Rejoicing the Crisis in the Name

Judith Butler’s notion that language is performative and therefore can be used as a tool to subvert dominant discourse is very appealing. For Butler, gender and race are social constructs that can be deconstructed through the ‘slippage’ or the failure of the performative, which opens a space of resistance for the marginalized. She cites Spivak’s “enabling violation” to explain how agency can be realized from within the conditions of oppression. The repetition of hegemonic terms can “reverse and displace their originating aims.”

The iterability of the terms of subjectivation creates a space of ambivalence that allows the other to rework them (Derrida anyone?). Butler claims that heterosexuality as the normative ideal seeks to both naturalize itself and render itself original so homosexuality becomes a product of repudiated heterosexual love. However, Butler insists that when a drag queen imitates the ideal woman it becomes clear that the ideal does not exist. No performance of sexual norms can reach this ideal, and the resulting gap between the ideal and reality opens up an ambivalent space from which other voices can speak and be heard. The drag performance then can create agency as the “Queen will out-woman women.” (I really like this!) In this way, the fetishization of the feminine ideal can bring about a symbolic crisis which will in turn effect a crisis in the morphological stability of the name ‘woman’, or ‘man’.

In other words, the language of oppression can be used against itself, so to speak, to reveal that terms overtly fixed in meaning are inherently ambiguous. And if this is so, they no longer refer to their original referent. In this way, through the reworked terms imposed identities are exchanged for space to construct new ones.

Butler’s text reminds me of the old films in which Carmen Miranda sings with a pineapple? on her head. She represents the quintessential Latina: loud, colorful, exotically over the top. She is so ridiculous that her parody of the stereotypical Latin American female proves the fallacy of the myth. The Irish Spring soap ads do the same regarding the ideal man.

Any problems?

I think that some may question using the language of oppression to resist its power. There may be the danger that this will only strengthen the performativity of language that has traumatized generations of people living in the interstices of society. They might call for the invention of a new language to remove the shackles of the old. However, Butler claims that the “I” cannot extract itself from the history that created it and gains agency from the power relations it hopes to undermine.

Who Can Speak for Whom?

When bell hooks asks if we can imagine a black woman lesbian making a film about white gay subculture, I find it very difficult to justify my pursuit of an MA in post-colonial studies. I mean, who am I to comment on the experience of the colonial subject? I write about trauma at the hands of European hegemony, but even as an Irish-Canadian woman my experience cannot be called trauma. There is no real ‘post’ in subaltern studies. People continue to suffer the ravages of the European legacy of expansion. I have no answer to bell’s question; just a rather shamefaced and pathetic shrug is all I can come up with. Perhaps my experience as a privileged expat at local public schools in West Africa urges me to make some sense of it all.

One incident in particular that occurred at school when I was about eight or nine haunts me. Hassana, a Fulani girl and I were sent to the principal, Mrs. Jarma, to receive punishment for running around a public swimming pool. Hassana was beaten with a ruler and emerged from the office with a huge gash on her upper arm. When it was my turn to be dealt with, Mrs. Jarma spoke to me harshly and sent me on my way. Writing this makes me very aware that the story is mine in every sense of the word: my world, my words, Hassana’s lack of space, her quiet sobbing . . .

Yes, whiteness informs my perspective, so how can I write about/for the multitudinous Other without taking their space? Maybe our only option is to write/read, film/watch, sing/listen with or alongside one another.

Another point hooks makes is that films such as Paris Is Burning often make spectacle out of ritualized play and commodify blackness. Her point brings to mind the traditional Sunday night documentary (the objective ethnographer’s gaze) in which empowering forms of self-expression, such as theatre depicting slavery in the Ivory Coast, become exotic entertainment for North Americans.

The appropriation of dominant discourse to articulate social and cultural identities is one way of resisting oppression and dismantling cultural essentialism; however, there is a need for global institutions of higher learning to open themselves up to indigenous texts, films, music, etc… Perhaps this way the sexist/racist ideas, for example, that black men are hyper-masculine, that whiteness personifies the idea of femininity, that gay men are feminine will give way to the possibility that there are many ways of being in the world.

Raymond Williams

“Clearly there is something in the psychology of print and image that none of us has yet quite grasped.” Raymond Williams says this after discussing his family’s ability to appreciate “culture”. Their finesse of feeling, quick discrimination, and clear grasp of ideas are evidence of what he calls the false equation of the “badness” of popular culture as a reflection of the mental development of its consumers. In other words, all human beings are able to appreciate art, which has the mysterious quality that engages perceivers regardless of their education, class, religion, time etc…And what remains constant before all these viewers throughout history? Form. But that is a topic for another day. Back to the text.

Williams’ argument that culture is always traditional and creative and made up of both ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings makes sense, especially when you apply this definition to literature. First, tradition is part of a text not in the form of a fixed past but one that is also continuously being rewritten to create new narratives in the present. Secondly, literature engages individuals as part of a common humanity that is in a continual process of development.

While Williams accepts the Marxist theory that there is a strong relationship between culture and production, and that education is restricted to a privileged few, he rejects the notion that there is an ignorant mass of working class people that are excluded from a dying English culture. The Marxists demand a different system of production that can save English culture. However, argues William, culture cannot be prescribed as it is made and remade (organically he might say today) by people who are living. Literature, as we have discussed in class, is always in a process creation.

Williams goes on to disprove several myths about the effects of the development of industrial society. First, he rejects the idea that the price we must pay for economic power and is a “cheapened” culture. Second, he does not agree that commercial culture is a product of popular education, i.e. now that “the masses are educated” culture is going out the window. There are no masses; it is only a word for othering people. In fact, there were just as many trashy newspapers before public education, and there is much more good literature in circulation today.

Finally, Williams calls for a common education that will foster a socialist democratic community whose cultural institutions enrich the lives of ordinary people.

I really enjoyed this reading. His understanding of culture as a continual process that gives agency to individuals and communities, a process that cannot be planned by ideology, describes the conversation that literature forces us to engage in without losing our subjectivity.

Auras from Forms

I am trying to understand what the aura of a work of art is. Benjamin explains that modernity has changed the way we perceive art. In particular, the mechanical reproduction of art has resulted in the loss of the aura. It seems that auras in art only occur when a work is authentic, original and not reproduced, and this is the reason films as reproductions of images do not have them. I have difficulty grasping this idea because I keep thinking of films that Benjamin would consider inauthentic works of art but that I feel that do not aestheticize politics to support a fascist cause.

Trinh Minh-ha’s film Reassemblage would be a good example of politicized art that is original while at the same time reproducible. Films that document daily life have a certain realist aesthetic that engages the audience’s intellect and sensory perceptions in the same way that they are employed in life. Trinh Minh-ha’s film appears to meet Benjamin’ definition of “auraless” art. In her film, Trinh focuses on the mundane and the natural rhythms of a Senegalese village without resorting to the gloss of a didactic ethnographic documentary of the National Geographic kind. There is no voice-over of the traditional ethnographer’s film that tells the audience what to think, and nothing is explained to provoke a particular response in the viewer. Images are woven into a collage of rhythms that we decipher with our senses, so that rather than simply watching the scenes we experience them. She doesn’t produce what Banjamin calls “reception in distraction” or entertainment founded on shock effects. The audience members are left to experience a Senegalese village as if they were there, and to make any conclusions on their own terms. The resulting effect negates the stereotype of the Western anthropologist who has unlocked the secrets of an Other primitive culture. We are presented with a world that exists independently of the West in a form of art that ‘reproduces’ life to show its lack of any one truth.

Trinh’s art entices the viewer into considering the existence of a multiplicity of possible realities in flux. Her editing skills create the form of her work, which is inseparable from the film’s content. As in any art form, the ORIGINAL shaping of the raw footage IS the content of the film.

So we are back to form. The more I read, the more I like the idea that art is form is art. Whatever art does, it all starts with how its form triggers the conversation among the perceiver(s).

“Le vert est ou”

Austin and Literature

The notion that when we speak we are performing actions that our words refer to and that these utterances are neither true nor false, must have been obvious when people heard themselves being called “Heretic” during the Spanish Inquisition. The horror they felt was due to the fact that once declared a heretic, one became one regardless of the ‘truth’ of the matter. Unfortunately, this declaration was often in Austin’s terms a ‘felicitous’ performative. However, the notion that all language is performative is new and really quite frightening for me.

If one applies Austin’s theory to literature, the implications for the reader are serious for literary language is also performative; it is not true or false, and it creates/makes real the world it ‘speaks’ of. This means that it also brings to life the ideas, morals, ideology that lie within the text. In other words, literature helps to shape/perform the world. And the repetition of Western ideology over centuries would then only serve to ensure that certain ideologies are deeply entrenched in communities where texts ‘perform’ acts. We have seen this before in Althusser, for example.

Literature creates reality to override other realities. Therefore, when texts ‘speak’ of women and men, the idea of woman and man is performed. This suggests that gender is a construct of literary language. In other words, there is no woman or man as such outside of the text. We are female or male animals whose social performance is just that, a performance constructed in great part by language and the society that language performs. This might apply to any cultural construction of human beings. Extrapolating further, literature can transform reality. Then text might not construct female and male human beings but discover many possible varieties of individuals.

Questions:

1.  What is felicitous and infelicitous literary language? Perhaps felicitous literary language is literature that uses language and form to successfully engage its audience in a ‘conversation’ that stimulates reflection on human experience. Infelicitous literary language would fail to do this. But then a lot of what we call non-literary texts becomes literature.

2.  Where does meaning come from, or where is the subject in language? Austin claims that the speaker’s words and not her/his intention are performative. This means that you mean what you say/do, not what you think. However, when I say, “I love you” to my great-grandmother my intention is to tell her how much she means to me, so my intention is embedded in my words/actions, isn’t it?

Similarly, if I say, “I love you” to a partner I am thinking of breaking up with to delay the inevitable, my words ‘perform’ my intention as well as the ‘infelicitous’ illocutionary act of falsely declaring my love for the other person.

3.  Why are the words of an actor not performative? (I asked this before I read the next text)

“Percussion in mis major”

Limited Inc. is very difficult to follow, and I really can’t pretend to understand it all. However, I did at least grasp the tone, and I couldn’t help chuckling when I read what looks like a rant against poor Austin.

His argument owes a lot to Austin’s concept of performative language, but for Derrida the theory is flawed for several reasons:

1.  The writer does not have to be present. Searle says a shopping list and notes to a colleague during a lecture require the author’s presence. Derrida’s argument still holds as the shopping list and notes can be used repeatedly at other times. I have no problems with this idea, For example, once at an airport, someone behind a double glass wall wrote a message for me on the glass. I am sure that the glass was cleaned that day, and neither the writer nor I ever saw it again. However, it was quoted several times in many other contexts, resulting in different meanings each time. Therefore, even when a text is destroyed, its language can live on.

2. Requiring a speaker to be sincere suggests that there is meaning outside the text, but all meaning is in the text.

However, Derrida is addressing Austin (Sarl) and his ideas were formed over the course of his education in France. Doesn’t his resistance to traditional readings of texts come from his engagement with theorists from Plato on?

Searle argues that intentions do not always need to be conscious and sees no need for the separation of intention from the expression of intention. I agree that the two converge at times, and I don’t see how this convergence contradicts Derrida’s idea that texts infinitely defer meaning. Borges’ texts will be interpreted with and without consideration of his intention, but it is difficult to believe no trace of Borges remains in his work. When we read, we are discovering more of the world, and Borges remains in it through his writing. As we have discussed in class, the point of literature is to generate conversation on the human experience, not to arrive at a single possible meaning. The text keeps the dialogue going because meaning is elusive (even its origin!) The phrase, “Le vert est ou” repeated (used) in certain academic circles has and will have various meanings each time it is repeated. It might speak of Searle’s argument, of Derrida’s theory, of an example bad grammar, etc…

Also, I cannot help thinking of testimonial literature, and I worry that excluding the author and her/his history might be silencing Others. When women in South Korea write stories of their double oppression in a patriarchal society under a totalitarian regime, they use a certain voice and form to change the world. Yes, their text is performative, but if we don’t acknowledge their authorship, can we say that we are listening to their voices? They are writing to change the present world as well as any number of worlds in the future. If someone cries, “Help”, don’t we need to know whom it is in order to respond?

When a narrative about past events subverts oppressive discourse by creating a plurality of perspectives, the author and readers recuperate the past to inform the present. In this case, the text is dependent on realities outside and inside its language.

3.  “Parasitic” or “Non-serious” language utterances are no different form any other utterance.  And although signs appear before speech, and not the other way around as Austin claims, all language is performative. Searle claims that Austin’s exclusion of “non-serious” language was temporary. This seems odd. Derrida’s attack on Austin’s exclusion of “non-serious” utterances makes sense to me. If you have a theory about language, why exclude such a large portion of the language we use? Derrida claims that all utterances are repeatable and it is this very iterability of language that makes it performative.

4.  The iterability of written language in the absence of the writer makes it performative for with every iteration there is a break with a previous perfomative context to perpetually defer an ultimate meaning. Searle claims that Derrida is confusing iterability with permanence, but reprinted texts are read differently each time, and thus iterative.

I like the idea that literature’s performativity and iterability perpetually defers meaning so that texts can transform the world. However, I don’t see how the absence of the writer permits us to disregard all traces of her/his voice in the text. Yes, any sign can exist without the sender and/or receiver, but controllers at a Pan American Airways station might have saved Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan if they had known the signals they were picking up were coming from their plane!

A gardener in Papua New Guinea would say this meaning he had pulled a plant’s roots out of the ground. It is German and English mixed with Malay syntax and appropriate here because I am going to focus on the resisting subject in The Penal Colony. This form of Pidgin (Tok Pisin) is a creolization of language, which is a form of resistance against dominant discourse where subjects struggle with the power of the state for control of their bodies. They create a new language to claim space for themselves.

In Kafka’s tale, the nameless characters are products of various power structures that repress individual will. They have no agency because their subjectivity is created by the state. All their actions demonstrate that they are Althusser’s concrete subjects. The state apparatus inscribes the law on their bodies. Just as a harrow cultivates the land, Kafka’s harrow is history subjecting the body to violence in the construction of culture.

However, throughout the story there are signs that the system is flawed and resistance to power is always present.

The Condemned Man

The first sign of resistance to the Old Commandant’s order is the Condemned Man’s insubordination. Rather than begging forgiveness for his misdemeanor, he grabs his superior and shouts, “Throw away that whip or I’ll eat you up.” This mimicry of the master’s aggression reflects the barbarism of the state and demonstrates the individual’s non-compliance with the law.  Later, the condemned man dares to bend over the glass of the harrow, and the fact that he is chained and then must be strapped on to the bed of the Apparatus is a clear indication of the individual’s resistance to coercion.

Once in the bed, the Condemned is overcome by nausea and throws up so that the stump of felt can no longer silence him. His vomit flows into the machine.

Later, he uses signs to communicate with the soldier with whom he makes friends. When he sees the officer in the Apparatus, he smiles as he realizes that he will get his revenge. Finally, he tries to leave the island with the Traveler. All of these actions point to an individual’s resistance to power.

The Apparatus

Kafka’s machine of torture is a reflection of the State’s inability to completely control all subjects. Thus, the machine only “seems to do its work uniformly.” It squeaks creating a disturbance that infuriates the Officer who sees that it is still “not working properly.” In fact, the officer unwittingly admits to the failure of the system when he calls the tortured “martyrs.” The transfiguration on their faces brings to mind saints on burning pyres who refuse to give up their faith and just before death experience a transfiguration that only confirms their convictions. The condemned in the penal colony resist even while their sentences are being inscribed down to the very core of their bodies.

The Officer, on the other hand, does not require straps and cannot use the felt stump as he willingly submits to his torture and death. There isn’t even the slightest hum when the Officer is in it, perhaps because he, like Pontius Pilate, cannot wash his hands of his guilt. However, the machine self-destructs because it is torturing one of its own docile subjects. Paradoxically, the state as oppressive power can only function when it is suppressing individual will. In other words, where there is “guilt beyond a doubt” resistance is inevitable. (The imploding machine reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s imploding robots, which are unable to deal with the changeable nature of morality because they lack free will)

The Traveller

The Traveler recognizes the inhumanity that the Apparatus represents. He cannot decipher the language of the diagrams, but he is horrified by the implication of what he sees. He refuses to support the Officer, and although his decision not to stop the machine from killing the Officer points to his own subjectivity cultivated by another oppressive system, he bites his lip and says nothing. Why does Kafka add this detail? The biting of his lip indicates that he is holding something back. He is not completely without a conscience. Something is bubbling just under the surface. The reader is disappointed in his pathetic behaviour, and when he prevents the Soldier and Condemned Man from leaving the island with him, he appears to be a very callous individual. However, I would argue that the glimmer of conscience that keeps threatening to make itself heard is Kafka’s acknowledgement of the resisting voice that we may choose to stifle but that is, nevertheless, always there.

If citizens are products of a culture that controls them, why the need for the Apparatus?

Where there is power there is resistance, which is an expression of individual will.

As my Irish grandfather said to his children when they were not allowed to speak Gaelic and had to use English in school, “Bastardize de language baiy!”

So they would ask, “Verarugoin and vatarudoin?”

I haven’t slept much this week because first I learned that literature is dead, and then I read that ideology/consciousness is determined by material circumstances. Let me deal with the first nightmare.

Literature is dead! In another words, because we all act out of radical evil, literature along with its writers and readers no longer have anything honest (for lack of a better word) to say about being human. This claim, I feel, is itself an act of radical evil, for it silences the multitude of voices that continue to express themselves through the writing and reading of literature. I mean, how can anyone claim that the stories, testimonials, reflections of those whose discourse runs contrary to hegemonic discourse do not constitute literature? Who are we to silence them? Perhaps those in mourning are thinking of themselves as authors and readers who have lost interest in contributing to the conversation still generated by literature. Actually, I think people who lament the death of literature are deceiving themselves (dishonestly). Literature as language is a manifestation of the unconscious, so if it were dead we would be mute. However, we continue to speak honestly about what it means to be human, and the conversation continues.

Also, I would like to add that Kant did suggest that a conversion from radical evil acts to moral acts that coincide with our moral thoughts (moral as in for the greater good) is possible. There is redemption, not in the religious sense from a God or Being outside the self but through the   individual’s effort. This is as far as I got, but it seems to me that we are not doomed to a permanent state of radical evil, and there is literature out there that is ALIVE and KICKING!

Now to Althusser:

1. “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”  We rely on language to establish our reality so we are always victims of ideology: in other words, material conditions, or things, first and consciousness second.

Those who listened to the language of Gandhi, King or Sui Kyi were the victims of certain ideologies and found agency with another.

What about art? Surely there are works of art that reflect a myriad of hybrid thought systems that successfully challenge state ideologies.Where does individual human creativity fit? Are we creative because we are victims of ideology? What about the middle-class writer whose act of writing subverts dominant discourse?

What about the wealthy citizen giving up all vast wealth to work as a volunteer? Aren’t his or her actions a reflection of individual agency?

2. “Ideology has material existence.” Ideology manifests itself through actions that become practices.

What about all the actions that manifest numerous ideologies? In a pluralistic environment of competing ideologies there must arise vast grey areas where actions (of resistance) reflect an ever-evolving patchwork of consciousnesses!

3. “All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.” 4. “Individuals are always already subjects.”

What about refugees born in a refugee camp and arriving in Victoria on a boat? What is their ideology? Who hails them and will they respond?  Whose subjects are they?

LACAN

The id is the signifier that emerges as language. So Lacan does not agree that things come before consciousness, or that things come first and language exists to name them.

No, “consciousness begins with the letter”. This means language is the signifier, which is always displaced from the object of desire. Like Saussure, Lacan believes that the bar between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and cannot be crossed. We are forever barred from what we desire and language can only function metonymically (Freud’s displacement) with an occasional wondrous metaphor (Freud’s condensation) popping up once in a while.

The object of desire can only be sensed as a lack that is occasionally manifested through metaphor. For example, a dove might mean peace.  We desire peace, or we sense that it is something desirable, but we don’t know what it is. The image of the dove only offers a fleeting glimpse of what we think we lack.

(The paradox is that these metaphors revel a momentary glimmer of what we desire when there is a certain amount of distance between the object of desire and the signifier)

So it seems that we can never be present to ourselves. We can never satisfy our desires because the signified, the object of desire is perpetually deferred.

Meaning is always out of reach, but that is how language creates the subject. Without the desire for the ever-elusive object, language would be unnecessary. If we could know the unconscious, language would never be needed. Language is necessary because only through conversation can we engage the unconscious and develop as human beings.

The conversation continues…