After Identity, Politics

Thank you Lorrie Moore for rejecting the Clintonistas' sentimental appeals for female votes by reminding us of the Clintons' conservative political record and thank you even more for stating what no male educator dares to say in a public forum:

The children who are suffering [most] in this country, who are having trouble in school, and for whom the murder and suicide rates and economic dropout rates are high, are boys — especially boys of color, for whom the whole educational system, starting in kindergarten, often feels a form of exile, a system designed by and for white girls.

Pre-election discussions should be about material issues (rising inequality, a rotting infrastructure, health care, the cost of war, etc.) not about sentimental symbolic issues (role models). It's the 21st century people -- time to move beyond the identity politics that have paralyzed the American left.

Writing and Resistance: A Response to Coetzee

It is naive to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say ... Writing, then, involves an interplay between the push into the future that takes you to the blank page in the first place, and a resistance. Part of that resistance is psychic, but part is also an automatism built into language: the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propogating themselves. Out of that interplay emerges, if you are luckly, what you recognize or hope to recognize as the true.

(J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point).

Coetzee's deconstructive account of the writing process directs attention to the materiality of language, the linguistic automatism that is a function of language's materiality, and the writer's stuggle to harness the autopoetic energies inherent to language during the act of writing. In this way, his remarks help explain why writing (and especially teaching composition) can be so challenging.

Writing, as George W. Bush might put it, is "hard work." The successful writer (and here I will resist constructing an extended metaphor of writing as war) must be prepated to encounter opposition and resistance throughout the writing process. Novice writers, and some experienced ones who forget what they've learned, tend to approach writing naively, as the direct expression of a preformed thought or idea.

However, as thoughtful and honest writers will tell you, writing - with a few instrumentalized exceptions (such as, perhaps, writing a grocery list, though Derrida's theory of differance makes even this act of writing more complex that it would initially appear) - is rarely, if ever, so straightforward a procedure.

If, to deploy a familiar trope, writing is a journey towards the truth, or at least some sort of knowledge, the route that the writer must take is a circuitous one in which the available pathways are not immediately recongizable. Indeed, the writer will frequently be disoriented and discover that what appeared to be the safest and most direct path is filled with obstacles that necessiate a rerouting.

Writing is a matter of resistances. Like thinking, or cognition, with which it is virtually synonymous, writing is a recursive process. As we write, the very transcription and inscription of our thoughts, which do not exist independent of the linguistic forms, words, in which they are materialized, makes it possible for thinking to continue into the future.

Coetzee characterizes this compositional proces as a kind of "interplay" during which linguistic pattern formation in which words come to cohere into units that are positioned or arranged in a recognizable and thus sensible and coherent shape. Coetzee's account of writing as a kind of linguistic pattern formation identifies two types of resistance with which the writer struggles.

Both of these types of resistance include an affective dimension.

The first type of resistance is "psychic," Coetzee's term for the psychological obstacles - doubts about one's authority, anxieties about being original, clever, aversions to exposing oneself to the gaze of the Other, etc. - that can generate writer's block and impede the process of composition. Here, then, the affective dimension involves the emotions the writer experiences when facing the space of writing, figured by Coetzee as the blank page.

Lacan and Zizek, not to mention numerous literary writers who offer testimony to the anguish and suffering (jouissance) involved in writing, remind us that these negative affects are a necessary component of writing. The writer must 'tarry with the negative' and work through these affects, which, particularly if one is excessively egocentrically oriented, can become debilitating obstacles. However, when the writer risks becoming a dupe of language and recognizes the impossibility of not falling into error, nonsense, or madness (the terrifying "night of the world" in which relations to the other are literally severed), these negative affects can shift valence. The extreme anguish writers feel when tarrying with the desubjectifying and inhuman force of language can morph abruptly into ecstatic jouissance.

Such shifts occur when these negative affects are not registered immediately as signs of one's personal failure but are instead posited externally as an element immanent to the act of writing. When looked at awry, from a dialectical perspective, these affects appear as obstacles that create productive resistances that exercise and test the writer's constitution or will to power in a way that ultimately makes him or her stronger. In this way the affects can act as catalysts, not obstacles.

The second type of resistance is material. It has to do with the machinic quality of words, which are always and already endowed with significance and meaning that is beyond our control. The connotative and denotative force inherent to language puts constraints on the writer's ability to make use use of them, to shape them into sensible utterances, the meaning of which is fixed within a particular composition.

In another post I will say more about the affective aspects of this second type of resistance.

Walter Benn Michaels Weighs In at The Valve

Walter Benn Michaels responds to bloggers who've been debating the merits of The Trouble With Diversity. In my estimation, he does an excellent job of refuting the major arguments against made him, most of which turn out to miss his major point concerning the way the Left's efforts to combat economic inequality (the US once aspired to wage a War on Poverty, after all, though it ultimately decided to fight a war in Vietnam instead) have been eclipsed in the US, first by modes of identity politics and then by a more banal commitment to "diversity."

(Cue Luna's "Lost in Space.") "I've heard it all before" at various UIC forums, so what I found most intriuging in this exchange was Michaels' response to the University Diarist, a blogger who wonders why the dedication to The Trouble with Diversity made her "skin crawl."

Lately I've been researching about affect and literature, a project that I suspect Michaels would view as a dead end insofar as it would seem to privilege the subject's response to the stimuli produced by textual object over the author's intention. The critics and theorists I'm looking at try to posit a subjectless affect, and at this point, to be honest, I'm undecided about the viability of this model, at least when it comes to writing.

But to return to the topic at hand, the UD's rhetorical question could certainly serve as a example of the need to reason through our initial affective responses. The UD's visceral response to the dedication in TTWD that leads her to fantasize about Michaels and his wife dying while having sexual intercourse. I won't go into details. It's just a bit too gross, not least because Michaels and Jennifer Ashton are colleagues of mine at UIC. (Yes, my response is based partly on my subject position.)

Anyway, here's Michaels' reply, which provides an example of how to respond with dignity to a pretty outrageous remark:

All this is put a lot more provokingly in the chapter itself, and because it’s put provokingly, I am not surprised that people are provoked. UD’s also being provoked by the dedication, however, I can’t explain. Maybe it’s because she literally misread it (she says it’s to “my wife” but it never mentions “my wife”). Maybe it’s because she doesn’t recognize that “so necessary” is an allusion and hence doesn’t see that it involves a certain amount of irony. But as to where her coital death fantasies come from, I’ve got nothing.

Coital death fantasies. Where's Zizek when we need him? I'm sure he'd have plenty to say on this topic, particularly within the context of a - ahem scholarly discussion. More importantly, I'd like to hear Zizek and Michaels debate the claim that the truth of a claim has "nothing to do" with the speaker's subject position. As I've suggested in an ebr essay discussing Zizek's account of Christianity's pervese core both Michaels and Zizek insist upon a universalist notion of the truth against varieties of postmodern pluralism or relativism. They also agree that multiculturalism, particularly academic multiculturalism, is a strategy for eliding class-based inequality. However, what I didn't address properly in my ebr essay was how differently Zizek and Michaels understand the truth.

The difference, in short, has to do with Zizek's commitment to a universally divided subject and his model of ideology, two factors that lead him to insist that a speaker's motives (both conscious and unconscious) matter greatly when it comes to assessing the validity of his or her claims. For instance, it might be true that Sadam Hussein was a brutal dictator, but when VP Cheney was making this claim in the buildup to the Iraq war, what mattered was the deeper truth concerning the motives for repeating this assertion publically from a position of great authority. Michaels would argue that Zizek's position is based on notions of authenticity that he finds irrelevent. I should work all this out rigorously at some point, but there's work to be done...

First, one pressing question: What is the ironic reference to "so necessary" that Michaels suggests the UD misses? My guess: Jay-Z's "Change Clothes, lyrics by Pharrell. If Walter is at today's colloquium, I'll have to ask him.

Reading Notes: Rei Terada's Feeling In Theory

Prefatory remarks: I was expecting a lot from Rei Terada's Feeling In Theory and after spending lots of time with the book I feel disappointed. Terada could explain my feeling with a de Manian account of how emotion functions. According to de Man’s model, emotions arise as a solution to the inevitable interpretive impasses that we experience as empirical creatures. Upon encountering an ambiguous phenomenon (and Terada recognizes that de Man’s model of textuality ultimately doesn’t distinguish between natural objects in the world, such as an other who appears as a giant, and art works that have been created) my uncertainty will lead me to feel anxiety or fear. This fear will enable me to act and respond to whatever phenomenon I’m perceiving by metaphorically substituting a hypothetical figure that I will take to be a literal fact. I’ll return to this ur-scenario in a bit. Allow me to indulge, briefly, in my emotional response.

Reading Feeling in Theory was a let down, but I’m not sure whether it to hold the book or myself more responsible. That is, I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped either Terada’s project--constructing a poststructuralist theory of emotion--or her fundamental claim--that emotion not only doesn't require a unified subject to do the feeling, but that emotion depends upon the very nonexistence of the subject. At times it seems that Terada’s book boils down to an extended meditation on the de Manian claim that our insights into the meaning of the ultimately undecidable text are a function of our blindness to the figural status of tropes that we literalize.

In other words, her basic critical insight is that whenever de Man works through the play of figures and tropes in his readings, the passages he chooses to analyze are directly concerned with emotional responses. Terada argues, then, that de Man is advancing a theory of emotion as well as a theory of rhetoric and that the two are intimately related, for emotions turn out to be effects produced by the play of rhetorical structures. I was expecting more of a payoff from Terada’s book.

My disappointment, according to Terada’s theory, could be due to my inability to make adequate sense of her book. As a strategy of coping with my experience of the book’s undecidability, which generates an intolerable anxiety, I dub her book a "disappointment." Calling the book a "disappointment," according to this line of reasoning, should not trick anyone into believing that it is literally a disappointment. This is merely a metaphorical substitution that I’ve made as a sort of coping strategy which enables me to being acting (in this case, to get around to writing a response, to reread the second half of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, etc. to finally getting around to actually reading Rousseau, etc.). My act of denomination makes possible a series of metaphorical substitutions that will generate subsequent emotions. For example, once I convince myself that the book is a “disappointment” (perhaps an act of bad faith, but possibly a useful one) I may get angry or I might be inspired, etc.

Ultimately, I’m not sure Terada breaks much new ground regarding de Man. Like Frances Ferguson, she identifies a strong empiricist streak in deconstruction, thoughfor Terada this is precisely why it offers a useful account of emotion. Here, then, are some key quotes from Terada that are particularly relevant to her discussion of "deconstructive passion" and the "nonsubjectivism of emotion."

"If we have emotions because we can’t know what to believe (what texts and people are up to), as de Man suggests, then we have emotions even though we can’t know which emotions we ought to have. if we truly knew which emotions we should have, we would no longer feel like having any" (89).

This quote illustrates that Terada gets the fundamental de Manian move, which is to treat written compositions, artworks, bodies, iconographic representations, and objects in the world as texts, which is to say as objects that seem to signify. However, what de Man’s analyses strive to demonstrate is the complex manner in which these text generate the illusion of meaningfulness. For de Man all off the aforementioned objects are ultimately opaque and meaningless. Terada’s reading begins with the notion that what we experience as emotion begins with instinctive (I think this is the right word) response to the fundamental meaninglessness of objects in the world. (In this regard, Terada picks up on the existential streak that was more prominent in early de Man, which has been described in detail by Frank Lentricchia).

"I am arguing that a discourse and ideology of emotion exist; that poststructuralist theory shows their relation; and that the effect of this exploration is to suggest that we would have no emotions if we were subjects" (4).

When Terada speaks of poststructuralist theory, she primarily means deconstruction; she argues, for example, that "Derrida and de Man unfold fully the nonsubjectivism of emotion" (7). Terada proposes that, contrary to his reputation for being a dispassionate theorist, de Man was not only particularly interested in emotion, but that his writings offer a "direct" theory of emotion. She notes that de Man's choice of authors in Allegories of Reading (Rilke, Proust, Nietzsche, and Rousseau) was due in part to the emotionality of their prose. In the preface to Allegories de Man informs us that "The choice of Proust and Rilke as examples is partly due to chance, but since the ostensible pathos of their tone and depth of their statement make them particularly resistant to a reading that is no longer thematic, one could argue that if their work yields to a rhetorical scheme, the same would necessarily be true for writers whose rhetorical strategies are less hidden behind the seductive powers of identification" (AR ix). The phrase that Terada picks up on and runs with is “ostensible pathos." As she explains, de Man's larger deconstructive project is to undermine the priority that has been given to "thematic," by which de Man means, "referential" readings and to advance in their place "rhetorical" readings that trace the figural movement of tropes through a text. In Allegories of Reading , de Man aims to deconstruct the "ostensible pathos" in several texts associated, in complex ways that needn't concern us here, with Romanticism. In other words, de Man wants to reject so-called referential readings of these texts in which their meaning "would be located in their author's intentionality and psychology" (48). That is, the typical way of treating the pathos in the texts written by the aforementioned authors is to identify it with real emotions that were experienced by them. De Man regards such a view as being dependent upon a naive understanding of emotions--how they function, why they occur, and how the can be transmitted. De Man wants to expose emotion and affect as a rhetorical effect and to do so he "calls our attention to the deployment of pathos as a persuasive tactic" (49).

(Note: When de Man speaks of rhetoric he does not do so in the usual sense of a carefully crafted mode of discourse aimed at persuading its audience of a particular position. This view of rhetoric emphasizes authorial control and mastery over language; whereas rhetoric in the de Manian sense stresses the extent to which the figurative nature of language eludes control of its users. For de Man, language users are always trumped by the tropes that they employ).

As a critic, de Man is typically interested in foregrounding the extent to which all of our experiences of reality are thoroughly mediated. As Stanley Fish has put it, "deconstructive or postructuralist thought is in its operation a rhetorical machine: it systematically asserts and demonstrates the mediated, constructed, partial, socially constituted nature of all realities, whether they be phenomenal, linguistic, or psychological" (Critical Terms 215). Terada's move, then, is to read Allegories of Reading as a text about the illusory nature of our emotions, which are typically regarded as being immediate expressions of an internal state. Terada argues that such a model of "expression is the dominant trope of thought about emotion" and that as a trope it functions "to extrapolate a human subject circularly from the phenomenon of emotion" (11). Following upon the work of de Man, whose mid to late texts provide "a coherent model of emotion as tropic structure" that conceptualize "emotions as practical interpretive acts which are as yet not classically subjective" (50) Terada aims to expose the expressive hypothesis as part of an ideology of emotion that is to be rejected for perpetuating an outdated model of subjectivity based upon a unified and stable self. The claim that emotions are thoroughly mediated doesn’t strike me as being a particularly novel position, though, to her credit, Terada’s account of how emotions function in de Man’s readings is more interesting. The interest, for me anyway, lies in the move to treat emotions as linguistic or rhetorical phenomena.

Here, then, are some passages that we might turn to in order to extract more from Terada’s account of de Man's theory of emotion:

ex #1) Wordsworth
Terada focuses attention on how de Man’s reading of the "Blessed Babe" passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude—in which the "Babe who sleeps/ Upon his Mother’s breast; who, when his soul/ Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul, Doth gather passion from his Mother’s eye!"—stages an ur-scene of perception. In this scenario, an emotion, here passion, is figured as a nurturing substance that can be exchanged from one person to another and which makes possible a communion between them. This communion between mother and infant is based upon the sense of recognition that occurs during the exchange, and what de Man would have us recognize is the illusory nature of of the sense making that the emotion facilitates.

Terada summarizes de Man’s reading, which puts pressure on the ambiguous nature of emotion, as such: "...emotion coincides with the shaping of sense, suggesting that emotion is itself a figure—here it serves as a prosopopoeia and as metaphor—that consolidates an outside, a face, an inside, and a precarious means for getting back and forth between them" (5). The conclusion de Man would have us take away from his reading is that "one’s own emotion does not really provide access to the feelings of others or reflect the structure of reality... but the affective force of emotion understandably persuades us to think so" (55). In other words, the force of an emotionally moving experience creates a powerful and convincing illusion, namely, that we have direct access to the inner life of others and by extension to reality itself. However, the very experience of emotion, of being affected and feeling intensely, is always and already thoroughly mediated. The sense of being overcome by emotion is a form of making sense, and sense making, for de Man, is a linguistic phenomenon that involves being seduced by the movement of rhetorical figures and tropes. This Wordsworthian moment is particularly important for de Man as it illustrates the trope of prosopopoeia and the role that the face plays in the interpretive process.

This raises a question posed to me by my lovely wife, Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, in an e-mail: "What about babies who have not yet entered the mirror stage?" As I understand it, Terada and de Man are relatively uninterested in psychoanalytic accounts of the prelinguistic subject, though they do share a belief with thinkers like Lacan and Kristeva that the entry into the symbollic order is a foundational moment in human development. If I read Terada correctly, she would argue that until they acquire language infants do not, in fact, experience emotions, though they obviously are affected by their sensory impressions of the world.

ex #2) Rousseau
The key moment in deconstruction’s engagement with emotion is the moment from Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Human Languagesin which a primitive man first encounters a man from another tribe and reacts with fear. In Rousseau’s parable of denomination, the primitive man’s fear leads him to perceive them as bigger, stronger and as a potential threat to his welling being. As a consequence of his fear and distrust, he dubs them giants. Only after repeated encounters with the other man and members of his tribe will he discover that these men are not actually bigger or stronger. At that point the man will invent a word, such as man, that will apply both to himself and the other. The point of Rousseau’s parable is the figurative nature of the first word: "This is how the figurative word is born before the literal word, when our gaze is held in passionate fascination; and how it is that the first idea it conveys to us is not that of the truth" (42).

ex #3) Kant and Schiller

In "Kant and Schiller," de Man criticizes Schiller for misappropriating the Kantian sublime for "practical psychology," a move that dephilosophizes the sublime by neglecting Kant’s concern with the limitations of the faculties of reason and the imagination and instead focusing on the problem of coping with a terrifying experience. De Man is full of contempt for Schiller’s use of the sublime. He acknowledges the usefulness of the "topological figuration." Schiller posits in which a fictive or hypothetical danger substitutes for a literal danger. Such a move, we have seen, occurs in Kant as well, and at times the ability to come to terms with a real, but uncertain, danger by providing a fictional figure can provide a strategy for self-preservation. However, de Man opposes the manner in which Schiller deploys the trope of the sublime so that self-preservation becomes a purely idealized state in which the powers of the mind are entirely divorced from the material body, which remains in physical danger (65).

Terada understands De Man’s late essays on Kant to be addressing the aforementioned fear “by tracking the consequences of Kantian apatheia” (82). Kant takes care to distinguish between affects and passions. The distinction lies in the fact that affects are "impetuous and unpremeditated, passions persistent and deliberate" (Kant 132n39). Surprisingly, perhaps, in Kant’s system, affects are valued more highly, because the deliberate pursuit of passion threatens to become an a manic obsession for repetition, that is a from of addiction. Kant’s discussion of affects advances a hierarchy of value that privileges "emotions the less arbitrary and coercive they are" (83). Kant’s criteria for judging emotions lead him to praise apatheia "when found in a mood that adheres emphatically and insistently to its principles, cannot only be sublime but most admirably so" (quoted in Terada 83).