generative processes: the creation of a new subjectivity, for inscription only -- by the way, this paper sucks for many MANY reasons

There is a nervous condition felt by many under the aegis of advanced capitalist economic practise. It is no longer enough to call it an alienation felt by the distance between workers and the means of production. The interpellative gestures of social and productive discourse under advanced capitalism are misread by many as being a sense of advanced temporality, a quickened pace. It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to cope, each as an individual, to the social and productive demands made on them. Indeed, the very notion of individuality which is fundamental to philosophic and legal discourse in nations which have developed capitalist economies is itself becoming ever more problematised. I wish to take as fundamental to this present examination the notion, elaborated in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, of a hybrid existence between humanity and the machines that are employed in production. There has never been an ontological distinction between humanity and its technological practises and devices. Primitive humans were as fully hybridized with their tools and technologies, in the ontological sense, as their modern counterparts. There has always been a hybridized discourse between what is organic and what is technological. The public sphere is always-already the medium in which the hybrid subject is formed. Through a process of interpellating subjects, the productive agents of society reproduce themselves: “the behaviours of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 23). As a subject always-already interpellated under the panopticon of control which constitutes and reifies such institutions, there is no true exteriority to the system. (If we view resistence against an authority a product of that authority, as Foucault himself does in Discipline and Punish, then what marks the rupture necessary for the creation of an alternate system of production and interpellation: violent interruption of the system, characterised by the two World Wars which led to a relatively peaceful Europe at the expense of many of its former colonies, or the aggressively pacifist resistence which led to Indian independence from Britain?).

Presently, the principle concern that I wish to explore is the degree to which technological hybridization has changed two concepts for philosophical discourse: subjectivity (or even more precisely, the degree to which ‘immanence’ can be understood) and the sublime. Both of these concepts have been tied (historically speaking) to a sense of ‘organic’ transcendence. Alternately phrased, notions of the beautiful and of truth cannot be defined in the same manner as they once had. There is no hieratic (divine) subject to which the gesture of transcendence is given function, as I will further elaborate below. Postmodernity has transformed the beautiful to achieve an aesthetic balance between technological application and natural (human) generation. Technologies which have increased the circulation of goods in order to maximize market development have also allowed increased population flows which simultaneously disrupt and constitute productive capacities. The current developments in the hybridization of human subjects and mechanical processes signal a metonymical exodus, as subjects are continually attempting to dislocate themselves from the limitations of their productive capacity. This occurs in “not only spatial but also mechanical [means] in the sense that the subject is transformed ... toward (or with) the machine – a machine exodus” (Hardt & Negri: 367). Moreover, this exodus “is no longer defined by the linear path it followed throughout the modern period”, as linearity has ceased to function as it once had (see below). It is fitting that the linear technologies of the industrialization would induce linear aesthetic responses (and ruptures, in the sense of Cubist or Expressionist aesthetics), and likewise digital technologies of the post-industrial era, which invoke the referential patterns of the rhizome, will induce non-linear responses (and ruptures). It is my intention to widen the scope of the non-linearity of postmodern subjectivities somewhat, in particular in relation to the conception of aesthetic as relating to temporal continuity.

As advanced capitalist economics, and specifically market capitalism, are continually creating wealth from non-material means not directly tied to labour (such as land and stock market speculations), time itself has become the “exchange value”. In a very reductive sense, time has been erased from the interpellative mechanism of productive social structures which function by (and in order to) creating subjects. It is a form of a vicious cycle, with productive motivation standing as Adam Smith’s infamous ‘invisible hand’. As Hardt and Negri point out, there is alongside ‘material’ labour an ‘affective’ form of production which relates to material labour in a complex manner. Indeed, such production informs the entire landscape of production. Worker alienation is the desire for production to lend meaning to the subject’s existence; desire becomes nothing when it lacks a substantial Other to which it applies itself. Desire for an Other to the present is that which creates time as a concept. This Other has disappeared in modern capitalism to become merely a quantized element of the Self, a temporality wholly dependent on the annihilation of past and present for a marketable future. This is in counter distinction to Marx’s determination that capital always requires an ‘outside’ to itself in order to actualize surplus value. Yet it is within this ‘anomaly’ that a creative space can be located, negotiating the demands of both subject and time, which create themselves in the same expressive gesture (time is, in the sense of creation, a restoration of an infinite present). Furthermore, this motivation, or affective production, is tied to ideology and not material value itself; in Sartre’s formulation, there is no thing-in-itself for the otherwise empty signifier ‘money’ in its most absolute sense. Jameson argues that a good deal of postmodern architecture is emblematic for the empty signification of modern signs. It is interesting in this regard to note the continual use of building design, typically the most capital-intensive medium for aesthetic expression, to metaphorically stand for the deterioration of capital itself. (Is this the ghost of Marx’s ‘general intellect’ in a new form?) The glass skins which form the structures of many contemporary skyscrapers reflects “the difference between a brick and a balloon”, serving to “dematerializ[e spirituality itself] without signifying in any traditional way” (Jameson 1999: 186). Religious doctrine has been shifted from the transcendent gesture of its spiritual forms to become the empty ritualistic faith associated with consumer culture.

New temporalities and subjectivities are formed by technological developments, and these altered senses of time inform conceptions of the ‘present’ in a complex and heteroglossiac manner. The sense of rupture required for Jameson’s notion of periodization has folded in upon itself somewhat. It is becoming increasingly difficult to assuage past and present in the digital archive of culture, as the two are purposefully conflated as a means to further a certain nostalgia for the present. To use Derrida’s conception of the archive as a site of violence, it is my belief that the current exultation of financial gain over the rights of the citizen body is itself a reflection of the violence done to the present by capitalism. This violence cannot be exclusively figured in a national framework. We cannot blame America, for example, for the domination of other countries on moral grounds alone for the simple reason that as morality is situationally relative, there can be universal sense of justice imposed from without. It is not incomprehensible therefore that many who actively seek America’s dominance over other countries see themselves as acting in a morally just manner, and consequently will not relinquish their positions by moral appeals against productive systems. Not only will it be made clear that there is no longer a ‘without’ to which an enlightened individual can retreat, but also the irrationalities and problematics of the system of production and culture which is represented by the semantic figure ‘America’ can be appropriated to perpetuate the disruption of the system as a whole. For the expression of hate only feeds back in upon violent repression and consequently the system is never metamorphosed. The sense of jouissance which constitute the strategies used to legitimate corruption is the same jouissance which constitute the struggle in opposition, and thus mutual destruction is resultantly to be expected. Instead the process must itself be harnessed, (not necessarily under the guise of a conscious control), and restored from internal means. At this point authoritative agents interpret the populace in a manner suggesting a violent reaction in order to further the legitimacy and jurisdiction of Empire. Subjects are themselves interpellated within this violent act: it is their mutual destruction as individuals in the absolute sense which guarantees their formation as subjects in the sense predicating (productive) citizenship. Is it possible to suggest that money, as an otherwise empty signifier, is itself the mark of archival violence? Certainly time is sacrificed for this particular form of impression, as it is excised out of the equation in real financial terms. So is subjectivity in its historical sense, as a newly reinscribed subjectivity, which prefigures the termination of the older productive mechanisms, is fabricated in subjects who are themselves made ‘timeless’ locked into an eternal present of desire and expectation. And yet, lacking the sense of time results in a dislocation of the sublime, at least in regard to Adorno’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Gestures made invoking transcendence lead to ideological categories (such as politics or aesthetic judgement), and consequently there can be no possibility for the conceptualization of a universalized entity, or in other words, a transcendent one.

And yet the financial market is itself seeking a certain transcendence, at least in terms of temporal and geographic space. This is a gesture enacted with the recognition that the current system of production is not self-sufficient in relation to profits. The internal stages of the cycle of its decomposition follow Marx’s formulation in Capital, in which money is concentrated in order to be realized as capitalization, usually along production lines which have distinguishable limitations. Every material construct is limited and circumscribed by its creation. In terms of production, growth will be continually diminished by necessary expenditures, and consequently the profit margin diminishes to virtual non-existence. At its most reductive figuration, one only has to refer to the definition of a recession in contemporary economic parlance: not as a loss of money, but a zero growth in profit revenues. It is not enough for capitalism to plateaux, making the same amount of money year after year (even after inflation is accounted for), but rather profits must continually rise, otherwise the company is perceived to flounder under ‘market pressure’. (It is interesting to note that all elements of the rhizome of the various heteroglossiac finanscapes seek to monopolize power, conglomerating like pooled mercury and demonstrating the true nature of market pressure.) As a consequence, capital must itself be dislocated from geographic localization, and indeed ultimately from production itself. It is my belief that with the digital quantization of cultural production, and the emergence of digital technologies of control over manufacturing production, as more and more fragments become autonomous wholes, they network together, functioning as an ever-increasingly omnipresent rhizome of productive interpellation.

Within finance capital itself, the sole value given to the present is in anticipation of future earnings; there is no present without a future-reflection which adds value over the present. Accordingly, it is possible to recognize the non-existence of the future in economic terms, and what we name and quantize as such is merely a certain nostalgia for the present. In reality the present serves as a defence against the future, and the continually diminishing units of time which serve to define the present in economic discourse can be seen to function as the division of the present into nothingness, as more and more instances of the future giving meaning to the present (nostalgia for the present). In this sense the present can never be truly itself in any capacity. Expectation has itself become a consumable product, to the point where the future exists and is reified solely in the financial terms of its present capitalisation. This mechanism can be seen to operate most distinctly in finance capital, yet can be located in other realms of culture and production as well. (It should be noted however that simple reactionary approaches will not serve to ‘fix’ the problems of the postmodern subject, and indeed such nostalgic flights from technology are themselves transformed into commodities, the current zeal for organic farming practices perhaps most emblematic of the ‘back to the Earth’ movement defining itself for the 21st century.) Pastiche is one of the aesthetic figurations for this cross-contamination of the past and the present in terms of content or form, and by its nature as object of interest serves to anticipate the future (itself a form of nostalgia for the present, an anticipated future looking back on the present with a positive judgement). It is possible then to view society itself conglomerating not as a monolithic structure of productive capacity, which is indeed where, in a rather ominous manner, market capital seems to be heading, but rather as a rhizome of micro-productive spheres.

Technological advancement under late capitalism signals the push through capitalism that is required to overcome it. The technologies which Empire requires for its continuation are the same which can be used to overcome the centralization of power which is the principle condition for its existence. This is true even of ‘Empire’ itself as a concept. To use a rather harmless example, the transfer of representational media into the digital realm allows for a greater amount of such cultural products to be more readily consumed. It is far more efficient (and by extension less costly) to produce and distribute texts in their digital form than has been allowed before by any other technology. More importantly, productive capacity has itself begun the process of digital conception, as an ever broadening array of software tools are becoming available for general use. While these developments certainly do not overcome the requirement under modern economic doctrine for the outlay of capital in order to realize productive capacity – one still needs to purchase the computer hardware in addition to having the knowledge of its use, which itself reflects a certain socio-economic elitism – they certainly begin to foreshadow the prognostications Hardt and Negri elaborate in the latter part of Empire.

Within this framework, it is interesting to note the changes that have occurred in representational media over the past few decades. Increasing flows (in Appadurai’s sense) of culture allow older conventions and aesthetics to be recontextualized as individual instances of artistic expression, and not as being representative of the artform itself in any ontological manner. Time is significant in this respect, for the continual accretion of cultural production depends very highly on this continual circulation of textual elements. In this capacity, it is possible to analyse cultural production in a quantified form. Individual artworks do not retain the Benjaminian aura they once had, not only because of mass production but also because of sheer volume of cultural artefacts. Every consumer product has been associated with a variety of representational media – commercials for Coca-Cola can use references to classic cinema as well as top-40 music, and each becomes subsumed to the product itself – and this may lead to sensory anaesthesia in the sense of being able to discern what is substantively original from copies or appropriations. In a very real sense there is nothing which cannot be assigned a monetary value, and one of the crises felt by modern consciousness is the reduction of all the dreams, desires, and histories of individual subjects into a quantized element. It was a very small step from the Anglo-centric media representations of the 1950s to the current panoply of cultural voices which all speak the same language, namely commercial discourse. Literature was perhaps the first to do so, as the reading audience was meant to enter into a fictive state of immanence with the author. Simultaneous to this fact must remain the elitism inherent in the medium; until as late as the 18th century, there were very few participants in the discourse, for both educational and economic reasons.

One of the more prominent tangents that modern musical composition (in the avantgarde, in any respect) has taken involves the transference of determinate control away from the composer. This compositional technique is not entirely a new one – wind chimes and other ‘sound sculptures’ are centuries old – yet by employing them within digital media there is an interesting juxtaposition of temporalities. The ‘aggressive present’ which defines a great deal of modern production has in the computer created a tool for the dissolution of time within the subjective framework of a human lifetime. This has interesting repercussions on the aesthetics and forms of music, itself an expression of a present made absolute in its most truth sense. Music is ephemeral, qualifying each moment with meaning by involving time as a fundamental element. The moment signals both itself and a nostalgic glance away from itself, to its own termination [Death drive?]. One of the responses music has had to digital technologies is to remove the composer from the creative process to a degree not normally associated with aesthetic techniques. Hegel provides a means by which determinacy can be negotiated, as he links it with verbal language and not musical ones. Generative music operates in the vein of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome, as each musical element is informed by and in turn informs every single other element in the system. Any figuration of determinate conceptuality must be cast aside in order to let the piece speak for itself. The composer uses software which generates music based on the rules that the composer wishes to establish, however arbitrary they may be, and themselves made to evolve and create new rules. This process ostensibly is to direct the musical output to as limited a degree as possible while still retaining aesthetic value. Furthermore, generative compositional forms signal the discourse of hybridization between humans and machines. As the system can use adaptive strategies, typically founded on the principles of fractal and biological (population growth and adaptation) mathematics, it can frequently prove to be an interesting juxtaposition and negotiation of compositional and improvisational strategies involving both human subject and machine (can the current state of artificial intelligence research allow us to call it a subject?).

Generative systems seek to hypostatize the present as a fundamental element standing outside of the experiencing subject’s temporality. In other words, the present only exists in relation to an expected future and has no transcendent signification in and of itself. Certainly, this refers back to Kantian transcendence, yet Kant’s notion of the sublime has lost some of its applicability, as the composing subject and the listening subject do not share the same frame of reference. In its most brief and reductive terms, the conditions for judgement by the subject are wholly different, and thus the composer cannot gesture toward the same aesthetics of form used by ‘linear’ composers. In a very real sense, generative music dispels the illusion many feel concerning the aesthetic experience of music, namely that it is a medium invoking a sense of transcendency in the subject. Quite on the contrary, music is forever tied to the present in a manner that other forms of cultural expression are not. The past and future of music do not have any solidity save in a subject’s reflective consciousness, and thus within the ‘past’ of consciousness Kantian judgement enters into the relation between subject and object. In linear musical forms, the present is given meaning by the past (crescendos, harmonies, melodic phrasing, “themes”, etc) and yet with generative music there is no relation of signification other than simple origination. Seen in this context, it is possible to liken such forms of composition to the life process itself, as each moment of music serves not only to signal itself as such but to provide the generative base for future “generations” of notes. By removing the individual from the system of composition (production) to as much a degree as possible, any appeals to the sublime or the beautiful must also be distinguished from their Hegelian traditions, usually used in the discourse of aesthetics. Such composers do not establish parameters in which the compositional output is controlled in a direct manner, but rather the composer determines the course which the music will follow by means of a system of compositional rules.

Jem Finer’s Longplayer project, in which a generative algorithm based on the mathematical dynamics of life processes and other fractal and logarithmic systems continually produces one composition which is intended to remain operational for one entire millennium, is the logical extension of this principle. The piece is intended to be available to anyone with an internet connection, and as well has several physical locations around the planet. Each of these nodes serves to inform the others, and accordingly the system as a whole functions as a rhizome. The process used by Finer invokes contemporary genetic research and refigures that knowledge as an aesthetic principle. In doing so, the work aggressively defies both consumption (in the traditional mode of its operation) and the interpellative practises of modern cultural institutions. There is no single moment of signification in any sense in the ‘present’ of Longplayer. And yet fundamentally the piece serves to heighten the listening subject’s awareness of their own subjectivity, as the machine creating the piece interpellates the listener as a subject identical to all others despite temporal or geographic distance. Principally this is accomplished by removing the conceptual totality of the piece from the boundaries of a single subject position. In other words, all subjectivities are as one to the interpellative capacity of the piece. In actuality there is no ontological distinction between machine, composer, and composition in terms of the listening subject. Consequently, it is possible to determine the essential concern of the piece is human subjectivity to time itself.


APPENDIX????? WTF??!??

At the end of the representational spectrum (at least in terms of its valuation by mainstream society) is digital entertainment, more precisely understood in its more colloquial usage as “video game” or “computer game”. While such terminology refers to the fact that such games take place on video screens, the coincidence of its origin should be noted with the development of the home video revolution (which itself, in a rather melodramatic sense brought people in from the harsh elements of the public exhibition of films). In a very real sense, the new must be described in terms of the old, or what is most easily recognized in conventional terms. When the first mass produced arcade machine entered North American culture in 1972, there was a great deal of confusion as to the relationship between what was on screen and what the user performed: it was felt that the user should do “something”, and then watch the results, thus remaining within the linearity of subjective relation ascribed by the video medium. Other than a few exceptions – being the laserdisc-based games of the early 1980s such as Dragon’s Lair, which were extremely linear and did not involve the participating subject in any meaningful manner by allowing judgement or strategic adaptation – digital gaming is fundamentally antithetical to the process involved in ‘video’, consequently the term should be recognized as a rather appropriate misreading. There is no precise linear equation of medium and its relation to the viewing subject. This lack occurs not only in the ontology of the ‘interface’ – one reads books or watches films or theatrical performances from start to finish, for example – but also in terms of the form of subjectivity interpellated by the medium itself.

Gaming is a user-defined medium which deviates significantly from the traditional figuration of production author/text. The narrative does not exist as a prior object, but rather like generative music unfolds under the guise of a few generative rules, and is given shape as the participating subject progresses through the game itself. In this sense, the subject is author of its own experience; the narrative is reified by the subjectivity imposed on the participating subject. The narrative can be as simple as that which results from a game like Pac-Man and its contemporary equivalent of the first-person ‘shooter’ genre, or as complex as the narratives developed in ‘toy sand-boxes’ such as SimCity and the persistent online playfield of games such as Everquest. The authors of such programs are not placing the participating subject into a totality of narrative and experience such as those of other mediums. Just as has occurred in music by the use of a variety of generative processes in composition, game producers provide the rules by which the system operates but in no manner do they control the ‘final product’ or the experience the subject will have with their creations. There is no conductor who leads the viewing subject to a specific point, but rather the subject itself makes decisions involving (and creating) the outcome. The question remains as to what forms of subjectivities might come to exist in virtual worlds, and perhaps more importantly what happens to time during that process. Such is, by virtue of its diverting nature, wholly beyond the scope of this present examination.




Bibliography

Adorno, Theodore. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2001.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles, & Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1996.

Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.

Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn. New York: Verso, 1998.

(Mattelart, Armand. Networking the World: 1794-2000. Trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.)

(Therborn, Goran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1980.)

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Jameson's Four Maxims: A Singular Modernity

A Singular Modernity, or Jameson’s Four Maxims

the term itself: “everything modern is necessarily new, while everything new is not necessarily modern” (18)

First Maxim:

We cannot not periodize.

“What is at stake here is a twofold movement, in which the foregrounding of continuities, the insistent and unwavering focus on the seamless passage from the past to the present, slowly turns into the consciousness of a radical break; while at the same time the enforced attention to a break gradually turns the latter into a period in its own right” (24)

Second Maxim:

Modernity is not a concept, philosophically or otherwise, but a narrative category.

“the ‘correct’ theory of modernity is not to be obtained by putting [the origins of modernity] together in some hierarchical synthesis....what we have to do with here are narrative options and alternate storytelling possibilities, as which even the most scientific-looking and structural of purely sociological concepts can always be unmasked” (32)

Third Maxim:

The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated.

“It is not to be understood as an ontological proposition, that is, it does not affirm that no such thing as subjectivity exists. It is rather a proposition about the limits of representation as such, and means simply that we have no way of talking about subjectivity or consciousness that is not already somehow figural” (55-6)

Fourth Maxim:

No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it is able to come to terms with the hypothesis of a postmodern break with the modern.

“[there] is at least one clear dividing line between the modern and the postmodern, namely, the refusal of concepts of self-consciousness, reflexivity, irony or self-reference in the postmodern aesthetic and also in postmodern values and philosophy as such, if there can be said to be such a thing. I imagine this also coincides with the disappearance of the slogan of freedom, whether in its bourgeois or anarchist sense” (92-3)

Points of reference:
“As for the ontology of the present, however, it is best to accustom oneself to thinking of ‘the ,odern’ as a one dimensional concept ... Foucalt, Les Mots et les Choses which has nothing of historicity or futuricity about it. .... Radical Descartes, Meditations alternatives, systematic transformations, cannot be theorized Heidegger, Nietzsche; Basic Writings or even imagined within the conceptual field governed by the Weber, The Protestant Ethic word ‘modern’” (215)



Annotated Bibliography

Chefdor, Monique. “Modernism: Babel Revisited?”, Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives. Ed. Monique Chefdor, R. Quinones, A. Wachtel. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1986. 1-6

This article focusses on the confusion surrounding the term ‘modernism’ itlsef. Anglo-American critics capitalize the word, as it symbolizes a “historically and conceptually defined movement in literature and arts”, while continental critics do not, as they see the term as a catch-all for the numerous ‘isms’ or movements of the “period”; the latter prefer ‘modernité’. There is also dispute amongst Latin-American critics: for some modernismo refers to a type of symbolism, whereas for others it is the avant-guard reaction against symbolism. Chefdor points out that the use of terms like ‘High Modernism’ demarcates a certain tension in the umbrella term to contain the varieties of artistic expression for the “period” in question.

Chiari, Joseph. The Aesthetics of Modernism. London: Vision P, 1970.

An older volume specifically chosen to demonstrate the narrative of history countered by Jameson, leading from Aquinas’s critique or Aristotle, through the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment (specifically the Copernican revolution) which increased the trend toward secularism and the immanence of the human subject (Cartesian self-awareness), to late-eighteenth century nihilism of Nietzsche and Baudelaire. Chiari seems halfway to Jameson’s ‘truth’ in his statement that “every age is a kaleidoscope of conflicting elements, rationalized and categorized into shapes, according to the sensibility, taste, and fashion of the day” (16).

Frisby, David. Fragments of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity P, 1985. 1-37.

In this section, Frisby looks at the paradoxes inherent in the critical study of the modernist project. He begins by quoting Lyotard’s implicit coordination of modernism with fascism, and that the failure of such a project is precisely the destructured forms of post-modernity. The first ‘phase’ of modernity Frisby describes as Baudelaire’s flaneur seeing himself continually anew in the masses; the artist must look to the ‘now’ rather than an eternal timelessness in the past. The second ‘phase’ emerges with a sense of history impacting upon consciousness; the ‘cult of the self’ was reified in the aestheticization and decadence of the late 19th century. Frisby then summarizes Marx’s main works, perhaps best with the phrase: “the commodity form not merely symbolizes social relations of modernity, it is a central source of their origin” (22). Modernité in the materialist sense is the continuous production of new commodities, which serves to distract the masses from the reproduction of the same fundamental relations of production – thus it is an inversion of the conception of modernist aesthetics, namely as an everchanging signifier for permanence, and thus ironically it is itself transitory. Frisby then sides with Nietzsche in believing that art serves as a counterculture for such forms of human decadence. Art is the examination of every minute moment as representing the eternal.

Isaak, Jo Anna. The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P,
1986.

Examines the two notions of modernism popular at the book’s publication, namely ➀ self-consciousness is equal to an artistic gesture towards non-representationalism, ➁ self-consciousness equal to intense realism. She then posits Joyce’s Ulysses as a text which contains both the art of style (non-realistic representation) and the art of (realistic) representation. Isaak then continues her examination of the modern with a one-hundred page critique of the conflation of the visual and literary arts. This inter-media fusion of aesthetic influences reflects Marinetti’s dictum: “There is no such thing as painting, sculpture, music, or poetry; there is only creation!”

Larsen, Neil. Modernism and Hegemony. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 3-31

Larsen begins by invoking Jameson’s afterword in Aesthetics and Politics where Realism and Modernism are conjoined within a single hermeneutic process. He then himself problematizes this, stating that such a creation does not explain “the specific appropriateness of an aesthetics of representation as such to the problem of history” (5). Larsen falls back on Adorno’s position that one cannot truly represent any historical occurrence, for that precise re-presentation brackets its subject in an entirely different manner – which a priori reveals what was not there and hides what was – in other words, aesthetic realism is the realism of the singular representation, not of the subject in its original authenticity. A similar extension can be made with Jameson’s beliefs concerning ‘periodization’, namely that one cannot not periodize, and thus the past is solely the present seen a a specific manner, and consequently the term ‘Modernism’ cannot truly signify the totality of occurrences in art during the 20th century. Thus the power of naming is displaced from the agency of culture producers to culture readers who then rewrite their own history as anterior fact. The empowered subject represents itself in modern art by means of a fissure or crisis in representation, whether that of style or content; in political terms, art redeems the failure of the proletariat by opening up fissures “in a history without revolutionary agencies”.

Reflecting Eagleton: Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Reflecting Eagleton: Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

The Modern

The avant-garde culture which dominated Modernism attempts to reintegrate art into political life to achieve socio-political ends, a socialist future in which art and society achieve a mutual enlightenment. In this sense the present – the actuality – of the subject is merely a dislocated future which exists simultaneously as now and to come. History then becomes a rupture in temporality (re: Cubism, montage in cinema) rather than a linear narrative.

Modernism resists commodification by rejecting the bourgeois forms and tropes of representation in favour of the less consumable and non-representational: surrealism; dadaism; serialism; the theoretical (or academic) enfranchisement of form and structure as reified, for example, in the work of the Cubists, the neoclassicists, and musique-concrete. In this regard, “Modernism refuses to abandon the struggle for meaning” while simultaneously attempting to continually re-localize sites of meaning away from itself. It thus denies the self of its referent (object; “I am art”) while simultaneously glorifying the self which enacts the representation (object[strikeout word]; “I am the gesture of art”) in a performative manner.

The utopia envisioned by the Modern aesthetic was checked by elements of late capitalism which institutionalized and commodified its once revolutionary gestures. “High modernism ... was born at a stroke with mass commodity culture”; it resists commodification, but that very gesture of resistence is itself institutionalized as commodity. In protesting bourgeois elitism in art and politics, modernism attempted to remove itself from general social practice (re: mass commodity culture) and thus reiterated the isolationism and elitism it strove to overcome. It became a fetish, the singular ‘collectable’ in both its materiality and its existence as image.

The Postmodern

Artistic expression within postmodern culture is “the dissolution of art into the prevailing forms of commodity production”. It is not simply l’objet d’importance in its material form, but rather the gesture of its presentation is its ontology. Thus, Eagleton expands upon Jameson’s belief that pastiche is the mode of postmodern art by reclaiming parody as a equal structural element. Po-mo art reiterates the tropes of modernism but moves their political implications. No longer is the alienation of the human subject the dominant theme of art, as such remains tied to tradition metaphysics which correlates an a priori gesture of transcendence with all human endeavour. Consequently there can not be an attribution of value to representation; rather value is a subjective concept which must remain in relation to the art object and not an element of the object itself.

The commodification of art reflects the aestheticization of the commodity; art and political life return to the pragmatic from their theoretical plateaux. Since the modernist project was itself subsumed by commercial culture, then the postmodern project will reposition itself in a pre-emptive manner within capitalist discourse; “only that which is already a commodity can resist commodification. If the high modernist work has been institutionalized within the superstructure, postmodernist culturewill react demotically to such elitism by installing itself within the base”. Thus simple valuation of bad and good – high contra low art – is deemed obsolete; the historical process and any notions of aesthetic value which are its consequence must be forgotten, while simultaneously its forms and tropes are themselves consumed and reused by postmodern expression.

“From modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all critical distance from it, countering this with a poker-faced presentation of ‘bizarre’ experiences which resemble certain avant-garde gestures”. The postmodern project wrongly assumes the end of representation to signify the death of truth, and thus a multiplicity of truths can co-habitate.

The postmodern subject oscillates between the interiority of its individuality and its citizenship amongst a faceless mass.

The Discourse of the Other in The Prowler

There has been a great deal of discussion concerning the real-world applicability of critical theory. Despite ostentatiously basing their works on tangible examples in literature and society, theorists have often been accused of merely exchanging ideologies amongst their own elite academic society with no acknowledgement to those outside their ‘interpretive community’. There are however many artistic works which do not allow for an interpretation unaided by critical discourse. Certainly the most popular critical model used to interpret art in the twentieth century has been psychoanalysis. It has been praised for its universality, although it is just as frequently been over-emphasized as an effective tool of evaluation. Other models have been proposed which can be applied just as universally, arguably the most important of which have proven to be the deconstructivist ideas of Derrida and Foucault. In establishing mutually-dependant binaries – such as Self and Other – deconstructionism has proven to be a productive supplement to literary studies, explicating relations between characters for example. Furthermore, other critical movements have emerged from deconstruction theory which have also been of great influence. Perhaps the most currently debated critical movements are feminism and post-colonialism, which are similar in that each acts as periphery to the central masculine-imperial ideology. They endeavour to subvert this dominant cultural ideology and displace it with their own. Adapting these theoretical models to analyse Kristjana Gunnars’s text The Prowler demonstrates their usefulness to literary study, as indeed the work is pregnant with theoretical meaning. Gunnars continually emphasizes the Other, which is mainly the various representations of the prowler as individual, and in fact the Other can almost be viewed as the Althusserian problematic of the text. The Other is also signified in the author’s implicit post-colonial discourse, which posits her native Iceland as occupied country under the authority of several other nations. Additionally, feminism informs not only the subject matter of the novel, but its structure as well. Indeed, the form of the text – regarded somewhat loosely as a novel by Gunnars herself (or the publisher) – is difficult to interpret without regarding feminist discourse.

        Emerging from Saussurian and Lacanian ideas of slippery signification, deconstructivist theory analyses the relationships between dominant and marginal entities. Derrida’s work – and also in the ideas of Bakhtin – suggests that the two are not mutually exclusive, but alternately are intimately intertwined ontologically. The definition of one depends on the existence of the other. It is within this context that the concept of the Other can be applied to literature. In The Prowler, the Other is not one entity to the narrator, but indeed there are a variety of Others. Gunnars is in fact subtextually referring to the structuralist ideology of slippery signification in this regard, for while the meaning of the term itself remains the same, that which it signifies changes dramatically through the text. The prowler is variously a thief, the reader, the narrator, a man onboard the Gullfoss, the author, and finally the text itself. Indeed, it is the prowler-as-reader which provides the greatest disclosure of Gunnars’s application of slippery signification. Every aspect of the prowler – as thief, as author, as narrator – are all contained within the position of reader: “There are prowlers everywhere. They prowl about, looking for dialogue” (Gunnars, 74). The author and narrator become the reader as well as the thief in order to understand their story, for it is the “reader [who] ... steal[s] from the text”(Gunnars, 59) and is therefore able to take its meaning. The exchange of roles in this manner is implied by her statement that “the answer is also contained in the question” (Gunnars, 24), that the very act of questioning is its own answer. By destroying the boundaries between the various prowlers, between author and reader, the author / narrator is “free to steal from [herself]” (Gunnars, 59), and consequently learn from her writing. This is made most evident when the narrator and the prowler-as-Other cooperate in reconstructing a puzzle on board the Gullfoss. Furthermore, there are several instances in the novel where Gunnars posits herself as Other to the text itself: “It is not my story. The author is unknown. I am the reader.” (Gunnars, 119). The Self is identified by the Other; Gunnars logic therefore is to become the Other in order to realize the Self. The narrator herself endeavours to become the Other, first describing herself as the prowler of the school library, but also more importantly when she begins to learn other languages. Throughout the text she refers to the almost mythological purity and value of other cultures, that “anything that came from far away was good. Life elsewhere was magical. The further away it was, the more magical” (Gunnars, 21). There is no purity in the Self, it is diseased and needs to be cured by the Other. Such a belief emerges when the narrator is brought to a doctor who tells her “if you live in the Middle East, ... you can maybe go to the Red Sea and wash in it. That will no doubt cure you”, as “up here in the North there is no hope” (Gunnars, 37). Indeed, the self-doubt of the narrator is blatantly expressed when she states that “material for stories came from magical places so far away that people there had never heard of us” (Gunnars, 83).

        She does in fact come to a very distinct conclusion about her existence within the Self-Other binary however. Like Derrida, Gunnars states her preference for the ambiguity – of the freeplay – between the definitions of Self and Other caused by their mutual dependence. By identifying with the text itself, Gunnars is able to observe all of these different borders and abuse their definitions, for “all that a story is ... is a way of looking at things” (Gunnars, 90). She is well aware that any definition given to an entity is not a strict and complete measure of its existence, but instead that “everything ... depends on vantage point” (Gunnars, 90). There are many references to the uncertainty and arbitrariness of socially defined borders which express the author’s desire for freeplay. Iceland itself, while having the definite physical borders of being an island, does not have any ethnic or cultural ones. There is no sense that nations are defined by natural reasons, and consequently the narrator questions the rigidity of national boundaries, whether one can “know when there was a border? Can borders be felt? Is there perhaps a change of air, a different climate, when you go from one country to another?” (Gunnars, 60). At several times Gunnars mentions the classless system upon which Icelandic society is built; everybody is a “white Inuit” at relatively the same socio-economic level. The narrator is often confused when confronted with distinctions in class, as when she lived with her great-aunt and her housemaids. The encounters that she has with other cultural groups also hint at the ambiguity of boundaries. She initially defines Americans as abusers, as men who would prey on teenage Icelandic girls. When she goes to school in America however, she learns that Americans are not in fact different from her own countrymen. The author also makes reference to the lack of a perimeter in modern electronic communication, which can indeed be seen to define much of modern world culture: everyone has access to American radio and television broadcasts. It is within such regions of ambiguity that the author / narrator does indeed find solace. Outside of boundaries she defines herself, free of self-judgement and free of judgement by the Other. It is for this reason that she likes sailing, where she is between boundaries and can feel “entirely at home (Gunnars, 134) as “the text is relieved that there are no borders” (Gunnars, 164).
There are certain limitations placed upon such a lack of ‘natural’ borders however, as it is human nature to delineate the natural world for political and economic reasons. Consequently, those Icelanders who did in fact listen to American radio were accused of betrayal: “Rolls of invisible barbed wire circled the American as across the airwaves” (Gunnars, 71). Additionally, while the narrator herself is above all ethnic classification and is able to function among all the various groups at school, nevertheless there were many who had been rigidly inscribed within a set class definition. These socially described exactitudes can be seen to emerge quite directly from Iceland’s status as an occupied country. Following Bhabha’s discourse of mimicry, it could be argued that the Icelanders’ adapting of class distinctions is a mimicry of the authority imposed upon them by their quasi-imperial occupiers. In other words, the occupying peoples – such as the Danes – attempt to recreate the stratified conditions in their home country, and in doing so they cause the Icelanders to internalize colonial authority and displace their own identity. Gunnars makes the resultant alienation quite apparent when she speaks of their culinary habits, which are different from those of other peoples because of necessity: “we are the white Inuit. We eat fish. And in summers we graze like sheep among the mountain grasses” (Gunnars, 7) because Iceland “was a country where people died of starvation” (Gunnars, 39). The reader is brought to sympathize with these white Inuit not because of the relatively poor food selection, but rather due to the estrangement and self-effacement that results from their cultural differences. A more obviously colonial alienation occurs as a result of the extensive leprosy found in Iceland, lepers which had been expelled to Iceland by other countries because “they did not think the people on this remote island counted” (Gunnars, 41). Gunnars is implicitly asking why it is that Iceland is not to be respected, and why it has little respect for itself. According to Bhabha such is the nature of colonial discourse, as the authority of the occupying nation – signified by its denigration of Iceland – is mimicked by the colonized. Gunnars herself predates Bhabha’s work, yet she does signal his ideology; another interpretation of “The answer is also contained in the question” is the mimicry of colonial discourse.

        The author / narrator’s self-doubt can also be explained in terms of post-colonial theory. It is the desire of the colonizer to define the colonized; they are the Self which defines the Other. When she doubts the authenticity of her text – “I do not feel clever. If I laugh at myself, it is because I have nothing to say and I am full of love. Because nothing I say says anything. There will be mere words.” (Gunnars, 4) – it is precisely because she questions her right to assume for herself a voice. Much like her relationship with her parents – Iceland “was not a country where children spoke to adults. Only the adults spoke to the children” (Gunnars, 10) – the narrator struggles to claim for herself a discourse within the colonial system. Obliquely referring to Said’s Orientalism, the narrator presupposes the authority of imperialist texts when she describes Malraux’s text on the Chinese Revolution as “something worth writing ... a true story” (Gunnars, 86). Her own text is something to be doubted: “it is not writing. Not poetry, not prose. I am not a writer” (Gunnars, 1). The voice that does emerge however is not expressed in her own Icelandic language as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o suggests is necessary, ostensibly because she has internalized so many languages as her own. She even forwards the notion that language is not the defining characteristic of an individual, that “there can be nothing extraordinary ... in a language” (Gunnars, 5). Iceland itself remains under colonial authority and does not express itself in any meaningful cultural way: there are, for example, “no Icelandic dances” (Gunnars, 44). But ultimately the text is given life by the author / narrator, it does stand independent as a worthy story.

       Indeed, by claiming the text for herself – not as a story or a poem, but just as a means of expression – Gunnars not only escapes from the trap of a post-colonial mentality of silence, but also from the trap of a masculine ideology which similarly imposes a silence upon her. It the “relief just to be writing” (Gunnars, 3) that confirms her independence. The very act of writing itself rejects patriarchy, for “writing ... contain[s] a note of defiance. To confront its opposite, to stare it down” (Gunnars, 105). This rejection of masculine-imposed silence is completely within the ideologies of Helen Cixous, who explicitly calls for women to write. The traditional masculine views of women, that they are far too influenced by their emotions to have meaningful discourse, must be rejected if women are allowed to speak. Gunnars posits that it is not emotion itself which impedes discourse, but rather it is “conflicting emotions [which] are silencing” (Gunnars, 36). Certainly she had internalized masculine oppression, of not owning her own identity as her name was not her own but belonged to a man: “I was certain I was my father’s property” (Gunnars, 94). This identity is quickly rejected however as she continues to write and identify with the text. From one author emerges two voices, one which remains repressed by a patriarchal society and another which merely intends to write in her own voice. The latter censors the intended writing of the former, it is the other author, “behind the official author, who censors the official text as it appears. The other author writes: that is not what you intended to say. I think of a book which has left in the censor’s words.”
(Gunnars, 63).

       This multiplicity of expression again finds a correlation in the ideologies of Cixous. Women must acknowledge their bodies in their writing, as indeed this is the basis for expression for both genders. Consequently female writing will be informed by the multiplicity of their sexual experience; no single approach will suffice, but instead the multi-orgasmic, multi-sensuous woman will speak with multiple voices. Certainly Gunnars makes several references to the importance of the female body to her expression: the anorexia experienced by the narrator’s sister is directly associated with her silence. More importantly however, the very structure of the text is informed by Cixous’s ideology of multiplicity. It does not have a linear focus, but instead approaches the narrative and thematic strands in a variety of ways; the ending itself is self-described as arbitrary. Neither time nor the narrative are contiguous, but are broken up and placed seemingly randomly in the text, picked up at certain moments and subsequently dropped until late. The structure of the text is not a ‘rising action leading to climax followed by denouement’, but rather “an unfolding of layers” (Gunnars, 25). Conversely, male authors need a distinct purpose which is to be followed directly and linearly: “The male line. The masculine story. That men have to be going somewhere. Men are always shooting something somewhere” (Gunnars, 25). Accordingly, the novels written by Icelandic men have a particular motive, which was to slander women accused of having American lovers. Such works have one centre which is pursued. Alternately, The Prowler is an attempt “to watch the egg hatch” (Gunnars, 28); it has no specific centre but is composed, like the jigsaw puzzle that the narrator and the prowler collaborate on, of numerous centres. While in her text “there are figurative prowlers looking for something” (Gunnars, 110), Gunnars-as-prowler has already found the numerous centres with which she has constructed her identity.

        Certainly when one has been informed by some measure of critical theory The Prowler aids in its own interpretation. Gunnars does not bury the Althusserian problematic of the text too deeply, but rather seems to delight in periodically exposing it for critique. Indeed, such is perhaps her point, as it conforms with the theme of the text. The Prowler is a meditation upon the gradual cognizance of self-identity, an identity which emerges in multiple fashions. Gunnar’s Self is not informed and defined by any single Other, but rather it is a centre for numerous Others. Consequently, identity could be extended to represent the transitional area between an almost infinite number of centre-periphery relationships. By the end of the text, Gunnars suggests that it takes a long time to come to this necessary realization.



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