Eyes Wide Shut: the ritualized death of the cinematic subject, or: how I fell when the image started moving

Marinetti and the Italian Futurists provided artistic circles with a blueprint with which to structure the twentieth century. There would be two principle dictums: technology and kineticism. That the former had published his initial manifesto in 1909 when cinematic forms were just coming into their own is no coincidence. Film was arguably the quintessential modernist statement, and yet simultaneously it was anti-modern in an important respect. Unlike other art forms, film did not encounter an ontological crisis in the early decades of the century. And yet, to say that modernism is at heart a manifestation of a particular crisis of representation in artistic expression is to join the ranks of many critics indeed. Certainly within the traditional means of artistic gesture – literature, painting, music composition, drama – there was indeed a marked conflict between methods of representation and the new modes of production and reproduction made available by modernization. There is little question that photography forever changed the function of ‘realism’ within the visual arts, for example. Photography did something else however, although this accomplishment was certainly not its primary intention. By distilling representation to the capacity of the artist to ‘see’ and consequently to capture his subject, the relative ease with which that moment of subjectivity, between the artist’s gaze and the object of his gesture, could be transmitted (re-presented) to an audience created a new aesthetic for reproducibility which ultimately resulted in the language of cinema. Both cinema and photography emerge from the modern period as perhaps best exemplifying the rupture felt between ‘objective’ reality and subjective experience typical of modernism proper.

There is (of course!) no better place to begin an examination of the aesthetic of film than with Benjamin. Arguably, film is the first mode of expression which counters the notion of authenticity and auratic presence elaborated in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Benjamin had examined the historical dimension of a given art piece within the scope of its cultic function, which is its uniqueness as a material and historical object. The sense of time in the work is lessened by means of facsimile, and what was once the mythic history of art – its auratic nature – is lost. One can attempt to contemplate, for example, the particular history of David’s The Oath of Horatii prior to its mechanical reproduction and thus its entrance into popular discourse, creating a list of all the figures of note who stood in its presence as well as all the historical events it witnessed. In this capacity the artwork retains the ritualistic function Benjamin ascribes to it, namely as a singularity which invokes a sense of awe and transport (aesthetic, spiritual, etc) in the viewing subject. The artwork enters into mythical status at this point, achieving a degree of reverence associated with the sacred. The act of experiencing art in this regard is akin to the Christian eucharist, in which the imbibing of a unique artefact of the divine signals a transubstantiation from the flesh to the spirit. Yet this cultic function of art is entirely lost by mechanical reproduction, and as a consequence any artistic gesture which anticipates its future reproduction will itself be altered by this foreknowledge: “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (Illuminations, 224).

Seen in this manner, The Starry Night for example retains and represents the subjectivity van Gogh felt toward “a certain night sky over a small village”; there is no sense that this moment of time is lost as the image is repeatedly consumed. After a process of mechanical reproduction however, it becomes in a sense an infantile photograph (in the sense of a juvenile photographic gesture), standing outside of its original temporality and thus creating a new tradition and history for itself, ignoring even the remnants of the old. Most importantly, this mechanism is performed without the foreknowledge or anticipation by the artist itself. Consequently for the modern viewing subject who has witnessed this image reproduced on everything from mugs and postcards to shirts and desktop wallpaper, the image does not represent an individual’s (van Gogh’s) sense perceptions one night which had been represented in a manner suggesting an aesthetic divergence with the Impressionist and Romantic traditions which dominated the eighteenth century. For many the sense of dread and uneasy anticipation figured by the threatening clouds hovering menacingly over the small village is lost. The work becomes a “beautiful image” and “one of the classics” which ontologically merges with the object on which it is presented, with functions distinctly separate from those ascribed by its original medium. Instead of signifying the original aesthetic gesture of the painting, the reproduced Starry Night signifies the totality of its historical existence in one refigured moment. In other words, van Gogh-on-a-mug alters its history from auratic singularity to art-object, as one consumable good among a mass of others. One experiences not the artist’s subjectivity in relation to the object of his gaze, but rather the history of the image’s representation. The image becomes a sign for its own use as an image always-already consumed, a sign which signifies its own usage as a sign. Thus, one remembers all the times this image has been represented: a shirt worn by someone in the mall, the poster on the wall of a friend’s apartment, and ultimately back to the museum which licences the piece for consumption. In this respect, it is possible to agree with Benjamin’s assertion that in the age of reproducibility, the function of art, no longer ritualistic in nature, “begins to be based on another practise – politics” (224). Sadly, in the case of deceased artists, the only political gesture left to their works is that of consumer consumption and the transfer of wealth.

Yet this very transfiguration of the function of art is ritualistic in a manner perhaps not realized by Benjamin. Mass culture and its bastard child consumerism are themselves rituals in every respect, yet they do not signify anything greater than themselves. They are empty signifiers pointing to themselves; the ritual is never consummated, there is no zenith or sacrificial moment, but rather one is left anticipating the return of the ritual. The modern consumer is immersed in a zeitgeist of dissatisfaction as this is the only means for the ritual of consumption to sustain itself. Adorno and Horkheimer attribute the lack of satisfaction in mass culture to its empty aesthetic gestures, which serve to achieve a “surrogate identity” as authentic artworks by means of simple repetition and intertextual figuration. Certainly the cinema is not immune to such commercial gestures, for as stated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “ the universal criterion of merit is the amount of “conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment” (124). In a very real sense, the rules of film making initially established by the studios – at its inception, films which were not documentaries but rather attempted mimetic gestures were exorbitantly expensive – allowed Hollywood to be a self-sufficient entity, producing consumables which inscribe the studios as monopolies. Until recently, media attention, whether in popular press or television, only recognized as legitimate films which followed certain patterns of production. Any deviation from such preconceptions led to categorization (read: rejection) as experimental, foreign, or B-cinema; as Adorno and Horkheimer posit, those outside the mainstream “are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur”, and also have to accept organization from above” (122). That the rules for production were inherently hegemonic in origin signified the requirement of a vast expenditure of capitol on the part of a film producer, and led to a uniformity which came to be known as Hollywood – sets and locations had to be “realistic”; actors had to conform to certain standards of appearance; only certain forms of cinematography, tied to studio-grade “professional” equipment, were allowed. Works could in fact be accomplished outside of the studio system, yet a wide exhibition of the film was another matter, for the studios owned both the distribution channels and the majority of theatres. Consequently, avant-guard or “outsider” films remained marginalised to rep cinemas, underground theatres, art galleries, and other equally disreputable venues. Film reception, like production, itself became standardized under the studio monopolies, most evident in the yearly Oscar presentations, reflecting Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument that “the culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product” (127). The Hollywood film merges product/consumption and aesthetic into a singular entity stripped of its autonomous value: “under monopoly, all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through.... Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce” (121).

To return to Benjamin, is there then no ritual function for cinema, for home music (re)performance, or for interactive entertainments? Must we, as early critics of the culture industry suggest, relegate film to the monotony and mediocrity of commercialism? While certainly not auratic in the sense Benjamin suggests, there are other opportunities for a ritualistic existence outside of the mere totemism implied by the singularity and historical uniqueness of the art object. In its sociological function, cinema suggests, for example, the ritual death of both the mass subject and the pre-eminence of the individual subject. The darkened space and the loud volume of the theatre certainly immerses the viewing subject into the images presented, and one achieves that coveted ‘escape from reality’ which every film magnate espouses. The presence of others within the theatre merely underscores the need for an individual experience with the film; one may forgive the noises of snacking (itself part of the ritual), yet conversations and other noises invariably interrupt and annoy the viewer. Yet this experience, despite its gestures towards interiority, is indeed a collective one, a shared death experience made even more vivid by the re-emergence into the lobby where (hopefully) the film is discussed. This ritualized death is further manipulated by moments of comedy and pathos in their respective film genres, which serve to unite the reactions of the audience into a single emotional gesture. The unified laugh of an audience is the moment of catachresis when the individual realizes its position as individual-within-the-mass, an ontologically different position than either the recognition of individuality or of the mass as ‘other’. In an interesting postmodern twist to this conception of the ritual of the cinema, the home viewing experience is fundamentally different, and consequently the rather empty ritual of commercialism is further emphasized as the only one left linking the viewer to other human subjects. Most stimulating from a Marxist perspective is the DVD format for home viewing, which engages the viewer with extra features as the only reason to buy and not to make a copy of the film, which are almost invariably the marketing materials used to promote the film in the first place. The postmodern consumer thus willingly subsidizes the entire process of cultural production, and endlessly enacts an empty ritual.

Such is not an entirely new phenomenon, however. In twentieth century capitalism, film becomes a glorification of the mode of its production, and thus the list of the top five grossing films rightly enters the news archive of the week. By emphasizing the pleasure the audience receives from registering the leisure and wealth required to produce the film, the audience is itself affirmed as legitimately consuming an art which is itself legitimately produced. Any notion of authenticity – or even Adorno’s conception of autonomy, which he himself put into perspective: “the emphasis on autonomous works is itself socio-political”(AP, 194), which, inverted on Adorno himself, suggests the impulse to seek autonomy in art as itself a function of bourgeois leisure – must be put aside for the moment, for late capitalism has in a sense folded subjective experience in upon itself as yet another element of the process of commodification. Seen from that perspective, all products reflect the reality which created them for precisely the reason that reality as such (or, even more precisely the hyper-reality proposed by Baudrillard, Eco, and others) is merely the narrative creation of a ‘reality’ from the framework of a reflective act post temporum of the product itself. When viewed within the context of the rising uniformity of consumer culture – the wealthy are not distanced culturally from the petit bourgeoisie or the working class, but rather all experience the same television, popular music, and films to a more or less equal measure – it could be argued that there is no longer a bourgeois culture to which the avant-guard reacts. In other words, there is no longer a divide between resistance and affirmation of the dominant modes of production. The pop-art movement in the visual arts had anticipated just such a trend in the 1960s, with both Warhol and Lichtenstein acting as principle negotiators between commercial and artistic expression.

It is here that I would like to put the rather infamous debate between Lukács and Bloch into a contemporary perspective. The former had posited that capitalism was a totalizing front which brought the masses into the same aesthetic space (production or reception) as the elite. Only by artistic gestures towards realism can the masses access the truly revolutionary and come to realize their political situation: “the large-scale, enduring resonance of the great works of realism is in fact due to this accessibility, to the infinite multitude of doors through which entry is possible....The process of appropriation enables readers to clarify their own experiences and understanding of life and to broaden their own horizons” (AP, 56). One cannot avoid the thoroughly bourgeois examples Lukács uses, for all belong to the standard canon of texts which have been the subject of numerous attacks from the 1970s onward by those seeking to expand the canon and redefine the process of canonization. Indeed, Lukács’s thought serves to exemplify Jameson’s notions of the narrativization of history in A Singular Modernity, and one must question the priviledged position from which Lukács’s realism developed. Alternately, Bloch forwarded the notion that the avant-guard could be located precisely in the fissures between social reality and subjectivity. Accordingly, the alienation experienced by subjects under capitalism was made manifest by the individual artwork, and no totalizing concept of art production is possible within a linear framework. For Bloch there is no such thing as a progression for art; rather he posits a more useful (from the perspective of the post-modern) conception of Erbe, which suggests a myriad of potentialities and possibilities for the reception and production of art. There is no truly authentic sense of ‘reality’ within this conception, for such a gesture merely reflects a specific ideological narrativization of a field of texts within the Erbe. Thus, Lukács’s appeals to a certain material reality which one can either represent (authentic art) or avoid (popular art), and is certainly not objective: “Lukács’s thought takes for granted a closed and integrated reality that does indeed exclude the subjectivity of idealism, but not the seamless ‘totality’ which has always thriven best in idealist systems.... Whether such a totality in fact constitutes reality, is open to question” (AP, 22). In this respect, we can view Bloch’s conception of the artist negotiating the Erbe as approaching Benjamin’s notion of a progression towards a universally citable history: Benjamin’s “redeemed mankind” for which “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost” (Illuminations, 254). There is no truth as to the progression of artistic expression except that which emerges with the individual artist; no history for art exists save that which an artist creates through their work.

So where does this leave the cinema? I wish here to state the somewhat precarious notion that the editing process itself, montage if you like (although I do wish to avoid the genre convention of ‘montage’ as such), is precisely the creation of a new temporality which more realistically (in Bloch’s sense, not Lukács’s) represents the fissure in modern culture between social reality and subjective experience than traditional media have been able. Whether or not one wishes to make the value judgement whether film is therefore more important to the twentieth century than literature or painting is beside the point and, as Jameson points out, is regardless simply a matter of taste. The intersection of disparate images during montage is the moment when the pleasure experienced by the viewing subject during the act of imposing a continuous temporality, and thus a narrative, upon those images is met with the interruption of the entire process by the objective temporality of the film itself. In other words, a multiplicity of temporalities coexist within the space between frames: one the sense of objective time, and others corresponding to an internalized sense of time, which can of course be manipulated by the director/editor of the film. The former can be exemplified by a sense conveyed in Kubrick’s 2001 of the precision required for movement in a zero gravity environment by the long time it takes for objects to move onscreen (and the resultant boredom among many viewers, as “nothing happens” narratively speaking). The shower sequence in Hitchcock’s Psycho is perhaps the best example of the latter, in which the rapidity of movement and shot juxtaposition serves to pull the moment, and by extension the viewing subject, out of time. The shock experienced by the viewer is influenced less by content (as the ‘guilty’ pleasures of horror film fans can attest, smiling as body after body is mutilated in ever more graphically exciting ways) than by its presentation.

This process is akin to Barthes’s notion of the punctum in photography, which is the detail in the image which forces a rupture in temporalities between the viewing subject and the photographic image, bringing the former tangentially to an infinitude of reflection while atemporalizing the latter. In this sense the original moment represented in the image is destroyed and cannot be recovered. No degree of ‘realistic’ intentions will therefore represent the original subject in its entirety, but rather gestures toward realism cause the phoenix-like rise of the subject to figure itself as an allegory for its own termination. It was precisely this realization which photography imposed on the visual arts, causing them to modify their representational capacity. If an artist attempts to crystalize a moment by a representational gesture, it can only be judged successful if it takes this death-of-the-subject into account. To recognize this rupture is to historicize the subject, to create it upon reflection. It is difficult to ignore the pleasure this figuration of reality folding upon itself (as the hyper-real), and indeed one can liken it to Barthes’s jouissance, or the moment of death-creation in which the subject becomes a fetish for itself. The fetishized subject will lose its own sense of history by destroying time, entering an atemporal space of pleasure anticipation. This is in a sense both a blessing and a curse, for the subject of the gaze will be at its most pure – aesthetically, politically, etc – at the same time that it annihilates itself. The fetish looks back onto itself, continually trying to recreate the remembrance-of-the-past-anticipating-the-future, and thus becomes temporally displaced from itself. When controlled, the fetish instinct reifies the subject as a sacrificial one, and consequently legitimates the artistic gesture. The history of this (self)control becomes the structure of the artwork itself.

Kubrick recognizes this process in both Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut. Roughly halfway through the former, a scene in which Lady Lyndon is presented lying in her bath contemplating the infidelities of her husband is shot with the focal point of the camera slowly zooming out from a close-up of her upper body, eyes askew, to a neo-Rembrandtian composition with her at the centre. At the end of the camera’s movement, Lady Lyndon glances straight at the camera (this gesture itself a further reference to the Rembrandtian subject). This moment is the point at which the subject becomes aware of her own annihilation as subject (and by means of a structural analysis, a realization by the actress Marisa Berenson herself of her in situ vulnerability), and accordingly she arrests the viewer’s attention to this moment in time. The subject is made immortal by this gesture, which forces the viewer to reconsider their subject-position in relation to the film; the viewer becomes the watched and is made aware of the predatory nature of this relationship, reflecting back upon Lady Lyndon’s subjection to the emotional violence perpetrated by her husband. A similar occurrence – and one which perhaps more directly exemplifies the conception of jouissance that I wish to invoke – happens in the first half-hour of Eyes Wide Shut, during a scene in which Dr. Harford and his wife Alice are kissing in front of a mirror. Alice is focussing on their image in the glass as their ‘passion’ rises (this act itself an analysis of the simulacrum which I do not wish to engage with here), and just prior to a fade from scene Alice (Kidman?) glances directly at the camera with a look of utter contempt at the moment she is taken along with her husband to ‘rapture’. Alice, or perhaps more accurately the Alice-subject, for this process is not one directly linked with the narrative of the film, realizes the pleasure experienced by the viewing subject, in a manner at her expense, and appropriately involves the audience in her ritual slaughter. As a somewhat related aside, Robert Mapplethorp’s 1975 photograph Self Portrait is just such a gesture, a recognition of the ontological absurdity of subjecting himself to the photographic process. His death is met with a smile – I cannot help but amusingly wonder whether Camus would either roll in his grave or laugh triumphantly at this particular realization that suicide is indeed the most pressing of philosophical issues. Mapplethorp’s phallus/arm thrust across the white backdrop playfully reifies the conception that the death of the subject brings about the artistic ‘life’ of the image itself, while his mostly out-of-frame body suggests that the literal insertion of such an obviously generative metaphor conceals the artist himself from the ritual he is simultaneously mocking and invoking.

So we return to the experience of (death-as-) pleasure by the audience. Is it possible to view the conditions under which the film is experienced as preparing the audience for the ritualized deaths to be presented, ‘onstage’ as it were. I wish to return to Benjamin’s comments in this regard, for, as stated above, he believed that mechanical reproduction – here the mediation of the image by the camera – removed the cultic value of the art: “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.... This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed” (Illuminations, 228-9). And yet in the very next section he describes the experience of acting before the camera in the very terms implied by the ritualized death outlined above. Quoting Pirandello, “with a vague sense of discomfort [the film actor] feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality [and] life”. Then, in a passage foreshadowing Kubrick’s sentiments: “The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera ... is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public” (230-1). This instance of transport is the ritualized death of the subject, the process of mediation of the original moment by the cinematic process. For a film with only commercial intentions, there is no need for transport or ortherwise transcendental gestures, but simply entertainment. The ‘outer’ ritual of the sociological process of film viewing is enough to sustain the entire mechanism. Is it possible to suggest an avenue for mediating the commercial and the artistic without falling back on the pop-art aesthetic, which by definition was non-political (although I would here agree with Lenin that everything is political)? The commercial product is a fetish, which as outlined above is a temporal discontinuity between the ‘presentness’ of an object and its relocation in the anticipatory gestures of the relating subject. Consequently, if the anticipation of pleasure is in a reductive sense the product being sold and consumed, it is pleasure itself which remains unconsumable and thus the last bastion for the avant-guard, but such is largely outside the frame of this present examination.


Addendum

Robert Mapplethorp: Self Portrait (1975)


Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. ‘Commitment’. Trans. Francis McDonagh. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken, 1968.

Bloch, Ernst. ‘Discussing Expressionism’. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.

Horkheimer, Max & Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. J. Cumminng.
New York: Continuum, 2001.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Lukács, Georg. ‘Realism in the Balance’. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.

The Moderns, or how to write a conference paper about Nothing, in particular

To say that modernism is a constellation of artistic expressions or even a certain totalizing aesthetic, un fait accomplit, is primarily to misjudge the intentions of those who may fall under its aegis. Certainly there was a fundamental shift from the pre-modern to modernité proper, yet the recognition of a single defining point for the commencement of the latter in fact betrays a certain conceptual impulse which we must deem inherently anti-modern. The consequences of periodization are obvious, and perhaps a touch stereotypical; even the overlapping ‘geological’ nature of periods and movements which informs Foucault’s reading of socio-structural changes in Les Mots et les Choses is perhaps too much of a generalization when localized on modernism. It is therefore my intention to look at modernism as a recognition of the multiplicities, contradictions, and absurdities inherent in existence, which then become reified in given artistic expressions. Central to this position is the awareness that a multiplicity of existences has both spatial and temporal concerns; we see, for example, that the modernist gestures of Stein or Kafka do not correlate in either respect with those of Borges or Tarkovsky, and yet each can claim citizenship within a modernist aesthetic. Fundamentally, they make the same interpolative gesture in relation to the viewing subject, in part the abstraction of subjective experience from the capacity to represent and interpret that experience, as well as the same ontological claim upon themselves, namely a negation to which I shall return shortly. The list of unique artistic expressions that can be contained within modernism as narrative trope are as numerous as the points (of rupture, origin, etc) from which modernism as narrative category emerges from the pre-modern: historical occurrences such as the social and religious revolutions in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries; philosophical creations such as Cartesian rationality or the nihilistic individuality of Nietzsche; or perhaps with the introduction of the (self)creation of the human subject by its own (un)conscience, forwarded by Freudian psychoanalysis.

The last example best exemplifies the principle conception about modernism, namely that it knows itself, that it is self-aware and by extension self-referential. In many respects, Freud’s work anticipates the anxieties of representation which were not to enter into modernism proper until serialism in music, abstract expressionism in visual art, and the “lost generation” in literature (and language poetry in the later context of a post-modern crisis). Repetitive gestures of representation, which by the turn of the century had begun to include mechanical techniques of image and language reproduction, created in a sense a high tide of represented figures and exhausted tropes. Reality has by the pre-war period incorporated previously symbolic modes of understanding and expression as tangible and in a very real manner marketable products, and thus the authentic artist, siding with Nietzsche in the belief that the ‘real’ – a construction of reality predicated on the reiterated past – is intolerable, seeks a new language in order to express his own subjective experience of their surroundings. It is at this point that the artistic gesture encounters an impasse in relation to the artist, namely that the latter has seen itself before itself in this very guise. The subject is made painfully aware that it is using a language increasingly distanced from experiential reality, and thus a rupture is formed within the subject’s historical sense of time.

It is here that the subject creates the present by reifying the past as the past, namely as a narrative category or trope by which the present is defined. The modernist sees the eternal present within the recurrent past and the rupture that this creates within subjective relations to time, much as the chronological flow of Proust’s text is famously suspended with reveries of childhood as certain smells and tastes elicit profound reminiscences (and in a physically real sense time is objectively telescoped for the reader, as one compares the simple lifting of a madelaine to one’s lips in relation to the time it takes to read Proust’s narration of the event and realizes that the very physicality of this text – over 3500 pages in many editions – is itself a modernist gesture). The impasse which hinders the artistic gesture mentioned above is the moment when the artist realizes that nothing new has emerged to define the past by a repetition of the present; in other words, the continual repetition of the past annihilates both the past as the present. Consequently, the initial crisis of representation felt by the ‘High” modernists of the visual arts, namely that the introduction of certain technological advances such as still and film cameras made traditional representation in painting and graphic art completely irrelevant, can be correlated to a similar crisis encountered by painters of the late modern period who found that they had exhausted the various schools of interpretation/production within abstract expression. And thus the anti-consumerist gestures of the avant-guard (which in Benjaminian terms is de facto anti-bourgeois) became the pro-consumption repetitive tropes of pop art; the avant-guard gesture of Magritte’s La Chambre d’Ecoute was reiterated by Warhol’s Goethe. In a similar manner the avant-guard of Schoenberg’s serialism and Berg’s atonality in modern composition became the widely popular neo-classicism of Stravinsky. Indeed, one can locate a unique intra-mediary correlation between the artistic gesture in music and the visual arts in the 1950s, when abstract expressionism emerged as the logical extension of the initial crisis of representing the subject realized by the Impressionists at the very same time that freely improvised music emerged from direct compositional influence; one gets the same sense of spatial and temporal play within the art of both Pollock and de Kooning, for example, as one can interpret within the music of Morton Feldman or Ornette Coleman. Each seeks to relocalize the past in order to more accurately situate the present, and thus legitimate the artistic gesture itself. Importantly, film, itself a new medium born with modernité, suffers no such crisis of representation. To summarize in brief, modernity must remain continually at play with its own conceptualization in order to remain truly modern. The modern artist must indeed follow Rimbaud’s dictum, “Il faut être absolument moderne!”, and remain like Baudelaire an eternal flaneur of the present, for living and creating otherwise is precisely the annihilation of history.

And yet the construction of the artist of modernism remains in a very real sense a mythology, and as such requires situation within its own narrative voice. It is here that I wish to posit the closest thing I can to a thesis concerning modernity. Modernism is a description rather than a totalizing category pour-soi. Within rhetorical terms, modernity is a trope for textual production, yet it is one which, in a performative manner, creates and signifies itself. As Fredric Jameson writes in A Singular Modernity – admittedly the guiding critical text for my present formulation of the modern – “this is to say that the trope of ‘modernity’ is always in one way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative paradigms” (35). And thus an artist who is self-aware is merely one representation of what the modernist artist can be. There are indeed others, suggested by the notoriously unconscious modernist expressions of Jackson Pollock, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet, who remain distanced somewhat from the authentically self-referential texts by ‘High’ modernists such as Duchamp, Joyce, and Faulkner. There is not one narrative which universalizes and conceptualizes all that is located within its jurisdiction. Despite a multiplicity of subjects of and subjective experiences depicted in warfare, Picasso’s Guernica does not attempt to contain all the voices of the participants of the Spanish civil war nor does it attempt to re-present as legitimate their subjectivity to that experience. That space of silence – not an ontological muting but rather a semantic one – is both the negative space of the darkness, which defines the forms and serves to function as a sort of negative dialectic imparting meaning to the ‘positive’ images, as well the geometric and temporal fracturing of the images themselves into their constituent parts. The latter differs the initial experience of Guernica as conceived objet d’art, initially distancing the viewer of the mural from itself as an image, but it also geographically unifies them as a multiplicity of overlapping images which create subelements of visual representation. One can notice, for example, that the white rectangular area to the right of the mural’s centre when viewed in the same plane as the lightbulb-eye conflation just above the horse’s mouth in the centre suggests a darkened room in which the artist repeats the violence done to bodies in warfare by interrogating them as subject to his artistic gaze (simultaneous to this, we see ourselves situated within this room, ourselves interpolated as agent-victim of the recuperated violence).

In this capacity, Picasso’s work doubles in upon itself, replicating the silence of its subjects within a language that can speak only by negation, by precisely what it is not. It has in effect sealed the historical rupture between the gesture of painting (or representation, and by extension of the historical process in general) and the event itself, which upon reflection is an element of and for its own history, and thus solved its own representational crisis by the very act of negating itself within this rupture. That this conscious gesture of rupture is one and the same with the same implicit and unavoidable one in the photographic process is no simple accident of historical synergy. I am here thinking of Barthes’s argument in Camera Lucida, in which the temporality of the photographic subject is utterly destroyed by the infinitude of the moment of time captured in its representation. In other words, the viewer experiences a fundamentally different set of subjectivities in relation to the image, and thus a new mode of production is required for the artist who wishes to express the authentic. Film and still cameras had captured the horrors of warfare (and indeed all of its subjects) more provocatively than was possible with the language of art the moderns inherited. Thus a new language was required to re-create the visual arts as authentically and legitimately expressive. Bodies in Picasso’s mural are made infinitely more sensual than they would given a traditional depictive gesture – I invoke the ontologic interchangeability of orgasm/pleasure and termination/death as the extension of de Sade and the French formulation of jouissance as le petit mort – and thus the violence done to them is even more intolerable. In a very real sense then, the viewing subject is made to experience the dislocation of their own body along with the numerous arms, heads, and legs which populate the scene simultaneous with the realization that this process is one of self-mutilation. This process of internalization is further evidenced by a somewhat more literal interpretation of the figures within the scene, who seem to merge the private and the public spheres of subjectivity and emphasize the violence inherent in this act. They are both the intruders and the intruded upon, and represent places and moments of hiding, discovery, and subterfuge, and one is reminded that the Blitzkrieg – an act of warfare targeting an entire population both civilian and military – was perfected in the Spanish conflict. The sense of dread and guilt, both of the future and the avoidance of the inevitable within that future, permeates Picasso’s mural and the viewing subject is forced to confront the limits of its own rationality. Guernica speaks to the desire for a totalizing experiential representation of its subject and the ontological crises which this process by consequence suggests.

As a logical extension of the principle of narrative multiplicities, we must not, by a process of institutional exclusion and thus textual censorship, avoid the voices of the repressed in modernity, those among the subaltern who may not have the agency to represent themselves as authentic subjects within the conception of modernity. I am here thinking of the recovery strategies proposed by feminist and post-colonial critics, who wish to re-introduce texts that have been excised from the archive of modernity and authenticate them within the canon of academic study; this is a theme to which I will later return. That the modern subject requires certain aesthetic realities for acceptance as ‘modern’ reflects the institutional nature of criticism in its most general sense, namely that of inscribing the past with the voice of the present. Indeed, Jameson identifies such a conception as belonging to the ‘High Moderns’, a term which must be positioned as belonging to the canonization of art and not a category for its production: “most often they allowed representation to follow its own semi-autonomous course ... they allowed it to separate itself from its content and its object” (198). It is my own belief that such an arbitrary stance toward the signifier reflected the sense of play, in the sense proposed by the later Wittgenstein, towards conceptualization in general. In other words, during the moment of artistic gesture the individual artist whether consciously or not creates a text (perhaps body is both more accurate and more suggestive than text) which adheres solely to an internal logic, and in a sense prefigures itself to itself. In this respect, Duchamp’s 1946 piece Paysage Fautif, composed entirely of the artist’s own semen, best exemplifies the gesture of modernism, although in an admittedly abstract manner. The rational mind of the viewing subject seeks order within this particular amorphous geometry produced by Duchamp, and thus the image begins as an overhead picture of an island perhaps, or the conceptualized resistence of an organic, non-angular entity against the angular and obviously mechanized confinement of the frame and the negative (and negated) space it suggests. Rather the gesture Duchamp makes is quite literal: art is simply a jouissance reified and solidified, and consequently made into a gesture, by its own materiality. In the vein of Escher’s representation of mathematical space or the ‘self-sufficient’ compositional feedback of musical phrases in the magnetic-tape era Varèse or Cage, the gesture enters into itself in order to emerge as a concrete entity.

This has been true of artistic expression in a very broad sense throughout post-classical history – the emergence of perspective in Renaissance European art, and western-style tonality in post-monastic musical composition are as self-referential or ‘internalized’ in the sense given above as any artistic gesture of the twentieth century. Yet there is one fundamental difference, namely that which the self represents to itself as an ontological reality; this has indeed changed from the pre-modern to the modernists. The difference within modernism itself is that this process of representation-to-oneself is a process of increasing abstraction and duplication. For the pre-modern artist the representation of a given subject was simply: “I am painting x, and thus need to follow the rules for painting such subjects in order to realize x as x within my audience’s perception of x”. That painting until the middle of the 19th century has been traditionally conceived within the discourse of art history as a process of increasingly ‘realistic’ representations of given subjects, followed by the rupture of an Impressionism which celebrated painting for its own sake, is more reflective of the narrativization of history than historical actuality itself, for the contrapuntal (and to a degree contradictory) subtext to such histories will forever remain the sublimated surrealism of fantasy artists beginning with Bosch and running through the engravings of Blake straight to post-Impressionism. Rather the pre-modern artist remains such precisely because of a belief in a totality and universality of representation, or in other words that x will forever be viewed as x so long as it is painted correctly. Alternately, the modern artist is cognizant that there is no true x except the representation of x, and therefore the act of play occurs in a secondary manner in relation to the subject of the art gesture. For the modern artist, x becomes a mere abstraction for the true process of art, namely “within my audience’s perception of x through medium y, I wish to realize x as y in order to properly situate x as x”. This process can exhaust our alphabet quite readily – Duchamp would locate the museum itself as z, for example – as the subject position of both the artist and the audience are continually negotiated and re-conceptualized.

And yet the ontology of the art gesture is exactly the same, despite the multiplicities it suggests. The subject is annihilated in order to be recreated as as representation. Thus the modern artist, regardless of medium, plays with representation itself knowing full well that the representation of a given subject will then be re-presented to the viewer of the artwork. This is not the same as the process Arthur Danto describes in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, in which the awareness of criticism ontologically changes artistic expression, and indeed changes the modes of its production (Danto himself does not use such an obviously Marxist teleology, but my purposes are served) – Andy Warhol knowing, for example, that the process of art criticism and reception requires a priori certain criteria which are then negated or emphasized in a particular piece of work. More to the point I wish to suggest that within the modernist aesthetic the critical function was itself an element for play within a broader gesture towards culture, which would include not only the critical function but also those of the market, ethics, technology, ethnography, sociology, etc. Indeed, the mark of the modern is the same that marked Cain: having destroyed the traditional subject of art, modern art must now be protected from those who wish it vengeance, and thus it retreats into itself in order to legitimate itself. The rupture from the pre-modern to the modern is an act of violence, and in this capacity I cannot think otherwise than Derrida in Archive Fever. The pleasure of the archive – the institutionalization of the modern as modernism – is precisely the pleasure of inscribing certain texts into the archive and excluding others in a process of negation. Thus the Tintin comic strip is not modern in the institutional sense for the reasons that it is not like that which has been included; likewise Mina Loy has been recovered from the purgatory of the non-modern as a legitimate and authentically modern artist. Indeed, how can one think otherwise, with an example such as ‘There is no Life or Death’ from The Last Lunar Baedeker, which sees only an eternal present created out of a narrativization of its own past: “There is no Life or Death / Only activity / And in the absolute / Is no declivity”. She tells us that nothing exists save a certain subjectivity towards ourselves, and this by extension precludes totalizing gestures (life and death being two of the most obvious examples). This is fundamentally the same gesture as Faulkner’s temporal fracturing of narrative subjectivities in The Sound and the Fury, just as Picasso’s Guernica echoes her line, “There is no Space or Time / Only intensity”, in the refusal to objectively situate a site the ‘real’. The annihilation of the subject of the present inaugurated by the past is the subject of her unpublished ‘Continuity’, in which the eternity of subjectivity encounters the ironic termination of the eternal present by mechanical reproduction. Loy twice invokes the passage, “Continuity / renews / precedence”, which serves as a concept prefiguring its own continuation and reification as poem despite its grammatical fracture. The unpublished ‘Echo’ perhaps best concretizes the expressive gesture towards an ontologic negativity which I have been promoting throughout this discussion. Existence is figured as an inquiry which fundamentally looks through itself to create itself; “our anxious ‘Why’”, the philosophical imperative which constitutes the self, returns as an ambiguity, an echo, which then reifies whatever is external and transcendent to itself as mere subjectivity: “echo is no answer”. The sole answer to the question of existence that Loy is here forwarding is the process of self-creation through negation.

It is with modernism that we enter into the space where institutionalization encounters authenticity, and within this space a certain respect must be given to all those who consciously or not were able to counter the violence done to them by exclusion from the umbrella of (High) Modernism. It must be recognized that there are experiences of modernity which will never be recovered – one must think of the anonymous poets of the first world war who are canonically deferred in favour of an Owen or a Brooke, just as one must think of the anonymous housewives whose expression of domestic subjectivities in textile or food production were as powerful a realization of the modern as Stein’s Tender Buttons. And yet we can accept the relatively nonsensical text of a Stein or a Burroughs as important objects of study precisely because we have the institutional means to accept their existence, namely the study and reproduction of language in both the educational and critical mediums. Other modernist gestures which cannot be so easily contained are excluded from study; they are censored by the archive of modernism itself. It is thus that we arrive at what I initially posited as an institutional function of modernism which is itself anti-modern. Modernism must attempt to contain all that is a gesture of the modern, and yet it cannot for it has created a temporality for itself which cannot inscribe the totality of the modernist oeuvre within its archive. The sense of history is created out of specific modes of production which embraced the expressions of certain artists while rejecting others as ‘not-of-itself’. And indeed, it is to be remembered that Modernism is a narrative creation and as such it a priori excludes that which contradicts a given experiential reality. Thus, while Marinetti’s followers could indeed rejoice in his dictum that there is no painting, sculpture, or poetry, but rather there is only creation (!), all elements of said creation cannot be contained within Modernité proper, as Jameson elaborates in A Singular Modernity: “each mode of production has its own system of temporalities” (79), further emphasizing the inscribing process of history from specific vantage points. In this sense it is easy to see why the readymades of Duchamp were so readily accepted, and indeed consumed, within the art community; had Duchamp’s gesture been less akin to sculpture, had he for example made a film of himself baking a cake and submitted the reels for museum installation and looped presentation, his subversive expression would have been greeted with a sense of boredom rather than anger – the film would be a non-art and thus a non-entity for criticism, whereas the readymades were so obviously anti-art, and thus inherently artistic in their negational qualities. Forgetting the absurdity of the preceding example for a moment, it does serve its purpose, namely to further underline the notion of modernism as a narrative trope, as a history created by the present for the present. A contemporary critic would have no problem whatsoever in discerning the gesture and artistic consequences of a filmed occurrence, regardless of subject; in this sense, it is possible to argue that only within a post-modern society can the modern be truly situated.

the violence of pornography

last night onscreen
there was a girl
and only part of a man

she was gasping, grasping
looking for the air
which he took away for himself

she died seven times
while asking for no memory just video
he pulled back and sought her always

her eyes closed, ice like tears
slowly on her cheek suddenly
she couldn't see and never would again

i came in silence and reloaded

Subaltern

Since entering the critical lexicon, subaltern has ironically returned to its etymological roots. The word derives from the Latin alternus (alternate) and the prefix sub (under). In the language of the late empire, subalternus had emerged in military usage to define mid-level officers, and was incorporated into modern British military discourse. The principle meaning as defined by the OED has been generalized to “of inferior rank”; interestingly, in the study of logic, the term refers to a concept as “particular, not universal”, an interpretation Spivak was to further elaborate. Importantly, within grammatical terms, subaltern is both a noun – an entity representing itself – and an adjective – connoting an ontological link with an Other which defines it.

Most academics – principally the notorious Kindly Ones of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin – locate the incorporation of subaltern into the critical lexicon within the work of Antonio Gramsci in reference to his studies, beginning in the mid-1930s, of Italian social history. He argued for the importance of the histories of those groups who remained outside of elite political structures whose hegemonic position were constituted a priori as the subjects of and for history. The politically disenfranchised, Gramsci argued, were themselves important historiographical subjects, whose cultures and political motivations (conscious or not) were as influential as those of the elite few. Their history could not be as easily traced, especially using the narrative methodology of conventional historical discourse which limited analysis to the loci of power. The subordinate are (anti)subjects in the sense that their historical trace is sporadic and sometimes contradictory, as their agency and in particular their means of self-representation is by definition circumscribed by those “in” power.

Subaltern entered post-colonial and literary criticism by means of the Subaltern Studies group of South Asian historians, and more principally by Gayatri Spivak who contributed to their publishings. The group’s examination of the subaltern follows Gramsci in believing that academicism was itself tied to hegemonic elitism: “the nominating authority is none other than an ideology for which the life of the state is all there is to history” (Guha 1), with obvious consequences to concepts of nationality and national identity. Spivak sought to problematize subaltern identity in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which challenged the commitment of the Subaltern Studies group to the capacity of the subaltern subject for self-representation. Citing Foucault, Spivak in “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern” posits the discourse – and thus the means for the actualization of self-identity – of the subaltern as inherently dependent on their subject-position in relation to the hegemonic localization of power: “I remain troubled by anything that claims to have nothing to do with its opposition” (92-3). In the Foucauldian sense, the ‘statements’ of the subaltern – the means by which the subaltern understands its own position – are contained within the power-locus of the elite. Such ‘énonciations’ in discourse by the subaltern are not autonomous from the political project which reinforces hegemonic power structures, but alternately they remain ‘assigned’ within its boundaries. Discourse within conventional terms stemming from Enlightenment rationality requires a homogenous and universalized subject-position from which the ‘function of existence’ of language would allow understanding amongst all the participants. The subaltern subject is ontologically dislocalized and cannot be effectively collectivized, and is therefore incapable of truly authentic self-representation. Shetty and Bellamy further problematize the subaltern by engendering it, as Spivak herself had done in the third and fourth sections of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, emphasizing the numerous locations where power (or lack thereof) and capacity for representation intersect. The subaltern subject, multitudinous and inherently duplicitous to itself, cannot be condensed to a single experience/event of self-representation, and accordingly Spivak ends her article with the terse statement: “the subaltern cannot speak” (104).

The violence experienced by the subaltern by their lack of self-representability is perhaps not solely the epistemic violence of the act of institutionalized silencing, but also an archival violence in the sense Derrida makes in Archive Fever. The disharmony between a subject’s pragmatic experience and their means for (self) representation is the fracture between memory and institutionalization – itself the process of creating an archive, which is both the historical (and historiographical) trace as well as the codification of law, discourse, and behavioural norms. The inability for self-representation by the subaltern is precisely the site of archival violence as “the place of originary and structural breakdown” and thus the violation of “that which is remembered” (Derrida 14) by elite discourse. In a very real sense the subaltern subject is not textually locatable within the archive of elite discourse, which is itself appropriated (consciously or not) into discourse by the marginalized. Consequently the subaltern is always-already defined as a silenced entity within its own discourse.


Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1996.

Guha, Ranajit. “The Small Voice of History”. Subaltern Studies IX. Ed. Shahid Amin & Dipesh Chakrabarty. Delhi: Oxford U Press: 1996.

Shetty, Sandhya and Elizabeth Bellamy. “Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever”. Diacritics 30.1 (2000): 25-48.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Stanadayini’”. Subaltern Studies V. Ed. Ranajit Guha. New York: Oxford U Press, 1987.

–––– “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. English 3QQ3 coursepack, 1999. Ed. Dan Coleman. 401-23.

Manitoba - Start Breaking My Heart

MANITOBA
Start Breaking My Heart
[Leaf, 2001 / Domino, 2003]

This wonderful release is actually a reissue of the SBMY album from 2001 along with tracks from a subsequent ep. Dundas native Dan Snaith just couldn’t find support from Canadian labels for his brand of melodic beats, and subsequently moved to London. It is a tragedy that North American listeners still cannot conceive of electronic composition separate from the club scene, as some of the best producers at work today hail from our shores, and are producing work exponentially greater than the simple 4/4 of, ahem, “genre pioneers” like Moby and the Chemical Bros.

Fans of the Warp and Ninja Tune rosters will recognize Manitoba’s lazy-yet-busy grooves and fluid melodic passages, while Mille Plateaux sympathizers will appreciate Snaith’s glitchy textural aesthetics. Several of the tracks betray his jazz and classical roots, with contrapuntal harmonic and melodic phrases oscillating in the mix, while the complex rhythms owe more to Art Blakey than a 303. The best of accessible electronica.

MP3: Manitoba - Paul's Birthday

The Canadians of Old

The Canadians of Old is widely regarded as a keystone for Canadian literature, for it united French and English reading communities, at least in the commercial terms of the novel’s popularity. Early translations – the first appearing only a year after the novel’s original publication – were marred by overly melodramatic prose and textual exclusions. De Gaspé’s voluminous notes and explanations, for example, were usually excised from English editions. I myself would argue that the French and English texts served not to unify a culturally heterogeneous population, but rather to demonstrate the anxiety and tension of co-habitation. Perhaps more importantly, however, The Canadians of Old serves as a foundation for a new Canadian national literature because it is among the first texts to critically examine an important historical occurrence which was subsequently to define a national identity. It should be noted, however, that I wish to examine identity itself as in a sense a constellation of forms rather than a monolithic entity. For, as de Gaspé’s text demonstrates, the ambiguities, paradoxes, inaccuracies, and most importantly the exclusion and glossing of “otherness” themselves serve to reify and create the oscillating presence which is national identity.

So who were these Canadians of old? What defines them as a people, distinct from the English and the French, and of course, as I will later elucidate, the Aboriginal peoples? It is interesting to note that more information can be gleaned from the text as to what the Canadians are not, rather than what exactly they are. Putting aside Aboriginal claims to the title, it is clear that Canadians as defined by the text are for the most part French-speaking land owners and tenants. English speakers are exclusively British subjects, and of course one must remain aware of the publication date for de Gaspé’s text, which predates Confederation. Therefore we can understand that English speakers will remain tied to their empire, while French-speaking persons born in North America will become a unique nationality separate from the Imperial claims of France itself. De Gaspé remains clear as to the origin of this difference, as he repeatedly refers to “the indifferent Louis XV” (177) who ignored the plight of New France, especially during the Seven Years War. As an historical aside, such indifference can be best attributed to France’s continental obligations, as well as the vast superiority of the English naval fleet, rather than the callous disregard of the country’s monarchy. This sense of abandonment, of weakness, can be seen to inform de Gaspé’s valorization of Canadian fighters at the beginning of chapter twelve: “You have been misunderstood, my Canadian brothers of old! You have been falsely besmirched .... Shame on us who, instead of exploring the ancient chronicles of our race’s heroic deeds, we’re content to bow our heads beneath the humiliating reproach of being a conquered people .... Shame on us who are mortified to be Canadians!” (151). The rhetoric here phrased seems to be the manifestation of the famed inferiority complex of Canadian national (stereotyped) identity. Therefore, Canadians can be seen to be defined by their opposition, which would have been seen as insurmountable. It is here that de Gaspé distances the English-speakers from the French, for during the 1759 war, the repulsion of English forces by the Quebequois is described as a “Victory ... most dearly bought by the French and the Canadians” (180).

Perhaps even more importantly than their status as non-British, Canadian national identity, at least in cultural terms, is defined by de Gaspé along aristocratic lines. Such is to be expected perhaps, for the author was himself descended from New France’s aristocratic families. Yet the novel in its entirety suggests a nostalgic return to the ancien régime, with the subtext that the seigneurial system followed God’s will. In an ontologically prescient manner, the very landscape – its beauty, fertility, and economic potential – are linked a priori with aristocratic privilege. Jules, in conversation with Archibald, correlates the nostalgic sentimentality of his youth with his later ability to profit from the land of his birth: “I love everything about this place ... it never seems as beautiful anywhere else. I love this stream that I used to turn the little wheels I called my mills “94). Indeed, birth associated with privilege defines human potential and moral character: “In terms of character, Seigneur d’Haberville possessed all the qualities that distinguished the old Canadian noblesse” (95). It is within this space – the definition of aristocracy which subsequently implies a national identity – where several paradoxes emerge in de Gaspé’s thought. For while Canadians are themselves defined by their French heritage – Jules, for example, remarks that “if the French lose Canada, most of the Canadian noblesse will probably emigrate to France where they have friends and protection” (189), and of course with nobility goes culture – simultaneous to this French heritage is the recognition of a shared culture amongst the aristocracy regardless of their country of origin. Such can first be identified by de Gaspé’s epithets, many of which are from British authors, but more importantly they signify a universal reading culture to which members of the aristocracy have almost exclusive privilege. This shared, alomst contractual, culture is of course reified in the relationship between Jules and Archibald, who are depicted as brothers from childhood who attended school together.

Consequently, de Gaspé’s depiction of the English is fraught with paradoxical relations. For while they are numerously depicted as brutish and uncompassionate, particularly during the destruction of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli in chapter twelve – Major Montgomerie in particular is portrayed as unmerciful and violent – simultaneously British rule was, in a sense very real to de Gaspé, a blessing in disguise, for as on page 151: “we may have benefited from the cessation of Canada, for the Revolution of ‘93 with all its horrors barely touched this fortunate colony, then under British flag”. The horros to which he refers are of course the plebeian rejection of the of the aristocratic system in France, during which many nobles lost their property, if not indeed their lives. Within this context, we can determine de Gaspé’s valuation of proper national existence. Order is maintained within the post-feudal system of the seigneuries, where the privilege of the aristocracy is granted in lieu of a contract to protect those whom they oversee. Like a father sheltering his children, the seigneurs must protect those under their guard, for as the narrator says on page 203, “It is the privilege of well-born persons to treat their inferiors with unfailing respect”. The d’Habervilles maintained this civil order, and consequently they “experienced fewer hardships than many in their position, for they were loved and respected by the censitaires, and had never suffered the humiliations that the common people are want to heap upon their superiors in distress” (203). The habitants give their labour wholeheartedly to the task of rebuilding the estate and their homes. They are themselves a superstitious group which lacks the insights gained by civility and are thus contented with a simple existence: “Our habitants aren’t so fussy as we are, nor are their palates so jaded. I’m sure their meals, washed down with a few shots of brandy, leave them nothing to wish for” (103). It is their duty to sublimate themselves to the seigneurial order. Indeed, duty is all important for de Gaspé, as it provides the moral imperative for the hierarchization of the populace. Simultaneously, however, he is not uncritical of the performance of duty which is blindly executed, as Archie’s actions demonstrate: “my life was poisoned by remorse since that fatal day when the inescapable duty of a junior officer forced me to carry out heart-sickening acts of vandalism” (205). Yet captain d’Haberville comes to understand this impulse, and soon forgives Archiibald of his transgression.

The institution of the monarchy holds such a (ir)rationally stratified body politic together, and consequently the d’Habervilles pledge their allegiance to the English king. Says captain d’Haberville, “Serve your new sovereign as loyally as I have served the king of France” (248) Notably, this phrase is uttered before the passing of the old guard, the ancien régime, which the captain represents. That the English retained their monarchy while the French king was beheaded in the Revolution speaks to de Gaspé’s allegiances. French Canada, and by extension the Canadians, will likely prosper under British rule if they accomodate themselves, much as within the Scottish had, in opposition to the economic and social ruin which the Irish experienced by resisting Britain. It is likely that de Gaspé’s desire to accede to the British monarchy allowed the proliferation of the English translation of his novel. Indeed, by the end of the text, Jules has himself married an Englishwoman, and rightly enters into peaceful cohabitation with the English aristocracy. De Gaspé resists simple objections that the Canadiens – the French – are a defeated people by suggesting that they willingly returned to the feudal order under British rule. For example, Jules’s statement on page 239 that “our habitants have traded their muskets for the plough. They’re opening up new land – and in a few years this seigneurie will be bringing in a healthy return. With the help of my modest legacy, we’ll soon be as rich as we were before the conquest”. Additionally, the process of imperial conquest does contain a reciprocity, as earlier noted. Within the narrative, this is achieved primarily through Archibald, who aids the d’Habervilles on numerous occasions, namely by convincing the English governor to grant the family a reprieve from expulsion to France. Less dramatically however, Archie’s love of Jules momentarily unites the French and the English during the war. The French and Canadian soldiers “were so moved at seeing the Englishman tend their young officer that they never even thought of harming him” (181). It is Archie’s aristocratic nature – his bravery, strength, and determined initiative – which here transcends nationality. The true connection of l’Anglais and the French is young Archibald d’Haberville, who, reflecting Archie’s earlier statement that childhood is “the time when true wisdom is known” (214), sees the entirety of the narrative (the text as work) as well as the history of his family within the dancing embers of the fireplace: “a small group of men, women, and children walking, dancing, jumping, rising and falling – and now suddenly everything’s disappeared” (252). Here we can see de Gaspé’s greatest paradox, for while his novel posits the successful integration of the French into the English empire, in his old age it seems that he believes that the Canadian spirit itself, once tied to strict religious custom – Catholicism – has weakened over time: “Some of our nineteenth-century Christians appear embarrassed by a religious act performed in public. At the very least, this shows either a narrow or cowardly mind” (22-3). Certainly these are not aristocratic virtues, which explains de Gaspé’s nostalgic attempts at reverie in the Canadians of his fictionalized history.

a woman smiles through her violence while a man sits indifferent

a woman smiles through her violence
the censuring sensuality of her voice
pulls at my teeth like icicles broken off a roof
she stares past her own skull
at the whiteness of this page
as i struggle with these words
my outrage at her ignorance lies impotent

i leave in peace

a man sits indifferent
but never the same after the events around him
his face was never one of note
except for the passing years
like an insect crushed under a shoe
he was changed from moment to moment
until he laughed at eternity

i smiled and gave him a quarter

he who squats firm while others weep forgiveness

he perches on one foot
hands held in fists, out at his sides
one leg raised straight ahead

cut-off jeans
a running shirt tucked in
Adidas gym bag, browned with age

he squats in the corner
straining against himself
and the judgement of others

his hair is patchy
cut with a bowl around his head
his weight held on a skinny frame


over and again he stumbles as his balance fails
the tendons in his legs strain
pain shoots into his face
sometimes he falls, but he is never discouraged

all of his worth falls with him onto the ground
but again he tries, squatting behind a car
he won't stop even as they laugh
his running shoes pointing to the sky

his death will end western civilization
its wake will be disastrous to many like him
who, pining for meaning, seek physical transcendence
and the immortality of their flesh, disintegrating

he is the fetish i wish that i had
grasping at my own boundaries, marginal
caring about something as much as him
derided and damaged, he sits outside my window

i choose you like a heartbeat

i choose you
like my heartbeat distant
at the end of a corridor

desire contains
like walls
makes dirty
like murder
flows silent
like a bird
fallen in water

it pools in the back of my throat
as i think about the space between us
and what remains of our distance

Only in termination can we locate authentic music

The only analogy I can think of in relation to music is positively communal and historic in nature. Instruments in music are the means of distilling essences. The instrument is not itself the reification and purpose of music, but rather the means by which mythology is dispelled from materiality -- like a telescope which, upon seeing the ship sail into the horizon, dispels the mythology of a flat planet Earth. The nice thing about the instrument is that it must be public in its function; it needs reception in order for it to be ontologically coherent. (Tragedy lies in the fact that few listeners can distinguish the true beauty of music as separate from its fetishistic consumerist function, and thus see through the lens, as it were.)

Only when death, termination, a punctum of nothingness, simultaneously obliterates and creates all meaning in the note do we find authentic music. For example, Chopin demonstrates an innate knowledge that music is always-already a decadent historical artefact which exists in its subjective immanence as a fragment of memory and is immediately destroyed. It is this fact which leads in Chopin's music to the many abrupt terminations at the end of brisk cascading passages. John Coltrane placed a similar demand on his saxophone, as he continually sought the unification of presence and annihilation -- a point of zero-degree signification.

Ultimately, we must view such gestures as ontologically monotheistic in nature.

Subversive Stationery: Techno Twinkle and Paper Cuts in William Gibson’s Neuromancer

                        A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway.
Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies,
at others the churned-up mud of the road.
– Stendhal

Joseph Tabbi, when discussing several postmodern, techno-writers, points out that “[t]hese writers carry on both the romantic tradition of the sublime and the naturalist ambition of social and scientific realism, but in a postmodern culture that no longer respects romantic oppositions between mind and machine, between organic nature and human construction, metaphorical communication and the technological transfer of information” (1).  In William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, there is an opposition between the ultra-modern society that Gibson is presenting and the presence of the past that is creeping just beneath the surface.  Gibson frequently uses the term “arcology,” and for the purposes of this essay I will define this term as a self-contained community where the parts harmoniously complement the whole and the whole naturally integrates with the surrounding landscape.  This essay will explore how the “shiny” exterior of the setting of Gibson’s new world is formed to mirror itself and its hopeful future and how this is countered by the underlying dystopia that inhabits the place of the denigrated past which becomes represented in a paper trail of violence, litter and failed intimacy.

Gibson describes for us a futuristic, hyper-modern, technological environment which is bright, electric and reflective: along with much of the Sprawl, Case’s hang-out, the Jarre “was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon” (7).  The difficulty with such a shiny environment is that if you see nothing but yourself reflected in everything you see, and if everything you see is not representative of who you are, there is a certain resistance to compliance with the supposed arcology as defined above.  Gibson’s future society is one that flourishes at night and in neon, a time when the sky – “the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3) – can be obscured by the lights of the city: “By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky” (6-7).  The human body, in Gibson’s constructed environment, reflects back the environment that has formed around it.  At one point in the text, Case describes Molly’s body as though it were machinery: “the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane’s fusilage” (44).  The distinction of the human face disappears in the technological accoutrements.  A character, such as Molly, with her razor sharp fingers and her reflective mirror shades instead of eyes, seems to be the embodiment of the technological landscape which thrives on darkness and violence.  When Case looks into her eyes, he sees himself, and more than once, Case mentions that this bothers him; he is unable to “read” her face, to tell what she is feeling – “Her face was blank; the colours of Riviera’s projection heaved and turned in her mirrors” (140) – and even if she is sleeping or awake – “He was never sure, with the glasses” (133).  The formation of an intimate relationship with someone like Molly (someone who is so representative of this society) seems and is, eventually, an impossibility.  Case’s first glimpse of Molly is fleeting: “A head appeared, framed in the window, backlit by the fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished.  It returned, but he still couldn’t read the features.  Glint of silver across the eyes” (18).  His inability to read her features when he first encounters her persists throughout the novel; however, it is interesting that, later, Case has the ability to see through Molly’s eyes via a cyberspace link.  This cyber-connection simulates an intimacy that is unimaginable to Gibson’s readers; however, to Baudrillard, “[t]o simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (3).  The intimate connection between Molly and Case is, at best, one way:  Case can feel what it is like to be inside Molly’s body, and she can know when he is there, but they cannot communicate with each other directly.   This failure of intimacy is not limited to Case’s relationship with Molly.  His memory of Linda Lee is also representative of this reflective, technological environment.  He remembers her literally in the light of a video game, one of the major preoccupations in this society:

her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon.  (8, my emphasis).

Rather than expressing her efforts or her actual participation, she reflects the results and the actions of the war game.  The situations with Molly and Linda are not the only times Case has difficulty interpreting human features.  This motif recurs when Case has been arrested by Turing; he notices “the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze hieroglyphs [...] (164, my emphasis).  The human body is an unreadable sign in Gibson’s world, or at least something as anciently readable as a hieroglyph.   Each of these instances – Molly, Linda, the bathers – is an example of the failure to connect with others around him, on a more intimate level with his lovers, and even on a basic, social level with his fellow humans.

As has already become evident, violence is also an inherent component to Gibson’s setting,  and this violence has a very strong link to the traditional notion of fate.  The sky has turned a poisoned shade of grey, and the constellations are either manufactured or not visible.  Gibson carries over the traditional literary use of stars as a sign of destiny or fate; however, just as with Molly and the environment in general, these stars are sheathed in violence.  Gibson refers to the “chrome stars” (11), the shuriken which is Molly’s gift to Case after their shopping trip – she gives the gift of a lethal weapon to her lover – she calls it a “souvenir,” something by which to remember her (44). This symbol of Case’s violent destiny disappears and reappears a number of times in the text.  At one point, Case “saw the shuriken on the bed, lifeless metal, his star.  He felt for the anger.  It was gone.  Time to give in, to roll with it [...]” (163).  The old notion of one’s fate being in the stars is problematised here; there are no more stars, and the only one that guides Case’s destiny is a violent weapon.  By the end of the novel, Case throws his star away

to bury itself in the face of the wall screen.  The screen woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it pain.
‘I don’t need you,’ he said.  (270).

What we can see thus far is that while there may be a resistance to the arcology that has been developed, there is also a level on which it takes over.  The intimacy that may have developed between these people is consumed by the continuous reflectiveness of the surroundings.

This becomes increasingly apparent in Freeside, where the Tessier-Ashpool family resides as the prime example of the corporate arcology.  This family – a very complicated corporate structure – is described by the “family terminal” (in the form of 3Jane’s adolescent essay) as “an old family, the convolutions of [their] home reflecting that age.  But reflecting something else as well.  The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull’” (173).  There is, of course, a very strong connection between the Tessier-Ashpool family and the dream Case has about an experience he once had with a hive of wasps.  He destroys the hive, but interestingly, he more or less reveals the inside, the “hideous [...] perfection” of this natural phenomenon (126).  Tessier-Ashpool strives for much more than reflection; it strives for the evolutionary perfection of the hive, the true arcology, the route to immortality (229).  As Wintermute says, “anyway it was supposed to work out that way.” (171).  But, perhaps the strength of the corporate drive, the act of “turning in,” has forced this arcology into an exclusionary stasis, which in turn, justifies the anxiety which rejects the environment this society forces on its residents.  The arcology is not working as the desired kind of “living wall” and appears more as a forcible construction rather than a natural or evolutionary process.

The element that appears essential to uncovering the hideous imperfection of the societal constructions in Gibson’s novel is paper, just as the hive is covered in “gray paper” (126).  Gibson's use of paper in this highly digitised future is minimal.  Reading appears to be an outmoded activity: virtual holidays and video games have usurped paper culture.  The disadvantage this may represent is never overtly in question in the novel – why “write” something on paper when you can save it to disk, view it on screen, access it by jacking into a database – however, it does illustrate a limitation to the information that is readable by artificial intelligence (AI).  There is a distinction made between “reading” information and “accessing” information.  Case asks Wintermute if he is able to read his mind.  Wintermute replies: “Minds are read.  See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate.  I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind” (170).  Wintermute – the AI who wishes to merge with another AI – cannot merge without the help of a few humans.  He needs their help in order to acquire the word that is the key to his potential merger with Neuromancer: this need can be seen as a manifestation of the need for the “flesh,” which will be discussed more below.  In Gibson’s novel, words and language seem to be two of the victims of the antiquation of paper culture.  By placing paper in the setting explored above – in terms of the technology and reflective, ultra-new world space it inhabits – we may be able to analyse some of the issues that surround the position language occupies in a culture in which the individual can, potentially, transmit information instantaneously.  The main concern with any use of language in Neuromancer is in Wintermute’s need for “the magic word” in order to amalgamate the two AIs.  When Case asks him for the word, Wintermute replies that he does not know:

‘You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don’t know, because I can’t know.  I am that which knoweth not the word.  If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't know.  It’s hardwired in.  Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch though that ice and scramble the cores.’ (173)

They need the word in order to allow for the new beginning.  “In the beginning was the Word,” and in this new beginning is another Word, a password to create a new life form.  Just what the magic word is remains unclear.  We can fairly confidently surmise that it may be, in fact, “Neuromancer,” considering that later, when Case tells Wintermute the name of Neuromancer, he replies that “[h]is name’s not something I can know” (261).  This does present itself as a Rumpelstiltskin type of situation.  There are several fragmented, intertextual references to mythology, fairy tales and the Bible which may suggest the underlying importance these references still hold, even in the realm of the cyberpunk.  Again, this is a source of traditional information unattainable by the AIs, and perhaps this lost intertextuality with the past is part of Gibson’s project.  Just as Wintermute is “that which knoweth not the word,” we too are not told, evoking our immediacy to and participation in the lost knowledge, facing us with the inability to know. However, it is an issue of even greater ambiguity.  The environment which has been constructed has become as static as the television sky, and the desire for something better has been replaced by the desire for something different.  In Chaos Bound, Katherine Hayles briefly discusses the importance cryogenics plays in Neuromancer:

the corrupt and powerful clan of Tessier-Ashpool has for generations practised cryogenics, so that its members have virtually all become simulacra (as their replicated names and numbers indicate).  The prospect that human beings can become simulacra suggests that a new social context is emerging which will change not only what it means to be in the world but what it means to be human.  Within the context-of-no-context, the postmodern shades into the posthuman.  (276)

The older generations, in the act of recycling themselves to relive among the newer generations, are effectively contradicting the notion of a “new social context.”  The younger generation cannot mature, because there is no one to replace.  Nothing is renewed and nothing changes.  This fact is recognised when Case and Molly are attempting to obtain the password from 3Jane: Case argues that if she refuses to give them the word, nothing will change: “You’ll wind up like the old man.  You’ll tear it all down and start building again!  You’ll build the walls back, tighter and tighter....I got no idea at all what’ll happen if Wintermute wins, but it’ll change something!” (260).  The struggle is one of the new generation’s search for change against the old-world constructions.

Stemming from the old-world constructions appears to be the new craving to be rid of the flesh.  There is a constant desire, especially for Case, to escape into cyberspace.  The virtual world is one way of having the time pass without even noticing it.  When Case regains his ability to manoeuver in cyberspace, we are told that “[t]his was it.  This was what he was, who he was, his being.  He forgot to eat.  Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table.  Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the long table” (59).  He has a strong drive to shed his “meat puppet” or his flesh.  And yet, at the same time that Case wants to escape his flesh and as much as he likes escaping into the matrix, he is disturbed by the idea of Dixie Flatline “as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses [...]” (76-77).  Dixie Flatline is several steps beyond recording human life on paper documents; here, his human personality is recorded to survive beyond death and paperwork.  The flesh is gone, the notion of time is gone.

I would argue that paper is the manifestation of many of Gibson’s preoccupations, and it also ties in very tightly with the themes that have been discussed thus far.  At any time that paper is mentioned, it is related to one of three things: litter, violence, failed intimacy (all representative of Gibson’s world).  Paper is no longer used for letters, it occupies the place of litter.  In Istanbul, Case notes that Turkey is “a sluggish country” where, during a rain storm, “[a] few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here” (88).  In less sluggish countries, paper is disposed of in favour of digital and other forms of communication.  At the Finn’s, Case and Molly walk through a “tunnel of refuse,” of paper litter which was “cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places” (72).  Even in the home of Julius Deane – the 135-year old man who appears to be a link to the paper past – the time of the past is dusty, distorted and deceptive: “Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room [...]”; “A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor.  Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time” (12).  The time of the past is distorted, relegated to the dusty area of old, unused bookcases.  Not only that, but even though Deane’s desk is “littered with cassettes, scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of clockwork typewriter [...]” (34), we find that not all that is surface is revealing.  In his article, “Gibson’s Typewriter,” Scott Bukatman addresses the popular story that William Gibson composed his cyberpunk masterpiece on an antique typewriter.  His argument is that history was erased from the postmodern novel, and that “[s]ome attention to the typewriter may therefore be warranted in order to type history back into Neuromancer” (73).  Julius Deane’s typewriter is equally significant: this quaint old man, this supposed link to the past is, in fact, a violent man, who uses the typewriter to hide a gun, not to type letters or manuscripts.

We also see paper linked to other weapons: when Case cannot get a gun, he purchases a Cobra to defend himself at the beginning of the novel, and paper is used to wrap the cylinders of the Cobra (15).  Also, when Molly buys him the souvenir of their shopping trip, it is “origami-wrapped” in “recycled Japanese paper” (44).  The paper tears away from this souvenir to reveal the shuriken.  Molly is important to the role of paper and communication in this novel.  She is almost exclusively the character who handles paper of any informative importance, and she also has several modes of communication, including the silent language of jive.  She is the one who passes notes on stationery or paper napkins that are meant to convey information.: “She [Molly] drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him.  He opened it.  Grid coordinates and entry codes” (76).  Case, on the other hand, is often unable to comprehend or communicate.  He does not understand any language other than English, nor does he understand the jive Molly uses to conduct business.  He consistently mispronounces names, and we are told that Case is barely print-literate.  In the same way that Case looks at travel as “a meat thing” (77), we can imagine that he also considers old forms of communication a meat thing as well.

Molly’s final “dear john” note to Case is the culmination of the categorical use of paper outlined above:

There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside the door, a single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted with the shuriken.  He slid it from beneath the nine-pointed star and opened it.
HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY.  IT’S THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS OKAY? XXX MOLLY
He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the shuriken.  (267)

The note is a sign of the failed intimacy between Molly and Case; it uses a shuriken for a paper weight (a sign both of violence and destiny), makes reference to the way Molly is “wired” (a sign of her own destiny), and it is quickly crumpled and thrown away.  This suggests that words on paper are disposable and biodegradable, in fact so degraded as to become erasable even on a more permanent surface: “There was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion” (232).  The use of written language is so polished that the words disappear: this is reminiscent of the unreadable code of both Linda’s and Molly’s faces, and perhaps this is an accurate way to describe Gibson’s prose style – his language is so visual that the actual words themselves seem to be lost in imagery – but, it also suggests the inability to use words in any tangible, tactile form; that there is something less disposable about digital language, information and communication.  However, Gibson is also questioning this disposability: because Wintermute cannot participate in the now antiquated paper culture, he cannot acquire the necessary knowledge to complete his transformation alone.

Popular images of the future often waver between pristine chrome whiteness and dirty underbelly decrepitude.  William Gibson’s Neuromancer indulges in both of these representations of the future; however, the glossy world of neon and cybernetic beauty is subverted by the discovery that there is an amnesia chip which allows more women to become prostitutes by simply “renting the goods” without any psychological ramifications; that people live in homes the size of coffins; that Molly can spit instead of cry, and that neither we nor Case ever learn the colour of her eyes.  The tension between the past and the future is not the greatest tension in the novel.  The greatest tension arises out of the stasis of the present. And while the issues of violence, failed intimacy and the denigrated paper culture are not directly noticed by the characters in the novel, there is a prevailing sense of the need for change, that the future is not working and that a new age must soon enter.  Even if it is no better than the current situation, it can at least claim that it is new.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean.  Simulacra and Simulation.  Trans. Sheila Fraser Glaser.  Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1997.

Bukatman, Scott.  “Gibson’s Typewriter.”  Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture.  Ed. Mark Dery.  Durham: Duke UP, 1994 (71-89).

Gibson, William.  Neuromancer.  NY: Ace Books, 1984.

Hayles, N. Katherine.  Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Tabbi, Joseph.  The Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to
Cyberpunk.  Ithaca: Cornell UP.

the little death

it has been weeks it has been months and
the sentences pass like years, perhaps
she has seen the quiet desperation with which I write

alone, slow
interrupted delays
like an atheist masturbating

i don't really think that she smiles
as the little deaths which i have written
fall across the page without anger

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.