I wrote my thesis on Cory Doctorow’s Recent novel, Makers.  Originally, the idea was to write something that had a great deal to do with the aesthetics of practice that this blog has been dedicated to developing.  In the end (as seems always to be the case) it ended up being about something rather different. ere is still a long-form piece in the works regarding Makers and the materiality of use-value.  This paper is a descriptive bibliography, which seeks to elucidate the implications of Doctorow’s very forward-thinking publications practices for a twenty-first century theory of the novel and novel readership.  Check it out by clicking the link below.

Re-Makers: The Novel in Digital Collaborative Space

He begins by laying out a series of terms which he sees as notably absent from the literature on aesthetic criticism, despite their direct applicability to such discussions.  His (admittedly incomplete) list includes the opposed pairs neat/messy, clean/dirty, ordered/disordered, cluttered/uncluttered, cleared/not cleared, blemished/unblemished, and attractive/unattractive.  Leddy suggests that while these terms are generally applied in everyday settings considered outside the purview of aesthetics, many of them are used frequently to describe traditional art objects.  As Leddy points out:

In the visual arts, for example, we speak of clean lines, clean edges, muddy color, neat construction, and cluttered space. Of course, the lines in a visual work are not literally clean: literal cleanliness has to do with the features of the work qua physical object. A painting is literally clean if it is free of dirt, dust, food particles, and such. (260-261)

It is easy to see that, when we speak of ‘clean lines’ in a painting, we are being rather metaphorical in our use of the term, transferring a term from everyday situations in order to speak of aesthetic qualities.  However, when we borrow such terms for new applications, we also inevitably borrow a larger part of the original concept, no matter how metaphorical we are intending to be.  And as Leddy points out, there is no clear place to draw our distinction between what is a literal use of a word like ‘clean’ and what is finally metaphorical.  The term ‘clean’ itself is always relative, so that its object inevitably falls onto a sliding scale of application.  A clean room might be one in which all visible dirt has been removed and things have been put back in their right place.  We would not be happy with this same definition applied to a fork in a restaurant.  A clean fork is one that is thoroughly sanitized.  So it could be said that the term ‘clean’ as applied to the room is far more metaphorical than the same term applied to a fork.  Likewise, even our qualifications for the cleanliness of a fork may look rather metaphorical when compared to those we require of a syringe or scalpel.

Leddy suggests that we call those qualities listed above, whether we are locating them in an artwork or a bedroom, “Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities,”  and goes on to argue that, while we might like to draw a line between their use in aesthetics and everyday life, that line would inevitably be arbitrary and subject to continual debate: a certain ‘messiness’ injecting itself even into our definitions of ‘messy’.  Furthermore, Leddy points out, “we learn the concept of cleanness [and other everyday surface aesthetic concepts] as children,” which “gives the perceptual meaning of ‘clean’ a certain developmental primacy” (261). This last point seems to suggest what we must assume is true: that aesthetic sensibilities are built up over time on top of those general sensibilities that we early develop regarding our immediate surroundings.

Indeed, it seems as though Leddy’s list is rather too restrictive, as many of those terms which we associate with high-cultural aesthetic critique (even some of those which appear frequently in the aesthetic literature) are more or less metaphorical reapplications of terms used to describe everyday perception.  For example, we might speak of a film or a piece of music being ‘light’ or ‘dark’, of a fine wine or cheese as being ‘chocolatey’, of a painting being ‘forceful’ or a poem’s rhythm as being ‘loose’.  All of these words are taken from general descriptive use and reapplied as aesthetic categories.  Perhaps aesthetic sensibility in general requires not so much the attainment of new critical categories but the transference of more generalized critical categories into the realm of high-culture critique.  The layperson struggling to describe an aesthetic experience is not so much searching for the right word as searching for the correct metaphorical application of a more generalized descriptor.  This also raises a question as to the ‘naturalness’ of such metaphorical applications.  An aesthete would likely employ metaphorical aesthetic descriptor, such as ‘dynamic’ or ‘forceful’, and when pressed for the reasons behind such a usage point to certain similarities between the metaphorical application and the more literal one.  But I wonder how naturally such metaphorical applications arise.  Would a layperson, if pressed for a description of aesthetic qualities, arrive at similar terminology?

Leddy does not address such concerns because he is primarily interested in those aesthetic qualities that are used to describe surfaces.  He compares his categories to those that Göran Hermerén (in The Nature of Aesthetic Qualities) calls gestalt qualities.  Hermerén’s gestalt qualities are those structural qualities which lend an object its aesthetic value.  In this view, Leddy suggests, a building’s aesthetic value arises from the contributions of the architect and the interior decorator, “not the neatener or the cleaner” (262).  ”But,” Leddy continues:

this does not mean that ‘neatness’ and ‘cleanness’ are inapplicable to what architects and interior decorators do. As I have indicated, the architect and interior decorator are responsible for another domain or ontological layer to which the terms ‘neat’ and ‘clean’ may be applied….It is arguable that neatening and cleaning contribute to a room being more balanced, harmonious, and integrated. Perhaps this happens not simply through revealing these properties by through clarifying them.” (262)

Leddy grants his Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities rather little in the way of complexity, but allows that they assist in the appreciation of what he seems to see as the deeper aesthetic qualities of a work.  An old oil painting, therefore, benefits from a literal cleaning in large part because that cleaning reveals and clarifies those more complex aesthetic qualities which are of most interest to an aesthetic evaluation of the work.

I am not so ready to cede the complexity of everyday surface aesthetics.  I am suspicious that when Leddy classifies such qualities as lacking in complexity, he is taking for granted the socially constructed field of high-culture aesthetic qualifications which his study seems at first interested in calling into question.  Leddy gives the lie to his assumptions when he asserts that “[i]t is because of this complexity that we have professional critics in art and not in room neatness” (263). Bourdieu suggests that aesthetic complexity itself is socially constructed, so that calling any one aesthetic quality ‘complex’ and another ‘simple’ or ‘straightforward’ is as much (or more) an assertion of one’s cultural capital as it is a statement of any phenomenon inherent to the object itself. If anything, that such aesthetic qualities as Leddy is interested in exploring are so ingrained into our everyday consciousness as to seem straightforward or easily taken for granted suggests a deeper social significance.

Leddy touches on this possibility when he suggests that, as we early learn concepts of everyday surface aesthetics, that education “seems to privilege ‘neat’ and ‘clean’ over ‘messy’ and ‘dirty’” (261). He goes on to point out that a sensibility which values a certain degree of messiness or disorder is often associated with avant-garde artistic movements, such as Impressionism or Abstract Expressionism, part of the attraction of which “may be due to this tension between surface messiness and underlying neatness” (260).  To what degree might this type of resistance be seen as ideological opposition to an aesthetic power-block which values cleanliness and order?

Walter Benjamin, discussing the aesthetic sensibility of Germany under National Socialism, warns against a “concept of beauty” which shows “the same devotion to the licked-clean which the carnivore displays toward its prey” (“Review of Sternberger’s Panorama”, in The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008, p. 160).  It seems as though a whole range of artists are interested in subverting the cleanliness of their aesthetic objects. Modernist and postmodernist novels calls into question notions of ‘clean’ narrative voice and character development; avant-garde music subverts the notion of ‘clean’ melody; jazz and rock and roll music undermines notions of ‘clean’ instrumentation.  The resistance to such notions of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘order’ in artistic fields is enough to call into question the ideological ground for considering ‘cleanliness’ as superior to ‘messiness’.

The French theorists are also Kantian insofar as they grant our inaccess to the thing-in-itself, the signified. In Lacan, we reach the mirror stage quite early, well before we are able to make a choice in the matter, and the transformation is part of a one way process. Once we are embedded in language, we cannot become unstuck. Derrida uses Kant’s pererga to explain away the object d’art. They both seem to accept, as Kant, that there is a clearly-demarcated and unbridgeable gap between an “I” and an “it.” Further, their theory of language cuts us off from both. The subject remains for Lacan, but it has now become alienated from the object as well as itself.

Nietzsche is a great antidote to such positions, which is I guess ironic since he must also have been foundational in the work of the French theorists. He posits the dissolution of the unified subject, our immersion in the world of the thing. The emperor, he suggests in “On Truth and Lying,” has always been naked, and it is only through language (broadly construed—Nietzsche speaks in terms of metaphor) that we have found ourselves stuck in the first place.

Nietzsche distinguishes between the man of concepts, regularity and reason, and the man of pretense, myth and immediacy. Modern, enlightened man, he says, will “no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions,” but must rather “generalize all these impressions first, turning them into cooler, less colorful concepts in order to harness the vehicle” of his life to them (768).

Nietzsche offers a radical and unsettling world in which this unsticking might be possible. He turns to pre-Socratic Greek society for an example of man for whom, “thanks to the constantly effective miracle assumed by myth…anything is possible at any time, as it is in a dream, and the whole of nature cavorts around men as if it were just a masquerade of the gods” (772). Modern man rarely considers just how much of his life and society functions based on the assumptions that trees will not talk and things, when dropped, will fall to the ground. By calling to mind a people for whom these assumptions did not hold, for whom at best trees usually didn’t talk, Nietzsche challenges us not to start looking for talking trees, but to recognize our position within the construct so that we might realize our own embeddedness in Nature (and thus, perhaps, gain perspective on ourselves as a species). He reminds us of what the physicist or the brain-scientist might remind us: our minds work the same way as everything else, and are made up of everything that is the world. Any distinction between ourselves and our environment is possible only by the workings of the very universe we hope to examine.

The sort of nihilistic direction to take this would be to look inward, toward the absence of the subject center which we have been so interested in preserving for so long. The subject-object divide is really only important because of the first part anyways, right? And to be awakened to its absence might seem tantamount to declaring that life has no meaning, all is but opinion, and we might sit back and watch as the economically powerful and the rhetorically dominant arise. (To some extent, I feel like this is a huge social effect of the French theories that grow out of Nietzche: relativism abounds. Saussure and Foucault can’t but make advertisers better at their jobs.)

But we might instead look outward, and begin to see ourselves finally as a part of the integrated circuit, to discover ourselves as acting agents in the physical world. We can recognize ourselves as things in motion in a universe of things in motion, and might find a new center (or perhaps sidestep the need for one) in an understanding of how our actions work to change the physical world, and how we are acted upon by that world. Rather than dissolving the subject, we might better dissolve the object. We might interpret the object world as it works to extend our inner world into space and time.

This is an exercise in consciousness, but it is also a material process that must consider the human in the most physical terms. It is one best begun by extending the physical parameters by which we define the human body. Let the psychology present itself as an effect (a physical effect, no doubt) of the material processes, the things in motion.

(Parts of this post have appeared in earlier posts.)

…we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context. (5)

Drawing on Simmel, he declares that “Economic exchange creates value,” and he proposes that “the commodity situation in the social life of any ‘thing’ be defined as the situation in which its exchangeability (past, present, future) for some other thing is its socially relevant factor” (3, 13). Appaduri’s definition of the commodity situation is based on an understanding of the commodity not as a thing-in-itself but as a certain social relationship with the thing. By virtue of its social and cultural context, the thing moves into and out of its commodity status. (Appadurai also speaks of the “commodity phase” in the life of the thing (13).) Some things, Appadurai suggests, spend more time than not as commodities, others tend toward the opposite pole, but the potential of any thing to become a commodity is only one aspect of its social existence.

What the definition does not make clear, and what is complicated further by several of Appadurai’s later examples and analogies, is whether the reverse is true. If a thing is not always a commodity, is a commodity always a thing? Appadurai would seem to say no. He takes a lot from Mauss, and while he discusses “nonmonetized, preindustrial economies” he remains strictly (“methodologically”) on the trail of the things themselves. However, as he moves toward comparing these cultures to our own, Appadurai slips consistently into a discussion of information exchange over and above object exchange. In his explanation of the methods by which elite regimes of value tend perpetuate their own status in their attitudes toward things, Appadurai compares the exclusivity and sumptuary laws of early societies, laws designed to designate certain objects and classes of objects as fit only for kings or ruling classes, to modern systems of fashion which, absent any exclusivity in actual commodity ownership, create complex and ever-changing sign systems out of “democratically” available commodities. In his discussion of “tournaments of value,” which he defines as “complex periodic events that are removed in some culturally well-defined way from the routines of economic life”, Appadurai compares the set of ritual practices associated with the kula with those of the Chicago Grain Futures Exchange (21). He illuminates in both of these examples striking similarities in the sorts of cultural practices regarding value that seemingly very different types of societies share. Just as in the kula, in which cultural elites vie for power and prestige through the exchange of a very particular set of things, so too do the traders on the futures exchange attempt to corner the market in particular commodities. In his effort to demonstrate similarities, however, Appadurai seems to lose track of the very things that his methodology has set out to follow.

‘Follow the things’ tracks very nicely for each of his premodern examples. In sumptuary law, it is the right to things that is restricted, and the value of a thing—its political power (“broadly construed”)– is largely based upon its presence. When there are only a few things to be had, and the king has them all, then the king sets himself apart from the masses by the having itself, the presence of the thing. Likewise, in the kula, the “tournament of value” takes place in relation to the exchange of things, of shells and bracelets, the quantity and quality of which determine—by social designation—the status of the respective exchangers.

The thing, on the other hand, is notably absent from both modern-day examples. (I mean the thing in its most material sense. A physical object against which we might stub our physical toe.) In modern Western fashion practices, ownership or possession of a material thing has been replaced (in large part) by possession of information regarding the appropriate meaning of the thing, or which among the many things would prove most socially advantageous as a sign, I.e., that taste, explored by Bourdieu, which might convey the appropriate social information. Likewise, in the exchange of commodities futures, it is not the thing which is traded, but rather the possible future possession of a thing based on sets of data (and the more precise the data the better). In both cases, the place of the thing is taken by information about the thing, and yet, according to Appadurai, the commodity persists.

Does Appadurai suggest that, by virtue of their being commodities, the grain future and the fashion sense are thereby thingified? If so, it would seem that he gains a useful definition of commodity at the expense of a meaningful definition of thing. What is a thing that is a nonmaterial thing? And what use is there in talking about things if the category might include such nonmaterial entities as financial algorithms and high-cultural aesthetic?

At times, Appadurai seems to acknowledge the distinction. In his initial comparison of sumptuary law with fashion, he states:

In such restricted systems of commodity flow, where valuables play the role of coupons or licenses designed to protect status systems, we see the functional equivalent but the technical inversion of ‘fashion’ in more complex societies. Where in the one case status systems are protected and reproduced by restricting equivalences and exchange in a stable universe of commodities, in a fashion system what is restricted and controlled is taste in an ever-changing universe of commodities, with the illusion of complete interchangeability and unrestricted access. (25)

And later in the essay:

Modern consumers are the victims of the velocity of fashion as surely as primitive consumers are the victims of the stability of sumptuary law. (32)

But he does not seem to notice, or he has no interest in, the very real difference that this “technical inversion” has with regard to the things at play in each example. What Appadurai’s slip suggests to me is the all too easy assumption that words are things too. That a culture somehow does not change when it moves from an economy of goods to an economy of discourse. Of course, the goods have not disappeared. Indeed, it seems all too likely that their proliferation may lie near the heart of the very historical rift that Appadurai attempts to bridge.

But a “Cultural biography of things,” as Kopytoff suggests, does seem a promising methodology. What is missing from Appadurai’s analysis, and largely also from Kopytoff’s, is any extended consideration of that biography outside of the context of exchange. We shop a lot, that is certain, but a huge number of the things we buy we buy spend a rather brief period as a commodity before being consigned to…something else. Look around the room and categorize the things you see according to their length of life. How many of them are, by Appadurai’s definition, currently in a “commodity phase”? How many of them are, at this very moment, acting socially as fashions or stock futures? What are the rest of them doing?

It seems that Appadurai has missed an opportunity, or perhaps simply mistitled his book. He seems to be interested in the social construction of value through exchange of commodities, and not really things at all. Things are another matter altogether; in his analysis of modern capitalist societies, they operate as a rather misleading metaphor. We mustn’t assume (indeed, we must argue against the notion) that things have a social life only or even primarily at their moments of highest commodity potential. The best hidden, least understood, and perhaps most interesting aspects of the social life of things are those many days and hours that they spend outside the realm of commoditization. What do they do while they are out of the spotlight? The things on my shelves are the things that have been interesting me lately, and all the things in my cabinets (and my cabinets themselves). Most of these things spent a rather brief time as commodities before entering indefinite non-commodityhood in my office and living room and kitchen. What do we call these things, and how do we discuss their continuing social lives?

And this sort of thing does matter.

“In doing the biography of a thing, one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them? How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness?” (XA 67)

By doing such a biography, Kopytoff argues, we might illuminate the ways in which things are not only materially constructed, but socially and culturally constructed as well. We could examine the life of a car, as it goes from gleaming newness to well-used shabbiness, to dilapidation, and (if it is lucky) to a second life as a restored classic. Notice that, by calling the well-loved classic lucky, I am already talking about the thing as if it were in some ways human. Indeed, with the example of a classic car, the real felt and often admitted emotional and psychological attachment is quite common. We might be less inclined to consider the biography of a paper clip, or of a dollar bill, or of a blender.

Last night I happened to watch the documentary Tapped (2009, Dir. Stephanie Soechtig, Jason Lindsey) on Netflix. It is essentially a (quite lucid) examination and condemnation of the bottled water industry. I admit that the most compelling sequences were those which exposed the unjust and heavy-handed tactics of the large water-bottling corporations (Nestle, Coke, and Pepsi, in case you don’t know). However, the film also contained the obligatory discussion of the way that plastic water bottles originate in oil and become waste. The life story of a bottle. These sorts of ecological project, those that take on litter or resource depletion, are always faced, it seems to me, with the task of waking up their audiences to the thingness of their things. And how often biography seems an appropriate rhetorical mode.  Tapped, however, seems to fail in their bottle biography at at least one (crucial) moment in the bottle’s life: the time it spends actually interacting with humans.  The analysis of the bottle-making process is well-developed, and accompanied by footage of the bottle factory.  Likewise, the end result of bottle profusion is demonstrated through an interview with an ecologist, a walk along a well-littered beach, and a trip out into the North Pacific gyre.  The moments in between however, what might be called the bottle’s “best years,” are captured only in a hazy segment shot from a low angle in which anonymous masses walk down the street carrying their water bottles absentmindedly in hand.  This seems to fall short of the purpose, if only because it is just this absentmindedness with regards to the thing of the bottle that the documentarians have an interest in shaking up.

In a similar sense, Bruno Latour introduces a sociology of things. He speaks of things as “nonhumans” in order to emphasize their ongoing relationship with what is designated (often without examination of the term) as “human” (XC 298). The things he is most interested in examining are those things to which we have “delegated” some otherwise more difficult human actions or responsibilities (XC 299). I might call his things technology, but technology broadly construed. Latour’s illustrates his concepts (often quite humorously) through the example of a hydraulic groom or automatic door closer. Through the introduction of a door (which replaces the human necessity of smashing down a wall and then rebuilding it each time we wish to enter or leave a building), a spring (which eliminates the need of a human groom or door-man, as well as the hassle of constantly training the general public to close the door behind them), and a hydraulic pump (which, by storing up real human energy, eliminates the possibility of being injured or distressed by a too-quickly swinging door), the door-closer integrates itself very particularly into a real human social context. It does human work, and it even has certain limitations which impose actions back onto human actors (the need to keep the door open, for example) which Latour calls “prescription” (XC 301).

Latour suggests that if we want to know just how much work we have delegated to a particular thing, we must only imagine the world without it. He insists that a study of society which does not include the things to which we have delegated human responsibilities would ever be incomplete and ultimately misleading.  A study of the ‘flash mob’ phenomenon or the student protests of Iran’s Green Revolution, for example, would seem ridiculous if it neglected to include the complex role that social media played in their organization and outcomes.  Likewise, a study of family eating habits must incorporate an interest in the cookery, the ingredients, and the table.

A genealogy of things might prove equally fruitful. We might examine the heritage of a thing, those things which came before it and might be said to have ‘led to’ the particular thing we are interested in investigating. The ancestors of a thing might find their kinship in a physical relationship, a relationship of specific purpose, or an aesthetic heritage. In any case, tracing such relationships between things might illuminate the various paths by which our ideas about things, their specific cultural meanings, transform over time.

As a quick example, a short history of the phone:

The early telephone had a separate apparatus for speaking and for listening.  It was an expensive technology; people usually had only one phone in their house, and this often in the main hall.  In order to call someone, you had to ring through the operator.  Thus, it is safe to say that the early telephone was not an exceedingly personal device.  One might not count on a telephone conversation being private, when anyone in the house might hear, to say nothing of a potentially nosy operator. But we can see that a great deal of labor has already been designated to the telephone.  It is no longer necessary to walk across town to speak to a friend, or to post a telegram or a letter (which themselves require labor in their delivery).

As telephone technology advanced, the direct-dial was added and the ear and mouth pieces were incorporated into a single handset.  This is an improvement in efficiency, for sure. We can now leave the heavy part of the phone on the table, and lift only the lightweight handset.  We have also designated to the telephone system the responsibilities once held by the operator.  It is important to note, after Latour, that the operator’s role has not disappeared; it is simply that it is now performed by a thing.  But the direct-dial also offers the possibility that the telephone might become more discreet.  We can make a call, say, to an accomplice or a lover, and we might expect a certain degree of privacy on the line as we cradle the handset on our shoulder and speak softly into the mouthpiece.

Note that word: cradle.  This is what we do with that handset, isn’t it?  And even when we set it again on the base, it is still cradled.  The aesthetic transformation of the phone, therefore, seems to mirror (to imply, to demand) a changing emotional relationship to it.  The earliest phone, likely in the parlor, looks quite a bit like a mash-up between a coat rack and a loud-speaker, a public depository with a public voice.  The later phone is more intimate.  We cradle it, we finger the dial, we twirl the coiled rubber cord.  When the phone goes cordless, it seems to imply a certain new freedom.  We are no longer tied to the wall or desk on which it sits, we are free to roam the room.  But the cordless phone seems to prescribe some new action on our part as well.  For if the phone can be where ever we are, then there is no excuse for missing a call.  We are always connected.  Though we can take the phone into the closet to speak in private, we have given over to the technology the possibility that we are ever, in fact, alone.  This last piece is carried through to the cell phone as well.

The designs that Roger Christian synthesised from Ron Cobb’s prolific and extraordinary conceptual sketches for Alien (1979) are lingered over lovingly at the start of the movie. Ridley Scott knows that corridors matter in a horror (or ‘haunted house’) movie, but these marvellous sets are also being showcased to sell the gritty and grimy, commercial and industrial reality of the Nostromo as well. The upper sections related to the command deck were dirtied down with gold and black paint after a reshuffle of sections in order to convey the grittier world inhabited and Parker and Brett on the engineering level.

Anderson mentions films with a lot of ‘corridor business’.

de Glas examines more closely a pair of publishing houses in order to draw conclusions about the influence they have in the production of their authors. He is interested in qualifying what he sees as an oversimplification in Bourdieu’s own analysis of the publishing house:

A further question mark set against Bourdieu’s analysis of publishing houses concerns the rather abstract level of aggregation of this analysis. Bourdieu divided publishing houses “according to the distribution of their commitments between risky, long-term investments (Godot) and safe, short-term investments, and by the same token, according to the proportion of their authors who are long-term or short-term writers”….Bourdieu was characterizing publishers’ lists in only a general fashion, but what is lacking is any further study of particular sections of an author’s body of works within a list. (p. 382, quoted text from Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief” [1993])

de Glas summarizes the work of Boschetti on two French publishing houses that were established around the time of the first world war, those of Bernard Grasset and Gaston Gallimard. The eventual success of Gallimard’s Nouvelle Review Francaise over Grasset, despite Grasset’s implimentation of “modern methods of recruiting authors and promoting literary books,” is attributed largely to Gallimard’s ability to unify his publishing house around a certain, younger, literary cadre, with an interest (because they were not well known) in defining themselves against the prevailing avant garde of the “fashionable salons” and “the ‘rive droite’” as well as the Academie Francaise (383). Boschetti posits this process of “social renewal” that accompanies the new, younger avat garde , can be explained as a very specific ‘position-taking’ by the younger writers within a field of positions that is largely established. She gives a further example in the Surrealists, who, several years later, define themselves against the very set of avant garde artists ushered in by the NRF.

Young authors define themselves against older authors, in the hope of creating their own ‘new thing.’ This all makes perfect sense, and (to me at least) really doesn’t need the sort flogging that it seems to get in the Sociology of Literature. The problem is that both de Glas and Boschetti (and Bourdieu, for that matter) seem to see this adolescent rebeliousness, this resistant position-taking, as sufficient explanation for the Surrealist project itself:

On this point, both Bourdieu and Boschetti criticize the approach of traditional ‘literary studies’ which have mainly approached the development of an author’soeuvre as the realization of an original authorial project. In reality, according to both, the reverse is the case. It is the structure of the literary field which determines the possible positions of authors (and, according to Boschetti, of publishers), not the other way around. (384)

Two things: First of all, the second half of the statement above is in no way the reverse of the first half, as de Glas states. Indeed, it is hard to see how the conclusion he draws at the end of the statement relates in any way to an author’s oeuvre or to their authorial project. Indeed, that the structure of a literary field determines the possible positions of authors (both established and new) makes perfect sense. However, in the end, this seems to say little more than “you can’t be Proust, we’ve already got a Proust.” More importantly however, is the assumption on de Glas’s part of the sizeof the role position-taking plays in the production of the actual literary work. This is the sort of reductive determinism of which Bourdieu makes me ever more suspicious.

de Glas qualifies the arguments of Bourdieu and Boschetti, and then states his thesis:

My central thesis is that the publishing house…is not merely a gatekeeper, certainly not the mere gate-keeper it is alleged to be [what horrible writing!]. It’s involvement goes much further. From the very beginning and in various ways the publishing house decisively influences the creativity of the author. (386)

He goes on to examine the publishing list of the Dutch publishing house W.L & J. Brusse, and shows (rather conclusively, I think) that it is a combination of long-term authors and new and emerging authors that make a publishing house successful. What he doesn’t do, however, is prove his thesis, that these trends have any effect on the work of authors themselves. It seems clear from his analysis that authors creative production influences the long-term success of the company, but how (or if) this process works in reverse (the point he sets out to prove) is not even touched upon.

The second article, by Barker-Nunn and Fine, examines the role of Melville’s contemporary critical establishment in destroying his reputation. The authors paint a picture of a young and rather culturally naive Melville who, after the publication of his first novel, was taken up as the spokesman for Young America, a democratic critical faction in New York. Melville took the theoretical underpinnings of Young America, which emphasize independence and formal risk taking, so to heart that he ended up isolating himself from the establishment. Near the end of his literary career, Melville found himself with very few critical or popular fans.

This again seems rather trite. A circular argument, even: Melville was critically unpopular because critics didn’t like his work. The more ambitious claim in this article, perhaps, and one which mirrors that of de Glas, is that this critical atmosphere had a significant impact on the way that Melville wrote, as well as the things he wrote about. Barker-Nunn and Fine say things like “The content and form of Melville’s work was affected not only by his being a Young American writer but by his being a New York writer as well…” (88), but they never actually tell us how it is that Melville’s form reflects the influence of the Young Americans. Certainly, he had taken from them parts of his writing philosophy. He had probably taken also from any number of people, and not least of all the crew of the whaler that inspired Typee in the first place, but the crew of the whaler doesn’t fit into anyone’s concept of a ‘literary field.’ It seems more clear though, from their growing displeasure with his writing, that Melville was less inclined to ‘toe the line’ than the Young Americans would have liked. That he ended his career in relative obscurity suggests that whatever formal approach he was employing, people in the mid-19th century just didn’t get it. Whatever it was, they thought it was bad.

And so we are back to our facile Bourdieuian mantra: Melville asavant garde can be explained in his position-taking as resistant to the ‘main line’ of literary production, as represented both in the Young Americans and in the New England poets. I fail to see the profundity. Nor can I understand how this helps us understand anything about Moby Dick, any more than I can understand how the fact that the Surrealists were young and resistant to traditional production avenues helps us understand the motivations for Un Chien Andalou. An author might easily define himself against the ‘main current’ in literature: he might simple produce utter nonsense, words and phrases and sentences that don’t seem to fit together at all (Dada, anyone?), and we could make the same arguments about his position-taking that seems continually to be made in Bordieu-inspired Sociology of Culture. It just seems reductive, or banal, or both, and needlessly so. Surely, there are ways of accounting for a broader understanding of networks of influence than that put forward here.

This course has been hugely beneficial. One of the reasons I came back to school was that I, as I was teaching Language Arts, found myself increasingly unsure about my own convictions with regards to art in general, including the arts both of teaching and of language. This course has given me a language with which to interrogate my understanding of art, and a language with which to teach it. It has also, along with the other courses I took this semester, effected an expansion of the concept of art beyond the realm of individual objects or production to include a broad complex of both ideas and behaviors.

It is perhaps telling of the influence of this course that those theorists who we studied early form a foundation for my understanding, and those we approached near the end of the course are the ones with which I feel and ongoing engagement. I am ever drawn back to Kant and Hegel for the theoretical underpinnings of modernity. It feels as though Kant offered an ideal rationalization for art, that Hegel grounded it in a method. The importance for both of these is necessarily ongoing, but there is a certain strain of the mythological in later theorists, a certain suggestion that some new turn in human consciousness is upon us, that I just can’t help being attracted by. Ironically, my ongoing interaction with these later theorists, my uncertainty and interrogation of their ideas at a level more immediate to my own interests, has translated into a relative dearth of address in these journals. Whether this is due more to the mounting responsibilities in other classes later in the semester, or to my ongoing uncertainty and curiosity with regards to these theories, I can’t say (though I’d be willing to bet it’s a bit of both). In this final journal entry, therefore, I’ll attempt to address some of these later theories briefly, and with an eye to the ongoing influence they are having on my own theories.

Kristeva looks below language for rhythm, and understands rhythm as a truly organic phenomenon. It is thus through the chora, the “discrete quantities of energy” which move through the pre-oedipal subject who is “always already involved in a semiotic process” that language arises (2071-2). The chora is the “essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral states” (2072). Kristeva’s theory effectively does away with the issues of “incitement” that arose in Freud and were preserved in Lacan. Kristeva understands that the subject needs no incitement because it is always already involved in meaning-formation, and that Saussure’s langue, vocal language systems, are just a product of the “various constraints imposed on this body…by family and social structures” (2072). Kristeva seems to suggest a potentially biological underpinning to notions of the self when she traces the development of our perceptive apparatus back to the mother, the biological well-spring of our very material existence. She follows systems of meaning all the way to the genetic level, suggesting that “genetic programmings are necessarily semiotic: they include the primary processes such as displacement and condensation, absorption and repulsion, rejection and stasis” (2076). The place where these deep codes are communicated is “enigmatic and feminine,” “rhythmic, unfettered,…musical, anterior to judgment” (2076). It seems like Kristeva’s description of pre-linguistic meaning could be equally applied to pre-linguistic man. The poet who can channel the chora is one who communicates the depth of being, the mythical source of humanity.

Barthes makes no excuses for his Mythologies, which come to seem like a telling of the story we tell each other when we might not seem to be telling each other anything. In this way he relates to Bourdieu, who wants to demonstrate the power of these untold stories to shape our ideas about the world, and Michel de Certeau also suggests that the smallest actions constitute an entire mythological system which works below reason and intellectual action.

I was convinced, even after the short readings that were assigned in class, that I would find myself inevitably involved in an ongoing relationship with Frederic Jameson and Michel Foucault. I added their books to my Amazon wishlist even before I had decided on my courses for next semester. Jameson’s Marxism seems to offer a wonderful mode of ongoing historical interaction and politically conscious critique. And while Jameson himself criticizes Foucault for the ‘no-way-out’ paradox of his system of knowledge, I can’t help but agree with Jameson also that the post-structuralist project is a product of its own historical moment, and this moment seems crucial in the development of Western thought. If we can understand Kant in relationship to his ‘author-function’, that his philosophy was inevitably a product of his historical moment, little more than a vocalization of things which were, by the time he wrote, on the very tips of everyone’s tongues, We might understand Foucault’s work and that of the late Marxists (I’m thinking also of Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment which, though I have not read it, I understand to be negative in its treatment of Enlightenment philosophy since Kant) to be equally a product of some ‘new era’. The very fact that Foucault can put his theory into words, as Donna Haraway suggested, may signal its own obsolescence. I am inclined to take Jameson at his ‘word’: we are ‘post-modern’ also in the sense that many of the structures of human thought and social interaction, structures which presented themselves in the phantasmagoria of modernity as inevitable and timeless, have fractured under the weight of their own responsibility. This is perhaps the ‘awakening’ that Benjamin seemed so interested in effecting, and that it is an ongoing crisis in contemporary history surely might speak to his resurgence in critical interest. Foucault does seem to lock us into a mode, but he cannot account for the ways that just our knowledge of being locked in might suddenly burst the lock, in a lightning-flash insight. Nor does he seem, at least so far as what I have read, to realize the power-relationships moving in the opposite direction. I have been reading a little Michel de Certeau, who seems to understand that, although we may live within a system of power and discourse which is largely beyond our individual control, we do control it, even if at the most ‘negligible’ scale, with our very habitual existence. The ways in which individuals interact with the Foucault’s web invariably shifts the balances of power, if ever so slightly. In creating an inescapable web, Foucault also offers us the tools which we might use to shape the web more ideally.

Indeed, it seems at times when Foucault uses words like “discourse” and “power,” he is simply substituting more menacing-sounding terms for earlier notions of “language” and “culture”. He is interested in highlighting the ways that our ‘language’ plays into the established power-structures. In this way, his project would seem to accord with that of Jameson and other Marxists, since it demonstrates the ways in which our system is organized in order to perpetuate itself. We might understand language from a Saussurian perspective to be just such a system, and Hayles ideas about information are likewise structured. If we drew a line from N. Katherine Hayles to Julia Kristeva, we could conceive of the ways that, in a very strictly biological sense, communication has always been a matter of information systems. Kristeva’s chora derive from genetic and biological systems, which have the potential of quantification in the same terms of electric impulses that we use to describe computer systems. Of course, this is all beyond current science to demonstrate concretely, but it is within the capacity of the system itself. Perhaps the way out of the system, as Derrida might suggest, is to plumb its depths. Science seems in some ways to epitomize the system of knowledge that Foucault understands as our web of power and discourse.

Indeed, it might be from this perspective that we approach the work of Hayles and Haraway. It is through technology that science vocalizes itself in our everyday existence. Our interactions with technology create what Benjamin casts as our perceptive unconscious, the ever-changing mode of perception through which we evaluate our surroundings. To this end, science fiction contains a mythologizing impulse; it is a mythologizing of the future, but of a future which is also ever present.

I might even be inclined to argue for the presence of a mythology in Jameson’s concept of the ‘postmodern’. Could we conceive of pastiche as a mythology which has been driven by the increased speed of modern change to address ever more contemporary moments in social memory? When our entire mode of perception is being acted upon at an ever-increasing rate, the temporal depth of our relationship with the world around us must decrease, if only because we find ever fewer connections in times which seem increasingly far away. For pre-historic and classical man, lengths of time between significant change were long, and so epic myth attempted to encompass a global depth, explaining in its origin stories the existence of contemporary phenomenon. For post-modern man, our origin seems rooted ever more contemporaneously, and so when we look for our foundations, we can’t help but look not to ancient history but still to the earliest moment which seems to accord with our own. That these images of history don’t necessarily look anything like real historical circumstances speaks to their power as ‘myth’, even as it seems to call for their examination in light of dialectical history or the history of the seats of power.

As I hope is evident in this collection of journals, this course has given me both a theoretical framework in which to work and an (at least initial, if still rather vague) understanding of the ways my own ideas, about art as much as about contemporary existence generally, fit into and grow out of this broader framework. As far as a course with which to begin my graduate study, I can’t imagine one that would have been more helpful.

Derrida constructs the frame as the middle ground which Kant gives us as a directional tool, pointing us in the direction of the true aesthetic object. The frame is perergon, it is outside the work, but it is essential in telling us that a work of art, in fact, exists (ostensibly, within the frame). However, Derrida exposes the empirical regression that such a dichotomy–of inside and outside, artwork and pererga–must necessarily introduce. We can never be sure that we have, in fact, set all extraneous details aside in our pursuit of the object, and so must eventually put the object of beauty itself aside in order to finally determine its beauty. Self-defeating, to say the least.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, this same concept of liminality is turned inside out. The play itself is structured so as to make the audience successively uncertain as to their position with regards to reality. Kant’s aesthetic (for Derrida) suggests a continual movement inward toward the object, while at the same time necessitating a continual ‘reframing’ of the object in relation to those things external to it. Derrida’s hypothetical artwork–a framed painting of a building surrounded by columns shaped like clothed statues–points up this continual reframing. Shakespeare’s play also seems to point continually outward to a reality, while continually reframing that reality with regards to the ‘art’ which is theatrical performance.
One of the most ingenious aspects of the play’s structure is that it must necessarily be in play before the play itself actually begins, and it extends itself outward again from the play’s ending. In between, it plays all sorts of games with the concepts of interiority and exteriority. Here, very quickly, I’ll breakdown how I see this being achieved.
The audience of the play has, upon entering a theater, set aside certain assumptions about ‘real life’. There is a tacit understanding that ‘entertainment’, whatever else it may be, is a diversion from the real. While I am being entertained, there are no jobs to worry about, no familial concerns, no pressing external circumstances (the fact that I have come to the theater suggests that I have made arrangements for my work, my kids, etc.). In this respect, the theater itself acts as the first realm of unreality into which the audience is drawn. While this is true at the play’s start, it is made explicit as the play ends, when Puck offers the audience the opportunity to cast the play itself off as nothing more than a dream. By vocalizing the option, however, Puck extends the plays action beyond that played on the stage, in order to incorporate, at the very least, the action of the audience as they leave the theater and return to the ‘real.’

Within the action of the play itself, however, this same structure is preeminent. The play opens in Athens, which is at the start to be considered the realm of unreality, when compared with the perceived reality of the actual people in their actual seats in the actual theater. That Athens is being played before them on the stage offers the audience the opportunity to reframe their concept of the real: perhaps they had considered that entering the theater was a diversion from reality, perhaps not, but now they are clearly being asked to draw a frame around the artwork, and to place themselves, externally, in relation to it. I am real, Shakespearean Athens is fake, is fantasy, is artwork. It is key, however, that in this section of the play certain elements of the ‘reality’ of Athens are also established. Patriarchy is in full effect, gravity works, death is possible, social interactions are fraught with complications; things are not ‘ideal.’

The escape from the city again brings into focus the dual nature of the Derridian frame: the lovers move outward from the city, away from civilization and toward nature (and thus, ostensibly, toward some deeper biological reality–for Freud and Lacan, the dreamworld is a little bit more ‘real’); however, in doing so they draw the audience, once again, into a deeper sense of unreality. Now, the audience must conceive of Athens as ‘real’, insofar as it is opposed to the ‘dream’ of the forest. Thus far, the audience has stacked their frameworks: The world outside the theater is real, I in my seat am real, Athens is real, and it is the dream-forest that is the center of unreality. It is from this point that art springs. And yet, in the Mechanicals rehearsal, a further level of unreality is suggested. That a play could be performed in the dream world itself suggests that the dream world is not so much different than our own. We, after all, are watching a play right now (although the play itself seems intent on obscuring this very simple formulation). As Quince goes about the forest clearing pointing out the stage, the tiring-house, he is surely indicating the actual stage, and in the Elizabethan theater he might as easily indicate the actual tiring-house, which immediately collapses the framework thus far established. Indeed, the entire rehearsal, which takes place at the center of the audience’s frame, is built around exposing the inner workings of the illusion of theater. Here, in the ‘reality’ of the dream-forest, the Mechanicals discuss stage lighting, prop difficulties, the writing of the play, the fact that characters are just actors in costumes. It seems as though, right in the center of its artifice (Act 3, Scene 1 is the center of the play, both by scene, and–more or less–by length), Midsummer performs a sort of deconstruction on itself, pointing out through characters at the center of the artifice that it works to sustain the ‘mechanics’ by which that artifice is sustained.

Bottom’s dream, which we experience as the reality of the dream-forest, is indeed, the bottom of our dream as well. From the moment he goes to bed with Titania, the play moves increasingly back out of the frames which it has constructed. It seems interesting to note here, however, that the devices by which things are ‘put right’, in the play’s interest to get the lovers back to Athens, to move back to reality, all seem to involve a ‘putting to sleep’ as well. This offers the opportunity for the image of awakening to reality–the lovers awaken to the reality of Athens, bottom awakens to the reality of the forest–but it also suggests that the move to that reality contains within it the same qualities of ‘putting to sleep’ that are associated with dream.

By ending with “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the play repositions its audience to consider the framework in which they experience art and artifice. They have, along with the lovers, been reintegrated into the reality of Athens, but even this movement is one which must certainly recall the original, and more immediate, disintegration into the false world of Athens with which the play began. If this suggestion is missed by anyone the first time around, the play-within-the-play drives it home. The audience now is asked to respond to pure artifice (we saw it under construction in the forest, and we see it fall apart in “Pyramus and Thisbe”), but we are responding to this pure artifice alongside Theseus, Hippolyta, and the lovers, with whom we must both identify (we watch what they watch) while we are immediately distanced from them (we watch them watching). (Does Derrida’s regressive frame not suggest itself further: who watches us watching them?)

Of course, as I have already suggested, Puck’s final monologue points outward once again. If the implication was not taken up by watching the audience on stage, Puck leaves no doubt that the audience, too, has been complicit in this artifice. “That you have but slumbered here” suggests that you, too, must now wake up. However, as in the play, we may question what it is we are waking up to. No one in the play could quite shake off their dreams, and we might expect to have the same experience. Oberon’s final speech, indeed his final existing in and presiding over the manor house at Athens, makes clear the role which fantasy plays in the propagation of reality.

All this very quickly.