The Film Journal, issue 14, 2004

Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up By Asbjørn Grønstad Asbjørn Grønstad recently submitted his dissertation on the aesthetics of violence in American cinema, and is currently associate professor with the Department of English, University of Bergen. Having published a number of articles on film theory and on various topics within American film, Grønstad is currently preparing a study of transgressive visuality in contemporary American and French cinema."

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While the protocols of metafiction and narrative self-reflexivity have become the order of the day in much contemporary mainstream cinema, there is scant evidence to suggest that there has been a correspondingly self-conscious problematization of film's material basis. This is a rather peculiar omission, given the current rapid conflation in many feature films of the digital and the photographic. In her book Prosthetic Culture (1998), Celia Lury points out that photography and computer generated imagery (CGI) represent and entail two fundamentally different ways of seeing, founded on and required by the ontological specificity of each image-yielding practice. (1) On a similar note, Kevin Robins worries that postphotography will alter "the epistemological structure" of our culture. (2) It might have been a comparable uneasiness that in a 1999 issue of Sight and Sound prompted Peter Matthews to advocate film theory's return to the enigmatically realist philosophy of André Bazin. (3) As you may recall, Bazin argues first that the principal purpose of the filmic is the mummification of change itself, and second, that the ethics of photographically-based art involves nothing less than the emancipation of memory from subjectivity. "The aesthetic qualities of photography," Bazin famously writes in "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," "are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities." (4) Bazin promotes the concept of celluloid memory as a superior and in fact more ethical alternative to individual memory, steeped as the latter is in the cosmetic modifications of our own private recollections. For a vivid enactment of the principle at the core of Bazin's commemorative poetics, consider this somewhat lengthy excerpt from Don DeLillo's Americana (1971):

"I took the camera from my lap, raised it to my eye, leaned out the window a bit, and trained it on the ladies as if I were shooting. One of them saw me and immediately nudged her companion but without taking her eyes off the camera. They waved. One by one the others reacted. They all smiled and waved. They seemed supremely happy. Maybe they sensed that they were waving at themselves, waving in the hope that someday if evidence is demanded of their passage through time, demanded by their own doubts, a moment might be recalled when they stood in a dazzling plaza in the sun and were registered on the transparent plastic ribbon; and thirty years away, on that day when proof
is needed, it could be hoped that their film is being projected on a screen somewhere, and there they stand, verified, in chemical reincarnation, waving at their own old age, smiling their reassurance to the decades, a race of eternal pilgrims in a marketplace in the dusty sunlight, seven arms extended in a fabulous salute and to the forgetfulness of being. What better proof (if proof is ever needed) that they have truly been alive? Their happiness, I think, was made of this, the anticipation of incontestable evidence, and had nothing to do with the present moment, which would pass with all the others into whatever is the opposite of eternity." (5)

Although rarely approached by the discourse of films, this evidential incontestability that the photographically filmic is said to promulgate is of course nothing if not contestable. One of the few films that grapples explicitly with the semiotic and mnemonic ambivalences of photography, as well as with the difficulty of the process of seeing, is Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, a quintessential text of 1960s art cinema just recently released on DVD. Widely regarded as a film which exposes both the schism between appearance and reality (6) and the occasional indistinguishability of observation and deception, (7) Blow-Up is also a metapictorial work of introspective filmicity which in effect foregrounds the conditions of its own deconstruction. Moreover, in this process Blow-Up becomes not film theory but a theory film, its discursive method laid bare (as Bazin's reality) as a form of what one may term cine-thinking. (8) But, the complex procedures and movements of the film's rhetoric aside, what exactly is it that Antonioni's stylish narrative shows us? What, in short, is the film a theory of? Blow-Up, first of all, reveals not only the materiality of film but, more importantly, the attendant opacity of its images. (9) Secondly, Antonioni's centerpiece-the David Hemmings character's intense examination of the pictures he took it the park-allegorizes the ontological specificity of photographic film as opposed to for instance computer-animated film. What inscribes this difference, what phenomenologically underwrites photographic visuality, is the promise of the aleatory, the fortuitous-the correlative of which may be something along the lines of Roland Barthes's notion of the punctum, or the "contingent subzone of the still image." (10) This I shall return to shortly.

There is something about Antonioni's aesthetic forensics in Blow-Up which vaguely reminds me of certain segments in other films, moments of indeterminate anxiety which test the viewer's perceptual resilience. One such moment is the opening shot of Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah 1971), in which we first see a menacingly fuzzy image-unfocused and impenetrable - gradually becoming legible as a high-angle shot of a group of children playing games among the headstones in an English churchyard. The indistinct quality of this initial image creates an impression of density-of material substance-not so readily associated with the clearly defined image of conventional cinematography, which we tend to think of as supremely and even blissfully transparent. Furthermore, Peckinpah's nebulous opening image connotes decomposition, a suggestion which the diegetic proximity of the cemetery accentuates.

The density of the photographic and the latency of death are likewise drawn together in another film that came to mind as I was watching my new DVD version of Blow-Up. This film was Bill Morrison's Decasia (2002), a conceptually ambitious project in which the filmmaker uses found archival footage in various stages of deterioration to meditate upon the transient materiality of film stock. About to dissolve before our very eyes, these spectral images come to inhabit a volatile signifying space, precariously perched between representation and abstraction, visibility and blankness. We glimpse, among many other objects, the contours of parachutes set against the backdrop of a broken sky, a caravan of camels traversing a deformed desert, Wall Street in the throes of a conflagration, and a boxer fighting back a corroding image. Reminiscent of Michael Snow's To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror and Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate (both 1991), Decasia evidently demands to be seen as an aestheticization of processes of decay. At the same time it is impossible to overlook the extent to which the film reconstitutes itself as a rather unrelenting essay on the subject of film preservation (Paolo Usai, noted conservationist of the moving image and author of The Death of Cinema (2001), is even mentioned in the credit sequence).

The drama that Morrison's film stages is that of the disintegration of the ephemeral surface of the image and the viewer's resultant apprehension of the fragility of the profilmic event. It is precisely because the photographic image possesses a measure of material solidity that it also becomes vulnerable to the forces of decomposition. Blow-Up can be read, I think, as a literalization of what I have elsewhere referred to as film's "illusion of transparency." (11) What filmic opacity ultimately means, then, is that the diegetic world envisioned by a filmmaker is neither less inscrutable nor more mimetic than that of the painter or the writer. (12) Antonioni himself seems to have grasped the non-transparent texture of film images intuitively:

We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under this last one, right down to the true image of reality, absolute, mysterious, which no one will ever see or perhaps right down to the decomposition of any image, of any reality. (13)

Like the story by Cortázar (himself etched onto the film as one of the homeless men) on which it is based, Blow-Up's narrative seems to thrive on the conflict between observation and comprehension, on a dynamic Heisenbergian tension that derails story progression and carries the film unapologetically over into the realm of theoretical speculation. This happens at the moment when the film starts to move in on itself, turning inward, approaching its own material source, emerging from photography only to return to it, thus closing the circuit. As David Hemmings's photographer grows increasingly obsessed with what his camera might have captured in the park, the Blow-Ups come to dominate the screen, threatening to overpower the cinematic. The film assumes a hermeneutic of pixelation, a pixel hermeneutic, if you will. Thomas (he is named Michel in the short story, why does Antonioni call him Thomas?) the photographer appears to have forgotten all about his larger project, which is to produce a photo-book of London and, perhaps, pursue the painter's girlfriend. And what causes this narrative disruption is something as ostensibly inconspicuous as a glance in a photograph. Tracing the sightline of Jane's apprehensive gaze, Thomas subsequently discerns the indefinite shape of what he thinks might be a body partially occluded by the shrubbery. Immersed in the mystery that his camera inadvertently has recorded, Thomas enlarges the image until its fuzziness becomes too overwhelming. The anatomy of this murder cannot be extracted from the Blow-Up's pixel logic, but is something that Thomas has to piece together in his own mind.

At one point in Cortázar's short story, the narrator, who is a translator and an amateur photographer, tells us that in photography he has found a means with which to fight nothingness. Yet this vaguely existentialist stance is accompanied by an acute awareness of the seemingly insurmountable problems of telling and of seeing. To paraphrase slightly a statement made by J. Hillis Miller, seeing itself "is extraordinarily hard work. It does not occur all that often." (14) For Cortázar's translator, as for Antonioni's photographer, storytelling takes over where seeing leaves off. Michel invents the young boy's biography, fashioning a sordid little drama out of the behavior and the gestures which constitute a chance encounter. Thomas makes up his own murder mystery on the basis of patches of pixels that are dubious and even potentially deceptive.

In retrospect it is not difficult to read Thomas's and Blow-Up's key narrative premise as epitomizing the 1960s art-film conventions of the cinema of ambiguity. What above all defined this "festival film" (of which Antonioni himself was a principal exponent, along with directors like Bergman, Fellini, and Godard) was a peculiar synthesis of the modes of objective realism, expressive subjectivism, and authorial commentary. (15) A sense of indestructible uncertainty thus became the raison d'etre of films like Blow-Up. Much as we may still be able to admire Antonioni's accomplishment, however, his purposeful orchestration of the ambiguous now seems, if not dated, if not too studied, then at least somewhat routine (as does the plethora of psychoanalytical readings-centering on Thomas's voyeurism and misogyny-that the film has invited over the years). (16) Watching the film again these days, what has probably become more immediately commanding is that which sequentially brackets the sense of narrative ambiguity, that is, its material source and epistemological prospects. All this may seem as fuzzy as the photographer's enlargements, but the point, anyhow, is merely that what strikes us as Blow-Up's most salient achievement nowadays is not its ambiguity but rather its contributions in the field of film theory. In a word, Blow-Up is not just a narrative but a treatise, a film that pictures theory, to speak in the Mitchellian vernacular. Antonioni brings to the surface that tantalizing semiotic opacity of which all of the visual arts partake but which so infrequently gets articulated. What is more, the film flaunts the contingencies of visual hermeneutics, it emphasizes the inter-relations of photography, corporeality, decomposition, and death, and, most obviously, it configures the instability, the limits, of photography's truth. The complex presence of the film's corpse pinpoints this perennial interpretive dilemma: "we are certain that we see it, but we cannot be certain that what we see is real." (17)

Blow-Up, finally, also delineates what we perhaps somewhat conservatively would want to claim is a decisive attribute of the photographic, namely, the aleatory. This concept, I would argue, is closely connected with what the French call l'insolite; that is, a curious, incongruous element within a given totality. Both the aleatory and the incongruous-with reference to the photograph-are redolent of the punctum, though not entirely in a Barthesian sense. As you will remember, the punctum is the second "theme" that Barthes finds in the photograph and is that aspect which transcends the "unconcerned desire" of the studium to "pierce" the viewer. (18) Though the idea of the punctum has been largely over-discussed by now, it may nevertheless be worthwhile succinctly to review its basic tenets as described in Camera Lucida (1980). Barthes himself appears to put forth an affectionist point of view with regard to the punctum, which he conceptualizes in terms of for instance a wound, a prick, a mark, a sting, or a cut. (19) The punctum, he says, is a detail "which attracts or distresses me," (20) hence, it is a phenomenon the possibility of which hinges on its emotional impact on the viewer. But the existential mode of the punctum is aleatoric. It is, as Barthes writes, something that simply "happened to be there," something "offered by chance and for nothing," (21) much like the blurry outline of the dead body in Thomas's photograph.

What animates Antonioni's narrative, then, is the intrusion of this l'insolite, the random occurrence. Thomas's impassive lens, to use a Bazinian idiom, mechanically chronicles a lovers' tryst and the choreography of their embrace and what might or might not be the protruding legs of a corpse. Photography does not discriminate, the particles of the profilmic are nonaligned and disinterested. That which is before the camera, Antonioni says, is permeated by "the same marginal details, the same excess of material. By making a selection you are falsifying it. Or as some would say, you are interpreting it." (22) But, in making such a selection, it is difficult to eliminate the delicate and subtle interruption of the fortuitous. The aleatoric in Thomas's photographs is not like Barthes's understanding of the punctum, but it does nonetheless comprise a kind of punctumicity, conceived as the space in which the opacity of the visual and the hegemony of the accidental converge.

It is clear that, for Thomas, the world can only be seized through form, yet the film is ultimately about the failure of that ambition. (23) Thomas's search for reality in the image is Bazinian at heart. Like Bazin, he waits for the contingent to unveil itself in the image. Truth, however, is frustrated not only by the faultlines of perception or interpretation but, perhaps just as importantly, by the insufficiency of form itself. After all, a Blow-Up signifies not only the enlarged photograph which becomes a metaphor for Antonioni's film, (24) but can also mean an explosion (maybe like the one which concludes the director's subsequent film Zabriskie Point?)-a destructive discharge that pulverizes the object. In the end, the photographer's Blow-Ups represent the limits of the visual field and thus convey to us that "the photographic event is the form of something other than itself, something deeper, more mysterious, dark, mutable, and finally indecipherable." (25) And if not by "launch[ing] desire beyond what [they] permit us to see," (26) how else would photographic images continue to fascinate us?

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Notes

1. Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), 3.
2. Kevin Robins, "The Virtual Unconscious in Postphotography," Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, Ed. Timothy Druckery (New York: Aperture, 1996), 156.
3. Peter Matthews, "Divining the Real," Sight and Sound 9.8 (1999): 25.
4. André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: U of California P, 1967), 15.
5. Don DeLillo, Americana (New York: Penguin, 1971), 254.
6. Thomas Harris, "Rear Window and Blow-Up: Hitchcock's Straightforwardness vs. Antonioni's Ambiguity," Literature/Film Quarterly 15.1 (1987): 61.
7. Terry J. Peavler, "The Mimetic Paradox in Contemporary Narratives: Cortázar and Antonioni," Philosophical Papers 30 (1984): 100.
8. See Éric Alliez, "Midday, Midnight: The Emergence of Cine-Thinking," Trans. Patricia Dailey, The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinerma, Ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), 293.
9. For a sustained argument concerning the subject of filmic opacity, see D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (Durham: Duke UP, 2001).
10. Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 141.
11. Asbjørn Grønstad, "Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema" (Diss: U of Bergen, 2003), 87.
12. Other critics have also pondered the significance of the "opacity of the artifact" both in Blow-Up and in the Julio Cortázar story ("Las babas del diablo") which inspired the film. See for instance David Grossvogel, "Blow-Up: The Forms of an Esthetic Itinerary," Diacritics 2.3 (1972), 51.
13. Charles Thomas Samuels, "Michelangelo Antonioni," Encountering Directors (New York: Capricorn Books, 1972), 23.
14. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), 3.
15. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985), 205.
16. See for instance Robert Eberwein, "The Master Text of Blow-Up," Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, Ed. Peter Lehman (Tallahassee: The Florida State UP, 1990).
17. Micheal Pressler, "Antonioni's Blow-Up: Myth, Order, and the Photographic Image," Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 5.1 (1985): 53.
18. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), 26.
19. Barthes, 27.
20. Ibid, 40.
21. Ibid, 42.
22. Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow-Up, Trans. John Matthews (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 11.
23. Grossvogel, 51.
24. Richard Lee Francis, "Transcending Metaphor: Antonioni's Blow-Up," Literature/Film Quarterly 13.1 (1985): 48.
25. Pressler, 49.
26. Barthes, 59.
    
    

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Bibliography

Alliez, Éric. "Midday, Midnight: The Emergence of Cine-Thinking." Trans. Patricia Dailey.
The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 293-302.

Antonioni, Michelangelo. Blow-Up. Trans. John Mathews. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1971.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard.
London: Vintage, 2000.

Bazin, André. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." What is Cinema? Volume 1. Trans.
Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. 9-16.

Black, Joel: The Reality Effect. Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative. New York:
Routledge, 2002.

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

DeLillo, Don. Americana. New York: Penguin, 1971.

Eberwein, Robert T. "The Master Text of Blow Up." Close Viewings: An Anthology of New
Film Criticism. Ed. Peter Lehman. Tallahassee: The Florida State UP, 1990. 262-281.

Francis, Richard Lee. "Transcending Metaphor: Antonioni's Blow-Up." Literature/Film
Quarterly. 13.1 (1985): 42-49.

Grossvogel, David. I. "Blow-Up: The Forms of an Esthetic Itinerary." Diacritics. 2.3 (1972):
49-54.

Grønstad, Asbjørn. "Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American
Cinema." Diss. University of Bergen, 2003.

Harris, Thomas. "Rear Window and Blow-Up: Hitchcock's Straightforwardness vs.
Antonioni's Ambiguity." Literature/Film Quarterly. 15.1 (1987): 60-63.

Isaacs, Neil D. "The Triumph of Artifice: Antonioni's Blow-Up." Modern European
Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation. Eds. Andrew Horton and Joan Magretta. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1981. 130-144.

Linderman, Deborah. "Narrative Surplus: The 'Blow-Up' as Metarepresentation and
Ideology." American Journal of Semiotics. 3.4 (1985): 99-118.

Lury, Celia. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. London: Routledge,
1998.

Matthews, Peter. "Divining the Real." Sight and Sound. 9.8 (1999): 22-25.

Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and
Benjamin. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1994.

Peavler, Terry J. "The Mimetic Paradox in Contemporary Narratives: Cortázar and
Antonioni." Philological Papers. 30 (1984): 97-101.

Pressler, Michael. "Antonioni's Blow-Up: Myth, Order, and the Photographic Image." Post
Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities. 5.1 (1985): 42-59.

Robins, Kevin. "The Virtual Unconscious in Postphotography." Electronic Culture:
Technology and Visual Representation. Ed. Timothy Druckrey. New York: Aperture, 1996. 154-163.

Samuels, Charles Thomas. "Michelangelo Antonioni." Encountering Directors. New York:
Capricorn Books, 1972. 15-32.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.

Stewart, Garrett: Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis. Chicago, U of
Chicago P, 1999.

CONTEXT no. 14 , Reading Pierre Klossowski by John Taylor

CONTEXT, no. 14

Reading Pierre Klossowski
John Taylor

Let’s take Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) at his word, and read him with his favorite word. He claimed to “fabricate simulacra.” What exactly did the French writer mean? The word “simulacrum” is restricted by English usage to “a representation of something (image, effigy),” to “something having the form but not the substance of a material object (imitation, sham),” and to “a superficial likeness (appearance, semblance).” Contemporary French understands the term similarly, while maintaining traces of more concrete Latin meanings: “statue (of a pagan god),” even “phantom.” Interestingly, French adds “a simulated act” to these semantic possibilities, as in Raymond Queneau’s amusing description in Zazie in the Metro: “He took his head in his hands and performed the futile simulacrum (fit le futile simulacre) of tearing it off.” For Roman writers, a simulacrum could also be “a material representation of ideas” (and not just that of a deity), as well as “a moral portrait.”

One must think in Latin when reading Klossowski. All of the above meanings inform the strange and disturbing erotic fiction of this writer who not only produced The Baphomet (1965) and the trilogy Les lois de l’hospitalité (The Laws of Hospitality) (1954-1965), but also translated Suetonius, Virgil, and Saint Augustine (alongside Kafka, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Hölderlin, and Heidegger). The author’s intimacy with Latin, and with Latin literature, cannot be overemphasized. So strong was his attachment that it clearly affected his French syntax and diction, as if the dead language had somehow survived in him—a second mother tongue, both nourishing and competing with a first one. Possessing an antiquarian atmosphere all its own (especially in The Baphomet), Klossowski’s style disorients readers unaware of this linguistic background (which includes, moreover, his consorting with liturgical and biblical Latin during his World War II years spent as a Dominican novitiate). May it be said that Klossowski’s meticulously quaint style is itself a simulacrum of sorts, a conscious transposition into French of the spirit of Latin, a modern-day linguistic specter of a once-vital source that has been lost and in this way “recovered”?

The notion of “simulacrum” especially informs the mystical poetics that Klossowski associates with an unusual and not uncontroversial form of erotic behavior, as depicted above all in the three novels making up the trilogy: Roberte Ce Soir (1954), The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1959), and Le Souffleur (1965). (In the definitive structuring of the trilogy, Klossowski left Le Souffleur at the end, but reversed the order of the two other volumes.) Briefly stated, in those three novels (which return thrice to the same plot, though from different narrative angles and with different literary techniques), a main character named Octave (who sometimes tells the story, sometimes is “morally” portrayed) applies what he terms “the laws of hospitality” and thereby shares his wife, Roberte, with sundry guests and visitors. In Roberte Ce Soir, the codified detail of these laws appear as a manuscript framed and hung in the visitor’s bedroom.

147;Hospitality” of this kind posits, to say the least, a provocative conception of marriage, not to mention love. If Klossowski had contented himself with staging the social consequences of such a practice, his erotic writings would have remained shallow, however scandalous and (more often than critics have noticed) comical. Yet as in other examples of that quintessentially French literary tradition going back at least as far as the Marquis de Sade (the pertinence of whom Klossowski himself rehabilitates in Sade My Neighbor, 1947), explicitly sexual, even blatantly pornographic, writings sometimes aim well beyond their immediate subject matter. Paradoxically, such fiction can wax philosophical.

The French propensity to incarnate ideas in depictions of the carnal reaches a high point in Klossowski’s fiction, which indeed resembles Sade’s in a few ways. As graphic as his erotic scenes are, they are hardly intended to titillate; instead, they generally consist of stark, emotionally neutral descriptions. Moreover, in Klossowski, the sustained quasi-theatrical poses making up the sexual scenes do not particularly create the illusion of continuous sexual movement. Another key concept for Klossowski is that of the tableau vivant, a static dramatic scene forming, literally, a “picture made up of living characters.” His sexual scenes form intricate, puzzling tableaux-signs. But signs indicating what?

Metaerotic in this sense, Klossowski’s writing tends to direct the reader “beyond” the immediate textual (that is, sexual) detail. Perhaps some readers will engage their own sexual fantasies, as narrative “filler,” and thereby add fluid movements to these set pieces, but more often than not they will ponder a perplexing abstract question: To what ends have been arranged these sordid tableaux vivants, and what motivates them? The reader moves constantly from concrete sexual detail to questions and ideas, and this effect partly results from the various narrative forms employed (straightforward storytelling, diaristic notes, dialogues) and from unexpected shifts in narrative viewpoint. The importance lies in how the tableaux vivants are perceived and experienced—personally or vicariously, bodily or mentally.

As the first volume of the trilogy progresses, Roberte comments on her husband as a character, then as a character-author of a book—in fact, the second volume, Roberte Ce Soir—that he has written about her. In this first book, which alternates passages from Roberte’s and Octave’s diaries, Octave also reflects on himself as a character, then as a character-author. In other words, passages that have recently been written (as it were) become objects of commentary in other, not necessarily later, passages. When Octave describes his art collection, he self-analyzes his writings about Roberte as well. And the paintings that he details (sometimes rather painstakingly) also bear on the story. Adding to the multiple ironies is that Roberte is a radical deputy who is a member of a Governmental Educational Committee that must decide whether to ban Octave’s writings about her. An additional spoof on censorship (and self-censorship) can be found in Klossowski’s little-known “divertimento,” Roberte et Gulliver, published in 1987.

Given this multilayered narrative approach, it is not always easy to establish what levels of “reality” or phantasm are being dealt with at a given point in the tripartite narrative. Klossowski approved of the critic Jean Roudaud’s remark that he had set to work narratively Giordano Bruno’s definition of thinking as “speculating with images.” Increasingly, the story seems less one of real than of speculative events.

The second version of the same story, Roberte Ce Soir, renders even more intricate these intertwined speculative narratives spinning off from what is Octave’s single persistent obsession: how to love Roberte. This second volume is actually narrated not by Octave, but rather by Antoine, Octave’s nephew (who ends up having a sexual relationship with his aunt); and Antoine discusses, too, how Roberte is represented in Octave’s writings. Crowning the complexity is a puzzling sentence discreetly slipped in at the onset of Roberte Ce Soir. Antoine, the narrator, observes: “I was thirteen years old when I was adopted by the Octaves.” Does this strange use of a first name in the plural imply that Roberte is actually one with Octave, and even that Klossowski is one with Antoine (as well as with Octave and Roberte), rather as in Flaubert’s quip that “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”?

More generally, the “host,” Octave, wants to experience the risk of losing Roberte so that he can love her all the more strongly. For him, voyeuristic tension engenders an amorous exaltation restoring, for him, the initial purity of his love. But experiencing once again original, quasi-sacred amorous feelings demands transgressing conventional marital behavior and shrewdly manipulating others, including his wife (as well as Antoine and various “guests”). Such are the questionable Manichaean (not to say Machiavellian) ethics at play here. Similar manipulations are staged in the Templar tale, The Baphomet, and its theatrical counterpart, L’Adolescent immortel (2001), though in these books Klossowski stresses more the idea of an initiation or a moral “itinerary.”

Searching for the sacred via transgression brings to mind the French philosopher Georges Bataille, about whom Klossowski wrote an important essay: “La Messe de Georges Bataille.” Sinning and sacredness also blend in the hauntingly beautiful poems and novels of Pierre Jean Jouve, whom Klossowski praises in another essay for preserving “a qualitative notion of the human soul as being made up of contests between the body and the mind.” Klossowski admires the latter’s novels as exegeses “of an absolutely unique kind, of the soul’s itinerary as it is dominated by sin.” Although Klossowski eventually modified his critical vocabulary (eschewing terms that derived from his midlife religious crisis), these remarks about Jouve elucidate his own fiction. Just replace “sin” with “phantasm” or “obsession.”

How does “simulacrum” relate to all this? In the self-elucidating fourth section of Tableaux vivants: essais critiques 1936-1983 (2001), Klossowski recalls that in antique statuary, because it was considered impossible to create a soul to animate the simulacra of gods, the souls of intermediaries—that is, demons and angels—would be invoked and locked inside holy or sacred images so that these “idols” would thereafter have the power to perform good or evil deeds. Klossowski infers a psycholiterary theory from this ancient custom: the emotion contained in a work of art—and thus provoked in the spectator or reader—is correlative to a “demonic movement.” Klossowski’s characters are “idols” in this literal, as well as ancient, sense.

Pursuing this same idea in his book-length essay, Diana at Her Bath (1956), Klossowski explains how the goddess Diana makes a pact with an “intermediary demon” so as to appear before Acteon, a human being. “The demon simulates Diana in a theophany,” comments Klossowski, “and creates in Acteon the desire and the hope of possessing the goddess.” Klossowski adds that the demon thereby “becomes Acteon’s imagination as well as a mirror-image of Diana.” This double effect of the simulacrum is essential. The demon inhabits not only what it reveals (the goddess Diana), but also the spectator (Acteon) to whom the image of the goddess is revealed. In both his painting and writing, Klossowski aimed to create simulacra that affected the “contemplator” (the spectator, the reader) in the same way that an “invisible model” had affected him.

The “demonic” aspects of Klossowski’s artistic philosophy, in its later stages, perhaps seem closer to the psychoanalytical paradigms of obsession and phantasm than to Christian concerns with evil and the Devil. Still, it remains difficult to read his works without recalling his long training for the Catholic priesthood. Beset with “pathophania,” as he put it, Klossowski believed that obsessional negative visions should be exorcized. For him, writing was no rhetorical game, but rather the very act by which imaginative subject matter is dealt with, then exorcized. In Tableaux vivants, he writes of “simulacrum” as the “realization of something that is incommunicable in itself or unrepresentable: literally the phantasm in its obsessional constraint.” The function of the simulacrum is “at first to exorcize,” he adds, “but in order to exorcize the obsession, the simulacrum imitates what it fears in the phantasm.” Klossowski’s images—both artistic and literary—are always tantalizing and often cumulatively harrowing because of this conscientious, indeed courageous, mimesis.

The crucial difference between Klossowski and Sade is that the former’s explorations of fear and phantasm are aimed at very special forms of mystical purity. In his essay on Bataille, Klossowski argues that “the soul must expel all that it silently imagines: only through impure speech (une parole impure) can a soul hope to [ultimately] rest in its silence, in the silence through which it exists, no longer being anything but that silence.” The remark is hermetic, but it seems that the pursuit of love (in Klossowski’s sense) could be added to this yearning for silence and that what he longed for could likewise result only from a long process of purification: the continual expression of, and subsequent exorcism of, troubling mental images.

Nearly all of Klossowski’s fiction was written during a fifteen-year period, ranging from the quasi-autobiographical La vocation suspendue (1950), concerning his religious crisis during the Second World War (when he studied theology in Saint-Maximin, Lyons, and Paris), to the intentionally anachronistic tale, Le Baphomet. Before this period, Klossowski had translated and penned essays (some of which are collected in Écrits d’un monomane: essais 1933-1939, 2001, and Un si funeste désir, 1963), though he later rejected some of this earlier work, remarking (in a letter cited in the critical collection Pierre Klossowski, 1985) that he considered Roberte Ce Soir as the “decisive rupture,” after which he understood that “thought could only be interpreted by means of the imagination, not the contrary.”

Toward the end of the 1960s, he stopped writing almost completely. As he evolved from the art of aligning words to the studied use of line and color, his career paralleled that of Louis-René des Forêts (1918-2000), whose haunting story Le Malheur au Lido, written in homage to Klossowski (it bears the dedication “for Octave”), offers an oblique introduction to the latter’s sensibility. Both writers moved from storytelling to an increasing use of dialogue (a literary form that, compared to description, they considered nearer reality), and from dialogue to what Klossowski called the “mute gestures” of drawing. In other words, both writers eventually adopted an almost permanent writerly silence during their last years, seeking out a more direct means of reproducing mental images. Des Forêts did eventually work on a final prose masterwork, Ostinato.

In Klossowski, this evolution does not really derive from an admission of creative impossibility (coupled with the Beckettian necessity of continuing to create, of “going on”), but rather from an all-exclusive drive to get as close as possible to the most basic phenomena of life, to the most potent gestures of aliveness. It is arresting that his quest entails not a solitary individual casting a hard eye at his existence, but rather an individual intimately linked to one or more other individuals. As Klossowski contemplated human beings together, the notion of “gestures” that would be suggestive of countless, perhaps mutually contradictory consequences came to fascinate him. Such primordial gestures or poses could not honestly be described: they were necessarily pre- or nonverbal. At this point in the man’s creative soul-searching (he was in his late sixties), literature was sacrificed for art. As for the writings that appeared before this radical turn, they are not meant to “please” or “amuse” (though they are not without humor); and some long passages try the reader’s patience. But what remains admirable is this intent author’s relentless urge to go ever further upstream, to get behind discourse and conceptualization, to stalk desire and movement as they manifest themselves in all their multivarious potential. And then to craft fitting simulacra of what he has glimpsed; that is, disquieting representations of something still further upstream, at a mysterious fountainhead that cannot truly be described, or fully seen, or touched.

Selected Works by Pierre Klossowski in Translation

The Baphomet. Trans. Sophie Hawes and Stephen Sartarelli. Marsilio Publishers.
Diana at Her Bath/The Women of Rome. Trans. Sophie Hawes and Stephen Sartarelli. Marsilio Publishers.
Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. University of Chicago Press.
Roberte Ce Soir and The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. Dalkey Archive Press
Sade My Neighbor. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press,

Selected Untranslated Works

L’Adolescent immortel. Éditions Gallimard
Écrits d’un monomane: essais 1933-1939. Éditions Gallimard
Les lois de l’hospitalité. Out of Print.
Le mage du nord. Out of Print.
La Monnaie vivante. Joelle Losfeld
Origines culturelles et mythiques d’un certain comportement des dames romaines. Out of Print.
Pierre Klossowski. Ludion.
Roberte et Gulliver. Fata Morgana
Un si funeste désir. Éditions Gallimard
Tableaux vivants: essais critiques 1936-1983. Éditions Gallimard
La vocation suspendue. Éditions Gallimard.

Συνέντευξη του Richard WOLF, "Ελευθεροτυπία" - 01.03.2009 -- http://globala.blogspot.com/

ΣΥΝΕΝΤΕΥΞΗ ΤΟΥ RICHARD WOLF

στον ΧΡΟΝΗ ΠΟΛΥΧΡΟΝΙΟΥ*

Στο πάγωμα των αυξήσεων στους μισθούς των εργαζομένων στις ΗΠΑ αλλά και σε όλο τον κόσμο αποδίδει τη σημερινή κρίση ο καθηγητής Οικονομικών στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Μασαχουσέτης Richard Wolff. Υποστηρίζει ότι με τα εισοδήματα των εργαζομένων χαμηλά, οι τελευταίοι δεν μπορούσαν να απορροφήσουν τη διαρκώς αυξανόμενη παραγωγή. Σύρθηκαν μάλιστα στον υπερδανεισμό προκειμένου να αποκαταστήσουν την αγοραστική τους δύναμη, με αποτέλεσμα να δημιουργηθεί η σημερινή κρίση. Ετσι, η διέξοδος δεν μπορεί παρά να είναι μια βαθιά κοινωνική αλλαγή.

*Οι ΗΠΑ αντιμετωπίζουν μια βαθιά, παρατεταμένη ύφεση που αναμένεται να χειροτερέψει το 2009, παρά το οικονομικό πακέτο στήριξης της κυβέρνησης Ομπάμα. Είναι η πραγματική αιτία η κρίση στην πιστωτική αγορά που εξερράγη τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2008 ή υπάρχει κάτι βαθύτερο και πιο ανησυχητικό;

*Η αμερικανική οικονομία συνετρίβη εξαιτίας των βαθιών δομικών ανοιγμάτων που άρχισαν να δημιουργούνται από την τελευταία μεγάλη κατάρρευση, τη μεγάλη ύφεση της δεκαετίας του '30. Υπήρχαν τεράστια ανοίγματα μεταξύ δανειστών και δανειοληπτών, μεταξύ του εισαγωγικού και του εξαγωγικού εμπορίου, μεταξύ ιδιωτικών επιχειρηματικών στόχων και κοινωνικών στόχων και μεταξύ αγοραίων συναλλαγών και κρατικών ελέγχων των αγορών. Εντούτοις, το υπόβαθρο όλων αυτών ήταν το κλασικό καπιταλιστικό αίνιγμα όπου οι καπιταλιστές οδηγούν προς τον περιορισμό των μισθών, ενώ συγχρόνως χρειάζεται οι εργαζόμενοι να αγοράζουν την αυξανόμενη παραγωγή αγαθών και υπηρεσιών. Εν ολίγοις, τα μαζικά εισοδήματα των εργαζομένων ήταν πάρα πολύ χαμηλά για να απορροφήσουν τα καπιταλιστικά αποθέματα. Ο δανεισμός με ιστορικά πρωτοφανή ποσά θα μπορούσε μόνο να αναβάλει την κατάρρευση της οικονομίας. Οταν οι εργαζόμενοι δεν μπόρεσαν πλέον να πληρώσουν για τη συσσώρευση περισσότερου χρέους, ακολούθησε η τρέχουσα οικονομική κατάρρευση.

*Δεν θα μπορούσε να ειπωθεί το ίδιο σήμερα για την παγκόσμια οικονομία στο σύνολό της; Ο οικονομολόγος Carl Wein-berg, είπε πρόσφατα ότι ακόμα κι αν οι πιστωτικές ροές αποκαθίστανται, τα προβλήματα δεν τελείωσαν για την παγκόσμια οικονομία.

*Η αποκατάσταση των πιστωτικών ροών είναι από μόνη της μια παράξενη ιδέα ή στόχος. Η κατάρρευση της οικονομίας εμφανίστηκε αρχικά επειδή επιπλέον δανεισμός δεν ήταν εφικτός για τα εκατομμύρια των αμερικανών εργαζομένων. Από τη στιγμή της κατάρρευσης της οικονομίας, εκατομμύρια άνθρωποι στις ΗΠΑ και την Ευρώπη έχουν χάσει τις δουλειές τους, υποχρεώθηκαν σε μείωση μισθών και έχασαν τις αποταμιεύσεις τους. Είναι τώρα λιγότερο αξιόπιστοι για πίστωση απ' ό,τι ήταν πριν την κατάρρευση. Οι πιστωτικές ροές δεν μπορούν να επαναληφθούν χωρίς βασικές αλλαγές στο οικονομικό σύστημα. Γι' αυτό τα δισεκατομμύρια που δόθηκαν στις τράπεζες απέτυχαν να επαναφέρουν το δανεισμό. Οι τράπεζες ξέρουν ότι οι κίνδυνοι του δανεισμού υπερβαίνουν κατά πολύ τα πιθανά κέρδη. Αυτό το γεγονός δεν μπορεί να εξαφανιστεί με φαντασίες περί αποκατάστασης της ευημερίας μας. Ηταν μια πιστωτική φούσκα βασισμένη στα θεμελιώδη προβλήματα της οικονομίας. Δεν μπορούμε, ούτε έπρεπε να θέλουμε, να επιστρέψουμε εκεί.

*Η οικονομική ανάπτυξη των ΗΠΑ πριν την ύφεση ήταν προβληματική. Οι πλούσιοι έγιναν πλουσιότεροι, η μεσαία τάξη συρρικνώθηκε και οι συνθήκες για τους φτωχούς εργαζόμενους επιδεινώθηκαν. Συμφωνείτε πως ό,τι γνωρίζουμε από την πολιτική οικονομία του καπιταλισμού μάς οδηγεί αβίαστα σ' αυτό το πόρισμα;

Ο πρόεδρος Ομπάμα επέλεξε συμβούλους από την ομάδα του Μπους και οικονομολόγους που είχαν χρησιμοποιηθεί επί Κλίντον.

*Συμφωνώ απολύτως. Πρώτον, έπειτα από έναν αιώνα πραγματικών αυξήσεων στους μισθούς, οι αμερικανοί εργαζόμενοι ανακάλυψαν στη δεκαετία του '70 ότι οι εργοδότες είχαν βρει τρόπους να μην αυξήσουν άλλο τους μισθούς των εργαζομένων. Με τη μεταφορά της παραγωγής σε περιοχές φτηνού εργατικού δυναμικού, με την ηλεκτρονική μηχανοργάνωση του χώρου εργασίας, με την προσέλκυση μεταναστών πρόθυμων να εργαστούν με χαμηλότερους μισθούς, οι αμερικανικές εταιρείες ήταν σε θέση να θέσουν σε τέρμα τις πραγματικές αυξήσεις στους μισθούς των εργαζομένων. Από τη δεκαετία του '70 οι μισθοί ποτέ δεν επανέλαβαν την ιστορική τους τάση προς τα πάνω. Εν τω μεταξύ, η παραγωγικότητα εργασίας συνέχισε να ανεβαίνει. Με τους μισθούς στάσιμους και την παραγωγικότητα να αυξάνεται, οι ΗΠΑ βίωσαν μια ιστορική έκρηξη κέρδους στις δεκαετίες του '80 και του '90 που οδήγησε πολλούς να φαντάζονται ότι ο καπιταλισμός είχε με κάποιον τρόπο απελευθερωθεί από τις κλασικές αντιφάσεις του. Πράγματι, για να αποζημιώσουν τους αμερικανούς εργαζομένους για τη μη αύξηση στους μισθούς, μερικά από τα κέρδη τους τα προσέφεραν πίσω με τη μορφή δανεισμού ώστε να συνεχιστεί η ανοδική τάση της κατανάλωσης. Αυτό το σύστημα, λοιπόν, προέβη σε υπερ-επέκταση της πίστωσης, κάτι χαρακτηριστικό της καπιταλιστικής οικονομίας σε περιόδους έκρηξης κέρδους. Οθεν η ενδεχόμενη κατάρρευση όταν τα πιστωτικά όρια έφτασαν στο τέλος της γραμμής. Είναι λάθος να μιλάμε για «χρηματοπιστωτική» κρίση. Ναι, οι πρώτες καταρρεύσεις έκαναν την εμφάνισή τους στους πιστωτικούς οργανισμούς και ανάμεσα στις τράπεζες. Οι ρίζες της κρίσης, όμως, βρίσκονται πίσω από τις πράξεις κάθε καπιταλιστή, μεγάλου και μικρού, από τη Wall Street μέχρι τη Main Street. Ηταν το ότι έδωσαν τέλος στο καθεστώς της αύξησης των μισθών των εργαζομένων.

*Πολλοί αναλυτές συνάγουν το συμπέρασμα ότι η Ε.Ε. θα έχει μεγαλύτερη δυσκολία να ελέγξει την τρέχουσα διολίσθηση της οικονομίας απ' ό,τι οι ΗΠΑ. Συμμερίζεστε αυτές τις απόψεις;

*Οταν ξέσπασε η κρίση στις ΗΠΑ, οι εκθέσεις από την Ε.Ε. έλεγαν ότι η Ευρώπη θα παρέμενε σε μεγάλο βαθμό ανεπηρέαστη. Κατόπιν ειπώθηκε ότι η διαφορά μεταξύ του αγγλοαμερικανικού μοντέλου (οικονομικός νεοφιλελευθερισμός) και του ηπειρωτικού ευρωπαϊκού προτύπου (σοσιαλδημοκρατία) θα διασφάλιζε στην Ε.Ε. ευκολότερη, συντομότερη και λιγότερο άδικη οικονομική κρίση πριν την επιστροφή στις καλές μέρες της ευημερίας. Τώρα, οι περισσότεροι παρατηρητές αναγνωρίζουν ότι τουλάχιστον οι παγκόσμιες οικονομικές διασυνδέσεις που έχουν πλέξει οι πολυεθνικές και οι μηχανισμοί της αγοράς -και οι οποίοι μέχρι προ τινος διατείνονταν ότι λειτουργούν πολύ καλά- μεταφέρουν τη βαθιά κρίση που πλήττει την αμερικανική οικονομία σε κάθε γωνιά του πλανήτη. Η Ευρώπη δεν μπορεί να δραπετεύσει. Επιπλέον, οι ΗΠΑ έχουν περισσότερα όπλα στη διάθεσή τους και είναι θεσμικά και πολιτικά σε καλύτερη θέση να αντιμετωπίσουν την κρίση. Είναι επίσης καλύτερα τοποθετημένες για να μετατοπίσουν τα χειρότερα της κρίσης πάνω στην Ευρώπη από το να συμβεί το αντίθετο.

*Για ποιους λόγους ο Ομπάμα δεν κοίταξε για συμβούλους έξω από τους στενούς κύκλους της χρηματο-οικονομικής ελίτ;

*Η άνοδος του Ομπάμα στο πολιτικό προσκήνιο έγινε με τη στήριξη της κεντρώας πτέρυγας του Δημοκρατικού Κόμματος. Οι οικονομικοί σύμβουλοι για την εκστρατεία του προς το Λευκό Οίκο προέρχονταν από το κύριο κατεστημένο των οικονομικών και επιχειρηματικών κύκλων. Το Δημοκρατικό Κόμμα επικύρωσε κατά μεγάλο μέρος το νεοφιλελευθερισμό των τελευταίων 25 ετών όπως επικύρωσε τη νομισματική πολιτική του Μπους όλο το προηγούμενο έτος. Ο Ομπάμα ο ίδιος ψήφισε υπέρ αυτής της νομισματικής πολιτικής. Ως πρόεδρος συμπεριφέρεται ακριβώς όπως έδειχναν όλα τα έως τώρα δεδομένα: επέλεξε συμβούλους από τους συναδέλφους της ομάδας του Μπους και οικονομολόγους οι οποίοι είχαν συμβουλέψει την προεδρία Κλίντον και που διέφεραν ελάχιστα σε θέματα βασικής οικονομικής πολιτικής. Οι επιλογές του είναι περιορισμένες, δεδομένου ότι ουσιαστικά όλοι οι οικονομολόγοι του κατεστημένου έχουν περάσει τα τελευταία 30 έτη πανηγυρίζοντας πως η ιδιωτική επιχείρηση και οι αγορές εξασφαλίζουν αποδοτικότητα, ευημερία, και ανάπτυξη. Αυτοί οι άνθρωποι δεν έμαθαν καν τα οικονομικά του κεϊνσιανισμού, πόσω μάλλον την κριτική θεωρία του καπιταλισμού. Οθεν η εκπληκτική ανικανότητά τους. Μέχρι τώρα, ό,τι έχουν κάνει είναι πολύ λίγα και πολύ καθυστερημένα.

*Σε ένα πρόσφατο άρθρο σας ασκείτε σφοδρή κριτική στο κατεστημένο των οικονομολόγων. Να συμπεράνουμε, ως εκ τούτου, ότι δεν είστε αισιόδοξος πως η τρέχουσα οικονομική κρίση θα μας διδάξει κάποια μαθήματα για τον καπιταλισμό;

*Οι σημερινοί μετριοπαθείς κεϊνσιανιστές θέλουν δημοσιονομική πολιτική αντί των νομισματικών πολιτικών που ήταν σε ευμένεια από την ομάδα του Μπους. Οι πιο αριστεροί κεϊνσιανιστές, όπως ο Stiglitz, θέλουν δημοσιονομική πολιτική συν την εθνικοποίηση των τραπεζών. Στο γενικό κλίμα ευφορίας για την εκλογή του Ομπάμα και την απομάκρυνση του Μπους, οι κεϊνσιανιστές δείχνουν ανίκανοι να δουν όλα τα εμπόδια που υπάρχουν για την επιτυχία της δημοσιονομικής πολιτικής και της εθνικοποίησης τραπεζών. Σε αυτό είναι τόσο τυφλοί όσο οι νεοφιλελεύθεροι προκάτοχοί τους, που ήταν εξίσου βέβαιοι ότι η νομισματική πολιτική θα τερμάτιζε την κρίση. Οι σημερινοί κεϊνσιανιστές απαριθμούν και αντιμετωπίζουν μόνο τις δομικές πτυχές της οικονομίας που παρήγαγε και διατρέφει την κρίση. Την ίδια στιγμή η περαιτέρω κοινωνική επιδείνωση και τα κινήματα ανθρώπων από τη βάση της κοινωνίας μάς προκαλούν να δούμε, τουλάχιστον, ορισμένα από τα σημερινά προβλήματα, από θέσεις πιο επικριτικές απ' αυτές των κεϊνσιανιστών. Αυτοί ανοίγουν διάπλατα τις πόρτες στη κοινωνική αλλαγή ως τη μόνη ουσιαστική λύση στην τρέχουσα κρίση.

__________________________________________________________



Ο RICHARD WOLFF είναι ομότιμος καθηγητής Οικονομικών στο Πανεπιστήμιο της Μασαχουσέτης και καθηγητής στο πρόγραμμα διεθνών σπουδών στο New School University στη Νέα Υόρκη. Είναι μια από τις δεσπόζουσες ακαδημαϊκές φυσιογνωμίες στις οικονομικές επιστήμες. Αποφοίτησε από το Harvard (magna cum laude), συνέχισε για μεταπτυχιακές σπουδές στο Stanford απ' όπου και απέκτησε μάστερ, στη συνέχεια πήγε στο Yale απ' όπου έλαβε μάστερ στην Ιστορία, ένα επιπλέον μάστερ στα Οικονομικά και το διδακτορικό του. Εχει δημοσιεύσει πάνω από 10 βιβλία και εκατοντάδες άρθρα και είναι μέλος της συντακτικής επιτροπής της επιθεώρησης «Rethinking Marxism».
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* Αναδημοσίευση απο την ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΤΥΠΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗΣ/ΟΙΚΟΝΟΜΙΑ, 01.03.2009

Ctitidue & Revolution -- http://philcsc.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/critique-and-revolution/

AFTERWORD TO

CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAL BAKHTIN, & RAYMOND WILLIAMS

(Edwin Mellen Press, 2009)

by E. SAN JUAN

In response to a recent discussion on “the end of theory,” the distinguished Marxist critic Fredric Jameson introduced a historical-materialist standpoint in surveying the recent trajectory of critical thought in Europe and North America. From structuralism to poststructuralism, theory–the rubric for philosophical reflection on society and culture in general–now shifts to a third moment, the political, which in turn is reducible to antagonisms of all sorts. But for Jameson, the decisive move is the fourth moment, “the theorizing of collective subjectivities” (2003). By this he means substituting for the object of study the structure and dynamics of specific cultural modes, or particular cultural production processes instead of individual texts or privileged discourses. One group undertaking this kind of theorizing is the Subaltern Studies (of which Spivak is a member) and, by extension, the practitioners of postcolonial studies who consider the achievement of Edward Said as an exemplary model. How does academic postcolonial theory measure up to the standards and principles of critique set forth by Bakhtin, Gramsci and Williams?
Vintage postcolonial criticism initially approached the problem of colonial and postcolonial identity from a Eurocentric angle. The Australian scholars Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin posited the subject in colonized societies as a product of Cartesian philosophy centered in the person of the white property-owning individual. I recapitulate their argument here found in their textbook, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. Within the framework of Enlightenment thought, the autonomous male individual is conceived as the rational creature separated from the world, from reality and others, by a reflexive, doubting sensibility. This founding axiom of European humanism creates the subject independent of divine will or cosmic forces that transcend private consciousness. This European self or “I” deploys intellect and imagination to understand and represent the world. In general, the faculty of reason distinguishes the subject’s capacity to act and produce meaning. It ignores the role of social relations or the network of social practices in fashioning the self. Subject and object are clearly distinct and separate. It is this reason-centered subject of colonial power that subjugated and exploited the peoples of Africa, Asia and the Americas in the early stage of capital accumulation.
Deploying the theories of Freud and Marx, and the philosophical intervention of Nietzsche, the subject of Cartesian individualism has been deconstructed by contemporary critical theory; that is, it has been exposed as contingent and fissured, not unified and demiurgic. Capitalism entered a crisis with the emergence of the proletariat and its self-activizing organizations. Meanwhile Freud’s discovery of the unconscious revealed the limits of bourgeois rationality. Participating in the social movements of his time, Marx asserted the priority of “social being” over individual consciousness. The postmodern subject is now recognized as a product of ideology, discourse, and a network of variable social factors. Individual identity becomes an effect and not a cause, thus destroying the thesis of sovereign independence of the Cartesian cogito. The traditional property-owning subject has thus been seriously undermined by this new epistemology, a development that coincides with the political awakening of the colonized subjects, les damnes de la terre, in the hinterlands of Empire. Theory and practice are coalescing in the age of popular revolutions around the world.

Ultimate Reckoning?

In the last quarter of the 20th century, global capitalism entered a severe and inescapable crisis. Imperialism adopted a postcolonial mask of neoliberal tolerance. The postcolonial subject, now a flexible citizen-consumer, still claims to be free from the influence of the social relations of production. Ashcroft and his Australian colleagues, as noted earlier, choose to regard subjectivity as produced by discourse, following Michel Foucault’s teaching. Discourse engenders a subject dependent on the rules of the system of knowledge and behavioral norms that constitute it. In sum, the subject is no longer the originator of his actions or thoughts, as was once presumed; it is now perceived as a “variable and complex function of discourse.” With respect to authors, for example, “the author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within the society” (Foucault 1979, 202; 209). Systems of knowledge exercise power to produce and control subjects such as “criminals,” “perverts,” “lunatics” within the discourses of criminality, sexuality, and psychiatry. Thus, orthodox postcolonial theories operate on the basis of this axiom: “Within any historical period, various discourses compete for control of subjectivity, but these discourses are always a function of the power of those who control the discourse to determine knowledge and truth. Thus, while a person may be the subject of various discourses, subjectivity will be produced by the discourse that dominates at the time” (Ashcroft et al 1998, 224).
What is problematic here, of course, is the rationality and intelligibility of these discourses. The proponents of materialist critique would counterpose the following queries: Are they independent of the material relations of production? In what way are these discourses imposed or legitimized? How are they replaced or readjusted to conform to new historical conditions? Who is the power behind the discourse of the mass media and electronic communication? If the discourse of colonialism and imperialism creates the identity of the colonial subject, how can the postcolonial subject free itself from the power of the corporate media, commodifying spectacles, and other techniques of institutional control? We shall see in a moment how this repertoire of interrogation applies to the life-and-death predicament of Latin American and Asian protagonists of decolonization.
The answers offered by mainstream postcolonial critics are usually a variant of Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment humanism, or a reformulation of Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence. Thus, there is no fixed subject or agency that can initiate radical change or substantive structural transformation. There is only the hybrid, ambivalent, mimicking subject of Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Gayatri Spivak, and their followers. But then, is the postcolonial subject trapped in her subjectivity, alienated and denied any power of choice, self-reflection, or resistance? The answer to this question is left suspended; or else, as in the elegant practice of Said, a secular humanist learning is invoked to provide knowledge and direction for a pluralist compromise (more on this later).

From the Caribbean to the Mediterranean

One alternative is Frantz Fanon’s idea of challenging colonial discourse by revolutionary political mobilization and a strategy of counterhegemonic violence. As a psychologist, Fanon paid attention to the operation of discourse, ideology, and other material instruments of subjugation. He argued that the Algerian subject, for example, can transcend his powerlessness by solidarity, direct participation and collective decision-making. Fanon’s rhetorical affirmation seems to capture a kind of quasi-Enlightenment agency: “I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis I will initiate the cycle of my freedom” (1952, 231). Fanon’s hypothesis is an attempt to mobilize the natives’ reflexive and intuitive capacity to recapture “the lasting tension of their freedom” so that they will be able to create “the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.” Nonetheless, given the tendency to abstract moralizing and ethical generalizations, Fanon’s existentialism needs to be historicized in order to harness its pedagogical efficacy agit-prop potential.
Earlier we have seen how Gramsci’s understanding of human subjectivity as a dynamic composite of forces immanent in history is defined by the conflict of classes for hegemony. Gramsci’s subaltern intellectual emerges from that conflict. Analogous to the postcolonial subject, the subaltern finds identity and direction in relation to the social group or collective that provides meaning and value to his actions. Significance and value spring from the world-view or framework of beliefs connected with embattled social classes based on the division of labor inscribed in a historically determinate mode of production. Thus, discourse, ideology and language mediated through intellectuals are able to “interpellate” the subject since they acquire efficacy only within the socioeconomic process of the formation of social classes that ultimately determine identity as a function of the position of the individual in society. This is the central argument of Bakhtin’s research into novelistic discourse and Williams’ project of delineating the genealogy of cultural formations. We can investigate this conception of colonial identity in other “third world’ thinkers such as Che Guevarra, Amilcar Cabral, C.L.R. James, and others (see San Juan 1998). For now, it might be useful to speculate briefly on Said’s impact in forging a postcolonial critique useful for our post-9/11 epoch.

Said’s Intervention

Since the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Said has been credited with inaugurating a whole slew of disciplinary approaches, among them postcolonial criticism, colonial discourse analysis, and of late, “accidental feminism.” Said himself disclaimed the vacuous postcolonial babble in vogue, dismissed “postcolonial” as a misnomer, and affirmed his interest in analyzing neocolonial structures of dependency imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on the global South (1998/9). He was of course for women’s liberation in general. Who would not be? Whether he was a humanist or not, in the traditional sense of defending classical European civilization from the barbaric “Others,” is mischievous speculation. Over against fashionable deconstructive modes of inquiry, Said clearly preferred Gramsci’s historicizing method of inventory to Foucault’s genealogy, adding that he was “always trying to gear my writing not towards the theoretical constituency but towards a political constituency” (1998/9, 92). Proof of this is his prodigious and powerful critiques of the Israeli state’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people and the unconscionable support of the U.S. governing elite to this unrelenting outrage.
There is something salutary in reminding ourselves that notwithstanding Maxine Hong Kingston’s intervention in 1975 (when Woman Warrior was published), it was Orientalism that may have effectively “opened the way for a thoroughgoing critique of the discursive production of ‘other’ spaces,” as David Palumbo Liu suggests (1999. 304). Actually, Said did not initiate this genre of debunking, but he was certainly persuasive and strategically influential in the way he performed his task. Said himself learned a lot from Foucault and poststructuralist thought, although he inflected the archaelogical and demystifying mode of interpretation: reading, for Said, engages traditional literary forms in the light of known communal criteria and secular pursuits. He evolved from the textual free play and undecidabilities of Beginnings (1975) to the more determinate critiques of Orientalism whose ideological and political premises are more fully articulated in The World, the Text and the Critic (1991) and, more substantially, in Culture and Imperialism (1993). I think the lessons of Culture and Imperialism as well as of the essays collected in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000) should be the locus of our attention if we want to find out how we can use Said’s optic, particularly his contrapuntal deployment of historical, cultural and ideological motifs, in revitalizing the rather repetitious, banalizing if not opportunist, cliches of current Asian American Studies sanctified in the orthodoxies of our hoary curricula and formulas enshrined in our canonical texts.
Like most intellectuals in the U.S. academy, Said’s work illustrates a postmodernist eclectic style proud of its complexity, its nuanced and urbane erudition, and openness to experimentation. The institution of the U.S. university afforded him opportunities but also self-internalized constraints. Despite Said’s versatile appropriation of themes and concepts from the rich archive of the Marxist tradition, from Lukacs, Gramsci, Fanon and C.L.R. James, and despite his commitment to the revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinian intifada, he was never able fully to situate culture, and its diverse expressive forms, within the complex dynamic of the altering historical modes of production and reproduction in specific social formations. His training was extremely confined to the literary and philological, even though he tried to apply, with suave sophistication, his knowledge of economic, political, and philosophical ideas to the hermeneutics and judgment of cultural forms and practices. But, as I explained in Racism and Cultural Studies, it was not so much a lack of knowledge as a deliberate refusal to historicize power relations in concrete material conditions (a method deployed by Raymond Williams, whom Said admired) that limited Said’s insightful readings of novels, opera, poetry, etc. One example is his rather moralistic and psychologizing essay, “Yeats and Decolonization” (1990) whose self-serving exchange-value is replicated by opportunist “clerks” seeking a niche in the swiftly crumbling “Project for a New American Century.”
So what particular use-value useful for resolving the perrennial crisis of the humanities can we import from Said? What I am proposing is that we avoid the pedagogical limitations of Said’s rather schematic and even formulaic understanding of power relations, and focus instead on his mode of criticizing the doxa of institutional disciplinary regimes. This critique may be discerned in his numerous books on the Palestinian struggle. One can also trace the dialectical logic of this critique in one of his last essays, “The Clash of Definitions” (2000). On the one hand, Said cogently exposes the invidious rhetoric of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and its reified concepts that distort the real world, a metaphysics of ideological manipulation. On the other hand, Said rejects the notion that all of reality can be reduced to tropes, constructed figures, metanarratives, etc. For Said, the world’s dynamic complexity requires a conceptual apparatus and sensibility that can capture its changes, overlaps, mixtures, variations, crossings, migrations, etc. In short, we need to test our theories against the reality of the world we live and not settle into the rut of conformism. In this light Said, valuing more adequately the insurrectionary example of Fanon, revised his judgment of Lukacs (in his later essay on “Traveling Theory Reconsidered”) in response to the resurgence of anti-capitalist struggles in the nineties. Eloquently formulated in essays such as “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community,” as well as the instructive “On Defiance and Taking Positions,” Said’s lesson for scholars and activists—the use-value of his critical “worldliness” in permanently interrogating the established consensus–may be summed up in one word: defiance.
The Menchu Affair

How does such “defiance” play out in the intellectual agon of the “culture wars”? The recent controversy over Nobel prizewinning Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu and her authority as an indigenous spokesperson brings into sharp relief the substantive issues of objectivity versus human interest in what has come to be known as the current “Culture Wars.” It serves as a timely reminder that the dispute over truth (now referred to as “truth effect,” after Foucault and postmodern nominalists) and its representation is transnational in scope and perennial in nature. It evokes the memory of some durable controversies in the humanities and social science disciplines that have assumed new disguises since the “two cultures” of C.P. Snow, or much earlier, the anarchy/culture polarity of Matthew Arnold. Should the tale be trusted over the teller, as D.H. Lawrence once advised? Or is it the case that if there is no teller, there is no worthwhile tale?
Obviously the question of knowledge of what is real, its legitimacy and relevance, occupies center stage. Much more than this, however, in the secular/technological milieu of late modernity, what concerns us is the usage to which such knowledge, whether of the natural world and society, is put. Inflected in the realm of knowledge about culture and society, the problem of representing the world (events, personalities) looms large, distilled in such questions as: Who speaks now? For whom? And for what purpose?

Who Speaks? For Whom? In the Name of What?

One way of responding to such questions is by evasion. The pursuit of truth, objectively detached from the perspective of the truth-seeker, ironically dispenses with speaker, circumstance, and addressee. It displaces what Bakhtin calls the dialogic scene of communication. The truth-seeker interested in the content of the tale asks: Is Rigoberta Menchu telling the truth, that is, conveying accurately the objective facts about the torture of her family?
Anthropologist David Stoll, the author of Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans, testifies that Menchu is lying. Seemingly adhering to a traditional positivist standard, Stoll argues that Menchu’s testimonio “cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be” because he compares it with the reports of his informants in Guatemala. No one, however, has checked the veracity of these informants. Are they more reliable? Under what criteria? Stoll contends that Mayans who did not side with the guerillas are more trustworthy, or at least their reports vitiate Menchu’s credibility. Stoll accepts quite naively the other versions of what happened in Guatemala, and for him they are more authentic, if not more veridical. Those versions invalidate the truth-telling authority of Menchu’s autobiography.
Protagonists on either side do not stake their positions on details but on the theoretical framework which makes intelligible both Menchu’s narrative and Stoll’s interrogation. Literary critic John Beverley, for example, emphasizes the genre or discursive structure of Menchu’s testimonio. He underscores Menchu’s ideological agenda and her programmatic goal of building solidarity. On the other hand, Stoll, D’Souza and other detractors try to counter Menchu’s revolutionary agenda by their politically-correct demand for facts regardless of genre or stylistic form in which such truth is found. In a review (The Nation Feb. 8, 2000) of Stoll’s book and Menchu’s recent testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, Greg Grandin and Francisco Goldman cogently show the inconsistencies of Stoll’s position. Both sides, it seems, do not quarrel over certain “givens” which are described in other accounts (see, for example, Eduardo Galeano’s Guatemala Occupied Country). In this context, sociologist John Brown Childs writes: “At least 100,000 indigenous peoples have been murdered by (U.S. supported) government forces; at least 40,000 have ‘disappeared,’ which is to say they have been murdered; 450 villages have been destroyed; and 250,000 people have been turned into refugees because of government “anti-guerilla” campaigns aimed at the Mayan population” (1993, 20). Since Menchu is not expressing this “given,” it seems acceptable to all parties.

Truth Versus Reality?

We are not rehearsing the ancient dictum about objective scientific truth in chronicles and annals versus reality based on individual experience. Many members of the academic community are familiar, to one degree or another, with the antithetical modes of historiography and the attendant controversy elucidated sometime ago by E.H. Carr in his book, What is History? There is a continuing debate between those who espouse a naturalist or scientific point of view typified by historians like Marc Bloch, and those who advocate a hermeneutic or interpretive view upheld by R.G. Collingwood, Barraclough, and others. Carr himself tried to strike a compromise when he asserted that “the historian is engaged on a continuous process of moulding the facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to his facts,” unable to assign primacy to one over the other. But what are the facts? Obviously one cannot search for the facts without some orientation or guideline concerning the totality of social relations and circumstances where those “facts” are located; otherwise, how can one distinguish a fact from a non-fact?
Postmodern thinkers influenced by poststructuralist trends (deconstruction; de Certeau, Rorty, Clifford) contend that objective truth in historical writing is impossible. History is not a body of incontrovertible, retrievable solid facts (in Mr. Gradgrind’s sense) but a text open to disparate interpretations. Although I am not a “fan” of Michel Foucault, it may be useful to insert him into this debate. Foucault’s lesson for us is that historical accounts are problematic representations of life because they are constituted by heterogeneous cultural codes and complex social networks entailing shifting power differentials. Knowledge, in short, is always complicit with power. Ultimately, questions of truth reflect conflicting ideologies and political interests associated with unstable agencies. Not that reality is a mere invention or fiction, but that its meanings and significances are, to use the fashionable phrase, “social constructions” that need to be contextualized and evaluated for their historically contingent validity. Such constructions are open to critique and change. From this angle, both Menchu’s testimony and Stoll’s debunking are riddled with ambiguities and undecidables that cannot be resolved by mere arbitration over facts–such arbitration and facts are themselves texts or discourses that need to be accounted for, and so on. In the end, it’s all a question of power and hegemony. Or is it?
The excesses of postmodernist reductionism are now being acknowledged even by its practitioners. What discipline or method of inquiry can claim to be justified by a thoroughgoing skepticism and relativism? While I do not subscribe to an overvalorized notion of power, whether decentered or negotiated through an “infinite chain of signifiers,” a power not embedded in concrete sociopolitical formations, I think the stress on historical grounding is requisite and unavoidable. This is perhaps a commonplace. But I mention it nevertheless to foreground the need to be more critical about the contemporary resonance of what is involved in historical representation of non-Western groups, collectivities, and peoples by intellectuals of the economically powerful North. Self-awareness of the limits of one’s mode of knowing Others is now a precondition for any engagement with subjects that once were defined or constituted by ethnocentric, preemptive, and often exploitative world-views and their coercive apparatuses.

Politics of Mis-recognition

We confront here an enactment of the subtle politics of Othering, an ubiquitous theme of the now banal identity politics, when Stoll subjects Menchu to interrogation. When “first world” producers of knowledge of indigenous peoples claim to offer the “truth” or the credible representation of people of color inhabiting colonized, “postcolonial” or neocolonial regions and internal dependencies, shouldn’t we stop and ask what is going on, who is speaking to whom and for what purpose? There are no pure languages of inquiry where traces or resonances of the intonation, words, idioms and tones of the Others cannot be found. I want to cite a recent and somewhat analogous case here which concerns the relation between contemporary American scholarship and the production of knowledge about Philippine history.
The centenary celebrations of the 1896-98 Philippine revolution against its former colonial power, Spain, have just ended when interest in Spain’s successor, the United States, was sparked by the U. S. government’s recent demand for virtually unlimited rights of military access to Philippine territory. With the loss of its military bases in 1992, the United States is trying to regain, and reinforce in another form, its continuing hegemony over its former colony.
Successful in defeating Spanish colonial might, the revolutionary Republic of the Philippines ended when the U.S. intervened in 1898. The Filipino-American War broke out in February 1898 and lasted for at least a decade. A lingering dispute exists as to how many Filipinos actually died in this “first Vietnam.” The exact description of the US-supervised genocide is still lacking. Stanley Karnow, the popularizer of U.S. scholarship on the Philippines, cites two hundred thousand Filipinos while the Filipino historian Renato Constantino puts it at 600,000, the number of casualties in Luzon alone, given by General Bell, one of the military planners of the “pacification” campaigns. Another scholar, Luzviminda Francisco, concludes that if we take into account the other campaigns in Batangas, Panay, Albay, and Mindanao, the total could easily be a million (1987, 19). Do we count the victims of “collateral damage,” civilians not involved in direct fighting? The U.S. strategy in fighting a guerilla war then was to force all the natives into concentration camps in which many died of starvation, disease, and brutal treatment. What is the truth and who has it? Where are the reliable informants who can provide authentic narratives? Whom are we to believe?
In the Balangiga, Samar, incident of September 28, 1901, exactly forty-five American soldiers were killed by Filipino guerilla partisans. The Filipinos suffered 250 casualties during the attack and another twenty soon after. In retaliation, General Jacob Smith ordered the killing of all Filipinos above the age of ten. In a few months, the whole of Samar was reduced to a “howling wilderness.” No exact figures of total Filipino deaths are given by Karnow and other American historians. Exactly what happened in the numerous cases of American military atrocities against Filipinos investigated by the U.S., is still a matter of contention. But there is general agreement that the war was distinguished by, in the words of Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo, “extreme barbarity.” Exactly how many died in the Samar campaign, or during the entire war, is again a matter of who is doing the counting, what are the criteria employed, and for what purpose. Historiographic methodology by itself cannot answer our demand for a sense of the whole, a cognitive grasp or mapping of the total situation. Other more totalizing and deerminate processes of discovery and logic of confirming belief are required.

Counter-intuitive Inference

Of more immediate relevance to the Menchu/Stoll non-exchange is the recent hullabaloo over the stature of the Filipino revolutionary hero Andres Bonifacio (1863-1897). An American specialist in area studies, Glenn May, acquired instant notoriety when his book Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-creation of Andres Bonifacio came out in 1992. In a supercilious tone, May questioned the veracity of certain documents attributed to Bonifacio by Filipino intellectuals and political leaders. Without any actual examination of the documents in question, May, hedging with numerous “maybes” and “perhaps,” accused Filipino historians–from Teodoro Agoncillo to Reynaldo Ileto–of either forging documents or fraudulently assigning to Bonifacio certain texts responsible for his heroic aura and reputation.
Except for evincing the customary and pedestrian rationale for the academic profession, this exercise in debunking an anti-colonial hero lends itself to being construed as a cautionary tale. It can be interpreted as a more systematic attempt by a member of the superior group to discredit certain Filipino nationalist historians who are judged guilty of fraud and other underhanded practices unworthy of civilized intellectuals. Ileto’s defense tries to refute the prejudgment. He accuses May of privileging “colonial archives” over oral testimonies, of deploying the patron-client/tutelage paradigm which prejudices all of May’s views of Filipinos, and one-sidedly discounting any evidence that contradicted May’s thesis that the Philippine revolution was really a revolt of the elites, not of the masses. In short, May’s version of the “truth” cannot be trusted because he functions (whether he is aware of it or not) as an apologist of U.S. imperial policy, a role that has a venerable lineage of pedigreed scholars from the anthropologist Dean Worcester to academic bureaucrats like David Steinberg, Theodore Friend, and Peter Stanley. Their scholarly authority cannot be divorced from the continuing involvement of the U.S. corporate elite in asserting its control, however indirect or covert, over Philippine political, cultural, and economic affairs. I suppose that joining this group of luminaries is enough compensation for May and other “disinterested” seekers of facts and truth.
As in the Menchu/Stoll confrontation, May’s outright condemnation of at least four generations of Filipino scholars and intellectuals is revealing in many ways. The following heuristic questions may be offered for further reflection and discussion: Should we still insist in the axiomatic dualism of objective truth and subjective interpretation in accounts of fraught events? Shouldn’t we consider the exigencies of the dialogic communication: who are the parties involved? In what historical moments? In what arena or set of circumstances can a citizen of a dominant global power question the veracity of a citizen/subject of a subordinated country without this act being considered an imperial intrusion and imposition? Can the investigation of individual facts or events in these dependent polities be considered legitimate as sources of “objective’ knowledge without taking into account the hierarchical ordering of nation-state relations? What attitude should researchers from these powerful centers of learning adopt that will dispel the suspicion of “third world” peoples that they are partisans of a neocolonizing program, if not unwitting instruments of their controlling corporate elite?
Obviously, the more immediate stakes in the ongoing “culture wars” are social policies and programs within the United States, with secondary implications in terms of foreign policy—such as ongoing counterinsurgency actions of the US military against Moro and New People’s Army guerillas–and academic priorities. Still, we cannot ignore how the attacks on indigenous testimonios like Menchu, or heroic figures of nation-states that claim to be sovereign and independent (including scholars and intellectuals of these nation-states), are both allegories of internal political antagonisms/class warfare and the literal battlefields for recuperating the now attenuated imperial glory of pax Americana of the Cold War days. After Abu Ghraib and the revelations about outrageous torture procedures in Guantanamo, reality has now superseded the truth-telling propaganda of the Bush administration and its apologists.

Subaltern Utterance

Contrary to some pundits of deconstruction, I believe the subaltern or the colonized subject, whether Menchu or Agoncillo (now deceased), can perform the role of witness and “speak truth to power.” Menchu can and has indeed skilfully struggled to represent herself and her people in times of emergency and crisis. Her Nobel Prize award may be considered an index of her effectivity. For the indigenous peoples of Guatemala and other dependent formations, the purpose of speech is not just for universally accepted legitimate cultural reasons–affirming their identities and their right of self-determination–but, more crucially, for their physical survival. Such speech actualizes the expressive and communicative virtues of language. Its actualization in public exchange entails responsibility, hence the need to respond to criticisms or questions about “truth” and its grounding. In particular, it entails judgment about justice and accountability.
A warning by Walter Benjamin may be useful to clarify the notion of “truth” in lived situations where “facts”–the gritty incalculables of reality–intermesh with feeling and conviction. In his famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin expressed reservations about orthodox historians like Leopold von Ranke whom Marx considered “a little root-grubber” who reduced history to “facile anecdote-mongering and the attribution of all great events to petty and mean causes.” Benjamin speculated that the “truth” of the past can be seized only as an image, as a memory “as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” I believe this moment of danger is always with us when, in a time of settling accounts in the name of justice, we see the Stolls and Mays suddenly come up with their credentials and entitlements in order to put the “upstart” subalterns in their proper place. This is also the moment for us to take sides.

National Allegory Again

Permit me to enter a parenthesis here concerning a mode of subaltern speech, the theory of “national allegory.” Controversial and yet uncannily heuristic, this theory enunciated by Fredrick Jameson remains us of one of the most neglected but salient elements of an evolving Marxist critique, in particular a materialist hermeneutic. First proposed in the essay “Third World Lilterature in the Era of Multinational Capital” (1986), Jameson argued that the individual-centered narratives of writers in the ex-colonized, now postcolonial, societies of “the third world” necessarily assume a double function: as an expression of monadic consciousness and as an emblematic representation of the collective experience of the whole oppressed society. Writers like Lu Hsun (China) and Ousmane Sembene (Senegal) compose what is now recognized as versions of the testimonio by Latin American scholars (the best example is Menchu’s autobiography discussed earlier)—life-histories of both the writer and her community.
We need to historicize this aesthetic form further. Given the uneven development of capitalism in semi-feudal peripheralized social formations, the modern bourgeois forms of writing cannot but be altered by the subaltern subject-position of people of color. Jameson contends that the articulating principle of “third world” expression in the era of monopoly capital is both ideological and utopian. This embodiment of ambivalence, more precisely polysemic signification, captures both the reification of life in business society as well as the residues and survivals of pre-capitalist modes of production that escape commodification and anomie. He refers to the vision of community and modes of resistance and opposition that are fundamentally utopian. Such a method of appraising cultural production in colonized societies reflects the dialectical method of critique applied to overdetermined social formations where diverse modes of production coalesce. Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian Marxist, objects to Jameson’s theory because it cannot encompass the infinite diversity of “third world” aesthetic and cultural practices. Ahmad cites the multilingual literatures of the Indian subcontinent as refusing the concept of “national allegory.” While Ahmad correctly highlights the hybrid, variegated textures of literary practice in the Indian region, I think he fails to appreciate fully Jameson’s totalizing or historicizing intent. Jameson is actually applying on non-Western writing the method of ideology-critique and utopian extrapolation that he has outlined in “On Interpretation” in his major oeuvre, The Political Unconscious. In his reply to Ahmad, Jameson stressed the implications of his stance one of which is the need “for a relational way of thinking global culture” and a comparative study of cultural situations—a way out of the orthodox regimen based on the dismal canons of “Western civilization.”
Our research program would indeed benefit from this Jamesonian version of critique. From the hindsight of Jameson’s later work on postmodernism, Brecht, modernity, and the tieup between culture and finance capital, I would suggest further inquiry into the pedagogical usefulness of “national allegory” and the dialectical method it enables. What we need is a relational, contextual and historicist thinking absent from what prevails in the Establishment academy today. I would contend that the synthesizing historiography embodied in the program of “national allegory” allows a critique of ideological formations in particular times and places, at the same time as it permits the dialectical sublation of the limits of any empirical instance in subjugated formations by disclosing the utopian possibilities of freedom and justice repressed in them. In effect, the hypothesis of “national allegory” induces the inferential comprehension of “the political unconscious” invested in the “third world” subject whom Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” the racialized and inferiorized proletariat of the Empire’s hinterlands, whose negativity and unfathomable privation symbolize the possibility of change and redemption from global capital’s dehumanizing profit-instrumentalizing barbarism.

Hypothetical Injunction

A few months before his death, Said, arguably the founding “patriarch” of postcolonial studies, reassessed his critique of “Orientalism” by affirming the value of “humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle” so as to enable the speaking of “issues of injustice and suffering” within the amply situated contexts of history and socioeconomic reality. He invoked sentiments of generosity and hospitality so that the interpreter’s mind can actively make a place for “a foreign other,” the “active practice of worldly secular rational discourse”. He strongly denounced the current U.S. government policy of celebrating “American or western exceptionalism” and demonstrating contempt for other cultures, all in the service of “terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral regime change” (2003, 17). In an earlier interview, Said asserted that his main interest was in neocolonialism, not postcolonialism (which, to him, was a “misnomer”), in “the structures of dependency and impoverishment” in the global South due to the operations of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (1998/99, 82). Overall, a modernist humanism, not postcolonial hybridity, deconstruction, or genealogy of speechless subalterns, was for Said the paradigmatic framework of inquiry for a comparative analysis of cultures and societies in an epoch of decolonization.
After over two decades of intellectual specialization and investment, postcolonial inquiry has now enjoyed sufficient legitimacy and prestige in the Euro-American academy to make it serviceable for reinforcing the White Supremacist consensus. Decolonization is over. The natives now run the government. Long live the free market (now collapsing) around the planet! Works by Bhabha, Spivak, and others are institutionally consecrated “touchstones,” to use the Arnoldian rubric, that, though somewhat vitiated as products of a “comprador intelligentsia,” nevertheless serve to authorize a validation of colonialism and its legacies as a useful if ambivalent resource. Informed by theoretical protocols and procedures hostile to nationalist movements, not to speak of anti-imperialist revolutionary struggles and other “metanarratives” inspired by Fanon, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and others, postcolonial studies today function as supplements not to the critical theories of Derrida, Foucault or Deleuze, but to the official apologetics of the “new world order” called “globalization” ushered with the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, that is to say, the end of history and the eternal triumph of capitalism and its attendant ideology, neoliberal globalism. As Arif Dirlik summed it up, postcolonial discourse has become an academic orthodoxy in its “self-identification with hybridity, in-betweeness, marginality, borderlands”—a fatal move from the “language of revolution infused with the vocabulary of political economy to a culturalist language of identity politics” (2000, 5).

What happened to revolution and the decolonizing figure prefigured by Caliban and personified by Rizal, Sandino, Nelson Mandela, and others? In his master-work Culture and Imperialism, Said paid homage to the revolutionary militants, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and others, as the locus classicus of emancipatory “third world” discourse who engaged the recovery of lost integrity in the context of regaining the territorial habitat of memory—places instead of spaces— and popular sovereignty. But today, nationalism and national liberation struggles are anathema to postcolonialists. And with the neoconservative counter-revolution after the defeat of U.S. aggression in Indochina, a “cultural turn” effectively replaced the revolutionary process in history with an endless process of “abrogation and appropriation” of colonial texts and practices in quest of an identity that is ultimately and forever decentered, shifting, borderless, fluid, aleatory, ambivalent, and so on. What encapsulates all these qualities is the term “transnational,” the prefix “trans” functioning as the magic word that would bridge the immense gap between the terrible misery of peoples in the underdeveloped South and the affluent suburban megamalls of the North. One might ask: Would transnationals and transculturals resolve questions of suffering and injustice that confront us daily in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Colombia, the Philippines, and of course in the “internal colonies” of North America and Europe?

Weather Reporting

In the canonical handbook by Ashcroft et al referred to earlier, we do not find any entry for “Liberation” but one for “Liminality”. And, more telling, there is no entry for “Revolution” either. Aside from the valorization of the liminal as the in-between hybrid notion, “rhizome” is privileged by our postcolonial experts as the concept (attributed to Deleuze and Guattari, but defined in Foucauldian terminology) that best describes colonial power: “it operates dynamically, laterally and intermittently.” Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin assert that “There is no master-plan of imperialism, and its advance is not necessarily secured through violence and oppression”; and therefore we should focus on the way “cultural hegemony” operates through “an invisible network of filiative connections, psychological internalizations, and unconsciously complicit associations” (1998, 207). Surely these generalizations will strike anyone as quite dubious, departing radically from Gramsci’s use of “hegemony” as a historically variable combination of force and consent. They also prove spurious and untenable compared to Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia and William’s category of “structure of feeling.”

One sign of the terminal exhaustion of this anti-totalizing stance is the reduction of the issue of globalization to “the nature and survival of social and cultural identity,” thus evacuating the arena of political and socioeconomic struggle which Said and his models (Fanon, C.L.R. James) considered salient and inescapable. Disturbed by this trend, students and teachers at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, recently organized a conference on “the politics of postcoloniality.” Anticipating an “Empire Resurrected,” they posed the following questions in a futuristic or subjunctive mode (reproduced from a widely circulated flyer):

What are the chances of establishing direct colonialism again in the 21st century? Why did the old empires give up their old colonies in favor of indirect colonialism? What are the conditions that would make them revert back to direct colonialism? What are the circumstances (economical/political/cultural/social) that would facilitate the resurrection of direct colonialism/empire? How can colonial schemes be countered? What should be the new mode of resistance? What is the role of civil disobedience in this case? Is terrorism/radical resistance the new mode for countering the new empire? What are the viable modes or resistance? How can postcolonial theory respond/react to such a possibility? What would be its role?

These are fresh winds blowing from the dusty ivory-towers of the Empire’s academies where the tomes of Bakhtin, Gramsci and Williams are kept, perhaps gathering dust. They betoken grassroots unrest that might stir us up from the dogmatic slumber induced by the seductive pleasures of postcolonial contingency and postmodernist disjuncture, summoning us to gather our energies for celebrating the birth of what Marx called, in “Theses on Feuerbach,” the critique of “revolutionary praxis.