I said a while ago that reviews in literary studies tend to be excellent compared to those in other disciplines. But there are always exceptions:
Dr. Rostvig is again excellent on the intellectual background, particularly in bringing familiar material into new focus. She gives a fresh turn to the topic of Augustan poetry and landscape-gardening. Her essay on the still underrated James Thomson, who played a large part in destroying the classical ideal of the beatus vir, is excellent criticism. She resolutely traces the course of the river to its end; but as it widens to the sea, the water grows shallow and the fish more commonplace. When a Watts, a Collins, or an Akenside swims by, Dr. Rostvig marks him appreciatively. But the tiddlers come in shoals here, and we are forced to look at them too with almost comic concentration. There was too much in Dr. Rostvig's first book; she still lacks the discrimination of the compleat angler.
-James Kinsley, Review of English Studies, Feb. 1960 (in a review of volume 2 of Maren-Sofie Rostvig's classic The Happy Man)
Yikes.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Molecular, shmoelecular
I often recall this statement of Fredric Jameson whenever the dissolution of the Left becomes too much to bear:
The critique of totalization in France goes hand in hand with a call for a “molecular” or local, nonglobal, nonparty politics: and this repudiation of the traditional forms of class and party action evidently reflects the historic weight of French centralization (at work both in the institutions and in the forces that oppose them) as well as the belated emergence of what can very loosely be called a “countercultural” movement, with the breakup of all the old cellular family apparatus and a proliferation of subgroups and alternate “life-styles.” In the United States, on the other hand, it is precisely the intensity of social fragmentation of this latter kind that has made it historically difficult to unify Left or “antisystemic” forces in any durable and effective organizational way. Ethic groups, neighborhood movements, feminism, various “counter-cultural” or alternative life-style groups, rank-and-file labor dissidence, student movements, single-issue movements—all have in the United States seemed to project demands and strategies which were theoretically incompatible with each other and impossible to coordinate on any practical political basis. The privileged form in which the American Left can develop today must therefore necessarily be that of alliance politics; and such a politics is the strict practical equivalent of the concept of totalization on the theoretical level. In practice, then, the attack on the concept of “totality” in the American framework means the undermining and the repudiation of the only realistic perspective in which a genuine Left could come into being in this country. There is therefore a real problem about the importation and translation of theoretical polemics which have a quite different semantic content in the national situation in which they originate, as in that of France, where the various nascent movements for regional autonomy, women’s liberation and neighborhood organization are perceived as being repressed, or at least hampered in their development, by the global or “molar” perspectives of the traditional Left mass parties.
-The Political Unconscious, page 54, note 31.
Looking back on the last decades of the 20th century, where we saw the rise of a neoliberalism (which translates to the rise of an effectively Libertarian Right, a Left that is often anti-Labor, and a far-Left that threatens to desert the Democratic Party [remember Bush got elected because so many defected to Nader, thinking him greener (!) than Gore] more than it compromises with a more moderate Left politics)--a neoliberalism that, we now plainly see, has utterly destroyed this country's infrastructure (and if it isn't plain to you, you need to look around), you have to wonder why theorists who prided themselves on their politics didn't pay more attention to statements like this. And you really have to wonder why Jameson got so much flack in the U.S. for making them at the time, from people who claim to recognize the force of his critique of the critique of totality, but who nevertheless go on to stick him in a long line of totalizers.
Because it is basically right on every single point. Getting behind people like Deleuze in the late 20th century without really adapting them to the American context made no political sense in the U.S. whatsoever. The only way it even seemed to make sense was precisely because of the state of the forces that Jameson here outlines: you denied the narrative was valid from the perspective of your particular group, concluded this meant the only valid totality was non-totality, multiplicity, a proliferating pluralism--and thereby subscribed to that narrative.
Of course, everything turns on what counts as a valid "adaptation." What I like about the quote is that it sets the bar for this so low: all Jameson asks for is some sensitivity to the resonance of the words, rather than what we might call their grammar: that is, their ability to cohere and build up a (non-totalizing) political ontology of whatever sort. But people in those days were better humanists than they thought they were, apparently, and loved their system-building: they argued, effectively, that merely "using" these theorists (as it was called) was precisely a mode of adapting them. Thus the popularity of Foucault: he's easier Deleuze.
But it is no accident that smarter theorists (Judith Butler is a good example) affirm the correctness of this Jamesonian narrative with very few reservations, because--well, a lot of them spent some time in France, and have some familiarity themselves with the resonance of the terms. To put Jameson's demand in a different way, all he is asking people to do is familiarize themselves a bit with the contexts in which these statements are made. It isn't even a demand that people familiarize themselves with the "original" context of the statement (just as it isn't the ideas of Deleuze or any of the Frenchies that Jameson is here indicting): it isn't translation, but simply reading the rhetoric (another word for this sort of resonance, which you would think would have resonance here, where Yale School ideas were popular) of the texts that is necessary, and picking up on the fact that that they come from, and address, a different situation.
In short, what I like about this quote is that is basically comes from experience, though it does not require that experience to be forceful: it doesn't take much to see that certain political concepts developed in France are meant to address a certain political state of things, and while plurality might work there, its near-inevitable result would be to further fragment a country where there has been nothing like a significant (post-Depression) Communist Party, where social issues have always been thoroughly divorced from economic ones because of the inexistence of a history of a landed aristocracy and the subsequent tenuousness of any class distinctions (a situation which is unfortunately changing today, as the lower-middle "class" of tax-paying baby-boomers screwed over by Wall Street bankers starts to develop something like the first serious class-consciousness in America since before the Depression), and groups and interests face nothing like the centralization in France.
Or, to put it more mildly--for I can't say this fragmentation didn't also provide a beneficial sort of shift of the situation in some ways (while the Labor and the Women's Movements were, however, both slaughtered in the 80's and 90's)--imported along with the ineffective political theories was a suspicion of centralization which had no practical application at all in the U.S., except as a way to protest the Vietnam War or something like the "corruption" (something so vague and unbounded it now hovers over things as banal and routine as occasional government overspending) of the Nixon administration. The repression of various groups, and a lack of means for forms of this repression to become visible, wouldn't end with the dismantling of this centralization--which, after all, has its roots in policy and could have been corrected or (but you never heard anything of the relation of theory in general to policy except by feminists and Marxists, though in the early 90's things started to turn more generally that direction under the pressure of events) retheorized.
It seems like a history of thoroughly short-sighted people: people who concluded that a sort of pluralistic local-government politics was the natural outgrowth of everything that started in the 60's, and so anything that seemed theoretically to push in that direction, or further develop that idea, was deemed useful. And there seemed no threat of losing various federal guarantees that created and sustained the environment in which such ideas could be fostered (it is especially depressing now to hear older academics remember the ample funds sluiced into universities in the 60's). But as the forces opposing everything that politics stood for grew and grew, and even used its ideas to oppose it (still happening: again, prior to an election, Republicans are making the Democrats into the politically-correct and pluralistic, concluding that the much vaunted "respect for the other" also means love of terrorists)... well, you have to be glad that things (at least in the humanities) seem to be turning in other directions: critical theory is dissolving, or rather expanding, into more focused, concrete endeavors, which nevertheless posit genuine totalizing concepts (the media of media-studies is one of them). Which also means Deleuze's rhetoric--and many other rhetorics--might finally be read, after all these years.
The critique of totalization in France goes hand in hand with a call for a “molecular” or local, nonglobal, nonparty politics: and this repudiation of the traditional forms of class and party action evidently reflects the historic weight of French centralization (at work both in the institutions and in the forces that oppose them) as well as the belated emergence of what can very loosely be called a “countercultural” movement, with the breakup of all the old cellular family apparatus and a proliferation of subgroups and alternate “life-styles.” In the United States, on the other hand, it is precisely the intensity of social fragmentation of this latter kind that has made it historically difficult to unify Left or “antisystemic” forces in any durable and effective organizational way. Ethic groups, neighborhood movements, feminism, various “counter-cultural” or alternative life-style groups, rank-and-file labor dissidence, student movements, single-issue movements—all have in the United States seemed to project demands and strategies which were theoretically incompatible with each other and impossible to coordinate on any practical political basis. The privileged form in which the American Left can develop today must therefore necessarily be that of alliance politics; and such a politics is the strict practical equivalent of the concept of totalization on the theoretical level. In practice, then, the attack on the concept of “totality” in the American framework means the undermining and the repudiation of the only realistic perspective in which a genuine Left could come into being in this country. There is therefore a real problem about the importation and translation of theoretical polemics which have a quite different semantic content in the national situation in which they originate, as in that of France, where the various nascent movements for regional autonomy, women’s liberation and neighborhood organization are perceived as being repressed, or at least hampered in their development, by the global or “molar” perspectives of the traditional Left mass parties.
-The Political Unconscious, page 54, note 31.
Looking back on the last decades of the 20th century, where we saw the rise of a neoliberalism (which translates to the rise of an effectively Libertarian Right, a Left that is often anti-Labor, and a far-Left that threatens to desert the Democratic Party [remember Bush got elected because so many defected to Nader, thinking him greener (!) than Gore] more than it compromises with a more moderate Left politics)--a neoliberalism that, we now plainly see, has utterly destroyed this country's infrastructure (and if it isn't plain to you, you need to look around), you have to wonder why theorists who prided themselves on their politics didn't pay more attention to statements like this. And you really have to wonder why Jameson got so much flack in the U.S. for making them at the time, from people who claim to recognize the force of his critique of the critique of totality, but who nevertheless go on to stick him in a long line of totalizers.
Because it is basically right on every single point. Getting behind people like Deleuze in the late 20th century without really adapting them to the American context made no political sense in the U.S. whatsoever. The only way it even seemed to make sense was precisely because of the state of the forces that Jameson here outlines: you denied the narrative was valid from the perspective of your particular group, concluded this meant the only valid totality was non-totality, multiplicity, a proliferating pluralism--and thereby subscribed to that narrative.
Of course, everything turns on what counts as a valid "adaptation." What I like about the quote is that it sets the bar for this so low: all Jameson asks for is some sensitivity to the resonance of the words, rather than what we might call their grammar: that is, their ability to cohere and build up a (non-totalizing) political ontology of whatever sort. But people in those days were better humanists than they thought they were, apparently, and loved their system-building: they argued, effectively, that merely "using" these theorists (as it was called) was precisely a mode of adapting them. Thus the popularity of Foucault: he's easier Deleuze.
But it is no accident that smarter theorists (Judith Butler is a good example) affirm the correctness of this Jamesonian narrative with very few reservations, because--well, a lot of them spent some time in France, and have some familiarity themselves with the resonance of the terms. To put Jameson's demand in a different way, all he is asking people to do is familiarize themselves a bit with the contexts in which these statements are made. It isn't even a demand that people familiarize themselves with the "original" context of the statement (just as it isn't the ideas of Deleuze or any of the Frenchies that Jameson is here indicting): it isn't translation, but simply reading the rhetoric (another word for this sort of resonance, which you would think would have resonance here, where Yale School ideas were popular) of the texts that is necessary, and picking up on the fact that that they come from, and address, a different situation.
In short, what I like about this quote is that is basically comes from experience, though it does not require that experience to be forceful: it doesn't take much to see that certain political concepts developed in France are meant to address a certain political state of things, and while plurality might work there, its near-inevitable result would be to further fragment a country where there has been nothing like a significant (post-Depression) Communist Party, where social issues have always been thoroughly divorced from economic ones because of the inexistence of a history of a landed aristocracy and the subsequent tenuousness of any class distinctions (a situation which is unfortunately changing today, as the lower-middle "class" of tax-paying baby-boomers screwed over by Wall Street bankers starts to develop something like the first serious class-consciousness in America since before the Depression), and groups and interests face nothing like the centralization in France.
Or, to put it more mildly--for I can't say this fragmentation didn't also provide a beneficial sort of shift of the situation in some ways (while the Labor and the Women's Movements were, however, both slaughtered in the 80's and 90's)--imported along with the ineffective political theories was a suspicion of centralization which had no practical application at all in the U.S., except as a way to protest the Vietnam War or something like the "corruption" (something so vague and unbounded it now hovers over things as banal and routine as occasional government overspending) of the Nixon administration. The repression of various groups, and a lack of means for forms of this repression to become visible, wouldn't end with the dismantling of this centralization--which, after all, has its roots in policy and could have been corrected or (but you never heard anything of the relation of theory in general to policy except by feminists and Marxists, though in the early 90's things started to turn more generally that direction under the pressure of events) retheorized.
It seems like a history of thoroughly short-sighted people: people who concluded that a sort of pluralistic local-government politics was the natural outgrowth of everything that started in the 60's, and so anything that seemed theoretically to push in that direction, or further develop that idea, was deemed useful. And there seemed no threat of losing various federal guarantees that created and sustained the environment in which such ideas could be fostered (it is especially depressing now to hear older academics remember the ample funds sluiced into universities in the 60's). But as the forces opposing everything that politics stood for grew and grew, and even used its ideas to oppose it (still happening: again, prior to an election, Republicans are making the Democrats into the politically-correct and pluralistic, concluding that the much vaunted "respect for the other" also means love of terrorists)... well, you have to be glad that things (at least in the humanities) seem to be turning in other directions: critical theory is dissolving, or rather expanding, into more focused, concrete endeavors, which nevertheless posit genuine totalizing concepts (the media of media-studies is one of them). Which also means Deleuze's rhetoric--and many other rhetorics--might finally be read, after all these years.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Self-reference and metafiction (and realism)
There's a distinction to be made between self-referential stories and metafictional stories. While self-reference rolls itself up into a ball, seeking to disappear in indexicality, metafiction sprawls, unfolds, and interrogates the consequences of self-reference and parody more than it engages in either. In metafiction is room for development, where self-reference aims for merely a more pithy postmodern version of the modernist paradox Frederic Jameson describes so well: resolution in paradox, fragmentation that effectively means closure--all of which announces the inflexibility of form at the same time as it mourns the loss of an unironic formal achievement. Of course, modernism can't be reduced to just that, but this is precisely the reduction postmodernism accomplishes in order to turn this fatalism into a weird schizophrenic joy, closing off all the utopian modernist alternatives in order to elaborate, rather than change, this relation to form. So the pithiness here comes from the sense that metafiction can be dissolved into a series of instances of self-reference (otherwise known as allegory), or the sense that in instances of self-reference, we are getting all that metafiction allows.
But the overturning of this relation between the two has itself to be overturned, set back on it's feet. Instead of narratives like that of "Seinfeld," which rigorously--and wonderfully, in its last episode, though everyone hated precisely this fact--stuck to its self-referential pseudo-closure, we need more stories like "It's Garry Shandling's Show," which is a wonderful example of the possibilities of meta-fiction. Where "Seinfeld" constantly got laughs because it was a parody of the sitcom's premise, a show about shows and so really "about nothing"--or, to put it more accurately, referring (via its plots mostly) constantly to its own status as merely plausible--"It's Garry Shandling's Show" allows Shandling the metafictional possibility of actually commenting upon the way the show will unfold, and motivating this moment of self-reference into a drama: plots often involve Garry trying to avoid having to do an upcoming scene, and all self-reference actually dissolves into a fiction that is actually about fiction. Rather than making fiction's status as merely probable the beginning and end of the story, the status actually motivates a story about fiction.
The difference is subtle (I have a little difficulty bringing it out here), but the effect is a completely different sort of tale: while "Seinfeld" maintains the division between fiction and reality and exploits it, "It's Garry Shandling's Show" has no use for such self-consciousness of fictionality, and spills over into reality, blurring it's lines. This produces, basically, realism's brand of fiction (it's this more than anything like the science fiction of which Latour speaks). Garry maintains the notion that you can actually come over to his show, and often invites the audience in for dip: the point is not that the show is accounting for it's status as a show, but rather that you don't know where the fiction begins or ends. Garry is a guy who can be on a stage and be fictional--fiction is something different than acting, in other words, or it is only that. The odd doubling-over that Latour describes so well as the point of a dualistic notion of reference--this is just another event in reality, and can interact with it only because reality is really not as opposed to fiction as we thought it was.
Another way of making the distinction is to say that the opposition of fiction is not reality but history, not in the sense that fictions are ahistorical (though this actually does apply in some ways), but that fictions are negated by an idea of reality that claims to be objective and different than the narratives we tell about it. Fiction has no problem dealing with reality, but when it meets the claim that the people it deals with are not historical persons (and, as Michael Wood explains, especially when they are real people who are embellished through fiction, like the heroes of Homer Aristotle has so many problems with), it then has all sorts of problems. It's only when we believe reality has anything to do with history in this sense that reality then becomes opposed to fiction in such an austere way. Otherwise, like Latour says, the world interprets itself: what's crucial is that meta-fiction tries to restore this state of things, while self-reference or the restricted play between allegory and irony, comes from that despairing state of things just described, and will preserve the distinction between historical reality and fiction at all costs.
A final note: I had a little trouble distinguishing between the self-referential and the metafictional above, partly because "Seinfeld" is only explicitly self-referential in its form, and this actually makes it less visible (thus the disappointment with the last episode came from people mistaking the show's form for something else that involved the sort of everyday comedy that was its subject, something that would be about something). A cleaner example might be a reality show, especially one about trying to get on TV: Kathy Griffin's reality show is a good one, while "The Comeback" is pretty much a perfect example, because it takes the premise of reality TV (something lurking behind both Shandling and Seinfeld's ventures, but not really crystallized yet) to the max, and shows it to be precisely this sort of infinite self-reference. But that's still too formal, even if it shows just how dead and boring postmodernism is when it's view of things really hits TV. A more direct example can just be taken from "It's Garry Shandling's Show," since it uses self-reference to get to the plane of metafiction. The direct reference in the scene above to the monologue that opens the show is self-referential, while what it implies in terms of action is metafictional: Nancy has to stop what she's doing to wait for Garry to finish the monologue, because it's a monologue, something that, in fiction, has a particular shape and has to be traversed in a particular fashion--and not just because Garry refers to the show and what he is doing in general, in the abstract. What's funny is the waiting, and then the fact that she realizes that because the monologue is this particular object (I think like the realists we might call it an "object," or at least that's my take on how to turn people like Harman towards narrative, via their excellent reflections on what is involved in aesthetics) she can go do something else while Garry finishes--it's this that's funny, not the reference. You can also probably distinguish between them if you look at the great theme song, though things get hazy when you try to distinguish between types of utterance, as Derrida a long time ago (and this realist possibility of metafiction is, in my reading of him, what he tries to preserve here) showed with Austin:
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The theme to Garry's show,
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song,
I'm almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry's show.
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The opening theme to Garry's show,
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits,
We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle,
Then we'll watch "It's Garry Shandling's Show."
This was the theme to Garry Shandling's show.
"This is the theme to Garry's Show" is self-reference, while the amazing, hilarious turn "I'm almost halfway finished," picks up the narrative potential in "Garry called me up" and starts something metafictional, which doesn't take the plausibility of fiction for granted, and doesn't try to shore it up, but explores it, makes it spill out into and merge with reality.
But the overturning of this relation between the two has itself to be overturned, set back on it's feet. Instead of narratives like that of "Seinfeld," which rigorously--and wonderfully, in its last episode, though everyone hated precisely this fact--stuck to its self-referential pseudo-closure, we need more stories like "It's Garry Shandling's Show," which is a wonderful example of the possibilities of meta-fiction. Where "Seinfeld" constantly got laughs because it was a parody of the sitcom's premise, a show about shows and so really "about nothing"--or, to put it more accurately, referring (via its plots mostly) constantly to its own status as merely plausible--"It's Garry Shandling's Show" allows Shandling the metafictional possibility of actually commenting upon the way the show will unfold, and motivating this moment of self-reference into a drama: plots often involve Garry trying to avoid having to do an upcoming scene, and all self-reference actually dissolves into a fiction that is actually about fiction. Rather than making fiction's status as merely probable the beginning and end of the story, the status actually motivates a story about fiction.
The difference is subtle (I have a little difficulty bringing it out here), but the effect is a completely different sort of tale: while "Seinfeld" maintains the division between fiction and reality and exploits it, "It's Garry Shandling's Show" has no use for such self-consciousness of fictionality, and spills over into reality, blurring it's lines. This produces, basically, realism's brand of fiction (it's this more than anything like the science fiction of which Latour speaks). Garry maintains the notion that you can actually come over to his show, and often invites the audience in for dip: the point is not that the show is accounting for it's status as a show, but rather that you don't know where the fiction begins or ends. Garry is a guy who can be on a stage and be fictional--fiction is something different than acting, in other words, or it is only that. The odd doubling-over that Latour describes so well as the point of a dualistic notion of reference--this is just another event in reality, and can interact with it only because reality is really not as opposed to fiction as we thought it was.
Another way of making the distinction is to say that the opposition of fiction is not reality but history, not in the sense that fictions are ahistorical (though this actually does apply in some ways), but that fictions are negated by an idea of reality that claims to be objective and different than the narratives we tell about it. Fiction has no problem dealing with reality, but when it meets the claim that the people it deals with are not historical persons (and, as Michael Wood explains, especially when they are real people who are embellished through fiction, like the heroes of Homer Aristotle has so many problems with), it then has all sorts of problems. It's only when we believe reality has anything to do with history in this sense that reality then becomes opposed to fiction in such an austere way. Otherwise, like Latour says, the world interprets itself: what's crucial is that meta-fiction tries to restore this state of things, while self-reference or the restricted play between allegory and irony, comes from that despairing state of things just described, and will preserve the distinction between historical reality and fiction at all costs.
A final note: I had a little trouble distinguishing between the self-referential and the metafictional above, partly because "Seinfeld" is only explicitly self-referential in its form, and this actually makes it less visible (thus the disappointment with the last episode came from people mistaking the show's form for something else that involved the sort of everyday comedy that was its subject, something that would be about something). A cleaner example might be a reality show, especially one about trying to get on TV: Kathy Griffin's reality show is a good one, while "The Comeback" is pretty much a perfect example, because it takes the premise of reality TV (something lurking behind both Shandling and Seinfeld's ventures, but not really crystallized yet) to the max, and shows it to be precisely this sort of infinite self-reference. But that's still too formal, even if it shows just how dead and boring postmodernism is when it's view of things really hits TV. A more direct example can just be taken from "It's Garry Shandling's Show," since it uses self-reference to get to the plane of metafiction. The direct reference in the scene above to the monologue that opens the show is self-referential, while what it implies in terms of action is metafictional: Nancy has to stop what she's doing to wait for Garry to finish the monologue, because it's a monologue, something that, in fiction, has a particular shape and has to be traversed in a particular fashion--and not just because Garry refers to the show and what he is doing in general, in the abstract. What's funny is the waiting, and then the fact that she realizes that because the monologue is this particular object (I think like the realists we might call it an "object," or at least that's my take on how to turn people like Harman towards narrative, via their excellent reflections on what is involved in aesthetics) she can go do something else while Garry finishes--it's this that's funny, not the reference. You can also probably distinguish between them if you look at the great theme song, though things get hazy when you try to distinguish between types of utterance, as Derrida a long time ago (and this realist possibility of metafiction is, in my reading of him, what he tries to preserve here) showed with Austin:
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The theme to Garry's show,
Garry called me up and asked if I would right his theme song,
I'm almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry's show.
This is the theme to Garry's show,
The opening theme to Garry's show,
This is the music that you hear as you watch the credits,
We're almost to the part of where I start to whistle,
Then we'll watch "It's Garry Shandling's Show."
This was the theme to Garry Shandling's show.
"This is the theme to Garry's Show" is self-reference, while the amazing, hilarious turn "I'm almost halfway finished," picks up the narrative potential in "Garry called me up" and starts something metafictional, which doesn't take the plausibility of fiction for granted, and doesn't try to shore it up, but explores it, makes it spill out into and merge with reality.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)