b2o: boundary 2 online

Month: March 2014

(re)Introducing Nergis Erturk, b2er

Professor Nergis Erturk of Penn State (nue5@psu.edu) has joined the editorial collective of boundary 2. Professor Erturk will develop articles, reviews, and special issues in her areas of interest, namely, (post)colonial histories and theories of language and writing practices; Marxism, communism, and translation (including questions concerning Soviet Orientalisms, language politics of the Comintern, and literary communism); critical regionalism in west and central Asia; Turkey and contemporary cultures of resistance. With Özge Serin (Columbia, Anthropology), Nergis is currently editing a special issue on “Marxism, Communism, and Translation.”

March 24, 2014
The Digital Turn

David Golumbia and The b2 Review look to digital culture

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I am pleased and honored to have been asked by the editors of boundary 2 to inaugurate a new section on digital culture for The b2 Review.

The editors asked me to write a couple of sentences for the print journal to indicate the direction the new section will take, which I’ve included here:

In the new section of the b2 Review, we’ll be bringing the same level of critical intelligence and insight—and some of the same voices—to the study of digital culture that boundary 2 has long brought to other areas of literary and cultural studies. Our main focus will be on scholarly books about digital technology and culture, but we will also branch out to articles, legal proceedings, videos, social media, digital humanities projects, and other emerging digital forms.

While some might think it late in the day for boundary 2 to be joining the game of digital cultural criticism, I take the time lag between the moment at which thoroughgoing digitization became an unavoidable reality (sometime during the 1990s) and the first of the major literary studies journals to dedicate part of itself to digital culture as indicative of a welcome and necessary caution with regard to the breathless enthusiasm of digital utopianism. As humanists our primary intellectual commitment is to the deeply embedded texts, figures, and themes that constitute human culture, and precisely the intensity and thoroughgoing nature of the putative digital revolution must give somebody pause—and if not humanists, who?

Today, the most overt mark of the digital in humanities scholarship goes by the name Digital Humanities, but it remains notable how little interaction there is between the rest of literary studies and that which comes under the DH rubric. That lack of interaction goes in both directions: DH scholars rarely cite or engage directly with the work the rest of us do, and the rest of literary studies rarely cites DH work, especially when DH is taken in its “narrow” or most heavily quantitative form. The enterprises seem, at times, to be entirely at odds, and the rhetoric of the digital enthusiasts who populate DH does little to forestall this impression. Indeed, my own membership in the field of DH has long been a vexed question, despite being one of the first English professors in the country to be hired to a position for which the primary specialization was explicitly indicated as Digital Humanities (at the University of Virginia in 2003), and despite being a humanist whose primary area is “digital studies,” and the inability of scholars “to be” or “not to be” members of a field in which they work is one of the several ways that DH does not resemble other developments in the always-changing world of literary studies.

Earlier this month, along with my colleague Jennifer Rhee, I organized a symposium called Critical Approaches to Digital Humanities sponsored by the MATX PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where Prof. Rhee and I teach in the English Department. One of the conference participants, Fiona Barnett of Duke and HASTAC, prepared a Storify version of the Twitter activity at the symposium that provides some sense of the proceedings. While it followed on the heels and was continuous with panels such as the ‘Dark Side of the Digital Humanities’ at the 2013 MLA Annual Convention, and several at recent American Studies Association Conventions, among others, this was to our knowledge the first standalone DH event that resembled other humanities conferences as they are conducted today. Issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability were primary; cultural representation and its relation to (or lack of relation to) identity politics was of primary concern; close reading of texts both likely and unlikely figured prominently; the presenters were diverse along several different axes. This arose not out of deliberate planning so much as organically from the speakers whose work spoke to the questions we wanted to raise.

I mention the symposium to draw attention to what I think it represents, and what the launching of a digital culture section by boundary 2 also represents: the considered turning of the great ship of humanistic study toward the digital. For too long enthusiasts alone have been able to stake out this territory and claim special and even exclusive insight with regard to the digital, following typical “hacker” or cyberlibertarian assertions about the irrelevance of any work that does not proceed directly out of knowledge of the computer. That such claims could even be taken seriously has, I think, produced a kind of stunned silence on the part of many humanists, because it is both so confrontational and so antithetical to the remit of the literary humanities from comparative philology to the New Criticism to deconstruction, feminism and queer theory. That the core of the literary humanities as represented by so august an institution as boundary 2 should turn its attention there both validates the sense of digital enthusiasts of the medium’s importance, but should also provoke them toward a responsibility toward the project and history of the humanities that, so far, many of them have treated with a disregard that at times might be characterized as cavalier.

-David Golumbia

Browse All Digital Studies Reviews

March 21, 2014
Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Prodigal Political Emerson

by Sarah Blythe
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Much like the other volumes in the series, the chief aim of A Political Companion to Emerson is to challenge the notion that a particular author is much more politically minded than past scholarship has allowed. Ralph Waldo Emerson was no stranger to such censure, even within his own lifetime. The most biting assessment comes from fellow author, Rebecca Harding Davis, who reflected on her interactions with Emerson and his “Atlantic coterie” in her 1904 cultural memoir, Bits of Gossip. She describes the coterie as thinking “they were guiding the real world,” while in fact “they stood quite outside of it, and never would see what it was.”¹ Of Emerson as an individual, she had only this chilly assessment: “He took from each man his drop of stored honey, and after that the man counted for no more to him than any other robbed bee.”² This version of Emerson—the alienated dreamer, or worse, the intellectual vampire—is certainly unfair but not altogether groundless. Some of Emerson’s writings can be off-putting at times, especially when taken out of context. Most famously, in Emerson’s hymn to nonconformity—“Self-Reliance”—the transcendentalist professes such a radical disavowal of social obligations in pursuit of genius that his individualism seemingly transforms into something akin to an unfeeling libertarianism. He first proclaims he will “shun father and mother and wife and brother” when his genius calls, writing on “the lintels of the door-post, Whim,” and in the next breath flippantly disregards his obligation to the poor: “Are they my poor?”³ But to suggest that Emerson is simply coldly rejecting his social obligations or taking an apolitical stance is to willfully misunderstand him.

The primary achievement of A Political Companion to Emerson, then, is in righting this complicated, and oft-skewed version of the famous transcendentalist. As several of the critics in this volume point out, Emerson is posturing here. He aims for shock in his attack on “the thousandfold Relief Societies” that merely conform instead of reform and thus offer relief to no one.⁴ Ever the “reluctant reformer” (as Lawrence Buell terms him in his recent biography), this younger, ³more idealistic Emerson ultimately confirms his commitment to self-reliance even when faced with the pragmatic realities of slavery and other social injustices later in life.⁵ It is only after his death that Emerson became increasingly estranged from these moments of political activism. Defanged of his radical politics and abolitionist stance beginning with Holmes’s and Cabot’s biographies in the 1880s, this depoliticized version of Emerson was perpetuated by critics through the 1980s, who tended to emphasize his passive self-reliant (and apolitical) individualism, as volume editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk highlight in their lengthy introduction (16-17). Within this context, Emerson is a prime candidate for sustained political study, the first of its kind in Emerson studies.

Youthful scholars more familiar with Emerson criticism of the last twenty years will be surprised that he was ever so roughly handled by late-nineteenth- and earlier twentieth century Emerson scholars. It may seem strange to image an author, who wrote so movingly about abolition, de-politicized first by his contemporaries and later by the academy. Some readers might even question the value of pushing against such fossilized scholarship. However, working through A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from its “classic” re-readings of Emerson’s political mind from the 1990s through more current twenty-first century scholarship, readers will perceive not just a dynamic picture of the famous transcendentalist’s political mind, but also a multi-vocal intellectual history of political scholarship on Emerson. As a political companion, the collection sketches the complicated and sometimes contradictory development of Emerson’s political thinking as much as the complicated and contradictory development of scholarly uses of Emerson’s political thinking. Dissonant and melodious, frustrating and engaging, the authors and texts thankfully do not present an explicit or clear picture of Emerson’s politics; but nor should they. The selected authors instead rub up against each other, praising and censuring accordingly, but never quite coming to consensus, forming the kind of dissensus that Emerson would heartily approve.

A substantial volume (thirteen essays in all), the book is divided into four sections beginning with four “classic” texts on Emerson by notable political theorists and philosophers: William Carey McWilliams, Judith Shklar, George Kateb and Stanely Cavell. In choosing a chapter from McWilliams’s formidable 1973 study of national manhood, The Idea of Fraternity in America, to begin their collection, Levine and Malachuk forward a version (albeit mild) of the apolitical Emerson the volume is designed to contradict. But this is done to effect. McWilliams argues that Emerson wasn’t so much an apolitical thinker but a political idealist who believed that human progress would eventually abolish slavery and the United States would become a “political brotherhood.” For McWilliams, Emerson “firmly believed that progress did not require a movement; it was written in the motion of nature, and would come of itself” (46). Because the political brotherhood was inevitable, Emerson was able to eschew politics, McWilliams maintains. While McWilliams briefly concedes that Emerson’s rhetorical use of fraternity has allowed numerous critics to cast Emerson as a philosopher of democracy, he ultimately concludes that, “Emerson’s was a doctrine of activity, individualistic romanticism, not democracy” (48-9). Emerson, then, is not a champion of democracy but of individualism in such a reading. McWilliams’s essay may seem out of place given the aim of this volume, but it represents an important shift from previous attacks on Emerson’s self-reliant individualism: McWilliams does not completely depoliticize Emerson but instead makes him politically passive. It is this version of Emerson’s political passivism that later essays in this volume vividly confront.

The second “classic” text by Judith Shklar likewise reconsiders the notion that Emerson’s individualism was at odds with democracy. Where McWilliams sees in Emersonian thinking a call for a progressive political brotherhood, Shklar finds reconciliation between democracy and individualism in Emerson’s skepticism. Focusing on Representative Men and “Self-Reliance,” Shklar suggests that skepticism and democracy were joined in Emerson’s mind because individuals participating in a democracy necessarily have doubts about the opinions of fellow citizens (65-66). But Emerson’s purpose in writing Representative Men is not merely to praise Montaigne’s skepticism, Shklar maintains, but to demonstrate the “absolute necessity of great men for revealing the possibilities of reason, imagination, discovery, and beauty” without “begrudging the great men their glory, not because he was small minded but because an uncritical belief in great people was not compatible with his democratic convictions” (59). Because Emerson thought we were all reformers, there must be doubts, Shklar ultimately insists.

Shklar’s essay is in many ways a platform for her working out of her own political theory to contend with the current problems of American democracy and has been used as such by fellow political theorists. Shklar finds redemption in political skepticism. In this sense, the editors might have been better served using Sacvan Bercovitch’s “Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent” (published in 1990) in the South Atlantic Quarterly instead of Shklar’s more politically provocative piece. Bercovitch’s essay comes to roughly the same conclusion—finding in Emersonian thinking a space for dissent within a democratic consensus—and has had a greater impact on American literary studies than Shklar’s treatise.

The final two authors in this first section—Cavell and Kateb—are most aptly selected. In Buell’s fitting assessment, “No one has written more searchingly about Emerson’s theory of self-reliance than George Kateb.”⁶ As the essay selected for this volume demonstrates, Kateb has come to understand Emerson’s self-reliance as promoting an individualism that works within instead of against democracy. Emerson’s problem with democracy, as Kateb notes, is that it requires “association,” which has the potential to disturb self-reliance. But since Emerson calls for self-reform in his self-reliance, Kateb finds in Emerson a means to defend the individual against institutional regulation. Elsewhere Kateb calls this means “negative individuality,” or the kind of character that disobeys unjust conventions and laws.⁷ The resulting struggle for self-reliance, in Kateb’s estimation, “is a struggle against being used” (87). Stanley Cavell is also invested in the philosophical matter of instrumentalism, but he finds a more suitable answer in Emerson’s skepticism or his “averse thinking” as the title suggests, connecting Emerson directly to the philosophy of Heidegger and Nietzsche. That said, much like Shklar’s skepticism, Cavell’s “averse thinking” has had more impact in philosophy and political theory than Emerson studies or the study of American literature but it is a worthy inclusion none-the-less.

Part 2 of this volume is ambiguously titled “Emerson’s Self-Reliance Properly Understood,” but it might be better identified as “Emerson’s Self-Reliance and the Politics of Slavery.” The three essays contained in it look more carefully at Emerson’s self-reliance in the context of a democracy that suffers slavery, arguably the most troubling aspect of Emerson’s writings. Jack Turner, James H. Read, and to a lesser extent Len Gougeon, each explore Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance in conjunction with slavery and social reform. Both Turner and Read call attention to Emerson’s increasingly public abolitionist stance beginning with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 precisely because it made him and every other northern explicitly complicit to slavery, an institution which likewise denied slave and master the ability to realize self-reliance.

~

Dissonant and melodious, frustrating and engaging, the authors and texts thankfully do not present an explicit or clear picture of Emerson’s politics; but nor should they.

~

In Turner’s careful reading of Emerson’s “ethics of citizenship,” he discerns a “complex interplay” of two key ideas: self-reliance and complicity (126-7). While Turner is attentive to the fact that Emerson never addressed these two terms directly (complicity and self-reliance), he finds in Emerson’s antislavery writings and his abolitionist activities a clear demonstration of his (Emerson’s) belief in their incompatibility, for complicity is just another name for conformity. Turner is likewise careful to not exaggerate Emerson’s activism, noting that he was reluctant to speak out about slavery until the Fugitive Slave Law required more action of him. In the end, Turner finds in Emerson’s ethics of citizenship “a politics of self-reliance that allows for moral compromise” and “a promising model for meeting the contemporary challenge of civic engagement (142).

Moving from Turner’s ethics of citizenship, Gougen and Read focus on the complicating factors informing Emerson’s self-reliance as well as his changing relation to the abolition movement as new laws began to force citizens into conformity and complicity with the institution of slavery. Clearly the traumatic events of the mid-nineteenth century troubled Emerson’s definition of self-reliance. Emerson responded, Read claims, by embracing John Brown and his radical politics and speaking out against slavery more vociferously. Both acts are deeply political for Read: speaking out against slavery in antebellum America was tantamount to taking action against it (162). In this context, Emerson’s self-reliance becomes a model for moral compromise and a means of taking action against slavery “without along the way compromising or suffocating one’s own intellectual and practical self-reliance” (153). But most importantly, Read contributes a picture of Emerson as a growing intellectual mind who recognized the limits of his self-reliant philosophy later in life and strove to reconcile these limits in a democracy that denied self-reliance to slave and master alike. Along these lines, Gougeon looks beyond Emerson’s self-reliant treatise to see how Emerson used his transcendental philosophy in the service of social reform. This philosophy allows for every person (regardless of race) to participate in the universal (the “Over-Soul”) “providing the basis for both individual self-reliance and a collective identity” (186). For Gougeon, Emersonian social reform may begin with the individual, but it does not end there; self-reform leads to social reform. And, like Read and Turner, Gougeon also highlights Emerson’s evolving transcendental thinking, demonstrating a commitment to “rotation” and “becoming.”

Part 3 of the collection is dedicated to probing Emerson’s transcendental philosophy in an effort to recover Emerson’s transcendentalism without setting it apart from his political philosophy. As numerous critics in this volume note, Emerson has been as much denuded of his transcendental philosophy as his political philosophy. The essays put forward in this section, then, “retranscendentalize” Emerson whilst they repoliticize his thinking, locating in Emersonian transcendentalism no opposition to political engagement. Alan M. Levine grapples with Emerson’s skepticism, concluding that Emerson’s doubt was fundamental to his transcendental beliefs, while Daniel S. Malachuk battles past scholarship that has effectively detranscendentalized Emerson, obscuring the commitment to equality in his transcendental thinking. Finally, Shannon L. Mariotti examines Emerson’s metaphors of vision, questioning his ability to see problems clearly with transcendental sight. Noting a change in his thinking around 1844, Mariotti concludes that Emerson came to question the validity of his transcendental vision, ultimately finding a middle ground in his transcendental visual practice of “focal distancing.” Mariotti’s essay ultimately explores a version of Emersonian political theory that reconciles his transcendental idealism with the practicalities of social reform.

The fourth and final section is also the most knotty, designed to cast Emerson as a devout liberal (or progressive) democrat. While Emerson’s progressive democratic leanings are undeniable (Buell goes so far as to claim Emerson personified the Union ideal for moderates as well as progressives during the Civil War), the three contributors concluding this volume emphasize (or perhaps over-emphasize) certain aspects of liberal democracy said to be embraced by Emerson.⁸

Neal Dolan’s recent account of Emerson’s theories of commerce aims to reinterpret our understanding of his vision of liberal democracy. In doing so, Dolan offers a new interpretation of Emerson’s use of the language of ownership, commerce, and property. At once muddled and overly rigid, Dolan’s argument maintains that Emerson uses the language of property and commerce to “symbolically resolve a cultural dilemma” between old world economics and new world economics (344). For Dolan, Emerson championed America’s liberal democratic values against European feudal-aristocratic social systems on the one hand; on the other, he was weary of the American tendency to “reduce all relationships to marketplace calculations” (344). Dolan concludes that “Emerson inflected this economic idiom in distinctive ways in an attempt to raise his audiences understanding of their rightful property, and thus of their rightful selves, to a yet higher, more spiritual, and more ecstatic plane” (345). However, in interpreting Emerson’s economic idioms within the context of “Puritanism, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the full emergence of a market economy in antebellum America,” Dolan strips Emerson (and his contemporary transcendentalists) of his more radical politics in order to frame the transcendentalist as a pro-capitalist liberal democrat (345). This version of Emerson is not only unpalatable but also largely incorrect. One must remember that Emerson rubbed elbows with Orestes Brownson, who espoused a brand of socialism in the 1830s that Marx would make famous a decade later. This is not to suggest that Emerson was as radical a socialist as Marx or even Brownson (no need to rush-order your Che Emerson t-shirts), but I would challenge Dolan’s assertion that Emerson was “pro-market” during his “supposedly radical phase” in both action and thought (361). As evidence for this claim, Dolan first points out that Emerson “participated” in market-capitalism to the extent that he marketed himself (the action). He then offers a problematic reading of a passage from “Politics,” in which Emerson makes the outrageous assertion that “while the rights of all as persons are equal…their rights in Property are very unequal” (the thought). If taken at face value, this evidence is indeed damning, but here Dolan fails to recognize Emerson’s posturing as a mechanism for criticizing a political system of which he was often skeptical.

In contrast to Dolan’s interest in property, Jason Frank probes Emerson’s understanding of representation and representativeness in order to demonstrate the democratic importance the “representative man.” For Frank, Emerson’s representative men are not departures from his philosophy of self-reliance because “they elicit the transformative capacities of democratic constituencies forever in the midst of a process” (385). Because there is a distinct relational dynamic between the representative and the represented according to Frank, “this relation stimulates perfectionist transformation” not at odds with Emerson’s theory of self-reliance. The final essay by G. Borden Flannigan likewise reassesses Emerson’s commitment to excellence in the face of liberal democracy in “Representative Men,” but does so by stressing his debt to Plato and Aristotle.

In reading this collection of essays one gets the sense that Emerson was not an explicitly political thinker; nor was he an explicitly apolitical thinker. He might be best represented as an evocative thinker, a philosopher (often a political philosopher), a humanist, and of course a transcendentalist. He thought carefully and “becomingly” (in an Emersonian sense) about the world in which he inhabited. It is therefore difficult to locate his philosophy—political or otherwise—in just one text or at just one moment in his life. When Emerson wrote, “rotation is the law of nature” in Representative Men, he is not dwelling on physical laws of change; his meaning is social and political, suggesting process, progress, and most importantly change over time on a personal level as much as a national level. And since we now readily accept that personal is political, this volume, along with this series, reminds us never to regard any thinker as wholly removed from the political sphere.

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Sarah Blythe is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at UNC Chapel Hill. Tentatively titled “Juicy Effects,” her doctoral dissertation examines the excessive florid and floral rhetoric populating the American short story in the decades straddling the Civil War.
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Notes
1. Davis, Rebecca Harding. Bits of Gossip. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904. 33.
Back to essay
2. Ibid. 46.
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3. Emerson, R.W. “Self-Reliance.”
Back to essay
4. Ibid.
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5. Buell, Laurence. Emerson. Cambridge; Harvard UP, 2004.
Back to essay
6. Ibid. 158.
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7. Kateb, George. The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithica: Cornell UP, 1992.
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8. Buell. Op. Cit. 206.
Back to essay

March 20, 2014
José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013): A Collage

José Esteban Muñoz’s sudden passing in December 2013 has saddened many and sent shock waves through the queer theory, performance studies, queer of color and critical race studies communities. A prolific author, editor, beloved teacher and mentor, and Professor of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Cuban-born José Muñoz made vibrant contributions to the intellectual life of our era and to the personal and professional lives of many individuals in our communities. To honor his life and work, I asked several of José’s close friends and colleagues to contribute a brief essay focusing on a specific idea, passage, or personal memory and share with us what Muñoz’s work has meant to them. What follows is a rich personal collage of love, wonder, grief, appreciation, and admiration for a scholar and a friend whose work and life will continue to resonate and inspire beyond his death.

– Petra Dierkes-Thrun

March 14, 2014
Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau

Politically Transcendental

by David Faflik
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A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, Ed. Jack Turner

To begin his study At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature, John Carlos Rowe levels a late twentieth-century charge against American transcendentalism (and, by extension, American transcendentalists) that might as well have been made a century prior. Indeed, Rowe’s antebellum predecessors anticipated his complaint that Concord, Massachusetts’s so-called sage, the sometime area minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a crank; that his idealistic minions were starry-eyed dreamers; and that the “New School” in literature and religion with which Emerson and his adherents were affiliated was hopelessly removed not only from the everyday concerns of this world, but the eternal concerns of the next. In due course the members of the mostly young, middle class, and restless circle surrounding Emerson had the “transcendental” label attached to them. This was not a flattering designation at the time. Nor has the term entirely lost its negative connotations, as witnessed by the modern practitioners of what Rowe styles “political critique.” In Rowe’s reading, and in Rowe’s words, transcendentalism to this day can be said to suffer from inherent “limitations” as a means of ideological inquiry. Central to these supposed shortcomings is “the romantic idealist assumption that rigorous reflection on the processes of thought and representation constitutes in itself a critique of social reality and effects a transformation of the naïve realism that confuses truth with social convention” (1). Transcendental dissent is from this perspective at best an oxymoron. At worst it’s seen as part of an insidious bourgeois cultural apparatus, the dismantling of which is long overdue.

Among those of Emerson’s contemporaries to have escaped, just barely, the dubious charge of transcendental by association is Henry David Thoreau. The Concord native writer, reformer, and day laborer aspired no less than did his mentor to romantic realms of consciousness. Thoreau as a result has received his share of criticism over his alleged Emersonian abstractions. By and large, however, Thoreau is acknowledged in this our twenty-first century to be a different kind of transcendental animal. On the one hand, he’s been accorded the status of a first-rate artist on the strength of his master work, Walden. On the other hand, Thoreau is celebrated today as much for his politics as his aesthetics. The unabashed contrarian’s reform writings and lectures alone have earned him the reputation of being a social activist who didn’t rest on high-minded principles. And it’s within the context of this abiding revisionist view that we receive A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau. The sixteen individually composed essays that are collected in this volume together set out to test the texture and extent of Thoreau’s political convictions. More to the point, they attempt to answer whether and how the politically signifying words of a reputed transcendentalist such as Thoreau could translate into meaningful action. Here the general consensus is that they did.

As part of the Political Companions to Great American Authors series, Turner has rallied his contributing scholars around the premise that the literary is necessarily political. Or, as the Series Editor Patrick J. Deneen writes, American literature itself must be considered “one of the greatest repositories of the nation’s political thought and teachings,” over and above the usual suspects of political theory and philosophy (Turner vii). Turner accordingly divides the essay contributions from his collection into four broad areas of political interest. These include “Thoreau and Democracy”; “Conscience, Citizenship, and Politics”; “Reverence, Ethics, and the Self”; and “Thoreau and Political Theory.” In the first of these, we witness Thoreau in the perennial transcendental light of his public commitments, as opposed to his private pursuits. In Part II, we’re shown a writer whose work is to be judged in the aggregate as a kind of conscientious speech act, the effectiveness of which performance we’re invited to measure by its contemporary reception. Part III takes on the ethical and metaphysical concerns that Turner sees “both informing and issuing from Thoreau’s politics” (7). Part IV, finally, situates Thoreau’s thoughts and deeds within the comparative framework of canonical political theory, past and present. For this final section, we’re treated to a utopian Thoreau who was influenced by the likes of Jean Jacques Rousseau, before we go on to weigh the great chain of political thinkers (Gandhi, Theodor Adorno, Martin Luther King, Jr., Stanley Cavell) who felt, in turn, Thoreau’s influence. Throughout, Thoreau is credited with “repelling us even as he charms us,” in the process fostering what Turner names “intellectual agon” (10). But not once is the Harvard-trained Latinist turned teacher, tinkerer, writer, lecturer, naturalist, and anti-slavery agitator accused of what commentators in the tradition of John Carlos Rowe might characterize as transcendental fecklessness. In every sense of the word, Turner’s Thoreau matters.

The varieties of Thoreau’s political significance constitute the operative argument of this Companion. There are, for example, fresh reexaminations of Walden. Nancy L. Rosenblum writes of that work’s “romantic aversion,” “calculated to épater la bourgeoisie” (16-17). Brian Walker ranks Walden as “a democratic advice book” for anyone seeking “trade-offs … between freedom and consumption” (59-60). George Shulman bypasses Walker’s “alternative economics” to examine the “poesis” of “prophecy” that’s distilled in the multivalent (“extra-vagant,” in Thoreau’s famous formulation) language of the author’s opus (138). Walden in this reckoning becomes a discursive template for transformation, its imaginative prose a provocative model for readers who would “link citizenship to resistance rather than to subjection” (136).

Not all the Companion is dedicated to Walden, of course. Much as Robert Milder once went about Reimagining Thoreau, in a wide-ranging study that bears that title, Turner’s contributors canvass the full catalog of Thoreau’s writings in an attempt at repoliticizing his entire oeuvre. One popular topic for discussion is “Resistance to Civil Government,” the essay Thoreau wrote in 1849 after his refusal to pay a local poll tax. This latter show of defiance, the author’s chosen protest against U.S. involvement in the Mexican War, landed him for a night in a Concord jail. Now it’s become an occasion for continuing political analysis. Some forty years after Hannah Arendt upbraided the author for allowing “moral obligation” to obviate his political involvements (Arendt 84), scholars debate the impact that “Resistance” has had on everything from the current environmental movement to what Jane Bennett posits are the oppositional “techniques of self” (Turner 294). Equally innovative treatment is given to the web of revealing connections to be drawn when we situate Thoreau’s diverse works – A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “Life Without Principle,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and “Walking,” among others – alongside such disparate figures as the American abolitionist John Brown, President Abraham Lincoln, Hobbes, Locke, Plato, and Karl Marx. We’re even asked to read Adorno’s negative dialectics back into Thoreau, and vice versa. There is, in short, a Thoreau for more or less everyone, irrespective your politics, historical period, or personal expectations of a man whose memory led no less an earnest advocate than India’s Mahatma to urge his followers to be “so many Thoreaus in miniature” (Gandhi 7:267).

~

But not once is the Harvard-trained Latinist turned teacher, tinkerer, writer, lecturer, naturalist, and anti-slavery agitator accused of what commentators in the tradition of John Carlos Rowe might characterize as transcendental fecklessness. In every sense of the word, Turner’s Thoreau matters.

~

If there’s anything missing in this Companion, it’s the old Thoreau. By “old” I don’t mean Rowe’s Emersonian transcendentalist, for whom politics was beside the point. Rather, I mean the man of letters who’s been a mainstay of many an English Department curriculum since at least the appearance in 1941 of F. O. Matthiessen’s canon-making American Renaissance. The Companion’s Series editor, Patrick Deneen, is inclined to conceive of “the great works of America’s literary tradition” as “the natural locus of democratic political teaching.” Belles lettres are from his standpoint best suited for attracting citizen readers who’ll remember the message precisely because of the medium. But whereas an Americanist (and Christian socialist) such as Matthiessen might speak in passing of the “possibilities of democracy” without ever committing himself to the specific political qualities of his texts (Matthiessen 146), A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau suffers from the opposite problem. Deneen again speaks of “the pleasures afforded by … literary form,” and all the “subtle” attentiveness the very category of the literary demands from “careful” and “patient” close readers. Deneen in fact dismisses outright any overly politicized readings that have been predicated on “a hermeneutics of suspicion” (Turner vii). Yet in the end there’s precious little “hermeneutics” at all in Jack Turner’s otherwise ably compiled volume. With several important exceptions, and to state the obvious, most of the essayists in this collection approach Thoreau not as formalists but as political scientists. They’re interested in topics, not tropes.

This isn’t to wish for a return to the apolitical days of the New Criticism. A passing fashion for New Formalism notwithstanding, a harkening back to text as text hardly seems possible, or desirable, in the wake of the cultural turn of the 1970s. What I’m suggesting, instead, is for scholars from any and all academic disciplines to recognize that life and language need not be deemed mutually exclusive, any more than transcendental optimism be regarded as proof positive of political quietism. At the very least, A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau marks the start of that project.

David Faflik

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Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. “Civil Disobedience” (1970), in Crises of the Republic. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1972, 49-102. Print.

Gandhi, M. K. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 100 vols. New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1958-1994. Print.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. 1941. Rept. New York: Oxford UP, 1968. Print.

Milder, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Rowe, John Carlos. At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print.

March 13, 2014
The Realm of Potentiality

by Roderick A. Ferguson, University of Minnesota

~

Of José Munoz’s inspiring work, the argument in which I would most locate and recognize my own interests and solidarities would be his almost incantatory observation in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. After calling for a queer politics that dares to “see or imagine the not-yet-conscious,” a politics that can derive much of its revolutionary energies from past insurgencies, he wrote, “The not-quite-conscious is the realm of potentiality that must be called on, and insisted on, if we are ever to look beyond the pragmatic sphere of the here and now, the hollow nature of the present. Thus, I wish to argue that queerness is not quite here; it is in the language of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a potentiality.”¹ I am drawn to this argument in particular because it is clear that for José a very powerful realm of potentiality—one that can provide us with the resources for the not-quite-conscious, for the utopian future whose materiality we can find in the audacious dreams and visions of past formations—lies in and with minoritized communities and peoples themselves. Remember, for instance, that he opens the chapter from which the passage comes with the 1970 manifesto produced by that queer of color organization that disbanded almost as soon as it emerged—Third World Gay Revolution. In his chapter, the organization stands as a metaphor for that dazzling resource of all minoritized communities—that is, the power to yearn for and suggest something beyond the given state of affairs. And in many ways, he was, trying to encourage us to develop optics for seeing (where minoritized life is concerned) not only what “is” but what—if provided the conditions for its own liberation—“can be.”

In this way, his argument and indeed his work are rebuttals to those stultifying and empiricist methodologies that attempt to pin down the lives of queers, women, and people of color, pinning them down in that longstanding and misguided effort to capture their “true” and “unchanging” meanings. In this regard, we find José performing a maneuver that is characteristic of his work: the use of minoritized subjects as levers for epistemological and philosophical considerations. In addition, his work assumes political import as it excavates and rearranges critical formations like queer theory and Marxism to point to and call for insurrections in the current state of affairs, recognizing that the existing conditions never exhaust historical or social possibility. Here, he takes a page from Herbert Marcuse who argued, “to express and define that-which-is on its own terms is to distort and falsify reality. Reality is other and more than that codified in the logic and language of facts.”²

By coincidence or providence, I have been reading Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings’s biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. There is a part in that text that makes me appreciate José’s originality and genealogy all the more and helps me figure out what to do with the space he left behind. In a summary of the young Benjamin’s 1913-1914 essay “Metaphysics of Youth,” Eiland and Jennings write, “What we do and think, [Benjamin] says, is filled with the being of our ancestors—which, having passed away, becomes futural. Each day, like sleepers, we use ‘unmeasured energies’ of the self-renewing past… In awakening its own historical resonance, the present gathers to a moment of decision, by which, rooted in the past, it grounds a future…”³ Queerness, like the figure of sleep for Benjamin, was José’s way of describing a practice that—while sometimes giving the appearance of disengagement—actually reprocesses the “unmeasured energies of a self-renewing past” to break new and non-normative ground.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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Notes
1. José Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 21.
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2. Marcuse, “A Note on Dialectic,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arrato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 2000), 447.
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3. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 44.
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March 10, 2014
Brown Study

by Deborah Paredez, University of Texas-Austin

~

It was the blue hour.

That time when bodies turn silhouette against the vast azure.

When you stumble home from the bar towards bed—yours, anyone’s—to, as Joni Mitchell sings, “lay down an impression and your loneliness.”¹

When, at last, the baby sleeps and you can now prepare for your morning class.

The blue hour.

Which actually lasts less than an hour, the blue burned to dawn after about 20 minutes.

But what’s an hour, really, when you measure your days against straight time?

It was the blue hour on the last class day of the semester. I was writing up my final notes for my lecture course, “Performing America.” How to end it? How to convey to my students a model for performing (against) America? I turned to José Feliciano’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” letting it play over and over as I stared out the window towards the cerulean horizon.

It was José Muñoz who, years ago, first introduced me to Feliciano’s minor key take on the anthem. It was José who taught me how to practice a critical and ethical attentiveness to a wide range of performances by Latina/o artists. José who helped so many of us identify “all sorts of antinormative feelings that correspond to minoritarian becoming.”² José who helped us hear in Feliciano’s song the tentative strumming of those first measures, the plaintive “Ohhhhh,” the steady murmur of the melody and the languorous voice refusing to keep the time. The lag. The longing the longing the longing. This, José instructed us, is what it sounds like to feel brown.

For those of us invested in and, indeed, in love with Latina/o performance (studies), José’s work was the light of the blue hour: the source of illumination against which we positioned our own bodies of work in the hopes of being made to seem more luminous, more clearly defined. The distinct shape of our work was impossible to achieve in any other light. He named our feelings and their relationship to our (lack of) access to citizenship; he chronicled the disidentificatory practices so central to our identificatory pursuits; he legitimated our strivings for that sparklingly sapphire queer beyond.

Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light?

It was the blue hour on 4 December 2013, a moment of passage.

It was the blue hour and Feliciano’s voice shirred the silence and the dawn broke the blue and I taught my class, playing Feliciano’s song under my lecture for the whole hour, and I returned to my office and received word of the news.

It was the blue hour and it passed too soon and I was left feeling brown.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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Notes
1. Joni Mitchell, “Down to You,” Court and Spark, CD, Asylum, 1974.
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2. José E. Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31.1 (Spring 2006): 679.
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March 10, 2014
Our Chusma, Ourselves: On the Ghosts of Queerness Past

by Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley

~

José was a ghost even before he ever left us. He refused “the burden of liveness” demanded of a young genius, delivering instead a performance haunted by party boy, theorist, punk, hipster, mentor, nerd, sissy, and chusma par excellence (Disidentifications, 189). (Chusma: loud, bitchy, hysterical, snarky, demanding and unapologetically colored, a hot, messy “occasion to speak queer and beyond” [195].) Into the hallowed spaces of erudite scholarship, he dragged the remains of his working-class immigrant upbringing like the gaudy train of a second-hand wedding dress ready to take over the room, sullied and storied. These were the unruly ghosts he conjured and enlisted to do the dirty work of making institutions accountable to those they had excluded. Muñoz translated class shame into the high theory spectacle of chusmería to refuse the beige decorum of whiteness and middle-class respectability and revel in the colored excesses of feminized drama and gossip, crying, a moco tendido, into a sea of left-over Latino feeling.

The future queerness of José’s intellectual imagination has always been peopled with the still beating hearts of the ghosts of his chusma past, those far away from the limelight of the academic stages he graced so ungracefully. Carrying the memory of dreams deferred, and the promise of raucous outrage, he demanded a new formulation of time that could encompass both. Refusing the burden of liveness is about rejecting the restrictive temporality of minoritarian subjects to dwell in the contained chambers of our singular relevance, to call out the ways we precede and exceed the stages of our signification. To name the haunts of our hurts is to envision the pressures and potentialities of being social subjects capable of envisioning future worlds together.

Refusing liveness, and forever animated, the performance of Muñozity that erupted whenever José arrived (late of course) was always a happening that he had helped to create and defile before his entrance. Like a street kid, passing out flyers to the latest club opening, Muñoz invited everyone to the party, ready to crowd the dance floor of his utopian world-making. The air would change with the rumor of his presence; it became perfumed with the sticky possibility that there might be enough breathing room for others who were never imagined as belonging, let alone worth inhaling. But once on the dance floor, José made you work for your place in the soul train line. Like the oracle that he was, he had the ability to read all the possibilities of your intended academic attire, and pluck out the precise theoretical accessories that would turn your shit out. A ghost that could send you back to start, armed with a new shade of fabulous to make your own. The dark emotions of José’s open windows were also there in the teary blue light of city mornings stumbling home alone to contemplate a lifetime of losses.

I like to imagine José as a queer child in his Hialeah home, the imprint of clear hard plastic still pressed onto the tender flesh of his moist thighs, pondering the performance of the color green, theorizing the scent of his tias’ heavy bosoms, and feeling brown. It is these twists of queer time that float through his work—the ghosts of other horizons. Chusmería is about honoring the imprint of plastic, of La Lupe whining to Heidegger, of stepping out of and into the ecstasy that exists in another temporal register where José is about to walk into the room (or was that him who just left?). Even and especially in the stillness of death, he asks us to refuse the burden of liveness, insisting instead that we make the most of chusma gestures of ephemera, the trace in the text, the question in the quote, the promise in the queerness yet to come. Having joined the ghosts in the wings throwing shade and brilliance, he invites us—even now—to come out and make a queer production of our broken hearts.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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March 10, 2014
Please Come Flying

by Kathryn R. Kent, Williams College

Please Come Flying¹

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying…

Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying.

Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
please come flying.
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.

Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears…
…please come flying.

On the second-to-last page of Cruising Utopia, José cites my analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s encomium-as-inducement-as-enticement, “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore.” He summarizes the heart of my reading: “Kent explains the ways in which Bishop’s work signaled a queer discourse of invitation that did not subsume the other but instead was additive” (188). Not “subsum[ing] the other” but inviting, inciting them–this might just as well describe José’s presence, his understanding of friendship, his sometimes fierce teasing, which pushed me to recognize and own my weaknesses as a critic, an activist, a writer, a co-conspirator, as well as my strengths. I don’t think I could have fathomed the dynamics of this poem if I hadn’t spent six years in graduate school with José as my constant, loving, demanding interlocutor. As he writes of the Bishop poem, “[t]his invitation, this plea, is made despite the crushing force of the dynasty of the here and now. It is an invitation to desire differently, to desire more, to desire better” (189). How many times did so many of us find José’s work, and his way of being—itself, in his words, a form of “performative provocation”—calling us to “collective political becoming,” to a “stepping out of this place and time to something, fuller, vaster, more sensual, and brighter” (ibid.)? In that somewhere, someplace, not yet here, I like to imagine José is waiting, not always so patiently, for the rest of us to, in Bishop’s words, “please come flying.”

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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1. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1987), 82-83.
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March 10, 2014
A Leap Into the Void: Finding Muñoz through the Process of Losing Him

by Jack Halberstam, University of Southern California

~

Some will say that José Ésteban Muñoz died an untimely death – he died too young with too much still to do. However, like his formulation of queerness as a state of being that is present in its absence, available as a lost past, unreachable as a beckoning future, I would rather say that Muñoz died as he lived, in a queer time that he may not have chosen but that insistently chose him. Like many of the exotic queer art world natives about whom he wrote, Muñoz sacrificed everything within the here and now for a then and there that had not yet and could not yet arrive. Like Jack Smith arriving late to a performance that he would then abort, or like Fred Herko meeting death early by making his last performance “a perfect jeté” out of a friend’s apartment window (Cruising Utopia, 148), Muñoz left us all shocked and surprised by his sudden exit, saddened and bereft by his final decline. Muñoz’s departure was not quite a jeté, nor was it a failure to show; it was rather an abrupt cessation of a life that had spun quickly around a chain of precious moments offering brief glimpses of another world while losing energy in the present for the here and now.

How might we understand Muñoz’s early death through his own work as a gesture of refusal, a refusal of timeliness itself? In “A Jeté Out the Window” in Cruising Utopia, Jose writes about the staging of Fred Herko’s suicide as his final performance. Using the concept of surplus value to frame acts, work, modes of being which exceed capitalist flows, José uses Herko’s leap into the void as an example of an excessive gesture – one that could be read as useless, childish, wasteful, nonsensical – but that literally refuses all that capitalism, and capitalist notions of time, offer. Instead, it signals the way in which, within queer aesthetic production, escape and refusal are juxtaposed in an altered temporality that does not respect the markers of “late” and “early” at all.

In the context of queer worlds, furthermore, excess and loss sit side by side as potent evidence of the utopian imagination. For the queer utopian, the ideal world cannot be reached through the here and now; it must be conjured by crazy, risky, wild leaps into the void. This notion of the utopian situates art as a guide to future terrains that may or may not ever surface. Muñoz reminded us of this other function for art through his bravura readings of Ernst Bloch. Bloch, Muñoz tells us, understands art as “enacting a pre-appearance in the world of another mode of being that is not yet here” (147). The “not yet here,” like the “already gone,” represent non-straight temporalities within which other possibilities appear fleetingly, like ghosts from the past, glimmers of the future, markers of the anticipated and the lost.

In Fred Herko’s death-embracing leap out of the window of a friend’s apartment, Muñoz finds a performance that defies explication, understanding or rationality; it defies capitalist logics of sense and accumulation. It sheds what it should embrace and embraces what it should fear. It is perfect in its unknowability and absolute vulnerability. The controlled leap into the void performed by Herko makes art out of what is otherwise an uncontrollable descent into death. And Herko’s last dance places queer art in an oblique relation to life itself. If vulnerability is proximity to harm, to unbecoming, then queerness seeks to rewrite the conditions of pain, harm and fear not as identity formations, but as routes to wild embodiment.

Accordingly, I do not come to mourn José Esteban Muñoz; I come to celebrate his wild sense of time, possibility, potentiality. “Queerness is not yet here,” he writes in Cruising Utopia. “Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1). José, in death as in life, brings us a step closer to “the warm illumination of the horizon” that he possessed the unique ability to see, to describe and to touch. The fact that this horizon is as often death as it is art should not dissuade us from basking in its glow.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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March 10, 2014