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  • LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun — The Linking Matters: An International Poetics of Sense-Making and Innovation

    LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun — The Linking Matters: An International Poetics of Sense-Making and Innovation

    by LI Zhimin and Daniel Braun

    This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.

    A subtle chain of countless rings

    The next unto the farthest brings;

    The eye reads omens where it goes,

    And speaks all languages the rose;

    And, striving to be man, the worm

    Mounts through all the spires of form.

    ——Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be “excluded” from circulation.

                                          ——Marjorie Perloff

    When a mother gives an egg to her child and says “egg” at the same time, she is helping her child establish “a link” between language and the world. But what is the nature of this link? As the great Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure explained, langue (by which he meant particular languages, like French, or English, or Mandarin Chinese) is a system of signs which parcels out the world of sense into discretely sayable things. The signs that comprise this system are complex: they are composed of a signifier – the acoustical image, as he called it, that is formed from a combination of a given language’s phonemes – and a signified – the conceptual image or item recalled and indivisibly linked with that string of phonemes. The linguistic sign is not the thing in the world which it names.[1] In the scene described, the mother teaches the child the link between all three elements in a single stroke, bringing the child irrevocably into the world of language – both the particular language, through which this introduction is made, and language in general, what Saussure called langage. Eventually, the child will learn to draw a self-conscious distinction between language and the world which it denominates, between what is sometimes called the linguistic functions of use and mention, as when he refers to ‘egg’: not the reproductive ovum and its nutriment, but the three-letter word spelled /e/g/g/. The creation of these links is the foundation for all human thinking, upon and out of which all of our most complicated thoughts are built. It is from the perspective of these links that we can examine some of the most pressing questions concerning what I will call international poetics, the communication of innovations and norms within and between the poetry of particular languages and cultures, and beyond.[2]

    The best recorded story to demonstrate how the first links between a signified, a signifier, and the real world are created is that of Helen Keller. As she recalled: “As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”[3 In this passage, Keller vividly describes the moment when “the link” between the word “water”, and the wonderful cool flowing water of the world that was impressed upon on her mind. Though the signifier of the linguistic sign is objective, common to all speakers of a language, the cognitive image to which it is linked, and the emotional associations it bears, are personal, subjective and changeable. The significance of this division between the objective elements of language, and the subjective half to which they are bound and supported, is significant to the study of poetics.

    T.S. Eliot’s theory of an “objective correlative” is a case in point. He states: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”[4] Eliot is correct in suggesting that such an emotion can be “evoked”. However, it is mistaken to assume that “the link” between “the evoker” and “the evoked” is objective. In fact, as exemplified in the case of Helen Keller above, the emotional association with the image of a particular object in one’s mind is formed by a combination of personal experience and collective instruction, the results of which are at once common enough to allow communication among speakers, yet irreducibly individual, and variable among one another, such that we can never know if our signifieds are identical to each other’s. This is indeed one of the great mysteries and miracles of language. Beyond this brute difference of other minds, there are the idiosyncrasies and vagaries of experience that contribute to the formation of our sense of our language. For Helen Keller, the emotional response evoked by the word “water” included the unique joy and enlightenment she experienced when she learned the word. The word retained for her a sense of the discovery of its link to the world. Another reader, one perhaps not deprived of their senses in the way Keller was, might have a completely different emotional response to “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,” not only with respect to other readers, but to the artist endeavoring to evoke the objective correlative itself.

    Yet people do share certain common experience, which is what makes Eliot’s theory possible in the first place. All human beings, being human, share certain life experiences and outlooks upon the world that enable them to enjoy the same literary works. The notion of a classic work, enjoyed by people of all nations around the world, is tacit proof of the commonalities across regional differences that make international literary and artistic success possible. People of the same national or cultural background will of course share more personal experience than those of different national or cultural backgrounds. There are artistic works that are highly favored in one culture while not well regarded in others. A good example is the novel A Dream of Red Mansions (《红楼梦》，1744-1754)[5] which is regarded as the best novel ever written in Chinese, yet hardly read in the west.

    Literature often serves a pedagogical function. The degree to which works are read, and continue to enjoy success, often depends on their ability to continue to teach readers something about themselves, and their world. Ezra Pound, another remarkable theorist of literature (and poet), is among the most vociferous exponents of this theory of literary efficacy. He vividly describes the rewards a fruitful reading experience offers as “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”[6] Indeed, rewarding reading experiences are those that enlighten and develop our minds, stimulating them to great satisfaction. At the root of any literary judgment, the overall motive force by which literary traditions are sustained, is this affective dimension of reading. To read in an engaged way, to persist in reading, is to be somehow moved by it.

    How does this affective core of reading, which binds traditions and communities together in spite of their differences and distances, hold for the international communication of modern poetry, not least when even the most highly experienced reader of one culture can feel lost in the works of another. Bewilderment occurs not just with respect to the idiomatic sense of another language and culture but, when it comes to poetry especially, the ways in which an artist plays and puns with every level of that language. A story told by the distinguished scholar Huang Yunte about his colleague Zhang Ziqing, is illustrative. Reading Charles Bernstein’s poem “Fear of Flipping,” Zhang persistently asked the poet for the lexical meaning of the words in the poem. Huang explained, “the poet is more invested in the ring of echoes of wall, ball, fall, all, and even the half- rhyming repel, than the lexical meaning of these words. The ricochet of sounds and syllables, creating the titular fear of flipping, like a flip or slip of tongue, looks to walls to keep it inside or floors to hold it up.”[7] In other words, Bernstein is experimenting with the sonic dimension of poetic lines; indeed, one could say that the ‘meaning’ of his verse here is produced by his play effects with the reverberation of rhyming syllables across the poem. Poetic meaning is therefore not restricted to, or even primarily, lexical here. The title of the poem sets the terms for this play by punning on the phrase “fear of falling,” a substitution of one term / phobia for another, which flips the sense of the phrase on its head. The echoing internal rhymes create a verbal image which gives shape and body to this gesture of flipping, retaining the ghost of the original phrase even as it ricochets across the altered soundscape of the lines. This practice will no doubt be recognizable to readers who are familiar with the poetics of the Language School. The play serves as a framework for linking mind and world beyond and between the confines of individual languages, and is definitive of Bernstein’s practice.

    Huang Yunte’s interpretation is not difficult to understand. However, it was wholly foreign to Zhang Ziqing, and would almost certainly be to anyone who did not come to Bernstein’s work with the framework of sound and cognitive play in mind. Modern poetry like his is not unique in being theory-laden – that is, constructed and expounded according to the unique poetics of its practitioners. Nevertheless, modern poetry and poetic theories are two sides of a coin; they stand by working together – all the more so as poetry becomes esoteric in form, further removed from the conventions of ordinary language use, and governed increasingly by rules of composition unique to it. Without knowledge of the theories which govern such an esoteric art, therefore, one can find oneself at sea while reading a modern poem.[8] This is especially true of poetry where innovation does not occur at the lexical level either: indeed, where the poetry at stake is not a matter of lexical play. The divergence of modern poetry from the rules which governed previous traditions – rules of a more subtle kind of artifice intelligible to a broader literate class – has made the dissemination of its doctrines and theories a necessary part of its reception and interpretation. The difficulty a lay but native reader faces with work like Bernstein’s is exacerbated in the international context, where neither fluency in the language of composition, nor education within a broadest concept of the originating culture, can serve as sure guides. It is paramount that Chinese scholars introduce both modern poetry and modern poetic theories together, teaching them as two facets of the same literary phenomenon.

    Many modern poems make good sense in a lot of ways other than the traditional lexical one, which is why they seem quite difficult to understand. T. S. Eliot once said: “We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”[9] Indeed, modern poetry is as difficult to comprehend as modern civilization. The difficulties are comparable, mimetic even, in so far as the poet is driven, in Eliot’s reasoning, by a vocational maxim to both reflect and train the sensibility of his audience to his work through the dislocations of language he performs. The difficulty of modern poetry is a difficulty inherent in its context: modern civilization. What of its value, the other aspect (ever present) of Eliot’s judgment. A difficult poem is good not because it is difficult. In fact, the difficulty of many poems is not that difficulty of modernity refracted, but rather a failure to adequately make sense of the incoherence the poet intuits. It is a subtle difference, one with which Eliot was principally concerned. A difficult poem is good only when it creates one more possibility, “forcing language into meaning,” in an unconventional way. Again,“Fear of Flipping” is exemplary. From the perspective of linking, it is an exploration of more possible ways to make new, and possibly more efficient, thought ways and patterns. The poem’s difficulty is likewise a function of the way in which it is approached. Though Eliot would demur to such a consequentialist proposition, perhaps the test of a difficult poem’s quality may be the very satisfaction of mind, its inspiration and development, that has affectively and cognitively bound generations of poetry readers to one another in a tradition millennia-old, and world-wide.[10]

    What then of the transposition of these difficult poems into foreign contexts. From one perspective, it would be easy to conclude that poems like“Fear of Flipping” simply cannot be translated into Chinese. Semantics are not what a translator ought to target here, yet there are no characters in the Chinese language that reproduce the poem’s soundscape either: wall, ball, fall, all, and repel, are constructions of the sound system of English. Chinese phonology simply does not permit their formation. Yet this perspective is impoverished, for the link the poem creates (the link which is its essential, creative practice and energy) is certainly “translatable.” The poem’s signature effect, its ‘fear of flipping’ so to speak, can be reached in the target language of Chinese, and the minds of readers from this or another culture, like those of its author and his native culture, can be enlightened and developed by a translation which ‘translates’ those effects. From the linking perspective, the reward for reading a poem is to build up some new and better links, so that the minds of its readers can grow. In bringing, i.e., “translating”, poems like “Fear of Flipping” to readers in China, we need to explicate them in detail, line by line, giving more detailed interpretations than what Huang Yunte does in his essay; but we also must consider the general theory and framework of mind that the poem conjures. For it is only by doing both that Chinese readers will be rewarded in their encounter with the difficulty of works like those of Bernstein, or his Language School peers. This is the true project and mission of translation.[11] To deal with such poems that stand closely with the linguistic features of the particular language in which it is written that cannot be replicated in Chinese, the strategy for translation is not to focus on the technical details of linguistic features, but on helping readers in China in understanding the ways, i.e., the frameworks of mind presented in the poems, so that they could not only understand them but also create links in Chinese in the same spirit – and to replicate the features where possible, according to the rules of Chinese.

    Marjorie Perloff has noted: “Charles Bernstein has been, of all contemporary American poets, the one who has done the most to bring back those important words and phrases that tend to be ‘excluded’ from circulation.”[12] In other words, the contribution Bernstein’s works have made is not only to serve an individual reader by promoting his/her intellectual and emotional growth, but also, and more importantly, to serve contemporary American language and culture as a whole. With poems like“Fear of Flipping”, Bernstein has been constructing and reconstructing some delicate links to promote the growth of contemporary American thought capacity. That is to say, his work has contributed to the growth of the thinking capacity of the American cultural being, which, if well “translated”, can help other cultural beings develop in similar, relevant areas too.

    Different from lyrics, narrative works, both in verse and prose, tell stories that define the formation of certain links, as well as the associated emotions, so that they can often be translated in the traditional way. Story travels across cultural borders much more freely than poetic technique.

    In the field of international cultural communications, a mind, or a culture at large, grows in two ways: one is of transplantation, the other of inspiration. The key difference between these two learning ways is that the former offers something that cannot be logically developed out of the exercise of the learner’s own mind or the recipient culture’s institutional self-renewal, while the latter brings something that can be logically achieved by the recipient person or culture.

    Here are a few examples to further demonstrate the difference. When Sun Yat-sen established the Republic of China in 1911, he attempted to “transplant” the whole American political system into China, which was a failure because it did not function well in the Chinese culture by then. After the May Fourth Movement in 1919 (五四运动), the western ideology of free love and free marriage were introduced into China, which inspired many young people, who totally understood them, cherished them and were willingly guided by them, because in Chinese history there had been many people who had fought for their freedom of love and marriage, though they had not developed the theory of these practices to the degree the west had. In some cases, the transplantation model and the inspiration model are combined together, such as in the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; Socialism was transplanted from the former Soviet Union, while Chinese Characteristics refers largely Chinese people’s own innovation, partly on basis of traditional Chinese political practice, and partly inspired by Western political practices.

    When a Chinese student learns English, s/he needs to learn a vocabulary and a grammar / syntax (words, and the rules for their formation and combination). In this way, his/her mind grows by “transplantation”. When a Chinese scholar learns Charles Bernstein’s poetics, acquiring a totally new way of thinking, it is also of transplantation. Inspiration, by contrast, is the event of learning something that can be interpreted, understood, and made good sense of in the context of one’s already established knowledge. For example, all traditional western poetry, especially Romanticist’s works, such as those by William Wordsworth, can be easily understood by Chinese readers, as they share much of the spirit with traditional Chinese poetry.

    Where do these processes of transplantation and inspiration fit in the current world of international poetics? Among the most interesting instances in the communication of inspirational learning is what one may call mis-interpretive innovation. These are cases defined by a fortunate mistake, in which the application of a norm in the target language and culture to the translation of a work produces something incongruous with the original cultural perspective. One famous example is Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method”. As Xie Ming said, “This etymological, compositional theory of the ideogram, from which Pound derived his ‘ideogrammic’ method, had an enormous impact on his thinking about poetry and other cultural matters, and on the writing of the Cantos.”[13] The method has influenced many poets in the west: “An American mind, brought to ideographs by an art historian of Spanish descent who had been exposed to Transcendentalism, derived Vorticism, the Cantos, and an ‘ideogrammic method’ that modifies our sense of what Chinese can be.”[14] Indeed, it is for this reason that Pound is said, in a well-known oxymoronic idiom, to have ‘invented Chinese poetry in English”. And yet, as explained on the back cover of the book The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the Chinese language is just a set of signifiers, like the English language or any other languages.[15] This now seems to be common knowledge to most English readers. However, Ezra Pound’s invention of the “Ideogrammic method” made perfect sense in its context, and it was a wonderfully productive method for the composition of his works. It was an extremely valuable invention in poetics in English, inspired indeed.

    There are many more examples of mis-interpretive innovation. Let us offer a personal one. When Li Zhimin was invited to give a talk on Ezra Pound’s lyric “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”, Li found the other three panelists interpreted the poem as a war poem, the context for which was England’s involvement in WWI.[16] This appeared quite strange to him, as Li had been accustomed to interpretating the poem in the cultural context of its original author, the great Chinese poet Li Bai (701-762). In the traditional Chinese cultural context, this poem is normally taken as a love poem that romanticizes the mutual love and devotion of a young couple, which is considered a key virtue of the family ethics highly valued by Confucianism. Li found his American colleagues’ new (to me) interpretation compelling, making good sense as it does of the historic context in which the poem was translated and read in England. In fact, this new interpretation is inspiring and fascinating, and has contributed to the growth of Li’s understanding of the original and translated poem. What we can see from this example is that poetry not only exists in its original or translated context, but between them, in the historical and cultural rhymes that mutually illuminate diverse regions of the literary tradition.

    Let us give another example that illuminates the importance and shifting influence of context. A famous Chinese scholar prof. Yue Daiyun once held a seminar and discussed a novel entitled “Marriage of Xiao‘erhei (小二黑结婚)” with her American students. In the novel, there is a character named Sanxiangu (三仙姑) who often makes herself up to look more beautiful, which is meant to be inappropriate as she is of the working class, so that the conventional comments in the proletarian literary circle in China on this character is always negative. However, Yue Daiyun found all her American students were supporting Sanxiangu, as they thought there was nothing wrong with her making herself up. On the contrary, they considered Sanxiangu to be an admirable woman, as she seemed to them to love life.[17] Yue Daiyun came to agree with her American students’ comments, and has been retelling their views to her students and colleagues back in China, which is surely a contribution to the interpretation of the character Sanxiangu as well as the whole novel in China.

    The purpose of international interactions is not to make all cultures the same. Rather, international interactions can make all parties more perfect in their own way. We learn from each other in the transplantation model only when there is no alternative. We apply the model of inspirational learning in most cases. The overriding principle to decide whether any international communication is fruitful or not is whether it makes good sense in terms of the recipient individual or culture, indeed, whether it enriches the recipient through the change it rings.

    In the model of inspirational learning, the exchange can move in both directions: the innovative knowledge produced by the recipient may depart from the codes and conscience of the original culture, and yet in doing so inspire something novel in return, within the original culture. With the back and forth of such international communications, human knowledge on the whole is greatly expanded. In fact, the method of international communication, especially of the mind-expanding forms of poetry, is perhaps the best way for humanity to develop itself by diversifying itself: that is, to resist the pull of sameness.

    International interaction follows more or less the same principles in other fields. For example, in the field of politics, China and the West have learned and benefited from each other, and will continue to do so in the future. Jacques Gernet has said: “China furnished the first example of a disciplined, rich, and powerful state which owed nothing to Christianity and seemed to be based on reason and natural law. It thus made a powerful contribution to the formation of modern political thought, and even some of its basic institutions were imitated by Europe.”[18] Indeed, he convincingly argues that what the West has learned from China it has learned in the inspirational model. In return, China has learned a lot from the West as it developed during the modern age, much of which has transformed Chinese society to a great extent, such as in the fields of education, industrialization, urbanization and so on. And again, perhaps in the future, some of modern China’s successful institutions might serve as good examples from which the West might learn, and so on in perpetuity.[19]

    Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that all forms of life are linked: “A subtle chain of countless rings/ The next unto the farthest brings”[20] as he writes in the poem which prefaces his essay “Nature.” Helen Keller’s story about the creation of the link between the signifier “water,” the concept water the signified on her mind, and the water out there in the world, is a story about the origination of thought, without which she would have lived in a kind of intellectual darkness all her life. But the story is general: if human beings could not create links between the world and the world of signs, human beings would have lived in the darkness as well. Without poetry to further enhance these links, or to break and remake them, and without its transposition between languages, in which it is once more remade into a monster of linguistic and cultural confusion (in the etymological sense of this word), our thought would be even darker. The linking is everything; it is, as Emerson reminds us, life itself.

                                              2022/04/18

    _____

    LI Zhimin is “Guangzhou Scholar” Distinguished Professor of English at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University (Guangzhou, China, 510006). He serves as President of Foreign Literature Society of Guangdong Province. His research interests focus upon studies on modern poetics, culture (philosophy) and English Education (Email: washingtonlzm@sina.com).

    Daniel Braun is English Lecturer with Special Honor at School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University. He got his PhD in English literature Studies in Princeton University in 2019.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 65-66.

    [2] More discussions on the formation, nature and functioning of such links are made in Li Zhimin’s monograph The Good and the True of Knowledge (Beijing: The People’s Press, 2011) [黎志敏：《知识的“善”与“真”》。北京：人民出版社2011年版。]

    [3] Helen Keller, Story of My Life (C. Rainfield, 2003), 11. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.

    [4] T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Methuen, 1920), 92.

    [5] TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo, A Dream of Red Mansions, Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994). TSAO Hsueh-Chin and Kao Heo are of the Wade-Giles System. In modern Pinyin system, they are Cao Xueqin and Gao E respectively.

    [6] Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Toronto：George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968), 4.

    [7] Yunte Huang, “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 275.

    [8] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Modern English Poetry: Innovation through Theory,” Foreign Language and Literature Research, Vol. 35, No. 5, 2020, pp. 27-34. [黎志敏：《理论主导下英语诗歌的现代转型》，《外国语文研究》2020年第5期。] In this essay, Li argued that modern poetry and modern poetic theories have to be read side by side to make good sense of both of them.

    [9] T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 289.

    [10] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “Innovative Spirit of Modern Poetry: To Develop Human’s Intellectual and Emotional Capacities,” Foreign Languages and Cultures, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2021: 1-8. [黎志敏：《现代诗歌的创新精神》，《外国语言与文化》2021年第2期。] In this essay, Li argues that one major function of modern poetry is to promote the development of human’s intellectual and emotional capacities.

    [11] In fact, this is what we have done in our on-line bilingual course on modern poetry in English. This on-line course can be reached at: https://www.ulearning.cn/course/25598. In this course, Charles Bernstein is invited to have given a talk on an excerpt from Dark City, in which he gives a line to line interpretation. This is indeed the best way to “translate” a difficult modern poem.

    [12] Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019,” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. Vol. 48, No. 4, 2021, p. 86.

    [13] Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 236-237.

    [14] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 162.

    [15] See the note on the back cover in the book: Ernst Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936).

    [16] A discussion of Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife” by Al Filreis, Emily Harnett, Josephine Park, and Li Zhimin. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/app/public/watch.php?file_id=208367

    [17] Yue Daiyun and others, “Feminism and Literary Criticism,” Free Talks on Literature, No. 6, 1989, p. 19. [乐黛云等：《女权主义与文学批评》，《文学自由谈》1989年第6期。]

    [18] Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 523.

    [19] Please refer to LI Zhimin, “The One Way Model of Cultural Interaction: Literary Interactions between China and Cambridge,” The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2012: 111-127.

    [20] R.W. Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 2009), 18.

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    Works Cited

    • Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” In Selected Essays, edited by T. S. Eliot, 281–291. London: Faber and Faber, 1954.
    • ——. “Hamlet and His Problems.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, edited by T. S. Eliot, 87–94. London: Methuen, 1920.
    • Emerson, R.W. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 2009.
    • Gernet, Jacques. A History of Chinese Civilization, translated by J. R. Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
    • Huang, Yunte. “Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 255–278.
    • Keller, Helen. Story of My Life. C. Rainfield, 2003. This ebook was produced by Project Gutenberg. It is available at: http://www.CherylRainfield.com.
    • Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era. London: Faber and Faber, 1972.
    • Perloff, Marjorie. “Introduction to Charles Bernstein’s Distinguished Wenqin Yao Lectures at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Fall 2019.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, no. 4 (2021): 85-90.
    • Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” In Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot, 3-14. Toronto: George J. Mcleod Ltd., 1968.
    • Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course in General Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin, edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. NY: Philosophical Library, 1959.
    • Xie, Ming. Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.
    • Yue, Daiyun and others. “Feminism and Literary Criticism.” Free Talks on Literature, no. 6 (1989): 18–24.

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    Additional Reading

    Read more about Charles Bernstein’s writing and see responses to translations of his work in the boundary 2 special issue “Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences” (volume 48, issue 4).

  • Tessel Veneboer — Penetration as Philosophy (Review of McKenzie Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders: on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker)

    Tessel Veneboer — Penetration as Philosophy (Review of McKenzie Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders: on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker)

    a review of McKenzie Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders: on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker (Duke University Press, 2021) 

    by Tessel Veneboer

    In Philosophy for Spiders McKenzie Wark reads the novels of the punk avant-garde writer Kathy Acker as philosophical texts, or as the title proposes: as “low theory.” Low theory rejects the privileged terms of “high theory” and likes to remind the reader that the philosopher has a body. This theory “from below” often talks about sex and makes theoretical thinking a bodily task. Wark also finds this kind of thinking in Kathy Acker’s literary experimentation. Acker’s “null philosophy” comes from below – from the body and self of the author – while undoing that same self.

    As scholar and writer, Wark has made significant contributions to the fields of media theory and cultural studies with Hacker Manifesto (2004), Molecular Red (2015) and Capital is Dead: is this something worse? (2019). More recently, she turned to gender theory and memoir writing with Reverse Cowgirl (2019) and now she has published this personal-critical reading of Acker’s experimental prose. Philosophy for Spiders comes with a content warning for “sex, violence, sexual violence and spiders” as well as a form warning: “this book has elements of memoir and criticism but is neither” (4). As the subtitle of the book suggests, Wark proposes to read Acker’s work as philosophy, more specifically as low theory, a term first used to describe the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall and popularized by Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Wark follows Acker in her view that perhaps she was not writing novels: “they’re big chunks of prose, but are they novels? More groups of stories. Some of them aren’t even that” (54). Rejecting a clear-cut division between the novel and a philosophical text allows Wark to read Acker’s prose as “philosophical treatises” (54). The reader might wonder what the low in low theory reacts to: is it the dominance of the “master discourse” of high theory, or does the complicated content of high theory make the genre inaccessible? Developing low theory as an aspirational genre, Wark longs for a kind of philosophy that emerges outside of a (patriarchal; and even matriarchal) tradition:

    It is a philosophy without fathers (or even mothers), and so no more of their Proper Names will be mentioned. This philosophy for spiders is not a philosophy in which gentlemen discourse on the nature of the beautiful, the good, and the true. It is philosophy for those who were nameless as they had to spend their time working for the money. A philosophy not by those who could arise from their place to announce it, because their place was to be on their knees, their mouths full of cock. A theory in which otherwise quite tractable bad girls and punk boys go off campus and conduct base experiments in making sense and nonsense out of situations. “Recruited due to our good intentions, V and I’ve instead learned a brutal philosophy: ignorance of all rational facts and concepts; raging for personal physical pleasure; may the whole Western intellectual world go to hell.” (81)

    Where Wark aims for a philosophy without “Proper Names” Acker turns to the literary and philosophical canon to think with and write through. Acker’s work refers to (but never cites) a wide range of canonical thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud who inspire her to question the primacy of rationality and the Cartesian subject. In one of her first novellas Kathy Acker writes: “I’m trying to get away from self-expression but not from personal life. I hate creativity” (Acker 1998, 86) and in her short story New York City in 1979 the character Janey “believes it is necessary to blast open her mind constantly and destroy every particle of memory that she likes” (Acker 1981, 6-7)  Acker’s work rejects the idea that an author should have an original voice, which for her is a bourgeois conception of literature that only serves to support the capitalist “cult” of individuality. For Acker there is no creativity involved in creation. As Wark asserts, “the bourgeois writer is an acquisitive animal. A creature of power, ownership, and control. What it writes, it owns; that which writes is the kind of being that can own. Kathy was a different beast – or beasts” (5). Acker’s interest in anti-creativity stimulates her appropriation of “found” material such as canonical texts, overheard conversations and dreams – for Acker they are all as “real” as any other event. Throughout her work Acker compulsively recounts and repeats events from her life; her mother’s death, painful romantic encounters, unrequited crushes, dreams, gossip, and jobs she did. At the same time, Acker consistently lies about all of those aspects of her life – to the extent that even her date of birth is contested.[1] Treating events of her own life in a similar manner to the texts she plagiarizes, everything is part of Acker’s “anti-creative” project. Her work is sometimes seen as aggressively opposing meaning-making – thanks to her oft-cited mantra of “Get rid of meaning. Now eat your mind.” But Acker’s ambitious rewriting of the literary canon is not simply a postmodern displacement of meaning. Her literary experiments are concerned with procedure, method, and memory.

    One of the ways Acker explored her interest in (and suspicion of) memory was writing “fake autobiography”: a rewriting of her life interwoven with found materials, like conversations she overheard and texts she copied. In her early text “Politics” (1972) for example, she collages conversations between her stripper-colleagues together with scripts she wrote for a live sex show on 42nd Street with (clearly fictional) incestuous lesbian fantasies. In her biography of Acker Chris Kraus suggests that Kathy Acker’s numerous lies must be seen as a fundamental part of both her life and work. She even goes as far as to propose that her consistent lying was a condition for writing:

    Because in a certain sense, Acker lied all the time. She was rich, she was poor, she was the mother of twins, she’d been a stripper for years, a guest editor of Film Comment magazine at the age of fourteen, a graduate student of Herbert Marcuse’s. She lied when it was clearly beneficial to her, and she lied even when it was not. […] But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write? (Kraus 2017, 14)

    In Wark’s recounting of their shared past (Wark and Acker met in Australia in 1995 and embarked on a short affair) she is fully aware of Acker’s self-mythologizing tendencies. Wark fictionalizes their meeting and points to the gaps in her own memory as well as Acker’s habit to treat her life and her literature the same:

    Not everything Kathy ever said to me was—strictly speaking—true. Particularly when we got to New York. It was as if we were inside a Kathy Acker book, written on flesh and city. […] I knew nothing about New York at the time. Anything Kathy told me could be true to me, was true to me. She showed me the New York of myth. We wandered from Central Park toward the East River, to Sutton Place. Sutton Place, she told me, was her childhood home. In the psychogeography of New York, it is certainly a place from which a Kathy Acker should hail. It is in countless movies, from How to Marry a Millionaire to Black Caesar. Lou Reed has a song that mentions not walking there. It’s in Catcher in the Rye; it’s in Great Expectations and My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini—by Kathy Acker—and some of her other books. (33)

    Considering all the ways in which Acker put herself on the line in her work, her body as a performer, autobiographical material, her creation of the persona, makes it possible for Wark to read Acker’s life and work as a spider web of narratives, identities, and concepts. In the early 1970s Acker started publishing her first appropriative texts under the pseudonym “The Black Tarantula” and copying from the Marquis de Sade and a book of portraits of female serial killers. In her work Acker often puts everything she copies in the first person but she did not only steal from other texts, she also stole from her own life. Wark’s construction of a spider web of Ackers takes its cue from Martino Scioliona’s suggestion that Acker’s auto-plagiarism becomes a narrative web in which “Acker always recounted her own life story as if it, too, was a stolen text” (in Wark 2021, 5).

    Weaving a web of Acker’s selves, Wark unwraps herself too, at least the selves that Acker made possible in their affair and in her texts. Wark met Acker in 1995 at a reading in Sydney. At the dinner after the reading the two writers connected and started a short affair. An email correspondence followed their meeting and was published in 2015 as I’m Very Into You: an intimate document of the flirty and intellectual emails they exchanged over a period of a few weeks. Both I’m Very Into You and the memoir part of Philosophy for Spiders reveal how Wark felt seen in her femininity in this meeting with Acker in the 1990s and how this might have informed her recent gender transition. In 1995 Wark wrote in an email to Acker: “There are reaches of me that I can only put in language as feminine, and those reaches exposed themselves to you, felt comfortable next to you sometimes. That doesn’t happen very often” and now in her Philosophy for Spiders Wark says she wanted to escape masculinity and that “reading Kathy again helped to transition” (7). Wark remembers: “who I was starting to be with Kathy. I was starting to be her girlfriend. That concept” (22). In search of more concepts, Wark (re)reads Acker’s complete body of work almost thirty years after their initial meeting in Australia. From Acker’s texts Wark assembles phrases and claims around different concepts like “love,” “capitalism” and “penetration.” In so doing Philosophy for Spiders sketches a web of Acker’s selves along with concepts Wark finds in Acker’s work, providing a glimpse into what might turn out to be a philosophical system.

    Wark rightly points out that Acker’s texts are “studded with philosophical questions” (56) and that these questions predominantly center around desire, subjectivity, form, and the failure of language. Her novel Great Expectations (1982) is exemplary for how Acker’s philosophical mode, if we can detect one, rejects the linearity of logical thinking:

    Stylistically: simultaneous contrasts, extravagancies, incoherences, half-formed misshapen thoughts, lousy spelling, what signifies what? What is the secret of this chaos? (Since there is no possibility, there’s play. Elegance and completely filthy sex fit together. Expectations that aren’t satiated.) Questioning is our mode.” (Acker 1982, 107)

    Acker’s philosophical mode questions hierarchies of knowledge by asking the “big” questions of philosophy as if they were dumb questions. Moreover, this questioning mode is inherently tied to the body, and thus to sex and gender. In her essay “Seeing Gender” (1997 [1995]) Acker reflects on her writing practice and directly responds to the work of “high theorists” like Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. In the essay she looks back on her writing practice, the (gender) politics of plagiarism, and her ambition to find what she called “the languages of the body.” In a typical Ackerian manner, she takes the figure of the young girl ­­– in this essay she uses Alice from Alice in Wonderland –who has yet to discover the limits of her being and knowledge. As a child, the girl wanted to become a pirate – the only way to see the world – but since “I wasn’t a stupid child, I knew that I couldn’t.” Still, she knows what “the pirates know”, namely that in writing and being “I do not see, for there is no I to see” (Acker 1997, 159). Instead, “to see was to be an eye, not an I.” The essay progresses as a theoretical inquiry into gender and the body through Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (1979) and Butler’s reading of that text in Bodies that Matter (1996). Acker’s ambitious quest for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world come together in her observation of the self: this conflation of the eye and the I, consistently destabilizing the second through the first. In Acker’s logic then, a feeling is a concept. This doesn’t mean that experiencing an emotion will directly lead to knowledge, but that to see is a way of knowing. Since Acker’s girls don’t have a language of their own, they can’t know themselves except through feelings. In Don Quixote (1986) Acker writes that “real teaching happens via feelings” (159) and “my feelings’re my brains” (17). Barred entrance to the world of knowledge, the “stupid” girl as philosopher can make sense of her own subjectivity through sensuality, not rationality. Quoting a letter from the Romantic poet John Keats from 1817, Acker reflects in Great Expectations:

    Only sensations. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it exists materially or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty… The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth. I am the more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning – and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be Oh, for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! (Acker 1982, 64)

    Acker rewrites Keats but keeps his opposing two notions of truth here: the reasoned truth of the philosopher and the truth of the artist which, for Keats, can only emerge through sensations and passions, through the imagination. As Wark’s Acker web suggests, Acker is not interested in a mastering feelings with language, rather the opposite: “I feel I feel I feel I have no language, any emotion for me is a prison” (Acker 1982, 24).

    Wark follows Acker in that she lets the intensity of their mutual crush precede the thinking. In the first chapters Wark serves the reader queer sex scenes before she turns to Acker’s philosophy. Both the story of their affair and Wark’s readings of Acker are tied to questions of gender and a dysphoric experience of the body. In “The City of Memory” Wark recalls:

    In our room at the Gramercy, sometimes I was Kathy’s girl. I wanted to watch her strap himself into her cocks. The leather harness was all black straps and shiny buckles. Its odor an appealing blend of leather, lube, and sweat. Kathy did not want my help with it, but she took her time. Choosing cocks. Inserting a cock in the harness, another in his cunt. Strapping on the harness without either falling back out again. Even after a few drinks Kathy was deft at this. I Just lay back and admired her technique, his presence. (35)

    Using this descriptive mode for a “phenomenology of the body” (81) allows Wark to narrate Acker’s genderqueerness too, underscored by the use of alternating he/she pronouns. Wark shows how remembering their encounter will always also be a rewriting of the meeting. Throughout the book Wark’s receptiveness and passivity are important–in bed but also in their shared thinking: “She had philosophical questions. I could only describe things” (22). In Philosophy for Spiders Wark connects Acker’s multiplication of the authorial self to gender and what she calls a “penetration theory” (92). Acker’s appropriative and autoplagiaristic writing becomes a practice of “selving: reproducing self-ness” (54). Wark shows how thinking about gender in terms of penetration destabilizes a coherent sense of the self as gendered. This is also a textual concern because reading and writing turn out to be processes of penetration too. In Reverse Cowgirl, Wark finds that “the great asymmetry of human being” is the division between the penetrators and the penetrated and this asymmetry allows for trans identifications:

    If I could not know who I was from the world touching me from the outside, prodding ‘til I felt a self; then I would become one by being touched from the inside. Edward’s cock would press my insides against their boundaries, pushing what would become, when pressed, against skin from the inside, a being I could call, a being I could call I. This coming into being, this inside out subjectivity, would change things between us. (Wark 2020, 53)

    Both the penetrator and the penetrated are “involuntary agents” but allow for different experiences of gender. In Reverse Cowgirl penetrative sex makes it possible for Wark to feel a “temporary non-masculinity” (Wark 2020, 176). In this space of “non-existence” the body comes first, negotiating power dynamics and identity through a relationality of being penetrated, penetrating and penetrable. Acker too was interested in penetration, particularly the penetrable body as a site of knowledge. In her experimentation Acker soughtliterary forms for “the languages of the body” (Acker 1997, 143) by way of masturbatory writing, bodybuilding and writing pornography. Foregrounding the body creates an articulation of gender as an asymmetry of sex rather than a binary position. This allows Wark to read the bodies in Acker’s work as “potentially trans:”

    Just as the eye and I, or sensation and desire, differ, so too the fucker and the fucked. This asymmetry of sex might be just one of the zones in which to think about gender, although in the Acker-text the asymmetries of sex acts can arise in all sorts of ways out of all sorts of bodies. There’s no essential diagram of gendered bodies. In that sense all Acker bodies are potentially trans. (90)

    Bodies are trans here to the extent that they are assumed as not-cis. Still, assuming that desire always destabilizes sexual difference doesn’t necessarily illuminate our understanding of what gender is, because as Wark writes in Reverse Cowgirl “there is never any symmetry to what wants” (26). To desire is to not know or understand that desire. Both in Reverse Cowgirl and in Philosophy for Spiders, Wark is interested in the way penetration potentiates a different experience of the body and self-consciousness: “being-penetrated creates a node around which every other difference— sensations, selves, genders—can disperse” (Wark 2021, 91).

    In Acker’s logic, penetration centers the self and makes thinking possible. In Wark’s words, to be penetrable and penetrated is “to have an axis for sensation in the world” as opposed to those who do the penetrating. They “act as subjects in the world but they don’t react, they don’t let the world in much” which leads Wark to claim that to penetrate is “just not that interesting” (92).  The question left unanswered here is: uninteresting for whom? And how are we expected to view Acker’s role of the penetrator in the sex scenes Wark describes? An obvious answer would be that switching positions allows access to both experiences but in this book being penetrated appears to be the privileged position because the penetrable body has access to a specific form of knowledge as it “comes to know itself, not its penetrator” (153).

    For Acker, the question of penetration is a problem of language. In her early text Breaking through memories into desire (2019 [1973]) Acker asks: “Language. How do I, fucked, use the language? I don’t want to be doing this writing” (381) and in My Mother: Demonology (1993) Acker writes that “the more I try to describe myself, the more I find a hole” (in Wark, 154). A temporary centralized subject emerges in the destabilizing encounter of sexual penetration. This is where Wark finds a first philosophical concept in Acker’s work: a phenomenology of the body or what she calls Acker’s “phenomenology without the subject” (54).

    Wark’s reading of Acker’s “languages of the body” as low theory raises the crucial question of how sex relates to knowledge.  To theorize through sex is to choose confusion over rationality, non-knowledge over knowledge and to problematize the subject’s relation to knowledge. Sexuality clearly interests Acker, not necessarily because it precedes patriarchal discourse or cannot translate the experience of sexuality to language, but because sex does not affirm a self or one’s personal pleasures. For Acker, sex is a crucial site of negativity: her texts reveal the failure of language to express identity and introduces sex as a question of the (incoherence) of subjecthood. Sex is the moment in which the self is destabilized, displaced once more, and thus where knowledge breaks down.[2]

    Acker’s recurring character Janey fails to be a sovereign subject in the patriarchal structures imposed on her. Her obsession with sex ruins her education as a proper young woman because rationalized knowledge is inaccessible to a “stupid” young girl like Janey. Her failure to know how to use language, how to behave properly, how to be, illustrates the typical young girl’s experience of inhabiting available structures of knowing and their limits. Stupidity in Acker’s work is not necessarily non-knowledge or absence of knowledge, it is more an investigation of the unknowability of the subject herself and the limits of her language. Avital Ronell has pointed out how Acker’s texts explore the emancipatory potential of stupidity.[3] Acker’s characters embrace stupidity in that they refuse knowledge in the form it is given to them. In her book Stupidity (2002) Ronell proposes to take stupidity seriously as a philosophical position because it does not “stand in the way of wisdom” (5) and asks how it can be turned into a productive category of thought and as a locus for the unmaking of language – one of Acker’s literary concerns too. Stupidity, Ronell writes, is a “political problem hailing from the father; it combines with conservative desires for stability, comfort, and authenticity, but it also opens up other spaces of knowing” (16). Wark makes a similar point:

    A philosophy of emotions, like a philosophy of language or sensations, has to start from doubt, uncertainly, confusion – with nonknowledge. “My emotional limbs stuck out as if they were broken and unfixable.” (GE 58) And: “I don’t think I’m crazy. There’s just no reality in my head and my emotions fly all over the place.” (63)

    The problem of the speaking subject in Acker’s work becomes a project of asking the “stupid” questions. This way, Acker’s project is concerned with a philosophical position from which to think “stupidly.” Reading Acker’s texts as philosophy should therefore not be a question of what ideological tendencies or feminist politics are being thought or taught, but a much narrower question: how to establish a thinking self without relying on the Cartesian model of the subject. Acker asks: “But what if I isn’t the subject, but the object?” (in Wark, 142).

    As her literary experiments started to take shape in the early 1970s, Acker sought words and ideas to understand what she was doing. Considering her radical decentralizing approach to identity, Acker found a home in the thinkers of poststructuralism. But any attempt to uncover intentionality in her work is tricky because she successfully mystified her own methods and theoretical influences in interviews. In an interview with her publisher Sylvère Lotringer, Acker claims she started to understand her experimental writings strategies when she got to know poststructuralist thought through Lotringer’s publishing house Semiotext(e). Interestingly, Acker places herself on the same level as the French philosophers she admired and was even surprised they didn’t know her work:

    I was like a death-dumb-and-blind person for years, I just did what I did but had no way of telling anyone about it, or talking about it. And then when I read ANTI-OEDIPUS and Foucault’s work, suddenly I had this whole language at my disposal. I could say, Hi! And that other people were doing the same thing. I remember thinking, why don’t they know me? I know exactly what they’re talking about. And I could go farther. (Acker 1991, 10)

    Whether Acker really was not aware of “French theory” before meeting Lotringer is disputed by Chris Kraus, but the typically poststructuralist concern with identity and desire through the fragmentation or decentralization of the “I” is present from her earliest published work in the 1970s. In 1975 Acker did take her place among the philosophers: at the “Schizo-culture” conference Lotringer organized with French thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard as well as American artists and writers like Richard Foreman, Philip Glass, and Acker’s literary idol William Burroughs. Lotringer’s introduction of the “then unknown radical philosophies of post-’68 France” (as MIT Press retroactively describes the event) to the American avant-garde marked a shift in how Acker relates to theory in her work. Acker’s poststructuralist tendencies were a perfect fit for the academic zeitgeist and appear to have contributed to the “meteoric rise of her academic reputation” (Punday 2003). Her texts proved popular among academics who aimed to lay bare the ways in which Acker engaged with theory: in her rewriting of film scripts, one might find a reflection of Baudrillard’s ideas; her wild science fiction novel Empire of the Senseless must be the result of reading Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. But as the Acker scholar Tyler Bradway recently pointed out, these theoretical readings of Acker “obscure her ultimate frustration with the way that these discourses, particularly deconstruction, made her writing too narrowly readable, rendering it ironically subordinate to and exemplary of an external master discourse” (Bradway 2017, 106). Still, Acker’s typically fragmented and “unreadable” texts continue to resist such theoretical interpretations – hence Wark’s interest in reading her as low theory.

    To render the text unreadable, to think non-intelligibly, writing stupidly, obviously implies a questioning of the distinction between false and true knowledge. Embracing stupidity as a philosophical mode blurs the line between true and false statements, but also informs Acker’s ambition to develop a non-authoritarian use of language. In 1984 Acker writes in Art Forum:

    I write. I want to write I want my writing to be meaningless I want my writing to be stupid. But the language I use isn’t what I want and make, it’s what’s given to me. Language is always a community. Language is what I know and is my cry.” (Acker 1984)

    Writing the immediacy of thought through a nontransparent use of language – language as a “cry” rather than expressive of an idea – leads to a “false clarity” (Harper 1987) and in Acker’s case results in a logic that sounds consciously contradictory and finds a ground in excessive affect. Acker’s writing of sex and romantic crushes seems personal and very intimate but the feelings she describes are not “hers” in the way that they belong to Kathy Acker, they are taken from or inspired by the texts she reads while writing. Wark proposes that in Acker’s work, “emotions, feelings, affect, might be keys to a certain kind of understanding that is subjective but not necessarily individuated” and that “feelings can become concepts” (63). The question of desire and self-reflection in narrative is crucial for Acker. In Great Expectations (1982) Acker writes that “narrative is an emotional moving” and in Eurydice in the Underworld (1997) that “as if reality was emotional, I perceived solely by feeling” (in Wark, 63). Acker works consistently against the idea that feeling opposes knowing. We can “know” our feelings but the feelings are not pieces of knowledge themselves, at least not in the kind of “high theory for whom Plato is daddy” (Wark, 54).

    To understand how Acker’s texts both work with and reject philosophy as high theory, it is worth considering her contribution to the Lotringer’s Schizo-culture conference, which was neither theoretical nor particularly literary. At the conference Acker presented translation exercises: Janey’s “Persian Poems” which would later become part of Janey’s education from age ten to fourteen in Blood and Guts in High School (1984). The translation exercise is short but unambiguous about Janey’s position as object: “to have Janey / to buy Janey / to want Janey / to see Janey / to come Janey / to beat up Janey” (1984, 84). In these evidently false translations Acker reaffirms her concern with how language constrains rather than liberates. The only possible agency for Acker’s recurring protagonist Janey is to surrender to the position of object. In these translation exercises and throughout Acker’s work, Janey is doomed to be the predicate of the sentence, the object to the subject. The first numbered lines are succeeded by a translated line that overflows, exceeding the initial format as it turns into a passionate address:

    5. The streets are black. You haven’t fucked for a long time. You forget how incredibly sensitive you are. You hurt. Hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt. You meet the nicest guy in the world and you fall in love with him you do and you manage to get into his house and you stand before him. A girl who puts herself out on a line. A girl who asks for trouble and forgets that she has feelings and doesn’t even remember what fucking’s about or how she’s supposed to go about it because she wasn’t fucked in so long and now she’s naïve and stupid. So like a dope she sticks herself in front of the guy: here I am; understood: do you want me? No, thank you. She did it. There she is. What does she do now? Where does she go? She was a stupid girl: she went and offered herself, awkwardly, to someone who didn’t want her. That’s not stupid. The biggest pain in the world is feeling but sharper is the pain of the self.

    6. Is there any fresh meat? (Acker 1984, 88-92)

    The turn from the interpellating “you” to the descriptive “a girl” signals a shift from an intimate address to a distant observation of the girl’s being as defined by rejection. The “there she is” is characteristic of the way the figure of the girl features as an ontological negation throughout Acker’s work; she momentarily comes into being through an encounter with lack, in this case simple and clear rejection, and thus when she starts questioning her own desires. These painful desires reveal how feelings are a problem for Acker’s subject: “the biggest pain in the world is feeling but sharper is the pain of the self.” In Wark’s reading the only agency Acker’s girls have is their “amorality and ability to exploit their own desirability” (151):

    Girls are, among other things, objects that power perceives as a thing to desire. As if they had no subjectivity. Rather than claiming to be subjects, girls in the Acker-web escape into unknowability, as far as power’s gaze is concerned. Their bodies may be penetrable, and that is the function assigned them as objects, but otherwise they can choose not to be known at all. The girl too is not an identity but an event, something produced by chance and fluid time. Lulu: “you can’t change me cause there’s nothing to change. I’ve never been.” (151)

    Acker’s radical determinism about the symbolic absence of woman in language and literature generated a wide range of feminist interpretations of her work, particularly as being exemplary of écriture féminine by studying Acker’s experimental literary form as a critique of the male canon (which it undoubtedly is) and her sex writing as expressive of a female voice. Even if Acker’s texts themselves appear to reject academic interpretations, Acker herself was a fanatic reader of philosophy, including “French feminists” like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Helène Cixous. As she writes in “Seeing Gender”, philosophy pointed her towards knowledge she had experienced intuitively herself, namely that “woman” does not exist: “She has no essence, for all that comes into being, according to Plato, partakes of form. I knew this as a child, before I had ever read Plato, Irigaray, Butler. That, as a girl, I was outside the world. I wasn’t. I had no name. For me, language was being.” (Acker 1997, 161) Acker’s concern with the linguistic “I” as a being that always lacks, and thus must copy if she is to speak, also reveals the role that sex plays to understand the failure of language.

    Wark is not the first to suspect that Acker’s interest in the immediacy of language and sex can function as a form of theorizing. Martina Sciolino pointed out in 1990 that we might read Acker’s fiction as performative philosophy: “A writer of innovative narratives that converse with theorists as diverse in their constructions of desire as Georges Bataille and Andrea Dworkin, Acker creates fictions that are theories-in-performance” (Sciolino 1990, 438). Acker’s “theories-in-performance” reveal different ways in which lines can be drawn between the author and her theoretical material. To see how this kind of “performative philosophy” can function outside of an already established philosophical discourse, it might be helpful to turn to Chris Kraus again who reads the diaries of the French philosopher Simone Weil as philosophical investigations. For Kraus, the only condition for a text to be philosophical, to read these “personal” texts beyond memoir, is that the text must be concerned with rhetoric: “In Weil’s philosophy, just like in narrative or phone sex, it’s not the story that we’re really hearing, it is the fact and act of telling it” (Kraus 2004, 77).

    Considering the significant reception of Acker’s texts in the world of “high theory” and Wark’s reaction to these readings through the concept of low theory, the question of the intentionality of Acker’s project lingers. It is complicated because, for Acker, the subject always emerges as a being of language for whom no “genuine” agency is possible; in Acker’s world agency is limited to being a receptacle. To do is always a being done to. In this sense, it might not be particularly helpful to look at the influence of theory on Acker’s work because it assumes a text outside of, or a “before” reading theory, while Acker’s writing practice itself is a reading practice as much as it is a writing practice.

    Leslie Dick has observed how Acker’s writing functioned as an extension of her reading, that “her plagiarism was a way of reading, or re-reading, appropriating and customizing what she read, writing herself, so to speak, into the fabric of the original text” (Scholder et al. 2006, 1). Her writing consists of readings of texts that provoke her reaction, evoke a fantasy or stimulate her to rewrite the texts she is consuming. In this sense, her writing has always been a form of critical writing. In Learning for the Revolution (2011), Spencer Dew reads Acker’s work as instructive, labelling it a “pedagogical project,” and Martina Sciolino describes Acker’s work as “materially didactic” (437). Harper (1987) specifies Acker’s critical project further as “less a conscious political philosophy than a pursuit of the immediate the unregulated present” but argues that Acker “consciously participates in the poststructuralist project of the liberation of the signifier from fixed meaning” (47).  In Philosophy for Spiders, Wark smartly avoids the question of intentionality by emphasizing the inseparability of reading and writing and how that relation creates subjectivity in the text. Wark frames this as a relation of passivity and, again, penetration:

    The Acker-field is a sequence of books about—no, not about. They are not about anything. They don’t mean, they do. What do they do? Get rid of the self. Among other things. For writer but also reader. If you let them in. You have to want it to fuck you. It happens when there’s a hole. Rather than say one reads, one could say that one is booked. A body can be booked a bit like the way it can be fucked. A body uses its agency to give access to itself to another. A body lets go of its boundedness, its self, its selfishness, and through opening to sensation disappears into the turbulent real. (156)

    For Wark the reader as well as the writer is a hole, ready to be penetrated by other texts. Not that the author has no agency at all but in writing she is also being written. This is how Acker’s philosophy can be understood in terms of stupidity and unknowledge; it rejects the idea that anything we think we know or want is “ours.” Acker’s naïve lyrical I is also a displacement of the position of the philosopher.

    This penetrative relation between self and text is also what Wark scrutinizes with Acker’s words in Philosophy for Spiders. Wark’s reading of Acker is clearly this kind of “penetrated writing:” Wark herself does not emerge as a particularly original thinker here but instead lets Acker do the thinking. For Acker the impossibility to speak as an authentic self is at the center of her work and Wark’s proposition to let Acker talk to herself creates an interesting encounter of voices but is oftentimes awkward, especially when the reading lacks interpretative strength. Wark offers us Ackers on a plate but does not interpret this group of texts. The voices in Wark’s web of Ackers sometimes sound detached, as isolated sound bites. Wark appears to share the view of the artist Vanessa Place, who she cites early in the book: “citation is always castration: the author’s lack of authority made manifest by the phallus, presence of another authority” (7) but Wark does not really do the work of using the citations to create a different text. This makes it at times difficult to feel where Philosophy for Spiders is going with this mapping of concepts and raises the question what is exactly at stake in this low-theoretical reading of Acker. Is it to make way for other, more detailed, theoretical readings of Acker’s work, or for Wark to create a personal encounter with Acker’s texts? Both are of course possible and fair reasons to write the book, but the wide range of concepts and citations at times are puzzling when they are not brought together in a reading.

    The sex scenes in the book offer a way to read the book: Wark’s reading of Acker lets itself be penetrated by Acker. The meeting of texts as the meeting of bodies:

    Maybe gender is transitive in another sense. Between any two bodies is a difference. Maybe that difference is gender even when it is not, actually, gender. It’s what top and bottom imply, a difference. Maybe the genders could be transitive verbs, and can be applied in any situation where part of a person acts on another through that gender as an action: Kathy manned me. (29)

    This difference that is not sexual difference leads Wark to formulate an “asymmetrical” theory of penetration which can be mapped onto gendered bodies: “the body penetrating is often (but not always) male and the body penetrated is often (but not always) female” (93). Wark’s interest in penetration and penetrability sounds almost instructive when she tells us that “everyone ought to know how to top: ethics” (22). The lesson for the reader here seems to be that these dynamics in sex reveal “gender as an action” which in turn affirms the action of passive and active in terms of feminine and masculine – at least Wark herself when Acker “manned” her. Wark’s reading of Acker’s texts as making space for transness relies on this evocation of the “dysphoric body” and its needs and desires, “a category that maybe overlaps a lot with the trans body but is not ever identical to it” (178). Wark develops three “philosophies” of Acker in the book. The first is a “null philosophy” centered around the question of the self. Wark finds this philosophy in Acker’s questions around emotions, memory, and exteriority. The second philosophy is the encounter with the other, with sections ranging from “library” and “rape” to “fathers” and “death.” The third philosophy that Wark discerns is concerned with capitalism and Acker’s questions around sex work, the commercialization of art, and Acker’s fame.

    Acker’s legacy has had many faces. First as punk and transgressive in the NYC art and performance world, then the critical reception with poststructuralism in the 1980s and 1990s and today we are seeing another one of Acker’s afterlives in contemporary (auto)fiction, for which she functions as some sort of precursor, like in the works of Olivia Laing and Kate Zambreno.[4] Perhaps together with the publication of the emails I’m Very Into You these books stimulate the cultivation of Acker’s persona. In her blurb for Philosophy for Spiders, Sarah Schulman asserts that Wark’s “highly personal sex memoir evolves the growing ‘My Kathy’ genre in trans directions.”  One recent publication in this supposed ‘My Kathy’ genre is Olivia Laing’s novel Crudo (2018), whose fictional narrator is called “Kathy” and bears some characteristics of what we know of Acker’s life but at the same time functions as a placeholder for Laing to talk about developments in her own personal life: her approaching marriage to an older well-known poet during a summer holiday in an Italian villa. This kind of autobiographical writing would undoubtedly be the classic bourgeois novel form for Acker, despite the appropriation of the voice of “Kathy.”[5] In The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012) Schulman positions Acker as a central figure in an art scene that was “radically queer” and describes how Acker’s fiction “faded from view” due to gentrification: “[H]er context is gone. Not that she was a gay male icon, but rather that she was a founder and product of an oppositional class of artists, those who spoke back to the system rather than replicating its vanities” (Schulman 2012, 53). Even though Schulman is referring to a post-1980s gentrification, we might ask if the growing ‘My Kathy’ genre indicates a new kind of Acker reception. Now that Acker is no longer “fading from view” because of gentrification, might her renewed popularity point towards a new kind of gentrification? To see how Acker’s persona is being used today raises the question if she, as the typical transgressive and outcast writer, functions as some sort of token for radical literature in personal memoir and autofiction writing. And where can we situate Philosophy for Spiders in the web of Kathy Acker’s afterlives?

    In the afterword Wark claims that she wants to “push her back in the direction of a minor literature – trans lit: the writing of and by and for trans people” (170). Not to retroactively label Acker’s person as trans, but to think of her texts as a writing “among those for whom being cis gendered is not their state, their homeland, their family, their fantasy” (170). Wark wants to make space for Acker in a genre she calls “trans girl lit.” Wark’s own autofictional undertaking in Reverse Cowgirl might give us a clue as to how an author can be the “involuntary agent” of her own writing when Wark, high on shrooms, reflects on the narrative web she has created à la Acker: “Reverse Cowgirl made sense to me, finally, as a sort of autofiction account of someone who was trans all along and did not know it yet. In this case, even the writer didn’t know the shape of the web she made” (175). Like in Acker’s appropriative writing, other people’s texts have authorial agency and Wark’s own life is reframed as a web of unconscious narrative turns. Penetrating or penetrated, neither the life story nor the texts are in the author’s hands.

    Now that the reputation and position of Acker’s work is moving towards canonization and perhaps even gentrification, can we view Wark’s book indeed as a pushback against the canonization of Acker? Wark’s reading of Acker as “minor literature” provokes a shift in the reception of her work in two ways: to consider Acker as a theorist, which I’m sure will bring about various new Acker readings, as well as to pose the question of the “non-cisness” of Acker’s work.

    As such, Wark’s move does secure Acker’s radical work from being completely assimilated into a literary world where bourgeois story lines, plot development and stable subject-positions still reign – even if Wark does this work in the very contemporary self-reflective autofictional mode. On a more theoretical level, Wark’s reading of Acker is slightly opaque in a style we might call “after Kathy Acker,” namely dealing with (philosophical) knowledge as a question of subjectivation and sex. The knowledge in the text does not belong to the author-philosopher or the reader when the theorist refuses to engage with her material in a straightforward top-bottom relationship. Perhaps “theory” as a label is even outdated. Wark writes, with Acker:

    There’s no consistent and self-same subject that can be the author of theory from on high, and who could survey history, discover its hidden concept, and announce its destiny. “Since all acts, including expressive acts, are interdependent, paradise cannot be an absolute. Theory doesn’t work.” (138)

    As “switchy philosophers” Wark and Acker want to be topped and penetrated by the texts they encounter but in so doing they do not get rid of mastery completely. It cannot be denied that in the top/bottom difference Wark explores, the bottom has power too and can even be a form of mastery in itself,[6] especially in this case, when producing a new text. This is perhaps how the genre of low theory can function as a form of mastery as well. Even if we accept that low theory is accessible and not pretentious like classic high theory, it imposes a reading that is hard to object to. Whereas the critical reader can oppose high theory with arguments, low theory does not allow for a similar debate because it already preempts theoretical objections. Using the terms of penetration theory we might say that low theory works with the power of the bottom. A seduction that can hardly be countered – surely not with theoretical arguments. And this seems to be what Wark has learned from Acker and Philosophy for Spiders shows in a smart way: to think about and with the penetrable body as a site of power and (self)knowledge. In Kathy Acker’s texts the lyrical I as theorist emerges as an inarticulate subject who cries stupid phrases and expresses illogical desires: a girl. And even if “theory doesn’t work,” Acker’s girls and Wark’s web of Ackers remind us that as long as there is feeling, there will be thinking.

    _____

    Tessel Veneboer is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Ghent University. She specializes in queer theory and experimental literature. She is currently working on a dissertation on Kathy Acker (supported by the Research Foundation Flanders).

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] Library of Congress gives her birth date as 1948 while most obituaries used 1944 as date of birth.

    [2] In her book What is Sex (2017), philosopher Alenka Zupančič takes psychoanalysis as a philosophical problem and proposes that sex is the missing link between epistemology and ontology: “sex is messy because it appears at the point of the breaking down of the signifying consistency, or logic (its point of impossibility), not because it is in itself illogical and messy: its messiness is the result of the attempt to invent a logic at the very point of the impasse of such logic. Its “irrationality” is the summit of its efforts to establish a sexual rationale” (What IS Sex, 43).

    [3] See “Kathy Goes to Hell: On the Irresolvable Stupidity of Acker’s Death” by Avital Ronell in Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006).

    [4] See Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018) and Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests (2019).

    [5] In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer Acker explains that she “always hated the bourgeois story-line because the real content of that novel is the property structure of reality. It’s about ownership. That isn’t my world-reality. My world isn’t about ownership. In my world people don’t even remember their names, they aren’t sure of their sexuality, they aren’t sure if they can define their genders.” (Acker 1991, 23).

    [6] In Homos (1995) Leo Bersani shows how S/M relations demonstrate the power of the bottom over the top and as such S/M practices have “helped to empower a position traditionally associated with female sexuality” (82). In light of Wark’s “penetration theory” this would mean that the position of the bottom is not necessarily female or powerless because for Bersani “the reversibility of roles in S/M does allow everyone to get his or her moment in the exalted position of Masculinity (and, if everyone can be a bottom, no one owns the top or dominant position), but this can be a relatively mild challenge to social hierarchies of power” (86).

    _____

    Works Cited

    • Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1984. New York: Grove Press.
    • —. Bodies of Work: Essays. 1997. London: Serpent’s Tail.
    • —. Don Quixote. 1986. New York: Grove Press.
    • —. Great Expectations. 1982. New York: Grove Press.
    • —. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. 1991 New York: Semiotext(e).
    • —. “Models of our present.” Art Forum. February 1984.
    • —. My Mother: Demonology. 1993. New York: Grove Press.
    • —. Portrait of an Eye. 1982. New York: Grove Press.
    • Bersani, Leo. 1996. Homos. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    • Bradway, Tyler. 2017. Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Gajoux, Justin. Ed. 2019. Acker 1971-1975. Paris: Editions Ismael.
    • Harper, Glenn A. 1987. “The Subversive Power of Sexual Difference in The Work of Kathy        Acker.” Substance 16, no. 3: 44-56.
    • Kraus, Chris. 2017. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Allen Lane.
    • Punday, Daniel. 2003. Narrative After Deconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press.
    • Ronell, Avital. 2002. Stupidity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
    • Scholder, Amy, Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, eds. 2006. Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker. London: Verso Books.
    • Schulman, Sarah. 2012. The Gentrification of the Mind. Berkely: California University Press.
    • Sciolino, Martina. 1990. “Kathy Acker and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism.” College English 52 (4), 437-445. http://aquila.usm.edu/fac_pubs/7342.
    • Scott, Gail, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, eds. 2000. Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Toronto: Coach House Books.
    • Wark, Mckenzie. 2020. Reverse Cowgirl. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
    • Wark, Mckenzie. 2021. Philosophy for Spiders: on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker. Durham: Duke University Press.

     

  • Nasrin Olla — Metamorphic Humanity (Review of Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason)

    Nasrin Olla — Metamorphic Humanity (Review of Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason)

    Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

    by Nasrin Olla

    This review has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.

    I

    While the human has always been the unstable and troubled ground of humanistic inquiry, one can’t help feeling that in our neoliberal and digital age, the very tectonics of that ground are shifting. Everywhere one looks, objects of technology are becoming phantom limbs of the human body, producing sensations of attachment, whilst remaining detachable. Alongside these spectral appendages, neoliberal forms of reason do much to encourage students, citizens, and workers to think of themselves not simply as producers of capital, but as human-capital. Today, we are faced with multiple scenes in which the human and non-human meet at a vanishing point. What forms of historical memory emerge at such a vanishing point? What modes of reading and critical attention does such a metamorphic humanity demand of us? Contemporary critical theory has provided a plethora of terms and concepts—posthuman, transhuman, cyborg, non-human agent, vibrant matter—in an attempt to answer these questions. Joining these debates, Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, translated from the French by Laurent Dubois, offers an alternative genealogy of this current predicament.

    “In a world set on objectifying everybody and every living thing in the name of profit,” writes Mbembe in a recent article entitled, ‘The Age of Humanism is Ending,’ “the erasure of the political by capital is the real threat. The transformation of the political into business raises the risk of the elimination of the very possibility of politics. Whether civilization can give rise at all to any form of political life is the problem of the 21st century” (Mbembe 2015). First published in France in 2013, Critique of Black Reason is an insightful and poetic reflection on this problem of political life in our neoliberal times. Best known to an anglophone audience as the author of On the Postcolony and the essay “Necropolitics,” Mbembe sets out an ambitious project of thinking through what it means to share the world, to live alongside one an-other, and to be in-common, in the midst of a world that increasingly understands all forms of relation through a market orientated metric.

    Over the last twelve years, the pathbreaking work of Wendy Brown, Michel Feher, and David Harvey has charted the emergence of neoliberal forms of reason as they undo the basic tenets of Western democracy and reduce all forms of value to an economic metric.[i] This work has been indispensable in providing a language to trace the emergence of that new formation of the human  that Michel Foucault aptly dubbed homo oeconomicus. Much of this work has tried to illustrate what is new about neoliberalism. Harvey, through a Marxist analysis, has focused on the political-economic development of a global neoliberal order. While Brown and Feher, leaning on a Foucaultian apparatus, have conceived of neoliberalism as a political rationality which insidiously expands into all quarters of life. In an attempt to illustrate the way neoliberalism is distinct and novel in its corrosive tactics, Brown, Harvey, and Feher’s work has tended to pay far less attention to the way neoliberalism borrows from the oppressive racialized tactics of the 20th century. What does neoliberalism co-opt from the logics of racism, colonialism, and slavery? What continuities exist between the tactics of race thinking, and neoliberal reason? How is racism today bolstered by a neoliberal agenda?[ii] It is precisely such questions that animate Critique of Black Reason.

    In the opening pages of Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe describes the way neoliberalism, with its digital technologies, extends and supplements the borders of the human. Mbembe argues that neoliberal forms of reason give rise to a reality in which there is “little distinction remaining between psychic reflexes and technological reflexes,” and where the “subject is plastic and perpetually called on to reconfigure itself in relation to the artifacts of the age” (Mbembe 2017a: 3-4). He describes our era as one in which the human is not simply a producer of things, code, or machines, but emerges as a “human-thing, human-machine, human-code,” effectively a “human-in-flux” (4). But if in the age of the digital and neoliberal we find that the human is undergoing a transformation (becoming something other) we need not think that this process is unprecedented. Rather, Mbembe argues, this transformation is prefigured and haunted by the history of slavery and colonialism, through which black bodies vacillated between a commodity-form and a human being.

    This history began with the Atlantic slave trade, but did not end there. Mbembe argues that the slave trade produced black humanity as “human-merchandise, human-metal, and human-money” (180). For Mbembe, this experience of fluctuating between a human and an object is the defining feature of black life in the modern world. He describes the black body as “…the only human in the modern order whose skin has been transformed into the form and spirit of merchandise—the living crypt of capital” (6). Mbembe’s attention to the dehumanizing capacity of race is in sync with Alexander Weheliye’s recent argument, in Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human, that race is not well understood as a “biological or cultural classification,” but as “a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (4). Mbembe’s book provides an original contribution to debates around post-humanism, bio-politics, and neoliberalism by foregrounding “the gesture of race that, notably in the case of people of African origin, consists of dissolving human beings into things, objects, and merchandise,” (Mbembe 2017a:11) and suggesting that contemporary regimes of power, which reconfigure the human and the nonhuman, resemble this history in which blackness was placed in the zone of the infrahuman.

    Today, Mbembe argues we are faced with an extension of a condition which modernity reserved for black bodies. Provocatively, Mbembe terms this contemporary induction of wider humanity into the living crypt of capital: the “becoming black of the world” (7). For Mbembe, the becoming black of the world is not a dead end. On the contrary, it occasions a return to and reexamination of black life in modernity in order to ask: how did black life survive a history of objectification and death-in-life? What forms of imaginative escape and creative reversal did it develop? And in what ways are critiques of race thinking and colonialism particularly useful in our neoliberal times?

    For Mbembe, ours is a moment in which animism, neoliberalism, and capitalism are merging. Animism, the projection of life onto inanimate objects, is everywhere present in an age of digital technologies. For example, when digital technologies are endowed with human like qualities: voices, faces, and genders. Or in the world of augmented reality gaming where gamers follow, chase, and trace life-like digital projections in the physical world. Animism is also present in corporate culture: where we find corporations seeking to redefine themselves as persons in order to access rights traditionally reserved for human-persons.[iii] Alongside the rise of animism, we find that in neoliberal culture humans are increasingly objectified. The neoliberal subject thinks of herself as a kind of micro-corporation, and increasingly values herself in terms traditionally reserved for inanimate entities (such as market-oriented metrics, numerical ratings etc.). The neoliberal subject, Mbembe argues, must turn herself “into viable merchandise” that can be “put up for sale” (4). Lastly, Mbembe suggests, ours is an era in which capitalism does not simply exploit workers, but abandons them. Capital does not need workers to function: increasingly their labour can be replaced by artificial forms of intelligence, and digitized platforms. Such abandoned subjects are condemned to live their lives in the short-run and must constantly adapt to the demands of a changing market place.

    In Critique of Black Reason Mbembe reads this contemporary metamorphosis of the human alongside black diasporic history, asking: Is the animism of our times comparable to the necromantic animism of colonial domination? In what ways does the so called ‘primitive’ animism of pre-colonial African cultures (which animated the lifeless as a form of survival, escape, and self-invention) relate to contemporary forms of animism? In what ways does the expulsion of the black (le nègre) from the category of the human prefigure the dehumanization of abandoned subjects today? How does the metamorphic figure of the slave haunt our neoliberal era?

    Readers looking for one answer to these questions will be disappointed. The book does not proceed by offering a set of problems and a corresponding set of easy solutions. Rather, in Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers us a set of maps through which we might locate our present moment. On the one hand, Mbembe maps the fantasies, delusions, desires, and unreason that have propelled centuries of racism and, on the other hand, the alternative approaches to life, death, and being-in-common that emerge from traditions of anti-racist critique. The aim of these maps is not to produce an account of ‘what actually happened in the past,’ nor do they aim to produce a history of ideas. Rather, Mbembe focuses on those moments in the past that bear some resemblance to our present moment: those forms of power, modes of subjectivity, and practices of critique that might offer us ways of naming and escaping our present. Some readers will no doubt interpret Mbembe’s relation to the past as presentist, and in some senses this is true. Critique of Black Reason is not a book that accepts traditional demarcations between the present and the past. Rather, Mbembe pays attention to those parts of the past that will not be buried, and that are constantly resurrected in our present moment. The epigraph that opens the book, taken from Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, well describes the ghostly history that Mbembe returns too: “These heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of” (1). Mbembe’s writing attempts to delve into the darkest moments of the past in order to see the present in a different light;[iv] thus he describes his writing as “a sort of reminiscence, half solar and half lunar, half day and half night” (8).[v]

    Each chapter offers a set of historical situations and a set of concepts that navigate these settings. Concepts are not hierarchically presented but are horizontally interlinked. As the reader moves through the book, it becomes clear that the book does not start or end with one definitive conceptual framework or historical example, but creates constellations of multiple settings and concepts. In his excellent translator’s introduction, Laurent Dubois describes this writing style as cartographic: “What Mbembe offers us here is a cartography in two senses: a map of a terrain sedimented by centuries of history, and an invitation to find ourselves within this terrain so that we might choose a path through it—and perhaps even beyond it” (ix). The effect of this cartographical method is that in the end, Mbembe does not provide the reader with any final political orientation. Rather, he encourages readers to look for “resonances and interferences” between historically situated modes of thought, and pick our own paths through the deep complexity of our present moment (Mbembe 2015).

    Throughout the book, the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work is present.[vi] Indeed, Mbembe’s cartographical style is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s call in A Thousand Plateaus to: “Make a map, not a tracing” (12).[vii] For Deleuze and Guattari, a tracing is a ready-made shape or structure that explains a desire or gives meaning to an object; a tracing tends to privilege one master concept or example and reproduce it onto the world. In contrast, a map aims to be open, and to move in more than one direction simultaneously. To make a map is to connect different forms of thinking and frameworks in order to allow several stories, examples, and concepts to interact non-hierarchically. Mapping is also an attempt to encourage the reader to participate in the process of working through problems, concepts, and examples. To create a map is always to invite readers to find themselves, their own worlds, and situated knowledge within the authors account. Hence Rosi Braidotti, following this Deleuzian impulse, has argued that cartographic modes of analysis require the participation of the reader by asking, “Do we live in the same world? in the same time-zones? How do you account for the kind of world you are living in?” (6).[viii] Unlike colonial practices of mapping—which privileged opposition and enclosure—this kind of mapping aims to foster collaborative, open-ended and dynamic forms of alliance.

    Like Deleuze and Guattari, Mbembe embraces both the open and invitational character of the rhizomatic map. And yet for Mbembe, the project of mapping is a not a way to escape Freudian dogma or the root-like structure of Western philosophy. Rather, it is a way to speak to the specificity of our present moment—to its “possibilities” and “present dangers” (Mbembe 2017a:1)—in a way that remobilizes the idea of a collective and shared future. Neoliberalism, Mbembe argues, can be identified through its “dispossession of the future” (5).[ix] In the era of neoliberalism, everything happens in the short-run and little attention is paid to what kind of future we collectively wish to create. Little attention is paid to what kind of world we want collectively to inhabit. Whether in relation to climate change or the refugee crisis, neoliberalism disavows the idea of collective responsibility, instead advancing a politics of enmity and separation.[x] Elsewhere, Mbembe has called this relation to the future a “negative messianism” that “feels no need to search for or to bring about some form of community” (Mbembe 2017b). The task of critical thought today, Mbembe argues, is to find ways to revitalize the idea of a collective future, a sense of shared responsibility for the world, and a practice of co-produced knowledge about the world.[xi] Cartography—in so far as it invites the reader to locate herself in a shared past, a present we must collaboratively name, and a future that remains open—becomes the experimental analytics of such collectivity.

    One potential drawback of Mbembe’s style of writing is that it often gives rise to hyperbolic statements. For example, Mbembe writes that the potential fusion of capitalism and animism leads to “very distinct possibility that human beings will be transformed into animate things made up of coded digital data” (Mbembe 2017a:5). Such dramatic prose elides the fact that the human has never been the stable ground of any humanism and therefore, we need not be alarmed by the idea of human beings in flux. As Spinoza teaches us, we have always already been in a fluctuating and interdependent relation to the natural and inanimate world. Therefore, the question today should not be is the human in crisis? Or will the human be made into something inanimate? Rather, the question is what insidious forms of power are working today to dehumanize specific populations? How does this relate to the generalized animism of our digital and neoliberal age? We could ask similar questions about the idea that today blackness is being generalized. Are there not still forms of racism for which black bodies are the privileged subject? Do contemporary forms of white supremacy not differ from generalized forms of animistic objectification? Some of this subtlety gets lost in Mbembe’s far-reaching analysis.

    On the other hand, this criticism is partially assuaged by recognizing that Critique of Black Reason does not offer us a framework that symptomatically represents or reproduces phenomena in the world. It offers us a map. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, maps do not attempt to reproduce the world on the page; rather they attempt to construct a platform that might lead to new ways of experiencing, feeling, and sensing the world. On my reading, the perspective of the becoming black of the world is not an overarching or unmovable regime of power, but an invitation constructed through hyperbole: to think about the important place that African history has in our world today. To think about the way traditions of global black criticism offer us alternative conceptions of the human. To think collectively about how we name our era and how we can foster multiple paths toward creating a shared future in the One World we inhabit. Depth is not the strength of this book. Neither is slowness. This is a book which speeds time up, which connects up large geographies, and searches for alliance among diverse thinkers. It sketches, locates, marks, and invites insights. Such a strategy leaves the burden on the reader to pay attention, engage, find points of alliance, and points of dissonance.

    II

    One of the crucial interventions of Mbembe’s study is to reread the central themes of the African American archive from the “other side of the Atlantic” (Mbembe 2018). Mbembe aims to map new paths and avenues for African American thought from the perspective of the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, South Africa, and Martinique. Over the last two decades, debates in black studies in the US have been dominated by the themes of social death and the liminal figure of the slave. In Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe attempts to shift this emphasis away from the paradigm of social death and towards questions of life, a humanism-to-come, and One World composed of a thousand parts. Mbembe hopes to make an intervention into African American thought through his conception of black reason, which paves the way toward an afro-futuristic humanism. Part of the difficulty of reading Critique of Black Reason is that its central terms—black reason and critique—are buried within the book rather than clearly defined. It is therefore helpful to offer a textual reading of these two terms as well as to offer an analysis of the contribution Mbembe makes to scholarly debates on racism and afro-humanism in our contemporary era.

    In Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers a map—which spans the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries—of the fictive dimensions of racial difference. The book asks: who is the elusive subject that the term “black” refers to? What precisely does this term aspire to tell us about this subject? What kind of unity does the term “black” suppose? Mbembe argues that racial distinctions can only ever possess an illusionary unity. Of black identity he writes, “I mean to question the fiction of unity that it carries within it” (Mbembe 2017a: 25). However, Mbembe’s aim is not to rehash circular debates around the essentialism of identity categories; Critique of Black Reason is, rather, an exploration of race as the phantasmagoria of modernity. More precisely, Mbembe is interested in the entanglement of fiction and truth, life and death, madness and sanity, reason and unreason, which racialized forms of difference (what he calls “black reason”) inaugurate.

    The voice that echoes off every page of this book is that of Frantz Fanon.[xii] In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote: “Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?” (Fanon 2004: 182). For Fanon, colonialism produced a kind of unreality because it constantly made the colonized question their statues as human-beings. Echoing this Fanonian insight, Mbembe argues that race is not a biological or empirical fact, but a “structure of the imagination;” and racism consists “most of all in substituting what is with something else, another reality” (Mbembe 2017a: 32). Like Fanon, Mbembe is interested in the “sensory life” (106) of race that works to mask and unmask subjects; he writes of race as a mask made up of a “massive coating of nonsense, lies, and fantasies” (39)—simultaneously “material and phantasmic” (2). The central term in this book, “black reason,” is exemplary of this Fanonian influence.

    So, what is black reason? For Mbembe, black reason is not some essential form of reason that can be attributed to people of a certain race; rather, it is the reason that created race. What, Mbembe asks, does race do? What is the logic—the black reason—that propels racial distinctions? Broadly conceived, “black reason” is a term that names the process by which Western modernity produced Africa and its populations in a negative capacity—as a world outside, a world apart, or the klossonos of the world—in order to constitute itself positively (53-61). More specifically, black reason names a “complicated network” (10) of discourses, modes of governance, forms of subjection, and fantasies that used a racialized arithmetic to divide humanity—to separate out populations of similar beings (humanity-in-general) and populations made up of beings who were not “human like all others” (black-humanity) (85).

    Mbembe provides many examples of the ways in which people of African descent have been excluded from the category of the human. This exclusion is accompanied by hysterical and fantastic images of Africa and its populations as a primitive people who have fallen out of time and history—essentially, a socially dead people. For example, when Hegel wrote of Africa he did not simply refer to a mappable geographical location, but to an unhistorical place populated by a “humanity staggering through life, confusing becoming-human and becoming-animal” (12). Mbembe writes:

    The notion of race made it possible to represent non-European human groups as trapped in a lesser form of being. They were impoverished reflections of the ideal man, separated from him by an insurmountable temporal divide, a difference nearly impossible to overcome. To talk of them was, most of all, to point to an absence—the absence of the same—or, rather, to a second presence, that of monsters and fossils (17).

    When one speaks of Africa, Mbembe argues, one gives up responsibility, and the relation between words and things begin to deteriorate. We enter a symbolic realm that is governed by delirium, hysteria, and phantasy. Hegel’s Reason in History marks the high point of a “gregarious phase of Western thinking” in which “grasping ideas became gradually detached from the effort to know deeply and intimately” (17). For Mbembe, this crisis of meaning-making is not simply a relic of a bygone age, rather it finds its way into our contemporary imaginary: “Still today, as soon as the subject of Blacks and Africa is raised, words do not necessarily represent things” (13).

    In Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe is not simply interested in the fact that black life is historically seen as non-human; he is interested in the form of power that constitutes this non-human status. What kind of (un)reason allows Hegel to imagine Africans as “human entities incapable of ridding themselves definitively of the animal presence which they were mixed”(17)? To explore this question, Mbembe dwells on the dark magic of modernity—its ability to transmogrify human beings into human-objects, human-animals, or transform a geographical location into a heart of darkness, a non-place—which, he argues haunts black life today. For Mbembe, it is this dark magic of modernity—which distorts reality and produces regimes of fantasy—that penetrates the postcolony.

    For example, Mbembe argues that colonial-era statues and monuments in the postcolony “perform” the function of “entrapment” through a practice of necromancy (126). These statues and monuments work, on a daily basis, to resurrect or conjure up those who had terrorized and “threatened Blacks with the sword and with death” (128). Mbembe writes:

    The presence of the lugubrious dead in the public arena is meant to ensure that both murder and cruelty, which the dead personify, continue to haunt the memories of the ex-colonized to saturate their imaginary and the spaces of their lives (128).

    Through a practice of necromancy and geomancy, the colonizer lives on and continues to haunt the ex-colonized. This means that the ex-colonized cannot think “clearly” (128) because they are constantly accosted by this unyielding spectral presence. Mbembe calls this a funerary power which is propelled through a circulation of taking life and resurrecting the dead.

    This analysis of the funerary power of colonial statues is uncannily prescient. Two years after the French edition of Critique of Black Reason was published a wave of demonstrations swept through South African university campuses protesting the presence of colonial-era statues. The protests were sparked by a group of students at the University of Cape Town who demanded the removal of a prominently placed statue of the colonial mining magnet Cecil John Rhodes. In South Africa, these protests produced much public debate. Some asked: are colonial remnants not a part of South Africa’s divided history? Should they not be left standing in order to be learnt from? If we remove these statues are we denying and repressing South Africa’s painful past? (In the United States a somewhat similar debate has emerged in relation to confederate flags. What do these flags represent? Are they a harmless part of Southern history?) The power of Mbembe’s attention to the magical and enchanting dimensions of racial domination is vivid in relation to these debates.

    Mbembe argues that colonial power aimed to dominating both the living and the dead or the animate and the inanimate. Therefore, we must never underestimate the capacity of those ‘mute things,’ which the colonizer left behind, to enchant the public arena. Colonial era statues are ritualistic: they aim to remind the colonized that the colonizer is a subject who not only conquered all forms of life, but who also “outruns death” (126). These statutes “envelop the subjugated” (127) by appearing in victorious garb at the entrance of government buildings, in the walkways of public gardens, or the foot of institutions of learning. They are placed prominently in order to make the colonized feel uneasy, out of place, and inhibited in the public arena. Mbembe’s language of enchantment, alchemy, and magic allows us to see that these statues are not passive features of the built environment. Nor are they simply commemorative remnants of a traumatic past. Rather, they are spatial actors who work to haunt, disturb, and confuse those they encounter.

    Significantly, all these moments in which black life is trapped in the unending circuit of death-in-life—whether through Hegel’s dreams of primitive Africans or the necromancy of colonial-era statues—are examples of black reason. In short, black reason is the fictional economy that facilitates this oppressive circulation of death and life: a logic that partitions the world, and closes off the category of the human, using race as its modus operandi.

    This conception of black reason sets up the central dilemma that Mbembe wishes to tackle. Namely, what resources can be found in the capacious corpus of black criticism that can offer a critique of black reason? Which critiques are successful and which simply reproduce the violent logics of black reason? Importantly, for Mbembe, “the work of race” is fundamentally “the very negation of the idea of the common, or of a common humanity” (54). Hence the question that faces black criticism is how to foster a form of belonging, and being-in-common that is not founded upon the ejection of black life from humanity. Significantly, what do we do with race—that form of difference that has through-out history been used to banish life to a space of crisis and a death-in-life—in such a project? It is in answering this question that Mbembe introduces his conception of a humanism-to-come.

    Black reason, Mbembe argues, is the fictional economy that produces, and uses race to divide humanity into humans and non-humans. It is a logic that produces the word ‘black’ in an attempt to wound, dehumanize, and objectify. Some strands of black thought (such as: Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and those writers who affirmed “a so-called politics of Africanity”) tried to reverse the racist telos of black reason by arguing that African people have their own histories and cultures which constitute a distinct, but not inferior humanity (88). These forms of criticism closed themselves off from the rest of humanity, because they failed to critique the false partition of black humanity from humanity-in-general. On Mbembe’s account, to claim that blackness is a sign of ontological, cultural, or national distinction is an inversion and not a critique of black reason. Against these modes of writing, Mbembe argues that African and black identities have never been distinct or unique, rather these identities were always “nourished” by multiple “ethnic, geographic, and linguistic differences” (95). Therefore the name ‘black’ ought to be reclaimed not as a retreat from humanity, but as a call to a future-to-come in which black people are part of a common humanity composed of a thousand parts.

    Mbembe’s conception of black reason suggests that racial distinctions are historical and contingent.[xiii] And that it is not race (or blackness) but the idea of a common humanity that ought to be the basis of revolutionary thinking today. Indeed, throughout Critique of Black Reason Mbembe affirms those modes of black criticism which look forward to, and desire a world without racial difference. For example, in his reading of Césaire’s work he asks: why does Césaire use the word black and not simply human being? He argues that for Césaire the word ‘black’ is not connected to the “idolatry of race,” (159) but is “the ultimate metaphor” for a humanism-to-come that would include black people not as black, but as human (159). Similarly, he writes of Glissant’s thought as consistently affirming the idea that all races and cultures share One World which is made up of “a thousand parts. Of everyone. Of all worlds” (180). And he writes of Nelson Mandela as ultimately “seeking an idea that in the end was quite simple: how to live free from race and the domination that results from it” (172). Indeed, Mbembe affirms those “strands” of black criticism in which “difference is only one facet of a larger project” (183). Within these modes of thought the word “black” is not used with the “goal of finding solace within it,” but as a way of “clouding the term in order to gain distance from it” (173).[xiv]

    Thus far, I have traced the development of black reason as it turns into a critique of black reason in order to illustrate Mbembe’s four major interventions into African American thought. The first is to centralize the archive of Africa and the Caribbean. The second is to provide a historical (and not an ontological or national) reading of race. The third is to couple the practice of critique with the creation of a future. The fourth, finally, is to reinvigorate the idea of a humanism-to-come which would reject the hierarchical division between humans and non-humans. Thus, Mbembe writes: “The path is clear: on the basis of a critique of the past, we must create a future that is inseparable from notions of justice, dignity, and the in-common” (177). In a general sense, Mbembe aims to shift the emphasis away from blackness as a form of social death, toward blackness as a prophetic call for a new humanism that would be grounded in ideas of a shared world, an expanding horizon of the possible, and a shared future.

    I would argue that while this intervention is compelling—particularly, in so far as it attempts to expand the archive, terms, and conceptual apparatus of the middle passage paradigm that has dominated US based black studies—Mbembe risks overlooking complicated debates around positionality and placement of ‘blackness’ by refusing to directly engage with the archive of contemporary African American thought. For example, the work of Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, and Frank Wilderson has emphasized the way the figure of the slave continues to haunt black life. In different ways, each has argued that lived experience of black populations continue to be shaped by the oppressive structures of slavery. Hartman in Lose Your Mother argues that if “slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America” is it not because of an obsessive or melancholic relation to the past, but because “black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic” that was “entrenched centuries ago” (6). Black people live in what Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” which is made up of “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (6). On this account, to be ‘black’ is to constantly negotiate dehumanizing forces, and to live under the constant threat of death. If the ‘future’ is not a category that is emphasized in these accounts it is because the legacy of slavery structures the present in ways that are not easy to overcome.

    Moreover, Moten, Sexton, and Wilderson have argued that black subjection (in so far as it excludes black subjects from the category if the ‘human’) troubles the categories which traditionally humanistic discourses have taken for granted. For example, Moten (following Nahum Dimitri Chandler) has argued that the subaltern condition of blackness is well understood as a “paraontological” force which resists, and disrupts traditional demarcations between: the subject and the object, or the outside and inside, or the ugly and the beautiful (Moten 2008). Similarly, Sexton writes of blackness as a “paralogical” force which allows us to think “differently about space, time, being, existence” (Sexton 2017). Importantly, for these theorists—whether we call them Afro-optimists or Afro-pessimists—blackness works to put in question traditional conceptions of the body, the human, humanism, the present, the past, critique, and judgment. In this sense, blackness fugitively escapes and exceeds the terms and categories of modernity’s humanist discourse. Thus Wilderson writes, “the explanatory power of Humanist discourse, is bankrupt in the face of the Black. It is inadequate and inessential to, as well as parasitic on, the ensemble of questions which the dead but sentient thing, the Black, struggles to articulate in a world of living subjects” (55).

    On Mbembe’s reading, the name ‘black’ ought to be re-claimed not as something that stands besides or on the side of (para-) the human, humanity, logic, or ontology. Nor should it signify a form of being that is always already facing death. For Mbembe, seeing blackness as apart from humanity-in-general or the name for a socially dead population is to be blinded by the logic of black reason, which we must attempt to move beyond. Successful critiques of black reason are those that move through the history of racism propelled by “hope of escaping the world as it has been,” and desire to be “reborn into life, to lead the festival once again” (Mbembe 2017a:173). The name ‘black’ in such a project prophetically calls on a new humanism, which would embrace difference as the basis of what is common among humanity. How does such prophetic conception of the name ‘black’ relate to the lived experience of the after-life of slavery? How do we negotiate the desire for a future beyond the idolatry of race, and the desire to bear witness to the ongoing legacies of slavery, and colonialism? What is the relation between a futuristic humanism-to-come, and the critiques of humanistic discourse that theorists such as Moten, Wilderson, and Sexton have offered? By avoiding these questions Mbembe has produced a conception of a humanism-to-come which stands in a clearly critical, but also vague relation to the important work of theorists such a Hartman, Moten, Sexton, and Wilderson.

    The lack of engagement with contemporary African American thought is not the only weakness of Mbembe’s archival practice. In the public discussions of this book that have taken place over the last few months—both in South Africa and the United States—readers have wondered what this book would have looked like if the tradition of critique which it explored had included the voices of black women. Indeed, despite Critique of Black Reason’s far-reaching scope, the archive of black criticism relied on is almost entirely masculine: Fanon, Glissant, Césaire, Garvey, Mandela, Tutuola, Tansi, Baldwin. Given that the scope of this project is so large (a critique of the racist logic that undergirds the modern order) the reader is left wondering what blind-spots this book reproduces through its archival bias.

    Despite these criticisms, the strength of Critique of Black Reason‘s indirect intervention lies in the language of enchantment, dreamworlds, necromancy, and alchemy which the book develops. In Critique of Black Reason, the workings of racism are described not in sociological or historical terms, but as a form of enchantment which closes off the category of the human. In a similar way, anti-racist critique is described as a prophetic incantation, and a search for a world-to-come within this world. This mapping of competing phantasmagoric worlds opens up multiple questions, and suggests multiple paths to rethinking the legacy of decolonial, and abolitionist thought in our contemporary world. Moreover, I have suggested that Mbembe does not sufficiently address the critiques of humanism which contemporary African America thought has produced, but this does not mean that he resorts to any traditional conception of the human (or humanism). On the contrary, one of the powerful interventions of Critique of Back Reason is the way it shows how the human has been re-enchanted, and re-made through African aesthetic traditions. In these traditions, the human is thought of in several different forms, and is always a subject in process. In order to explore this non-traditional conception of the human, I will offer a reading of the central chapter of this book, “Requiem for the Slave,” in which the reader is introduced to the idea of a metamorphic human.

    III

    In Critique of Black Reason, several kinds of metamorphic subjectivities are mapped. At the start of the book, Mbembe maps the metamorphic subject of our digital and neoliberal world. This subject is one who must constantly transform herself in order to remain competitive and valuable; moreover, this is a subject who must constantly negotiate the ever blurring boundary between things and persons or the animate and the inanimate. He goes on to show the way in which this contemporary subject is prefigured by the human-in-flux—”at once outside and within the human” (135)—that slavery, colonialism, and race thinking (black reason) produced. The metamorphic power of neoliberalism, and black reason are both aimed at destructively trapping the human in a space between death and life. How do we resist such morphing? How do we critique the necromantic power of such transmogrification? In the second half of the book, Mbembe aims to answer these questions by mapping another mode of metamorphosis, which blurs the boundary between the animate and the inanimate, as a mode of survival, and an affirmation of life. By turning to experimental African literature, Mbembe explores the immanent modes of critique which re-inscribed tradition using the resources of dreams, fantasies, and orphic knowledge; and resisted death by reclaiming the powers of necromancy, enchantment, animism, and metamorphosis.

    The quintessential example of this mode of critique is found in the experimental aesthetics of the Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi and the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola. Both authors create fictional worlds that linger between life and death. In the case of Tutuola’s literature, this liminal space is expressed through the figure of the ghost; in Lansi’s literature it is explored through the creation of what he calls “rag-humans,” which are neither alive nor dead, but exist in a half-world and live a half-life (134). These fictional worlds explore the capacity of racism to turn people into human-things, human-animals, or ghosts whose liminal status prevents them from fully joining the world of the living or the dead. Both these authors critique this liminal space by creating unexpected relations among life, loss, and death. Tansi and Tutuola, Mbembe argues, bear witness to the destructive transformations of black reason by embodying and reversing its cannibalistic logic for their own means. Like the schizophrenic subject in the work of Deleuze and Guattari this literature produces a critique of black reason by scrambling “all the codes” (148).

    In these literary landscapes, characters leap through the realms of death and life. They constantly transform themselves—into animals or inanimate objects or different people—in order to preserve life. For example, Tansi’s experimental novel Life and a Half opens with a scene of torture in which what he calls a rag-father is being eaten alive by a character referred to as the Provincial Guide. The rag-father’s body is torn asunder and his organs are strewn all over the room, but he does not die. The Provincial Guide repeatedly asks: “Now, what are you waiting for?” And the rag-father repeatedly answers: “I do not want to die this death” (6). In Tansi’s universe, even at the moment where the human is in some sense already dead, there is a kind of agency, and a resilient desire for life. This desire for life is present even if it can only be articulated as a desire for another kind of death. And so, the rag-human transforms himself into a being who dies a thousand deaths, because he will not accept the unwanted death offered to him. In a similar way, in Tutuola’s literary landscapes we find people who are constantly chased by death. In order to escape death, they transform themselves into animals or other humans. Sometimes these transformations lead to death anyways. However, these transformations are always aimed at survival. One transforms oneself, morphs into something else and enchants the world, in order to continue living and to resist an unwanted, and pre-mature death. What Mbembe tries to offer here is another way of remembering the slave, not only as that human who was always already dead, but also as that metamorphic human who danced with death, in order to resurrect the lifeless a thousand times over.

    The colossal violence of black reason is its capacity to turn life into a death-in-life. To banish certain subjects into a liminal state in which life can no longer be affirmed, but must be lived out as, what Tansi called, a half-life. What fascinates Mbembe about black critique is its capacity to celebrate “the ineradicability of life” in defiance of this “long life-denying history” (Mbembe 2005). For Mbembe, this defense of and desire for life is the force behind the thought of Édouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Nelson Mandela, Marcus Garvey, and Frantz Fanon. These traditions of critique aim to bring back to life dead subjects, deserted spaces, and barren languages:

    The durability of the world depends on our capacity to reanimate beings and things that seem lifeless—the dead man, turned to dust by the desiccated economy; an order poor in worldliness that traffics in bodies and life. The world will not survive unless humanity devotes itself to the task of sustaining what can be called the reservoirs of life. The refusal to perish may yet turn us into historical beings and make it possible for the world to be a world. But our vocation to survive depends on making the desire for life the cornerstone of a new way of thinking about politics and culture. (Mbembe 2017a:181)

    If racist logic is powerful because of its ability to harness the power of metamorphosis as a form of entrapment and social death, then in critiques of black reason this power of metamorphosis is immanently reclaimed and turned into a life-affirming force. Fanon’s work, Mbembe tells us, was propelled by the conviction that every human being—no matter how much violence they have undergone—has “something indomitable and fundamentally intangible that no domination” can “eliminate” (170). Throughout his work, Mbembe argues, Fanon tried to create modes of thought and practice through which this ineffable resilience “could be reanimated and brought back to life” (170). For this reason, Mbembe calls Fanon’s thought a “metamorphic thought” (162).

    For Mbembe, black identity is not exceptional or distinct (black subjects are human like all others), but if there is a characteristic that is historically original or innovative about black life, it is the capacity to survive the dehumanization of racist imaginaries by learning to morph, transform, and enchant hegemonic traditions; to produced immanent forms of critique by delving into the depths of black reason’s “nocturnal economy” (130) in order to rework and transform its logic from within. In this sense, what Mbembe offers as a humanism-to-come is not grounded in a traditional understanding of the human. It is grounded in an archive of black criticism that uses “play, leisure, spectacle, and the principle of metamorphosis” in order to produce several modalities of being human, and approaches to life (176). In the end then, Critique of Black Reason seeks to remind readers that while social death is a paradigm that dominates the history of racism there is also a hidden tradition of metamorphic critique that moves through death in order to affirm life.

    Throughout the book, Mbembe’s writing is marked by a double gesture: simultaneously he maps the racist forms of reason that produce modes of death-in-life and unveils the traditions of critique that rise up to immanently deconstruct such racism. For example, we will recall that in the opening pages of this book he argued that today we are faced with the looming perspective of the becoming black of the world. Mbembe offers us this phrase in an attempt to map the dangers that emerge from the potential consolidation of neoliberalism, capitalism, and animism; to show the way this fusion borrows much from the logics of racism and colonialism. It is also an attempt to suggest that as we think through, resist, and critique these contemporary forces of dehumanization we can fruitfully borrow much from metamorphic anti-racist modes of critique. In other words, in so far as our neoliberal-animistic culture inherits and expands the cannibalistic logics of race thinking it also (potentially) makes itself vulnerable to those critiques of black reason that—in another time—creatively resisted similar forms of depredation.

    This much is implied in Mbembe’s use of the word becoming. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari explain the idea of becoming by using the example of a wasp and an orchid. They argue that the wasp and the orchid are not well understood as two different types or categories of things. When the wasp flies around the orchid, moving pollen from one flower to the next, it becomes categorically indissociable from the orchid. Therefore, we should therefore think of them in symbiotic, but not equivalent relation: “a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp”(10). In a similar way, Mbembe seems to suggest that the looming threat of the ‘becoming black of the world’ is always already coupled with a counter or minor, but not equivalent perspective which we might call the becoming world of the black. This perspective is one in which the search for a common world, and the desire for life which animated critiques of black reason becomes a universal, and generalizable project. On my reading, the aim of this book is to make such a liminal perspective available. And it is only by recognizing this implicit perspective that we can interpret the otherwise unexplained optimism that runs through this book and is encapsulated in the opening sentence: “I envision this book as a river with many tributaries, since history and all things flow toward us now” (1, emphasis mine).

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    ______________. 2017a. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press.

    ______________. 2017b. “Negative messianism marks our times.” Mail & Guardian, February 3, 2017.

    ______________. 2018. “Conversation: Achille Mbembe and David Theo Goldberg on Critique of Black Reason.” Theory, Culture, and Society, July 3, 2018. https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/conversation-achille-mbembe-and-david-theo-goldberg-on-critique-of-black-reason/

    Moten, Fred. 2008. “Black Op.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 5: 1743-1747.

    Sexton, Jared. 2017. “On Black Negativity, or the Affirmation of Nothing.” Interviewed by Daniel Colucciello Barber, Society + Space, September 18th, 2017. http://societyandspace.org/2017/09/18/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing/

    __________. 2011 “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions Journal no. 5:1-47.

    Tansi, Sony. 2011. Life and a Half: A Novel. Translated by Alison Dunby. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Wilderson, Frank. 2010. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Durham: Duke University Press.

    Notes

    My thanks to Bilkish Vahed, Cathy Caruth, and Christopher Newfield for generously commenting on this essay.

    [i] See Brown 2015, Harvey 2007, and Feher 2009.

    [ii] David Theo Goldberg has recently argued that today we need to mold “a critical analytics” which might enable us to comprehend “racially driven neoliberalisms and neoliberally fueled racism” (viii). Such a suggestion is in sync with Mbembe’s project in Critique of Black Reason.

    [iii] See Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.

    [iv] “Critique,” Mbembe writes in a recent preface to On the Postcolony, “is witnessing as well as endless vigilance, interrogation and anticipation. A proper critique requires us first to dwell in the chaos of the night in order precisely to better break through into the dazzling light of the day” (Mbembe 2005).

    [v] Although I have not discussed it here the influence of music, particularly Congolese music of the 1980’s, on Mbembe’s style of writing is significant. Mbembe writes: “The emotional sublimity of the Congolese musical ­imagination taught me how indispensable it was to think with the bodily senses, to write with the musicality of one’s own flesh” (Mbembe 2015). For an extended reading of Congolese music see Mbembe 2005.

    [vi] See especially chapter three (92-102) and chapter five (143-150) of Critique of Black Reason where Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of becoming, itinerant identity, and schizophrenic subjectivity are referenced in key moments.

    [vii] For an exploration of mapping see Flately 2008. Flately writes of Deleuze and Guattari’s project of mapping: “The revisable, rhizomatic affective map not only gives us a view of a terrain shared with others in the present but also traces the paths, resting places, dead ends, and detours we might share with those who came before us” (7).

    [viii] Brain Massumi puts it succinctly: “The question is not, Is it true? But, Does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations  and perceptions does it open in the body?” (1992, 8).

    [ix] See Mbembe 2013 where he says of his work at WISER in Johannesburg: “The time of the market, especially under the current capitalist conditions, is a time that is very fragmented and the time of consumption is really a time of the instant. So we wanted to recapture that category of the future and see to what extent it could be remobilized in the attempt at critiquing the present, and reopening up a space not only for imagination, but also for the politics of possibility.”

    [x] See Mbembe 2016b for a discussion the role of separation contemporary politics.

    [xi] This argument is in sync Wendy Brown’s recent suggestion that the question that stands at the center of political life today, “What kind of world do we want to live in?” (Brown, 2018) is simple in its formulation, but profound in its burden.

    [xii] As Laurent Dubois notes in the translator’s introduction to Critique of Black Reason: “…the greatest guide throughout is Frantz Fanon, whose writings Mbembe has engaged with throughout much of his work. Fanon’s “situated thinking, born of a lived experience that was always in progress, unstable, and changing,” provided a model of critical thought that was “aimed at smashing, puncturing, and transforming” colonialism and racism. His was always a “metamorphic thought,” and as such an ever-present and ever-relevant guide through the ruins of the present.” (xiii)

    [xiii] In a conversation with David Theo Goldberg, Mbembe says: “As a matter of fact, to speak about modernity is to confront the fact of capitalism. And there is hardly any way in which we can think about capitalism without having to account for racial slavery and its aftermath. I wanted to explore this genealogy of modernity that places racial capitalism at its heart as the cauldron in which the idea of Black, of blackness, was produced. I wanted to take seriously the idea that Black, or blackness, is not so much a matter of ontology as it is a matter of historicity or even contingency. I also wanted to contest those lineages of blackness that use memories of trauma to develop discourses of blackness as ontology” (Mbembe, 2018).

    [xiv] David Marriott in a recent essay on Critique of Black Reason has argued that the conception of black reason and a humanism-to-come are inconsistent or mismatched. If black reason is a realm of magic, enchantment, necromancy, then how can it so seamlessly be tamed by a well reasoned humanistic intervention? Marriott asks, how can blackness both name “a primordial difference within the human” and be overcome through a rational and all inclusive form of humanism? (67) On my reading, some of these questions would clarified if Mbembe engaged with contemporary African American thought.

  • Corbin Hiday – Formalization and its Futures: Review of Tom Eyers’ “Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present”

    Corbin Hiday – Formalization and its Futures: Review of Tom Eyers’ “Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present”

    Tom Eyers, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2017

    Reviewed by Corbin Hiday

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

    The stakes of Tom Eyers’ recent monograph, Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present, are clear from the work’s ambitious first sentence: “This book proposes a new theory of literary form and formalization” (2017: 1). Eyers’ effort attempts to carve out space within a recent proliferation of what might be understood as a return to form, one aspect of his larger intervention into contemporary methodological debates. Speculative Formalism provides both an exciting contribution to the heterogeneous, unformed moment of “new formalism,” as well as an acute explication of a range of “positivisms” in literary studies (11). For Eyers, a theoretically rigorous formalism exists antithetical to the digital humanities and object-oriented ontology (OOO) —illustrative of such “positivisms”—instead insisting on the necessity of “the critical attention to form” for any project of critique (28).1 In his titular allusion to the “Critical Present,” Eyers acknowledges this larger context of which his work is a part, with particular attention to scholars like Caroline Levine, Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, Franco Moretti, and Graham Harman, all as ultimately unsatisfactory interlocutors. Ultimately, Eyers’ version of formalization, and his articulation of “speculative formalism” refuses a familiar dichotomy of literary mimesis—“its reflective or reproductive capacities”—and a self-enclosed version of literature—“fictive self-reference and self-foundation” (4). In order to produce an alternative to these poles, Eyers constructs sustained close readings of a series of poetic texts, in which Francis Ponge’s poems ultimately become central, and convincingly moves between and among various theoretical lenses, with Paul de Man’s version of deconstruction never too distant.

    If we were attempt to “formalize” Eyers’ own work, albeit perhaps vulgarly, we might break the monograph’s composition into sections, with roughly the first half grappling with the “critical present” referred to above in the guise of “new formalism,” digital humanities, and object-oriented ontology, and the second half articulating a version of “speculative formalism” through poetic engagement, in the form of rigorous and attentive close-readings paired with theoretical interlocutors such as Alain Badiou, de Man, and Jean Laplanche. Of course, this type of bracketing and separation of method and practice is largely unfair to Eyers’ ambitious, and multifaceted project, but the demarcation can function to better orient the reader to the scope of the intellectual and critical stakes. Thus, we might understand the two parts as dialectical, moving between method and practice, holding together Eyers’ account of the “critical present” and his theoretical production of formalism as “speculative.” The chapter that occupies the middle section of Speculative Formalism, strategically moves from the larger context of the “critical present”—object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman being its manifestation here)—to the more intimately focused readings and philosophic inquiry that marks Eyers’ work. In this sense, Eyers’ chapter, “Francis Ponge, Jean Cavaillès, and the Vexed Relation between Word and World,” represents a pivot from survey to instantiation, presenting a reading of Ponge’s poetry as attendant to and oriented toward objects, but outside the theoretical framework of OOO.

    For Eyers, through both deconstructive and psychoanalytic frameworks, language constitutively disrupts “the lack of a suitably nuanced account of subjectivity in Harman’s object-oriented ontology” and necessitates a “set of processes of formalization, processes that are motored by the resistances of objects, both material and linguistic, and in processes that are never ‘flat’ or easily delineable in the manner that Harman and his acolytes so often presuppose” (69). Turning to poetic objects through the work of Francis Ponge, Eyers continues: “[p]erhaps Ponge’s poetry of objects is best understood, then, as a somewhat devilish celebration of different instances of material and textual violence, of the ineluctable smothering of the autonomy of objects by the caprice of human language with its anthropomorphic excesses” (85). Eyers acknowledges a relationship between poetics and objects across Ponge’s poems, but in this process, exposes the limitations of OOO, while also laying the foundation for his own theoretical method. I refer to “foundation” here because this chapter, in many ways, becomes central to the book as a whole, in its staging of poetic, theoretical and philosophical encounters that are crucial to Eyers’ understanding of formalization, to his “speculative formalism.” Ponge’s influence persists throughout the book, becoming the looming literary figure for Eyers’ argument; one site of such persistence can be found in Eyers’ focus on the fruitful tension in the interplay of word and world, a “vexed relation,” marked by what he calls, “a fragile resonance between the two” (65), and only resonant “when both poetic language and the material world are imagined as necessarily shot through with impurities, such impurities preventing the swallowing of one by the other while permitting, nonetheless, their ruptural connection” (62). The fragility of both word and world, in their “impurities,” marks what Eyers finds productive in limits, a necessary incompletion and inability for literary language to achieve totalization of what Eyers refers to as “its various outsides—materiality, history, politics, nature” (1). According to Eyers, this becomes explicit in Ponge’s poetry as a function of corporeality, looking like Freudian erogenous zones: “the impasses of language are written on the body, in the involuntary corporeal contractions that poetic language and the object of that language alike may inflict” (86). This refusal of two poles, reflection and self-reference, inside and outside, not only characterizes Eyers’ larger project and his theorization of poetic, or literary (more on this distinction below) formalization, but also echoes the commitments of another imminent figure in Eyers’ work: Paul de Man.

    While Ponge’s poetry becomes central, functioning as Speculative Formalism’s conceptual literary center, Eyers owes his largest theoretical debt to de Man. In his chapter, “Paul de Man’s Poetic Materialism,” Eyers sets out to read de Man’s late essays, collected posthumously in Aesthetic Ideology, as a political and historical extension of his linguistic and tropolgical concerns via the “concepts of ‘materiality’ and materialism’” (126). Eyers’ theoretical articulation of the non-correspondence between word and world, or at least their “fragile resonance,” producing a type of opening in closure (87), finds resonance with the particular de Manian brand of deconstruction. Eyers writes, “Representation, then, as a correlational model of reference, is put radically in question throughout de Man’s career” (128). In order to grapple with this question, Eyers turns to de Man’s engagement with Kant, and his (de Man’s) skepticism regarding the alignment of reference with “phenomenalism,” ultimately attempting to produce a “properly materialistic philosophy and poetics” (128). However, even within his debt to de Man, Eyers shifts the critical terrain, departing “from a number of his conclusions” (125). Where de Man finds fragments after a deconstruction involving the interaction of “‘grammatical’ structure” and “‘rhetorical reading,’” Eyers’ “speculative formalism would rather trace the uncanny persistence of texts even after their apparent detotalization” (125), preserving a “formative force of the linguistic and philosophical binds” (149). Even within deconstructive dissolution and fragmentation, Eyers insists on the constructedness of form, this “formative force” akin to what he refers to earlier in the book as the “formativeness of form” (5). An insistence on this literary residue, the site of what’s left over after the “vexed relation” between world and word, necessitates Eyers move from de Man to psychoanalysis at the conclusion of Speculative Formalism. While de Man functions as the towering theoretical figure, Eyers’ final chapter turns to psychoanalysis as the concluding orienting “model” in order to fully account for lingering concerns of temporality and historicity (153).

    In his final chapter, “Language Poetry, Psychoanalysis, and the Formal Negotiation of History and Time,” Eyers concludes by turning to sources at the same time unlikely—the “so-called ‘language poets’”—and likely, psychoanalysis, a basis for his previous two books: Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology and Marxism in Postwar France (2015) and Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ (2012). In order to do this, Eyers continues his meticulous close readings, here of language poets Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe, and turns to psychoanalysis via Jean Laplanche to construct his final theoretical frame, producing in the process a conjunction of unexpected bedfellows, illuminating a bridge between two important spheres of twentieth-century theory and poetics. Eyers locates a particularly useful homology between Silliman and Laplanche in their shared “refusal to concede this forced choice,” between the simultaneous “temporal instant” and its dissolution and “even deletion,” irreducible to being “simply individual nor utterly collective or historical” (160). In this final chapter, we find the culmination of much of Eyers’ theoretical vision, reasserting the persistence of gaps and absences, the simultaneous openings and closures running through Speculative Formalism. The historical stakes of “absence” are refracted through reconceptualizations of linearity and subjectivity in Silliman’s poem, “Albany”: “Silliman pictures the degradations of historical possibility precisely through his determined staging of the absence of plottable narrative unfolding, in the very instability of the (barely hinted at) subject-positions from which the poem’s particles of sense can be thought to emanate” (161). Eyers ends the chapter by triangulating the thought of Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche, ultimately tracing the profound influence of psychoanalysis over the project as a whole:

    If there is a legacy of Lacan’s reinvention of Freudian theory, and of Laplanche’s sophisticated extension and displacement of that legacy, is it surely this insight: word, world, and subject alike, in all their complex and asymmetrical entanglements, make contact at moments of apparent untranslatability; that is the broader thesis of this book with respect to literary form in particular. (181)

    Here, an explication of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory finds connection to “literary form in particular.” However, because of Eyers’ particular attention to poetic objects, poetry comes to emblematize the capacity for this untranslatable “contact,” but it remains unclear why poetry stands in for literature as such. I wish now to briefly address this curious conflation of poetry with “literary form in particular” throughout Speculative Formalism.

    Early on in his monograph, Eyers addresses a methodological and theoretical decision that ultimately results in sustained and successful attentiveness to poetry, while eliding narrative prose as object of critique. Eyers defends this decision at the end of his introduction: “It may be that poetry, with its self-conscious disruption of this narrative impulse…can act as a fever-chart of asubjective, even materialist impulses that are not so easily pinpointed in narrative, but that sit nonetheless at the eccentric center not only of all literary forms (narrative surely included), but also of variants of political and historical form” (32). Here, without explicit reference, Eyers seemingly has de Man in mind, particularly the materialist de Man that Eyers takes up in his fourth chapter, discussed above; however, it might be useful to return to the de Man of “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in which a reading of Proust moves between metaphor and metonymy in a battle for “primacy,” ultimately revealing a similar “self-conscious disruption”; near the end of de Man’s extensive reading, he notes that the text produces a “state of suspended ignorance” (de Man 1979: 19). This suspension, produced by the interaction, opposed to the convergence, between grammar and rhetoric, looks ahead to de Man’s theory of irony found in Aesthetic Ideology (building upon Schlegel’s formulation): “irony is the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes…the undoing, the necessary undoing, of any theory of narrative…” (de Man 1996: 179). So, to return to Eyers’ claim regarding the suitability of poetry to his project, why abandon narrative when, following de Man, disruption exists as constitutive to its form, and to perhaps literature as such? As de Man notes, this internal tension and contradiction, i.e. deconstruction, exists within the Proust passage itself, not as an external addition:

    The deconstruction is not something we have added to the text but it constituted the text in the first place. A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode, and by reading the text as we did we were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place (de Man 1979: 17).

    While Eyers seeks to avoid the Jamesonian impulse toward the “irreplaceability of narrative” (2017:32), we might return to de Man, following his conception of the “poetic” (or rhetoric) as literature broadly understood.2

    In the absence of any engagement with narrative, particularly novels, Eyers refuses to pursue the rich narrative contributions of his preferred theoretical frameworks: post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Marxian literary theory, and de Manian deconstruction. Further, in his decision to focus solely on poetry, Eyers cannot fully articulate a repudiation of the literary mimesis he targets, a term more generally associated with prose, with its most problematic articulations related to the novel. We find one alternative to the mere reflection of mimesis in a version of literary “production,” and here we find Eyers’ debt to Pierre Macherey: “[t]o write of a ‘speculative’ formalism is simply to acknowledge that literature, is a peculiar site of production in its own right, one whose peculiarities are what allow it an awkward connection to its various others” (4). While I would argue that the novel exists as a particularly adept form at constructing “awkward connection[s] to its various others,” does a theory of form and formalization, as it relates to poetics or the “poem,” then produce an imagined world through the word, or does a rethinking of poetic formalization merely re-present or reflect the world in all of its instabilities, contradictions, and gaps? If a new theory of formalization looks more like the latter, then how does Eyers avoid mimesis under a different name? In other words, following Raymond Williams, how do we get “from reflection to mediation?”3

    The question of mediation also raises the issue of Speculative Formalism’s uneven relationship to Marxist literary theory, perhaps stemming from the fact that this tradition generally takes its corpus to be the novel. Here it might be useful to turn briefly to Lukács and attempt to bridge the gap between novelistic and poetic form. As Lukács notably states in Theory of the Novel, “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given…yet which still thinks in terms of totality” (1971: 56). Somewhat relatedly, in his essay, “Art and Objective Truth,” he also writes about the limits of art, only ever able to give us the “approximation” of the “totality of life” (1978: 38). Compare Lukács to Eyers on poetic form and its “inability to present the whole”:

    It is in poetry’s determinative inability to present the whole, an inability written into the very productive constraints exemplified in poetry by the marshaling of language into meter, that it gains momentary access to the similar failures of completion and rational totalization that define its referents, referents otherwise assumed to lie submissive in anticipation of poetic representation (Eyers 2017: 101).

    Here we have what seems like a useful formulation to draw out a particular homology between poetic and novel form. Following Lukács, we know the novel might desire or strive toward the representation of totality, but because of formal (and historical) limits, the novel necessarily cannot fully capture totality in all of its social antagonisms, breaks, and ruptures. Is it possible to extend the idea of what Eyers refers to as a “noncorrelational spark” (62) beyond poetics into the realm of prose, specifically the ways in which the novel form constructs noncorrelationism?

    At stake here, in some sense, is the applicability or mobility of Eyers’ theory of formalization. In other words, does his insistence on the poetic object reveal something about form or formalization that the novel cannot? In the final chapter, Eyers provides his reader another defense of poetry: “Poetry, that is, seems ineluctably caught between the individual and the collective, or between the particular and the universal, and it is at the level of poetic form that these formative contradictions are best accessed” (169). In the idea of being “caught between the individual and the collective, or between the particular and the universal,” I find particular resonances between poetry and the novel form, thus suggesting potential openness and the conditions of possibility for the narrative future of Eyers’ “speculative formalism.” Following this, I want to suggest that Eyers’ attention to poetic objects throughout Speculative Formalism in no way forecloses or limits the possibility of the theoretical usefulness or applicability of his account of formalization to other objects of study. In fact, his refusal of a series of what he calls “neo-positivisms” (36), the latest fads in literary studies, allows for an embrace of negativity, and more than tarrying with or falling into a “negative theology” (133), Eyers convincingly articulates a version of negativity that opens up and expands the ways in which we think through our various worlds—theoretical, historical, political. In conclusion, I briefly suggest a return to the relation between Lukács and Eyers through Eyers’ own reading of Theory of the Novel. Early on in this account Eyers writes of Lukács’ early work: “Theory of the Novel may well bear within it non- if not anti-narrative theoretical resources” (Eyers 2016: 86). To borrow and slightly revise: Eyers’ Speculative Formalism certainly bears within it non-poetical theoretical resources, and I look forward to the after-life of this important work.

     

    Corbin Hiday is a PhD student in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses primarily on the Victorian novel, environmental and energy humanities, Marxist theory, and psychoanalysis. He is also the Economy Editor at Another Chicago Magazine.

     

    Notes

    1. While Eyers will specifically take up digital humanities and object-oriented ontology in Speculative Formalism, engagement with debates around “critique” and “post-critique” in literary studies are not explicit. For paradigmatic examples of the “post-critique” strain of the “critical present,” see Bruno Latour’s foundational essay, “Has Critique Run Out of Steam” (2004), and Rita Felski’s literary critical version in The Limits of Critique (2015).
    2. Again, in de Man’s “Semiology and Rhetoric,” he refers to the “deconstructive discourse that we call literary, or rhetorical, or poetic…” (1979:18).
    3. Here I have in mind Williams’ chapter, “From Reflection to Mediation,” from Marxism and Literature (1977).

    References

    De Man, Paul. 1996. Aesthetic Ideology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

    De Man, Paul. 1979. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    Eyers, Tom. 2017. Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

    Eyers, Tom. 2016. “Form as Formalization In/Against Theory of the Novel. Mediations, Vol. 29, No. 2: 85-111. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/form-as-formalization

    Lukács, György. 1971. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

    Lukács, György. 1978. Writer and Critic, and Other Essays. Translated by Arthur Kahn. London: Merlin Press.

     

     

     

  • Carey Balaban: Operationalizing Basic Research and Scholarship

    Carey Balaban’s talk, “Operationalizing Basic Research and Scholarship: A System-of-Systems Approach for the Militarization of Knowledge” is now online! This talk opened b2’s conference on The Militarization of Knowledge at the University of Pittsburgh, November 13, 2015.

    Dr. Balaban is a Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology, Neurobiology, Communication Science & Disorders, and Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the Director of the Center for National Preparedness.

  • Etienne Balibar: In War

    At Open Democracy, b2 contributor Etienne Balibar charts a path forward for Europe after last week’s attacks in Paris.

  • From Latin America to Abya Yala: A Review of Latinamericanism after 9/11

    From Latin America to Abya Yala: A Review of Latinamericanism after 9/11

    A Review of John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11

    Click here for Spanish text/ Clic aqui para leer en español

    by Emilio del Valle Escalante (Maya k’iche’, iximulew)

    In the wake of the September 11 attacks on U.S. soil in 2001, Latin American nation-states united behind George W. Bush’s policies toward denying “terrorist groups the capacity to operate in this Hemisphere.”1 Through the Organization of American States Bush stated: “This American family stands united” (Youngers, 151). However, instead of nurturing this support, the Bush administration turned its back on Latin America and launched a “war on terror” in the Middle East (particularly Iraq) that ignited a long and divisive conflict whose consequences are still felt today, particularly with the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). U.S. distancing from Latin America, some have argued, led to the emergence of Left-leaning politics that through democracy have taken control of the nation-state, a phenomenon that is known as the Marea rosada or “Pink Tide” politics. Indeed, after September 11, 2001, we see the establishment of the governments of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Cristina Fernández in Argentina, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, governments that mark a transition from neoliberal capitalist economies to “socialist” oriented ones.

    Taking this context as a point of departure, John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11 explores the significance of the Marea rosada governments for Latin American studies, arguing that these Left-leaning governments open up a “new, unforeseen, and unforeseeable series of possibilities and determinations.”2 With their bet on socialism, these governments mark a decline of the Washington Consensus in the region and a shift away from identification with U.S. power. Beverley sees these political processes as unfolding a necessary confrontation between Latin America and the United States that provides an opportunity to redefine and assert Latinamericanism’s “ideological and geopolitical force” (Beverley, 7). The book includes an Introduction and seven chapters where Beverley engages in discussions and debates with various sectors of the Latinamericanist intelligentsia in order to re-examine, conciliate, transcend and establish a new critical “post-subalternist” framework that validates the nation-state as a site of struggle and proposes a “new” Latinamericanism that in its engagement with social movements can potentially lead to political and social change (Beverley, 15).

    In the chapters “Latinamericanism after 9/11” and “Between Ariel and Caliban,” Beverley maps the debates between Latinamericanists who claim to speak from Latin America and those who speak of Latin America outside its geopolitical boundaries. In these chapters, he develops a critique of neo-Arielist intellectuals like Mabel Moraña, Hugo Achugar, and Nelly Richard who propose a critical stance that instead of embracing the new politics and demands of social movements, seem more interested in rearticulating a form of critique that values high culture and the authority of the criollo-mestizo intellectual as a carrier of knowledge and cultural memory.3 Neo-Arielist arguments against Latin Americanists in the U.S., according to Beverley, have three components: 1) Latin American studies from the U.S. concentrate on identity politics and multiculturalism, discussions that have been “transferred” to Latin America and misrepresent diverse histories and social-cultural formations; 2) Latin American Studies occludes the prior engagement by Latin American intellectuals on “native grounds,” and in doing so, they subalternize the contributions of thinkers from Latin America; 3) theoretical frameworks such as Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies from the North contribute to diminish Latin America’s ability to implement its own projects of national or regional identity and development (Beverley, 62-63)

    Beverley points out that by constructing an argument that situates Latin America against Latinamericanists in the United States and other parts of the world, neo-Arielists offer an inadequate response to cultural and economic U.S. hegemony. By claiming to speak “from” Latin America, or “on the ground,” these intellectuals not only overlook the orientalization that operates within the Latin American lettered city, but also reassert their own cultural and political authority and that of literature and literary criticism (Beverley, 61). In doing so, they end up reaffirming their own criollo-mestizo European origins and bourgeois or middle class status and articulate a discursive position incapable of producing a “national-popular appeal”(Beverley, 20) Instead, Beverley proposes a new form of Latinamericanism that recovers the “space of cultural dehierarchization ceded to the market and neoliberalism” and is “capable of both inspiring and nourishing itself from new forms of political and social practice from below” (Beverley, 22-23). This would entail recognizing the multiethnic and multinational nature of Latin America, the demands of Latin American social movements and the populations threatened by globalization and neoliberalism, the forms of territoriality that go beyond the nation-state (e.g. Hispanics in the United States), the struggles against male chauvinism, racism, homophobia, and those of women and sexual minorities for gender equality (Beverley, 24). Given that all of these demands and struggles are constitutive of Latin America itself, it is now time, Beverley argues, to develop critical approaches that can incorporate these populations’ demands in order to affirm Latin America as its own civilizational project, “capable of confronting U.S. hegemony and expressing an alternative future for the peoples of the Americas” (Beverley, 18).

    In the third chapter, entitled “The Persistence of the Nation,” Beverley offers a critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2001). Since Hardt and Negri argue that we live in a sort of Roman Empire where there is no “center” and/or “periphery,” Beverley asks: who in the world today represents a logic of resistance that can bring down Empire and propose alternatives to its logic? Beverley’s critique concentrates on Hardt and Negri’s idea of the “multitude” by which they mean the “many-faced, hydra-headed, hybrid collective subject conjured up by globalization and cultural deterritorialization” (Beverley, 26-27). For Beverley, however, the multitude is an expanded way of naming the proletariat as a hybrid or heterogeneous and “universal” subject that dismisses the specific demands—many times nationalistic—of the subaltern. For example, the social movements that Hardt and Negri themselves evoke, like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, or the Intifada in Palestine, are characterized by identity politics and the necessity to change the nature of the nation-state. Hardt and Negri want to imagine—Beverley indicates—a form of “politics that would go beyond the limits of both the nation and the forms of political and cultural representation traditionally bound up with the idea of hegemony” (Beverley, 27-28).

    In chapter four, “Deconstruction and Latinamericanism,” Beverley concentrates on Alberto Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference which he reads as a “new” form of Latinamericanism that uses deconstruction as a theoretical framework capable of renewing “if not the Left in a traditional sense, then certainly an emancipatory politics to come in the emerging new world order of globalization” (Beverley, 44-45). Moreiras, according to Beverley, is concerned with the politics of knowledge involved in the representation of Latin American culture, and aims “to bring into crisis and radicalize the ideological and conceptual space of Latin American cultural studies” (Beverley, 45). Given that Moreiras depends on the appropriation and privileging of certain kinds of knowledge (usually that of high culture, or the baroque), like the neo-Arielists, he ends up re-signifying the authority of the intellectual, failing to interrogate his own critical position and authority, as well as other forms of subaltern knowledge that fall outside the metropolitan Latinamericanism he proposes. In this sense, Moreiras articulates a critical space of cosmopolitan critical theory “which is itself produced by and feeds back into the logic of globalization” (Beverley, 54).

    In “The Neoconservative Turn,” Beverley sees that alongside the re-emergence of the Left as a political force after 9/11, there is also a critical tendency within the Latin American Left that “is characterizing itself, or turning ‘conservative’ in cultural matters but ‘liberal’ in political and economic ones” (Beverley, 91).  This critical tendency, similar to neo-Arielism and deconstruction, is represented by a middle- and upper-middle-class, university-educated, and what is essentially a white, Criollo-Ladino/Mestizo intelligentsia that attempts to recapture “the space of cultural and hermeneutic authority” (Beverley, 93).  This intellectual class is exemplified by, among others, Mario Roberto Morales, Mabel Moraña and Beatriz Sarlo who develop critiques, respectively, of the Maya movement in Guatemala, the field of Latin American literary criticism against postcolonial and Subaltern studies theoretical frameworks, and testimonio and witness literatures. In their respective discussions, these critics display a strong discomfort with multiculturalism and identity politics, which they see as fetishizing and Orientalizing their subaltern object of study. These authors speak “in the name of the authority of literature to disqualify the effort of indigenous and subaltern subjects to write themselves into history” (Beverley, 83). From these readings, Beverley concludes that the neoconservative turn in Latin America is characterized by 1) a rejection of the authority of the subaltern voice and experience, and an extreme dissatisfaction with or skepticism about multiculturalism or interculturalidad and identity politics; 2) defense of the authority of the writer-critic as the bearer of knowledge; 3) reaffirmation of their criollo-mestizo identity; 4) failure to recognize the persistence of racism and gender hierarchies; 5) expression of a “disavowal of the project of the armed revolutionary struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, in favor of a more considered and cautious Left” , and 6) a “reterritorialization of the academic disciplines—particularly the field of literature and cultural criticism” (Beverley, 89). Beverley’s concern is that this group “has the potential to divide unnecessarily the new Latin American Left and inhibit its emerging hegemonic force at both the national and the continental levels” (Beverley, 91).

    In chapter six, “Beyond the Paradigm of Dissolution,” Beverley discusses the question of armed struggle in Latin America. He contends that the accounts of the armed rebellions, such as Jorge Castañeda’s Utopia Unarmed (1994), provide a negative view of insurgency that is “more inclined to see where we went wrong than what we did right” (Beverley, 109). These negative perspectives develop a “paradigm of disillusion” where critics retrospectively speak of armed insurgency as “equivocation,” or romantic, immature, “ill-conceived” movements “doomed to failure,” “prone to excess, error, irresponsibility and moral anarchy”(Beverley, 98-99). Despite the fact that with the defeat of many of these movements, previous forms of capitalist domination were “restored” (now under the banners of “neoliberalism” and “globalization”), to view the armed struggles in these negative terms obliterates the fact that they paved the way to current political and social activism in the present (e.g. EZLN or other ethnic mobilizations in Latin America). In this sense, current social movements confront similar challenges as those of the 1960s: how to “transform the state and begin to transform society from the state” (Beverley, 107). Moreover, “many of the people involved in the governments of the Marea rosada or in the movements that brought them to power, cut their political teeth in the period of the armed struggle” (Beverley, 98). The “experience of armed struggle in Latin America, including Cuba—Beverley argues—went in the direction of democracy, and brought into politics a new spirit of hope for change that had been missing since the 1930s and new possibilities for direct participation” (Beverley, 105.)

    Beverley closes his book with “The Subaltern and the State,” arguing for the need of a “post-subaltern” paradigm; that is, a critical perspective that in its critical approach to the nation-state reveals its debt to, but in turn, displaces subaltern critical frameworks. Beverley finds at least two limitations with Subaltern Studies. First, it conceptualizes the subaltern as outside and constitutively opposed to the state and modernity since these institutions have been the result of colonialism. Second, Subaltern Studies imagine civil society as completely independent from the nation-state. What the Marea rosada governments have shown, however, is that the subaltern and the state can be compatible. He indicates that “Chavismo was precisely the result of the crystallization of a variety of social movements operating in Venezuela in the wake of the Caracazo into a new political bloc” (Beverley, 114). Similarly, the success of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia was the result of Indigenous social movements that sought to and successfully modified economic relations and established a leadership that is “predominantly indigenous” (Beverley, 109). In this sense, Marea rosada governments, according to Beverley, allow us to envision a state that can bring “into it demands, values, experiences from the popular-subaltern sectors (which would require a prior process of hegemonic articulation of a new political bloc capable of addressing the state), and how in turn, from the state, society can be remade in a more redistributive, egalitarian, culturally diverse way (how hegemony might be constructed from the state, in other words)” (Beverley, 115-116).

    While I find relevance in Beverley’s critique of neo-Arielism and deconstruction, his assessment of the armed struggle, the importance of the nation-state and identity politics in a “globalized world,” and his call for an intellectual political project that engages with social movements, I also find some significant shortcomings in his arguments. Let me address them here.

    As we can see, Beverley’s main critique of Latinamericanism has to do with its failure to recognize and incorporate the demands of social movements and the populations threatened by globalization and neoliberalism. However, if the idea is to incorporate into hegemonic institutional spaces—dominated by middle- and upper-middle-class, university-educated, and essentially a white, Criollo-Ladino/Mestizo Latin American intelligentsia—the “demands, values, experiences of the popular-subaltern sectors,” to what extent isn’t Beverley complicit in preventing “the effort of indigenous and subaltern subjects to write themselves into history?”(Beverley, 83).

    Beverley recognizes that the civilizational project of Latin America has historically entailed the suppression and marginalization of Indigenous “languages and ways of thinking and being” (Beverley, 59) on the assumption that Indigenous life and culture are “inadequate” or “backwards.” Because of these assumptions, “Indigenous Peoples or peasants or workers or the urban poor may not identify themselves with the project” (Beverley, 48). But while Beverley underscores these limitations, he does not have a problem advocating for a “new Latinamericanism.” In doing so, he rejects and obliterates some of the categories and alternative projects being proposed by social movements, in particular, those of Indigenous and Afro-descendant intellectuals.4 I am surprised, for instance, that Beverley does not reflect or consider the category and civilizational project of Abya Yala 5 which has been proposed by some Indigenous scholars and activists since the 1980s, and has been theorized by Beverley’s former student, the Kichwa scholar Armando Muyolema.6 Muyolema challenges the idea of Latin America precisely because it is and continues to be constitutive of an ethnocentric and colonialist project that, for the most part, endorses the aspirations of the white, and criollo-mestizo intellectual sectors Beverley criticizes. Latin America is not merely a “name” or category, but rather a geopolitical project that embodies and confirms the historically enduring regime of colonialism in the region. Indigenous Peoples can only be a part of Latin America as long as we give up our lands, languages, and cultural and religious specificities. Contrary to the civilizational project of Latin America, Abya Yala, according to Muyolema, would represent our own civilizational project and locus of political enunciation.

    Indeed, for many Indigenous and non-Indigenous sectors, the possibility of “alliance politics between social groups” and the formation of “a new historical block at national, continental, and intercontinental levels” (Beverley, 83) does not lie so much in a “new” Latin American or Latinamericanist project anymore, but rather, in Abya Yala. For us to recognize and endorse the former, in my view, will contribute to affirming a colonialist logic that overlooks our needs as Indigenous Nations: in particular, our continued efforts to recover and defend our territories, and restitute our linguistic, cultural and religious specificities, efforts that Latinamericanism in all of its forms has failed to deeply address and understand. Because of these, I would venture to say that the efforts of subaltern-popular Indigenous rights movements would be better invested in first developing an Indigenous and even global historical block that while it addresses internal and external oppressions also manages to bring us together as diverse Indigenous Nations struggling to overcome external and internal/settler colonialisms. Our positioning as Indigenous subjects will not only allow the hegemonic articulation of our demands, but also negotiate with non-Indigenous others the constitution of multicultural or intercultural national models based on our own Indigenous perspectives.

    With regards to Beverley’s discussion of the Marea rosada, there is no doubt that these Left-leaning governments have brought economic and political benefits to important sectors of disenfranchised populations. However, what do we make of Michelle Bachelet’s re-enactment of Augusto Pinochet’s 1984 “anti-terrorist law” which has been used to incarcerate Mapuche activists in the northern region of the Araucania in Chile? Or Rafael Correa’s efforts to shoot down the offices of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), an organization that supported Correa’s presidential election? (Not to mention the incarceration and assassination of several environmental Indigenous activists and peasant leaders in the Amazonian regions of Ecuador). Or the Evo Morales administration invading Amazonian Indigenous territories (the so-called “TIPNIS” affair) to build roads, bridges and electrical power systems to economically favor sectors of his constituency? In my view, what Marea rosada governments show is that while they have constituted the nation-state as a site of struggle that proposes socialism, and in one case, established a leadership that is “predominantly indigenous,” at the same time they demonstrate how they are capable of reproducing colonialism, often becoming—as suggested by Nicholas Dirks—“as repressive as the worst colonial regime.”7

    By pointing this out, I am by no means suggesting that we don’t see the nation-state or modernity as sites of political possibilities. Like Beverley, I believe that the nation and its hegemonic institutions are clearly necessary sites of struggle that with our participation and critique will eventually change the rules of the game in favor of a “popular-subaltern block,” and the construction of a “society that is at once egalitarian and diverse” (Beverley, 79). Unlike him, however, I don’t believe that the work of social movements should be understood as complete once their efforts culminate in the occupation of the State. Instead, social movements and their hegemonic articulations should be the guiding force in continuing to redefine the nation-state, and the transformation of society, changes that can only occur from below, instead of above.

    Emilio del Valle Escalante (K’iche’ Maya, Iximulew) is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He is the author of Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala (SAR Press, 2009).

    NOTES

    1. Coletta Youngers, “Latin America,” in Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11, ed. John Feffer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 151.

    2. John Beverley, Latinamericanism after 9/11 (London-Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 7.

    3. Arielism in Latin America refers to an intellectual class at the beginning of the twentieth century that developed a political stance and discourse against the United States’ imperial expansionism after the Spanish-American war of 1898. Figures like Uruguayan José Enrique Rodo evoked the figure of Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to suggest that while Latin America embodied noble, intellectual, harmonious and sensible virtues, the U.S. represented insensible and material ones. Besides Rodo, this group included Argentinian Manuel Baldomero Ugarte and Mexican José Vasconcelos.

    4. For a discussion about the relationships between Afro-descendants and the nation state in Latin America, see Agustín Lao-Montes, “Decolonial Moves. Trans-Locating African Diaspora Spaces,” Cultural Studies. 21:2-3 (March-May 2007): 309-339.

    5. For those unfamiliar with the term Abya Yala, the concept emerged toward the end of the 1970s in Dulenega, or what, for others, is today San Blas, Panama, a Kuna Tule territory. Abya Yala in the Kuna language means “land in its full maturity.” After the Kuna won a lawsuit to stop the construction of a shopping mall in Dulenega, they told a group of reporters that they employed the term Abya Yala to refer to the Western Hemisphere or the Americas in its totality. After listening to this story, the Bolivian Aymara leader, Takir Mamani suggested that indigenous peoples and indigenous organizations use the term Abya Yala in their official declarations to refer to the American continent. Since the 1980s, many indigenous activists, writers, and organizations have embraced Mamani’s suggestion.

    6. See Armando Muyolema’s “De la cuestión indígena a lo indígena como cuestionamiento. Hacia una crítica del latinoamericanismo, el indigenismo y el mestiz(o)aje,” ed. Rodríguez, Ileana, in Convergencia de tiempos: estudios subalternos/contextos latinoamericanos estado, cultura, subalternidad (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 327-363.

    7. Nicholas Dirks, Colonialism and Culture, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 15.

  • Governed by Chance: On War, Disorder, and Representation

    by Anders Engberg-Pedersen

    In his unfinished magnum opus, On War, Carl von Clausewitz writes: In war “the light of reason moves through different media, it is broken into different rays than during speculative contemplation.” Clausewitz knew what he was talking about. He was only twelve years old when he entered the army in 1792, and the following year he experienced the matrix of war from the inside. First for Prussia and later for Russia he fought against the French armies in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which put Europe into an almost permanent state of war from 1792-1815. What Clausewitz did not know was how he should describe that state. The enormous reach and intensity of the wars had so profoundly changed the way the world normally functions that the state of war could neither be described nor understood and certainly not managed with the means inherited from the past. For Clausewitz, the wars seemed to be a prism that deflected the light of reason and splintered fundamental categories of time, space, and knowledge. Back at his desk after the wars ended, he attempted to draw the outlines of this prism in the many historical and theoretical works he wrote until he succumbed to cholera in 1831.

    He wasn’t alone in this endeavor. A generation of writers, philosophers, cartographers, pedagogues and inventors, who had all spent several years of their lives inside the war matrix, had run into a similar problem: how do you describe let alone manage a phenomenon that seemed devoid of any kind of order? What is the state of knowledge, how do you make decisions, how do you act?

    In the eighteenth century military theory had been guided by geometry. Early in the century leading theorists such as Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban and Menno van Coehoorn had developed the highly intricate star-shaped fortifications that can still be found protecting the old core of many modern cities. In their treatises the carefully calculated architectural shapes emerge directly from simple geometrical forms. Readers of Tristram Shandy will remember Laurence Sterne’s satire of such complex calculations in the form of Uncle Toby, who runs around on a bowling green playing at war. He first builds a three-dimensional model of the fortifications in the War of the Spanish Succession, and proceeds to play through the siege with a pair of jackboots as mortars and two Turkish tobacco pipes as smoke generators. Sterne satirizes not just contemporary treatises of fortification, but also their implicit belief that military theory was a fully developed science – the belief that with the aid of the rules of geometry war as a phenomenon could be rationalized and brought under control.

    Nevertheless, the geometrical principle, as Clausewitz labeled it, was widespread. In a treatise from 1748, the French military theorist Marquis de Puysegur wrote that it was easy to teach the art of warfare “without war, without troops, without an army, without having to leave one’s home, simply by means of study, with a little geometry and geography.” With the notoriously well-disciplined Prussian troops of Frederick the Great, which on his command could move around on the battlefield in a complex military choreography, geometry had not disappeared, it had simply migrated from dead matter to living matter, from buildings to people.

    It is this crystalline order that breaks down around 1800. The minor, tactical battles and sieges of the eighteenth century were replaced by enormous armies that spread out across a theater of war stretching from Madrid to Moscow. Even though only about 10.000 soldiers made it back alive, Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 with an army numbering between 4-500.000 men. When war was waged on such a scale and with so many unknown factors, the geometrical order seemed to belong to a past age.
    What came in its place? That was the question military theorists, writers, and inventors all grappled with at the turn of the century. In 1797 a retired Prussian general by the name of Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst set the stage for an important shift in the thinking of war. He published a book in three volumes entitled Observations on the Art of War, on its Progress, its Contradictions and its Reliability. It quickly attracted attention due to its radical theory of knowledge. According to Berenhorst the recent expansion of military activities had transformed war into an “empire of chance,” an amorphous, random, chaotic phenomenon where chance reigns supreme. As such, war can neither be understood nor controlled. Only, no one will admit it. As he writes: “No teacher can make themselves begin with the confession: his science lacks all elements, the entire field is governed by chance.”

    Not everyone bought Berenhorst’s radical scepticism, but with his provocative treatise he formulated the challenge that contemporary thinkers all had to deal with: if war can no longer be subjected to a geometrical order, but does not consist entirely of chance events either, then how can it be described? Clausewitz is most famous for his statement that war is the continuation of politics by other means. But more interesting is what he has to say about war and knowledge, about which knowledge order obtains in a state of war. Clausewitz’s all-important move is to replace Wahrheit—truth–with Wahrscheinlichkeit – probability. Yes, war is indeed pervaded by chance, and yes, you are often forced to act on the basis of uncertain or lacking information, so you won’t make it far if you insist on acting only on certain knowledge. If, however, you conceive of the state of war through the lens of the probability theories that were being developed at the same time in France by people such as Pierre-Simon Laplace, then you will wield a tool that is perhaps less noble than truth, but extremely practical and useful for dealing with uncertainty and chance. In other words, in the state of war truth does not exist, only probabilities that together produce an “average truth.”

    G.W.F. Hegel was not happy. For this towering figure of philosophy probability was a weak form of knowledge and, as he put it, “nothing compared to truth.” But for a number of thinkers and writers whose military experience was not limited—as Hegel’s was–to a brief glimpse of Napoleon on the evening before the battle of Jena, and who did not thereby believe to have seen the “World Soul on horseback,” that kind of statement was metaphysical nonsense. In a direct challenge to the leading German philosophers – to Kant’s critical philosophy and in particular to the speculative idealism in Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling – they took their starting point in the state of war and sought to develop a more world-oriented thought that could describe and navigate the mutable empirical world they inhabited. As Clausewitz put it, it was time to become “unlost in philosophical dreams.” And in order to wake up, truth had to be replaced with probability, certain, well-grounded knowledge with a groundless non-knowledge, with calculable uncertainty.
    How do you make such a complex calculation? The at times dreamy, unworldly fascination with the subconscious in the Romantic period is here given a new twist. Since it is far beyond the capacities of conscious thought to calculate with so many uncertainties, you should instead leave the calculation to an intuitive sense that the military thinkers called the “tact of judgment.” In other words, the subconscious was seen as an extremely potent mathematician who with lightning speed weighed all the relevant probabilities and improbabilities against each other and in the obscure recesses of the mind almost immediately delivered the best of all possible average truths to consciousness.

    Heinrich von Kleist, the tragic and brilliant Prussian poet, thought that the new understanding of the state of war and the new means of dealing with it were of such importance that he wrote an entire play about it. The Prince of Homburg, in the drama of the same name, suddenly abandons the superior commander’s predetermined battle plan and rushes into the fray with his troops when he intuitively senses that the moment for action has come. In the commander’s carefully planned choreography of troops and in Homburg’s groundless tact, the military theory of the eighteenth century clashes with the new way of thinking war around 1800. Of course Kleist complicates matters, for even though Homburg emerges victorious, it is mentioned in passing that he has twice before deprived the commander of victory by acting intuitively. The truth average of Homburg’s subconscious mathematician is merely 33 percent.
    But could tact be trained? Was it possible to learn how to navigate the empire of chance? This was the problem that several inventors around Europe now tried to solve. The Napoleonic Wars coincide with the development of the modern war game. The advanced hi-tech virtual reality simulations used by the military today can be traced back to forgotten names such as Venturini, Chamblanc, and Opiz around 1800. Before then, the war game was not much more than a variation on chess, but their predictability and abstract form appeared increasingly obsolete when compared to the inventors’ own experiences in the Napoleonic Wars. In 1806 a man by the name of Johann Ferdinand Opiz therefore made contingency into the central operative principle of war when he introduced two dice into his war game. All actions were now associated with different degrees of probability, and whether they succeeded depended on the yes or no of the dice. Opiz reprinted a gushing review of the war game in the accompanying manual: “What a difference! What incomparably more important, far superior advantage compared to chess!—which admittedly practices the mind immensely in reflection, but in no way teaches the soldier the various and often mind-boggling impediments in an operation.” It may well be that Opiz wrote the review himself. Regardless, his war game constituted an innovative simulation of the contingent knowledge order that Kleist and Clausewitz would later describe in their literary and theoretical works.

    The novelists faced a perhaps even greater problem. For where the theorist and the military commander ‘only’ had to describe and manage the state of war, literary authors were forced to create the state of war from scratch. They could not simply include a pair of dice along with a manual of when and how to use them in the novel. Instead they had to develop other means for simulating a phenomenon where chance, contingency, and uncertainty were not peripheral elements, but constituted its very core. Indeed, the first serious attempt to describe the state of war ends in an utter failure. But at first it looked quite promising. Toward the end of the 1820s, Honoré de Balzac had laid down a clear battle plan. In his notebooks we read the following entry: “To write a novel with the title The Battle (La Bataille), in which you hear the canon roaring on the first page and the cry of victory on the last one.” Balzac intended to describe one of the great Napoleonic battles from beginning to end. The novel had already been announced, and Balzac’s correspondence during the summer and fall of 1832 give the impression of an enthusiastic and industrious writer who can soon deliver his manuscript. But the publication date is repeatedly postponed and his reassuring letters about the state of the novel is replaced by frustrated confessions that he suffers from writer’s block. The topic is too big and the state of war too complex. In October he finally owns up to a friend: “You have won! I haven’t written a line of La Bataille. But I spent so much energy on it!” After further deadline extensions he finally calls it quits, and the novel ends where it began with the grandiose intention. The product of his hard toil remains a minimal fragment scribbled on the verso of another manuscript. It reads: “La Bataille. First Chapter: Gross-Aspern, 16 May 1809, toward noon.”

    To get a better grasp of his topic, Balzac had turned to a different medium of war that had become the sine qua non for the management of the enormous military operations of the day: the topographical map. With his corps of topographical engineers Napoleon established an extended cartographic network across Europe and thereby started a two-dimensional arms race between the major nations. For the empires had to an unprecedented degree become dependent on their symbolic doubles, on the extent and precision of their paper empires. Thus when the Russians invaded Paris in 1812, they were quick to loot the Dépôt de la guerre – the central depot for military maps.

    Cartography did not help Balzac solve his literary problem, but it became such an important part of Napoleonic warfare that the one medium ended up migrating into the other. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace the military map appears every time the Russian generals plan a battle. Tolstoy is less interest in the war against the French, however, and more in criticizing the knowledge order of the military map. He repeatedly reduces the map to a symbol of a pseudo-scientific military theory that excludes time, probability, and chance. While the map is often connected to a divine omniscience, Tolstoy preaches a kind of epistemic atheism. For him, as for Berenhorst, the state of war consists of ‘one hundred million contingent factors” impervious to any kind of control and management. Where Opiz and other inventors of war games designed simulations for the purpose of training officers to handle the contingencies of war, Tolstoy, in his mammoth novel, designs a number of literary simulations that place the reader in the midst of a phenomenon that appears so irrational and shapeless and that creates such a pervasive disorder that it can never be controlled or even conceived. For Tolstoy, war is the essence of incomprehensibility.

    War is fundamentally about destruction. But war is also an aesthetic phenomenon. Our understanding of it is inextricably tied to the ways in which we build our representations of it. In the symbolic order – in the operational logic of the war games, in the topographical image of military cartography, in the forms of literary texts – we can decode the shifting historical conceptions of the state of war and its complex knowledge order. And there we find an understanding of war that reaches beyond the extensive, but nevertheless historically limited terrain of the Napoleonic Wars. When a number of French philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Debord ask whether civil society is itself a latent state of war, whether our everyday lives are not a continuation of warfare by other means then they find support in the world picture that was articulated by people such as Kleist and Clausewitz. The state of war, which a generation of thinkers had tried to see clearly, ends up as a prism that reflects back on civil society and reveals a fundamental disorder of things underneath the civilized façade. However far one wants to follow that theory, one will do well to follow the French philosophers back to the military thinkers, inventors, and writers of the nineteenth century to get a better understanding of the phenomenon that has pursued us like a shadow up through history and is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

     

    Anders Engberg-Pedersen is the author of Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Harvard University Press, March 2015).

  • Empson’s “Sacred Mountain”: Poetry, Criticism, and Love

    By Q.S. Tong ~

    Empson (second row, right of center) with colleagues and guests at Peking University

    William Empson (second row, right of center) with colleagues and guests at Peking University. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    We do not fly when we are clay. We hope to fly when we are dust.

    William Empson, “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 91.

    When he is free he knows that he is free, that rebirth is at an end, that virtue is accomplished, that duty is done, and that there is no more returning to this world; thus he knows.

    William Empson, “The Fire Sermon,” The Complete Poems, 3.

    “Inertia and apathy,” says Raymond Williams, “have always been employed by the governed as a comparatively safe weapon against their governors.”1 Following the loss of confidence in one’s formative society and in the possibility of meaningful and productive human relationship in it, escape enacts a personal decision that one must take after a sustained period of inertia and apathy in order to imagine a radical change and to live a different life. Escape is thus “an honest substitute for revolution,” “a drastic change without external compulsion to make it.”2 Unless there is a willingness to see the self and others differently, to see one’s own country and the world differently, it would be difficult to imagine any real social and moral progress. “To become morally independent of one’s formative society,” asserts William Empson, “is the grandest theme of all literature, because it is the only means of moral progress, the establishment of some higher ethical concept.”3 It’s difficult to know whether Empson had himself in mind when he made this grand statement about the ethical aspiration of literature. Empson was not a revolutionary, nor was he committed to any radical political doctrine; but he was a rebel in his own way, a dissenting mind, and an idiosyncratic presence in twentieth century literature and criticism.

    This essay does not intend to reassess Empson.4 Rather, it offers a critical narrative of how the new realities of his time affected his life and how he reacted to them through work in wartime China. Empson manifests his intellectual qualities in his relation to China. His visits to China were not initially motivated by an explicit political agenda or an ideological program, but by the necessities of life. Although he had already achieved considerable critical reputation with the publication of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), he did not have a fulltime teaching position in England until he was offered the Chair of English at the University of Sheffield in 1955. It had been more than two decades since he graduated from Cambridge. For Empson, understanding and dealing with difficulties and failures of life was both a practical challenge and an intellectual question. In the face of growing influence and power of the institutionalized life, it seemed necessary to devise his own method of resistance and technique of self-care. To seek a new community, a new modality of life, would make it possible to envision the desired change in life and to create the possibilities of self-renewal. China in the 1930s was still able to offer the opportunities of escape from home and a new communal life in which Empson could hope to develop an understanding of the profession of literature and to turn that understanding into a positive and productive force of life.

    “Courage means Running”5

    From 1937 to 1938 and again from 1947 to 1953, Empson lived and worked in China, straddling the crucial historical moment of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. In “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” (1940), the longest and most biographical of his poems recording his experience of teaching English in China, Empson admits that China is his chosen place of exile: “it is true I flew, I fled” (19).6 He explains the poem’s pre-occupation with the imagery of “flying” thus: “‘Flying’ … is being used here for escaping ordinary troubles as well as other things.”7 It’s not just life-threatening dangers that would compel one into exile from one’s native land; ordinary troubles are the manifestation of a routine hostility against thinking, freedom, and life. “I ran about on hope, on trust,” declares Empson (“Nan-Yűeh,” 20). “Flying,” as a method by which the self seeks possibilities of protection, preservation, and survival, is not only a recurrent topos in Empson’s poetical and critical writings, but also a defining character of his early professional life. Empson flew and ran, literally and figuratively, from forms of vulgarity and snobbery permeating academic society where life was reduced to a protracted process of endurance. To be away from one’s formative society would be like leaving behind a whole system of constraints and prohibitions and trying to achieve a degree of freedom, however incomplete it might be.

    Good life is self-sustainment through endurance. Central to Empson’s concern is the development of an understanding of the human capacity “to take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one,” and “one must do this with all life, because the normal is itself limited.”8 This is an Empsonian paradox that resonates with his favorite critical concept: ambiguity. Writing for him is perhaps also a form of escape – from its normative mode of articulation, its accepted procedure, and its shared methodology. Escape may well be understood to be a critical posture adopted in response to the radical inadequacies and hostilities of life by disengaging from them through self-displacement. This posture requires courage, partly because it is an act of self-denial and renunciation of what one has had in terms of one’s social formation, and partly because it entails isolation and solitude. The inescapable loneliness presents itself as a consequence of the uncompromising alienation one has to endure, but it is a necessary condition of life and experience for the restoration of a limited degree of self-respect and self-esteem. “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” begins with the memorable poetic epigraph from W.B. Yeats:

    The soul remembering its loneliness Shudders in many cradles …
    … soldier, honest wife by turns,
    Cradle within cradle, and all in flight, and all Deformed because there is no deformity
    But saves us from a dream.9

    Empson composed the poem while the Faculty of Arts of Peking National University was taking temporary shelter in the Sacred Mountain, Nan-Yűeh (the Southern Mountain) in Hunan Province.10 The inaccuracies in the citation from Yeats, understandable due to the unavailability of library resources, are uncannily potent and suggestive for its unintended amplification of loneliness into a shared quality of life.

    The holy mountain where I live
    Has got some bearing on the Yeats.
    Sacred to Buddha, and a god
    Itself, it straddles the two fates…. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 27–30)

    To be sacred, it is necessary to accept isolation and loneliness. “The rule for a sacred mountain,” Empson explains, is that “it must be isolated so that people from all round can see the home town.”11 The dialectic of the two fates would be another example of Empsonian paradox: “the opposed ideals of personal immortality and of extinguishing yourself or merging into a world soul.”12 But these ideals are nearly impossible to realize in reality. One must “fly” in order to merge into a “world soul,” and one could only achieve eternity after one’s death. Empson accepted the challenge to understand this radical ambiguity of life, thus transforming the lived loneliness, in the figure of the Sacred Mountain, Nan-Yűeh, into an experience of the emotional and intellectual sublime in wartime China.

    Ambiguity and the Politics of Tact

    Empson’s critical reputation rests on the development of the concept of “ambiguity” in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Based on his observation of insufficiently studied textual behaviour, Empson defines ambiguity as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”13 Though primarily concerned with literary language, “ambiguity” is understood and used by Empson in an extended and slightly metaphorical sense. The term is, he explains, “descriptive,” and it suggests “the analytical mode of approach” (Ambiguity 1). The idea of ambiguity espouses no critical principle and proposes no theory about itself, but it presents an inescapable experience of poetry, language, and life as multifaceted, inconsistent, contradictory, and unstable. For “the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” and of social and intellectual life with which Empson was concerned, despite his apparent formalistic tendency (Ambiguity 3). It couldn’t be farther from the truth to subscribe his critical work to the practice of the New Criticism, which Empson once described as a “self-blinding theory,” a “print-centred or tea-tasting outlook,” and an “ugly movement.”14

    Never meant to be just a work of literary criticism, therefore, the book is a shrewd and controlled development of the author’s worldview. The classification of ambiguity into seven types allows him to construct a critical nexus and to demonstrate inherent semantic indeterminacies in poetic expression as well as in human experience. There are “social ambiguities” that yield less readily to analysis but throb on the page (Ambiguity 2). As far as Empson is concerned, the need to recognize and accept ambiguity as the essential quality of language and poetry is the only intelligent point of departure for serious intellectual work. Literature is an immense complex of language, as life must necessarily be an experience of radical ambiguities. It would be only honest to recognize and deal with that complex and those ambiguities. Empson’s elaborations, meditations, reflections, amplifications, or seemingly wilful digressions, mingled with interpretative textual examples, are beyond the accepted scope of interpretative responsibilities and established protocols of academic criticism. This is, however, what Empson intended to do. Criticism must break free from the singularity of meaning; “the writer is at root the critic” and should be “at odds with his society, and with official doctrine.”15 Seven Types of Ambiguity is a critical record of the pain and joy in understanding what Empson calls “the logical disorder” inherent in language and life.16 Paradoxes and contradictions characterize life and literature; disorder is a necessary other to life’s order, logic, and end. What Empson seeks to understand is a whole range of possibilities that radical ambiguity would create for the expansion of analytical freedom and interpretive agency.

    Life is paradoxical, not just because it is punctuated with endless moments of contradiction and ambiguity, but because it will need to encounter life’s ultimate other: death. Criticism and poetry, the two most important literary genres of self-expression for Empson, offer a unique form in which to engage with life’s other: death, and the fear of death, which is constitutive of the knowledge and experience of life itself. At the time he was working on the book, Empson was an undergraduate student at Cambridge and had no real connection with China. Nevertheless, his employment of the Chinese sources in the book offers an interesting example of Empsonian ambiguity that would reveal the classical Chinese poetic view on life and death. Quoting Arthur Waley’s translation of the fifth century poet Tao Qian, Empson ruminates on the paradox of the two human scales of time measurement:

    Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
    Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.

    The observation of the ambiguity revealed in these two lines: the rapid receding and disappearing of a life-long span and the permanence of “a spot of time,”17 radiates into a set of reflections on the dialectic of life and death:

    The repose and self-command given by the use of the first are contrasted with the speed at which it shows the years to be passing from you, and therefore with the fear of death; the fever and multiplicity of life, as known by the use of the second, are contrasted with the calm of the external space of which it gives consciousness, with the absolute or extra-temporal value attached to the brief moments of self-knowledge with which it is concerned, and with a sense of security in that it makes death so far off. (Ambiguity 24)

    These musings triggered off by the two lines from Waley’s translation of the Chinese poem are not just a textual commentary; they are, as Roger Sale notes, a critique of “the whole dramatic idea of life” in Western literature that “[w]hen life must be seen from a peaceable and fatalistic point of view it is not dramatic.”18 Again, Empson misquotes the Waley translation of the poem: “fair morning” in the original is silently transformed into “spring morning.”19 But this would be another example of“intelligent and illuminating”20 misquotation that enables interpretation to foray into a moment of splendid optimism to overcome the fear of death:

    Contradictory as they stand, critics almost must conceive them in different ways; we are enabled, therefore, to meet the open skies with an answering stability of self-knowledge; to meet the brevity of human life with an ironical sense that it is morning and springtime, that there is a whole summer before winter, a whole day before night. (Ambiguity 24)

    Despite that unavoidable eventuality of human life, there is a whole summer we can, and should, enjoy before winter. Such insistence on the contradictions of life and their value for an understanding and interpretation of the mysteries of life and inevitability of death would be an effective method of self-protection, for “life involves,” says Empson, “maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.”21 Developed in terms of inescapable contradiction, opposition, and inconsistency, therefore, the conceptualization of ambiguity presents a distillation of Empson’s philosophy about the predicament of life, or rather life as predicament. Seven Types of Ambiguity, in documenting literary and historical responses to various types of ambiguity, may thus be appropriately considered to be a book about the history of human efforts to understand irresolvable contradictions in language and life.22 John Haffenden draws attention to a constellation of keywords in Empson’s writing that have shaped and defined his critical language: “clash, conflict, contradiction, subplot, outsider, scapegoat, resistance, hidden, secret, dissent, isolation.” These keywords begin to outline a critical history of digression, disruption, non-conformity, resistance, and “flight” which Empson narrates through a rich array of poetic examples in the book.

    In the Preface to the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson spells out his intention in writing the book thus: “My attitude in writing it was that an honest man erected the ignoring of ‘tact’ into a point of honour” (Ambiguity vii). In this admission of the critical impulse to reject academic tact, Empson defines the book in terms of its intended challenge to some of the most commonly held critical positions in the academy. The book, therefore, is an attack on different types of authority: sanctified and fetishized literary meaning and academic masters. His refusal to accept tact in the practice of criticism is considered to be a distinctive mark of the Empsonian style of articulation.23 Empson could be difficult or even rude especially when “argufying,” a word he used to describe the mode of engagement he preferred,24 but, as Paul A. Bové reminds us, in discussion of Empson’s critical practice, there is the need to understand “what it was about Empson that made him intolerant and sometimes intolerable.”25

    The practice of tact is already a social irony, a situational paradox. Representing what is lost, missing, or fragmented, tact, Adorno says, “lives on only parody of forms,” and it is “an arbitrarily devised or recollected etiquette for the ignorant.” It is, he continues, a modern invention and a bourgeois norm:

    For tact, we know now, has its precise historical hour. It was the hour when the bourgeois individual rid himself of absolutist compulsion. Free and solitary, he answers for himself, while the forms of hierarchical respect and consideration developed by absolutism, divested of their economic basis and their menacing power, are still just sufficiently present to make living together within privileged groups bearable.26

    As a modern social ethic, tact at once serves the bourgeois notion of individualism and destabilizes that individualism by its discrimination and exclusion of the different. In proposing a new social order in place of that of absolutism, it “mimicked traditional courtesy, manners – modes of honouring others – without formalism,”27 and as such it continued its regulatory authority in governing local relationships. In academic criticism, tact – what a communal majority considered and accepted to be good manners of speaking, writing, and thinking – quickly becomes a substitute for genuine human relationship, social or intellectual. “[A] certain kind of politeness,” notes Adorno, “gives [individuals] less the feeling of being addressed as human beings, than an inkling of their inhuman conditions.”28 But the abolition of tact would make “existence” “still more unbearable;” and the necessity of tact shows only “how impossible [existence] has become for people to co-exist under present conditions.”29

    Empson dislikes tact. Good manners are, he claims in Some Versions of Pastoral, “an absurd confession of human limitations.”30 In a brisk analytical leap, Empson makes a significant connection between tact and snobbery. Like tact, literary snobbery is an expression of the common and standard; in the context of social relations, it’s an attitude taken to hide human limitations. Empson cites Aldous Huxley who has written substantially about “snob interest” in literature and art. The common form of academic snobbery that Huxley singles out is the dilettantish exhibition of literary knowledge – “that delicious thing old Uncle Virgil said, you remember” – and “puzzle interest” as a branch of “snob interest.” Literary snobbery of this kind, Empson notes, is the product of the historical practice of “general knowledge” required for an educated person. One consequence of specialization of criticism is the rapid reduction of “the field of ‘general knowledge’ that old Uncle Virgil used to inhabit, because there are now more interesting things to know than anybody (or any poet) knows. There is no longer therefore a justification for snob treatment of them.”31 Huxley provides a catalogue of common literary snobberies, including “hostesses [hunting] literary lions” and “enriched button manufacturers … [collecting] pictures and first editions.”32 The pervasiveness of such literary snobbery, which is part of general social snobbery, replenishes the academic profession of literature with snobs. “It is the snobbery which renders it absolutely necessary for a large class of people to have read all the latest books…, to have seen the latest exhibitions and plays, heard the latest music.” In essence, “snobbery is a tribute paid by inferiority to superiority…. In the world of the spirit, snobbery is the tribute which philistinism pays to art, ignorance to learning, and stupidity to talent.”33

    It begins to make sense that Seven Types of Ambiguity takes pride in its contempt for the practice of tact in the academy. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the study of “Eng. Lit.,” especially at his alma mater, the University of Cambridge, was in effect the study and practice of Eng. Lit. Crit.34 Nothing would be more damaging to the vital force of criticism than its total institutionalization, which would entail not only expert knowledge, but also prejudice and snobbery, protected by what Empson has contemptuously called “the Lit. Crit. Establishment.”35 To reduce criticism to a routinized procedure or to ascribe it to an understanding of literary studies as a privileged site of professional exhibition and performance is to alienate it from its historical soil and social intention. Nothing is more important than the acceptance of criticism’s main task: to engage with what truly matters in literature and life. Looking back at his work in 1978, Empson could be reasonably satisfied with his practice of that understanding of the function of criticism. Since his undergraduate work on ambiguity, he had not “even felt a change in [his] line of interest” and “continued to try to handle the most important work that came to hand.”36

    It’s perhaps easier to write against tact and forms of vulgarity by setting a distance between oneself and the institutional establishment. In China, outside that establishment of “Eng. Lit.,” Empson seemed to have had a positional advantage in thinking and writing about the academic profession of literary criticism. He could easily ignore“the sound of contended munching from a field of academic critics, and the perpetual swish-swish of their white-wash brush.”37 This is probably why Empson would find it hard to adjust to the academic life of Britain after his extended stay in China. He noted the revival of Christianity in the academy to which he was to respond with Milton’s God.38 He would have to “attend to the opinion in Eng. Lit. Crit., if only because of its effects upon the students,”39 and he was unable to persuade his colleagues that critical work required no standardization of writing and thinking. He began his famous essay “Volpone” (1968) with these remarks:

    A good deal of standardization of opinion and critical method became necessary when Eng. Lit. became a large profession, and I think the results are often mistaken; but it is naturally hard to make my colleagues agree with any such judgment.40

    Academic parochialism, reinforced by the insistence on the unquestioned sense of disciplinary identity, adoption of received methodology, and compliance with professional tact must be rejected before criticism could become a meaningful exercise of mind and an act of public intervention. Beginning his university education as a student of mathematics, Empson developed a special interest in the impact of new scientific discoveries on literature and in “the world-picture of the scientists” he believed the poet had much to learn from. Disciplinary formations in the literary studies blinded many to the creativity of the scientific world. “I have always found the worldpicture of the scientists much more stimulating and useable than that of any ‘literary influence,’” Empson said to a Chinese colleague. In this admission of literature’s limitations, there was a quiet turning-away from the kind of academic politics that had reduced critical thinking to snobbery: “it seems to me trivial to say that scientific thought isn’t real thought; it only suggests a quarrel between different faculties in a university about which should get more money and better buildings.”41

    Empson’s intellectual idiosyncrasy constituted a professional anomaly. His critics have accused him of being unprofessional in his critical approach and mode of expression, in his carelessness in the use of sources and references. Yet, he “flew” to a place where such professionalism was not only practically impossible, but also quite absurd. Empson enjoyed himself in the convenience of finding regulations, critical schemas, or academic tact inconvenient. To quote from memory, for instance, was an organic act of writing, and “this idea of checking your quotations as an absolute duty,” writes Empson, “is fairly recent, and not always relevant.” He invokes the example of Hazlitt “who habitually quoted from memory, and commonly a bit wrong, but he was writing very good criticism.”42 There had been Coleridge before Hazlitt who had been criticized for non-identification of German sources and references he cited and used liberally.43 His defense of misquotation was manifestly not so much about intellectual integrity or honesty as about what position one should take in face of the disabling effect of professionalization and standardization in thinking and writing.

    Community of sympathy

    To ignore academic protocols would be Empson’s statement on the function of criticism as a committed form of engagement with ambiguities in literature and life. Physical immobility, like linguistic non-ambiguity, reflects a state of intellectual status quoism. Empson’s choice of escape was consistent with such forms of resistance as Charles Baudelaire’s dandyism and Victor Segalen’s exoticism. Harootunian notes the similarities between these apparently unrelated responses to a common aesthetic and poetic enemy. Dandyism, Baudelaire contends, is the “best element in human pride” and an effective weapon in “combat[ing] and destroy[ing] triviality” “in the struggle with a social conformism that threatened to install homogeneity everywhere that industrial capitalism has established its regime in the nineteenth century.” 44 And Segalen viewed exoticism “as the candidate best suited to protect contemporary life from the relentless banality wrought by the transformation of capitalism into mass-society imperialism and colonialism.”45 Two decades before Empson took up his teaching position in China, Segalen had lived in China for an extended period of time, from 1909 to 1914, and again in 1917. Empson and Segalen might have gone to China for different reasons, but for each the country offered the possibilities of self-renewal and liberation from the banalities of “an everyday life landlocked in repetitive routine.”46

    One may hope to live a “self-centred emotional life imposed by the detached intelligence””47 through a voluntary relinquishing of one’s formative society. Satire, cynicism, or political activism were not Empson’s measures of self-help and self-protection. He could not accept “the comforts of Christianity accepted by T.S. Eliot, or later by Auden and preferred “the special loneliness of the atheistic rationalist who places no particular trust even in the mind.”48 Virtue and intelligence, two qualities essential for honest and meaningful critical work, “are alike lonely,”49 rare, and unaccepted. Escape was both reaction and action: “‘Thank God I left’” (“Nan-Yűeh,” 60). Empson’s allusion to Peter Walsh in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a textual act of self-affirmation. Walsh departed for India, leaving behind his formative society with all its trivialities: “the snobbery, stuffiness and gossip of little England.”50

    I felt I had escaped from They
    Who sat on pedestals and fussed. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 21-22)

    Empson understood and sympathized with this feeling of relief. China for him, like British India for Peter Walsh, provided the opportunity to reject the metropolitan life. Empson’s political commitment was non-commitment, and his political involvement was the choice of disengagement. Once he had decided to leave, his emotional relief was palpable. Appropriately about flight, escape, courage, and commitment, “The Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” records the joy derived from the sense of liberation and freedom in its “relaxed and conversational phrases of his later style” and in its “unhurried comment on his thoughts and experiences in wartime China.”51

    Before he decided to work and live in China, Empson knew only that he “should want to get away from the English.”52 I. A. Richards, who had already been in China since the late 1920s, inspired Empson. In January 1931, Empson wrote to Richards: “I want to travel, and, as you see, it is now fixed in my mind that I want to go to China.”53 In the 1930s, serious graduates of literature considered it a rewarding job to teach English, and an attractive alternative to unimaginative office work, not just because “jobs are rare,” but because teaching provided the young minds the possibilities of continuing to be “Clever young men of liberal opinions.”54

    What was awaiting Empson in China in the autumn of 1937, however, was a massive evacuation of the universities from Beijing to the country’s inland for shelter from Japanese brutalities. He joined the faculty of Peking National University in Changsha, Hunan Province in central China, which, together with Tsinghua and Nankai Universities, had just formed the wartime Temporary University, which would move to Kunming, Yunnan Province and be renamed the National Southwest Associated Universities, abbreviated in Chinese as Lianda. The nine-year history of Lianda spanned the entire period of the Resistance War (1937–1945). In Hunan, the Faculty of Arts of the Temporary University was housed in a missionary school on the Nan-Yűeh Mountain and stayed there for one semester from November 1937 to February 1938. Empson had escaped England only to run again from the immediate dangers of the war in China.

    The journey from Changsha to Kunming was a heroic odyssey. In his Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution, John Israel wrote: “The official overland distance …was 1,033.7 miles (1,663.6 kilometers), of which more than 800 miles were covered on foot, an average in excess of twenty miles a day for forty days of walking. Much of the trek was over rugged terrain in bad weather.”55 It was an epic journey many Lianda faculty members and students remembered, perhaps not without nostalgia, as an enduring modern academic romance. Those who participated in the long march were acutely aware of its historical significance, and started to circulate their memoirs as soon as the journey was completed.56 Empson, too, realized the historical significance of this remarkable experience and produced a sizeable amount of writings about it. “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh” is a poetic memoir of his reflections on life and literature, politics and war, fear and loneliness, courage and heroism during his time of teaching in China. His short essay “Chinese Bandits” (1938-39) records the danger, and excitement, in his encountering with the bandits who remained active and operative in the mountainous recesses outside Mengzi, Kunming.57 “A Chinese University” (1940) pays tribute to Lianda as a symbol of courage, confidence, and optimism in enduring and confronting the brutality and barbarism of Japanese aggression. This experience of teaching in China would become the centerpiece of his inaugural speech “Teaching English in the Far East” at the University of Sheffield.58

    In the midst of the war, with unstable student populations, limited supplies of classroom materials, and Japanese air raids, academic work could not remain normal; teaching and learning had to be practiced differently. Teachers had to invent syllabus materials as they went along; sometimes they taught classes without textbooks. But teaching never stopped: “The lectures went on sturdily from memory.”59 Some of Empson’s Chinese colleagues found it hard to teach from memory, but Empson enjoyed it. legendary and has become part of the history of Lianda:

    The abandoned libraries entomb
    What all the lectures still go through,
    And men get curiously non-plussed
    Searching the memory for a clue.
    ……
    Remembering prose is quite a trouble
    His phenomenal memory was
    But of Mrs. Woolf one tatter
    Many years have failed to smother.
    As a piece of classroom patter
    It would not repay me double.
    Empire-builder reads the yatter
    In one monthly, then another. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 43 – 59)

    Empson taught English literature and later a course on modern English poetry at Lianda. Teaching was meaningful and rewarding and became part of life:

    The proper Pegasi to groom
    Are those your mind is willing to. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 49–50).

    Poetry must be experimented and experienced, and it began to develop an organic link with the realities of life: “We teach a poem as it grew” (“Nan-Yűeh,” 52). The young minds, too, grew with the growth of poetry. Empson’s influence on his Chinese students was immense, especially on those young poetic minds who were to become the first generation of modernist poets in China, including, notably, Mu Dan (1918–1977).60 Many of them were to recall emotionally those exciting and happy days with their poet-teacher Empson at Lianda.61

    Empson was admired by his Chinese students as an “abstract” and “modernist” poet, but he had a special understanding of himself as a poet.62 Poetry is not life’s decoration, nor is it a means of intellectual narcissism and self-indulgence; it is a procedure through which to develop self-knowledge and to strengthen and solidify emotional life.63 Poetry is insincere unless it’s capable of resolving the conflicts in the poet and thus preventing him or her from sinking into total despair and irremediable insanity.64 Poetry, in other words, becomes a laboratory for the development of self-knowledge, and like Empson’s critical writing, it should ideally capture, understand, and interpret life’s ambiguities. Some of his best poems are “complicated in the way that life really is.”65 In face of the immense complexities and radical ambiguities of life, especially when poetry proves inadequate for the lived feelings of loneliness, waste, and loss during the time of war, one could only become poetic by stopping writing poetry. Starting to see other possibilities that life might offer, Empson was keen on exploring his intellectual life in different spheres of experience. In a letter to I. A. Richards in early 1933, Empson wrote: “I am stopping trying to do literary work; it seems too hollow for some reason.”66 His poem “Let It Go” (1949) is “about stopping writing poetry”:

    It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
    The more things happen to you the more you can’t
    Tell or remember even what they were.

    The contradictions cover such a range.
    The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
    You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.67

    If this is partly about his decision to write no more poetry, we must understand that the dangers of the “madhouse and the whole thing there” lie in the direction of poetry, and writing more poetry might lead to things going “so far aslant.”68

    The mode of teaching and the physical environment on Nan-Yűeh suited Empson’s temperament. Teaching at Lianda at the time of war could not possibly be a model of professionalized and specialized literary studies. In a community of scholars and students like Lianda, tact would be out of place, and teaching could not be the performance of a professional task, a repetition of “[t]hat pernicious hubble-bubble,” or “classroom patter” which dominated, and continues to dominate, the academic platform of “Eng. Lit.” There would be no condition to standardize teaching at Lianda; teaching was literally fieldwork carried out away from the institutionalized space of academy, on the mountains and later in the rural area of Kunming. It was a profoundly personal experience.

    Empson reported that his time at Lianda was a period of remarkable intellectual fecundity, productivity, and creativity, despite, or rather because of, the difficult circumstances. The perils of war and shortage of daily supplies, for example, imposed on Empson and his colleagues an extraordinary sense of responsibility, and at the same time helped to create a community of sympathy that would render the profession of teaching and practice of literature purposeful and rewarding. The refugee universities, Empson says, “really are universities,” and Lianda was “not a bad place for an inquisitive mind to live.”69 During this period of exile, Empson was working with an exceptional array of minds engaged in writing some of their most important works. On Nan-Yűeh, Empson began The Structure of Complex Words; Jin Yűe Lin completed his seminal book On the Tao; Tang Yongtong drafted the first part of the History of Chinese Buddhism; and Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-Lan) finished Neo-Confucianism (Xin lixue).70 “Those few months at Nan-Yűeh,” recalls Feng, “were the most intellectual. We devoted all of our daytime to writing, except the time for teaching and eating. … We might seem to be detached from the national calamity and have hidden in our ivory tower. But this is so only because we didn’t know how to express and let out our anger and grief, and we had to concentrate on our work.”71 Many of Empson’s colleagues were educated in Europe and the US and returned to serve, defend, or reform their country. Just as they were “intellectually cosmopolitans and politically nationalists,” they, like Empson, were perhaps all “elitists.”72 “I felt I was in very good company,” Empson recalls.73 Empson’s life with the refugee universities, first on Nan-Yűeh and then in Mengzi, Kunming was characterized by confidence, optimism, and gaiety, and these sentiments, vividly manifest in “Autumn on Nan-Yűeh,” define a remarkable community of intellectual sympathy formed and consolidated by a shared sense of commitment, a community that was bound by “a noble heritage and common mandate”:74

    The souls aren’t lonely now; this room
    Beds four and as I write holds two. (“Nan-Yűeh,” 41-2)

    Isolated, aloof, and sacred, Nan-Yűeh was the sanctuary of intellectual integrity and a symbol of the intellectual sublime. Empson “would always think of the mountain as his ideal of the academic community.”75 Lianda was where he ended his exile.

    If “the idea of solidarity is potentially the real basis of a society” in times of peace,76 the idea of community must be even more firmly grounded in the development of solidarity in times of war. Empson endured the hardships of the journey across the rough terrains with Lianda and survived the perils of war. His students and colleagues respected him because of his unwavering dedication to his work in China and his solidarity with colleagues and students in defiance of aggression and oppression. This is perhaps where Empson differed from his mentor Richards. The difference between them lies in their practice of criticism and in their understanding of intellectual commitment and communal solidarity at the time of war and hardship. While China, for Empson, was a place of exile and serious intellectual work, it was, for Richards, a site of linguistic experiment with Basic English. Empson considered Richards’s departure for the U.S. at the outbreak of the war as an act of betrayal, and he would not forgive Richards for deserting not only his Chinese friends but also his project of Basic English in China, which he had promoted with evangelical zeal before the Sino-Japanese war. “You had let the Chinese down,” he told Richards bluntly.77 Empson was especially contemptuous of those orientalist Westerners, those “beastly little Lovers of the Far East,” who thought it “dignified to be in China,” but “have slunk off leaving only man namely me” in China.78

    “Chinese Ballad”: Love and Continuity

    In 1952 when he was about to leave China for his position at the University of Sheffield, Empson published his last poetic work “Chinese Ballad.” In his Inaugural speech at Sheffield, Empson used his experience of teaching in wartime China in the 1930s to outline his understanding of intellectual work and teaching. His experience of China contributed substantially to his understanding of the use and value of literature and of the role of the critical intellectual. “Chinese Ballad” is a poetic fragment extracted from a long revolutionary narrative poem by the Communist poet Li Ji (Li Chi), Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang (Hsiang- Hsiang) (1946). Empson made an effort to be close to the original in translating the poem into English. He says: “The translation is word for word, so far as I can know from simply being given the meanings of the characters.”79 Of course, the “translation” of the Chinese poem had to be in the tradition of Ezra Pound – Empson had little Chinese.

    The poem depicts the pathos of two lovers who must part each other by the imperatives of the revolutionary task. Setting off to the frontline fighting the Japanese, Wang Gui encounters a rare moment of tender love and restrained emotional torrent with his lover Hsiang-Hsiang, who could not imagine herself being separate from her soldier-lover. Standing by the stream in the valley, where they must bid final farewell to each other, Hsiang-Hsiang points at the “deep” and “thick” mud beneath their feet and beseeches Wang Gui to perform an extraordinary symbolic act of human union:

    Make me two models out of this,
    That clutches as it yearns.

    Make one of me and one of you,
    And both shall be alive.
    Were there no magic in the dolls
    The children could not thrive.

    When you have made them smash them back:
    They yet shall live again.
    Again make dolls of you and me
    But mix them grain by grain.

    So your flesh shall be part of mine
    And part of mine be yours.
    Brother and sister we shall be
    Whose unity endures.80

    The poem records the emotional turbulence characterizing love in the time of war and the poignancy of the need for self-sacrifice. What is moving about the poem is its “respect for courage and for decision,”81 its understanding of the need to accept the conditions of the present, and its optimistic longing for an imagined future of reunion. The poem rehearses the Empsonian question about life as an experience of possibilities and impossibilities. At the heart of the poem lies the symbol of a more radical paradox of the desire for physical inseparability and the pathos that follows the realization of its impossibility. In the process of creating the doll-couple, Hsiang-Hsiang performs a symbolic marriage and thereby expresses her unreserved love for her soldier-lover, which is disrupted by the painful realization of the need to part. The poem’s internal rhymes and repetitions create the effect that “the lines seem to circle around themselves in a way that eerily suggests their futility.”82 The utopian quality of human love is vividly figured in the fusion of the dolls, an image which reminds one of what Roland Barthes calls “engulfment” as love’s necessary illusion: “we die together: an open death, by dilution into the either, a closed death of the shared grave.”83

    The final stanza of the poem crystallizes Hsiang-Hsiang’s difficulties to come to terms with the necessity of her lover’s departure for the frontline:

    Always the sister doll will cry,
    Made in these careful ways,
    Cry on and on, Come back to me,
    Come back, in a few days.

    These lines are not in the original; they are Empson’s addition.84 With this poetic coda, the “fullness of the poem’s respect for what it contemplates,” says Christopher Ricks, “is achieved because the subject so fully reconciles so much in Empson’s thinking and feeling.”85

    As much attracted to the poem’s celebration of love, Empson was intrigued by its balladic form, which, he notes, “had been used in classical style.”86 The poetic fragment is intertextually derived from a poem by the thirteenth-century woman poet Guan Daosheng (1262–1319), who made this poetic effort to hold back her husband’s departing passion. Li Ji’s ballad successfully “transposed or restored” the classical theme “into popular style.”87 The original is richly suggestive of a total physical union and a willingness to renounce the self for the achievement of that union. In Li Ji’s appropriation of the classical poem, the implied sexuality of love is transformed, enlarged, and elevated into a political form of human relationship in the revolutionary class of peasant-soldiers, and a shared idealism, as embodied by the Chinese Communist Party’s wartime capital Yan’an, which looms large in the background of Li Ji’s poetic narrative.

    It’s difficult to ascertain whether Empson was fully aware of the political implications of the poem, and I’m not aware of any personal relationship between Li Ji and Empson. But it was perhaps unnecessary for him to know Li Ji or that much about the poem. If there is anything in common between them, it is this understanding of literature as organically connected with life and reality. Empson’s sympathy with the Chinese revolution is well known. His decision to stay on teaching in Peking after the Communist victory in 1949 was evidence of his solidarity with this new nation. On October 1, 1949, Empson witnessed the founding of the PRC in Peking. He was moved by the spectacle of the military parade and civilian processions, which he described as a symbolic act of people’s will:

    I did not expect to be more than bored, but found myself extremely moved almost at once. You may believe that what is being celebrated will turn out a delusion, but history is full of gloomy afterthoughts. Here you have celebrated victory of revolt against tyrants, supported by the countryside alone, practically their bare hands, against a government drawing on the full terrors of modern equipment with medieval or fascist police methods into the bargain. If anything in history is impressive you are bound to feel that is.88

    Unlike his wife Hetta, who accompanied him throughout the period of his appointment at Peking, Empson was not formally a member of the British Communist Party. His leftist political sympathy was not just a political ideology, but also a critical and aesthetic response to the realities in China that fell far short of the minimum standard of human decency. Prior to his translation of “Chinese Ballad,” his sympathy with the Chinese revolution had already shown itself in his special interest in Chinese revolutionary art.

    In late 1948, Empson went to see the performance of the “Yellow River Cantata” on the campus of Peking University. The Cantata, composed by the French-educated artist Xian Xinghai who traveled to Yan’an in 1938, the same year as Li Ji did, was thematically related to Wang Gui and Li Xiangxiang. Its performance at the Square of Democracy of the University was “a bold step,” because, Empson explains, it “was forbidden in Chiang Kai- shek’s Peking, and could only happen within the barbed wire”:

    [The Cantata] is about guerilla resistance to the Japanese in North China, using a lot of indigenous folk-tunes, and using Western instruments. The peasant singing is faintly like Russian singing, and very unlike the strained voice of the Chinese ruling- class music, popular in the cities through opera. Basing the revolution on the peasants thus gave a fair case for letting in European techniques; but even so the Cantata … always keeps voice and orchestra separate…. I thought it hauntingly beautiful, all the more in the late dusk in the great square with a tense audience waiting for the liberation of the city.89

    Empson’s sympathy with the CCP’s revolutionary literature is both political and aesthetic. He was drawn to the egalitarian harmony and organic love in “Chinese Ballad”; for the poem, or the translation of it, was “an assurance that though life may be essentially inadequate to the human spirit, the human spirit is essentially adequate to life.”90 The poem’s “simple dignity, clear-sighted and touching,” and its “particular kind of conclusive triumph,” which is realized in love, serve as a suitable poetic conclusion to Empson’s reflections on ambiguity as the condition of life.91

    From his first book on ambiguity to his last poetic composition “Chinese Ballad,” there seems to be a consistent pattern in Empson’s thinking and writing. The concept of ambiguity recognizes the potentialities of diversity and multiplicity in language and the value of literature as knowledge of possibilities and impossibilities in life, and in practice, it makes possible a democratic form of criticism in analysis and interpretation. Empson’s decision to teach in China was a choice of disengagement from things and people he had decided not to engage at home. Escape is not exactly a struggle against a specific government policy, a particular ideology, a political authority, or even an identifiable external object, but neither is it non- action, passivity, or non-resistance. One has to be outside one’s formative society in order to be a critic of it. Empson’s “Sacred Mountain,” intended to be a substitute for his formative society, may well be an idealized community in which he was able to imagine a new type of human relationship and “interpersonal fusion in love”92 against alienation, pessimism, and despair.

    1. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780 – 1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 304. Back to essay

    2.  Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), vol. i, 368, 370. Back to essay

    3. William Empson, “Volpone,” in Essays on Renaissance Literature, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), v. 2, 72. Back to essay

    4. Biographical and critical studies of Empson are copious. John Haffenden’s William Empson: Among the Mandarins and William Empson: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005) are indispensable biographical studies of Empson. Critical studies which have particularly helped me in thinking about the significance of Empson’s work in China include: Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), Paul H. Frye, William Empson: Prophet against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991), Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: Athlone Press, 1978). Critical Essays on William Empson, edited by John Constable (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1993), is a useful collection of critical essays and reviews of Empson’s works. Back to essay

    5. This is the title of a poem by Empson published in 1936: “Courage Means Running,” collected in William Empson, The Complete Poems, edited with Introduction and Notes by John Haffenden (London: Penguin Press, 2000). Back to essay

    6. William Empson, “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” in The Complete Poems, 91. Hereafter this work is cited parenthetically as “Nan‐ Yűeh.” Back to essay

    7.  Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐ Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 380. Back to essay

    8.  William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986), 114‐5. Back to essay

    9.  W. B. Yeats’s “The Phase of the Moon” reads:

    The soul remembering its loneliness
    Shudders in many cradles; all is changed,
    ….
    Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn,
    Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all
    Deformed, because there is no deformity
    But saves us from a dream. (88‐102)

    W.B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1983), 165‐6. Back to essay

    10.  Empson notes:

    Nan‐yueh is a sacred mountain about seventy miles southwest of Changsha; the Arts Departments of the Combined Universities were housed on it for a term in 1937, and then we moved further back to Yunnan.
    Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 379. 

    Back to essay

    11.  John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 456. Back to essay

    12.  Empson, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 379. Back to essay

    13.  William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 1; hereafter this work is cited parenthetically as Ambiguity. Back to essay

    14.  William Empson, Letter to Philip Hobsbaum, 2 August 1969, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 477, 481, 480. For Empson, the acceptance of intention is the beginning of responsible criticism, and “the effects of renouncing it … produces dirty nonsense all the time, with a sort of tireless unconscious inventiveness for new kinds of nonsense.” Empson, Letter to Philip Hobsbaum, 2 August 1969, Selected Letters of William Empson, 477. Back to essay

    15.  Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 5. Back to essay

    16.  The seven types of ambiguity, Empson explains, are “intended as stages of advancing logical disorder” (Ambiguity 48). For a reading of the ambiguity of this formulation, see Paul H. Fry, Chapter 3, “Advancing Logical Disorder: Empson on Method,” William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice (London: Routledge, 1991). Back to essay

    17. William Wordsworth, The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, OUP, 1970), xi:258, 213. Back to essay

    18. Roger Sale, Modern Heroism: Essays on D.H. Lawrence, William Empson, and J.R.R Tolkien (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973), 122. Back to essay

    19. The poem by Tao Qian, in the Waley translation, is as follows:

    Swiftly the years, beyond recall.
    Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.
    I will clothe myself in spring‐clothing
    And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.
    By the mountain‐stream a mist hovers,
    Hovers a moment, then scatters.
    There comes a wind blowing from the south
    That brushes the fields of new corn.

    Tao Qian (372‐427), “New Corn.”
    A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), 116. Back to essay

    20. These are Empson’s words for a misprint that occurred in the eleventh edition of Philip Sidney’s “You Gote‐heard Gods” that the original “morning” is replaced with “mourning”:

    At whose approach the sun rose in the evening,
    Who where she went bore in her forehead mourning,
    Is gone, is gone, from these our spoiled forests,
    Turning to deserts our best pastor’d mountains.

    See Seven Types of Ambiguity, 38. Back to essay

    21.  Empson, Note to “Bacchus,” The Complete Poems, 290. Back to essay

    22.  See Sale, Modern Heroism, 117. Back to essay

    23.  Matthew Creasy, “Empson’s Tact,” in Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Clarendon). Back to essay

    24. Empson explains his use of the word thus: “Argufying is the kind of arguing we do in ordinary life, usually to get our own way; I do not mean nagging by it, but just a not especially dignified sort of arguing. This has always been one of the things people enjoy in poems; and it can be found in every period of English literature.” See William Empson, “Argufying in Poetry,” in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffendon (London: The Hogarth Press, 1988), 167. Back to essay

    25.  Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2008), 118. Back to essay

    26.  Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 36. Back to essay

    27.  J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 64. Back to essay

    28.  Adorno, Minima Moralia, 37. Back to essay

    29.  Adorno, Minima Moralia, 37. Back to essay

    30.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 293. Back to essay

    31.  Empson, “Note on Notes”, Empson, The Complete Poems, 113. Back to essay

    32.  Aldous Huxley, “Snobs,” in Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 7 (2007), 88. Back to essay

    33.  Aldous Huxley, “Snobs,” in Aldous Huxley Annual, vol. 7(2007), 87. Back to essay

    34.  For critical reflections on the academic genealogy of Cambridge English, see Raymond Williams, “Cambridge English, Past and Present” and “Crisis in English Studies,” in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1991). Back to essay

    35. William Empson, “Postscript” to Christopher Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (London: The Athlone Press, 1978), 206. Back to essay

    36. Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205. Back to essay

    37.  Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205. Back to essay

    38.  Empson explains in the book how his experience of teaching at government universities in the Far East made it harder for him to adjust to the revival of Christianity in the British academy: “Having had ten years teaching in Japan and China, and having been interested only in propaganda during the war, halfway through them, I am still rather ill‐adjusted to the change of atmosphere. Lecturing at the Government universities in the Far East, which means firmly non‐missionary ones, was not likely to prepare me for it; I gathered that those of my students who became interested in Paradise Lost, though too polite to express their opinion to me quite directly, thought ‘Well, if they worship such a monstrously wicked God as all that, no wonder that they themselves are so monstrously wicked as we have traditionally found them.’” Empson, Milton’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 10. Back to essay

    39.  Empson, “Postscript” to Norris, William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism, 205 – 6. Back to essay

    40.  Empson, “Volpone,” Essays on Renaissance Literature, v. 2, 66. Back to essay

    41.  Empson, Letter to Chien Hsueh‐hsi, 7 September 1947, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 151. Back to essay

    42. See John Constable, “Preface,” Critical Essays on William Empson, ed. John Constable (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), 4. Back to essay

    43. Coleridge considered plagiarism to be “intentional imitation.” Simple similarities between authors should not be held as proof of plagiarism, and true plagiarism did not typically show itself in textual parallelism, but was often covered by textual dissimilitude. Referring to an unidentified volume of poetry “completely made up of gross plagiarisms from Akenside, Thomson, Bowles, Southey, and Lyrical Ballads,” Coleridge noted a range of “artifices” the poet employed to “disguise the theft, – transpositions, dilutions, substitutions of synonyms, etc. etc. – and yet not the least resemblance to any one of the poets whom he pillaged.” An “intentional plagiarist,” wrote Coleridge, “would have translated, not transcribed.” What was important for Coleridge was whether or not the mind in the text was (or intended to be) original. Coleridge called for the need to judge by “the original spirit.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Letter on Plagiarism (December 15, 1811), in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London: Dent, 1960), vol. 2, 184 – 191. Back to essay

    44. Harry Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” Foreword to Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, trans. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2002), vii. Back to essay

    45.  Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” vii. Back to essay

    46.  Harootunian, “The Exotics of Nowhere,” viii. Back to essay

    47.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 273. Back to essay

    48.  Willis, William Empson (New York and London: Columbia University press, 1969), 44. Back to essay

    49.  Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 293. Back to essay

    50.  Haffenden, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐ Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 388.  Back to essay

    51.  Willis, William Empson, 44. Back to essay

    52.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards [early December 1929], Selected Letters of William Empson, 13. Back to essay

    53.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards, 29th January [? 1930], Selected Letters of William Empson,16. The letter is inaccurately dated. In the letter Empson reported to Richards that he had met Wu Mi, Dean of Tsinghua University, and expressed to him his interesting in teaching in China. Wu Mi recorded the meeting in his diary on January 25 1931. Empson’s letter should be dated 29th January 1931. See Wu Mi, Wu Mi riji (Wu Mi’s diaries), vol. 5 (1930 – 1933), ed. Wu Xuezhao (Beijing: Joint Publications, 1998), 176. Back to essay

    54. Auden, “Letter to Lord Byron,” Auden, Collected Poems, 99. Neal Wood notes that a whole group of graduates joined the teaching profession in the 1930s: “Some of the most promising university graduates turned to teaching and tutoring for want of better opportunity. W.H. Auden, Arthur Calder‐Marshall, G. Day Lewis, Michael Redgrave, Edward Upward, and Christopher Isherwood are but a few. Positions in foreign colleges were taken by Rex Warner, Malcom Muggeridge, Jullian Bell, William Empson, and William Plomer.” Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (New York: Columbia UP, 1959), 38. Back to essay

    55.  John Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford: SUP, 1998), 56 ‐7. Back to essay

    56.  Qian Nengxin, for example, published in 1939 his Xinan sanqianwubai li (Three thousand and five hundred lis through south‐west China) with the Commercial Press. Recently, there has been a spate of publications about Lianda in China, including memoirs, historical and academic studies, and archival records. Back to essay

    57. Mengzi was a rural county not yet touched by the advance of modernity, a frontier region that, though providing shelter from the cruelty and brutality of the war, had its pre‐modern dangers and risks. “Even by day, it was risky to walk in the countryside, for widespread possession of arms reflected the prevalence of banditry in a frontier region. The young English poet William Empson … was robbed several times during rural strolls. The library in the customs compound was open after dark, but every hour a bell rang to alert students who had finished their studies that an armed escort was ready to accompany them back to their dormitories.” Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution, 67. Back to essay

    58. Empson’s memoirs of teaching in wartime China are collected in his The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Reviews, ed. John Haffenden (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). Back to essay

    59.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” in The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 190. Back to essay

    60.  Mu Dan emerged as a leading modernist poet in the 1940s. He entered the Department of Foreign Languages, Tsinghua University in 1935 and after the outbreak of the Sino‐Japanese war, travelled to Hunan and Kunming with Lianda. In the course on modern English poetry, Mu Dan read with Empson contemporary Anglo‐American poets including some of Empson’s friends such as T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. Mu Dan was profoundly influenced by Auden, who had just been to China to report on the war. In 1942, Mu Dan joined the China Expeditionary Force fighting the Japanese in the mountainous terrain between Berman and Yunnan. Some of his best known poems such as “The Demon of the Forest” (1945) record the wrenching grief, pain, despair, and anguish in response to the unbelievable brutalities of war he had experienced. He left China for postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1948. Back to essay

    61. Wang Zuoliang, who studied with Empson at Lianda in those two “mobile years,” writes: Empson “traveled with the Universities, and us, by way of Hong Kong and Hanoi, to Mengzi and finally to Kunming. As if cheered up by the city’s beauty and its breezes, he mounted a course on Modern English Poetry. What was unique about this course was that the teacher himself was a modern English poet. …And it was also a course taught by a literary critic famous for his quick and agile mind. … The fact that we had a modernist poet teach us was more attractive than any readings we did. As a result, a new literary trend was being formed among his students and his students’ students.” Wang Zuoliang, “Remembering Empson,” Waiguo wenxue (Foreign literature), no 1, 1980, 3. See also Zhao Ruihong’s essay: “Remembering the Modernist English Poet Mr. Empson,” in Zhao Ruihong, Linuan xiange yi jiuyou (Fragments about old friends in the time of war) (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 2000), 25‐45. Back to essay

    62. Empson’s two poetic collections Poems (1935) and The Gathering Storm (1940) were published symmetrically before and after his first stint of teaching in China between 1937 and 38. “The first volume … was mainly ‘love poems about boy being too afraid of girl to tell her anything,’ whereas the second…. was more political, written in the midst of a war which he could see was going to become global.” See Paul Dean, “The Critic as Poet: Empson’s Contradictions,” The New Criterion, October 2001, 25. Back to essay

    63. Empson, “A London Letter,” Poetry 49 (January 1937), quoted in Haffenden, “Introduction” to The Complete Poems, xi. Back to essay

    64.  See Adam Phillips, “No Reason for Not Asking,” London Review of Books, 28:15 (Aug. 26, 2006). Back to essay

    65.  See Haffenden, Introduction to The Complete Poems, xxxix. Back to essay

    66.  Empson, Letter to I.A. Richards, February 18, 1933, Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 55. Back to essay

    67.  Empson, The Complete Poems, 99. Back to essay

    68.  See Ian Tromp, “A Poet Duly Noted,” The Nation, December 31 2001, 37. Back to essay

    69.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 191. Back to essay

    70.  Empson, “A Chinese University,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 190. Back to essay

    71.  Fong Youlan, “Huailian Jin Yuelin xiansheng” (Remembering Mr. Jin Yuelin), Lianda jiaoshou (Lianda’s Professors) (Beijing: New Star Press, 2010), 91. Back to essay

    72.  Israel, Lianda, 84. Back to essay

    73.  Empson, Note to The Complete Poems, 380. One of his roommates was the U.S. educated flamboyant George Ye who proposed Empson’s elegant Chinese name 燕卜荪. See Fu Guoyong (傅国涌), Ye Gongchao zhuan (Ye Gongchao: a biography) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2004). Back to essay

    74.  Israel, Lianda, 2. Back to essay

    75.  Haffenden, Note to “Autumn on Nan‐Yűeh,” The Complete Poems, 382. Back to essay

    76.  Williams, Culture and Society, 318. Back to essay

    77.  Quoted in Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 504. Back to essay

    78.  See Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, i, 502. Back to essay

    79.  Empson, Note to “Chinese Ballad,” The Complete Poems, 400. Back to essay

    80.  Empson, “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 103. Back to essay

    81.  Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in Roma Gill, ed., William Empson: The Man and His Work (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 206 – 7. Back to essay

    82. Lewin, Review of The Complete Poems of William Empson, ANQ, 15:4 (Fall 2002), 49. Back to essay

    83.  Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin, 1990), 11. Back to essay

    84.  Empson said: “I added the bit about children, but I understand that is only like working a footnote into the text, because the term specifically means dolls for children.” Note to “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 400. Back to essay

    85. Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in Roma Gill, ed., William Empson: The Man and His Work (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 207. Back to essay

    86.  Empson’s note to the poem. Back to essay

    87.  Empson, Note to “Chinese Ballad,” in The Complete Poems, 400. The original poem in Chinese reads:

    《我侬词》元·管道
    昇你侬我侬,忒煞情多。
    情多处,热如火。
    把一块泥,捻一个你,塑一个我
    将咱两个,一齐打破,用水调和。
    再捻一个你,再塑一个我。
    我泥中有你,你泥中有我。
    与你生同一个衾,死同一个椁。

    The Kungfu film star Bruce Lee had a rendering of the poem in English under the title “Parting”:

    Who knows when meeting shall ever be.
    It might be for years or
    It might be forever.

    Let us then take a lump of clay,
    Wet it, pat it,
    And make an image of you
    And an image of me.
    Then smash them, crash them,
    And, with a little water,
    Knead them together.

    And out of the clay we’ll remake
    An image of you, and an image of me.
    Thus in my clay,
    there’s a little of you,
    And in your clay,
    there’s a little of me.

    And nothing will ever set us apart.
    Living, we’ll be forever in each other’s heart,
    And dead, we’ll be buried together.

    Bruce Lee, Artist of Life, ed. John Little (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2001), 116. Back to essay

    88. Empson, “Red on Red: William Empson Witness the Inauguration of the People’s Republic of China,” London Review of Books, 30th September 1999. Back to essay

    89. Empson, “Pei‐Ta before the Siege,” The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 198. Back to essay

    90.  Christopher Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” in William Empson: The Man and His Work, 207. Back to essay

    91. Ricks, “Empson’s Poetry,” 206 – 7. Back to essay

    92.  Erich Fromm defines love as “interpersonal fusion.” See his The Art of Loving (Penguin Classics, 2000), 17. Back to essay

  • Library of Congress Interview with Dawn Lundy Martin, editor of forthcoming dossier in boundary2 vol. 52, no. 4 (November 2015)

    Poet, essayist, and multimedia artist Dawn Lundy Martin, editor of “On Race and Innovation,” a boundary2 dossier forthcoming in vol. 42, no. 5 (November 2015), was recently interviewed by the Library of Congress.  Below is a small excerpt of the interview:

    “In contrast to conventional images of the black female body, your poems are stark in their physicality; they also speak of the body in a conceptualized way. Can you talk about this duality?

    The black female body is an invention of conventional thought. It has been conceived, at least in the West, via a series of manipulations, perceptions, and racist interventions by institutions—intellectual, political, and popular alike. I believe in the black female body only in so far as one is an individual who might make certain claims about their own legitimate being in the world. But that is difficult. How do we know ourselves except through the eyes of the other? How to claim something legitimately and intimately given the cultural representations of the black female body that have nothing to do with our interiorities? It’s a fraught intersection—femaleness and blackness—one that should not be easily articulated or regurgitated. Hence, what might be understood as a conceptualized means of approaching and speaking the black female body. I want to resist being put into your box of recognizability. I want to give the finger to those eyes of knowing/creating.”

    If you wish to read the interview in its entirety, please visit the Library of Congress website.