The Imagination in Measure for Measure

For this final post, I would like to return to some of the same ground I covered in my first, in which I looked at the "temptation scenes" (2.2 and 2.4) of Measure for Measure in terms of Patterson's discussion of the autonomous self in Chaucer. Since we have now read another essay dealing with medieval self-consciousness, Nicholas Watson's "The Phantasmal Past: Time, History, and the Recombinative Imagination," let's see if we can find evidence for or against the hypothesis that something like the medieval "imagination" is depicted in these scenes.
     To be a bit more precise, I am interested in Watson's description of the cellula imaginativa as a troubled mediator between external reality and the faculties of "judgment and memory" (9); "troubled" because the rational part of the mind seems to require images produced by the imagination in order to function at all, yet there is no way to be sure these images will adequately represent reality and the imagination may further muddy the waters by combining images haphazardly (as in dreams). Watson uses the example of John of Morigny's Liber florum to demonstrate the severity of this anxiety, as well as one ingenious scheme for managing it in the context of divination: "the Virgin's appearance in dreams must be carefully vetted for diabolical deception. [... E]ven true visions may contain a whiff of the diabolic, a mingling of truth and error" (28). That this kind of thinking was still possible in Measure for Measure's day may perhaps be established by the prominent place in Descartes' philosophy, a generation later, of the famous "evil genius" hypothesis (e.g., Meditations 22).
     And the scenes of the play leading up to Angelo's temptation do indeeed introduce the notion of the shaky relationship between image and truth. Vincentio's appointment of Angelo as his deputy begins with the ironic (in retrospect) claim that "There is a character in thy life / That to th'observer doth thy history / Fully unfold" (1.1.28-30). The metaphor is of an open book, the sight of which produces reliably intelligible images in the mind of the "observer"; but Angelo answers with a less confident figuration: "Let there be some more test made of my mettle / Before so noble and so great a figure / Be stamped upon it" (1.1.49-51), introducing a coining motif that will recur several times in 2.4.
     Angelo first retools it as a metaphor for Claudio's crime in begetting a bastard:
                                                            It were as good
          To pardon him                 [. . .]
                            [. . .]                               as to remit
          Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's image
          In stamps that are forbid. (2.4.42-6)
But the appearance of the coining image that most clearly associates it with the imaginative faculty occurs in Isabella's response to Angelo's claim that "women are frail too" (2.4.125): "Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves, / Which are as easy broke as they make forms. / [...] / [...W]e are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints" (2.4.126-7, 130-1). The imagination here is figured both as a fragile mirror of the soul and as a faculty for imprinting images on the woman's "soft" judgment. It was this latter formulation that would prove so enduring among British empiricist philosophers, beginning with Hobbes: "There be also other imaginations that arise in men [...] from the great impression made in sense" (Leviathan 1.2.4).
     The argument thus far I hope has established that the crucial "temptation scenes" of Measure for Measure are, in fact, concerned with a mental faculty akin to the medieval "imagination," which stamps images or forms onto the mind in a way that can be misleading and problematic. But the question remains, given the ease with which Measure for Measure's characters--and indeed those of early modern drama in general--are taken in by the imagination's false coinings: how is one to go about "vetting" its distressing productions?


Works Cited

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. 3rd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. 46-105. Print.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. J. C. A. Gaskin. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. Eds. Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. Print.

Theorizing the 18th C Imagination: Novelty in Roxana

Nicholas Watson’s “The Phantasmal Past” presents Chaucer’s House of Rumour as representative of the recombinative medieval imagination, an “engine of images” driven by “a constant stream of sensory impressions that it instantly manufactures into phantasms…” (14). Viewing the House of Rumour as a virtual machine churning out “tidinges” is partly what enables Watson to recover “the very feature of the past most successfully suppressed and assimilated by modernity: the novelty of the past…” (7). Such a comparison could be extended to the growth of literacy in England in the 17th and 18th centuries, and particularly to the news cycle (and indeed, J. Paul Hunter makes a similar claim linking novelty, imagination, and the 18th c. newspaper in Before Novels).The “engine of images” referenced in Watson would seem to have a real-life counterpart in the printing press, churning out a mixture of fictional forms and social commentary that recall the past as phantasm. Roxana intersects with both Watson’s argument and the celebrations of novelty found in eighteenth-century newspapers, demonstrating a way in which to theorize the 18th c. imagination.

Roxana’s development is deeply informed by Defoe’s preoccupation with novelties and newspaper publishing. Indeed, Defoe’s long-standing fascination with the imagination is evidenced in his Journal of the Plague Year and The Storm, two pseudo-journalistic pieces that document public reactions to disasters. A tidbit of news made equally of “fals” and “soth” elements plays prominently in Roxana’s narrative: the role of Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II and famed actress who formed the basis for Roxana’s character. Watson describes how, in medieval imaginative theory, “our perception of all reality, past, present, and future” “is constantly staged as “a negotiation between the false and the true” (18). Extending this theory to the 18th c. requires viewing Roxana as the site where this negotiation takes place, as the reader synthesizes the ambiguous image of Nell Gwynn with Roxana’s own indeterminate traits. Although the Preface insists that the story is “laid in Truth of Fact; and so the work is not a Story, but a History,” this assertion is continually called into question by Roxana’s revisions (2). One might read Roxana’s undermining of the “Truth of Fact” as reminiscent of Dante’s musings on the Geryon, the “nightmare product of the recombinative imagination…the lie with the face of a truth” (19). Watson shows how the unraveling of Geryon’s image reveals the poem as a “comedia” for the first time and highlights its fictionality. Roxana’s truth similarly conjures up an “epistemological uncertainty” that Watson is unable to resist comparing to “that essential, fraudulent modern genre, the ‘novel.’”(22).

Imaginative understanding “first conceives of the object of inquiry in corporeal terms,” Watson notes (5). If the image of the past can be read as a body, Roxana stands in for the imaginary archive, with its many fragmented editions and complicated relationship with truth-telling. Reading Roxana requires a piecing together of the many versions of Roxana, assembling a more-or-less coherent whole. Yet Watson also suggests that the “circulation, the process of question , answer, and exchange….is vital to the mode of imaginative thought” (36). This brings me back to the idea of how the 18th c. newspaper, Roxana’s chosen profession as a prostitute, and Watson’s imaginative theory remain linked: each depend on circulation of textual and literal bodies. Defoe’s fascination with imaginative thought led him to construct Roxana as a “phantasmic presence,” a novelty constantly kept in circulation as she is rewritten and revised (36).

Watson suggests that “the medieval imagination indeed forms an essential part of the history of novelty, which is also part of the history of the modern” (18). I'm curious about whether reading “across the divide between present and past” can help me understand 18th c. novelties, or whether I'm simply succumbing to the teleological reading Watson warns against (7). Is there a place for modernity in Watson's medieval analysis?

The "Hand that wrote mortality": Toxicity and animate objects in "The Birthmark"

Toxicity is undoubtedly present in “The Birthmark.” Aylmer produces potions and supplements that he administers to his wife Georgiana both directly and indirectly, by filtering vapors through the air and secretly adding his concoctions to her food. The presence of these toxins (we know they are toxins by the end, when Georgina is killed by them) differs somewhat from Chen’s analysis of lead paint in Chinese-made toys and her own disease of MCS in that Aylmer knowingly and purposefully produces and administers the story’s toxins. The intentionality here is mirrored to some extent in Chen’s description of the Thomas the Tank Engine toys as they were interpreted by white Americans, in that the American consumers generated a mentality of sexualized and racialized threat from China, as if the Chinese workers intended to intoxicate white boys with a homosexual desire. The difference is, of course, that the threat to Georgiana is one of exaggerated heterosexuality or patriarchy, in that Aylmer attempts to form her into the perfect wife by removing the birthmark. By this logic, toxicity in the story would be an agent of normative order, rather than of queer productivity, as Chen argues.

            However, such a reversal of Chen’s argument about toxicity cannot take place so simply in the story. Just as the Chinese workers also experienced the toxicity of lead, in fact to a greater degree than did the white American child, so too does Aylmer experience a different type of toxin: the birthmark itself. To both Aylmer, who cannot stand the sight of the birthmark, and Georgiana, who consequently suffers under her husband’s horror, the birthmark is the most powerful toxin of all in the story.  Chen describes of a toxin: “It is not necessarily alive, yet it enlivens morbidity and fear of death” (265). Georgiana’s birthmark similarly is equated inevitably with death; it is the “spectral Hand that wrote mortality” (1322). Its influence on Aylmer’s mind and body is severe; he cannot look at his wife without “a strong convulsive shudder” (1324), and soon the birthmark’s toxicity transfers to Georgiana who “learn[s] to shudder at his gaze” (1322). We learn that the birthmark “‘has clutched its grasp, into your [Georgiana’s] being, with a strength of which I [Aylmer] had no previous conception’” (1329). In addition, like Chen’s description of her altered, slightly delusional state after the deluge of toxins she experiences walking down the street, Aylmer’s intoxication by the birthmark begins affecting his mental state: he has nightmares about surgically removing the mark, he isolates himself more and more in his laboratory, and Georgiana warns that he must remove the birthmark “or we shall both go mad!” (1329).

            Certainly there are strong differences between the birthmark as toxin and the toxins in Chen’s article; namely, the birthmark is not toxic in and of itself. Rather, it becomes toxic through Aylmer’s need for perfection in his wife (his patriarchal impulse). In this way, the birthmark gains meaning not only as a toxin but as the animated (queer) object that Chen argues is produced by toxicity. I put “queer” in parentheses because it may be too great of a move to posit the queerness of Georgiana/the birthmark’s subversion of patriarchy. In any case, the birthmark certainly reflects Chen’s “animacy:”  “[animacy] is described alternately as a quality of agency, sentience, or liveness…These many meanings must be sustained together, for they all circulate biopolitically, running through conditionally sentient and nonsentient, live and dead, agentive and passive bodies” (280). The birthmark, with its ability to “write mortality,” appear under Aylmer’s gaze as if knowing his disgust, and change color and shape with Georgiana’s emotions, betrays all three qualities of animacy: agency, sentience, and liveness, respectively. Where the birthmark’s position as an animate object gets muddied is the fact that is not an object external from Georgiana’s body. It is in fact not really an object at all. This, however, I would argue reveals not that the birthmark is not an animate (queer) object, but that together Georgiana and the birthmark form one animate (queer) object (see my post about Bernstein’s dolls article for evidence of Georgiana as a sentient doll). This conclusion is quite different from Chen’s. For Chen, toxicity produces “queer bonds” between subjects and animate objects; in “The Birthmark,” toxicity exists in and is queerly bonded to an animate object within one subject. Does the story’s version therefore demonstrate an internal, harmful rupture of the relationships and “queer loves” Chen argues are propelled by toxicity (281)? Or does Georgiana and her birthmark present a new internally productive plurality of toxicity, queer bonds, and animate objects? Clearly this is complicated by the fact that Georgiana is killed in the end by the birthmark’s toxicity, specifically its intoxication of Aylmer. Perhaps without the threat to the male heteronormative self, the productive plurality argument could have emerged as successful in the story.

Your Body is a Wonder-land: Transcending Alaimo’s Trans-Corporeality in Lady Audley’s Secret

The opening paragraphs of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret describe the natural space and idyllic environs that surround Audley court. Man-made edifices insinuate themselves into the landscape as the description progresses bearing not only the handprint of man but insidious foreboding. A religious vision of harmonious nuns that once prayed and worked in the court, using the very well that is now “stagnant,” “idle” and “rotten” adds to the scene (44). Tracing a connection that has been well understood in Christianity for centuries, these introductory descriptions depict the interdependent trinity of earth, body and spirit. In the Christian bible humans are essentially built from earth and will return in death to the dust of which they are formed. This linkage is stabilized and unchanging, so that this cultural belief (religion) predetermines both biology and humanity. Thus trans-corporeality is always already present and acknowledged in the inescapable religious genealogy of each birth and in the ritual actions that are couched in the natural world, such as baptism and burial in the earth. The replacement of questionable science with the certainty of spirit in this construction allows for the extension of trans-corporeality into a space of immateriality and transcendence. To ignore that crucial connective tissue is to try to build a body out of clay without the power of animating it.

            In the first chapter of Bodily Natures: Science Environment and the Material Self, Stacy Alaimo points out that “the sense of selfhood is transformed by the recognition that the very substance of the self is interconnected with vast biological, economic and industrial systems that can never be entirely mapped or understood” (23). Though apt, this assertion focuses on the necessity of connecting these fields without acknowledging the significance of how these connections are formed.  Without the groundwork of significance, the result is “confusion and contestation that occur when individuals and collectives must contend not only with the materiality of their very selves but with the often invisibly hazardous landscapes of risk society” (Alaimo 17). Braddon’s narrative is alert to show “all that scary stuff, supposedly out there, is already within” the toxic body of Lady Audley, which is the site of inherited madness (Alaimo 18). This gendered and toxic nature is passed down matrilineally and the catalyst that sparks the necessary intra-actions that cause this latent toxicity to surface are those of environment. But rather than a contested space of unstable networks, Lady Audley’s narrative takes place across a complex network of biologies that are made material, corporealities that are imbedded in landscape, animation of meaning through language.

In Braddon’s Christian depiction of the body, flesh and environment are porous, reflecting and exchanging and absorbing into each other in significant ways as in Alaimo, but consistently Braddon insists on grounding this relationship with religion. As Alaimo points out, science “offers no steady ground, as the information may be biased, incomplete, or opaque and the ostensible object of scientific enquiry” and “the material world—is extremely complex, overwrought with agencies, and ever emergent” (20); however, the Christian text posits that the antidote to these shortcomings are the stable groundworks of Christianity. Braddon’s biblical scaffolding anchors the complexity of nature and self in religion and calls attention to the diffuse animating energy that flows between and makes apparent this interconnectedness on a scale unbounded by time and space. John 1:1 explains that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” and in John 1:14 that this word “became flesh” and dwelled on earth as Jesus. The revelation of the Word (Logos) that is present before creation being manifested in the flesh so that it can be understood by human minds parallels the textual manifestations of meaning in and between the body and the environment that makes trans-corporeality significant.

Without the connective understanding of the significance of Peace having “taken up her abode” and the “handiwork of that good old builder—Time” that makes the relevance of Braddon’s landscape clear and creates an alarming contrast with the “secret chambers” and dark passage of the lime tree walk, the narrative linkages between these descriptions hazes over (Braddon 44-5). The cohesiveness of Braddon’s narrative is bounded by biblical illusions that insist on the inevitability of the network of the text. The last line of the novel quotes Psalms 37:25 as a rationale for the shape of the text because evil must be punished and the good must be rewarded since God never shows “the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.” Thus Alaimo’s trans-corporeal subject finds himself not only “inextricably part of the flux and flow of the world” (17) but also in possession of the transcendent revelation and the ability to express it that make this inextricable connectivity meaningful.

Queer texts, queer history, and a prosthesis problem

In thinking about my post for this week I felt the temptation to use Chen’s article on toxicity to help me formulate a proper queer reading of The Member of the Wedding, a reading that the text, with its agonies over the incomprehensibility of heterosexual marriage, seems to beg for and that I never really tried this quarter. But strangely, though I was so sure a queer analysis would be a cinch, I encountered some trouble in my attempts to use my text to say something about toxicity as a way of understanding queerness. Certainly queerness is here in Member, and ties to Chen are evident. The family formation of Berenice, Frankie, and John Henry in the kitchen can be described as a model of queer domesticity à la Chen, as the kitchen is a non-reproductive space and the state of relationships within it bear an uncanny resemblance to the toxic domesticity that Chen and her lover share: “Distance in the home becomes the condition of these humans living together, in this moment, humans who are geared not toward continuity or productivity or reproductivity but to stasis, to waiting, until it passes” (Chen 277).

            And yet there seems to be something historically specific about theorizing with toxicity that puts a wrench in the notion of putting it in dialogue with McCullers’ mid-20^th century work. The panic about Chinese lead in toys and considerations of immunity and multiple chemical sensitivity are specific contemporary examples that seem to say that thinking with toxicity is made necessary by a particular historical and geopolitical condition. For Chen, toxicity matters because we theorize in the West in the 21^st century. So how can the present’s toxicity matter to McCullers in 1946, and (or?) how can 1946 speak to the present?

            When queer texts seem to want to speak to each other across decades but history gets in the way, perhaps the question becomes how to formulate a queer conception of history. Because I know how to use the internets and I took a queer theory course once, I am well aware that there has been plenty of thought about what it might mean to queer history, but as I only have 600 words I’ll content myself with arguing that I think Nicholas Watson has something to say about it. Watson argues that historians should “work with, as well as on, the models of thought and feeling they study, adapting these models for historiographic use” (1) and through the use of this strategy he proves that the past exists in the present through the collective imagination, as a phantasm. An argument that the past doesn’t just haunt the present but is actually present within it can be understood as a queer move because it destabilizes the notion that history has a linear reproductive thrust, instead suggesting a model where the past and present are bound together by imagination.

Guy who lost his hands in WWII says: "Prostheses,
like seminal historical events, are hard to ignore!"

            I think it’s easy to argue that this queer conception of the past is a solution that allows me to use McCullers to talk about toxicity and vice versa. After all, Watson writes that the “living spirit” of the past survives “among other places, in the branch of the cultural imaginary called scholarship” (6), and the fact that he uses medieval modes of thought to make an argument about historiography in 2010 suggests that Watson, at least, wouldn’t mind a visionary strategy that invokes 1946 for my present use. But here I can’t help but remember Chen’s discussion of her mask as prosthesis: the prosthesis allows her to function in the toxic world but also marks her disability. In using Watson as a tool that would allow me to connect McCullers and Chen, have I created some sort of textual prosthesis or at least suggested one is necessary? What are the implications of suggesting that texts whose central concern is queerness can/should/must develop queer ways of talking to each other (as I’ve just done), and then using a third text to prosthetically connect the two—does a move like this, in the context of queer theory, mark queer texts as deficient?

Power/Knowledge in Measure for Measure

I want to look at inclusionary and exclusionary power in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, as Foucault uses those terms in his "15 January 1975" lecture. At first it seemed to me that Angelo, acting as the Duke's deputy, utilizes exclusionary, and the Duke (something more like) inclusionary power; but the situation now seems a bit more complicated than that.
     Duke Vincentio has "let slip" for "nineteen years" the enforcement of Vienna's strict laws against fornication (1.3.311), and puts Angelo in charge knowing he will be a severe enforcer-figure, thus drawing criticism from Vincentio himself while also reining in the town's "liberties" (in multiple senses). Angelo's strategy for enforcement seems stolidly exclusionary. He orders the executions of Claudio ("guilty" of impregnating his betrothed, Juliet) and Barnardine (who had escaped execution under the Duke because "his friends still wrought reprieves for him: and, indeed, his fact [...] came not to an undoubtful proof" (4.2.241-3)). Angelo's instructions to the Provost include the order that Claudio's head be brought to him after his decapitation, an interesting hint of attempted oversight. The head's status as a guarantor of justice properly executed (Shakespeare's London Bridge featured a display of severed heads to remind passersby of the penalty for treason) is problematized when, at Vincentio's urging, the head of the recently deceased pirate Ragozine is substituted for Claudio's, with Angelo none the wiser. Clearly, Angelo needs to learn a thing or two about effective surveillance before graduating to the use of Foucauldian inclusionary power.
     Duke Vincentio, on the other hand, paradoxically uses his abdication in the play's first scene to cement both his government's rule over the populace and his own position at the top of that "pyramid of uninterrupted power" (Foucault 45). By taking on a friar's habit, Vincentio puts not only his ordinary subjects (Claudio, Isabella, the Provost) but even the acting Duke, Angelo, in the position of inmates of the Panopticon. While Angelo exercises exclusionary power to "pluck down" the brothels and harshly punish fornicators, the Duke goes about collecting information about his subjects in the manner of the plague town "overseers" in Foucault's account. If anything, Vincentio's program is more efficient in that he is able to delegate parts of his task (as he does not only with Angelo, but also when he enlists Mariana, Isabella, and the Provost to carry out his schemes before they know he is the Duke) without sharing knowledge and thus control of the process with them. One might also see his plot to reconcile Mariana, who resides in a "moated grange" outside the city, with Angelo as a move toward greater inclusion: Mariana moves from a space beyond the easy surveillance of city authorities into the city proper.
     On the other hand, Angelo's exclusionary practices have a seemingly unintended inclusionary result. When Pompey first announces that "All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down" (1.2.186), he also notes that those brothels within the city limits will be allowed to "stand for seed: they had gone down too, but that a wise burgher put in for them" (1.2.188-9). In this instance, Angelo's full exercise of (exclusionary) power seems to have been thwarted by the "wise burgher"'s buying up of the condemned properties. As implied when Pompey assures Mistress Overdone "though you change your place, you need not change your trade: I'll be your tapster still" (1.2.196-7), these "houses" will be converted into legitimate places of business only to serve as fronts for their continued operation as whorehouses. The result of this play of opposing forces (Angelo's brute force and the burgher's clever subversion of the law), interestingly enough, is the possibility for heightened surveillance as the brothels are quarantined within the city's jurisdiction. Pompey, Overdone, and their customers are drawn closer to the center of Vienna's administrative apparatus, and Pompey even becomes an agent of State justice as assistant to the executioner while serving time in prison.
     Perhaps more interesting than the contrast between Angelo's straightforward, exclusionary way of bringing order to Vienna and the surveillance characteristic of Duke Vincentio is the way that the attempt to exlude criminals from one space produces the unintended consequence of their inclusion in another, closer to the center of power and thus more accessible to strategies of "quadrillage," surveillance and analysis which allow for the more efficient extension of state power.

Celebrating self-destruction

The ending of Heartbreak House—in which the characters not killed by bombers celebrate the recent destruction and ecstatically hope that it will come again—continues to trouble me, and I have been wondering this week if Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” might have something to say to it. Certainly, Heartbreak House was explicitly written by Shaw in order to explore the condition of the British state at the beginning of the twentieth century, while Mbembe’s article is set at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and argues that “contemporary forms of subjection of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror” (39; emphasis added). And yet there are some startling parallels between Mbembe’s descriptions and various moments of Shaw’s play. He goes on to say that “what connects terror, death, and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics” (39).

If the house in Heartbreak House is the ship of state (see earlier posts for textual analysis!), it is also a physical space with “boundaries and internal frontiers” that resonate with the “spatialization of colonial occupation” in Mbembe (26). This is not to say that it stands for a colonized space, but rather that the state described by Heartbreak House is a place of spatial regulations with specific and enforced borders, as is the occupied colonial territory used as an example of the “state of exception” in “Necropolitics.” This suggestion goes against Mbembe’s claim that there is a move in colonial politics to create “a distinction between, on the one hand, those parts of the globe available for colonial appropriation and, on the other, Europe itself” which is “crucial in terms of assessing the efficacy of the colony as a terror formation” (23-4). Heartbreak House erases that distinction by describing the state in the same terms as the colonized territory—both operate as a “state of exception.” And both are populated by people “alive but in a state of injury” (Mbembe 21).

I want to be careful about this comparison of people “alive but in a state of injury.” In Mbembe, this means real people suffering from real violence. In Shaw this means characters reduced so much by their surroundings that they are figuratively incapacitated: they sleepwalk; they are trapped by the bounds of the house. Only as a metaphorical claim about the condition of the state could the stakes of Heartbreak House be taken as comparable, and perhaps not even then, because the kind of violence that Mbembe describes is absent from the play. Nevertheless, I think this very difference between the two descriptions might be the key to the ending of the play.

In Mbembe’s article, there is a clear source of oppression—a place from which violence is enacted. In Shaw’s play, on the other hand, there is no source for the oppression of the characters. They behave as though they are in a constant state of spiritual siege, but this siege has no location. If it stems from anywhere, it stems from each of the other characters in turn: it is diffuse. Thus I wonder if what we see in the final moments of Shaw’s play is the characters’ attempt at the resistance and transcendence that Mbembe portrays at the end of his article. And I wonder if, further, this moment is ultimately the same kind of false hope that Mbembe and Bataille describe in the death of a “suicide bomber.” Mbembe explains Bataille’s argument about the “suicide bomber,” as someone who “ ‘dies seeing himself die, and even, in some sense, through his own will, at one with the weapons of sacrifice. But this is play!’ And for Bataille, play is more or less the means by which the human subject ‘voluntarily tricks himself’ ” (38).

Actor Networks: Infinite Distribution

        For Kant, critique differs from dogmatism insofar as it rejects the possibility of knowing the absolute; for Nietzsche, God is dead.   Such perspectives entail infinite possible worlds in which the inexistence of any given object is a reality--all entities depend on an infinite set of contingent facts. This clearing, crystalized by the phrase, “things might have been otherwise,” sets the conditions in which I would like to situate Bruno Latour’s treatment of the subject.
         According to Latour, “whenever you…define an entity (an agent, an actant, an actor) you have to deploy its attributes, that is, its network;” a network is “what takes any substance that had seemed at first self contained…and transforms it into what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers.” (5)  But if any entity is constituted by its essential relations,  does an actor network cease to be finite?  Because finitude is the very condition that delegitimizes positing the absolute, actor network theory (ANT) presents a complex case to critical philosophy.
       When Latour asserts that a given individual is "defined by the list of other individuals necessary for its subsistence," what happens if essential relations are infinite?  I suggest that, in the era of critique, identifying the subject with its essential relations eliminates finitude from the horizon of thinking the subject.  After Kant, to think the subject as an actor network is to contemplate it as an infinite set--a formal cousin to the set of all natural numbers.

         As infinite, does an individual become absolute?   To address this question let us consider whether or not a given network carries existential necessity.
       The network I would like to focus on is one stanza from Ben Lerner's Mean Free Path.  By attempting to determine whether or not the stanza is necessitated by its relations, it becomes immediately obvious that it necessarily depends on them.  However, this does not answer the question of whether such relationships make the stanza absolute.  As a network, its infinite distribution means that each word  refers to an entity existentially dependent on infinite facts.  But as a totality, a spatially located finite set of graphemes, the stanza allows us to contemplate its infinite series of textual relations, while, at the same, revealing whether those relations make the stanza an inevitable being.

For the rain made little

                 Affective adjustments

to the architecture.

For the architecture was a long

lecture lost on me, negative

mnemonics reflecting

               weather

and reflecting

                reflecting.

       Lines, words, phonemes, and graphemes all mediate identity in such a way that everything is made of everything else.  Keeping in mind, that for ANT “every individual is part of a matrix whose line and columns are made of the others as well," consider how the spacing of "Affective adjustments" implicates "rain" in the first line as playing a causal role to the second.   An enjambment between lines one and two allows us to visualize "the rain" making "little/ Affective adjustments" on the material page. This arrangement reinforces a parallel relation between the repetitive sound of rain drops and "a", "l" and "r" sounds repeatedly falling as the eye runs down the page.  In other words, the sonic parallel between rain and repetition in the stanza does not rely on rhythmic similarity alone.    In a downward motion, we see "a" sounds moving into "l" sounds, which in turn move into "n" sounds, and finally into "r" sounds.  Staccato placement of the word "reflecting" becomes the final equivalent to rainfall only because of the stanza's previous connections.  The infinite series produced by the words "...reflecting/ reflecting" is, indeed, distributed throughout the entire stanza.
           However, in no way do these relationships make the stanza necessary.   Infinite dependence does not generate necessity.  As such, insofar as the object's infinitude does not determine its inevitability, the stanza unravels any possibility of it being absolute.  Nothing in our analysis of textual dependence entails that the stanza "had to be."  Consequently, ANT appears to offer a way to think the infinite subject without thinking dogmatically--a leap in the history of thought.   

Watt: Inclusion and Reading, or, Effing the Ineffable

            In “15 January 1975” Michel Foucault describes two distinct forms of power—that of marginalization and exclusion (negative power) and that of normalization and inclusion (positive power). Inclusive power involves “a series of fine and constantly observed differences between individuals who are ill and those who are not” and  “is a question of individualization; the division and subdivision of power extending to the fine grain of individuality.” With this form of power, which Foucault locates particularly in the plague city, “there is close and meticulous observation…an ever more constant and insistent observation” (46) of “abnormal individuals.” Clearly (?) positive power permeates (alliteration!) our current social institutions, so it seems appropriate to think about how this model might apply to reading fiction, and what it might mean to be a reader of “abnormal” characters.

            It is safe to say that Beckett’s fiction is populated almost exclusively with “abnormal individuals.” His protagonists are often mentally-ill, homeless, or institutionalized and incessantly define themselves in relation to the “normal” individuals around them. Watt/Watt is no exception. As is (hopefully) clear from previous posts, Watt becomes alienated from his external reality as his ability to make meaning deteriorates—it might be useful to think of the breakdown of the signifying chain in Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in which the “schizoid” experiences language as a “rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.” In Watt, as his predecessor in Mr. Knott’s house explains, Watt “partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail” (50). Watt’s attempt to glimpse that which lies behind systems of meaning (be it something or no-thing) leads him quite literally to an asylum, as we learn in Part III of the novel that the preceding two parts have been dictated by Watt to a man named Sam (get it?) through the fence that surrounds the asylum.

            In Foucault’s model of power, it would appear that Watt, a clearly abnormal individual, has been inclusively neutralized by positive power structures. However, the sheer opacity of the novel occludes a reader from reaching any safe position from which to “observe” Watt’s abnormality—indeed, the novel forces the reader into the position of a plague-city observer, and then shows you how imperfect observation (and therefore power-through-observation) can really be. To begin with, narrator Sam explains that “Watt spoke as one speaking to dictation, or reciting, parrot-like, a text, by long repetition become familiar. Of this impetuous murmur much fell in vain on my imperfect hearing and understanding, and much by the rushing wind was carried away, and lost for ever” (127). Here the reliability of the narrative is undermined considerably. Soon after, Sam asks

But what kind of witness was Watt, weak now of eye, hard of hearing, and with even the more intimate senses greatly below par? A needy witness, an imperfect witness. The better to witness, the worse to witness. That with his need he might witness its absence. That imperfect he might witness it ill. That Mr. Knott might never cease, but ever almost cease. Such appeared to be the arrangement. (167-67)

Here the inclusive power of observation (read: the act of reading) is destabilized—no longer can we trace the movement of power through the various structures of observation and normalization. Instead, Beckett seems to suggest that such mastery was always an illusion, and that perhaps traditional structures of power (language most of all) can be undermined by changing our relation to the structure, and acknowledging our weaknesses and almost inevitable failure.

Choose Your Own Ending: Leper or Plague?

Foucault locates the seam that stitches together the medical and the judicial in “the power of normalization,” a “fundamentally positive power that fashions, observes, knows, and multiplies on the basis of its own effects” (48). I would like to trace how a similar stitching together of the medical and the judicial can be located in Roxana’s criminal acts and psychological deterioration, illustrating how Foucault’s theories operate in a historical moment caught between repressive and positive technologies of power.

When Roxana first consents to become the mistress of the Jeweler, her landlord, she insists that her crime is doubly significant: “I was a double Offender, whatever he was, for I was resolved to commit the Crime, knowing and owning it to be a crime…” (Defoe 44). While Roxana’s careful self-examination persists throughout the novel, her resolve to commit crimes fades into a confusion that borders on hysteria. Raymond Stephanson writes that Roxana is a “study of psychological breakdown which applies contemporaneous medical and philosophical theories about mental illness” in order to focus on “the mental and psychological welfare of the individual” (101). I would add to Stephanson’s argument the qualification that welfare is not so much at stake as much as psychological warfare between the self, the pathological criminal, and the mentally ill subject. Roxana grapples with articulating her crimes as she succumbs to mental illness, failing to uphold the Preface’s promise to “make frequent Excursions, in a just censuring and condemning her own Practice” (Defoe 2). That is to say, the line between madness and crime becomes increasingly blurred as she becomes vulnerable to the normalizing force Foucault describes.

While Roxana frequently alludes to a sense of being guided by an unknown power, it is never entirely clear who is monitoring her. An allegorical reading might posit that Roxana is haunted by her Puritan roots and never entirely able to divorce herself from a religiously-based piety. But Roxana makes her contempt for religion known in the moments following the storm, telling us she has “no View of a Redeemer, or Hope in him…” (Defoe 129). If Roxana is responding to a norm enforced by her readers, one can account for Roxana’s constant availability for surveillance, even when she is unable to distinguish between her acts and their consequences. It is not so far a stretch to imagine Roxana presenting herself for inspection at the window in the plague town—she would not have us believe her dangerous or ill.

Neglecting the mechanisms of exclusion Foucault cites in relation to the exile of the lepers seems to be a mistake, though, given Roxana’s publication date. Foucault writes that “Plague replaces leprosy as a model of control, and this is one of the great inventions of the eighteenth century…” (48). Once again, I turn to the alternate endings of Roxana to identify how remnants of repressive power remain intact. At least one reviser felt it necessary to banish Roxana to jail, and more than several sentence her to death, suggesting a power that operates through exclusion. It is difficult to reconcile these negative forces with the ending eerily reminiscent of plague power: Roxana repeatedly recounts “all the Passages of her ill spent Life to me” (where “me” is never specified) and “made her peace with God” (Defoe 1). Even after the book draws to a close, Roxana must repeat her confessions over and over in an effort to gain absolution. Such an ending could very well account for Roxana’s willingness to tell her tale in the first place, as she “presents herself at the window” to be counted (46). Could eighteenth-century readers choose the ending they liked best? Is it possible that they could align themselves with either leper or plague power, as we did in class?

Stephanson, Raymond. "Defoe's "Malade Imaginaire": The Historical Foundation of Mental Illness in "Roxana." Huntington Library Quarterly. Vol. 45, No. 2, Spring 1982.

The Governance of Isabel Osmond née Archer

Foucault’s “15 January 1975” is concerned with the modes of control that the French state exercised over “abnormal” or dangerous populations from the middle ages through the 18th century, the second of which eventually became the model for modern “positive technologies of power”, to be exercised over the entire population. The first of these modes was “exclusion”, the goal of which was purification and which was employed in the case of lepers.  Exclusion eventually gave way to the second mode of control, manifested during the plague; it was, conversely, “inclusion” -- an extreme inclusion, whereby plague society was partitioned and surveilled constantly: “It was a power that was continuous... surveillance had to be exercised uninterruptedly. The sentries had to be constantly on watch...and twice a day the inspectors...had to make their inspection in such a way that nothing that happened in the town escaped their gaze” (45 Foucault).

Later, this power was transferred from the emergency situation to everyday governance. According to Foucault, “[The Classical Age invented techniques of power] that can be transferred to very different institutional supports, to state apparatuses, institutions, the family and so forth. The Classical Age developed therefore what could be called an ‘art of governing’” (48), but, significantly, one that was deployed for governance in modes not so totalizing as for the plague society. Instead, such modes were deployed in schools, medicine and industry; the Classical Age “refined a general technique of the exercise of power that can be transferred to many different institutions and apparatuses” [italics mine]. In other words, this method of control was diffused so as to become more palatable.  I would argue that, even as they were refined for state government, the plague society’s methods of control were not refined for women, because it did not matter whether they agreed to be governed; governing them needed less subtlety.

Decades after the Classical Age Foucault writes about, women in 19th c. western society were subject to plague society control within the home (and, of course women in many developing and non-secular societies today are still treated to the plague society’s surveillance): their spheres of life were restricted (like the plague victim’s) to the home and friends’ homes -- to spaces where they were known. When they left these spaces, they were accompanied by men or other chaperones who could watch [over] them. The patriarch was sovereign and his wife and children, if they existed, his subjects. As long as they lived within his walls, he was entitled to know where his family were at all times, how they spent their time and money, and with whom they associated. For the wife, who of course never grew up and out of her husband’s home, this might have been understood as for her own good since perhaps the fate to be most avoided by a woman in the 19th c. was that of being cast out by her husband.

Like the plague victim, a failure to appear when and where expected would give rise to suspicion: the plague victim who was ill and could not appear at the window was dangerous to public health and the woman who did not answer when called for was likewise considered dangerous. She was a danger to herself (that is, she was forever in danger -- supposedly from those who would prey upon her) when she could not be accounted for, a danger that was a sexual danger to her honor and thus, she was a danger to the unity of the home and, by extension, to the fabric of society. In both cases, the danger is called a danger to the public good, but it is also a danger to the state.

We can see the tension between this old mode of governing women and the “modernization” of views about women in The Portrait of a Lady, a portrait that anticipates high modernism in its themes. As wealthy and free-spirited Isabel comes of age and her personality solidifies, she becomes intrigued with Gilbert Osmond’s “old world” quality and apparent refinement of taste, but as soon as they are married, she understands to what degree he demands that her self be sacrificed to his conservatism: “He said to her one day that she had too many ideas, and that she must get rid of them....He really meant it—he would have liked her to have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance.  She knew she had too many ideas; she had more even than he supposed, many more than she had expressed to him when he asked her to marry him.” And she tries to conform to his requirements: “One couldn’t pluck [her ideas] up by the roots, though of course one might suppress them, be careful not to utter them.”

By suppressing her ideas, Isabel has learned to participate in her own surveillance and when she refuses to leave Gilbert for the reason that her (suspiciously new) ideas of marriage do not permit of rupture under any circumstances, the character the reader has come to know is destabilized and lost. Not only has Gilbert oppressed her, but, having come around to his way of thinking, she agrees to be oppressed. “The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all.  Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deerpark.  He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gather an occasional nosegay ....He didn’t wish her to be stupid....But he expected her intelligence to operate altogether in his favour, and so far from desiring her mind to be a blank, he had flattered himself that it would be richly receptive.  He had expected his wife to feel with him and for him, to enter into his opinions, his ambitions, his preferences; and Isabel was obliged to confess that this was no very unwarrantable demand on the part of a husband” (italics mine).

Waaay out of words....

Amputation's Agency, or How Titus Turned me Into a Leper

In his article on necropolitics, Achille Mbembe suggests that imagining the political as a form of war begs the questions “What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?” (12).  Concerned only with tracing the concept of sovereignty from late-modern times (as opposed to pre- or early-modern times), Mbembe chooses the institution of slavery as the paradigmatic example of wounded or slain bodies in order to answer his questions and understand the historical account of the rise of terror in contemporary times.  The slave’s humanity, though his body is kept alive, is erased through the master’s possession of his body; this possession manifests itself through a sustained state of terror—the threat (without the fulfillment) of possible death—and this threat is kept alive through repetitive injuries of the slave body.  Mbembe’s discussion of injured bodies still relies on this opposition of life and death, and gives no special credence to the injured body beyond this—the slave’s existence is one of death-in-life, and the subjected—but living—body remains a “shadow” of existence, rather than a powerful entity, itself.  Perhaps this is because of the special quality of the slave as commodity.  Were the slave to lose a hand, his body would become even more of a shadow than it is to begin with, and rather than being subjected to a state of terror, in which he can harness the power of that “protean capability” to create art from suffering, his utility being nullified, his body would simply be discarded. The slave’s capabilities for art and alternative perspectives rely on an able body (mostly able, anyway), just as, in Foucault’s world, the plague-victim’s agency in creating and maintaining sovereign power relies on his ability to survey his neighbors.

In Titus Andronicus, the necropolitical influence of the sovereign clearly permeates and catalyzes the plot.  It is precisely the right of the state to kill (as a Roman general, Titus sentences the son of his enemy queen to death) that initiates the revenge (that queen, made empress, uses her power to subject Titus’s daughter to rape and amputation).  Later, under the influence of Aaron’s sadistic ruse, Titus donates his hand to the emperor in hopes of saving his sons’ heads (literally—they are to be decapitated). 

In a very crude analogy, we can try to compare Titus, as a “slave” to the Roman state to the literal slaves of the plantation.  However, unlike the slave of Mbembe’s argument, Titus can lose his hand and still participate in the revenge plot.  When compared to a figure more like the leper of Foucault’s lecture, Titus’s role in the revenge plot reveals a more subversive agency than that of the slave or the plague-victim, and beyond anything Mbembe discusses.  Titus, though wronged by the Roman state and deprived of his hand, can exact a revenge of his own, one carried out through madness, rather than the reason that seduces the subject of a sovereign power into believing, as Mbembe articulates, that “[t]he exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom” (13).  Ostracizing himself from the community of reasonable, autonomous subjects that achieve agreement “through communication and recognition” and forge a new political body, Titus effectively subverts the power those subjects participate in, and reinstates his family as a ruling sovereign in Rome (or, at least, that is the very optimistic reading of Titus’s conclusion).  By literally cutting himself (or his hand) off from the community, he manages to reorganize power in a way that those who work within the community (the queen and Aaron as plague victims?) fail to do. 

If, as Mbembe suggests, we, rather than “considering reason as the truth of the subject, we can look to other foundation categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death” (14), can we then revise Mbembe’s “categories” to include something not like the death-in-life of the slave/ plague-victim, but rather something very tangible like the deformed (re-formed?) body of the handless general or the ailing leper?