Esthetic Experiments : Interdisciplinary Challenges in American Studies [1 ed.] 9781443866347, 9781443844642

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Esthetic Experiments

Esthetic Experiments: Interdisciplinary Challenges in American Studies

Edited by

Edyta Just and Marek M. Wojtaszek Typeset by Marta Kotwas

Esthetic Experiments: Interdisciplinary Challenges in American Studies, Edited by Edyta Just and Marek M. Wojtaszek This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Edyta Just and Marek M. Wojtaszek and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4464-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4464-2

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Esthetic Experiments. Interdisciplinary Challenges in American Studies Edyta Just and Marek M. Wojtaszek Chapter One............................................................................................... 11 Technology and its Discontents: The Crisis of Subjectivity Wojciech Majka Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 25 In the Land of Ghost-Signs, or William Gibson’s Spook Country Anna Krawczyk-àaskarzewska Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41 Military Memoirs and Masculinity Joel Janicki Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 57 Humane Soldiers: Soft Power, U.S. Soldiers and the Baghdad Zoo Jane Desmond Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 73 Different Feminist Approaches to Reproductive Technologies: Biopolitics in Feminist Speculative Fiction Anna Gilarek Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 89 The Centrifugal Age: Literary Movements of Avant-Pop, Slipstream and Bizarro Julia Nikiel

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 105 President Goes to Hollywood: Popular Culture Depictions of the White House World Anna Bendrat Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 123 Simpleton as a Symbol of American je-ne-sais-quoi, or a Quasi-National Icon Paweá DudziĔski Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 139 Men, Women and Fame: Generating Serial Killers in American Pop Culture Dorota WiĞniewska Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 155 Pantopia of Transference: Of Future and Sound; The Soloist and the Sonic Unconscious Edyta Just and Marek M. Wojtaszek Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 169 Multiculturalism of American Music as a Basis of the National Composers’ School Marina Pereverzeva Contributors............................................................................................. 183 Index........................................................................................................ 187

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 4-1. A Third Infantry Division soldier examines Uday Hussein's cheetahs at the Baghdad Zoo, 2003. Photo by Jim Garamone, supplied for public use by Department of Defense media.

INTRODUCTION ESTHETIC EXPERIMENTS: INTERDISCIPLINARY CHALLENGES IN AMERICAN STUDIES EDYTA JUST AND MAREK M. WOJTASZEK

[T]he uniqueness of esthetic experience … is … a challenge to thought. —John Dewey, Art as Experience (2005, 285)

The book grows out of the 2010 Polish Association of American Studies international conference held at the University of Lodz, Poland. The meeting constituted a platform to discuss and renegotiate the issue of “American diversity” from an interdisciplinary angle. The publication consequently builds upon one of the main conference themes which debated esthetic dimensions, and interpretatively challenged the current processes, of technologization of culture in the American context. Contemporary American landscape is wrought with ongoing processes and phenomena of technicization observable at the intersections of multiple layers of society. The book brings into attention their selected cultural and political aspects, emphasizing timeliness and necessity of academic intervention into, and evaluation of, their specificity and ramifications. Given that the United States is the laboratory of most advanced technological experimentations and the terrain of most rapid diffusion of their innovative outcomes and solutions, there is a constant need to explore the social-cultural ramifications and influence they exert upon the American modes of thought and existence. The essays take this challenge and respond esthetically to the issue of the presence of technology in American life by reopening and renegotiating the very concept of technology and widening its meaning and offering its novel unanticipated epistemological liaisons. Presenting critical and analytical account of cultural narratives which define, speak of, and use diverse technologies (of writing, sound, media representations, surveillance, war),

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Introduction

the authors compiled in this volume investigate the coalescence between technological production on the one hand and textual on the other. In effect, the texts break with the conventional technology-bounded perspectives on the technical and subject it to critical revisions and creative reformulations. In doing so, they offer esthetic analyses of the being, functioning, implementations, and impact of different technologies. Moreover, texts conduct esthetic experiments which engender novel perspectives on American cultural—both textual and technological— production. Importantly, the authors of the essays collected in this book embark upon the original project which is largely inspired by and runs along the intrinsic American tradition of pragmatic thinking and experiencing. Placing emphasis on the social character of knowledge, pragmatism proposes that experience is linked with one’s peculiar conditions and requires one’s active participation in the generation of the epistemic context. It inevitably necessitates that which John Dewey terms as “reflective intelligence” conceived of as an embodied and embedded reaction to one’s environment. In pragmatic view, the context makes one think and, consequently, learn how to productively and effectively reply to the requirements and challenges it engenders. This philosophical tradition of knowledge clearly highlights that “the scientific inquirer, the philosopher, the technologist derive their substance from the stream of culture” (Dewey 2005, 276). In their various approaches and styles the essays actualize the pragmatic principle of action, conceptualizing new images and understandings of the technical which now emerges as a driving force of any experience in general and the experience of American culture in particular. It is often argued that American intellectual tradition is in itself a certain response to the material conditions of its growing. Faced with natural obstacles, American people had to remain open to constant negotiation, innovation, and improvisation as well as develop adaptive skills and a capacity for experiment. Experi-mentality is conceived of as inherent to historical and cultural development of the United States which is best expressed in the concept of the Frontier. As the main motivational force stimulating geographical, economic, political and cultural generation and solidification of American nation, it promoted experiment as a creative way of inductive learning, of making use of resources and adapting to environment. Via experimentation American culture annuls stagnation, triggering esthetic resiliency. Sustaining a direct correspondence with the social-cultural framework (which crucially constitutes the major source of their inspiration), the texts analyze the esthetic effects of

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the uses of various technologies and their practical dimension and bearing upon the conduct and course of American life. They recognize the essence of experimenting as fueling esthetic transgression, renegotiating the established borders and maximizing cognitive experience. The idea of the book responds to the current academic appeal— inspired by postmodern questioning of the foundations and realized, most importantly, by deconstruction—to dismantle one of the constitutive pillars of Western civilization, namely, the opposition between techne and episteme. Viewed hitherto as derivative and of lesser cultural value, techne is now reconceptualized and configured into an immanent mechanism, whose integral part in the epistemic production is pragmatically acknowledged as both structural and instructive. Recognition of the technical dimension of knowledge production allows one to realize the importance of its experimental character which actualizes in the sphere of experience in general and esthetic experience in particular. Submitting selected illustrations of contemporary American cultural production to analysis, the essays in their interpretative mode proceed largely experimentally by bridging the gap between techne and episteme. In doing so, they endeavor to reformulate and complexify an experience of technological American culture. The book aims to clarify and exemplify that the junction of text and technology implies that meanings are embedded in a material which—as John Dewey claims—“becomes the medium for their expression” (2005, 284). In its content the book seeks to affirm the esthetic experiment of bringing together techne and episteme in the context of American Studies, which effectuates “opening of new fields of experience and disclosing new aspects and qualities in familiar scenes and objects” (Ibid., 150). In bringing together techne and episteme, the essays go beyond conventional paradigms of cultural analysis. Submitting the very concept of interdisciplinarity to inquiry, they rely upon and further develop such innovative scholarship emerging in the United States as animal studies, music studies, memoirs studies, war studies, science and technology studies. Consequently, the publication introduces and popularizes the assumption that American cultural experience emerges as a genuine experiment of an esthetic nature. In establishing interdisciplinary dialogues and experimenting with various heuristic and analytical approaches and devices, the authors account for the place and function of techne in the effectuation of American cultural experience and creation of an image of America as an esthetic experiment, par excellence. The image of American culture that emerges out of this collection reflects the very experimental nature of the history of the United States as well as epistemically fosters and advances original forms of research and hence

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Introduction

new knowledge in American Studies. Any practical activity including scholarly doings (writing, researching, thinking), following the pragmatic imperative will obtain tangible empirical results and, as John Dewey flatly states, “will, provided that it is integrated and moves by its own urge to fulfillment, have esthetic quality” (Ibid., 41). Therefore, the essays on the one hand pose a challenge to traditional conceptions of mass media, technologies, politics, gender, visual arts, literary, poetic, and sonic expressions and, therefore, can well be addressed to the readership of American Studies, esthetics, visual cultures, science and technology studies, gender and women’s studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and musicology. On the other, the collection of texts locates itself at the frontier of innovative research on the growing estheticization of experience, thus contributing to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. The esthetic dimension actualizes and affirms itself most explicitly in the process of generation on multiple levels, involving not only sense experiences and affective flows but also, importantly, desire for movement and fulfillment which altogether lead to the rise of potential. The unique essence of American experience, which manifests itself through its inherent driving force of action and being active, entails the coming together of the pragmatic, the practical, the common, and thus acquires esthetic quality. The esthetic is that which the esthetic does, which best explains the mechanism of experiment. All in all, both American culture and the essays presented in this volume express an affirmation of experimenting as a pragmatic mode of production which propels and stimulates further experiences and encourages a quest of alternative and interesting ways of thinking about America. In Dewey’s view, to unravel new aspects in familiar contexts and things, that is to experiment and to venture means to perceive esthetically, thereby opening novel realms of experience and knowledge (Ibid., 150). Wojciech Majka in the opening essay argues that much as technology busies itself with ontic progress, ontology asks us to regress into the origin of man’s ideas. At the same time, we should not consider science to be the cause of technology. The author ponders how we can determine our orientation towards it? The question, he claims, asks us not to look at the objective phenomenon of technology but rather at our orientation or relation towards it, i.e., the mode of thinking that makes technology possible, since it is cognition that creates relations between human beings and the world. In point of fact, he concludes, to understand technology we must adopt a perspective that would not be technological, in other words,

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we should not seek to define technology through its own instrumentality and terminology but rather come to understand the kind of thinking that makes it possible in the first place. Anna Krawczyk-àaskarzewska analyzes Spook Country, the 2007 novel by William Gibson. Unlike most of the writer’s oeuvre, it is set in the contemporary, predominantly U.S. universe, where the physical reality has already been transformed by VR and cyberspace and can thus be (even more) thoroughly manipulated by Cold War spies, monomaniacal agents, cynical media moguls, and puzzled, growingly paranoid civilians. The very title of the book offers, she claims, a way of interpreting this heavily mediatized setting. Gibson’s fictitious world is ridden with conspiracy theories, obsessed with stalking and surveillance, dis/empowered by stateof-the-art technologies, cluttered with the excess of digital data as well as energized by new modes of communication and artistic expression. More specifically, as a result of growing connectivity, the author suggests, Americans live in a spook country, somewhere between Google Earth and eBay, exposed to the ever-changing semiopolitical landscape, whose spectral signs are frustrating in their ambiguity, even though they can be easily tracked: GPS-ed, googled and wikipedized. At the meta-level, Krawczyk-àaskarzewska infers that Gibson’s immersion in this augmented reality steers the reader away from the text, into the labyrinth of online references and categories. Joel Janicki begins his essay with a claim that Post-Cold War America has been marked by a triumphalism of its hegemonic military superiority and a glorification of power and violence often expressed in military images. He consequently proposes that popular culture is awash with these hegemonic male figures in uniform in many forms, and in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the resultant wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sub-genre of military memoirs has witnessed a burgeoning growth. His study provides background information on the nature and extent of this growth and examines issues of violence, gender and hegemonic masculinity from the perspective of two military memoirs based on soldiers’ experiences in the Second Iraq War which commenced in 2003. Due to the increasing role of females in the American armed forces, he introduces a dual perspective on masculinity and violence in the military that of female as well as male. The author develops relevant ideas including male bonding, the role of shame in forging martial virtues, and the role of fathers in shaping military values, as derived from Joshua Goldstein’s monograph on gender and war while the term hegemonic masculinity is provided by R. W. Connell, who examines dominant male behavior from the perspective of feminism.

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Introduction

In her text Jane Desmond suggests that scholars often dismiss news reports about animals as simply “soft news” crafted to tug at human heartstrings. She, therefore, takes an opposite view: that the circulation and recirculation of these stories, and in particular that of the melodrama of animals, soldiers, and governments narrated around the Baghdad zoo and the U.S. military actions in Iraq, can be analyzed as important public discourse, revealing the power of such sites to become magnets for emotions. Desmond reads them as discursive “evidence” of cruelty assigned to one political faction or of the capacity for humane generosity assigned to another faction. She demonstrates the linkage between “soft news” and “soft power,” focusing specifically on the ideological cache of zoos, and the politics of humanitarianism, as they intersect with the narrated role of the U.S. Army in “saving” the Baghdad zoo and helping reopen it as one of the few relatively safe public spaces for civilian leisure in Baghdad after the war. In doing so, the author simultaneously engages with emergent scholarship in critical animal studies that insists that our understandings of human history must include the histories of humananimal relations, in this case that of animals and war. Anna Gilarek discusses different feminist approaches to both reproduction and the role of technology in the procreative process as dramatized by authors of feminist speculative fiction. Feminist dystopian works, as she views them, draw attention to the negative consequences of leaving procreation under male control. Frequently, they voice the concerns of radical feminists who denounce assisted reproduction as a tool of patriarchal oppression. Feminist utopias, on the other hand, explore the idea of female-controlled reproduction. According to Gilarek feminist utopian authors frequently perceive reproduction as the factor determining women’s social liberation or subjugation. They introduce reproductive technologies in their works not only to explore the potential benefits of a complete reproductive independence, but also to draw attention to actual problems posed by the lack of reproductive freedom in patriarchal societies. In a defamiliarized context, they address the fact that under certain circumstances pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing may be disempowering for women. In her text, the author aims to analyze feminist utopian and dystopian visions in terms of their stance on technologized reproduction. With the emergence of terms such as post-postmodernism or pseudomodernism and the simultaneous flourishing of such previously disregarded vectors of literary expression as cross-genre or graphic fiction, Julia Nikiel contends that American literature today seems to be witnessing a general intensification of decentralizing and decanonizing

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tendencies. While the influence of postmodernism remains tangible, she argues, there have recently appeared a number of literary movements which in various ways merge the esthetics of postmodernism with elements appropriated from the once forbidden zones of popculture, mass media and popular or non-realistic fiction. In her essay she reviews the literary movements of Avant-Pop, Slipstream and Bizarro, each of which constitutes a unique artistic response to the world. Having evolved through the contemporization of postmodernism, Nikiel claims, the three appear to be representative of the recent diffusion and scattering of postmodernism into a number of more or less independent literary phenomena. Showing the extent to which people’s lives are infiltrated by hyperconsumption and contemporary mediascapes, and analyzing the reality of cognitive dissonance, or merging elements of humor with transgressive content, these movements, the author concludes, respond to the current need for structural and thematic diversity, creating literary representations which not only provoke and astound, but also shift and morph as rapidly as the reality which produces them. Being the focus of American politics and receiving the most media attention, the figure of the president, as Anna Bendrat claims, inspires the leading theories of the presidency which contain explicit or implicit assumptions about the president’s use of the media in political communication. One of the most popular media outlets used for shaping the image of the American presidency is the TV and film industry. In her essay the author focuses on the representation of the presidential figure in The West Wing TV series, which features the president as an idealistic and virtuous statesman. Bendrat’s objective is to explore how the political content and message in The West Wing resonate with the empirical (descriptive) and normative (judgmental) political theories. She traces their elements in two selected episodes opening the fourth season of the series. The author argues that the discursive politics of The West Wing serves two parallel goals: it presents the mechanisms of governing the country, and, simultaneously, it attempts to assess the consequences of particular political issues, such as the intensity of partisan politics and the competing visions of presidential leadership. Paweá DudziĔski examines a cultural phenomenon of a simpleton in the U.S. along with great literary predecessors of such quasi-national icons as Forrest Gump and Homer Simpson, and analyses a symbolic significance of quasi-simpletonic figures in four masterpieces of American literature, namely: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Sound and the Fury, Of Mice and Men, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His premise is that simpleton comprises an integral part of American Psyche

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Introduction

and is therefore a recurring theme in American culture. Furthermore, DudziĔski argues that American writers excel at portraying full-blown, protagonists, whose presence is highly charged with ironic deadlock (Northrop Frye); hence, the main role of a simpleton is, arguably, to express a subversive criticism of contemporary American society. He concludes with an observation that a diachronic interpretation implies a historical interdependence between the Zeitgeist and resulting changes in subsequent avatars of the simpleton. The murderabilia market, as Dorota WiĞniewska points out, constitutes a small part of the magnanimous serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture since the 1970s. The celebrity culture around serial killers has developed so far that one can now purchase the nail clippings and hair of some killers, as if they were religious icons. However, as the author suggests, the ongoing debate around the ethics of murderabilia shows just how difficult it is to draw a neat line between those who condemn and those who participate in that culture. According to WiĞniewska, the only way to understand the serial killer popular culture industry is to divert from the condemnatory tone and assume, for the time being at least, an attitude of moral neutrality toward that industry. Rather than pronounce the existence of celebrity serial killer culture to be either good or bad, the author instead concentrates on the conditions that allowed for the emergence of that culture. In particular, she analyzes how the concept of “fame” has evolved in ways that not only permit the existence of criminal celebrities such as the serial killer, but also make the serial killer the exemplary modern celebrity. In doing so, WiĞniewska argues that the fame of serial killers is absolutely central to the understanding of the varieties of cultural work they do in the contemporary American culture. The essay by Edyta Just and Marek M. Wojtaszek is a criticalcreative investigation of the sonic power of the unconscious as it is expressed through the narrative of Joe Wright’s film The Soloist (2009). Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idiosyncratic philosophy and schizoanalysis, the authors aim to critique the implicit negativity inscribed in the phantasmatic understanding of the unconscious functioning under the Phallus-Oedipus and offer a radical and affirmative alternative. In particular, they consider the process of transference as constitutive of the psychotherapeutic practice and indispensable for its success. Just and Wojtaszek critique the dialectical and representational framework as too rigid and restrictive to account for ongoing uncanny generativity. They focus on the relation “doctor—patient” and expose its limitations which inevitably make of the psychoanalytic praxis a systemic

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tool of coercive adaptation thus, in fact, castrating an event of shimmering transferential desire. De-cathecting it from the imperative of remembrance of things past as well as of speaking (of them), the authors rediscover and attempt an ethological analysis of its sonic production. In their view the film reveals its essence and function not in replication (of pathological symptoms) but rather future-oriented, untimely, schizo-creation. Just and Wojtaszek emphasize the transformative—indeed, healing—potential music wields, especially when experienced collectively. Transference is purged of dialectical bounds and affirmed as an immanent and protean sound machine, an affective process of en-during, i.e., forever futuredriven experiencing. Marina Pereverzeva claims that national identity of American music has been one of the most interesting, disputable and exciting problems of musicology. The diversity of vernacular specificities plus the variety of incoming traditions have contributed to the multicultural character of American music. Development of the national musical culture, Pereverzeva maintains, saw an evolution of original forms and distinctive genres based precisely on the synthesis of the different national traditions. The openness to diverse artistic traditions from Europe, Asia and Africa fostered multiculturalism and inspired musical experimentation of the American composers in the twentieth century. The author concludes that multicultural music greatly influenced the process of constructing an American sense of identity.

Bibliography Dewey, John. 2005. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin Group.

CHAPTER ONE TECHNOLOGY AND ITS DISCONTENTS: THE CRISIS OF SUBJECTIVITY WOJCIECH MAJKA

Introduction The overall aim that we are setting before ourselves here is to account for the kind of thinking that characterizes modern technology and science. Additionally, our task will be to examine how what will be referred to as techno-science affects the human sense of identity that rests on the foundation of a cognitive understanding of the idea of subjectivity. We will, therefore, commit ourselves to what in short can be called a hermeneutic phenomenology of techno-science and thus examine and characterize the kind of thinking that makes techno-science possible. The hermeneutic approach to techno-science, however, was already anticipated by such American thinkers as Henry David Thoreau who, for example, maintained that “all great laws are really known to the simple necessities of men before they become the subject of science” (Thoreau 1999, 8). Thoreau comes extremely close to the existential understanding of science that leading American philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus or Joseph Rouse find in their readings of Martin Heidegger. Rouse observes, Heidegger gave philosophical priority to his existential-ontological conception of science, but also thought that the greater familiarity of logical and ontical conceptions showed something important about science. Although science always presupposes an understanding of being, the scientific project of discovering what and how entities are within its domain obscures the understanding of being that makes inquiry possible. (Rouse 2007, 117)

Thus, both Thoreau and Rouse seem to agree with the fact that we must change our approach to the methodology behind scientific thinking. From

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the perspective of onto-theology this thinking is based on the division of experience into a subjective and objective content. The onto-theological tradition, therefore, automatically assumes that science is the methodology that was developed to help us understand and relate to the objective world in a meaningful way.

The Hermeneutic Origin of Science The assumptions behind hermeneutical phenomenology that root science in the existential terra firma, however, are similar to the intellectual framework behind American pragmatism that emerges from the theories of such thinkers as Charles Sander Pierce, William James or John Dewey. Additionally, what can be observed here is that pragmatism gestated in the womb of American transcendentalism and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson are a very clear example of the mysterium coniunctionis of both transcendentalism and pragmatism. In The American Scholar we hear Emerson clearly calling for a pragmatic (not theoretical) approach to knowledge at large, [b]ooks are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. (Emerson 1981, 56)

By calling out to the active soul Emerson stresses the importance of the experienced and, therefore, pragmatic source of knowledge. In point of fact, knowledge is not to be derived from books but from a pragmaticexistential background. By means of extension it can be assumed that science itself must also have its roots sunk in pragmatic and existential soil. It follows from the above that before we look at techno-science from a hermeneutic perspective we will direct our attention to the roots of Western thinking. In other words, what must first of all be accomplished is the understanding of the background of Western thinking as such. In a hermeneutical sense the background is the equivalent of the phenomenological horizon that surprisingly was also anticipated by Emerson who famously claimed that “in the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature” (Emerson 1981, 11). Just as the hermeneutical tradition raised objection to the role and place of subjectivity in experience

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so Emerson devoted himself to the same kind of skepticism when he declares that “standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God” (Ibid., 11). What Emerson is hinting at here is the possibility of the desubjectification of experience that we have earlier seen so characteristic of existential hermeneutics. Thus, instead of the window of subjectivity we are supposed to raise ourselves above the socialized subjectivity and view existence from the universal perspective of being that in Emerson is identified in a pantheistic way with Brahmanic nature. What this thinking asks us to do is not to regard the subject as a being that is in-itself and for-itself. Rather, subjectivity is nothing more than a mask that is put on the Dionysiac forces of nature. Or, to put it in a different way, subjectivity is the mathematical projection of a techno-scientific form of thinking that has dominated the Western world. We will, therefore, now attempt to phenomenologically bracket the notion of subjectivity in order to come to terms with what it essentially entails. Questioning subjectivity today, however, automatically throws us into a sphere of irrationality and mysticism. Yet, we do not want to first desubjectify experience only to later mystify it; rather, our attempt is to point to a lucid, existentially pragmatic basis and origin of the subjective mathematical projection. The subjective principle in primitive man was immensely weaker than in people of the modern world. In other words, primitive man enjoyed what we may call a sense of collective subjectivity which was strictly connected with the forces of nature just as we find in the oeuvres of the American transcendentalists who urge us to shed the slough of sociality and enter the state of what Emerson calls the “the secret communion between man and vegetable” (Ibid.). Thoreau, on the other hand, comments on the umbilical relation between nature and man in the following way, [n]ature is right, but man is straight. She erects no beams, she slants no rafters, and yet she builds stronger and truer than he. Everywhere she preaches not abstract but practical truth—she is no beauty at her toilet, but her cheek is flushed with exercise. The moss grows over her triangles. Unlike the man of science she teaches that skeletons are only good to wear the flesh, and make fast the sinews to—that better is the man than his bones. (Thoreau 1999, 4)

What we are, therefore, apprenticing ourselves here to is the idea that subjectivity is nothing more than a linear perspective that is imposed on

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Chapter One

experience, a perspective that is brought into being on existential grounds in the sense that it is the attitude that we have adopted towards being that determines the experience of existence. From the perspective of subjectivity the world and experience come to be organized in a chronologically causal way and the subject itself is nothing more than the face of its own naturally predetermined history. According to the view that is being advocated here, subjectivity as such does not have an a priori ontological basis but a historical one. In other words, there is nothing positive in the sense of innate about subjectivity; rather, it is strictly the effect of socialization and the appropriation of cultural paradigms.

The Psychological Perspective Let us look at the phenomenon of subjectivity from a typically psychological vantage point. Carl Gustav Jung entertained the belief that subjectivity is quite a novel acquisition and that in ancient times primitive cultures shared what we may call a collective sense of subjectivity. Moreover, the subjectivity of the primitive man was very closely connected with nature and its emanations. In other words, as we have earlier observed in Emerson, it was believed that there supposedly existed some sense of connectedness between nature and man and this link was the basis of the primitive sense of subjectivity. Modern man, however, does not identify himself with natural forces to such an extent as people of the ancient world. Instead, he seeks a sense of identification with paradigms measured out by societal forces and the standards that they enforce. Thus, just as subjectivity seems to have been influenced by natural phenomena in the past, so the subjectivity of the modern man is determined by social reality and, therefore, what we call the subject is not an inherent principle but a borrowing, a mask that we put on, which in itself is the effect of our participation in the social world. Amongst others, it was Jacques Lacan who pointed to the fact that subjectivity is primarily a social construction. He believed that at a certain stage of the evolution of subjectivity the child sees itself reflected in the mirror and it identifies with the image that it sees of itself. Its subjectivity is built on the idea of misidentification, as the child instead of identifying with itself and where it really is identifies with the image that it sees of itself. Thus, subjectivity comes to be erected upon an artificial persona that is abstracted from the mirror image. In short, in the Lacanian sense it can be stated that we think where we are not and, therefore, we are where we think not (Lacan 1977, 139). In other words, the psychological perspective proves that subjectivity

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is at base a social construction. What happens is that we abstract the notion of subjectivity from the mirror of society that we emerge from just as primitive man read himself off of the aura of nature. In a poetic sense the artificiality of such a socially construed subjectivity is vividly portrayed by, for example, E.A. Robinson whose eponymous character is victim of a stale pointless existence which eventually leads to his suicide, Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean-favored and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich, yes, richer than a king, And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine—we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked and waited for the light, And went without the meat and cursed the bread, And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet in his head. (Robinson 1994, 968)

From the perspective of the poem individual subjectivity is a phenomenon that emerges from the overall social context. Much as Richard Cory is an individual and dies as one, his individualism is an idea that makes sense only on the basis of a shared social context. Cory dies but the social context that made him possible survives and serves as the hermeneutical background against which his existence can be measured. The social context uproots the self from its primordial being and makes the self see itself from the perspectives that it offers. Therefore, the social context produces an image of each and every one of us that does not match our primordial self but instead the social context simply places the self within its structures as if to fill in a gap. This kind of selfhood and the being that it has in front of itself could really be anyone’s. It follows from this that life does not in fact belong to a unique self, for anyone else who would be placed in a similar situation would be leading the kind of being that the self in question is leading. In other words, just like in the case of R. Cory the self is nothing more than a functional mask that the social

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context wants the self to wear not for its purposes but for the sake of the public standards and norms. The fundamental conclusion here is that the self which we experience or allows us to experience being is not ours but the society’s, for we always see ourselves from a socialized perspective. Even an authentic self, whose fundamental feature is that it defies blind conformism, acts on basis of the norms and standards that are supplied by the social context.

The Religious Perspective If we are, however, to look for the origin of the subjective—objective perspective, we should direct our attention to religion and philosophy. Before we do this we should, first of all, point to the fundamental difference between religion, philosophy, and science and the kind of thinking that makes each of them respectively possible. True religion must be looked upon from the perspective of revelation and not from that of the positive sciences that working with the kind of thinking definable through the cause-effect principle force the understanding of religion into pre-established concepts. Additionally, any philosophy that instead of centering upon being itself tries to focus on the first being is on the wrong path, or it is simply not philosophy at all but a positive science, whose positum is the first being. Thus, philosophy studies that which is more primordial than science; it looks at being as such and how it makes the being of essents possible. Moreover, from a traditional point of view what must be taken into account is that there is a clear dichotomy between philosophy and religion. The former is only a tool that the latter is to use to attain levels of understanding that would enhance the revelation of the divine. Yet, for Heidegger religion conceived as theology is a science and its methods are scientific. What is the relation, therefore, between science and philosophy? For one thing the sciences study the reality that was disclosed beforehand and, therefore, they offer a descriptive or analytic understanding of objects. The sciences, in short, deal with a thematization of being, a categorical segmentation of being that classifies essents according to fixed categories that are the essential qualities of subjectivity. Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, offer more than the sciences. They are preoccupied with more than the being of beings. In other words, they look at the preconditions, i.e., the contexts that beings possess. From a religious point of view, what must be accounted for is a very important cultural transformation that took place some 4000 years ago with the ancient Jews. Of course, what is being implied here is the

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transformation of the polytheistic world into a monotheistic one. What can be observed about the deities behind polytheism is that they were at best indifferent to human destiny and additionally they were believed to be amoral. With monotheism the whole religious paradigm is not only changed but completely reversed. In opposition to the polytheistic deities the monotheistic god—Yahweh—chooses man as his elected being. Furthermore, Yahweh creates a specific medium, i.e., the language of morality through which he communicates with man. However, he communicates with man not as a species, a nation or an ethnic group, but rather with man as the individual subject. Contact with the divine thus comes to be personalized. This anthropomorphization of the divine is developed all the further by Christianity from whose perspective God possesses personal attributes. Moreover, this personalized God loved man to such an extent that he was willing to sacrifice his one and only son who died for man (never before did humanity have a God that would be willing to suffer with mankind in order to save it). Nevertheless, it is for this reason that the Gnostics or Muslims saw Christ not as a God but as a prophet. Huston Smith observes that “Islam honors Jesus as a true prophet of God. It even accepts the Christian doctrine of his virgin birth” (Smith 1986, 205). However, the humiliating death that Christ suffered happened to Christ the man not Christ the God, since God could not possibly meet such a humiliating end. Nevertheless, the religious perspective that we have presented above proves that subjectivity comes to be decidedly motivated by a personalized understanding of the divine which in itself is the effect of the monotheistic revolution.

The Philosophical Perspective From the personalism that we find characteristic of monotheistic thinking we move to rationalism whose stronghold is to be found in Greek philosophy. What the Western world in a general sense owes to the Greeks is that they were the first culture that started questioning being or at least they managed to question it successfully, which contributed to the creation of Greek philosophy. In other words, for the first pre-Socratic thinkers it was not enough that we simply exist. We should also know and understand why we should want to exist in the first place. Therefore, the Greeks built their culture on the foundation of reason which in itself puts man in a skeptical relation to reality. As a consequence of the shift from myth to reason, rationality came to be associated with the highest level of being that the individual was to raise himself to, since it was the individual subject that was supposed to understand reality after all. Rationality

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offered the individual a bird’s eye view of reality, yet at the same time it created the illusion that reason is a phenomenon that exists in opposition to the objective world that was reduced to the level of instrumental availability. Reason, therefore, was placed in the subject that was believed to be the principle that puts a meaningful construction on the supposedly inchoate and meaningless countenance of nature. According to this way of thinking rationality promoted the notion of dualism and the division of reality into subjectivity and objectivity and, consequently, into the contingent and the universal. Nevertheless, from what has been mentioned above it still appears that subjectivity has no inherent substantiality of its own. It is a social construction which in this case is connected with reason and power, as reason—classically understood—sets man in an instrumental relation to the reality that he seeks to control. The artificiality of subjectivity naturally flows out of Protagoras where Plato refers to the myth of Prometheus. What we learn is that at a certain point the gods asked Prometheus to distribute powers amongst the living organisms. Prometheus does not perform the action himself but instead asks his brother to do it for him. This is the reason why Epimetheus goes down in history as the symbol of stupidity. He does distribute powers amongst the different forms of life according to the principle of proportionality where big organisms are made strong but slow, and small organisms are made weak but fast. However, while distributing the powers (inherent natures) to the given forms of life, Epimetheus forgets about man and man ends up deprived of a positive quality that could be associated with something like a fixed subjectivity, i.e., a fixed, fossilized center of experience. In other words, man is empty as though he were deprived of natural being which is why we can repeat after T.S. Eliot that ontologically, We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar. (Eliot 1990, 1283)

Thus, it is because of our original hollowness that Prometheus later has to go and steal the fire, which we can understand in a variety of ways. Fire can symbolize rationality, logos and, of course, science and consequently

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technology. In other words, fire is what Richard Rorty would call the protoplasm of technocratic thinking that puts man in a power relation to reality, [t]he West … has been on a power trip …, with the Greeks, it invented itself. A metaphysics of the Will to Power… and an antimetaphysical technocratic pragmatism are the destined lost stages of Western thought. This is the result of Plato’s attempt to rise above the pragmatism of the marketplace, to find a world elsewhere. (Rorty 2007, 513-514)

It follows from the above that because man does not have idiosyncrasy of his own; since he is as if expelled from nature, he has to fill the void that is in him by a form of thinking that is technical, which would ensure his survival. Thus, even from this example we see that subjectivity is something that was invented in the sense that it is the consequence of the Promethean fire. It is not a natural construction in that it is the effect of a rationalized power relation to reality.

Techno-Science and the Instrumentalization of Being Bearing all that in mind we need to ask ourselves if there is a different way in which we can think about techno-science and the relations that it creates between us and the world. What we need to do is abandon all thinking that thinks the subject-object division a God given phenomenon. In other words, we should try and give techno-science an existential foundation which means that science cannot be said to derive from some objective reality but rather from the actual lived, phenomenological experience. Techno-science, which is conventionally believed to be the study of the empirical objective world is nothing more than a product of the forms of life that make it possible. Nevertheless, if techno-science is to be reduced to the level of existence, it is necessary that we look at consciousness in a very similar way, as consciousness is the very foundation of all scientific thinking. To do this we have to get rid of a certain prejudice which asks us to believe that consciousness is the basic way in which existence is experienced, a belief that stems from Cartesianism that modern American thinkers like, for example, John Searle reject. In considering the relation between the human brain and AI, Searle claims that while it is true that the mind does function similarly to a computer, the latter cannot create intentional states that we could believe to be rooted in the notion of a fixed sense of subjectivity,

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Chapter One [o]f course the brain is a digital computer. Since everything is a digital computer, brains are too. The point is that the brain’s causal capacity to produce intentionality cannot consist in its instantiating a computer program, since for any program you like it is possible for something to instantiate that program and still not have any mental states. Whatever it is that the brain does to produce intentionality, it cannot consist in instantiating a program, since no program, by itself, is sufficient for intentionality. (Searle 2001, 394)

Following Searle, what can be realized is that when we look at our experience of reality we come to see that the basic way in which we are is not consciousness but intuitive coping with things, as H. Dreyfus would say. By means of analogy, this is also what William James would call “ideomotor” functioning. In other words, our basic level of experience is intuition, we deal with things automatically without really representing our actions to ourselves in thought. Subsequently, at this level of intuitive being, we do not really differentiate between ourselves and the world; rather, the two exist in a state of union, i.e., we and the world are one and the same thing. It seems that consciousness and cognition at large come into play only when this intuitive coping for some reason breaks down. It follows from the above that techno-scientific thinking is based on a pragmatic, instrumentalized understanding of language. The role of language in the instrumental sense is to describe reality by means of its classification. In this way language is believed to stand in a one to one relation to reality in the sense that words can be said to stand in for real objects. However, language does not only refer to things, since words also have the potential of referring not solely to things but to other words as well. This can lead to a situation in which language detaches itself from things in which case language really disengages itself from the lived experience. This is the greatest danger of science. In other words, it is not that techno-science can get something wrong in the sense of an erroneous theory but that it can come to be too much absorbed with its own terminology and so completely separate itself from the reality of lived experience. What is worse, thinking that has detached itself from the lived experience can think itself to be superior to the reality of that lived experience and, therefore, it can think itself to be a form of thinking that warrants an objective description of reality. The instrumentalization of experience is the effect of the kind of language that techno-science keeps working with. In the scientific view language is nothing more than a tool that is used to describe reality within a space that is said to exist outside. In other words, we are dealing here with the contrariety of reality and man where man as the subject exists in opposition to reality that needs to be

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qualified by the language that he has at his disposal. Thus, the words that stand behind language are the embers of the original Promethean fire. There is, however, a way out of this subjectivized-objectivized understanding of experience that can be accomplished if only we alter our mode of thinking. As we are the kind of beings that we are, i.e., because we are rational and social (let us remember that Aristotle said that only a beast or a God can exist alone), what we call the world or reality is the effect of our collective togetherness. Therefore, reality does not have an exterior-interior type of basis; instead it exists as the consequence of the different relations that hold between individual members of social reality. Consequently, techno-science, just like the whole of reality, is a social construction and, therefore, in itself it can seek to do nothing more than find new modes of description for the experience of being. Yet, reality here is a very fluid phenomenon that has nothing definitive about itself, i.e., it cannot be mathematically divided into a subjective and objective content; rather, it emerges from the horizon of language which as George Steiner, for example, maintains has an independent being, [a]s Western consciousness has become less dependent on the resources of language to order experience and conduct the business of the mind, the words themselves seem to have lost some of their precision and vitality. This is, … a controversial notion. It assumes that language has a “life” of its own in a sense that goes beyond metaphor. It implies that such concepts as tiredness and corruption are relevant to language itself, not only to men’s use of it. (Steiner 1998, 25)

The danger that flows from science understood conventionally as a discipline that wants to discover the right, objective structure of reality is that it completely instrumentalizes the world. What is meant here is that from the perspective of science there really is no such thing as nature. What does exist, however, is the occurrent (natural resources), i.e., nature that has been technologically segmented and made available for human practical needs and purposes. Techno-science does not only instrumentalize nature as environment but it also does the same with human nature. Thus, it is more difficult than it was in the pre-scientific world to be able to provide a clear and concise definition of what it means to be human. From the techno-scientific perspective life is reducible to function and value, i.e., it can be reduced to political, social, economic or biological dimensions and there is no common denominator for what it exactly means to be human. This, of course, only suggests that what we have mentioned earlier about the artificiality of subjectivity holds true for the subjectivity of modern man,

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since it appears that the center of subjectivity and humanness can be only assumed and anchored in a given cultural paradigm. Admittedly, there is no meta reality or objective world of which the human experience could be said to be nothing more than a copy like some rationalists maintain.

Conclusion As we have hoped to prove, techno-science is much more than a production of mechanisms all of which are appropriated to human needs, wants, and desires. It is fundamentally a way of thinking that characterizes the being of modern man, whose subjectivity cannot be conceived of as a genetic composition but a social borrowing. In other words, subjectivity is not an autonomous feature of the individual but a reflection of the general state of the social context that the individual finds herself/himself in. The cult of subjectivity stems from the general attitude to being that exists in monotheism whose primal feature is the personification of the other. In this light subjectivity is the effect of the schematization of being. On account of the fact that we are beings that are ontologically empty, we have learnt to represent reality to ourselves and the effect of this representative ability is what we call subjectivity which appears as an alienated construct in the world from which it feels excluded. Technoscientific thinking, being based on the subject-object division, is in itself the ultimate consequence of the kind of attunement that is marked by exclusion and representation that automatically becomes the subject’s way of dealing with its ontological emptiness. The basic condition of the subject’s being is that it dwells with skills that allow it to cope with the ontological background—the available, as H. Dreyfus would call it, which refers to the instrumentalized world of nature. However, it is not only the self’s everyday practices that have a background from which they are said to emerge. The same applies to science which in itself also makes sense but within the field of its own theoretical assumptions that Thomas S. Kuhn calls “community paradigms” (Kuhn 1996, 46). In other words, scientific laws are not discoverable at random but rather they emerge from a certain kind of thinking and a set of socialized practices that can be said to make them possible. Wanting to study objectivity, natural science studies the occurent which itself is nothing more than a deworlded version of the available. Thus, the fundamental difference between science and the humanities is that the former makes sense within the sphere of explanation which is understood on the presupposed scientific background. Quite similarly, the

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humanities are based on the shared lived experience which develops in understanding (not explanation), and therefore, the humanities study the human self as if from inside its world, whereas science working with the illusion of objectivity creates an artificial reality that it calls theoretical, which in itself is not truer than the lived experience of the self but simply derivative of it. In other words, the world of theory which stems from an eidetic understanding of reality is only possible as the effect of the decontextualization of the lived experience and the theories that stand behind science are nothing more than deworlded ideas that come from the existential background. Science in itself, therefore, tries to fit nature into its own conceptual matrix. To do science one must study the relations that hold between theories or try to discover new ones that would fit into the vernacular of the previously accepted ones. In this way nature as studied by science is deworlded. It is because of this deworldization that scientific theories are often wrong since they misunderstand reality, living in the illusion of the so called objective truth, which in itself is nothing more than a way in which the world matters in a given social context. All this amounts to the idea that no science can be said to exist as detached from the reality of the lived experience.

Bibliography Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1990. The Hollow Men. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H. Abrahms, vol. 2, 2383-2386. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1981. The Portable Emerson. Eds. Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley. New York: Penguin Group. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Écrits. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Robinson, Edwin Arlington. 1994. Richard Cory. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Nina Baym, vol. 2, 968. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Rorty, Richard. 2007. Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism. In A Companion to Heidegger, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, 511-533. Malden MA.: Blackwell. Rouse, Joseph. 2007. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science. In A Companion to Heidegger, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, 173-191. Malden MA.: Blackwell.

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Searle, John. 2001. Minds, Brains, and Programs [The Chinese Room]. In Classics of Philosophy: The Twentieth Century, ed. Louis P. Pojman, 388-394. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Huston. 1986. The Religions of Man. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Steiner, George. 1998. Language and Silence. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thoreau, Henry David. 1999. On Science. Ed. Laura Dassow Walls. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

CHAPTER TWO IN THE LAND OF GHOST-SIGNS, OR WILLIAM GIBSON’S SPOOK COUNTRY ANNA KRAWCZYK-àASKARZEWSKA

Introduction Spook Country, the 2007 novel by William Gibson, is, unlike most of the writer’s oeuvre, set in the contemporary, predominantly U.S. universe and constitutes the second installment in the trilogy of novels which deal with the world as it is, rather than with some futuristic scenario.1 In order to account for this generic switch, Gibson pointed out in several interviews that the new millennium reality is changing too fast for him to be able to extrapolate the present events into a clearly demarcated future. In fact, the contemporary time frame seems to pose a genuine challenge for anyone who strives to describe and/or fictionalize it, because, as Scarlett Thomas observes in her review of Spook Country, in this “half-imagined, half-real present … it is almost impossible to tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined” (Thomas 2010). Bearing this caveat in mind, it would nevertheless be difficult not to notice that Gibson’s ambition in Spook Country is precisely to portray the real world in a particular location and time frame, no matter how unfamiliar and incomprehensible that world has become. More specifically, the novel offers a bleak, though complex and intriguing vision of the post-9/11, “war on terror” United States, and can thus legitimately be called “an overtly political book” about “a country awash in confusion, fear and pervasive paranoia” (Sheehan 2007).

Plotting Characters Three intersecting plotlines dominate the novel. Hollis Henry, formerly the vocalist of fictional cultish rock band The Curfew, and now an aspiring

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music journalist, agrees to work for Node, a magazine which does not even exist yet, but will most likely be devoted to spotting important cultural trends. The task assigned to Hollis is to write a text about “various things artists were finding to do with longitude, latitude, and the Internet” (Gibson 2007, 27). To be more precise, she is supposed to find and interview a fashionable artist Bobby Chombo, who specializes in locative art and, additionally, is an expert in military navigation systems. It turns out that Hollis’s real employer is Hubertus Bigend, the Belgian marketing mogul who first appeared in Pattern Recognition (2003) and who features also in Zero History (2010). Secondly, of great importance is a young Chinese-Cuban man called Tito, who is a crime facilitator and assists in transfer of sensitive information. The information is stored on iPods he regularly hands over to an old man, with no small assistance from his numerous, though mysterious, family members, although he strongly believes in the protection from orishas, deities responsible for mediating between people and supernatural phenomena. Once Tito completes his most important assignment, he will be forced to start from scratch, move to a new place, say farewell to his family, begin an entirely new existence. Finally, there is Milgrim, a drug addict who knows Volapük and Russian, and is thus of great use to Brown, a character who pretends to be working for one of U.S. law enforcement agencies, although his exact role and status are never revealed. Brown believes that the information transferred by Tito concerns some embarrassing aspects of the U.S. intervention in Iraq and therefore attempts to track down the young man and his aides. In exchange for a steady supply of his favorite drug, Milgrim has to decode the messages sent by Tito, although neither he nor Brown realizes that their targets are aware of the surveillance and use their messages to spread misinformation. All the parties concerned are vitally interested in tracking one object: a shipping container which is constantly on the move, being airlifted from one ship to another. The reader will learn about its destination and the nature of its cargo only in the final chapters of the novel. It turns out that inside the container someone hid one hundred million U.S. dollars stolen from a fund meant to rebuild Iraq after the so-called war on terror. However, the chase after the container is not caused by pecuniary interests. Headed by a mysterious old man, Tito, Chombo and their partners in crime play a prank on those who misappropriated the money. They mark the container with trace elements which will make the money impossible to launder and thus useless from the point of view of those who profiteer from the war.

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In his review of Spook Country, Dave Itzkoff identified the overarching Gibsonian theme as “the novice initiated into an alternative reality he or she never knew existed” (Itzkoff 2007). While his assessment seems accurate enough, I would nevertheless qualify it by suggesting that, in fact, the alternative reality is not something unknown or untraversed as far as the protagonists of the novel are concerned. Rather, one should admit that the contemporary reality poses specific and unprecedented challenges as far as the degree and ubiquity of secretiveness are concerned. To be more precise, in Spook Country surveillance as a modus operandi, a condition of life, has already been internalized by the whole society, including the principal agents moving the story forward. Judging by the actions and thoughts of the main characters in Gibson’s novel, they all give the impression of being obedient and resistant at the same time; they serve some darker forces’ agendas, but they also try to enjoy a modicum of independence, achieve their creative potential, and maybe even find happiness. Their preferred exchange currencies will differ significantly, ranging from money and ideology (Hollis and Tito) to drugs (Milgrim) and the power to influence and manipulate (Bigend), but they have something in common: a yearning to retain agency, even if most of their personal freedom has been taken away.

Augmented Reality Starting with his seminal Neuromancer (1984), the settings in Gibson’s fictitious worlds have always been heavily mediatized. In Spook Country the writer presents the reality in its next logical stage of development. It has already been irreversibly transformed by VR and cyberspace and now it can be (even more) thoroughly manipulated thanks to the combining of real and virtual elements. In essence, it is the so-called augmented reality: a version of the world that makes the relation between the computer user and his/her immediate surroundings much more interactive.2 Of particular significance here is the fact that by being superimposed on various objects, the computer-generated information alters or enhances the user’s perception of the world. Although the term “augmented reality” was coined by Tom Claudell in 1990, its defining parameters—“virtual graphics being superimposed upon a real-life situation” (Cassella 2009)—make it obvious that the concept has already been applied in practice for several decades. The present-day growth of AR has no doubt been boosted by advancements in the mobile communications, computing and gaming industries. If we are to believe Robert Rice’s technoutopian scenario, the years from 2010 to 2020 will

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become known as the Decade of Ubiquity (Rice 2009) precisely in terms of how seamlessly convergent and pervasive media will turn out to be and how strongly they will affect education, entertainment, defense, business, advertising, social communication, etc. In Spook Country, however, the changed perspective of the world is a process happening already, rather than a projection into a more or less distant future. The ubiquity of the media produces a slightly disturbing effect, that of a mediated world which is no longer distinctly alternative or parallel, and which now, instead, subsumes everything. The new situation is reflected upon by Bigend, who in a conversation with Hollis explains to her the changing status of musicians and consumers of music, “The pop star, as we knew her”—and here he bowed slightly, in her direction—“was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.” “Of—?” “Of a state in which ‘mass’ media existed, if you will, within the world.” “As opposed to?” “Comprising it.” (Gibson 2007, 101)

If Bigend’s description is to be taken seriously, then it would appear that the media no longer perform the role of an intermediary between the world and the viewer/spectator/listener because there is nothing unmediated left to mediate. The original point of reference—the real world—is long gone or, in a more optimistic version, it is in flux, constantly questioned, reworked and redefined.

Hidden in Not so Plain View: Locative Art, History and Paranoia The surplus and instant availability of media and digital data produces various consequences, including the creation of new modes of communication and artistic expression. One of the most fascinating aspects of Spook Country is that it depicts highly idiosyncratic ways of dealing with historical events. To give the most striking example, holographic artist Alberto Corrales employs some of the new digital technologies to reconstruct deaths of famous people exactly where they took place. When Hollis meets him for the very first time, he takes her to Sunset Boulevard and recreates in front of her eyes the dead body of River Phoenix. Another celebrity “covered” by Corrales in this fashion is Francis Scott Fitzgerald, or rather the moment in which the writer has a heart attack. While it is not obvious what purposes Corrales’s installations serve, apart from satisfying his potential clients’ morbid, so to speak, curiosity, the reader can at least

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learn how the locative artist approaches history. In the words of Odile, Hollis’s French friend and guide in the community of artists, for Corrales history is a “personalized space” which emerges “[a]lways from trauma” (Gibson 2007, 15). As one of Gibson’s characters repeats after Faulkner, the past is not dead and is “not even past” (Gibson 2007, 100). Yet although it can be invoked to question the familiar concept of linearity, nevertheless complete ahistoricism is not a viable option, either. One could argue that locative art provides an instructive shorthand for how things which no longer exist can be recreated and how they exist only under specific circumstances for the selected groups within a heavily fragmented, confused society, for whom unequal distribution remains an unquestionable staple of capitalist economy. In addition, locative art might be treated as a logical outcome of how, armed with the so-called new media, societies and communities destabilize history, while ignoring the consequences of such an atemporal gesture. Choosing extraordinary events, taking them out of context, making them available for consumption; all the above practices can be highly entertaining but are not conducive to renegotiating meaning, and they certainly fail to cement the already fractured communities. On a more positive note, Itzkoff prefers to look at Corrales’s digitallyenhanced installations as a vehicle for seeing things subjectively, in completely different ways than others: “locative art becomes a potent metaphor for a disjointed world where anyone can experience reality as he chooses to see it, and no two people’s observations of the same place or event need coincide in any way” (Itzkoff 2007). The patterns of creating and disseminating opinions in the digitalized world of today pretty much confirm Itzkoff’s observations. As Thomas Foster puts it, “The electronic public sphere tends to generate specialized subgroups rather than a generalized public” and those subgroups tend to be “more directly integrated into the privatized consumer relations that traditionally constitute civil society than the bourgeois national public sphere ever was” (Foster 2005, 210). On a broader plane, and in the context of the growingly dominant “sub rosa” paradigm, the plot of Spook Country is driven by characters who are either invested in or resigned to functioning in covert ways, yet at the same time they are usually aware that they are spied upon, tracked, made part of or implicated in the global machinery of surveillance. The associations with panopticon are inevitable, though not necessarily accurate, since the willingness on the part of those surveilled to conform to the expectations of the system is undoubtedly in low supply. Rather, we are dealing with a series of measures and countermeasures taken by people who very

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slowly, and sometimes in painful ways realize the extent and power of secrecy. For those who, like Milgrim, have hitherto been detached from the real world and were not used to operating “borderland territory between unlikely truths and likely falsehoods” (Thomas 2010), the forced covertness constitutes something of a mild shock. This world of people following and watching other people was new to Milgrim, though he supposed he’d always assumed that it was there, somewhere. You saw it in movies and read about it, but you didn’t think about having to breathe someone else’s condensed breath in the back of a cold van. (Gibson 2007, 34)

When Hollis, while visiting Chombo in one of his hiding places, notices the container for the first time (and she should not be granted the sight), it is with her AR visor on. The container—a McGuffin-like dark object of desire—might be interpreted as yet another “part for the whole” substitute, a thinly veiled metaphor for how ultimately the world is unknowable and how our perception of it rarely yields meaning: Beyond where it had been, as if its tail had been a directional arrow, hung a translucent rectangular solid of silvery wireframe, crisp yet insubstantial. It was large, long enough to park a car or two in, and easily tall enough to walk into, and something about these dimensions seemed familiar and banal. Within it, too, there seemed to be another form, or forms, but because everything was wireframed it all ran together visually, becoming difficult to read. She was turning, to ask Bobby what this work in progress might become, when he tore the helmet from her head so roughly that she nearly fell over. (Gibson 2007, 63)

Once Hollis and other characters get closer to the “real” meaning, their efforts are thwarted and the searchers remain in the dark. The container is “somewhere out there,” always potentially traceable, but elusive, immaterial nearly to the very end of the novel. It is hardly surprising that Bigend calls the thing the Flying Dutchman (Gibson 2007, 87). In their discussion of the growing popularity of conspiracy theories, David Freeman and Jason Freeman called the beginning of the twenty-first century “a new age of paranoia” (Freeman and Freeman 2008, 154). Naturally, the currently prevailing paranoia-friendly mood is directly related to the growing confusion and anxiety in the so-called Western societies. If one were to, once again, adopt Milgrim’s point of view in Spook Country, and take into account the symbiotic relationship between his drug addiction and the conspiratorial frame of mind, it would become obvious that he does not contest even the most out-there theories: “If

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Brown had declared the Queen of England to be a shape-shifting alien reptile, craving the warm flesh of human infants, Milgrim would not have argued” (Gibson 2007, 78). But what is the significance of Milgrim’s tacit approval of David Icke’s most famous, and perhaps most absurd conspiracy theory? His, and many others’, passive stance towards the discourse of conspiracism in fact helps perpetuate the ridiculousness that should have been put into doubt from the very beginning. Ultimately, one could argue that no matter how legitimate some of the societies’ fears might be, an uncritical endorsement of conspiracy theories disrupts not only the fabric of collective life, but also the individuals’ well-being. In the recent years, several scholars and journalists have suggested that the blame for the expansion or even mainstreaming of conspiracism rests predominantly on the passive and intellectually lazy society. While criticizing the CT discourse, Jamie Bartlett went so far as to accuse its adherents of “kneejerk, lazy cynicism” (Bartlett 2010), though at the same time he downplayed the legitimate anger of disillusioned constituents who no longer feel empowered politically and, in addition, are forced to deal with the world of rapid technological advancements and equally dramatic change of values and social mores. The tendency to seek hidden truths beyond the facade can transform even the most rational human beings. It is not accidental that the chapter 34 of Spook Country bears the same title as the novel and is devoted almost entirely to how Hollis feels in the perfectly surveilled world, where media are ubiquitous, words do not have obvious referents and “possession of information amounts to involvement” (Gibson 2007, 175), Bigend and his James Bond villain’s car, his half-built headquarters to match, his too much money, his big sharp curiosity and his bland willingness to go poking it wherever he wanted. That was potentially dangerous. Had to be. In some way she’d never really imagined before. If he wasn’t lying, he’d been paying people to tell him about secret government programs. The war on terror. Were they still calling it that? She’d caught some, she decided: terror. Right here in her hand, in Starbucks, afraid to trust her own phone and the net stretching out from it, strung through those creepy fake trees you saw from highways here, the cellular towers disguised with grotesque faux foliage, Cubist fronds, Art Deco conifers, a thin forest supporting an invisible grid, not unlike the one spread on Bobby’s factory floor in flour, chalk, anthrax, baby laxative, whatever it was. The trees Bobby triangulated on. The net of telephony, all digitized, and all, she had to suppose, listened to. By whoever, whatever, made the sort of things Bigend was poking at its business. Somewhere, she had to believe, such things were all too real. Maybe now, they already were. Listening to her. (Gibson 2007, 149)

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In spite of anxiety and misgivings, Hollis never really considers herself to be one of the key players in the secret service charade, nor is she sure of her status as one of the strategic targets of surveillance. Her common sensical modesty seems justified to a large extent. Throughout the novel, her ability to actively influence the world is periodically undermined; though brilliant and perceptive, she is a puppet-like character principally driven by the ambitions and motivations of others, especially Bigend. Even when Hollis gets to know Corrales and locative art, in which the artist is keen on “annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing” (Gibson 2007, 22) in order to augment the real world, her power to transform the lives of others does not significantly increase. Although, technically speaking, that sort of simulated environment should be interactive and liable to manipulation, the benefits of this interaction and influence are not available to the protagonist. Hollis is capable of perceiving and interpreting the world, but not of changing it. It would seem accurate to perceive Hollis as a character with limited agency, rather than as a standard heroine on a journey of discovery and self-fulfillment.

The Big Deal with Bigend Hubertus Bigend appears in each of the novels constituting Gibson’s latest trilogy. He is the owner of Blue Ant, an advertising agency which specializes in viral marketing. Always on the lookout for things which promise to be extremely trendy in the near future, Bigend appears to be fond of hiring female protagonists (Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition, Hollis Henry in Spook Country and in Zero History) and each time has a clear agenda: to lay his hands on the cool earlier than his competition. In either case, he wants to get to know the origin of the desired commodity, either the creator of the so-called footage (Pattern Recognition), or the creator of locative art products (Spook Country), though officially he just wants Hollis to write an article for a budding magazine. What makes Bigend dramatically different from Hollis is the degree of influence he exerts. He is someone who is pulling the strings, controls the flow of events, intervenes in ways which, from Holly’s point of view, are irritating and disquieting, even if they are a logical consequence and extension of his power drive and status. When Hollis compares Bigend to “a monstrously intelligent giant baby” (Gibson 2007, 147), she is right. Her intuitive assessment of the situation is also correct from the point of view of how Bigend functions in the context of covertness. The marketing mogul unearths secrets, whereas intelligence agencies are interested in maintaining things and operations secret. Yet these two mutually exclusive

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spheres of human activity have a lot in common. Most characteristically, they share interest in anomalies and in ruthlessly exploiting them: “I’ve learned to value anomalous phenomena. Very peculiar things that people do, often secretly, have come to interest me in a certain way. I spend a lot of money, often, trying to understand those things. From them, sometimes, emerge Blue Ant’s most successful efforts. Trope Slope, for instance, our viral pitchman platform, was based on pieces of anonymous footage being posted on the Net.” “You did that? Put that thing in the background of all those old movies? That’s fucking horrible. Pardon my French.” “It sells shoes.” He smiled. “So what do you expect to get out of this, if you can find out what’s in Chombo’s container?” “No idea. None whatever. That’s exactly what makes it so interesting.” “I don’t get it.” “Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.” “Which means?” “Secrets,” said Bigend, gesturing toward the screen, “are cool.” (Gibson 2007, 103)

While on the quest for all things unusual, Bigend is “utterly amoral in the service of his own curiosity” (Gibson 2007, 147); if not a typical antihero, he at least remains an unlikeable character of key importance and considerable ambiguity. However, when trying to consider Bigend in ethical terms, one has to admit that the borderline between his wish to be cool and his greed does not seem obvious at all, at least not as far the world of Spook Country is concerned. And there is one more aspect that modifies the largely negative image Hollis’s employer projects. Bigend is certainly a master of appearances, a guy who loves having the upper hand, being in control, yet, paradoxically, even he, the great orchestrator, can be cheated by his temporary employee, as the end of the novel convincingly demonstrates.

America the Ghostly In one of William Gibson’s 2006 entries on his blog, Jack Womack’s words were quoted furnishing some clues to the possible interpretations of Spook Country. Womack drew the readers’ attention to the basic ambiguity of the very word “spook,” which may be understood as a spectral presence, but also as an intelligence agent: “agent of uncertainty, agent of fear, agent of fright” (Womack 2006). Even more helpful were his remarks

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concerning the fictitious land Gibson decided to focus upon in the upcoming novel: Country: in the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind. Where your bed is made. Spook Country: the place where we have all landed, few by choice, and where we are learning to live. The country inside and outside of the skull. The soul, haunted by the past, of what was, of what might have been. The realization that not all forking paths are equal—some go down in value. (Womack 2006)

Very much in accordance with the above explanations, Gibson presents the USA as a land teeming with ghostly occurrences and agents of influence, and neither the specters nor the agents should be perceived as supernatural presences. Can any further, and more concrete, generalizations be made concerning the portrayal of the country in Gibson’s novel? The overall answer would have to be that it is certainly not a flattering vision. The “postnational” America strikes the reader as mistrustful, divided, rife with political uncertainty and, ultimately, irrational. Back in the 80’s, when cyberpunk seemed to offer the interpretive key to postnational geographies, the readers tacitly acknowledged the dominance of all things corporate. Nowadays, it would seem, even the patterns of dominance, hierarchies and strategies are no longer obvious, since the corporate, the military, and the political worlds seem to have converged into a menacing, all too powerful entity. The political fracturing is touched upon only a few times in Spook Country, with the focus firmly on how politics only adds up to the overall frustration, anger and confusion on the part of the constituents. In a brief conversation with Odile, Hollis talks about her mother: “She complains about my father. He’s older. I think he’s okay, but she thinks he’s obsessed with American politics. She says it makes him too angry.” “If this were my country,” Odile said, wrinkling her nose, “I would not be angry.” “No?” Hollis asked. “I would drink all the time. Take pill. Anything.” “There’s that,” said Hollis, remembering dead Jimmy, “but I wouldn’t think you’d want to give them the pleasure.” “Who?” asked Odile, sitting up, suddenly interested. “Who would I pleasure?” (Gibson 2007, 242)

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Quite apart from the language misunderstanding, it is instructive to see how differently the two characters react in the above quoted scene. While Hollis seems to feel quite strongly about partisanship and the necessity of holding a decisive front against politicians, the mythical “them,” who irritate her father so much, Odile shrugs it all off, opting for a more hedonistic way of dealing with politics. While the above conversation does not offer enough evidence that Gibson meant to show a stereotypical attitudinal contrast between an indifferent European and a righteous Yank, it does suggest that the process of polarization has already started and the sense of disenfranchisement on the part of American “civilians” promises to wreak havoc in the relatively predictable community. The post 9/11 and “pre-Tea Party” America, a country no longer run by adults, as one of the characters nostalgically observes, is incapable of functioning as a healthy national and socio-political structure. Its citizens cannot or refuse to understand that the events of 9/11 do not and should not change the constitutional foundations of the country. Ironically, it is Milgrim, a person who relies on anti-anxiety drugs and is used by a member of the federal power apparatus, who is chosen by Gibson to voice a few simple truths about the state: “A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” … “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable…. “If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.” …. “It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.” (Gibson 2007, 129-130)

The “deep wonder” Milgrim experiences might make the reader wonder as well. Characteristically enough, the above quoted passage strongly suggests that Milgrim himself feels distanced from the words he is uttering. The well known explanations concerning the real purpose of terrorism, the diatribe on what a nation is or should be, and the

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observations on human psychology which are almost banal in their familiarity; all these seem to come from some external site of reason and common sense: from a treasure of lore whose coordinates we have learned to ignore or forget too frequently. Perhaps Gibson voices a conviction that adherence to those principles would steer the society away from anxiety, into more productive coping mechanisms and emancipatory possibilities. Although the destruction of the New York twin towers on the eleventh of September 2001 remains a fixture in the collective memory, a nodal event, to use Gibson’s words, the passage of time brings about a disquieting consequence. Like Node, the magazine Hollis allegedly works for, the World Trade Center complex is now defined by its absence: it seems as unreal as possible, mediatized, rendered spectral, or, still more worryingly, transformed into an entity onto which various, mutually incompatible meanings can be projected. The sense of personal as well as collective trauma evaporates, the benefit of hindsight does little to help understand the significance of the 9/11 event: the past seems both distant and present insofar as it can be manipulated, erased, made to resemble a sci-fi scenario: He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off, in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically colorsaturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiarlooking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in. (Gibson 2007, 95)

On the opposite coast, Los Angeles seems unreal, confusing, enticing and impermanent at the same time. For Hollis, a typical sunny morning in West Hollywood feels like some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in. That sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty, of something a little more than a hundred years past, but in that moment achingly present, as though the city were something you could wipe from your glasses and forget. (Gibson 2007, 30)

How does one fight spooks and the sense of spookiness in a country populated by spectral memories and presences, where “the spectral eludes even the most impressive regimes of control” (McAvan 2010, 412)? The variously understood and explored notion of spectrality cements the novel

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and helps condense its most striking message. The past has the ability to haunt the present, but its effect is at best limited. The world, it would seem, relies on ghostly apparitions which are, in fact, very contemporary: unseen, but powerful governments, individual agents of influence and chaos, Yoruban orishas, and other amazingly effective spirits. Gibson’s central metaphor seems particularly apt because even though his ghosts remain invisible, they can nevertheless be extremely influential and scary.

Conclusion In Neuromancer, William Gibson defined cyberspace as “[a] consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity” (Gibson 1984, 67). More than two decades after the release of the book, it seems that the “hallucination” has become even more complex, but much less consensual. One could argue that it assumed a truly nightmarish quality. The synergy of marketing, espionage, growingly immersive media, and militarism in Gibson’s more recent novels makes it possible to create a world which is simultaneously fascinating and repulsive, instantly googlifiable, but also vulnerable to geohacking, a “combination of banal artificiality and social breakdown” (Taylor 2008, 789). No one is free from paranoia, and complete privacy is quickly becoming an almost unattainable luxury. The supposedly limitless possibilities resulting from the use of technology are available only to the obscenely wealthy, while the masses are confined to living in heavily controlled urban enclaves. Technology involves specific economic, political and cultural costs, but cannot offer liberation to those who need it most. Gibson, “the archetypal novelist of the information age” (Taylor 2008, 788) proposes a penetrating, if subtle, critique of how societies deal with the presence of cyberspace in the twenty-first century. The progression of the current social demise follows a disturbing pattern: from the emotional post-9/11 trauma depicted so powerfully in Pattern Recognition, through the impact of the war on terror on the mentality of growingly paranoid citizens in Spook Country, to a complete internalization of that paranoia in Zero History, in which the Deleuzian paradigm of control societies (Deleuze 1990) seems to be fully in operation. In the words of Mark Lacy, we are now dealing with “a biopolitics 2.0, where new technologies make possible the proliferation of mini-panopticons, where all individuals

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become active components in the fabric of control, and where ‘border controls’ are everywhere” (Lacy 2010, 334). In contrast with the relatively optimistic Pattern Recognition, where the apophenic power of Google transcends making random connections and leads to a sense of redemption for the protagonists, Spook Country offers a rather disillusioned perspective on the productivity of mediatized knowledge and the dis/empowerment it entails. Packed into nodes, jealously guarded by secretive parties, thrown around for idle amusement, knowledge turns out to be helpful primarily in facilitating crime. Even the well-meaning characters in Spook Country are incapable of using it for more than a prank. The quest for meaning here is nowhere near as satisfactory as in the earlier novel. Gibson’s symbolic journey from the semiotic forest to the media jungle is not a particularly pleasant or heartwarming experience. There are, however, good aspects of spectrality in this land of transferred influence, of agency at once lost and reclaimed. The slightly more promising prospects for a regenerating alternative seem to reside somewhere at the intersection of art, cyberspace and drug-fueled oblivion. Itzkoff mentions “empowering anonymity” (Itzkoff 2007) and argues that the protagonists in Spook Country are “ultimately able to channel their feelings of detachment and insignificance into something meaningful and pleasantly destructive” (Itzkoff 2007). The “kneejerk, lazy cynicism” (Bartlett 2010) gives way to activities which are not necessarily productive but which help to reclaim significance in the midst of fear and paranoia. For once in this “puzzle palace of bewitching proportions and stubborn echoes” (Park 2007), the weapons of surveillance can be turned against the oppressors.

Notes 1

The other two novels in the trilogy are Pattern Recognition (2003) and Zero History (2010). 2 Occasionally, augmented reality is also referred to as “mixed” or “blended.” See “Trends in EdTech: Augmented Reality” at http://augreality.pbworks.com/w/ page/9469035/Definition-and-key-information-on-AR (accessed May 11, 2011). An extended defintion of augmented reality is also available at http://lexicon.ft. com/Term?term=augmented-reality (accessed May 11, 2011).

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Bibliography Bartlett, Jamie. 2010. Conspiracy Theories Are Corroding Our Society. Guardian September 3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2010/sep/03/conspiracy-theories-corrodingsociety?showallcomments =true#start-of-comments (accessed September 5, 2011). Cassella, Dena. 2009. What Is Augmented Reality (AR): Augmented Reality Defined, iPhone. Augmented Reality Apps and Games and More. Digital Trends November 3. http://www.digitaltrends.com/ mobile/what-is-augmented-reality-iphone-apps-games-flash-yelp-an droid-ar-software-and-more/ (accessed September 11, 2011). Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Postscript on Control Societies. In Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, 177-182. New York: Columbia University Press. Foster, Thomas. 2005. The Souls of Cyberfolk. Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. Minneapolis: London: University of Minnesota Press. Freeman, Daniel, and Jason Freeman. 2008. Paranoia: the Twenty-First Century Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins. —. 2003. Pattern Recognition. New York: Viking Press. —. 2007. Spook Country. London: Penguin Books. —. 2010. Zero History. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Itzkoff, Dave. 2007. Spirits in the Material World. New York Times August 26. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/books/review/Itzkoff 4-t.html (accessed September 17, 2011). Kitchin, Rob, and James Kneale. 2001. Science Fiction or Future Fact? Exploring Imaginative Geographies of the New Millennium. Progress in Human Geography 25.1: 19-35, http://phg.sagepub.com/content/ 25/1/19 (accessed September 15, 2011). Lacy, Mark. 2008. Designer Security: Control Society and MoMA's SAFE: Design Takes on Risk. Security Dialogue 39 (April): 333-357. http://sdi.sagepub.com/content/39/2-3/333 (accessed September 5, 2011). McAvan, Em. 2010. Paranoia in Spook Country: William Gibson and the Technological Sublime of the War on Terror. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.3-4 (July/September): 405-413, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 17449855.2010.482431 (accessed September 17, 2011). Park, Ed. 2007. Shadow and Act. LA Times August 5. http://articles.lati mes.com/2007/aug/05/books/bk-park5 (accessed September 17, 2011). Rice, Robert. 2009. Augmented Vision and the Decade of Ubiquity. Curious Raven Blog March 20. http://curiousraven.squarespace.

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com/future-vision/2009/3/20/augmented-vision-and-the-decade-of-ub iquity.html (accessed September 7, 2011). Sheehan, Bill. 2007. Dark New World. Washington Post July 22. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/ AR2007071902242.html (accessed September 15, 2011). Taylor, Paul A. 2008. From mit-sein to bit-sein. Informational Pattern Recognition and the Chronicle of a Life Foretold. Information, Communication & Society 11.6: 781-798. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 13691180802005212 (accessed September 5, 2011). Thomas, Scarlett. 2010. Networking. New York Times September 8. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/books/review/Thomas-t.html? _r=1 (accessed June 9, 2011). Womack, Jack. 2006. Spook Country: the Title. William Gibson Blog October 9, http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archi ve.html (accessed May 17, 2011).

CHAPTER THREE MILITARY MEMOIRS AND MASCULINITY JOEL JANICKI

1 Post-Cold War America has been marked by a triumphalism of its hegemonic military superiority and a glorification of power and violence often expressed in military images. Popular culture is awash with these hegemonic male figures in uniform in many forms, and in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the resultant wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sub-genre of military memoirs has witnessed a burgeoning growth. This study provides background information on the nature and extent of this growth and examines issues of violence, gender, and hegemonic masculinity from the perspective of two military memoirs based on soldiers’ experiences in the Second Iraq War which commenced in 2003. Due to the increasing role of females in the American armed forces, a dual perspective on masculinity and violence in the military is presented, female as well as male. Relevant ideas developed in the paper include male bonding, the role of shame in forging martial virtues, and the role of fathers in shaping military values, as derived from Joshua Goldstein’s monograph on gender and war while the term hegemonic masculinity is provided by R. W. Connell, who examines dominant male behavior from the perspective of feminism. This study sets out to examine two military memoirs, one from a male, and one from a female perspective, which characterize the experience of American soldiers deployed in Iraq in the years 2003-4.1 David Bellavia’s House to House (2007) describes the intense urban fighting of a front-line Alpha unit in the nine-day Second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004 by a staff sergeant. Kayla Williams’ Love my Rifle More than You (2005) was written soon after her one-year stint in Iraq in support of the U.S. infantry. She provided Arabic language translating skills for the Quick Reaction Force of Delta Company and gives a feminine perspective on sexual

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politics and male behavior in the military in a combat setting. Her comments on individual and collective behavior and attitudes of male soldiers serve to balance the bonded masculine types present in Bellavia’s memoir, which is characterized by the virtual absence of the female. The two memoirs chosen for this study link together genre, class, and gender as indication of the middle-class self. The writing represents an assertion of identity as soldier: with memoir as a form of self-biography the self is placed at the center of the writing; the extent to which the individual is subject to someone else’s control and how the individual is positioned within authority relations are issues common to both memoirs. Both memoirs are concerned with the extent to which an individual is free, responsible, and the agent of his/her own actions as well as the degree of self-knowledge that is revealed in the course of the experiences described. The question of authorship of a co-authored text, its intrinsic literary quality, the military memoir as sub-genre and the peripheral position of non-commissioned enlistees are also factors to be taken into consideration. Nevertheless, the intense nature of the lived experience in a combat zone together with the authors’ status as witness to history legitimizes the undertaking. The memoirs describe physical and social settings that encourage violent and aggressive masculinity identified as hegemonic masculinity.2 Issues and events pertaining to violent masculinities collectively defined and supported by the army resulting in the institutionalization of a violent masculinity are brought to light together with problems in overcoming this identity in a post-combat setting. Joshua Goldstein’s monograph War and Gender (2001) addresses what he refers to as a number of myths associated with the militarized male, i.e., that male bonding is stronger than female bonding; men are better able to work in hierarchies, and have more respect for rank; he also identifies several other aspects of masculinity relevant to the present study, including feminine reinforcement of soldiers’ masculinity, the test of manhood as a moti-vation to fight, the role of shame in shaping masculine behavior, the father’s role in enforcing gender identities in their children, and women’s peace activism.

2 Goldstein places emphasis on the unnatural horrors of war, its hellish state and the “spectacles of pain and misery that defy comprehension” (Ibid., 8). Intense socialization and training is necessary to help men overcome their natural aversion to participating in combat; male culture toughens up young boys and makes them into hardened men.3 Fear is the

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emotion that comes “naturally” in combat, and learning to compel oneself to function in spite of the fear leads to success in the fighting unit. He refers to “critical moments” of soldiers in combat, especially for the battle untested, when they are initially paralyzed by fear. One overcomes this paralysis by fear through a sense of responsibility for the well-being of one’s “family” and a strong sense of shame for what could be perceived as any untoward cowardly behavior. Bellavia himself undergoes such a crisis in the heat of battle in Fallujah, yet manifests his ability to impose his will on his uncooperative body so as to be able to perform the actions needed to survive, defeat the enemy in close quarters and protect the men in his unit. The several chapters devoted to his individual acts of bravery in outdueling and overcoming threatening enemy insurgents one by one and mano a mano serve as a climax of the memoir and his true initiation into hegemonic masculinity. The father’s role in enforcing gender identities on young children, especially boys is critical (Ibid., 243-4). Goldstein asserts, “For most men an effeminate son is far more worrying than a tomboy daughter.” Fathers, with their own stricter sense of masculinity, are more typically bent at “maintaining a stance of male dominance toward their sons, as an older boy might do” (Ibid., 244). Though the father—child relationship is significant for writers of military memoirs, Sergeant David Bellavia’s father was particularly sensitive to the apparent lack of hegemonic masculinity in his son. Growing up, the young David had four dominant males to contend with, three older brothers together with his father, a situation which placed him at the bottom of the status hierarchy. The father’s disparaging remarks, evident signs of disgust and humiliating name-calling directed at his son added to the latter’s sense of inadequacy and failure to live up to his father’s standards, while serving as motivation to enter the military and regain his father’s respect and secure his own status as a man tested by the ordeals of combat. Goldstein challenges some of the reigning military myths, viz., men are innately more hierarchical in orientation, better at giving and taking orders in a chain of command; that they adhere more strongly to an ingroup versus and out-group psychology allowing them to kill enemies without qualms. Such a male-bonding hypothesis explicitly underlies the U.S. military’s current policies excluding women from combat which affirms that males’ unique bonds are necessary for mortal combat and would be undermined by a disruptive female presence. Small-group bonding is important to combat effectiveness, as it provides a central motivation for soldiers to participate in battle, i.e., to watch each other’s back. Patriotism is an afterthought and rarely enters into the picture in

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a combat zone. Male-bonding keeps soldiers fighting under fire, even after being hit. Many of these “myths” of male-bonding are borne out by Bellavia’s descriptions of the most intense fighting that took place in Iraq. “In battle the unit will become the only important thing in the infantryman’s universe,” as the unit’s individual soldiers are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their brothers-in-arms (Bellavia 2007, 8). The prolonged conditions of danger they are exposed to purge them of petty feuding and forge bonds of mutual loyalty and devotion. The strength of this bonding is attested to by the English poet and World War I memoirist, Siegfried Sassoon, who came to set aside his anti-war principles out of a sense of loyalty to his fellow soldiers and his perceived duty to solidify the cohesion of the group (Sherman 2005, 58). Yet, in questioning whether bonding is gendered, Goldstein underscores the findings that indicate small-group bonding as not dependent on gender; rather male bonding occurs in combat situations because it is only accessible to men (Goldstein 2001, 199). Goldstein notes that the warrior mystique “requires men to willingly undergo an extremely painful, unpleasant experience—and to hang in there over time despite every instinct to flee.” In forging his warrior image, a man “learns to deny all that is feminine and soft in himself” (Ibid., 266). He develops physical courage, risking wounds even death, and assumes a willingness to engage superior forces; he learns endurance, withstanding extremes of climate, pain, hunger, thirst and fatigue without giving in to demoralization; he comes to demonstrate his strength and skill, becomes physically robust, a shrewd tactician, exhibiting nevertheless “an element of frenzy in the desperate heat of battle.” The warrior is a man of honor, keeping his word, loyal to his leader and comrades (Ibid., 267). Shame is another key element that bonds men together. Those who fail tests are publicly shamed and humiliated, and are branded as negative examples.4 Succumbing to fear in battle and proving oneself a coward can be the most severe of punishments, a stigma that is difficult to atone for and erase. Shell shock is, as Goldstein puts it, “the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest against the concept of manliness itself” (Ibid., 285). Bellavia’s masculinity issues center on overcoming his abject fear in the face of danger as his motivation to become a soldier, his relationship with his fellow staff sergeant as his role model, and the notion of personal courage intensify. Kayla Williams, meanwhile, provides a feminine insight into individual and group behavior of the military male; she describes aspects of the feminization of the army

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and reveals aspects of the hegemonic female soldier in wartime conditions. Bellavia’s memoir has a very narrow temporal scope and is primarily limited to the Second Battle of Fallujah which lasted for nine days in November, 2004, immediately after the U.S. presidential elections. Williams devotes several chapters to her years prior to entering the military as well as her military training prior to her deployment in Iraq, though her main focus is devoted to her active duty from March 2003 to February 2004.

3 Kayla Williams writes of the limitations the female soldier frequently bumps into in the course of military life in Iraq. She appears to have a stable sense of identity; unlike many recruits, she spent years living on her own, involved in relationships, including a close relationship with a Saudi Arabian. She displays an emotional stability, and appears significantly more mature than her young male counterparts. Nevertheless, her sex plays a large role in defining and limiting her military experience. Moreover, the situations she finds herself in, for the most part, are removed from the fierce fighting Bellavia encountered in Fallujah. Her experience is too often limited to mundane, everyday encounters with soldiers on her Forward Operating Base; of more interest is her interaction with local Iraqis, since she, unlike most American soldiers deployed in Iraq, possessed the Arabic language communication skills to bridge the vast American-Iraqi cultural gap. Her efforts to win over hearts and minds were undermined by her deployment in Mosul, an area dominated by nonArabic speaking Kurds, a situation that appears to be an all too typical waste of Army resources. Williams’ personal traits of pettiness and narcissism crop up repeatedly in her complaints about food, lack of privacy, and frequent squabbling with a particularly inept female superior officer. She encounters firsthand the exploitation of her gender in the interrogation of Iraqis in Mosul, one of the many prisons in Iraq where abuses took place. Her discomfort with tactics and her decision to discontinue her involvement speak well of her moral sense. Yet, her overall experience in Iraq yields no development of the deep bonds of camaraderie that are forged in the all-male units fighting in Fallujah, where all aspects of pettiness were purged by the tangible sense of danger surrounding them. Though she paints herself as a teenage rebel, and questions the judgment of her superior officers, she gives no signs of subverting the patriarchal structure of the military establishment. Rather, she conveys

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a sense of being worn down emotionally and psychologically by the yearlong stay in Iraq, as her attempts to break down cultural barriers between the locals and the American soldiers became more half-hearted over time. Apparently, she came to evince a growing sense of estrangement, antagonism, and hostility toward the Iraqi people in the course of her deployment from March 2003 to February 2004 that mystified and frustrated her, but was evidently due to the growing perception of the Iraqi people that the American Army was not a liberating but rather an occupying force. Nevertheless, several of the gender issues that have become an increasingly prominent feature in the American military, are present in her writing. As Hillman writes, “The post-Vietnam armed forces have become ‘feminized’ in many key respects. ‘Feminine’ skills include compromise, negotiation, and communication” (Hillman 2007, 150) most helpful in peacekeeping operations. At the same time, as Williams’ account bears witness to, military leaders have not made “the military workplace safe for women; rather, they have reinvented a ‘warrior’ culture of aggression and male coming-of-age” (Ibid., 150). Upon her deployment in Iraq where Williams served in Military Intelligence5 she often encountered verbal abuse from her male counterparts. At the outset she was given the following choice of labels: “slut” or “bitch”: “If you’re a woman and a soldier, those are the choices you get. What’s the difference between a bitch and a slut? A slut will fuck anyone, a bitch will fuck anyone but you” (Williams, 2005, 13). The army slut is characterized as “friendly, outgoing or chatty; a bitch, meanwhile, is pigeon-holed as distant, reserved, professional (Ibid., 13). Williams acknowledges the toughness required of female soldiers to survive the countless male counterparts of “hyped-up guys,” who think almost exclusively about two things, i.e., killing or getting laid. They tend to see their female counterparts only in sexual terms. Yet, she appeared to bask in the attention a female soldier gets, which makes her feel special and enhances her feelings of power; for a female in uniform, looks are subordinate to gender. One of the central gender issues involving a female soldier is that of empowerment, given the training in weapons she receives and the arms she bears. The very title of her memoir suggests that Williams became empowered to a significant degree. Moreover, it suggests an attitude of erotic attachment to her weapon that implies at the same time a disdainful refusal to engage in sexual relations with male soldiers. Indeed, early on Williams refers to her “love” for her M-4, and observes that its smell is the smell of strength and that a gun in one’s hands provides a sense of completeness. “It can turn you, though. Women are no different from men

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in their corruptibility. And in their competence and incompetence” (Ibid., 15). She also notes that females at the firing range do better than males because they follow instructions better. Firing a weapon felt good. “Empowering” (Ibid., 44).6 While she embraced her status as a soldier in uniform in a combat zone where she kept her rifle within reach at all times, she appeared reluctant to brandish her weapon, let alone fire it; her attitude and actions described in the book rather reveal her female instinct for the preservation of life. The one time she felt compelled to pose aggressively with her weapon in hand occurred as a warning to a driver in a passenger car to refrain from attempting to pass the convoy of American vehicles she is part of (a tactic used by suicide bombers). She exhibited great relief when the threat failed to materialize and she could set aside her gun. Male soldiers, including officers, are portrayed by Williams as often hostile to civilians, pointing their weapons at them, needlessly increasing tension among them. Her primary effort to build trust between Iraqi civilians and the American military were easily undermined by overly aggressive behavior of male comrades-in-arms. She would often berate male soldiers for taking potshots at local people and shooting up their cars. She pointed to a lack of signs in Arabic to warn drivers that checkpoints were being approached, one of the many thoughtless sources of unnecessary violence and an overall lack of respect for Iraqi people and their customs. One teen-age American soldier brags to her about his killing of an Iraqi “dude”: It was “the coolest. That’s why I’m here. To get a job done” (Ibid., 144). An issue that complicates bonding for females in the army is their status off limits to frontline fighting. Though, as of 2005, ninety-one percent of Army career fields were open to women, no women were allowed in artillery units, in the infantry, in Rangers or Special Forces, though they were able to take on support roles for the infantry and Special Forces. Military Intelligence, on the other hand, has become increasingly feminized as females have been trained to do negotiating work with locals. Nearly one-third of Military Intelligence is comprised of females (Ibid., 17). Williams notes several of the complicating factors involving women in the military. These included the wide age range of women, one being a 34-year-old mother of six, the inability of some females to handle a gun. Most debilitating of all was the fact that females tended not to bond at boot camp due to their cattiness: “I really hated living with females,” she concludes (Ibid., 46). Her stubbornness and lack of respect for her female superior officer came to a head when the latter committed the cardinal sin of shedding a tear before a subordinate officer. “You never cry in front of a subordi-

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nate. Especially if you’re a woman in a position of authority. The guys already think we can’t handle this” (Ibid., 91). “How am I going to survive working for this woman?” (Ibid.) was a constant gripe. As Goldstein points out and Bellavia bears witness to, all pettiness and sources of minor friction disappear completely when a unit depends on all its members for sheer survival in frontline fighting, a situation off limits to females. Williams found it difficult to make/feel a connection with members of her platoon. She complained of men ignoring her and giving her the cold shoulder for not putting out. It took a long time for her to undergo anything in the nature of an initiation process, something that happened to Swofford his very first day in boot camp. Such a ritual is necessary to win the respect of colleagues and entails doing something difficult and dangerous, if not foolhardy. Ultimately, by driving a humvee over a steep and rocky incline on her own, she was able to prove her manhood to her male comrades. The sign of acceptance, she learned, is when colleagues laugh with and not at you. Ironically, Williams’ status as a “hegemonic female” came into play most blatantly when she was called upon to interrogate Iraqi prisoners. Human Intelligence in the army: appeared to presume guilt, while any form of resistance tended to bring out the sadist in interrogators (Ibid., 205). One’s sense of having power over a zip-tied man is evidenced by the habitual use of threats and intimidation to get what one wants. Williams came to ponder the status of one low in the military hierarchy as being powerless to make decisions to control one’s life and then suddenly having seeming absolute power over the fate of another human once she became involved in the demeaning interrogations. Iraqi prisoners were kept in cages on the second Brigade’s compound. “Loud rock music was blasted day and night to deprive them of sleep, making them chant ‘I love Bush. I love America’” (Ibid., 206). They were told to remove their clothes and strip themselves naked and were humiliated verbally by the female Human Intelligence Interrogator. She took part in humiliating prisoners, degrading them and breaking them down in spite of her awareness of the Geneva Conventions. She admitted that the problem was much more pervasive than the events perpetrated at Abu Ghraib where abuses occurred at the end of 2003. In the minds of the soldiers any interrogation procedures were authorized because the prisoners were deemed terrorists. The degradation of enemy combatants served to undermine the idealism and principles of the warrior spirit and proved counter-productive to military motivation and likewise degrading to all parties involved.7 Williams ultimately confesses to decidedly mixed feelings about her military experience. At the end of her tour of duty, now weaponless, she

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found herself unconsciously reaching for a phantom carbine, and experiencing pangs of anxiety when becoming aware of its loss. Upon her return home in February 2004, the year in Iraq seems like “a sick dream,” a lost year in her life (Williams 2005, 273). Like many combat veterans, she tended to avoid non-Army people and felt most at home with those who have experienced Iraq. As opposed to Bellavia, she had no personal grieving to undergo; no one in her company was killed in Iraq. She found herself very impatient with the American way of life, with the civilians who had no clue as to the nature of her experience. She continued to be disturbed by the conflict of “trying to help people with a gun in your hand” (Ibid., 282-283).

4 The Second Battle of Fallujah provides the apocalyptic setting for Bellavia’s memoir and makes his account riveting. Fallujah became a besieged city after the abduction and murder of four Blackwater contractors; their burnt bodies dragged through the streets and hung on a bridge for public display. Bellavia’s account eschews any background description and instead concentrates on the nine day house-to-house assault on the city to wrest control from the insurgents who wanted the city as a safe haven. His unit leaves in February 2005, having been in Iraq for one year engaged in the military’s most intense house to house fighting since Vietnam; 1,500 of the enemy killed, 100 Americans killed and 1000 wounded. In Bellavia’s memoir, though the narrative proper ends on a note of victory on a personal and unit level as well as the successful completion of the mission, the book’s epilogue sees him return to Fallujah two years later, where it remains a completely destroyed city and the cost of the victory and the miserable state of Fallujah create a deeply discordant tone and sense of frustration. Fallujah, the myth of the ultimate battle, crumbles. The unvarnished truth was that U.S. soldiers were over-armed and were guilty of blatant and often indiscriminate overkill, facts that attest to the extreme danger and constant tension they experienced throughout the battle.8 The questions Bellavia poses to himself on the eve of battle revolve around his manhood: “As infantrymen, our entire existence is a series of tests: Are you man enough? Are you tough enough? Do you have the nuts for this? Can you pull the trigger? Can you kill? Can you survive? The initial casualty estimate is thirty percent to get a foothold in the city— impossible to keep everyone alive” (Bellavia 2007, 48). The questions

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soon enough are answered as he jubilates over the killing of an insurgent outside his home; he derives special pleasure in depriving the family members from providing any source of comfort in his dying moments. Bellavia’s personal delight in killing him is punctuated by the terse comment: “It felt just” (Ibid., 49). His delight is short-lived, however, as he immediately becomes appalled at his own action and thoughts: “What have I become?” (Ibid., 50). This initiation into military manhood is curiously followed by the only flashback present in the memoir, one that appears to provide the young soldier’s motivation to enter the military and put his challenged masculinity to the test, though he never makes this explicit. He indicates that he is the youngest of four boys—“the weakest link” in his family of hegemonic males. He depicts a critical moment in his life, when he appears paralyzed by abject fear in the presence of both his father and mother. The crisis occurred when he was already twenty-three years of age, no raw recruit; two burglars high on crack break into his parents’ home. He is immediately perceived by the burglars as “no threat” and ridiculed mercilessly. In a futile attempt to take charge of the situation he gets hold of his father’s shotgun in the basement “but I realized I was not prepared to use it. I didn’t know how.” He remains in the basement immobilized while the hoods terrorize his parents. His failure to act is a devastating testament to his lack of courage and will. “I stood paralyzed with fright and watched them.” His father’s glare is “a mixture of disgust and pity: I was not yet a man, even at twenty-three. I could hardly face my family. I was a coward that day. I had let everyone down and proved that I couldn’t take care of myself, let alone protect the ones I loved the most” (Bellavia 2007, 45-46). Bellavia never refers to his father again in the course of the memoir, yet the haunting self-doubts about his manhood recur at critical scenes in his descriptions of the fighting in Fallujah. In the chapter titled “Battle madness” the author gives vent to the complex emotions swirling inside him in the aftermath of a vicious nocturnal skirmish the first night of the battle, an initiation into the hell of Fallujah. Battle madness grips me. Combat is a descent into the darkest parts of the human soul. A place where the most exalted nobility and the most wretched baseness reside naturally together…I embrace the battle. I welcome it into my soul. I cup my hands to my mouth and take a long breath. “You can’t kill me!” I rage into the night, “You hear me, fuckers? You can’t kill me! You will never kill me!”Fitts, his co-staff sergeant, coolly responds: “Bell, chill the fuck out.” (Ibid., 120)

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The intensity of the battle is conveyed effectively in the writing: the first day of fighting comes to an end more than halfway through the book (Ibid., 177). Fitts is Bellavia’s role-model, the epitome of the hegemonic male, a born leader who is capable of taking three bullets in a surprise firefight while continuing to lead his unit out of danger. He is a true-blue army man who loves to talk down the Marines; as an NCO grunt he denigrates the pampered officer corps, partly in order to boost the morale of the unit’s rookies. The surges of emotion that cloud Bellavia’s reason expose him to excessive danger and make it difficult to size up the constantly fluid situation. He adores and envies Fitts, while remaining ever disdainful of his inability to keep cool under fire, [i]t was typical of the roles Fitts and I played with each other. When I flip out, he stays calm and cools me down. He keeps me in control when I’m on the verge of losing it. Similarly, when I push the envelope and take risks, he’s always there to stop me from going too far. Whatever my state of mind, whatever situation I get us into, Fitts is always there for me. But he never has a dip. The bastard. (Ibid., 121)

The climax of the memoir centers on a crisis of courage Bellavia undergoes when he needlessly exposes his unit to enemy fire by his failure to act in a timely way and experiences anew the intense shame, guilt, and self-deprecation of the cowardice displayed before his father. He is unable to fire his weapon to eliminate two well-positioned snipers perched in a safe-house where, it turns out, several other insurgents are present. He decides to go after them by himself, putting his life on the line. In a series of dramatic encounters he ends up killing individual enemy combatants described in breathless detail over four gripping chapters; the ordeal culminates with his hand-to-hand struggle with the lone remaining “terrorist”—a gray-bearded man who appears as a kind of father-figure. Their weapons having become inoperable in the course of the fighting, the two of them are reduced to fighting with bare hands gripped around each other’s throat and face. Finally, Bellavia recalls he is equipped with a knife, plunging it into his enemy’s breast. Just before he succumbs, the wizened Iraqi transforms his chokehold into a caress, looking up into his killer’s eyes with compassion and forgiveness. It has been observed that intimate acts of violence can be the most profoundly intimate of experiences, with hands grappling over each other’s throat, mouth and eyes in a death struggle of brutal sensuality (Tick 2005, 25). For Bellavia, his final encounter with the enemy served to affirm, at the very least, the humanity of his antagonist, as well as

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recognition of the need to overcome and counter the forces of annihilation with affirmative acts. One of those affirmative acts entailed a return to Fallujah in 2006 to come to grips with the haunting memories of the deaths of his comrades on the city’s streets. Like Whitman in his elegy to Lincoln and the American Civil War soldier, his arms full of lilacs as tokens of love and sacrifice, Bellavia comes to Fallujah bearing flowers. In this case, the American GI places a single red carnation at each site where a soldier from his company was slain, a symbol of blood and sacrifice. One carnation, unexpectedly, is presented to an elderly Iraqi matron, who accepts this token on one of the miserable streets of Fallujah. The scene is filled with the poignancy of the inexpressible sufferings of the Iraqi people embodied in the old woman together with the image of the spiritually adrift American attempting to make amends and arrive at some kind of closure. In realizing his dream of manhood, Bellavia overcomes his harsh selfcriticism. Seeing himself formerly as a failure while idealizing his peers, he arrives at a degree of self-acceptance. His second affirmative act is the penning of his military memoir, writing down the accounts of his hellish experiences in Fallujah. He dedicates the memoir not to his father, who is mentioned only in the fateful chapter depicting his own cowardice, but to his son, who, he hopes, will be able to read it someday so as to understand him and appreciate the trials under fire he went through in becoming a man.

Concluding Remarks The two memoirs taken together provide insights into the nature of masculinity among the generation of American soldiers engaged in combat operations in Iraq. Bellavia depicts the combat soldier on the front line as a consummate insider who achieves the status of hegemonic male, effectively bonding with the men in his unit, and overcoming the paralyzing fears and shame rooted in his boyhood relationship with his father. Williams’ portrayal provides insight into both the masculinized female soldier and the effect of the uniformed female presence in a combat zone. Williams casts light on the obstacles facing the female soldier in coming to grips with her ambivalent gender status. Donning the uniform does little to blur the categories of male and female. The female presence in a world dominated by young, often immature males with high levels of testosterone appears to reinforce rather than eliminate sexual differentiation, creating sexual tension that compels female soldiers to willy-nilly regard themselves as sexual objects. Bonding

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among female soldiers has yet to achieve the “got your back” mentality of male units under fire; rather, Williams characterizes her female peers as “catty” and her attitude toward her female commanding officer was contemptuous and bordered on insubordination. Williams also displayed a feminine sensitivity to the culture and values of the Iraqi people, a trait all too rare in an army whose apparent mission was to liberate and not occupy the nation. Her observations came to serve as barometric measurements of the growing hostility of the Iraqis toward the American military presence. Finally, in spite of the machismosounding title of her memoir and the sense of empowerment it implies, Williams displayed a reluctance to use her weapon. This is in stark contrast to the oftentimes trigger-happy behavior of male soldiers described in her book and the overkill methods of Bellavia’s unit in Fallujah. Yet, there is little doubt that female soldiers, presently barred from front-line activity, forced to play limited ancillary functions in military operations, dominated by the traditionally all-male decisionmakers at the top, will continue to make inroads to gender equality in U. S. military institutions.

Notes 1

Military memoirs can be viewed as a sub-genre of autobiography in AngloAmerican literature. The patriarch of the modern American Army, Ulysses S. Grant, authored the now classic Personal Memoirs in 1885. Each war produces its own significant works. World War I inspired the memoirs of Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Several contemporary memoirs that are highly regarded include Charles B. Macdonald's Company Commander, (World War II, 1999) Philip Caputo's Rumor of War, (Vietnam, 1977) and, more recently, Anthony Swofford's Jarhead (First Iraq War, 2003). Currently, the writing of military memoirs has gained institutional support. With the expressed interest of preserving history through the eyes of those who lived it, many organizations work with potential memoirists to bring their work to fruition. The Veterans History Project, for example, compiles the memoirs of those who served in a branch of the US Military—especially those having seen active combat. Some autobiographical service companies periodically publish memoir collections featuring clients that participate at no cost to themselves. War.com presents a seemingly endless listing of military memoirs: Tip of the Spear by David S. Pierson is just the tip of the iceberg, as the memoirs are subdivided into increasingly specific domains. The category of Post-World War II Conflicts has the subdivision of Persian Gulf, and a further subdivision of ground war. The Military Memoir Review published by the Military Writers Society of America provides critical reviews of recently published works. 2 Connell poses the issue of hegemonic masculinity as a response to the insights into femininity brought into play by women’s studies from the 1970s and 1980s

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expressed in terms of the following relationships: power/knowledge/judgment, fluidity and complexity in the sexual/social construct of the individual. His fourfold model of the structure of gender relations can be outlined as follows: 1—power relations: traditional subordination of women and dominance of men; the reversals and resistances stemming from feminism (recourse to equal opportunity); 2—production relations—gender divisions of labor, task allocations, and their economic consequences (referred to as the patriarchal dividend); 3—cathexis or emotional relations; emotion as an increasingly important topic for social theory; emotional energy being attached to an object; the practices that shape and realize desire; 4—communicative symbolism, including process of communication, visual and sound vocabularies, gender subordination through notso-subtle linguistic practices (2000, 10-11). 3 See Chapter 5 of his monograph: Heroes: the making of militarized masculinity. 4 Nancy Sherman has written of the psychological pain soldiers experience if they see themselves as having failed. In attempting to realize the dream of manhood one may not escape a harsh self-criticism, seeing oneself as a failure while idealizing one’s peers. War is the most compelling initiation into adulthood as it encompasses “all the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual challenges of life in their most intense and threatening forms” (War and the Soul, 2005, 48-49). Basic training, as an initiation process, can be viewed as a symbolic form of death and rebirth: one’s civil identity is eradicated and replaced by the warrior identity with its central focus upon killing. The proving ground is battle. In traditional society coming home a warrior means coming home a full man, with the rights, privileges, respect, and honor so deserved. 5 In 2005, the year that Kayla Williams was released from the army, women comprised 16 percent of American armed forces (2005, 151). (In World War II, more than 350,000 women were in uniform). 6 A male soldier’s erotic relationship with his weapon is depicted in Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, who was trained as a Marine sniper. In one lyrical scene, he waxes inspirational as he describes his weapon, an M40A1 rifle. As his closest companion and source of power, he provides a loving description of rounds, their dimensions and capacity. For Swofford the rifle is imbued with an overpowering sexuality: “Some shooters might liken the trigger to a clitoris, and the well-placed shot to the female’s orgasm, but in STA 2/7 we refrain from anthropomorphizing our weapons. To do so would introduce a human element into an entirely mechanical relationship. To do so might humanize our enemy, a certainly fatal mistake” (2003, 134). Cleaning his rifle is a religious act: “Generally, the sniper sits cross-legged while cleaning the rifle, a pose not so unlike the lotus position of the Buddha under the fig tree, but of course, the sniper does not eat figs.” He labels it as a “meditative task, as with most tasks that might help save your life” (Ibid., 135). Swofford’s intimate relationship with his rifle endows him with a sense of confidence, pride and consummate skill. The enemy usually remains abstract “as difficult for me to comprehend as my own birth … We are within one hundred feet. I could, in two to three seconds, produce fatal injuries to all three of the men. This thought excites me, and I know that whatever is about to occur, we will win”

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(Ibid., 137). The weapon as a source of seductive empowerment, coupled with the thought of its destructive potential, is herein given tangible expression. 7 Female soldiers bore the brunt of the punishments meted out in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal: Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, an Army Reserve officer in charge of the prison at Abu Ghraib, was reprimanded and demoted, while Specialist Lynndie R. England was sentenced to three years’ confinement and dishonorably discharged (Hillman 2007, 160). Major General Barbara Fast, the highest-ranking woman to serve in Iraq, served as intelligence chief for the U.S. military ground commander and oversaw the interrogation centers at Abu Ghraib during 2003 and 2004. 8 Oliver Poole, a British journalist, describes the culture of violence in Iraq that destroyed the daily lives of Iraqis. The frenzy of killing reached a peak after the Feb. 22, 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. Civilians “were not simply being killed; they were being beheaded, garroted and tortured. Victims were having electric drills used and them and cigarettes stubbed out on their flesh. Eyeballs were being gouged out. Bones were broken and body parts hacked off” (Poole 2008, 237). He goes on to note that in contrast to the American soldiers who leave after one-year deployments, “the ones reassigned develop serious mental problems.” The situation is much worse for the Iraqis unable to leave the war-zone. According to an Iraqi psychiatrist, “In Iraq 90 per cent of people have some form of mental problem due to the lives they face” (Ibid., 241).

Bibliography Bellavia, David (with John R. Bruning). 2007. House to House: An Epic Memoir of War. New York: Free Press. Connell, R. W. 2000. The Men and the Boys. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engel, Richard. 2008. War Journal. New York: Simon and Schuster. Goldstein, Joshua. 2001. War and Gender. How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haddad, Tony, ed. 1993. Men and Masculinities: A Critical Anthology. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Hillman, Elizabeth L. 2007. The Female Shape of the All-Volunteer Force. In Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or How Not to Learn From the Past, eds. Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young, 150-161. New York: New Press. Howson, Richard. 2006. Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity. London: Routledge. Johnson, Chalmers. 2006. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books. McKenna, Kate, Eric Peters, and Doug Weatherbee. 1993. Recon-structing Masculinities Through Autobiography. In Men and Masculinities:

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A Critical Anthology, ed. Tony Haddad, 59-75. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. Poole, Oliver. 2008. Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad. London: Reportage Press. Ricks, Thomas. 2009. The Gamble. New York: Penguin. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1930. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber. Sherman, Nancy. 2005. Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2010. The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers. New York: Norton. Swofford, Anthony. 2003. Jarhead. New York: Kinsdale Press. Tick, Edward. 2005. War and the Soul: Healing Our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Wheaton, IL.: Quest Books. Williams, Kayla (with Michael E. Staub). 2005. Love my rifle more than you: Young and female in the U.S. Army. New York: Norton.

CHAPTER FOUR HUMANE SOLDIERS: SOFT POWER, U.S. SOLDIERS AND THE BAGHDAD ZOO JANE DESMOND

Fig. 4-1. A Third Infantry Division soldier examines Uday Hussein's cheetahs at the Baghdad Zoo, 2003. Photo by Jim Garamone, supplied for public use by Department of Defense media.

Introduction Every war has its zoo story, or so says U.S. National Public Radio correspondent Anne Garrels, writing of her days in Iraq in 2003: “Sarajevo, Kabul, and now Baghdad. Every war has a zoo [story because]

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animals are a lot less demanding an interview than people, and a lot easier to access” (2004, 95). Garrels, a seasoned war correspondent, is dismissive of these stories, saying that “in Afghanistan, the zoo became an easy focus … for reporters, who competed to own the starving blind lion.” She adds: “I hope I don’t descend to doing the inevitable zoo story” (Ibid., 95), suggesting that blind lions like the Kabul zoo’s “Marjan” pull too easily at the heartstrings, and border on the saccharine, avoiding the hard stories of war. But in this article I will take an opposite view: that the circulation and recirculation of these stories, and in particular that of the melodrama of animals, soldiers, and governments narrated around the Baghdad zoo, can be analyzed as important public discourse, revealing the power of such sites to become magnets for emotions, and to be promulgated as evidence of cruelty assigned to one faction or of the capacity for humane generosity assigned to another faction. I will sketch the contours of that larger argument, especially with regard to reportage in the U.S., demonstrating what I see as the linkage between “soft news” and “soft power.” I will focus specifically on the ideological cache of zoos, and the politics of humanitarianism, as they intersect with the role of the U.S. Army in “saving” the Baghdad zoo and helping reopen it as one of the few relatively safe public spaces for civilian leisure in Baghdad today. In doing so, I simultaneously engage with emergent scholarship in critical animal studies that insists that our understandings of human history must include the histories of human-animal relations, in this case that of animals and war (Swart 2010). I am especially appreciative of the opportunity to develop this work for publication based on the keynote address I delivered on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary celebration of the Polish American Studies Association, at the conference in àódĨ, Poland, October, 2010, organized by Professor ElĪbieta Oleksy and her colleagues. The response to that address convinced me that these issues may have wide appeal, and that several scholars in Poland are already taking an interest in “animal studies” in their own research, thus widening the transatlantic dimensions of this new strand of scholarship.

“Animal Studies” Framework and “American Studies” Before proceeding to the main focus of this article, let me provide something of the framework of Animal Studies which provides background for this research. In a great deal of our work as American Studies scholars in Poland, the United States, and elsewhere, we grapple

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with issues of diversity, identities, narratives, and politics. We do so mostly in the context of those most prominent dimensions of social differentiation that so profoundly shape American public discourse, ideologies, institutions, and the daily life experiences of our populations: among these are gender, racialization, social class, and sexuality. National origin, native identities, religion, ethnicity, generation and age, and the status of our physical selves as “disabled” or not, are also powerful dimensions of social life. To these we can add regionalism, political persuasions and urban/suburban or rural origins. And there are yet other markers of social difference that at times are very meaningful, such as level of education, or veteran status. Animal Studies as an emergent scholarly focus and interdisciplinary community of researchers asks us and enables us to look at the operations of another profound dimension of difference: that of species differentiation and the ways that human and animal relations are not only everywhere in our lives, but saturate our visual and linguistic systems of representation. They form a powerful framework for mobilizing concepts of “the natural,” and of defining, in different ideological, philosophical and religious systems, what it means to be “human,” for we often code that humanity in contradistinction to the not-human, or the animal. And this distinction has often been used by one group against another, to denigrate some as subhuman and like animals while elevating others to full humanity. Animal Studies or “Critical Animal Studies” or “Human-Animal Relations,” are some of the terms currently used to reference this new wave of interdisciplinary scholarship emerging in the last decade (especially, but not exclusively, in the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand).1 Excitement in this arena is growing as Animal Studies provides a new crucial meeting ground for scholars from history, literature, environmental studies, cultural geography, the social sciences, media, and the visual arts. In the U.S., for example, we are seeing the launch of new book series at university presses, academic listserves, journals like Animals and Society, special panels at the Modern Language Association, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association, and multiple thematic conferences and summer research institutes.2 The American Sociological Association recently added a formal Animal Studies section to its membership, and in recognition of the impact expected on future directions of scholarship, the U.S. Social Science Research Council just supported the first dissertation fellowships in Animal Studies, in 2009. The first and only graduate concentration in “Animal Studies: Social Science and Humanities Perspectives,” was recently inaugurated at Michigan State University, and

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administered by the Sociology Department. And in the spring of 2010, New York University announced that it had received a gift of a million dollars to help support the development of Animal Studies there, including a faculty appointment and the creation of an undergraduate minor.3 At my own institution I recently led a year-long campus-wide initiative (2010-2011) through the Center for Advanced Study that unites faculty and students from the College of Liberal Arts, the experimental sciences, the Veterinary College and the Law School, titled “Knowing Animals: Histories, Strategies, and Futures in Human/Animal Relations.”4 All of these numerous developments indicate that this is a growing, dynamic interdisciplinary arena of scholarship poised to develop new paradigms for research and to gain institutional status in the next decade. I want American Studies to be part of this growth. Although some of us working to develop Animal Studies are institutionally located in American Studies, like Janet Davis at the University of Texas at Austin and Brett Mizelle at California State University at Long Beach, in general, American Studies, both in the U.S. and abroad, has been slower than some other scholarly communities to embrace this new wave of interdisciplinary work. In sharing this work on the Baghdad zoo, I hope to spark American Studies scholars’ interest in animal studies and give a sense of the range of social and political stakes that can be found in thinking deeply about human-animal relations. Many of the current key issues in American Studies scholarship, including transnational relations, U.S. colonialism, racialization, paradigms of gender and sexuality, issues of embodiment and political rights, food studies, regionalism, sports, commodification and consumption, immigration, and technological transformations can be opened up by asking a simple question: what if we inserted human-animal relations into those realms of investigation? Whole new realms of practice also open to our consideration. For instance, we could analyze any of the following: the billion dollar industries of factory farms, the pharmaceutical industries’ reliance on animal testing, dog fighting and racial profiling, cock fighting in Arizona, or urban spatial organization and horsepower in nineteenth century New York. Or we might examine oil painting portraits of prize winning cattle in the homes of the eighteenth century elite, the linkage of animals and colonized people at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the role of nineteenth century literature like “Black Beauty” in promoting the development of animal welfare organizations, the popularity of Mickey Mouse, entrepreneur extraordinaire, or the terror of zoonosis that emerges in public discourse about the Avian flu, just to give a few examples. We suddenly find that

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animals are not marginal but central to the ways that communities and nations make sense of themselves, of others, and of the world around them. What might be the transformative potential for higher education institutions if we took animals seriously as a central component of intellectual investigation that necessarily cuts across nearly all disciplines instead of being relegated to a few, such as biology, zoology, and animal sciences? (Howard 2009) What would a fundamental paradigm shift from human-centric to “post-humanism” approaches look like? (Wolfe 2009) Is the twenty-first century the century of post-humanism, the end of the long legacy of the Enlightenment which placed notions of human rationality at the center of history? If we can conceive of such a challenge, can we develop new work in American Studies to meet this challenge? Can a focus on human-animal relations help us understand how diverse populations narrate their identities and their relations to the world? In this essay, I hope to contribute to that endeavor by presenting a case study, taking the Baghdad zoo as the focus of my research, so let me return now to that project.

Zoos and War I became intrigued by the number of stories about the zoo in Baghdad that kept appearing in reports of the war there. I had written about zoos before, but from the point of view of their ideologies of visuality and design (Desmond 2001). Now I found that soldiering and zoos were often connected in the U.S. news, and I wanted to ask what cultural work this linkage was doing. A whole narrative landscape of innocence, rescue, and restoration began to unfold. Central to this story is a specific program of the U.S. military called C.E.R.P., the acronym for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program. According to the U.S. Department of State’s website, called “America.gov—telling America’s Story,” CERP began with the capture of some of Saddam Hussein’s assets. These monies, equivalent to millions of U.S. dollars, were uncovered by the U.S. military in his palaces during the spring 2003 invasion. According to this source, the idea to use this money to rebuild Iraq sprang to mind immediately. “When we captured the funds, the Marines’ first reaction was, ‘Let’s put it back into the economy,’” says Marine captain David Romley in a 2003 interview. The program started on a small scale that May when commanders overseeing towns and villages were each allocated $5,000 to spend at their discretion on projects aimed at helping the communities reestablish order” (America.gov).

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Since 2003, this program aimed at the “hearts and minds” of Iraqis has grown dramatically as a textbook example of David Nye’s concept of “soft power.” Nye, a professor of government at Harvard University and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under the Clinton administration, described this mode of political influence as “the ability to get what you want through attraction, rather than coercion” (Whitney 2008). This seems a simple enough concept, but the term has caught fire in foreign policy circles since Nye named it. One of his examples of “soft power” in operation is the use of U.S. Navy vessels to provide relief supplies after the 2004 Asian tsunami, which, he says, helped substantially raise the approval rating of the Navy in Asia. Another example is China’s increasing emphasis on “soft power” relations like staging the 2008 Olympics, to narrate the rise in China’s economic and military might in the region as a soft ascent to leadership rather than a cause for alarm. For Nye, the ideal foreign policy combines the “hard power” of military threat when needed with the soft power of persuasion through attraction. He terms the resulting mix “smart power.” The CERP program promised to provide the soft part of the equation to balance the hard power of the U.S. military invasion (Whitney 2008). In Iraq, CERP funds have been used at the community level to restore essential basic services like sewerage and drinking water lines, to rebuild schools and medical centers decimated in the war, and to support cultural events. The original (or “smart power”) intent was for the soldier on the ground to be the eyes and ears of the military, seeing a need in the community they patrolled and being able to respond immediately with cash payments of relatively small amounts to get crucial services restored without the endless bureaucratic red tape and delays that might otherwise result. Successful projects like restoring potable water to a hundred thousand residents in an Iraqi community certainly may have helped America’s image in that community. Provisions were also developed for much larger scale projects to be funded, but only through a vetting and bidding process. Still, projects up to $100,000 USD could be approved simply, at the U.S. military division commander level. This is a huge amount of quickly available money in a cash economy where the wages of a college professor in 2002 were reported at $15/month (Garrels 2004). Even by 2008, where rates of inflation meant that day laborers could earn the equivalent of USD $8.00/day, this is a staggering amount of money.5 In 2003, its first year of operation, the CERP program was funded at $88 million according to the U.S. State Department’s website. This number has skyrocketed since then. By August of 2008, the U.S. had spent

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at least $2.8 billion in CERP funds in Iraq. And, as of 2009, the U.S. congress has appropriated more than $10 billion in CERP funds for both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a substantial part of what is described as $52 billion in foreign aid and reconstruction support to Iraq over the last 5 years since 2009—what Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, calls the “largest foreign aid program in U.S. history.”6 Although the zoo allotment is a small portion of this amount, it has generated a huge amount of publicity. What was originally meant as “walking around money for commanders to achieve a desired effect in their battle space, slowly … has [now expanded to] become a de facto reconstruction pot of money,” says Ginger Cruz, the U.S. Office of Reconstruction’s deputy inspector general. Originally devised as a way to replace broken water pipes and bombed out classrooms, CERP has ballooned into a huge “bank,” paying civilians “compensation” payments for civilian injuries and deaths sustained in U.S. attacks, providing funds for hotels for foreign businessmen to use, and in, 2006, hiring tens of thousands of once insurgent Iraqi members of the “Sons of Iraq,” putting them on the U.S. payroll to fight what the military calls “hard-line extremist groups” (Hedgpeth and Cohen 2008). With this expansion, the CERP program has recently come under scrutiny and increasing criticism in Washington. Reports of graft have surfaced, along with critiques that projects are started and not sustained. This, combined with a lack of planning for the eventual take-over of infrastructure projects by the Iraqi government, mean that sometimes the same project is paid for many times over as soldiers rotate in and out of an area, each fixing the same problem over and over again.7 But early on in its inception, CERP seemed to be working as intended by the military: helping to lower rates of insurgency in areas that had basic services restored, and showing in concrete terms, as Army comptroller Stephen E. Kent reported in 2004, “that Americans cared, and demonstrated that we truly wanted to assist in the reconstruction of Iraqi communities across religions, tribes, and regions” (Kent 2004). Army Colonel Michael Toner said at this time that CERP was “better than bullets” (Kent 2004). The rebuilding of the Baghdad zoo was certainly one of these early better than bullets projects.

The Baghdad Zoo Once the largest zoo in the Middle East with 600 animals in its “collection,” the Baghdad zoo was the site of intense military fighting when U.S. soldiers battled with Fedayeen troops loyal to Saddam Hussein.

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In the aftermath of the battles, hundreds of zoo animals escaped, and hundreds more were later stolen by looters, either to use for food or to sell on the lucrative black market in “exotic” animals. Only a few dozen animals remained (according to Anthony Lawrence), generally those too big or too fierce to be stolen, including a thirty year old blind bear and some lions (Nickels 2009). Cages and water pipes were destroyed, and unexploded ordinance littered the property. After the battle moved on, the zoo became a prime site for looters, desperate as food stocks dwindled in town, who took everything from peacocks to tools to copper wire in the lampposts to sell on the black market, leaving the zoo devastated. One of the earliest stories about animals at the zoo coming out of Baghdad reported that the U.S. bombing had inadvertently “liberated” the lions of the zoo, who were roaming the stricken city at will. This image, of the “King” of the natural world, at large in the built environment of humans, simultaneously telegraphed a narrative of a “fall of civilization” —after all the city was taken over by “wild” animals, mapped on to the encounter of U.S. soldiers with the exotic and dangerous “other” of the unknown Iraq. The news story reported widely was that a patrol of U.S. soldiers unexpectedly came upon a pride of lions roaming the debris littered streets, and fearing for their lives, shot the lions dead. A combination of regality and barbarism fused in this moment—as the soldiers proclaimed that “they didn’t want to do it, but their lives were threatened.” This moment is the narrative denouement in the popular graphic novel The Pride of Baghdad (2006) which broke though the limitations of graphic novel U.S. fan bases, and became reviewed by mainstream media. As Teresa Mangum and Corey Creekmur note in their review of the book, the talking lions in the novel upend the cute-laden Disney story style to take on “nature red in tooth and claw” issues as the pride struggles to feed itself and to defend itself against other animals also loosed by the bombs. Padding silently through a bombed out city apparently emptied of live humans, the first days of the war are seen through the eyes of the animals who struggle with issues of whom to trust among their “natural” animal enemies while strategizing how best to adjust to their newfound “freedom.” While the allegorical nature of the novel is surely present, the book, as Mangum and Creekmur persuade us in their analysis, is just as much about the impact of war on non-human animals as it is about using animals as allegorical avatars for human truths (Mangum and Creekmur 2007). That this incident of lion shooting by U.S. soldiers received widespread news reporting in the U.S. is indicative of the cultural capital that the zoo has had in the war.8 And, it is to that that I now wish to turn.

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While some may question the ethics of spending any human resources of time, energy, and money on sustaining the lives of animals while human need is so great in a war zone, others respond differently. Both journalists and readers, I think, perceive in the reports of the animals an opportunity to relate to a truly “innocent” victim of war. In an urban war where guerrilla tactics prevail, it is often difficult, from the U.S. soldiers’ pointof-view, to tell who one’s “enemy” is and who is not. In Iraq, even the normally presumed innocent “women and children” of the non-combatant category cannot automatically be assumed to be non-threatening. Women, after all, can hide Kalashnikovs beneath the flowing folds of their burkahs, while boys as young as 14 can be suicide bombers. Only infants and toddlers appear to be totally safe and in those cases, soldiers may fear that their parents might use them as lures precisely because they should be outside the calculus of aggressor and enemy. For U.S. soldiers in Iraq, all Iraqis may be seen as potential enemies, or potential allies. Animals, however, may play a symbolic role both in the narration of nationalism and in that of “liberation.” But they themselves remain untainted—a true “innocent” who cannot take sides during a war. The animals, though owned by Iraqis, are not Iraqi. They cannot, presumably, lie, dissemble and booby trap. Nor can they be political allies. Animals, especially the megafauna like lions and tigers, and the region-specific animals like camels, can carry a heavy symbolic burden while retaining their status of the war’s true innocents. This could change if, for example, donkeys were loaded with explosives and used as Trojan horses, but so far this is not the case. For those Iraqis working in the zoo, their devotion to the animals long in their care also seems to exist outside the ethical ambivalence of the war zone. Some even risked their own safety to continue to work at the zoo, knowing that their association with foreigners could make them targets. Just as animals may be presumed “innocent,” so too can the destruction of their habitat, the national zoo, be seen as senseless. The notion of making it up to these innocent victims was repeatedly cited in the first weeks of the war as U.S. soldiers individually came by the zoo and fed their rations to the starving animals. Over and over again they said “it’s for the animals” as conservationist Lawrence Anthony reports in his narrative of his work in spearheading the “saving” of the zoo (Anthony 2007). This small gesture may have provided the soldiers with a brief oasis of moral un-ambivalence—a respite from the vigilance and distrust that structured their encounters with all but their own corpsmen. Anthony, a private conservationist from South Africa was, miraculously, one of the first civilians allowed into Iraq after the U.S. bombing started.

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Working with a small cadre of Iraqi professionals from the zoo, including chief veterinarian and associate director of the zoo Dr. Husham Hussan, he jerry-rigged water, captured looters, stole food from Saddam’s hotels, and hobnobbed with mercenaries providing security to find food and water for the few animals left in the zoo. Anthony’s book Babylon’s Ark: the Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo is told as a tale of heroism, shared by Iraqi caretakers and zoo professionals who risked their lives working with foreigners, U.S. soldiers, and of swat team-like aid eventually donated by international animal welfare NGOs. In her analysis of 2003 news stories about the Baghdad zoo, Kathryn Denning comments on this stew of participants, calling it “rhetorically rich,” and suggesting that “American forces (were) being represented as liberators and caretakers who stepped in to protect the helpless animals abandoned by the Iraqis themselves,” an implicit parallel with the narration of justification for U.S. intervention to “liberate” the Iraqi people from the failed rule of Saddam Hussein (2008, 63). Further analyzing the news coverage’s mobilization of the zoo as both metaphor and metonymy for Iraq itself, she notes news patterns portraying the zoo as a battleground, as a symbol of recovery, as evidence of backwardness requiring external “Western” (quotation marks mine) intervention, and as a metaphor for the way Iraqis treated American POW’s and for how Hussein himself should be captured and put on display (Ibid., 64-65). I do not disagree with the overall contours of this analysis, although Lawrence’s own narrative clearly salutes the central role of the Iraqi zoo workers themselves, but I want to delve deeper into the role of the animals. A notion that they are situated as putatively part of nature and “outside of culture” is, I believe, implicitly mobilized. At least in Anthony’s narrative of the tale, the zoo became a magnet for soldiers who wanted to do something “good” without fear of retaliation.9 Here are a couple of examples: One day a badly needed generator appeared on the back of an army truck that pulled up at the zoo. It was quickly offloaded while the soldier walked away to go to the bathroom with a wink and a nod. Later he could truthfully say to a superior he had no idea how it had been “stolen” from his truck. At another point, a hilarious scene played out when soldiers volunteered to help transport a rescued ostrich which had been stolen from the zoo for sale on the black market. With no other transport available, the soldiers stuffed the giant bird in a troop carrier, with its long neck sticking out the top like a periscope. The reactions at the checkpoints must have been incredulous (Anthony 2007, 96).

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Crucial, I think, to the U.S. soldiers’ interest in the zoo, and particularly the help early on by Lt. Brian Szydlik (pronounced “Shadalik”), who had nominal oversight of the entire Al Zawra park in which the zoo was located, was the service men’s experiences growing up with zoos. Most metropolitan areas in the U.S., and many much smaller towns, have a municipal zoo. And a trip to the zoo is often included in school curriculums or experienced as a fun family outing. In fact zoos in the U.S. receive more visits than major sports events each year (Mullan and Marvin 1987). Whatever our feelings about zoos, in the U.S. they remain a cultural resource widely touted as a positive cross-class experience, akin to a library, but presumably more fun. For these U.S. soldiers, then, we can assume that the “zoo” in Baghdad was a common category of experience, and a zone of leisure that was deemed value free—in the sense that it was not associated with a particular ethnic group, religion, or political faction. Unlike other cultural institutions, for example a national museum, or ethnic festivals, a zoo (despite its origins as a symbol of imperial pride and its status as a municipal institution controlled by the state) can be seen as outside politics. While scholars have debunked this myth, for most of the general populace in the U.S., I think that the zoo is seen as an apolitical space. This is part of the attraction that the story of the zoo has had for U.S. journalists, for the U.S. public, for the U.S. soldiers, and ultimately as well for the Iraqis of Sunni and Shiite affiliations and of all classes who flock to the zoo after it is rebuilt. The zoo, and the planned Disneylandlike development of Al Zawra park into an amusement park by a U.S. firm, can be approached as a politically shared, or politically neutralized space of protected leisure. This does NOT mean that narratives about the U.S. “saving” the zoo cannot be deployed as positive political “PR,” as my title from “inhuman” to “humane” seeks to capture.

Soft News and Soft Power News about the zoo, and its special status as a non-political space— home to the unequivocally innocent—makes for great soft news. Journalists define soft news as: news which is about ongoing issues and is intensely personalized and emotional. Given the cultural context of zoos in the U.S., few in the United States would read news of the animal’s plight at the zoo and not abhor the conditions that produced starving animals. Many may say, however, that no money should be spent on animal welfare while war disrupts human life. However, to the extent that this is described as humanitarian work and not posed in opposition or competition to

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human need, this would not necessarily interrupt the news audience’s affect and pleasure in deploring this injustice to innocents and the celebration of their rescue from what would have been certain death. This notion of animals as non-combatants and not members of specific cultural or national groups, is superseded further by an idea (in Europe and the U.S. at least) of animals as avatars of the natural world. In many cases, an encounter with this “natural history” is deemed a necessary part of education, even a sort of natural right, for young citizens for example through viewing dioramas in natural history museums, so often the site of school field trips. Once imperial menageries, zoos later became part of civic institutions open to the public. In the U.S., they, along with museums, orchestras, parks, and a local ballet company, became expected components of major cities, and carried with them similar ideologies of moral uplift and civic education in the “natural order” of the world. The civic institutions were supposed to be open to all, as part of the education of citizens, and the zoo provided an education in the relation of humans to a natural world, supposedly represented in miniature by specimens from around the world. A significant amount of work has now been done on the ideological narratives embedded in zoos. Recently, zoos have styled themselves as conservation agencies, as “Noah’s arks” to save populations on the brink of extinction, but their educational mission of staging a set of relations with a “natural” world has never been more loudly foregrounded as it is today. Presumably, for U.S. soldiers, and for U.S. consumers of news about the rehabilitation of the zoo and the U.S. military’s role in it, this same framework of civic right, civic education, and human/animal divide would obtain as the dominant interpretive frame. And, the restoration of that opportunity would be welcomed not only on behalf of saving “innocent” non-combatant, non-Iraqi animals, but also as a way of restoring nonpolitically marked order. Unlike a restoration of a mosque, for example, which would remind the news audience of the Islamic population and multiple Orientalist stereotypes of Islam as breeder of potential terrorists targeting the U.S., a zoo seems like a U.S. institution, and best of all one that is supposedly “culture free,” hence non-political on its face. These stories can then generate good will at home and potentially in Iraq towards the U.S. military.10 That this news was popular is indicated— to use a very blunt, unscientific yardstick, by the listing of 4, 980 stories in my “Google News” search of “Baghdad Zoo” for the period 2003-2009. News reports were picked up not only in the U.S., including in the U.S. Defense department news (such as the “Defend America: U.S. Department of Defense news about the War on Terrorism” website, and the U.S.

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Department of Defense website but also by non-U.S. news outlets like AlJazeera (Garamone 2003). The story provided powerful visuals too, evidenced by the listing of 15, 900 listings on Youtube for the Baghdad zoo which included videos of the arrival of “Hope” and “Riley” two tiger cubs from the a United States’ zoo in 2008. News about animals, as the ultimate signifiers of supposedly noncultural, non-political divisions, can provide powerful soft news stories and powerful soft power impacts not only in zones of U.S. military action, but also on the U.S. home front where a battle for continued support of U.S. foreign policy must be waged. The stories can either be “bad news”—i.e. the bombing of the zoo and the escape of terrified animals, or “good news”—a rarity in a war zone—like rescuing Uday Hussein’s illkept lions from his private menagerie where they were left to starve. Therefore, we should pay attention to these stories, and track their generation by the military and the news media as well as their consumption in the U.S. and elsewhere … I opened this paper quoting National Public Radio war correspondent Anne Garrels saying that every was has its zoo story. I’d suggest here that there is a reason for that, and it is not the one Garrels provides—it has less to do with reporters wanting an easy interview with a camel and more to do with the power of soft news to support soft power. And the unacknowledged status of animals as the ultimate non-combatants who, perceived as free of any cultural, political, ethnic, or religious associations, are, even more than children, the most potent vehicle to generate that. Rather than dismissing such events and the stories they generate, we should be analyzing them for the cultural work they can and do.

Notes 1

See: New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, http://www.canterbury. ac.nz/Spark/Group.aspx?groupid=18; The Australian Animal Studies Group, http://www.aasg.org.au/; and The British Animal Studies Network, http://www.bri tishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk/. 2 H-Animals Discussion Network, http://www.h-net.org/~animal/, is an example of one listserve. Johns Hopkins University Press published a book series called “Animals, History, Culture.” Columbia University Press also publishes a book series called “Critical Perspectives on Animals: Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Culture.” 3 See http://ecoculturalgroup.msu.edu for information about Michigan State University’s Animal Studies graduate minor. See http://www.nyu.edu/about/newspublications/news/2010/09/23/nyu-creates-animal-studies-initiative-to-support-inte rdisciplinary-research-coursework-in-emerging-academic-field.html for information about NYU’s animal studies initiative.

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4

See University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Center for Advanced Study, http://www.cas.illinois.edu; and Knowing Animals Initiative, http://www.knowing animals.illinois.edu. 5 With rapid inflation, by 2008 the city government rate of pay for a garbage worker was approximately $8USD a day. Still, this means an annual wage of about $2,000, an amount easily available through CERP. See Hedgpeth, Dana and Sarah Cohen, “Money as a Weapon.” Washington Post August 11, 2008. http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/10/AR200808100 2512.html. 6 Stuart Bowen NPR interview. As of 2009, the U.S. congress has appropriated more than $10 billion in CERP funds for both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 7 “Iraq reconstruction project needs its own rebuild.” NPR. http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=114351038. 8 The incident is also at the center of the Pulitzer Prize nominated play Two Soldiers at the Baghdad Zoo, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2009. The senseless killing of the lion serves as the fulcrum for grappling with senseless death in the warzone. 9 Anthony’s South African citizenship was key to his ability to maneuver in the war infested city. It was crucial that he was both not Iraqi and not American. Iraqi’s responded to his “land of Mandela” self description, and American troops related to him as non-Iraqi and non-Arab. A team of mercenaries from South Africa, hired as security teams, adopted him as a compatriot and helped provide otherwise unavailable tools and foodstuffs for the zoo. 10 At least one political scientist has found though that those populations in the U.S. who get most of their foreign policy news from soft-news outlets like Entertainment Tonight (the least educated segments of the population) are likely to lean toward isolationist foreign policies seeing those stories as evidence of individual not institutional suffering or need (Baum 2002; Baum 2003).

Bibliography Anthony, Lawrence. 2007. Babylon’s Ark: the Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Baum, Matthew E. 2002. Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public. The American Political Science Review 96: 91-109. —. 2003. Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Denning, Kathryn. 2008. Regarding the Zoo: On the Deployment of a Metaphor. International Journal of Heritage Studies 14.1: 60-73. Desmond, Jane. 2001. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garamone, Jim. 2003. Baghdad Zoo Recovering from War, Looting. American Forces Press Service May 12. http://www.defense.gov/news

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/May%202003/no5122003_200305125.html (accessed December 8, 2009). Garrels, Anne. 2004. Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War and the Aftermath as Seen by NPR’s Correspondent. New York: Picador. Hedgpeth, Dana, and Sarah Cohen. 2008. Money as a Weapon. Washington Post August 11. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2008/08/10/AR2008081002512.html (accessed December 8, 2009). Howard, Jennifer. 2009. Creature Consciousness. Chronicle of Higher Education 56: B6-B9. Kent, Stephen E. 2004. Commander’s Emergency Response Program. Armed Forces Comptroller Summer. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_hb6527/is_3_49/ai_n29126563 (accessed December 8, 2009). Magnum, Teresa, and Corey K. Creekmur. 2007. A Graphic Novel Depicting Wars as an Interspecies Event: Pride of Baghdad. Animals and Society 15: 405-408. Mullan, Bob, and Garry Marvin. 1987. Zoo Culture. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Ltd. Nickels, Steven Zyan Kain. 2009. Baghdad Zoo Recovering From War Destruction. Digital Journal December 6. http://www.digitaljournal. com/article/283306 (accessed February 1, 2011). Swart, Sandra. 2010. Horses in the South African War, c. 1899-1902. Animals and Society 18: 349-366. Vaughan, Brian K., and Niko Henrichon. Pride of Baghdad. Vertigo, 2006. Whitney, Joel. 2008. How Soft is Smart: Joel Whitney interviews Joseph Nye. Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics October. http://www. guernicamag.com/interviews/how_soft_is_smart_1/ (accessed December 8, 2009). Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER FIVE DIFFERENT FEMINIST APPROACHES TO REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES: BIOPOLITICS IN FEMINIST SPECULATIVE FICTION ANNA GILAREK

Introduction The issue of reproduction has always been central to feminist politics due to its obvious relevance for women. The introduction of reproductive technologies has intensified the preoccupation with women’s procreative choices, sparking a heated debate in feminist circles. Consequently, feminist thought in this field is characterized by considerable variety. This diversity of studies testifies to the fact that feminism is by no means a monolithic movement but one characterized by inner diversity and a multiplicity of viewpoints, all of which prioritize the well-being of women. Two of the most prominent aspects in the discussions concerning reproductive technologies are the degree of medical interference and male participation in the procreative process, and the potential benefits and dangers for women. Liberal feminists generally endorse reproductive freedom, emphasizing the rights of individuals to choose from any available options according to their preferences (hooks 2000, 21). They perceive assisted reproduction as value-free or “ethically neutral,” that is, neither good nor evil, but potentially beneficial if used properly and only harmful when abused (Gregg 1995, 18). However, many radical feminists oppose such valuation, expressing the opinion that such developments are inherently evil, insofar as they are products of male science and will inevitably be used by men as a tool of continued patriarchal oppression. The most vehement criticism is voiced by such feminists as Andrea Eliot (1983),

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Gena Corea (1986, 1987), Rita Arditti and Renate Duelli Klein (1984), Robyn Rowland (1992), and Janice Raymond (1998). The main criticism against reproductive technologies is that they grant control over female bodies to men and thus limit women’s autonomy in every possible sense. Moreover, these radical feminists point to the intrusive character of such procedures, which are believed to manipulate female bodies. As a result, women are said to become objects rather than subjects. This objectification is closely associated with a commodification of both mothers and children. In accordance with Rosemarie Tong’s division concerning radical feminism, such convictions can be identified with radical-cultural feminism, as opposed to the radical-libertarian branch (2009, 3). Whereas the representatives of the former regard natural reproduction as their exclusive privilege, the latter see it as an encumbrance to be removed. Accordingly, radical-cultural feminists resist technological intervention in the reproductive process, while radical-libertarian feminists emphasize its emancipatory potential. Such a sanguine view on assisted reproduction is famously represented by Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), in which she identifies male control of reproduction as the locus of patriarchal oppression. She considers women in patriarchal societies to be reduced to the status of a sex-class, whose only hope for liberation lies in the technological revolution that would transform the politics of reproduction (Tong 2009, 75). In accordance with this view, the most appropriate way to achieve procreative freedom is to eliminate natural reproduction via ectogenesis, that is, extrauterine (in vitro) gestation. This would relieve women from the burden of live birth, distributing the responsibility for childcare equally to both sexes and enabling women to access the same opportunities and liberties that men enjoy. The result would be an androgynous society in which the differences between men and women are diluted in the name of total equality. By contrast, radical-cultural feminists perceive the exclusiveness of their reproductive capacity as a source of power rather than a burden. They reject the concept of androgyny while celebrating femininity and female biology. Such an essentialist stance renders them unwilling to eradicate inbody gestation, which they consider a feminine experience to be cherished. However, some essentialism-oriented feminists are not reluctant about reproductive technologies. This is especially the case with lesbian feminists, for whom the possibility of procreating without the need to engage in heterosexual intercourse is of vital importance.1 This could be accomplished by means of such various techniques as in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, ovafusion or chemically-induced parthenogenesis,

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which might permit women to procreate without the direct participation of men. The fact that most of these reproductive options remain within the realm of fantasy has attracted science fiction authors who have repeatedly explored this subject. Feminist science fiction enters into a dialogue with feminist theory and attempts to speculate on the consequences of adopting such solutions. It is in speculative fiction that authors “acknowledge the repressive economies of twentieth-century reproduction” (Donawerth 1997, 14). While utopias concentrate on reproduction as a solely female issue, dystopian works draw attention to the negative consequences of leaving it under male control. Thus, feminist utopian authors envision societies in which women can reproduce independently of men due to the use of advanced technologies. Dystopias, on the other hand, frequently depict women as reproductive slaves whose procreative function is exploited, leading to their complete social subordination. The aim of this essay is to analyze feminist utopian and dystopian visions in terms of their approach to technologized reproduction. I will demonstrate that the majority of authors perceive reproduction as the factor that determines women’s social liberation or subjugation. Thus, they introduce reproductive technologies in their works in order to explore the potential benefits of complete reproductive independence. To envision alternate universes in which procreation has been revolutionized is to draw attention to the actual problems posed by the lack of reproductive freedom in patriarchal societies.

Feminist Dystopia and Patriarchal Control of Reproduction Marleen Barr observes that “the writing of dystopian science fiction is intimately related to the realities of reproductive technologies and their threat to women’s autonomy” (1993, 92). Investigating the problem, dystopian authors envision worlds where women are breeders with absolutely no control over the time and manner of impregnation as well as no parental rights whatsoever. They are, as Barr aptly puts it, reduced to the status of “reproductive prisoners” or “birth machines” (Ibid., 83). The most prominent masculinist dystopias of this kind include The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood. The objectification of women depicted in this novel is thought to mirror similar problems posed by capitalism, which is considered to regulate women’s reproduction and exploit them as a sex class (Cortiel 1999, 76). The socialist feminist perspective is that women in this system are underprivileged because of their childbearing

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function, which relegates them to household duties and assigns them commodity status. Juliet Mitchell, Alison Jaggar, Iris Marion Young, Heidi Hartmann, and Sylvia Walby, have, among others, expressed such views (Tong 2009, 5). In The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood expresses in a fictional framework the fear that “reproductive technology will increase male control over women” (Ibid., 81). The novel depicts a quasi-religious regime, Gilead, in which there exists a class of women labeled as Handmaids, whose sole purpose in the system is to bear children for influential men, the Commanders, when their wives prove to be infertile. The Handmaids are not people in their own right but vehicles for child production, a fact of which they are perfectly aware: “We are for breeding purposes: we aren’t concubines, geisha girls, courtesans … there are no toeholds for love … We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices” (Atwood 1987, 146). Since all forms of medical intervention in the reproductive process, such as artificial insemination, are banned as unnatural, a Handmaid can only conceive a child by way of ordinary sexual intercourse. This assumes a form of an elaborate, “highly ritualized” ceremony, during which the Commander’s wife is present, as she is the one who will assume parental rights once the child is born (Booker 1994, 76). This “state-sanctioned rape” epitomizes the social, political and biological subjugation of women under patriarchy (Hooker 2006, 280). Furthermore, as Alice Adams notices, the depiction of the Handmaids’ situation “touches uncomfortably close to contemporary concerns, such as the intensifying battle over surrogacy, abortion, and fetal rights” (1994, 107). Indeed, the novel constitutes a critical voice in the debate over surrogate motherhood, which many feminists, like Gena Corea, Betty Friedan and Janice Raymond, to name a few (Markens 2007, 60), derogate as inimical to women, due to the fact that it turns them into “reproductive vessels” (Andrews 1998, 168). These feminists denounce paid surrogacy as they consider it harmful to both woman and child. Also, they emphasize the connection between surrogacy and two other factors limiting women’s freedom: denial of women’s right to abortion and to paid labor, both of which feature prominently in The Handmaid’s Tale. In addition, such complete lack of reproductive freedom might be an extrapolation of contemporary problems surging in the aftermath of the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the prominence of religious movements that seek to force women to have children, even if they prefer to abort (Booker and Thomas 2009, 265). Atwood expresses the conviction that such legal constraints as the criminalization of abortion constitute infringements of

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women’s freedoms depriving them of choice in regard to their physical and emotional state. Certainly, it is patriarchy that is to blame for the reproductive oppression of women. Dystopian works of feminist speculative fiction are aimed at making this point clear by means of straightforward social indictment. In feminist dystopian visions technologized reproduction is censured for taking pregnancy and birth out of women’s control, by the introduction of machine- and drug- controlled impregnation, gestation and labor.2 Also the potential pernicious effects of bioengineering are denounced.3 Unlike dystopias, feminist utopias offer more implicit criticism, expressed by the indication of better alternatives.

Feminist Utopia and Egalitarian Solutions Feminist utopias explore visions, which remain in stark contrast to bleak dystopian scenarios. Natural reproduction is frequently viewed in such works as “a mechanism of oppression” (Mohr 2005, 24). Here, technology assists women in overcoming patriarchal reproductive enslavement. The first approach to be discussed is the radical-libertarian angle, according to which men should play a greater part in the procreative process and share all responsibilities with women. Such an arrangement is envisioned by Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), in which the protagonist, Connie, travels to the future community of Mattapoisett where gender differences have become diluted and live birth has been replaced by ectogenesis so that everyone can become a mother. Thus, in Mattapoisett “childbearing has become technologized as a basis for equality” (Makinen 2001, 158). Fetuses are gestated in artificial wombs, the so-called brooders, for 9 to 10 months to ensure optimal time for development. Connie describes this in a detached manner in spite of her uneasiness at the sight of “seven human babies joggling slowly upside down, each in a sac of its own inside a larger fluid receptacle” (Piercy 1991, 102). Connie finds it hard to accept such changes, which, to her, seem largely unnatural or even non-human: “She hated them, the bland bottle-born monsters of the future, born without pain” (Ibid., 106). She also objects to the social organization of Mattapoisett, in particular, to the fact that when babies are “born,” they are given to any family unit that expresses a willingness to take a baby into its care. What is especially significant is the fact that such units consist of three people, the so-called co-mothers, none of whom are genetically related to the adopted children. Such an arrangement is thought to ensure a propitious environment for the proper functioning of the childrearing process. For the people of Mattapoisett it is vital that all children are valued for what they are and not

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because of the parents’ sense of genetic possession, which is a purely patriarchal notion (Tong 2009, 74). What is more, such factors as the co-mothers’ sex, sexual orientation and racial or ethnic origins are completely inconsequential, the result of which is a community of perfect tolerance, where only personality features retain significance. Still, Connie’s reaction is one of distress and incomprehension, “How can men be mothers? How can some kid that isn’t related to you be your child?” (Piercy 1991, 105). She initially fails to perceive the benefits accruing from this technological solution as her patriarchal upbringing shaped her perception and taught her to accept only patriarchal standards while rejecting others. Her guide in Mattapoisett, Luciente, explains to Connie why the transformation was indispensable: .

It was a part of women’s long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding. (Ibid., 105)

Relinquishing the power of giving birth is seen as a prerequisite to dismantling patriarchal organization in a world in which males dominate over female biology. Paradoxically, powerlessness can only be overcome when power is renounced and shared with men who can be changed through the positive experience of motherhood. Despite Luciente’s elucidation of the undeniable benefits of implementing such a technology, Connie cannot cope with the sense of deprivation felt at the thought that what she sees as a female privilege was ceded to men. She questions male ability to fulfill the role of the mother appropriately: “How can anyone know what being a mother means who has never carried a child nine months heavy under her heart, who has never borne a baby in blood and pain, who has never suckled a child, who got that child out of a machine …” (Ibid., 106). Clearly, she relates motherhood to the experience of giving birth, while the people of Mattapoisett see it as a voluntary choice—emotional rather than physical affinity. Moreover, they emphasize the fact that natural birth creates a bond with the child that cannot be shared by men, which is precisely what makes them inept as fathers and social beings. Some feminists, like Gloria Steinem, argue that it is due to mothering that women are less violent than men, since as life-givers they value life more (Murphy 1998, 182). Hence, the only way to better socialize men is to allow them to assume the roles of mothers.

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Another shock comes to Connie when she sees a man breastfeeding: an act which has been enabled by hormonal treatment, resulting in men growing breasts. This is intended to ensure that both sexes not only bear the same responsibility for the child but also that they have the same opportunity to strengthen the bond with the child while nursing. Connie, however, sees it differently: She felt angry. Yes, how dare any man share that pleasure. These women thought they had won, but they abandoned to men the last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and milk. (Piercy 1991, 134)

Connie feels as if women had been robbed of an exclusively feminine experience, their only source of superiority over men, who lack the ability to bear children. She seems to perceive women’s worth only as suppliers of babies and giving birth as their only achievement in society. Connie’s qualms embody some feminists’ fear that by such voluntary disempowerment women render themselves dispensable to society (Murphy 1998, 192). For instance, according to Robyn Rowland, the technologization of reproduction might ultimately result in the death of the female (Maher 2001). Piercy seems to anticipate such radical-cultural feminist arguments, according to which “women are allowed to exist in patriarchy because of their childbearing function” (Murphy 1998, 193), and their status in society would, therefore, be undermined by the use of reproductive technologies. She also attempts to refute this contention by demonstrating that women can be “valued for themselves rather than for their ability to carry children” (Rudy 1997, 28) and that only the use of reproductive technologies can ensure that. In Piercy’s vision, high-tech reproduction leads to a better community of perfect equality in which “everyone raises the kids … Romance, sex, birth, children … that isn’t women’s business anymore. It’s everybody’s” (1991, 251). Piercy’s text remains in concord with Shulamith Firestone’s views on reproduction. Firestone was the first theorist to advocate the profits that ectogenesis might bring. Like the inhabitants of Mattapoisett, for whom live birth is a horrific and bloody experience from primitive times, she considered pregnancy to be “barbaric” (Murphy 1998, 193) and appealed for a technological revolution to end women’s reproductive bondage (Wajcman 1991, 56). Despite a nostalgia for natural birth expressed in Piercy’s novel (Payant 1993, 103), the text is clearly a defense of Firestone’s views, especially of liberation by the introduction of reproductive

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balance whereby motherhood is degenderized and where sex is “uncouple[d] … from power” (Benford 1987, 81). Feminist utopian works like Piercy’s concentrate on depicting alternative forms of reproduction as utopian solutions. However, visions of reproductive freedom are meant primarily to underline the lack thereof in patriarchy. They point to actual problems that the infringement of women’s reproductive autonomy might bring. Women in strongly patriarchal societies are denied the right to birth control; they live in constant fear of unwanted pregnancy, as they are the ones who bear the brunt of its consequences. For instance, the discriminatory practices of a patriarchal society limit women’s career opportunities due to their maternal obligations, while men are free to pursue their goals. Moreover, women are barred from making informed and conscious choices concerning their procreative lives. This situation is caused by the lack of proper education and also by unequal power relations with their male partners. Additionally, pregnancies are not infrequently the result of sexual violence, in which case a woman might prefer to abort the fetus. Nonetheless, women are often denied the right to safe abortion, even when their health or life is endangered. Novels like Piercy’s provoke consideration of such problematic issues, even if not addressing them in a straightforward manner. Instead, they portray a more rewarding existence for women, which is seen as conditional on their reproductive freedom. This, in turn, is guaranteed by the application of advanced technologies.

Reproductive Independence in Feminist Separatist Utopias Some radical-cultural feminists, in particular, lesbian feminists also see high-tech reproduction as a liberating tool, yet they seek other ways to revolutionize the process. They prefer methods which would ultimately obviate the need for male participation, making women totally independent from men, while retaining in-body gestation. Such solutions are envisioned in feminist separatist utopias, in which women’s peaceful existence is conditioned by the elimination of men, as it is believed that patriarchal oppression can never be put to an end as long as men are present. However, the elimination of men can be realized only if women manage to assert their autonomy by gaining independence in the reproductive process. One of the most common devices imagined by feminist authors is the technology of ovafusion, in which two female ova are merged so that

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a child can be conceived without the use of sperm. Such a possibility is explored by Katherine V. Forrest’s Daughters trilogy (2002), which recounts the story of a group of women who call themselves the Unity. Tired of the abuses of patriarchy, they decide to leave Earth and create an all-female lesbian community on a different planet. Such a radical step was made possible by the discovery of Estrova, which allows them to “combine the motile ovum from one woman with the sessile ovum from another to create exclusively female life” (Forrest 2002, 180). Thus, not only does it render men redundant but it also ensures that no boys are born, which is seen as a guarantee of safety for women. The sociopolitical significance of this discovery is evident in the reaction of the male part of the society. Predictably, they consider the use of Estrova a violation of the natural course of events. Many men are advocates of very radical steps to curtail the procedure, “Death for unnatural procreation! The unnatural child is a monster. Death to monsters! Any woman using Estrova—we burn! Anyone found with Estrova—we burn!” (Ibid., 52). Such a violent reaction and Inquisitionlike rhetoric reveal the dread that men feel at the thought of being made obsolete. Primarily, however, their fear is connected with the sense of ceding control to women. “Freedoms given to women have created evil in the world” (Ibid., 52), men maintain, identifying evil with anything that threatens patriarchy. Therefore, all means available to the patriarchal apparatus are employed to stop Estrova from being used. Consequently, it is “buried under an even greater torrent of religious and medical condemnation and legislative hysteria than what once surrounded abortion” (Ibid., 180). Just like abortion and birth control, Estrova is outlawed to ensure male supremacy over female biology. Both men and women are aware of the fact that Estrova “represents biological independence for all women everywhere, for all time” (Ibid., 181). An example of woman-dominated reproduction at work is an allfemale planet, Maternas, where the women of the Unity are free to use Estrova and to make their own reproductive choices. As a result, every birth is a conscious decision and every child is wanted and taken care of. Consequently, abortion is not an issue, as there are no unplanned pregnancies. Thus, as far as children’s welfare is concerned, the effect is roughly the same as in Woman on the Edge of Time, the only, however conspicuous, difference being the presence of men or lack thereof. The trilogy is an expression of Forrest’s belief that the only way to terminate women’s oppression is to make reproduction “independent of heterosexual relations” (Melzer 2006, 222).

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A similar opinion is expressed by Suzy McKee Charnas who envisions an all-female community—the Riding Women, featured in Motherlines (1974). The text is a continuation of Walk to The End of the World, a masculinist dystopia in which men occupy a stretch of land they call the Holdfast which remains “virulently patriarchal” (Runyan 1994, 209). The dystopia exposes various forms of brutalization and exploitation of women, including reproductive slavery. In the sequel, Charnas contrasts the life of the Riding Women with that of the “fems” who remain under Holdfast authority. The Riding Women adopt reproductive solutions similar to the women of the Unity, yet the starting point for the procreative transformation is different. While the inventor of Estrova was a woman, Motherlines is an example of “how the technologies produced within modern patriarchy could be used to enact the revolution” (Adams 1994, 184). In other words, since science and technology are traditionally associated with patriarchy (Wajcman 1991, 5), they can be used by men as means of biological subjugation. It is one of the reasons why many radical feminists denounce technology as “invasive, misogynist, unnecessary” (Rudy 1997, 22). Still, as shown in Motherlines, women have the capacity to appropriate male technology for their own use in order to create means of male-free reproduction. Before the Wasting, a male-inflicted ecological disaster, men conducted experiments on women which involved breeding females with two sets of genes, resulting in one-parent reproduction. This laid the groundwork for parthenogenesis, asexual reproduction without fertilization. The Riding Women from Charnas’s novel are the descendants of the “first daughters,” who managed to survive the Wasting and “figured out how to use the men’s information machines” (Charnas 1989, 273). They live in the Grasslands, a desert area, of which men of the Holdfast have only a vague conception. Their separate existence is made possible by the fact that, as the descendants of the lab women used in the tests, their genomes are altered in such a manner that they have developed the capacity to reproduce parthenogenetically. As one of the Riding Women explains, “Our seed, when ripe, will start growing without merging with male seed, because it already has its full load of traits from the mother. The lab men used a certain fluid to start this growth. So do we” (Ibid., 274). This procedure is not without drawbacks. First of all, in every procreative act the offspring, invariably a daughter, doubles the traits of her mother. This leads to a total lack of genetic variation, precluding any chance for growth or development (Shugar 1995, 160). Another controversial aspect of such a reproductive method is the fact that the fluid used by the women to

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catalyze the onset of pregnancy is horse’s semen. During annual meetings women mate with stallions, a procedure which only “starts [the] seed growing” (Charnas 1989, 296), without any genetic contribution on the part of the horse. “We are not half horse” (Ibid., 296) the women emphasize. One can conclude that this reproductive solution is still preferable to the women’s reproductive exploitation in the Holdfast (Barr 1993, 45), which is characterized by “enforced violent reproduction” (Mohr 2005, 196). The Riding Women see mating with horses as superior to intercourse with a human male, as the act of impregnation is free from the sense of sexual subjugation, “He [the horse] is innocent … it’s nothing at all like a man overpowering a fem just to show her who’s master” (Charnas 1989, 297). As for the procedure itself, it is considered “simple and clean, compared to rape in the Holdfast” (Ibid., 274). Thus, mating with horses allows the Riding Women to “separate sexuality from reproduction, possession and domination” (Mohr 2005, 201). Consequently, they are shown to be living a better and freer existence than the “fems” in the patriarchal Holdfast. Moreover, being “a new species” (Clemente 2004, 85), they are depicted as superior to females who were not altered genetically and did not develop the capacity for parthenogenesis. Dana Shugar notices that for the Riding Women the heterosexual method of reproduction transforms women into slaves because “their creation relies on male participation in what the women perceive to be a singularly female function” (1995, 163). Therefore, as a solely feminine domain it ought to remain completely inaccessible to men. Novels like Charnas’s or Forrest’s can be seen as an indication that our own society faces the problem of male control that stems from heterosexual intercourse and generates reproductive oppression (Donawerth 1997, 15).

Concluding Remarks Assisted reproduction has been a controversial issue among feminists, due to disagreements as to its consequences for women. Shulamith Firestone’s early enthusiasm about its liberating potential was quickly replaced by caution and even outright rejection. In order to oppose and monitor the development of reproductive technologies, anti-technology feminists established a network called FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering). The organization expresses the concerns that many feminists share, mainly that assisted reproduction is intended “to control population quantity and quality through controlling women’s reproductive capacities” (FINRRAGE).

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Opponents of technologized reproduction fear the consequences of the unchecked growth of reproductive technologies. It is believed that this growth might lead to such morally questionable developments as eugenics and sex pre-selection. These, in turn, might entail commercialized production of children made to order. Still, it has to be acknowledged that despite these objections, the wide range of alternatives offered by technologized reproduction has stirred the imagination of numerous feminist science fiction authors, who often present it as one of the potential weapons in the battle against patriarchy and its inherent biological inequality. Feminist speculative fiction novels provide an arena in which to “dramatize scientific theories, to explore the development of new technologies, and even to speculate about the future of social and political relations” (Yasek 2008, 419). Science fiction authors conduct intellectual experiments to indicate viable options, but also to highlight problematic issues, which are often accepted as the norm, such as the fact that under certain circumstances pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing may be disempowering for women. Even if, as Maureen McNeill observes in her recent study, reproductive technologies failed to bring about the expected liberation of women, the very act of speculating about their potential is significant (2007, 85). Feminist science fiction works draw attention to the fact that many women are dissatisfied with their biological destiny, or rather with the manner in which it is fulfilled in a patriarchal society. In reaction to this discontent, writers explore such alternatives as eliminating women’s reproductive labor or seizing absolute control over procreation. The results of both scenarios are comparable— the males in the invented worlds no longer have the capacity to control female biology. This gives women reproductive freedom which is translated into the spheres of personal and public life. According to Max Charlesworth, the feminist consensus that has been reached on the issue of reproductive technologies is characterized by a mixture of healthy skepticism and an acceptance of its potential benefits (1995, 131-132). Still, many feminists doubt that assisted reproduction could bring any tangible effects in real life. For instance, Juliet Mitchell remarks that “it is not a question of changing (or ending) who has or how one has babies. It is a question of overthrowing patriarchy” (Adams 1994, 193). In other words, patriarchy has permeated so many spheres of social life that the problem is too multifaceted to be approached from only one angle. Therefore, it might be assumed that pro-technology feminists are mistaken in their belief that once reproduction is revolutionized, gender problems will disappear. Therefore, one can argue that the presentation of such far-fetched technologies as ecto- or parthenogenesis in feminist

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science fiction is merely meant to estrange the reader in an effort to raise awareness of existing problems and the need to address them. This defamiliarization raises readers’ consciousness of the necessity of redefining gender roles with regard to parenthood and of the need to grant women the right to autonomous reproductive decisions.

Notes 1

See Erica Haimes and Kate Weiner, “‘Everybody’s Got a Dad ...’. Issues for Lesbian Families in The Management of Donor Insemination” (2000) and Elizabeth Sourbut, “Gynogenesis: a Lesbian Appropriation of Reproductive Technologies” (1996). 2 Such visions are to be found in Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), Zoe Fairbairns’ Benefits (1979), and Katherine Marcuse’s “Twenty-First Century Mother “(1976). 3 A dystopian vision explored by Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake (2003).

Bibliography Adams, Alice E. 1994. Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature. Ithaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, Andrews, Lori B. 1998. Surrogate Motherhood. In Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology, ed. Patrick D. Hopkins, 157-170. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Arditti, Rita, and Renate Duelli Klein. 1984. Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? London: Taylor & Francis. Atwood, Margaret. 1987. The Handmaid’s Tale. London: Virago Press Ltd. —. 2003. Oryx and Crake. Bloomsbury: McClell and Stewart. Barr, Marleen. 1993. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Benford, Gregory. 1987. Reactionary Utopias. In Storm Warnings: Science Fiction Confronts the Future, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, 73-87. Carbondale, IL.: Southern Illinois University Press. Booker, M. Keith. 1994. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press. Booker, M. Keith, and Anne-Marie Thomas. 2009. The Science Fiction Handbook. Singapore: Fabulous Printers Pte Ltd. Charlesworth, Max. 1995. Whose Body? Feminist Views on Reproductive Technology. In Troubled Bodies: Critical Perspectives on

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Postmodernism, Medical Ethics, and the Body, ed. Paul A. Komesaroff, 125-141. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press. Charnas, Suzy McKee. 1989. Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines. London: The Women’s Press. Clemente, Bill. 2004. Apprehending Identity in the Alldera Novels of Suzy McKee Charnas. In The Utopian Fantastic Selected Essays from the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Martha Bartter, 181-190. Westport: Praeger Publishers. Corea, Gena. The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. —. 1987. Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cortiel, Jeanne. 1999. Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Donawerth, Jane. 1997. Frankenstein’s Daughters. Syracuse, NY.: Syracuse University Press. Dworkin, Andrea. 1983. Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females. London: The Women’s Press. Fairbairns, Zoe. 1979. Benefits. London: Virago Press. Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company. Forrest, Katherine V. 2002. Daughters of an Amber Noon. Los Angeles, CA.: Alyson Books. Haimes, Erica, and Kate Weiner. 2000. ‘Everybody’s Got a Dad ...’. Issues for Lesbian Families in The Management of Donor Insemination. Sociology of Health & Ilness 22.4: 477-499. Gregg, Robin. 1995. Pregnancy in a High-Tech Age: Paradoxes of Choice. New York: New York University Press. Hooker, Deborah. 2006. (Fl)orality, Gender, and the Environmental Ethos of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Twentieth Century Literature 52(3): 275-297. hooks, bell. 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. London: Pluto Press. Lloyd, Moya. 2005. Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Maher, Jane-Maree. 2001. The Productivities of Pregnancy: Reviewing Medical Technologies and Feminist Critiques. Hecate 27(2): 135-146. Makinen, Merja. 2001. Feminist Popular Fiction. New York: Palgrave. Marcuse, Katherine. 1976. Twenty-First Century Mother. In Marriage and the Family through Science Fiction, eds. Val Clear, Patricia Warrick,

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Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph Olander, 21-15. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Markens, Susan. 2007. Surrogate Motherhood and The Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press. McNeill, Maureen. 2007. Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology. New York: Routledge. Melzer, Patricia. 2006. Alien Constructions. Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. Austin: The University of Texas Press. Mohr, Dunja M. 2005. Worlds Apart: Dualism And Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. Jefferson: McFarland and Company Inc. Publishers. Murphy, Julien S. 1998. Is Pregnancy Necessary? In Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology, ed. Patrick D. Hopkins, 184-200. Bloomington IN.: Indiana University Press. Payant, Katherine B. 1993. Becoming and Bonding: Contemporary Feminism and Popular Fiction by American Women Writers. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press. Piercy, Marge. 1991. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Ballantine Books. Raymond, Janice. 1998. Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and The Battle Over Women’s Freedom. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Rowland, Robyn. 1992. Living Laboratories Women and Reproductive Technologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rudy, Kathy. 1997. Ethics, Reproduction, Utopia: Gender and Childbearing in Woman on the Edge of Time and The Left Hand of Darkness. NWSA Journal 9(1): 38-48. Runyan, Anne Sisson. 1994. Radical Feminism: Alternative Futures. In Women, Gender, and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies, and Prospects, eds. Peter R. Beckman and Francine D’Amico, 201-215. Westport: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Shugar, Dana R. 1995. Separatism and Women’s Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Sourbut, Elizabeth. 1996. Gynogenesis: a Lesbian Appropriation of Reproductive Technologies. In Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace, eds. Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti, 227-241. London: Zed. Tong, Rosemarie. 2009. Feminist Thought. A More Comprehensive Introduction. Boulder, CO.: Westview Press.

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Wajcman, Judy. 1991. Feminism Confronts Technology. University Park, PA.: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Wilhelm, Kate. 1976. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. New York: Harper and Row. Yasek, Lisa. 2008. Science Fiction. In Women, Science, and Myth. Gender Beliefs from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Sue V. Rosser, 419-426. Santa Barbara, CA.: ABC-CLIO Inc. FINRRAGE: Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering. http://www.finrrage.org/index.html.

CHAPTER SIX THE CENTRIFUGAL AGE: LITERARY MOVEMENTS OF AVANT-POP, SLIPSTREAM AND BIZARRO JULIA NIKIEL

Introduction The rise of postmodernism in the second half of the twentieth century was symptomatic of a shift in thinking about the world many people experienced in the late 1950s and 1960s. Both in its content and form, postmodern literature mirrored people’s uncertainty as well as their growing skepticism about the existence of objectivity or ultimate truths. Yet, at the turn of the twenty-first century, opinions started to proliferate proclaiming the end of the postmodern era. According to some critics, postmodernism in literature, no longer novel and refreshing, was simply finished. This, however, does not seem to be the case. It was in the final decades of the twentieth century that the general intensification of decentralizing tendencies in the field of literature and culture led to the emergence of a number of literary movements which today can be said to spring from the esthetics of postmodernism, but which are also highly miscellaneous and, even more importantly, ultimately modern in their approach towards such concepts as language, plot, literary boundaries or genre decorum. In this paper, I introduce three, most prominent, movements which seem to have evolved through contemporization of postmodernism: AvantPop, Slipstream and Bizarro. Explaining first the circumstances of the movements’ emergence, I demonstrate that they are representative of what Frank L. Cioffi (1999) calls centrifugal changes in contemporary literature. After I specify the movements’ links with the esthetics of postmodernism, I proceed to describe individual artists’ lineage as well as the subjects and artistic forms they explore. Finally, I conclude that not

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only Avant-Pop, Slipstream and Bizarro, but also most of the other newlyemergent literary movements respond to the current need for structural and thematic diversity, creating literary representations whose changeability and provocative character match the reality which produces them.

(Post)Postmodernism in the Making What was postmodernism? What was postmodernism, and what is it still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. (Hassan 2001, 1)

In one of his essays, Charles Jencks argues that the development of postmodernism followed “a sinuous, even tortuous, path. Twisting to the left and then to the right, branching down the middle, it resemble[d] the natural form of spreading root or meandering river that divides, changes course … and takes off in a new direction” (1986, 2). Another critic observes, that a “rather vague, nebulous, portmanteau word for everything that is more modern than modern,” today the term “postmodernism” “appears in virtually every sphere of … culture and media” (Woods 1999, 3). It is only rarely, however, that those who use postmodernism as a fancy buzzword realize how varied and changeable postmodernism has been and how many unpredictable forms it has always assumed. In 1959, Partisan Review published Irving Howe’s essay “Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction.” In his text, Howe described a passive and alienated society founded upon consumption and mass production, one in which values are confused and traditional sources of authority undermined. Exactly twenty years later, Jean-François Lyotard’s La Condition Postmoderne officially introduced postmodernism into the philosophical glossary. Translated into English as “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” Lyotard’s book used the word “postmodern” with reference to “the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies” (2003, 72), which, according to Lyotard, were characterized by a profound distrust towards grand or metanarratives. An analysis and, in fact, also a poignant critique of what became known as the postmodern societies were included in Frederic Jameson’s controversial article “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” printed in New Left Review in 1984. In the article, Jameson claimed that the contemporary dissolution of values and social codes resulted from the modes of thinking and the structures of labor imposed upon human societies by the late, that is mid-twentieth century, capitalism. Postmodernism marked its presence not only in the fields of philosophy, epistemology and social studies. By the late 1960s and 1970s

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the term was adopted also by a number of architects such as Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks (Drolet 2003, 2), who began to use it to differentiate between the modernist International Style and the new architectural forms distinguished by referentiality, ornament and eclecticism. What is more, in his famous treatise Simulacra and Simulation (1995), Jean Baudrillard described what he saw as the “new era of information technology [and] of images exchanged and consumed in dizzy profusion” (Mikics 2004, 169). In the following years, Simulacra and Simulation came to be perceived as a seminal text heralding the emergence of a reality characterized by the loss of realness. Finally, it was in the 1970s that literary critics like Ihab Hassan or Leslie Fiedler started to identify certain esthetic shifts which they observed in the field of literature and which, being closely connected with the issues analyzed by Howe, Jameson or Lyotard, were, in their opinion, indicative of the emergence of the postmodern literature. As Connor remarks, “Postmodernism was not the invention of literary critics, but literature can certainly claim to be one of [its] most important laboratories” (2004, 62). From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, a growing number of recognizably postmodern works were created by such American authors as William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Robert Coover or Donald Barthelme. What is more, “Postmodernism’s prominence in the 1970s and 1980s was visible not only in syllabuses and academic journals but also, for instance, in the postmodern turn taken by [such] decidedly nonacademic author[s] like Philip Roth” (Hoberek 2007, 235-236). All of the above-mentioned writers came to be known as postmodernists, authors whose fiction was not a mere replacement or successor of modernism, but rather an expression of a new, celebratory sooner than repentant, way of writing and thinking. Postmodernism’s dependence on the concepts of modernism as well as the movement’s nature and idiosyncratic characteristics became the main field of interest of the literary theorist Ihab Hassan. In “Towards a Concept of Postmodernism,” Hassan proposed a table in which, by juxtaposing a number of concepts, he created a schematic comparison between the modern and the postmodern—Purpose vs. Play, Design vs. Chance, Hierarchy vs. Anarchy, Distance vs. Participation, Centering vs. Dispersal, Root/Depth vs. Rhizome/Surface, Type vs. Mutant (1987, 91). Nonetheless, as Hassan admitted himself, these and other dichotomies could not be treated as absolute and unequivocal, because “concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound” (Ibid., 92). A further analysis of the esthetics of postmodernism appeared in Hassan’s famous

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essay “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective” published in Critical Inquiry in 1986. In this essay Hassan listed eleven concepts which according to him explicated postmodernism. The notions included indeterminacy, fragmentation, decanonization, irony, self-less-ness/depth-less-ness, the un(re)presentable, hybridization, carnivalization, performance/participation and immanence. Hassan’s eleven concepts might be seen as forming a general frame for the definition of postmodernism. Postmodernist criticism owes a lot, however, also to a number of other literary theoreticians, most notable of them being Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale suggested that “where modernist fiction is epistemological—… concerned with problems of knowledge and understanding, postmodernist fiction is ontological—… concerned with the creation and interrelation of worlds of being” (Woods 1999, 65). In his second book, Constructing Postmodernism (1992), McHale analyzed the postmodernist tendency to project unstable literary environments, deconstructed, self-erasing, self-reflexive or fragmented realities construed “according to a logic not of development, or of the unfolding of a preexisting form, but of compilation, a word that is often taken to mean a piling or heaping together, but may in fact derive from Latin compilare, meaning ‘to plunder’” (Ibid., 75). Apart from presenting postmodernist worlds as riotous and subversive, McHale investigated also the Baudrillardian notion of the postmodernist dependence on television and mediation as well as the postmodernist rejection of “the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ art …, belie[f] in excess, in gaudiness, and in ‘bad taste’ mixtures of qualities” (Barry 1995, 84) and the literary postmodernism’s tendency to scavenge on texts and meanings. In her A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), Linda Hutcheon, on the other hand, chose to focus on the literary manifestations of the waning of grand narratives described by Jean-François Lyotard. Analyzing postmodernism, or narcissistic or historiographic metafiction, as she calls it, in terms of ex-centricism and polyphony of narrative voices, she shows that “postmodernism seeks local or provisional, rather than universal and absolute, forms of legitimation” (Woods 1999, 11). In 2005 in The Death of the Postmodern and the Post-Ironic Lull, intellectual historian Minsoo Kang proclaimed the final demise of postmodernism and dated it to June 18, 1993, the day when John McTiernan’s The Last Action Hero (1993) translated onto the screen such postmodern devices as satire and referentiality (Hoberek 2007, 237). According to Kang, “in the US … there [was] no surer sign of an intellectual idea’s final demise than its total appropriation by mass culture”

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(Hoberek 2007, 237). Today, however, it seems that such statements may be far too extreme, for, in the case of postmodernism, the appropriation by popular culture appears to constitute not dissolution but rather a step in a new direction. As Connor argues, in the new millennium, postmodernism is “indeed show[ing] an extraordinary capacity to renew itself in the conflagration of its [proclaimed] demise” (2004, 1). In The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, Connor writes that “just as Goethe is said to have died with the Enlightenment slogan ‘Mehr Licht!’ (‘More Light!’) on his lips, so at one point one might have imagined postmodernism going ungently into its goodnight uttering the defiant cry, ‘More Voices!’” (Ibid., 14-15). Today, thanks to mass media and the blurring of high and mass culture, the postmodern goal of polyphony can be finally realized. As Frank L. Cioffi puts it, “[T]he dividing line between ‘serious,’ ‘elite,’ or ‘literary’ fiction and ‘popular’ ‘potboilers’ has become [today] so osmotic that it … seems a fully permeable membrane allowing back and forth passage as easily as a capillary” (1999, 84). Formerly neglected mediums of literary expression such as the graphic novel or the cross-genre mixtures of reality and fiction find themselves promoted to the status of serious writing (Hoberek 2007, 237), while more and more literary modes mark their presence on the American literary scene. As Andrew Hoberek observes, “American fiction [seems to] ha[ve] entered a phase of as-yet-uncategorized diversity similar to the one that prevailed following World War II” (2007, 237); an era which Cioffi calls “The Centrifugal Age,” one in which “everything seems to be spinning out from the center … And there is no center, or the center cannot hold” (2004, 82). Decentralizing tendencies in the field of literature and culture not only accompany but also accelerate the contemporization of postmodernism. As a result, today, postmodernism appears to be undergoing a pop culture-generated, post-itself diffusion into a number of more or less independent literary phenomena. Three, probably most prominent examples of such phenomena are Avant-Pop, Slipstream and Bizarro.

Postmodern by Birth, or “[p]ost-this, post-that, post-the-other, yet in the end/ Not past a thing” According to such theorists as Mark Amerika, John Kessel, Heinz Insu Fenkl and Carlton Mellick III, Avant-Pop, Slipstream and Bizarro are distinctive literary movements engaged in their own idiosyncratic dialogues with the readers and with reality. Nonetheless, having evolved through contemporization rather than renunciation of postmodernism, all

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three movements remain to a large extent grounded in postmodern esthetics. First of all, all three phenomena exemplify a profound incredulity towards most recognized canons and authorities. Acting against the hegemony of imposed perceptions and meanings, authors associated with Avant-Pop, Slipstream and Bizarro discredit such naturalized mastercodes as history and religion and emphasize the fact that in a highly ambiguous world, everything remains open to revision and reinterpretation. Apparently well aware of the contemporary de-centering of selfhood, they endeavor to reflect the contemporary sense of incompleteness common to people lost inside the alienating and indifferent world of today. Intent on showing that today nothing can be in fact taken for granted, Avant-Popsters, Slipstreamers and Bizarro writers follow Hassan and McHale in rejecting the idea of a fixed and coherent reality. Breaking narrative frames and defamiliarizing reality, they project unstable but disturbingly possible literary environments which perform the double role of playgrounds for the author’s creativity and of (distorted) mirrors of the real world—as argued by Larry McCaffery—“these books refuse to privilege a single familiar world, instead they insist that reality is multiple, a fluid interaction of people, codes, and meanings not reducible to the empirical biases of most so-called ‘realistic’ fiction of the past” (1992, 219). “These works … lured me outside my genre safety zone. They made me uneasy. They made me want more” (Black). The feeling of uneasiness Holly Black mentions in “Stepping Over The Cracks” appears to be directly linked with another postmodernist characteristic common to Slipstream, Avant-Pop and Bizarro—the movements’ tendency to experiment and cross-pollinate. By overtly opposing literary conventions and genre homogeneity as well as by intruding into the sphere of correspondence between words and their meanings, authors associated with the three phenomena carnivalize their texts, turn them inside out and create captivating parodies and pastiches inside which both the stylistic and the semantic literary boundaries become blurred. Exploiting the generative power of language, they turn to playful experimentation and heterogeneity as means of subverting the traditional belief in the dependability of linguistic discourse. Furthermore, by means of intertextuality and plagiarism as well as by refusing to rely upon sequentiality and by imitating the techniques used by the mass media, they seem to challenge the idea of storytelling and create fragmented, collage-like, hallucinatory and very often schizophrenic texts which remain open to interpretation and demand the readers’ participation in the decoding or even in the production of

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meanings. As stated by an Avant-Pop author Dough Rice, the “readers must fuck the text. Interact with the text in such a way as to produce meaning, not try to repeat the perceived authorial intention” (1996, 5). However, it should not be assumed that Avant-Pop, Slipstream and Bizarro constitute merely contemporary continuations of postmodernism. Despite various similarities between them and the tenets of postmodernism, they are all characterized by a number of features which contribute to their distinctive literary identities and which distinguish them from other contemporary (post)postmodernisms.

“I Want to be Television”—Avant-Pop, or Writing inside a Mediascape In 1986 Lester Bowie, an American composer and trumpeter, released a jazz album entitled Avant-Pop. Using popular culture as a repository of musical themes which he investigated and then reworked, Bowie created an innovative, improvisatory work which showed that “glitzy, kitschy, easily consumable pop materials are [in fact] a rich source of raw material whose elements can be explored, played with, and otherwise creatively transformed” (McCaffery 1995, xxi). Bowie was not alone in his recognition of the potential of popular or mass culture, for the late 1980s and the early 1990s marked the emergence of a new breed of artists. In their works they combined “Pop Art’s focus on mass culture with the avant-garde’s spirit of transgression and emphasis on the use of radical formal methods” (McCaffery 1996, 1), thereby following the same pattern as Bowie by merging innovation with elements appropriated from the mainstream. While they did not form a coherent group, the artists came to be known as Avant-Popsters, creating what Larry McCaffery and Ronald Sukenick called the Avant-Pop phenomenon. As the hyphenated form of its name suggests, Avant-Pop traces its lineage to two important artistic phenomena, namely to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European avant-garde and to the Pop Art movement which appeared in the second half of the twentieth century. While Avant-Pop adopts avant-garde radicalism and rebelliousness and acknowledges the artistic value of the banal and the kitschy, the movement claims above all to be a literary response to the reality in which its representatives live and create—the reality of hyperconsumption and the unprecedented development of technology and mass media. Hyperconsumption to a large extent constitutes an inundation which by means of digital media presents hyperconsumers with unending levels of easily-accessible information, simultaneously immersing them in popular

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culture, which becomes the source not only of entertainment, but more importantly of archetypes, patterns of behavior, and points of reference. These archetypes and patterns are multiple, ready-made and often supplemented by—or supplanted with—images. What is more, as they are mediated and diffused by means of television and the Internet, they become ubiquitous and consequently appear highly credible, which is why consumers accept them as socially appropriate and use them in their everyday lives. In this way mediascapes enter people’s lives. Once subordinate to the real world, they now aspire to become this world’s lawful parts (or even heirs to this world’s realness). Thus, far from functioning only as channels through which information and culture reach people, media act as tools by means of which mass culture essentially colonizes, consumes and processes the life it feeds on. In their writing, Avant-Pop authors remain supremely critical of the social scale of hyperconsumption. Moreover, raised in the age of television and the Internet, hence familiar with the ways in which media-generated culture functions, they seem eager to demonstrate to what extent today’s people’s lives are infiltrated by contemporary mediascapes. Thus, instead of engaging in a direct assault upon hyperconsumption’s hegemony, Avant-Popsters choose to adopt a more flexible attitude and practice what can be called a parasitic relationship with mass culture, with which they co-exist and co-evolve, but which they are also constantly striving to subvert (McCaffery 1995, xvi). In order to show readers how easy it is to get lost and even to lose oneself in (the world of mass) mediation, they mimic mass media techniques and construct literary worlds which in their data saturation, fragmentariness and nonsensical structure mirror what Larry McCaffery calls a “revolving-door reality” (Ibid., xxvii), that is a kind of media-specific reality in which the world and its representations are never totally separated. Demonstrating the degree to which contemporary mass media tend to consume everything from history to people’s imagination and individuality, Avant-Popsters lay bare the rapaciousness of mass culture, make people realize how dangerous this culture’s ubiquity might be, and prove how cunningly media act in order to lure people into artificially projected worlds in which they risk losing not only their identities but also their sense of reality.

“A Place Where You Have Never Been”— Slipstream, or Estranging the Everyday In 1989, three years after the release of Lester Bowie’s Avant-Pop album, in a column published in the SF Eye, Bruce Sterling, a science

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fiction author and one of the fathers of the cyberpunk movement, proclaimed the existence of Slipstream, “a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality” (Sterling). Although he remained skeptical about Avant-Pop’s prospects of becoming a fullyrecognized genre, Sterling did grant it some degree of literary identity. According to him, Avant-Pop deserved the same recognition as was due to the whole motley of texts crammed under the umbrella term of “science fiction” (Sterling). Aiming to increase Slipstream’s credibility, Sterling created the Slipstream List. In addition to a number of little known writers, the list included also such prominent figures as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Günter Grass, William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. Over time, thanks to figures like John Clute, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel and Heinz Insu Fenkl, the term Slipstream came to coexist with such cognates as fabulation, cross-genre or interstitial fiction. All of these cognates, though not precisely synonymous and sometimes, as happens with fabulation and interstitiality, seen as superordinate, revealed a farreaching affinity with Slipstream and helped clarify this phenomenon’s theoretical background. Similarly to Avant-Pop, authors associated with Slipstream did not form a coherent group. Nevertheless, the majority of their works should be placed somewhere between the mainstream and the speculative writing; they exhibit a number of features which—especially if measured against the genres of fantasy and science fiction— witness of the phenomenon’s literary distinctiveness. Writers, while willing to address readers’ expectations, usually create either completely familiar (in structure, in theme, or even in both) or thoroughly foreign narrative realities. As such they respond either to the readers’ sentiment for canons or their desire to become immersed in the unknown. In the case of Slipstream, however, instead of making readers choose between home and new lands, writers offer the experience of the fringe, the in-between. They achieve it by quoting literary worlds and by creating generic jigsaw puzzles, i.e., works which simultaneously maintain a relationship with a number of literary conventions. “Slipstream,” Bruce Sterling argues, “tends not to ‘create’ new worlds, but to ‘quote’ them, chop them up out of context, and turn them against themselves” (Sterling). When readers enter Slipstream texts, they face realities only superficially resembling those they expect, ones which while in some ways familiar, are, however, changed to such an extent that they border on the unrecognizable and “morph into something that even the most astute reader would never have been able to predict from the opening paragraphs, and sometimes even from the penultimate paragraphs” (Adams). Constructing texts which both push literary conventions to their limits and

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explore genre borderlands, authors such as Carol Emshwiller, Michael Chabon and Jeff VanderMeer attempt to provide readers with “the epiphany that comes from breaking through to someplace different” but unfrequented, and as such, thrilling, because still “not quite mapped” (VanderMeer). In other words, Slipstream writers seek ways to disturb their readers’ sense of the ordinary and to show them that what they consider real and normal is in fact disorienting and weird. Trying to determine what, apart from genre cross-pollination, lies at the core of Slipstream’s literary identity, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel in “Slipstream, the Genre That Isn’t” note that “where horror is the literature of fear, Slipstream is the literature of cognitive dissonance and of strangeness triumphant” (2006, xi). The strangeness Kelly and Kessel mention apparently concerns the tendency of Slipstream “to sarcastically tear at the structure of ‘everyday life’” (Sterling) and hence to manifest the conviction that there is not much order in reality. Incoherent and unpredictable, disorienting and feeling like dreams or déjà vus, Slipstream texts tend both to resist discernment and to defy common sense. “What’s more,” Bruce Sterling writes, “they often somehow imply that ‘nothing we know makes’ ‘a lot of sense’ and perhaps even that ‘nothing ever could’” (Sterling). Cognitive dissonance relates to Slipstream’s being “an expression of the zeitgeist” (Kelly and Kessel 2006, xii) of the twenty-first century and is analyzed in detail by Kelly in an interview with John Joseph Adams: When we are presented with two contradictory cognitions—impressions, feelings, beliefs—we experience cognitive dissonance, a kind of psychic discomfort that we normally try to ease by discounting one of the cognitions as false or illusory and promoting the other to reality. But in some cases we aren't well served by this convenient sorting out. (Adams)

According to Kelly, in the contemporary reality of ubiquitous information and variety it is often better for people not to choose between options but instead to make their minds simultaneously nest two contradictory ideas (Adams). Responding to this reality, Slipstream embraces cognitive dissonance and constructs its literary environments on the basis of the coexistence of two or more opposing cognitions. Hence, defying any explicit answers, Slipstream writers point towards the impenetrable character of (contemporary) reality and provide their readers with stories which first “present … contradictions and then, deliberately and with great skill, elaborate on them without trying to resolve them” (Kelly and Kessel 2006, xii).

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“The Ultimate Outsider Lit”—Bizarro, or Seasoning the Weird with the Absurd The beginnings of Bizarro, the third phenomenon whose emergence seems linked with the contemporization and diffusion of postmodernism, should be traced back to the late 1990s. At that time there appeared a group of underground authors interested in exploring the “weird, cultlike storytelling, the literary equivalent of a David Lynch or Tim Burton movie” (Frank) and “focus[ed] on unexplained speculative elements pinioned by heavy doses of humor and repulsion” (Keene). Most of the authors associated with the phenomenon, and among them writers such as D. Harlan Wilson, Vincent Sakowski, Paul Bradshaw or Kevin L. Donihe, had their books already rejected by a number of publishing houses, because of the publishers’ skepticism about the books’ marketability and their appeal to the general audience. Hence, as the scene grew, within several years there appeared not only zines but also publishing companies—Afterbirth Books, Raw Dog Screaming Press, Eraserhead Press—which came to specialize exactly in the kind of fiction the scene produced. The turning point in the development of the Bizarro movement was in 2005 when on his personal blog, John Edward Lawson published Kevin Dole 2’s essay “So What the Fuck Is This All About?”—“NOT A GENRE MANIFESTO! but rather, an attempt to shallowly explicate [a] new genre, whatever it’s called” (Dole 2). Lawson’s post triggered a self-reflective discussion among the authors who identified themselves with the scene described by Dole. What all the authors agreed on was that their fiction definitely eluded any clear-cut literary divisions: “We’re kind of sci-fi, but more concerned with the esthetics of technology than material prediction,” Dole wrote, Magical realism with a little too much of the former and not enough of the latter; horror more interested in the grotesque than the macabre; stuff that would be pornographic if it were in any way an attempt to be sexually titillating. Very dark, but often funny. (Dole, 2)

In spite of initial fear of becoming labeled and hence, in their opinion, both losing their literary identities and having to conform to certain imposed generic limitations, authors like Vincent Sakowski, John Edward Lawson, Andre Duza, Carlton Mellick III and Gina Ranalli finally recognized the affinities among their works and chose to identify their writing with what, after days of discussion, they agreed to call “Bizarro.”

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According to its theorists, “Bizarro, simply put, is the genre of the weird” (Team Bizarro 2006, 5). The quality of weirdness alludes to the disturbing feeling people experience when confronted with something thoroughly unusual, very often repulsive or nonsensical, yet oddly inspiring and seductive. On his website Jeremy Robert Johnson defines weirdness or bizarreness as “the feeling you get when you read or see or hear something that makes you feel the right kind of wrong—that feeling where you can’t decide whether to masturbate, cry, do both, or start making explosives in your basement” (“F.A.Q.”). Therefore, it does not surprise that the nature of the esthetic and thematic content of Bizarro literature is closely linked with the phenomenon’s “love for the surreal, the darkly comic, the profane and, quite often, the tasteless and gleefully violent” (Vanderhooft). Combining humor with serious issues or with dark, transgressive and disgusting content, Bizarro stories respond to reader’s desire to experience something disquieting and often scary, that does not, however, rely for its effect on the threadbare elements familiar to everyone from traditional horrors and gothic stories (Adams). Consequently, Bizarro literature is often flavored with a huge dose of violence, perversion and obscene sexual imagery. Crossing the boundaries of good taste, political correctness and decency, Bizarro fiction operates, however, not just for the sake of simple entertainment or defiance. As JoSelle Vanderhooft writes in The Pedestal Magazine, Bizarro stories “are not [ones] that shock for the sake of shocking. Although they sometimes push envelopes with the force of a jet engine …, these are also thoughtful, provocative and even haunting stories that engage skillfully and creatively with human folly and frailty” (Vanderhooft). The purpose behind boundary trespassing appears to be then to investigate the hidden reasons for any boundaries’ existence. Bizarro authors intend above all to shock and provoke their readers with the aid of absurd and transgression, and at the same time to amuse them with their texts’ unorthodox and half-serious approaches to the dark and disturbing imagery and themes. Hence, in their writing, they mingle elements appropriated from science fiction, horror or Gothic fiction with a humor of the kind encountered in jokes or cartoons. Whether cartoonish or completely absurd, humor in Bizarro not only entertains but also serves as a perceptive literary commentary upon both the way people see the world and the world itself. As Cook puts it, Each of [the Bizarro] stories is a pin poking a hole in one aspect of our absurd society and while, individually quite hilarious and telling, together [the stories] become chilling and painfully insightful. (Cook)

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Conclusion If contemporary fiction is indeed post-postmodern, this does not exemplify some singular, dramatic, readily visible cultural transformation … but grows out of a range of uneven, tentative, local shifts that in some cases reach back into the postmodern period and can now be understood in hindsight as intimations of a new order. (Hoberek 2007, 241)

Recent years revealed a considerable uncertainty on the part of philosophers and critics concerning both the contemporary status of postmodernism and the philosophical and cultural character of the epoch which seems to have succeeded it. The emergence of terms such as postpostmodernism or pseudo-modernism suggests a growing awareness of the changes wrought upon culture by the occurrences of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the field of literature, the influence of postmodernism remains, however, still visible. Whereas high postmodernist qualities might be seen in the writings of authors like Mark Z. Danielewski, Steve Tomasula and Junot Díaz, a number of literary movements—not only Slipstream, Avant-Pop or Bizarro but also New Weird, Steampunk and Hysterical Realism—in various ways merge postmodern esthetics with the elements appropriated from the heretofore separated zone of pop culture, mass media and popular or unrealistic fiction to create unnatural, often unholy, textual alliances which rather than orbit around tradition, tap into contemporary people’s decentralized experience of reality. It matters little if these movements are called the “Future Fiction, or Post-Pomo, or Popomo, or Critifiction, or, better yet, I-Don’t-Know-What-To-Call-Myself, or New-New-Post, or New-Age, or The-Revolution-of-Writing-Number-70, or simply Writing, or What-TheHell-Do-I-Know” (Federman 2004, 169), they are all undoubtedly “heading in roughly the same iconoclastic, envelope-pushin’ direction” (“Kid Shirt”), creating literature which not only provokes and astounds, but also changes as quickly as the reality it describes.

Bibliography Adams, John Joseph. No date. Award-winning Authors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel Team up as Editors to Define a Genre that ... Well ... Isn’t. Sci Fi Weekly. http://www.areaman.org/award-winningauthors-james-patrick-kelly-john-kessel (accessed October 9, 2012). Barry, Peter. 1995. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Glaser. Ann Arbor, MI.: University of Michigan Press. Black, Holly. No date. Stepping Over The Cracks. Interstitial Arts Foundation: Artists Without Borders. http://www.interstitialarts.org/ what/reflection_black.html (accessed February 16, 2009). Cioffi, Frank L. 1999. Post-Millennial Postmodernism: On the Professing of Literature in the Centrifugal Age. College Literature 26(3): 82-94. Connor, Steven. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Garrett. No date. Bizarro Starter Kit: Orange. http://imperial youthreview.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/get-to-know-bizarro-part-1the-basics-a-review-of-the-bizarro-starter-kit/ (accessed November 10, 2012). Dole 2, Kevin. No date. So What the Fuck Is This All About? http://rdsp.livejournal.com/42785.html (accessed October 9, 2012). Drolet, Michael. 2003. The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts in Philosophy, Politics and Sociology. London: Routledge. Federman, Raymond. 2004. Critical Reflections on the Pathetic Condition of the Novel in Our Time. symploke 12.1-2: 155-170. Frank, Gary. No date. Horror World Reviews: THE BIZARRO STARTER KIT. http://www.horrorworld.org/september_2006.htm (accessed May 7, 2009). Hassan, Ihab. 1987. The Postmodern Turn. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. —. 2001. From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/ Global Context. Philosophy and Literature 25(1): 1-13. Hoberek, Andrew. 2007. Introduction: After Postmodernism. Twentieth Century Literature 53(3): 233-247. Howe, Irving. 2003. Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction. In Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader, ed. Bran Nicol, 148-152. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Jameson, Frederic. 1984. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New Left Review 1:146. Jencks, Charles. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? London: Academy Editions. Kang, Minsoo. 2005. The Death of the Postmodern and the Post-Ironic Lull. Columbia, MO.: University of Missouri. Keene, Brian. No date. Living the Bizarro Life: An Interview. http://mondobizarro.yuku.com/topic/941/Living-the-BizarroLife#.UJ0_AYbAD1U (accessed October 9, 2012).

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Kelly, James Patrick, and John Kessel. 2006. Slipstream, the Genre That Isn’t. In Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, eds. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, vii-xv. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications. Lyotard, Jean-François. 2003. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader, ed. Bran Nicol, 72-90. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McCaffery, Larry. 1992. The Avant-Pop Phenomenon. ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 5(4): 215-20. —. 1995. Avant-Pop: Still Life After Yesterday’s Crash. In After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, ed. Larry McCaffery, xixxxi. New York: Penguin. —. 1996. Reconfiguring the Logic of Hyperconsumer Capitalism. American Book Review 17(6): 12-13. McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge. —. 1992. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Mikics, David. 2004. Postmodern Fictions. In A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture, ed. Josephine G. Hendin, 187-209. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Rice, Dough. 1995. PLA(Y)GIARISMS. American Book Review 17(6): 5. Sterling, Bruce. No date. Slipstream. http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/ Bruce_Sterling/Catscan_columns/catscan.05 (accessed February 1, 2009). Vanderhooft, JoSelle. No date. The Bizarro Starter Kit. The Pedestal Magazine. http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=2877 (accessed May 3, 2009). VanderMeer, Jeff. No date. Sudden Hummingbirds, Sudden Dislocations: The Interstitial Experience. Interstitial Arts Foundation: Artists Without Borders. http://www.interstitialarts.org/what/reflection _vandermeer.html (accessed February 11, 2009). Woods, Tim. 1999. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Defining Bizarro. 2006. In The Bizarro Starter Kit: Orange, eds. Team Bizarro, 5-6. Portland: Bizarro Books. F.A.Q. http://www.jeremyrobertjohnson.com/faq.html (accessed May 11, 2011). Kid Shirt: D. Harlan Wilson: Dr. Identity. http://kidshirt.blogspot.com/ 2007/06/dr-identity.html (accessed May 11, 2009).

CHAPTER SEVEN PRESIDENT GOES TO HOLLYWOOD: POPULAR CULTURE DEPICTIONS OF THE WHITE HOUSE WORLD ANNA BENDRAT

Introduction One of the most popular media outlets used for shaping the image of American presidency is television and film industry. Terry Haas and Peter J. Haas suggest three ways of looking at the relationship between Hollywood and Washington, D.C. (Christensen and Haas 2005, 7). The first approach distinguishes political films focusing on the content which depicts various aspects of the political system. The second one places emphasis on the political and ideological message or intent they impart. The third way of identifying political movies posits films as potential vehicles of two types of political theory: empirical (i.e., descriptive) and normative (i.e., judgmental). According to Christensen and Haas, in the case of movies dealing with presidency there is an observable correlation between: (1) content and empirical theory and (2) message and normative theory. In the first instance, political content corresponds with the empirical political theory when the films “emphasize describing political institutions, processes and actors,” thus “help audiences to better understand political phenomena,” such as the operations of the executive office (Ibid., 7). In the second combination, a political message can be juxtaposed against the normative political theory in that it “seeks to judge, prescribe and/or persuade,” or, in other words, evaluate the performance of the President (Ibid., 7). The aim of this article is to explore how the political content and message resonate with the empirical and normative political theories in the The West Wing series, which shortly after the broadcast of the pilot episode by NBC in 1999, was appraised as the best American political drama. Before discussing these specific issues, the

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contours of the series’ storyline will be presented. With this frame of reference, the elements of the empirical (descriptive) and normative (judgmental) political theories will be traced in both the content and message of two selected episodes which open the fourth season of The West Wing series. The episodes entitled “20 Hours in America, Part 1/2” feature presidential campaign overshadowed by a domestic tragedy and jeopardized by an imminent threat of the international diplomatic scandal.

The Civic Lesson of Democracy Referred to as “one of the smartest and most original TV series ever made,” The West Wing offers an “insider’s look” at the Oval Office (Challen 2001, 7). The title refers to the section of the real-life White House where the U.S. President and his staff perform daily duties of running the country. The iconic setting gives viewers a sense of a privileged position as being “allowed in.” The atmosphere of unique fictional intimacy was carefully rendered thanks to the contributions of such political celebrities as Clinton’s former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, former Reagan and Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan (Ibid., 20). For the series’ creator, executive producer and writer, Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing was an opportunity to convey a more nuanced portrait of presidency which he had previously delineated in the script for the movie The American President released in 1995. Sorkin also authored scripts for A Few Good Men, released in 1992 and based on his own play, and The Social Network (2010) about the Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. Reviewers and fans of The West Wing agree that one of the very best aspects of this series is its writing which blends an incessant sense of urgency with strong character development against the background of the day-to-day activities of the highest office in the country (Fahy 2005, 10). As the show unfolded it became clear that the plot did not revolve solely around the President. It was certainly driven by a genuinely expressive cast of actors featuring the staff members who “looked capable of carrying their scenes and characters so convincingly they deserved the ‘co-star’ label” (Challen 2001, 3). Yet, the powerful entrance of Martin Sheen as President Jed Bartlet, who appeared in the very last sequence of the pilot episode, quoting the Scriptures, “I am the Lord, your God, you shall not place false gods before me,” immediately earned him a star status. Sheen’s mesmerizing presence, combined with passion and charisma evoked by his character, placed him as the “first among equals” in The West Wing series (Ibid., 4). The figure of President Bartlet, as

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envisioned by Sorkin, embodies the most desirable and praiseworthy presidential features. On the one hand, he is an American blue blood from the East Coast, a liberal economist, whose academic career prior to holding public office resulted in a Nobel Prize in economics. Yet, in spite of his exceptional erudition and outstanding intellect, President Bartlet demonstrates a unique ability to communicate with average citizens without a condescending attitude. From the outset it was apparent that politics would play a crucial part in The West Wing. The drama features a fictional American president and his staff as they pursue their policy and political goals of Democratic administration. Yet, as Sorkin once explained, Your enjoyment of the show really isn’t going to depend upon whether you agree with that episode politically or whether you agree with a character politically ... The show is going to be all over the map, populated with characters who are able to argue all sides of an issue. (Ibid., 2)

A wide array of political issues raised in the show earned it the esteem of a “running civic lesson” for an average American citizen (Paxton 2005, 147). Although it was sometimes criticized for distorting the actual practices of American politics, “it is precisely at that point of departure that the show starts to get interesting,” observes Samuel A. Chambers (Chambers 2003, 84). In his view, the series significantly widened the American political spectrum, opening the space for revived public interest in important civic issues. Simultaneously, each episode presented a personal story with a certain amount of a real-life melodrama, which usually ended on emotionally-laden note. This compound of national politics and personalized narratives posed a challenge for a scriptwriter as “artistically, it is hard to create genuine characters and write credible dialogue that reflect and articulate ideas without seeming to pound in the message with a sledgehammer” (Christensen and Haas 2005, 281). In other words, what lay at the inception of The West Wing series and at the same time brought it wide acclaim among the American public was the creation of a believable portrayal of the American president without trivializing politics or dehumanizing the office. The growing popularity of The West Wing series demonstrated that the drama-like combination of politics and film was a perfect mode of positioning the viewers towards greater interest in political issues. As Paul Challen observes, People started talking about it around the office water cooler and at parties. Each week, the various ethical dilemmas that had been raised and debated

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Chapter Seven became fodder for real-life discussions over coffee, in kitchens and bars, and in the pages of newspapers and magazines. Inevitably, in the age of electronic communications, many discussions were showing up on the growing number of fan-created Internet websites. (Challen 2001, 5)

Its top-rating success resulted in a series of awards within its first year broadcast. In 2000 The West Wing became the first TV series in history to have received nine Emmy Awards for a first year show, compared with a single one garnered by a similarly acclaimed HBO series The Sopranos (Rollins and O’Connor 2003, 3). That same year the Television Critics Association for the first time awarded one show, The West Wing, three distinguished titles: i.e., the best drama, the best new program, and the best program of the year. Every new episode attracted millions of viewers and throughout its seven seasons the series successfully kept its position at the forefront of the world of TV series, leaving behind such highly publicized reality shows as Temptation Island and Survivor. Altogether The West Wing received twenty-four Emmy Awards, including four consecutive awards for the best drama series (Ibid., 6).

The West Wing as an Agent of Empirical and Normative Political Theory In what follows I will demonstrate the show’s projection of two aspects of political theory (Christensen and Haas 2005) through a close analysis of the dialogues which anchor the two-part opening of the fourth season, entitled “20 Hours in America.” In this expanded “day-in-the-life” episode President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and his staff run a campaign for re-election in Indiana. On the way back, three White House staffers, including the Communications Director, Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), the Deputy Chief of Staff, Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), and his personal assistant, Donna Moss (Janel Moloney) are accidentally left behind by the presidential motorcade. While the three stranded staffers embark on a mishap-laden trip to Washington, D.C., back in the White House President Bartlet with his Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry (John Spencer) attempt to deal with the consequences of a U.S.-sponsored covert assassination of a foreign diplomat who was disclosed as an anti-American terrorist mastermind. What emerges through the interplay of discussions between the White House senior staff members is a model of a political drama corresponding with both empirical and normative political theories proposed by Terry Christensen and Peter J. Haas (Christensen and Haas 2005, 7). The first of

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the two theories, referred to as empirical or descriptive, occurs in the passages devoted to the intricacies of running the presidential office and the campaign. The normative, or judgmental, theory develops throughout the show in the scenes referring to acute political divisions on a campaign trail in Indiana and debates, thus juxtaposing two contrasting visions of presidential leadership.

Content and the Empirical Political Theory: Mechanisms of the White House Home and Abroad Christensen and Haas agree with Murray Edelman’s claim that “The mass public does not experience politics through direct involvement,” but “its perceptions are founded upon and filtered by symbolic representations, such as those provided by the film medium” (Ibid., 10). Put differently, movies set in political contexts or evoking political messages act as “sources of the symbolic content that informs mass understanding of the political system” (Ibid., 10). This statement can also refer to The West Wing series as it well illustrates the application of the empirical theory to acquaint the viewers with the mechanisms of daily operations in the White House. Three examples of such operations will be presented in this section: (1) the practice of “staffing” the President, (2) the strategy of international conflict resolution, and (3) the mechanism of shaping the immediate response to a controversial campaign issue. The first example relates to the practice known as “staffing” the President. Josh, who regularly performs this duty, due to his unfortunate absence needs to delegate the task to Sam Seaborn, the Deputy Communications Director (Rob Lowe). Despite great fatigue caused by growing demands of the ongoing campaign, Sam willingly agrees to attend to the President. Unsure of what the task requires, he is instructed by Josh in an elaborate way, As it gets later in the day he's going to start to talk to you. You're going to tell him how the meeting he just had with his Council of Economic advisors relates to the meeting he had with the Agriculture Secretary, relates to his intelligence briefing, relates to the environment, relates to jobs, relates to education, relates to the campaign. (The West Wing)

The scope of the task emerging from Josh’s description seems to require not only extensive knowledge but, above all, exceptional deductive skills. In order to be the President’s “wide-angle lens,” it is necessary to possess a desirable quality of analytic thinking based on a constantly expanding pool of expert knowledge. When Sam is asked by his friend,

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Mallory, to share his impressions, he responds with a metaphor evoking chaos theory, thus establishing the analogy between government and science. He says, “[Chaos theory] has to do with there being order and even ... great beauty, in what looks like total chaos. And if we look closely enough at the randomness around us, patterns will start to emerge” (The West Wing). Confronted with the overwhelming magnitude of the task he just accomplished, Sam humbly expresses his greatest respect for Josh and makes a confession, I love Josh like a brother and he's a world-class political mind but until today, I didn't know he was smarter then I was (The West Wing). Being once a personal aide to the President makes Sam question his competence and reinforces the sense of reverence for the grandeur of the highest office in the country. This provokes his heartfelt confession: I've worked here three years and eight months and until you sit in the room all day, you can't comprehend the chaos of the Oval Office. I had one good moment talking about the global ripple effect of budget deficit, but that was it. The rest of the day was just keeping up. And this was a pretty light day … Oh, I'm not complaining. I'm saying one good moment is great. It's a golf shot. (The West Wing)

Even though Sam is aware of the complexities awaiting him in assisting the President, he nevertheless asserts, “I've got to get back in there” because “that's where it's happening” (Ibid.). Sam’s enthusiasm and unquestionable belief in the ideals of public service make his attitude indicative of Sorkin’s paradigms of public servants. There are no staff conflicts as they admire each other and no one is ravenous for power since their only motivation is to serve the country. John Podhoretz calls them, somewhat ironically, “noble soldiers in the noble cause,” who are “washed of every impurity because of it” (Podhoretz 2003, 223). The seemingly idealistic West Wing inhabitants consider public service a commendable mission but at the same time they are portrayed as frail vulnerable humans who are struggling with personal problems against demanding job obligations and hectic professional schedules. Moreover, in Sorkin’s vision, the staffers are also prone to miscalculated judgment. This makes their commitment more genuine, though not always fully effective. Another aspect of the empirical theory present in The West Wing concerns foreign policy. The series features numerous narratives of international policy battles and unexpected military threats. For the purpose of the show, the writers created a fictional Middle East country of Qumar. In many aspects it bears resemblance to the emirate of Qatar but

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can also be seen as an amalgam of many standard clichés about the Middle East, including oil wealth, radical Islam, state-sponsored terrorists, and the oppression of women. After September 11 attacks it became the main venue for the show's terrorism subplots. Qumar is an absolute monarchy, ruled by a dictatorial sultan and his family. It offers home and financial support to the fictional Bahji terrorist group. The end of the third season saw President Bartlet order the assassination of the Qumari defense minister, Abdul ibn Shareef, justifying that he was a terrorist mastermind. Earlier Shareef had made a botched attempt to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. The case of Shareef’s covert assassination returns in the opening episodes of the fourth season when the Americans are informed about the re-opening of Qumari investigation. The following fragment of the secret counsel between the Chief of Staff Leo McGarry and Admiral Fitzwallace reveal the dark secret of Bartlet administration. Instead of bringing the case of an alleged terrorist to international tribunals, the President, faced with an imminent threat to the American people, decided to eliminate its source in secrecy and fabricate a fallacious account of events for the international public: FITZWALLACE We did a legitimate SAR with the UK and Royal Qumari Guard. This is a plane that went down in the Bermuda Triangle. Plain and simple. LEO And that really happens? FITZWALLACE What do you mean? LEO The Bermuda Triangle. FITZWALLACE Does it really happen? LEO I thought maybe it was like Toscanini landing in a cornfield. FITZWALLACE Planes, boats, about 200 of them-- including five navy avenger bombers and the rescue plane that went in after them. LEO Is there a chance they're going to find the plane?

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Several months later the authorities of Qumar formally reopened the investigation, yet their move had a hidden agenda. They knew the Americans stood behind Shareef’s death but they decided to use this to their advantage. Qumari officials formally put the blame on their adversary, Israel, thus insinuating that the United States officially was to blame. The situation develops throughout the whole season and culminates in the retaliatory kidnapping of the President’s daughter, Zoey, which brings Jed Bartlet to the decision of abandoning his presidential power temporarily under the provisions of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Apart from offering an insightful lesson about the American strategy for international conflict resolution, the situation in Qumar raises the issue of the public officials’ self-sacrifice in the name of domestic tranquility and national security. Even though President Bartlet risked the trial in the Hague, he strongly opposed the plan of excluding him from allegations and putting the blame for the assassination on his advisors: “It was my order and you executed it flawlessly and I stand by it. I stand by you, I stand by you all. I stand by it till I die” (The West Wing). What is characteristic of The West Wing dialogues is the humorous punch line which breaks the pathos of the situation and humorizes an idealized character. President Bartlet sees off his accomplices, joking, “Plus, I'm going to need some cell mates in Holland (Ibid.). The sudden shift of the mood in President’s monologue brings forward the characteristic interplay of two different spaces: public and personal, which is regarded as a trademark of the whole series. In the featured scene the public, thus more dignified space, revolves around the issue of criminal and moral liability of a public servant. The latter, more humorous and detached personal space, emphasizes the individual traits of The West Wing presidential character. The next element of the plot illustrates the interconnectedness of empirical and normative theories. It depicts a common theme for both theories, namely, the re-election campaign. The motif of the campaign is a composite of elements which lay the groundwork for both descriptive and judgmental theories. To start with the empirical one, “20 Hours in America” traces the mechanism of shaping the message on women’s issue,

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given specific electoral circumstances and time constraints. The situational context involves the revelation of the President Bartlet’s multiple sclerosis affliction and his attempt to conceal his disease from the public, including White House staff members. When the information about the President’s condition leaks into the press, Jed Bartlet faces impeachment and his wife, Abbey, has her medical license suspended after she admits to treating her husband without any formal notification of his condition. While the President was campaigning in Indiana, the First Lady flew to California where she gave an interview in a local LA radio station. When asked about her license, Abbey replied that currently she was “just a wife and a mother,” which in some circles was interpreted as m e r e l y a wife and mother. Saying these words, she could not have predicted the sequence of fierce responses from both feminist and anti-feminist circles. For instance, the following day at the rally in Wisconsin there appeared women wearing aprons and rolling pins. Also, the Republican candidate’s wife, Janet Richie, publicly denounced Abbey’s words, criticizing her hierarchy of values by saying: “Being a wife and a mother are the most rewarding roles I've ever played. I think Abbey Bartlet and I have two different ambitions” (Ibid.). Finally, a Southern Baptist radio host expressed similar sentiments, arguing that “this is another sign that Abbey Bartlet is a liberal elitist feminist” (Ibid.). All these events could, in consequence, undermine President Bartlet’s popularity with female electorate. Bruno Gianelli (Ron Silver), a highly effective campaign strategist, refuted the criticisms directed at the First Lady, stipulating that “the biggest nonsense issue in the campaign will belong to the women” who question “whether Abbey Bartlet loves her children” (Ibid.). At that moment the viewers get to learn how the problem is tackled by a team of PR specialists and what is involved in the procedure of crafting the immediate response to a newly arisen issue. When Bruno articulated his dissatisfaction with women’s involvement in the campaign, he mentioned two contemporary conservative anti-feminist activists, Phyllis Schlafly and Ann Coulter, who seemingly would “have a square dance” hearing Janet Richie alluding to women’s ambition. The strategy of referring to real politicians and current legislative initiatives, accompanied by occasional appearances of C-SPAN and MSNBC logos on West Wing televisions, allows the show to portray the “back story” of politics. Above all, the real-life accents help The West Wing achieve “an impressive level of mimetic verisimilitude” and thus validate the presence of the empirical theory (Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles 2006, 13).

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Message and the Normative Political Theory: Regional Partisanship and the Vision of Presidential Leadership In “20 Hours in America” the campaign serves as a link between the empirical and the normative theories. In the latter case, the campaign clearly illustrates the way the show “seeks to judge, prescribe and/or persuade” two political issues: (1) regional partisanship and (2) presidential leadership (Christensen and Haas 2005, 7). As for partisanship, setting the scene in Indiana allowed the authors to explore the way in which a liberal agenda represented by Bartlet’s administration resonates in a traditionally Republican environment. The choice was not accidental since both sides can be easily identified as prototypical in their respective political allegiance. As for Sorkin’s White House, Ann C. Hall calls it “a liberal’s dream come true,” whereas Indiana's cultural conservatism has kept it Republican in presidential elections for the last generation (Hall 2005, 15). The show managed to capture the clash of the views resulting from different conceptualizations of politics. In “20 Hours in America” Sorkin shows the lack of enthusiasm for the Presidential staffers among the regular Indiana citizens whom they come across on their way back to Washington, D.C. A good example of an unfavorable reaction to presidential officials is a brisk conversation between Josh and a store manager of a local gas station: STORE MANAGER Good morning. JOSH Good morning. We're stranded and waiting for a ride. Do you mind if we wait here? STORE MANAGER How did you get stranded? JOSH Well, we work for the President, actually, and he was campaigning nearby this morning and ... STORE MANAGER Oh, yeah. JOSH ... we got left behind by the motorcade, then our ride ran out of diesel ...

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STORE MANAGER Didn't vote for him the first time. Don't plan on voting for him the second time. JOSH Okay. Well, we'll just wait outside, if that's all right? STORE MANAGER I don't like loitering. (The West Wing)

The store manager was not the only one who openly expressed his lack of political sympathy for the Democratic administration. In his case the feeling of distrust was purposefully intensified as the conversation took place amidst the background radio news informing about failing economy triggered by the unprecedented fall of the Dow index. Another instance occurs when Josh, Toby, and Donna work their way across the state with the help of Tyler, a teenage campaign volunteer. When they rush to the train station, all of a sudden Tyler stops to talk to his friends. The girls, aware of who Tyler’s companions are, remain largely unimpressed and even sarcastic: FRIEND 2 We know who you are. We're not rednecks. DONNA Okay. Well, I'm Donna Moss and this is my boss. JOSH Josh Lyman. TOBY Toby Ziegler. DONNA Anyway, we're very much crunched for time and we think that you ... TOBY I work at the White House. FRIEND 2 Wow, humongous whoop. JOSH Come on. He's Communications Director. It's a decent-sized whoop.

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In the last comment the Indiana teenager reveals her political allegiance and openly expresses her skepticism for a liberal agenda on abortion. However, the particular emphasis in regard to the normative theory in The West Wing was placed on the issue of presidential leadership. The figure of President Bartlet imparts a sense of great trust in American political processes and thus sets the standards for a presidency model extremely high. In Pamela Ezell’s view, “Bartlet and his cadre of loyal idealistic aides seemed a perfect antidote for a nation weary of human frailty in its ultimate leader” (Ezell 2003, 160). Moreover, one should not overlook the public’s intensive weekly exposure to the idealized presidential image through television. The suggestive comparison made by Brill’s Content magazine rightly indicated that “President Bill Clinton spoke to forty million people only one night each year during the State of the Union broadcast, while Sorkin’s President Bartlet on The West Wing speaks to thirteen million people every Wednesday at 9 p.m.” (Pompper 2003, 28). The episodes center around the argument between Josh and Toby about the way they should play out presidential leadership in the campaign. The staffers responsible for constructing the campaign message seem to have two different visions of framing the President’s intellectualism, perceived by many as snobbery. Toby inclines towards convincing people that Bartlet is an ideal person for the job and, therefore, he prefers to focus on the content of the message, to which Josh responds that he simply wants to win. On their trip back to Washington, D.C., they continue to exchange opinions and compare Bartlet with his Republican opponent Robert Ritchie. Bartlet’s erudition is thus juxtaposed against Ritchie’s straightforward manner and good personal skills. On the one hand, Josh has doubts whether Bartlet’s rhetoric is comprehensible for a regular citizen. He comments on the line form the convention speech which talked about “challenges too great for a Potemkin presidency” (The West Wing). In order to understand the metaphor of the presidency, in which every appearance suggests that nothing goes wrong, it is necessary to comprehend the concept of Potemkin villages and be familiar with their historical background (Soloveytchik 1972, xi). According to the historical myth, Russian minister Grigory Potyomkin, who led the 1787 Crimean military campaign, had hollow facades of villages constructed along the desolate banks of the Dnieper River in order to impress Catherine II with the value of her new conquests. Assuming that intellectually demanding rhetoric

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may not appeal to a large section of less educated electorate, Josh wants Toby to realize that “most people w e r e n ' t the smartest kid in the class,” or, to put it more bluntly, “Most people didn't l i k e the smartest kid in the class” (The West Wing). On the other hand, the staffers unanimously criticize Ritchie’s unconcealed ignorance and his uncritical reliance on specialist advisors: JOSH Why is it we cite Ritchie's advisors by name? The Milton Friedman economic plan? The Leonard Tynan education plan? TOBY I give credit where credit's due. JOSH It's our way of calling him a puppet, right? TOBY Josh, he cites them more than we do, which is his way of saying, "I want to be President the same way you want a cold beer." JOSH No. It's his way of saying, "I think it's great that Bartlet's a Nobel Prize winner. When I'm elected, I'm going to hire me some of those." TOBY No, no. Should be what he's saying. What he's saying is, Eastern education isn't for real men, but don't worry. I'll have Jews for the money stuff. (Ibid.)

Further on, Toby cites Ritchie’s blunders which reveal the opponent’s poor knowledge of history and current political situation: TOBY Frivolous law firms. JOSH What? TOBY He meant to say "frivolous law suits" and he said "frivolous law firms." JOSH Who?

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118 TOBY Benjamin Disraeli. JOSH He misspeaks.

TOBY Yes, he does. He also thinks Sarajevo and Bosnia are two different countries, so that's bit of a setback for the region. JOSH Yes. TOBY Chamberlain led England in World War II. I don't mind that he doesn't know history, I mind that he hasn't seen a movie. "Mexico is part of NATO." JOSH He meant they were an ally. TOBY What, did they lob a chalupa at the Warsaw Pact? JOSH I agree, it's not impressive but as you pointed out he's going to be surrounded by ... (Ibid.)

Angered by Josh’s questioning attitude, Toby speaks up, Do you think [Ritchie] ever disagreed with one of his advisors? Do you think -- honestly -- do you think he's ever said to one of his advisors "I've got a different idea?" I-I don't care if he thinks Luxembourg's an uptown stop on the IRT. And I don't care about the Greco-Roman wrestling matches with the language-- not that polished communication skills are an important part of this job-- what I care about is when he was asked if he'd continue the current U.S. policy in China he said, "First off, I'm going to send them a message--an American leader." I don't know what that means, but everybody cheered. (Ibid.)

As the above passage indicates, Toby finds it hard to comprehend the logic behind people’s enthusiasm inspired not by verifiable deeds but by mere promises of strong leadership. Sorkin does not leave the dispute over two visions of presidential leadership unresolved. In the contest between Bartlet’s dignified, reassuring, and competent statesman and Ritchie’s

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“regular guy” who hands down the job to the specialists, the verdict is dictated by a life scenario marked by an unexpected tragedy. By the end of the second episode there appears a crucial scene which resonates strongly with the viewers’ experience of a terrorist attack. An official dinner ends abruptly when the President informs the participants about a terrorist attack at an Iowa college swim contest which left fortyfour young people dead and a lot more critically wounded. The scene is a composite of images and sounds which resonate in people’s memory as vestiges of American trauma after September 11 attacks. The feeling of despair is greatly intensified by the soundtrack i.e., Tori Amos’ “I don’t like Mondays.” The story of the song appeared earlier in the show, quite spontaneously recalled by Donna, “[W]hen you said it's Monday, I flashed on the song. A few days ago someone told me that a girl shot up her school one morning and when they asked her why, she said, ‘I don't like Mondays’ and that's where the song comes from” (Ibid.). The story turns out to be relevant to the music played in the background as the day continues to get worse, culminating in a bombing. The song starts to play as the stranded staffers make it to the shelter from a driving rain only to see the news reports on the tragedy. The music continues as Bartlet finishes the black tie event with an uplifting speech: ... restoring abundance amid an economic shortfall, securing peace in a time of global conflict, sustaining hope in this winter of anxiety and fear. More than any time in recent history, America's destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek nor did we provoke an assault on our freedom and our way of life. We did not expect nor did we invite a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people's strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive. 44 people were killed a couple of hours ago at Kennison State University. Three swimmers from the men's team were killed and two others are in critical condition. When, after having heard the explosion from their practice facility, they ran into the fire to help get people out. Ran into the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They're our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we're reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. (Ibid.)

This is the moment in which the episodes reach their climax. In the words of Jed Bartlet Sorkin speaks to American collective memory, inviting the spectators to root for the leadership which stands to its call in the moment of trial. Concluding his speech, President Bartlet utters uplifting words about heroism and the speech concludes with the line:

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“This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is the time for American heroes and we reach for the stars” (Ibid.). Finally, in the early morning, Donna, Josh and Toby reach the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and, despite obvious fatigue, they decide to walk to the White House. As they cross the bridge, with the Lincoln Memorial shinning on the horizon ahead of them, Toby tells his companions the following words, which best summarize The West Wing’s idea of a presidential leadership impersonated by Jed Bartlet: TOBY If our job teaches us anything, it's that we don't know what the next President's gonna face. And if we choose someone with vision, someone with guts, someone with gravitas, who's connected to other people's lives, and cares about making them better ... if we choose someone to inspire us, then we'll be able to face what comes our way and achieve things ... we can't imagine yet. Instead of telling people who's the most qualified, instead of telling people who's got the better ideas, let's make it obvious. It's going to be hard. JOSH Then we'll do what's hard. (Ibid.)

The combination of the mood and the setting of the final scene leaves viewers no doubt that despite acute disagreements the declaration made by Josh is to become a guiding principle of the staff’s heartfelt commitment towards Bartlet’s successful reelection.

Conclusion Following the analyses of two opening episodes from The West Wing’s fourth season, the series’ content and message may be perceived as both the agents of a political theory and the tools in the development of a deliberative model of democracy. As a vehicle of empirical and normative political theory, the discursive politics of The West Wing serves two parallel goals, i.e., (1) it informs the viewer about the mechanisms of governing the country on both internal and international levels and, simultaneously, (2) it attempts to evaluate the implications of particular political issues of concern, such as the intensity of regional partisanship and the competing visions of presidential leadership. Looking from a broader perspective of the whole series, The West Wing emulates the spirit of deliberative democracy as envisioned by

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Habermas and Benhabib who called consensus-oriented public dialogue “a procedure of ascertaining intersubjective validity in the public realm” (Benhabib 1992, 132). Although the political developments of the series do not always portray the ideal outcomes based on bipartisan agreements, the underlying concept of The West Wing grants a key role to the idea of deliberative democracy through an ongoing exchange of facts and opinions in characters’ dialogues. Turning to a conception of language as an instrument of political action, Samuel Chambers poses an adequate question: “What if it is possible to locate within the conception of political dialogue presented by Sorkin a certain alternative vision of democracy, a vision that exceeds the current scope of American politics?” (Chambers 2003, 86). The author suggests that the basic, yet somewhat neglected, practice of political discourse may reveal a possibility of “reconfiguring American politics” (Ibid.). This process may be viewed as a return to Kant’s moral universalism, based on a monologue of a subject’s will (Habermas 1984, 94). Reconstructed by Jürgen Habermas, the monologue in political environment transforms into a dialogue and thus restores plurality and deliberation as guiding principles of political action.

Acknowledgements This paper was prepared thanks to the doctoral grant (1451/B/H03/2010/38) awarded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education for the years 2010-2012.

Bibliography Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the self: gender, community, and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. New York: Routledge. Challen, Paul. 2001. Inside the West Wing: an unauthorized look at television’s smartest show. Toronto: ECW Press. Chambers, Samuel A. 2003. Dialogue, Deliberation, and Discourse. The Far-Reaching Politics of The West Wing. In The West Wing: the American presidency as television drama, 81-100. New York: Syracuse University Press. Christensen, Terry, and Peter J. Haas. 2005. Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Film. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. Ezell, Pamela. 2003. The Sincere Sorkin White House, or, the Importance of Seeming Earnest. In The West Wing: The American Presidency As Television Drama, 159-174. New York: Syracuse University Press.

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Fahy, Thomas Richard, ed. 2005. Considering Aaron Sorkin: Essays on the Politics, Poetics, and Sleight of Hand in the Films and Television Series. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston, MA.: Beacon Press. Hall, Ann C. 2005. Giving Propaganda a Good Name: The West Wing. In Considering Aaron Sorkin: Essays on the Politics, Poetics, and Sleight of Hand in the Films and Television Series, 115-126. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. Parry-Giles, Trevor, and Shawn J. Parry-Giles. 2006. The Prime-time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Paxton, Nathan A. 2005. Virtue from Vice: Duty, Power, and The West Wing. In Considering Aaron Sorkin: Essays on the Politics, Poetics, and Sleight of Hand in the Films and Television Series, 147-178. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. Podhoretz, John. 2003. The Liberal Imagination. In The West Wing: The American Presidency As Television Drama, 222-234. New York: Syracuse University Press. Pompper, Donnalyn. 2003. The West Wing. White House Narratives That Journalism Cannot Tell. In The West Wing: The American Presidency As Television Drama, 17-31. New York: Syracuse University Press. Rollins, Peter C., and John E. O’Connor, eds. 2003. The West Wing: The American Presidency As Television Drama. New York: Syracuse University Press. Soloveytchik, George. 1972. Potemkin: A Picture of Catherine’s Russia. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press.

CHAPTER EIGHT SIMPLETON AS A SYMBOL OF AMERICAN JE-NE-SAIS-QUOI, OR A QUASI-NATIONAL ICON PAWEà DUDZIēSKI

[A] queer custom which is still kept up in America ... Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. —Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (2011, 67) A reflection on the American mutation of stupidity-consciousness into the slacker ethos of the ‘whatever’ would reveal a so-far unmarked counterimpulse to the pervasive stupidity of American culture. —Avital Ronell, Stupidity (2002, 90)

Introduction This text examines a recurring, and indeed persistent, motif, in American culture, of a certain fictional character, which goes by a generic name of a simpleton.1 The data is derived from literary works as well as popular culture and presented through the prism of Socratic irony, which looms large as a covert cultural criticism inherent in the seemingly innocuous, yet deeply ironic stories that display a simpleton.2 It also examines the symbolic significance of the simpleton in American culture as one of its oldest structural reference points. Such a reading, supported by Northrop Frye’s mythopoetic theory, demonstrates that simpleton comprises an integral part of American psyche constituting a recurrent theme in American—both popular and high—culture. Furthermore, I argue that the widespread popularity of half-wits in the American cultural landscape is congenital with original American traits and by the same token may be acknowledged as a quasi-national signifier of the American society. This premise is based on the fact that every generation seems to have a propensity for a recurring primitive character of a “simple soul” who easily becomes a quasi-national icon. Thus, to have such a prota-

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gonist is designed to captivate the public and, consequently, to promote the work for widespread popularity, especially through the medium of popular culture. Finally, the paper proposes allegorical interpretation suggesting diachronic interdependence between the, so-called, Zeitgeist and resulting changes in subsequent incarnations of simpletons. The examples presented in the text include a whole spectrum of cultural production, ranging from the nineteenth-century prototypes (most notably Huck Finn), as well as the twentieth-century comedy-drama films and domestic situation comedies (Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp3, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Forrest Gump, and The Simpsons). The article has a tripartite structure, i.e., the first part provides a definition of a simpleton, the second presents a short outline sketch of original conditions which allowed different sorts of prototypical simpletons to proliferate and get deeply ingrained in the American culture. This historical background of the main factors contributing to the wide distribution of popular predecessors of American simpletons serves consequently as a springboard for the thesis put forth in the final part that American culture excels in portraying enthralling well-rounded characters of “simple souls.” This third—main—part makes the case for a symmetry between such pivotal quasi-national icons as Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, Donald Duck, Forrest Gump, Homer Simpson, Shrek and their great literary predecessors, Huck Finn (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn),4 Benjy (The Sound and the Fury), Lenny (Of Mice and Men), Chief Bromden (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and Boo Radley (To Kill a Mockingbird). It also describes persistent fascination of both readers and writers, or what Stanley Fish called “interpretive community,” (Fish 1976, 483) with a simpletonic figure; its persistence in different incarnations,5 its rise to power/popularity from a secluded, peripheral country bumpkin (e.g. Rip Van Winkle, Huck Finn) to a mainstream celebrity (Forrest Gump) or a full-blown head of American household, e.g., Homer Simpson, himself one of the most recognizable American fathers notwithstanding his deficient parenting capabilities. Indeed, as Jonathan Gray observes in Watching with the Simpsons. Television, parody, and intertextuality, “The Simpsons is not just a blip on television history’s map í it is one of the longest running, most beloved, and recognized shows” (Gray 2006, 13).6

Defining a Simpleton The Penguin Dictionary defines a simpleton as “somebody who is not mentally deficient or who lacks common sense or intelligence” (Allen 2004, 1304). However, this is a category that defies simple categorization,

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e.g., as a fool or worse, since the term is deliberately chosen to represent “only a mild deformity, so it could swing on either side of the boundary on which the sound mind is mapped” (Ronell 2002, 298). As a result, a simpleton is only seemingly a puerile character with a limited understanding of American society (a child, an immigrant7, an Indian, a cyborg, or even an animal8—like Jack London’s Buck from The Call of the Wild and White Fang) who has difficulty in adopting, or adjusting to, existing cultural conventions. The term “simpleton,” therefore, does not imply only derisive connotations and, by the same token, is not used in a pejorative way (hence the je-ne-sais-quoi), but first and foremost is designated to a childlike character, often blissfully ignorant, low-class n’er-do-well and who, in fact, after all is said and done instead of a hopeless case of a puerile simple soul oftentimes turns out to be anything but a simpleton.9 Admittedly, behind the mask of a half-wit or a fool hides a relatively decent, likeable human being, who first appears as a naive and silly character, but who, through no fault of his own, is often on the verge of a disaster, e.g., being a homeless social outcast (Huck, the Tramp) or a victim of forces beyond control, which in the end leads to his demise.10 Northrop Frye calls such types of protagonists Pharmakos (scapegoat): “The rejection of the entertainer, whether fool, clown, buffoon, or simpleton, can be one of the most terrible ironies known to art, as the rejection of Falstaff shows, and certain scenes in Chaplin” (Frye 1973, 45). Following Frye’s distinction between two tendencies in fiction— “a ‘comic’ tendency to integrate the hero with his society, and a ‘tragic’ tendency to isolate him” (Ibid., 54)—all simpletons incline towards the latter even if the overall mood of the work is on the surface highly comical (Huck, the Tramp, Forrest Gump in the novel). It is mainly an American trait because in the U.S. the approach to simpletonic figures is not a matter of either-or—i.e., drama or comedy—but is a subtle mixture of both, which makes American simpleton a very poignant character in the end. In point of fact, this type of hero resembles more Hellenic eiron or Plato’s Socrates than braggadocio or buffoon. Ironically, a simpleton may not be the most intelligent character in the story, but usually at the end of the day he “knows a hawk from a handsaw,” to use Hamlet’s phrase, meaning that the label is a social construct and hence a relative term.11 Having a simple soul as a protagonist is therefore a roundabout way of criticizing the mores of one’s community. Furthermore, a simpleton in America has his own voice and is allowed to speak for himself, especially in literature, where he usually narrates a story in the first person even if he has a mind of a three-

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year-old child like Benjy, which makes his account—as is the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury—barely readable. Simpleton is, of course, hardly limited to American culture per se; this type of hero shapes plots from time immemorial in many cultures. They are called by different, generic or proper, names. Thus, in Ancient Greece there were three stock characters, i.e., bomlochos (buffoon), alazon (impostor or braggard) and eiron (a self-derogating character) (Cuddon 1999, 611), miles gloriosus in Ancient Rome (Plautus), braggadocio in England or the Shakespearian Fool, buffoon in France or Voltaire’s Candide, picaro in Spain or Cervantes’ Don Quixote, there is even a Polish variation by the generic name of Sowizdrzal or the pseudo-simpletonic figure of StaĔczyk. There are many other outstanding examples such as Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin from The Idiot, or The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, which prompts an argument that simpleton is a popular protagonist in western culture even if he is only a stock or a flat character.12 Notwithstanding the fact that it is not an inherently American construct, it may be considered a quasi-national signifier of the American pluralist society since it runs like a common thread through this rhizomatic phenomenon. Apparently, simpleton in America seems to have succeeded by proliferating and putting down deep roots, which was not necessarily the case in the Old World where his appearance and popularity were relatively scarcer. Writing about a different theme (male bonding and general lack of well rounded female characters), Leslie Fiedler made a shrewd observation that, mutatis mutandis, is applicable to simpletons as well, “The great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of the library, their level of sentimentality precisely that of a pre-adolescent” (Fiedler 2008, 24). He further writes, Found here and there in British literature, scarcely at all in other traditions, this “boyish” theme recurs with especial regularity in American fiction (…) There is obviously something in the American character that responds to its appeal - or perhaps, conversely, the theme itself through our great books has served to create in its own image what we call the American character. It is Cooper who first dreams the American version of this theme, converting a peripheral European archetype into the central myth of our culture. (Ibid., 182)

Arguably, the motif of a simpleton is intertwined with the myth of the American Adam, where Cooper’s mythopoeic invention of Natty Bumpo— “the full-fledged fictional Adam” (Lewis 1955, 104)—underwent a slow process of democratization13 by way of a slow evolution, where the

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original national myth of an individual, uncorrupted by civilization, transmuted in one way or the other into its nemesis.14 Not only does the American simpleton outnumber its European antecedents but also surpasses their grotesque and flat stock features that do not change in the course of the story. Moreover, they are rather round insofar as they usually develop and change, or they are endowed with Socratic superiority, which makes them commendable characters instead of butts of ridicule.15 While in Europe simpletons existed at the margins of aristocratic culture, in America they filled a cultural niche after the American Revolution, when the Americans did away with the British hegemony. As a result, the nascent society produced its own versions of national icons and myths, transmuting a flat, stock, character of a simpleton into a well-rounded protagonist, who—despite being created among often uncouth people, who settled down westwards from the original eastern states—is nonetheless suffused with Socratic irony, and therefore transformed into great works of subversive art in the carnivalesque tradition as described by Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin 2004, passim). In sum, although the term in question is an over-generalized category created by cultural “larger than life” stereotypes, literary hyperboles and caricatures propagated in popular culture, American interpretive community excels in portraying enthralling characters of “simple souls” who are bound to evoke indelible memories and public sympathy despite their flaws and individual shortcomings. Essentially, the undergirding argument of this paper is that this type of hero occupies significant, even emblematic, albeit on the surface peripheral, place; hence, they are quasinational (i.e., unofficial, low-brow), instead of national (official, highbrow, classic, traditional). Furthermore, it appears that American interpretive community seems to indulge in simpletonic or pseudosimpletonic characters on a far greater scale than any previous European culture. Despite the fact that the simpleton’s origins can be traced to the Old World, he appears to have found for himself a fertile ground in the New World due to rough conditions and poorly educated pioneers who came to inhabit American wilderness.

Social and Historical Reasons for the Widespread Popularity of Simpletonic Figures in the U.S. From the outset the New World was overshadowed by the colonial European hegemony on the one hand and by the overwhelming large spaces of natural wilderness of the vast American continent on the other.

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As a result, pioneers conquering the land had to sacrifice subtle intellectual sophistication or supercilious aristocratic decorum in order to survive inclement climate and general rough living conditions. The western frontier, in particular, forced on its future inhabitants crude, coarse, or sometimes even vulgar lifestyle. Bill Bryson has a particularly relevant chapter called “Domestic Manners” in his book Made in America which provides a piquant example, To be sure, there was something in this. Americans did often lack certain refinements. Louis Philippe, the future king of France, reported with dismay during a trip through the States in 1797, that when he asked for a chamber-pot his host told him there were none but invited him to make free use of the window. (Bryson 1998, 260)

Hence, jokes, popular songs, or stories spawned a particular type of a rather primitive hero,16 such as a simple and hard-working farmer, solitary, uncivilized, backwoodsman, rough frontiersman17, primitive country bumpkin18, happy-go-lucky Yankee19, or the American Wild Man20 who merged altogether into an image of the conventional American simpleton in the middle of the nineteenth century (e.g., Rip Van Winkle, Huckleberry Finn, or Billy Budd). The simpleton is, therefore, a stereotypical hybrid conglomerate of mixed immigration when tradition was still in statu nascendi. In short, judging by its origins, American simpleton can be said to have been “fortunately” spared pernicious and wicked influence of European “unwholesome” learning, stereotypically attributed to corrupt European aristocrats.21 Richard Hofstadter, describing the pervasive ubiquity of anti-intellectualism in the U.S., writes, Hence, as the demand for the rights of the common man took form in nineteenth-century America, it included a program for free elementary education, but it also carried with it a dark and sullen suspicion of high culture, as a creation of the enemy. (Hofstadter 1963, 154)

Putting a “simple soul” or a childlike character from a nascent republic on a pedestal appeared as an act of defiance to European, mostly English, aristocratic powers-that-be. Ralph Waldo Emerson neatly expressed this American defiant trait in the concluding sentence of his essay entitled History, where he writes, [B]ut the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature, but from it, rather. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary. (Emerson 1850, 36)

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To summarize, Americans became attached to their own newly-minted heroes—however uneducated or rough they were—even if they inhabited the peripheries of the civilized world. Thus, American democratic society, more than any European one, was prone to a ludic type of culture, often frowning upon rigidified supercilious European aristocratic notions of high-culture.22 People in the U.S needed their own heroes who would range from simpletons to cowboys.

Huckleberry Finn and His Transcendent Progeny This final part makes the case for a quasi-national iconicity of popular simpletonic characters and their literary prototypes permeating American culture starting with “an authentic American Original” (Bloom 2007, 169), namely Huckleberry Finn. Although originally The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was meant as pure entertainment, while writing the novel, Mark Twain had a writer’s block and consequently a ten-year break during which he had a “change of heart” and wrote a politically involved masterpiece commenting on the most important issue that troubled the American nation, i.e., the problem of racism. Its main hero Huck, “an unkempt, somewhat rough boy” (Lamb 2005, 439) is the first important American (pseudo)simpleton whose pivotal cultural importance has now become a cliché, blown out of proportion due to somewhat hyperbolic, yet clearly mythopoetic, remarks made especially by Hemingway (in his book The Green Hills of Africa), but also by Faulkner and other writers as well.23 Harold Bloom, an eminent contemporary literary critic, writes, “No other figure in our novelistic tradition is as likeable or as influential as Huckleberry Finn” (Bloom 2007, 170). He is included among simpletons for a few significant reasons. First, his character served as a blueprint for many other literary and cultural simpletonic figures and influenced the development of American culture down the line. Second, Huck’s I.Q. was not “up to scratch”—in Huck’s own words, he was “leather-headed” (Twain 2011, 465). Finally, notwithstanding the fact that Huck was unaware of his moral superiority, his genuine simplicity, his social status of a “southern white trash” and ungrammatical backwoods vernacular (Wagenknecht 1954, 177) was very shocking, indeed unheard of, and that triggered a wave of protests among some educated Americans who succeeded in banning the book in several places, most notably in Boston (Lamb 2005, 441). Including Huck among simpletons is, of course, a matter of interpretation, and similarly other examples of “simple souls” after careful

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consideration turn out to be sole praiseworthy characters. Calling this situation an “ironic deadlock,” Northrop Frye states, “It is more usual ... for the artist to present an ironic deadlock in which the hero is regarded as a fool or worse by the fictional society, and yet impresses the real audience as having something more valuable than his society has” (Frye 1973, 48). This way, Twain used the ironic deadlock pertaining to simpletonic figures as a means of covert cultural criticism. Finally, Huck may have been an uncivilized primitive child of nature but, in the light of Emerson’s dictum, he illuminates not only the postbellum South but also human condition. It is a very important trait which will echo time and again, however stupid or uneducated a character may seem at first glance, he or she embodies the irony of Socratic superiority even when unaware of one’s own heroism. By the same token, the term “simpleton” ought to be read vis-à-vis Socratic irony more as a pseudo-simpleton, since his overall significance overshadows any personal flaws. By his very presence, even when he does not voice out loud any overt criticism, he is nevertheless a bitter comment on the wrongs of the society as is the case with Huck but also other simpletonic figures. In sum, Huck becomes a Socrates who appears at the same time simpleminded and wise. Bakhtin claims, Characteristic, too, is the combination of the image of Socrates, the central hero of the genre, wearing the popular mask of bewildered fool ... with the image of a wise man of the most elevated sort ...; this combination produces the ambivalent selfpraise in the Socratic dialogue: I am wiser than everyone, because I know that I know nothing. (Bakhtin 2004, 24)

The second major incarnation of the American simpleton appeared in a very turbulent period, which probably accounts for their mental deterioration and their consequent chilling demise—i.e., Benjy’s dismissal to an asylum, the Tramp’s muteness and resultant disappearance in the talkies, which Slavoj Žižek summed up as the transformation of the movies from Chaplinesque into Hitchcockian type (Žižek 1992, 1), and, last but not least, Lenny’s death from the hand of his friend and keeper Milton. In the light of the aforementioned rough conditions until the nineteenth century America had remained inferior to European colonial empires,24 especially to Britain and France. However, the first two decades of the twentieth century spurred a great deal of significant changes which cannot be enumerated in their entirety. Suffice it to say that due to the transformation and growth of American culture a whole way of life and mindset shifted from the old rustic to a modern urban way of life. Ina Rae

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Hark states, “By the end of the 1920s a rapidly urbanizing society had begun to assert its distinctive qualities fully, perhaps predominantly, into imaginative life” (Hark 2007, 223).25 As a result, a sea-change had come about between Huckleberry Finn and the three simpletons from this period discussed above. Although those three figures are at first glance unlike each other in physical appearance, their plotlines on the other hand offer a poignant commentary on the Zeitgeist; namely, what is striking especially in the literary characters (the Tramp in this respect differs slightly from Benjy and Lenny due to the esthetics of the cinema that shaped him for the tastes of the lower echelons of the society) is that the previous avatar of the simpleton is demoted to a lower level of humanity, i.e., he is transmuted into a pathetic victim depending on others (i.e., Benjy on his family, and Lenny on his friend Milton). In short, in that day and age the simpletons in question became simpletons qua idiots. They are both “developmentally challenged” and in one way or another speech-impaired (which symbolizes the society’s attempt to muffle their critical voices, perhaps to suppress their traditional significance), and they are dependent not on their wits, like Huck, but on their nearest and dearest who, to make matters worse, perceive them as a considerable cause of discomfort and are forced to dismiss them as inapposite burdens. Benjy is eventually sent to the asylum and Lenny, already an orphan, is killed by his companion (a possible brother). Thus, the old myth of American simpleton was revoked after a transitional period of the Progressive era with a tragic result. This theme of rejection may reflect symbolically the cultural paradigm shift—i.e., American society’s progression from an agricultural to an industrial model, which made it possible for American spirit to stop feeling inferior to Europe. As McDonald observes, “It is certainly clear that, in contributing to an emerging set of artistic practices, Americans began at this period not just to imitate but to create, not just to be open to influences but to be influential” (McDonald 2008, 133). The Americans emerged at that time as a strong, dynamic nation and as a consequence tended to repudiate the myth of the simpleton in the mainstream American culture.26 Although, metaphorically speaking, literature became a hostile ground for simpletonic protagonists, the cinema spawned a panoply of simpletonic characters. As Bob Batchelor notes, “Film stars like Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple were among the best known personalities of their era” (Batchelor 2009, 478). Apart from these icons, American movies boasted of a great number of other silly characters, such as Buster Keaton, Laurel

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and Hardy, Donald the Duck, Popeye the Sailor, The Marx Brothers, etc. Evidently, comedy genre became an ideal haven for all kinds of simpletons. The final chapter of simpletonic incarnations begins in the sixties (another transitional period) with slightly paranoid figures of Chief Bromden and Boo Radley and culminates in the late eighties and early nineties with the next great eruption of simpletons and their overwhelming success in mass culture with such widely recognizable characters as Forrest Gump or Homer Simpson. Chief Bromden and Boo Radley are very ambiguous simpletonic characters because it is not even clear whether they are really simpletons at all. The chief’s mental deficiency may be induced by the society which rams down his throat strong drugs and destroys his father with alcohol and deceitful dealing. Chief Bromden, the narrator of the story which takes place in a lunatic asylum, pretends to be deaf and dumb but in reality he discerns with sharp acuteness the situation in the asylum notwithstanding few paranoid hallucinations induced by strong pills that he takes. Boo Radley is a mysterious recluse who shuns people but seems to like children (we do not know much about him as he is in the dark—literally and metaphorically). A few elements seem common and significant, such as the act of murder committed at the end of both novels on a white male by the (pseudo)simpletons in question. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Randalph MacMurphy is driven into a vegetative state partly by the nurse Rachit and then mercifully killed by the chief, which puts him out of his misery. In To Kill a Mockingbird the murder is committed under the cover of darkness in the presence of Scout by Boo Radley. This symbolic act is a reversal of the fate that met the previous avatars of simpletons from the earlier era (modernism), especially of Lenny who was also mercifully killed by a white male because he strangled a woman. Here, both a woman and a purported simpleton take revenge, as it were, on the figure of a chauvinistic white male. In my view, this fact foreshadows the postmodern paradigm which obviates the white male hegemony by giving voice to oppressed minorities (women, children, Native Americans etc.). The final outcome of this paradigmatic shift is the simpleton’s ascent to power—“the reign of a simpleton”—since he seems to have won the day. Moreover, he is recognized as a true American, even a hero, in the person of Forrest Gump and in Homer and his famous family.27 The sole fact that now the simpleton can find a wife speaks volumes about his status in the (post)modern world; he is officially admitted into American society and recognized as a bona fide American. (When we compare them

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with the first prototypes like Van Winkle with his unpatriotic salute to George III or the society’s attempt to change and civilize Huck, the simpleton has come a long and successful way). Indeed, it seems that in the postindustrial western world the simpleton flourishes; he has contributed to the society, is virile, has offspring, and thus has overcome forces that marginalized him. I will conclude by claiming that after the 1960s and the consequent sea-change brought about by many “posts” and “-isms,” which paved the way for the ubiquitous prevalence of the grotesque and the carnivalesque, for an overturning of traditional ideals in the society by ridiculing its basic tenets and deconstructing logocentric western mindset, the upshot is indeed amenable to various simpletons and jesters. Curtis White acknowledges this view in his book The Middle Mind. Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves in which he roundly declares, “In the world of the Middle Mind, all one asks of art is to be ‘entertaining’, ‘fun’, and ‘interesting’ … The huge irony here is that what cultural conservatives like George Will fear most, that the values of a shared cultural tradition are being lost, has come true” (White 2004, 39, 69). Perhaps the present times may be viewed in terms of simpletonic hegemony or dumbing down ideology, as Ronell points out, “Stupidity, the indelible tag of modernity is our symptom” (Ronell 2002, 11). In the same vein Curtis White argues, “Of course, this is a perfect state of affairs for the culture of the Middle Mind, which thrives on the thoughtless and ephemeral enthusiasms that it presents as culture” (White 2004, 43). To sum up, the aforementioned characters, classified loosely as simpletons, have become a significant U.S. contribution to the world culture. Most of them are widely recognizable and popular not only in America but throughout the world, despite the time span which separates their first entrance on the stage from the present moment. It, therefore, leads to a conclusion that Americans excel in creating such characters which are not one-dimensional and utterly mindless but oftentimes inspiring and sympathetic. Hence, they symbolize the je-ne-sais-quois, this nebulous American quality connecting traditional American optimism with the spirit of authentic simplicity.

Notes 1

However, the necessary caveat is the fact that the word “simpleton” is not used in the colloquial sense, but serves as an umbrella term for a literary category that defies simple categorization because it encompasses a broad gamut of anti-heroes, pseudo-simpletons, comical stock characters, which may also include non-human protagonists and whose common characteristic trait is being in a position of an

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underdog (excluded, “the other,” freak, etc.) in American society. Another interchangeable term in this article, for a simpleton, is “simple soul.” 2 This list is not meant to be exhaustive. The presented selection consists only of the most popular characters, as including all simpletonic figures permeating American culture is beyond the scope of this article. Therefore, the focus is only on the most salient examples where the simpleton is the main, or one of the main, protagonist and not a background—supplementary—figure, as e.g., Pip in Moby Dick, Pearl in Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Prissy in Gone with the Wind, Goofy in Donald the Duck, or Sugar boy in All the King’s Men, to name but few. Also, due to the article constraints Billy Budd and Rip van Winkle are mentioned only, but not analyzed at length. 3 Most notably, Modern Times from 1936. 4 Although Washington’s Irving Rip Van Winkle and Melville’s Billy Budd (“a saintly avatar of stupidity” Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Ronell 2002, 101) may also classify as prototypical simpletons they are overshadowed by Huck’s historical importance, as described later. 5 Although in this text it is usually a “he,” due to the traditional white male dominance in the literary canon, still the neutral pronoun “it” is used. 6 See also John Alberti (2004, 63): “There is no doubt that The Simpsons was a remarkable addition to U.S. prime-time television when it first appeared ... Its longevity in prime time as well as its success in syndication, attest that its appeal has been more than mere faddishness.” 7 See Avital Ronell (2002, 59): “We owe the introduction of the term moron to American psychologists, who derived it from the Greek to designate light debilitation, just below ‘average.’ The term was invented for use in the testing of immigrants and, in particular, for their children, upon arriving in the United States. These morons were also defined as incapable of dealing with their own affairs with ordinary intelligence or taking part in the struggle for survival.” 8 Compare the French term denoting stupidity (bête) with bêtise and its connection with animals in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1994, 150) and Avital Ronell (2002, 42). 9 Huckleberry Finn is the most outstanding example. 10 Simpletons from the thirties are a case in point, namely, Benjy, Lenny and the Tramp from Charlie Chaplin’s movies. They are discussed in subsequent paragraphs. 11 This way King Lear may be said to be a fool while the Fool and Edgar disguised as Tom O’Bedlam intelligent characters. This point is discussed later together with the character of Huck Finn. 12 There is also a term in Yiddish, see Birner (1984, 179): “Rosten, in his book The Joys of Yiddish, defines the shlemiel as a foolish person or simpleton, a hard-luck type and a born loser. Yet he notes that a shlemiel can also be someone who is brilliant and learned and even successful. The shlep, on the other hand, drags himself around and plays the role of a drip or a poor performer. He seems capable of not doing a thing as he shleps himself about through life.” 13 Let me quote just one remark concerning The Simpsons which is a case in point: “The Simpsons is a television series that is tailor-made for democracies”

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(Keslowitz 2006, 24); and according to Jonathan Gray it is a “sterling example of ‘democratainment’, or entertainment with a democratizing, public sphere component” (Gray 2006, 110). 14 See Ronell’s interpretation of Gump’s innocence (2002, 55): “Fortune smiles upon the dumbbell, offering a supplement of protection to one who, like the sleepwalker, is not woundable. In this regard stupidity is worn like a protective device, a bulletproof investment in unconscious occurrences … The character associated with stupidity—in contemporary picaresque rendition, an offspring of Forrest Gump—can serially move forward … only to the extent that he is spared knowledge of positions taken or deeds accomplished. Moral purity, American style, can be ensured only by radical ignorance.” 15 Compare, for example, Huck with Candide. 16 Most of the examples that follow come from Constance Rourke American Humor: A Study of the National Character (Rourke 1931, passim). 17 Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson and Buffalo Bill. 18 e.g., the “Johnny Appleseed” myth of primitive natural man (JurczyĔski 1995, 52). 19 e.g., from the first American play The Contrast by Royal Tyler. 20 See Monahan (2008, passim); or, compare Queequeg from Moby Dick. 21 This binary opposition between corrupted Europeans and innocent Americans found a good expression in Twain’s mocking title of his travelogue to Europe entitled The Innocents Abroad or the New Pilgrims Progress, or in The Adventures of Huck Finn in the persons of bogus Duke and Dauphin. 22 This reciprocally found American style unpalatable; see e.g., the so-called paperwar in the nineteenth century between British and American men-of-letters (Burk 2007, 353n). 23 See Ernest Hemingway (1994, 16): “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. ... But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” 24 See Kathleen Burk (2007, 357): “Henry James famously felt that American culture could not itself inspire and support a serious writer, and that to remain in the U.S. would condemn him to being a provincial writer.” 25 See also Gail McDonald (2008, 120): “In the 1910s and 1920s, it became customary for American intellectuals to declare that the time had arrived when America should take its place at the table with grown-ups.” 26 See Gail McDonald (2008, 167): “Complaints about America’s provincialism and conformity were a refrain among American intellectuals and artists in the 1920s.” 27 See Joseph J. Foy (2008, 10): “There was a considerable amount of eye rolling and gnashing of teeth by academics and sociopolitical commentators throughout the United States after a much-publicized 2006 report by the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which found, among other things, that while 22 percent of Americans can name all five members of the family from the popular television show The Simpsons, only 0.1 percent could name all five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

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Bibliography Alberti, John, ed. 2004. Leaving Springfield. The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture. Detroit, MI.: Wayne State University Press. Allen, Robert, ed. 2004. The Penguin Dictionary. London: Penguin Books. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 2004. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquis, transl. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX.: University of Texas Press. Batchelor, Bob, ed. 2009. American Pop. Popular Culture Decade by Decade 1900-1929. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Publishing Group. Birner, Louis. 1984. The Shlemiel and the Shlep: A Psychoanalytic Note on Two Masochistic Styles. Modern Psychoanalysis 9: 179-189. Bloom, Harold. 2007. Novelists And Novels. A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Infobase Publishing. Bryson, Bill. 1998. Made in America. London: A Black Swan Book. Burk, Kathleen. 2007. Old World, New World. The Story of Britain and America. London: Little, Brown. Cuddon, John Anthony Bowden, ed. 1999. Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Emerson, Waldo Ralph. 1850. Essays. Boston: James Munroe & Company. Fiedler, Leslie A. 2008. Love and Death in the American Novel. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press. Fish, Stanley E. 1976. Interpreting the Variorum. Critical Inquiry 2(3): 465-485. Foy, Joseph J., ed. 2008. Homer Simpson Goes to Washington. American Politics through Popular Culture. Lexington, KY.: The University Press of Kentucky. Frye, Northrop. 1973. Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gray, Jonathan. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons. Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York and London: Routledge. Hark, Ina Rae, ed. 2007. American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Hemingway, Ernest. 1994. Green Hills of Africa. London: Arrow Books. Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage Books.

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JurczyĔski, Tomasz. 1995. Dictionary of the United States. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne. Keslowitz, Steven. 2006. The World According to the Simpsons. What Our Favorite TV Family Says about Life, Love and the Pursuit of the Perfect Donut. Naperville: Sourcebooks, Inc. Lamb Robert Paul, and G.R. Thompson, eds. 2005. A Companion to American Fiction 1865-1914. Padstow, Cornwall: Blackwell Publishing. Lewis, Richard Warrington Baldwin. 1955. The American Adam. Innocence Tragedy and Tradition in Nineteenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. McDonald, Gail. 2008. American Literature and Culture 1900-1960. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Monahan, Peter Friedrich. 2008. American Wild Man. The Science and Theatricality of Nondescription in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, and Djuna Barnes. ST. Louis, MO.: Washington University. Ronell, Avital. 2002. Stupidity. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Rourke, Constance. 1931. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Twain, Mark. 2011. Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Montgomery, AL.: New South Books. Wagenknecht, Edward. 1954. Preface to Literature. New York: Henry Holt and Company. White, Curtis. 2004. The Middle Mind. Why Americans Don’t Think for themselves. New York: Harper Collins. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Enjoy Your Symptom. Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. New York and London: Routledge.

CHAPTER NINE MEN, WOMEN AND FAME: GENERATING SERIAL KILLERS IN AMERICAN POP CULTURE DOROTA WIĝNIEWSKA

Introduction “At the bottom of the horror heap lies the immensely generative story of a psychokiller who stalks to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one,”(Clover 1992, 21) announce the opening lines of Carol Clover’s deliberations on serial murderers narratives in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws. Sensational coverage of serial crime has always had a prominent place in American popular culture from the earliest forms of colonial popular literature through the “yellow journalism” of the nineteenth century to the true-crime book and slasher movie of today. However, the mythic figure of the anonymous, maniac killer achieved its greatest prominence in the 1980s. In part, this prominence came from a number of high-profile cases of serial killers—especially Ted Bundy, who courted the media throughout the decade in a futile attempt to avoid the Florida death penalty. Whatever the sources of the serial killer narratives that pervaded the decade, it is clear that the serial killer replaced other monsters as the principal bogeyman of the late twentieth century. Although serial killings are characterized by their relative randomness and lack of any personal connection between the killer and his or her victims, the literature and popular culture surrounding serial killing are dense with explanations which clarify both the killer’s motivations and how the society helped create them. These narratives try to answer one question often asked by people confronting and participating in the culture of violence, i.e., how did we come to this?

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In order to develop a better understanding of how criminals in general and serial killers in particular have become such widely popular figures in contemporary American culture, in the first section of my essay I want to emphasize both the influence of media technologies, and the reasons that lie at the core of such a high demand for stories of violence and death among American populace.

Born to Be a Star Throughout American history criminals have been the target of professional opinion makers, whether they be newspaper editors, TV reporters, documentary filmmakers, who all seek to make a point about American culture by making the criminal into an emblematic figure (Kooistra 1989, 40). Given that the serial killer has been a part of America’s cultural imagination since Jack the Ripper’s East London murders achieved infamous notoriety, many of these “examiners” seem to take a perverse pride in the idea that Jack the Ripper might be an American, perhaps feeling that the United States should lead the world in all things, including crime. By examining the nineteenth-century popular culture response to the Ripper murders in both Britain and the United States, as well as the American reaction to the case of H.H. Holmes, the first high-profile American killer in Chicago in the 1890s, they noticed the connections between murder and nationality. Thanks to this emphasis on nationality, American commentators could not avoid discussing the delicate subject of H.H. Holmes’ Americanness, a discussion that in turn necessitated an uncomfortable consideration of the relationship between violence and American identity. The truth is that for all his emphasis on self-invention, H.H. Holmes could serve as the example of an American archetype with a long and complex history, i.e., the self-made man. His career encapsulates both the promise and the anxieties created by the figure of the self-made man. His (in)famous life was characterized by humbug, deception, the love of money, self-promotion, and tireless self-reinvention. One might say that, like so many others, he was inspired by the example of Benjamin Franklin’s meticulous self-examination, as his restrict program, when incarcerated, included exercise, reading, academic study and vegetarianism. At first glance, the fact that such inclinations came from someone awaiting trial may seem like a sick parody of the Franklinian ideal. In reality, he personified the replacement of the original concept of self-making defined by character building with a self-made man defined by ceaseless quest for money and utterly grisly passions regardless of

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questions of character, morality and ethics. Rather than his notoriety, it was his encapsulating a century of anxieties about the concept of selfmaking that made the nineteenth century headlines; such “ability” made him a cultural icon and his ill fame was heralded by the nineteenth-century press. As the variety and scale of media technologies evolved, the opportunities for publicizing criminals expanded enormously. Such developments are, of course, one reason why representations of criminality now play a central role in the American mass media. According to David Krajicek, during the late 1980s, newspapers and television news broadcasts lowered their editorial standards in order to compete with tabloid media such as Hard Copy and the National Enquirer. The tabloidization of the mainstream media has had an especially damaging impact upon the reporting of crime. The serial killer became a dominant media figure not only because he personified the tabloid sensibility but also because he exemplified other important features of how the contemporary American mass media represent crime (Ibid., 4). One such feature is that the media routinely overreport violent crime. Although murder constitutes a tiny fraction of all crimes committed in the United States, murder and other crimes of violence dominate media reporting of crime. As a result, the incidence of lesser crimes is minimized, and the incidence and impact of violent crime are exaggerated enormously (Schlesinger and Tumber 1994, 184). Such inclinations of crime news editors, their tendency to focus on sex and celebrity trivia as well as to perpetuate inaccurate myths by presenting chaotic and ultimately false images of crime found its logical culmination in the media frenzy surrounding the O.J. Simpson case in the mid-nineties (Krajicek 1998, 9, 63). If increased attention to crimes involving celebrities was one consequence of the tabloidization of the American mass media in the 1980s, another was a newly prominent role of serial killers during this period. The years since 1985 have seen a change in how the American mass media have represented crime, the change that has had important ramifications for the celebrity status of the serial killer. Comparisons of serial killers to gothic monsters are commonplace. Naturally, positioning serial killers as such represents our attempt to salvage a community by defining what stands outside that community. In other words, serial killer is the most recent incarnation of the monstrous Other. Just as the monster is a strongly ambivalent figure, an “othered” being who seems strangely familiar, the same can be said about celebrities. The famous are simultaneously like us and completely other than us, inhabiting a different order of reality that we both desire and resent. Mark Edmundson has even argued that

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Perhaps the reason why most studies of serial killer celebrity culture do not draw attention to the fame of serial killers is that the hegemonic definition of fame still assumes that it is an inherently positive category. According to this line of thinking, criminals in general, and serial killers in particular, are still more appropriately described as infamous or notorious rather than famous, as antiheroes rather than heroes. In fact, the iconic status of serial killer in contemporary American culture is compelling evidence of the collapse of the difference between fame and notoriety. In particular, the marginalization of merit as a defining factor in fame means that nowadays to be famous and to be notorious are often one and the same thing. Most writers on the subject agree that Americans have witnessed a change in the nature of fame over the past decades. If in the past the categories of the famous were “populated” by those recognized for praiseworthy achievement, today the famous are the visible, rather than the talented. As Cathy Madison has commented, “In 1896 celebrities were leaders … whose qualities we admired and aspired to; today celebrity means only someone whose name and face we know” (Madison 2000, 5). In turn, what it takes to be seen no longer has any necessary connection to merit but is determined by whatever attracts the public’s attention. Thanks to the “morally neutral” nature of contemporary fame, “to be notorious or to be infamous may be no more than shortcuts” to fame, “more efficient uses of the machinery of fame” (Fisher 1986, 155). Perhaps this is the motive for those crimes committed by obsessed fans—by attacking the famous, you become famous. Although the existence of famous serial killers might seem a perversion from the honorable history of fame and its orthodox definition, Tyler Cowen reminds us that “many of the supposed ‘heroes’ of the past were liars, frauds, and butchers to varying degrees” (Cowen 2000, 65). On a related note, Chris Rojek argues that it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between celebrity and notoriety because, although notoriety usually connotes “transgression, deviance and immorality … today celebrity often involves transgressing ordinary moral rules by, for example, excessive conspicuous consumption, exhibitionist libidinous gratification, drug abuse, alcohol addiction, violence and so on” (Rojek 2001, 31).

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In The Image, Daniel Boorstin’s pessimistic account of what happened to the American Dream, he laments the modern tendency to degrade all fame into notoriety and finds this tendency encapsulated in the celebrity. For him, the celebrity embodies the superficiality that has come to dominate the public sphere in the United States. The celebrity’s visibility stands in for a chilling lack of substance in contemporary public figures, a lack of substance symptomatic of a culture that has come to prize image over reality (Boorstin 1962, 57-58). Although it would be a mistake to use the terms “fame” and “celebrity” interchangeably, clearly the two categories are closer today than they have ever been before. Once fame is characterized primarily by visibility rather than achievement, it no longer makes sense to distinguish between good and bad forms of fame. In a society where merit-based fame ceases to have any meaning, recognition and self-exposure are now believed to be absolute goods in themselves. As Braudy puts it, “Fame promises acceptability, even if one commits the most heinous crime, because thereby people will finally know who you are, and you will be saved from the living death of the unknown” (Braudy 1986, 562). When the essential factor about stars is whether they are broadly known, the way is open for notoriety to fill the gap left open by the disappearance of merit in definitions of fame. The fame of serial killers is not limited to the fact that they are culturally omnipresent in contemporary American culture or that promoting their fame has become a staple of American popular culture. If, as Leo Braudy argues in The Frenzy of Renown, the exemplary twentiethcentury famous person “is especially the person famous for being himself or playing himself” (Ibid., 554), than it is not enough to say that serial killers are famous. Judging by contemporary standards of fame, the serial killer is the exemplary modern idol, widely known for being himself. This might be a counterintuitive statement, as surely serial murderers are famous for what they do, not for who they are. In the serial killer, however, action and identity are fused. So is it possible that serial killers are idols? The answer seems positive—yes, they are idols of obliteration. In his essay “Critique of Violence” Walter Benjamin argues that the violent destructiveness of criminals inheres not necessarily in the deeds they commit but in what their deeds imply about an attack on the very principle of law itself. To support his claim, Benjamin emphasizes “how often the figure of the ‘great criminal,’ however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public. This cannot result from his deed, but only from the violence to which it bears witness.” He goes on to say that “in the great criminal this violence confronts the law with the threat of

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declaring a new law … the threat that horrifies the public as it did in primeval times” (Benjamin 1998, 281). The serial killer both outrages and thrills us by his seeming ability to stand outside the law, to make his own law, in an action whose mutual destructiveness and creativity mirror our ambivalent response to the killer, composed of both fear and attraction. These are uncomfortable feelings to acknowledge, but what could be more quintessentially American than a complex and ambivalent reaction to a violent crime? As Stathis Gourgouris points out, “If American society is paradigmatically founded on the primacy of law [“The Bill of Rights”], it is also co-incidentally founded on the phantasmatic allure of the outlaw— the Wild West, the frontier and so on: the errant loner who forges his own rights, in some improvisational fashion, as he goes along” (Gourgouris 1997, 135).1 This claim is promptly fueled by Frederick Jackson Turner’s divagations in the Significance of the Frontier in American History when he says that the frontier became a constantly reenergizing force in the production of American individualism—the driving force of American history. But the same individualism could also be a destructive force if not harnessed properly because of this individualism’s impatience with social conventions (Turner 1990, 50). From the above we should understand why there is such a vibrant market in contemporary America for representations of death in general and of serial murder in particular; the famous serial killer effectively satisfies a double need: the need for representations of death, and the need for celebrities. And where do these needs come from? According to Vicki Goldberg, the expanded media technologies of the 1980s coincided with an increased need for representations of death as the reality of death receded from everyday American life. As the average American became less and less likely to be confronted with the brute reality of death in the form of dead bodies thanks to the improvements in public health and increased sophistication of the funeral industry, Goldberg argues, there was a related increase in representations of death, an increase largely enabled by the development of new media technologies and fueled by the people’s desire to find other ways to manage their continuing anxieties about death now that death had been removed from the public sphere. Representations of death, especially esthetic representations of death, are able to ease such anxieties because “they occur in a realm clearly delineated as not life, or not real, even as they refer to the basic fact of life we know but choose not to acknowledge too overtly. The delight because we are confronted with death, yet it is the death of the other” (Goldberg 1998, 33-35). Both celebrities and representations of death are potent means of resolving a variety of anxieties, ranging from a fear of death to concerns

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about what constitutes acceptable social behavior and worries about the decline of individuality in modern society. For example, Jib Fowles argues that the market for celebrities in general, and film stars in particular, arose as a “result of the dislocating impact of urbanization on the American population, a process that began in the nineteenth century but reached a critical point in the early years of the twentieth century” (Fowles 1992, 160). Faced by unfamiliar and estranging urban environment, the new generation of city dwellers eagerly looked around for models of personality and found them, according to Fowles, on the screen (Ibid., 160). The utility of stars, however, was not restricted to displaying positive aspects of personality, but served as a rite of exorcisms to negative emotions. One of the reasons why violence has become such a central part of American entertainment is that by “aggression onscreen or onstage, stars perform the important psychological service of helping to vent anger” (Ibid., 163). While Fowles’ argument concerning the role of celebrities seems plausible, would not criminals be more likely to create, rather than resolve, anxieties? There is no reason to assume that only fictional representations of death and violence resolve anxieties. Although audiences feel less ambivalent about expressing their identification with fictional rather than actual serial killers, representations of real criminals can also serve as cathartic function for their audience, as Paul Kooistra argues in the context of explaining the appeal of the “heroic criminal” (Kooistra 1989,19). Certainly, serial killers are not celebrated in the same way as heroic criminals such as Jesse James, Billy the Kid or Bonnie and Clyde because they lack the emphatic dimensions of these Robin Hood-type outlaws. So what exactly is the appeal of the serial killer, why is he such a dominant figure in American popular culture? The most encompassing answer seems that this lone killer satisfying his inner desires with no concern for the lives of others, embodies many of the cultural patterns in America of the last few decades. The serial killer is, as Mark Seltzer observes, not only horrifically abnormal but also “abnormally normal” (Seltzer 1998, 152). The killer achieves both notoriety and anonymity. He (almost always a “he”) is both chameleon-like in his ability to appear in different forms and distinct in leaving his signature upon the frightened culture. In Seltzer’s reading of the serial killer as cultural icon, these murderers achieve a version of the American vision of success, distorted as it may be.

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Hip to Be Square In the past fifteen to twenty years, serial killers have increasingly been portrayed in popular culture as caricatured exemplars of a kind of aggressively “hip,” permanently jaded, ironic, postmodern version of cool. This type killer continuously cultivates and promotes his deviancy within a pervasively cynical and nihilistic pop-culture wasteland. Seltzer makes a point, [t]he postmodern serial killer necessarily exists in a chaotic, fragmented environment—one devoid of any authentic values and feelings saturated with banal consumerism and ephemeral mass-media simulacra. Hence, extreme antisocial behavior becomes the normative method for negotiating one’s way through all of the violence, confusion, vacuity and absurdity that abounds. (Ibid., 152-156)

The contemporary American serial killer embodies a dehumanizing process and operates largely as an “abstraction” which distracts attention from the damaging social phenomena and historical predecessors which produced him. Further, in some senses the serial killer, however abstract, gives name and identity to the increasingly incomprehensible violence and brutality diffused through contemporary life. In the following section of my essay I intend to look at a few samples of American literary and cinematic works that not only portray the serial killer as the ultimate outsider or enemy of society, which reflect back upon society its own perversions and fears, but which also present him as its ultimate product. The examples should also demonstrate how the serial killer deeply resonates with the American public and how, although his call of and for fame and celebrity is no longer imperative, the fictionalized serial killer in his individual assertion of violent control remains recognizably American. Multiple murder, of a sort roughly comparable to what is now called serial killing, appears quite early in American prose—in Nick of the Woods (1835), the novels Ormond (1799), The Partisan (1835), and The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845). While they are mostly derivative of the European Gothic, all present multiple body counts and villains in which one can see the literary prototypes of the contemporary serial murderer. The Gothic genre’s adaptability to film in the twentieth century made possible by the Gothic reliance on visual imagery, transferred the vitality of the fictional murderer to the present cinema-dominated age. The character of the multiple murderer flourished in the new medium.

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Consequently, movies have exploited the mental dungeons of serial murderers since silent films, commercializing these creatures into a franchise. The first cinematic multiple murderers—Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Jack the Ripper in Waxworks (1924), Franz Becker in M (1931), among others—were European Gothic villains. Moving away from the Gothic origins of the old-continent serial killer cinematography, it is necessary to examine some representative works in relation to the specific American culture that produced them. Examples of American cinematic serial killers since the 1920s include: The Lodger, 1926; Night Must Fall, 1937; Shadow of a Doubt, 1943; The Bad Seed, 1956; Psycho, 1961; The Boston Strangler, 1968; Frenzy, 1972, Murder by Decree, 1979; Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984; Manhunter, 1986; Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 1990; The Silence of the Lambs, 1991; Man Bites Dog, 1992; Kalifornia, 1993; Romeo is Bleeding, 1993; Serial Mom, 1994; Copycat, 1995; Seven, 1995; The Usual Suspects, 1995; Scream, 1997; Kiss the Girl, 1997; and American Psycho, 2000. Certain entries relate to real cases, such as The Boston Strangler, and Henry: The Portrait of a Serial Killer. These cases focus on sex as a motive, but not the kind of sex that we might joyfully pursue in the comfort of our boudoir. In fact, sex does not reveal itself in any simple fashion throughout the list. Many of the culprits become embroiled in money and politics as reasons for the serial killings, whereas the others become murderers who slaughter for revenge, fear of exposure, the joy of killing, or for reasons too obscure to unravel. Sex no doubt resides somewhere in this web of dark intentions, although the relatively blunt act of “rape for the sake of rape” does not appear prevalent in the films sampled.2 What lies at the core of all these “performances” is the serial killers’ murder of strangers, their ability to seduce victims into their own deaths while, at the same time, avoiding police detection. These qualities render these criminals compellingly supernatural, mythic and indeed almost godlike in effect. Even if captured, they ultimately manage to escape justice. The killers escape personal responsibility is such a way as to spread the blame for murder among the society that helps create the “monster,” by the same token constituting the “Americanness” of the phenomenon. This type of plot directed at least two narratives and their authors. One is John Naughton’s 1986 film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, based on the study of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. The other is the infamous 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho and its film version.

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Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) is often cited as the original serial killer movie, which spawned and entire genre of serial killer or “slasher” stories popular throughout the seventies, eighties, and early nineties. In homage to Psycho and Ed Gein’s—one of the American iconic psychopaths—life story, Jonathan Demme directed The Silence of the Lambs, a film which in gory detail recreates the scenes from the life of a serial killer who wears the female skin of his victims. What is most important to John McNaughton’s project, however, is not recreation of the distasteful details of the actual Lucas’s life. Rather the film is a psychological study of a man who can repeatedly kill strangers and inmates alike without remorse and an examination of a culture in which that can so easily happen. One of his (McNaughton’s) most important decisions in the film is to respond specifically to the mid-1980s law enforcement definition of the serial killer and the resultant media promotion of serial killer stories. The feature of this coverage was an implied need for stronger law enforcement capabilities to combat the lower-class vagrants-turn-outlaws preying upon decent society (Jenkins 1988, 137). The film both echoes and subverts this concern acknowledging the existence of a Henry Lee Lucas but also admitting the impossibility of ever stopping those rare few like him. This impossibility stems from Henry’s insistence on avoiding pattern through studied randomness and unpredictability of modus operandi. Such practice identifies him as not so much a criminal genius but rather an “everyman” killer. His lower-class bluntness contrasts directly with the elitist, manipulative Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs. Henry is aided in his “invisibility” by a casually brutal and nomadic society of wilders, as implied by the pointless beating of the homeless man that goes unnoticed by all except Henry. In Henry’s America, homicide rates do not arouse any official reaction and pass unnoticed by the media. One might conclude again that the serial killer who wishes to “go public” with his murders must be unusually inventive in his identifiable pattern (as it is the case in The Silence of the Lambs and Seven). Alternatively, he must compile an enormous victim toll so as to attract the simultaneous attention of the police and the media. Henry, however, disguises himself behind the enormous violence level and corresponding desensitization inherent in American society. Such passivity is also inherent among those who serve to protect it; there are no heroic FBI profilers chasing through the Gothic landscape to save the endangered American family in Henry. Henry’s vagabond lifestyle of the road mirrors the larger nomadic wanderings of the average American so deeply inscribed in one of the most cherished American values, i.e., mobility. His drifting echoes not

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only the specific fictional genre of the road movie but the larger issue of American pride in its very rootlessness. Mobility in America has always meant freedom to escape one’s past and the consequences of that past. For him, mobility allows him to escape punishment for murder. Just as history is susceptible to a multiplicity of interpretations, so is Henry’s personal history. As viewers, we are granted little insight into the personal history that contributes to Henry’s present-day savagery, although we do learn that he spent time in prison for killing his mother. The supreme irony in all this is that Henry is a perfect gentleman, whom Kim Newman calls “the most normal, well-balanced person in the film” (Newman 1991, 44), until he kills Becky, his friend and potential lover. His murder of her thus illustrates the dangers inherent in romantic notions that a man can save a woman from the grimness of daily existence. This deconstruction of gender myth is central to the kind of American neoGothicism exemplified by writers such as Tennessee Williams, whose key influence McNaughton often cites (McDonough 1991, 45). Leslie Fiedler’s theories of the “classic” American novel also come as particularly relevant here. He maintains that (male) American writers typically shun any adult treatment of heterosexual relations and present their female characters as “monsters of virtue of bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality” (Fiedler 1969, 26). While the female gender looms large in most patriarchal American literature, it exists as a largely impersonal force of nature to be dominated or a pull toward socialization and domestication to be fled (Ibid., 28). Hence, it needs to be halted or, more preferably, erased. Henry’s murders, in that sense, quite adequately inscribe themselves in this American model. Frequent misogyny is also one of the most troubling components of American Psycho and the main character’s channeling of the sexual drive into murder labeled the novel as repulsive. The literary revulsion of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho can only be described as a media tirade. No one seemed to notice Ellis’ debt to The Great Gatsby, another tale about self-fashioning in a gilded age of greed.3 In the traditional sense, the novel contains no plot or characters of any substance. Instead, it presents one epic catalogue of designer brand-names and products after another. Not only does this textual strategy illustrate its title character’s obsessive nature, but it additionally sums up the overriding theme of American Psycho: the self-cannibalizing aspects of capitalism in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s America. As Juchartz and Hunter observe, “Ellis uses violence and greed, in their most extreme forms, as metaphors to reflect the real-life corruption in the world of his readers” (Juchartz and Hunter 1996, 72). Michelle Warner, for her part concludes, “[American Psycho] depicts the

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end project of a society that teaches its members only to consume others. It takes psychological cannibalism to its physical extreme” (Warner 1996, 144). Mary Harron’s film translates Ellis’ minute attention to social forms and commodities into an extravagant visual banquet. In the first scene, waiters serve exquisite dishes in an expensive restaurant Patrick Bateman, a successful Wall Street broker, attends with his fiancé. Presentation is allimportant. It is obvious that “consumption” is a universal pun; it signals the excesses of insensitive materialism and simultaneously transforms “good taste” into a matter of life and death. Bateman has taste but no gusto whatsoever. He is utterly anesthetized by sex, drugs, and violence. He only becomes animated when a rival’s taste bests his own, as it is staged in the scene in which stockbrokers compare their handsomely engraved business cards enacting a duel which strangely resembles the one from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Western. Bateman’s humiliation about his inferior business card prompts him to assault a homeless black man while parroting the platitudes of Reagan’s social policy: “Just say no to drugs. Why don’t you get a job? You have a negative attitude. You are a loser. I have nothing in common with you.” [In the film, all those who service the rich (waiters, limo drivers, masseuses, dry cleaners) are minorities— black, Asian, Hispanic]. Patrick Bateman is a “wilder.” Wilding is defined as a brutal, apparently motiveless attack committed by malefactors on luckless strangers. Initially considered to be an urban crime with racial overtones, “wilding” is now identified as a much more generalized and politicized expression of extensive and uncontrolled American individualism in the economic, political, and social arenas (Jenkins 1988, 7). According to Robert Conrath, the serial killer as “wilder” achieved some iconic status during the late 1980s precisely because his extreme egocentrism parallels to the “money-grubbing … megalomaniacal likes of Donald Trump and Michael Milken” (Conrath 1996, 150). Patrick Bateman is obviously named after Psycho’s Norman Bates and less obviously Batman. These two genre shape-shifters, uneasily positioned between the poles of “villain” and “hero” in a recognizably Gothic strategy, are ideal referents for protagonist Bateman. Bateman, whose identity is constructed solely from whatever pieces of 1980s consumer society he can integrate into his public persona, naturally gravitates toward those horror narratives with which his audience and potential victims should be familiar. It is wickedly illustrated in deadpan scenes with the detective, where Harron evokes Ion Ionesco’s “Theater of the Absurd” and Luis Buñuel’s

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The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie. She explains, “Bateman is bored and has so little personality or center that he doesn’t know how to act, so he watches and imitates in order to get ideas how to behave” (quoted in Warner 1996, 142). In this regard, Bateman emerges as the dark double of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There, he imitates and recycles, or rather devours and digests whatever he sees in popular culture. In addition, Patrick Bateman is an example of “serial killer chic,” which can be further defined as a “sensibility that depends on a culturewide voyeuristic interest in notorious murderers to simultaneously dwell upon and mask its own obsession with the subject” (Juchartz and Hunter 1996, 73). The film successfully captures this atavistic narcissism and tedious repetitiveness of Bateman’s world: he is obsessive-compulsive about his facials, his muscles, his music, his videos, and his food; he is a control freak who is losing control. He cares more for products than people: “Don’t touch the watch! Or that robe! Or put that glass on the table!” he shrieks at various women who come to his apartment. Juchartz and Hunter further remark, “He is the spokesman for the commodities brokers, the corporate raiders, the account executives, the stock traders, the financial manipulators, and all the other upper-class wilders who try to touch meaning through purchased sensation” (Juchartz and Hunter 1996, 75). Bateman and his peers have artistic pretensions, but only in the selfflattering sense that “art” somehow stands at a critical distance from common culture and thus can only be appreciated by those such as themselves, possessed of sensitivity and refined intellect. However, the traditional distinction between high and low art has been eradicated in the fashion typical of the (postmodern) murder narratives. On many pages of his novel Ellis laboriously critiques the 1980s musical icons in a parody of academic textual analysis while simultaneously welcoming their ease and accessibility. The songs of Phil Collins and particularly Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to Be Square” equate with high culture for Bateman and express his desire to fit in the corporate world of commodities.4 The film’s final scene marks Bateman’s utter disintegration. He can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality, but again, no one seems to notice. This last aspect conspicuously contends that a society based largely on the manipulation of stocks and credit is abandoning its last connections to tangible economic foundations and thus, by implication, its sense of shared community. Desensitized, the society absorbs Patrick Bateman— the nightmare America created. Because fictional representations of serial killers are often based on the biographies of actual killers, one might say the serial killer narrative spans both fictional and nonfictional genres; both

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in true crime books and fictional representations we find a kind of selfreflexive cultural analysis gone awry.

Conclusion As seen from the above literary and cinematic examples, the serial killer conceives of actions in a manner that resembles the violent methodology of the larger social structure. Therefore, the killer stands a good chance of remaining unremarkable, largely undetectable or invisible. Hence, the serial killer is nearly unstoppable within the web of be it communal, corporate or institutional violence. This concept of “invisible killer” is ambiguous enough that it can be used to level devastating critiques of the violence underlying traditional American values … were it not for his celebrity repute that American culture has swaddled him in. Due to this bilateral nature of their status, the appeal of the serial murderers in the postmodern popular culture is not entirely clear. Nonetheless, it is possible that they are meant to reflect and cater to the narcissism, hostility, jadedness, and cynicism of a certain portion of the contemporary audiences who prefer to experience garish displays of violence and criminality unencumbered by the implied moral framework that is traditionally grounded in the imperatives of justice and catharsis. Above all, in serial killers we may find a kind of self-reflexive analysis of American identity gone awry.

Notes 1

Richard Slotkin argues that American frontier authors claimed for themselves the notion of “family unity” while simultaneously investing it with certain irony. The frontier hero usually escapes from the reunited family, fleeing from its constraints out into “the Territory.” Huckleberry Finn, of course, is the most famous literary character to do this, but he has his antecedents, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking (Slotkin 1992, 472). 2 Some of these films portray females as serial killers, ranging from lighthearted figures (Serial Mom) to more somber characterizations (e.g., The Bad Seed, Black Widow, Romeo is Bleeding). Gender differences in the movies and in reality show that the females’ modus operandi favor a material over a sexual motive for serial murder, and that females engage in luring rather than stalking tactics to claim their victims (Wilson and Hilton 1982, 496). The victims, unfortunately, find themselves just as dead either way. 3 In this cautionary tale about inauthenticity and self-invention, Nick Caraway describes listening to Jay Gatsby’s story about the sad thing that happened to him in his youth as being like “skimming hastily through a dozen magazines”

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(Fitzgerald 1999, 69). Ellis updates Fitzgerald’s fable of extravagant selffashioning, for reading it resembles skimming GQ, Rolling Stone, Interview, Playboy, Hustler. Just as Gatsby invents a Platonic ideal of himself, Bateman confesses (while peeling off a facial mask), “The is an idea of a Bateman, but I am simply not there.” 4 At this point, it seems inevitable to mention Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song. By the time he wrote it in the late seventies, the slang terms “hipster” and “hip” meant something slightly different from the 1950s “rebel.” To be hip in the seventies was “to be on the cutting edge of popular culture, to be in the know about what things were cool and what things were not” (Fowles 1992, 88). Most importantly, being hip meant being able to negotiate and manipulate the flow of images, styles, entertainment and goods available in consumer culture. Executioner features both kinds of hipsters: the murderous, fifties-style “white negro” rebel Gary Gilmore and the swinging seventies pop media producer Lawrence Schiller. What unites there hipsters is the ability to control death, whether it is through action or representation.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. 1998. Critique of Violence. In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jepthcott, 277300. New York: Schocken Books. Boorstin, Daniel J. 1962. The Image; or, What Happened to the American Dream. New York: Atheneum. Braudy, Leo. 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York: Oxford Universty Press. Conrath, Robert. 1996. Serial Heroes: A Sociocultural Probing into Excessive Consumption. In European Readings of American Popular Culture, eds. John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet, 147-157. Westport: Greenwood. Cowen, Tyler. 2000. What Price Fame? Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Edmundson, Mark. 1997. Nightmare on Elm Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Fiedler, Leslie. 1969. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Dell. Fisher, Philip. 1986. Appearing and Disappearing in Public: Social Space in Late-Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. In Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, 155-188. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1999. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner.

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Fowles, Jib. 1992. Starstuck: Celebrity Performers and the American Public. Washington, DC.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Goldberg, Vicki. 1998. Death Takes a Holiday, Sort Of. In Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment, ed. Jeffrey Goldstein, 27-52. New York: Oxford University Press. Gourgouris, Stathis. 1997. Enlightment and Paranomia. In Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, eds. Hent De Vries and Samuel Weber, 119-149, 361-365. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Harron, Mary. 2000. American Psycho. Los Angeles, California: Lionsgate and Muse Films. DVD recording. Jenkins, Philip. 1988. Myth and Murder: The Serial Killer Panic of 198385. Criminal Justice Research Bulletin 3(II): 1-7. Juchartz, Larry, and Erica Hunter. 1996. Ultraviolent Metaphors for (Un)Popular Culture: A Defense of Bret Easton Ellis. Popular Culture Review 7(1): 67-79. Kooistra, Paul. 1989. Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power and Identity. Bowling Green, OH.: Bowling Green State University Press. Krajicek, David J. 1998. Scooped: Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze, and Celebrities. New York: Columbia University Press. Madison, Cathy. 2000. Robert and Me. Utne Reader, May-June: 5. McDonough, John. 1991. Director Without a Past. American Film, 42-49. Newman, Kim. 1991. Review of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, dir. John McNaughton. Sight and Sound 1(3): 38-46. Rojek, Chris. 2001. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books. Schlesinger, Philip, and Howard Tumber. 1994. Reporting Crime: The Media Politics of Criminal Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Seltzer, Mark. 1998. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge. Slotkin, Richard. 1992. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Harper. Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1990. The Significance of the Frontier in American History, ed. Harold P. Simonson. New York: Continuum. Warner, Michelle. 1996. The Development of the Psycho-Social Cannibal in the Fiction of Bret Easton Ellis. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 17(2): 140-46. Wilson, Wayne, and Tonya Hilton. 1982. Modus Operandi of Female Serial Killers. Psychological Reports 82: 495-497.

CHAPTER TEN PANTOPIA OF TRANSFERENCE: OF FUTURE AND SOUND; THE SOLOIST AND THE SONIC UNCONSCIOUS EDYTA JUST AND MAREK M. WOJTASZEK

[A] cosmic present embraces the entire universe: only bodies exist in space, and only the present exists in time. —Gilles Deleuze (2004, 7)

Introduction “We are too accustomed to thinking in terms of the ‘present’,” laments Gilles Deleuze. In a somewhat similar vein, the tagline of the film by Joe Wright from 2009 The Soloist announces: “No one changes anything by playing it safe,” emphasizing on the one hand the common platitude that any transformation is conditioned by, and tantamount to, resignation from an alleged “comfort” of present safety and on the other hand positioning change as inextricably yoked to time, traditionally construed as abandonment of the present and moving into the future, which necessitates encounter with the unknown, with the not-yet. But what if, as The Soloist insists, what we take as the to-come is always already happening now, inscribed in and contemporaneous with it; what if change is not about (human) projective futurity (utopian or dystopian) but realizes itself in an ongoing (non-human) pantopian presencing?1 Telling the story of a homeless schizophrenic and gifted musician, Nathaniel Ayers, the film, rather than naively promise mental recovery by underscoring redemptive and therapeutic powers of music and companionship, works throughout to reconsider and reposition them as immanent forces of time, not as temporal adventures or enterprises headed for some future outcomes, but entirely internal to the time present as (un)timely instantaneous events, the present which does not in any way absorb the past and future. Deleuze

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claims, “[A] future and past divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into the past and future in both directions at once … It is no longer the future and past which subvert the existing present; it is the instant which perverts the present into inhering future and past” (Deleuze 2004, 188-189, our emphasis). The notion of “presence,” as Derrida made sufficiently clear, differently conceptualized and explicated in the dominant genealogy of Western philosophy, has worked effectively to produce an illusion of intellectual safety and existential security, thus promoting experimentality within set limits and habituality as a dominant mode of life. It could do so by either enchaining time to movement or by configuring and reproducing eternal categories thereby generating a phenomenal sense of stability through the relatively slow passage of ordered (metric) time. The major problem that both Deleuze’s philosophy raises and the film expresses is principally the problem of time and its relation to being,2 that is, how we come to experience our life as time-bound and how we come to acquire our sense of being, literally our prae- (i.e., before) and -sens (etymologically related the Latin verb esse, to be). Consequently, we argue, far from overarching abstraction, the concept of “presence” is rethought and reinvigorated as always already expressive of the coming into being of being, of the present/presence, i.e., its be-coming in time, its temporal creation, and thus constitutive of an immanent plane of an ongoing future-driven interpretation. Collocated equally with the Latin sensus, it additionally points towards its empirical, sensible, genesis. Subjecting the communal loci of apparent peace—sanity and friendship— to a rigorous critique, the film courageously proposes a vivid and ultimately vibrant reformulation of the present, playing them differently and dangerously, opening them up to the untimely sonic experimentations. The present, away from “an encasement,” a stable point of reference to which past and future are relative in time, as the film makes clear, is understood as an activity of instantiation, i.e., encounter, which immediately rips it open to past and future. Deleuze states, “The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass. In other words, each present goes back to itself as past” (Deleuze 1988, 59). It is precisely in this sense that we can conceive of the future as an unfolding (becoming) of the past as presence, as “the living present” (Deleuze 2004, 74)—an assemblage forever different, forever new, an eternal return of the same, the only same that ever returns—i.e., difference. Far from the realm of human habituality, the film expresses the present as the crystal, as an instantaneous ingress of a sound-machine, “the vanishing limit between

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the immediate past which is already no longer and the immediate future which is not yet” (Deleuze 2001, 81), whose virtual productivity is unlimited in the past and future directions in which it unfolds.

Of the Unconscious and Sound: From Demiurge to Smith It is indeed sound that not only exposes the limits and affective squalor of representation but also best exemplifies the indiscernibility characteristic of time as the instantaneous splitting into present and past; “present that passes and past which is preserved and as such past remains contemporaneous with the present that it has been” (Deleuze 1988, 58), the splitting into the actual and the virtual; the instant a sound sounds, or better is sounding, it becomes immediately past. As such, it engenders an immanent sonic transference, an in(ter)ference, which sustains becoming, that is future enduring. As one of the few philosophers Deleuze, regards arts in general and music in particular as a form of thought. This apparently banal proposition turns out to be pregnant with unanticipated ramifications. Representational thought has construed music hylemorphically, subjecting it to the spirit of an epoch which takes on various forms—either a vision of order and stability, internally hierarchized owing to theological or rational-scientific foundations or a passionate obsession, a question of feeling or expression. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari propose an altogether alternative view, whereby form is no longer imposed on inert, shapeless and chaotic matter but constitutes an effect of an abstract (yet not ideal!) modulation of a material—i.e., matter which is always already specified in its peculiarities, range and plateaus of intensities and potentials. They shift to a molecular level which forever runs potentially adjacent to the recognizable objectivity and which we will refer to as the shimmering unconscious sonic production, whose uniqueness they aptly grasp and render in terms of metallurgy (2004b, 453). They state, If metallurgy has an essential relation with music, it is by virtue not only of the sounds of the forge but also of the tendency within both arts to bring into its own, beyond separate forms, a continuous development of form and beyond variable matters, a continuous variation of matter: a widened chromaticism sustains both music and metallurgy. (Ibid., 453)

Nathaniel Ayers, playing Beethoven on the two-string violin, works as a smith in musical material, observing it and interacting with its particular flows of intensities. He is playing without notes, remembering the sonic knowledge once learnt, actualizing anew the sensible movements and

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postures. “Each present goes back to itself as past,” stresses Deleuze (1988, 59), thus logically each past virtually affirms itself and realizes in the living present. In doing so, Deleuze affirms knowledge not as formally anamnetic but purely and sensibly virtual. The Soloist tells the story of how music—not necessarily as formal compositions but, above all, as living and ubiquitous sonic mechanosphere “is capable of serving as the foundation for the unfolding of time” (Ibid., 59), the story of knowledge, of life, of future as reminiscence. Conducting a sonorous (intensive) reduction to the sounding itself, i.e., peeling off a sound of anything that might tie it with historically constituted forms, the musician creates entirely novel musical realm. He makes it possible to explore the world of sound in all its material presence, which is neither simple nor undetermined. If it is often perceived as chaotic, then certainly not from the commonsensical perspective. This unconscious sonic material is always already equipped with certain texture, zones of intensities, densities. Deleuze elsewhere pointedly notes, In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side, there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornellos that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return. (Deleuze 1993, 104)

In sounds produced by traditional instruments (humans included!) one discovers an immense complexity, a differentiating game of forces. To make this game audible is not only, as the film in all its sonic virtuosity illustrates, to open the music to a becoming-new but also, most importantly, to instigate the process of a becoming-music of non-musical matter! To the question what Ça is, Deleuze, therefore, replies “the refrain of a song, whose verses form the many series through which the element circulates” (Deleuze 2004, 67). As such, music “has always had one object: individuations without identity that form ‘musical beings’” (Deleuze 2006, 296). Steady sound, scratchy resonance, smooth clamor, laughter, scream, splash, dropping, groaning, grunting, humming, beeping, clapping, fluttering, swishing, hush: an anamorphic flow of sounds, constant noise, non-oedipal pulsation. This pantopia of sounds equally embraces shimmering stream of voices, flickering pieces of street and phone conversations, ceaseless humming of TV and radio broadcasts. Voices, words, syllables, consonants, vocals that do not represent anything, have no linearity and no history, are not recognizable. Every office, every house, every street corner, a whole assemblage of what makes up a metropolis is suffused

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with an ongoing sonic production—the frenetic yet real city-mechanosphere. Noisy current of vibrating and pulsating sounds creates a sonic cartography, a sonic map corresponding accurately with a map of a city. This noise, however, is not untidy, messy, contaminated or dangerous per se. It corresponds well with clean and sterile contours of conurbation, the intersections of perpendicular, parallel, curved and diagonal lines of streets and houses, its bright and luminous colors. The anonymous noise, transparent air, sterilized tints and geometrical precision of city’s silhouette are illegitimately born, released from the contagious promiscuity of the has-been and to-come, including also the blurry collection of familial paintings and representational forms of memory. This untainted emptiness of the unintelligible noise and sterile city forms plateaus of potentiality, a plane of consistency, a unique mode of individuation. “Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. … Latitude and longitude are the two elements of [this city] cartography” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b, 287). Waves of sounds, clarity, and transparence of the city unparadoxically stand for tranquility and peace, a productive emptiness full of vibrating multiplicities which “have relations to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and word” (Ibid., 8). Both noise and city endlessly encourage a kénotic experience of “emptying out of the self, [and] opening it up to possible encounters with a number of affective outsides” (Braidotti 2005, 306). The zoë of sonic polyphony carries being, helps it navigate, maneuver and endure. It is in this sense that one can posit that life is a sonic production as unconscious, “Das Lied von der Erde.” The colorful crowd of the Los Angeles’ outskirts, the dwellers of the Lamp Community, and Nathaniel Ayers welcome the city and welcome the noise. “Outsiders,” living on the city’s fringes, functioning in a nonidentitarian vortex, resisting the molar forms of phallogocentric system and its coordinates. To be on the periphery, at the margins, on the street, to inhabit parks, to flee into tunnels and to open up to the constant shimmering of sound waves is to dismiss transcendence and slide into a productive oneness—i.e., immanence; plenitude of becoming-other. Nathaniel’s body functions as a sensual membrane perceptive of every incoming sonic affect. Everything goes through it and the skin does not prevent the self from arriving particles which trigger non-human becomings. Waves of sounds are impossible to block. Their vibrating, pulsating or smooth movement causes not only an ear membrane to tremble, but moves the whole body, organ, tissue and cell. The city, the noise, and the body of an “outsider” interweaves with an immanent

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assemblage the outcomes of which can never be foreseen a priori. This assemblage, this space-time is [a] plane of immanence where elements gather, bump into one other, pass through each other and cross over one another. It is a space of … territorialization and deteritorialization, of stratification and destratification. Thus, it is a space where nothing remains a separate entity, a space of constant becoming. (Just 2011, 269)

“In a tunnel (…) I can hear the city sounds and not be locked off from life, locked off from the world,” confesses Nathaniel. His becomingsound, becoming imperceptible makes itself audible in his act of speech. For Nathaniel his participation in the linguistic universe is partial in so far as he disrespects and disobeys conventions that organize language. Nathaniel’s immanent act of speech deterritorializes language. As a metallurgist, he makes semiotic and linguistic matter sound, resonate with his own body sounding, his sound-machine. His words intersect with one another in an immanent and rhizomatic manner, becoming a ritornello of sense. They repeat themselves anew, subject to no representational function, and can be characterized only by their speeds and slownesses when cut into single letters spelled one by one. Nathaniel’s becomingsound is thus also his sense-machine; it is plain that sense is, as Deleuze in The Logic of Sense restlessly underscores, an affair of the surface, incorporealities, of sounds, their temporal and material production. An immanent machine producing sound, noise and a “constant disturbance, constant disturbance, constant disturbance.” Inhabiting an Outside, dwelling in and producing unintelligible yet sensible sounds, Nathaniel defies representational imperatives of sameness and recognition. Furthermore, Nathaniel’s becoming-sound disobeys linearity as the time becomes “the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b, 289). His life becomes an art of immanent experimentation commencing “a creative process that is not configured by unfolding a fixed essence or telos (Braidotti 2005, 306). Nathaniel’s life is a pure molecular creation, an immanent affirmation of difference, “a multiple and complex process of transformation … a flux of becoming” (Ibid., 306). His complex life as much as Beethovenian music he adores playing is a genuine “clamor of being” played on and expressed via a necessary minimum of means. “Beethoven produced the most astonishing polyphonic richness with relatively scanty themes of three or

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four notes. There is a material proliferation that goes hand in hand with a dissolution of form (involution),” emphasize Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 298). Nathaniel becomes-sound, a veritable and vulnerable sonic machine. He is a protean sound machine with the ability to gather the city, the noise and the pulsation of his own sonic body and make them audible even for the “semi-deaf” molar forms dwelling in representational spaces. He assembles and, like a smith, molds the anonymous, deterritorialized sounds, forms immanently their sequences, only to leave them anonymous and deterritorialized again. A “constant disturbance” must become musical for music to become a “constant disturbance.” In this sense, Nathaniel’s music is not molar in so far as it consists of the city, of noise, of his own throbbing body. It cannot be played in the concert halls or closed apartments. His music is not connected to any inside but forever stays outside; Nathaniel exasperatingly explains, Beethoven lives out in the freshness of the air … take lessons in a tunnel. Where I can hear the city sounds and not be locked off from life, locked off from the world. In the tunnel I can hear the music the way it’s supposed to be played. Not in this place [apartment], there is not city sounds. There is no Beethoven, there is no Los Angeles, California. (The Soloist)

Only in its connection with a real Outside, with a city, with noise, with a body with the earthly-cosmic mechanosphere can music maintain its immanence, its nonlinearity and sonic variability. Only then can it function and become an experience, experiment, constant creation, affirmation of an Aionic difference, and so can everybody who is affected through it. Noise, hum, sound, waves of sound, moving particles of the air, a “constant disturbance” of the phantasmatic unconscious. For Deleuze, the unconscious is “fundamentally a crowd” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, 33), “populated by multiplicities” (Ibid., 34), with “indefinite moves toward and away from zero” (Ibid., 35). With an immanent flow of constantly trembling particles the unconscious becomes an immanent and tremulous space-time inhabited by moving multiplicities. In this sense it turns into an affirmation of immanent and creative difference that has no origins; ça knows nothing about the Oedipal triad. The ontological/cosmic unconscious production was forcefully turned against itself; the theatricality of sameness, representation, and linearity emerge as one (negative!) of its multiple expressions. A sound functions as an immanent percept, it just is, jingling, clanging, vibrating, trembling—the living present that instantaneously happens. The percept of sound immediately effectuates an affect of immanent tremor, immanent color, immanent

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ritornello of memory, forever affectively vulnerable, artistically precarious, and prone to alteration. The pulsating and vibrating particles of the air do not have history, resist resemblance and recognition-based intelligibility. Thus, the pulsating and vibrating unconscious stands principally for a rhizomatic map not a trace; it is endowed with sonic potentia of nondefinition and “the freshness of the air.” The unconscious vibrates, trembles, pulsates; ça sonne, indeed! Air surrounds the skin and constantly touches the nerves. The sound wave is simultaneously already-there and not-yet-here, too early and too late, going to happen and having just happened and so is the unconscious. In no way—as Deleuze puts it—does the present contradict Aion. Quite on the contrary, as Deleuze claims, “It is the present as being of reason which is subdivided as infinitum into something that has just happened and something that is going to happen, always flying in both directions at once” (2004, 74). It endures, lasts, continues already-there and not-yet-here. An utterly real presence expressive of a pantopia of sonicity and futurity.

Of Transference and Sound Such an immanent figuration of the unconscious, forever futureoriented in its continuous construction of the present, implicates not only a different economy of communication but also creates an altogether alternative view of interpersonal relationships. Whereas the former— eschewing its linguistic formalization—becomes a physical semiosis (production, emission, and reception of material charges-signs)3, the latter, changing their motivation and objective, transform into voyages of discovery of one’s presence yet un-sensed/un-known. Escaping the negative regime of (mis)recognition, which provokes subjective abolition, psychological entrapment, and affective bondage, human relations affirmatively emerge out of a process of what we are tempted to call “counter-admiration,” a peculiar and paradoxical sensation of immediate and simultaneous inspiration and exhaustion, an immanent and mystical voyage of becoming-other. The film unfolds a story of a genesis of an uncommon and unexpected relationship, a friendship between Nathaniel and Steve Lopez, L.A. Times journalist. Conceived of affirmatively as a sonically transferential relation, their friendship tests the limits of their endurability, thus affectively triggers the widening of one’s psychosomatic boundaries, constraints, ailments, and inhibitions. Before, however, the friendship between men actually begins, there is a non-human, far deeper, sonically vibrant fraternity at work: between Lopez and words, and Nathaniel and sounds. For the “insiders,” the molar

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forms functioning under the phallic order with firmly defined identities, the noise must be blocked or at least ignored. It is not that molar forms can simply reject the noise, in so far as they participate in its production, yet the productive potential of anonymous sound waves becomes, somehow, overlooked and disregarded. In itself located at the threshold of representation—the realm of intelligible words and traditionally formalized music—sound cannot and must not be taken seriously. “Constant disturbance,” an affirmative and creative potential of sound becomes utterly frustrating. Nathanial’s becoming-sound disturbs the representational order of Steve Lopez’s landscapes. Initially, for Lopez the city, noise, Nathaniel’s sonic production must be tamed and rendered into a comprehensible, linear, and recognizable and linguistically constructed space. Lopez confesses, “I do words for a living.” He tries to write about Nathaniel’s history, to know about his family, to comprehend what happened. His strives to impose order, linearity and intelligibility onto Nathaniel’s rhizomic, sonic and sensibly pulsating life-story. Lopez approaches Ayers morally, offering a diagnosis, medications and apartment. “After all, schizophrenics have a mother and a father, don’t they? Sorry, no, none as such. They only have a desert with tribes inhabiting it, a full body clinging with multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, 34). Lopez finds it hard to come to terms with Nathaniel as he is, his highly precarious presence. Even though his body pulsates and passionately resonates with eternal streams of sounds. Even though his pen and notebook occasionally become a drumstick and a drum, his representational universe at first stubbornly remaining immune to the Nathaniel’s sonic interventions, it slowly begins to interweave with and even follow Nathaniel’s rhythms. One does not need to listen to be able to hear, to sensibly produce and carry on with one’s own rhymes, songs, to become a part of one’s life melodic cacophony. It is undeniable, however, that this very same “constant (sonic) disturbance” may generate a sense of unbearable, unendurable musical vertigo, cementing one’s negative feeling of alienation and confusion, leading—as Deleuze and Guattari in their schizoanalysis do not cease to repeat—to a “black hole,” a genuine process of schizophrenia as the decent of a molecular sound-machine into an unproductive abyss, forming a clinical entity of a schizophrenic. The film—in all its affirmative mood and mode—tells the story of a man’s indefatigable quest for musical producibility and endurability, the story of an undutifulness, of flight, of a man’s objection to believe in the allencompassing power of the negative (psychoanalysis) and its ideals, the story of a passionate encounter of two men and the transferential desire that connects them, the story of a sublime sickness that representation does

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not rest to press down to guards its own (alleged) sanity. It is the story of the living present as fraternity of actions and passions, the temporal extension that will forever have accompanied the men’s life-enriching encounter, which, as Deleuze remarks, “expresses and measures the action of the agent and the passion of the patient” (Deleuze 2004, 7). We argue that the immanent fraternity that brings Nathaniel and Lopez together bears an explicitly sexual character and develops via seduction and, after Derrida and Deleuze, we will stress that as such, it is distinct, at least potentially, from coupling and a relation of recognition. It requires, in lieu of reflection, genuine opposition, generative of transferential learning and mutual love not through communication, consensus, discussion or dialogue but is generated through con-versation, a communicational bringing together of singularities. Jacques Lacan rightly admits, “Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is transference—something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present” (Lacan quoted in Evans 1996, 214, our emphasis). As the film already in its title conveys, immanent transference as friendship needs singularity, which, of course, has nothing in common with individuality. Individuality assumes subjective judgment, psychological narcissism and category-based representability rooted in one’s rational capacity and moral hubris, which progressively and effectively sentences one to solitariness and deteriorates into self-obsession. Conversely, singularity is a humble belief in one’s esthetic uniqueness in full affirmation, awe, and admiration of one’s multiplicity. This ineluctably necessitates an altogether different conception of one’s being, its relation to other beings, and life in general—an ethical accountability dictated not by imperatives but measured experimentally by bodies themselves and always shifting frontiers of sustainability. However disgustful of the city noise and indifferent to the music in general, while in the philharmonic Lopez cannot resist an immanent becoming-sound; becoming-alreadythere-and-not-yet-here while exposed to the Nathaniel’s becoming-music. Traditional linguistic communication collapses as insufficient a device to express one’s sonic experience. The only way out is yet another negation—proclamation of (deserved) exhaustion. Lopez’s immunity and resistance to the pantopia of sounds leave him with a sensation of failure. “I am an enemy. A stranger. I do not know who to fault (…) Done trying. I resign. I resign. From everything” (The Soloist). It is only in his experience of becoming-Nathaniel/’s-music, of a con-versation through sounds, of sounding endurance, of a sensible endurance through a sound; with no history, no recognition, no Ayres or Lopez; experience of a vibrating plateau of imperceptibility that Steve acknowledges and

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welcomes the sonic endurability of Nathaniel’s life, body, i.e., his living and enduring unconscious desiring producibility. Sanity can only be imagined from the vantage point of a primordial decay and madness as an ideal. Friendship as an ultimate partnership is the idealistic projection motivated by the sense of ontological inequality and combat. Leaving utterly behind this Platonic legacy, The Soloist as the story of immanent transference that affectively realizes itself in its sonicity affirms time as the living present in its creativity and potentia of change. Rather than one recovers, one will ever have recovered. Time is not conceived of (nor sensed) as a healing mechanism; one does not become sane, but rather, as the film accentuates especially in its denouement, one is sane in becoming, i.e., one attains and affirms sanity in becoming.

Conclusion: Univocal Life Nathaniel’s leap of faith means a courageous practice of constructing immanence, a line of flight, which, in other words, boils down to ontologically unrestrained sonic expressivity, unlimited to the merely human. It is also expressive of his untimely and affective belief in the living (sonic) present which implicates within itself simultaneously the lived past of its cycle (time as sound) and an anticipated future thereof (time as friend), which remains located on an immanent timeline of living presents, which can itself be shown to be part of a living present of longer extension, and to comprise within it still shorter durations (Deleuze 2004, 74-75). This emerges as a genuine illumination: music (sound) and life (being) are two expressive modes of the same living and cosmic substance. From this perspective, it seems logical to note that it is representational metaphysics that has coerced us to live a truly schizophrenic life, ontologically split in uneven and dissymmetrical halves, where thinking and being, sense and sensibility, authenticity and artifice have been forced to separate for the sake of ostensible order and peace. It is obvious now that becoming must be provoked through an instant, occasioned by an event, an interruption or irruption—the living immanent present wherein lies the gain of eternity—of eternal return as difference. This is an act of pure creation, which no longer differentiates between material practice and formal reflection; both combine and condense in order to produce the new. Genuine creations are no doubt born of admiration, a seductive conversation, and passion for transversal experimentation and becoming, which never occurs under representation and thus, quite rightly, is classified as creatio ex nihilo. Deleuze and Guattari note, “When development subordinates form and spans the

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whole, as in Beethoven, variation begins to free itself and becomes identified with creation” (2004b, 105). The past and present concatenate, each runs into the other, past becomes present becoming future, the present as an instant, an event comes to function as modes of incitement to future enduring. Each is a mode of the other’s future proliferation; both converge singing the glory of wondrous enduring life. Consequently, the role of transference changes radically from a psychoanalytic device of efficacious (therapeutic) communication predicated upon an idea of a distanced and judgmental master of knowledge. It becomes an art of the sensible con-versation whereby singularities can play out their experiential/experimental tunes in whichever manner they like (linguistic, or otherwise sonic), a naive openness and affirmative belief in the to-come as a realization of virtual assemblages of potentialities incessantly emerging out of presencing. Transference is reformulated away from a creationist (hylemorphic) act of healing to become an “immanent activity of subjectivation” (Guattari 1995, 14), i.e., following, sensing, responding to the other’s sonic reactions, a becoming-other, enduring with her/him; susceptible to the sensual vibrations and flows, a meticulous symptomatology, and, most of all, friendship. To dwell in, produce sounds, and to experience/experiment (with) music that consists of the cities, noises, bodies, melodies requires that one disavow homologous representation. It is also to be constantly affirmatively “disturbed” and to pass this disturbance further into the future anterior that best—not at all paradoxically—expresses the (living) present as enduring, simultaneously becoming involved in an ongoing sonic production and schizo-creation. Neither does such transference serve recognition-based comprehension nor can it result in a culturally defined diagnosis. We risk a claim that such a transference may become therapeutic itself in so far as it affectively “heals” everybody from the cultural imprints and inscriptions. This is because it mobilizes the unconscious (non-oedipal!) “forces—the schizzes-flows-forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions” (Seem in Deleuze and Guattari, 2004a, xxi). It is what it does. There is no point in drawing the lines to connect the present with the past for the sake of some safe future—utopian or otherwise idealized. Conversely, immanent desire requires that one abandon the illusion of safety maintained by one’s habitual addiction to the present/presence both temporally and spatially—which ultimately turns out ostensibly painlessly repetitive and vampiristically dispassionate—and affirm the painful time of becoming which—extending beyond human temporality—liberates transference from the communicative imperative of retrieval of memories

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and memories of eclipsed traumas and engenders it as a flight into the conversing sensible living present which … will always have been. Finally, transference is always about the virtual and as such it facilitates the flows and conversations of the sonic unconscious desire. It is precisely in this sense that one cannot think and speak of Nathaniel as well as of Lopez and equally of their relation but in the future anterior. “Music is on the side of the nomadic because the moment it is activated, it challenges spatial and temporal constellations” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 88). Let us conclude with Steve Lopez’s closing quotation from the film, “Mental experts say that the simple act of being someone’s friend can change his brain chemistry, improve his functioning in the world (…) By witnessing Mr. Ayers’s courage, his humility, his faith in the power of his art, I’ve learned the dignity of being loyal to something you believe in, of holding on to it, and above all else, of believing—without question— that it will carry you home” (The Soloist).

Notes 1

We follow here Manuel DeLanda who in his book Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2005) convincingly argues, “The problem of time in a Deleuzian ontology needs to be approached in exactly the same terms as that of space” (Ibid., 106). Therefore, in the concept of presencing we retain both the temporal and spatial (physical) understanding of the term presence, i.e., now and be present. 2 It is in this sense that Deleuze’s philosophical oeuvre can be thought of as continuation of Heidegger’s project of reanimating metaphysics developed in Being and Time and equally a creative response to it put forth in his Difference and Repetition (1968). 3 Hence, the physical notion of transference.

Bibliography Braidotti, Rosi. 2005. Writing. In The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr, 306-307. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DeLanda, Manuel. 2005. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London & New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Zone. —. 1993. The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

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—. 2001. Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2004. The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester. London & New York: Continuum. —. 2006. Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. Nomadology. The War Machine. New York: Semiotext(e). —. 2004a. Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane. London & New York: Continuum. —. 2004b. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi. London & New York: Continuum. Evans, Dylan. 1996. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London & New York: Routledge. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis. Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press. Just, Edyta. 2011. If Writing Has to Do with Desire, What ‘Kind’ of Desire Is That? Between Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze. In Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research. Researching Differently, eds. Rosemarie Buikema et al., 261-272. London & New York: Routledge. Seem, Mark. 2004. Introduction. In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane, xvii-xxvi. London & New York: Continuum. Wright, Joe, dir. 2009. The Soloist. Los Angeles, California: DW Studios L.L.C. and Universal Studios. DVD recording.

CHAPTER ELEVEN MULTICULTURALISM OF AMERICAN MUSIC AS A BASIS OF THE NATIONAL COMPOSERS’ SCHOOL MARINA PEREVERZEVA

National identity of American music has been one of the most interesting, debatable, and exciting questions of contemporary musicology both in the United States and worldwide. The variety of native, regional, territorial, and local origins as well as the multiplicity of adopted traditions present in the United States gradually fostered multiculturalism, which inspired the nation’s musical diversity. The musicologist Hugh Wiley Hitchcock introduces two terms in his approach to American music: “cultivated” and “vernacular” traditions (Hitchcock 2000, XIV), which are quite broad and compound, I mean by the term cultivated tradition a body of music that America had to cultivate consciously, music faintly exotic, to be approached with some effort, and to be appreciated for its edification—its moral, spiritual, or aesthetic values. By vernacular tradition I mean a body of music more plebeian, native, not approached self-consciously but simply grown into as one grows into one’s vernacular tongue, music understood and appreciated simply for its utilitarian or entertainment value. (Hitchcock 2000, 56)

In addition, the country has continually modified its ethnic structure, which consequently triggered connection and unification of its cultural traditions, artistic trends, and esthetic principles. Studying the history of music, Richard Crawford attempts to understand the nature of American musical experience and follows the African-American writer Ralph Ellison, who claims that “the diversity of the total experience rendered much of it mysterious,” and that “the country’s experience embodies connections that can only be revealed by exploring the full range of it” (Crawford 2001, VII). He further remarks that “American diversity carried

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the key to American experience, for much that appeared unrelated was actually most intimately intertwined” (Ibid., VII) and then confesses: “Ellison’s faith that, if explored in the right spirit, the country’s diversity would reveal its interconnectedness made me feel the same was true of American music” (Ibid., VII-VIII). While remaining connected with the European artistic heritage for a few centuries, the musical culture of the USA was seeking ways of emancipation and individual development. In the eighteenth century American music continued the musical traditions of the English church, folk, social genres of music, Austrian classicists and German romanticists (e.g., Anthony Philip Heinrich, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, John Knowles Paine, Horatio William Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick and Edward Alexander MacDowell), as well as French impressionists (e.g., Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Charles Martin Loeffler). The subsequent periods of development of the national musical culture, however, witnessed an evolution of original forms and distinctive genres based precisely on the synthesis of the different national traditions. In the nineteenth century they included the minstrel show, spiritual, blues, and ragtime, whilst the twentieth century contributed jazz, gospel music, country music, and musical theater, all of which have come to be national hallmarks of American culture. The first national musical-theatrical form, i.e., the minstrel show was a form of entertainment in which white actors recreated features of the Black culture by means of mimicry, gestures, songs, dance, and speech. The vocal genre of the spiritual synthesized musical traditions of the Black folk songs and Protestant chorale. It combined chant-like singing with accord texture and modal and rhythmic features of African-American folk songs. Jazz also united several kinds of musical art, emerging from a long interaction between various genres of African-American and European music, including ragtime, blues, band music, popular songs and dances, minstrel shows, spirituals, and skiffle. Interestingly, the end of the twentieth century demonstrated that not only jazz or country should be perceived as emblematic of American music but also another kind of style could become popular and represent the uniqueness of American music. One of the main features of the development of traditional music in the USA is “the mixing and blending of various folk-strains to produce new forms” (Lomax 1975, XVI). American folklorist Alan Lomax writes, “Our best songs and dances are hybrids of hybrids, mixtures of mixtures, and this may be the source of their great appeal to a cosmopolitan age and the cause for their extremely rapid development. Folk music, like other arts and sciences, blooms hard by the crossroads” (Ibid., XVI). He elsewhere

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continues, “Indeed, it seems very likely that one day all American music will be café-au-lait in color” (Ibid., XX). For example, the energetic hoedown dance includes African-American dance forms, the English jig and Scottish reel elements, whereas the Black breakdown dance encompassed elements of the all-European quadrille and quickstep. The country style was formed via synthesis of folk music in the South-Eastern States which were based on Scottish and Irish ballads with the cowboy songs of the South-Western region, which likewise combined British traditions with other kinds of folk music, including Mexican and AfricanAmerican. A close interaction of various contrasting sources was typical of both folk music in the USA and the creativity of academic composers. Multiculturalism became one of the main features of American music and served as an important guideline for the development of the national music school of eminent composers. Multiculturalism is thus considered to express the signs and traits of Americanness in the American art of music.

Towards Vernacular Musical Traditions One of the leading tendencies of American music in the twentieth century was independent search which—rather than evolve from European models—connected with the actual acoustical experience of America’s own musical environment. This explains an increase of some composers’ and folklorists’ interest in traditional music of various nationalities inhabiting the USA as well as an appeal to mold British, AfricanAmerican, Native American, and other folklores into established musical genres. American composers actively entered into a dialogue with musical cultures of other continents, which resulted in a particular “eclecticism,” “polystylistics,” and “stylistic pluralism” that are characteristic of American culture as a whole. National musical style was formed during the culminating wave of “Americanism” (Zuck 1980; Rosenfeld 1940).1 During the 1920-1940s this became the main objective for American composers who strove to build upon the spiritual experience of various peoples constituting the country and to incorporate into their music the most characteristic features of the American culture of the time. Many composers (notably, Arthur Farwell, Charles Wakefield Cadman, Rubin Goldmark, Charles Ives) became interested in the traditional music of different nations living in North America. Later, Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Elie Siegmeister, Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles, William Grant Still developed an Anglo-Celtic, Amerindian, AfroAmerican, and Creole musical folklore traditions.

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The oldest member of the “American Five” (i.e., a group of composers who tried to endow their art with unique national traits), Charles Ives was a “musical patriot.” Acquainted with the spiritual and genre music of the USA (cowboy and patriotic songs, fiddlers’ tunes, ragtime, dances and marches for wind bands), he incorporated and developed these musical traditions in his works. Ives aimed to create a uniquely American symphony, and his Second Symphony (1909) is one of such examples. The composer not only developed European musical traditions (stemming from Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, DvoĜák, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky), but also introduced features of American vernacular music (such as Protestant hymns, gospels, Stephen Foster’s songs, popular songs from the Civil War, fiddlers’ melodies and dances). He used a number of fiddle tunes and Foster songs (e.g., “Camptown Races”) in his rousing Finale of Second Symphony which ends with a collage formed of the patriotic tune “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and military band fanfares in the brass instruments party. The same polystylistical diversity is also characteristic of Ives’ piano sonata “Concord, Massachusetts, 1840-1860” composed in 1915. The sound texture of this piece incorporates quotations from Beethoven, Brahms, Foster, Mason, Chopin, Debussy, and Scriabin in its first movement, while bringing in ragtime rhythms and Puritan hymn tunes into its second movement. At the beginning of the orchestral set “Three places in New England” (1920) Ives quotes such melodies as “Old Negro Joe,” “Marching in Georgia,” and “The Call to Battle for Freedom,” combined by means of a well-organized counterpoint (Pereverzeva 2007, 180 - 182). Musically interpreting history, Ives emphasizes the idea that the past unites all Americans of whatever national provenance they are. Ivashkin states, Ives became the first composer who was able to show a fanciful combination, composition and synthesis of traditions which in their pure forms are characteristic for American music. He was able to rise over the ordinariness of the acoustical atmosphere of America … and feel the highest spiritual unity as manifested by its different voices. (Ivashkin 1991, 85)

Henry Cowell, a connoisseur of Celtic mythology, British and American folklore, Oriental rituals, ceremonies and art, was one of the most “pantophagous” composers (in the sense of his approach to various musical traditions). He appropriated in his works the melodies of various nations as diverse as Chinese, Japanese, African, South Indian, Indonesian, and Middle Eastern as well as Irish musical traditions, remaining all along

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highly interested in American Puritan hymns. During 1956-1957 Cowell and his wife, ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson, went on a world tour for 14 months (with the support of a Rockefeller Foundation grant) and surveyed the music of Ireland, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Iran, India, Pakistan, and Japan, collecting musical materials. The traces are well audible in the composer’s studies and creative works: Persian Set for a chamber orchestra combined Western and Persian string instrument “tar” (1957); Ongaku (1957), in which Western instruments imitate traditional Japanese ones; Madras Symphony (1958); Homage to Iran for violin and piano (1959); two concertos for Japanese kotos and orchestra (1962; 1965) and many others. It is, therefore, no coincidence that Cowell created such works as United Quartet (1936), American Melting Pot for chamber orchestra (1940) and United Music for orchestra (1943). Moreover, Cowell wrote hymns and fuging tunes, series based on early Anglo-American folk hymnody (Hitchcock 2000, 13). In the United Quartet Cowell made an attempt toward “universal” musical style, which, in his view, can be created in the USA. Crawford states, The United Quartet makes use of ostinatos, drones, and stratified textures in ways that help to explain his [Cowell’s] claim that the work should be understood equally well by Americans, Europeans, Orientals, [and] higher primitives. (Crawford 2001, 595)

This piece is original in form, style, and content; clarity and simplicity are achieved through the use of unique musical elements inspired by many places and periods, for example, classical European music (represented in the building up of a carefully planned form), primitive music (realized by using a three-tone scale and the different ways the three tones appear which is a procedure of some primitive music), Oriental music (recreated by modes which are constructed by analogy to Oriental modes), and modern music (represented by the use of unresolved discords and by free intervals in two-part counterpoint). The winner of First Honors and of the prize from the National Music Appreciation Committee, Roy Harris incorporated generously certain elements of Black music, melodies of the Puritan chorale, cowboy ballads, and Civil War songs in his symphonies. In his Folksong Symphony (1942), considered to be an outstanding contribution to symphonic literature, the composer presented a panorama of American musical folklore, compiled in the anthology Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (collected and published by J. and A. Lomax) as well as illustrated by The American Songbag (edited by Carl Sandburg). It is possible to hear the melodies of

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cowboy songs and ballads (such as “O Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” “Old Chisholm trail” and “Laredo”), fiddlers’ tunes and dances (of the early pioneer days), lyric songs of the South (“Mountaineer Love Song,” “Jump Up My Lady”), labor and religious songs of the Black spirituals (“A Little Boy Named David” and “De Trumpet Sounds It In My Soul”), Civil War songs (“The Girl I left Behind,” “Johnny Comes Marching Home”). It is remarkable that the composer selected the melodies according to their intonation and strove for a convergence and generality of intonation in their development. Harris expressed the musical nationalism whereas his creativity remained in tune with the times so “during the 1930s sense of cultural unity grew among Americans as stronger connections were felt among the nation’s regions” (Crawford 2001, 592). In that period “artistic works … portrayed the United States as an array of local settings, each with its own character” and “Americans were in the process of finding a common racial identity that would override the local differences that divided them” (Ibid., 592). With the ever-increasing national awareness of the 1920s one might expect that the vernacular traditions would inspire more frequently the American composers. However, such works in this period are rather scarce. National “polyphony” will emerge much later in the American musical landscape. The music of different national traditions was “built” into common Western European artistic and stylistic context during the first forming period of American composers’ school. It is in the second half of the twentieth century that the U.S. composers emphasized their remoteness from the European culture. Their sounding dissimilarity, which marked out national peculiarities, did not transform into cultivated music. However, there were important exceptions in the early musical Americanism. For instance, in 1936 Aaron Copland wrote El salon México, inspired by a 1932 visit to a dance hall in Mexico City. He states, “It wasn’t so much the music or the dances that attracted me as the spirit of the place” (Ibid., 587). Clearly, Copland endeavored to capture the country’s flavor by means of music. Making effective use of native popular Mexican melodies, the composer maintained their distinctiveness, remaining in the range of the diatonic tonal system. The later American composer and critic Virgil Thomson observed that Copland’s “music offered one approach to simplification” and his “employment of folk-style tunes was, as Copland was to write later about The River, ‘a lesson in how to treat Americana’” (Ibid., 588). Copland also created jazz-derived and country-derived works, considering them models of a genuinely American musical style. The composer utilized the nineteenth-century tonal style and made no attempt to draw on inner essential devices. Conversely, he was

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one of the first authors to have expressed feelings, colors, and sensations, rather than pictorial images of the different geographical regions of the country. Crawford contends, Copland put a New World stamp on four large-scale works of the period by borrowing folk and popular melodies, as he had done in El salon México. In two ballets about the West, Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), cowboy and Western tunes appear. A Lincoln Portrait (1942) for orchestra, featuring a narrator who speaks words of Abraham Lincoln, quotes Stephen Foster’s Camptown Races and Springfield Mountain, a folk melody from eighteenth-century New England. Appalachian Spring (1944), a ballet set in rural Pennsylvania during the last century, contains a set of variations on the Shaker tune Simple Gifts. (Ibid., 594)

Undoubtedly, numerous composers considered jazz to be the most important element of a genuine American musical style, which is why William Grant Still, Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Conlon Nancarrow as well as musicians of the “third-stream” (Gunther Schuller, Red Norvo, Ralph Burns, George Handy, Robert Graetinger, Rolf Liebermann and the others) and many others took the “jazz path” for themselves. Since the late 1950s the “third-stream” composers broadened their interests by encompassing fusions of classical music with elements drawn not only from African-American sources but also from other traditions, including Turkish, Greek, Hindustani, Russian, and Cuban music.2 Crucially, in many American musicians’ view, the jazz-derived rhythm (asymmetrical patterns, polymeric and irregular phrases system) was key in separating American music from the European one. Undeniably, jazz harmony, instrumentation, and timber colors can well be regarded as distinguishing features of U.S. national music.

From “Melting Pot” to Musical Multiculturalism The variety and range of traditions did not preclude their exploration. Exposing the common traits (in mode, melody, rhythm, texture, and so on), American composers emphasized distinctiveness of different musical cultures. During the twentieth century the conception of multiculturalism developed gradually into American music, which clearly reflected the social and national quest for identity. Harry Partch’s artistic development was distinctive for his profound interest in diverse artistic and esthetic conceptions as well as Eastern musical cultures. He built new instruments from different materials which in many ways resembled Ancient, Eastern, and African instruments.

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Among them there are Zymo-Xyl, constructed out of hubcaps, a kettletop, oak blocks, and old bottles; Mazda Marimba with its tuned light bulbs that have been severed at the sockets and then eviscerated; Gourd Tree and one Gong made from temple bells and eucalyptus; Kithara, 72-stringed instrument based on the Greek kithara and “Castor and Pollux” Kitharas; the adapted Diamond marimba; the modified harmonium chromelodeon; the bamboo marimba “Eucal Blossom” in flower form; “Spoils of War” like a glass bowl set, and so on. Partch’s system of artistic ideas was formed under the influence of Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, and European musical traditions. Hence, one of the main principles of the composer was “transethnicity,” which meant the obliteration of the cultural differences between nations (Pereverzeva 2007, 314). Various musical traditions, as diverse as ritual ceremonies from the Congo and the American music hall, exerted a considerable influence on the composer’s thinking. Many of his works were associated with mythologies of different nations. At the same time, the composer tried to emphasize the unique identity of American music. He wrote down the notes of American folksongs during his trips to the Midwest, and then incorporated them into his musical works. Partch’s works include a variation on the popular American song “Yankee Doodle” (written in 1944), the dance action, “The Bewitched” (written in 1956), portraying scenes from American life of the 1950s, a multimedia opera Delusion of the Fury (composed in 1966), into which he incorporated two myths from non-European countries: a Japanese tale of a pilgrim repenting for murder and an African story of a quarrel mediated by a deaf and myopic judge. In addition to Japanese traditions (the Noh and Kabuki Theater) and African traditions (magical rites, invocations, and ritual ceremonies) Partch also reverted to the tradition of Ancient Greek tragedy, especially the symbolism of Greek mythology in his Delusion of the Fury. The instrumental ensemble includes instruments from various continents. Aside from the aforementioned ones, other examples of Partch’s musical works illustrate the same tendency. Multiculturalism of American music was also vividly expressed in the second half of the twentieth century, most notably, in the works of John Cage. The composer claimed that there were no essential differences between Eastern and Western art for him, as he was immensely inspired by the idea of a unity of the surroundings and harmonious coexistence of various peoples. In his account, music is capable of recreating the integrity of the world. This implied its inherent pluralism, internationalism, multiculturalism, and openness for various peoples with different opinions, tastes, characters, and spiritual aspirations, as life in its essence presents a

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parallelism of multifarious cultures, religions, nations, images, and thoughts. This idea was ingeniously realized in the composer’s work Apartment House 1776 (1976), in which American folk songs, patriotic hymns, military marches, and religious tunes of various confessions sounded out simultaneously. As it is obvious from the title, this work has a nationalistic element associated with it. For Cage, America is no longer a “melting pot” but a pluralism of world music. Apartment House 1776, written on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of American Independence, incorporated some kinds of music which had been commonplace in America two centuries before. To perform this work, a number of instrumentalists and four vocalists are required: an AngloSaxon Protestant, a Native American, a Sephardic Jew, and an African American who sing melodies from different religious traditions simultaneously in different languages and vocal styles. International music from all parts of the world is combined and presented as an integral whole. As I argued elsewhere (Pereverzeva 2007, 457), in this way Cage presented the phonosphere of his country, where speech and music from different nations and continents is heard from the windows of apartment houses at the same time. While Ives, Cowell, and Harris tended to use tunes from different countries which were melodically homogenous with each other, Cage and other composers of the late twentieth century sought to emphasize difference, individuality, diversity, and dissimilarity of these melodic units. In addition, their musical interests and outlooks broadened; it was particularly the diversity of international traditions that became characteristic of American music. Moreover, Cage used various international musical instruments from Balinese and Japanese temple gongs and Turkish cymbals to Indian rattles and Latin-American maracas, teponaxtles, and quijadas. His basic tenet is that all musical traditions are equally interesting and valuable (Pereverzeva 2006, 204-210). Many devotees of experimental music shared the multicultural ardors of Cage. Lou Harrison was interested in Chinese and Indonesian cultures as well as that of the Amerindians. When writing compositions for Indonesian gamelan in the 1970s, he composed music endowed with distinctly perceptible Oriental stylistic traits: e.g., percussion ensembles in combination with traditional European instruments were enriched by various exotic instruments (i.e., Chinese pear-shaped lute pipa, mbira,3 metallophones, xylophones, bamboo flutes, drums and gongs from Indonesian gamelan) and objects. One of the composer’s main ideas was the unity of East and West, which he strove to achieve by means of his art. A reciter reads Navajo folk

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tales accompanied by a gamelan-sounding instrumental texture in the Finale of Harrison’s Fourth Symphony (1995), which demonstrates a quest of certain common elements between Eastern and Western musical cultures (Pereverzeva 2007, 307-309). Interestingly enough, Harrison also gave Esperanto titles to some of his compositions. Many other American composers also used Indonesian gamelan instruments, among them being Colin McPhee who lived in Bali (1934-1936) and wrote a few significant musicological books on gamelan and Bali music and some musical works, e.g. Tabuhtabuhan (1936) for symphonic orchestra, Balinese gongs and European instruments imitating the gamelan sounding. After Ives and Cage, other composers propagated the idea of multiculturalism, particularly George Crumb, the composer representative of the trend of “New Eclecticism” which grew popular in the 1970s among various other esthetic conceptions and musical stylistic tendencies of postmodernism, with which, emphatically, the idea of multiculturalism became to “resonate.” He drew his inspiration from both American and European musical styles, discovering semantic relations between them in the past and present. The composer seemed well-acquainted with the philosophical schools of Antiquity, African-American music, American folksongs, Amerindian rituals, and Latin American culture. Crumb made extensive use of such instruments as the maracas, Chinese cymbals, banjo, sitar, mandolin, Jew’s harp and other instruments, including artificial and invented ones. In his composition Black Angels (1970), he made numerous quotations of, and stylistic allusions to, the music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Mussorgsky, Chopin, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Alban Berg. Furthermore, Crumb studied Appalachian folklore, spirituals, Civil War and Amerindian songs, which was reflected in his Appalachian Songs of Sorrow and Melancholy (2004). Significantly, multiculturalism is evident in his suite Night of the Four Moons (1969) for voice and chamber ensemble.4 The ensemble includes percussion instruments from many countries, for instance, Tibetan prayer stones, Japanese Kabuki blocks, African thumb piano mbira, Chinese temple gong, crotales, tambourine, bongo drums, and castanets. The text includes fragments of poems by Federico Garcia Lorca in Spanish. The poem’s epilogue: “Run away, moon, moon, moon!” (inspired by an ancient Gypsy legend) was performed as a simultaneous manifestation of “Musica Mundana” (music of the spheres), which is to be played by an onstage cellist, and “Musica Humana” (music of the mankind), which must be played by the offstage singer, alto flute, banjo, and vibraphone. Endowed with Mahlerian style, “Musica Mundana” emerges and fades like a distant echo, whereas “Musica Humana” is in the tonality of F-sharp

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Major and recalls the final section of Joseph Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, since here, likewise, performers slowly leave stage while playing their final phrases. It is interesting to note that the composer tends to combine the simplest melodic and rhythmic means, typical of primitive musical cultures, with experimental techniques which helped him to achieve a musical-stylistic synthesis. Without using traditional Spanish musical devices, the work attempts to capture the moods of Lorca’s poetry and the instrumental forces, including so subtle timbers, provide commentary on the text. As a result, Crumb’s music captures the sincerity and finesse of Lorca’s work. The late Romantic European music, American minimalism, jazz, rock, pop, and Latin American music heavily influenced the compositions of John Adams. The “Americanism” of his style is identified in the combination of various traditions. The theme of interethnic relations in the USA always had a particular significance for him. The story of seven young Americans of different ethnic backgrounds, who survived a calamitous earthquake in Los-Angeles in 1994, constitutes the plot of his “song composition” “I was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky” (1995). The composer wrote 25 different songs in gospel, ballad, rap and funky styles with the accompaniment of a rock ensemble. Speaking metaphorically, Adams emphasizes the importance of human originality, individuality of emotional reactions to difficult events and tolerance, exhorting all nations to cease making interethnic wars and to stand together in the face of serious common difficulties. In his Christmas oratorio El Niño (2000) Adams made use of Biblical texts (including the Books of the Old and the New Testament, Medieval mystery and Martin Luther’s Christmas sermon texts) as well as Spanish religious and secular poetry of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In this work the author reaches a balance between the transplanted culture of Europe and the musical reality of the New World. The sound of the guitar, simultaneously evoking Latin American music and bearing traces of the early European lute, is prominently heard in those sections of the composition written in Italian madrigal or organum styles which are expressed in instrumental tunes in the German baroque style or luxurious instrumental timbres and colors of the modern orchestra. A theatrical play is performed in a movie in which the Christmas story is given a contemporary interpretation. A young Latin American couple and their child living in California symbolize Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus, while homeless hobos wandering in the wilderness between the airport and the sea coast symbolize the Magi. Adams uses different sources in exploring not only the common ground of various cultures but also the

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relationships between various forms of thought and feeling (Pereverzeva 2007, 369-371). The aforementioned American composers used not only instruments, melodies, rhythms and expressive means of the European nations’ musical traditions but also compositional principles, characteristic of non-European exotic music. They tried to reveal and expose distinctive accents of this music, i.e., its modal and rhythmic systems, harmonic features and compositional organization. Cowell created pieces in the style of free improvisation using ostinato technique recreating hypnotic character of Middle Eastern and Asian religious music. John Cage wrote such improvisatory pieces as Indian raga and organized his musical forms by means of tala principle, haiku and tanka number row 5-7-5 and 5-7-5-7-7. He also created music by means of “chance operating” method borrowed from “I-Ching”5. A wide variety of techniques is utilized in Partch’s pieces ranging from the incorporation of two ancient Greek scales and an Amerindian Zuni song to composer’s typically microtonal speech-song settings of poetic texts. Admittedly, American composers sustained their interest in Oriental philosophies, religion, and art throughout the twentieth century. This interest culminated in American minimal or repetitive music. La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass adopted stylistic features of traditional, especially, ritual music of India, Indonesia, China, Israel, and other Asian and African countries. By the end of the twentieth century American composers had broadly used lots of artistic means assimilated from the worldwide musical experience. American musical traditions have looked to diverse ethnic cultures and gained inspiration from their specificities, thus implementing and promoting the idea of multiculturalism. America has been a nation of the nations; the country which creatively brought together different cultures and closely co-operated with the international community. The internationalization of American art has now been going on for over two centuries. Animated by intercontinental migration of the writers, artists, and musicians, this tendency became popular in many countries in the twentieth century. Their migration stimulated proliferation of new ideas and active development of the arts. The openness to diverse world traditions, characteristic of American culture in general, became fruitfully exploited by American composers in the twentieth century. Multicultural music helped the nation to construct its spiritual unity. A qualitatively new integral musical whole emerged in American music as a result of continuous development and permeation of artistic traditions from Europe, Asia, and Africa.

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Thus, the features of Anglo-Saxon and European heritage dominated in American music in the early stages of its development. Afro-American artistic traditions entered the world musical scene at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the second half of the twentieth century Asian and Latin American folk cultures appeared, enriching the U.S. art of music in their unique manners. Minstrels, jongleurs, and minnesingers, bearers of multiculturalism, traveled from all over Europe, adapting song, dance folklore, and instrumental repertoire of various nations of the old continent. Throughout the twentieth century the USA witnessed an unprecedented process of migration of peoples and an intensive amalgamation of ideas and traditions in one culture. It became plain that “the vernacular” itself is multiple, which was well-expressed in the oeuvres of the many American composers. Both inexorable changes of the world and its ethnic-social systems have consequently affected the form and content of American music. Newer and newer national traditions kept on flowing into multicultural American music. Let me conclude with the words by Wiley Hitchcock: The rapidity with which shifts in social function and “status” of various musics have occurred in the United States is one of the most striking things about our dynamic musical culture (reflecting, of course, our culture at large)—in fact, as far as I know, it is unique. (Hitchcock 2000, 56)

Notes 1

According to eminent American musicologists, this term came to denote the unique style of American composers in the twentieth-century music. The culmination of Americanism was observed in the first half of the century. This concept expressed an orientation of composers towards national kinds of folk and professional music of the country and the use of themes and plots from American peoples’ life. The American composers tried to realize in their works the most characteristic and essential features of the national culture, using not only the adopted European traditions, but also the vernacular ones. Rozenfeld stated that the term “Americanism” in music designated the main idea of USA composers, consisting in the “expression of national experience and creation of the American musical style” (Rosenfeld 1940, 226). 2 For more information, see: Joachim Ernst Berendt, The Jazz Book from Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond. Westport, CT.: Lawrence Hill Company, 1981; Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 3 An African lamellophone-like musical instrument consisting of tuned lamella, viz., metal strips attached to a resonating box, which are plucked with the thumbs; it was found throughout many regions of sub-Saharan Africa and in Latin America; the name came from Zimbabwe.

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4

This work was written during the period of the mission of Apollo-11, June 16-24, 1969. 5 Chinese “Book of Changes” is used for divination, however, Cage used it like method of composition. To create a piece of music, Cage asked the questions to “I Ching” in order to find out how much sounds and what rhythm will appear in each measure. The composer made some tables having sound material, rhythmic groups and so on and then he tossed two coins to find out a certain number. Then he wrote in the score the sounds which were in the table cell which in turn was specified by the number cast out by two coins.

Bibliography Berendt, Joachim Ernst. 1981. The Jazz Book from Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond. Westport, CT.: Lawrence Hill Company. Crawford, Richard. 2001. America’s Musical Life: a History. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Gioia, Ted. 1997. The History of Jazz. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Hitchcock, Hugh Wiley. 2000. Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction. Upper Saddle River, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Ivashkin, Alexander. 1991. Charl’z Aivz i muzyka dvadtsatogo veka [Charles Ives and a music of the twentieth century]. Moscow: Soviet Composer Press. Lomax, Alan. 1975. The Folk Songs of North America. New York: Doubleday & Dolphin. Pereverzeva, Marina. 2006. Dzhon Keidzh: zhizn’, tvorchestvo, estetica [John Cage: the life, the creative works, and the aesthetics]. Moscow: Rusaki. —. ed. 2007. Muzykal’naya kul’tura S.SH.A dvadtsatogo veka [Musical Culture of USA of the twentieth century]. Moscow: Tchaikovsky State Conservatory Press. Rosenfeld, Paul. 1940. Americanism in American Music. Modern Music 17(4): 226-232. Zuck, Barbara. 1980. A History of Musical Americanism. Ann Arbor, MI.: UMI Research Press.

CONTRIBUTORS

Anna Bendrat is a faculty member in the English Department at Maria Curie-Skáodowska University in Lublin, Poland. She specializes in American Studies and her research interests include American culture and politics, transatlantic relations and contemporary political discourse. She is a Board Member of the Polish Rhetorical Society and serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Forum Artis Rhetoricae. Her publications focus on rhetoric as a mode of political critique and cultural and social representation. The most recent publications are: “How to Define Rhetoric? The Ambiguities of Theory and Practice in Contemporary Persuasive Communication” and “There is a Bear in the Woods… From the Cold War to the War on Terror: War Rhetoric in Presidential Campaign Commercials.” Jane Desmond is a specialist on performance studies, embodiment and social identity, and human-animal studies. Professor of Anthropology and of Gender/Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, U.S.A., she also directs the International Forum for U.S. Studies: A Center for the Transnational Studies of the United States. She is the immediate past President of the International American Studies Association (2008-2011), the author of Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (University of Chicago Press, 1999) as well as several edited books. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and is currently completing a new book on human-animal relations titled Displaying Death/Animating Life. Paweá DudziĔski is a doctoral student at the University of Biaáystok, Poland. He received his M.A. degree from the Department of English Philology at the Biaáystok University. His interests concern cultural evolution of the Western world and its philosophical underpinnings, while his dissertation examines the phenomenon of simpleton in American literature and culture.

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Anna Gilarek completed her Ph.D. on utopia and dystopia in feminist speculative fiction at Maria Curie-Skáodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Her research interests include science fiction, ethnic literature and gender studies. Her publications include articles on feminist speculative fiction and alternative history. Joel J. Janicki is Associate Professor in the English Department at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan where he teaches American Literature, Anglo-American Poetry and Polish Language and Culture. He has recently published papers on Pushkin’s Ʉɚɩɢɬɚɧɫɤɚɹ Ⱦɨɱɤɚ (The Captain’s Daughter, 1836), the American Travel Diaries of J. U. Niemcewicz (1797-1799), and Michael Ondaatje’s novel, Anil’s Ghost (2000). Edyta Just holds degrees in political science (MA) from University of àódĨ, Poland and gender studies (Ph.D.) from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies and Women’s Studies Centre, University of àódĨ. Her field of expertise includes gender studies, philosophy, pedagogy and cultural studies of science and technology. Her recent publications are Berteke Waaldijk and Edyta Just (eds.), Tuning Educational Structures in Europe. Reference Points for the Design and Delivery of Degree Programmes in Gender Studies (Universidad de Deusto, Spain, 2010) and Wiesáaw Oleksy, Edyta Just and Kaja Zapedowska-Kling, “Gender Issues in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs),” Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (2012). Anna Krawczyk-àaskarzewska graduated from the University of Warsaw (Ph.D. in American Literature). Since 1995 she has been on the faculty of the English Department at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn. She published articles and presented papers on H.P. Lovecraft and William Gibson’s prose, the history and challenges of the discipline of American Studies, and various visual culture phenomena. Her current research focuses on film/comic book adaptations of the literary canon and cultural representations of the city.

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Wojciech Majka is presently affiliated with the Pedagogical University of Cracow where he holds classes devoted to literature and philosophy. He is the author of numerous publication devoted to theoretical revisions of literature and culture. In 2007 he published his first book Avatars of the Libido which is an epistemological overview of the theory of the unconscious as it unfolds in the writings of Jung, Freud and Lacan. In 2011 another book appeared Man in Search of Social and Ethical Foundations: A Phenomenology. Wojciech Majka received his Ph.D. from the University of Silesia in 2005. His present scope of interest centers upon issues connected with psychoanalysis, phenomenology as well as the intellectual history of Europe. Julia Nikiel is a Junior Lecturer in the Department of American Literature and Culture at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Her academic interests range from experimental literature and popular culture to cultural geography and the theory and poetics of space. Currently she is working on a doctoral dissertation focused on the influence of globalization on the perception and representation of space in contemporary American and Canadian literature. Marina Pereverzeva holds a Ph. D. in musicology. She is author of books and articles on American, European and Canadian music of the twentieth century, translator of John Cage’s works, including his book Silence, and many other texts of American and Canadian avant-garde composers. She now works in Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory (professor, editor, doctoral candidate, and scientific secretary of dissertational council of Conservatory). Pereverzeva had a scientific training in Canada and USA (August- September 2011, Canadian Embassy in Moscow Scientific Grant). Dorota WiĞniewska graduated from the English Institute, University of àódĨ. She received an M.A. in English from the University of Toledo, Ohio and a Ph.D. from the University of àódĨ. She is a full-time faculty member in the Department of American Literature and Culture at the University of àódĨ, Poland, where she teaches courses on American film, literature and culture, and academic writing. Her areas of scholarly interest include: American Gothic fiction and horror film, pop culture and gender studies.

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Marek M. Wojtaszek is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the University of àódĨ, Poland; currently affiliated with the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies and Women’s Studies Centre. He graduated from international relations at the University of àódĨ, Poland, Études Européennes at the Jean Moulin Université in Lyon, France, and completed a postgraduate program in contemporary philosophy and gender at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. in the Humanities. He published in English in the fields of esthetics, critical theory, gender studies, psychoanalysis, and visual cultures. His main areas of research include esthetics, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, gender, and ICTs.

INDEX absurd, 31, 99, 100, 146, 150 Adams, Alice, 76, 82, 84, 85 Adams, John, 179, 180 America, 3, 33, 34, 35, 53, 61, 62, 69, 106, 114, 119, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 133, 135, 140, 144, 145, 148, 149, 151, 169, 171, 172, 177, 180, 182 American crime literature, 139, 152 American media, 141 American music, 9, 48, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181 American president, 7, 45, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120 Post-9/11, 25, 35, 36, 37 Post-Cold War, 5, 41 American Psycho, 147, 149, 154 animal studies, 3, 6, 58, 60, 70 art, 1, 5, 31, 38, 92, 95, 125, 127, 133, 151, 160, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172, 176, 178, 180, 181 art, locative, 26, 28, 29, 32 Atwood, Margaret, 75, 76, 85, 86 augmented reality (AR), 5, 27, 30, 38 Avant-Pop, 7, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101 Baghdad zoo, 57, 63, 66, 68, 70 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 127, 130, 136 Baudrillard, Jean, 91, 102 Bellavia, David, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55 Benhabib, Seyla, 121 Benjamin, Walter, 143, 144, 153 biopolitics, 73

Bizarro, 7, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102 Braudy, Leo, 143, 153 Cage, John, 176, 177, 178, 180, 182, 185 celebrity, 8, 28, 124, 141, 142, 143, 146, 152 Challen, Paul, 106, 107, 108, 121 Chambers, Samuel, 107, 121 Christensen, Terry, 105, 107, 108, 109, 114, 121 cognitive dissonance, 7, 98 Connell, R. W., 5, 41, 53, 55 conspiracism, 5, 30, 31 control societies, 37 Cowell, Henry, 171, 172, 173, 177, 180 Crawford, Richard, 169, 173, 174, 175, 182 Crumb, George, 178, 179 culture, popular, 5, 8, 93, 95, 96, 123, 124, 127, 139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 151, 152, 153, 185 cyberspace, 5, 27, 37, 38 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 37, 39, 134, 136, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 186 Desmond, Jane, 6, 57, 61, 70, 183 Dewey, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 12 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 11, 20, 22, 23 Dworkin, Andrea, 73, 86 dystopia, 6, 75, 77, 82, 85, 155, 184 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 18, 23 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 12, 13, 14, 23, 128, 130, 136

188 esthetics, 1, 2, 3, 4, 144, 169, 175 ethology, 9 feminism, 5, 41, 54, 73, 74 feminist speculative fiction, 6, 73, 75, 77, 84, 184 Fiedler, Leslie A., 91, 126, 136, 149, 153 film, 7, 8, 9, 30, 33, 99, 105, 106, 107, 109, 118, 124, 130, 131, 134, 139, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 179, 184, 185 film, horror, 139, 150, 185 film, slasher, 139, 148 Firestone, Shulamith, 74, 79, 83, 86 Forrest, Katherine, 81, 83, 86 Franklin, Benjamin, 140 frontier, 2, 144, 154, 173 Frye, Northrop, 8, 123, 125, 130, 136 Northrop Frye's mythopoetic theory, 123, 129 gender, 4, 5, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 59, 60, 77, 84, 121, 149, 184, 185, 186 Gibson, William, 5, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 184 Goldstein, Joshua, 5, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 55 Haas, Peter J., 105, 107, 108, 109, 114, 121 Habermas, Jürgen, 121, 122 Harris, Roy, 171, 173, 174, 177 Harrison, Lou, 177, 178 Harron, Mary, 150, 154 Heidegger, Martin, 11, 16, 23, 167 hooks, bell, 73, 86 Huckleberry Finn, 7, 124, 128, 129, 131, 134, 135, 152 human-animal relations, 6, 58, 59, 60, 61, 183

Index hyperconsumption, 7, 95, 96 internationalism, 176, 180 Iraq, 5, 6, 26, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70 Iraqi war, 5, 6, 41, 53 Ives, Charles, 171, 172, 177, 178, 182 Jameson, Frederic, 90, 91, 102 Jung, Carl Gustav, 14, 185 Just, Edyta, 1, 8, 9, 155, 160, 168, 184 Krajicek, David, 141, 154 Lacan, Jaques, 14, 23, 137, 164, 168, 185 Lomax, Alan, 170, 173, 182 Lyotard, Jean-François, 90, 91, 92, 103 masculinity, 5, 41, 42, 43, 50, 52, 54 male bonding, 5, 41, 42, 44, 126 masculinity, hegemonic, 5, 41, 42, 43, 50, 51, 52, 53 media, 1, 4, 5, 7, 28, 29, 31, 37, 38, 57, 59, 64, 69, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 101, 105, 139, 140, 141, 144, 146, 148, 149, 153, 184, 186 mediascape, 7, 95, 96 mediatized knowledge, 38 soft news, 6, 58, 67, 69 military, 5, 34, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 62, 63, 69 gender relations in the military, 5, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50 military memoirs, 5, 41, 42, 43, 52, 53 U.S. military, 6, 43, 46, 47, 53, 55, 61, 62, 68, 69 multiculturalism, 9, 169, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181

Esthetic Experiments

paranoia, 5, 25, 30, 37, 38, 132 Partch, Harry, 175, 176, 180 phenomenology, 11, 12, 13, 19, 185 Plato, 18, 19, 125 political drama, 105, 108 political theory, 105, 108, 120 political theory, empirical, 7, 105, 109 political theory, normative, 105, 106, 108, 114, 120 posthumanism, 39, 61, 71 postmodernism, 6, 7, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 99, 101, 178 postmodernism, esthetics of, 7, 89, 91 psychoanalysis, 163, 185, 186 psychology, 35, 36, 43 rationalism, 17, 22 religion, 16, 59, 67, 94, 180 religion, Christian, 17 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 15, 23 Ronell, Avital, 123, 125, 133, 134, 135, 137 Rorty, Richard, 18, 19, 23 Rouse, Joseph, 11, 23 schizoanalysis, 8, 163 science, 3, 4, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 59, 60, 61, 73, 82, 110, 121, 128, 167, 170, 184 science fiction, 75, 84, 85, 97, 100, 184 Searle, John, 19, 20, 24 serial killers, 8, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152 Sherman, Nancy, 44, 54, 56 simpleton, 7, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 183 Slipstream, 7, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101 Slotkin, Richard, 152, 154

189

sound, 1, 9, 54, 125, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 172, 179, 182 spectrality, 5, 33, 36 Spook Country, 5, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38 Steiner, George, 21, 24 subjectivity, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22 surveillance, 1, 5, 26, 27, 29, 32, 38 technology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 18, 21, 28, 31, 37, 60, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 91, 95, 99, 140, 141, 144, 184 technologies, reproductive, 6, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 83, 84 The Simpsons, 124, 134, 135 The Soloist, 8, 155, 158, 161, 164, 167, 168 The West Wing, 7, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 120 Thoreau, Henry David, 11, 13, 24 Tong, Rosemarie, 74, 76, 78, 87 transcendentalism, 12 transference, 8, 157, 164, 166, 167 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 144, 154 Twain, Mark, 123, 129, 130, 135, 137 unconscious, 8, 135, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 185 utopia, 6, 75, 77, 80, 155, 166, 184 violence, 5, 41, 47, 51, 55, 80, 100, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152 war, 1, 3, 5, 26, 31, 41, 42, 44, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 93, 118, 135, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178, 183 war and animals, 6, 58, 64 Williams, Kayla, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 56

190 Wojtaszek, Marek M., 1, 8, 9, 155, 186

Index Žižek, Slavoj, 130, 137