The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory 9780748693405

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The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory

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The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory

edited by stuart sim

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Stuart Sim, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9339 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9340 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9341 2 (epub) The right of Stuart Sim to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Preface Stuart Sim I: Marxism Introduction: Marxism 1 Marxism: Philosophy and Social Theory Stuart Sim 2 Western Marxism Stuart Sim 3 Post-Marxism Stuart Sim II: Structuralism Introduction: Structuralism 4 Structuralism and Semiotics Georges Van Den Abbeele 5 Genetic Structuralism Marcel Danesi III: Poststructuralism Introduction: Poststructuralism 6 Phenomenology and Poststructuralism Derek M. Robbins 7 Deconstruction Nikolai Duffy 8 Discourse Theory Georges Van Den Abbeele IV: Postmodernism Introduction: Postmodernism

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9 Philosophical Postmodernism: From Adorno and Derrida to Foucault Philip Goldstein 10 Postmodern Aesthetics Nikolai Duffy V: Postcolonialism Introduction: Postcolonialism 11 Postcolonial Theory and Criticism Claire Nally 12 Black Studies Bella Adams 13 Critical Race Theory Bella Adams VI: Gender Introduction: Gender 14 Queer Theory Gareth Longstaff 15 Men, Masculinity and Critical Studies Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill VII: Feminism Introduction: Feminism 16 First and Second Wave Feminism Claire Nally 17 After de Beauvoir: ‘French’ Feminism and Sexual Difference Carole Sweeney 18 Postfeminism Stéphanie Genz VIII: Historicism Introduction: Historicism 19 Reception and Reader-Response Theory Bruce Harding 20 New Historicism Bruce Harding 21 Cultural Materialism Neema Parvini IX: Formalism Introduction: Formalism 22 Russian Formalism and Narratology Georges Van Den Abbeele 23 New Criticism Graham Allen

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contents X: Science and Critical Theory Introduction: Science and Critical Theory 24 Critical Theory and Paradigm Shift Arkady Plotnitsky 25 Critical Theory and Mathematics and Science Arkady Plotnitsky 26 Cognitive Science and Critical Theory Peter Garratt XI: Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory 27 Freudian Psychoanalysis Geoffrey Boucher 28 Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory Matthew Sharpe Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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y thanks go to The Companion’s nineteen contributors for all their work in the writing of this volume; to Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for all her help and advice during the planning and compiling of the volume; and to Dr Helene Brandon. Special thanks go to Christine Barton for doing such an excellent job of copy-editing on such a large and complex volume.

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PREFACE Stuart Sim

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hy do so many critical theorists turn to science to find reinforcement for their theories? Can the cognitive sciences provide a new direction for critical theory? Can Marxism still contribute to theoretical debate after the fall of communism and the Soviet empire that was founded on it? Has postmodernism run its course and become a dead end? Is there any value left in structuralist principles? These are just some of the questions posed by this Companion, in which an international team of academic specialists on the topic considers the changing role of critical theory in the new century, demonstrating its continuing importance across disciplines ranging from the arts and social sciences through to the hard sciences, as well as the new directions, ideas and theorists emerging in each of the fields. Taking note of the many new theoretical and socio-political developments in recent years, the Companion provides readers with an opportunity to reorient themselves within the history and role of critical theory in its many forms.

Structure and Format of the Companion The volume is divided into eleven sections comprising twenty-eight chapters overall, with each covering a particular branch of critical theory from Marxism through to present-day developments. Every chapter will consider the historical development of the theory in question, outlining the main concepts and thinkers involved, and then move on to assess its relevance to current academic and socio-political concerns and debates, paying particular attention to recent advances in the area and the emergence of new voices. The advent of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, for example, has led to a reassessment of the foundational bases of critical theories in general that is still very much ongoing. The changing fortunes of Marxism in the last few decades have had a dramatic impact on the entire field of critical theory, given its widespread influence as a body of thought throughout the twentieth century, that is still in process. Feminism continues to evolve, positioning itself

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against new developments in the field and generating many of these itself in turn. Cognitive science is opening up exciting possibilities for the creation of new lines of critical enquiry. Indeed science in general is doing so, as theories about the nature of the universe keep appearing and competing with each other for our attention. Few theorists can be unaffected by how this is altering our perspectives about the nature of human culture, science being the primary source of metaphysical ideas these days (appropriately enough, physics being the leading player). Even theories that have been around for a long time have not been immune from such changes, and the volume therefore will provide a comprehensive overview of all the main areas of critical theory to determine where they stand now in relation to these. The book’s sections comprise: I) II) III) IV) V) VI) VII) VIII) IX) X) XI)

Marxism Structuralism Poststructuralism Postmodernism Postcolonialism Gender Feminism Historicism Formalism Science and Critical Theory Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory.

Inevitably, there are often overlapping themes and concerns in these chapters, with theories and theorists appearing in a different perspective each time around to indicate the need to be aware of what is being discussed across the entire field. Theories are not produced in isolation, but within a dynamic context of debate, where ideas are constantly being tested, refined and extended. The volume’s chapters cross-reference in such a way as to make this interactive quality of critical theory constantly apparent. In each chapter, textual citation will be given briefly in brackets to the particular edition being used, with full publication details (including original publication dates for older texts) to be found in the master bibliography at the end of the book.

The Scope and Range of Critical Theory Critical theories have proliferated over the course of the modern era and on into the postmodern, and are now extensively deployed in pretty well every area of intellectual enquiry. Academic life is all but unimaginable without critical theory, where it forms the basis of textual interpretation and discourse

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construction – as it notably does in such areas as literary studies, media studies, philosophy, sociology and politics. Theories come and go, however, and their fortunes can fluctuate markedly according to the fashion of the age. Structuralism can become one of the leading methods for a few decades from the mid-twentieth century onwards and then decline sharply in popularity after the rise of poststructuralism. Feminism keeps branching out in new directions, each with its own set of concerns that can to some extent supersede older versions of the theory: the ‘second wave’ challenging many of the assumptions and goals of the ‘first wave’, for example, and now a ‘third wave’ of postfeminism making its mark in the discourse as well. New theories keep emerging as science progresses and the socio-political landscape changes. Equally, older theories can be adapted to current developments and continue to have an impact on debate, rather than just remaining as historical curiosities – the fate, for example, of most older scientific theories. Despite the critiques put forward by poststructuralists, and these are by no means accepted by all other theorists, there are still insights to be yielded by structuralism. Structure is always a critical factor in the analysis of narratives – taking the word ‘narrative’ in its broadest sense, as Roland Barthes does when he declares that ‘[t]he narratives of the world are numberless’ (Barthes 1977: 79). New Criticism is still a useful teaching tool to help students of literary studies understand the inner design, and the effect it can make on readers, of texts, particularly poetic texts.

Applying Critical Theory Critical theory tends to be used in a fairly eclectic manner these days, with elements of various theories often being combined in the art of analysis. A synthetic approach is probably now the norm, with textual analysts each putting together their own model, drawing freely on the range of theories available to them. That is one of the key reasons to be aware of what the field as a whole has to offer us. It is inconceivable to engage with any field in the humanities and social sciences (and increasingly, even the hard sciences), without the facility of critical theory with which to position yourself against existing interpretations and construct your own in turn. Once you construct a reading of a text, then you enter into the wider critical debate, and are contributing to how the field is developing. Being theoretically informed is not an optional part of study any more; it is instead a necessary, central, part. This volume is designed to bring you up to date with what is happening right across the spectrum of critical theory, so that you can become a part of that wider debate.

The Future of Critical Theory There has been speculation of late that we have reached the ‘end’ of theory, that its ‘moment’ has now passed and it is now of no more than historical

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interest – conferences even get held on this issue. In the sense of so-called ‘high theory’ and the academically divisive ‘theory wars’ that it spawned back in the 1980s and 90s, when new ‘isms’ seemed to be coming on stream with bewildering rapidity, that is probably the case. It is not likely that theories of society will cease to be devised, however, and these cannot avoid having implications for all aspects of society, including criticism and cultural commentary in general. Neither can textual interpretation avoid projecting a world view that will relate to a particular social theory, even if only implicitly, giving it an ideological significance: in that respect, no interpretation can be apolitical. Texts, of all kinds, will continue to be reinterpreted by each new generation, and to acquire different meanings within a changing society. That is the task of critical theory, and the more we are aware of its history, then the more resonant our textual interpretations will become within society at large.

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INTRODUCTION: MARXISM

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n Part I, Stuart Sim examines three different traditions of Marxist thought: Marxism as a Philosophy and Social Theory, Western Marxism and postMarxism respectively. These represent very distinctive strains of Marxism, indicating how it began to develop away from the authoritarian style that had come to mark out its communist interpretation, until eventually thinkers on the left were critiquing some of its most basic assumptions. This was to come to a head with the publication in 1985 of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s highly controversial book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which launched a sustained attack on classical Marxism’s refusal to acknowledge the failure of some of its theoretically based political projections. The authors’ call for a much more pluralistic approach to politics resonated widely on the left, changing the terms of debate within the subject quite substantially. Yet despite the many setbacks that Marxism has gone through in the political realm (the collapse of the Soviet empire particularly standing out), it continues to be a vibrant area of intellectual enquiry, eliciting contributions from across the spectrum of disciplines, as it always has done. Its strong sense of historical and social context stands sharply opposed to the more formalistically inclined theories, such as structuralism and New Criticism, and it has maintained a significant presence in aesthetic debate.

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1 MARXISM: PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY Stuart Sim

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arxism has been a source of controversy ever since it first emerged as a theory in the mid-nineteenth century. Heavily based on Hegelian dialectical philosophy, it developed into an enormously influential social theory that was instrumental in shaping the course of twentieth-century global politics, inspiring various revolutions and challenging the validity of all other existing social and political systems. Its most far-reaching effect was to provide the underlying principles for the communist movement, which, through the agency of the Soviet Union and China, became an extremely powerful geopolitical force. Although we are now adjudged to live in post-communist times, the major regimes having either collapsed or reconciled themselves with the capitalist system that for so long was their avowed enemy, Marxism has not disappeared as a factor in global culture. It has even been experiencing something of a revival of interest in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the 2007–8 credit crisis, which has raised serious doubts about the viability of the current capitalist order. Marx’s assessment of the weaknesses of capitalism as a socio-economic system still holds up surprisingly well after all this time, even if his projected solutions have largely lost their credibility given communism’s turbulent history and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet empire. In this first of three chapters on Marxism’s legacy, the emphasis will be on its development as a philosophy and social theory into what is referred to as either ‘classical’ or ‘orthodox’ Marxism (the terms will be used interchangeably here), where Karl Marx’s original ideas are taken to be sacrosanct, and the role of critical theory is to show how these ideas can be implemented as faithfully as possible in the world around us. In practice, classical Marxism means Marx’s thought as filtered through such later thinkers as V. I. Lenin and the Soviet movement in Russia – Marxism-Leninism as it came to be known in that context. Classical Marxism can be very rigid in its application and it does demand that Marx’s ideas are approached pretty much as gospel truth, as they were within the Soviet empire until the appearance of glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s, events which effectively heralded the end of Soviet MarxismLeninism. Chapters 2 and 3 will deal with Marxism in its nonclassical guise,

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as Western Marxism and post-Marxism respectively, although brief reference will be made to some of the key aspects of those phenomena here in order to set the scene for the later chapters.

Marx, Hegel and Dialectical Materialism Marxism’s roots lie in G. W. F. Hegel and his system of dialectical philosophy, as outlined in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Hegel conceived of the dialectic as a force working within history that determined how cultures would evolve: a ‘World-Spirit’ as he conceived of it. We were to think of the World-Spirit as a ‘self-supporting, absolute real being’ (Hegel 1977: 266) that revealed itself to us through human consciousness. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel mapped out human history as a series of stages by which the World-Spirit progressed to its highest possible level of development: ‘The History of the World begins with its general aim – the realization of the Idea of Spirit’ (Hegel 1956: 25). It was a sequence running from the Oriental World, through the Greek and the Roman, up to modern times in the German – that is, from East to West. Each stage, or ‘thesis’, generated a contradiction, its ‘antithesis’; the latter then combining with the former to create a ‘synthesis’ constituting a more advanced stage of the process. This dialectical interaction kept recurring until such time as the World-Spirit eventually came to its full realisation. As Peter Singer has summed it up: ‘In the Philosophy of History, one immense dialectical movement dominates world history from the Greek world to the present’ (Singer 1983: 77). The theory is idealistic in conception, as well as highly abstract (Hegel presents a formidable challenge to his translators), and Marx’s contribution to dialectical philosophy was to locate it more firmly within the material world, where it was the actions of human agents that brought about change and cultural development. More specifically, it was the actions of particular classes of people determined to impose their own set of values on society in order to rule. Nevertheless, for Marx too, if for somewhat different reasons, there was an ‘immense dialectical movement’ underlying human history that he sought to articulate to us. The basic core of Marx’s ideas are laid out in The Communist Manifesto of 1848, co-authored with his life-long collaborator Friedrich Engels. The major premise is that history proceeds primarily by means of class struggles, whereby one class exerts power over all the others in its society until it is overtaken by a new emerging class, as Marx contended had happened when the bourgeoisie had gained enough power to supersede the feudal order that had reigned in Europe for several centuries beforehand. For Marx the next, and last, step to occur would be the eclipse of the bourgeoisie by the industrial proletariat that was growing so rapidly in nineteenth-century Western Europe and America, forming the workforce in the factories that manufactured the products craved by the bourgeoisie. Then, ‘[i]n place of the old bourgeois society, with its

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classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx and Engels 1975–2005: 6. 506), and the socio-economic exploitation that had marked out all other previous stages would cease. Marx’s historical vision is modelled closely on the operation of the Hegelian dialectic, with the class in power (the thesis) giving rise to its antithesis (one of the dominated classes), which in time will create the conditions for the rise of yet another antithesis – ‘its own grave-diggers’, as Marx pithily put it (Marx 1975–2005: 6. 496). This is a process that will continue until the proletariat gains power, at which point we will have reached the end of history; the resultant ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Marx and Engels 1968: 327), representing the apex of human development in Marx’s view. What Marx and Engels offer is a blueprint for human progress that will escape the mass economic exploitation on which industrialised society is based – a phenomenon that was all too apparent in nineteenth-century Western Europe, when disparities in wealth between social classes were steadily increasing. Once the proletariat are in control of the means of production, then it will be used for the public good rather than primarily for the benefit of the capitalist class who rake off its excess profits – gained from the ‘surplus’ labour in effect stolen from the workers. So rather than an amorphous, metaphysically oriented World-Spirit seeking out full realisation, there is a real-world conflict with precise goals that have the capacity to exert mass appeal. The Hegelian dialectic has been brought down to an everyday level and given an altogether more human, as well as overtly political, dimension. As one of Marx’s most famous sayings has it: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx 1975–2005: 6. 5). Marx’s monumental Capital (three volumes, two of them published posthumously) went on to outline precisely how the economic exploitation of the proletariat operated, thus showing the material conditions that underpinned, and directed, the Hegelian-derived dialectic. In Marxist parlance, it was the economic base that dictated the nature of the social superstructure, and in Volume I (the most read and consulted of the three) Marx painstakingly works out theories of money and value that were to guide the communist movement for over a century. Although a densely structured work, in dialogue with a wide range of contemporary political and economic theories, the message of Capital is easy enough to grasp: that the means of production must be taken over and controlled by the workers if their contribution to human progress is to be maximised. Marx was very much a champion of progress, more than willing to acknowledge the bourgeoisie’s contribution to this in recent history, but there was for him an ineluctable logic about their dominance being overcome: this was simply the way that class struggle worked. Society, as he put it, ‘is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing’ (Marx and Engels 1968: 230), and for him all the signs pointed in

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the direction of a change in favour of the proletariat. Overtaking the bourgeoisie was to be the driving force behind communism as a socio-political movement, its method of creating a new social order where all would share in the success of technological advance, not just capitalist businessmen and shareholders.

Marxism as a Critical Theory: Politics Marxism’s great selling point as a critical theory is its comprehensiveness: it really does provide an analytical method, as well as specific guidelines for action, for every conceivable area of human existence. This was held to be the case even through into the world of science as far as its adherents were concerned: scientific research and findings that contradicted Marxist principles were subject to suppression by the party, and any that appeared to vindicate them (such as Trofim Lysenko’s controversial, later discredited, work on genetics) was met with official approval. Science, in common with all areas of Soviet life, was to be ideology-led and politically accountable. Marxism’s rationale is clear and the critical theorist always knows exactly what is supposed to be achieved by its application, and, arguably even more importantly, why. From the starting assumption that all history is the history of class struggle, it then becomes a matter of identifying how this manifested itself at any one point, and of cataloguing the methods by which the ruling class maintained its position of superiority over the mass of the population – that is, what form the exploitation took. The theory will then indicate what should be done to overcome this state of affairs and bring about the end of class struggle; the ultimate objective being to show the way towards the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Detractors (such as poststructuralists and postmodernists, for example) will also claim that these features demonstrate precisely what is wrong with the theory: that it lacks flexibility, and in a very real sense determines what the outcome of analysis will be beforehand. Marxists seek evidence to support their theory, not evidence that problematises it. But Marxism’s apparent universality proved a powerful attraction to several generations of critical theorists, and nowhere more so than in the sphere of politics. One of the first, and most successful, of those to apply Marxist theory to politics was Lenin, whose contribution to Marxism essentially lies in the field of political strategy. Lenin emphasised the role of the party in the creation of a communist state, regarding it as the vanguard of the proletariat and tasked with showing it how to achieve its objective of ending class struggle once and for all. The stranglehold that the Communist Party came to exercise over Soviet life can be traced back to Lenin’s interpretation of what was necessary to overturn the bourgeois state. His strategic vision was outlined well in advance of the Russian Revolution of 1917 in What Is To Be Done? (1902), which attacks Russian Social-Democracy as having become too diffuse a movement to be

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relied on any longer to lead to successful revolution. Lenin calls instead for ‘the consolidation of militant Marxism’ (Lenin 1988: 239) that would mark out the Soviet Communist Party throughout its regime. Militant Marxists would form ‘the genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class’ (Lenin 1988: 239), as the Soviet Communist Party then proceeded to conceive of itself from the Revolution onwards. Having identified three main ‘periods’ of the Russian Social-Democracy movement up until the time of writing, Lenin’s rather chilling conclusion as to what has to be done now is: ‘Liquidate the third period’ (Lenin 1988: 239). The work’s savage opening broadside against proponents of the concept of ‘freedom of criticism’ (Lenin 1988: 74) gives a clear pointer as to how the ‘fourth period’ of militant Marxism will develop. Although Russia was one of the least developed countries in Europe at the time, having a relatively small industrial base and a far larger peasantry than proletariat, Lenin nevertheless regarded it as a prime candidate for a communist revolution on the grounds of it being the weak link in the capitalist system, the point where its contradictions became most glaring (as in the contrast between rich and poor). Russia could become an inspiration for the rest of Europe, therefore, in the vanguard of the more widespread revolution that Lenin was convinced had to happen, given the increasingly exploitative nature of imperialist capitalism and the social tensions this was unleashing. Communism became the main channel by which Marxism was put into practice as a political system, and it was implemented in many countries around the globe in the twentieth century, generally closely allied to the Soviet axis (although disagreements did exist between its members on occasion). In the Soviet Union its reign lasted for seventy-odd years, until the pressure for change that had been building up in the 1980s led to the creation of a notably more open society that to some extent embraced Western democratic principles (although vestiges of the old regime’s authoritarianism still remain right through into our own time). In the aftermath of World War I there were abortive communist uprisings in Germany and Hungary – the latter involving the young Georg Lukács, later to become the inspiration for the emergence of a distinctively ‘Western’ style of Marxism, as a Deputy Commissar in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Then after World War II most of Eastern Europe turned into satellite states of the Soviet Union. China, too, instituted a communist regime under Chairman Mao Zedong from the late 1940s onwards, with similar systems taking root elsewhere in South East Asia in North Vietnam and North Korea. Cuba was a latter-day addition to the communist bloc after the success of Fidel Castro’s revolution there in the later 1950s. The bloc as a whole grew to be an extremely important and powerful presence in global politics, with the Cold War between it and the West dominating affairs on that scene between the 1940s and the 1980s (even today, relations between the US and Russia, the major powers on either side of the Cold War divide, can be very prickly and conspicuously deficient in mutual respect).

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Although there were some local variations in practice to be noted, communist regimes tended to follow a very similar model overall, with a one-party state controlling the means of production, running all the media, and admitting no political opposition. It was an authoritarian, totalitarian system, which severely curbed individual rights, the state organising pretty well all aspects of human existence right down to the most basic of levels. An extensive surveillance system run by an aggressive secret police force (backed up by a network of civilian informers) ensured that the party’s power went largely unchallenged. Given Marxism’s obsession with the economic domain, it was perhaps ironic that this ultimately proved to be its weakest point, and communist regimes signally failed to match the economic success of the West – or even provide basic necessities for all of their citizens in a dependable manner. Shortages were rife in most areas of everyday life, as are still evident in the remaining communist regimes (Cuba and North Korea particularly), and communism’s reputation has never really recovered from such embarrassing failings. There seems little appetite in the twenty-first century for any return to the communist model, with even China having largely turned its back on its classic formulation. Marxism’s capacity to continue developing as a critical theory may well hinge on its ability to detach itself from its communist history, which can make quite depressing reading, even for sympathisers. One of the major problems that Marxism has had to face as a theory is why its predictions do not always work out. The inherent contradictions of capitalism were confidently expected by Marx to lead to economic crisis, at which point support for the system would collapse and the proletariat would be in a position to step in and seize power: The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society are most conspicuous to the practical bourgeois in the vicissitudes of the periodic cycles to which modern industry is subject, and in the culminating point of these cycles, a universal crisis. Such a crisis is once more approaching, although as yet in its preliminary stages. By its universality and its intensity, it will drum dialectics into the heads even of the upstarts of the New, Holy, Prussian-German Empire. (Marx 1972: lx) Capitalism has been regularly hit by economic crises since Marx’s time, with the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s, a sustained period of mass unemployment and plummeting living standards for the majority of the population, seeming to be a textbook case that ought to have generated global revolution in line with the Marxist schema. Yet these crises have not led to the wholesale rejection of the capitalist system that Marxism was geared towards, and capitalism has been surprisingly resilient, continually rebuilding itself in the absence of any wholesale revolution by the masses (although for the more fundamentalist Marxists, the final crisis is always just approaching). One of the first Marxists

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to address this problem in detail was the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, who used the concept of hegemony as an explanation for Marxism’s apparent forecasting failures. Hegemony was the condition in which a dominant group, with a controlling position in a society’s system of production, was able to impose its values on others without necessarily having to use force. In fact, it could even appear to have the consent of the mass of the population to do so. This could be achieved by indoctrinating the population with its social and political values and beliefs through the range of institutions and systems that a society contained other than the means of production as such – education, the arts, and the media, for example. What these latter were passing on was the belief system of the ruling class, presented as if it was the natural way to live, the common-sense set of values to espouse, rather than something that was ideologically determined. However, this was also backed up by the ‘coercive power’ of the state, which could be brought to bear ‘on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively’ (Gramsci 1973: 12) if circumstances ever necessitated this. As long as a delicate balance could be maintained between consensus and force (with intellectuals and creative artists heavily involved in sending out the ‘right’ message to the masses to keep them in line), then such circumstances could be kept at bay, thus securing the hegemonic power of the ruling group. If it was to be successful as a revolutionary theory then Marxism had somehow to disrupt that consensus, to show that its apparent spontaneity was actually artfully contrived. That ultimately proved to be an even more difficult task than the original theory had implied it would be, the determined efforts of a whole series of hegemony theorists notwithstanding. The method Gramsci puts forward to counter hegemonic power is the ‘philosophy of praxis’, the union of theory and practice. This differs from the way Marxism was hereafter to develop in the West; that is, with a bias towards philosophy in its academic form (see Chapter 2, ‘Western Marxism’), rather than as an actual everyday political practice, as it remained in the Soviet Union. Gramsci was always very much oriented towards political life and the need for class struggle to break the hold that capitalist hegemony had on Western society, taking seriously Marx’s injunction to thinkers to concern themselves with changing rather than merely interpreting the world. Marxism’s doctrines increasingly came under attack from the Western left as the twentieth century progressed, and ‘Western Marxism’ began to develop in a different, generally less doctrinaire, form than its Soviet counterpart. The upshot was the emergence of a post-Marxist movement in the later twentieth century, concerned to break free from what it considered to be the theory’s totalitarian, deterministic ethos, while still retaining the spirit and left-wing orientation of the original. Chapter 3 will cover this latter movement in detail, but it is important to note that there was still a commitment to Marxist ideals amongst many prominent post-Marxists. At the heart of the work of figures

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like the writing team of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, key advocates of a post-Marxist temperament to break with the mistakes of the past, lay a desire for reform rather than demolition of Marxism (see in particular their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy), even if their more traditionally minded detractors did not see it that way and accused them of betraying the cause. Although it would have to be said that Marxists quite frequently make such a charge amongst themselves, their sectarian groupings rarely having much tolerance towards interpretations of Marx’s ideas other than their own: schism has proved to be only too common in Marxist circles. One of the aspects of Marxist thought that has created the greatest difficulties in its application as a political theory has been its totalising bias. Marxism insists on a one-party state system, led by the communists, and demands strict adherence to the party line by followers in order to ensure the party’s continuing dominance; hence Lenin’s rejection of ‘freedom of criticism’. The assumption is that the party really will be able to exercise complete control over human affairs as long as it is given a free hand. Dissent therefore tends to be quashed in Marxist states and this runs counter to the spirit of democracy as it has been practiced in the West in modern times, which at least in theory allows open opposition to be expressed on social and political issues (although always within certain prescribed limits). Marxism is traditionally associated in the West with dictatorship, and this has meant it has been viewed with considerable suspicion by many in terms of its political ambitions: dictatorship is a hard sell to any society with a history of commitment to individualism, and dictatorship plus economic inefficiency even more so. Some areas of human affairs, however, have proved notoriously difficult to incorporate within Marxism’s totalising vision, with the feminist movement a case in point. Feminism has had an interesting dialogue with Marxism over the years. On the face of it there is much in common between the two movements, with each seeking to overcome exploitation and traditional hierarchies of power – in feminism’s case, that exercised by patriarchy for most of human history. What Marxism can provide feminism with is evidence of the economic basis of women’s exploitation, as well as a policy for overturning this through revolutionary action, and a school of Marxist feminism did duly emerge. As many feminists have come to recognise, however, Marxism can be a very patriarchal theory itself, and they have not always been happy with their goals being subsumed within the wider context of class struggle. In practice this has often led to feminist goals being downgraded in importance beneath those of the working class, who are always deemed to take precedence in the Marxist scheme. What feminist theorists are concerned about is the exploitation that women suffer across the social scale, not just within the working class, and classical Marxists can struggle with this. Ultimately, the two sides have different conceptions of what constitutes politics.

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Disagreement between Marxist and feminist theorists dramatically came to a head in an essay by Heidi Hartmann entitled ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism’. Hartman’s argument was that feminism historically was very much in a subsidiary position as regards Marxism, and that this was holding back the feminist cause: ‘Many Marxists argue that feminism is at best less important than class conflict and at worse divisive of the working class’ (Hartman 1981: 2). In Hartmann’s view, therefore, Marxism and feminism at present were locked in an ‘unhappy marriage’ – and unless the incompatibilities between the two movements and their objectives were addressed honestly, then the only solution would have to be divorce. Feminism saw politics in operation at the level of the personal (‘the personal is political’ as the slogan went), whereas for Marxists it was a collective, class issue. Hartmann was still optimistic about overcoming such incompatibilities, suggesting that the campaign against both patriarchy and capitalism should be given equal importance, but the two movements have essentially followed divergent paths since her intervention. Post-Marxists are far more likely to be in sympathy with, and offer support for, feminist ideals than their classical counterparts are. Powerful though it was, the Leninist tradition was not the only one within Marxism to have a significant political impact: both Trotskyism and Maoism deserve to be considered as well. Leon Trotsky was one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution and a noted theorist himself, in the area of the arts as well as politics: he was a highly regarded literary critic and historian, for example. After the rise of Stalin, Trotsky, a critic of the Stalinist bureaucratic approach to the organisation of a workers’ state, was forced into exile. There, he was to become an alternative voice to official communism, providing a focus for opposition in that respect until his assassination in Mexico in 1940. Trotsky devised a theory of ‘permanent revolution’ that attracted a lot of interest on the left, being designed as a method to prevent the slide into authoritarianism and bureaucratisation that had taken place in the Soviet Union under Stalin. As the title of his last book had it, Stalinism was a case of The Revolution Betrayed and it had only succeeded in creating an all-powerful state bureaucracy rather than a true workers’ state of the kind envisaged by Marx, thereby setting an extremely bad example for the international socialist cause. How the Soviet system might have developed under Trotsky rather than Stalin is one of Marxism’s most intriguing mysteries, and Trotskyism did continue to attract supporters around the world throughout the days of Soviet dominance. Many fringe socialist parties in the West were Trotskyist in orientation, with some still active to this day – although rarely having much impact on mainstream national or international politics, constituting more of a protest movement on the far left than anything else. Maoism represented an attempt to rethink Marxism for a very different kind of culture than the Western model that Marx had been dealing with in Capital. China was essentially a peasant-based society (far more so than even

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Russia had been in 1917 when compared to advanced European economies like Britain and Germany), and lagged far behind the West in terms of its economic development. Mao was very aware of this discrepancy and spoke on the eve of the Chinese Revolution’s success of the need to address ‘the contradiction between China and the imperialist countries’ (Mao 1972: 36). His interpretation of Marxist theory was therefore geared towards the needs of a developing country, where the bulk of the population was living at or close to subsistence level – ‘poor and blank’ in his words (Mao 1972: 36): Lenin’s theory of the ‘weak link’ simply did not work in this context. Maoism therefore proved to be an attractive option for communist movements in other similar developing countries. Mao did attempt to speed up the industrialisation process in China in order to close the gap with the developed world, through the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the later 1950s, but this was signally unsuccessful. In its aftermath Mao instituted the ‘Cultural Revolution’ in 1966, which was inspired by the notion of ‘permanent revolution’. Its impact, driven by the notorious ‘Gang of Four’, proved to be socially and economically disastrous for the nation, which took years to recover from its disruptive policies. Many intellectuals and professionals lost their posts in the cities and were forced into menial occupations, often in remote parts of the country: the notion being that this would remove the distinction between various kinds of labour, and prevent the re-emergence of a class system. After Mao’s death in 1976, however, the political climate in China changed quite dramatically. The Communist Party turned its back on concepts such as ‘permanent revolution’, as well as most of the Maoist tradition in real terms, and shifted away quite deliberately from classical Marxist policies, embracing instead a form of state-controlled capitalism that many see as a betrayal of the theory’s ideals (another ‘degenerated’ workers’ state in Trotskyist terms). This is a policy still being followed to this day. One can well imagine the reaction of such as Marx and Lenin to officially sanctioned campaigns exhorting citizens to strive to accrue wealth (‘to get rich is glorious’), that indeed this was almost their patriotic duty. The Chinese economy is now very much integrated with that of the West, and it has produced its own class of rich entrepreneurs – not to mention generally very poor working conditions, and wages, for the urban proletariat that has grown up in the wake of its massive industrial expansion designed to service the needs of Western consumers. China’s Communist Party is now heavily dependent on the outsourcing of production from the West to the developed world in order to maintain its power over the populace – yet another irony for Marxists to ponder upon.

Marxism as a Critical Theory: Aesthetics Marxism has had particular success in the area of aesthetics, inspiring several generations of both critics and creative artists internationally. The arts were

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always viewed as a very important aspect of cultural development by Marxist theorists, a powerful and highly effective method of instilling communist values in the general populace (the mirror image of how hegemony theorists like Gramsci identified it as working in the capitalist system). Various aesthetic theories were devised to explain how this process worked, both of a prescriptive and descriptive kind. Reflection theory was an early example of the descriptive type of aesthetic theory in Marxist thought. Thus for Georgi Plekhanov works of art reflected the ideological concerns of their age, and were valuable to study on that basis. Marx put forward similar ideas in his brief forays in this area of discourse, suggesting that we view classical Greek art and literature as representing the ‘historical childhood of humanity’ (Marx 1975–2005: 28. 48) and as therefore providing us with something like a window into the past. Plekhanov could be judgemental as well, however, condemning what for him was the decadent art of the Cubist movement as a reflection of a similarly decadent age that a Marxist could only oppose. Echoes of reflection theory will turn up in other Marxist aesthetic theories, although it will be modified quite substantially over the years. Instead of a straightforward process of reflection, a much more complex relationship will be posited as in operation between artworks and their ideological context. For succeeding generations of Marxist aestheticians, artworks are deeply implicated in how ideology develops, often being instrumental in shaping ideological attitudes amongst the general public: the interaction is not just one way, as Plekhanov seems to imply. Even so, reflection theory does succeed in establishing what becomes the primary concern of Marxist aesthetics: the ideological role of art. Socialist realism, on the other hand, which held sway in the Soviet Union for many years from the 1930s onwards, turned out to be a highly prescriptive aesthetic. It decreed that works of art above all should serve the interests of the state, and it operated a strict programme of censorship to ensure that creative artists complied with this dictate. There was a strongly didactic quality to the socialist realist ethic, insisted upon by the Stalinist regime’s infamous cultural commissar A. A. Zhdanov in the 1930s, which saw the arts as a way of promoting the virtues of socialism amongst the citizenry in a post-revolutionary age. Writers for Zhdanov, as a case in point, should take on the role of ‘engineer of human souls’ (Zhdanov 1977: 21) on the state’s behalf. Criticism of the state’s policies was expressly forbidden, as many authors found to their cost, and anything that hinted at sympathy for the bourgeoisie or capitalists was taken to be little short of treasonous and harshly dealt with by the authorities. Avant-garde experimentation was particularly frowned upon, with artists being forced to adopt fairly old-fashioned styles in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. In consequence modernism, for much of the twentieth century the dominant aesthetic in artistic practice in the West, was outlawed in the Soviet Union, being criticised as elitist in spirit and alienating to the public; anything along the lines of abstract expressionism or twelve-tone music, for

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example, was definitely ruled out. Significantly enough, Trotsky took a very different approach to the arts, arguing that any artwork ‘should be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art’ (Trotsky 1960: 178). Socialist realism, however, was to judge artworks almost solely by political criteria – very much to the detriment of the Soviet artistic community, who struggled to satisfy Zhdanov’s demands on this score, especially after the upsurge of experimentalism in the arts that took place in the Revolution’s early years (constructivist art, for example, which flourished in the early 1920s). Modernism was often accused of being elitist and alienating in the West as well, but at least artists were not banned from producing work in that mode, although of course that did not guarantee that their efforts would achieve much in the way of performance or public exposure. There was in fact rarely much of a mass audience for modernist experimentation. The Frankfurt School theorist Theodor W. Adorno did defend modernism from the Marxist side (although as will be discussed in Chapter 2, Adorno was anything but doctrinaire in his support of Marxism as a philosophical or political system), particularly with regard to music; although the defence he offered was of a very selective kind. Adorno championed the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers – much disliked by socialist realists – as opposed to the work of Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky was considered a modernist too, but his early ballet scores, such as Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, were sending out the wrong message about the human condition as far as Adorno was concerned. The protagonists of both ballets ended up being crushed by the conformist demands of their society – reactionary sentiments according to Adorno, for whom what the ballet’s narrative was saying was that individuals had no chance against the forces of tradition. Adorno railed against the turn to neoclassicism by so many composers (Stravinsky and a host of others) in the post-World War I period, regarding such a reappropriation of past styles as amounting to a ‘new conformism’ (Adorno 1973: 5) on the part of those involved. Schoenberg, however, with his invention of a twelve-tone, atonal method of composition, which broke distinctively with past practices, represented ‘progress’. By abandoning Western music’s seven-tone scales in favour of twelve-tone sequences of notes which are then reworked in a variety of ways over the course of the composition, the individual notes are, Adorno believes, set free, since they are no longer under the sway of any scale’s tonal centre (C in the key of C major, for instance). In consequence, for Adorno: ‘Twelve-tone technique is truly the fate of music. It enchains music by liberating it’ (Adorno 1973: 67–8) – a typically Adornian paradox. Adorno was eventually to move in a recognisably post-Marxist direction in his thought. Apart from anything else he had a particular dislike of mass culture that made it difficult for him to identify completely with a movement so committed to mass social conformism as orthodox Marxism on the Soviet

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model clearly was. But the socialist realism aesthetic drew criticism even from more committed Marxist thinkers in the West, as in the notable case of Bertolt Brecht and his theory of epic theatre. Brecht’s line, prefiguring that of Adorno after him, was that the new kind of society which communism was committed to promoting required a new kind of art, and that it would be regressive to follow older models of artistic practice. Socialist realism was guilty of just such a sin in Brecht’s view, as in its preference for a nineteenth-century style of realism in literature. Epic theatre was designed to break with what for Brecht was a hackneyed, outdated style of drama that was inappropriate for addressing the pressing social issues of the post-World War I situation in Europe. As outlined by Brecht’s associate, the critic and theorist Walter Benjamin, epic theatre was to be regarded as a revolutionary style of theatre that would openly confront the values of the ruling class. It was conceived of as an essentially didactic form, the primary concern being to make the audience aware of the many injustices of their society and the implication of the ruling class in these. Above all, epic theatre was supposed to make the audience think, rather than merely entertain them. Nineteenth-century realism was simply no longer adequate to that task and had to be abandoned; for Brecht and Benjamin it promoted basically bourgeois values, since what counted as realism ‘then’ could not qualify as realism ‘now’. As Benjamin put it, to continue to produce work in that manner, as many creative artists were doing, was simply to ‘supply material for an apparatus which is obsolete’ (Benjamin 1973: 1). Something far more radical was required in order to make the audience recognise the extent of the changes that had occurred in the socio-political landscape in the interim, and it should be left to the creative artist to decide what form this should take. Nevertheless, the doctrine of realism was defended by such eminent Marxist theorists as Georg Lukács – even if he did not accept all the tenets of socialist realism. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism Lukács was in fact deeply critical of the socialist realist aesthetic, while putting forward a case for realism that could even include bourgeois authors (‘critical realism’ as he dubbed it). Lukács did not demand direct identification with the communist cause, as socialist realism did; his only requirement being that the work in question laid bare the social relations of its society so that its inequalities were made apparent to the reader. Thus an author like Thomas Mann could be useful to the communist cause, whereas an author like Franz Kafka was detrimental. In works like The Trial and The Castle Kafka saw us as the victims of nameless forces that controlled our lives and could not be opposed, which to Lukács was tantamount to saying that revolution or social change would never be possible – and that was a message very obviously to the benefit of the ruling class, helping to dampen down any revolutionary sentiments that might arise. Mann, on the other hand, although clearly bourgeois in his sympathies, showed social relations as they actually were, which served to reinforce the case for the revolutionary change that communists were advocating.

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New schools of Marxist aesthetic theories were being developed into the 1960s, as in the structural Marxist movement, which proved to be very influential in academic circles into the 70s and 80s. Its technique of literary analysis was known as ‘reading against the grain’, and it involved identifying what the narrative under review was hiding from us about the real nature of social relations in the world it was picturing. The theory developed out of the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser, primarily through the work of his follower Pierre Macherey, whose book A Theory of Literary Production outlined its analytical principles. Althusser had argued that artworks such as texts could show us the workings of ideology ‘in some sense from the inside’ (Althusser 1971: 204), and that is what reading against the grain was designed to bring out. Ideology was for Macherey, ‘the false resolution of a real debate’ (Macherey 1978: 131), and it was the duty of the Marxist critic to reveal how that process was functioning in literature. So for Macherey, ‘the text explores ideology . . . puts it to the test of the written word’ (Macherey 1978: 132); in other words, it exposes ideology for what it really is. In the English academic world, Terry Eagleton followed on from Macherey’s lead to develop a system of ‘categories for a materialist criticism’, whereby we could come to recognise the ways in which the literary text was ‘a certain production of ideology’ (Eagleton 1976: 44, 64), encouraging us to understand the world from a particular biased perspective. Literary criticism on the structural Marxist model was therefore to be thought of a ‘science of the text’ (Eagleton 1976: 64) complementing the Marxist project’s social critique. As usual in Marxist aesthetics, the point of the exercise was to further Marxism’s political ambitions in general. For any Marxist thinker, working in any medium, politics will always take precedence.

Marxism in the Twenty-First Century Despite the rise of post-Marxism, and the collapse of communism’s credibility as a socio-political system with the demise of the Soviet empire, Marxist ideas continue to inform both political theory and the world of critical theory. As noted before, the attractiveness of such a comprehensive form of critical theory on practitioners should never be underestimated: Marxism covers all eventualities. Studies of Marx are still regularly being published – most recently Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, by Jonathan Sperber, 2013. The tendency now is to present him, as Sperber does, as a man of his time, an antidote to his somewhat hagiographic treatment throughout most of Marxism’s history as a universally applicable theorist who had uncovered the secret of human society, with Marxism seen as the ‘science of society’ that consigned all other social theories to historical oblivion. Yet it is true of all thinkers that they are always historically situated, and cannot avoid responding to, and becoming embroiled in, to at least some extent, the issues and concerns of their period,

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and that does not prevent Marx from having a role to play in cultural debate in our own time and on into the future. As long as there are significant economic inequalities to be found in the world, especially between the West and the developing world, then Marxist ideas are likely to stay in circulation and find an audience. Indeed, the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom end of most Western societies, under the prevailing regime of neoliberal economics with its tireless advocacy of market fundamentalism as humankind’s new destiny (or even ‘World-Spirit’), would be enough on its own to keep Marxism alive there. In that latter respect, the credit crisis has given a new lease of life to the Marxist community in the West, seeming to provide undeniable proof of the underlying instability of capitalism as an economic system. The system’s structural weaknesses are now only too evident – even to many of its supporters, who are divided as to how to resuscitate it. As the theorist David Harvey has put it, we are now at ‘an inflexion point in the history of capitalism’ (Harvey 2010: 217) that constitutes an open invitation for a mass movement to be marshalled against it to bring it down. Marxism is still an extremely powerful method of analysis of economic systems therefore, even if you do not agree with the solutions that classical Marxism calls for, and Harvey feels that it could even now provide the inspiration for the development of a mass movement against the current socio-economic paradigm. Whether that ever occurs is more of a moot point, but it does seem likely that Marxism, with its high ideals and theoretical depth and comprehensiveness, will constitute a fertile source of ideas for counter-capitalist movements well into the foreseeable future. Indeed, undaunted by communism’s decline, some theorists like Slavoj Žižek are still advocating the virtues of violent revolution in order to overthrow the current socio-economic order, arguing that it might after all work better next time around than it ever has done in the past (see Chapter 3 for more on Žižek). Again, that is a contentious point, but it is proof that Marxism’s aura has not yet disappeared, nor its ability to inspire radically minded dissent against the status quo: its appeal defiantly lingers on. While it is highly unlikely that Marxism will ever again wield power on the global scale that it once did in the heyday of communism, it cannot be written off altogether quite yet either: it forms too large a part of modern Western history for that to happen. How that body of material was expanded, and taken in a nonclassical direction, by the work of Western Marxists and postMarxists forms the topic of the next two chapters.

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2 WESTERN MARXISM Stuart Sim

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he establishment of the Soviet Union meant that Marxism became a major player on the world stage, transforming it from a philosophy with socio-political pretensions into a fully-fledged socio-political theory that could be judged by the effect of its policies. Russia effectively turned into a test case for the Marxist project, becoming highly symbolic for the socialist cause internationally, which could now monitor its progress towards the desired condition of a workers’ state and assess the methods that it used. Given the need to build a new kind of society with a completely different set of values to the old Tsarist one in Russia, Soviet communism tended to develop into a doctrinaire theory which prized, indeed demanded, adherence to the party line rather than philosophical debate about the validity or otherwise of its principles. Marxism was the ‘science of history’ and the ‘science of society’, and that was the end of the argument. Under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, Marxist theory became canonised, to the extent that any opposition to it was quickly stifled by the Soviet authorities – often with extreme brutality, as Stalin’s regime amply demonstrated with its numerous gulags full of political prisoners. Classical, orthodox Marxism, that based on a fairly literal reading of Marx’s oeuvre, was taken to be beyond criticism in the Soviet system, and when its predictions failed, or when its application did not have the expected effect, then some excuse had to be found outside the theory to explain why this was not really the case (to be fair, a not uncommon response within belief systems in general). Hence the development of the concept of hegemony, which exercised so many Marxist theorists over the course of the twentieth century until Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe mounted their concerted attack on it in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the work which more than any other established post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right. Not all Marxists outside the Soviet Union were happy to accept the rigidly enforced dogmatism of Soviet Marxism, however, and a tradition grew up of what came to be described as Western Marxism, an approach which, as Perry Anderson pointed out in the 1970s in Considerations on Western Marxism, maintained a more philosophical orientation than the economics-inclined Soviet interpretation. Western Marxism is generally considered to date from the early

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work of Georg Lukács, particularly his History and Class Consciousness of 1923, which brought him into considerable difficulties with the Soviet authorities, who demanded that he publicly renounce the views he expressed there. While Lukács subsequently did so, proceeding to change his orientation as a writer in an attempt to placate the Soviet establishment, History and Class Consciousness nevertheless succeeding in influencing a new generation of Marxist thinkers in the West, most notably the Frankfurt School. How that tradition of Marxism developed, and its relationship to Soviet orthodoxy, forms the subject of this chapter.

Perry Anderson: Mapping Western Marxism Anderson identified ‘a common intellectual tradition’ that could go under the heading of ‘Western Marxism’ (Anderson 1976: 1), seeing it as comprising various figures and movements running from Georg Lukács through Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School to more recent theorists such as Louis Althusser. For Anderson, Western Marxism was a ‘displacement’ of the concerns of the classical Marxist tradition as it had developed in the pre-World War I era, a displacement whose main distinguishing feature is its ‘structural divorce . . . from political practice’ (Anderson 1976: 25, 29). Western Marxism proceeds from a different kind of intellectual tradition than that of Russia, one that did not have the same political orientation and that was more interested in Marxism as a subject of academic study. Figures like V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, for example, could hardly think of Marxism in anything but political terms, treating it as a putative political practice awaiting implementation. Anderson notes that, with a few notable exceptions such as Antonio Gramsci, economic matters are generally avoided in Western Marxism, as well as practical political issues about how to prosecute the class struggle against the bourgeois state – again, the latter being the major concern of the likes of Lenin and Trotsky. The result was ‘a basic shift in the whole centre of gravity of European Marxism towards philosophy’ (Anderson 1976: 49), that very much set it apart from its Soviet counterpart, rendering it a primarily intellectual pursuit, more at home in the academy than in the rough-and-tumble world of daily politics. And it is true to say that Marxism’s greatest impact in Western Europe was in the university world; politically, its appeal rapidly diminished. The French and Italian communist parties did maintain some influence for a while, particularly in the post-World War II period, but this gradually dissipated until they became little more than fringe movements in their country’s national politics. Anderson points out that a seminal event for this more academic approach to Marxist thought was the discovery and publication in Russia in the 1930s of Marx’s ‘Paris Manuscripts’ from 1844, which were regarded as emphasising the philosophical foundations of his concept of historical

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materialism. The Manuscripts are often claimed to reveal a more humanistic side to Marx’s thought than is to be found in his post-Communist Manifesto writings, and they made relatively little impression in the Soviet Union itself, where the later, economics-focused Marx was to stay in favour. In Anderson’s neatly turned phrase, the Manuscripts were to generate a series of works by a variety of Western theorists over the next few decades that were ‘on Marxism, rather than in Marxism’ (Anderson 1976: 53). This was Marx for a very different kind of audience than the classical tradition had envisaged, and the Soviet regime was actually working with on a daily basis, with a very different set of concerns and interests than the encouragement of a popular revolution. In part, this academic turn to the study of Marx’s thought helps explain the resurgence of interest in figures like G. W. F. Hegel, as the Western academy sought to explore Marx’s philosophical roots and situate him more fully in philosophical history and previous explorations in the nature of the dialectic. This was to lead in the later twentieth century to an increase in interest amongst Western Marxists in the work of Immanuel Kant along with Hegel, ‘Kant before Marx’ as it came to be referred to in French intellectual circles. The reasoning behind this shift of focus was that Kant gave us a more openended form of the dialectic than Hegel did, one that never reached completion. For classical Marxists, who believed that Marx’s thought had radically broken with the past, this was a largely unnecessary exercise to undertake, however, and a distraction from Marxism’s real business. Louis Althusser’s notion of the ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s thought (see below), was an attempt to revive this view of Marx in the Western academy; but although it was in vogue for a while, it was going against the intellectual current of Western Marxism in general. Neither was the Western tradition all that interested in the work of Friedrich Engels, whom it treated as an unimpressive thinker. Anderson is critical of the way that Western Marxism retreated into the academy, which he considered to be a retrograde step with defeatist overtones, merely generating yet more philosophical interpretations rather than the change in socio-political practices that Marx had urged. In that respect it has nothing much to contribute to the cause of revolution, and for Anderson that is still a live possibility. Noting encouraging signs of the growth of a revolutionary consciousness around the world in the mid-1970s, his verdict on Western Marxism is fairly damning: ‘All that can be said is that when the masses themselves speak, theoreticians – of the sort the West has produced for fifty years – will necessarily be silent’ (Anderson 1976: 106). Not long afterwards, however (as will be seen in Chapter 3), the same kind of signs would suggest to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe that it was time to transcend classical Marxist thought and become post-Marxist instead.

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Georg Lukács and Western Marxism Lukács remains one of the most impressive theorists within the Marxist canon, a thinker whose contributions to philosophy, literary criticism and literary theory still resonate in our own day. History and Class Consciousness, written in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, took a very pragmatic attitude towards Marxist doctrine, claiming that Marxism should be treated as a method rather than a set of doctrinal principles – and a method that would hold true even if it were the case that ‘research . . . disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses’ (Lukács 1971a: 1). Marxism was not to be approached as ‘the “belief” in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a “sacred” book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method’ (Lukács 1971a: 1). In many ways Lukács was opening up the door to postMarxism by taking up this position, moving away from the quasi-religious interpretation of Marxism that was already beginning to be such a potent factor in Soviet life, the belief that Marxism constituted received truth and should be followed to the letter. Neither did Lukács agree with the deterministic interpretation of Marx’s theses that was turning into Soviet orthodoxy, arguing that: it is dangerous for the revolution to overestimate the element of inevitability and to assume that the choice of any particular tactic might unleash even a series of actions . . . and trigger off a chain reaction leading to even more distant goals by some ineluctable process. (Lukács 1971a: 330) This was to raise questions over Marxism’s forecasts, as well as its teleological orientation, an unpopular line to take in the aftermath of an apparently successful communist revolution that saw itself as a model for the rest of the world. An attack on Engels’ work was further proof of Lukács’ anti-dogmatic attitude (and as noted above, Engels would never find much favour among Western Marxists). Soviet Marxism did not follow up such lines of thought, however, and it would be left to Western Marxists to carry on Lukács’ critique of the Marxist canon. Lukács may well be considered the founder of Western Marxism, but much of his work after History and Class Consciousness was consciously directed towards restoring his reputation with the Soviet authorities, who had reacted with such hostility to that work and what they perceived to be its overly Hegelian bias. Hegelianism was viewed with considerable suspicion in the Soviet camp, being regarded as not rooted enough in material concerns in comparison to Marx, who was held to have ‘corrected’ this failing in Hegel by developing dialectical materialism. Lukács accordingly went on to write a defence of the Leninist interpretation of Marxism (Lenin: A Study

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on the Unity of his Thought); then a doctoral thesis on Hegel in the Soviet Union (later published as The Young Hegel), which made a case for Hegel’s early work as more aware of economic issues than it had been thought, and thus a suitable subject for a materialist-minded Marxist to address after all. Yet despite this attempt at rehabilitation, Hegel proved to be far more of a subject of interest to Western Marxists than to their Soviet counterparts. Lukács increasingly turned back to literary studies after this point in his career, however, constructing a theory of ‘critical realism’ by which to read narratives from a Marxist standpoint. Works such as The Historical Novel are still highly regarded in the field of literary studies, and The Meaning of Contemporary Realism continues to stir up controversy for its essentially negative interpretation of modernism.

Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School History and Class Consciousness made a notable impact on the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose approach to Marxism was to be characterised by a very critical, non-doctrinal stance that was against the grain of Marxist thought in the period. Any Marxist who did critique the Marxist theoretical model soon found themselves, like Lukács, at the receiving end of condemnation by the Soviet authorities. Written during World War II, when the School was in exile in the USA after fleeing the Nazi takeover in Germany, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment took a jaundiced view of both Western democracy and Soviet communism, criticising both for being dogmatic and assuming that theirs was the only possible way of running a society. Neither system could deal with dissent or internal critique of its beliefs, and expected uncritical obedience on the part of its citizens: ‘The choice by an individual citizen of the Communist or Fascist ticket is determined by the influence which the Red Army or the laboratories of the West have on him’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 205), being the authors’ rather despairing judgement. Even more critically, Adorno’s later Negative Dialectics constitutes a broadside against the very foundations of Marxism, arguing that the theory’s conception of the dialectic is misguided and does not hold up to any sustained philosophical scrutiny. His main point is that the notion of totality on which Marxism is based is not tenable, that it is in the nature of the operation of the dialectic that there will always be something that escapes any attempt at totalisation. That will become a recurrent theme amongst post-Marxists, particularly those of a poststructuralist orientation, that totality is an unrealisable condition, invalidating any theory dependent on this as a premise. Adorno’s concern is to create instead an ‘anti-system’ which will ‘substitute for the unity principle’ on which Marxism depends, ‘the idea of what would be outside the sway of such unity’ (Adorno 1973: xx). Given Marxism’s obsessive need to

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exercise complete control over human affairs, that can only be interpreted as an attempt to undermine its authority: the theory cannot accept that anything at all could be ‘outside the sway’ of its main concepts, comprehensiveness of coverage being one of its major claims. For Adorno, however, it is only through ‘the insertion of some wretched cover concepts’ (Adorno 1973: 152) that Marxism can keep up the claim to be in possession of the universal truth on which its authority rests. Another product of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, remained in America after the School moved back to Germany when World War II ended, and developed his own rather freewheeling brand of Marxist-influenced thought, as in works like One-Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation. Marcuse contends that Marxism’s emphasis on the experience of the working class misses the point that capitalist exploitation applies to other classes too. Even the middle class in a country like America is being exploited, through various ‘new forms of control’ (Marcuse 1964: 1) that have been introduced, which collectively have the effect of creating a compliant and largely docile workforce of ‘one-dimensional men’ (American society can be quite surprisingly socially conformist in that respect). Such ideas proved to be very influential in the countercultural movement that developed in the country from the 1960s onwards, offering a challenge to its ideological belief-system with its obsessional commitment to economic success. The gradual decline in middleclass income, and fringe benefits, that has been so evident in American society over the last few decades bears witness to the power that the corporate sector wields over employees in general, not just the traditional working class. Class in the European sense of the term has always been a rather dubious concept in the American context anyway, presenting a significant obstacle to the application of Marxist schemes in that country, where individuals are harder to pin down in terms of their social position. The work of the Frankfurt School was carried on by a new generation of theorists after Adorno et al., most notably in the work of Jürgen Habermas, who was Adorno’s research assistant for a period in the 1950s. Habermas deployed the interdisciplinary approach so characteristic of the School’s work, but was notably less pessimistic in outlook than either Adorno or Horkheimer, who often sounded as if they had given up entirely on the way that the culture around them was developing. Despite a general sympathy towards Marxist theory, Habermas was increasingly drawn to liberal democracy over the years, becoming a noted champion of that system – if in an idealised form, which he admitted could not be found in any of its current manifestations in Western culture. He was a champion, too, of the Enlightenment and modernity, although emphasising that they represented an ideal which had often gone badly wrong and been used to justify socially and politically problematical actions. Nevertheless, he thought that modernity was a concept well worth fighting for, and this was to bring him into conflict with the burgeoning postmodernist-poststructuralist movement of

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the later twentieth century. Habermas was a bitter critic of the latter, arguing that the work of its major French theorists, such as Jean-François Lyotard, represented a form of neoconservatism, thus foregrounding his own commitment to a more traditional form of left-ish politics. Habermas’s emphasis on the need for a consensus in socio-political relations, and on continuing the project of modernity, went very much against the grain of Lyotard’s own political beliefs, which were grounded on ‘dissensus’ – constant opposition to the dominant ideology of one’s society – as well as a rejection of all that modernity stood for. Habermas, on the other hand, regarded modernity as an ‘unfinished project’ (Habermas 1996: 38–55), which, depending on exactly how you define modernity, is a position that could be defended by either Marxists or neoliberals. Habermas wanted to refine modernity, but he remained a firm supporter of ‘Enlightenment Project’ values, expressing a generally optimistic view of the future if these were aspired to with a greater sense of commitment. Another more recent thinker to challenge standard Marxist conceptions of the dialectic has been Roy Bhaskar, whose researches, like Adorno’s, lead him to posit a much more open form of the process. Once again we find the notion of a graspable totality being dismissed: ‘Reality is a potential infinite totality, of which we know something but not how much’ (Bhaskar 1993: 15). For Bhaskar, a closed totality was an unfortunate legacy that Hegel had bequeathed Marxism and it had been highly detrimental to Marxism’s subsequent development, particularly in terms of communism. Bhaskar’s anti-Hegelianism differentiates him from many of his Western Marxist peers.

Nicos Poulantzas and ‘Fractions’ Theory Pinning down class status was becoming increasingly difficult in the modern European context too, as Nicos Poulantzas’s work points out. The homogeneous classes that classical Marxism requires for its theories to work properly, are in reality becoming very diffuse in Poulantzas’s view. He suggests that we need to start thinking instead in terms of class ‘fractions’ that can be made up of individuals from a wide range of social positions, whereby classes can become ‘dissolved and fused with other classes, as groups’ (Poulantzas 1973: 77) that sometimes (but not always) share the same outlook – that will depend on the particular socio-political circumstances obtaining at the time. It is a much more fluid scenario than Marx had imagined, one in which individuals’ ‘structural class determination is not reducible to their class position’ (Poulantzas 1975: 15), and it does raise questions about the validity of the Marxist notion of totality once again. Whether we can ever really grasp this in its entirety at any given moment, given the various conflicting currents at work within a society like ours, becomes highly doubtful. (The concept of ‘rainbow politics’ is built on much the same kind of principles, with various classes fusing together over some pressing social or political issue.)

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Poulantzas is still in agreement with classical Marxism’s overall aims, but his theory of fractions means that there is a need for constant revision of Marxist concepts to cope with a world where ideological positions are not permanently fixed (Poulantzas’s revisions take account of the structuralist theory so popular at the time, for example). Class struggle is by no means as straightforward a process as many Marxists choose to think, nor class consciousness as easily identifiable: we need to remain aware that there is always the ‘possibility of contamination of working class ideology by the dominant and petty-bourgeois ideologies’ (Poulantzas 1975: 205). It is a point that all hegemony theorists repeatedly will make in their various ways, but Poulantzas draws more a radical conclusion from it than most.

Adapting Marxism: Jean-Paul Sartre On the face of it, existentialism would seem to be a particularly difficult theory to reconcile with Marxism, but Jean-Paul Sartre did try to do so, an indication of Marxism’s strong presence in twentieth-century French intellectual life (destined to wane dramatically after the événements of 1968). Existentialism pictured individuals as being alienated, and treated alienation as an ontological rather than an ideological condition. For Marxists, of course, the reverse was true, and any sense of alienation that we experienced came from being exploited and oppressed by the political system under which we lived. In an industrialised society under the control of the bourgeoisie as owners of the means of production, we were alienated from the fruits of our labour, since the profits they created were very unequally shared – and that was to be considered a class, rather than an individual, issue. Sartre, on the other hand, saw our alienation as the product of our coming into existence in a world that had no transcendental meaning, and the focus was on how this affected the individual and what could be done to render us able to function in the face of the considerable personal anxiety created by that condition. Sartre had a complicated relationship with Marxism, and could be very critical of the French Communist Party, as he was in What is Literature? (1948), where he attacked its treatment of dissent against the party line. Opponents, he complained, were never really debated with by party officials but instead just ‘discredited’ on a personal level (Sartre 1967: 190), a reaction which revealed the Party’s basic authoritarianism and refusal to entertain the possibility of internal critique – precisely what Western Marxism came above all to stand for. His most substantial engagement with Marxist theory comes in later career in the Critique of Dialectical Reason of 1960. There, he attempts to bridge the gap between the world views of existentialism and Marxism. Sartre complains about the way that Marxism has turned into a deterministically minded doctrine, which for him amounts to a denial of human freedom, freedom being one of the cornerstones of the existentialist ethos. As far as Sartre is concerned,

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individuals always have freedom of choice, no matter how limited this may be on occasion, and this enables us to live an ‘authentic’ life if we make the right choices and avoid getting into situations where we are prevented from following those up. His solution to achieving an accommodation between Marxist and existentialist objectives is that the dialectic ‘must proceed from individuals and not from some kind of supra-individual ensemble’ (Sartre 1991: 36). This means that any revolutionary action that occurs, no matter how widespread this may prove to be, must have its roots in a freely arrived at decision by the individual. Class consciousness does not figure in the equation from the existentialist perspective, and neither is the individual to be thought of as a mere puppet in the communist party’s hands as part of the collective will.

Preserving Marxism: The Concept of Hegemony As it became apparent that capitalism was not necessarily going to collapse once its internal contradictions were revealed, recurrent socio-economic crises failing to trigger this event, theorists began to cast around for ways to explain how it could be that the capitalist system continued to inspire support, even if only tacit, under such adverse circumstances. The concept of hegemony came to play a key role in this process, showing how the ruling class could maintain its position of power by making its code of values seem to be entirely natural rather than imposed, thus preventing the build-up of revolutionary ideas within those sectors of society that it was actively exploiting. As discussed in Chapter 1, Antonio Gramsci was a major proponent of this notion, and he became a critical influence on various generations of Marxist theorists. Hegemony was progressively refined by Gramsci’s successors, whose objective was to make it fit into the development of the capitalist system over the course of the twentieth century with its various economic and political crises. One of the most important voices in Western Marxism was Louis Althusser, who developed an interpretation of Marx’s work that came to be known as ‘structural Marxism’ (although Althusser himself did not like the term, and denied the link with structuralist theory). Structural Marxism had a particular vogue in the 1960s and 70s, and, as was noted in Chapter 1, generated an influential school of criticism based on the principle of ‘reading against the grain’ of what literary narratives appeared to be telling us about the nature of social relations in our world (as in the work of Pierre Macherey, Terry Eagleton et al.). Althusser and his followers produced a particularly influential book entitled Reading Capital, which represented an attempt to answer the various criticisms that Marxist theory had attracted over the years (although the English edition only includes the contributions of Althusser and Étienne Balibar). The notion behind the project – based on a seminar held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris to reaffirm Marx’s significance in contemporary life – was that many of the apparent problems in the theory could be resolved

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by much closer reading of the classic texts themselves; Althusser insisting that ‘it is essential to read Capital to the letter’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 13) to prevent such errors from creeping in. That becomes a common refrain of Western Marxism: that Marx will only fail us through misinterpretation of what he actually says. Althusser takes seriously Marxism’s claim to be the definitive ‘science of society’, identifying an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work (from the mid-1840s onwards); this being the point at which it is transformed from mere philosophical speculations based on Hegelian principles into a powerful science giving us a blueprint on how to change society radically for the better. Althusser went on to put forward his own interpretation of how hegemony functioned in an advanced society. His contention was that societies were controlled by two principal sets of forces: the Institutional State Apparatus (ISA) and the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA). The former equates to the Gramscian vision of hegemony, comprising the educational system, the arts and the media that spread the ‘correct’ values and beliefs throughout the population – almost by stealth, as it were. These put in place the ‘capitalist relations of exploitation’ (Althusser 1971: 146), that dictate the character of everyday life, the rules we live by and largely take for granted. This is the process defined as ‘interpellation’ by Althusser. Whereas the RSA – made up of the police, the army and the security forces – is what the state ultimately depends upon to enforce its power if the ISA ever loses its credibility and begins seriously to be called into question, perhaps even to the point of open defiance and popular revolution (examples of which continue to proliferate in our own time, as in the Middle East in the last few years with the phenomenon of the ‘Arab Spring’, and the governing authorities’ uncompromising reaction to such mass uprisings). In its role as the science of society, Marxism enables us to see through the system of ideology which we are schooled into by the ISA to the real ‘lived relation between men and their world’ (Althusser 1977: 233), and so to a realisation of the oppression and exploitation that it invariably involves. Étienne Balibar’s contribution to Reading Capital addresses the issue of whether there is enough of a theory of history in Marx’s work to substantiate the claim that Marxism is to be considered the only true ‘science of history’. While conceding that Marx’s references on this topic are of an ‘elliptical nature’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 202), he does not think that this invalidates the claim; rather, this is held to ‘demand the production of new theoretical concepts’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 208) by his followers to bring out what is latent in Marx’s analyses. From this perspective, Marx’s work is not complete, instead we are asked to recognise that ‘Capital . . . founds a new discipline: i.e., opens up a new field for scientific investigation’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 308): as good a justification for the Western Marxist enterprise as you are likely to find.

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Althusser can be regarded as very much representative of the Western Marxist tradition in his attempt to rehabilitate Marx for an audience which was beginning to have considerable doubts as to what his theories were being used to justify. The shift towards a more philosophical bias in analysing Marx’s work turns attention away from the socio-political problems thrown up by the introduction of the communist system in the Soviet empire and China, and by implication is exonerating Marx from any blame in these. Explaining what Marx ‘really said’ becomes the point of the exercise, and for the Western Marxist community in general this need not lead to the excesses of communism as it has been practised in the twentieth century. Marx should not be seen as the villain of the piece, nor as at all responsible for the disjunction that had grown up between theory and practice. This can become a rather tired argument after a while, however, and it is one that rarely satisfies its critics. The effect of hegemony is to keep postponing the predicted collapse of capitalism and the arrival of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ into the future, and as far as some Marxists like the American critical theorist Fredric Jameson is concerned, almost indefinitely so. Even Jameson is beginning to doubt the validity of the classical Marxist template for how class war will be waged, envisaging that the struggle ultimately will involve ‘forms we cannot yet imagine’ (Jameson 1991: 417). None of these conclusions is exactly comforting to would-be Marxist activists, who can only see their hopes of revolution and a new social order fading away as any kind of imminent prospect. It can make challenging capitalism seem a somewhat thankless task – almost like the plight of Sisyphus as pictured by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Jameson and many other Marxists may choose to believe that we are now going through ‘late capitalism’ (as argued so persuasively by Ernest Mandel in his 1972 book of that name), but the system’s continued, and stubborn, resilience can make this seem more of a hope than a reality: late capitalism is proving to be a particularly stubborn beast. Another solution to the resilience of capitalism was Eurocommunism, which took its inspiration mainly from the work of Gramsci. Eurocommunism chose to operate within the existing multi-party set-up of Western democracy, and tried to present a much softer image to Western voters than communism had done in the past. The idea was to make the party representative of a much wider cross section of the population, and to appear less of a threat to the existing Western way of life. Eurocommunists were quite willing to operate within the existing system as it was constituted. Although it did attract a certain amount of popular support in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in Italy, Eurocommunism did not really survive the subsequent collapse of the Soviet empire, which seemed to suggest the ultimate unworkability of communism as a political system. Whether it would have preserved Western democratic institutions if it had ever gained a parliamentary majority, or reverted to type instead, would have to remain an open question.

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After Althusser Many other young Marxists contributed to Althusser’s seminar series at the École Normale Supérieure, such as Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. Macherey has already been considered in Chapter 1 in the context of Marxist aesthetics, but both Rancière and Badiou are also worth exploring in terms of the intellectual trajectories each pursued in the aftermath of Althusser – right into the current century, demonstrating that Western Marxism is still a factor in our culture. Both theorists were to distance themselves from Althusserian Marxism after the 1968 événements, with Rancière arguing that Althusser’s scheme failed to allow for spontaneous action on the lines of the événements, while Badiou’s initial reaction was to turn to Maoism (although eventually he is to sound quite post-Marxist in outlook). The conduct of the French Communist Party during the événements, where it eventually sided with the De Gaulle government in its suppression of the uprising, shook the belief of the French intellectual community in classical Marxism quite profoundly. Many turned away from it altogether, joining the ranks of poststructuralism and postmodernism instead (as Lyotard for one did), identifying strongly with those movements’ sceptical attitude towards universal theories in general. Others like Badiou went in the opposite direction, embracing Maoism as a purer form of the Marxist project that could transform political life in the West. In Maoist theory practice takes precedence over theoretical abstraction, and there is no distinction to be made between intellectual and manual labour, rendering the class struggle, right down to the level of the peasantry, of even greater importance than in the Marxist-Leninist tradition (which was capable of theoretical abstraction in its own way). Badiou’s philosophical development, however, features the kind of complexity that has come to be associated with Western Marxism rather than the more down-to-earth approach found in Maoism, being heavily based on mathematics and in particular set theory: another case of seeming to be ‘on’ rather than ‘in’ Marxism. Set theory is a fairly abstruse form of mathematics that underpins the discipline in modern times, leaving Badiou open to the same charge of academicism that Anderson makes about the Western Marxist movement in general. It is just such attempts to link philosophy and the hard sciences that Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont will go on to be so critical of in Intellectual Impostures, where Badiou’s is summarily dismissed as merely another example of the ‘abuse’ of Gödel’s set theory at the hands of contemporary French philosophers (see Sokal and Bricmont 1998, Chapter 11). For Badiou, on the other hand, set theory provides the basis of the ‘foundational style’ (Badiou 2003: 50) that he seeks to reintroduce into contemporary philosophical discourse. Badiou’s books have only been translated into English in quite recent years, meaning that his wider impact on critical theory came well after that of Althusser and Macherey.

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Badiou develops a theory of the ‘event’ that, despite his pronounced antipathy to poststructuralism and postmodernism, is nevertheless quite close in spirit to that put forward by Lyotard (to be discussed in Chapter 3). For Badiou the event is to be understood as the product of a particular ‘encounter’; as happens, for example, when two people fall in love. That encounter then becomes a significant event that alters and structures their lives, whether for good or ill, from that point onwards: it creates a new ‘situation’. Unless such an event occurs, individual human beings do not really turn into proper ‘subjects’, although it is crucial that they continue to recognise the significance the resultant situation holds for them in order for this process to unfold. In Badiou’s terminology, somewhat recalling the existentialist notion of authenticity, individuals so affected are required to maintain a sense of ‘fidelity’ towards the event in question. Two translators of Badiou’s work, Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens, have suggested that fidelity should be treated ‘as a remodeling of the Marxist concept of praxis’ (Badiou 2003: 31) in that it demands an active response to the situation generated – as in the case of a politically significant event. The fact that Badiou conceives of such responses as being more like shots in the dark undertaken by ‘singular’ individuals than coordinated collective action, however, is unlikely to satisfy classical Marxists; nor would they be able to accept Badiou’s claim that nowadays ‘there is neither progress, nor proletariat’ (Badiou 2003: 54). Badiou’s journey from Althusserian Marxism through Maoism to a defence of the value of ‘singular’ actions, is symptomatic of the intellectual contortions that the French left felt itself forced into making in the later twentieth century, in the wake of first the événements in 1968 and then the collapse of the Soviet empire in the 1980s. Revolutionary communism did indeed appear to have terminally lost its way by then, and even to have been a deeply misguided project in the first place. In a 1997 interview, when asked to describe how his political outlook had changed since his Maoist period in the 1970s, Badiou revealingly replies that whereas earlier he had believed that ‘an emancipatory politics presumed some kind of political party’, what he is now promoting instead is ‘politics without [a] party’ (Badiou 2001: 95). This would seem largely to negate the Marxist concept of class consciousness, yet Badiou can also still define himself as a Marxist, claiming that many of ‘Marx’s fundamental intuitions’ have proved to be correct, and that there is therefore ‘no need for a revision of Marxism itself’ (Badiou 2001: 97). To most classical Marxists, with their firm belief in both class consciousness and a centralised party, this would look distinctly post-Marxist in orientation, and not necessarily all that far from the position earlier outlined by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their post-Marxist ‘primer’ Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. As his interviewer, Peter Hallward, goes on to remark: ‘It’s a little strange to run into a Marxist philosopher who rarely refers to the mode of production and some kind of economic determinism, however attenuated’ (Badiou 2001: 105). But

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these aspects are the least defensible aspects of the Marxist project after the Soviet Union’s collapse, as well as China’s move towards state-controlled capitalism. Félix Guattari, co-author with Gilles Deleuze of texts in the 1970s and 80s with a post-Marxist slant (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus), similarly felt the need to reconfirm his Marxist beliefs in later career, evidence of the emotional pull that Marxism is capable of exerting. Rancière’s turn away from Althusser led him to question many of the concepts and principles at work in Marxism, such as whether there is a working class as Marxists understand the term – a theme also taken up by André Gorz (see Chapter 3). His work post-Althusser makes a point of denying there is any great difference between the abilities and intelligence of intellectuals and the so-called proletariat (another term that Rancière questions), emphasising their essential equality – a position echoing French thought’s flirtation with Maoism. Commentators have struggled to place his work overall, however, since it tends to move freely between disciplines and schools of thought and to become increasingly critical of orthodox Marxism, with its conception of the party as the dominant power in society. The Leninist notion of the party as a ‘vanguard’ movement that the masses must follow obediently, certainly clashes with Rancière’s commitment to equality. As Giuseppina Mecchia has argued, Marxism constitutes for Rancière, at best, ‘only one of the many foundation stones on which to build a startlingly original conceptual framework’ (Mecchia 2010: 39). New ‘conceptual frameworks’ are exactly what Western Marxists specialise in of course, although not all will go to the lengths of Rancière.

The New Left The ‘New Left’ that began to emerge in the later decades of the twentieth century in Britain can also be seen as part of the Western Marxist project, with the journal New Left Review (still active today) as its flagship. Prominent New Left thinkers were figures such as Stuart Hall, a highly influential voice in the development of cultural studies as a discipline in the English-speaking academy. Hall contributed regularly to the journal Marxism Today, which offered a challenge to Marxist orthodoxies in the later twentieth century, calling for a re-thinking of the Marxist project in the face of cultural change. One of the most important legacies of Hall for the development of cultural studies was its emphasis on how audiences consumed media, etc., insisting that this was a far more active process than had previously been thought. Cultural hegemony, in other words, was not just a matter of the uncritical consumption by the mass of the ruling class’s ideas – these were not necessarily accepted wholesale or passively, as theorists like Gramsci appeared to be implying. Such ideas do seem to be gesturing in the direction of post-Marxism.

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Hall’s critiques of the left, as in his controversial volume of collected essays entitled The Hard Road to Renewal, summed up the dilemma faced by socialism in the later decades of the twentieth century, with the Soviet project now discredited and neoliberal market forces seemingly taking over control of political life in the West. He was particularly scathing of those who felt that Marxism still provided the solution to the Thatcherite ‘revolution’ as it was unfolding in the UK from the late 1970s onwards, complaining that ‘the left is not convinced that it cannot continue in the old way’ (Hall 1988: 11). Hall insists that, like it or not, the left will have to ‘[s]ubmit everything to the discipline of the present reality, to our understanding of the forces which are really shaping and changing the world’ (Hall 1988: 14), rather than taking refuge in the theories of a Marxism that for him has been eclipsed by events. He remains confident, however, that the left can reform itself, and feels no need to draw the radical conclusions that Laclau and Mouffe do in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The fact that the left is still struggling to counter neoliberalism into the second decade of the new century, however, indicates that the road to renewal has been even harder to negotiate than Hall had imagined. Marxism has also been subjected to ongoing scrutiny in the pages of other British journals such as Radical Philosophy, now into its fifth decade of publication, which has featured a roll call of the British left as contributors or editors (Peter Osborne and Jonathan Ree, for example). The heated debate over Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas in the 1980s, involving such figures as Norman Geras, is an indication of just how much Marx’s ideas still matter to those on the left, even if, like Geras, they tend in the main to be fairly liberal rather than orthodox in outlook. Geras’s career is worth reflecting on in this respect. He uncompromisingly rejected Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist sentiments, but was never an uncritical defender of the Marxist tradition, writing a very popular blog (Normblog) in his retirement years until his death in 2013. Normblog made him many enemies on the left for its defence of Israel, as well as consistent criticism of the kind of theocratic, authoritarian regimes that many on the left supported as long as they were anti-American in attitude. Geras’s non-doctrinaire approach is evident in his support for a Palestinian state to be created alongside Israel (hence his criticism of Israel’s settlement of the West Bank), and his willingness to be as critical of Western policies towards tyrannical regimes in the developing world as of those regimes themselves. Geras’s continuing commitment to Marxism, but his equally principled refusal to fall back into uncritical acquiescence of the theory and its history, can be seen in a late piece of writing of his, a contribution to a volume of essays exploring Marxism’s meaning in the twenty-first century entitled The Legacy of Marxism (derived from a 2011 conference run by the journal Global Discourse). The essay, ‘What does it mean to be a Marxist?’, identifies ‘personal, intellectual and socio-political ways of being a Marxist’ (Geras 2012: 13), and proceeds to examine the validity of each in our time.

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The uncompromising conclusion constitutes a direct challenge to the Marxist community to resist the lure of the doctrinaire approach that has sullied the movement’s history: [U]nless a Marxism of personal belief and a Marxism of creative intellectual work both thoroughly renewed and wrested once and for all from the grip of anti-democratic and illiberal themes and concepts – unless such a Marxism can come to animate the Marxist political left, Marxism as a political force might just as well be dead and buried. (Geras 2012: 22) For Geras, that is the proper way to arrest what was for him the fatal slide towards post-Marxism, which from his perspective effectively announced the death and burial of the theory.

Conclusion Western Marxism did introduce a new dimension to the study of the theory, and the subject remains one of substantial interest in the academy right through into our own century. Throughout the humanities and the social sciences, Marxism’s place in the history and development of cultural and critical theory in modern times has to be acknowledged, and it is generally the Western tradition that is considered in greatest detail. Neither the Leninist nor the Maoist side has generated anything like the same amount of interest (for all the latter’s brief flourish on the French scene in the 1970s), nor proved to be such a fertile source of ideas in the Western academy. Yet despite the ingenuity shown by so many Western Marxists in opening up new perspectives and constructing new ‘conceptual frameworks’ on Marxist theory, thereby seeking to distance it from an increasingly problematic communist system and its history of social repression (‘these terrorist States’ as Alain Badiou described the socialist bloc, post-collapse (Badiou 2003: 76)), it was not enough to prevent a more radical critique of the discourse’s past from emerging in the West. Post-Marxism was to adopt a notably more iconoclastic attitude towards the whole corpus of Marxist thought and its history than its Western Marxist forbears, one that saw no need to keep exonerating the original theory from any blame for the abuses committed in its name, and that is what will now be considered in Chapter 3.

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3 POST-MARXISM Stuart Sim

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y the later twentieth century Marxism was increasingly being called into question by left-wing thinkers in the West, who could not reconcile such a doctrinaire theory with the changes they saw taking place all around them in global culture. There was a general move towards a more libertarian society to be noted, and that was very much out of kilter with Marxism’s authoritarian approach to politics and the notion of central control – the ‘command economy’ concept that held sway throughout the Soviet empire and Maoist China. For many thinkers in the West, communism’s historical record since the 1917 Russian Revolution was becoming a source of considerable embarrassment, and the eventual upshot was the gradual emergence of post-Marxism as a theoretical position standing in opposition to most of what classical Marxism and the Marxist-Leninist tradition had stood for – as well as the bulk of Western Marxism for that matter. Post-Marxism drew heavily on poststructuralist thought, which in its turn drew considerable inspiration from the work of the later Theodor W. Adorno, particularly his Negative Dialectics with its sustained attack on Marxism’s totalising bias. Poststructuralism rejected totalising thought in general, regarding totality as an unachievable state, and Marxism became one of its main targets. The various currents that go to make up post-Marxism will now be explored.

Challenging the Foundational Concepts Although it is not always straightforward to differentiate between Western Marxism and post-Marxism, certain recurrent features do begin to come to the fore in the work of various theorists that merit grouping them under a post-Marxist tag that did not become a commonplace until the 1980s. After that stage, post-Marxism takes on a specific identity that moves it out of the Western Marxist orbit – although still largely within the academic world that had fostered the development of the latter. While there was criticism of aspects of Marxism from its supporters both before and after the establishment of the Soviet system (right back to pre-Russian Revolution figures like Rosa Luxemburg, who took issue with the orthodox conception of class unity and its importance in creating a revolutionary situation), it would not be until

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the later twentieth century that it gradually took on a systematic character in terms of questioning its founding concepts. This questioning could be to the point of outright rejection, or to a revision that made those concepts all but unrecognisable to a classical Marxist – not to mention most Western Marxists as well. Amongst the first theorists to engage in this kind of searching analysis were Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, as in their books Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production and Mode of Production and Social Formation in the 1970s. Hindess and Hirst firmly position themselves against the doctrinaire approach to Marx’s work, and in that respect they could hardly be more explicit in their challenge to classical Marxism in declaring that ‘Marxism is not a “science of history” and Marxist theoretical work has no necessary connection with the practice of the historian’ (Hindess and Hirst 1975: 308). It is the teleological bias of Marxist theory, apparent throughout its history in the work of a succession of thinkers, that Hindess and Hirst cannot accept. To emphasise this factor is to downgrade the importance of human agency, which to them is not in the spirit of Marxism as a revolutionary theory. They are not afraid to identify gaps and loose ends in Marx’s work, which to them argue against treating it as a series of almost sacred texts in the manner of the Soviet tradition: Lukács had, of course, already warned against such an approach as early as 1923 in his highly controversial History and Class Consciousness. Hindess and Hirst’s line is that Marxist theory has to be continually revised and reformed if it is to go on meaning anything significant in the global political arena, and it will never reach its potential unless it is being subjected to the kind of scrutiny that they feel they are undertaking. In consequence, they conclude that there is an urgent need in Marxist circles for a ‘radical change in concepts and problems . . . if we are to be able to deal with the social relations and current political problems that confront us’ (Hindess and Hirst 1977: 12). Laclau and Mouffe will proceed to push that demand much further in just a few years in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, when they signal the need to adopt a postMarxist attitude on the left. Another nail in the coffin of Marxism’s theoretical credibility was supplied by the French theorist André Gorz, who argued that the working class, the very focus of the entire Marxist project, was in fact fast disappearing by the later twentieth century: ‘The traditional working class is now no more than a privileged minority. The majority of the population now belong to the postindustrial neoproletariat, which, with no job security or definite class identity, fills the area of probationary, contracted, casual, temporary and part-time employment’ (Gorz 1982: 69). (The term ‘precariat’ has recently been put forward to describe this fairly amorphous mass (see Standing 2011).) Gorz was writing in 1980, but the situation is considerably more advanced in the West in our own day, especially now that so much of our product manufacture has been outsourced to the developing world – China and South East Asia in the

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main. If there is a proletariat left then it is to be found there, rather in its traditional heartland of the West, where white-collar and service-based employment have steadily been increasing at the expense of that in manufacturing and heavy industry. Casualisation and the trend towards ‘zero-hours’ contracts in the West in recent years, have been further fragmenting any residual sense of class identity that may have been left in the ‘neoproletariat’ identified by Gorz. Union membership has also been in sharp decline for quite some time now, exacerbating the process. Remove the working class from the equation and there would appear to be little point at all to the continuation of the Marxist project. Gorz also argues that the homogenous proletariat as perceived by Marx and his followers was always a particularly woolly concept anyway, since individuals differ so much (psychologically, if nothing else), and we are much more than the sum of our working existence. The latter can only ever partially define us for this thinker: ‘The proletariat is no more than a vague area made up of constantly changing individuals’, and ‘it is impossible that individuals should totally coincide with their social being’ (Gorz 1982: 75, 90). This is to cast doubt on Marx’s economistic bias, with its insistence that it is the economy alone that forms society and human consciousness; in other words, that base always determines superstructure, one of the foundations of Marxist theory. Guy Standing, too, calls into question the old notions of class structure, highlighting the emergence of a new, socially far more diffuse grouping than orthodox Marxists posit, called the precariat (the notion of ‘precarity’ itself, can be traced back to the work of such thinkers in the French tradition as Gorz). For Standing, although the precariat has certain ‘class characteristics’, it should be regarded as ‘a class-in-the-making, if not yet a class-for-itself, in the Marxian sense of that term’ (Standing 2011: 8, 7). It is to be seen as the product of a culture in which wealth disparity is rapidly growing; a culture where those at the top end, such as bankers and company executives, are being awarded huge annual bonuses, while more and more of the population is being forced into casual employment with little or no job security and minimal prospects. Standing identifies ‘a lot of anger out there and a lot of anxiety’, that is creating a dangerous situation that all too easily ‘could lead society towards a politics of inferno’ (Standing 2011: vii) if it is not addressed with care – and addressed as a matter of urgency. The classical Marxist interpretation of this state of affairs would be to treat it as a pre-revolutionary condition that could be worked on by party members, active in areas like the union movement, to develop into a full-blown proletarian revolution at some later date; but Standing argues that it is far more complicated than that, far less receptive to the standard Marxist analysis. ‘It is not right to equate the precariat with the working poor or with just insecure employment, although these dimensions are correlated with it’ (Standing 2011: 9), he cautions us. Instead, the precariat is a jumble of interests, skills and occupations that,

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viewing it in the most positive light, ‘can be a harbinger of the Good Society of the twenty-first century’ (Standing 2011: vii). At present, however, the precariat is at the bottom end of the new hierarchy of four classes that Standing feels has replaced the Marxist conception based on a nineteenth-century model of society arranged into lower, middle and upper classes. Now we have a mega-rich elite, a ‘salariat’ with stable, salaried employment (civil servants, for example), and then a group of ‘proficians’ (those with highly marketable professional, technical, skills), all ranged above the precariat. Everyone ranked higher than the precariat level has a sense of security in their lives that those below them can only dream about – the precariat being left effectively bereft of career prospects. Critically for Marxists, the precariat is all but impossible to unionise and thus turn into a force that could be mobilised on ideological lines – a traditional method whereby Marxists established a power base within a society. The sheer diffuseness of the precariat defeats such an exercise. Marxism is for thinkers like Standing stuck in an old-fashioned ‘labourist’ vision of society and working life, leaving it in consequence unable to deal with the phenomenon of precarity – action which he believes is urgently needed to prevent it being prey for demagogues of both the right and the left. As a stab at what that ‘Good Society’ feasibly might involve and would make it thrive, Standing suggests the implementation of a basic income for all, provided by the state, which could then be added to by individuals through the marketing of their individual skills. If that could be achieved then we would have what Standing describes as a ‘politics of paradise’ (Standing 2011: vii); but while Marxists would no doubt agree with the egalitarian principle of an equal basic income, they would not be likely to perceive enough sense of a centralised state in allowing individuals to profit in an unpredictable way by the utilisation of their own particular talents. The dialogue with Marxism reaches an impasse. As for the right, the very notion of a state-controlled basic income would be anathema to them: merely the welfare state by another route and so to be vociferously opposed. What Standing comes to exemplify is the dilemma of the socially conscious thinker caught between the fundamentalisms of right and left. Neither of these positions would appear to have much to offer to the majority of the population, each being oppressive in its own particular way, as well as anti-democratic in their bias towards an elite – with neoliberal bankers and market traders on the one side, communist party officials and theoreticians on the other.

Laclau and Mouffe and the Critique of Hegemony The most sustained attack on the concept of hegemony was launched by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their provocative study Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in 1985. Heavily influenced by poststructuralist thought,

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Laclau and Mouffe set out to dismantle the concept of hegemony, arguing that it was preventing the left from addressing the inherent flaws of Marxist theory, flaws which were inhibiting the natural growth of a revolutionary consciousness. Laclau and Mouffe saw evidence of that revolutionary consciousness emerging in a fairly diffuse manner in the form of various new social movements that were beginning to make their presence felt around the globe, generally campaigning for very specific causes with a very specific agenda. Classical Marxism, with its well-known dislike of anything that hints remotely of spontaneity, found these movements extremely difficult to deal with as they did not fit its schema as to how revolution should arise – that is, through the agency of class struggle prosecuted by the proletariat (preferably under the direction of the communist party). It could only view social movements based on special interests – such as ethnic, sexual or ecological, for example – as a distraction from the real business; the classical tradition’s rigidity coming to the fore once again. For Laclau and Mouffe, however, such movements were well worth cultivating in order to generate change in the world, and if that meant breaking with classical Marxist doctrine then they were quite prepared to do so, although they considered themselves still to be motivated by Marxist ideals: to be ‘post-Marxist’ as well as ‘post-Marxist’, as they defined their position (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 5). The goal was to bring Marxism up to date to fit a changing world which no longer fitted the model of Marxism-Leninism with its essentially nineteenth-century outlook: ‘a question-mark has fallen more and more heavily over a whole way of conceiving both socialism and the roads that should lead to it’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 1), as they put it, hence the need to reassess the entire history of Marxist thought and practice. Laclau and Mouffe’s critics on the other hand, and there were no lack of these on the left in the aftermath of the publication of Hegemony & Socialist Strategy, adjudged them to be more anti-Marxist than post-Marxist: sad symbols of ‘an intellectual malady’ that was afflicting the European left, as Norman Geras saw it (Geras 1987: 43). In effect, that ‘malady’ was to be seen as a failure of nerve concerning the validity of Marxism’s claims. Hegemony theorists put forward various reasons as to why Marx’s forecasts did not work out as planned, but for Laclau and Mouffe this line of argument amounted to little more than an intellectual cheat; an ad hoc method of covering over a theory’s failures so as to protect that theory’s supposed universal authority. Hegemony was in fact a prime example of the ‘wretched cover concepts’ that Adorno was so contemptuous of in Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1973: 152). The more that ‘cover’ concept is applied, and developed by later generations of theorists, then the more glaring the gap between theoretical prediction and socio-political reality has to become. Laclau and Mouffe make what to them seems to be the obvious move after such repeated disappointment, and start querying the credibility of the theory itself. Behind their project lies the same distrust of totalisation that had generated ‘negative

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dialectics’: a scepticism that any theory could cover all eventualities and never be in need of revision no matter what happened in the wider world. From such a perspective classical Marxism could only appear a dinosaur of a theory by the later twentieth century, one sadly out of touch with cultural change. Laclau and Mouffe advocated replacing a hegemony-led Marxism with ‘radical democracy’, a concept that the two of them have continued to refine in their writings, collectively and individually, since Hegemony and Socialist Strategy came out. Radical democracy was designed to provide an alternative to both the one-party system promoted by Marxism, and what for Laclau and Mouffe was the deeply compromised system of parliamentary democracy practised throughout most of the West, in which a consensus of the participating political parties left a significant section of the population without any effective political outlet. In both cases minority voices were drowned out, and for these theorists that meant neither system could claim to be truly representative. The point of radical democracy was to ensure that the excluded were brought into the political process, and given a platform from which to make their grievances heard. Jean-François Lyotard argued that this ought to be one of the major roles of philosophers, to enable the vulnerable to resist the power of the establishment – a practice he describes as ‘philosophical politics’ (Lyotard 1988: xiii). For all its idealistic intent, radical democracy has some serious gaps as a theory. It has had to address the issue of what it would do if any political grouping failed to abide by its ground rules, and the answer given by Mouffe sounds surprisingly like the solution reached by both Marxism and parliamentary democracy: that it would have to ban such a dissenting group from the political process (how this could be enforced is an altogether trickier issue). Mouffe’s line of argument takes on a noticeably moralistic tone at such points: ‘A democratic society cannot treat those who put its basic institutions into question as legitimate adversaries’, and radical democracy ‘does not pretend to encompass all differences and to overcome all forms of exclusion’ (Mouffe 2000: 120). But any political system at all could put forward that defence of its own hegemony – including totalitarian ones such as communism, which had no qualms at all about imprisoning or even killing any opponents to its policies: legitimacy can be an extremely elastic concept (as of course can democracy, which all communist states claimed to be). We seem to be no further forward as to how to reorganise society after such a judgement. Critics have also pointed out that radical democracy provides little substantial guidance as to what the institutional infrastructure for such a projected system would be, or how it would operate to keep a radical democratic society functioning efficiently. David Howarth, for example, complains that the theory has some glaring ‘deficits’ in that respect, and that these have to cast some doubt on its viability in the political arena as it is currently constituted. We need to be aware of the many ‘economic, material and institutional obstacles’

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(Howarth 2008: 189) that lie in the way of radical democracy’s planned project. Classical Marxism, of course, knows exactly what to do when faced with such obstacles, enabling decisive action to be taken: whether or not you agree with its programme, it does at least have the virtue of clarity. Clarity and the decisive action it sanctioned could, however, have some nasty downsides. Reflecting on the vast schemes undertaken in Soviet Russia to alter the natural environment to fit the totalising vision of a command economy, Zygmunt Bauman notes how these so often ended in disaster: ‘Deserts were irrigated (but they turned into salinated bogs); marshlands were dried (but they turned into deserts); massive gas-pipes criss-crossed the land to remedy nature’s whims in distributing its resources (but they kept exploding with a force unequalled by the natural disasters of yore)’ (Bauman 1992: 179). For yet another thinker, therefore, it was a case of ‘the project of total order’ (Bauman 1992: 178) failing to match reality.

The Postmodern and Poststructural Critique of Marxism Postmodernists in general were highly critical of Marxism, which for them was a relic of the past that society had outgrown any need for. Arguably the most vicious attack on Marx and the Marxist tradition from this perspective is to be found in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, an intemperate and impassioned work which came out in the aftermath of the 1968 événements in Paris. Essentially, this is an attack on Marx’s totalising method and everything that it is forced to marginalise in order to make the theory viable; phenomena such as chance and the emotions – the latter always posing a problem for rationalist-based theories, Marxist or otherwise. The world simply does not operate in the predictable way that Marxism assumes, Lyotard contends (Michel Foucault had earlier reached much the same conclusion). History is a much more chaotic affair than Marxists are ever willing to admit, meaning that it cannot be engineered to fit any pre-existing scheme, no matter how sophisticated or apparently ‘scientific’ in character it might appear to be. Lyotard emphasises the importance of the ‘event’ in his philosophy (as we have seen his compatriot Alain Badiou also does), by which he means the unpredictable, and that is precisely what Marxism cannot encompass within its philosophy of history. Events cannot be planned, only responded to, and they always signal the limits of totalising theories. Our libidinal drives similarly resist being incorporated neatly within a preexisting scheme of how human affairs unfold, and Lyotard has some provocative asides to make about Marx for that reason: ‘We have no plan to be true, to give the truth of Marx, we wonder what there is of the libido in Marx, and “in Marx” means in his text or in his interpretations, mainly in practices’ (Lyotard 1993: 96). It is a rather Freudian point that is being made here: that the emotions and our subconscious drives can never be

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completely suppressed and will resurface in some form or other (the ‘return of the repressed’), no matter how much theories like Marxism try to write them out of human history. Marxism is for Lyotard one of the prime examples of a ‘grand narrative’; that is, a theory claiming to have universal application, to be in possession of the ultimate truth – as, for example, most major religions traditionally have done. Thus, as Lyotard sums it up: ‘A Marxist political practice is an interpretation of a text, just as a social or Christian spiritual practice is the interpretation of a text’ (Lyotard 1993: 95–6). There is a clear contrast with Louis Althusser at this point, that thinker arguing that Marx does not need so much to be interpreted as read very closely so that his intended meaning becomes transparent to the reader. It is precisely over-interpretation of Marx’s texts, as is occurring repeatedly in Western Marxist circles, that Althusser is complaining causes confusion as to Marx’s message. Lyotard, however, is a deeply sceptical thinker when it comes to belief systems in general, regarding them as responsible for most of the ills of our culture in their refusal to admit the validity of positions other than their own – that is, to admit the fact of difference, a phenomenon that all poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers are keen to make us acknowledge and support (see also Jacques Derrida and Foucault, for example). A commitment to diversity is one of the hallmarks of these movements. Lyotard’s own preference is for ‘little narratives’; small, temporary movements which work to achieve delimited ends and then are dissolved once their particular objective is realised. The goal is to prevent the build-up of monolithic political parties (not to mention monolithic political leaders on the Joseph Stalin model) mainly interested in holding on to power for its own sake. When that happens, parties soon become authoritarian and abuse their power, as the history of communism only too amply demonstrates to a confirmed post-Marxist such as Lyotard. Lyotard had been in his early life an active member of a reform-minded group within the French Marxist community entitled socialisme ou barbarie, which could be very critical indeed of the Marxist establishment (the Communist Party, PCF, being a major factor in French politics of the time). In his writings for the group’s newspaper in the 1950s Lyotard was already expressing doubts about basic Marxist doctrinal principles, complaining that the situation in Algeria, where there was an armed revolution taking place against French colonial rule, did not really fit the classic Marxist schema and in consequence needed a very different approach taken to it. As Lyotard pointed out, Algeria was a mainly peasant-based society where a theory devised for an advanced industrialised society simply would not work, the proletariat there being minuscule (echoing the point made by Mao Zedong in the early days of communist rule in China). He could already detect the growth of a self-interested, power-conscious, party machine that would not be in Algerian society’s best interests in the longer term.

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Another of Lyotard’s colleagues in socialisme ou barbarie, Cornelius Castoriadis, was similarly dismissive of Marxism’s all-embracing approach to each and every political situation: ‘As for a rigorously rigorous theory, there is none in mathematics; how could there be one in politics?’, going on to conclude that ‘the very idea of a complete and definitive theory is a pipe dream’ (Castoriadis 1987: 4, 71). This could only mean to Castoriadis that ‘Marxism is dead as a theory’ (Castoriadis 1987: 63), an eminently post-Marxist sentiment to express. Foucault and Jean Baudrillard also both turned against Marxism, being just as critical in their own way as Lyotard of its ‘grand narrative’ pretensions. Foucault’s work rejects the notion of there being a dialectic of history, seeing no inevitability whatsoever to the rise to power of the dominant class in any age. Ideological dominance to Foucault is a matter of constructing a discourse with its own internal rules on what can and cannot be done within its sphere of operation, and managing to engineer its general acceptance; but he does not consider any discourse as being inherently superior and insists that its power can always be contested. Much of his writing is concerned with how particular discourses exert their control over the population at large, and the changes in attitudes and behaviour this brings about in a given society. Thus the discourse of ancient Greece included open tolerance of homosexuality, but this activity eventually was outlawed in later Roman and early Christian society, with heterosexuality becoming the sexual norm and homosexuality being classified as deviant behaviour. Although homosexuality continued to be practised in the Christian world, it had to do so more or less underground until very recent times. For Foucault, however, there was no moral issue involved; this was simply a matter of power being enforced on behalf of a dominant belief system. In a similar fashion, the mentally ill came to be considered behaviourally deviant and were increasingly confined to asylums in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. Another dominant group was enforcing its standards of conduct on the population at large, but there was no reason why we should accept it had any right to do so – there was no underlying dialectic at work necessitating the emergence of this discourse, therefore no obligation to abide by its rules. Just to make his opposition to dialectical materialism as clear as possible, Foucault even went so far as to insist in an interview that ‘I have never been a Marxist’ (Foucault 1988: 22). Baudrillard explicitly attacks Marxism in The Mirror of Production, particularly its obsession with production. In his view this does not, and cannot, lead to our collective liberation as Marxist theory firmly believes it will, rather it turns us into slaves of the system: ‘Revolutionary hope is based . . . hopelessly on this claim’ (Baudrillard 1975: 59), being his uncompromising judgement. This constitutes a direct attack on Marxism’s vision of human progress, which was based on a belief that it needed only a change in the ownership of the means of production, from the capitalist class over to the proletariat, to realise

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its objectives. To Baudrillard, this makes no difference – we are still trapped in a system of production for its own sake. What is also being called into question is Marxism’s economistic bias: the notion that it will only be through improving the economy that real human progress can be made. Marxism is skewed towards quantitative change at the expense of the qualitative, or at the very least assuming that the latter will automatically arise from the former. Taking the Soviet system from 1917 onwards as a test case, that becomes an increasingly difficult position to defend. Derrida’s Specters of Marx represented an intriguing contribution to the development of post-Marxism. Derrida’s anti-totalising orientation – much influenced by Adornian ‘negative dialectics’ – could hardly dispose him towards the Marxist method. His reputation was established in the first place by his critique of the totalising pretensions of structuralist theory (see Writing and Difference, for example), which he set about ‘deconstructing’ – that is, drawing attention to the various unsubstantiated assumptions on which structuralism was based. One could certainly say that Marxism was guilty of much the same sin: that there is a dialectic working through history, as a case in point. Nevertheless, Derrida was careful to acknowledge Marx’s critical role in modern culture, and there is not the note of irritation in his reassessment of Marx that can be found in so many post-Marxist thinkers (Lyotard most notoriously). We could not, Derrida argued, escape the legacy of Marx’s thought, and he remained an extremely powerful presence in contemporary political and philosophical debate – even if his status was now that of a ‘spectre’, a part of our collective ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 1994: 10). It was all a matter of how we interpreted that legacy, however, with Derrida arguing that The Communist Manifesto could be regarded as one of the most ‘urgent’ texts around today, just as long as we ‘take into account what Marx and Engels themselves say . . . about their own possible “aging” and their intrinsically irreducible historicity’ (Derrida 1994: 13). This opens the way for Marxist theory to be refashioned to meet contemporary socio-political circumstances. But ‘aging’ and ‘irreducible historicity’ are precisely what communism and classical Marxism deny applies to this body of thought: universal theories do not need to be refashioned, they hold for all time. It is over that crucial issue of historicity where the divide between classical and post-Marxists mainly lies. Derrida actively campaigns for multiple interpretations of Marx’s thought, arguing that there is no one true reading of this body of material; instead, ‘there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them’ (Derrida 1994: 13). While this is firmly in line with the poststructuralist commitment to pluralism, it can only appear unacceptable to the more orthodox Marxist with his or her belief in the essential unity of the Marxist message. Further attempts have been made to ‘postmodernise’ Marx, as in Terrell Carver’s The Postmodern Marx, where he posits ‘multiple Marxes’ (Carver 1998: 234) to replace the interpretative model of the classical tradition, with

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its assumption of a unified body of thought which demands a communist system in order to be properly realised (Carver 1998: 5). The Marx that emerges from any engagement with his work then becomes simply the ‘product’ of a particular ‘reading strategy’ (Carver 1998: 5) that happened to be adopted at that time: so Marx can be postmodern, or poststructural, or deconstructive, or feminist, and so on, depending on the reader. Again, the idea is to open Marx up to contemporary developments, rather than being trapped into trying to explain why the theory has been systematically misinterpreted by so many of its adherents in the political arena. Although Marxism then loses its prized quality of comprehensiveness, the positive aspect is that its insights and analytical power are being brought into current cultural debates, so it can be argued that it is still meeting its original objective of helping to change the world. Piecemeal change of this kind, however, would not be radical enough to satisfy the demands of hard-line Marxists, for whom anything short of revolution and the creation of a new social order would count as failure. Adapting Marxism in such a fashion would be to them fatally to weaken the theory. After running through this selection of postmodern and poststructural thinkers it becomes clear that the major objection to Marxism is its totalising imperative. Postmodernism and poststructuralism (which overlap quite considerably with each other) are proceeding from a very different world view, one based on difference, diversity and the general incompleteness of things. From this kind of perspective Marxism appears to be a form of fundamentalism, demanding adherence to its basic principles much in the way that religious faiths do: either you take these on board uncritically or you run the risk of being dubbed a heretic – regardless of how much of Marx’s scheme you are convinced by otherwise. For the true believer there is no middle path: you are either with us, and totally so, or you are against us. The sceptical temperament associated with postmodern and poststructural thought cannot accept such restrictive terms of rerefence, and can only be thought of as post-Marxist – with the emphasis very definitely on the ‘post’ in this instance.

Slavoj Žižek: Leninist, Western or Post-Marxist? Although very often classified under the heading of postmodernism or poststructuralism, Slavoj Žižek is notoriously difficult to pin down quite that precisely, being more than something of a maverick thinker, and as such he occupies an oddly ambivalent position in the development of a post-Marxist consciousness. In The Sublime Object of Ideology he provides what is effectively a striking new interpretation of false consciousness, based on Lacanian psychiatry, which works to undermine its credibility as a key concept in the Marxist canon. Marxist theory held that it was only because they were in a state of false consciousness that the working class did not rise up against their capitalist oppressors, and that once they came to recognise this fully then

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they would take the appropriate action of revolution with the goal of seizing power for themselves. Hegemony explained how this false consciousness was propagated. Žižek, however, argued that there was a quite natural disposition to refuse to face up to what we as individuals took to be unpalatable facts: a condition he described as ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (Žižek 1989: 29). As Žižek saw it, in such cases we both knew and did not know what the real state of affairs was, simultaneously. That we were being oppressed by a far superior, utterly ruthless power could qualify as just such an unpalatable fact, and enlightened false consciousness could be considered an entirely rational response under the circumstances – a recipe for personal survival in trying times. This was not an argument that classical Marxists could accept at all, in that it appears to bypass class consciousness altogether. Žižek also takes more direct aim at Marxism when he questions the assumptions of discourse in communist systems: ‘the People always support the Party because any member of the People who opposes Party rule automatically excludes himself from the People’ (Žižek 1989: 147). Unity from such a perspective therefore amounts to little more than a sham: in such cases we can note, yet again, that ‘legitimacy’ is being used in a highly questionable manner. Žižek is also capable, however, of defending Marxism’s Leninist tradition in quite a provocative fashion – putting the case for the return of revolutionary terrorism, for example, in his later book In Defence of Lost Causes. We should be seeking to ‘reinvent’ rather than ‘reject terror’, we are told there, with Žižek arguing that Leninist pragmatism ‘implied a vision of state and society totally incompatible with the Stalinist perspective’ (Žižek 2008: 7, 232). Stalinism represents for Žižek a perversion of the revolution’s ideals (as Trotsky had believed before him), and we should not judge communism on the basis of that. Universal emancipation was the inspiration behind the communist movement, and it is a cause that Žižek feels still very much committed to carrying on. In Defence of Lost Causes is worth dwelling on, because it seems to sum up the quandary that both Western and post-Marxist thinkers in the twenty-first century find themselves caught in: can Marxism be detached from communism’s bloody history, or does that merely constitute a defence of the indefensible? To his credit, Žižek does not shy away from the challenge this poses but attacks it head on, relishing the opportunity to defend ‘lost causes’ on the grounds that the current socio-political situation demands that such a choice has to be made. Postmodern accommodations with the new socio-political order are to be deplored, and Žižek opts to put the case for revolutionary idealism instead: that will be his way of remaining true to Marx, rather than the route taken by such as Laclau and Mouffe with their essentially non-violent ‘radical democracy’. He has no time for any ‘softer’ (Žižek 2008: 6) methods of trying to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat: what is needed is a return to revolutionary basics, even if it involves a measure of terrorism to undermine the status quo and bring about real, and hopefully lasting, change.

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Postmodernism is to be regarded as giving in to the enemy, with Žižek very deliberately going against the grain of the prevailing intellectual currents on the left, with their attempts to come to terms with the doctrines of the market, and enthusiastic advocacy of greater pluralism in the ideological arena. The cause may have been lost, repeatedly and systematically, but in Žižek’s opinion not irretrievably so. Yet that is an argument unlikely to convince much outside the ranks of the hardline left, for whom the next time around is always going to be the lucky one when everything falls into place and goes according to plan. Žižek himself is quite blasé about assuming this attitude, almost gleefully informing us that, ‘the truth is that I don’t give a damn about my opponent’ (Žižek 2008: 8). Žižek works hard to distance himself from Stalinism, referring to it right at the book’s outset as ‘a nightmare which caused perhaps even more human suffering than fascism’ (Žižek 2008: 7), which is a strong statement for anyone of the far left to make. Marx is not to be held responsible for such a ghastly misinterpretation of the concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that certainly did nothing for the cause of universal emancipation. Therein lies the rub, however, as Stalin was by no means the only dictatorial leader that worldwide communism managed to produce. Mao’s crimes against humanity are well documented, too; and North Korea still labours under a tyrannical regime that could hardly be further from emancipatory ideals. The question does need to be asked as to why communism has so often fallen into this trap, and whether there is something in Marxism itself that promotes the development of such behaviour. For thinkers like Adorno it is the totalising imperative within Marxism that gives rises to totalitarian-minded regimes on the Soviet or Maoist model, and far from being a perversion of Marxist theory it is instead intrinsic to it. As long as that imperative is adhered to, and acts as a guide to political conduct, dictatorship in its most negative sense will be the likeliest result. From this standpoint, attempts to separate Marx from Marxism as it has been practised over the course of the twentieth century – Stalinism, Maoism and all – are simply doomed to failure. Žižek, however, begs to disagree, and is dismissive of Adornian-style pessimism. Žižek’s call for a return to Marxist revolutionary idealism despite communism’s largely depressing historical record, is at once both admirable and somewhat desperate. Admirable, in the sense that he is not afraid to face up to that record and adopt an unfashionable position: few contemporary Marxist theorists are willing to be quite as explicit in their support of anything that promises widespread terror and violence. Desperate, in being apparently stuck in what is now a very outmoded form of thinking that no longer has any significant resonance with the general public, and is likely to fall on deaf ears. It is as if Marxism has learned no new tactics even with over a century of at best problematical socio-political impact to contemplate: under the circumstances, going back to terror can come across as just plain

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nihilistic. For all Žižek’s impassioned pleading, it still registers as yet another exercise in revisionism: it wasn’t Marx’s fault; it wasn’t Lenin’s fault; most Marxist critics are deeply misguided, or haven’t really understood what is at stake, etc., etc. While Žižek is right to point up how increasingly unequal and tension-riven a society we are living in at present (neoliberalism remaining the prevailing economic orthodoxy, despite the painful austerity that has come in the wake of the economic mess it left behind after its latest ‘boom’), reaching back to a tradition of terror – however ‘reinvented’ – hardly seems a viable, long-term solution to that malaise.

Conclusion Post-Marxism has performed a very valuable service in providing a sustained left wing-oriented critique of classical Marxism, which has more weight to it than any similar critique by Marxism’s traditional enemies on the right ever could have, in not coming from a prejudiced position. Marxism’s failings in terms of its intolerance of internal criticism are only too well documented, and have succeeded in giving the theory a very negative image: there is no doubt that it can be both authoritarian and totalitarian in operation, as even a cursory glance at Soviet or Maoist history will quickly reveal. What postMarxism suggests is that Marxism can be reformed and still play an important role in global politics, as long as it is interpreted in a freer and more open-ended manner than it has been for the bulk of its history: insisting on the maintenance of doctrinal purity and absolute allegiance to a party line is unlikely to win much in the way of support in contemporary culture. From a post-Marxist perspective, thinkers like Althusser only succeed in leading us into a dead end. Perhaps Žižek’s later work is a recognition of the pressing need to break out of this impasse, hence his growing impatience with most of both Western and post-Marxist thought. Even more moderate Marxists agree that we have to change direction, with David Harvey, for example, arguing that we should now consider the possibility of putting together a general movement with all those who feel themselves to be ‘anti-capitalist’, suggesting that we call it ‘the Party of Indignation’ and drop our concern with divisive doctrinal differences (Harvey 2010: 260). Whether post-Marxism itself can develop much further as a theoretical position is a more questionable issue. Laclau and Mouffe have certainly tried their best to do so through their concept of radical democracy, but this remains at best a somewhat abstract notion, difficult to put into practice in the current political climate. Nevertheless, radical democracy has succeeded in pointing up the shortcomings of liberal democracy in the West, and Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis of this system is never less than extremely thought-provoking. Politics in liberal democracies does tend towards a rather cosy consensus of the main parties involved that works to exclude marginal voices, and it can be very

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hard to effect any significant degree of change under such a system, which it suits those parties to maintain. Yet outside that political bubble of entrenched interests there is quite a high level of disenchantment about the system to note in recent times. This manifests itself in several ways, some of which radical democracy could approve of and incorporate within its project: the ecology movement, the anti-globalisation movement, and Occupy all spring readily to mind. Some of them it patently could not, however: namely, right-wing nationalism, neo-Nazism, or anti-government movements like the Tea Party in the USA with its almost mystical belief in the power of individualism (the ‘frontier’ spirit, as was, being applied in a totally alien socio-political context). Derrida’s description of Marx as a spectral presence in post-communist times very neatly captures where we are now with his legacy. As Derrida also points out, ghosts can be very persistent, and critical theorists still feel the need to take account of Marxism in their work given that it forms such a large part of the West’s modern cultural history. Marxism always seems to be lurking somewhere in the background of the debates in the field, a body of work that theorists must orient themselves against, both politically and theoretically. One might say that the ghost of Marx lies behind the notion of the precariat, for example; particularly when it is suggested by such analysts as Standing that it has as-yet untapped revolutionary potential that might eventually pose considerable problems for the currently dominant neoliberal economic order. Certainly, no one on the left can avoid engaging with Marxism in some fashion, as post-Marxism in all its formulations so clearly demonstrates, and those at the other end of the political spectrum will have to take note of the conclusions reached, generating yet more dialogue in turn. Marxism is still a valuable resource, therefore, if no longer the ultimate authority that so many once took it to be. Summing up on the bloc of three chapters on Marxism, it is worth noting that many of the topics and concepts developed by classical Marxists, Western Marxists and post-Marxists have now become part of the common currency of critical debate. There are few critical theorists around nowadays who will not pay close attention to the socio-political implications of their theories and objects of study, or to the overall ideological context within which their work takes place. Marxism has been instrumental in bringing the issue of ideology right to the forefront of critical analysis, and that may well prove to be its most lasting, and by no means to be underestimated, contribution to the field of critical theory.

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tructuralism was very much the theory in vogue in critical circles during the mid-twentieth century, especially with the development of semiology, the theory of signs, and most especially in French thought. Ferdinand de Saussure had pointed the way to semiology in his famous Course in General Linguistics decades earlier, and Roland Barthes was to popularise the ‘linguistic model’ as the basis for theoretical enquiry, conceiving of the world of discourse as a series of narratives each with its own underlying grammar. Georges Van Den Abbeele traces the history of structuralism from its linguistic roots through to more recent work in the field of semiology from Umberto Eco onwards. Often criticised for its overly formalistic method and concerns, Lucien Goldmann was to add a more political orientation in his so-called ‘genetic structuralism’, and this variant is the topic of Marcel Danesi’s chapter. Danesi insists that genetic structuralism has become unfairly neglected, and that it still has much to contribute to contemporary intellectual enquiry, particularly through its commitment to ‘dialectic method’ in the social sciences. It is one of several theories covered in the volume which are clearly ripe for reappraisal. After the critique mounted by several ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers like Jacques Derrida from the 1960s onwards, structuralism’s influence declined sharply, but many of its techniques survive in critical analysis, and semiology is still actively developing as a field.

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4 STRUCTURALISM AND SEMIOTICS Georges Van Den Abbeele

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hile commonly thought in combination with each other, structuralism and semiotics arose from fundamentally different concerns and objects of study. Semiotics is a theory of signs with roots dating back to antiquity but reformulated in the modern era by Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, working independently from each other and to significantly different ends. Structuralism is basically a methodological model based in Boolean algebra and group theory but deployed in varying ways across the extent of the human and social sciences. The two come together first in Saussure’s early twentieth-century development of a ‘structural linguistics’ based on a conceptualisation of the linguistic sign as necessarily arbitrary and conventional, and then, most dramatically, in mid-century with the ‘structural anthropology’ of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose work creatively and brilliantly applies the Saussurian ‘linguistic model’ to kinship relations and other social and cultural phenomena. Lévi-Strauss is also to be credited as the first to use the work ‘structuralism’ per se to describe his work and that of like-minded researchers, such as Roland Barthes and Algirdas Julien Greimas. After the heyday of classic structuralism and semiology in the 1950s and 60s, the split between the two emerged in the form of poststructuralisms of various kinds, on the one hand (including deconstruction, discourse theory and postcolonialism), and a more properly cognitive semiotics, on the other (with eventual links to cognitive science, informatics, and some forms of visual studies and cultural studies). The classic premise of sign theory is that of something standing for something else (aliquid stat pro aliquo), a formula found variously throughout ancient and medieval philosophy, but perhaps best captured by Augustine’s definition of a sign as ‘a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses [Signum est enim res praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire]’ (Augustine 1995: II. 56–7). For Saussure, coming out of this tradition, signs are twofold or ‘Janus-like’ entities with a signifying aspect that stands for something signified. The resulting signifier/signified dyad, however, is not simply reducible to an opposition between words and things. Prioritising the linguistic sign over other semiotic manifestations, Saussure describes the

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relation between signifier and signified as that between a concept and a soundimage. By the latter, Saussure insists that it is ‘not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses’ (Saussure 1960: 66), a definition that closely recalls the Augustinian formulation above. The signified, by the same token, is not the referent or physical object per se but what is ‘signified’ about it in the form of a conventionalised concept or meaning: Whether we try to find the meaning of the Latin word arbor or the word that Latin uses to designate the concept ‘tree’, it is clear that only the associations sanctioned by that language appear to us to conform to reality, and we disregard whatever others might be imagined. (Saussure 1960: 66–7) To boot, the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary and conventional, that is to say, there is no natural or motivated relation between soundimage and the concept it signifies: the sounds t-r-i have nothing at all to do with the plant form indicated. Saussure thus rejects any form of cratylism, or the idea that there is a ‘natural’ relation between signs and what they signify, a position traditionally associated with the Greek philosopher, Cratylus, as portrayed in Plato’s dialogue by the same name. But Saussure’s contribution, as the title to his work suggests, Course in General Linguistics (edited posthumously by his students in 1916), goes far beyond the classic theory of the sign in two parts to elaborate an entirely new theory of language in opposition to the classic philology of the time that remained primarily interested in charting the historical derivation of individual words and etymologies as atomised units. Instead, the ‘structural’ theory of language, or ‘structural linguistics’, proposed by Saussure posits language as an arbitrarily constructed system of signs whose value lies not in their identity as positive terms but in their difference from each other. Saussure’s emphasis is on a ‘synchronic’ rather than ‘diachronic’ view of language, and on its implicit structure (what he calls ‘langue’) rather than any particular uses or utterances (parole). Concomitantly, Saussure’s approach underscores an understanding of language in terms of its code rather than any specific message that might be communicated by the code. The arbitrariness of the sign is key to Saussure’s larger project, to the extent that meaning or signification is not about a relation of identities but about oppositions and differences. What this means is that signs (and their component parts) cannot be thought in isolation but only in relation to other signs. This is where Saussure’s contribution to the development of semiotics is decisive. By way of example, it is not simply that the red colour of the stop signal has an arbitrary relation to its signification (a relation of difference, one might add here), nor is it simply that red in this context is conventionally understood to mean ‘stop’, but that it is not so much the red that matters per se as that it is not green, or yellow, which would alternatively

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indicate ‘go’ or ‘caution’. For this reason, it doesn’t matter what shade of red (pinkish or purplish or whatever) it is, just as long as it is not confused for yellow, or green. Signs exist, then, as a function of their difference, not only internally as per the arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and signified but also externally in terms of their opposition to other signs. These differences can be charted along two axes: 1) the paradigmatic, or the relation between the actual sign deployed at a given time and all its potential alternatives (‘the cat on the mat’ rather than ‘the dog on the mat’ or ‘the hat on the mat’); and 2) the syntagmatic, or the relation between signs in their sequence (‘the cat on the mat’ rather than ‘the mat on the cat’). The structuralist linguist, Roman Jakobson (1956), following up on Saussure would later correlate these two kinds of relation to those described by the classic rhetorical figures of metaphor (or relations of comparability/substitutability) and metonymy (or relations of contiguity/sequence). The sophistication and rigour of Saussurian structural linguistics would quickly enable linguistics to claim a kind of scientific prestige among the human sciences even while providing a useful model applicable not only to other obvious sign systems (the dream of a general semiology) but also to all kinds of other phenomena susceptible to such a structural or structuralist analysis. Before turning to ways in which the linguistic model is applied to other fields, however, it is worth considering alternative theories of the sign and their effects on the more specific area of semiotics per se. One alternative to the more properly semiotic dimension of Saussure’s work can be found in the somewhat earlier work of the American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce. As opposed to Saussure’s dyadic formulation of signifier and signified, Peirce proposes a tripartite theory of the sign that also channels Augustine: ‘A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ (Peirce 1985: 5). What the representamen stands for or represents Peirce calls the ‘object’ of the sign, but to the further extent that the sign ‘addresses somebody’, it also ‘creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign’ (Peirce 1985: 5). This resultant sign Peirce calls the ‘interpretant’. The interpretant, in turn, can serve as the representamen or even the object for another interpretant, and so forth. As opposed to Saussure’s code-like division between signifier and signified, Peirce’s sign theory thereby thinks toward a general production of signs and meaning, or semiosis. Part of the difference between Peirce and Saussure has also to do with their methodological aims. For Saussure, the theory of the sign is established with a view towards elaborating a general theory of linguistics and language-like systems, such as codes. Peirce, on the other hand, is a philosopher interested in more general questions of logic, epistemology and cognition, hence the question of the interpretant, or how we know not only what a sign signifies but that it signifies. Such an approach leads him to develop several topologies of the sign, including most famously, the triad of icon, index and symbol, which define differing kinds of relation between sign and object. Whereas the symbol corresponds to

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Saussure’s arbitrary and conventional relation between a sign and what it signifies, the icon posits a relation of similarity (such as pictures, diagrams, mimicry of all kinds) and the index one of contiguity between those terms (such as that between smoke and fire, or a weathervane and the wind). The latter two thus represent motivated relations within the sign. So, while Saussure’s work has contributed more directly to the structural analysis of systems, Peirce’s semiology, via the subsequent work of Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, Kalevi Kull and others, has often proven more useful to scholars interested in various forms of signification (especially visual or mixed textual/visual semiosis: pictoral representation, film, advertising, tourism, design, and so on), as well as non-human communication (zoosemiotics) and informatics. A different approach developed in the Soviet Union with the critique of Russian formalism led by the circle of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, published in 1929 under the name of Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (Voloshinov 1986), mounts a dialectical argument against both traditional historical philology and Saussurian linguistics, denounced as ‘abstract objectivism’. Further developed by Bakhtin himself, most specifically in his essay, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (in The Dialogic Imagination), the argument questions the validity of the distinction between a synchronic and a diachronic approach to language, specifically by criticising Saussure’s depiction of langue as the impersonal system of norms from which individual utterances or parole can be generated. For Volosinov/Bakhtin, all language is deeply socio-historical and embedded in dialogue. What this means is that there is in fact no such thing as an individual or monologic utterance. Utterances are by definition social and assume an interlocutor, if not multiple interlocutors, whose utterances both assume previous utterances and anticipated responses: the dialogic principle. Moreover, language is not ‘unitary’ but inherently multiple and stratified, diversified by differences of genre, social class, professional practice, age, region, even local clan or family organisation. To boot, there is even within the word, the weight of the multiple histories, references, connotations, accentuations and divergent meanings it necessarily bears as one uses it. This irreducible diversity of language, its necessary plurality as languages, Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. The socio-historical fact of dialogics and heteroglossia means that all signification is contextual and in struggle with other meanings and accents, with ‘alien words’. As such, all language partakes in ideology. What we call language is but the current composite of this ongoing social and historical clash between different languages, different ideologies, in constant dialogue. There is no self-standing langue or free, unencumbered parole, no fixed signified or signifier, only heteroglossia in dialogue: The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogue threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance, it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. (Bakhtin 1981: 276)

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Still another alternative to Saussure, specifically with reference to his semiotic theory, was the fourfold division of the sign proposed by the Danish linguist, Louis Hjelmslev. Recasting signifier and signified as expression and content, each of which can be ascribed its own form and substance, Hjelmslev like Peirce allows for a kind of analysis (which he terms glossematics) that exceeds the phonocentrism of an approach based primarily in spoken language. Expression can have the same form, for example, but with a very different material substance (speech, writing, gesture, etc.) to indicate a content, whose form (semantic presentation) is also to be differentiated from its immaterial substance (meaning). Finally, another linguist, A. J. Greimas, formulates his own fourfold model of the sign in purely abstract and differential terms as the ‘elementary structure of signification’, better known as the ‘semiotic square’. Refining the Saussurian insistence on the priority of oppositional difference by reintroducing the classic logical distinction between contradiction (or the negation of another term) and contrary (or antagonistically opposing terms, such as hot and cold), Greimas posits four ‘semes’, or minimal units of signification, two of which (a and ~a, or anti-a) are defined by their contrary relation to each other. Each of these two semes posits its own contradictory semes (non-a and non-~a), the two of which, at least in Greimas’s preliminary formulation, then form a parallel relation of contrariness to each other. Finally, one can draw vertical lines of implication between a and non-~a, on the one hand, and between ~a and non-~a, on the other hand, completing the quadralinear relation between the terms, readily visualised in the form of a square: a

~a

non ~a

non -a

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What Greimas proposes here is nothing less than a rigorously structuralist semantics, where what a seme or bit of meaning ‘is’ matters less than its relational constellation, the sum of the contrary and contradictory differences between and within signs. The added merits of Greimas’s model is both to posit a generative model of signification or semiosis and an impressive adaptability in terms of scale (from the mico-discursive level to large narrative sequences, or from sentence to novel) as well as range (texts, images, film, social and ideological formations of all kinds). In this way, Greimassian structural semantics emerges both in response to the application of the structural linguistics model to other domains of thought and as further incitation for that expansion into the broad intellectual movement understood as structuralism. One should note in this regard Greimas’s particular association with the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and with the literary and cultural critic, Roland Barthes. It is Lévi-Strauss, of course, who pioneered the first and most ambitious expansion of the Saussurian linguistic model into other fields, in particular that of anthropology. His 1948 doctoral dissertation on The Elementary Structures of Kinship loudly heralded this move, first by its overt parody of Durkheim’s classic Elementary Forms of Religious Beliefs, replacing ‘form’ by ‘structure’, and then by its analysis of kinship relations not in terms of the family as an isolatable unit but as defined precisely in terms of its relation to other families and potential family members within a larger social organisation, such as a clan. Within such a social order and following the imperative of the incest taboo, men and women are expected to marry outside their kinship unit according to a culturally defined set of rules, prohibitions, imperatives and obligations. In traditional societies such as the ones he studies, the basic unit of kinship may prescribe that the maternal uncle’s relation to the nephew is to that between brother and sister as the relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife. Such a society thus acts ‘like’ a language in the Saussurian sense with a stable underlying structure that simultaneously allows for an enormous variety of expression within the system of rules that define that structure. And as in the case of Saussurian structural linguistics, the key to understanding the underlying system or ‘structure’ is not by analysing the discrete units involved but rather by analysing the relations between the terms. Such a relational analysis is the classic determining move that defines structuralism as a mode of thought, such as in the complex four-way homology or ‘isotope’ proposed above by Lévi-Strauss to explain a socially defined set of kinship relations. As opposed to a simple analogy that describes a relation between two terms, the four-point homology indicates a relational structure that defines how multiple terms enter into a ongoing set of specific relations with each other: not just a is like b, but a is to b as c is to d. And although the metaphor of language is loudly proclaimed, the methodology actually deployed by Lévi-Strauss can be seen to owe as much to set theory and abstract algebra as it does to structural linguistics per se.

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In his work, Lévi-Strauss accordingly develops this structuralist analysis of traditional societies broadly and across innumerable examples not only with regard to kinship, but also in the cases of ritual, mythology, and the wide range of intellectual/creative practices he refers to as the ‘savage mind’. The latter is characterised, in opposition to the ‘modern’ scientist/engineer’s instrumentalised organisation of knowledge, by what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘bricolage’, or making do with the materials one has to hand, repurposing them as needed to meet a particular need or objective. And just as there are modern ‘bricoleurs’ who tinker to find solutions, so the so-called ‘savage mind’ is to be understood not as a lesser or ‘primitive’ form of intelligence but rather as the universal prototype for human behaviour as it structures our relation with the natural world, including our tendency to classify the world in different ways and reorganise it according to varying similarities and oppositions. This belief in a deep, universal structure of the human mind defines the fundamental humanism of LéviStrauss and his impassioned insistence, most notably in his autobiographical Tristes Tropiques (1955) as well as in the essays that make up The Savage Mind (1962), that traditional cultures and societies have as much or more to teach us about contemporary challenges as our vaunted modernity. This universalist impulse of structuralism is found elsewhere, and especially in the very conceptualisation of what we mean by structure. Quoting the Czech structural linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Lévi-Strauss defines the four key elements of structuralist analysis as follows. First, the aim is to move from the study of ‘conscious phenomena’ to that of their ‘unconscious infrastructure’. Second, this aim is realised by analysis of the relation between terms rather than the terms in themselves. Third, this relational analysis should show the concrete ‘system’ organising those relations, ‘elucidating their structure’, and thus, fourthly, ‘discovering general laws’ of an ‘absolute character’ (LéviStrauss 1963: 33). While methodologically useful as a proposed mode or procedure of analysis, the problem here is that we are still left a bit unclear as to what exactly a structure is, a problem compounded by the use of the word, ‘structure’, or its close cousin, ‘system’, within the very attempt to define it. A more cogent definition is the one proposed by the psychologist Jean Piaget, who elaborates three conditions for something to meet a strong definition of structure as an analytic concept spanning many disciplines from mathematics to the human sciences. Drawing overtly from group theory and abstract algebra rather than Saussurian linguistics, Piaget defines a structure, firstly, as a ‘totality’, or an entity whose properties distinguish it as a whole from the mere set of its elements. Secondly, a structure must bear within itself a transformational capacity; and thirdly, it must be self-regulating (Piaget 1971a). Language, kinship and other systems of social behaviour clearly qualify as structures under this definition, which strives to differentiate the concept from the Platonic idealism of structure as a stable form by insisting rather on a structure’s internal logic as both consistent and self-transforming.

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This dynamic or ‘constructivist’ concept of structure can also be applied, as does Piaget himself in his radical revision of Gestalt psychology, to the various (synchronic) stages in the (diachronic) process of child development, each of which logically but also predictably leads into another as the child interacts with a necessarily unstable environment. For Piaget, the self-regulating perceptual/intellectual stage also contains within itself the wherewithal to overcome any cognitive dissonances that emerge in the encounter with one’s experiential environment by suddenly and wholly recasting itself at a higher, more complex stage of development, with an entirely different set of operational rules and internal logic. This notion of a sequence of synchronic stages superseding each other by the sudden disruption of an epistemic crisis enables a kind of diachronic or historicising structuralism whose echoes can be found in the work of Thomas Kuhn and the early Michel Foucault of The Order of Things, but also in Louis Althusser’s revisionist Marxist concept of the ‘epistemological break’ and in Jacques Lacan’s theory of the ‘mirror stage’. Elsewhere, however, structuralism designates more specifically the application of the Saussurian linguistic model to other fields of study and, perhaps most dramatically, to the area of literary analysis. The key figure in this regard is Roman Jakobson, whose early association with the Russian formalists, and subsequent role in founding of the Prague Linguistic Circle, make him a prime articulator of the relation between linguistics and ‘poetics’, broadly understood in the wake of Russian formalism as the scientific study of literature, or more precisely, ‘literariness’, as a specific use of language with definable (formal) features (Shklovsky 1965a, Eichenbaum 1965). Expanding upon the code/message distinction, for example, within the communicational situation of a sender and a receiver, Jakobson delineates six functions, each of which dominates and inflects the communication in profoundly different ways. The emotive function, for example, focuses on the expressiveness of the sender; while the conative function is directed toward persuading or moving the receiver. The referential function directs us to the context; the phatic function is concerned with assuring the channel of communication; and the metalinguistic function highlights the code. Finally, the poetic function, for Jakobson, dominates when the emphasis is on the message itself, as is the case not only in poetry per se but whenever the focus of attention and self-reflection is on the very statement of what is said. Further drawing upon the Saussurian differentiation between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions of language, Jakobson defines the poetic function as the projection of ‘the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection [paradigmatic] into the axis of combination [syntagmatic]’ (Jakobson 1960: 358). In other work, Jakobson also correlates this primacy of the paradigmatic in poetic language with metaphor (or similarity), and the concomitant dominion of the syntagmatic with metonymy (or contiguity), thus reconnecting the new terminology of structural linguistics with the classic rhetorical categories of tropes (‘Two Aspects of Language and

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Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, 1956). This powerful convergence of linguistic terms and literary concepts has proven irresistible to generations of literary critics and theorists. In terms of its subsequent development, structuralist literary analysis can thus be observed in three different ways. First, there is a kind of reinvigorated mode of textual explication, making use of all the terms and concepts of structural linguistics, but otherwise strikingly similar to Anglo-American New Criticism with its emphasis on laboriously unpacking the presupposed coherence or unity of an aesthetic object, in other words, its underlying unity of form and content, the exposition of which is the fundamental task of the interpreter. A prime example of this kind of work in a structuralist context is the infamous and elaborately detailed explication of Charles Baudelaire’s poem, ‘The Cats’, by the superstar structuralist duo of Roman Jakobson and Claude LéviStrauss. To the extent, however, that structuralism is really a mode of analysis rather than an interpretive or hermeneutic method per se, the results of structuralist textual exegesis often appear somewhat underwhelming, and all the more so given the laborious and painstakingly precise deployment of technical linguistic terminology. To say that the phonetics of Baudelaire’s poem (or any other text) underscores its symbolic content, or that the key to the poem lies in the word situated at its formal centre (middle word in the middle line), hardly contributes to an understanding of that poem beyond the methodologically presupposed convergence of form and content in a great work penned by a culturally acknowledged ‘genius’ in the craft. On the other hand, the topological exposition of the systemic elements in a group or corpus of works is where the linguistically and mathematically inspired sources of structuralist literary analysis find a much stronger and more intellectually enriching outcome. This is the second of the three levels mentioned above. In this case, one chooses a corpus of related works (by the same writer, in the same genre, same period, etc.) and studies them as one might a language with each work being a kind of parole that helps us infer the langue or systemic structure that generates the different works in question but with unsuspected (or unconscious) similarities between them. Key works in this mode include Roland Barthes’s On Racine (1962), Tzvetan Todorov’s Grammaire du Décameron (1969), or Umberto Eco’s ‘James Bond: a narrative combinatorics’, which itself appears among other important contributions by Barthes, Todorov, Greimas and others, in a defining special issue of the journal, Communications, in 1966 on ‘the structural analysis of narrative’. Eco’s study, in particular, is noteworthy for its systematic unravelling of the sexist, racist and xenophobic stereotypes that form the underlying structural basis for Ian Fleming’s popular novels, a critical move that clearly anticipates the later emergence of cultural studies. In terms of scale, the most ambitious undertaking in this second level of structuralist literary analysis is the massive four-volume Mythologiques (1964–71) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, where the

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anthropologist details the oppositional structures, combinations and permutations that define the vast corpus of Amerindian myth. In the preface to the first volume, The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss further elaborates on the linguistic metaphor by proposing a more extended analogy between myth and music as representing ‘common mental structures’ that both exist in time as linear sequences yet suspend time by their fundamental repeatability. At the same time, though, myths and musical compositions allow, and may even encourage, a stunning set of differing expressions, or variations on a theme. It does not matter, insists Lévi-Strauss in a key corollary to his structuralist approach, with which variation, or which specific myth one chooses to begin the analysis since the presupposition is that the same underlying structure will eventually be revealed no matter where the starting point. In addition to these two levels of structuralist literary analysis that proceed either to verify the formal unity of a single work or to locate the common core of a given set of works, a third level proceeds to grasp a text within a larger system of signs. Such a analysis is more properly semiotic than structuralist in orientation and is most capaciously and exhaustively outlined by Umberto Eco in his A Theory of Semiotics, but its exemplary figure in both theory and practice is Roland Barthes, whose abiding interests in all kinds of signs and systems of signification clearly exceed his more narrowly structuralist works, just as his critical engagement with all kinds of cultural and popular cultural forms casts a much wider net than his nonetheless highly original and field transformative achievements in the specific area of literary criticism. But Barthes’s initial point of departure is in a Brechtian-inspired form of ideology critique whereby the overt designation of artifice as artifice reveals the ideological motivations behind its production and reception. The critical work of showing how signs operate as signs thus subtends a demystifying project to reveal the constructed, ideologically motivated basis behind what would otherwise pass as natural, or what ‘goes without saying’. Writing Degree Zero (1953) already begins this project by designating a level of signification, which he calls ‘writing’, situated between the normative and impersonal strictures of language, on the one hand, and the personal idiosyncrasies of style, on the other. Writing, in terms that also recall Bakhtin’s dialogics, is ‘both form and value’ as it locates, or more precisely, signals the writer’s engagement with a given historical and literary conjuncture. From the liberal use of obscenities as the sign of a radical political stance in periodicals from the French Revolution to the deliberately neutral or blank writing deployed by post-World War II writers such as Albert Camus or Maurice Blanchot (the ‘writing degree zero’ of the title), Barthes traces how these overt signs of literariness translate certain ideological or political positions. As such, they represent a second order of signification propped onto the primary signifying level of signifiers and signifieds, whereby the signifieds in turn serve as the signifiers for a second-order signified. Barthes pursues this approach in his groundbreaking study of mass culture, Mythologies (1957), constructed as

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a series of very short analyses of a stunning variety of specific cultural phenomena (sports, cuisine, travel guides, celebrity news, household products, political ads, etc.) followed by a long, theoretical essay which elaborates the concept of a second-order signification as the key to revealing the ideological mystifications at work. One of the most memorable essays in Mythologies, ‘Wine and Milk’, lyrically unpacks the beloved cultural signification of wine in France as the quintessential signifier of Frenchness to the point that efforts to introduce milk as a healthy alternative by President Mendès-France or through American movies were doomed to failure and ridicule: ‘milk remains an exotic substance; it is wine which is part of the nation’ (Barthes 1973: 68). To which Barthes appends one of his most damning conclusions: The mythology of wine can in fact help us to understand the usual ambiguity of our daily life. For it is true that wine is a good and fine substance, but it is no less true that its production is deeply involved in French capitalism, whether it is that of the private vintners or that of the big settlers in Algeria who impose on the Muslims, on the very land of which they have been dispossessed, a crop of which they have no need, while they lack even bread. There are thus very engaging myths which are however not innocent. And the characteristic of our current alienation is precisely that wine cannot be an unalloyedly blissful substance, except if we wrongfully forget that it is also the product of an expropriation. (Barthes 1973: 68, trans. modified) But Barthes’s semiological pursuit of such multiple layers of signification, where each signified in turn becomes the signifier for a higher-order signified, eventually leads to his breaking away from classic structuralism toward what would be called poststructuralism. This break is signalled by the publication of S/Z in 1970 as well as several contemporaneous articles, in particular, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), and ‘From Work to Text’ (1971). In a sense, S/Z represents the high watermark of structuralism, beginning as a massive textual explication of a single short story by Honoré de Balzac, Sarrasine, rather arbitrarily divided into myriad small units of analysis (typically a single sentence, or even just a clause, but sometimes a couple of sentences), which are then each subjected to the full toolbox of structural and semiotic analysis, organised by Barthes into five codes: hermeneutic, semantic, action, symbolic, and reference. The result is a reading of the Balzac story that dwarfs the original in size, some 200 pages of analysis for a mere thirty pages of text. More significantly, what is revealed by this marathon interpretation is precisely not the isolation of a common infrastructural core that would effectively be the blueprint for all other Balzac stories, all other examples of nineteenth-century prose fiction, or for that matter, all narrative form itself as a fundamental category of the human mind. Contradicting

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the Lévi-Straussian reduction of a large narrative corpus to a single ur-myth, Barthes’s intense analysis of a single short story instead powerfully reveals the specific ways in which that text is in fact different from other narratives. Moreover, this focus on textual difference rather than structural identity with other works also opens the text up to a much vaster network of significations. ‘From Work to Text’ details this process as one of unlimited difference and semiosis, whereby what seems at first to be a self-standing work of art unravels as an infinite chain of signs and signification that endlessly refers to and rejoins other texts, an indefinite and horizonless intertext. Within this web of (inter) textuality that necessarily both precedes and succeeds us, the ‘author’ can no longer be considered the sole source and origin of a work for whom he or she would stand as its ultimate authority and guarantor of the text’s meaning. This is what Barthes means by his celebrated, provocative and often misunderstood announcement of the ‘death of the author’. This does not mean that there are no authors in the sense of writers who take their material and fashion it out of other texts, only that writers can no longer be considered to create and control godlike the texts they write, that as soon as they are written, readers will make what they may out of them, becoming in turn ‘writerly’ rather than simply ‘readerly’ in their reception, understanding and retransmittal of texts. This concept of textuality then drives a host of ‘post’-structuralist concerns, most notably those of the circle of scholars around the journal Tel Quel, for whom textual semiotics became the basis for a revolutionary (and at times, explicitly Maoist) politics that linked the ‘liberation of the signifier’ to that of the unconscious and of exploited labour (thus summarily collapsing Saussure with Freud and Marx). This amalgamation is most striking in the early work of Julia Kristeva (Semeiotikè, 1969; The Revolution of Poetic Language, 1974), who redefines the ‘semiotic’ to refer to the pre-Oedipal stage of the child immersed in a maternal realm of inchoate, undifferentiated sense as opposed to the subsequent ‘symbolic’ order of language, meaning and (paternal) law. Other critics and thinkers inspired by Barthes’s approach to textuality, such as Gérard Genette, Jonathan Culler or Michael Riffaterre, focused more particularly on concomitant questions of literary interpretation, such as the complex role of rhetorical figures or tropes, paratexts or framing material (such as book covers, title pages, prefaces, postfaces, appendices, etc.), presuppositional or inferential structures, and hypo- or intertexts. Still others, such as Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch dramatically expanded the field of textuality to include visual, cinematic or other cultural material. Barthes himself contributed to the expanded concept of text with his later work on photography, fashion, Japanese culture (Empire of Signs, 1970), amorous behaviour (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1977), and perhaps most scandalously, textual pleasure itself (The Pleasure of the Text, 1973). And coming from a completely different direction and training but likewise expanding a concept of text and interpretation against the tenets of classic

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structuralism, Clifford Geertz’s 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures marked a reorientation of the field of anthropology away from the abstract structural modelling of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘view from afar’ and back toward an ethnographic practice steeped in interpretation and participant-observation. For Geertz, it is not the deep structure of a culture that matters (in its putative similarity with other human cultures as per Lévi-Strauss) so much as the specific ways the inhabitants of that culture interpret its manifestations. Those manifestations are not to be discounted as superficial signs of hidden structure but treated as texts in their own right. The ethnographer’s task, then, as per Geertz’s famous depiction of a ‘Balinese Cockfight’, is to engage in what Geertz terms after Gilbert Ryle a ‘thick description’ of that cultural text, thoroughly bringing to bear everything of note to explicate the meaning the event has for the participants themselves, that is, ‘the story they tell themselves about themselves’ (Geertz 1973: 448), even going so far as to allow that participant-observer, the ethnographer him- or herself, to be written into the scene of that description (as opposed to the classic pose of feigned absence). What has thus come to be called interpretive or symbolic anthropology studies culture as a set of texts to be interpreted much like the work a literary critic does, an analogy Geertz repeatedly makes. But just as a literary critic faces an endless task of interpretation as a text continually opens itself up, so too is the kind of cultural analysis Geertz proposes ‘intrinsically incomplete’, so that no thick description can ever be thick enough: ‘And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is’ (Geertz 1973: 29). Far from abstracting a deep structure independent of context and universally common to the human mind, Geertz reasserts the particularity of specific cultures and contexts, in a way not unlike Barthes’s rejection in S/Z of a structure that would make that story like all others and concomitant emphasis on textual difference and interpretation. This ‘post’-structuralist turn is most identified, however, with the deconstructive approach taken by Jacques Derrida, most notably in his early works, Of Grammatology (1967) and Writing and Difference (1967). His essay, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, anthologised in the latter volume and read at the landmark 1966 Johns Hopkins University conference on ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’ (published as The Structuralist Controversy (Macksey and Donato 1972)), explicitly takes on the concept of structure itself with particular reference to Lévi-Strauss. Derrida argues that a structure insofar as it is an entity that is by definition ‘structured’ presupposes some kind of centre that organises it either as a defining, originating or teleological principle that structures it qua structure. The centre is both part of the structure and not part of it, it stands at its very core and yet outside it, as something hidden, both present and absent. In semiotic terms, the presupposition is that of an ultimate or transcendental signified that brings the process of interpretation to a close in the form of some final (or originary) meaning that transcends the chain of signification. Derrida deconstructs the underlying ‘metaphysics of presence’ in

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structuralism that strives to limit or forestall the limitless work of difference in undermining all forms of identity. Difference is both the necessary condition of possibility for identity, yet it is at the same time what undoes identity formation. In the case of the concept of structure, its identity further depends upon some kind of ‘free play’ in the structure (what Piaget terms ‘transformational capacity’), yet that same free play necessarily threatens the self-sameness of the structure in its restructuration. For a structuralist such as Lévi-Strauss dedicated to synchronic analysis and explanation, a major stumbling block occurs with the effect of time or history, upon synchronic organisation, hence his recourse to the concept of ‘breaks’ to explain temporal difference. History too, Derrida maintains, is equally bound by the metaphysics of presence and the positing of some transcendental signified, such as an origin or endpoint that gives history meaning, and therefore being as presence. To this conundrum of différance (the neologism Derrida coins to indicate the temporal as well as spatial play of difference), one could either follow a Rousseauist nostalgia for an origin that never was (as does Lévi-Strauss in his ‘primitivist’ ethnology of the savage mind as essential humanity) or embrace a Nietzschean delight in the endless freeplay of an ‘active interpretation’ with no horizon of truth. In Of Grammatology, Derrida expands his deconstructive reading of Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau to include Saussure’s ‘logocentric’ privileging of oral speech over writing in his modelling of semiology and structural linguistics. Writing, however, is the operator of difference within the Saussurian model, both undermining the presumed plenitude of speech as the repository of meaning by revealing the play of writing and différance within speech itself as the very principle that underlies structural linguistics, i.e. the difference between terms as what defines them, not any inherent qualities in those terms, as Saussure famously illustrates by the example of the letter ‘t’ written in various different ways all nonetheless recognisable as that letter because it is not confused with any other. Writing emerges, then, not as the secondary reproduction or degraded, imperfect ‘copy’ of oral speech but as the very arche-principle that makes the differential meaning of speech possible in the first place. Derrida’s writing informs the general theory of textuality as interpretive deconstruction, as a poststructuralism that continues nonetheless to rely on the fundamental principles of structuralism and semiotics not in order to reveal patterns of common identity and universal meaning but rather to underscore the deconstructive work of difference and of interpretation as unlimited semiosis. Various structuralist approaches persist through poststructuralism, then, less to locate or extrapolate the identity of deep structure as the endpoint of analysis than to question the epistemological value of that uncovered structure. Structure can emerge as repressive, or as a suspect form of transcendentalism, or as metaphysics of presence. For poststructuralists, the analysis continues by a focus on what is not said, on what is left missing or unaccounted for, what the gaps tell us, or even the redundancies or excesses of a given text.

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Significance may lie precisely in what eludes or points beyond structure (Marin 1973), or even a sequence of structures (Van Den Abbeele 1986). Another path for semiotics, more particularly, is opened by moving beyond the structural linguistics of Saussure, with its founding distinction between langue and parole toward the generative grammar of Chomsky and its parallel concepts of linguistic competence and performance. Whereas the Saussurian paradigm posits an abstract, underlying structure of language for which individual utterances (parole) are mere tokens, Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965) posits an innate human capacity for language, and linguistic competence, therefore, as the ability for the native speaker of any given language to ‘generate’ an infinite number of grammatically correct utterances from a finite set of rules. Like Saussure, however, competence for Chomsky is in fact an idealised capacity to be distinguished from any actual linguistic performance, which may be marked by all kinds of ‘grammatically irrelevant’ features such as mistakes or forgetfulness. The earliest and strongest attempt to adapt the generative model to a traditional area of structuralist inquiry is Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975), the second part of which elaborates a theory of ‘literary competence’ less as a method to explicate any given literary text than as a metacritical approach to understanding the act of interpretation itself. The task of a structuralist poetics, then, would be to elaborate the system of rules and conventions that define literary competence as it is put to work in the interpretation of given texts. And while Culler’s subsequent work aligns him more closely with deconstruction, others have pursued an approach inspired by generative grammar but also tempted by various forms of cognitive science. The cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We Live By, 1980) looms large in this development by their radical reframing of the Chomskyan ideal of innate human competence into the concept of the ‘embodied mind’, whereby cognition, as biologically determined by the sensory and motor capacities of the human body, structures even our most abstract reasoning on the basis of metaphors drawn from our preconceptual lived experience. Since Thomas Daddesio (1994) first proposed a possible alignment between such cognitive theories with the classic tenets of semiotics as a meaning-making activity based in sign, structure and code, efforts to bridge the two in the name of a specifically cognitive semiotics have come into existence in various locations and with differing practitioners. Like cognitive science itself, however, the term cognitive semiotics covers an impossibly widespread range of concerns and practices across an array of disciplines from neuroscience and artificial intelligence to more traditional work in literature, visual studies and anthropology (as per classic structuralism). Given such disparity, it should not be surprising to find that much of the work so far is of uneven quality, with a tendency to ‘borrow’ concepts uncritically across disciplines, or to fall back on less sophisticated, empirical notions of rational subjectivity (Warren Buckland, The Cognitive

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Semiotics of Film, 2000). The challenge will be to define semiotic cognition, or even the cognition of semiotic activity, in such a way as to enable an interpretive practice that can build on recent advances in embodied cognition without losing the critical, foundational rigour of Peirce, Saussure and their ablest, most consequential followers.

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5 GENETIC STRUCTURALISM Marcel Danesi

Introduction

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tarting in the late 1950s, Lucien Goldmann, a French philosopher of Jewish-Romanian origins, put forward a theory of literature and culture that he designated genetic structuralism (see Goldmann, The Hidden God [1955], 1964; Recherches dialectiques, 1959; The Human Sciences and Philosophy [1966], 1973; Epistemologie et philosophie 1970; Towards a Sociology of the Novel [1973], 1975; Lukács and Heidegger [1973], 2009). Synthesising Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s four-stage model of childhood development, known as genetic epistemology (Piaget 1964, 1971b), with a basic Marxist interpretation of social evolution, genetic structuralism seemed at first to be a powerful new mode of inquiry into the origins and functions of literary texts. However, it has rarely been used as a framework for conducting such an inquiry or for the analysis of texts, with only a few exceptions (Mayrl 1978, Cohen 1994, Zimmerman 2006). The reason may well be that Piagetian psychology and rigid ideological Marxism were beginning to fall into disfavour in the era when Goldmann started developing his theoretical approach. Moreover, the words genetic and structuralism have different nuances of meaning in his framework than their usual designations, likely causing confusion among social scientists and literary theorists alike. But if not the framework itself, at least some of Goldmann’s ideas deserve much more attention than they have received, given that, unlike many other critical approaches today, genetic structuralism (henceforward GS) puts forward several key principles that allow for the connection of literature to deeper unconscious processes in the human psyche. Perhaps the main strength of GS lies in how it portrays a literary text not as a singular, inspired work of verbal art – a viewpoint inherited largely from Romanticism – but as a small, but meaningful, part of a totality of human psychic effort across time and space. Goldmann saw literature (and culture) not as a repository of single works invented through the efforts of different individuals, but as the result of those individuals reacting to genetic (unconscious) processes that characterise the history of collectivities. In some ways, GS recalls the historicism of Giambattista Vico and his four-phase theory of cultural

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evolution (see The New Science [1744], 1999), each of which is mirrored by specific linguistic tropes – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. Each of these tropes reflects a different form of consciousness. Similarly, French sociologist Émile Durkheim saw expressive artefacts as reflexes of a ‘collective conscious’. Thus, the early forms of literature – such as the myths – stem from this mindset, sustaining meaning-making in collectivities and keeping people within them bound emotionally to each other: The collective conscious is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousness. Being placed outside and above all individual and local contingencies, it sees things in this permanent and essential aspect, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas . . . [It] alone can furnish the mind with the molds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them. (Durkheim 1912: 12) The ‘genetic’ aspects of GS, therefore, allude more to imaginative mental processes, rather than are not purely biological ones. They are part of a ‘phylogenesis’ of thought and expression that is governed by historical forces and the forms of consciousness that different time periods generate.

Early Influences As mentioned, Goldmann was influenced by two primary intellectual sources, Marxism and Piagetian psychology. According to those who have written on Goldmann, the literary critic and Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács (1962, 1963, 1964, 1968, 1971a, 1971b) is identified as a major influence as well. But a comparative reading of Lukács and Goldmann produces analogies rather than evidence of a direct influence of one on the other. Goldmann broke away, actually, from Lukács’s adoption of rigid Marxism, preferring instead to develop a flexible dialectical method for the study of literature and the human condition in general. Essentially, Marxism, the ideas of Lukács, and GS all have their roots in nineteenth-century German idealism as exemplified by Hegel (see The Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], 1977) and Kant (see Critique of Pure Reason [1781, 1787], 1997). Hegel emphasised the importance of historical processes in the study of philosophy, art, religion, science and politics. He wanted to comprehend why something came into being as it did and why, over the course of history, it came to be replaced by its opposite. He also sought to know why an equilibrium between the two opposed forces emerges spontaneously to instill a psychic balance. Hegel saw creative forms of culture as part of an unconscious impetus for gaining the equilibrium. Kant believed that we cannot understand anything beyond our actual experience of something. Thus, the mind and its objects are not separate things, as Cartesians have always maintained. On the contrary, for Kant the mind is actively

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involved in interpreting objects it experiences, organising them into categories, and thus constructing knowledge. From constructivist conceptions such as these comes the basic premise of general structuralism that a human phenomenon (language, art, and so on) cannot be understood in isolation, but as part of a totality that crystallises from historical (genetic) processes. Mayrl explains this aspect of Goldmann’s conception as follows: ‘The historical aspect of the totality involves the methodological mandate that, in addition to being grasped in its structural context, a phenomenon must be understood as the totality of its moments of change and development’ Mayrl (1978: 20). Goldmann referred to change as ‘structuration’ and development as ‘destructuration’. The implication is that any structured artefact or system (a work of literature, language and art) reflects a temporary state of equilibrium, which is destructured as time progresses; that is, it is decomposed into the components that make it up. Thus the flow of creativity starts from totality (wholeness) to specificity. Marxist critiques of modern societies stress the structural (or structuring) aspect of totality, given that the parts of any collectivity or system are seen as dependent upon the whole in order to function. On the other hand, in bourgeois, capitalist society, as Lukács emphasised throughout his writings, the opposite viewpoint is the rule. In such societies an abiding and destructive emphasis on individualism leads inevitably to alienation (Marx’s term) and on the separation of ideas into succinct and distinct categories. From the latter tendency, the different disciplines have arisen (starting in the Enlightenment), whereas a true genetic (Marxist) epistemology would amalgamate the disciplines into an overriding dialectic of knowledge. As a university student, Marx was heavily influenced by Hegel, especially Hegel’s idea that rational ideas were the driving force in history. In the early 1840s, however, Marx began to move away from a strictly Hegelian philosophy, rejecting the Hegelian notion that rational ideas determined events. Marx maintained the opposite, namely that material forces – the forces of nature and especially of human economic production – determined ideas (Marx 1867; English translation Marx and Engels 1975–2005). GS retains the Hegelian viewpoint that ideas are indeed the forces behind genetic processes. The Hegelian model led Goldmann to enunciate a view of the human condition based on three general maxims: 1. Humans have a tendency to adapt to the environment in which they live and, over time, to transform that environment in ways that make sense to them. 2. Humans have a tendency to be consistent and thus to create structured forms – theories, works of art, rituals, and so on, in response to their everchanging plight (structuration). 3. Humans have the tendency to modify and develop structures at their whim over time to produce derived forms (destructuration).

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Goldmann saw the manifestation of these three tendencies especially in literature. Specific works of literature arise from responses to a specific environmental situation, but nonetheless reflect the universal tendency to adapt to, and to understand, the situation. Structuration is thus both a subjective act and part of a collective consciousness. As the form of consciousness changes over time, the acts of structuration are destructured to produce derived and increasingly complex forms of art. This genetic process is universal and is the reason why literary works can easily be translated from one language to another because it is the result of interaction between collectivities (cultures) and their responses to situations. The individuals who create works of literature thus reveal the particular state of consciousness of the collectivity at the same time that they reveal a particular view of that form of consciousness. Goldmann’s Marxist stance is unlike that taken by Lúkacs, which is more reminiscent of the Frankfurt School philosophers’ view that culture is a product of economic forces, not just psychic ones. The School, founded in the 1920s, was the world’s first Marxist school of social research. Its aim was to understand the expressive and creative ways in which human groups produced meaning collectively under the impact of modern technology and capitalism. The scholars belonging to the School included Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Leo Lowenthal. In one way or another, they took a highly negative view of capitalist culture, with its stress on individualism and marketplace ideology. As Lukács often observed in his critical literary writings, literature and other forms of art in capitalist bourgeois societies are perceived as commodities that are literally sold in the marketplace by a ‘culture industry’ controlled by capitalist rulers. The exceptions to this pattern stand out considerably and implicitly reject the commodity culture mindset. For Lukács the perfect example of this was Thomas Mann. Adopting Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s (1929–34) concept of hegemony, at least as a subtext, Lukács claimed that the domination of society by the group in power occurs in large part through the control of the levers of mass expressivities. Gramsci had used the term in reference to his belief that the dominant class in a society used social ‘instruments’, which varied from outright coercion (incarceration, the use of secret police, threats, and so on) to gentler and more ‘managerial’ tactics (education, religion, control of the mass media), in order to gain the consent of common people. The Frankfurt School theorists were, overall, highly pessimistic about the possibility of genuine culture under modern capitalism, condemning most forms of popular culture as forms of propaganda designed to indoctrinate the masses and disguise social inequalities. Goldmann started with this kind of outlook, rejecting the bourgeois notion that cultural and literary texts should be considered in themselves, rather than as part of a genetic process. But he went well beyond this purely Marxist stance.

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Indeed, Goldmann was more influenced by Sigmund Freud’s (1913, 1919, 1956, 1962) ideas of development in childhood than by Lukács’ Marxist stance. Goldmann believed that development phases in childhood affected emotional and psychic outcomes in adulthood, seeing analogies with the origins and evolution of literary movements, from childlike myths to advanced ironic writings. Freud suggested that most of what is in our minds is not accessible to us; it is unconscious, but it shapes our behaviour. In his ‘structural hypothesis’, Freud claimed that there is a continual struggle going on in our brains among the id (body), the ego (subjectivity), and the superego (collectivity). The id is a cauldron of seething excitement – a concept that Goldmann applied to literary creation, which starts off as a highly emotional response to a situation. The id generates a lot of energy, but the energy cannot be used effectively because we are always being drawn by a desire to take care of our instinctual needs. It thus seeks expression constantly. One of these expressive outlets is writing. Opposing the id is the superego, which is essentially the moral conscience of a collectivity. As the id seeks gratification and has great energy, it must submit to the demands of the collectivity, and this tension can cause considerable mental anguish. The literary author gives expression to this oppositional tug within all of us. This is why we see ourselves in the text. And, in fact, the ego is an interpretant, to use Charles Peirce’s idea that we are constantly attempting to decipher signifying input (see Peirce 1931–58). The ego seeks to harness the energy of the id in socially constructive ways by using the superego to moderate behaviour – hence the rise and growth of literary expression as a social constructive process seeking equilibrium between opposing Hegelian forces. In other words, literature stems from this unconscious search for an equilibrium between genetic structuring and destructuring, although it never really achieves it. This need comes out as much in psychotherapy as it does in conversation and more broadly in human expressive activities. This is why we ‘understand’ all these. We already possess the understanding mechanisms inside of us. A similar kind of conceptualisation can be found in so-called phenomenology, originally developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early 1900s, to emphasise the importance of conscious experience in the construction of categories of expression, from literature to science. Husserl aimed to understand how consciousness – awareness of sensations and emotions – works in order to better understand how experience shapes the human brain. Modern-day phenomenology characterises the forms of consciousness (the things of which one is conscious) as phenomena, and the processes involved in consciousness-formation, such as perception and desiring, as acts. These are related to objects of consciousness and thus are also considered to be phenomena. This intrinsic relationship between phenomena and acts is called intentionality. Phenomenologists also claim that past experiences will limit people’s ability to understand phenomena and thus to act accordingly. One

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way to counteract this limiting tendency of past experience is through what they call ‘fantasy variations’, that is, through acts of imagining how the same experience might be perceived under varying circumstances. The features of the experience that remain constant, despite the variations, are thus seen to constitute its essence. Husserl has had a number of followers, even though it is not clear what the influence of phenomenology in the cognitive sciences has been, other than an emphasis on experience, which is now part and parcel of most psychological schools of thought. The followers include the French psychologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see The Structure of Behaviour [1942], 1965; and The Phenomenology of Perception [1945], 1962) and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (see ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, 1998). Both have argued that phenomenology should not be limited to an analysis of consciousness. Phenomenology has, however, had some impact on the study of intentionality across several disciplines, including literary theory.

Structuralist Background: Linguistics, Semiotics and Anthropology In order to grasp Goldmann’s scientific, rather than ideological, sources of influence, it is instructive to step back and take a cursory look at how structuralism emerged and the mindset it established in the social sciences generally, which certainly influenced psychology, and especially Piaget. Structuralism is the general term used to designate a specific approach to human expressivity and systems (language, art, and so on) based on several fundamental ideas, especially the idea that signs exhibit relational structure. In music, for example, the arrangement of tones into structures known as melodies is felt to be ‘musically correct’ only if this arrangement is consistent with harmonic relational structure, that is, flowing along on the basis of specific chord relations. In language, single words can only refer to things, but they take on meaning when combined into sentences and utterances according to rules of relation among them. Overall, there are two main types of relations – for example, in order to recognise something as a melody or a sentence, one must be: (1) able to differentiate it from other melodies and sentences; and (2) know how its component parts fit together. More technically, the former is called paradigmatic (differential) and the latter syntagmatic (combinatory) structure. Structuralism grew out of the work and ideas of the early founders of psychology, who attempted to give a scientific basis to the study of conscious experience by breaking it down into its specific relational structures. One of its main techniques came to be known as opposition. What keeps two words, such as cat and rat, recognisably distinct and, thus, meaning-bearing? A structuralist would say that it is, in part, the fact that the phonic difference between initial c and r is perceived as distinctive. This constitutes a paradigmatic feature

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of the sounds in a language, called phonemic. Similarly, a major and minor chord in the same key will be perceived as distinct on account of a half-tone difference in the middle note of the chords, called tonemic by structuralist musicologists. These examples demonstrate that structures (sounds, tones, and so on) acquire meaning in part through a perceivable difference built into some aspect of their physical constitution – a minimal opposition in sound, a minimal difference in tone, and so on. The psychological importance of opposition was noticed by the early psychologists, especially Wilhelm Wundt (1901) and Edward B. Titchener (1910). In his Course in General Linguistics (1916: English translation 1960), the philologist Ferdinand de Saussure called this feature of structured systems, différence, noting that it co-occurs with combination. When putting together a simple sentence, for example, we do not choose the words in a random fashion, but rather according to their relational properties. The choice of the noun brother in the subject slot of a sentence such as My brother loves maths is a paradigmatic one, because other nouns of the same kind – girl, man, woman, and so on – could have been chosen instead. But the choice of any one of these for that sentence slot constrains the type and form of the verb that can be chosen and combined with it. Co-occurrence is a syntagmatic feature of all systems. Structuralism was elaborated by a number of linguists who met regularly in Prague in the early 1920s. Word pairs such as cat-rat, for example, were called minimal pairs by Trubetzkoy (1936, 1968). Minimal-pair analysis was also used to examine higher-level oppositions such as synonymy (big-large), antonymy (big-little), taxonomy (rose-flower), part-whole relations (handlecup), and so on. As psychologist Charles K. Ogden claimed, ‘the theory of opposition offers a new method of approach not only in the case of all those words which can best be defined in terms of their opposites, or of the oppositional scale on which they appear, but also to any word’ Ogden (1932: 18). In the 1930s and 1940s, structuralists started noticing that oppositional structure cropped up in the analysis of non-verbal systems as well. For example, in the integer system of numbers, oppositions include positive vs negative, odd vs even, and prime vs composite. Claude Lévi-Strauss was probably the first anthropologist to explicitly study cultural systems with the tools of structuralism in the 1950s. In analysing kinship systems, he found that the elementary unit of kinship was made up of a set of four oppositions: brother vs sister, husband vs wife, father vs son, and mother’s brother vs sister’s son (see Structural Anthropology, 1958; English translation 1963). Lévi-Strauss suspected that similar relational sets characterised other cultural systems and, thus, that all social organisation had oppositional structure. Lévi-Strauss sought what he called ‘unsuspected harmonies’ of oppositions across the spectrum of human culture. His proposal was to look for pairs of opposites common to all human societies. His fieldwork among Amerindian tribes in the 1930s impressed upon him that those harmonies were

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present initially in founding myths (see The Savage Mind [1962], 1966; and Myth and Meaning, 1978). The purpose of a myth, he suggested, was to provide a logical theory that could explain inherent opposites or contradictions. One attempt at ‘harmonization’ can be seen in the relation between raw and cooked food (Lévi-Strauss 1964). Cooked food allows humans to leave the world of nature behind and to focus on their own adaptations to it on their own terms. Culture emerges the instant that cooked food does. This change from the raw to the cooked reflects a change in mentality from the human being as a ‘tinkler’ to the human being as a ‘thinker’ (Lévi-Strauss 1962). The ‘tinkler’ works with the hands to extract from the world what is necessary for survival; the ‘thinker’ is an engineer who has a more abstract approach to solving the same practical problems of existence. The thinker invents tools and materials that transcend the limitations imposed on humans by their bodies. The tinkler and the engineer face similar problems of survival; but they solve them in radically different ways. Since its introduction as a general philosophy in the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, structuralism has been criticised frequently as being artificial and not consistent with the facts of human development. However, the Prague School linguist Roman Jakobson (1942) argued that the notion of opposition could, actually, be used to explain the psychology of verbal ontogenesis (see Jakobson 1971). Jakobson showed empirically that sound oppositions that occur frequently are among the first ones learned by children. Nasal consonants – /n/ and /m/ – exist in all languages; and, significantly, they are among the earliest phonemes acquired by children. On the other hand, consonants pronounced near the back of the throat are relatively rare and are among the last sounds acquired by children. In other words, the theory of opposition predicts the sequence of sound acquisition in children. Another critique of opposition theory has been that it does not take into account associative (figurative) meaning and structure. The study of such structure came, actually, to the forefront starting in the 1970s within linguistics and psychology (Pollio, Barlow, Fine, and Pollio 1977, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, Fauconnier and Turner 2002). The American linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson (1987) were leaders in this paradigm shift, claiming that a simple linguistic metaphor such as ‘My brother is a tiger’ cannot be analysed as a simple idiomatic replacement for some pre-existing literal form, but, rather, that it revealed a conceptual systematicity. They thus called it a manifestation of a conceptual metaphor, namely people are animals. This is why we can also interpret, say, Sam’s or Sarah’s personality in animal terms – a gorilla, snake, pig, puppy, and so on. Each specific linguistic metaphor (‘Sam is a gorilla’, ‘Sarah is a puppy’, and so on) is an instantiation of an abstract metaphorical concept – people are animals. Now, does the existence of such formulas in cognitive activity lead to an invalidation of opposition theory? As Lakoff and Johnson have cogently argued, conceptual metaphors are formed

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through image schemata. These are the source for the people are animals conceptual metaphor, which seems to be an unconscious image that human personalities and animal behaviours are linked in some way. In other words, it is the output of an ontological opposition: humans-as-animals. It constitutes, in other words, an example of how opposition might manifest itself as an associative phenomenon, not just a binary or multi-order one. In this case, the two poles in the opposition are not contrasted (as in night vs day), but equated: humans-as-animals. This suggests that oppositional structure operates in a quasi-contrastive way at the level of figurative meaning. The most severe critiques of opposition theory have revolved around the related notion of markedness (Andrews 1990, Battistella 1990). In oppositions such as night vs day, it can easily be seen that the ‘default’ pole is day – that is, day is the notion in the opposition that we perceive as culturally or psychologically more fundamental. This pole is called the unmarked pole, and the other pole, the marked one (since it is the one that stands out exceptionally). This analysis can be justified, arguably, because it has a source in human biology – we sleep at night and carry out conscious activities in the day. Needless to say, if a culture exists in which activities are carried out during night-time and sleeping during daytime, the markedness relation would be reversed. Now, the problem is deciding which pole is marked and unmarked in a socially problematic opposition such as the male vs female one. The answer seems to vary according to the social context to which the opposition is applied. In patrilineal societies the unmarked form is male; but in matrilineal ones, such as the Iroquois one (Alpher 1987), it appears to be female. Markedness, thus, seems to mirror social realities. Thus, its dismissal by various philosophers and semioticians, such as Michel Foucault (see The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972a and 1972b) and Jacques Derrida (see Of Grammatology, 1976), seems unwarranted. Their critiques led to the movement known as poststructuralism, which started in the late 1950s, gaining prominence in the 1970s. In poststructuralism, oppositions are to be ‘deconstructed’ (as Derrida put it), and exposed as resulting from an endemic logocentrism on the part of the analyst, not the result of some tendency present in the human brain. In contrast to Saussure’s idea of différence, Derrida coined the word différance (spelled with an ‘a’, but pronounced in the same way), to intentionally satirise Saussurian theory. With this term Derrida wanted to show that Saussure’s so-called discoveries could be deconstructed into the implicit biases that he brought to the analytical task at hand, because a science of language can never succeed since it must be carried out through language itself and thus will partake of the slippage (as he called it) it discovers. Poststructuralism had a temporary impact on various fields of knowledge. Because written language is the basis of knowledge-producing enterprises, such as science and philosophy, poststructuralists claimed that these ended up reflecting nothing more than the writing practices used to articulate them.

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But in hindsight, there was (and is) nothing particularly radical in this diatribe against structuralism. Already in the 1920s, Jakobson and Trubetzkoy started probing the ‘relativity’ of oppositions in the light of their social and psychological functions. Basing their ideas in part on the work of German psychologist Karl Bühler (1934), they claimed that language categories mirrored social ones. The goal of a true structuralist science, therefore, was to investigate the isomorphism that manifested itself between oppositions and social systems. In other words, opposition theory was the very technique that identified social inequalities, not masked them. There is no evidence in Goldmann’s writings that he was influenced directly by this kind of debate and by structuralism proper. But there is little doubt that the train of thought that is inherent in structuralism did. The idea that structures are meaningful only in relation to others is the basic tenet of structuralism, and this is exactly what GS assumes to be the guiding force in structuration and destructuration. However, nowhere in Goldmann’s analyses of literary texts do we find a direct use of opposition theory. But it is implicit everywhere. So, in a sense, the term ‘structuralism’ in ‘genetic structuralism’ has a generic epistemological sense, rather than a technical one.

Genetic Epistemology Probably influenced by Saussure who maintained that structures should be studied as they occur in a system, which he called synchronic, rather than how they developed to their current form, which he termed diachronic, structuralism emphasised the non-genetic (non-historical) features of systems. It was Piaget in psychology who applied structuralism to a genetic framework, calling it, as mentioned, genetic epistemology, claiming that to understand how the mind develops one needs to look at its genesis in childhood and thus at both synchronic and diachronic factors in the ontogenesis of thought. With his ingenious experiments on child subjects, Piaget was the first psychologist to document, empirically, that ontogenesis was a stage-based process. Piaget’s (1964) genetic epistemology posits that children pass through four distinct chronological periods of mental development: (1) the sensorimotor period, when they acquire a basic knowledge of objects through their senses, lasting until about age two; (2) the preoperational period, from about two to seven, during which children develop such skills as language and the ability to draw; (3) the concrete operations period, from about seven to eleven, when they begin to think logically (classifying objects, solving logical problems, and so on); (4) the formal operations period, which lasts from about eleven to fifteen, when children begin to reason realistically about the future and to deal with abstractions. It is not so much the chronological accuracy of the stages, nor the fact that culture may intervene to modify some of them and even obliterate them, but the idea of a structured ontogenesis of cognition that made Piagetian

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psychology a basic point-of-reference in all subsequent research within developmental psychology. Piaget’s genetic approach is still widely accepted as charting the primary psycho-biological milestones of cognitive development. Piaget has shown, in a phrase, that humans progress from a sensory and concrete stage of mind to a reflective and abstract one. Reactions to Piaget’s theory have criticised it for its determinism and its overemphasis on cognitive processes at the expense of affect and emotion. The work of Vygotsky (see Thought and Language, 1961) in particular has had a substantive impact on the general thrust of genetic epistemology today. Vygotsky proposed developmental stages that go from external (physical and social) actions to internal cognitive constructions and interior speech via the mind’s ability to construct images of external reality. His definition of speech as a ‘microcosm of consciousness’ is particularly characteristic of his approach. Action, imagination and abstract thought are the chronologically related stages through which each child passes on the way to mature thinking: that is, the child first employs non-verbal symbols (action, play, drawing, painting, music, and so on), then imaginative constructs (narratives, fables, dramatisations, and so on), and finally oral expression and creative writing on the way to the development of abstract thought. Thus, unlike Piaget, Vygostky gave subjective creativity in children a much larger role in determining how development unfolds. Nevertheless, the idea of genetic stages in development still remains a valid, albeit discussable, notion within psychology. From Piaget, Goldmann adopted genetic epistemology and modified it to produce a genetic view of literature as a stage-based developmental phenomenon – a view espoused as well by the Canadian literary scholar Northrop Frye (see The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, 1981).

Genetic Structuralism As we have seen, GS is based in Hegelian epistemology and an amalgam of structuralism, historicism, psychology, Marxism, with touches of phenomenology. Its highly eclectic nature may well be the reason why it has really never caught on as a general movement in literary or culture theory, both of which have tended to seek uniform frameworks for understanding the phenomena of literature and culture. As Cohen (1994) has argued, Goldmann is hard to place in the history of ideas. While many Parisian leftists of his era staunchly upheld Marxism’s scientific validity, insisted that it was in a severe crisis and, thus, that it had to reinvent or reconstitute itself radically if it were to survive. He rejected the traditional Marxist view of the proletariat and contested its structuralist viewpoint, which he found to be too reductive, unlike the more general movement of structuralism in the human sciences. This, writes Cohen, is likely the main reason why Goldmann’s own name and

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work were eclipsed, despite the acclaim of thinkers such as Piaget. Goldmann refused to portray humanity’s future as a result of the blind force of historical laws and propensities. He saw the future, rather, as a wager akin to Pascal’s wager on the existence of God. As discussed, Piaget was the most important input into GS because, as Mayrl (1978) also points out, Piaget’s goal was to demonstrate that knowledge is constructed, not innate, and gained through direct experience. Our direct experience of gravity makes our knowledge of it more valid and understandable than our indirect experience with black holes. In GS, progress from one stage of development in childhood to another comes by way of assimilation, which occurs when the perception of a new event or object occurs to the child in an existing mental schema and is usually used in the context of self-motivation, and by way of accommodation, whereby experiences are accommodated by the child according to the outcome of the tasks. Thus, unwittingly, Goldmann adopted a Vygotskian view, projecting it onto a basic Piagetian epistemology. It might be the only ever attempt, albeit unwitting, to integrate Piaget and Vygotsky. The highest form of development is equilibration, which encompasses both assimilation and accommodation as children change their way of thinking in order to arrive at a correct understanding of phenomena. Goldmann also saw ‘cultural creation’ as being subject to the same laws of development as Piaget showed. Human behaviour is a response to a particular situation and tends, therefore, to create a balance between the subject of action and the object on which it bears. This tendency to equilibrium, using Piaget’s psychological notion, always has an unstable, provisional character. Thus, human realities inhere in two-sided processes: destructuration of old structuration and structuration of new totalities capable of creating equilibria vis-à-vis new demands of collectivities. Goldmann sought, therefore, to uncover the mechanisms underlying both the equilibria that humans destroy and those towards which they are moving. In his comprehensive study of GS, Zimmerman (2006) points out that Goldmann’s influences may have been two-edged swords, both providing him with deep insights into human nature and with all the faults of Marxism and Piagetianism. Goldmann emphasised the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of Lukács, stressing totality or collective consciousness, but hardly accepting any of the economic and political biases of Lukács’ work. His two-year apprenticeship with Jean Piaget in Zurich gave him a way out of Lukács’s rigid Marxist interpretations of how consciousness assimilates and adapts to material conditions. In a sense, GS is both a continuation of Lévi-Strauss with an implicit amalgamation of Vygotsky. It is this inherent aspect of GS that may have relevance for contemporary social science. If we have not yet reached a full understanding of Goldmann’s thought, the reason, Zimmerman argues, may well be that we do not yet understand our own situation. Thus, there are cogent reasons for a further study of Goldmann, reasons that are far from being purely academic.

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One lacuna in Goldmann’s GS is the theory of Vico, as mentioned, that the stages of culture and literature reflect different forms of consciousness. In The New Science Vico elaborated the notion of poetic logic – a universal form of imaginative thinking that allows humans to understand the world initially in sensory and bodily ways. Vico claimed that we can gain understanding of what poetic logic reveals about human thinking by studying one of its most luminous products – metaphorical language. The ancient names of the gods, for instance, were humanity’s first metaphorical models for explaining phenomenological events (such as weather phenomena). Jove was a metaphor for the thundering sky. Once the sky was called Jove, all other experiences of the same phenomenon could be ‘found again’ in the name. Jove is a conscious metaphorical separation of the sky from the earth, of the divine (or metaphysical) from the human world. From these metaphorical ideas, the first conscious humans learned to make sense together. The ideas so formed were the basis for the creation of the first human institutions, from marriage and the family to religion and economic systems. The Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman (1990) was similarly interested, fundamentally, in unravelling the raison d’être and origins of meaning structures in the origins of human institutions and in how these constituted the source of cultural cognition. Both Vico and Lotman saw the metaphorical imagination as the primary faculty of mind underlying the invention of these very structures. Vico argued that all creative artefacts, from literature to science, result from bodily and sensory experiences absorbed and transformed by the imagination into meaningful wholes. The transformations manifest themselves initially in metaphorical literature (myths). The innate universal capacity to think metaphorically is the most important feature of primordial consciousness. This is totally dependent on the images generated by bodily experiences as they are encoded and shaped by the imagination. From this ‘poetic’ state of mind the first human cultures took shape, establishing the first institutions, especially religious, burial and marriage rites. The organisation of early cultures is, thus, universally ‘poetic’; that is, it is based upon, and guided by, conscious bodily experiences that have been transformed into generalised ideas by metaphor. The distinguishing feature of the primordial form of human consciousness is that it allows us literally to ‘imagine’ stimuli that are no longer present for the sensory system to react to in its biologically programmed way. The thought units that result from these images are iconic signs – units of thought that stand for their referents in direct ways. These signs also allow humans to think about their referents away from their contexts of occurrence. The mythic imagination can thus ‘create’ new realities totally within the confines of mental space – hence the meaning of imagination as a creative faculty. By not being constrained to a stimulus-response environment, the imagination has bestowed upon humans the capacity to ‘imagine’ fictional (context-free) beings, objects and events. The imagination

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thus liberates human beings from the constraints imposed on all other organisms by biology. Lotman also saw the basic form of mentality as poetic – a form which he characterised as energeia, a kind of ‘creative potency’ that undergirds every act of meaning-making, from the simple invention of words to the creation of elaborate artistic texts. Culture is a product of this kind of creative semiosis (sign-making). Lotman called it the semiosphere. The semiosphere emerges as a response to a specific human need to model and interpret the dynamic flux of the world in the form of signs. Of all the systems that emanate from semiosis, no other is as powerful and as unique as language. Language is the ultimate achievement of semiosis. But language alone would not complete the picture of culture, which is also constituted and informed by drawings, music, artifacts and other non-verbal models of the world that people make and use routinely. Together with verbal models, they constitute one huge Text (Lotman 1990: 377). Given the role of the imagination in spurring the human mind to create its own world of thought, the question becomes: How does one go from imagining to actually producing signifying structure? For Vico, the answer is to be found in a second unique ability of human mentation – the ingegno ‘ingenuity’, ‘invention’, the faculty of the conscious mind that organises the poetic forms produced by the imagination into meaningful structures. The ingegno is, therefore, the source of syntax in language and of narrative structure in verbal discourse. It was at the creative nucleus of the earliest myths that humanity literally invented. This produces textuality in human affairs, an interconnected form of representation that bestows a sense of wholeness and unity upon signification. Vico also developed a theory of cultural stages and the cultural cycle, which is implicitly present in Goldmann. The corso of history unfolds in terms of the three ages – the ‘divine’, the ‘heroic’ and the ‘human’. Vico portrayed each age as manifesting its own particular kind of customs, laws, language, and even human nature. He did not, however, see this historical sequence as necessarily irreversible. So, he elaborated the idea of the ricorso, the return of an earlier age in the life of a culture. The course of humanity, according to Vico, goes from a poetical nature, through a heroic one, to a rationalistic one. Each age has its own kind of mentality and language. The poetic mentality, for instance, generates myths; the heroic one, legends; and the rational one, narrative history. Rationality, according to Vico is humanity’s greatest achievement. But, unlike Cartesian philosophers, he did not see it as an innate ‘given’. He considered it to be a point of arrival that was achievable only in a social ambiance. Human beings do not inherit rationality from their biological legacy. Stripped of culture, which is a collective memoria, human beings would be forced to resort to their poetic, or corporeal, imaginations to make sense of the world all over again.

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This general train of thought, of change (structuration through language) and development (destructuration) is implicit in Vico and explicit in Goldmann. The key to understanding cultural evolution, in both, is language and its literary products, because it constitutes the primary expressive means by which humans encode their thoughts and, therefore, can come together in order to think collectively – as a species. By studying the language of the people living during a specific age, Vico claimed, the scientist should be able to reconstruct the forma mentis of that people. This was Goldmann’s view as well. GS is thus an implicit adoption of Vico, with sprinklings from the sources mentioned above. Clearly, Goldmann made no reference to the Vichian paradigm, but it is nonetheless there and that is what makes GS potentially a powerful analytical tool today. But Goldmann’s view of scientific inquiry still creates problems among Western scientists for the simple reason that, in Western culture, the term science has always been synonymous with the ‘objective’ knowledge of ‘facts’ of the natural world, gained and verified by exact observation, experiment and ordered thinking. The model of language moving through tropological stages – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony – to produce the various literary genres, however, is now a principle of literary criticism, put forward initially by Northrop Frye in The Great Code, who admitted explicitly his reliance on Vico. In other words, GS is potentially a very powerful model for understanding the origins and evolution of conscious cognition – a goal that is being pursued today through cognitive science, neuroscience and other such sciences of the brain. These would be better informed by even a cursory understanding of genetic structuralism in its general outline form as a theory of human consciousness – a theory that relates the parts (human subjectivities) to the whole (human collectivities) through historical (genetic) forces, which play out in tandem with, but also separately from, biological forces.

Conclusion In order to have a comprehensive understanding about literary works, Goldmann called his model a dialectic method, that is, literary analysis method that mainly focuses on coherency, on how a literary study results in a single comprehensively coherent meaning. The term dialectic was used in this way by Hegel and elaborated later by Marx. But it seems to have retained its original Platonic sense of inquiry through logical and questioning procedure. This may be Goldmann’s most significant insight – the revival of dialectic method in the social sciences, which rely too much on empirical methods alone. But because of the advent of conceptual metaphor theory, the spread of Peircean semiotics throughout the social scientific landscape (see Peirce 1931–58), Goldmann is destined to remain largely at the margins of literary theory and the history of ideas – a fate suffered largely by Vico. Peirce’s views of the threefold nature of

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semiosis, from iconicity (sensoriality), to indexicality (relation), and symbolicity (cultural meaning-making) have many of the same elements implicit in GS. The fundamental dialectical principles that Goldmann elaborated, which revolve around his notion that human behaviour and agency can be seen as meaningful responses to particular situations and needs, and that human creativity is a reification of internal unconscious stages of change, are still fascinating and should be revisited if a true theory of literature is to be constructed, especially in an age where the very notion of literature itself is under discussion. Of particular relevance is the Hegelian notion of equilibrium, a force that comes about in response to specific contextual needs. This would lead to a whole series of speculations that are highly relevant today across various disciplines, such as: Is knowing a result of destructuring thought and action? Is there more to creation than subjectivity of expression? Is the sense of collectivity more primal than individualism? Can there be a truly new text? All this has significance for literary studies, cognitive science, anthropology and semiotics. In the latter case, GS might shed light on what Peirce called ‘hyposemiosis’ – the production of meaning that is culture-specific, yet universally accessible through inference.

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INTRODUCTION: POSTSTRUCTURALISM

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oststructuralism is a fairly loose term used to cover a range of thinkers, all of whom shared a common interest in challenging the status quo in their fields, particularly the basis for authority in each case and the criteria lying behind value judgements. Jacques Derrida initiated a thoroughgoing critique of the assumptions behind structuralism from the 1960s onwards, arguing that these were questionable when subjected to close scrutiny. Phenomenology had earlier challenged some of the basic assumptions behind Western philosophical thought, and poststructuralists drew heavily on this tradition, as Derek Robbins goes on to show in Chapter 6. A very influential school of thought, called ‘deconstruction’ grew out of Derrida’s work, and had a notable impact in fields such as literary studies, philosophy and feminist theory – eventually even in legal studies. Nikolai Duffy explores this in Chapter 7, arguing that although it has been widely demonised by the left (Marxists especially), its thoroughgoing scepticism is still of great value in analysing the claims made by the various systems of our culture. In Chapter 8, Georges Van Den Abbeele looks at how discourse theory developed from the linguistic researches of Émile Benveniste through to its most notable exponent, Michel Foucault, and then more recently to the ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ of Norman Fairclough. The many cross-references Van Den Abbeele makes in this chapter indicate just how central the concept of ‘discourse’ has become to the critical theory enterprise.

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6 PHENOMENOLOGY AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM Derek M. Robbins

Introduction

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y reference to articles published by Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss in the journal Word at the end of World War II, I first try to situate ‘structuralism’ philosophically prior to considering the subsequent function of the phenomenological movement in enabling an intellectual transition to ‘poststructuralism’ in France during the 1960s. I first consider the specific interpretation of Husserl offered by Merleau-Ponty and I then give brief accounts of the logic of Lyotard’s conceptualisation of ‘postmodernism’ and of Derrida’s development of ‘deconstructionism’ in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s version of Husserl’s work. I next consider the relationship of Bourdieu’s reflexive, ‘poststructuralist’ sociology to that interpretation of Husserl and, finally, I examine Diana Coole’s use of the work of Merleau-Ponty to ground a contemporary critical theory.

Ernst Cassirer Ernst Cassirer gave a paper on 10 February 1945, just a few days before his death, to the Linguistic Circle of New York. It was subsequently published in August of the same year in the first number of a new journal – Word – with the title: ‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’. Cassirer traced the history of the development of modern linguistics and he attempted to place that development in its philosophical context. During the nineteenth century, he argued, the emerging science of linguistics looked to physics and psychology for its models and, in each case, this meant operating with the prevailing materialism of those disciplines. The corollary was that the ‘logical’ dimension of language was neglected. It was Husserl who reversed this tendency. His Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations] (Husserl 1900, 1922) insisted, in Cassirer’s words, that ‘logical truth is formal, not material, truth’ and: ‘It does not depend on special empirical conditions, it is universal and necessary’ (Cassirer 1945: 103). Cassirer argued that Husserl’s attack on

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psychologism and his dismissal of John Stuart Mill’s attempt to establish a ‘system of logic’ empirically necessarily caused difficulties for the development of the science of linguistics which depended on some relationship with empirical psychology. Cassirer referred to Leibniz’s familiar distinction between ‘truths of logic’ and ‘truths of fact’ and he suggested, however, that ‘If the adherents and defenders of the program of linguistic structuralism are right, then we must say that in the realm of language there is no opposition between what is “formal” and what is merely “factual” ’ (Cassirer 1945: 104). He referred specifically to de Saussure, Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson, and other members of the ‘Cercle Linguistique de Prague’, as major proponents of this view. Cassirer proceeded to digress slightly to consider the ‘morphological idealism’ which he found in the biological work of Goethe, Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, in order to pose the question whether contemporary linguistics was in a situation which was analoguous with that of comparative anatomy in the mid-nineteenth century. There seemed to be two critical questions: ‘The first is, Is language an organism?; the second, Is linguistics a natural science or is it a Geisteswissenschaft?’ [science of the mind/spirit] (Cassirer 1945: 109). Cassirer found the first question to be based on a ‘mere metaphor’ and he concluded succinctly that ‘we may say that language is “organic”, but that it is not an “organism” ’ (Cassirer 1945: 110). The second question re-opened the fin-de-siècle debate between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaft. Cassirer expressed surprise that two of the main contributors to this debate – Dilthey and Rickert – had not reflected on the status of language. His view was that linguistics should be considered a Geisteswissenschaft as long as we do not regard ‘Geist’ as a substance which is opposite to ‘matter’. Cassirer reiterated his early rejection of substantialismin order to insist that ‘Geist’ should be used ‘in a functional sense as a comprehensive name for all those functions which constitute and build up the world of culture’ (see Cassirer 1923). He also related this view to the notion of ‘symbolic form’ which had become the key to his philosophical orientation (see Cassirer 1953–7): ‘Language is a “symbolic form”. It consists of symbols, and symbols are no part of our physical world. They belong to an entirely different universe of discourse’ (Cassirer 1945: 114). Cassirer’s paper was a slightly inconclusive, although enlightening, ramble around the topic. He recommended the work of von Humboldt and discussed the meaning of ‘Gestalt’ before concluding: What I wished to make clear in this paper is the fact that structuralism is no isolated phenomenon; it is, rather, the expression of a general tendency of thought that, in these last decades, has become more and more prominent in almost all fields of scientific research. (Cassirer 1945: 120) The key point, in other words, was that, in Cassirer’s view, the development of structuralist linguistics simply raised in acute form the problem of

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the relationship between descriptive language and phenomena that had been endemic in Western European epistemology in respect of all science since the emergence of the Scientific Revolution.

Claude Lévi-Strauss Less than a year before, in May, 1944, Claude Lévi-Strauss had delivered a paper to the same Linguistic Circle of New York entitled: ‘Application des méthodes de la linguistique moderne à l’anthropologie, particulièrement aux systèmes de parenté’ [‘Application of the methods of modern linguistics to anthropology, particularly to kinship systems’]. This must have been the basis of the article which was published in the second number of Word (August 1945) as ‘L’analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie’ [‘Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology’] (Lévi-Strauss 1945). There is no evidence of direct dialogue between Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss, but some degree of cross-reference must have been in the minds of the editors of Word. Lévi-Strauss’s article would become one of the most important contributions to the collection of essays which he published in 1958 as Anthropologie structurale – a book which, translated into English in 1963 (Structural Anthropology), dominated the structuralist vogue in the 1960s both in France and in the English-speaking intellectual world. From the outset, Lévi-Strauss insisted that the scientific success of linguistics should not be confined to linguistics. He said of the journal Word that, ‘It must also welcome psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists eager to learn from modern linguistics the road which leads to the empirical knowledge of social phenomena’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 31). In respect of anthropology, it should now no longer be the case that linguists and anthropologists might ‘occasionally communicate’ but, instead, that they should acknowledge that their operations formally resemble each other. As Lévi-Strauss commented: ‘Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 34). As Lévi-Strauss pursues his argument, however, it becomes increasingly clear that he was attempting to associate linguistics with the social sciences with a view to refining their analyses rather than with a view to advancing ‘the empirical knowledge of social phenomena’. He argued that previous work which had tried to bring linguistics and anthropology together had analysed speech and vocabulary and had not yet understood that ‘structural analysis cannot be applied to words directly, but only to words previously broken down into phonemes’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 36). The article proceeded to discuss the way in which structural analysis can operate in relation to kinship systems. Lévi-Strauss first differentiated between systems of ‘terminology’ and systems of ‘attitudes’, insisting that there is a ‘profound difference’ between the two. He argued against Radcliffe-Brown’s supposed view that attitudes ‘are nothing but the expression or transposition of terms on the affective level’ (Lévi-Strauss

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1963: 38), and he proceeded to consider in detail Radcliffe-Brown’s discussion of the ‘avunculate’ as expressed in his article on the maternal uncle in South Africa (see Radcliffe-Brown 1941). Radcliffe-Brown had concluded that there were two opposed sets of systems of attitudes in operation in the situation which he had observed and that the determinant in choosing between them was ‘descent’ – that is to say the historically diffused dispositions inherent in the particular situation. By contrast, Lévi-Strauss proceeded to offer additional evidence of the same avunculate phenomenon derived from completely different societies – the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia, Tonga in Polynesia, and Lake Kutubu in New Guinea – in order to falsify the ‘descent’ interpretation. He concluded that ‘in order to understand the avunculate we must treat it as one relationship within a system, while the system itself must be considered as a whole in order to grasp its structure’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 46). Lévi-Strauss anticipated some objections to his conclusion and, in particular, he tried to counter the objection that his structural analysis would suppose that the avunculate should be present at all times and in all places. Lévi-Strauss’s response was to argue that kinship systems do not have the same importance in all cultures and hence that the first task of the structuralist anthropologist is to ask, in relation to the observation of any culture, the preliminary question: ‘Is the system systematic?’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 48). In this defence, LéviStrauss appears to have renounced the ambition of cultural anthropology in pursuit, instead, of the more circumscribed interest in analysing the intrinsic systematicity of systems. The article ends with a clear confrontation with the research tradition associated with Radcliffe-Brown. Lévi-Strauss cites a passage from Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘The Study of Kinship Systems’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1941) in which he argued that kinship systems are constructed genealogically, and Lévi-Strauss argues in opposition: Of course, the biological family is ubiquitous in human society. But what confers upon kinship its socio-cultural character is not what it retains from nature, but, rather, the essential way in which it diverges from nature. A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation. (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 50) He comments, finally, that we must ‘never lose sight of the fact that, in both anthropological and linguistic research, we are dealing strictly with symbolism’ and we must recognise that ‘any concession to naturalism might jeopardize the immense progress already made in linguistics, which is also beginning to characterize the study of family structure, and might drive the sociology of the family toward a sterile empiricism, devoid of inspiration’ (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 51).

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty Lévi-Strauss returned to France from the United States in 1948. Refugees from Nazi Germany had already imported phenomenological thinking to the United States and social philosophers such as Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch had made attempts to assimilate the legacy of Husserl to indigenous American pragmatism. Marvin Farber was instrumental in managing this process of intellectual assimilation, editing, in 1940, Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (Farber 1940), and then, in 1943, The Foundation of Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the Quest for a Rigorous Philosophy (Farber 1943). Most of this first American reception was of ‘early’ Husserl. There is no evidence that Lévi-Strauss engaged philosophically with this work and it is clear from Cassirer’s article that he still regarded Husserl primarily as an idealist critic of psychologism who contributed beneficially to the rejection of the influence of materialism on linguistic theory in the nineteenth century. On returning to France, Lévi-Strauss would have found that there was already great and increasing interest in the work of Husserl and that there were several competing strands of interpretations of phenomenology – in part a consequence of the posthumous publication of his texts from the archive established during World War II at Louvain. Merleau-Ponty had been one of the first to take advantage of the archive at Louvain. He went to Louvain first in April 1939, and retained access to unpublished material all through the 1940s. We know from H. L. van Breda’s account (1962), precisely what kind of access Merleau-Ponty had to the Husserl archives which had been moved to Louvain after Husserl’s death in 1938. Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du comportement [The Structure of Behaviour] had been published in 1942 and his Phénoménologie de Perception [The Phenomenology of Perception] in 1945. As well as Ideen I [Ideas I] (Husserl 1983) this cited other early works of Husserl; late published works such as Erfahrung und Urteil [Experience and Judgement], ed. Landgrebe [1948] (1973) and Part I of Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie [The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology] (Husserl 1970b); and unpublished works, including Parts II and III of Die Krisis [The Crisis] which had been consulted at Louvain. Merleau-Ponty’s course of general psychology at the Sorbonne in 1950/1 was on Les sciences de l’homme et la phénoménologie [Human Sciences and Phenomenology], reissued in 1958. In April 1951, he gave a paper entitled ‘Sur la phénoménologie du langage’ [‘On the phenomenology of language’] to the first international colloque of phenomenology which was published in 1952 in Problèmes actuels de la phénoménologie [Contemporary Problems of Phenomenology] and subsequently reprinted in his Signes [Signs] in 1960. In July 1951, the Cahiers internationaux de sociologie published his ‘Le philosophe et la sociologie’ [‘The philosopher and sociology’], which was also reprinted in Signes. In

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‘Sur la phénoménologie du langage’, Merleau-Ponty made the important distinction between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Husserl, suggesting that in the former period Husserl had regarded ‘les langues empiriques comme des réalisations “brouillées” du langage essentiel’ [‘empirical languages as “muddled” realisations of essential language’] (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 137). By contrast, MerleauPonty argued that in his late period Husserl represented language comme une manière originale de viser certains objets, comme le corps de la pensée (Formale und transzendentale Logik) . . . ou même comme l’opération par laquelle des pensées qui, sans lui, resteraient phénomènes privés, acquièrent valeur intersubjective et finalement existence idéale (Ursprung der Geometrie) [as an original way of targeting certain objects, like the body of thought (Formal and Transcendental Logic) . . . or even like the operation whereby thoughts which, without it, would remain private phenomena, acquire intersubjective value and, ultimately, ideal existence (Origin of Geometry)]. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 137) Husserl had begun, in Logical Investigations, by opposing the view that our knowledge is dependent on our psychological make-up and by seeking to emphasise instead the importance of logic. This was what still seemed to Cassirer to be the essence of Husserl’s a priori idealism or transcendental phenomenology. The influence on Husserl of his pupil Heidegger was that Husserl gradually seemed increasingly to countenance an emphasis on historically situated Being (Dasein). In the posthumously published ‘late’ Husserl texts (especially The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1970b), and Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (Husserl 1973)), he seemed to emphasise that logic is grounded in our experience of the social world, or what he called the ‘life-world’. This impression may have been the consequence of the editorial work of his assistant Ludwig Landgrebe who had carried out his doctoral research on Wilhelm Dilthey and was subsequently to indicate his attachment to Heidegger’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty was among the first of Husserl’s followers to appreciate the significance of this apparent shift. In the passages quoted above, Merleau-Ponty referred to Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, published in 1929, and to his Origin of Geometry, first published posthumously in 1939 (see Landgrebe’s Introduction to Husserl 1973, for the circumstances in which Husserl wrote Formal and Transcendental Logic and its relation to Experience and Judgement). Merleau-Ponty’s contention was that Husserl had moved away from an emphasis of a pre-existing, a priori, ideal, or essential language form towards the view that linguistic expression is a material, bodily function within the world, an instrument of behavioural adaptation, an activity of corporeal interaction or inter-subjectivity, which

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has the effect of constructing the ideal. In the specialist terminology of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty advanced the view that Husserl had moved from transcendental to constitutive phenomenology or, better, to a phenomenology in which transcendentalism is constituted. For Merleau-Ponty, wrestling with his relationship to Marxism at the time of the death of Stalin (1953), this interpretation of Husserl enabled him to render dialectical materialism compatible with idealism rather than antagonistic towards it. It also enabled him to distinguish his position from that of Sartre, whose L’Étre et le Néant [Being and Nothingness] (Sartre, 1958), subtitled ‘an essay in phenomenological ontology’ still presupposed the view of the primacy of the individual ego that he had outlined in his first publication which appeared in 1936 as Un essai sur la transcendance de l’Ego [An Essay on the Transcendence of the Ego] (Sartre, 1972).

The Post-War Generation in France Jean-François Lyotard Merleau-Ponty had been influenced by the lectures which Aron Gurwitsch had given in France during the period at the end of the 1930s after he had left Germany and before his emigration to the United States in 1940. In an essay entitled ‘The Perceptual World and the Rationalized Universe’, probably written in 1953, Gurwitsch wrote: In the final period of his life, Husserl did, more and more, call attention to the perceptual world, such as the latter plays a role in everyday, natural life. That is the world in which we find ourselves, in which we act, react, and work. It is in that world that we encounter our fellow human beings, to whom we are bound by the most diverse relationships. All our desires and hopes, all our apprehensions and fears, all our pleasures and sufferings (in short, all our affective and emotional life) are related to that world; all our intellectual activities, both practical and theoretical, also refer to it. In describing and analysing the perceptual world, one must take it such as it, in actual fact, offers itself to the natural consciousness of everyday life, such as it appears prior to the idealizations entailed by scientific interpretation and explanation. The world is conceived by modern civilized human beings in the perspective of the physical sciences, such as they have been established since the seventeenth century. Even when we happen not to be physicists, or when we are not very familiar with the theories of physics and with the results arrived at by it, we conceive and interpret the world in relation to the very existence of physics. (Gurwitsch, ed. J. Garcia-Gomez 2009: 411–12)

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Following late Husserl, Gurwitsch argues that we all go about our lives in a perceptual world and that the explanations of the sciences are rationalisations or idealisations which are superimposed on our everyday perceptions. However, Gurwitsch does not suppose that our perceptions remain experiential in an unchanging way. The second paragraph in the quoted passage indicates that, historically, past rationalisations become incorporated into taken-for-granted present perceptions. This can be described as an acceptance that, trans-culturally and trans-historically, primary perception is susceptible to rational modification. The essential emphasis of constitutive phenomenology, therefore, is that, in every generation, the process of constituting understandings of the world remains the same in deriving rational explanation from primary experience, but that, historically, newly constituted meanings redefine primary experience for every succeeding generation. This is not to say that the historical constitution of meaning is inevitably ‘progressive’ or cumulative. On the contrary, every generation has the capacity inter-subjectively to construct understandings which are valid for itself by manipulating those which it inherits. Rationalisations have no absolute referential value. Explanations do not develop autonomously in differentiated discourses but are mediated by continuous reference to primary experience but, equally, that primary experience is not grounded humanistically in a transcendent ego. Primary experience is continuously collective or inter-subjective rather than individualistic or egoistic. The title of a 1941 article of Gurwitsch – ‘A non-egological conception of consciousness’ (Gurwitsch 1941) – highlights the differentiation of constitutive phenomenology from Sartrean existentialism. Although Sartre advanced the view that existence precedes essence, he did so by presupposing that all individual human beings constitute themselves in absolute freedom rather than by supposing that constituting ‘individuals’ are already systemically pre-constituted – saturated with inherited or socially mediated attitudes and dispositions. This is the background to the situation in which Lyotard, Derrida and Bourdieu began their intellectual careers. Lyotard was the oldest of the three (born in 1924) and graduated from the Sorbonne at the end of the 1940s. Derrida and Bourdieu were both born in 1930 and both entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1950. Shortly after completing a Master’s thesis on ‘Indifference’, Lyotard taught in Algeria for two years, returning to France in 1952. In 1954, he published his short introduction to phenomenology in the ‘Que Sais-je’ series of the Presses Universitaires de France (Lyotard 1991). Importantly, Lyotard recognised that any response to phenomenology demanded that it should be understood as a movement rather than as a fixed philosophical position. He tried to outline the ‘common style’ of phenomenology after ‘having rendered to Husserl that which is Husserl’s: having begun’ (Lyotard 1991: 34). The first part of the book, devoted to Husserl, was followed by a short ‘Note on Husserl and

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Hegel’. Lyotard acknowledged that it was Hegel who had originally given ‘phenomenology’ its meaning, but he argued that the crucial distinction between the two thinkers was that ‘Hegelian phenomenology closes the system’ while ‘Husserlian description inaugurates the grasping of the “thing-itself” before all predication’ (Lyotard 1991: 68). In other words, to use Lyotard’s later terminology, Hegel’s dialectic was wrongly subordinated to a historical grand narrative. In this early text, therefore, we can find Lyotard’s latent hostility to totalising systems of thought. The second part of the book is devoted to discussion of ‘Phenomenology and the Human Sciences’ which offers, first, a general discussion of the relationship and then subsequent chapters considering phenomenology and psychology, sociology, and history. Lyotard accurately contended that Phenomenology constitutes at the same time both a ‘logical’ introduction to the human sciences, in seeking to define the object eidetically prior to all experimentation; and a philosophical ‘reprise’ of the results of experimentation, insofar as it seeks to retrieve fundamental meaning, particularly in proceeding to the critical analysis of the intellectual apparatus used. (Lyotard 1991: 76) What was missing from Lyotard’s discussion in 1954, however, was any critique of the status of cognition. He had absorbed Husserl’s commitment to the development of ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’ (to use the title of a text of Husserl of 1911) and explored the consequences of this position for the human sciences. In the late 1960s, Lyotard studied at Nanterre and came under the influence there of Mikel Dufrenne whose Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique [Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience] had been published in 1953 (Dufrenne 1953). The influence was apparent in the thesis which Lyotard wrote at that time which was published in 1971 as Discours, figure [Discourse, Figuration] (Lyotard 1971). Whereas Lyotard’s La Phénoménologie quotes Merleau-Ponty’s La phénoménologie de la perception favourably, Discours, figure considers the shortcomings of Merleau-Ponty’s posthumously published (1961) reflections on the work of Cézanne: L’oeil et l’esprit [Eye and Mind]. Merleau-Ponty rightly maintained his opposition to the dualism of Descartes’s Dioptrique [Dioptrics] but, in Lyotard’s view, he remained trapped within a commitment still to the primacy of cognition and consciousness. In the reflections of these two early texts of Lyotard on Husserl, mediated in part by Merleau-Ponty, we find, therefore, most of the ingredients of what he was to articulate briefly in La condition postmoderne [The Postmodern Condition] (Lyotard 1984) and in more detail in Le différend [The Differend] (Lyotard 1988). This is not the place to explore the development of Lyotard’s thinking in detail, but I simply suggest that some of the main characteristics of ‘postmodernism’ – scepticism about the grand narrative of history, opposition

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to the repression of art by rational analysis, espousal of small narratives as modes of individual communication – derive from his reading of Husserl.

Jacques Derrida By 1957, Derrida was planning a state doctorate on ‘The Ideality of the Literary Object’. This was never completed but, instead, he gave a paper in July 1959, on ‘ “Genèse et structure” et la phénoménologie’ at a conference held at Cerisy-la-Salle which was subsequently published in revised form (de Gandillac 1965). This paper was followed, in 1962, by Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry (which was one of the ‘late’ Husserl texts cited by Merleau-Ponty) (Derrida 1989). In his paper of 1959, Derrida argued strongly against the prevailing tendency of the time to differentiate the ‘late’ from the ‘early’ Husserl. He juxtaposed passages from Husserl’s first work – Philosophy of Arithmetic of 1891 – and his Formal and Transcendental Logic of 1929, and then analysed the argument of Ideen I (1913) so as to suggest that Husserl would never throughout his career have recognised any choice between ‘structural’ and ‘genetic’ analysis, and would never have considered that genetic analysis superseded structural. On the contrary, Husserl’s constant quest was, in his own words, to identify ‘the structural aprioris . . . of genesis itself’ (Derrida in de Gandillac 1965: 245). In so far as Husserl did move towards ‘constitutive’ phenomenology, this seemed to cause him, according to Derrida: to renounce the purely descriptive space and the transcendental pretention of his research in favour of a metaphysic of history where the solid structure of a Telos would allow him to recover . . . a primitive genesis which became more and more invasive and which seemed to accommodate phenomenological apriorism and transcendental idealism less and less. (Derrida in de Gandillac 1965: 246) In short, Derrida suggested that Husserl, perhaps under the influence of Heidegger, had succumbed to a self-betrayal. Derrida was, therefore, intent on restoring the dialectic which he believed informed Husserl’s procedure, from ‘early’ to ‘late’, a dialectic, however, which emphasised the primacy of structures as a prioristically present as preconditions for experience. From the very beginning, in his Philosophy of Arithmetic, Derrida argues, Husserl refused to locate the origin of the universality of arithmetic discourse in any ‘heavenly sphere’. This necessarily seemed to push him towards locating the discourse empirically as grounded psychologically, but it was ‘psychologism’ that he sought to combat and, unlike some of his contemporary philosophical psychologists, such as Wundt, he never went as far as suggesting that the recognition of the genetic constitution of ideality amounted to its ‘epistemological

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validation’ (Derrida in de Gandillac 1965: 247). Derrida proceeded to clarify his reading of Husserl by differentiating Husserl’s approach from those separately taken by Wilhelm Dilthey and the Gestalt psychologists. My use of the word ‘ideality’ in respect of Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl’s view of arithmetical language indicates the relationship between Derrida’s paper and his proposed doctoral thesis. Derrida was interested in the philosophical grounds for claiming that literary discourse might transcend the particular conditions of its production. Derrida pursued the same implicit enquiry in his subsequent introduction to Husserl’s last text, emphasising the affinity between Husserl’s earliest discussion of arithmetic and his latest discussion of geometry. He argues that ‘the origin of arithmetic was described in terms of psychological genesis’ in the early text – specifically not as a history of arithmetic, while in the late text, Husserl repeated the same project in respect of the origin of geometry ‘under the species of a phenomenological history’ (Derrida [1962] 1989: 28), that is to say, under the species of a non-empirical history. Underlying this endeavour over a period of fifty years lay Husserl’s attempt to deploy history categorally rather than empirically, and Derrida devotes much of his introduction to the Origin of Geometry to consideration of the validity of Husserl’s understanding of history. Derrida’s conclusion is that Husserl made a shift towards an emphasis on language which is a ‘historical incarnation’ which ‘sets free the transcendental, instead of binding it’ (Derrida [1962] 1989: 77). Again, this is not the place to explore Derrida’s work in further detail. My point is simply to illustrate that Derrida’s response to Husserl was anti-empirical in form and content. He operated within philosophical discourse and emphasised the quest for a non-empirically defined notion of genesis. His discussion of speech and writing in the introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry anticipated the development of his own ‘deconstructionist’ thinking.

Pierre Bourdieu Bourdieu made some cryptic remarks about his thinking during his student years at the École Normale Supérieure (1950–4) in an interview of 1985 with, amongst others, Axel Honneth. Asked whether he had never been interested in existentialism, Bourdieu replied: I read Heidegger, I read him a lot and with a certain fascination, especially the analyses in Sein und Zeit of public time, history, and so on, which, together with Husserl’s analyses in Ideen II, helped me a great deal – as was later the case with Schütz – in my efforts to analyse the ordinary experience of the social. But I never really got into the existentialist mood. Merleau-Ponty was something different, at least in my view. He was interested in the human sciences and in biology, and he gave you an idea of what thinking about immediate present-day concerns can be

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like when it doesn’t fall into the sectarian over-simplifications of political discussion . . . he seemed to represent one potential way out of the philosophical babble found in academic institutions . . . (Bourdieu 1990: 5) Unlike Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard and Derrida, all of whom were inclined to offer their thinking as ‘philosophy’, Bourdieu, by contrast, was always disposed to take the view, as he later expressed it, that ‘tout est social’ [‘everything is social’] (Bourdieu 1992), including the foundations of philosophical discourse. Merleau-Ponty’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France was ‘In praise of philosophy’ (Merleau-Ponty 1963) even though traditional philosophers thought that his contribution was an aberration (see Robbins 2012). In spite of their positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the experimental university centre at Vincennes, respectively, Derrida and Lyotard were also instrumental in the establishment in 1983 of the ‘Collège International de Philosophie’ which, although opposed to the ‘state-philosophical’ model of institutionalised philosophy, nevertheless sought to revive acts of philosophising. In the year that the college opened, Bourdieu made a contribution entitled ‘The Philosophical Establishment’ to a collection of essays on Philosophy in France Today (Bourdieu 1983). Bourdieu took the view that philosophical discourse operates with its own rules within socially constructed institutional contexts. Its value was dependent on its practical relevance and it is significant that he gave ‘Fieldwork in philosophy’ as the title for the interview of 1985 quoted above. Bourdieu’s position-taking in respect of philosophy was consistent with the interpretation of the work of Husserl which always lay at the back of his thinking. It was consistent with Lyotard’s recognition that phenomenology established an open movement rather than a species of institutional philosophy, but Bourdieu chose to pursue the implications of this perception in his social scientific research whereas Lyotard sought to actualise his view of the potential of non-cognitive artistic activity. Bourdieu’s poststructuralist social science developed out of his awareness of constitutive phenomenology and, as suggested in the quote above taken from Gurwitsch, it was completely logical that his poststructuralist position should emerge gradually after he had assimilated a structuralist approach, that, in other words, his poststructuralism was never an anti-structuralism but, rather, a position consciously constituted from what it superseded. Bourdieu was conscripted to serve in the French army in Algeria in 1956. After demobilisation in 1958, he taught at the University of Algiers for two years during which time he wrote Sociologie de l’algérie and carried out the research which led to the publication of Travail et travailleurs en algérie (Bourdieu, Darbel, Rivet and Seibel 1963) and Le déracinement, la crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en algérie (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964). The first two publications were elements of a combined ‘acculturation’ project. Trained as

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a philosopher, Bourdieu absorbed the methodology of acculturation studies developed in the United States by, among others, Melville Herskovits. This involved an attempt to measure cultural adaptation by assessing attitudinal changes in relation to baseline characteristics, but Bourdieu approached a task which was intrinsically defined in social psychological and cultural anthropology terms with his own particular phenomenological orientation. He was confronted with the problem of how to communicate his findings within the accepted intellectual frameworks of existing discipline discourses. Sociologie de l’algérie was translated into English in 1962 as The Algerians (Bourdieu 1962). Bourdieu took the opportunity to elaborate his original account of the traditional social organisation of Algerian tribes by introducing a series of diagrams which represented genealogical practices structurally. In short, Bourdieu adopted the descriptive procedures which had become dominant in France as a consequence of Lévi-Strauss’s publication of his Structural Anthropology (1958). Bourdieu was invited back to France in 1960 by Raymond Aron who had established a research centre and was in need of active young researchers to pursue sociological enquiries related to the positions which he had outlined in his courses of lectures since his appointment to the chair of sociology at the Sorbonne in 1955. In other words, Bourdieu was constrained in the 1960s both by the domination of structuralism within the field of anthropology and by the circumscribed parameters assigned to sociology by the anti-Durkheimian Aron. Bourdieu worked within, and then beyond, these ‘censures’. After publishing several books arising from his Algerian research, Bourdieu then directed three major research projects – on student culture, on museum and art gallery attendance, and on photography. These projects generated texts which seemed to have involved detailed empirical work and they were quickly categorised as contributions to the sociology of education and culture. However, the meticulous way in which the procedures adopted in these projects was always specified in appendices suggested that Bourdieu was seeking to articulate his sense that his findings were not comprehensive representations of social reality but logical consequences of those ‘problems’ which corresponded with his own attitudinal dispositions. His objectifications were grounded subjectively, although he also argued that his ‘subjectivity’ itself was systemically generated. In the second half of the 1960s Bourdieu wrote several key articles which show that he was exploring the relationship between forms of explanation and forms of prior experience. The first of these – ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’ [‘Intellectual field and creative project’] (Bourdieu 1971) – was published in a special number of Les Temps Modernes (1966) devoted to the ‘problems of structuralism’, edited by Jean Pouillon. In his ‘presentation’ of the special number, entitled ‘un essai de définition’ [‘An attempt at definition’], Pouillon, an anthropologist who shortly afterwards was to edit a collection of articles in honour of Lévi-Strauss on his sixtieth birthday, articulated the fact that ‘structure’ was being used in two different ways. As he puts it: ‘En fait, la

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structure est à la fois une réalité – cette configuration que l’analyse découvre – et un outil intellectuel – la loi de sa variabilité.’ [‘In fact, the structure is at the same time a reality – that configuration which analysis uncovers – and an intellectual tool – the law of its variability.’] He usefully argued that French has two adjectives which are spelled differently: ‘ “Structural” renvoie à la structure comme syntaxe, “structurel” renvoie à la structure comme réalité’ [‘ “structural” relates to structure as syntax, “structurel” relates to structure as reality’] (Pouillon 1966: 779–80). This differentiation corresponds with the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘factual’ structuralism to which Cassirer referred. I argued that Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Radcliffe-Brown and of diffusionism in anthropology suggested that he was primarily concerned with ‘formal’ structuralism. Bourdieu’s article introduced the concept of ‘field’ as a way of securing a dialectical relationship between the formal and the factual. In doing this, Bourdieu began to deploy constitutive phenomenology and, perhaps quite specifically, the concept developed by Gurwitsch in his Théorie du champ de la conscience (Gurwitsch 1957), translated as The Field of Consciousness (Gurwitsch 1964). In his first paragraph, Bourdieu announced that all products of intellectual creativity – whether of art, literature, science or theatre – derive their meaning within an exchange system of values – ‘fields’ – rather than as expressions of individual intention. He deployed a factual structuralism to try to discredit subjectivist individualism. Lévi-Strauss had suggested that the validity of this kind of factual structuralism depended on the intrinsic susceptibility of observed phenomena to be analysed systematically, whereas, in his second paragraph, Bourdieu hinted that the validity of factual structuralism rather depended on the artificial construction of past fields of reality by present structuralists disposed to impose a meaningful system on inchoate facts. There was a structuralism in fact in historical situations but this was the immanent construct of historical agents. There is no necessary connection between the factual structuralism of the past and the interpretive impositions on that past of present formal structuralists. Present-day formal structuration just happens to be the strategic activity of a minority of structuralist linguists exchanging their interpretations within the constituted and circumscribed field of structural linguistics. Even while he was, in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron, preparing the publication of La reproduction [Reproduction], subtitled ‘Éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement’ [‘Elements for a theory of the educational system’] (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), Bourdieu continued to explore the nature of the correlation between factual and formal structuration. His ‘Condition de classe et position de classe’ [‘Class condition and class position’] (Bourdieu 1966a) implied that explanations of social phenomena, such as peasantry, in terms of unitary, universal class condition are formal impositions on the factual constitution of class relations through position-taking practised immanently by social agents in diverse contexts. His ‘Sociology and

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Philosophy in France since 1945: Death and Resurrection of a Philosophy without Subject’, written with Jean-Claude Passeron (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967), suggested both that the humanist tendency of Sartrean existentialism was historically constituted in some kind of systemic, structural affinity with the Resistance and the subsequent Liberation, and that, fallaciously, American neo-positivism contrived in response to be a-philosophically objective. For Bourdieu, constitutive phenomenology opened up the possibility that there could be an ongoing dialectic between subjective and objective social perceptions, whereby there might be recognition that all subjects differentially objectify experience and that all objectifications are grounded in subjective experience. Knowledge and experience constitute each other bi-directionally. Differentiation between the two is not a matter of kind, but of relative power. Bourdieu’s orientation towards acceptance of a constitutive dialectic was reinforced by his reading of Cassirer at the time, stimulated by his work on Cassirer’s pupil, Erwin Panofsky (see Bourdieu’s Postface to his translation of Panofsky 1967). In his ‘Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge’ (Bourdieu 1968), Bourdieu began by acknowledging that the influence of structuralism had been beneficial in exorcising subjectivist or social psychological interpretation from social scientific explanation, but this negative achievement was not sufficient. Bourdieu cites Cassirer’s article in Word in making his case for a theory of sociological knowledge which would assimilate formal structuralism by situating it within the practice of social agents. Bourdieu’s attachment to constitutive phenomenology enabled him to articulate a poststructuralist position which, by definition, had to be advanced through sociological engagement with the social rather than through philosophical detachment. It was in the 1970s that Bourdieu consolidated his scepticism in respect of ‘natural attitude’ social sciences in favour of constitutive assumptions which would finally lead to his commitments to ‘reflexive sociology’ and to ‘socio-analytic encounter’. The transition from his Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972) to its ‘translation’ as Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) is indicative of Bourdieu’s crucial advance towards a poststructuralist position. The first text offered three ‘structuralist’ articles about Algeria written in the early 1960s (one of which – ‘La maison kabyle ou le monde renversé’ [‘The Berber House or the World Reversed’] – was included in Pouillon’s publication in honour of Lévi-Strauss: Pouillon and Maranda 1970). Bourdieu then proceeded to provide a critique of the shortcomings of his earlier, structuralist articles. By contrast, Bourdieu took the opportunity provided by an English translation to reorganise the text. The new book incorporated the three articles into the discussion in such a way that it offered a positive blueprint for future research rather than a rejection of earlier achievement. One crucial section of the changing text was published in English in 1973 as ‘The Three Forms of Theoretical Knowledge’ (Bourdieu 1973). Here Bourdieu outlined his view that social research requires two ‘epistemological

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breaks’. To become constituted as ‘science’, the unarticulated primary experiences of people have to be re-presented objectively according to the socially constructed rules of relatively autonomous discourses. In order that this necessary break should not privilege objective understanding as absolutely valid or superior, there has to be a second break whereby the social conditions of production of objective explanation are subjected to scrutiny. As he was to put this in 1973 in ‘Sur le pouvoir symbolique’ [‘On symbolic power’], there are ‘structuring structures’ (‘factual structuralism’) and there are ‘structured structures’ (‘formal structuralism’) (in Bourdieu 1991). Bourdieu’s poststructuralism represented an attempt to retain a dialectical relationship between the two kinds of structures. It was not simply that Bourdieu was adopting a constitutive methodology in his projected researches. The essence of Bourdieu’s poststructuralism was that he accepted that his new research orientation had been constituted cumulatively from his earlier research. Bourdieu wrote several articles in which he explored the ‘structure’ and ‘genesis’ of his thoughts or those of others. Unlike Derrida, however, Bourdieu was not drawn to philosophical deconstruction, but, rather, to an acceptance of a continuing process of social historical construction to which his own work was just one socially motivated contribution. He does not appear to have had reservations about ‘empirical history’ in part because, like Merleau-Ponty, he saw it more as a process of corporeal inter-generational transmission in which cognitive behaviour is an instrument of adaptation than as an intellectual progression.

Poststructuralism after Bourdieu Constitutive phenomenology entails constant re-constitution. Poststructuralism was the product of a particular historical moment when structuralism was re-constituted. During his lifetime, Bourdieu was able to sustain a correlation between his contributions to structured discourses, such as those of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, literary and art criticism, and the structuring social conditions of his personal trajectory. The short autobiography which he wrote in the last few months of his life (Bourdieu 2008) attempted to remain true to the anti-humanist orientation of ‘Intellectual field and creative project’ in that he presented his self and his intellectual work as the products of the social systems in which he had participated. The phenomenologically constitutive dimension underlying his reflexivity has been hard to preserve and his poststructuralism has been absorbed, as methodology, into resurgently autonomous discourses. Apart from attempts to counter this trend in relation to the post-mortem appropriation of Bourdieu’s work, one of the most promising reconstitutions of the phenomenological basis of poststructuralism has emerged in the work of Diana Coole. She concluded her first book on Women in Political Theory, published in 1988 when she was a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Leeds, with a chapter discussing ‘Contemporary Feminism

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and Political Thought’. She argued that there was a need for feminist thinking to transcend the supposed duality of gender characteristics – the supposition by which male domination had perpetuated itself. She recommended that feminists ‘need to engage in the demystification and deconstruction of patriarchal culture’ (Coole 1988: 276), but she insisted that recourse to genetic differentiation would be a mistake. As she put it: To the extent that (the contribution of women) is defined in terms of an essential female corporeality and psychology, however, the opportunity to emancipate women while redefining the world in which they live, will be lost. For then they will simply come full circle, voluntarily embracing those qualities which the earliest expressions of Western culture imposed upon them, when it structured its thinking in terms of sexual polarity in which the male principle was superior and central. (Coole 1988: 276–7) In short, women need to become engaged in an ongoing, poststructuralist reconstitution of their social roles. It was only in her Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (Coole 2007) that her indebtedness to MerleauPonty became explicit even though she mentioned in her acknowledgements that she had ‘had an abiding interest in Merleau-Ponty’s work ever since I discovered it as a doctoral student in Toronto (Coole 2007: vii). She justified her detailed study by submitting that Merleau-Ponty’s politics ‘suggests a way of returning to politics after poststructuralism, anti-humanism, and the demise of the subject’ (Coole 2007: 1). She also asked early in her study whether Merleau-Ponty should be viewed as ‘a thinker who combined phenomenology with poststructuralist sensitivity or, alternatively, a poststructuralist avant la lettre’ (Coole 2007: 10), preferring herself to take the former approach. These comments suggest that Coole’s perspective was shaped by the forms of poststructuralism which she wanted to oppose – forms which operated on the assumption that poststructuralism, anti-humanism, and the demise (death) of the subject were mutually reinforcing positions. My view is that Bourdieu ‘combined phenomenology with poststructuralist sensitivity’ and it was this that defined his poststructuralism – achieved perhaps on the basis of the way in which he effected an operational coexistence of formal and factual structuralisms. The consequence is that I concur with Coole’s representation of Merleau-Ponty’s position and think that Bourdieu’s work and political activism manifested precisely what it was she wanted to celebrate in the achievement of Merleau-Ponty. In her discussion of the development of the work of Judith Butler, Coole has cautiously welcomed Butler’s apparent recognition, in her Undoing Gender (Butler 2004), that agency suggests a relational process which is at odds with her ‘earlier emphasis on subjectivity as the constituted effect of power’ (Coole 2008: 27). Coole comments that this shift in Butler’s position, restoring some of the original phenomenological characteristics of

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her thinking, has important implications. She says of Butler’s reference to phenomenological apprehension that: It is the careful analysis of unfolding events and social trajectories this entails, together with the sociological sense of a complex social field on which it relies, that suggests a more engaged politics than poststructuralism is able to sustain. (Coole 2008: 27) For me, it was the phenomenological apprehension underpinning his sociological work that defined the alternative poststructuralism which Bourdieu offered.

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7 DECONSTRUCTION Nikolai Duffy

D

econstruction is arguably one of the most important and influential schools of modern thought, with its influence stretching across several different disciplines and fields, ranging from philosophy, critical theory and literary studies, to ethics, political science, historicism and jurisprudence. Yet despite the scale and range of influence deconstruction has had over the years, it is remarkably hard to pin down with any single or unifying definition. It is also hard to date. Deconstruction does not ‘begin’ with Derrida but, as Derrida has so often shown, was rather something that was always already at play throughout the entire history of Western metaphysics. The act of deconstruction is to engage reactively, to intervene, with this history. Far from being a hindrance, however, these problems of definition actually reveal something fundamentally important about deconstruction itself. To begin with, deconstruction is not a philosophy. Derrida is very clear on this point. Deconstruction does not present a system of thinking, and nor does it seek the foundational philosophical principles of ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’ (‘philosophy’, from the Greek, philosophia, meaning ‘the love of wisdom’: philo meaning ‘loving’, and sophia, knowledge). Yet nor is deconstruction, strictly speaking, a theory. It is not a set of rules, regulations or even assumptions that might be applied to a particular text or situation in order that they might be understood or interpreted. Deconstruction may well be put in service of elucidation but explaining things is not its primary motivation. On the contrary, deconstructive criticism argues that all systems of communication (literary, philosophical, cultural, political, legal, and so on) are governed by an inherent instability. One of deconstruction’s principle tasks is to demonstrate the ways in which this instability calls the regulation and habit of those systems into question. Deconstruction pulls the carpet out from under our feet. This in itself is a challenging position to hold, but deconstruction’s challenge – and critical importance – goes further than this. Deconstruction dismantles but does not offer any alternatives; in so doing, deconstruction challenges us to live in what we might think of as ‘deconstructed space’, that is, in a position of uncertainty in which we interrogate and question everything around us. For Derrida, this is the ethical vigilance of deconstruction; for its detractors, it is the anarchic and irrational consequence of deconstruction.

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Deconstruction first came to prominence in 1966 when Jacques Derrida published the lecture, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’. One of Derrida’s central arguments in the lecture was that the modern period – since at least the time of Nietzsche, and then developing via the work of Heidegger and Freud – is characterised by an essential breakdown of traditional ways of thinking. From the Renaissance onwards, ‘man’ had been placed at the centre of intellectual conceptions of the world; everything stemmed from and came back to the central position of the human. Starting with Nietzsche’s avowal of modern nihilism, however, Derrida argued that the foundational position of the human in intellectual conceptions of the universe had been eroded. Derrida cites three principle reasons for this breakdown of fixed notions of the world: world historical events (the two World Wars; the Holocaust as the mark of the collapse of Europe as the centre of the world order); science (including Werner Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ and the relativity of Einstein, both of which collapsed notions of time and space as fixed and absolute); and the modernist experimentation in literature, music and the visual arts. For Derrida, the world lacks fixity; it is decentred and premised not on fixed absolutes but on ‘play’. As Derrida writes: before becoming a discourse, an organised practice that resembles a philosophy, a theory, a method, which it is not, in regard to those unstable stabilities or this destabilization that it makes its principal theme, ‘deconstruction’ is firstly this destabilization on the move in, if one could speak thus, ‘the things themselves’. (Derrida 1988: 147) At its heart, deconstruction articulates a profound scepticism towards any claim to knowledge, even its own, such that rather than replacing one world view with another, deconstruction seeks to render all claims to knowledge equivocal. In 1967 Derrida developed these ideas at length in three landmark volumes: La Voix et la Phenomene (Speech and Phenomena), L’Ecriture et Difference (Writing and Difference), and De la Grammatologie (Of Grammatology). In Speech and Phenomena Derrida argued for the fundamental role of difference in language and thought, structuring his argument around a detailed close reading of the work of the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl. In Writing and Difference Derrida collected a series of essays in which he began to develop the particularities of his position in relation to contemporaneous debates about psychoanalysis, the human sciences and ethics. The third and final book, Of Grammatology, caused arguably the greatest interest and controversy (at least in the English-speaking world after the translation by Gayatri Spivak that was published in 1976), especially in terms of his elaborations about the notions of ‘text’ and what would come to be termed ‘différance’. After an introductory discussion in which Derrida argued that ‘grammatology’, the theory of written signs, could point the way to an understanding of language freed from

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the myth of presence and open to the work of différance, Derrida then began a painstaking ‘deconstruction’ of the accounts of language given by, among others, the Swiss semiotician, Ferdinand de Saussure, the French anthropologist and ethnologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the Swiss political philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ One of Derrida’s key statements in Of Grammatology was the much-quoted ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’. It is a problematic phrase to translate into English, literally meaning ‘there is nothing outside-text’ but most commonly translated as ‘there is nothing outside of text’. In a book that runs to just over 350 pages it might seem a little perverse to focus so much attention on a single sentence, yet much of the force and complexity of deconstruction as a whole is concentrated in this pronouncement. At its most basic, the phrase simply means that everything around us is textually constructed. More acutely, it is to say that our apprehension of the world and all that constitutes it actually depends on these textual constructions. There is no world without these texts; our understanding of things, as well as our primary experience of them, depends upon their being in language. Without language, there is no world; the word gives us the world. In this regard, deconstruction can be understood as a process akin to literary reading, whereby the task of the deconstructionist is to study and decipher both what it is said and how it is said. This is also, in part, the reason why deconstruction had its first major impact on the academy in literary studies. Deconstruction reads both closely and widely, making every effort to point out contradictions and inconsistencies in a text, to show how those texts work and how they fall down, to show what the words on the page carry within themselves, sometimes even despite themselves, unconsciously. It is only by paying close attention to the words on the page that these other factors become objects of textual commentary and critical focus. Approaching philosophy from a literary or textual perspective invites us not to take philosophy at its word – whereby the evidence of understanding would correspond to an ability to paraphrase that which is being argued – but to think about how its argument is presented, how this problematises or deepens our understanding of both texts and contexts.

Destruktion One of the seminal influences on the early development of deconstruction was the work of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. The very term ‘deconstruction’ originated from Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s notion of destruktion. The common German word for destruction is Zerstörung; Heidegger’s term is a deliberate attempt to shift the emphasis of destruction from ‘destroy’ to ‘dismantle’ (‘abbau’ means ‘dismantling’). For Derrida Heidegger’s sense of ‘destruktion’ means a particular mode of critical thinking in

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which ‘the elucidating speech must each time shatter itself and what it had attempted to do’ (Heidegger 2000: 22). As Barbara Johnson put it in a muchquoted passage from her book, The Critical Difference: Deconstruction is not synonymous with ‘destruction’. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’, which etymologically means ‘to undo’ [. . .] The deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text. (Johnson 1980: 5) This is a radical proposition, not least because it also requires a manner of expression that renders every assertion equivocal. This is why Derrida’s method of philosophical exposition can appear so unorthodox. His frequently convoluted style, with its complex syntax, long sentences, digressions, paradoxes and quibbles is not meant to be deliberately difficult but remarks, rather, the manner in which, throughout his work he was constantly at pains to match content with form. In Of Grammatology Derrida puts it in the following terms: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain ways falls prey to its own work. (Derrida 1976: 24)

‘Différance’ Derrida repeatedly emphasised this sense of deconstruction, writing in 1988 how: [i]t is a question [. . .] of producing a new concept of writing. This concept can be called gram or différance. The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each ‘element’ [. . .] being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of other elements of the chain or system [. . .] Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. (Derrida 1981a: 26)

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In this passage Derrida references and draws attention to arguably the most important term within deconstruction, a term that might be considered a synonym for deconstruction itself: ‘différance’. First outlined in 1972 in Marges de la Philosophie (Margins of Philosophy), Derrida declares that ‘différance’ is neither word nor concept. It is not so much a term as a non-term at work – at play – in the margins of each and every text, philosophical or otherwise. With its silent ‘a’ différance cannot be expressed phonetically, but only graphically. In this sense, différance is not presentable as such; it cannot appear in and as itself because it is never self-identical, it always exceeds itself in the instant of its inscription; in différance there is always an excess remainder outside of presence that is both yet to end and yet to begin, and which thus puts into question the very idea of presence. Différance is not, it is not of the order of what ‘is’, which is to say that it is neither itself, nor of the order of presence, but rather, that which ‘makes possible the presentation of the being-present’ (Derrida 1982: 6). Thus, différance is not meaning but the condition of possibility of meaning, of sense, of communication. Différance is neither end nor origin, but rather the possibility of each. Yet this is also why différance can never become a name. To regard it as a name, which is to say, to make it present, to realise it, would be to contradict precisely that which makes naming, presence and realisation possible. Différance is this double bind of that which ‘is’ taking place in the same instant that what ‘is’ – Being – is erased. In his essay on Derrida, ‘Elliptical Sense’, Jean-Luc Nancy characterises Derrida’s sense of différance as a ‘lightening of meaning’ (Nancy 1992: 41). As Nancy writes, ‘the lightening of meaning’ refers, like différance, to the ‘knowledge of a condition of possibility that gives nothing to know’ (Nancy 1992: 41). As such, ‘[m]eaning lightens itself [. . .] as meaning, at the cutting edge of its appeal and its repeated demand for meaning’ (Nancy 1992: 42). Nancy underscores an important point here. Différance does not seek to suggest that meaning does not exist but that it only exists in the movement of play. Of course, one of the problems that arises here concerns the question of how one is to speak of différance at all. If, as Derrida asks, ‘[i]t goes without saying that it cannot be exposed,’ what is one to do in order to speak of it? (Derrida 1982: 5). Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the response is twofold. On the one hand, it is not possible to speak of it. But on the other hand, each time there is speech – or what Derrida would call writing – différance has always already been spoken. As Derrida explains, and from its etymological roots in the Latin differre, différance is polysemic, it simultaneously incorporates within itself the two meanings of to defer and to differ. In this sense, it inscribes – and, at the same time, is inscribed by – both temporalisation and spatialisation. And yet the space-time thus named by différance never actually takes place – once again it is neither begun nor complete but is rather in that non-space and non-time of the always already which, in the absence of a beginning or an end, remains

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undecidable and thus can ever only repeat itself. In certain senses, this character of the ‘always already’ resembles Heidegger’s notion of ontological difference, in which the presence of Being is always deferred due to the fact that beings discover themselves always already in the world. The difference, however, is that, as Derrida explains, différance would be ‘ “older” than . . . ontological difference and the truth of Being’ for the very reason that it is that which makes the question of Being possible (Derrida 1982: 22). In other words, in order to ask the question of Being that question must necessarily be always inscribed within language, but that which makes language possible is différance. Thus, différance is the silent thought behind the ontological question of Being that puts that question of Being into play. For Derrida, it is precisely this play of différance – of difference and deferral – that makes the question of Being, of meaning, of sense, in short, of language, audible. Différance does not deny the possibility of Being but rather exposes the noncoincidence of Being with its question: the question of Being always already defers Being because it is always already otherwise than Being. The ‘always already’ space-time of différance situates différance at once both within the past and within the future. That which ‘is’ always already necessarily must have been there yesterday and will be there still tomorrow. At the same time, however, as it is ‘always already’ this is a past that, strictly speaking, has never taken place, which is to say, has never been present, and a future which can never become ‘modalised or modified into the form of the present, which allows itself to be neither foreseen nor pro-grammed’ (Derrida 1992a: 200). Time here is no longer linear but a twisted mist, the time of waiting. Différance is out of joint and out of place, neither a ‘who’ nor a ‘what,’ but a certain possibility of each and either awaiting itself. In Specters of Marx Derrida writes that ‘[o]ne question is not yet posed. Not as such. It is hidden rather by the philosophical, we will say more precisely ontological response’ (Derrida 1994: 29). Différance is this ‘not yet,’ which is to say that différance is not, not yet, not quite, not now, behind philosophy, and also therefore, before it. But as différance is irreducible from the question of the condition of possibility of Being and of language, by which I also mean, because the question of Being and of language always already find themselves within the condition of différance, then both Being and language are themselves out of joint and out of place, neither yet nor now.

The Influence of Deconstruction: Literary Studies and Feminist Theory Two of the areas on which deconstruction has arguably had its greatest influence are literary studies and feminist theory.

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Although Derrida’s early work was concerned primarily with rereading the history of Western metaphysics, it was actually his application of deconstructivist practices to literature that first made deconstruction internationally infamous. In particular, the take-up of deconstruction within English departments in American universities marked a seismic foundational shift in literary studies that would last a generation, and whose implications and consequences continue to count within literary studies to this day. The most pronounced, if short-lived, instance of the influence of deconstruction on literary studies was on the so-called ‘Yale School’, particularly in relation to the work of Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman and, perhaps most significantly if most controversially, Paul de Man. Collectively, these scholars published jointly the volume Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) but it was de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1971) and Allegories of Reading (1979a), together with Hillis Miller’s Fiction and Repetition (1982) and The Linguistic Moment (1985) that brought the widest attention to the influence of deconstruction on literary criticism, and that spawned a revolution in literary critical practice. Of critical importance to the Yale School was Derrida’s early analysis of language and his sense of the inherent play of signifiers. The inherent undecidability Derrida identified within all discourses came to dominate the ways in which literary texts would be read. More than this, though, literary texts came to be seen as exemplary expressions of the very undecidability and equivocation deconstruction was at pains to expose in all discourses. In an interview, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, conducted with Derek Attridge and published in Acts of Literature (1992b), Derrida remarks that one of the essential features of literature is its freedom to say anything. Yet such freedom, Derrida argues, comes with the caveat that what literature says can be written off as ‘fiction’. ‘In the end’, Derrida comments, ‘the critico-political function of literature, in the West, remains very ambiguous. The freedom to say everything is a very powerful political weapon, but one which might immediately let itself be neutralized as a fiction’ (Derrida 1992b: 38). It is the doubleness of literature that most interests Derrida. Literature can say things, but it does not necessarily claim authenticity for what it says. Literature may well reflect a recognisable world but at the same time, literature transforms that world, reframes it, relocates it into a context and landscape that, before anything, is linguistic, textual. As such, literature comes to exemplify the very means by which, Derrida argues repeatedly, the world appears to us, or knowledge is derived, and so forth. In Derrida’s terms, in other words, literature is writing par excellence. It is important to remember that deconstruction’s emphasis on the différance of meaning isn’t about saying that meaning doesn’t exist but that it only exists in the movement of play. In this way, différance articulates the manner in which meaning is never here but always somewhere else.

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Much of Derrida’s argument here picks up on the work of his nearcontemporary, Maurice Blanchot. ‘Everyday language calls a cat a cat, as if the living cat and its name were identical’ (Blanchot 1995: 325). Yet for Blanchot language is not a direct or transparent medium. In other words, units of language are abstractions used to refer to objects that are not present, such that each word actually circulates within ambiguity and dissimulation. What this points to, then, is that for Blanchot literature takes place as a site of irreducible strangeness that is at all times resistant to the parameters of conceptual thought. If literature does anything, Blanchot argues, it can only be said to dissolve any foundation upon which certainty and definiteness could be grounded. In this sense, we can say that literature functions for Blanchot and Derrida within the form of an essential equivocation. As the Blanchot scholar Leslie Hill puts it, literature transgresses or exceeds philosophy ‘not because it confronts the law of representation from a position of greater authority, but because it turns aside from representation in order to affirm the other law [. . .] that interrupts all representation’ (Hill 1997: 102). In this regard, deconstruction corresponds to this sense of literary fluidity of showing where the assumptions that underpin all structures are premised on an originary gap or rupture. This is why one of Derrida’s primary aims was to create a new form of writing that really formed itself out of this paradox of word and rupture and was formally reflective of the condition of l’avenir of différance. It was also this emphasis on new forms of writing that gave deconstruction its primary applicability to a new wave of primarily French feminist discourse, marked in particular by the work of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, and their elaboration of a form of feminist critique premised on what they call ‘écriture feminine’. Much of the feminist deconstructive project stems from the publication of Cixous’s 1976 essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, and subsequently Irigaray’s piece ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ (1980) and ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other’ (1981). Employing the deconstructive strategy of breaking down the distinction between binary opposites, Cixous and Irigaray argued that woman was oppressed and hidden by linguistic conventions that are patriarchal, latently if not always manifestly. In this regard, French feminists argue that this binary logic tends to group with masculinity such qualities as light, thought, activity, reason, head, and so on. In this way, French feminists argue that structure of language is what they term phallocentric – it privileges masculinity in general by associating it with things and values more appreciated by the masculine-dominated culture. For French feminists, then, the binary oppositions that structure language represent the world from the male point of view. In this way, they argue, women are systematically forced to choose – either they can imagine and represent themselves as men imagine and represent them (in which case, women can speak but they will speak as men) or they can choose silence, thus becoming what the

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critic Ann Rosalind Jones terms ‘the invisible and unheard sex’ (Jones 1986: 83). Or, as Mary Poovey puts it: By definition of this ‘economy of the same’ (the phrase is Irigaray’s), woman is not-man; as such, she is ‘other’ to that which is the norm. As one example of this, woman’s sexuality has been theorised as lack because it has been conceptualised in terms of male sexuality; in keeping with this, woman has been rendered semantically passive because she has been relegated to the position of the object, not the subject of desire. (Poovey 1988: 55) In opposition to this, French feminism sets out the case for the particularity of an écriture feminine. The influential theorist Julia Kristeva has argued that feminine language is semiotic rather than symbolic. What she means by this distinction is that rather than opposing and ranking elements of language, rather than constructing a hierarchical order between two terms – in the sense that the head would be preferable to the heart, light to dark, and so on – instead of arranging these binary oppositions into a particular order, feminine language is rhythmic and unifying. According to Kristeva, feminine language is derived from the pre-Oedipal period of fusion between mother and child. In this way, by being associated with the maternal, Kristeva argues that feminine language isn’t simply threatening to culture – which would be patriarchal – but also a medium through which women might be creative in new, innovative, transformative ways. Yet although there would appear to be something essentially affirmative and liberating in Kristeva’s understanding of feminine language, of the semiotic over the symbolic, it’s important to bear in mind that Kristeva, in a move akin to the deconstructive insistence on aporia and paradox, also argues that we need to be a little hesitant before prematurely celebrating the creative liberation of women. In other words, Kristeva argues that if a feminist language refuses to participate in the dominant, masculine discourse, then it actually risks being marginalised as an activity by men. If we put that another way, essentially for Kristeva the risk is that feminine language might become relegated to political insignificance. Taking up this mantle Cixous argues that in order to escape the discourse of mastery – that is, patriarchal discourse – it is necessary for women to write the body. For Cixous, sexuality and the language in which we communicate are inextricably linked so that to be free also involves the freedom of the other. In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ Cixous argues that writing is structured by a ‘sexual opposition’ favouring men, one that ‘has always worked for man’s profit to the point of reducing writing . . . to his laws’ (Cixous 1981: 253). In this context, for Cixous, the invention of a new critical writing will allow women to, as she puts it, transform their history and seize the occasion to speak. Cixous then issues the following challenge: ‘Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

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Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth’ (Cixous 1981: 250). In this context, for Cixous, the practice of écriture féminine is part of an ongoing concern with exclusion, with the transformation of subjectivity, and the struggle for identity. Cixous wants to establish a mode of writing that is poetic, that uses excessive imagery, and that therefore can’t quite be pinned down by the main, dominant or male notions of language. If we just take one example here of Cixous’ own practice of writing, from ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, Cixous writes: ‘We the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies – we are black and we are beautiful’ (Cixous 1981: 248). Cixous’s style is deliberately excessive and hyperbolic: ‘our lovely mouths gagged with pollen [. . .] we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces’, and so on. There is a conscious indirectness to Cixous’s style, a refusal to state things minimally, clearly, but through repetitions, metaphors, figurative language. It is also for this reason that Cixous privileges things such as laughter, contradiction, paradox and parody – things that essentially spill over, that common sense can’t quite work out what to do with. A crucial thing to remember, however, is that the main reason that Cixous employs such a style is because she argues that the dominant culture does not really know what to do with such language. It cannot bracket it off, dismiss it, because it cannot grasp all of it. There is always a turn of phrase, an image, a metaphor that escapes, that can’t quite be brought to heel. In this way, for Cixous, part of the value of feminist writing is actually the way it persists in the margins and gaps (as the repressed, the unconscious) of a male-dominated culture.

Deconstruction and Politics: Democracy to Come In his later writings Derrida began increasingly to focus on the importance of the endlessly deferred future of différance (that came to be termed, l’avenir, to come), applying it in particular to a re-evaluation of the notion of democracy, and subsequently applying it to ethical, political and legal scenarios more generally. The widening of Derrida’s frame of critical engagement also accounts for the increased influence of deconstructive practices on fields as diverse as Critical International Relations and Critical Legal Studies. In an interview conducted in the wake of the attacks on 11 September 2001, Derrida defines democracy – and justice – not as existing in the present but as ‘to come’. Democracy, Derrida argues, issues a promise to the future, ‘a promise that risks and must always risk being perverted into a threat’ (Derrida 2003: 120). For Derrida, the common manifestation of so-called democracy is little more than a form of governance, of political administration and decisionmaking. Derrida’s invocation of the ‘not yet’, however, relocates democracy – and the political more generally – away from administration towards the

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promise of its idea. To think the idea of a democracy to come is to remember the promise of the Enlightenment yet to be fulfilled, which is to say, no doubt somewhat simply, emancipation for all, which would mean for everyone. It is also, therefore, to remember the injunction of this promise, to welcome it, and by so doing to attend to the task of trying – and failing – to bring it into the present. The critical point is that the non-arrival of the promise of democracy decentres political structures and foundations precisely because it inscribes a hiatus, an element of uncertainty that destabilises the authority of each and every political system. Derrida is not suggesting that things grind to a halt; administrative decisions, he argues, must still be taken, of course. His point, rather, is simply that it is also necessary that those decisions should be contested in turn. Derrida’s point is that in order for the political to remain not only faithful to this specifically ethical responsibility of the future, but also to make it politically active, the political can never possess, neither today nor tomorrow, a pre-given programme or course of action. ‘Democracy to come’ fails, but this failure is necessary: failure reignites the need to try again. In rather reduced terms, Derrida’s point is that it is necessary to decide, but that it is also necessary to critique, that we simultaneously perform both tasks, and that we do so without authority, from the displacement and dispossession of the time of l’avenir. For Derrida, such a condition corresponds to an ethical imperative and it has justice at its core.

Deconstruction and Critical Legal Studies: The Force of Law ‘Justice’ is, and has always been, a key term within deconstruction, beginning with the early paper discussing the American Declaration of Independence. Yet it was only when Derrida began, from the 1990s onwards, to devote more and more time to analysing the nature of justice that deconstruction became closely associated with jurisprudence and legal theory. Although embedded in much of his later writing on ethics, hospitality, forgiveness and justice, the particularity of Derrida’s notion of law is most clearly set out in the two papers ‘Before the Law’ and ‘Force of Law’. In each essay, Derrida’s principle interest lies in interrogating the conceptual foundations upon which both legal theory and practice rest. As with all elements of deconstructive analysis, in other words, the primary interest lies in the interrogation of sources; Derrida is interested in the idea of law more than its administration. In ‘Force of Law’ Derrida asserts that the law, as with all systems, is founded on an aporia. As with his sense of the political, Derrida’s primary aim in the essay is to establish the ways in which the administration of law does not necessarily correspond to what law is commonly understood to mete out, namely the administration of justice. ‘Law’, Derrida writes, ‘is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just that there be law, but justice is incalculable’

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(Derrida 1990: 947). The lexical distinction here between law and justice is paramount. Law may well be guided by a notion of justice, but law must calculate, weigh up, set out rules and regulations, maintain boundaries and make decisions as to whether the terms of the law have been upheld. Justice, on the other hand, is both an abstract noun and an abstract quality; it is hard to pin down. It guides and yet, at the same time, it eludes definition. This is why Derrida describes justice as incalculable. As with democracy, Derrida maintains that justice is ‘to come’. It must guide decisions but every decision must also be cognisant of its own limitations, its own ‘unfoundedness’. Again, failure functions as a barometer. It is the persistence of failure, combined with the requirement always to try again, that establishes the ethical impulse of both justice and deconstruction. Indeed, it is precisely this correlation between failure and repetition that justice and deconstruction share in principle that leads Derrida to declare, somewhat controversially, that ‘deconstruction is justice’ (Derrida 1990: 949). In every situation, statement and declaration something misses, escapes; something falls through the cracks. There is a humility to this notion of deconstruction (and justice) in the form of a repeated – and repeatable – admission of limitations.

Critiques of Deconstruction For all that, though, Derrida’s propensity for writing such seemingly overblown and headline-grabbing soundbites has led to much derision and criticism of deconstruction as a practice. From the very beginning, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ and the wider claims of deconstruction it was taken to represent very quickly became one of the principle targets of deconstruction’s detractors, who held it up as symptomatic of the folly of the deconstructive project as a whole. One of main reasons Derrida’s statement aroused not just suspicion but often outright hostility was because it was seen to turn the assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition on its head. It is an absurd notion, so the criticism goes, to hold that there is nothing outside text. Text may well be a method of representation but, in an argument that dominates Western metaphysics and that stretches back at least as far as Plato, it is the world that prefigures the word, and not the other way around. One of the tasks of philosophy, traditionally conceived, is to bring things into light rather than to demonstrate that everything is premised on the plays of shadow. This, after all, was why Plato famously denounced poets and believed they should be banished from the ideal Republic. Poetry, Plato argues, is inauthentic and irrational. It deals not with truth but with illusion. Derrida would not disagree but the value accorded the inauthentic is very different in each philosopher’s hands. A similar argument against deconstruction – couched in curiously personal terms against Derrida himself – was staged by a group of philosophers who were opposed to Cambridge University’s decision to award Derrida an

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honorary degree. Writing in an open letter published in The Times, the signatories declared ‘In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour’ (Smith 1992: 13). As the letter continued, ‘M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets’ (Smith 1992: 13). One of the particularly interesting elements of this attack on deconstruction and Derrida is the fact that the principle point of concern is the linguistic trickery so central to Derrida’s analyses. For Derrida, deconstruction is about paying attention to what he terms ‘the play of differences’ but for its detractors these differences become representative of the fact that deconstruction is little more than a ‘play of surfaces’, a question of style over substance (Derrida 1981a: 26). Despite the personal nature of many of these criticisms, on one level the signatories are not incorrect in their sense of deconstruction. Far from being a point of illegitimacy, however, for Derrida this concern with differences and linguistic complexities is about establishing a discourse and a mode of thinking that is authentic, that both responds to and reflects the way things are. It is important to remember that deconstruction is part of the wider late twentieth-century movement known as poststructuralism that holds that the structures that constitute the world are not natural but constructed and that, as such, they can be reconstructed in myriad different ways. It is not so much that deconstruction makes the literal suggestion that there is nothing outside of text, but that one of its central tenets is that there can be no sense of things unless those things are conceptualised in language. This, again, is why deconstruction suggests not simply that there is no world without the word, but that the word is precisely that which gives us – in the sense of establishes, institutes – the world. As Derrida elaborated, this sentence means ‘there is nothing outside context’ (Derrida 1988: 136). If Derrida appears to strike a defensive tone it is not accidental. Limited Inc was Derrida’s response to a series of criticisms levelled at his notion of deconstruction by analytic philosophers who regarded deconstruction as little more than pseudo-philosophy or sophistry. Prior to the letter published in The Times, in the 1980s several prominent philosophers publicly were claiming that deconstruction was ‘not philosophy’. One of the main criticisms of deconstruction was vented in 1977 by the American philosopher, John Searle. Responding to Derrida’s essay from 1972 on speech act theory, ‘Signature Event Context’, Searle contended that Derrida demonstrated no engagement with, if not awareness of, contemporary philosophy of language. Searle argued that Derrida’s approach was naïve and concerned with issues that analytic philosophy had already resolved in one form or another. As Searle put it in The New York Review of Books, Derrida’s work is characterised by ‘the low level

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of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial’ (Searle 1983: 75). As with the ‘Cambridge affair’, the irony of such criticisms is that they actually articulate one of the basic tenets of deconstruction, ‘I do not seek to establish any kind of authenticity’, Derrida writes, because all authenticity – or, more specifically, any claim of authenticity – is itself always already inauthentic (Derrida 1988: 55). To claim not to establish authenticity does not do away with the idea of the authentic, but refigures or affirms the authentic within the non-space of this ‘not’. Truth belongs to the charlatan. Charlatanry is a counter-signature, but it is also, Derrida argues, the only ‘type’ of signature possible, a signature that does not in fact ‘sign’ but that sets forth both the potentiality of signing and the experience of the signature outside itself, in its non-self-identity. The counter-signature is the experience of inexperience, the absence of the signature, the signature deferred and different from itself. In other words, the counter-signature is the experience par excellence of ‘différance’, this term, non-term, around which deconstruction revolves. At around the same time as these debates, deconstruction also found further critique from the newly formed literary critical movement, New Historicism. New Historicism, or ‘cultural poetics’ as Stephen Greenblatt prefers to call it, first came to prominence in the 1980s and holds that ‘history cannot be divorced from textuality’ (Greenblatt 2005: 1). As such, New Historicism has tended to view deconstruction with suspicion, claiming that deconstruction relies upon a profoundly ahistorical textualism. It is a rather reductive understanding of deconstruction and one that unnecessarily polarises the relationship between textualism and context. Derrida’s own writings on politics, law, hospitality and the ethical imperative to decide or calculate point, even if only indirectly, to the misreading of deconstruction implied by New Historicism’s reaction to it. Deconstruction is not, strictly speaking, ahistorical. The difference, as Nicholas Royle has pointed out, is that deconstruction conceives of history as being less about the past than the future (Royle 1995: 13–38). Derrida’s sense of l’avenir, even of the futurity of the deferred temporality of différance, are about the manifestation of the future from the past. Walter Benn Michaels offers a more prosaic defence of the New Historicist critique of deconstruction, arguing that [i]t is often said that the ‘new historicism’ opposes deconstruction, in the sense that deconstructive critics are ‘against’ history and new historicists are ‘for’ it. Neither of these descriptions seems to me to have much content. In any event, the deconstructive interest in the problematic of the materiality in signification is not intrinsically ahistorical. (Michaels 1987: 28)

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Michaels’ point is well supported by Derrida’s frequent analyses and invocations of the archive, the work of mourning, and his sense of ‘hauntology’. Such aspects of Derrida’s writing, however, drew specific critique from various prominent Marxist thinkers, including the translator of the work that first brought Derrida notoriety in the English-speaking world, Gayatri Spivak. Much of this criticism stems from a sense that deconstruction either misreads or fails to confront adequately Marxist thinking. Such criticism coalesced after Derrida’s attempt to broach the question of the relation between deconstruction and Marxism, recorded in his 1993 book, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, in which Derrida, in a much-quoted passage, made the following claim: ‘Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism’ (Derrida 1994: 92). In response, Spivak published an article called ‘Ghostwriting’ in which she argued that Derrida’s response to the question of the relation between deconstruction and Marxism was often vague and lacked the rigour of analysis that was one of the principle characteristics of deconstructive practice. Spivak figured this omission as a blind spot in Derrida’s thinking about ‘Capital’ (Spivak 1995). For Spivak, Derrida’s text fails to address the manifold ways in which capital operates transnationally. Spivak also criticises Derrida’s inability to conceive any means by which the omniscience of capital might be challenged. This lack of alternative positions, if not solutions, echoes a familiar charge levelled against deconstruction, particularly in terms of the relevance of deconstruction to political theory. Deconstruction may well critique and dismantle but, so the argument goes, once the process of dismantling is complete, deconstruction is unable to imagine other, alternative positions from which counter-hegemonic thinking might be considered. The Marxist response to Specters of Marx culminated in a symposium on Derrida’s text, the proceedings of which were published in the rejoinder volume, Ghostly Demarcations, edited by Michael Sprinker, and comprising several prominent Marxist intellectuals, including Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey. As Sprinker puts it in his introduction, the symposium arose because of a disappointment with the lack of clarity still in Derrida’s writing on the question of the relation between deconstruction and Marxism. Antonio Negri’s critique, in particular, declared that deconstruction had exhausted itself, arguing that deconstruction was haunted by ‘an aura of nostalgia’ (Negri 1999: 8). For Negri, deconstruction’s methodology is marked by its historical appearance. The world, Negri argues, is no longer the same as that out of which deconstruction emerged; the world is no longer demarcated by binary oppositions but by flows and fluidity, of capital, labour, culture, and so on. In this regard, global capitalism has co-opted deconstruction and actually shares an affinity with it – or at least with its methodological practices and general critique of essentialism and totalisation – rather than an

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aversion to it. After all, marketing and brand analysis agencies make a specific career out of applying deconstructive theory to consumerism, analysing the ‘coding’ and ‘signification’ of products and brands in order to better tailor them towards ever-evolving consumer taste and desire. It is a state of affairs far removed indeed from the critical rigour of deconstruction as originally conceived by Derrida. Yet perhaps this present state of affairs is also where the force of deconstruction reappears. Deconstruction takes nothing for granted, and it demands that we too subject ourselves – our actions, habits and attitudes – to a similar scrutiny. In this, deconstruction has been, and will always be, a force of critique and an act of resistance, of intervention. Whether such resistance is understood as a source of infinite possibility or ineffectuality is, no doubt, a question of what deconstruction is understood to do. The complicity deconstruction uncovers within every system might be valorised as a strategic imperative to respond and to question, but it might just as easily be written off as the groundless absence of an answer that does not meet, to quote once more from the letter to The Times, ‘accepted [and acceptable] standards of clarity and rigour’. This is the inescapable risk of hesitancy, but it is also the promise and the possibility of thresholds.

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8 DISCOURSE THEORY Georges Van Den Abbeele

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he concept of discourse as an object of critical analysis dates to a series of articles written by the structural linguist, Émile Benveniste, between 1946 and 1958, later regrouped and republished as the section, ‘Man in Language’, in his Problems in General Linguistics (1971). In the course of analysing the role of personal pronouns, verb tenses and spatial-temporal markers (deixis), Benveniste delineates a dimension of language that operates outside the classic Saussurian paradigm of signifiers and signifieds. What he accordingly calls ‘instances of discourse’ do not designate determinable concepts – there is no conceptual definition of the pronoun ‘I’, for example, on a par with that of a noun like ‘tree’ or ‘table’ – but rather the interface between language and subjectivity. Thus, ‘I’ refers to rather than signifies the meaning of whoever is making the utterance, the subject of the enunciation, just as the pronoun ‘you’ refers not to some semantic concept but only to whoever is being addressed by the utterance. Similarly, indicators of space and time, such as ‘here’ or ‘now’, take their sense only in reference to the current situation of enunciation rather than holding spatio-temporal meaning in any absolute way (such as the impersonality of a calendar date). These so-called deictic markers, like the instances of discourse, position the subject within discourse, as opposed to other kinds of language such as historical narrative, where the third-person pronoun, preterite verb form, and calendric/geographical indicators predominate, to the point that, as Benveniste puts it, ‘the events seem to tell themselves’ (Benveniste 1971: 208) without the overt intrusion of human agency in the form of discursive instances. Ultimately, however, the question raised by such linguistically determined markers of subjectivity is whether the subject is not actually formed by its very positioning within this preinscribed set of possibilities rather than existing prior to language in some autonomous way that would allow it to ‘use’ language as a tool and with no consequences for whatever it means to be a subject. Of course, Benveniste’s work reinforces the classic structuralist tenet that subjectivity exists only in, or is formed by, language. As such, Benveniste’s theory of discourse had a profound influence on developments in structuralism and poststructuralism, especially on Barthesian literary and cultural critique, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the Tel Quel group.

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Discourse theory would have its greatest elaboration and most consequent development, however, in the work of Michel Foucault, whose early works (The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge) develop the concept of discourse, or discourses, to designate the field of practices that determine relations between differing kinds of knowledge, on the one hand, and correspondingly different forms of subjectivity, or subjection, on the other. What passes for knowledge at any given time in any given society is defined by institutionalised practices of inclusion and exclusion. So, for example, with regard to his magisterial study on Madness and Civilization (1961), while folly may have been perceived in earlier times as a blessed form of insight, the so-called age of reason beginning in the seventeenth century proceeded to criminalise all nonconforming expressions of ‘unreason’, or madness, which were then subjected to specific practices of exclusion by way of incarceration, hospitalisation, revocation of rights, and so on. The ‘mad’ find themselves dispossessed even of the right to speak on their own behalf, but the historian who would try to speak on their behalf, or ‘in their place’, merely compounds the injustice steeped as he or she is within the discourse of reason by usurping the speech of those dispossessed others. Instead, what Foucault proposes is ‘the archaeology of a silence’, the uncovering of what remains unsaid behind what he terms the discursive practices of knowledge understood as reason. To inhabit discourse as a ‘subject’ within the so-called ‘age of reason’ presupposes one’s rationality and sanity, just as when Descartes must exclude the possibility of his own madness to arrive at the foundational proposition of rational subjectivity, ‘I think, therefore I am’. The book’s second ‘postface’, added in 1972, ‘This body, this paper, this fire’, conjures up a plethora of Benvenistian deictics in response to Derrida’s blistering deconstructive critique of Foucault’s reading of Descartes. Working closely with the texts of Descartes, Derrida questions whether the very rejection of one’s own madness is not in effect the height of folly itself within this supposedly foundational moment of reason as the exclusion of folly. Foucault’s acerbic response is to denounce Derrida’s textualist approach and differentiate it from his own mode of analysing specifically discursive practices. The distinction, telegraphed rather obscurely in the essay, refers to Foucault’s more sustained discussions of his methodology in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, published as ‘The Discourse on Language’ (delivered 1970; 1972b), the preface to Birth of the Clinic (1963), and most extensively in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). In these texts and elsewhere, Foucault inventories the ways in which discourses are systematically controlled and limited in society. These procedures include both ‘external limitations’ (which exclude discourses based on taboo subjects, madness, or falsity) and ’internal’ restrictions (among which we find both commentary and the author-function) whose task it is to master the ‘element of chance’ in language. Among the latter, Foucault lists such practices as the ‘author function’ by which we limit

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the potential meaning of language by attributing a given set of utterances to the ‘authority’ of an author. But language has not always been understood in other times and places as a function of its author, and even in our times, not all utterances are assumed even to have an author (such as impersonalised information, legal documents, signposts, and so on). Similarly, grasping or organising utterances in terms of objectified categories such as a ‘book’ or a ‘work’ is a discursive practice, which despite its apparent convenience or air of common sense in limiting the infinity of language, is not by any means the only way to proceed (think only of the Internet). ‘Commentary’ is another internal restriction that limits discourse by establishing it as an ongoing relation between a primary text that is commented on and a secondary text that comments on the primary text. This relationship between primary and secondary texts is nonetheless complicated, according to Foucault, in two ways. The first concerns the ‘top-heaviness’ of the primary text or the attribution of a certain ‘wealth of meaning’ to it so that there are endless things to say about it. The second (which seems to contradict the first) is that ‘whatever the techniques employed, commentary’s only role is to say finally, what has silently been articulated deep down’ (Foucault 1972a: 221; Foucault’s emphasis). ‘The novelty’, states Foucault, ‘lies no longer in what is said, but in its reappearance.’ The ‘everchanging and inescapable’ paradox of commentary is that it must ‘say, for the first time what has already been said, and repeat tirelessly what was, nevertheless, never said’ (Foucault 1972a: 221). This formulation of commentary as a rather paradoxical discursive practice is also Foucault’s way of dismissing the kind of textual approach he associates most negatively with Derrida. Rather than proposing a strategy of deep or ‘close’ reading, Foucault invites an analytical approach that would seek not to uncover the ‘wealth’ of a text but to discover the ‘law of its poverty’ (Foucault 1972a: 120), or alternatively, not to provide an interpretation but to elaborate a description. No longer would it be a question of discovering new layers of profundity in a text but of analysing discourses according to their ‘exterior’ dimensions, of formalising the rules of their organisation as ‘surface’ phenomena, a project he describes as a kind of ‘archaeology’. Foucault’s most ambitious project in this regard is his monumental The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), where the analysis of discursive practices that guide the formation of various ‘disciplines’ of thought issue in the uncovering of larger-scale epistemic structures that in turn define or frame entire historical epochs in terms of what can and what cannot be considered knowledge. Departing entirely from Marxist dialectical history or even traditional positivist or developmental historiography, Foucault describes these epistemes as essentially arbitrary formations of knowledge that can last for a century or two, before a sudden, inexplicable break that ushers in some completely different episteme with concomitantly different disciplines and different ways of constituting what passes for knowledge. Even the concept of ‘man’, so apparently obvious and essential

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to the ‘human sciences’ that define the modern episteme, can just as easily wash away, to quote the book’s inimitable and provocative last words, ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault 1994: 387). What the archaeology of discursive practices reveals is the stunning otherness of the past, not the past as a less developed version of the present but as something completely and inalterably different. Nevertheless, such a conclusion does not necessarily render historiography an antiquarian exercise (which it certainly can be). On the contrary, the exploration of the past as other conversely puts into sharp relief the very historicity of the current moment, its irredeemable contingency and potential for unsuspected and radical change. Foucault will accordingly come to describe his project as a ‘history of the present’ (Foucault 1979: 31). It should be noted, though, that the epistemic formation of distinct discursive practices within a limited space and time do not merely reflect neutral ways to master the limitlessness of language. Rather, epistemes are constituted as dynamic structures of inclusion and exclusion that determine who can speak, about what, and under what circumstances; they determine what passes for knowledge and stupidity, reason and madness, truth and falsehood; in short they determine forms of subjectivity and subjection within systems of power. That relation, between subjectivity and power, underpins Discipline and Punish, whose ostensible subject is the history of criminal justice and the penal system. What makes the book remarkable is less the study of different forms of criminological thought and the ‘birth of the prison’ per se, than the explication of the insidious ways what Foucault calls ‘power/knowledge’ operates as a kind of technology that disciplines bodies through specific modes of subjectivisation and objectivisation that blur the conventional distinction between external coercion and internal accommodation. The central metaphor of Jeremy Bentham’s model of the prison as a panopticon concretises this fundamental insight: a single watchtower at the prison’s centre can survey and control the entire prison population, not because the guard can see everything that is happening but because each inmate cannot at any time escape the possibility of being the object of the watchman’s gaze and therefore is led to internalise that gaze as self-correction. As such, this is much more than a book about the penitentiary system. The prison appears as but one example among others of a broader disciplinary society where power is exerted not through some readily identifiable central authority like a monarch but through a diffusion of discourses that define who we are, what we are and what we can or cannot do, what we can know or not know, and what we can say or cannot say. In short, power and knowledge work intimately together at the very level of our subjectivity and of our very bodies, or our ‘subjection’ as Foucault felicitously puts it. This formulation substantively revises and expands the earlier concept of discursive practices by understanding discourse, not merely as a set of

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linguistic possibilities, but as a structured relation of power, knowledge and subjection. Stated otherwise, the disciplines of knowledge whose archaeology Foucault traced in The Order of Things are also disciplines in the correctional or punitive sense as they function to police the borders of what can and cannot be accepted as allowable knowledge, speech and behaviour. The disciplines of knowledge are thus also technologies of power, hence the conjoining of power/knowledge as discourse. And while this notion of discourse recalls in some respect the concept of ideology, it differs markedly in several key ways. Discourse is at once much more specific and much more generalised than ideology to the extent that it permeates and pervades lived experience as what we can know, think or do. It is not false consciousness, since the only kind of consciousness we can know is already embedded in the discourse of power/ knowledge. Nor is it simply the mirror reflection of economic determinism or the economically driven interests of a particular class. Rather, discourse instantiates power/knowledge at every social level and in myriad complex material practices. The combination of analytic rigour and flexibility in turn made this concept of discourse attractive to a wide range of post-Marxist and postcolonialist thinkers. Most notably, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) expanded and applied the concept of discourse to the critical analysis of institutionalised forms of racism, colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, it is precisely as an exercise in discourse theory that Orientalism far exceeds the chronicling and critical debunking of the derogatory stereotypes that have long characterised the West’s perception of the ‘Orient’. Nor is Said content with deconstructing the demeaning European representation of a geographical entity, the Orient, out of the extraordinarily complex and diverse peoples and cultures that make up the vast expanse of the Middle East. Rather, Said persuasively links the mythic construction of ‘the East’ to its perpetuation in institutionalised forms of knowledge production that are themselves ratified and reproduced through Western imperial domination of the Arab and/or Islamic world. And it is in this way, as Said notes, that certain kinds of ‘texts’ to which ‘expertise is attributed’ by the ‘authority of academics, institutions, and governments . . . can create not only knowledge but the very reality they appear to describe’ (Said 1995: 94). Said concludes: ‘in time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it’ (Said 1995: 94). ‘Orientalism’ is a discourse to the extent that it takes place as an ongoing and self-perpetuating relation of knowledge and power that is supported by the apparatus of political as well as educational institutions. This institutionally embedded status of discourse also reinforces the instantiation of concomitant forms of subjectivity and subjection: the selfperpetuating and internalised subjectivity of the racialised other but also the entitled subjectivity of the government official, foreign officer or ‘Orientalist’

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scholar, who can presume a certain authoritativeness of knowledge and power thanks to his situation within the discourse. True to Foucault’s critique of textual commentary, the point of discourse analysis is not primarily to interpret a given text or author but to disclose that text or author’s embeddedness in a discourse that always already writes him. When Said reads Gustave Flaubert or Sir Richard Burton, his interest is less in elucidating those writers qua writers than in reading out their implication in the discourse of Orientalism. It is the discourse itself that is the object of critical analysis; hence the thematic organisation of a book that treats multiple authors, as opposed to the extended readings of individual works that is the hallmark of textualist approaches. Discourse theory as thus developed by Foucault and Said, to the extent that it engages an analysis of the relations between knowledge and power, has experienced widespread adoption and success in the hands of critics interested in the critique of modes of domination and subjection not readily subsumed under the classic Marxist paradigms of economic determinism and capitalist modes of production. Hence, its notable adoption and adaptation after Said by postcolonialism, critical race theory and cultural and historical studies. And, of course, the development of post-Marxism itself is deeply indebted to discourse theory. In particular, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), borrow heavily from Foucault’s theory of discourse as part and parcel of an overtly Gramscian rearticulation of the socialist political project ‘towards a radical democratic politics’ (the book’s subtitle). Specifically and in opposition to the classic Marxian theory of society as a dialectic of class struggle based in relations of production, a conceptualisation they view as ‘essentialism’, Laclau and Mouffe propose a model of the social as the hegemonic articulation of subject positions defined not by identity but by the relationality of their differences. Society as a structured field of differential positions sounds like the very definition of discourse, and indeed that is the term Laclau and Mouffe use to describe it, while also expanding the definition of discourse well beyond Foucault by rejecting any distinction between ‘discursive and non-discursive practices’ or between ‘what are usually called the linguistic and behavioural aspects of a social practice’ to the extent that ‘every object is constituted as an object of discourse, insofar as no object is given outside every discursive condition of emergence’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 107). For Laclau and Mouffe, it is not just (for example, medical or criminological) discourse defined in linguistic terms that structures the relations between differently positioned subjectivities (doctors and patients, or police and prisoners) in the context of various (clinical or judicial/penal) institutions but rather the complex articulation of those institutions and subjects that is discourse. Support for this conceptual expansion of the term discourse is found via recourse to Wittgenstein’s theory of language games, which eschews any difference between the ‘mental’ and ‘material’ character of what

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we are calling discourse, to the extent that language games ‘include within an indissoluble totality both language and the actions interconnected with it’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 108). The example given is that of a team of builders, one of whom calls out for various materials (blocks, pillars, slabs, beams, etc.) in the order they are needed for the building’s construction, and another who passes the construction materials when prompted by the other’s call. The ‘language game’ is not merely the communication system between the builders (whether verbal, written, gestural or even just professional force of habit) or even just the actions implied in the communication calling for this rather than that piece of material, but also and most importantly the materials themselves in their specific and differentiated use as blocks, slabs, pillars, and so on. It is the organisational practice of building a building, or for that matter, setting up a clinic, or maintaining colonial rule, that according to Laclau and Mouffe ‘constitutes a differential and structured system of positions – that is, a discourse’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 108). The articulation of elements that make up a discourse is no longer mere ideas, or ideology, or even ‘discursive practices’ in a narrowly linguistic sense, but embedded in and through all kinds of institutions, political organisations, social and cultural rituals. What we can accordingly call ‘politics’, or the hegemonic articulations of power and domination as ‘discourse’, can no longer be restricted to the classic Marxist binary of conflict between classes, understood in essentialising and unitary terms as sole agents of economic self-interest. Rather, politics as discourse opens onto a much broader set of subject positions, not only those conventionally based in gender, race, ethnicity, nationality or other socially marked ‘identities’, but also their multiple, unstable, often contradictory, even antagonistic intersections. In addition to previously marginalised or excluded subjectivities, new and, even heretofore unpredictable, forms of subjectivity can emerge as political agents in discourse. Feminist theory and queer theory go even further beyond this kind of post-Marxist revision by radically questioning the very basis of identity in its presumably most biologically determined and most inflexible form, that of gender. Judith Butler, most famously, deconstructed the difference between (biological) sex and (cultural) gender in her 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity to argue that the sexed body itself is a cultural construction, whose coherence is established and reinforced through coerced repetitive acts that within contemporary society align the subject within the regulative, naturalising discourses of heteronormativity, or compulsory heterosexuality. Sex/gender thus occurs as culturally framed performance rather than the expression of some pre-existing core essence, whether biological or cultural. As Butler is keen to clarify, however, in her subsequent Bodies that Matter (1993), that ‘performance’ is not the free choice of a self-standing subject, it is not a wilful ‘act’, but a repetitive and constrained normative process, a disciplinary practice, that in turn actually constitutes the subject as sexed/

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gendered and polices that subject within existing norms. That said, the very iterability (or implicit difference within repetition) of gender performance also enables potential deviations from or revisions of normative identity, or what later theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis will term, a ‘queering’ of identities that underscores or affirms the free-floating basis of identity itself. The concept of gender as performance, or as ‘technology’ to use de Lauretis’s alternative expression in her 1987 Technologies of Gender, situates queer theory as both analysis of and resistance to the normative regulation of sex, gender and sexuality. To the extent that the disciplinary practices informed by those norms are themselves embedded in institutions of power/knowledge, we can see queer theory’s indebtedness to the concept of discourse as elaborated by Foucault, and most cogently in his final three-volume work on The History of Sexuality (1976–84). The first volume of that series, The Will to Know, explicitly returns us to the discursive construction of sexuality. Specifically refuting the commonly held assumption that the Victorian era ushered in a climate of sexual repression, Foucault argues instead the modern era (dating back to the seventeenth century) exhibits a marked proliferation of discourse about sex and sexuality, the urgency of speaking about it, indeed, a coercion to tell all (most notably in the mode of the confession). All this talk, however, served less to repress or to empower specific forms of sexual behaviour than to consolidate institutionalised knowledge about sex, what Foucault terms a scientia sexualis, whose function in turn became the management of sex, its policing, even criminalisation. Sexuality thus emerges as a discourse through the interaction of those institutions (church, government, school, and so on) whose concern with acquiring knowledge about sex dovetailed with the extension of their power. Ultimately, this power is about exercising a sweeping governance over life itself, what Foucault thus calls ‘bio-power’. Unlike traditional power which is concentrated in the hands of a single sovereign, who holds the power of life and death over any given subject, biopower is diffused and dispersed throughout the interlocking array of institutions, practices and discourses that claim authority over the biological welfare either of individuals or of the species. To the extent that sexuality bridges the concern of both individuals (pleasure) and species (propagation), it has assumed the privilege accorded to it by modern societies as the key to human understanding. As such, sexuality operates both as an apparently free and expressive mode of individual self-stylisation and as a self-regulating subjectivation to an external form of social coercion. Such simultaneously internal and external ‘technologies of the self’ are the subject of the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self. Studying, respectively, ancient Greece and imperial Latinity, Foucault again surprises us by revealing two moments in antiquity where forms of sexual behaviour appear not as self-standing objects of disciplinary knowledge, be it liberatory or repressive, but rather are situated variously within a range

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of other discourses that prescribe certain ideals of domestic or public selfstyling. The (self)cultivation in classical Athens of a dominant and respected public figure is achieved precisely through an ethos of self-domination and the wise apportionment of pleasures, be they alimentary, economic, medicinal or sexual. Likewise, the discourse of self-care in imperial Roman culture encompasses a wide set of concerns within which sexuality is but one among many activities which need to be inflected according to the most caring ‘work of oneself on oneself’ (Foucault 1990: 51). At the same time, these ‘stylistics of existence’ (Foucault 1990: 71) were hardly solipsistic exercises in autarky but, as Foucault argues, ‘a true social practice’ that ‘took form within more or less institutionalized structures’ (Foucault 1990: 51) such as schools, political organisations and married life, where the relation to others is mirrored in the relation to self, and vice versa. But this also means that these and other such technologies of the self both enable one’s self-objectification and self-subjectivisation as a subject and subjects or subjugates that self to certain forms and practices of power. The process of subjectivisation is both internal and external, idiosyncratic ‘self-styling’ and conformist submission to rules, all in the same gesture. Another way of understanding this is that subjectivity occurs in and out of pre-existing discourses and practices, and no matter how freely self-fashioned the subject thinks itself to be it is always already embedded in the technologies of power that frame its possibilities, rule its modalities and condition its very existence as such. In the modern era of bio-power, these technologies extend to life itself, not merely as in the sovereign’s exclusive and traditional right to make die or let live but rather in the generalised capacity to make live or let die. This capacity plays along two axes: (1) a kind of ‘political anatomy of the human body’ that deploys a set of disciplinary procedures exerted on individual bodies to mould, bend and manipulate them into docile machine-like forces in the service of efficiency and economy; and (2) a ‘population bio-politics’ that takes hold of the species-body in terms of regulating its proliferation and continuation through births and deaths, levels of health, life expectancies, and so on. At the confluence of these two axes is sex as what gives access at one and the same time to the life of the body and to the life of the species, hence its value as a ‘crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death’ (Foucault 1998: 147). In the context of bio-power, sex then takes the place held in traditional society by blood, both literally, as what the sovereign’s blow is empowered to shed, and symbolically, as the consanguinity of familial castes and hereditary social hierarchy. This archaic symbolics of blood is replaced under the regime of bio-power by sexuality as the point of convergence of the individual body with the species body, a situation whereby the notion of sex can serve as the artificial unity for all kinds of behaviours, biological functions, sensations and pleasures. Foucault concludes, ‘sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified’, ‘a sort

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of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected’ (Foucault 1998: 154, 157), hence its discursive primacy as both the cause for discourse in the form of the scientia sexualis and as its ultimate meaning. Nonetheless, we should not be blinded by this mirage of sex in ignorance of the vaster workings of biopower and the proliferation of discourses that seek to govern and regulate life itself, in short the indefinite politicisation of life itself in all its forms, including necessarily the manifold ways of death and dying. Foucault views the advent of bio-power in its myriad manifestations as a relatively recent phenomenon, roughly dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, he notes that the contemporaneous advent and growth of capitalism itself is indebted to the crucial role played by bio-power in the development and spread of those disciplinary technologies that produced ever more ‘docile’ bodies such as those needed, for example, in repetitive factory work. More importantly, bio-power marks a certain threshold of modernity at the point where the abiding interests of the state moves from being merely territorial to being population-based and where the living body, or even just living matter, becomes the object of political strategy and contestation. Concomitant to this shift is the move from power being principally located in political/juridical institutions to its being diffusely imposed through norms and cultural practices. As Foucault summarises: ‘For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’ (Foucault 1998: 143). One need look no further than the rancour of contemporary political debate around such issues as abortion, euthanasia, even disease prevention to gauge the validity of Foucault’s claims. The historical relation, however, between bio-power and modernity has been vigorously contested by Giorgio Agamben, who locates the former at the very origin of political existence in antiquity; parsing the difference in ancient Greek between the term, zoe, as the mere fact of life as shared by all living beings, and bios, as ‘a qualified life, a particular way of life’ such as the ‘form or way of life proper to an individual or group’ (Agamben 1998: 1). Bios thus channels the realm of what we can call political existence, while zoe indicates a status of what Agamben calls ‘bare life’ which stands before or outside the political, outside discussions of what is meant by the good life or the way to live within a society according to various norms or expectations. Bare life stands to political qualified life Agamben argues, channelling Carl Schmitt, as the sovereign does to the existence of the polis itself. Just as the sovereign rules not only by holding the right of life or death over its subjects, but also by being the literal exception to the rule, being both inside and outside the law and so able at any time (but classically only under emergency or exceptional conditions) to suspend the law, so too is bare life paradoxically included as it is excluded from political subjectivisation. Agamben’s image for both the

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sovereign exception and the included/excluded status of bare life is that of the Roman law category of homo sacer, literally ‘sacred man’ but legally defined as one who is no longer a political being (citizen or subject). The homo sacer is the individual reduced to ‘bare life’, someone ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (Agamben 1998: 8), a curious turn of phrase which is Agamben’s major task to explicate in the course of a broader argument that what Foucault sees as the advent of modern bio-power is actually the extension of the sovereign exception into the ongoing state of affairs, the State of exception, that increasingly reduces all life to that of ‘bare’ or ‘sacred’ life. To be in the sacred zone where one can be neither killed nor sacrificed means being removed from under the jurisdiction of all laws, human as well as divine, being excluded from political existence entirely, dead to society but not biologically dead. It is to be at the very whim of the sovereign exception, which can dispose of the sacred person with impunity as it so wishes. For Agamben, the very image of modern sacrality is the camp, not only the Nazi extermination camps but also those of the Gulag and of mass deportations, refugee camps and centres for displaced persons of all kinds, airport detention facilities, and so on. Inscribed within the territory of the State as a zone outside it, the camp spatially and literally reproduces the included exclusion of bare life. ‘The camp’, writes Agamben, ‘is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (Agamben 1998: 168–9), such as in modern totalitarian states, but also increasingly and disturbingly so, in democracies as well, where the increasing decline of official politics into entertainment and ‘public relations’ is matched by the seemingly relentless growth of secrecy, corruption, mass surveillance and incarceration. What Agamben calls the camp is the ‘materialization of the state of exception’ as the ‘creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction’ (Agamben 1998: 174). As such, ‘the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself’ (Agamben 1998: 174): It is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the care of the nation’s biological life as one of its proper tasks. (Agamben 1998: 174–5) The State’s ownership of the nation’s biological life also means, however, and by the same stroke, the extension of its sovereign power to mete out death, whether to ‘protect’ the life of the nation’s species by the death of specified individuals or groups within that nation (albeit preliminarily reduced to

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bare life status in order to justify their being killed with impunity), or because certain forms of life are considered ‘not worth living’, or by another conceivable justification under the State of exception. The ultimate consolidation of bio-power is utterly coterminous with an unparalleled extension of the right to kill, so that in effect such a bio-politics is at one and the same time a ‘necro-politics’, as Achille Mbembe has coined the term. Mbembe follows up on Foucault and Agamben’s claim that: the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. . . . [a state that] made the management, protection and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. . . . In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state. (Mbembe 2004: 17) Resituating this analysis of Nazism within a postcolonial and global historical frame, Mbembe describes the wider context of necropolitics and necropower in the development of the ‘terror formation’ constituted by the institution of slavery and the sovereign exception of colonial occupation, settlement and administration. Unlike the European situation, sovereign power in the colonial world is not at all exceptional and its lethal ability to dispose of its subjects is an unquestioned norm buttressed by the reduction of entire populations to bare life status through the discourse of race and its embedded institutions of slavery, the plantation, the ghetto and, of course, the camp, in all its invidious and nefarious manifestations. Even the distinction between war and peace disappears (Mbembe 2004: 25) as the confluence of disciplinary power, biopower and necropower generates an endless cycle of slaughter and extraction of resources. Such unrestrained necropolitics continues unabated in massive if dispersed sectors of the postmodern, postcolonial world where ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe 2004: 40). Studying the particular forms of both repression and resistance in such lethal environments from the ‘collateral damage’ of drones and cluster bombs, to the coercive and socially disaggregating ‘war machines’ of unrestrained urban militias, private armies and mercenary contractors, to the conundrum of resistance as self-destruction that drives the suicide bomber, Mbembe further concludes that ‘under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred’ (Mbembe 2004: 40). If we think of discourse as a structured articulation of language, subjectivity and power embedded in and articulated through institutions, then necropolitics clearly puts us before a limit case, one where power exists only through and for the eradication of its

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subjects and where language ceases to have any say at all, except perhaps in the inchoate gesture of self-annihilation. How can one speak truth to a power whose murderous regime entails the destruction of the one who would speak, truth or no truth? Truly, the lines between any conceptual or semantic pair seem inalterably ‘blurred’. The problem of meaning and language within any given socio-political or cultural formation, not merely the extreme case of necropolitics, leads us back again to that vexed question of the relationship between discourse and context. It also raises the question between, for example, necropower (or bio-power) as discourse and the discourse about necropower. If necropower implies an unrestrained regime of murder, it also must include discourse itself within the list of entities to be killed. Concomitantly, the discourse about necropower is thus not merely an analytical moment but also an act of resistance to that power, a ‘speaking truth to power’, but from a standpoint outside, or so it would seem, the institutional reach of necropower. Of course, all discourse – even the most critical! – is, whether it acknowledges it or not, caught within its own webs of power/knowledge, implicated within its own institutional structures and subject positions, within its own discursive formations. Rather than existing prior to discourse, subjectivity – and subjection – emerge from our always already being in discourse. How exactly to analyse the discourses within which one speaks and lives is the purview of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as developed most methodically by Norman Fairclough in a series of key works from Language and Power (1989), through Discourse and Social Change (1992), Critical Discourse Analysis (1995), New Labour, New Language (2000), Analyzing Discourse: Text Analysis for Social Research (2003), and Language and Globalization (2006). Basically, Fairclough’s approach grounds social analysis (more traditionally Marxian than Foucauldian) in linguistics. As opposed to Foucault’s external analysis of discourse, Fairclough hearkens back to a more explicitly text-based approach with a concomitant commitment to textual interpretation per se. Discourse analysis breaks down for him into three distinct moments: first, a ‘normative’ or immanent critique of sample texts that explicates them on their own terms according to their specific rhetorical, grammatical and argumentative structure, including internal and logical contradictions. The second moment in critical discourse analysis involves an ‘explanatory’ critique that explicates the findings of the normative critique in terms of the social and political forces that shape the discursive features of the sample texts. These include what he terms the ‘power in discourse’ which refers to the forces that dominate the production and dissemination of the discourse, that is, who can speak and when and how. There is also the ‘power behind discourse’ or the social forces that shape the ‘order of discourse’, that generate, operationalise and make possible the distribution and widespread adoption of specific discourses. In many ways, Fairclough’s analysis of power

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structures and social forces ‘behind’ discourse resembles the classic Marxian critique of ideology as a set of ideas that support the dominant class structure through their widespread acceptance and acquiescence as ‘common sense’, even by individuals whose interests run counter to the social/political hierarchy. Much of the work of making ideology acceptable as common sense stems from a variety of techniques described in specific terms by Fairclough, such as the ‘decontextualization’ and ‘recontextualization’ of given textual tokens and the role not merely of intertextuality in the classic sense but also what Fairclough terms ‘interdiscursivity’, to name the ways in which a given discourse can call on other discourses to advance its persuasive aims. For example, the neoliberal reform of universities calls upon a discourse of ‘marketization’ in which students are rebranded as ‘consumers’ and courses as ‘product’ or commodities to be sold, ‘marketed’, through successful advertisement within an environment where education ceases to be a state-supported public good but a revenue dependent business (‘Critical Discourse Analysis and the Marketisation of Public Discourse: The Universities’, in Fairclough 2010: 91–125). Similarly, but in a different vein, the rise of the ‘New Labour’ movement in the UK reabsorbed and channelled various elements from other, pre-existing discourses (New Labour, New Language). In principle, then, the first two moments of critical discourse analysis (the normative and the explanatory) can lead to a third moment, namely ‘praxis’ or ‘transformative human action’, which those disabused by the first two moments of critique would undertake not as a discursive revision of the discourse but as a form of social action that would take on the very ‘powers behind discourse’ whose ideology is masked as common sense. Fairclough admits to some conceptual challenges in formulating exactly how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can lead to actual social change: ‘There is a disjuncture between CDA and transformative action. CDA is directed at and motivated by action to make social life better, but there is not a direct line from CDA to transformative action’ (Fairclough 2015: 14). Nonetheless his tenaciousness regarding the socially transformative potential of CDA says less about the limits of his methodology than it underscores his ongoing commitment to an Enlightenment view that fervently associates critical learning with social emancipation. Hence too, his interest in the crucial role played by education in developing a critical awareness of language as a first stage toward civic engagement and social improvement. Nor is it surprising that the primary focus of Fairclough’s practical analyses has been on examples of overtly political discourse (speeches, slogans, advertisement) and the possible ways of resisting or revamping them in the interest of social and political betterment. One notes how this Enlightenment stance contrasts with Foucault or Agamben or Mbembe’s more general scepticism toward the legacy of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, there is the claim that knowledge will

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overcome unjust power; on the other hand, the deep suspicion that knowledge is at every stage implicated in and complicit with the very structures, institutions and regimes of power. Correlatively speaking, Fairclough’s practical methodology brings us back to the linguistic rigour and specificity of Benveniste’s initial conceptualisation of the term, discourse, while at the same time mitigating, justly or unjustly, the powerful critique of rationality undertaken by Foucault in his development of discourse theory as an entire field of critical inquiry.

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INTRODUCTION: POSTMODERNISM

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ostmodernism is a very wide-ranging set of theories, under which poststructuralism arguably could be placed. Initially, it came to prominence in the field of architecture as a reaction against modernism, the dominant style in twentieth-century architectural practice around the globe (the international style’ as it came to be referred to). A theory of postmodernism began to emerge from the work of the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, in which modernist ‘brutalism’ was challenged by a style mixing old and new elements, or ‘double-coding’. The creative arts were to incorporate such ideas enthusiastically, and a distinctive, pastiche-based, postmodernist style soon developed. Nikolai Duffy deals with postmodernism’s aesthetic dimension in Chapter 10, emphasising the socio-political importance of its commitment to pluralism and hybridity. Jean-François Lyotard’s work was more specifically politically oriented, attacking the underlying ideological assumptions of modernity. His book The Postmodern Condition with its vigorous attack on ‘grand narratives’, as found in universalising theories such as Marxism, was extremely influential in later twentieth-century thought. Whereas grand narratives claimed to be in possession of the ‘truth’, philosophical postmodernism was to take a relativistic attitude, challenging institutional authority in general. The critique of Marxism’s totalising tendencies had started as far back as the work of Theodor W. Adorno, and in Chapter 9 Philip Goldstein considers how this was developed by several of Lyotard’s contemporaries, such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, concluding with Alain Badiou’s assessment of where we are now with postmodern theory.

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9 PHILOSOPHICAL POSTMODERNISM: FROM ADORNO AND DERRIDA TO FOUCAULT Philip Goldstein

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ohn frow has suggested that the term ‘postmodern’ has acquired so many meanings that it is not a useful term (Frow 1997: 21). Two meanings have, however, gained importance. One is the notion that postmodernism breaks with the high modernist division between great art and popular culture (see, for example, Huyssen 1984, in which he credits the women’s movement and experimental art for overcoming the modernist ‘feminization’ of mass culture by creating a postmodernism which draws on mass culture’s forms and genres; see also Polan 1988: 50). Another, more philosophical definition explains postmodernism as a critique of Enlightenment rationality. Steven Best and Doug Kellner, for example, describe postmodernism in this way: ‘the philosophical project of Descartes, through the Enlightenment . . . is criticized for its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalizing and totalizing claims, for its hubris to supply apodictic truth, and for its allegedly fallacious rationalism’ (Best and Kellner 1991: 4). In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson also describes postmodernism as a critique of Enlightenment rationality. He adds, however, that the ‘psychic dispersal, fragmentations, . . . temporal discontinuities’ resulting from this critique imply a ‘dissolution of an essentially bourgeois ideology of the subject’ (Jameson 1981: 124–5). Although he claims that only the ‘post-individualistic social world of the future’, not the postmodernists’ ‘schizophrenic ideal’ of desire, intensity or fragmentation can genuinely fragment or decentre the bourgeois subject, he aptly characterises the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment as a dissolution of the middle class or ‘bourgeois’ subject. Certainly the notions of difference, repetition, singularity and historical truth of Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault accord with this characterisation. To an extent, the work of Theodor Adorno also accords with this view. He critiques the Enlightenment in the postmodern fashion but inconsistently preserves the realism and truth of critical theory.

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Theodor Adorno and Postmodern Theory In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer show, for example, that the ‘instrumental reason’ of the Enlightenment opposes mythological outlooks at the same time that it imposes an equally mythological faith in modern science. As they say: ‘Just as the myths already realize enlightenment, so enlightenment with every step becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 11–12). Contrary to mythology, science maintains that humanity, not the gods, rules nature, yet ‘myths already realize enlightenment’ because both mythology and science presuppose that knowledge enables knowers to dominate nature and people, but requires them to sacrifice themselves and repress their desires. In the name of facts and laws, the Enlightenment dismisses the magic and fantasy of myth but enlightenment still ‘becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology’ by exacting sacrifices from the enlightened and endowing established social structures with a mythical inevitability. This critique of Enlightenment reason gives Adorno’s views postmodern import. The critique derives, however, from the Marxist Georg Lukács, who argues that capitalism extends the commodity’s domination to all social institutions (See Buck-Morss 1977: 25, and Bernstein 1984: 82). He shows that, as a result, an instrumental rationality, which calculates means, not ends, evaluates techniques, not values, and seeks autonomy, not community, governs the social and the economic institutions of bourgeois society. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer also maintain that this instrumental rationality dominates bourgeois social life; they claim, however, that instrumental rationality does not begin with the capitalist system, as Lukács says; rather, it begins with the classical Greeks. They show, for example, that Homer’s Odysseus describes Ulysses resisting the sirens in order to underline the Greek mastery of nature: ‘Measures such as those taken on Odysseus’ ship in regard to the Sirens form presentient allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 34). The mastery of nature, along with opposition to mythology, characterises the propositional logic and conceptual discourse of both the Greeks and the modern Enlightenment. Not only does Adorno maintain, unlike Lukács, that the equipmental or instrumental rationality has dominated society since ancient times, he also refutes Marx’s belief that at the end of history communism overcomes the opposition of capitalists and workers and establishes a classless society. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Adorno claims that, ‘[p]urely conceptual’, this reconciliation represents the domination of Enlightenment reason because it imposes an abstract identity denying the subject’s concrete particularity or its historical individuality (Adorno 1984: 113). Faced with what he aptly termed ‘life after Auschwitz’, Adorno defends the non-identity of subject and object because this non-identity of subject and object limits theory, whose classifications,

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types and conceptual constructs fail to grasp concrete experience (see Brunkhorst 1999: 126). Both this critique of Marxism and of instrumental or Enlightenment reason give his theory postmodern import; however, he also accepts the Hegelian realism whereby the concrete textual object implicitly overcomes the reification imposed by instrumental reason and reveals the objective truths mediating between it and society. Despite his criticism of Marxist theory, he argues that art can, by virtue of its unresolved oppositions, resist its commodified character and reveal the divisions and conflicts characterising social life. As Adorno says, by ‘exposing the irrationality and absurdity of the status quo’, art resists its reified character and reveals the underlying truth of a divided society (Adorno 1984: 78).

Jacques Derrida as Postmodernist In the postmodern manner, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault also break with Marxist theory and Enlightenment reason, but they reject this socio-historical realism and consistently defend the value of difference or singularity. Consider, for example, the influential essay ‘Difference’, in which Derrida criticises Martin Heidegger’s realist notion of being. On the one hand, Heidegger and Derrida share the onto-theological tradition according to which language serves the ends of thought. While traditional phenomenology treats speech as the expression of consciousness and writing as a mere supplement of speech, both Heidegger and Derrida deny speech expresses consciousness and that writing supplements speech. Heidegger maintains, however, that language reveals the presence of ‘being’. In Poetry, Language, Thought, for example, he tells us that art brings ‘what is’ ‘into the Open’, but it does so as a ‘happening’, revelation, or ‘unconcealment’ (Heidegger 2001: 45, 35). To let truth be, the artistic text overcomes its technological ‘enframing’ and reveals and conceals Being, disclosing and hiding truth. Derrida grants that writing purports to reveal Being or Truth, as Heidegger says, but, instead of doing so, writing generates it as a discursive effect or differs it indefinitely. As the inaudible ‘a’ in différance suggests, writing generates textual effects which Heidegger (mis)construes as the venerable presence of ‘Being’. In short, both Heidegger and Derrida consider language or writing more fundamental than conventional rationality; however, while Heidegger assures us that language brings back the presence of metaphysical realities (‘being’) obliterated by modern rationality, Derrida undercuts that faith in being. A positive notion, writing generates only the illusion of presence, producing the effects of it. Derrida also critiques the realist ‘onto-theology’ of Marxism. For example, he argues that, in the name of science, Marx condemns the spiritual or spectral other in terms of which Hegel explains history. Derrida argues, however,

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that Marx fails to exclude this spectral other, whose presence reasserts itself as the revolution’s spirit (Derrida 1994: 106–9). Derrida maintains that Marx’s critique, which includes not only the spirit or spectre of dialectics but also the bourgeois ideology and commodity fetishism of capitalist society, opposes but fails to exclude these spectral others because they are already within Marxism, part of Marx’s revolutionary spirit or communist movement. Derrida goes on to claim, however, that true communism requires an absolute hospitality to a religious or messianic other always already part of us. As the ‘undeconstructible condition of any deconstruction’ and the vital ‘legacy’ of Marx (Derrida 1994: 28), this messianism affirms a transcendent sense of an other, including the dead.

Difference and Repetition: The Postmodernism of Gilles Deleuze Giles Deleuze does not defend a utopian messianism, but, in a number of works on Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and other philosophers as well as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, which set forth his own views, Deleuze also examines notions of difference and faults the theories of Heidegger and Marx. In Difference and Repetition (1968), which expounds his own views most fully, he goes on to make the notion of difference and repetition the foundation of a creative ontology presenting new ways of experiencing life or engaging in political action. He argues that the notions of difference and repetition undermine conventional or common sense beliefs in representations, models, propositions, contradictions, facts, dialectics, laws of nature, objects and causes. These beliefs form what he terms ‘the dogmatic image of thought’ because they ‘crush thought under an image which is that of the Same and the Similar in representation’, which ‘profoundly betrays what it means to think, and alienates the two powers of difference and repetition’ (Deleuze 1993a: 167). Since we do not, as a result, employ concepts or representations of objects or use propositions to refer to them, how we can experience the world becomes an issue. To explain this experience, he argues, as David Hume does, that thought is based on habit. Deleuze objects that Hume’s notion of the habitual association or, as Hume says, the ‘constant conjunction’ of ideas and impressions denies difference because his notion allows the contemplation of contradiction, but Deleuze still bases thought on habit. That is, unlike consciousness, thought is characteristic of animals and humans insofar as both function by habit or memory, what Deleuze calls the passive synthesis of impressions or intensities. The passive synthesis moves from past to future and lies in the spirit which contemplates an object – a general form of difference. Our 1,000 habits – contractions, contemplations, pretentions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues – form the basis of passive syntheses. As Deleuze says, ‘[T]he world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self . . . but it is the system of a dissolved self’ (Deleuze 1993a: 78).

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To explain the experience of time, he elaborates this notion of habit or passive synthesis. It establishes the foundation of time, but the memory, which is based on a second passive synthesis distinct from habit, also forms the basis of time. As he says: The first synthesis, that of habit, constituted time as a living present by means of a passive foundation on which past and future depended. The second synthesis, that of memory, constituted time as a pure past, from the point of view of a ground which causes the passing of one present and the arrival of another. (Deleuze 1993a: 93–4) Consciousness, by contrast, engages in what he calls an active synthesis of memory, which has a double principle of representation: a production of the past present and a reflection of the actual present. From the viewpoint of consciousness or active synthesis, we experience empirically a succession of different presents, which are also the coexistence of always growing levels of the past in passive synthesis. This combination of forms of repetition, including these active and passive syntheses, explain memory, perception, sensation, instinct, heredity, and so on. Central to this ontology of difference and repetition is the work of Nietzsche, whose notions of the eternal return of the same and of the death of God and dissolution of the self justify, Deleuze claims, making the notions of difference and repetition fundamental dimensions of experience. In the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche shows that the strong man resists the conventional, Christian morality of the group in order to assert his own values or perspectives, whereas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche explains the eternal return of the same as the fateful experience of what one has already been or experienced. Deleuze argues, however, that the strong man or overman central to Thus Spoke Zarathustra ensures that difference replaces identity in the eternal return of the same: ‘Nietzsche’s leading idea is to ground the repetition in eternal return on both the death of God and the dissolution of the self’ (Deleuze 1993a: 111). On the one hand, Deleuze faults traditional philosophy because it takes for granted what Deleuze calls the dogmatic Image of Thought, in which philosophy seeks what is true and everyone know what it is to think. On the other, he interprets the traditional philosophies of Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Kant, Hegel and others in terms of this Nietzschean view of difference and repetition. For instance, Deleuze argues that in The Republic and several dialogues, Plato means to distinguish the one, true idea from the many false versions of it. In the famous parable of the cave, Plato shows that without such truth people are subject to misleading impressions and are unable to experience the ‘light’ of truth. Deleuze grants that in Plato everything culminates in the affinity of thought with the true, grounded in the analogy of

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thought with the good. Deleuze argues, however, that to reverse Platonism is not to deny the primacy of the true over the impression, the original over the copy, the model over the image. In Plato the idea or being (the one) is actually difference because non-being is not the contradiction of being. Nonbeing or the many is also difference: ‘Being is difference itself’ but ‘non-being is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is difference’ (Deleuze 1993a: 64). Moreover, in many of Plato’s dialogues, the problem is to measure the rivals, select the pretenders, distinguish the thing and its imitations, and in the ancient fashion, that of myth and epics, to destroy the false pretenders. Such dialogues make difference a matter of truth vs rhetoric – true or false lovers, poets, priests and sophists. Similarly, Deleuze reinterprets and faults Aristotle’s claim that thought reflects reality. Aristotle explains the genres of art in terms of such reflection. Hence tragedy can show the unexpected consequences of the hero’s choices because the plot of a tragedy shows the mysterious nature of the universe. Deleuze objects, however, that the Aristotelian concept of genre reduces it to a form of identity, which destroys it. In addition to Plato and Aristotle, Deleuze faults the views of Kant even though Deleuze remains Kantian. In the Critique of Pure Reason and other works, Kant shows that space and time are not objective features of experience but constructs of the mind. By indicating what the conditions of possibility of experience are, what Kant calls the unity of apperception explains such constructs of experience. Deleuze also explains what makes experience possible, but he rejects the unity of apperception because it is based on common sense or empirical fact. The criticism of ‘this image of thought is’, he says, ‘precisely that it has based its supposed principle upon extrapolation from certain facts[.] . . . Kant traces the so-called transcendental structures from the empirical acts of a psychological consciousness: the transcendental synthesis of apprehension is directly induced from an empirical apprehension’ (Deleuze 1993a: 135). Deleuze also indicates how we construct experience or what its conditions of possibility are, rather than its causes or objects, but his creative ontology provides new ways of constructing experience, instead of conforming to empirical fact. Lastly, like Adorno and Derrida, Deleuze faults the dialectical philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, who argues that the contradictions which society evolves explain its evolution and show the workings of spirit, which anticipates the whole from history’s origins. Deleuze objects that the Hegelian dialectic preserves the whole only as a gigantic memory. Moreover, Hegelian contradiction, which treats non-contradiction as existing, makes identity the explanation of existence. ‘Hegelian contradiction does not deny identity or non-contradiction; on the contrary, it consists in inscribing non-contradiction within the existent in such a way that identity . . . is sufficient to think existence as such’ (Deleuze 1993a: 49). In this way the dialectical opposition betrays difference.

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Anti-Oedipus: The Postmodernism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A product of the rebellions of the 1960s, the collaboration of Deleuze and Guattari produced Anti-Oepidus, which preserves Deleuze’s creative, Kantian ontology explaining experience and his critique of traditional philosophy, including the rejection of representations, models, propositions, contradictions, facts, dialectics, laws of nature, objects and causes. Anti-Oepidus goes on, however, to engage in an extended critique of the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. It is well-known that in Freud’s view the repression of a (male) child’s incestuous desire to possess the mother and to kill the father explains the child’s unconscious mind. Drawing on Sophocles’ Oedipus, the Greek tragedy in which Oedipus kills his father and seduces his mother, Freud called this state of a child’s mind the Oedipal complex. Deleuze and Guattari grant that Oedipus is an important figure in modern capitalist society, but they reject both Freud’s and Lacan’s accounts of the unconscious, because they believe that it is really social, not private. Like Adorno and Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari also fault Marxism, especially Marx’s belief that capitalists exploit their workers, who must sell their labour power to survive, and appropriate the surplus value, which is the value above and beyond the cost of the labour and machines. Deleuze and Guattari grant that capitalism exploits its workers and appropriates surplus value, as Marx says, but they argue that it is not the struggle of workers and capitalists which explains this exploitation; on the contrary, society’s norms and conventions, what they call the socius, imbues workers (and women and minorities) with a desire to be exploited. What resists repression and exploitation is not the revolutionary working class or its political parties; what resists them is what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘schizophrenic’ flows of desire because they break with the socius. To justify these critiques of Marx and Freud, Deleuze and Guattari reject a number of conventional distinctions. They deny, for example, that production and consumption are different. Marx considers this distinction central to a capitalist economy, but they argue that everything is production, which they also speak of as kinds of machines. They deny the distinction of body and mind or man and nature, which they consider different ways of experiencing life. As they say, ‘[M]an and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other . . . They are one and the same producer-product’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 4–5). They deny that subject and object are different on the grounds that there is no subject behind the experiences of life. They deny the distinction of life and death. Desire, which includes them, is more fundamental. They argue, then, that a ‘materialist’ psychiatry introduces desire into the psychological mechanism and production into desire, which they call desiring machines. In the terms of Difference and Repetition, desire is the passive

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synthesis that engineers partial objects, bodies and flows. They grant that psychoanalysis discovers this production of desire or the desiring machine but complain that it buries the discovery under a new idealism, which is what they consider the Oedipal complex to be. In general, what they term the socius, which is society’s conventions and norms, regulates the flows of desire. It, not the Oedipal complex, explains the repression of desire in the unconscious. More importantly, they claim that workers favour their own exploitation not because they neglect their rational interests but because psychic repression makes social repression desirable. It is not the worker, then, that resists the system; it is the schizophrenic, whom they call the ‘schizo’ and whom they distinguish from those ill with schizophrenia. The schizo resists this repression because he or she acts as a desiring machine. Freud assumes, by contrast, that the individual forms an unconscious in the context of the private family. Deleuze and Guattari grant that psychic repression is caused by the family, but they say that it, not the individual’s ‘drives’, makes desire incestuous. Similarly, Lacan situates the unconscious in the family, but he treats unconscious desire as a lack, which means, they say, that it produces fantasies, not flows. What’s more, the production of a lack does not, they argue, come from the unconscious but from the socius or ruling class, which organises needs and wants amidst an abundance of production. Deleuze and Guattari deny, in other words, that the repressed desires of the child in the private family explain the Oedipal complex: ‘[b]y boxing the life of the child up within the Oedipus complex, by making familial relations the universal mediation of childhood, we . . . fail to understand the production of the unconscious itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 48–9). They grant that the Oedipal complex is important, but they claim that capitalism, not the private individual’s repressed desires, situates it in the family. Moreover, to show that it is capitalism, not the universal human nature presupposed by Freud, which situates the Oedipal complex in the family, they explain how primitive, feudal or despotic, and capitalist societies have evolved. In a primitive society, the earth, which Deleuze and Guattari consider a territorial machine, is the first socius. Because encampments are necessary, the nomad cannot simply drift with flows of desire and direct sexual filiations; the socius dominates. In general, a social machine sets apart flows of desire and distributes parts of a task, thereby using men and forming memory. If desire acts for its own sake or in excess of any needs, Deleuze and Guattari characterise it as the surplus value of code. In a primitive society, the surplus value of code operates the territorial machine, organising selections of tasks or goods and allocating portions to each person. As a result, the territorial machine excludes the exchange, commerce and industry of capitalism as well as its classes, which evolve much later. Moreover, in primitive societies, debt is like a gift, not an economic exchange. The giver is like one who is robbed or punished. In addition, kinship is dominant, not classes. Incest

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does not already exist, as the Freudians claim, because myths prohibit incest between father and daughter and mother and son; instead, through marriage, men exchange women from different families, establishing what Deleuze and Guattari call their filiations, which are homosexual arrangements. ‘Wherever men meet to take wives for themselves, to negotiate for them, to share them, etc., one recognizes the perverse tie of a primary homosexuality between local groups, between brothers-in-law, co-husbands, childhood partners’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 164–5). In place of capitalist economic exchange, there are ties of economic and political alliance between tribes, which combine with these relations of filiation within tribes. Deleuze and Guattari also explain how in feudal society the despotic or ‘megamachine’ of the state replaces the territorial machine of primitive society. This megamachine, which opposes the codes of the primitive territorial machine, is hierarchic, with the despot at the top, the bureaucratic apparatus below the despot, and the villagers at the bottom. Establishing empire, the despot pursues vengeance and incites ‘ressentiment’, which brings about bad conscience. Moreover, to become the despot, the prince marries the princess-sister and the mother-queen. This incestuous practice codes or ‘overcodes’ the coded flows of desire so that the megamachine can regulate them. The despot becomes what Deleuze and Guattari term the body without organs (or organisation), but the overcoding produced by incest makes all of the organs of all the subjects part of the despot’s body. As Deleuze and Guattari say: For what is at stake in the overcoding effected by incest is . . . that all of the organs of all the subjects, all the eyes, all the mouths, all the penises, all the vaginas, all the ears, and all the anuses become attached to the full body of the despot. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 210) With the growth of capitalism, the organs of the subjects rebel, detaching themselves from the despot and becoming those of the private man. The decoded flows making the despotic state feudal are not enough to bring about capitalism. Neither is the development of commodity production, which reinforces the feudal state. Capitalism emerges from the coming together or the conjunction of decoded flows of property, money, production, means of production and deterritorialised workers, who are workers expelled from the land which they worked and forced to move to the city. In fully developed capitalism, which includes merchant, finance and industrial capital, the process of deterritorialisation moves to the peripheries (the Third World), where the underdeveloped countries become part of the capitalist machine. The ‘politico-military-industrial-economic complex’ established by developed capitalism extracts human surplus value in the periphery, engenders enormous surplus value from automated or ‘machinic’ production, and absorbs the surplus value produced.

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To critique Freudian theory, Deleuze and Guattari argue that in capitalism, the family does not dominate economic production, as it did in despotic regimes; rather, the family is subordinated to economic production and it is privatised, with father, mother and child becoming the representatives or ‘simulacrum’ of capital. In this privatised family, capitalism inserts the Oedipal complex, with the mother the simulacrum of territoriality, and the father, of despotic law. In other words, contrary to psychoanalysis, the socius or social field of capitalism forms the unconscious, not the family. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the ‘communication of the unconscious does not by any means take the family as its principle; it takes as its principle the commonality of the social field insofar as it is the object of the investment of desire . . . the family is never determining but is always determined’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 276).

The Postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard In The Postmodern Condition, which is subtitled A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard adopts a very different perspective: instead of developing a creative ontology which critiques Freudian accounts of desire and the unconscious, Lyotard engages in a positive historical study which explains postmodernism as the result of changes which the last few centuries have produced in the character of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge. Commissioned by the President of the Conseil des Universities of the government of Quebec, this report argues that the modern era employs grand narratives or ‘metadiscourses’ to justify or legitimate knowledge in the face of religious or political oppression. As Lyotard says: I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectic of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. (Lyotard 1984: xxiii) He defines the postmodern as ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). Beginning in the 1950s, the postmodern is, then, the era in which scientific knowledge can no longer be legitimated by traditional or ‘grand’ narratives but instead finds legitimation in its little narratives or immanent practices. In Wittgenstein’s analytic terms, he argues that in the postmodern era the cognitive, prescriptive and evaluative ‘forms of life’ or ‘language games’ of the sciences expect their performance or competence, not the grand narratives, to legitimate them. Moreover, formally incommensurate, the cognitive, prescriptive and evaluative language games of the specialised sciences or disciplines must provide their own legitimating ‘ideological’ rationales because the traditional grand narratives can no longer justify them. As Lyotard says, ‘[t]he little

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narrative [petit récit] remains the quintessential form of imaginative invention, most particularly in science’ (Lyotard 1984: 60). Unlike Deleuze, Derrida and other postmodernists, Lyotard, moved by the Algerian war, initially defended Marxist theory; however, in Libidinal Economy and other earlier works, he critiques the Marxist theory which he had previously defended, and, as scholars point out, the critique anticipates this account of postmodernism (see, for example, Sim 1996: 28). Responding to the political upheavals of the 1960s, he grants that the scientific theory discovered by Karl Marx establishes its formal independence of its socio-historical context, as the influential Marxist Louis Althusser argued. Moreover, Lyotard admits that the capitalist economy and its state bureacracy allow science the formal autonomy defended by Althusser. Lyotard argues, however, that in Marx’s account the state and the economy work together to circulate and reproduce capital. He maintains that, as a result, science does not resist ideology, as Althusser says; science fosters and defends the reproduction of capital and the exploitation of workers, teachers and students. In the former USSR and in the Western world the growth of economic exploitation and of the technocratic state bureaucracy gave the sciences, including Marxism, a conservative function: they justify the capitalist economic enterprises and the state bureaucracy and alienate both workers and students (see Lyotard 1973: 78–166). In The Postmodern Condition, which restates and extends this critique of Marxism to other ‘grand’ narratives, Lyotard argues that the emergence of post-industrial society explains why the grand narratives can no longer legitimate knowledge. In general, to legitimate knowledge, a legislator must be authorised to prescribe the conditions in which a statement becomes part of a scientific discourse. Legitimating knowledge involves, then, political and scientific statements. This makes the question of scientific knowledge a question of government as well. The problem is, however, the legitimacy of scientific knowledge, not just knowledge, which involves, Lyotard says, not only truth but also competence with regard to efficiency, justice, happiness, beauty. More importantly, Lyotard notes that knowledge has traditionally had a narrative form because popular histories, with heroes, successes, and so on, gave institutions legitimacy. In such traditional narratives, which involve a triple competence: speaking, understanding and doing, what made the narrator authoritative is his having heard the story himself. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave shows that people want stories, Plato’s dialogues legitimate narrative knowledge. They mean to legitimate science but are not scientific because they tell a story of scientific legitimation. Unlike the narrative knowledge of traditional culture, a scientist like Copernicus is, by contrast, supposed to both speak the truth and defend his assertions. Since the scientist can prove what he says, we consider his statements true. Moreover, one teaches scientific statements only if they are verifiable by argumentation and proof.

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Once the bourgeoisie emancipates itself from traditional authorities, it legitimates itself by bringing back stories in which the hero is the people and progress is the result. In these stories, all people have a right to science, so with the universities the professors and the administration require the nation to spread the new scientific knowledge to the people. Lyotard’s example is Humboldt University in Germany, which was expected to use science in the nation’s spiritual formation. Bringing together ‘is’ and ‘ought’ statements, the Humboldt project forms a subject legitimated by knowledge and the nation. In this way, the speculative philosophy of the schools unites different sciences in the formation of spirit. Lyotard shows, then, that knowledge found its historical legitimacy both in a practical subject, humanity, and in an epic version in which the concrete subject emancipates itself. He argues, moreover, that the crisis of knowledge comes from an internal erosion of the principle of the legitimacy of knowledge. As a language game, science cannot legitimate itself because it lacks a universal metalanguage enabling it to regulate practical affairs. The only metalanguage explaining the axioms of science is that of logic. As a result, humanist or speculative philosophy annuls its function as legitimation and studies logic or the history of ideas. More importantly, in the late eighteenth century, when science becomes a force for production, capitalism creates foundations of private research in which the laboratories engage in applied research and act like businesses. In post-industrial society, information and other new technologies also influence knowledge, which is then broken into quantities and produced to be sold. Moreover, it develops new types, including knowledge exchanged in order to maintain ordinary life as well as credits of knowledge aimed at optimising the performances of a programme. Scientific knowledge also produces many different discourses, including linguistics, cybernetics, computers and translation. The changes in knowledge affect universities as well. The demand for experts grows, so universities are asked to form competencies, not ideas – a version of delegitimation. As Lyotard explains, the world of postmodern knowledge is regulated by a play of information accessible to experts. The students are either professionals or technical intelligentsia, and the universities devoted to producing technical cadre are divided from those devoted to promoting imaginative spirits. The technocrats produced in these institutions do not consider what society calls its needs because they are not independent of the new technologies. In other words, no scientist worries about science or society as a whole. As a consequence in its pragmatic aspects, science is contrary to a stable system. Scientific statements give rise to ideas, which indicate an open or unstable system. Lyotard characterises this evolution of postmodern science as discontinuous, catastrophic and paradoxical, what he terms paralogical. It explains the unknown, not the known.

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Jürgen Habermas has argued that one can establish a consensus among the proponents of different disciplines if the proponents rise above their disciplines and engage in rational debate. Lyotard denies, however, that such a consensus is possible because it mistakenly presupposes that the grand narratives, especially that of speculative philosophy, have not lost their validity. Without consensus, there is no way to resolve the disputes between different disciplines. As he argues in The Differend, without a metalanguage, the resolution of disputes is inherently unfair to one of the parties because its rules differ from the other party’s rules.

Michel Foucault as a Postmodernist Like Lyotard, Foucault examines the positive, factual history of disciplinary knowledge, rather than the conditions of possible experience described by Deleuze and Guattari or the differed presence of Derrida. He does not speak of grand or metanarratives or of scientific knowledge, but in a postmodern fashion he does suggest that the discourses of the disciplines or, as he says, power/ knowledge impose ideals of normality and thereby reproduce themselves and/ or the subject, rather than foundational, humanist ideals. In the early The History of Madness (originally published in English in abridged form as Madness and Civilization), Foucault, like Nietzsche, who preserves the ancient view that Dionysiac madness is a tragic experience, claims that madness readily transgresses the ethical precepts of ‘bourgeois’ morality, but he maintains the changing historical contexts of madness explain this transgression. He says, for example, that in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries madness replaces leprosy as a spiritual condition revealing signs of God’s wisdom. Like the lepers, the mad, who are on a voyage, a quest or a journey, remain within the community, where madness shows the tragic abyss of life, its existential emptiness; however, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the rationalists condemn madness as error and exclude it from social life. ‘Reason’ excludes madness from itself and from society because the mad can always overcome their insanity and think rationally. The many hospitals and workhouses built in the seventeenth century grouped together sexual libertines, debauchers, alchemists, victims of venereal disease, impious disbelievers, homosexuals and the mad on the grounds that all such abnormal activities simply violated ethical and theological norms. Foucault suggests that it was not scientific critique or outraged humanity but institutional changes which ended the practice of interning the mad with the criminals, vagabonds and profligates. For example, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, psychopathology returned the mad to human realms, but only because in this era the mad acquire human rights. Moreover, once economics becomes a distinct discipline, poverty loses its status as a moral fault. Since economics shows that the poor work to make the rich rich,

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society admits that it is obligated to help the labouring poor, and the poor and the mad are separated. Liberated from internment, the mad become free to enter asylums, where psychoanalysis, which becomes an absolute wisdom, gives it the power to speak, to end its silence, and to recognise itself. In The Order of Things, Foucault also shows that changing historical conditions, not universal or foundational norms, explain the changing forms of discourse, but he adopts Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem’s belief that evolving paradigms explain the historical development of a discipline, not the Nietzschean view that madness itself undermines the ethical norms of the rationality excluding it. Foucault assumes that such a paradigm or episteme underlies an era’s disciplines or expert knowledges and explains their cognitive force. Modes of positive knowledge, these epistemes rupture and break with each other. The Renaissance, the classical era and the modern era constitute sets of assumptions or epistemes establishing the disciplines which subsequently undermine them. Foucault claims, moreover, that in the twentieth century the modern disciplines fracture the unified figure of human being in terms of which in the nineteenth century phenomenology grounds them. As Lyotard also suggests, the modern episteme divides into the mathematical sciences, the social sciences and philosophical disciplines, and thereby undermines the phenomenological project – to establish the human foundation of the sciences. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault goes on to argue that, as a strategy with dispositions and techniques, discourse forms a complex of power/knowledge organising diverse institutions including the family. He still assumes that such complexes undermine foundational norms, but he produces what he terms a genealogy of a discourse’s divisions and influence, rather than an archaeology explaining an era’s discourses about criminals, the insane or knowledge. For instance, he points out that to determine the culpability of the accused, judges require the expertise of psychiatrists, anthropologists and criminologists, all of whom enable the judge to determine what the criminal can be, not just what he did. Exercised not only on the accused or the guilty but also on the insane, children, students, prisoners, workers and ex-convicts, this scientific-juridical complex engages in political tactics and strategies producing what Foucault terms a technology of the body. Foucault still situates this genealogy in distinct historical periods whose socio-historical changes explain its evolution, but the genealogy examines the emergence and extension of the technology, not the episteme underlying various discourses. Foucault argues, moreover, that, impersonal and autonomous, a discipline is not a form of ideological hegemony but an ‘anatomy of power’ used by different institutions, including the family, to impose conceptions of normality ensuring ruling-class domination. While eighteenth-century philosophers and jurists seek in the legal pact the model on which to construct social life, the technicians of discipline elaborate techniques of individual and collective coercion of bodies.

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The eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, which becomes the dominant class, imposes a juridical code of formal equality and a parliamentary form of regime. Disciplines are the other side of these processes. Essentially inegalitarian and hierarchic, disciplinary systems of micropower underpin the general juridical form which guarantees an egalitarian system of rights. The rewards and the penalties of this disciplinary surveillance impose standards of normality on docile bodies. Disciplines adjust a ‘multiplicity’ of people to the multiplying apparatuses of production, including the production of knowledge and of aptitudes at school, of health in hospitals, and of destructive force in the army. One cannot, Foucault argues, separate the accumulation of capital from the accumulation of people – the techniques which make the ‘cumulative multiplicity’ of people useful accelerate the accumulation of capital. In other words, he suggests that, while the bourgeoisie imposes formal or legal equality, this ‘microphysics’ of power, coercive, not persuasive, explains the underpinning of eighteenth-century social life. Moreover, this power dominates larger and larger areas of social life. Schools, hospitals, prisons, armies and factories employ these technologies, which organise spaces, time and bodies. As in the earlier works, Foucault claims here too that in the eighteenthcentury hospital, school, factory and prison, where the technologies ensure objectivation and subjugation, disciplinary procedures or mechanisms enable knowledge and power to reinforce each other. In other words, while the disciplines making up the human sciences seem to oppose and to change schools or factories, the disciplines actually make the technology more effective. Indeed, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these technologies spread to so many different institutions that Foucault speaks of a whole carceral society, not just prisons. Moreover, he points out that even though the prison fails to reform criminals, the prison remains the central form of punishment. The carceral society perpetuates the delinquency the prisons mean to reduce because this society uses delinquency to survey the population and to direct and exploit tolerated illegalities. In The History of Sexuality (vol. I), Foucault also shows that, as strategies of power, disciplinary knowledge has a constitutive or ‘subjectivizing’ force whereby it enables or ‘interpellates’ the subject, including its unconscious. In this case, he claims, as Deleuze and Guattari do, that sexual desire is not repressed or subversive, as Freudians and Marxists say; it is a normal construct of modern discourses, which incessantly promote talk about sex. Modern society talks so obsessively about sex not because sexuality has been repressed but because it evolves a will to knowledge about sexual matters. In The History of Madness, the Nietzschean will to power transgressed bourgeois morality, while, in the History of Sexuality, the will to knowledge is embedded in institutional practices, especially the confession. Foucault points out, for example, that in the medieval era, the church demanded very detailed confessions of sexual acts, whereas in the seventeenth

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century confession shifts from such explicit acts to more private thoughts and intentions. More importantly, he shows that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governmental policies which regulate population, birth control, sexual hygiene and education, explain sexual activities and thereby produce discussions of sex at the same time that they police the activities of the population. In this postmodern fashion Foucault once again critiques theoretical ideals, for it is the normalising practices established in the family or other institutions, not in the law nor in scientific or humanist theory, which explain the changes in social life. This time, however, he claims, as Deleuze and Guattari do, that power both proliferates pleasure and multiplies perversions or misconducts. He shows, for instance, that power produces the figures of the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple and the perverse adult. Similarly, psychology, medicine, and so on, give the middle class its own body, while welfare, birth control, poverty, and so on, give the working class a different body. Moreover, the working class develops its own sexuality because it finds bourgeois sexuality oppressive. Lastly, medical discourse claimed that pure blood ties excluded mixed marriages – no miscegenation, while perversion stemmed from degenerate family lines – an insane parent, for example. Since racism stems from this nineteenth-century union of pure blood and bourgeois sexuality, Foucault’s account of sexuality ultimately explains the Nazis’ anti-semitism, including the Holocaust. Unlike Foucault’s archaeological accounts of madness and knowledge, his genealogical studies of punishment and sexuality examine the nexus of power/ knowledge and radically critique the normative import of theoretical ideals; still, both his archaeological and his genealogical studies indicate that, as postmodern theory suggests, discourse undermines the humanist’s ideals of rational norms and universal truth and evolves distinct historical configurations which regulate the body, institutions and even society.

Conclusion: Alain Badiou and Postmodernism Alain Badiou emerged as a major, new French philosopher with the publication of Being and Event (1988). Unlike Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and other postmodern philosophers, he preserves rationalism by identifying mathematics with ontology and defends Marxism by making it a matter of personal commitment or ‘fidelity’, not science or historical truth; nonetheless, in ‘The Adventure of French Philosophy’, Badiou aptly characterises postmodern philosophy as, in general, an attempt ‘to displace the relation between the concept and its external environment by developing new relations to existence, to thought, to action, and to the movement of forms’ (Badiou 2005: 70). What’s more, except for the work of Adorno, whose realist treatment of postmodern themes falls outside his scope, he fully summarises the main philosophical tendencies in terms of which I have explained postmodern theory. For

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instance, he says that one tendency is, as the work of Deleuze, Lyotard and Foucault indicates, the French appropriation of German philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger, who were transformed into ‘something completely new’ (Badiou 2005: 69). The second tendency, evident especially in Deleuze and Guattari’s work as well as Lyotard’s, is, as I suggested, to construe science as a practice of creative thought and not an object of conceptual truth. The third tendency, which characterises not only Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, but Derrida and Foucault as well, is the engagement in action or politics but not political parties, showing thereby that philosophy is not just for philosophers. The fourth and last tendency, which characterises Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard more than Foucault or Derrida, is to modernise philosophy by creating new ‘forms of life’ (Badiou 2005: 70).

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10 POSTMODERN AESTHETICS Nikolai Duffy

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he nuclear physicist David Bohm once remarked how ‘revolutionary changes in physics have always involved the perception of a new order and attention to the development of new ways of using language that are appropriate to the communication of such order’ (Bohm 1972: 249). Similarly, Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, first published in 1927, states how it is not possible to know the exact position and motion of something at the same time. For Heisenberg, the subatomic world of quantum mechanics goes against the grain of common sense. Throwing into question classical concepts such as mass, location and velocity, it demands a departure from the standard language and imagery of physics. Heisenberg likened the uncertainty principle to the ‘observer effect’, noting how any observation alters – and therefore affects – the thing being measured. There is no detached point from which impartial and precise measurement can be made such that each measurement, inevitably, is and will always be imprecise (Heisenberg 1949: 20). Speaking in interview thirty years after the publication of his paper on the uncertainty principle, Heisenberg repeated his sense that the so-called new physics required a new conception of language, one that registered uncertainty by rendering the seemingly precise language of science equivocal (Peat and Buckley 1996: 5). In 2002, the then United States Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, gave a news briefing to the US Department of Defence, concerning the evidence linking the state of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction, and asserted that: ‘as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know’ (Rumsfeld 2002). Writing in response to Rumsfeld’s speech two years later, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek asserted that there is a fourth category of knowledge, overlooked by Rumsfeld, namely the ‘things we don’t know we know’. This, Žižek argued, is the realm of the Freudian unconscious, ‘the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself”, as Jacques Lacan used to say. In many ways, these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to,

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may pose an even greater threat’ (Žižek 2004). There is, Žižek is suggesting, beyond our control, something we cannot quite reach or understand, something, perhaps, that we do not wish to know, or something that we never know directly but only imprecisely, that, like dreams, we only know through disguises and subterfuges. Despite their great differences, what is crucial about Heisenberg’s notion of uncertainty or imprecision and Žižek’s sense of the unknown knowns is that both theories point to one of the most significant elements of postmodern aesthetics, in all its various guises, namely, a concern with representation, with what appears, as well as with what fails to appear, what falls through the cracks. Some of the most influential elements of postmodern aesthetics have been concerned with placing border zones or the liminal at the centre of things. Postmodern aesthetics has to do with a sense that language is not always adequate to the task, that things do not quite come to light, and that this shadowy element is an integral and constitutive element of the postmodern age in general, and of postmodernism in particular. In his highly influential book, The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha noted that, [i]t is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond [. . .] Our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the ‘present’, for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix ‘post’: postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism. (Bhabha 1994: 1) Bhabha goes on to argue that: The ‘beyond’ is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past. . . . Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but in the fin de siècle, we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond’: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delà – here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth. (Bhabha 1994: 1) Postmodern aesthetics engages this question of oscillation as theoretical question and practical constraint. In other words, postmodern aesthetics is interested in asking the question of how to stage this imprecise border zone, that is, how represent it as oscillation. For this reason, postmodern aesthetics is an eclectic and often contradictory field encompassing visual art, architecture, film, literature, dance, music and

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film. It is a mode of being in the world, as well as a formal and philosophical response to the particular conditions of late capitalism in the West. It blends a concern with aesthetics with contemporary debates in questions surrounding geography, urban planning, situationism, ideology, psychology, mathematics, physics and philosophy. Jean-François Lyotard famously categorised the postmodern as ‘the end of grand narratives’ and the postmodern age as the age of eclecticism. ‘Eclecticism’, Lyotard wrote: is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae; you watch a western; you eat McDonald’s at midday and local cuisine at night; you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in Hong Kong; knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows. . . . Together, artist, gallery owner, critic, and public indulge one another in the Anything Goes – it is time to relax. But this realism of Anything Goes is the realism of money: in the absence of aesthetic criteria it is still possible to measure the value of works of art by the profits they realise. (Lyotard 1992: 8) In aesthetic terms, disciplinary boundaries merge; aesthetic practices proliferate, as do the various theories underpinning them. In contradistinction to the traditional emphasis on notions of aesthetics ‘depth’, there is an increased concern with surfaces, particularly in terms of what such surfaces simultaneously reveal and veil. Epistemology becomes less a science of knowledge as indeterminacy; clarity becomes incredulity; lacuna becomes both structural and organising principle. Chance replaces certainty. As the American writer, Paul Auster, puts it: Chance is a part of reality: we are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence [. . .] What I’m talking about is the presence of the unpredictable, the utterly bewildering nature of human experience. Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. In philosophical terms, I’m talking about the powers of contingency. (Auster 1995: 278–9) What is at stake is a form of language, a form of making and living, that privileges openness, difference and uncertainty. Contingency renders structures and systems equivocal; it destabilises authority, promotes flux over fixity. In any artistic discipline postmodern aesthetics achieve this effect most commonly through fragmentation, syntactic disruption, collage, deviation, digression, polyphony, a hybridisation of genre, simultaneous multiple plot lines (more often than not, left unresolved), an overload of both information and symbols, a valorisation of surface over depth. As the American poet, Rosmarie Waldrop, writes:

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Vertigo. The terms shift. The relation of the terms shifts. The richness undermines itself. If everything is like something else, no one likeness means anything [. . .] we are left with ‘pure’ analogy, the gesture of it rather than any one specific analogy. A gesture that makes the terms transparent for the very structure of language, of signification [. . .] Transparency for the structure of signification – and for its limits: the silence, the infinite, the nothing, all it is not able to hold. (Waldrop 2002: 96) The trouble is that, often against their best intentions, artistic forms have a tendency to produce fixed representations of the world: a literary text becomes a finished product contained by the physical wrappers of the book; an architectural drawing becomes a rigid structure. The aesthetic question of how to keep equivocation mobile has taken many different forms, some more successful than others, but none that has formulated a definitive practice. The quest for openness and for plurality will always fail. Contingency evades control, and equivocation can never be brought to term. Failure is an integral element of postmodern aesthetics. In the words of Samuel Beckett’s 1983 text, Worstward Ho, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett 1983: 89).

Postmodern Architecture: Double Coding and Radical Eclecticism Postmodern aesthetics first gained currency in the field of architecture, particularly through the work of Kenneth Frampton, Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks. Jencks has been one of the most prolific and ardent exponents of postmodern aesthetics, beginning, in 1977, with the publication of his book, The Language of Postmodern Architecture, going up to the 2011 publication, The Story of Post-Modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture. Following Lyotard’s sense of postmodernism as synonymous with the end of so-called grand narratives, and his subsequent declaration that a war should be waged against any attempt at or form of totality, Jencks conceives postmodern architecture as a system of pluralities. Postmodern designs are hybrids, incorporating diversity of material and style, cultural pluralism and historical reference. Jencks was reacting against a particular reading of modernist architecture that began to dominate architectural thinking in the 1970s. Modernist architecture was criticised for its utilitarianism, particularly its valorisation of function over style, together with the importance attached to geometrical simplicity, uniformity, monumentality and standardisation. In the words of one of the principal modernist architects, Le Corbusier, without the clean and clear lines of geometrical design, ‘we have the sensation, so insupportable to man, of shapelessness, of poverty, of disorder, of wilfulness’ (Le Corbusier 1931: 48).

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Arguably, Jencks’s greatest elaboration of this notion of postmodern aesthetics is best encapsulated by his notion of ‘double-coding’. For Jencks, PostModernism (as he writes it) is ‘that paradoxical dualism, or double coding, which its hybrid name entails: the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence’ (Jencks 1986: 10). ‘A Post-Modern building’, Jencks argued, is [. . .] one which speaks on at least two levels at once: to other architects and a concerned minority who care about specifically architectural meaning, and to the public at large, or the local inhabitants, who care about other issues concerned with comfort, traditional building and a way of life. (Jencks 2002: 3) On this model, postmodernism fuses the vanguard and the popular, speaking to both – frequently mutually exclusive – audiences at once. Buildings are understood to function as a language or a discourse. In other words, buildings communicate; they suggest symbolic, metaphorical and cultural meanings, correspondences and connotations. They reference the historical and the cultural moment of their design and construction. They echo, develop and amalgamate. It is the self-consciousness of a building of its own double-coding that renders it postmodern. Indeed, this is one of the central double discourses of postmodern aesthetics, in any guise. It is self-reflexive, ironic, open and plural. The novelist and critic, Umberto Eco, usefully develops what is at stake here when he writes: I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. (Eco 1984: 67) Here authenticity is achieved via a self-reflexive irony. The sincere declaration of love is only possible by ironising its expression. In the postmodern age, in other words, sincerity becomes most sincere when it becomes a parody of pastiche of itself. One of the other main exponents of postmodern architecture was Robert Venturi, whose most important books were Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972). In opposition to what he perceived as modernism’s ‘easy unity of exclusion’, in the former book Venturi argued for a ‘complex and contradictory architecture based on the

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richness and ambiguity of modern experience’ (Venturi 1966: 16). For Venturi and his wife and collaborator, Denise Scott Brown, the interest lay in combining a commercial or ‘pop’ sensibility with postmodern notions of hybridity that characterised the untidy sprawl of mass-built suburbs and the growing commercial and urban importance of automobile strips (for more on this, see Scott Brown 1984). For Venturi and Scott Brown this postmodern sensibility found its exemplary expression in Las Vegas where, they argued, in a typically postmodern attitude influenced by semiotics, ‘the sign was more important than the architecture’, and that architecture, more than anything else, should be a ‘communications over space’ (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1972: 8). It exemplifies what Jameson calls ‘the heterogeneous fabric of the commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape of the postsuperhighway American city’ (Jameson 1992: 63). It is about blending the theories of the fine arts with the materials and modes of the mass media. All buildings are symbols, Venturi suggests; all buildings function as signs. Las Vegas does this to an exemplary level, Venturi argues, because the Strip comprises a variety of styles and references, many of which ‘blend and clash’, and all of which are prefaced (announced, advertised) by large-scale billboards competing to entice drivers of cars to stop and enter. The appeal of Las Vegas is its non-hierarchical inclusiveness. The ordinary becomes decorative. The Strip, Venturi and Brown argue, ‘is not an order dominated by the expert and made easy for the eye. The moving eye in the moving body must work to pick out and interpret a variety of changing, juxtaposed orders’ (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1972: 135). In some respects, this is the idiom of commercialism, or what Frederic Jameson would refer to as ‘late capitalism’. Yet the key point for Venturi is that Las Vegas embodies the ‘commercial vernacular vocabularies of the highway environment and urban sprawl’ and, as such, becomes ‘an appropriate symbolic architecture of our time’ (Venturi 1984: 109). It is the example par excellence because: Allusion and comment, on the past or present or on our great commonplaces or old clichés, and inclusion of the everyday in the environment, sacred and profane – these are what are lacking in present-day Modern architecture. We can learn about them from Las Vegas as have other artists from their own profane and stylistic sources. (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1972: 53) Elaborating on many of the ideas suggested or implied by Venturi, Jencks’s other key term for determining the scope of postmodern architecture is ‘radical eclecticism’. Such an aesthetic, Jencks argues, resists cultural uniformity and rejects the idea of a dominant centre. In other parlance, it employs juxtaposition, oxymorons and contradiction, and connotes a smorgasbord aesthetic, combining both a freedom to choose and an opportunity to amalgamate or

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blend references and allusions drawn from a variety of cultural and historical periods. In this regard, a very helpful way of understanding what is at stake in postmodern architecture is to conceive it along similar lines to the notion of the palimpsest/palimtext central to most theories on literary postmodernism. As Michael Davidson puts it: The palimtext is neither object but a writing-in-process. As its name implies, the palimtext retains vestiges of prior inscriptions out of which it emerges. Or, more accurately, it is the still-visible record of its responses to those earlier writings. The palimtext is a kind of ruin that emerges in an era when ruins no longer signify lost plenitude. The modern ruin, as Walter Benjamin points out, is immanent in mass-produced commodities, an allegory of modern materiality’s impermanence and ephemerality. (Davidson 1997: 68) Radical eclecticism is about creativity and reinvention. Richard Kearney describes radical eclecticism as a ‘creative pluralism’, arguing that ‘one of the goals of this “radical eclecticism” is to rid us of the illusion of some englobing national or imperial ideology which contrives to erode cultural differences’ (Kearney 1992: 584). As Kearney continues, postmodernism conceives history as a collage, and so: resists the naïve belief in history as demonstrating inevitable progress or regress, and suggests that we draw from the old and the new in a recreative and nondogmatic way. The ‘post’ in postmodern refers not just to what comes after modernity. It signals another way of seeing things, one which transforms the linear model of historical time into a series of multiple perspectives. (Kearney 1992: 585) In relation to this, it is important to stress that such a postmodern aesthetic does not propagate a caustic cultural relativism but rather demands an active engagement with non-resolvable difference. The creative task concerns the ways in which such differences might be combined without any of those differences being collapsed into the same. In design terms, it concerns the ways in which different, and sometimes acutely conflicting, references and styles can co-exist without synthesis.

Lyotard – The Differend, the Sublime? Jean-François Lyotard explored the philosophical and aesthetic implications of this notion of difference in arguably his most important philosophical book, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1983). In legalistic terms, by ‘differend’ Lyotard means a conflict between parties that cannot be decided or

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resolved because the parties cannot agree on a rule of judgement. One way of understanding what is at issue here is via an account of refugee law and postmodernism given by Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington. In their paper, ‘A Well-Founded Idea of Justice’, Douzinas and Warrington cite a case for asylum in Britain by Sri Lankan refugees. The claim for asylum was made on the basis that the refugees feared persecution and death if they were returned to Sri Lanka. The claim for asylum was rejected on the grounds that the plaintiffs were unable to demonstrate reasonable grounds for their fear of persecution in the homeland. The rejection of the asylum claim came down to a double bind. On the one hand, the judgement stated that fear of persecution is a subjective state and, as such, the plaintiffs were required to articulate their fear in a clear and rational manner in order for their case to be heard clearly and properly. On the other hand, it was argued that fear, particularly an acute fear for one’s life, if genuine, would exceed the bounds of rational speech such that the plaintiff would struggle to articulate the grounds of their fear. The trouble was that, in such a scenario, the case would not be able to be heard because the plaintiffs were unable to articulate their case for asylum. The double bind leads to an infinite circularity. As Douzinas and Warrington write, here the differend refers to ‘an extreme form of injustice in which the injury suffered by the victim is accompanied by a deprivation of the means to prove it’ (Douzinas and Warrington 1995: 209). Lyotard calls this sense of the differend an ‘ethical tort’. As Lyotard writes: Should the victim seek to [. . .] testify anyway to the wrong done to her, she comes up against the following argumentation, either the damage you complain about never took place, and your testimony is false; or else they took place, and since you are able to testify to them, it is not an ethical tort that has been done to you. (Lyotard 1988: 5) There is an absurdity in such a judgement, but also a violence. In either case, the point is that the differend, as one of the prime emblems of postmodernism, foregrounds the notion of incommensurability. Although Lyotard’s key areas of focus in The Differend are the legal and the linguistic, in subsequent work he aligned the notion of the incommensurable to postmodern aesthetics, particularly in respect of his use of the term the ‘sublime’. First articulated in the eighteenth century by the British philosopher, Edmund Burke, and subsequently – and arguably more famously – developed by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant – the aesthetics of the sublime refers to an aesthetic of the wild, the untamed, the raw, the savage. It is an aesthetic term distinguished from notions of the ‘beautiful’ or of ‘taste’. Most frequently, the sublime is associated with large-scale natural phenomena, such as waterfalls, mountains and thunderstorms. In this, the sublime is understood to be that which is awe-inspiring, that combines experiences of wonder with

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terror. One ever feels one’s smallness. In this respect, the sublime is an eccentric or extravagant aesthetic. Becoming eccentric, getting outside our own limits, and trying to transcend the narrowness of our own experience can give us the vision of larger life, of some life ‘pasturing freely where we never wander’ in Thoreau’s phrase (Thoreau 2005: 146). The exploration of life by means of analogy possesses a spiritual dimension that logic does not. To be extravagant means to wander outside the limits of everything we have learned as received knowledge, prescribed feelings, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to think. In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard defines the sublime as that which is ‘subjectively felt by thought as differend’ (Lyotard 1994: 131). The sublime interrupts teleological judgement, pointing to a realm that resists both complete conceptualisation and categorisation. The sublime renders thinking reflexive but not categorical. Lyotard’s most decisive understanding of the sublime, then, is that it points to a fundamental aporia of knowledge; it names – or, perhaps better, implies – the limits of conceptualisation. And in this sense, the sublime occasions the differend. It leads to an impasse such that every representation of it, at least to a degree, fails. This is why Lyotard famously claims that the sublime is the presentation of the unpresentable. As Andrew Slade notes, ‘art is sublime where and when it strains to disclose the Idea – it is sublime where its object is absent’ (Slade 2007: 22).

Deleuze, Guattari and Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari notably characterised such an aesthetic ‘minor literature’. In their book, Kakfa: Towards a Minor Literature, they outline three constitutive features of minor literature: ‘Its language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’; everything in minor literature ‘is political’; and in it ‘everything takes on a collective value’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 16). In other terms, minor literature refers to: a minor literary movement within a larger literary tradition; literature written by minority groups within a larger cultural, linguistic and/or national environment; and experimental literature which, they argue, ‘minorizes’ a dominant or ‘major’ language. In a theory not without its detractors, particularly from the perspective of postcolonial studies, in their book, Deleuze and Guattari’s primary example was high modernism in general, and the work of Franz Kafka in particular (for a critical account of Deleuze and Guattari’s argument, see Kaplan 1996: 65–100). Deleuze and Guattari define Kafka as a ‘minor’ writer on two grounds: firstly; Kafka represents an ethnic and linguistic minority working within the confines of a foreign empire; secondly, Kafka’s experimentation with form and theme were both a consequence of and challenge to the social and political environment in which he lived. The wider application of these ideas into postmodern aesthetics has revolved around Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of minor literature as ‘deterritorialising’

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language by intensifying or exaggerating features within it. As Ronald Bogue observes, ‘what is crucial about a minor usage of language is that it deterritorializes sound, “detaches” it from its designated objects and therefore neutralizes sense. The word ceases to mean and becomes instead an arbitrary sonic vibration’ (Bogue 2003: 104). One of Deleuze’s central adjectives for elaborating this sense of deterritorialisation is ‘schizophrenic’ and much critical literature has been written on this aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy (for an introduction to this subject, see Colman 2014). In a much more self-contained essay on the nineteenth-century American writer, Hermann Melville, however, Deleuze discusses this effect in terms of ‘stuttering’. One of the primary functions of literary, cinematic, musical and artistic aesthetic experimentation, Deleuze argues in that essay, is to destabilise ‘language’ by disrupting any and every attempt to move towards sequentiality, continuity and coherence. ‘When a language is so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer’, Deleuze writes, ‘[. . .] then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. When a language is strained in this way, language in its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent’ (Deleuze 1993b: 113 [emphasis in original]). For Deleuze, language is heterogeneous. The stutter accentuates this conception of language by emphasising its anti-representational and ‘agrammatical’ qualities, in the strongest postmodern senses of those terms (Deleuze 1993b: 68). From this perspective, the function of the postmodern aesthetic, for Deleuze, becomes nothing other than its own constant self-contestation and shifting translation. To put it another way, aesthetic experimentation becomes identical not with itself but with a critical imperative of disruption.

Literary Postmodernism Experimenting with ways of presenting the unpresentable has been one of the most important, and long lasting, elements of postmodern fiction. In Britain, postmodern aesthetics first came to critical attention thanks to Peter Ackroyd’s self-described ‘polemic’, Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism, published in 1974 (at the time of publication the term ‘postmodernism’ had not been universally accepted and was sometimes, as here, thought of as contemporary modernism). In that work Ackroyd critiqued the sense of literature as a moral force that, following the influence of F. R. Leavis and New Criticism, had come to dominate literary studies. Modernism, Ackroyd argued, did away with universalist conceptions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘experience’, replacing it instead with a ‘movement in which created form began to interrogate itself, and to move toward an impossible union with itself in self-identity. . . . Language is seen to constitute meaning only within itself, and to excise the external references of subjectivity and its corollary, Man’ (Ackroyd 1976: 145).

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Ackroyd’s own early fiction is an exemplary example of postmodern aesthetics in practice. His 1985 novel, Hawksmoor, was one of the first novels to be set simultaneously both in the past (the early eighteenth century) and the present (1980s). It tells the dual narratives of the eighteenth-century architect, Nicholas Dyer, and the 1980s detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor. Under the supervision of Christopher Wren, Dyer builds several churches in the East End of London, while also engaging in occultist practices directly opposed to Enlightenment notions of rationality and human progress. In the 1980s Hawksmoor investigates, unsuccessfully, a series of murders committed in the churches built by Dyer. The novel demonstrates a series of postmodern techniques, particularly in regard to its use of temporal dislocation, intertextuality, pastiche, parody, irony, scepticism, self-reflexivity, metafiction and indeterminacy. Nothing of note in the novel is resolved. Indeed, in terms of this latter narratological conceit, Hawksmoor is one of the earliest examples of ‘anti-detective fiction’ that came to be seen as a central genre within postmodern fiction. In the United States the postmodern anti-detective genre is synonymous with the work of Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster. Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is a short but labyrinthine narrative in which narrative control and order are deliberately subverted. Red herring and dead end are layered one on top of the other; possible signs and meanings are everywhere. The novel explodes with possibility, including the possibility that none of it means anything at all. As Peter Barry notes, ‘In postmodernism, the distinction between what is real and what is simulated collapses: everything is a model or an image, all is surface without depth’ (Barry 2002: 89). In Auster’s The New York Trilogy, a wrong number launches a catalyst of events that ends in a self-reflexive cul-de-sac: I lost my way after the first word, and from then on I could only grope ahead, faltering in the darkness, blinded by the book that had been written for me. And yet, under this confusion, I felt there was something too willed, something too perfect, as though in the end the only thing he had really wanted was to fail – even to the point of failing himself. I could be wrong, however. I was hardly in a condition to be reading anything at that moment, and my judgement is possibly askew. (Auster 1987: 314) Other notable postmodern novels that incorporate the frustration of narrative resolution include J R by William Gaddis, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, In the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. In the latter, the narrative self-reflexivity is pushed to the limit by incorporating the reader as the chief protagonist within the novel. False starts lead to new beginnings, digressions, deviations, puzzles and unresolved mysteries. Given the interest of postmodern aesthetics in trying to find

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a form that ‘presents the unpresentable’, the subversion of the detective genre gained large currency precisely because the generic conventions of detective fiction presuppose precisely the world view that is challenged by postmodernism. As William Spanos famously puts it, detective stories: demand the kind of social and political organisation of the well-made world of the totalitarian state, where investigation or inquisition in behalf of the achievement of a total, that is, preordained or teleological determined structure – a ‘final solution’ – is the defining activity. It is, therefore, no accident that the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination is the anti-detective story . . . the formal purpose of which is to evoke the impulse to ‘detect’ and/or psychoanalyse in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime. (Spanos 1987: 24) Such aesthetic concerns also feature predominantly in postmodern poetry, in which the poem is no longer seen as an artefact but rather an open-ended process. Along with the crossover work of John Ashbery, this mode of poetic practice arguably received its fullest – or at least, most vocal – expression from the group known as L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E poets. Headed by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, the L⫽A⫽N⫽G⫽U⫽A⫽G⫽E poets were intent on disrupting the sense of language as a transparent and authentic reflection of experience. In Lyn Hejinian’s phrase, it was about formulating an aesthetic that rejects closure (see Hejinian 2000: 40–58). The motivation was political. As Andrews and Bernstein wrote: ‘It is our sense that the project of poetry does not involve turning language into a commodity for consumption; instead, it involves repossessing the sign through close attention to, and active participation in, its production’ (Bernstein and Andrews 1984: x). Most often this repossession of the sign was attempted via the simultaneously combinatory and disruptive compositional modes of intertextuality and collage. Fragments from other texts or discourses (literary, pop cultural, political, and so on) recur and alter, ‘blend and clash’ in Roland Barthes’s famous phrase (Barthes 1977: 147). As Walter Benjamin once remarked, collage is a progressive form because it ‘interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ and so ‘counteracts illusion’ (quoted in Buck-Morrs 1991: 77). The American poet Pierre Joris comments how painterly collages make discrete elements visible whereas literary collage bury their borrowings, ‘deriving [an] essential fracture from the seams that make clear the fact of heterogeneous elements being brought together’ (Joris 2003: 84). Bernstein reinforces this sense of collage, writing how collage is ‘the use of different textual elements without recourse to an overall unifying idea’ and contrasting this notion of collage with the practice of montage which is defined as ‘the use of contrasting images toward the goal of one unifying theme’ (quoted in Joris 2003: 87).

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Tracing the citational technique of collage back to the ancient patchwork practice of cento, Marko Juvan similarly outlines the ways in which collage ‘defiantly undermines its own stylistic harmony and semantic coherence’ (Juvan 2008: 170). According to Marjorie Perloff, ‘collage has been the most important mode for representing a “reality” no longer quite believed in and therefore all the more challenging’ (Perloff 1998: 385). Or, as the authors of the 1978 Group Mu manifesto put it: ‘Each cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality’ (Group Mu 1978: 34–5). As a collage work takes shape, much textual movement is towards an equivocation between building and tearing; collage is the form, perhaps more than any other, of the art of the between or the differend. In the words of the French poet, Emmanuel Hocquard, collage corresponds to a ‘surfing on pre-existing writings, passing between, creating other movements and other meanings from pre-existing materials’ (Hocquard 2003: 17). Collage is a form of relation but it is one where such relation is premised on and by an ‘epistemology of incompleteness’ and the ‘limits of knowing’ (Retallack 1999: 341).

Postmodern Music and Art Such aesthetic practices were not only confined to literary postmodernism, however. In music, John Cage extended these ideas, suggesting that collage is exemplary because it correlates to a contemporary mode of living in the world. ‘A great deal of our experiences’, Cage commented in interview, ‘come from the large use of glass in our architecture, so that our experience is one of reflection, collage, and transparency’ (Cage 1987: 6). Cage developed these ideas in his own work, particularly in terms of his contribution to ‘indeterminate music’. Here chance in composition and performance becomes a primary factor. In terms of performance, for instance, the composer produces a score but the arrangement of its performance is decided by the performer during the performance. Morton Feldman’s Intersection 3 (1953) is one of the most wellknown examples of this type of composition. As with literary postmodernism, much of the point here lies in the author or composer giving up the illusion of control over their text. Chance procedures lead to chance happenings. Cage’s own 4’33” (1952) is a case in point. Composed in three movements for any instrument, the score instructs the performer not to play for the duration of the piece. The composition, then, may comprise four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but more commonly it comprises the noises and sounds of the environment in which the piece is being performed. What happens during each performance cannot be determined in advance. Cage’s stated aim was to ‘approach imperceptibility’, although the failure to achieve this aim is also an integral element of its aesthetic (Pritchett 1993: 138).

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The same aesthetic aim characterises the early work of the American composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, both of whom engaged in what came to be classified as ‘minimalist’ music. Steve Reich’s Piano Phase (1967), for instance, involves a 12-note melody played simultaneously by two pianos. As the piece progresses, however, the pianos slowly become out of phase when one of the pianists plays their phase slightly faster until each piano line is separated by one note. The two pianos then synchronise their speed again so that, while they are playing at the same time, they are playing different notes. In a categorically postmodern turn, the synchronic becomes diachronic. Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts (1974) develops this method by elongating the duration of repetition and juxtaposition to about four hours across eleven instruments. Patterns change and meld (‘clash and blend’) constantly but their shifts and changes are almost imperceptible. Such attempts at imperceptibility also characterise much of postmodern art, particularly in terms of video art. Andy Warhol’s films from the 1960s are a striking and highly influential early example. In a manner similar to Cage’s sense of music, Warhol produced a series of films in which nothing happened: a static image of the Empire State Building that lasts for eight hours (Empire, 1964), a six-hour film recording the image of a man sleeping (Sleep, 1963). As the conceptual artist, Kenneth Goldsmith puts it: Warhol often claimed that his films were better thought about than seen. He also said that the films were catalysts for other types of actions: conversation that took place in the theatre during the screening, the audience walking in and out, and thoughts that happened in the heads of the moviegoers. Warhol conceived of his films as staging a performance. (Goldsmith http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/goldsmith_boring.html) More recently the British artist, Douglas Gordon has blended these visual and musical postmodern strategies of phasing, repetition and imperceptibility, most notably in his 1993 work, 24 Hour Psycho, in which Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is rendered silent and slowed down to two frames per second so that the screening of the film lasts for twenty-four hours. The famous shower scene in which Marion is stabbed and dies, for instance, lasts for just over half an hour, rather than the two and a half minutes in the original film. In Gordon’s work, the familiar is defamiliarised. The accumulation of phasing, repetition and duration leads to a sense in which something is at once visually recognisable but experientially altered or out of place. Gordon’s attention is focused on the example of an aesthetic practice that flouts traditional notions of the duration of the artwork, as well as of the close relation between duration and ‘value’. Here Gordon serves as a precursor to the conceptual artist and writer, Kenneth Goldsmith, who advocates an artistic practice premised on elongation and boredom. Typing out, scanning or cutting and pasting the

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entire contents of one edition of the New York Times (Day, 2003) or transcribing local weather reports (The Weather, 2005) or traffic news (Traffic, 2007), Goldsmith repeatedly emphasises that his notion of boredom exists only in a situation in which the reader or viewer has the opportunity to walk away, to do something else. The work’s effect, in other words, lies less in its relentlessness than in the way it opens itself to being ignored, in the sense that its effect equates to the way in which it can be discarded, just as a television set can be switched off at the simple push of a button. At stake here, then, is a provocation to see how long it takes for someone to grow distracted or irritated, to demand something in return for the time they have invested in the artwork. As such, one of the principle challenges of such art is its ongoing critique of value in the contemporary world. Specifically, it challenges the commodification not simply of art but of private life as well in which a measurable or quantifiable return (financial, entertainment) is expected from any form of temporal investment. Even more provocative, however, is the argument that such works are themselves actually assemblage products of contemporary capitalism, in which their ‘valueless’ content is symptomatic of the contemporary cultural and political landscape. In other words, these artists repackage the world around them in order to point to its arbitrary plasticity. That such works are dependent on modern technology is no coincidence. These artists and writers rely on technological ability not so much because they want to hold up a mirror to the world around them but because they actually want to perform the banalities of capitalist labour in order to make it visible: to present the unpresentable. Postmodern aesthetics identifies both a conundrum and an opportunity. It conceives impossibility as provocation. It is the idiom and product of late capitalism, all surface and mirror, but it is also a challenging and radical critique of late capitalism. This plurality is an essential feature of postmodern aesthetics; hybridity its most important legacy for developments in contemporary aesthetics.

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INTRODUCTION: POSTCOLONIALISM

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ostcolonialist theory and criticism concerns itself with the position of colonised peoples and the legacy this has left in their culture. Edward Said has memorably portrayed what this meant in terms of the Middle East, defined as the ‘Orient’, and therefore the ‘other’, to the technologically more advanced West. The colonisers invariably treated colonised cultures as inferior to their own, and the effects of this experience have dogged the latter long after the end of colonial rule. Postcolonial theory has also come to include how race and culture have been represented in Western societies, and how this has affected the experience of their minority racial communities. In Chapter 11, Claire Nally explores the various facets of postcolonial thought, as it has evolved from the work of such key figures as Frantz Fanon, Said, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Homi K. Bhabha, through to more recent developments like glocalisation and altermodernism. It is a history that has seen significant changes in emphasis from nationalist and linguistic concerns to the impact of globalised capital and consumerism on non-Western societies, and the ecological and gender issues this has been generating. In Chapters 12 and 13, Bella Adams considers the growth of Black Studies and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the USA as a reaction to the unequal treatment of the African American community at the hands of the white majority. Despite the advances made in the field of civil rights, race still remains a critical factor in America, and Black Studies and CRT theorists are committed to drawing attention to the injustices to be found across all sectors of their nation’s life.

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11 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND CRITICISM Claire Nally

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ostcolonial readings of cultural documents address the issues of colonial history and literary constructions of native communities, as well as rendering visible the traumatic discourses implicit in representations of the colonial experience. Colonialism itself might be described most usefully as ‘the settlement of territory, the exploitation or development of resources, and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitants of occupied lands’ (Boehmer 1995: 2). This practice has occurred throughout history (the Anglo-Normans colonised Ireland in the twelfth century, the Spanish and the Portuguese explored the Americas in the fifteenth century), but is most clearly articulated in the nineteenth century with the ‘Scramble for Africa’, as portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Postcolonial theory emerged as a field of criticism in the 1990s, although, as this chapter will detail below, figures such as Frantz Fanon and Chinua Achebe were challenging notions of colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, as was Edward Said in the 1970s. Postcolonialism seeks to account for Western representations of race and culture, while exploring the potential for cultural resistance to such negative images of specific racial communities. While colonialism by its very nature undervalues the colonised nation’s past, the postcolonialist seeks to recuperate indigenous experiences and the concrete specificity of local knowledges. Postcolonialism also deconstructs those binary oppositions at the basis of colonialism which characterise black as negative and white as positive. However, precise definitions of postcolonial critical practice are somewhat contested. Critics agree that postcolonialism is concerned with challenging a Eurocentric and metropolitan perspective, but Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin maintain in The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 1–2) that it is not just about a study of cultures after the departure of the colonial power, but rather a study of the historical process from the moment of external intervention to the present day. The evolution of postcolonial theory marks the ways in which critics have interrogated ideas of representation (Fanon and Said) cultural mixing (Homi Bhabha), the issue of language and communication

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(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Edward Braithwaite) and the ways in which postcolonialism has engaged with other fields of cultural critique (for instance, the relationship between feminism and postcolonialism in Spivak’s work). In more recent developments, postcolonialism has offered opportunities of fruitful research in links with altermodernism (Bourriaud), and ‘glocalisation’, (a portmanteau word signifiying the interaction of the global and the local) which Ashcroft et al. characterise as ‘the ways in which the global is transformed at the local level’ (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 218).

Early Postcolonial Thought: Frantz Fanon and Edward Said Fanon’s contributions to the history of postcolonial studies are enshrined in his two major works, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Fanon’s own experience as a black middle-class intellectual born in the French colony of Martinique, in a world which normalises whiteness, provided material for his developing analysis. Fanon’s initial objective is to address the ways in which colonialism has eroded the black man’s sense of self. He establishes that ‘There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect’ (Fanon 1986: 12). He then catalogues the ways in which the black community has essentially internalised the discourse of colonialism, which portrays the black experience as something negative and degraded (Fanon 1986: 13). White culture becomes something which black men seek to emulate, through wearing European clothes, employing European languages or privileging European ideas above those of the native community (Fanon 1986: 25). Indeed, one of Fanon’s targets is the black woman who he believes is complicit in colonial discourses: ‘I know a great number of girls from Martinique, students in France, who admitted to me with complete candour – that they would find it impossible to marry black men’ (Fanon 1986: 47–8). Later postcolonial and feminist critics have considered such a portrayal of women rather unsympathetic, although his theories do relate to earlier figures such as Langston Hughes (a central figure in The Harlem Renaissance) who similarly identified in his essay ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ (1926) that the black community valorises marriage to paler spouses. Thus, as Ania Loomba suggests, ‘For the white subject, the black other is everything that lies outside of the self. For the black subject, however, the white other serves to define everything that is desirable, everything that the self desires’ (Loomba 2005: 123). Underpinning Fanon’s idea of the black other is a hierarchical power structure: the white man is ‘the master, whether real or imaginary’ (Fanon 1986: 138). This construction of blackness signifying negativity is also articulated in Edward Said’s work, as discussed below. Fanon identifies how visible difference, through black skin colour, constructs the colonised subject’s very existence: ‘Ontology – once it

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has finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside – does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (Fanon 1986: 110). It becomes impossible for the black man to identify with his own culture, as this has been debased, but it also suggests how colonialism has pushed to the periphery any uncomfortable aspects of civilisation: sensuality, laziness, criminality, violence and irresponsibility are all attributes which are used to illustrate ‘blackness’. Thus Fanon identifies the ways in which colonialism functions in binary oppositions of white/black and positive/negative, which has itself been internalised by the community: ‘the Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly’ (Fanon 1986: 113). Fanon also establishes that language is one of the most crucial means of resistance and decolonisation: ‘To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization’ (Fanon 1986: 17–18). By adopting European languages, the colonised subject ‘is elevated above his jungle status’ (Fanon 1986: 18), but obviously loses a central part of his identity; a subject also discussed by later scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Edward Braithwaite. Therefore, the burden of decolonisation falls on the colonised subject to articulate his identity positively, in part through cultural affiliation, and overturn the binary opposition of colour and representation: ‘I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN’ (Fanon 1986: 115). In discussing Fanon’s later text, The Wretched of the Earth, Edward Said maintains that Fanon’s argument ‘represent[s] colonialism and nationalism in their Manichean contest, then to enact the birth of an independence movement, finally to transfigure that movement into what is in effect a trans-personal and transnational force’ (Said 1993: 325). In naming and labelling the ways in which colonial discourses function to denigrate native experience, Fanon might be hailed as a crucial figure in early postcolonial studies. Edward Said’s own contribution to postcolonialism through Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) also marks him as one of the most influential critics of the twentieth century. Said’s theory of ‘Orientalism’ centres on the ways in which Europe has discursively represented and fixed the East. In his introduction, Said states it is ‘one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’ (Said 1995: 1). Moreover, this imaginative space is correlated with a material instantiation. The Orient is a place of ‘European material civilization and culture’ (Said 1995: 2). It represents institutions, ideologies, scholarship and imagery which in every instance is in direct opposition, ‘the Occident’: ‘Orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said 1995: 3). Said identifies how Orientalism is mainly, but not exclusively,

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British and French, taking in India, biblical texts and lands, the spice trade, colonial institutions such as armies and administrators, as well as scholarship and various constructions of sensuality, cruelty and exoticism. From the somewhat incongruent selection of cultural practices arises a body of texts which Said suggests are based ‘on a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony’ (Said 1995: 5). It is less about ‘ascertaining’ the attributes of the Orient and more about ‘constructing’ it: ‘The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made Oriental’ (Said 1995: 5–6). It was also a means for establishing collectivity: European cultures and peoples become cohesive and superior by contrast with, and proximity to, their Oriental counterpart (we might think of Oriental backwardness versus European development for instance). However, Orientalism also presents a ‘challenge [to] the rational Western mind’ (Said 1995: 57) insofar as it destabilises rationality by its own excesses, and in turn taxes the Occidental with new means of control and the exercise of power. Thereby, Orientalism is quite clearly another construction of the Other, having much in common with Fanon’s articulation of this phenomenon. However, the effect of this is not simply to demonise or control the East: rather it is a set of discourses including history, sociology, aesthetics, philology which reflects ‘a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world’ (Said 1995: 12). Indeed, Said dates the evolution of Orientalism to the traditions of nineteenth-century scholarship: the text’s discussion of figures such as the philologist Ernest Renan (1823–1922), suggests how and in what ways a form of Orientalism was institutionalised. It simultaneously lauded the East as an escape from European conventions, but also perceived it as a backward and barbaric entity (Said 1995: 150). In many ways, in the post 9/11 climate, very little has changed in the West’s relationship with the East, and especially with Islam: ‘One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced information into more and more standardized molds’ (Said 1995: 26). This correlation between the culture of the academy and that of the state is particularly important. Ania Loomba notes how ‘one of Edward Said’s most valuable achievements in Orientialism was not simply to establish the connection between scholarship and state power in the colonial period, but to indicate its afterlife in a “post-colonial” global formation with the US at its epicentre’ (Loomba, 2005: 228). Our own historical moment, with specific reference to the globalisation of US discourses on the East, is still determined by Orientalism. However, the ways in which some of these ideas might be countered are located in developments in postcolonial theory, such as ‘glocalisation’, which will be discussed further below.

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Decolonising Africa: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Language Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Decolonising the Mind (1986) presents a highly combative account of the colonised subject’s relationship with the colonial language (English, French, Portuguese, for instance). The polemic centres on whether it is more strategic in terms of cultural identity to reject the colonial language and embrace native culture. Ultimately, Ngũgĩ himself dispensed with writing in English, preferring to communicate primarily in one of Kenya’s national languages, Gĩkũyũ, as ‘his gesture towards redistributing power and subverting neo-colonialism’ (Himmelmann 2008: 473). Taking African literature as his focus, Ngũgĩ maintains the effect of colonialism is the internalisation of the value of English. For Ngũgĩ, language constructs social reality, and in turn, represents an affiliation to a particular culture: ‘The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 4). He evaluates how African literature can be defined: is it literature about Africa, by Africans, or are African languages the criteria? One of the major problems is of course audience. Ngũgĩ notes that European languages have often been employed as a nationalist and decolonising stratagem to unite disparate tribes (each with different languages) against white oppression. He goes on to explain how English acquires a form of linguistic capital in Bourdieu’s definition: ‘all linguistic practices are measured against the legitimate practices, i.e. the practices of those who are dominant’ (Bourdieu 1991: 53). The foundation of this linguistic capital is the colonial school system. Ngũgĩ offers a critique of the use of colonial language in an African context, suggesting that the teaching of English also devalued the native language and produced something of a split identity in African children (Ngũgĩ, 1986: 11). Kenyan languages became associated with ‘negative qualities of backwardness, underdevelopment, humiliation and punishment’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 28), and therefore were rejected by the community. However, the effect of this is ultimately quite traumatic: Ngũgĩ identifies how the oral tradition (orature) became obsolete, ‘taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 12). For Ngũgĩ, language testifies to who we are, where we are from, and what our place is in the world, as well as our relationship to each other, and what cultural affiliations we have. It is all about our understanding of our surroundings and in this way, language becomes a marker of identity. In this argument, the colonial language results in alienation and the only way to circumvent such an effect is to restore an ‘authentic’ culture, simultaneously erasing the colonial past. Thereby, language as a cultural system is of especial relevance to postcolonial analysis. Ngũgĩ also characterises English as the literature of the petty bourgeois (Ngũgĩ 1986: 20). It generates divisions, not in tribal terms, but on class lines. Simultaneously, the psychological effect of the imposition of colonial language is ‘a vacillating psychological make-up’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 22).

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The African middle class experiences a greater crisis of identity than those who retain the native language. However, there is also a problem with the use of native languages in relation to modernisation: ‘the use of English and French was a temporary historical necessity’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 25). However, this also means imperialist culture is able to conquer the masses more effectively, as ideas of modernisation and progression expressed in English cannot be communicated adequately to the working class or the peasantry. By contrast, colonial governors have ensured ‘the Christian bible is available in unlimited quantities in even the tiniest African language’ (Ngũgĩ, 1986: 26). Therefore, in order to decolonise the minds of the masses, it becomes increasingly important to speak in native language. Ngũgĩ also highlights the effect of this complex relationship between the African community and English language: ‘What we have produced is another hybrid tradition, a tradition in transition, a minority tradition that can only be termed as Afro-European literature; that is, the literature written by Africans in European languages’ (Ngũgĩ 1986: 26–7). Plainly, he sees this as deleterious and problematic, a dilution of ‘authentic’ African experience. However, in his theorisation of hybridity, Homi Bhabha detects the possibility of radicalism as well as colonial trauma. Similarly, Edouard Glissant perceives the related idea of ‘créolisation’ as a foundational part of Caribbean life.

Appropriation and Caribbean Culture: Edward Kamau Braithwaite Edward Braithwaite’s argument in The History of the Voice (1984) focuses on the Caribbean context and by contrast to Ngũgĩ, valorises the appropriation of English rather than suggests the need to reject it. In many ways, his articulation of creolisation suggests the need to recover folk culture and the importance of ancestral heritage, but at the same time, it is impossible to deny the influence of European cultural models in Caribbean communities. Notably, as well as being cross-cultural, the idea of creolisation reflects the reality of Caribbean society: formulated through the ways in which colonial and colonised subject interact as a mixed population, and is constantly in process, ‘incorporating aspects of both acculturation and interculturation’ (Ashcroft et al. 2013: 69). Acculturation signifies how one culture is absorbed into another, while interculturation relates to a reciprocal relationship where cultures mix and influence each other. Braithwaite sees Caribbean English as something which has been shaped to fit local experience: he describes the use of the English language as being different from standard English (Braithwaite 1984: 5). He describes this language as follows: ‘nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors’

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(Braithwaite 1984: 5–6). In common with Ngũgĩ, Braithwaite highlights the significance of colonial education in promoting the devaluation of folk cultures and especially the native language: ‘the educational system of the Caribbean did not recognize the presence of these various languages. What our education system did was to recognize and maintain the language of the conquistador – the language of the planter, the language of the official, the language of the Anglican preacher’ (Braithwaite 1984: 8). He explains that English literature, incarnated through canonical works such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen and George Eliot, had little relevance to the colonised community: he famously relates how Caribbean children negotiated poetic descriptions of snow, mapping such alien experiences onto their own landscape in a form of creolisation: ‘the snow was falling on the canefields’ (Braithwaite 1984: 9). This is important, given his focus on the relationship of people to their geographical reality, and how they articulate that through language. Similarly, he explains that English has given the Caribbean a rhythm which is influenced by poetic models, including the pentameter. Braithwaite explains that ‘nation language’ breaks down the pentameter, and instead, employs dactyls, using a different stress pattern in order to map an alternative environmental experience. Nation language is English, but not official or standard language, due to the influence of African paradigms in Caribbean heritage: ‘in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions, it is not English, even though the words as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree’ (Braithwaite 1984: 13). Nation language is also a strategic gesture, just as much as Ngũgĩ’s rejection of English in preference for Gĩkũyũ. It can promise resistance and radicalism through fracturing the official discourse: ‘can English be a revolutionary language? And the lovely answer that came back was: it is not English that is the agent. It is not language, but people, who make revolutions’ (Braithwaite 1984: 13). Essentially, breaking down standardised language and rendering it fit for an alternative, colonised experience destabilises the very authority of the English word. Indeed, Braithwaite explains that nation language, as the mode of communication for the enslaved individual, can be used ‘to disguise himself, to disguise his personality and to retain his culture’ (Braithwaite 1984: 16). It is closely linked to the blues, the calypso, to ‘native musical structures’ (Braithwaite 1984: 16). It is also emphatically related to the oral tradition, based on sound and rhythm more than the arrangement of words on a page. Rejecting the designation of this hybrid speech and writing as ‘dialect’ (which has pejorative connotations of ‘bad English’), Braithwaite asserts the role of nation language in revealing the submerged experience of the colonised subject.

Homi Bhabha and the Theory of Hybridity In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha provides an account of hybridity, which is basically the effect of mixing cultures, languages and societies, as a result of colonial intervention. As detailed in Ngũgĩ’s account, this

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is often quite traumatic: in terms of the hybrid subject, it can result in a fragmented or fractured psyche. Bhabha notes that hybridity ‘is a separate space, a space of separation – less than one and double – which has been systematically denied by both colonialists and nationalists who have sought authority in the authenticity of origins’ (Bhabha 1994: 120). In many ways, Ngũgĩ articulates faith in this sense of authenticity. Through hybridity, the colonised community is not English or French, nor is it entirely ‘native’. Such people are situated in between colonial representations of human and savage, periphery and metropolitan centre, self and other. Colonial intervention produces ambivalence, uncertainty and a complex identity politics, resulting in a lack of belonging and alienation from one’s culture. However, hybridity can also produce a number of decolonising practices. Daniel Boyarin carefully summarises this double bind of hybridity as the problems encountered on the borders of cultures and states: ‘Bhabha focuses on the fault lines, on the border situations and thresholds, as sites where identities are performed and contested. Borders are also places where people are strip-searched, detained, imprisoned, and sometimes shot’ (Loomba et al. 2005: 343). In common with Edward Said, Bhabha maintains that colonialism is underpinned by racial discourses which function to legitimate the conquest of land and people. Bhabha deems this to be ‘an apparatus of power’ (Bhabha 1994: 70) and hinges on the construction of difference: ‘the objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin’ (Bhabha 1994: 70). He identifies particularly the ways in which governmental systems operate through the premise of othering. Referring directly to Said, Bhabha suggests that this is not a static procedure, but rather one which is ‘continually under threat from diachronic forms of history and narrative, signs of instability’ (Bhabha 1994: 71). What Bhabha is claiming here is that colonial discourses are ‘ambivalent’, by which he means they address two somewhat conflicting concerns simultaneously: through othering, the colonised subject is rendered infantile, sensual, lazy, strange and alien, but at the same time, the colonised is incorporated into Western logic, through the ultimate objective of colonialism, which is to civilise. Bhabha notes how ‘the black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants (the bearer of food); he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child; he is mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar’ (Bhabha 1994: 82). These essentially contradictory discourses are characteristic of ambivalence, difficult to pin down or indeed to fix the colonised subject in a particular stereotype. Because of this, there is a somewhat neurotic reiteration (Bhabha terms this ‘repetition’) at the root of colonial stereotypes, an anxiety about meaning and fixity which always comes to a dead end. In correlation with the idea of ambivalence, Bhabha draws attention to one of the key ways that the colonised community can challenge or destabilise

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colonial authority: he describes this as ‘mimicry’, which is in the simplest terms, how the native community performs deference and Englishness: ‘He is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicised is emphatically not to be English’ (Bhabha 1994: 87). In many ways, this is a rearticulation of Fanon’s idea of the ‘mimic men’, but Bhabha’s theory here hinges on uncertainty, the partial and the incomplete – a flawed copy. One of Bhabha’s most famous examples of minicry is derived from Macauley’s ‘Minute’ from 1835, in which the latter discusses the education of the Indian community and how the effect of colonialism should produce a class of people who are racially Indian, but who are educated in English sensibilities: ‘the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha 1994: 88). It achieves this disruption through the problematisation of the notion of origins, the partial nature of colonial power: ‘Its threat . . . comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory “identity effects” in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no “itself” ’ (Bhabha 1994: 90). As Ania Loomba suggests, ‘it is the failure of colonial authority to reproduce itself that allows for anti-colonial subversion’ (Loomba 2005: 80). In his discussion of ‘sly civility’, Bhabha begins by interrogating nineteenthcentury writings on the subject of colonialism: he suggests these are founded on ‘an agonistic uncertainty contained in the incompatibility of empire and nation; it puts on trial the very discourse of civility within which representative government claims its liberty and empire its ethics’ (Bhabha 1994: 96). At this point he cites John Stuart Mill who argued for democracy and liberty, with the exception of the colonies, where ‘a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government’ (Mill, cited in Bhabha 1994: 96). These narratives also suggest how colonial systems insistently require definition from subjugated peoples, which Bhabha describes as follows: it is ‘the narcissistic, colonialist demand that it should be addressed correctly, that the Other should authorize the self, recognize its priority, fulfill its outlines, replete, indeed repeat, its references and still its fractured gaze’ (Bhabha 1994: 98). When the native subject refuses to answer this demand directly, he radically destabilises colonial authority. This idea of ‘sly civility’ is a phrase which Bhabha borrows from the 1818 sermon of Archdeacon Potts: ‘If you urge them with their gross and unworthy misconceptions of the nature and the will of God, or the monstrous follies of their fabulous theology, they will turn it off with a sly civility perhaps, or with a popular and careless proverb’ (Potts, cited in Bhabha 1994: 99). This becomes ‘the native refusal to satisfy the colonizer’s narrative demand’ (Bhabha 1994: 99), but it is also a repudiation couched as politeness, and subservience. It is an evasive tactic which suggests acquiescence while plainly denoting resistance to the colonial authorities. Again, the problem of representing and fixing the colonised subject becomes apparent. Bhabha describes this ‘incalculable native’ as one who ‘produces a problem for civil representation in the discourses of

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literature and legality’ (Bhabha 1994: 99). Of course, this subject is both resistant and obedient, questioning the logic of Western civility even as he or she impersonates it. Ultimately, Bhabha’s figuration of hybridity and its related identity effects produces a critique of monolithic nationalisms. Despite Fanon’s deep-rooted desire to recover an ‘authentic’ culture as a counter to colonialism, Bhabha insists this form of unity is impossible, due to the very same logic that threatens colonial discourses. He explains that the concept of a ‘people’ is ultimately elusive: it is on the one hand, in the present and constantly in process, a speech act and a performance which defeats any originary point, while it also gives the impression of a ‘pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past’ (Bhabha 1994: 145). As such, postcolonial theory in the 1990s, while acknowledging its debt to earlier theorists, quite clearly dissociates itself from prior instantiations of unitary culture.

Creolisation: Edouard Glissant and Decentred Culture One of Glissant’s major contributions to the study of postcolonialism is the reevaulation of myths of origin. As opposed to other postcolonialists who privilege the recovery of the indigenous or aboriginal cultures, Glissant forgrounds the potential inherent in the collision of different cultures. He maintains that the ‘periphery’, in this case the Martinican Caribbean, has reconfigured the colonial centre, even as much as the ‘metropolitan centre’ changed the cultural and geographical landscape of the Caribbean itself. In Glissant’s analysis, Creole is radical because it has no fixity, and is readily adaptable. Because it emerged from the confrontation of several cultures, ‘it has no singular, organic origin . . . there is a logical connection between, on the one hand, the rejection of the Western values of origin and filiation and, on the other, the positive value attached to mixed, composite cultures’ (Britton 1999: 15–16). In Le Discours Antillais (1981), Glissant hails this as ‘the worldwide experience of Relation. It is literally the result of links between different cultures and did not preexist these links. It is not a language of essence, it is a language of the Related’ (Glissant 1989: 241). Such a defeat of essentialism is crucial in reconfiguring the binary discourses which earlier figures like Fanon maintained were central to colonial oppression. In his later texts, Glissant characterises creolisation as ‘a self-conscious principle extended to human society in general and generating the same kind of dynamic multiplicity that characterizes the chaosworld’ (Britton 1999: 16). This closely relates to the ways in which theories of globalisation influenced postcolonial studies.

Spivak and Feminist Postcolonialism While critics such as Frantz Fanon saw women as complicit in colonial discourses, several feminist critics, including bell hooks, Audrey Lorde and

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, have addressed the intersections between the native experience and the women’s movement. The importance of Spivak’s analysis to debates in postcolonial studies is difficult to underestimate. In the seminal article, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) Spivak considers whether it is ever possible to recover the narratives of the oppressed, without descending into essentialism. Guha suggests Subaltern Studies addresses ‘the politics of the people’ against the indigenous elite (Ashcroft 1995 et al.: 26). However, for Spivak, this very definition of ‘the people’ is problematic. For her, the colonised subject is ‘irretrievably heterogeneous’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 26). She also notes how far Guha’s model is based on a fairly traditional schema of ‘a deviation from an ideal – the people or subaltern . . . [are themselves] defined as a difference from the elite’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 27). In this way, the idea of the subaltern normalises the elite culture, and presents the silenced colonised subject as Other: ‘because of the violence of imperialist epistemic, social, and disciplinary inscription’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 27). ‘Subaltern’ simply means one of inferior rank, who is subject to the dominant class. It is a term originally derived from Antonio Gramsci’s work, relating to peasants and oppressed workers (he derived it from the military term for an officer under the rank of captain), but it has been reconfigured in postcolonial studies to discuss forms of colonial subordination, ‘whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way’ (Guha 1982: vii). Subaltern Studies evolved into a discrete group of historians and theorists who sought to raise the profile of South Asian cultures which were outside the elite. The project also sought to locate oppressed groups in relation to dominant ones, and recover the voice of those peoples silenced in the academic community and the wider world. Indeed, the Subaltern Studies project accords in many ways to Said’s ‘permission to narrate’, a gesture which seeks to challenge and correct official versions of history and colonialism (Kennedy 2013: 51). However, Spivak’s essay offers a critique of Subaltern Studies. She argues that however sympathetic and good willing such a project may be, it will ultimately devolve into essentialist constructions. She suggests that such critics have no experience of the extent of colonial subjugation, and especially, the way in which patriarchy and colonial oppression combined. Similarly, in terms of representation, to speak for a woman is ultimately fraught with difficulty. Spivak articulates the problem of depiction (speaking about) and delegation (speaking for or instead of). For Spivak, to claim to have access to a privileged knowledge base re-enacts a patriarchy rather than establishing a radical gesture. In generalising about the ‘subaltern’ experience, gender-specific knowledges are eroded: ‘For the “figure” of woman, the relationship between woman and silence can be plotted by women themselves; race and class differences are subsumed under that charge’ (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 28). In this

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way, colonised women are doubly disenfranchised due to race and to gender, something which the broader category of ‘subaltern’ fails to identify. Indeed, she takes the experience of sati (where an Indian widow immolates herself on her husband’s funeral pyre) as an example of how impossible it is for such a subject to be heard. As Ania Loomba has commented: ‘[in] the lengthy debates and discussions that surrounded the British government’s legislation against the practice of sati, the women who were burnt on their husband’s pyres are absent as subjects’ (Loomba 2005: 195). As such, they are spoken for, constructed even in absence. This is exactly what Spivak felt the broader project of Subaltern Studies was re-enacting. More generally, the project of recovering lost voices, while laudable, is impossible: in the constitution of the Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary – not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. (Ashcroft et al. 1995: 24) Indeed, by attempting to speak for such communities, Spivak identifies that the intellectual is complicit in such discourses of oppression.

Postcolonial Futures: The Altermodernism of Bourriaud and Enwezor In his groundbreaking account of the theory underpinning the Altermodern Exhibition at Tate Britain in 2009, Nicola Bourriaud discusses the death of postmodernism and posits the unification of modernism and postcolonialism. He explains that contemporary culture has been characterised by a ‘fastburn’ culture, characterised most clearly in humanity’s rampant consumerism through the squandering of natural resources. Since the 1973 oil crisis, however, Bourriaud claims that our ‘superabundance’ has become finite. By 2008 and the collapse of the global financial system, it became apparent for Bourriaud that there was a turning point in history. He signifies this moment as the death of postmodernism and the birth of the altermodern. Addressing the ways in which the altermodern intersects with postcolonialism, Okwui Enwezor addresses the conditions of modernity in various parts of the world. He suggests there are four categories of economic and social experience: (1) Supermodernity, which is essentially the way in which European and Western cultures have developed. It relates to the idea of the centre and the ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ system which is fundamental to capitalism. (2) Andromodernity is a characteristic which refers to parts of Asia, such as China, India and South Korea: it is marked by an acceleration of development, but also devises alternative models of modernisation. Enwezor sees this as a lesser modernity, insofar

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as it lacks the same level of global power structures, economies, technologies and politics. (3) Speciousmodernity relates to countries such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Turkey. In part because of theocracies and dictatorships, they are often viewed as demonstrating superficial modernity: evolving secularisation and reform of Muslim society is not seen as sufficient to allow for modernisation. However, Enwezor also suggests that such models can be a form of postcolonial resistance, especially in terms of Islamic radicalism as an alternative to Western capitalist decadence. (4) The Aftermodern is characterised by the African experience, insofar as it is constructed as being removed from the persuasions of supermodernity, and rooted in tribal ethnocentrism. Bourriaud explains that altermodernism is an attempt to ‘delimit the void beyond postmodernism’ (Bourriaud 2009: 11) and suggests that it ‘has its roots in the idea of “otherness” (Latin: alter, with the added English connotation of “different”) and suggests a multitude of possibilities, of alternatives to a single route’ (Bourriaud 2009: 12). He deploys the metaphor of the archipelago to define altermodern practice. As a geographical entity, the archipelago is an often quite large group of islands scattered offshore and suggesting localised identities networked within a broader sea. It is a rejection of monolithic culture, and instead, focuses on ‘the plurality of local oppositions to the economic standardization imposed by globalisation’ (Bourriaud 2009: 12). The effects of this mean dispensing with ideas of nationalism, of fixed identity and indeed ‘mainstream reification’ in favour of a multiplicity of global cultures. Bourriaud is also keen to suggest that altermodernism discards notions of multiculturalism, in so far as these are frequently rooted in an essentialist model of identity: ‘there are no longer cultural roots to sustain forms, no exact cultural base to serve as a benchmark for variations, no nucleus, no boundaries for artistic language’ (Bourriaud 2009: 14). The idea of origins, the identification of ethnic affiliation, once quite strategically useful (see Fanon), has been reduced to ‘a system of allotting meanings and assigning individuals their position in the hierarchy of social demands’ (Bourriaud 2009: 19). Interrogating the myth of origins, Bourriaud maintains that instead, we need a model of ‘heterochrony’: ‘a vision of human history as constituted of multiple temporalities, disdaining the nostalgia for the avant-garde and indeed for any era – a positive vision of chaos and complexity’ (Bourriaud 2009: 13). It is a celebration of diaspora, migration and exodus, and hence, takes as its image the ‘trans-cultural nomad’: one who explores the present from all locations of time and space. As an example, we might think about how ‘displacement’ produces meaning: the idea of translation from one culture to another, or one time frame to another, becomes of the greatest importance. For instance, Joachim Koester’s ‘From the Travels of Jonathan Harker’ (2003), retraces the protagonist of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This takes him through the Borgo Pass, and a confrontation with a modern landscape ill-suited to the literary Transylvania, which is itself a place of otherness: he visits a tourist hotel called ‘Castle

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Dracula’ (built in 1982), and perceives suburban sprawl and illegal logging. Koester’s work both translates cultures (the Irish literary text and the contemporary Bargau Valley), situates disparate local experiences and ecological sensitivity: Koester notes that: the landscape showed signs of the logging industry in the form of treeless spots. Spots that did add a post-historic touch to the surroundings, but also pointed to something familiar from the past and present, the transformation of a landscape by the forces of market economy. (Koester n.d.) Okwui Enwezor addresses the altermodern in his article, ‘Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence’, where he discusses the notion of ‘grand modernity’, which is essentially the idea of European reason, progress and rationality. These ideas of universality, as Enwezor suggests, have been distorted in the service of imperialism (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 27). By contrast, ‘petit modernities’ do not signify an overarching or universalising narrative. Also known as ‘provincialities’, they are ‘premised on finding a way to render the divergent experiences and uses of modernity’ (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 27). As an example, Enwezor looks at China and South Korea, which ‘bring alive to our very eyes brand new urban conditions and cultural spheres that were not remotely imaginable a generation ago’ (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 28). The development of these countries rests on a sizeable export economy, but it nonetheless unites local, concrete specificities: ‘[China and South Korea] are both undergoing modernization based on the acquisition of instruments and institutions of Western modernity . . . without the wholesale discarding of local values that modify the importations’ (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 29). Rather than convert native cultures into models of sameness, as per colonial methodology, this instance of altermodernism ‘articulates the shift to off-centre structures of production and dissemination; the dispersal of the universal, the refusal of the monolithic, a rebellion against monoculturalism’ (Enwezor in Bourriaud 2009: 31). This ‘off-centre’ or ‘off-shore’ image clearly represents the notion of the archipelago which Bourriaud identifies as part of the altermodern project. In many ways, as Enwezor himself suggests, the altermodern owes much to Glissant’s theory of ‘the poetics of relocation’, offering links and constellations of meaning rather than fixity or a binary opposition. More broadly, the altermodern reinterprets what Roland Robertson has described as ‘glocalisation’. He suggests that globalisation need not refer to macro-level perspectives exclusively, but can account for the micro-culture. Therefore, glocalisation addresses the trans-local, or the super-local: ‘the contemporary assertion of ethnicity and/or nationality is made within the global terms of identity and particularity’ (Featherstone et al. 1995: 26). This model most obviously blends ‘global’ plus ‘local’ (or ‘critical regionalism’, to deploy

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a synonymous term), and is related to the Japanese dochakuka (from dochaku meaning ‘living on one’s own land’) and is defined as the way farmers used generalised techniques to fit local conditions. In business and advertising, this relates to the personalisation of a product to fit a region, and an acknowledgement of the differing perspectives of local markets, orientating between the particular and the universal. This dialectic implies a two-way relationship (rather than the multiplicity which altermodernism espouses) and obviously, theories of glocalisation still retain a degree of focus on ethnicity, something which Bourriaud and Enwezor seek to resist. However, this engagement with global capitalism, the developing economic statuses of East and West Asia, and the decentralised practices of altermodernism, all suggest the ways in which postcolonial theory has sought to account for new fields of interest.

Conclusion As the preceding discussion has demonstrated, postcolonialism has a number of themes and concerns which pervade instances of theoretical discussion. In the early articulation of cultural resistance to colonial regimes, through figures like Frantz Fanon, the desire for an ‘authentic’ culture and sense of communal belonging becomes apparent. Similarly the recovery of indigenous language and cultural specificity becomes increasingly important. By contrast, other postcolonialists such as Braithwaite and Glissant celebrate the effects of creolisation as a strategy which can challenge official languages and fracture their authority, making the colonial language speak for the native community. This trend continues through Bhabha’s discussion of hybridity, an identity effect which is both traumatic and empowering. Through the intervention of feminism, however, it is possible to locate colonised women as doubly disenfranchised: subjected to the oppressions of imperialism and also patriarchy. Finally, in the cross-cultural currents of altermodernism and the increased focus on global communities (including the role of the ‘glocal’), more recent postcolonial theories can address the issues of consumerism and capitalism; the development of ecology; and the ways in which formerly colonial societies engage with modernity.

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12 BLACK STUDIES Bella Adams

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UPPORT THE STUDENT STRIKE, STOP POLICE TERROR, SMASH RACISM’ and ‘STOP THE HATE EDUCATE’ are just two of the slogans featured on banners in American student-led campaigns for Black Studies and Ethnic Studies. Crucially, however, these slogans appeared in not one but two campaigns considered vital to the study of race in the US, despite being decades apart: the first is from the longest student strike in American history at San Francisco State College between November 1968 and March 1969 (Whitson 1999), the last, from student protests to House Bill 2281, an anti-Ethnic Studies act introduced in Arizona in 2010 and upheld in 2013 (Letson 2012). When viewed side by side, these (and other) student-led campaigns for curricula diversity consistent with an anti-racist and social justice agenda serve to highlight the political dimension of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies, or their ‘Black radical origins and subversive leanings’ (Fenderson et al. 2012: 10) in an American education system closely aligned to law and politics. Under slavery and segregation, African Americans were excluded from and marginalised in/by mainstream education, at least until civil rights lawsuits, most notably, Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Brown decision overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) supporting racial segregation. Although enabled by the Civil Rights Movement, black student activists were frustrated by its slow progress on and off university campuses and so turned in the late 1960s to the more radical Black Power Movement and its ‘sister’ the Black Arts Movement. Acknowledging that the university is ‘a political thing, and it provides identity, purpose, and direction’ (Karenga, quoted by Marable 2000: 23), Black cultural nationalist scholars insisted that university curricula ‘speak . . . directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America’ and ‘relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for selfdetermination and nationhood’ (Neal 1968: 29). Although Black America has a long history dating back to the 1600s with the arrival of the first Africans to the Americas, or, for some, even further back to the ancient Nile Valley civilisations, the academic study of this history mainly gets going at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, in the work of W. E. B. DuBois, Alaine Locke, Arthur A. Schomburg and Carter G.

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Wilson. Building on the work of these men, later black scholars insist ‘Black Studies is not merely the study of black people’ (Asante 1986: 255). According to cultural nationalist and Afrocentric scholar, Molefi Kete Asante, ‘teaching about blacks in history or the sociology of blacks is not enough’ because these traditional disciplines privilege ‘eurocentric cultural icons’ such as ‘universality’ or ‘objectivity’ (Asante 1986: 259, 257). Anthropologist St. Clair Drake also argues, ‘what we have called “objective” intellectual activities were actually white studies in perspective and content’ (quoted by Marable 2000: 21). Compared to these traditional disciplines and, for that matter, the ‘white’ discipline of Negro Studies (Drake 2007: 339), Black Studies provided new perspectives on, by and for Black America. Whether delivered by Black Studies, Afro-American Studies, African American Studies, Africana Studies or Africology, each term having its own specific history and politics, these new perspectives spoke more directly than ever before to black students’ needs and aspirations by focusing on black texts, theories and methodologies beyond Eurocentrism. Black Studies offers relevant education, mainly in the humanities and social sciences across disciplines and genres, including slave narratives, black vernacular texts such as spirituals, blues and hip hop, Afrocentric methodologies, analyses and philosophies, Black Women’s Studies, Critical Race Theory, the Racial Justice Movement and the Environmental Justice Movement. Analyses of these and other black cultural forms also involve exploring the conditions of their production and reproduction, typically but not exclusively inside the US in order to promote race-consciousness and black self-empowerment against white privilege. This dual emphasis on scholarly critique and social corrective is as necessary now in the colour-blind twenty-first century, as it was in the colour-conscious 1960s and 1970s because the US remains a racially unequal society. As law professor Michelle Alexander observes, ‘We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it’ by implementing new systems of ‘racialized social control’ such as mass incarceration to replace the older systems of slavery and segregation (Alexander 2012: 2, 4). Although prison cells and university classrooms seem worlds apart, there is nevertheless a point of convergence between them, not least in Arizona where HB2281 is part of ‘a disturbing pattern of legislative activity hostile to ethnic minorities and immigrants’ (UN report, quoted by Cha-Jua 2010: 10). By re-presenting Ethnic Studies as ‘reverse racism’, ‘politicalization of history’, ‘anger’ and ‘anti-American terrorism’ (Cha-Jua 2010: 11), the right designates it and associated behaviours illegal, for example, race-conscious ways of reading blacklisted books. On the list of books that apparently threaten both government and society are Bill Bigelow’s Rethinking Columbus, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory, Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Cambium Audit, 2 May 2011: 116–20).

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Between the San Francisco State strike and the Arizona protests, Black Studies has developed in ways scholars assessing its history describe as ‘uncertain’ (Huggins 1985: 73), ‘precarious’ (Miller 1990: 96), ‘ironic’ (Rooks 2006) and ‘ambiguous’ (Rojas 2007: 2). In spite (and arguably because) of this volatile history, or, in Dianne M. Pinderhughes and Richard Yarbourough’s words, ‘tradition of struggle’ (Pinderhughes and Yarbourough 2000: 171), Black Studies remains intellectually and socially compelling, innovative and transformative – all qualities this chapter seeks to emphasise in its interpretation of Black Studies’ near fifty-year history into three roughly periodised parts: it begins by recounting what until recently was regarded as ‘a glaring hole in the historiography of Black Studies’ (Rogers 2012: 22), specifically the drive for Black Studies beyond the San Francisco State strike; the second part concentrates on the institutionalisation and professionalisation of Black Studies in the 1980s and 1990s as the right-wing offensive in American politics gained widespread legitimacy, and black scholars debated cultural nationalism’s significance in relation to newly emerging and often highly theorised areas of study such as multiculturalism and globalism; the third part explores Black Studies’ more recent developments, as the right-wing offensive mutated into contemporary colour-blind racial politics that maintain dominant hierarchies across American society in institutions as seemingly diverse as universities and prisons, right down to physical environments.

Expanding the History of Black Studies, 1960s–70s In From Black Power to Black Studies, Fabio Rojas notes that the San Francisco State strike ‘stand[s] out in the popular imagination as black studies’ defining moment’ (Rojas 2007: 1). At the time, the 133-day strike certainly attracted a lot of media attention for its mass rallies and anti-racist demands. Of particular interest was the spectacle of violence, with American newspapers typically endorsing the right-wing views of College President, S. I. Hayakawa, and California Governor, Ronald Reagan, who considered police brutality an appropriate response to misuse of university property. Today, the strike is celebrated in and beyond San Francisco State for ‘paving the way for equity and social justice on campuses nationwide’ (Nance 2008). It is widely recognised as contributing not only to the institutionalisation of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies but also to educational affirmative-action programmes across the US. Expanding Black Studies’ history beyond the San Francisco State strike and other protests in the 1968–9 academic year depends as much on oral histories and other acts of recuperation, as it does on scholarly research. In an editorial celebrating the fortieth anniversary of San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies, SFGate columnist Sam Whiting observes: The first and still the only academic department of its kind in the country . . . came out of the black studies department, which came out of the famed student strike of 1968–69, which came out of the BSU [Black

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Student Union], which came out of a wager made in Los Angeles shortly after the Watts Riots of 1965 . . . [about starting in BSU leader James Garrett’s words] ‘a black student movement in a predominantly white campus’. (Whiting 2010) Needless to say, Garrett won the bet, and with colleagues like Jerry Varnado and Nathan Hare at San Francisco State, alongside many other black scholars elsewhere, helped to ensure a national future for Black Studies – although, admittedly, not always in line with ‘the recycled narrative that Black Studies moved from “protest to program to department” on each and every campus’ (Fenderson et al. 2012: 10). In a recent special issue of Journal of African American Studies, the editors and contributors seek to complicate this recycled narrative by focusing on a range of defining moments in the history of Black Studies, beyond the San Francisco State strike. For example, Ibram H. Rogers argues that the death in April 1968 of Martin Luther King Jr, ‘gave life to Black Studies . . . more than any other historical incident’, although the mass student protests across the US on ‘Diversity Thursday’ in February 1969, swiftly followed by the fourth anniversary of Malcolm X’s death do come close, too (Rogers 2012: 26, 50). Rogers explains that Malcolm X helped to politicise students, as did cultural nationalist politics more generally in the 1960s with regard to institutional racism, thus providing a background for the Black Campus Movement, 1965– 72. Near the point when this movement disbanded, mainly because, as Rogers argues, black student activists became more concerned with off-campus racial injustices, and ‘the offensive phase of the movement’ shifted to a defensive phase seeking to preserve Black Studies – black professors, for example, Cornell University’s James Turner became the focus of institution building (Rogers 2012: 34–5). Central to the Black Studies Movement, Turner’s experiences challenge the protest-to-programme paradigm since he was involved in the different stages of Black Studies in Harlem (as an informal student of black nationalism), Central Michigan (as an undergraduate student), Northwestern (as a graduate assistant at the African Studies Center) and Cornell (as Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center). In his interview for the special issue of Journal of African American Studies, Turner identifies other defining moments in Black Studies’ history, most notably student activism before 1968 at historically Black universities and colleges, or HBUCs. He also references the role of academic conferences, particularly Howard University’s ‘Toward A Black University’ in the autumn of 1968. This conference attracted between 1,500 and 1,900 delegates from across the US, many of whom criticised the development of HBUCs as ‘replica . . . dominant white institutions’ that were demographically black but remained institutionally white, especially in terms of the curriculum (Turner, quoted in Fenderson and Katungi 2012: 127).

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In addition to advocating a strong curriculum by, for and about African Americans delivered by black professors with long-term commitments to the discipline at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, Turner argued that Black Studies requires institutional autonomy, or its own budget and buildings (Fenderson and Katungi 2012: 133–5). A key tenet of Black Power, namely self-determination thus fed into the institutionalisation of Black Studies at Cornell and other, but by no means all, universities and colleges. While Turner advocated the development of Black Studies as an autonomous discipline, other scholars acknowledged problems with this model. For instance, cultural historian C. L. R. James said, ‘I do not recognize any distinctive nature of black studies – not today, 1969’, because he could not ‘separate black studies from white studies in any theoretical point of view. Nevertheless, there are certain things about black studies that need to be studied today’ (James 1969: 390, 404). Here, James’s politics override his theory, particularly in view of American history, although his peer, economist Arthur Lewis, doubted the efficacy of such a politics by insisting, ‘The Road to the Top is through Higher Education – Not Black Studies’ (quoted by James 1969: 390). This warning (and others like it, for example, Kilson et al. 1969) failed to stem Black Studies’ rapid growth. According to Rogers, 1968–9 saw the formation of over ‘650 Black Studies courses, programs, or departments’, rising to nearly a thousand in 1970 (2012: 35). Interest may have decreased in Black Studies in 1972, but this was also the year that The Chronicle of Higher Education announced, ‘black studies programs . . . now fill a standard, if insecure, niche in the curriculum’ (Janssen, quoted by Rogers 2012: 35). Despite this insecurity, Drake observed, ‘the rate of institutionalization accelerated after 1974’ (Drake 1979: 340), with many programmes surviving into the late 1970s when some were made financially and intellectually stronger through grants, mainly from the Ford Foundation (Griffin 2007), publications such as The Western Journal for Black Studies and A Scholarly Journal of Black Studies, and the formation of professional organisations, for example, the National Council for Black Studies, the African Heritage Studies Association and the Institute of the Black World. Over a period of just ten years, argues Drake, ‘black studies programs have brought a highly visible superficial “blackening” of academia. The black presence has become inescapable and legitimized’ (Drake 1979: 344). However, with institutionalisation and legitimisation came what Drake describes as ‘a trade-off’ (Drake 1979: 340). Black Studies may have helped to transform the idea of the university, as ‘multi-ethnic, with ethnicity permitted some institutional expression, and with black studies being one of the sanctioned forms’, but in the process ‘Black studies became depoliticized and deradicalized’ (Drake 1979: 340). For Drake, this deradicalisation represents ‘a change in style of expressing “blackness”. . . . Repudiation of “blackness” was not demanded as the price for survival’ (Drake 1979: 341), although

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for more radical scholars deradicalisation involves denationalisation and by extension deracialisation. Whether viewed as selling out, or, in Rojas’s words, ‘chilling out’ (Rojas 2007: 215), Black Studies’ institutionalisation and professionalisation generated a series of interrelated debates about its future direction and goals. The most influential of these debates was between cultural nationalists who espoused Black Power and Afrocentric principles and their more liberal and often integrationist counterparts. Between these two dominant perspectives, or ‘The Black Studies War: Multiculturalism Vs. Afrocentricity’ (Thomas 1995), a third ideological position emerged, sometimes formulated in terms of a ‘synthesis’ (Thomas 1995), at other times, a rejection of self-separation and integration in favour of a ‘transformationist or radical perspective’ focused on ‘transform[ing] the existing power relationships and the racist institutions of the state, the economy, and the society’ (Marable 2000: 31). For practical and political reasons, Black Studies emerged in the 1980s and later predominantly as a liberal interdiscipline, most successfully at elite American universities where Rojas estimates 40 to 50 per cent offer formalised units in Black Studies, for example, Harvard’s ‘interdisciplinary unit that appeals to both black and liberal white audiences’. Elsewhere, the numbers are significantly lower, below 10 per cent (Rojas 2007: 169–72, 218). From these figures, it is clear that Black Studies survives as a dynamic interdisciplinary site with changing ideological functions. In the 1970s, it may have been seen as a way to promote racial harmony, mainly between blacks and whites for reasons ranging from social justice to corporate multiculturalism, but today, as black feminist Noliwe Rooks notes, Black Studies is ‘key to understanding shifting realities of diversity among black people’, beyond racial dualism and is ‘a vital tool to foster broader discussions of the nature, makeup, and meaning of race, diversity, integration, and desegregation’ (Rooks 2006). Black Studies thus looks set to persist, at least until 3 March 2095, when cultural historian Robin D. G. Kelley imagines two possible futures for it in his semi-fictional, time-travelling tale, ‘Looking B(l)ackward: African-American Studies in the Age of Identity Politics’.

Black Studies in the 1980s and 1990s Prior to its publication, Kelley presented ‘Looking B(l)ackward’ as the keynote address at a conference at Princeton University in 1995. This piece offers a darkly satirical account of Black Studies at the end of the twentieth century, although there is some movement back and forth from this era befitting Kelley’s time-travelling protagonist, Dr Kelley. Attending a conference on postraciality that includes discussions of the bell curve wars and the theory wars, Dr Kelley falls into a coma in the panel, ‘Deconstruct to Reconstruct, That’s All We Do’ (Kelley 1997: 2). A century later, he wakes up to see the balkanised future

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of Black Studies at Community College University (CCU) and across the US, each programme struggling to survive against the Hard Right and from Black Studies wars, mainly between, in Kelley’s account, ‘Asante Hall, the home of the Center for Africological Thought and Practice’, ‘Stuart Hall, where the Program in Antiessentialist Black World Studies was housed’ including Black Culture/Gender Studies, and the extraordinarily successful ‘Urban Underclass Institute’ in W. J. Wilson Hall (Kelley 1997: 4, 7–8, 12). On witnessing the horrors of this last Black Studies programme, Dr Kelley loses consciousness and returns to 1995 where he (or Kelley) with obvious relief sees before him ‘an endless sea of faces whose contributions to our work have been invaluable’, and who have contributed to the ‘various schools of thought within this larger matrix we call Black Studies’ (Kelley 1997: 15–16). Dr Kelley’s travels serve as a microcosm for a series of interrelated Black Studies debates in the 1980s and 1990s taken to their seemingly logical conclusions in the 2090s, not only the bell curve wars and the theory wars, but also the war between Afrocentric cultural nationalism and multiculturalism (including black feminism and black Marxism). Beyond academia, Dr Kelley’s time travels provide insight into the American government’s wars on welfare, street violence, illegal drugs and other behaviours it associated with poor, black people, especially those born between 1965 and 1984, or ‘the hip hop generation’ (Kitwana 2003: xiii). With the rise of the right at the century’s end, there is an obvious sense of irony about falling into a coma at a conference on postraciality. Here, Kelley suggests that postraciality signals the end of neither Black Studies nor racism, but a desensitised condition akin to colour-blindness that not only affects whites but also black middle-class professionals who are privy to ‘relatively good times . . . if you never left the auditorium, conference room, or movie theaters’ (Kelley 1997: 9). Just prior to losing his consciousness and history, presumably in (for some) Eurocentric academia, Dr Kelley loses his way en route to the bell curve debate. These losses provide Kelley’s Murray with ‘his only evidence’ for a follow-up book to The Bell Curve (1994) in which he questions the racial advances brought about by affirmative action by arguing that ‘members of racial groups with lower average IQ scores who make it into the ranks of the cognitive elite are incapable of processing such knowledge’ so fake it, suffer from mental health problems, or fall into a coma (Kelley 1997: 3). Fundamental to the right-wing offensive of the 1980s and 1990s, this interpretation of affirmative action allows ‘less qualified’ blacks privileged access to higher education, to their detriment and the wider society’s: ‘Something about’ it is, ‘fundamentally unfair – un-American – no matter how admirable the ultimate goal’ (Murray 1994: 221). For the long-time beneficiaries of white affirmative action, the colour-conscious version of the policy also undermines the supposedly race-neutral goals of American education for universal knowledge, best delivered, according to William Bennett, Allan Bloom and other

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conservatives by the Western canon rather than a multicultural curriculum geared towards identity politics. Bennett and his reactionary peers proclaim the existence of, if not the need for, a common culture that passes itself off as such despite white/European (and other) biases and privileges. As critical race scholar David Theo Goldberg explains: ‘monoculturalism not only purports to universalize the presuppositions and terms of a single culture, it likewise denies as culture – as embodying and reflecting worthy value(s) – any expression that fails to fit its mold’, specifically ‘The Voice of America – confident, perhaps even brash, uncritically unself-conscious, and overwhelmingly white’ (Goldberg 1994: 5). In the history of American monoculturalism, from Republican resistance to European colonialism and imperialism to ‘Keeping America White’ and ‘The Voice of America’ (Goldberg 1994: 3–5), as the latter also circulate in the contemporary colour-blind era, the multiculturalist challenge to the ideal of a common culture is uneven in its implementation. ‘Our multicultural, multilingual, multiracial population’ may be ‘a Manifest New Destiny’ (June Jordan, quoted by Lee 2004: xvi), with whites becoming a minority in the US by the middle of the twenty-first century, and multiculturalism may circulate as a mainstream discourse in education and popular culture, but these multicultural facts by themselves do not signal the end of the war against white monoculturalism. In its latest formulation, white monoculturalism promotes its own multicultural project, or corporate multiculturalism, a racist anti-racist discourse, so to speak, which ultimately supports the white privilege it claims to counter because its primary concern is reforming not transforming institutional structures, for example, race awareness week in a colour-blind era. Whether anti-racist or racist, anti-Eurocentric or neo-Eurocentric, grassroots or corporate, political/practical or cultural/theoretical (Gordon and Newfield 1996: 3–6), multiculturalism’s conflicting projects render it too risky for cultural nationalist scholars in particular. In ‘The Black Studies War: Multiculturalism versus Afrocentricity’, Greg Thomas focuses on the work of two men who for him best ‘personify the ideological poles’: Harvard’s acculturationist and prolific literary scholar and premier multiculturalist’, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Temple’s liberationist and ‘champion of Afrocentricity’, Asante (Thomas 1995). In Kelley’s future, too, Afrocentricity is opposed to multiculturalism, albeit by way of Anti-Essentialist Black World Studies, including Black Culture/Gender Studies. Kelley emphasises the ideological or theoretical nature of this opposition in the names he gives to the Black Studies programmes delivered from Asante Hall and Stuart Hall, the Center for Africological Thought and Practice, criticising the separation of thought and practice or culture and politics that poststructuralists/multiculturalists in Anti-Essentialist Black World Studies seem to advocate when highlighting the discursive construction of race against biological and cultural essentialisms.

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At stake in this Black Studies war is the definition of blackness, or, in Gates’s terms, the ‘blackness of blackness’ (Gates 1983: 685), which for Afrocentric critics means ‘Africans’ (Asante 2009), whereas for poststructuralist/ multiculturalist critics like Hall and Gates it means ‘everyone in the family of blackness’ (Kelley 1997: 8). Each side charges the other with race denial, if not a denial of racism – at the expense of black feminists in particular. Kelley’s Dr Patricia Post offers an insight into the burden of Africanness as it affects a majority of black people who fail to conform to ‘one way to be black’, typically ‘black male’ (Christian 1987: 58, 60). According to Dr Post, Africology’s attacks on black feminism leave women like her institutionally insecure and with little choice but to join Anti-Essentialist Black World Studies. Even here, however, Dr Post is threatened by ‘the black British invaders – they were men for the most part’ (Kelley 1997: 9), most notably, Hall, Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer. The term ‘invaders’ suggests a link to British colonialism and imperialism, an ironic link for a critic like Hall given that he originated from Jamaica, a former British colony and a Commonwealth country; at the same time, however, ‘invaders’ does help to articulate experiences of displacement felt by Black Studies scholars in the 1990s with the rise of Postcolonial Studies and, to a lesser extent, Diaspora or Pan-African Studies. As postcolonial critic Ella Shohat explains: [I]f the rising institutional endorsement of the term postcolonial is, on the one hand a success story for the PCs (politically correct), is it not also a partial containment of the POCs (people of color)? . . . One has the impression that the postcolonial is privileged because it seems safely distant from ‘the belly of the beast,’ the United States. (Shohat 2000: 135) In particular, corporate multiculturalists committed to political correctness can rest assured that postcolonial intellectuals from the UK and its former colonies demonstrate diversity in the American higher education system, although not necessarily in a radical way: If it’s about getting black faces at Harvard, then you’re doing fine. If it’s about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you’re not doing well. And if it’s about having diversity that includes African-Americans from the South or from inner-city high schools, then you’re not doing well, either. (Mary C. Waters, quoted by Rimer and Arensen 2004) With multiculturalism and globalism seeming to threaten Black Studies from within and without, and with poststructuralism seeming to deny race and racism through emphases on diversity and language, or linguistic play, Afrocentric

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resistance seems understandable. Importantly, however, this resistance does not make Afrocentricity the polar opposite of these other theories since it too insists that ‘culture is learned, it isn’t biological’ (Kelley 1997: 6). Indeed, Asante understands Afrocentricity as ‘a constructural adjustment to black disorientation, decenteredness, and lack of agency’, primarily via the act of ‘marking’, which is when ‘a person delineates a cultural boundary around a particular cultural space in human time’ (Asante 2009). Asante’s references to culture suggest a point of correspondence with poststructuralism, perhaps even the influence of the African and African American tradition of ‘signifyin[g]’ beyond European theory (Gates 1983: 685, 687–9). By the same token, Gates’s understanding of signifyin(g) emerges in relation to the Signifying Monkey, ‘a trickster figure, of the order of the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology’ (Gates 1983: 687). Gates also insists ‘our generation must record, codify, and disseminate the assembled data about African and African-American culture’ (Gates 1992: 123). In Kelley’s nightmarish future, these points of correspondence are perhaps part of the reason both Asante Hall and Stuart Hall are small buildings in disrepair, with few staff and students who are forced to share the same photocopier. In his analysis of the Asante-Gates dynamic, Abdul Alkalimat notes a further point of correspondence: ‘Both represent an ideological retreat by a new black middle class that has been unable to find the courage to link up with the masses of Black people fighting to survive’ (quoted by Marable 2000: 31). Following Alkalimat, Marable also argues that Gates’s integrationism and Asante’s separatism represent their retreat from ‘power relationships and the racist institutions of the state, the economy, and society’ (Marable 2000: 31). Increasingly, other black scholars argue that this opposition is overdrawn, particularly for the younger generation who see that ‘nationalist versus integrationist have moderated from their polar extremes’, arguably to the point of ‘fusion’ (Kitwana 2002: 149). For this generation, Bakari Kitwana adds, ‘even those wrapped in the most radical political perspective feel entitled to their piece of the American pie. At the same time, even the most reformist/integrationist orientated hip hop generationer recognizes the disparate treatment of African Americans and realizes that change is necessary’ (Kitwana 2002: 150). Where this change is most clearly necessary, and where the black masses are most obviously at the centre of critique is in Kelley’s W. J. Wilson Hall at the Urban Underclass Institute, the most (financially) successful Black Studies programme at CCU. Directed by Dr Souless Thomas, the Institute is staffed by criminologists and genetic engineers intent on transforming a multiracial underclass through a combination of ‘Behaviour Adjustment Technology’ (BAT) and ‘chemical warfare’: ‘This method has turned the coldest homeboy into a model citizen – a better gentleman than myself’, remarks Dr Thomas (Kelley 1997: 14). The BAT racial project is not designed to eliminate poverty, as Dr Kelley believes, only certain behaviours, for example, violence, nihilism, unemployment and dysfunctional welfare families (Kelley 1997: 14). Although

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racialised as black, the fact that these behaviours are exhibited by a multiracial underclass suggests to conservatives and some liberals the declining significance of race in American society at the end of the twentieth century. Against right-wing interpretations of The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (2012), William Julius Wilson argues that ‘historic’ racism is not in decline, only that ‘non-racial factors . . . impacted significantly on the black community’ (Wilson 1997). These nonracial factors include ‘the computer revolution, changes in scale-based technology [and] . . . internationalization of economic activity’, which, together, reduce the demand for low-skilled workers, a disproportionate number of whom are black (Wilson 1997). For Wilson, national and international economic changes impact unequally on ‘The Two Nations of Black America’, of which the hardest hit are black inner-city communities, their disadvantages emphasised by the rise of a black middle class of highly trained and educated professionals (Wilson 1997). The disparities between these two classes provide the right with further opportunity to blame welfare-reliant blacks for their own poverty and related behaviours rather than historic racism, deindustrialisation and globalisation. Prior to The Bell Curve about black biological inferiority, Murray espoused in Losing Ground (1994) an equally controversial thesis about social policy and race. According to him, social policy, for example, affirmative action is ‘monumentally ironic’ since it fosters rather than prohibits the emergence of a ‘black’ underclass, ‘the object of the most unremitting sympathy’ and ‘condescension’ that sees ‘whites . . . tolerate and make excuses for behavior among blacks that whites would disdain in themselves or their children’ (Murray 1994: 222–3). Equally, however, if not more so, are the disdainful economic behaviours underpinning white tolerance, at least in 2095: the Urban Underclass Institute and associated private industries depend for their future on young black men (and increasingly women) from deprived neighbourhoods, the vast majority of whom are not in education, nor are they ever likely to be. At this prospect, Dr Kelley loses consciousness and returns to 1995, his timetravelling experiences informing Kelley’s insistence on the value of ‘looking b(l)ackward’ in order to understand how ‘the new crises in African American culture’, including ‘racial profiling, environmental justice, electoral politics, youth issues, parenting, globalization’ (Kitwana 2002: 1, 149) have a longer history derived from, as Eric Michael Dyson observes, ‘the historical legacy of slavery, which continues to assert its brutal presence in the untold suffering of millions of everyday black folk’ (Dyson 2004: 138).

Black Studies Now, 2000s– Throughout the history of Black Studies, from the social movement stage in the 1960s and 1970s and the academic profession stage in the 1980s and 1990s,

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right through to the twenty-first century there has been a concern with social justice within and beyond the American education system. Even recent developments in Black Studies, not just globalism and multiculturalism, but also racial justice and environmental justice are originary and ongoing concerns. In 1970, for example, San Francisco State’s Black Student Union demanded the academic institutionalisation of the ‘cultural heritage of Third World people, specifically black people’ for educational and political purposes, ultimately, ‘to redistribute the wealth; the knowledge, the technology, the natural resources, the food, land, housing, and all the material resources necessary for a society and its people to function’ (quoted by Umemoto 2000: 63). In The African American Studies Reader, Nathaniel Norment argues that ‘the central goal in the years ahead should be for African Americans Studies to have an impact on the quality of life for all African American people’ (Norment 2007: xl), including those most at risk from ‘the New Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2012: 2). For Alexander, the new Jim Crow is evidenced in the mass incarceration of young black men (and increasingly women), although, for other critical race scholars, it exceeds the Western ‘military-carceral ring’ and includes the Eastern ‘ring of poverty’ (Lee 2004: 15) and in the South and ‘Up South’, as Robert D. Bullard observes, ‘a disproportionately large amount of pollution and other environmental stresses in [black] neighborhoods as well as in their workplaces’ (Bullard 2000: xiii, 1). For African Americans confined to these toxic environments, and for new social movements focused on racial justice and environmental justice, neither race nor racism is declining in significance. As legacies of the Civil Rights Movement, sometimes critically so, these new movements have developed in tandem with increasing academic interest in Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory and Environmental/Ecocritical Studies, particularly from the late 1990s onwards. Fundamental to these new social movements is recognition of the ways in which historic racism continues to reproduce racial inequalities, which at their worst resemble Kelley’s nightmarish future and the ‘chemical warfare on the worst neighborhoods in the country’ (1997: 14) involving illegal drugs and il/legal toxins, and their devastating impact on young black people in particular. In his analysis of The Hip Hop Generation, Kitwana explains how young black men often have few choices when it comes to ‘the informal economy’ involving gangs and related criminal activities (Kitwana 2002: 35). For them, as Dyson also explains, ‘low level educational achievement’ and ‘structural unemployment of . . . virtually epidemic proportions’ mean their lives are at ‘a low premium’ that only this informal economy seems to relieve with its promise of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘material gratification’ (Dyson 2004: 138, 141). Most lucrative is the drugs trade, particularly after crack-cocaine emerged in the mid-1980s. The government responded with the War on Drugs typified by criminal and civil penalties for selling crack that were so severe that they were ‘unprecedented in the federal system’, and provided a legal way for the Right

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to discriminate against blacks-as-felons (Alexander 2012: 53–4). Racial profiling and ‘paramilitary policing’ (Kitwana 2002: 64–5), when coupled with new laws enforcing mandatory minimum sentences for crack and for a third crime helped to give the US ‘the world’s largest prison population and the world’s largest second highest per capita incarceration rate’, particularly among black youth (Kitwana 2002: 56–7). Of the crack epidemic, one senator observed that ‘if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it’ (quoted by Alexander 2012: 53), probably someone like Kelley’s Dr Thomas at the Urban Underclass Institute and affiliated private industries. The privatised prison industry has profited from mass incarceration for illegal drug offences, especially after the War on Drugs ensured ‘prison admissions from African Americans skyrocketed, nearly quadrupling in three years, and then increasing steadily until it reached in 2000 a level more than twentysix times the level in 1983’ (Alexander 2012: 98). Disproportionately incarcerated, especially compared to whites, which over this same period saw its prison population increase eight times (Alexander 2012: 98), young black (and brown) men provide ‘virtual slave labour’ for the government and increasingly private companies because ‘a captive, non-unionized labor pool, where benefits, vacation time, unemployment compensation, minimum wages, payroll and Social Security taxes, and even human rights and anti-sweatshop activists are non-issues’ (Kitwana 2002: 73). Where civil and human rights are most obviously an issue, however, is in poor black neighbourhoods, if not, as should be the case, in a wider democratic society. Kitwana and other black scholars observe how mass incarceration negatively impacts on black families, increasingly already tenuous gender and intergenerational relationships, with the ‘sexual terror’ in prisons exacerbating rising rates of AIDS among young blacks who are already struggling with ‘the mental and physical strain demanded by prison’s survival-at-all-costs culture’ (Kitwana 2002: 76–81). By the mid-2000s, young black men were fast disappearing into the prison industrial complex, so much so that Ebony magazine in 2006 posed but did not answer the question, ‘Where Have All the Black Men Gone?’ (Alexander 2012: 179). Although not in their families or communities, black men are only too visible in the global cultural phenomenon of hip hop, most notably, gangsta rap, which combines ‘prison culture, street culture, and Black youth culture’ in an apparent glorification of the worst racial stereotypes, for example, ‘young, don’t give a fuck, and black’ (Kitwana 2002: 77, 121). Black Studies debates about hip hop culture and gangsta rap, or ‘the hip hop wars’ (Rose 2008) divide along class, gender and generational lines. Although this musical form and related phenomena, including styles of language, dress and dance are criticised for causing urban violence and sexual misconduct, or, a little more critically, contemporary minstrelsy, these criticisms, often from older and/

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or middle-class blacks fail to engage its complexity and the historical forces underpinnings its emergence (Dyson 2004: 401–40). For Kitwana, Dyson and other scholars, hip hop culture is social criticism, a product of historic racism, or the new Jim Crow that it seeks to expose and, ideally, counter. But illegal drugs (and concomitant mass incarceration) represent just one arsenal in the Right’s ‘chemical warfare’. In a 1987 report by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ; also see the 2007 report by Bullard et al.), race represented ‘the leading factor in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities and determined that poor and people of color communities suffer disproportionate health risk’, between 50 and 60 per cent of them living in locations with ‘one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites’ (Adamson et al. 2002: 4). For UCC-CRJ director, Reverend Benjamin Chavis, these facts and figures demonstrate ‘environmental racism’, specifically: racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the lifethreatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and history of excluding people of color from leadership in the environmental movement. (Quoted by Adamson et al. 2002: 4) While environmental racism affects black (and other non-white) communities across the US, the South, as Bullard explains in Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, proved particularly appealing to chemical and other polluting industries. Typically viewed as ‘a socially and economically “backward” region’, which as late as 1982 suffered ‘service deficiencies’, alongside deficient labour, business and environmental regulations, the South seemed the ideal location for these polluting industries, the air contamination from them re-presented as ‘the sweet smell of prosperity’, if not, ‘a panacea for the decades of neglect and second-class status accorded the region’ (Bullard 2000: 23, 5, 29, 27). Agribusiness, too, played its part in this neglect, with Spencer D. Wood and Jess Gilbert estimating ‘a 98 percent loss of black farm operations between 1900 and 1997’ to large-scale corporate farms (Green et al. 2011: 55). The opportunities that the polluting industries seem to offer in terms of jobs gained widespread support from public officials, and even, as Bullard highlights, civil rights leaders committed to social justice and the provision of decent public services, for example, better schools and houses apparently made possible by increased investment and employment. However, the argument that ‘jobs were real; environmental risks were unknown’ (Bullard 2000: 27) does not necessarily hold up, since white middleclass communities already had jobs and a sense of the environmental risks so they pursued with some success not-in-my-backyard or NIMBY policies. Historically, environmentalism is predominantly a white discourse and geared

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towards white interests, for example, nature conservation. According to Bullard, NIMBY-ism and conservationism result in ‘the place-in-blacks’-backyard (PIBBY) principle’ (2000: 4), with white environmentalists and white industrialists regarding poor black communities in particular as ‘pushover[s] lacking community organization, environmental consciousness, and with strong and blind pro-business politics’ (Bullard 2000: 27). Following the PIBBY principle, white trees may have been saved but black housing and workplaces suffered from industrial pollution. Environmental justice and social justice were increasingly recognised by black activists as interrelated issues, or, in the words of one UCC-CRJ director, ‘yet another breach of civil rights. . . . The depositing of toxic wastes within the black community is no less than attempted genocide’ (Bullard 2000: 31). Such powerful rhetoric helped to mobilise grassroots campaigns during the 1980s against environmental degradation of predominantly black areas. By the 1990s, links between environmental and social justice were increasingly recognised, at least enough for the American government to establish the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) in 1993 and, a year later, Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898. In the aftermath of large-scale events such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 it is impossible not to see how social and environmental justice are linked, as unnatural disasters (see, for example, Deming and Savoy 2011: 3–4). In grassroots environmental justice organisations, black working-class women often assume central roles, for example, ‘African American Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Memphis, Tennessee’ (Simpson 2002: 82–104), African American author Barbara Neely’s re-presentation of the Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative in Blanche Cleans Up (Neeley 1998; also see Stein 2002), and ‘Sustaining the “Urban Forest” and Creating Landscapes of Hope’ in Baltimore, Maryland (Di Chiro 2002). The influence of black feminism is apparent at Syracuse University’s Department of African American Studies, which launched the Gender and Environmental Justice project in 2007, mainly in ‘an effort to convert Africana intellectual thought into a tool for social transformation’ (Mugo 2007). Although ‘ “hot” topics’ for black social scientists (Bullard 2000: xvii), environmental racism and environmental justice took longer to influence the humanities, mainly because of, as Ursula Heise explains, the influence of theory and its ‘overarching project of denaturalization’ (Heise 2006: 505). This project may have worked against conservative efforts to legitimate social hierarchies via appeals to nature, but it proved problematic for social movements that needed ‘to reground human cultures in natural systems and whose primary pragmatic goal was to rescue a sense of the reality of environmental degradation from the obfuscations of political discourse’ (Heise 2006: 505). Experiencing its own theory war, albeit in colour-blind terms, environmental criticism or ecocriticism seems to offer little to Black Studies because its

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standard assumptions are white. For example, white ecocriticism typically privileges idealised natural environments, which in African American history are often associated with oppression, for instance, slavery plantations, prison farms and lynching sites, or exceed predominantly urban black experiences. Not until Cheryl Glotfelty’s call in 1996 for diversification of its standards in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) did mainstream ecocriticism start to take more seriously ‘a diversity of voices’ (quoted by Adamson and Slovic 2009: 6) that had long been there. As environmental justice cultural studies critic T.V. Reed argues, there is a long history of black and other non-white writers engaging with environmental racism, to which ‘the field still needs to catch up’ (quoted by Adamson and Slovic 2009: 12): from African representations of nature in the literature of slavery (Finseth 2009) and the Harlem Renaissance (Outka 2008) to concerns about water (Wardi 2011) and food (Witt 1999), including the lack thereof in ‘food deserts’ (McClintock 2011: 89). Perhaps if mainstream ecocritics had spent more time thinking about this history, or, at the very least, the contents of their morning cup of coffee, as suggested by Martin Luther King and reiterated by Soenke Zehle, then they would have seen how it contains ‘the history of slavery’ and other systems of human and non-human exploitation and oppression against which black (and other nonwhite) activists and artists have protested (Zehle 2002: 341). While environmental justice politics dominates the movement, the editors of and contributors to The Environmental Justice Reader argue that poetics and pedagogy, or ‘teaching and making art are intrinsically political acts’ (Adamson et al. 2002: 7). In the pedagogy section of the Reader, four professors discuss their experiences of teaching environmental studies, typically as an interdisciplinary subject focused on environmental racism, and each with a strong sense of the ways ‘environmental justice education taps the intellectual and organizational resources of previous (minority) social movements’ (Zehle 2002: 337). For these and other environmental justice scholars, radical pedagogy has its roots in the Black Studies Movement and other related movements that almost fifty years before recognised the role of the scholar-activist in bringing about ‘a cultural revolution in art and ideas’ (Neal 1968), and, by extension, ideologies and institutions. Understood in this context, Black Studies is, as Rooks notes, ‘a successful example of the pursuit of social [and environmental] justice and democratic reform, [and] a harbinger of widespread institutional and cultural change’ (2006). Its history may be marked by all sorts of conflicts – from the race war in the 1960s and 1970s, as it continues today in new colour-blind forms, to the culture wars, bell curve wars, theory wars, the war between Afrocentricity and multiculturalism, right up to contemporary chemical wars – but socialenvironmental justice requires nothing less. So, rather than reading conflict as a sign of Black Studies’ failure, is it not better to understand it in terms of the discipline’s ‘on-going and profound critique and corrective’, summarised

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by Maulana Karenga as a compulsion ‘to practice internally what it demands externally, i.e., self criticism and self-correction . . . and an intellectual rigor and relevance which both disarms its severest critics and honors its original academic and social mission’ (quoted by Norment 2007: xlvi)? Conflict-as-self-critique certainly underpins Kelley’s vision in ‘Looking B(l)ackward’ for the future of ‘the larger matrix we call Black Studies’, peopled by ‘sane, committed, brilliant intellectuals’ fully able ‘to put up a good fight against the right-wing racist onslaught we now face’ at the century’s end – 1995 and, presumably, 2095 (1997: 15), if not all the years before, between and after. ‘Looking b(l)ackward’ over Black Studies’ history to the San Francisco State Strike, right up the contemporary colour-blind era of ‘the new Jim Crow’ in institutional settings as varied as classrooms, prison cells and chemical plants, sometimes less than a mile apart, particularly in black neighbourhoods, makes only too clear the continuing need for Black Studies: Though it has never been as easy topic of conversation for Americans, race is still a central feature of American culture and society. But America is not well practiced in confronting its complexities. That is why we need African-American studies more, not less, than ever before. It is an essential place for helping us understand and discuss the nature of blackness, the efficacy of affirmative action for African-American students, and the meaning of racial progress in the 21st century. (Rooks 2006)

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13 CRITICAL RACE THEORY Bella Adams

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ow . . . critical race Theory has gone mainstream’, at least that is what law professor Dorothy Brown imagined CRT founder Derrick Bell would have said had he been alive in March 2012 to witness the furore in certain sections of the American media following the release of footage from 1991 of Bell and Barack Obama embracing (Hadro 2012). The video shows Obama warmly introducing his former teacher to fellow Harvard law students with the phrase, ‘open your hearts and minds to the words of Derrick Bell’ (Shapiro 2012). According to right-wing columnists, Obama’s words evidence his radical politics in the past and, more worryingly for J. Christian Adams, in the present: ‘Bell’s racial world view is now manifesting in the policies of the Obama administration’ (Adams 2012). In Adams’s estimation, this worldview sanctions ‘a counter-American, collectivist idea. Reparations, race-based hiring and excusing New Black Panther voter intimidation are some of the evil fruits of Critical Race Theory’ (Adams 2012). Other evil fruits, or, less emotively, CRT’s most controversial tenets, as enacted in, for example, the O. J. Simpson trial and gangsta rap have further contributed to its mainstreaming. As Jeffrey Rosen remarks in his 1996 article, ‘The Bloods and the Crits’, ‘the rhetoric of the [CRT] movement is already reverberating beyond the lecture hall and seminar room. It is finding echoes in the courtroom, too, and in popular culture’ (Rosen 2000: 584). There are various reasons for CRT’s mainstreaming, beyond quite regular appearances in the American media. For example, Rosen offers a liberal explanation to do with its popularity amongst respected individuals of the American bar who, for him, ‘soften its more unsettling conclusions’ (Rosen 2000: 585). At once supporting and undermining this sort of explanation, the American Right from the 1980s onwards took a hard-line approach to individuals and policies variously connected to ‘a nasty racialist theory’ (Adams 2012) informed in part by black counterstories or, as Rosen proposes, ‘conspiracy theories, that are widely accepted in the black community, even though they are factually untrue’ (Rosen 2000: 584). ‘Get real’ is arguably the most appropriate response to these sorts of liberal-conservative explanations, not least because, as Bell observed in his

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1990 article ‘After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Postracial Epoch’, ‘statistics on poverty, unemployment, and income support the growing concern that the slow racial advances of the 1960s and 1970s have ended, and retrogression is well under way’ (Bell 2013: 9). It was well under way in the 1990s when ‘one-third of black Americans continue[d] to live in poverty, and the ghetto poor continue[d] to be the victims of modern “progress” ’ and ‘vicious economic conditions that make their lives hell’ (Dyson 1993: 147). And, it is well under way in the twenty-first century: ‘white family wealth in the U.S. is nine times that of African American family wealth and black young men are seven times more likely as whites to be incarcerated’ (Roediger 2008). Moreover, ‘the diseases of the poor in the U.S. are the diseases of people of color. 75 percent of all active tuberculosis cases afflict them’ (Roediger 2008). Finally, ‘host neighbourhoods of commercial hazardous waste facilities are 56% people of color whereas non-host areas are 30% people of color’ (Bullard 2007: x). Such statistics demonstrate that race matters, and for a significant number of black Americans that nothing has changed regarding contemporary race relations. However, this sort of argument meets with one of its greatest challenges in the election and re-election of the first black American president (although black political advances do have a longer history going back to 1870; see, for example, Parks and Rachlinski 2013: 198–200). Indeed, Obama’s victories seem to some to indicate everything has changed regarding race, with commentators on the Left and Right both interpreting his successes as a sign of the nation’s racial advances, if not ‘the end of race-thinking’ (Roediger 2008). For Thomas Holt, however, these ‘all or nothing’ arguments are as ‘wrong and shortsighted’ as each other, and they prevent us from understanding ‘the contradictions and incoherence . . . in contemporary racial phenomena’ (Holt 2002: 6). In political and popular cultures, one notable contradiction is black celebrity, with Holt citing Colin Powell and Michael Jackson as cases in point, and David Roediger, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods and Obama. Other notable examples are O. J. Simpson, the late rapper Tupac Shakur, described by Michael Eric Dyson as ‘the first black icon to join the pantheon of the posthumously alive, people who defeat their own death through episodic appearances in the mythological landscape’ (Dyson 2004: 482), and other artists, producers and entrepreneurs associated with hip hop. Both Holt and Roediger ask how black celebrities can prove so popular among whites when more everyday experiences tend towards hostility and violence. How is it, asks Holt, that a white crowd screams with excitement for Jackson, but for other black men ‘it screams for blood’ (Holt 2002: 7). Or, as Roediger asks, how does Obama attract the support of white racist voters, and his election victories represent to the right-wing press ‘a triumph for the nation, even while opposing his election’ (Roediger 2008). Such ironies are most powerfully felt by young black

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men, or the hip hop generation, who are ‘murdered, maimed and imprisoned in record numbers, [just as] their styles have become disproportionately influential in shaping popular culture’ (Cornel West, quoted by Kitwana 2002: 10). These contradictions and ironies necessitate rethinking about race and racism from an historical point of view. Increasingly, race scholars emphasise the dynamic nature of race and racism, often talking about racisms and ‘social formations’ (Holt 2002: 22) or ‘racial formation[s]’ (Omi and Winant 1994: 50). For instance, Dyson insists ‘we must account for the differences between racism in the nineties and racism in the sixties, and then present a progressive race theory that addresses racism’s cruel persistence’ (Dyson 1993: 147), particularly for those most at risk from ‘the New Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2012: 2). CRT scholar Patricia Williams also recognises ‘racism’s hardy persistence and immense adaptability’ (Williams 1998: 14), with Holt adding that although ‘racism . . . is never entirely new’, this does not discount the need for a theory that understands how ‘race is . . . constructed differently at different historical moments and in different social contexts’ (Holt 2002: 1–2). Holt argues for understanding ‘historically specific “racisms” and not a singular ahistorical racism’ in relation to other social phenomena’, for example, the US political economy and the globalised economy (Holt 2002: 21–2). Dyson, too, and race scholars more overtly committed to CRT also insist on the importance of taking into account ‘new-age global economics’ (Williams 1998: 12) and other experiences like class, gender, sex, religion and geography that intersect with race (Dyson 1993: 154). Although the racial formation of the United States is dynamic, the continuation of racial double standards beyond the civil rights era into a supposedly postracial epoch provides a more realistic explanation for the current popularity of CRT. It has gone mainstream not because a black and/or leftist elite promoted and misrepresented it, as Rosen contends, but because CRT offers persuasive descriptions of the complicated relationships between race and power in American society. CRT also offers various strategies for racial justice and, increasingly, other social and environmental justices, some of which, as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic propose in their discussion of the future of race in America may become ‘the New Civil Rights Orthodoxy’, while others may be ignored, rejected or partially incorporated (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 148–9). Unlike Bell’s imagined future in ‘After We’ve Gone’, a satirical piece that depicts white America agreeing to sell its black population to aliens to alleviate the national debt, Delgado and Stefancic’s imaginings over two decades later represent a future where blacks and other non-whites have not gone. If anything, they outnumber whites, with this demographic change offering, so Delgado and Stefancic hope, the possibility of a third Reconstruction against further retrogression; if not, in their worst case scenario, race war and

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neocolonialism (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 145–6). More or less from Bell onwards, CRT has asked important questions about the limited outcomes of the first and second Reconstructions in and after the 1860s and 1960s respectively. CRT also demands a third Reconstruction and ways to bring it about, not so much slowly perhaps, since gradualism in matters of racial justice was a main cause of concern for Bell and his peers, as ‘surely’ and ‘irreversibly’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 145). This chapter is organised into thematic sections identifying the key tenets of critical race theory at the point of their emergence and in more recent formulations. As should be clear already, the mainstreaming of CRT is a new development, whether in and by the American media or in the work of race scholars, often as these two fields intersect, for instance, Williams’s articles for The Nation and her madwomanprofessor blog. The fact that CRT has been so influential on race-thinking in the US also makes it mainstream, with race scholars not explicitly associated with this field taking on board a number of its insights as standard, most notably, the critique of liberalism, which, together with an analysis of CRT’s beginnings and influences, is the focus of section one. Sections two and three explore other standardised ideas, specifically the narrative turn, with CRT scholars using literary terms, for example, ‘melodrama’ (Bell 2004: 6), ‘pantomime’ (Williams 1998: 15), ‘STORYTELLING, COUNTERSTORYTELLING, AND “NAMING ONE’S OWN REALITY” ’, (Delgado and Stefancic 2013: 61) to emphasise that race is performed or narrativised, most powerfully in contemporary postracial or colour-blind discourses that maintain white privilege. Section four discusses how CRT has moved beyond the black/white binary, to, in William’s words ‘a more complex hybridising of racial stereotypes with the fundamentalisms of gender, class, ethnicity, religion’ (Williams 1998: 12).

Beginnings, Influences, and the Critique of Liberalism Much critical race scholarship emerges in relation to high-profile race cases, both past and present, because the majority of its key figures, for example, Bell, Delgado, Stefancic, Williams, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and so on are law professors. CRT began in American university law departments, particularly those influenced by Critical Legal Studies, or CLS, a leftist ideological movement that disputed the liberal Enlightenment assumption that ‘law was . . . distinguished from politics because politics was open-ended, subjective, discretionary, and ideological, whereas law was determinate, objective, bounded, and neutral’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xiv). Deconstructing this distinction along the lines of CLS founder, Alan Freeman, who stated that ‘I cannot regard the court as autonomous and separate from the society that orchestrates it’ (Freeman 1995: 45), critical legal scholars argue that the law is discursive and so operates within

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dominant power structures. As such, it is marked by indeterminacy and contradiction, along with serving a legitimating function vis-à-vis these structures, enough for cultural theorist Cornell West to describe the twentieth century as ‘barbaric . . . for the legal academy, which has, wittingly or not, constructed for the justificatory framework . . . shameful social practices that continue to this day’ (West 1995: xii). The ‘critical’ in CLS (and CRT) derives in part from European theories, including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critical theory, Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony theory, and some versions of postmodernism that challenge Enlightenment ideals from a perspective focused on self-critique and ultimately social liberation. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘The Enlightenment must examine itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed’, an examination focused on ‘the destructive aspect of progress’, or the ways in which modern political economic systems, so capable of promoting social justice, in fact do the opposite, as was made especially clear to them by European fascism and, increasingly, American capitalism (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: xv, xiii). World War II also helped to highlight the irony of fighting fascism abroad when black Americans experienced fascism at home under Jim Crow, not remedied in any substantial way by laws for racial reconstruction. The failure of laws such as the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to secure little more than symbolic equality represents a further irony, summed up in the title of Freeman’s article, ‘Legitimizing Racial Discrimination in Antidiscrimination Laws’. Brown arguably serves as an originary case for critical legal and race scholars, not least because they experienced or witnessed its impact first hand, from its promising beginnings, as, in Bell’s terms, ‘the Holy Grail of racial justice’ that ‘energized the law, encouraged most black people, enraged a great many white people’ (Bell 2004: 3–4), to its transformation into policies that legitimated the dominant racial hierarchy. Preoccupied with how this transformation was able to occur, Freeman accounts for it in terms of ‘the perpetrator perspective’ (Freeman 1995: 29), whereas Bell analyses it according to ‘the interest-convergence theory’ (Bell 2004: 4). Although different, each of these explanations offers a critique of liberal discourses on race in America, specifically the determination to see ‘racial discrimination not as conditions but as actions . . . inflicted on the victim by the perpetrator’, the remedy to which is the neutralisation of the perpetrator’s inappropriate actions, rather than the victim’s inappropriate conditions (Freeman 1995: 29), unless, of course, as Bell argues, these conditions, most notably slavery and segregation threaten national interests. According to him, ‘black rights are recognized and protected when and only so long as policymakers perceive that such advances will further [dominant white] interests that are their primary concern’ (Bell 2004: 49). For some, Bell’s rereading of Brown constitutes sacrilege, perhaps making it the first in a series of CRT’s so-called

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evil fruits, but interest-convergence theory does have its basis in American history and culture. ‘One need not look far’, insists Mary Dudziak, ‘to find vintage ’50s Cold War ideology in primary historical documents relating to Brown. For example, the amicus brief filed in Brown by the U.S. Justice Department argued that desegregation was in the national interest in part due to foreign policy concerns’ (Dudziak 2013: 137). Moreover, one need not look far to find further support for critical analyses of liberal discourses on race by black Americans who have provided a wealth of commentary, or counterstories on the limits of American liberalism under various racial formations, from slavery and segregation, as evidenced in W. E. B. DuBois’s question, ‘What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? . . . To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, unholy licence’ (DuBois 1998: 14), and Malcolm X’s question, ‘What do you call a black man with a PhD? And . . . the answer is “nigger” ’ (Dalton 1995: 80), through to a postracial colour-blind epoch in which certain laws, for example, California’s Proposition 209 (1996) and Michigan’s Proposal 2 (2006) serve to undermine affirmative action. These laws ‘prohibit their state governments from discriminating or granting “preferential treatment . . . on the basis of race” ’, even as a way to alleviate historic racism (Carbado and Harris 2013: 25). These examples help to show that African Americans were really already critical, and that the influences of CRT exceed European critical theories and Critical Legal Studies. For Delgado and others, moreover, these theories seem too closely aligned to ‘imperial scholarship’ (Delgado 2013b: 53), a Eurocentric or white tradition that utilises various silencing mechanisms, most commonly, as Harlon L. Dalton notes, speaking for and about blacks to ensure ‘our absence’ when ‘we do have a hell of a lot to offer’ that ‘we learned from life as well as from books’ (Dalton 1995: 80–1).

Learning from Life and Books, or the Importance of Experience and Narrative CRT breaks with CLS mainly on the issues of experience and by extension rights, with, for example, Anthony Cook, Crenshaw, Dalton and Matsuda arguing that CLS is too abstract and too dismissive of liberalism. Instead, CRT seeks to offer more thorough analyses of liberalism and postmodernism based on black and other non-white experiences, or, respectively, ‘engaging in [liberal] rights discourse . . . as an act of self-defence’ (Crenshaw 1995a: 117) and ‘more contextual experiential deconstruction’ (Cook 1995: 101). In this way, CRT seeks to resolve racial discrimination in ways palpable, even and especially to those located at the very bottom of American society. As Delgado and Stefancic put it, ‘If laws do not relieve the distress of the poorest group – or, worse, if they compound it, we should reject them’, or, at the very least, treat them with suspicion (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 27).

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Bell did precisely this when he saw that Brown ‘no longer meshed’ with the requirements of black schoolchildren (2004: 4), as do judges who sentence young black men to shorter and, for them, fairer prison sentences in order to circumvent police racial profiling. Another form of circumvention also occurs among black jurors via jury nullification, which privileges, as Paul Butler explains, justice and conscience over the law, and recognises the importance of developing ‘noncriminal ways of addressing antisocial [non-violent] conduct’ such as theft, perjury and drugs offences that are often ‘a predictable response to oppression’ (Butler 2013a: 283). Butler also proposes ‘a hip-hop theory of punishment’ delivered by black communities that promotes respect, sorely lacking in the conventional system of criminal justice involving mass incarceration (Butler 2013b: 533). These examples represent CRT’s ‘call to context’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2013: 3) and they demonstrate the importance of, in Matsuda’s words, ‘looking to the bottom’, to ‘the actual experience, history, culture, and intellectual tradition of people of color in America’ as the basis for new and valuable sources of knowledge, power and politics (Matsuda 1995: 63). Importantly, however, looking to the bottom also entails representing it, and this process risks ‘cooptation’ and ‘utopianism’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: 61), or potentially repeating the mistakes of imperial scholarship. CRT thus devises certain strategies for limiting appropriation, all of which involve self-critique and the reformulation of categories underlying philosophical and political liberalisms. A good many of these strategies criticise ’the implied objective, neutral, and impersonal voice of mainstream scholarship’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: 314), and in so doing render the scholar something of a Gramscian ’organic intellectual’ (Matsuda 1995: 63; Cook 1995: 90) grounded in specifically black and other non-white traditions and experiences that are understood in their diversity. Fundamental to the articulation of this diversity is storytelling and counterstorytelling, or the narrative turn. Autobiography, biography, chronicle, parable, satire and other overtly rhetorical forms resist a single meaning or interpretation, thereby reducing the risk of total co-optation, and they also highlight the ways in which dominant views of race are narrativised. More precisely, as Delgado explains in ‘Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative’, stories and storytelling have become increasingly important to CRT because they are a means by which social reality is constructed. In short, stories have ‘reality-creating potential’, some, the dominant stories of the ‘in-group’, more so than others because they produce and reproduce ‘the prevailing mindset by means of which members of the dominant group justify the world as it is, that is, with whites on top and browns and blacks at the bottom’ (Delgado 2013c: 71–2). Delgado’s emphasis on mindset, or ‘thinking, mental categorization, attitude, and discourse’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 21) as a powerful means of racial discrimination ties him to the idealist school of CRT, which gained prominence over the realist school that dominated early CRT and emphasised the material and economic bases for

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racial discrimination. The differences between these two schools notwithstanding, Delgado and other critical race scholars have negotiated between them and established a middle ground that recognises ‘words . . . wound’, with racial/racist insults having psychological, sociological and political effects (Delgado 2013a: 179). While in-group words and stories wound, out-group counterstories can function in creative and destructive ways: they can ‘build consensus, a common culture of shared understandings, and a deeper, more vital ethics’, which also draw on a long history of black and other non-white storytelling traditions in order to render visible and ultimately destroy the taken-for-granted authority of the dominant mindset (Delgado 2013c: 72). Storytelling thus serves to highlight the narrative and ideological underpinnings of dominant racial hierarchies that once destabilised help to reveal how experiences and events generate multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings, as well as offering insights into alternative and typically silenced or invisible realities. The narrative turn is sometimes understood as CRT’s second ‘evil fruit’, as evidenced in, for example, the O. J. Simpson double-murder trial (1994), specifically Johnnie L. Cochran’s defence strategy of legal storytelling in which, as Rosen reads it, black jury members were instructed to ignore the evidence and instead respond to ‘group solidarity and racial essentialism’ in order to ‘ “send a message” to the racist police that letting a murderer go free was an appropriate payback for a legacy of state-sponsored oppression’ (Rosen 2000: 587–8). This legacy was clearly evidenced in the Rodney King trial in 1992, which saw his attackers acquitted despite video evidence against them. This outcome made clear to blacks that ‘even when they played by the rules, they could expect nothing in return – when the evidence was clear as day, it could be explained away’ (Dyson 2004: 62). While this explaining away of evidence did generate outrage, for example, the LA riots, it was not generally considered to distort the facts. By way of contrast, Cochran’s distortion of Simpson as a ‘White Man’s Negro’ into ‘blackness-as-oppression’ (Dyson 2004: 51–2) received widespread criticism. In Rosen’s view, ‘Cochran refused to let facts get in the way of his fiction’ (Rosen 2000: 586). Simpson’s racial ambiguity worked to his legal but perhaps not personal benefit, although, as Dyson contends, it was key prosecution witness police detective Mark Fuhrman’s racism and incompetence that ultimately set him free. These race trials help to show that ‘stories can . . . deceive’, which is why CRT scholars Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry insist that legal ‘storytelling must include efforts to ensure the truthfulness and typicality of the story’ (Farber and Sherry 2013: 723).

CRT’s Counterstory: Everyday Racism, White Privilege and Colour-Blindness A persistent theme in CRT is that ‘racism is normal, not aberrant, in American society’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2013; 2), whether in macro or micro forms

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such as structural racism, right down to everyday encounters in ‘subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are “put downs” of blacks by offenders’ (C. Pierce, quoted in Davis 2013: 190). CRT has contributed to changes in the ways racism(s) is understood, from individualised actions, or ‘a matter of prejudiced attitudes or bigotry on the one hand, and discriminatory practices on the other’, to an understanding of racial inequality as a condition, or, in Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s words, ‘a structural feature of U.S. society, the product of centuries of systematic exclusion, exploitation, and disregard of racially defined minorities’ (Omi and Winant 1994: 69). Challenging the liberal ideal of historical and political progress, structural racism renders the US a white supremacist state, despite some civil rights advances and re-election of a black president. While early CRT texts used ‘white supremacy’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xiii), it is arguably more common to see ‘white privilege’, ‘normative whiteness’ (Williams 1998: 4) or ‘white-over-color ascendancy’ (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 7) in more recent CRT texts. Although white supremacy is only too noticeable, typically because of its association with the Ku Klux Klan or explicitly fascist groups, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, neo-fascist groups concerned about white victimisation and white rights such as the National Association for the Advancement of White People, white privilege in contrast seems almost unnoticeable, if not invisible – at least to dominant whites who tend to understand racism in terms of colour-consciousness and a problem for blacks and other non-whites. For dominant whites, there is little understanding that they, too, are coloured or raced, and that their whiteness has a history, starting officially in 1790 when ‘Congress limited naturalization to “white persons” ’ and retained a racial requirement for citizenship until 1952 (Haney López 2013: 75–81). Such a requirement also suggests that racism is a white problem, albeit one that is most powerfully felt by blacks and other non-whites. While Critical White Studies, which emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s, is often considered responsible for this new emphasis on whiteness, there is no shortage of examples of blacks writing about whites in critical ways well before this date. In 1935 DuBois discussed white privilege in public institutions, even as it applies to working-class whites: ‘It must be remembered’, insists DuBois, ‘that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white’ (DuBois 1998: 700). Also commenting on her public and psychological wages, albeit in 1988, Peggy McIntosh identifies fifty advantages she has as a white over non-whites, including ‘being told that people of her color made American heritage or civilization what it is; not needing to educate her children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily protection; and never being asked to speak for all people of her racial group’ (Wildman and Davis 2013: 797). In fact, McIntosh

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does not even need to be told that history, civilisation, the media, the retail and service industries, figurative language and imagery, and so on, are white since, as she says, ‘I will feel welcomed and “normal” in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social’ (McIntosh 1988). Whiteness is so normal that it does not even need to be named, or ‘marked in the indicative there! there!’, this ‘exnomination of whiteness’, as Williams phrases it, representing ‘the beginning of an imbalance from which so much, so much else flowed’ (Williams 1998: 5). These strategies of not noticing race and not naming whiteness demonstrate white privilege, as well as being fundamental to colour-blindness, as this ideology differently circulates in a range of conservative and liberal racial projects. For critical race scholars, colour-blindness is both impossible and undesirable, if not ‘perverse’, notwithstanding a few noteworthy moments in American history, namely, Justice John Harlan’s (1896) and Martin Luther King’s (1963) calls for equality regardless of race consistent with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 26). Such moments may be ‘well-chosen temporal slice[s]’, as Williams admits, but they do at the same time allow her to dream of a colour-blind future of racial equality, beyond idealist and universalist appropriations of colour-blindness – ‘I don’t think about color, therefore your problems don’t exist’ and ‘We are the world! We are the children!’ (Williams 1998: 11, 2–3, 6). Rather perversely, these appropriations are blind to the reality of race and racism in contemporary American society. More so than the 1960s and 1970s, a period of race-consciousness in the sense that race and racism were discussed out loud by racists, cultural nationalists and in Executive Orders 10925 (1961) and 11246 (1965) promoting affirmative action, the contemporary period is marked by the sense that ‘race is something about which we dare not speak in polite social company’ (Williams 1998: 15). While Williams compares race to a ‘public secret’ (Williams 1998: 9) that only those not yet educated into dominant racial etiquette dare to speak, Lawrence says it is a ‘forbidden conversation’ and alongside words like ‘segregation’, ‘racism, stigma, or white flight . . . rarely appears in public policy discussions or private conversations’ (Lawrence 2013: 49). Williams’s reference to polite society, reinforced by Lawrence’s assertion that ‘people of good will’ often feel offended by, or fearful of, such conversations (Lawrence 2013: 49), introduces a class element to silence about race and racism. Yet, not naming, not noticing and, in its latest formulation, ‘noticing but not considering race’ are for Neil Gotanda and other CRT scholars ‘self-contradictory because it is impossible not to think about a subject without having first thought about it at least a little’ (Gotanda 2013: 35–6). Gotanda goes on to add that colour-blind non-recognition and non-consideration of race and, by extension, racial subordination invariably reinforce white privilege against

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the assumption of moral and legal superiority of so-called (race-)neutrality as it occurs in everyday American life, through to education, employment and the law. Following this logic, colour-blindness is not anti-racist, as liberal whites believe, and neither is it opposed to colour-consciousness. The debate about affirmative action helps to highlight the similarities between these seemingly conflicting discourses, which share a commitment to racial diversity while simultaneously maintaining white privilege. On a literal level, ‘blindness’ and ‘consciousness’ or ‘sightedness’ are opposed, an opposition that the Right reinforces when it argues that race-conscious affirmative action is a form of reverse racism that is unconstitutional, un-American and contrary to the goals of the Civil Rights Movement in its unequal privileging of supposedly less qualified blacks and non-whites in jobs and education. For liberals and conservatives alike, Charles Murray among them, ‘race is not a morally admissible reason for treating one person differently from another. Period’ (Murray 1994: 223). Such (race-)thinking underpins efforts to eliminate affirmative action, most recently, Michigan’s Proposal 2 and California’s Proposition 209, whose advocates regard ‘affirmative action [a]s the quintessential example of a preference on the basis of race; the policy benefits blacks and Latinos and burdens whites and, in some formulations, Asian Americans’ (Carbado and Harris 2013: 25). Legal cases, for example, in education, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), Hopwood v. Texas (1996) and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), turn on this racial preferencing of blacks and Latinos and burdening of whites. In ‘The New Racial Preferences’, Devon Carbado and Harris conduct ‘a thought experiment’ with regard to Proposal 2 and Proposition 209, focused on whether or not colour-blindness can be properly put into practice in the education admissions process. An important part of this process is the personal statement, with Carbado and Harris asking, ‘what do antipreference mandates require with respect to personal statements?’ (Carbado and Harris 2013: 25). For their imaginary student, Maria Hernadez from East Los Angeles, these mandates require her to remove her name, her address and any direct references to her race from her personal statement, although with or without these racial signifiers, Carbado and Harris argue, race remains fundamental to the admissions process as either ‘an elephant in [the admission officer’s] mind’ or as a ‘default presumption . . . that the applicant is white’ (Carbado and Harris 2013: 26). While Maria can choose whether to remove racial signifiers from her personal statement, making her ‘racial identity essential or inessential, salient or insignificant’, possibly regardless of her own experiences that may help to make her statement intelligible to the admissions officer, Carbado and Harris point out that this choice does not exert the same pressures on a white applicant (Carbado and Harris 2013: 26). Although a ‘racially cleansed’ statement may make it unintelligible and unrecognisable, there is also a strong chance that adherence to colour-blindness may also be rewarded. For these

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reasons, Carbado and Harris conclude, ‘Proposition 209 and Proposal 2 neither eliminate race from admissions, nor make admissions processes racially neutral. Both initiatives produce a new racial preference that has gone largely unnoticed’ (Carbado and Harris 2013: 27). Colour-blind discourses, from the New Right’s use of supposedly raceneutral code words in the 1980s and 1990s, most notably, (black) ‘welfare queens’, (black) ‘career criminals’ and (Asian/Latino) ‘immigrants’ and neoconservative efforts at this time and after to endorse universalism and liberalism in the value accorded to ‘merit’ and ‘excellence’, through to the new racial preferences, serve to render affirmative action as either undeserved or unnecessary. Under the closely related liberal racial project, emphasis is also placed on securing racial advances socially and economically as part of ‘a transracial political agenda’ that recognises the interrelationship between class and race, albeit in hierarchical terms (Winant 2004: 63). This complicated set of responses to colour-conscious affirmative action that regard it as racist helps to explain the shift towards (race-)neutral policies, including, as of late, colour-blind affirmative action on moral and, perhaps more tellingly, on legal grounds, arguably consistent with Bell’s interest-convergence theory. In his discussions of affirmative action, Delgado argues that the neutralisation or at the very least the minimisation of race so that it informs only a small part of educational and employment selection processes is primarily for reasons of white self-interest and ‘social utility, not reparations or rights’ (Delgado 1991: 398). As such, ‘the beneficiaries of history’s largest affirmative action program’ can feel good about themselves. ‘Well’, says Delgado, ‘if you were a member of the majority group and invented something that cut down the competition, made you feel good and virtuous, made minorities grateful and humble’, as well as ‘guilty, undeserving, and stigmatized . . . you would feel pretty pleased with yourself’ (Delgado 2000a: 398). Similarly, for Bell, this form of affirmative action is ‘affirmative discrimination’ since it implies ‘noblesse oblige, not legal duty, and suggests the dispensation of charity rather than the granting of much-deserved relief’ (Bell 2004: 140). Thus understood, affirmative discrimination reeks of paternalism, and it leaves black and other non-white ‘beneficiaries’ feeling stigmatised, so much so that (appropriated) colour-conscious and colour-blind public policies can divert attention from the complicated ways race and power intersect in American society as a system of disadvantage and advantage that ‘no amount of hand-waving and obfuscation can eliminate’ (Gotanda 1991: 37). This long history of white affirmative action that most whites, both conservative and liberal, seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone renounce has led a number of radical race scholars to demand the abolition of whiteness. Following Roediger’s argument that ‘whiteness is not merely oppressive and false, it is nothing but oppressive and false. . . . It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom

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one can hold back’ (Roediger 1994: 13), Noel Ignatiev and fellow ‘race traitors’ insist, ‘treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity’ (‘What We Believe’). White abolitionism seeks to abolish whiteness as a socio-economic position, not white people per se, only those whites who think and act white by not recognising, opposing and disrupting white privilege as it operates in both macro and micro forms in institutions and in everyday encounters. Obviously, white abolitionism has its critics, mainly whites, but the black scholar Winant also doubts whether whiteness can be abolished because of its relational and dynamic relationship to blackness. At the same time, he does recognise that Critical White Studies and white abolitionism have helped to ensure that whites and whiteness ‘can no longer be exempted from the comprehensive racialization process that is the hallmark of U.S. history and social structure’ (Winant 2004: 65).

Counterstories to CRT’s Counterstory: Beyond the Black/White Binary, Intersectionality and Interconnectivity In its mainstreaming, CRT is increasingly marked by interdisciplinarity, with race scholars using a CRT perspective to understand how race matters beyond the law, for example, in education, the social sciences, and, more recently, the humanities. Gloria Ladson-Billings’s question, ‘Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?’ (Ladson-Billings 1998: 7) can arguably be extended to other disciplines such as Cultural Studies. In their contributions to the 2013 edition of Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, andré douglas pond cummings and Butler both discuss hip hop. Noting ‘a furious kinship’ between CRT and hip hop, specifically in the work of Bell and Public Enemy, and Crenshaw and Queen Latifah, cummings details how each movement privileges narrative and shares ‘a deep desire to give voice to a discontent brewed by silence [or colour-blindness], and a dedication to the continuing struggle for race equality in the United States’ (cummings 2013: 107). Although identified by Public Enemy’s Chuck D as the ‘black CNN’ (quoted by cummings 2010: 115 and Butler 2013b: 533), a phrase that highlights hip hop’s pedagogical function, hip hop, like CRT, repeatedly meets with criticism, which at its most vitriolic is held responsible for the ‘nastiness’ it represents. Rather than understanding CRT and hip hop in terms of ‘nasty racialis[ms]’ (Adams 2012), cummings and Butler regard them as counterstories, sometimes, as with Crenshaw and Queen Latifah, feminist counterstories to a maledominated counterstory: ‘Who said the ladies couldn’t make it?, you must be blind / If you don’t believe, well here, listen to this’ (Queen Latifah’s ‘Ladies First’, quoted by cummings 2010: 117). Representations of misogyny, typically in gangsta rap, with its references to ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’, are a main point of focus in ‘the hip hop generation’s war of the sexes’, although, as Bakari Kitwana notes, this war is increasingly recognised as a product of white racism,

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economic deprivation and the dehumanising experiences of mass incarceration of young black men (Kitwana 2002: 90). In addition to representing these conditions, at their most dismal in the criminal justice system, Butler argues that hip hop may also offer a more effective theory of punishment based on community justice and respect, as opposed to ‘sleeping on the floor in cages . . . / The system ain’t reformatory, it’s only purgatory’ (Immortal Technique, quoted by Butler 2013b: 543). CRT’s mainstreaming has also influenced the development of subgroups such as Critical Whiteness Studies, LatCrit, AsianCrit and, more recently, BritCrit that focus on racialisation, predominantly in Western multicultural societies. Delgado and Stefancic use the phrase ‘differential racialization’ to refer to ‘the ways the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market’ or foreign policy (Delgado and Stefancic 2012: 9). For example, LatCrit scholar George A. Martinez observes these differences with regard to the racialisation of Mexican Americans, who at different times in their history have been defined as ‘cowhites when this suited the dominant group – and non-white when necessary to protect Anglo privilege and supremacy’ (Martinez 2013: 491). Most recently, the racialisation of Arab Americans has seen them move ‘between zones of whiteness, Otherness, and color’ (Shryock 2008: 111–12), typically to their disadvantage with regard to civil rights and racial profiling, especially (but not exclusively) since the 9/11 terrorist attacks: ‘The logic of post-September 11 profiling turns on equating being a Muslim (or Arab or Middle Eastern [or South Asian]) with being a terrorist’ (Ahmad 2013: 496). Moreover, this event has further undermined legal efforts to challenge racial profiling, which following 9/11 was regarded as justifiable in and beyond the popular imagination for reasons of national security. As Muneer I. Ahmad notes, ‘Whereas 80 percent of Americans opposed racial profiling before September 11, after the attacks almost the same percentage favoured it for those assumed to be Arab or Muslim’ (Ahmad 2013: 494). Differential racialisation represents an attempt to move beyond the dominant black/white racial paradigm in a multicultural American society. In his analysis of this paradigm, LatCrit scholar Juan F. Perea discusses the role of leading textbooks on race, specifically Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992) and Cornel West’s Race Matters (1993) in perpetuating the black/white binary in ahistorical and politically indifferent ways. According to Perea, this paradigm suggests that the US has ‘only a single race problem’ between whites and blacks, ‘rather than a more complex set of racisms’ as experienced by other non-white, nonblack Americans, who seem to function for Hacker, West and other leading writers on race as little more than ‘unexplained analogies to Blacks’ (Perea 2013: 463–4). While there are similarities between non-white experiences of racism, as evidenced in, for example, Jim Crow signs such as ‘NO DOGS

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and CHINESE ALLOWED’ or ‘NO DOGS, NEGROES, MEXICANS’, this analogous relationship is reductive. Not only does it risk hierarchising racisms, even to the point that Latino/a, Asian American, Arab Americans and American Indians are not considered ‘subject to real racism’, but it also marginalises the fact ‘racism is much more systemic and pervasive than is usually admitted’ (Perea 2013: 464). For these reasons, Perea argues that the dominant black/white paradigm disrupts all non-white efforts for racial justice, and does little to challenge non-white, non-black stereotyping and silence. ‘It is time’, he says, ‘to ask hard questions of our leading writers on race’, and ‘to demand better answers to these questions about inclusion, exclusion, and racial presence’ consistent with historical and demographic facts (Perea 2013: 464). While differential racialisation responds to the racial complexity of American society, the CRT concept of intersectionality explores, in Williams’s words, ‘the hybridising of racial stereotypes with the fundamentalisms of gender, class, ethnicity, religion’, alongside globalised labour and environmental issues (Williams 1998: 12). Taking issue with binary thinking in ways similar to nonblack non-white CRT scholars, feminists and, more recently, queer theorists have also complicated CRT’s counterstory with their own counterstories arguably as a way of challenging the hierarchical arrangement of competing social oppressions that forces ‘divided loyalties’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: 354), ultimately to the advantage of the dominant whites. While it is possible to see these counterstories to CRT’s counterstory as new developments, in the sense that the US is understood as more multicultural today relative to its formation in the 1960s and 1970s in mainstream and identity politics discourses, it is also the case that the intersectionality, specifically the intersection of race and gender was already really vital to early CRT scholarship. The emergence of CLS and CRT cannot be separated from feminist legal theory, specifically ‘fem-crit’ (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxiii) and the insights of, for example, Crenshaw in ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’. Emphasising the importance of understanding intraracial differences that are typically overlooked in traditional identity politics, Crenshaw writes that when these political discourses ‘expound identity as “woman” or “person of color” as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling’ (Crenshaw 1995b: 357). Other fem-crits such as Williams, Taunya Lovell Banks, Dorothy Roberts and Regina Austin, also describe the experience of being asked to fit into an either/or paradigm: ‘I am categorized as being part of a black world, or a white world, or a female world, or a world of poverty and cultural deprivation’ (Lovell Banks 1995: 331). In his analysis of intersectionality, Delgado notes in one of his imaginary dialogues with his student Rodrigo that this pressure to conform to one paradigm, and, moreover, to ‘define who is “divisive” ’ reveals a power dynamic between addresser and

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addressee in favour of the former (Delgado 2000b: 255). Fem-crits challenge this dynamic by highlighting how ‘racism and sexism are interlocking, mutually reinforcing components of a system of dominance rooted in [white] patriarchy’ (Caldwell 2013: 364). Most at risk from this system are black female rape and drug victims who are treated as ‘less believable or less important’ and less human than their white female peers (Crenshaw 1995b: 369; Roberts 1995: 405). Beyond fem-crit analyses of stereotypes of black female sexuality are those addressing the intersection of sexuality and race from a queer CRT perspective. In ‘Out Yet Unseen: A Racial Critique of Gay and Lesbian Legal Theory and Political Discourse’, Darren Lenard Hutchinson focuses on the brutal murder in 1990 of Julio Rivera by three white supremacists, one of whom later admitted he killed this working-class Latino because he was gay. Yet Rivera’s sexuality and how it intersected with issues of race and class were, as Hutchinson explains, ‘largely omitted from political discourse’, with the police and the media failing to recognise Rivera as ‘gay and the victim of antigay violence’ (Hutchinson 2000: 326–7). Utilising race and class stereotypes of Latin machismo and violence, the police and the media reinforced heterosexism and homophobia, even making Rivera ‘responsible for his own murder’ (Hutchinson 2000: 328). According to Hutchinson, the determination by the police and media, on the one hand, and gay and lesbian legal theorists, on the other, to privilege either race/class or sexuality ultimately ‘denies the benefits of freedom – life – to persons who suffer multiple forms of oppression’ (Hutchinson 2000: 332). Queer theorist Francisco Valdes uses the concept of ‘queer interconnectivity’ (Valdes 2000: 339) as a means to address the ways in which heterosexism, homophobia, racism and classism work together. These fem-crits and queer-crits both emphasise that intersectionality and interconnectivity are not intended to divide and hierarchise groups but rather to build coalitions. For them, intersectionality and interconnectivity ‘provide a basis for reconceptualizing race as a coalition between men and women’ (Crenshaw 1995b: 377) in their diversity, including those most at risk from personal and public acts of violence because of their class, gender, sexuality, religion and race. For Valdes and these CRT scholars, ‘inclusionary perspectives and projects are not only necessary, but infinitely more enlightening and empowering than their opposites. This is because particularity provides specific but only partial insight’ of intersecting, interconnecting and mutually reinforcing structures of domination and subordination that are ultimately detrimental to ‘all of us’ (Valdes 2000: 337). Whether they emerge in relation to legal cases such as Brown, Bakke and Grutter, trials involving black celebrities (Simpson, Mike Tyson, Tupac Shakur) and black teenagers, for example, Trayvon Martin, Obama’s substitute self and son, futuristic fantasies of a postracial epoch brought about by

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deportation (Bell 2013; Delagado 2013d), or hip hop culture, CRT counterstories, in all their diversity, serve both pedagogical and political functions inside the legal academy and beyond. CRT counterstories equip people with a critical understanding of the complicated ways power structures operate in American society, enough to usher in, so CRT scholars hope, a third Reconstruction, if not a properly colour-blind future.

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INTRODUCTION: GENDER

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areth Longstaff deals with the rapidly developing and increasingly important field of queer theory in Chapter 14, noting how it has radically problematised accepted notions of gender and sexual identity. Queer theory, he argues, has been a source of striking new readings of both media and cultural texts that continue to inspire commentators, and its influence can be felt right across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. A consciously interdisciplinary project, queer theory has drawn extensively on deconstruction and poststructuralist thought, as well as LGBT and second wave feminism. As Longstaff makes clear, queer theory represents a concerted challenge to many of the cultural certainties on which our society is based, and goes on finding new ways of doing so. In Chapter 15, Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill investigate the growing interest in Masculinity Studies, a field that also has notable interdisciplinary implications. They consider the various critiques that have been constructed of the concept of hegemonic masculinity, and how these have impacted on areas such as queer and trans theory in recent years. Given the inequalities that still exist, and are in some senses becoming even more pronounced, between men and women in the wake of recent socio-political crises, they conclude that there is a greater urgency than ever to understand what lies behind men’s practices.

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14 QUEER THEORY Gareth Longstaff

Introduction

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he origins of queer theory can only be grasped if the paradoxes which precariously outline its meaning, purpose and use in the field of critical theory are examined. In a variety of cultural and critical settings queer theory has come to be associated with how queer bodies and queer identities are expressed as well as attending to how and why gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, cross-dressing, inter-sexual and pan-sexual subjects articulate their ‘queerness’ as queer. In this way gendered bodies and sexual identities which inform and invert how bodily identity is articulated have also become crucial to queer theorisation and the means by which queer can also be outlined as a way of thinking or producing critical responses to several paradigms of critical theory. Additionally, we may also suggest that the origins and foundations of queer theory can be seen in deconstruction and poststructuralist theory, the radical and liberationist LGBT politics from the 1960s onwards, branches of second wave feminism, gay male studies, and more complexly in aspects of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis. As well as this and since its inception from the late 1980s and into the early 1990s it is apparent that queer theory may be most productively understood as a concept that has been formed less in relation to an ontological identity or cogent epistemology and more in terms of an indeterminate position or identification. Key texts which summarise and in some respects canonise queer theory, such as Anne-Marie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction (1996) and Donald E. Hall’s Queer Theories (2003), have given rise to a critical trajectory of queer that has been employed as a methodology, a scholarly discipline and a way of thinking critically about gender, sexuality, the body and identity. As Jagose notes, it resists ‘that model of stability – which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effects – queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire’ (Jagose 1996: 3). These overlaps and inconsistencies which circulate in relation to identity are also the point of entry for critical theory which employs queer theory to read and reread media and cultural texts as queer.

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In light of this queer theory is a self-consciously difficult theoretical discipline to position and use because it ‘describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire’ (Jagose 1996: 3). In so doing it deliberately addresses this disjointedness as both a theoretical and methodological tool of intervention and interrogation to understand its own value and purpose. It is also a discipline that examines the prevailing intersections that occur between desire and language, to (re)situate marginalised identities allied to sexual and gendered modes of cultural or political resistance based on hegemonic and heterosexual modes of surveillance and regulation. This chapter will examine how those knowingly incoherent discourses of desire and language relate to the production, reception and future of queer theory as intentionally unstable, multiple and volatile. In this way queer theory is in itself linked to desire as an unpredictable and impulsive force; one which, like queer theory, seems to be imbued with the intersections of liminal, schismatic and dissident longing. In the last half century we have also seen that queer as a critical and theoretical paradigm is almost akin to desire in that it is ‘something in language but not [in] itself linguistic’ (Dean 2000: 203). In this vein queer is a trope and paradigm in language that is riven by the paradoxes of that language. It is also something that can and cannot be spoken of, can and cannot be seen, and a lot like desire, queer theory is a critical discourse that is always open to unpredictable means of expression, often tethered to impulsive, precarious and impermeable practices. It may be that queer is a way of thinking rather than a way of acting. As we will also see, once it is subject to modes of queer embodiment and the politics of a distinctly queer act then its power to subvert and undermine hegemonic modes of domination and normalisation are somehow extinguished. The chronological qualification of coherent dates, events and representational images which act as dividing lines has determined a precarious ‘history of queer’ through aspects of heterosexual definition and containment. Since the late 1960s projects associated with Western gay male liberation have constructed and examined homosexual subcultures in an attempt to displace the position of heterosexual masculinity as an oppressive regulator and subjugator of identity. This has not been done via one direct and sweeping narrative but through a range of subversive and assimilatory processes that have resulted in homo/heterosexual culture and desire operating through ambiguity and doubt. It is the aim of this chapter to ask how these epistemological discourses established in the mid- to late nineteenth century have been used in the formation of homosexual identity as resolute, and why work in the late twentieth century in the fields of feminist and gay studies and then queer theory concerned with identity, representation and subjectivity render it irresolute. There is a now well-established field of enquiry concerned with chronological and canonical histories of non-heterosexual desire in Western cultures

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of capitalism, identity politics and self-defined visibility – three fields which seem to inform and inflect queer theory. As well as this, the ambiguities which are often positioned as binaries between the historical markers of gender (as ‘femininity’/‘masculinity’), sexuality (‘heterosexuality’/‘homosexuality’) and identity (as ‘gay’/’straight’) are pulled apart by ‘queer’ and its power to facilitate dialogues concerned with the gaps between how epistemological discourse has formed a powerful illusion of ontological specificity. This in turn distils and inhibits queerness through a politics of visibility so that the (in)visibilised, pathologised and criminalised category of homosexuality as perverse, ‘unspeakable’ and closeted set out in the nineteenth century and sustained until the late 1960s is primarily allied to socially specific and gay-male oriented definitions of selfhood, pride and sensibility before, during and after the period problematically referred to as Stonewall. The term ‘queer theory’ is thought to derive from the feminist and psychoanalytic scholar Teresa de Lauretis. Although she would later refute this claim as something of a queer urban myth there are several historical accounts of queer theory that claim the term was first used by her during a conference on lesbian and gay sexualities held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in February 1990. A more reliable foundation to the term and the academic discourse itself and what it has come to encompass, can be seen in the year following this conference in a special edition of the journal differences: A journal of feminist cultural studies entitled ‘Queer Theory’ in which de Lauretis stated that: the terms lesbian and gay designate distinct kinds of life-styles, sexualities, sexual practices, communities, issues, publications, and discourses; on the other hand the phrase gay and lesbian or, more and more frequently, lesbian and gay (ladies first), has become standard currency [. . .] In contrast to this ‘Queer Theory’ was arrived at in the effort to avoid all of these fine distinctions in our discursive protocols, not to adhere to any one of the given terms, not to assume their ideological liabilities but instead to both transgress and transcend them – or at the very least to problematize them. (de Lauretis 1991: v) As well as this, queer theory addresses how and why socially constructed identities which define our ideas about sexuality do so. It also interrogates and questions how notions of homosexuality (or indeed any sexual identity outside of a heterosexual model) have historically been defined – and of course, in doing so, looks at how heterosexuality has been differentiated from its homosexual ‘other’ and/or counterpart. The focus of queer theory is often on issues which examine how sexuality is framed in culture and the powerful ideological implications this has on individuals. It also asks how identities which are formed through epistemological regimes of heterosexual knowledge and oppression are also those identities that produce the power to queer and

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to query sexual norms. In this way, both as a politically informed and theoretically daring technique, queer theory was also formed as a radical response to heterosexual forms of social regulation and heterosexist orthodoxy in strands of academic output.

Situating a Queer Past . . . Accounting for this sort of uneven and precarious setting, it is clear that both the intellectual and political development of queer theory still proves challenging because it has been formed through divergent threads of critical thought and ambiguous theoretical intersections rather than historically cogent or classifiable legacies. As Donald E. Hall observes in Queer Theories, ‘the concept of “a” queer history is [. . .] a problematic one’ and like the concept of ‘history’ itself is subject to ‘an artificial construct, one that depends upon numerous acts of interpretation, exclusion, and information shaping that reflect inevitably and indelibly the beliefs of the historian or critic’ (Hall 2003: 21). This view of history and historiography as a cultural and textual construction is embedded in the beginnings of queer theory and its primary allegiance to theories of deconstruction and poststructuralism. Adam Isiah Green uses the work of Derrida and Foucault to locate queer theory’s relationship to sociology, and does so by recognising that ‘queer theory has a very specific deconstructionist raison d’être’ which marks a departure from sociological thinking (and to an extent the work of Michel Foucault examined in this section), and ‘moves queer theory away from the analysis of self and subject position [. . .] and toward a conception of the self radically disarticulated from the social’ (Green 2007: 27). Here it is useful to remark that queer might be more productively positioned as a symbolic identification as opposed to a bodily identity. We see this in Leo Bersani’s Homos and his approach to ‘homo-ness’ in which he suggests a ‘redefinition of [queer] sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself’ (Bersani 1995: 7). In his example Bersani suggests that by pulling away from queer identity sexually marginalised subjects will begin to cultivate a form of what he terms ’homoness [that] offers an anti-identitarian identity’ (Bersani 1995: 101) in which identity is refuted, displaced and dissolved in favour of something non-ontological and epistemologically precarious where only a series of identifications remain. This conceptual notion of ‘homo-ness’ uses aspects of psychoanalysis to sophisticate the broader nature of queerness to indicate that sexuality and desire are infused with ‘an impersonal sameness ontologically incompatible with analysable egos’ (Bersani 1995: 101), which in this instance intentionally energises and eradicates the possibility of gay male personality, identity and self-hood. To grasp something of this turn towards queer identification rather than queer identity it may be useful to explore how both deconstructionist and poststructural trajectories inform and precede queer theoretical positions

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as ones that are ensnared and understood through language, power and discourse. In relation to the emergence of queer theory we see that deconstruction alerts queer theorisation to the error of an identity, a discourse or a text, and uses this as a way to interrogate, unravel and undo it. Deconstruction is predominantly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and is concerned with the simultaneous reinforcement and dissolution of binary opposition as both ‘the condition and the effect of all interpretation’ (Namaste 1994: 223). Deconstruction is central to queer theory because it is concerned with ‘the illustration of the implicit underpinnings of a particular binary opposition’ which are reliant upon ‘the play between presence and absence’ as ‘the condition for interpretation, insofar as each term depends upon the other for its meaning’ (Namaste 1994: 223). Theories of deconstruction examine how binary oppositions in language and representation are dependent and reciprocal rather than oppositional and conflictual. This informs the strategies that queer theorists such as Bersani picked up upon in attempts to undermine the claim that meaning is established in pure opposition to something or someone. In this way Derridean deconstruction is intrinsic to queer theory because it goes some way towards exposing and examining how ‘that which appears to be outside a given system is always already fully inside of it’ (Namaste 1994: 222). Namaste suggests that the Derridean concept of ‘supplementarity’ also forms a queer framework or even bedrock as it is allied to ‘the effect of interpretation because binary oppositions, such as that of speech and writing, are actualised and reinforced in every act of meaning-making’ (Namaste 1994: 223). In this way the intersections of queer identity, subjectivity, language and desire are simultaneously trapped inside a binary, yet yield the potential to break free. The stronghold of a binary can be transgressed but that is only possible because it ensnares us through the transgression ‘we reinscribe [at] its very basis’ (Namaste 1994: 223). This emphasises and ‘refers to ways of thinking about how meanings are established’ (Namaste 1994: 222) and how in this way queer meaning as supplementarity is organised and distributed through the production and exchange of presence and absence, or in Derrida’s own words, ‘the play or presence and absence, the opening of this play that no metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend’ (Derrida 1976, in Namaste 1994: 222). Through deconstruction and its relation to sexual identity we begin to see that homosexuality and heterosexuality are integral and dependent upon one another in queer theoretical interventions. In Sexual Dissidence (1991) Jonathan Dollimore observes that there may be little opportunity for an effective oppositional form of transgressive queer resistance as the outsider (the queer subject) is already integral to dominant power rather than in direct conflict with it. From this sort of assertion and also from the fields of deconstruction and poststructuralism there emerges within queer theory a complex

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interplay of power and resistance in which queer identity and criticality is both reinforced and undermined. If, as Dollimore also recognises, that by moving back and forth from the margins to the centre, the queer subject may also become ‘a challenging presence via containment’ (Dollimore 1991: 224), then queer theory vis-à-vis deconstruction ascertains that queerness is an equally necessary appropriation and negation of those dominant notions of sexual identity and human nature, by which it has been initially excluded and defined. An example of this can be seen in how camp and effeminate homosexual identities are marked out as certain ‘types’ through processes of definitional construction in something like soap opera or reality TV media. Yet in turn these ‘types’ are simultaneously negated or eradicated of their campiness or effeminacy if they are aligned to gay male sexual desire in discourses like pornographic media. In other words, while gay men have the capacity to subvert the discursive terms of definition allied to them as socio-sexual subjects they often reconstruct the tropes responsible for this categorisation and subordination by valorising them as desirable. A further instance of how this is represented can be seen in the ambiguous and sexually explicit semiotics of gay male porn. Much of it utilises spaces such as the prison, the army and the gym changing room to invoke discourses of gay male fantasy which rely upon hypermale heterosexual identity. This could also be seen in the contemporary practice of ‘selfies’ in which gay men are choosing to self-objectify and selfrepresent themselves as ‘straight-acting’. If we take this further and use queer theoretical paradigms to unpack these claims then we could suggest that campness, effeminacy and its ambivalent alignment to gay male desire is rooted in how and why dominant cultural discourses towards the end of the nineteenth century converge around the fundamental binaries of male and female. These modes equated masculinity and femininity within a gendered matrix whereby masculinity and femininity were both subject to and subjectivised by gender. As Judith Butler observes, this polarisation ‘does not do away with the subject’ but rather forms questions around ‘the conditions of its operation and making’ (Butler 1993: 7) so that any confusion about gender and sexuality was subject to ideologically specific forms of regulation. As the Victorian era progressed, the politics of visibility associated with the tropes of masculinity and femininity began to intersect and contradict around discourses of the homosexual body and self as effeminate. This in turn meant that gendered and sexualised representations associated with effeminate masculinity and masculine effeminacy began to problematise their discursive meaning. As Alan Sinfield also observes, ‘although there was a tendency to perceive same-sex passion as effeminate, effeminacy still did not necessarily signal same-sex passion’ (Sinfield 1994: 45) and the boundaries between masculinised and feminised behaviour were deployed for a number of diverse and incongruent reasons, but primarily as a method to challenge

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normative assumptions of what heterosexuality was. If effeminacy is considered as an identity, the claims that it involves sexual desire and sexualised representation become problematic. Epistemological discourses which define elements of heterosexual masculinity as ‘hyper-male/macho’ and aspects of homosexuality as ‘camp effeminacy’ locate and dislocate the meanings and interpretations of these discourses via two oppositional yet overlapping areas of tension, which we may suggest draw us nearer to the purpose of queer theory as an attempt to articulate these complexities. Taking this kind of queer reading into account, Michel Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality Volume I: The Will to Knowledge allied to ‘the tactical polyvalence of discourses’ also allows queer theorists the means to conceptualise how strategies of resistance in which ‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged’ (Foucault 1998: 100–2, 101) also relied upon ‘the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (Foucault 1998: 101). Foucault uses the example of how ‘nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality’ facilitated the ‘formation of a “reverse” discourse’ (Foucault 1998: 101) and in so doing gave rise to many of the tropes and signifiers that are allied to queer identities and identifications. Just as the term ‘queer’ was once a marker of degradation and discrimination, through the reversal of its own cultural discursivity it systematically follows Foucault’s rubric of the sexually and socially marginal subject taking the elements responsible for their categorisation and strategically reinscribing deviance in terms of desire. Through their inherent instability and incoherence, discourses can effectively become a productively queer ‘hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy’ (Foucault 1998: 101). Foucault isolates the publication of Carl Westphal’s article of 1870 ‘On Contrary Sexual Sensations’ as the point from which homosexuality (as deviance) could be identified as a social and sexual category. Homosexuality was defined here in terms of its relation to the conventionally inferior category of femininity, and how the medical and legal categories of the sexual ‘deviant’ and discourses established after this point sought to position and thus control homosexuality as a constituent part of sexual aberration. This dialogue between normality and deviance is at the crux of the queer theoretical project and is also the kernel of Foucault’s intellectual project. It is also apposite to queer theory because it is alert to how and why hegemonic and ‘normal’ identities have been formed and sustained on the basis of identities which have been constructed and understood as ‘deviant’. Accounts of queer subjectivity which use queer theory to critique how non-heterosexual subjects are positioned and articulated in opposition to heterosexuality can be unearthed here. Like Derrida, Foucault’s accounts consider how the construction of homosexual and

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heterosexual identities attempt to account for yet also fall outside of the conventions of binary specificity. Investigating his trajectories of sexuality and also allowing for other conceptual paradigms he identified in this volume of work such as the ‘ “repressive hypothesis” ’ (Foucault 1998: 10–12) and the ‘perverse implantation’ (Foucault 1998: 36–51), it is also important to note that heterosexual discourse as imperceptibly ‘normal’ has constructed homosexuality as a visibly oppositional ‘deviant’ type in conflict with what it means to be both homosexual and heterosexual. Building on the example of camp and effeminate tendencies mentioned earlier we perhaps see this instilled in the gay/queer processes and metaphors of the ‘closet’ and ‘coming out’ which simultaneously situate marginalised sexual identities as resistant and defiant while subjugating them to expectations to ‘straight-act’, ‘pass’, or assimilate into heterosexual/ heterosexist culture. It is later and more specifically in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Between Men (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), that the emphasis towards the potential of dialogues which could (and now have) occurred between the binary of homo and hetero allow for the divisions and overlaps which inform queer theory and its position between the hypotheses of essentialist-constructionist debates to occur. A key feature in both debates is the examination of why the construction of same-sex desire is located beyond the terms which define what also lies at the precarious root of queer theory. Queer theorists such as Sedgwick critically engage with Foucault to examine how homosexuality has been formed as both an epistemology, and a discourse, which in turn overdetermines homosexual identity and in so doing a homosexual self. The epistemology of the homosexual has shored up its own ontology and kept it powerfully entrenched in heterosexual culture both as an identity but also a gap between the coexistent yet imprecise modes of identification, history and strategy we now comprehend as queer. Sedgwick observes that by stating when there is a birth of the modern homosexual, Foucault entangles homosexuality in a paradigm shift so that ‘knowledge itself constitutes that sexuality’ (Sedgwick 1990: 44). If, as Foucault states, through the process of discourse the ‘homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology [. . .] the homosexual was now a species’ (Sedgwick 1998: 43) Sedgwick uses his argument to situate how the ‘homosexual’ simultaneously naturalises and denaturalises the epistemological locus of identification so that heterosexual/ homosexual power is not distributed hierarchically but through reciprocal and contingent exchange. Here binary functions of knowledge and power traverse beyond the specificities of the sexual identity, so that rather than trying to locate and isolate the homosexual, and thus render the identity as ontologically coherent, discourses unravel the identity in question rather than tether it via modes of repression, transgression or subjection.

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The paradoxes that intensify these questions of homosexual epistemology as definitional, and its ontological concealment as revelatory, are instilled in Sedgwick’s discussion of the ‘closet’ which underscore ‘the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/hetero definition’ (Sedgwick 1990: 3), which also become a fundamental feature in queer theory. By examining how homosexuality has been constituted and identified through processes of negation and incitement of both homo and hetero sexuality, Sedgwick identifies how the ‘necessarily assignable [. . .] homo- or hetero-sexuality’ which is then mapped onto a ‘binarised identity [. . .] full of implication’ for that ‘sexual identity’ (Sedgwick 1990: 2) is at the essence of how queer theory and consequently queer identity is represented and read. These ‘binary identities’ which refer to essentialist and constructionist positions raise questions in relation to the representation of each sexual category and the ways in which queer theory attempts to interrogate how they are positioned in discourse and representation. The essentialist (ontological) debate, upholds that homo- and heterosexuality are universally constant, independent of cultural and historical contingency and thus an invariable feature of identity, and the constructionist (epistemological), suggests that hetero- and homosexuality are formed relationally through historically and culturally variable discourses bound to the politics of identity and identification (see Chambers in Barker and Clark 2002: 165–80). By emphasising historical ambivalence between the two positions of an epistemological knowledge and ontological ‘being’, Sedgwick returns Foucault’s reversal or inversion of discourse and the paradox that while ‘medical, legal, literary, [and] psychological’ (Sedgwick 1990: 2) factors linked to contours of knowledge and power attempt to polarise any non-heterosexual sexuality in an either/or binary, these discourses actually expedite a space where uncertainty and inconsistency between models of heterosexual normality / homosexual deviance, as well as visibility/invisibility, are negated and negotiated at the same time. It may be that this space is the location of queer theory. By questioning how essentialism and constructionism propagate an ambiguously foreclosed identity politics, which always remains queer (that is in between homosexual and heterosexual identity) yet also constitutes knowledge, we see that this ‘queer knowledge’ can never offer a fully transparent view of a transgressive or new realm of sexuality because it also attempts to constitute and commodify that sexuality as ‘queer’. In this way queer theory begins to catalyse an ambiguous relationship to both heterosexual and homosexual authority and dominance. More specifically, it may be that queer theory is crucial to the construction of straight and gay masculine tropes of dominance through the very fact that it is seen to be ‘at once culturally marginal and discursively central’ (Dollimore 1991: 222). In the wake of this, the signifier ‘queer’ is anchored in a politics of empowerment and recognition which always relies upon the homophobic nuances of degradation from both inside

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and outside of contemporary gay and straight culture as its trigger. If, as Foucault maintained, that discourse must not be conceived of as being ‘divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one’ (Foucault 1998: 100), there are also political and cultural uses and interpretations that queer theory has proliferated where we begin to see that the term itself may be insufficient to account for the diverse strategies of resistance previously grouped together as examples of the reversal or inversion of discourse. In addition to this, and since its inception, queer theory has also been allied to politicised modes of resistance, activism and interference that have imbued queer texts and modes of expression with a recognisable form of purpose and intent. Ironically, this is also linked to the mainstreaming and commodification of queer identity since its moment of inception in the 1990s.

The Queer Moment As early as 1972 and in his work Homosexual Desire the radical gay scholar and activist Guy Hocquenghem claimed that all desire (but more so gay/ queer desire) was moving towards a moment of dehumanisation. Hocquenghem suggested that gay culture (or more specifically the gay movement) ‘pushes capitalist decoding to the limit and corresponds to the dissolution of the human; from this point of view, the gay movement undertakes the necessary gay dehumanisation’ (Hocquenghem 1993: 145). What Hocquenghem seemed to be getting at here was how powerfully capitalism had affected politically dissident identities and desire so that even twenty years before it was termed ‘queer’, queer identity, politics and theory was ‘only divisible a posteriori, according to how we manipulate it’ (Hocquenghem 1993: 50). These dehumanising practices that Hocquenghem recognised are drilled down into the core of capitalism’s drive to commodify queer identity to the extent that it is ‘condensed into a cultural signifier’, so that ‘the [queer-self] as commodity remains securely fetishised’ (Hennessey 2000: 128) and is reduced through repetition and signification to an image of itself. In other words, when the queer body as a signifier is signified as a sign of queer personality, then queer identity itself is assembled as nothing more than a commodified trace of the politicised and subversive acts and strategies of resistance that came before. Before this shift the development of queer theory in the 1990s also stemmed from the impact of politically radical movements like ActUp and Outrage. As well as this in the key years of 1990–1 non-assimilationist movements such as Queer Nation were also formed through modes of queer separatism, extremism and activism. These radical groupings were in response to the violently right-wing discrimination implicit in the Thatcher/Reagan era and during the AIDS crisis. They were not only formed as ways to contest oppressive threats

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but were also platforms for resisting the mechanisms of heterosexist stability and institutionalisation as well as the problematic notions of how ‘queer liberation’ vs ‘queer equality’ related to queer politics. These movements instilled queer theory with a politically vigorous dimension that many argue has dissipated. For example, and particularly in light of the legalisation of civil partnerships and gay marriage, it could be claimed that the queer radicalism of the 1990s has been eroded away in support of queer assimilation. Yet because queer theory and these earlier political causes evolve from the AIDS crisis they also emphasise how theoretical interrogation through a renewed form of activism is the catalyst for social change during a particular cultural moment. For instance, texts such as Simon Watney’s Policing Desire (1987), Leo Bersani’s seminal essay ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987), and Douglas Crimp’s AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1987), all address the AIDS crisis through the rhetoric and experiences of gay men in the mid- to late 1980s by examining how and indeed why the gay male AIDS victim was positioned and controlled against a backdrop of homophobic settings that regulated and defined them as ‘perverse’. In his work Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994) Lee Edelman is concerned with how this sort of rhetoric of (homo) sexuality is configured in cultural and literary texts. This rhetoric is referring to an indeterminate series of psychic and social operations in relation to what has been represented and categorised as ‘gay’. Edelman works through a dense and complex range of theories and theorists to try and understand what the gay male body means and how it has come to perpetuate a false ontological identity. He is committed to interrogating the conditions that have constituted this, and by critiquing the social, ideological, linguistic and textual practices produced in relation to gay male sexuality he isolates the inherent anxiety at work in gay representation and its relation to the rhetorical structures of dominance which produce and control how sexuality is understood culturally. This way of unpacking a text could now be considered ‘queer’ inasmuch that this mode of querying recognises that there is always a double bind functioning so that homosexuality (or indeed any sexual identity) cannot be understood outside of the cultural and textual artefacts through which it has been produced. This then points towards the notion of gay identity operating on a paradoxical plane whereby it must always be readable and visible to the dominant heterosexual order, yet this readability is in part produced by the non-heterosexual subject who wants to be read. In this way any queer or non-heterosexual sexuality is identified by Edelman as that which must be ‘ignored, repressed, or violently disavowed in order to represent representation itself as natural and unmediated’ (Edelman 1994: xvi). In other words the legibility and legitimacy of heterosexuality is determined by queer sexualities, and these queers are both enabled and subjugated by a continuous system of representation so that heterosexual authenticity can maintain dominance.

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Queer work such as Edelman’s may also belong to the discipline of ‘gay male studies’ which along with second wave feminism has also contributed to another aspect of queer theory. Work which emerged from the second wave of feminist politics and activism became crucial to the foundations of queer theory. More specifically second wave feminism influence could be allied to queer theory via the discourse of lesbian feminism and its ‘range of sometimes contradictory political and theoretical positions’ (Jagose 1996: 56). Here the problematic factions which stemmed from the lesbian feminine/gay male binary of power in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s can be seen in a work such as Marilyn Frye’s ‘Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement: Another View of Male Supremacy, Another Separatism’ (1983), where the notion of lesbian/gay affinity is undermined and the reification of conflict between gay men and their lesbian counterparts is amplified. As well as this a theoretically ambitious body of work including that of Adrienne Rich, Monique Wittig, Gloria Anzaldua, Diana Fuss and most famously Judith Butler’s influential Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993), carves out a relationship between disciplines that may (or may not) be grouped together as second wave feminist, lesbian feminist, or ‘women’s studies’ and their association or negation of queer politics and theory. Some of these concerns are instilled in some radical second wave feminist work often referred to as ‘anti-porn’ which investigated the nature of pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights in capitalist societies. Andrea Dworkin, in work such as Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), groups pornographic output through the production of masculine power and discourse. Dworkin argues that it is only in the fundamental abjuration and disavowal of masculine power, oppression and dominance (disguised as the eroticisation of capitalist and patriarchal power in pornography) that women can realise their own subjective sexual liberation. By following both moral and ethical approaches and aligning them to an anti-masculine rhetoric enforced through the activist group Women against Pornography (WAP) (and more specifically Dworkin’s and Catherine MacKinnon’s anti-pornography civil rights ordinance of the city of Minneapolis (1988)), many of these debates could be contingently reframed as queer. Just as Dworkin positioned these concerns as central to a masculine domination over women, what also becomes clear is that if they are transposed and repositioned in terms of queer theoretical critique allied to the construction of hetero-sexual (and in conjunction hetero-sexist) representations in pornography, they can be redefined and reread through the trajectories of queer identity politics and a queer theoretical position predicated by tangible forms of ideological oppression, misogyny and violence. During the 1990s these modes of queering or querying a text were sophisticated into forms of methodological technique and modes of critical enquiry in fields as diverse as sociology, media and film studies, geography, English

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Literature and cultural studies. As well as this, the trajectory of queer theory has now been applied to the emergent fields of new and social media, race, belief, class and disability theory so that queer theoretical analysis is now itself embedded in textual analysis. A collection such as Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research (Browne and Nash 2010) sets out to question and address how the divergent nature of queer epistemologies and ontologies can be interpreted and applied to social scientific research. In this way and while ‘queerness’ as a methodological tool of investigation still holds the potential to undercut and subvert hegemonic identity types, it also exists as something that Sedgwick claims ‘now counts as knowledge’ and, as such, this ‘ “knowledge” can scarcely be a transparent window onto a separate realm of sexuality, but, rather, itself constitutes that sexuality’ (Sedgwick 1990: 44). Here there is yet another paradox at work, in that on the one hand a distinctly queer methodology, discursive praxis and also epistemology undercuts the transgressive and/or subversive potential of queer theory, while on the other paradoxically developing it as innovative, necessary and valuable. In addition, journals such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture and Sexualities rely upon scholarly work which addresses how popular media texts and queerness intersect. In this way queer theory as both a methodological and empirical field of inquiry has the capacity to infiltrate and influence almost every paradigm of mediated and cultural life, and queer theory as a method of textual analysis has generated critical responses that have transformed the meanings of those texts. Queer theory as a textual and methodological tool has also proliferated in areas of critical and theoretical investigation which are predicated by ‘queer’ in fields as diverse as English literature, film, TV, Sci-Fi music, geography, online identity and identification, self-representation, self-expression and any other number of interdisciplinary approaches to cultural studies which seem to embody something allied to the uneven nature of queer theoretical work. For example, the convergence of queer theory and the discourse of online media are, in part, simultaneously concerned with the contradictory, obtuse or eccentric dimensions of identity and sexuality. Output that has dealt with the analysis of queer identity and sexuality and online media either emphasises and/or valorises how identity and the body are marked by fluidity, ambiguity and confusion. Yet in their examination of online/queer identity it also seems that many of the critical issues related to the formation of queer bodies, identities and discourses are increasingly prone to accounts of queer desire in which identities are reciprocated and not complicated by the very terms they have set out to undermine. This contention has been a critical thread of responses to queer theory over the last decade or so and the emergence of terms such as ‘post-queer’ (Ruffolo 2009; Halley and Parker 2011), now offer a way of reconsidering how queer

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identities are relational, differentiated and excluded in both conventional and incoherent ways; yet ultimately ways that function perfectly in capitalist societies of consumption that ‘manufacture[s] homosexuals’ (Hocquenghem 1993: 50) through modes of textual representation. It may now be more apt to locate the concluding parts of this chapter in line with post-queer theorists (Ahmed 2006, Munoz 2009, Halperin and Traub 2010, Halley and Parker 2011, Halberstam 2011, McGlotten 2013, Penney 2014) who seek a way out of queer theoretical landscape where queer identity and politics are conventional, acceptable and convenient. In so doing they attempt to draw on a vocabulary which allows for a way to move beyond a politics of identity, gender and the body as ‘queer’ by addressing how modes of affect, failure and desire as ‘post’ or ‘after’ queer may now allow for a mode of queer theorising that probes the terms that seem to locate, define and confine its future as queer.

A Queer Future? It may be that the abstruse and contingent nature of queer theory makes it almost impossible for the queer subject to actually ‘be queer’. If this queer subject is one that is always vulnerable to the fractured nature of its poststructural and deconstructionist origins, then is it possible to speak of queer identity and/ or a discourse of queer theory through representational texts and in cultural life at all? In this way it may be that queer theory’s preoccupation with the transgressive nuances of a manifestly queer sexuality, gender and identity has also been its undoing. The centrality of the queer body seems to have abated the potentiality of queer theory allied to desire and subjectivity, yet in doing so forced it into new and often disparate directions which have been now been allied to the term ‘post-queer’. Post-queer theory acknowledges that queer theory has been called into question as a critical trajectory because it renders the queer subject ‘subjectless’. As well as this, work which might be considered as post-queer acknowledges that ‘queer theory is less an ongoing event than a periodisable moment, a relatively defunct agenda that can be safely syllabised and packaged for digestion through a shrink-wrapped assortment of contained debates (essentialism vs. social construction, the politics of outing, transgendering etc.)’ (Shapiro 2004: 77). In this setting, queer theory has offered no consistent way to analyse the queer self and in so doing it has led queer subjects into simultaneously seductive and injurious forms of self-expression. While it is still clear that queer theory cannot be neatly mapped or appropriated, the post-queer is inflected by ways to consider and negotiate the discourse of ‘after’ queer and in so doing also acknowledges the question of a whether a queer future is possible or even necessary. In the introduction to the post-queer collection After Sex? On Writing Since Queer theory (2011) Janet Halley and Andrew Parker cite Sharon Marcus’s

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work which argues that ‘if everyone is queer, then no one is – and while this is exactly the point that queer theorists want to make, reducing the term’s pejorative sting by universalising the meaning of queer also depletes its explanatory power’ (Marcus 2005: 196 in Halley and Parker 2011: 7). Taking this into account we might also suggest and address the issue that queer subjects of this post-queer environment are still largely gay and lesbian subjects that have been assimilated into hetero-normative practices of normality and regulation. In addition we see through discourses such as gay marriage how queer identity has been assimilated into popular media and culture and also in filmic representations which have sought to commodify queer life as an integral part of neoliberal capitalism. In the range of popular filmic texts which examine paradigms of queer desire, lifestyle, history and assimilation such as Brokeback Mountain (2006), The Kids are All Right (2010) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013), there has been the cultivation of what James Penney understands as a ‘brand of queer pseudo-politics’, underpinned by the claim ‘that queer theory has run its course’ through the counter-intuitive fact that an Anglo-American queering and ‘subversion of sexual identity has turned the sexually marginal inward’ (Penney 2014: 15, 1, 2). In this way queer theories have also been criticised for their failure to take into account non-Western discourses of class, race and ethnicity. In a postqueer sense it is this limitation which may also serve as the potential for the future of queer theorisation in transnational/cross-cultural discourses. Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times is an example of this and contends that its main aim is to address ‘the management of queer life at the expense of sexually and racially perverse death in relation to the contemporary politics of securitization, Orientalism, terrorism, torture, and the articulation of Muslim, Arab, Sikh and South Asian sexualities’ (Puar 2007: xiii). Aligning neoliberal queer subjects to discourses of life, marriage and reproductive patterns of family, Puar contends that there has been a shift away from the disruptive construction of the queer dissident and in its place an orientalisation of the terrorist as an ‘otherly’ threat. Other works being circulated under the term ‘post-queer’ include the intersectional and bold manoeuvres to connect Marxism to queer theory (see Kevin Floyd’s The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism (2009), and Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011)) which considers and conceptualises how notions of productive failure or the ‘ “rejection of pragmatism” ’ should be considered as an intrinsic feature of queer theory and its capacity to cultivate new forms of ‘nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive lifestyles, negativity and critique’ (Halberstam 2011: 89). The discourses of affect and emotion are also important in light of how queer theoretical work has shifted its emphasis from that of specifically queer bodies and identities towards more abstract notions of queer subjectivities, responses and identifications. In Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), her assimilation of the

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phenomenological implications of emotion and trauma seem to suggest that queer theory’s apparent implosion and its contradictory limits lead to a new position or possibility which is simultaneously queer and post-queer, here and there, tangible yet intangible. A feature which seems to thread through and mark these post-queer texts is the discourse of the future. Not only in terms of whether or not a queer future is possible but in relation to the question of a queer futurity that undermines the cultural and discursive predispositions of certainty, hegemony and legacy. In Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2006) he discusses the figure of the child that haunts hegemonic and normative representations which only queer theory has the power to undermine and overcome. Queer has the capacity to thwart and subvert the innocence and powerful construction of the child in culture and in this ways allies itself to a future that José Esteban Munoz imagines as ‘a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’ (Munoz 2009: 1). This way of superseding the confines of the queer present, or indeed queer moment, can also be seen in Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington (1997) and Cruel Optimism (2011), which are concerned with the politics of how queer citizenship and more so queer theory itself is underpinned by ‘the realisation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy or too possible, and toxic’ (Berlant 2011: 24). If we understand the post-queer as cruelly optimistic, as strategically failing and precariously allied to a futurity without a clear ‘future’, then we see that it acknowledges ‘the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object’ (Berlants 2011: 24) while retaining what Munoz terms ‘the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’ (Munoz 2009: 1). Fittingly, it is the intersectionality of a queer past, present and future which attest to the impossibility of queer theory and the seditious pleasure it takes in not knowing what comes next.

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15 MEN, MASCULINITY AND CRITICAL STUDIES Chris Haywood and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill

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he study of men is nothing new. Critical theory has often placed men at the centre of their arguments and in attempts to explore the nature of social, economic and cultural worlds, they have examined meanings, attitudes and behaviours. By default, men have often been at the centre of such analysis. However, more recently critical theorists began to scrutinise men as men. This shift of focus on men as an area of critical inquiry has a number of political and conceptual implications. One of these is to recognise that men and what is understood as men is often shaped by common sense and taken-for-granted assumptions. A recent example of this can be found in media reports of shootings taking place in European schools. Although the majority of such crimes are undertaken by young men, the gendered nature of these crimes remains invisible and unspoken. Klein and Chancer (2000) highlight that the main narratives surrounding such crimes focus on gun control, exposure to violent media and family backgrounds. In contrast, crimes committed by women are not only reducible to social deviancy but also their femininities. As such the institutional and cultural production of men’s gendered meanings, emotions and practices often go unnoticed and often result in hidden and insidious articulations of power. The issue here is that the (in) visibility of the socially constructed nature of masculinity reduces men’s emotions, meanings and practices as unproblematic and self-evident. Thus one of the main themes underpinning this chapter and broader the study of men, is to question how and why men are gendered. A common sense account of the study of masculinity might be to position it as a response to Women’s Studies or even to think of it as an anti-feminist project. However, as Michael Kimmel has pointed out: ‘Masculinity studies is not necessarily the reactionary defensive rage of the men’s rights groups, the mythic cross-cultural nostalgia of mythopoetry, nor even the theologically informed nostalgic yearning for separate spheres of promise keepers’ (Kimmel 2002: ix). In fact, Kimmel suggests that Masculinity Studies can support and further the political aims of a feminist approaches. The difficulty with the terminology in this area is that there is not a coherent body of work or theoretical

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approach that can be identified as ‘Masculinity Studies’, Men’s Studies’, ‘Male Studies’ or ‘Critical Masculinity Studies’. Rather the term has been used to coalesce a wide range of diverse and sometimes contradictory philosophical, disciplinary, political and methodological positions. For example, the study of masculinity can be found in Sex Role theory, Film Studies, Poststructuralism, Marxism, Queer theory, Historical Studies, Symbolic Interactionism, Literary Studies and Feminism (see Gottzén and Mellstrõm 2014). Given the breadth of the field, this chapter focuses on the more prevalent approaches to men and masculinity that are currently being developed by European scholars. It does this first, by providing a brief historical overview of the disparate political movements that have underpinned the study of masculinity, including the men’s movement and anti-sexism. The chapter then develops this historical approach by examining one of the most popular approaches to the study of men, that of hegemonic masculinity. By highlighting a number of critiques of hegemonic masculinity, the chapter explores more recent developments in the field that include: queer theory, trans theory and post-masculinity theorising.

Men, Gender and Equality An important area for the development of the study of men and masculinity emerged in response to women’s calls for equal rights and fairness. Men and women began to highlight that the same issue of sexism that feminists were identifying, was also affecting men (Farrell 1974; Nichols 1975). One of the initial areas that was identified as particularly important was the emotional damage that was being caused by the social roles that were determining how men should live in society. As a result, men were claiming that they were also being oppressed by normatively sanctioned social expectations. As Bob Pease points out: ‘They saw consciousness-raising groups as vehicles by which men could get in touch with their feelings, free themselves from sex-role stereotyping, learn to be more caring for other men and struggle together against the imposition of the socially oppressive male role’ (Pease 2000: 124). One of the implications of this position is that it challenged the assumption that all men are the same. More specifically, it argued that men were also subject to the power relations and could experience domination and subordination by other men. If the category of men becomes fractured, or if there are various versions of being a man, then the link between gender and biology becomes troubled. The implications of this is that the ways that men behave are subject to change and challenge pervasive social and cultural assumptions that ascribe traits such as aggression, competitiveness, fear of intimacy and emotional stoicism to masculinity. Politically, it can be argued that strategic alliances can be formed between men and women that enable a working together to challenge and remove gender based inequalities that are embedded in traditional sex roles. It is suggested that in the past such alliances included: implementing

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equal opportunities initiatives within public institutions, developing anti-sexist educational material, co-parenting, and developing anti-discrimination laws at a local state level (European Commission Network on Childcare, 1993). Alongside this, men’s activism in challenging gender inequalities was to ask governments across Europe to recognise the importance of safeguarding men’s rights, in terms of paternity pay, access to their children and broader health and welfare rights. At the same time, a far more conservatively orientated approach, often named as pro-male, anti-women and anti-feminist, can also be traced. Raewyn Connell has described an element of this approach as ‘masculinity therapy’. She traces its movement from an early 1970s association with countercultural therapy and a pro-liberal feminist focus on the removal of the traditional male role, to a 1980s emphasis on a search for the ‘deep masculine’. An example of this can be found in the US text, Robert Bly’s (1990) Iron John. Drawing upon ‘mytho-poetic’ concepts, he argues for the restoration of a lost, traditional masculinity – for the urgent need to encounter ‘the hairy man’. Strategies to reclaim an authentic masculinity can be found in emotional self-exploration, male bonding and recovering damaged relationships with fathers. Located within the context of an emotional architecture of a pre-social man, returning to an original authentic masculinity enabled men to celebrate becoming a ‘hard warrior’ rather than a ‘soft wimp’. As a consequence, such an approach has the tendency to reinforce gender inequalities rather than dismantle them. For example, Men’s Studies groups were arguing that feminisation of society is deemed to be disturbing men’s natural self-identities and must be resisted. Such a view is still evident in discussion on boys’ socialisation. For example, discussions about boys’ perceived underachievement in school are often couched in terms of a feminised curriculum and teaching practice. As such, it is argued that a curriculum and a teaching practice that promotes gender equality restrict boys from being their true selves. In response, educators are suggesting a number of ‘boy-friendly’ initiatives that include single-sex classes and boy-friendly reading material in the belief that the masculinising of the curriculum will lead to higher levels of male achievement. One of the embryonic moments in the emergence of a critical study of masculinity focused on moving away from searching for an authentic masculinity towards men challenging the social norms and values that underpinned oppressive practices. Central to this position was the claim that alternative forms of masculinities could be developed, cultivated and learned. The emergence of pro-feminist men shifted a political activism less in terms of creating equality but more focused on challenging the social and economic structuring of men’s power. These pro-feminist men often made their gender and sexuality a subject of self-reflexive political inquiry. In the 1970s and 1980s, Achilles Heal in the UK emerged as a journal that brought together writings that highlighted pro-feminist men as complicit in patriarchal power and broader structures

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of oppression. Importantly, the biographies of male authors became a point of critical inquiry and a source of inspiration for a wide range of interventions around sexuality, violence and pornography. This began to signal a more empirically led theoretical understanding of masculinity. For example, Victor Seidler’s work unpacks the emotional dynamics of masculinity that were often premised on a Cartesian division of rationality and emotion (Seidler 1989). The implication here is that it is the masculine that is configured through rationality that leads to emotional oppression of women and men themselves. The innovative aspect of Seidler’s work is that it begins to frame the experiential within the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis. According to Seidler, the rigid straightjacket of masculinity needs to be carefully unpacked to reveal how masculinity is formed and practised; psychoanalytical readings were one theoretical strategy to achieve this. Other critical approaches to understanding men could be seen in the early work of Jeff Hearn, who began to position masculinity within a gendered economy. He used Marxist political economy to understand gender as part of a class dichotomy. Masculinity was seen as operating as an ideological template, used to link men’s relationship to (re) production. As Hearn pointed out: ‘While men persist in the base of reproduction, masculinities persist in the “ideology” of production’ (Hearn 1987: 98). As such, the structural location of masculinity could be positioned within a Hegelian dialectic with masculinity understood as a structured ideology maintaining men’s patriarchal privilege. Importantly for Hearn, male power can be explained by an analysis which takes into consideration the specific conditions that give rise to it. One way of doing this has been to consider men and women as ‘sexual classes’, structurally located within the relationships of patriarchy and capitalism. Earlier masculinity studies became pivotal to studies of men as it began to understand how social and cultural definitions of masculinity were embedded within relations of power. In summary, the first part of the development of a critical study of men and masculinity was to recognise the socially constructed nature of men’s meanings and behaviours. However, the shift towards an understanding of how the social, economic and cultural context shapes men’s experiences contributed to the emergence of a study of men and masculinity that made their voices, their relationships and their lives more central to the analysis. One of the most prevalent concepts that has been developed in European work on masculinity has been that of hegemonic masculinity.

Critical Theory, Men and Hegemonic Masculinity From the 1980s to the 1990s, studies of men and masculinity demonstrated a shift from understanding men and women through fixed categories of material difference, towards an understanding of gender relations based on local contexts. In short, such studies began to question the basis of masculinity not

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simply by challenging the epistemological assumptions that underpinned it, but also by questioning the institutional and cultural practices that authorised them (Traister 2000). Thus, accounts of men positioned within dialectical relationships with women began to move towards understanding men and masculinity through institutionally and culturally specific social relationships. These texts argued for the need to rethink categorical theories that suggest that gender/sexual relations are shaped by a single overarching factor. More specifically, studies of men and masculinity began to disaggregate overinflated concepts, such as patriarchy, maintaining that these relations are multidimensional and differentially experienced. This shift was captured by a move from understanding men’s attitudes and behaviours through a ‘masculinity’, and instead began to recognise that men were engaging in different ‘masculinities’. Central to the new emphasis on masculinities was the work of Raewyn Connell. Her research began to suggest a more complex understanding of how masculinity is experienced by men and women in a variety of different ways. For Connell, masculinity becomes articulated through a series of relationships and in order to explain the nature of these relationships she moves from a concept of masculinity to masculinities. Crucially, the move to a more plural framing of masculinity results in a redistribution of power that is no longer contained by a logic of the powerful/powerless couplet based on sexual difference. Rather, men become subject to the power of other men and repressive regimes of masculinity. Instead of using a Hegelian dialectic that frames gendered difference, Connell uses Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (Connell 1987). More specifically, Connell understands masculinities as shaped by specific social contexts and as a result, some masculinities become more influential over other masculinities. As some masculinities occupy privileged positions, other masculinities are subordinated and marginalised. In different contexts, it is argued that some men will occupy more powerful positions than others and they achieve this through winning the consent of other men and women, in order to do so. Connell’s earlier work operationalised the concept of hegemonic masculinity in the context of schooling. Her focus on ‘Cool Guys, Swots and Wimps’ signalled that different ways of being a young man were placed within a hierarchy of social power (1989). Thus the ‘Cool boys’, from labouring classes with low academic ability were viewed as ‘trouble makers’ and took part in resisting school authority structures. In this context, masculinities were organised in relation to hierarchies of the institutional knowledge of the school. So, in the school, academic knowledge became the most legitimate and institutionally sanctioned knowledge. With the ‘Cools Boys’ working against this institutional sanctioning through forms of resistance, other boys aligned themselves to the school. As a result, some boys became hegemonic, while others became marginalised. For example, men occupying hegemonic masculinity would often ‘other’ different groups of men, such as gay men, black men or disabled men, to sustain the legitimacy and normalisation of their own

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masculinity. Michael Kimmel’s work on the formation of masculinity suggests that masculine subjectivities are constituted through the rejection by that which is culturally deemed as feminine. An example of this is how men objectify heterosexuality in order to validate their identities as masculine. As a result, masculine identities are structured through a heterosexuality that creates its stability through the rejection of that which is feminine (read as homosexual): ‘that the reigning definition of masculinity is a defensive effort to prevent being emasculated’ (Kimmel 2007: 80). It should be added that rather than displacing feminist politics, Connell’s hegemony of masculinity creates the possibilities for a more comprehensive understanding of patriarchy. Sofia Aboim points out that although hegemonic masculinity is underpinned by men’s domination of women, it also serves to oppress men who may be from a lower class, identified through particular racial or ethnic categories or through sexuality. In short, hegemonic masculinity sustains: ‘a gender order that segregates men in accordance with how far removed they are from the hegemonic norm: white, heterosexual, professionally successful’ (Aboim 2010: 3). Thus, why men are involved in the hegemony and why some men accept subordination is due to the patriarchal privilege that is accrued by being in power or being complicit in such powerful positions. The hegemonic template for masculinities was further developed by Connell to include masculinities that were complicit, subordinated and marginalised. Connell suggests that ‘masculinities constructed in ways that realized the patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline troops of patriarchy, are complicit in this sense’ (Connell 1995: 79). Complicit masculinities would be lived out by men who may not be part of the hegemony, but benefit from its presence. Another relationship within hegemonic masculinity is that of marginalised masculinities, that refers to those masculine styles that are positioned as ‘outcasts’ (Phillips 2005). As indicated above, such men are often named as different from those men who take up hegemonic masculinities. The final aspect of Connell’s model of masculinity explored here is that of ‘protest masculinity’. Raewyn Connell and James Messerschmidt suggest that protest masculinity is ‘a pattern of masculinity constructed in local workingclass settings, sometimes among ethnically marginalised men, which embodies the claim to power typical of regional hegemonic masculinities in Western countries, but which lacks the economic resources and institutional authority that underpins the regional and global patterns’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 848). Therefore, a hegemony of masculinity tries to understand and map out the nature of relationships that take place between different men. The concept of hegemonic masculinity has had a global reach and is now a major influence on the study of men and masculinity. Through an analysis of over 128 English-speaking articles that used hegemonic masculinity as the core concept, Messerschmidt identifies how hegemonic masculinity has been used in various ways (2012). He identifies how hegemonic masculinity has been

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used at a local level. For example, how masculinities operate within particular institutions such as schools, the workplace, in spaces of leisure and also to describe how masculinity operates at regional level and global levels. However, Messerschmidt suggests that ‘Within the core articles examined, there remains a fundamental collective intellectual tendency by numerous editors, reviewers, and authors to read “hegemonic masculinity” as a static character type, i.e. to psychologise the idea and ignore the whole question of gender dynamic’ (Messerschmidt 2012: 245).

Developing Hegemonic Masculinity Messerschmidt suggests that one of the difficulties of hegemonic masculinity is that it is conflated with all forms of masculinity. More specifically, he argues that we need to begin to unpack hegemonic masculinity into two distinct forms, that of dominant and dominating. Dominant masculinities refer to the most popular forms of masculinity that are celebrated or culturally commended. Dominating masculinities have power and control in specific situations. Messerschmidt suggests that although these masculinities may be prevalent in particular contexts, they are not necessarily central to unequal relationships between men and women. In essence, he is arguing that there is slippage between hegemonic masculinities and other prominent masculinities where power does not necessarily have to be patriarchal. As Messerschmidt argues: ‘this distinction between hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities further facilitates the discovery and identification of “equality masculinities” ’: ‘those that legitimate an egalitarian relationship between men and women, between masculinity and femininity, and among men’ (Messerschmidt 2012: 673). This notion of ‘equality masculinities’ can be seen in the work of Thomas Johansson and Andreas Ottemo who argue that we need to focus on how power is exercised and how masculinities are subject to ‘change, transformations and contradictions’ (Johansson and Ottemo 2013: 5). They recognise, through the work of Paul Ricoeur, that ideology has a range of legitimating, distorting and integrating functions. In effect, rather than unpack hegemonic masculinity, Johansson and Ottemo explore hegemony itself. As a result, they suggest that hegemony and ideology in the field of masculinity studies have been elided. More specifically, they suggest that studies of hegemonic masculinity tend to reinforce an ideology that is often too structured and non-negotiable and, as a result, the possibilities for change, transgression and transformation are restricted. In response, Johansson and Ottemo use Laclau and Moufe (1985) to build into their discussion of masculinities more scope for change and transformation. In order to recognise the dynamic nature of masculinities, they argue that we need to examine the instability of meaning. The implication of meaning never being fixed is that it is impossible to achieve a fully formed and constituted subject. This means that hegemony is in the process of continually making and establishing its authority. A key aspect of this

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is antagonism. The centrality of antagonism to an understanding of hegemony enables an understanding of social relations that are perpetually in conflict and that are continually destabilised by the play of differences. By interpreting hegemony as unstable and in a constant rearticulation of differences, the possibility of a range of subject positions facilitates not only the questioning of fixed identities but also the possibility of new ones. Thus, they argue that existing approaches to masculinity interpret change within the dynamics of patriarchal distribution, rather than as a space for the emergence of new possibilities of which power can be articulated. European scholars have considered other ways of developing hegemonic masculinity. Ann-Dorte Christensen and Sune Qvotrup Jensen elaborate on the unpacking of hegemonic masculinity by suggesting that there are three areas that need clarifying. First, they suggest that the relationship between the concept at a macro-level and the concept at a micro-level needs to be addressed. More specifically, they argue that it is important to understand how broader social configurations of hegemonic masculinity are manifest in everyday practice. Alongside this, Christensen and Jensen, like Johansson and Ottemo, suggest that hegemonic masculinity needs to be understood in relation to the antagonisms and slippages between categorisations of men’s practices. The final point that they identify and develop further is the notion of hegemony in terms of the dual processes of the oppression of women and the oppression of men. For example they argue that ‘The concept of hegemonic masculinity is thus fundamentally based on two interrelated and inseparable dimensions: (a) male dominance and oppression of women, and (b) hierarchical classification of masculinities’ (Christensen and Jensen 2014: 8). It is through the separation of men’s practices that masculinities can be understood as patriarchal and nonpatriarchal. Therefore, it is possible to have masculinities that operate outside of hegemonic relationships and this can lead to the separating of masculinities that support gender equality and those that support patriarchy. They also suggest that there needs to be an acknowledgment that change in masculinities is possible and that such change can facilitate feminist interventions. It is by treating these dimensions separately that an understanding of how different categories intersect with other forms of social power such as age, race/ethnicity and sexuality can be realised. They suggest that: This approach makes possible multifaceted and process-centered analyses, where different social categories are understood as mutually constitutive. Forms of social differentiations other than gender (class, race/ ethnicity, age, sexuality etc.) will thus influence, shape and construct masculinities. The focus will be on the dynamic power relations, and this focus can sharpen the grasp of changes within and overlaps between different masculinities rather than localizing fixed categories and power relations. (Christensen and Jensen 2014: 24)

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Christensen and Jensen recognise that separating the hegemonic from the non-hegemonic may be a too simplistic response and point to the need to understand how masculinities simultaneously ‘strengthen or weaken patriarchy’. As highlighted above, their emphasis is on the intersectionality of social relations and understanding how people can be located within simultaneous positions. Such categories operate to mutually constitute one another and as a result, according to Christensen and Jensen, other forms of power mediated across different social categories can support or undermine hegemonic masculinity. Finally, a recent development in the field of masculinity studies has been to critically explore how masculinity is constituted. Rather than think of masculinity as being formed through relationships of opposition, Eric Anderson usefully argues that we need to rethink the internal constituents of masculinity itself (Anderson 2009). He engages with theories of masculinity that suggest that heterosexual masculine subjectivities are constituted through homophobia. Instead he argues that the constitution of masculinity is changing. This means that masculinity and homophobia can be viewed as conceptually discrete. In other words, heterosexual masculinities can be constituted without relying on homophobia as a constituent factor. Therefore, unlike Kimmel’s proposal that masculinity is based on homophobia, Anderson argues that at a cultural level there is less homophobia. This, it is argued, is leading to a more inclusive masculinity that recognises and affirms homosexual otherness rather than using such otherness to sustain a masculinity. One of the reasons for this is that the political landscape has changed, where the acceptance and inclusion of gays and lesbians has increased. As a consequence of this, ‘a culture of homophobia, femphobia, and compulsory heterosexuality’ (Anderson 2009: 7) otherwise known as ‘homohysteria’, is decreasing. The interesting aspect of Anderson’s work is that it highlights how masculinity can be constituted differently. While recognising the positive potential of Anderson’s work, Tristan Bridges suggests that the reconstruction of masculine subjectivities could be understood as a characteristic of a privilege afforded by groups of white heterosexual men. More specifically, Bridges highlights how men who take on gay aesthetics to distance themselves from a traditional stereotypical masculinity may not necessarily mean a lessening sexual or gendered inequality. For example, in Bridges’ study of pro-men’s rights groups, he argues that some men in this study used gay aesthetics in order to distance themselves from a traditional stereotypical heterosexuality. However, as a consequence, the identification of heterosexual identities, in pro-homosexual and feminist ways, rearticulated sexual inequalities. He suggests that: ‘men’s behaviors are best understood as reinvigorating symbolic sexual boundaries and recuperating gender and sexual privilege in historically novel ways’ (Bridges 2014: 78). Furthermore, by representing themselves through gay aesthetics, these men reinforce traditional sexual categories and the historical privileges that accompany them. Thus,

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according to Bridges, it is the dis-identification with traditional masculinities that can enable existing structures of gender inequalities to reproduce. Hence, the lack of homophobia in the constitution of masculinity does not mean the erasure of sexual and gendered difference. The debate as to how the internal dynamics configure masculinity continues to have a major impact on the development of masculinity studies in European contexts. However, another direction of analysis that has had less influence is a more radical challenging approach to understanding masculinity. This approach calls into question the epistemological foundations of masculinity studies by scrutinising fixed notions of male and female and the ascription of binary gender categories of masculinity and femininity. This approach is usually associated with queer and trans theory.

The Queering of Masculinity Queer and transgender theorists have productively explored the destabilisation of biological categorisations of sex. One of the aims of studies of men and masculinities has been to denaturalise sex, gender and desire, and to emphasise the active cultural production of masculinities. This aim has also been facilitated by work with a wide range of sexual minorities, including lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals and transgendered groups. At the same time, there continues to be a range of popular ascriptions that link sexual choice and gender with an assumed association of homosexuality with femininity and lesbianism with masculinity. This association serves to deny the validity of same-sex desire, while producing heterosexuality as conceptually inescapable (Pringle 1992). Early work by Diane Richardson suggested that ‘Historically, lesbians have been portrayed as virtual men trapped in the space of women’s bodies: “mannish” in appearance and masculine in their thoughts, feelings and desires, rendering their existence compatible with the logic of gender and heteronormativity’ (Richardson 1996: 4). Emerging decentred female and male gay subjectivities provide concrete evidence that femininity and masculinity is not something one is born with or an inherent possession, but rather an active process of achievement, performance and enactment (Plummer 1981; Weeks 1977). In short, gay and lesbian scholars and activists have been among the most dynamic contributors to recent sexual theorising in destabilising sociological and common-sense connections between men/women and masculinity/femininity within the broader structure of gender relations (Bristow and Wilson 1993; Kirsch 2000). One of the productive contributions of gay and lesbian movements has been to deconstruct these connections. Early gender theorists usefully questioned the social construction of the biological categories of male and female (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Gatens 1996; Laqueur 1990) and highlighted that ‘either sex is privileged as a biological

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attribute upon which a gender ideology is imposed, or sex is denied as merely the ideological mystification that obscures cultural facts about gender’ (Elam 2000: 267). One way to demonstrate the social construction of biology has been through the queering of gender/sex categories. For example, Halberstam in her discussion of female masculinities suggested that female bodies are able to take on and live out particular masculinities, just as male bodies are able to take on femininities (1998). In other words, the study of masculinity from Halberstam’s approach is not directly focused on the biological category of men. Hence, female masculinities become a means of understanding how bodies are read through particular social and cultural codes of maleness. In many ways masculinity becomes dis-embodied and operates precisely because the material evidence (biology, chromosomes, genetics, hormones) in which masculinity has been traditionally fixed becomes unanchored. Myra Hird situates the relationship between sex and gender as political in the sense that ‘the authenticity of gender resides not on, or in the body’, but by a ‘particular system of knowledge, power and truth’ (Hird 2000: 353). This suggests that the relationship between sex and gender is held together by particular ways of conceptualising the body. As a result, biological sex is a historical construct and is thus materialised through its application to the body. As a result, masculinity in this approach is not something that is associated with culturally defined bodies but can also operate across a range of bodies. Importantly, a critical masculinity studies has the potential to turn in on itself and question the viability of what makes masculinity and whether a masculinity is or should be associated with culturally coded maleness. One of the implications of the understanding of the discursive formation of biology is an emerging question of the epistemological status of the ‘real’ body. More specifically, genital difference becomes framed as a discursive regime that facilitates the existence of coherent stable biologies. This prompts the possibility, as Judith Butler has pointed out, of an inversion where the coherency of biological sex exists primarily through the discursive reiteration of gender (2004). Thus, gender is performative in the sense that it provides the conceptual possibilities of biological sex to exist. Performance is not used in a theatrical sense but rather as a form of citation. This means that the actual citing of gender produces the possibility of biological sex. In this way, the citational operates as a material presence that secures and establishes the existence of gender. This means that the idea of the social construction of masculinity as opposed to the biology of man, become destabilised. With its roots in Foucauldian analysis, biological maleness becomes understood as a social historical framing of ideas where: ‘western ideology takes biology as the cause, and behaviour and social statuses as the effects, and then proceeds to construct biological dichotomies to justify the “naturalness” of gendered behaviours and gendered social status’ (Lorber 1993: 568). In this way, biology operates as ideology that constructs maleness. In other words, the designation of bodies

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exists as a context where discourses of maleness and femaleness are written. This gender binarism presupposes the nature of male and female through an appeal to ‘biology as ideology’. As Kevin Floyd remarks: Is gender a ‘destination’? Is this a useful way of putting it? Is gender a location? A place? A space? Is the line separating masculinity from femininity a border one can cross like a wall or a fence? What about the region between these two territories, which transgender and intersex studies have begun to map for us? The metaphors brought to bear in the effort to identify differently gendered bodies, in the struggle to find language that can push the limits of available vocabularies, can themselves be revealing. (Floyd 2011: 45) Transgender Studies and its awareness of the normalisation of biology provide a new context for the study of men and masculinity. One of the reasons for this is that studies of masculinity tend to situate and locate their arguments through a gendered intelligibility that is based upon masculinity and femininity. Transgender and intersex research disrupts the often neat segregation of culturally ascribed male and female categories. Thus, transgender theory highlights the social and cultural deployment of gender dimorphism by state institutions. Masculinity Studies has nervously recognised and acknowledged transgender and intersexuality, not simply because of the (dis) location of men, but because of the challenge to the intelligibility of gender. If gender begins to operate outside of dimorphic frames of understanding, then the epistemological traction achieved by naming social relations as masculinity (and femininity) becomes limited. Medical surgeries that on the one hand curtail and seek to position bodies within male/female binaries begin on the other: to make available all kinds of embodied subject positions that seem to inhabit an outside of the very distinction between male and female, the way in which human beings are now able to inhabit some space that seems irreducible to received gender vocabularies – precisely as a result of this rapidly changing technology. (Floyd 2011: 46) One way in which we can begin to think outside gender is by using Kath Weston’s concept of the ‘unsexed’. She uses this idea to open up a space of gendered ambiguity. This ambiguity occurs at times where gender becomes undefined. She also draws upon examples of transgender or queer episodes where sex remains unknown and it is difficult to assign male/female sex. This moment, she argues, is not about the emergence of another gender type, for example, a ‘third sex’ or intersex, it is a moment that disrupts the gender categorisation based upon masculinity and femininity. ‘Unsexed

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refers to that passing glimmer of an instant just before an acceleration into meaning gives way to what is commonly called “gender” ’ (Weston 2002: 33). Thus, the disruption of gender norms is a temporal disruption – an interval of meaning – where difference itself becomes displaced. It is precisely through researching moments of gendered ambiguity that can enable us to think outside masculinity and femininity. In other words: By attending to fleeting moments when gender zeros out and bodies become unsexed, the discussion can go beyond the business of identifying the referent or exposing the nonexistence of the referent, whether you want to locate gender’s referentiality in the genes, or in the domain of history and culture, or nowhere at all. Zero allows for movement in and out of gender-soaked categories, a movement that depends upon the possibility of gender’s short-lived dissolution. By holding open the ‘place’ of unsexed before giving way to a gendered classification, zero is the sign that makes that subtle movement apparent. (Weston and Helmreich 2006: 117) As Weston points out, it is the moment between the first glance, and the second glance, before whatever gender category is being used, that we need to explore in more detail (2002). It is suggested that the process of gender transitivity can be found in everyday situations. This is not the same as performativity, where repetition congeals to form ontologies; the unsexed is the moment within the spaces of its repetition. As queer theory and Transgender Studies begin to break down and challenge the binary structures of gender and masculinity they enable us: ‘to imagine, to try to think, an outside to the very distinction between masculinity and femininity, to aid the development of categories, concepts, and knowledges adequate to such an outside’ (Floyd 2011: 46). The next section begins to think about what a study of men’s gender outside masculinity might begin to look like.

Gender Without Masculinity The final area that this chapter addresses is to consider the refusal to frame gendered attitudes, affects and behaviours through masculinity categories. This section takes its point of departure from Weston’s approach that highlights a moment prior to the ascription of gender categories to bodies, where existing frames of recognition are no longer useful. It is suggested by Seth Mirsky that studies of masculinities tend to treat men’s lives as co-extensive with masculinity (Mirsky 1996). The consequence of this is that the institutional and cultural authorising of men’s practices can only be understood through the concept of masculinity. This prompts a number of epistemological questions that include: is the focus of enquiry for gender theorists the study of masculinity or men?

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Can we study men without recourse to gender? Can masculinity exist without gender? As Floyd suggests: It is one thing to deconstruct or defamiliarize masculinity in some new way or to insist that, ultimately, there is no such thing as masculinity in the singular but only a dizzying range of masculinities in the plural, as so much scholarship has done so powerfully for so long now. But it seems quite another thing to push the conceptual limits of masculinity studies itself, to try to think an outside to masculinity that does not immediately and predictably reveal itself to be femininity. (Floyd 2011: 46) One common theme that frames these questions is that: men’s lives might not be contained through particular masculinities; that there may be areas or moments in men’s lives where by explaining those moments though masculinity might be irrelevant: such possibilities are not comprehended in a men’s studies approach which, against its stated intentions, theorizes masculinity as a necessary attribute of human males. (Floyd 2011: 30) Mirsky usefully suggests that if men’s practices can only be understood or explained through the concept of masculinity, then the concept loses its analytical traction. According to Mirsky, masculinity is constituted in two key ways. First, masculinity is often defined in opposition to women and second, men are positioned as being in a more dominant position to women. This approach appears similar to early pro-feminist men’s projects, where gender interventions involve a political strategy that requires a radical rejection of their masculinity, which was seen as essentially tied up with a relationship of power. In this way, approaches to the study of men need to think not simply about identifying the range of masculinities, but moments where masculinity is resisted and the implications of this. One way to think about this is through the notion of post-masculinity (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2012). A post-masculinity position might align itself with queer or trans theory by thinking about a theory of gender that is not dependent upon masculinity and femininity identities. For example, Judith Butler explains how gender can be understood as a regulatory concept that operates to link masculine and feminine attributes to culturally designated bodies. In her account of gender, masculinity and femininity do not necessarily have to be reducible to gender, and gender does not have to be reducible to masculinity or femininity. The result of this is that a conceptual space can exist between masculinity and femininity on the one hand and gender on the other: ‘To keep the term gender apart from both masculinity and femininity is to safeguard a theoretical perspective by which one might offer an account of how the binary

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of masculine and feminine comes to exhaust the semantic field of gender’ (Butler 2004: 42). It is interesting to consider what might emerge from this conceptual space once the semantic possibilities of gender have been exhausted. According to Butler, this entails thinking about the ways that gender has become proliferated, where gender operates beyond the binaries of the feminine and the masculine. For Butler, the conceptual de-linking of masculinity from gender is a productive possibility. As a consequence, male behaviours, attitudes and practices can no longer be simple indicators of masculinity (or even gender). This resonates with European poststructural readings of representation that question the presumption of self-evident and fixed meaning. In the context of studying men, there is currently a compunction that male subjectivities and practices have to be explained by a concept of masculinity. The consequences of resisting the regulatory regime of dyadic gender theory is that a move beyond ‘masculinity’ as a conceptual and empirical default position is required. Queer theorists enable an understanding of how the regulatory basis of a dyadic notion of gender as masculinity and femininity requires a conceptual frame whereby subjectivities and practices have to be incorporated within that system. In short, there can be no space outside masculinity, where men’s subjectivities and practices can be explained. This is the basis of one of Jean Bobby Noble’s critiques of female masculinities, where the ascription of female masculinities leads to the re-inscription of an existing gendered signification, albeit via new representational strategies. More specifically, Noble argues that: ‘by gender I mean the sets of cultural meanings and technologies that, in the case of masculinity, have allowed power, an imaginary construction of the male body, and masculinity to all function as synonyms for each other’ (Noble 2006: 33). She goes on to argue that masculinity and the male body are not reducible to each other, but each is articulated through the other (Noble 2006: 35). One of the difficulties of this approach is that it is hard to provide empirical examples. However, Noble achieves this is by understanding the relationship between men, boys and masculinity. She highlights how contemporary culture is now fascinated with the notion of the boy – from Hollywood films through to music and boy bands. In the UK concerns over boys’ underachievement in education highlights how culturally precious boys have become. The appeal, according to Noble, is that boys have become understood in opposition to men. The cultural fascination with ‘boys’, if we agree with Noble, is that being a boy both promises a phallic power, but also eludes a hetero-normativity that often constitutes masculinities. Therefore, boys are required to participate in a cultural refusal, as part of a broader resistive moment to adult masculinity and its attendant symbolic weight and cultural expectation. It is therefore suggested that social and cultural notions of masculinity are premised on the rejection of boyhood and boyhood becomes a ‘productive failure’ of manhood (Noble 2006).

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An example of this can be found in recent media reports on boys and sexual activities with their female teachers. One of the patterns found in media accounts is that female teacher and boy-pupil sexual relations are not simplistically reported as sexual abuse. Rather, boys’ sexual activity is at one moment explained through their status as children, while at another moment becomes configured through epithets of adult hetero-normative masculinity. One headline that is used repeatedly when reporting on female teachers and male pupils is that of the ‘Miss Kiss’. By positioning teacher and pupil behaviours through this language, the sexual activity shifts from that of attack and abuse to one of childlike playground activities. For example, a report on a teacher who was convicted of ‘kissing a 15-year old boy in a school cupboard’ highlights that the judge warned the teacher about her ‘immature and romantic nonsense’ (Wainwright 2005). Other reports refer to ‘teen romps’, ‘groping’, ‘flirting’ ‘snogging’ and ‘Miss sacked over kisses’ (Higgins 2005). The language reflects boys’ underdeveloped sexual competency and inexperience. But rather than position the boys as innocent, they occupy a space of an active sexuality. Although news reports draw upon a ‘too young’ discourse as a means of textualising their moral and legal concern, their sexual practices that are ‘falling outside the heterosexualist continuum are effectively rendered unintelligible by mainstream narratives, including (and especially) those focused on boyhood and emergent masculinity’ (Quint 2005: 42). Thus, what appears as sexual practice of men, has to be re-signified. From this perspective, desire can only legally and morally exist within the possibilities of the category of childhood and at that point is re-coded as an ineffectual and immature childhood desire. However, these sexual practices stand outside the childhood discourse but cannot be contained within an adult masculinity. As a result, the gender of boys cannot be cohered through the concept of masculinity or childhood. As yet, we have not developed our gendered theory sufficiently to accommodate this gendered liminality.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted a number of different theories of masculinity that are being used across Europe to study and research men and masculinity. It began with a discussion of the historical foundations of masculinity studies, primarily in relation to feminism. The chapter then moved to explore how the disconnection between sex and gender could be thought of in relation to hegemony and hegemonic masculinities. The limitations of this approach were explored especially in relation to hegemonic masculinity. The chapter also highlighted the importance of queer theory and the implications of collapsing the dyadic notion of gender. Finally the chapter examined the possibility of understanding male genders outside of a masculinity identity. In summary, popular culture is awash with men’s issues crammed with discussions about

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the difficulties and problems associated with being a man. Television talk shows, magazines and editorials, and government press releases discuss not simply ‘problem men’, but also the problem of being a man. At the same time, social democratic projects across Europe are unravelling as the inequalities between men and women are appearing to widen. The need to make sense of men’s practices, how we describe them and how we understand what men do is a project that continues to be of key importance.

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INTRODUCTION: FEMINISM

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eminism constitutes one of the most important theoretical developments of modern times, and it has evolved in a number of directions, which are investigated in turn by Claire Nally, Carole Sweeney, and Stéphanie Genz in Chapters 16 to 18. Nally looks at first and second wave feminism from the rise of modern feminist thought in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, outlining how second wave feminists felt motivated both to react against and revise the themes and concerns of their first wave predecessors. She regards feminism as ‘a constantly evolving discourse’ that, for all the wide disparities in attitudes taken towards such issues as pornography, nevertheless features broad agreement about the need for social justice that forms a basis for feminism’s continued development. Sweeney’s topic is so-called ‘French’ feminism, and how it differs from the mainstream Anglo-American tradition of feminist thought. Often criticised for a bias towards biological essentialism, this style of feminism has been deeply influenced by French poststructuralism, particularly deconstruction and its insistence on the cultural importance of ‘difference’. Sweeney traces the radical shift in approach that occurs between Simone de Beauvoir and such controversial figures as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Genz covers the rise of postfeminism as a reaction to certain aspects of both first and second wave feminist thought, pointing out the many different, and often conflicting, meanings and connotations the term has come to have. Certainly, postfeminism has been a source of much controversy within feminist circles, but Genz nevertheless finds considerable value in its thoughtprovoking nature.

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16 FIRST AND SECOND WAVE FEMINISM Claire Nally

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eminism is a highly contested political and literary theory, marked by pluralities in the approach to sexuality and pornography; the role of Eurocentrism and women of colour; how we theorise biology and the body, alongside whether separatism is a viable and indeed useful perspective for a revolution in society at large. The following chapter will address the origins of feminism, through Mary Wollstonecraft and her precursors, then the major features of first wave feminist theory in figures like Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as how second wave feminists like Toril Moi, Shulamith Firestone and women from the Anglo-American tradition like Kate Millett sought to engage with and revise their predecessors. The tensions in feminism(s) in the late 1970s and 1980s, with Audrey Lorde’s analysis of the erotic in ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ (1984) and the exclusion of black women in feminist discourses in ‘I am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities’ (1988), as well as Andrea Dworkin’s articulation of anti-pornography feminism and separatism, reveal a highly complex body of critical thought. Finally, more recent critics, such as Donna Haraway in her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1991), have staged an intervention in traditionally ‘masculine’ discourses such as science and technology, while gesturing towards the complexities of postmodern feminism. There have been recent challenges to the notion of ‘the oceanography of the feminist movement’ (Siegel 1997: 52), or wave theory, that is, the standard linear chronology dating from the very late eighteenth century with a first wave high point in the early twentieth century, followed by a second wave in the 1960s and 1970s. As Ruth Lewis and Susan Marine note (2015), the notion of feminist ‘waves’ is problematic for several reasons. In dividing feminist history in these terms, we fail to draw analogies between generations of women; their influence on each other, and how feminist inheritance is used and negotiated. The ‘wave’ metaphor suggests ‘homogenous bodies of thought that are distinct from one another and, within each wave, feminists acting in agreement with one another – each a droplet in a wave’ (Lewis and

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Marine 2015: 131). Mindful of this, the current chapter will use the idea of the tapestry, as articulated by Lewis and Marine: In this version, feminism borrows from generations past but insists on its own values, priorities, and forms of agency. A tapestry is constituted by its history – the history of tapestry traditions, skills, techniques, materials, and the weavers who create the tapestry – so that the history is woven into the present. So with feminism; its history is present in contemporary feminism, its precursors are woven into the very fabric of the debate, politics and practices. (Lewis and Marine 2015: 132) Feminism becomes a constantly evolving discourse, rather than a series of discrete historical moments. Thus, while identifying the major theories of key feminists, this chapter will also set out the ways in which congruencies and parallels emerge in feminisms across the centuries.

Early Feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft In conventional analyses, feminism’s emergence is usually established with the first wave of writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, revealing antecedents in the Enlightenment’s focus on reason and egalitarianism as the cornerstone of modern society. Wollstonecraft published her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and it angered many readers: Horace Walpole famously commented of Wollstonecraft that she was ‘a hyena in petticoats’ (Johnson 2002: 1), and the gradual revelation of her bohemian personal life provided ample evidence for the dangers of feminism to her detractors. Her greatest contribution to early feminist politics is her challenge to women’s ‘innate’ weakness, in which she tackles Rousseau’s hypotheses that women are naturally dependent on men and ill-suited to learning (Wollstonecraft 1992: 108). In theology, women were universally held to be morally and physically inferior, after their biblical mother, Eve. Such constructions of femininity thereby contributed to the notion that women were unfit for public life, civil responsibility or any real employment beyond the home. Wollstonecraft disputes this position by maintaining ignorance only fosters weakness, while giving women access to education would promote active, vital and morally responsible citizens. Thus Wollstonecraft takes issue with stereotypes of femininity, and maintains that women’s inferiority (which she actually does not dispute) is caused by social environment rather than Nature. She maintains that ‘difference’ is not innate, but rather propagated by a society which denies women access to knowledge: ‘All the difference I can discern arises from the superior advantage of liberty which enables [men] to see more of life’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 105–6). She identifies that women are frequently rendered more ‘artificial, weak characters than they would

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otherwise have been; and consequently, more useless members of society’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 103), because through their lack of education, they suffer from a deficiency of Reason. The centrality of the use of Reason arises from the well-rehearsed arguments of Enlightenment philosophy, such as Kant’s ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (1784). This positions Reason as a cornerstone of humanity, alongside a hostility to authority which was eventually to culminate in the French Revolution (1789), and a confidence in the reform of modern civilisation along more egalitarian principles (Wollstonecraft 1992: 91–9). While A Vindication does not strike a modern reader as especially radical, given that Wollstonecraft doesn’t seek the vote, for instance, she nonetheless articulates a number of comparatively innovative ideas for her time. She asserts the need for financial independence and the ability to pursue a career: ‘How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty’ and notes that women only concern themselves with their appearance because patriarchy has encouraged female vanity through the necessity of competing in the marriage market (Wollstonecraft 1992: 268, 319). She also maintains that in cases of common-law marriage, a man should be compelled to provide for any children, and that ‘the [unmarried] woman who is faithful to the father of her children demands respect, and should not be treated like a prostitute’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 167). She also refers to ‘the absurd unit of a man and his wife’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 263), where in common law, a woman’s legal existence was deferred to her husband. This argument continued throughout the nineteenth century, until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 and 1882, which allowed women to own property and retain any money they earned in their own right. She characterises the reading of novels as ‘sentimental’, and asserts that due to a confined education, women pursue ‘trifling employments’: they naturally imbibe opinions which the only kind of reading calculated to interest an innocent frivolous mind inspires. Unable to grasp anything great, is it surprising that they find the reading of history a very dry task, and disquisitions addressed to the understanding intolerably tedious, and almost unintelligible? (Wollstonecraft 1992: 314) In order to foster female autonomy and intellectual ability, Wollstonecraft suggests that education should be founded on co-educational principles (Wollstonecraft 1992: 192), where girls and boys study from five to nine years of age, for free and across all social classes. She advocates the study of both the arts and sciences. While she doesn’t challenge a woman’s role as maternal caregiver and wife, she does imply a renegotiation of the public and private spheres through her advocacy of women’s potential contribution to society:

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Women might certainly study the art of healing and be physicians as well as nurses. . . . They might also study politics, and settle their benevolence on the broadest basis. . . . [I]s not that Government then very defective, and very unmindful of the happiness of one-half of its members, that does not provide for honest, independent women, by encouraging them to fill respectable stations? But in order to render their private virtue a public benefit, they must have a civil existence in the state, married or single. (Wollstonecraft 1992: 266–7) One of the major problems with A Vindication, and this is also the case with criticisms levelled at Virginia Woolf and first wave feminism generally, is that Wollstonecraft addresses herself to the plight of the middle-class, implicitly white, woman (Wollstonecraft 1992: 81). While she was sympathetic to the poor, the focus of her polemic in A Vindication does not concern them directly (in contradistinction to her other writings, such as Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 1796). She maintains that women should be ‘raised sufficiently above abject poverty not to be obliged to weigh the consequences of every farthing they spend, and having sufficient to prevent their attending to a frigid system of economy which narrows both heart and mind’ (Wollstonecraft 1992: 260). Conversely, the aristocratic lady is incapable of redemption by education, due to the luxurious nature of her existence, and will have no place in a reformed society (Wollstonecraft 1992: 81). Middle-class women are in the envious position of being neither stupefied by opulence or excessive toil, and are thereby well placed to effect potential change.

Virginia Woolf – Writing and Education for Women Along with her predecessors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and the Langham Place circle (a group of middle-class women meeting in the mid-nineteenth century) (Sanders 2001: 23), the focus of Virginia Woolf’s feminism was the provision of education and economic independence: ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (Woolf 1945: 6). She argued for a specifically female literary tradition, and articulated the concept of ‘androgyny’ in writing, while also celebrating lesbianism. These are the major themes of A Room of One’s Own (1929) while Three Guineas (1938) marks a departure in its seeming advocacy of separatism. While she had some brief participation in suffragist activism in the 1910s, her main objective was the intellectual life of women: suffrage and the right to vote were valuable causes, but for Woolf, insufficiently broad in its scope (Marcus 2000: 211). Woolf’s initial focus is on education targeted the inequalities of the system: while women-only colleges such as Girton and Newnham were founded in the late nineteenth century, women were only allowed to gain degrees equal

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to men from Cambridge University in 1948. In her famous and incensed story of women’s experience in Oxbridge, Woolf details how a Beadle provided a literal and physical barrier to her learning: she wasn’t allowed to walk on the grass (not being a Fellow or Scholar), and couldn’t gain access in the library unaccompanied or without a letter of introduction. For Woolf, the inequality of access to education is one of the reasons women do not have a literary tradition (feminism’s incursion into literary studies has at least recovered a part of a female lineage, but in Woolf’s time this was less visible). The solution is material: her independent income allows her the freedom to write. The denied access to writing is the substance of Woolf’s polemic about Shakespeare’s fictitious sister: a woman could not have written like Shakespeare, not because of intellectual failing, but material and societal limitations. A woman in the period would be forced into marriage. If she sought to avoid such a fate, she might seek solace in acting. But this too was debarred to her as a proper role for a woman. Ultimately, Shakespeare’s sister is seduced by a theatre manager and kills herself. As Woolf explains, ‘any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at’ (Woolf 1945: 51). Lacking the opportunity to deploy her gifts like her brother, her voice absent and silenced in the historical record. Viewing the paucity of women in the English literary tradition until Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, Woolf noted each of these female writers composed novels. Such middle-class women would have to write in the sitting room, and as Woolf suggested, it would be easier to write a novel than poetry or a play in such conditions: it also means their focus is on character and social relations, which is the very material before them. Woolf notes, in common with Wollstonecraft in this respect, that few women had ‘the right to possess what money they earned[,] . . . for all the centuries before that it would have been her husband’s property’ (Woolf 1945: 24). Even worse is the patriarchal ideology which secures aspirational women writers in their place: the world is indifferent to a poverty-stricken poet such as Keats, but openly hostile to a woman writing (Woolf 1945: 54). Woolf also identifies, with the absence of a female tradition, how women in literary texts are constructed purely in relation to men, rather than same-sex friendships or female solidarity – women do not write women, they are written about. In reference to lesbianism, Woolf states: ‘ “Chloe liked Olivia. . . .” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women’ (Woolf 1945: 81). She suggests Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra would be a very different text if Cleopatra liked Octavia: rather than constructing women through patriarchal logic (women in relation to men, women as lesser and other), women might write about themselves, and thus would be seen to be infinitely more complex:

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‘it is becoming evident that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests of domesticity’ (Woolf 1945: 83). In this, Woolf also articulates the inherent difference between men and women: ‘it is obvious the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail’ (Woolf 1945: 74). While generations of male writers have written about women, their experience is incommensurate to living life as a woman: how little can a man know [of a woman’s life] when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goddess and hellish depravity. (Woolf 1945: 82) Notably, Woolf had taken issue with the Madonna-Whore dichotomy in her deconstruction of the ‘Angel in the House’ (‘Professions for Women’), flagging up such characterisations of women as patriarchal constructions. In order to counter this, Woolf maintained women must write about their own experiences, different entirely from men’s perspective: ‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help’ (Woolf 1945: 76). She references the problem of biologism which would become a key focus for later feminisms (see Luce Irigaray for instance): The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits them[,] . . . doing something but something that is different; and what should that difference be? All this should be discussed and discovered. (Woolf 1945: 78) Here, Woolf primarily maintains that the roles of men and women in society determine the type of writing they produce. There is also an issue of language, insofar as Woolf’s feminism is fundamentally modernist. Her enterprise was to fracture language, as the female writer found ‘there is no common sentence ready for her use’ (Woolf 1945: 77). Woolf advocates breaking up the established structure of sentences and sequences, as she was to practise in her own novels, such as Mrs Dalloway (1925) and even more radically, The Waves (1931). Additionally, she mounts an eminently modernist critique of the notion of the humanist unified self, which she characterises as a monolithic, masculine and phallic ‘I’:

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It was a straight dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one always hailed to the letter ‘I’. (Woolf 1945: 98) In contrast to this perspective, Woolf identified the need for a plurality of experience: if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. (Woolf 1945: 96) Woolf theorised such a shift in consciousness as ‘androgyny’, whereby she means writing takes on a multiplicity of viewpoints: ‘that the mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment that it is naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided’ (Woolf 1945: 97). In articulating how this would work in feminist practice, Woolf references the ideal woman novelist: she wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when she is unconscious of itself. . . . [I]t is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. (Woolf 1945: 92, 102) It is also this issue of androgyny with which second wave feminists took issue. In A Literature of Their Own (1977), Elaine Showalter suggests Woolf’s notion of androgyny reveals how uneasy she was with femaleness, while Toril Moi maintains ‘Through her conscious exploitation of the sportive, sensual nature of language, Woolf rejects the metaphysical essentialism underlying patriarchal ideology’ (Moi 1985: 9). Equally problematic for some later feminists was Three Guineas, a text which aligns hypermasculinity, patriotism and fascism, in which Woolf rejects the notion of nationhood, explaining ‘as a woman I need no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (Woolf 1993: 234). This privileging of a white, middle-class feminism became central to some of the major debates in the second wave: how can the liberal perspective of the white woman equate with the doubly disenfranchised black woman’s experience? Several critics, including Audrey Lorde, would challenge feminism’s partiality in this respect.

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Simone de Beauvoir – The Other and Existential Feminism Initially published in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is foundational in terms of feminist discourses. However, de Beauvoir’s own political position was rooted in socialism, not feminism: At the end of The Second Sex I said that I was not a feminist because I believed that the problems of women would resolve themselves automatically in the context of socialist development. By feminist, I meant fighting on specifically feminine issues independently of the class struggle. (Schwarzer, 1984: 32) Despite this claim, in 1972 she declared herself feminist because she believed the radicalism of the second wave could institute the changes she had sought in The Second Sex. The ‘embroidery’ metaphor for the history of feminism, rather than the notions of ‘first’ and ‘second’ wave, might be reiterated here, as de Beauvoir’s positioning in the twentieth century does not suggest a break with prior theories, as much as sympathetic incorporation and renegotiation. The alliance of feminism and socialist politics is more uneasy than it might first appear. In literary theory, the Marxist-Feminist Collective sought to read Victorian texts through Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey, while Cora Kaplan has used Althusser to consider Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. Despite this, as Terry Eagleton noted in his Introduction to the Second Edition of Myths of Power, traditional Marxism has suffered from an ‘infamous “gender blindness” ’ (Eagleton 2005: xxvi) in its strategic partiality towards class. In some ways, de Beauvoir’s early position on feminism might be seen to collaborate with this perspective: ‘A truly socialist ethics, concerned to uphold justice without suppressing liberty and to impose duties on individuals without abolishing individuality, will find most embarrassing the problems posed by the condition of woman’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 89–90). Both traditional Marxism and de Beauvoir hoped that in a Marxist society, equality (including that of the sexes) would be a natural progression (there were figures who simultaneously sought to embrace feminism and leftist politics, such as the anarcha-feminist Emma Goldman). Despite this stance, she also offers a criticism of Engels, suggesting women’s oppression did not begin with capitalism (Tong 1992: 204). Ultimately, in this later work, she prioritises feminism above the class war: ‘I am a feminist today, because I realized that we must fight for the situation of women, here and now, before our dreams of socialism come true’ (Schwarzer 1984: 32). Despite her obvious allegiance with socialism, de Beauvoir’s major philosophical influence was not Marxism, but rather existentialist philosophy. She famously began her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929, and his work was influential in the background to The Second Sex. Following G. W.

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F. Hegel, who theorised that consciousness is alienated from itself, producing a fracture he described as the transcendent self (the observing ego) and the immanent self (the observed ego), Sartre saw the divided psyche as ‘Beingfor-Itself’ (pour-soi), and ‘Being-in-Itself’ (en-soi). Each Being-in-Itself locates itself as a subject, and locates all other social beings as objects, or Others. In acquiring self-definition and subjectivity, the psyche constantly asserts ascendancy over other beings: ‘In establishing all other beings as Others, each self describes and conceives of itself as transcendent and free and views the Other as immanent and enslaved’ (Tong 1989: 197). For de Beauvoir, this foundational tenet of existentialism also impacted on women’s experiences (de Beauvoir 1972: 96–7). She argued that man has designated woman as the Other, while retaining the ontological category of Self or the One for the male: The individual who is a subject, who is himself, if he has the courageous inclination towards transcendence, endeavours to extend his grasp on the world: he is ambitious, he acts. But an inessential creature is incapable of sensing the absolute at the heart of her subjectivity; a being doomed to immanence cannot find self-realization in acts. [She is] shut up in the sphere of the relative, destined to the male from childhood, habituated to seeing in him a superb being whom she cannot possibly equal. (de Beauvoir 1972: 653) In articulating this position, de Beauvoir rejected the idea of essentialism. She carefully delineates how reproductive sexuality is often characterised in terms of active (male) and passive (female), and how ‘[t]he ovule has sometimes been likened to immanence, the sperm to transcendence’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 44), but rather than resorting to biologism, she maintains that reproductive discourses of medicine and science view empirical data according to social constructs and with patriarchal ideology at the root of its theorisation: ‘On the respective functions of the two sexes man has entertained a great variety of beliefs. At first they had no scientific basis, simply reflecting social myths. . . . With the advent of patriarchal institutions, the male laid eager claim to his posterity’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 39). Indeed she expressly counters essentialism as follows: ‘I deny that [biological facts] establish for her a fixed and inevitable destiny’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 65). This engagement with scientific discourses is replicated in Donna Haraway’s exploration of the gendering of biology in Primate Visions (1989) and her evasion of this essentialism in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (discussed further below). The most famous declaration of The Second Sex: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 295) is of a piece with de Beauvoir’s anti-essentialism. Indeed, in common with second wave feminist Shulamith Firestone, de Beauvoir resisted the idea that maternity was a high point of a

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woman’s life (de Beauvoir 1972: 62–3), but rather saw childbearing as another way in which women can be objectified and alienated from themselves. She also highlighted that the independent woman with a career, who might nonetheless be married, does not exempt herself from the duties society apportions her as a woman: ‘She does not want to feel that her husband is deprived of advantages he would have obtained if he had married a “true woman”; she wants to be presentable, a good housekeeper, a devoted mother, such as wives traditionally are’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 703). In ascertaining the ways in which women are encouraged to manage working life, home life, conventional femininity, beauty, marriage and children, de Beauvoir identifies similar issues that would later concern third wave feminists: in short, the ways in which contemporary popular culture suggests women can ‘have it all’.

Feminism’s Second Wave As Lewis and Marine have identified (2015), in the attempt to portray the history of feminism chronologically, the fissures in feminism are often emphasised, alongside departures from one’s predecessors, rather than the nature of inheritance and common ground. Imelda Whelehan also iterates that in historicising feminism, we must note that, ‘Modern liberal feminists have reaped the benefits of two centuries of liberal feminist writings, and in a sense, all current feminist positions derive impetus and inspiration from such writers’ (Whelehan 1995: 34). This is not to overlook the tensions and different perspectives which cohere under feminism, but rather to address the commonality as well as generational shifts in women’s emancipatory political thought. Following the success of the first wave, US agitation for liberation had several strands: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, which contested the role of the housewife and mother as the only legitimate lifestyle choice for women. Indeed she identified that women’s magazines in the 1950s and 1960s bolstered such an ideology, with editorial decisions made chiefly by men. Women had less access to the workplace due to internal and societal pressures to forsake their careers for marriage and a family. Freidan founded NOW (National Organization for Women) in 1966, to campaign against sex discrimination, in response to the US Equal Opportunity Commission’s failure to respond to appeals for equal rights. On a smaller but more radical scale, the idea of the collective had great influence in later feminisms: women’s liberation in the US and in the UK had strong allegiances with civil rights groups, trade unions and anti-war campaigns. In September 1968, a demonstration against Miss America beauty pageant included a ‘Freedom Trash Can’, into which campaigners threw heels, bras, girdles and dishcloths as symbols of women’s enslavement (Thornham 2001: 31). In America, there were links between feminism, anti-Vietnam and student crusades, while in the UK, feminism often aligned itself with working-class militancy, industrial

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disaffection and most prominently, activism like Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. In 1981, ‘Women for Life on Earth’ began a long-standing campaign against the storage of American nuclear weapons at RAF Greenham, and in December 1982, 30,000 women held hands around the perimeter fencing. Such radical politics also required a theoretical reinforcement: the rise in radical feminism, including lesbian activism, became a major thread in the feminist tapestry. We only need look to figures such as Audrey Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig for evidence of this in the second wave. However, it is also a strong feature of earlier feminisms: both Woolf and de Beauvoir evaded conventional heterosexuality in theory and in practice (Meese 1992, Simons 1992), testifying to the ways in which feminism overlaps and influences each generation of women. In literary theory specifically, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) is a feminist classic. She addresses the importance of gendered power dynamics, alongside the progress of first wave feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how these ‘sexual politics’ have influenced the writings of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Jean Genet. Millet established a model of feminist literary criticism as ‘a critical force to be reckoned with. Its impact makes it the “mother” and precursor of all later works of feminism criticism in the Anglo-American tradition’ (Moi 1985: 24). In contradistinction to the New Critical model’s focus on the literary text, Millett argued for the importance of political and social contextualisation: ‘I operate on the premise that there is room for a criticism which takes into account the larger cultural context in which literature is conceived and produced’ (Millett 2000: xx). One of the major problems with Millett, however, is the way in which her own feminist legacies are startlingly absent. For instance, as Moi notes, Millett is clearly indebted to Simone de Beauvoir, but she makes only a fleeting appearance in Sexual Politics (Moi 1985: 25). Despite this, the radical agenda of the book is still current. Sheila Jeffreys reads Millett in tandem with the pornography industry: ‘ideas about women and sex in the 1960s novels by Norman Mailer and Henry Miller which Millett scrutinises so incisively lie at the foundation of today’s industry, and contemporary feminist campaigns against pornography will be enriched by the knowledge of her work’ (Jeffreys 2011: 76). As such, Millett’s currency to later debates can be identified, especially given Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon’s work, or more broadly, the ‘Porn Wars’ of feminism.

Feminist Biologies – Shulamith Firestone In her radical feminist discussion in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Firestone engaged with a number of key issues which had been occupying feminist theories for centuries: reproduction and the nuclear family, the construction of women as caregivers, as well as how to locate socialism within feminism (this

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was fundamental to de Beauvoir and later to Haraway, the former of which Firestone references at several intervals). Firestone maintains that ‘sex class is so deep as to be invisible’ (in Nicholson 1997: 19), by which she means sexual difference underpins every form of social organisation. She castigated Marx and Engels for overlooking this in their analysis of inequality. Her discussion of historical materialism, therefore, has an emphatically gendered perspective: historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historic events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another; in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction and childcare created by these struggles; in the connected development of other physically-differentiated classes [castes]; and in the first division of labor based on sex which developed into the [economic-cultural] class system. (in Nicholson 1997: 25–6) She targets the idea of ‘Nature’ as a stable category which predetermines our behaviour: ‘Feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the very organization of nature’ (in Nicholson 1997: 20). Biological contingencies, such as a woman’s capacity for childbirth, is not actually celebrated (unlike in other feminisms such as Mary O’Brien and Adrienne Rich, who saw female reproductive capacity as a source of strength), and here it is rather an instance of oppression. In rephrasing Engels, she shifts our focus from economic to biological conditions: ‘relations of reproduction rather than of production [are] the driving force in history’ (Tong 1992: 72). Rather than differentiating between the sexes, Firestone maintained that if men and women could abandon their designated roles in reproduction, it would be one step towards dismissing sexual roles entirely. In some ways, this involves a complete reconsideration of scientific discourses: Evelyn Fox Heller has identified how far discussions of biology are predicated on metaphors of active and passive which in turn shore up cultural determinants of gendered behaviour and construct these as entirely natural. She notes that the narrative of reproduction often figures the egg as a passive and feminine receiver of the active masculine sperm. Alternative scientific discussions have narrated the idea of fertilisation that involves a process where cells ‘find each other and fuse’ (Heller 1995: 34). While Firestone certainly sees ‘the basic reproductive unit of male/female/infant’ as immutable fact (in Nicholson 1997: 23), she nonetheless maintains the nuclear family is a comparatively recent development in human relations, and one which we can circumvent through the intervention of science: while she cautions that ‘new technology, especially fertility control’ (in Nicholson 1997: 24) may be used against women to reinforce exploitation, she nonetheless explores the ways in which ‘artificial

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reproduction’ would thwart a child’s dependence on the mother, resulting in a fairer division of labour in the home and the public sphere. It would also mean that ‘genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally (a reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality . . . would probably supercede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality)’ (in Nicholson 1997: 25). In her evaluation of biology as something from which we need to be freed, Firestone might be located alongside other feminists such as Donna Haraway.

Porn Wars – Feminism, Separatism and the Sexualisation of Women The issue of pornography and the sexualisation of women’s bodies in the service of pleasure, is one of the most contested and fraught areas of feminist theory. Drucilla Cornell’s Feminism and Pornography helpfully reframes tensions and what she calls ‘the divisive “which side are you on” mentality’ (Cornell 2000: 1) in preference for representation of the challenges surrounding the theorisation of sexual explicitness. The academic journal Porn Studies was launched in 2013, provoking outrage from some sections of the feminist community (Cadwalladr 2013). Similarly, narratives which affirm sexual emancipation from figures like Brooke Magnanti (the writer of the Belle du Jour diaries from the early 2000s) and campaigns for the rights of sex workers reveal the problems surrounding the cultural representations of sexually explicit material: we can see the tensions from the 1970s and 1980s are still current today. Feona Attwood, one of the editors of Porn Studies, has identified the myriad ways in which pornographic material has been mainstreamed (Attwood 2010) and Brian McNair has theorised how the ‘pornosphere’ functions in modern society (McNair 2002). Equally campaigns such as ‘No More Page Three’ and the criticisms levelled at fitness regimes such as pole dancing and burlesque reveal how there is still little consensus about women and sexuality. Germaine Greer summarises this point in lucid, cautionary terms as follows: ‘To deny a woman her sexuality is certainly to oppress her but to portray her as nothing but a sexual being is equally to oppress her’ (Greer 2007: 410–11). The tensions within second wave feminism about the state-sponsored prohibition of pornography centred on Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon’s Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance campaign of 1983. Essentially, they maintained that pornography was a violation of women’s civil rights and an instrument of patriarchal oppression. One of the major problems was that of definition: what exactly constitutes pornography? Dworkin and MacKinnon identified it as ‘the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women whether in picture or words’ (Cornell 2000: 29), but they also identified it should include one or more of the following representations of women: dehumanisation as sexual objects, things or commodities; enjoyment of pain or humiliation; sexual pleasure in being raped, tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised

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or physically hurt; postures of sexual submission; body parts are exhibited so that women are objectified and reduced to those parts; penetration by objects or animals; scenes of degradation, injury, abasement, torture, shown as filthy or interior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual (Cornell 2000: 29). The problem is that by its very nature, women are constructed as victims, sexuality is enacted upon them rather than by them: ‘pornography is the institution of male dominance that sexualizes hierarchy, objectification, submission, and violence’ (Cornell 2000: 32). Despite the liberal defence (including from feminists) that the sexual imagination should not be policed by the state, Dworkin and MacKinnon maintained (in common with the feminist adage) that ‘the personal is political’, identifying that most pornography is produced through sexual and economic inequality: women are subjected to coercion, abuse, exploitation, while the conditions of production are related to poverty and homelessness: ‘these conditions constrain choice rather than offering freedom’ (Cornell 2000: 103). One of the ways in which anti-pornography crusades achieved a politicisation of sexuality was to draw a clear alignment between pornography, rape, male violence and the murder of women. In a speech from a ‘Take Back the Night’ March in 1978, Dworkin suggested that: erotic pleasure for men is derived from and predicated on the savage destruction of women. . . . The fact is that the process of killing – and both rape and battery are steps in that process – is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination. . . . [P]ornography functions to perpetuate male supremacy and crimes of violence against women because it trains, educates and inspires men to despise women, to use women, to hurt women. (Cornell 2000: 41–2) We might note a number of issues which complicate this representation. Dworkin’s opponents have questioned whether the link between pornography and male violence was as predetermined as she suggested (Cornell 2000: 258), and speculated whether it might be preferable to deconstruct pornography, rather than prohibit it entirely. This leads us to a careful and situated critique about the nature of sexualised visual culture. As with all discursive practices, pornography is not a static formation which functions in a singular cultural context: consumption and audience, representation, production conditions all plainly influence the marketable product. While Laura Mulvey usefully theorised how women are constructed by the male gaze in cinematographic techniques (Mulvey 1975), a female gaze might have a very different discursive effect. One of the major interrogations of Dworkin and McKinnon’s theoretical stance was the nature of gay pornography (produced by the community and for the community), which articulates (at least ideally) alternative sexualities and institutes a

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reconsideration of heteronormativity. As Frug suggests: ‘Not all pornography is simply about women being fucked. There are some pornographic works in which women fuck, for example . . . and many works in which the subjectivity of a female character is a dominant and successful thematic concern’ (Cornell 2000: 262–3). For instance, there might be a perceptible difference in the ideology, production values and marketing of an SM pornographic film created by lesbian women for a female audience. Dworkin and MacKinnon’s critique is clearly based on a model of heterosexuality: something that men enact on women. By contrast, lesbian and socialist feminists felt that censorship would merely codify already stringent laws against repressed groups, and indeed, many gay and lesbians articulate that pornography produced for them and by them is actually empowering (Whelehan 1995: 78). Related to this, Adrienne Rich claimed that there is ‘a nascent feminist political content in choosing a woman lover or life partner, in the face of institutionalized heterosexuality’, although she doubts whether even lesbian pornography is created for anything other than ‘the male voyeuristic eye’ (Rich 1980: 659, 641). The advantage of lesbian sexuality is that its very nature circumvents, excludes and destabilises patriarchy, and therefore some commentators maintain that its expression in pornography is a radical gesture. The ‘porn wars’, as they came to be known, produced fissures in second wave feminism, but as we will see in Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg, it is possible to renegotiate instances of essentialised identities which caused so much contention in the second wave feminist community.

Cyborg Studies and Postmodernism – Donna Haraway and Technological Feminism In some ways, posthumanism has presented one of the most pertinent interventions in feminist discourses. In her book, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Katharine Hayles identifies that posthumanism deconstructs our privileging of the body. Materiality is ‘an accident of history’ (Hayles 1999: 2) and one which can be successfully renegotiated through the process of hybridisation with the machine: ‘in the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals’ (Hayles 1999: 3). Thus the idea of ‘Nature’ itself, with all the gender determinants this implies, can be rendered null and void. One of the clearest ways in which posthumanism functions is through technological development (and indeed, we might note how the emergence of ‘fourth wave’ feminism in the twenty-first century, with its emphasis on Web 2.0 and Internet activism owes something to a dialogue with Haraway and posthumanism), including various medical interventions in the performance and treatment of the physical body, augmentation

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through prosthesis, and perhaps more unusually, the role of gaming in popular culture. In 2013, one of the clearest articulations of this was the development of the Android game ‘Ingress’ (https://www.ingress.com/), closely linked to the geo-caching phenomenon which uses GPS systems and navigational devices to locate real-world objects. In games which employ geo-caching, the online environment overlaps with the real world, conflating the public and the private in an entirely new way. Theoretically, the conflation of human and machine opens up new possibilities for thinking about the performance of identity, despite the visibility of gendered and frequently misogynistic discourses online (for instance, see @EverdaySexism on Twitter). What is real/artificial, the self/ the other is no longer a particularly relevant demarcation, and in this way, the traditional humanist perspective of selfhood is revised. Enlightenment universality predicated on the white, middle-class privileged male becomes redundant in the face of the plural, multiple and shifting identities of the posthuman, undermining binary discourses and opening up the possibility of defeating Lyotardian grand narratives (see the ‘Postmodernism’ section of this volume), including origin myths, biology and even the Garden of Eden itself: It is certainly true that post-modernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (e.g. the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature – a source of insight and a promise of innocence – is undermined, probably fatally. (Haraway 2004: 11) In ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Donna Haraway presents one of the earliest articulations of posthumanism, and anticipates technological revolutions by several decades. Haraway’s theory might be correlated with Shulamith Firestone’s in some respects, especially given the ways in which the interaction between science and feminism has produced new freedoms for women (IVF, surrogacy, contraception). Certainly this is one of the developments Haraway underscores when she claims, ‘Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality’ (Haraway 2004: 7). Rather than being constructed by, or indeed subjected to, biological and material instantiations (of which the second wave was paradoxically as guilty as traditional patriarchy), the cyborg allows for the combination of the organic and the manufactured: it is a hybrid involved in combining informational simulations and the ‘natural’ body: [C]ertain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. . . . High-tech

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culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices. (Haraway 2004: 35) Haraway’s suspicion of second wave biological essentialism provokes this postmodern interrogation of ‘nature’ and the Real, the celebration of multiplicity and the composite body. More broadly, her celebration of cultural difference (race, gender or class) offers a way to negotiate future feminisms and inclusivity.

Conclusion Feminism (or more properly, feminisms) can be seen to convey a complex set of theoretical positions. In broad agreement about social justice for women, the achievement of this goal is approached in a multifaceted way: sexuality and pornography, femininities, biology and the usefulness of separatism have all been touchstones for debates, renegotiations and contestations. Despite this, the overwhelming narrative of feminism is one of consolidation: the influence of women’s voices from history are still heard in the present. If we consider Caroline Criado-Perez’s campaign in 2013 to ensure Jane Austen featured on an English banknote, or the ways in which women have recently taken to the streets again in the revival of grassroots protests such as ‘Reclaim the Night’, as well as Internet campaigns such as The Everyday Sexism Project (Cochrane 2013), we can see that the legacies of first and second wave feminisms are essential as we progress further into the twenty-first century.

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17 AFTER DE BEAUVOIR: ‘FRENCH’ FEMINISM AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Carole Sweeney

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ew would deny, notes Teresa de Lauretis, that feminism has been ‘all about an essential difference’ (de Lauretis 1990a: 255). How sexual difference, rather than ethnic, national or economic difference, is defined, deployed or denied has been one of the central concerns of second and third wave feminisms. In Britain and the USA at the beginning of feminism’s second wave in the 1960s, the question of sexual difference was secondary to more pressing material questions of social, juridical and political discrimination against women in their everyday lives. This kind of feminism, broadly termed equality or liberal feminism, was activist and pragmatic in orientation, depending on a working definition of woman for political efficacy. While it was strategically expedient for liberal feminism’s project to posit ‘woman’ as a universal category, the solidity of this definition began to be challenged by the insights of a different kind of feminism, informed by Continental philosophy, that focused less on the conditions of material oppression than on the psycho-symbolic structures of patriarchal thought that subordinated women in less visible, but no less injurious, ways. As it split between its Anglo-American and Continental versions, the methodological fault line running through second wave feminism was the definition of sexual difference, and two seemingly opposing strands of feminism developed in the late 1960s and 70s. Generally, Anglo-American feminism was concerned with the politics of class and ethnicity, focusing on lived experience and women’s oppression in the widest sense, while ‘French’ feminism, heavily influenced by poststructuralism, philosophy and psychoanalysis, was more interested in the naturalising operations of patriarchal language and systems of thought that constructed woman as ontological otherness For Julia Kristeva, sexual difference is at once biological and physiological, and this initial difference is translated into ‘the symbolic contract – that is, the social contract’, a ‘difference between men and women as concerns their relationships to power, language, and meaning’. This translation results in, as she

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notes in ‘Women’s Time’, the ‘interiorization of the fundamental separation of the socio-symbolic contract’ (Kristeva 1995: 210, 223). In its ‘French’ mode then, feminism pulled away from the concerns of Anglo-American liberal feminism and the quest for political and economic equality to explore how sexual difference is constructed by the universalism underpinning Western thought that can only conceive of femininity as man’s negative copy and thus, eternally, radically other. This exploration turned to psychoanalysis, first to Freud, then to Lacan, in order to question the psychic economy of sameness inscribing woman both as unknowable alterity and an overdetermined signifier. Freud’s concepts of sexual difference and the ‘riddle of femininity’ had been rejected by earlier feminists who objected to his theories of castration and penis envy that seemed to assert, unproblematically, the primacy of the masculine subject. However, as Juliet Mitchell argues in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Freud’s theorisation of sexual difference is symptomatic rather than prescriptive: ‘Psychoanalysis’, she says, ‘does not describe what a woman is far less what she should be; it can only try to comprehend how psychological femininity comes about’ (Mitchell 1974: 338). For Mitchell, and feminist work influenced by the French Lacanian school, such as Jacqueline Rose’s Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986) and Shoshana Felman’s Literature and Psychoanalysis (1977), Freud’s concepts are not so much concerned with the real, anatomical organ of the penis than its socially constituted symbolic power and ‘the ideas of it that people hold and live by within the general culture’ (Mitchell 1974: xvi). At the centre of what became known as French feminism then, is the importance of the symbolic power of the phallus as it is operates, often imperceptibly, in language and thought. Influenced by the poststructuralist scepticism towards the idea of a unified subject, French feminism turned its attention to the phallocentric systems of thought that sustain the logic of patriarchy through a dissemination of an economy of ‘the problematics of sameness’ (Irigaray 1985a: 26–7). Roused by the changed intellectual currents after May 1968, this type of feminism emerged out of a post-Nietzschean Continental tradition and, accordingly, had particular views on the construction of subjectivity. Rather than assuming the stable subject that was central (even crucial) to the Anglo-American tradition of social and materialist feminism, French feminism was informed by the concept of the divided subject that was integral to post-Freudian psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. Whereas Anglo-American feminism tended towards a more ethically orientated egalitarianism, focused on the communality amongst women and their agency in the world, French feminism was, as de Lauretis notes, characterised by ‘pleasure, danger, radical difference, subversion’ (de Lauretis 1990b: 29). These two strands then, often in productive but sometimes antagonistic relation, form the bifurcated trajectory of feminist critical thought – between equality and difference feminism – in both its second and third waves.

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In the American tradition, difference feminism, exemplified by works such as Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989) and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982), posited some essential biological differences between men and women. Focusing on the outcomes and effects of difference rather than on its origins, they were more interested in psychology than psychoanalysis in their identification of ‘feminine’ difference. A notable exception was Nancy Chodorow’s extremely influential examination of object-relation theories, The Reproduction of Mothering, in which she writes of the ‘centrality of sex and gender’ in psychoanalysis, and that sexually differentiated gender roles are the result of ‘social structurally induced psychological processes’ (Chodorow 1978: 7). Elsewhere, there was an emphasis on pointing up women’s invisibility in literature in a new type of feminist literary criticism, often described as gynocentric, that included, for example, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), Ellen Moer’s Literary Women (1976), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1970) and Adrienne Rich’s ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (1972). At first glance these two strands of feminism appear wholly incompatible; the former devoted to fighting social, political and economic discrimination against women based on their sexual difference, arguing that women are not different but rather equal to men, while the latter uncovers the deep workings of sexual difference in philosophy and culture and asserts the centrality of this difference, suggesting that this very marginality can work to inscribe women more powerfully in culture. However, across these two positions (and in particular in earlier difference feminism) there was often a convergence of interests as both versions sought to defy the patriarchal idea that women were inferior because of their difference to men and thus each version of these two feminisms sought to endow sexual difference with positive rather than negative values. In very different ways, then, both types of feminism were involved in establishing an affirmative notion of sexual difference. For most forms of feminism, the question of sexual difference demanded a new interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture, opening up new questions for feminism: is sexual difference biologically ‘natural’ and therefore immutable? Or, rather, do cultural and ideological forces wholly construct difference? If sexual difference is produced by biology and physiology how do these, then, affect ontology and epistemology? And if sexual difference does exist, should the attributes of femininity always be seen as positive in relation to a negatively defined masculinity? While each version of feminism, French and Anglo-American, was committed, albeit in different ways, to describing and condemning women’s oppression, the question of sexual difference began to assume a more central place in debates across feminism, often structured around questions of equality versus difference, and of essentialism versus nonessentialism (for the equality-difference debate see Joan W. Scott 1990). As the question of sexual difference became central to feminist critical theory in the

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1970s and 80s, the role of language began to take up a more important position in these debates. However, many of these questions, concerning language and philosophy as well as the material conditions of women’s oppression, were first suggested in a much earlier feminist work that for the first time addressed the question of sexual difference in both philosophical and material contexts. The bridge between first and second wave feminism, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) opens with the now-famous statement, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 295), suggesting for the first time that sexual difference, specifically femininity, was culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. In meticulous detail, over two volumes, de Beauvoir analysed the idea of a ‘natural’ essence of femininity versus the cultural constructedness of femininity, suggesting a distinction between the categories of sex and gender in the production of woman as a cultural signifier. After accounting for the concept of essence in an existential sense, that is, woman presented as immanence and man as transcendence, de Beauvoir argued that whether understood culturally or physiologically, sexual difference for women, is almost exclusively located in her body: ‘Woman, like man’, she says, ‘is her body; but her body is something other than herself’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 61). For de Beauvoir, it is in the discrepant spaces between the body and the self, between biology and ontology, that women experience a sense of alienation and alterity. For the most part underappreciated, even ignored, at the time of its publication, The Second Sex represented an important moment for feminist thought in that it proposed, for the first time, a difference between the categories of sex and gender. This distinction, however, was sometimes less than clear-cut in her explanations and, as Toril Moi notes, de Beauvoir’s dilemma is that she argues that ‘Woman both is and is not her body’ (Moi 1994: 90). This dilemma is produced by the tensions between de Beauvoir’s feminism that is characterised by the complex materiality and overdetermined nature of the female body and a Sartrean existentialism that requires the existence of a free subject. On the one hand, de Beauvoir notes that there are few significant and abiding biological differences between males and females and those that appear in humans, particularly post-puberty, are the result of social and cultural conditioning and habituation rather than any physiological factors. On the other hand, however, in the chapter ‘The Data of Biology’ she offers a description of women’s sexual difference as predominantly biological: ‘From puberty to menopause woman is the theatre of a play that unfolds within her and in which she is not personally concerned’, and elsewhere she states that from ‘birth the species seems to have taken possession of woman and tends to tighten its grasp’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 60, 58). In this oscillation between two seemingly incompatible positions, de Beauvoir alights upon a complex situation in which biology is not extricable from culture and her work reaches, what Moi calls, a productive ‘double impasse’ (Moi 1994: 91).

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In many ways ahead of its time, de Beauvoir’s work problematised the question of sexual difference suggesting that the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ are so complexly intertwined that it is often difficult to separate them out into distinct components: ‘it is not upon physiology that values can be based; rather the facts of biology take on the values that the existent bestows upon them’, and also ‘we must view the facts of biology in the light of an ontological, economic, social and psychological context’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 68–9, 69). Presciently, de Beauvoir noted the degree of women’s acculturation into patriarchy is so acute as to ‘produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature’ (de Beauvoir 1972: 26). Thus, sexual difference, is posited here as a complex configuration that cannot be easily separated into distinct biological or cultural factors and that the effects of the latter are so profound and yet so undetectable that they appear as ‘natural’. For de Beauvoir then, sexual difference, whether understood as innate and biological or constructed and cultural, was central to an understanding of women’s social, economic and cultural oppression. In this way, The Second Sex laid important foundations for second wave feminism, both in Europe and the USA. However, the insights in de Beauvoir’s work would stand in a complex and often fraught relationship with the next generation of feminism in France much of which was influenced by the psychoanalysis she had roundly denounced. In the gauchiste setting of post-’68 France, with its new intellectual and political energies, a new type of feminism was emerging in France in which the demand for appreciable material equality played little part. As the memory of les evénéments began to fade, this generation of soixant-huitard feminists ‘took the question of sexual difference in new, and often controversial, directions’ (Fraser and Bartky 1992: 2). Influenced by Derridean poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in literary studies, this new type of theoretical feminism seemed to take issue with, on the surface at least, many of the insights of The Second Sex. Particularly hostile to de Beauvoir’s aversion to psychoanalysis and an emphasis on sexual equality, this feminism was not, however, a wholesale repudiation of her work. Indeed, as Moi has noted, the relationship between French feminism and Beauvoir has sometimes been a vexed one but one that, despite different theoretical orientations and ideological concerns, shares some common ground. In fact, in 1976 de Beauvoir distanced herself from what she regarded as the injurious essentialism of French feminism by refusing to assert the superiority of women over men. Summarising the concerns of ‘French’ feminism and its focus on the ‘symbolic contract’ of sexual difference, Kristeva avoids such questions of inferiority and superiority, rather pointing up the importance of the ways in which the symbolic contact, as invisible as it is powerful, determines a woman in the social domain so forcefully that it appears as if she were naturally this way or that:

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Sexual, biological, physiological, and reproductive difference reflects a difference in the relation between subjects and the symbolic contract – that is, the social contract. It is a matter of clarifying the difference between men and women as concerns their respective relationships to power, language, and meaning. The most subtle aspects of the new generation’s feminist subversion will be directed towards this issue in the future. This focus will combine the sexual with the symbolic in order to discover first the specificity of the feminine . . . and then the specificity of each woman. (Kristeva 1995: 210) A label invented largely outside of France, ‘French’ feminism is a term that many feminists in France have subsequently disputed, and even, in some case, derided. Less a movement than a loosely aligned intellectual affinity between a few poststructural theorists, many of whom were linguisticians and psychoanalysts, this feminism grew in importance and reach from the late 1970s to the end of the 1980s, but in many ways has eclipsed other varieties of feminism. As Christine Delphy has noted, ‘French feminism’ ‘is not feminism in France’ (Delphy 1995: 166; see also Gambaudo 2007; other notable proponents of ‘French’ feminism are Catherine Clément and Sarah Kofman). Although its critical legacy and influence continues to be felt to the present, in reality, French feminism was a small, if disproportionately influential, component of a much wider feminism in France. Feminists in France who were not part of ‘French’ feminism include Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin and Nicole-Claude Mathieu. Unconcerned with civil disobedience and the juridical reformation of a broader activist feminism in France that sought equality and political change, French feminism focused on psycholinguistics, poetics and philosophy, producing theoretical writing often condemned for its abstraction and sibylline obfuscation. De Beauvoir objected vehemently to what she regarded as the mystifying writing style of ‘French’ feminism, claiming that Hélène Cixous’s work in particular was virtually impossible to read. The work of ‘French’ feminism challenged American humanist, liberal feminism as well as the more socialist, materialist orientations of British feminism. While both of these kinds of feminism had largely discredited psychoanalysis, in particular Freud’s accounts of female sexuality, ‘French’ feminists looked to psychoanalysis, and in particular to Lacan’s reworking of Freud and his notion of language and the symbolic order, for different explanations of sexual difference. Originating in the disciplinary tradition of Politique et Psychoanalyse, a group founded by Antoinette Fouque that Delphy has condemned as an ‘antifeminist political trend’ (Delphy 1995: 167), they reversed the hierarchy of these terms to ‘psych et po’ in order to emphasise psychoanalysis over politics. Indeed, as Delphy points out, two out of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of French feminists, Luce Irigaray (1930–), Hélène Cixous (1937–), and Julia Kristeva (1941–), positioned themselves very explicitly as non-feminists

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even to the alarm of the MLF (Mouvement de Libération de la femme) taking to the streets of Paris to protest against the term feminism (Delphy 1995: 192). Other feminist groups in France were adamant that the psychoanalytical insistence of these ‘non-feminists’ on the primacy of the female body was a serious flaw that ignored the fact that, according to them, women were a distinct social class rather than biologically defined entities. In 1977 the Questions féministes collective published a written denunciation of the Psych et Po position: ‘We believe that there is no such thing as a direct relationship with the body; to say there is, is not subversive, because its denies the existence and power of social forces – the very forces that oppress us, oppress our bodies’ (Duchen 1986: 41). A third, and lesser-known, French feminist theorist, Monique Wittig (1935–2003), whose work would have a profound influence on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1999) had a more temperate engagement with poststructuralist thought. In her essay ‘One is Not Born a Woman’, she picks up where Beauvoir left off, arguing that women ‘have been compelled in [their] bodies and in [their] minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for [them]’ (Wittig 1997: 309). ‘French’, or perhaps more properly French poststructural psychoanalytical feminists were all, in different ways, concerned with a psycholinguistic and philosophical understanding of Beauvoir’s dilemma in The Second Sex: what might it mean to be both born and become a woman? Although significantly different in many ways, what unites the work of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva is the shared view that ‘woman’ as a signifier is a deeply problematic category; one simultaneously overdetermined and yet invisible within a patriarchal system that has, as Lisa Walsh notes ‘always figured subjectivity on a masculine model of identity’, one which has systematically refused to ‘acknowledge that which lies outside the parameters of an unified, thoroughly self-conscious subjectivity’ (Oliver and Walsh 2004: 4). Thus, the work of ‘French’ feminism examined both the state of being and the processes of becoming a woman imbricated in an economy of phallocentric sameness that consigns femininity to a negatively inscribed margin of body and matter. Further, they explored the sense of an otherness that might exist in a subject that is freed from, or at least made aware of, the false binary of male-female. Unlike much of AngloAmerican feminism, these writers broadly agreed on the non-identity of the subject and its ‘in process’ status. For Cixous, the subject is a ‘non-closed off mix of self/s and others’ (Cixous 1994: xvii); while for Kristeva, the ‘subject never is’ but ‘only the signifying process’ (Kristeva 1984: 215). Strongly informed by Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive method and the concept of différance first proposed in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ (1966), French feminism drew particularly upon a specific aspect of deconstruction that interrogated the ‘natural’ binaries underlying Western ontology. Arguing that the binaries organising thought are not neutral pairings but structured by

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a privileging of presence and identity in the first term, we must recognise, says Derrida, that in ‘a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy’ (Derrida 1981a: 41). Drawing out the repercussions of Saussure’s notion of language as a system of ‘difference without positive presence’, Derrida thus challenges the authority of the binary logic structuring Western thought and the idea of a transcendent centre holding all in place and in so doing dismantles, or at least undermines, the grand narratives of what Spivak calls ‘the millennially cherished excellences of Western metaphysics’ (Spivak 1981: 157). ‘One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand’ and one must ‘overturn the hierarchy’ in order to expose the ‘conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition’ (Derrida 1981a: 41). Deconstruction’s aim, says Barbara Johnson, is ‘not an annihilation of all values or differences’ rather it is ‘an attempt to follow the subtle, powerful effects of differences already at work within the illusion of a binary opposition’ (Johnson 1980: xii). For feminism, then, this Derridean methodology was useful as a way of thinking about the legitimacy of the binaries structuring the symbolic economies of sexual difference and the ways in which women are conceived as the second, inferior term in these violent hierarchies that exerted powerful naturalising effects on the subject marked as feminine. Intellectually shaped by deconstruction, ‘French’ feminism examined how language positions women as pure difference, as not-man, and how this difference marks them as always already essentially inferior. Asserting that sexual difference does exist, although not in any straightforward denotative way, their arguments about language and subjectivity broke with Beauvoir’s feminism and with a philosophical humanism that had predominated in Sartrean existentialism. Drawing on the wider insights and energies of poststructuralism, at its intellectual apogee at this time, the ‘Big Three’ of ‘French’ feminism: Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray, differed in approach and focus but shared some concerns around the ontological and psycholinguistic idea of ‘woman’ as negative otherness that had become deeply entrenched in the female psyche as ‘natural’ essence. For these thinkers, then, sexual difference is not biological, but constructed in what Cixous calls the ‘ideological theatre of representation’ and always bound up with ontological foreclosure that can only represent woman as not-man.

Hélène Cixous Perhaps the French feminist most influenced by deconstruction, Hélène Cixous echoes Derrida explicitly in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ when she says that ‘thought has always operated through opposition’. In The Newly Born Woman she observes that all logocentrism reduces thought to a hierarchal binary system:

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Through dual hierarchical oppositions. Superior/Inferior. Myths, legends, books. Philosophical systems. Everywhere (where) ordering intervenes, where a law organizes what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical). And all these pairs of oppositions are couples. Does that mean something? Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought – all concepts, codes and values – to a binary system, related to ‘the’ couple, man/woman? (Cixous and Clément 1986: 64) Sexual difference is understood as caught up in these violent hierarchies: ‘Male privilege [is] shown in the opposition between activity and passivity, which he uses to sustain himself. Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition: activity/passivity. . . . Moreover, woman is always associated with passivity in philosophy’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 64). Clearly drawing on Derridean thinking in ‘Sorties’ Cixous sets out the now well-known set of binaries and suggests, via Derrida, that philosophy can only think in binaries and thus ‘orders and reproduces all thought’. She argues that of all the binaries that have structured Western philosophy the most abiding one is male/female which has become a ‘theory of society’ and of ‘all symbolic systems in general’: Activity/passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night Father/Mother Head/Heart Intelligible/Palpable Logos/Pathos. [. . .] Man/Woman (Cixous and Clément 1986: 63) The categories of male and female, translated as nature-culture, are rigidly hierarchical with the ‘cultural’ male privileged over the inferior ‘natural’ female, reigned over by a phallocentricism that always returns to a male source, ‘to the Father’, with the phallus as the ‘transcendental signifier’. Questioning the ‘solidarity between phallocentrism and logocentrism’, Cixous exposes what she calls the ‘burial’ of women in language and thought, and that death is always at work in these binary oppositions in which women have been forced ‘between two terrifying myths’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 65, 68). In a phallocentric system of meaning, women are positioned, she argues, outside of meaning and defined only as man’s negative; they are absence, ‘not-the same’ and therefore are outside of representation. Outside of singularity, identity, rationality woman can only be conceived of as radical alterity

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and in philosophical terms regarded as non-existent, Crucially though, this non-existence is not the same as a Lacanian lack but rather an impasse of representability in existing language. Cixous recognises this fundamental unrepresentability of woman: ‘Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex’ (Cixous 1981: 255), a view echoed by Kristeva when she notes ‘[i]n “woman” I see something that cannot be represented’ (Kristeva 1981: 137). Deconstruction does not seek to reposition woman as the second sex to the first but rather, as Françoise Collin notes, to transform ‘alienation to otherness’ and simultaneously to disseminate this otherness as a valid subjectivity in its own right (Collin 2004: 28). In this way, deconstruction reveals the symbolic violence done to women that has produced them as non-identity, where we ‘can no more speak of “woman” than of “man” without being trapped within an ideological theater where the proliferation of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications, transform, deform, constantly change everyone’s Imaginary and invalidate in advance any conceptualization’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 83). For Cixous, then, making lived experience more egalitarian for women was not the aim of her feminism, rather she sought to expose the working of sexual difference in language and thought: namely, that woman was so deeply inscribed as absence and as non-identity within Western thought that there was no space in language to describe her other than as the repository of difference. Using deconstruction, Cixous undoes the violent hierarchy of sexual difference to reveal phallogocentricism – the invisible rule of the phallus in language – thus sabotaging a notion of subjectivity conceived of as unmarked, that is, as masculine (see Poovey 1988 and Spivak 1981). Moreover, she points up the double bind inherent in this predicament, suggesting that the binaries constructing sexual difference also foreclose speaking about sexual difference and thus imposes a muteness on women’s voices; women have been silenced, literally and figuratively, by patriarchy. When deconstruction is applied to these binaries it results in the disruption of subject-object relation, creating what Derrida calls a ‘middle voice’ that produces the space and practice of the ‘new insurgent writing’ that is écriture féminine (Cixous 1981: 250). For much of ‘French’ feminism, then, the aim was twofold: firstly, to reveal the ontological bias of a philosophical tradition based on masculine concepts of presence and form, and then to give a subjective language back to women ‘silenced by the cultures of the past’ (Kristeva 1995: 208) and to allow them to revel subversively in their alterity. First used by Cixous in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, écriture féminine is marked neither by the organising principle of the Freudian nor the Lacanian phallus and thus seeks a different language, one that is bisexual, with which to tell different stories: ‘If we continue to speak the same language to each other’, said Irigaray, ‘we will reproduce the same stories’ (Irigaray 1980: 69). Écriture féminine dissolves the hierarchy of same-different and speaks

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from the ‘in-between’ and is ‘infinitely dynamized by an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another’ marked by its ‘transformation of the same into the other’ (Cixous 1981: 254). One of the most well-known concepts in French feminism, écriture féminine means not women’s writing but rather writing marked as feminine, an important distinction. Cixous is clear that, despite the label ‘feminine’, this writing practice is not ‘natural’ to women; it is not the sex of the authors that matters, but the kind of writing he or she writes. Based in the gendered experience of the body, the body as non-identity and alterity, écriture féminine exhorts women to write with their bodies: ‘By writing her self, woman will return to the body what has been more than confiscated from her’ (Cixous 1981: 250). It is vital, says Cixous that ‘Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies’ (Cixous 1981: 245). Cixous argues that language is inseparable from phallocentrism: ‘the logocentric plan had always, inadmissibly, been to create a foundation (to found and fund), phallocentrism’ (Cixous and Clément 1986: 65). Écriture féminine celebrates writing as bodily jouissance but in doing so ascribes the female body and its inscription in writing a centrality that seems, on the face of it at least, to suggest a return to a biological essentialism. Clearly, there is a risk in returning women to such a close relationship with their bodies, one recognised by Monique Wittig when she notes that women ‘have been compelled in [their] bodies and in [their] minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for [them]’ (Wittig 1997: 309). The concept, or category of woman then, began to be interrogated in ways that, by and large, took sexual difference in all its forms as a given, an ontological fact, necessitating psychoanalytic scrutiny rather than empirical denial. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this position has provoked charges of essentialism, particularly from Anglo-American feminists, as they saw it as an assertion of the very biological determinism that had imprisoned women in their biology. Indeed, many critics of ‘French’ feminism have noted the political dangers inherent in what appears to be an endorsement of essentialist biological determinism, warning of the hazards of such an approach in the real world where ‘writing the body’, the slogan most associated with French feminism, appears to be contiguous with, at best, sexism and patriarchy and, at worse, misogyny. Seen in this way, both Cixous’s écriture féminine and Irigaray’s parler femme seemed to be returning women to their bodies and its inescapable biological difference thus coming dangerously close to repeating the discourses of patriarchy. Seen otherwise, one might regard this as a tactical or strategic essentialism that operates tactically, provocatively, pushing for a revaluation of what a female body or femininity more broadly might mean in a changed economy of sexual difference. Noting the distinctly idealistic, even utopian strain in French feminism of this time, Nancy Miller has observed that this type of feminism has exclusively privileged ‘a textuality of the avant garde’

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and as such functioned as a ‘hope, if not a blueprint’ of an imagined future (Miller 1976: 339–60). Similarly, in ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, Elaine Showalter acknowledges that French feminism ‘describes a utopian possibility rather than a literary practice’ (Showalter 1981: 185).

Luce Irigaray Of the Holy Trinity of ‘French’ feminists, Luce Irigaray is the writer whose work has been most frequently labelled essentialist. However, many of her ideas around sexual difference have often been oversimplified, even misunderstood. Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference resembles that of Cixous in its emphasis, not on biological differences, but rather on the fact that culture has insisted upon these differences (conceived of only as negativity) to such an extent that they have become naturalised. Although primarily concerned with psycholinguistic and philosophical structures of sexual difference, Irigaray was working towards a vision of society, again in many ways a utopian one, in which the exchange of women as commodities between men ‘would no longer be the basis for the constitution of a cultural order’ (Irigaray 1996: 45). In her doctoral dissertation, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974; English translation 1985a), for which she was sacked from the École Freudienne, Irigaray was critical of both Freud and Lacan, both of whom, she argued, were trapped within the logic of the dominant phallic economy and thus unable to think of difference outside of this. Departing from a position broadly similar to that of Cixous regarding the ontological invisibility of women within culture but with the accent on philosophy rather than psychoanalysis, Irigaray sees the history of Western thought as one based upon a univocal masculine subjectivity; a discourse of sameness in which women cannot really be said to have any real ontological existence save for that of a negative copy of man. If women cannot be anything more than man’s negative then they cannot truly be said to exist at all. Irigaray argues that according to Freud, female sexuality is ‘graphed along the axes of visibility’ that is only ever shaped by a masculine sexual economy within which ‘the little girl must immediately become a little boy . . . THERE NEVER IS (OR WILL BE) A LITTLE GIRL’ (Irigaray 1985a: 48). Thus, for Irigaray there is no such thing as femininity as it simply has no place to exist and thus the only sexual identity ascribable to women in such a system is a bodily one. This is not a desirable scenario for Irigaray but one that must be the starting place for reconceiving the female subject. Irigaray’s first works, Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One, focus on how masculine subjectivity has not only ‘constructed the world’ but had also interpreted this world from its own ‘single perspective’ (Hirsch and Olson 1996: 346). In Speculum she takes on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel, as well as Freud, in order to demonstrate, like Cixous, the ways in which philosophy has been unable to conceive of the idea of women. In

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the violently sexed hierarchy of male-female, women are the non-thinkable of thought which functions through ‘the exploitation of the body-matter of women’ (Irigaray 1985b: 85). Speculum reads a range of texts as exemplary of the phallocentric economy of masculinity that can only conceive of woman as a second-rate copy of man, showing that as a consequence of a phallogocentric metaphysical discourse underpinning all of Western thought man is defined as the ‘one and only’ (both mind and body/matter) and woman not just as the opposite and negative of body/matter, but as completely outside language and representation: ‘It is indeed precisely philosophical discourse that we have to challenge, and disrupt, inasmuch as this discourse sets forth the law for all others’ (Irigaray 1985b: 74). Again, like Cixous, Irigaray reveals the ways in which women have been negated or elided from culture into a zone of nonmeaning that can only conceive of woman as ‘non-man’; that is, as ontological and metaphysical absence. The non-existence of femininity does not, however, preclude a purely feminine-marked space for pleasure, one that Irigaray calls, after Lacan, jouissance, and women’s speech, what she calls ‘parler femme’. Women’s language which is a little ‘mad’, she says, comes from the body which has ‘sex organs more or less everywhere’ and centred particularly on the two lips instead of the phallus (Irigaray 1985b: 29, 28). Prone to incoherence and ‘inaudible’ to men who listen with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand’, women’s language seems to be tied ineluctably to women’s anatomical difference (Irigaray 1985b: 29). It is this kind of yoking of women’s being to their bodies and the insistence that their language is inherently diffuse and unintelligible that has prompted the harshest criticism of Irigaray’s work. Carolyn Burke wonders, ‘Does her writing manage to avoid construction of another idealism to replace the “phallogocentric” systems that she dismantles? Do her representations of parler femme . . . avoid the centralizing idealism with which she taxes Western conceptual systems?’ (Burke 1981: 302). These criticisms sometimes, however, miss the broader point made by Irigaray which is a polemical one that often exaggerates the relationship of exact correspondence between woman and her body in order to provoke new ways of thinking about patriarchal notions of biological difference that has cast women as lack and weakness. Hers is not so much a lifelike or realistic depiction of the relationship between women’s bodies and their language, rather it is a reimagining or, as Jane Gallop says, a ‘re-metaphorisation’ of the possibilities of an alternative kind of economy of meaning (Gallop 1983: 83). In defence of Irigaray’s perceived essentialism, Diana Fuss has argued that despite its inconsistency across her entire oeuvre, Irigaray’s work is a necessary corrective to Lacan’s powerfully influential concept of woman as lack, seen in his infamous pronouncement that ‘woman is not’; she is lack, absence, the void and completely outside of and therefore unrepresentable in language. Better then, suggests Irigaray, in the first place at least, women can speak through and about their bodies than not at all.

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Thus, in both Speculum and This Sex, Irigaray finds it vital to acknowledge a strategic kind of sexual difference, one which is not to be taken as if it were real, in order to identify precisely what this difference is and how it operates in culture and thought. Beginning with Freud’s theories of femininity, she says that there is little point asking ‘What is woman?’ but rather, we need to examine the ways in which ‘within discourse, the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject, they should signify that with respect to this logic a disruptive excess is possible on the feminine side’ (Irigaray 1985b: 78). Moreover, she rejects the idea that there needs to be another concept of woman saying that this is returning to a masculine system of representation that can function as a ‘more or less obliging prop for the enactment of men’s fantasies’ (Irigaray 1985b: 25). Irigaray thus develops the criticism of phallogocentrism that is central to all of ‘French’ feminism, asserting that in a masculinist philosophical system women are forced back into their bodies from where their only recourse is a form of subversive mimesis or hysteria. Charges of essentialism are focused, for the most part, on Irigaray’s early work and on very particular passages of This Sex and tend to neglect the politically strategic nature of her essentialism that is not an insistence on sexual difference itself but recognition of how it has been imagined and articulated across history. Her later work entails a different kind of engagement with the question of sexual difference which for some critics seems to advocate a position of less than strategic essentialism in which she asserts the ‘natural’ division of the world, a balancing out of gender privilege and giving ‘rights for women appropriate to their sexed bodies’ (Irigaray 1993: 80). In this work and elsewhere, Irigaray argues that the ‘exploitation of women is based upon sexual difference and can only be resolved through sexual difference’ (Lotringer 2000: 146).

Julia Kristeva A leading member of the Tel Quel group, Julia Kristeva’s work is thematically close to that of Cixous and Irigaray in some ways. She agrees with them that women are excluded from culture by their inscription as radical otherness, but departs from them both in a number of important ways on questions of identity and difference. Her understanding of sexual difference and its relationship to subjectivity is not, however, straightforward. On the one hand, she describes sexual difference as ‘foremost and irreducible’ while on the other she regards it as a part of a wider marginality and otherness: ‘Call it “woman” or “oppressed classes of society”, it is the same struggle, and never one without the other’ (Kristeva, quoted in Moi 1985: 164). Kristeva’s work offers less a conceptualisation of a graphic sexual difference than a theory of the ‘poetic’ maternal space of the semiotic that she sees erupting into the paternal symbolic order through the subversive poetics of avant-garde writing.

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Taking on the Lacanian notion of the symbolic and the imaginary orders to reveal the limits of this model and the ways in which it excludes women from culture, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) suggests a new, less phallocentric model of psychosexual identity wherein the maternal assumes a more central role. For Kristeva, sexual difference only begins with the entry of the child into the symbolic system. Reworking some key Lacanian concepts of the symbolic order and the law of the Father, Kristeva suggests that males and females each stand in very different relation to their entry into the symbolic order. As the child enters the patriarchal symbolic order of language, it must conform to its rules and thus to the law of the Father. Kristeva argues that this entry is predicated upon a separation from and repudiation of the semiotic maternal. In her model, Lacan’s imaginary becomes the semiotic ‘chora’, a pre-Oedipal pre-linguistic space of bodily pulsions and plenitude marked by flow, rhythm and continuity. The primary libidinal space of the chora, named after Plato’s concept, a space of ‘mixing, of contradiction, of movement’ (Kristeva 1977: 57), is repressed by the symbolic order that governs meaning and intelligibility in culture, but, Kristeva argues, always threatens to disrupt this order. In artistic terms, this disruption takes the form of poetry and avant-garde writing, spaces of non-closure and multiplicity of affective meaning that pose a threat to the paternal law governing the symbolic order. In the space of the chora, there is no separation between signifier and signified that upholds the binaries of difference; rather it is made up of semiotic ‘pulsions’ that have been marginalised by the patriarchal symbolic order that enforces a thetic homogeneity of meaning. However, Kristeva does not unequivocally link the semiotic chora, or avantgarde writing, with a concept of sexual difference and frequently rejected comparisons of her work with theories of écriture féminine; ‘Nothing in women’s past or present publications seems to allow us to affirm that there is a feminine writing’ (Kristeva, quoted in Moi 1985: 163). Coining the term the ‘subject in process’ (sujet en procès), Kristeva was apprehensive of any kind of closed, fixed identity: ‘All identities are unstable: the identity of linguistic signs, the identity of meaning and, as a result, the identity of the speaker’ (Kristeva 1980: 19). Wary of any kind of politics based on a collective sense of identity, she distanced herself from Cixous and Irigaray warning of the dangers of a ‘hysterical obsession’ with the ‘essentialist cult of Woman’: ‘If the feminine exists’, she argued, this is ‘only in the order of significance or in the signifying process’ (Kristeva 1980: 19). Later, she states, in a similar way to Cixous, that ‘a woman cannot “be” . . . in “woman” I see something that cannot be represented, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies . . . [C]ertain feminist demands revive a kind of naive romanticism, a belief in identity’ (Kristeva 1981: 137, 138). The space of avant-garde writing is one which ‘dissolves identity, even sexual identities’ and as such allows a way out of the obsessive focus on sexual difference. For Kristeva then, a truly feminist practice can ‘only be negative, at odds with what already exists’ (Kristeva 1981: 138, 137).

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This ostensible repudiation of feminism as a political force and her insistence that the phallocentric symbolic order is more or less unchangeable made her work vulnerable to charges of political pessimism, as does her aversion to any kind of systematic sexual difference. In later work, Kristeva demonstrates a longer view of feminism as a series of necessarily complex engagements with the question of sexual difference. In ‘Women’s Time’, she adumbrates her responses to ‘three generations’ of feminism and examines the genealogical development of feminism and its attempts to tackle the question of sexual difference. Criticising liberal feminism for its emphasis on universalism and denial of sexual difference, she nonetheless praised this generation for making it possible for women ‘to attain positions of leadership in the worlds of business, industry, and culture’ (Kristeva 1995: 214). The second generation of feminism, to which ‘French’ feminism belongs, closely attended to the question of sexual difference examining the ‘psychosymbolic’ structures of patriarchy and the ways in which it excludes women by making it ‘difficult, if not impossible, for women to adhere to the sacrificial logic of separation and syntactic links upon which language and the social code are based’ (Kristeva 1995: 213). The challenge for the third stage of feminism is to find a language for women’s ‘corporeal and intersubjective experiences’ (Kristeva 1995: 208). This feminism will, Kristeva presciently claims, ‘combine the sexual with the symbolic in order to discover first the specificity of the feminine . . . and then the specificity of each woman’ (Kristeva 1995: 210). In this way, then, Kristeva anticipates the focus on gender that will become central to feminism’s third wave in the 1990s and, in particular, to the work of Judith Butler. The body will continue to have an important place in third wave feminism but the discussion over the sex-gender divide will take on a new direction seen for the first time in ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’. In this essay, in many important ways a sweeping away of essentialism, Butler uses Foucault to examine the ways in which French feminism has often regarded the body as a natural ‘thing’, that we can somehow get back to, and which pre-exists the prison-house of language. In a move that will define debates around sexual difference for the next decade or so, Butler argues, via Foucault, that sex is ‘a fictitious category’ and the body only becomes only ‘sexed’ within discourse that invests it with the status of the ‘natural’. Butler focuses on how subversion is possible only when the ‘culturally constructed body’ is recognised as such and that any subversion will come from ‘within the terms of the law’ rather than looking for liberation in any normative idea of the female body (Butler 1992: 172–5).

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18 POSTFEMINISM Stéphanie Genz

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ostfeminism is a prominent yet disputed concept in the lexicon of cultural/media studies and, to a lesser degree, political and social sciences. While the term emerged as early as 1919 after the vote for women had been won by the suffrage movement (Cott 1987), it is fair to say that this initial mention of postfeminism – understood in evolutionary terms as a progression of feminist ideas – did not materialise in any concrete way, cut short as it was by momentous historical developments such as the outbreaks of the two World Wars. It was not until the 1980s that postfeminism gained prominence, first as a journalistic buzzword and then in wider cultural and academic circles (see Bolotin 1982). Many of these early manifestations of postfeminism tended to invoke a narrative of progression that insists on a time ‘after’ feminism, as was (and still is) the case with frequent media obituaries that announce if not the death but at least the redundancy of feminism – Harper’s Magazine, for instance, publishing a ‘requiem for the women’s movement’ as early as 1976. In this context, postfeminism signalled the ‘pastness’ of feminism – or, at any rate the end of a particular stage in feminist history that can broadly be referred to as feminism’s ‘second wave’, a common designation for the increased feminist activity in North America and Europe from the 1960s onwards (Nicholson 1997). Since then, the term has acquired a number of different meanings and discursive connotations. In popular culture, it is used as a descriptive marker for a number of (particularly) female characters that have emerged from the 1990s onwards, with Helen Fielding’s chick-lit heroine Bridget Jones and the Spice Girls often held up as the poster girls of postfeminism (Genz and Brabon 2009). In academic writings, it sits alongside other ‘post-’ discourses – including postmodernism – and refers to changing constructions of identity and gender categories (like ‘woman’, ‘man’ and ‘feminist’) (Brooks 1997). Likewise, in political philosophy and social theory, postfeminism has been read as symptomatic of a posttraditional era characterised by dramatic changes in social relationships, role stereotyping and conceptions of agency (Mann 1994). More recently, postfeminism has been anchored within neoliberal society and consumer culture that cultivates individualistic, competitive and entrepreneurial behaviour

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in its construction of a self-regulating and enterprising subject whose consumption patterns come to be seen as a source of power and choice. At this juncture, we might also want to investigate how current political changes and the end of a boom-and-bust economic model have affected the larger cultural climate and ethos of postfeminism. Certainly, if late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century postfeminism was marked by optimism, entitlement and the opportunity of prosperity, then indisputably such articulations have become more doubtful and less celebratory in a post-2008 recessionary environment where the neoliberal mantra of choice and self-determination is still present but becomes inflected with the experiences of precarity and risk and the insistence on self-responsibilisation (Gilbert 2013). One of the first critical examinations was provided by American journalist Susan Faludi who describes postfeminism in terms of a ‘backlash’ – which also serves as the title of her 1992 bestseller – a devastating reaction against the ground gained by the feminist movement (Faludi 1992: 15). This largely pessimistic account links postfeminism to anti-feminist and media-driven attempts to turn the clock back to pre-feminist times, fuelled by the conservative governments that defined 1980s Reaganite America and Thatcherite Britain. For Faludi, postfeminism as backlash works hand in hand with right-wing political ideologies to launch an attack on the core beliefs and politics of the women’s movement (enfranchisement, equal pay, sexual liberation, and so on) and to rearticulate conventional versions of femininity and domesticity, with 1980s films like Fatal Attraction (1987) depicting backlash fears and ‘new traditionalist’ rhetoric (Probyn 1990). Following Faludi, some writers have interpreted postfeminism as a backlash and hence primarily a polemical tool with limited critical and analytical value (Whelehan 2000). However, these readings have been superseded increasingly from the 1990s onwards – a decade marked in political terms by ‘Third Way’ philosophy and rationale underlying the governments of US ‘New Democrats’ and UK ‘New Labour’ (Genz 2006) – in favour of more complex accounts that argue for a nuanced understanding of postfeminism that takes into account the term’s diverse entanglements with feminism and other cultural and political theories. For Ann Brooks, for example, postfeminism is indicative of feminism’s ‘maturity into a confident body of theory and politics, representing pluralism and difference’ (Brooks 1997: 1). Her rearticulation of postfeminism as ‘feminism’s “coming of age”’ situates the term within the theoretical frameworks of anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist movements – like postmodernism and poststructuralism – thereby rendering it capable of contesting modernist, imperialist and patriarchal structures (Brooks 1997: 4). Similarly, in Patricia Mann’s account of micro-political forms of agency and activism, postfeminism emerges as the ‘postmodern offspring of feminism’ that signals the end of the ‘amazingly enduring normative identification of humanity with men and masculinity’ (Mann 1994: 2). Here, postfeminism comes to be seen as a ‘frontier discourse’ that engages with the

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breakdown of social organising structures and effects a shift within feminism from debates around ‘equality’ to a focus on ‘difference’ (Mann 1994: 208). This deconstructive move implies the disintegration of the tenets of dominant culture along with an attack on universalist and essentialist thinking – importantly, involving a critique of the foundationalist premises of both patriarchy and feminism, as well as the deconstruction of their relevant subject categories, ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘feminist’. Roughly at the same time, a similar commitment to diversity was echoed in other, less academic and more journalistic, quarters by a group of young, ‘new’ feminists who adopted a generational logic to differentiate themselves from the second wave of feminist activist campaigning. Coming to the fore in the mid-1990s, the most prominent advocates of this standpoint – Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, Natasha Walter and Rene Denfeld – supported an individualistic and liberal agenda that relies on a rhetoric of choice/agency and established a critical as well as temporal distance from what they saw as uptight, establishment feminism, dismissed for instance by Denfeld as the ‘New Victorianism’ that is totalitarian in its upholding of views reminiscent of an earlier age (1995). Mostly taking the form of popular polemic, these accounts were often cast in familial terms as mother-daughter conflicts, a pertinent example being Rebecca Walker’s – daughter of Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple – collection of essays To Be Real: ‘young women coming of age today wrestle with the term [feminist] because we have a very different vantage point on the world than that of our foremothers’ (Walker 1995: xxxiii). Beyond the generational divide, young women growing up in a post-second-wave environment were also reacting against negative images and stereotypes of ‘the women’s libber’ that had been propagated by the popular press since the 1970s and that are most vividly depicted by the iconic figure of the humourless and drab ‘bra-burner’ (Genz 2009). In these circumstances, postfeminism with its emphasis on female individuality and selfdetermination came to be seen as ‘more rewarding but also as a lot more fun’ (Budgeon 2001: 60). Unsurprisingly perhaps, such evaluations of postfeminism as the new ‘improved’ feminism free from the dictates of the second wave motherhood were short lived, as a range of critics started to undo the ‘illusions of postfeminism’ (Coppock et al. 1995) – most prominently led by feminist ‘foremothers’ who attacked their ‘daughters’ for their historical amnesia, misappropriations of the feminist/familial legacy and uncritical adherence to media stereotypes. According to Lynne Segal, the breed of ‘new feminists’ ‘were able to launch themselves and court media via scathing attacks on other feminists’, depleting the radical spirit of feminist politics in the service of a managerial elite (Segal 2003: 152). A concerted and rigorous critique of postfeminism was mounted from the early 2000s onwards, chiefly by feminist media and cultural scholars who focus on popular culture as the

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natural habitat of postfeminist images and rhetoric – undercutting in some ways theoretical investigations of ‘academic’ postfeminism, so that by now, there is little doubt that media-based analyses have taken precedence over other, anti-foundationalist readings. As a popular idiom, postfeminism is deployed mainly outside the academy – denoting a wider cultural space and atmosphere, what Rosalind Gill calls ‘a postfeminist sensibility’ (Gill 2007: 254) – and it is criticised for lacking intellectual rigour and promoting an exclusive and exclusionist viewpoint that is white, middle-class and heterosexual by default (Tasker and Negra 2007). For many feminist media critics, postfeminism’s relationship with feminism – as a critical and political paradigm – is paramount and they focus on how, to varying degrees, postfeminist culture incorporates, commodifies, depoliticises and parodies feminist ideas and terminology, resulting in the worst case in an ‘undoing’ and ‘othering’ of feminism. Angela McRobbie (2009) has described this discursive process as a ‘double movement’ that takes feminism ‘into account’ only to dismiss it as dated and old-fashioned and thus repudiate it. A more inclusive interpretation is provided by Genz and Brabon (2009) who problematise the understanding of postfeminism as ‘a ritualistic denunciation’ of feminism (McRobbie 2004: 258) in favour of a contextualising approach that demarcates an interdiscursive ‘postfeminist landscape’. Taking as a starting point the semantic confusion over the directionality and meaning of the ‘post’ prefix, postfeminism is discussed as a ‘junction’ made up of an array of relationships and connections within/between social, cultural, academic and political arenas. Here, the term addresses the paradoxes of a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century setting in which feminist concerns have entered society and culture at large and are articulated in (politically) contradictory ways. While Western popular culture remains a key site for critical investigations (see for example Harzewski 2011; Gwynne and Muller 2013), recent additions to the postfeminist canon have sought to discuss postfeminist identities in relation to intersecting politics of sexuality, race, class and location – for example through the experiences of young female migrants and ‘mail order brides’ (Gill and Scharff 2013) – or engage with psychosocial negotiations of postfeminist sentiment. Ringrose (2013), for example, focuses on ‘postfeminist education’ to investigate how young girls and women are located within a range of ‘assemblages’ in a school environment, embodied by the cultural figures of the ‘successful girl’, the ‘mean girl’ and the ‘sexy girl’. These symbols of postfeminist education are part of a broader context of what she calls ‘postfeminist panics’, for instance in the growing concerns over the sexualisation of children. Other consumer-orientated critiques have interpreted postfeminism as part of contemporary brand culture that shapes not only consumer habits but wider political, cultural and civic practices (Banet-Weiser 2012). Postfeminism is discussed as a ‘particularly rich context’ for ‘self-branded girls’ who use

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self-presentation techniques – linked to social media and other online spaces – to craft a self-as-brand that is ostensibly empowered and enterprising within consumer culture, for example through public bodily performances and the production of user-generated content (Banet-Weiser 2012: 56, 64). As Genz notes, beyond considerations of what postfeminist self-hood entails, we also need to investigate how postfeminism – as a ‘gendered brand space’ – engages these subjects and taps into emotion and affect as crucial elements in the construction, marketing and consumption of (female) subjectivity (Genz 2015). Here, postfeminism acquires ‘affective relational qualities’ (Banet-Weiser 2012: 9), usually associated with brand culture and emblematic of contemporary ‘experience economies’ where consumers no longer merely consume goods and services but they are looking for memorable events that engage them in a personal way (Pine and Gilmore 1999). These current developments highlight that though postfeminism – in its current late twentieth- and twenty-first-century manifestation – might still be considered an emergent critical concept, it has had over thirty years to solidify into a conceptual category and develop a critical history in its own right that spans the backlash years of the 1980s, the ‘Third Way’ 1990s and the uncertain, post–9/11 and recessionary years of the new millennium. At this point it is also worth reminding ourselves that, as Nancy Whittier puts it, the ‘postfeminist generation is not a homogeneous, unified group’ (1995: 228). The term continues to be divisive and contradictory, causing some critics to reject it because, as Susan Douglas notes, ‘it has gotten gummed up by too many conflicting definitions’ (2010: 10). At the same time, the cultural presence and resonance of postfeminism has become hard to ignore, specifically as it continues to evolve with changes in the political, cultural and economic environment.

Points of Contention While debates surrounding postfeminism are varied and depend to a large extent on the critical positioning and background of commentators, we can identify distinctive postfeminist strands that connect feminist notions of gendered empowerment and choice with cultural practices of commodification and individualism. This thread also brings postfeminism into close political alliance with neoliberal ideas and tendencies that promote competitive individualism and entrepreneurship in consumer-citizens – proposing, as David Harvey notes, that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free-trade’ (Harvey 2005: 2). This section will lay out specific areas of conflict that have riddled the critical and cultural terrain of postfeminism and that can broadly be constructed around a set of operative

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trends of entrepreneurial femininity, commodity/corporate feminism and neoliberal individualism. One particular point of contention that has been brought to critical attention revolves around the relationship between feminism – as a political activist stance – and femininity as a gendered identity that has historically been imprinted on the female body. As Joanne Hollows has commented, feminist critiques have often been ‘dependent on creating an opposition between “bad” feminine identities and “good” feminist identities’ (Hollows 2000: 9), with the result that femininity has been associated in much feminist writing with negative associations of female oppression and inferiority – famously denounced for example by feminist veteran Betty Friedan as ‘the problem that has no name’ (Friedan 1992: 54). Focusing on media representations as a particularly visible location for a broader range of postfeminist discourses, a number of critics have argued for a modernisation of femininity that reconfigures existing victim/power dualities (Genz 2009; Gill and Scharff 2013). Popular culture has proven a fertile ground for the examination of postfeminist subjects who engage in expressions – or fantasies – of feminine agency and sexual empowerment. In this context, postfeminism has been linked with the publishing phenomenon of ‘chick-lit’, a highly lucrative and femaleoriented form of fiction that emerged in the 1990s. Frequently characterised by ubiquitous pastel-coloured, fashion-conscious covers, chick-lit has attracted a devoted readership as well as the disdain of critics who have dismissed it as trashy fiction. In these narratives, young urban women (also known as ‘chicks’ or ‘singletons’) re-address femininity – and its traditional, heterosexual trappings (beauty and body practices, sexiness, domesticity) – and balance private and public success. Epitomised by Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones and the main protagonists of the American television series Sex and the City (1998–2004), the female characters spend much of their time in pursuit of heterosexual enjoyment and designer commodities, while debating problems – mostly related to their single lives and dating habits – within their network of friends. The 1990s chick has been seen as exemplary of the controversies and contradictions surrounding postfeminism, particularly in its construction of a post-second-wave working heroine who is financially independent, selfreliant, sexually assertive and pleasure-seeking, yet troubled by personal neurosis and body-consciousness. In this scenario, sexual knowledge and feminine embodiment are central for the expression of modern female power, promoting in Harris’s words the ‘can-do girl’ as the ideal postfeminist subject who is ‘flexible, individualised, resilient, self-driven, and self-made’ (Harris 2004: 16). While postfeminist subjectivity clearly functions within the confines of compulsory and normative heterosexuality – what Radner calls a ‘technology of sexiness’ (1999: 15) – it has also allowed critical forays into unfamiliar and contradictory subject/ agency positions. Scholarship on the postfeminist subject has focused on the

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breakdown of dichotomies – feminism/femininity, subject/object, complicity/ critique, false/enlightened consciousness, emancipation/empowerment – to discuss the complex identity positions that become available in the context of politically distinct, neoliberal modes of governmentality that construct the self as both freely choosing and self-regulating (Gill 2008; Genz 2009). Critics have struggled to reconcile the affective and entrepreneurial dimensions of postfeminist culture with its confining and disciplinary aspects giving rise to a range of Foucaultian- and Butlerian-inspired concepts that seek to capture the postfeminist dialectic of agency and control, self-actualisation and normalisation. For example, in her examination of gender representations in the media, Gill discusses postfeminism in terms of a ‘shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification’ to describe highly sexualised contemporary women who are not ‘straightforwardly objectified but are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects’ (Gill 2007: 258). Genz’s model of ‘postfemininity’ similarly investigates the paradoxes of contemporary femininity that references both traditional narratives of feminine passivity and more progressive scripts of feminine agency (2009). Here, the Foucaultian notion of assujetissement (or, ‘subjectivation’), later developed by Judith Butler, is drawn on to explain the process of post-feminine subject formation as involving ‘both the becoming of the subject and the process of subjection’ (Butler 1997: 83). In this oxymoronic formulation, the subject is instituted through constraint and inhabits a contradictory site that is constraining and liberating, productive and oppressive. The long-standing opposition between subject and object – transferable to some extent to the categories of feminism and femininity – is re-examined to account for the varying degrees of freedom and boundedness that circumscribe postfeminist, neoliberal agents. The gender implications of this conceptual turn are clear as it is predominantly women who are called upon by postfeminist neoliberal economies to articulate their self-hood in terms of preset scripts of femininity, beauty and sexiness. In addition, a thorny issue has been the obvious limitations and exclusions of postfeminist subjectivity in identity terms of class, age, race and sexuality as well as in relation to political and economic positioning. In Genz’s account, post-femininity displays an internal reflexivity and awareness of feminist values and principles, yet at the same time cannot avoid heteronormative, phallocentric, misogynist and consumerist significations (Genz 2009). A specific point of debate has been postfeminism’s commercial appeal and its consumerist implications that are viewed as a ‘selling out’ of feminist principles and their co-option as a marketing device. As Banet-Weiser notes, feminism is ‘rescripted’ so as to allow its ‘smooth incorporation into the world of commerce and corporate culture’ (Banet-Weiser 2007: 209). In this context, advertising has been investigated as a key site that incorporates and appropriates feminist ideas and values, mostly through the use of feminist-informed rhetoric (‘emancipation’, ‘liberation’ and perhaps most

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prominently, ‘choice’) – evidenced for instance by L’Oréal’s long-standing ‘I’m/You’re Worth It’ campaign to sell cosmetic and hair products (Lazar 2009). This exemplifies what Goldman (1992) calls ‘commodity feminism’ (a play on Marx’s commodity fetishism) whereby female consumers can achieve ‘freedom’, self-empowerment and agency through the consumption of massmarketed products. As such, the emphasis on feminism as commodity can be seen as part of a broader cultural and marketing move towards consumer empowerment and activism that reconfigures existing relationships between seller and buyer and transforms practices of social (and political) activism into marketable commodities (Cova and Dalli 2009; Banet-Weiser and Lapsansky 2008). Postfeminist culture provides a distinctly gendered focus to these debates in its promotion of an entrepreneurial feminine identity – what Lazar labels ‘entitled femininity’ – that encourages women to ‘take care and pamper themselves, enjoy autonomous sensual pleasure, and have access to an exclusive public space’ (Lazar 2009: 380). Yet, as Lazar reveals, the ‘key to unlocking these entitlements is through consumption’ (Lazar 2009: 380), indicating that what we are witnessing here is a mutation of conventional definitions of empowerment – and on a larger scale, citizenship (BanetWeiser and Lapsansky 2008) – into market strategies only possible within the confines of a capitalist system. This anchors postfeminism within a consumerist ideology that ties the notion of freedom and the production of the self directly to the ability to purchase, with individual agency premised upon and enabled by the consumption of products and services. The end result of this commoditisation and branding – it is feared – is a ‘free market feminism’ that works ‘through capitalism’ and is based on ‘competitive choices in spite of social conditions being stacked against women as a whole’ (Whelehan 2005: 15). Postfeminism’s commodification of feminism via the figure of the empowered female consumer also highlights its adherence to entrepreneurial forms of individualism that eschew collective, activist politics in favour of a selfgoverning individual who embraces (consumer) choice and self-rule as guiding principles. Postfeminist subjects often pit sexual, feminine and consumer pleasures against political participation, epitomised for example by the communal idea of ‘sisterhood’ central to many expressions of collective feminist politics. Of course, the idea of a united feminist ‘we’ – and, related to this a collective politics of engagement – has become problematic for a number of reasons, not least feminism’s ‘turn to culture’ whereby ‘there has been an increasing tendency in feminism to think about politics through the medium of cultural debate’ (Barrett 1990: 22). This move towards the cultural arena has created a more critical and reflexive feminism whose initial ‘consensus and confidence around issues of “patriarchy”, distinctions along sex/gender lines, as well as issues of “subject” positioning and sexuality’ are cast into doubt by the emphasis on deconstruction and difference (Brooks 1997: 38).

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This emergence of ‘cultural politics’ has been interpreted as a ‘crisis of activism’ within feminism and its dissolution as theory and practice. As Andrea Stuart asks, how do feminists now go about changing oppressive situations ‘without some sort of campaigning “movement”’ (Stuart 1990: 40)? Postfeminism appears at the centre of the discussions on the state of contemporary feminisms and politics where it is said to effect a de-collectivisation of the feminist movement, transforming feminist politics and its collective programme of equal opportunity into a set of atomised, personal attitudes and lifestyle choices (Douglas 1995). The individualist thread that runs through much of postfeminist culture undercuts feminist politics to the extent that, as Nancy Cott notes, as much as feminism asserts the female individual, ‘pure individualism negates feminism because it removes the basis for women’s collective self-understanding or action’ (Cott 1987: 6). The problem here lies not with postfeminism’s celebration of personal struggles and triumphs but rather with a tokenist and meritocratic agenda that redefines oppression and structural disadvantage as personal suffering while reframing success as an individual accomplishment, competitive drive and self-determination – whereby, whatever social position, those with enough ambition, talent, effort or skills will rise to the top. According to Angela McRobbie (2007), this amounts to a ‘new sexual contract’ that places young women – or ‘top girls’ – at the heart of a meritocratic economic system that incites them to become wage-earning subjects while locking them in a kind of prison of activity, without that entailing real political involvement. Postfeminism’s individualist discourse and meritocratic ethos also locate it more broadly within a neoliberal political and cultural field that mobilises self-responsibilisation and self-reliance and promotes, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words, that there are only ‘individual solutions to socially produced problems’ (Bauman 2007: 14). The next section will engage in more detail with political positionings of postfeminism and debate the viability of a ‘postfeminist politics’.

Postfeminism and/in Politics In some ways, the heading of this section might be considered controversial by some critics who define postfeminism in non-activist terms, being at best self-absorbed and self-policing narcissism (Douglas 1995) and at worst, a retrogressive and reactionary backlash that undermines the gains of the feminist movement/politics and returns women (and men) to the limited gender roles of a bygone era (Faludi 1992). Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, for example, take the distinction between ‘feminist politics’ and ‘postfeminist culture’ as the starting point for their investigation, suggesting that ‘the transition to a postfeminist culture involves an evident erasure of feminist politics from the popular, even as aspects of feminism seem to be incorporated within that

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culture’ (Tasker and Negra 2007: 5). Here, postfeminism is conceived as inherently ‘middle of the road’ and works to ‘invalidate systematic critique’ by transforming the postfeminist subject into a ‘silent’ consumer (Tasker and Negra 2007: 19, 3). Other critics have been more open to the possibility and potential of postfeminist politics by expanding the vocabulary of political actions to include instances of individual agency and consumer empowerment. Taking as her starting point the premise that changing gender relations are the most significant social phenomenon of our time, Patricia Mann formulates a theory of ‘micro-politics’ that takes into account the ‘multiple agency positions of individuals today’ (Mann 1994: 160). ‘Like it or not’, she writes, ‘ours is an era that will be remembered for dramatic changes in basic social relationships, within families, workplaces, schools, and other public spheres of interaction’ (Mann 1994: 1). If currently fewer people are willing to connect ideologically with any political movement and communal forms of political action are on the wane, then feminism should be regarded less ‘an identifying political uniform’ than a ‘theoretical and psychological resource’ (Mann 1994: 100). For her, taking up a postfeminist position involves an endeavour to capture the changing quality of social, cultural and political experiences in the context of a more general process of women’s social enfranchisement and unmooring from patriarchal relations (Mann 1994: 114). Following Mann, Genz and Brabon maintain that postfeminism should not be seen as ‘an alternative to feminism and its political struggle’ as it does not give rise to a ‘bounded philosophy’ and ‘an organized political movement that gains its force through activist lobbying at grass-roots level’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 34). By contrast, postfeminist modes of critique seek to accommodate the complicated entanglements that characterise gender, culture and politics in late modernity by adopting a ‘politically “impure” practice’ that effects ‘a double movement of exploitation and contestation, use and abuse, rupture and continuity’ (Genz and Brabon 2009: 171, 40) – amounting to what Butler in a different context calls a ‘politics of discomfort’ that encourages us to ‘liv[e] the political in medias res’ (Butler 1995: 131). In this sense, postfeminism is emblematic of the paradoxes of modern-day politics and culture, seeking to reconcile feminist ideas of (female) emancipation and equality, consumerist demands of capitalist societies and neoliberal tenets of individual empowerment. A key place to start this process of rethinking is the concept of the individual itself that has always been at the heart of feminist activism and politics, exemplified by the well-known second wave feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ that implies that everyday interactions between men and women (sex, family life, household chores) are no longer simply private matters but implicated in the exercise of institutionalised power (Genz 2009). As we have seen, postfeminism has been criticised for severing the link between individual women and collective activism by embracing a singular, self-centred and

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competitive form of agency that undermines the communal aspects of feminism and its distinct social and political goals. In Angela McRobbie’s words, postfeminist women – also labelled ‘TV blondes’ – are characterised by ‘ruthless . . . individualism’ and present a fantasy of female omnipotence which ‘on the longer term . . . may prove fatal’ as it means ‘living without feminism’ (McRobbie 2001: 363, 370, 372). By contrast, Mann’s notion of ‘gendered micro-politics’ relies on a model of ‘engaged individualism’ that allows individual actors to combine ‘economic and interpersonal forms of agency’, and experiment with ‘various identities as well as diverse familial and community relationships’ (Mann 1994: 124). In these circumstances, the micro-political agent comes to be seen as a ‘conflicted actor’ capable of operating within ‘various institutional discourses without ever being fully inscribed within any of the . . . frames of reference that engage us’ (Mann 1994: 31). This allows for a more dynamic and flexible model of political agency that arises from ‘a struggle that is not only without a unitary political subject but also without a unitary political opponent’ (Mann 1994: 159). As Mann admits, the rules of postfeminist micro-politics are ‘not clearly defined’ as the playing fields of these contemporary gendered conflicts are still ‘under construction’ (Mann 1994: 186). Undoubtedly, postfeminism attributes a central position to the individual which also aligns it more broadly with examinations of the conditions of (self-)identity in post-industrial Western liberal democracies in which men and women are thought to be progressively unfettered by the roles and constrictions associated with previous habitual practices and institutions (Beck 1992; Giddens 1992). This line of thought is associated with the work of Anthony Giddens who formulates a theory of the self as reflexively made by the individual. Giddens suggests that with the decline of traditions – what he designates the ‘post-traditional order of modernity’ (Giddens 2008: 5) – people’s lives are less shaped by certainties and more by the self-construction of personal biographies that allows individuals to engage in the reflexive ‘project of the self’ and become authors of their own life scripts. In this account, the more society is modernised, the more subjects acquire the ability to reflect upon their social conditions and prescribed life story and change them – a particularly appealing proposition for women who historically have been disadvantaged and excluded from social and political power. This construction is not optional but an ongoing project that demands the active participation of the subject (Beck 1992: 135). As Shelley Budgeon notes, this might especially be relevant for young women in contemporary society as ‘processes of individualisation and detraditionalisation mean that not only are a wide range of options available to them in terms of their self-definition, but that an active negotiation of positions which are potentially intersecting and contradictory is necessary’ (Budgeon 2001: 10). Here, individualisation operates as a social process that, instead of separating the self from a collective identity, increases

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the capacity for agency while also accommodating a rethinking of the individual as an active agent. The concept of the agentic individual brings into play heightened levels of personal choice and self-care as well as more entrepreneurial and corporate conceptualisations of the ‘self as enterprise’ prominent in some political quarters (du Gay 1996: 156). In particular, the privileging of the individual is facilitated by the pervasive ideology of neoliberalism that extends and disseminates market values to social and individual action at large. As Nikolas Rose proposes, today’s ‘enterprise culture’ accords a vital political value to the self who aspires to autonomy and interprets its reality and destiny as matters of individual responsibility (Rose 1992: 141–2). The enterprising self is motivated by a desire to maximise its own powers, happiness and quality of life as well as releasing its market potential through the promotion of a ‘go-ahead’ mentality, efficiency, competition and high performance. In the 1990s for example, this ideology of competitive individualism – itself a contemporary manifestation of ‘possessive individualism’ as discussed by C. B. Macpherson in the 1960s (see Gilbert 2013) – was a prominent feature of ‘Third Way’ philosophy adopted by centre-left governments in Europe and the United States as a middle course between right and left ideology. Propagated at the time by US President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as the rationale underlying the governments of the New Democrats, New Labour and die Neue Mitte (the New Centre) respectively, Third Way political philosophy saw human and economic interests as interdependent, endorsing that ‘the most important task of modernisation is to invest in human capital: to make the individual and businesses fit for the knowledge-based economy of the future’ (Blair and Schroeder, quoted in Genz 2006: 334). The equivalence of human values and needs with those of the marketplace has been criticised as an abandonment of traditional socialist ideals in its creation of a market society in which human beings become an element of a market economy (see Genz 2006). At the same time, neoliberalism’s rational and entrepreneurial actors function within an affective economy whereby as Lois McNay argues, ‘individual autonomy becomes not the opposite of, or limit to, neoliberal governance, rather it lies at the heart of its disciplinary control’ (McNay 2009: 62). Neoliberal subjects are legitimised as self-governing citizens through discourses of choice and free will, with freedom itself being manufactured by their ability to compete in the ‘game of enterprises’ (Foucault 2010: 173). In this regime, freedom is not a given but an obligation and responsibility – as Foucault puts it succinctly in The Birth of Biopolitics, ‘liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free’ (Foucault 2010: 63). Here, we can clearly detect conceptual and rhetorical links with postfeminism’s individualist and commoditised understanding of empowerment and

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agency. As Gill highlights in her examination of contemporary media and gender, at the heart of both neoliberalism and postfeminism is ‘the notion of the “choice biography” and the contemporary injunction to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy’ (Gill 2007: 260, 262). She is sceptical of this neoliberal/postfeminist junction that emphasises the individual as an ‘entirely free agent’ and she criticises the postfeminist subject for the return to normative gender roles and ‘reprivatization of issues that have only relatively recently become politicized’ (Gill 2007: 259–60). For Gill, this amounts to a ‘higher or deeper form of exploitation’ that implicates women in their own subjugation and objectification, imposing (male) power not ‘from above or from the outside’ but from within their ‘very subjectivity’ (Gill 2007: 258). Genz also locates postfeminism within a neoliberal political frame, specifically in relation to 1990s Third Way political economies that ‘encourage women to concentrate on their private lives and consumer capacities as the sites for self-expression and agency’ (Genz 2006: 337–8). Genz admits that engaging in postfeminist neoliberal practices is politically messy and risky but, in her view, it also allows for a more flexible understanding and construction of political agency and identity. Her discussion of ‘fashion feminism’ – exemplified for instance by the provocative T-shirt campaigns (‘The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own’) by the American designer/writer/women’s rights activist Periel Aschenbrand – is circumscribed by the caveat that such micro-political actions might not be replicated at a macro-political level (Genz 2006: 346). Furthermore, a more currently pressing issue relates to the ‘intensified neoliberalism’ that has emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and ensuing austerity agenda adopted by a number of Western economies (Gilbert 2013: 19). If pre-recession neoliberal postfeminism thrived on an entrepreneurial individualism/femininity and consumer mentality underpinned by a logic of entitlement and the opportunity of prosperity, then the experiences of precarity and individualised impotence in the midst of growing economic and social hardship have led to a sense of resignation and austere self-restraint that cast doubt on neoliberalism’s aspirational promises. The following section will underline a range of new postfeminist complexities that are tied to a changing economic, cultural and political climate that defines the ‘new age of austerity’ as invoked by British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2009.

Austerity Postfeminism and Post-Sexism ‘We live in a time of deep foreboding, one that haunts any discourse about justice, democracy, and the future’, Henry Giroux asserts in his account of the ‘Disimagination Machine’, highlighting that ‘market discipline now regulates all aspects of social life and the regressive economic rationality that drives it sacrifices the public good, public values, and social responsibility to a tawdry

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consumerist dream’ (Giroux 2013: 257). Giroux is uncompromisingly scathing in his attack on free-market fundamentalism and neoliberalism that in his eyes support deregulated ‘casino capitalism’ and give rise to a pseudoDarwinist, survival-of-the-fittest world in which freedom and equality have become unaffordable luxuries for the vast majority of the population (Giroux 2013: 258). He is adamant that what we are seeing in the harsh climate of the post-2008 economic downturn amounts to a breakdown of democracy symptomised by the disappearance of critical thought, the realm of the social, public values and any consideration of the common good. Instead, the recessionary era is characterised by predatory corporatism, obsessive investment with selfinterest and a ‘narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a new sociopathic lack of interest in others’ (Giroux 2013: 260). In this new culture of greed, social relations are remodelled as retail transactions – whereby ‘consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship’ (Giroux 2013: 264) – and those regarded as ‘failed consumers, workers, and critics’ fall prey to a ‘politics of disposability’ (Giroux 2011: 592). The post-millennium has undoubtedly been troubled by a seemingly interminable economic crisis and the ensuing atmosphere of austerity and anger at corporate greed, the rollback of opportunities and transfer of risk to culture at large. The current political and cultural moment is also complexly gendered, fears abounding that we are witnessing ‘the end of men’ and a concomitant ‘rise of women’, a trend not borne out by economic reality and rising numbers of unemployed women (Barrow 2012; Rosin 2010). The interplay of economic insecurity and gender further intensifies a number of (post-)feminist dilemmas and points of contentions, specifically in relation to postfeminist notions of entitlement and micro-politics, and the corporatisation of feminism. For example, Lazar’s suggestion that ‘the postfeminist subject . . . is entitled to be pampered and pleasured’ needs to be problematised in the context of a post-recession environment that no longer guarantees (economic) success and reward to even the most hard-working individuals (Lazar 2009: 372). This also has a more general effect on postfeminist popular culture and its depiction of female characters: where for example in the case of late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury heroines, failing might have been conceived as a ‘virtue’ (McRobbie 2009) – epitomised by the professional ineptness and persistent blundering of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones – such underachievement and incompetence are no longer held up as endearing signs of female identification and imperfection but now turn out to be equivalent to economic suicide as countless, qualified professionals compete in an ever more aggressive and merciless job market. In this sense, the prospect of prosperity and entrepreneurship that may have been viewed with confidence in the pre-recession decades appears less as an individual entitlement than a corporate obligation in times of austerity that masks the rollback of opportunities under the rhetorical guise of necessity, self-restraint and self-responsibility. In these circumstances, the affective state under neoliberal

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culture might be described at best as a ‘cruel optimism’ whereby we are encouraged to believe in the idea of a brighter future while ‘such attachments are, simultaneously, “actively impeded” by the harsh precarities and instabilities of neoliberalism’ (Littler 2013: 62). Moreover, the unfolding of contemporary neoliberal hegemony has also impacted on feminism that, as Angela McRobbie notes, has become ‘an active force-field of political values’ (McRobbie 2013: 120). In fact, in order to deeper embed ‘as a new kind of common-sense’, neoliberalism enters into a ‘symbiotic relationship with liberal feminism’ (McRobbie 2013: 124). Focusing on the figure of the professional middle-class mother, McRobbie detects ‘something of a feminist endorsement’ specifically in a British political context that sees the animosity and repudiation of feminism that were ‘feature[s] of the Blair government’ recede (McRobbie 2013: 121). In its place, there emerges a new neoliberal ‘corporate feminism’ that is more ‘branded and personalised’ and champions women who ‘will enter the labour market and stay in it’ (McRobbie 2013: 133, 121). In some ways, this line of criticism echoes well-rehearsed arguments about postfeminism as a constitutive component of neoliberal rationality, most notably in the context of the ‘New Economy’ of the 1990s and ‘the displacement of democratic imperatives by free market ones’ (Tasker and Negra 2007: 6). While neoliberal (post)feminism is unquestionably politicised in its inclusion of a ‘distinctly gendered dimension to the mantra of individualism’ (McRobbie 2013: 121), the exact politics of this stance remain as problematic as ever. For critics like Giroux, for example, the regime of ‘economic Darwinism’ under neoliberalism relies on an ethos of anti-intellectualism and ignorance to both ‘depoliticise the larger public while simultaneously producing the individual and collective subjects necessary and willing to participate in their own oppression’ (Giroux 2011: 165). In this reading, the ‘cheerful robot’ comes to be seen as a metaphor for the systemic construction of ‘a new mode of depoliticised and thoughtless form of agency’ that reduces civic responsibility to banal acts of consumption (Giroux 2011: 165). Gilbert as well posits that neoliberal ideology works to ‘secure consent and generate political inertia’ in its bid to convince and console austerity-weary citizens that the sense of perpetual competition and insecurity that pervades recessionary cultures is natural and that frankly, there is no point in fighting the inevitable (2013: 15). Here, survival – or, in Gilbert’s words, ‘feeding one’s children and keeping them out of relative poverty’ (Gilbert 2013: 14) – becomes an achievable but highly demanding task that keeps most social actors too busy to engage in any substantive political challenge to the norms. The general cultural mood is encapsulated by the notions of ‘disaffected consent’ and ‘resigned compliance’ where consent is conditional and grudging rather than enthusiastic (Gilbert 2013: 13, 18). This has led to an amplification of neoliberal enterprise culture where citizens are called upon to share sacrifice, bear the burden of economic downturn and the responsibility for economic uplift and (self-)improvement.

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While our current era might thus be perceived as ‘post-political’ in some ways – characterised by self-responsibilisation rather than social responsibility – it has nonetheless produced distinct forms of social and political action that re-engage with critical thinking and the language of reform and activism. Against the backdrop of global cutbacks, bailouts and austerity measures, macropolitical protests are growing, not just pursuing an anti-capitalist vein that highlights the self-serving and avaricious practices of the ‘masters of capital’, typified by the widely reviled image of the ‘greedy banker’. The present climate of global crisis and uncertainty has also generated a range of specifically gendered revolts that adopt a ‘boob and bust’ politics to address a range of gender inequalities. From Femen’s ‘topless Jihad’ against sex tourism and religious institutions in the Ukraine to the now worldwide ‘SlutWalk’ movement to challenge sexual violence, sexualised feminist politics have erupted in many different locations, re-appropriating the topless female body as a means for political expression and activism. These bare-chested protests employ the body as gendered political capital to unmask distinctively female crises in the context of an increasingly imbalanced global society. The reasoning that underlies these gendered forms of political resistance can clearly be traced back to a postfeminist logic that argues for the subjectifying potential of the (post)feminine body and makes a case for ‘sexual micro-politics’ that allows individual women who express their sexuality in a politically relevant manner (Genz 2006). The SlutWalk movement in particular has magnified these postfeminist debates on a macro-political scale, spreading around the globe from its original manifestation in Toronto in 2011 where the ill-advised comments of a Canadian police officer during a routine ‘personal safety’ visit to a University campus – suggesting that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’ – galvanised local women to organise an activist protest against ‘slut-blaming’ ideology that implicates the victim of sexual violence (see Ringrose and Renold 2012). This kind of sexualised activism seeks to effect a positive re-evaluation of sexual promiscuity and/ or sex work through a mobilisation of the ‘slut’ persona – connected with a whole category of words associated with female sexuality (‘tart’, ‘slag’, ‘whore’, and so on) – in an effort to produce what in theoretical terms Judith Butler refers to as ‘resignification’, a ‘subversive citation from within’ (Butler 1995: 135). As Ringrose and Renold explain, one of the goals of the SlutWalk as a collective movement is to ‘push the gaze off the dress and behaviour of the victim of sexual violence back upon the perpetrator, questioning the normalisation and legitimisation of male sexual aggression’ (Ringrose and Renold 2012: 334). In this sense, this postfeminist politics of resignification is not unlike other kinds of sexual politics that centre on the reclamation of words, the term ‘queer’ as an emblem of pride and visibility being the most notable in this respect. Yet, the trust in sexual resignification as a political postfeminist tool needs to be tempered by the awareness that these are also extraordinarily sexist times in which sexism is at once hyper-visible but not seen. Of course, critics have

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long highlighted postfeminism’s inherently sexist and politically conservative dimensions – whereby it is criticised for engendering not the eradication of sexism but its transformation into a more indirect and insidious form (Genz and Brabon 2009). The post-recession years in particular have seen a reinvigoration of new types of sexism – ‘new sexism’ (Benwell 2007); ‘enlightened sexism’ (Douglas 2010); ‘postfeminist sexism’ (Gill 2011); ‘critical sexism’ (Ahmed 2013) – that belie assumptions of gender equality and sexual freedom. The range and meanings of these variously named contemporary sexist positions bear clear resemblances to wider postfeminist debates that have been explored in this chapter: Benwell (2007) and Douglas (2010) for example examine contemporary sexism in terms of its ironic tone and postmodern reflexivity, allowing in Douglas’s words for an ‘enlightened’ sexist stance that wears ‘a knowing smirk’, is immune from criticism and ‘feminist in its outward appearance’ (Douglas 2010: 14, 10). Focusing on retro-stylish television series like PanAm (2011–12) and Mad Men (2007–), Lynn Spigel (2013) on the other hand discusses postfeminist nostalgia as a key operative device that allows the audience to frame sexism in period images and thereby lock it in the past – a move, we might add, that is also replicated more broadly in austerity cultures of thrift that consume the past in a ‘nostalgia mode’, markedly represented by the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Most recently, Genz’s analysis of ‘sexist liberalism’ and ‘liberal sexism’ has raised a number of issues in relation to neoliberal postfeminism’s politics of resignification and articulations of (female) entitlement and empowerment (2016). According to Genz, the postfeminist confidence around resignification – that a history of patriarchal domination and sexual victimisation could be reclaimed and given a new meaning – is wavering in the context of our contemporary age of uncertainty riddled with debt, doubt and destitution. Popular culture in particular has witnessed a shift towards sexual licentiousness and aggressive physicality that reflects the immediacy of our times with citizens sharply divided by their rank/class and access to capital. The sexual sensationalism on show for example in historical/fantasy television series like Game of Thrones (2011–), The Borgias (2011–13) and The Tudors (2007–10) speaks to the stark realities of a post-2008 world in which well-being and security are no longer guaranteed by the neoliberal mantra of a free-market economy that is meant to provide everyone with the right and potential to make profits and amass personal wealth. At the same time, popular television series such as these do not deny or refute sexism – by rendering it ‘imperceptible’ as some second wave feminists in the 1970s argued (see Frye 1983) – in their unapologetic and humourless depiction of hetero-sexist norms and sexual violence. This raises interesting questions about the nature of visibility itself and its relation to critique whereby making a political issue ‘visible’ or ‘speakable’ might not be enough as an act of emancipation and political awareness. These final ramifications around notions of ‘post-sexism’ highlight the compound

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effects of recessionary rationality on gendered postfeminist culture and more generally point towards an intensification and complexification of postfeminist ideologies. As this chapter has outlined, postfeminism as an analytical category is now an intricate part of current critical debates around (self-) empowerment, subjectivity and agency. Perplexing and troubling for some, postfeminism is also a compelling and provocative feature of contemporary culture, society, academia and politics that demands critical attention and provides an opportunity to practise conflict constructively.

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INTRODUCTION: HISTORICISM

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aking a historicist view of texts involves being sensitive to factors outside the text itself, such as readers and their socio-cultural context. It lies at the opposite pole to formalist criticism, with its conception of texts as almost self-contained entities. Reception and reader-response theory, as Bruce Harding outlines in Chapter 19, places the emphasis firmly on the reader and the exchange that takes place between each reader and the text. Harding considers the work of the main advocates of this position, such as Georges Poulet, Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser, and their insistence on treating textual-reception as a humanistic, rather than a mechanistic process, as implied by formalism. Harding then proceeds in Chapter 20 to consider New Historicism, which operates on the principle that historical traces are to be found in texts and that we must always be aware of the world that lies outside the text itself. As formulated by Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism had a significant impact on literary studies from the 1980s onwards. For many literary scholars in the period, it formed an antidote to deconstruction and its firmly anti-historicist approach to texts. Cultural materialism, as Neema Parvini goes on to discuss in Chapter 21, also took issue with the anti-historicist bias of deconstructive thought, building on the legacy of the English cultural commentator Raymond Williams. It had particular influence in the field of Shakespeare studies, where the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, amongst others, gave rise to the notion of ‘political Shakespeare’. The conflict between historicist and formalist analysis continues to be central to critical theory.

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19 RECEPTION AND READER-RESPONSE THEORY Bruce Harding

New Critical Anti-Affectivism

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nterest in the phenomenology and psychology of reading and the benefits and drawbacks of transactional subjectivism arose from the 1940s onwards in the wake of the harsh New Critical, objectivist attacks on the intentional (genetic) and affective fallacies. As W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley stated: The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does) . . . [which] begins by trying to derive the standards of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear. (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1949: 31) Andrew Bennett argued that the prime purpose of this polemic was ‘the desire to purge literary criticism of the indiscipline of the alleged “femininity” of gossip’ and muddled indulgence in the motley, in favour of disciplining the discipline and making it ‘austerely literary, rigorously linguistic, and astringently intellectual’ (Bennett 2005: 75, 76). Beardsley and Wimsatt were not denying the patent fact that authors have intentions and authority (auctoritas) but, rather, were: (1) attempting to emphasise the prime importance of exploring what I call ‘textual intentionality’, or the poet’s intrinsically focused intentions as the text expresses them, and (2) piously insisting that the ‘best’ texts are autonomous, self-referential ‘verbal icons’ capturing sensuous and non-rational experience. Furthermore, deep fears about accepting ‘irrelevant’ emotive responses by ‘ideal readers’ as validating an undisciplined affectivism led very thoughtful, experientially minded critics in France, Germany and the Anglo-American world to reconceive the dynamics of a reader-oriented form of criticism. Even the normally cautious George Steiner noted that ‘the relation of the true reader to the book is creative’ (Steiner 1996: 17) and empirically constitutive of the text’s ongoing life. Similarly, Steiner argued: ‘No ascription of meaning is ever

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final, no associative sequence or field of possible resonance ever end-stopped’, for ‘meanings’ and ‘the psychic energies which enunciate, or, more exactly, which encode them, are in perpetual motion’ (Steiner 1996: 22). Reader-response criticism sought to restore reality to literary and cultural studies by reminding us that inert paper-bound objects need to be activated by real, and imperfect, biological people. Some theorists (notably Norman Holland) took Freudian ideas into overdrive and postulated a literary self-analysis using texts to mirror individual reader’s neuroses which discredited a legitimate movement, and this is why his fellow Americans Stanley Fish and Wayne C. Booth insisted on a more communal sense of reading space: to avoid overblown psycho-therapeutic claims while accepting the insights of European phenomenologists (Poulet and Iser especially) as they forced a recognition of texts as humanistic and not mechanistic entities. In 1929, a reviewer of I. A. Richards’s books noted with alarm that Richards had rather positivistically identified ‘ten difficulties which arise in the reading of poetry’, and described these items, from Practical Criticism (1929), as ‘a terrifying list of possible misdemeanours’, illustrated by hair-raising accounts of the ‘most nightmarish quality’ in student responses to unnamed and anonymised texts (Twitchett 1929: 602). The besetting sin to Richards was ‘Doctrinal Adhesion’, as an impediment to a notionally ‘pure’ (non-ideological, non-referential), intrinsically focused aesthetic reading, as this directed attention away from the pristine, self-sufficient text towards extrinsic, prosaic and distracting concerns (politics, social ethics, the new psychology, and so on). However, this commendable zeal to uncover the unmediated ‘textual unconscious’ (or preconscious) often degenerated, in practice, into a crude literary-critical positivism purging ideas from texts and foregrounding aesthetics, as when Cleanth Brooks, an American New Critic, attempted to impose a false division between ‘the work itself’ and ‘[s]peculation on the mental processes of the author’ (Brooks 1951: 74). This is the very troubling dyad which Georges Poulet later theorised and vaporised. Indeed, the whole reception aesthetics movement placed priority not on the author or the text, but on the criticality of readers and the mental exchanges which can subsist between them, authors and texts, banishing socio-historical contextualisation. Poulet embraced critical practice as a dynamic process of reciprocity, insisting that ‘the ideal act of criticism must seize (and reproduce) that certain relationship between an object and a mind which is the work itself’ (Poulet 1969: 65) – or between the text and the delivery vehicle (physical form) which transmits that expressed and ongoingly expressive mind (subject, or the interactable content of inner experience and intentional consciousness). Poulet’s account of the processual evolution of the ‘read’ text is compelling: At this point, no object [play, poem, novel] can any longer express it, no structure can any longer define it; [the text] is exposed in its ineffability and in its fundamental indeterminacy. Such is perhaps the reason why

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the critic, in his [sic] elucidation of works, is haunted by this transcendence of mind. It seems then that criticism . . . needs to annihilate, or at least momentarily to forget, the objective elements of the work, and to elevate itself to the apprehension of a subjectivity without objectivity. (Poulet 1969: 68) It is arguable that the chief flaw of a strongly centred affective criticism of this type lies in its dynamically ‘presentist’ emphasis – namely, that it valorises the solitary cogito encountering les plaisirs du texte in a solipsistic mode, without recourse to examining the wider structural, thematic, ideological and contextual issues which may animate and vivify that text, both from outside and within. The truly interesting aspect of this is how the concerns of the reception aesthetes correspond to core dicta made by Jacob Bronowski, the philosopher of science and purveyor of scientific humanism. In his lectures at MIT in 1953, Dr Bronowski (a poet as well as a noted biologist) forcefully rebutted naïve ideas of the scientist ‘fixing by some mechanical process the facts of nature’ (Bronowski 1972: 11) and not engaging in any human filtering. Bronowski articulated a dynamic, post-Heisenbergian recognition that: There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. (Bronowski 1972: 20) This ‘Two World Systems’ debate is vital and confirms the value of response theory as a valid heuristic illuminating receptivity and subjectivity as an unavoidable paired datum of human experience and knowledge-creation.

‘Death of the Author’ Criticism (Barthes), Fish, Booth, Holland and Bleich Roland Barthes’ famous essay ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ (‘The Death of the Author’) emerged in the midst of the 1968 Parisian evenements and totally put paid to the New Critics’ ‘genetic heresy’. Barthes’s classic – and highly seductive postmodern thesis was that: ‘Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ (Barthes 1977: 147). Alvin Kernan wittily described this as ‘the literary sansculottes’ dethroning and driving out ‘the rentier authors’ as dominant authorities and despatching them (Kernan 1990: 73), but Geoffrey Hartman contributed the

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more pregnant idea that ‘if there is a key, the author has locked the text and, as it were, thrown the key away – into the text’ (in Atkins 1983: 55). As Paris was the home to French New Wave cinema and auteurisme (the valorisation of ‘authorial’ directors), it was arguably quite an odd place for the project of ‘deauthor-ization’ to emerge, yet Barthes’s principle of affectless, depersonalised critique (which shuns identity-politics) had been to a degree anticipated when the objectivist New Critics Wimsatt and Bearsdley rejected the existentialist doctrine of emotive and personal meaning in texts: ‘Emotion, it is true, has a well-known capacity to fortify opinion, to inflame cognition, and to grow upon itself in surprising proportions to grains of reason. We have mob psychology, psychosis, and neurosis’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 26–7). Yet while it was one thing to espouse a principled rejection of authorial opinions as a putatively reliable guide in interpreting literary texts, it was quite another to totally decentre authorship in a movement which parallels Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ discourse of a century earlier. The generic GodAuthor was now fully dethroned as an existential ‘trace’ in light of the deconstructionists’ assertions of the radical contingency and lack of any ‘metaphysics of presence’ inherent in all textuality per se. This mode of regard negates the exploration of anterior and framing concerns, as which cultural and social identities are being given ‘voice’ in texts, as in David Bleich’s assertion that in the act of reading literature, ‘the author is not speaking to me, and I am not speaking to him. I am reconstructing a piece of language whose origin is permanently inaccessible to me’ (Bleich 1978: 238). This is potentially a very asocial and anti-historical, decontextualising reading strategy. Wimsatt and Beardsley led the charge for a cognitive criticism of ‘classical objectivity’ as against an affective ‘romantic reader psychology’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 34) and Bleich reminds us that the New Critics were waging a defensive war in a hyper-technological world that valued hard, physical evidence, so that they tried to ‘hypostatize a literary text as a document with an internally coherent objective meaning’ (Bleich 1978: 33). Bleich’s ‘Americanist’ mode of personal self-exploration is not what Poulet and the Geneva School sought, but its therapeutic cast does recall Holland’s Freudianised recycling, in egopsychology, of the Aristotelian notion of health via the katharsis of art, by his insistence that literary response has a potentially therapeutic function in helping to burn off readers’ inexpressible and intrapsychically repressed anxieties. Holland believed his method was broadly therapeutic, exposing the originary (and Freudian) ‘core-fantasy’ shared by an author and a reader, up-thrusting and introjecting repressed unconscious wishes into a safely aestheticised form of conscious response to text – literacy wittily slated by Steiner as ‘transient Narcissism’ (Steiner 1996: 35). Holland revised his 1968 postulates, in 1975 publishing his ‘transactive’ hypothesis (Five Readers Reading), in which readers can ward off anxiety in the act of reading by ‘the projection of a safe fantasy into the work’ (Wright 1984: 65). This is a more humanist and liberatory

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view of reading-as-transference, in which readers (‘analysands’, or patients in transference) use texts (as de facto analysts) to transact and work through their own value sets and identity issues, transforming these into identified and highly charged ‘themes’ in literary works. Yet for all that they can remain solipsistic rhapsodes. A traditional word for this – without the chic psychoanalytic theorising – was eisogesis. Elizabeth Wright justly queried why such practitioners ‘fail to ask why readings should be communicated’ (Wright 1984: 68) at all to a wider critical audience of readers and scholars. Victor Erlich observed that Stanley Fish (see Fish 1970: 123–62) viewed ‘the reading experience as hardly safe’ (Erlich 1975: 767), being liable to expose self-inadequacies to readerly view and so, possibly, transforming our minds and values negatively instead of reassuring us. In the reading experience charted by Fish (Surprised by Sin [1967]), ‘we are roped into committing ourselves to positions we must later give up’ (Erlich 1975: 767) in a contestable mental and ideological space; for the Fishian approach of meaning-construction eschews simple retrieval-construal and ultimately ‘focuses on the reader rather than the artifact’ (Fish 1970: 139). Fish well appreciated that a key issue with affective criticism is that it ‘leads away from “the thing itself” in all its solidity to the inchoate impressions of a variable and various reader’ (Fish 1970: 139); yet he insisted that literary meaning-making is a valid activity engaged in by competent ‘informed readers’ as they participate kinetically in decoding and translating abstruse sentences (which, once activated, are events which generate effects, and are not inert objects) centred in ‘the temporal flow of the reading experience’, to create a living event, a holistic gestalt (Fish 1970: 127). The notion of ‘meaning as event’ recalled for Fish a slow-motion camera as the reader’s actualising participation is predicated upon ‘something that is happening between the words and in the reader’s mind’ (Fish 1970: 128). Reading, in Fish’s view, is an affective experience which ‘makes us do something’, so ‘[t]he objectivity of the text is an illusion, and moreover, a dangerous illusion, because it is so physically convincing’ (Fish 1970: 131, 140). Where, for objectivist critics, reading is an extractive process, for Fish and the receptor-critics it is an event, ‘the actualization of meaning’ via the ‘activating consciousness of the reader’ (Fish 1970: 144, 141). For Fish, the search for determinable ‘messages’ is pointless, as the meaning of an utterance is the experience it projects. He celebrates this analytical ‘method’ as self-sharpening – ‘and what it sharpens is you. In short, it does not organize materials, but transforms minds’ (Fish 1970: 161). Fish later espoused the idea of ‘reading communities’, emphasising the power of a collectivity who share a set of common assumptions and values, so that ‘[w]hat will, at any time, be recognized as literature is a function of a communal decision as to what will count as literature’ and one that ‘will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers continues to abide by it’ (Fish 1980: 10, 11). Wayne Booth added an extra dimension of

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stringent responsibility when he espoused an ethical criticism which matches the storyteller’s ethos with that of implied receptors who acknowledge ‘an ethics of readers – [of] their responsibilities to stories’ (Booth 1988: 9). This is what Booth meant by his rhetorical query about the kind of ‘company we have kept’ in forging a communal conversation which he calls ‘coductive’ (coduction being a drawing or bringing out together). Booth offers a neat elaboration and advancement upon Fish’s rather relativistic and unfocused construct of ‘interpretive communities’, even as he concedes its approximative shape: ‘Coduction can never be “demonstrative”, apodeictic: it will not persuade those who lack the experience required to perform a similar coduction. The validity of our coductions must always be corrected in [critical] conversations about the coductions of others whom we trust’ (Booth 1988: 73). The key orientation that devalued reception studies, and the social structures forming the context of reception processes themselves, was the astonishingly naïve New Critical dictum that texts are autonomous and exempt from socially determined representational and communicative systems. David Bleich rejected social or primarily programmatic readings in his subjectivist paradigm of ‘personal self-exploration’, for he noted rather timidly and defensively that knowledge ‘is the subjective construction of our minds, which are, after all, more accessible to us than anything else’ (Bleich 1978: 8, 35). In Bleich’s assertion about ‘the desire to create knowledge on one’s own behalf and on behalf of one’s community from the subjective knowledge of the work of art’ (Bleich 1978: 93) we discern the seeds of Fish’s interpretive communities of intersubjectively negotiating and linked readers. Bleich was sanguine in taking from all this an enhanced reliability of literary knowledge, ‘because it allows each community [of literary concern] to authorize its own knowledge with its own experiences’ (Bleich 1978: 126). Bleich defended his loose notion of subjective response as scientia on the hopeful proviso that readers consciously articulate their ‘motives for knowledge as the rationale for [their] declaration of knowledge’ while accepting ‘the subjective principle that the observer is part of the observed while the observed is defined by the observer’ (Bleich 1978: 100, 122). Here critical theory is catching up with the core insights of modern particle physics, but is running off the road into unrestricted interpretive relativism. Murray Schwarz and Norman Holland’s seminar welcomed and affirmed subjectivity of response and expressly rejected the ‘professional avoidance techniques’ (Schwarz 1975: 756) of literary objectivism. In their ‘Delphi Seminars’, it was found that ‘readers take in literary works by shaping them to meet their characteristic adaptive and defensive strategies’ (Holland and Schwarz 1975: 789), which certainly sounds like a neo-Freudian therapeutic model of ‘literary creation and re-creation’. But it is difficult, empirically, to fault Holland and Schwarz for their concern ‘to discover how the distinctive character of each of our minds affects the literary transactions we engage in and the

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critical statements we make’ (Holland and Schwarz 1975: 790), especially as Fish has articulated the Heisenberg point that the observer is ineluctably part of the observed while trying to define it.

D. W. Harding and Georges Poulet: The Act of Affective Reading Theorised Foucault’s theorisation of the ‘author function’ utilised a broader concept of authorising discourse (e.g. Freudian analysis), but nonetheless it remained one which denominates and authenticates notions of subjectivity as a discursive formation. The modern ‘subject’ was born from the Renaissance onwards with the advent of a revived Greek humanism and was an offshoot of the heroic artist trope, granting the artist-subject a discrete and communicable subjectivity to share with a wider public. Andrew Bennett has analysed the text-terrorists’ attack on ‘the “capitalist” hegemony of authorcentric, bourgeois, humanist ideology’ (Bennett 2005: 18). A clear instance of that genteel ideology came in D. W. Harding’s essay ‘The Bond with the Author’, in which Harding asserted that ‘Any but the most naïve kind of reading puts us into implicit relation with an author’ (Harding 1971: 307). Harding did important empirical work on the psychology of the reading act and research into reader response, as de facto communication with a projected authorial persona, and he avoids a naïve intentionalist reading, strenuously arguing that ‘Not what the author intended, and not what he [sic] was aware analytically of having created, but the work as he consented to leave it is the thing that concerns the reader’, for ‘critical analysis may be no part of his creative strength’ (Harding 1971: 309). Harding’s credo is impressive: ‘More important is the fact that much of the author’s intention exists in no form separable from what he achieves; it is only in the course of writing that his intention defines itself in full detail’ even though the quality of that achievement may well elude the author, for ‘What he intended and what he noticed are less important than what he did’ (Harding 1971: 309). Harding suggests that if we are not to eliminate the putative authorial persona totally from the reading, then we must embrace the dual ‘necessity for the author to exercise . . . control over the reader’s response’ and for ‘the reader to submit to [such] control’, for Harding values a ‘quasi-social relation’ with the author ‘even if he [sic] is dead or totally inaccessible’ (Harding 1971: 311). He argues that some degree of direction by the author is a legitimate working assumption in criticism so as to determine and limit acts of misprision, for otherwise ‘we treat reading as a purely individual creative or projective activity’ (314). This is a cardinal point for a disciplined critical practice. I. A. Richards confidently distinguished between genuine variant readings and arrant misreadings, yet Harding more thoughtfully allowed that variance is an inevitable given, ‘knowing that the full effect of any writing, at least any emotive writing, must depend in part on the unique structure of personality

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and experience to which it is assimilated by each reader’ (Harding 1971: 314). Harding focused on devising practical critical strategies to bridge this cognitive gap, but he was right to exclude variances which merely indulge our own moods, reinforce our prejudices and confirm ‘a narcissistic reflection of our self’ (Harding 1971: 319); for responding adequately to a great work ‘means becoming something different from your previous self’ (Harding 1971: 325). Significantly, Harding’s notion of a disciplined subjectivism resonates with Georges Poulet’s ‘take-over’ theory: And this process of entering into another person’s pattern of growth is an essential difference between real literary experience and free imaginative response to a barely intelligible or completely ambiguous piece of writing, however suggestive and stimulating to our own latent creativeness that may be. (Harding 1971: 325) In 1978 DeMaria lamented that ‘[i]n the newest practical criticism the role of the reader is more prominent than the performance of the writer or the independent harmony of the text’ and envisaged an Iserian ‘interpenetration of created work and creating reader’ (DeMaria 463, 467). But surely all this shadow-boxing is concerned properly with locating the uniquely ‘purposive’ intention of the published work, which confidently intends its own meaning and, as such, is light years away from the despised ‘biographical fallacy’ excoriated by Wimsatt and Beardsley. The deconstructionists – whom Lehman memorably termed the purveyors of ‘harmless pseudoradicalism’ and ‘critical terrorism’, as their ‘invincible skepticism blunts its force as an instrument of dissent’ (Lehman 1991: 74, 76) – wage ideological war against such patrician and Platonic conceptions of well-wrought poetic urns, and, like Geoffrey Hartman, assert the parity of the reader-critic with the creative writer as a co-creator of meaning. The conflict is ultimately framed around ‘readerly’ epitexts and occurs between the graphi-readers who believe in autotelic meaning and the solidity and ontological autonomy of texts and refuse to countenance any notion of an antecedent and authorial voice (New Critics and Barthes), and the existentialising epi-readers who willingly try to recall and recreate the uniquely valenced ‘voice’ (of the silent/ced author) which ‘speaks’ the texts they are reading (Poulet and the phenomenologists). The philosopher-critic Georges Poulet published his first key manifestoes of an experiential critique de la conscience (‘criticism of consciousness’) reading position in 1949 (his Edinburgh essays), 1954 and 1959, when he asserted that literature encodes subjective (and inter-subjective) perceptions of realities that transcend history and simple-minded ‘biographism’. For Poulet, the attuned reader must be prepared to subject him- or herself to foreign experiences and perceptions that allow them to explore the work’s expression of a conscious,

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perceiving being and, as such, to be ‘inhabited’ by thought through a ‘strange displacement of myself by the work’ (Poulet 1969: 59): to be taken over by the symbolic author. As Lawall paraphrases this, the literary thought ‘is a motivating impulse, an original birth which must be resurrected by the reader as he rethinks and re-creates the author’s own expression’ (Lawall 1968: 78) in his or her psyche. In this way, textually embedded thought is born anew in a malleable, biophysical form, and this is Poulet’s miracle of transactional exchange and a living and transitive exercise in a shared inter-subjective phenomenology. Poulet insists on texts as actualisable identities: that while made of paper and ink, books ‘lie where they are put, until the moment someone shows an interest in them’; that while they are inert physical objects made of paper and ink, books ‘wait for someone to come and deliver them from their materiality, their immobility’, for ‘books are not just objects among others’ (Poulet 1969: 53). Poulet writes of a literary, mentalistic interpenetration between books and their readers which retains cogency, especially so in the age of Kindle and e-books: On the other hand, take a book, and you will find it offering, opening itself. It is this openness of the book which I find so moving. A book is not shut in by its contours, is not walled-up as a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside of itself, or to let you exist in it. In short, the extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer outside or inside. (Poulet 1969: 54) Poulet defined fictional works as ‘subjectified objects’ which allow one to think ‘the thoughts of another . . . as my very own’ in ‘my innermost self’ (Poulet 1969: 55, 56, 54). This experiential reification of ‘a second self’ which ‘thinks and feels for me’ may seem to engender passivity and what Poulet called the ‘annexation of my consciousness by another (which is the work)’ (Poulet 1969: 57, 59). Yet it does facilitate an active sense of mutuality and sharing that ‘in no way implies that I am the victim of any deprivation of consciousness’, but, rather, that ‘I begin to share the use of my consciousness with this being whom I have tried to define and who is the conscious subject ensconsed at the heart of the work’ (Poulet 1969: 59). One may be forgiven for wondering if Poulet is unintentionally hypothesising communication with the immanent self and the ‘mental entities’ (Poulet 1969: 54) of an historical author. That said, Poulet preferred Jean-Pierre Richard’s extroverted vision (see Richard 1954), from which the subjective consciousness embraces an extrinsic world that extends well beyond the confines of the expressive, textually vocalising self. Yet, contradictorily, the experiential literary critic is not permitted to reference psychology, sociology or metaphysics. For Poulet, books are not aloof and resistant, self-sufficient exterior objects (e.g. sculptures). They

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are, conversely, potentially ‘interior’ entities ‘condemned to change their very nature, condemned to lose their materiality’ (Poulet 1969: 55), being subsumed in the consciousness of humans, the best of whom will merge their selfhood with texts and deploy an intuitive Einfuhlungsgabe (extreme empathy of experiential response). This premise is clearly closely akin to the New Criticism (and to Derrida’s intrinsic focus on a crafted and coded linguistic solipsism) yet Poulet firmly rejected any pretence of critical distance or objectivity of response. Indeed, Poulet romantically insisted that once readers replace ‘a direct perception of reality for the words of a book’ they deliver themselves, ‘bound hand and foot to the omnipotence of fiction’ in an inescapable ‘takeover’, when they become ‘the prey of language’ (Poulet 1969: 55). Lawall asserts that in Poulet’s Christianised existentialism, formal literary qualities (style, diction, structure) must be subordinated in order to ‘discover in the text the overall, non-objective reality of the author as subject’ (Lawall 1968: 81) yet not claiming to have sourced any definitive authorial intention. The expression of a ‘voice’ as an intense record of consciousness (as in a CD awaiting being played) is the origin, point and destination of Pouletian identitarianism that is linked to the Cartesian formula of the cogito (thinking self) of each ‘author’ working out his expressive identity. To the effect that the author opens a window on his or her view of the phenomenal world, critics-readers may entertain and explore these themes, but Poulet will not permit the reader to independently set the authorial-interpretive agenda by recourse to external standards and models, in order to conduct any extra-literary external appraisal/audit of the text(s) being encountered. Poulet deduced a vexing consequence: I am someone who happens to have as objects of his own thought, thoughts which are part of a book I am reading, and which are therefore the cogitations of another. They are the thoughts of another, and yet it is I who am their subject. . . . I am thinking the thoughts of another. (Poulet 1969: 55) This cognitive surrender is surely vastly overstated (in what precise sense can a notional reader think another’s thoughts without a skerrick of qualification or critical distanciation?). Poulet may view a given thought, or given literary expression, as a datum about which he urges: ‘I think it as my own’ (Poulet 1969: 56); but this is surely an expression of his own readerly idiosyncrasy, not to mention the assertion of an astonishing phenomenological naïvety. ‘My consciousness behaves as though it were the consciousness of another’ (Poulet 1969: 56) is a statement fundamentally misconceiving metaphor for reality (adducing a temporary state of mind for something more substantial) and is ultimately expressive of a worrisome abdication of the sovereign cogito. Furthermore, Poulet advanced very strong affective claims, insisting that if we read ‘without mental reservation’ our comprehension ‘becomes intuitive’ and

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hyper-responsive to feeling, that astonishing facility with which we ‘not only understand but even feel what [we] read’ (Poulet 1969: 57). Poulet’s naïve (but immensely attractive) psychologism draws attention to the reader being ‘on loan to another’ who ‘thinks, feels, suffers, and acts within me’, as a ‘second self takes over, a self which thinks and feels for me’ (Poulet 1969: 57). Does such abject affective-cognitive surrender actually occur or only in Poulet’s musings about a phantom ‘Ideal Reader’ succumbing to what he calls the ‘total commitment required of any reader’ (Poulet 1969: 57)? Poulet theorises the resurrection of Barthes’s despised author, naming this literary doppelgänger as the incarnated spirit of the historical author cheating death and acting as a post-mortem Svengali, performing astonishing acts of ventriloquism: When I read Baudelaire or Racine, it is really Baudelaire and Racine who thinks, feels, allows himself to be read within me. Thus a book is not only a book [i.e. decomposable printed matter], it is the means by which an author actually preserves his ideas, his feelings, his modes of dreaming and living. It is his means of saving his identity from death. . . . [This] seems to justify what is commonly called the biographical explication of literary texts. Indeed every word of literature is impregnated with the mind of the one who wrote it. As he makes us read it, he awakens in us the analogue of what he thought or felt. To understand a literary work, then, is to let the individual who wrote it reveal himself [sic] to us in us. (Poulet 1969: 58) If we read this with a metaphorical mindset, it starts to make impressive sense, positing the book as a partial transcription of the psychic configuration of its creator with the receptive reader acting as a kind of willing palimpsest or playing-machine, or mode of post-authorial articulation, but surely also a receptor who may play with the controls and share in the co-production of textual meaning and developing a temporary common consciousness. Poulet draws back from any crude and foolish literalisation of the departed or physically remote bio-physical author, arguing that in the reading experience we remake (resurrect) the work in a ‘vital inbreathing’, a kind of mental pregnancy that enables a work of literature to become ‘(at the expense of the reader whose life it suspends) a sort of human being’, or ‘a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects’ (Poulet 1969: 59); or, I would prefer to say, of its own otherwise inert, unarticulated objectivity. So instead of an act of psychic vampirism, we are confronted instead with the challenge of actualising a past and alteric sensibility encoded in webs of words, tropes and coded perceptions. It is a stunning model of mirrored perception-reception of ‘the conscious subject ensconsed at the heart of the work’ which Poulet termed ‘the apperceptual world of the author’ (Poulet 1969: 59, 61).

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Poulet described his radical theory of response to René Wellek (6 October 1956) as based on the premise that ‘criticism has for its primordial goal our comprehension of a work, that is to say to situate us in a thinking and feeling consciousness, a subject in connection with its objects. . . . The literary work is not a flower or a fruit. It is the creature smelling the flower and tasting the fruit’ or discovering ‘a consciousness that is substituted for our own’ (cited in Lawall 1968: 129), and thus accessing a purported preverbal human experience of another. This is incarnated reading, but an approach which risks homogenising authorial discourse into the expression of simple monolinear, monoplanar themes, thereby short-changing the existential complexity encoded in the fates of several characters. As Lawall so cogently reminds us: ‘the critic must analyze all aspects of the author’s expression if he is to represent adequately the author’s existential identity’, in that the effort ‘to represent a mental universe requires the complexity of a game of three-dimensional chess’ (Lawall 1968: 133). The text as an active art-object awaiting literary apperception is premised on an almost absolute identity and lack of distance between the text and the reader by which Poulet sought a criticism of comprehension by union, but contended that literature is by definition ‘already a transportation of the real into the unreality of verbal conception’ (Poulet 1969: 62). In this austerely objectivist and non-mimetic schema, the best critical act ‘will constitute a transposition of this transposition, thus raising to the second power the “de-realization” of being through language’ by cognitive blasting, deploying the most lucid language to push texts to a kind of annihilative vanishing point of analytical clarity (Poulet 1969: 62). Clearly this hypercriticism is closer to the literary chills of New Criticism than to Poulet’s highly proximate, intellectually sensuous and personalist dicta and diktats but Poulet sought to fuse subjectivism with a more distanced form of textual appraisal in which: Sensuous thought is privileged to move at once to the heart of the work and to share its own life; clear thought is privileged to confer on its objects the highest degree of intelligibility. Two sorts of insight are here distinguishable and mutually exclusive: there is penetration by the senses and penetration by the reflective consciousness. (Poulet 1969: 63) Stanley Fish (1980), clearly influenced by Poulet, the Geneva School, Iser et al., powerfully explored the illusion of objective reading and the vacuous maps of potential misreading by inept (or ‘un-ideal’) individual readers in context of the more important, overarching collective construction of textuality signalled by their often unconscious membership of ‘interpretive communities’ that reflect a diachronically framed and experientially valenced zeitgeist. For Fish was clear that symbolising a symbolic object as a ‘real’ one (New Criticism) is illusory and argued feistily (Fish 1970: 146). Fish moved on to dissolve any heuristically valid distinction between ‘ordinary’

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and ‘literary’ language codes, noting that communal forces of taste formation must operate: All aesthetics are . . . local and conventional, reflecting a collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers (it is very much an act of faith) continues to abide by it. (Fish 1973: 52) As Bleich put it, there is no objective authority and, furthermore, that ‘no existing standards are necessarily right or wrong’, for ‘[b]oth the interpretive judgments and their criteria of viability are intersubjectively renegotiated when they are proposed anew’ through critical dialogue (Bleich 1978: 159). All canons of taste are finally arbitrary as are legal fictions (e.g. Parliamentary Sovereignty) and strict distinctions in court judgments between ratio decidendi and obiter dicta, so that it is small wonder that Fish’s academic journey came to encompass the textual politics articulated in postmodern legal theory (Fish 1989). The interpretive community discourse is akin to Dworkin’s notion of legal and literary-critical practice as ‘chain enterprises’ in which interpretation is sourced in institutional affiliations of agreed reading practice (Dworkin 1982). In his earliest theorisations, Fish the anti-formalist promoted a self-aware, reader-centric focus that clearly built upon Poulet’s textual internalisation strategy (internalising the textual ‘Other’), but where, with Poulet, the ‘author’ re-existed by being internalised in the reader and not in any pre-textual entity, with Fish the text speaks through the reader, provided it is recognised that each text is read by its own rules and signifying system and we concede that ‘we live in a rhetorical world’ in which notions of ‘intention’ ‘must be interpretively established . . . through persuasion’ (Fish 1989: 25). This affective critique, leading to ‘human self-interpretation through literature’, was also advocated and later greatly developed by Wolfgang Iser of the University of Konstanz (1993: xiii) as a proponent of a metacritical subjectivity that is profoundly anthropomorphic and impressively humanistic.

The Staying Power of Wolfgang Iser Iser’s earliest theory of Wirkungstheorie was a neo-Pouletian heuristic which postulated that the implied reader responds to a network of response-inviting text structures (e.g. patterns, shifts in point of view, blanks in the text) which impel the reader to engage and grapple with the inchoate text, filling lexical gaps along the way and so creatively constructing the otherwise inert, unrealised text in an activity comprising ‘a sort of kaleidoscope of perspectives, preintentions, recollections’ (Iser 1972: 284). In a powerful essay, Iser addressed the need to cognise the ‘realization accomplished by the reader’, as a convergence of text and reader is essential, for bringing ‘the literary work into

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existence’ (Iser 1972: 279). ‘Dynamic reading’ for Iser is not to be confused with ‘the individual disposition of the reader’ (Iser 1972: 279) but, rather, with a contact zone of experiential and adventurous transactional liminality that rewards active and creative reading and yields new insights. Iser cited Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962) as proclaiming how texts may parallel life and asserted that the best authors challenge readers, for ‘it is only by activating the reader’s imagination that the author can hope to involve him and so realize the intentions of his text’, to bring the text ‘to fruition’ (Iser 1972: 286, 282). From this Iser moved to a radical interpretive stance about multivalent meanings: that as expectations are rarely fulfilled ‘in truly literary texts . . . we feel that any confirmative effect’ of the kind sought in denotative and expository texts ‘is a defect in a literary text’ (Iser 1972: 283). Iser’s nuanced but open approach yields deep insights: One might simplify by saying that each intentional sentence correlative opens up a particular horizon, which is modified, if not completely changed, by succeeding sentences. While these expectations arouse interest in what is to come, the subsequent modification of them will also have a retrospective effect on what has already been read. This may now take on a different significance from that which it had at the moment of reading. Whatever we have read sinks into our memory and is foreshortened. It may later be evoked again and set against a different background with the result that the reader is enabled to develop hitherto unforeseeable connections. (Iser 1972: 283) Iser’s key insight is that divergent readings of the same text provide ‘ample evidence of the degree to which literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written’ (Iser 1972: 283). The processes of prediction, predication and retrospection, as discussed, lead to ‘the “gestalt” of a literary text’, as individual readers attempt ‘to fit everything together in a consistent pattern’ that will accord with ‘and must inevitably be colored by our own characteristic selection process’ (Iser 1972: 288, 289). Iser argues for an unusual but dynamic oscillation between the polysemantic/indeterminable nature of texts and the creative and dynamic illusionmaking activity of readers who impose our own systems of order on texts, such that if we cannot do so, ‘sooner or later we will put the text down’ (Iser 1972: 290). Not being able to score a perfect balance in decoding, backtracking and wrestling with the text keeps the reading process going. Iser’s phenomenological research suggests that our shattered (‘defamiliarized’) expectations are ‘integral to the aesthetic experience’ (Iser 1972: 292). ‘The moment we try to impose a consistent pattern on the text, discrepancies are bound to arise’, Iser observed, drawing us into texts and ‘compelling us to conduct a creative examination not only of the text, but also of ourselves’ (Iser 1972: 295). Iser

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believes that ‘[t]he efficacy of a literary text is brought about by the apparent evocation and subsequent negation of the familiar’ (Iser 1972: 295) as takenfor-granted realities are contested and even confuted as our preconceptions are put to flight. Iser explains that this interrogative praxis is what Poulet meant by his arresting conception that ‘in reading the reader becomes the subject that does the thinking’ (Iser 1972: 297). From this premise Iser concluded that the text must needs be viewed as a substantialist node of consciousness upon which dialectical acts or transactions of inter-subjectivity can occur — ‘a relationship that can only come about through the negation of the author’s own life-story and the reader’s own disposition’ (Iser 1972: 298). Out of this transaction, Iser suggested, readers may clarify their own values and better formulate ‘ourselves and what had previously seemed to elude our consciousness’ (Iser 1972: 299). Texts as resistant, even dangerous, mental grinders would be an apt metaphor for this conception of the reading experience. Many years later, Iser theorised the ‘text game’ as one which also transmutes ‘its representational worlds’ (Iser 1993: 281). His notions of textual performativity (as engaged in by active readers) embraces the extra-textual, the intra- and inter-textual, as fictions ‘perform’ to solve problems and, in modern times, ‘to extend the human mind’ even as we re/cognise the fact that such texts are transparent illusions in their playful acts of ‘aesthetic semblance’, using ‘phantasmatic figuration’ as a mode of anthropological inquiry (Iser 1993: 97, 293, 296). Iser propounds a Pirandellian idea that texts may assist human selves to ‘stage’ their evolving life plots (especially affectively) in phantasmatic terms, via a reciprocal transactional ‘doubling’ action between texts and lives. This is an intriguing conceptualisation of texts as rehearsal vehicles in the discovery of alternate selves or life-scenarios, and it is what Iser means by a possibilist ‘literary anthropology’ of ‘human self-exegesis’ (Iser 1993: 302) which moves beyond the dull Aristotelian obsession with mimesis and certainly takes the old dated notion of ‘reader response’ to new existential heights, even as it is a consonant outgrowth of that transactional paradigm of the reading act. In its openness to existential novelty Iser proposed that ‘staging is always a simulacrum that does not even pretend to be copying anything pregiven’ because it is clearly oriented towards models of futurity for the experiencing and plastic, indeterminable reader-self that Iser cryptically terms ‘a fractured “holophrase”’(Iser 1993: 302). Iser takes it as a given that human beings are neither fixed monads nor ‘transcendental egos’, so that literary play is, ipso facto, a liberating experiential activity and ‘mechanism’ which ‘allows us to keep changing in the mirror of our possibilities’ (Iser 1993: 302). ‘Playing away’ what we appear to be, Iser argues, opens up ‘the plenum of our possibilities’ that never reaches ‘a final determinacy’ (Iser 1993: 303) of the self. Continual play at ‘otherness’ is liberating and Iser suggests that it may even be ‘the root from which aesthetic pleasure springs’ as

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well as provisioning self-transpositional acts, shifting in and out of ‘ourselves’ (Iser 1993: 303). Such staging ‘allows us – at least in our fantasy – to lead an ecstatic life by stepping out of what we are caught up in, in order to open up for ourselves what we are otherwise barred from’ (Iser 1993: 303). Iser’s is a fascinating and beguiling hypothesis (in Popperian terms) which accounts for literary pleasure and the possibility of shared self-disclosure. Iser is a literary eminence who has kept the faith with reception aesthetics during an era of remarkable upheaval in critical theory, and whose creative insights and hypotheses have reinvigorated and maintained the relevance of an affective stylistics of reader response into the 1990s and beyond so that this episteme is now a critical commonplace that retains some vibrancy, refusing to lie down and be overtaken by newer and more extrinsically focused critical theories.

Envoi As Bleich noted, ‘subjectivity is an epistemological condition of every human being’, and the whole project of reader-response criticism has been broadly predicated on the concept of ‘the subjective authorization of knowledge’ (Bleich 1978: 264, 295) which replaces any pretence of absolute human truth by deploying inter-subjective (or what I call ‘transactional’) negotiation on the path to shared knowledge construction amongst defined communities of interest: It is not possible to ‘have’ an interpretation of a work of literature in isolation from a community. Even though one can read a poem, decide what it means, and then keep it a secret, such an interpretation has the same epistemological status as an unremembered dream. Its lack of negotiative presence renders it functionally nonexistent. . . . The degree to which knowledge is not part of a community is the degree to which it is not knowledge at all. (Bleich 1978: 296) Linguistic re-symbolisation by disciplined and shared textual exchanges about literary works which generates consequential knowledge is the powerhouse of an informed, interconnected reception aesthetics. Even as we concede that reader-oriented critique is no longer avant-garde, one can do no better than summon Bleich for one final burst of lucidity: ‘The distinction . . . between real objects, symbolic objects, and people, suggests that in English, the “real” objects are words and texts; the symbolic objects are language and literature. The subject is people, who speak, read, and write’ (Bleich 1978: 298).

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20 NEW HISTORICISM Bruce Harding

The Lexicon of ‘Historicism’: The Literary Variant

T

he term ‘new historicism’ (NH) can be a site of confusion. It signifies an exercise in the historically grounded (diachronic) imagination, a deviant offshoot of traditional historical criticism and a soft American New Left academic offspring of contextual criticism that ‘covers a broad range of overlapping critical enterprises’ but which is largely beholden to ‘the sons of Karl’ Marx and ‘the sons (and daughters)’ of the transgressive postmodern theorist and historian Michel Foucault (Abrams 1989: 364, 365). It effects a mode of socially resonant, anti-humanist interpretive unmasking called ‘defamilarization’ (after the work of Russian Formalists) that is central to the ‘New History’/ nouvelle histoire notably associated with the Annales school in France. The ‘movement’ also owes an unconscious debt to the ‘sociology of knowledge’ writings of Max Scheler, Max Weber and Karl Mannheim, as well as to Vico and Herder, the noted Romantic era scholars who insisted on the historicity of all knowledge. New Historicists insist that historical traces inhere in the very fabric of texts rather than as stable and distantly external ‘events’, thus contesting the deconstructionists and urging that there is plenty of reality (and a textinforming reality at that) outside the text. Indeed, texts mediate social reality. Ideally, the movement articulates the mutual interpellation of the literary with ‘historic’ events and texts: that art is embedded in a complex cultural-historical matrix and so may produce social knowledge. Edward Said has expressed the core tenet of New Historicism: that there is no privileged, purely objective Archimedean standing-ground in creating and interpreting literature: ‘there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality’ (Said 2002: 299). Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt are unhappy with an Old Marxist view of artworks conceived as mere superstructural epiphenomena of an economic system, and they have defended the ‘hermeneutical aggression’ of their readings (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 9).

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Following Geertzian anthropology, New Historicists tend to view whole distinct cultures as ‘texts’ and pursue a democratising focus which is open to exploring marginalised literary genres. In keeping with this, there is a focus on ‘body history’ and even a tendency to desacralise works deemed products of ‘genius’, being appropriately sceptical of the New Critical view of the literary text as ‘a sacred, self-enclosed, and self-justifying miracle’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 12). Gallagher and Greenblatt (leading practitioners-founders) express the unexceptionable wish ‘to imagine that the writers we love did not spring up from nowhere and that their achievements must draw upon a whole life-world [which] has undoubtedly left other traces of itself’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 12–13). Inspired by the Old Historicist Erich Auerbach in latching on to exemplary text units found within the cultural archive, and seeking Ezra Pound’s ‘method of Luminous Detail’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 15) to explore the real and the messily particular, Gallagher and Greenblatt deploy the ‘new historical anecdote’, or fragment, ‘to produce the effect of a historical real’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 19). They assert that the anecdote disrupts ‘history as usual’ and is ‘irritatingly antithetical to historical discourse’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 50), presumably meaning idealised positivist (objective) ‘history’-making. Gallagher and Greenblatt freely concede that New Historicism ‘is not a repeatable methodology or a literary critical program’ and ‘sincerely hope’ that their readers ‘will not be able to say what it all adds up to’, for ‘if you could, we would have failed’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 19). Louis Montrose has reminded us that there is no monolithic ‘New Historicism’ in the singular, but, rather, a range of ‘New Historicisms’ (Montrose 1992: 392–418), and it is worth attending to the varied work of such impressive practitioners as Joel Fineman, Jonathan Goldberg, Marjorie Levinson, Jerome McGann, Louis Montrose, Louis Mink, Wesley Morris, J. H. Robinson and Brook Thomas. George Steiner has justified critics attending to authorial and societal contexts, where these are available to us, ‘to help elucidate the author’s intentions and field of assumed echo’ yet all the while strenuously avoiding a naïve intentionalism (Steiner 1996: 27, 29). Steiner insisted that textual hermeneutics are cumulative and recursive, so that semantic ‘substantiation grows’ over time, assisting in the construal of lexis in a rational, disciplined and demonstrable frame (Steiner 1996: 27). And the American judge and legal scholar Richard Posner, in rebuking positivist doctrinal legal scholarship for its fundamentalist approach to legal texts of all kinds, has noted that an overdue ‘hermeneutical turn’ among ‘the legal professoriat’ has forced a recognition of ‘the social and in some versions the political construction of reality’, which has exposed ‘the epistemic shallowness of the enterprise’ of orthodox doctrinal scholarship and ‘the naivete of legal interpretation’ as practised by academic legal doctrinalists (Posner 1995: 85, 88). Such transformations have surely

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not been unaffected by the rise of New Historicism (an essentially American movement) as it pioneered the notion of a contextualising reading in which ‘interpretation is as much creation as discovery’ (Posner 1995: 174), which Stanley Fish has latterly demonstrated in his insightful anti-foundationalist, anti-positivistic deconstruction of regimes of a literalising (pre-Saussurian) judicial rhetoric in favour of strongly socio-culturally situated and self-aware readings of texts (see Fish 1989). At its finest, New Historicism is a species of critique which attempts to demystify dominant ideologies and the reification of Marxian ‘false consciousness’, which is why Harold Bloom cynically labelled it as a variant of ‘school of resentment’ criticism (Bloom 1988; cited in Lehman 1991: 27), or neoMarxist victimology, because Foucault led the way and rather schematically and eclectically diagnosed the often insidious mechanisms of social power in post-Enlightenment Western societies and their self-legitimising disciplinary regimes of ‘truth’ (l’ordre du discours) as a means of asserting statist macropower over minorities. Foucault strove to historicise several ideas of truth, knowledge (epistemes, or representational stages), rationality and reason in a more labile mode than orthodox Marxist or phenomenology’s essentialistic frames. Foucault favoured a context-driven conception of knowledge-making and his notion of epistemes (discrete periods of history defined by world-views which morph, or are refurbished, into new epistemes) made him a formidable legatee to the evolution of New Historicist thinking, and its project of arousing the historical imagination, as a frame-breaker; and his frequently random collections of sources struck an echo in the later ‘anecdotal’ praxis of Greenblatt and Gallagher. New Historicist criticism notably dominated Shakespeare studies from the 1980s as it allied textual analysis with historical contextualisation, yet the ‘movement’ has been attacked for an insufficiency of theorising and its self-confessed refusal of systematisation (‘new historicism is not a coherent, close-knit school in which one might be enrolled or from which one might be expelled’ (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000: 2)). Of course, a key issue is that one can equally overcontextualise (rigidify into historical matrix) as well as undercontextualise texts, thereby inhibiting and shackling interpretive responses from less frozen modes of apprehension. David Scott Kastan has insisted that a simple realist and unrigorous view of ‘history’ has shackled the NH project, with ‘New Historians’ failing to explore aesthetic and ahistorical (formalistic) questions which, for instance, the work of Shakespeare posed; rather, being yoked to trying to locate truths of the past and spinning faux gold out of thin material. Certainly Greenblatt’s Shakepeare biography, Will in the World (2004), is an instance of subjunctive history, being peppered with suppositious phrases such as ‘may’, ‘could have’, ‘might’ and ‘perhaps’, which become seriously annoying. Kastan (1999) has asserted that NH has failed to explore its own methodological assumptions

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and procedures, but this may seem a small failing for a movement which at least tried to interrogate the idea that both standard history and academic criticism are discursively incapable of delivering fully objective judgement and, as such, are unable to escape being netted within ideological frameworks. However Betteridge assails Greenblatt for, de facto, decrying purely aesthetic criteria and then linking his telling micro-anecdotes to ‘some grand historical narrative, for example the death of feudalism’, and then excavating these ideas via ‘a detailed analysis of a literary text’ that is accomplished with ‘great wit and skill’ yet often also with an unreflective aesthetic simplesse (Betteridge 2005: 3). This amounts to a charge of academic ‘bad faith’ for a mode of analysis which avoids: explicitly justifying itself as a form of literary criticism by making a number of claims about its validity that refer beyond its objects of study. It validates itself by referring to history and in the process becomes a kind of history-lite – history without the burden of producing a truth of the past since in the end the truths it produces are based on the close textual analysis of works of canonical literature. (Betteridge 2005: 3) This is a valid ground of critique, yet Betteridge seems to hark back to a disconcerting and naïve melange of positivistic old historicism and New Criticism in advocating an ethical-aesthetic critical discourse which proposes that ‘works of literature produce truths that can be critiqued on the basis of their truthfulness’ (Betteridge 2005: 3). Peter Uwe Hohendahl has argued that NH: de-emphasises aesthetic differences through thick description of cultural details. Since the art-work is no longer guaranteed a special status (aesthetic theory has been discarded as ideology), it can be rescued from indifference only through linking and weaving. (Hohendahl 1992: 103) Foucault’s historicising and denaturalising practice insisted that knowledge and truth cannot be essential or ahistorical (as viewed within the ‘old historicism’) but, rather, reflect ineradicable power struggles; and while his analyses could be circular and self-predictive, Foucault usefully rejected the essentialising theories of Marxism and phenomenology in conducting crafted historiographical investigations and vignettes, which he likened to genealogy and archaeology as he deconstructed discursive formations to make space for histories of the present (The Archaeology of Knowledge 1969, 1972). The critical point surely is that as human beings are biologically and situationally located, it makes full sense to conduct historicised and ironised evaluations of

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all their cultural products. And this work is vital in an age of gleeful, apolitical deconstruction (the ‘new formalism’) in which texts are viewed ‘both as selfreferential and self-disseminative into an open set of undecidable meanings’ (Abrams 1989: 366). New Historicism applies, with suppleness, the Marxist materialist interpretation of history, which Harold Laski once described as ‘the insistence that the material conditions of life, taken as a whole, primarily determine the changes in human thought. It is not some indwelling idea, Providence, the World-Spirit, or Natural Reason, which secures the changes that occur’, for ‘[t]he colour and connotation of our ideas is always given by, and shaped from, the manner in which men [sic] have to gain the means of life’ (Laski 1927: 58, 59). This materialist focus perhaps explains why M. H. Abrams derisively labelled the school ‘a radically political criticism’ and ‘the New Politicalism’ (Abrams 1989: 364, 365), but we surely cannot follow Abrams in his raw assertion that the ‘New Political Readers’ always set out to aggressively subvert and replace plain meanings, to ‘convert manifest meanings into a mask, or displacement’ to uncover hidden political meanings (Abrams 1989: 366–7). For example, Jerome McGann is surely justified in asserting that literary texts are infused with abstract overarching ideologies which they concretise and that their representations cannot but host periodised (thus straightjacketed) assumptions and values. While this may sound toxic to an orthodox humanist scholar, it merely invites responsive critics to recognise ‘that the critical study of such products must be grounded in a socio-historical analytic’ that invites ‘deconstructive materialist’ critics to conduct analyses in that illusion-making ground of masked ideology (McGann 1983: 11). The alarm bells should ring with the risk of eisogesis if the ‘Newreaders’ do not subject their own methods to strict self-ironisation, and to the extent that some do not, Abrams has made a cogent Popperian point. He concedes that this radicalised stance can yield ‘credible political discoveries about a literary work’ if done in a non-triumphalist spirit of the working hypothesis ‘instead of a ruling hypothesis’, and if the NH canons ‘are applied in a way that permits the author’s text some empirical possibility of countering a proposed political reading so as to adjudge it probable, or forced, or even dead wrong’ (Abrams 1989: 369). Such hermeneutical humility avoids self-confirming and ‘empirically incorrigible’ findings and ‘a critical authoritarianism’ and intolerance ‘that brooks no opposition’. Failure to adhere to that positive norm can become a foolish method which can lock in new forms of ‘false consciousness’ by rejecting falsifiability and never querying the ‘conversion, by this apparatus, into an ideological cover-up, or displacement, or rationalization of political or social reality’, and even reductively risking ‘cancelling the imaginative delights that works of literature, in their diversity, have yielded to readers of all eras’ (Abrams 1989: 370).

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‘Historical’ Historicism Defined The tradi