Critical Theory & The Academy

Showtime

2010-12-05T17:45:00.004-05:00

I have created your final post assignment by combining a selection of your suggestions from last Thursday's class. Special thanks to In the Box, Kerfuffle, Total Eclipse of the Heart, Theorize This, and the Pedagogical Imperative.

Compose a post a) defining queer (in a variety of its senses, including the ways in which Butler and queer theory use it); b) explaining queer theory; and c) discussing the conflict (as troublesome, powerful, productive, etc.) inherent in identifying with a particular identity while simultaneously rejecting identity politics. You should make reference to Butler's "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in your post as well as any other source you find useful. In addition, you should "make your post pretty" (with a video clip, image, etc.). If you wish, you may use popular cultural examples to explain and support elements of your post.

Posts are due by Wednesday, 12/8, at 7 p.m.

A conversation about feminism

2010-11-28T10:08:00.003-05:00

In class last Tuesday, we began to discuss the main points of Cixous's "Sorties" and of the selection we read from Butler's Bodies that Matter. I asked you to consider the two texts in conversation with one another and to respond to the following:

What are the parameters of the conversation? What are the main concerns of each text? What concerns do they share?
Identify the argument of each text and the foundations (including concepts, theoretical methods, theorists) of each argument.
Describe the writing styles of each theorist and analyze the differences between the two.
What are the major disagreements in the conversation?

For this week's post (due Wednesday 12/1 by 7 p.m.), engage in the critical conversation. Within a thorough and detailed account of the critical conversation between Cixous and Butler, offer your own analysis of the nature and the place of the "feminine" within feminism.

Guest lecture, Ken Rufo on Baudrillard

2010-11-01T21:39:00.003-04:00

I am happy to introduce a guest of years past, Ken Rufo, and to include below his engaging, thorough, and thought-provoking lecture on Baudrillard. Ken is a former blogger who followed the Critical Theory & the Academy blog project from 2006- 2008 and offered this post shortly after Baudrillard's death. We will be discussing the lecture, so print out the post and bring it to Thursday's class.

Jean Baudrillard - French sociologist, philosopher, pataphysician - I don't really know what you should call him. People say he was a postmodernist, whatever that means, but he repeatedly disavowed the label and said that he was actually arguing against postmodernism. The interpretations of his work are all over the map. Some theorists, like Arthur and Marillouise Kroker laud Baudrillard's alleged celebration of postmodern culture, John Armitage refers to his work as a "tired" form of postmodernism, Mike Gane thinks Baudrillard failed to be radical enough, and heavyweight Doug Kellner complains that Baudrillard lost it when he gave up on trying to help advance and improve Marxist thought, which was his only really valuable contribution. Everyone seems to have a different read, which is probably a sign that Baudrillard is a deceptively difficult thinker. Or that people are crazy.

In what follows, I'll try to give something like an historical overview to Baudrillard's work, as well as attempt to situate him relative to some of the other theories you have encountered.

Baudrillard begins as a Marxist, and if you go take a look at his early works, you'll find a heavy Marxist bent and an explicit engagement with Marxist thinkers (most notably Lukacs and Debord). His first book of original theorizing, System of Objects, is an attempt to modify structural Marxism (which focuses on the material modes of production, and which begins its critical analysis of the commodity by talking about things like use-value - what an object does - and exchange-value - how much it is worth relative to something else). Baudrillard felt that structural Marxism was too limited, and that it needed to incorporate "sign-value" into its analysis. By sign-value, Baudrillard is pointing to something that seems obvious to us today, namely that often what an object represents or signifies is more important than how much it costs or how high quality is its construction. If you want a really obvious example, think about Tommy Hilfiger, who doesn't even make his own clothing, but instead buys cheap, sweatshop made clothing and adds his brand to it - that's sign value, pure and simple. Baudrillard argues (this is back in the 60s and early 70s) that focusing on sign-value means that you have to focus on patterns of consumption rather than the modes of production.

Sometime later, in a book called For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard sets out to explain how the commodity can be understood as a sign in and of itself, and vice versa, how the sign is understood as a form of commodity logic. This book is brilliant but almost mind-numbingly complicated, and suffice it to say that at the end of a whirlwind tour of theorizing about semiotics and commodity-forms, Baudrillard argues that even the Marxist idea of the commodity is always already a function of a preexisting sign-value, or to put it another way, that Marxist theory requires, implicitly, a prior set of assumptions about how language works and how they influence thought. So this book is the first of several shifts from the early Baudrillard: instead of trying to add sign-value to the commodity, like he did previously, now Baudrillard is saying that actually sign-value is what made possible the analysis of the commodity in the first place.

Now how is that possible? Again, it's a rather complicated story, but part of what Baudrillard is getting at is that we cannot assume that the commodity, as analyzed by Marx, is really a "discovery." It could be that Marx is inventing the commodity even as he "discovers" it at work, since by analytically codifying the commodity and explaining how it works to support capitalism, he is establishing a set of theoretical principles that make of the commodity-object a set of theoretical commodities. In other words, instead of buying stuff with my money, with Marxism I can explain stuff with my theories and concepts. Those two movements are not unrelated.

At the risk of trying a bit of specificity, think about this: in semiotics (from Saussure) the sign is comprised of the signifier (the phonemes that comprise a word) and the signified (the concept of the word), and the signs only gain meaning through a sort of negation, or what Saussure calls their diacritical function, which is really just a fancy way of saying we know what something is because of what we know it isn't. Like a cat isn't a dog, or truth isn't falsehood, that sort of thing. Saussure also says that this meaning is facilitated by the fact that language functions as a system, governed by grammar and syntax and what not, and that makes things a lot easier than if people were just shouting out words in random order. For Marx, the commodity is structured very much like the sign, except instead of signifier and signified, it has use-value and exchange-value, and it gets transformed from merely a random object of value into a "commodity" through its exchange with other commodities, a process that eventually gives rise to a pure form of the commodity - money. Marx says that money is the pure commodity form because money can be exchanged for anything; in other words, it is pure exchange value, and of course this hides all the labor that went into making it, labor that was probably done in order to make the object have a use-value, and that was probably exploited so that the capitalists could turn it into surplus-value. Put into specifics: people ( i.e. laborers) worked to make a chair comfy and sturdy, but when it gets converted into whatever dollar amount for which it will be sold, we lose sight of that whole labor component and even of use-value, thinking instead primarily (maybe even only) of its exchange-value.

Anyway, I'm explaining all of this in order to suggest that the structure of the two systems - Saussure's semiotics and Marx's critique of Capital - are rather similar. Not the same, but close enough, and after another 150 pages of examining this relationship, well, Baudrillard's arguments about what this closeness means are pretty convincing.

So where does this lead him, or us? Well, interestingly, one of his conclusions is that these systems of analysis, with all their critical power, are still just new systems of exchange-values. Remember when I wrote previously that Marx's analysis of the commodity becomes a kind of theoretical commodity, something that we use to make our class papers or arguments look good? For Baudrillard, the possibility exists that these new systems of exchange, in this case "critical theory" or "Marxist theory," become a model of sorts that produces its analyses as if they are self-fulfilling prophecies. One just follows the analytical formula, deploying the right terms or concepts when needed, and voila, you've got yourself some good criticism. This starts to frustrate him after a while. Think about it for a bit, we'll come back to it.

Anyway, by the time he is done with Political Economy of the Sign he has decided that Marx has a lot more problems than just forgetting about or not predicting the importance of sign-value. Instead, he argues that Marx goofs up, badly, in that he "naturalizes" labor, i.e. he makes it seem like in the absence of capitalism (either before industrial capitalism, or after the communists take over), man will simply labor because he likes to labor, and he likes to labor because he likes being useful, or likes producing things with use-value. In this way Marx justifies focusing on who controls the modes of production, arguing that it should be the workers (come on, unite!) who control production and not the capitalists with the surplus money. Viva la revolucion and stuff. Baudrillard thinks the problem here is that once you naturalize labor, the only thing you can focus on is production, and for Baudrillard production is a wrong turn. Capitalism doesn't care who produces what, he argues, instead all it cares about is that it is constantly producing stuff, because in the end capitalism is about consumption, not production, and the only way to continue to justify consumption is to constantly have new objects produced in order to consume them. So Marx got it backwards: capitalism isn't about the production of exchange-value, it's about the naturalization of use-value ( e.g., "Oooh, I could sure use that new gadget!"). Each of these are actually sign-values, that is, theoretical sign-values. So Baudrillard argues that really Marx's theories are the "mirror of production" and are a good rhetorical balancing act that actually helped support capitalism rather than subvert or oppose it. If you want confirmation of this theory, from someone who is not a particularly big Baudrillard fan, check out Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld and Catastrophe, where she basically shows that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. spent the Cold War talking about who could make more stuff, more efficiently, and both routinely supported government-funded campaigns celebrating factory work, with one saying, basically, "let's show those godless commies!", and the other saying "let's show those evil capitalists!"

But wait a second, you're thinking, I thought Baudrillard was the guy who said everything is a simulation. What's all this random Marxist stuff? Don't worry, we're getting there. See, in System of Objects, simulation is already one of Baudrillard's concerns, but he doesn't really use the terminology in the same way. What he does say is that the mass production of objects and the general flow of wealth is making it possible, more and more, for people of lower classes to "simulate" living like people in the upper classes. I, too, can have representations of fine art on my wall, or something that looks like a good desk. It won't be a family heirloom made by Master Deskmakerman, but it won't be a beat up bit of plywood laid across some half-broken bricks, either. In the years after System of Objects, Baudrillard sticks with his interest in simulation (though again, he doesn't really focus on it in those terms), and does so following two basic themes: first, the new media of television (mostly television), though all media do it in some ways, seems to increasingly speed up, copy, and generally make artificial things appear real, and second, all these theoretical models, like Marxism, are functionally critical simulations, constantly making artificial meanings appear as if they are the real meanings, and pretending to discover insight when in reality they created the model that produced the insight, so they produced more of a simulation of insight rather than anything novel.

So around 1976, in another huge book, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard first sets forth this idea of simulation as being of particular value, devoting a whole chapter to what he calls the "order" of simulation. At the time, he identifies three basic orders. In the first, simulation stands in for reality, this is the order of the counterfeit or of forgery. In the second, simulation hides the absence of reality. And in the third, simulation produces its own reality, as if reality was the consequence of a model that makes possible its production.

The example I always use to explain this is that of money, which is, after all, a good example, since it also happens to be Marx's pure commodity form. So think about it this way, once upon a time, if you had a cow, and I had some hay, and you wanted hay and I wanted some beef, we might meet up, decide how much hay the cow is worth and make a trade. But of course, we're not going to carry the cow or the hay around in our pockets or on our backs, so we'll need some kind of icon that signifies the cow or hay, and that we trust signifies it correctly. So if I have a carving of the cow, you need to trust that the carving doesn't exaggerate how much meat is on the cow, or if I have some drawings of the hay, you need to trust that I actually have some hay at all, or that the hay corresponds to the amount of hay depicted, and so on. Now chances are that we're going to trust each other enough to make our deal, since after all, if we finally go to make the exchange and realize we've been cheated, we would call off the exchange. This use of icons, then, is the first order of simulation. But it gets to the point where I get annoyed carving a new cow each time I go to market, and there are moments when I just don't need hay, just like there are moments when you just aren't hungry for beef (I'm a vegetarian, so that moment has been like 12 years for me, but whatever), so we come up with something else: money. I assign a dollar amount to my hay, and you assign one to your cow, and now we don't need to exchange goods, instead we exchange money, which now stands in for the perceived or assumed exchange value of the goods or services we wish to purchase. Hell, I don't even need to own hay. I just need some cash, and I can get the beef, because after all, you can then use that cash to go buy yourself some hay. Or some alcohol. Or some Elvis albums. It doesn't matter, because the use of money no longer requires any actual referent to a real object or action. In other words, it's the second order of simulation. But this creates some uncertainty, because it turns out that my $20 one day may not buy the same amount as my $20 dollars on some other day, which means, egads, that the value of my $20 varies. In effect my $20 isn't actually $20 dollars, or at least isn't any objective value that can be called $20. Confusing. Think about the stock market if you want to see this principle carried out to its extreme: a company can appear to be doing well because it exceeded expectations, even though the expectations were very low and it's still not making a profit, and yet the value of the stock, and thus the company, rises independently of the value of what they produce or how well their goods are being received. The dot com bust and Enron show that the stock market works in ways that are often unrelated to anything remotely objective or verifiable, and yet entire fortunes and values are predicated on the flow of stocks and the expectations of the stock holders. In effect, the value is determined by a model of that value, rather than some real reference outside of that model. Even when the bubble bursts and certain companies collapse within that model, as with the dot commers and Enron, the really odd part is none of those collapse changes anything - the stock market keeps on ticking as if those failures are the exception rather than the norm, and the money made by Ken Lay and others is still their money. There are moments when it actually does collapse or crash, at least in part, and we can think of these as a bit of reality's revenge, but overall the model stage of simulation is so pronounced that it just keeps on trucking.

I'll get back to the media and technology side of this equation in a second, but real quick let me say that this is exactly the case with Marxism: it is just another model, and as such a simulation, and since it is about producing a truth, in ends up inadvertently feeding the idea of production that it attempts to subvert or oppose as being the evil axis of capitalism. It is also the same problem that Baudrillard has with psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan. Psychoanalysis acts like it has discovered the unconscious, but really what it does is to produce the unconscious as an expository device in accordance with its own precepts. Lacan had an army of terms and tricks, and each of these purport to explain something real out there in the world or in the psyche, whereas Baudrillard argues that it invents them. Baudrillard also sees the same model process overtaking Foucault, in that by the time Foucault writes his famous History of Sexuality, vol 1 power basically means everything, everywhere, for everybody, and so the truth of analyzing power is precisely its invention as a theoretical model. The point is that everyone keeps producing these systems of production, proliferating signs and truths and concepts, and yet doing so with the pretense of discovering what they are actually inventing. These forms of critical thought are false start for Baudrillard, and in the end, he argues that side with the subject's desire to produce meaning for itself, even if the meaning it produces is the codified uncertainty of its meaning. Ambiguity is perfectly palatable to the subject, he argues; ambivalence, on the other hand, can be revolutionary.

It is at this point that hopefully some of the earlier discussion seems useful. The binary relationship between a signifier and signified in semiotics replicates the formal logic of the commodity: by positing a relationship of equivalence (exchange) between signifier and signified (even diverse, polyvalent signifieds), the logic of signification controls and dominates the production of meaning: meaning may be misunderstood or distorted, but fear not, for in the end, meaning is possible. Signification establishes a positive code of meaning, another victory of form occluded by the debate over semantic content. In turn, the commodity rhetorically circumscribes the sign: meaning can be consumed, used, exchanged. And so we return to a fairly banal metaphysical trap, desperately searching for the meaning of the something so that we can deny its alternative — nothingness, confusion, whatever. Baudrillard puts it this way in Symbolic Exchange and Death: "Expression always falls into the trap... of assuming the force of an authority, an agency, rather than a substance. Western thought cannot bear, and has at bottom never been able to bear, a void of signification, a non-place and a non-value. It requires a topography and an economics" (p. 234).

Against signification's positive value, Baudrillard (p. 161) positions the "symbolic," an affect of meaning that falls outside the process of signification, the "outside the sign" of which "we can say nothing, really, except that it is ambivalent." Symbolic exchange, this formal ambivalence, would contrast with the productivist logic of exchange found in signification. Sounds a bit vague, eh? It is, necessarily; any clarification of the symbolic succumbs to the logic of signification. Small wonder that Baudrillard has a difficult time explaining the concept and can offer only a limited array of illustrations (most notably the ritual of gift-giving in premodern societies). As a consequence, Baudrillard abandons explicit hope in symbolic exchange as a counter to signification shortly after its initial introduction, despite strong initial support: "Only symbolic disorder can bring about an interruption in the code" (p. 4). He talks about the "Code" a lot in the 70s, as it's his short hand for the idea of a theoretical model that determines or produces reality as an effect, in the same way that computer code produces a program or application.

Anyway, that's the 70s. He writes a fairly famous book called Seduction, where he argues that we should try to seduce rather than produce, play with appearances rather than deconstruct them. The book gets a lot of crap for being rather sexist, which it is or it isn't depending upon your point of view. For the most part, the book's interesting because it's his next attempt to think of an alternative to all the problems of critical thought he's laid out. I mean it's tough to announce that pretty much most forms of critical thought invent the stuff they purport to discover, that they support the things they fight against, and then still offer a coherent and useful alternative to all of that. So a lot of Baudrillard's work from '76 on is an attempt to try to tease out different possibilities. I won't go through them all, but at various points in times he suggests: symbolic exchange (gift economies), seduction, pataphysics, fatal theory, radical theory, impossible exchange, nihilism, yada yada. They're all thought experiments, so it's not really fair to harsh on their inadequacies too much.

Ok, cue the exciting music. Fast forward a bit and imagine it's the early 80s now, and Baudrillard writes the book that would eventually be featured in the first Matrix movie: Simulacra and Simulation. Here he picks up the discussion of simulation in Symbolic Exchange and Death and runs with it, stressing two things: first, that the third, model stage is really a simulacral stage rather than a simulation stage, and second, that the orders of simulation are really a kind of ontological precession of reality, in that each one causes a regression that overwhelms the relationship between reality and its others in the previous stages. A simulacrum is a term that is first covered by Plato and it basically means a copy without an original, a somewhat paradoxical definition, but one that makes sense if you've ever visited Epcot or the ET ride down at Universal Studios, where you get to wander around the forest that you see in the movie as you wait in line to ride in the fake bicycle. These look like simulations, but they're actually so fake that they aren't actually copying anything, they're just making stuff up and telling you it's like the real thing. "Oh look, we're in the Japanese section of Epcot now! You can tell, because that lady is wearing a kimono and that store sells soba noodles. Woo hoo!" By the time this third stage shows up, the culture of simulation is so massive, so entrenched, that there's really no hope of uncovering the real on our own. In fact, the problem with simulacra is that they effectively "realize" things, which is to say, make them real. It's like going to a national park and trying to figure out where the really famous pictures were taken, so you can recreate the picture - the simulational stuff is so pervasive that you filter your real experiences through the simulation of that reality. This is what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal. And the reason there's no way out of it is because even if you go off to wherever you're going to see if the simulation you saw of it previously was really accurate, you're already relating to the real through the referential lens of the simulation. So the real you discover will always be an effect of the simulation, a copy or non-copy of it. It's like the real is the moon or a satellite that now orbits the earth, rather than the other way around.

Eventually, Baudrillard adds a fourth stage to the simulation hierarchy, what he first calls the viral or fractal stage of simulacra, and eventually decided to call "integral reality," a state where simulation is everywhere, and no longer even needs models, because it is so pervasive that it means nothing and everything all at once. If we want to keep with our money example, the fourth stage is the stage of credit and virtual banking. You can infinitely defer paying something, buy it on credit, make small payments. The money gets debited automatically, you spend it by swiping a card, you never even see the money, barely remember how much you spend, and even when you spend it, you're not really spending it, since you are really borrowing it against the idea that you'll eventually pay it. I read recently that consumer debt - the amount consumers have advanced to themselves under the name of "credit" - is at a staggering 210 trillion dollars, from which I think it's safe to say that this virtual flow of money is what is keeping the American economy afloat, not actual productivity. Again proof that, as Baudrillard realized pretty early on, it's consumption that makes capitalism work, not production.

Baudrillard has also written about how this question of simulation affects politics, first in his much maligned The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, which dealt with the first Guld War, and then in his much condemned The Spirit of Terrorism, which dealt with 9-11. I actually think both books are quite insightful, and they're short, so grab copies, you'll like them, or at least like hating them.

He has also recently played with the idea of impossible exchange, in a book of the same name. The idea is that the world ultimately resists our attempts to theorize it, whether those attempts are philosophy or physics, and that this actually may be a saving grace, in that it hints that there's a point where even integral reality may fail to integrate the entirety of its opposition. In this, it also means there are limits to the simulacral nature of exchange-value and signification: "Everything which sets out to exchange itself for something runs up, in the end, against the Impossible Exchange Barrier. The most concerted, most subtle attempts to make the world meaningful in value terms, to endow it with meaning, come to grief on this insuperable obstacle" ( Impossible Exchange, p. 6).

At the end of the day, Baudrillard is not trying to rescue the real, if such a thing is even possible, but he is trying to rescue illusion, and for him there can be no illusion in a world where everything is "realized." Despite being made popular through The Matrix movies, Baudrillard actually disliked the films, precisely because he thought the incredible special effects actually reproduced the problem of simulation into it. Baudrillard wants instead for there to be the possibility of illusion, of non-meaning, of mystery, and much of his work attempts to reproduce that. As he says in a number of places, his work is like science fiction theory, but that's the only kind of theory that doesn't fall into the trap he identifies in critical thought.

A few bits of trivia before we go.

First, in the fourth version of the Matrix script - they shot the fifth version of the script, which was just the fourth with some edits - Baudrillard is actually mentioned by name. Some of the dialog in the first movie - like "welcome to the desert of the real" and "there is no spoon" - are actually direct quotes from various Baudrillard books. In addition, Keanu Reeves, who takes a lot of crap somewhat undeservedly,* was actually required to read Simulacra and Simulation, and two other books, before auditioning, and the audition included a discussion of the book.

Second, there's a great apocryphal story of Baudrillard giving a talk in Las Vegas, mixing together bits of poetry, his own writing, and karaoke, all while wearing a gold lamet suit.

Third, Baudrillard was also a professional photographer, and has several books of photographs and had several professional exhibits.

Fourth, the animosity of some towards thinkers like Baudrillard and Derrida is almost shocking, and for those of us who feel enriched by their work, whether we agree with it or not, reading some of the pieces published when Baudrillard and Derrida died is rather depressing. This post is long enough, but below** I'll post an embarrassingly spiteful review of Baudrillard's work published in, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Education, so you can get an idea for the sort of vitriol I'm talking about.

That's it for the post. Baudrillard was my first great theorist love, and I remain very fond of him, though there are others in whom I invest more time and energy. Still, Baudrillard has always seemed to me to be full of interesting things, and even his misses (and there are many misses) still pack a wallop.

*I say "undeservedly" because hey: he surfs, he likes science fiction, he actually really got into the Baudrillard reading, and he's a huge fan of the brilliant British group XTC. All things considered, he can't be that bad.

**Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated March 23, 2007

CRITIC AT LARGE
The Death of Jean Baudrillard Did Happen

By CARLIN ROMANO

The death of the 77-year-old French thinker Jean Baudrillard — best known for the flamboyant title of his 1991 screed, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, and the salute to his doubts about reality in The Matrix (1999) — did take place on March 6. No one spent an instant wondering if it might be one of the eccentric thinker's "simulacra" shimmering in a world of faded authenticity. Newspapers, no fans of mere appearance, provided blunt takes on the man.

Libération, founded by the realer-than-real Jean-Paul Sartre, ran a full-front page photograph and covered Baudrillard's death over three inside pages. Le Figaro expressed its view of his less-than-rigorous work by calling Baudrillard "a sociologist by training and a philosopher by vocation." The words that festooned French- and English-language reports — "celebrated," "provocative," "controversial" — were not accompanied by "convincing," "persuasive," "groundbreaking," or other words a thinker might prefer.

Born in Reims in 1929 to a family of civil servants one generation removed from peasantry, Baudrillard ran away from school, à la Rimbaud, in his teens. He later studied German in Paris and began a 10-year career as a lycée teacher of German in the provinces, translating into French such German writers as Marx, Bertolt Brecht, and Peter Weiss.

Only at age 37 did Baudrillard earn his Sorbonne doctorate in sociology, under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. He then started teaching at the University of Paris at Nanterre, from which he retired in 1987 to concentrate on his whirlwind "postmodernist bad boy" career and his photography.

When Baudrillard wanted to be understood, he tilted to the simplistic and outrageous. His greatest act of intellectual decadence came after 9/11. In The Spirit of Terrorism, he wrote, "It is we who have wanted it. ...Terrorism is immoral, and it responds to a globalization that is itself immoral." Baudrillard asserted that "the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them." He observed that "we can say that they did it, but we wished for it."

As always, Baudrillard whacked the United States, the country from which the self-declared enemy of modern "consumerism" — its corruption of reality into oppressive "hyperreality" — accepted innumerable free trips, honoraria, lecture invitations, visiting appointments, and publishing contracts. America is the superpower that "by its unbearable power, has fomented all this violence which is endemic throughout the world, and hence that (unwittingly) terroristic imagination which dwells in all of us."

Other notable Baudrillardean insights in that miserable book? The action of the terrorists "does not seek the impersonal elimination of the other." What happened at the World Trade Center "was not enough to make it a real event." And the capper, re the twin towers: "It was, in fact, their symbolic collapse that brought about their physical collapse, not the other way around."

Many Baudrillard critics quote these lines because of their distinct moral stench. But Baudrillard's blithe idiocies ran throughout his work: "To jog is not to run but to make one's body run. ... Jogging strives to exhaust and destroy the body" (The Transparency of Evil). "The masses are no longer social" (Fragments). "Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation" (Forget Foucault).

Like a French Ann Coulter with stumpy legs and nicotine-ruined lungs, but sans Coulter's gift for punchy images, Baudrillard stalked fame by making outrageous declarations he knew to be false. In Fragments and other collections of interviews, he brayed egotistically about his brilliance while admitting he made up quotations in his scholarly work.

Authors of the Baudrillard obituaries, like the writers of encyclopedia articles on him, found it easier to list subjects he'd written about (Marxism, the "ecstasy of communication," symbolic exchange, seduction) or the usual-suspects list of influences (Nietzsche, Mauss, Debord, Bataille) than to articulate what he claimed about them.

As The Times of London politely put it, his writing was "not always clearly understood," his "nihilism and hermetic language were unique, lending themselves neither to codification nor to being organised into a coherent doctrine." The Daily Telegraph less politely noted, "Critics complained that his complexities amounted to pretentious gibberish and dismissed him as a charlatan — or at best an ironic postmodern joke."

In fact, few could make heads or tails of Baudrillard's prose, typically a hodgepodge of undefined abstractions. They could only regurgitate labels —postmodernist, post-postmodernist, Situationist, post-Situationist — because his sentences often didn't make sense. More than any other modern French "master of thought," Baudrillard exemplified the calculated strain in French academic culture that elevates a handful of thinkers in its lucid, elegant language to superstardom precisely because they perform the dance of opaqueness best.

All veteran humanities people know the reasons: Intentionally obscure French philosophy is an established performance art; there's money to be made, appointments to be secured, prestige to be garnered. Just as rich, white American pop-music execs grasp that giving a tyro singer one name automatically wins teenage fans, operators in the "master of thought" biz know that positioning a properly hieratic obscurantist correctly can lead scholarly publishers to issue any dreck the thinker produces and eventually trigger secondary trots on the "masters" by the same acolytes driving the whole process. Once a French thinker hits the mark, of course, no one dares shut him or her up, or suggests such plebeian activities as editing or rewriting.

Baudrillard, though, may be the screw-up who endangered the brand. His published writings were so bad, and his publicity-hound manner so obvious, that the image of incomprehensibility and clownishness attached itself to the "respectful" profile drawn by his advocates and they couldn't rub it off.

Physicists Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in their stinging book, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (Picador USA, 1998), devoted a whole chapter to Baudrillard. Quoting him at length, the authors accused Baudrillard of making references to scientific terms "with total disregard for their meaning," offering "unwarranted philosophical claims," putting forward "no argument whatsoever" for the idea that science arrives at hypotheses "contrary to its own logic," repeatedly producing sentences "devoid of meaning," and descending into "a gradual crescendo of nonsense."

Even one of Baudrillard's shepherds in America, historian Mark Poster of the University of California, Irvine, sounds like a man with an embarrassing franchise in the second edition of his Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Polity, 2001). In his writings till the mid-80s, Poster observes, Baudrillard "fails to define his major terms ... his writing style is hyperbolic and declarative, often lacking sustained, systematic analysis when it is appropriate; he totalizes his insights, refusing to qualify or delimit his claims. He writes about particular experiences, television images, as if nothing else in society mattered. ... He ignores contradictory evidence."

Imagine such comments on a submitted doctoral dissertation at an American
graduate school. And the scholarly world published every Baudrillard hiccup?

Another French writer died two days earlier than the sainted postmodernist
master. Henri Troyat (né Lev Aslanovitch Tarrasov), the 95-year-old Russian
expatriate who won the Prix Goncourt at age 27 and produced 105 books, finally ground to a halt.

No school of disingenuous acolytes will tend Troyat's flame. Troyat didn't need any. Every sentence he wrote delivered clear information or judgment. French departments don't teach graduate seminars in Troyat's work. Yet in his biographies of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, Flaubert, Verlaine, Zola, Balzac, and more, the immigrant who came to France at age 9 and religiously measured his sentences against Flaubert's grappled more with issues that arise when imaginative intelligence confronts the world than the "philosopher by vocation" ever did.

No one will read Jean Baudrillard in 50 years, once those who made money off his antics fade. As in show business, so in academe. No fraud survives his enablers. Troyat, by contrast, will endure as long as his subjects. The same Le Figaro that tweaked Baudrillard opined of Troyat's death, "the favorite writer of the French is dead."

If Baudrillard had pulled off the trick (accomplished by premodernist Art Buchwald) of commenting on his own demise, would he have accused himself of
suicide, mirroring his repulsive suggestion that the twin towers and their doomed inhabitants committed suicide in a reciprocal gesture to the 9/11 hijackers?

Not likely. That would have required the spirit of criticism, which he lacked.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for
The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the
University of Pennsylvania.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B9

Author Author, What's Your Function?

2010-10-29T08:57:00.006-04:00

Foucault's project in "What is an Author?" involves examining the curious relationship between the text and the author, especially in light of the (then) recent disappearance of the traditional author as source or origin of the text's meaning. His interest lies in the function of the author's name, not an author's name. The presence of the author's name--that is, any author's name for any text that needs to be understood as being authored, as having an author--serves to classify or give a certain status to certain types of discourse. The author of the "author function" is not an individual but a function of discourse. Foucault is explicitly not interested in a "sociocultural analysis of the author as an individual" or the "system of valorization" that gives authors their artistic status and generates interest in the "man and his work ." For the purposes of his study of the author-function, he has to set aside certain questions that he nevertheless believes merit attention, such as "How is an author individualized in a culture such as ours?"

That question of course informs Foucault's analysis of the author-function (especially in his discussion of the author-function's connection to the legal system) but I would like you to explore it more fully and in a different way for next week's post (due Wednesday, 11/3, by 7 p.m.). Here's the plan:

Recently The Paris Review made its entire archive of author interviews free to the public (which in my opinion is perhaps the greatest thing that has ever happened on the Internet). Go to the archive and read one of the interviews. Choose an author whose work you know. As you are reading, consider the following:

What kinds of questions are being asked?
What connections are being made between the writer and his or her work, by the interviewer and by the writer?
What assumptions about the writer inform the interviewer's questions?
What does the interviewer assume the reader wants to know?
How does the writer conceptualize his own or her own figuring as an artist?
In other words, how does he or she seem to feel about the way he or she is represented or how his or her work is understood?

More generally, consider:

Why are we interested in this author as an individual?
What kind of individual do we assume he or she is?
What status does he or she have?
How do we valorize the author? How are we simultaneously valorizing certain types of writing or texts?
How does the interview process (and the presence of the interview in The Paris Review) serve to give the author his or her cultural status?

Compose your post from a consideration of these questions, rather than answering them in succession. Include a summary of and a link to the interview in your post.

Guest post, Ashley Shelden on Lacan

2010-10-20T20:20:00.002-04:00

I'd like to welcome this week's guest lecturer, Ashley Shelden, Assistant Professor of Literature and Film at Kennesaw State University who specializes in 20th century British literature, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Her post on Lacan addresses some of the complexities of Lacan's theory of the subject-including the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the mirror stage, and the death drive. The post will be enormously helpful as we discuss Lacan and psychoanalytic theory. For your post next week (due Wednesday, 10/27 at 7 p.m.), to Dr. Shelden's post. Respond to specific points, perhaps by explaining how they inform your understanding of psychoanalytic theory or by raising questions you might have about them. Thank you, Ashley, for extending, deepening, and enriching our discussion on Lacan and psychonanalytic theory.

Jacques Lacan’s “return to Freud” stands out not merely as a repetition of the tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis, but also crucially as a reworking of them. Indeed, one of Lacan’s most important and innovative contributions to the field of psychoanalysis remains his attempt to think psychoanalysis, a theory of sexuality and the subject, through the framework offered by structuralist linguistics. Though Lacan’s writings and ideas are infamously complex and multilayered and though they insist upon the impossibility of ever fully and finally deciphering their “meaning,” one might nonetheless say that if there were a “key” to Lacanian psychoanalysis, this “key” would be precisely Lacan’s rewriting of the Saussurean “sign.”

Saussure writes the sign like this:


                    S (signified)


                      s(signifier)

Lacan rewrites the sign as such:


                    s (signifier)


                      s(signifier)

Whereas in Saussure’s theory the signified (the meaning of the word) is the privileged term, in Lacan’s theory the signifier (the word itself) becomes the privileged term. Moreover, for Lacan, the “signified” turns out to be just another signifier. Language, Lacan suggests, can produce the illusion of meaning only by one signifier’s reference to another signifier. Meaning is produced, then, not through the magical operation by which we might imagine one word (signifier) is wed to only one meaning (signified), but rather through a rhetorical figure called metonymy. Metonymy can be defined as a relation of proximity, as a word-to-word connection. Meaning gets produced through a sliding movement from one signifier to another: word-to-word-to-word-to-word. But the effect of this sliding or slippage is not meaning or truth, but rather the illusion of meaning, because there is nothing in this movement that forces it to stop finally at a fixed meaning. Metonymy as slippage produces meaning as an effect, not as a verifiable fact. We can pursue meaning—both linguistic and existential—with as much passion and energy as we want, and indeed we do, but the continuous metonymic movement of language insists that this pursuit will be infinite. The end of our pursuit of meaning is no end at all; we will only find another signifier that will lead us to another and to another and to another. Lacan thus exposes the way in which the meaning that the signified might seem to provide proves to be radically unfixed.

All of Lacan’s theory rests on this fundamental observation that there is no signified, only signifiers, only words. Everything else—his theories of the subject, of desire, of the constitution of reality—issues from this premise and the logical corollary it implies: insofar as there is no signified, no identifiable or fixed meaning for any one signifier, that which constitutes who we think we are, what we think we want, and what we think of the world shows itself to be radically unhinged. The linguistic structure of Lacan’s psychoanalysis has such deep and broad ramifications, because he suggests that linguistics applies not only to language but to humans as well. Why? Lacan’s great observation about the human subject is precisely that we, each and every one of us, are constructed through and as language. That which imbues us with an apparent sense of identity, with desire, with “meaning” is precisely language itself. There is no human subject, for Lacan, before language. Language makes us who we are, and we are nothing other than signifiers in a metonymic chain, slipping and sliding towards a sense of self. But not unlike the signified, no matter how far we travel down the path to “personal meaning,” in pursuit of our identities, what we find is just another set of signifiers that will continue to propel us through our infinite pursuit. In order to grasp more concretely the concept of a human subject that emerges through and as language, think, for instance, of The Matrix. For Lacan, we are like the figures in the matrix, made up of pure code. But instead of being made up of numbers, the subject for Lacan is made up of language, of signifiers. Lacan’s term for this matrix-like structure is “the Symbolic.” There is NO OUTSIDE of the Symbolic in Lacan’s theory. We cannot enter and exit the Symbolic as we choose. Rather, we are born in the Symbolic; we live in the Symbolic; and we die in the Symbolic. None of us exists outside language. Without language, you are not you; I am not I. Indeed, the matrix of language, the Symbolic, makes us who we are. Without it, we are nothing.

If Lacan’s rewriting of the Saussurean sign is the “key” to his theory, then desire is the keynote of psychoanalysis. Desire is an absolutely central concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, every subject is imbued with desire. Not one of us is exempt from it. The reason for this, as you may have anticipated, is language. The fact that the human subject exists only within the Symbolic has everything to do with the centrality of desire in our lives. To understand the relation between language and desire, you could imagine the Symbolic, or language, as a system from which there is something lacking. It is as though language is a puzzle that was created with one missing piece. To be within language is to be continually circling around this absence, attempting to find something to fill this void. But the void, this lack, is constitutive of the system of the Symbolic itself. It cannot be filled. The activity of attempting to fill the void in language is, for Lacan, synonymous with desire. Desire also responds to this lack. Since we are all subjects constructed through and as language, the void that constitutes language also constitutes us. Just as there is a hole at the center of language, there is a hole at the center of the subject, a void that we attempt to fill through desire. But the void in the subject is constitutive; it cannot be filled. Thus, insofar as language is structured as metonymy, desire follows the same structure. For Lacan, DESIRE and LANGUAGE are synonymous. If you are talking about language, you are also talking about the activity of desire. And if you are talking about desire, you are always already talking about the linguistic structure of metonymy, which is the structure of language as such. Metonymy designates not just the proximate relation of one word to another but also movement from word-to-word-to-word, and therefore the suggestion that desire takes the structure of metonymy makes good sense. After all, when we desire, we pursue an object that we think will fill the lack within us; in this pursuit, we move ever closer to achieving the object of desire. Lacan refers to the object of desire as the objet petit a. And just as the metonymic model of language designates that we can never finally access meaning, so too the metonymic model of desire suggests that we can never access the object of our desire, the objet petit a. In desire, one always only approaches the object of desire but never quite reaches it. Or, if you do finally get the object of your desire, the boy or girl or iPhone of your dreams, you will inevitably find that the thing or person you thought you wanted turns out to be not as good as you thought. Thus, you begin pursuing another different object, maintaining the metonymic movement of desiring. Desire does not end, because it can never be satisfied, propelling one infinitely towards a goal just on the horizon, “whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move,” as Tennyson wrote in “Ulysses.” The inability to be satisfied by the object of desire maintains the lack in the subject, a void that can never be filled.

The void that structures the Symbolic thus suggests that the human subject is profoundly unstable. No one has a fixed, coherent identity. All one can ever have is the illusion of identity. The idea of identity as illusory brings us to the question of the “Mirror Stage,” which imbues the infant with just such an illusion. The word “illusion” suggests the realm of the visual, and in so doing, points to the importance of the visual image in Lacan’s theory of the subject. Images, or illusions, coincide with our experience in the Symbolic, and Lacan refers to the register in which these images appear as “the Imaginary.” Thus, the Symbolic and the Imaginary intertwine to make up our visual-linguistic sense of the world. It would seem that though the Symbolic is profoundly unstable, what produces stability is precisely the Imaginary, which would follow the old dictum, “seeing is believing.” But the Imaginary does not confer actual stability on the world or the subject. If anything, the Imaginary can only produce the illusion of stability through the operation of the image. The instability of the Imaginary becomes most clear in Lacan’s essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” which you read for class. On the one hand, the mirror stage is the moment in which the infant apprehends its sense of identity through the perception of an image in a mirror. The infant experiences the solidification of its identity, realizing that before seeing its image it was a “body in bits-and-pieces,” a body fractured and fragmented without any coherence. The image in the mirror provides the coherence that was missing before and in so doing produces the idea of identity. On the other hand, the identity achieved in the mirror stage turns out to be just the idea of identity, the promise of identity, and not identity as such. Moreover, the mirror stage does not eliminate anxiety caused by instability but actually creates new anxiety.

First of all, the mirror stage does not provide the infant with an identity, or with coherence, but rather invites the infant to anticipate a future in which it will have an identity. But this future is illusory—indeed, imaginary—to the extent that all subjects, whether infants or not, are only ever aspiring to being whole and coherent. The lack in the symbolic, the lack that constitutes the subject, insists that this be the case. We will never be whole; we will never have a concrete sense of identity. One can only ever anticipate having an identity. This is what Lacan means when he writes that the mirror stage “situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming.” Identity is first and foremost “fictional.” And moreover, the subject is always only “becoming” an identity; one cannot say that the subject “became” an identity, because the process of “becoming” is un-ending. One only ever “asymptotically” approaches having an identity, moving towards but never quite reaching it. Secondly, I said that the mirror stage doesn’t alleviate but creates anxiety. Once the infant sees its image in the mirror, feeling jubilant anticipation about the identity it will become, it also simultaneously becomes aware of the fact that before the encounter with the mirror image, it was a “body in bits-and-pieces.” The “body in bits-and-pieces” is utterly disorganized, incoherent, unstable, and without any sense of identity, anticipatory or otherwise. With the recognition that the infant once was this fragmented being, even as it jubilantly anticipates becoming the ideal image of itself in the mirror, it also begins to feel anxiety and fear. What the infant becomes anxious about is becoming again that “body in bits-and-pieces.” The logic of the anxious infant runs: if I was once that fractured being, without any sense of self, I could easily become that again. Thus, even as the joyful promise of identity exists for the infant in the mirror stage, coinciding with this promise of coherence is the danger of incoherence. The infant realizes, in other words, that the illusion of identity is just that: an illusion. There is nothing in the Symbolic or the Imaginary—in the registers of language or the image—to ensure stability and guarantee meaning. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, we have no solid ground on which to stand.

What finally creates this instability in Lacanian psychoanalysis is something like Derrida’s concept of différance. It is a force that undoes meaning, destabilizes our sense of self, and shatters reality. But instead of différance, Lacan calls this force “the death drive.” The death drive occupies each of us; it is within each of us from the start. However, the death drive is not what it sounds like it is. You might think that “the death drive” is a suicidal impulse, which drives us to kill ourselves. But it is not that. Rather, the death drive is that which leads us to destroy our Symbolic and Imaginary goals. That is, if in the Symbolic we desire and pursue meaning, something to fill up the lack in the self and in language; and if in the Imaginary we anticipate and pursue a concrete, coherent image of identity, then the death drive wants us to abandon the search for meaning and for identity. The death drive aims not to fill in but to preserve the void in the self. According to Lacan, the death drive finds its most intense manifestation in the sexual act, and in particular, in the moment of orgasm. In French, a colloquial term for orgasm is “le petit mort,” which means “little death.” It is precisely the “little death” of orgasm for which the death drive strives. When you have an orgasm, you lose any sense of yourself; you forget the world for the sake of sexual release. You are no longer thinking about what you need to do, who you think you are, or even where you are. Lacan calls this orgasmic moment of blindness jouissance. “Jouissance” means “enjoyment” in French, and it derives from the verb “jouir,” which also means “to come.” The death drive thus directs human subjects away from Symbolic and Imaginary coherence and towards the single goal of sexual satisfaction. And since the experience of jouissance shatters, if only momentarily, our sense of self, the death drive is contrary to every attempt to confer identity upon the subject and meaning upon the world. The death drive is that which always threatens to undo one’s sense of self in favor of sexual gratification.

Sexual satisfaction and identity are thus completely contradictory. The death drive aims for sexual satisfaction, for jouissance, and jouissance is precisely what shatters identity. Thus, Lacanian psychoanalysis provides us with not only a theory of the subject constructed through and as language, not only a theory of the way identity is shaped through images, but also a theory of why the term “sexual identity” is illogical. For Lacan, “the sexual” is antithetical to identity. And the structure of identity is endangered by “the sexual.” What this suggests is that sexual identity politics are going to be profoundly troubled from the outset insofar as the category of “identity” has nothing to do with “sexuality.” These two concepts are so radically separate that one cancels out the other. Where identity prevails, the sexual, the death drive, and jouissance become obscured. And where sexuality erupts, identity categories fall apart. It turns out to be the case, in other words, that the factor—sexuality—which contemporary culture associates most closely with one’s “true” self, has nothing at all to do with one’s self at all. Sexuality, for Lacan, radically destabilizes the self and threatens to undo all the structures within which we try to make meaning of the world.

I know what I need to take apart my baby's heart

2010-10-13T11:15:00.004-04:00

The film Derrida was released in 2002. Jacques Derrida died on October 8, 2004. We are now watching footage of a dead man, which changes the tone of the film entirely. Mourning and image cannot be separated. As we see in the film, they were never separate for Derrida.

Various reports remembered Derrida in various ways just after his death. Most of the mainstream obituaries are frustrating to say the least, so I will only include one brilliant mention of his death from a source that we might properly call a newspaper: "Jacques Derrida 'dies' " (from The Onion). For more nuanced accounts of Derrida's life and death, see In Favor of Thinking, Spurious, tobias c. van veen, in medias res, and Jack Balkin.

For next Wednesday's post (10/20 7 p.m.), write an analytical response to the film, Derrida. You might consider some of the following questions in your analysis:

Is there irony in the project of trying to capture the "true" Derrida in a documentary film? Do the directors realize it? What is the format of their "biography"? Does the format provide an acknowledgment of some of Derrida's ideas?
How is Derrida depicted through images? What is his image? Is there only one? Are various images in conflict?
How does Derrida handle the interview process? Does he resist the interview process? Is there a disconnect between what the interviewer wants to know and what Derrida wants to say, i.e. between what Derrida thinks is important and what the interviewer thinks is important?
What parts of the film do you connect to ideas in "Structure, Sign, and Play" and how do you connect them? Do you understand specific ideas better? What is the general sense you get of Derrida's theories through the film?

As you did with last week's post, you have the option of working in a discussion of this post's title, which is yet another song lyric. What does the lyric mean? What does the song in which it appears mean? How do you make sense of the lyric in relation to poststructuralism and to Derrida's ideas?

You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids

2010-09-29T11:40:00.001-04:00

In the excerpt of Course in General Linguistics you read this week, Saussure introduces several key ideas about language and the sign:

"in language there are only differences without positive terms" (40)
"the bond between the signifier and the signified is radically arbitrary" (35)
"signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position" (39)

For your post due next Wednesday (11/6, 7 p.m.), offer an explanation of one of these three statements. What does Saussure mean? How do you understand the statement? Give examples (other than Saussure's or Barry's) to support your explanation.

If you are so inclined and want to show off (and earn "extra points" and/or my undying respect), work in a commentary on the lyric that is the title of the post. What does the lyric mean? What does the song in which the lyric appears mean? Do the lyric and song really have anything to do with Saussure? With language? With structuralism?

Guest post, Christopher Craig on Marxism

2010-09-20T14:29:00.001-04:00

I am pleased to introduce Christopher Craig, our virtual guest lecturer for the week and Assistant Professor of English at Emmanuel whose research focuses on Cold War American Literature. His explanation of ideology as it relates to cultural texts beautifully expands on the ideas we began to explore last week. We'll discuss the post in class this week. For your post next week, due by next Wednesday's deadline, prepare a response to Dr. Craig's post. Respond to specific points, perhaps by explaining how they inform your understanding of Marxism or by raising questions you may have about them. Thanks, Chris, for your interest in the class and for your lecture.

Some thoughts on Ideology

During the height of the Cold War, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called hundreds of people before its panel. First led by Parnell Thomas, and then the infamous Joseph McCarthy, the committee interrogated those who had been identified as communists. Through these interrogations, it sought to pressure people into naming the names of other communists and communist sympathizers. Its aim, it claimed, was to purge all communists from American society. Along with damaging the professional lives of countless people, like the Hollywood Ten, the committee contributed to the hysterical notion that communism posed a genuine threat to the “American way of life.” The anti-communist anxiety it engendered had serious real-life implications for those labeled communist. Not only did people lose jobs and loved ones, but, as in the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, they also lost their lives. The Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953, each at the age of 35, for allegedly passing American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Many believed that they were innocent of some, if not all, of the charges against them. Nonetheless, they were executed, in large part, some say, because of what they believed in, rather than what they did.

But things have certainly changed, haven’t they? While shopping at a trendy clothing store recently, my friend Tiffany spied a copy of Marx’s Communist Manifesto leaning against a replica of Rodin’s Il Penser, on a table that contained this year’s most stylish jeans. To make sure that it wasn’t a fluke, some kind of joke played on the store by neighborhood radicals, she went back several times over the course of a few months. There it was every time. The text, whose call to arms – “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE”– influenced revolutionaries around the world and contains some of the ideas for which many American communists were exiled, imprisoned, and executed, now sat as part of an advertising scheme in a space seemingly hostile to its declarations. Does this event signify an end to the communist threat in America? Is it a satirical gesture which represents corporate America’s gloating, if not ironic, sense of humor in the face of the Eastern Bloc collapse? Doubtful. It seems to me that it offers an example of how the ruling class appropriates those ideas which it finds most threatening. It commodifies them and mystifies their meaning, while also potentially taming the subversive behaviors that might result from them.

From this perspective, the Manifesto brings a number of useful qualities to the store’s display. On the aesthetic side, its bright red cover emphasizes the subtle burgundy tones deeply embedded in the fabric of the jeans (as Tiffany tells it). More importantly, of course, its place on the table links the low-cut jeans and the clothing store itself to ideas of revolution and radical change. It encourages consumers who purchase products from the store to imagine themselves as radically different from those who do not. Through the repeated consumption of these commodities, consumers acquire a kind of cultural language, however unconsciously, which provides them with the ability both to express and decode information specific to this mode of consumption. In the process, this “cultural capital,” as the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu calls it, grants them a particular level of social distinction. In this case, consumers are encouraged to see themselves as fashion revolutionaries, bringing about radical change in fashion through their willingness to intervene in the hopelessly homogeneous dress of their day, as well as independent thinkers who take naughty pride in their rejection of the conformities of American capitalist culture.

Thus, the juxtaposition of the Manifesto and the jeans collapses vague notions of radical thought and consumer capitalism. Crumbled in this collapse are the actual ideas contained in the Manifesto. Marx argues, for example, that most workers of world are trapped in “wage slavery,” exploited by the ruling classes which benefit economically from paying low wages and maintaining deplorable working conditions. This compelling insight, which still holds true in many parts of the world, including America, is crucial to Marx’s critique of capitalism. It fuels his call to the working class to free itself from the chains of ruling class bondage. As the foundation of the philosophy of revolution (the overthrow of capitalist governments) which American big business and government has longed feared, it contains the ideas for which many capitalist societies dating back to the 19th century have punished radical thinkers and activists. But here it is absorbed by the act of consumption: buying the jeans may signify a rejection of the American status quo, but it does not suggest the recognition of the exploitation required to make them or inspire action against that exploitation. The laborer exploited to produce the jeans, which were made, no doubt, in some sweat shop, vanishes in the display that makes it cool to be communist.

While the retailer’s use of the Manifesto to mystify the revolutionary ideas contained in Marx’s polemic may seem insignificant, it is not an isolated example. Think about the multitude of Che Guevara t-shirts, key chains, and refrigerator magnets that people purchase in the U.S. Guevara, a Marxist revolutionary, who participated in the Cuban Revolution under Fidel Castro, was captured in a military operation organized by the CIA and the U.S. Special forces and executed by the Bolivian Army in 1967. He fought for the very socialist values that corporate America has attempted to repress and destroy. Yet his image adorns commodities produced by a variety of American corporations. What do we make of this contradiction? Some young people wear his image proudly, believing that they are voicing their disgust of the inequalities produced by the capitalism. But the commodification of Guevara’s legacy has left his convictions no more dangerous to capitalism than Fox’s resident radical, Bart Simpson. Guevara, like the Manifesto, has been assimilated into society as a commodity that offers consumer pleasure, usually, though not always, in the form of the expression of dissatisfaction or displeasure, a gesture that seems to be activism enough for most folks.

These examples demonstrate, in part, how the ruling class assumes hegemonic control of some of the ideas available to society. There are, of course, much more aggressive ways in which the ruling class accomplishes this. Consider the ownership and control of media organizations in the U.S. today, the way the news routinely, and incessantly, covers the stock market’s gains and losses: if the U.S. government accounting agencies report that wages across the country are up this quarter, what are you likely to see stock prices do tomorrow? Drop. Why? Well, because investors will see the rise in wages as a rise in production costs, and a likely cut into profit margins. Most of the time, the media will cover this story from the perspective of the stock owners, as a troubling development. But what is the irony here? Most people, and even most people watching the nightly news, are wage-earners, not stock owners, and hence the news of wages increasing would ostensibly be a good thing for people in their position. The reverse, of course, would also be the case. And indeed the reverse has been the case for at least the past two decades in the United States. When wages and benefits are being held down, productivity and profits for owners are all rising. This will be covered in the media as a universal and unqualified positive sign for all, even though it means that more people are working longer and harder for less pay, not only in absolute terms, but especially in relative terms. That is to say the workers, even if they are only getting slightly poorer in terms of how much food or consumer goods they can buy, are getting much poorer in comparison to the owners, and hence growing much less secure and less powerful in relationship to their de facto rulers.

One might say that from a Marxist viewpoint this is the quintessence of ideology, the representation of one particular group’s, or more specifically, one class’s outlook, values, and interests, as if they are “universal” to all, what Antonio Gramsci calls society’s “common sense” view of the world. This representation often mystifies or attempts to resolve social contradictions in the culture, in order to give the appearance of a unified and cohesive society. My point here, I suppose, is that American ruling class ideology continuously spins narratives that attempt to limit the working class’s ability to recognize and respond to its own subjugation. By allowing the masses to purchase their rebellion, for example, the ruling class provides an outlet for the frustrations that result from working in low-wage jobs (relatively speaking, of course), with few or no benefits, while it also profits in the process. Sporting events come to mind here. Think about how often working class people are targeted by professional sports advertising. At games, in bars, and even at home, they are given the opportunity to cheer “their” teams on, venting their frustrations, experiencing momentary exhilarations, and focusing much of their time and spending significant amounts of their money, all to what end? Corporate profit and a distracted populus. When the ruling class convinces working people that corporate profits are actually a good sign for all – all boats rise in the rising tide sort of thing – it encourages them to believe in the virtues of an economic system that does not have their best interest in mind. The more they follow this line of thinking, the more deeply mired they become in the very socio-cultural and political conditions that limit their ability to achieve economic success under capitalism. Hence, one function of ruling class ideology is to assure the complacency of the working classes, in order to also assure the power and dominance of the ruling class.

What, you may being asking, does any of this have to do with literature and Marxist literary theory? Well, in part, I want to argue that literature is ideological. That is not to say that all literary texts written under capitalism openly endorse the values and interests of the ruling class. Rather I want to suggest that this literature necessarily contains capitalist ideology and advances some of the priorities of the ruling class, however marginally or indirectly, regardless of the author’s intent. From this perspective, the experiences, class position, gender, and race of the author represent only one contributing factor to how the text expresses meaning. Traditional American reading practices, the kind taught in our public high schools, for example, tend to privilege the author. The text’s authority is assigned to the writer. Even if readers acknowledge a narrator or speaker, they focus inevitably on the author and the imaginary world s/he creates. There can be no denying that a writer’s work is informed by the conditions under which s/he lives. But texts have a logic all their own, whether consciously grasped by the author or not.

We believe that there are narratives that exist outside of the dominant ideology of society. Novels, for example, that confront or ignore ruling class values and interests are somehow separated from the ideology to which they are hostile or with which they are seemingly unconcerned. While these texts do identify important oppositional voices in the dominant society, they cannot escape the influence of the ideology they oppose. As Fredric Jameson observes, “for Marxism . . . the content of class ideology is relational, in the sense that its ‘values’ are always actively in situation with respect to the opposing class ideology, and defined against the latter” (Political Unconscious 84). That is to say that any given text necessarily contains both dominant ideology and those ideas which oppose it, even if those opposing ideas are not openly expressed. Consequently, those texts which seem radical departures from the dominant values of society are nonetheless engaged with those values, even when, and perhaps, especially when, they claim that they are not.

Conversely, literature that happily legitimates and naturalizes ruling class values and interests does so in contrast to those values and interests which it opposes. “Normally,” Jameson writes, “a ruling class ideology will explore various strategies of the legitimation (his emphasis) of its own power position (84). These “strategies of containment” (53), as Jameson calls them, limit a text’s ability to express both its dominant and oppositional voices simultaneously. In many cases, particularly with texts considered “masterworks” or “universal literature,” the text offers the “illusion or appearance of isolation or autonomy” (85). Its strategies of containment stifle, “reduce to silence,” or marginalize, the opposing voices within it. As a result, it appears to confirm the dominant values of the culture from which it comes as well as the dominant values of the culture which has sometimes appropriated it as its own.

Take Shakespeare, for example. His plays explore the complexities of humanity. They interrogate such canonized themes as love and hate, madness, sadness and joy, and good and evil. These aspects of his work are often emphasized in American public high schools. Students are taught that Shakespeare’s work comments on the essential or universal qualities of humanity, as though our experiences with love and sadness and goodness are not shaped by our class positions. But the body of his work also offers an arguably subversive political commentary on the troubling rise of capitalism taking place in early modern England. For a variety of reasons, this commentary is deeply embedded in the fabric of his plays. But by ignoring it, teachers instruct students to look beyond the aspects of Shakespeare’s work that might offer insight into some of the early developments of capitalism and illuminate the long history of class struggle that continues today.

Some Marxist literary critics attempt to access the antagonist class positions of texts like Shakespeare’s plays that appear to legitimate the values of the ruling class. They want to demonstrate how the oppositional voices contained in these texts identify evidence of class struggle. Through this critical process, they can show how the values and interests of the dominant class are not universal but repressive, intended to keep the power relations between the ruling and working classes one-sided. For most of us, learning to read texts this way helps us to see through the ever-present ruling class ideology that exists in everything from the literature we read to displays in trendy clothing stores to the nightly news. Hence, our ability to grasp and practice Marxist criticism provides us with the tools necessary both to understand literature from a class-based perspective and also to acknowledge the ideological forces that consistently attempt to shape our lives.

Consumere Creatio

2010-09-14T09:30:00.004-04:00

On the first day of class, we considered composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's remark that the planes colliding into the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 was the "greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos." We also discussed the reaction of music critic Anthony Tommasini in his New York Times article, "The Devil Made Him Do It." Some of the questions we began to explore were: What are the aesthetic components of 9/11, according to Stockhausen? In rejecting 9/11 as "art," what aesthetic criteria is Tommasini using? What does it mean to theorize 9/11 on a political or aesthetic level as something other than "attack" or "terrorist act"? How do we define terrorism? How do we define art? How is the "value" of art connected to moral values? How have responses to 9/11 been controlled? How do they continue to be controlled? How are most officially validated responses connected to sentimentalism, anti-intellectualism, jingoism, and conservative moral values and to what effect?

Continue this discussion on your group blogs. In your first post, give your thoughts as a group on Stockhausen's remark and the questions we began to discuss. Use any additional resources you find useful or interesting, including any material (newspaper articles, journal articles, blog posts, etc.) on 9/11, terror, theory, and art.