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.

World Bank / IMF protests in Washington DC

There were protests in Washington DC over the weekend. I was there. You were there as well, unless you have been avoiding the media coverage. I have net yet watched any of the local news, and cannot really comment on how it was presented, but I will state that the broadcasts in Washington itself were not accurate. I have to qualify this by saying that they were not accurate from my vantage point. They did reflect one particular reality however. Just as the police were at times beating protesters in a rather desperate attempt to maintain the (corporate) ideology which the World Bank / IMF represents, so were the various official news media in Washington trying to bombard the average news-watcher with a specific agenda. I believe they were ultimately more successful.
The news media proved itself quite able to disarm the power of the protest.
No issues were raised. There was little talk of why the protesters were angry, except for a few anti-capitalist soundbites. These brief rants would succeed in raising warning flags among most of the newscast’s audience, who to a great extent have been socialized to fear all forms of social conscience as communistic. There were of course many adamant anti-capitalists among the crowds, but most protesters were merely calling for limits to the excesses of rampant and unregulated capitalistic enterprise. It was these voices of moderation which were silenced by the media authorities. Instead the protest was presented as being a group of extremists who desire civil disobedience largely for its own sake. Perhaps this process was most aptly symbolized by the focus upon the anarchists, who to my eyes numbered only a few dozen among the estimated ten thousand protesters. It was they who were given the most airtime during the early “set-up” days of the protest. I can only assume that their extreme beliefs would have immediately signalled to the television audience the dangers of the protest movement. Certainly this was felt by the staff at the hotel in which we were staying, who were otherwise unaware of the goals of either the protesters or the World Bank / IMF.

Byzantine Defensive Structure: A Brief analysis of the Origins of Defence-in-depth

One could successfully argue that the cultural heights achieved by the Byzantine Empire, and Constantinople in particular, were attained in large part because of the relative peace and security that it experienced for nearly a thousand years. Certainly the Empire had to contend with a great many threats, yet only infrequently was the “heartland” centre directly assaulted. Constantinople itself proved unconquerable until it lost the battle of Manzikert in the eleventh century. The Byzantines faced numerous enemy powers on several fronts and were frequently defeated, yet throughout its history the Empire could repeatedly be defined with an overused maxim: Byzantium lost the battle but won the war. The most important factor in determining the ultimate survival of the Empire was the organization and professionalism of its military system. Living up to their stereotypical depiction as bureaucrats, it was through an administrative re-organization of the Empire that Byzantium could effectively counter and contain aggressive foreign powers. Both civil and military administration were overhauled to adopt a defensive strategy which protected the centre of the Empire while to an extent consciously sacrificing the periphery. This strategy emerged from studying the reality of frontier warfare faced by Byzantium. Above all else, the Byzantines were most adept at studying the tactics, units, and strengths and weaknesses of their enemies. A great deal of literature concerning a variety of military endeavours exists, much of it reflecting on the ancient tactics known to Byzantine scholars. Probably the more significant of these are the Strategikon – attributed to the sixth-century emperor Maurice, but more likely written by an unknown field commander under his command – the Taktika, a manual written in the eleventh century by the emperor Leo VI, and an anonymously written pamphlet frequently translated as On Skirmishing Warfare. Each of these texts describes one primary tactical consideration, namely to avoid conflict whenever possible. As the history of Byzantine warfare was to demonstrate, this was sound advice. The Byzantine army was frequently in a position in which it had to defend itself against superior enemy troop strength, not only at the strategic level but also in terms of individual battles. I will be examining the rise of the Byzantine defensive structure during the sixth and seventh centuries until the Empire was compromised by its defeat at the battle of Manzikert, which signalled then end of its supremacy in the East.

The Byzantine Empire had of course emerged from the Roman Empire, and therefore had inherited Roman military and administrative practice. Many of the threats faced by Byzantium were problems that likewise had menaced Rome, and Byzantine emperors and generals were to benefit from solutions initiated by their predecessors. Most crucial were developments in the armed forces. A new type of opponent had emerged in the middle of the first millennium with the insurgence of barbarian forces such as the Huns and the Scythians into the Roman Empire. These barbarian hordes represented a germinal type of shock warfare which could not be effectively countered by the traditional military system based on the legions. Rome’s new enemies were for the most part cavalry units which quickly struck vulnerable sections of the empire and withdrew with their plunder. To counter the damage caused by such raids, the Roman army was restructured to place more emphasis on smaller cavalry units which were obviously more mobile than the larger and much less flexible infantry-based legions. These mounted soldiers could be mobilized much more rapidly than the old legion and proved much more adept at defending the vast borders of the empire. Furthermore a smaller number of cavalry could adequately defend the frontier, which had previously required extensive garrisoning. Of course, the decline of Rome occurred despite these advances in the military, although a great many other factors were involved which lie beyond the focus of this essay. As delineated in the Strategikon, Byzantium incorporated cavalry into its military structure, yet further improved on the Roman system by outfitting two main divisions of mounted unit or cataphract, one equipped with lance or spear and the other with bow and arrow. Initially, bows were used as cavalry support, replacing the much less flexible small-unit catapults and ballistae used by the Romans. Mounted archers were adopted from the warriors of the Steppes – primarily the Huns – and proved very effective at defeating even the largest of infantry-based enemy armies. Cavalry units equipped with lance or spear were used as shock troops to break enemy lines, and also as close-quarter support for mounted and infantry archers.

The Byzantines had also learned a great deal from Roman strategic advances which precipitated from Roman frontier defence. The role of the army changed from being an instrument of aggressive imperialism to a more defensive posture. Much like the late Roman Empire, Byzantium simply did not have the human or material resources to effectively expand its borders. Nor, in fact, did it have the desire to do so. The territories held by Byzantium in the centuries leading up to the Moslem invasions of the early seventh century were in a sense believed to be possessed by the Emperor in accordance with the divine will to form a perfect correlative temporal kingdom to that in heaven. The concept of a divine empire was mirrored in the body of the emperor himself. Using a rather crude but obvious metaphor, the Byzantines believed that just as the physical body of the emperor could not be divided, neither could the lands of the Empire be fractured without disintegrating the entire state. Such an ideological stance was to prove problematic when the Western half of the old Roman empire proclaimed its independence with the crowning of Charlemagne in the ninth century. This was viewed as a heretical act, as the Byzantines believed that God had ordained only one emperor to justly rule on earth. Yet the Empire had to accept that its ‘natural’ borders were eastern, as it would have been impossible to stage any major offensive in the west. Byzantium did regain Venitia and the Dalmatian Coast as recompense for acknowledging the Western emperor diplomatically with the Pax Nicephori. The reconquests of lost land in the east, however – as carried out by the emperors Bardas in the ninth century, and Nicephorus II in the mid-tenth century, among others – was consequently believed to be a restoration of the divine will, not the potential for new beginnings which conquest usually anticipates. Of course such a belief remained largely abstract; the citizen majority were frequently opposed to the mobilization of the armies for the purpose of conquest, primarily because any offensive had to be financed by means of higher taxes. A further complication was that the ‘natural’ boundaries of the Empire were rather indefinite. Some territories which were believed to be Byzantine possessions were in fact outside of the Byzantine administrative system; Venice is a prime example of such a relationship, as it was independently governed, yet was allied with Constantinople. Border states, some of which were ostensibly outside the ‘natural’ empire, had begun to be colonised by native Byzantines by the ninth century. These settlers then proceeded to absorb the local population into the regular Byzantine citizenry, wherein Christianity proved itself to be an invaluable tool. In retrospect, this process succeeded in expanding the ‘native’ lands of the Empire. Other territories were jointly shared with foreign powers, such as Crete which was portioned between the Empire and the Caliphate. Still other lands were held in possession in largely diplomatic terms as tributary states or free alliances. Many of these diplomatically-held territories were used as buffer states against hostile foreign powers, and were therefore almost as important for the Empire’s well-being as the ‘naturally’ held ones. After the Bulgars had been pacified and an alliance secured with a diplomatic marriage, Bulgaria was used as a buffer state to keep both the Russians and the Magyars at bay. There are even a few instances of Byzantium entering into alliances with neutral foreign powers with the provision that the latter wage war with the enemies of the Empire. While such alliances did not expand the physical zone of control possessed by the Byzantines, they did establish a wider area of influence which just as ably checked aggressive foreign powers. A final means of securing the loyalty of foreign populations was to convert them to orthodox Christianity. Subsequently, they would be valuable allies against ‘heretical’ peoples such as the Turks and the Arabs. Following these considerations, the Empire was arguably defined much more by its sphere of influence than its physical possessions. Furthermore, history was to prove the fluidity of these boundaries, as they were never to remain static for any length of time. Yet the Byzantines retained their concept of a divinely ordered earthly empire, and sought to defend what must be referred to in retrospect as its most frequently held territories.

As theoretically sound as this principle was, it did not survive the Islamic raids of the seventh century. As the Moslem invasions were to show, the Byzantine army was simply not capable of providing a static system of defence against border raiders. The vast size of the empire was its greatest weakness, as many of its provinces were far too distant from Constantinople to be effectively defended. Most of the territories held by Byzantium were those most easily defensible from the capital. However, several themes such as Egypt and Palestine were of immense economic importance, and therefore justified the additional effort required to retain them. Such wealthy lands were of course as highly valued by Byzantium’s enemies, and many did not remain in the Empire’s possession after the Islamic invasions. Quite simply, the distances involved where much too great for a single, centralized army to adequately defend. The troops at Constantinople, which were the most trained and best provisioned, would have taken months to mobilize and reach any frontier conflict. The great distance to the capital was also problematic in terms of slow communications and supply trains, which adversely affected tactical decision making along the frontiers. Despite the presence of garrisons along the frontier, any substantial enemy army would quickly overwhelm and occupy border provinces before the main Byzantine force could arrive from the capital. Local ability for resistence was virtually non-existent as civilians had since the early Roman empire been prohibited from owning weapons, a precaution against rebellion. Consistent throughout the period here studied, Byzantine strategic ideology centred upon defence of the capital and its immediately neighbouring territories. Therefore, the emperor would not deploy the main army along the frontier to strengthen the garrisons as this would weaken the capital defensively. With no standing force to protect it, the vital centre of the Empire would consequently be overrun should the army fail to repulse an invasion. In the early seventh century, this possibility very nearly became manifest, as Persian forces surged into Byzantine territory, capturing cities throughout Mesopotamia, Syria, and Armenia; they had in fact raided as far as the Bosporus.

In this context the emperor Heraclius was to prove himself extremely virtuosic in countering both the immediate threat of the Persians and the long-term defence of the Empire. It was largely through an administrative restructuring during his reign and continued by his successors Constans II and Constantine IV that Byzantium was able to counter threats against its territory. The various territories of the Empire were divided into smaller, more geographically cohesive regions called themes. Initially there were fourteen themes, but they were expanded in number to twenty-one in the ninth century in order to increase their defendability by further delineating them to specific geographies. Critical frontier regions, such as mountain passes and choke points for enemy movements, were themselves made into small themes called clissurae and were under the command of a clissurarch. These clissurae maintained their entire force at a high level of readiness; consequently, the troops stationed in the clissurae needed to be periodically rotated to less exhausting tours of duty in other themes. Neither the themes nor the clissurae succeeded in completely stopping invasions, yet they did stop invaders from reaching the inner provinces of the empire, which were of course much more important from the Imperial perspective. The administrative system of the themes was tied to its military system. Each theme had an armed force containing three thousand to seventy-two hundred soldiers, depending on the strategic importance of the theme. Obviously, the themes which were most frequently under threat of invasion were provided with the most troops. The various Anatolic and Armeniac themes – which bordered the Moslem territories – had more troops than most of the lesser themes combined; the Anatolic theme was itself the largest and most prodigious, as it was the corridor for the majority of Arab invading parties. Thrace, wherein Constantinople was situated, was of course almost as significant, but it was defended primarily by the tagmata, and not the theme troops. These three themes constituted the bulk of the empire in terms of military significance: of the estimated eighty thousand soldiers in the Byzantine army in the late eighth century, only five thousand were situated elsewhere in the empire. One mush also not ignore the agricultural significance of these themes, in terms of both economic importance to the empire – Thrace had become the granary to the empire after the loss of Egypt – and population density, as they provided the bulk of the soldiers for the army. The Byzantines liked to vary the strength of their armed forces periodically to confuse enemy intelligence. Themes were the highest division of unit, followed by various numbers of turmae, which were themselves composed of numerous bandae comprising three- to four-hundred soldiers. In this way themes might be formed with the same number of divisions but contain fewer or greater troops. Even after the creation of the themes, troop strength along the frontier did not improve drastically, yet such was not the principle behind the restructuring process. Yet, save for a few minor locations, the Empire was much more secure by the ninth century than it had been since Roman times. Of course, it was helped by the civil unrest of the Arab empire, which did weaken the Moslems to the extent that no great invading force could be assembled. In any case, an excessively large army was not only very expensive and hard to co-ordinate and supply along the frontier, but it was rarely required as a defensive force. On Skirmishing Warfare states that a cavalry unit of three thousand would prove quite capable of defeating most Arab raiding parties. The themes therefore proved more than adequate at countering the incessant raids by small bands of mounted soldiers that plagued the borders of the Empire. Primarily, they were much more flexible and responsive to threats and could adapt more quickly to changing situations along the frontier. A strategos could effectively mobilize two to four turmae each of cavalry and infantry within minutes of receiving news of an invading force.

Of course, such a strategy requires an extensive reconnaissance network. An sizeable spy network had been in place since the early Roman republic, and the Byzantine system refined and expanded on its inheritance. Merchants had long been used as they could most easily and inconspicuously infiltrate enemy cities and courts. More professional agents were also used and found emplacement primarily in foreign courts as emissaries, courtesans, or servants. Important foreign officials and other ‘connected’ individuals were bribed in exchange for intelligence reports. A counter-intelligence unit was also created, the most important of which was located along the Arab border specifically to prevent the incursion of spies from the Moslem territories. These akritai served as spies themselves, although in a much less subdued fashion than their courtesan and merchant counterparts. Frequently, they raided into enemy territory to spy on or harass enemy troops to gather information, and also abducted and imprisoned enemy civilians and military personnel in order to extract information. These units proved especially vigilant in their border patrols, as they arrested any individual who did not have a permit allowing his presence.

Intelligence reports were not only scrutinized by the strategos commanding the theme adjacent to the enemy lands in which his spies were stationed, but were relayed to the other strategoi and to the central bureaucracy in Constantinople using two means. Byzantium still operated the old Roman messaging system, the cursus publicus, which consisted of a messenger corps, a series of posts where messengers could exchange their horses when they tired, and a system of roads to allow quick travel. For more important information which required to be much more hastily delivered, a system of beacon fires was created and refined during the reign of Theophilus. These beacon stations extended from the frontiers in Asia Minor to the high terrace overlooking the imperial palace. Information about any event which threatened the frontier would consequently reach the capital within an hour or so. In terms of tactical intelligence, every theme had a small scouting corps used to report enemy troop movements and formations. As the Strategikon states, such intelligence is of vital tactical importance: “before the battle and until it is over, [spies] should keep both the enemy and their own units under observation to prevent any attack from ambush or any other hostile trick”. Furthermore, “every effort should be made by continuously sending out keen-sighted scouts at appropriate intervals, by spies and patrols, to obtain information about the enemy’s movements, their strength and organization, and thus be in a position to prevent being surprised by them”. Byzantine strategists knew well that espionage worked just as easily against them, and used counter-intelligence tactics to confuse their enemies. Those soldiers who were positioned at scouting and beacon fire posts were relieved periodically to avoid betrayal. On the tactical level, the Strategikon gives further advice:

If an enemy spy is captured while observing our forces, then it may be
well to release him unharmed if all our forces are strong and in good
shape. The enemy will be absolutely dismayed by such reports. On the
other hand, if our forces are weak, the spy should be treated roughly,
forced to divulge enemy secrets, and finally either be put to death or
sent off somewhere under guard.

A primary consequence precipitating from the great distances between Constantinople and the borderlands was increased internal disunity, as loyalties to the Emperor were much more problematic. This was frequently to prove costly, most significantly during the early Moslem invasions. To pacify newly re-conquered or diplomatically assimilated populations, the Imperial government often re-settled them to other parts of the Empire, and simultaneously re-colonized the area with native Byzantines. Alien nobility were absorbed into the Byzantine administrative and military bureaucracy, and were given titles, land grants, and command duties, although most often they were forced to convert to Christianity in order to qualify. This process usually worked to placate important foreigners and suppress any insurrectionary tendencies with which they might sympathize. There were a few notable instances in which this process of imposing patriotism upon assimilated peoples rebounded against the Empire. During the eighth century, Byzantium had relied primarily on friendly, non-Islamic Arab tribes along the border of the Islamic territories to signal an upcoming invasion, as well as to fight beside the Byzantine troops. In return, these tribes gained trading privileges and protection from conversion and assimilation into Islam. Yet, the Byzantines had pushed this relationship too far by imposing the high taxes usually relegated to conquered territories, and consequently these friendly Arab tribes withdrew their support for the Empire. Arguably, it was this fact which led to the loss of Mesopotamia and Palestine to the Islamic conquers. In the early ninth century, another group of Arabs who were hostile toward the Caliphate was assimilated into the Byzantine Army. The Arabs were understandably enraged by this action, and sent an army of fifty-thousand into Byzantine territory, capturing Ankara and Amorium, the latter of which had become by this time the second most important city in the Empire. More devastating was the rebellion by the Pechenegs, a people located in the Balkans. In order to deal with the considerable threat they suddenly posed to the Empire, the emperor Constantine Monomachus relocated theme troops in Armenia to the Balkans. This allowed the Seljuk Turks free access to the entire province, and the subsequent invasion was to lead to the battle of Manzikert, which was to signal the effective end of the Empire as a superpower. A further consideration was the allowance given to foreign merchants and traders, who were authorized to establish their own cultural centres – primarily at Constantinople, which had large Islamic and Italian (Venetian) communities. In this manner hostilities were diminished along the borderlands, as foreigners gradually became Hellenised, Christianized, and acclimatized to life in the Empire. Of course, many kept their traditional cultures, yet only rarely did this sense of cultural identity become nationalistic to the extent of open rebellion.

While administrative efficiency was helped by appointing the strategos of the army as governor for the theme, this had the same potential to create rogue armies did as the older Roman provincial system. Rome itself had solved this problem by separating military and civil jurisdiction. The theme strategoi were of course reiterations of the old Republican governors, and Roman history provides sufficient evidence to warrant concern about the unification of military and civil authority in one individual. Consequently, from the reign of Heraclius the strategoi were personally chosen by the Emperor to ensure their loyalty. Similarly, a bureaucratic system was established to supervise the payment of wages to the armies, which until the reign of Heraclius had been sporadic and consequently subverted troop morale and loyalty. Importantly, this salary was paid by the Imperial bureaucracy in the capital and not through the theme bureaucracy; this was done to ensure troop loyalty to the Emperor and not to the local strategos. Soldiers in the themes were given land grants upon entering service, and these lands became hereditary possessions. The eldest male child would inherit both his father’s land and his contract to military service. Leo’s Taktika stressed the symbiotic relationship between the farming class and the soldiery; each depended for its existence upon the other. The Empire could not afford to hire mercenaries except in the interim -- and anyhow mercenary troops often proved dangerously unreliable – and its urban population proved to be useless militarily. Therefore the rural peasantry proved itself to be the backbone of the Empire’s defensive system. In this manner a continual supply of troops was ensured. One could surmise that troop casualties were quickly replaced as the sons of dead soldiers sought not only their inheritance, but vengeance for their fathers’ deaths as well. While this would certainly not ensure long-term troop loyalty, it would provide the army with a continual supply of young recruits eager to engage enemy forces. The most obvious flaw in this land-grant system was that it could be exploited by strategoi who had the desire to do so. Unlike the tagmata who were better paid and received the rich agricultural lands around Constantinople, the theme soldiers became increasingly dependent on their strategoi to support them. As soldiers had to pay for their own equipment and horses, many gradually went into debt to their strategos and were forced to forfeit part if not all of their land claims. In combination with the lands given to the strategoi for successful commands, by the late tenth and early eleventh centuries a new class of military aristocracy had emerged. If they so desired – and often they did, especially in the eleventh century – they could raise a private army under the guise of theme units to enforce their own political agendas. This would ultimately lead to a great deal of rebellion and civil war, which obviously weakened the Empire. By the middle of the eleventh century, the military and financial resources of the Empire had to a great extent been exhausted because of factional fighting between the civil aristocracy centred upon Constantinople, and the rural military aristocracy. This weakness greatly contributed to the success of the Turkish invasions before the battle of Manzikert. For the period being studied here, however, they were not a great factor in undermining the defensive position of the Empire until this later instance.

From these considerations emerged the overall strategy for the defence of the Empire, which has been termed “defence-in-depth” by modern historians. In brief, this strategic system allowed raiders access to frontier territories, yet did not permit penetration into the more valuable heartland of the Empire. Upon crossing the border, Arab armies would be shadowed by units of Byzantine cavalry and harassed as they broke up to raid the countryside. Any usable provisions outside of the city walls would have been destroyed, therefore leaving the raiders isolated and unprovisioned. The main theme force would then surround and destroy the weary invaders. This cat-and-mouse tracking stratagem was effective in isolating and destroying small splinter groups of the main force and ultimately reducing its strength without directly engaging the main army. It is hardly surprising that ambushes were most frequently used in these encounters, and indeed the Strategikon had advised just such a tactic: “Well-planned ambushes are of the greatest value in warfare. In various ways they have in a short time destroyed great powers before they had a chance to bring their whole battle line into action”. Cunning strategoi also used kidnappings, assassinations, and misinformation to sow dissension and lower morale among enemy lines. The theme as a whole – as well as any neighbouring themes who could be mobilized without compromising the security of their own territories – would then confront the newly reduced invading host, and on territory advantageous to the Byzantines and after the strategos had adequately prepared his forces. When the theme did encounter enemy troops, their tactics centred upon quick shock operations, with the lance-equipped cataphracts charging the enemy with support from the mounted archers, who would attempt to outflank the enemy lines. Should the strategos encounter an opposing army obviously superior to his own and a threat to the centre of the Empire, the Emperor would mobilize the tagmata, which would have gained time to reach the front by the delay tactics inherent in the defence-in-depth stratagem.

Of further importance to the theme system was the Byzantine navy, which until the tenth century had no equal in the eastern Mediterranean. Certainly there were other powers before the tenth century, such as the Arabs who, after the seventh century conquests were able to deploy a navy, yet they remained relatively minor in comparison to the almost overwhelming superiority of the Byzantine naval forces. Coastal and island themes had their own naval units under command of the strategos; additionally there was a central navy which operated out of Constantinople much like the tagmata, but obviously had a much larger effective field of operations. The navy served to patrol the waters around the themes, and quite successfully kept enemy raiders and invaders from landing in Byzantine territories. Most importantly however, as long as the navy retained control of the eastern Mediterranean, Constantinople could withstand any siege. Obviously this was an extreme circumstance, as any siege of the capital would be politically disastrous to an emperor. Yet on occasion, it did in fact occur. Byzantine strategy was also aided by the relative disorganization of its enemies. Beyond the early conquests, the Arabs did not seem to desire any more territory, and consequently did not organize any invading force larger than simple raiding parties. Furthermore, by the late ninth and early tenth centuries, the Abbasid Caliphate was on the verge of collapse and was simply not interested in invading the empire. It was during this period that Byzantium in fact took the offensive, particularly under the emperor Nicephorus II. Of course, Byzantium’s enemies were just as quick to capitalize on occasional weaknesses within the Empire as well. Not every emperor fully supported the military. Some emperors viewed the military as an relatively unjustified drain on imperial finances which could better be apportioned within Constantinople itself. The emperors Constantine X and Romanos IV were of this ideology; while not openly hostile to military concerns, they simply felt pressure to expend resources elsewhere. Others, such as the empress Irene, were in fact openly hostile toward the military bureaucracy and consciously attempted to weaken it. For the most part, this military-administrative system reduced the threat of invasion, at least for the internal provinces.

While this defensive strategy did ultimately succeed in arresting the invading forces from capturing the centre of the Empire, it did not do so without consequences. Foremost, and perhaps most obvious, was the fact that such a strategic position required the sacrificing of the frontier lands for the containment of invaders. The raiding parties did indeed encroach into Byzantine territories, and they succeeded in plundering much of the local wealth before they were destroyed or were forced to withdraw. Defence-in-depth proved to be a highly expensive strategic ideology, in terms of both territorial destruction and casualties among the local population. Furthermore, it had one prime strategic flaw which was occasionally exploited. The various outposts which acted as garrisons and scouting forts did succeed at performing their task, yet they caused a reliance on maintaining fortified positions. The themes did indeed ultimately retain control of their territory, yet they sacrificed initiative to the raiders. They became a reactionary army, instead of one an enterprising one. What this meant in tactical terms was that they had to rely upon the movements of the enemy to precipitate their own actions. By the tenth century, Byzantine armies rarely ventured out to engage their enemy without first being prompted. Consequently, the themes lost some of their mobility, an element of tactical warfare for which they had been originally created. Larger invading forces began to turn towards the forts, laying siege to them instead of the cities, which resulted in the theme soldiers becoming merely an expanded garrison, instead of the stealthy, mobile attackers which had originally been their purpose. This in turn affected troop morale, which was of vital importance in ancient warfare. Byzantine troops frequently suffered from lower-than-desired morale because of their isolation and dependence on enemy actions to inform the activities of their own units. Many frontier troops threatened to mutiny, and some did cross over into enemy camps. Occasionally, this was due to the lack of provisions caused by besieging enemy forces. Similarly, invaders frequently had a much higher morale because their intended targets were ostensibly ‘easy pickings’. The imbalance in troop morale occasionally led to the desertion Byzantine units, who would abandon their fortified position and withdraw to the more ‘secure’ interior. Such occurred along the Bulgarian frontier, which was abandoned as the Bulgar king Krum was successfully leading his forces into Byzantine territory. Further problematic was the placement of the forts themselves, as they frequently weren’t positioned to support each other. Accordingly, successful raiders – such as the Arabs in the ninth century – were able to capture them one at a time in succession. Ultimately, what the Byzantine dependence on fortified positions to support the defence-in-depth strategy accomplished was a sense of predictability. Invaders could easily observe Byzantine troop movements, as they were confined to specific (and relatively permanent) areas. Raiders would enter into the province and do as much damage as possible before they were contained or were driven from the theme.

Yet Byzantine forces continued to succeed throughout the period here studied. The damage inflicted by invaders would quickly be repaired, defences would be rebuilt, land would be reclaimed, and the local populations – which as mentioned above frequently suffered high casualties – would continue to thrive. Usually the encroached-upon frontier was fully restored by the next campaign season. Likewise, the empire continued to thrive despite continued invasions, which were sometimes almost on an annual basis in certain key invasion corridors. The centre of the Empire was not threatened, except on a few occasions, for the majority of the four hundred year period herein examined. The defence-in-depth strategy succeeded, for example, in protecting the fertile coasts of Asia Minor by sacrificing the relatively barren wastes of the Anatolian plateau along the Arab borderlands. Viewed in the Imperial context, which was of course more interested in securing and legitimizing its authority than it was with the concerns of a distant and economically unimportant province, this was a very small sacrifice indeed.

Bibliography
Primary

Anon. On Skirmishing Warfare. (Need English translation)

Leo VI the Wise. Taktika. (Need English translation)

Maurice. Strategikon. Trans. George T. Dennis. Philadelpia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1984.

Secondary

Browning, Robert. The Byzantine Empire. Washington: The Catholic University of
America Press, 1992.

Dupuy, Ernest and Trevor N. Dupuy. The Encyclopedia of Military History. New York: Harper
& Row, 1977.

Dvornik, Francis. The Origins of Intelligence Services. New Jersey: Rutgers University
Press, 1974.

Kaegi, Walter. Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992.

Kazhdan, A.P. and Ann Wharton Epstein. Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and
Twelfth Centuries. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

Nicol, Donald M. Byzantium and Venice: a study in diplomatic and cultural relations.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988

Norwich, John Julius. Byzantium: The Apogee. London: Viking, 1991.

Treadgold, Warren. The Byzantine Revival 780-842. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1988.

Whittow, Mark. The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025. Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1996.

The Brothers Karamazov

First Impressions...

Guilt

The eternal damnation of the soul. I guess I am expecting one of the brothers to suffer in a more or less conventional manner for the patricide. This will not be an entirely pleasurable reading experience, because I will be much too aware of my own guilt through the pleasure of voyeurism. I do expect the courtroom sequence to demonstrate that we all suffer by one person’s guilt; likewise do we share that person’s culpability. Dostoevsky is probably aware of this fact, as he pursues the societal construction of individual guilt through the exploration of the Karamazov family history. Whomever happens to be the murderer will not be solely responsible. For the individual act of participating in that particular event of killing he will surely act alone. Yet the conscience – the psychology – of reaching such a brutal conclusion involves the entire family and extends to the entire human race. The fact that seemingly normal individuals have the same latent bloodlust as any criminal is proven by attendance at executions, such as the autos-da-fé. Father Zosima elucidated possible reasons for society’s wish to quickly exterminate the guilty. Criminals are continual reminders of our own (arrested) barbarity. The “fires of hell” such as Inquisitorial burnings allow humanity to forget our collective guilty conscience through sheer spectacle. Dostoevsky seems to imply that some ashes of guilt do remain upon humanity however. It is simple: the fires of hell represent “the suffering of one who can no longer love”. He implies that akin to Jesus we as a civilization must love our enemies instead of burning them and submerging the ashes under our collective conscience.

Who is to be Guilty?

The individual Karamazovs have been moulded by their family history to reject society at the same time they apparently embrace it: Ivan hides behind his reason, compartmentalizing and justifying the world and his remoteness from it; Dmitri uses both love and violence in a process of self-ostracization which could eventually lead to his sharing of the contempt felt for the elder Karamazov by most people in the novel; Alyosha’s mysticism (asceticism) is perhaps the most conscious withdrawal from society; and Smerdyakov’s existence – or rather non-existence – as the bastard Karamozov is perhaps the most obvious instance of banishment in the text. It is not just for narrative reasons that Dostoevsky remains ambiguous concerning the guilty party through the opening sections of his text. He wishes to promote the fact that we are all capable of murder given extreme circumstances.

Impressed...

The notion of absolutes and universals has not been removed from the popular conscience despite the best efforts of many prolific post-modern thinkers. Contrary to Nietzsche, for the vast majority of people God is not in fact dead, in either the literal or abstract interpretation of that statement. Old universals have simply been replaced by newer ones promulgating their ideological liberalism while simultaneously rejecting the validity of “lesser” works. What has been more broadly accepted, however, has been the idea of allowing a more or less equal space to all viewpoints and means of expression. Technology is of primary influence on the creation of such a liberal society, as it has provided a means by which various ideologies can be expressed. Modern intellectual expression has to some extent become more exclusionary as a consequence; either one “gets it” or not. In several respects, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is conversely very much a self-contained text in terms of its ideological debate. In particular, the author seems to be positing the redemptive theology of Father Zosima against the ideology of the absurd espoused by Ivan Karamazov. Indeed, there are overtones of Platonic dialogue within these sequences of philosophical exposition. There are of course two viewpoints presented – a Pro and a Contra as explicitly laid out in Book V – yet there can be no arguing that the author himself wishes to present his particular doctrine, wherein he aligns himself with Zosima, as being a universal truth. Primarily, I will be focussing upon Ivan’s ideological position, with reference to Zosima’s much more optimistic and redemptive theology.

Certainly there is little room for the application of late-twentieth century ideological liberalism to Dostoevsky’s writing, although Ivan’s nihilistic ideology does seem to suggest a more modern and existential school of thought. There is of course no doubting Dostoevsky’s religious opinions; his theology is both piously and devoutly expressed in many of his works. Yet, while he does not in fact question the ultimate absolute of God, he does imply other universals to be rather arbitrary. Most obvious is his treatment of guilt and justice in the novel. There is no simple explanation of individual culpability; no character is condemned outright. This belief is shared by both Ivan and Father Zosima. Dostoevsky seemed to want to focus upon the psychological and sociological aspects of criminal behaviour, and this is expressed throughout his works. As a consequence, he implies that justice itself is not a universal in terms simple cause and effect dispensation, in other words that crime x should receive punishment y. Throughout The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky undermines such a simplistic notion of earthly justice, and instead submits his characters to a more absolute jurisprudence. Ultimately for the author, and as Father Zosima states, justice must emerge from a personal communication with the divine.

From the very start of the novel, Dostoevsky suggests a very modern concept of guilt and justice by subverting its conventions. In one particular respect, his opinions concerning judiciary practise are in fact even more enlightened than those which currently exist in most of the industrialized world. If one is to interpret the entirety of his writing with respect to Dostoevsky’s theology, it becomes readily clear that his beliefs concerning justice do in fact originate in terms of guilt before the divine, although there is no practical or ideological reason that it should remain within a theological realm; a secular practise can be instructed by religious belief. In terms of theological origination, all of mankind shares in the guilt from the original fall from grace; the flesh must be transcended before innocence is regained. One cannot therefore simplistically denounce others for their crimes while supposing themselves to be above any such abhorrent behaviour. As Father Zosima states, “you cannot be anyone’s judge. No man on earth can judge a criminal until he understands that he himself is just as guilty as the man standing before him and that he may be responsible than anyone else for the crime” (p. 388). Zosima teaches that one must act like Christ, accepting the guilt of others onto one’s own conscience (or soul, in wholly religious phrasing). Every individual is guilty if they do not provide an example of virtue to those for whom it is required. As a further extension, one must rejoice in the righteousness of others, for in this manner one can avoid being burdened by one’s own guilty conscience. Moreover, others must not be weighted down by one’s own guilt. Within this context Zosima’s behaviour towards Dmitri early in the text can be understood. Interpreted in terms of Zosima’s prophetic nature – evidenced by his oracular relationship with Alyosha – his supplication in front of Dmitri is arguably a plea for forgiveness for his upcoming false conviction, as Zosima would acknowledge that Dmitri’s trial is only an earthly one and therefore not the true justice of God’s mercy. In many ways, Zosima acts as prognosticator to many of the other characters in the text as well. It becomes painfully clear by the end of the text that Zosima’s statements are reflected in Ivan’s constitution; ostensibly Dostoevsky is presenting Ivan’s tragedy as an example of the correctness of Zosima’s theology. Ivan’s suicide is resultant from the absurdity he sees in the world. As he states in book V, he will not choose to exist in a society which condones the suffering of the innocent to justify salvation for the rest. Yet Ivan counters himself when he states that he cannot love those people whom he actually encounters; they are no longer the innocents that he believed them to be, and conversely he feels a deep sense of revulsion towards them. Consequently, he believes that love can not truly exist in the world, and that the notion of ultimate love as professed by Zosima to be an impossibility: “Christ’s love for human beings was an impossible miracle on earth” (p. 284). Love for Ivan is a purely theoretical concept, a pure abstraction with no material plausibility. Hatred seems to be directed towards beggars and other unfortunates in particular, perhaps because they are physical manifestations of Zosima’s theology – in other words, following Zosima, one must give aid to beggars precisely because one is not a beggar. Ivan’s beliefs seem to be very much related to his father’s self-absorption and lack of sympathy for others; he has internalized these beliefs almost as much as his brother Smerdyakov. One particular instance later in the novel suggests that Ivan does in fact feel some sense of social indebtedness towards others. With the sequence in which Ivan picks up the drunk peasant and finds shelter for him, Dostoevsky seems to suggest that despite his character’s coldheartedness, even Ivan has a basic sense of human decency that cannot be disregarded.

In thoroughly secular terms, mitigating circumstances must be considered for a society to dispense proper justice. In The Brothers Karamazov, the primary mitigating circumstance is of course the elder Karamazov himself. Throughout the text, he is portrayed as a brute and uncaring man, almost beastly in his pursuit of self-gratification. In essence, it is his relationship with his sons which creates a situation in which any of them could be driven to murder their father. Ivan proves himself strangely prophetic when in detailing the story of a murderer who had been brutally raised by his parents. Certainly the actual act in broad terms is itself not completely foreign to anybody, although for the vast majority of people it is an impulse left repressed for the course of their lives. This impetus does find a means of expression however, although this form of bloodlust is vicarious in nature. Until the evolution of modern visual media, tendencies for the vicarious expression of violence did in fact involve the real suffering of others, either through violent sporting events such as hunts and staged combat, or through officially bureaucratic public executions, such as the autos-da-fé described in the Grand Inquisitor chapter of the novel. This section also elucidates the notion of why society desires the eradication of its criminal elements. They are continual reminders of the arrested barbarity of every individual; their execution or imprisonment is an attempt to cleanse the collective conscience of a community. As Zosima states in book VI, the fires of hell are simple allegory, a spectacle which allows humanity to forget its collective guilt. A society will destroy its criminal elements, but will not arrest the ultimate cause of criminal behaviour. For Zosima this is a simple instance of lack of true faith, of ignoring genuine religious practise as it requires too much of a sacrifice to forgive criminals for their behaviour.

To Ivan however, justice is merely an expression of humanity’s latent barbarousness. Public executions are merely a communal forum in which the desire to witness another’s suffering is officially sanctioned. It matters not whether those sentenced are in fact innocent or guilty, as the punishment is both the trial and the conviction. Neither does it matter whether the punishment will arrest any future criminal activity, as it serves its immediate purpose to appease the bloodlust of the masses. It is for this reason that Ivan rejects any concept of the righteous salvation of the damned. The contempt that he feels toward the religious who believe they have attained this state of grace is fairly explicit when he describes the execution of a vicious murderer:

And the next thing, brother Richard, covered with the kisses of
all his brothers and sisters, was dragged up onto the scaffold, placed
under the knife of the guillotine, had his head chopped off in the
most brotherly fashion, and gained eternal bliss.
(p. 289)

For Ivan, the idea of a murderer finding salvation through an execution is akin to redemption of society through the torture of a child. Just as the chaplains at the execution reach a state of religious fervour, so does the torturer enter a state of bliss while he is performing his violence upon another. Each is identical in that the suffering of another becomes a source of pleasure and self-gratification. Throughout his philosophizing, Ivan demonstrates his agreement with the Marquis De Sade in stating that all instances of love are in fact various forms of dependency. It is a simple binary: lovers need those who requite their love, just as torturers need the object of their ferocity. Indeed, it becomes an essential element of an individual’s identity, and Ivan seems almost humourously to suggest that through the internalization of brutality, Russians have created their national identity: “To us, nailing people by their ears is unthinkable because, despite everything, we are Europeans. But birch and lash, they’re different – they’re something that’s really ours and cannot be taken away from us” (p. 287). Man has a very refined sense of cruelty, and the act of torture becomes art in and of itself. There is no real other motive than sheer pleasure in witnessing and inflicting suffering upon others. It is within this context that Ivan views any sense of religious love as wicked, for the religious need (and love) the sinful because it is through them that good and evil are defined. He vehemently rejects such a existence: “I’d rather not know about their damn good and evil than pay such a terrible price for it. I feel that all universal knowledge is not worth that child’s tears when she was begging ‘gentle Jesus’ to help her” (p. 291). His arguments do not demonstrate any confidence that there is a solution to the tragic fate of humanity, and consequently his nihilistic mentality and belief in the ultimate absurdity of all existence lead to his suicide. Humanity will ultimately destroy itself in an orgy of violent self-gratification; it will voraciously consume itself and enjoy the taste.

Ivan’s entire discourse to Alyosha is very much an example of this process, as he quite explicitly delights in the rather disgusted reactions which he stimulates in his brother. Not only does he revel in the barbaric details of his lecture, at times he seems to internalize them himself and act out the part. In describing the “justice” of a general who kills a child for a relatively minor misdemeanour, he begins to shout at Alyosha much like the general himself might have: “Perhaps he ought to have been shot, to satisfy the moral indignation that such an act arouses in us? Well, speak up, my boy, go on!” (p. 292). The frequent use of children in his examples is of course demonstrative of Ivan’s extremism. Were he to rely on more median examples of earthly suffering – as more commonly exists in the world – his arguments would lose some of their merit. Of course, one must forgive suicides for their extremism, as such is their nature. His rebellion against the traditional doctrines of Christianity is not entirely complete, however, as even he desires a Christ figure for redemption. Only by accepting the suffering caused by existence will anyone find salvation: “I want to see with my own eyes the lamb lie down with the lion and the resurrected victim rise and embrace his murderer” (p. 294). Just as the lion must kill the lamb for that is the lion’s essence and purpose, so must the torturer inflict suffering for that is its purpose. Surely such a tenant is a difficult one for the majority of people to accept. Ivan’s suicide is proof that even he could not believe in such an existence.

Ivan’s philosophical beliefs are very important in order to fully understand his character. That this section of the novel is just as equally detailed as a later book which presents Zosima’s complex theology suggests that Dostoevsky wanted the reader to compare the two. It is a somewhat subtle manner in which an opinion can be conveyed to the reader. Dostoevsky does in fact intend his audience to be more convinced by Zosima’s devout theology than Ivan’s proto-existentialism. Yet each is allowed a voice; the reader naturally becomes an advocate for one or the other. Certainly there is some truth in Ivan’s ideological stance, although the fact that there he has no hope or sense of purpose draws one away from his nihilism. By the end of the novel, it is quite obvious that Dostoevsky has presented an ideology which cannot function, for it is far too destructive for those who practise it.

Bibliography

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamavoz. Trans. Andrew H. MacAndrew. Toronto:
Bantam Books, 1981.