Not explained, exactly, but here's the link I just sent you an email about that spells out one influential account of how thinking about PhD education, the job market, and the digital might go together:
http://nowviskie.org/2013/new-deal/
Monday, October 28, 2013
A preview of coming attractions....
After that whole thing about not remembering the play about a tree in Flusser, and not exactly recalling why I asked you to think about the writing due last week as collaborative, I will admit to doubting myself a bit. So I went back to my office and opened up the doc where I sketched my plan for the quarter's writing.
Now, I willingly admit that I'm tweaking the plan a little in response to what you all are doing--initially I had scheduled the first collaborative (as in working with someone else on a post) assignment for next week, for example, but what I read this past week suggested now was the time.
Thus the question, why had I so insisted last week that the "pick up a thread" from someone's post assignment was collaboration? My assignments in this class are always pretty open--dictating that baseline structure of dialog between theory and primary work is about as far as I want to restrict you. Why hadn't I left everyone free to take the "thread" assignment where they wanted, even if that meant being antagonistic?
The answer, the arc of writing assignments I devised in September revealed to me: the antagonism project comes later.
Not this week! Don't be antagonistic towards your writing partner! Keep your antipathies at bay for a little while longer! Play nice! But please know you won't be able to do so forever....
JM
Now, I willingly admit that I'm tweaking the plan a little in response to what you all are doing--initially I had scheduled the first collaborative (as in working with someone else on a post) assignment for next week, for example, but what I read this past week suggested now was the time.
Thus the question, why had I so insisted last week that the "pick up a thread" from someone's post assignment was collaboration? My assignments in this class are always pretty open--dictating that baseline structure of dialog between theory and primary work is about as far as I want to restrict you. Why hadn't I left everyone free to take the "thread" assignment where they wanted, even if that meant being antagonistic?
The answer, the arc of writing assignments I devised in September revealed to me: the antagonism project comes later.
Not this week! Don't be antagonistic towards your writing partner! Keep your antipathies at bay for a little while longer! Play nice! But please know you won't be able to do so forever....
JM
A good question.
I really like the question of what English is as a discipline if work like Rita Raley's is at home in it. (The person in our department whose work most resembles hers is, of course, Colin Milburn.) This is, to me at least, a very different question than asking why an English student might read Flusser, what that student might need to know about media differences, or performance, etc.
Take a look at Raley's web page to see what she taught last year while visiting at NYU English: http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/
Take a look at Raley's web page to see what she taught last year while visiting at NYU English: http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Latour and loss, following Ashley
Many thanks to Lee for reminding me that I should link my post for this week to the main part of the blog. In the spirit of collaboration, I chose to place my post (regarding Ashley's reading of Latour in conversation with Gawain) as a comment on an existing thread, so as to emphasize the contexts of my arguments. Apologies for any confusion this might have caused.
AB
AB
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Necropolitics at a Distance
Last week, Aaron raised an interesting question
about the link between necropolitics and killing that takes place at a distance
(temporal, spatial), proposing that “perhaps it’s possible to consider the necropolitical in relation to killing that occurs in belated or temporally discontinuous contexts.” The suggestion that “killing at a distance” may still
be usefully included under the rubric of the necropolitical enables me to draw
a connection between Mbembe’s work and The
Picture of Dorian Gray and to see necropolitics at work in in the deaths of
two lower-class characters: Sybil Vane, the actress who commits suicide when
Dorian breaks off his engagement to her, and James Vane, her brother, who dies
in an accidental shooting at Dorian’s hunting lodge.
In what way are these deaths, which the text
uneasily names as murders -- “‘So I have murdered Sybil Vane,’ said Dorian
Gray, half to himself, ‘—murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little
throat with a knife’” (96) – properly necropolitical?
They illustrate, in a way that admittedly strains the terms of Mbembe’s
argument, a “power” that “refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized
notion of the enemy” in order to establish and maintain a right to kill (Mbembe
16). Dorian and Lord Henry justify rhetorically, post-facto, the deaths of
Sybil and James by framing both lower-class characters as potential dangers to
Dorian’s existence: “If you had married [Sybil] you would have been wretched,”
Henry suggests (97), and after seeing James’s corpse, Dorian weeps with relief,
“for he knew he was safe” from any attempts by James to avenge his sister’s
death (199). While the need to kill
Sybil and James was not present while they were alive, Dorian is able to
conjure it afterwards to assuage the guilt he feels for his role, however
accidental, in their deaths.
This rhetorical slight-of-hand is helped by a preexisting
right to kill that the upper class
holds over the lower class, in practice if not in law, illustrated chillingly
by Alan Campbell’s reaction to Dorian’s confession of the murder of Basil
Hallward: “Murder!...I shall not inform upon you. It is not my business” (161).
That is, while the lower class is not always framed as a dangerous enemy that needs to be killed in order for the
upper class to survive, it is still constructed as a population that is eminently
disposable. (This may go some way to explain Lord Henry’s ghoulish reduction of
Sybil and James’s deaths to their aesthetic value, as “a wonderful scene [from
a play]” (100) or “an annoying subject” (196), respectively.)
Also, to reconnect these murders-at-a-distance to Aaron’s
example (the radioactive fallout to which “low-use segments” of the population
were subjected as a result of nuclear testing), we can see that in both cases, while
the deaths of specific subjects are unintended, the killing act was itself an
assertion of the state/upper class’s right to kill. Testing nuclear bombs is
itself an assertion of the right to use them in acts of war; on a smaller
scale, the firing of guns at animals -- and the lower-class employees (beaters)
whose job it is to drive them into the path of the upper-class hunters – is an
act that asserts the right to kill, and it takes place in a setting (the
hunting lodge’s extensive grounds) that symbolizes Dorian’s economic and
political power. In both cases, a demonstration
of power results in actual deaths.
What may bar these deaths from being usefully
included in a consideration of necropolitics is not the distance between the
act of killing and physical death, but in the missing intention to kill; here,
murder is not the “primary and absolute objective” of the characters’ actions. Nevertheless,
the characters’ assertion of the right to kill is the condition of possibility
for the deaths, however casually unrelated the two events may appear, and the deaths
therefore result from a kind of necropolitics.
Does extending an understanding of necropolitics to
include the accidental or not-directly-intended deaths of disposable
populations in addition to the deliberate murders of threatening ones – to include
letting die as well as killing –
assist or obscure our attempts to follow the operations of necropolitics in the
world? Does the unpredictability of killing-at-a-distance point to a fatal flaw
in necropolitical sovereignty? Or does it make such sovereignty appear all the
more capacious and inescapable?
Is he dead? Was he ever alive? (A response to Bryan and a post for Mr. Obama)
In his post “Is he dead? Is she dead?”,
Bryan reflected on Mbembe’s notion of “death-worlds”: “new and unique forms of
social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life
conferring upon them the status of living
dead” (40).
After reading his post, I left a comment asking him to
expound on the source of these conditions in the poem: who or what was
exercising necropolitics. He responded by essentially telling me that my
question was irrelevant: the source did not matter, only the experience. Of course, I am only roughly
paraphrasing what were in fact lengthy and complicated readings of Mbembe’s term.
What Bryan’s reading of Mbembe, and Rankine through Mbembe, brings to light is
the prospect that events of killing as well as perceived fear from events of
killing do not exist outside of and distinct from the individual as concrete
“facts.” The sensation of terror that the individual feels does not comes from
a cause that bears out an effect; there is no cause of death—it is
always-already present.
In a footnote to my post on
Mbembe that same week, I had emphasized that the event of killing was actually
immaterial to Mbembe—a contention I took him to task for in my post. Yet
Bryan’s post and response to my question about the source of necropolitics—the
entity that decides who to kill—puts pressure on my pat reading of necropolitics
and the question of sovereignty. Instead of a focus on the importance of the
event of killing, and its tie to an individual’s sovereignty in the text,
wouldn’t a true necropolitical reading also examine the creation of
death-worlds?
While the Sir Gawain is on the one hand about the event of killing Gawain,
the narrative also represents Gawain’s fear of being killed. Gawain is marked
early on as someone who will be killed and therefore, for the reader is both
alive and dead. Even further, Gawain himself feels both alive and dead. The
clearest illustration of this zombie-like consciousness is when the poem
describes Gawain at the very moment he is tempted with the green girdle:
Deep in his dreams he darkly mutters
As a man may that mourns, with many grim
thoughts
Of that day when destiny shall deal him
his doom
When he greets his grim host at the Green
Chapel
And must bow to his buffet, bating all
strife (1750-1754).
In
sleep Gawain mutters as if awake. In sleep he is as if a man that mourns. In
sleep, he is aware that he is dying, and pictures the moment when he dies.
Sleep’s proximity to death, as well as death’s disturbance of sleep creates a
death world: a feeling dead while being alive. For the logic of the text, it is
at the very moment that a state of a death-world emerges that the opportunity
to escape death arises. Starting from the very next line, Bertilak’s wife
appears, and at the end of this scene, offers Gawain what he determines is “a
pearl for his plight, the peril to come” (1859). At the thought that “could he escape unscathed, the scheme
were noble!” (1860) Gawain as a character seems to unravel. His rather simple
obedience to the Green Knight’s quest is blurred by the possibility of meeting
death to and escaping it. He knows he is dead, but feels alive. And while The
Green Knight ultimately forgives him of his error, Gawain comes to Arthur’s court
as a ghost-of-sorts: one who was expected dead, but returns.
After identifying the terror of Gawain’s
death-world in Sir Gawain, it is tempting
to then ask: how does it come about? I could, for instance, delve into the
implications of The Green Knight’s forgiveness as an exercise of power and
argue that ultimately The Green Knight does win by letting Gawain live. I could
also rehash the slippery semiotics of the green girdle as an object that
reifies and marks Gawain’s multiple deaths (death as courageous, death in being
Bertilak’s ultimate conquest, death of his own sense of self, death as an
individual and transmutation into a social spectacle). But do these questions
about power and killing actually matter?
As Bryan posits at the end of his post: “Death-worlds, then, are powerful ideas
or things only insofar as… they end up structuring private and public thinking
to the extent that ‘lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and
redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred’ (40).” For us to think of
death-worlds, we cannot simply say they exist and tie them to some structural
outside. Death-worlds are, by definition, nebulas: they are zones where values
(resistance, redemption, freedom) and desperation (suicide, sacrifice,
martyrdom) are blurred. Recognizing this liminal space where an individual can
feel dead while alive, and alive while dead, I would argue two things about Sir Gawain. First, given that the
tipping point of the narrative unraveling happens when Gawain is in the state
of the death-world, it would seem that affect is more central to the plot than
an external cause; Gawain falls apart because of this sensation of feeling dead,
not merely that he will be dead. Second, Gawain, from start to finish, is never
fully alive or fully dead—from the moment he sees himself as sacrifice to the
moment he is redeemed through Green Knight’s forgiveness and the court’s
kindness, he is always dead, while still alive. And yet, while I acknowledge a
reversal from challenging to now accepting Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” as a lens
of literary analysis, I also wonder if the quest for the value of applicability
and the impulse of applying his theory is not ultimately blurred by the
conditions, constraints and questions we face in reading texts and theories the
way we do.
Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again
You may have
noticed a trend in my blog posts: Hyde, Hyde, and more Rah! Rah! Go Hyde! But
in continually attempting to break the bonds between him and Jekyll, by always
reading him as a separate, struggling, sovereign self perhaps I have been
carried away by, as Ashley Sarpong terms it in her Friday, October 18th blogpost, the "myth of the individual" (3rd paragraph). I’d like to bring Jekyll and Hyde back
together[1], not in opposition but in an exploration of how the two (and
possibly “others”) are irrevocably intertwined, specifically within a
psychological Latourian network. While I realize that applying a sociological
theory to psychology is a potentially problematic move to make, I’d like to see
if thinking of the psyche of Jekyll as a network clarifies Latour’s rather
murky concepts of “individuals,” “attributes” and “properties,” while also
dealing with and moving beyond the Sarpongian specter of “lack” in networks.
Jekyll & Hyde is a story that is obsessed with
the idea of splitting the identity. At first, this split is viewed as being
dual in nature:[2] “Man is not truly one, but truly
two” (Stevenson 79). We have Jekyll and we have Hyde—two identities, two bodies. But, in fact, the
separation isn't as clean as we, and definitely Jekyll, might like it to be.
It’s clear that when in the body of Jekyll, Hyde is always still there in his
mind, bubbling beneath the surface and fighting for ascendancy (88). Although
there is less textual evidence to prove the flip side, Jekyll also seems to be
present within the personality of Hyde. We know that they share a “memory in
common” (85) and that Hyde, oh so coincidentally, retains Jekyll’s handwriting
(89). Conscious supremacy determines
then, in Jekyll & Hyde, whose body is shown to the world and what actions
that body takes. But the conscious supremacy of one identity does not mean the
complete disappearance of the other. Though we have the bodies of Jekyll or
Hyde, psychologically, we actually always have either Jekyll/Hyde or Hyde/Jekyll.
Internally, they can never be fully split. To further complicate matters, Jekyll raises the
specter of more than two identities being possible. He states, “I say two,
because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others
will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess
that man will ultimately be known for a mere polity of multifarious,
incongruous, and independent denizens” (79). Basically, if two, then why not three, or four, or so on and so forth. Thus, we actually have a psyche created of
Jekyll/Hyde/Others (or Hyde/Others/Jekyll, etc.) and Jekyll(Hyde/Others), in his depression-induced cynicism, mistakenly views these
identities as independent when in fact, his own experiment has proved that they
can never be so; they are forever internally networked together, regardless of
what exterior shape is displayed.
So, when Latour states, “a given individual will be defined by the list of other
individuals necessary for
its subsistence” I argue that it is possible to view “other individuals” as
interior as well as exterior. In so doing, Latour’s “attributes” and “properties”(5, 12) become, not isolated facets of an individual,
not finite objects, but individual themselves who have their own networks while
also contributing to larger networks of other individuals or societies—creating
networks within networks within networks, spheres within spheres. Yet, even with this proliferation of meaning
and connection, Sarpong raises the question of the data lack,
the empty space, than can exist between two networked characters or indviduals.[3] But, if we visualize networks as 3D objects
(especially according the pictures Latour gives us on pgs. 6 and 7), then the
empty spaces that interest Sarpong are on the surface of the network. I do not find this superficial “lack” to be a
cause of anxiety because, while there may be a lack of data, the “lack” doesn’t
signify that the connections aren’t there, it only signals that we don’t yet
have the technology to render them visible.[4] The “lack” I do find far more troubling is the
empty space that exists at the very center of any network.
Latour’s networks don’t appear to revolve around anything, they’re only
a series of constantly proliferating connections that we use to define
ourselves and create meaning in the world.
In this sense, they’re very Derridean. I’m not even the center of my own
network, because my network is composed of myriad other networks and “I” am
only a network within larger networks. Structures or networks have no center, which is why there is always room for another network, or another sphere
of meaning to be fitted inside or outside our
current sphere of meaning—excluding totalization in an infiniteness of play. I’d like to close by
grappling with my sense of unease in viewing meaning and the world this way. It
seems that in arguing for ever-expanding connections and play, all these scholars
have argued for is a new Heaven and Hell, a way of thinking about and encapsulating the beyond
beyond the beyond. This expansion, then, remains reductive in nature. Post-structuralists
haven’t expanded meaning; they’ve just reduced it to the infinite—a word that
perhaps we use too casually, a word whose meaning is always beyond us, always
unknowable, and always non-existent. Is saying a person, object, thing, idea, or word has infinite meaning the same as saying it has no meaning? I think it quite possibly is.
Citations:
Latour,
Bruno. “Networks, Societies, Spheres.” Keynote. INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR ON
NETWORK THEORY. 19th February 2010. Annenberg School for Communication and
Journalism, Los Angeles. 1-18
Saposnik, Irving S. "The
Anatomy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Studies in English Literature
1500-1900 4th ed. 11
(1971): 715-31. JSTOR. Web
Sarpong, Ashley. "Slippery Semiotics: Identity, Network and Meaning. (For Obama-the Shutdown Warrior)". Friday, October 18th. Blogpost from ENL 200 Fall 2013. <http://enl200f2013.blogspot.com/2013/10/in-last-weeks-post-i-wasdetermined-to.html>
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Martin A. Danahay. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2005. Print.
[1]
I’m influenced by Irving Saposnik here who argued that thinking about Hyde
without thinking about Jekyll is to never have the full story. As he states,
“Without a Jekyll, there could never have been a Hyde, and without Hyde, one
can never fully know Jekyll” (727).
[2] Jekyll
is constantly using a language of doubling when he describes himself and Hyde:
He describes his psyche as being “polar twins” that are constantly struggling
for a conscious supremacy (Stevenson 79). He talks about the “thorough and
primitive duality of man” (79). He gives us another image of a double when he
describes Hyde as being “knit to him closer than a wife” (91).
[3] Sarpong is specifically interested in the moments when characters
in Sir Gawain are found “’in lack’/deprived of the evidences ‘needed to read
their connections with each other’ (1st paragraph, comment)
[4] Latour
states that the trick of rendering the empty spaces on the surface of the
network as no longer empty “is in changing the density of connections until a
net ends up being indistinguishable from a cloth” (7)
Janie the sovereign.
“Yeah Jody, don’t keer
whut dat multiplied cockroach told yuh [...]
you got tuh die, and yuh can’t
live.” (Hurston 102)
***
I’ve wanted to write back to Lee for a while now.
Lee is doing things with Dr
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that I would never have expected. Here I sat, thinking
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel was a simple horror story of the fuddy duddy 19th
century British variety -- and yet, in her analyses Hyde has morphed from a
back-alley London creeper to a fascinating figure of monstrosity. Lee has
explored ways in which Mr. Hyde’s subhuman status and life on the margins of
society puts him in conversation with the dehumanization and subhumanization of
other figures deemed unworthy by a society.
I particularly like the move that Lee makes in her blog entry
from October 19th. Although I knew that Achille Mbembe’s article
contained valuable insight, his article felt too expansive -- to work with his
words I felt that I needed to have a primary text concerned with oppression on
a massive scale. In her post, Lee focuses on the singular and specific
applications of Mbembe. For Lee, ideas float. I draw from this move.
***
Now, Mbembe is very specific about the scale and aims of his
argument:
My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations (14).
Doesn’t get much more blunt than that.
Despite this warning, I can’t help thinking of two moments --
one in Mbembe, one in Their Eyes Were
Watching God -- that somehow work together. In Mbembe, the first line:
“This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignity resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (11).
In Hurston, I am thinking of the long, protracted death of
Jody “Joe” Starks, Janie’s second husband. What kills Joe? As with many other
aspects of the novel, Hurston allows space for multiple meanings and
explanations. On one hand, a doctor tells Janie that Joe’s kidneys are shutting
down, and his death has been long coming. One the other hand, Pheoby admits to
Janie that
“Janie, Ah though maybe de thing would die down and you never would know nothin’ ‘bout it, but it’s been singin’ round here ever since de big fuss in de store dat Joe was ‘fixed’ and you wuz de done dat did it” (Hurston 97-8).
Fixed. I’ve been
interested in this idea since I first encountered it in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Here, fixed means that Janie has taken something vital from Joe,
something that leads him to think “There was nothing to do in life anymore.
Ambition was useless” (94-5).
Despite the claims of Janie and the doctor to the contrary,
I think that she kills Joe, and that it happens when Janie upbraids him in the
store after he has abused her in public. As the men around him laugh at Janie’s
sharp tongue, Joe
realized all the meanings and his vanity bled like a flood. [...] Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish [...] worse, she had cast down his empty armor before men and they had laughed, would keep on laughing. (94)
Unable to conceive of himself outside of only definition of
maleness he knows, Joe responds with his last available tool: violence.
Joe Starks didn’t know the words for all this, but he knew the feeling. So he struck Janie with all his might... (95)
And he retires to his room to die.
What if Janie is our sovereign, holds the power of life over
death? And what if she does it not through physical violence, but through the
power of her words to destroy?
(wc: 644)
Friday, October 25, 2013
Challenging Colebrook's Conception of Concepts and Contexts
In Sarah’s post, “Reading
Without a Map: (Il)legibility in Jewett,” she clearly articulates some of the
difficulties of reading texts with disjointed structures and complicated historical
contexts, by means of Claire Colebrook’s “The Context of Humanism.” Sarah
writes that “the text’s fragmented
structure draws attention to itself; it bogs you down in minute details of the
lives of seemingly random individuals.” Similarly, in Junot Díaz’s
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,
the text is formally disjointed, chronologically nonlinear, and consistently
fractured by footnotes that, needless to say, dwarf Lee’s. Furthermore, in Díaz’s
novel, readers are subject to a “highly mythologized conception of the past,”
through the presentation of Trujillo as a “superhuman” or “alien,” as I
discussed last week. However, this week I would like to respond to the convoluted
relationship between context and content, and how, “for Colebrook, a text’s
legibility is not tied to its historical context but to something that
communicates across time,” which Sarah precisely elucidates as Colebrook’s
position. I will argue, on the other hand, that this view of context is erroneous
and incompatible with Díaz’s presentation of the past.
There are varying levels of context that are requisite for a
true attempt at understanding The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Structurally, Díaz inundates the novel
with footnotes, which give ancillary pieces of information (i.e. a context), but which also
elaborate upon various culturally transmitted stories from the Dominican past.
These stories are simultaneously contained within the overarching narrative
thread referentially and uncontained independently. Moreover, the narrator, Yunior,
who may or may not be reliable, frames his discussions within the footnotes
through his own cultural, familial, and individual prejudices about the
historical narratives of the DR, which creates a profound subjectivity that overcomes
the traditional objectivity of historicizing footnotes. Like Sarah, therefore, I find that “we
[readers] have no anchor, map or familiar structure,” when analyzing Díaz’s
text. Colebrook, when responding to this dilemma, argues that “there can be a
shared meaning of a concept because of a context, but that same possibility
frees the concept from any speaker and any closed
context” (Colebrook 715-16). However, being outside of the rebellious and
politically fraught history of the DR (i.e.
its closed context) and having no cultural ties to that island, I find it
hard to find a shared meaning with many of the concepts that Díaz
presents, even with the provided context of the footnotes, let alone by some seemingly
impracticable separation from context, which Colebrook seems to suggest.
Moreover, since the given context is largely idiosyncratic and biased (what retellings
of history are not?), I wonder to what extent a separation from that context would
allow for an adequate understanding of the text.
From the moment that Abelard said the “Bad Thing” about
Trujillo, the de Leóns consider their line doomed because of a
curse. But Yunior questions the problems of this subjective historiography in a
footnote: “There are other beginnings certainly, better ones, to be sure – if you
ask me I would have started when the Spaniards ‘discovered’ the New World – or when
the U.S. invaded Santo Domingo in 1916 – but if this was the opening that the
de Leóns chose for themselves, then who am I to
question their historiography?” (Díaz 211). Here, Yunior seems to advocate
for Colebrook’s sentiment that “one must assume some mediating horizon from
which all contexts might be view and compared, even if one then goes on and
acknowledges the necessary limitations of one’s own context” (Colebrook 715). Still,
tracing the origins and demonstrating the implications of the fuku is inherently
problematic for Yunior, who is not a member of Oscar’s family (but he raises an
interesting point, nonetheless). I would argue that the context (Abelard Cabral’s
actions in the mid-1940s) is what allows for a concept (the fuku) to be made;
however, as Yunior reveals, there have been numerous historical events with similarly
incalculable, negative effects upon Dominican families, yet the de Leóns are completely willing to devotedly cling to that
one unfortunate event, because it relates solely to their own family. This
fundamentally contradicts Colebrook, because it demonstrates that a context
does not belie the force of concepts (715). For the de Leóns, the context is the only justification for and the originary of the concept. The “ultimate
context” (the originary) is never ruptured by the “power” that makes contexts
possible (715); conversely, in Díaz’s work, contexts open and destroy
concepts, which enables an orientation to and mode of thought towards what is
specific to the de Leóns and their complicated relationship with(in)
the DR.
Powerfully Decentered
In
previous posts, I argued that, in its use of sketches or “story-islands,” The Country of the Pointed Firs challenges
the amalgamating aspects of Bruno Latour’s network theory methodology by
forcing the reader to alternate between seeing parts and wholes, sketches and
novel. Conceptually speaking,
characters do exist as part of a network, as attributes of Jewett’s work (not to mention the fact that they are
all somehow related by blood or marriage), but in spite of this quite literal
linkage characters are individuals placed against
the overarching structures that bind them. In the process of troubling critical
attempts to place the work firmly in any genre, the fragmented form of Pointed Firs also prevents its
characters from blending into any notion of network as a unified organism. A
question then arises about how deploying network theory in the process of
engaging with a more linear, plot-driven work might alter the reader’s
experience. Beyond that, if writers somehow espouse this theoretical methodology
in the creative process, one is forced to question whether the novel in its
traditional, hierarchical form can even continue to exist.
In Kate’s post “Haunted Networks in The Little Stranger” she engages with similar concerns. She cogently argues, that “to deploy Latour’s networks in Water’s novel is to decenter the novel’s focus on its human characters and broaden the scope of its interests,” allowing the reader to imagine the novel as being “about the ancestral home itself.” It’s exciting to imagine the seemingly limitless possibilities presented by Latour and Kate’s arguments, but I’m also left feeling unsure about the full ramifications of deploying this methodology. Generally, what does it mean for a novel to “broaden the scope of its interests” and beyond that, exactly how “broad” is this scope? As Kate points out, according to Latour’s theories, viewing the novel as a network can work to disperse positions of power and ownership, but isn’t the act of viewing Hundreds Hall as the sort of center of the novel (network), what the novel is “about,” a mode of reinstating a position of power? If by definition, a network de-centers, then how can viewing a novel as a network allow it to be “about” anything other than network? Which brings me back to my initial question of how Latour’s theories transform the novel. On the most basic level, how do we talk about a work, specifically a novel, in these terms?
I would argue that while the fragmented, highly idiosyncratic structure of The Country of the Pointed Firs troubles Latour’s conception of a fully amalgamated network, it also decenters the reader’s focus. Like Latour’s actor network, it seemingly has no center. It’s true that while we are inside the work, inhabiting Jewett’s world, she forces us to see each individual character and sketch in all of its peculiarities. I noticed, however, that once I am outside of the text looking back on what I’ve read, all the details blend; I have a heightened awareness of attributes, but all I can see is Dunnet Landing. In other words, the work isn’t just about Dunnet Landing it is Dunnet Landing. Dunnet Landing is a network constituted by its attributes—sketches—that effectively displaces the concept of “The Novel” as a point of inquiry. Therefore, it appears that in order to come to terms with this work I have to arrest my quest to find linear narrative in accumulated details and character studies. In short, I have to stop treating it like a novel. I need to take a hint from Jewett and start breaking rules.
In Kate’s post “Haunted Networks in The Little Stranger” she engages with similar concerns. She cogently argues, that “to deploy Latour’s networks in Water’s novel is to decenter the novel’s focus on its human characters and broaden the scope of its interests,” allowing the reader to imagine the novel as being “about the ancestral home itself.” It’s exciting to imagine the seemingly limitless possibilities presented by Latour and Kate’s arguments, but I’m also left feeling unsure about the full ramifications of deploying this methodology. Generally, what does it mean for a novel to “broaden the scope of its interests” and beyond that, exactly how “broad” is this scope? As Kate points out, according to Latour’s theories, viewing the novel as a network can work to disperse positions of power and ownership, but isn’t the act of viewing Hundreds Hall as the sort of center of the novel (network), what the novel is “about,” a mode of reinstating a position of power? If by definition, a network de-centers, then how can viewing a novel as a network allow it to be “about” anything other than network? Which brings me back to my initial question of how Latour’s theories transform the novel. On the most basic level, how do we talk about a work, specifically a novel, in these terms?
I would argue that while the fragmented, highly idiosyncratic structure of The Country of the Pointed Firs troubles Latour’s conception of a fully amalgamated network, it also decenters the reader’s focus. Like Latour’s actor network, it seemingly has no center. It’s true that while we are inside the work, inhabiting Jewett’s world, she forces us to see each individual character and sketch in all of its peculiarities. I noticed, however, that once I am outside of the text looking back on what I’ve read, all the details blend; I have a heightened awareness of attributes, but all I can see is Dunnet Landing. In other words, the work isn’t just about Dunnet Landing it is Dunnet Landing. Dunnet Landing is a network constituted by its attributes—sketches—that effectively displaces the concept of “The Novel” as a point of inquiry. Therefore, it appears that in order to come to terms with this work I have to arrest my quest to find linear narrative in accumulated details and character studies. In short, I have to stop treating it like a novel. I need to take a hint from Jewett and start breaking rules.
Allusive Networks in The Little Stranger
In her post “Tea Cake and Literary Play,” Jenny explored an
idea that is not explicitly addressed in Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play,”
but that naturally arises from it. For Jenny and her analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the idea
of literary play leads to how a text “sets up readerly expectations … and
leaves us unsure whether [it] has confirmed or contradicted them.” In the case
of Jenny’s novel, the result of literary play is to leave characters (and the
reader) wondering – “What kind of story am I in?” Novels such as this and The Little Stranger ultimately resist a
definitive answer to that question.
Critics such as Katharina Boehm have labeled Waters’s works
as exemplifying “postmodern historiographic metafiction” a genre that “draws
attention to the narrativity of the past by exposing “both history and fiction
[as] discourses, human constructs, signifying systems” (237). Consequently, the
novel bristles with allusions to British literature, specifically of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – various works of George Eliot and Charles
Dickens, Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies,
Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience,
and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, to name a few. For Derrida (and Jenny), the quick introduction and
equally speedy dismissal of these allusions lead to play; they suggest ways of
understanding the story by offering potential points of comparison with
previous stories. As Jenny writes, such a Derridean reading offers “an
acknowledgment of tropes, stereotypes, and a literary tradition (and its
foils), but an effort to pursue complexity rather than reveal a ‘true’ and
fully explained nature.”
A “true” center and stable meaning are also impossible for
Latour. An actor is always simultaneously a network, both an individual and the
countless connections it has. Therefore, these allusions can be seen as
connections the text has to other,
previous works of literature. However, to stick with Latour, these are only
connections that the novel has, they
don’t define what it is. For
instance, the text’s implicit comparison of Caroline Ayres with Tess of the
D’Urbervilles could suggest, among other things, that Faraday takes advantage
of her in their romantic relationship. Yet to see The Little Stranger as a rewriting of Tess is a mistake. First of all, the class relationship is inverted
– Caroline is the figure of the upper class and Faraday is of the lower – and
second, it is Caroline who breaks off the engagement. The narrative offers the
comparison but doesn’t sustain it.
Katharina Boehm doesn’t acknowledge another complexity of
these literary allusions. She sees them simply as a textual alternative to the
material history of the house. However, these are not merely connections to
other works that the novel “has” – they are made by the characters themselves.
The fact that Faraday narrates the novel brings into question the provenance
and nature of many of these allusions, while others are made by other
characters. Does someone like Faraday see a kinship between his life and those
of these figures of Victorian fiction? Or is he aware of the gaps and
breakdowns where the allusions fail?
I think that Latour’s networks and Derrida’s “play” work so
well in this novel because of the way the text resists closure: a multiplicity
of networks and connections, but no “center”; a variety of possible
interpretations, but no “answer.” The review
that I cited at the beginning of the quarter discusses how emotionally unsatisfying
the ending is. The Ayres family is nice enough that you don’t want to witness
their downfall and destruction, while Faraday certainly isn’t likeable enough
for you to appreciate his questionable triumph. Perhaps Latour helps to reveal
the novel’s attempts to illustrate the truly complex networks of history.
word count: 610
Milton and the Possibility of Unconscious Tyranny
This week, I wish to take up Kate’s question from two weeks ago of the subconscious tyrant: “What does it mean when a ‘tyrant’ doesn’t know he’s terrorizing his ‘subjects’? Milton draws heavily on the language of tyranny to craft his arguments, drawing on both historical tyrannies such as the Inquisition and that of the Holy Roman Empire, but also numerous times refers to a more metaphorical intellectual tyranny potentially in play upon the passage of the 1643 licensing order. Tyranny and its synonyms circulate throughout the treatise, stopping short of attaching to the English Parliament, but invoked as a potential consequence in the future (or raised as a spectre of the past).
Milton’s treatise carries an incredible awareness of tyranny, then, and the question of ignorant or unconscious tyranny seems irrelevant in this case. However, one of Milton’s rhetorical devices does just what Kate theorizes: he constructs Parliament to be ignorant of the tyrannical effects of the law they passed. Perhaps to stay on Parliament’s good side, or perhaps to give them the benefit of the doubt and encourage repealing of the law, Milton repeatedly words his arguments to suggest that governments may accidentally pass laws without knowing the full consequences. He writes in one example: “I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes, when I have sat among their learned men…and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought” (363).
He assumes a generally benevolent government: “we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was beyond the manner of a Roman recovery,[1] it will be attributed…to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom” (338). Additionally, the stakes for Milton are not yet as high as in Mbembe’s article: the law Milton writes about deals not with the regulation of life and death, but rather of knowledge, so that minds are being subjugated, not bodies.[2] Milton assumes a benevolence that modern theory (Foucault in particular) has gone a long way to showing cannot exist.
However, Milton presents a possible reason for the distinction between early modern sovereignties and contemporary ones: the capabilities for surveillance and control differ vastly. Milton can mock the mass licensing of music, dancing, windows, balconies, garments, discourse, and people as implausible because the resources simply did not exist to observe every aspect of early modern English life (355). And who would watch the watchers? Milton also acknowledges that licensers of “infallibility and uncorruptedness” did not exist, and therefore the processes of censorship had an impracticability inherent in them. Today, however, we have learned of the Panopticon and know that a society can censure itself, making Milton’s proposed army of book and guitar-censors unnecessary. Is it a logical necessity, then, that with greater interconnectivity, firepower, and subject-managing, power must also become more self-aware? In a technological age, is accidental tyranny impossible?
Even in Milton’s time, kings were conscious of their subjects, and on the best of days, aware that they had a responsibility to govern them well. But we are speaking of power on a large scale; both Mbembe’s article and Milton’s treatise deal with powers on the national or global scale rather than the intimate and familial, as Kate writes of. And while Milton constructs Parliament as accidentally tyrannous (with the power to reverse their mistake), he also does so in service of his own agenda and to make his critique more palatable—leaving us to question whether unconscious or subconscious tyranny exists as a possibility only in the microcosm, and whether large-scale emergent powers are necessarily conscious of their tyranny.
[1] Referring to the overthrow of Charles I.
[2] The links between sovereignty and necropolitical violence begin to form, however, as control over the mind leads to control over the body. Milton’s spectre of tyranny may also be a state tyranny, not yet like the modern surveillance state but certainly carrying the connotation of unjust and excessive rule.
Milton’s treatise carries an incredible awareness of tyranny, then, and the question of ignorant or unconscious tyranny seems irrelevant in this case. However, one of Milton’s rhetorical devices does just what Kate theorizes: he constructs Parliament to be ignorant of the tyrannical effects of the law they passed. Perhaps to stay on Parliament’s good side, or perhaps to give them the benefit of the doubt and encourage repealing of the law, Milton repeatedly words his arguments to suggest that governments may accidentally pass laws without knowing the full consequences. He writes in one example: “I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes, when I have sat among their learned men…and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought” (363).
He assumes a generally benevolent government: “we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was beyond the manner of a Roman recovery,[1] it will be attributed…to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom” (338). Additionally, the stakes for Milton are not yet as high as in Mbembe’s article: the law Milton writes about deals not with the regulation of life and death, but rather of knowledge, so that minds are being subjugated, not bodies.[2] Milton assumes a benevolence that modern theory (Foucault in particular) has gone a long way to showing cannot exist.
However, Milton presents a possible reason for the distinction between early modern sovereignties and contemporary ones: the capabilities for surveillance and control differ vastly. Milton can mock the mass licensing of music, dancing, windows, balconies, garments, discourse, and people as implausible because the resources simply did not exist to observe every aspect of early modern English life (355). And who would watch the watchers? Milton also acknowledges that licensers of “infallibility and uncorruptedness” did not exist, and therefore the processes of censorship had an impracticability inherent in them. Today, however, we have learned of the Panopticon and know that a society can censure itself, making Milton’s proposed army of book and guitar-censors unnecessary. Is it a logical necessity, then, that with greater interconnectivity, firepower, and subject-managing, power must also become more self-aware? In a technological age, is accidental tyranny impossible?
Even in Milton’s time, kings were conscious of their subjects, and on the best of days, aware that they had a responsibility to govern them well. But we are speaking of power on a large scale; both Mbembe’s article and Milton’s treatise deal with powers on the national or global scale rather than the intimate and familial, as Kate writes of. And while Milton constructs Parliament as accidentally tyrannous (with the power to reverse their mistake), he also does so in service of his own agenda and to make his critique more palatable—leaving us to question whether unconscious or subconscious tyranny exists as a possibility only in the microcosm, and whether large-scale emergent powers are necessarily conscious of their tyranny.
[1] Referring to the overthrow of Charles I.
[2] The links between sovereignty and necropolitical violence begin to form, however, as control over the mind leads to control over the body. Milton’s spectre of tyranny may also be a state tyranny, not yet like the modern surveillance state but certainly carrying the connotation of unjust and excessive rule.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Tea Cake and literary play.
Derrida illustrates the seeming contradiction of "destroying" a structure by writing against it, an act which leaves the aspiring contrapuntalist locked in a closed circle. Using the example of the rise of the discipline of ethnology, Derrida writes:
Derrida proposes a solution to this quandary, and it is as simple and complex as its name: play, which is
To read Their Eyes Were Watching God is also to witness the sort of play that has made Zora Neale Hurston's novel the subject of so much debate. In the way that she depicts Janie's search for love and subsequent romance with Tea Cake, Hurston sets up readerly expectations about the common trope of women taken advantage of in love, and leaves us unsure whether she has confirmed or contradicted them.
Tea Cake, the younger lover with whom Janie steals away to the Everglades in the second half of the novel, is met with suspicion by many characters in the novel, including Janie herself. After first meeting the charming 25-year-old, Janie wonders
Despite all this foreshadowing of misery, Tea Cake returns the next morning chiding Janie for having doubted him, but admitting that he had taken her money and ultimately spent it. Tea Cake's explanation is long, rambling, and fantastical, and yet Janie believes his story and throughout the rest of the novel Tea Cake is never revealed to be a con artist (though he is by no means innocent, having several more episodes of losing Janie's money through a complex sequence of events).
In this way, Tea Cake both speaks back to a trope and denies it; ultimately his character hovers somewhere in between con artist and romantic hero, abuser and selfless lover. This sort of complex characterization comes about exactly through a sort of literary play -- an acknowledgment of tropes, stereotypes, and a literary tradition (and its foils), but an effort to pursue complexity rather than reveal a "true" and fully explained nature.
Consequently, whether he wants to or not -- and this does not depend on a decision on his part -- the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them. (282)Derrida's point seems like mere semantics, but the more you think about the implications, the freakier things get. What is lost when a concept is undermined by demonstrated evidence and critique -- whether that be psychoanalysis or young-Earth creationism? Are we replacing that earlier lie with the truth? What happens when that subsequent truth is undermined?
Derrida proposes a solution to this quandary, and it is as simple and complex as its name: play, which is
no longer turned toward the origin...and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who...has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. (292)Play -- a field without expectations for discovering a universal human truth. Play, which allows for a constant questioning and substitution of one idea for another, a guiltless review of old methods and tired theory. Play allows us to generate more ideas and spend more time developing them, rather than fearing that their existence is threatening ours.
To read Their Eyes Were Watching God is also to witness the sort of play that has made Zora Neale Hurston's novel the subject of so much debate. In the way that she depicts Janie's search for love and subsequent romance with Tea Cake, Hurston sets up readerly expectations about the common trope of women taken advantage of in love, and leaves us unsure whether she has confirmed or contradicted them.
Tea Cake, the younger lover with whom Janie steals away to the Everglades in the second half of the novel, is met with suspicion by many characters in the novel, including Janie herself. After first meeting the charming 25-year-old, Janie wonders
Then again he didn't look like he had too much. Maybe he was hanging around to get in with her and strip her of all that she had. (119)After Janie has left her old town to live with Tea Cake, Hurston writes a scene which sets up the expectation that Tea Cake has finally fulfilled Janie's fears by abandoning her in a strange city and stealing the three hundred dollars she had brought with her. After waiting for Tea Cake all day and realizing that her money has been taken, Janie sits in her empty room all night, recalling the fate of another woman who had left town with a younger man, had
gone off laughing and sure. As sure as Janie had been. (140)The reverie ends with the woman, Annie Tyler, returning destitute and broken, having "waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her" (141).
Despite all this foreshadowing of misery, Tea Cake returns the next morning chiding Janie for having doubted him, but admitting that he had taken her money and ultimately spent it. Tea Cake's explanation is long, rambling, and fantastical, and yet Janie believes his story and throughout the rest of the novel Tea Cake is never revealed to be a con artist (though he is by no means innocent, having several more episodes of losing Janie's money through a complex sequence of events).
In this way, Tea Cake both speaks back to a trope and denies it; ultimately his character hovers somewhere in between con artist and romantic hero, abuser and selfless lover. This sort of complex characterization comes about exactly through a sort of literary play -- an acknowledgment of tropes, stereotypes, and a literary tradition (and its foils), but an effort to pursue complexity rather than reveal a "true" and fully explained nature.
(wc: 672)
Desiring Networks in Dorian Gray
As a novel deeply concerned with attributes – with appearances,
associations, material possessions, and influence – The Picture of Dorian Gray invites an understanding of its
characters, and particularly its protagonist, as actor-networks. Dorian sees
himself as “a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange
legacies of thought and passion,” influenced and corrupted by art and
literature, by his friends, and by the actions and even the personalities of
his ancestors (Wilde 137). If corruption is one of the “action[s]…to be redistributed”
(Latour 2) through the actor-networks in the novel, desire is another: Dorian is
an object of desire for both Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward, however
differently these two characters express it. For me, one of the many
interesting questions prompted by thinking of characters (and Dorian Gray in
particular) as actor-networks is, what does it do to view an object of desire
as an actor-network? How is the desire directed at an ostensibly self-contained
object redistributed - or not - to the other entities networked with that
object?
One answer that The Picture of Dorian Gray proposes to this question is that actor-networks redistribute the desire directed at one node of the network to other nodes. For Lord Henry, for example, desire for Dorian becomes a desire for knowledge about Dorian’s family history (conceivably, Dorian’s “network of production”). Henry demands of his uncle: “I want you to tell me about [Dorian's] mother. What was she like? Whom did she marry? […] I am very much interested in Mr Gray at present” (Wilde 34). Henry’s uncle obligingly relates a tragic history of forbidden marriage, contracted murder, and death in childbirth, and Henry responds to this story with something strangely like desire: “So that was the story of Dorian Gray’s parentage…it stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance” (37, my emphasis).
The novel also suggests that desire for an object includes a desire to integrate that object into one’s own network of ideas and associations (one’s own “network of production). Lord Henry becomes obsessed with the idea of “influencing” Dorian, imagining that “the most satisfying joy” left to the present (Victorian) age is “to project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment” (37) – an act not overtly sexual, but still strangely intimate, embodied, and penetrative. All the moments in which Henry introduces Dorian to the people, locations, and actions that form nodes in his (Henry’s) own network are too numerous to review here; a memorable example is “the yellow book,” which once exerted its “poisonous” influence on Henry, and which Henry then presents to Dorian (121). Indeed, Henry seems so obsessed with the thought of merging his and Dorian’s networks that he retroactively incorporates attributes of Dorian’s actor-network, such as Dorian’s fiancé Sibyl Vane, into his own: “It was through certain words of his [Henry’s]…that Dorian Gray’s soul has turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her” (57). For Henry, desire seems to focus not solely on an entity but on an entire actor-network.
But The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a third possible relationship between desire and networks, and that is a refusal, like Basil Hallward’s, to understand an object of desire as an actor-network. Basil’s desire for Dorian hinges on an image of Dorian as a monolithic totality, remarkably unfragmented and unconnected. To Basil, Dorian is a “mere personality” with the potential to “absorb my [Basil’s] whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself” (10). Significantly, Basil is introduced to Dorian Gray by a woman who “quite forget[s] what [Dorian] does” and is “afraid he – doesn’t do anything” (11); Dorian’s lack of attributes is what leads “one [to feel] he had kept himself unspotted from the world” – to which Lord Henry adds, “No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him” (19). Just as Henry is obsessed by the thought of influencing Dorian, Basil is obsessed with keeping Dorian uninfluenced; he becomes “angry” when Henry begins to mention the social circles in which Dorian circulates, and ends by begging Henry: “Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him” (16). Later, as their friendship breaks under the strain of Henry’s influence, Basil confesses to Dorian: “I wanted to have you all to myself” (110). Predicated as it is on a fantasy of Dorian as an isolated and self-contained object, rather than an actor-network, Basil’s desire for Dorian is doomed to failure.
Based on this text alone, I can't propose any over-arching pattern or broad insight that might arise from recognizing objects of desire as actor-networks. I think such a recognition does emphasize the idea that objects of desire are fragmented, not self-contained, and it suggests that desire is necessarily redistributed – though how much and in what ways remains ambiguous – to other entities in the actor-network. I’d love to hear other thoughts on this. In what ways is it useful or productive to think of desire as existing not between subjects and objects, but between actor-networks?
One answer that The Picture of Dorian Gray proposes to this question is that actor-networks redistribute the desire directed at one node of the network to other nodes. For Lord Henry, for example, desire for Dorian becomes a desire for knowledge about Dorian’s family history (conceivably, Dorian’s “network of production”). Henry demands of his uncle: “I want you to tell me about [Dorian's] mother. What was she like? Whom did she marry? […] I am very much interested in Mr Gray at present” (Wilde 34). Henry’s uncle obligingly relates a tragic history of forbidden marriage, contracted murder, and death in childbirth, and Henry responds to this story with something strangely like desire: “So that was the story of Dorian Gray’s parentage…it stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance” (37, my emphasis).
The novel also suggests that desire for an object includes a desire to integrate that object into one’s own network of ideas and associations (one’s own “network of production). Lord Henry becomes obsessed with the idea of “influencing” Dorian, imagining that “the most satisfying joy” left to the present (Victorian) age is “to project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment” (37) – an act not overtly sexual, but still strangely intimate, embodied, and penetrative. All the moments in which Henry introduces Dorian to the people, locations, and actions that form nodes in his (Henry’s) own network are too numerous to review here; a memorable example is “the yellow book,” which once exerted its “poisonous” influence on Henry, and which Henry then presents to Dorian (121). Indeed, Henry seems so obsessed with the thought of merging his and Dorian’s networks that he retroactively incorporates attributes of Dorian’s actor-network, such as Dorian’s fiancé Sibyl Vane, into his own: “It was through certain words of his [Henry’s]…that Dorian Gray’s soul has turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her” (57). For Henry, desire seems to focus not solely on an entity but on an entire actor-network.
But The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a third possible relationship between desire and networks, and that is a refusal, like Basil Hallward’s, to understand an object of desire as an actor-network. Basil’s desire for Dorian hinges on an image of Dorian as a monolithic totality, remarkably unfragmented and unconnected. To Basil, Dorian is a “mere personality” with the potential to “absorb my [Basil’s] whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself” (10). Significantly, Basil is introduced to Dorian Gray by a woman who “quite forget[s] what [Dorian] does” and is “afraid he – doesn’t do anything” (11); Dorian’s lack of attributes is what leads “one [to feel] he had kept himself unspotted from the world” – to which Lord Henry adds, “No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him” (19). Just as Henry is obsessed by the thought of influencing Dorian, Basil is obsessed with keeping Dorian uninfluenced; he becomes “angry” when Henry begins to mention the social circles in which Dorian circulates, and ends by begging Henry: “Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him” (16). Later, as their friendship breaks under the strain of Henry’s influence, Basil confesses to Dorian: “I wanted to have you all to myself” (110). Predicated as it is on a fantasy of Dorian as an isolated and self-contained object, rather than an actor-network, Basil’s desire for Dorian is doomed to failure.
Based on this text alone, I can't propose any over-arching pattern or broad insight that might arise from recognizing objects of desire as actor-networks. I think such a recognition does emphasize the idea that objects of desire are fragmented, not self-contained, and it suggests that desire is necessarily redistributed – though how much and in what ways remains ambiguous – to other entities in the actor-network. I’d love to hear other thoughts on this. In what ways is it useful or productive to think of desire as existing not between subjects and objects, but between actor-networks?
The Suicide of Hyde
Although Achille Mbembe discusses
power and death on a global scale, when reading “Necropolitics” I was most
drawn to his discussions of slavery and suicide. Paraphrasing Gilroy, Mbembe
states that in the suicide of slaves, death “can be represented as agency. For
death is precisely that from and over which I have power“ (39). Applying this
idea of “agency through suicide” in Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde’s suicide becomes his way of resisting a
society that wishes to contain and control him and of achieving a humanity that
everyone believes him (and perhaps all slaves) incapable of.
In my first blogpost, I brought up
the idea that we can think of Hyde, at least in the beginning, as a creature in
slavery. He was brought into existence to solely serve the purposes and
pleasures of another being, his “master” Jekyll. Although he eventually overcomes that master,
or subsumes him actually, he is still subject/slave to the Victorian social and
moral codes of the era he lives in. As
Mbembe says, to exist as a slave is to suffer “expulsion from humanity
altogether” (Mbembe 21). And we see this de-humanization of Hyde throughout the
novella: He’s described as “ape-like,” (Stevenson 46) a creature of “deformity”
(41) whose face is imprinted with “Satan’s signature” (42), a “fiend” (82).
Lastly, most damning of all, he is “a child of Hell” that contains “nothing
human, [because] nothing live[s] in [Hyde] but fear and hatred” (90). In
essence, he’s relegated to animalistic slavery because he doesn’t have a dual
nature that Jekyll insists is a fundamental part of humanity (78-79).
But these representations, while
easy to buy into, do not paint Hyde in his fullness. In fact, he is not only capable
of hatred, but love as well, even if it is only a love of excess and experience.
He has a passionate attachment to being in the world, and he fears only one
thing—the end of experience, death itself. Jekyll’s locus of control rests solely on
the fact that “[Hyde]fears [his] power to cut him off by suicide” (92). Is it
supremely poignant or ironic then, that it is Hyde, not Jekyll, who commits the
suicide? I would argue for poignancy because, for Hyde, it’s the greater
sacrifice; it is he whose “love of life is wonderful” (92). Jekyll thinks
nothing more of his end but that “I am careless” (93). Whether poignant or
ironic, it’s utterly important that it is Hyde who kills himself because it
demonstrates his capacity for courage which helps him gain something most people would never ascribe to him—his humanity.
Jekyll wonders, near the end of
narrative, “Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find the courage to
release himself at that last moment?” (93). The answer is “Yes, he does find the courage” and refuses to
let himself be taken by Utterson and Poole because to do so would be to remain
in a state of slavery, now serving a new master, the Victorian sense of
morality and social justice system. In his suicide, Hyde faces the one thing he
feared to do (dying) and he does it, not through necessity but by choice. He
becomes a being of both hatred and love, a being of fear and courage. He gains at least a measure
of duality (a state of being that Jekyll argues is necessary to be labeled as
human), thus transcending his previous existence as an animalistic creature of servitude. And he proves his humanity and removes himself
from his state of slavery only because he dies and by his own hands[1].
Whether it is freedom from slavery, or from the prevailing view of his in-humanness, "death and freedom are irrevocably
interwoven” in the suicide of Hyde (Mbembe 38).[2]
Word Count: 629
(Please read footnote 2 if you
would like to see a paragraph that I was going to insert after this ending, but
didn’t due to word count constraints. I think the post works as it is, but I noticed
an interesting pattern in Mbembe and wanted to somehow include it but couldn’t.
Consider it a choose your own ending if you will)
Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Martin A. Danahay. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2005. Print.
[1] There are critics who have argued that Jekyll
ultimately kills Hyde (an argument I do not agree with as I find no textual
evidence for such a claim). A lot of movie adaptations of the novella have Utterson
shoot Hyde (rather than Hyde committing suicide)..
[2] And here I end my argument, firmly
centered upon the death of the individual subject, refusing to expand my
argument to the global proportions of Mbembe’s necropolitics. Why, you ask? I'll
tell you. The last section of the essay (before the conclusion that is), is the
first time where Mbembe discusses the deaths of individuals. And in
this section, he does something quite startling that he doesn’t do anywhere
else. He inserts first-person pronouns into his writing and ends up referencing
, more than once, his own death. At the very least, he uses the language of his
own death to make points about death and agency. What this means is that rather
than being merely the author, Mbembe becomes the person who is being
killed (which makes his actions a form of literary suicide since he is
writing, or producing, his own death) (36, 37, 39). Mbembe can’t help but make death
personal and individualized. Thus, I would say that as much as Mbembe talks
about contemporary global warfare and the destruction of thousands of people,
what he most interestingly also ends up proving (intentional or not) is, that
of all the deaths that happen in this world, the most important death, because it is the only one we can understand or experience, is our
own.
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