Plasticity and Double Reading

Habit cuts a trench; or so it seems—a channel coordinating conduct of the subject.  Having certainty that trees deaden in the winter or that the sun will rise tomorrow depends, according to David Hume, on the habitual recognition of like causes preceding like effects. To repeat is to condition propensity as such.  But if custom is “the great guide of human life,” what possibilities remain for opposing the transformation of formal repetition into force? (§5, 1, 6,)  If resisting that force sets the stakes for agency, what does it mean to resist?  For Catherine Malabou, resistance is isomorphic to explosion.  The brain not only receives form through experience; it shifts the very conditions of experience itself. The brain, in other words, is plastic.

 According to Malabou, “Plasticity unfolds its meaning between sculptural molding and deflagration…to talk about plasticity of the brain means to see in it not only the creator and receiver of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form.”(6) The dialectic of reinscription and radical difference in the brain is not only biological, “it is a history.”(1) That is, “the structural bond [between history and the brain] is so deep that in a certain sense it defines an identity.”(1) But how can changes within consciousness, that is, changes in history, unveil themselves within a discursive field that is itself historically conditioned?  How can “the new world” express itself in “the old world?”  

I want to take a closer look at the relation of plasticity and the problem of a discursive limit by examining the possibility that language, in this case poetry, can upset the apparent mutual exclusivity of totality and the new. Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path explodes the conceptual syntax of its own theme—motion is more primary than the bare difference between disruption and continuity—by establishing a steady and reliable refrain of phrases throughout the text.  Rather than building structure, the refrain marks the cancelling of structure.  It marks motion that frustrates the category of difference between disruption and continuity. By going two ways at once Mean Free Path gets close to expressing an “agency of disobedience to every constituted form.”

To comprehend the conceptual connections across the patchwork phrasing of Lerner’s stanzas while simultaneously acknowledging the separation of those phrases amounts to reading two things at once.  Perhaps, this is precisely the phenomenon that occurs upon a fourth or fifth reading of the book, and, perhaps, that operation collapses the difference between order and continuity.  Try reading the following lines straight through, and then mix them around to connect the phrases: “It’s autumn.  Foils are starting to fall/ There are three hundred sixty-thousand/ And that’s love. There are flecks of hope/ Eight hundred eighty ways to read each stanza/ Deep in traditional forms like flaws.” (43) Now attempt to do both steps at once.  Achieving the third step, reading outside of a difference between disruption and continuity, exposes, I suggest, an analog to the explosive reinscription of form that neural plasticity produces in the brain.    

But in this very respect, discursive limit presents a problem.  The conditioning one goes through to develop a double reading seems to bring to the fore the very differences between disruption and continuity that such a reading means to obliterate.  When one considers the text as a whole, however, repetition puts this problem in check.  Learning to “double read” erases, or forgets, the difference between local ruptures and global repetitions in the text. When the phrases “night vision green,” “surface effects,” “wave,” “fascism,” “there in the trees,” and “to the pathos,” become the Mean Free Path’s refrain, movement itself overcomes the category of difference between disruption and continuity.  Through this dialectical process, we experience something like the text as being “situated between two extremes: on the one side the sensible  image of taking form (sculpture or plastic objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion).” (5)

Vienna as Centered Structure (?) in Measure for Measure

In "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Jacques Derrida begins with a discussion of "classical" conceptions of "structure," a term borrowed from structuralists such as Claude Levi-Strauss who applied Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theories to many cultural phenomena. For Derrida, the two essential components of structure—in what he hopes to show to be an outdated model—are "center" and "play." Of these two amorphous terms, "center" seems to signify whatever element of the structure the analyst privileges, and which "is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible," thus both opening up and closing down the possibility of "play" or transformation of the other elements. A structure with unlimited play would then be one without a center, but this, Derrida tells us, "represents the unthinkable itself" (279). Perhaps Wittgenstein (I am thinking of his analysis of spiel, a term and concept seemingly none the less useful for its lack of any coherent definition, in the Philosophical Investigations (e.g. 69, 71)) might disagree on this point.

     Unfortunately since the alternative is impossible to conceive, this notion of centered structure is only "contradictorily coherent" because the center "escapes structurality." To the extent to which it is conceived of as part of the structure, it must be subject to the same "permutation[s] or [...] transformation[s]" as the rest of the structure's elements: apparently, structuralist notions of the "structurality of structure" required this. But this the center, as center, cannot be. So why continue to think of structures as having centers? In addition to the aforementioned unthinkability of the only possible alternative, Derrida deduces a further psychological reason: "as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset" (279).

    Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber, commenting on the political context of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, describe the roles of the ruler and the power structure she or he represents in an early modern commonwealth using strikingly similar language. Like Derrida's "center," which both opens up the possibility of anxiety-inducing "play" and manages that anxiety by closing it down, the early modern prince utilizes "the arousal and management of anxiety in his subjects" as one of his primary methods of ensuring "the subjects' obedience" (135). They provide as an example James I's practice of allowing subjects to be brought to the gallows and actually ascend the scaffold before pardoning them, which recalls the Duke's decision to allow Isabel and Claudio to remain in ignorance of their imminent deliverance even when this deception seems immaterial to the success of his plot (138). To what extent is the similarity between Kamps' and Raber's understanding of the early modern state as it appears in Measure for Measure, centered on the Duke; and Derrida's much more abstract notion of "centered structure;" substantive, as opposed to merely verbal?

     One problem with seeing Shakespeare's Vienna as a "centered structure" in Derrida's terms is that the play revolves around precisely what Derrida seems to see as impossible in such a structure: the violation of its center's "fundamental immobility" as the Duke hands over his authority to Angelo, moving out of his privileged social position as sovereign ruler as he takes on a friar's habit. On the other hand, Derrida does speak of a "series of substitutions of center for center" which constitutes the history of the concept, implying that the kind of substitution we see in the play might not demolish the State of Vienna's legitimacy any more than any of the links in the "chain of determinations of the center" (279) which constitutes the history of Western thought has succeeded in overthrowing the general notion of centered structure. But this just brings us back to the question: for what reason and in what sense is this substitution "interdicted," and what happens to a structure when (what was thought of as) its center does undergo alteration and ceases to be itself?

Works Cited

Kamps, Ivo and Karen Raber. "Governance." Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts. By William Shakespeare. Eds. Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004. 117-48. Print.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations. Eds. P. M. S. Hacker and and Joachim Schulte. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Rev. 4th ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2009. Print.

Watt//Pot//Knott

            The plot of Samuel Beckett’s Watt is simple enough:  an aimless man called Watt stumbles upon an estate in the Irish countryside, becomes the butler for the estate’s owner (Mr. Knott), and generally loses his mind (see previous posts). Beckett wrote the novel while hiding from Nazi forces in occupied France, and years after its publication dismissed the novel as “an exercise” that allowed him “to keep in touch.” This dismissal has had a serious impact on the novel’s critical history, and lead many critics to agree that the novel presents not so much characters in a plot but various linguistic permutations that eventually empty language of meaning. I would argue, however, especially in light of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” that this dismissal of the novel as a linguistic exercise actually highlights the fact that the novel itself dramatizes the play and deferral of significatory systems. Thus we no longer see the emptiness of Watt and Mr. Knott as a failure of characterization on Beckett’s part, but as the necessary condition for understanding how meaning is made in any system.

I have already discussed Watt’s dismay at watching the “Galls father and son” fix a piano (you may think I am making a big deal out of one passage from a novel but it is almost the only concrete event that happens in the whole novel). The fallout from this event is, for Watt, the complete failure of signification. We see this dramatized most especially with language, such as in the instance of Watt and the pot (get it? “Watt” rhymes with “pot” rhymes with “Mr. Knott”). The narrator explains that the pot    

resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and

be comforted. It was in vain that it answered, with unexceptionable adequacy, all the purposes,

and performed all the offices, of a pot, it was not a pot. And it was just this hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot that so excruciated Watt. (64-65)

Here the arbitrary nature of language comes to the foreground, and Watt is characterized as a lamentably “deep subject” who mourns the “hairbreadth departure from the nature of a true pot.” His need for stable signification, or, as it is later characterized, “semantic succour,” is “so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats. Thus of the pseudo-pot he would say, after reflection, It is a shield, or, growing bolder, It is a raven, and so on” (66). Here, Watt cares not so much for “true” signification as much as any signification at all—indeed, we learn later that this disorienting experience in interstitial spaces (see “Beckett’s Radical Ecology” from last week) actually allows Watt to enjoy the experience of nothingness. The narrator explains that Watt did not “[long] at all times for this restoration, of things, and for himself, to their comparative innocuousness,” but that “there were times when he felt a feeling closely resembling the feeling of satisfaction, at his being so abandoned, by the last rats” (67).

                This transition from the need for “semantic succor” to “a feeling closely resembling the feeling of satisfaction” seems to me to reflect a shift from Derrida’s “saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of thinking” to the “Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of…a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (292). Indeed, Mr. Knott comes to stand in alternatively as the elusive Transcendental Signified—that center that will bestow meaning and rein in the play of elements in a system—and precisely as the “noncenter” to the system, which opens the freeplay of language infinitely. The narrator explains that “Watt suffered neither from the presence of Mr. Knott, nor from his absence,” and that “this ataraxy covered the entire house-room, the pleasure-garden, [and] the vegetable-garden” (170). Watt’s “ataraxy,” or “freedom from mental disturbance” (thanks wiktionary!) ultimately allows him to excuse himself from all systems of meaning to the point of insanity—a final point which underlines the hesitant tone of Derrida’s conclusion, which gestures at the “formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (293) that is, in every sense, unimaginable for those of us still trapped in the old metaphysics game.

Truth/Fiction in Roxana

In the Preface to Roxana, the narrator assures that “the Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History” (Defoe 1). With Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in the back of my mind, I found it easy to be suspicious of the words “Foundation,” “Truth,” and “Fact,” all of which rely on a representational theory of language undermined by poststructuralist criticism. But as Derrida writes, “…we cannot do without the concept of the sign, for we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity…” (281). Derrida acknowledges the impossibility of discarding metaphysical thought entirely, leaving us only with the option of deconstructing the system of meaning.

In short, I want to use Derrida’s deconstructive techniques to consider how the story/history—or more accurately, truth/fiction—opposition unravels within Roxana and simultaneously opens the text up to allow an endless play of meaning. A structuralist critic might carve up the text with the opposition of truth/fiction in order to direct us to consider language as a system of signs. Even the narrator of Roxana wants us to evaluate the text with these terms in mind, by insisting that we view the most ridiculous events as a “true history” even while hinting strongly at their fictionality. (Disclaimer: for the sake of this argument, let us assume that Roxana has some basis in truth—and I believe it does. The Storm of 1703 is a dead ringer for Roxana’s storm repentance experience.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Storm_of_1703 But it soon becomes evident that a structuralist critique cannot explain the slippage between truth and fiction. For instance, many of the children Roxana bears simply vanish, without any indication of where they have gone or why the narrator sees fit to introduce them in the first place. While this could be viewed as narrative sloppiness, it happens frequently enough that the reader begins to question how realistic it is that children can be discarded willy-nilly. In this sense, the reader is always being asked to call into question the narrator’s assertion that Roxana is constructed on an “unassailable foundation—an absolute or immutable truth claim” (Derrida). Another (and perhaps better) example can be found in the various untruths Roxana tells and retells in various ways, undermining her own narrative.

So it is at the point when the narrator self-consciously questions the truth claim that, as Derrida says, the novel’s discourse “reflects on itself and criticizes itself” (286). By shutting out “fiction” entirely in the Preface, it is all too evident when fiction inevitably works its way into Roxana’s story. Derrida attempts something similar when he looks for ways in which Lévi-Strauss gestures toward “two directions of meaning” with the use of the word “supplementary” (289). But here is where my argument diverges from Derrida’s. While Derrida examines where Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is inadequate (and subsequently deconstructs the nature/culture opposition), I am unsure of whether Roxana’s narrator intentionally allows for play in the Preface. The truth/fiction binary is not presented so much as it is toyed with throughout the text. Roxana is ostensibly not literary criticism, and was not written in the context of structuralism and semiotics, so perhaps that is why I feel so uncomfortable subjecting it to the same rigorous criticism that Derrida uses in his essay. I’m also not sure I fully succeeded in deconstructing the truth/fiction opposition in Roxana, since I’m still searching for a new concept to emerge from the collapse of oppositions. Regardless, I hope I have shown that the “Foundation” referenced in the Preface is anything but—rather, it’s a sticky point that the narrator often comes back to contradict.

The Anxiety of Dissolution

Berlant and Warner (in “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?”) would like to resist an easy categorization. Varying ideas and works should not be grouped under the term “queer theory” insofar as this term might be assumed to have “stable referential content and pragmatic force” (344). They are proposing that queer commentary describe a set of ideas and works united, perhaps, only through their emphasis on a kind of practice—particularly the practice of dissolving existing identity categories.

Heartbreak House describes a group of people caught in a corrupt structure. Many of the characters attempt to take advantage of this structure in order to benefit (often by taking advantage of the others), but each finds him/herself ultimately powerless. What they celebrate, in the end, is the partial destruction of their home. This destruction also comes with the death of two of the most reprehensible characters: the Burglar, who has previously attempted to swindle the rest out of some money, and Mangan, whose position is the result of both his exploitation of laborers and his lies to Ellie’s father. As an audience, it is to be expected that we might celebrate the end of these two villains. And yet there is something decidedly disturbing about watching Ellie, for example, after the threat has passed:

MRS HUSHABYE. But what a glorious experience! I hope they’ll come again tomorrow night.

ELLIE (radiant at the prospect) Oh, I hope so.

Randall at last succeeds in keeping the home fires burning on his flute (117).

The audience may rejoice to see the end of two such obviously harmful figures; but, by celebrating, we also seem to join in Ellie’s wish for her own destruction. In other words, we are implicated in the desire to simply end everything—to let the whole corrupt structure come crashing down.

Shaw wrote Heartbreak House in 1913—just before the outbreak of WWI—but the play remained unpublished and unproduced until after the war, explicitly because of its odd relationship to the idea of destruction. There is a deep ambivalence, I would argue, throughout the play. It asks for the downfall of corruption, and criticizes the immobility of its characters. And yet the destruction of the characters’ world, as a solution to their dissolute ways, does not seem to offer an acceptable answer. It leaves us simultaneously celebrating and abhorring the end of their world.

Both of the terms used by Berlant and Warner—queer theory and queer commentary—have an investment in the political. Fundamental to the destruction of categories is a resistance to the power structures that imbue such categories. And Berlant and Warner are careful to explain that this destruction is not meant as a loss of political possibility, but rather as a resistance to problematic political modes. They write, “the failure to systematize the world in queer theory does not mean a commitment to irrelevance; it means resistance to being an apparatus for falsely translating systematic and random violences into normal states, administrative problems, or minor constituencies” (348). And yet, I think Heartbreak House points to the anxiety that such an approach can lead to. The destruction of categories, as a political project, is valuable. But it does not seem to have an answer for how people might live, except in continually exercising this facility. Heartbreak House describes the temptation to destroy systems. But is also leaves us with the fear that this is not enough—that we will be left with a house in ruins and nowhere to go.

Despite Derrida’s discussion of the endless creativity and celebration that we should associate with the realization of an empty center, his arguments seem as though they might leave us without the possibility of political action. Queer commentary, as described by Berlant and Warner, is of course unwilling to give up the possibility of political action. But it is inherently unstable, a program that by its very nature seeks to undercut itself, “a culture whose marginal history makes it inevitably controverted” (349). Heartbreak House expresses the fear that destruction, without simultaneously introducing new modes of being, is empty. And it reminds us of just how much courage it will take to move away from those places in which we are comfortable. “Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us,” cries Hector. But not one of the characters can bring him/herself to do it. It is cold outside. And besides, there is breakfast in the morning.

Successful Failures of Language in Titus Andronicus (or How Titus Kicks Poststructuralist Ass)

Shakespeare’s works have come to represent the ideal form of written language; his plays, along with a handful of other canonical early texts have formed the foundation for literary studies for centuries, precisely because of the well-wrought verse.  And yet, Shakespeare was first and foremost a dramatist, not a poet; his plays were written in the popular verse style, but their aim was performance, not silent study.  Language, his texts seem to suggest, is at best a tenuous method for communication, and while supplementary action still falls short of perfect delivery, it at least reminds us of the fickleness of meaning attending a strictly verbal event.  This anxiety of signification permeates his work, making him a proto-poststructuralist hero.  Titus Andronicus (as I will continue to remind you all) has long been banished from the aforementioned canon of literary works, largely because of its crudely constructed verse.  And yet, it is precisely the “substandard” language of the text, I would argue, that most effectively communicates its own failure to communicate, pitting voicelessness against loquaciousness in such a way as to champion the former--Titus hits the mark precisely by missing that mark.

Jacques Derrida’s lecture/essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” effectively birthed poststructuralism in its critique of structuralist anthropological methodology.  Concerned by the idea of a fixed center of a structure that is supposedly entertaining “freeplay” of the contained elements, he insists that it just doesn’t add up: “…the center is not the center,” he tells us (279).  What this means, then, is that “…language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse…everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified is never absolutely present outside a system of differences” (280).  To insist upon a fixed center is to betray a desire for meaning, a meaning that can never be pinned down. 

Shakespeare’s text really elucidates this struggle and desire for meaning.  His characters pitifully cling to meaningless associations (national, romantic, filial, etc.) and the depressing but inevitable conclusion is that the Roman state is so inherently flawed that the violence and betrayal that seeks to upset it is ultimately just another cog in its bloody machine. Repeatedly in the play, characters fight for a linguistic genealogy, a line which begins with some kernel of truth they can harvest to combat an increasingly present sense of subjective morality.  When God utters “I am that I am,” he provides the verbal, ontological root that many seek; Shakespeare, however, substitutes that text with another foundational Western text—Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  When her uncle, Marcus, discovers the raped and mutilated Lavinia, he makes a speech that has gone down in Shakespeare history as one of the worst abuses of language.  The speech includes the necessary allusion to the mythical Philomela, who suffers a similar fate, and carries on for forty-six lines of overly wrought, poorly utilized metaphor.  Famously known as a failure of language, I argue instead that this is the brilliance of its misuse. Marcus’s speech is the verbal equivalent of grasping at straws; facing his ravished niece, his words are at best seen as attempting to heal a wound and at worst as upstaging the very real traumatized girl.  The literally voiceless girl’s presence still trumps the overabundance of verbal signification performed by her uncle.  The overuse of bad language here points to the present absence of Lavinia’s voice, and while it does not actually render it more effectively, it does express the utter impossibility of ever doing so through language.  

Okay, Malabou: Plastic Narration in The Portrait of a Lady

If we didn’t know it to be very bad practice to conflate the author with the narrator or speaker of a work of literature, we might call Henry James the narrator of The Portrait of a Lady. The identity of the narrator constitutes itself as the novel progresses, so that his instability reminds one more of a person going through the world than of a storyteller committing words to print.

The narrator refers to him or herself as biographer, as first person “I”, he uses free indirect discourse, and is also the omniscient third person. Clearly there is a contradiction here: the I of firsthand experience can be a biographer perhaps, but he cannot also know the unspoken thoughts that free indirect discourse and the third person relate.

As biographer, the narrator identifies himself thus, disclaiming any knowledge of her thoughts: “‘Do you know I’m very much afraid of it -- of that remarkable mind of yours?’ Our heroine’s biographer can scarcely tell why, but the question made her start and brought a conscious blush to her cheek.” But in the next sentence we see the narrator lapse from biographer -- a role which supposes an outside, human perspective, which is limited in its knowledge, --  into omniscience. “She returned his look at moment, and then with a note in her voice that might almost have appealed to his compassion, ‘So am I, my lord!’ she oddly exclaimed.” Here, he knows more than the biographer in discerning Ralph’s compassion having been “almost...appealed to”.

Later in the book, the narrator speaks from the first person, describing a Roman scene based on his own experience in the city. “It is impossible, in Rome at least, to look long at a great company of Greek sculptures without feeling the effect of their noble quietude.... I say in Rome especially, because the Roman air is an exquisite medium for such impressions.” He is no longer the disinterested omniscience who stands by to note Ralph’s compassion; instead, the narrator of these lines has his own feelings to express.

And, in a moment of editorializing (though it may appear to be free indirect discourse, it is not: it addresses a reality that the characters have not yet encountered -- they have not yet gone to Rome), we learn that “There were ten days left of the beautiful month of May -- the most previous month of all to the true Rome-lover,” followed by what may either be free indirect discourse or further editorial: “Isabel would become a Rome-lover; that was a foregone conclusion.” Was this a foregone conclusion for the narrator, who would then style himself as human -- he concludes and opines -- or for Isabel? Whose voice is this? And, what happens when we suddenly  cannot tell the difference between a character’s thoughts and the narration? Or between narration and editorial?

I would argue that this proliferation of personhood in the narrator mimics the self-presence of an interlocutor, at once offering more than and undermining the usual fixity of narration. Yet in doing so, it doesn’t detract from the overall coherence of Portrait, even if destabilizes the storyteller. Instead, the variously limited and de-limited viewpoints add a richness of perspective, putting the reader into conversation with each. It shows the differences that exist within a self, like ourselves, that is always present to a changing reality, which it both accepts and shapes, plastically, as per the thinking of Catharine Malabou.

Malabou’s main concern is with the difference between the brain’s being perceived as “neuronally” plastic rather than flexible and thereby accounting for the creative and ongoing construction of the self-present, mental self. It is through understanding the relationship between the plastic brain and its environment that we can account for the possibility of radical action and resistance in the individual.  Harnessing the difference between the similar concepts plasticity and flexibility, where plasticity embodies a reactive tendency to change while flexibility indicates acceptance of outside input, we glimpse hope for individual agency. In this mode, the narrator constitutes an interactive and radical self by inhabiting multiple modes at once and by refusing the limits inherent in each, which is how plasticity works.

The plastic reaction is precisely that: it acts again or against the influence, growing or strengthening thereby while the flexible response only bends in avoidance or degrades itself in making way for. Malabou (I’m unclear whether she ascribes to neuroscientists the idea of flexibility or of plasticity) wants to privilege and harness the idea of plasticity over flexibility as a model not just for the brain’s activity, but for political and self-actualizing activity. For, what individualism have we anyway if we do not both resist and strategically utilize systems requiring conformity? In order to achieve freedom -- the freedom to speak meaningfully, we must respond creatively and positively to the powers that be, and in this re-activity (I know; deconstructionist move there), constitute selfhood. It is a plastic relation with the usual narrative modes that James uses to engage the reader as interlocutor rather than simply as storyteller.  

Detecting the Diseased Brain in Lady Audley's Secret

In the introduction to her book, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, Catherine Malabou suggests that “neuronal functioning and social functioning interdetermine each other and mutually give each other form (here again is the power of plasticity), to the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish them” (9). Her title itself implies a collective brain and it is this version of the brain that operates in Lady Audley’s Secret. The tension between “the preservation of constancy” in the socially-authored self and “the exposure of this constancy to accidents, to the outside, to otherness in general” in the accidentalized, individual self is the paradox in which both Braddon’s text and Malabou’s brain as work exist (71).

Plasticity is threatening to a brain that is aware of its own functioning because it suggests impermanence and, more disturbingly, because it suggests destruction of itself. Lady Audley as a character becomes the threat of plastique to the stasis around her. The country manor Audley Court quietly decays inspiring “a yearining to have done with life, and to stay there forever,” Robert Audley’s comfortable laziness defies movement and Alicia Audley insistently remains in the home in which she has “reigned supreme since her earliest childhood” (Braddon 44,46). The Talboys' mansion takes the idea of rigidity even further and both the characters and the building itself are edifices of stone and marble (Braddon 222). This stonework is the product of the envisioned social brain, a reproduction of belief in the ‘rigidity’ of an entirely genetically determined brain” (4). But the illusion of stability and structure is a work and they do not want to know it.

Ironically, within the novel it is only the threat to stasis and rigidity that causes movement in an effort to restore Malabou’s “homeostasis.” The environment of this novel seeks to deny the plasticity of Malabou’s brain with its capacity to receive form and the capacity to give form, as well as to “annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create” (5). This plasticity is a threat because it “offers an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model” (6). Although identity is important, inherent in the desire for localized knowledge, it is the inclusive identity not exclusive individuation that is its goal.

Lady Audley takes on the impression of these social models even as she refuses to conform to them. Her actions are motivated by a desire to work within the system that she lives in, not to escape it. Like Malabou’s reader, Lady Audley mistakes flexibility for plasticity, a mistake promulgated by the social world of the novel. She is denied “the resource to giving form, the power to create, to invent or even erase an impression, the power to style” (12). She believes “every clue to identity buried and forgotten,” but instead she is haunted by residues, echoes, relics that make erasure and newness impossible (Braddon 53).

Lady Audley seems to participate in the creation of new identity through the self-fashioning that is “at once the elaboration of a form, a face, a figure, and the effacement of another form another figure, which precede them ore are contemporaneous with them” (71). However, since fashioning is an insistence on form, the polymorphism that is “open to all forms, capable of donning all masks, adopting all postures, all attitudes,” that “engenders the undoing of identity” is denied to Lady Audley by detection (71-2). Narratively enacting the dichotomy of the neuronal desire for both development and retention, the social environment becomes the nervous system, desiring to “preserve itself from destruction” by keeping “itself in the same state” of stable identity (74). While Lady Audley becomes the brain itself: the site of tension that both acts and is acted upon to make identity. Thus if Lady Audley’s agency, her disguises and her change of identity, are undetected by the social nerve center within the body politic the larger social brain will cease to function.

In thinking about cerebral functioning Malabou examines “the transition from the biological to the cultural, from the strictly natural base of the mind to its historical—and thus also, necessarily, its political and social—dimension” (56). In contrast, Lady Audley’s Secret moves from the cultural to the biological by blaming the brain of Lady Audley for her plastic sense of ethics and identity. Her plasticity allows her to form misleading impressions and refashion impressions in disruptive ways. These “energetic discharges” and  “creative bursts that progressively transform nature into freedom” momentarily overwhelm the extended social consciousness, ignoring conscience and the narrative affirmation of stability (74). The plasticity of Malabous’s brain is relocated into the biological disease of dementia that is the result of “extreme mental pressure” (Braddon 385). Lady Audley suffers from “latent insanity,” a version of the “autodestruction” that is inherent to all identity and that all identity struggles against (71). Entitled “At Peace,” the final chapter of Braddon’s novel suggests the end of cerebral struggle, imagining both the stabilized brain at rest and the death of the entire body, sharing with the brain a final destructive moment.

Frankie/F. Jasmine/Frances in the Derridean fugue

The introduction to my (very cheesy) 1965 Time Life Books edition of The Member of the Wedding says that McCullers compared the structure of this novel to a musical fugue. I haven’t managed to discover where this piece of information comes from, and a little googling suggested that McCullers might have actually said this about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but nevertheless I think the characterization is apt. I don’t know whether anyone in this class is a classical music buff, but I am not, so I thought I’d offer up this Wikipedia entry and this Youtube video to help us understand what a fugue is before I dive in too far.

The novel is structured in three parts, and each part plays upon a theme with variations. This theme certainly includes Frankie's desire to take part in the wedding, which is introduced in part one, built up and dwelled upon in part two, and ends in disaster in part three. But casting the event of the wedding as the novel's driving force tends (as in my cheesy Time Life introduction) to encourage simplistic interpretations having to do with coming-of-age and Frankie's desire to grow up and find love. I find it more compelling to consider the shifts and transformations of Frankie herself as the theme we follow through this literary fugue, since the novel is so concerned with her process of becoming, and since the variations of her conception of herself are made so clear. One of the most striking examples of Frankie’s variability is her changing name. In part one she is Frankie, in part two she becomes F. Jasmine, and in part three, on the bus home from the wedding, we learn her final name: “Frances wanted to whole world to die” (126). It becomes even more enticing to cast Frankie in this role if we consider that, in musical terminology, the theme in a fugue is referred to as the “subject.”

            I want to first of all suggest that we can connect the structure of a fugue to Derrida’s conception of structurality. The fugue allows us to think “the structurality of structure” (Derrida 278) by simultaneously emphasizing and deemphasizing its center—that is, its theme. We are introduced to a melody in the beginning, and we want to be able to follow it, but as the fugue reintroduces the same melody in another pitch the initial melody begins to dissolve. The melody is continually and simultaneously creating and destroying itself throughout the piece, and since that melody, or theme, or subject, is both the thing that makes up the different parts of the fugue and the entirety of the fugue itself, its status as a center is constantly called into question.

            When we understand the structure of Member as a fugue, and when we place Frankie/F. Jasmine/Frances in the role of the fugue’s subject, a Derridean understanding of fugue can lead us to a Derridean understanding of the novelistic subject in Member. Frankie’s renaming is part of a continuous effort to inscribe herself on her surroundings, but Berenice and John Henry never remember to call her by her new names. She imagines herself dead or mutilated: “It is a terrible thing to be dead!” (66), “I feel just exactly like someone has peeled all the skin off me” (32). She creates personas for herself: “Captain Jarvis Addams sinks twelve Jap battleships and decorated by the President. Miss F. Jasmine Addams breaks all records. Mrs. Janice Addams elected Miss United Nations in beauty contest. One thing after another happening so fast we don’t hardly notice them” (103). Frankie, like the fugue’s melody, creates, destroys, and recreates herself, not only in her renaming at the start of each formal section of the novel, but constantly and continually.

Frankie’s desire to understand herself as a fully realized subject is expressed as a desire to belong to the wedding of her brother and the bride, but we always know that this realization will, in the end, show itself to be impossible. The pain and longing that Frankie experiences as she tries to belong to the wedding and to make herself understood in varying ways can be expressed as a Derridean “nostalgia for origins,” and in this way what we see played out in Member is an expression of the “[dream] of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile” (Derrida 292). 

Mental Patterning and Self-Fashioning in “The Birthmark"

In Malabou’s “You Are Your Synapses,” the dialectic between the unconscious and the personality, the neuronal and the mental, the brain and the self is under consideration. Malabou uses the discoveries of neuroscience to explain and understand more abstract conceptions of selfhood; taking this perhaps to an extreme, I would like to employ her ideas about the translation of neuronal patterns into images and the plasticity of the brain to contemplate Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” to the extent that it is as a symbolic embodiment of these mental processes.

            Certainly when Malabou and Hawthorne were writing these works, the following argument was never, ever, in consideration. Nonetheless, I will obstinately argue for a reading in which the characters Aylmer and Georgiana in “The Birthmark” represent the relationship between the brain and its projected images. As we have seen before, Hawthorne allegorizes Aylmer as a human mind. When considering Malabou’s articles and the fact that both Aylmer and Georgiana are “flat” characters that are reciprocal foils for each other, I would argue that Aylmer and Georgiana together form one human mind, in which Aylmer is the “brain” (neuronal) and Georgiana is the “proto-self” (mental).

            In “You Are Your Synapses,” Malabou avers that mental patterns are transcribed from neuronal patterns and are finally constructed as “images” (61). Here, the relationship with the constructed “brain” of Aylmer and Georgiana in “The Birthmark” becomes clearer. Hawthorne insists that Aylmer grows more and more obsessed with removing his wife’s hand-shaped birthmark, and in fact more and more afraid of the birthmark, because he associates it directly with the impossibility of human perfection, or, the impossibility of immortality; it is the “spectral Hand that wrote mortality” (1322). Thus Georgiana is reduced to a mere projected image of mortality, the object represented by the brain’s fixation on death. The connection is furthered in the fact that Aylmer’s gaze eventually causes Georgiana’s birthmark to appear: “[the birthmark] needed but a glance, with the peculiar expression that [Aylmer’s] face often wore, to change the roses of her cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the Crimson Hand was brought strongly out, like a bas-relief of ruby on the whitest marble” (1322). Malabou explains that the translation of neural patterns to mental patterns (“images”) involves a certain circuitry which demonstrates that the brain is “caught in the act of representing its own changing state as it goes about representing something else” (61). As Aylmer, the brain, represents his own preoccupation with death onto Georgiana and her birthmark, the birthmark seems to have a life of its own that, in appearing under Aylmer’s gaze, represents that preoccupation back to Aylmer, as evidence for his “own changing state.”

            Georgiana as the image of a self obsessed with mortality thus communicates to the brain (Aylmer) the necessity of succeeding in debunking his fears and allowing his self to reform more healthfully. The urgency with which Aylmer works to concoct his elixir clearly increases as the story progresses and as the birthmark shows itself more and more frequently. In the end, Aylmer does create a potion that removes the birthmark. Yet it kills Georgiana in the process. Malabou’s concept of plasticity as it relates to self-fashioning now comes into play. She explains that the construction of the self is “structured by the dialectical play of the emergence and annihilation of form” (72). Though Aylmer initially succeeds in overcoming his self-definition through fear of mortality by removing Georgiana’s birthmark, this achievement is fallible and would constitute the “flexible” self that Malabou posits as impossible. Georgiana’s death indicates that a new proto-self could not exist without the “explosion” (using Malabou’s terms) of the last one.

            Yet in the end, Hawthorne seems to suggest that these two selves could, possibly, have coexisted: “had Aylmer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness, which would have woven his mortal life of the self-same texture with the celestial” (1332). Evidently here Hawthorne returns to his religious lesson: that Aylmer’s fear of mortality would have been assuaged had he accepted the immortal afterlife of a pious person. Nonetheless, in my reading of Georgiana as the proto-self and Aylmer as the neuronal self, the possibility for the coexistence of two represented selves perhaps challenges a conceptual reading of Malabou’s dialectic of explosion and creation of identity. 

How Titus Andronicus Contests Geographies of State and Academic Discourse

            In her article “New Fields, Conventional Habits, and the Legacy of Atlantic Double-Cross,” Amanda Claybaugh criticizes the bifurcated structure of typical English departments in the United States—that of American versus British literatures, with the occasional exception for a trans-Atlantic literature course here and there.  The main problem lies, she claims, in that trans-Atlanticism became institutionalized as a field, and that, “offering itself up as an alternative to them...implicitly reaffirm[s] their [British and US literary studies’] existence” (445).  Likewise, opposing discourses in academic discussions have seemed to give a space to affective readings of material, as opposed to more traditional (body-excluding) methods of literary analysis, and yet the role of affective readings in critical discourse still remains dubious.  If anything, affect seems to be a somewhat novel branch of psychoanalytic theory, and more “serious” (read: “objective”) critical works remain the dominant force in literary theory.

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus interrogates the validity of a state-bound identity through confusions of roles and relationships among the characters—Goth and Roman (and Moor) alike.  Tamora, Queen of the Goths at the beginning of the play becomes Roman Empress; the Andronici, a noble family in Rome, resorts to help from Rome’s enemies by the end of the play in order to reestablish power.  And while we learn that such categories as “self” and “other” become complicated through the debasement of geographic and national identity, literary critics have historically reinforced a similarly problematic spatial dichotomy; that between the academy, dedicated to the maintenance of a literary canon that consists of “higher” forms of art, and that of the public, who feed on such sensationalistic and grotesque representations that they must necessarily be banned from the beloved canon.  It is, after all, this sensationalism and unfortunate closeness to ridiculousness that ostracizes this first Shakespeare tragedy from a respected position beside other Shakespeare plays written around the same time.  What happens, then, in dedicating ourselves to the study of such “serious” and transhistorically pertinent works such as Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, is we undermine our own mission by adhering to norms within study of English literature that would consider Titus’s gory sensationalism a relic of crude tastes of the early modern audience, and not worthy of classroom study in the contemporary classroom.  Such a play, though, designed to elicit visceral, emotional responses from the reader/audience, is precisely that which speaks most aptly to modern times.  And yet it still remains one of the least read, and most highly contested Shakespeare plays on the market.  Such academic snobbery effectively reinforces the problematic categories of self and other that both Shakespeare, and Claybaugh speak to. 

Geography marks identity in the play’s opening act; upon hearing that her son is to be sacrificed before the Romans, the captive Tamora, Queen of the Goths, begs Titus to spare him:

Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome

To beautify thy triumphs and return

Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke,

But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets

For valiant doings in their country’s cause?

O, if to fight for king and commonweal

Were piety in thine, it is in these! (1.1.109-15)

Titus, fully upholding his Roman duty, explains to the desperate woman, “These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld / Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain / Religiously they ask a sacrifice. / To this your son is marked, and die he must” (1.1.122-25).  Tamora appeals to Titus’s emotions, attempting to bridge the gap caused by differing nationalities through the devastation a parent feels at the death of a child.  Titus, though, privileging the rational rules of military law over the sentimental, personal impulses, catalyzes the cycle of violence that mobilizes the revenge plot.  Soon enough, though, national or geographic loyalties have atrophied in the face of betrayal and deceit; Titus, upon hearing that his two of his three remaining sons are to be executed for a crime they did not commit, discuss their new relationship to Rome, says to his son Lucius, “Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive / That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers? / Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine” (3.1.54-7).  Noble general has been reduced to babbling, crying father, and the scene only intensifies the onslaught of emotional devastation, for father and audience alike.  Just after this exchange between father and son, Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, enters the stage, raped, tongue-less, and hand-less.  This moment signals Titus’s descent into unending anguish and rage; it also (historically) has elicited the most violent of reactions from audiences watching the play, from fainting to sobbing to illness.  It is precisely this violence of emotional response, critic and professor Peter Elbow reminds us, that lends the viewers/readers of the play the power to learn from the work’s subversion of dangerous norms of identity boundaries.   In discussing the benefits of an academic affective discourse, he suggests that “[d]iscourse that renders often yields important new cognitive insights such as helping us to see an exception or contradiction to some principle we thought we believed” (Elbow 137).  Just as Claybaugh insists that trans-Atlantic studies is a remedy for stultified literary scholarship, so too can we see how Titus can, as the play itself disrupts doubtful geographic identities, also show how an affective discourse can disrupt the problematic spaces of high versus low literature and revive the academy. 

Bibliography

Claybaugh, A. “New Fields, Conventional Habits, and the Legacy of Atlantic Double-Cross.”

American Literary History 20.3 (2008): 439–448.

Elbow, Peter. "Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshman and

Colleagues." College English Feb 53.2 (1991): 135-55. JSTOR.