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?

Hawthorne's Death-World

In “Necropolitics,” Mbembe focuses on nation-states and colonial occupations to define contemporary necropolitics as the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (38–39). The first sentence of the article also implicitly broadens the scope of the argument in asserting that “sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11). Mbembe does locate his formation of necropolitics in the sovereignty of the nation-state (see the first note on p.11); but does he delimit “necropower” to these parameters? Are “necropolitics” and “necropower” synonymous? I will argue that the article allows for a more general application of a necropower analysis, a lens through which I will read the physical space of Aylmer’s laboratory in “The Birthmark.”

            “The most accomplished form of necropower,” Mbembe argues, “is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine” (27). The nexus for this necropower is found mostly in the spatial concerns of Gaza and the West Bank, in which “territorial fragmentation” (27), surveillance, and “splintering occupation” (28) generate a “death-world” (40) of a most advanced state. Thus in order to understand Aylmer’s laboratory as an advanced “death-world,” we must undertake an analysis of the space in the story through each of these parameters. First, territorial fragmentation. Unbeknownst to Georgiana, Aylmer creates a “boudoir” in which Georgiana is to reside during the experiments to remove the birthmark. After a fainting spell, Georgiana wakes up in “an enchantment”: “Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments, not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman” (1325). Considered alongside Mbembe’s description of territorial fragmentation, of which “the objective…is twofold: to render any movement impossible and to implement separation along the model of the apartheid state,” we see how Aylmer reasserts his control over Georgiana through a redefinition of “the relationship between sovereignty and space” (28). Georgiana surely has no possibility for movement beyond the borders of her apartments. Aylmer visits her daily to perform tests, yet she is unable to cross into his workspace. The deliberate description of the conversion of Aylmer’s old “smoky, dingy, sombre rooms” to the now feminine, perfumed, adorned space also hearkens to the idea of separation in the vein of the “apartheid state,” in which segregation is gendered rather than racialized.

            Next, Aylmer’s constant surveillance of Georgiana correlates to the oppressive and often violent surveillance in Gaza and the West Bank. When Aylmer begins to watch her closely and make extremely specific “minute inquiries as to her sensations,” (1327), Georgiana realizes that she has already been administered some of Aylmer’s concoctions, “either breathed in with the fragrant air, or taken with her food” (1327). Mbembe describes of colonial occupation: “surveillance is both inward and outward-oriented, the eye acting as weapon and vice versa” (28). In the sense that Aylmer’s watchfulness is yoked to his concealed assault of Georgiana’s body, Georgiana is surveilled similarly to the inhabitants of the colonial state.  

            Finally, we turn to Mbembe’s analysis of “splintering occupation,” a phenomenon that takes part of the “politics of verticality.” Best described through the network of roads in which Palestinians and Israelis, in theory, never travel on the same road but move along parallel or perpendicular lines and intersect occasionally, this splintering occupation is reflected well in the separate-yet-connected quality of Georgiana’s apartments and Aylmer’s laboratory. As I have already discussed, Georgiana cannot move between the two spaces. Yet, “she could hear [Aylmer’s] voice in the distant furnace-room, giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like a grunt or growl of a brute than human speech” (1326). Georgiana therefore has distant access to the men’s pursuits, as the Israelis or Palestinians encounter each other indirectly in the segregated infrastructure, yet Aylmer and Aminadab’s work is foreign to the extent that is seems inhuman and enemy-like.

            Georgiana transgresses once and crosses the border into Aylmer’s lab. In this revelatory moment, she understands the full truth of her husband’s project: “there is danger!” in the administration of the potions (1329). Nonetheless, she diverts Aylmer’s anger at her transgression by submitting to his plot despite the danger involved. She happily accepts a potion that she seems to know will kill her:

“‘I might wish to put off this birth-mark of mortality by relinquishing mortality itself, in preference to any other more. Life is but a sad possession to those who have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand. Were I weaker and blinder, it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself, methinks I am of all mortals the most fit to die’” (1330).

In light of this last speech, Georgiana is martyred when she dies, a death that is simultaneously murder and suicide. Her assertion of her moral superiority follows the same lines as Mbembe’s “logic of martyrdom” and her death fits Mbembe’s martyrizing process: she allows her body to become “a mere thing, malleable matter;” she invests her life with a “transcendental nomos outside it;” finally, in choosing death, she “escapes the state of siege and occupation” (37). Yet I have trouble reconciling her murder/suicide with Mbembe’s argument simply because of its ambiguous status as murder and/or suicide. She escapes Aylmer’s tyrannical control, but does not take him down with her. She chooses death, yet Aylmer actually succeeds in his quest (to remove the birthmark). Is her “escape” more problematic than that of Mbembe’s suicide bombers, or has she made the same escape from necropower into immortality?

When Plague Victims and Lepers Meet: Coming to Terms with Fluctuating Normality in Braddon and Foucault

At first glance, the plot of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret closely follows Foucault’s description of the exile of lepers: Lady Audley, who is identified as physically and psychically diseased, is sent to a Maison de Sante in Belgium so that she can not longer infect others with her symptoms. Wholesome English country life is restored and Lady Audley promptly dies in confined exile. However, as it turns out Lady Audley has not been exiled, she has escaped the plague city as the scapegoat of plague victims. The plague spreads through the Audley family, like the blue mould that is rotting away the contents of Lady Audley’s chamber, disallowing the looked for return to health and suggesting that this “perfect health” may not have existed in the first place. Braddon’s normalcy looks remarkably abnormal: patriarch, Sir Michael Audley, has fled from his ancestral hall, Audley court; his daughter Alicia has married a man she does not love because the man whom she has been interested in since adolescence, Robert Audley, has moved into a cottage with his unusually close friend George Talboys and married his sister, who looks eerily identical to her brother. The construction of this text suggests not only that Foucault’s lepers may live in plague cities and be subject to exile ordered by individuals who are themselves diseased, but also that the “normalization” that is the aim of the behavior of both these groups is constantly in flux and therefore unobtainable.

            In his lecture from 15 January 1975 Foucault suggests that “that very strange notion, “perversity,” that begins to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century” can be traced back to the desire to contain abnormality in order to reify the normal functioning of society (32). The negative medieval model of exiling lepers is contrasted with the inclusive positive eighteenth-century model of the communal care and voluntary surveillance of plague victims. Lepers, like Lady Audley, are cast “into a vague, external world” in order to “purify the community” (43, 44). This attitude is revised in the plague city that encloses victims through “spatial partitioning and control (quadrillage)” and subjects them to uninterrupted surveillance that is permanently recorded (44-45). Foucault suggests that “plague is the marvelous moment when political power is exercised to the full” and “where dangerous communications, disorderly communities, forbidden contacts can no longer appear” (47). Rather than a source of popular repression, Foucault argues that this model of “discipline-normalization” is “always linked to a positive technique of intervention and transformation, to a sort of normative project” (50).

            However, this normative project assumes the norm is stable or at least stable enough that it can be enacted on the population in the ways that Foucault describes. In Lady Audley’s Secret, Robert Audley relies on the plague-city apparatus of “expert medico-legal opinion” to identify an “abnormal individual” in an effort to sustain the “power of normalization” (33, 42). However, Robert does not contain Lady Audley in a local hospital since her crimes are committed in a state of dementia for which she is not responsible, instead he expels her from the community to an asylum in a remote European wilderness. The society that remains does not return to a state of purity or of community—individuals splinter off in unhappy and abnormal ways that deny surveillance and record-keeping. In the space of the narrative, “normal” has changed and thus the problem of enforcing and restoring it is the project of a diseased mind. The very enclosure that creates a sense of community and control in the plague town is the condition that spreads disease and dooms the healthy to illness and death by bringing them in close contact with the infectious fluids of the sick and creating a concentration of corpses that attracts the rats that carry the plague-spreading fleas. Similarly, George Talboy’s desire for physical closeness to Robert Audley, his professed yearning for the “strong grasp” and “friendly touch” of his friend absorbs into this novel’s happy, nationalistic ending and transmits symptoms of a constantly-mutating, drug-resistant strain of undiagnosable normalcy (444).

Do marginalization and normalization coexist?

In class on Monday we discussed at length how Foucault uses the examples of lepers and plague victims to distinguish between two types of power. There is the power that excludes and represses (“leper power”) which can be understood as negative since its goal is to eliminate by marginalization what Foucault in the context of his discussion of medico-legal expert opinion identifies as the dangerous or perverse individual. Then there is the power that seeks to normalize (“plague power”): a positive power working to mold individuals to fit within the boundaries of acceptability by monitoring them and making them monitor each other. I am interested in thinking about whether the two types of power that Foucault identifies can ever exist simultaneously, or whether their apparent coexistence is the marker of some third formation of power. We touched on this question in our discussion of Mbembe’s “Necropolitics”: in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government exercises violent “leper power” on Palestinians in the same (or at least a very closely adjacent) geographic space as the “plague power” it exercises on its own citizens. It also uses surveillance, seemingly a tool of “plague power,” to achieve its “leper power” ends. But are these two powers really coexisting in this instance or are they just confusingly layered on top of each other? In class we seemed to agree upon the latter.

I wonder if the tenuous space where the individual meets society could mark a possibility for these two powers’ coexistence. Bruno Latour argues that in fact the individual and society are not separate entities, perhaps precluding the possibility for such a space, but nevertheless there is ample evidence that literary texts comprehend the existence of this space and often understand it as troubled. Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding suggests that there exists a temporal location—puberty—that demands a meeting between the desires of the individual and the societal processes of power.

            At twelve, Frankie Addams encounters a nameless normalizing force that crystallizes in the event of her brother’s wedding. The mysterious restlessness that has already befallen her during “that green and crazy summer” takes shape in her understanding the event of the wedding as the paragon of belonging to some larger society she can hardly imagine. Her efforts to self-normalize in order to participate in that society include buying a “wedding dress” to wear to the event, but the dress is inappropriate for Frankie: Berenice tells her, “Here you got on this grown woman’s evening dress. Orange satin. And that brown crust on your elbows. The two things just don’t mix” (78). It’s possible to understand this statement as an instance of societal self-policing: Berenice tells Frankie that her efforts to execute a gendered performance have failed and need to be reconsidered. Frankie doesn’t wear the dress to the wedding. “Plague power” at work.

But does Berenice’s gender policing constitute inclusion for Frankie? At the event that is supposed to continue Frankie’s normalization, she is mostly ignored, but: “Mrs Williams…asked F. Jasmine two times what grade she was in at school…Mr. Williams also asked her what grade she was in at school; in fact, that was the main question asked her at the wedding” (127-128). These characters are expressing what they understand to be an appropriate form of societal participation for Frankie, but Frankie sees their questions as a denial of how she understands herself. After the wedding is over, “The world was now so far away that Frances could no longer think of it” (138). The possibility for power to normalize an individual by working within some society that remains mysterious to and “far away” from her is dubious.

How does a normalizing power work if the individual can’t understand how to interact with it? What happens when a power that seeks to normalize creates an individual who understands herself as marginalized? Should this kind of power be understood as a type of “leper power” after all, or is the marginalization that Frankie experiences a side effect of “plague power”? But how can this be so? If such questions must remain unanswered in this (already longer than) 600 word blog post, The Member of the Wedding at least shows us that the two types of power Foucault outlines are not mutually exclusive, and offers one model for their interplay.

The People Are Absent (In which Heartbreak House and Jonathan Lamb have a fight about character)

In the theatre, we have the sense that there are the characters . . . and then there are the people. Jonathan Lamb describes this distinction in “’Lay Aside My Character’: The Personate Novel and Beyond” (although he specifically discusses the 18th century novel, the article seems interested in the distinction as such). He writes, “it seems generally agreed that characters, whether particularized or not, are public, while persons, if they are really set on privacy, tend towards a narrower role and ultimately an inaccessible particularity, at which point they become something else altogether” (272). By the end of the article, the person is an essential component of fiction, and one that includes both “an ideal self,” set against and supported by a world of fictions, and the ability to author representations of that self (282-4).

The very experience of theatre is one that reinforces this distinction. We see the character (clearly both public and accessible) played by a person (presumably someone with a private, inaccessible life and mind). And inherent to the form is the presence of the author. We are aware that it is the actor who authors the character before us. Beyond that, we know that there is the costume designer, the director, the lighting designer, the playwright, the technical director, and so on. Lamb stresses the faultiness of our sensing faculties: the person is aware of and resists the fictional nature of “all the contingent details of the phenomenal world, and all systems of arranging and judging them” (283). All of the theatrical authors mentioned are making fiction with our empirical experience, and we assume that they exist beneath, in private, as makers. This private world is what the program pretends to represent, with its headshots, biographical notes, letters to the audience about the process of creating the show, and lists of donors who “made it possible.”

And yet, Heartbreak House contends, such a distinction is all nonsense. Making representations is not distinct from living and experiencing an “ideal self”; character is not distinct from person. All of the characters in Heartbreak House perform a series of roles—just as though they were actors onstage—and so they comment on the making of characters. But they are not persons. They have no sense of inner life; indeed, they entirely lack ground. Ellie, for example, is alone at the beginning of the play. She has time; she has quiet; she has a book (appropriately, it is Othello). Does she spend this time in contemplation? No. Does she spend it in a monologue, informing us of some thoughts that have been troubling her, and suggesting conflicts in the work to come? No. Does she spend it considering characters in a play? Not remotely. She lacks an audience . . . and so she falls asleep.

The characters of Heartbreak House are always performing roles, but they are not conscious actors who assume the roles they play. Each time a façade is given up, another façade takes its place. The burglar, it turns out, is actually just pretending; he is really a con artist taking a collection. Except as soon as we accept this new story, Captain Shotover declares that the con artist is the old pirate Billy Dunn . . . except this is a role he has previously assigned to someone else. And so on. And as soon as these figures are no longer playing—indeed, as soon as their present roles begin to erode? They fall sleep. They have nothing else.

If we take Heartbreak House on its face—as a piece in the theatre—it will inevitably appear to redraw Lamb’s distinctions. If, however, we understand the behavior of the characters as an argument about the person underneath those characters, it suggests something entirely different. Actors, authors, and the people whose faces you see in your program? They are a fiction, Heartbreak House argues. They are always characters.

Moretti’s Methodology: The Cure for Symptomatic Reading?

Moretti’s Methodology: The Cure for Symptomatic Reading?

There are four competing versions for the “original” publication of The Portrait of a Lady: two were simultaneously serialized in England and the United States, and each was bound into book form shortly thereafter. I had assumed that perusal of the textual variants might tell us something about the ways in which English usage in England was different from that in the United States. Using Moretti’s system, I confirmed the existence of textual variation, but found also that I had to take care that the reading of these findings was not too symptomatic, as per Rooney’s discussion. Implementing his system myself at once transformed my symptomatic reading into a surface reading and made me desire more context for Moretti’s investigation.

I looked at various versions of the text of The Portrait of a Lady to see how many dashes had been printed; I chose the dash for the unscientific reason of its seeming to me an interesting piece of punctuation in that it has no fast rules governing it; it is a piece of punctuation that is open to interpretation -- thus, one can imagine how my symptomatic reading of the dash might easily lead me to some conclusions re: the temper of the English reader in coping with the mystery of the dash versus that of the American reader; who would be more willing to engage with this nebulus? I assumed we could learn something about the transatlantic readership in the early 1880s: a natural time constraint inheres in the fact that the versions I looked at did not appear over decades like some revisions do, as the artist matures and looks back or as conventions of language change; instead, these four versions of The Portrait of a Lady are issued within the space of only two and a half years.

First, I looked at the first serial installation of the text as it appeared in the English Macmillan’s Magazine in October 1880; next, at the same installation as it appeared in the American Atlantic Monthly in November 1881. After that, I examined the same portion of the work when it was published by Macmillan in book form in 1882; and finally, I looked at the same portion as published in the United States by Houghton Mifflin in 1881. To approximate Moretti’s method, I counted the dashes in each version by downloading an editable version of each and manually using the Find + Replace function (same results, more laborious process).

In Volume I, the Atlantic stripped the Macmillan version of the text of 28% of its dashes, retaining only 80 of the original 110. Although the English Macmillan’s Magazine serial publication began before the American Atlantic Monthly started running The Portrait of a Lady, an American publisher, Houghton Mifflin, bound it as a book first. In doing so, they reinserted (or left intact) 108 of the original 110 dashes. And then Macmillan did the same thing -- a curious choice, since Macmillan already had an edited version of the text. Because both the American and English versions of the bound text appear to be the same, my original hypothesis -- being able to “read” the readerships on either side of the Atlantic through their relationship to the dash -- was undone. The editorial choices made in England were thought fit to travel without doing any real violence to an American set of readers and, in this instance, the dash tells us nothing about the mind of the English reader versus that of the American.

Fortunately, the history of The Portrait of a Lady’s publication is available to further inquiry: the plates for the book were originally fabricated by Macmillan in England then sent over to the United States, where they were first published by Houghton Mifflin and later used by Macmillan to print the English version. This information confirmed the unraveling of my symptomatic reading I would have done. It is, however, not the case that history would yield the 7,000 novels investigated by Moretti to further, perhaps contradictory, investigation. That is, we can never know if the shortening of novels’ titles is a response to the exigencies of advertising unless we are able to confirm this with supporting evidence (i.e. a control group of long titles juxtaposed with shorter ones). So, while his method yields data that would otherwise be too burdensome to calculate and might, as in my case, thwart a desired symptomatic reading, I am not sure that the data does not simply produce another “text” that is equally open to interpretation. The shortening of titles over time may just as well have informed us as to the price of ink and paper as to the necessity of advertising in circulating libraries’ catalogs. While his set of data may offer another data point in the reading of a body of texts, it may be just another data point.

A Poetics of "Nobody In Particular"

    According to Jonathan Lamb, the eighteenth century novel unified two representations of the subject: “the idea and function of the person,” one who is “always in a provisional state of being”’—“a subjunctive mode of self-identification”—and a figure with at least one shred of empirical connective tissue; a thing that is “neither a character nor a person, nor yet quite a nobody.”  (274) Fictional subjectivity of the novel, says Lamb, arose when the onset of rights discourse was synchronic with modern fiction.  Out of this synchrony emerged “strange alliances… [between] politics, property, and poetics.” (274)  Accordingly, person construction in the novel and “the radically new poetics of the subject and the state” engaged in a kind of symbiosis during the eighteenth century.  In reflecting upon this relationship, I want to pose the possibility that Lamb’s argument offers an entry point for thinking about poetry. That a poetics of identity in politics found its way into the aesthetics of 18^th century fiction, raises the question of how a referent of provisional becoming moves from some domain outside of poetry into the poem.

     The speaker of John Berryman's Dream Songs holds clear ties to real events experienced by the author and the eternally returning and developing figure of "Henry"who appears to share a strange space with the speaker's identity.  Clearly, the speaker of a confessional poem might be better thought of as a person than a character. For other kinds poetry, however, character—“a nobody in particular”—might serve as a more appropriate figure for the speaker.  Insofar as characterization, according to Catherine Gallagher and Deidre Lynch, can free up “the Cartesian unity of the self…and the experimental basis of knowledge,” perhaps poetry, when freed “from this kind of referentiality,” can and does “[strike] out on its own, exploiting a set of generic possibilities that enlarge the diversity of character by way of imaginative virtuosity, not empirical knowledge.” (273)  I suggest that Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path performs this operation.  

   Lerner's speaker enjoys a kind of disembodied agency; a schizophrenia that works both for and against one supposed goal of the text--to make "a little path for Ari;" something "composed entirely of edges." (42)   For example:

The ode just visible beneath the elegy
The preemptive elegy composed entirely
This movement from the ground to cloud
Of waves decaying slowly on plucked strings
Is lightning.  I don't know how else to say it
I mean without writing.  Maybe if you let
The false starts stand, stand in for symbols
Near collapse, or let collapsing symbolize
The little clearing loving is.  Maybe then

    A distributed thing, the speaker shatters into fragments jutting at various angles.  Instead of unifying the concept of a "preemptive elegy" being "composed entirely.../of waves  decaying slowly on plucked strings"  we have another thought interposed: "This movement from ground to cloud."  This thought, however, is also interrupted before it can finish with "Is lighting."  The speaker divides into many.  As such, he or she fails to meet a necessary condition for personhood--unification of the subject. Unity of the "I," provides the person's boundaries for becoming.  The split personality, however, is a divided subject--two persons sharing a body.  If a person, as such, depends on unity, does a character also depend it?  Insofar as characters can be "creatures and things as well as invented stories of named but non-existent human beings," they need not follow same existential conditions of personhood.  But does it follow that nothing prevents a character from being massively distributed?  What about the weather, emotions, and atmosphere?--all have characterological roles in a variety of narratives.   Mean Free Path, then, raises an important question:  How stands the gap between the one and the multiple?