Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Wrinkle
In
History
A Wrinkle in History
Essays on Literature and Philosophy
William Egginton
Contents
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Foreword
Between History and Theory
The essays collected in this volume, although written on subjects
as historically and thematically disparate as medieval theology and
contemporary neopragmatism, nevertheless share a common focus
or question: what is the relevance of philosophy for thinking about
politics, literature, or, more generally, history? This last is perhaps the
most fundamental in that it encompasses all the others. On the one
hand, all discourse, be it philosophical, political, or literary, has its
history and is thus, perhaps irremediably, limited or constrained by
that history. On the other, politics, literature and, most obviously,
philosophy all strive to articulate visions that transcend the historical
constraints of their production. The paradox that these contravening
forces engender finds a particularly persistent expression in the fields of
the humanities, and perhaps most clearly in the study of literature, in
which scholars have increasingly felt the obligation to define themselves
as being primarily either historians or theorists. The acceptance of
this divide leads to a pitched battle of styles, between those who deride
theoretically minded scholars as presentists whose contamination of
the past with faddish theories deprive their conclusions of any plausible
claim to truth, and an opposing camp that criticizes in historicists a
lack of theoretical sophistication that relegates their conclusions to the
irrelevant torpor of mere academic bookkeeping.
Such Balkanization leaves many scholars, among whom I
count myself, with strangely divided loyalties. For one thing, it is
unfortunately the case that these invectives are sometimes (I hesitate
to say, often) true. The application paradigm of literary studies, in
which one spices up a text with fashionable theory, represents the
bankrupt extreme of theoretical tendencies, while the denigration
of theory in the name of historical accuracy at times covers for a
simple and lamentable lack of anything interesting to say. That said,
I am convinced that the very best work in what can be broadly called
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foreword
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Chapter 1
A Wrinkle in Historical Time
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In the course of his brief article, Barthes proceeds to subject the dis
course of history, in its manifestation in the work of four traditional historiographers, to the tools of structural discourse analysis, and
in doing so shows that historys difference lies primarily in its rhetorical move to conceal its dependence on rhetorical, or subjective,
discourse. The main trope that Barthes identifies in historical discourse, the one most responsible for producing its realistic effect,
is its collapse of the linguistic dimensions of signified and referent
into one reality: In other words, in objective history, the real
is never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the
apparently all-powerful referent (17). However, this obscuring of
the signified is an effect of a particular method of representation,
namely narrative, the privileged signifier of the real (18); Barthes
thus stops short of indicting all historical representation, distinguishing the historical science of the present day as being interested in
exposing structures rather than chronologies.
With his 1973 book, Metahistory, and his 1978 collection of es
says, The Tropics of Discourse, Hayden White initiated the most farreaching application of discourse analysis to historiography. Arguing that there can be no proper history without the presupposition
of a full-blown metahistory by which to justify those interpretive
strategies necessary for the representation of a certain segment of the
historical process (Tropics 51), he goes on to articulate a method of
critique of historiography, by which one can presume to reveal the
metahistorical perspective underlying any work of historiography.
While Whites work does not in any way suggest a repudiation of
history as a practice,10 it does lead to a radical relativism in which no
form of representation is privileged above others:
The historian operating under such a conception could thus
be viewed as one who, like the modern artist and scientist,
seeks to exploit a certain perspective that does not pretend
to exhaust description or analysis of all the data in the entire
phenomenological field but rather offers itself as one way
among many of disclosing certain aspects of the field. (46)
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To deny that a historical account may exhaust description or analysis of a given field is not to say, however, that any event is subject to
unlimited interpretations. As White points out, the relative truth
of representation is always inscribed in a limited context of application by its inherently intersubjective system of notation:
When we view the work of an artist or, for that matter,
of a scientist we do not ask if he sees what we would see
in the same general phenomenal field, but whether or not
he has introduced into his representation of it anything that
could be considered false information for anyone who is capable of understanding the system of notation used. (47)
Since all acts of communication are contextualized within some
linguistic community, Whites critique would apparently allow for
distinguishing true from false information in a historical representation, all the while recognizing that the interior context of the
account, i.e., its narrative ordering, will inevitably be inflected by a
particular ideological perspective.
In current theoretical discussions of history, one may ascertain
at least two ways of responding to or incorporating the relativism of
Whites critique: one I will call, with Keith Jenkins, the making of
postmodern histories, the other, as expressed by Jacques Rancire,
embracing a self-consciously subjective poetics of history. Accepting enthusiastically Hayden Whites relativism, along with Michel
Foucaults somewhat more radical skepticism, Keith Jenkins argues
against the existence of any grounds for knowledge, not only knowledge of a historical nature, but in general. Pointing to the trend
in philosophy from Nietzsche to the present, Jenkins claims that
modern thought has been led from all sides to the inexorable conclusion that there are no objective foundations for any philosophical
position:
As they have searched even harder for some foundations for
their own positions, what they have all realized is that no
such foundations exist either for themselves or for anybody
else and nor have they ever done so: every idol has had
feet made of clay. As a result, skepticism or, more strongly,
nihilism, just do now provide the dominant, underlying intellectual presupposition of our times. (Jenkins 64)
Jenkins is perhaps well advised to use the perfunctory postmodern
quotation marks around our times, as his exulting claims could be
taken by some to be not as representative of the present as he might
like to think; indeed, Nietzsche, for all his skepticism, would probably have preferred to call everyone else nihilistic, while retaining
for himself the title of Yeah-sayer to life. That said, Jenkinss is
certainly an adequate generalization of the contemporary epistemo
logical scene, and his approach to producing history is a good approxi
mation of what must be the unspoken norm among those informed
enough to know that they live in postmodern times:
My own view on these possibilities that post-modernism
has constituted at the very same time as allowing expression, is that such attempts at status quo recuperation and
closure are unlikely to be effective within the trajectory of
democratising, sceptical/ironic social formations and that,
aprs Widdowson, they ought not to be anyway. Between
the Scylla and Charybdis of, on the one hand, authorized
history and, on the other, post-modern pastlessness, a space
exists for the desirable outcome of as many people(s) as possible to make their own histories such that they can have
real effects (a real say) in the world. (67)
This statement is given in the context of a minor sparring with Widdowson over the effects of postmodern relativism for well-meaning
proponents of minor histories. Widdowson apparently thinks that
the less powerful challengers to official history will feel the weight
of truthlessness more than their opponents; Jenkins is optimistically
certain that a dropping tide will scuttle all boats (although it might
be appropriate to wonder if his panacea of democratising sceptical/ironic social formations is a guaranteed product of the reign of
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Chapter 2
On Dante, Hyperspheres,
and the Curvature
of the Medieval Cosmos
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the edges of the visible cosmos is the uniformity of the cosmos itself,
a relatively short time after its birth. Osserman calls the hypersphere
that conforms to this structure a retro-verse, in that its poles stretch
from the here-and-now to a remote past, some 20 billion light years
away.3 The seeming paradox of the retro-verse and the aspect that
makes it most difficult for us to grasp is that from our point of
reference, as from any point in the universe, we appear to be at the
center of an enormous sphere, the circumference of which is in fact a
single point, the point that marks the beginning of time.
One of the reasons for which this is so difficult for us to
conceptualize, according to Osserman, is that, while we have
learned to overcome our flat-earth mentality in measurements on
a global scale, we have not yet overcome our tendency to think
in terms of a flat universe (Osserman 85). Clearly, advances in
mathematics have enabled physicists to propose such a model, despite
our apparent inability to imagine in four dimensions (which is what
it takes to conceptualize a hypersphere). In particular, a nineteenthcentury mathematician named Georg Riemann developed a noneuclidean geometry with which one could theorize the curvature
of space, and which, right from the start, began to suggest plausible
solutions to ancient conundrums, such as the problem of the edge
of the universe. If the universe is finite rather than infinite, as most
ancient philosophers, apart from the Epicureans, believed it to be,
what would occur when one arrived at its edge? What would lie on
the other side, and how could that other side not be, itself, part of
the universe?
Riemanns model resolved that paradox, which is rooted in the
assumption that the universe is flat, or Euclidean. If, instead,
it is positively curved and Riemannian, then it can be finite
in extent and still not have any edge or boundary. In
Riemanns model, every part of the universe looks like every
other part, as far as shapes and measurements go. (88)
Acknowledging that it is one thing to explain an abstract mathematical
model, and quite another to have a reader or a listener understand
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Mobile shows that the Empyrean is not just perched on top of the
mundane cosmos in one specific place, as it necessarily appears in
any two or three-dimensional rendition; rather, the edges of the
Empyrean are everywhere around us and, like the contemporary
cosmos, homogenous. Having been informed of its uniformity,
Dante immediately wonders of its location, or better, it locatability.
As she is wont to do, Beatrice answers his as-yet-unasked question
as follows:
La natura del mondo, che queta/ il mezzo e tutto laltro
intorno move,/ quinci comincia come da sua meta;/ e
questo cielo non ha altro dove/ che la mente divina, in che
saccende/ lamor che l volge e la virt chei piove./ Luce e
amor dun cerchio lui comprende,/ s come questo li altri;
e quel precinto/ colui che l cinge solamente intende./ Non
suo moto per altro distinto,/ ma li altri son mensurati
da questo,/ s come diece da mezzo e da quinto;/ e come
el tempo tegna in cotal testo/ le sue radici e ne li altri le
fronde,/ omai a te pu esser manifesto. (XXVII, 106-120)
[The nature of the universe, which holds the center still and
moves all else around it, begins here as if from its turning
post. This heaven has no other where than this: the mind
of God, in which are kindled both the love that turns it
and the force it rains. As in a circle, light and love enclose
it, as it surrounds the rest and that enclosing, only He
who encloses understands. No other heaven measures this
spheres motion, but it serves as the measure for the rest,
even as half and fifth determine ten; and now it can be
evident to you how time has roots within this vessel and,
within the other vessels, has its leaves.]
The place of the Primum Mobile which, as we shall see, was a
central concern for cosmological speculation in Dantes time is
attributed to Gods mind; this, however, does not detract from its
reality. On the contrary, time, motion and the physical existence of
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the lower spheres are utterly dependent on this place, and God is
seen as encircling it, providing both its force and the incentive
love of its motion, and hence the motion of the entire universe.
Now, if there is no physical location for the Primum Mobile, what is
the nature, or form, of its spiritual location in the mind of God? As
it turns out, the Primum Mobile forms the outer boundary of a new
set of concentric spheres, toward the center of which Dante directs
his gaze:
[...] un punto vidi che raggiava lume/ acuto s che l viso
chelli affoca/ chiuder conviensi per lo forte acume;/ e quale
stella par quinci pi poca,/ parrebba luna,/ locata con esso/
come stella con stella si collca./ Forse cotanto quanto
pare appresso/ alo cigner la luce che l dipigne/ quando l
vapor che l porta pi spesso,/ distante en torno al punto
un cerchio digne/ si girava s ratto, chavria vinto/ quel
moto che pi tosto il mondo cigne;/ e questo era dun altro
circumcinto,/ e quel dal terzo, e l terzo poi dal quarto,/ dal
quinto il quarto, e poi dal sesto il quinto. (XXVIII 1630)
[...] I saw a point that sent forth so acute a light, that anyone
who faced the force with which it blazed would have to shut
his eyes, and any star that, seen from earth, would seem
to be the smallest, set beside that point, as star conjoined
with star, would seem a moon. Around that point a ring of
fire wheeled, a ring perhaps as far from that point as a halo
from the star that colors it when mist that forms the halo
is most thick. It wheeled so quickly that it would outstrip
the motion that most swiftly girds the world. That ring was
circled by a second ring, the second by a third, third by a
fourth, fourth by a fifth, and fifth ring by a sixth.]
And thus it continues until he observes nine spheres, mirroring the
nine spheres on the other side of the Primum Mobile, except that
these increase in speed and perfection as their size decreases and
they approach the absolute center, which is God.7
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feel like one looking in.12 In this way, Lewis expresses the paradox
of Dantes cosmos: a sphere in which the circumference, what we see
out there, coincides exactly with the center. Is this, then, a common
topos in medieval thought? It would seem to be from the prominence
that Lewis grants it, and yet his one example is none other than our
own:
But I have already hinted that the intelligible universe
reverses it all; there the Earth is the rim, the outside edge
where being fades away on the border of nonentity. A few
astonishing lines from the Paradiso (XXVIII, 25 sq.) stamp
this on the mind forever. Seven [sic] concentric rings of light
revolve around that point, and that which is smallest and
nearest to it has the swiftest movement [...] The universe is
thus, when our minds are sufficiently freed from the senses,
turned inside out. (116)
Let us not pass over in silence the subordinate clause, when our
minds are sufficiently freed from the senses, for this is precisely the
crux of our discussion. For the modern reader, it requires a radical
wrenching of mind from sense to conceive of a universe turned inside
out. And yet Lewis implies that this way of thinking comes naturally
to the medieval mind. Perhaps we cannot say with certainty whether
such a model came naturally to medieval thinkers; we can say,
however, that such a model occurred to Dante, whether naturally or
not, and that it was, therefore, well within the realm of possibilities
for a poet of his time to imagine the universe in a way that, while
paradoxical to the modern mind, solved certain problems peculiar to
the medieval mind. The problem that Dante solved was, of course,
the age-old problem of the edge of the universe that, according
to Osserman, had stumped philosophers until Riemann (Osserman
88). However, while it was still a problem for the Middle Ages, it
would appear that, by the time of Newton, the universes edge could
not be a problem, because the universe was believed to be infinite
and thus have no edge. In order to best understand the nature of
Dantes solution, then, let us consider how the problem was phrased
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What was not a problem for the stoics became a real conundrum
for the scholastics, one intimately related to the problem of the place
and subsequent motion that had to be attributed in some way to the
cosmos. In attempting to deal with what lay outside the universe,
some thinkers, such as the thirteenth century Henry of Ghent,
were willing to advance the notion of a vacuum that would qualify
as something by the mere fact that it was dimensional, but they
insisted on distinguishing this space from a pure nothing without
dimensions, which they argued could not exist (Grant, Place and
Space 151). In other words, dimensionality would necessarily remain
an attribute of something; even if this something were void space, it
would still exist in the sense of being substantial. But a majority of
thinkers maintained their opposition toward the existence of extracosmic space despite the paradoxes it seemed to spawn. This was
the case throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (150),
although, for reasons we will now consider, thought experiments
concerning such space became increasingly common.
Place and Space after the Condemnation of 1277
As Grant says in regard to the Condemnation, [a]s a consequence
of three articles in the Condemnation of 1277, it became an
excommunicable offense to deny Gods power to create an accident
without a substance or to deny the possibility of the separate existence
of a quantity or dimension on grounds that such an entity would be
a substance (Place and Space142). That it to say, as a consequence
of establishing the theological doctrine of Gods omnipotence,
the Church created an institutional space in which the problems
of space and place could be rethought and new presuppositions
tested. If, before, thinkers had balked at the seeming absurdity of
attributing dimensionality, an obvious attribute of things that exist,
to pure, empty space, such a hypothesis would now be supported by
the immense authority of the Church. Equally, while scholasticism
and theology had always agreed that, de facto, God had created
only one world, the Condemnation made clear that no one could
deny the possibility that He had made others, or that He had the
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beyond the world and space (spatium) are one and the same; and
so-called imaginary space is true space, for imaginary space (in the
common opinion of philosophers) is nothing and nothing is space,
and the space which they call imaginary space is true space (spatium
verum) (Grant, Infinite Void55). Not only is the imaginary nothing
to be animated as something, it will become the most important
something of them all, the sine qua non of all existence:
For the Uncreated is that whose beginning does not preexist; and Nothing, we say, is that whose beginning does not
pre-exist. Nothing contains all things. It is more precious
than gold, free of origin and distinction, more joyous than
the appearance of beautiful light, more noble than the
blood of kings, comparable to the heavens, higher than the
stars, more powerful than a stroke of lightening, perfect and
blessed in every part. Nothing always inspires. (57)
In the passage of time between the thirteenth and the seventeenth
centuries, then, we have moved from an epistemological configuration
in which it was difficult to imagine space as an independent entity,
and certainly not as one with the attribute of dimensionality, to
one in which such a concept with such an attribute is the necessary
condition for all being. It is important to stress two fundamental
aspects of this new conception of space: first, that it was flat, the
embodiment of an abstract, geometrical (Euclidean) system; second,
that it was real, the ultimate hypostasis of what had once been
merely a thought experiment. As Koyr puts it, the replacement
of the Aristotelian conception of space a differentiated set of
innerworldy places, by that of Euclidean geometry an essentially
infinite and homogeneous extension from now on [was] considered
as identical with the real space of the world.22 According to Grant,
it is this entity that allowed for the fusion of Theology and Natural
Philosophy that had never been possible during the Middle Ages:
In the seventeenth century, the secular and theological
currents would merge for the first time, when God was
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be; and one could not readily conceive the contrary (qtd. in Grant,
Place and Space144). Such a belief, that one cannot imagine the
non-existence of an outside a non-existence that was itself a point
of doctrine only a short time before indicates that already in the
fourteenth century a process of foreclosure was beginning in which
the abstraction of infinitude would finish by colonizing completely
the imagination of reality.
It is during this same time frame that, across the sciences,
abstraction begins to become an intrinsic element of analytic
methodology. Oresme himself adapted some of the insights of a group
of thinkers associated with Merton College, Oxford, who had devel
oped a way of thinking about an objects qualities, such as motion,
temperature and weight, as abstract, i.e., separately analyzable,
entities (Lindberg 295). Oresmes particular contribution was to
adapt and improve upon a geometrical system of representation of
qualities originally developed by one Giovanni di Casali in 1351
(297). Oresmes idea was that changes in a particular quality could
be mapped in time, if the subject of the quality in question were
abstracted, represented in two-dimensions as a line. In this way,
changes in quality could be measured quantitatively, in that a
particular geometric shape could be taken as an adequate substitution
for what had previously been largely unrepresentable.
Thomas Kuhn associates the emergence of methods based on
abstraction at this time to a renaissance of neo-platonism, which
valorized ideal, immutable forms over empirically-existing objects.23
That geometry could be used to predict and standardize observations
could only be a sign that the abstract elements of geometry,
mathematically perfect forms, were in fact the reality upon which
the physical world was based. According to Kuhn, it was just such
an epistemological change, a change in the value accorded to forms,
that explains the possibility of the Copernican revolution: No
new discoveries, no sort of astronomical observation, persuaded
Copernicus of ancient astronomys inadequacy or of the necessity for
change. Until half a century after Copernicus death no potentially
revolutionary changes occurred in the data available to astronomers
(132). If renewed valorization of abstract forms was a major impetus
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Chapter 3
Mimesis and Theatricality
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a distinction that comes naturally to spectators versed in its conventions, but one that was phenomenologically unavailable to Europeans living prior to the sixteenth century. Its absence, however,
allowed for an experience of mimesis that had no requirement of a
prohibition of fiction, for the simple reason that fiction itself, defined
as Costa Lima defines it as dependent on the manipulation of
frames of experience was not a possibility. The space of depiction,
of imagination, of narrative, and of spectacle, for this culture, rather
than in an opposed, representational relation to the world, was both
radically of the world and potently in the world. And as such it allowed for modes of mimetic experience quite alien to the limited
options of Renaissance aesthetics.
At the outset of Control of the Imaginary, Costa Lima identifies the problem that for him has taken on the allure of an obsession: why did the Italian literary theorists of the Renaissance, at the
beginning of what we identify today as modernity, predicate their
notion of mimesis on a prohibition one Costa Lima calls scandalous a prohibition of fiction itself?2 Such a prohibition is scandalous for two reasons: it contradicts other actual theorizations and
manifestations of mimesis in western history; and it betrays potential
ideal theorizations and manifestations, ones that Costa Lima himself is engaged in liberating from the overly restrictive mold cast by
the thinkers of early modernity.
The notion of mimesis that Costa Lima is committed to advancing emphasizes the essential fictionality of mimesis itself, acknowledging that all acts of artistic production contain elements
of both identification and estrangement, and that this latter element is what must be theoretically salvaged from the destructive
prohibition of the Renaissance. I will return to this argument in
greater detail below; for now it is the former claim that is of interest to us.
For Costa Lima, the early modern theorization of mimesis subordinates all artistic production to the strictures of a some object
existing in reality, a subordination he associates with a metaphysical
world view.3 The centrality of this real, exiting model, whether inside the human subjects psyche or outside in the observable world,
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history that purport to return to history and allow the past to speak
for itself e.g., Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt and the new historicism are guilty of reducing the Middle Ages to a caricature in
order to prove some point, a point inevitably having to do with the
newness of the sixteenth or seventeenth century and its pertinence
to modern life.
As it happens, many of the voices Costa Lima turns to in order
to support his subjectivity thesis are engaged in refuting, from the
vantage of medieval studies (Howard Bloch is an excellent example) the claim that subjectivity is particular to a modernity born in
the Renaissance. By citing such scholars, Costa Lima is indicating
that he too does not subscribe to such a limitation of the notion;
and yet it seems that for the development of subjectivity to be
a substantial part of his explanation for the historically specific
prohibition of fictionality in sixteenth century poetics, he would
per force have to defend such a historically specific notion of subjectivity, one that appears quite a bit later than that described by
Howard Bloch.
Now, my feeling is that there is something to the myth of medieval exceptionalism, and that, in fact, there is something quite
radically different about notions of aesthetics, conceptions of political agency, and even experiences of personal identity between,
say, times prior to the fifteenth and after the sixteenth centuries.
And I think Costa Lima is right in fingering sixteenth century
attitudes toward mimesis as being central to this difference. On
the other hand, I agree with Patterson in rejecting the vocabulary
of subjectivity as a catch-all explanation for this change. For one
thing, the concept is too general; there is a tendency to confuse the
philosophical notion, derived from one pole of the subject/object
divide, with historically specific models of political agency, with
phenomenological descriptions of self awareness, with psychoanalytic typographies, and so on. What I am proposing is a notion
quite specific to the sixteenth century, and to the poetic theories
that Costa Lima is discussing. It is a notion that corroborates Costa
Limas contention that the verisimilar mimesis of the Renaissance
is not the only option, while at the same time suggesting that al-
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[One could not ask how long an action that was being represented lasted, or in what place occurred all the things that
one saw, nor how many acts the comedy had. For one would
be answered hardily that the action had lasted three hours,
that everything had taken place on the stage, and that the
violins had marked the intervals of the acts. In the end, it
was enough to please that a great number of verses recited
on the stage carry the name comedy.]
The Abb is criticizing what he takes to be a defect of the preclassical theater, its inability to distinguish between what we call now
the time (or space) of action from that of performance. Indeed, I am
claiming that such a distinction was phenomenologically inaccessible prior to the modernity. But this inability is at the same time an
ability, an ability to experience as a unity a distinction that for the
Modern Age has been fundamental, perhaps even foundational. For
not just modern theater, but the very experience of space that modern theater as well as most other forms of modern spectacle, most
all of which, I would argue, take their form from the template of
the theater presupposes, is predicated upon the separation of the
dimension of meaning from that of being, and the subordination of
the latter to the former.
The theme of verisimilitude, developed with such urgency by
thinkers like Robortello, Scaliger, and Castelvetro, had to do with
the relationship between two spaces: the space of lived experience
and a new space, separated from the spectator by a virtual screen
and existing in a mimetic relation to the first. The appearance of this
space is what sparks the debates concerning verisimilitude i.e.,
the prohibition of fiction that Costa Lima describes but it does so
precisely because it is the appearance of this space that makes fiction
possible. Costa Lima is also aware of this, pointing out that a sensation of similarity does not exhaust literary mimesis:
Instead, it must be added that it is carries out within a specific sphere, that of aesthetic experience. That sphere, in its
turn, presupposes that those who participate in it under-
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languages kinship with things in the way that Don Quijote does
makes of one a madman, a man of primitive resemblances in the
eyes of the new order; but the new order also has its madness, the
realm of madness and imagination opened up by languages
detachment from things, and by the emergence of theatrical frames
that, from the perspective of resemblances solid certainties, must
look threatening indeed. Such a reading corroborates Costa Limas
thesis: the continuity of social institutions is protected, in a certain
sense, by the prohibition of the realm of fiction, of madness and
imagination.
But if theatricality as the dominant experience of space is new,
then it must have replaced another experience, that of presence: an
experience, I have suggested, which may turn out not to support
a concept of mimesis that can be classified along the spectrum of
identification and estrangement. To the extent that there is mimesis
in presence, it is not a mimesis that could fall prey to the veto against
fiction, quite simply because fiction in the sense we have understood
it involving necessarily the keying of frames is not even a possibility in the spatiality of presence. This is not to say that people
who experience this spatiality do not tell or even act out stories, just
that the stories they tell convey meaning in a different way. They
are not experienced as simultaneously occurring in an alternate, but
viable, imaginary space to that of the telling or the enactment; they
are not predicated upon a keying of frames; which is to say, they retain the power of their performativity and, as such, are experienced
in different ways: as invocations; instructive allegories; truths to be
mastered through repetition; even spells, curses and incantations.
Presence
In The Golden Bough, James Frazer described a mode of interaction
with the natural world that he called magical. In analyzing the principles on which this magical relation is based, he posited that there
existed two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles
its cause; and second, that things which have once been in contact
with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the
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the objective presence of the sacred was held to have a special and,
indeed, quite practical power. The cult of the saints, for instance,
led not only or even principally to the pious imitatio of their deeds,
but rather to the obsessive adoration of their preserved bodies. As
Huizinga writes, [t]he physical presence that the saints possessed
by virtue of their depictions was unusually intensified by the fact
that the church permitted and even favored the veneration of their
relics.... Before St. Elizabeth of Thuringia was buried, a crowd of
devotees cut or tore strips from the winding-sheets of her face and
cut off her hair and nails, pieces of her ears and even her nipples.16
These relics appear at times to have served as amulets, imparting
peace, fertility and good weather everywhere they were carried
(Kieckhefer 78).
Likewise, the words of prayers could also function as charms that
could either work alone or be used to intensify the effects of a particular ritual. Indeed, sometimes the words did not even need to be
recited, as if the very substance of the paper and ink that bore them
had become imbued with their magical power. One manuscript on
exorcizing demons, for example, recommends drawing the sign of
the cross and writing the beginning lines of the Gospel according to
John on a sheet of parchment, and then scraping the words into holy
water for the afflicted person to drink (Kieckhefer 74).
Finally, the experience of sacred objects and words as practically
effective cures, talismans, and charms extended even to the holy Eucharist. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the doctrine
of the Eucharist was being redefined and the Real Presence of Christs
body was explicitly claimed to become present in its substance at the
moment of the blessing, people increasingly demanded to see this
miraculously transubstantiated host, and the custom spread of having the priest elevate it over his head after the consecration so that
people at mass could behold it (79). This gesture, which had traditionally been meant as an imitation of Christs gesture of slightly
raising the bread while blessing it at the Last Supper, became highly
exaggerated by the second half of the twelfth century in response
to the peoples desire to see and adore the body of Christ.17 For the
people who came flocking to witness the elevation, the motivation
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Cots Limas argument, while at the same time confirming its essential premises.
It may well be that, to us moderns, this fictional aspect of mimesis is our only alternative to the verisimilitude of the Renaissance
theorists; it may be that the non-representational mimesis of a magical world view is beyond our realm of experience. But despite Costa
Limas insistence that the view of mimesis to which he is committed
is one of the cases of keying of primary and habitual frames (Social
456), he gives, from time to time, a hint that he may be in search
of an even less restrictive description of the aesthetic experience. In
his discussion of Freud, for example, he claims that what is decisive in the constitution of mimesis, then, is the creation of a staging,
which is not so much the repetition of a model as the organization
of a response to that model carried out at the level of the sensorial
(Control 50). While the use of the word staging would suggest that
we are still in the realm of theatricality, the rest of the sentence belies
that impression. For to look at mimesis as the way a body organizes
a response at the level of the sensorial is to open the door to different modes of perception, creation, and interaction with the world
around us, ways that could, perhaps, transcend the aegis of social
representations.
Chapter 4
On Relativism, Rights and Differends, or,
Ethics and the American Holocaust
The shades of those to whom had been refused not only life
but also the expression of the wrong done to them by the
Final Solution continue to wander in their indeterminacy.
By forming the State of Israel, the survivors transformed the
wrong into damages and the differend into a litigation. By
beginning to speak in the common idiom of public international law and of authorized politics, they put an end to the
silence to which they had been condemned. But the reality
of the wrong suffered at Auschwitz before the foundation
of this state remained and remains to be established, and it
cannot be established because it is in the nature of a wrong
not to be established by consensus.1
Jean-Franois Lyotard
Holocausts
In David Stannards manifesto of remembrance, American Holocaust, the author makes explicit the connection between the Jewish
Holocaust of the 1930s and 40s, and the destruction of the native
populations of the Americas in the decades following Columbuss
arrival in Hispaniola in 1492:
Elie Wiesel was right, the road to Auschwitz was being
paved in the earliest days of Christendom. But another conclusion now is equally evident: on the way to Auschwitz the
roads pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies
and of North and South America;2
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because,
[j]ust twenty-one years after Columbuss first landing in
the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorers had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly
8,000,000 people those Columbus chose to call Indians
had been killed by violence, disease, and despair. It took
a little longer, about the span of a single human generation, but what happened on Hispaniola was the equivalent
of more than fifty Hiroshimas. And Hispaniola was only
the beginning. (AH x)
Almost every aspect of the problem Lyotard grapples with in the epigram as regards the Jewish Holocaust has relevance for the American
Holocaust3: where the Nazis intended to obliterate an entire race, the
Europeans, in many cases, succeeded; where a differend arises between the claims of survivors and the apologists of Nazism, there are
no survivors of the American Holocaust, if only because of the historical distance that separates it from the present; where the defeat of the
Nazis allowed for a regime in which their actions could be judged and
condemned (if only according to the juridical rules of cognitive discourse4), for 500 years the historical discourse of the West has classified the colonization of the Americas not as a holocaust but as a discovery, and has celebrated 1492 as one of the great events of world history.
As the editors of one volume marking the quincentennial put it:
Most of modern history has been written, analyzed, and interpreted with the emphasis on what has been described as
the Discovery, perceived predictably from the perspective
of the people who presumably did the discovering. Those
who were discovered have had little or no real say in how
that history is written and limited opportunity to tell it as
they feel it is.5
But, if this is the case, and given the fact of the almost total silence
imposed on the native idiom, how can we explain that we, the
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descendants of this event,6 can now cast a critical gaze on our own
history, and judge that a wrong was committed? And, assuming
the existence of such a desire, how do we go about attesting that
wrong, restoring that idiom?7
The immediate answer is, of course, that the silence was never
total, that Europe was never a monolithic unity, and that even at the
time of the conquest an alternative story was emerging, concerning,
for example, the Black Legend of the Spaniards barbarous treatment
of the natives. But while these narratives reveal and describe practices that might have otherwise never come to our attention, they do
nothing to restore the idiom of the vanquished. The French or the
English idioms were not incommensurate with the Spanish idiom;
between their genres of discourse there is no differend, for theirs is
the discourse of colonialism, and of mercantile competition. If this
is the case, then we are still left with the task of regaining what was
destroyed, of finding an idiom to express what has been silenced,
or, at the very least, of bearing witness to the differend between the
peoples who came into contact in 1492. As Sylvia Wynter asks,
Can we, therefore, while taking as our point of departure
both the ecosystemic and global sociosystemic interrelatedness of our contemporary situation, put forward a new
world view of 1492 from the perspective of the species, and
with reference to the interests of its well-being, rather than
from the partial perspectives, and with reference to the necessarily partial interests, of both celebrants and dissidents? 8
Such a new world view implies a new consciousness, a consciousness not rooted exclusively in the hegemony of one idiom, a consciousness whose existence is perhaps only attested to by the desire
some have to attain it. And it is this desire that remains to be explained, for it is a desire that suggests an obligation in the sense of the
ethical, an obligations that reaches us from outside the boundaries
of an idiom, or of a world view, and that can account, in some mysterious way, for how that world view might change without ever being defeated. I suggest that the roots of this change must be sought
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that the Indians should be given [to the Spaniards] and that this was
in agreement with human and divine law (F 28).
If this decision satisfied the Crown for a given time, the question
of the conquests legitimacy continued to be posed in the Universities, particularly among a group of scholars that came to be known
as the School of Salamanca.12 One basic problem they considered
was that while slavery, as a legal institution, could be imposed on
those captured during the course of just warfare, the Spanish Crown
wished to consider the inhabitants of the Indies not as enemies conquered through warfare, but as its own subjects and vassals, whom it
would not make sense to enslave. As Queen Isabel informed Nicols
de Ovando, we wish the Indians to be well treated as our subjects
and our vassals (F 34). Apologists for the enslavement of the Indians therefore had to look not to the juridical rights of the conquerors for their legitimacy, but rather to the very nature of the native
peoples (39). From this need arose the debate in the early sixteenth
century over the Aristotelian doctrine of natural slavery.
According to Aristotle, some commentators said, there is a type
of man whose reason, the defining feature of men, has, for some
reason, failed to achieve proper mastery over his passions (42). Such
a man is not capable of self-mastery and it is therefore necessary that
he be subjected to the mastery of another for his own guidance. That
such natural slaves existed was not a difficult proposition to accept;
but to justify on this basis the enslavement of the Indians required
that the Indians, or barbarians in general, be identified with the
idea of the natural slave (47).
For Francisco de Vitoria, leader of the Salamanca school, just
as there are physical laws that determine the behavior of things in
nature, so there are laws of human behavior that determine how
one ought to behave vis--vis others. The difference between these
two types of law is that man, graced with a free will, may choose to
disregard the law (59). But if man may disregard the law, how are
individual humans to know what the natural law actually dictates?
Humans have access to this knowledge, says Vitoria, because it is
reflected in custom and popular opinion. Knowledge, he says, is
that thing on which all men are in agreement (60).
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powerful individuals, who had used their free will poorly, they could
have the effect of leading a people away from the knowledge of the
natural law, since [t]he impulse to follow a bad ruler if he has
some claim to legitimate authority, is as strong as the impulse to follow a good one (101). Ultimately, therefore, while Vitoria could
conclude that the Indians were not entirely irrational creatures, he
could not say with certainty that they were fully rational either, and
thus left open the possibility that they were something in between
the two (79).
The conflict over the legality of the Spanish campaigns in the
new world came to a head in the debate at Valladolid in 1550 between
Seplveda and Las Casas. The debate centered around Seplvedas
claim that it was just for the Spanish to wage war against the Indians
and to enslave them if need be. He supported this claim with four
theses, namely: 1) Indians are barbarous13 ; 2) Indians commit
crimes against natural law (AM 87); 3) Indians oppress and kill
innocent people (89); and 4) War may be waged against infidels
in order to prepare the way for preaching the faith (95).
To the first of the theses, Las Casas rebuttal was that Seplveda
had generalized and simplified Aristotles definition of barbarian
to suit his own purpose, and he responded by deriving three classes
of barbarian from Aristotle, and later adding one more derived from
scripture. The first three were: 1) Those who are barbarians because
of their savage behavior; 2) Those who are barbarians because they
have no written language in which to express themselves; and 3)
Those who are barbarians in the correct sense of the term (83). Of
the first two definitions, neither one justified their referents being relegated to the category of natural slave: the first because it was a relative term, which even highly developed peoples such as Spaniards
could merit if their behavior was sufficiently savage; the second
because it is used only in a restricted sense, and had no relevance to
a peoples rationality. Of these two, only the second, highly specific
sense of barbarian applied to the Indians, but, since it was a value
free description, saying nothing about their rationality, it could not
justify warfare against them as natural slaves. Las Casas also added
a fourth definition of barbarians as those who are not Christians,
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but concluded that the first, second and fourth definitions were all
improper and had nothing to do with Aristotles concept of a natural slave (87). He was left, therefore, with only the third definition
barbarians, who in the proper and strict meaning of the word, are
those who, either because of their evil and wicked character or the
barrenness of the region in which they live, are cruel, savage, sottish,
stupid, and strangers to reason.14 Not content merely to demonstrate that such a definition failed to describe the native inhabitants
of the new world, Las Casas would argue that such a people could
not be imagined to exist in a Christian universe.
First he established that, indeed, of Seplvedas three definitions, only this third one could actually fulfill Aristotles definition
of natural slave, because such creatures
lacked the reasoning and way of life suited to human beings
and those things which all men habitually accept. The Philosopher discusses these barbarians and calls them slaves by
nature since they have no natural government, no political
institutions (for there is no order among them), and they
are not subject to anyone, nor do they have a ruler. [...] They
have no laws which they fear or by which all their affairs are
regulated. There is no one to evaluate good deeds, promote
virtue, or restrain vice by penalties. Finally, caring nothing
for life in a society, they lead a life very much that of brute
animals. (ID 33)
Ironically, Las Casas would not allow that a race of such men
could even exist, except as a rare exception, for God would not allow
for such an imperfection in his plan. In other words, a race of such
men could not, in fact, be men, since men are definable primarily in
term of reason.
And since a rational nature is provided for and guided by
divine providence for its own sake in a way superior to that
of other creatures, not only in what concerns the species
but also each individual, it evidently follows that it would
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89
The third thesis, that war was justified in the name of the innocent victims of Indian rituals, provoked the most complicated,
and most radical, of Las Casas rebuttals. Of the many principles
he invokes, two are of particular interest here. The first is that, even
if one accepts that the Indians do unjustly kill innocent people as
part of their religion, to allow this to happen is a lesser evil than
to wage war on them, thereby killing many more innocents, and
perhaps earning such hatred as to never again hope for their willful
conversion to Christianity (190). The second principle is perhaps
his clearest articulation of what we could call cultural relativism,
that the impulse to offer what one values most to God, hence human
sacrifice, is in itself a noble expression of natural law, whereas what
one chooses to sacrifice is subject to the vagaries of human laws and
customs. Therefore, the fact of human sacrifice is not at all contrary
to the dictates of natural reason, and, if it is ultimately an error, it
is one that should be excused, as it can owe its origin to a plausible
proof developed by human reasoning (242).
As to Seplvedas fourth thesis, that war was justified as a prelude to preaching the faith, in order to attain, as it were, a captive
audience, Las Casas had recently published a treatise on this topic
called The Only Method of Preaching the True Faith. In this treatise,
as in his rebuttal, Las Casas argues from both a pragmatic and a
moral perspective that conversion by force is neither effective, since
it can only inspire hatred and fear rather than love and trust, nor is it
right, since the method is in direct contradiction to the message.15
The central goal, then, of Las Casas discourse was to attribute
to the Indians a dignity deserving of the Spaniards respect, a respect
that would encourage the Spaniards to persuade the Indians of the
advantages of their civilization and of the truths of their religion, but
not to do so violently. The central rhetorical maneuver he adopted
to pursue this end was to counter Seplvedas concept of a graded
humanity, in which different races could be more or less human,
with the notion of an absolute humanity, guaranteed by the perfection of Gods creation. It was this principle that allowed him to
argue for the viability of different forms of expression of the essence
of humanity, natural reason, but it was just as much the observed
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91
that point beyond which one cannot explain ones adherence. Why
should I do what God ordains is right? Because God ordains it. Because it is right. The point is not that such a response shuts down
dialogue; although in many cases it may, the very phrase to shut
down dialogue implies that there would more dialogue where that
came from, if only it were not shut down. Rather, the tautological
definition or the ethical phrase mark the point beyond which there
is no discourse and no current ground for dialogue. The essential
difference between Las Casas and Seplveda in this respect is that
whereas the latter grounded his vision of human potential in a particular, existent and national model, that of the Spanish people,18
the former left his idea of humanity somewhat more indeterminate,
grounded not in a tangible set of attributes but in a tautological
equation and an ethical conviction: all men are rational, and all who
are rational are men, and this is so because God says so.
Although Las Casas and Seplveda each claimed victory following the debate (AM 113), there was no immediate change in Spanish colonial policy, a fact that can only indicate that, whichever one
might have been the most persuasive in that given context, the ideas
and interests that Seplveda represented prevailed. Sylvia Wynter
attributes this victory to an epistemic receptivity to the secular, and
nationalist, underpinnings of Seplvedas theoretical position:
[...] the debate at Valladolid can be seen as the official occasion of the conceptual revolution that formally ushered in
the modern world. It was a debate which Seplveda as the
Spanish nationalist won (as OGorman argues, according
to Phelan) precisely because his mode of reasoning corresponded to the great changes that were taking place in Europe, ushered in by the commercial revolution both before
and after 1492. These changes were to lead to the organization of human life on secular rather than on religious terms.
Seplveda, in spite of his still hybrid use of religious terminology and concepts, can be said to have provided the first
secular operational self-definition of the human subject,
one whose universally applicable verbal symbol was that
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edged toward this last alternative [use of force] less readily than the
absolutist/objectivist, and would be, under these conditions, more
reluctant to exercise that force (160).
If the relativist is just as ready as the objectivist to engage in activism for a cause, although less likely to use violence in doing so, what
can account for this strength of commitment that is not based on a
belief in the absolute rectitude of ones world view? Smiths answer
would appear to share some of the assumptions of certain schools of
pragmatism: the relativist, she claims, would perform actions that
she saw as part of a longer-range pattern of acts that appeared to
have, as their likely outcome, a state of affairs that she, along with
other people, saw and evaluated as desirable (166). In this sense,
what an objectivist mistakes for absolute aesthetic or moral values,
the relativist recognizes as being beneficial or disadvantageous in respect to her desired ends: when we allude to a work as great, good,
bad, or middling, we usually imply great, good, bad, or middling for
something and also, thereby, as something: that is, with respect to
whatever functions or effects works of that kind might be expected
or desired to serve or produce (13). While such a description makes
the relativist appear admirably in control of, and unusually aware
of, his or her own dispositions and desires, it does not indicate a
great deal of concern for what those desires are, why she has them or
where they might have come from. To Richard Rortys attempt to
answer this question by defining ones ethnos as the group formed of
those who share enough of ones beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible (CV 169), she responds by defining it instead as those
who share situations or conditions and, therefore, also share histories
and economies and, accordingly, have developed, over time, more
or less congruent routines and patterns of behavior, and, therefore,
engage in mutually consequential interactive practices (169). If,
then, the relativist appeared to us to be unusually aware of his or her
desires and dispositions, it is because she believes them to emerge,
unproblematically, from ones environment. But if this is the case,
her critique of Rortys self-consciously adopted ethnocentrism becomes purely academic: while Rortys pragmatist seeks to ground
his or her actions in community as opposed to objective truth, and
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natural meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural, and our words will only express facts [...]. The
right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense
in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. (LE 7)
Of course, one might immediately dissent by pointing out that language is far from being limited to expressing facts; such a use of language is only one, to use Lyotards term, genre of discourse, one that
happens to be preferred by the scientific disciplines. But such an objection misses the point that ethics, whatever it is, cannot be reduced
to descriptive, factual language. As Wittgenstein puts it, although
all judgments of relative value can be shown to be mere statements
of fact, no statement of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of
absolute value (6). By saying this, Wittgenstein is not denying the
existence of ethics; but whatever ethics is, it exceeds the limitations
of descriptive language, it is not reducible to a factual description of
a strategy for attaining some desired end, it is, rather, a fundamental
part of whatever determines those desired ends.
The maneuver that accounts for the association between true
ethics and a certain kind of ethical statement resides, he claims, in
an endemic misuse of language in ethical and religious expression,
which makes the ethical statement a simile of a factual statement:
Thus it would seem to me that when we are using the word right
in an ethical sense, although, what we mean is not right in its trivial
sense, its something similar... (LE 9). The trivial statement, then,
refers indirectly to another level of interaction with the world that
has no adequate expression itself. If it did, one could drop the simile,
and tell it like it is, an impossibility since, in our case as soon as
we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand
behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first
appeared to be a simile now seems to be mere nonsense (LE 10).
But again, the problem is not that there is nothing to express, but
rather that there is an urgency, a feeling, a need to express, which
cannot be put into words:
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either the law is reasonable, and it does not obligate, since it convinces; or else, it is not reasonable, and it does not obligate, since it constrains (D 117). For Lyotard, the cognitive, that genre of discourse
distinguished by its recourse to reason, is entirely heterogeneous
from other genres, such as the prescriptive. The ethical cannot, then,
be phrased in descriptive, i.e., cognitive terms, and therefore cannot
be explained or derived according to the rules of logical causality:
Obligation is not a fact that can be attested, but only a feeling, a
fact of reason, a sign (D 122).
If the ethical experience cannot be explained or attested, this is
not to say that ethical situations cannot be described. One characteristic of such a situation is that it involves a relation between an
addresser and an addressee, like most instances of phrasing, but
one in which a party used to conceiving itself as an I finds itself inexplicably trapped in the position of the you, of the addressee:
An addressor appears whose addressee I am, and about
whom I know nothing, except that he or she situates me
upon the addressee instance. The violence of the revelation is in the egos expulsion from the addressor instance,
from which it managed its work of enjoyment, power, and
cognition. It is the scandal of an I displaced onto the you
instance. The I turned you tries to repossess itself through
the understanding of what dispossesses it. [...] But it cannot annul the event, it can only tame and master it, thereby
disregarding the transcendence of the other. (111)
The question is: what sort of occurrence has the power of removing
the I from the addressor instance. If two parties who are fluent in
the same genre of discourse meet and converse within the boundaries and rules set by that genre, then neither is removed from the
addressor instance, although each addresses the other. In such a situation, the identity of the I is not shaken, for, as in Lacans description
of an act of communication, the sender receives his own message
back from the receiver in inverted form.28 The ethical cannot play
a role in such an encounter because it, the ethical, is a mode of the
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French thinkers. But Hegels edict becomes more ominous and critical if it is read not as a naive confidence in the ability of reason to
assert itself through the movement of Spirit, but as a melancholic
realization of the historicity of Truth. If the real is coterminous with
the rational it is because reality eventually conforms to what is reasonable, but rather because what is real dictates its own terms, it
presupposes its own reason, its own rectitude. In terms of this logic,
rather than dismiss Auschwitz as being unreasonable, we must face
the far more brutal task of bearing witness to the fact that at a
certain time, for certain people, it was rational, it was, in fact, the
ultimate ethical duty.29
What is also real, and also rational, is our dissent, our refusal and
condemnation of Auschwitz. However, is this dissent not the result
of a contingent gift of history? Are we not free to condemn and
criticize and explain away the stain of Auschwitz because the party
whose genre of discourse legitimated Auschwitz was defeated in war?
What if a similar damage occurred, the destruction of millions of
lives, resulting in a similar wrong, the silencing of their history, the
invalidation of their genres of discourse and hence their modes of
redress? And what if the party that perpetrated this wrong was never
defeated in a war, never brought to trial? In such a case could there
even be a differend? And, if not, how could we, descendents of the
criminals, ever know that a crime had been committed?
And yet, in the case of what I have called, with Stannard, the
American Holocaust, we are questioning the narrative of conquest;
we are seeking to redress a wrong; we are trying to bear witness
to a differend. What allowed for the emergence of this desire, what
accounts, at least in part, for this failure of speculative reason to
make rational the real, was apparently present in the culture of the
conquerors from the first years of the encounter. If, as I have tried
to suggest in the first section of this paper, Las Casas described and
advocated the possibility of a much more respectful interrelation
with a radically foreign culture, he could only do so on the basis
of a universal concept of humanity, precisely that tool of speculative reason that Lyotard rejects as being complicit in the erasure of
cultural difference.
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Rights
As we saw in our previous discussion of The Differend, Lyotard is suspicious of any discourse that attempts to account for or resolve conflicts or differends through the imposition of a universalizing code.
Humanity was the term he rejected from Kant, and yet we see that
it is also the term used by Las Casas more than two hundred years
earlier as a precondition for extending respect across a cultural divide.
But for Lyotard, who takes his model of the discourse of rights from
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the universalizing impulse of the discourse of rights always originates from,
and is inflected by, the particular ethnos of a nation:
The Declaration [of rights] legitimates the legitimation of
the prescriptive. It adumbrates a regression in the authorizations by passing to a rank of legitimacy above that of political (meta-normative) legitimacy. This passage is stirred by
the imperialist principle of legitimation which impels it to
universalize itself in the same movement by which it sets
boundaries on the extension of legitimacies. This tension
is resolved by the legitimation of the very bounds of legitimacy. The limits brought to bear on authority determine a
political constitution (Article 16). What authorizes the fixing of the said limits (the Declaration itself) is the Idea of
man [...] As the supreme authority, addressor, and sense of
the meta-normative, man should have signed the Preamble
of the Declaration. Such is not the case. (D 145)
A declaration is still a phrase, and as a phrase must have an addressor and an addressee. A phrase that is intended to establish law must
authorize itself in reference to another phrase. The Declaration of
Rights seeks to transcend this regression of authorizations by universalizing its legitimacy as the ultimate limiting agent of all other
codes of authority. However, in order to accomplish this it still must
authorize itself, its addressor must lay claim to universal authority,
which it does, Lyotard says, by referring to the Idea of man. But the
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women), through autonymic neutralization, through narrative redemption, etc., it leaves a residue of differends that
are not regulated and cannot be regulated within an idiom,
a residue from whence the civil war of language can always
return, and indeed does return. (142)
So the differend is Lyotards melancholic response to utopian hope;
it can in no way guarantee a better world, but it can provide obstacles to hegemony, and ensure that civilizations are not swallowed up
by history, never to have a second chance on this earth.30
However, the problem with differends is quite possibly both
better and worse than Lyotard would have us believe: worse because,
rather than pose an obstacle to a universalizing genre, like the economic, or a totalizing narrative, like that of nationalism, the differend may be the ultimate support of these forms of, to use ieks
term, ideological fantasy; better, on the other hand, because, if
this last idea is true, the differend could also, despite Lyotards denial, open the possibility of an ethical community as opposed to a
community of exclusion. The key to this duality is a term we have
seen in conjunction with the debate between Seplveda and Las Casas: substance. Before, I distinguished between national substance
and ethical substance; let us use the term spiritual substance to
refer at a more general level, without evaluating it in any way, to
the feeling of cohesiveness that permits a given group of people to
conceive of themselves as forming some sort of social whole. According to iek, the spiritual substance of some group or community
is neither born of that group nor pre-exists it independently, but is
the result of a fundamental blockage, the impossibility that one will
ever have immediate access to the intentions and desires of ones
fellow individuals. This substance emerges because individuals can
never fully coordinate their intentions, become transparent to each
other31:
The very surplus of the objective Spirit over (other) individuals, of the collective over the mere collection of others,
thus bears witness to the fact that others remain forever an
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But he also argues that this relationship of desire, because it is anchored to an element of absolute contingency, a rupture in the logic
of the symbolic order, provides the subject with a breathing space,
a glimmer of freedom: This lack in the Other [symbolic order]
gives the subject so to speak a breathing space, it enables him
to avoid the total alienation in the signifier not by filling out his lack
but by allowing him to identify himself, his own lack, with the lack
in the Other (SO 122). I am suggesting that the differend that apparently separates different cultural groups offers similar dangers, in
that it may ultimately support nationalistic and imperialistic narratives, but that it also offers the possibility of supporting a different
sort of bond between people, one based on a substance that is not
national but ethical, in that it depends on a sense of obligation that
is distinguishable from both the specific reason of a given national
narrative and the constraint of forced participation. Rights, rather
than being solely vehicles for the erasure of heterogeneity, can create
the space for the emergence of precisely this sort of bond.
In her powerful defense of the notion of universal human rights,
Renata Salecl takes into account the traditional critique of such
theoretical positions as Marxism and feminism, which share basic
aspects of Lyotards critique. The basic argument common to these
theoretical positions is that whenever a claim is made in the name
of, or for, humanity, as a universal entity, it is made from a particular social perspective, and, as a result, risks generalizing one groups
experience into a truth about the human condition. Thus, for certain feminists, human rights are actually mens rights, and the state
uses them as a means of social control (of sexuality).33 Or, for Marxists, rights are a product of bourgeois ideology which, by establishing the abstract categories of human equality and freedom, tries to
mask existing relations of domination in capitalist society and the
actual inequality and unfreedom of concrete individuals (WS 91).
In response to these (more than justified) fears, Salecl proposes a
different notion of human rights, as precisely that space in which
such relations of dominance can be limited, not because of some
explicit authorization, but because of the radical indeterminacy of
that space: The contribution of human rights to democracy lies in
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the fact that human rights can never be totally defined, that their
character cannot be determined in full, that they cannot be enumerated (WS 92). Rights, instead of being articulated on the basis of a
series of universal attributes of the category of the human, should be
conceived of as an always expandable space in which the power one
has over another is limited, not merely the power to physically affect
the other, but the power to interpret and define him or her in terms
of ones genre of discourse. In other words, humanity is invoked, but
not as a concept providing an adequate description of the human
and his or her needs and desires, but rather as an absolute limit on
the power of definition, on the power to substantialize what makes
one group different from another. What this means politically is
that those leftists who have accepted a basically relativistic, or antiobjectivist, epistemology, should not, as a result of that epistemology, be afraid to advocate for the universality of those rights they
believe ought to be universally attainable, and that they need not
ground this ethical posture in any specific set of attributes of the
human, but rather on the infinite spirit of a tautologically defined
humanity, as, say, those beings who deserve these rights. Why? Because we owe them that, because we ought to.
If both iek and Salecl have stressed the dire importance of
retaining some concept of universal rights in a time of reemerging
nationalist violence and ethnic hatred, it is not despite but rather
because of their mistrust of universalizing narratives. The principal
difference between Lyotards and their position is that while Lyotard
may be paraphrased as saying differends happen, iek and Salecl
could be imagined to respond, yes, but substance happens too, and
differends wont stop it. To bear witness to the differend, to maintain a sense of obligation to another despite her difference, requires
a bond nonetheless, an ambit for the experience of substance, but
one not limited or defined by specific attributes or qualities. As we
saw in the case of the debate between Seplveda and Las Casas, each
one founded his argument on a concept of humanity; but while the
formers had its guarantee in a national substance, the latters was
anchored to an ethical notion, a substance without attributes and
tautologically defined. This notion does not allow Las Casas to enter
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into a relation of immediacy with the other, to truly know the other
on its own terms (as iek would say, the other doesnt know itself
either). It does, however, create the space for a relation of respect,
a relation based on a feeling of obligation toward a humanity that
remains fundamentally ineffable, yet unavoidably present.
Chapter 5
Cervantes, Romantic Irony
and the Making of Reality
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not rationalize his intentional activity in the same way the historicist
critic would, he insists that we have to imagine him [Cervantes]
being able to assent to them [the rationalizations] once their terms
had been made clear to him (RA 251). It is important to emphasize,
however, that if we historicists succeed in traveling back in time and
making clear to Cervantes certain terms being applied to his work,
we will have also changed the nature of Cervantes the author and
his relation to the world, for it is precisely by means of adding new
concepts and relating them to existing ones that people come to have
different outlooks and new ideas.
The notions of epistemological irony and the making of reality that I formulate in these pages would not have made much
sense to an unadulterated Cervantes. Indeed, there would be a lot
of clarifying to be done for them to be acceptable to the very romantic thinkers who I claim conceptualized them for the first time.
Nevertheless, I still claim to be making true, and historically accurate, statements about the meaning of the texts I discuss. How is
this possible? Close ends his book with a criticism of the presentism
implicit in the argument that we cannot be interested in a work of
art without somehow feeling that it is of our own time. Such an
argument makes the assumption that there is a temporal zone Our
Time freed from the ties of history, and within which all that has
been created is accessible to us in terms of easy and natural familiarity (RA 252). But Close and the intentionalist-historicists who
share his way of thinking have made another, equally prejudicial
assumption: that there is a temporal zone Cervantess Time freed
from the ties of the present, and within which all can be observed
and commented on without disturbing its primordial and objective
rest. Such a zone does not exist, because the road to the past must
always be built with the tools of the present. My romantic reading
of Quijote should be understood in this light.
Hegels Critique of Irony
In the introductory lectures in which he prepared his 1820s Berlin audience for a systematic framing of the principal questions of aesthet-
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ics, Hegel deals with the question of irony in a way that has become
more famous for its dismissive tone and cursory analysis than for its
actual content.7 In this passage, Hegel correctly credits Friedrich von
Schlegel as the first theorist (in the romantic sense) of irony, and then
goes on to describe and condemn a version of irony mostly striking
for its utter lack of similarity to Schlegels. Hegel justifies his dismissal of the aesthetic category of irony entirely on its supposed heritage
from Fichtes philosophy, insofar as the principles of this philosophy
were applied to art (A, I 119).8 For Hegel the philosophical essence
of irony is to be found in Fichtes epistemology, and its insistence on
the primacy of the ego: With respect to the closer relation of Fichtes
statements with the one tendency of irony we need only emphazise
the following point: that Fichte identifies as the absolute principle of
all science, reason, and knowledge the I, and specifically the quite
abstract and formal I (A, I 119).9 While Hegel appears to be limiting this connection to only one tendency of irony (mit der einen
Richtung) in fact his criticism of the concept remains at all times a
criticism of Fichtes idealism, and of nothing else.
As regards this one tendency of irony, then, it is characterized
for Hegel by these three, fully Fichtean, aspects: first, it is, as stated
above, based on the ego as an abstract and formal principle. Second,
all particular, objective content of the egos world is negated by the
fact that it has existence only through the ego, and therefore nothing
exists in and for itself but only as produced by the egos subjectivity
(A, I 120).10 Finally, because the ego is a living being, it must realize
itself in a world populated by other living beings; however, when
the ego realizes its individuality in an artistic way, as an artist, this
involves converting this real world into a world of appearances dependent in every way on his caprice. He is not bound by reciprocal
relations, but rather looks down on them from the heights of his creative genius, knowing that he is at any time as free to destroy them
as he was to create them. Having outlined this critique of Fichtean
idealism as applied to art, Hegel nonchalantly attributes the entirety
of his straw adversary to Schegel, saying This irony was invented by
Mr. Friedrich von Schlegel, and many others have prattled on about
it and continue to prattle on about it still (A, I 121).11
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here and now and reality the dead, physical limits of a contingently determined world.16 In a world characterized by such a
tension, the consciousness of self that forms the essence of human
being faces an impressive paradox. Because human being consists of
both spirit and matter, self-consciousness requires the simultaneous
occupation of mutually contradictory categories: on the one hand
one must be conscious a characteristic of ideality of oneself as
part of the world, as material being; but at the same time one must
be conscious of oneself as consciousness. As a material being, one
exists as an element in a causally determined chain of being. But as
an ideal entity one is essentially undetermined. Equally disturbing is
the effect of self-consciousness on the subjective/objective polarity:
as consciousness one is a subject in relation to the objective world;
but self-consciousness must be simultaneously the subject grasping
and the object being grasped.
In light of this philosophical problematic, Schlegel identifies
irony as the form of paradox itself.17 Irony is the very form of paradox because it refers, most specifically in artistic production, to the
act by which consciousness pulls itself up from its conditioned nature as material being and apprehends itself as simultaneously conditioned and unconditioned, as partaking of spirit and of the world.
In this way irony not only signifies the paradox of consciousness, it
participates in it: it is [t]he freest of all licenses, since by way of it
one overcomes oneself; and also the most lawful, since it is unconditionally necessary (PJ, II 198).18 As self-conscious beings, in other
words, we cannot avoid being ironic.
Such an understanding of irony, however, can no longer be the
sole domain of the artistic genius. Indeed irony seems to take on a
double life in Schlegel: as on the one hand a principle of human existence, and on the other an artistic discovery proper to the romantic
movement. But then the same could be said of romanticism in general, which was thought by all involved to be both a historically specific artistic movement and a stage in the development of consciousness that humanity had finally attained. According to Hegel, for
example, with the advent of romantic art, the nature of beauty and
of the relation of the Idea to art had to be grasped in a deeper way
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underlying the previous formulation of irony as paradox. This tension appears variously as one between determined and undetermined
existence, between the ideal and the real, and between the subjective
consciousness and the objective world. The analogy for this tension
in the realm of representational practice is the relation between a sign
and a referent or, to make the analogy clearer, between a series of signs
and some objective whole to which the series refers. In the original
series of opposed terms, the notion of infinity lay on the side of the
ideal, or of consciousness, and was opposed to a physical world that,
in its essentially determined nature, was perceived to exhibit a quality
of finitude in relation to the unbounded freedom of the ideal. That
physical existence might itself be deserving of the predicate infinite, in
the sense of infinitely extended space, was dealt with prototypically by
Hegel with his notion of bad infinity, an endless, meaningless alteration or negation of the finite, devoid of the divine element of spirit.23
For Schlegel the semiotic relationship has the curious effect of reversing this philosophical commonplace, in that the sign, in the hands of
the poet, makes of mundane reality a mystical whole, and does this by
injecting the real with the quality of infinite significance.
Poetry is romantic, then, insofar as it denotes (bezeichnet) the
tendency toward a deep, infinite meaning (PJ, II 364, qtd in Romantische Ironie 67).24 Although the whole, das Ganze, can no
longer be equated with such an idea as mere reality, we need not
assume the working of some mystical, esoteric agency. By writing of
the world the poet bestows meaning on something inert existence
that would remain meaningless independent of poetic intervention. By bestowing meaning on reality the poet makes of reality
a vessel of spirit makes, in other words, the finite infinite. The
poets words, then, produce meaning while at the same time indicating a further meaning beyond those words, a meaning that tempts
consciousness ever forward, ever outward, and yet never satisfies it.
It is this tendency, and this relation between consciousness and the
infinite, that Schlegel associates with irony.
Just as the second formulation derives in part from the first, so
does the third unfold from the second. If we were to schematize the
second formulation it would look something like this:
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To sum up, Schlegels concept of irony, far from being a monolithic application of Fichtean ego-philosophy to artistic practice, can
be characterized by a series of three propositions, none of which is
reducible to an expression of pure subjectivism. In the first formulation, irony is positioned at the crossroads of philosophy and art
and marks the coming to self-consciousness of artistic practice. In
this view, irony encompasses any and all manifestation in artistic
practice of what we have called the self-referential paradox, the representation that includes itself within itself. Insofar as the creative
consciousness finds itself in its own creation, it infuses that objective
creation with meaning, and endows it with the attribute of infinity.
Hence the second formulation of irony describes it as an epideixis of
infinity. The experience of the self as a bound entity in a boundless
universe of meaning then introduces a libidinal element into the
dynamic of irony, an element that emerges in the third formulation,
in which irony is equated with love, the force of attraction pulling
Dasein out of its familiar territory and into the world of infinite
meaning. It is in light of this interpretation of irony, and its full
association with romanticism in Schlegels system, that we must understand his claim that Don Quijote is the only through and through
romantic novel (Romantische Ironie 79).
Epistemological irony
According to Bertrand, when Schlegel encountered Don Quijote in
1797 his ideas on irony were largely established (Bertrand 221). As
we have seen, however, Schlegels irony-concept is multi-faceted; to
grasp it in its complexity one needs to consider his writings from
throughout his career.27 That some early aspect of Schlegels thinking about irony had already been solidified by the time he read Don
Quijote says nothing about the extent to which the book influenced
the totality of his conception. But regardless of whether one can
claim Cervantes as the direct influence behind Schlegels and in
general German romanticisms notion of irony, it can certainly be
argued that the Spanish author had an important hand in fashioning the cultural world28 in which the romantics lived and wrote.
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Bertrand says as much himself, when he asks: But why did Schlegel
make right away such a large place for the Spanish poet in his aesthetics? Why, if not because Cervantes responded to the new needs
of his spirit and because his work placed him on the route toward
new ideas? (Bertrand 103).29 I want to argue that if Cervantess
works, and in particular Don Quijote, corresponded to some set of
new spiritual needs of Schlegel and the romantics, that is so precisely because Cervantes put into prose the kind of world and temper
that their writings would later theorize. Cervantes, in other words,
created the ground from which romanticism thought itself.
To understand the nature of this ground, let us recall that, for
Schlegel, art and philosophy were converging on a new manifestation of human being, and that his concept of irony aimed to describe
the essence of that new spirit. The three formulations of that concept
that we have derived imply a common, schematic structure: a frame
distinction in which reality appears as a representation that potentially includes the representer and the act of representation within its
diagetic space. In large part, Cervantes may be said to be the creator
of a new genre precisely insofar as he uses the medium of the written
word to develop techniques of self-referentiality to their paradoxical
extreme. Recall that what is at stake here is not subjectivity as it is
commonly understood. As many medievalists have argued, a stable
first person narrator figure is detectable in European writing from as
early as the twelfth century.30 Rather, what is at stake is a technique
that projects the very act of literary creation into the literary world
being created, that short-circuits, in other words, a barrier dividing
the fictional and the real.
a) Fictionality
Strangely enough, the act of short-circuiting the barrier between
the fictional and the real is by a kind of retroactive efficacy
constitutive of that very distinction. To understand this apparently paradoxical formulation, we need to first consider Luiz Costa
Limas distinction between the fictional and the fictitious. According to Costa Lima, prior to and during the sixteenth century written
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engaging with the topic of chivalry would seem to support the contention that, if Quijote is a representative of a bygone organization
of knowledge, his contemporaries are in most ways just as lost as he
is. They are lost insofar as they have not yet learned the fictional
technique of dissociating writing from the truth standard generally
applied to life. The play of identities and similarities that characterizes Foucaults classical age of representation might be seen in this
light as an epistemological effect of a narrative practice that relativizes
reality with respect to a series of reports concerning its nature.
Epistemology, as its critics are fond of pointing out, takes as
its basic model a spectator who distinguishes between the truth
of what he or she is seeing, which is corrigible, and the fact that
he or she is seeing something, which is judged to be incorrigible.36
This distinction evolves into that between noumena and phenomena,37 and ultimately into the epistemological deadlock in which the
knowing subject cannot come to know anything of certainty regarding the thing in itself. An episteme in which knowledge was
conceived to be an imminent expression of the real, the prose of the
world, would not presume such a distinction: species or phenomena would be perceived as inseparable from qualities of certain noumenal substances; it would not occur to anyone to think
of certain realms of experience as essentially more or less corrigible
than others. Reality, in other words, would not be a distinguishable
entity about which one could have more or less correct perceptions,
because perceptions and statements about perceptions would be part
and parcel of the same reality, all portions of which would be beholden to the same standards of judgment. If such was the case when
the world produced its own prose, what sort of a narrative practice
might have the effect of relativizing that reality with respect to reports concerning its nature?
It is of course my claim that the narrative practice in question
is best exemplified by Don Quijote, a novel whose overriding theme
is the contrast between reality and its various renditions on the
part of differently positioned characters. Let us consider the case of
the helmet of Mambrino. Quijote has attacked a poor barber and
robbed him of his barbers basin, convinced that he is an enemy
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knight and that his barbers basin is in fact the long lost and much
coveted magic Helmet of Mambrino. When confronted by Sanchos
laughter over the helmets appearance, Quijote explains the series of
adventures that must have occurred in order that the helmet should
appear in its present, broken condition, which he implicitly admits
falls somewhat short of a great warriors helmet:
You know what I think, Sancho? That this famous piece of
this enchanted helmet must have, by some strange accident,
come into the hands of someone who didnt know to recognize or esteem its value, and without knowing what he was
doing, seeing that it was made of the purest gold, he must
have had the other part melted down to take advantage of
its price, and from the remaining half, he made this, which
looks like a barbers basin, as you say. (Q I 260)38
The logic of this dispute is thus: we see the same thing, but we disagree as to its nature, as defined by its origins, which seems to satisfy Sancho, especially given that he has taken advantage of the adventure to exchange his old packsaddle for the barbers newer one.
But Sanchos opportunism comes back to haunt him when the
same barber later recognizes him and his packsaddle and accuses
Sancho and Quijote of theft. While fighting over the packsaddle,
the barber announces to all present that Quijote and Sancho had
taken it from him by force at the same time that they took his brass
barbers basin. At this point Quijote intervenes, claiming that the
barbers mistaking a magic helmet for a barbers basin only proves
that he is in error about anything else he is claiming:
So that your graces see clearly and manifestly the error in
which this good squire has fallen, well, he calls basin what
was, is, and will ever be the helmet of Mambrino, which I
took from him in a good fight, and of which I made myself the master with legitimate and licit possession. As for
the question of the packsaddle, Im not going to get into
that; what I will say is that my squire Sancho asked my
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permission to take the trappings from the horse of this defeated coward, with which to adorn his; I gave it to him, and
he took them, and if they have turned from trappings into a
packsaddle my only explanation is the usual one: that such
transformations are to be seen in the events of chivalry; for
the confirmation of which, run, Sancho my son, and bring
out the helmet that this man claims is a basin. (Q I 528)39
Sancho, of course, is less than enthusiastic about going to fetch the
helmet, since he knows that it is in fact a barbers basin, which
evidence might persuade the others present that he has no right to
the packsaddle (a right that is already suspect given Quijotes interpretation of the packsaddle as jaez, a chargers trappings). Moreover, Quijote himself remains somewhat uncertain as to the stand
he should take in regard to the trappings, which Sancho and the
barber are both referring to as packsaddle. The most he is willing
to assert is that if they have in fact turned into a saddle, then this is
not so surprising, since such transformations are the occupational
hazard of knight-errantry.
The chapter that ensues is appropriately titled Wherein is
finally resolved the question of the helmet of Mambrino and the
packsaddle and other adventures having occurred in all truth.40
Cervantess habitual reference to the notion of truth is especially remarkable in this chapter, which is in many ways concerned with the
very nature of Truth. Seeing the opportunity for an excellent prank,
Quijotes barber friend, nuestro barbero, immediately weighs in
and, claiming the authority of an expert in the field, strenuously
denies the other barbers claims that the yelmo is a baca.
Sir barber, or whoever you are, know that I am also of your
profession, and I have been for more than twenty years and
have a certificate of examination, and I know very well all
the instruments of barbery, without missing one; and not
more or less was I in my youth a soldier, and I also know
what a helmet is, and a morion, and a headpiece with a visor, and some other things about soldiering, I mean, about
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the weapons of a soldier; and I say, excepting better judgement and subjecting myself to better understanding, that
this piece before us and which this man has in his hands not
only is not a barbers basin, but is as far from being one as
white is from black and truth from a lie. (Q I 529-30)41
Truth, as I said above, is what is in question here, and it is worth
noting that our barbers implicit standard of truth is equivalent to
the distance between the essence of a thing and a report made about.
The basin, he insists, is as far from being a basin as truth is from
falsehood. The other barber, it follows, is either deceived or lying.
He is of course deceived, and quite purposefully, by the companions, who are having some good fun at his expense. One by one
they enter the fray, until finally the nobleman don Fernando suggests that they resolve the issue democratically and proceeds to take
a secret ballot, with the unanimous result that the asss packsaddle is
judged to be a horses trappings, and the basin a helmet. We should
not make the mistake here, however, of reading this scene as some
sort of statement about the undecidability of reality. There is no
question but that this is a joke, and that in reality the packsaddle
and the basin have never been anything but what they are. In one of
the books great comic moments, Quijote is even heard to say that,
if they want his opinion, the packsaddle looks like a packsaddle,
but that he is not about to, as he said before, take a position on that
matter. Our reading, therefore, should not be that reality has become undecidable, but precisely the opposite: the truth of the identity of the objects in question is guaranteed by the existence of an
independent reality that we, as observers outside of the framework
of the narrative, can confirm.42 In other words, the characters at
hand can argue about the nature of their perception precisely insofar
as we, the readers, have a concept of reality that is independent of
their various reports. As Rorty puts it by way of a criticism of the
epistemological world-view, its assumption is that you can have
reality in one hand and a sentence about reality in the other and
compare the two to see if they match.43 It is precisely this world-view
that Cervantes is busy constructing.44
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c) Ironys paradox
As I suggested above, Cervantes prose might be well characterized as
a pushing of the paradoxes resulting from self-referentiality to their
logical extremes. Examples of this thematic in Don Quijote are legion. One need only mention the abyss of narrative frameworks in
which the actual authorship of the story we are reading is couched:
we the readers are presumably reading a translation (the accuracy of
which at times comes into question) the narrator made of a manuscript he found in a market, ostensibly written by an Arabic historian;
Cervantes himself (who might be the narrative voice) is referred to
obliquely as an historical figure (in the captives tale: Q, I 476); and
the entire vortex of authorship falls into temporal paradox when, in
the second book, the adventures of the first book have already been
published, distributed, read, and even translated into other languages although only a month has passed since their first outing.45 This
collapsing spiral of self-referentiality corresponds well to the novels
overall obsession with its own medium of transmission, that is with
its focus on the relation between frame and content. Already within
the telescoping framework of authorship the novels content begins to
adopt a similar form, in which Quijote and Sancho become the audience for interpolated stories, which they in turn reflect on.
In this light, the transition between the novel of 1605 and that
of 1615 can be seen as one between a world in which we the readers
laugh at the characters for not knowing how to read fiction, and a
world in which a new subgroup of fictional-readers/readers-of fiction has been born, a population that simultaneously came of age
and became fictional by reading the 1605 novel. For it is certainly
the fundamental and significant difference between the two the
difference that makes of 1615 another novel and not merely a sequel
that the entire structure of the narrative has become doubly selfreflective. The characters of part two are now often characters who,
like us, have read 1605 and from it learned the art of secondary keying, have learned to actively forget to submit writing to the tribunal
of truth, and thereby create a world capable of experiencing the bizarre and the fictitious as possibilities of the imagination.
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Within the borders of their reality, the effect for the characters
of this generalization of fictionality is that the previously sound distinction between the fictitious and the real is sundered, and characters everywhere start to lose their bearings. Perhaps one of the most
beautiful examples of this loss-of-reality effect is the episode of the
lackey Tosilos. In this episode, the duea Rodriguez, being herself
somewhat simple of mind, has asked Quijote who is now being
treated as a fictional character by the Dukes court to rescue in
real life the honor of her daughter, whom a nobleman and friend
of the Duke has deceived with a false promise of marriage. When
Quijote presents his challenge to the Duke, the Duke accepts in his
friends name, and then orders his lackey Tosilos to play the role of
the deceiving nobleman. But on the day of the battle, when Tosilos,
dressed the role of a knight ready for battle, first lays eyes on the dueas daughter, he falls in love with her for real and, instead of crossing lances with Quijote, renders himself and agrees to marry her.
When he takes off his helmet and the duea and her daughter see
that it is not the nobleman but the Dukes lackey whom the daughter will marry, they strenuously protest. Quijote, however, addresses
their complaints by suggesting that the new husband is still, in fact,
the nobleman, but that his countenance has been changed to that
of the lackey by enchanters jealous of Quijotes latest victory. His
advice to the daughter is to accept the offer of marriage from a man
who without doubt is the same you wish to attain as a husband
(Q, II 449),46 to which the daughter evetually responds: Whoever
it is who asks my hand I thank him; for I would rather be the legitimate wife of a lackey than the dishonored lover of a gentleman,
which he who dishonored me is certainly not (Q, II 450).47 What
we see in this scene is a double collapse of the borders between the
fictitious and the real and the opening of the space of the fictional:
on the one hand, the lackey playing a role realizes that role by really falling in love within the confines of a game, and subsequently
speaking real words from a fictitious position; the daughter, on the
other hand, recognizes an offer proceeding from the fictitious as
potentially more real than that which she had set her hopes on, and
in effect realizes its potential by accepting it.
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Realizing the fictitious, stepping across a border that had previously been sealed, implies a space with a new quality: viability. The
fictional space is viable precisely insofar as characters from one side
of a frame distinction can feel they occupy the same space as characters on the other side that they can, for instance, fall in love with
those characters or, at the very least, identify with them. But this
maneuver, inherent to the experience of fictionality, entails to its full
extent the paradox of self-referentiality, the paradox of a creator who
creates him or herself in the very act of creation, who is both subject
and object, simultaneously and, in a sense, seamlessly.
Perhaps the most renowned version of the self-referential paradox is the liars paradox, in which a listener is asked to judge whether
the speaker of the statement I am lying is in fact lying or telling the
truth.48 The listener is unable to answer consistently, because if the
speaker is judged to be speaking the truth, then by his own report he
is lying, but if he is judged to be lying, then his report that he was lying is true. One, Lacanian, solution to this paradox is to argue that it
is not in fact a paradox for one who is a subject in the proper sense. A
subject is one who is always divided into two agencies, linguistically
speaking, which Lacan labels the subject of enunciation and the subject of the utterance.49 The liars paradox is merely a demonstration
that the subject is never entirely identical to himself, that he cannot,
in other words, simultaneously occupy the I of enunciation and
the I of the utterance. When analyzed in this form, then, I am
lying, breaks down into The I of the enunciation is reporting that
the I of the utterance is lying, and there is no longer any paradox.
To push this a bit further, the reason there is no paradox is really that
there is no true self-referentiality; one can only refer to a representative of oneself, in this case, a linguistic shifter.
Analogously, the self-referentiality of fictionality, which we
schematized as
A R[A V{F}]
must be hiding a fundamental disjunction between the A outside
the frame and the A inside the frame, which we should therefore
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part would necessitate cutting him in two.52 To which Sancho replies that since the reasons for condemning him and releasing him
are equally balanced, they should let him pass, because it is always
better to do good than evil.
Sanchos compassion must be seen here as an unreasonable supplement to a reasonable law, a law that precisely on account of its
fidelity to reason to the letter is at odds with a humanity that
it cannot perfectly circumscribe. For the letter of the law demands of
the subject his self-identity, a self-referentiality without remainder that
the human, as a subject of language, cannot attain. To analyze this
dynamic in its historicity, however, we should precisely not say that the
subject has changed from a monolithic creature capable of self-identity to a dualistic one lacking that capability. Rather, we should stress
a gradual alteration in the understanding of the individuals relation
to public discourse. The notion of an objective realm of judgment as
distinct from subjective experience and hence the grounding notion of law in the Occident is emerging out of a time when ones
guilt or innocence in the face of the law was conceived as inseparable
from ones capacity to force all of existence (and hence opinion) to the
truth of ones view. The law passes judgment on A, on that aspect of
our selves that has, structurally speaking, the status of a fiction. A critique of epistemology may take much comfort in the notion that the
philosophers modern profession was born of a storytellers technique;
but the critic should also keep in mind the extent to which the most
fundamental institutions of the modern world owe their ground to
this same fictionality, and to its ironic fission of self-identity.
Back to Hegel
At the outset of this paper, I argued that Hegel had, in his Aesthetics, misconstrued romantic irony, attributing it to an expression of
unbridled subjectivism inspired by Fichtean idealism. In this final
section, I claim that, whereas Hegel might have condemned his own
idiosyncratic interpretation of the Schlegelian notion, another notion of irony narrativized by Cervantes and theorized by Schegel
is everywhere present in Hegels system.
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Romantic art was, for Hegel, the last step in arts trajectory.
It was an historical form invented in the high Middle Ages, and
characterized by the turn to inwardness one finds in the ideologies
of chivalry. The three pillars of chivalry honor, fidelity, love
perform in artistic expression the newly found principle of infinite
subjectivity: honor constitutes the insertion of the entire individual
into the substance of a demand or prohibition; fidelity the insertion
of the entire individual into a political relation of personal, not abstract, nature; love the insertion of the entire individual into a deliberate sacrifice of independence to the beloved (A, II 607-633). But
such rampant inwardness leads necessarily to a desire for concrete
actuality, which the individual then searches for in representations,
which become ever more realistic (rise of realism) and with which
he or she can then identify. Therefore, on the one hand we have the
withdrawal of the individual into his or herself and the resultant extremes of subjectivism that entails, and on the other the represented
world, characterized by a proliferation of more and more meaningless details independent of subjective intervention and constitutive
of an increasingly prosaic reality. These, then, are the conditions for
the end of art and for the beginnings of (modern, skeptical) religion,
a religion in which God becomes the equivalent of an answer to the
question emerging from this sundering between the subject and the
real. These conditions are also, it should be clear, exactly those that
Hegel criticized under the name of irony in the work of Schlegel
and his followers. But in that case, Hegels anger would appear to be
directed not at irony per se, but at the tendency to conceive irony as
an aspect of art instead of as the herald of its end.
For Hegel, Don Quijote is a romantic work not because of its
thoroughgoing irony, but despite it. It is a kind of border work, retaining on the one hand all the characteristics that Hegel finds so
delightful in romantic art Quijotes noble character, the interpolated tales and on the other hand tolling their death knells via its
ironic mockery of its very own contents (A, II 657). Romantic art
dies with Quijote because, quite simply, its time had come. When an
art form reveals what was previously concealed, this revelation removes whatever interest the subject had in it, and the space is created
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for a new form, with a new purpose to be created. Such, for Hegel,
is Cervantess relation to chivalry, to the heart and soul of romantic
art. But then irony, insofar as it brings about the dissolution of art,
must be understood as fulfilling arts vocation, a vocation Hegel describes in the following words: Against this must we claim that art
is called to reveal the truth in the form of the sensual art creation, to
represent that reconciled antithesis, and thereby it has its vocation in
itself, in this representation and revelation (A, I 108).54
The reconciled antithesis in question is the one that has been
badgering spirit throughout Hegels lectures, between the abstract
universal, logos, conceptual thought, on the one hand, and life, embodiment, passions, on the other. If this antagonism is to be revealed
as already reconciled in arts last gasp, the revelation can only be the
following: that the modern individual, the individual whose world
is no longer favorable to the production of art, is ironic. He or she
is ironic in precisely the sense that I outlined above, insofar as his
or her core experience of the world is fictional: an agent capable of
differentiating (abstracting) his or herself as an agent acting within
the world. This secondary agent could be the one who guides our
identificatory adventures in fictional places, or one who represents
us in the abstract arena of public law, but the truth to be revealed
is that the individual is both, simultaneously and inseparably, the
representer and the represented, the actor and the character.
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Chapter 6
Psychoanalysis and the Comedia:
Skepticism and the Paternal Function
in La vida es sueo
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I undertook in How the World Became a Stage. In part, the thesis presented there states that, indeed, the model of consciousness theorized
by psychoanalysis is largely historical, in that its basic parameters are
what I term theatrical. This theatrical model of consciousness corresponds to a specific mode of experiencing space, a mode conditioned
by transformations in the everyday practices of spectacle in the cultures comprising early modern Europe. The Spanish Golden Age
theater was one of the great institutionalizations of the new staging
practices of the modern period. Consequently, psychoanalysis and
the Spanish Golden Age theater are likely to share certain presuppositions regarding the nature of the self, and questions asked of one
can quite possibly illuminate the other, and vice versa.
What is most relevant about the concept of theatricality for a
discussion of La vida es sueo is that the period marked by the ascendancy of theatricality in the phenomenal realm corresponds to
the ascendancy of skepticism or epistemology in intellectual history.
The trope in question is the infamous Cartesian theater, in which
phenomena prance by on the stage of the minds eye, and the foundational task of all knowledge is to guarantee that these phenomena
accurately (clearly and distinctly) represent the world as it really is.
In light of this historical convergence, the question that La vida es
sueo can be heard to ask is: How does one found a moral order in
a skeptical universe?10
Psychoanalysis, or to finally become more specific, Lacanian psychoanalysis, claims that certain problems beset any system of rules
governing human interaction, problems involved in, for instance,
the distribution of sexual roles and identities, individual gratification versus social constraint, the legitimation in the individuals
psyche of that power exercised on the individual, and so on. The
common root behind any and all formulations of this problem is the
existential trauma of what Heidegger called Geworfenheit, normally
translated as thrownness, and what Lacan described as the simple
and unavoidable fact that the language the individual speaks always
pre-exists his or her entry into the world.11
From this starting point we climb a little further, and perhaps
more precariously, into Lacanian territory. For in its existential
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situation of thrownness in the world, the human animal gains knowledge in the form of language, of having a name, an identity, an
idea of good and evil in exchange for the loss of a certain promise
of satisfaction, an ignorant, bestial, sublimely complete satisfaction
of the one who cannot question and hence cannot desire. Whether
or not this satisfaction actually exists is irrelevant because, for the
speaking being, it does exist in the unconscious, as something lost.
It is what comes to stand in for this lost promise of satisfaction that
Lacan calls the phallus, a philosophical abstraction based on Freuds
observation that the childs blissfully hermetic, symbiotic relationship with the mothers body is rent by the realization that the mother
desires someone else, the father, the phallus being then that which
the father has but the child does not.12 The phallus, this signifier of
lacking enjoyment, is repressed and replaced by the first signifier to
take on the role of the name of the father, a homophonic wordplay meshing nom du pre with non du pre, namely, that language
of social constraint that allows the being on the verge of language to
justify its new-found dissatisfaction on the power of the other or of
the law, that is to say, that allows the young speaker to replace constitutive impossibility with a merely contingent prohibition.
La vida es sueo presents us with a model of an individual, who
is man as such as well as a man, and more specifically a prince.13
The action we are invited to witness concerns the problem posed
by Geworfenheit to the embodiment of the law, for kings, unfortunately, must also be born, and they are not born already made. A
king, then, must be the law, but also must undergo the process of
the imposition of the law on the human psyche. He must respond,
in other words, to a power greater than himself, namely, the power
of his own father, king at his own birth.
In La vida es sueo, the problem of this simultaneous becoming
a king and becoming a man brings together the general trauma of
Geworfenheit with that specific aspect of it involved with the constitution of the individuals identity as a sexual being, and does so
all within the intellectual context of that form of consciousness I
have called theatricality. Segismundo has grown up in a tower with
no contact either with his father, who has never seen him, nor with
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his mother, who died at his birth. He has definitely lost the phallus
his entire existence is nothing but pain and loss but there has
never appeared a master signifier, a name of the father, a voice authorized to give reason to his loss via a definitive prohibition. Clotaldo,
his caretaker, has not filled that role, for he is also acting in the guise
of another, to whom he himself never gives a name:
Si sabes que tus desdichas,/ Segismundo, son tan grandes,/
que antes de nacer moriste/ por la ley del cielo; si sabes/ que
aquestas prisiones son/ de tus furias arrogantes/ un freno
que las detenga/ y una rienda que las pare,/ por qu blasonas?14
[If you know that your misfortunes, Segismundo, are so
great, that by heavens decree you died before being born;
if you know that this prison are a bit to detain and reins
to stop your arrogant furies, then why are you heralding
yourself?]
In Clotaldo, who has done his best to raise and educate Segismundo
despite the circumstances, Segismundos complaints and impotent
rage find no answer, no apodictic justification. Clotaldo can only
tell him that his living death was decreed by the law of heaven. In
place of the positive prohibition of a present father, Segismundo is
given only the empty answer of fate, an answer that is no answer at
all but rather a question in return, por qu blasonas? There is no
power willing to take responsibility for what psychoanalysis terms
the subjects symbolic castration, the realization of powerlessness in
the face of the world. In the formulation given above, Segismundo
is left to suffer in the face of the impossibility of his own satisfaction
and receives no solace from the threat of a tangible prohibition.
In order to test the prophecies that foresaw Segismundos violent temperament and his eventual overthrow of his father the
prophecies that motivated his imprisonment at birth his father
Basilio decides to release Segismundo on a trial basis. His plan is to
let Segismundo out of the tower where he has been held captive his
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entire life, restore him to his place as prince and heir to the kingdom,
and tell him the truth about his captivity. If then, knowing the truth
and restored to his power, the prince behaves in a proper, princely
way, he will be allowed to remain in power. If he acts improperly, or
abuses his power, he will be drugged, returned to his tower, and told
that the interlude he just experienced was nothing but a dream.
As might be expected, Segismundos sudden and unexpected release provokes in his psyche a certain crisis of identity, a crisis that
will remain one of the pivotal themes of the play:
Yo, en palacios suntosos?/ Yo entre telas y brocados?/
Yo cercado de criados/ tan lucidos y brosos?/ Yo despertar
de dormir/ en lecho tan excelente?/ Yo en medio de tanta
gente/ que me sirva de vestir?/ Decir que sueo es engao;/
bien s que despierto estoy./ Yo Segismundo no soy? (II. iii.
12281238)
[I in sumptuous palaces? I in fabrics and brocades? I surrounded by such bright and shining servants? I awaking
from my sleep in such an excellent bed? I, in the middle
of so many people helping me to dress? To say that I am
dreaming is a mistake, I know well that I am awake. I, am
I not Segismundo?]
The last of this series of questions, if not the question of existence
itself (a question which Segismundos exercise in doubt, unlike Descartess, does not lead him) is nevertheless the ultimate question of
identity. Faced with the radical metamorphosis of every aspect of
his lived existence, Segismundo is forced to ask whether he is in
fact Segismundo, that name signifying his existence, the particular
nature of his thrownness in the world, which had, nonetheless, always been attached to a completely different reality. This forceful
bifurcation of the self into two potential agencies, the self named
Segismundo whose experience has until this moment been unitary,
and the self that now pronounces that name from an estranged perspective, will be instrumental to the change Segismundo undergoes
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law, then, is always built on the foundation of the first signifier, the
first word to give a name to the infants new found dissatisfaction.
The sense of obligation the individual feels toward the law, toward
doing what he or she ought to do, is based on this initial submission
to the paternal function. In Segismundos case, it is precisely this
sense of obligation that lacks:
BASILIO: Bien me agradeces el verte,/ de un humilde y
pobre preso,/ prncipe ya!
SEGISMUNDO: Pues en eso,/ qu tengo que agradecerte?/ Tirano de mi albedro,/ si viejo y caduco ests,/
murindote, qu me das?/ Dasme ms de lo que es mo?/
Mi padre eres y mi rey;/ luego toda esta grandeza/ me da
la naturaleza/ por derechos de su ley./ Luego, aunque est
en este estado,/ obligado no te quedo,/ y pedirte cuentas
puedo,/ del tiempo que me has quitado/ libertad, vida, y
honor;/ as, agradceme a m/ que yo no cobre de ti/ pues
eres t mi deudor. (II. vi. 1500-1519)
[BASILIO: How it pleases me to see you raised from a poor
and humble prisoner to a prince!
SEGISMUNDO: And what do I have to thank you for?
Tyrant of my will, if you are old and frail, dying, what are
you giving me? Do you give me more than what is mine?
You are my father and my king; so all this greatness is owed
to me by nature, by right of its law. Therefore, even in this
state, I am not obliged to you, and rather can ask of you a
reckoning for the time, freedom, life, and honor you have
taken from me; so be thankful rather to me, that I do not
collect from you, as you are in my debt.]
Segismundos argument has a certain reason to it, until we realize
that it applies not just to the special case of Segismundos captivity,
but in general to the theme of filial obedience. For once the captivity of the age of legal minority is over, what obligation does a young
adult owe to his or her parents and to the world? Is it not, in some
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Let me try to bring this all together. The speaking human subject
experiences a gap or slippage between the sentences its utters about
itself, and the self these sentences are supposed to represent, a gap
manifested by the fact that it is neither omnipotent (it cannot realize
every desire that comes to its mind) nor is it omniscient (it cannot
answer basic questions concerning who it is, or why it has come into
being). This gap is filled in or legitimated by the paternal function, a
function that replaces impossibility with prohibition (e.g., the question of my ultimate identity is answered by reference to my name,
the name of the father). In macro-social and philosophical terms,
the basic structure of authority in the Middle Ages was characterized
by the presence of the father exercising this function: Gods will was
manifest in the world, his body present in the Mass; princes were
local entities, deploying a power that was always tangible, visible; no
distinction was made between how a thing appeared to the senses
and how it was in itself. In the early modern period, authority begins to be founded in a different way: it is argued that Gods presence
is represented in the Mass (the fact of the Spanish Counter Reformation is ideological evidence of the power and pervasiveness of this
interpretation); kings become the centerpieces of vast bureaucratic
empires, seldom coming in direct contact with their subjects, and
their power is said to be derived from God; phenomena are no longer
attributes or species of the things in themselves but are rather the
effects of those things on the observer. If the father signifies the
function of the legitimation of powerlessness at its most fundamental
level, one way of categorizing the general sway of these changes is as
the absence of the father. An order based on the absence as opposed
to the presence of the father is an order we can describe as skeptical.19
Ultimately, goes the logic of such an order, you cannot know why you
must obey, yet you must nonetheless.
Faced with the rebellion of his son, Basilio admits that Segismundo has indeed discovered the truth of his identity, and that
therefore he, Basilio, has in some sense failed in his paternal function of maintaining the separation between self and identity, between actor and character. But if Basilios absence has resulted in the
failure in Segismundos person of the paternal function, this failure
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concern is Segismundos formulation and acceptance of the skeptical thesis that life itself is a dream, and his deriving from this thesis
an ethics of self mastery that eventual returns stability to the social
order. Even before he wakes, Caldern sets the stage, as it were, for
the conversion to skepticism, while at once reminding us that the
skeptical thesis is also a theatrical thesis. Segismundo is heard, yet at
the portal of consciousness, to mutter
Salga a la anchurosa plaza/ del gran teatro del mundo/ este
valor sin segundo,/ porque mi venganza cuadre;/ vean triunfar de su padre/ al prncipe Segismundo. (II. xviii. 207377)
[Let this unsurpassed valor step out onto the wide plaza of
the great theater of the world, that my vengeance take place;
let them see prince Segismundo triumph over his father.]
Unaware as of yet that he has returned to his former condition, that
his enjoyment of unlimited power was merely a dream, Segismundos
real dreams continue to express his fantasies of revenge and domination. But the fact that his revenge will be enacted on the great stage
of the world suggests that the metaphor of the dream and that of
the stage are involved in the same work, that of warning us against
identifying ourselves too completely with our earthly roles, because
in heaven we are likely to be judged by a different standard.
The invocation of Calderns other great moral allegory, El gran
teatro del mundo, might suggest a different interpretation of the
plays ethical argument from that of the skeptical thesis I have been
advancing. For in Caldern classic auto sacramental, it is not skepticism that founds the moral order but rather the threat or promise
of eternal punishment or reward depending on how one plays ones
ephemeral, earthly role. Indeed, such a model is skeptical only insofar as it implies that our present role is not real, as in eternal, but
rather temporary, like the world itself. But such a view, perfectly
in keeping with medieval theology, is precisely not an example of
the skeptical thesis as I outlined above. In El gran teatro del mundo
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the father is in fact quite present, in the person of the holy autor de
comedias responsible for the story, casting, and mse en scne of the
earthly comedy.
One could conclude from this that Caldern is in fact trying
to defend against the skeptical thesis, not advance it. Here I would
agree with Henry Sullivans claim that the Spanish baroque theater,
far more than its English and French contemporaries, is straining
to maintain a foothold in a transcendent truth and a sense of obligation to a higher order (Lacan and Caldern 39). There is no
doubt as to the desire of Spains religious intelligentsia for the retention of a theology of presence to accompany the absolutist political
agenda. What I am suggesting, against Sullivans argument, is that,
even in Caldern, the attempt was often unsuccessful, and therefore failed to ward off the ascendancy of skepticism. Sullivan supports his claim by means of an intepretation in which the comedia is
seen as maintaining a neoplatonist realism in the face of a menacing
nominalism from across the Pyrenees and the Channel. This realism, in which the magic sense of the word was not lost but rather
the shimmer of the signifying relationship was retained and held in
public view (42), is apparently attested to by the fact that objects
and events on the Spanish stage are consistently endowed with an almost paranoid (my modifier) significance by the characters perceiving and interpreting them (45). My response to this is twofold. First,
it sounds backwards: a world in which a dagger as signifier refers to
no set of facts in the real world of events but rather merely represents a subject for another signifier (45) sounds like the epitome of
a nominalist universe, not a realist one. And there I would agree: the
world is becoming progressively more nominalist, Spain included.
Secondly, the examples Sullivan cites Gutierres interpretation
of the dagger in El mdico de su honra, Basilios interpretation of the
horoscope in La vida es sueo are all perfectly common topoi in
world literature and not at all limited to Counter Reformation Spain
(think of Othellos interpretation of the handkerchief, or any one
of an infinite number of examples of cosmic irony from Oedipus
to the present, in which the protagonists interpretation of an event
brings about the precise end he is trying to avoid).
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[This is a dream; and since it is, let us dream pleasures now, as later
they will be sadness.] But this very conclusion reminds him of the
resulting desengao and dissuades him from this course:
Mas con mis razones propias/ vuelvo a convencerme a mi./
Si es sueo, si es vanagloria,/ quin por vanagloria humana/ pierde una divina gloria?/ Qu pasado bien no es
sueo?/ Quin tuvo dichas heroicas/ que entre s no diga,
cuando/ las revuelve en su memoria:/ sin duda que fue soado/ cuanto vi? Pues si esto toca/ mi desengao, si s/
que es el gusto llama hermosa/ que le convierte en cenizas/
cualquiera viento que sopla,/ acudamos a lo eterno; que es la
fama vividora,/ donde ni duermen las dichas,/ ni las grandezas reposan./ Rosaura est sin honor;/ ms a un prncipe
le toca/ el dar honor que quitarle. (III. x. 2964-88)
[But I finally convince myself of the opposite by my own reasoning. If it is a dream, if it is vainglory, who will, for human
vainglory, lose out on divine glory? What past good is not
a dream? Who has had heroic delights who does not say to
himself, when he relives them in his memory, Doubtless all
that I saw was a dream? Because if this touches on my honor,
if I know that pleasure is a beautiful flame that is turned to
ashes by whatever breath touches it, let us rather turn to the
eternal; for it is life-giving fame where not even delights sleep
nor greatness rests. Rosaura is without her honor; but to a
Prince corresponds the giving of honor, not its removal.]
Certainly Segismundo touches on two positive theses: that to resist
temptation is to opt for divine glory; and that while earthly pleasure
is intense, it is also ephemeral, and therefore one should choose the
eternal pleasure of reputation. However, each of these positive justifications for his ultimate decision are framed and made possible by
the irreducible, inescapable skeptical thesis that everything he is experiencing may only be a dream from which he could awake at any
moment. It is ultimately this uncertainty, and his acceptance of it,
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that leads him to restore the moral order originally disturbed by his
own fathers hubris, his unwillingness to remain without knowledge
about the future.21
In the sociology and political historiography of modernity, perhaps no question has been more central than that of the legitimacy
of political power, for it is the peculiar fate of modernitys political
offspring, the citizen, that we should owe allegiance to an order we
are also responsible for upholding, that we should, in other words,
simultaneously rule and obey. In bringing together the vocabularies of psychoanalysis and the Golden Age theater, in asking of each
the question, posed in the language of the other, of the structure
of human consciousness, we have arrived at a startling thesis for
the sociology of political power in the modern age. According to
this thesis, the ultimate force of legitimacy in the modern world is,
paradoxically, the very problem that is its historical counterpart in
the realm of philosophy: skepticism. For any regime to function it
requires its individuals to feel a sense of obligation to the law, but it
is precisely this sense of obligation that is ostensibly sacrificed in a
regime characterized by the absence of the father, a regime, in other
words, founded on the explicit refusal of direct, coercive leadership.
What our combined vocabularies of psychoanalysis and Calderonese
have revealed is that in regimes depending on a diffuse and representational deployment of power, skepticism functions, even at the
level of the individual psyche, as its own legitimation. Skepticism
bridges the gap between individual psychic development and social
cohesion because it is precisely the individuals acceptance of the
paternal function, of the name of father as the marker of the limits
of his own knowledge an acceptance that is also constitutive of
his own identity that founds the sense of obligation to the law required for such a system of social organization. Caldern wrote at a
time when western culture was discovering this dynamic for the first
time. Psychoanalysis is a product of a culture in whose unconscious
it was already deeply embedded. Perhaps by reading them together
we can simultaneously increase our understanding of a culture in
which our roots are firmly planted and grasp more clearly the shady
outlines of our own.
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Chapter 7
Intimacy and Anonymity,
or How the Audience became a Crowd1
If we are to grant credibility to the notion, advanced by Gustave Le Bon and other crowd psychology theorists of the turn of the
twentieth century, that the notion crowd is profoundly historical,
and that its historicity must be located in the period of high modernity,2 then it becomes germane to ask of this concept the question
of its origins: if an assembly of individuals did not always have the
characteristics of a crowd in the modern sense, what sorts of cultural
practices might have led to the emergence of this specific mode of
mass phenomenon? The thesis I would like to present here is that a
powerful crucible for the transformation of generic assemblies into
modern crowds is to be found in the audiences of early modern European playhouses. This is not to say that an equivalence is to be
established between the terms audience and crowd. Indeed, I am in
full agreement with Gabriel Tarde that an audience is not a crowd,3
that, to be more specific, essential characteristics of crowds as defined by the crowd psychology theorists are definitively absent from
early modern theater audiences. Rather, what must be underscored
is how the theatrical establishments of early modern Europe, in responding to distinct social and political anxieties provoked by the
assemblage of large numbers of people in limited spaces, worked to
bring about the very sort of social formation that would spark contrary anxieties among political theorists in high Modernity. To put
it in straightforward terms, if the early modern state, its functionaries, and its theoreticians were concerned with the chaotic potentials
of individuals when they came together as masses, the primary concern of nineteenth and twentieth-century political theorists is with
the possibility of crowds acting non-chaotically, as a unified force.
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among the numbers of citizens entailed by state and imperial borders. Symbolic power, in which the sovereign could be represented
in his absence as an entity embodying the national identity, became
the norm for the modern state, and in many ways still remains the
norm, although the normative sovereignty of the state system shows
signs of being superceded.31 The relationality entailed by symbolic
power assumes a complex play of intimacy and anonymity, and takes
its model from the stage.
For an individual to conceive of him or herself as belonging to
an extra-communal entity such as a nation requires a double process
of distantiation from a communal matrix and re-identification with
a larger, abstract entity. It demands a process like that described
above as the extrusion of the intimate, if only in order that the intimate core find its home in a desired conformity with a greater whole,
a people or even a general will whose concerted action provides the
legislative (first as merely subject, then as author) body of the nation.
This model is theatrical in that the force of such desired conformity
follows precisely the pattern traced above of identification with a
core of intimacy posited as being withheld by the character on the
stage. But it is also theatrical in a much more concrete sense, in that
the theorists of state policy both took advantage of theatrical models
and turned to the institution of the theater itself as a potential tool
for habituating agglomerates of individuals to the basic elements of
group identification.
One overriding concern of Gaspar de Jovellanoss generously
titled Memoria para el arreglo de la polica de los espectculos y
diversiones pblicas, y sobre su orgen en Espaa [Memo for the
improvement of behavior at spectacles and public diversions, and on
their origin in Spain] is to criticize the decay of Spains contemporary theater scene, to vituperate the license and liberality of its writers, while at the same time proposing in the strongest possible terms
a defense of the theater as an institution, providing the government
adopt appropriate public policies concerning its management. Jovellanoss assessment of his contemporary theater scene is reminiscent
of that of a theater snob like Cervantes speaking about the undue
influence of the vulgo in his day; but now it is not mere taste that is at
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risk but public morals in general. In other words, the vulgo who once
threatened the integrity of art has now been replaced by a vulgar art
that threatens societys integrity:
Se cree, por ventura, que la inocente puericia, la ardiente
juventud, la ociosa y regalada nobleza, el ignorante vulgo,
pueden ver sin peligro tantos ejemplos de impudencia y
grosera, de ufana y necio pundonor, de desacato a la justicia y a las leyes, de infidelidad a las obligaciones pblicas y
domesticas, puestos en accin, pintados con los colores ms
vivos, y animados con el encanto de la illusion y con las gracias de la poesa y de la msica? Confesmoslo de buena fe:
un teatro tal es una peste pblica, y el gobierno no tiene ms
alternativa que reformarle o proscribirle para siempre.
[Shall we believe, perchance, that innocent childhood, that
ardent youth, that leisurely and dainty nobility, that the ignorant vulgo, can see without danger so many examples of
impudence and ill-breeding, of conceit and foolish honor,
of disobedience to justice and the laws, of infidelity to public and domestic obligations, put into action, painted in the
most lively colors, and animated with the charm of illusion
and the grace of poetry and music? Let us confess in good
faith: such a theater is a public nuisance, and the government has no other alternative than to freeform it or proscribe it for ever].32
Since proscribing public diversions amounts to either at best an impossibility or at worst a public catastrophe, reform is the only answer. But it is precisely in the specific nature of his recommendations
for reform that we glimpse the emergent outline of that entity whose
cultivation Jovellanos sees as essential for the construction of a malleable body politic.
In all of Jovellanoss description of social life, the negative and
undesirable is depicted in terms of disunity and unpredictable
movement la pereza y falta de unin y movimiento que se nota
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en todas partes [the laziness and lack of unity and movement that
is noticed all over] whereas the desirable takes the form of unity,
tranquility, and stability:33 El estado de libertad es una situacin
de paz, de comodidad y de alegra; el de sujecin lo es de agitacin,
de violencia ye de disgusto; por consiguiente, el primero es durable,
el segundo expuesto a mudanzas [The state of freedom is a situation of peace, of comfort, and of happiness; that of subjection is one
of agitation, of violence, and of displeasure; consequently, the first
is durable, the second likely to undergo perturbations].34 The obvious means, then, of bringing about a happy, peaceful body politic
is through the facilitation of stable unity and the discouragement
of disruption and unnecessary movement: Por el contrario, unos
hombres frecuentemente congregados a solazase y divertirse en
comn formarn siempre un pueblo unido y afectuoso; conocern
un inters general, y estarn ms distantes de sacrificarle a su inters
particular [on the other hand, men who congregate frequently to
enjoy themselves and have fun together will always form a united
and affectionate people; they will know a general interest, and will
be less likely to sacrifice it to their private interest].35 It is worth
noting here that affect is conceived of here as a group attribute, one
moreover that has both effective and resulting qualities insofar as it
is a kind of affect that helps create communal bonds (a solazarse y
divertirse en comn) as well as the affect of union that results from
this congregation. Furthermore, it is precisely this affective union
that constitutes the body politic that Jovellanos describes, in terms
clearly resonant with a Rousseauian spirit, as a general interest that
outweighs or overrules private interest.36 Finally, this investment
in the general body politic is described ethically in quasi-Kantian
terms as being the condition of possibility of freedom, porque
sern ms libres.37
If the making of the perfect crowd is the recipe for a successful and enlightened body politic, the theater is the place for its
confection:
el Gobierno no debe considerar el teatro solamente como
una diversin pblica, sino como un espctaculo capaz de
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Nevertheless, while for Jovellanos as for later proponents of revolutionary politics such unity would ultimately lead to the ability to
place the general good over the individual good, and hence to the
possibility of freedom, modern times would reveal a dark side to this
vision, concern for which was clearly at the forefront of the crowd
psychologists considerations.43
The first thing one notices about audience descriptions from
this period is the abundance of organic and fluid metaphors. Mesonero Romanos, one of the great documenters of Spanish customs
in the nineteenth century, describes the theater without people as
a cuerpo sin vida, un cadaver yerto e inanimado [body without
life, rigid and inanimate cadaver].44 Although quick to focus his
painterly eye on individual disturbances, making of them fodder
for his sarcastic caricatures, Mesonero nevertheless more often than
not allows individual action, whether intrusive or not, to be registered in harmonious interaction with others, such that women, so
often criticized in the misogynist tradition for their garrulousness,
become here the source of an undifferentiated roar: mil y mil voces, si quier gangosas y displicentes, si quier melfluas y atipladas,
se confunden naturalmente en armnico diapasn, y ms de una
vez sobresalen por entre los dilogos de los actors o sobre los crescendos de la orquesta [thousands and thousands of voices, perhaps
nasal and disagreeable, perhaps mellifluous and shrill, are naturally
confused in a harmonious tuning fork, and more than once leap
out from among the dialogues of the actors or over the crescendos
of the orchestra] (Mesonero 139). As a whole the audience can even
be expected to respond in kind and on cue, albeit according to the
dictates of a leader, namely, of that section of the audience occupied
by the theater intelligentia, of whom he says: los unos y otros esperan con atencin la muestras inequvocas de su sentencia, y aplauden
si aplaude, y silban por simpata cuando escuchan a la inteligencia
silbar [one and all wait with attention for the unequivocal show of
their sentence, and applaud if they applaud, and whistle in sympathy
when they hear the intelligentsia whistle] (141). Finally, the overall
impression one is left with of this theater from the outside, as he
calls it, is the simtrica variedad of the audience, an extraordinary
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22). Nevertheless, the volatility and power of the crowd is never far
from sight.
Even biographically speaking, there is some logic to having this
magical effect on this oceanic crowd take place specifically at a theater. Victor Hugo was, after all, in addition to the acclaimed author
of Notre Dame de Paris, the defamed author of Hernani, that play
that put such a violent end to the dominance of neo-classical rules in
French theater. Hernani played in the face of vicious and desperate
opposition for forty-eight nights, bringing in each night, as Hugo
writes in his journal, five thousand francs.47 And yet if Hugo has the
audience to fear, there is another crowd, properly speaking, forming,
and coming to his defense. If Hernani plays on, it is because for
forty-eight performances, ever-renewed by new blood, the romantic
army kept up the fight. Inside the theater, outside in street and parlor, in the papers, the battle went on, throwing the young men of
the Latin Quarter into a frenzy. In Toulouse, a young man died in
a duel over Hernani (Miller 25). A culture war, certainly, the force
of whose advent is announced, by Hugo, by his followers, by his
romantic army with the prophetic power of an insatiable crowd.
Why bother to hiss Hernani? Hugo asks. Can one stop a tree
from greening by crushing one of its buds? (25). The implication is
clear; the place may have been merely the theater, but Hernani was
no longer alone; this audience had become a crowd.
The crowd on the streets of the world
February 17, 2003. The New York Times begins one of its lead articles stating that the world knows now two superpowers: the United
States, shrill in its insistence on pursuing war with Iraq, on the one
hand, and on the other, public opinion, expressing its dissent worldwide in the form of crowds taking to the streets as they have apparently never done so before. Even if we can explain away the numbers
by saying there is approximately a billion people more on the planet
now than there was thirty years ago, that is certainly not a growth
attributable to those western societies that have been hosting this
dramatic showing of popular discontent. This is curious because if
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Le Bon and other predicted that the twentieth century would be the
era of crowds, in recent times voice whose own political progenitors
would have embraced this motto as their own have issued a sober
dismissal:
CAE [Critical Art Ensemble] has said it before, and we will
say it again: as far as power is concerned, the streets are dead
capital! Nothing of value to the power elite can be found on
the streets, nor does this class need control of the streets to
efficiently run and maintain state institutions. For CD [civil
disobedience] to have any meaningful effect, the resisters
must appropriate something of value to the state. Once they
have an object of value, the resisters have a platform from
which they may bargain for (or perhaps demand) change.
At one time the control of the street was a valued item.
In nineteenth century Paris the streets were the conduits for
the mobility of power, whether it was economic or military in
nature. If the streets were blocked, and key political fortresses
were occupied, the state became inert, and in some cases collapsed under its own weight. This method of resistance was
still useful up through the 60s, but since the end of the nineteenth century it has yielded diminishing returns, and has
drifted from being a radical practice to a liberal one. This
strategy is grounded in the necessity of centralizing capital
within cities; as capital has become increasingly decentralized, breaking through national boundaries and abandoning
the cities, street action has become increasingly useless.48
The streets are dead, in other words. In the age of digital commerce and multinational capital, the appropriate form of resistance
is thought not to involve the slow, brute numbers of massive crowds,
but to surge rather in the flow of information so vital to capital itself.
Even if large crowds gather to disrupt the meetings of those shepherds of the new world order, analysis of their strategies emphasizes
the quick and fluid organization that their own use of digital technology enables, over the sheer force of their numbers.
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general good. But the crowd has a way of confounding both versions: it haunts the general good of universal reason with the terror
of unified unreason; it haunts the freedom of individual desire as the
desire for something more, for shared affect, for community, for a
greater good. That is why, even today, especially today, when a hegemony of screens creates the illusion of intimacy with a billion other
souls, the crowds that walk the streets of the world present a power
that, win or lose on any given day, cannot be ignored.
Chapter 8
Reality is Bleeding:
A Brief History of Film
from the Sixteenth Century1
The past several years have seen a surge in the number of films
that call into question the nature of the reality represented within
the diagetic borders of the screen. In some cases this is a result of the
blending of the diagetic reality into other represented realities, and in
one extreme case The Blair Witch Project of 1999 reality broke
out of the very borders that define it as fictional and was perceived
as real by its viewers.2 In this essay I argue that this thematic convergence is not new, but is rather the logical extension of a narrative
trope whose history predates the invention of film and, in fact, reaches
back to the invention of theater in the sixteenth century.3 This trope,
which I refer to as bleeding, has been the obsessive concern of writers ever since spectacle began to be organized in such a way as to
presuppose an ontological distinction between the space of the viewer
and the space of the character. Moreover, the splitting central to this
organization of space, this rending of experienced space into reality
and some other dimension that represents it, is foundational for a
good deal of cultural production in the modern western world, particularly that involving narrative, theater, television, and film.
In the first section of the essay I distinguish between two ways
of making represented realities realistic. One, which I call illusionism, functions by convincing the spectator that the medium
the film, the pixels, the oil and canvas is an object; the other,
realism proper, convinces the spectator that the object is merely a
medium for another, not yet discovered, object. Whereas technological innovation has its largest cultural impact on the experience of
illusionism, the sort of subversion of the spectators place and peace
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determined by a set of specific historical and technological circumstances, that, in other words, this particular kind of reality-effect
in which the spectator experiences the spectacle as if it were the
actual reproduction of some real event is the logical outcome
of progressing technologies of visual and audio reproduction. What
stymies such a theory, however, is the simple fact that Blair Witch
created this effect with only the most basic equipment, technology
that has been widely available for years (apart from the hand-held
video recorder, technology available since the invention of film itself). In fact, more or less the same stunt was performed with audio
technology already in 1936 when Orson Welles convinced thousands
of panicked listeners that Earth was being attacked by Mars.
The key to understanding the independence of the Blair Witch
reality-effect from todays increasingly sophisticated technologies
of audio and visual reproduction lies in a tension apparently inherent to the medium of film, a tension between two tendencies that
we will call illusionism and realism. Both terms need to be defined
within the parameters of a representational schema. Let us symbolize this schema as
V M[O]
where V stands for the viewer, M for the medium, and [O] for the
object, content, or reality that is framed by the medium. The
statement then reads: the viewer perceives the object as framed by
the medium. The function of the frame, as analyzed by Goffman,
is to key the represented reality, such that the viewer implicitly
understands that a new set of rules are involved in interacting with
it (e.g., suspension of disbelief as an enabling rule of fiction).5 With
this basic, more or less nave schema, we can now differentiate between the respective structures of realism and illusionism.
Both tendencies have, on the surface, similar aims (which is why
they have traditionally been conflated into a single concept: namely,
realism). These aims could be stated as the desire to reduce, and
ultimately to eliminate, the distinction for the viewer between M
and O to present, in other words, the mediated representation of
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becomes
V O[O],
in which the second O now stands for a further reality, a reality that
naturally impacts on our own because what in the first case was
perceived as a relatively innocuous medium framing the represented
reality is now perceived as part of the objective, represented reality
itself, a trace of some real act of violence.10 This is, of course, exactly
the logic of The Blair Witch Project: a snuff film adapted for popular
consumption.
The result of having distinguished the representational structures of illusionism and realism is the following thesis: whereas illusionism reinforces the viewers sense of his or her own space as
ontologically distinct from the diagetic space of the screen, realism
does the opposite, undermining this ontological security. This is because, as we noticed above, by presenting the medium as object, illusionism retains and even reinforces the original framing function
of the medium, and the viewer continues to key the medium just as
he or she had keyed the object via the medium before. In realism,
however, in which the object is presented as medium, the framing
function ceases to distinguish the viewers dimension of being from
that of the object. The frame now serves solely to indicate a temporal or spatial distance between two objects, that which is present at
hand and some other to which it refers. No ontological distinction
is produced.
Why is it, however, that with realism the object is so easily accepted as a medium? What is it about the cinematic presentation
of, for example, Blair Witch, that tempts us to step over the frame
that normally protects our reality from the intrusion of fictional objects?
If we return to our original representational schema
V M[O],
and to our definition of realism as
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M = O,
then we might ask the question: can we ever have an immediate
knowledge of the object against which to measure the accuracy
of its representation via medium M? The answer, it seems, is that
while an object might be perceived free of the effects of medium
M, it will never be perceived free of all effects of mediation. When
we judge a representation as realistic, then, what we are actually
saying is that M = O where O stands for our context-dependent
expectation of some experience Q. V M[O] becomes, therefore
V M[M{Q}], and so forth, with no logical limit to the number
of interior mediations. The cinematic object, to put it simply, is
always already mediated.11
What enables cinematic realism to undermine the framing
function supporting the viewers sense of reality is a technique I will
call bleeding,12 in which the frame separating two or more levels of
represented reality fails. In the language of speech act theory, one
keys a frame by rendering its signifying contents non-performative.13
The trick of bleeding, therefore, is first to create within the primary
frame of the film another frame that mimics the performative/nonperformative relation of the original frame distinction, and then to
deactivate the newly keyed frame. The result is that the spectator,
who is fully expecting the interior reality to remain fictional with
respect to base reality, is caught off guard when these rules no longer
hold. While this technique does not always lead to the reality-effect
produced by Blair Witch, Blair Witch can nevertheless be understood as the result of the technique pushed to its logical extreme. In
the next section, I present some recent examples of bleeding, as well
as a brief history of the trope in film, and then proceed to show how,
far from being a technique inherent to film, bleeding has its origins
in the sixteenth century, with the birth of the modern theater.
A history of bleeding
This section begins by considering a curious though perhaps coincidental thematic convergence among a group of films released
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from 1997 to 1999. All of these films, The Truman Show (1998),
Pleasantville (1998), The Matrix (1999), and eXistenZ (1999),14 feature as their principal narrative trope the bleeding between what we
have been calling base reality and a representation of that reality within the already representational reality of the film. While in
some cases the impulse behind the narrative seems to be the new
possibilities offered by computer-enhanced special effects (The Matrix, Pleasantville), this is certainly not the case for the relatively
simple visual effects of eXistenZ and The Truman Show. Indeed, in
principle, the presentation of a virtual reality in film requires no
special effects, since the better the illusion represented the more that
reality should resemble the base reality of the film and the less need
for technological fireworks to pull it off (a fact that the makers of
some films dealing with VR seem not to have considered, e.g., Johnny Mnemonic [1995]).
In order for bleeding to be successful to be cinematic, aesthetic, desirable the distinction between the realities to be bled
must be established. In Pleasantville this is the distinction between
violent, jaded, contemporary American culture, and the bland, sexless utopia of family values represented by the reruns of the 1950s
television show Pleasantville, watched obsessively by the sensitive
and nerdy David Parker. The black-and-white world of Pleasantville
is clearly metaphoric of the sort of moral stability and certainty the
young David brought up with his sex-pot sister Jennifer by his divorced mother, and abandoned by his dead-beat dad so earnestly
desires. When an unsolicited television repair man (played, rather
disturbingly, by Don Knotts) replaces their remote control with one
that might have been designed by Jules Verne, David and his sister
are transported into Pleasantville, where their nineties personalities
play havoc on its innocent and isolated citizens for the remainder
of the film. Once Pleasantville itself has become the films base
reality, the bleeding is experienced quite literally as a color bleed.
As the characters and their simple world are gradually introduced
to the complexities and attractions of a more modern world, this
infection appears to us and them as the transformation from a
black-and-white to a Technicolor reality.
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In The Truman Show, Truman himself is presented as the embodiment of a sort of pervasive media bleed emblematic the film
appears to be telling us of contemporary life. Truman is the starring character of a television show that has aired continuously since
the day he was born. The problem is hes also the starring actor.
Whereas all the other actors on the show exist as normal people,
i.e., have a split existence as actors (who presumably have another
life, a life in which they can give interviews about their involvement
with the show) and characters (who exist in real world for Truman, on the Truman Show for everyone else), only Truman exists
exclusively in one world. For Truman, reality is representation; or,
at least, our representation is his reality. But Trumans world also
has representation, in the form of 1950s black-and-white television
shows basically indistinguishable from Pleasantville, whose purpose
in his world is to quell his desire to venture out from his own, hermetically sealed Pleasantville. Both films, then, thematize the desire of a modern, profligate world for the unattainable innocence
of simpler, happier times, as well as the irresistibility of the modern
world to the denizens of the naive utopias we create. But whereas
for Pleasantville bleeding is a narrative trick intended as a vehicle for
this cultural exchange, The Truman Show presents bleeding as part
of the problem: we are so jaded and so medialized that we run the
risk of bowling over the distinction between reality and representation, between real life and mere entertainment. Bleeding, for the
Truman Show, is a symptom of contemporary society, and Truman
himself the emblem of its newest form of victimage.
If Pleasantville and The Truman Show emphasize the distinction before the bleed, the interest of The Matrix and eXistenZ is how
they follow the logic of bleeding to its logical conclusion, asking, if
the realities are so close that bleeding is a potentiality, then how are
we to know which reality is really real? Both films trap the viewer
into believing, as a viewer is trained to believe, that the films initial
diagetic space is in fact reality, and then go on to subvert that acceptance in surprising ways. In The Matrix we are led to experience
a truth that, according to the character Morpheus and paraphrasing the early Wittgenstein,15 cant be talked about but can only be
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shown. This truth is that the mysterious Matrix is, in fact, this, here,
now. Everything we (since we have accepted the films version of
reality) are experiencing is in fact an illusion, the effects on our consciousnesses of a powerful computer program; we are, in essence,
living in a virtual reality program run by artificial intelligences who
are keeping our bodies alive for the purposes of their own energy
consumption (the fact that this is a scientific non-sequitur doesnt
detract from the effect of the revelation). When the hero Neo swallows the pill proffered by Morpheus containing a drug that inhibits
the programs effect on his actual, physical brain, he, and we, are
ripped out of the old real world now revealed to be an illusion
and plunged into the new real world of enslavement to machines
and covert revolutionary activity. If The Matrix presents us with one
of the most radical possible examples of bleeding it does so by implicating us, unavoidably (if you werent warned in advance, there
was no way of avoiding the trap), in the trope: when Neos reality is
questioned, so is ours; the Matrix took over reality, and we bought
it, hook, line and sinker.
Cronenbergs eXistenZ is the lower-budget, gross, slimy-thing
version of The Matrix. As in The Matrix, we are introduced into a
world that we have no choice but to accept as base reality, despite
ample evidence that it is not our world (the gross, slimy things in
question are game pods that plug into bio-ports drilled into the
base of ones spine.) It is also the most narratively complex version
of reality bleeding, in that the films characters game characters also
play VR games, games within the games that themselves thematize the original game as well as the very notion of virtual gaming
and its foundational distinction from reality.16 The film begins in
a reality that will only be revealed as virtual at the end of the film;
but by the time we come to that recognition, Cronenberg has succeeded in undermining our trust in any notion of a stable or base
reality. When the world of the game dissolves into the final scene, we
are confronted with a product testing contact group similar but not
identical to the one with which the film started. Gone, however, are
the slimy game pods, and in their place are suitably high-tech, unbiodegradable, blue-plastic helmets and hand controls. The entire
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story, from the first moment on, was part of this game; none of the
characters were who we were led to believe they were. Nevertheless,
the normally-relieving reality-effect of returning to some ground is
sabotaged by the frame shifting we have just endured, and when the
lead characters themselves turn out to be terrorists, and turn their
guns on an innocent bystander, we can empathize completely with
the last words of the film: Wait, isnt this still a game?
Perhaps the first thing to note about this new trend in cinema
is that it is not entirely new. In recent years viewers have been treated
to not a few films whose principal trope revolved around the keying
of the external or base frame, and hence a shifting of the ground the
viewer could call home. One such example is The Game (1997), in
which a rich man learns that the purpose behind a mysterious game
he has been given as a birthday gift was in fact a ruse designed to
swindle him of all his wealth, only later to discover that this discovery itself was merely part of the original game, intended to put
in him the midst of a life and death struggle that he would really
believe, that he could not, in other words, dismiss as a mere game.
Another is Jacobs Ladder (1990), which tells the story of a Vietnam
veteran suffering from what could be a demon possession, paranoid
delusions about a government experiment with noxious chemical agents, paranoid delusions resulting from such experiments, or
all of the above. Only in the last scene do we realize that, like the
Civil War soldier in Ambrose Bierces An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge,17 the entire story has been the hallucination of a dying soldier
who has never left Vietnam.
Given that the loss of reality is a priori one of the most unsettling feelings one can have, it should come as no surprise to learn
that bleeding came into its own as a technique peculiar to horror
films. While Wes Cravens recent popularity is due to the autoreflexive kitsch of such Clearasil horror films as Scream (1996), Scream
2 (1997) (the sequel about sequels), and Scream 3 (1999) (we got it
already), he honed his aptitude for irony with the classic Nightmare
on Elm Street (1984), an original that spawned its own sequence
of sequels, until Craven returned and capped it off with one of the
great bleeders of all, Wes Cravens New Nightmare (1994). Whereas
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the original Nightmare fluidly shuttled the viewer back and forth
between dreamed and real life, the New Nightmare did so between
the story line of a Freddy Krueger film and the base reality of the
movie crew making the movie. In a scene indebted in equal parts
to Borges and Julio Cortazar, Craven himself is interviewed about
the movie in progress, after which the camera pans to his typewriter
where we see typed out the last words of the very interrogation we
have just witnessed. Shortly thereafter, John Carpenter joined the
fray with In the Mouth of Madness (1995), about the release of a
book so frightening that as people read it they go mad. In the final
sequence, we learn that not only is the hero, John Trent, himself
living out master horror writer Sutter Canes last novel, it is in fact
this novel that we are experiencing; the book has been released as a
movie, the very movie that we are in the midst of watching (which
presumably then justifies any inconsistencies in the plot as possible
results of the insanity weve fallen into by watching the film).
What Craven and Carpenter realized was that cinema had a
heightened capacity for frightening the viewer owing to its tendency
to coerce him or her (without his or her noticing) to adopt a certain
point of view, to accept, in other words, new coordinates for the
experience of what we are calling base reality.18 Film has this capacity first because the moving image is such an (apparently) close
correlate to the visual phenomenal experience of everyday life, and
second because the flexibility of camera movement and montage allows the director to get into, as it were, the viewers head (subjective
camera, or POV shots), by approximating the closest possible point
to the apex of the angle of his or her (again, visual) perception. Both
of these remain valuable observations despite the fact that the second reason in some striking ways contradicts the first (we tend not
to visually perceive the world in cuts, fades, and rapid close-ups,
at least until our viewing practices and conventions have taught us
to do so). Once a viewer has accepted the directors coordinates, it
becomes quite easy to bleed that constructed reality into a new one,
or vice versa, be it the reality of a dream or hallucination, a paranoid
fantasy, a holodeck,19 a virtual reality program, a television show or,
indeed, another film.
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reality is bleeding
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Aristotle had said so, but rather because twelve hours was the longest
amount of time an audience could reasonably be expected to remain
in a theater without attending to the necessities of the body, such as
eating, drinking, excreting the superfluous burdens of the belly and
bladder, sleeping and other necessities.26 This is not to say that such
a strict correlation was always accepted; on the contrary, even during
the Classical period in which the unities enjoyed such preeminence
there were those who would criticize overly strict adherence to them.
At the time of Castelvetro, for example, Alessandro Piccolomini argued against his position, claiming that audiences knew perfectly
well that what they were seeing was not truth, that were it truth
there would be no need for imitation and that, therefore, exact temporal correspondence was not necessary (Carleson 54).
The occurrence of such debates in the sixteenth century demonstrates that the viability of alternate realities is not necessarily or
solely determined by the technological capacity of the medium of
reproduction at hand. Theoretically, not only bodies moving around
on a minimally appointed stage but also the printed word can be
marshaled for the creation of a viable alternate reality. The trick is
to persuade the spectator to accept, even if only momentarily, the
proffered coordinates as being those framing his own reality. But
how? How does one convince spectators to alter even in the slightest
degree a set of coordinates that have been serving them pretty well
for as long as they can remember?
It turns out, surprisingly and perhaps a bit circularly considering where this argument began, that the answer to this question
might well be: by causing two represented realities to bleed into one
another. Circular indeed! If, as I have apparently argued, a precondition for bleeding is the establishment of an alternate, but viable,
imaginary reality, how can I now proceed to claim that the viability
of this reality hinges in part on the technique of bleeding? The only
way I can make this claim is historically: first, by suggesting that it
is through the practices and conventions of the theater that western
culture first learned how to construct and experience alternate, but
viable, imaginary realities; and second, that a fundamental aspect of
this historical apprenticeship, a pivotal step in the acquisition of the
reality is bleeding
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From the outset playwrights grasped the insight the metatheatrical essence of the theater had into their characters psychology
and hence into that of their public. Think of Shakespeares deservedly famous use of the trope in Hamlet, the play within the play,
a mousetrap, set to catch the conscience of the King.29 Hamlet
directs a theater piece, the Murder of Gonzaga, in such a way as to
represent for an audience that includes his uncle the murder of his
father by his uncle. As he intends, his uncles conscience is sorely pricked by this spectacle, suggesting that, in some subtle way,
the screen separating reality and representation within the reality
of the play has been breached. Other canonical examples include
Calderns La vida es sueo (1635), in which the violent prince Segismundo is convinced that the few moments of freedom he has experienced in a lifetime of captivity were merely the workings of a dream.
In this case, we are treated to a sort of reverse bleeding, since the
main character has been deceived into perceiving the existence of
a screen the one separating his real reality as a lonely prisoner
and his dreamed reality as a powerful prince where there is in
fact none. Segismundo is never disabused of this fantasy, and is left
believing that his two realities have decisively if not permanently
bled into one another; the final, skeptical moral being that life is
a dream, and we can never be too confident of our identity or of our
power.30 In the French theater, Corneille used the technique in his
short play, L illusion comique (1636), and Rotrou in his retelling of
the Genesius tale, Le vritable Saint Genest (1647); but bleeding was
probably most effectively adapted by Lope de Vega, in his version of
the same story, Lo fingido verdadero, or True Pretence, staged several
decades before Rotrous in 1608.
Which Reality is bleeding?
Realism functions at a level I have called ontological because it involves the human beings apprehension of reality at the most basic,
phenomenological level.31 It is in this sense that I claim only halffacetiously in the title that with this essay I am presenting a history
of film from the sixteenth century. For the organization of spatiality
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that undergirds the age of film has its origins in the change of spatiality ushering in the early modern age. In this form of spatiality,
a viewer experiences the act of spectatorship as organized around
a fundamental division between various dimensions of being: the
spectator exists as a body engaged in the physical act of viewing, but
also as a potential character projected onto the other side of a spatial border, be it the edge of a stage or the screen. It is precisely this
ontological distinction that enabled the emergence of the very representational schema with which we began our analysis of realism and
illusionism, for the body of the actor is a medium for a characters
reality in exactly the same way that the cinematic image mediates
the cinematic object.
Realism, therefore that tendency in film to present the object
or content of a cinematic representation as a medium of a further
reality is a tendency not merely of film, but of any form of representation starting with theater that has as its most basic
element a screen, an ontological separation between realities. This
means that realism has existed for as long as realities have existed. To
push this formulation one step further, we might add that the very
notion of Reality has only existed in its present sense since theatrical spectacle allowed for the proliferation of realities. For why insist
on the notion of Reality if there is nothing to defend it against? It
should not, therefore, surprise us that the concept reality did not
enter the vernaculars of western Europe until the sixteenth and in
some cases seventeenth centuries.32 Although the concept of real
certainly existed in philosophical discourse prior to the early modern period for Aquinas what was real was that which existed as an
expression and representation of the word of God it is only in the
sixteenth century that the idea begins to emerge of reality as existing
in contradistinction to intellectual fictions.33 For it is only when
what is real becomes a question to be brought from the conflictridden world of the senses to the tribunal of the mind that Reality
begins to take form as a place, a dimension, a value, or a quality.
It is already common to identify the literary-aesthetic concept
of realism as one of the essential historical markers of Modernity.34
What we must add to this is the insight drawn from Heideggerian
reality is bleeding
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as such, because the very act of negating the potentially viable space
of our perceptions produces the notion of an ultimate a true Reality
against which the various alternate realities are to be weighed.
The big claim of this essay, then, is that this Reality that is
the core reference of epistemology is itself a product of the media
practices developed in the sixteenth century, media practices that
required participants to organize perceptual space into compartmentalized realities whose ultimate value was determined only in
relation to those other realities that framed them and that were in
turned framed by them. That these realities started to bleed into one
another almost immediately should also not surprise us, since the
very path that led us to question our knowledge of Reality guaranteed that we would never find a definitive answer, because, like the
phantom object at the end of a series of mediations, that Reality was
never there. It is a structurally necessary element of one peculiarly
modern way of organizing experience; it had a beginning; it has
had a history; and perhaps it will come to an end. In the meantime,
when we see reality bleed in fiction and in film, and at times bleed
into that reality we like to call our own, we can read it as a sign: a
sign of its mortality.
Chapter 9
Keeping Pragmatism Pure:
Rorty with Lacan
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points I make might make some Lacanians indignant. My intention, rather, is to cull from Lacan and in some cases from Slavoj
iek, Lacans most influential contemporary interpreter another
vocabulary, palatable for pragmatists like me, without keeping any
of the obscurantism that is the residue of Lacans Zeitgeist. I will be
doing (to quote Rorty on Heidegger) to Lacan what he did to everybody else, and what no reader of anybody can avoid doing (EH
49), i.e., reading Lacan by my own, pragmatist, lights.
Nominalism and experience
If I were forced to sum up the core of Rortys philosophy, his most
passionate commitment, in one short phrase, I would say that his
philosophy is one that endeavors always and everywhere to dismantle epistemology, to debunk the notion, entrenched in our culture
since Descartes, of the human subject making judgments about
the accuracy of its mental representations of the world-out-there.7
An immediate objection to reading Rorty with Lacan is that while
Rorty is explicitly anti-Cartesian, Lacans model of subjectivity is
explicitly Cartesian.8 But Lacans Cartesianism is itself the product
of a strong reading of Descartes, a reading that removes the epistemological divide from between the world and the subjects perception of the world and replaces it with a divide between the subjects
world and its language.
For Lacan, Descartes founds the modern subject not only in that
le cogito philosophique est au foyer de ce mirage qui rend lhomme
moderne si sr dtre soi dans ses incertitudes sur lui-mme9 [the
philosophical cogito is at the portal of that mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself in the midst of his uncertainties
about himself]10 but also and more importantly in that the language
of his self-certainty becomes the model for the modern desire for
self-identity. Rather than taking as the subject of psychoanalysis the
strong and certain center of apperception that watches impressions
go by in the theater of its mind, Lacan reads Descartes cogito ergo
sum as the description of a speaking thing chasing endlessly after its
unconditioned being:
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and the incorrigible certitude that we are indeed receiving some such
impressions he is equally disapproving of any attempt to distinguish between those things we can talk about and those things that
might be out there but for which we have no adequate vocabulary.
This second disapproval, called nominalism after Wilfred Sellars,
is based on the later Wittgensteins injunction not to try to get between language and its object. As both the elder Wittgenstein and
the younger Heidegger knew, our language, like our historical and
cultural world, is coterminous with our ability to think. To try to
transcend this condition would necessarily lead to self-deception or
inauthenticity (EH 51).
According to Rorty, whereas the younger Wittgenstein had
hoped to be able to find the nonempirical conditions for the possibility of linguistic description, he later dropped the whole idea
of language as a bounded whole which had conditions at its outer
edges, as well as the project of transcendental semantics:
He became reconciled to the idea that whether a sentence
had sense did indeed depend upon whether another sentence was true a sentence about the social practices of
the people who used the marks and noises which were the
components of the sentence. He thereby became reconciled
to the notion that there was nothing ineffable. (EH 57)
Rortys agreement with this form of nominalism leads him down
a logical path from the pragmatic and interesting claim of Sellars
that all cognition is a linguistic affair to a highly unpragmatic alliance with what I will call a priori physicalism (even if, as he claims,
of a non-reductive sort) and its collapsing of distinctions between
machines, non-human animals, and humans. My suspicion is that
this is an instance of Rortys (in my view) healthy dedication to
philosophical pragmatism being tainted by the temptation of keeping his philosophy pure, of following a train of thought to its logical extreme. My own feeling is that there is no need to stay on the
train that long, and that by maintaining one distinction between
experience and language use, a distinction that Rorty himself at
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But the fact that language does not have a representational relation
to the intrinsic nature of things does not mean that there is nothing specific or philosophically interesting that we can say about it.
One of the difficulties Rorty apparently has with Lacan is that his
thought leads people to treat language as if it were unique and philosophically interesting:
One begins to be enthralled by phrases like the unconscious is structured like a language,19 because one begins
to think that languages must have a distinctive structure,
utterly different from that of brains or computers or galaxies (instead of just agreeing that some of the terms we use
to describe language might, indeed, usefully describe other
things, such as the unconscious). (EH 4)
At the same time he insists that [l]anguage [should not] become
the latest substitute for God or Mind something mysterious,
incapable of being described in the same terms in which we describe
tables, trees, and atoms (EH 4). But if he allows that languages can
be studied like trees, and that we can use words to describe them,
then it seems pragmatic to allow that they might have a specific
structure, that it might make more sense to use one vocabulary to
describe languages and another to describe galaxies. In fact, much
as he would like to deny it, Rorty is in a minority in claiming that
there is nothing mysterious, or at least philosophically interesting,
about language. Consider just a few examples from the litany of
mysteries that language presents for a linguist like Noam Chomsky, who, incidentally, is no more a fan of structuralist approaches
to language than he is of the metaphysical naturalism that the
contemporary cognitive science Rorty finds so attractive presents
for him. For Chomsky, no approach to the study of language has
come even close to eliminating the problems brought up by twentieth-century thoughts favorite whipping boy, Descartes: the fact
that it is unbounded in scope, not determined by external stimuli
or internal state, not random but coherent and appropriate to situations but not caused by them, evoking thoughts that the hearer
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desire. Even if one could posit that the combination of all possible
languages would be the equivalent of a sponge with no holes, one
must realize that it is also in the nature of languages that, as Rorty
says, you cannot let all possible languages be spoken at once (EH
46). The ineffable, then, would be precisely the word that indicates
this relation to what cannot be said at any given time.
Metaphysical desire
For the younger Wittgenstein, the sentence that summed up his
Tractatus, and that, hence, for Rorty, gets everything wrong, is
what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk
about we must pass over in silence.24 The problem with this sentence for the pragmatist is that it posits a clear distinction between
the whole of language, which can be described in its full complexity,
and the realm of the ineffable, of those things that can be shown
but not said and hence must be left in silence. The psychoanalytic
pragmatist also disagrees strenuously with this sentence, but for different reasons than does Rorty. The psychoanalytic pragmatists reversal of this sentence would be, What we do say is almost never
clear, and every sentence we utter piques us with the possibility of
something that has not yet been said. What the second half of this
formulation suggests is that there can be a notion of the ineffable, or
at least the persistently ineffed, that does not thereby suppose the
ability to get between language and its object and study or map
out language as distinct from the world, and vice versa. The suggestion of the first half, which I will spell out in greater detail below,
is that clarity in the sense of objective certainty as to the meaning
of the others speech, or total transparency of the others intentions,
is a phantom, the desire for which whether exhibited by logical
positivism or a priori physicalism is in fact explicable in terms of
the effects the ineffability of experience has in our unconscious.
Another way to put the distinction central to the Tractatus is
as one between the available and effable world and the unavailable
and ineffable substance of the world (EH 58). This is a felicitous
formulation in light of ieks Lacanian/Hegelian treatment of the
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notion of substance. Jouissance, according to iek, is the only substance acknowledged by psychoanalysis. But what we need to keep
in mind when we read such a statement is precisely the fact that by
means of it iek undermines any possible Tractarian effort to find
an invariable substance upon which to found an analytic of knowledge. For substance, like the Lacanian real, is the word iek uses
to refer to the that which must stay the same in all circumstances,
the Gods eye view, the Ding-an-sich, and every and all such manifestation of what we can also call, quite simply, metaphysical desire25
or the desire for something metaphysical. When he says, as he often
does, that jouissance is not historical,26 what he means is that what
Rorty calls the ambition of transcendence has always haunted us,
and part of facing up to ones finitude, or even facing up to ones
contingency, involves the realization that if you cant found certainty on jouissance, you cant get away from it either.27
One of the few arguments against pragmatism that Dewey
ever countenanced was made by G. K. Chesterton, when he said
[p]ragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. Although
Dewey accepted the point, he believed that this human need was
merely a need, one that, like a childs need for constant maternal
attention, could be outgrown: Dewey was quite aware of what he
called a supposed necessity of the human mind to believe in certain absolute truths..... But he thought that the long-run good done
by getting rid of outdated needs would outweigh the temporary
disturbance caused by attempts to change our philosophical intuitions (TP 77). Psychoanalytic pragmatism differs from Deweys
and Rortys pragmatism by placing the yearning for transcendence
along with contingency and finitude, not as a human need that it
makes sense to grow out of, but as a useful way of describing human being with which it makes sense to come to terms.28 One way
to describe the practice of psychoanalysis is as a method for helping
humans beings deal with the disturbances metaphysical desire provokes in their physical, quotidian, mundane existence.
Rortys term for this desire is the ambition of transcendence,
which, in the form it took in modern philosophy, gave us the
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distinction between the world and our conception of the world, between the content and the scheme we applied to that content, between the truly objective and the merely intersubjective (TP 109).
But the ambition of transcendence is for Rorty a philosophical illness, something for which philosophy should serve as a therapy in
that it should always do its best to extirpate it from any philosophical discourse. The late Wittgenstein and the early Heidegger wrote
exemplary books in this sense, in that,
[f]rom the point of view of both Philosophical Investigations
and Being and Time, the typical error of traditional philosophy is to imagine that there could be, indeed that there
somehow must be, entities which are atomic in the sense
of being what they are independent of their relation to any
other entities (e.g., God, the transcendental subject, sensedata, simple names). (EH 59)
Psychoanalytic pragmatism is of a kind with these books in refusing
to posit such objects, but differs (at least from Wittgenstein and his
nominalist followers) in that it sees as one of its purposes, and as
an interesting philosophical project, the explanation of why people
suffer from metaphysical desire,29 the discussion of whether in some
forms it might be socially and individually beneficial, and the consideration of how best to avoid its possible ill effects, both social and
individual.
Ultimately, the fact of ineffability and its resultant metaphysical
desire explains much of what Rorty wants to erase from traditional
philosophy, but it also explains an aspect of Rortys own belief system that without it would remain mysterious. This is the aspect of
progress that is so important to Rorty as a liberal. For if we take
seriously the notion that there is no world out there to which the
ever-increasing correspondence of our linguistic practices is the motor of all knowledge, then what takes the place of that motor? What
drives us forward? What constitutes progress?
Rorty defines progress in terms of the belief that the situation
one sees in ones community is better now than what it was in the
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past, and the hope that it will be better in the future than it is now.
For the pragmatist, better means merely having more of the things
that her community in its present historical condition desires
and less of what it abhors. What a liberal community most abhors is
cruelty, so it follows that the liberal pragmatist sees progress in terms
of a march from a greater to a lesser prevalence of cruelty in her community and in the world.
This is straightforward enough, and yet it seems reasonable to
inquire not on what does the pragmatist base her desire for progress, for that is the kind of senseless metaphysical question that
pragmatists rightly dismiss out of hand, but rather whence the
various future options that constitute possible paths along which
to progress? For certainly one could imagine a world, perfectly
in keeping with the pragmatists non-essentialist view of language,
in which a given community simply continues to play one and the
same language game for all eternity, never desiring to change, since
its members are not aware of the existence of other options, and
certainly are not being caused to change by environmental stimuli,
since their languages and tools do a pretty good job of managing
and predicting their environment as it is. In other words, one could
imagine a situation in which the idea of change simply never occurs.
Why, then, if Rorty is right, does change occur? Why does it make
sense to talk about progress the way he does?
Rorty himself acknowledges that for Dewey the notion of progress was a kind of transcendence. Dewey, he says,
wanted us to keep something vaguely like a sense of transcendence by seeing ourselves as just one more product of
evolutionary contingencies, as having only (though to a
much greater degree) the same sort of abilities as the squids
and amoebas. Such a sense makes us receptive to the possibility that our descendants may transcend us, just as we
have transcended the squids and the apes. (TP 196)
This interpretation of the transcendence of progress in Darwinian terms is, predictably, attractive for Rorty, for in this way he can
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explain human progress as simply a much more complicated manifestation of the same kind of change present in biological evolution:
The history of human social practices is continuous with the history of biological evolution, the only difference being that what Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett call memes gradually take over
the role of Mendels genes (TP 206). This statement is of use for a
metaphilosophical perspective that wishes to emphasize the random
aspect of human events over their planned aspect. But random mutation seems an inadequate model for the notion of human progress
as Rorty wants to describe it. For human beings use the human tool
called language to imagine the future, to sich vorstellen (set before
themselves) various scenarios, to choose from them, and then to try
to realize these projects. In order to better do this, they invent new
languages for the description of new possibilities. No vocabulary I
have come across to discuss the random mutation of genes responsible for evolution would employ such terms.
Although in general Rorty would agree with the statement above
that progress depends on a process of inventing new vocabularies for new purposes at times he seems to negate this in order
to defend the discourse of liberalism against the possible intrusions
that as yet unseen vocabularies might constitute. His principal disagreement with Foucault, for instance, is about whether in fact it is
necessary to form a new we (CIS 64). In Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity, Rorty even suggests that there is something about being
an ironic intellectual that inhibits one from being a radical, or even
a progressive and dynamic liberal (CIS 91), since the ironist
cannot offer the same kind of hope that the metaphysician can. But
given that our selves and communities are nothing but webs of beliefs, descriptive centers of gravity, it seems that the development
of a new vocabulary is tantamount, in many cases, to the formation
of a new we.
Apparently and fortunately, in my view Rorty has changed
his mind on this issue. In an article on Catherine MacKinnon and
the utility of pragmatism for feminism, he argues that it is precisely
pragmatisms willingness to dispense with present vocabularies
and not to believe that these vocabularies are adequate to expressing
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all viable political goals that makes it an ideal partner for political
movements like feminism, political movements whose success depends on what Foucault would call inventing a new we.
Universalist philosophers assume, with Kant, that all the
logical space necessary for moral deliberation is now available that all important truths about right and wrong
can not only be stated but be made plausible, in language
already to hand. I take MacKinnon to be siding with historicists like Hegel and Dewey and to be saying that moral
progress depends upon expanding this space. (TP 203)
If the webs of beliefs and desires that constitute our identities perceive progress as doing things better than they used to be done, using
more effective vocabularies than did our forbears, we must conceive
of progress toward the future as continuing to allow poets and revolutionaries to develop new vocabularies for as yet unimaginable worlds.
But this ability to invent new vocabularies, to imagine a contrast
between a painful present and a possibly less painful, dimly seen future (TP 214), requires another factor, one that pure pragmatism
does not account for: desire. It is not enough to answer the question of motivation with the same dismissive shrug that we answer
the question of the ultimate foundations for our beliefs, and claim
that people just desire change and that to ask why is an uninteresting
question. The fact is that not everyone desires change. Progressives
are the kind of people who do desire it. And, in contrast to Rortys
earlier claim above, that there is something incompatible between
ironism and progressive liberalism, I would even say that the more
ironic, the more nonmetaphysical ones belief system is, the more
one will be devoted to progress (whether or not we like the direction
that progress might take). Metaphysical desire, the desire that derives
from our specifically symbolic being-in-the-world, requires transcendence, and if not expressed in one form, it will appear in another.
Of course its quite doubtful that Rorty would accept such a
formulation, given his tendency to think of desires as a subgenre
of beliefs. There is little in common between the notion of a
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belief system, what Rorty calls our final vocabulary, would forever
remain unchanged.31 (When a new perception is so new as when
the telescope allowed men to see craters on the face of the moon
its integration can indeed cause a revolutionary change in belief,
but the actual change will still be produced by metaphors, such as
the moon is made of corruptible substance.)
The parallel with Lacanian semiotic theory would be as follows.
There are basically two ways in which words relate to one another
and hence in which our symbolic order and unconscious function the names for these, which he takes (in altered form) from
Jakobson, are metonymy and metaphor.32 Although he does not use
the same terminology as Davidson, it is not too much of a stretch
to say that, for Lacan as well, metaphor belongs to the domain of
use, in that metaphor is the name Lacan gives to the words we use
to stop the metonymic sliding of signifiers. At a microsyntactical
level, the metaphoric function can be fulfilled by any element, word,
gesture, indication, pause, or silence that serves to stop a sentence
and inform the listener: My most recent string of noises has ended,
you should make sense of them now.33 At a macrosyntactic level,
metaphor is the active ingredient in any acquisition of knowledge,
as it involves the insertion of a new word (or of an old word used in
an initially unrecognizable way) into the normal, metonymic chain
of words. Any constellation of words comprising ones knowledge
(either about specific subjects or, theoretically, the entirety of ones
knowledge) consists of a great number of words related metonymically34 to one another (in that one refers to another for its meaning
and so on), and a very small number of words that hold the place of
the constellation, that respond dumbly to the question, But why,
finally, is that the case? that do not refer back to the next word in
the chain for their meaning but rather, tautologically, to the constellation as a whole.35 These special words, which are also the principal
elements of each individuals or groups final vocabulary, are called
by Lacan quilting points (points de capiton), in that they hold together the webs of beliefs that constitute the descriptive centers of gravity that are ourselves and our communities.36 Like democracy
or freedom to an American, these are words that are conceived of
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accidental coincidence he describes will never have a chance to occur. It seems, then, that much of Rortys position as outlined in
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity eventually runs afoul of the objection to his criticism of Foucault that I discussed above: namely,
that to guarantee progress, to bring about dimly-sensed future possibilities for diminishing pain, he must allow for the possibility that
new wes will be formed, and it is only the work of the thinkers he
defines as private thinkers that will eventually bring that about. A
strict divide, then, between the public and the private is not desirable if one cherishes, as Rorty does, the constant mutation of final
vocabularies that constitutes progress.
Among the various practices that Rorty categorizes as private
in that they have to do with the individuals effort to define
herself as autonomous over and against the blind impresses that
have formed her and the final vocabularies into which she has been
thrown psychoanalysis holds a special place. Psychoanalysis is
important to Rorty because it showed how every individual life, not
just the poets or the revolutionarys, can be seen as a poem, as a
process of self-creation.
By seeing every human being as consciously or unconsciously acting out an idiosyncratic fantasy, we can see the
distinctively human, as opposed to animal, portion of each
human life as the use for symbolic purposes of every particular person, object, situation, event, and word encountered
in later life. This process amounts to redescribing them,
thereby saying of them all, Thus I willed it. (CIS 37)
By recasting human Being in terms of poetic self-creation, Freud
helped distance us from the traditional Platonic model of morality in terms of which what one ought to do was conceived of as
a function of a universal truth concerning human nature. Rather
than working toward the Good, whose truth resided in each individual human being, Freud helped us see moral consciousness as
historically conditioned, a product as much of time and chance as
of political or aesthetic consciousness (CIS 30). If Platos project
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had been to bring together the public and the private, by claiming
that individual perfection was inherently commensurate with social
justice, Freuds demonstration of the contingency of moral identity
helped make it clear that the quest for self-perfection would not automatically lead to social justice, that in fact the opposite was just as
likely true (CIS 34).
Because the quest for self-perfection does not lead to social justice, Freuds own method for seeking autonomy a method that
constituted a valuable contribution because it conceived of this quest
as available to everybody, not just poets ought as well to be confined to the private realm. Rorty is, consequently, quite dismissive of
attempts to make of psychoanalysis a tool for social change, claiming that Freudo-Marxist analyses of authoritarianism have offered
no better suggestions about how to keep the thugs from taking over
EH (162). But what Rorty fails to mention in his discussion of Freud
is that while Freud may well have helped destroy any notion of the
individuals conscience partaking of an essential, extra-individual
morality, much of his writing nevertheless argues that it is precisely
the interaction and overlap between the individuals private drives
and the demands that society makes of him that is responsible for so
much of the pain (and pleasure) that occurs both at the individual
and the social level. Psychoanalysis, then, cannot be relegated purely
to the private sphere, for the problems it treats are reflections of public norms and the individuals it helps create in turn change and affect those norms. If the purpose of public discourse is to find ways
of ensuring that the thugs not take over, it may turn out that some
of the Freudian veins of Ideologiekritik that Rorty dismisses do have
some proposals to make.
The problem of how to keep the thugs from taking over can also
be stated as that of how to ensure that a liberal society continue to
be liberal in the sense of the word that Rorty emphasizes, i.e., that it
continue to strive for the diminution of cruelty. The problem stems
from the fact that, for Rorty, there is no such thing as a universal
ethical sense, a built-in mechanism for recognizing the humanity
in another human and automatically respecting it, treating it as an
end in itself. Rather, individuals recognize others because they have
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defined paradigmatically in relation to an entire structure as opposed to in relation to their local position in a syntagm, as red and
tree usually are. Each refers to a global semantic field, an ideology concerning what is right, what it means to be a man, etc., that
goes far beyond being able to use a word correctly in a sentence.
Of course these examples can also be defined by their position in
a sentence, but when they function in a final vocabulary, their unjustifiable nature is analogous to the metaphoric function of standing-in-for-something. Insofar as they function as metaphors, these
words can also be seen in a Lacanian vein as being constellations
of quilting points. The added benefit of thinking of them in these
terms is that one realizes that insofar as the identity of an individual
is constituted by a web of quilting points words that stand in
for the ultimate lack of foundation in some metaphysical reality,
that stand in for the symbolic orders incompleteness vis vis lived
experience it is also held together by desire, by the desire for the
real that supports any system of meaning. In community politics,
this desire manifests itself as that ineffable pleasure or horror that,
as we discussed above, accompanies any invocation of the final vocabulary. Communities, then, are not only held together by agreement concerning fundamental beliefs and desire; they are also and
more fundamentally held together by libidinal investments.40 These
libidinal investments are as responsible for all the good that is done
in the name of a community everything that a liberal like Rorty
says we should be proud of when we think about our country41 as
they are for all the evil that is done its name, racism and nationalistic
violence being the prime examples.42
For Rorty, as long as one includes in ones final vocabulary the
importance of not causing pain, then all one needs to guard ones
society from becoming comfortable with the pain of others are good
descriptions.
What would guard such a society from feeling comfortable
with the institutionalized infliction of pain and humiliation
on the powerless? From taking such pain for granted? Only
detailed descriptions of that pain and humiliation de-
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250
a wrinkle in history
251
some final vocabularies are simply better than others; because from
our perspective some are more likely to promote social ills than others; these are the ones we would like most to dismantle.
What we call social ills always have to do with vocabularies.
One needs a vocabulary to make distinctions. This does not mean
that, for instance, love is more natural than hate, but rather that the
differentiation that supports both requires a vocabulary. There is
no more likelihood of a natural aggression to the other prior to it
meaning something (i.e., having a place in a vocabulary) than there
is of a natural hatred of grass or small furry animals. The natural man might kill the furry animal, or might leave it in peace, but
he is unlikely to feel that its eradication is necessary to his way of
life. Psychoanalytic Ideologiekritik of the kind that iek promotes
believes that such a desire to hurt or to eradicate the other is an indication that the other has been constructed as a symptom, that which
is perceived as keeping the subjects of a community from truly being
what their final vocabulary promises they really are. When this is
the case, the only thing that will prevent violence is what iek calls
traversing the fantasy, coming to the realization that ones fantasy,
the final vocabulary upon which ones community is founded, is
contingent. This is humiliating. But sometimes what a society needs
is a little humiliation just to keep it honest.44
Ultimately, whether in public or in private, in philosophy, Ideologiekritik, or clinical practice, pragmatism and psychoanalysis have
the same goal: to make people more comfortable with contingency.45
The psychoanalytic pragmatist sees that this goal has positive public
consequences as well, since it sees racism, sexism, homophobia, and
ethnic hatred as ways that people who are not comfortable with the
contingency of their selves and their societies react to that contingency via a direct expression of their jouissance. In other words, it
feels good to hate when one sees the object of ones hatred as responsible for what is wrong in ones world. But if one learns to recognize
that what is wrong in ones world is wrong because worlds are human creations and human creations never can tap into the perfection of pure correspondence to an ideal (the metaphysical fantasy
par excellence), then one can learn to direct ones jouissance in other
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253
the prevalence of this question, along with its social and individual
concomitants metaphysical desire and its various offshoots, the
desire for progress included as having much to do with the notion of ineffability. But since metaphysical desire is a social and not
just a philosophical phenomenon, it behooves us not to try, as Rorty
does, to eradicate it from a minor discourse, but rather to analyze it,
to think about the ways in which its manifestations act to increase
pain, as well to imagine how it might be redirected toward better
ends. All of this requires a vocabulary that refuses the temptation to
keep pragmatism pure, that knows, in other words how to talk
about the ineffable.
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Notes
Notes to chapter 1
1. Jacques Lacan, crits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Norton, 1977), 51.
2. See, for example, Metahistory (Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1973, and The Discourse of History, in The
Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (University of California Press,
1989).
3. Letter to President Clinton from William M. Detweiler, national commander of the American Legion, Jan. 19, 1995, The New York Times, E5,
Feb. 5, 1995.
4. Letter to I. Michael Heyman, Secretary of the Smithsonian, from a
group of scholars, Nov. 16, 1994, The New York Times, E5, Feb. 5, 1995.
5. Almost everyone who thinks at all about history speaks about it by
way of some dualism, be they the German terms Historie and Geschichte
(de Certeau), or historiography and the past (Jenkins), the purpose is to
acknowledge the traditional separation between the real thing (the events
themselves) and the retelling of those events by the historian, in which the
events are subject to ordering and interpretation. One of Hayden Whites
innovations is to locate within these traditional distinctions a more fundamental one between history and metahistory, and then show that distinction to be practically null. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 52.
6. As Jenkins argues, such facts, though important, are true but trite
within the larger issues historians consider. Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking
History (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 32.
7. The case of the Smithsonian debate is pleasantly ironic in that elements
that usually represent the political Right, and share its rhetoric of certain
fundamental values right and wrong, truth and falsehood, etc. are
forced to adopt the terms of relativism conveys, gives the impression
and to have recourse to openly political justifications of their position,
since the institutional banner of truth and objectivity is being waved by
the other side.
8. This recalls ieks characterization of the cynicism of postmodern ideology, no longer Marxs classic They do not know it, but they are doing
it, but rather They know very well what they are doing, but still, they
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a wrinkle in history
are doing it. Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso,
1989), 29.
9. A personal epilogue: Having already written the above section, and
feeling, myself, some dismay at the lost opportunity to bring a different
view of the Hiroshima bombing to Americans, I happened upon an editorial in the New York Times entitled The Crimes of Unit 731 (March 18,
1995), 15. This editorial was intended to inform Americans of Japanese
brutalities during the war, mainly against the Chinese which included
the deliberate release of deadly epidemics and the experimental torture of
individuals but also to remind us of the role of the U.S. government in
downplaying these atrocities after the war, in order to please a new ally and
to hide its own interest in Japanese research into biological warfare. The
clear suggestion is that the U.S. government might have just as much interest as the Japanese in attempting to minimize the facts or offset them with
Japanese sufferings, especially the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The fact that such information, itself largely unrelated to the
historical question of the American decision to bomb Hiroshima, would
lead me to question my own position on the debate underlines the fact that
what passes for discussions on historical reality are almost always informed
by ones ethical positions.
10. I have never denied that knowledge of history, culture and society was
possible; I have only denied that a scientific knowledge, of the sort actually
attained in the study of physical nature, was possible (23).
11. Jacques Rancire, The Names of History (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994), 5.
12. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Historicism, in The Ideologies of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 157.
13 .As he writes, paraphrasing Althusser, any statement about human
nature, is necessarily and irredeemably ideological (160).
14. This is one of the weaknesses, for instance, of contemporary new
historicist work in what is called the early modern period. As Lyndal
Roper says of Stephen Greenblatts article concerning the problem of psychoanalytic codes for the interpretation of early modern texts, In other
words, we know that we are dealing with early modern, historical subjects
because they do not evince a concept of the individual this is what
their historical distance consists of and yet it is the poststructuralist critique of the subject and of psychoanalysis which is drawn upon to
read our evidence in this manner. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil:
Witchcraft, sexuality and religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 11.
notes
257
15. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 19.
16. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New York and London:
Monthly Review Press, 1971), 172.
17. This claim is based on his observation that Foucaults notion of the
subject is, rather, a classical one: subject as the power of self-mediation
and harmonizing the antagonistic forces, as a way of mastering the use
of pleasures through a restoration of an image of self (2). While the accuracy of this description might be subject to debate, it is irrelevant to the
discussion at hand.
18. Slavoj iek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994), 30.
19. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Fantasy and The Origin of Sexuality,
The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49.1 (1968): 1-18, 8.
20. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1939), 89.
21. Although for Freud the unconscious is already collective: I do not
think that much is to be gained by introducing the concept of a collective unconscious the content of the unconscious is collective anyhow, a
general possession of mankind (209).
22. Although questions of preceding and following are actually moot,
since the unconscious is always already present as a screen between perception and consciousness.
23. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III: The Psychoses, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 111.
24. This position, that the lacunae of speech are the truth for which a
psychoanalytically inspired history should strive, is also that of Michel de
Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press,
1988), 326: We are thus led back to the connection of theory with fiction,
in play within that space between history and the novel, and developed on
the level of the visible text within the relation between demonstration (historiographical verisimilitude) and its lacunae (an analytical truth).
25. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter
Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 28.
26. Slavoj iek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 102.
27. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261.
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notes
259
260
a wrinkle in history
11. This is Grants thesis, which I will discuss in more detail at a later
point.
12. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 119.
13. Pierre Duhem, Le Systme du Monde: Histoire de Doctrines Cosmologiques de Platon Copernic, 10 vols. (Paris: Hermann, 1913-59), VIII 158.
14. All translations of Duhem are mine.
15. E. Grant, Place and Space in Medieval Physical Thought, Motion
and Time, Space and Matter: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and
Science, eds. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus,
Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1976. 137-67, 138. Rpt. in E. Grant,
Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy (London: Varorium Reprints, 1981).
16. In the words of Pseudo-Siger of Brabant, if such dimensions are assumed to be a place and since such dimensions are nothing, it follows that
place is nothing, which is impossible (Place and Space 140).
17. E. Grant, Medieval and Seventeenth-Century Conceptions of an Infinite Void Space Beyond the Cosmos, ISIS 60 (1969): 39-60, 41. Rpt.
in E. Grant, Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy (London:
Varorium Reprints, 1981).
18. E. Grant, Jean Buridan: A Fourteenth Century Cartesian, Archives
internationales d histoire des sciences 64 (1963): 251-255, 252. Rpt. in E.
Grant, Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy (London: Varorium Reprints, 1981).
19. See, for example, Dales, The Scientific Achievement of the Middle Ages.
20. E. Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of space and vacuum
from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 135-147. Bradwardine actually denied that God
could make an infinite void that would be independent of Himself, as such
a space would therefore be coterminous with God or contain him, impossibilities since God contained all and could not be contained or equaled.
Grant, E. Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 176. Therefore the infinite
void was God, and hence could not have extension or dimension.
21. Flat is to be understood here and for the remainder of the essay as
rectilinear.
22. Alexandre Koyr, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), viii.
See also Jacques Merleau-Ponty and Bruno Morando, The Rebirth of Cosmology, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), who
notes
261
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a wrinkle in history
notes
263
16. Johann Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J.
Paton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 192.
17. Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans lOccident mdival (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 346.
18. The extended argument, from which the preceding examples were
culled, is to be found in my How the World Became a Stage.
Notes for chapter 4
1. Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press,
1988), 56. Hereafter cited as D.
2. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of
the New World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
246. Hereafter cited as AH.
3. I wish to emphasize that I use the term magnified in its strictest, most
mundane sense, and in reference only to Lyotards philosophical problem,
not in any way to the magnitude in moral terms of either event. This is not
an essay in comparative victimology.
4. Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press,
1963), is a critique of precisely this application of juridical reason.
5. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettle Ford, Introduction, in Race,
Discourse and the Origin of the Americas (Washington and London: The
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 1. Hereafter cited as RD.
6. ...in that we inhabit a world indelibly altered by it.
7. I borrow the terminology I am using to frame these questions from
Lyotard: As distinguished from a litigation, a differend [diffrend] would
be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments.
[...] A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by
which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse
(D xi).
8. Sylvia Wynter, 1492: A New World View, in Vera Hyatt and Rex
Nettlefored, eds. Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas (Washington and London: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 8. Hereafter
cited as NW.
9. The sick humor of this practice is not only evident to modern readers.
Las Casas confessed that on reading it he could not decide whether to
laugh or to weep and even its author, Palacios Rubios was reported to have
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laughed out loud when told about the manner in which it was read. See
Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 35.
10. According to Sylvia Wynter, The function of the juridical document
was therefore to draw the culturally alien people of the Caribbean and the
Americas within the classificatory logic of the Judeo-Christian local culture
theology, and yet to do so in specifically monarchical-juridical terms that
could make their subjugation and expropriation by the Spanish state seem
real and normal. See Sylvia Wynter, The Pope Must Have Been Drunk,
The King of Castile a Madman: Culture as Actuality, and the Caribbean
Rethinking Modernity, in Alvina Ruorecht and Cecilia Taiana eds. The
Reordering of Culture: Latin America, The Caribbean and Canada in the Hood
(Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995, 17-42), 19. Hereafter cited as P.
11. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and
the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, England: The Cambridge University Press, 1982), 31. Hereafter cited as F.
12. For this section concerning the Natural Law philosophy of the Salamanca School, important in order to give a sense of Las Casas immediate
intellectual progenitors, I have relied almost entirely on Pagden.
13. Lewis Hanke, All Man Kind Is One (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 83. Hereafter cited as AM.
14. Fray Bartolom de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992),
32. Hereafter cited as ID. There is no extant text of Las Casas Defense,
which he prepared in Spanish and read to the audiences and judges at
the Valladolid debate. The version I have used is Stafford Pooles English
translation of a Latin translation of the original made some time around
1740. Lewis Hankes summary and discussion of the debate is based on
the same source.
15. What do joyful tidings have to do with wounds, captivities, massacres, conflagrations, the destruction of cities and the common evils of
war? They will go to hell rather than learn the advantages of the gospel
(ID 270).
16. Sylvia Wynter, Do Not Call Us Negroes: How Multicultural Textbooks
Perpetuate Racism (San Francisco: Aspire, 1992), 87.
17. Qtd. in Sylvia Wynter, New Seville and the Conversion Experience of
Bartolom de Las Casas. Part II, Jamaica Journal 17.3 (1984): 46-56. 46.
Hereafter cited as NS2.
18. [...] there is no people, among the civilized, which surpasses the
Spanish in prudence, wit, strength, skill in war, humanity, justice, religion,
notes
265
266
a wrinkle in history
notes
267
268
a wrinkle in history
1947), 322: For Schelling, Don Quijote was a mythical saga symbolizing
the inevitable struggle between the ideal and the real, a conflict typical of
our world, which has lost the identity between the two. Although there is
no citation, he is probably quoting from Schellings Philosophie der Kunst.
17. Friedrich von Schlegel, Lyceums-Fragment 48 in Prosaische Jugendschriften, (Vienna: J. Minor, 1882), II, 190. Henceforth abbreviated to PJ.
Qtd. in Romantische Ironie 22.
18. Qtd. in Strohschneider-Kohrs 22. die freyeste aller Licenzen, denn
durch sie setzt man sich ber sich selbst weg; und doch auch die gesetzlichste, denn sie ist unbedingt nothwendig.
19. der Begriff fr sich selbst, der denkende Geist, sich nun auch seinerseits in der Philosophie tiefer erkannte und damit auch das Wesen der Kunst
auf eine grndlichere Weise zu nehmen unmittelbar veranlasst ward.
20. Schlegel, Athenums-Fragment 116 in Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Raschm (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1964), 39: Und doch
kann auch sie [die Ironie] am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und
dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den
Flgeln der poetischen Reflexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Reflexion
immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln
vervielfachen.
21. See my How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the
Question of Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), especially chapter 3.
22. Schlegel, Schriften und Fragmenten aus den Werken und dem handschriftlichen Nachlass zusammengestellt und eingel (Stuttgart: E. Behler,
1956), quoted in Romantische Ironie 66: Ironie ist gleichsam die Epideixis
der Unendlichkeit.
23. Hegel, Hegels Logic trans. William Wallace, (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1975), 137.
24. die Tendenz nach einem tiefen unendlichen Sinn.
25. The true etymology is, of course, somewhat different: romantisch in
German proceeds from the tendency of the literary critics of that age to
focus on the literature and national identities of the Romance cultures,
which literature was written in the vernacular Romance (French and Spanish) in contradistinction to the traditional language of literacy: Latin. By
the sixteenth century the majority of published material in the Romance
vernacular was adventure literature of the kind today denoted by the notion of chivalry, and hence the Romances central connotation was this
type of literature and its attending content of the dedication of knights
to their ladies. See Gumbrecht, Eine Geschichte der Spanischen Literatur
(Frankfurt: Surkamp, 1990), vol. I, 185-6.
notes
269
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notes
271
W. Felkel, (Detroit, Mich., Wayne State UP, 1991), 126-130, for further
arguments concerning reality and its transmutations.
43. Rorty would not agree with the use of world-view, because the whole
point of his argument is that the notion of differing world-views, or conceptual schema through which we interpret the world, is misleading. For
this argument see his essay, The World Well Lost, in his Consequences of
Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 3-18.
44. The epistemological world-view corresponds, of course, to the rise
of skepticism in western intellectual life. As Robbins argues, Spain was at
the forefront of this historical development insofar as it confronted most
insistently the issues regarding knowledge and perception which lay at the
heart of intellectual developments elsewhere in the conteintent, albeit
primarily via works of fiction. Jeremy Robbins, The Challenges of Uncertainty: an Introduction to Seventeenth Century Spanish Literature, (London:
Duckworth &Co, 1998), 41.
45. See Allens note in Q, II 44.
46. que sin duda es el mismo que deseis alcanzar por esposo.
47. Sase quien fuere este que me pide por esposa, que yo se lo agradezco;
que ms quiero ser mujer legtima de un lacayo que no amiga y burlada de
un caballero, puesto que el que me burl no lo es.
48. For an exhaustive history of the paradox and its various (attempts at)
solutions see Alexander Rstow, Der Lgner, Theorie, Geschichte und Auflsung, (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987).
49. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 800-802.
50. With this division of the agent we are now also in agreement with
Lukacss understanding of irony, a formal constituent of the novel form
that signifies an interior diversion of the normatively creative subject into
a subjectivity as interiority, which opposes power complexes that are alien
to it and which strives to imprint the contents of its longing upon the alien
world, and a subjectivity which sees through the abstract and, therefore,
limited nature of the mutually alien worlds of subject and object, understand [sic] these worlds by seeing their limitations as necessary conditions
of their existence and, by thus seeing them, allows the duality of the world
to subsist. Georg Lukcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock,
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 74-75.
51. Digo yo, pues, agora replic Sancho que deste hombre aquella
parte que jur verdad la dejen pasar, y la que dijo mentira la ahorquen, y
desta manera se cumplir al pie de la letra la condicin del pasaje.
Pues, seor, gobernador replic el preguntador , ser necesario
que el tal hombre se divida en partes, en mentirosa y verdadera, y si se
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notes
273
8. Henry Sullivan, The Oedipus Myth: Lacan and Dream Interpretation, in The Prince in the Tower: Perceptions of La Vida es Sueo, ed. Frederick A. de Armas (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 117-31,
112.
9. Sullivan is in fact a dedicated historicist. (See, for instance, Henry
Sullivan, Lacan and Caldern: Spanish Classical Drama in the light of
Psychoanalytic Theory, Gestos 10 (1990): 39-55.) As I make clear below, I
simply disagree with some of his historical conclusions.
10. The discussion of the problem of skepticism is an important theme in
the history of the criticism of La vida es sueo. See, for example, Marcelino
Menndez Pelayo, Caldern y su teatro, Estudios y discursos de crtica literaria (Santander: CSIC, 1941), 224, in which he argues that Calderns
play stages a transition from skepticism to dogmatism. Jos Mara Valverde, in the introduction to his edition of La vida es sueo (xiii), argues
precisely the opposite, claiming that unlike Descartes, Segismundo never
escapes from his doubt, and can only proceed by replacing certainty with
moral conscience. As will become clear below, Valverdes interpretation
convinces me more.
11. In keeping with the attitude toward theory that this article is meant
to showcase, I will not quote formulations by Lacan or followers of Lacan
in order to seek out their corrolates in the play. Instead I will make only
synthetic remarks based on my own knowledge and interpretation of
Lacanian ideas and provide occasional references for the interested reader to consult in more detail. For Lacans ideas about the human beings
throwness in language, see his Linstance de la lettre dans linconscient
ou la raison depuis Freud, in crits (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966). For
more on Heideggers notion of Geworfenheit, see Sein und Zeit (Tbingen:
Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 167-180.
12. See Lacans article, La signification du phallus, in crits (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966).
13. Menndez Palayo, in the chapter cited above, also argues for an allegorical understanding of the work as a symbol of human life in general.
14. Caldern de la Barca, La vida es sueo, ed. Jos Mara Valverde (Barcelona: Planeta, 1981),
I. iv. 319-327.
15. See Everett Hesses classic article, Calderns Concept of the Perfect
Prince in La vida es sueo, in Critical Essays on the Theatre of Caldern, ed.
Bruce W. Wardropper (New York: New York University Press, 1965).
16. Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 66-72.
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17. In order to avoid a long digression into the debate around the social
transformations leading from the late Middle Ages to the early modern
period, let us just say that even the strongest critics of the various theses
of medieval exceptionalism grant that the world in 1600 was enormously
different form that in 1300. See, e.g., Lee Pattersons article, On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies. Speculum 65
(1990): 87-108. For the sake of this discussion let us stipulate merely that
the general tendency of these changes was to greater social mobility and
a corresponding undermining of the traditional social and metaphysical
order.
18. What follows is a brief summation of ideas and definitions from How
the World Became a Stage.
19. For another argument supporting the presence of skepticism in Calderns thought, see Daniel Heiples Life as Dream and the Philosophy of
Disillusionment, in The Prince in the Tower: Perceptions of La Vida es
Sueo, ed. Frederick A. de Armas (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1993), 111
- 116.
20. David Castillo and William Egginton, All the Kings Subjects: Honor
in Early Modernity, Romance Language Annual 6 (1995): 422-27.
21. Edmund M. Wilson corroborates this argument when he argues that
all the major characters in the play are too confident in their own abilities.
La vida es sueo, Caldern y la crtica: historia y antologa, eds. Manuel
Durn and Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra. 2 vols. (Madrid: Ed. Gredos,
1976) 1:300-328, 318.
Notes to chapter 7
1. Thanks are due to my assistants Andrew Franklin, Megan Pendergast,
and Aimee Woznick, without whose tireless research this chapter would
have been inconceivable.
2. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Dunwoody,
Georgia: N.S. Berg, 1968). See also Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd
Psychology: Gustave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third
Republic (London: SAGE Publications, 1973). As Walter Benjamin writes,
The crowd no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth
century writers. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) 166.
3. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parson (New
York: H. Holt, 1903), passim.
4. The terminology and theses are those of Jos-Antonio Maravall. See in
notes
275
276
a wrinkle in history
Ludens: Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel [Hamburg, 1956]), argues that
there was a practice of play peculiar to the Middle Ages that involved the
generation of the very spaces that would normally distinguish the serious
from the playful or fictional. See Gumbrecht, Laughter and Arbitrariness,
Subjectivity and Seriousness: The Libro de Buen Amor, the Celestina, and
the Style of Sense Production in Early Modern Times, Making Sense in
Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1992), 111-122.
13. See, for example, E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (London/Edinburgh/New York: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1903), I 187.
14. Elie Konigson, LEspace Thtral Mdival (Paris: ditions du Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975), 50.
15. See my An Epistemology of the Stage: Subjectivity and Theatricality
in Early Modern Spain, New Literary History 27 (1996): 391-414.
16. Splica de la Ciudad de Sevilla al Consejo de Castilla, sobre licencia para
representar comedias, quoted in Jean Sentaurens, Sobre el pblico de los
corrales sevillanos en el Siglo de Oro, in Creacin y pblico en la literatura
espaola, eds. J.-F. Botrel and S. Salan (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1974)
56-92, 62-3.
17. Wallace Sterling, Jr., Carros, Corrales, and Court Theatres: The
Spanish Stage in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Quarterly
Journal of Speech 49 (1963): 17-22, 20.
18. Don Quijote de La Mancha (Madrid: Ctedra, 1996), I 557; quoted
and commented in John J. Allen, El papel del vulgo en la economa de los
corrales de comedias madrileos, Edad de oro XII (1993): 9-17, 12.
19. Cervantes 557. The figure of the vulgo has a long and troubled history
in Spanish letters, which we will only touch on here. Of note is the idea
that one of the implicit butts of Cervantess wit and resentment is his rival
and far greater success in the world of the stage, Lope de Vega, who, as a
writer who benefited extravagantly from the adoration of the vulgo, might
be thought to treat them in a more generous light. See Kirschners comparative study of the figure of the mob in Shakespeare and Lope, in which she
argues that the Lopean mob is portrayed in somewhat better terms than its
Shakespearean equivalent. Teresa J. Kirschner, The Mob in Shakespeare
and Lope de Vega, in Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama
1580-1680, eds. Louise and Peter Fothergill Payne (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1991), 140-151. Nevertheless, when speaking of the vulgo
as the recipients of their own work, individual playwrights tended to be
quite withering. See, for some examples, Hugo A. Rennert, The Spanish
Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega (New York: Dover Publications, 1963),
notes
277
117. The English context corroborates this disdain for the taste of the
masses: for Jonson, for example, the uninstructed reader is bound to be
cozened by plays and the source of the cheat is to be found in the multitude, though their excellent [supreme] vice of judgment. Leo Salinger,
Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 200. See also Nicoll Allardyce, The Garrick Stage:
Theatres and Audiences in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: The University
of Georgia Press, 1980). As the case of the Drury Lane theater riots indicate, the threat of random or individual violence in the theater did not
mean that theater audience could not on occasion also act as more or less
unified mobs. Henry William Pedicord, The Changing Audience, in
The London Theatre World, 1660-1800, ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1980), 245. See also Leo
Hughes, The Dramas Patrons (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971) for
descriptions of English audiences behavior in the eighteenth century.
20. Egginton, Epistemology of the Stage 408. Cf., for the case of the
English stage, Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender
in Shakespeares England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
21. Lemazuriers Galrie historique, quoted in W. L. Wiley, The Early Public Theatre in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 21112.
22. For a historical examination of the Cartesian theater, see my How
the World Became a Stage, chapter 5.
23. Baltasar Gracin, El Criticn (Madrid: Ctedra, 2000), 381.
24. See my Gracin and the Emergence of the Modern Subject, Hispanic
Issues 14 (1997): 151-169.
25. Maxim 94 of Orculo manual; Gracin, El hroe, el discreto, orculo
manual y arte de prudencia (Barcelona: Planeta, 1984).
26. Todo est ya en su punto y el ser persona en el mayor [Everything is
now at a crest, and being person is the utmost]. Orculo maxim 1.
27. For arguments concerning the history of publicity in this sense, see
the articles collected in A History of Private Life, as well as Jrgen Habermass influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans.
Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989).
28. The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1976).
29. That the experience of anonymity is both ubiquitous within the
historical epoch of modernity and pivotal in modern power relations is
supported by a linguistic analysis of forms of address. More specifically,
the burgeoning of publicity as the stage for the organization of power
278
a wrinkle in history
notes
279
280
a wrinkle in history
38. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979).
39. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des
Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 52.
40. See Jobst Welges contribution to Crowds, eds. Jeffrey T. Schapp and
Matthew Tiews (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
41. Sein und Zeit (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 126.
42. A psychoanalytic explanation for this phenomenon can emerges from
a reading of the debate Freud stages in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (trans. James Strachey [New York: Bantam Books, 1960])
with what he refers to as Le Bons deservedly famous work on crowd psychology. If the libidinal bond constitutive of mass behavior requires explanation in that love usually describes a relationality between individuals
across a barrier distinguishing an object or another person, whereas the
crowd phenomenon clearly seems at odds with this formulation Freud
solves this problem by arguing that individual members of the crowd have
put one and the same object in the place of the ego ideal and have consequently
identified themselves with one another in their ego (61). Likewise, by attending in a nonparticipatory way to the performance taking place on the stage,
audience members effectively shift toward the outside the ego-boundary
normally demarcating the separation between self and other, the result
being that the audience can react to affective input in a non-differentiated
way, thus producing the effect so characteristic of the crowd as described
by Le Bon and others: that of the collective mind.
43. For an analysis of a specific example of the political mobilization of
theatrical crowds, see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18 B L and the
Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, California: Stanford University
press, 1996).
44. Obras de Don Ramn de Mesonero Romanos, Biblioteca de autores espaoles, vol. 200 (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1967), 139.
45. Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 15.
46. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, trans. Walter J. Cobb (New York: New
American Library, 1965), 21.
47. Richard Miller, Bohemia: The Protoculture Then and Now (Chicago:
Nelson-Hall, 1977), 26.
48. Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience,
http://www.critical-art.net/books/index.html, 11.
49. See Lynn Jamieson, Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 19: intimacy is again
becoming attenuated not because people are being re-absorbed into a pre-
notes
281
modern type of communal life but because mass consumer culture promotes a self-obsessive, self-isolating individualism which is incapable of
sustaining anything other than kaleidoscopic relationships.
50. thats RL [real life]. Its just one more window, as Sherry Turkle
quotes from one of her wired informants. Life on the Screen: Identity in the
Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 13.
51. Electronic Disturbance,
http://www.critical-art.net/books/index.html, 3.
Notes to chapter 8
1. The thoughts presented here were inspired by a talk given by Scott
Bukatman at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in
May of 1999, and by further discussions with Bernadette Wegenstein. See,
for example, Wegenstein, Shooting Up Heroines, in Reload: Rethinking
Women and Cyberculture, eds. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (Boston,
MIT Press, 2001), and Bukatman, Terminal Identity : the Virtual Subject
in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, Duke UP, 1993).
2. This essay focuses primarily on the manifestation of this phenomenon
in film, although it is obviously part of a general zeitgeist that finds expression in a variety of media. The trope of bleeding I describe below has
become so common that the television series Falcons Crest actually ended
its long and successful run by revealing that the entire world it depicted
had been the dream of a character from another popular show. For some
analyses of media other than film, see, for example, Sherry Turkle, Life
on The Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1995), and Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation:
Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999).
More than just a history of the trope in film, this paper seeks to contextualize this zeitgeist as a whole.
3. And am I not, in so doing, merely rehearsing what Jean-Louis Braudy has
claimed is the historical move par excellence in film studies, namely, finding its origin in practices other than film? Or what of Braudys own claim,
that cinema is the realization of a desire to represent inherent to human psychology, a realization next to which painting and theater were merely dry
runs? Jean-Louis Braudy, The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches
to the Impression of Reality in Cinema, in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen,
and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford UP,
1992), 690-707; 697. My reply is that the particular desire realized by film
is not universal, as Braudy argues, but rather specific to the epistemology of
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a wrinkle in history
notes
283
Limits of Modern Aesthetics, in Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society, Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara Groselclose, eds. (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1985), 197-210, 1985
11. While this chapter is not the place to pursue it, a connection between
this model and a Lacanian analysis of mediation suggests itself, in which
the ever-receding {Q} has the value of the objet petit a, the piece of the
real that is both the object and cause of desire. This Lacanian analysis
has tended to focus on how the medium of film temps the viewer to evercloser identification with a given viewer position precisely insofar as a total
identification a collapse of mediation, in other words always fails.
The literature on this topic is extensive; see, for example, Slavoj iek, In
His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large, in Everything You Always Wanted
to Know About Lacan But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock , Slavoj iek, ed.
(London and New York: Verso, 1992), 211-272; and Joan Copjec, Read My
Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The
MIT Press, 1994), 15-38.
12. Reality bleed comes from Cronenbergs eXistenZ (1999), and refers
to a phenomenon in virtual reality gaming in which elements of the real
world begin to invade the created world of the game.
13. Costa Lima 460. The term, of course, refers to John Austins How to
Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP 1975 [1962]).
14. And of course there are more, as others have noted. See, for example,
Daniel Argent, The Reality of Reality: How eXistenZ and The Thirteenth
Floor Reflect Their Filmmakers View of Film and Audience, Creative
Screenwriting 6.2 (1999): 74-76. One element all these films clearly have
in common is that they are all to some extent about mediation. As I will
argue below, such example should not be seen as exceptional, however, but
rather as the actualization of an ever-present potential of representational
practices since theater. Realism proper, then, is always about mediation.
15. This mention is not entirely gratuitous. The fact that the Matrix is
itself the product of a language (albeit digital) and hence in some quite
literal sense has been put into words (or symbols) belies Morpheuss claim
and provides support for the later Wittgensteins contention that one cant
get between language and reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, third edition, G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958), 21-22, passim. I am grateful to my student Kenji
Arai for this insightful argument.
16. A new breed of video games partakes of this bleeding effect. One
such game, Majestic, takes over the mail program of your browser in order
to deliver real-time updates of your virtual characters whereabouts and
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notes
285
286
a wrinkle in history
notes
287
288
a wrinkle in history
18. Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 20; quoted in TP 43.
19. This metaphor (simile, in this case), which inaugurated Lacans combination of structural linguistics and psychoanalysis, is actually of the kind
that Rorty would usually admire, because it initiated new possibilities of
thought on the basis of an utterance that at first glance seemed absurd. See
my discussion of metaphor below.
20. Noam Chomsky, Language and Thought (Wakefield, Rhode Island &
London: Moyer Bell, 1993), 36.
21. Rorty makes this point himself about that aspect of language he calls
our final vocabularies: ... we do not construct final vocabularies. They are
always already there. We find ourselves thrown into them. Final vocabularies are not tools, for we cannot specify the purpose of a final vocabulary
without futility twisting around inside the circle of that final vocabulary
(EH 38). Which is to say that at least some aspect of language, our final
vocabularies, is unique, since we can describe pretty much everything else
without twisting around in it. Rorty might add that the same thing can be
said of thought or brains or neurons. I agree, but I dont see how this
is an objection to the statement that there might be something philosophically interesting to say about language.
22. Jacques Lacan, Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet, in
Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 11-52, 25; an excerpt from the unpublished Seminar VI on Le dsir et son interprtation.
23. See, for example, Slavoj iek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques
Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991),
147-154, and For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political
Factor (London: Verso, 1991), passim.
24. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961) forward; quoted in EH 57.
25. This phrase comes from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An
Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
26. See The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 50, for only the
most recent example.
27. The ahistoricism of this account can made perfectly compatible
with the pragmatist historicism that I share with Rorty by saying, on the
one hand, that the statement all human beings partake of metaphysical
desire implies merely that metaphysical desire is central to my (historically situated) definition of a human being and, on the other, that one
can make any pronouncement one wants without thereby assuming that
notes
289
290
a wrinkle in history
deal to J. D. Nasios Enseignement de Sept Concepts Cruciaux de la Psychanalyse (Paris: ditions Rivages, 1988). See 240 for his explanation of the
association of metaphor with S1, the meaningless master signifier whose
authority supports all knowledge.
33. This function is explained in Subversion du sujet et dialectique du
dsir dans linconscient freudien, in crits 798-828. ieks commentary
throughout chapter 3 of Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989)
is extremely useful.
34. It is certainly reasonable to dispute Lacans use of this term, which
ultimately seems to have little to do with the poetic device of the same
name. The point to infer from his metaphorical appropriation of metonymy is that when words are used normally they may be understood to
lie adjacent to one another in a chain, what structural linguistics refers to
as the syntagm. This metonymy of words linked together in a signifying
chain becomes itself Lacans principal metaphor for desire because of the
movement or sliding along the chain that occurs as we produce or listen to
language, a sliding in which the meaning of the present word always hangs
on the next, and so on.
35. The former Lacan refers to as S2, or knowledge, the latter as S1, or the
master signifier.
36. For the diachronic and synchronic effects of les points de capiton, and
their identity with metaphor, see crits 805.
37. This is actually my extrapolation. Rorty explicitly denies the usefulness of the ironist intellectual at times, saying that ironist theory is at best
useless and at worst dangerous (CIS 68) to the quest for social justice.
But his ambivalence on this issue is demonstrated by his belief, expressed
at other times, that the ironist is needed to construct new vocabularies, as
I indicated in the section on progress above.
38. Rortys response to this rhetorical question is an emphatic Yes!
39. McCarthy also touches on this criticism in Private Irony and Public
Decency 365. Later, in his reply to Rortys reply, he asks a similar series
of questions to mine, a series intended, like mine, as a reductio of Rortys
position. See An Exchange on Truth, Freedom, and Politics II 650.
40. When orthodox Jews in Israel band together and throw feces at conservatives and women trying to pray at the Wall, they are not driven to
do so by an agreement concerning fundamental beliefs and desires, but
rather by the feelings of enjoyment that accompany striking a blow in
Gods name.
41. See his essay, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1998).
notes
291
42. The source of this analysis is, of course, ieks Sublime Object chapter
3, Identification; passim; although the theme is touched on in all of his
books.
43. On Truth, Freedom and Politics I 637.
44. iek himself discusses Rortys public/private split, in Looking Awry
157-60. There he argues that the very social law that, as a kind of neutral
set of rules, should limit our aesthetic self-creation and deprive us a part
of our enjoyment on behalf of solidarity, is always already penetrated by
an obscene, pathological, surplus enjoyment. ieks critique of Rorty is
that he seems to be positing the possibility of a universal social law not
smudged by a pathological stain of enjoyment (160). But I dont see
how this can be the case, given that Rorty (unlike iek) doesnt believe
in anything universal, much less a social law. In fact, while his language
differs greatly from ieks flamboyantly continental psychoanalese,
Rorty would probably agree completely with the notion that the fantasies
or vocabularies that hold communities together are run through with particular libidinal investments. He just would refuse to derive from this the
belief that therefore it makes no sense to strive for solidarity. Where the
two viewpoints should naturally meet would be an acknowledgment of the
importance of an analysis of such libidinal investments for the establishment of local solidarities. For a discussion of ieks particular brand of
universalism, see my On Relativism, Rights, and Differends, or, Ethics
and the American Holocaust, in this volume.
45. If one starts off from the view that freedom is the recognition of contingency rather than of the existence of a specifically human realm exempt
from natural necessity, one will be more dubious about the social utility of
philosophy than Habermas is (TP 326)