more dependable, responsible, and practical than pursuing an absent truth that will always be obfuscated by historical processes.
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Future-present-spaces: Traces of visibility continue in imagining the future, thereby creating a sense of presence and reality; yet potentiality holds itself in abeyance by conflicting forces of unknowability and determinism. Transversal theory calls this area future-present-space, foreseeable but maintaining vagueness and possibility (often in terms of probability). In contrast to future-absent-space, this realm bears marks of present culture and state machinery’s processes. Investigative–expansive modes of analysis (i.e. modes): Vital to aesthetic and research approaches of transversal poetics, investigativeexpansive modes resemble traditional critical practices – characterized as dissective-cohesive (d.c. modes) – insofar as they parse out objects of study into individual segments for interpretation. However, rather than reassembling these pieces into a holistic, conclusive analysis, investigative-expansive modes maintain the singularity of each section and explore relations with alternate planes of interpretation and connectivity. As this approach is necessarily fluid, the exact parameters of its praxis change according to the nature and course of each exploration. A chief objective of this expansive methodology is to contextualize historically, ideologically, and critically both the subject matter and the analysis itself within local and greater milieu. Mobile and vine-like, the investigative-expansive mode resists anything resembling predetermination or circumscription and requires continuous maneuverings and reparameterizations in response to unexpected, even sudden, emergences of glitches, quagmires, and new information as it deduces, trail blazes, follows off-beat leads, takes tangential excursions, while rigorously sprawling analytically. Momentous discoveries: A term from transversal theory on acting, but one that also applies to transversal research activity, momentous discoveries are engines for becomings-x and comings-to-be that lead the transversal actor (or researcher) to undergo active realizations and performances based on her interconnectivity with the environment. Situating oneself fictionally in relation to spacetime per theatrical convention (manipulating ratios of space and time), the actor may then channel single or multiple momentous discoveries, providing the impetus for eventualizations, their necessary termination, and the subsequent reconfiguration of the environment. In this manner, momentous discoveries allow for the infinite exploration and generation of singular experiences that exemplify the agential potential of transversal acting.
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Naming-function: Where Michel Foucault replaces the outmoded category of the author with that of an “author-function,” which operates in certain discourses, the naming-function replaces the problematic term “name” to emphasize the many uses of proper naming. An adaptive and advantageous navigational mechanism that can be mobilized to transverse social, cultural, political, and economic registers and stratification, the naming-function has the potential to encode, escape, and scramble power relationships much as the author-function admits ownership of texts yet obscures accountability for their expressions and impact. The naming-function reveals that proper naming need not operate simply in one direction, from sociopolitical conductors of state power to subjects, but also in reverse, differently, multi-directionally, and multidimensionally; interpellation does not just demarcate; it also liberates and mobilizes. Deployments of proper names do not merely short-circuit the interpellative processes of state machinery when contrary to its objectives of order and transparency. Rather, the ensuing feedback disperses catalytic enablers and affecters of subjective singularities in a transversal field of coefficients that glitch regulated instances of the proper name. As a re-appropriation of proper naming from the linear agenda of state machinery, the naming-function provides a counter-tactic by which to undermine societies’ mechanisms of control and surveillance. Objective agency: The power of a sign to frustrate or transcend the effectual parameters and expectations generally ascribed to that sign by a system of codification within which it functions, objective agency is often most apparent when there is ignorance, presignification, and miscommunication with regard to the sign in question. Objective agency can be found in or associated with an inanimate object, a concept, or powerful icon, social identity, or group, like a celebrity or subculture with emulative authority, and can be especially influential when there is fetishization. Through the fetishization of the sign-object – the idolization of, obsession with, and submission to the sign-object – the fetishist conceptually and emotionally opens himself up to, even welcomes, the sign-object’s objective agency. Official territory: The network of ruling properties (sociopolitical conductors, systems for knowledge transfer, governmental and cultural structures, etc.) within a society that fuse and laminate overlap among subjective territories and provide the rationale, infrastructure, and parameters for the society. Establishment of officially territory typically occurs in conjunction with the emergence of an official culture.
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Paused consciousness: If change constitutes the major theme of experience, by which time and space become apparent, through assertions of difference and modulation, then paused consciousness accounts for the necessary gap between one period of experience and the next. For example, if suddenly surprised, one cannot shift seamlessly from one state to the next; rather, one briefly becomes unaware of one’s surrounding and the faculties of perception temporarily disappear. Such a gap becomes vital through theater: when an audience member suddenly realizes she has become oblivious to the environment, as if in a dream, paused consciousness has occurred. Pressurized belongings: As an agent enters a new territory, whether subjective or official, it unleashes one of two spatial shifts: it may, in assimilating into the group, cause expulsion, which in turn marks those that remain internal to the group according to their relationship with the expelled; or it may force a redefinition of the group’s boundaries and existence. These processes make up pressurized belongings. Becomings and comings-to-be combine to prompt pressurized belongings, which in turn catalyze further becomings and comings-to-be. In this sense, pressurized belongings act as connective tissue to the infinite emulative shifts that subjects constantly undergo. Principle of citationality: Layerings of individually legible codes – and therefore often laminated ideologies – represented on stage, in any social performance, or in any expressive medium reveal the principle of citationality. Through their simultaneous yet staggered articulation, citational codes concentrate and extend the significance of the-codethat-can-be-cited (the very definition of a code), but at the same time refract that code, enabling a defamiliarizing and analytic gaze. Principle of translucency: When a social or theatrical performance incorporates inconsistent and contradictory codes that in effect present mixed or simultaneous messages, the principal of translucency is operative. However subtly, the codes must be identifiable and featured. Because the coding forces the audience to become active readers of the performance, rather than merely passive voyeurs, in order for the coding to produce reactions, it must be accessible and interpretable. In other words, if there are many codes at work or if the codes are obscure, then the audience will be too confused and detached, and the principle’s
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Open power: Any power not defined, often aleatory, immanent, idle, or invisible.
power will be lost. Translucent-effects cannot occur when the coding is blurred and amorphous. Each code displayed must be distinct and recognizable, even while it is a component of a larger picture. In most cases, translucency is most effective when there are just two or three featured codes. The more codes operative, the greater the potential for obfuscation. If skillfully executed, translucency can promote a transversal performance. For this reason, the transversal performer often deliberately pursues translucency. Should the principle of translucency be achieved by the performance, the spectator, and often the performer, experiences disempowerment, but also magnetic attraction, as if being absorbed into the performance event. The spectator or audience member is manipulated by the specific rhetoric and atmosphere of the event, by the event’s power that moves the spectator transversally outside of her own subjective territory. But the transversal territory into which the spectator moves is not necessarily that of a subjective territory of an other, but rather a creative space. The artfulness with which the principle of translucency is realized produces the conditions for both the desire for artistic development and its pursuit on the part of the spectator. Movement into transversal territory is prompted by the coalescence of the contradictory coding during the interpretive process. Thus, the event’s transversal power emerges through the resonance and wonder it manufactures. The spectator is jarred from the parameters of conventional discourse and reason, exposed to the multi-layeredness always present in all performances but rarely so apparent, and is drawn toward the newfound pellucidity. The principle of translucency is therefore a complex occurrence by which the spectator sees one or two or more things through others while at the same time seeing the others themselves. Faced with a radical situation, rather than wanting to deny or flee from the experience, the spectator wants to assimilate into the transversal territory of the performance and emulate the performer of such alluring translucency. These wants are demonstrated by either submission to or convergence with both performance and performer. Convergence takes the form of counter, complimentary, or more intimate rhetoric and engagement. The spectator wants to be in cahoots with the transversal performer. Progressive quagmires: Research states, or states of being, become progressive quagmires when the investigative tools which were believed to fuel progress prove unable to resist the analysis’ momentum and thus are incapable of generating new directionality and expansion because the analysis is pushed along a rigid course. And yet the researcher,
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Projective subjunctivity: The willful imposition of hypothetical thought, theory, and/or theater on a person or group to effect subjunctive movements. Projective transversality: Unlike transversality that fuels one’s own movement, albeit in causal conjunction with any number of environmental factors, projective transversality is different in the sense that it is willfully imposed on another, effectively transforming someone or something else. It is a process of others-becomings-others or otherscomings-to-be-others. Projective transversality can be seen as resulting from deceit conceits between selves, as in the characters of Hamlet, or between the event and its spectators, as with an audience watching a production of Hamlet. Reflexive-consciousness: The means by which one’s consciousness regards itself in relation to its operations and progressions. This in turn facilitates tangential references for the connections between a subject and her subjective territory, thereby affecting considerations of subjectivity, subjunctivity, and subjectivation as consciousness explores its possibilities of engagement, growth, and change across spacetime. Reflexive consciousness, as such, enables one to observe and maneuver oneself within and through environments, both immediately and remotely, from various perspectives and levels of intensity. Shakespace: An example of articulatory space, particularly potent both in scholarly currencies due to Shakespeare’s prominence in major cross-disciplinary discourses and in various popular cultures insofar as Shakespeare dominates theatrical production worldwide. Touching upon seemingly every facet of critical practices, Shakespace comprises a nexus of transversal power, capable of generating and intensifying transversal movements through the constant renegotiation of its imbricated discourses and phenomena. Additionally, the term Shakespace acts metonymically as a method to understanding articulatory spaces as a whole, and thus can serve pedagogically as an entryway into transversal poetics. Social power: Achieved by individuals and groups when they occupy, through discourse and action, social spaces that are important to the
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having experienced past “successes” with them, and being urged on by social, cultural, political, and paradigmatic conventions, is reluctant to part with these investigative tools and, by extension, the delimiting assumptions underlying them.
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Sociopolitical conductors: The familial, religious, juridical, media, and educational structures – the replicators, transmitters, and orchestrators of thoughts, meanings, and desires – that interconnect a society’s ideological and cultural framework, sociopolitical conductors are agents of subjectivation, inculcating, defining, and regulating subjects. From the standpoint of the society they most serve, each modality of sociopolitical conduction seeks the prevention or colonization of opposing subjective territories and transversal territories. They work to organize and stratify the articulatory spaces interfacing their spatiotemporal operations as a means by which to identify, constrain, and appropriate sites of difference and transversality. Hence, they can also function as transversal agents, either through their attempts to channel transversal power in the interest of their sociopolitical purposes or by fueling transversal power inadvertently as a symptom of their actions. Some-other-where-but-not-here-space: When Romeo utters the line, “Tut, I have lost myself, I am not here. / This is not Romeo, he’s some other where,” he engages with both his emotional state and the metatheatrical and metaphysical paradox of the play: that he is “there” before the audience in physiological certitude yet “not there” due to his death (revealed in the prologue). He is simultaneously living and dead and neither, occupying a liminal space elsewhere, inherently undefined; he is some-other-where-but-not-here. This space can be invoked on stage, thus aesthetically referenced, but never explicitly displayed, by definition; theater revels in the impossibility of this formulation. Space: Although not considered distinct from time in actuality, for transversal theory, space does not have just the distinct meaning as typically employed in everyday communication: demarcated physical properties or their absence; the environments people and things occupy. Rather, transversal theory incorporates both of these understandings and extends them abstractly to include conceptuality, emotionality, discourses, and multidimensional presences, as in subjective territories, subjunctive spaces, and articulatory spaces. State machinery: Simultaneously singular and plural, state machinery is the amalgamated, dynamic interchange of sociopolitical conductors.
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functioning of a society. Social power is demonstrated through authoritative presence and legitimation of perspective in a society’s institutional and non-institutional social spaces that work to affect the society’s members.
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Operating across space and time, immanently and externally, materially and invisibly, the machinery totalizes the mechanics of subjectifying (and civilizing) processes. Sociopolitical conductors can work with both repressive and ideological power, and can act independently or in concert, therefore making the composition of the state machinery complex and contingent. In this way, state machinery accounts for the inseparability of what Louis Althusser calls the “(Repressive) State Apparatus,” which includes the governmental mechanisms such as the military and the police that work to control people’s bodies, from his subsidiary “Ideological State Apparatuses,” the inculcating mechanisms that work to control people’s thoughts and emotions. However abstractly or concretely apparent, state machinery is fueled by state power, which is any force working to cohere, arrange, and make whole. State power: Any force that works in the interest of coherence and organization among any variables is state power. For instance, state power is at work as you read this book and impose order and meaning to facilitate comprehension. Subjective territory: Dual definitions of the operative term “subject” inform subjective territory: it is both a product of processes that subject an individual to their normalizing and authoritative modes of experience, and a condition of subjectivity and sentience forged from those processes. Composed of the conceptual, emotional, and physical range from which all individuals perceive and experience, this area can become part of an official territory when reinforced by state machinery and galvanized by state power. Subjective territory is constantly in flux, dynamically interacting with other subjective territories and reconfiguring accordingly. Subjunctive movement: As subjunctive space is the hypothetical dimension of “what-ifs” and “as-ifs” that unsettles certain authoritative processes in critical practice, the kinesis of thought, emotion, and spacetime that propels the subject therein is subjunctive movement. Participating in subjunctive movement may segue into transversal movement, leaving agency, linearity, and cogency behind. Subjunctive space: When hypothesizing on potentialities, possibilities, and “what-ifs” and “as-ifs,” one enters subjunctive space. Crucially, individual agency remains intact during the occupation of this area, a fundamentally “in-between” fulcrum, mobile state that operates between subjective and transversal territories. As a hinge between subjugation and resistance, oppression and subversion, and self-reinforcement and
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Transversal acting: Transversal acting casts the theories and methodologies of transversal poetics onto performed praxis. Characteristics of transversal poetics become realized and literally fleshed out in spacetime: the investigative–expensive mode of analysis informs the dismantling of actors’ teleological explorations; subjective and official territories refer to the interplay of subjectivity, desire, and consciousness of actors and audience; and becomings and comings-to-be are articulated modes of corporeal technique, embodied cognition, and semiotic and somatic coding. The ongoing (moment-to-moment) performance constantly shifts and mediates both the narrative and spacetime, thereby creating characters, rather than vice versa. This process opens the actor to the possibilities of momentous discoveries and subsequent eventualizations. Transversal agent: Embarking on transversal movements inaugurates subjects as transversal agents. In other words, radical changes that disrupt maintenance of a subjective territory forge paradoxically a transversal subject, an unsustainable condition incorporating two mutually exclusive phenomena: transversality and subjectivation. Whether consciously or not, when a subject becomes a transversal agent, she actively permeates and makes permeable the parameters of her subjective territory and generates a continuously shifting series of conditions that challenge the underlying structures of her individuality and social identity. Yet this entropic reconfiguration, if developed beyond occupation of transversal territory (a typically ephemeral state), can produce enhanced reflexive-consciousness and agency by triggering new experiences and perspectives never before imaginable. Moreover, the reconfiguration highlights subjectivity’s transversal relationship to the subject, subjectivity itself constituted through emergent crystallizations of singularities into composites of awareness within multiplicities of potential. Transversal movement: Experience and performance of emotions, thoughts, embodiment, and/or actions that exceed the borders of one’s subjective territory constitute transversal movements. In effect of such movements, one enters transversal territory, however ephemerally, as an unconstrained journey through spacetime that subverts systems of subjectivation, reconfigures and/or expands her subjective territory, and
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self-redefinition, subjunctive space complicates and possibly destabilizes the relation of the subject to state machinery; however, given its infinite capacities, it may also reinforce these bonds, leading to further inscriptions of subjective territory and official territory.
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Transversal power: Any force, whether physical, material, ideological, aesthetic, emotional, conceptual, etc., that precipitates and drives deviations – transversal movements – from the norms and encodings of subjective and official territories. Reconfigurations of thought, emotion, and experience occur when subjectivity transgresses the parameters maintaining subjective territory. By extension, the surrounding organizational structures may also undergo reconfiguration. Transversal power is a catalyst for such transformations. Transversal poetics: The combined aesthetics, theory, and methodologies of transversal poetics works to inspire critical inquiry, scholarship, pedagogy, artistic creation, and life experience that are mutually supportive, adaptive, and felicitous. Transversal poetics is innovative and versatile as it emphasizes positive formulations of consciousness, desire, subjectivity, identity, expression, meaning, and so on. It is exploratory and malleable as it constantly reappraises its premises, influences, methods, contexts, and subject matters of inquiry to develop efficient modes of thought and action. It is collective and collaborative as it acknowledges as much as possible the conditions of its emergent activities: its histories, sources, and conversations. Transversal territory: A nebulous and chaotic spacetime unconstrained by state machinery and its inculcating and disciplinary processes that work to maintain subjective and official territories in agreement with the codes and structures of a given society. Most often prompted by experiences radically atypical, whether ecstatic or traumatic, and sometimes spurred by movement into subjunctive space, entrance into transversal territory constitutes escape and autonomy from not only the immediate subjective territory of the individual, but also from all alternative or possible subjective territories. Transversal territory usually acts as a catalyzing and transitional space from which new experiences, subjective reconfigurations, and, by extension, dissident mobilizations can emerge. Transversal theory: Striving to engage everything conceivable, affective, and subjunctive within and without discursive practices, transversal theory conceptualizes subjectivity, experience, and events, along with their contexts and processes of inauguration and propagation, as productively and affirmatively as possible. It emphasizes presence and comparison;
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therefore modifies the structures of the official territories of which her subjective territory is a component.
288 Transversal Subjects
Translucent-effects: Translucent-effects result from exposure to representations and performances of cultural codes with various, complex markings of aesthetics, ideology, social identity, and subjectivity. The sheer visibility of these codes attests to the apparent solidity of subjective territory, yet this translucency also, simultaneously, obfuscates, blends, or redefines meanings as it reveals the layering to the territory, making its maintenance and affirmations elusive, destructive, and/or transformative. Critically, these codes are intentional in the phenomenological sense, existing in the audience’s perception, rather than necessarily in the subject’s self-awareness; thus, they are essential elements of both social performance and theater. Vulnerabilities, surrenders, and slippages: Like the investigativeexpansive mode of analysis, which emphasizes interconnectivity divorced from authoritative reconfigurations, transversal acting theory celebrates the gaps, stumbling, and breakings within supposed narrative and subjective construction. This can lead to crystallizations with non-predetermined or anticipated phenomena. As such, vulnerabilities, surrenders, and slippages constitute sought-after fissures in what might otherwise be, especially for people and processes non-transversally inclined, the pursuit of holistic creation. Their ability to subvert subjective territory, that is, domination and regulation of conscious experience and hermeneutics, propels them to produce momentous discoveries and eventualizations otherwise inconceivable within and ultimately irreducible to the given environment and conditions from which they emerge. Wilderness-effects: Encounters with foreign, mysterious, or radically transformed actual or imaginary spaces, including the objects they contain, their structural components, and the meanings they signify, or simply the experience of foreignness, especially when confronted with a previously familiar space, can generate wilderness-effects: disorientation, alienation, adventure, danger. Traces of familiarity or the familiar may persist, but profound feelings of being lost or adrift in a strange wilderness are predominant: abjection, fear, thrill, abandonment, despair. Transversality can produce wilderness-effects. Witness-function: Theatrical or otherwise, events may implicate an audience as not only spectators, but also as accountable witnesses to
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interconnectedness, relationality, and inclusion; agency, movement, and exploration; becomings and potential.
289
their occurrences. This can blur the convention of the “fourth wall” to a theatrical performance. Whether in effect of a theatrical event or another kind of event, the witness-function encourages participation and hitherto unthought of possible interactions with events and their consequences. The indeterminate and negotiable witness-function can be inclusive, exclusionary, suspenseful, stupefying, affirming, and so on, yet it usually works to individuate subjectively, and often contributes to community building through the sharing of testimony, particularly when this occurs among witnesses of the same event. Once a person becomes a witness, her experience is, to greater or lesser degrees, either identifiable or not, something to which others can relate to or not, something expressible or not; and, depending on the audience to whom a testimony is conveyed, one, consequently, either counts as an individual, a subject and/or a citizen or does not. The witness-function, whether manifested as a sharing of a momentous discovery, a review of a theatrical performance, or a testimony to a crime, works to reinforce, complicate, or fracture commonalities among its audience’s socio-culturally prescribed parameters of experience (an audience’s subjective territories that a given society delineates and strives to maintain). Under such commonplace circumstances, then, the voice of one witness, as the assumed or proper representative of a collective, such as a theater critic or bystander to a political crime, can become the cry of a generation. Alternatively, in a court of law, the voice of one witness can become the singular truth that condemns an innocent person to capital punishment. In these ways, the witness-function operates as an influential juncture in historical processes, a connective action that links past-spaces with present-spaces and future-absent-spaces through the expressive presence of an individual. In turn, one of the ways in which subjectivity permeates critical inquiry is through the reflexive operations of the witness-function. This is because the witness-function puts heightened emphasis on the oftenstrained relationships between individual and collective interpretation and experience and the immediacies with which the witness-function necessarily reveals its own constitutive particularity and flexibility with regard to prospects for reinterpretation rather than pretense to objective transmission of the past.
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Glossary of Transversal Terms
Abelli, M. 70n.27 Abrahamson, Jonas 199n.10 absent-spaces 164, 272 Adorno, Theodore 5 aesthetic consciousness 12 affective presence 19–20, 24, 26, 42, 56, 86, 90, 110, 190, 226, 242, 272–3, 275, 277 Agamben, Giorgio 203, 205, 209–10, 214–22, 228, 232, 235–8, 255n.17, 258n.37 see also bios politicos, Muselmann, state of exception, zoé agency 1, 3, 8, 13, 41, 47, 64, 66, 89–90, 126, 197, 247, 266, 275, 280, 285–8 Akiskal, H. S. 70n.27 aleatory 85–6, 91, 121n.1, 266, 281 Alford, Richard 59 Althusser, Louis 50, 56, 66, 285 amentia 174 American revolution 214, 251 An Apology for Actors see Heywood, Thomas An Essay on Human Understanding see Locke, John anamnesis 135, 138–9, 146 ancien régime 127, 205 Anderson, Benedict 206, 254n.6 animality 170–3, 179, 181–2, 192, 198n.5, 268 antitheatricalism 35, 37, 39, 71n.38, 72n.43 apartheid 46–8 Appleton, Lilla Estelle 199n.9 Arbib, M. A. 30 Arbuthnot, John 179 Arcades Project see Benjamin, Walter archeo-teleology 181, 195 see also Derrida, Jacques architecture 125, 133, 149, 152, 153, 156–7, 160n.23, 189, 264
Arendt, Hannah 204, 214–18, 246, 248, 251, 259–60n.46 Aristotle 217–22, 225, 236, 241, 249 Arnauld, Antoine 239 Artaud, Antonin 95, 102, 184, 194 articulatory space 24–5, 147, 165–6, 169, 183, 186, 222, 272–3, 283–4 Asmat 203 assemblages 50, 84, 118–21, 135, 265 Atkins, Douglas 73n.52 Attridge, Derek 51 Aunger, Robert 71n.32 authenticity 177, 245, 255n.17 author-function 61, 280 see also Foucault, Michel Bacon, Francis 174–5 Baines, Ed 199n.12 Bakan, Joel 89 Bakhtin, Mikhail 8, 67n.13 Baldi, Pierre 32–3 Balée, William 257n.31 Baraz, Daniel 221–2 Bark, J.E. 196–7n.2 Baroni, S. 70n.27 Barthes, Roland 41, 145, 159n.6, 160n.13, 232 Barton, Anne 59, 74n.59, 74n.60 Bateson, Gregory 162, 163, 188 Baudelaire, Charles 196–7, 241 Baudrillard, Jean 62, 83, 97, 104–10, 112–18, 122n.9, 123n.11, 143, 253, 267 see also irreferentiality, simulation Bauer, Ingrid 199n.11 Bavela, J.B. 28 Beardsley, Monroe C. 6–7, 67n.8 becomings 10, 16, 23, 25, 28, 31, 53, 56–9, 64, 71, 85–6, 89, 97, 113, 121, 171–2, 178, 184, 186, 190–1, 196–7, 235, 243, 245, 253, 264, 266, 268–70, 273–9, 286, 288 290
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Index
becomings-other 2, 10, 38, 64, 89, 184, 186, 190–1, 196, 211, 213, 273, 283 Béguin, Albert 9, 68n.16 Benjamin, Walter 200n.17 The Arcades Project 194–7 Bentham, Jeremy 127, 199n.8 Benveniste, Émile 145 Benzoni, Girolamo 230 Berger, Peter 5, 175, 180 Berlusconi, Silvio 248 Bernieri, F. J. 28 Bernstein, J.M. 255n.17 biopower 200n.14, 203, 205, 214–15, 236–7 see also Foucault, Michel bios politicos 209–14, 217–20, 232–3, 237, 241 see also Agamben, Giorgio bis ceremony 203 Blackford, Holly 191 Blackmore, Susan 27, 71n.37 Blackmur, R.P. 6 Blatchford, Peter 199n.12 Bleich, David 14, 69n.22 Bloch, R. Howard 61 Bloom, Harold 7, 41, 67n.10 Blumer, Herbert 5, 65n.3 Boal, Augusto 194, 200n.16 Bock, J.K. 28 Bodin, Jean 254n.7 body without organs (BwO) 83, 94–104, 107–11, 114–18, 120, 266–7 see also Deleuze, Gilles Boghossian, Paul 169–70, 197n.1 Boltanski, Luc 203, 218, 255n.16 Bondeson, Jan 197–8n.2 Booth, Stephen 14 Booth, Wayne 14 Borradori, Giovanna 243, 246–8, 251, 259–60n.46 Boundas, Constantin 121n.1 Bourdeille, Pierre (Seigneur de Brantôme) 212 Bourdieu, Pierre 159n.4, 255n.16 Boyer, Pascal 71n.33 Bradley, A. C. 20 Brecht, Bertolt 186, 195, 246 Brik, Osip Maksimoviˇc 7
291
De Brissac, Count de Cossé 212 Broadbent, M. 28 Brodie, Richard 26, 71n.36 Brodtkorb, Paul 9, 20, 68n.17, 70n.25 Brooks, Cleanth 6, 67n.8 Brown, Stuart 182 Buchanan, Ian 124–7, 133–6, 141, 159n.6 Buck-Morss, Susan 195 Buffon, George-Luis Leclerc 198n.5 Burke, Edmund 214, 254n.13 Bush, L. K. 28 Butler, Christopher 73n.52 Butler, Judith 198n.5 Calverton, V. F. 5, 66n.5 Calvo-Merino 72n.39 Camden, William 52, 55 Canale, D. 70n.27 Candido, Joseph 74n.56 cannibalism 204, 209–10, 222–35, 241, 256n.21, 257n.29, 257n.31, 269 capital punishment 289 capitalism 12, 43, 97, 110, 149, 192–5, 252, 263–4 Cappella, J. N. 28 Carruthers, Peter 9 Cartesian dualism 179, 229 see also Descartes, Rene Cassano, G.B. 70n.27 castration complex 94, 114–15, 120 see also Freud, Sigmund Certeau, Michel de 124–52, 158, 159n.3, 159n.5, 159n.6, 159n.10, 160n.13, 160n.15, 160n.24, 162, 176, 193, 230, 256n.21, 267 see also geometry, nowhen, strategies and tactics chain gang 183, 189–92, 196–7 Charles IX (King Charles IX of France) 225 Charnes, Linda 60 Chartrand, Tanya 31 Chastel, Jean 211–12 Chaumard, Henri 257n.29 childhood 102, 111, 114–15, 162–97, 268
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Index
Chodorow, Nancy 4, 65n.2 Chomsky, Noam 243 Cicero 231 Cincinnatus 227 civilized subjects 164, 183, 228, 235, 249 cognitive neuroscience 4, 19, 28, 33 Cohen, Walter 28 Colebrook, Claire 121n.1 comedic law 273 comings-to-be 10, 16, 23–31, 34, 38, 40, 56, 85–6, 164, 172, 184, 188, 190, 196–7, 213, 229, 245, 273–4, 276–7, 279, 281, 283, 286 conceptual territory 136, 274 Confessions see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Conquergood, Dwight 199n.8 Constance School of Reception Aesthetics 14, 27 constructivism 1–2, 164, 169, 175–6, 180 control societies 199n.8 see also Deleuze, Gilles Cooley, Charles 5, 65n.4 Cratylitic naturalism 59 Cressy, David 74n.61, 75n.65 Culler, Jonathan 14, 41, 69n.22, 73n.48, 73n.52 Curtis, Henry 191 Dabbs, J.M. 28 Damiens, Robert-François 187–9, 206, 213 Dawkins, Richard 25–7, 71n.36 De Icona see Nicholas of Cusa De Man, Paul 14, 41 Debord, Guy 160n.24 deceit conceits 273–4, 283 deceitful imperative 274 Declaration of Independence 204 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 204, 217 Defoe, Daniel 179–80 Dekker, Thomas 54 Deleuze, Gilles 83–103, 106–21, 121n.1, 121n.2, 122n.5, 122n.7, 185, 199n.8, 218, 246–8, 251–3,
266–7, 270 see also body without organs (BwO), control societies, desiring-machine, immanence, pain waves, rhizome delirium 226–7, 241 Dennett, Daniel 27, 67–8n.14, 71n.37 Derrida, Jacques 1, 4, 19, 41–53, 56, 59, 64, 73n.53, 106, 181, 195, 203, 233, 243–7, 251 see also différance Descartes, René 4, 207, 229 see also Cartesian Dualism desire 83–101, 108–21, 121n.2, 122n.5, 178–81, 195–6, 198n.5, 226, 236, 242–5, 266–7, 273, 282, 284, 286–7 desiring-machine 83, 87–8, 93–6, 100, 102, 107–8, 111, 114, 118, 266 see also Deleuze, Gilles desiring-production 83–96, 101, 104, 107–17, 122n.3, 266 Dewey, John 5 Di Nasso 70n.27 Di Pellegrino, G. 30 dialectic of celebrity 275 dialectical seeing 194–6, 200n.18 dialecticism 6, 8, 12, 92, 125, 159n.6, 170, 194–6, 200n.18, 219, 267 différance 39, 42, 46–7, 106 see also Derrida, Jacques Dilthey, William 10–11, 69n.18 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 256n.23 disease 104–10, 113, 115–16 dissective-cohesive modes of analysis 84, 119, 125, 128, 133–4, 142, 144–5, 149, 166, 177, 198–9n.2, 267, 275–6, 279 dissensus 203, 216–18 see also Rancière, Jacques Donato, Eugenio 41 Douthwaite, Julia 173, 198n.4 Du Bellay, Joachim 233, 257n.29 Dubai 154–5, 160n.23 Eaglestone, Robert 255n.17 education 6, 12, 43, 100–1, 135, 192, 195, 249, 284
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292 Index
Eichenbaum, Boris 7 Eichmann, Karl Adolf 246, 259n.46 Eisenmenger, W. 197–8n.2 Eliot, T. S. 6 embodied simulation 30 emergent activity 276 Emile see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques emotional contagion 29, 36 empathy 10, 21, 28, 31, 176, 205–7, 273 emulative authority 23–4, 28, 56, 110, 172, 190, 193, 212, 229, 274–7, 280 Enlightenment, the 127, 168, 174, 198n.4, 219, 251 epiphenomena 41 Erasmus, Desiderius 231 Erikson, Erik 4–5 Essay on the Origin of Language, An see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Essays see Montaigne, Michel de ethics 89–91, 218, 220–1, 234 ethnography 190, 223 eventualizations 277, 279, 286, 288 Ewen, C. 59 excessive cruelty 213, 218, 221 Felman, Shoshanna 41, 73n.50 Felperin, Howard 73n.52 ferality 162, 165, 173–5, 178–80, 183, 198n.4, 225, 236, 268 Ferguson, Frances 185 Ferguson, R. Brian 257n.31 Ferry, Anne 59, 75n.69 fetishism 60–3, 112–16, 227, 280 Feuerbach, Anselm von 165–82, 197 Field, T. 28 Fischer, Michael 73n.52 Fish, Stanley 14–16, 69n.23 flânerie 194, 196 Foucault, Michel 61, 75n.64, 124–9, 139, 141, 169, 183, 187–93, 199n.8, 200n.14, 203, 205, 214, 219, 236–8, 252–3, 257–8n.34, 262–5, 280 see also author-function, biopower, panopticism Frankfurt School 5, 66n.5
293
French revolution 204, 210, 214, 215, 236–7, 253n.3, 253–4n.4 Freud, Sigmund 4–5, 20, 24, 65n.2, 84, 94–6, 98, 100–2, 108, 111–15, 118, 122n.9, 145, 160n.15 see also castration complex, libido, madonna/whore complex, pleasure principle, psychoanalysis, reality principle, repression Fudge, Erica 174, 198n.4 fugitive elements 110, 195, 248, 253, 269, 275, 277–8 fugitive explorations 196, 277–8 fugitive subjects 278 fugitive subjunctivity 278 fugitivity 162, 164, 186, 192, 195–6, 278 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 22, 29, 33, 72n.39 future-absent-spaces 278, 289 future-present-spaces 278–279 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 10–12, 14, 69n.19, 69n.21, 172, 176 Gagen, Elizabeth 199n.12 Gallese, Vittorio 30–1, 72n.39 Gandy, Matthew 197–8n.2 Gane, Mike 109 Geffroy, Gustave 197 Geneva School 9–10, 39, 68n.16 Genosko, Gary 106 geometry’ 132, 134, 159n.5 see also Certeau, Michel Gerson, Jean 258–9n.41 Giannaccini 70n.27 Gibson, Charles 257n.28 Giddens, Anthony 216 Giles, H. 28, 60 Glaser, D.E. 72n.39 global mapping 125 Goddard, Michael 270n.3 Godin, Seth 71n.36 Goffman, Erving 5 Goodall, Jane 199n.10 Gosson, Stephan 71–2n.38 Gouges, Olympe de 204–5, 210, 253n.4
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Index
Goux, Jean-Joseph 60, 62 Grant, Susannah 222 Greenberg, R. 28 Greenblatt, Stephen 57–8, 256n.21 Greene, John 35–7 Grezes, J. 72n.39 Griffin, Eric 257n.28 Guattari, Félix 83–21, 185, 218, 246–8, 251–3, 262–7, 270, 270n.3 Habermas, Jürgen 203, 243–8 Hacking, Ian 175 Hadfield, Andrew 257n.28 Haggard, P. 72n.39 Halliburton, David 68n.17 Handke, Peter Kaspar 181–2, 198n.6, 268 Harlow, Harry 172–3 Hartman, Geoffrey 41, 68n.17, 73n.49, 255n.17 Harvey, Aaron 155–6 Hassan, Ihab 9 Hatfield, Elaine 29 Hauser, Kaspar 162–83, 190, 195–7, 197–8n.2, 268–9 Hedrick, Donald 38, 78n.31 Hegel, Georg Willhelm Friedrich 43, 198n.5, 219 Heidegger, Martin 9–10, 68n.15 Hellenistic philosophy 200n.14 Henry IV (King Henry IV of France) 206, 211, 250, 258–9n.41 Henry IV 1 & 2 (plays) see Shakespeare, William Henry V (play) see Shakespeare, William Heraclitus 231 Herlihy, David 221, 256n.19 hermeneutic circle 11 hermeneutics 11–14, 39–40, 44, 69n.21, Hermogeneam nominalism 59 Herrick, Jeffrey 198–9n.6 Herzog, Werner 197–8n.2 heteroglossia 58 Heywood, Thomas An Apology for Actors 37 Hicks, Granville 5, 66n.5
Hirsch E. D., Jr. 12–13 historical consciousness 12 historical contingency 175 historiography 142–4 Hobbes, Thomas 135 Holland, Norman 14, 20, 69n.22 Holland, Gene 267 Hollander, Eric 70 holocaust 218–19, 237, 255n.17 Holsinger, Bruce 214 Horkheimer, Max 5 Houdebine, Jean-Louis 47, 73n.53 Hsee, Christopher 29 human rights 203–53, 254n.9, 258–9n.41, 269 humanism-essentialism 1–2, 6, 40, 229 Hunt, Lynn 204–10, 214–15, 254n.9 Husserl, Edmund 1, 8–10, 18–19, 30, 40, 44–7, 64 hyperspace 126 hypochondria 96–7, 101, 103–4, 107–12, 115–17 immanence 87, 90–1, 94, 97–9, 106–9, 112, 117–20, 122n.4 see also Deleuze, Gilles Ingarden, Roman 9 intellectual property 239–40 intentional attunement 30, 72n.39 internetspace 147 interpellation 50, 56, 64–5, 244, 280 interpretive communities 15–16, 52 intersubjectivity 9–10, 27–31, 40, 50, 172, 235 investigative-expansive modes of analysis 3, 14, 51, 121, 125, 144–5, 158, 166, 183, 219, 253, 267, 275–6, 279 Ionesco, Eugene 182 irreferentiality 106, 112, 113 see also Baudrillard, Jean Iser, Wolfgang 11, 14, 16–19, 38, 69–70n.24, 168, 172, 176 Itti, Lauren 32–3 Izard, C. E. 28 Jakobson, Roman 73n.48
7, 41, 67n.11,
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294 Index
Jameson, Frederic 6, 66n.6, 125–7 Jauss, Hans Robert 14 Jay, Martin 66n.5 Jeannerod, M. 30 Johnson, Barbara 41, 73n.50 Joyce, James 159n.12 Judowitz, Dalia 229 Julie, or the new Heloise see Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Jung, Carl 4, 65n.2 Kafka, Franz 265 Kahan, Claudine 255n.17 Kant, Immanuel 4, 176–8, 185, 251, 274 Kaspar see Handke, Peter Kato, Kentaro 199n.12 Kelter, S. 28 King John see Shakespeare, William Klein, Melanie 4, 65n.2 Korte, W. 197–8n.2 Kowsar, Mohammad 270n.3 Krause, Victoria 254n.7 Krieger, Murray 67n.8 Lacan, Jacques 4–5, 126 LaCapra, Dominick 255n.17 Laclau, Ernesto 6, 66n.6, 257n.26 LaFrance, M. 28 Lakin, Jessica 31 L’Angelier, Abel 235 language acquisition 172 LaRouche, Lyndon 252 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 210, 230 Lauren, Paul Gordon 254n.9 Lawall, Sarah 68n.16 Le Morte D’Arthur see Malory, Sir Thomas Lebel, Jean-Jacques 264 Lee, Hongjoo 33 Lee, Joseph 184–92, 196 legality 166, 180, 210, 231, 238 Legislación de Indias 210 L’Estoile, Pierre de 211, 254n.11 Lestringant, Frank 230, 256n.21 Levelt, W.J.M. 28 Levenson, Leah 66n.5 Levi, Neil 255n.17
295
Levin, Samuel 41 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 41, 53, 232–3 Lewis, Robert 183, 186–91 libido 100, 108, 114, 118–19 see also Freud, Sigmund Lily, William 62 linguistics 11, 39–43, 58–61, 74–5n.62, 105, 172, 179, 198–9n.6, 216, 220, 232 Linnaeus, Carl Systema Naturae 173–4 literacy 58, 74n.61, 178–9, 229–43, 249, 258–9n.41 Livy 256n.23 Locke, John An Essay on Human Understanding 61–62 logocentrism 42, 45, 50 Lotman, Yuri 41 Lotringer, Sylvère 251–3 Louis XV (King Louis XV of France) 206 Loyseleur, Pierre 230 Lubeck, Phillipp Schmidtt von 179–80 Lucachini, A. 27n.70 Luckman, Thomas 175, 180 Luhrmann, Baz 21 Lynch, Aaron 26, 71n.36 Lyotard, Jean-François 117, 218, 255n.16 Macisaac, Warren 74n.60 Maddux, William 31 madonna/whore complex 111, 116 see also Freud, Sigmund Malory, Sir Thomas La Morte d’Arthur 64 Maltby, Walter 257n.28 maps 125–8, 144–9, 163 Marazziti, Donatella 22, 70n.27 Marchi, Dudley 257n.29 Mareste, Adolphe de 260n.47 Mariana, Juan de 250 Marion, Simon 203–4, 209–10, 214, 231–2, 235–45, 249–50, 253, 258n.40, 258–9n.41 Pleas by Mister Simon Marion, lawyer of the Parliament… 203
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Index
Martin Daniel 210, 230–3 Marx, Karl see Marxism Marxism 5–8, 11–12, 14, 24, 43, 66n.5, 75n.69, 92, 109, 194, 214, 230, 252 Masala, I. 70n.27 masochism 34, 96–101, 107, 112, 116, 122n, 7 Mason, Lowell 193 Massacre of the Bridge of Cé 213 Massey, Doreen 73n.53 Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff 171, 177–8 Massumi, Brian 89, 121n.1 Maus, Katherine 254n.8 Mauss, Marcel 122n.10 McClintock, Anne 47–8 Mead, George Herbert 5 Medici, Catherine 258–9n.41 Medvedev, Pavel N. see Bakhtin, Mikhail Mehlman, Jeffrey 41 Meltzoff, A.N. 28 memetics 19, 26 memorialization 50, 148–150, 153, 158, 203, 211–12 Mengali, F. 70n.27 Mensard, Phillipe 255n.17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 9, 30, 72n.40, 126, 133–4 Mero, Everett 183–5 Meserve, Margaret 258n.39 micro-techniques 127–8, 141, 146 Miller, J. Hillis 9, 41, 68n.16 Mills, Robert 238, 258n.38 Milton, John 226–7, 242 mimesis 149, 187, 191, 196, 199n, 12 mimicry 28–31, 34, 36, 71–2n.38 momentous discoveries 279, 286, 288 Montaigne, Michel de 62, 74n.59, 203–4, 209–10, 213, 218, 222–36, 241, 243, 245, 253, 256n.21, 256n.24, 259n.43, 266, 269 Essays 229–30, 233, 235 “Of Cannibals” 204, 209–10, 213, 222–3, 226–35, 241 Montesquieu, Charles The Spirit of the Laws 204
More, Thomas Utopia 54 Mouffe, Chantal 6, 66n.6, 257n.26 Mullaney, Steven 59 multiplicities 1, 3, 20, 26, 90, 121, 181, 234, 252, 265, 272, 286 Munday, Anthony 72n.45 Mungai 70n.27 Muselmann 218, 237 see also Agamben, Giorgio mystic theology 139 Nagel, Thomas 170–1, 173, 175, 197n.1 names (name theory) 3, 41, 48–64, 74n.59, 75n.63, 75n.64, 75n.70, 120, 138–9, 145–6, 149, 160n.15, 174, 280 naming-function 61, 63–5, 280 Nash, Richard 198n.4 National Institute for Play 182, 188 Natterstad, Jerry 66n.5 Navarre, Marguerite de 258–9n.41 Neumann, R. 28 neurochemistry 19, 22, 32–7 New Criticism/formalism 6–9, 11, 13, 39, 67n.8, 69n.21 Newton, Isaac 146 Newton, Michael 179, 198n.4 Nicholas of Cusa 124 De Icona 139–41 Nixon, Rob 47–8 Noonan, Jeff 73n.53 Norris, Christopher 73n.52 nostalgia 113–15, 194, 253 nowhen 132, 137, 153 see also Certeau, Michel de Nussbaum, Felicity 198n.4 objective agency 280 Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) 22, 50, 70n.27 Oedipus complex 94, 112 “Of Cannibals” see Montaigne, Michel de Olguín, B.V. 199n.8 open power 281 oral cultures 74n.61 Ovid 209 paganism 221, 258–9n.41 Page, Vince 153
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296 Index
pain waves 99–101, 104, 107–8, 115–16 see also Deleuze, Gilles Palmer, Richard 14, 69n.21 Panalp 28 panopticism 126–9, 132–3, 135, 139–41, 144, 146–7 see also Foucault, Michel Pardailhé-Galabrun, Annik 207–8 Parker, Patricia 256n.21 Parrot, Ray 67n.11 Parturier, Françoise 205, 254n.5 Pascal, Blaise 239 Passingham 72n.39 Patriot Act 245, 249 Paus, T. 30 paused consciousness 16, 281 pedagogy 6, 42, 181, 183, 186, 188, 195–7, 283, 287 Pellegrini, Anthony 199n.12 Pensky, Max 195 Perlmutter, Ruth 197–8n.2 Peter of Hanover 175, 178–9, 268 phenomenology 1, 8–10, 12, 14, 16, 19–20, 26–7, 30, 39–40, 42, 44, 46–7, 51, 64, 68–9n.17, 69n.21, 110, 124–6, 134, 141, 170, 172, 176–7, 194, 196, 200n.14, 209, 236, 266, 269, 288 Pinker, Stephen 172–3 Pisan, Christine de 258–9n.41 Plato 24, 59, 105, 186, 200n.14, 209, 219, 221, 225–6, 229, 231, 241, 243 playgrounds 4, 165–8, 182–97, 199n.11, 199n.12, 200n.14, 268–9 Pleas by Mister Simon Marion, lawyer of the Parliament …. see Marion, Simon pleasure principle 94 see also Freud, Sigmund Pop Art 152 Poster, Mark 149–51 post-humanism/constructivism 1–2, 164 poststructuralism 6, 12, 14, 41, 51, 59, 90, 105, 229–30, 232 Potts, Michael 154 Poulet, Georges 9, 68n.16 Powesland, P.F. 28
297
Pratt, Mary Louise 14, 69n.22 premodernity 219, 241 pressurized belongings 110, 164, 178, 213, 229, 281 Presles, Raoul de 258–9n.41 Prince, Gerald 41 principle of citationality 281 principle of translucency 181, 235, 257n.33, 281–2 printing / print media 238–42, 252, 258n.39 privacy 207, 214 progressive quagmires 46, 282–3 projective subjunctivity 138, 283 projective transversality 38, 283 Proust, Marcel 195 Provine 28 psychoanalysis 20, 65n.2, 84, 87–8, 91–7, 102, 107–20, , 122n.7, 122n.9, 145, 197–8n.2, 267 see also Freud, Sigmund Puttenham, George 62 Racine, Jean 239 Rainer, G. 72n.42 Rainoldes, John 35–36 Rancière, Jacques 203, 205, 214–18, 253n.2, 254n.13, 255n.15, 255n.16 see also dissensus Ranganath, C. 72n.14 Ransom, John Crowe 6, 67n.8 Ranum, Orest 208 Ravaillac, François 206, 212 Raymond, Marcel 9, 68n.16 Read, M. 171, 179 reader response theory 14, 23 reality principle 98 see also Freud, Sigmund reception theory 14, 19, 40–1, 44, 169 reflexive-consciousness 16, 44, 52, 85–92, 110, 121, 177, 195, 235, 246, 266, 270, 283, 286 refugees 216 repression 88, 93, 96, 100, 108, 114, 116, 121n.264 see also Freud, Sigmund Reynolds, Bryan 65n.1, 66–7n.7, 71n.28, 71nn.30–1, 71n.34,
10.1057/9780230239289 - Transversal Subjects, Bryan Reynolds
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Index
72n.43, 74n.55, 158n.1, 254n.10, 257n.26, 264–70 rhizome 109, 120, 252, 270 see also Deleuze, Gilles Richard, Jean-Pierre 9, 68n.16 Richard II see Shakespeare, William Richards, I. A. 6, 67n.8 Riddel, Joseph 41, 68n.17 Riffaterre, Michael 14, 41, 69n.22, 73n.48 Rimbaud, Arthur 226–7, 241 Robespierre, Maximilien 204, 247, 253n.3 Rolnik, Suely 265 romanticism 110, 197–8n.2 Romeo and Juliet see Shakespeare, William Rorty, Richard 69n.21, 169–70 Rose, Sven Erik 255n.17 Rossi, A. 70n.27 Rothberg, Michael 255n.17 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 83, 87, 97–118, 122n.8, 176, 179, 181, 185, 187, 192, 197, 206, 228, 266, 267 Confessions 100, 122n.8, 267 Emile 176, 181, 185 An Essay on the Origin of Language 181 Julie, or the New Heloise 206 Rousset, Jean 9, 68n.16 Rucci, P. 70n.27 Russian Formalism 8, 66n.6 Ryan, Michael 52n.73 sadism 96, 114, 122n.7, 212–13 Saint Augustine 221, 258–9n.41 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin 260n.47 Sanyal, Debrati 255n.17 Saussure, Ferdinand de 41, 43 Savile, Anthony 177 Scaevola, Gaius Mucius 234, 257n.32 Schalkwyk, David 46, 49 Scheflen, A.E. 28 schizoanalysis 91, 97, 104, 109–10, 114–15, 117–21, 266 Schizo-Culture conference (1975) 252
schizophrenia 22, 83, 96, 101, 121n.1 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 10–11, 69n.18, 69n.21 Scholes, Robert 41, 73n.48 Schreber, Max 133–4 Searle, John 9, 175 Segal, Janna 50 Sehr, Peter 197–8n.2 self-fashioning 57–8 semiotics 32, 40–4, 51, 59–61, 64–5, 105–6, 114–15, 178, 190, 192, 200n.18, 252, 266, 277–8, 286 Seneca 218, 221–2 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 210, 230–2, 238, 240–1 sentimental novel 206, 209 September 11, 2008 146–9, 158, 243, 245–6 Sévigné, Mme de 205 Shakespace 24, 27–8, 35, 38, 50, 147, 272, 283 Shakespeare, William 1, 4, 14, 19, 22–8, 34–40, 48, 51–2, 55, 57, 60, 65n.1, 71–2n, 38, 74n.58, 74n.59, 167, 243, 265–6, 272, 274, 283 Henry IV 1 & 2 52–63 Henry V 37–8, 52–6, 60, 63 King John 167 Richard II 52, 54–7, 62–3 Romeo and Juliet 19–21, 37, 48, 50–2, 265 Shepard, Sam 270–1n.3 Shklovsky, Viktor 7 Silverman, Kaja 197–8n.2 simulation 30, 97, 104–7, 112–14, 117, 122n.10, 123n.11, 267, 274 see also Baudrillard, Jean Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous) 63 Slatoff, Walter 14 slavery 219, 221–2 Smith, Sir Thomas 60–1, 75n.67 social reality 175 sociopolitical conductors 15–16, 24, 48, 65, 101, 119, 135–6, 163, 168, 177, 224, 244, 269, 275–6, 280, 284–5 somatic markers 72n.41
10.1057/9780230239289 - Transversal Subjects, Bryan Reynolds
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298 Index
some-other-where-but-not-here-space 284 Spanos, William 9, 14 spatialization 124–5, 129–38, 144, 152, 159n.5, 159n.10, 185, 187, 196, 264, 265, 281 speech acts 8, 145–6 Stamenov, Maksim 72n.39 Starobinski, Jean 9, 68n.16 state machinery 3, 16, 24, 50, 64–5, 86, 110, 135–6, 163–5, 184, 186–7, 190–1, 224, 245, 264, 268–9, 274, 278–80, 284–5, 287 state of exception 218, 237 see also Agamben, Giorgio state power 16, 26, 65, 66–7n.7, 119, 135, 215, 234, 280, 285 Steiner, George 39 Steintrager, James 198n.4 Stendhal, Krister 260n.47 Stoicism 229, 231, 233 Strack, F. 28 strategies and tactics 125, 129, 132–3, 138–9, 144, 152 see also Certeau, Michel de Strozzi, Fillipo de Piero 212–13 structuralism 5, 14, 39–42, 44, 51, 66n.6, 73n.48, 232 Stubbes, Phillip 35–6, 72n.35 subjectivation 2, 50, 52, 56, 85, 89, 97, 162, 164, 183, 217, 224, 234, 236, 245, 265, 269, 278, 283–6 subjective territory 2, 10, 16, 19, 49–50, 56, 59, 66–7n.7, 89, 97, 135–7, 158, 159n.10, 166, 168, 171, 176, 194, 224, 234, 264, 269, 273–4, 276–8, 282, 283, 285–8 subjectivity childhood and, 162–5, 183–4, 268; deconstruction and, 44, 46; Deleuzoguattarian/ schizoanalytic concepts of: 89–90, 92, 97, 121, 121n.1; epistemic relativism and, 169; fugitive/transversal conceptions of, 2, 16, 35, 65, 66–7n, 85–6, 89, 91, 174, 177, 181–2, 208, 224, 234, 263, 265–6, 268–70, 274, 277, 283, 285–9; generally:
299
1–7; human rights and, 209, 219, 258–9n.41; New Criticism and, 7; neurochemistry and, 19; phenomenological conceptions of, 8–9; proper names and, 50, 59; psychoanalytic constructions of, 4, 84; reader–response theory and, 10; reducible models of, 175; Shakespeare and, 38; sociological constructions of, 5–6; spatial practice and, 124–5, 135–6, 267; Structuralism and, 41; writing and, 177, 179, 228–9, 235, 238; see also intersubjectivity, subjectivization, subjective territory subjunctive movement 85–6, 137, 163, 174, 251, 274, 278, 283, 285 subjunctive space 164, 174, 193, 273, 285–6, 287 subversion/containment paradigm 66–7n.7 Sullivan, K. M. 197–8n.2 Sussman, Henry 200n.17 Swain, Jonathan 190–1 Swift, Jonathan 179 Systema Naturae see Linnaeus, Carl Szaz, Janos 197–8n.2 taxonomy 171, 173–4 Taylor, Gary 57 Taylor, Mark 73n.52 temporality 167 Tennenhouse, Leonard 54 Terdiman, Richard 141 Termine, N. 28 territorialization 177, 180, 191, 194 terrorism 222–3, 243–4, 247–9 Teskey, Gordon 226–7, 242 The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power see Bakan, Joel The Spirit of the Laws see Montesquieu, Charles theatre of the oppressed 194 theatricality 181, 184, 186–91, 194, 196, 268
10.1057/9780230239289 - Transversal Subjects, Bryan Reynolds
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Index
300 Index
Uhlmann, Anthony 270–1n.3 Ulmer, Gregory 73n.52 urban reform 183, 191 Utopia see More, Thomas
utopianism 159n.6
54, 123n.11, 132–5, 137,
Valladolid Hearings 209, 230–1, 233, 235, 240 Vinokur, Grigory 7 Virilio, Paul 147 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) Treatise on Tolerance on the Occasion of the Death of Jean Calas 206 voyeurism 133–4, 281 vulnerabilities, surrenders, and slippages 288 Warren, Robert Penn 6, 67n.8 Watts, Isaac 193 Webb, J. T. 28 Weber, Harry 67n.11 Weber, Samuel 200n.18 Weichhold, G.M. 197–8n.2 Wellek, Rene 6 Whitehead, Neil 257n.31 wilderness-effects 288 Williams, Raymond 75n.67, 276 Wilson, Thomas 62 Wimsatt, William K. 6–7, 67n.8 Winnicott D. W. 4–5 Withycombe 56, 74n.59 Witkiewicz, Stanislav 264, 270–1n.3 witness-function 191, 288–9 Wojnarowicz, David 264 women’s rights 258–9n.41 Wong, James 200n.14 Woodson 28 World Trade Center 125–7, 133–5, 139–40, 144–8, 155, 243 Wrightson 74n.58, 75n.65 Yonge, Charlotte 56, 59 Yvain, or, the Knight with the Lion see De Troyes, Chrétien Zalloua, Zahi 229, 256n.21, 256n.24 Žižek , Slavoj 267, 271n.4 zoé 217 see also Agamben, Giorgio zooz 158n.2
10.1057/9780230239289 - Transversal Subjects, Bryan Reynolds
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Thomas, Joseph, Jr. 192 Thompson, E.P. 75n.65 Thompson, Ayanna 254n.8 Tindall 28 Tomashevsky, Boris 7 torture 114, 187–9, 206–13, 221–3, 226, 234, 237, 245, 248, 254n.7 totalitarianism 204, 215, 218, 222, 244–6, 249 Toulmin, Stephen 229 tourism 125 translation 56, 122n.8, 147, 177, 230 translucent-effects 282, 288 transversal acting 279, 286, 288 transversal agent 284, 286 transversal movement 2, 16, 18, 34, 65, 66–7n.7, 85–8, 92, 121, 125, 137–8, 148, 159n.12, 164–5, 174, 176, 187, 194, 235, 268, 272–3, 278, 283, 285, 286–7 transversal poetics 3–4, 14–16, 19, 35, 65n.1, 66–7n.7, 97, 121, 229, 235, 275, 279, 283, 286, 287 transversal power 26, 36–9, 71n.34, 72n.43, 137–9, 145, 158n.1, 183, 267, 282–4, 287 transversal territory 136–7, 141, 193, 264, 274, 282, 286–7 transversal theory 10, 16, 18, 34–5, 51, 84–92, 97, 110, 113, 121, 125, 177, 223–4, 234, 262, 266, 269, 279, 284, 287–8 trauma 112, 114, 246, 287 Treatise on Tolerance on the Occasion of the Death of Jean Calas see Voltaire Tredgold, A.F. 174–5 Trotsky, Leon 7, 66n.5 Troyes, Chrétien de Yvain, or, the Knight with the Lion 63 Turner, Henry 71n.28 Tynyanov, Yury 7
