Textual Practice, Volume 6, Number 3 (Textual Practice Journal)

TEXTUAL PRACTICE 6.3 Editor Terence Hawkes, University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. Reviews editor Christopher Norris University of Wales College of Cardiff Postal address: as above US associate editor Jean E.Howard Columbia University Postal address: Department of English and Comparative Literature, 602 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York N.Y. 10027, USA Editorial board Gillian Beer Girton College, Cambridge Terry Eagleton Linacre College, Oxford John Frow Queensland University, Australia Linda Hutcheon Toronto University, Canada Mary Jacobus Cornell University, USA Francis Mulhern Middlesex Polytechnic Editorial Assistant Tamsin Spargo

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Textual Practice is published three times a year, in spring, summer and winter, by Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author(s) and publishers, but academic institutions may make not more than three xerox copies of any one article in any single issue without needing further permission; all enquiries to the Editor. Contributions and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at University of Wales College of Cardiff. Books for review and related correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, University of Wales College of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XE. Advertisements. Enquiries to David Polley, Routledge Journals, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE. Subscription rates (calendar year only): UK full: £50.00; UK personal: £28.00; Rest of World full: £52.00; Rest of World personal: £30.00; USA full: £85.00; USA personal: £55.00. All rates include postage; airmail rates on application. Subscriptions to: Subscriptions Department, Routledge Journals, Cheriton House, North Way, Andover, Hants, SP10 5BE. ISSN 0950-236X Phototypeset by Intype, London Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge. © Routledge 1992 ISBN 0-203-99074-9 Master e-book ISBN

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

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 6 NUMBER 3 WINTER 1992

Contents

Articles Philosophy traversed by psychoanalysis SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK Apes and familiars: modernism, mimesis and the work of Wyndham Lewis PETER NICHOLLS The question of the canon: the examples of Searle, Kimball and Kernan PETER ERICKSON Theory in the age of mechanical annihilation JOSEPH N.CLEARY Modernity-Postmodernity: a dialogue VASSILIKI KOLOCOTRONI and MARGERY METZSTEIN The sins of Scarlett HARRIETT HAWKINS

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Reviews David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment; Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory TERRY EAGLETON David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History DAVID AMIGONI Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Signatures of the Visible PETER BROOKER Colin MacCabe (ed.), Futures for English GARY DAY Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth and Essays on Heidegger and Others CLIVE CAZEAUX Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text DAVID DARBY Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English; Peter Washington, Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English FRED BOTTING A.C.Hamilton (Gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia WILLY MALEY Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits MICHAEL GARDINER

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David Wood (ed.), Philosophers’ Poets NICHOLAS DAVEY John Bushnell, Moscow Graffiti; Richard Goldstein, Reporting the Counterculture JOHN MOORE Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Times PETER DAVIES David M.Rasmussen, Reading Habermas DIETER FREUNDLIEB

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Philosophy traversed by psychoanalysis SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Does psychoanalysis enable us to approach philosophical problems in a new way, i.e. to throw a new light on them from within, not by way of an external and ultimately irrelevant ‘psychoanalysis of philosophy’? The aim of the present paper is to substantiate an affirmative answer to this question by submitting to a Lacanian reading two philosophical themes: that of Enlightenment (Aufklaerung) and that of the ontological constitution of reality.

I AUTHORITY AS THE ULTIMATE SUPPORT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT Socrates versus Christ At first sight, Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments do not belong to philosophy but rather to an intermediate domain between philosophy proper and theology: they endeavour to delimit the Christian religious position from the Socratic philosophical one. Yet their externality to philosophy is of the same kind as that of Plato’s Symposium: they circumscribe the discourse’s frame, i.e. the intersubjective constellation, the relationship towards the Teacher, towards Authority, which renders possible the philosophical (or Christian) discourse. In this sense, Fragments is to be read as the repetition of Plato’s Symposium (repetition in the precise sense this term receives with Kierkegaard): its aim is to perform Plato’s gesture in new circumstances, within the new status that knowledge acquired with the advent of Christianity. Both texts, the Symposium as well as Philosophical Fragments, are texts on love and transference which form the basis of every relationship towards the Teacher qua ‘subject supposed to know’. Kierkegaard’s starting-point is that the whole of philosophy from Plato to Hegel is ‘pagan’, i.e. embedded in the pagan (pre-Christian) logic of knowledge and remembrance: our life as that of finite individuals by definition takes place in an aftermath, since all that really matters has always-already happened; up till the Hegelian Er-Innerung, knowledge is therefore always conceived as a retrospective remembrance-internalization, a return to the ‘timelessly past being’ (das zeitlos gewesene Sein), Hegel’s determination of essence. True, the transient, finite subjects attain eternal Truth at some determinate instant in the time of their lives; once the subject enters the Truth, however, this instant is abrogated, cast away like a useless ladder. Which is why Socrates is quite justified in comparing himself with a midwife: his job is just to enable the subject to give birth to the knowledge already present in him, so the supreme recognition one can grant to Socrates is to say he was forgotten the moment we found ourselves face to face with Truth. With Christ, it is just the opposite which holds: the Christian truth, no less eternal than the Socratic one, is indelibly branded with an historical event, the moment of God’s incarnation. Consequently, the object of Christian faith is not the Teaching, but the Teacher:

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a Christian believes in Christ as a person, not immediately in the content of his statements; Christ is not divine because He uttered such deep truths, His words are true because they were spoken by Him. The paradox of Christianity consists in this bond linking the eternal Truth to an historical event: I can know eternal Truth only in so far as I believe that the miserable creature who two thousand years ago walked around Palestine was God. Motifs which, according to the philosophical common knowledge, define the postHegelian reversal—the affirmation of the Event, of the Instant, as opposed to the timeless, immovable Truth; the priority of existence (of the fact that a thing exists) over essence (over what this thing is), etc.—acquire here their ultimate background. That which is ‘eternal’ in a statement is its meaning, conceived in abstraction from the event of its enunciation, from its enunciation qua event: within the Socratic perspective, the truth of a statement resides in its universal meaning; as such, it is in no way affected by its position of enunciation, by the place from which it was enunciated. The Christian perspective, on the other hand, makes the truth of a statement dependent on the event of its enunciation: the ultimate guarantee of the truth of Christ’s words is their utterer’s authority, i.e. the fact that they were uttered by Christ, not the profundity of their content, i.e. what they say: When Christ says, ‘There is an eternal life’; and when a theological student says, ‘There is an eternal life’; both say the same thing, and there is no more deduction, development, profundity, or thoughtfulness in the first expression than in the second; both statements are, judged aesthetically, equally good. And yet there is an eternal qualitative difference between them! Christ, as God-Man, is in possession of the specific quality of authority…1 Kierkegaard develops this ‘qualitative difference’ apropos of the abyss that separates a ‘genius’ from an ‘apostle’: ‘genius’ represents the highest intensification of the immanent human capacities (wisdom, creativity…), whereas an ‘apostle’ is sustained by a transcendent authority which a genius lacks. This abyss is best exemplified by the very case where it seems to disappear, namely the poetic exploitation of religious motifs: Richard Wagner, for example, in his Parsifal used Christian motifs as means to invigorate his artistic vision; he thereby aestheticized them in the strict Kierkegaardian sense of the term, i.e. made use of them with their ‘artistic efficiency’ in mind—religious rituals like the uncovering of the Grail fascinate us with their breathtaking beauty, yet their religious authority is suspended, bracketed.2 The paradoxes of authority If, however, the truth-claim of a statement cannot be authorized by means of its inherent content, what is then the foundation of its authority? Kierkegaard is here quite outspoken: the ultimate and only support of a statement-of-authority is its own act of enunciation: But now how can an Apostle prove that he has authority? If he could prove it physically, then he would not be an Apostle. He has no other proof than his own statement. That has to be so; for otherwise the believer’s relationship to him would be direct instead of being paradoxical.3

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When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force: authority proper is at its most radical level always powerless, it is a certain ‘call’ which ‘cannot effectively force us into anything’, and yet, by a kind of inner compulsion, we feel obliged to follow it unconditionally. As such, authority is inherently paradoxical; first, as we have just seen, authority is vested in a certain statement in so far as the immanent value of its content is suspended—we obey a statement of authority because it has authority, not because its content is wise, profound, etc.: Authority is a specific quality which, coming from elsewhere, becomes qualitatively apparent when the content of the message or of the action is posited as indifferent…. To be prepared to obey a government department if it can be clever is really to make a fool of it. To honour one’s father because he is intelligent is impiety.4 Yet at the same time Kierkegaard seems to purport the exact opposite of this priority of the Teacher over the Teaching: an apostle—a person in whom God’s authority is vested—is reduced to his role of a carrier of some foreign message, he is totally abrogated as a person, all that matters is the content of the message: Just as a man, sent into town with a letter, has nothing to do with its contents, but has only to deliver it; just as a minister who is sent to a foreign court is not responsible for the content of the message, but has only to convey it correctly: so, too, an Apostle has really only to be faithful in his service, and to carry out his task. Therein lies the essence of an Apostle’s life of self-sacrifice, even if he were never persecuted, in the fact that he is ‘poor, yet making many rich’.5 An Apostle therefore corresponds perfectly to the function of the signifying Repraesentanz; the invalidation of all ‘pathological’ features (his psychological propensities, etc.) makes out of him a pure representative whose clearest case is a diplomat: We mean by representatives what we understand when we use the phrase, for example, the representative of France. What do diplomats do when they address one another? They simply exercise, in relation to one another, that function of being pure representatives and, above all, their own signification must not intervene. When diplomats are addressing one another, they are supposed to represent something whose signification, while constantly changing, is, beyond their own persons, France, Britain, etc. In the very exchange of views, each must record only what the other transmits in his pure function as signifier, he must not take into account what the other is, qua presence, as a man who is likable to a greater or lesser degree. Interpsychology is an impurity in this exchange. The term Repraesentanz is to be taken in this sense. The signifier has to be understood in this way, it is at the opposite pole from signification.6 Therein consists the paradox of authority: we obey a person in whom authority is vested irrespective of the content of his statements (authority ceases to be proper the moment we make it dependent on the quality of its content), yet this person retains authority only in so

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far as he is reduced to a neutral carrier, bearer of some transcendent message—in opposition to a Genius where the abundance of his work’s content expresses the inner wealth of its creator’s personality. The same double suspension defines the supreme case of authority, that of Christ: in his Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard points out how it is not enough to know all the details of the Teacher’s (Christ’s) life, all He has done and all His personal features, in order to be entitled to consider oneself His pupil—such a description of Christ’s features and deeds, even if truly complete, still misses what makes Him an authority; no better do those fare who leave out of consideration Christ qua person and concentrate on His teaching, endeavouring to grasp the meaning of every word he ever uttered—this way, Christ is simply reduced to Socrates, to a simple middleman enabling us to gain access to the eternal Truth. If, consequently, Christ’s authority is contained neither in His personal qualities nor in the content of His teaching, in what does it reside? The only possible answer is: in the empty space of intersection between the two sets, that of His personal features and that of His teaching, in the unfathomable X which is ‘in Christ more than Himself’—in this intersection which corresponds exactly to what Lacan called objet petit a:

Kierkegaard’s ‘materialist reversal of Hegel’ Such an assertion of authority seems to be the very opposite of the Enlightenment whose fundamental aim is precisely to render truth independent of authority: truth is arrived at by means of the critical procedure which questions the pro et contra of a proposition irrespective of the authority that pertains to its place of enunciation. But to undermine the false evidence of this incompatibility between authority and Enlightenment, it suffices to recall how the two supreme achievements of the unmasking of ideological prejudices that grew out of the project of Enlightenment, Marxism and psychoanalysis, both refer to the authority of their respective founders (Marx, Freud). Their structure is inherently ‘authoritarian’: since Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical field which sets the very criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the test in the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their followers; if there is something to be refuted in their texts, this can only be a matter of those statements which precede the ‘epistemological break’, i.e. which do not belong under the field opened up by the founder’s discovery (Freud’s writings prior to the discovery of the Unconscious, for example). Their texts are thus to be read the way one should read the text of a dream, according to Lacan: as ‘sacred’ texts which are in a radical sense ‘beyond criticism’ since they constitute the very horizon of veracity. For that reason, every ‘further development’ of Marxism or psychoanalysis necessarily assumes the form of a ‘return’ to Marx or Freud: the form of a (re)discovery of some hitherto overlooked layer of their work, i.e. of bringing to light what the founders ‘produced without knowing what they produced’, to invoke Althusser’s formula. In his article on Chaplin’s Limelight, André Bazin recommends the same attitude as the only one which befits Chaplin’s genius: even when some details in Limelight appear to us aborted and dull (the tedious first hour of

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the film; Calvero’s pathetic vulgar philosophical outbursts; etc.), we have to put the blame on ourselves and ask what was wrong with our approach to the film—such an attitude clearly articulates the transferential relationship of the pupil to the Teacher: the Teacher is by definition ‘supposed to know’, the fault is always ours… The disturbing scandal authenticated by the history of psychoanalysis and Marxism is that such a ‘dogmatic’ approach proved far more productive than the ‘open’, critical dealing with the founder’s text: how much more fecund was Lacan’s ‘dogmatic’ return to Freud than the American academic machinery which transformed Freud’s opus into a collection of positive scientific hypotheses to be tested, refuted, combined, developed, etc.! Lacan’s scandal, the dimension of his work which resists incorporation into the academic machinery, can be ultimately pinned down to the fact that he openly and shamelessly posited himself as such an authority, i.e. that he repeated the Kierkegaardian gesture in relationship to his followers: what he demanded of them was not fidelity to some general theoretical propositions, but precisely fidelity to his person—which is why, in the circular letter announcing the foundation of Cause freudienne, he addresses them as ‘those who love me’. This unbreakable link connecting the Doctrine to the contingent person of the Teacher, i.e. to the Teacher qua material surplus that sticks out from the neutral edifice of Knowledge, is the scandal everybody who considers himself Lacanian has to assume: Lacan was not a Socratic Master obliterating himself before the attained Knowledge, his theory sustains itself only through the transferential relationship to its founder. In this precise sense, Marx, Freud and Lacan are not ‘geniuses’, but ‘apostles’: when somebody says ‘I follow Lacan because his reading of Freud is the most intelligent and persuasive’, he immediately exposes himself as non-Lacanian. This ‘scandal’ of the spot of contingent individuality which smears over the neutral field of Knowledge points towards what we could designate as Kierkegaard’s ‘materialist reversal of Hegel’. Hegel ultimately stays within the boundary of the ‘Socratic’ universe: in his Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness arrives at the Truth, recollects it and internalizes it, via its own effort, by comparing itself with its own immanent Notion, by confronting the positive content of its statements with its own place of enunciation, by working-through its own split, without any external support or point of reference. The standpoint of dialectical truth (the ‘For-us’) is not added to the consciousness as a kind of external standard by which its progress is then measured: ‘we’, dialecticians, are nothing but passive observers who retroactively reconstruct the way consciousness itself arrived at the Truth (i.e. the ‘absolute’ standpoint without presuppositions). When, at some point of the consciousness’s journey, Truth effectively appears as a positive entity possessing an independent existence, as an ‘Initself’ assuming the role of the external measure of the consciousness’s ‘working-through’, this is simply a necessary self-deception ‘sublated’ in the further succession of the ‘experiences of consciousness’. In other words—in the words of the relationship between belief and knowledge: the subject’s belief in an (external) authority which is to be accepted unconditionally and ‘irrationally’, is nothing but a transitional stage ‘sublated’ by the passage into reflected knowledge. For Kierkegaard, on the contrary, our belief in the person of the Saviour is the absolute, non-negotiable condition of our access to truth: eternal Truth itself clings to this contingent material externality—the moment we lose this ‘little piece of the real’ (the historical fact of Incarnation), the moment we cut our link with this material fragment (reinterpreting it as a parable of Man’s affinity with God, for example), the entire edifice of Christian knowledge crumbles. On another level, the same goes for psychoanalysis: in the psychoanalytic cure, there is no knowledge without the ‘presence of

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the analyst’, without the impact of his dumb material weight. Here we encounter the inherent limitation of all attempts to conceive the psychoanalytic cure on the model of the Hegelian reflective movement in the course of which the subject becomes conscious of its own ‘substantial’ content, i.e. arrives at the repressed truth which dwells deep in it.7 If such were the case, psychoanalysis would be the ultimate stage of the Socratic ‘Know thyself!’, and the psychoanalyst’s role would be that of an accoucheur, a kind of ‘vanishing mediator’ enabling the subject to achieve communication with itself by finding access to its repressed traumas. This dilemma comes forth at its clearest apropos of the role of transference in the psychoanalytic cure. In so far as we remain within the domain of the Socratic logic of remembrance, transference is not an ‘effective’ repetition but rather a means of recollection: the analysand ‘projects’ past traumas which unconsciously determine his present behaviour (the repressed and unresolved conflicts with his father, for example) on to his relationship to the analyst; by means of the deft manipulation of the transferential situation, the analyst then enables the analysand to recall the traumas which were hitherto ‘acted out’ blindly—in other words, the task of the analyst is to make evident to the analysand how ‘he (the analyst) is not really the father’, i.e. how the analysand, caught in the transference, used his relationship to the analyst to stage the past traumas. Lacan’s emphasis is, on the contrary, throughout Kierkegaardian: transferential repetition cannot be reduced to remembrance, transference is not a kind of ‘theatre of shadows’ where we settle with past traumas in effigia, it is repetition in the full meaning of the term, i.e. in it, the past trauma is literally repeated, ‘actualized’. The analyst is not father’s ‘shadow’, he is a presence in front of which the past battle has to be fought out ‘for the real’. Lacan versus Habermas The point of the preceding argumentation, of course, is not to defend the blind submission to authority, but to remark the fact that discourse itself is in its fundamental structure ‘authoritarian’ (for that reason, the ‘discourse of the Master’ is the first, ‘founding’ discourse in the Lacanian matrix of the four discourses; or, as Derrida would say in his writings of recent years, every discursive field is founded on some ‘violent’ ethico-political decision). Out of the free-floating dispersion of signifiers, a consistent field of meaning emerges through the intervention of a Master-signifier. Why? The answer is contained in the paradox of the ‘finite infinity/totality’ which, as one knows from Claude Lévi-Strauss onwards, pertains to the very notion of the signifier: the symbolic order in which the subject is embedded is simultaneously ‘finite’ (it consists in a limited and ultimately contingent network which never overlaps with the Real) and ‘infinite’, or, to use a Sartrean term, ‘totalizing’ (in any given language, ‘everything can be told’, there is no external standpoint from which one can judge its limitations). Because of this inherent tension, every language contains a paradoxical element which, within its field, stands in for, what eludes it—in Lacanese, in every set of signifiers, there is always ‘at least one’ which functions as the signifier of the very lack of the signifier. This signifier is the Master-signifier: the ‘empty’ signifier which totalizes (‘quilts’) the dispersed field—in it, the infinite chain of causes (‘knowledge’) is interrupted with an abyssal, non-founded, founding act of violence. The philosophical term for this inversion of impotence into a constitutive power is, of course, the notion of the transcendental with all its inherent paradoxes: the subject experiences as his constitutive power the very horizon which frames his vision due to his

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finitude. For this reason, it is precisely the notion of the transcendental which enables us to distinguish Lacan from, say, Habermas. With Habermas, the status of the ‘disturbances’ which vitiate the course of ‘rational argumentation’ by way of a non-reflected constraint is ultimately contingent-empirical. That is to say, they emerge as empirical impediments on the path of the gradual realization of the transcendental regulative Idea. With Lacan, conversely, the status of the Master-signifier, the signifier of the symbolic authority founded only in itself (in its own act of enunciation), is strictly transcendental: the gesture which ‘distorts’ a symbolic field, which ‘curves’ its space by introducing in it a non-founded violence, is stricto sensu correlative to its very establishment—in other words, the moment we subtract from a discursive field its ‘distortion’, the field itself disintegrates (‘de-quilts’). Lacan’s position is therefore the very opposite to that of Habermas according to whom the inherent pragmatic presuppositions of a discourse are ‘non-authoritarian’ (the notion of discourse implies the idea of a communication free of constraint where only rational argumentation counts, etc.). Lacan’s fundamental thesis is that the Master is by definition an impostor: the Master is somebody who, upon finding himself at the place of the constitutive lack in the structure, acts as if he holds the reins of that surplus, of the mysterious X which eludes the grasp of the structure. This accounts for the difference between Habermas and Lacan as to the role of the Master: with Lacan, the Master is an impostor, yet the place occupied by him—the place of the lack in the structure—cannot be abolished, since the very finitude of every discursive field imposes its structural necessity. The unmasking of the Master’s imposture does not abolish the place he occupies, it just renders it visible in its original emptiness, i.e. as preceding the element which fills it out. Whence the Lacanian notion of the analyst qua ‘envers’ (reverse) of the Master: of somebody who holds the place of the Master, yet who, by means of his (non)activity, undermines the Master’s charisma, suspends the effect of ‘quilting’, and thus renders visible the distance that separates the Master from the place he occupies, i.e. the radical contingency of the subject who occupies this place. For that reason, their strategy of subverting symbolic authority is also fundamentally different. Habermas simply relies on the gradual reflective elucidation of the implicit, nonreflected, prejudices which distort communication, i.e. on the asymptotic approach to the regulative ideal of free, unconstrained communication. Lacan is also ‘anti-authoritarian’, he is as far as possible from any kind of obscurantism of the ‘ineffable’, he too remains thoroughly attached to the space of ‘public communication’. This unexpected proximity of Lacan to Habermas is corroborated by a procedure, proposed by Lacan, which caused a great amount of resistance even among some of his closest followers: la passe, the ‘passage’ of analysand into analyst. Its crux is the intermediate role of the so-called ‘passeurs’: the analysand (the ‘passant’) narrates the results of his analysis, the insights he arrived at, to the two ‘passeurs’, his peers, who thereupon report on it to the committee (‘comité de la passe’); the committee then decides on the analysand’s ‘passage’ into the analyst. The idea of these two middlemen who channel every contact between the ‘passant’ and the committee is very Habermasian indeed: they are here to prevent any kind of ‘initiatic’ relationship between the passant and the committee, i.e. to prevent the ‘passe’ from functioning as the transmission of an initiatic knowledge, after the model of secret cults: the analysand must be able to formulate the results of his analysis in such a way that the two ‘passeurs’, these two average men who stand in for the common knowledge, are able to transmit it integrally to the committee—in other words, the detour through the field of public knowledge must not affect

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the ‘message’ in any way. The contrast between Habermas and Lacan finds its clearest expression apropos of the notion of ‘ideal speech situation’: Habermas conceives it as the asymptotic ideal of intersubjective communication free of constraint, where the participants arrive at consensus by means of rational argumentation. Contrary to the common opinion, Lacan also knows of an ‘ideal speech situation’ which undermines the imposture of the Master-signifier: it is none other than the analytic situation itself—here, the abyss that separates Lacan from Habermas becomes quite evident. In the process of psychoanalysis, we also have two subjects speaking to each other; yet instead of facing each other and exchanging arguments, one of them lies on the couch, stares into thin air and throws out disconnected prattle, whereas the other mostly stays silent and terrorizes the first by the weight of his oppressive mute presence. This situation is ‘free of constraint’ in the precise sense of suspending the structural role of the Master-signifier: the analytic discourse qua ‘envers’ of the discourse of the Master transposes us into a state of undecidability, previous to the ‘quilting’ of the discursive field by a Master-signifier, i.e. in the state of the ‘free-floating’ of signifiers—what is ‘repeated’ in it is ultimately the very contingency which engendered the analysand’s symbolic space.

II FANTASY AS THE ULTIMATE SUPPORT OF REALITY Symbolic beatitude Fritz Lang’s noir western Rancho Notorious (1950) begins where a Hollywood story usually ends: with the passionate kiss of a couple awaiting their marriage—immediately thereupon, brutal bandits rape and kill the bride, and the desperate bridegroom (played by Arthur Kennedy) commits himself to inexorable revenge. His only clue as to the identity of the bandits is ‘Chuck-a-luck’, a meaningless signifying fragment. After a long search, he unearths its secret: ‘Chuck-a-luck’ designates a mysterious place whose very name it is dangerous to pronounce in public, a ranch in a hidden valley beyond a narrow mountain pass, where Marlene Dietrich, an aged saloon singer, ex-fatal beauty, reigns, offering refuge to robbers for a percentage of their booty. Wherein consists the irresistible charm of this film? Undoubtedly in the fact that, beneath the usual western plot, it stages another mythical narrative, the one articulated in its pure form in a series of adventure novels and films whose action is usually set in Africa (King Solomon’s Mines, She, Tarzan): they narrate the story of an expedition into the very heart of the black continent where white man had never set foot (the voyagers are lured into this risky trip by some incomprehensible or ambiguous signifying fragment: a message in a bottle, a fragment of burned paper or the confused babbling of some madman hinting that beyond a certain frontier, wonderful and/or horrible things are taking place). On the way, the expedition is confronted by diverse dangers, it is threatened by combative aborigines who at the same time strive desperately to make the foreigners understand that they should not transgress a certain frontier (river, mountain pass, abyss), since beyond it there is a damned place from which nobody has yet returned. After a series of adventures, the expedition goes beyond this frontier and finds itself in the Other Place, in the space of pure fantasy: a mighty black kingdom (King Solomon’s Mines), the realm of a beautiful and mysterious queen (She), the domain where man lives in full harmony with nature and speaks with animals (Tarzan). Another mythical landscape of this

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kind was of course Tibet: the Tibetan theocracy served as a model for the most famous image of the idyllic world of wisdom and balance, Shangri-la (in The Lost Horizon), which can be reached only through a narrow mountain pass; nobody is allowed to return from it, and the one person who does escape pays for his success by madness, so that nobody believes him when he prattles about the peaceful country ruled by wise monks.8 The mysterious ‘Chuck-a-luck’ in Rancho Notorious is the same forbidden place: it is by no means accidental that all the crucial confrontations in the film take place at the narrow mountain pass which marks the frontier separating everyday reality from the valley where ‘She’ reigns—in other words, at the very place of passage between reality and the fantasy’s ‘other place’.9 What is crucial here is the strict formal homology between all these stories: in all cases, the structure is that of a Moebius strip—if we progress far enough on the side of reality, we suddenly find ourselves on its reverse, in the domain of pure fantasy. Let us, however, pursue our line of associations: do we not encounter the same inversion in the development of a great number of artists, from Shakespeare to Mozart, where the gradual descent into despair, when it reaches its nadir, all of a sudden changes into a kind of heavenly bliss? After a series of tragedies which mark the lowest point of his despair (Hamlet, King Lear, etc.), the tone of Shakespeare’s plays unexpectedly changes, we enter the realm of a fairy-tale harmony where life is governed by a benevolent Fate which brings to a happy conclusion all conflicts (The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, etc.). After Don Giovanni, that ultimate monument to the impossibility of the sexual relationship, to the antagonism of the relation between sexes, Mozart composed The Magic Flute, a hymn to the harmonious couple of Man and Woman (note the paradox of how the criticism precedes the panegyric!).10 The horrifying, lethal and at the same time fascinating borderline that we approach when the reversal into bliss is imminent is what Lacan, apropos of Sophocles’ Antigone, endeavours to indicate by means of the Greek word ate.11 There is a fundamental ambiguity in this term: ate simultaneously denotes a horrifying limit which cannot ever be reached, i.e. the touch of which means death, and the space beyond it. The crucial point here is the primacy of the limit over the space: we do not have two spheres (that of reality and that of pure fantasy) which are divided by a certain limit; what we have is just reality and its limit, the abyss, the void around which it is structured. The fantasy-space is therefore strictly secondary, it ‘gives body’, it materializes a certain limit, or, more precisely, it changes the impossible into the prohibited. The limit marks a certain fundamental impossibility (it cannot be trespassed, if we come too close to it, we die), while its Beyond is prohibited (whoever enters it cannot return, etc.). Thereby we have already produced the formula of the mysterious reversal of horror into bliss: by means of it, the impossible limit changes into the forbidden place. In other words, the logic of this reversal is that of the transmutation of Real into Symbolic: the impossible-real changes into an object of symbolic prohibition. The paradox (and perhaps the very function of the prohibition as such) consists of course in the fact that, as soon as it is conceived as prohibited, the impossible-real changes into something possible, i.e. into something that cannot be reached not because of its inherent impossibility but simply because access to it is hindered by the external barrier of a probibition. Therein lies, after all, the logic of the most fundamental of all prohibitions, that of incest: incest is inherently impossible (even if a man ‘really’ sleeps with his mother, ‘this is not that’, the incestuous object is by definition lacking), and the symbolic prohibition is nothing but an attempt to resolve this deadlock by a transmutation of impossibility into prohibition—there

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is One which is the prohibited object of incest (mother), and its prohibition renders accessible all other objects.12 The trespassing of the frontier in the above-mentioned series of adventure films follows the same logic: the forbidden space beyond ate is again constituted by the transmutation of impossibility into prohibition.13 By means of the reversal of (impossible) limit into (prohibited) space, of Don Giovanni into Magic Flute, we thus elude the real qua impossible: once we enter the domain of fantasy, the trauma of the inherent impossibility is replaced by a fairy beatitude. Mozart’s Magic Flute, its image of the amorous couple forming a harmonious Whole, exemplifies perfectly the Lacanian thesis that fantasy is ultimately always the fantasy of a successful sexual relationship: after the couple Tamino and Pamina successfully undergo the ordeal of Fire and Water, i.e. trespass the Limit, the two of them enter symbolic bliss. And it is reference to the anti-colonial national revival which enables us to locate more precisely the dream-like character of this beatitude: the agents of the anti-colonialist national-liberation struggle necessarily fall prey to the illusion that, by means of their struggle, they ‘realize the ancient dreams of their oppressed ancestors’. Therein consists one of the fundamental mechanisms of ideological legitimization: to legitimize the existing order by presenting it as a realization of a dream—not of our dream, but of the Other’s, the Dead Ancestor’s dream, the dream of previous generations. That was, for example, the reference that determined the relationship towards the Soviet Union in the twenties and thirties: in spite of the poverty and wrongs, numerous Western visitors were fascinated by this very drab Soviet reality—why? Because it appeared to them as a kind of palpable materialization of the dream of millions of past and present workers from all around the world. Any doubt about the Soviet reality thus entailed instant culpabilization: ‘True, we in the Soviet Union make numerous mistakes, but when you criticize our efforts with ironic disdain, you are making fun of and betraying the dream of millions who suffered and risked their lives for what we are realizing now!’14 The situation here is not unlike that of Zhuang Zi who dreamt of being a butterfly, and after awakening posed himself a question: how did he know that he was not now a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi?15 In the same way, post-revolutionary ideology endeavours to make us understand that what we live now is a dream of our ancestors come true; the worker in the Soviet Union of the thirties, for example, is a pre-revolutionary fighter dreaming that he is a worker in the Socialist paradise—if we complain too much, we might disturb his dream. This detour through the dead Other is necessary for the ideological legitimization of the present to take effect. On another level, the fantasy of the harmonious love couple in Mozart’s Magic Flute follows the same logic: the dreary bourgeois everyday reality undergoes a kind of transubstantiation and acquires a sublime dimension as soon as it is conceived as the actualization of a pre-revolutionary dream of a free love couple. Wherein consists the logic of this reversal? A further formal homology might set us on the right track: do we not encounter the same matrix in Freud’s most famous dream, that of Irma’s injection?16 Do not the three stages of this dream correspond to the imaginary dual relationship, its ‘aggravation’ into an unbearable antagonism which announces the encounter of the Real, and the final ‘appeasement’ via the advent of the symbolic order? In the first phase of the dream, Freud is ‘playing with his patient’,17 his dialogue with Irma is ‘totally stuck within the imaginary conditions which limit it’;18 this dual, specular relationship culminates in a look into her open mouth: There’s a horrendous discovery here, that of the flesh one never sees, the

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foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety, the final revelation of you are this—You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness.19 Suddenly, this horror changes miraculously into ‘a sort of ataraxia’ defined by Lacan precisely as ‘the coming into operation of the symbolic function’20 exemplified by the production of the formula of trimethylamin, the subject floats freely in symbolic bliss—as soon as the dreamer (Freud) renounces his narcissistic perspective. Jacques-Alain Miller was quite right to subtitle this chapter of Lacan’s Seminar II simply ‘The imaginary, the real and the symbolic’.21 The trap to be avoided here is of course to oppose this symbolic bliss to the ‘hard reality’: the fundamental thesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis is on the contrary that what we call ‘reality’ constitutes itself against the background of such a ‘bliss’, i.e. of such an exclusion of some traumatic Real. This is precisely what Lacan has in mind when he says that fantasy is the ultimate support of reality: ‘reality’ stabilizes itself when some fantasy-frame of a ‘symbolic bliss’ forecloses the view into the abyss of the Real. Far from being a kind of dreamlike cobweb that prevents us from ‘seeing reality as it effectively is’, fantasy is constitutive of what we call reality: the most common bodily ‘reality’ is constituted via a detour through the cobweb of fantasy. In other words, the price we pay for access to ‘reality’ is that something—the real of the trauma—must be ‘repressed’. What strikes the eye here is the parallel between the dream of Irma’s injection and another famous Freudian dream, that of the dead son who appears to his father and addresses him with the reproach ‘Father, can’t you see that I’m burning?’ In his interpretation of the dream of Irma’s injection, Lacan draws our attention to the apt remark by Eric Ericson that after the look into Irma’s throat, after this encounter with the Real, Freud should have awakened—like the dreamer of the dream of the burning son who awakens when he encounters this horrifying apparition: when confronted with the Real in all its unbearable horror, the dreamer awakens, i.e. escapes into ‘reality’. One has to draw a radical conclusion from this parallel between the two dreams: what we call ‘reality’ is constituted exactly upon the model of the asinine ‘symbolic bliss’ that enables Freud to continue to sleep after the horrifying look into Irma’s throat. The anonymous dreamer who awakens into reality in order to avoid the traumatic Real of the burning son’s reproach proceeds the same way as Freud who, after the look into Irma’s throat, ‘changes the register’, i.e. escapes into the fantasy which veils the Real. Psychoanalysis and German idealism Thereby we attain the level at which it becomes possible to elaborate the link that connects the psychoanalytic theory of drives and the philosophy of German idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), its notion of reality as something constituted, ‘posited’ by the subject. The dimension of psychoanalytic theory lost with the ascent of positivist ego-psychology is its opposition to the common-sensical (and at the same time scientific) approach which accepts so-called ‘external reality’ as such, as something given in advance, and reduces the problem of the ‘psychical apparatus’ to the question of how (if at all) this apparatus succeeds in accommodating itself to reality, in connecting, ‘coupling’ with it. In this perspective, the

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definition of ‘normalcy’ is a psychical apparatus open to reality, whereas the psyche is ‘pathogenic’ if, instead of establishing proper contact with reality, it builds its own ‘disjointed’ universe. It was of course the classical Marxist criticism of ‘conformist’ psychoanalysis that it opposed itself to such a notion of reality: the ‘reality’ to which conformist psychoanalysis refers as a norm of psychic ‘sanity’ is not neutral reality as such, but the historically specified form of social reality. By offering as its ideal the subject ‘adjusted to reality’, conformist psychoanalysis makes itself subservient to existing social reality, to its relations of domination, devalorizing critical distance towards it as ‘pathological’. The scope of this criticism is, however, limited by the fact that it still retains the notion of accordance of psychic apparatus with reality, although only as a ‘regulative idea’ to be realized in the non-alienated society to come. A step further (or a step backwards into a nonhistorical absolutization of the split, if we look at it with the eyes of the above-mentioned Marxist criticism) was already accomplished by Freud himself, whose theoretical startingpoint was an original, irreducible, so to speak constitutive discord between the logic of the psychic apparatus and the demands of reality: it is because of this discord that ‘discontent in civilization’ is something that defines the condition humaine as such. ‘By its own nature’, the psychic apparatus is not adjusted to reality: it runs following the ‘pleasure principle’ which cares nothing for the limitations imposed by reality; thereupon, the conditions of selfpreservation enforce upon the psychic apparatus a renunciation of the absolute predominance of the ‘pleasure principle’, its transformation into the ‘reality principle’. The point not to be missed here is that the reign of the ‘reality principle’ is not something that the psychic apparatus could arrive at following the immanent, spontaneous path of ‘maturation’, but something imposed, extorted by means of a series of traumatic cuts (‘complexes’, integrations of losses): our most ‘natural’ openness to reality implies that the prohibitions which exert pressure upon the inherent logic of the psychic apparatus have successfully broken it down and become our ‘second nature’. However, even such a notion of the irreducible discord between the psychic apparatus ‘spontaneously’ striving for the reign of pure ‘pleasure principle’ and the demands of reality still accepts ‘reality’ as something simply given in advance, as a positive entity independent of the psychic apparatus, which, from without, exerts its pressure and disturbs the balanced functioning of the psyche. True, we are now far from any kind of pre-established harmony between the psychic apparatus and reality: the focal object of psychoanalytic theory is the traumatic process by means of which the psychic apparatus is forced out of the closed circuit of the ‘pleasure principle’ and into connecting with reality; yet ‘reality’ is still simply here, given in advance as that to which the psyche must adjust itself. By introducing the dimension of ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, the late Freud accomplishes here two further steps which—in so far as we think out all their consequences, as was done by Lacan—change completely the picture presented above. The hypothesis of ‘death drive’ concerns precisely this point: its implication is that the foreign body, the intruder which disturbs the harmonious circuit of the psychic apparatus run by the ‘pleasure principle’, is not something external to it but strictly inherent to it: there is something in the very immanent functioning of the psyche, notwithstanding the pressure of ‘external reality’, which resists full satisfaction. In other words, even if the psychic apparatus is entirely left to itself, it will not attain the balance for which the ‘pleasure principle’ strives, but will continue to circulate around a traumatic intruder in its interior—the limit upon which the ‘pleasure principle’ stumbles is internal to

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it.22 The Lacanian mathem for this foreign body, for this ‘internal limit’, is of course objet petit a: objet a is the reef, the obstacle which interrupts the closed circuit of the ‘pleasure principle’ and derails its balanced movement—or, to refer to Lacan’s elementary scheme:

And the final step to be taken is to grasp this inherent impediment in its positive dimension: true, the objet a prevents the circle of pleasure from closing, it introduces an irreducible displeasure, but the psychic apparatus finds a sort of perverse pleasure in this displeasure itself, in the never-ending, repeated circulation around the unattainable, always missed object. The Lacanian name for this ‘pleasure in pain’ is of course enjoyment (jouissance), and the circular movement which finds satisfaction in failing again and again to attain the object, the movement whose true aim coincides therefore with its very path towards the goal, is the Freudian drive. The space of the drive is such a paradoxical curved space: the objet a is not a positive entity existing in space, it is ultimately nothing but a certain curvature of the space itself which causes us to make a bend precisely when we want to get directly at the object. It is for this reason that Lacan was so fascinated by the paradoxes of courtly love: the Lady is such a paradoxical object which curves the space of desire, i.e. which offers us as the way to attain it only endless detours and ordeals—more precisely, the Lady is in herself nothing at all, a pure semblance which just materializes the curvature of the space of desire.23 The resemblance of the depicted Lacanian scheme to the section of an eye is by no means accidental: objet a effectively functions as a rift in the closed circle of the psychic apparatus governed by the ‘pleasure principle’, a rift which ‘derails’ it and forces it to ‘cast a look on the world’, to take into account reality. This is how we should conceive Lacan’s thesis that objet a serves as a support to reality: access to what we call ‘reality’ is open to the subject via the rift in the closed circuit of the ‘pleasure principle’, via the embarrassing intruder in its midst. The place of ‘reality’ within the psychic economy is that of an ‘excess’, of a surplus which disturbs and blocks from within the autarky of the self-contained balance of the psychic apparatus: ‘reality’ as the external necessity which forces the psychic apparatus to renounce the exclusive rule of the ‘pleasure principle’ is correlative to this inner stumbling-block. How should we then conceive the relationship between objet a, this strange body in the very heart of the psychic apparatus, and so-called ‘external reality’? The crucial point not to be missed is that objet a functions as the inherent, internal ‘excess’ which impedes from within the ‘smooth running’ of the psychic apparatus, as its immanent antagonism, whereas reality always, by definition, appears as an external limit; the Lacanian name for such an internal self-impediment is, of course, the Real. The radical conclusion to be drawn from all this is that—contrary to the common-sensical external opposition of ‘pleasure principle’ and ‘reality principle’ (upheld also by the early Freud)—‘reality’ is not something given in advance but something the ontological status of which is in a way secondary, in other words: something constituted in the precise meaning this term acquired in German idealism. What we call ‘(external) reality’ constitutes itself by means of a primordial act of ‘rejection’: the

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subject ‘rejects’, ‘externalizes’ its immanent self-impediment, the vicious circle of the driveantagonism, into the ‘external’ opposition between the demand of its drives and those of the opposed reality. It is here that, within psychoanalysis, the achievement of German idealism ‘returns’ which was ‘repressed’ in post-Hegelian thought: the process of constitution qua the subject’s pre-history, i.e. what must have gone on before the subject could establish a relationship with ‘external reality’—the process which, with Fichte, acquires the form of the I’s absolute act of [(self-)positing] (of itself as) the object; which, with Schelling, appears as the antagonism of God’s pre-history, resolved when God speaks out his Word. Ljubljana University, Slovenia

NOTES 1 Søren Kierkegaard, ‘Of the difference between a genius and an apostle’, in The Present Age (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), pp. 100–1. The immediate content of Christ’s statements can be utterly insipid, yet as soon as we take into consideration the fact that they were pronounced by Christ, God’s son, the same statements acquire unfathomable profundity—their very insipidity turns miraculously into an index of its opposite. What we encounter here is yet another way to conceive the Hegelian ‘coincidence of opposites’: a statement turns into its opposite the moment we take into account its place of enunciation. Today, in the postmodern era, such a reversal is easily detectable in the way different political parties proclaim their aim to reach ‘beyond narrow party interests’ and to be ‘non-ideological’: uttered by a political party, the reference to a ‘non-partisan’ content is nothing but a form of appearance of its opposite, i.e. a way to score points in the political struggle; the same goes for the self-proclaimed ‘non-ideological’ or ‘post-ideological’ attitude which is nothing but a strategy to assume hegemony in the ideological struggle. In other words, the elementary rule here is ‘the cleaner you are, the dirtier you are’: the more the content (the enunciated) of our goals is ‘really’ non-partisan, non-ideological, etc., the more our position of enunciation is that of an agent in the ideological struggle. 2 Such an aesthetic attitude towards religion is of course characteristic of romanticism as such; the very title of Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme (1802) is indicative in this respect: what interests him is not the inherent truth and authority of Christian religion but the poetic power of Christian mythology. 3 Kierkegaard, op.cit., p. 105. 4 ibid., pp. 96 and 100. 5 ibid., p. 106. 6 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London: Tavistock, 1979), p. 220. 7 The two most elaborate versions of this approach are to be found in Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), and in Helmut Dahmer, Libido und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972). 8 This utopian world is of course structured as a counterpoint to the Western aggressive, patriarchal civilization: the realm of matriarchy (She), of black rule (King Solomon’s Mines), of harmonious contact with nature (Tarzan), of balanced wisdom (Lost Horizon). The message of these novels, however, is more ambiguous than it may seem:

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for the heroes who entered this idyllic world, life in the domain of saturated desire soon becomes unbearable and they strive to return to our corrupted civilization; the universe of pure fantasy is a universe without surplus-enjoyment, i.e. a perfectly balanced universe where the object-cause of desire cannot be brought to effect. 9 This is the reason why this pass is always shown in a way which points out its artificial character (one perceives immediately that it is a studio set, with its entire background— including the ‘Rancho Notorious’ in the valley below—painted on a gigantic cloth); the same procedure was used by Hitchcock in his Marnie, among others. 10 A homological inversion in the domain of painting occurs in the work of Edvard Munch; the despair of his ‘expressionistic’ phase is followed by a quasi-magical appeasement when Munch found support and a stable point of reference in the rhythm of Nature, the life-giving power of the Sun, etc. On a more general level, the fundamental matrix of such an inversion of extreme tension into peaceful felicity is offered by the passage of modernism into postmodernism. The crucial point here is that what changes in this shift is not the perceived object or state of things but the standpoint from which the perceived state of things appears as horrifying: we pass from modernistexpressionist horror into postmodernist etheric bliss when the dimension of authentic subjectivity, the implicit standard of normality, disintegrates. Within modernism proper, the same logic is at work in the shift from expressionism into modernist formalism. Let us recall the fate of Sprechgesang (stylized ‘speech-song’) in Arnold Schoenberg’s musical compositions: in Gurrelieder, Sprachgesang is still ‘contextualized’, it appears as the calming-down of the unbearable pain of King Valdemar who bemoans the death of his beloved Tove. During his nightly rides, Valdemar articulates his pain in a traditional late-romantic air, whereas the Speaker celebrates the dawn of a new day which dispels nocturnal horrors in the form of Sprechgesang. In Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg’s later work, this dialectical tension, i.e. the mediation of the Sprechgesang with the late-romantic chromatic air, is lost: Sprachgesang emancipates itself and occupies the entire field. To return again to the domain of painting, this shift from Gurrelieder to Pierrot Lunaire is homologous to the shift from the early to the late work of Joan Miro: one is tempted to say that the entire Miro is already contained in his early paintings, which are still figural: here, the elements of the late Miro, the famous jovial, ‘childish’ abstract coloured shapes, are present in the guise of details of an overall figural canvas. Miro thus in a way ‘reified’ his own work, he ‘forgot’ the dialectical mediation of its elements, he abstracted them from their totality and conferred upon them the appearance of independence. The logic of the inversion is everywhere the same: the jovial childish immediacy which at first emerges as the form-of-expression of its opposite, i.e. as the affected manifestation of the deepest despair in which the subject is no longer able to express his/her horror directly but can only mimic an idiotic innocence, loses this ‘mediation’ and pretends to be ‘true’ childish innocence. 11 Cf. Jacques Lacan, Séminaire, livre VII: L’étbique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986), ch. XX. 12 Beside the real impossibility and the symbolic prohibition there is a third, imaginary, version the economy of which is psychotic: incest is necessary and unavoidable since every libidinal object is incestuous. An exemplary case of it is the Catharic heresy which prohibits every sexual relation, claiming that intercourse with whichever libidinal

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object, not only with one’s parents, is incestuous. As to these three modalities of incest (its impossibility, prohibition, necessity), cf. Peter Widmer, ‘Jenseits des Inzestverbots’, Riss, 2, 4 and 6, Zürich 1986–7. 13 On another level, the same paradoxical reversal characterizes ‘national revival’ under the conditions of colonial repression: it is only the colonial repression (‘prohibition’) which stirs up resistance and thus renders possible the ‘national revival’. The ‘spontaneous’ idea that we are salvaging the remains of a previous tradition from under the yoke of colonial repression corresponds precisely to what Hegel calls ‘the illusion of (external) reflection’: what we overlook in so far as we are victims of this illusion is that Nation, national identity, comes to be through the experience of the threat to its existence—previous to this experience, it did not exist at all. This goes not only for the classical anti-colonial struggle but also for the present national tensions in the Soviet Union: although they experience themselves as a return to the pre-Communist tradition, it was the very Communist ‘repression’ which, by means of prohibition, opened up their space, i.e. posited them as possible. 14 Here we encounter the function of the ‘subject supposed to believe’: the existing order is legitimized via the fact that a doubt about it would betray the naïve belief of the Other (of the foreign worker who believes in the USSR, who, by means of this belief, confers meaning and consistency upon his life). As to the notion of the ‘subject supposed to believe’, cf. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso Books, 1989), pp. 185–6. 15 For another reading of this paradox cf. The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 45–7. 16 Cf. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), ch. II. 17 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 159. 18 ibid., p. 154. 19 ibid., pp. 154–5. 20 ibid, p. 168. 21 ibid., p. 161. This reversal of trauma into bliss is equivalent to a kind of symbolic lobotomy: excision of the traumatic tumour, like the operation to which Francis Farmer was submitted in order to ‘feel good’ in the American everyday ideology. 22 The best indicator of this inherent impasse of the ‘pleasure principle’ is the actual state of popular ideology in the USA, so-called ‘nonism’, i.e. NON-ideology: the attitude of radical renunciation (to pollution, to fat and cholesterol in food, to stressful situations, etc.). In short, the final price for a pleasure-oriented life is that the subject is bombarded from all sides by superego prohibitions: don’t eat fat and beef, avoid food with pesticides, don’t smoke, don’t pollute…a new empirical confirmation of Lacan’s paradoxical inversion of Dostoyevski’s famous proposition in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted’: nothing at all is permitted—not even the most innocent pleasures of eating, drinking and smoking. More precisely, we can get anything, but in an aseptic, substanceless form—anything, including the most cruel fantasies, like that of ‘Ratman’, Freud’s famous analysant (of being tortured by a rat who penetrates the anus). A recent hushed-up scandal with a movie star revealed that the staging of this fantasy is currently fashionable in Hollywood: a veterinary surgeon cuts off the teeth and claws of a mouse; it is then put

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in a bag and its tail tied to a string; when the bag is deep in the anus, the excitement is provided by the animal’s desperate motion till it suffocates; then it is pulled out by the tail (the problem of the Hollywood star was that he pulled the string too hard, so that the dead mouse stayed within and the star had to seek medical help). Here we have the paradox of consumption-nonism: you can get everything, but in a form robbed of substance—cake without sugar and fat, beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, mouse without teeth and claws… 23 We all know the crucial step accomplished by the theory of relativity, the step from the thesis that matter ‘curves’, ‘bends’, space to the thesis that what we call ‘matter’ is nothing but the curvature of space. Perhaps this homology enables us to grasp the Lacanian proposition on the purely formal status of objet a: far from being the positive, material cause of the curvature, the derailing of the path of desire, objet a—in so far as it is perceived as a positive entity (the Lady in courtly love, for example), is nothing but a chimerical materialization of the curved structure of the space of desire itself. And since the only ‘substance’ (‘matter’) acknowledged by psychoanalysis is enjoyment, we can also say that enjoyment is ultimately nothing but a certain purely formal curvature of the space of pleasure/displeasure, a curvature which makes us experience pleasure in displeasure itself.

Apes and familiars: modernism, mimesis and the work of Wyndham Lewis PETER NICHOLLS

Tarr bowed to Kreisler as Bertha said his name. Kreisler raised his hat.=Then, with a curious feeling of already thrusting himself on these people, he began to walk along beside Bertha.=She moved like an unconvincing party to a bargain, who consents to walk up and down a little, preliminary to a final consideration of the affair. ‘Yes, but walking won’t help matters’, she might have been saying.=Kreisler’s indifference was absolute.=There was an element of child’s privilege in Tarr’s making himself of the party, (‘Sorbet, tu es si jeune’). There was the claim for indulgence of a spirit not entirely serious!=The childishness of this turning up as though nothing had happened, with such wilful resolve not to recognise the seriousness of things, Bertha’s drama, the significance of the awful words, ‘Herr Kreisler!’ and so on, was present to him.=Bertha must know the meaning of his rapid resurrection—she knew him too well not to know that.=So they walked on, without conversation. Then Tarr enquired if she were ‘quite well’. ‘Yes, Sorbert, quite well,’ she replied, with soft tragic banter.1

Wyndham Lewis’s fiction is full of such edgy moments, of encounters where hesitation and mutual suspicion underwrite his characters’ laborious production of their social ‘drama’. So the ‘three-legged affair’ of Tarr, Bertha and Otto Kreisler steps its clumsy way between concealment and histrionic self-display. Kreisler (the artist manqué) pretends indifference while wanting Bertha; Bertha meanwhile wants Tarr but is preoccupied with her preparations for the ‘drama’ necessary to achieve that end; and Tarr, who as the authentic artist-figure should have nothing to do with either of them, indulges himself by playing the naïf. Tarr, we quickly learn, is particularly bad at handling such ‘sentimental’ moments: his realm is that of the intellect (‘He had no social machinery but the cumbrous one of the intellect’ (p. 23)) and as Lewis would insist throughout his career, ‘when reason speaks the language of feeling, it is liable to become a most muddled jargon.’2 Once we have remarked Tarr’s lack of ‘social machinery’ we will be prepared for another highly ambiguous word in Lewis’s lexicon, ‘personality’. In the awkward encounter recorded above, it is the ‘personality’ which is the medium of self-dramatization, a chameleonic shifting of personal projections induced, like Bertha’s ‘soft tragic banter’, by the changing social environment. ‘Personalities’ in this sense come and go (at one point Tarr and Bertha are caught ‘posing for their late personalities’ (p. 220)), and if Lewis’s fiction never handles drama or ‘action’ without irony it is because these modes of self-presentation, grounded as they are in habits of

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imitation, can never rise above the second-rate. Hence, too, his rejection of Eliot’s rather confused notion of ‘impersonality’, with its proliferation of time-bound selves, in favour of some form of psychic stability: It might be a good thing—I do not say it is—for an artist to have a ‘personality’, and for a scientist not to have a personality: though here of course I am not using ‘personality’ in the Ballyhoo sense—I do not mean an individualist abortion, bellowing that it wants at all costs to ‘express’ itself…. I mean only a constancy and consistency in being, as concretely as possible, one thing—at peace with itself, if not with the outer world, though that is likely to follow after an interval of struggle.3 But this ideal of being ‘one thing’ is hardly likely to be valued in a world which makes a ‘religion of impermanence’4 and where ‘personality’ turns out to be something on loan from somebody else. So Lewis observes in The Art of Being Ruled that the more ‘individual’ people think they are, the more they are expressing a ‘group personality’: ‘If they were subsequently watched in the act of “expressing” their “personality”, it would be found that it was somebody else’s personality they were expressing.’5 It is easy to let preconceptions about Lewis (the ‘Modernist-as-Fascist’) blur our apprehension of the issues at stake here.6 I want to suggest that his unravelling of social relations involves more than a conventional right-wing rejection of the ‘herd’; that what we have in his fiction and theoretical essays is in fact a very precise mapping out of a set of problems which lay at the heart of a particular modernism. That modernism, which it is too paradoxical to call ‘British’, is one he shares with Pound, Joyce and Eliot. It is a canonical modernism, but one which is also highly particularized, concerned to define its aims against those not only of the main European avant-gardes but also of writers closer to home like Conrad, Woolf and Lawrence. There were differences enough, of course, between the socalled ‘Men of 1914’—differences which Lewis, for reasons we shall see, was keen to emphasize—but what gave the four writers an early sense of common purpose was their rejection of ‘romanticism’ in the name of avant-garde modernism. This rejection took various forms, but it was motivated at bottom by a critique of the notions of spontaneity and originality which underpinned the ideal of (lyric) expressivity which writers like Woolf and Lawrence seemed to be developing from romanticism. The ‘Men of 1914’ version of modernism is in this sense rooted in a paradox which I want to explore in some detail: for while their critiques of modernity are aimed at contemporary tendencies toward social imitation, their repudiation of other types of modernism derives from a scepticism toward those very forms of romantic ‘authenticity’ which might seem to offer an alternative to a ubiquitous mimetism. To assume, then, that this modernism is simply anti-mimetic is to miss the complex roles which ideas of secondariness and imitation play here. Indeed, one guiding assumption will prove to be that a certain type of mimesis is the necessary antidote to romanticism, but a mimesis freed in some sense from mere ‘imitation’.7 That modernism is, as a general cultural phenomenon, to be defined through its rejection of mimetic modes is a commonplace which does not require documentation here. In its more complex versions, the proposition connects a fundamental hostility to representation with a desire to seize the present. This is the project of modernism as Paul de Man defines it:

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The continuous appeal of modernity, the desire to break out of literature toward the reality of the moment, prevails and, in its turn, folding back upon itself, engenders the repetition and continuation of literature.8 De Man’s conception of modernity as ‘a falling away from literature and a rejection of history’ certainly catches the tone of some of the main tendencies within European modernism. But this preoccupation with immediacy, with ‘the reality of the moment’, is precisely what Lewis’s own modernism rejects: A space must be cleared, all said and done, round the hurly-burly of the present. No man can reflect or create, in the intellectual sense, while he is acting—fighting, playing tennis, or making love. The present man in all of us is the machine. The farther away from the present, though not too far, the more free.9 For Lewis, the epitome of such ‘Presentism’ is the Italian futurist, whose ‘life is such an eternal present as is matter’s; only being a machine, he wears out’.10 This rejection of an ‘eternal’ present and the dream of transcendence it embodies certainly distinguishes Lewis’s modernism from most of the pre-war tendencies in Europe.11 Hence the concern in Tarr with forms of mimetism and the emphatic demonstration of the unoriginality of romantic desire. Bertha, we discover, is not really an object of desire for either Tarr or Kreisler; she is rather a stake in the game between them, ‘an unconvincing party to a bargain’. The rivalry between the two competitors turns out to be more important than its ostensible object, just as the drama of Kreisler’s ludicrous duel with Soltyk soon eclipses any thoughts of Anastasya. Lewis’s way of structuring the narrative through markedly symmetrical relations between characters emphasizes a kind of ‘doubling’ at work: envy springs from imitation rather than from competition for an object, and in a characteristic move Kreisler will strive to usurp Tarr’s place only to discover that in the process he has lost his own.12 We are close here to René Girard’s account of ‘imitative desire’ as the principal discovery of the modern novel. In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard describes what he calls the ‘triangulation of desire’, a relation structured around subject, model and object.13 It is in nineteenth-century fiction, he argues, that desire is first seen to be mediated by and copied from a third party whose function as a model turns out to be more important than the actual object of desire. According to Girard, the transition to ‘modernity’ can be mapped by the shift from ‘external’ to ‘internal’ mediation: where under the ancien régime the model to be copied had been transcendent to the subject (‘beyond the universe of the hero’ (p. 9)), ‘internal mediation triumphs in a universe where the differences between men [sic] are gradually erased’ (p. 14) and the model becomes increasingly like the subject. All desire is in this sense ‘Desire according to the Other’ (p. 5), and internal mediation is fraught with hatred and rivalry, since the model functions as both the origin of the subject’s desire and the obstacle to any realization of it. Desire thus becomes ‘metaphysical’, detached from pragmatic considerations and the pursuit of any ‘tangible advantage’ (p. 86). This, argues Girard, is the world of Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoievsky and Proust, whose work exposes the romantic myth of spontaneous desire and explores the violence on which social relations are founded. It is not difficult to read Tarr in this context, and perhaps for that reason Lewis’s early enthusiasm for Dostoievsky has often been invoked in discussions of the novel. There is one

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main difference, though, for already in Tarr the drama of rivalry has begun to approach burlesque; as in the later Snooty Baronet (1932), tragedy has degenerated into black comedy. There is a calculated slide toward pastiche here by which Lewis surely means to suggest that in his own time, in the world of mass politics and advanced consumerism, imitative desire produces not active antagonism but passive identification.14 As he puts it in another early book, ‘The life of the crowd, of the common or garden man, is exterior. He can live only through others, outside himself.’15 In the later Time and Western Man, the point is made more vividly: For our only terra firma in a boiling and shifting world is, after all, our ‘self’. That must cohere for us to be capable at all of behaving in any way but as mirror-images of alien realities, or as the most helpless and lowest organisms, as worms or as sponges.16 The function of art must be accordingly to refuse such osmotic identification and to create a fictional world in which we are denied the too-easy solace of sympathetic involvement. Kreisler, Lewis pithily remarked, is ‘a machine (a “puppet”, not a nature)’.17

II This aspect of Lewis’s writing is familiar and not widely liked, but it might help to understand the need for its particular asperity if we look briefly at another work of the time which explores the theme of imitative desire in a very different way. In Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Dowell’s narrative provides a striking example of desire as identification. Dowell’s ignorance of Ashburnham’s affair with his wife Florence is so extreme as to hint at collusion. Ashburnham usurps his friend’s position quite blatantly, but instead of reacting in a spirit of antagonism and rivalry, Dowell finds himself accepting Leonora’s ‘look of a mother to her son, of a sister to her brother…she looked at me as if I were an invalid’.18 It is not coincidental that family relations should be called upon to defuse aggression here, for only the family can sustain this residually feudal order (Ashburnham has been ‘the good landlord and father of his people’ (p. 153)). The myth of the family is in short the bedrock of the ‘sentimentalism’ of an order doomed to disappear,19 an order in which masculine desire produces not open rivalry but envy. Ford’s sympathies lie clearly enough with this order, but at the same time the novel cannot help exposing Ashburnham’s moral ‘innocence’ as a sort of socialized infantilism—Leonora ‘was even taught that such excesses in men are natural, excusable—as if they had been children’ (p. 170)—and the regular association of Dowell with figures of weakness prepares us for that final moment of emotional identification which registers the full absurdity of imitative desire: thinking of Ashburnham, Dowell concludes that ‘I love him because he was just myself.…I am just as much a sentimentalist as he’ (p. 227). Ford, no doubt, hoped that this remarkable moment of forgiveness might give substance to the ‘sentimental’ world of good soldiers, but viewed from the starker standpoint of Lewis’s fiction, Dowell’s passivity signals modernity’s collapse into passive imitation. It is ironic indeed that the opening section of The Good Soldier should first appear in Lewis’s Blast (under the title ‘The Saddest Story’), for Ford’s valedictory gesture toward a society in which

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‘tradition’ and class structure could still mask the drift toward psychic uniformity clearly placed the novel outside Lewis’s own conception of the modernist avant-garde.20 That Dowell could allow his desires to be fulfilled by another and then convince himself of the moral fineness of his usurper would surely have expressed for Lewis the very essence of old lavender. And when Dowell tells us on the final page of the novel that Ashburnham was ‘to the last, a sentimentalist, whose mind was compounded of indifferent poems and novels’ (p. 229), Ford (one might imagine Lewis remarking) has given the game away: the pathos of identification which the novel cannot bring itself to disavow is the reflex of large-scale cultural enervation. This ‘sentimental’ elision of life and art would become the constant butt of Lewis’s satire as he tried to dissociate the secondary forms of ‘social’ desire from the creative work of the artistic intelligence. Tarr’s habitual response is thus, we assume, close to Lewis’s own: ‘He exalts Life into a Comedy, when otherwise it is, to his mind, a tawdry zone of half-art, or a silly Tragedy. Art is the only thing worth the tragic impulse, for him’ (p. 20). When life becomes ‘tragic’ we may be sure (according to Lewis) that sex is involved, for a vulgar ideology of romance has falsely transformed an ‘appetite’ (p. 28) into something ‘artistic’ which masquerades as ‘original’ desire. So Tarr, for example, ‘had a theory that snobbery and sex, like religion and sex, were to be found together’ (p. 23)—a theory founded on the idea that sexual desire is somehow based in imitation (just as Kreisler desires Bertha simply as a move in his struggle with Tarr). In other words, sexual desire produces a sort of lacuna in the subject, a lack which is made good by copying someone else’s desire, by finding a relation with another by which one’s own self might then be mirrored back in idealized form. Herein lies the most important difference between Kreisler and Tarr, for whereas ‘Woman was the aesthetic element in Kreisler’s life’ (p. 102), Tarr had always known that ‘Surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for an artist’ (p. 214). There is misogyny here, but although Lewis, like the other ‘Men of 1914’, yields too easily to the temptation of this kind of bravado, something else is involved as well. For sexual desire is a kind of ‘suicide’ not primarily because it entails a surrender of the masculine to the female will, but because the romantic pursuit of the ‘other’ proves in fact to be the pursuit of the ‘same’. For all its pretensions to ‘drama’, romantic desire amounts to not much more than a kind of infantile narcissism, and while there is plenty in Lewis’s work to evidence chauvinism in these matters, there is also much to show that he was trying to uncover a process of social identification which went beyond the categories of gender. This is particularly clear in The Art of Being Ruled where Lewis’s attempt to deal objectively with feminism is based on the assumption that ‘There is no mysterious difference between the nature of the sexes.’21 Seen from this perspective, the doubling and symmetry within his narratives testifies to the inescapable specularity of desiring relations, to the narcissism which he locates as the structural compulsion of democratic (or communistic) societies for which the other must always prove to be the same. That drive toward the ‘suppressing of differences’22 expresses for Lewis the negative principle within modernity, for in finding itself elsewhere, the subject experiences a loss of the borders of the self, a loss of that psychic territoriality which stands over against the regressive and ‘jellyish diffuseness’ of those who display ‘a lack of energy, permanently mesmeric state, and almost purely emotional reactions’ (p. 314). Sexuality construed as desire rather than as simple appetitive need thus seems to threaten the self by opening the way to fantasies of identification whose unreality derives from a

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narcissistic suppression of otherness. That such fantasies are especially damaging to the artistic intelligence is a view expressed not only by Lewis, but also, in different ways, by Pound, Eliot and Joyce. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example, Stephen Dedalus’s youthful lust leaves him ‘drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon’, while Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley similarly ‘drifted on’ after his first experience of ‘real’ passion has produced an ‘impetuous troubling/Of his imagery’.23 The conjunction of ideas of ‘drift’, sexual desire, and youth is linked to this modernism’s conception of a romanticism which it must outgrow and leave behind. Claims for the autonomy of the new avant-garde are thus associated with a model of psychic development which to some extent parallels the Freudian trajectory from primary narcissism to objectival desire. There is no acknowledged debt to Freud here (in fact, Freud is always categorized by these writers as a prime instigator of the ‘romantic twilight’, in Lewis’s phrase),24 but the decadence/modernism relation provides an alternative model for an (historical) emergence from solipsism into a dynamic relation to the world.25 This is precisely the way that Eliot recalls his early encounter with Romantic poetry: I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, [and] Swinburne…. At this period, the poem, or the poetry of a single poet, invades the youthful consciousness and assumes complete possession for a time. We do not really see it as something with an existence outside ourselves; much as in our youthful experiences of love, we do not so much see the person as infer the existence of some outside object which sets in motion these new and delightful feelings in which we are absorbed.26 Eliot, rather like Freud, defines maturation in terms of the drawing of boundaries between self and other; perception of an object therefore signals the emergence from narcissistic fantasy, an emphasis we might trace in the related poetics of ‘imagism’ and Eliot’s own ‘objective correlative’. As in the examples from Pound and Joyce, ‘youthful desire’ threatens the necessary distance between self and other: the subject loses its identity in another, just as the youthful sensibility may be ‘invaded’ by the work of an earlier poet. Eliot, like Lewis, thus tends to regard romantic desire as damaging because it is both ‘private’ and unoriginal. This rejection of privacy as somehow decadent may again seem odd in the face of the usual understanding of modernism as a turn toward the subjective. But one has only to compare Henry James’s complaints about the ‘complete proscription of privacy’ in America to gauge the particular emphases of this modernism.27 James’s disorientation in the new public spaces of hotels contrasts markedly with, say, Lewis’s preoccupation with bars and pensions in his early Breton stories.28 For Lewis, these are privileged spaces of adult hospitality, spaces freed from the claustrophobic constraints of the domestic scene, and his subsequent critique of modernity focuses on the disappearance of an authentically public sphere. For ‘[t]he present age is a private age in-the-making’,29 with genuine sociality now overtaken by the ‘personal life’: ‘Each individual, when he got the chance, became a little universe to himself of exclusive personal life.’30 This ‘personal life’ is thoroughly mediated by a culture of consumption in which, Lewis argues, as work becomes less important than play, ‘this part of life into which all the cultural activities would be pressed would now become the serious part.’31 A society defining itself in terms of leisure is thus one in which life becomes increasingly

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aestheticized: ‘art’ provides the collective representations of a ‘private’ life which is founded in the rituals of imitation. Hence the indictment in Tarr of life as ‘a tawdry zone of halfart’ (p. 20), for it is not simply that modern existence has been invaded by ‘artistic’ values, with the process of commodification governed more and more by the criterion of the ‘beautiful’; to this we must add that modernity’s degraded aesthetic produces an iconography bound by the frozen time of passive identification. As Lewis puts it: The world in which Advertisement dwells is a one-day world. It is necessarily a plane universe, without depth. Upon this Time lays down discontinuous entities, side by side; each day, each temporal entity, complete in itself, with no perspectives, no fundamental exterior reference at all.32 The lack of ‘exterior reference’ and the idea of claustrophobic enclosure (‘each day… complete in itself’) connect Lewis’s critique of advertising with his campaign for ‘public values, in contrast to the private values of the half-lighted places of the mind’.33 With modernity, however, the public sphere is itself eroticized, as advertising and fashion establish forms of hegemony based on mimicry and imitative desire: In all this vast smooth-running process you see the image of a political state in which no legislation, police, or any physical compulsion would be required: in which everything would be effected by public opinion, snobbery, and the magic of fashion.34 Fashion provides the perfect vehicle for modernity’s conflation of the aesthetic and erotic, with the romantic dream of union symbolizing a general loss of social differentiation. Lewis quotes approvingly Julien Benda’s critique of this aspect of modernity: Note, also, a strong emotion, caused at the sight of this innate conjunction procured between the soul of the artist and that of the object, such as the sight of two people intimately embracing would awaken. Let us learn to recognize, also, in their will to install themselves inside things, a kind of thirst to sexually invade everything—to violate any intimity, and mix themselves in the most intimate recesses of the being of everything met.35 Benda’s idea of ‘sexual invasion’ encapsulates Lewis’s own misgivings about sexual desire as a medium of identification which produces psychic uniformity. Tarr, we recall, aligns sex with snobbery because both are grounded in a degraded ‘aesthetic’ which promotes imitation as originality (as Girard puts it, ‘The snob does not dare trust his own judgment, he desires only objects desired by others. That is why he is the slave of the fashionable’ (p. 24)). Snobbism is thus, Lewis suggests, the underlying principle of a society in which ‘culture’ has become the most powerful means of social integration. Such a society is motivated by the search for models to copy and by a desire to feel at home everywhere. That need to live in a world purged of otherness is the principal motive behind what Lewis dismisses as the various romantic fashions of the time (the child-cult, artistic amateurism, homosexuality, and the time-cult).36 To be ‘in love with the past’, for example, as Lewis claimed Pound was, is to want to inhabit the past, to deny its strangeness in an act of imaginative colonization. Such projections are, Lewis tells us repeatedly, grounded in the fantasies of the nursery, a site

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which has an important part to play in the too-cultural world of The Apes of God. ‘Whenever we get a good thing, the shadow comes with it, its ape and familiar’, claims Lewis,37 his choice of words reminding us once more of primary narcissism and the play of imitation which constitutes familiar and familial bonds.

III Can there, then, be any successful defence against the lure of the mimetic? Here Lewis shifts between a strategy of withdrawal (the posture of The Enemy’) and a humorously aggressive participation in social ritual at the level of surface only. As he puts it in The Art of Being Ruled, ‘it is the spirit of the artist that maintains this superficiality, differentiation of existence, for us: our personal, our detached life, in short, in distinction to our crowd-life.’38 It is this division between surface and depth, public and private, which Lewis explores in the early sketch called ‘Some Innkeepers and Bestre’. Here he celebrates the ‘characterless, subtle, protean social self of the modern man’ which is made possible by the ‘conventional, civilised abstraction of social life’: And such a result can only be achieved by this modern ideal of abstracting energy from a purely personal and coercive form, and making it a fluid, unaccented medium—the civilised man, in short. This is the modern man’s ideal of realising himself in others; that is, the degree of himself, and not the specific character, which is inalienable.39 That last sentence may seem to echo Hegel’s concept of ‘recognition’, but Lewis is careful to specify a dimension of the ‘very self’ which must remain disengaged from the agonistics of social life. The distinction is crucial to his thought, since it allows mimetism to be grasped (and controlled) as self-conscious play rather than misconstruing it as self-expression (hence Tarr can allow himself to act the naïf, just as the young Lewis could visit a bal musette in Paris as a character out of Tolstoy).40 The problems attaching to Lewis’s politics come into focus here, since the polemical role of the Enemy is to restore a certain distance to social relations which modern democracies have rendered too proximate. Lewis accordingly found it increasingly difficult to attach his political theory to any political party. The infamous Hitler (1931) notwithstanding, the whole thrust of his thought was against identification and he therefore could not share the later enthusiasm of Pound and Eliot for ‘strong’ figures like Mussolini and Maurras.41 The concept of the ‘Enemy’ entails a refusal of any identification, a refusal which is in line with Lewis’s observation in The Lion and the Fox that ‘The feudal european [sic] king was essentially not a patriarch, but a stranger and an enemy.’42 Lewis’s preference for distance over identification is, however, something he shared with Pound, Joyce and Eliot during the first phase of modernism; like Tarr, all four ‘turned away from the immediate world’ (p. 29) and from the romantic fantasies of ‘presence’ which would receive their most extreme expression in Artaud’s theory of ‘absolute’ theatre.43 That turning away was, in contrast, a turn toward art and toward representation (Lewis later observed of the development in his painting that ‘Writing—literature—dragged me out of the abstractist cul-de-sac’).44 Two different conceptions of mimesis now begin to appear: on the

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one hand, mimesis as mere imitation (this is the social principle of a debased modernity), and, on the other, mimesis as a process which somehow supplements its model.45 Within this ‘logic of the supplement’ we can detect two main tendencies which will help to distinguish the work of Lewis from that of Pound, Joyce and Eliot. For the latter group, a productive mimesis can be defined in terms of intertextuality rather than by presupposing some relation between text and reality.46 It is curious that Girard, while arguing that the standard view of imitation, from Plato on, fails to consider the role of ‘appropriation’,47 does not refer this insight to the intertextual relation. As Lacoue-Labarthe observes,’ “literature”, far from reflecting (as Girard always seems somewhat tempted to think) a prior generalized mimetism, is on the contrary what provokes mimetism.’48 The supplementary function of mimesis, then, exploits both lack and excess, with, say, Hölderlin’s translations from the ancient Greek ‘making Greek art say what it had not said’.49 The function of textual imitation (of pastiche, allusion, citation, translation) in the work of Pound, Joyce and Eliot thus constantly undermines an aesthetic of spontaneous desire. Hence, too, perhaps, the importance of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as a precursor of this modernism: for while Emma’s career is the very embodiment of secondhand (‘literary’) desire, Flaubert’s countervailing model of verbal precision (the novel itself) tacitly proposes a ‘genuine’ aesthetic as a ground of critical distance. A literary style thus steeped in self-reflexivity at once reveals the illusion of spontaneous desire and presents itself as an alternative model to be copied. That ‘copying’, however, is a process grounded in self-irony, since the fundamental presupposition of ‘style’ is that desire is always mediated by textuality and thus has to be grasped, as it were, from the outside, from the standpoint of ‘writing’ rather than by an act of imaginative identification. So while the ‘Men of 1914’ stress the importance of the object as support for a properly ‘externalized’ desire, this emphasis is coupled with a powerful sense of that desire as mediated by existing literary models-and conventions (it is, to adapt Pound’s phrase, desire ‘made new’ rather than fantasized as somehow original). We are now in a better position to understand Lewis’s critique of these modernists, for while the ‘intertextual’ form of mimesis might seem to promise a full critique of romanticism, it actually produces, in his view, only new patterns of identification. If Pound, Eliot and Joyce are all in different ways caught up in the Bergsonian ‘time-cult’, that is because their preoccupation with the past is founded on a will to reanimate and humanize that which, properly, is dead (a form of imaginative ‘sympathy’ re-opens the self to the kind of ‘invasion’ of which Eliot spoke). Lewis’s own approach to the past is deliberately different: The Past as myth—as history, that is, in the classical sense—a Past in which events and people stand in an imaginative perspective, a dead people we do not interfere with, but whose integrity we respect—that is a Past that any person who has a care for the principle of individual life will prefer to ‘history-as-evolution’ or ‘historyas-communism’.50 Lewis’s ‘classical’ version of history thus flatly opposes a romantic ‘past’ conjured up by a parasitical modernism which, as he observes of Pound’s, is always trying ‘to get into the skin of somebody else’.51 Such parasitism makes art merely the reflex of a democratic Zeitgeist; as Lewis would later remark in Rude Assignment (1950), There is, indeed, no “other fellow” any longer: otherness, like opposition, is reactionary. We are all One Fellow.’52

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It is the function of art, then, to restore that lost ‘otherness’ and thereby to inhibit the sort of compound identification which makes us ‘all One Fellow’. The argument for the ‘deadness’ of art which Lewis gives to Tarr draws on the nineteenth-century preference for artifice over nature, but does so in such a way as to block any appeal to erotic ‘sentiment’.53 Here we approach Lewis’s alternative to the ‘time-bound’ forms of intertextual mimesis: ‘…deadness is the first condition of art. A hippopotamus’ armoured hide, a turtle’s shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand; that opposed to naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life, along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement, on the other.—Deadness, then,’ Tarr went on, ‘in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.’ (pp. 299–300; Lewis’s emphases) Thus conceived, the art-work has no ‘flame-like ego’ to warm our own, and its pure exteriority signals the death of any compensatory metaphys-ics. It is easy to underestimate the severity of Lewis’s aesthetics, especially as his rejection of naturalism seems to have something in common with Pound’s.54 But Tarr’s theory of art has no place for the concept of transcendent ‘form’ which underpins much of Pound’s early thought about representation. What Lewis has in mind is something closer to Heidegger’s way of linking art to mortality. Gianni Vattimo summarizes the theme as follows: The monument—and, historically speaking, neoclassical art is also this—is not the artistic casting of a full life, but rather a formula which is already constituted in such a way as to transmit itself, and is therefore already marked by its destiny of radical alienation: it is marked definitively, in so many words, by mortality. The monument-formula is not constructed so as to ‘defeat’ time, imposing itself on and regardless of time, but so as to endure in time instead.55 The work of art thus exists as a trace or memory, as part of a temporal continuum which we cannot re-live.56 Once the habits of identification and assimilation are checked, the way is open to conceive the work as the production of an aesthetic otherness which opens a gap or breach within the rhythmic flow of social life, fracturing the ‘everyday drunkenness of the normal real’57 and confronting the complacent smile of the happy inebriate with the savage ‘grimace’ of the artist. As Lewis puts it in Men Without Art, ‘the non-human outlook must be there (beneath the fluff and pulp which is all that is seen by the majority) to correct our soft conceit.’58

IV If art is ‘non-human’, then mimesis is a kind of death; this is Tarr’s conclusion: ‘Death is the

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thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person’ (p. 299). Art, one might say, allows the present to ‘die’ into history, opening a perspective in which a violent comedy might compensate for the passivity of a generalized social mimetism: Violence is of the essence of laughter…it is merely the inversion or failure of force. To put it another way, it is the grin upon the Deathshead. It must be extremely primitive in origin, though of course its function in civilized life is to keep the primitive at bay. But it hoists the primitive with its own explosive.59 The gap between copy and original is now prised open to become the space of satire, a space in which people are seen from the absolutely material perspective of the deathshead as ‘necessarily comic: for they are all things, and physical bodies, behaving as persons’.60 Theperpetual present of mimetic desire is torn apart as it is exposed to the ‘intense and even painful sense of the absurd’ which characterizes satire.61 We are close here to Walter Benjamin’s description of allegory, in which the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head. And although such a thing lacks all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all classical proportion, all humanity—nevertheless, this is the form in which man’s subjection to nature is most obvious and it significantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual.62 Lewis’s conception of satire also requires a ‘petrification’ of the human into the thing-like, an ensemble of grotesque surfaces rather than ‘classical proportion’ (‘art consists…in a mechanising of the natural’).63 Hence the distinction he draws between the ‘external method’ of satire (a product of his ‘philosophy of the EYE’)64 and the ‘internal method’ which he associates with ‘the subterranean stream of the “dark” Unconscious’ and with behavioural imitation: ‘In dealing with (1) the extremely aged; (2) young children; (3) half-wits; and (4) animals, the internal method can be extremely effective. In my opinion it should be entirely confined to those classes of characters.’65 Lewis’s ‘external method’ will function accordingly as a calculated disruption of mimesis: for satire in his sense entails at once dispassionate observation and a withering of its objects into art. Satire, then, supplements its object not by breathing new life into it but by ‘murdering’ it as surely as, in Lacan’s words, ‘the symbol manifests itself as the murder of the thing.’66 If Lewis’s work seeks to break the hold of social imitation by recasting mimesis as a work of supplementation, it therefore does so in an almost literal sense, by making the lack in its object the condition for a satirical excess in its representation. The Apes of God (1930) is in every sense the monumental expression of that process. There Lewis depicts a world of wealth and affectation in which the ‘societification of art’67 has produced a pervasive amateurism. At the centre of this world is the nursery and its games of narcissistic identification; as Horace Zagreus observes, ‘The universal return to the mentality of childhood and of savagery—Nursery after Army, and dug-out canoe after dugouts in

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trenches—that seems to ensue’ (p. 430). Only the shadowy Pierpoint seems uncontaminated by the mimicry and mockery which are the standard currency of this world; a kind of absent original (or Enemy) who often functions as Lewis’s mouthpiece,68 Pierpoint in his ‘encyclical’ to Zagreus grounds the whole novel in a powerfully stated theory of imitative desire: It is to what I have called the Apes of God that I am drawing your attention—those prosperous mountebanks who alternately imitate and mock at and traduce those figures they at once admire and hate. And bringing against such individuals and their productions all the artillery of the female, or bi-sexual tongue, will abuse the object of their envy one day, and imitate him the next: will attempt to identify themselves with him in people’s minds, but in the same breath to belittle him—to lessen if possible the disadvantage for them that this neighbourhood will reveal. (p. 131; Lewis’s emphasis) In a ‘super-democratic’ society (p. 127), ‘aping’ and the ‘propagation of the second-rate’ (p. 129) are the norm, with ‘lifelike imitation’ (p. 367) concealing the real absence of both art and ‘life’. It is a world seeking stability in familiar self-regarding fantasies—‘the love of babyhood, the return to the womb, the corruption of the cradle’ (p. 215)—and Lewis’s exuberantly minute dissection of its lore and social mechanisms hollows it from within, exposing its inner fragility by cataloguing the enormity of its pretensions. Here modernist writing performs what Lewis would regard as its most vital role, showing the disastrous aestheticization of the real while in the same movement making of an ‘excessive’ satirical style the instrument by which to drive a wedge between art and life. As Zagreus puts it, ‘the real should not compete with creations of Fiction. There should be two worlds, not one’ (p. 271). Lewis would agree, but with the caveat that Zagreus is, as usual, stealing his lines from Pierpoint—a final reminder, perhaps, that here, as in almost all of Lewis’s other work, the problem of mimesis appears as the founding condition for modernism itself. University of Sussex

NOTES I am grateful to Rachel Bowlby, Paul Edwards and Alan Munton for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. 1 Wyndham Lewis. Tarr: The 1918 Version, ed. Paul O’Keefe (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), pp. 215–16. See the editorial note on p. 5 of this edition for Lewis’s odd use of the double hyphen as a punctuation device. The novel was revised for a new edition in 1928; for the later text of this passage, see Tarr (London: Calder & Boyars, 1968), pp. 195–6. 2 Men Without Art, ed. Seamus Cooney (1934; Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), p. 108. Cf. Lewis on ‘the enslaving of the intelligent to the affective nature’ in The Art of Being Ruled, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (1926; Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), p. 334. 3 Men Without Art, p. 62.

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4 The Art of Being Ruled, p. 25. 5 ibid., p. 148. 6 This is not a negative judgement on Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), but a reference to the way in which Jameson’s subtitle has been used to obstruct discussion of Lewis’s work. 7 The concept of ‘mimesis’ has recently become central to debates in philosophy and psychoanalysis. See especially Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 119, on the need to ‘deliver mimesis from imitation’. This volume, along with its ‘Introduction: Desistance’ by Jacques Derrida, has helped shape the present essay, as have Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde: Aspects of a Philosophy of Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), and the works by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen cited below. 8 Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 162. 9 ‘Essay on the objective of plastic art in our time’, in Walter Michel and C.J.Fox (eds), Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 213. 10 ibid., p. 212. Pound’s rejection of Italian Futurism as ‘accelerated impressionism’ similarly emphasizes the conjunction of the romantic and technological—see ‘Vorticism’ (1914), reprinted in Gaudier-Brzeska (1916; Hessle: Marvell Press, 1960), p. 82. 11 On this aspect of European modernism, see my ‘Futurism, gender and theories of postmodernity’, Textual Practice, 3. 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 202–21; ‘Consumer poetics’, New Formations, 13 (May 1991), pp. 75–90; and ‘Sexuality and structure: tensions in early expressionism’, New Theatre Quarterly, VII, 26 (May 1991), pp. 160– 70. 12 See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (1982; London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 36, on Melanie Klein’s theory of envy: ‘It does not arise out of competition for the object (the loved, desired object); it focusses instead on a double (and not a third party), an interloper who is increasingly hated as the subject puts herself in the other’s place and finds herself deprived of what then becomes her place.’ 13 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Further references will be given in the text. 14 Cf. Jameson, Fables of Aggression, pp. 35–61, on the ‘agons of the “pseudo-couple” ’. 15 The Caliph’s Design, ed. Paul Edwards (1919; Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1986), p. 30. 16 Time and Western Man (1927; Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), p. 5. 17 Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography, ed. Toby Foshay (1950; Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1984), p. 165. Cf. ‘Inferior religions’ (1917), in The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), p. 150, where Lewis remarks of his characters that ‘They are only shadows of energy, not living beings. Their mechanism is a logical structure and they are nothing but that.’

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18 The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 37. Dowell also designates himself as a child and patient (p. 50), a ‘male sick nurse’ (p. 68), and ‘a woman or a solicitor’ (p. 224). Further references will be given in the text. 19 Throughout the novel, Ford aligns ‘sentiment’ with an order doomed to disappear and characterizes it as a predominantly masculine attribute (Ashburnham, for example, is ‘just a normal man and very much of a sentimentalist’ (p. 141), whereas Leonora’s ‘purposeful efficiency’ (p. 131) also entails a ‘want of sentiment’ (p. 132)). The same theme is more obviously pursued in the tetralogy Parade’s End (1924–8). 20 On Ford’s death, Lewis explained to Pound that he could not write an obituary, ‘not having been a Fordie-fan or having been able to readmore than 3 lines of any of his fiction’. Lewis concluded that Ford ‘belonged to a happier & more cultivated age than this’ (see Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 212). 21 The Art of Being Ruled, p. 250. Jameson, Fables of Aggression, p. 97, observes that for Lewis, The positive term which logically corresponds to the negative one of the female principle is not the male…but rather art, which is not the place of a subject, masculine or otherwise, but rather impersonal and inhuman.’ 22 The Art of Being Ruled, p. 29 (Lewis’s emphasis). 23 The Essential James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 125; Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), pp. 217, 219. 24 Rude Assignment, p. 180. 25 On modernist conceptualizations of decadence, see my ‘Futurism, gender and theories of postmodernity’, pp. 202–12. 26 ‘On the development of taste’, in The Use of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), pp. 33–4. See also the discussion in Cassandra Laity, ‘H.D. and A.C.Swinburne: decadence and modernist women’s writing’, Feminist Studies, 15, 3 (Fall 1989), pp. 467–70. 27 The American Scene, ed. W.H.Auden (1907; New York: Scribner’s, 1946), p. 168. Cf. ibid., pp. 166–7: The custom rages like a conspiracy for nipping the interior in the bud, for denying its right to exist, for ignoring and defeating it in every possible way, for wiping out successively each sign by which it may be known from an exterior.’ Lewis, in Men Without Art, p. 126, criticizes James for turning ‘inwards instead of outwards’ (Lewis’s emphases). 28 On this aspect of Lewis’s early work, see Alan Munton, ‘Wyndham Lewis: the transformations of carnival’, in Giovanni Cianci (ed.), Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/Pittura (Palermo: Sellerio, 1982), pp. 141–57. 29 The Writer and Absolute (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 198. 30 The Art of Being Ruled, p. 69. 31 ibid., p. 142 (Lewis’s emphasis). 32 Time and Western Man, p. 12. 33 Men Without Art, p. 120 (Lewis’s emphases). 34 The Art of Being Ruled, p. 362 (Lewis’s emphasis). 35 Quoted in The Art of Being Ruled, p. 232 (Benda’s emphases). For the original, see Benda, Belphégor (1918; Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1947), p. 9. 36 Lewis’s way of connecting homosexuality with social identification has something in

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common with Freud’s later work (Lewis may have known Totem and Taboo—see The Art of Being Ruled, p. 253, for a reference to the son consuming the father). See also BorchJacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 30, on Freud’s theory that ‘the strictly social (not “directly sexual”) relation with another is a relation with “an otherself”, whether a homosexual counterpart or a model of identification, a narcissistic reflection or an interiorized “object”.’ 37 The Art of Being Ruled, p. 196. 38 ibid., p. 232. 39 The Complete Wild Body, p. 224. 40 Rude Assignment, p. 159. 41 In The Art of Being Ruled, p. 54, for example, Lewis comments on ‘the senseless bellicosity of the reactionary groups of the Action Française types’. His own presentation of Hitler emphasizes his subject’s typical rather than heroic aspects: ‘Adolf Hitler is just a very typical german [sic] “man of the people”…. As even his appearance suggests, there is nothing whatever eccentric about him. He is not only satisfied with, but enthusiastically embraces, his typicalness’ (Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), pp. 31–2). See also Jameson, Fables of Aggression, pp. 179–85. 42 The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (New York and London: Harper, 1927), p. 125 (Lewis’s emphasis). 43 See my ‘Anti-Oedipus? Dada and surrealist theatre, 1916–1935’, New Theatre Quarterly, VII, 28 (November 1991), pp. 331–47. 44 Rude Assignment, p. 139. 45 This sense is already in Aristotle: see Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, p. 255, quoting Aristotle: ‘On the one hand, techne carries to its end [accomplishes, perfects, epitelei] what phusis is incapable of effecting [apergasasthai]; on the other hand, it imitates.’ Lacoue-Labarthe continues (p. 257): ‘Art, since it substitutes for nature, since it replaces it and carries out the poetic process that constitutes its essence, always produces a theater, a representation. That is to say, another representation—or the presentation of something other, which was not yet there, given, or present’ (his emphases). 46 Cf. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 187: ‘Mimetic relations can be regarded as intertextual: relations between one representation and another rather than between a textual imitation and a non-textual origin.’ 47 To double business bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. vii, 201. 48 Typography, p. 130. 49 ibid., p. 221. Cf. ibid.: ‘…if the “modern” was not for Hölderlin something like the après coup, in the strict sense, of Greek art: that is to say, the repetition of what occurred there without ever taking place, and the echo of that unuttered word that nevertheless reverberated in its poetry.’ The form of ‘supplementation’ which underlies this discussion of mimesis should be referred to Derrida’s concept of the supplément in Of Grammatalogy. 50 Time and Western Man, p. 230. Cf. Men Without Art, p. 165: ‘it is the end of history, and the beginning of historical pageant and play.’

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51 Time and Western Man, p. 70. Lewis concludes that ‘This sort of parasit-ism is with him phenomenal.’ It is also fundamentally passive: ‘[H]is is the receptive role; he is the consumer, as he would say’ (ibid., p. 69). 52 Rude Assignment, p. 73 (Lewis’s emphases). 53 See Men Without Art, p. 99: ‘All the nineteenth century poetry of France…from the Fleurs du Mal onwards, was stiffened with Satire, too.’ 54 See, for example, Pound’s critique of a modern aesthetics of the ‘caressable’: The weakness of the caressable work of art, of the work of art which depends upon the caressability of the subject, is, incidentally, that its stimulativeness diminishes as it becomes more familiar. The work which depends upon an arrangement of forms becomes more interesting with familiarity in proportion as its forms are well organized’ (Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 97). 55 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R.Snyder (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), p. 73. Lewis in The Writer and the Absolute, p. 80, refers to Heidegger as ‘the sub-zero climax of German pessimism’, but there is no evidence of a serious engagement with the philosopher’s work. 56 Cf. Time and Western Man, p. 8: ‘The less reality you attach to time as a unity, the less you are able instinctively to abstract it; the more important concrete, individual, or personal time becomes.’ 57 The Complete Wild Body, p. 149. 58 Men Without Art, p. 99. 59 The Complete Wild Body, p. 101. 60 ibid., p. 158 (Lewis’s emphases). 61 Men Without Art, p. 232: ‘“Satire”…refers to an “expressionist” universe which is reeling a little, a little drunken with an overdose of the “ridiculous”—where everything is not only tipped but steeped in a philosophic solution of the material, not of mirth, but of the intense and even painful sense of the absurd.’ 62 The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 166. 63 Men Without Art, p. 129 (Lewis’s emphasis). 64 ibid., p. 97. 65 ibid., pp. 99, 98 (Lewis’s emphasis). 66 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1980), p. 104. 67 The Apes of God (1930; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 131 (Lewis’s emphasis). Further references will be given in the text. 68 And see Julius Ratner’s passing reference (p. 419) to ‘our solitary high-brow pur-sang Lewis’.

The question of the canon: the examples of Searle, Kimball and Kernan PETER ERICKSON

The acrimonious debate in the United States over the literary curriculum prompts two questions: what is the origin of the debate? and how do we assess its larger implications? The debate’s emergence can be directly traced to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which set in motion a network of forces inside and outside the government that converged to promote an aggressively traditionalist cultural discourse. This dual nexus is exemplified by William Bennett’s prominent role as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in which capacity he issued To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984), and by the founding in 1982 of The New Criterion, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball. Thus the Reagan presidency and its extension in the Bush administration have brought into being and lent credibility to a traditionalist cultural line, which in turn appears to support and enhance their presidential legitimacy. One small illustration of the mutually reinforcing nature of these two federal and private institutional sites is Hilton Kramer’s desire to bask in the glow cast by the presence of William Bennett’s successor, Lynne Cheney, at his lecture on ‘the crisis’ in the humanities.1 Kramer’s solution to the crisis—a return to close reading—is based on premises—that the entire profession has abandoned the practice of close reading, that a renewed emphasis on close reading would necessarily result in the vision Kramer wishes to institute—so conspicuously false, and the disproportion between his inflammatory style and meagre content is so drastic, that one’s initial response can only be stunned disbelief. But this is quickly followed by the realization that the main point is extratextual: the paper gains its meaning from the circumstance of Lynne Cheney’s being there to hear it. It is not Kramer’s words so much as Cheney’s tacit bureaucratic authority to act on them that the scene puts on display. Hence Kramer’s need to preserve the otherwise irrelevant details of the original conditions of performance in the published version of his text. Such contexts begin to explain why so much energy is being expended on the issue of the role literature and literary interpretation play in the construction of competing images of national identity. For both sides, symbolic effects are believed to have political effects. The cultural space defined by the curricular debate is one place where basic decisions are being made about how, for example, race is to be represented and thought about. On the conservative side, the fashioning of a new racial politics is involved through the discovery and exploitation of another source of white anxiety: not only will minorities take away your jobs through the ‘reverse discrimination’ of affirmative action, but also your children’s required college reading will include major minority writers! As if political and economic change were not enough, the prospect of cultural change symbolized by a reconstituted curriculum implies a threat at once more subtle and more difficult, if not impossible, to defend against. Reaganism has made a tremendous investment in arousing and defying this

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fear and the appeal of the Reagan legacy cannot be understood without this key element. The underlying message is that minority artists have been able to appropriate the instruments of high culture and thereby to gain access to the collective imagination, that most vulnerable terrain, at a new and sustained level. The conservative antidote is a posture of resistance that insists on a ‘return to the basics’ in higher education in the form of a return to the classics. This high-minded, noble-sounding defence of the great tradition is understood from the traditionalist standpoint as the curtailment of the new scholarship focusing on the political implications of race and gender and as the restoration of our literary heritage to its rightful place as a ‘positive’ inspirational force in national life. Regular communication between British and American critics about this cultural conflict is vital. But the analysis of contemporary British and American cultures should acknowledge not only shared common denominators but also points of difference. There are suggestive parallels between the cultural strategies of Thatcherism and Reaganism; indeed the general framework of the preceding argument about Reagan’s impact will be recognizable to readers familiar with Stuart Hall’s emphasis on the political significance of the cultural field and on the importance of ideological intervention to Thatcher’s overall success.2 Yet, on the other hand, multiculturalism has quite different histories and meanings in the two countries. Kobena Mercer, who studied in England and currently teaches in the United States, remarks on the ‘progressive potential’ of multiculturalism in the latter: One final point on multiculturalism concerns the possibility of a comparative reading of its inscription in official public policy in Britain and the United States. Whereas in Britain, the term emerged as part of a managerial strategy on the part of social democracy in the late 1960s in which cultural difference, or ‘ethnicity’, was invoked as a means of fragmenting the emergence of a collective black identity, in the United States in the 1980s, against the background of neo-conservative hegemony, its connotations suggest a breakdown in the management of ethnic pluralism and draw attention to the question of possible alliances and coalitions between various groups.3 In the American context, it is important to document and to analyse the assumptions and rhetorical moves of the traditionalist reaction for two reasons. First, the traditionalist position has been so highly effective in capturing media attention that it is extremely difficult for the multicultural side to receive a fair and accurate hearing. Second, the traditionalist approach on cultural matters is not confined to a conservative core but extends across the political spectrum.4 Ultimately the cultural clock cannot be turned back: the new work by minority writers will not disappear but continue to grow and to reshape our cultural legacy. In the short term however, serious political consequences follow from how recent literary and scholarly developments are framed and portrayed in public consciousness. The present essay, which is part of a larger project,5 contributes to the critical examination of the traditionalist perspective by focusing on three specific instances. The three writers in question are differently situated: John Searle is a philosopher, Roger Kimball is a managing editor and cultural journalist, Alvin Kernan is a literary critic. Their tonal variations are considerable: Searle is measured and bland, Kimball is combative, and Kernan is plaintive. Despite their differences, however, the three represent a limited range of responses to the issue of canon

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revision. The similarities outweigh the differences because all three adopt a defensive posture: each portrays the canon as under attack and each therefore seeks to protect the canon from hostile take-over.

I The last three decades have witnessed a major literary historical development—the emergence of substantial bodies of work by minority writers. The power of this work resides not only in the strength of individual achievements, but also in the cumulative, collective force that comes from the subtle interrelations among authors’ works within each minority tradition. When I use the term ‘power’, I mean literary power, for it is first and foremost a literary phenomenon. Though it has become habitual to blame theory as the villain for whatever one finds undesirable, this development cannot be explained as a figment foisted on us by literary theorists: the critics are following the creative writers, not the other way around. The overall result is a substantial, though by no means total, shift of power in favour of emergent minority literatures. More than anything else, it is this reallocation that has prompted the current reassessment of the canon. Despite their notoriety, the emergent minority literary traditions have not been admitted, widely and routinely, as part of our general professional discourse. To be sure, all new work encounters a cultural time-lag before it is fully assimilated into ongoing scholarly conversation. But, in this case, a deeper hesitation beyond the normal process of a gradual, phased acceptance is at work—a resistance that concerns the racial implications of increasingly powerful minority literatures. Race is frequently ruled out of bounds as irrelevant to the consideration of literary merit. Nevertheless, the prospect of the combined force of numerous successful minority writers has an important racial meaning because it represents the symbolic disruption of prevailing white control of the creation and interpretation of cultural imagery. Such a development changes the position of white authors and critics: it implies a loss of taken-for-granted authority, and it requires a psychologically complex adjustment for which we white critics are not prepared. In this connection, no easy, smooth transition to a greatly expanded literary canon is possible. The two sides in the canon dispute have entirely different responses to the new literary historical situation. On one side of the divide is a thoroughgoing immersion in minority literatures; on the other side is an avoidance that amounts to denial. It is important to emphasize just how fundamental this difference is. It is not simply that their assessments differ, but rather that one side demonstrates no direct, first-hand experience of the new literary material. Thus the two sides cannot talk because one side refuses to give minority literatures the most basic recognition of actual reading. In literary critical terms, acknowledgement means, in the first instance, acquaintance with individual literary works in concrete detail. But if this standard of close reading—of which some advocates of the established tradition claim to be the only upholders in relation to classical writers—is not extended to emergent minority writers, then the argument can only be advanced by innuendo and generalization that remain quite literally out of touch with its subject and that are never put to the test of specific examples. Because one side has not done its homework, has not made the most minimal commitment to basic research in the field of minority literatures, the discussion necessarily proceeds at cross-purposes, breaks down, and leaves us with the

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present stalemate. To probe further the communication barrier outlined thus far, I turn to the specific case of John Searle’s long article, The storm over the university’.6 I want to examine Searle’s assumptions and formulations about the literary canon because I think they are representative and because they are so prominently displayed. Searle presents himself as a moderate who occupies a middle ground: ‘the debate tends to be shallow because it is presented as a conflict between the cultural left, on the one hand, and the somewhat simplified views held by Bloom and Kimball, on the other. Why should one accept these as the only choices?’ (p. 38). Despite the image of balance, Searle in fact tilts toward one side. While he is unremittingly dismissive of the ‘cultural left’, his treatment of Roger Kimball’s articulation of The New Criterion’s vision is accommodating, if not cozy: ‘Still, there is a fair amount of truth to Kimball’s diagnosis’ (p. 30). Nevertheless, though I do not share Searle’s views, I find enough to respect in his position to believe that a useful and positive conversation across the divide may be possible. In Searle’s sophisticated version of the traditionalist position, the definition of the literary canon is admirably flexible. The canon is diverse and fosters within itself a critical perspective: ‘the “tradition” is by no means a unified phenomenon, and properly taught, it should impart a critical attitude to the student, precisely because of the variety and intellectual independence of the works being taught, and the disagreements among them’ (pp. 36–7). Moreover, the canon so constituted is provisional and changing: ‘there never was, in fact, a fixed “canon”; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were always being revised’ (p. 37). Because Searle finds this conception of the canon entirely adequate to our present situation, he can imagine no legitimate intellectual advantages that accrue to a multicultural approach. Though conceding that he does ‘not fully understand’ current literary studies (p. 38), Searle feels no compunction about characterizing the motives of multicultural literary criticism as merely political, where the term ‘political’ is pejoratively understood as the abandonment and violation of intellectual integrity. The key word for Searle is ‘intellectual’. But it is precisely on intellectual grounds that I disagree with his point of view. There are intellectual deficiencies in the traditional account even in its sophisticated form, and these shortcomings create compelling intellectual reasons for turning to a multicultural model. My purpose is to demonstrate that multicultural critics have at least as good, if not better, claim to the intellectual values that Searle wishes to uphold. From Searle’s perspective, the canon dispute is readily resolved: If the objection to the ‘canon’ is that it consists almost entirely of works by white males, specifically white males of European (including North American) origin, then there would appear to be an easy and common-sense solution to the problem: simply open the doors to admit the work of talented writers who are not white, or not male, or not European. (p. 34) This open-ended stance is greatly preferable to a mutually exclusive approach that forces an either-or choice between established and emergent literature. To this dilemma Searle makes the sensible response that we should study both. Yet generalized appeals to common sense

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are not the same as intellectually rigorous investigation. An initial difficulty is that Searle has in theory provided for minority writers, but in practice does not include any in his list of examples. Of the five women authors Searle names, none is a woman of colour. This uneasy silence forces us to wonder why he cannot bring himself to mention specific instances. Does this omission mean that Searle has not made the actual effort to read minority authors, or does it suggest Searle’s uncertainty about whether he considers any minority writer of sufficiently high quality? Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Searle agrees that Toni Morrison is a ‘talented’ (p. 34) author and that her Beloved is a ‘first-rate’ (p. 35) achievement worthy of inclusion in the canon. There remain two fundamental conceptual problems concerning the scope of the terms ‘diversity’ and ‘criticism’. The chief difference between traditionalist and multicultural models of the canon is that the former assumes a single tradition, while the latter believes in irreducibly plural traditions. Though not unified, Searle’s tradition is none the less unitary in the sense of being conceived as a single entity—hence Searle’s notion of changing the tradition by adding or subtracting individual authors. The basic units of organization are single authors, however diverse; and their diversity is expressed through the framework of a single tradition of single authors. The multicultural approach uses a different starting-point: the basic organizational category is not individual authors but multiple traditions. Diversity is thus placed on a different conceptual basis. One implication of this latter approach is greatly to complicate Searle’s unproblematic allusion to ‘one’s inheritance’ (p. 40). This is not to say that minority traditions are totally self-sufficient; rather, each minority tradition is a distinct cultural field that cannot, through the catalytic action of singling out individual authors, be dissolved into an overarching common tradition. Common culture is still a valid concept but, because we need to think of it as comprised of traditions rather than isolated individual authors, its negotiation requires a new set of intellectual operations. This is a specifically intellectual issue because, as I see it, the traditionalist model can no longer encompass the literary facts with which we must deal in the present historical moment. Just as there are built-in structural limits to the traditionalist model’s ability to comprehend the full range of contemporary minority literatures, so there are strict limits to the intellectual range of its response to established authors. For Searle, a central, prized element of the classical tradition is its intrinsic critical perspective—‘emphatically including the intellectual tradition of skeptical critical analysis’ (p. 35). Accordingly, Searle is dissatisfied with a system of thought that fails to cultivate ‘the critical purpose of education’: ‘His [Michael Oakeshott’s] educated person does not look as if he would produce any intellectual revolutions, or even upset very many intellectual apple carts’ (p. 41). Despite Searle’s celebration of the critical spirit, however, his idea of criticism operates within narrow confines. Searle welcomes and approves the critical upsetting of apple carts, but this open invitation is negated by an insistence that only a certain kind of criticism is valid—namely, that which confirms and preserves the status of established authors. The problem is revealed by Searle’s references to Shakespeare as an exemplar of the great tradition: ‘most of them, for example several works by Plato and Shakespeare, are of very high intellectual and artistic quality, to the point of being of universal human interest’ (p. 34); ‘because of the intrinsic intellectual and aesthetic merits and importance of the works of Plato, Shakespeare, or Dante…’ (p. 36). The rhetorical conjunction here works to make ‘intellectual’ and ‘Shakespeare’ equivalent terms. But if ‘intellectual’ is defined as

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‘Shakespearean’, it follows that a critique of Shakespeare must be seen as a betrayal of the intellect and, as such, must be automatically rejected: ‘Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked’ (p. 36). The prefatory word ‘Ironically’ functions to close off further investigation and thus marks the dividing-line between traditionalist and multicultural versions of criticism. Searle’s traditionalist formulation neither accurately conveys, nor allows for, what is currently happening in the Shakespearean negotiations conducted by contemporary minority writers such as Gloria Naylor. A critical perspective on Shakespeare, as against Shakespeare’s critical perspective, is written off as intellectually disreputable, if not altogether inconceivable. In contrast, the multicultural model of the literary canon uses a different concept of criticism, one that recognizes the possibility of a sharp, responsible criticism of Shakespeare that cuts through the protective mantle of his canonical status. Such multicultural criticism differs in kind from its traditionalist counterpart in that it envisions the project of upsetting and reorganizing the canonical apple cart as intellectually valid and necessary.

II Though in general outline they subscribe to recognizably similar views of the canon, the move from John Searle to Roger Kimball’s ‘“Tenured radicals”: a postscript’ requires a change of gear.7 Where Searle’s tone is cautious, imperturbable, even unctuous, Kimball strikes a pose of unremitting urgency. If Searle’s layered approach is restrained and provisional in sounding the alert, Kimball’s relentless monotone promotes an atmosphere of crisis, with ever more dire warnings of clear and present cultural danger. Searle reassures us that curricular changes at Stanford have caused no damage, but Kimball insists that things have already gone too far. These tonal differences affect content: Kimball, in effect, presents a narrower, strippeddown version of Searle. Like Searle, Kimball applauds, loudly but briefly, the Western tradition’s capacity to generate its own internal criticism:’…nor has any tradition been more committed to self-criticism than the Western tradition’ (p. 8). But this commonplace has even less meaning in Kimball’s context than in Searle’s. The appreciation of the critical faculty is only a token rhetorical gesture; its substance is given short shrift. Criticism is held in abeyance by an implicit double bind: since the Western tradition is more critical, we should not criticize. Thus criticism technically exists, but Kimball does not want to hear it. Although Kimball’s appeal to ‘the steady, if pedestrian, light of common sense’ (p. 9) appears to overlap with Searle’s call for common sense, the term takes on a different meaning in Kimball’s deployment. The qualification ‘if pedestrian’ introduces a defensive note: the effect is slight and covered by overbearing sarcasm. Nevertheless, Kimball manifests a momentary uneasiness about not being intellectual that is utterly absent from Searle’s mood of urbane, confident authority. In this regard, Kimball’s attempt to pay Searle the compliment of attributing to Searle Kimball’s own ‘consummate simplicity’ (p. 11) falls flat. Kimball dignifies his simplicity through a defiant pride in his lack of intellectual sophistication: If that sounds like a list of clichés, well, it is—just as any true description of what

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matters in education will be. It is in the nature of generalizations about life’s difficult choices to be perfectly obvious, which is perhaps why both are so often confounded by those making a profession of intellectual sophistry. (P. 11) But Kimball’s purported virtue of plain speaking modulates into a melodramatically overwritten injunction that positively discourages intellectual engagement and complexity: A swamp yawns open before us, ready to devour everything. The best response to all this—and finally the only serious and effective response—is not to enter these murky waters in the first place. As Nietzsche observed, we do not refute a disease. We resist it. (p. 12) Such passages are symptomatic of a general problem: because his overriding motive is to draw the line that will instigate a clear-cut confrontation between ‘culture and barbarism’ (p. 13), Kimball has no use for the delicacy, nuance, and complication that are necessary accompaniments of intellectual work. As a result, Kimball oversimplifies everything he touches. The intellectual crudeness of his own style of argument does much to erode the elements of ‘civility’ and ‘middle ground’ (p. 9) whose loss he deplores. Kimball’s tendency to cut intellectual corners is illustrated by his misleading distinction between New Criticism and more recent modes. The former’s interest in Verbal complexity’ (p. 5), Kimball implies, disappears in the latter’s concentration on the nonliterary categories of race and gender. But most feminist criticism, for example, remains firmly grounded in close interpretation of verbal patterns. Far from being inherently incompatible, feminist and literary criticism are interdependent: one gains access to literary representations of gender through close reading of individual texts that illuminates their overall linguistic structures. A more serious misrepresentation is Kimball’s view that multiculturalism necessitates ‘an attack on the idea of a common culture’ (p. 6). This bald assertion is incorrect, for a multicultural approach rejects not the concept of common culture but only the oversimplified traditionalist version of it. Invoking Searle’s ‘universal human interest’ (p. 11), Kimball achieves his image of common culture by means of a short cut in which the notion of universalism mediates cultural differences by neutralizing them. Kimball conflates two steps when he uses the principle of equal access to literature ‘regardless of class, gender, skin color, ethnic origin, etc.’ (p. 12) as definitive proof for ‘the idea of universal humanity’ (p. 6). One can wholeheartedly agree with step one, but there is no reason to follow Kimball’s leap to step two. ‘Transcends’, the magic word that effects this leap, reduces difference first to ‘contingencies’, then to mere ‘accidents’: ‘To speak of universal human interest is to acknowledge faith in a community of human endeavor that transcends the contingencies of race, gender, ethnic heritage, and the like’ (p. 12); ‘a common good that trancends the accidents of ethnic and racial identity’ (p. 13). The logic produces a false universal that tries to make the effects of difference disappear by making them seem trivial and irrelevant. ‘Accidents’ does not do justice to cultural difference because it portrays differences as a source of interference to be discounted and erased, but fails to see its positive potential. Though Kimball will have no truck with

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paradox, his accusation that ‘for the multiculturalist what is important is not what binds us together but what separates us’ (p. 6) can be more accurately rephrased as: what separates us is what binds us together. The multicultural approach to common culture takes the more difficult route of going through cultural difference rather than circumventing it. Finally, it must be noted that Kimball does not practise the universalism he preaches. The strident particularism of his use of Evelyn Waugh as the article’s animating literary force stands in striking contradiction to Kimball’s recourse to Arnoldian language about ‘the best that has been thought and said’ (p. 12). Though hardly representative of the best that has been thought and said, Waugh is the only writer that Kimball celebrates by actual quotation (pp. 8, 13). Waugh is a very narrow funnel through which to circulate the ‘insight, beauty, or truth’ (p. 11) vested in the great tradition. Kimball’s avid interest in Waugh does not give evidence in support of ‘the idea of universal humanity’ (p. 6), but testifies rather how parochial is Kimball’s literary and political sensibility. In a follow-up account of the 1990 convention of the Modern Language Association,8 Kimball once again stresses the ability of literature ‘to speak to us across the barriers of time, geography, social system, religious belief, to say nothing of the currently favored barriers of sex, class, race, and ethnic origin’ as evidence that ‘the qualities that unite us as human beings are more important than the contingencies that separate us as social and political agents’ (p. 11). This pious declaration remains at the inert level of abstract, hypothetical assumption: in over ten years The New Criterion’s contribution to the understanding of African-American literature is so scant as to be virtually non-existent. Like Searle, Kimball stands ready to cross racial barriers. Yet in practice his pronouncement is empty: he will cross that bridge when he comes to it, but since he never actually reaches it, the moment of crossing is indefinitely postponed. Kimball is therefore poorly positioned to make authoritative claims about the complexities experienced by white readers of black authors. Instead, The New Criterion’s paucity of interest in minority literatures raises the question whether its principled opposition to multiculturalism serves as a justification and cover for an operational policy of benign neglect.

III Alvin Kernan’s The Death of Literature sounds a different note from that of Roger Kimball.9 If Kimball presents the figure of the embattled, no-nonsense critic primed to counterattack, Kernan is plaintive to the point of giving up. His primary notes are regret and nostalgia. Nevertheless, the visions of Kimball and Kernan are related as twin sides of a set of shared assumptions about the literary canon. The central topic that Kernan addresses is the large-scale, multifaceted institutional and cultural change of ‘the past thirty years’ (p. 1), a time-scheme that makes the 1960s the crucial turning-point in the demise of the old order that prevailed ‘between the mideighteenth century and the mid-twentieth’ (pp. 5–6). The key question becomes: how does Kernan characterize the new situation in our current historical moment? Kernan’s relation to the topic of cultural change is organized by his alternation between the two postures of journalist and prophet. In the former role, he parades a collection of contemporary symptoms in a breezy, cursory fashion. His account of curricular change at Stanford is indicative of the catchy, superficial style of tabloid reportage:

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In 1988, Stanford University, for example, made the front pages and the TV news programs with a debate about whether its required course in great books, including many works of literature, should drop some of the classics, all written by ‘dead white males’, to make room for the inclusion of books by women, blacks, and Third World writers. The great books which had hitherto formed the basis of liberal education were denounced as elitist, Eurocentric, and the tools of imperialism. Under this kind of pressure, the faculty and administration agreed to replace such writers as Homer and Dickens with books like Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. (pp. 3–4) As journalist, Kernan claims to be impartial: ‘it is as fact, not a judgment of what has happened, that they [the ‘new views’] are here described in as neutral a way as possible’ (p. 2). But neutrality is not possible because Kernan’s vocabulary is loaded, negatively toned, and overwhelmingly alarmist. Moreover, as prophet, Kernan is anxious to render judgment. It is the affinity between the two roles of journalist and prophet that gives the book its flavour and structure: since both roles appeal to the same vocabulary, Kernan’s voice readily blends the two perspectives. Kernan’s journalistic function feeds his particular prophetic stance as a cultural lamenter who tilts toward, sides with, the pessimists: ‘Even if Bennett, Hirsch, and Bloom are taken at something less than face value, the widespread interest in their views testifies to a general concern that book culture, of which literature is a central part, is disappearing, and with it many of society’s central values’ (pp. 4–5). The ‘many optimists who see a new and better literary system arising from the ashes of the old’ are dismissively undercut by withering mock-heroic parody: ‘This redirection of literature is perceived by its supporters as a giant step for humankind’ (p. 5). Kernan’s preoccupation is rather with the ashes, as the central image of death in his book’s title proclaims. Death may not be too strong a term to evoke the magnitude of the cultural change we are going through, but Kernan misidentifies its referent. Something has died, but it is not literature; what has died is rather a certain world view and the literary critical habits that support it. Death in this latter sense is exemplified by Kernan’s discussion of Norman Mailer (pp. 204–5, 207), who symbolizes the artist’s inability to recover from ‘a crisis of confidence in the traditional values of literature’ (p. 3). Even more striking than his selection of Mailer as an index of cultural health is Kernan’s refusal to look elsewhere, further afield. Kernan’s image of death applies to a limited range of literature that has disappointed him. However, rather than explore new literary territory, Kernan places a self-imposed restriction on the intellectual field he is willing to encompass and gives himself over to mourning. How does Kernan back himself into a corner in which the elegiac mode appears the only palatable option? Why is despair preferable to expanding the range of literary material? Contrary to Kernan’s position, literature is very much alive. But its life has shifted in significant measure to emergent minority literatures. The most important and powerful literary experiences I have had during the past decade have come from such writers as Rita Dove, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker; Paula Gunn Allen, Louis Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko; Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Amy Tan, Yoshiko Uchida. Such writers are now carriers of the values that Kernan cherishes and thinks have disappeared: ‘the belief in writing and creating

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art as near sacred callings, the visionary power of the imagination, the perfect form and the truth of the literary text’ (p. 203). One reason that Kernan cannot acknowledge the massive shift of cultural energy represented by the extraordinary growth of minority literatures is that this realignment has occurred on a scale not envisioned in the standard formulation of literary tradition given by T.S.Eliot in ‘Tradition and the individual talent’ (1919) and duly cited by Kernan (p. 14). Kernan can neglect major new literary developments only by seeing them as non-canonical, inferior, and incidental. This perception is implied by the ominous, condensed allusion to ‘less prestigious writings’ in the counterpointing of ‘traditional intellectual qualities represented by the classics of literature versus social values of equality of gender and race represented by less prestigious writings’ (p. 4). Or witness the offhand gesture to ‘writings by blacks and authors of various ethnic origins, not previously considered significant enough to be included in the official literary canon’ (p. 86). These phrases are based on a conspicuously unexamined assumption; their claim to validity rests on Kernan’s avoidance and ignorance of the literature he classifies as unworthy. A similar technique of avoidance is apparent in Kernan’s treatment of feminism as a critical approach. His repeated references to feminism demonstrate no attempt at scholarly investigation, no pretence of serious acquaintance with different kinds of feminist literary criticism. Instead, Kernan uses the term ‘feminism’ as a code word in expectation of a simple stock response. As Kernan’s invocation of the word ‘positive’ three times on his final page (p. 213) indicates, the outcome of feminist criticism is in his view negative: ‘Give away, lose, or discredit these texts—Homer, Shakespeare, Balzac—and literature is out of business’ (p. 212). To the contrary, feminist criticism of Shakespeare, for example, is both thriving and positive. Feminist critical negotiations with Shakespeare’s texts offer not the meretricious exhilaration Kernan alleges, but rather a responsible and culturally vital process of reassessment in the context of a greatly expanded and diversified literary field. However, the positive implications emerge fully only when one is willing to recognize and actively to engage this newly enlarged field.

IV The examples could be multiplied, but this survey of three specific instances provides a representative sample of the intellectual and emotional repertoire of traditionalist defences of the canon. The defensive character inhibits and all but prevents fruitful engagement with the new literature by which the canonical apple cart is not only upset but also redefined and renewed. It is with this note of renewal as a key to cultural health that I wish to conclude. The ultimate spirit to which multicultural investigation commits us is neither destructive nor utopian. The multicultural figure of the contemporary Renaissance of minority literatures, with its image of rebirth, provides a positive alternative to the figure of death, both negative and unwarranted, so prominently featured in the title of Kernan’s book. On the other hand, the multicultural approach does not project unduly optimistic images of salvation as in Kimball’s scorned ‘multicultural paradise’ (p. 13). The multiculturalism I have outlined here implies a contingent idealism, with full stress on its conditional nature. This multiculturalism affirms not a panacea, but the sober recognition of the difficulties that we must work through in moving toward the goal of a common American culture. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

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NOTES 1 The information about Cheney’s presence is featured in note 1 on page 1 of Kramer’s ‘Studying the arts and humanities: what can be done?’, New Criterion, vol. 7, no. 6 (February 1989), pp. 1–6. 2 Hall’s work is collected in The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988). Also important is Alan Sinfield’s Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), especially ch. 3, ‘Literature and cultural production’. 3 Mercer’s comment occurs in the discussion following his paper on ‘“1968”: periodizing politics and identity’, in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 448–9. 4 Examples of cultural traditionalism on the left are: Irving Howe, ‘The value of the canon’, New Republic, vol. 204, no. 7 (18 February 1991), pp. 40–7 and Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (Knoxville, Tenn.: Whittle Direct Books, 1991). Howe’s article is reprinted in Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Dell, 1992); Schlesinger’s prestige as an opinion-maker is indicated by the immediate republication of his book under the Norton imprint (1992). 5 Other parts of this larger project include: ‘Rather than reject a common culture, multiculturalism advocates a more complicated route by which to achieve it’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 37, no. 41 (26 June 1991), B1–B3; ‘What multiculturalism means’, Transition, 55 (1992), pp. 105–14; The two Renaissances and Shakespeare’s canonical position’, The Kenyon Review, n.s., vol. 14, no. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 56–70; and two manuscripts, ‘Multiculturalism and the white male critic’ and ‘Multiculturalism and the problem of liberalism’. These essays grow out of and extend the discussion of multiculturalism in my book, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 6 Originally published in The New York Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 19 (6 December 1990), pp. 34–42, Searle’s article is reprinted in the Debating P.C. collection (see n. 4). My citations are to the page numbers in The New York Review. 7 Kimball’s ‘“Tenured radicals”: a postscript’, which first appeared in The New Criterion, vol. 9, no. 5 (January 1991), pp. 4–13, was subsequently published as the ‘Epilogue’ to the paperback edition of The Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). My quotations are from the version in The New Criterion. 8 Reprinted in Debating P.C. (cited in n. 4), Kimball’s The Periphery vs. the Center: the MLA in Chicago’ appeared in The New Criterion, vol. 9, no. 6 (February 1991), pp. 8– 17, from which I cite here. 9 This discussion of Kernan’s The Death of Literature (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1990) is based on my review in Criticism, 33 (1991), pp. 263–5.

Theory in the age of mechanical annihilation JOSEPH N.CLEARY

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift towards unparallelled catastrophes. Albert Einstein

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. Walter Benjamin

The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means [is] politics. Emmanuel Levinas

I January 16th, 1991; George Bush: ‘As I report to you, air attacks are under way against military targets in Iraq. We are determined to knock out Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb potential.’1 February 9th, 1991; Mikhail Gorbachev: ‘Judging by some statements on a political level and those made by influential mass media organs, attempts are being made to condition people by both sides of the [Gulf War] conflict to the idea of a possibility, and permissibility, of the use of mass destruction weapons.’2 Although the recent Gulf War was not what is generally considered a nuclear war, the phantasmic penumbra of nuclear war inflected that conflict from the start. The strategic amplification of the fear that Iraq possessed immediate nuclear capacity, Israeli hints of a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Iraq, mass media hype concerning ‘Saddam’s “power to threaten the world with mass destruction”’,3 oppositional estimates that the tonnage of conventional munitions discharged by the US-led forces produced ‘a destructive power equivalent to five Hiroshimas’,4 or predictions of catastrophic ecological fall-out of nearnuclear dimensions, variously compounded the apocalyptic tenor of Gulf War discourse in ways that ultimately blurred any easy distinction between rhetorical nuclear fantasy and the calculus of conventional military strategy. Conventional military calculus, in other words, was actively inhabited by the negative materiality of the nuclear referent.5 The Gulf War underscores just how central the institutional preparation for war and the

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prosecution of war are to contemporary politics. One of the arguments of this essay is that issues of war and of militarism—or what might in shorthand be termed the problematic of contemporary political force—have not, however, been sufficiently or systematically engaged by currently dominant forms of oppositional political theory whether of marxist, neomarxist or poststructuralist disposition. Its military dimension not discounted, the crushing defeat of Iraq represented something more than a military success for the coalition powers involved. The mobilization of popular domestic endorsement of the war, both within the US and to varying degrees within Western Europe, represented the crucial political counterpart to the more spectacular military extravaganzas. The extent of this domestic consensus obviously poses a major challenge for those oppositional social movements that consider it their task to promote real political change. If political theory is to play an active role in the process of self-analysis which oppositional social movements must undertake in the wake of the Gulf War, then what I have termed the problematic of contemporary political force will have to be shifted much more closely to the centre of current theoretical analysis. Ernest Mandel has argued that ‘decades of uninterrupted armament’ have characterized the development of late capitalist society. He argues indeed that a ‘tendency towards a permanent arms economy’ constitutes ‘one of the hallmarks of late capitalism’.6 Given Mandel’s thesis (and his work remains one of the definitive analyses of late capitalism) that the economic logic of late capitalism and the technology of nuclear militarism are intimately interconnected, one might reasonably have anticipated that the problematics of militarism would find a prominent place in those formations of political theory that specifically define themselves in relation to the conditions of the contemporary, ‘postmodern’, moment. For neomarxist as for marxist theory, however, the issue of militarism continues to be considered at best an issue of secondary politico-conceptual importance. On the other hand, institutionally dominant appropriations of poststructuralist theory have been so concerned to junk the whole Enlightenment project, and its attendant epistemological and political concerns, in favour of some putative ‘program in which a new toleration acknowledges the principled incommensurability of language games and their contestants’7 that the very possibility of collective politics, let alone of any systematic engagement with the reality of contemporary militarism, would seem to be ruled out of court from the very start.8 To argue that they do not systematically engage the subject of militarism is not, it must be emphasized, to suggest that the problematic of force is simply absent from these theories. On the contrary, just as the Gulf War was not what is generally considered a nuclear war but was none the less marked from the outset by the spectre of nuclear devastation, so too it might be suggested, by way of analogy, are contemporary political theories marked by the trace or the patina of nuclear militarism even when issues of force appear furthest from their manifest theoretical concerns. The negative materiality of the nuclear referent, the palpable effect exerted by a force that exists primarily as a negativity, actively inhabits contemporary theory just as it actively haunted the conventional military calculus of the Gulf War. In what form, then, does this impress of nuclear militarism on political theory display itself? In The Sense of an Ending Frank Kermode is fond of quoting Wallace Stevens to the effect that ‘It is a peculiarity of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era.’9 That peculiarity is as much a feature of theoretical as of poetic discourse. In an era of which Klaus R.Scherpe has remarked that ‘The producibility of the catastrophe is the catastrophe’10 it is not surprising that current political theories appear deeply imprinted by an eschatological anxiety concerning matters of ‘the end’. It is when one analyses the manner in which these

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various theoretical fields construct and then dispose or orient themselves toward a particular ‘end’ of society that the impress of militarism begins more clearly to disclose itself. It will be the central argument of this essay therefore that despite their real theoretical antagonisms, classical marxism, neomarxism and poststructuralism all unfold within a common historical continuum marked by the crucial transition from conventional to nuclear militarism and that they occupy a shared rhetorical structure—the invocation of a social crisis that bears within itself the possibility of an ultimate end. In other words, these theoretical fields necessarily invoke a manifest or latent horizon of futurity, an eschatology, frequently articulated in terms of a decisive historical catastrophe—the exact form of which may vary from capitalist crisis to totalitarian terror to nuclear apocalypse—and the manner in which they direct themselves towards that horizon powerfully inflects the type of critical project they elaborate and the type of politics they at least implicitly endorse. In the case of classical marxism the projected ‘end’ is inscribed in the form of a breakdown in capitalism which creates the preconditions that enable a proletarian seizure of power. The catastrophe invoked in this paradigm is figured as an intermediate stage in which the conditions of the (capitalist) past and the potentiality of a nascent (socialist) future coexist: the concept of ‘revolution’ provides the necessary categorical term that allows for strategic conjecture as to how the passage from immediate catastrophe to socialist future is to be materially actualized. In this paradigm, the actualization of that transition inevitably requires a resort to some form of ‘revolutionary’ militancy. The transition from conventional to nuclear militarism constitutes a specific, but too little analysed, historical framework or grid upon which paradigmatic shifts in the general field of contemporary oppositional theory might be cognitively mapped. The instantiation of nuclear militarism after the Second World War problematized certain basic classical marxist axiomatics concerning the nature of power and the revolutionary seizure of power. These developments provide a crucial conceptual context within which the loosely contemporaneous emergence, and current intellectual ascendancy, of what can be termed neomarxist and poststructuralist political theories can be tracked.11 Neomarxist theory tries to escape the classical marxist dyad of catastrophe-utopia and to elaborate instead the possibility of a democratic socialist counter-hegemonic process. The ‘revolutionizing’ of society is conceived as an ongoing transformation of existing institutional structures, not as the construction of a totally new society founded on the postrevolutionary ruins of a defeated capitalism. The classical marxist eschatology of a definitive ‘end of history’ is circumvented in this way, but the concept of ‘hegemony’, upon which this notion of social transformation depends, runs up against considerable difficulty when confronted with the problem of repressive military force. Peace movement discourse concerning the nuclear arms race provides an important example of the return of the apocalyptic invocation of ‘last things’ in political movements that specifically eschew the logic of revolution. Attempted rapprochements between neomarxist and peace movement politics—one of the more crucial leftist alliances of the contemporary period—disclose some of both the possibilities and the problems that a politics premised on ‘hegemony’ encounters when faced with the problematic of force. Whatever these difficulties, the public prominence of, for example, Edward Thompson’s marxist humanist peace-movement theses and the present academic ascendancy of Gramscian leftism, combine to demonstrate the extent to which contemporary leftism has shifted towards the idea of a coalitional or hegemonic practice and away from politics conceived on the basis of socially determined positionalities.

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The manner in which this theory of a coalitional politics arises out of, is embedded in, and experiences real difficulty in coming to terms with the problematic of force will be the focus of the third section of this essay. Defined as it is by its opposition to all totalizing or teleological modes of thought, poststructuralism would appear to offer the most intractable material for an analysis of eschatological morphologies. Derrida has written, however, that ‘The hypothesis of…total destruction watches over deconstruction.’ ‘That is why’, he writes, ‘deconstruction, at least what is being advanced today in its name, belongs to the nuclear age.’12 As with marxism, there are many versions of poststructuralism. However, the proclivity of major poststructuralist critics to select past historical catastrophes—whether of the Gulag, Auschwitz, or the totalitarian state—and to project these forward as images of the future towards which our present is directed, indicates that the eschatological charge with which Derrida here imbues the deconstructionist project is by no means restricted to Derrida alone.13 For present purposes, however, an analysis of Derrida’s text ‘No Apocalypse, not now’ will allow for some provisional conclusions about poststructuralist constructions of the ‘end’ and about poststructuralist claims to represent a political theory more adequate to present conditions than the marxist critique that it proposes to supersede. The issues raised in this essay converge around the radical challenge posed by militarism for contemporary society. Hence the focus on theoretical formations which offer themselves as radical critiques of that society or as the repositories of an alternative political practice that would lead beyond the conditions of the present. The invocations of catastrophe that constitute the outer horizons of these various fields of social theory—classical marxist, neomarxist, poststructuralist—always harbour, I will argue, an explicit or implicit military referent. If ‘the magic of mechanical annihilation’14 that so disturbingly characterized the Gulf War is to become part of our critical rather than our aesthetic consciousness, then the issue of militarism must be propelled from the eschatological rim of these political theories into sharper analytical focus.

II In his ‘Theory of Force’ developed in the Anti-Dühring, Frederick Engels attempted to work out the theoretical relationship between politico-military force and economic power. Refuting Dühring’s thesis that economic conditions are determined by politico-coercive force, Engels asserted that force necessarily derived from and depended upon the productive capacities available to a particular society and that force is inevitably therefore ‘mediated by economic power’.15 Contemporary political theory would suggest that any analysis that posits either the determinate primacy of the economic or of the politico-coercive instance represents only an anachronistic mode of analysis. A less peremptory reading of Engels’ text will reveal that the more complex substratum of his argument revolves around the critical question as to how ‘power’ is to be theoretically conceptualized. Fundamental, then, to Engels’ opposition to Dühring is his perception that a thesis that posits the primacy of political force must ultimately presuppose some notion of an inherent will to power that acquires an effectively metaphysical status—as drive or demiurge towards domination—once the conceptual priority of the political over the economic instance is granted. Engels’ concern firmly to

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ground the problem of political agency within an economic analysis therefore represents something more than a desire for a self-fulfilling historical narrative whereby capitalism will ultimately collapse as a result of its innate contradictions: an urgent if underlying concern of the ‘Theory of Force’ is to frame the problem of political agency in materialist terms, without which a metaphysics of the political will must theoretically predominate. Since his task is not simply to provide a descriptive sociology, but also to grasp how society might be transformed by the agency of the prole-tariat, Engels cannot simply foreclose the issue of political will altogether however. Unless it is to be simply assumed that the inexorable logic of capitalism is such as to self-destruct, he is compelled to address the question of will, of political agency. The moment of revolution can only arrive, Engels writes, when the proletariat are in a position to make their will prevail against the warlords in command. And this moment will arrive as soon as the mass of the people—town and country workers and peasants—will have a will…. What the bourgeois democracy of 1848 could not accomplish, just because it was bourgeois and not proletarian, namely, to give the labouring masses a will whose content would be in accord with their class position—socialism will infallibly secure.16 Unavailable to the present, revolutionary ‘will’ is relegated by Engels to a position beyond theory: it is lodged in some as yet unrealized futurity. The crucial tensions in Engels’ ‘Theory of Force’ derive then from the attempt to negotiate three disparate logics of political motion or process: between a non-willed historical determinism and a Dühringesque will-topower, Engels strives, less than successfully, to articulate a materialist concept of political will—i.e. ‘a will whose content would be in accord with…class position’. This is an attempt to define political agency or will as something neither logically preceding material conditions nor simply given by them. For Engels, militarism and the actualization of the revolutionary will of the proletariat are dialectically interconnected. The breakdown of capitalism, he argues, materially manifests itself in the form of the mass militarization of industrial society. Necessitated by the intensification of both class struggle and inter-capitalist competition, this militarization of society ‘bears within itself the seed of its own destruction’.17 Military expenditure hastens ‘financial collapse’ while universal military service will ultimately make ‘the whole people familiar with the use of arms, and therefore enabling them at a given moment to make their will prevail against the warlords in command’.18 In other words, the circumstances of total war require the mass mobilization of the proletariat, thus establishing the necessary preconditions for the realization of collective revolutionary will: ‘At this point the armies of the princes become transformed into armies of the people; the machine refuses to work and militarism collapses by the dialectics of its own evolution.’19 The classical marxist tendency, exemplified here by Engels, to stress the priority of the economic base in matters of force had as at least one of its consequences the fact that the concept of ‘revolution’ thus derived could not be a predominantly militarist one. Nevertheless, the logic that connected revolution and war required that the latter play something more than a catalytic role for the realization of revolution. If the circumstances of total war prepare the historical conditions for the emergence of collective revolutionary will, it is also the case that that will must ultimately be realized by means of war. The

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actualization of a post-capitalist revolutionary society, in other words, would require some use of military force. Perry Anderson has succinctly outlined this classicist logic of revolution: a proletarian rising is always a political operation, whose fundamental aim is not to inflict casualties on the enemy, but to rally all the exploited masses together…. Yet it is also, however, necessarily a military operation. For no matter how successful the working class is in dividing the coercive apparatus of the State (army or police), detaching major segments from it, and winning them over to the cause of the revolution, there still always remains an irreducible core of counter-revolutionary forces, specially trained and hardened in their repressive functions, who cannot be converted; who can only be defeated.20 Even when a socialist revolution could draw on sufficiently broad popular appeal as to render the military dimension of the seizure of power secondary and minor, that revolution would inevitably be threatened not merely by counter-revolutionaries from within but by the hostility from without of those states threatened by the emergence of a new social system or at least by the idea of a new social system. ‘When the unity of the bourgeois state and the reproduction of the capitalist economy are ruptured’, Anderson writes, ‘the ensuing social upheaval must rapidly and fatally pit revolution and counter-revolution against each other in a violent convulsion.’21 From the perspective of the late 1870s when the Anti-Dühring was written, Engels’ prediction of the collapse of European society under the weight of its own militarization appears prescient. What the quantitative accuracy of Engels’ projections cannot accommodate, however, is the qualitative metamorphosis of the conditions of war that the unleashing of nuclear power in 1945 and the transcontinental instantiation of nuclear militarism that followed would inaugurate. Radically interrogating the basic tenets of enlightenment faith in the immanent rationality of historical process, the devastating annihilative capacity of nuclear militarism would impose a particularly severe strain upon the pivotal classical marxist category of ‘revolution’, given its reliance on the need for the use of military force by an insurrectionary proletarian class to overpower what Anderson calls the ‘irreducible core of counter-revolutionary forces’. The qualitative novelty of post-Hiroshima militarism would lie in the fact that a level of nuclear capacity would soon be achieved that was such as to be capable of abolishing the entire economic and social infrastructure from which the instruments of this destructive power had been originally derived. The level of ‘overkill’ or ‘mutually assured destruction’ arrived at via the arms race between the capitalist and communist blocs would strain the logic of Engels’ assured axiom that ‘always and everywhere it is the economic conditions and the instruments of economic power which help “force” to victory’ to breaking point.22 This is not to suggest that Engels’ claim that military force was conditioned or mediated by economic power would cease to apply to nuclear militarism. Nuclear militarism obviously continues to consume vast sums of money just as the production of nuclear technology continues to be related to the level of development of the productive capacities of the participant states. The fact is, however, that once nuclear militarism achieved a level of destructive surplus sufficient to abolish the whole productive apparatus from which this capacity derived, Engelsian assumptions concerning the always/inevitable subordination of

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the modes of destruction to the mode of production were profoundly problematized. Moreover, the fact that the nature of nuclear weaponry is such that it must be stored and stockpiled (rather than periodically expended) means that the precise reproductive logic that governed the relationship between conventional militarism and economic power cannot be assumed to apply to the conditions of nuclear militarism. Where Engels perceived the threat that militarism posed for society in terms of parasitic expenditure leading to economic collapse, nuclear militarism poses the additional threat of an actively physical destruction of the whole social infrastructure. The destructive surplus achieved by nuclear militarism in relation to economic conditions suggests a much greater elasticity in the circumstances of that relationship. This greater elasticity might be conceptualized in terms of a relative autonomy between the modes of production and destruction which would hold in theoretical suspension the priority of the economic base upon which classical marxist theories of force had more confidently rested. One of the consequences of that ‘relative autonomy’ is that the social relations peculiar to nuclear militarism differ drastically from those characteristic of the pre-nuclear or conventional mass militarism upon which Engels’ theory was predicated. For Engels, militarism implied massive social mobilization and war necessitated the acceleration of this process to the degree that a mobilized proletariat would be in a position actually to implode the militarized social order ‘from within’.23 Nuclear militarism makes possible the actual reduction of mass conscript armies, however, and the prosecution of nuclear war would obviously render mass mobilization irrelevant. Both mass militarism and nuclear militarism condition society for scenarios of ‘total war’: to this extent, as Martin Shaw remarks, the majority of society continues to participate in nuclear militarism but ‘in a passive, vicarious manner, since war-preparation requires only their tacit ideological consent, no longer their practical involvement’.24 Nuclear militarism, then, does not so much frustrate as effectively reverse Engels’ construction of the relationship between war and the articulation of collective revolutionary will. Within the global framework of nuclear militarism every regional conflict can be represented as a threat that might ultimately escalate to a level that would precipitate nuclear conflict: in such circumstances war is more likely to stymie than to stimulate revolutionary will. Robert Maniquis has observed that once it became possible even to claim, as in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that nuclear power could be used to save lives, ‘then the nuclear narrative achieved formal perfection’.25 Nuclear militarism, in other words, lends itself to the elaboration of a symbolic order of terror in which a local extermination can always be represented as necessary for the prevention of an even yet more widespread extermination. Given the global dimensions of the nuclear panoply and the semiotics of annihilation it underpins, the forms of collective ‘mobilization’ that have followed from this have, not surprisingly, tended to take the form of reactionary populist statocracy rather than collective revolutionary will. The eschatological morphology of classical marxist theory, then, has a significant military component. Actually existing nuclear militarism, however, underwrites a global symbolic order that is itself suffused with intimations of eschatological catastrophe. This type of catastrophe cannot, however, be conceived of as one that would yield a moment to be seized and transfigured by a risen proletariat. It is evident, then, that classical marxist eschatology is profoundly compromised by nuclear militarism. Perry Anderson speaks of the advent of world socialism in terms of ‘a

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fundamental economic crisis’ that would ultimately lead to an ‘ensuing social upheaval [which] must rapidly and fatally pit revolution and counter-revolution against each other in a violent convulsion’.26 Robert Maniquis has archly but astutely commented that ‘If we substitute in Anderson’s socialist scenario the word “thermonuclear” for “violent” convulsion,’ then the anachronistic quality of the scenario ‘that treats the vast violent end as only another historical stage’ reveals itself.27 For Maniquis, Anderson’s is an ‘anachronistic scenario’ that actually contrives ‘to ignore the hegemonic effect of the nuclear symbolic’ and thus betrays an odd affinity with establishment fantasies of achieving unrivalled nuclear supremacy in so far as both modes of thought display ‘a nostalgia for decisive but limited violence’.28 ‘Traditional political discourse’ of whatever stripe, Maniquis surmises, ‘must suspend or bracket the nuclear in order to be spoken.’29 This is not to argue that localized revolutions cannot or have not proceeded under the shadow of the nuclear symbolic. Such actions must, however, either deliberately bracket or consciously negotiate the complex calculus of the ‘nuclear bet’.30 What Anderson terms the ‘military operation’ cannot in a nuclear context simply be regarded as an unproblematical supplement to the ‘political operation’. Revolutionary action, Maniquis concludes, will proceed, as it has tended to since the Second World War, by forms of insurgency and peaceful transformation that take multiple and discrete goals based on diverse regional strategies.31 But these dispersed and localized struggles are necessarily provisional, always subject to isolation and reversal, and thus inconclusive on any global level: they do not permit of the finally decisive confrontation with the forces of capital of the order posited by Anderson’s classicist scenario.

III If ‘cold war’ nuclear militarism had problematized the classical marxist concept of revolution and its attendant military component, the actual issue of militarism loomed larger than ever on the political horizon. The task of adapting marxist theory to address the conditions of late twentieth-century western society would be initiated by what has become known as the ‘new left’—the emergence of which temporally coincides with the implacement of ‘overkill’ capacity by the superpowers during the late 1950s and early 1960s. This ‘new left’ movement set in motion a complex and protracted process of theoretical reconfiguration that extends into the present. The diverse issues and intellectual influences that shaped the process have been discussed elsewhere:32 for present purposes, however, two major aspects of this ‘new left’ movement require particular attention. At the level of praxis, the activity of the new left was intimately affiliated with peacemovement politics. Whether in the form of leftist association with CND in the late fifties and sixties, the American protests against the Vietnam war in the sixties and early seventies, or the ‘peace movement’ of the eighties, the importance of this rapprochement is evident. At the level of theory, the work of Antonio Gramsci would over this same period become increasingly central to the elaboration and self-definition of this new leftist project.33 In many respects, as we shall see, these two developments complemented and mutually reinforced each other. Whether the leftist project thus defined could comprehensively address the problematic of force remains seriously in question, however. For the Anglophonic world at least, Edward Thompson emerged as the most influential

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leftist representative of the most recent stage of this leftist/peace-movement rapprochement. Responding to the escalated coldwar manoeuvres of the early 1980s, Thompson’s powerful 1982 polemic ‘Notes on exterminism, the last stage of civilization’ provided the dominant conceptual framework for this alliance. Beginning with a call for ‘a cogent theoretical and class analysis of the present war crisis’, Thompson’s article concludes with an appeal for ‘the regeneration of internationalism’ as the political response demanded by the exigencies of the nuclear crisis.34 Preliminary overtures towards ‘class analysis’ not-withstanding, the whole weight and thrust of this essay was directed against the adequacy of ‘class analysis’ to provide a cogent theoretical basis for a political response to the nuclear dilemma. For Thompson, the overdetermination of the arms race was such that it ultimately defied reduction to any ‘single causative historical logic’ which would thereby furnish the basis for further analysis ‘in terms of origins, intentions or goals’.35 Although ‘historically formed, and to that degree subject to rational analysis’, the contemporary nuclear moment, he argued, ‘exists now as a critical mass on the point of irrational detonation’.36 Analogous for him in this respect to the dynamic of classical imperialism, Thompson proposed that nuclear militarism had ‘assumed an autonomous self-gener-ating thrust in its own right, which can no longer be reduced by analysis to the pursuit of rational interests’.37 The rationalist assumptions of class analysis are invoked here, then, only to be bracketed and set aside as essentially irrelevant. Although acknowledging its institutional dimension, nuclear militarism is inscribed in Thompson’s text as a broad societal ‘drive’: the term ‘exterminism’ is deployed to designate ‘something of the character of a society: of its drive and the direction of that drive’.38 Implicitly if not explicitly, Thompson’s detachment of the problem of nuclear militarism from ‘the pursuit of rational interests’ and his resort to the logic of noumenal societal ‘drives’ resurrects all of the antinomies of force-as-will which Engels had struggled to sublate in his rebuttal of Dühring by insisting on the primacy of the economic underpinnings of force. For Thompson, however, the relative autonomy of nuclear militarism totally shatters the basis for confidence in this economistic analytical mode: the agency and direction of nuclear militarism conceived as ‘drive’ cannot be brought into focus, they refuse to disclose their intelligibility, in terms of historical materialist analysis. For Thompson, even if the arms race did find its origins in class conflict, the magnitude of indiscriminate destruction threatened by nuclear warfare is such that the extra-class consequences are held to outweigh and supersede the intra-class complexities involved: ‘exterminism itself’, he concludes, ‘is not a “class issue”: it is a human issue’.39 The exigencies of nuclear crisis render it imperative that a politics of coalition displace that of class struggle: exterminism can only be confronted by the broadest possible popular alliance: that is, by every affirmative resource in our culture. Secondary differences must be subordinated to the human ecological imperative.40 Given this imperative of universalist alliance to which all other interests must be subordinated, an insistence on class analysis must ultimately be constructed as divisive. Thompson’s assertion that ‘Certain kinds of “revolutionary” posturing and rhetoric, which inflames exterminist ideology and which carry divisions into the necessary alliances of human resistance, are luxuries which we can do without’ establishes this construction, and the necessary displacement of the disruptive category of class is effected by means of a

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rhetorical subterfuge that reduces class-premised politics in general to the caricature of ‘“revolutionary” posturing and rhetoric’.41 The word ‘certain’ here suggests that Thompson’s critique is restricted to militant factionalists, but it is evident that any form of class-based revolutionary-oriented positionality must ultimately be deemed irresponsible in the face of a demand for universalist alliance. Indeed by the time Thompson’s analysis reaches its close, revolutionary marxism has been wholly reduced to the level of caricature and those associated with such politics are placed not only outside the fold of ‘the broadest possible alliance’ but within the camp of the armies of the apocalypse: ‘Those voices which pipe, in shrill tones of militancy, that “the Bomb” is “a class question”…are only a falsetto descant in the choir of exterminism.’42 Thompson’s work cannot be made to serve as synecdoche for the range of political positions available to what can be broadly characterized as the neomarxist new left. Nevertheless, it is important to note the many important points in which ‘Notes on exterminism’ is representative of dominant tendencies and symptomatic problems within the larger field of neomarxist theory of which this essay is merely part. Thompson calls for a politics of broad popular alliance as a way beyond the apparent impasse of class politics. The emergence of new social movements, particularly those mobilized around issues of feminism and race, had in any event already compelled the new left in general to attempt to rework the politics of class through a ‘politics of difference’ and coalition.43 To what degree it would prove possible to articulate a politics of difference within the framework of an analytic fundamentally premised on the laws of motion of political economy and the pivotal role of the proletariat was always a matter of controversy. It is probably fair to suggest that in both his formal retention of the category of class and his actual emptying or hollowing out of actual class analysis, Thompson’s ‘resolution’ of this difficulty is representative of neomarxist discourse in general. A politics of coalition must assume that individual consciousness and political agency owe more to cultural production than to social determination. If, as Tony Bennett observes, ‘neither history nor the fixed positionality of social classes can guarantee a subject for socialism, then so, by the same token, there are no given or absolutely fixed limits to the constituencies which may be recruited in support of socialist objectives.’44 It is within this context of a leftism increasingly committed to coalition-building rather than to class politics that the congruent ascendancy of Gramscian theory in this period is best appreciated. The appropriation of the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’ allowed the neomarxist left to reconstitute the problematic of historical transformation in terms of the struggle over culture and consciousness rather than in terms of economic conflict: this shift of emphasis would prove crucial to any politics of coalition. Moreover, Gramsci’s conceptual separation of the ‘war of manoeuvre’ from the ‘war of position’ lent itself to an appropriation by the neomarxist left whereby the privileging of ‘the war of position’— translated in this context as the politics of coalition-building—took as its sometimes muted counterpart either the abandonment of, or, worse because more inconsistent, the theoretical repression of the concept of the ‘war of manoeuvre’. The de facto disavowal of the telos of ‘revolutionary’ transformation which the separation of these terms facilitated was easily reconciled, therefore, with leftist commitment to peace-movement politics and the advocacy of disarmament. But the abstract deferral of, rather than conscious theoretical engagement with, the place of the ‘war of manoeuvre’ meant that neomarxists might practically involve themselves with issues of modern militarism (via the peace movement for example) without

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ever fully addressing what the larger implications of such issues for socialist theory in general might be. Among the costs of such contradictions might be counted not only theoretical and political inconsistency, but also the left’s incapacity rigorously to address the question of the relationship between marxism and militarism. The Gramscian-legitimated neomarxist preoccupation with the positivity of power opened up vital new possibilities for leftist practice. This focus, however, also had its negative consequences: first, an attenuated capacity to theorize the specific nature of the repressive state apparatuses and, second, a failure theoretically to address the question as to how capitalist society might ultimately be decisively transformed without some resort to militant force. In other words, the valorization of the ‘war of position’ as the task of the present and a corresponding temporal deferral of the role of the ‘war of manoeuvre’ to some completely abstract point in the future does absolutely nothing to clarify the theoretical logic of their interrelationship. Effectively what this can mean is that neomarxist leftism remains committed to a project of total historical transformation but lacks any theoretical capacity or commitment to address the question as to how this transition is ultimately to be effected.45 We might conclude, then, that focusing as it did on the problem of nuclear militarism, the peace movement provided an outlet for a comprehensive neomarxist praxis which might at once be read as both a pragmatic response to, and an evasive deferral of, sustained theoretical engagement, with the effective failure of either ‘revolutionary’ or ‘hegemonistic’ marxisms to provide a satisfactory theoretical analysis of the problematic of contemporary force. The leftist/peace-movement rapprochement constituted a decisive but mostly tacit departure from the premises of historical materialist analysis. Thompson’s ‘Notes on exterminism’ marks one such departure but his essay is symptomatic of much broader developments within leftist critique. But if the peace-movement project elaborated by Thompson constitutes a rupture within marxian materialism, that project also recuperates the rhetorical structure of revolutionary marxist discourse. As Russell Berman has observed, both peace-movement and revolutionary marxist discourse operate ‘within a shared rhetorical structure—the invocation of a crisis that has the potential of leading to an ultimate end’.46 But where revolutionary marxism was directed towards the instrumentalization of catastrophe to effect historical transformation, peace-movement politics are premised upon the need to avert a catastrophe that cannot be thus utilized. The mobilizing images are thus qualitatively distinct even if formally similar.47 The distinction might best be marked perhaps by differentiating between a marxian politics of universalist revolution and the peace movement’s universalist redemptory disposition. Where the former attempted to elaborate a theory for the realization of a new society out of the catastrophe of the old, the latter attempts to redeem the present from its own most catastrophic tendencies. This redemptory disposition of peace-movement politics also extends, as we shall see, to poststructuralist discourse.

IV The formal symmetries between the rhetorical structures which frame both peace-movement and poststructuralist politics are striking. Both positions are inscribed within a rhetoric of projected dystopia: each takes as its task the need to arrest or avert the actualization of

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dystopian tendencies deemed to be already embedded in the conditions of the present. The task of the peace movement is to avert the deep irrationalist drive towards annihilation threatened by the proliferation of nuclear armaments. Poststructuralist theory contends that all metanarratives of emancipation that attempt to realize a rationalized society—marxism must obviously be counted among these—embody an irrational entelechy towards the homogenization of power that perverts the very goals towards which these metanarratives claim to be directed. With Lyotard, poststructuralist critics see in emancipatory metanarratives such as marxism a logocentric ‘fantasy to seize reality’ that, because such narratives fail to attend to their own discursive composition, portends ‘a return to terror’ in the form of totalizing regimes of truth.48 The poststructuralist insistence on difference and discontinuity and on the textuality of meaning serves therefore as a check on the inherently dystopian will-to-power that emancipatory metanarratives are supposed to harbour. The peace movement does not propose a programme of transformative social change; its task is restricted to campaigning against nuclear armaments and to a vigilant monitoring of any extension in the circuitry of these armaments. Similarly, poststructuralist ‘protocols of vigilance’ require the poststructuralist critic to patrol the metanarratives of liberation policing ‘the enunciation of any new truths, originary principles, and a new axiomatics’.49 Like its peace-movement counterpart, the poststructuralist agenda must ‘by design, fall short of an affirmative programmatic, for, the very structure of affirmation is ineluctably complicitous with those very repressive modalities and algorithms’50 that poststructuralist critique takes as its political task to police. This formal symmetry does not of itself constitute a critique of either peace-movement or poststructuralist positions, of course, nor does it indicate that the politics of these positions are identical. What these rhetorical symmetries do suggest is that the politics enunciated from these positionalities are analogously inflected: both are imbued with a powerful admonitory charge that necessarily lacks any affirmative content except in the minimalist sense that both attempt to arrest, defer or deter the actualization of those catastrophic tendencies assumed to be inherent in the present. To admonish is to caution against, to reprove, to protest rather than to actively propose. To what form of political intervention does poststructuralism lend itself then? If its task is to problematize the very foundations of ethics, politics or political theory, does this not place poststructuralism at a tremendous remove from those existing social movements that attempt to advance active political programmes for substantive social change? If poststructuralism does not aim to be anything other than a speculative philosophy or a critical academic discourse, then such questions are evidently unimportant. Yet Derrida at least would seem to wish to endorse the most radical programs of a deconstruction that would…aspire to something more consequential, to change things and to intervene in an efficient and responsible though always, of course, very mediated way, not only in the profession but in what one calls the cité, the polis and more generally the world.51 Change here is defined, quite vaguely, as the ‘maximum intensification of a transformation in progress’.52 Derrida’s own intervention into the 1980s nuclear armaments debates, via his essay ‘No Apocalypse, not now’, would seem to attempt precisely this type of active intervention into a worldly process of political change. An analysis of this essay therefore

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will enable us to calibrate the ratio between poststructuralism’s maximalist and minimalist political claims and to draw some conclusions about the type of intervention it ultimately affords.53 In ‘No Apocalypse, not now’ Derrida proposes that the hypothesis of ‘a total and remainderless destruction’ that is nuclear catastrophe ‘watches over deconstruction, it guides its footsteps’.54 By claiming that ‘deconstruction belongs to the nuclear age’, Derrida posits not only the direct bearing of the nuclear era upon the elaboration of a project such as deconstruction, but also ambitiously claims for deconstruction a special competency to engage the problematic of nuclear militarism. Deconstruction ‘belongs to the nuclear age’, then, in the sense both that the objective possibility of nuclear catastrophe constitutes the outer parameter within which all contemporary political discourse unfolds, and also in the sense that the nuclear 'épochè’ constitutes a logico-political limit that deconstruction is perceived to be especially adapted to think.55 The complex, dense, and frequently elliptic manner in which Derrida sets about establishing the particular adequacy of deconstruction to the task of nuclear critique does not readily lend itself to synopsis, but the essential outlines of this argument can be delineated none the less. Given the deconstructionist propensity to problematize the logic of origins, it should not surprise us that for Derrida deconstruction’s competency is not a historically conditioned one but derives rather from the peculiarly a-historic quality of nuclear war, from the fact that nuclear war is distinguished from all previous wars in that it resists subsumption to historicist narrative. This specificity of nuclear war is crucial to Derrida’s argument: Unlike the other wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or less the same type in human memory…nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event. The explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a ‘classical’, conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war. The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or a text.56 When Derrida conceives of nuclear war primarily as a ‘phantasmatic projection’57 he is not asking us to doubt the actuality of existing nuclear technology. For Derrida, the ‘phantasmatic’ quality of what he terms ‘the nuclear referent’ derives from the fact that that referent cannot be imagined outside of the tropology of the existing archive although nuclear war is not itself ‘archival’ since its actualization ‘would irreversibly destroy the entire archive and all symbolic capacity’.58 The hypothesis of a total nuclear war represents then, for Derrida, the perfect example of the impossibility of ever closing the gap between the ‘signifier’ and the ‘real’ to which it refers since the real-ization of nuclear war would itself constitute the negation of that in the ‘name’ of which such a war was actuated. The ‘massive “reality” of nuclear weaponry’ and the ‘fable’ that is nuclear war are, Derrida iterates, distinct but profoundly intermeshed: For the ‘reality’ of the nuclear age and the fable of nuclear war are perhaps distinct, but they are not two separate things. It is the war (in other words the fable) that triggers this fabulous war effort, this senseless capitalization of sophisticated weaponry…which, through techno-science, through all the techno-scientific inventiveness that it motivates, structures not only the army, diplomacy, politics,

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but the whole of the human socius today…. ‘Reality’, let’s say the encompassing institution of the nuclear age, is constructed by the fable.59 It is the ‘non-event’, the ‘fable’ of nuclear war that determines and legitimates, that is constitutive to this degree, of ‘the “reality” of the nuclear age’. When Derrida refers to the ‘fabulous textuality’ of nuclear war he alludes, however, not only to this ‘phantasmic’ quality but also to the whole range of informational and communicative apparatuses within which nuclear technology is embedded. ‘Nuclear weaponry depends’, he remarks, ‘more than any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information and communication, structures of language’.60 Nuclear technology cannot then be conceived of as a purely techno-scientific phenomenon but belongs to a whole discursive web of ‘techno-militaro-politico-diplomatic’61 networks. The tangled web of discourses that constitute ‘nuclear strategy’ then, is, as Christopher Norris observes, comprised of ‘a whole range of imaginary tactics, threats and other such gambits whose complexity far outruns the grasp of any rational decision-making process’.62 Nuclear strategy, in other words, is comprised of an elaborate series of performative speech acts that are always open to misreading, to errors of misinterpretation or miscalculation by the ‘other’; always embedded within the ‘fabulous textuality’ of nuclear strategies is the potential to trigger the ‘reality’ to which they allude. Nuclear technology, then, is embedded within the ‘essential rhetoricity’63 of nuclear strategy; ‘nuclear strategy’, however, cannot constitute an authoritative master-narrative for these matters since there is in reality only ‘a multiplicity of dissociated, heterogeneous competencies’ that produce a ‘knowledge [that] is neither coherent nor totalizable’.64 Consequently, Derrida concludes, those expert in the analysis of discourse must consider themselves ‘as competent as others to deal with a phenomenon whose essential feature is that of being fabulously textual, through and through’.65 If this compellingly establishes a role for discourse analysis in this area, it still remains for Derrida to explain why deconstruction in particular ‘belongs to the nuclear age’ and can claim as such to perform a privileged function in this context. To pursue this claim we must return to Derrida’s assertion that ‘It is the war (in other words the fable) that triggers this fabulous war effort.’ This point is underscored towards the conclusion of his text when Derrida remarks that ‘nuclear war…can only come about in the name of that which is worth more than life, that which, giving its value to life, has greater value than life.’66 What these statements reiterate is that for Derrida the actualization of nuclear war is conceivable only in the context of an absolute belief in the transcendent legitimacy of some ideology in whose ‘name’ that war could be waged. The key point here is that Derrida assumes that it is logocentric dogmatism that precedes, determines and brings into being as it were the reality of nuclear technology: the ‘causality’ that produces the condition of nuclear stand-off is conceived of exclusively in discursive terms. Conflict, in other words, is located entirely within the register of its epistemic constitution. Einstein’s admonition that the atom bomb had changed everything save our modes of thinking is re-echoed in Derrida’s assertion that ‘Between the Trojan War and nuclear war, technical preparation has progressed prodigiously, but the psychagogic and discursive schemas, the mental structures and the structures of intersubjective calculus in game theory have not budged.’67 What Derrida posits here is a technological leap and a cultural lag: deconstruction is then inserted into this space not just as any other analytical

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model but as a decisive advance in the whole field of conceptual practice, a paradigmatic shift that Derrida infers would make good the fatal lag between technological sophistication and contemporary analytical rusticity. The distinctiveness of Derrida’s position can best be clarified here perhaps if it is situated in relation to some of those positions that we have earlier examined. For Engels, the causality of militarism and of war is fundamentally imbricated in economic conditions and consequently in the social struggles to which these conditions give rise. Thompson’s position, similar in rhetorical outline to Derrida’s, is predicated on the assumption that the objective possibility of nuclear catastrophe, as well as the relative autonomy of nuclear technology, is such that any analysis of the historical origins of the crisis proves either impossible or simply counterproductive. Unlike Derrida, however, Thompson clearly does not trace a line of direct causal complicity between the violence embedded in nuclear technology and that epistemic violence which Derrida believes to be fundamental to all logocentric discourse. Because he retains a commitment to the conventional premises of rational humanist analysis, Thompson must construct what he perceives to be a societal tendency towards destruction in terms of an aberrant irrational ‘exterminist’ drive, the exact agency of which is inscrutable: this noumenal ‘drive’ or ‘will’ must be re-harnessed to the proper rule of reason. The rhetorical symmetry of their positions notwithstanding, then, Derrida’s position differs from Thompson’s in that he perceives the violence embedded in nuclear technology not in terms of an inscrutable aberration of reason but as the logical limit, the inevitable entelechial completion or perfection, of a deeper epistemic arche-violence always-already conditioned by and lodged within the discursive production of logocentric ‘meaning’ and ‘truth’. It is in this context that deconstruction, which knowingly and consciously dedicates itself to the relentless dissection and deferral of the production of ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’, which refuses linguistic closure and self-assuredness of any kind, and which thus lays claim to no predictive knowledge, can be valorized by Derrida as the exemplary critical practice to address the exigencies of the nuclear moment. From this, Derrida can proceed to infer that the deconstructionist deferral of meaning and refusal of truth becomes the very condition for survival within the shadow of nuclear holocaust: One can no longer oppose belief and science, doxa and épistémè, once one has reached the decisive place of the nuclear age…. In this critical place, there is no more room for a distinction between belief and science, thus no more space for a ‘nuclear criticism’ strictly speaking. Nor even for a truth in that sense. No truth, no apocalypse. (As you know, Apocalypse means Revelation, of Truth, Un-veiling).68 If the infinite suspension of ‘truth’—what Derrida refers to as the refusal of ‘the name of’ in which war might be waged—is stipulated as the mandatory requirement for the deterrence of the eruption of ‘apocalyptic’ violence, then the question becomes in the name of what principle, on what basis, is Derrida’s own position advanced? If only the relentless dissection of ‘truth’ and an infinite commitment to the indeterminacy of ‘meaning’ will serve to prevent the hardening of oppositions into conflict-laden polarizations that ultimately escalate into political antagonisms which at a global level portend nuclear annihilation, then on what basis is it that Derrida intervenes here? It cannot be in the name of any conventional political position since these in their logocentrism are deemed to be inherent carriers of violence. Of

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course opposition to the nullifying prospect of nuclear annihilation might appear not to require explanation. But this in itself does not help much. If an ineffable oppo-sition to the prospect of nuclear annihilation is to be translated into something more concrete, to be transformed into a comprehensive and identifiable position with regard to nuclear militarism for example, then that ‘position’ must be motivated by some underpinning principle of affirmative meaning or vision of larger social change. What Derrida’s focus on the deconstruction of the processes of the production of meaning leaves totally unresolved, indeed unaddressed, is the problem as to how an ineffable abhorrence of nuclear catastrophe is to be actively shaped into a positive political agenda. The injunction ‘No truth, no apocalypse’ is possessed of a compelling admonitory charge but the very rigour of deconstruction’s methodological procedures inhibits its political possibilities. It is difficult not to conclude, then, that deconstruction’s admonitory charge is achieved at the cost of a corresponding political emptiness. A fundamental problem with ‘No Apocalypse, not now’ is that by taking its starting-point from the hypothesis of a total nuclear war, rather than from the actuality of nuclear militarism, Derrida circumscribes the possibility of any effective engagement with the institutional materiality of military-political force. Effectively bypassing such issues, Derrida instead subsumes the question of nuclear militarism under the generalized problematic of epistemic violence. Nuclear violence is simply transposed on to the paradigmatic grid of discursive violence. Within the framework of this subsumption, Derrida has provided no theoretical basis that would allow us to generate useful and necessary distinctions between epistemic violence and the institutional materiality of nuclear violence which would enable an address to the specificity of the latter. For Derrida, nuclear violence is merely the logical limit, the ultimate completion, of an epistemic violence deemed to be inherent to the conditions of the production of meaning. This tends towards a distension of the concept of ‘violence’ that glosses any distinction between epistemic violence and material force, between individual and institutionalized force, between violence in its localized and international manifestations. Given this undifferentiated construction of ‘violence’, deconstruction seems at times to be directed towards a quasi-mystic asceticism since any rigidification of difference can be deemed from this standpoint to be complicit in an ongoing chain of violence that must ultimately portend nuclear disaster. This tone of irenic asceticism is certainly evident towards the conclusion of Derrida’s text when the invocation of absolute violence seems to invite as its antithesis the imperative of absolute peace. Nuclear war, Derrida writes, ‘can only come about in the name of that which is worth more than life, that which, giving its value to life, has greater value than life’, whereas ‘those who want nothing to do with that catastrophe are ready to prefer any sort of life at all, life above all, as the only value worthy to be affirmed.’69 This valorization of ‘life above all’ should not prevent us from noting that ‘life’ here is merely hypostatized as the absence of absolute annihilation: the whole social spectrum of non-nuclear violences, oppressions and exploitations are silently countenanced under the larger imperative to defer conflict in the name of preserving ‘life above all’. Even were Derrida’s textual concept of the social to be accepted, it would be necessary to complicate the idea that the institutional apparatuses of force could be effectively opposed solely by deconstructing the discourses that legitimate them. Derrida brings his essay to conclusion by invoking the fable of the abandonment of Babel, the moral of which appears to be that:

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God and the sons of Shem having understood that a name wasn’t worth it—and this would be absolute knowledge—they preferred to spend a little more time together, the time of a long colloquy of warriors in love with life, busy writing in all languages in order to make conversation last, even if they didn’t understand each other too well.70 Peter Schwenger has aptly termed this concept of resistance ‘Scheherazade-like’ since its operating principle appears to be that the function of criticism is to ‘keep us talking in order to defer apocalypse’.71 But what material social conditions enable and guarantee such discourse? What Derrida’s concept of a ‘colloquy of warriors’ assumes is a neo-liberal social imaginary, an ideal speech situation perhaps, in which individuals or groups of individuals address each other as free political agents engaged in reasonable conference and debate: the institutional constraints and social determinations that operate upon these ‘warriors’ have been discounted. Even without appealing to the notion that society is founded on a prediscursive ground, it is evident that, their discursivity notwithstanding, different apparatuses and institutions have their own disciplinary practices and technologies that regulate social conduct in ways which are not, to quote Tony Bennett, ‘reducible to a politics of consciousness’.72 For this reason, then, deconstructionist critique cannot in itself be accounted a sufficient intervention with, in this case, the institutions of nuclear militarism. Yet deconstruction’s constitutive logic disestablishes, within its own terms of reference at least, the basis for forms of political intervention that go beyond this critical mode of address. The poststructuralist critic, it must be concluded, remains trapped within a disabling double bind.

V In this essay I have examined how certain broadly defined theoretical paradigms might be configured in relation to developments in modern militarism. Schematizing somewhat for the sake of clarity, a general ‘upward’ displacement of the problematic of force can be detected in the trajectory that runs from the revolutionary marxism of Engels/Anderson through the ‘hegemonistic’ projects of Gramsci/Thompson to the ‘epistemic’ focus characteristic of Derridean poststructuralism. For revolutionary marxism, the analysis of militarism could be firmly grounded in the objectivity of economic analysis. Considerably complicating the appeal to economically given social positions characteristic of this approach, the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’ provided the basis for a reconceptualization of social struggle by insisting on the positivity of power as the organization of consent. Subsequent neomarxist appropriations of this concept of power tend, I have suggested, to lead to a disabling underestimation of the institutional materiality of repressive force. Recent neomarxist/peace-movement alignments demonstrate in exemplary fashion the antinomies of ‘hegemonistic’-based philosophies of power and resistance. These rapprochements premised the struggle for nuclear disarmament on a ‘hegemonistic’ concept of politics as the organization of popular consent. Yet precisely because the very notion of ‘hegemony’ itself rests upon a concept that splits ‘power’ in terms of the couplet ‘consent/coercion’, this analytic could not satisfactorily disclose the material

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consubstantiality of consent and coercion in the material reality of state power. In other words, the emphasis upon the positivity of power as consent that the concept of ‘hegemony’ insists upon, has tended to inhibit adequate theoretical engagement with the institutional materiality of force. If the Gramsci/Thompson model, then, shifts the weight of emphasis from the domain of the economic to that of the cultural/ideological organization of political consent, Derridean poststructuralism further shifts the analytical focus to the level of the episteme: that is, the problematic of force is located within our inherent modes of producing meaning and knowledge. The Derridean insistence on the rhetorical nature of all knowledge—including economics—disallows the appeal to objective social relations that subtends conventional marxian analysis. Moreover, since any extra-theoretical object—militarism in this case— cannot be separated off from its theoretical representation, the problematic of force is folded into the broader epistemological concerns posed by deconstruction. Yet, as our analysis of ‘No Apocalypse, not now’ indicates, the commitment to the indeterminacy of meaning fundamental to deconstruction makes it impossible for Derrida to provide a political basis for the opposition to nuclear militarism despite his desire to bend deconstruction to this task. Lacking this basis, his theoretical critique cannot be squared with a larger political programme to oppose nuclear militarism, and without such a programme the critique itself cannot effect change. The emphasis on the positivity of power that the combined influence of the works of Foucault and Gramsci has done so much to consolidate in current neomarxist theory is in itself essentially a positive development. What is, however, most disturbing about this insistence on the productive aspect of power is the corollary neglect of the diverse state machineries of coercion and of the national and transnational organization of war industries. Foucauldian-derived concepts of the state as a disciplinary machine seem, in much contemporary political analysis, to sponsor the notion that the passage to ‘postmodernity’ involves a corresponding shift in the exercise of power from modes of exploitation-coercion to modes of manipulated consent. As Nicos Poulantzas has observed: ‘what we might call the “softening” of physical violence in the exercise of power has become an almost commonplace idea.’73 What this complacent genealogy of contemporary society occludes— despite the glaring evidence of the ever-expanding technologies of destruction to the contrary—is that no law exists whereby an increase in ideological or disciplinary control must entail a corresponding reduction in the role of coercion. There is, however, a more positive aspect to contemporary leftist critique that provides at least the basis for a more productive engagement with these matters. In sometimes complementary ways, the works of Gramsci, Foucault and Althusser have variously reiterated the idea that abstract concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘ideology’ or ‘force’ always exist in the form of social apparatuses and are most productively analysed in terms of the material practices, technologies and modalities of these apparatuses. The classical marxist tendency to theorize militarism in terms of the laws of motion of political economy would seem to be connected to the dearth of extended studies on the specific institutional modalities of the machinery of coercion, and the contemporary preoccupation with the positivity of power does nothing to correct this. An institutionally focused analysis that addressed the problematic of force by starting from the complex network of institutions and formations which regulate the machinery of modern coercion offers the best possibility for ways beyond current theoretical impasses.

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Such an approach would, however, have to go beyond what Poulantzas terms ‘the notion of a simple complementarity of violence and consent’ which conceives of these as ‘two calculable homogeneous magnitudes’ that can be divorced from each other.74 This tendency characteristically manifests itself in such common analytical couplets as ‘violence-consent’, ‘repression-ideology’ or even ‘revolution-hegemony’. Commenting on Althusser’s differentiation between ideological and repressive state apparatuses, Poulantzas points out that this very distinction cannot be sustained except at a descriptive level since, depending on the form of state or regime or even at particular moments of crisis, a number of apparatuses can shift from one to another of these modalities and assume new functions.75 The capacity for this type of slippage underlines the deeper complicity between the productive and coercive dimensions of power: it also sharply underscores the need for sustained and ongoing leftist analysis of the problematic of force beyond Gulf War or even Cold War. Columbia University

NOTES I would like to thank Professor Jean Howard for her resolute support through successive drafts of this essay. The help of Gemma Murphy, Colleen Lye and Y-mna Siddiqi is also gratefully acknowledged. 1 George Bush, ‘Speech of January 16, 1991’, in Micah L.Sifry and Christopher Cerf (eds), The Gulf War Reader (New York: Times Books, 1991), p. 312. 2 Mikhail S.Gorbachev, ‘Statement of February 9, 1991’, in The Gulf War Reader, p. 329. 3 This statement is attributed by TV host and syndicated columnist Patrick Buchanan to A.M.Rosenthal, columnist for The New York Times. See Patrick Buchanan, ‘Have the neocons thought this through’, in The Gulf War Reader, p. 214. Responding to Rosenthal, Buchanan writes ‘This is hyperbolic nonsense. All Mr Bush need do is tell Saddam: “Use poison gas on my troops, and I will use atomic bombs on yours”.’ 4 Michael T.Klare, ‘High-death weapons of the Gulf War’, The Nation, 3 June 1991, p. 721. 5 I borrow the term ‘negative materiality’ from Ronald Schleifer’s Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 7. Schleifer uses the term ‘negative materiality’ to refer to the manner whereby something which exists solely as negativity, such as death, and which cannot therefore be conceived as a substantive ‘thing’, can none the less exert palpable material effects. I use the term here to refer to the manner in which the negativity of ‘nuclear war’, which like death cannot be regarded as a substantive ‘thing’, can none the less exert a material effect upon conventional military strategy or indeed upon contemporary political theory. 6 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 1978), p. 274. 7 Haynes Horne, ‘Jameson’s strategies of containment’, in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Postmodernism, Jameson, Critique (Washington: Maisonneuve Press, 1989), p. 272. Horne is referring to the work of Jean-François Lyotard. 8 The works of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio constitute important exceptions here. References to nuclear apocalypse and to terrorism recur in many of Baudrillard’s works.

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For Baudrillard, however, these phenomena are merely continuous with the simulated reality of postmodernity and they are not accorded any specificity. For an insightful analysis of Baudrillard and ‘the end’ see Klaus R.Scherpe, ‘Dramatization and dedramatization of “the End”: The apocalyptic consciousness of modernity and postmodernity’, trans. Brent O.Peterson, Cultural Critique, vol. 5 (Winter 1986–7), pp. 95– 129. 9 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 96. 10 Scherpe, ‘Dramatization’, p. 96. 11 The terms ‘classical marxist’, ‘neomarxist’ and ‘poststructuralist’ are obviously deployed here as schematic markers to map broad theoretical constellations and not as precise indications of any particular positions within these larger constellations. I use the term ‘neomarxist’ here loosely as a flag of convenience to denote the range of contemporary leftist theories that may be demarcated from more traditional marxisms by their refusal of a master discourse of proletarian revolution. Although the position of Gramsci himself remains ambiguous in this respect, the extended process of adapting Gramsci’s work towards a politics of con-sensual coalition and the articulation of an anti-teleological politics of process is pivotal in this regard. What crucially marks this divide perhaps is a shift of analytic emphasis from the social determination of classes to a politics of consciousness directed towards the interpellation of political subjecs. 12 Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’, trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics, 14 (Summer 1984), pp. 20–31, p. 27. 13 I refer here to the Weberian strain of pessimism that links such otherwise diverse poststructuralist thinkers as Lyotard and Foucault: both tend to construct reverse teleologies which emphasize enlightenment rationality as a unilinear drive towards totalitarian administration and terror. 14 Ernst Jünger, ‘Über den Schmerz’, in Samtliche Werke, 2nd section, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980, p. 183). Quoted in Scherpe, ‘Dramatization’, p. 104. 15 Frederick Engels, ‘Theory of Force’ in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works: Volume 25 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), p. 161. 16 ibid., p. 158. 17 ibid., p. 158. 18 ibid., p. 158. 19 ibid., p. 158. 20 Perry Anderson, The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100 (Nov. 1976–Jan. 1977), pp. 5–78, p. 77. 21 Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1980), p. 195. 22 Engels, ‘Theory of force’, p. 159. 23 ibid., p. 158. 24 Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay in the Social Theory of Total War and Peace (London: Pluto Press, 1988), p. 46. 25 Robert M.Maniquis, ‘Pascal’s bet, totalities, and guerilla criticism’, Humanities in Societies, 6 (Spring and Summer 1983), pp. 257–82, p. 279. 26 Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism, p. 194–5.

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27 Maniquis, ‘Pascal’s bet, totalities, and guerilla criticism’, pp. 264–5. 28 ibid., pp. 264–5. 29 ibid., p. 262. 30 ibid., p. 258. 31 ibid., p. 265. 32 See, for example, Robin Archer et al. (eds), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On (New York and London: Verso, 1989) and Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis In Historical Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981). 33 An account of the importance of Gramsci’s work for contemporary leftist analysis, particularly leftist cultural studies, is beyond the scope of this essay. For a useful analysis of Gramsci’s central influence in contemporary cultural studies see Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), especially ch. 10. For a genealogy of the concept of hegemony see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). 34 Edward Thompson, ‘Notes on exterminism, the last stage of civilization’, in Exterminism and Cold War (London: New Left Books, 1982), pp. 1–33, pp. 1, 29. 35 ibid., p. 1. 36 ibid., p. 1. 37 ibid., p. 21. 38 ibid., p. 20. My emphasis. 39 ibid., p. 28. 40 ibid., pp. 29–30. 41 ibid., p. 28. 42 ibid., p. 30. 43 The term ‘a non-pluralistic politics of difference’ is Homi Bhabha’s. As I understand it, the term speaks to the difficulty, evident in much new-left discourse, of theoretically accommodating different political constituencies and subject positions without simply resorting to pluralism and relativism. See Bhabha’s ‘DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation’, in Homi K.Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291–322. 44 Bennett, Outside Literature, p. 253. 45 See Anderson’s ‘The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ for an extended analysis of this problem in relation to Gramsci’s own work. I have drawn extensively on this essay for this part of my argument. 46 Russel A.Berman, Modern Culture and Critical Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 197. 47 By subsuming the sharp revolutionary ‘moment’ of classical marxist eschatology and by stretching or extending it to indefinite process, a leftist ‘hegemonistic’ project to a large degree abrogates the apocalyptic tenor of the former. But in order to guarantee the coalitional or co-optive bonding that maintains this processual movement, the hegemonic paradigm must also have recourse to a rhetoric of crisis that will make such bonding seem imperative. The ‘hegemonic’ paradigm then is caught in a curious double bind whereby revolutionary eschatology is deintensified at one level but the rhetoric of ‘catastrophe’ is reinvoked and reintensified in a different modality. 48 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G.Bennington and B.Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.

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82. 49 R.Radhakrishnan, ‘Poststructuralist politics—towards a theory of coalition’, in Kellner (ed.), Postmodernism, Jameson, Critique, pp. 301–32, p. 302. 50 ibid., p. 302. 51 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of law: “The mystical foundation of authority”’, trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review, II, 5–6 (July-August 1990), pp. 920–1045, pp. 931– 3. 52 ibid., p. 933. 53 Derrida’s most overt and explicit treatment of the nuclear issue is in the ‘No Apocalypse, not now’ essay already cited. Other Derridean texts of interest for analysis of the place of this topic in his work include The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and ‘Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy’, trans. John P.Leavey, Semeia, vol. 23 (1982) and Oxford Literary Review, 6 (1984), pp. 3–37. 54 ‘No Apocalypse, not now’, p. 27. 55 ibid., p. 27. 56 ibid., p. 23. 57 ibid., p. 26. 58 ibid., p. 28. 59 ibid., p. 23. 60 ibid., p. 23. 61 ibid., p. 24. 62 Christopher Norris, ‘On Derrida’s “apocalyptic tone”: textual politics and the principle of reason’, Southern Review (Adelaide), 19 (March 1986), pp. 13–30, p. 24. 63 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, not now’, p. 24. 64 ibid., p. 22. 65 ibid., p. 23. 66 ibid., p. 30. 67 ibid., p. 24. 68 ibid., p. 24. 69 ibid., p. 30. 70 ibid., p. 31. 71 Peter Schwenger, ‘Postnuclear postcard’, Papers on Language & Literature, 26 (Winter 1990), pp. 164–81, p. 175. 72 Bennett, Outside Literature, p. 270. 73 Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: New Left Books, 1978), p. 78. 74 ibid., pp. 80–1. 75 ibid., p. 29.

Modernity—Postmodernity: a dialogue VASSILIKI KOLOCOTRONI and MARGERY METZSTEIN

The structure of this dialogue is based on Plato’s Symposium. The Symposium is an elaborate fiction. As a genre, that is, as a dramatic dialogue, its main objective is to praise Socrates and to expound his philosophy. It has also become a paradigm for the exchange and rehearsal of philosophical views. As such, it can be taken as a model for the academic seminar. Its original artificiality may be seen paradoxically, as part of its function. We have chosen to emphasize the paradox of the Symposium in order to foreground both the enabling and limiting aspects of this legacy. We have used the artificial element of the form as a means of circumscribing a space where our discourse can proceed. In doing so we acknowledge that this is an intertextual space: a space of dialogue, of exchange and of conflict. Our version of the dramatic dialogue depends on the adoption of personae: they are Wildean personae, in the sense that we venture to mimic and parody discourses of modernity and postmodernity. Wilde’s is the voice of artifice and excess, that which rehearses received discourse and thereby exposes its exclusions. The excess of which we speak ruptures the discourses of rationality and plurality and returns as the excluded ‘other’ in both. In spite of the radical claims of our century’s intellectual avant-gardes, the concept of a self-critique of dominant discourses still ignores, humiliates and insults the female and, in turn, ‘feminizes’ its own blind spots and exclusions. SIBYL: Cassandra, the other day I met a friend who is a very good friend of Bosie’s who had apparently been to that dinner party at Bunbury’s house. Oscar Wilde was at the party and I asked my friend to tell me what he talked about. He couldn’t remember everything and I’ve already told this story twice, so you could say that I have rehearsed it. As a matter of fact, quite apart from any idea of edification, I take an extraordinary pleasure in talking myself, and in hearing others talk, on philosophical topics; but any other type of conversation—and particularly the talk of you Academics—fills me with distress on my own account and with pity for those of you who are with me, because you think that you are accomplishing something when in fact you are accomplishing nothing. You in your turn may perhaps think me an unfortunate creature, and you are probably right, but my feeling about you is a matter not of opinion, but knowledge.1 CASSANDRA: You are always the same, Sibyl, you are always running down yourself and other people…but we won’t argue about that now. Just confine yourself to doing what we asked and describe the course of the conversation. S: Well, this friend, I think he was Ernest, said that apparently Oscar anticipated an inevitable and necessary change in the role of the philosopher. I think this is exactly what he said: That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those

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who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, society must sooner or later return to its lost leader, the cultivated and fascinating liar…. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society and without him a dinner-party…is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society…. Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style.2 C: That sounds very turn of the century, very fin de siècle to me! I mean apocalyptic, in a way. Is that maybe what Bradbury and McFarlane mean when they talk of ‘those cataclysmic upheavals of culture, those fundamental convulsions of the creative human spirit’?3 Or maybe Woolf, when she claims that ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’?4 S: Yes, I suppose in the sense of a drastic change, but doesn’t apocalypse also mean revelation, uncovering? Thinking of Nietzsche I would suggest that it even means unmasking, the taking off of one’s mask.5 C: Yes, certainly, but who is this liar that Wilde talks about? S: Well, the ‘liar’ in Wilde is a complex type that results from a rereading and transvaluation of inherited beliefs. By inverting the notion of ‘truth’ as an ultimate value, he simultaneously undermines the revered figure in Western society. His ‘liar’ is at the same time a philosopher, a critic and an artist. C: Do you mean that he can only be drawn from a cultural elite? S: No, he is ‘cultured’ exactly because he draws on nature only in order to create his own myth, to create himself. This is in a sense a reading of Nietzsche’s statement that one can only become what one is.6 C: But why is the ‘liar’ so important in relation to society? S: Because this notion of the created self reveals the artificiality and suppressed struggle hidden behind the mask of the concept ‘individual’. It also disrupts the narrative of Truth about this individual and in so doing calls this a ‘lie’. C: But what’s ‘individual’? S: It may mean the modern subject, the subject of the Enlightenment. The knowing ‘I’ as a fixed entity which depends on a network of rationalizations. C: Is this subject a man or a woman? Or is it both? Is it an ethnically and geographically specific subject? S: Well, the subject of modernity seems to be wearing a mask of neutrality and universality. C: Oh? You mean humanity… S: No. Well, yes. That’s interesting because it’s not clear who that subject is. Although it is referred to as a ‘he’, it seems to be genderless and universal, what Habermas calls ‘a subjectivity puffed-up into a false absolute’.7 C: This reminds me of what Adorno and Horkheimer said about the modern subject that originated with the Enlightenment. They say that:

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The system the Enlightenment has in mind is the form of knowledge which copes most proficiently with the facts and supports the individual most effectively in the mastery of Nature. Its principles are the principles of self preservation. Immaturity is then the inability to survive. The burgher, in the successive forms of slave-owner, free-entrepreneur, and administrator is the logical subject of the Enlightenment.8 S: But who are these slaves, that the subject depends upon and exploits? C: They are the necessary objects of appropriation for the assertion of the subject’s growth and progress (of the plant ‘man’, as Nietzsche puts it). S: You mean that they enable the very concept of the subject to be? C: Yes. Both Nietzsche and Adorno say that the very idea of the concept is a manifestation of the ‘will-to-power’, of the struggle to dominate nature. According to Adorno, ‘concepts… are moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature’.9 S: So you mean that the very construction of the subject necessitates the positing and exploitation of an object—the slave—or a mass of others who cannot occupy that subject position. The concept of universality, then, conceals a hierarchy of relationships which are elided by the positing of the subject. C: Well, that’s one way to put it… The other day I was at a seminar and I heard Habermas calling this ‘a pretended universality’,10 one which depends on the suffering of the excluded. Therefore, we can say that the subject is a hierarchical concept which is a crucial feature—perhaps a by-product—of a capitalist society. But who constructed this powerful subject? S: This is the same thinking being which is made manifest in Descartes’s Meditations. What we already have there is the equation of consciousness and rationality. ‘I think therefore I am.’ But I wonder can everyone think? C: Not everyone has the time to think and some people can’t think because they are irrational. S: Oh, so the concept of rationality depends on its opposite, irrationality? Now that is interesting. Didn’t Nietzsche say something to the effect that Truth and error, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil are not to be opposed to one another; on the contrary [they are] as points along a single continuum…[and that] all things in general are essentially interrelated and derive their character from their interrelations.11? C: So, according to Nietzsche, the opposing of rationality and irrationality is already a false formulation which propagates and relies on its inherent misconceptions. S: Does that mean that rationality depends on othering and domination? Aren’t women, by the way, often associated with nature? Aren’t they usually called irrational, natural and primitive? Doesn’t Prospero create Caliban and depend on his primitiveness—the corruption of his ‘other’, Sycorax? Adorno and Horkheimer once said about this relationship: For millennia men dreamed of acquiring absolute mastery over nature, of converting the cosmos into one immense hunting ground. It was to this that the idea of man was geared in a male-dominated society. This was the significance of

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reason, his proudest boast. Woman was weaker and smaller. Between her and man there was a difference she could not bridge—a difference imposed by nature, the most humiliating that can exist in a male-dominated society. Where the mastery of nature is the true goal, biological inferiority remains a glaring stigma, the weakness imprinted by nature as a key stimulus to aggression.12 C: Well, if you are saying that the rational subject of modernity depends on the construction and domination of an irrational, primitive, natural and feminine or ‘feminized’ other, then this would mean that its idea of progress is built on the same kind of conceptualizing. All this talk about progress reminds me of what Benjamin said: ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’13 Is the idea of progress false then? S: Oh, yes, it’s a mask—As I recall Wilde saying, ‘The Truths of Metaphysics are the Truths of Masks’14 and this version of modernity relies on progress as a metaphysical truth. C: The mask then conceals but in a sense also protects. By putting on the mask of those forces that are dominating Nature and those other non-subjects, you forget their presence and eventually you forget that you are wearing the mask. S: Is this discourse about the rational subject then a mask which needs to be prised off? What would that reveal? C: It would reveal a loss of memory, of what there was before the mask. It would also reveal a desire to assert a space outside of that struggle of forces. S: So, in a nutshell, this subject is an interpretation which is carved out and primatized from many other possible interpretations. C: Yes, but how can we so easily sum this up? Do we know these other interpretations? Have they been allowed to speak? It seems to me that the voice that speaks for them relegates them to an irrational—and ineffable—space and fixes the terms of the discourse. It sets the parameters for a self-legitimating and perpetuating discourse. This is a male voice and one of its privileged expressions can be heard in the declamations of the philosopher. About philosophy, Nietzsche says that ‘[it] always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to creation of the world…’15 S: Is Nietzsche, then, calling philosophers ‘moral universalists’ whose discourse manifests a ‘will-to-power’ which silences those whose position is outside the moral sphere? C: Yes, and it is a humiliating silence. Because one of the things that Habermas said was that ‘social movements and political battles have repeatedly been and will continue to be necessary in order to break the chains of…universalist principles which are, in fact, selectively exhausted and applied in an insensitive fashion.’ He urges us, therefore, to learn from the fatal experiences and the irreparable suffering of those who have been humiliated and insulted; that no one may be excluded in the name of any moral universalism, be they an underprivi-leged class, an exploited nation, a marginalised minority or suppressed women.16 S: But isn’t Habermas here simply pointing to the emancipatory aspect of the project of modernity? Primarily, that is, emancipation from religion, a metaphysical totality whereby most subjects were slaves, i.e. non-thinking or sinful beings—women by definition?

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C: Yes, it is an emancipation, in the sense of taking matters into your own hands, away from God that is, and God-man. It constitutes a promise for a life which can be lived ‘now’ and which will progressively improve with the help of the subject’s ever-developing powers of rationality. But this is a Janus-faced figure. S: Do you mean that the Enlightenment emancipates the subject from the shackles of religion and posits a new set of freedoms, but by donning the mask of the subject it actually reconstructs a new tyranny? C: The white male rational subject of modernity is ensnared by this ideal/goal of progress, the goal of history as growth. This requires Utopian thinking in order to perpetuate itself. S: What is the Utopia here? C: The eternal newness of the present moment. The dialectic of the past sublated— transgressed and carried over—in the present and projected into the future. S: Oh, you mean the Hegelian Aufhebung, that non-identity in identity is sublated and synthesized in order to produce a unified, puffed-up subject. So the very mode of thinking which constructs the subject in history also constructs history in the image of the subject. C: Yes, and what is also interesting is that Nietzsche interprets the dialectic by exchanging the term sublimation for the term sublation.17 This has interesting psychological connotations but it also emphasizes the constant movement of becoming rather than the absolute reconciliation of Hegel’s synthesis. S: But anyway, aren’t we told that this subject in history has failed to emancipate itself? Aren’t we currently reminded that it has failed to inhabit the Utopia, the ‘non-space’ of freedom? C: Yes. This is the point at which the discourse of ‘post modernity’ supposedly begins. S: How do you mean, ‘post’? C: Well, ‘post’ means ‘after’, doesn’t it? Like an after thought, an after effect… S: But after what? Modernity is then at an end. What does it mean for modernity to be at an end? C: It means that the ‘post’ posits modernity’s end but also the end of its telos, of its goal. S: So, modernity succeeded in carrying out its project… C: No, it failed; therefore, in a way, ‘post’ also implies a loss and a movement away from. It also posits itself as ‘meta’, that is, being aware of its distance, it constantly celebrates the loss but also points to a new beginning. S: But how is this new? Does it occupy a new space? How is this different from the discourse of modernity? Does this not also wear a mask (another interpretation)? C: Yes, and it is a double mask. On the one hand, it is wearing the tragic mask, of standing for what is lost, but also the mask of representing the loss, of interpreting and, as we have said, appropriating it. S: You mean like the ‘hypocrite’, the actor in Greek drama?18 C: Yes, and it is both a mask of mourning and a mask of parody. I believe Lyotard says something interesting about this. He claims that we live in a period which is simply a blind (compulsive) repetition of an earlier period of mourning, of the period in which we mourned God, of the very period which gave rise to the modern world and to its project of conquest. To pursue that conquest today would simply mean perpetuating the conquest of the moderns, the only difference being that the notion of reaching unanimity has been abandoned.19

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S: But I thought Lyotard was a prophet of post modernity. This seems to suggest that he is also a prophet of the apocalypse… C: Well, what he did was to give a vision of modernity’s apocalypse. This has a double set of connotations; on the one hand, apocalypse as the end, as it is itself at the end of the Biblical narrative, but also apocalypse in the literal sense of revelation, that is, the uncovering, the unmasking of modernity’s discourse. S: How then does Lyotard occupy a different space from Nietzsche and Wilde, to whom if you recall I referred to at the beginning of our conversation. Is this what Nietzsche means by ‘eternal recurrence’, that Lyotard is a new prophet whose discourse repeats the discourse of all prophets of the apocalypse? C: Except that he posits new caveats: to be wary of philosophizing; to be wary of mythologizing; to resist the glamour of utopia and of fin-de-siècle thinking; to be wary of religion. S: What!! Is this not a reformulation of Adorno’s negative dialectic— that is, of a mode of thought and of a discourse which constantly criticizes itself? C: Yes, it is a moment, however, which has either been dismissed as a pessimistic moment, or, in the words of Hal Foster, as ‘a moment which is hard to relinquish but is in need of revision or rejection’.20 S: Oh, is that what Blaine McBurney means when he talks about ‘the postmodern transvaluation of modernist values’? C: Yes, how did that piece go? I had forgotten about that…! I think it goes: To the avant-garde’s fetichism of elitism and obscurantism, the postmodernist response should be an ethic of communicability…[which] to have any value…must be mediated by [the following] considerations…considerations of autonomy, critical mimesis, a pluralistic de-totalising attitude of hermeneutical openness to tradition and history and the revivification of the category of content.21 S: Is he serious? But to get back to Foster, why is the Adornian critique in need of rejection? Is Adorno’s model not able to account for the space in which post modernity inserts itself? C: According to Foster, it has become in itself an instrumental model, normalizing and prescriptive, especially since what it posits as subversive, namely the aesthetic, is now part of the University, the Museum, the Market. S: But I thought that Adorno’s model did not only apply to the aesthetic but is a continuous process which criticizes identarian thinking (i.e. which posits identity and simultaneously calls this into question). Or, to paraphrase Nietzsche, that ‘the identity of each object consists in its difference from all other similar organisations.’22 Is this model therefore not applicable to the discourses of post modernity? C: It is, but it is being elided by relegating Adorno’s critique to the aesthetic sphere only. It is post modernity again positing itself as the new and in doing so reducing the past to an over-simplification and implying its demise. S: Does that mean that Adorno’s negative dialectic can be retained and used to reconstruct the subject differently, from the ashes, as it were, of the subject of the Enlightenment? In other words, remembering all of those others who were subject, thrown under the concept of the subject? C: Yes, indeed. For Adorno and Horkheimer the project of the Enlightenment and the

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principles of science and progress presuppose the objectification of repressed others. They say that perennial domination over nature, medical and non-medical techniques are made possible only by the process of oblivion. The loss of memory is a transcendental condition for science. All objectification is a forgetting.23 So, the process of critique is at the same time the re-covering of a memory, a re-membering. S: What has the discourse of modernity and post modernity forgotten? C: Has it maybe forgotten women and their conflicting discourse? That discourse has been marginalized in the discourse of modernity and sublated in the construction of the subject and its natural accompaniment, the family unit. Women also seem to have been forgotten in the discourse of post modernity, except when they are used as an instrument to signify plurality and rupture, as a symbol. Women as the shadow which both haunts the discourse of the subject and validates the discourse of the new Enlighteners.24 S: But where does this leave ‘woman’ as ‘subject’? Is it not a paradox to even phrase it this way? Can woman ever be that kind of subject, and if not, does the yoking of woman and subject unmask the fragility of this subject and expose its power; its power to assign, to signify, to represent and to silence? C: But this is perhaps another instance of a forgetting: of a forgetting of the reality in the modes of production and reproduction in capitalist society. This post modern use of woman in ads and cultural products, for example, as an element of plurality and difference, is it not another instance of (commodity) fetishism—different in form, but similar in kind, to its use in modernity? S: Are you thinking of Baudelaire’s idea of the modern woman being more clearly represented in the image of the prostitute?25 C: Yes, but also in the image of the mother, the wife, the muse, the irrational non-thinking being, the object of male discourse and representation. S: So, when we said earlier that the rational subject of the Enlightenment necessitated nonsubjects, it now seems that an emancipatory discourse would foreground those objectified in this discourse, in order to resist the vicious circle of modernity and post modernity; in order to enact an Adornian negative dialectic and to cast off the Hegelian synthesis and reconciliation. C: But where will such a discourse be heard? Can it be heard in the parenthetical inclusions of contemporary Enlightened thinkers? S: What was that you said about ‘parenthetical inclusions’? Were you thinking of Terry Eagleton’s response to feminism, where he answers a question about the relations between men and feminism by referring to his own experience as a working-class boy at Cambridge?26 C: Yes, that’s what I meant…. But to continue, can the emancipatory project of modernity be resuscitated by once again looking away from the problem ‘woman’, in a move that purports to be re-addressing the subject as a plural collectivity? S: No, this is a fallacy. It assumes that we have moved from the ‘I' to a sort of plural ‘we’. But who is that ‘we’? Is it not still an excluding ‘we’? C: Well, one can say that feminists have carved out a space for themselves in the Academy, the family and the state; at the same time, they are still voices which are fetishized, offered

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as a salve, as the comforting supplement of the rational that has learned to include. S: Do you mean feminists or post-feminists? Because I heard this woman say that the time has come for the post-feminist utopia of a new, caring, understanding and inclusive world.27 C: But is this not a return of the repressed disguised as the rational caring subject? Does this not repeat the story which we overheard at the beginning? Only now, instead of being the irrational other, we have woman as the rational mother, running a crêche for the deflated subjects of a post modern Bethlehem… S: Yes, and this is what Michele Le Doeuff means when she says that as soon as we regard femininity as a fantasy product of conflicts within a field of reason that has been assimilated to masculinity we can no longer set any store by liberating its voice. We will not talk pidgin to please the colonialists.28 This also reminds me of something I overheard Nietzsche saying to his sister: Supposing truth to be a woman—what? is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of woman? That the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have hitherto been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench. Certainly she has not let herself be won—and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and discouraged. If it continues to stand at all. For there are scoffers who assert it has fallen down, that dogmatism lies on the floor, more, that dogmatism is at its last gasp.29 C: Are you sure he said that? Elizabeth must have laughed at him, knowing his lack of success with ‘wenches’…! S: She was probably too busy editing his works to take any notice. C: Hold on, but I thought Nietzsche was critical of this project of traditional philosophy. Why is he using woman as a metaphor here? S: Here he writes woman as a symbol which undoes the discourse of universality: ‘Supposing truth to be a woman’, but at the same time he once again presents her as a fetishized, albeit in this case, aloof maiden. C: Can we not discern here, glimmering through Nietzsche’s scorn, a fear of the unthinkable, that there is no proper means for ‘winning a wench’? S: It looks like this metaphor is another covering which conceals a discourse of sexuality and the body which exceeds and haunts even Nietzsche’s counter-discourse. C: But that is a continuing saga. S: Well, let us think about it tomorrow… Tomorrow has arrived. Our main concern when we wrote the above dialogue was that the theorists of the ‘post’ era, while proclaiming the redundancy of the subject as a meaningful concept and celebrating multiplicity, were at the same time appropriating women as a metaphor and negating her subjecthood. This, we claim, had already been established by Enlightenment thinkers, including some of those who offered a critique of the project of the Enlightenment. Recently, several articles and reviews appeared in the daily press concerning

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two feminist texts, The War Against Feminism by Marilyn French (Hamish Hamilton, 1992) and Backlash, The Undeclared War Against Women by Susan Feludi (Chatto & Windus, 1992). These two books maintain that there has been a backlash against feminism and that the gains made for women since the 1960s are being undermined. It seems appropriate, therefore, to conclude by considering the terms employed by two male critics in their response to these feminist claims. Neil Lyndon and Richard Gott both deny that there is such a ‘backlash’ and suggest that if there is a problem, it has been caused by feminists. Lyndon believes that ‘feminism is getting in the way of essential progress’ and that ‘the aggressive claims of modern feminism have helped to cement disadvantages for men’.30 It seems almost superfluous to note that Lyndon is glued to the mask of the Enlightenment subject and views ‘progress’ as the goal of a civilized society. We are reminded of Adorno and Horkheimer’s statement that ‘The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress’;31 yet, Lyndon needs a scape-goat and so blames men’s disadvantages and the lack of change in the relationship between men and women on a feminism which he portrays as an irrational, vituperative harridan. The image of the Medusa seems to haunt his discourse. In a glib summary of the two feminist texts, Gott refers to ‘tendentious feminist tracts’ and makes a clear division between American feminists (imperialist, demented) and British women and men who ‘are interested in the sheer variety of women’s experiences…endlessly intrigued by the possibility of different forms of struggle and resistance’.32 This lan-guage clearly places Gott as a camp-follower of the ‘post’ brigade. It both erases the connection between American and British feminist movements and separates feminists from women and men who apparently belong to a different species. In doing so, he elides the difficulties of ‘struggle and resistance’ in the facile terms of a celebratory pluralism. Ros Coward, on the other hand, acknowledges the main thesis of Feludi’s book and notes that ‘This spring there are welcome signs that the myth of an era of post-feminist equality is finally starting to crumble.’33 We are more sceptical. The suspicions which underpin our dialogue—a moment of intervention in the incomplete project of modernity—appear to have been prophetic. We can only hope that the emancipatory potential of that project will yet be fulfilled. University of Strathclyde

NOTES 1 This is an adaptation of the opening ‘scene’ of Plato’s The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth, 1951), pp. 33–5. 2 Oscar Wilde, ‘The decay of lying’, in De Profundis and Other Writings (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 71–2. 3 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 19. 4 Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (London, 1924), p. 24. 5 ‘Everything profound loves the mask’, Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 51. See also Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London, 1973), p. 5: ‘Interpretation reveals its complexity when we realize that a new

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force can only appear and appropriate an object by first of all putting on the mask of forces which are already in possession of the object…. A force would not survive if it did not first of all borrow the features of the forces with which it struggles.’ 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888), trans. R.J.Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1979). 7 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge and Oxford, 1987), p. 56. 8 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London, 1989), p. 83. 9 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B.Ashton (London, 1973), p. 11. 10 Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Pragmatic, Ethical and Moral Use of Practical Reason’, Annual Lecture for the Centre for Criminology and the Social and Philosophical Study of Law, University of Edinburgh, 24 May 1990. 11 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 45. 12 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 248. 13 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow, 1979), p. 258. 14 Oscar Wilde, ‘The truth of masks’, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London, 1976), p. 1078. 15 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 21. 16 Habermas, ‘The Pragmatic, Ethical and Moral Use of Practical Reason’. 17 For a discussion of Nietzsche’s use of the term ‘sublimation’, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New Jersey, 1974), pp. 236–7. 18 The Classical term for the actor in Greek drama was ‘υποκριτής (hypocrite). 19 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Universal history and cultural differences’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford, 1989), p. 316. 20 Hal Foster, ‘Postmodernism: a preface’, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London and Sydney, 1989), p. xv. 21 Blaine McBurney, ‘The post-modern transvaluation of modernist values’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 12 (1985), p. 105. 22 Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 83. 23 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 230. 24 We were thinking here of the newly ‘enlightened’ men/academics who have recently entered the feminist debates. Relevant publications include Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York and London, 1987) and Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A.Boone and Michael Cadden (London, 1991). 25 For a discussion of Baudelaire’s views on women, see Angelika Rauch, ‘The Trauerspiel of the prostituted body, or woman as allegory of modernity’, Cultural Critique, vol. 10 (Fall 1988), pp. 77–88, and Janet Wolff, The invisible flâneuse: women and the literature of modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 2, 3 (1985), pp. 37–46. 26 Terry Eagleton, ‘Response’, in Men in Feminism, pp. 133–5. 27 We are referring to a paper given by Marleen Barr at the University of Strathclyde in May 1990, entitled ‘Feminist fabulations’. Barr’s paper was a reading of recent science fiction writing by women, whereby new ‘post feminist utopias’ of worlds inhabited by

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women and men in a spirit of reconciliation replace the ‘feminist dystopias’ of previous generations. 28 Michele Le Doeuff, ‘Women and philosophy’, in French Feminist Thought: A Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford, 1988), p. 196. 29 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, p. 31. 30 Neil Lyndon, ‘Hey girls, this noose don’t fit’, Independent on Sunday, 29 March 1992. 31 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xiv. 32 Richard Gott, ‘America’s feminist imperialism’, Guardian, 26 March 1992. 33 Ros Coward, ‘Lash back in anger: have feminists fired a war on women?’, Guardian, 24 March 1992.

The sins of Scarlett HARRIETT HAWKINS

Atlanta, Georgia, has produced two popular classics unrivalled in their worldwide success— Coca-Cola and Gone With the Wind. Likewise, their manufactured-to-formula sequels have proved comparably meretricious. The nouveau Coca-Cola spectacularly hyped in the 1980s is already forgotten, and Alexandra Ripley’s effort to replicate Gone With the Wind soon will be. Or so one hopes. In the meantime, Ripley’s Scarlett1 can serve to challenge Todorov’s theory that (as distinguished from a ‘literary classic’ which defies generic categorization) a ‘masterpiece of popular literature is precisely the book which best fits its genre’. By this standard, in contrast to Margaret Mitchell’s defiantly unconventional original, Ripley’s generically orthodox romance would appear to qualify as a ‘masterpiece of popular literature’. But in cultural practice—as opposed to Todorov’s theory—the reverse holds true. For over fifty years Gone With the Wind has stood alone as the woman’s war novel, the home-front war novel. As such, it has been a communal source of inspiration and consolation to innumerable people of differing nationalities and ideologies who have likewise experienced and survived war, defeat, occupation, famine. Gone With the Wind is now as popular in the Soviet Union as it was in post-war Europe and Japan (Hitler banned it in occupied Europe because Scarlett was a dangerous symbol of resistance). In many cases it is the book that has personally meant most to individual readers. In a national poll sponsored by the American Library Association in 1987 it was the overwhelming choice for the ‘best book read’. This was fifty-odd years after its original New York Times reviewer claimed that ‘for sheer readability’ it was ‘unsurpassed by anything in American fiction’. When it was published back in 1936, historical novels were not critically sneered at as they are today, since they were not exclusively or primarily identified with women authors and consequently denigrated as they have been ever since Mitchell’s blockbuster won the Pulitzer Prize. On the contrary, they were associated with literary classics such as A Tale of Two Cities and War and Peace. This is important, since it was by adjusting the major conventions of the nineteenth-century historical novel to her own purposes that Margaret Mitchell broke new ground. As Georg Lukács has observed, in contrast to the older ‘historical drama’ that traditionally dealt with makers and shakers of history, such as Antony and Cleopatra or Tamburlaine, ‘bourgeois’ historical novels by Scott, Dickens and Tolstoy dealt with comparatively ordinary people caught up in wars and revolutions over which they had no control. This is the mainstream tradition of the romantic historical epic to which Gone With the Wind belongs. Mitchell’s novel is, for instance, no more or less romantic than A Tale of Two Cities or (more recently) Dr Zhivago. But it dramatically differs from other well-known works in this genre by focusing so forcefully and consistently on the way war, social upheaval, hard times, worlds turned upside down, historical bonfires of the vanities, affect women of all ages, races and classes who survive unaided to till the fields, bear the children, bury the dead, pick up the pieces after the battles are over. ‘This was the end of the road, quivering old age,

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sickness, hungry mouths, helpless hands plucking at her skirts.’ ‘Tomorrow she would fit the yoke around her neck.’ However much they might deplore her bitchy conduct, hardly any woman—hardly anyone—can fail to sympathize with the original Scarlett’s situation. For that matter, as an unreconstructed bitch (in the great tradition of Becky Sharp) the courageous heroine of Mitchell’s novel can, defiantly, do and say what innumerable women have wanted to, but dared not, do or say out loud. The amusing cover of Scarlett’s Women, Helen Taylor’s study of ‘Gone With the Wind’ and its Female Admirers shows a dowdy middle-aged housewife being swept off her feet by Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. But the most significant historical impact has been Scarlett’s entirely salutory influence on successive generations of admiring young wannabes who identified with her spirited rebellion against a restrictive society. Recalling her own youthful enthusiasm for Gone With the Wind, the American columnist Ann Landers spoke for multitudes: ‘I immediately identified with Scarlett’s determination not to let customs, proprieties, people or events dictate the terms and quality of her life.’ And five decades after the book was first published, Mitchell’s/Scarlett’s violation of certain major taboos is still radically, breath-takingly liberating:’ “Why, why”, Scarlett’s mind stuttered, “I believe women could manage everything in the world without a man’s help—except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.” ‘What popular novel, before or since, has dared to stress the fact that many women are not naturally maternal, do not invariably want children, and should not pretend to want them—or have to have them—if they don’t? What Mitchell’s heroine opened up to her admirers was the possibility of independence, choice. The same is true of her novel’s structure. From the beginning—the conclusion was the first part she wrote— Margaret Mitchell directed the course of the action towards an ‘open’ ending that simultaneously departed from romance conventions and assured a continuing appeal to the reader’s imagination. Gone With the Wind has been making money without a ‘happy’ ending for a half a century. By contrast, Alexandra Ripley mechanically adapts the characterization and action of Scarlett to the generic clichés currently mandated by the Harlequin/Silhouette/Mills & Boon romance factories, including the prescribed closure in domestic bliss. ‘Her life would be fine, with Rhett loving her, loving their baby. They’d be the happiest, lovingest family in the whole world.’ The tasteless, standardized, baby-food formula to which Ripley’s book conforms was well outlined on the front page of the New York Times by the chief editor of Meteor mail-order romances (‘Romance Novels Discover a Baby Boom’, 3 April 1991): A single heroine meets Mr Right and ‘somehow’ gets pregnant. Not realizing how much he truly loves her, she determines ‘to have the baby on her own’. ‘He is really desperately in love with her and wants the baby’ but he misunderstands her behaviour and she misunderstands him, and their misunderstandings serve as ‘the excuse for the book to go on’ for 250 pages in the case of Meteor Romances—and for 759 pages in the case of Scarlett. Which epic extension is Ripley’s only deviation from the generic rules. Likewise, her heroine’s most daring gesture of defiance is to quit wearing corsets. If Margaret Mitchell imagined a major movie when she wrote Gone With the Wind, Alexandra Ripley clearly envisaged the mother of all mini-series when she churned out successive episodes in which: Scarlett goes back to Tara, Scarlett goes to Charleston, Scarlett goes to Ireland, Scarlett rides to the hounds, Scarlett buys a manor house, and, above all, Scarlett has a baby. ‘The baby opened her eyes…. And Scarlett felt love. Without conditions, without demands, without reasons, without questions, without bounds, without reserve,

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without self. “Hey, little baby,” she said.’ (Hey! Hey! Little Baby!) Could it be that Ripley also had a musical, a kind of rock Show Boat in mind? This might explain why she pads out her overlong novel with song lyrics including ‘The Rock Island Line is a mighty fine line!’, ‘Hear the wind blow, love’, ‘Peg in a low back’d car’, ‘I’ll take you home again, Kathleen’, The rising of the moon’, and ‘Momma’s gonna buy you a looking-glass’. The obligatory reunion with Rhett that serves to get Scarlett pregnant occurs after a nearly fatal boating accident. Awaiting rescue in the freezing cold, they keep their spirits up by singing duets, including ‘The yellow rose of Texas’ and the sea shanty ‘Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!’ (Afterwards, God knows why, ‘Scarlett thought of “Little brown jug how I love thee”.’) Their ardour thus aroused, they achieve the kind of union that is ‘beyond mind, beyond time, beyond the world’. Subsequently, however, as a result of misunderstandings conspicuously contrived to ensure that Scarlett will determine to raise the baby as a single parent, Rhett divorces her and marries another woman who obligingly dies later on. Meanwhile Scarlett sets out to be the best mother ‘in the history of the whole world’. She also sets out to find her family roots (the real Tara!) back in Ireland, where she takes to wearing fetching peasant get-ups with brightly striped stockings and lots of petticoats. Apparently having long forgotten the chain-gangs, black folks and burning crosses back in Dixie (‘Look away! Look away!’), Ripley’s Scarlett expresses righteous indignation about Ireland’s mistreated and exploited underclass. It was terrible the way that young men and women couldn’t get married because they had no land and no money to get any. The English landlords were truly heartless, the way they kept the Irish ground down under their heels. The Irish did all the labor to grow the wheat or oats, fatten the cattle and sheep, and then they had to sell to the English, at the prices the English set. At one with the peasantry, she supports the Fenians and sometimes even goes barefoot, ever a pioneer in radical chic. After all, she’s rich enough to defy convention if she wants to. Rhett’s divorce settlement paid her more than enough money to buy a stately home: ‘She was The O’Hara of Ballyhara, Irish and proud of it.’ ‘So what if the social world of Dublin was Anglo?’ But she soon determines to have the best of the English lifestyle as well as the best of times with her Fenian kinfolks. Her admirers among the ‘Anglo’ gentry include ‘the Earl of Clonmel, known to his friends as Earlie’ and a popular, horse-loving baronet affectionately known to all his friends as ‘Bart’. Unfortunately, the situation in Ireland being too complicated for her (or for Ripley) to cope with, it ultimately becomes impossible for Scarlett to have it both ways. Just in the nick of time, Rhett turns up in Ireland where they are caught in an uprising. Ballyhara is destroyed, but Scarlett and Rhett decide their true home always was and always would be wherever they can be together. ‘We can go anywhere, and as long as we’re together, it will belong to us’, Rhett ungrammatically tells Scarlett, ‘But, my pet, we’ll never belong to it.’ ‘A small, grimy hand tugged on his trousers’. ‘“Cat will go with you”, said his daughter.’ Could Ripley be having us on? Were it not for its witless, ponderous prose, Scarlett might be interpreted as a self-reflexive send-up based on the well-known adage, ‘A child is a cat substitute.’ For that is certainly what Scarlett’s child, ‘Cat’ O’Hara, is. ‘Cat was bound by no rules.’ ‘She wandered through woods and fields like a wild creature at home there.’ ‘There was never any point in looking for Cat.’ ‘She might be anywhere.’ ‘She just appears when a

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door or a window is left open.’ Happily, there was no need to worry about her, since she ‘always came home for her meals’. Scarlett ‘couldn’t figure out how the child knew what time it was’ but Cat ‘was never late’. Anyway, Scarlett was ‘determined not to cage her child’ although ‘it made some of the painters quite nervous when they found her on top of their scaffolding’. Want to be the best mother ‘in the history of the whole world’? Just adopt a loving, laissez-faire attitude and a child will look after itself like a cat. Indeed a real kitten would require more care and attention. As a new-born baby, Scarlett’s Cat ‘had an infinite capacity to amuse herself’, she never cried and ‘never fussed’. Likewise, as a 4-year-old, she ‘never moped, and she never whined’. ‘She was always occupied with some project or some game she invented for herself.’ To her servants, as well as to Scarlett, Cat was ‘a joy every hour’ of ‘the day and night’. She also has a miraculously rejuvenating effect on her mother: ‘the gentle softness of hope and youth and tenderness gradually returned’. And having such a remarkable child immensely enhances Scarlett’s appeal to men. The fabulously rich and handsome Earl of Fenton proposes to make her his Countess if she will present him with an ‘agile’, ‘fearless’ and ‘independent’ heir like Cat. For no-talent authors and publishers of quick-fix romances like Scarlett to push such irresponsible and socially harmful fantasies about the sheer bliss and erotic appeal of motherhood solely for the purpose of lining their own pockets is damnably mendacious. Compare Ripley’s portrayal of the perfect Cat with Mitchell’s portrayal of the original Scarlett’s hungry, frightened and whining son, Wade Hampton, and her all-too human daughter, Ella. ‘Scarlett’s child was a girl, a small bald-headed mite, ugly as a hairless monkey.’ Except for the whiskers, Rhett observed, ‘he looks just like Frank’. ‘I hope not, it’s a girl’, said Scarlett ruefully. ‘Ella! It annoyed Scarlett to realize that Ella was a silly child but she undoubtedly was.’ When Scarlett read aloud to her, Ella interrupted ‘with questions that had nothing to do with the story and forgot what she had asked long before Scarlett could get the explanation out of her mouth’. Also compare the minute percentage of men who have sought out single mothers to marry and protect with the huge number of men who have ditched young mothers along with their babies. The editors of the ‘Baby Boom’ romances quoted in the New York Times expressed genuine qualms about portraying maternity as a romantic and erotic panacea. ‘Because it is so difficult to maintain passion after child-birth,’ one editor explained, ‘fiction strengthens the fantasy that it is attainable.’ The man ‘who does not love children is not romance material’, noted another. Today’s romantic hero is ‘incredibly supportive and takes loving, attentive care of the heroine during her pregnancy’. ‘That’, this editor added dryly, ‘is the new fantasy.’ Likewise, photo-opportunity pregnancies and designer babies are the current rage in high-fashion magazines, while on film and television, the harassments and drudgery of parenthood turn out to be lots of fun, the stuff of situation comedy. But what about young girls encouraged to act out the ‘new fantasy’ who are left with a real baby to raise unaided except for their state subsistence allowance? That is the stuff of tragedy, the subject for a brave new Flaubert. For it would take comparable courage to attack today’s fashionable myths of motherhood. In fact, the fantasies of passion and social advancement held out to yesterday’s Emma Bovarys were far less pernicious than today’s Baby Boom romances. They offered a dream of escape from the domestic trap, they were propaganda for adventure, not for confinement. They certainly did not mandate bringing onto this disastrously overpopulated planet yet another completely helpless, possibly

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imperfect, physically, emotionally and economically demanding (£42,000 only covers basics) human child requiring unceasing attention for two decades. With the soaring statistical percentage of teenage girls giving birth in the US and the UK reaching its highest level in years, no fiftysomething author laughing all the way to the bank with her 2 million dollar advance should hype the duty-free benefits of motherhood to a single younger or poorer woman without attaching a warning: Caveat emptor. ‘Believe it or not.’ Ripley’s book is, literally speaking, cultural materialism at its worst. Of course it could be argued that any female dimwitted enough to buy the bill of goods here offered deserves just what she gets. Ripley’s sequel to Mitchell’s original novel is the literary equivalent of a mule marketed in horse-harness that can’t fool anyone for long. The only positive purpose it serves is to set the courage and honesty of the original in sharp relief. But trading on the global popularity of Gone With the Wind (whoever had written whatever other sequel would likewise have had a best-seller), Scarlett has had record-breaking sales. And blockbusters that seem to give the public what it wants may goad media copycats into feeding us ever-increasing doses of the identical fantasies about maternity. As Margaret Mitchell reminds us, what people think they want and what they really want are two different things. People do tend to believe fashionable fictions, not only because they want them to be true, but because it is the fashion to believe them. This is why, regrettably, we have to give a damn about the sins of Scarlett. Linacre College, Oxford

NOTE 1 Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett (London: Macmillan, 1991).

Reviews TERRY EAGLETON • David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment (University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 272 pp., £19.95 • Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (MIT Press, 1991), xxiv+388 pp., £33.75 If Theodor Adorno has a claim to be among the most original philosophers and aestheticians of the century, then the claim is not without irony. For Adorno’s work marks the spot where both aesthetics and philosophy begin to implode under their own contradictions, leaving behind that ghostly imprint of themselves which is ‘negative dialectics’ or the self-negating work of art. In Adorno’s view, philosophy since the Enlightenment has dwindled to a clutch of reified concepts, signs of a brutal violence done to long-suffering Nature; and thought, if it is to be authentic, must thus be turned against itself, sent off in poignant pursuit of that which finally eludes the concept altogether. The most precious instance of that is the sensuous particularity of the work of art; and the only true philosophy would be one which clung to its object with all of art’s stubborn tenacity. Yet this would also be a kind of suicide of the spirit, undercutting philosophy’s claim to universality, and so along with it the frail hope for some universal emancipation of humankind. David Roberts is one of Australia’s finest aestheticians, a man who writes with equal fluency in German and English, and who (here is the bad news) is a doctrinaire postmodernist. Art and Enlightenment argues with admirable intricacy that Adorno’s work marks the exhaustion of the classical aesthetic tradition whose death Hegel was already proclaiming in his Philosophy of Fine Art; but in Adorno’s hands that lineage is given a kind of negative, artificial afterlife. This is because, in Roberts’s view, Adorno remains a hostage to the very tradition to whose crack-up he bears such eloquent testimony: if he sees art as at an impasse, it is because he is still in thrall to notions of artistic progress. Within the deadly dialectic of Enlightenment, that progress fatally inverts into its opposite; and nowhere is this more obvious for Adorno than in the music of Schoenberg, in which a free, unbridled subjectivity comes to congeal into a reified, rationalized system. Schoenberg’s music is at least authentic in its inner contradictions, which is more than Adorno will grant to his typecast antagonist in The Philosophy of Music, the supposedly proto-fascist Stravinsky. But if Stravinsky signifies for Adorno inauthentic pastiche and the final collapse of the bourgeois subject, this is all grist to Roberts’s own postmodernist mill. (Australia, for some reason that the cultural sociologists might investigate, is a major heartland of postmodernist theory.) Roberts is typically acute in showing just how Adorno

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downgrades Stravinsky; but what this retrieval of Stravinsky as proto-postmodernist then leads to is the final section of the book, where a certain falling off from the previous tough critical cutting-edge can everywhere be felt. Roberts’s case is that there is indeed a route beyond the deadlock at which classical art arrives, and this is an art which has fully embraced its own utter contingency. What we get, then, after a superbly incisive critique of Adorno, is a somewhat heady, repetitive hymning of our old friend the parodic, ironic, indeterminate work of art. Adorno, so the argument runs, should have had the courage to break beyond the impasse and throw tradition into the melting pot. It does not seem to occur to Roberts, who has much to say of an ‘emancipated’ art, that what tends to get boiled to a frazzle in the postmodernist melting-pot is not only clapped-out aesthetic lineages, but those histories of the oppressed and dispossessed which might do something to challenge the social order which reduced art to its ineffectual autonomy in the first place. Roberts’s politics here are of a purely aesthetic order, and thus ironically in line with much of the tradition he formally disowns. Emancipation, which for Roberts’s contemned Enlightenment had a little to do with such notions as social justice, freedom and equality, has now apparently dwindled to the delights of aesthetic self-reflexivity. It is hard to see that this is primarily what is needed in West Belfast or on the West Bank. The ironic, pluralized, open-ended art-work may of course be grasped as a utopian social model, and so have political relevance. But the social order it adumbrates is still rather a long way off; and in the meantime what might be required to achieve it is not only an emancipated but an emancipatory form of artistic production. It is significant in this respect that Bertolt Brecht, on whom Roberts has previously produced some excellent work, is here effectively rewritten as a fully paid-up postmodernist, as though his socialist activism were the least important of his traits. For all its striking insights, Art and Enlightenment is a secretly apocalyptic text. Once upon a time there was ‘tradition’, which for Roberts seems to mean that everything from Homer to Hardy can be viewed as smoothly continuous. Then the avant-garde broke dramatically out, and from there on—if only, unlike Adorno, we could shed our nostalgia— we are in the postmodern realm of freedom. This triumphalistic myth of the break from ‘history’ to ‘(post)modernity’ has a long history, and Roberts has just joined it. No doubt, lurking around the historical corner, is yet another version of the myth, for which postmodernist contingency will have congealed into inexorable necessity, and a new leap out of tradition will be accordingly demanded. Certainly as far as postmodernist theory goes, the stress on irony, indeterminacy and the rest is rapidly beginning to assume every bit as much compulsive repetition and doctrinal closure as the later Schoenberg. Lambert Zuidervaart has set himself the unenviable task of explicating Adorno’s notoriously opaque Aesthetic Theory, and executes the project with workmanlike aplomb. Rather than studying the text in isolation, he sets it usefully in the context of Western Marxism, critical theory and Adorno’s writings as a whole. There is little in this labour of love that the cognoscenti won’t recognize as familiar; but the book will serve as a valuable introduction for students and others wishing to get to grips with this most tortuous and suggestive of modern Marxist thinkers. Linacre College, Oxford

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DAVID AMIGONI • David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 197 pp., £25.00 (hardback) David Loewenstein’s book on Milton’s historical imagination can be seen as an attempt to rethink a set of reading prescriptions which have been asserted by English studies since this fellowship of discourse started to take shape in the late nineteenth century. These prescriptions are outlined in the words of Mark Pattison, writing in his biography of Milton for the Macmillan ‘English Men of Letters’ series: Milton’s pamphlets are not works of speculation, or philosophy, or learning, or solid reasoning on fact. They are inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of the hour…. Milton was the last man of whom a practical politician would have sought advice. He knew nothing of the temper of the nation…. Accordingly his opinions have for us a purely personal interest. They are part of the character of Milton, and do not belong to either [the] world of action or [the world] of thought.1 Pattison’s commentary on the writings of a figure who believed he could use writing as an agent in the historical process is specifically designed to cancel out an understanding of the possibility of any such agency— either ‘then’ (the 1640s), or ‘now’ (for Pattison, the 1870s). The commentary uses the by now familiar techniques later developed by the fully fledged discipline of English studies for immobilizing those politically charged writers it co-opts into its canon: thus Milton did not really ‘know’ the thoughts of the nation; Milton’s pamphlets were examples of a mere transient rhetoric of the moment—not literature and lasting; Milton’s prose apes the language of history and policy-making but it is clearly not ‘practical’, and in the end it can only be explained with reference to Milton as an individual—for even when they seem to be talking about political strategy, English men of letters are really only talking about themselves. I have started here because Pattison’s prescriptions are framing the prose writings by Milton—especially the controversial polemics like Of Reformation and Eikonoclastes—for a particular purpose. Pattison’s point is to cut these discourses adrift from the works comprising the œuvre that readers are invited to celebrate—Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. This brings me back to David Loewenstein’s attempt to alter this version of Milton which has been traditionally inscribed by the dominant trends of English studies. For Loewenstein, the polemical prose cannot be divorced from the later poetry; both forms of writing are troubled representations of ‘the drama’ of seventeenth-century history; both forms of writing are attempts to participate in and shape that drama. Loewenstein’s central point is that an acute self-consciousness about the nature of human history and the role that human agency plays in the shadow of God’s overdetermining ‘ways’ pervades all of Milton’s writing. According to Loewenstein, Milton’s view of history is

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complex and ambiguous, which is a reasonable, perhaps inevitable, view to hold of a writer who tried to yoke the divine and the human into one holistic vision. Loewenstein explores this view of Milton in detail through a chronological analysis of all of the writings from Of Reformation to Samson Agonistes. Unusually, though not surprisingly given his theme, Loewenstein devotes a whole chapter to Milton’s excursion into historiographical prose, the History of Britain. Loewenstein argues his case in a coherent and single-minded manner which can genuinely illuminate aspects of Paradise Lost which have proved troublesome to straightforwardly ‘literary’ readings; for instance, the ‘prophetical books’ of the poem (XI and XII) which Loewenstein argues represent Michael as pedagogue-historian, initiating the fallen Adam into the discipline of historical interpretation necessary for reading the signs which will structure the troubled history of the postlapserian world. As the notion of the Archangel Michael as both an authoritative reader of signs and the inscribed reading position suggests (p. 93), Loewenstein’s treatment of history is broadly semiotic and focused on the textual. This enables him to make some suggestive connections between Milton’s writings and twentieth-century theories of textual practice. For instance, he sees a relationship between the practice of semioclasm in Barthes’s Mythologies and Milton’s icon-shattering performance in Eikonoclastes (p. 64). Loew-enstein also uses Hayden White’s poetics of historiographical writing to analyse the rhetorical formation of both Eikonoclastes and the History of Britain. Loewenstein claims as a justification for his study that an analysis of the mythpoetic and formal aspects of Milton’s writing has been largely absent from the work of Christopher Hill (p. 5), which has also attempted to construct a view of Milton as an intellectual whose writings participate in history. However, Loewenstein’s broader methodological understanding of textuality leads his study into problems, for he is making significant claims about the role of the text in history which are difficult to square with his construction of Milton as a writer. Loewenstein claims that Milton’s understanding of writing as a shaping force in history make his texts good methodological candidates for a new historicist reading of the kind to which other forms of Renaissance textual practice have been subjected (p. 4). But what is new historicist about Loewenstein’s book? Or to put the question another way—and to glance back at the discourse of Mark Pattison which could be seen as a microcosm of the old biographical, positivist literary historicism, an historicism which kept the literary in an author-centred domain of its own, sustaining for it an illusory distance from competing sources of power— does Loewenstein’s book take us significantly beyond the disciplinary framework deployed by Pattison? Don E.Wayne has recently produced a helpful summary and a provocative polemic regarding the new historicism which can help to place Loewenstein’s methods and priorities in context.2 For new historicists, Wayne argues, discourse and representation form consciousness rather than reflect it. But practitioners of this method have, in selecting the cultural forms they have chosen to practise upon, implied that some cultural forms were more likely to have a powerful impact on forming consciousness than others; the most substantial body of work produced by both the new historicists and the cultural materialists has been concerned with reconstructing the discourses, practices and non-discursive materials of the Renaissance theatre, and its negotiations with competing formations of cultural power. Loewenstein seems aware of this in wanting to stress the ‘dramatic’ nature of Milton’s historical vision, and he displays the extent to which the language of the stage was appropriated by radical puritan divines and used as a metaphoric framework for constructing

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models of historical movement in the crisis of the 1630s. Loewenstein demonstrates that this usage is in turn appropriated by Milton (p. 26). But in this instance, he does not point out what is at stake; that is to say, he does not locate the consequences of Milton’s appropriation of this metaphoric frame within what Wayne has called a symptomatic reading of a broader cultural field. Loewenstein’s failure to develop a symptomatic reading of rhetorical negotiations within a cultural field is evident in his dealings with Milton’s History of Britain. Following the practise of Hayden White, Loewenstein chooses to focus upon an important tension in Milton’s historiographical writing—between an articulated desire for plain expression, and a strand of narrative which is much more obviously poetical. Loewenstein interestingly sees this as a textual tension which expresses a more powerful positional dilemma which Milton wrestled with—the desire to describe the historical process plainly, and the desire to enter into history as an agent through writing. Important though this is, it does not really go far enough. The plain style in historiographical writing was beginning to acquire a degree of political prestige; it was beginning to be institutionally validated as the authoritative way to write history. When Milton wrote in this way, he was appropriating authority. At the same time, there was the status of a poetical form of historiographical writing, derived from the authority of the ancients, a lineage in which Milton’s own writing and sense of ‘selffashioning’ was deeply implicated.3 Milton’s History of Britain enacts a crisis of authority in respect of the public and political nature of writing which Loewenstein’s depiction of an individualistic writerly dilemma does not quite grasp. Loewenstein individualizes Milton’s writing in a way that tends to undermine the drive to ‘new historicize’ which apparently underpins the study. Even so, it would be inaccurate to give the impression that Loewenstein never achieves this sort of symptomatic, intertextual reading which represents a contest for authority and the networks of textual and cultural power through which it was mediated. His chapter on the intertextuality of Milton’s Eikonoclastes (ch. 3) is fascinating and stimulating to follow. Loewenstein here demonstrates convincingly that Milton’s was a dialogic iconoclasm, thoroughly aware of the rhetorical terrain that it was ranging over. Further, Loewenstein pursues his theme of Milton’s sense of the drama of history to good effect in this chapter. He skilfully shows how Milton’s text deploys the trope of irony to invert the tragic shape given to the life of Charles I by the Eikon Basilike; as such, Loewenstein uses White’s framework of metahistorical analysis very effectively here. The whole chapter works so well because Loewenstein is constantly aware of what is at stake in the rhetorical battle that can be traced between these two texts: namely the construction and deconstruction of popular attitudes towards images of authority and their place within competing explanations of history. New Historicism has done much to substantiate Stuart Hall’s important theoretical observations on ‘the popular’ as a space constantly open to contestation by the shifting relations between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of cultural practice.4 Yet Loewenstein’s chapter on Eikonoclastes does not really come to terms with the popular. To illustrate this, it is helpful to contrast the different ways in which Loewenstein and Christopher Hill construct Milton’s cultural and intellectual position in relation to the popular. This difference over position is manifest in the way that Loewenstein and Hill read Milton’s practice of iconoclasm. In Milton and the English Revolution, Christopher Hill devotes a short chapter to Eikonoclastes which shows how Milton disrupts cultural boundaries by parodically parading how a solemn prayer from the Eikon Basilike of

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Charles’s has lewd origins in Sidney’s Arcadia; in other words, Hill draws out the extent to which in Milton’s text, the high and the low were in flux on Stuart Hall’s cultural escalator. Hill also stresses the role of positive images of the common people in Milton’s text—images which aim to secure a hegemony over this constituency.5 Clearly, Hill’s reading of Milton should be located within his broader project—to plot connections between the ‘great’ figures of the revolution and those such as Gerrard Winstanley, whose thought Hill extensively analysed in The World Turned Upside Down. Hill’s emphasis is upon making positive connections between figures of ‘high’ culture and those radical popular intellectuals whose writings have been marginalized by the massive condescension of history. This view of Milton should be contrasted with Loewenstein’s construction of Milton’s practice of iconoclasm and its orientation towards the popular. Loewenstein raises the point about popular non-discursive iconoclasm—physically smashing images of saints—only to insist on Milton’s distance from it; Loewenstein asks us to differentiate between the ‘violence’ of popular iconoclasm, and Milton’s ‘symbolic violence’, which we are asked to admire for its ‘complexity and sophistication’ (p. 67). Loewenstein’s reading needs to be taken on board; the tensions in Milton’s populism are perhaps under-represented in Hill’s account. Also, Loewenstein’s view of Miltonic distance from the popular is justified by the interpretation he advances of images of alienation to be found in Milton’s writing, and which he explains through Raymond Williams’s work on the self-exiled intellectual developed in The Long Revolution (p. 104). However, Loewenstein does not attempt to situate this alienation culturally as the full rigour of Williams’s cultural materialism would demand. For Loewenstein, the ‘complexity and sophistication’ of Milton’s style remains monologically isolated from such demands. David Loewenstein’s reading of Milton is valuable because it asks readers of Milton to look again at the marginalized prose and to see it in relation to the poetry. However, Loewenstein does not in the end produce a new historicist reading of Milton, but rather an elaborate New Critical reading of Milton’s historical imagination which demonstrates at length that Milton’s texts are wrought with tension, and are complex, ambiguous and sophisticated. Verbal icons that resist deconstruction, one might say; Loewenstein has moved the debate a long way from Mark Pattison, but he does not radically reinscribe Milton. Sunderland Polytechnic

NOTES 1 Mark Pattison, Milton, ‘English Men of Letters’ series (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 67; p. 119. 2 Don E.Wayne, ‘New historicism’, in Martin Coyle et al. (eds), The Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 791–805. 3 For a helpful discussion of the institutional and stylistic contexts within which Milton’s historiographical writing was formed, see French Fogle’s introduction to Milton’s History of Britain, in Complete Prose Works, vol. 5, pt 1 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. xix–xlix. 4 Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on deconstructing “the popular” ’, in R.Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981), pp. 227–40, p. 234.

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5 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Faber & Faber, London, 1977), pp. 174–5, p. 180.

PETER BROOKER • Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 438 pp. £24.95 (hardback), £14.95 (paperback). • Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1990), 254 pp. £35.00 It can’t go on. It goes on. Jameson’s essay ‘Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ in the three versions in which it has appeared since 1984 has become a central reference point in academic discussions of the postmodern, so often ironically about the loss of centres and the redundancy of intellectual debate. The earlier full version of this essay which readers will know from New Left Review appears here in slightly modified form as the title essay. Jameson presents this, quite rightly, but ironically again, given our famous ‘loss of history’, as an ‘historical document’, and does not therefore revise the essay to respond to the debate and criticism it has provoked. For this one would have to consult more recent essays and interviews, amongst them Jameson’s reply to the commentaries in the volume Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique (1990), passages of which do appear here in the long 121page ‘Conclusion’, a series of eleven ‘Secondary elaborations’, and an important accompaniment now to the title essay. Jameson announces the present, first volume’s themes as ‘interpretation, Utopia, survivals of the modern and “returns of the repressed” of historicity’ (p. xv) and these indeed run through the conclusion and the volume’s other essays on postmodern theory, video, Frank Gehry and postmodern architecture, Robert Gober and postmodernist conceptual art, new historicism and Paul de Man’s deconstruction, the media and the market, and postmodern nostalgia in Philip K.Dick and new gothic film. Coinciding with this volume, Signatures of the Visible collects Jameson’s essays on film, chiefly from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and is headed by the 1979 essay ‘Reification and Utopia in mass culture’. One could do worse than attempt to trace Jameson’s themes through these volumes, and retrospectively through his earlier work. Certainly this is now preferable to a further enumeration of the more narrowly postmodern features of pastiche, spatialization, nostalgia, psychic fragmentation and so on, though these essays inevitably seek to confirm and examine these too. His themes, however, derive from a more general commitment, which he here reiterates, to the idea of postmodernism as an historical phase (and more therefore than an aesthetic or cultural style); marked by a consciousness or structure of thought and feeling cognate with mass consumer society (for which Jameson borrows Ernst Mandel’s concept of ‘late capitalism’). All Jameson’s originality, but also the problems in his position, begin and return to this perception. The problems, starkly put, of periodization, of epochal or conjunctural analysis, and of relations between culture and economy are what have chiefly occupied his critics on the left. They are of course the old problems of and for Marxism, repressed but not forgotten, and Jameson can be vague and slippery, as well as orthodox or freshly challenging on them.

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But one wants initially less to pursue these issues than to credit the originality and flair of his work, which is considerable. In a way this is an old-fashioned compliment. Jameson’s book on film is in the main a series of textual-ideological analyses of Hollywood feature films (Dog Day Afternoon, Blow Out, The Shining) and of auteurs (Hitchcock, Kubrick) who have occupied a second modernist moment in American cinema; and what is impressive about Jameson, as a singularly imaginative and exploratory critic (an auteur and ‘text’ himself; certainly a main feature) is the way he writes his signature across a range of subjective, social, and putatively global meanings in contemporary cultural forms. One can only admire the speculative verve and variety of this writing with its deep and translucent knowledge and fast eddies of insight, page after page. But the figure of the auteur, who reworks a set of characteristic themes through a body of work, is after all too sedentary an image for Jameson. Nor does he pass through the urban postmodern in the more curious, ambulatory style of the flâneur, even if one were to put this second survival of the modern on fast forward. Jameson’s essays do more than set out the themes or more subtly mime the angles of a new cultural environment. Rather, the main volume here, especially, opens up and bears witness to a set of contemporary interpretative and political dilemmas, adopting a distinctive mode of enquiry which tests and reignites itself repeatedly; but which is also very importantly a quest for an alternative perspective and way forward. This is the Utopian drive in Jameson’s work, but in a way too the halt on his thinking. For Jameson concludes that a new future is presently barely conceivable, and most certainly unplannable; that the utopian impulse, like a wheel spinning in mid-air, has in the bleakest sense ‘nowhere’ to touch down. His quest(ioning) therefore becomes a symptomatic search simply for an exit, a way out of the absorbing entanglements of the postmodern. The last section of the ‘Conclusion’ is titled ‘How to map a totality’; a final reminder of the strategy of ‘cognitive mapping’ introduced in the title essay. But since, for Jameson, ‘we can’t get outside of things’1 there is evidently no such manual of cognitive mapping. There is no way, consequently, as the sixties required us, ‘to name the system’ of late capitalism; no way, for all that postmodernism is an historical condition, of seeing it as this, as a total system with a perceivable edge and end to it, and as such subject to radical transformation and transcendence. What is distinctive and original in Jameson returns therefore as the deeply problematical; most noticeably, in terms of the cultural politics of his analysis, as the problem of political agency. At one point, responding to criticisms on this score, Jameson glosses the idea of ‘cognitive mapping’ as ‘class consciousness’ (p. 418). Others, with more revolutionary conviction or self-righteousness, might appeal still to an assumed class consciousness but Jameson’s account of the massification of culture, the universalization of capital, the splintering effects of the social movements and the loss of traditional economic and social identities simply won’t permit it: as his qualification here, that it is ‘class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind’, reveals. In all honesty, Jameson can only scatter thoughts of political agency across possible social groups or project it upon a future hypothetical ‘international proletariat’. For all the challenge, exhilaration and venturesomeness of this decade-long project, therefore, Jameson’s trail turns into a spiralling and encircling one, offering flickering, uncertain glimpses beyond the postmodern encampment. But this too, then, he wants to persuade us, is the positive strength and integrity of a position inside the postmodern; that it is ‘already progress when we understand the impossibility of this project’.2

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One is tempted to find prototypical American narratives as well as modernist ones for this success in failure; to see Jameson, that is to say, as a true-to-myth and by definition frustrated American dreamer or utopianist. For just like (a recycled and very advanced model) Huck Finn, he too (in the mist, having no map) misses Cairo and the road to freedom, and has no option then but to adventure further down the Mississippi of the postmodern, back into the false values and pseudo-world of ‘sivilisation’—before attempting to light out once more (and evermore in our postmodern nightmare) for unmapped territory. Huck of course had it easy and had never heard of postmodern paranoia. Now, as Jameson warns, there is not only no real past to remember, and no way out, but ‘everything is rigged in advance’.3 To attempt to recall Twain and Huck and Jim, for instance, in a rechargeable collective narrative of freedom would be to discover Disney’s abbreviated re-makes had got to the American past and the mind-set of the American majority first. In this mood Jameson paints an unrelieved postmodern environment of ‘sheer advertising simulacra and images’ (p. 122), abundant and unbounded, like capitalism itself. In this world of instantly consumable or ready-made difference there is no unified subjectivity, critical distance, collective imagination, or history; and so no alternative. A full and uncorrupted representation of the future becomes impossible, and it’s best we know it. So far Jameson sounds like a cross between Baudrillard and Adorno (to whom he respectively acknowledges a debt and affinity). He has not, however, consented to Baudrillard’s cool fatalism (surely Baudrillard is one end-of-century guru who won’t make it through the nineties), nor to Adorno’s stand-offish pessimism. Jameson neither celebrates nor reviles the banalities of mass culture, still less sees these as comprising an achieved utopia. He looks rather (in principle one has to say) for the angles and corners of resistance in avant-garde and mass culture, as announced in ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’. In this conception postmodernism has been for Jameson, as he reminds us here, ‘“merely” a cultural dominant’ (p. 159). A ‘totalizing’ account would therefore point away from massively uniform homogeneity to ‘resistant and heterogeneous forces’. This assumes, obviously, an oppositional space and deeper, critically transgressive ideological level within culture, and tells us in turn, more generally, that the past is recoverable; that history is within reach of intellectual and political interpretation, and that an alternative future is not only imaginable, but even now emergent. Needless to say, this set of implications runs counter to much else that Jameson says. His examples of the counter-hegemonic too are often confusing or unconvincing. It is curious for example that his discussion of the American historical novel has concentrated on Doctorow’s Ragtime and that he has ignored the major examples of historical re-imagining and ‘rememory’ in de Lillo’s Libra and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as well as the interesting counter-movement of ‘dirty realism’. De Lillo’s work, incidentally, also directly and productively, opens up the senses of ‘plot’ as narrative and conspiracy, of things being rigged, which troubles Jameson. The discussion of Doctorow is in this present version more extensive than earlier. But Doctorow is still the ‘epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past’ (p. 24, my italics)—when The Book of Daniel arguably shows this tradition in the process of remaking—and the historical novel can still do no more than ‘“represent” our ideas and stereotypes’ about the past (p. 25, also p. 296)—when in a more positive view it competes with and trounces dominant representations. In fact, the impression is that Jameson has little time for ‘mainstream’ fiction. The fiction he shows most interest in and regrets not discussing fully is ‘cyberpunk’. His one-liner on

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this is, however, (confusing) enough to be going on with. It is, he says, ‘for many of us, the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself’ (p. 419). Aside from its cliqueness, what price here the oppositional force of postmodernism? And if Jameson means to indicate that cyberpunk is an exceptional instance of identity between a literary form and economic order (but what Marxist criticism outside the 1930s would ever accept this?) on what count is this a ‘supreme’ equivalence for a reader anxious to discover a social and cultural alternative? One might actually read cyberpunk, from William Gibson’s first story ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ onwards, quite differently, as a contemporary literature of parallel worlds and estrangement rather than of conformity. In Jameson’s view, however, estrangement, now become ubiquitous, and ‘meaningless’ (p. 121) is a leading casualty of postmodernism. If this were consistently his argument we would at least know where we stood, however unhappily. On the first page of the ‘Introduction’, however, where Gibson is quoted, Jameson offers a quite different description of postmodernism. Here, ‘Postmodernism, or post-modern consciousness [a troubling alternative itself] may then amount to not much more than theorising its own condition of possibility’ (p. ix). This credits postmodernism with an expression of repressed historicity—a description of Jameson’s own project perhaps, though his ‘cognitive mapping’ is a ‘modernist strategy’ (p. 409)—when ‘many of us’, I’m sure, had thought anyway that postmodernism—whether as cultural attaché to late capitalism, or as a name for the experience of this society—was about the occlusion of historicity. In short, in this example, but also in the chapter-length discussions of video, conceptual art, and architecture, the descriptions of postmodernism are inconsistent. One is left unsure whether it is ‘“merely” dominant’ or omniscient, an historical condition or cultural mode, an analytic or symptomatic tendency, equatable with or distinct from postmodern thought, or late capitalism. What is more, when Jameson’s examples do display an estrangeing, Utopian aspect, revealing a repressed collectivity, this can turn out to be disarmingly conservative (The Shining he shows is nostalgic for the lost leisure class of the 1920s) or desperately feeble, as when he points to the teamwork in cop shows.4 One might think this is all part and parcel of an unmappable postmodernism. The explanation I think lies rather in Jameson’s deepening pessimism, an effect of poststructuralist critiques of Marxist absolutes, perhaps; but primarily of the ever more controlling (and simultaneously uncontrollable) reach of capital, as Jameson sees it. His earlier neo-Gramscian perspective and the ‘war of position’ associated with it, confidently sketched, for example, in the earlier 1985 essay ‘Architecture and the critique of ideology’,5 now makes a rhetorical appearance as above, but is increasingly suffocated, just as his utopian political vision is squeezed into more abstract, hesitant, or ‘realistic’ formulations. A differently inflected image of entrapment has accompanied this change; from, in two outside instances, the 1975 essay ‘Beyond the cave: demystifying the ideology of modernism’ to the 1990 interview quoted above. In the first, aside from the framing references to Plato’s cave, Jameson refers as an image of experience under late monopoly capitalism to ‘that persona of Lautréamont sealed since birth in an airtight, soundproof membrane, dreaming of the shriek destined to rupture his isolation and to admit for the first time the cries of pain of the world outside’.6 He closes then in a parable from The Republic where prisoners imagine an outside world which is in fact the world of their shadows. In the later interview he draws a parallel between the paranoia induced by an image-driven society and the older Freudian notion of projection when ‘there wasn’t any way you could think

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outside these forces you were using to project images that you claimed to be different. This seems… another way of talking about how we can’t get outside of things.’7 One might set alongside these thoughts Jameson’s sense in the new volume of ‘the gradual evaporation of “otherness” on a shrinking globe and in a media-suffused society’ (p. 268) and apparent belief that ‘defamiliarization, the shock of otherness, is a mere aesthetic effect and a lie’ (p. 286). A membrane of tropes, of anxiety, fear and delusion, have been closing over the postmodern commentator apparently. The most significant change, however, is that Jameson had earlier seen ‘ways of breaking out of this isolation’.8 The first was a strategy of ‘symbolic recoding’ in an attempt via Deleuze and Guattari to circumvent capitalism’s recoding of the primal schizophrenic flux; and the second, somewhat astonishingly now, required a ‘complete and thoroughgoing transformation of our economic and social system, and the invention of new forms of collective living’ (ibid.). Both these exits appear all but closed now. One can further measure this change in the revision Jameson makes to the essay ‘Theories of the postmodern’ (published in the mid1980s as ‘Ideological positions in the postmodern debate’). He ends by discussing the compromising imbrication of the cultural in the political. His final thought in the earlier version is that ‘the only adequate way out of this vicious circle, besides praxis itself, is a dialectical view that seeks to grasp the present as history.’9 In the present version this closing statement is gone, replaced by two pages of uncharacteristically heavy-footed prose which present the self-consciousness of historical understanding as achieving no more than ‘a somber mockery of historicity’ in interminable replay (p. 64). In this ‘new enchanted realm’ there is no motion or true progress forward. Jameson concludes ‘that reflection on the impossible matter of the nature of a political art in conditions that exclude it by definition may not be the worst way of marking time’ (p. 65). These are prison thoughts, from the new open-plan postmodern prison; a new Gothic where ‘outside’ proves to be an extension of the prison domain. Can this be somewhere in the American academy, one wonders; an enclave where, as Jameson describes the Gothic, the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised: your privileges seal you off from other people, but by the same token they constitute a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault. (p. 289) Trapped in this isolation there are classically ‘middle class women’ but also ‘young men… intellectuals’. Where even the thought of political art marks time, the Utopian impulse retreats at best into hesitant speculation. In Robert Gober’s conceptualist ‘Untitled Installation’ (a room with an empty door frame through which the door can be seen against the opposite wall, and which has in its centre a mound of moss and on its walls a nineteenth-century landscape painting and postmodernist poem), the spatialization of objects, which obstructs our capacity to think historically, says Jameson, nevertheless opens a utopian prospect through its ‘door ajar’ (elsewhere in his essay on Frank Gehry’s house Jameson finds a door like a ‘time-travel device’ (p. 118)). Gober’s work, Jameson writes, ‘constructs… the idea of a concept that does not yet exist’ (p. 162); the concept of Utopian space is ‘foregrounded in a theoretical non-figurative way’ (p. 164).

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The problems here, of an historical vision, confined, with the loss of historical sense, to an abstract, imaginative register are often replicated, though less nervously, in the discourse and structure of the essays. The depthless, decentred texts of postmodernism make the older organizing frames of author, organic work, or canon, or the older hermeneutic assumption about the representative value of quotations, selected passages, extracts and texts, unworkable. Jameson accordingly develops a method of ‘allegorical transcoding’ as appropriate to these postmodern products; one which avoids any definitive one-to-one decoding and instead follows a mobile, horizontal scanning of possible relationships, circling back to revise these relationships as new compositional features or perspectives adjust their values. Jameson presents this method in the essays on video, conceptual art, and architecture—where, in this last, the concept of ‘wrapping’, that is to say, of surrounding one structure physically and historically with another in a relationship of changing tensions and dialogue, sounds analogous. Much of the fascination of Jameson’s writing lies in following the shifts, controlled asides, and Aufhebungen of this method. Whatever else it is at its most successful a formalist method, borrowed from the internal aesthetics of the texts themselves (postmodern theory becoming an example of what it claims to anatomize)—and borrowed too, one reflects, horrifyingly, from the logic of capital itself which ‘is dispersive and disjunctive…and does not tend toward wholes of whatever kind’ (p. 100). In these essays, Jameson is at pains to avoid any crude thematic allegorizing (which would, for example, unify the independent video AlienNATION under its title) but he does not, if I understand the aims of the method correctly, ‘transcode’ with any regularity, fullness, or even subtlety. He says at one point that he is tempted to characterize allegorical intepretation by the old-fashioned word ‘dialectical’ (p. 168). And both terms, as he says elsewhere, mean to ‘historicize’, which he intends in an orthodox materialist sense. This he requires us to distinguish twice over, once from historicist in the ‘bad sense’ of a postmodernist nostalgia film such as Blue Velvet with its levitating signifiers, or from the simulacrum of a suburban teenage bedroom ‘out of real history’ in Frank Gehry’s house (pp. 286, 118), and secondly, from the immanent analysis of ‘new historicism’, discomfited, as Jameson sees it, by notions of an ‘outside’ transcendent structure or totalizing concept. Most plainly, and repeatedly ‘to historicize’ means to grasp the present as a moment in history, ‘to awaken the question of the conditions of possibility’ (p. 105). One has to add that not only is this temptingly equivalent to old-fashioned ‘dialectical’ method, but also to the obsolete practice (so Jameson tells us) of ‘defamiliarization’: thus ‘Historicity…can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history: that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective’ (p. 284). I, for one, would be more than happy to welcome these old terms in from the cold. My objection is that Jameson does not (or cannot) commit his semiotic analysis to this further historicist move, to what he describes as its ‘second historical and Utopian step’ (p. 105). What instead he produces are, for example, a decoding of AlienNATION which finds its ‘reference’, in the film’s images of milk and Twinkies, to the assassination of Harvey Milk, announcing this as ‘at last…the brute fact, the historical event’, what AlienNATION is ‘“about”’ (p. 93); or a reading of Frank Gehry’s house in California which sees its corrugated aluminium fence and chainlinked balcony (‘wrapping’ the inner, original clapboard house) as an expression of ‘the junk or Third World side of American life today’ (p. 128). Whether one sees these conclusions as wild or sensationally apt, they are ‘subjective’ and disposable—for all the ‘unquestionable’

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truth of the historical event or the contradictions in US society behind them. There is no reason, outside the suasion of his rhetoric, to accept Jameson’s account of Gehry’s house over the ‘modernist’ interpretation he quarrels with. At one point he declares he must refuse Macrae-Gibson’s modernist account ‘on a more empirical basis, since, in my experience, the Gehry house does not particularly correspond to the defamiliarizing and perception renewing description’ (p. 122, my italics). The repressed that returns at moments like this is surely from some deep dark pre-modernist stratum. The stronger cry, all the same, remains the slogan which opens the now more than ever significantly titled The Political Unconscious: ‘Always historicize!’ Jameson avoids the sometimes obvious moves this would entail in relation to postmodern cultural forms (his discussion of the ‘conditions of possibility’ of the modernist Kafka in terms of the uneven development of economic and political spheres is exemplary) and on one occasion inexplicably backs away from a model candidate in Hans Haacke, whose art takes on those conditions, namely the museum and institutional totalities in which it is placed. Instead of this solid example of postmodernist oppositional art, Jameson chooses to follow the enigmatically anticipatory Robert Gober. The politics he finds in such work, including a special interest in postmodernist photography, ignores the explicitness of manifestos or programmes. It expresses a ghostly social dimension, and in what is itself a haunting description signals ‘an unacknowledged “party of Utopia”’ (p. 180), a kind of underground Masonic lodge of writers and artists—and one supposes intellectuals; since Jameson has spoken also of ‘the coming into being of a new, much larger, much more genuinely international intelligentsia or left network’.10 These ideas are of a piece with Jameson’s anticipations of a new international proletariat. It is not surprising that he has been criticized by those on the revolutionary and not so revolutionary left for a failure to connect these Utopian inspirations with manifest dystopian realities and contemporary struggles (on one ‘intellectual’ count only, Salman Rushdie’s continued very real entrapment tells us there is no such network or, worse, that it has no political will or influence). Jameson, anyway, clearly states that activism must wait (p. 264). His commitment, he might say, in an era when Utopia is difficult to conceive and impossible to realize, is the necessarily preparatory work of ideological struggle. His discussion in chapter 8 of the concepts of ‘planning’ and the ‘market’ in relation to any future socialist project would be one such example. Crucial though this is, a simpler, more fundamental, ideological task (in which novelists and artists Jameson ignores or evades are participating) is to reclaim the concept of ‘social reality’. I see no point, however, finally, in seeking to ‘correct’, still less chastise Jameson from some right-on critical or political position. When he writes of how ‘in our time…the claims of the officially political seem extraordinarily enfeebled and…the taking of older kinds of political positions seems to inspire widespread embarrassment’ (p. 180), many on the nomadic left will know what he means. Yet it is this structure of feeling, of suspended hope and allegiance, in the relations of artists and intellectuals to a radical past, to Marxism, organized labour, and the social movements, as well as to staid and predictable political positions, which itself needs to be historicized. Jameson’s conception of an ‘unacknowledged Party of Utopia’ is in this respect as much a symptom of the evacuated present moment as the idea of the end of history. His ‘successful failure’ to think beyond the contradictions of ‘postmodern capitalism’ suggests that conditions in the contemporary United States are at an especially impossible point. That is probably the place to start. University of Greenwich

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NOTES 1 ‘Postmodernism and Utopia: Interview with Fredric Jameson’, News From Nowhere (Autumn 1991), p. 8. 2 ibid. 3 ibid. 4 ibid., p. 9. 5 In Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2: Syntax of History (London: Routledge, 1988), esp. pp. 48–53. 6 ibid., p. 132. 7 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia’, p. 8. 8 Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, p. 132. 9 Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, p. 113. 10 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia’, p. 11.

GARY DAY • Colin MacCabe (ed.), Futures for English (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), 210 pp., £8.95 As we all know, English is dead. Very few people now believe in Literature as an aesthetic object enshrining eternal truths. The age of innocence is past and in its place we have a literature riven by history and unconscious desire, a literature always other to itself, a battle site of and for meaning, not the place where meaning finds its most perfect expression. All this can be taken for granted. The question is where do we go from here? There is no one answer but this collection is full of suggestions clamouring to be heard. Two of the most important are that we should abandon the idea of a unified English literature and that we should turn our attention to phenomena such as television, music video and deviancy. The challenge lies in developing critical practices to map these new horizons, taking care to avoid imposing literary modes of analysis in areas where they do not apply. The future direction of at least one branch of literature is indicated by the presence of poetry in the volume which, as it receives no critical comment, I will also leave to speak for itself. In his introduction MacCabe traces the new approach to English to the change in attitude to the humanities and social sciences which occurred in Paris in the 1960s through the work of Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Althusser. MacCabe characterizes this change as an ‘anthropological “turn”’ (p. 3) whereby our own culture becomes an object of study like any other. MacCabe implies that to study our own culture involves comparing it with others and he examines the problems inherent in this process. Is it possible to avoid a sense of cultural superiority when comparing our own culture with another? Indeed, is it even possible to compare cultures when their different languages give them such different conceptions of the

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world and how it may be experienced? On this point MacCabe considers Donald Davidson’s idea that we can only ever understand another culture through the interpretative strategies of our own. This would imply that comparisons between different cultures are inevitable, that knowledge about them is relative and also, perhaps, as MacCabe suggests, a sense of cultural superiority is unavoidable. MacCabe then moves on to examine the work of Richard Rorty who shares Davidson’s relativist position but expresses it in a different way, claiming that truth cannot be identified independently of the community in which it operates, and this contrasts with the traditional quest for objectivity which tries to find a basis for truth outside not just its own community but all communities. It is the word community which engages MacCabe’s interest. He argues that, as we are all members of ‘numerous collectivities [and] numerous communities which…hold contradictory beliefs and attitudes’ (p. 9) it is impossible to talk, in the sense that Davidson and Rorty do, of one community. This is a reasonable objection to Davidson’s and Rorty’s position but it depends on an unacknowledged slip from the word ‘culture’ to the word ‘community’. MacCabe begins by considering the problems attendant on studying one’s own culture, but the word culture slowly metamorphoses into the word community without any explanation or attempt to distinguish between the two terms. Nor is this all, for, despite his emphasis on difference and contradiction, MacCabe’s position is not too far removed from Davidson’s or Rorty’s. For example, he urges the interrogation of the literary tradition from the vantage points of race, class and gender so that the contradictions in that tradition can be exposed, creating opportunities to forge identities which it has suppressed. The problem here is that these identities seem to be intact before they’ve been forged, since to interrogate from a class position already assumes a class identity. More fundamentally, however, MacCabe too readily assumes a unity of race, class and gender which is not borne out by even the most cursory glance at, say, the history of feminism, marked, as it is, by disagreement between different factions. MacCabe may reject the existence of homogeneous communities but his programme for the interrogation of the tradition of English Literature actually requires homogeneous communities to do that interrogating. One problem which MacCabe does not address but should, is how these different communities are to communicate with one another. This is a surprising omission given that it touches on the very problem he is considering, namely how one culture relates to another. The trouble is that MacCabe, with his insistence on breaking up any notion of a common language or community, makes it very difficult if not impossible for communities to describe or share their experiences with one another, or even build a common front against oppression. Moreover, there seems to be something almost self-indulgent about MacCabe’s recommendation that oppressed groups use literature solely to bolster their own identities. Such a relationship is also reminiscent of those identifications that are characteristic of the mirror stage where subjects experience a false sense of unity. In the end, MacCabe’s introduction is notable for its isolated insights rather than consistency of argument. Apart from the slippery terminology a major problem is whether, if cultural study is to proceed on the basis of comparison, we can only understand, say, British television by understanding the television of another country. But this seems impractical and unnecessary. There would also be the difficulty of deciding which country’s television to choose: America? Tibet? Kenya? Surely something worthwhile can be said about British television without having to view the television of these or any other countries. In any case,

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the gaps in MacCabe’s argument ultimately suggest that he is unsure over whether it is in fact necessary to study another culture before you can understand your own. Another problem is that, at times, it is not clear whether MacCabe is talking about cultures as being within and part of another dominant culture or whether all the cultures he mentions are extrinsic to one another. The major limitation of the introduction, however, is MacCabe’s failure properly to connect his discussion of the problems involved in understanding our own culture with his vision of the futures of English as oppressed groups producing their own literature as well as interrogating the literary tradition. Possible feminist futures are represented by Jacqueline Rose and Penelope Wilson. The former writes on Hamlet and, taking the play as an emblem of the Western mind, argues that it represses femininity which always threatens to return and disrupt it. In this scheme, femininity becomes the unconscious of Hamlet and the Western psyche together. Rose’s view of feminity appears to be identical with what she considers the male conception of it, to be something dangerous which must be excluded—and so an opportunity to articulate an alternative definition or definitions of femininity has been lost. In Rose’s scheme femininity appears as something irredeemably other and beyond representation, making it seem like an essence, enduring and unchanging, and this lends a somewhat conservative tone to her article. Penelope Wilson wants to find a new direction for feminist criticism by focusing on Augustan satire. She acknowledges that this will be difficult since Augustan satire’s emphasis on the whole rather than the part appears to anticipate and neutralize criticism based not just on gender but on any committed position. Through an analysis of Swift and Pope, Wilson shows how the ideal of wholeness is achieved at the expense of repressing or appropriating the feminine. Here, despite her strictures, Wilson repeats the familiar view which perhaps shows just how difficult it is to break new critical ground. Wilson sees some possibility of doing this, however, through a feminist appropriation of the triangulation technique in Augustan satire whereby the narrator ostensibly speaking to a woman, is, in fact, addressing his remarks to the male listener beyond her. Although Wilson is not clear how this may work, her belief that feminism may adapt structures of representation to challenge patriarchy and thereby give femininity a voice suggests a more positive future than the one implied by Rose, where femininity is always on the outside, beyond representation, though it is not clear whether this is because there is something in the nature of femininity that makes it unrepresentable or whether it is not represented simply because it is repressed. There has been a awful lot written about female sexuality over the last few years and now it seems it is the turn of male sexuality to come under the microscope. Stephen Heath looks at the relationship between an oppressive morality and male sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century. He argues that one of the few means of representing male sexuality was through the perversions which were being studied in the new science of sexology. Heath traces this process in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In addition, he shows how that text anticipates and parallels many of Freud’s observations and he concludes by making some connections between the events of the novella and the Ripper murders. Stevenson’s description of male sexuality is not dissimilar to Rose’s account of female sexuality, which raises some interesting questions such as the value of distinguishing between male and female if it makes no difference to the way sexuality is understood. David Simpson is another contributor concerned with male sexuality. He suggests that, at the heart of King Lear, there is a fear of unregulated male sexuality. This view is not without

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its problems, the principal one being the assertion that male sexuality is represented by the women in the play. Little evidence is offered for this statement which becomes even more tenuous when Simpson ventures to locate the play in history by suggesting that Lear may represent Elizabeth I. This immediately reverses the logic of representation he has already established; now it is not the women who represent the men but a man who represents a woman. This raises the vexed questions of how a text articulates with history. The trouble with this formulation is that it implies there are two entities instead of just the process whereby the text inheres in history and history inheres in the text. To talk of text and history is to perpetuate the dualism of inside and outside from which history can only ever come off worse. For the most part, the contributors preserve the distinction between text and history. Their general view seems to be that history is what happened and literature reflects it, and their attempt to create a symmetry between the two would seem to be at odds with the editor’s call to dismantle individual works as well as traditions. Alan Sinfield makes use of the writings of George Buchanan to question the traditional reading of Macbeth as a play that attempts to legitimate the authority of absolutism. Such a reading depends on the stability of certain distinctions in the play concerning good and evil, the legitimate monarch and the usurping tyrant, distinctions which lose their validity in the light of Buchanan’s writings. Sinfield’s criticism is explicitly political and he distinguishes it from liberal and conservative accounts of Macbeth which in their different ways leave the state virtually unquestioned. Sinfield believes that criticism can help in the formation of opinion which will eventually challenge the state, a somewhat naïve conclusion to an otherwise sophisticated essay, since it assumes that criticism has a transcendental relationship with the state. This overlooks the fact that criticism is produced in educational institutions which are a fundamental part of the state’s ideological apparatus. It might be more constructive to see how criticism is determined, at least in part, by the state. The emphasis in this volume, for example, on breaking up the ‘Great Tradition’ finds an ideological parallel in the Thatcher regime’s assault on public monopolies and the welfare state, a crude analogy, certainly, but one worth considering. Jonathan Dollimore looks at the history of homosexual literature using a Foucauldian understanding of the relationship between dominant and subordinate groups. Specifically, he shows how homosexual literature has either appropriated and transformed the dominant ideology’s view of gays or else simply subverted it through humour and direct attack. This focus on the dominant and the deviant can be extended to the relationship between postmodern and conventional criticism in the book. The former is constantly troubled by the latter and this is most evident in Alan Durant’s article which is a reply to Donald Davie’s attack on his book, Ezra Pound: Identity in Crisis. The tone of defensive pleading which characterizes his reply (‘Arguably, approaches of this [Durant’s] kind should be taken seriously’; ‘exploring processes involved in construing modern poetry seems a valuable enterprise’ (p. 156)) shows the power conventional criticism can still exert. In part, this is due to the fact that postmodernism has been too quick to distinguish itself from the Leavisite tradition when it is the case that aspects of that tradition—for example close reading—inform at least one branch of postmodernism, namely deconstruction. The relationship between conventional and postmodern criticism is a complex one and needs to be thoroughly investigated. In this volume conventional criticism appears like the return of the repressed, disrupting and disorientating the futures envisaged by postmodern critical practices. Piers Gray adopts a straightforward biographical approach when he writes

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that Edward Thomas’s life is reflected in his poetry, while David Trotter gives an empirical account of how The Waste Land, in part, expresses and is influenced by Imperialist thinking. Does this mean that conventional criticism still has something to say? Certainly its presence in this volume acts as a constraint on poststructuralist articulations so that Ros Coward’s comment on characters in American soaps—that they do not develop but are emblematic of good and evil and, as such, help to provide a context for negotiating the choices and conflicts experienced by the family but especially women—is far below her usual level of theoretical sophistication. She blithely ignores, for example, how most of the women in Dallas conform to the male criteria for female acceptability by being glamorous. The mixture of conventional and poststructuralist criticism gives this volume a kind of aimlessness which is represented most forcefully in Tony Tanner’s essay on Joseph Conrad. By far the longest in the collection, it lacks direction, drifting from one topic to another without making any connection between them. The fact that Tanner concludes with a long note on Conrad and Darwin merely compounds the general sense of disorientation which is no way lessened by the reader’s being told, in a footnote, that the entire essay needs to be read in conjunction with another not in the volume. Tanner’s essay is only the clearest example of the lack of direction to be found in this collection. It is a mass exodus with everybody going in different directions at once, and while MacCabe may see this as the manifestation of a new pioneering spirit the final impression is one of confusion. Perhaps this wouldn’t be the case if MacCabe had a more positive view of unity but he seems to regard it as synonymous with oppression. There is no doubt that unity and totality can be stifling but, on the other hand, a certain binding together of elements is essential if a movement, or a text, is to function. As it stands, MacCabe’s scheme leaves groups developing in isolation which can only have an adverse effect on the futures he so fondly imagines they will usher in. However, there is an inconsistency here since MacCabe would like to see oppressed groups building up a sense of their own identity, which shows that not even he can escape unity’s fatal lure. This leads to the irony of this volume for the editorial vision of diversity and multiple futures is profoundly undermined by the narrowness of the critical vocabulary of the contributors. Words like ‘contradiction’ and concepts like ‘sexual difference’ are useful but, where they operate to the exclusion of others, perception narrows and discrimination is blunted: in such a situation attention is focused on the fact that something is repressed rather than that it is poetry or drama that is doing the repressing. Furthermore—but perhaps this is true of all critical practices—the criticism in this volume is, by and large, tautological, since it only ever seems to use literature as an illustration of its own premises, and the repetition is sometimes a little tedious. Another problem stemming from the limited critical vocabulary is that it precludes notions of hope, choice and responsibility. The human subject of this discourse is one crossed by drives and determinations and this seems to make building for the future through resistance and struggle a doomed cause, which again contrasts with the editor’s optimistic tone. Indeed the split between what MacCabe says and what the conceptual terminology of the volume implies points to a division in poststructuralism generally: on the one hand it has given us cause to distrust language’s ability to represent ‘reality’ or convey ‘knowledge’ about it, while, on the other, it assumes that it can represent and give knowledge of both texts and the world. The divisions and inconsistencies of the volume do not prevent it from being a good introduction to the objects and methods of study which characterize English at the

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moment, and indeed have done so for a number of years. However, until poststructuralism confronts its own divided consciousness and until there is a fuller understanding of its relationship with conventional criticism there is likely to be only one future for English— more of the same. Brighton

CLIVE CAZEAUX • Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Philosophical Papers Volume 1) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 226 pp. £27.50 (hardback), £8.95 (paperback). • Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Philosophical Papers Volume 2) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 202 pp. £27.50 (hardback) £8.95 (paperback). A theme in Rorty’s Philosophical Papers is circumvention, the attempt by one party to get the better of its opponent. The two parties in question are opposing conceptions of philosophy: philosophy as the quest for certainty and philosophy as a kind of writing. In my review, the two conceptions are championed by Norris and Rorty respectively. Rorty’s dependence on the freedom granted to philosophy by metaphor pitches him firmly in the ‘as a kind of writing’ camp. In Essays on Heidegger and Others, Rorty unashamedly admits that it is a pragmatist reading of Heidegger which is on offer (pp. 4–5).1 The reading makes up one half of his reaction to the quest for certainty. For the other half of his reaction, he adopts the stance of the fully-fledged pragmatist to uphold Dewey’s campaign for practical reasoning for the good of the many. By comparing and contrasting Heidegger and Dewey, Rorty argues that philosophy should give up trying to be right and start trying to be useful. However, the exchange which occurs between Rorty and Norris demonstrates that the possibility of victory for either philosophy is minimal. Given the nature of the contest which is under scrutiny, I suggest the theme is not circumvention but incommensurability, the inability of two parties to agree on a common ground for discussion. The opposition between the mathematical and the metaphorical conceptions of philosophy sets the scene for Rorty’s comparison between Heidegger and Dewey. Rorty informs us that the institution of philosophy is split in two (2, p. 21). The split is over the purpose of philosophy. On one side of the line is the ‘mathematical’ attitude to philosophy and on the other side the ‘metaphorical’ attitude. The former sees philosophy as the quest for certainty in knowledge, whereas the latter thinks knowledge claims should pass quite happily just as kinds of writing. The ‘mathematical’ is Heidegger’s term for philosophy which, in Hilary Putnam’s idiom, aspires to a God’s-eye view (2, p. 11). The ‘metaphorical’ is my term for what Rorty takes to be the opposite of the mathematical, that is, philosophy which is content to work at ground level, so to speak. What separates the two conceptions is the attention they pay to the contingency of their respective projects. ‘Contingency’ here describes the relation between philosophical language and the world. A disregard for contingency amounts to the

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assumption that there is a prelinguistic reality ‘out there’ which it is the job of philosophical language to be appropriate to. This disregard exemplifies the mathematical conception of philosophy. On this view, the world is the way it is by necessity and it is up to philosophy to specify the conditions of the nature of reality, emphasis on the ‘the’ showing that it is the task of mathematical philosophy to get it right, to be certain. According to Rorty, the analytic tradition is dominated by the mathematical conception of philosophy. The analytic mode of enquiry takes the relation between language and the world to be that of scheme and content: the world is held to be a given object of study and language is held to be the impartial scheme by which the world is known. The presupposition here is that the language which is currently to hand is ideally suited to making necessary and universal claims. Such investment in the language of the day can only have a limiting effect. The conceptual fund of the time is assumed to be the only fund we shall ever need and, as a consequence, the world (which we apprehend through concepts) is assumed to be a realm of finite possibility. Philosophy then proceeds to set down the conditions of possibility safe in the knowledge that reality is not going to throw up any surprises. In contrast, a regard for contingency affirms that philosophical language is not simply a scheme overlooking the world but that the two components are partners in an open-ended evolutionary process which bypasses the problem of adequacy altogether. The regard is evident in the metaphorical conception of philosophy. Here, language and the world do not operate on a scheme and content basis but in fact work together to extend the realm of possibility. The world at any given time is just one possible arrangement in an open-ended process of which philosophical language is a part. While the mathematical tries to delimit all possible logical space, the metaphorical actually introduces new possibilities to that space. My reason for using the ‘metaphorical’ to oppose the mathematical is that the phenomenon of metaphor, as Rorty understands it, does upset the notion that all possible outcomes can be reduced to correspond with a particular conceptual scheme. Rorty shares Davidson’s theory of metaphor. With Davidson, metaphor is not to be understood in terms of meaning but in terms of use, as something which materially affects our conception of the world (2, pp. 13–14). On this account, the world is not a static object which we view from afar but a condition, the nature of which is constantly revised by our understanding. A new, creative metaphor does not simply draw attention to an antecedently perceived similarity but rather creates a brand new object in the world. As Davidson points out, ‘rivers and bottles did not, as they do now, literally have mouths’ (2, p. 13). It is futile to attempt an explanation of metaphor in terms of meaning because, he would claim, metaphor operates at the level where the notion of meaning-as-a-measure is undermined. The mathematical model of understanding which assumes that an objectifying distance separates concept from object does not apply to the metaphorical. With Davidson, metaphor is an agency within the world which actually creates what we think of as being the world. The phenomenon of metaphor demonstrates the manner in which Heidegger and the pragmatist stand apart from the mathematical conception of philosophy. The point on which the two both agree is that philosophy should surrender its mathematical quest and recognize that, because of metaphor, its conditions and assertions can only ever be contingent. The community between Heidegger and the pragmatist can only be carried so far, though. The two philosophers share the metaphorical conception of philosophy but the eventual doctrines which they build upon their common ground rise in different directions. Rorty sees Heidegger as moving towards poetry. In Heidegger’s words, ‘the ultimate

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business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words’ which have sunk into routine usage (2, p. 16). If, in this context, poetry does not seem relevant to or worthy of comparison with philosophical enquiry, then Heidegger would probably say that it is because our judgement is dominated by the mathematical conception of philosophy. Philosophy, he thinks, should retrace its concepts back to their metaphorical origins to realize that there is no necessity governing the present situation. Study the philosophers of the past by all means, but for the vigour of their imagery and not for the cognitive insight which they purport to offer. Heidegger’s ultimate concern, on Rorty’s reading of him, is that we should relish the creative force of language without having to worry about whether or not our expressions fit a predetermined world; after all, by Heidegger’s lights, the new expressions themselves will create new worlds. Heidegger lends himself to a pragmatist reading because he advocates a return to contingency. Heidegger’s position is that the way we know the world now is just one of an infinite number of possible ways of knowing the world which could have been adopted. He thinks philosophy as a whole has adhered for too long to the mathematical conception. Philosophy thus conceived, Heidegger suggests, is the quest for certainty in knowledge bequeathed to the subject by Plato. He introduced the need to overcome epistemological scepticism into Western thinking and philosophers ever since have been trying to construct a theory of knowledge which will withstand the sceptic’s questioning. Heidegger adheres to the metaphorical conception of philosophy. For him, all the concepts which we think hold authority by necessity in the world were originally vivid metaphors instilled by poets. Metaphors, with use, lose their original impact and ossify into the concepts which make up an organizing scheme. The original metaphor though is completely devoid of necessity and it is because of this, he thinks, that our way of conceptualizing the world can only ever be one of many. Rorty reads Heidegger’s metaphors of building and dwelling as likening the contingency of our situation to the delicacy of the tie between design and eventual construction. Just as one house is built at the expense of other, unrealized designs, so one way of conceptualizing the world has application at the expense of other modes of understanding. As Heidegger writes, the notion of a ‘world picture’, ‘when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture’ (2, p. 29). With Heidegger, our world picture is precisely that, a picture: not a blueprint or a ground-plan but a canvas upon which the oils are moist for revision. As I mentioned above, Heidegger and the pragmatist share the metaphorical conception of philosophy but the eventual doctrines which they build upon their common ground rise in different directions. Rorty sees Heidegger as moving towards poetry and the pragmatist as moving towards social hope. The stress which Heidegger puts on our vocabulary being just one of many possible vocabularies is just what the pragmatist needs in order to cultivate the idea that language is flexible. Dewey’s pragmatism aims to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number by removing the language, customs and institutions which obstruct that happiness. Whereas Heidegger pursues the original force of metaphors for its own sake, the pragmatist, while encouraging new metaphors, hopes that, with use, they will be deadened and become literal concepts as soon as possible. The only thing to be done with ‘vibrantly alive metaphors’, Rorty avers, is ‘to help them become dead metaphors as quickly as possible, to rapidly reduce them to the status of tools of social progress’ (2, p. 17). The pragmatist is not interested in the metaphor itself but in how the concept which derives from the metaphor will benefit the community.

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The question of where one locates the fostered community philosophically once the notion of an ultimately knowable world has been dismissed does not bother Dewey. Dewey is essentially a social democrat. His thought, Rorty informs us, ‘has no point when detached from social democratic politics’ (2, pp. 19–20). Dewey’s affiliation with the metaphorical conception of philosophy is evident in that the greatest number to which he intends to bring happiness are not part of the sterile, objective world-to-be-known which mathematical philosophy targets. With Dewey, concepts have application within the world for practical, not epistemological reasons. The idea that you cannot refer to an object in the world unless you provide an indubitable frame of reference is, for the pragmatist, purely a hang-up of mathematical philosophy. The notion of such a frame of reference is a tired metaphor for which a use can no longer be found. It is at this point that we can best see how Rorty plans to meet the philosopher who is beguiled by the quest for certainty. Rorty’s sole weapon is his naturalistic conception of language. A naturalistic conception of language rejects everything that mathematical philosophy stands for. Naturalism dismisses outright the notion that we can stand back and make irrefutable claims about the nature of an object. Plato’s assumption that we can manipulate concepts to pass final judgement on any matter whatsoever does not hold here. For Rorty, there will never be a point in the history of language when it is equipped to formulate necessary conditions or universal claims. The fact that the concepts which we use are to hand is proof for Rorty that they are not suitors for categorical judgement but tools for practical reasoning. On this account, questions of right and wrong are not referred to a universal court of appeal but are debated with regard to what suits the good of the many. The rigid scheme and content model of knowledge is abandoned in favour of a position which does not rely on a model but just gets on with the business of living. Language is seen in terms of use rather than judgement. Rorty’s position, then, is this. The contingency of philosophical language is proof that mathematical philosophy is deluded in maintaining its quest for certainty. Thus philosophy can only ever be metaphorical philosophy: the practitioner should rejoice in the contingency of her situation and either, with Heidegger, set about trying to recover the original force of metaphors, or with Rorty, Dewey and the other pragmatists, deaden metaphors into new concepts for the benefit of society as quickly as possible. Norris, however, makes the claim against Rorty that it is impossible to get away from philosophy in the mathematical sense.2 His claim is made in response to Rorty’s announcement that philosophy, when it is not engaged in everyday, practical concerns, can best be described as a ‘kind of writing’. Norris argues that philosophy is not just a kind of writing but a distinct discipline characterized by the process of argument. We can witness the reasoning behind Norris’s assertion if we acknowledge that different temperaments are endemic to the mathematical and the metaphorical conceptions of philosophy. The distinction between the two conceptions was originally made with regard to the respect that each attitude had for the contingency of philosophy’s project. However, I propose that a difference in conduct also separates the two attitudes. For an argument to command respect within the community of mathematical philosophers, it must preserve the identity of the concepts featured in its premise throughout. Any collapsing of distinctions or subtle shifts in meaning will leave the argument open to attack and, ultimately, to the charge that its conclusion is false. The stricture of identity thinking, though, is precisely what metaphorical philosophy wants to avoid. Pedantic reason is a much less attractive prospect when the

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possibility of restoring the elemental impact of a metaphor is open. The accent with the metaphorical attitude is on continual change; the last thing that it is going to endorse is the notion of an object which remains the same over a period of time. The idea of such an object would be a throwback to the mathematical notion of an independent, objective realm which can be studied dispassionately and independently of one’s historical and cultural perspective. But, adapting Norris’s point to the issue of temperament, the very preservation of identity through the recovery from concept to metaphor (with Heidegger) and the transition from metaphor to concept (with the pragmatists) presupposes the tenet of identity thinking which is endemic to the process of argument within mathematical philosophy. Derrida is caught in the struggle between mathematical and metaphorical philosophy. On the one hand, commentators such as Rorty and Hartman want to claim him for the metaphorical tradition, while on the other hand, commentators such as Norris, Culler and Gasché want to claim him for the mathematical tradition. In ‘Philosophy as a kind of writing: an essay on Derrida’, Rorty takes Derrida to be exalting the more playful, literary aspects of language at the expense of its capacity to be philosophically precise, and he applauds him for this.3 However, such a reading, Norris argues, ignores ‘all the passages of hard-pressed textual analysis where Derrida shows deconstruction at work’ as philosophy, and mathematical philosophy at that.4 Deconstruction brings to light the strains and contradictions inherent in the discourse of philosophy which delimit the quest for certainty. Although his work may appear to be a critique of the quest for certainty, the observations he makes, in Norris’s opinion, do actually contribute to it, do actually comply with the mathematical view that it is possible to be right or appropriate or relevant in accordance with certain standards of judgement. Derrida is not just writing for the fun of it; through his unique style, he is actually presenting good, solid arguments with important consequences for philosophy. In the essay ‘Two meanings of “logocentrism”: a reply to Norris’, Rorty responds to Norris by redefining the target of Derrida’s work. Derrida’s arguments, whether they are held to be insightful or playful, are directed against the metaphysics of presence or, in a word, logocentrism. Rorty offers a prefatory account of the logocentrist’s position: Logocentrists believe that language sometimes accurately represents something non-linguistic, that sometimes sign and meaning coincide, in the sense that the sign perfectly represents something else—its meaning. The meaning, in turn, is a thought in somebody’s mind which itself may perfectly represent something nonmental. For logocentrists, language is at its best when it is perfectly transparent to reality—‘identical with its object’, as Aristotle and Hegel put it. (2, p. 130) Beyond this, however, Rorty undertakes to redefine logocentrism so that a new, wider understanding of the term is available. The result is that we have a narrow and a wide sense of the term. The distinction is made by Rorty to separate what Norris identifies as the hardcore arguments endemic to philosophy (as a distinct practice) from the everyday, commonsense arguments which the pragmatist employs to further social well-being. Logocentrism in the narrow sense is the condition which Derrida targets as a philosopher and amounts to the numerous assumptions which his predecessors have made in their quest for certainty. In the narrow sense, Rorty continues, logocentrism

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consists of something like the doctrines that… Norris identifies as ‘the three main assumptions that underpin the discourse of philosophy as a quest for ultimate, selfvalidating truth’. The notions invoked in aid of this project of self-validation— notions like ‘self-evident’, ‘intuitive’, ‘directly present to consciousness’, ‘conditions of the possibility of experience’, and so on—are not commonsensical, but obviously philosophical. (2, p. 109) Here, Rorty has included Norris’s point that although Derrida is targeting the assumptions which underlie the quest for certainty, the analyses he provides are nevertheless positive steps along the road. In the mathematical tradition, concepts are structuring principles distinct from, but none the less bearing down upon, the world. Their detached and abstract nature means that each concept cannot help but entertain its opposite. It is the close scrutiny that Derrida pays to the way in which such contradictions occupy the discourse of philosophy that Norris thinks is Derrida’s contribution to the quest for certainty. The wide sense of logocentrism is essentially Rorty’s naturalistic conception of language. In this view, concepts are not allowed to be structuring principles susceptible to contradiction but are simply given as terms with application and use. Any contradictions which may arise in the wider logocentrism are the ordinary contradictions that, in Rorty’s words, appear in any and every vocabulary (scientific, political, technical, or whatever) when it meets an anomaly—something with which it was not designed to cope. To develop a new vocabulary that will handle the new, perplexing cases is not a matter of escaping from philosophy, or from ‘the structure of previous thought’, but simply of reweaving our web of linguistic usage—our habits of responding to marks and noises with other marks and noises. (2, p. 109) The counter-claim which Rorty issues against Norris is that, without a scientific, political or technical background, without heed to the wide sense of logocentrism, the rigorous arguments which Norris admires in Derrida amount to nothing more than the philosopher swinging backwards and forwards between the poles in a binary opposition. The contradictions which Derrida so cleverly brings to light are only contra-dictions because he is targeting the narrow sense of logocentrism. Concepts which appear contradictory at the level of abstract thought may well receive straightforward application at the practical level. Rorty again: The fact that two contrasting terms get their meaning by reciprocal definability, and in that sense ‘presuppose’ each other, does nothing to cast doubt on their utility. Nor would such doubt be cast by showing, as deconstructionists often do, that the ‘upper’ term can be seen as a ‘special case’ of the ‘lower’ term. Practically anything can be seen, with a bit of imagination and contrivance, as a special case of practically anything else; dialectical and linguistic ingenuity will always suffice to recontextualize anything so as to cast doubt on its importance, or its previous role. But such ingenuity is in vain if it has no purpose more specific than ‘escaping from logocentrism’. (2, pp. 111–12)

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What Norris identifies as the hard-core arguments endemic to philosophy in Derrida’s work can only ever be kinds of writing because, by Rorty’s lights, it is in the nature of abstract concepts to invite the playful switching between opposite terms. By distinguishing between a wide sense and a narrow sense of logocentrism, Rorty is able to confine Derrida to the latter and present his work as wordplay bereft of cognitive value. I think a summary of the Rorty-Norris debate is in order. The subject of the debate, if we recall, is the status of Derrida’s philosophy: whether it is mathematical or metaphorical. Under the latter heading, one can either, with Heidegger, incline towards literature or, with Dewey, towards pragmatism. Rorty takes Derrida’s critique of logocentrism to be the affirmation that philosophy, including Derrida’s own contribution to it, is just a form of literature, and so pitches him firmly within the metaphorical camp. Norris, however, claims Derrida for the mathematical tradition on the grounds that he draws attention to the way in which binary oppositions have delimited the course of philosophy. Rorty comes back with his distinction between the narrow and the wide senses of logocentrism and asserts that to-ing and fro-ing within. binary oppositions, if detached from a social or political context, once again affirms the literary nature of philosophy. The exchange between Rorty and Norris is really a question of incommensurability. The possibility that the debate will ever be resolved is precluded by the fact that the two commentators meet with incommensurate conceptions of philosophy. Norris pledges his case against the background of the mathematical tradition, concentrating on the quality of argument in Derrida’s work which the tradition stands for. Rorty’s distinction between the narrow and the wide senses of logocentrism, however, is made from a metaphorical perspective, which means that the element of Derrida’s work which is under scrutiny, the binary opposition, is limited to being either a literary device or a tool for the pragmatist; the mathematical conception of philosophy and the quality of argument which it promotes do not receive consideration. Both Rorty and Norris are speaking on their own, separate terms. There is no common ground on which to stage an argument and, therefore, no possibility of a solution. The same incommensurability characterizes Rorty’s discussion of truth in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Rorty’s discussion is a contest between two perspectives on the status of truth: truth as an independent term of explanation versus truth as a mere term of endorsement which is spun off by a causal explanation. To develop this opposition, the first perspective holds that X works for a community because it is true, while the second perspective holds that X is true for a community because it works; truth is the explanation in the first arrangement, while in the second arrangement, it merely endorses a basic, causal explanation. The contest between the two perspectives originates in the incommensurability which exists between the mathematical and the metaphorical conceptions of philosophy. On the one hand, the mathematical philosopher maintains that the knowledge claims advanced by a community can aspire to be reports on the world as it really is, and that it is this supposed access to the ‘in itself’ which sets up truth as an independent term of explanation. On the other hand, the metaphorical philosopher maintains that the knowledge claims advanced by a community are assertions which are part and parcel of the community’s everyday interaction with its environment, and that it is this involvement in everyday matters which means that

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truth can only ever be a practical term of affirmation. Once again, we have the incommensurability between the celestial mathematical view and the ground-level metaphorical view. Rorty wants to dismiss altogether the idea that truth is a determinate relation which holds between judgement and the world (1, pp. 127–9). According to him, the only reason that philosophers need to define the nature of truth is that they are working with a particular model of knowledge: namely, the dualism of scheme and content employed by the mathematical philosopher. The dualism occurs between two ontologically discrepant realms, one featuring linguistic items and the other non-linguistic items. On this model, truth is perceived as a relation between a judgement and an item in the world which the judgement is about, where the relation of aboutness is non-causal in nature. The importance of a noncausal relation lies in that, for the dualistic model of knowledge, the correspondence between judgement and object should not be prompted by the object but should hold independently, that is, a judgement should be of an object as it is and not as it appears. The full weight of the notion of truth resides in the idea that one ontological order (language) can furnish an accurate report on another, discrepant ontological order (reality), where ‘discrepant’ is emphasized to acknowledge that the difference in kind does not permit any causal influence. The need, though, to bring the two disparate realms into relation is only there, Rorty claims, because mathematical philosophy exercises a dualistic model of knowledge. If philosophy is to pursue what he takes to be its rightful, metaphorical course, then it can bypass this need altogether. Rorty brings Davidson into the discussion to reinforce his position (1, pp. 126–50). Like Rorty, Davidson is keen to reprove the mathematical philosopher’s commitment to a stratum of correspondence which mediates between language and the world. Evidence of such a commitment is talk of meanings, conceptual schemes and responses to stimuli which assumes that they are actual stages in the cognitive process (as opposed to notions which merely illustrate the process). The terms are only introduced, Davidson announces, because the philosopher is working with the scheme-content model of knowledge and needs a bridge to cross the gap between scheme and content. Davidson, as he is interpreted by Rorty, does not subscribe to this model. He is, in Rorty’s view, part of the metaphorical tradition which views the making of judgements, together with language as a whole, as an inextricable part of our exchange with the world. Davidson replaces ‘correspondence’ with ‘coherence’ and a theory of truth with a theory of reference. His theory of reference is based on the operation of the field linguist (1, p. 133). The field linguist appeals to the basic assumption that the objects of belief in a particular community are the causes of that belief. (Belief here, for the purposes of the argument, is allied with language and judgement on the ‘scheme’ side of the scheme-content opposition.) The assumption is a holistic one and forms the basis of Davidson’s coherence theory. To understand the linguistic behaviour of a community, you don’t start off by looking for individual word-world correspondences but by looking at how their language as a whole causally interacts with, that is, is used to cope with, the environment. The field linguist’s translation works if most of her results can interpret the native’s utterances in terms of the objects which his utterances refer to. As Rorty points out, this standpoint combines ‘the Kripkean claim that causation must have something to do with reference [with] the Strawsonian claim that you figure out what somebody is talking about by figuring out what object most of his beliefs are true of’ (1, p. 134). With Davidson, reference is not a matter of

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correspondence between belief and object but of the coherence which makes the interpretation of a community’s belief system possible. A consequence of the field linguist’s method is that any appearance of correspondence which might emerge between a community’s beliefs and the objects of their beliefs will be simply a by-product of the appeal to a causal relation. The correspondence will not be the God-given fit between an object and a judgement of the object-as-it-is-in-itself but will just be the association which happens to work for the community. With Rorty and Davidson, once the causal relation between judgements and objects has been recognized, no further theory is necessary to explain the relation between language and the world. Even if ‘correspondence’ does indicate a particular relation which holds between judgement and object, ‘true’ cannot be used to explain the correspondence. I might want to say that the judgement ‘The ball is red’ corresponds to, that is, works as a description of a red ball because it is true. Rorty and Davidson, though, come back with the Wittgensteinian point that the only reason why the judgement corresponds to the ball is that I speak English. An apparently self-contained correspondence between judgement and object is replaced by the fact that ‘red’ only describes the colour of the ball because it is a sign which coheres with a particular language. By this account, ‘The ball is red’ is only true if we take it to be the affirmation that we are using the right words for the situation. Truth, for Rorty, is the fall-out from a holistic conception of meaning. The holism lies in the point that meaning is understood not as a distinct relation which mediates between language and the world but as the series of causal interactions which makes language a process in the world. This understanding, if we are to follow Rorty, disarms altogether the mathematical idea that truth is a determinate correspondence between words and objects which exists independently of the community’s causal associations. However, Rorty’s claims do not satisfy the mathematical philosopher. Rorty’s appraisal of Davidson does not resolve the dispute over the status of truth because the mathematical philosopher rejects the holism which is vital to Rorty’s position. And the contest is set to run indefinitely as a series of rejections issued, in turn, by one position against the other. The basis of the contest between the two perspectives is the incommensurability between the mathematical and the metaphorical conceptions of philosophy. The possibility of a settlement is precluded by the fact that each side makes use of notions which the other refuses to entertain. Rorty’s inclusion of Dummett in the chapter illustrates the exchange. Dummett’s point is that a holistic theory of meaning avoids the very analysis which we would expect a theory of meaning to provide (1, p. 143). Dummett’s view, as it is put by Rorty, is that Davidson’s causal, use-oriented theory does not allow for the ‘content’ of meaning, the specific ‘senses’ which speakers attach to the words of this language (1, p. 143); we need to work with an intermediate notion of content, Dummett responds, to explain the correspondence between judgement and object. However, for Rorty and Davidson, ‘sense’ and ‘content’ are just the tertiary bridging terms which are endemic to the mathematical conception of philosophy and which, therefore, on their account, are redundant. As far as they are concerned, there is no need to posit intermediary notions to explain the correspondence between judgement and object for, in their view, judgement and object are already connected, causally. Each response in the dispute over the status of truth is simply a philosophical tradition asserting itself at the expense of its opposite. We can look at the impasse between the two traditions in the general case. The incommensurability exists between the scheme and content model of knowledge adopted by

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the mathematical philosopher and the use-oriented model advanced by the metaphorical philosopher. The basic tenet of metaphorical philosophy is that language changes with use. The metaphorical philosopher asserts that, because of this contingency, language will never be equipped with the ‘ultimate’ concepts required to formulate necessary conditions and universal claims, the mainstays of mathematical philosophy. The mathematical philosopher replies that (1) not only is this in itself a universal claim but also that (2) the possibility of judgement in general presupposes a set of necessary conditions which we are linguistically equipped to set out. In response to (2), the metaphorical philosopher asserts that the opposition, by engaging in an argument which resorts to necessary conditions, is working on its own mathematical terms and not heeding the import of the original metaphorical claim. With (1), the charge that the metaphorical philosopher is guilty of the very thing which she herself denies again means that the mathematical scheme-content model of knowledge is in operation. So here the metaphorical philosopher avows that it is only the detachment which exists between the scheme and its content which enables the assumption that the guilt and the denial relate to the same object, namely, the making of a universal claim. But the mathematical philosopher comes back with the observation that his opponent, by making her response, falls back on the structure of presupposition which is endemic to mathematical philosophy. The parrying is set to continue ad infinitum for the incommensurate grounds which underlie the claims that the two philosophies advance preclude the event of either one coming to terms with the other. As I see it, there are two possible routes out of the impasse, but again, even these are biased: one towards the mathematical and the other towards the metaphorical. The mathematical approach would be to awaken both camps to just how Kant’s concept of the transcendental can act as a go-between for them. The awakening would occur by stressing the conditional element in the notion of a condition of possibility; in other words, it would consist of demonstrating the contingency present in what Rorty assumes to be an inflexible component within the mathematical conception of philosophy. Rorty dismisses transcendental arguments as ‘misleading ways of making the point that a certain set of terms cannot be used by people who are incapable of using another set’ (2, p. 112). But far from simply establishing the relative application of a particular set of concepts, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction can also be read as a thesis which reworks the whole notion of concepts having application. Kant tempers the rigid, mathematical understanding of a concept with the more flexible, metaphorical understanding. As I have argued elsewhere, the A Deduction addresses the problem of how an object experienced in the particular can be brought in relation to and made intelligible by a concept of the general kind.5 The problem is evidently a product of the mathematical conception of philosophy with its model of a conceptual scheme distinct from the content which is to be known by the scheme. Kant’s solution is to say that, on the grounds that intelligible experience is an empirical fact, concepts must be thought of as terms which have necessary application; if they did not have application, then we would not have intelli-gible experience. He recommends that we move away from the notion of a concept being a detached structuring principle and, instead, move towards the view that a necessary affinity exists between a concept and its object. The condition is that concepts open on to the objects which are to be known by them, and it is this openness, in contrast to the mathematical notion of detachment, which admits the contingency more readily associated with metaphorical philosophy. For there is no attempt by Kant to stipulate quite how the affinity is engineered; the nature of the object which fits

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the concept is not prescribed. We must be content to acknowledge that concepts, by their own nature, apply to objects. The effect of this mathematical course on the Rorty-Norris debate would be the acceptance by both parties of the claim that their arguments are complementary. The complementarity is to be found within the expression ‘conditions of possibility’. Rorty’s account is a part of the contingent, empirical world whereas Norris’s account is an appeal to the conditions of the contingent, empirical world. Earlier, such an appeal would have been viewed by the metaphorical camp as missing their point, but now, with Kant, we can see that an appeal to the conditions of possibility actually entertains the contingency of the metaphorical camp. Kant replaces the rigid scheme-content understanding of a concept with a more flexible, useoriented understanding. However, the quality of argument associated with the schemecontent model is necessary to arrive at the new understanding. In other words, the schemecontent model is a means to the use-oriented ends. This relation of dependence brings out the complementarity which exists between Rorty and Norris. The quality of argument which Norris admires in Derrida is accommodated to evince the conditions of possibility, and Rorty’s insistence that concepts are not impartial structures but terms with application is accommodated as a condition of possibility. What has essentially happened here is that necessity and universality (which the mathematical philosopher asserts and which the metaphorical philosopher takes exception to) have become components in conditions of possibility, after having originally been components in final judgements on the world. If we accept that mathematical philosophy is transcendental philosophy, then the quest for certainty is no longer the quest for final knowledge about the world but the quest for how knowledge about the world is possible at all. Given this arrangement, there is plenty of room in philosophy for Rorty to extend the realm of possibility and Norris to concentrate on the conditions of possibility. The metaphorical approach would be to deny that there is a contest at all. The benefit of this approach is that the whole business of one upmanship which, together with all the metaphors of ‘height’ and ‘looking down upon’, is immanent within the mathematical conception is avoided. The result would be that each philosophy continues with its own project, aware of what the other is about, and passes comment on the other only to complement its own position, not to denounce that of its partner. The prediction which Rorty offers runs along similar lines, although little hope is held out for the possibility of an exchange between the two sides: My hunch is that these traditions will persist side-by-side indefinitely. I cannot see any possibility of compromise, and I suspect that the most likely scenario is an increasing indifference of each school to the existence of the other. In time it may seem merely a quaint historical accident that both institutions bear the same name. (2, p. 23) The metaphorical course, if taken, would not lead to the conclusion of the Rorty-Norris debate but encourage a programme of friendly rivalry. The programme would essentially be an exercise in concentric circumvention, each reply consisting of the commentator drawing a circle larger than that of his predecessor’s in an attempt to contain his argument. Rorty’s reply to Norris in Essays on Heidegger and Others is the third round; we await the fourth from Norris.6 University of Wales College of Cardiff

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NOTES 1 From here on, references to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth will be prefixed by a ‘1’ and references to Essays on Heidegger and Others will be prefixed by a ‘2’. 2 Christopher Norris, ‘Philosophy as not just a “kind of writing”: Derrida and the claim of reason’, in Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction and Literary Theory, ed. R.W.Dasenbrock (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989), pp. 189–203. 3 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 90–109. 4 Norris, quoted by Rorty on p. 111 of Essays on Heidegger and Others. 5 The argument is featured in my unpublished paper ‘Language and the world’. The main articles which assisted my reading of the A Deduction were: Robert Pippin, ‘The schematism and empirical concepts’, Kant-Studien, 67 (1976), pp. 156–71; Eva Schaper, ‘Kant’s schematism reconsidered’, Review of Metaphysics, 18 (1964), pp. 267–92; Ermanno Bencivenga, ‘Knowledge as a relation and knowledge as an experience in the Critique of Pure Reason’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 15 (1985), pp. 593–615. Pippin sets out the difficulty to which Schaper and Bencivenga respond. 6 See Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism (Hemel Hampstead: Harvester, 1990) and The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, forthcoming 1993).

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DAVID DARBY • Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, translated from the French (1977) by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 262 pp., £29.50 The temporal and linguistic displacement effected in this translation of Lucien Dällenbach’s Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme exposes among the constituent parts of the study a disunity not immediately evident in the French text. Dällenbach confronts two areas of concern in this book: the exploration of a predominantly literary phenomenon using the narratological tool-kit borrowed relatively new from Gérard Genette’s Figures III (1972), and a study of the manifestations of the mise en abyme in the nouveau roman. These may belong well together in a 1977 francophone text launched upon a world where structuralist critics and nouveaux romanciers still shared centre stage, but they make uncomfortable joint principal players in the chronologically and geographically more distanced critical environment that confronts The Mirror in the Text. Dällenbach’s text is divided into three major sections. The first offers a heuristic study of the concept, working from André Gide’s famous notes on the subject of the visual and literary mise en abyme and progressing through the contexts in which the term has traditionally been used. The second, and largest, section—‘the major phase’ (p. 42)—of Dällenbach’s discussion offers a syntax of the three principal forms of the mise en abyme found in narrative fiction which were revealed in the first section. The third section, whose relationship to the rest of the text is problematic, considers the development of the phenomenon through the nouveau roman and the new nouveau roman. While the rationale for the inclusion of the ‘diachronic perspectives’ of this final section— working with the categories developed in the earlier sections of the text—is extremely adroitly argued, one suspects that this section will be of relatively little interest to the audience the translation will probably find. After all, little of the francophone critical literature on the nouveau roman has been granted the privilege of translation, and as a work on that topic The Mirror in the Text probably offers too little (or rather, too specialized a study), too late. The book’s true strength—and, one imagines, the decisive rationale for its translation—is no doubt its ingenious analysis of the three major forms of the phenomenon of narrative mise en abyme, where Dällenbach’s field of reference is deliberately not the nouveau roman but an impressive range of baroque, eighteenth-century, and especially nineteenth-century European narrative fiction and aesthetic theory. The tension between the two areas of interest concerns the primacy of the one over the other: if the analysis of the nouveau roman is included mainly to corroborate the central argument, it is surprising that the text should begin and end with that tradition of fiction in focus. Dällenbach’s solution to the ‘problem of how the two sections of the study are linked’ (p. 2), offered in the preface to The Mirror in the Text is to argue that ‘Part III presupposes Part II, from which it takes its descriptive and investigative methods’ (p. 3). This solution, however, sits uncomfortably with Dällenbach’s statement that the charting of an analytical system performed in the second part represents ‘the central task’ of the enquiry. Part III may indeed presuppose Part

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II; the ‘problem’ which Dällenbach attempts to gloss over is that the reverse is simply not true. The consequent tension would have been less visible or problematic in 1977; in the 1989 English text, however, it is inescapably apparent. A clear strategic manifestation of an unease in the combination of Dällenbach’s two main interests is revealed in a double standard involved in the determination of the degree of privilege granted to statements of intention by the empirical author of texts of narrative fiction. The section of Dällenbach’s analysis which—disregarding the nouveau roman—uses Genette’s terms to develop a typology and grammar of the mise en abyme stresses its structuralist-narratological dogma, stating: ‘most narratives…try to pull off a double trick by leading us to believe that there is a biographical person “behind” the implicit author, communicating through him/her’ (p. 79). This refutation of pre-structuralist conceptions of authorial agency in the narrative text is, however, suspended without too many blushes as soon as a nouveau romancier, and in particular Michel Butor, is under examination. Dällenbach is obviously quite at ease writing about ‘Butor’s fascination’ with the mise en abyme (p. 119) or discussing, albeit half-buried in an endnote, ‘the novelist’s [i.e. Butor’s] own views’ (p. 227, n 17). Elsewhere, we read of ‘Butor’s wish not to blunt the addressee’s critical activity’ (p. 124). This suspension of the dogma does, however, not apply only to Butor, since Dällenbach is also happy to discuss Claude Simon’s ‘aim’ in writing (p. 237, n 44). It is clearly no coincidence that the nouveaux romanciers upon whom Dällen-bach bestows such privilege are the very writers whom (and whose works) his other monographic studies—both before and after Le Récit spéculaire—have addressed,1 and about whom he is undoubtedly eminently qualified to comment. This is not to say that Dällenbach does not offer evidence of a blush now and again: discussing Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie, he opts for the compromise formulation of ‘the pedagogical-critical intention of the work’ (p. 127). Elsewhere he talks of ‘the intentions of the text’ (p. 137) and describes Ricardou’s Les LieuxDits as ‘a book whose ambition is to embrace the phenomenon of reflexion in its totality’ (p. 140). The problem is that Dällenbach appears to see no difficulty in assessing the status of critical utterances on the part of writers of fiction where these are available. The nouveaux romanciers have of course been excep-tionally profuse in their production of critical and theoretical statements pertinent to their fictional texts (or vice versa), and are in many cases as well known for their essayistic texts as for their experimental fictions. One might however have expected at least a cursory note outlining Dällenbach’s evaluation of the critical status of a writer’s statement of intention, since his practice with regard to Butor and Simon (and to some extent Robbe-Grillet (pp. 212–13)) obviously contradicts the foregrounding— elsewhere in his argument—of his rejection of interpretative strategies which acknowledge the intentions of an empirical author. His unhesitating readiness to opt out of his stated militant stance regarding such utterances is disconcerting and its inconsistency points again to the less than perfect cohesion of the two centres of interest in his study. The central section of this book offers a detailed analysis of what is revealed to be a dense complex of interlocking, related textual strategies exploited throughout the history of the novel. While recent anglophone commentators on auto-referential fiction allude to the mise en abyme as a characteristic feature of metafictional discourse, only Linda Hutcheon appears to have heard of Dällenbach’s study of the phenomenon.2 Thus, only Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative admits the complexity of the strategy and grants considerable attention to the effects produced by arranging texts en abyme. That anglophone narratologists and critics of

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self-conscious fiction have with this one exception ignored the heterogeneity of the group of techniques identified by Dällenbach as mises en abyme has rendered them blind both to the more subtle practical details and to some of the broader theoretical implications of all metafictional texts. While their approaches to metafiction have focused on the theoretical assumptions of auto-referentiality in fiction, their work has generally involved a kind of critical leap-frogging over the structural details of its empirical, textual manifestations, amongst which the mise en abyme plays—as Dällenbach’s analysis demonstrates—a principal, but by no means the only, role. There is a loud silence on the part of anglophone criticism into which The Mirror in the Text will add a much needed and rigorously argued analytical voice. The theory of metafiction is a well-developed field in the anglophone tradition; Dällenbach’s book will provide the means of a critical practice which will open a new discourse-analytical perspective on metafictional texts previously often cited with a conspicuous vagueness in support of theoretical argumentation. In this sense, The Mirror in the Text has for years been something of a critical missing link whose existence has been assumed as a logical necessity despite its absence from the bibliographies of the various studies of metafiction. Dällenbach’s impressively detailed analysis of what has in Englishlanguage criticism been treated as a suspiciously amorphous concept will warrant a return to the standard fictional texts discussed in studies of literary self-consciousness. Metafictional strategies such as the mise en abyme have come to be identified as essential manifestations of literary postmodernism. The effective synonymity of these areas is illustrated in the index of Hutch-eon’s The Politics of Postmodernism where the reader consulting the entry for ‘metafiction’ is instructed simply to see ‘postmodernism in fiction’.3 Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction is another of the very few anglophone critical texts which acknowledge Dällenbach’s study in particular and the sophistication of the treatment of this phenomenon in French poetics in general.4 The ‘oscillation’ between textual strata and the ‘spectacular concatenations’ at a number of narrative levels, which Dällenbach describes (p. 29) as consequences of the use of structuring verbal texts en abyme, are clearly manifestations of the ascendence of an ontological dominant which McHale’s text defines as characteristic of postmodernist fiction. The analytical categories which Dällenbach’s text develops, sketched very briefly by McHale, are splendidly applicable to the study of much postmodernist fiction, and complement well McHale’s concentration on the subversion, collapse, or compression of traditional ontological hierarchies in narrative fiction. Again, Dällenbach concentrates on the elementary testing of the structural(ist) nuts and bolts with which the bigger machine, which preoccupies anglophone (and not least Routledge) criticism, is assembled. In this sense, the delay until 1989 in the publication of The Mirror in the Text has resulted in the book’s appearance as something of an overdue critical anachronism (which reinforces rather than compromises its importance), and this has presented the translators of Dällenbach’s Le Récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme with a dilemma. In their approach to narratological terminology they appear to have disregarded developments in anglophone criticism during the remarkably long, twelve-year interlude between the publication of the two texts. In this way they appear to have resolved the question of how to translate Dällenbach’s entire text faithfully as a period piece of structuralist criticism, working from a source language replete with narratological terminology (grâce à Genette) into a target language and a target critical tradition which were in the 1970s to a not inconsiderable extent still hostile in their reception of continental (i.e. Gallic) critical

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practice. The consequence is that the terminology of Whiteley and Hughes’s text reflects the anachronism implicit in the timing of its publication. This in turn suggests a tacit acknowledgment of the element of historical interest the text might be intended to invite (as simply an important piece of structuralist criticism, now démodé), and distracts somewhat from the very novelty and originality of the study of the syntax of the narrative mise en abyme for non-francophone readers. Since the 1970s, the climate of the English reception of structuralist criticism has changed, thanks—as far as narratology is concerned—not least to the appearance of the 1980 translation of a large portion of Genette’s Figures III, and to the publication of a number of English-language monographs based on and modifying Genette’s categories,5 and English has of course achieved self-sufficiency in narratological terminology. It is, then, odd to be confronted with a book which insists on the expression ‘implicit author’ (p. 76) for ‘auteur implicite’, especially when one remembers the Englishlanguage origins of the term ‘implied author’, first coined in Wayne Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction. Of course, it has since come to signify a rather different textual intelligence to that defined by Booth, but as Dällenbach glosses the term in the text (indeed, in clearer terms than those used in many standard English-language definitions), the risk of a confusion between Booth’s and Dällenbach’s concepts would have been non-existent, had the translators opted for the more current English form. Dällenbach’s gloss, explaining that this ‘subject who has no existence beyond the enunciation s/he subtends’ (p. 76) is ‘called the implicit author in literary theory’, fails to hint at the term’s origins, and its anglophone readership in 1989 and beyond may be owed more than a vague wave in the direction of ‘literary theory’. A further instance of this kind of undertranslation is the adaption in the translation of Genette’s ‘narrataire’, when current English terminology happily supports the term ‘narratee’ to signify the narrator’s addressee. The effect of this kind of translation is, as I have suggested, the infusion of a strong sense of anachronism. If The Mirror in the Text’s text had been largely ignored by twelve years of anglophone narratology, Whiteley and Hughes seem quite simply to have returned the compliment. If the problem of undertranslation in this text is read as a symptom of this critical isolation, it is worth noting that the occasional terminological overtranslation also points toward the same diagnosis. For example, the linguistic and conceptual relationship of énoncé to énonciation is irrevocably blurred in Whiteley and Hughes’s ‘utterance’ and ‘enunciation’, and quite unnecessarily so since the French terms have been unproblematically appropriated by English-language criticism, precisely because they preserve this transparent etymological resonance. This question of the anachronistic style of Whiteley and Hughes’s translation leads full circle to the larger question of the dissonance between Dällenbach’s two principal interests. The discussion of the nouveau roman which opens (briefly) and closes this text is unlikely to have warranted the translation of Le Récit spéculaire: the majority of the important general works on the nouveau roman have remained untranslated, and, as I have indicated, the specificity of Dällenbach’s treatment of this novelistic tradition makes this book, in comparison, an improbable candidate for translation on those grounds. It is clearly the more broad-ranging, central section of this study which deserves to find an audience in its English translation; this is corroborated by the fact that those anglophone critics (Hutcheon and McHale) who draw attention to Le Récit spéculaire do so on the basis of this section, and without reference to Dällenbach’s chapters on the nouveau roman. In view of this, the inclusion of these chapters strikes the reader who is not a specialist in the nouveau roman as

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somewhat superfluous (or at best tangential), despite their unquestionable critical virtuosity. The student of other periods or national literatures—or of theory—will find in Dällenbach’s Part II the essential components of the typological investigation of the mise en abyme, and it is this part which displays in the present context the greatest potential in terms of further critical applications. As a result, the final section of the main text, as an analytical tour de force, assumes something of the character of a period piece of structuralist criticism, annexed like some of the five (albeit extremely informative) appendices which Dällenbach has made no attempt to incorporate into the progression of his argument. If the translators seem to have been unsure of the currency of the text which confronted them, their uncertainty is justified by the anachronistic character of this part of their undertaking. Two technical details of Dällenbach’s text have suffered in the formal arrangements of the translation. The stranger of these is the alteration made to the chapter numbering system, whereby in the source text the chapters are numbered in separate sequences in each of the book’s three major sections (i.e. 1:I–III, 2:I–V, and 3:I–II), and in the English text they are numbered in one sequence of 1–10. This plan would of course have been fine, had the translators remembered it as they progressed. Instead, however, chapter 6 of their text makes anticipatory reference (p. 92) to a chapter 5 (Dällenbach’s pt 2, ch. V; Whiteley and Hughes’s ch. 8), and chapter 7 refers (p. 94) to chapters 2 and 3 when it really means to direct the reader to Whiteley and Hughes’s chapters 5 and 6! The other change effected by the translators in the formal arrangement of the text concerns the conversion of the immense quantity of footnotes into endnotes. While at first sight perhaps an insignificant change, this feature of Whiteley and Hughes’s text exposes the fundamental incohesiveness of the text as a whole. Fully a quarter of the text (excluding bibliography and index) consists of notes, often at a ratio of more than one to a sentence of the main part of the text, and the constant turning of pages to consult this section makes for some very fragmented reading. This distraction counters the extremely careful and fluent articulation of the turning-points in Dällenbach’s reasoning. In the French as well as in Whiteley and Hughes’s English, the text otherwise reads extremely persuasively, as the connections between stages of the argument are made unmistakably clear. The logical unity of the text is in fact emphasized with such deliberateness that one suspects a motivating realization of the text’s need to convince its addressee of the grounds for the combination of its two dominant areas of interest. The length and frequency of the endnotes undermine, albeit to a relatively small degree, the ease with which the reader is walked through the progression of critical junctures in the argumentation. In practice, this retardation of the reading activity jeopardizes the convincing eloquence which Whiteley and Hughes have otherwise preserved effectively, and it will consequently thwart the care taken to paper over a crack which may already be harder to conceal—although through no fault of the translators—in the translation than it had been in Dällenbach’s 1977 text. Laurentian University, Ontario

NOTES 1 Le Livre et ses miroirs dans l’œuvre romanesque de Michel Butor (Paris: Minard, 1972); Claude Simon (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988). 2 For example: Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana, Chicago and

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London: Illinois University Press, 1979); Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1980); Michael Boyd, The Reflexive Novel: Fiction as Critique (London and New York: Methuen, 1984). 3 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 192. 4 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), p. 246, n 33. 5 In particular: Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978); Shlomith RimmonKenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London and New York: Methuen, 1983); and Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

FRED BOTTING • Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 240 pp., £25.00 (hardback) • Peter Washington, Fraud: Literary Theory and the End of English (London: Fontana, 1989), 188 pp., £4.99 (paperback) What are the consequences of the collapse of the institution called ‘English’? What happens to literature, or to theory, so often cast in the light of the diabolical usurper: reaction, postulated in the name of and aimed at returning to the sureties of the old order, or fragmentation as irreconcilable tendencies go their own divisive ways? Nostalgia and progress may well walk arm-in-arm as old and new battle it out. Oppositions, like those between literature (human value) and theory (political dogma), (imaginative) truth and (prosaic) fiction, that once provided clarity, security and imaginary puissance as banners distinguishing good from evil no longer seem to possess overwhelming power since their very structures have been made visible and rendered suspect. For many, advocates of the literary as well as the theory, the diagnosis of this condition does not provide much consolation. What, then, is to be done? In Fraud ‘The Problem’ is specified and the answer is boldly, if crudely, outlined: the hidden agendas of ‘RLT’ (radical literary theory), its revolutionary ambitions to destroy ‘bourgeois criticism’ and take over the world, must be exposed. After this unmasking of the lie of theory the truth and value of common sense, literature and academic neutrality will prevail. Such attacks on theory are, like theory’s ambitions according to Washington, ‘nothing new’. Theory, if such a general term can still apply, has already begun to interrogate the metanarratives framing political agendas and doctrinaire approaches as well as its own complicity with existing formations. Fraud’s belated, familiar and rather toothless savaging of theory, in general and partial terms, continues with attacks on Barthes’ ‘narcissism’ (so much for the death of the author), on language as the only

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reality (Saussure was ‘an old-fashioned realist’, p. 65), on de Man (whose work ‘deteriorates’ into ‘unbridled subjectivity’, p. 87) and deconstruction (a ‘dogmatic scepticism’ that says there are ‘only appearances’, p. 91). Feminism receives the treatment in a separate chapter wittily entitled ‘Girls on top’. While it is reassuring to be told that not all feminists are rampaging RLT subversives (some only want better jobs), it is not a sudden move away from outright antagonism: Fraud is more concerned with the caricatured extremes of a feminism obsessed by dismantling the ‘straw man of patriarchy’. Straw men dominate Fraud. According to the argument, RLT, constructing ‘bourgeois criticism’ as a monolithic enemy, bases its whole approach on making and attacking a straw man. While the rise of theory in Britain did depend on an identification of a singular, dominant and conservative institution and tradition to establish its own political and pedagogical difference, the fraught and generative axis of position/opposition soon led to a multiplicity of cultural, historical, sexual and political differentiations. Fraud, refusing to acknowledge the vast range of differences animating and dispersing theory, has composed its own menacing, monolithic straw man. Performing the very same manoeuvres that it attributes to theory, Fraud displays the persistence and power of grand binary oppositions in the structures of language and thought. The repetition, itself an index of anxiety, belies the claims to disinterestedness and undermines the assumed authority of its statements about theory as a projection of its own anxieties and interests. Fraud, however, claims not to have any political interests. Its purview is purely academic, its argument aimed solely at the preservation of academic neutrality: ‘it is not our business as teachers to transmit values of any kind, whether right, left or centre, in an institutional form’ (p. 12). Statements of this kind recur throughout the book: the business of teaching is ‘to develop the mental capacities of our pupils’ (p. 12) and to advocate ‘the disinterested pursuit of excellence’ (p. 177). Coinciding with arguments defending reference, reality, common sense, literary values and creative authority, a position emerges which appears remarkably akin to the liberal humanism that Fraud disclaims. The book marks itself out, not as a text that resists ideology, but one which either remains unaware of, or, to read it more cynically, presents as natural, tenets that are a testimony to ideology’s powerful and invisible effects and strategies. One wonders, not how much theory Fraud is prepared to accept, but how much of it has been thought through. Ideas, theory in various forms has insisted for decades, do not exist in a cultural, historical or political vacuum. Those espoused in Fraud are not simply located in a disinterested and thus culturally and politically disassociated liberal academy, itself an Enlightenment myth: they imply attitudes and practises that are blatantly evident in the textual strategies of Fraud. The neutrality or objectivity of the academy seems to give it an imaginary authority which is situated outside and above politics, unable, perhaps, to do anything but preserve an academic and political status quo. There are, however, other implications which emerge in the making of straw men. By criticizing theory for constructing its monolithic enemy (‘bourgeois criticism’) and doing the same to theory (‘RLT’), Fraud turns the latter into its own menacingly singular antithesis in which the construction of ‘RLT’ as totalizing, dogmatic, political and nonsensical appears as its own projection, a projection that legitimates the book’s virulent and indiscriminate attacks on various theories. In a mirror of its own making liberal humanism sees its own aggressive, intolerant and authoritarian self. Exploding English deals with similar concerns to those of Fraud, but engages with them in a much more informed and calm manner. Exploding English would perhaps respond to the

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aggressive, polemical tones of Fraud in much the same way that it objects to the badtempered, bitter and abusive stances struck by early advocates of theory in Britain. The appearance of theory in Britain, the angry exchanges that were provoked, as well as a detailed account of the McCabe affair, receive quite thorough attention as the book charts its own version of the development of and changes in the institution of English. While its principal axis runs from the 1950s, at the beginning of a career that saw wider opportunities for participation in tertiary education, to the 1980s, when the crisis of English threw up its major ‘symptom’—theory—and indicated the extent of transformations to come, Exploding English also offers an illuminating comparison of the very different assumptions and values that led to the establishment of English as a discipline at Oxford and Cambridge and contrasts the styles and impact of those institutions’ most prominent figures, Leavis and Lewis. The former’s power as a ‘force for cultural propaganda and persuasion’ (p. 49) is acknowledged, as is his legacy and influence on some of the wider aspirations of certain theorists, but it is the latter who, Bergonzi argues, provided more sophisticated and relevant accounts of literature as a culturally constructed phenomenon. The praise for Lewis reinforces one of Bergonzi’s general complaints about theory. He argues that, in its fascination with exotic (generally French) imports, British theory has neglected its own critical tradition and, reading translations without knowing the French scene well enough (only two critics make the grade), misunderstood its own incantations of the texts by those sacred names. Further criticisms of theory, neither particularly original nor very incisive—commenting on structuralism as ‘new new criticism’, Marxism as an ‘obsolete weapon’ or deconstruction as ‘intellectual nihilism’—lead to some of the more important questions that preoccupy this book. What happens to ‘English Literature’ in the wake of the explosion of canons and the proliferations of literary theories and literatures from other anglophone cultures? Offering a number of sensible suggestions and prognoses, Bergonzi seems inclined towards a disciplinary division that will place theory in the realm of cultural studies and leave English to those wanting to get on with the business of literary appreciation and creation. Nostalgia, more than any other consideration, appears to govern this choice, a nostalgia for the days when less professionalized academics combined the various strings of teaching, criticism and imaginative writing in an atmosphere of liberal and literary harmony. Donald Davie epitomizes such an academic: ‘the example of a dedicated university teacher, who is at the same time a fine poet, a practitioner of rigorously evaluative criticism, and a judicious reviewer’ (p. 152). Nostalgia acknowledges the disappearance of these ideals and lights a candle for their return. English is not what it used to be. But then, theory is not, perhaps, what it would have been. In the processes of transition between different paradigms and agendas certain boundaries seem to have been blurred beyond repair and other lines need to be drawn. But Bergonzi’s nostalgia for English hints at another nostalgia, one that inhabits areas of theory as it becomes uneasily institutionalized. Without its opposition to English, an opposition that gave it shape and direction, theory also seems a little lost as it traverses the borders of a number of established disciplines like philosophy, history or cultural studies and tries to find a place and identity for itself. Such returns, however, occlude the heterological elements and movements from which theory was forged. University of Wales College of Cardiff

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WILLY MALEY That were too long a work to count them all (FQ, IV.i.24.2) • A.C.Hamilton (Gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 1990), 858 pp., £175.00 In the Preface to William Shakespeare, Terry Eagleton likens his task in discussing the bard’s major works in a volume of such slender proportions to the ‘Summarize Proust’ contest which featured in an episode of the BBC comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus.1 The summary was to be conducted in twenty seconds, first in bathing costume, and then in evening dress. My own brief in this review is no less ridiculous, and the reader may envisage me sporting a top hat and trunks by the end of it. Indeed, it is impossible both to ‘summarize Spenser’ and to ‘summarize’ The Spenser Encyclopedia. However, since a large number of scholars have attempted the former, I am beholden to undertake the latter. As the man said: O what an endless work have I in hand! The Spenser Encyclopedia could by no means be described as light reading. It is a work which was thirteen years in the making. That it was completed at all is a tribute to the tenacity of its General Editor, A.C.Hamilton, who, in the summer of 1985, halved his teaching and went on half pay in order to devote more time to his taxing organizational role. Indeed, none of those involved with the enterprise can be accused of serving Mammon. The five editors—assisted by a twelve-member editorial board—enlisted over four hundred contributors from around twenty countries, all of whom offered their services free of charge. The resulting compilation takes the form of some seven hundred entries arranged under twenty-two categories (p. xii). I begin with this statistical information because it will determine to a certain extent the tenor of what follows. In short, this is not a text with which to play the Blatant Beast. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to insult one or two authors in the course of a review is forgivable, to insult four hundred savours of carelessness. I have my career to think of. So, rather than risk incurring the wrath of the multitude by embarking on a Pythonesque sketch of the Encyclopedia as a whole, I intend to focus here upon the few entries relating specifically to ‘my field’—Spenser’s Irish experiences.2 In the spirit of Falstaff after the Gadshill debacle, but without fear of contradiction, I can say that ‘I am a rogue if I were not at half-sword with a dozen of them two hours together’ (Henry IV, Part One, II. 4. 159–60). Given the fact that Spenser spent almost his entire literary career in Ireland, the Irish material in The Spenser Encyclopedia is really rather paltry. Those contributors who do address this area are understandably reluctant to dwell upon present reasons for the marginalization of Ireland in Spenser studies. Most of the material tends to be chiefly of antiquarian interest, treating as it does of biographical and geographical trivia. Then again, a deconstructive reader might reproach me here for marginalizing that which is central, since in some ways there is nothing outside of biography and geography. In any case, there is little engagement in the Encyclopedia with Ireland as source, context, pretext, and patron of

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Spenser’s corpus. By corpus I mean both the body of work produced by Spenser, and the body of Spenser produced by his work, and by ‘Ireland’. It is crucial to remember that Spenser and the other English planters displaced an Irish peasantry which was forced to eat what grass was left after Lord Grey’s scorched earth policy. Spenser himself is reputed to have died in London for lack of bread, according to Ben Jonson, following the overthrow of his Irish estate. There is no doubt that Spenser saw his epic poem as being ‘made in Ireland’. Two of the dedicatory sonnets for The Faerie Queene, those addressed to the Earl of Ormond and Lord Grey, describe the work as ‘the wilde fruit, which salvage soyl hath bred’, and ‘Rude rymes, the which a rustick Muse did weave, In savadge soyle, far from Parnasso mount’. Most of the dedicatees were steeped in Irish colonial affairs, as were all of Spenser’s patrons—Gabriel Harvey, Lord Grey, Walter Raleigh, and the Earl of Essex. For patrons and poet alike, the viceregal administration in Dublin offered a radical alternative to a contracting system of court clientage. Predictably, Ireland enters the Encyclopedia as ‘context’, that is, as a support or surround for the text ‘itself’.3 The two main pieces in the Encyclopedia on the Irish milieu—Ireland, the cultural context, by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain (pp. 403–4), and Ireland, the historical context, by Nicholas Canny (pp. 404–7)—provide informed analyses of language and politics in the Munster plantation. Ni Chuilleanain traces the motifs of autobiography, exile and pastoral in The Faerie Queene, crystallized in the Mutabilitie Cantos, where ‘the selection of North Munster as background enables Spenser to offset his cosmic drama with the perfect example of the particular and familiar’ (p. 404). Canny conducts a longer examination of the tensions within the English colonial community between the New English—the post-Reformation Protestant planters—and the Old English—the twelfth-century, predominantly Catholic descendants of an earlier conquest.4 Spenser’s arrival in Ireland with Lord Grey in 1580 coincided with a period of crisis and change in the relations between these two colonial communities, and, by extension, their contacts with the metropolis. This new conjuncture of crown, court and colony stimulates and complicates Spenser’s deliberations on Anglo-Irish policy, Canny maintains, and, as well as facilitating the reading of the View and the Brief Note, ‘this account should also assist us in understanding FQ V’ (p. 407). I would go further and suggest that Canny’s deconstruction of the English colonial system in early modern Ireland—for that is what it amounts to—sheds light on the whole of Spenser’s epic poem and also, as I have argued elsewhere, on The Shepheardes Calender, a work which precedes, in the minds of most critics, the literary impact of Spenser’s Irish experiences.5 Ciaran Brady, in his contribution to the Encyclopedia, argues that A Brief Note of Ireland (1598), the lesser of Spenser’s two treatises on Ireland, has been wrongly attributed as exclusively the work of one individual. The Brief Note is in fact a set of three documents, only the third of which—entitled ‘Certaine pointes to be considered of in the recovery of the Realme of Irelande’—can be laid with confidence at Spenser’s door. Its style and content match most closely that of the View. My own feeling is that the immediate context of the Brief Note—the overthrow of the Munster plantation and with it a direct threat to Spenser’s estate and livelihood—may account for the unevenness of the three documents, and for their urgency of tone and insistence on desperate measures. None the less, Brady has a thorough knowledge of the genre, and writes with authority and insight, making it difficult to counter his thesis.

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The entry on Kilcolman (pp. 417–22) by D.Newman Johnson offers a detailed history of the poet’s Cork estate, making the interesting observation that in coming to Ireland Spenser quickly discovered that castles, vestiges of a feudal past in England, were still very necessary as domestic forms of defence. Johnson concludes that ‘it is ironic that Kilcolman…lies mutilated and abandoned’ (p. 422). There is no attempt, however, to investigate this irony. Had Shakespeare lived in Glasgow from the date of the composition of his first play to his death, one would expect this fact to feature prominently in Shakespearean criticism, and not just in readings of ‘the Scottish play’. Yet the fact that Spenser spent almost his entire literary career shuttling between Cork and Dublin seems not to have troubled Spenserians too much, or rather, it appears to have troubled them so much that they have declined to investigate its consequences. Stratford in the summer is an international literary shrine teeming with tourists. This is in sharp contrast to the bleak ruin of Spenser’s Cork estate. Kilcolman stands alone and unwelcoming—‘mutilated and abandoned’—reached by wading across a muddy field. Ironically, the family who presently own the land on which Kilcolman stands (‘Spenser’s Castle’, as it is still signposted), bear the name of the Old English lord with whom Spenser was in constant litigation over property rights. The discrepancy between the importance attached to Shakespeare’s birthplace and that conferred upon the colonial retreat which permitted Spenser to write one of the greatest poems in the English language can be explained in a number of ways, but it has to do principally with subsequent Anglo-Irish history, and with what is increasingly referred to as the ‘British Problem’. Most critics of Spenser are aware that he wrote a lengthy prose treatise in 1596 entitled A View of the Present State of Ireland, and that two years later he penned a short tract called ‘A Briefe Note of Ireland’. These two political discourses are generally viewed as being of purely historical interest, and have accordingly been set apart from the main body of Spenser’s literary work. When they are brought in from the margins of the corpus, it is to bolster an argument on Book V of The Faerie Queene, the only section of Spenser’s epic poem thought fit to be read in relation to Ireland. While Irish historians have wrestled with Spenser’s prose, literary critics have either ignored the place of Ireland in Spenser’s poetry or berated the Book of Justice for being ‘bad poetry’. Ireland is the Achilles heel of English radicalism, and has been for as long as English literature has existed. Its exclusion from, or marginalization within, traditional criticism of Spenser says something about more than just the Spenser industry. It reveals one of the central tensions within the corpus, canon and culture of Englishness. Of course, the obverse of censorship is sensationalism, and there is a real danger that the growing concern with the colonial subject will simply repeat the colonial project, or, since the colonial project was always as much about cultural capital as economic capital, that it will merely inaugurate a higher stage of what it purports to critique. A fetishization of Ireland, I would argue, is evident in some of the new work on Spenser—and I do not absolve myself of culpability. Controversy is a highly marketable commodity, as the travel writers of the sixteenth century well knew, and exoticism and orientalism are charges that could be levelled with some justification at many modern ‘critics’ of colonialism. Paradoxically, Geoffrey Hartman has spoken of teaching Christianity to students at postwar Yale ‘by teaching them Spenser’.6 This is wholly inappropriate. Spenser was a proponent of genocide for the indigenous Irish. Ciaran Brady has pointed out that Spenser ‘coldbloodedly advocated a policy of general starvation’ for the native Irish.7 Indeed, if

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ultranationalism, a theory of racial supremacy, an appeal to unlimited sovereignty, and a politics of blood and soil, are all components of fascism, then Spenser ought not to be a role model for a tolerant society. Conversely, nor should he be singled out for crucifixion. It was Walter Benjamin who observed: ‘There is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism.’8 This is true not only of all of Spenser’s works, but all criticism, including The Spenser Encyclopedia. Let s/he who has no sin cast the first stone. The single major deficiency in the entries on Ireland in The Spenser Encyclopedia lies in the lack of any effort to conduct a mass biography of the undertakers in the Munster plantation, or to comment at any length on the numerous literary figures in the viceregal administration with whom Spenser must have had close contact. There is no real engagement with the leading lights in the Old English community. There is a short note on Barnaby Rich, and slightly longer items on Thomas Churchyard and Barnaby Googe, but nothing specific on Geoffrey Fenton or Richard Stanyhurst. Stanyhurst, a Dubliner and one of the most articulate representatives of the Old English in Spenser’s time, is a glaring omission, especially given the recent work of Colm Lennon on this neglected writer.9 Another deficiency in the volume is ‘theory’, either the theories of Spenser on language and culture, or the theories of individual contributors. Moreover, there is no clearly identifiable editorial line, merely a mute empiricism. One assumes that any serious engagement with critical theory would have called into question the project of an encyclopedia. If explicit theoretical pronouncements are absent—and this may not be a bad thing from the perspective of a textual practice that eschews dogmatic theoreticism—then there are numerous implicit theories on display. Among the most incisive entries are those on identity (pp. 386–7) and puritanism (pp. 573–4) by Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Sinfield respectively. There are, though, no sustained arguments from the general standpoint of new historicism or cultural materialism. The most fascinating entry for me outside of those on Ireland is Anthony Riley’s piece on Marx and Spenser (pp. 457–8). (This was the original title of my Ph.D. thesis, and is a pun dear to my heart.) Riley, in a fundamental analysis, takes at face value Marx’s infamous reference to ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’, and has a field day with the literary history of this gentle alternative to fight and flight. Riley rightly concludes that Marx must have been referring to The Faerie Queene, and not the View, an arse-kicking text which ‘challenges, rather more than apologizes for, official policy in Ireland’ (p. 457). The stated aim of The Spenser Encyclopedia is ‘to assess both what had been done and left undone in Spenser studies by gathering into one volume the best that the present generation of critics had to say about Spenser’. Significantly, another incentive was the impending publication of A Milton Encyclopedia. This should remind us that competition between publishers and scholars for readers, like that between universities for students, has a determining effect on what is printed and practised. The ‘implied reader’ of the Encyclopedia is ‘projected as an intelligent senior undergraduate’ (p. xi). It will assuredly offer research students in particular an ideal reference guide to one of the most influential figures in English literary culture, and one of the most controversial writers in Anglo-Irish history. This reader, though, was left wondering if the proper name of Spenser was finally a strong enough thread to bind together so many disparate essays. Indeed, one wonders if the effort to inter Spenser, to embalm or embody him in a single critical moment, runs counter to the poet’s own theory of mutability, where life and work are ‘unperfite’. An encyclopedia lends itself to closure. So too does a review.

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It is fifty years since Spenser was the sole subject of so much critical attention, with the publication of a variorum edition of his works. In that time there has been a move away from single-author studies, towards ‘themes’ such as ‘the colonial subject’.10 Thus the Encyclopedia, as a collection of monographs, although it is a new departure for Spenser— and for Routledge—marks a return to an older kind of criticism. In so far as the genre is concerned, the appearance of The Spenser Encyclopedia should prompt the textual practitioner to think through and question the theories of authorship and authoritativeness that underpin such a teleological project. University of Strathclyde

NOTES 1 Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. ix. 2 See Willy Maley, ‘Edmund Spenser and cultural identity in early modern Ireland’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1989); A Spenser Chronology (London: Macmillan, forthcoming). See also Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (eds), English Alternatives: Representing Ireland, 1534– 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press). For a comprehensive guide to sources, see my ‘Spenser and Ireland: a select bibliography’, Spenser Studies, 9 (1991), pp. 227–42. For a contemporary document analogous to Spenser’s View, see my transcription of the anonymous treatise The Supplication of the blood of the English, most lamentably murdred in Ireland, Cryeng out of the yearth for revenge, forthcoming in Analecta Hibernica. The key texts in an earlier period of scholarship are Pauline Henley, Spenser in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1928); Alexander C.Judson, Spenser in Southern Ireland (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1933); The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945); Patricia Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989). More recently, there has been a vigorous debate within Irish historiography on the place of Spenser as a literary representative of the New English. See Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Edmund Spenser on justice and mercy’, Historical Studies, 16 (1987), pp. 76–89; ‘Robe and sword in the conquest of Ireland’, in C.Cross, D.Loades and J.J.Scarisbrick (eds), Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Retirement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 139–62; Ciaran Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish crisis: humanism and experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present, 111 (1986), pp. 17–49; ‘Spenser’s Irish crisis: reply to Canny’, Past and Present, 120 (1988), pp. 210–15; The road to the View: on the decline of reform thought in Tudor Ireland’, in Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland, pp. 25–45; Nicholas Canny, ‘Edmund Spenser and the development of an Anglo-Irish identity’, The Yearbook of English Studies: Colonial and Imperial Themes, 13 (1983), pp. 1–19; ‘“Spenser’s Irish Crisis”: a comment’, Past and Present, 120 (1988), pp. 201–9; ‘Introduction: Spenser and the reform of Ireland’, in Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland, pp. 9–24. 3 On the interpenetration of text and context, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Afterword’, in Limited Inc. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988), where he states that deconstruction ‘supposes both that there are only contexts, that nothing exists outside

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context…but also that the limit of the frame always entails a clause of nonclosure. The outside penetrates and thus determines the inside’ (pp. 152–3). 4 On the Old and New English, see Nicholas Canny, The Formation of the Old English Elite in Ireland (Dublin: National University of Ireland, 1975), and ‘Identity formation in Ireland: the emergence of the Anglo-Irish’, in N.P.Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 159–212. 5 See Maley, ‘Edmund Spenser and cultural identity in early modern Ireland’, ch. 4, ‘“Who knowes not Colin Clout?”: The Shepheardes Calender as colonial text’. 6 Cited in Stephen Bygrave, ‘Review of Imre Saluzinsky, Criticism in Society, and Robert Moynihan, A Recent Imagining’, Textual Practice, 2, 3 (1989), p. 279. 7 Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish crisis’, p. 17. 8 Cited in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 208. 9 See Colm Lennon, ‘Recusancy and the Dublin Stanyhursts’, Archivium Hibernicum, 33 (1975), pp. 101–10; ‘Richard Stanyhurst (1547–1618) and Old English identity’, Irish Historical Studies, 21, 82 (1978), pp. 121–43; Richard Stanyhurst: The Dubliner, 1547– 1618 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981). 10 For a compelling instance of the new thematic and theoretical criticism, see Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

MICHAEL GARDINER • Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso 1991), 275 pp., £34.95 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback) Strange Weather is an intriguing examination of a number of popular scientific cultural movements in post-war America from the perspective of what could be termed ‘critical cultural studies’, a mélange of post-Marxist politics and postmodern analytical sensibilities. Ross’s central premise is that although science appeals to the ‘solid dimensionality of facts’—that is, aspires to the status of objective knowledge and truths beyond dispute—it is in actuality a ‘fully material “culture”, not merely a set of cold equations’ (p. 12). Of course, sociologists of science have long stressed the socio-cultural mediation (or even construction) of scien-tific practice, as demonstrated through ethnographic studies of laboratory settings or historical analyses of paradigmatic shifts in the boundaries of scientific orthodoxy. For their part, Marxists have already analysed the political economy of science and drawn attention to the close affinity between corporate and scientific interests in the context of capitalist production. Yet Ross is concerned to challenge the cozy relativism and apoliticism of the former and the failure on the part of the latter to examine science as a specifically cultural and hegemonic phenomenon, albeit one forged in dialectical interaction with the natural world. In other words, science can and indeed must be seen as a ‘culturally expressive act with fully political meanings’ (p. 12).

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This is a path which has recently been trodden by a number of radical American theorists, most notably Stanley Aronowitz in his Science as Power. What makes Ross’s study distinctive is his focus on the contestation of the dominant tradition of scientific rationalism through such developments as New Age, cyberpunk, computer hacking, the ecology movement and others which have arisen in the wake of the contemporary ‘crisis of rationality’. Ross sees these movements as somewhat resistant, but also as partially co-opted by the dominant social order and the apparatus of orthodox science. That is, while they are often sceptical about scientific rationality as it is institutionally embodied and ideologically expressed, and continue to have anxieties about nuclear armageddon or the depletion of the ozone layer, they tend to embrace (even celebrate) particular forms of technology as liberating and strive to legitimate their claims through the characteristic rhetorics of science itself. (Ross cites holistic medicine and the ‘acceptable face’ of environmentalism as two good examples.) As such, these technocultures differ markedly from their countercultural forebears of the 1960s, because they forcefully reject the latter’s pastoral romanticism as hopelessly gauche and backward-looking. For Ross, this ambivalence is not misplaced, and he suggests there is a lesson to be drawn from the emergence of these technologically-adept ‘new social movements’: that there is little to be gained from ‘holding on to the traditional humanist faith in the sanctity of the unalienated “natural” self, nobly protected from the invasive reach of modern science and technology’ (p. 8). Ross’s position is that the scientific baby is more or less permanently lodged in the socio-historical bath water, but that science can be reformed and made more responsive to considerations of cultural difference and the principles of radical democracy and communitarianism. As part of this transfer motion, science must be made aware of limits, predominantly natural or ecological ones. Such a kinder, gentler science would, suggests Ross, combine a sensitivity to the ‘lived experience’ of localized practices with a truly global grasp of social and ecological priorities. In other words, the utopian glimmer of science and technology—Habermas’s ‘promise of modernity’—can in principle be fulfilled, which means that the critical intellectual’s traditional luddite or technophobic suspicions are ultimately regressive and self-defeating. Ross therefore sounds a clarion call for left cultural politics to become ‘technoliterate’, and the sooner the better. Although Ross refers to the work of Fredric Jameson only in passing, his approach is Jamesonian in the sense that he views the discourse of the various technocultures he examines as complex admixtures of ideological and utopian elements. At their core, they express a profound desire for community, freedom, and autonomous creativity that is critical of the alienated and manipulated state of modern social relations. Yet in the absence of a coherent account of the wider connections between technology, capital and culture and an effective political praxis, their critiques are contained within the overarching hegemony of scientific rationalism and liberal democracy. As such, they are palpably unable to realize the kind of ‘progressive individualism’ that they strive to articulate (although in a fragmentary and inchoate fashion). The political task then becomes one of separating the wheat from the chaff; that is, of rescuing the ‘concrete utopia’ from the morass of masculinism, technofetishism and mysticism that pervades many of these movements. Perhaps Ross is preaching to the converted, but I find myself in broad sympathy with both his political vision of ‘leftist futurism’ and his sophisticated theoretical framework. Moreover, this study is written in a refreshingly candid, non-academic style that deliberately seeks to address an audience beyond the lecture-hall rostrum, and it succeeds in demystifying

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a great deal of generally impenetrable technospeak. Although Ross is sometimes a little too self-consciously hip for his own good, he more often than not hits the mark with the right blend of a fan’s ‘insider knowledge’ and the cultural critic’s analytical detachment. University of York

NICHOLAS DAVEY • David Wood (ed.), Philosophers’ Poets (London: Routledge, 1990), viii+200 pp. (£35.00). Was Nietzsche right after all? Do arch enemies need each other, define and gain their identity by mutual attempts at other-denying self-assertion? But what should happen to such bonding antagonisms if, as Cavafy suggests, ‘the Barbarians do not arrive:…and now what will become of us without barbarians. These people were a kind of solution’ (from the poem ‘Waiting for Barbarians’). For some philosophers the merest whiff of the poetic suffices for them to haul their most clanking of conceptual artillery into the field. In his Die Geschichte des Materialismus (1866) Friedrich Lange railed that the poetic as opposed to the philosophically policed public realms of knowledge (he was a Neo-Kantian after all) represented the realms of the subjective, of the fantastical and of wishful thinking. In a surprisingly similar vein, Habermas recently rounded on Derrida, arguing that were philosophy levelled to the genre of the merely literary, ‘it would be relieved of the duty of solving problems [and] would be robbed not merely of its seriousness but of its productivity’ (Discourse on Modernity, 1987, p. 210). Is this ancient contest of faculties still pregnant with portentous insight or, if the Barbarians have gone, is this conflict, like the kindred controversy over the status of knowledge in the arts and sciences, an idiotic debacle best left alone in the sulphured chambers of history? The collection of essays edited by David Wood will inevitably be seen either as clarifying points of faculty demarcation or as trying (hopelessly) to breathe life into an old dinosaur. Wood’s volume brings between the same covers essays generally high in standard yet varied in scope, intensity and perspicacity. Bernasconi’s article ‘Literary attestation in philosophy’ achieves a comprehensive discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of Tolstoy’s treatment of death. Bernasconi proposes that the introduction of literary examples within philosophical texts disrupts the distinction between philosophy and literature and thereby destroys the autonomy of the philosophical text. Whether this is advantageous or not is not discussed. Davies’s commentary on Levinas’s response to Heidegger and Blanchot examines the contention that in the face of the ‘il y a’, ‘always spoken of as an incessant and interminable shuddering, rustling, murmuring…of signification beyond the domains of sense’ (p. 42), the thinker must always give way to the poet (p. 43). Davies’s discussion is terse and informative but his conclusion vague; ‘distrustful of poetry, thinking is nevertheless obliged to entrust itself to it’ (p. 66). Exactly why this should be so is a question which is left hanging. Land’s ‘Narcissism and dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation’ is a joyously irreverent piece and Llewelyn’s concentrated miniature ‘Derrida, Mallarmé and Anatole’ is excellent within its field of focus, but both somehow lose grasp of the overall theme of the volume. This may not be their fault as much depends on editorial selection and

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advice. Though good on Derrida and Sollers, Hobson’s piece suffers from the same difficulty. Howell’s animated discussion of Sartre’s evolving appreciation of poetic language puts the case for redeeming his current disrepute amongst his contemporary compatriots on the ground that ‘[his] fascination with a kind of poetic nihilism which repudiates any political or cultural commitments should make us reconsider the current dismissal of him as a fetishist of communication.’ McAllester Jones’s essay on ‘Bachelard, science and poetry’ brings a twist into the overall debate suggesting that for Bachelard ‘it is not a question of either, or—man is either rational or irrational—but rather both, and—man is both rational and irrational. Scientific truth and poetic truth co-exist’ (p. 154). She then proceeds to show that in Bachelard’s view it is not just the poet but also the scientist who stands in polemical relationship to actuality and that, furthermore, the scientist like the poet is continually made and re-made by his thought. MacAllester Jones’s piece effects a subtle sea change in the volume, for the discussion of Bachelard shifts the debate from the poles of philosophy and literary texts to the wider controversies between scientific and artistic modes of knowledge. Bernstein’s essay on Adorno and Beckett inhabits this larger terrain but if Bachelard envisioned a fusion of these faculties, the piece on Adorno pushes them firmly back into steely opposition. Of Adorno, Bernstein remarks, ‘Aesthetic Theory [is]…the tracing of the possibility of art being “the saying of what philosophy cannot, can no longer say”’ (p. 177). And yet in a manner worthy of Adorno’s dialectical prowess, this simple opposition does not remain so for long. As a compliment to Bernstein’s admirable succinctness we quote the following passage at length: The assumption governing the belief that modernist art is now the organon for philosophy is irrevocably conceptual in its practice, and conceptual praxis is (necessarily) abstract: identity thinking. Philosophy, then, cannot avoid complicity with domination. Its attempts to avoid complicity—ellipsis, parataxis, fragmentation, examples—do not suspend complicity so much as provide a reminder of it. Art’s artefactuality and its reliance upon non-conceptual techniques open a space between it and empirical existence. That space is not indelible. Further, the meaning of that space as a determinate negation of empirical existence is not something that art can say without forfeiting its title as art. Philosophy can continue only by becoming non-philosophy, through the sub-ordination of its praxis to the praxis of art. Adorno continues the praxis that was philosophy, but it is not philosophy that he practises. The title Aesthetic Theory marks the incommensurability of the work with itself, the impossibility and necessity of its contents. (p. 190) This wonderful reversal whereby like Moses standing on the edge of the promised land, philosophy commits itself to pointing beyond itself and yet cannot, if it is to remain itself, ever realize what it alludes to is a modern variation of that aspect of German Romanticism which celebrates art’s unifying insights as opposed to philosophy’s analytical contentiousness. Adorno’s aesthetics (which are not totally unconnected from Heidegger’s) requires a degree of historical explication but sadly it is precisely the latter which the present volume lacks. The contest between philosophy and poetry is not an unchanging given of our historical

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tradition. Its forms are many and various. If an aim of this text is to introduce the student to the debate, it suffers from too many exemplars and an insufficiently general historical and conceptual map which could appropriately place them. A longer analytical introduction to this ancient conflict which outlined both the nature and impli-cations of the issues at stake would have increased the merit of this volume. Furthermore, granted that the selection criteria of such a volume are almost indefinite and considering that the pieces selected are all twentieth-century exemplifications of this debate, it remains a great pity that pieces on Heidegger and Hölderlin, on Gadamer and Rilke and/or Celan, or on either Gadamer’s or Oakeshott’s essays on poetry were not commissioned. In his recent volume of essays on the question of style in philosophy, Berel Lang quite rightly argued that no approach to a philosophical text can afford to neglect its literary dimensions. The idea of philosophy possessing a ‘zero style’, as Lyotard has it, is as unacceptable as a literature without concepts. But is this not partly the source of the problem: the proponents of this debate (which is more of a controversy between different styles of philosophizing than between philosophy and poetry per se) assume far too readily that there is a mutual exclusivity between the language of constative assertion and proposition and the language of disclosure, of showing, of allusion. Thinkers fall all too readily into this trap. Gadamer assumes that the language of the sciences is purely propositional whilst the realms of poetry and hermeneutic philosophy require the language of disclosure. Lyotard and Holub rightly insist to the contrary on the equally disclosive functions of scientific language, just as Pannenberg forcefully insists upon the necessity of the constative within hermeneutics. Even Adorno slips into this exclusivity when he argues that philosophy as a realm of conceptual critical knowledge cannot have a poetic element. The trap of this false exclusivity prompts a closing thought. Although nothing might seem as remote from the specificity of poetic exactitude as philosophical discourses on artificial intelligence or theoretical physics, is it not the case that philosophical and poetic language are like statemental and disclosive language, indissolubly bound up with one another especially in those moments when a text ‘comes alive’ in the mind of a reader? Kant’s comment in The Critique of Pure Reason that ‘Thoughts without content are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind’ (A.52) has in this context a strange appropriacy. Abstract philosophical language that cannot exemplify itself in the (poetically) concrete image is arguably as ineffectual as those poetic images that cannot reach out to and be illuminated by a general idea. As the images of the cave, the sun, and the line attest, despite his diatribe against the poets, Plato knew this all too well! Cardiff Institute of Higher Education

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JOHN MOORE • John Bushnell, Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 256 pp., £9.95 (paperback) • Richard Goldstein, Reporting the Counterculture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989) 165 pp., £8.95 (paperback) ‘Are we doomed to recuperate the past as an emblem of our helplessness to control the present, or can we get beyond the masque?’ Richard Goldstein asks in the Introduction to an anthology of his New Journalist writings of the 1960s. This is not only a pertinent question, but also an apt epigraph to both Reporting the Counterculture and Moscow Graffiti. Both demonstrate, in the words of Goldstein, that ‘in this culture of endless recuperation, those who do not understand history are forced to wear it’—or in the case of the Russian graffitos who form the subject of John Bushnell’s study, inscribe it. As might be expected, Goldstein’s text, despite its distinctly retrospective nature, remains the more engaging and engaged of the two. Bushnell’s dry, impersonal academic discourse on the largely derivative adolescent graffiti of the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s is unlikely to interest many people outside the specialized field of Soviet Studies. Within the context of the latter, Moscow Graffiti may be a significant work. But students of cultural production in general will find little in it to augment their hermeneutic projects. The text does not possess sufficient resonance, nor theoretical rigour, to transcend its narrow spatio-temporal specificity. The same cannot be said of Reporting the Counterculture. Goldstein’s sharp, intensely personal discourse on the popular music, personages and politics of the US counterculture remains of more general interest precisely because it conveys that sense of immediacy, lived experience and personal engagement associated with New Journalist counter-reportage. Just as Goldstein participated in the events he documents, so his prose style captures and conveys the vibrancy of an era when radical transformative energies appeared abundant, ‘when systems and structures—in art, politics, and (more tentatively) class and caste—seemed frangible’. As a result, his text speaks to contemporary concerns, engages the reader in a dialogue that Moscow Graffiti does not. Goldstein’s textual strategies shape, define and refract the contours of oppositional interventions against the US control complex and its dominant discourse. The energies of resistance are appropriately encoded in a discourse that transgresses stylistic boundaries by incorporating both ‘the mythmaking power of fiction and the credibility of reportage’. In contrast, Bushnell’s sociologi-cal discourse eviscerates or dissipates—at least for the reader—whatever elementary potential for subversion of Soviet hegemony that inheres in the graffiti of urban Russian youth. If such a characterization of the two texts calls to mind the stereotypical contrast between the dour totalitarianism of the Soviet state and the glamour of corporate capitalism, this is not incidental, but a product of textual constructions of the two dominant social formations of recent times. In both texts, oppositional initiatives emerge as products of the hegemonic structures they aim to resist: the nature and character of resistance remains conditioned by

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the socio-cultural context within which it achieves articulation. Hence the American counterculture appears more expansive and exciting precisely because it develops within, and then reacts against, a context typified by the confident—indeed hubristic—expansion of US imperialist hegemony. In contrast, Soviet youth subculture emerges as limited and quotidian because it defines itself within a context of widespread demoralization and ideological bankruptcy. The originality of American youth, due in part to their access to resources developed by US corporate capitalism, and discursively inscribed by writers such as Goldstein, contrasts pointedly with the unoriginality of their Soviet counterparts, whose signifiers (regardless of any nativized producerly appropriation) are almost wholly Western in origin, and whose praxis is initially formulated by a foreign academic. Goldstein at least, however, remains aware of the dangers involved in any liaison between the counterculture and its glamorous opponent, with all the possibilities for co-optation that incurs. In fact, such a recognition resides at the basis of Goldstein’s collating a selection of his writings from the 1960s. This is the most urgent reason to exhume the artifacts of New Journalism: its techniques were refined at the moment when we first began to grapple with the power of mass media to standardize experience, and its embrace of subjectivity was an attempt to resist this processed consensus. Such issues are with us still, as we struggle to build community and assert the distinction between culture and commodity. Goldstein is at pains to affirm the oppositional nature of his discourse in a context of pervasive commodification and spectacularization. ‘The revolution will not be televised,’ averred many radicals of the 1960s. But Goldstein reveals that rather than merely being televised, the revolution was staged and sold as a miniseries. ‘Counter-culture is a brain child of the new technology’, Richard Neville proclaims in Play Power (1970). And herein resides the source of its ideological contradictions and its limitations as a force for radical social transformation. The counterculture depended for its identity upon those very technological ‘advances’ that motivate the dynamics of US corporate capitalist development, and as a result the complicity of hegemonic sectors of the Underground with the mass media became increasingly unavoidable. Goldstein’s journalistic evolution encodes this process: As it became apparent that hip was fuel for the engines of an expansionist economy, it was more and more difficult to write about the counterculture apart from its co-optation. My work began to focus on this process, as it sucked in activists along with rock stars. The pseudo event became my beat, and the tone of my column…changed from irony to confusion, pain, and rage. I knew the music and the movement meant something to their followers, but the closer one got to the hot center, the more this revolution resembled spectacle for the sake of publicity. The tawdriness of the McLuhanite promise of electronic technology as a liberator and transformer of consciousness became gradually apparent. In its place developed an anxious recognition of a spectacularization of everyday life effected through the mass media shifting perception into simulacra, and an accompanying acknowledgement of the capacities for

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social control inherent in media technologies that were previously conceived as instruments of emancipation. Goldstein’s text charts the course of this process through observing the emergence of that now pervasive phenomenon known as hype. His reluctant conclusion articulates the disillusion of his generation: ‘No one escapes the media, including its antagonists’—or perhaps especially its antagonists, who are particularly subject to recuperation through simulation: Flower power began and ended as a cruel joke. The last laugh belongs to the mediamen, who chose to report a charade as a movement. In doing so, they created one. By the thousands, the real victims of flower hype poured into the slums of both coasts…. Through it all was a bizarre camaraderie between the fourth estate and the fifth dimension. Every paper picked its own hippie spokesman…. Reluctant, willing, or both, these men, too, became symbols. Those who accepted their pronouncements became victims. As a corrective to such mass media hype, New Journalists like Goldstein proposed the participatory immediacy and personalized narrative stance of their reportage. They attempted to develop a style of writing commensurate to the task of decoding the meaning of contemporary cultural and political innovations. But Goldstein remains all too aware that this new, hybrid mode of discourse was compromised by its provenance. It was left for the media to create that idiom, codifying concepts like ‘hip’, ‘pop’, and ‘revolution’, so that they could be marketed. The Beatles were presiding over a new development in postindustrial culture—call it mass bohemianism. Hip-tabs like the [Village] Voice and, later, Rolling Stone were in a unique position to debunk this hype while profiting from it. And profit they did. Just like the counterculture it documented, counter-reportage remained trapped within the unresolved dialectic of challenge and conformity. In part this dialectic remained unresolved due to ideological limitations which are rendered all too apparent in this text. For example, Goldstein retains a curiously contradictory attitude toward subjectivity. At one point in his retrospective Introduction, he remarks on the idealism of the sixties hip journalists: ‘Our faith in individualism was proving to be the ultimate marketable commodity.’ This perceptive comment is, however, rather offset by the fact that two pages later he closes his prefatory remarks by asserting that ‘Subjectivity is still a subversive act.’ Subjectivity may or may not be a subversive process, but the notion of subjectivity as a subversive act indicates an uncritical nostalgia for the unary subject. But more fundamentally, Goldstein’s closing affirmation suggests that little has been learned from the sixties. If the New Journalist ‘embrace of subjectivity was an attempt to resist [the] processed consensus’ imposed by the mass media, then—as Goldstein’s text indicates—it was a failure, and should be abandoned as a tactic of psychosocial transformation. The issue of engineered consensus, however, reaches out beyond the mass media to incorporate Reporting the Counterculture itself. Goldstein, for example, promotes a seamless version of the sixties counterculture, facilely referring to it in generic terms. Sixties style has a tantalizing expressiveness next to the depersonalized contours of

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mass culture now. But what we notice most is its cogency. Within the sanctioned parameters of sensibility, the most radical aspirations achieved a form and function they were denied in politics. In art and style, the sixties worked. The remarkable consistency that runs through sixties culture contradicts our image of that decade. How could such a chaotic time have produced such coherent art? One possibility is that, though the chaos was real (and eventually overwhelming), the culture harbored a hidden logic—to use a sixties word, a vision. The disturbing lack here of any sense of plurality or conflict within the sixties counterculture contributes to the seamlessness of its representation. One wonders who determined ‘the sanctioned parameters of sensibility’ in the counterculture, but that issue remains unproblematic in the present text. Goldstein never does specify the criteria for selecting the essays anthologized in this collection, which are presumably drawn from a wider body of uncollected journalistic pieces. In a postface, however, he indicates that these essays have been slightly edited, and more tellingly ‘In addition, I’ve omitted arcane references and expressions (who was Eve Democracy?) and, in a few cases, changed them into something approaching contemporary slang.’ There are issues here of rewriting history and losing the ‘feel’ of the sixties, the conveyance of which remains the stated aim of the volume. But more importantly, Goldstein—perhaps unwittingly— merely reinforces existing preconceptions about the sixties counterculture. By reprinting essays which focus upon figures and events familiar from standard historical accounts of the period, he runs the risk of engineering a consensus as insidious as that constructed by the mass media. Maybe the cultural productions of Eve Democracy (whoever she was) were more radical and exciting than those of conventional countercultural icons like Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol—all of whom merit an essay each in this book. Maybe Eve Democracy—or others like her—deliberately resisted recuperation by the mass media, or maybe she was too subversive to receive the hype treatment. How will we ever know if even ideologically sympathetic chroniclers like Goldstein suppress marginalized figures in order to concentrate upon the celebrities legitimized by the control complex? Goldstein never actually defines what he means by counterculture, although much of what he documents remains compatible with one part of the standard definition of the term, ‘an exploration of the politics of consciousness’, if not with its other part, which characterizes the counterculture as a movement that ‘comes closer to being a radical critique of the technocracy than any of the traditional ideologies’ (Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1970)). In his study of contemporary Soviet graffiti, Bushnell only devotes one chapter to the counterculture—others consider soccer fan gangs, rock music fans, and Bulgakov fans—but similarly fails to define the term. Certainly, however, on the evidence presented in Moscow Graffiti, Soviet counterculture remains far less radical than Roszak would have us believe was the case with its American counterpart. For Bushnell, Soviet counterculture remains a subset of Soviet subculture, a term which he defines as follows: ‘a subculture is recognized by ordinary men and women to be alien in its behaviour and values, while the subcultural group recognizes or defines itself as in opposition to the rest of society.’ The problem with such a broad definition is that it fails to distinguish between different types of opposition and to specify which aspects of ‘society’ are being challenged. ‘Graffiti informs us of the kinds of change in Soviet society over which the

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regime has had no control.’ This seems a fair assessment taken out of context, but within the context of communist totalitarianism any gesture which the state cannot control can be construed as oppositional, no matter how reactionary it might be, or how much it conforms with the wider dictates of the global industrial complex. One can readily grant that all graffiti function as cultural criticism. But to see graffito groups as ‘engaged in an anarchic struggle against the social order’, and to further assert that ‘a subculture defies and therefore subverts dominant cultural and social values’ (emphasis added) is an untenable position which can only be motivated by ideological wish-fulfilment. Bushnell fails to differentiate consistently between antagonism and opposition toward the Soviet social order. By frequently conflating the two, and by neglecting to examine the integers of class, gender and ideology which structure graffito subculture, he is able to represent the latter as engaged in an heroic (if incipient) popular struggle against the hegemonic discourse of Soviet totalitarianism. He is nearer the truth when he considers the graffitos’ contrasting use of Western and Eastern bloc semiotic systems. ‘Using symbols of presumptively English and Western origin as honorifics, gang graffiti imputes value to the culture from which those words come. Using Russian only as the language of derogation, the graffiti stand the official hierarchy of values on its head.’ An inverted hierarchy, however, remains a hierarchy. Soviet graffitos positivize Western capitalist signifiers because the communist authorities negativize them. In reacting in this way, the graffitos are still determined and hence controlled by the Soviet dictatorship. But perhaps more importantly, the symbols selected for imitation, derived from Western soccer hooligans, Western rock music, and Western social movements, testify to a broader, transnational, transideological allegiance—to the electronic mass media of global social control. It is on this phenomenon that Goldstein and Bushnell, with varying degrees of directness, ultimately converge. Thames Valley University

PETER DAVIES • Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Times (London: Verso, 1990), 263 pp, £32.95 (hardback), £10.95 (paperback) There is a paradox in the politics of poststructuralism. Although its adherents claim that it is above all else a political theory, it has yet to disseminate significantly beyond the boundaries of literary criticism and cultural studies, at least in British universities. Certainly, there is little interest in poststructuralism in the social sciences, where arguably its insights would be most useful. A similar paradox can be identified in the self-conscious positive ambiguity in titles of journals like Textual Practice. On the one hand it signifies that textual analysis is political, that interpretations of texts (are) matter. On the other, it implies the broadening out of ‘textuality’ from merely literary texts to all kind of other texts, including those which the uninitiated would regard simply as extratextual (like—or rather, especially—the realm of politics). But the suspicion remains that such titles are chosen to make poststructuralists feel politically relevant and right-on, and at the same time implicitly to legitimize their disdaining

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of engagement with the wider world, beyond what might be referred to as textuality in the narrow (traditional, liberal) sense. Because their theory is so overtly politicized, because it adopts a ‘politically correct line’ in radical struggles, many poststructuralists are acutely embarrassed that all they do is give wacky interpretations of Shakespeare. Busy castigating liberal humanism, poststructuralists fail to see that they share many of its worst characteristics: deconstruction (for example) has become another bourgeois parlour game to be played, like charades, at dinner parties. In part (forgive the marxist reductionism, but sometimes it still works) this is due to the liberal middle-class background of most academics. But I think that there is also a problem here with poststructuralist theory itself. Rightly suspicious of notions of universal Reason and of the universal intellectuals who until recently discovered and articulated it for us, poststructuralism nevertheless presents a different problem for a radical politics. This time it is not a problem of authoritarianism, but rather an abdication: the failure seriously to challenge power in many places where it still matters. Foucault’s notions of micro-resistance and the specific intellectual are the political models for most poststructuralists. But today this is too easily and too often interpreted in excessively individualized forms: reading texts remains, after all, a relatively isolated activity. It is easy for critics to argue that for all their talk of radical engagement, ‘poststructuralist politics’ (like ‘mass movement’) is a contradiction in terms. There is little poststructuralist discussion of the broader political terrain, or of the possibility of constructing collective subjects or communities of interest which might enable more effective challenges to power. But Foucault never intended to justify virtual non-engagement outside one’s academic work: his ‘hyper- and pessimistic activism’ included, for example, involvement in prisoners’ campaigns and the gay movement, and could not be described by the sceptic as mere careerism. That ‘everything is dangerous’ does not entail that nothing can be done. Poststructuralism emphasizes specificity of interests and resistances. Indeed the old liberal notion of self-interest has gained a new authenticity in their practice: their academic work is their politics. There is no fear here of authoritarianism, but consider for a moment the traces of arrogance and complacency in the following paradox. Radical theorists resist the system by conforming to their role in it, while workers with less exalted jobs resist the system (conforming to radical theory) by resisting what their work demands of them. It is the duty of every prisoner to escape, but academics must get promotion (‘don’t do as I do, do as I say’?). Baudrillard at least abolishes this offensive distinction by granting that ‘the masses’ are as conformist and inert as theorists. It is into this (a)political context that Ernesto Laclau’s refreshingly different New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Times arrives. A hero in Slovenia, his previous book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy—written with Chantal Mouffe, and first published by Verso in 1985—has been described by Slavoj Žižek as ‘perhaps the most radical breakthrough in modern social theory’, and ‘the only real answer to Habermas’. Why then is this Argentinian idol of the Yugoslavian Lacanians so little recognized in Britain, his adopted country, where he has worked for over twenty years? Laclau has the misfortune to fall between the borderlines of effectively non-overlapping areas of study. His poststructuralism is of little interest to the liberals involved in literary criticism who are embarrassed by politics unless it’s in Macbeth, and they can keep their hands clean. It is of little interest either to those who work in the social sciences, where radicals still tend to be marxists of some description, and they therefore regard him as a

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liberal. But the value of his work is that he provides a radical alternative to marxism while engaging with it on its own terms: he refreshes parts poststructuralists do not normally reach, confronting people outside literary criticism with the ideas of Derrida, Lacan and Foucault. Laclau grants that there is no ‘poststructuralist politics’, but is conscious of the new possibilities the theory opens up for political practice. His theoretical work is strongly related to his own political practice in Argentina and Europe. He writes: when today I read Of Grammatology, S/Z, or the Écrits of Lacan, the examples which always spring to mind are not from philosophical or literary texts; they are from a discussion in an Argentinian trade union, a clash of opposing slogans at a demonstration, or a debate during a party congress. (p. 200) Baudrillard has resurrected the universal intellectual as a nihilist: in the past everything was possible, now nothing is. It is also increasingly plain that what has become of the Foucauldian specific intellectual, concerned only with little resistances, represses the possibility of any broader engagement. This is now challenged by a radical alternative: Laclau’s reconstruction of Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectual’, reopening areas for engagement in political struggles at any number of levels: at work, at home and in the communities— local and global—that we inhabit. Laclau’s major contribution, then—in contrast to the theorization of universals by traditional intellectuals, and to Foucault’s theorization of specificity—is to theorize articulation. He agrees with Foucault that it is necessary to seek the specific in what is regarded as universal, and thereby to reduce the world to a human scale. Thus Laclau writes: ‘It is necessary to pass from a culture centred on the absolute—that therefore denies the dignity of the specific—to a culture of systematic irreverence’ (pp. 190–1). But while thus acknowledging specificity, he also stresses repeatedly that the specific is not self-contained or sutured, but is overdetermined. Laclau describes the social as a free play of differences, but at the same time the attempt to fix meaning—to limit play—in the operation of power. His concern is with the complex of antagonisms around this which mark postmodernity and with the possibility of democratic negotiation between subjects in an open and heterogeneous ‘war of position’. He argues that there is no universal subject. Like Foucault, he affirms that resistances and struggles are specific, that subjects have limited, partial aims: but he also insists that no subject is selfcontained: their identities are always incomplete and overdetermined. (For this reason, Laclau and Mouffe are sometimes accused by marxists of courting fashion by presenting themselves as the theorists of the so-called ‘new social movements’.) Unlike Baudrillard, Laclau is optimistic about the present and the future. Unlike marxists, his optimism does not depend on a denial of the present and a nostalgia for a lost past. Because the future is indeterminate, he argues, it is not irrevocably lost. This is one of the most exhilarating moments of the twentieth century; we are witnessing a proliferation as well as a fragmentation of political struggles. And Laclau does not see in the postmodern ‘crisis of reason’ any need for nihilism and the abandonment of radical politics. Instead, he regards this crisis in particular as opening ‘unprecedented opportunities’ for a radical critique and projects unrestrained by what he calls the Enlightenment’s rationalist ‘dictatorship’. Laclau argues that our ‘eschatological and epistemological ambitions’ might now have become more

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modest, ‘but the liberating aspirations are wider and deeper’. We do not require notions of transcendental and ahistorical Reason to engage in radical politics, he affirms: the new awareness of the historicity of being and the relativity of reason is entirely to be welcomed. There are no ultimate rational grounds to make correct decisions: rather, where decisions clash it is a question of politics (antagonism and/or negotiation). Ambiguity and antagonism are the rocks on which rationalism breaks apart. Any decision claiming an incontestable ‘rationality’ for itself is incompatible with a plurality of interests. ‘All the forms of radical rationalism are just a step away from totalitarianism’, he writes, suggesting that what follows from the deconstruction of the rational/ irrational binary is not a total arbitrariness but what Aristotle called phronesis: a weaker, pluralistic rationality—not a priori, but conversational—which can be contested because it is socially constructed, not heaven-sent. Laclau is concerned to criticize rationalist notions like ‘objective interests’. He argues that interests are constructed through articulation and struggle, not merely ‘recognized’ by rational subjects: it is meaningless and offensive to talk of agents having pre-ordained interests of which they are not themselves conscious. He attacks the rationalist doctrine which holds that people should behave in a certain way on the basis of abstract reasoning by an ‘impartial observer’. Their ‘objective interests’ are constructed by the observer on the basis of such reasoning, and people then called irrational when they fail to fall into line: castigated for their ‘false consciousness’ when they prefer to watch football than to concern themselves with politics. Laclau’s libertarian-pluralist position —a radical alternative to rationalism—is very different from Baudrillard’s celebration of apathy in his In the Shadows of the Silent Majorities, which otherwise deals with similar ideas. The dangerous authoritarianism of rationalism has been emphasized by Foucault. In Laclau we have another ‘rational critique of rationality’: he points to the relation between Enlightenment rationalism, the dictatorship of the proletarian vanguard and Plato’s philosopher-king, all of which rest their legitimacy on the same claim to a higher wisdom and a privileged access to truth. Universalism and rationalism are at the root of ‘totalitarian potentialities’: as he says, much of the horror of recent history can be traced to the attempt to embody or impose some form of abstract ‘Reason’. We have to renounce the rationalistic epistemological and ontological foundations of the Enlightenment in order to expand its democratic potentialities. He writes: Practices such as that of deconstruction, or Wittgenstein’s language games, accomplish the function of increasing our awareness of the socially constructed character of our world and open up the possibility of a foundation through collective decisions of what was before conceived as established forever by God, or by Reason, or by Human Nature—all those equivalent names that function by placing the destiny of human beings beyond the reach of their decisions. (p. 194) Poststructuralists will find much to admire in Laclau’s work, particularly those who really are concerned with a politics beyond literary texts. Admirers of Foucault might find Laclau’s style somewhat Althusserian: it is not that he attempts to construct a revolutionary ‘science’, but that he tends to write in a very—perhaps excessively—abstract way, in spite of his repeated emphasis on specificity. Although he is not a utopian system-builder, Laclau is

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concerned with overall assessments rather than decentred insights: but this must have a place in radical political theory. Too much specificity entails not being able to see the proverbial wood from the trees, and this is precisely what is wrong with much current poststructuralism. In our individual micro-resistances we overlook the possibilities for challenging power on a larger scale by looking to construct collective subjects. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time is a continuation of the work Laclau began in his quite astonishing earlier book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy which (despite its offputting title) brilliantly deconstructs marxist essentialism in tracing the genealogy of ‘hegemony’. I suggest that those new to Laclau look at the earlier work first, particularly the final chapter where the authors discuss contemporary social struggles and describe a ‘postmarxist’ radical democratic politics. New Reflections, in essays and interviews, contains useful clarifications, reiterations, modifications and minor developments of the previous work. Only the title essay—the longest in the collection—contains a substantially new contribution to postmarxism. Laclau, with Chantal Mouffe, edits Phronesis, a new Verso series, concerned with precisely the kind of critique of rationalism and universalism contained in New Reflections. The series ‘manifesto’ declares that the critique of essentialism is the ‘necessary condition’ for assessing the proliferation of struggles which marks conemporary postmodernity. The series has laudible objectives: notably to establish dialogue between recent developments in theory and radical politics. Its stated aim is to help bring about a non-essentialist theoretical culture and to participate in constructing a new vision for the left based around notions of radical and plural democracy. New Reflections is the first in the series. It will prove useful for those who are concerned with a relevant radical politics. Laclau’s ideas—especially his focus on articulation— constitute a challenging complement of Foucault’s specific and decentred projects. Furthermore, not only is his work ‘the only real answer to Habermas’ (as Žižek holds), but it is also a radical spit at Baudrillard’s exultant pessimism. Perhaps with the promised return of Althusser to theoretical fashionability, Laclau—who goes far beyond anything conceived by the rigorous Frenchman—will gain the recognition he deserves (or at least be read outside Slovenia). University of Wales College of Cardiff

DIETER FREUNDLIEB • David M.Rasmussen, Reading Habermas, with a bibliography by René Görtzen (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 146 pp. £35.00. David Rasmussen’s book Reading Habermas is a valuable addition to the rapidly growing Anglo-Saxon literature addressing the work of Jürgen Habermas. Rasmussen has been concerned with Habermas’s thought since the early seventies, and no one can dispute that his relatively short but densely argued study demonstrates the author’s intimate and extensive knowledge of Habermas’s œuvre, including, in particular, his more recent books The Theory of Communicative Action and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity—which form the

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focus of Reading Habermas. Rasmussen’s discussion of Habermas’s work, whether one agrees with his assessment or not, consistently raises important issues and takes into account recent critical literature. A relatively short review such as this cannot hope to do justice to all the aspects covered in this book. Rasmussen says that his views on Habermas have changed from an earlier, much more sceptical attitude, to a state where he feels that he has been ‘slowly persuaded’ (p. 1). But he immediately qualifies this by adding that what he has been persuaded of is that Habermas’s recent work is ‘fruitful’ and ‘worthy of the most careful and serious attention’ (p. 1). In fact, as it turns out, while Rasmussen is clearly on Habermas’s side politically, he has a number of important objections to make against some of the philosophical aspects of Habermas’s work which, if justified, would jeopardize his whole project and which we will have to address in a moment. Reading Habermas concerns itself primarily with Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. The first two of the six chapters of the book are largely expository and designed to familiarize the reader with Habermas’s account (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity) of the history of the ‘discourse of modernity’ from Hegel via the Left-Hegelians, the Right-Hegelians, and Nietzsche, to Adorno and Horkheimer. For a brief analysis of Habermas’s discussion of Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault the reader has to wait until the last chapter. While chapter 1 sets the stage in terms of a discussion of the problems arising from the project of modernity, chapter 2 focuses on Habermas’s strategy to overcome what he perceives as the past failures to complete, or at least continue, the project of modernity, i.e. the project of providing the guiding epistemic and ethico-political norms necessary for the implementation from within philosophy of a just social order, through the reconstruction of a communicative rationality inherent in our use of language. These failures are all attributed to the fact that the philosophers concerned with the problems of modernity remained within the conceptual restrictions of the philosophy of consciousness and the idea of subject-centred reason. In chapter 3 Rasmussen raises a number of objections against Habermas’s attempt to show the primacy of the type of communication from which he wishes to reconstruct his universalist concept of reason. In offering this critique, Rasmussen relies very much on Jonathan Culler’s objections to Habermas’s theory of communicative action, but this turns out to be a rather weak critique which fails to do full justice to Habermas. Other aspects of Rasmussen’s critique concern Habermas’s distinction between system and lifeworld and his attempt at a theoretical integration of the two. Here Rasmussen once more draws very much on other critics such as Thomas McCarthy, Dieter Misgeld, and Axel Honneth. Again I have doubts that this critique is finally convincing. It is also unfortunate that Rasmussen does not seem to have taken into account Habermas’s detailed responses to the objections raised by several of the critics Rasmussen relies on.1 The second half of the book follows a pattern similar to the first. Chapter 4 consists of an exposition of Habermas’s conception of a discourse ethics, a discussion of various criticisms that have been made by his neo-Aristotelian and neo-Hegelian/communitarian adversaries (together with Habermas’s response), and a number of cautious but none the less critical comments on the part of Rasmussen, suggesting that the communitarian critique is to some extent justified. Habermas’s strict distinction between questions of justification and questions of application is deemed untenable, and it is argued that Habermas, rather than deriving his universal ethical principles from language and communication, has simply accepted the

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universalist principles which already form part of a specific, radical democratic, form of modern life. Chapter 5, entitled ‘Communication and the law’, departs somewhat from Rasmussen’s previous procedure. Instead of discussing Habermas’s position in relation to some of his major critics, Rasmussen contrasts Habermas’s views on the relation between law and morality with the doctrines of Roberto Unger and Duncan Kennedy as two different representatives of the Critical Legal Studies movement. As in the previous chapter, however, the question Rasmussen focuses on is whether there is a need for a universalist morality beyond the legal context in order to legitimate the law, or whether a certain moral legitimation is already inherent in the law, a view which would support the communitarian camp. In other words, the choice is again between universalism and communitarianism. In the end, Rasmussen sides with Ronald Dworkin who argues that a principle of equity is already given in the law so that there is no need for a separate justification. In the final chapter Rasmussen returns to the larger issue of the overall feasibility of Habermas’s project. He summarizes the main arguments of the previous chapters and offers, in addition, an analysis of Habermas’s reading of Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault as well as an interpretation of why Habermas fails to come to terms with aesthetics. According to Rasmussen, Habermas, following Hegel rather than Kant, must press aesthetic experience into the mould of the rationality of science and morality or reject it altogether, as an other of reason, since in this Nietzschean form it side-steps the problems of modernity as perceived by Habermas. The problems of modernity must be solved politically, not by way of a reconciling aesthetics. On the whole, Rasmussen is in sympathy with Habermas, but he has grave doubts about the tenability of Habermas’s attempts to use reconstructive science in order to establish a universal communicative rationality and a universal ethics based on it. Let me now turn to a more specific discussion of the question whether Habermas has succeeded in showing that communicative action is primary and strategic verbal action is secondary. This is one of the key points of Rasmussen’s analysis, a point which I find least convincing, but which is crucial to Rasmussen’s critique. First, however, a brief reconstruction of how Rasmussen leads us into the issue. He begins by offering the following diagnosis of the problem situation Habermas tries to analyse and overcome. The project of modernity, that is the attempt to create a world that embodies the major Enlightenment ideals of human emancipation, is still unfulfilled and needs to be theorized anew if we want to avoid abandoning it altogether. Modernity, which Rasmussen, following Habermas, characterizes as the period, beginning with Hegel, in which it was realized that philosophy had nothing but itself, its own powers of reason, to rely on if it wanted to develop the cognitive and ethical norms necessary for an enlightened social order, is plagued by repeated failures to fulfil its promises. According to Rasmussen—and this is by now common knowledge—Habermas identifies the main reason for the past failures (which Rasmussen somewhat misleadingly calls the ‘dilemmas’ of modernity) as the attempt to develop a foundational philosophy from within the framework of the traditional philosophy of consciousness. The ‘dialectic of enlightenment’, as it was analysed by Horkheimer and Adorno, only appears inevitable as long as we hold on to a philosophy of consciousness which cannot conceive of reason other than in terms of instrumental reason, and which cannot get away from the epistemological model of a consciousness for which everything outside itself necessarily becomes an ‘object’, something that stands over against the mind as its ‘other’.

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Rasmussen argues that it is a peculiarly German trait in contemporary philosophy to regard the advent of the philosophy of language or the ‘linguistic turn’ as the means by which traditional philosophical problems can be solved. In particular, Habermas (and Apel) have tried to provide a solution to the ‘dilemma’ of modernity by drawing on the philosophy of language as it was practised, in the wake of Wittgenstein, by Austin and Searle. But according to Rasmussen, it is by no means obvious how this philosophy of language can solve problems it was never designed to resolve originally. Rasmussen emphasizes that Habermas, unlike Karl-Otto Apel, no longer believes in the possibility of a philosophical Letztbegründung (ultimate grounding). Philosophy is accorded by Habermas a more modest role as ‘Stand-in’ and ‘Interpreter’. But this raises the problem of how Habermas can legitimate his project of a communicative rationality. As reconstructive science, it seems to depend on empirical findings within a fallibilist framework, and no amount of passionate commitment to radical democratic principles can, in itself, provide a legitimation. It could be argued, therefore, that Habermas’s project is no more than ‘scientific reconstruction with a passionate intent’ (p. 7). Habermas believes that by reconstructing an already existing rational competence underlying all speech acts oriented towards reaching agreement, a form of communication he regards as primary, he can demonstrate the universal validity of the norms underlying this competence. Rasmussen suggests that Habermas relies too much on the scientific validity of reconstructive science, but this seems to me to be somewhat misleading. Habermas does not believe that his conception of communicative reason depends on the scientificity of universal pragmatics as a reconstructive science. He does not wish ‘to rest the principle of emancipation on the firm foundation of science’ (p. 36) as Rasmussen seems to believe. Rather, he wants to emphasize that reconstructions of cognitive competences, like investigations in other empirical sciences, are fallible in principle. It is the normative content that is reconstructed which, for Habermas, makes the difference. Rasmussen has a point, of course, for the real problem is that, however scientific universal pragmatics might be as a reconstructive science, it cannot, qua science, provide a legitimation for norms of rationality and ethics. This has been Karl-Otto Apel’s point all along, and he has been voicing this critique more and more strongly in recent times.2 Rasmussen tries to cast doubt on Habermas’s ‘scientific’ project of a universal pragmatics by examining the question whether the communicative use of language, rather than strategic uses, is indeed original and primary as Habermas contends. According to Rasmussen, the feasibility of Habermas’s whole programme of the completion or continuation of the project of modernity more or less hinges on this question, for only if the non-strategic communicative use of language with its inbuilt rationality is primary could it be argued that other forms of rationality are derivative. Rasmussen’s critique draws on the following arguments put forward by Jonathan Culler.3 Culler argues, quite rightly, that Habermas’s distinction between communicative and strategic action is crucial because Habermas needs to show that strategic verbal action is derivative of the communicative use. Culler then claims that Habermas’s attempt to use the Austinian and Searlean distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts to support the former distinction is not justified. Rasmussen quotes from Culler who says that Habermas’s use of this distinction ‘proves to be an unconvincing move, with little bearing on the point at issue, which fails in numerous ways: first because the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary is not a distinction between communicative and strategic

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actions’ (p. 39). Furthermore: ‘Many illocutionary acts seem primarily designed to produce certain effects rather than to bring about understanding: think, for example, of commanding someone to get out, warning them to look out, or calling them out, not to mention pronouncing them man and wife or appointing them to a committee’ (p. 39). Rasmussen seems to concur with this criticism and writes: ‘The point is quite simple: if the perlocutionary has a status equal to the illocutionary, one cannot be derived from the other’ (p. 39). According to Austin’s usage, Rasmussen argues, ‘many illocutionary acts produce effects rather than develop understanding’ (p. 39). Culler’s ‘rather devastating’ conclusion is therefore: ‘Since the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts is not a distinction between communicative and strategic action, even if one could show the dependency of the perlocutionary on the illocutionary, it would not advance Habermas’s argument’ (p. 39). Rasmussen realizes that Culler’s argument might be invalid for the simple reason that Austin’s concept of illocution and Habermas’s concept of illocution are not the same, since Habermas has deliberately modified speech act theory to make it fit his purposes.4 However, Rasmussen believes that even then ‘the case would be insufficient because in order to clearly separate the illocutionary from the perlocutionary one must demonstrate that they would always be so interpreted unambiguously’ (p. 39). Instead of following through this argument by showing that this cannot be done, Rasmussen first addresses another of Culler’s objections, namely that Habermas’s attempt to show that ‘understanding utterances is prior to and independent of understanding purposive activity’ (p. 39) is unsuccessful, since the whole point of speech act theory was to show that speech acts are purposive acts. Again Rasmussen realizes that this argument does not really hold because Habermas never denied that speech acts are performed purposively. All he claimed was that an illocutionary act is not a purposive-rational act in Max Weber’s (and Habermas’s) sense. Rasmussen then comes back to the previous point about the unambiguous interpretability of what is illocutionary and what is perlocutionary. Thus he writes: Obviously, the way out would be to discover that the very form [of rationality] upon which Weber concentrated was in principle derivative. The problem is that linguistic communication can not be so easily separated from purposive activity. Culler’s most telling point is given in an example. ‘To understand “Could you close the window” is to grasp that it could be used to get someone to close the window as well as to inquire about their abilities.’ This case makes the point that there is no state of affairs which grants the illocutionary a certain priority and the perlocutionary a derivative status even though one might wish it were so. (p. 40) Rasmussen apparently believes that Culler has succeeded in throwing considerable doubt on Habermas’s whole project, but this is by no means obvious. To look at the last and allegedly crucial point first: The utterance of ‘Could you close the window’, if understood as a request designed to achieve a certain perlocutionary effect, is an indirect speech act that could not be understood correctly unless the hearer understood that the speaker believed in the existential presuppositions of the propositional part of the speech act (i.e. there is a window in the near vicinity), believed that it is justified in terms of the norms of personal interaction to make a request of this kind (for example it is easier for the hearer than for the speaker to close the window), and made this request as an expression of

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his genuine desire that the window be closed. In other words, the perlocutionary effect aimed at is dependent on the hearer’s recognition that an illocutionary act has been performed that offers him or her the opportunity to respond with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the three validity claims characteristic of all illocutionary acts. To understand what perlocutionary effect can be achieved by the utterance is thus entirely dependent on a prior grasp of the illocutionary intent of the speech act. The fact that illocutionary acts can be performed as the means for achieving a further aim does not entail that the further aim is independent of the illocutionary act. The ambiguity of the utterance, if looked at outside any specific context, does nothing to prove Culler’s point.5 As Allen W.Wood puts it in his essay ‘Habermas’ defense of rationalism’: Habermas wants to make use of the fact that perlocutionary acts are parasitic on illocutionary acts to show that whenever speech acts are cases of strategic action or action oriented to success, they are parasitic on acts oriented to understanding. This would show that all speech acts involve Verständigung as an inherent telos, even those which are strategic in nature, oriented to success rather than understanding.6 Wood does not believe that Habermas has succeeded because, if we follow Austin, reaching agreement is a perlocutionary effect achieved by means of an illocutionary act. We must remember, however, that Habermas does not agree with this because if the agreement is reached on the basis of reasons underlying illocutionary acts and the warranty (Gewähr) thereby given by the speaker, in other words, if it is not achieved through any kind of causal impact, then the reaching of agreement is not a perlocutionary effect. Wood seems to be aware of this but claims that if Habermas redefines ‘illocutionary success’ in these terms, his thesis about the primacy of communicative over strategic action is question begging. I do not think that this is true, however, because Habermas’s theory of meaning tries to show that understanding of meaning as such involves the understanding of reasons. And the understanding of reasons is, for Habermas, non-causal and ‘extramundane’ as Wood himself is aware. The really contentious issue is therefore whether the offering and recognition of reasons between speech partners is something that is not amenable to causal analysis in principle—an issue I cannot go into here. The debate over Habermas’s theory involving Rasmussen, Culler, and Wood suffers, perhaps, from the fact that Habermas’s critics do not address his use of Dummett’s theory of truth-conditional semantics which, from a slightly different perspective, also allows Habermas to argue that meaning and validity are inherently linked, since to know whether a proposition is true is to know on the basis of what reasons it would be considered verified (or falsified).7 If Habermas’s theory of meaning, which draws on Dummett, is acceptable, then the primacy of communicative over strategic verbal action is secured.8 In his response to Wood, Habermas makes the point that his analogy between communicative and strategic action, on the one hand, and illocutionary and perlocutionary acts on the other was indeed premature, and that it is sufficient to show the primacy of the use of language oriented to reaching agreement purely in terms of his theory of meaning.9 This takes us back to Culler’s earlier point that the distinction between communicative and strategic action is not the same as the one between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts which Rasmussen drew on for his own critique. It seems now that this objection carries little weight. Habermas himself admits that the analogy is not as obvious as he thought, but

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Culler’s earlier examples of a command, a warning and the act of calling someone out can easily be accommodated by Habermas. None of these acts would be understood adequately without the hearer being aware of the three basic validity claims raised in all speech acts. The effect of warning someone, for example, can only be achieved if the hearer takes the speaker seriously in terms of the relevant facts, the normative rightness of giving a warning, and the genuine concern expressed by the speaker.10 I have examined Rasmussen’s discussion of the role of Habermas’s theory of speech acts in his attempt at a continuation of the project of modernity in some detail because I believe it is representative of his assessment of Habermas in general and crucial to Rasmussen’s critique. Rasmussen tends to rely too much on criticisms made by other commentators and does not investigate their claims in sufficient detail. This has unfortunate consequences for all the other issues raised in his book. Since he accepts Culler’s and other critics’ arguments against Habermas’s attempt to provide a legitimation of a universalist communicative reason, it is not surprising that he tends to agree with Habermas’s communitarian critics in the field of ethics. It seems to me that while Habermas’s project may well be in doubt for reasons Rasmussen does not go into, his own sceptical assessment is not entirely justified. None the less, Rasmussen’s book raises many important issues that are at the forefront of contemporary social and philosophical thought. It therefore deserves widespread attention. The addition of an extensive bibliography by René Görtzen is very helpful.11 Griffith University, Nathan, Australia

NOTES 1 See J.Habermas, ‘Entgegnung’ in A.Honneth and H.Joas (eds), Kommunikatives Handeln. Beiträge zu Jürgen Habermas’ ‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns’ (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 327–405. 2 See for example Apel’s contribution to the Festschrift for Habermas entitled ‘Normative Begründung der “Kritischen Theorie” durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit? Ein transzendentalpragmatisch orientierter Versuch, mit Habermas gegen Habermas zu denken’, in Zwischenbetrachtungen. Im Prozeβ der Aufklärung, ed. A.Honneth, Th. McCarthy, C.Offe and A.Wellmer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 15–65. Strangely enough, Rasmussen does not draw on Apel’s earlier but similar critiques of Habermas. Instead he claims that Apel’s allegedly ‘esoteric’ account of the history of the philosophy of language from the vantage point of a transcendental pragmatics provided Habermas with support for his more specific project of a universal pragmatics. 3 See his ‘Communicative competence and normative force’, New German Critique, 35, (1985). A slightly modified and expanded version of this paper was later published in Culler’s Framing the Sign (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 185–200, under the chapter heading ‘Habermas and norms of language’. 4 Here Rasmussen’s discussion could have profited from Habermas’s clarifications in his ‘Entgegnung’. See note 1. 5 Habermas is wrong, I believe, when he argues that understanding the meaning of a speech act necessarily involves the hearer in a normative response to the claims made. He is right in insisting that questions of meaning (Bedeutung) cannot ultimately be separated from questions of validity (Geltung), but one can understand the content of

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validity claims and their underlying reasons without being forced to respond normatively. But this is not Culler’s point. 6 New German Critique, 35 (1985), p. 160. 7 See J.Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 316–18. 8 I address some of the issues surrounding Habermas’s theory of meaning in my book Hermeneutics, Structuralism, Poststructuralism: Contemporary Philosophy and the Study of Literature, forthcoming. 9 See J.Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 133, note 31. 10 See also Habermas’s response to Culler’s objection that sincerity is not presupposed in many speech acts; ibid., p. 131, note 30. 11 As a native speaker of German, I may be allowed a somewhat nit-picking remark: As in the case of many other books on German subjects produced in Anglo-Saxon countries, the number of misspelt German words is annoyingly high. (For example instead of Das älteste Systemprogramm we find Die Alteste Systemprogram). There are also a considerable number of typing errors and other misspellings (e.g. ‘phylogenetic’ is consistently rendered as ‘philogenetic’ and ‘forebears’ become ‘forebearers’).

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TEXTUAL PRACTICE INDEX VOLUME 6

Index Volume 6

ARTICLES Kathy Acker Kathy Acker interviewed by Rebecca Deaton p. 271 Cristina Bacchilega Feminine voices inscribing Sarraute’s Childhood and Kingston’s The Woman Warrior p. 101 Pamela Banting The body as pictogram: rethinking Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine p. 225 Linda Charnes What’s love got to do with it? Reading the liberal humanist romance in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra p. 1 Joseph N.Cleary Theory in the age of mechanical annihilation p. 452 Peter Erickson The question of the canon: the examples Searle, Kimball and Kernan p. 439 Harriett Hawkins The sins of Scarlett p. 491 Bob Hodge and Alec McHoul The politics of text and commentary p. 189 Graham Holderness Shakespeare and heritage p. 247 Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Margery Metzstein Modernity-Postmodernity: a dialogue p. 478 Richard Levin Son of Bashing the bourgeois subject p. 264 Pam Morris Re-routing Kristeva: from pessimism to parody p. 31 Peter Nicholls Apes and familiars: modernism, mimesis and the work of Wyndham Lewis p. 421 Michael Payne Derrida, Heidegger and Van Gogh’s ‘Old Shoes’ p. 87 Alex Segal Language games and justice p. 210 Simon Shepherd What’s so funny about ladies’ tailors? A survey of some male (homo)sexual types in the Renaissance p. 17 Charles Shepherdson Biology and history: some psychoanalytic aspects of the writing of Luce Irigaray p. 47 Michael Westlake Michael Westlake interviewed by Antony Easthope p. 283 Slavoj Žižek Philosophy traversed by psychoanalysis p. 401

REVIEWS OF Maureen Bell, George Parfitt and Simon Shepherd (eds) A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers p. 348 Andrew Benjamin Translation and the Nature of Philosophy p. 316 Bernard Bergonzi Exploding English p. 539 Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (eds) The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other p. 305 Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English p. 348 Daniel Boyarin Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash p. 338 John Bushnell Moscow Graffiti p. 555 Alec Callinicos Against Postmodernism. A Marxist Critique p. 297 Iain Chambers Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity p. 373 Eric Cheyfitz The Politics of Imperialism p. 316

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Steven Connor Postmodernist Culture p. 373 Philip Cooke Back to the Future: Modernity, Postmodernity and Locality p. 373 Lucien Dällenbach The Mirror in the Text p. 533 Thomas Docherty After Theory p. 135 Antony Easthope Poetry and Phantasy p. 129 John M.Ellis Against Deconstruction p. 150 Colin Falck Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-modernism p. 364 Elizabeth Fallaize The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir p. 145 Richard Goldstein Reporting the Counterculture p. 555 A.C.Hamilton (Gen. ed.) The Spenser Encyclopedia p. 543 Kevin Hart The Trespass of the Sign p. 338 Fredric Jameson Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism p. 504 Fredric Jameson Signatures of the Visible p. 504 Ernesto Laclau New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Times p. 560 Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake Film Theory: An Introduction p. 166 David Loewenstein Milton and the Drama of History p. 499 Colin McCabe (ed.) Futures for English p. 513 Wilfrid Mellers Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion p. 178 David Murray (ed.) Literary Theory and Poetry: Extending the Canon p. 382 David Musselwhite Partings Welded Together p. 140 News from Nowhere Raymond Williams: The Third Generation p. 170 Richard Pine Brian Friel and Ireland’s Dream p. 324 Pretexts: Studies in Literature and Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 p. 330 David M.Rasmussen Reading Habermas p. 565 Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds) Modern Literary Theory: A Reader p. 326 David Roberts Art and Enlightenment p. 497 Douglas Robinson The Translator’s Turn p. 316 Richard Rorty Essays on Heidegger and Others p. 519 Richard Rorty Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth p. 519 Andrew Ross Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits p. 549 Andre Ross (ed.) Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism p. 373 John Paul Russo I.A.Richards: His Life and Work p. 385 Regina Schwartz (ed.) The Book and the Text p. 338 Tobin Siebers The Ethics of Criticism p. 354 Peter Sloterdijk A Critique of Cynical Reason p. 153 Janet Todd (ed.) Dictionary of English Women Writers p. 348 David Wood Chronicles of Darkness p. 180 Peter Washington Fraud: Literary Criticism and the End of English p. 539 Raymond Williams The Politics of Modernism p. 123 Raymond Williams Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism p. 332 David Wood (ed.) Philosophers’ Poets p. 551 Lambert Zuidervaart Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory p. 497

LETTERS FROM Mark Jacobs Laura Riding p. 119 John Nolan Laura Riding p. 296