Let a Hundred Isms Blossom

by Perry Meisel

Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers. The revolution in criticism is over. Departments of literature are no longer in disarray. In the late 1970's and early 80's, of course, there was a lot of blood on the tracks, the price an earlier generation had to pay for today's intellectual abundance and sometimes perplexing freedoms. The old boys, particularly the biographers, took very badly to anything with a French name or an ''-ology'' attached to it. You had to watch your flank. But by the mid-80's, you could say ''Jacques Derrida'' or ''Harold Bloom'' at dinner and your colleagues didn't get heartburn; they got hip. They hired the onetime offenders.

In fact, literary study in America has never been in better shape. Enriched by a variety of European methodologies since the early 70's, it has grown into a vast, synthetic enterprise characterized by powerful continuities rather than by disjunctions. Feminism, deconstruction, ''reader-response,'' ''New Historicism,'' ''postcolonialism'' – all share similar ends and similar ways of getting there in a momentous collaboration.

The story begins in Paris, with the publication of Roland Barthes's essay ''The Death of the Author'' in 1968. A witty, Wildean performer, Barthes wasn't really dumb enough to believe that there weren't people writing the books that carried their names (Woolf, Shakespeare, Kathy Acker). He meant that writers labor unconsciously, and that larger forces shape them and their work. Michel Foucault's 1969 essay ''What Is an Author?'' took Barthes's structuralist argument a step farther by showing how whole periods of history are given their imaginative space through certain key texts that define those periods and their assumptions.

But the French influence shouldn't be overestimated. American criticism has its own history. It's an open secret within the ranks that even before structuralism, deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis had become the fashion, three books of enormous influence, all of them written in the 70's, had already paved the way: Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) and Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence (1973). The terrain they map out is actually a common one, despite what you may hear around the Fiji cooler or at Starbucks.

Fish's book, a collection of essays in the reader-response mode, does what Barthes's essay does, although in a more systematic way. Fish's famous question is a dramatic instance of the American realization that there are obstacles to ''objective'' vision in the act of reading itself. The reader reads, or misreads, with his or her standards and assumptions, usually without even knowing it. Nor does the reader go it alone. He or she is always a member of what Fish calls an ''interpretive community,'' which governs one's very place in the world.

The implications of Fish's method are ontological as well as political. What inhibits the self also enables it. The paradox is a deconstructive one. Fish's description of the reader of Paradise Lost in his 1967 book, Surprised by Sin, is a good example. Eve's ''wanton . . . tresses'' and ''coy submission'' are wholly inappropriate in the Garden of Eden. Nobody could have been ''coy'' or ''wanton'' then. And yet the irony is just the point: Like the poet, but unlike Adam and Eve, the reader is impure, postlapsarian. Neither he nor Milton has any other way of imagining the situation.

If Fish empowered the reader, Edward Said empowered ''the other'' – the marginalized, the oppressed – with Orientalism, the father text, if I may be a little ironic, of postcolonialism. The reach of Orientalism has been vast, and it has, well, colonized and consolidated a whole new field of study. The interests of postcolonial studies are nonetheless familiar, especially its view of the self. Adding psychoanalysis to Said's perspective, the critic Homi Bhabha has shown that, like Fish's reader, the ''colonial subject,'' or self, is ''constructed'' – in this case, through a series of psychological ''identifications'' supplied by the slick hand of political oppression, whose ideology is often more effective than its rifle butts. The politically oppressed are a traumatic version of an interpretive community, a captive audience, so to speak.

Feminism and African-American criticism took the same lead even earlier. Both study oppression where it really lives – in the secret languages of the heart. Long before ''theory,'' W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of African-American ''double-consciousness'' – this sense,'' as he described it in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ''of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others'' – had required critics like Robert Stepto and Houston Baker Jr. to formulate a model of the self as split at its very origin.

Like colonial identity, gender is also governed by a split introduced into the child's very being, this time as a consequence of its inevitable ambivalence toward its parents, who both nourish the child and frustrate and disappoint it. As Juliet Mitchell was among the first to point out for English readers in Psychoanalysis and Feminism in 1974, the family isn't just a private affair, but a microcosm of the larger social forces that divide the self in the act of creating it.

We already have a name for this notion of the self in the brooding Anglophone poetic tradition, a tradition that is also political, even to the point of beheading a king more than a century before the French. This name is Romanticism, and its principal critical exponent since T. S. Eliot tried to obscure its real nature has been Harold Bloom. Bloom renames Romanticism ''the anxiety of influence'' and locates its beginnings with Milton, secretary to Cromwell as well as the visionary seer of Paradise Lost. Dr. Johnson later feared Milton because, as Johnson put it, he was a church of one. But the Romantic ''one'' is really a split self, too – a self that is divided, like Milton's Satan, at its origin, part the spitting image of a prior authority, part the self-creating desperado seeking freedom from its determinations. Like ''the death of the author'' or ''is there a text in this class?,'' ''the anxiety of influence'' is a trope for how the presumable originality or uniqueness of a given author is really the byproduct of the repression of prior authors – their ''misreading'' – who both serve and compromise the later writer in a murderous intrigue. Like Milton's Satan, we are all colonial subjects seeking to overcome the anxiety of influence of the interpretive communities that enable us.

If a synthetic academic criticism has so many tools at its disposal, why isn't everybody happy? In part, rivalries are simply inevitable, and some critics persist in denying the obvious continuities. Foucault's immediate American child, the New Historicism, lost some of its respectability in 1997 when Stephen Greenblatt, one of its inventors, refused to engage Suzanne Gearhart's challenge to talk about Foucault's complex and repressed relation to Freud. There is some irony in this, since New Historicists are supposed to be groovy and politically correct.

The desire to stake out new territory is particularly obvious in Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather (1995), as synthetic a work of scholarship as you will find, and yet one that aspires to an originality that's impossible now that the battle it fights has already been won. McClintock's conclusions are unassailable, and therefore no longer avant-garde. She combines Lacanian feminism with postcolonialism and Foucauldian close reading to show how, in the metaphors of Victorian novels as well as those of Victorian science, imperialism ''sexualized,'' as she puts it, the objects of its conquests, both human and geographical. That's what made dominion so attractive.

Ironically, a generation of critics who believe that the artist is neither independent nor solemn is having a hard time applying the same wisdom to itself. Many critics make routine conceptualizations difficult because they wish to purvey a culture of the expert rather than celebrate a climate of common sense and clarity. You could even say that the only problem with postrevolutionary critics is that they don't know a good thing when they see it.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, May 28, 2000

Sample view:

The Form of Politics

by Perry Meisel

I.

It is, of course, a deconstructive commonplace to observe that the singular or the unique is the function or the effect of a relation. And yet a political and intellectual climate like ours in America today – a New Sanctimony, if you will, a recall of transcendental categories by Left and Right alike – too often propounds the singular as a value in itself, whether it is ethnicity, gender, or oppression as such. Our climate needs to be reminded of this deconstructive commonplace, not only to explain to Neo-conservatives why and how deconstructive relativism is actually very systematic indeed, but also to distinguish deconstruction from the neo-centrisms of the Left (a self-contradictory description that is itself an example of the problem). These latter impulses, astonishingly enough, reconstitute the binarisms of black/white, male/female, power/oppression that gird tyranny, and that are under presumable siege as categories.

What is perennially misconceived about deconstruction (Harold Bloom's term "weak misreading" well accounts for the surprisingly literal response to Derrida that we all know) is that its procedure for deracinating essences, absolutes, transcendental categories of all kinds is not in the service of an anarchic play of signifiers. Nor is it designed to prioritize the historically repressed or marginalized side of an opposition. Deconstruction is a highly exact mode of reading designed, not to throw texts or the world into chaos, but to show how the world we think we find only gets – and has gotten – made in the shapes and terms that we take for granted as given, self-evident, natural.

American criticism may perhaps wake from its dogmatic slumbers by remembering what Anselm Haverkamp states in his introduction to this conference – that America is difference. This is the crucial tie between deconstruction and America despite deconstruction's French (and Germanic) ground of philosophical emergence (here, too, though, we should recall that both America and deconstruction share, after all, a place in the tradition of the Enlightenment despite a difference in the epistemological deposition of the subject that Enlightenment Romanticism was invented to sustain following the first death of God).

As Jonathan Culler points out, the performative or constitutive nature of discourse, together with its chiastic ground-making, is particularly plain in American life; indeed, it is American life's singular virtue. If marginal America constructs itself as a difference from dominant America, we should remember that dominant America constructed itself as an enabling difference from Europe, thereby preparing a common and originary ground for American life at large, based, not on European – read logocentric – notions of identity or sameness, but, in principle if not always or altogether in practice, on difference. This common epistemology of American life ironically guarantees freedom by requiring everyone to deal with influence.

Hence the ease with which we allow ourselves to be swayed by the language of the singular – of the essentiality of the ethnic, the gendered, the this, the that – is precisely what a deconstructive reassessment of the political asks us to question. Without aesthetic theory – I use these terms with Kant in mind – and without a deconstructive reimagination of the categories involved, a dangerous epistemological lassitude will continue despite the need for its correction.

Consider, for example, the category of the ethnic. What is its status as a notion? In 1992, the Poetics Institute of New York University and the Cardozo School of Law sponsored a conference with Jacques Derrida that allowed me to address the problem then. The Greek ethnos, I argued at that time, emerges in the Septuagint as a means of translating the Hebrew goyim, which has the sense of "heathen" – those who do not believe in the Jewish God. Only in the nineteenth century does the word gain the more specific sense of race with which we associate it still in this century. This way of reading ethnos as designating biosemiotic traits, sometimes derived iconically through or from the language a person speaks, well suited nineteenth-century ideological needs, particularly those of nationalism. The less-than-various array of ethnic nationalisms, from Mazzini to Herzl, sought a justifying physicalism familiar in nineteenth-century reasoning from phrenology to ethnography. Ethnography and ethnology alike emerge as disciplines of study contemporary with the growth of nationalist feeling, the first in 1834, the second in 1842. Lexicons record a hazy relation between ethnos and ethos, too, the latter meaning custom, although the nature of the relation is unclear. This muddy proximity is the very nature of the relation, which motivates what is merely customary among people by divining a mystic bond among them and elevating it, that is, reducing it, to the status of an innate rather than a derived characteristic.

The ethnic as a trope, then, rests, or fails to do so, on a paradox whose structure is a familiar deconstructive site constituted by the play between inclusion and exclusion. That which is without value – those who do not believe, those who are goyim or heathen – becomes precisely that which is of, that which is, value – the inherent, often racially construed trait that assigns and defines one at a presumably fundamental level. The ethnic or racial – that denigration or impropriety that defines goyim – is also the trope designed to signify the pure, the essential, the very opposite of the unclean or the improper that it originarily signifies in the history of its usage. It should be noted, too, that ethnos also originarily signifies the notion of "one's own" – of what is, properly speaking, proper to one – a notion whose like paradoxical structure has also long been familiar to us. Curiously enough, then, the otherness that structures the heathen or the unruly – the excluded – is also the properness, the inherence that structures what is included.

If a narrative were to be constructed from this play of the trope's senses, it would find its telos in the scientific racism and eugenics of the Nazi era, even if it might also find an epistemological counterpart in soil-Zionism, African-American separatism, or feminism of the essentialist variety. Democratic thinking, by contrast, describes the truth of the universality it declares by virtue of its erasure. Freedom of worship, for example, has as its implication that which guarantees the possibility of its emergence: a constitutional indifference to the very religions it frees.

Any contemporary articulation of the ethnic rolls and rocks on the lip of this paradox. Its negation is the repressed that returns late in the twentieth century with the revalorization of those ethnic categories that the century's civil and human rights revolutions, especially in the United States, supposedly put in question. The rise of multiculturalism in the United States and the end of the socialist ideal in the Soviet Union are, from this point of view, similar reactions against and repressions of the non-ethnic ideals of both political constructions.

II.

Any deconstructive reassessment of the political depends today, then, on a series of new assumptions about both society and subjectivity. Here deconstruction maintains its historical relation to psychoanalysis and Marxism alike, although by now these relations are so implicit that the crucial term in each case remains largely silent throughout the conference.

The unconscious is the conference's enabling notional secret, an Althusserian notion of the unconscious that understands subjects and ideology, texts and their reception, in reciprocal rather than exclusive terms. Avital Ronell's "testing" is a superb psychoanalytical representation of the subject. "Testing" suggests what the ego and any shape at all have in common – the doing and undoing of frames, edges, outlines, borders. "We exist in sway," says Ronell, linking Kant with Freud and Lacan, and linking epistemology with psychoanalysis.

The conference's second chief notion, ideology, is well described by Barbara Johnson without being named. By asking "what speaks?" rather than "who speaks?," Johnson efficiently points out the dynamic and constitutive relation between ideology and the unconscious, and the way in which this relation fashions the ground of self and society alike. When Judith Butler asks, "Why do words wound?," the answer is that the unconscious is structured like a language.

III.

In order to elaborate a deconstructive reassessment of the political, let us read a familiar and even topical text at some length. No twentieth-century text is more alluring for its presumable gender allegory than Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928). And yet no twentieth-century text is also more strategically plain about its own deconstructive rather than irreducible notion of gender than Orlando is. Everyone knows the popular conception of Orlando – even the movies attest to it: an allegory about how perfect a human being would be could s/he combine the qualities of both genders. The emblem for Orlando's apparently synthetic project is the book's hommage to androgyny, borrowed from Coleridge's picture of a harmonious imagination in the Biographia Literaria (1817). Woolf literalizes, or so it seems, Coleridge's idealizing descriptions of rich imaginative figures such as Shakespeare by switching Orlando's gender about halfway through the book. Woolf thus simultaneously preserves and changes Orlando's character as the rival demands of soul and history struggle beneath the full-throated ease of both the plot and Woolf's seamless use of language.

Culler's notion of performativity is dazzlingly evident as Woolf's text provides a virtual object lesson in how semiosis makes subjects from the ground up. What language brings into being in Orlando is gender as such. Even to call it "as such" is, of course, problematic, since gender's suchness or givenness is the function of a difference or a relation. Under the pressure of Woolf's language, Orlando's presumably central notion of gender splits its husk.

The key to the novel, as the saying goes, lies in the sometimes odd structure of Woolf's prose, which as a rule is so well sutured that the means of its production slips by. In the novel's third chapter, the narrator announces, with an apparent straight face, that "everything, in fact, was something else" (143).¹ How can what is "in fact" be "something else"? By definition, a "fact" is what it is – just the fax, ma'am – but here, quite ironically, the self-evidence ordinarily associated with "fact" is also taken away from it by virtue of how its self-evidence is represented – as "something else."

This kind of rhetorical oddness occurs again and again in the texture of the book's language, often structuring sentences in uncannily similar – and equally disturbing ways. "Everything was different," says the narrator early on (27), trying to give us a picture of the Elizabethan past by negation, even in a catalogue of vegetables, climates, and poets. How can a statement of nonidentity be a properly representational or descriptive one? "The arras" in "the hall" at Orlando's ancestral home "moved always" (45) – "moved always" is an oxymoron. Or, says the narrator, meditating on Orlando's future in the book's first chapter and thinking vaguely of official roles for him, he "was cut out for precisely some such career" (15). How can what is "precisely" also be "some such"? Similarly, if "openness . . . was the soul" of Orlando's "nature" (189), as the narrator says it is, then the outside – "openness" – and the inside – "soul" – are perilously and curiously identified.

The seeming imprecision in Woolf's language is, in fact, a rhetorical pattern – a principal one throughout the novel, and the way the novel itself goes about estimating as well as representing oppositions such as fact and fiction, text and world, and, of course, one gender and another.

The rhetorical pattern has as its counterpart the novel's larger structural pattern, which requires a similar transgression of the reader's assumptions once they have been put in place. Much as Woolf's sentences ask the reader to believe opposing or different kinds of propositions simultaneously, so, too, does the structure of the novel's fundamental illusionism. Orlando is at one and the same time the same person despite her change of sex midway through the book – her subjectivity is essential behind even gender. And yet Orlando is also a function of history, changing as she does in accord with the changes through which she lives. To define and represent gender, Orlando – and Orlando – both invoke history and deny it.

Rather than a problem, such structural irreconcilability is a strategy or device. Time must be invoked to describe something as timeless – Orlando's personality, for example – since the timeless can only be conceived of in its relation – its nonrelation – to time. And history can be thought of only in relation to a timelessness that is its foil or counterpart. In Orlando, everything, then – and remember, everything is something else – is as a rule put in place by its transgression. This strategy or device, both rhetorical and structural, I shall call Woolf's cross-writing – the transgression or crossing over of assumptions even as they are put in place.

Woolf theorizes cross-writing in Orlando by telling us that Orlando's own mind works in "violent see-saws" (46), not unlike Woolf's own clashing metaphors, "stopping at nothing," she says, "in between" (46). Sounding like Saussure (and Keats), Woolf gives cross-writing a differential model: "Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy" (45). Of course not: to know one means to know its difference from the other. To accent this relativist or relational semiotics, Woolf uses the same metaphor that she uses in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to show how difference works to constitute sameness: the clocks in London are off line, each ringing the same hour a bit differently from the others (1925, 60 - 61).² Woolf's description of Shakespeare early in the novel also matches the structure of her cross-writing: "his mind was . . . a welter of opposites" (22). Queen Elizabeth, too, is drawn according to the same plan: qualities such as "innocence" and "simplicity" were "all the more dear to her for the dark background she set them against" (23).

Woolf tells us in the book's preface to be prepared for this double rhythm or movement. "The book," she says, "will inevitably wake expectations in the reader which the book itself can only disappoint" (viii). Expectation and disappointment, disappointment and expectation – this is a fair estimate of the semiotic rhythm the novel employs to have its way with us. The play of expectation and disappointment on the reader's part is necessary for any horizon or circumference – any edge or margin or frame that situates an object as such, whether animate or inanimate – to emerge at all, and as a function of compounding, of difference. Readers know, says Woolf, how to "make . . . up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person; can hear in what we only whisper a living voice; can see, often what we say nothing about, exactly what he looked like, and know without a word to guide them precisely what he thought" (73).

Woolf reminds us of the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand at work here by calling our attention to it and its mechanisms. "The most poetic" kind of "conversation," she says, "is precisely that which cannot be written down" (253). This creates not simply awe at the depth of the conversation in question (a conversation between Orlando and her nineteenth-century lover, Shelmerdine), but also awe at the fact that such "repletion" or fullness, as Woolf puts it (253), can be the effect of "a great blank here" (253). Even the opposition between life and literature is handled – is simultaneously established and undone – by crossover rhetoric. While life and literature are on the one hand distinct ("Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another" [17]), on the other hand, the Queen "read him" – Orlando – "like a page" (25).

When Orlando's change of gender comes, the way in which Woolf represents it, rhetorically at least, slides over us without a hitch. "He was a woman" (137). The fictional illusion succeeds despite – perhaps because of – the rhetorical impossibility. This is, as it turns out, simply a hyperbolic instance of the mixed metaphors that Woolf uses to describe practically everything. Even the novel's plot is made, ironically, out of transformation.

Far, then, from being a self-evident singularity, gender – like ethnicity, or like subjectivity itself – is always already the function of a relation in Orlando. A commonplace of structural feminism, it is interesting to see it rehearsed as early as 1928. Even androgyny is not fusion, but a structure of difference. One doesn't fuse the genders by crossing them – one puts them in place that way, and always has. To be fused, the genders must be different. Gender is a difference, not an essential characteristic, an elementary semiotic activity in all cultures that, in one way or another, is part of the basis upon which a given culture's world, and its subjects, are formed. Gender is pure difference, a "pure performative," as Barbara Vinken puts it, whose role is merely paradigmatic, structuring a fundamental difference out of a formal necessity that is also necessarily political. As Orlando's confirmation of her new gender in the mirror suggests (138), form is itself always already political. The equivalence of politics and form is among the most provocative of the notions to which a deconstructive reassessment of the political leads. What is a politics of form?

Notes

1. All references are to Virginia Woolf, Orlando, rpt. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1973).

2. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, rpt. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1953).

Originally published in Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995).

How Postmodern Is It?

by Perry Meisel

The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970. Henry M. Sayre. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press: 1989. 308 pp. $39.

Coming as it does at the end of two decades of fierce activity in criticism and the arts alike, Henry M. Sayre's comprehensive study of the American avant-garde since 1970 reveals both the advantages and the dangers of trying to identify a coherent postmodernism that has meaning as a stable historical achievement. Sayre's descriptive history ranges from painting, photography, and performance to poetry, dance, and earthworks. Propounding a notion of postmodernism that distinguishes it from modernism both polemically and in practice, Sayre's book also summarizes the presumable link between postmodernism and certain aspects of poststructuralist critical theory, particularly deconstruction.

Sayre puns on the word "object" in his title in order to undo Clement Greenberg's classical modernist notion of the work of art as an "immanent object" - as an autonomous, bounded whole that is "irrefutably present." For Sayre, the word "object" shifts back and forth between meaning an "object" like a canvas or a poem in the modernist sense, and an "object" that is simply the aim or direction for a performance-oriented, postmodern poetics. He argues that, since 1970, the work of art as a modernist object has given way to the work of art as postmodern performance - open, in-process, and polyvocal. Using as a symbol and proximate source Andy Warhol's calculated evacuation (and negative reconstitution) of almost every received modernist virtue, from the exaltation of authenticity to the sanctity of the frame, Sayre shows us that "by the late sixties . . . the object per se had become . . . dispensable," whether the autonomous painting or poem, and so, too, had the gallery, the studio, and even the personality of the artist or author. "By the seventies," concludes Sayre, "the site of presence in art had shifted from art's object to art's audience, from the textual or plastic to the experiential."

This is a familiar and largely durable argument; its descriptive strengths include its ability to link many kinds of art and artists through their share in the almost programmatic approach they appear to follow in common. The relation of performance to painting and photography is central to Sayre's account, which chronicles the shift over the last 20 years from the work of art regarded as finished product to the work of art regarded as "work site." In fact, the book's most impressive sequence is Sayre's reading of Site, a 1964 performance by Carolee Schneemann and Robert Morris that sharply exemplifies Sayre's view of what postmodernism is, and of how it entails a decidedly critical relation to past traditions in art. Sayre reads Site as a virtual essay on Manet's Olympia (1863), claiming that Manet's presumably "finished" painting suffers a series of transformations as Schneemann and Morris "re-present" the image of the courtesan Olympia by resituating it in a cluster of other activities. As Morris performs "work" around Schneemann's re-creation of the seemingly static Olympia, says Sayre, "painting is transformed into sculpture, sculpture into dance. And dance itself is transformed . . . into ordinary, vernacular movement." Incorporated into and mobilized by the dynamism of performance, Manet's passive portrait - a presumably autonomous image - is opened to a world beyond the frame.

Equally instructive from Sayre's point of view is the difference between the painting of Eric Fischl and David Salle. Salle's work, writes Sayre, is "assimilative" and, in the artist's own words, "'autonomous'" and "'self-sufficient'"; it functions as a "closed network of signs." Fischl's, by contrast, is "disseminative," "theatrical" and "performative," inviting the viewer to recognize the "potentialities of the work" rather than keeping the viewer enclosed within it. Whether or not this argument is convincing (and whether or not Sayre's use of poststructuralist terminology is entirely plausible), it reflects Sayre's belief in a programmatic historical movement from product to process. This change is evident in, for example, Jonathan Borofsky's work, which, according to Sayre, calls into question the integrity of the painting as an object by exceeding the modernist box of frame and gallery alike, disrupting the autonomy of the art object as well as the institution that perpetuates it and redoubles its structure of exclusion. In the author's view, the performance art of Laurie Anderson is similarly disruptive; set in an "undecidable terrain," Anderson's performances disorient her audience by the "calculated disjunction" between her "high tech trappings and her self-consciously bohemian pose." Postmodern performance, then, moves the goal or object of art from "mastery" to "process," from "transcending the temporal" to "falling into it."

A parallel transformation, according to Sayre, structures the history of dance, which moves from classical ballet, with its emphasis on symmetry, to modern dance, with its preference for asymmetry and disjunction, to postmodern dance, with its "vernacular, task-like" movements. In reflexive postmodern fashion, Sayre's narrative of dance history also intersects with the histories of other arts, each holding up a mirror to the other. Especially rich meal for Sayre's position are the collaborations of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham in the 1950s, which make explicit a rejection, following Brecht, of the Gesamtkunstwerk or "integrated work of art." Cunningham's insistence on "the independence, not interdependence, of each part of the dance's presentation" is emblematic of "a consciously anti-Wagnerian" art, one that emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relations between mediums that are ordinarily combined in a presumably natural way in "integrated" work such as Wagner's own.

The political object of such transformative praxis, says Sayre, quoting Craig Owens, is not "'to transcend representation,'" but "'to expose that system of power that authorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting and invalidating others.'" Sayre also shows that "repetition" is the active principle of postmodernism. Postmodernism is thereby pedagogical, with repetition functioning as "a teaching tool," as Sayre puts it, for re-educating audiences in what to pay attention to in works of art. (Hence the logic of Trisha Brown's remark that "dance" is a "lecture form.") "Repetition and accumulation" - whether in Brown, Anderson or Schneemann - "become a way of creating suspense and drama, the knowledge in the spectator that any sense of the whole is contingent and must inevitably be submitted to revision."

Sayre's systematic approach draws on a series of notions from poststructuralism, chief among them the disappearance of the author, the polyvalence of meaning, and the fugitive presence of both the art object and the world it purportedly represents. The philosophical analogue to the disruption of painting as an autonomous object is the deconstruction of the phenomenological stability of the object as an empirical category.

Here, however, Sayre begins to get into trouble. While an adaptation of these notions is reasonable enough for the purposes of a description of the work he surveys, Sayre's use of such poststructuralist categories is exceedingly literal; it betokens an ultimate misunderstanding of poststructuralism's methods, a misunderstanding which becomes particularly evident in Sayre's overestimation of certain of the avant-garde practices he praises, and in his inability to see that what he claims to be a historically new stance in art - i.e., its performative aspect, its emphasis on process, its undecidability - is really little more than the normative epistemological condition of all art, albeit one that postmodernism makes exceptionally overt. The largely pedagogical cast of postmodern art does indeed suggest that its deconstructive dimension is in some measure quite real. Surely Site, for example, puts Manet's Olympia into an obvious relation to historical processes of labor and gender construction that are left unstated in the Manet painting itself. This does not, however, mean that such processes are not at work in Olympia, only that they are not made explicit there.

Surely, then, Sayre's argument is really about emphasis and overtness, not about an altogether historical occurrence in which a material, "postmodern" change in the status of the art object presages something entirely new. The object, as Stanley Fish remarks of texts, has never been there in the first place, no matter the historical moment or the state of critical opinion; objects of any kind are always the construction of an interpretative community. Sayre, however, seems to think that a text must be materially disrupted for this kind of observation to be true.

Sayre's unquestioning acceptance of the tacky authenticism of the Language poets is the surest evidence that neither Warhol nor Jacques Derrida has really sunk in. While it is in some sense a graphic counterpart to postmodern performance artistry that Sayre nicely details elsewhere in his book, Language poetry, from Charles Olson to Allen Ginsberg, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin, is by no means another example of the deconstructive epistemology shared by Warhol and Derrida, even though Sayre astonishingly mentions Derrida and Ginsberg in the same breath. No two figures could be more at odds; Ginsberg's is probably the consummate instance of works based on the precise kinds of myths about language (particularly the "presence" it can supposedly embody) that Derrida deconstructs.

Such bungling points to a larger and more perplexing problem: the curious misapprehension of "theory" that Sayre, like so many teachers and critics today, equates with postmodernism. Sayre's reading of Roland Barthes in a chapter at the books' close is so deeply misconceived as to render Barthes's work almost unrecognizable; among other things, it maintains critical categories such as "subjective" and "novelistic" that Barthes himself rendered obsolete. Sayre apparently needs the literal maneuvers of the Language poets to tell him that there is no such thing as a poem already in place, and the graphic absurdities of Rothenberg's or Antin's work to assure him that a poem is a porous and unstable semiotic field. He even needs the Language poets to show him (erroneously, by the way) how to open a poem "to the contingencies of history, time and place." Yet Paul de Man's fame rests precisely on his demonstration 20 years ago in "The Rhetoric of Temporality" that it was 19th-century Romanticism which opened an irreparable and actually constitutive gap between discourse and experience. Romantic poets bespeak this play of presence and absence perhaps even more eloquently than the photograph, whose epistemological dubieties do not, by contrast, mystify Sayre at all in his discussion of, say, Cindy Sherman or William Wegman.

What Sayre should have learned from the "theory" he endorses and claims to use is that the conditions he describes as postmodern are not historically new at all; rather, they are most rewardingly viewed as an amplification of the normative conditions that attend any cultural production once it is read and studied in the light of semiotic, deconstructive and reception-oriented approaches. Sayre overvalues the historical newness of what postmodern art does because his misreading of "theory" prevents him from seeing that what "theory" describes - the instability of texts, for example, or the lack of ontological ground in any semiotic system - are difficulties that assail culture throughout history. Postmodernism is, as Sayre himself says, really an extended pedagogical strategy that makes these difficulties literal, and that thereby transforms postmodern art into a form of criticism and teaching. Since postmodernism characteristically goes out of its way to vex its own integrity as a practice, and since it offers by definition no object about which to speak directly, it must be seen, after all, as a myth. Thus a particular irony - a distinctively postmodern one, if you wish - attends any critical attempt to address postmodernism. To devise an appropriate means of negotiating this encounter requires an irony greater than any Sayre himself has achieved.

Originally published in Art in America, December, 1990.

Sample view:

Rousseau's Quest

Jean Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. By Jean Starobinski. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. University of Chicago Press. $19.95.

Jean Starobinski's enormously influential study of Rousseau, published in French in 1957, is a welcome addition to the bibliography of European criticism available in English. One of the most celebrated achievements of what has been called the "criticism of consciousness" associated with Geneva, Starobinski's phenomenological meditation on Rousseau is based on the assumption that a writer's work is the embodiment of an authorial consciousness that precedes and exceeds its textual incarnation, an assumption in practice incompatible with neither subsequent deconstructive criticism nor traditional biography and history.

While Starobinski's analysis appears to reify a host of problematic ontological notions, his actual reading is very different. For Starobinski, Rousseau's quest for "self-awareness," a wry Starobinksi reminds us, "is intimately associated with the possibility of becoming someone else." Rousseau's famous conflicts are handled, not as struggles to be overcome, but as enabling tensions. Rousseau "was . . . contaminated by the very disease he was attacking," wishing "to set forth, in writing, a philosophy paradoxically based on the rejection of literature."

The many oxymora in Rousseau are therefore constitutive rather than contradictory: "There is," for example, "a 'natural order' in the very historical process that has estranged man from his 'natural condition'"; "the more general his protest, the more solitary he becomes"; "no words," in short, "can convey the inner conviction of innocence, while fiction proves strangely believable." The rhythm of Starobinski's rhetoric is like Rousseau's in its thick symmetry of formulations:

This new age is characterized by a crucial discovery: for the first time consciousness has a past. But this discovery, if it brings new wealth, also reveals an essential impoverishment, a lack. The temporal dimension that opens up behind the present moment is perceptible only because it is fleeing into inaccessibility. The mind turns back to an earlier world and sees that world, which once belonged to it, as lost forever. As the child's happiness slips away, the mind recognizes the boundless value of this now-forbidden joy. There is nothing left to do but create the poetic myth of a bygone era.

In such repetitive topoi Starobinski finds nothing less than "a behavioral archetype," a constant element in Rousseau's life and imagination. "He wants," in words that look forward to Jacques Derrida's later reading of Rousseau, "a presence that is also a partial absence."

Starobinski's focus, then, is neither the ideal transparency to which Rousseau aspires, nor the inevitable obstructions - language, laws, history - that disallows such unmediated vision, but the ratio between the two:

Is there, then, such a thing as a natural state? At best it is an imaginary position, midway between two extremes. There, however, movement does not cease. The "natural" self is nothing more than a fleeting image, glimpsed in passing and blurred by motion. My self is merely something that I lack, something that constantly eludes my grasp. I am always someone else, someone without a stable identity . . . . The "self" is not the unattainable position of rest but the anxiety that makes tranquillity impossible. My truth reveals itself by wresting me from the grip of what I had mistaken for a fundamental fact (which disappears the moment it is scrutinized), the "nature" wherein I had thought my "true self" was located.

We are only a step away from a deconstructive reading; the chief difference - tone aside - is that Starobinski locates Rousseau's paradoxes within a rhetoric of temporality or "duration" that is experiential rather than epistemological, existential rather than semiotic. "Signs failed to give Rousseau access to the world," writes a master of counterpunch, "but, like the waters that reflected Narcissus's own image, magically made his ego the slave of its reflection."

From a historical point of view, this highly particular structure of paradox is, argues Starobinski, new with Rousseau, and the oppositions to which it leads - between transparency and obstruction, authenticity and alienation, fullness and lack, freedom and bondage - inaugurate a revolutionary technology of both selfhood and literature. "For the first time," concludes Starobinski, "the problem of an 'existential' transcendence of literature arose outside the confines of traditional religious spirituality." Such a transcendence of literature is imagined, of course, within a decidedly literary space, not the least among the ironies that sustain Starobinski's Rousseau in what remains a parable of interpretation.

Originally published in Partisan Review 1, 1990

The Kingdom of Doublethink

by Perry Meisel

Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. By Stanley Fish. 613 pp. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. $37.50.

Of literary critics whose work comes to mind under the heading of ''theory,'' Stanley Fish, a professor of English and law at Duke University, has been pre-eminent as the orchestrator of a number of approaches to interpretation, chief among them reader-response criticism and deconstruction.

While no less rigorous than his earlier studies of Renaissance literature, Doing What Comes Naturally is a handy textbook for those who wish to catch up on the variety of questions to which literary criticism can usefully address itself today and to see a deconstructive method in action in various intellectual contexts, particularly in examining the similarities between questions of literature and law. Except for three of the 22 essays collected here, all have appeared in periodicals over the last decade, though they have been substantially rewritten for the present volume, especially the essay on Freud at the end of the book.

Ranging from constitutional jurisprudence to a recent chapter in the history of the reception of Paradise Lost, Mr. Fish's new work elaborates the claim he made in his influential book Is There a Text in This Class? (1980) that there is no such thing in life, law or literature as pure or immediate perception - or, for that matter, pure or immediate existence, for texts or for people.

The new book's title is intentionally ironic, since ''doing what comes naturally'' is how we usually - and unthinkingly - characterize what is really the result of one's involuntary participation in an institutional or interpretive scenario, whether as a jurist, a critic or even an athlete. ''The choices that occur to one 'naturally,' '' Mr. Fish says in his essay on the study of Milton, ''are already understood in terms of the needs of the profession'' - any profession - ''and therefore come already calculated.''

The correctives to popular misconceptions about contemporary literary criticism are wide-ranging and incisive. Mr. Fish's reading of Jacques Derrida in the essay ''With the Compliments of the Author'' nicely accommodates deconstruction to real and particular institutional situations, setting the record straight on Mr. Derrida as a proponent not of anarchic indeterminacy in interpretation but of an amplified sense of the paradoxes that ground self, world and texts.

Cool and systematic, such an approach pays off by collapsing, most dramatically, our customary belief in a categorical difference between what is subjective and objective in either interpretation or institutions. In studies of the German literary theorist Wolfgang Iser and the legal theorists Ronald Dworkin and Roberto M. Unger, and in an assessment of professional business such as scholarly publication and promotion, Mr. Fish shows how any opposition between subjective and objective, internal and external, intrinsic and extrinsic, is as a rule overridden in practice; one is never either individual or impersonal, but always both at the same time.

Mr. Fish's principal theoretical point is that ''there can be no such thing as theory.'' Less inclined to attend to the ironies of this contention than to show that it is simply true, Mr. Fish argues that since ''all knowledge is situational . . . we can never be at any distance from the knowledge we need.'' Thus he can also argue that what passes for theory has ''no consequences,'' since theory never makes a difference in practice anyway. What one ''always and already'' does (''doing what comes naturally'') is unconsciously created by interpretive assumptions that no conscious intervention can really undo. Theoretical posturing has no real effect on what we do.

The question of change preoccupies Mr. Fish (an essay is devoted to it), since his ''no consequences'' clause appears to alienate him from the possibility of action. However, he is at pains to show that change in any context is not only possible but inevitable, the normal and constant result of going about our business whatever our intentions.

Mr. Fish's chief practical aim throughout these essays is to show how the political claims of both left and right, whether in literary or legal studies, are essentially the same when it comes to epistemology. The Frankfurt School or E. D. Hirsch in literature, ''anti-foundationalism'' or ''foundationalism'' in law - such rival positions are linked by the same assumption: the belief in a transcendent truth outside the world they deplore from opposing points of view, with presumably opposed motives.

The seemingly distinct postures that separate the progressivism of ''political liberation'' from a belief in ''timeless masterpieces,'' Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno from Mr. Hirsch and Allan Bloom, the opponents of Robert Bork from his supporters, are ''finally exactly in the same position.'' Neither side will acknowledge the ironic and paradoxical situation in which it finds itself: the ''dilemma'' that ''awaits anyone who first acknowledges the essential historicity of all human endeavor but then seeks a space or a moment in which the pressure of that historicity can be escaped.'' Indeed, the political opposition between left and right, Mr. Fish says, is really a historical one between rhetoric and philosophy that is as old as Western civilization itself.

The book's centerpiece is a brief but dazzling essay entitled ''Anti-professionalism,'' a deconstruction of the distinction between professional and anti-professional biases in our culture that concludes by demonstrating that the two ''always and already'' go hand in hand. The reason is that the ethos of professionalism - the belief that the individual is master of his own destiny and can rise to the social prominence that expertise in a given field affords him - is the paradoxical product of an ideology of free choice and judgment. But that ideology runs counter to the belief in specialized, professional judgment in which it results.

''Anti-professionalism,'' Mr. Fish concludes, ''is the very center of the professional ethos, constituting by the very vigor of its opposition the true form of that which it opposes.''

Mr. Fish's belief that an unawareness of this ''doublethink'' is common to almost all thought leaves aside, however, one discipline for which this paradoxical kind of understanding is elementary: psychoanalysis. Mr. Fish devotes his final chapter to Freud, but it comes as something of a surprise given the 500 pages that precede it. A superb reader of everyone from Milton to Jurgen Habermas, Mr. Fish suddenly becomes an extraordinarily weak reader of Freud's most famous, and most literary, case history, the 1918 case of the Russian nobleman known as the Wolf Man because of his childhood dream of wolves outside his window.

The essay is entitled ''Withholding the Missing Portion.'' Freud is the best model for what he has argued for throughout his book, and yet when it comes to acknowledging this model Mr. Fish is blind to it. He misreads the measured ironies of the Wolf Man account as though their intent were somehow nefarious, particularly the deferred, retrospective construction of the ''primal scene,'' whose ''discursive'' reality Mr. Fish faults Freud for merely inventing.

This is, arguably, the special blindness that allows Mr. Fish his insights in the pages before, and betokens an anxiety of influence about psychoanalysis that likely accounts for the remarkable perspicacity he shows in interrogating any and all texts save Freudian ones. Perhaps, too, it is intended as a joke for these same reasons. It is, in any case, an oddly ironic way for a book that downplays the pleasures of irony to end.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, May 21, 1989

The Theory of Composition and the Composition of Theory

by Perry Meisel

What do our students really know when they walk into their first writing class in college? Too often we tend to think they know nothing at all - that their implicit scholarship in pop music, sports, fashion, even the semiotics of motorcycle repair, is altogether beside the point when they arrive in our midst. Texts and Contexts makes no such assumptions, and tells us why by appealing to the developments in the theories of human discourse that have contributed so much to the history of contemporary thought in the last two decades and more. Thanks to such developments - and, of course, to their own imagination and good sense - the Summerfields have generated a text and a practice very likely singular among efforts of its kind.

Crucial is the book's delicate but decisive adjustment in our pedagogy by moving it away from the usual "process" approach to composition and onto the student's - and the teacher's - growing recognition of what the Summerfields shrewdly call our "enabling constraints." These enabling constraints are the sediments of convention in everything we do, even in what we are, and in forcing them out into the open, the Summerfields show how useful a theoretical background can be in clearing up the muddle that has confronted us for years over the problem of teaching composition. Reading and writing, maintain the authors, are both products of concrete social exchange. Text production and text reception are a common process that makes the theory of reading - criticism - and the theory of writing - composition - virtually one and the same.

The implications of such a pedagogy are almost innumerable, but we can isolate at least two chief effects among them. The first is the degree to which the Summerfields tactfully but efficiently integrate the lessons to be had from structural linguistics, narratology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy; the second is the degree to which they can thereby go on to alter our frequent reflex manner of sustaining models of composition based on outmoded notions about hitherto uninterrogated categories such as essential selfhood, autonomous being, spontaneous expressiveness, and the supposed transparency of language itself.

First, then, the assumption throughout - as the title tells us - that any text always already has its context; nothing, in short, makes sense except in relation to something else. By virtue of subscribing so diligently to this axiom of structural linguistics in the tradition of Saussure and Jakobson, the Summerfields presume in all their suggestions for teaching the existence of a larger - and largely unconscious - cultural context looming up to determine what we do in even the most apparently marginal of writing exercises. This context the Summerfields call "funding," a term borrowed from the American philosopher John Dewey; other familiar terms for it include ideology, Chomsky's "competence," Foucault's "episteme," Lacan's "Symbolic," or, most recently, what Stanley Fish calls the presuppositions shared by "interpretative communities." To recognize this determining context startles us into realizing how entirely implicated we are in the social languages we normally oppose to our privacy. It is quite clearly the authors' intent, then, to make us hesitate about continuing to insist upon the notion of the "solitary" life of the author as it is usually mystified by our culture; instead, the Summerfields describe the real nature of the scene of reading and writing as a function of the "social production of discourse."

Thus, central to the theoretical recapitulations contained in the Summerfields' pedagogy is their reassessment of the status of the self, that fragile vessel to whom all of our teaching is addressed. Following one of the chief philosophical implications of structural linguistics (those made especially evident by the linguist Emile Benveniste and the philosopher Jacques Derrida), the Summerfields conclude that the self comes into being as a belated function of the various discursive situations in which it gets positioned - whether as father or mother, daughter or son, lawyer or doctor, student or teacher. The self is not - as the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan is most exact in articulating - what we usually think it is, an essence independent of time and history, "beyond culture," to use Lionel Trilling's phrase. The self is instead a bundle of conventions from the start, and its location in language is fundamental to its very coherence. The implications for teaching make the philosophical ones even more readily apparent.

Second, then, the results at the practical level of pedagogy proper: the "inner process" for the Summerfields is not what we customarily think it is in our usual attempts to theorize the self in the theory of composition. The authors are in fact exact and explicit about their lack of belief in a Rousseauesque kind of freedom in which an essential self may be said to exist independent of the community that otherwise sustains it - another way of saying that even the most private of personal experiences is at the same time also necessarily social, since it takes place as the result of discursive conventions that don't just express but actually shape what feelings we have. Thus, the otherwise familiar usefulness of notebooks and journals in composition class is, for the Summerfields, less the function of the students' discovery of an "authentic" self than it is of their discovery "that as their jottings accumulate, they come to constitute a representation of the self." This is not normative "process" pedagogy, then, but one designed instead to produce a more contemporary - and, for our students, a more faithful - view of the nature of experience than the liberationist ethic of spontaneity can provide. It is, as the Summerfields say, an "effective alternative to the current orthodoxies offered by the term process."

Indeed, the book has a luminous figuration for why "internal process" is not really monological or self-sufficient, a figuration theoretically precise as well as reminiscent of the psychological companions that haunt our Romantic literary heroes from Keats to Pater to T.S. Eliot - that of our "ghostly interlocutor," as the Summerfields call it, even in the solitude of idleness or despair. The "inner process," conclude the authors, is itself always polylogical, since "any 'personal' experience is," as they say, "inescapably saturated, informed, packed by public meanings."

The production of a systematic pedagogy in accord with the contemporary climate in criticism was, of course, bound to happen anyway - the demands of the real are too acute to have prevented it. If there is a reason why our renewed attempts to teach writing in the last decade have frequently failed, it is that we have relied too largely on outworn models of reading, writing, and selfhood that force us into appealing to categories that our students are predisposed to reject on the basis of what their lives are like in an overtly systematic and media-oriented world. While neo-conservatives imply that any devolution in reading and writing skills is a function of open admissions policies and affirmative action, the real truth is that such devolution is actually a function of our clinging to precisely the kinds of essentialist notions that the Summerfields put so plainly into question. The point, therefore, is not to lead students of composition - or of literature - into a realm of absolutes, but into an awareness of historicity and cultural particularities instead. Our students' various knowledges or "fundings" are not only systematic, but, given today's communications society, knowingly so. What may well separate us from our students is our lingering humanist belief in a realm beyond systems to which our students no longer assent. Thus a pedagogy of "enabling constraints" is one that is sufficiently paradoxical to correspond to the world as it presents itself in the present. "We bring them," say the Summerfields of their own students, "to a certain place in their heads wherein certain structures become," not restraints or ornamental annoyances, but, rather, "appropriate," and, indeed, "necessary." The text of the self and those of the world are in ever-shifting relation and pedagogy consists in bringing students to an awareness of the manifold structures those relations can and may take.

It is not, however, only a practical absorption of theory or even a winning pedagogy that distinguishes Texts and Contexts. Its plasticity as a text in its own right also requires recognition as a reflexive instance of what it has to say. After all, any ordering of its series of recommended writing exercises, each of them ingenious in itself, is provisional and experimental. Like Hugh Kenner's description of any given reading of Joyce's Ulysses, any given use or reading of Texts and Contexts is only one of so many "trial alignments," none absolute, none nugatory. In its refusal to construct itself upon any fixity, the book does what it says: the "various interacting dialectics" that may, as the authors put it, give shape to the book are always a function of how the teacher reads and uses it. The text, in other words, can, like any text, address itself only to particular, never universal, contexts; to put it another way, every text is a function of its reading, of its place in a signifying chain determined by specific reader or audience. To discover, moreover, that the plastic structure of Texts and Contexts resembles the structure of a postmodern novel such as Cortazar's Hopscotch is hardly surprising given the commonality of their projects. Like modernism and postmodernism themselves, the best pedagogy is clear about the socially necessary, if metaphysically random, orderings that language and society require of us no matter what our particular or momentary beliefs.

The range of the book's implications, then, are as striking for the criticism of literature as they are for the teaching of composition. Chief among them is the plain inevitability of our having to recognize that texts are different by virtue of degree rather than of kind, that a student essay and a poem by Ted Hughes - the kind of juxtapositions the Summerfields are fond of supplying us - in fact occupy or overlap equivalent discursive spaces despite what differences may otherwise separate them. But, of course, one can't measure that distance - one can't evaluate either Hughes's poem or one's own composition - without the presumption that both texts belong to similar fields of signification. Such a presumption is no less than the very precondition of measuring one's ability to perform in any discursive field at all, and the precise educational yield of the Summerfields' approach. In the process, it forces us to rethink, too, not just the relation of the literary to the paraliterary text, but also the reason we privilege literature as an object of study in the first place. We do so because literature is the locus par excellence for the production of persuasive rhetorical effects upon others, a microscope of the field of power in all its realms of play in life and letters alike, even in the semiotics of motorcycle repair. This position is perhaps difficult to accept wholeheartedly because of its raw truth; its inevitabilities are, however, inescapable. As a teacher, one cannot hesitate to explore every possibility.

Foreword to Texts & Contexts: A Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition, by Judith and Geoffrey Summerfield. New York: Random House, 1986.

Sample view:

Interview With Julia Kristeva

by Perry Meisel

PM: At what moment in French intellectual history would you say you arrived in Paris?

JK: It was a very interesting moment. Politically, it was one of the highest moments of Gaullism, that period when Charles de Gaulle said that he wanted to create a sphere of influence stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. Intellectually, there was the very interesting coexistence of the discovery of Russian formalism through Lévi-Strauss; a certain revival of Marxism, also on the background of structuralism (I mean a rereading of Hegel); and a third very important current, the renewal of psychoanalysis through Lacan. All these movements were, for me, the real background of the 1968 events. Because if you look at the people who were involved in the 1968 revolution - students - most of them were involved beforehand in very advanced theoretical writings. Les Cahiers pour l'analyse, for instance, at the Ecole Normale were done by people who became Maoists after 1968. So it was a kind of intellectual turmoil, a sort of real theoretical fever. Where can you speak of Marxism, structuralism, Freudianism? Not in the Eastern countries; it's not possible. American society is too technocratic and too dominated by positivist ideologies, whereas that's not the case in French society. It was a very, very rare conjunction.

PM: At what point did existentialism give way to this new wave and why?

JK: On the one hand, existentialism was, in my view, a regression with regard to the great philosophical and aesthetic formal movements, to take only my own fields. The whole development of linguistics, of formal logic, was fundamentally ignored by Sartrean existentialism. If you're interested, on the other hand, in art, the great revolution of the avant-garde, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and after them the surrealists - the entrance of psychosis into the life of the city which modern art represents - these were also ignored by existentialism. Thus, it was a reaction to all that. Structuralism, Marxism, Freudianism, joined together, are a reaction.

PM: And yet Lacan was, with the surrealists, already at work in the late 1920s. Why did it take so long, indeed, twenty years, maybe more than that, for this to break out? Lévi-Strauss had already begun his work before the war as well.

JK: Because of political reasons: you had the war. At that moment there was a sociological way of thinking, more rooted in the everyday and looking for immediate and simple causalities, that prevailed. Existentialism lasted after the war, for historical reasons and because of economic difficulties.

PM: So that a movement that claimed to interpret history was itself part of the determination.

JK: Precisely. It couldn't distance itself.

PM: It has been said that Sartre was unable to think the unconscious.

JK: Absolutely. I think that Sartrean thought has no means to deal with the unconscious and, similarly, with everything which is material and formal, in other words, with the whole problem of the modern arts, of poetry, of plastic art. The unconscious as a logic, as a language, which is the essence of the Freudian discovery, is entirely foreign to Sartrean thought.

PM: And yet in Marxism, even in orthodox Marxism, there is, implicitly at any rate, even before Lacan tells us so, a notion of the unconscious.

JK: It's not the same unconscious. I think that what seduced us in Marxism was rather a materialist way of reading Hegel and a concept of negativity. It was and still is a matter of finding the agent, the agent of process, the agent of history, the agent of the unconscious.

So, to summarize, there were some lacunae that had been pointed out in each - Marxism, structuralism, Freudianism - and, at the same time, some positive elements which had been brought in by the others. For example, Marxism had undergone a grafting of the theory of structuralism, but structuralism had undergone a grafting of the theory of subjectivity. In structuralism the subject was missing, so the subject was brought in in the form of different technical considerations: in linguistics, for example, the subject of enunciation, the speaking subject in literary texts, etc. There was a sort of exchange that enriched the three disciplines.

PM: In a sense, then, structuralism provided the link between Marxism and Freudianism that had never been accomplished before.

JK: At the moment we're in the middle of a regression which is present in the form of a return to the religious, a return to a concept of transcendence, a rehabilitation of spiritualism. It's a vast problem which can be interpreted in various ways. It is not uninteresting. There are now in France all sorts of spiritualist movements: pro-Christian, pro-Jewish, pro this and pro that. Here the Sartrean problem returns. I think that there's a religion of reason in Sartrean thought, just as in the new spiritualists there's a religion of transcendence. But both of them obliterate those forms in which the fact of signification is produced, the form in which meaning is produced.

PM: So, from this point of view, a religious notion of transcendence, a fetishizing of reason à la Sartre, are structurally the same.

JK: I think so, and both are regressions with regard to the current of thought which is most acute, most lucid in the twentieth century, and which involves, as well as the discovery of the determining role of language in human life, the whole adventure of contemporary art. There's a blindness in Sartrean thought in that regard which gives it extremely charming ethical and humanistic positions, just as it gives extremely precursive ethical and humanistic positions to all the new spiritualists today, who are often in the foreground of the cultural, ideological battle in Paris.

It would be better to take up again the basic presuppositions, start from the small things, the small notions. I had a professor who bequeathed to me a great wisdom in this area: Emile Benveniste, a professor of linguistics at the Collège de France. He used to say to me, "You know, Madame, I concern myself with small things, the verb 'to be,' for example." Well, I think one must have this ambitious modesty, leave the meaning of history, production, leave all that and take up instead the minimal components that constitute the speaking being. The little elements that make me speak, the little elements that make me desire. It's still too difficult to be able to separate them. I mean that it would be necessary to start from a minimalism, to simplify things, and to be satisfied with more rigorous thinking rather than stir up emptiness with grand theories.

PM: So could we say that Lacan and Benveniste together in some sense provided this next step, and that at this point one could situate the beginning of your work?

JK: Exactly. Benveniste's work is important because it sees the necessity of introducing the notion of the subject into linguistics. Chomskyan linguistics, even though it recognizes the place of the speaking subject (although in its Cartesian form), has finally stayed very far behind the great semantic and intersubjective field within discourse that Benveniste's perspective has opened up. What Benveniste wanted to found was not a grammar that generates normative sentences in limited situations. He wanted to constitute, and this is what is happening now, a linguistics of discourse. In other words, the object, language, has completely changed. Language is no longer a system of signs as Saussure thought of it; nor is language an object in the sense of generative grammar, that is, sentences generated by a subject presupposed to be Cartesian.

PM: What is the difference, then, from our traditional assumption of the artist as subject - that is, the artist who speaks in the work?

JK: I think that when you say that the artist speaks in the work, you suppose an entity that exists before the work. Yet we all know artists, and we know that very often their individuality is in total discordance or enormously different from what they've produced. In other words, the work of art, the production, the practice in which they are implicated extends beyond and reshapes subjectivity. There is, on the one hand, a kind of psychological ego, and on the other, there's the subject of a signifying practice. One mustn't imagine that there exists an author in itself, not that there is no relation between the two. I'm convinced that personal experience is very important for the materiality, the formal features, of the work of art, but there's no equivalence between the two. The work of art is a kind of matrix that makes its subject.

PM: In other words, our traditional understanding of modernism as the assertion of the free will of the subject over inherited forms is a misapprehension of what the twentieth century has given us?

JK: Precisely. Even more so because the problem of art in the twentieth century is a continual confrontation with psychosis. It's necessary to see how all the great works of art - one thinks of Mallarmé, of Joyce, of Artaud, to mention only literature - are, to be brief, masterful sublimations of those crises of subjectivity which are known, in another connection, as psychotic crises. That has nothing to do with the freedom of expression of some vague of subjectivity which would have been there beforehand. It is, very simply, through the work and the play of signs, a crisis of subjectivity which is the basis for all creation, one which takes as its very precondition the possibility of survival. I would even say that signs are what produce a body, that - and the artist knows it well - if he doesn't work, if he doesn't produce his music or his page or his sculpture, he would be, quite simply, ill or not alive. Symbolic production's power to constitute soma and to give an identity is completely visible in modern texts. And moreover, all of his experience, literary as well as critical, is preoccupied with this problem.

PM: So there is, then, to your mind, no way of one's role as an artist and one's role as political activist ever being entirely coincidental?

JK: I think that the artist, since we were just talking about form which is "content," is never more engagé than in his work. To ask an artist to s'engager in order to justify himself is an imposture into which many artists fall for reasons I have just mentioned: the work presupposes a lot of solitude and a lot of risks. You need to justify yourself; you need to identify yourself. But you have to know that, and if you know that, you can carry out engagement with humor; when you can, you take your distance. If not, engagement is the antidote to art. There's nothing more murderous for art than engagement. This is not to say that I am for art for art's sake. Art for art's sake is the reverse of l'art engagé. It presumes that there is such a thing as pure form, and contents that would be abject. I think, on the contrary, that contents are formal and forms are contents. Again, if you understand modern art as an experience in psychosis, to work with forms is the most radical way to seize the moments of crisis.

PM: So there is a political component to artistic activity and it cannot be direct.

JK: It's not direct and it's not immediate, because I think you know that you always ask yourself what the political component is, although that's a very recent question. Why not ask what the moral or religious component of aesthetic activity is? I think it's a relevant question. Remember Nietzsche's famous distinction between cursory history and monumental history. I think that the artist is in monumental history, and in monumental history, his relationship to history is through what one used to call morality or religion.

Originally published in Partisan Review 1, 1984

Alienating Alienation: Fredric Jameson's Revisionary Romance

by Perry Meisel

The Political Unconscious. By Fredric Jameson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. By Fredric Jameson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979.


What stirred Freud on his first visit to Rome in 1901 - as it had George Eliot and Walter Pater before him - was the disconcerting lesson that the city's form was its content. It was decay, the very decay of Europe inscribed in the "Eternal City," that startled in Freud its recognition and defense. A modernist reading of this episode would gloss it as an allegory of the soul's privation in a world of crumbling values. Yet the revolutionary side of this, Freud's representative experience, is not allegorical but structural. For in such a moment of vision we find the exemplary collapse of the Romantic oppositions that had organized Freud's early thought and then transformed it: form/content, self/other, subject/object, reader/text, consciousness/unconscious.
It has taken years for the consequences of this collapse to spell itself out in the various disciplines or gazes it invokes. And only in the dissemination of (post-)structuralist thought over the last decade or so have the consequences grown formalized enough to produce anything like the mighty narratological machinery engineered in the United States by Fredric Jameson. Especially significant is that Jameson's most recent work - The Political Unconscious and Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist- goes out of its way to restore to criticism in the current continental mode what its often lewd and ignorant opposition claims it lacks: an ambition beyond mere "formalism," some evidence against its supposedly aggressive contempt for "referentiality." Both The Political Unconscious and Fables of Aggression are monuments to the renewal or, really, the reinsertion of what we might call the referential imperative that proceeds directly from (rather than against) what Jameson will polemically call the "windless closure of the formalisms."
Key to the problem of referentiality for Jameson's noninstrumental or nonmimetic view of language is the problem of what really mediates social life and literary language. If language doesn't simply mirror the world, in what fashion does it refer? Much of the strength of Jameson's revisionist Marxist intervention derives from the answer to the question provided by the French refocusing on what in Marx is crucial, a project historically analogous to the great though troubled rereading of Freud begun by Lacan and recentered by Laplanche and (silently and negatively) by Foucault. Lacan's counterpart in the Marxist tradition is Althusser, and Pierre Macherey Jameson's Laplanche. Even the title of Macherey's Theory of Literary Production (Paris, 1966) already reverberates with the metaphorical linkage it enacts - a rapprochement between the production of goods and the production of texts. Needless to say, Lacan's rereading of Freud lighted on a metaphor in psychoanalysis structurally similar to the metaphor of production in Marx (note also the advanced efficiency with which it explained both Freud's system and its revisionary ratios). In psychoanalysis what had been revalorized - largely by an act of retranslation - were the Freudian notions of psychic economy and psychic investment (the latter a reappropriation of James Strachey's Hellenizing version of Besetzung, "cathexis"). Marx's language allowed art and ideology to find far closer and reflexive relations to the means of production than they seemed to have before.
Though Jameson himself is quick to refute the production analogy as a homology (one evidence perhaps of his certain indebtedness to it), it is nonetheless from this level of presupposition that his project is set in motion. The rejection of homology is in fact part of what Jameson claims the restoration of the category of mediation makes plausible all over again, namely, the staggered or "dialogical" relation between the social order and its symbolic products. Rather than an isomorphic relation between base and superstructure - for example, the production of material goods is structurally equivalent to the production of cultural goods - Jameson proposes the (only slightly) more complex notion that artistic texts are ideological products that try to escape or outwit the contradiction inherent in the production of goods as such. Thus the task of ideological production is to rewrite the contradiction as a "coherent" narrative.
Central, then, is the definition of ideology, which Jameson takes from Althusser's deconstruction of the classic Marxist opposition between base and superstructure. Ideology, says Althusser, is "the imaginary representation of the subject's relationship to his or her real conditions of existence." Jameson "refines" Althusser's definition "by distinguishing between such an 'imaginary representation' and its narrative conditions of possibility." To determine the latter, Jameson revalorizes the aesthetic in such a way as to "complete" Althusser, as he puts it, by offering, in Fables of Aggression, the following notion of aesthetic value as a methodological proposition: "that great art distances ideology by the way in which, endowing the latter with figuration and with narrative articulation, the text frees its ideological content to demonstrate its own contradictions: by the sheer formal immanence with which an ideological system exhausts its permutations and ends up projecting its own ultimate structural closure." Hence the privileged status of literature as a means of studying in action what Gramsci called "hegemony." "Ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic productions," writes Jameson in The Political Unconscious. "Rather the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions."
Thus Jameson's object is to intercept aesthetic form at is historical limit, indicating closures and/or breaks rather than narrating - overtly at least - a development or teleology that (in)directly causes or even governs the shifts his choice of texts enacts (modernism in the Lewis book, the movement from Balzac's classical realism to Conrad's impressionism in The Political Unconscious). And though ideology is narrative (and vice versa), history itself cannot be narrated as such because it is - Jameson uses another of Althusser's formulations - the always "absent cause" (like the Freudian unconscious) that the critic or historian can only reconstruct after the fact, as a paradigm or model installed retroactively by the act of analysis.
If Jameson's Marxism is largely Althusserian, the precise source of his methodological apparatus is in turn Lévi-Strauss's "The Structural Study of Myth," that central essay in which (the) myth(ological) is apprehended (as Barthes would also show) as an ideological structure. This structure is ideological in Althusser's exact sense: "as the imaginary resolution," as Jameson puts it, "of a real contradiction." But the myth's ideology is also structural, yielding thus to the analysis of its terms. Presented at length in The Political Unconscious, the Jamesonian "permutational scheme" (in his usage, always referred to as a combinatoire) is a structuralist invention designed to supersede the impossible options now open to "normal" criticism: "between antiquarianism and modernizing 'relevance' or projection." Such a "double bind" is especially familiar - indeed, exacerbated - in the study of pre-Romantic writers such as Shakespeare (did Hamlet have a "character problem" before the nineteenth century gave him one?), the history of whose criticism is, more than any other, a history of criticism's own historical determinations. In pre-Renaissance writers such as Chaucer, the "double bind" is especially obvious, forced as scholars are to choose between Talbot Donaldson's modernist, virtually Proustian reading of Chaucerian narration and D.W. Robertson's absolutist historicism, insisting, contra Donaldson, that Chaucer is unreadable without learning one's way back into the knowledge and presuppositions of the Middle Ages - only, of course, to remain there.
The specific elements Jameson has plugged into Lévi-Strauss's compensation structure are each familiar enough (semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism), although it is in the exchange among the three levels of analysis it projects that its peculiar strength is to be found. Before showing how the combinatoire works in practical criticism, let us quickly sketch its components in more detail:
(1) The introduction of Greimas's semiotic rectangle in order to diagram the binary oppositions that organize a given fiction's options: the ideals to which its world can aspire (usually through its characters), and the levels to which it can sink.
(2) The use of psychoanalysis at a Derridean level of apprehension: that is, narrative (like memory or language) as an exercise in simultaneous cancellation and preservation (the model of mind that emerges in Freud's "Note on the 'Mystic-Writing Pad'").
(3) The use of an Althusserian notion of mediation which seeks the closures of the resolution that a given text tries to perform upon its own "raw materials." It is also at this level that we see what Jamesonian mediation promises to produce: that opening onto the real or to history that emerges against the horizon of ideological closure dis-closed by the first two steps of analysis (what a given text resists, its "absent or unrepresentable infrastructural limiting system"). Thus the modernist ideology of ressentiment as Jameson describes it in an unlikely chapter on Gissing - the familiar modernist ideology of a restive resistance to civilization - becomes itself no more than the inverse of the order to which it is opposed, and so exposes not only the slavery of avant-garde sensibility to the master it seeks to dethrone, but also the shared capture of both sides of the (now sham) struggle within the same epistemic closure. Liberation and repression can be thought only in relation to each other.
In Fables of Aggression, Jameson appeals to Deleuze's and Guattari's distinction between the molecular and molar levels of narrative as a means of shifting his gaze from one level of his combinatoire to another, the levels in turn of a narrative's molecular and micro-components ("style," figural motifs) and its shaping or containing strategies at a more holistic level (often that of genre, such as the imposition of a romance tag in the second half of Lord Jim). Nor is the "unity" of a work what the combinatoire is designed to register and unpack.
From Jameson's point of view, the novel is therefore a privileged form, not only because it is the classic site of production of the bourgeois subject, nor even because ideology understood as narrative has no more exact expression than in the mechanisms of prose fiction. No, the novel is significant above all because it is a genre that takes earlier genres - as well as the codes of contemporary social life and value and their histories - as its own "raw materials" or "ideologemes." Jameson's notion of the novel is, from the start, that of the representation of representations even in its moments of realist desire. For even the classical realist is in fact reflexive, since the signifiers of his text are drawn from the signs that constitute the culture he depicts: if life itself is a matrix of sign systems, then representational art is always already a kind of (meta)commentary. Here the full extent of Jameson's particular debt to Bakhtin emerges, since these representations or ideologemes are the sedimented inheritances of social and aesthetic laws of every kind and description, laws or languages with which a "novel" (including what Jameson calls the "artificial" or vernacular epic) is, by definition, in constant and polyphonic dialogue (Bakhtin's "heteroglossia" or "dialogism" proper).
How does the combinatoire work in practice? In truncated form in a reading of Wuthering Heights: The question of Heathcliff's status as villain or hero is dismissed as a "disguise," his apparent centrality merely a function of his role as donor in the sedimented genre of the folktale (here Propp emerges behind Greimas) at work in the novel as an ideologeme. Though Heathcliff is no longer "the hero or protagonist in any sense of the word," the text nonetheless "deliberately" projects such a "misreading" to cover his function as "a mediator and a catalyst" in "his twofold mission . . . to restore money to the family and to reinvent a new idea of passion." (The habits of mind produced by this kind of narratological exercise even allow Jameson such provocative throwaways as the following brief meditation on the nature of tragedy and our customary interpretation of it: "Neither Creon nor Iago can be read as villains without dispersing the tragic force of the plays; yet our irresistible temptation to do so tells us much about the hold of ethical categories on our mental habits.")
With Jameson's reading of Balzac, we can watch the combinatoire stretch out a bit more. The semiotic rectangle allows Jameson to map out social inconsistencies or contradictions in a given novel as precise antinomies. Presented as a series of logical permutations, they offer fictional ways out of the "intolerable closure" of thought and action described by the diagram in order to produce a "solution" realizable only at the level of the imaginary or ideological. Thus in La Vieille Fille, Mademoiselle Cormon's two suitors come to represent (as productions of the "anthropomorphic combinations" of historically given possibilities that generate "characters") a double bind with no apparent escape: the impossible coexistence of Napoleonic energy and bourgeois impotence on the one hand (Du Bousquier) and, on the other, of languor and the (once-)legitimate power of the ancien regime (the Chevalier). Mademoiselle Cormon is thus denied an acceptable "match" from either point of view, since neither produces the ideal permutation that history has already taken away: energy combined with aristocracy. Hence the appearance of the exiled aristocratic officer, the Count de Troisville, who represents in a single figure what the other two cannot: the "legitimacy" of an aristocratic lineage and the almost "bourgeois" energy of a Napoleon. But because the count is already married, the solution or "match" can be thought at the only level proper to it - the imaginary. The count's emergence produces what Jameson calls the novel's "horizon figure," one who "blocks out a place which is not that of empirical history but of a possible alternate one: a history in which some genuine restoration would still be possible, provided the aristocracy could learn this particular object lesson, namely that it needs a strong man who combines aristocratic values with Napoleonic energy."
With Conrad we come to the edge of the history The Political Unconscious narrates (the earlier Lewis book continues the later one's historical trajectory into modernism proper), largely because Conrad's work embodies a "fault line" at which the nineteenth-century reduction of experience to the psychological subject reaches its outer limit. What Jameson calls Conrad's "sensorium" - the tendency of perceptual impressions to replace the objects which prompt them - is a "strategy of aestheticization," which turns the object world into a virtual museum by means of fetishizing the "independence of the image," thus recontaining it politically. Hence emerge (as one theorization) those ideologies of autonomous art, formalism, and so on, that may be said to (be able to) derive from the novel's first part (and that Conrad himself sought to guard against even earlier in the preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'). And yet because this first theorization threatens to collapse under the burden of what it represses, the text must produce a second part that will recontain what is socially dangerous in it (here we may recall too that Conrad interrupted composition of the novel at its midpoint):

On the one hand the manifest level of the content of Lord Jim . . . gives us to believe that the "subject" of this book is courage and cowardice, which we are meant to interpret in ethical and existentializing terms; on the other, the final consumable verbal commodity - the vision of the ship - the transformation of all these realities into style and the work of what we will call the impressionistic strategy of modernism whose function is to derealize the content and make it available for consumption on some purely aesthetic level; while in between these two, the brief clang from the boiler room that drives the ship marking the presence beneath ideology and appearance of that labor which produces and reproduces the world itself, and which, like the attention of God in Berkeleyan idealism, sustains the whole fabric of reality continuously in being . . . .

Thus the second half of Lord Jim is, according to Jameson, little more than melodrama (shades of the later Conrad?), which functions to recognize the explosive possibilities of the first half under the (now-)archaic genre of romance. Lord Jim becomes, then, an "ideological fable designed to transform into a matter of individual existence what is in reality a relationship between collective systems and social forms."
Focused as it is on the self-erasing structure of ideology or "mythology," Jameson's exemplary reading of Conrad's novel is obviously not limited to use of modernist, novelistic, or even canonical texts alone. The same sort of operation motivates many television advertisements today: Beta Max commercials, for example, about the simultaneous marriage of quadruplets - copies of copies for copies - bearing the "unifying" or recontaining "logo" "the one and only"; or even news shows advertising paintings of their video images as proof of their "originality." (Mary Tyler Moore had already only a few years before demystified the latter by making the production of a news show its enabling comic fiction.) Jameson's analysis of founding modernist documents such as Lord Jim, then, actually uncovers and elaborates the paradigm that produces ideological formations even in their broadest contemporary manifestations in popular culture.
Nostromo, too, indicates the limits of its ideological closure, but, as Jameson shows, in a way that inverts the strategy of Lord Jim, and, in the process, allows the later novel to touch upon history in a manner the earlier one cannot. For in Nostromo, the apparently psychological or personal drama of Decoud and Nostromo produces the emergence of the far more genuinely public drama that they secretly represent: "a narrative production of society itself" in their passage from nature to culture as they cross the gulf with their lighter of silver. But the cost of this production (the nuances of its development are too elaborate to recapitulate here) is the repression of one form of popular insurrection in the service of the new culture (the Montero brothers, whose "caesarism," as Jameson calls it, disallows them the right to represent "democracy" in a separatist occidental republic), in favor of another version, that of old Viola and the spirit of Garibaldi. The phenomenon, says Jameson, is "akin to Freudian splitting," whereby the "bad double" of the Monteros is canceled (even as it is preserved) by the valorization, instead, of the European (and so "properly" Latin) representation of revolution.
In the earlier Fables of Aggression, the combinatoire (there only implicitly formulated) performs similar work on Wyndham Lewis's corpus, and allows us to see the strategy of recontainment at work in a starker manner than in either Balzac or Conrad. At the molecular level of Lewis's sentences, argues Jameson, the trope of hypallage is privileged and therefore symptomatic: this is the trope by which an adjective comes to refer to a substantive different from the one to which it is assigned by the grammatical context. The opening of Lewis's 1917 Cantleman's Spirng Mate displays hypallage exactly: "Cantleman walked in the strenuous fields . . . ." Thus, remarks Jameson, "The attributes of actor or act are transferred onto the dead scenery . . . . 'Properties' come loose and stick to the wrong places." Metaphor, to put it another way, yields up its secret status as metonymy, thus collapsing the sacred difference between the languages of prose and poetry (at least in Jakobson's influential reading). And the point of Lewis's aggressive use of hypallage? To "transform the figurative into the literal," and so to "kick . . . away the metaphorical apparatus by which we have risen into the figural."
Before the consequences of such a claim rebound upon the later Lewis, however, the simple recontainment strategy of the "national allegory" of his early fiction will do, since his text does little to threaten it, hence gives it little to repress. "National allegory," after all, retains all those categories of essence and original qualities (racial type and so on) that are in fact vouchsafed by a prose that believes itself closer to the real than any literary language before it. For any speech with so much faith in its ability to achieve a higher verisimilitude must presume not only the existence of a natural and/or object world independent of language, but also the existence of fixed, universal essences that metaphysically - rather than socially - determine the fabric of social law from a transhistorical, archetypal, ultimately racist point of view.
The break in Lewis's career comes, however, when the earlier molecular strategy of a "literal" prose ends up deconstructing the conditions of its own possibility, admitting the price of its readability:

This complex narrative operation thus involves a four-term process. The novelist establishes an initial "literal" (which is to say, "fictive") situation, only immediately to fragment it into the building blocks and components of a new allegorical and thematic textual narrative, which has little enough thematic relationship to the original. The reader is then obliged to begin with the fragments of the allegory, which must be reconstructed in narrative form before the first-degree or "realistic" narrative can be deduced and inserted beneath the text as the latter's signified.
Yet this signified exists nowhere: it is an evanescent effect of the reader's own "prior knowledge" or existential experience, which comes before him/her with the force of something already known, something recognized, rather than witnessed for the first time.

So in order to repress the inauthenticity (in the Frankfurt Jameson's vocabulary) of modern life, Lewis is forced to invent a new kind of molar recontainment that will repress - that will (in the vocabulary of the Derridean Jameson) preserve and cancel at one and the same time - the utterly figurative nature of the "raw materials" of both life and literature. And what danger does its leakage threaten to expose? That of the "crisis" of the "authentic self," as it is dispersed into a vortex of ideologemes, transformed into what Jameson calls, following Jean-Francois Lyotard, a "libidinal apparatus." So the new vision that "displaces the crisis of the self" as it is decentered into a force field of dialogical proportions is the recontaining myth of the "strong personality" (Lewis's "proto-fascism" and its lineage in the earlier "national allegory"). By aligning the determinate possibilities of existence in a semiotic rectangle that allows only such judgments as weak/strong, mediocre/masterful, the only possible imaginary solution is that of the "strong personality."
To resuscitate Lewis, however, is also (and here Jameson follows Lewis himself exactly) to dismiss those canonical modernists situated squarely within Romantic tradition such as Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The repression (through a strong misreading) of Woolf and Joyce alike is symptomatic at a number of levels, especially when we remember that the "libidinal apparatus" is dramatized with far more pungency and authority in Woolf (or even Lawrence) than in Lewis (that "jar on the nerves," as Woolf puts it, skewing subjectivity in her fiction); or even more, when we recall that the decentering of the subject at the mercy of the raw materials of the vortex becomes an older Stephen Dedalus's overweening preoccupation in Ulysses. Of course, the flooding of a weak novelist by a strong critic is probably the real motivation for both Jameson's choice of Lewis and the swerve from canonical orthodoxy, even though the strategy carries in its train other side effects as well, especially the questionable endorsement of only those writers who practice an overtly "dialogical" prose fiction - James and Beckett in particular. (Why Jameson is willing to grant a separatist legitimacy to a postmodern literature still almost wholly within the debt of Joyce remains enigmatic.)
Surely, then, the dialogical appeals to Jameson not only because it describes the novel equally well from both a dialectical and a differential point of view, but also because it mirrors the structure of his own imagination so neatly. As a tissue of relations to other discourses and traditions, Jameson's own discourse constantly shifts its relations to its relations - moving, most characteristically, from Derrida in one phrase to the Frankfurt hermeneutic in the next - and can thereby change its entire range or play of epistemological coordinates from moment to moment in a transpositional strategy at once exhilarating and exasperating. To invoke Jameson's use of Bakhtin in his own defense is therefore a necessity as Jameson moves through the dialogical operations of the combinatoire by means of what he himself calls an "unavoidable shifting of gears." But whether this is all a calculated effect or simply the overflow of a sensibility overdetermined to the point of saturation remains for us to consider. Does Jameson's text, dialogical as it may be, perform the "critical return upon itself" that Jameson maintains all texts should display as a sign of auto-accountability, of what he calls the necessity of "reflexive play" in analysis?

*

Surely the relative autonomy that Althusser gives to art requires aesthetic discourse to play at the limits of its possibilities. Jameson is, of course, a critic at the limit, but also a critic at a moment of crisis as he comes into his maturity. However, can we legitimately address Jameson's project in the vocabulary of those now-suspect Romantic terms: development, style? And what of Jameson's often rawly layered prose, an insufficient irony, even an insufficient truculence? Can we say such things without presuppositions of personality and expressiveness that the Derridean (if not the Frankfurt) conscience forbids? Is Jameson's intent simply to reject the problem of style altogether in favor of a dialogism that can border on a resurrection of the Imitative Fallacy? Does Jameson genuinely relinquish the pose of the critic as sensibility in favor of the critic as mere functionary or sieve for the knowledges (sciences) that leak through his text? Or, by contrast, is Marxism itself an elaborate defense mechanism by which he can, in conscience, allow himself to dodge the question of his status as a writer under the shelter of the collective?
Lest we be accused of ideological capture by speaking of what may seem to be "style" in the quaint sense, let us recall that our purpose is not to reconstitute an Author, but to indicate gaps in the text's accounting machinery. One trope by which we can intervene in the problem of thinking the "collective" (for we do retain, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, our "bodies" and our "pleasures") is to reconsider that agency identified by another hybrid kind of criticism as the Reader (the best of it indebted to the last, decisive paragraphs of Barthes's "Death of the Author"). Who is the Reader if not precisely that absent but organizing agency that Jameson seeks in his attempt to find an equally totalizing subject to follow, even to rival (with all the requisite epistemological hedges) history in Althusser's sense, or the unconscious in Freud's? And what better model to mediate not only the dialogical relations already in place in a text of the past (Jameson's aim), but also to mediate in turn the additional relation of the belated Reader to the dialogical brew?
And yet despite whatever accommodations may be possible at the level of redefining the collective, grayer difficulties emerge when we consider the stamina with which Jameson defends the classical Marxist notion of alienation within the vortex of a postauthenticist deconstruction of the mythology of voice and presence (hence it is tempting to reconsider the trope of alienation, like much of the terminology of classical Marxism, as an ideologeme in its own right). From an immediate point of view, of course, no one can doubt that certain laborers are alienated from their work by a structure of relation quite different from the intellectual's. And yet to insist, as Jameson does, on a relative identity is not only to presume some "nature" from which "we" are supposedly estranged, but also to reconstitute that homology between the production of goods and of thought that Jameson himself rejects.
As the Lewis book attests, Jameson knows well enough that alienation is not simply the precondition of the artist as we know him. It is (also) his precise goal. In the Romantic case above all, the "originality" of the artist and his work - even of personality as such - is a product of precisely the degree of alienation from precedent that allows us to see something else, something "new" emerge from its sources in force fields whose agency the "new" text wishes to cancel ("individual talent") even as it preserves ("tradition"). This is, of course, the very structure of Lewis's problematic (and therefore exemplary) modernity, the separation that defines connection that in turn requires separation that in turn requires connection, and so on. Jameson correctly identifies this chiasmatic or transgressive schema as the recurrent structure of the modernist imagination, but the curious denial of its primary novelistic exponents returns again as a symptom that must mean something else.
Why, then, the repression of Romantic modernism despite its even richer possibilities for Jameson's argument than Lewis? Largely because it allows Jameson to repress that which Marx seems to go out of his way to avoid but which The Political Unconscious reconstitutes - or, better, recontains - in its final, and quite unexpected, chapter. There Jameson simply asserts an avowedly utopist view of what we might call the "socialist projection," a view of history as "a single vast unfinished plot," with the Marxist garden/resurrection marking the limits of its desire. Astonishingly enough - especially given the gear marked "Althusser" - here Jameson fully recuperates those apparently offhand Frankfurt tropes scattered throughout his text - the "fallen world of capitalism," the "radical impoverishment and constriction of modern life" - in order to produce the terms of an argument guaranteed (like the arguments of the canonical high modernists he deplores) to result in that Eliot/Lukacs (!) view of contemporary society as one of "reification" (the latter as much an ideologeme now as alienation). In fact, we may even say The Political Unconscious is structured very much like Lord Jim: it recontains at the molar level of the romance of Marxism the molecular level of deconstructive insurgencies of a practical critic who, like the text of the first part of Lord Jim, is already beyond the closure of the macro-text's inevitably frustrated strategy of recuperation. Despite Jameson's rejection of Hayden White's reading of Marxist historiography as romance in structure, Jameson quite clearly means to perceive the truth of the romance or the humanist argument - the Frankfurt reading of Marx - even as he cancels it with the voice of the French, Althusserian rereading. And to say that Marx is, like Hegel or Freud, a product of Romantic tradition anyway is to say nothing new.
By what transdiscursive authority, then, can Jameson speak of an ability to achieve what no philosophy has ever achieved - freedom from the closure his work describes? Even the simplest formulations make the problematic of prognosis a delicate one indeed, whether Freud's ("Only a wish can impel the psychic apparatus to activity"), or Marx's own, which reaches its limit in the fragility of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. The authority to which Jameson appeals, of course, is that of Marxism itself, to that (representation of a) "resistance to matter" which is, as he puts it, the crucial third term missing both in Derridean difference and in the (ultimately non-)dialectic of Hegel's master/slave relation. It is here that the ultimate instance of Jameson's self-accounting (or lack of it) emerges, and it lies in the difference, as it were, between dialectic and difference. Whether there is such a difference or not is the central but largely repressed question that Jameson himself raises only briefly, in the relative safety of an aside in Fables of Aggression. (In The Political Unconscious, he directly rejects any identity between the two procedures.) To try to mediate between a notion of differance and dialectic is, as Jameson suggests in an underdeveloped footnote in the later book, to appeal to another notion of temporality altogether (here the readerly alternative of Nachträglichkeit, or belatedness, recurs).
But the question remains: Do Derrida and, through Nachträglichkeit, Hegel, deconstruct Marx's "contradictions" into Foucault's chiasmatic, productive oppositions, the force fields of the symbolic, the very structure of ideological closure? If Marxism is a "romance" (whether Jameson assents or not), then its transcendental signified is the production of precisely that absent third term whose presence, as Jameson well knows (whether it is history, the unconscious, or the Real) is marked only by its absence. Indeed, the very reflexivity by which Jameson tries to have his garden and deconstruct it too is Derridean rather than properly dialectical (for the dialogical can also be read either way): "to invent a space from which to think . . . two identical yet antagonistic features together all at once." Of course, what emerges in this double definition is also what emerges when we note that the structure of surplus value in Marx - the difference between a worker's pay and the value of the object his labor produces, the classical measure of his alienation - is also the structure of signification as such for Derrida: the necessity of a surplus or residue of the always-already against which all that may be must come into being.

*

Despite these inevitable difficulties - even despite the fact that the irritation they often engender can become an odd source of pleasure - we owe to Jameson, as to no other Anglo-American critic, the debt of a profound politico-aesthetic revelation and example. It is not surprising, then, to find that, unlike the relatively recent Fables of Aggression, the newer Political Unconscious is addressed to a public rather more general than Jameson's work has presumed to address before. Life Geoffrey Hartman's Criticism in the Wilderness, it is additional evidence of avant-garde criticism giving way to the necessity of a more public stance, already a symptom of the resistance to theory that now becomes a subject in its own right. Such resistance suggests, of course, that public issues of the gravest significance are at question, especially the question of political action itself. Given Jameson's attraction to Nietzsche's deconstruction of antinomies such as good and evil, might not his own ideologemic position suggest in turn the historicization of left and right as we crest a new wave in history?
Jameson's most powerful contribution to the politics of theory, then, is not simply the referential yield of his rigorous discipleship to European criticism, nor even the practical fusion his work enacts between New York social criticism and New Haven close analysis. It lies instead, in the final instance, in the force with which it pressures the necessity, intentional or not, of rethinking the political agenda through the cautionary epistemologies that Europe has produced as the price for its dead.

Originally published in October 22, Fall 1982