Seamless Subsubsubjectivity

Quixote Voyage life southdeath, boat, cabs, train, steps, errante two men at once hybrid criollo doublings/splittings two lineages, two deaths, dreams and fantasies/reality Catriel fighting for both sides, the passion – time scarlet past and the present pink memory youth/age future/past.. solitude, county/city solitude North South history repetition and more repetition Derrida summer after summer. . . , certainty becomes unfixed and SOMETHING HAPPENS! And again! Choices are made to live….even in possible death – Quixote Eternity/Instant/mortality/immortality READING AND WRITING …..CREATING . . . . .

And Martín Fierro? The knife fighting gaucho a past lived with passion in face of the reality, not the abstraction of (physical) death

Arabian Nights (with pages missing!) tales ending only to begin again- fate – Dahlman subject of his fate. He takes the stairs, and something brushes his forehead! Bat/death AWAKE! Flavour of all things monstrous Eight days also eight hundred years, like old man outside time. Cab- A Room that Was not His Own. Cell Well cave. Virginia Wolf. The body. Death is not abstract but always part of our present. Dahl = valley?

Symmetries and anachronisms of reality. Cab – City and house public/private memory yellow light interior courtyards.

Cab- South = older and stabler world almost secret courtyard, the familiar old in the unfamiliar new

Café illusory contact with cat pane of glass transparencies and reflections. Time in Successiveness/The Eternity of The Instant. Magical Arabian Nights challenge to evil to the torment of the spirit/body

Train and the wonder of Being, Scherazade’s superfluous miracles. Wondrous fact of Being! Allowed himself Simply to Live!

The body and memory bouillon

Two Men at Once! Voyage/Imprisonment. Spirit/body. World/Nostalgic Literary Knowledge!

Rushing train White to Yellow to Red Sun. The plains and time transfigure the train/life. All Vast and Intimate – Secret  Perfect/Hostile solitude. Accepting the different station, the uncanny curve in life’s trajectory to the

Unfamiliar

The Subject accepts the adventure Walking slowly inhaling with the grave happiness the smell of clover.

RED passion of past sorry architecture Paul et Virginie naturaleza/sociedad, The doubling of the owner, unfamiliar/familiar back to sanitorium To Add Yet Another Event to That Day = Subject

Youth/Age THE GAUCHO/HISTORY POLISHED AS A STONE BY WATER BY A SAYING BY GENERATIONS OF HUMANKIND OUTSIDE TIME IN A SORT OF ETERNITY

Darkness smells sounds Something brushes his face bread/life – past, indigenous youth labourer/present criollo writer

Arabian Nights to block out reality They are feeling their oats and He Is Named

No longer an accidental face

Insults as though he were far away from life? Exaggeration of drunkenness fierce and mocking

SOMETHING UNFORSEEABLE HAPPENS – The South decides he must accept the challenge – instinct and action    life not allowed  LIFE NOT ALLOWED IN SANITORIUM

 ENOUGH STALLING! ENGAGE!

No hope, no fear creating his fate – rejecting One death unaware in the sanatorium in favour of life and choice with death as part of life CATRIEL/FIERRO THE ROMANTIC DEATH/The WRITER In A Room of his own creation CREATING .  . .

Spivak urges readers to deconstruct texts by acknowledging their complicity. She agrees with Said that literary writing reproduces Western hegemonic power over the Other and is interested in the way knowledge and power intersect. From colonization to globalization, socio-economic inequality has created texts that allow the West to ‘know’ the Third World. (What about the Second World?) However, although Spivak recognizes Said’s Orientalism and Guha’s conception of the heterogeneity of subaltern groups, she does not agree that this means that the subaltern subject as represented in dominant discourse can be read as existing outside it.

What about the women who refuse to sleep with their men if they go to war with the neighbouring tribe? (True story) Or, what about the chief that decides he wants the Canadian government to build a bridge at no cost, and protests outside the embassy until he gets it built? 

Using Derrida’s theory of desconstruction, where change occurs from within the difference of the sign, and “self” is itself always production rather than ground, she claims that our sense of self is structured like writing. In other words, the iterability of identity, or the irreducible nature of identity precludes the existence of the agented subject outside of dominant discourse.

I still have problems with this! It seems that dominant discourse homogenizes the West, so that welfare mums in Vancouver, for example, are not part of the equation.

We are all subject-effects positioned in various discourses whose interests are written into our texts. This does not mean that we can escape these discourses completely, but that we can be aware of them (of subaltern silences) when we look at texts so that perhaps in time we can hear the voices of Others. We can transform “impossibility into possibility.”

Is it enough only to be aware of the mute Other? Is there nothing else readers and writers can do? Spivak doesn’t talk about action.

Her point is that there is no resistance or subaltern consciousness completely separate from dominant discourse. Guha seeks to avoid essentializing the subaltern group by pointing to its plurality, but Spivak argues that he still assumes that there is a subaltern consciousness.

Looking at the role of women in patriarchal communities, Spivak comes to the conclusion that if female subaltern consciousness is a “red herring” then so must be the subaltern subconscious.

The position of women in various communities “syntaxes patriarchal continuity even as she is herself drained of proper identity.” Similarly, the heterogeneous subaltern groups “syntaxes” hegemonic discourse. Therefore, only by working within discourses and acknowledging “the complicity between subject and object investigation” can women and men be producers of signs in Derrida’s process of propriation.

Questions:

Why do I still feel that the world is divided into the First and Third World without any in-between?

What practices go along with her theory? Yes, we should read texts carefully to see how they create inequality in the world, but what can the peasant girl do?

Are there different kinds of complicity, i.e. the International Monetary Fund vs. CUSO?

Guha

Guha’s analysis of the discourse of history ties in very nicely with Said’s Orientalism.

In hegemonic discourse on colonial history, the peasant insurrections of India are spontaneous and unpremeditated affairs in which agency, either individual or collective, played no role. In other words, in orientalist texts revolt occurs outside the consciousness of subaltern insurgency, which is therefore irrational, instinctive, and uncivilized.

The primary, secondary, and tertiary discourses of official history all serve to silence the subaltern voice in history. The immediacy of the official primary discourse, and the distance of the secondary public histories written as personal or ‘impartial’ accounts of administrators’ documentation of events function as indicative and interpretative texts that together produce an historical ‘truth’. This imbrication of discourses reveals an ambiguity in which, a la Barthes, the indices of language (metaphor/being/adjectives) disrupt its functions (metonymy/doing/verbs). The result is ‘loosely cobbled segments’ of meaning that contain gaps or moments of risk that open up alternative possibilities of meaning. (This has Derrida’s iterability and irreducible meaning of the mark written all over it!) Gaps!

Thus dystaxia and Barthes’ ‘organization shifters’ which historiographers use to write history produce both messages and counter-messages in which authors are equally complicit. “The discourse of history, hardly distinguished from policy, . . . becomes a form of colonialist knowledge . . . a discourse of power,” and this takes Guha to the tertiary discourse.

In tertiary discourse, which ostensibly provides a new perspective of past events, writers also create an imaginary past for the Other. As rebelling citizens they do not participate in history, for the causes of rebellion are part of a grander scheme of a universal struggle for freedom from colonial oppression. Adopting the insurgents’ position, the writer of tertiary discourse hopes to support their struggle. However, by claiming an understanding of their cause as one caused by imperialism as a whole as opposed to injustices unique to particular communities, these writers reinforce dominant discourse. Even the insurgent’s religion as part of her/his political consciousness, which is dismissed as fanaticism in secondary discourse, is described as only a tool to manipulate the masses. As with the other two discourses the rebel is not the conscious subject of her/his own history.

I am always suspicious of dividing the world into finite numbers. Are there really only three types of discourse?

I am interested in Guha’s notion of the ambiguity inherent in armed struggle. The historian’s blindness to nuance in the desire to create a monolithic, fixed Other negates the possibility of a frightening, heterogeneous collectivity of insurgents whose history cannot be controlled. GAPS for the subaltern?

I would like to start with a few conclusions of the readings we have done so far. It seems the subject is dead. We have gone from the author as individual creator of the text, to a decentering of the subject, and finally the death of the author. I have no difficulty with the notion that authors are created by other texts. Authors do not write in a vacuum; they write as members of an historic moment of a particular society to which we can never return. Therefore, the author as she/he was at the time of writing is dead, but I don’t think we can eliminate the writer completely from the equation. I see the position of the author as somewhat synechdocical: the individual whose identity is always in flux represents society or a collective subconscious that is also always altering and vice versa. Human beings experience the world individually through the body and the psyche, and these experiences collectively produce societies, which in turn affect individual lives differently.

In other words because subjects, texts and readers are always in a process of becoming, they cannot be given a fixed identity or meaning. In this sense, they/we are part of the continuous performance of the sign – ad infinitum.

 The author is not dead.

Recognizing the Other and Examining Hegemonic Relationships

In Orientalism, Edward Said defines Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”, and argues that Western cultural identity developed by distinguishing itself from the Orient as if the latter were a second, inferior self. He further claims that in Western academia Orientalist doctrines continue to reinforce essentialist views of the Orient that imagine an ontological and epistemological distinction between the West and the East. As a result, Orientalism has come to represent a hegemonic relationship in which the binary of East versus West serves as a Western “corporate institution” for control over a fictitious East. This imagined East nevertheless exists in a very real form as a relationship between Occident and Orient based on power, domination and complex hegemony. Said cites Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony in civil society, where the influence of Orientalist ideas persists by consent rather than imposition, to explain the continued strength of Orientalism as a system of discourse. He calls for a new discursive strategy that recognizes the individuality of nations while impartially examining the general hegemonic relationships between states.

 Possible Problems with the text, Orientalism:

•  Most importantly for me, Said does not write a lot about the resistance of the colonized Other. What about the resisting subject as part of colonial discourse? The colonized nations occupy a non-static space in colonial history from which they have articulated resistance thereby forcing the colonizer to respond in different ways. Does he have a theory of resistance?

• This brings me to the ways in which the marginalized have resisted their oppression. While not sufficient to counterbalance hegemonic texts, they have always had their own texts. Also, whether through corridos, Yoruba chants or rap, they have challenged the West by making use of the spoken word. (Don’t forget visual art, theatre, music, etc…) In other words, the colonized subjects have a conception of themselves that is outside of the Orientalist panopticon.

• Has the binary opposition between West and East always been a fixed feature of Western discourse? Is history not a little bit more complicated? I am thinking, for example, of the French vs. English relationship with their colonial subjects, and the savage vs. the noble savage etc… Said seems to homogenize the West. However, you can argue that despite the differences within hegemonic discourse, the ‘other’ is always inferior.

• Said does not discuss in detail the role of capitalist expansion in the creation of Orientalist texts. In other words, aside from the literary canon of the West, other forces contributed to the creation of the inferior Other.

In sum, while I see the very obvious logic in Said’s argument, perhaps colonial power was not always imposed from above. The more nuanced history of colonization suggests that hegemonic discourse originated from various sources above, below, inside and outside many discourses of power and resistance. Which brings me to . . .

The Anonymous Babble

Foucault’s position regarding knowledge and power informs Said’s theory of Orientalism. As we have seen, the position of the author as the sole source of meaning is challenged from Saussure, Lacan and Althusser to Derrida for whom language constructs or invents the subject. So for Said the Western texts of a variety of disciplines produce knowledge about the Orient that constructs the Other. However, while Said seems to focus on individual Western authors whose works have collectively contributed to Orientalist power structures, Foucault denies the existence of ‘true’ authors. Furthermore, although he welcomes the shift in focus (a la Barthes) from writer to text, he challenges the notion of a work per se which attributes a false coherence to individual works.

Barthes may have claimed that the author is dead, but Foucault explains that the name of an author functions differently at different moments in history, proving that cultural norms determine our understanding of the author’s connection to a particular text.

Foucault’s association of a text’s recognition of ownership with prohibition and punishment, for example, points to how relationships of power are inherent in socio-political and cultural discourse.

Moreover, he claims that names such as Freud and Marx are “founders of discursivity” in that their writings are perpetually modified to inform new discursive practices, unlike scientific texts whose original authority remains unchallenged. In other words, Freud and Marx are the invisible originators of ever-changing discourses, which modify the original discursive practice as they return to it. (But what are they returning to? When we discuss Freud’s psychoanalysis, what are we discussing?) Thus for Foucault, eliminating the study of an author will allow a more objective analysis of how the text ‘performs’ reality/ies.

Final thoughts:

According to Foucault, the only subject is language itself. He is interested in how the text operates within a culture (mostly European it seems). This is wonderful for interdisciplinary studies and coincides with Said’s notion of Orientalist texts that come from a variety of disciplines. However, if there is no subject, no self, then individual voices of ‘othered’ societies have no agency.

Therefore, while I can see how the Orientalist vision in texts has constructed unequal power relations between peoples, I think that the world has always been made up of more than the two cardinal directions (East and West). Also, texts are produced by societies and individuals alike, the Palestinian-American intellectual voice of Edward Said writing of Orientalism, or that of the African-American feminist, bell hooks, on transgender, for example.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a great tale whose artful use of language and form propel the reader towards an ambivalent end that demands reflection. This tale is a gripping example of art that requires no knowledge of its author or context. Of course there are references to the American South of the 50’s and earlier, the Mikado, and the Old Testament. However, even without these references, the story speaks to common human experience and questions of morality, and the role of the individual in society. Because I have written quite a bit, I have highlighted the major points.

The story begins with a negative construction regarding an individual’s WANT: the grandmother has no desire to go on a family trip to Florida, and she spends the first part of the story manipulating everyone so that she can go to Tennessee. At this point in the text, she is a harmlessly annoying old woman and the family appears to be caught up in the details of the mundane. We immediately get an image of a thin, elderly self-righteous mater familias (she is nameless) who claims that she is at peace with her conscience, unlike her son who she is effectively guilt-tripping to make him change his plans to suit hers. Her daughter-in-law and the baby are also nameless, but her son is Bailey (officer of justice?), her grandson is John Wesley (founder of the Methodist movement that encourages people to experience Christ personally), and her granddaughter is June Star (Venus, Light bearer, Lucifer and very Hollywood).

During the discussion about the vacation, the grandmother, father and children are reading the paper where the grandmother sees the story about the Misfit. The newspaper as a means of communication does not seem to encourage conversation between the family members. The minimal exchange that comes from the paper centers on modern life and its preoccupation with social hierarchy and wealth; the grandmother, say the son and daughter, won’t stay home “to be queen for a day” or “a million bucks.”

The grandmother refuses to stay home (to face herself?) but appears to have some redeeming features as she hides her cat, Pitty Sing or Pretty/Pity Thing (The Mikado), because she is concerned that he will miss her; however, we wonder who will miss whom? Her apparent concern for the cat is a mask for her selfishness. We soon learn that the grandmother is all about appearances. She is dressed like a lady in case she should die on the road. Her hat in particular represents her gentility, and her fear of being in an accident foreshadows the family’s tragedy (in which her hat is destroyed), as does the graveyard, the town Toomsboro, the “hearse-like automobile” and the “open mouth” of the woods where the wind later moves “like a long satisfies insuck of breath” (I love this line) when Bailey and his son are shot.

A key transition in the story occurs when they go from urban spaces to the country and pass Stone Mountain (Confederate sculpture and KKK base camp) about halfway into the paragraph. So we travel with the family through the billboards of American industry to a very colourful natural landscape. They are moving from society and all that comes with it, social morality, consumerism etc… to a world where these no longer hold sway.

This is a pivotal point because suddenly the grandmother doesn’t seem harmless anymore. They pass a black child and she wants to paint him as if he were a cow in a picturesque country field. The black boy is part of the natural scenery and hardly present. He does not “have things like we do.” He is physically outside the car, cut off from civilization and all things human, and she would like to keep him there in a painting. The grandmother now is engaging in a passive violence against the other that the reader finds unacceptable. The child waves at them, but they don’t acknowledge his existence and only open the window to dump their garbage.

The sighting of the child followed by a view of a plantation graveyard reminds the reader of the history of slavery in the US which has “Gone with the Wind,” a reference to the civil war that has become Hollywood entertainment, worlds away from the past and present realities of the oppressed. In other words not gone at all.

There is then a doubling effect when the children play a guessing game with the clouds. A cloud is first a cow and then a car. These images confound the black child with the children in the car who are now the observed. In other words, in this story, who is observing whom? The reader is part of the text.

The more the grandmother reveals her dependence on appearance, the more we realize that her idea of being a lady has nothing to do with being a decent human being. Her tale of Mr.EAT demonstrates how she equates goodness with position and wealth.

At the Tower (Tower of Babel which God shatters to create many languages out of one) they  lament the lack of “nice” people these days. The repetition of the words ‘trust’ and ‘good’ render the terms meaningless, especially when used by Red Sam (American Communist?), his wife and the grandmother. Their goodness does not extend to the chained monkey biting fleas off himself as “as if they were a delicacy.” (Echoes of navel gazing?)

The superficiality of the modern world comes up again with the treasure hidden in the grandmother’s imaginary house. She knows that the tale of the lost silver will interest the children who have been brought up to value material wealth. Later, when they are lost, the only shame the grandmother feels is not due to the fact that she lies to her family about the house but that she will be caught out. Morality it seems is a question of what you can get away with while appearing to be an upright citizen of the world.

More Doubling

Pitty Sing snarls before he causes the accident as the Misfit does later when saying there is “no pleasure but meanness”. The cat is the Misfit’s double in that he causes the family’s destruction. But Pitty Sing is also the grandmother because she is the one who recognizes the Misfit so that he must kill them. In other words, the grandmother and the Misfit are one and the same: individuals outside goodness. She is a false ‘lady’, and he with his good manners is a false gentleman. (She asks him to pray but does not pray herself, and he responds that Jesus has upset the balance – the punishment no longer matches the crime). The Misfit appears to be referring to the Christian belief that we are all born sinners; however, I think the problem is that the system’s/man’s interpretation of right and wrong does not always mean justice. Anyway, the Misfit is beyond concepts of good and evil. For him the sky has no sun and no cloud. The grandmother and Misfit are individuals who have chosen their own morality outside of their community. Both are taking care of number one.

The juxtaposition of the mundane and the uncanny grotesque create an ambivalence, which at the end of the text reflects the switching of roles that the Grandmother and the Misft play. The condemning woman becomes the condemned and the condemned convict becomes an executioner.

In this ambiguity, space opens up for a new perspective on the world. The grandmother for once thinks of someone else, and the other is no longer at a distance as she reaches out to touch the Misfit. She dies looking at a now cloudless sky. Similarly, the Misfit no longer sees pleasure in killing. He removes his glasses and with defenseless-looking eyes ‘sees’ both the grandmother’s epiphany and that killing is “no pleasure in life.”