Theory Live

"And now he's here once again to capitalize on people's emotions."

Berlant, Lauren. “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event.” American Literary History, 20:4 (Winter 2008): 845-60

I call this "live theory" because I'm responding even before I finish the essay. I think Berlant's writing lends itself to that -- much as with reading in Chinese, some translation and paraphrase is necessary along the way.

This essay begins by giving me the idea that Yang Jiang’s essays, both as collections and as fragmented vignettes living their own lives all over the internet, act analogously to The Intuitionist or Pattern Recognition in that, like historical novels, they attempt to capture the affective response to the historical crises. If you can capture exactly what it was that we felt, then you can bring together the two opposing views that history determines us (structure) and that we determine history (agency). I pictured this at first as a closed door and person approaching. The person reaches out, opens the door, and walks through. The door shuts. Which determined what just happened, the person or the door? Clearly it was a process of the person’s immediate response to the circumstance of the door. The door didn’t make the person go through it. Similarly the person did not choose to open the door rather than simply pass through without opening it. Structure and agency affect each other.

Of course, most of the time the circumstances are far more complicated than one person and one door. Berlant asks, “...how does the aesthetic rendition of emotionally complex sensual experience articulate with what what is already codified as “knowledge” of a contemporary historical moment? How is it possible for the affects to sense that people have lived a moment collectively and translocally in a way that is not just a record of ideology?” Imagine if the only way to tell the story of 9/11 was with CNN news clips. Now imagine how much we add by writing novels that tell the intimate experience of the disaster. What does making the novel add? As for the second question of Berlant, I think immediately to the South Park parody of Alan Jackson’s song about 9/11: sometimes it is just a record of ideology.

Berlant proposes the to answer the questions by analyzing how people respond to such historical novels with intuition -- in this, she seems to be doing the same work as the makers of the South Park episode, exposing how intuition overrides critical judgment -- but I’m sure in a nicer way. For one thing, the plot of a historical novel is experienced in two ways at once -- it happens in your mind as an immediate experience, with the same perspectives as the characters. But it is also known to have occurred in the past. “[D]espite the singularities of affect, the historical novel points to a unity of experience in an ongoing moment that historians can later call epochal, but that at the time was evidenced as a shared nervous system.” (847) Translation: Even though “feelings” can only be had by one person, and even then they can’t have exactly the same “feeling” twice, with the historical novel we can make it seem like a whole group of people was having “feelings” together. Again, when we tell the story of 9/11, we do something -- like say where we were at the time -- that implies we were feeling something similar (a break in the daily routine, say. A shock.)

We have to check out what genre our novel is, because genres each manipulate the feelings of the reader in a different way: the ghost story makes you scared, for example. In Berlantese, genres are “a loose affectual contract that predicts the form that an aesthetic transaction will take.” Marxists like Lukacs first mapped out the conventions of the historical novel, and even realized that these conventions were linked to feelings, but they did not work out how different conventions activate different feelings. They did not have a science of “affect,” which is another way of saying that they didn’t care much for each other’s feelings.

A historical novel takes as its theme the past, but the feelings the story makes us feel are feelings that have to do with the historical present of the author. “Affect works in the present.” (848) This helps me solve the problem of what is so important about old people’s writings. Old people begin to see all of their experiences as “emergently historic,” especially if they have lived through multiple crises.

More to come.
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At Least I'm Un-Making Progress

Palmer's Lodge, Hampstead, London, (June 2010)

Daruvala, Susan. Zhou Zuoren and An Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

I revisited the first chapter of Susan Daruvala’s book about Zhou Zuoren to get a sense of how she writes the “theoretical frameworks” that I have been told more than once is my greatest weakness.

“Nationalism and Modernity,” the central section of the chapter, elaborates on the antagonistic forces that Zhou Zuoren’s philosophy opposes. A careful reading of this 11,000-word piece was more than a little xingku, and ultimately left me unsatisfied because it does not give any role to literature. But I’ll bracket that criticism for the next few paragraphs to summarize what this work actually offers: a passionate response to a set of readings that shows one student’s effort to understand why and how nationalism dominates modern societies.

* * *


Daruvala first sets out to set as the object of her concern the emergence of the nation-state, which occurs after the growth of long-distance trade and big cities. The word “modernity” describes this emergence, but is applies equally well to a new self-consciousness and capacity for reflection: how do we connect the two?

For one thing, the emergence of the nation-state is the emergence of people who see themselves as parts of a greater whole. They become willing to live and die for their country. This sentiment spreads out of England in the 18th century into other European nations, and their colonies.

But if some are willing to die for their country, inevitably others came to question whether this was the best practice. Perhaps there are times when one should ask not what one can do for one’s country, but what one’s country can do for one? And perhaps if the answer the country gives is “I shall make you into a productive tool,” then the contract between citizen and state may begin to look unfair. The Holocaust of course constitutes the extreme example of how unfair this may become.

For Liah Greenfeld, it is particularly important to understand that German elites were driven to create a nation-state out of a ressentiment, a sense of inferiority, against the more successful English. One wonders if they ever considered that the English were helped along themselves by their fear of Napoleon! In any case, we must remember that in addition to ressentiment, pure greed is a major factor driving the formation of nation-states; if we picture capital as a thing, we can look back on history to see the English, Germans, etc. carefully structuring the state and the nation to better serve it.

Books and print media have the key role of disseminating the discourse of nationalism: only with the help of books and newspapers could the English amplify their sense of Englishness; that they also became racists along the way is an inevitable feature of the rhetoric used in this discourse. Daruvala does not spell out this rhetoric, but I am reminded of the concept so popular at the moment (2010), that it is easy and efficient to build group identity by identifying the outsiders.

I lament this rhetorical pattern, which is so completely common even on the news reports I’ve heard just today, but I am also fascinated by its power and versatility. To see this, one only has to consider the emergence of nationalist discourse in the colonies: elite colonial subjects always want to become their masters: from the English, we have India.

Looking at the colonies is useful because it allows us to see that in the discourse of nationalism, “nation” and “modern” mean much the same thing. Nation-builders hoped that they would become modern, and hence more rational, and hence more fully free and rational; they did not see that they actually were making themselves into tools for the service of capital. Gradually a “stance of disengaged reason” makes a person begin to see herself as merely a part of the whole unable to change the whole. (Scientific discourse encourages this “stance of disengaged reason.”)

Eventually, the understanding that the parts ought to leave the whole alone becomes a moral claim. This, Daruvala will go on to claim, is what happened in China during and after the May Fourth Movement.

Meanwhile, nation-builders continue to think that having a modern nation will make them rational. As Paul Ricoeur argues, the drive to be ever more rational is a feature of humans, but goes awry when they build structures that serve capital, instead of attending to “what is most living and creative in them.” Another Frenchman, Patrick Tort, points again to the rhetorical pattern of evolution and progress which is a crucial part a larger “para-scientific ideology.” Just as we serve capital, we have come to serve science and rationalism. The unfortunate consequence of this service is amnesia, as Renan has said: “Forgetting...is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” (I suppose the way this works is as follows: I can play video games, what use have I of chess? I must form a nation-state, what use have I of Catholicism or Confucianism? Renan’s point was apparently directed at the French, who say “We have France, what use have we now of Spanish-speakers?”)

“Progress,” tied as it is to rationalism, pictures civilization as a warring party with nature. To identifying “civilization” with nations is to picture yourself fighting with other nations. Alternatively, civilization could be “open structures” separate from nations, which might allow more room civilizatons to co-exist.

Perhaps, since the nation has evolved as the organization best-suited to grow capital, that opposing the nation would help oppose capital? Tagore certainly thought so.

***

Despite the eloquence of Tagore’s anti-national vision (apparently he told a crowd of Japanese in 1916, “The people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with the cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power called the Nation.”), my objection to Daruvala’s account is that neither she nor Tagore have given any hint that “the Nation” is the source of the greed that drives civilization to care for the needs of capital rather than the needs of people. I think I see what she is driving at, however: if we can awaken ourselves to the fact of our slavery, we can begin to fix the problem. If we can remember the older habits, like filial piety, that make us serve people, that can help displace the service of capital. This is somehow a larger umbrella into which I can place the lessons of the “queer art of failure” and “against recovery” from recent readings. But all lack a real vision -- so far. I’ll be patient as I continue to study Daruvala with great care.


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The Public Sphere in China

Hanjiang Road, Hankou (Thanks, wikicommons)

Rowe, William T. "The Public Sphere in Modern China." Modern China, 16:3 (July 1990): 309-329

What makes modern society so different from ancient societies? Is it just that we have new ways of working in groups on larger, more complex projects than before? Does having ways of working in groups make us any better at communicating with each other, or at fighting for the rights of the weak and injured in the world?

Writing just after the translation into English of Jurgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, historian William Rowe reviews 1970s and 1980s work to analyze Chinese social structures in terms of the growth and decline of a “public sphere.” Most scholars answer the first question above with an affirmative to the second question: modernity is about the growth of long-distance trade, which necessitates new social structures such as newspapers, coffee houses, popular literature, trade guilds, neighborhood elites, and street repair teams. Habermas’ work specifically laments the transformation of the public sphere of the European bourgeoisie into a place where mass opinion is manipulated by large corporations, mass media, advertising, the ideology of social rights, an enormous bureaucracy, mass political parties, and highly-organized interest-group politics.



The work of China scholars, however, does not always lament. Research on 18th- and 19th-century Chinese social structures often celebrates attention to the “public” (gong) as a class of citizens, in contradistinction to “private” (si) concerns that were negatively encoded in the tradition for their exclusion of anyone outside the family; gong was also most often distinguished from “official” guan, which according to ancient ideals was a support to the larger community, but which was notorious for serving its own needs as a larger, more malevolent version of “private” actors. “Public” social structures included gongjian, special offices “authorized for use on local community projects such as road and irrigation work repairs.” These kinds of local elite structures continued to evolve through the early 20th century, when they began to realize that they were more effective at management than the imperial system.

Rowe admits frankly that the accounts available by 1990 had not developed the history of how this locally-based “public sphere” was “foreclosed” by the expansion of the “official” (guan) sphere under the late Qing, then Yuan Shikai, and then the KMT. The question, “Did an autonomous public sphere disappear in twentieth-century China, and, if so, at what moment?” remains intriguing and incompletely answered. Now that the Chinese government has scaled back from the peak of its intrusion into the intimate sphere, the question of both the intimate sphere and the non-governmental public sphere have become active topics for discussion again.

Rowe suggests that Habermas has “much to say” for students who would write the histories of “domesticity, friendship, and intimacy in China,” but leaves this aspect of history mostly outside the scope of his article. I take away a number of points, however, which I believe are applicable to my work so far (against my better judgment, I first put these down as a list, because they are still so fragmented in my mind):

“Why” attempt to find an analogue to “the public sphere” in Chinese history? Because we are looking for the opportunities that life offers for criticism. In doing this we follow the tradition of the Frankfurt School. between “public” and “gong” in Chinese history?

We are interested in the historical changes to people, and their values. Where Habermas studies the creation of the bourgeois (burgerlich) class which at first imposed its will on what was to become the notion of the “public sphere,” in China we must follow along the local elites who so often took responsibility for mass communication, education, and even repairing the roads.

For Yang Yinhang, a crucial component to popular sovereignty was the rule of law and an independent judiciary. I wonder how contemporary readers, intellectual or otherwise, understand Yang’s values, and his disappoinments?


My own focus on a woman who seeks only to remember her most personal and intimate relationships at first seems to put the economic origins of the local elite class out of my scope. But this is not quite the case; Yang Jiang remembers the centers of wealth in her own clan, in the Qian clan, and in the people she knew as a child in Shanghai. Uncomfortable feelings about one extremely wealthy family in Shanghai helps us to understand how Yang Yinhang and his family distinguished its own modesty and concern for social justice. The contrast of Yang’s more open and progressive home from the Qians also highlights the diversity of approaches to the tradition and such matters of public taste as “elegance” (ya).

Wuxi, with its dialect, its customs of teasing, it’s strong local community, makes it an ideal place for Yang Jiang. The influence of Qian’s Bofu, and the Wuxi teahouse culture, on him is directly connected to his production of a novel in Yang Jiang’s formulation.

Yang Jiang’s own practice is characterized as an appeal to public opinion. There is a basic faith that public opinion has not degenerated wholly into mass opinion. Yang Yinhang’s older and undeveloped view that an informed reading public could help in the creation of an informed and influential public opinion lives on in Yang Jiang.

There is a centuries-old war of the word “gong” in China -- does the responsibility of the public interest lie in the central government, or in the hands of its private citizenry? If self-interest (si) could be understood as crucial components of public interest (gong), then gong and si need not be opposed. This tradition is what Yang Jiang is trying to describe in her own family.

We can see this idea at work in Yang Yinhang’s dedication of his home to an elite activist from the late Ming. Yang Yinhang at the time had hope that an elite-led local public sphere might still be a force for political good using tools like the newspaper and the legal office.

The form of the essay lends itself to combining social comment with the deeply personal and subjective, with making symbolic the details of everyday living. In doing so, it shows itself a proper form to inherit the old tradition that would make gong out of si. No wonder it remains the major form for so many Chinese readers.
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Berlant and Intimacy, Again

An example of the many interactions intimacy can have with institutions

Berlant, Lauren. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 281-288.

On the third reading of this small, dense essay, I am just beginning to realize how difficult it is to use any of what Professor Berlant is saying, because I have not only to translate her often disconnected terms and propositions, I have to sift through carefully staged generalities and ambiguities to create statements that might apply directly to what I am thinking about. I thought once before that at the very least, writing under the influence of theory was less difficult than translating Chinese scholarship. How wrong that was!


Therefore, to help prepare the theoretical portions of my dissertation, I will begin going through American theory very, very carefully, tasting my thoughts along the way. I have time.


Berlant opens with a vision of intimacy as an element of stories that call us to look inward at intimate relationships between people, but also calls us to look outward towards "institutions of intimacy" that we hope will help us lead the lives we wish to lead. I find mysteriously intriguing Berlant's comment that intimacy as an element of stories is suited to simple elegance:

"I didn't think it would turn out this way" is the secret epitaph of intimacy.To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity.

Certainly, I do not at the moment see the connection between this form that intimacy takes and its dual inward/outward nature. All I have is an inkling.


The next three paragraphs are very unclear, but involve the ideas of therapy and jurisdiction (which I suppose we can understand as the law as an institution). Berlant's point seems to be simply that the stories we tell about intimacy have an influence on such institutions ("intimacy builds worlds")


Next, Berlant states the scope of the essays in that number of Critical Inquiry: the essays investigate the complex relationship between intimate life on public life and vice versa. For example, a billboard may suggest strongly that abortion is wrong: the public sphere has a message about the intimate sphere. But the intimate sphere may have something to say back to that. And so on and so forth. There are huge philosophical battles here: we Americans tend to consider private life more real than private life. How does all this happen? asks Berlant. "How can we think about the ways attachments make people public, producing transpersonal identities and subjectivities, when those attachments come from within spaces as varied as those of domestic intimacy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive crises?" (283)


In the USA, we perpetuate a divide between public and private that does not accurately describe many of our institutions, which in fact "can be read as institutions of intimacy." Habermas understood that if the public were to take up a role as critic, then "collective intimacy" must the ideal of the public in cafes, newspapers, and at home. "Persons were to be prepared for their critical social function in what Habermas calls the intimate spheres of domesticity, where they would learn (say, from novels and newspapers) to experience their internal lives theatrically, as though oriented toward an audience." (284) But it didn't work because people were driven to read and watch stories that are pleasurable, not merely instructive. It becomes hard to tell the difference between pleasure and critical function. Special interest groups begin to realize that many stories demean them, which calls into question whether we should ever have striven for a collective intimacy -- isn't it always a dream of omnipotence by some privileged class?


But intimacy is actually a very diverse, "wild thing:" we can find stories of people who walk dogs, or fetishists and their objects. Berlant reveals her interest in the marginalized people whose stories often go untold, and ask us to question, why are there so few plots? Single people, queer people, can become "unimaginable" even to themselves, thus wasting "world-building energy." Therefore there is a major need to "rethink" the narratives, presumably to increase to total diversity of narratives, of ways of being. "To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living."


When we consider intimacy, we always see tacit "fantasies" in the stories that people fight to show us and make us believe. When a certain kind of intimacy becomes an issue, we see people argue for it eloquently. When a population loses its sovereignty, the stories they produce can be expected to be bitter. Many, many kinds of trauma affect contemporary societies everywhere, but these traumas are now mass-mediated events, including testimony from those who suffer that offers a "shocking" message about intimacy (I'm not sure what Berlant means here: is she saying that the Haiti earthquake survivor shocks with her appeal via intimacy, or is she saying that we learn of our true intimates when they are sheared away, and this is shocking?)


To recap, Berlant's vision is of a set of essays that will further conversations about "the modes of attachment that make persons public and collective and that make collective scenes intimate spaces." My project would seem to engage only the first of these two rough divisions to the project -- I present stories by a single author that show intimate attachments becoming public. For me, the form of the Chinese essay is an intimation, in that it communicates with readers using spare signs and gestures. The essay shows us the personal details, sometimes of attachments and sometimes not, but always to form a multiplex attachment with many readers -- this is the power of the symbol. I take it as well from Berlant that it is crucial to attempt to understand how such stories affect and are affected by institutions such as the law. Certainly there are reciprocal relationships between stories and institutions that deserve consideration, though this aspect of the work remains most mysterious to me. Some clues that Berlant leaves include: check out the hidden divide between stories that instruct and those only meant to entertain, check for the most marginalized populations and their strategies, and think about to what extent the entire society is experiencing trauma through mass-mediation.

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Getting ecocritical

A quick mindmap to try to understand the interaction model.

Foote, Bonnie. “The Narrative Interactions of Silent Spring: Bridging Literary Criticism and Ecocriticism.” New Literary History 38.4 (2007) 739-753.

This article updates my sense of literary value: literature is language that exhibits dense internal interactions, as well as a great variety of interactions with its readers. “The sheer quantity and density of interactions are, in fact, exactly what make literature literature.” I like this formulation for now because it jives well with an ecological metaphor for human life: life is about expanding sociability through biodiversity, while good literature is about expanding communication through diversity of language, of artistry, of experience and imagination. Although I haven’t thought it through just yet, it seems to me that thinking of literature in this way gives us room to accept strong messages of advocacy as well as simply complex or realistic or otherwise sophisticated works of art.


Take Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as an example, says Foote. This is a good book to choose because it illustrates how a book and its critics can affect the social and natural worlds: Silent Spring started a very large national conversation about the effects of trace poisons that involved a large and expensive effort by the chemical industry to destroy Carson’s legitimacy. Eventually Carson’s work triumphed, Carson became a heroine, and certain steps were taken to open a national conversation on the environment. More importantly, Carson left a major mark on the narrative tradition in coming up with a form that suited the new problems of her day. As John Haines would say, Carson followed the example of the great modernists of the early twentieth century in tailoring artistic form to the needs of the moment with a consciousness that art, history, the environment, and our humanity are all interrelated pieces of some whole.

Foote’s nice reading of the epigraphs to this book and to its opening lead her to an application of network theory as the metaphor for this model: “In the parlance of network theory, Carson wove together an extraordinary array of influences to create a compelling communicative ‘hub,’ an O'Hare or LAX for ideas and emotions to move through, launch from, and reference. Her creation has never since lacked for emotional and intellectual traffic.” Foote calls for New Historicism, New Criticism, New Media studies, Reader-response criticism and other aspects of modern theory to work together to explain exactly how Carson was able to create persuasive, contentious rhetoric that opened so many eyes to the perils of the environment, and that continues to do so. Implicitly, Foote also can be said to be asking us to study why Silent Spring also stirred strong opposition, how the story of Silent Spring has been transformed throughout its afterlife. We are also meant to ask what exactly made Silent Spring a success when similar texts like the 1960s environmental essays of John Haines, say, are ignored.

This last bit would trouble Haines, I think. I think many artists find something repugnant in trying to crack open the secrets to fame and influence. As artists, they are afraid what might happen to art if the passion to create is understood as a function of the desire for influence. And rightly so, I think; art that plans to have a big effect can’t, as a rule. Art must begin with a certain attention to the world, to the reality of life in the world, and not be distracted by any vision of the unpredictable effects that the art may have in the future. John Haines is uncomfortable with the term “vision,” and now I can see why. But for the critic and teacher, vision is absolutely necessary, because we must choose what is good, often quite before any other readers have done so. Can a good teacher become a good artist? Certainly a good artist might also possess what it takes to teach -- I’ve seen this myself. But I’m not nearly so sure whether Foote’s interaction model, and my feelings of thrall over it, might be the death knell for any attempt I could ever make at creating art. I thus reach a dilemma that must be as old as the idea of teaching literature: should I continue to develop critical ability and give up on art, give up on criticism and pursue art, or continue to try for a composite form of expression that answers specifically to what I need to say?

One clue to the solution of my own dilemma is Foote’s assertion that literary criticism take an accounting of itself in light of the grandest vision it may have of art and society in interaction:

The next step would be to map literary criticism not just onto, but into, this interactive model. Literary critics constitute, after all, one of the most influential audiences for literature, the key group shaping the presentation of literature as an institutionalized narrative tradition, primarily through scholarly publication and university teaching. What territory, what potential, what influence does literary criticism have already, and what will it choose to claim in coming years? As Robert Scholes, Gerald Graff, and John Guillory have most memorably shown, these boundaries are hardly stable, and literary criticism could sharply interrogate and substantially expand them without exceeding its legitimate grasp.

As an institution of literature experts, we should be ashamed that we didn’t treat Silent Spring as a work of literature before. We didn’t teach any literature that worked seriously to change the world, because we have slowly but steadily relinquished any potential for literary criticism to change the world.

Here we come to another aporia in my current thinking. Should a smart person such as myself work to join an institution such as a university? If Silent Spring were not already considered literature, I could imagine one of my projects to have been to make students and teachers take Silent Spring seriously. But perhaps Silent Spring’s true power as a persuasive text is damaged by bringing it into the institution. Foote knows this is possible; certainly John Haines would see it as more than likely. We return to then to the idea that we must take a full accounting of why, how and what it is we are doing, and try to develop a vision (yes, Haines, a vision!) of where we need to go next. Foote has an elegant idea for an opening question:

Working further with the narrative interaction model, critics looking for appropriate lines of inquiry might ask: where in current and past societies are the interactions of narrative most dense, potentially or actually? Which narrative works provide linguistic hubs, hearthfires, for those interactions, and how do they do it? ... Where, though, are the constellations that literary criticism has missed?

The interactive model allows us to spot the dense areas, and we must attend to those. But we also need to fill in the gaps, or at least understand why the gaps are there: Haines tells us that it is a tragedy more people haven’t heard of Edwin Muir or Hermann Broch. Is it? Why?
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Reapproaching Positive Thinking 1

Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist that academics love to hate. Well, that's one point in her favor...

At the IABA 2010 conference, Nancy K. Miller mentioned Maureen Dowd’s June 1, 2010 column “A Storyteller Loses the Story Line” as evidence of the popular equivalence between the story of recovery and recovery itself. Miller seemed to me clearly following Barbara Ehrenreich, and when I brought this up with her she just nodded -- “I’m just nodding here, you’re so right,” she said. In any case, when I heard that Dowd had taken an interest in storytelling, however utilitarian, my interest was piqued, and so I read some Dowd. The climax of Dowd’s June 1 column is as follows:

In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama showed passion, lyricism, empathy and an exquisite understanding of character and psychological context — all the qualities that he has stubbornly resisted showing as president. It was a book that promised a president who could see into the hearts of other people. But there’s so much you don’t learn about candidates in campaigns, even when they seem completely exposed.

This president has made it clear that he’s not comfortable outside whatever domain he’s defined. But unless he wants his story to be marred by a pattern of passivity, detachment, acquiescence and compromise, he’d better seize control of the story line of his White House years. Woe-is-me is not an attractive narrative.

We can see here something of what Miller means when she speaks of an equivalence between the story’s positive and the real positive that is so desired. Dowd took the qualities Obama assigns himself in his life story for qualities he would take into his presidency. Obama doesn’t display those qualities in the story as Dowd sees it today, hence Dowd’s lack of satisfaction. Miller deduces a much stronger, and more stupid, reading here: Dowd wants Obama to come up with a story that seems more positive, and thus more attractive. Damn the facts. But a more sympathetic reading of Dowd is available to us. She wants Obama to display the qualities that he displayed before. She may even believe, as I do, that he really is an empathic and well-meaning man, but simply unable to project in this moment of multiple, interrelated crises. So her meaning may be for him to project what she still believes from his earlier story to actually, really be there. Miller makes this sound very bad indeed: a confusion of story and reality. But what needles me in both Miller and Ehrenreich is that in their current “realist” moment they deny any application to positive-seeking vision. I’ll be working to respond to this -- in part with the very careers of these thinkers.

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What's My Philosophy of Language? 1. Chomsky

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax by Noam Chomsky




Note: I haven't actually read this book, but I just got through the excerpt included in Critical Theory Since 1965 and I wanted to set down my thoughts.

In the first section of his book, Chomsky develops the idea of a “deep structure” within the mind that helps us generate language. Only this essentially rationalist approach (modeled with mathematics) can explain how we produce and understand infinitely many sentences, for empiricist approaches oversimplify the complex, active agency of the mind in acquiring language. Chomsky’s theory of language thus figures a debate between two theories of knowledge acquisition. I’ll need to think a lot more on where I should take this idea in my own writing about culture.

Noam Chomsky’s central interest is in how our language abilities develop as the consequence of principles deeply inherent in who we are as human organisms:

[I:]t seems reasonable to suppose that a child cannot help constructing a particular sort of transformational grammar to account for the data presented to him, any more than he control his perception of solid objects or his attention to line and angle. Thus it may well be that the general features of language structure reflect, not so much the course of one’s experience, but rather the general character of one’s capacity to acquire knowledge – in the traditional sense, one’s innate ideas and innate principles.

What is most surprising, and most compelling, about Chomsky’s opening chapter is that he derives this plan to study the “deep structure” of the mind’s language acquisition ability from 17th century rationalist philosophy. Chomsky’s impressive reading in this area shows the predominance of the thesis that what Chomsky calls “the acquisition of knowledge” is not a simple matter of perceiving external objects, but the active application of “the innate vigour and activity of the mind itself.” (Cudworth 1731, p. 49 of Adams and Searle). Descartes was far from alone, and thus not entirely original, in this line of thought.

Chomsky locates his own investigation in the deep structures of language acquisition in rationalism to contrast it with behavior scientific approaches the he correspondingly locates in “empiricism:” which models the mind as a rather simple “device:”

…it assumes that the device has certain analytical data-processing mechanisms or inductive principles of a very elementary sort, for example, certain principles of association, weak principles of “generalization” involving gradients along the dimensions of the given quality space, or, in our case, taxonomic principles of segmentation and classification…

Chomsky’s big problem is that the empiricist view makes dogmatic presumptions about these interior mental processes.

It’s clear that Chomsky’s line of thinking has implications far beyond the acquisition of language, which is now no more than a figure for an investigation of the human mind. Chomsky defends Leibniz’s wonderful metaphor of the mind, not as tabula rasa, but as veined marble, with the ideas of the mind, the mind’s output, shaped and determined in part by the veins of the marble.

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Renegade (2004)

Renegade: the Ahayuasca trip

Thanks to D. for introducing us to Renegade, which we watched again just the other day.

The film is incredibly fun, through and through, at least for anyone who likes graphic novels or entheogenic substances (preferably both).

I'd like to use it as a teaching tool in a theory class sometime. I'll explain the term "episteme" and the larger patterns of French thought using mostly just the above scene alone.
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Theory: The Queen of America, chapter 2

"Luke" of 2 Live Crew, one of Berlant's unlikely allies in the fight to be treated like an adult in America

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997. In chapter 2, "Live Sex Acts," Berlant looks at the work of feminists like Andrea Dworkin, religious rightists like Jerry Falwell, and morality advocates from the left like Tipper Gore. It is perhaps no real surprise that these disparate agents share an unrealistic, idealized view of how citizenship and culture work. From a cultural perspective, all of these forces work to create nested parental publics that treat Americans by and large as vulnerable young people, and they hope to censor out any obscene culture. But they can't tell very well what "obscene" means, and this brings us to a strong political point: the close links between citizenship and a vague fantasy of moral behavior meant to protect a populace modeled loosely as a group of vulnerable children violates the equal protection rights of sluts and queers. And that is wrong.

Notes in my main file. Under the cut, quotes coming when I get back to the book.

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The Uses of Literature: Responding to Challenges

From Shelton Walsmith's studio; photo by John Pack. Ten points if you can figure out how I got to this image from my theme.

As I was saying to my teacher JM last week, I think the reason my Fulbright application was unsuccessful was that I did not sufficiently explain, even to myself, the reasons for doing literature and the humanities. It was almost a good thing to have suffered that failure if it drives me to re-think what I'm doing and why.

As with "My Archive," this will be an entry that gets tagged and updated. It's clear to me that the main way for me to improve my writing next is to really push myself to go back to older writings, often one-shot comments on single topics, to improve them and connect them up with other things. My new outlining tool, checkvist.com, should make connections a bit more likely to happen as well.

So here's the new pattern I'm interesting in applying: first the outline of my reasoning so far, and then behind the cut, an immediate attempt to write out at least the main ideas contained in the outline, if not a complete write-up of the outline.

• Chapter 0: The Uses of Literature: Responding to Challenges
  • 1. Compare subject to subject
    • The Postmodern Subject, for example
    • But why does it matter in a changing world?
  • 2. Show the social and political climate
    • Encouraging "civil society," for example
    • pointing out our vulnerability if we become too "infantile" : towards moral purpose.
    • pointing out the rise of conservative politics -- Berlant
  • 3. Share and compare artistic techniques
    • "Appeal" as a main question
      • Chaves:
      • Stanley Fish: Art has no practical use; that's its use
  • 4. Other sources: Perry Link 2000, Calvino 1986, Engel 1973, Felski 2008

Literature is a craft that reveals. Its main use value in the larger world of philosophy, the humanities, and the issues of the day seems to me to be concentrated in the revelatory power of literature: it shows us who we are. It exposes the human condition. It can give us guidance regarding the challenges we face.

To my present thinking, this revelatory power works on two levels that are connected in complex ways: first the individual, and then the scales larger than that of individual: society, nation, race, gender.

Literature reveals individuals: speaking, performing subjects whose experiences, memories and motivations have both differences and points in common between our own. So we read about these individuals to enrich our own sense of ourselves and others around us, as individuals. Are feelings and activities are described. Are fears and desires, as well. The main building block of this kind of writing is individual experience, real or imagined, realist or allegorical. In Tang Xiaobing's work on Wang Anyi, for example, the subject Wang Anyi is compared directly to the subject Julia Kristeva to argue that reading Wang Anyi would inform our sense of the postmodern subject generally while at the same time beginning to include China in the conversation.

On larger scales, literature can be used to show the social and political climate of a place and time. Translations of Turgenev into Korean are part of a story that shows the growth of the early Korean state, the differences from Japan, and the characteristic understanding of all Korean people as proletariat, for example. In Chinese literature and art, we examine the best that is available to consider its potential for developing (or at least calling for) civil society. Similarly, Lauren Berlant defined the concept of the "infantile citizen" in American cultural politics in order to diagnose a selfishness and thoughtlessness that she clearly believes is infecting us. Both this and the Chinese example reveal moral and political agenda to literary criticism: we don't just "take the temperature" of our social structures, we give a diagnoses and treatment plan, even if it is implicit (and in Berlant it is often explicit).

After this consideration, a worry begins to develop that the revelatory power of literature may overlook craft, which is the central interest of many who write about art and literature. The concept of appeal often enters the discussion, as it does when Chaves introduces his book on Mei Yao-chen. Though Mei is not famous in China, Chaves avers, we should not worry about that. We should only worry whether he is a poet that might have some "appeal" to English readers.

Beyond "appeal," I seem to remember that writers like Stanley Fish often say that literature has no use value, and this is its use. They might decry my focus on the revelatory power as a misconstruing of literature's use, which is not to tell me the spirit of the age, but to communicate only the artful imaginings of its producer. I must revisit this argument before I disbelieve it entirely.

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Philosophy: Ursprung in Benjamin

Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee (1920). Benjamin would focus on this and other similar images to come up with a peculiarly backwards-looking teleology: by consuming history in the manner of great angels, we construct the future.

Last Thursday, I attended a job talk delivered by an applicant for a new job at my school. I sort of liked his presentation on the ways to pick out signs of traumatic memories in 1950s Korean melodramas, and pointing towards the 1961 film "Stray Bullet" as an example of a breakthrough in overcoming convention to say something about the invisibility of state violence in Korean lives.

B., one of the more theoretically sophisticated members of the department, asked the applicant whether he had considered the "limitations" of the genre he had chosen -- melodrama, a popular form of Korean film loosely resembling American film noir. B. pointed to Walter Benjamin's work on the trauerspiel as an example of trying to figure out the "limitations of the capacity to represent allegory as a result of the history of the form." Or so I have in my notes -- no doubt I did not catch the words exactly. The applicant responded quite well, I think, by saying that that was why he wanted to emphasize the origins of the Korean melodrama in the Japanese colonial period, as an imported, but nevertheless popularly re-appropriated genre. Certain Korean melodrama makers were also involved in the production of Japanese-supervised war propaganda, for instance. But I think B.'s point is well taken if, looking back, the applicant did not exactly say why it's important that the rules of Korean melodrama have a certain history. Indeed, when I go over my notes, it seems that the applicant's only comment on the continuity of the careers of directors like Choi In-gyu, from propaganda to nation-nurturing melodrama, was that they perhaps exhibit "irony," and no further elaboration.

This was perhaps a bad mistake, or perhaps not. It's always difficult to state the correct scope of research in arts and literature in the age of cultural criticism. What is so often necessary, and repugnant for the Asian studies scholar, is a return to a canon of cultural studies founding fathers. Walter Benjamin is a particularly troublesome CSFF, because his theory seems at first glance to be a grand allegorical narrative that runs parallel to some weird middle-class European Jew's myth of the Messiah, language, and being itself. In fact, there is no doubt that this is what Benjamin is about; but questions persists as to the practical use-value of Benjamin's narrative. Is B. correct that it at least provides an example by which to question the limitations of a genre? Probably, or so it seems to me. Thus, there's nothing for it but to try to understand something of what Benjamin is about.

Here are my opening notes regarding such an endeavor, arranged bibliographically, of course:

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne and with an introduction by George Steiner. London: NLB, 1977.

Since Benjamin's take on the PhD dissertation left two entire departments at the University of Frankfurt utterly confused and, moreover, resentful, I am going to take my time with approaching the text. Even the Wikipedia article contains a warning that its own description of the work may be unclear and confusing, which offers more evidence that this is a work for which I require guides - previous readers who have stated well what is at stake in the text itself and its reception since the late 1920s. As for Wikipedia, it offers up that Benjamin takes the Trauerspiel as an example of a monad, which as I picture it now is an idea that penetrates and propagates through cultural history that can be grasped from two distinct perspectives at once: from one perspective the monad is a tiny fragment of the larger system, with a distinct shape like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle. But unlike ordinary jigsaw pieces, monads contain information that can be used to deduce the entire remainder of the puzzle. The implication seems to be that a single monad reveals a universe of history, all the way back an origin. Whoa -- it kind of freaks me out just to write that!

Pizer, J. “History, Genre and Ursprung in Benjamin's Early Aesthetics.” The German Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1987): 68–87. This essay offers new insights to Benjamin's work on the German tragedy, or Trauerspiel, for English readers who have German and are already familiar with the basic notion of the Trauerspiel and other European imaginative literature. I don't have this preparation, but I plunged ahead anyway, reading aloud the German passages at first, then passing over them lightly because I simply don't what many words mean.

Back to the ability of the monad to reveal history all the way back to the origin. "Origin" translates Benjamin's German term "Ursprung," which is just one of the difficult philosophical constructs involved in Benjamin's theories. There is the mystic grand narrative we mentioned before, the stakes of which are hazy in the best of times, a fact attested to by the wide variety of readings we see in professional philosophy literature on this point. Thus Pizer begins:

All serious explorations of the early aesthetics of Walter Benjamin have attempted to come to grips with his complex critical telos of redeeming the origin ("Ursprung") of the creative word of God by liberating language from its post-Adamite role of defining objects. Only by treating literary texts with a view to recovering language in its divine primordial condition, prior to the Fall and the division of subject and object, can such a redemption be approximated. As Richard Wolin constantly emphasizes in his book on Benjamin, "Origin is the goal,"' and Benjamin feels this goal can only be approached by abandoning the treatment of literary texts as external constructs to be
analyzed and demystified. Only an immanent approach can transcend the work's historical imprisonment and glean its truth content. This truth content always points towards an understanding anchored in the divine origin of the logos.

It is Pizer's chosen work to evaluate and reconcile readings of Benjamin -- Wolin wins consistently, but only a broad reading can capture all the significance of Ursprung as a property inhering in the Trauerspiel as an abstract idea. Grasping Ursprung does not mean that one is exploring an idea ahistorically, but somehow the inverse, that it marks out the traces of history around it in all directions:

This brief overview of some of the past critical struggles with "Ursprung" shows a remarkable range of opinions concerning the interrelationship postulated in Benjamin's theory between history and genre. To sum up: "Ursprung" establishes the historical character of the genre, transcends the historical character of the genre, overcomes the ahistorical character of the usual view of genre, establishes the pre- and post-historical character of the genre, and transcends the accidental character of the history of the genre. Other treatments of "Ursprung" have emphasized the telos motivating the relationship of history and structure within the genre/work.

For Ursprung to do so much work seems impossible, but this is no mere idea or property we are talking about, but a monad.

Most interpreters of "Ursprung" have ignored its Leibnizian derivation. An important exception is Wolin, who indicates "the category of 'monad' serves as an additional illustration of the being and specificity of the idea. Like origin, the monad knows history not in terms of its extensive empirical being, but as something integral and essential." This is also true in relation to the literary genre. The Leibnizian monad is characterized by "plenitude, continuity and harmony." The plenitude -Benjamin uses the term "Totalitat" of form grounded in the "Wissenschaft vom Ursprung" is based on its ideational character. The idea is the configuration of the apparently contradictory
extremes of phenomena. This gives the idea a plenitude redeeming it from the linear character of history. ...In The Monadology (1715), Leibniz comments that "although each created monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which is particularly affected by it and of which it is the entelechy."

The term "entelechy" is a new and difficult one for me. According to Wikipedia, its something like the potential inherent in one body to become some other body, in a certain context. How's that for obscure? Wood, for example, may have as one entelechy the state of being made into boards and then a house, at least in consideration of wood as a building material, which of course happens when you are building a house. Similarly, a society can take on the entelechy of decline, sort of like the wood seeing itself as a burnt-down house, I suppose, which it might see if it was burning. I presume that Leibniz wanted society not to take on the entelechy of decline, but of progress, and this would be its chief engine towards that end. It's like when your coach tells you that keeping your eye on the ball will result in your catching the ball, that kicking the ball towards the goal will put the ball in the goal, and then you find that indeed it does, at least much of the time. This is part of Leibniz's grand dream that all the potential and possibility for a civilized society exists inside any particular fragment of the society, as long as the receptive mind was there to see it. As for the receptive mind, this is ideally the Enlightenment subject, an abstract consciousness that is a self portrait of Leibniz himself, but also at the same time God, as well. As Pizer continues (and runs a bit beyond my ability to comprehend fully):

The internal, perfected nature and form-engendering energy of Aristotle's entelechy imparts to the Leibnizian monad its self-sufficient integrity. The fact that the monads find their final cause and sufficient reason in God establishes harmony and continuity among them. But the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), which prefigures The Monadology epistemologically, establishes the fundamental immanence of all ideas. They are only linked externally by God.

Seriously, this for me is a nearly inscrutable way to conclude the discussion, though I do gather some sort of sarcastic humor is at work here.

But back to basics. The point of all this is that Benjamin at first looks like he is asking people who write about arts and literature to ignore the historical circumstances in favor of what the work gives of its own accord, but on closer inspection he is actually saying that when we look at a work in close enough detail, with enough intensity of philosophical reflection, then we can see all the history we need inside the work itself:

Whereas Der Begriff der Kunstkritik equates the idea of form with a continuum of forms, Benjamin represents the idea in the Trauerspiel book as a unique originary essence.24 This shift is necessary in order to establish an important thesis: the German Trauerspiel is not part of a continuum of the symbolic Greek tragedies. Rather, its "Ursprung" is grounded in a unique historical-philosophical moment, producing ideas embedded in the individual works. The task of the critic is to evoke these ideas through philosophical contemplation.

This certainly sounds very tough, if not impossible for a clumsy thinker such I as know myself to be. But as Pizer continues, it starts to seem like the basic idea behind most expository writing on arts and literature: we point out what crosses boundaries, and we do so that we may better understand how fine the art is:

The rejection of the establishment of a normative system of literary genres from both an inductive and a deductive position leaves Benjamin in the apparent position of endorsing a critical relativism which treats each particular work as an original category in toto. As such a view is foreign to Benjamin's aesthetics, it is natural that he distanced himself from it through a critique of the foremost modern proponent of the complete formal integrity of the individual work of art, Benedetto Croce. On the foundations of his refutation of Croce's nominalism, Benjamin formulates his concept of origin. He expresses support for Croce's rejection of the grouping of individual works of art into aesthetic categories, and the attempt to use genres to mediate between the universal and the particular. Benjamin deviates from Croce's rejection of the literary genres in endorsing the tragic and the comic as useful ideas. Unlike the concepts of "pure tragedy" and "pure comic drama," informed by the artificial inclusiveness of rule-based genre theories, the genre as idea is an internal structure. As such, it is neither prescriptive nor empirically comprehensive. Rather, as a monad, its totality is established by its incorporation of both the pre- and post-history of phenomena, including works of art. This indicates the fundamental link between origin and monad. A criticism based on the immanent totality of the idea rather than the extensive categories created by traditional genre poetics seeks what is generically exemplary in the individual work....A significant work is a transgressive work. The paradox that the "transgressive work will become a norm or a generic paradigm" precisely as it does away with norms is rooted in the principle of "Ursprung.

It seems that Benjamin wants to look to the edges of genres like Trauerspiel to see the greatest, because most transgressive, examples, which question the values and present something indicative of historical change, which we me reflect upon. That is one seed from which I must eventually grow my own idea of why we must continue to write about arts and literature.

Benjamin has a very subtle theory of how genre happens in history to be observed and reflected upon. The ideas for making art and literature come out of the ether of history, the mass unconscious, the cultural politcs, and then they coalesce onto the phenomena of history to form genre. Thus the Germans with Trauerspiel; thus the Chinese with wound literature; thus the Americans with The Simpsons and Family Guy. Water molecules coalesce onto bits of jagged surfaces to crystalize into ice; so the ideas and concerns of a people are caused by circumstance to arrange themselves into genre. The ability to see backwards from the genre -- here the Trauerspiel, coupled with contemporary reflection -- here Romantic criticism (oops, forgot to mention that before) to grasp the historical pattern behind it all is the hope and goal of Leibniz's theory of the world, and this is what Benjamin asks us to consider when we write about art and literature.

I will consider it. But I am thinking now back to a line from my first reading on Habermas, that younger and less pious member of the Frankfurt School, with a perhaps more fraught position among the CSFFs:

Habermas's basic philosophical endeavor was to develop a more modest, fallibilist, empirical account of the philosophical claim to universality and rationality. This more modest approach rids Critical Theory of its vestiges of transcendental philosophy, pushing it in a naturalistic, “postmetaphysical” direction (1988b). Such a naturalism identifies more specific forms of social-scientific knowledge that help in developing an analysis of the general conditions of rationality manifested in various human capacities and powers.

A dim vision appears in my head, of a vast and complex disagreement between the mystical and naturalistic branches of critical social theory. Habermas is over there grappling with sociologists, quantitative types who make tables and take polls. He is outside, in the air. Benjamin stays in, preferably in a place that is cool and not too brightly lit. He requires attention not to humans capacity to behave as nodes in a large chaotic system, for this is insulting to his sense of dignity and respect for the species. Instead he must look to what is immanent, to the godly self, a microworld filled with all the history of the entire world in every detail, wrapped up tightly in every genre, every work, every person and every idea if only conceived of and reflected upon with the proper depth of perspective.


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Reading/Paper writing: The Queen of America, 2

The Simpsons, Season Three, Episode 2: "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington" : Lisa satirizes, but also exemplifies, the infantile citizen

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997. In chapter 1, Prof. Berlant argues that movies and television, which are part of a larger "national knowledge industry," help us to be fat, spoiled babies who choose an utterly fictitious fantasy narrative of the American citizen as a patriotic, nature-loving white men who have no need to worry about poor people and minorities. In one popular trope that is apparently both roasted and exemplified in the above Simpsons episode, we can survive our traumas by visiting Washington, DC and touching something, or fainting and becoming awake again. A final, better variation on the narrative is perhaps the icon of minority group that marches on Washington, exposing the pain of the population by metonymies instead of icons.

A key passage sums up Berlant's argument, which really comes down to a dire warning here about the stories we tell ourselves:

Allegorical thinking helps to provide ways of explaining the relation between individual's lives, the life of the collectivity, and the story of the nation form itself. But much less benign things can be said about the normative deployment of national allegory. n24 As all of the infantile citizens' patriotic essays satirically remind us, the overorganizating image or symbolic tableau emerges politically at certain points of structural crisis, helping to erase the complexities of aggregate national memory and to replace its inevitably rough edges with a magical and consoling way of thinking that can be collectively enunciated and easily manipulated, like a fetish. In this way, for example, patriotism can be equated with proper citizenship. This means that the politcally invested overorganizing image is a kind of public paramnesia, a substitution for traumatic loss or unrepresentable contradiction that marks its own contingency or fictiveness while also radiating the authority of insider knowledge that all euphemisms possess. Extending from these sources of collective imagination, hegemonic allegories of the social appear to confirm inevitabilities and truths where strange combinations of structure and chaos reign behind the screen of the sign.

Other sentences of note:


1. The Theory of Infantile Citizenship.

Audre Lorde took a trip to DC as a child; her parents said it was for patriotism, but really it was a protest of racist school policies.

p. 27 "The the infantile citizen of the United States has appeared in political writing about the nation at least since Tocqueville wrote, in Democracy in America, that while citizens should be encouraged to love the nation the way they do their families and their fathers, democracies can also produce a special form of tyranny that makes citizens like children, infantilized, passive, and overdependent on the 'immense and tutelary power' of the state." n7

p. 29 "When cinematic, literary and televisiual texts fictively represent 'Washington' as 'America,' they theorize the conditions of political subjectivity in the United States and reflect on the popular media's ways of constructing political knowledge in a dialectic of infantile citizenship and cynical reason."

p. 30 "But because in all areas of its mode of production television encounters, engages and represents both the social and political routines of citizenship, and because it underscores the activity of animating and reflecting on as well as simply having a national identity, the problem of generating memory and knowledge in general becomes fraught with issues of national pedagogy, of how to represent what counts as patriotism and what counts as criticism to the public sphere." n12

p. 31 "All of these modes of publicity are normative technologies of citizenship that seek to create proper national subjects and subjectivities."


p. 34 "In contrast to the pilgrimage-to-Washington plots that narrate surviving, remembering, memorializing, and containing the traumatic national past, there is another species of narrative that involves surviving a present moment that feels menacing." (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)

p. 35 "These examples, I hope, begin to suggest why television's role in constructing the hegemony of the normative nation must be understood as a partial, not a determining, moment in a genealogy of crises about publicity, ideology, and the production of national subjects."

p. 36 "When a given symbolic national body signifies as normal -- straight, white, middle-class, and heterosexual -- hardly anyone asks critical questions about its representativeness. In mass society its iconicity is intensified by commodity culture's marketing of normal personhood as something that places you in the range of what is typical in public and yet is personally unique."

p. 48 "Allegorical thinking helps to provide ways of explaining the relation between individual's lives, the life of the collectivity, and the story of the nation form itself. But much less benign things can be said about the normative deployment of national allegory. n24 As all of the infantile citizens' patriotic essays satirically remind us, the overorganizating image or symbolic tableau emerges politically at certain points of structural crisis, helping to erase the complexities of aggregate national memory and to replace its inevitably rough edges with a magical and consoling way of thinking that can be collectively enunciated and easily manipulated, like a fetish. In this way, for example, patriotism can be equated with proper citizenship. This means that the politcally invested overorganizing image is a kind of public paramnesia, a substitution for traumatic loss or unrepresentable contradiction that marks its own contingency or fictiveness while also radiating the authority of insider knowledge that all euphemisms possess. Extending from these sources of collective imagination, hegemonic allegories of the social appear to confirm inevitabilities and truths where strange combinations of structure and chaos reign behind the screen of the sign."

p. 50 "In other words, the national knowledge industry has produced a specific modality of paramnesia, an incitement to forgetting that leaves simply the patriotic trace, for real and metaphorically infantilized citizens, that confirms that the nation exists and that we are in it."

Raw reading notes:
pp. 26-7 thesis paragraph. 27 p3: the infantile citizen. 28 Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington. p. 29, "they theorize." p 30, "what counts as" p4 31, modes of publicity - p5. 31-2 In Country, 1989. 33. contact will help you grow up, silly 35 Mr. Smith, a different species. p6: "These examples," p7, 36: "iconicity" 40, nation/nature 42 "national conference" -- haha. 45 intimacy - not as common a term as I expected here. 47 the sarcasm tradition. 48 p8, allegory -- fetish. The competent citizen, 50, p9 paramnesia. 41 an unusual use of body: "a disgusting body." 52, p10: "icons" p. 21 privatized citizen ship, Tocquville, 21-22 If... Thinking allegorically. The narrative here is: sent down, return.

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Philosophy: Habermas at first glance

Jürgen Habermas, b. 1921. Doesn't he look like Carl Fredricksen from "Up"?

I'm preparing to write a paper on "intimate publics" without quite knowing what that means. Berlant's introductory essay is still a little less than clear to me, but basically consists of defining the "cultural politics" of contemporary American "patriotic traditionalists," e.g. those who advocate for stronger laws against abortion, against same-sex marriage, and similar elements of an "intimate" sort. This public advocacy for issues we may well declare intimate apparently constitutes what Berlant calls the "intimate public sphere:" 

It is in this sense that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. The intimate public of the U.S. present tense is radically different from the "intimate sphere" of modernity described by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas portrays the intimate sphere of the European eighteenth century as a domestic space where persons produced the sense of their own private uniqueness, a sense of self which became a sense of citizenship only when it was abstracted and alienated in the nondomestic public sphere of liberal capitalist culture. In contrast, the intimate public sphere of the US present tense
renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere.

Berlant summarizes here the "intimate sphere" that Habermas describes in his 1962 work Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. No matter how many times I read the passage, however, I still just don't have quite enough grasp of Habermas' original concept to understand how Berlant distinguishes her own concept. How is "a sense of self which became a sense of citizenship" different from the present situation, in which citizenship requires as a condition certain "personal acts and values?"

So to begin, I have read the "Habermas" entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which took me quite some time even though it is only a starting point! A few notes, arranged in the order of the entry and bibliographically:

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit],
translated by T. Burger and F. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989 [German, 1962]. "...a detailed
social history of the development of the bourgeois public sphere from
its origins in the 18^th century salons up to its
transformation through the influence of capital-driven mass media. In
his description of the salons we clearly see his interest in a
communicative ideal that later would provide the core normative
standard for his moral-political theory: the idea of inclusive critical
discussion, free of social and economic pressures, in which
interlocutors treat each other as equals in a cooperative attempt to
reach an understanding on matters of common concern."

I'm fascinated by the vision of Habermas as a young man just my age in post-war Germany, dreaming of a world where people could speak freely and truly learn from each other. Chinese thinkers of the May Fourth era, like Shi Zhecun would, appreciate this vision as well. For this alone, I feel Habermas merits much further study. One other thing: it seems important to me that Public Sphere was an early, youthful work, containing much that Habermas would modify. Actually one of the most interesting things to learn in Bohlman's overview is that Habermas' thought lead to many dead ends and unresolved problems. And yet he is still considered "one of the most influential philosophers in the world!"

Toward a Rational Society [Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie; Protestbewegung und Hochschulreform], J. J. Shapiro (trans.).
Boston: Beacon Press, 1970 [German, 1968a, 1969]. Habermas considers the 1968 student demonstrations, expressing some sympathy but also deploring its "militant aspects." In a way that I don't quite understand, Habermas re-employed the Aristotelian concepts of techne and praxis to critique science and technology when they became ideologies in and of themselves. I find it very interesting that Habermas distinguishes himself clearly from Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno here, because allows more credit to science when he refuses to link it specifically to capitalist society and refuses to see technical advancement as necessarily a form of social domination.

Knowledge and Human Interests [Erkenntnis und Interesse]. Translated by J. J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971 [German, 1968b]. A continuation of his humanistic defense of science and search for a basis for reason. I like that Habermas is working basically with Enlightenment ideals, and wisely takes a pluralistic approach from the very beginning -- that he is not wedded to Marxism is a welcome idea. "In this transitional phase from Knowledge and Human
Interests to The Theory of Communicative Action,
Habermas's basic philosophical endeavor was to develop a more
modest, fallibilist, empirical account of the philosophical claim to
universality and rationality. This more modest approach rids Critical
Theory of its vestiges of transcendental philosophy, pushing it in a
naturalistic, “postmetaphysical” direction (1988b). Such a
naturalism identifies more specific forms of social-scientific
knowledge that help in developing an analysis of the general conditions
of rationality manifested in various human capacities and powers."

The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I:
Reason and the Rationalization of Society [Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Vol. 1:
Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche
Rationalisierung.], T. McCarthy
(trans.). Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 [German, 1981, vol. 1]. The first "mature" work that Bohlmann dwells on at some length. Habermas becomes interested in speech-act theory as well as Chomsky's notion of communicative competence, and returns to his own tradition for another round of large-scale readings:

To understand Habermas's mature positions, we must start with
his Theory of Communicative Action (TCA), a
two-volume critical study of the theories of rationality that informed
the classical sociologies of Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, and neo-Marxist
critical theory (esp. Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno). ....The
problem with pessimistic social theories of modernity is that they miss
the cultural dimension of modernization due to a one-sided, primarily
instrumental conception of rationality....[Habermas's] criticism of modern societies turns on
the explanation of the relationship between two very different
theoretical terms: a micro-theory of rationality based on communicative
coordination and a macro-theory of the systemic integration of modern
societies through such mechanisms as the market (TCA, vol. 2).
In concrete terms, this means that Habermas develops a two-level social
theory that includes an analysis of communicative rationality, the
rational potential built into everyday speech, on the one hand; and a
theory of modern society and modernization, on the other (White 1989).
On the basis of this theory, Habermas hopes to be able to assess the
gains and losses of modernization and to overcome its one-sided version
of rationalization.

This last part is very important to me, because I picture Yang Jiang as a very pragmatic, pluralist, open-minded writer herself, and I think to understand how she and similar minds react to their treatment by the Chinese Communist Party, we have to give them credit as agents attempting to engage with the system. What I don't understand yet, however, is how this grand, critical social theory can help us unpack literary texts. However, I'm almost there. Key elements include:

• The performative attitude. I need to link this back up to Culler's discussion of how performativity was applied in thinkers from Searle to Butler. In Habermas' vision, it is the "attitude" of speakers who are doing their best to achieve mutual understanding. This motivation underlies Yang Jiang's prose style, I'm just sure of it. She wants to remember the Communist era in such a way that the large-scale system of Communism is only a subset of a larger story of Chinese humanistic values. A basic distinction is thus that Yang Jiang's writing is always a "communicative action," in distinction to "strategic action" which may apply to desires and fears to -- cf. Frye's basic distinction between tragedy and comedy. Following Frye, however, I don't expect any literary text to be totally lacking in "strategic action."


• Validity claims (Geltungsanspruch) "In opposition to the positivist fixation on fact-stating modes of
  discourse, Habermas does not limit intersubjectively valid, or
  justifiable, claims to the category of empirical truth, but instead
  recognizes a spectrum of “validity claims” that also
  includes, at the least, claims to moral rightness, ethical goodness or
  authenticity, personal sincerity, and aesthetic value (TCA 1:
  8–23; 1993, chap. 1)." I'm particularly interested in the elements of that list, all of which are extremely high priorities in Chinese writing. This means that we can understand the universe of Chinese literature as a "sphere of validity," a "dialogical context." This must be close to what Berlant constructs in her idea of "cultural politics," modeled with an "archive." Further involved here is the division of any speech act that is a communicative action into three "world relations" :  "(a)
  expresses an inner world (an intention to communicate a belief); (b)
  establishes a communicative relation with a hearer (and thus relates to
  a social world, specifically one in which both persons share a piece of
  information, and know they do); and (c) attempts to represent the
  external world." I don't understand this theory actually, but I'm heartened by the inclusion of sincerity and expression of inner world as a factor in it. These are indeed the keys to understanding life writing.


• "System" and "lifeworld."  Large-scale contexts for speech acts. I don't know enough about these, or the possible relation to more familiar cultural studies terms like "cultural politics." But by treating democratic institutions specifically as systems, Habermas tries to describe society at its best, to nudge us there eventually. I really want to harness some of that philosophical power if possible. When Habermas wrestles with Gadamer's hermeneutics, he takes on the issue of objectivity and avows, contra Gadamer, that the social theorist must take a side. We must envision the "proper" design of democratic institutions. "Democratic institutions, if properly
  designed and robustly executed, are supposed to ensure that the law
  does not take this pathological form but is subject to the deliberation
  of citizens, who thus author the laws to which they are subject (see
  sec. 3.4)." Note that here what comes to mind is that I must understand as completely as possible the Anti-Rightist campaign, as well as the cultural scene after 1989, in order to really unpack the context of Yang Jiang's 1990s essays on life in the late 1950s. What Habermas steers us toward here is some statement on the health of a society. His fear that certain lifeworlds like markets and bureaucracy can supplant communication and strangle the life of citizens, for example, calls to mind Foucault for Bohlmann, but for me calls to mind the poignancy of books like Yiyun Li's The Vagrants. More on this fecund aspect of Habermas' communication theory soon, I hope.

From this point, the encyclopedia entry becomes more and more difficult, and I suffer for not having learned well other theories of democracy, such as those of John Rawls and T. Scanlon. I can see that Habermas is not interested in meaning as an absolute concept, but rather as a feature of "argumentative demands." From here Bohlmann goes on to an outline of Habermas' analysis of argumentation in general. As we go through this, Bohlmann begins to concentrate more and more on the theoretical underpinnings of democratic institutions, and the continuing debate over their potential for success. There is room in this theory for rhetoric, as well as for sincerity claims:

Sincerity claims (or
“truthfulness claims,” as it is sometimes translated) are
the prime example. These are claims an actor makes about his or her
interior subjectivity: feelings, moods, desires, beliefs, and the like.
Such claims are open to rational assessment, not in discourse but by
comparison with the actor's behavior: for example, if a son
claims to care deeply about his parents but never pays them any
attention, we would have grounds for doubting the sincerity of his
claim. Note that such insincerity might involve self-deception rather
than deliberative lying.

Thus it seems that the truthfulness issue of life writing comes out as a small subset of Habermas' work. As I considered Habermas' distinction of moral rightness and truth, of ethics and dignity, I wondered again about an idea first presented to me by Rob Gifford, of all people: that the basic claim of authenticity within the Chinese intelligentsia rests on their relationship to the peasants. I need to go back to this idea, possibly by looking up Gifford's travelogue on China again. Meanwhile, here's an example of Habermas' analysis procedure:

For example, in defending the ethical authenticity of
Tom's pursuit of a career in medicine, one need not show that
medicine is a career everyone must follow, but only that such a career
makes sense, given Tom's personal background, talents, and
desires. One can also examine Tom's career choice from a moral
perspective, but in that case one need only show that anyone in his
circumstances is morally permitted to pursue medicine. At the
rhetorical level, finally, the scope and depth of agreement differs
according to the type of claim. Moral rightness claims and empirical
truth claims are justified by reasons that should be acceptable to a
universal audience, whereas ethical claims are addressed to those who
share a particular history and tradition of values.

More scattered notes:

According to Habermas, moral
maturation involves the growing ability to integrate the interpersonal
perspectives given with the system of personal pronouns; the endpoint
of that process coincides with the capacity to engage in the mutual
perspective-taking required by (U).



The anthropological line of
argument focuses on identity formation, drawing on the social
psychology of G. H. Mead. In broad agreement with Hegelian models of
mutual recognition, Mead understands the individual's development of a
stable personal identity as inextricably bound up with processes of
socialization that depend on participation in relationships of mutual
recognition. Habermas (ibid., 195–215; 1990b) extends this
analysis to respond to feminist and communitarian criticisms of
impartialist, justice-based moralities. According to the standard
critiques, such moralities assume an implausibly atomistic view of the
self and thus fail to appreciate the moral import of particularity and
cultural substance: particular relationships between unique
individuals, on the one hand, and membership in particular cultural
communities or traditions, on the other.



Societies are stable over the long run only if their members
generally perceive them as legitimate: as organized in accordance with
what is true, right, and good.



Habermas has further developed his views on the relation between
philosophy and faith in his dialogue with Cardinal Ratzinger (who would
become Pope Benedict XVI)(2006b; German ed., 2005a). There he notes how
much Western philosophy owes to its Christian heritage, which
philosophers assimilated by developing ideas of “responsibility,
autonomy and justification; history and remembering; new beginning,
innovation, and return; alienation, internalization, and incarnation;
individuality and community” (2006b, 44; trans. amended). The
Christian idea of human beings as created in the image of God has been
especially important for Western moral-political theory, which
translated the religious idea into the secular view of persons as equal
in dignity and deserving unconditional respect (ibid., 45). This
assimilation of Christian ideas does not gut their substance, however.
In fact, religious communities still harbor potentials of meaning from
which philosophy can learn—potentials that have “been lost
elsewhere and that cannot be restored by the professional knowledge of
experts alone” (ibid., 43). As examples, he refers to the
“differentiated possibilities of expression” and
“sensitivities” regarding “lives that have gone
astray, societal pathologies, the failure of individual life projects,
and the deformation of misbegotten human relationships” (ibid.,
trans. amended). In acknowledging that religious modes of expression
can harbor an integral cognitive content that is not exhausted by
secular translations, Habermas seems to have located the boundaries of
his methodological experiment in demythologization. He thus calls for a
dialogue in which secular and religious forms of thought mutually
inform and learn from each other.

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Theory: The Queen of America

"The Queen of America Goes to Washington City" -- detail of the cover, from Google books. Love that face!

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Professor Berlant looks carefully at an eclectic "archive" of materials from the 1980s and 1990s that helps her explain the rise of conservative and liberal politics in America that use sex and other normally 'private' parts of our identities to define what a 'citizen' is. She "repudiates" compulsory heterosexuality, of course, but what makes the book interesting, possibly, is the use of popular materials, including materials that demonstrate the re-strengthening of conservatism in the Reagan years, to "take the temperature of hegemony."

I have a few opening comments on what I'm reading:



I was planning to go out to the library to look at this book today, but it was checked out. I made do by inspecting the introduction, which I found very hard going. I really need to get through more of this sort of cultural studies prose so I can become familiar with all its vernaculars. A sentence like this:

Portraits and stories of citizen-victims -- pathological, poignant, heroic, and grotesque -- now permeate the political public sphere, putting on display a mass experience of economic insecurity, racial discord, class conflict, and sexual unease.

is not so bad on its own, but I do wonder at the rhetoric used here. There are too many different words, so its difficult to get what is important. The sentence is too complex to comprehend easily. Terms like "citizen-victims" have only implied meanings, which is an aggravation to me. For the reader not experienced with this rhetoric, it is necessary to make a translation:

There is a vast population of America that is frustrated, and shows it in a wide variety of ways, some heroic, some not.

Of course, this exercise reveals much of the motivation for the type of prose used -- Berlant wants to make multiple connections at once. Its not just that Americans are made because they are poor, or at risk of becoming poor, or feel racial and sexual tension. It's all of these things at the same time. So Berlant wants to see basically how this frustration has been working itself out. There's an interesting hint that if we don't make these kinds of explorations, the nation itself faces some kind of vague risk:"Mass national pain threatens to turn into banality, a crumbling archive of dead signs and tired plots."

I'm attempting to focus closely on the concept of an intimate public, which is elaborated on in this passage:

The fear of being saturated and scarred by the complexities of the present and thereby barred from living the "Dream" has recently produced a kind of vicious yet sentimental cultural politics, a politics brimming over with images and faces of normal and abnormal America. In the patriotically-permeated pseudopublic sphere of the present tense, national politics does not involve starting with a view of the nation as a space of struggle violently separated by racial, sexual and economic inequalities that cut across every imaginable kind of social location. Instead, the dominant idea marketed by patriotic traditionalists is of a core nation whose survival depends on personal acts and identities performed in the intimate domains of the quotidian.

It is in this sense that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. The intimate public of the U.S. present tense is radically different from the "intimate sphere" of modernity described by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas portrays the intimate sphere of the European eighteenth century as a domestic space where persons produced the sense of their own private uniqueness, a sense of self which became a sense of citizenship only when it was abstracted and alienated in the nondomestic public sphere of liberal capitalist culture. In contrast, theintimate public sphere of the US present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere. No longer valuing personhood as something directed toward public life, contemporary nationalist ideology recognizes a public good only in a particularly constricted nation of simultaneously lived private worlds.

notes:

1. personal and political collapsed; mass experience of unease. the intimacy of national power. 2. the public rhetoric of citizen trauma; feeling vulnerable (3) 4. American Dream, intimate domains of the quotidian, Habermas, nostalgia-based fantasy notion, 5. explain conservative politics via intimacy. 6. fetus. national icon, 7. natoinality, trauma. intimacy, rhetoric and economic crisis. Institutions of intimacy <-> national questions. (8), 9 subjectivity. distract from structural conditions. hegemonic Reaganite. personal and structural: a false distinction. (10) 11. "national sentimentality." advertising. 12. reading and analysis. Foucault, Gramscie, Benjamin. Archive. quotidian citizenship. 13 naiton. (14) 15. counterfantasy, 16 sex and death. heteronormative culture (Michael Warner) (17) (18) identity. sex and crisis. "person" in American history. a heterosexuality to repudiate. 20 risky work. "takes the temperature of hegemony" nation, politics, culture, personhood. 21, 22. 1, 2, 3: Fetus. "Fat" by Raymond Carver. The Silent Scream. 4. Queer Nation. 5.

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