What Is Literary Theory?

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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The underlying intuition to first condition this question is that what is picked out by the word “philosophy” is basically the same as what is picked out by “theory.” “Theory” is whatever part of a discipline that reflects on the tools that discipline deploys to do its work. Thus, for example, “theory” is what is being done when a sociologist reflects on what is picked out by “society” or “group” or an anthropologist on “culture” or “ritual.” Almost every discipline these days has its own theory department, and no longer farms out the work to philosophy. (This didn’t used to be the case.) This has been a problem for philosophy, insofar as it has been harder for it to justify itself, but just insofar as it’s a problem for philosophy, it is—often covertly to those independent disciplines asking philosophy to justify itself—also a problem for the disciplinary theory-heads. The reason for this is that the experience of philosophy for 2500 years has been with abstract concepts and their relationships to each other. It has dabbled in concrete stuff from time to time, but every time it gets on a roll, the group of people in charge of the inquiry become full of themselves and secede from the union (a typical origins-story about disciplines from philosophy’s point of view). Without a doubt, every discipline has its own special problems that it needs its own special tools for, and for the most part it is best that a discipline make and improve its own tools (though outright stealing works, too). However, when it comes to seeing the relationship between those special tools and the special tools that other people are using, no one has any special province. The closest you can get is philosophy—that group of people with 2500 years of experience dealing with that kind of thing.

If you start with this understanding of “philosophy” and “theory,” the relationship between literary criticism and literary theory becomes a little clearer. It’s really the relationship between practical criticism of literary texts and theoretical reflection on the tools you use in those practical contexts. When you read Hawthorne through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis or Melville through the lens of Derridean deconstruction, you’re doing practical criticism when the primary goal of your train of thought is reading Hawthorne or Melville. If you’re trying to make a comment on psychoanalytic theory or deconstruction using whatever insight you may have pulled from reading Hawthorne or Melville, the comment itself is theory and besides the point of reading Hawthorne or Melville. Getting the theory right is a different context than using it to read other texts. It’s important to understand this. In the act of writing, one can attempt to do many things. But to know you’re doing many things, or to just do one thing and not those other things, one needs to see how to differentiate between different activities. And in the terms I’ve laid out, “getting theory right” means doing philosophy, which means attending to the problems generated in a different disciplinary sector than that of getting the literary text right.

Literary theory as a phenomenon in English departments in the United States is the product of the confluence of five things:

1) concern over how interpretation works
2) concern over what interpretations we should give
3) foundationalism
4) the dearth of Continental philosophy in the American university system
5) Baby Boomers flooding the market and looking for a way of distinguishing themselves for tenure and seeing this new thing to do (thus flooding journals and presses with articles and books about it)

The last two are sociological, external to literary-critical practice as such (which is not to discount the impact of the external, e.g. coming from wealth, going to an Ivy League school, being white, etc.). The last in particular I shall pass over without comment, and about Continental philosophy I will say one thing: while Continental philosophy’s seemingly sudden vogue requires more extensive treatment on just why it and not something else (one prima facie reason is that it was more “humanistic,” in a non-technical sense, than analytic philosophy had become), the conjunction of (5) with the lack of an established conversation about post-Hegelian philosophy in the United States produced the need to establish one. So professors in English departments started bootstrapping themselves in. The trouble that we are now seeing, however, is that no one is teaching it. Someone needs to teach it, because we should be reading it, and if it has to be English departments, while being weird and ironic (say it with me: English departments), then so be it—but they need to do a better job at teaching it in-house. Right now it is scattershot at best, and even then hit-or-miss as to quality, but the pressure of the discipline is that you do need to know something about it. I think the pressure is abating, which is a good thing for the discipline in the long run, but it isn’t clear to me that we shouldn’t yet have a better quality baseline education in it.[fn.1]

(1) through (3) are all theoretical, but it has been the conflation of these three distinct things that has produced the most theoretical trouble for literary theorists over the last 50 years. (3) is a distinctively philosophical issue, produced by thinking about “how one knows” isolated from any actual practices of knowing (it’s the isolation that makes it distinctively philosophical). The last 100 years of philosophy has produced a pure antifoundationalist strain of philosophical thinking. Philosophers of an antifoundationalist bent (which we can find all the way back in the Sophists and up to Hume and Hegel) finally reached self-consciousness about foundationalism being an actual problem to focus on in Nietzsche and the American pragmatists, and since then have produced a purer and purer polemic against that particular problem. The most confusing thing of all about the history of literary theory in the United States is that “literary theory” became self-conscious as a subgenre at the same time as the vogue of Continental antifoundationalism—which at the time was comfortably synonymous in many quarters with anti-theory (because “theory,” consciously or unconsciously, was nearly synonymous with “offering a foundation”).

The reason this could happen is that the dominant theoretical paradigm in English departments in the first half of the 20th century was “New Criticism.” New Criticism prided itself, however, on not being theoretical. The New Criticism achieved dominance in English departments, roughly, in part because of the pressure to discipline the discipline of literary studies (which itself was still being born as a university department in the first place), and so lose all the extraneous concerns in being a generally cultured person. What New Criticism combined, we can now see in hindsight, was the practice of “close reading” with foundationalism. To create a distinctive discipline, they claimed plausibly that the practice of close reading was what they did, implausibly that this was the only way one should read, and wrongly that this was the only way one could read. The first two claims are disciplinary claims for literary critics, and so can properly coalesce into a distinctive kind of thing called “literary theory.” The plausibility of their claims is, of course, a judgment by a disciplinary member on the far side of New Criticism’s hegemony. The third claim—the one called “wrong”—is the philosophical claim of foundationalism, where the moral “should” of the second claim turns into the stronger “could” of metaphysical necessity. (I’m not going to articulate and argue for why the vocabulary of correctness is, or rather should be, in play for the philosophical question as opposed to the disciplinary questions.)

I haven’t specified what close reading is as a practice, but granted that it does pick out something one can do, what you don’t want to do is confuse that practice with the question of how interpretation works—concern (1). The first claim of New Criticism is that there is a practice called “close reading,” a practice that can be differentiated from other practices of reading. To many people, this now seems quite plausible, and the first step towards plausibility is to understand that close reading is a kind of writing.[fn.2] But the New Critics sometimes treated it like simply reading, which makes it more plausible to think that what you are theorizing about is the uptake of conceptual information, i.e. interpretation. When you think of it as a kind of writing, the output of conceptual information, you’re more likely to see what you are doing as offering an interpretation—concern (2). The difference between the two is that when one theorizes about the former—interpretation qua interpretation—the focus is on a general human activity: the uptake of conceptual information is something everyone does all the time. One interprets, in this sense, a painting, the newspaper, or a stop sign as much as Hawthorne or Melville. This kind of theorizing will, indeed, be about the metaphysical necessity of how, exactly, one processes concepts and uses them in communication. As concern (1), put into full swing by Kant, philosophers of language from Austin to Brandom to Habermas have a lot that is relevant to say, but literary theorists have also said many relevant things (from Hirsch to Eco to Fish). However, what one should not do—to repeat—is make the mistake Fish acknowledges having made in his early, career-making books Surprised by Sin and Self-Consuming Artifacts: to confuse a reading with reading.[fn.3]

The only way to glue together concern (1) and (2) is with (3): foundationalism. This is how Descartes gets from the New Science to knowing in general (the logical positivists, too) and it’s the only way to get from a practice like close reading to reading in general. What you do is take one practice and claim that it is the foundation-practice upon which all others rest. This is close to what Kant does, but the transcendental maneuver is slightly different: it doesn’t take an object and “privilege it” (in a phrase still often used for antifoundationalist purposes), it asks what makes the object possible. It is essentially a mechanical question: what needs to be the case for this thing to work as it does? Close reading privileges, in the dirty sense, one kind of literary text: short ones. However, the practice of close reading can be used on anything, it’s just easier on short stuff. What made the New Criticism’s practice of close reading foundationalist is that they first gave a bad answer to how interpretation works (the central move is that it works on a text that is fundamentally isolated from the world—much easier to do on a lyric poem than a historical novel) and then claimed that any other kind of interpretation (e.g., through the use of biography, myth, class consciousness, etc.) is not true interpretation (usually qualified in some way to make “true interpretation” a gateway to the other, now extraneous activities—the other readings aren’t fake, they’re just irrelevant).

What happens when you get rid of foundationalism? Apparently what happens is that you spend another 50 years trying to figure out what getting rid of it means. The Continental philosophy imported in the 60s was all resoundly antifoundational in tenor, yet many foundational-esque habits continued. Some, like Fredric Jameson, tried to be upfront about it. But post-Foucauldian theory—which is something like a confluence of the political sensibilities of Marx with the antifoundational tendencies of Derrida—has struggled, to my mind, in shrugging off foundationalist theory because it feels the impulse to amp up the moral claims of “we should read this way” to “we need, nay, must read this way.” If you read “must” expressively, there’s no problem, but often the “must” comes with a battery of theoretical concerns about the nature of representation. “Representation is socially constructed,” we hear over and over again well after it was something that titillated us, “and therefore we must practice deconstructive criticism because showing how meaning is impossible is the only way to short-circuit the hegemony of European power.” If the vague reference to European power seems a stretch, all you need to do is remind yourself that “semantic authority” over descriptions that pass as true—and that passing as true is the only kind of true you get in this life—is what is produced in what we call “education.” And showing that meaning is impossible would indeed short-circuit such semantic authority (ignoring for the moment how one would have understood the meaning of that sentence). But it seems like a non sequitor from “this is the way representation works” to “we have to read this way.” It is basic to the is/ought dichotomy that Hume pointed out, and if you feel the need, as any form of antidualist, to blur that distinction, if you are also a critic of bourgeois liberalism and its ideology, then you’ll want to remind yourself that blurring that distinction is exactly how the liberal ideologists used their so-called essentialism to move from “I think liberalism is good” to “my cultural representations are the way the world works so I need to destroy everyone else’s.” The movement from is to ought has to be treated as a conversational non sequitor for the very idea of progressive change to be possible. If the necessity was understood to be a purely moral concern, a concern about how the practice of literary criticism should move forward, then the theorist would understand that repeating the lesson about how representation works is not an argument directly for the practice of deconstruction, but merely the preparation for clearing the field of old foundationalist dogma. Once the dogmas are clear, there are still a lot more questions about how one should read—or rather, what kind of readings one should offer.

The lesson I’ve tried to articulate in the above is that if you keep “how does interpretation work?” separate from “what interpretation should I offer?” you will find yourself in the proper disciplinary province of literary theory—reflection about the tools of literary criticism. Having some kind of idea about how interpretation works is, in this understanding, philosophical because interpreting linguistic phenomena is a general human activity and not distinctively literary-critical. This is not to say that philosophers are better at understanding interpretation qua interpretation than literary critics, but the questions and problems peculiar to it (as opposed to problems peculiar to interpreting Hawthorne or Melville) come up with more disciplinary regularity in philosophy than literary criticism (if only because the philosopher spends more time focused just on those abstract questions, and if only because all the special disciplines have forced such focus on the philosopher by making special disciplines around all the more concrete questions). Literary theory should be about what kind of interpretations we should be offering, but they shouldn’t turn on notions of metaphysical or epistemological necessity, for the only kind of reading those kinds of general necessity motivate are compositional—questions about rhetoric and clarity and such. Important questions, to be sure, and part of the province of an English instructor, but not special to literary criticism. Once we scrub Marx of his “science” and Derrida of “one cannot escape the discourse of philosophy,” then what we are left with are a number of tools—tools that can be refined by further reflection—and questions about what purposes we would like to fulfill by forwarding such-and-such a reading.

Endnotes

[1] My treatment of literary theory here, of course, is very schematic and far too generalized to count as good history. Still the best single account of how we get from the beginning of the 20th century to the end is Vincent Leitch’s American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s (the central movement with the aid of a little imaginative extrapolation), but for the purposes of understanding why French and German philosophy caught on and not, say, John Dewey, Gilbert Ryle, John Austin, or Wittgenstein, Leitch doesn’t make a good answer explicit. Analytic philosophy is introduced almost solely so that one understands that “Continental philosophy” is the other thing that was in fact popular. I don’t think Leitch’s account suffers much at all, but there is a smaller story to be told, one with curious outliers like Hans Frei’s legendary book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, published in 1974. In the preface, Frei acknowledges three major intellectual debts: Erich Auerbach, Karl Barth, and Ryle. The first two are nearly obvious for a book of this sort, but Frei says of Ryle that “anybody interested in hermeneutics has special reason to be grateful to [Ryle’s The Concept of Mind] for its demystification of the concept of intentional personal action, and the author’s steady refusal to divide intelligent activity into separate mental and external components. It is a lesson well applied to the way one views written statements and hence also how to read them” (viii). Frei in fact commends Ryle over the Continentals in doing what he regards as the similar activity of overcoming philosophical dualism. So why did Heidegger and Derrida catch on and not Ryle? Again, there are a few obvious, superficial answers having to do with tone, and Leitch does canvass some of the external motivating factors, but once one gets down to how the superficial facets like tone connect with externalities like the general tenor of American intellectual life and the internal workings of the conceptual dynamics (e.g., what’s attractive about Husserl’s notion of a lebenswelt), as soon as you realize that the conceptual dynamics are more or less the same as those produced somewhere else, you are kicked back to the level of superficialities and externalities. It’s not that superficialities and externalities cannot or do not (or should not) have an impact on the course of history—it’s that what we want out of a good intellectual history is a story that does more than lay down those three different things in parallel tracks and make the gesture “and these three things impacted each other.” I think part of the problem in producing this story is that some are not convinced, as a matter of theory, that the story can or should be told (e.g., Foucauldians) and that for those that are, we still don’t have a simple model of what that kind of historical ligature looks like, and that because—again, at the level of theory—we haven’t a good model of how the material-practical impacts the conceptual-semantic through the mediation of the communal-social (the kind of model people like Ryle and Heidegger were moving toward, and people like Habermas and Brandom have nearly completed).

[2] For an argument about academic reading generally being a kind of writing, see my "Reading Academically." What is articulated there is a special theory of composition attached to the commitment of writing about other writing (this being analogous to the special theory of relativity's relationship to the general one). What is implicit in this kind of composition (i.e., academic) is a practice of reading that readies the uptake of textual information for the output of textual information. "Close reading" is a further kind of special compositional form that requires something like an analogous special reading form. The best theoretical formulation I've heard articulated about the practice of close reading (by Ed Dryden) is that one takes a block of text and treats it is a synecdoche for the rest of the text. Another way of putting it is that you take one passage from, say, The Scarlet Letter and then treat it as a paradigm for reading the rest of The Scarlet Letter. This allows you to say, "By explaining what this passage means and how it works, I've explained what The Scarlet Letter means and how it works." Clearly, then, this kind of model works really well for when you can fit the whole of a text within the whole of the model: when the part you're treating as a whole (synedoche-style) is actually the whole of it. This is why the New Critics were so fond of lyric poetry. The model becomes attenuated when you apply it to longer texts, but the practice of working out the conceptual dynamics of a single passage (my definition of "close reading") still works well for generating the meaning and mechanics of larger texts, even if these larger texts are more complex because sheer size makes it possible to do more textual things (a fact you can grant even if you wish to argue that poetry is semantically more dense than prose: just think of a novel as a prose-poem). If you want to make a claim that The Scarlet Letter, for example, does three things, the compositional way of arguing for this is to generate each particular thing from three particular emblematic passages that do that thing really well. Once you've generated an understanding of "the thing," you can then apply it at will in writing about other passages of the text, relying on your earlier argued-for-claim-backed-by-evidence. What is important to see, however, is that this is a particular model of reading: you are seeing the text differently because you are looking in the text for something specific—emblematic passages. The ends of writing do alter the means of reading (a point made generally in the opening of "Reading Academically"). This kind of reading doesn't work very well on certain kinds of texts and certain kinds of textual phenomena (e.g., narrative action). Despite the fact that generating textual evidence for a written argument will always look something like close reading, close reading isn't always the best foot forward in reading a text.

[3] See the introduction to Is There a Text in This Class?, where he describes the evolution in his thinking, from a thesis about Paradise Lost to a full-blown critical methodology to seeing that that wasn’t right as a methodology (though yet as a specific reading) to finally his theory of interpretive communities.

Stuart Hall, Codes, and Theory

This was a presentation whose goal was to explicate two articles by Stuart Hall, "Encoding, Decoding" and "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies." It's a useful exercise for students, to help leverage oneself into another's theoretical perspective, but I also took the time to press some of my own positions on Hall's theory of coding. Hall's notions--or rather, perhaps, his metaphor--became extremely popular in the just budding field known to English Departments as "cultural studies." Hall was at the forefront of what came to be known as the Birmingham School, the place where English Marxist critics fled to do what they wanted to do, and one lasting field they helped pioneer was the study of popular culture. (The balance between the two poles of literature and popular culture might best be exemplified by Raymond Williams on one side and Dick Hebdige on the other.) One finds the metaphor of coding, for example, in Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious: a Marxist, but only oddly a member of cultural studies (mainly because, hinted at in the last section, most of whom identify as doing cultural studies don't want to say they are working in a discipline, and Jameson still held that Marxism--through its teleological philosophy of history--can still provide a ground for such work).

The article below functions as a primer on dislocating oneself from pre-Quinean philosophy of language. While anglophone philosophers of language largely don't work with Saussure, anglophone English professors largely don't work with Quine. Since whatever background I might be granted is in the anglophone tradition, I bridged the gap by being abstract, but the points Hall scores against the "defunct model," as I call it, are basically the one's post-positivists want to score. Where we go from there is the $64 question not everyone agrees about, and where my line of critical pressure comes from. But the basics about encoding and decoding is the same kind of thing Donald Davidson, for example, would want to say (with his account of triangulation).

You'll also notice a Marxist vocabulary blithely used (ideology, substructure): not my favorite choice, but Marxism underscores almost all the lasting critical trends that have made it to the new millennium. While deconstruction has thankfully petered out, New Historicism, Cultural Studies, and Post-Colonialism are still chugging along. But I cannot emphasize baldly enough: I hate the Marxist vocabulary. I think it just obscures everything important in a cloud of self-righteousness. So, while for some righteousness seems a necessary condition of their writing (like Jameson), for others the cloud lingers and annoys (like Hall, who seems otherwise quite sensible). Call it a bias, but I can't see that anything is gained by talking about "ideology" or "substructure" once everyone's turned in their "I have a science/method to distinguish illusion/ideology from reality/substructure!" cards (which even Jameson admits to not having).

All references are to The Cultural Studies Reader, 3rd Ed., edited by Simon During.

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What’s Meaning?

How is meaning generated? In an old version, “meaning” was seen as a little bundle put together by a speaker/writer and sent out into the world to be caught by a hearer/reader—meaning as a kind of paper airplane, or better—bullet. On this model, a reader shotguns sentences into her mind and understanding is a matter of getting each of these bullets right.

Hall sums up this defunct model in “Encoding, Decoding” as the “sender/message/receiver” (478) circuit. The biggest trouble is how thin the notion of each segment in the circuit is—how does the sender construct the message and what, exactly, does the receiver do with it? In an attempt to do justice to both ideology and substructure, Hall constructs a model of meaning generation and dissemination that attempts to capture, in an isolated yet flexible fashion, the various pieces of life that go into the creation of a bit of meaning.

Encoding

Every piece of communication—from a whisper over wine to Tom Brokaw’s bramble-mouth—has both a means and an end. For means, in the case of broadcast news, we can list cameras, computers, cell phones, satellites, green screens—all of these serve particular kinds of purposes in generating particular kinds of meaning (simply recall the “how cool are we” gesticulations of news outlets during the 2008 election with their holograms and mega-maps). In the case of writing, paper, pens, computers and other devices all contribute to the kind of meaning able to be produced (consider the case of Blake’s engraved poetry). Even—and this is key—in the case of one-on-one verbal communication we must—in order to remain coherent materialists—count utterances as material means. Think of the different kinds of meaning produced by the words “I love you” when said by a classmate versus Johnny Depp over wine. Not simply the producer is at issue here, but too, think if Depp had yelled it or, with all the charismatic power of years playing celluloid (now digital) heart-throbs coming to his aid, whispered it in your ear. When Hall says, “the organization and combination of practices with media apparatuses” (478), I think we must think long and wide. Every computer chip, every light bulb lighting Brokaw’s face, every acting lesson Depp took to get on 21 Jump Street—these all combine to transform senders into the particular kind of sender they are. The “means of production” in Hall’s vision of Marxism is considerably widened: “knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, historically defined technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and assumptions, assumptions about the audience and so on…” (479).

Having the means doesn’t produce meaning—you must have a message to impart. Thus enters the notion of having an end-in-view—the combination of the means with an end produces the encoded sign-vehicle (478). In the case of news, “reporting events” might be a typical end-in-view. What Hall highlights is how an actual event we see happening before our very eyes is not what is on the news. What he terms the “‘raw’ historical event” is what we otherwise call “life.” When we attempt to communicate about life—that is when the process of encoding begins, when the means of communicative production transform the raw material of life into a transportable object. Hall’s paradox becomes much more apparent when we replace “life” for “event” in his formulation: “[life] must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative [life]” (478). In terms of TV, “events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of television discourse” (478). When an event goes behind a camera, we put make-up on it, we light it, we shoot it at its most favorable angles. And even if we don’t, this too can become part of encoded meaning. Mockumentaries have raised our awareness of the earmarks of reality, the syle of the real. The rise of the jittery-camera (stemming from, perhaps, Saving Private Ryan's colossal success) as a technique has lent the constructed authenticity of “reality”—somehow we perceive (if not think) that Jason Bourne is deserving of more pathos because we can hardly see him behind Paul Greengrass’ interminable camera-shaking.

Decoding

Our notion of “meaning” is not complete, however—now that we have an encoded message, we must have a receiver to decode it, untie its message, generate the meaning latent within it. This is where things get tricky for Hall:

Once [encoding is] accomplished, the discourse must then be translated – transformed, again – into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective. If no ‘meaning’ is taken, there can be no ‘consumption’. If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. (478)

Hall suggests that the benefit of this approach is the isolation of encoding from decoding, but his description seems to go a bit beyond his cause. Hall seems to suggest that, e.g., if I do not buy Bud Light after seeing a commercial, the meaning-loop has not been closed. If we expand the notion of “social practices” to a very wide parameter, where even an occurent thought—something that just flashes across the mind's eye—counts as a member of a social practice (for Wittgensteinian reasons)—and I think this is the right approach for the lasting value of Hall’s model—then everything counts as a proper effect, up to and including the noise we attribute to foreign languages, for if we’ve previously formulated the assumption that there is an intentionally aimed message careening at us, then even the shrug of nonunderstanding is meaning enough. What meaning? “No meaning,” which is an articulable enough reaction and effect of a communicative event—“Did you see that advertisement for Bud?” “Yeah.” “What did you think of it?” “Nothing.”

I’m pulling a little hard on Hall’s notion, but I hope there’s a payoff. For there is certainly an obvious enough sense to what Hall’s suggesting if we limit ourselves to the example of advertisements and the perspective of advertisement executives. For the encoder, no meaning has been exchanged and the circuit remains unclosed if there is no apparent reaction, like buying beer or laughing at Super Bowl frogs and Clydesdales. It is helpful in this regard to recall William James’s old pragmatic question, “what’s the difference that makes a difference?” If the receiver remains, more or less, unaffected by the message, then should we say the receiver has even decoded it? Not a lot seems to hinge on saying yes or no, since either way the receiver is unaffected.

The trouble that I think begins here, however, is the lack of perspective. There are hardly any people populating Hall’s analysis. When I talked about ends-in-view, this was part pedagogical and part cover-up. What the ends of messaging are dissolved into, in Hall’s analysis, are roughly “hegemonic powers.” To get ahead of Hall, at the close he says, “Majority audiences probably understand quite adequately what has been dominantly defined and professionally signified. The dominant definitions, however, are hegemonic precisely because they represent definitions of situations and events which are ‘in dominance’ (global)” (486). It seems difficult to understand precisely what is said in that second sentence, what extra meaning has been generated to deepen our understanding of Hall’s vocabulary, when it appears tautological. What I think has dropped out and been replaced by an awkwardly rendered, anonymous power is the message-creator, and specifically the ends, or purposes, of the creation of messages. What we get instead is “dominance which is hegemonic because it’s dominant”—a kind of “dominance is as dominance does” answer to the ends of dominance. The end of power might be power, but power itself is always a steady state—it is a person’s share in power that fluctuates (perhaps even in Foucault's analysis).

How Not to Talk About Language

Saussure was wrong—language is not arbitrary, it has no rules, it is not based on conventions. Hard words, and difficult to defend, but evolution is important here: social practices are evolving bodies in reality. Part of the strike against scientific Marxism is the recuperation of the “superstructure,” or "ideology," the flake at the top of reality that Marx didn't seem to take seriously, but later Marxists like Gramsci do. Hall is sympathetic to this. However, if we see the beginnings of (oral) communication as a matter of collating noises to reactions, such that regularity of response to sounds becomes the beginning of a “language,” then the stability and utility of language only exists insofar as regularity is reproduced, sound and expected reaction. This stability is only as arbitrary as our thumbs—it is only from a cosmic, external view of language and species that we should be able to call the use of the word “cow” or thumbs arbitrary. And like thumbs, there are things language can and cannot do, but neither have rules—Wittgenstein’s metaphor of language-games was misleading just insofar as it cast the spectare of mechanical input-output productions. There are no “rules,” only effective and ineffective communication strategies—just as Hall says about the closing of the meaning-loop being the effect in social practices.

Hall seems importantly right to remark that “there is no degree zero in language” (481). In understanding, I take it, there is no point at which language drops out and reality stands apart naked. All signs are “culture-specific” and those that appear “natural” simply display the “depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in use” (481). There are two different notions here that make up the appearance of naturalness: depth and near-universality. We should distinguish between the two to capture the difference between a code’s wide dissemination and how deeply it is ingrained. The zero-degreeness of language and the trappings of naturalness is what stand in tension with Hall’s Sausurrean suggestion that “cow” is arbitrary and built out of convention whereas the pictogram of a cow is not. If we are to take seriously both the slogan that there is “no degree zero in language” and that all events—life—become transfigured in the process of encoding/decoding, including pictograms and TV, then we ultimately have to reject the nature/convention distinction. It is only by standing on the outside of Creation that we can attain the external view necessary to suppose arbitrariness. And this effect of standing outside of Creation isn’t, in fact, difficult to achieve once one follows Wittgenstein’s suggestion that a language composes a lebensform (lifeform) and then get’s dropped into a foreign-language speaking village—every sound will be noise, and the noises seemingly arbitrarily emitted. Why one noise as opposed to another? Why make that noise when you see a cow? To learn a language, however, you have to at once drop the notion that the noises are arbitrarily emitted and suppose that there is a pattern of regularity and stability, the learning of which constitutes the learning of a language. The noise the French make, “vache,” instead of “cow,” only seems arbitrary when you either don’t know the language at all or isolate it from the herd of other noises and compare them by themselves: “Why ‘vache’ instead of ‘cow’? How arbitrary!” Or the person who arbitrarily throws foreign words into conversation: “Why did you say lebensform instead of lifeform? How arbitrary!” Except that, just like what goes behind a camera, these can be earmarks for specific kinds of codes, e.g. a comedic display of erudition or a random display of arbitrariness.

Denotation and Connotation

Following fashions in linguistics, Hall defines “denotation” as “literal meaning” and “connotation” as “associative meanings” (482). Hall’s beef with the linguistic theorists is that they often mistakenly take denotation to be a transcript of reality, whereas connotation is all those extraneous and idiosyncratic associations we make between, e.g., vache and marbles—completely arbitrary to everybody but the person for whom it makes perfect sense. What Hall would rather like to do is take the denotative/connotative distinction as a rule of thumb to be deployed at instances of communication to separate out these two distinct parts. For example, the existence of sarcasm makes “Oh, you look great in those jeans” an entirely different denotation than if sans sarcasm. Denotations and connotations more fluidly interact with the action of communication.

There is a small cadre of problems hidden in Hall’s not-so-different use of the literal/associative distinction (some to do with metaphor, others to do with meanings-as-bundles), but the most interesting for a grasp of Hall’s style is that the use of “literal” allows Hall to eliminate reference to people communicating. If you don’t understand what somebody’s denoting, you ask them, “What did you mean?” and the first answer they decide to choose among a possible bevy of things they were signifying we can call the literal, denoted meaning, with all the others the frosting that makes language a beautiful, associative cake. This dissolves the faceless “literal,” which retains the notion of small, essential monads of meaning attached to small swatches of phrases, into “desired encoding”—what did the sender want the receiver to receive.

This muddies the water, however, for Hall suggests that it “is at the connotative level of the sign that situational ideologies alter and transform signification” (482). Recurring to a different distinction, the up-shot of Hall’s rendering is that the overt message is what is said on the surface while ideology is a covert encoding intended to slip past our decoding censors. “Desired encoding,” on the other hand, obliterates the difference between overt and covert since both are likely desired by self-conscious television news producers.

On the other hand, something terribly difficult happens when Hall continues his faceless analysis by talking about the decoding of denotative and connotative meanings. Things appear fine when he talks about the “‘work’ required to enforce, win plausibility for and command as legitimate a decoding” (484), for we can get the swing of how many techniques are used by people to disseminate a message and its decoder ring, positive reinforcement being the most general category to name it with (give a cookie to the person who cheers back “Bourgeois ideology!”). But something goes awry when we get to Hall’s three decoder positions—are these positions self-conscious or unconscious? Are they just analytically descriptive? How does an analyst know whether the dominant-hegemonic position is being taken if everyone, including the analyst, has to engage in the act of decoding, which produces the position of “am I getting this wrong?” This is where it is helpful to have a concept of agency lying around. Hall can’t ask anyone because his apparatus is built of faceless literal meanings and dominant codes. A lot of useful analysis can be done by Hall’s model, but it runs into a hole when moving to individuals decoding messages. Take Hall’s “simplest example of a negotiated code,” which is one that is a “mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements”: “At the level of the ‘national interest’ economic debate the decoder may adopt the hegemonic definition, agreeing that ‘we must all pay ourselves less in order to combat inflation’. This, however, may have little or no relation to his or her willingness to go on strike for better pay and conditions…” (486). Surely Hall’s worker is not self-consciously “adopting” the hegemonic option? Yet, would it not be terribly easier when talking about decoding to talk about the individual’s relationship to the codes in play? That, on the one hand, the worker feels a simple patriotism and responds to calls for duty, but on the other needs more money? The notion of “adoption” sneaks agency into Hall’s fairly unpeopled vocabulary because he needs it to describe people, but it reflects the same kind of arbitrainess nonsense we need to extirpate from the level of philosophy of language (what they call "decisionism" in moral philosophy). Choices and readings and decodings aren’t made arbitrarily, and some of the work involved in just this activity is elided by his vocabulary.

What Is Theory For?

The epithet I was reaching for at the close of the last section was “overtheorized.” This is a danger Hall takes up in his retrospective gloss on the growth of cultural studies in “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” At least at two points, Hall stops to remark that he hopes nobody’s reading him as anti-theoretical (39, 41). Nothing could have been farther from my mind, but it strikes up the utility of theory in general. Why should Hall be so self-conscious? Because theory is well-known for being over-jargonized? Well, what is theory if not a specific jargon one wields to approach a problem?

The trouble is that theory still plays two games—one amongst themselves and one with the problems. Over-jargonizing is a sign that theorists have been playing with themselves for too long. So Hall wants to suggest that they get their semiotics dirty (35). However, he also doesn’t want to slight theory. One exemplary metaphor he uses is “theoretical work as interruption” (39). Theory interrupts what you are otherwise doing, like working with people with AIDS. It allows you to create a space with which to wonder about the work you are doing, because in the midst of it you must remain in the midst of it to do it well. This space allows us to become self-conscious about the tools we employ while doing our work, and for cultural studies that means the way we represent, signify, and symbolize. For example, we no longer have autistic children because work done in identity-formation suggests that treating certain kinds of illnesses and whatnot as attributes rather than baggage creates a stymied identity that limits a person’s ability to grow—so we now have children with autism. Representational shifts like this are easily lampooned, but it is difficult to see why such representational experimentation is any different than the R&D we do in technological industry—if there’s a problem, you try and fix it. Some people do it badly, but still, how is that any different than Toyota?

Narrative and Making Sense

In honor of my first day of school, here is the paper I submitted to the grad schools I applied to. It includes pieces of three posts I have already posted (two of which were originally papers for what I called the "Time Class"), but the material has shifted enough that I'm not even going to bother pointing them out.

I feel like I'm 18 again. I haven't like I was 18 again since I was 23.

This was the culmination of the Time Class I took last summer that began with James, Bergson and Woolf, and I'm quite happy with it (which will only last for another couple months, I imagine). I don't like Jameson much, but he ends up making a pretty good foil. This paper crystallizes the dynamic I've been exploring, picked up from Rorty's practical philosophy and Pirsig's philosophical practice, between Narrative and Theory. It is likely largest stepping-stone in the area from where I am now and the things I'll be writing in the future.

What might be interesting for readers of Pirsig is my engagement with Sherman Alexie. In Lila, Pirsig apotheosizes the Native American, but his descriptions of them, I don't think, go much further at best than a finger in the right direction, too fuzzy and glorifying to reach what's really interesting in a contrast with white American culture. Reading Alexie will give you that real contrast, and the tradition that should be tapped into. (While on the one hand, this seems to depreciate Pirsig's own accomplishment, on the other, when I move to interpreting Alexie at the end of the paper, when I move to suggest that what Thomas the myth-maker says is not literally true, but that that's because he isn't using a Western sense of literalness, I could've just as easily said that Thomas was being metaphorical. That would've been true, but only from a Western perspective, and the breaking from a narrow literary reading to a larger literary-philosophical reading of the book was made possible for me, in part, because of my previous encounter with Pirsig.)

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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There are two kinds of people who feel all too keenly the potential loss of self: teenagers and philosophers. For the former group, anxiety often arises as they navigate the treacherous waters of identity formation, passing from the stage of dependent learning of childhood to the achieved autonomy of adulthood. Occasionally adolescents become disaffected as they become self-conscious about the entire process, learning that the available identity forms they are facing—and have indeed already inculcated in childhood—are the contingent products of a nameless history they seem randomly inserted into, thus eliminating their sense of uniqueness and any hope for autonomous control. A few of these inadvertently read Nietzsche, or perhaps Sartre, and become philosophers.

Through an interesting, though for present purposes passable, chain of events, many who in a past age might have become philosophers find themselves comfortably seated in English departments. If philosophy is generically the task of apprehending the largeness of culture and its problems, literary studies has produced a wing of their own to do just that: literary theory. In what follows, I would like to pick up one theorist of culture, Frederic Jameson, and evaluate his situation in contemporary theoretical discourse. Jameson’s overall argument is that our cultural coherence has disintegrated, leaving us—i.e., any chance of us having a sense of self—and our attempts to live well and responsibly in tatters, calling this condition “postmodernism.” My overall argument shall be that, while Jameson interestingly collages together a number of contemporary cultural patterns, his attempt to produce a (specific kind of) theory is exactly what hampers him. More specifically, Jameson believes a holistic account of language unsettles our attempts to make sense, whereas I will argue, in effect, that making sense is a basic condition of humanity (the basic form of which to be repeated is: to make sense of the case that we have demonstrably stopped making sense is to performatively contradict the case—you’ve just made sense). If my argument is right, though, we must redescribe the old ways of describing our situation in life that Jameson still clings to. For this I will recur to the example of Sherman Alexie and the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. In their work, we will find the messy stuff of life housed in the dwelling of mythic narratives.

Jameson’s first feature of postmodernism is “a new depthlessness” (Jameson 6). One of the prime pieces of evidence for this that Jameson points to is the rise of antifoundationalism in contemporary philosophy and theory. In Geyh, Leebron and Levy’s functional introduction to postmodern theory, they flesh out the notion of antifoundationalism chiefly by reference to Lyotard and Derrida. Lyotard defines “postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard xxiv, italics his). For Lyotard, the postmodern condition is basically a skeptical attitude toward “any philosophy or theory … which claims to provide a complete explanation of culture and society” (Geyh xx). Derrida’s orientation toward the function of language is a rejection of the atomistic, pairing off of word-bits with their correct world-bit partners in favor of a linguistic holism, where meaning is generated by the ensemble of signs in interlocking conjunction. Derrida’s realization was that meaning is therefore “always in some sense in process, unstable, and ‘in play,’” (xxi) as the circumscribed ensemble can always be increased or decreased as context demands—like the shift in music from a string quartet to the London Symphony Orchestra. So on the one hand, Lyotard eliminates the large, overarching foundations for situating ourselves in the world and, on the other, Derrida eliminates the small, underpinned moorings we used to situate ourselves.

This instability is enunciated well by Jameson as he discusses the fate of the “self” at the hands of postmodernism. Jameson says that “the very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside” (Jameson 11) and that postmodernism has made it central to itself to be “committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside” (12). This obliteration of the self is predicted largely by Wyndham Lewis’ identification of the irony of romanticism—all this focus on the individual personality ends up eviscerating the notion individuals.[fn.1] What we have, in some sense, is a hyper-romanticism in postmodernism, a dissolution of anything substantive to be as a self by the elimination of the traditional hard edges (of metanarratives or word-world pinnings) and the relocation of meaning-inscription within each person as they swim through the bottomless stream of time. We begin blending into each other because we are never quite sure where we end and someone else begins because we ultimately only know ourselves.

We should look closely, however, at what Jameson means by the “hermeneutic model.” Jameson says, in reference to his two readings of Van Gogh, that he’s using it in the sense “in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth” (8). So, in Jameson’s example, either his initial or his Heideggerian reading of Van Gogh’s peasant shoes replaces, perhaps, a simpler, shorter reading of the painting (something like, “They are shoes.”). This is characteristic of the earlier modern period, but in the postmodern period, we have works like Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes which “does not really speak to us at all” (ibid.). After noting a number of the painting’s features, Jameson concludes, “There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture…” (ibid.). If this is the case, though, one might wonder what the proceeding 167 words were if not an attempt to elaborate the “ultimate truth” to which Warhol’s painting is but “a clue.” Isn’t “there is therefore…” a signal that whatever fills in the ellipsis is the truth of the matter? The whole functioning structure of argumentative discourse preempts Jameson’s attempt to argue that postmodern discourse refuses conclusions in favor of unconnected pieces of flotsam, “oddments” without their “whole larger lived context” (ibid.).

In Jameson’s defense, he’s attempting to pull out the consequences to our culture of arguments that so-called postmodern theorists have been making. He says it would “be inconsistent to defend the truth of its theoretical insights in a situation in which the very concept of ‘truth’ itself is part of the metaphysical baggage which poststructuralism seeks to abandon” (12). The problem for Jameson is that he’s taking seriously things that he shouldn’t. Antifoundationalism doesn’t translate into a loss of truth, though many less careful theorists have thought so. A thorough-going theoretical antifoundationalism translates into a pragmatic linguistic holism. It doesn’t eliminate our connection to life, but radically reasserts the “whole larger lived context.” All antifoundationalism does to the hermeneutic model (“the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth”) is excise the word “ultimate.”

To help show what I mean, I’d like to trail into Jameson’s discussion of schizophrenia. Piggybacking on Jacques Lacan, Jameson “describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain” (26). Jameson states rightly that in holism the old “signified,” which used to be classically seen in atomistic conceptions of language as a material world-chunk, is now seen to be just another signifier.[fn.2] A signifier-as-signified, however, is in a particular kind of context, one of, roughly, being-pointed-to as opposed to the usual doing-the-pointing situation of a signifier. Jameson, again rightly, calls this a “meaning-effect,” but then goes on to call this an “objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves” (ibid.). A consistent holist would not say that the context-dependence of meaning puts objectivity (or truth) in jeopardy, but simply replaces a bad philosophy of language with a better one, one that redescribes the sources of objectivity accordingly.

This is the crux of Jameson’s argument, however. He has to take seriously the idea that objectivity has been exposed as a mirage to be able to bridge from the analogy between, on the one hand, the psychic life of persons and the functioning of language to, on the other, the meltdown of literary and historical meaning as postmodern artists set out to render life in contextless (and hence, meaningless) chunks. Jameson’s fear of schizophrenia is the cultural realization of “a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers” (ibid.). He says this creates “an experience of pure material signifiers … a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” (27). We might feel Jameson’s fear, which could be described “in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality,” but we might also “just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity” (27-8). The old, atomistic view of language once safe-guarded our sense that we could get back in touch with a solid reality, but—now in postmodernity—we no longer have this comfort.[fn.3]

To reapply the form of my argument again, Jameson’s argument breaks down by its very ability to compose itself as an argument.[fn.4] Put very simply—schizophrenic contextlessness cannot actually exist, for if it did, it would be just as much a “meaning-effect,” an effect of context, as any other normal-seeming, contextually generated meaning.[fn.5] Jameson cannot move from holism to a scary form of schizophrenia because holism simply describes how we are (and were) always situated, not a new situation. The only new thing in antifoundationalist holism is the fact that we are rejecting Plato’s way describing our reality, not introducing a massively new and differently behaving and organizing reality.

According to Jameson’s theory, we should encounter cultural artifacts that are isolated and contextless, “randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary” (25). The consequence of this theory is that displays of history and time should be free-floating, broken from their signifying chain. A good example of how this theory founders in practice is Sherman Alexie’s “A Drug Called Tradition.” In this section, Victor and his friends take an unnamed drug and free-float through a series of hallucinatory dreams in the recapitulation of the evening. This would seem to be a good example for Jameson’s cause: the very concept of history is called into question as the boys see pasts and presents that are clearly not what had happened or is happening. And by the end, Alexie has someone hallucinating a theory of history that ends with “We are trapped in the now” (Alexie 22, italics his).

The ironic return of context begins with analyzing the italics in the passage. Devoid of the context of the piece, one might think Alexie was emphasizing the trap of presentness, much like Jameson’s notion of the sad, but inescapable state of postmodernism. But this is not what the italics mean. The italics are part of a consistent effort to demarcate the boundaries between hallucinative state of dream and normal state of reality. This stylistic choice, among others, is what signals to us, the readers, that we are reading something different than what is contained in the other parts (whatever the differences end up meaning on any of the many levels one could interpret them).

The point is that Alexie, as a writer, circumscribes the context with which we are to read the passages as much as the atomist supposes that the world circumscribes our words and what they mean. The hallucinatory effects in Alexie are as much “meaning-effects” as are normality and my attempt at asserting this particular meaning-effect over the italics-as-emphasis reading is as much hermeneutical as any other. This doesn’t mean atomism is true, it simply means that context always determines meaning, including the appearance of meaninglessnes or contextlessness. Jameson has confused a theoretical point about language-functioning for an empirical shift in culture, including the empirical shiftings of literary production.

Jameson must make this confusion, however, for his theory to attain its critical bite. Jameson’s intention is to identify “a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm” in order “to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today” (Jameson 6). The key to understanding the perspective Jameson is coming from is seeing him as a nostalgic Platonist. Jameson says our “cultural production” “can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world,” but is now “in Plato’s cave” (25, italics mine). Plato was suggesting a metaphorics for describing our knowledge-production. The holists, like Derrida, want to reject wholesale this entire edifice, whereas Jameson seems to swallow Plato’s poison pill and imagine we were once out in the light of Plato’s Form of the Good, but we have now—in real historical time—been shuttled back down into the cave.[fn.6]

Seeing Jameson this way makes sense of his strange remark that the contemporary announcement of the “‘death’ of the subject” sees two possible formulations, “the historicist one, that a once-existing centered subject … has today in the world organizational bureaucracy dissolved; and the more radical poststructuralist position, for which such a subject never existed…” (15). If one buys into my argument, that antifoundationalism doesn’t set us adrift into an endless sea of interpretation, but thrusts us, paradoxically, into the position we’ve always been in—of figuring out what stuff means by the context we find ourselves in—then poststructuralism is ultimately not radical at all because nothing follows from it in terms of how to figure out what stuff means: nothing changes as a consequence of it. Jameson does think that something has followed from poststructuralism, but some of his more extreme formulations seem to be more like reductio ad absurdums for his theory. If poststructuralism meant more than the death of Platonic rhetoric, then indeed it would mean the end “of style, in the sense of the unique brush stroke” (ibid.). And yet, how is that not just more hyperbole, in direct relation to the postmoderns who do think their deconstruction of Plato means something to culture and not just the culture of philosophers? And worst of all, Jameson suggests that “concepts such as anxiety and alienation … are no longer appropriate in the world of the postmodern,” to which the only appropriate response seems to be: as long as there are teenagers there will be anxiety and alienation.

The question might be why Jameson thinks we need a conception of language, or truth or whatever, that is harder and edgier than the holist’s. For this we need not diagnose culture-at-large, like Jameson, but simply the much smaller culture of philosophers. What Jameson, and others who hope for foundationalist theory, suffer from is what Richard Bernstein calls “Cartesian Anxiety.” Cartesian Anxiety is Bernstein’s name for the fear one experiences when faced with the “grand and seductive Either/Or” situation of Platonism: “Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos” (Bernstein 18). Descartes set the pace for modern philosophy by turning inwards for the foundations of knowledge. The dialectic of modern philosophy, however, has turned up with nothing, and so we get Jameson and Lewis’ fear of the loss of personal identity.

There is another trail out of Descartes, however, that doesn’t falter on the trumped-up fear of falling into an abyss without a theoretical Archimedean point. Alasdair MacIntyre begins by thinking about what it means to be in an “epistemological crisis.” He does so in a very down to earth, real life manner, like when “someone who has believed that he was highly valued by his employers and colleagues is suddenly fired” or when “someone falls out of love and needs to know how he or she can possibly be so mistaken in the other” (MacIntyre 241). These are real problems that most of us have faced, or can at least imagine being in. What we think about people is based on how they behave, but sometimes our entire outlook on them changes and all their behavioral cues become transmogrified—and worse, sometimes we cease to be certain about how to take their behavior at all. What we “took to be evidence pointing unambiguously in some one direction now turns out to have been equally susceptible of rival interpretations” (ibid.).

This produces a frightful situation in which we lose our hold on reality. For “my ability to understand what you are doing and my ability to act intelligibly (both to myself and to others) are one and the same ability” (242). If we begin to lose our hold on others, we begin to lose our hold on ourselves. Recurring to the example of Hamlet as an exemplar of epistemological crisis, MacIntyre says perceptively that “to be unable to render oneself intelligible is to risk being taken to be mad—is, if carried far enough, to be mad. And madness or death may always be the outcomes that prevent the resolution of an epistemological crisis, for an epistemological crisis is always a crisis in human relationships” (243).

The wisdom that MacIntyre is pulling out of the example of such an individual in distress has the same implications for disciplines or paradigms of thought in distress. “When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative, which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them” (ibid.). The most important reason for such narratives is that without them we would be taken over by the kind of radical, paralyzing skepticism that Descartes (and every epistemological skeptic after) pretends to have. MacIntyre points out that even Descartes, having formally eschewed narrative for formal deduction from self-evident premises (Derridean transcendental signifieds), constructs narratives to couch his process in the Meditations. The epistemological consequences are large. MacIntyre says that an epistemological crisis, even after being abated, can induce two conclusions: 1) that our understanding of a situation, the schemata or paradigms we use to interpret, even the ones we just adopted to end the crisis, “may themselves, in turn, come to be put in question at any time” and 2) “because in such crises the criteria of truth, intelligibility and rationality may always themselves be put in question ... we are never in a position to claim that now we possess the truth or now are fully rational. The most that we can claim is that this is the best account anyone has been able to give so far, and that our beliefs about what the marks of ‘a best account so far’ are will themselves change in what are, at present, unpredictable ways” (244, italics mine).

I’d meditate on MacIntyre for so long because we see the antifoundationalist in a position of redescription. When MacIntyre says the italicized section above, he is saying the same thing as when Derrida suggests that meaning, in the sense of transcendental signifieds, is endless deferred.[fn.7] But we also get a sense of what this can mean to us actually living deferrers. It is a messy process and MacIntyre suggests that narrative is in fact indispensable to it. Without the writing of stories, of how we grew, matured, changed, we wouldn’t be able to make coherent sense of the stupid things we once believed. And our theories, our schemata, of how the world works, our sense of how reality is, is partly governed by the tradition we’ve grown out of. MacIntyre suggests that the only way to give consistent sense to the context in which meanings are both determined and change over time is if there is a diachronic notion like a tradition in play. And what’s more, “a tradition is a conflict of interpretations of that tradition, a conflict which itself has a history susceptible of rival interpretations” (249).

The conflict of interpretations, the conflict of truths, is the consternating thing about what is still broadly called postmodernism. One of the greatest, most morally inspiring impulses behind the frontal attacks on philosophical notions of “truth” and “objectivity” was that what counted as the “truth” was simply what the powerful, bloody winners at the altar of war said it was and all philosophy did was obfuscate the violence lying just underneath. The odd thing about Jameson is that he carries this strong moral impetus on his sleeve,[fn.8] and yet tries to diagnose our culture’s sense of “real history” by interpreting movies and novels—as if historians have ceased, or changed, their production. Jameson might be right that aesthetic innovations have altered our culture’s sense for the worse, but it is certainly not the case that they are a philosophical consequence of linguistic holism.[fn.9]

I would like to close by returning to Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and the curious, difficult-to-interpret Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Without question, Native American Indians are the necks underneath the boots of American military dominance. Our histories of their tribulations are naturally suspect. What we find in Alexie, particularly through the representation of Thomas, is not just an alternative history of Native American culture, like one would find in a Howard Zinn narrative, but a different conception of history, and particularly of our relation to it.

I’d like to begin again with “A Drug Called Tradition.” The boys in the story take a “new drug” (Alexie 13) which is never named in the story, which suggests we take the story’s title as a symbolic stand-in. This encoding takes on broader proportions when Victor says of doing the drug, “It’ll be very fucking Indian. Spiritual shit, you know?” (14) Native American culture has been eviscerated and overtly suppressed by the American government[fn.10] and the taking of this drug, tradition, suggests a reacquaintance with an outlawed piece of their culture. I would suggest that the notion of tradition at work in Alexie is very similar to the one MacIntyre develops. Thomas, throughout the stories in the book, represents most fully a person connected to the traditional past of Native American culture, through his act of visionary storytelling, but in this particular story the other boys become connected, too. Every boy has a vision of one of the other boys, though the stories are written in the first-person.[fn.11] This suggests a sort of symbiosis, that tradition isn’t just a connection to their past, but their connection to each other.[fn.12]

The suppression of Native American culture is shown as the violence it really is in Thomas’ trial. At the head of the story, a “BIA suit” says that Thomas has “A storytelling fetish accompanied by an extreme need to tell the truth. Dangerous” (93). The curious part is that Thomas’ truths sound distinctly like lies to Western ears. When Thomas is asked to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” he begins, “It all started on September 8, 1858. I was a young pony, strong and quick in every movement. I remember this” (96). None of this could be literally true, but Thomas isn’t speaking with a Western sense of literalness. Our “objective histories” are built on the metaphor of a passionless spectator recording the neutral details of life, like a clay tablet bombarded with particles. But the Native American notion of tradition and history born out of Alexie’s stories about Thomas is built out of a passion-filled orator connecting the value-ladened events of his life to the hopes of his community, like a leader marshalling his forces against the steady march of fate. Thomas’ “testimony” is allegorical from Western eyes (“What point are you trying to make with this story?” the judge asks (99)), but the community in front of him are held in thrall by his words, seeing the suppressed truth like Esther about her husband David WalksAlong.[fn.13] And so with the trial, we see the marginalized and ignored Thomas achieve apotheosis by a repentant crowd (“Thomas,” “We’re all listening” (99)) and condemned for nothing more than being Native American.[fn.14]

One of the most interesting figures in the story occurs three times, most prominently at the close. At the end of Thomas’ first story, where he’s a pony, he closes, “I lived that day, even escaped Colonel Wright, and galloped into other histories” (98). This is another odd locution for Western ears, but I think it suggests the over-lapping, dialectical quality found in MacIntyre’s sense of tradition.[fn.15] The second time is at the end of the news article recapitulating, from the slanted eyes of the West, what had transpired in the trial. It closes, “[Thomas] was transported away from this story and into the next” (103). The news article had carried the trappings and signals of “realness,” and Alexie’s close breaks us out of that spell, though we should perhaps wonder if it wasn’t a neutral real, but rather our Western real. The third occurs at the final close of the entire story, “Thomas closed his eyes and told this story” (ibid.).

Another self-referential quirk, perhaps, suggesting we start again at the beginning, but I think it brings us back to the skeletons in “A Drug Called Tradition.” Thomas’ myth-making fully encloses the whole story, including the points that make it seem Western-real and the ones that seem Indian-mythic, both of which require the opposition of the other to appear as the literary affectation of “real” and “mythic.”[fn.16] What’s more, they are also embedded in time-structures that ambiguously morph. The story told about the trial up to the point of the news article appears to be the present. The intersection of the article suddenly shifts us into thinking that what we had read was a recapitulation of the past in present-tense and the final switch occurs by making the suggestion that the story is a presently told past (“told this story”). Every gesture suggests all three time senses, past, present, and future.[fn.17]

“Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you” (21). Alexie’s myth for the mythic sense of tradition is at once descriptive and haunting. One could seemingly apply it to everyone’s connection to reality, as his continual second-person referral suggests. But we shouldn’t forget that the myth itself is induced by the drug of tradition, bookmarked by fully italicized sentences. For the Native American, “the past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That’s how it is. We are trapped in the now” (22). Reconsidering the enormity of the suggestion—the blood spilled in objective histories, even if we aren’t making the kind of sense Jameson desires—we might begin think that the italics function both ways, demarcation and emphasis. Alexie’s characters continually refer to “how things are,” and as fluid as this may be in Native American myth (as opposed to the Greek myths of static, essential identity), there does seem to be a contemporary, real trap for specifically Native Americans, and not just the usual trap of life for us all. If the demons of the past wrap into your future, where does hope lie? Alexie’s answer lies in the myth-maker, Thomas, the one who would change his community’s identity, its vision, enter into agonistic relationship with its previous interpreters.

This may seem a little messianic until we realize that the vision is within us all. We all carry a piece of the community with us, our sharing is what makes us an “us,” and any one of us can light that spark. Jameson talks a lot about a shattered homogeneity careening into a schizophrenic, heterogeneous mass, but it is difficult to see anything but a dispelled myth of absolute homogeneity that, when lifted, reveals the mess that life’s always been. Jameson needs some “hegemonic norm,” whether it’s the homogenous hegemony of high modernism or the hetero hegemony of post-, in order to conceive of a “radical cultural politics” (Jameson 6). To make a radical break, you need one really big thing. But life’s not like that. Life is a long series of smaller conflicts, and a single life is a narrative of those conflicts, and indeed, a narrative of conflicting narratives. We can arrange them in elucidating ways, like Alexie’s interweaving of time, reality, and myth, but what we shouldn’t do is become so afraid as to become philosophers, reducing everything to a single, if massively amorphous and interpenetrating, enemy. Leave that to the teenagers.

Bibliography

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Grove Press, 1993, 2005.

Bernstein, Richard. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

---. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayari Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 176.

Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy. Postmodern American Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Lewis, Wyndham. Time and Western Man. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993, 1927.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science.” The Monist 60 (1977): 453-72. Rpt. in Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism. Eds. Stanley G. Clarke and Even Simpson. New York: State University of New York Press, 1989. 241-61.

Endnotes

[1] “…the more your particular personality … obsess[es] you, … the less ‘individualist’ you will be in the ordinary political sense. … Your ‘individualism’ will be that mad one of the ‘one and only’ self, a sort of instinctive solipsism in practice” (Lewis 8).

[2] This is the real meaning behind Derrida’s much parodied line “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text,” or better, “There is no outside-text”). Derrida was not staking out a new form of idealism, or denying the existence of rocks, but denying, like Wittgenstein when he denied ostensive definition, that language is (or perhaps, can be reduced to) a word-world relation. Words are words (i.e., have meaning and are not just sounds or marks on a page) because of how they hang in a web with other words. For Derrida, the “transcendental signified” is the stopgap with which philosopher’s have searched so that endless bickering about the truth of X would cease. After the Kantian turn in philosophy, the stopgap has often been “the world,” or in Kant’s lingo, “the thing-in-itself.” See, on this, Derrida’s discussion of Peirce where he says, “The thing itself is a sign” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 49) and on his most infamous line Derrida, Of Grammatology 158.

[3] To be sure, the notion of schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain can be used just as well for an atomist, but there seems to be a heightened sense of precariousness for the holist. In the atomist picture, a break in the chain can be rectified by being put back in touch with the solid, unalterable signified. On the holist picture, on the other hand, everything is a chain of signifiers, every signified can be reduced to a signifier such that a shift in signifiers alters the composition of the signified. This is the force of Jameson’s “objective mirage”: once our solid signifieds are really as ephemeral as our constantly shifting significations, we begin to really fear the loss, now irrevocable, of our grip on reality.

[4] Which should be suitably ironic, given how much fun holists-cum-deconstructionists have in showing how displays of intelligibility slide into unintelligibility, that Jameson’s display of unintelligibility should slide into intelligibility.

[5] For instance, the actual psychological state of schizophrenia could be described as signifiers losing touch with their signifieds (which seems to be the image that Jameson more relies on), but that reposes on the old atomistic view. On the holist view, schizophrenia would better be described as signification-chain-A losing touch with signification-chain-B. On this view, schizophrenics don’t behave oddly because they are acting without context, but because they are acting in the wrong context, an A-chain that would be less socially awkward if it were an AB-chain.

[6] Lyotard makes this same mistake when he says that “the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, [to] the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it” (Lyotard xxiv). Universities and other institutions of knowledge-production, like scientific laboratories, have gone on producing without a hitch even after the loss of what Nietzsche called “metaphysical comfort.” Like the excising of “ultimate” in Jameson’s hermeneutical model, all the holist is excising is the “meta-” in metanarrative, and then arguing that all we need for legitimation are regular, run-of-the-mill narratives (about which I shall discuss shortly).

[7] This is partly what Derrida means by his neologism “différance.” See, for instance: “it marks not only the activity of ‘originary’ difference, but also the temporizing detour of deferral” (Derrida, Margins 14)

[8] See especially, “Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror” (Jameson 5). Also, “Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existence…” (17).

[9] Possibly the most revealing passage in terms of the connection Jameson hopes to make between artistic innovations and poststructuralism is this one:

Here [in Warhol’s work] it is as though the external and colored surface of things … has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces … this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject. (Jameson 9)

Are we really to believe the stylistic innovation of self-reference or of calling attention to the materials at work in the presentation means the destruction of reality? Jameson wants to connect the notion of a signifiedless signifier (a Platonic notion Baudrillard runs with, not the holistic notion of a signification chain) to these now common and old hat artistic tools and suggest they are destroying our sense of reality, but should we really buy that, rather than blaming it on, say, the pernicious effects on national trust of state propaganda brought on by the lack of governmental transparency?

[10] The subtle background of the white, governmental presence is given excellent expression by Alexie’s referral to the “BIA,” an agency most Americans are entirely unaware of. By casually using the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ acronym (like an FBI or CIA) Alexie is able to call attention to a major difference in the lived cultures of Native Americans and European Americans—Native Americans would recognize the “BIA” as the BIA, whereas almost all others would have to stop and think about what the “BIA” stands for (unlike “FBI,” which is just the FBI). The first appearance of this is Alexie 49, in an offhand reference (another way of suggesting the subtle, circumscribing presence) to a brick going through a BIA pick-up’s window.

[11] The first is Thomas’ about Victor (Alexie 15-6), the second is Junior’s about Thomas (17), and the third is Victor’s about Junior (18-9). The fourth vision is one of Thomas’ stories and the fifth, the skeletal theory of history, is ambiguously left unattributed.

[12] This is reinforced in Victor’s journey to Arizona with Thomas. At the end of it, Victor thinks to himself, “he couldn’t really be friends with Thomas, even after all that had happened. It was cruel but it was real” (Alexie 74). Thomas calls out verbally every thought Victor has in this passage, including that one, to which Victor responds internally: “Victor was ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams” (ibid.). I think this passage does two things: one, it reinforces this notion of tradition as our source of community (our context, what circumscribes who counts as “us,” “we,” “our”). And two, it weaves in the notion that Victor’s previous notion of “reality” isn’t, perhaps, so real after all, and it is Thomas’ myth-making that forms the real core of a true Native American reality. Alcoholism is our current reality, but is it all we can hope for?

[13] Esther hears “a noise that sounded something like rain” and gained the courage to leave her husband, who—so in step with the BIA—“took to calling his wife a savage in polyester pants” (Alexie 94, italics his).

[14] “[Thomas] was guilty, he knew that. All that was variable on any reservation was how the convicted would be punished” (Alexie 94-5). Since it was already established that the BIA was trying to make something up for him to be guilty of, what Thomas knows is his heritage and the convicted are every inhabitant on a reservation, punished variably by jail or alcoholism.

[15] This point is reinforced by the fact that Thomas is said, in an earlier crisis, to have “threatened to make significant changes in the tribal vision” (Alexie 93).

[16] For instance, Thomas’ telling of the stories appear weird to us at points because of reassertions of “expected behavior,” like the judge pounding the gavel or demanding the point of the stories.

[17] The story is first the present, then embedded in the past by the news article, and then swept into the future, when we will hear the story we already know, at the close.

Theoretical and Empirical Schizophrenia

This is another short paper written for a class that looked at how the concept of time worked in literature and theory. Every paper in the series takes up whoever we were reading and pairs them together. They aren't exactly haphazard pairings, but ya' know. It is an open question as to how forced brevity effected the efforts--good exercise; still not used to it. This continues on about Fredric Jameson's idea of "postmodernism" and formed the basis for my much expanded final. What is interesting here for fans of Pirsig is Sherman Alexie's meditations about Native Americans and the connection with madness, a very profitable intersection that hooks up nicely with Jameson, too.

You'll also notice the forced MLA. God I hate MLA.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Fredric Jameson, piggybacking on Jacques Lacan, “describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain.” (Jameson 26) Having already preemptively disposed of atomistic conceptions of language (in which meaning is generated when words are paired off with their appropriate world-chunks) by presupposing a Saussurean holism, Jameson bridges from the analogy between the psychic life of persons and the functioning of language to the meltdown of literary and historical meaning as postmodern artists set out to render life in contextless (and hence, meaningless) chunks. This movement, I should argue, requires a monumental leap from the theoretical to the empirical and using Alexie Sherman’s treatment of the past will help bring out this point.

Jameson states rightly that in the new holism the old “signified,” which used to be classically seen as a material world-chunk, is now seen to be just another signifier.[fn.1] A signifier-as-signified, however, is in a particular kind of context, one of, roughly, being-pointed-to as opposed to the usual doing-the-pointing situation of a signifier. Jameson, again rightly, calls this a “meaning-effect,” but then goes on to call this an “objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves.” (ibid.) This is not something a convinced holist would say. For the holist, the context-dependence of meaning does not put objectivity in jeopardy, but simply replaces a bad philosophy of language with a better one, one that redescribes the sources of objectivity accordingly.

Jameson, it would seem, is a holist, but a particular kind—a nostalgic one, wishing for the theoretical comforts of old. Schizophrenia, as stated before, is the breakdown of the signifying chain.[fn.2] Jameson’s fear of schizophrenia is the cultural realization of “a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.” (ibid.) He says this creates “an experience of pure material signifiers … a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.” (27) We might feel Jameson’s fear, which could be described “in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality,” but we might also “just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity.” (27-8) The old, atomistic view of language once safe-guarded our sense that we could get back in touch with a solid reality, but—now in postmodernity—we no longer have this comfort.

What I would like to suggest is that Jameson’s argument breaks down by its very ability to compose itself as an argument.[fn.3] Put very simply—schizophrenic contextlessness cannot actually exist, for if it did, it would be just as much a “meaning-effect,” an effect of context, as any other normal-seeming, contextually generated meaning.[fn.4] Jameson cannot move from holism to a scary form of schizophrenia because holism simply describes how we are (and were) always situated, not a new situation. The only new thing in holism is the fact that we are rejecting Plato’s way describing our reality, not introducing a massively new and differently behaving and organizing reality.[fn.5]

According to Jameson’s theory, we should encounter cultural artifacts that are isolated and contextless, “randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary.” (25) The consequence of this theory is that displays of history and time should be free-floating, broken from their signifying chain. A good example of how this theory founders in practice is Alexie’s “A Drug Called Tradition.” In this section, Victor and his friends take an unnamed drug and free-float through a series of hallucinatory dreams in the recapitulation of the evening. This would seem to be a good example for Jameson’s cause: the very concept of history is called into question as the boys see pasts and presents that are clearly not what had happened or is happening. And by the end, Alexie has someone hallucinating a theory of history that ends with “We are trapped in the now.” (Alexie 22, italics his)

The ironic return of context begins with analyzing the italics in the passage. Devoid of the context of the piece, one might think Alexie was emphasizing the trap of presentness, much like Jameson’s notion of the sad, but inescapable state of postmodernism. But this is not what the italics mean. The italics are part of a consistent effort to demarcate the boundaries between hallucinative state of dream and normal state of reality. This stylistic choice, among others, is what signals to us, the readers, that we are reading something different than what is contained in the other parts (whatever the differences end up meaning on any of the many levels one could interpret them).

The point is that Alexie, as a writer, circumscribes the context with which we are to read the passages as much as the atomist supposes that the world circumscribes our words and what they mean. The hallucinatory effects in Alexie are as much “meaning-effects” as are normality. This doesn’t mean atomism is true, it simply means that context always determines meaning, including the appearance of meaninglessness or contextlessness. Jameson has confused a theoretical point about language-functioning for an empirical shift in culture, including the empirical shiftings of literary production.

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Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Grove Press, 1993, 2005.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Endnotes

[1] This is the real meaning behind Derrida’s much parodied line “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text,” or better, “There is no outside-text”). Derrida was not staking out a new form of idealism, or denying the existence of rocks, but denying, like Wittgenstein when he denied ostensive definition, that language is (or perhaps, can be reduced to) a word-world relation. Words are words (i.e., have meaning and are not just sounds or marks on a page) because of how they hang in a web with other words.

[2] This notion can be used just as well for an atomist, but there seems to be a heightened sense of precariousness for the holist. In the atomist picture, a break in the chain can be rectified by being put back in touch with the solid, unalterable signified. On the holist picture, on the other hand, everything is a chain of signifiers, every signified can be reduced to a signifier such that a shift in signifiers alters the composition of the signified. This is the force of Jameson’s “objective mirage”: once our solid signifieds are really as ephemeral as our constantly shifting significations, we begin to really fear the loss, now irrevocable, of our grip on reality.

[3] Which should be suitably ironic, given how much fun holists-cum-deconstructionists have in showing how displays of intelligibility slide into unintelligibility, that Jameson’s display of unintelligibility should slide into intelligibility.

[4] For instance, the actual psychological state of schizophrenia could be described as signifiers losing touch with their signifieds (which seems to be the image that Jameson more relies on), but that reposes on the old atomistic view. On the holist view, schizophrenia would better be described as signification-chain-A losing touch with signification-chain-B. On this view, schizophrenics don’t behave oddly because they are acting without context, but because they are acting in the wrong context, an A-chain that would be less socially awkward if it were an AB-chain.

[5] Jameson commits this mistake when he says our “cultural production” “can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world,” but is now “in Plato’s cave.” (Jameson 25, italics mine) Plato was suggesting a metaphorics for describing our knowledge-production. The holists, like Derrida, want to reject wholesale this entire edifice, whereas Jameson seems to swallow Plato’s poison pill and imagine we were once out in the light of Plato’s Form of the Good, but we have now—in real historical time—been shuttled back down into the cave.