"Ghosts, Cowboys" and the multiphasic something.

Latino/a literary studies has long been working at the very boundaries of identity. Writers such as Arturo Islas in the 1970s and 80s described being pigeonholed by publishers, encouraged to revise their texts to be more digestibly Latino, more full of families and good food and pleasant sprinklings of Spanish, less concerned with existential rumination on identity politics. Since that time, publishers and writers, authors and theorists have been grappling with the slipperiness of what it means to be Latina or Latino, always careful not to fall into stereotype, but always conscious that the experience of being Latina or Latino in the U.S. is a particular one -- and that to acknowledge those particularities has powerful possibilities for political mobilization, affiliations, and identifications.

Claudia Milian’s piece thus bears the weight of this long-standing struggle to understand the complexity of experience. Her proposal that Latinities offers “a conceptual framework that plots other subjectivities and localities that have yet to be charted within and beyond” older, more bounded configurations makes Latinities a powerful tool for entering texts that deal in ambiguity, that are in some way “vying for our attention,” in some way indicate “a multiphasic something” beginning to emerge (2–3). It is this emphasis on the emergent that resists bounding that makes Milian versatile. She theorizes ethnoracial existence as always emergent, in-flux, and not static or easily relegated to the realm of stable “identification.” If what she calls ethnoracial “identities-in-the-making” cannot be tied to any “precise categorical beginning[s], or end[s]”, Milian’s argument forces our attention away from identity and the notions of stasis and stability that it often subsumes (3). Instead, Milian finds value in change, flux, and transition not merely as paths between opposed points or states but as modes of being or experience in and of themselves. In geometric terms, Milian values the vector over the point.

What happens, then, when we think of identifications as vectors? What happens when we toss aside the assumption that Claire’s historiographical-archival work in “Ghosts, Cowboys” is an attempt to locate some sense of self or some web of affiliation? For indeed, Claire’s work achieves the opposite: it is profoundly delocalizing and distributive in its affiliations and genealogies, not only in their networked quality, but also in their fragility. They seem to verge simultaneously on totality and collapse. We can easily read as though each displaced, tangential history Claire produces is an attempt to find “the” true or real past, but this assumes a kind of coherence and locatability that both Milian and Watkins call into question. What Claire calls “the inadequate weight of the past” need not be rendered “adequate” to become a vehicle for meaning and affiliation (177). Rather, Claire’s narratives build multiple and shifting affiliations out of multiple and shifting historical inadequacies. The text is an exercise in both self-making and self-negating as complementary processes of subject-formation.

The work Claire does may not fall strictly under the rubric of ‘Latinities,’ but the impulse she shares with Milian -- towards not who but how, the attention to the complex social dynamics that form the subject, rather than the singular, detached individual -- seems to herald what Raymond Williams has called the emergent: “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship [that] are continually being created” (123). That the emergent is often invisible to those who search for it -- and even to those engaged in it -- requires that we continually redirect and reattune our critical gaze. Perhaps Watkins is working somewhere in the same project as both Milian and Saskia Sassen by tracing a process of denationalization which captures “something that remains connected to the ‘national’ as constructed historically, and is indeed profoundly imbricated with it but is so on historically new terms of engagement” (Sassen 229, qtd. in Milian 5). In this sense, then, “Ghosts, Cowboys” is as much a story of nation-building as it is about one branch of the legacy of the Manson family, as it is about one house at 315 Lake Street.

Williams, Raymond. “Dominant, Residual, Emergent.” Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. pgs 121-135.

Aaron Bendetti
Jenny Colmenero 

(681)

The Hot Mess of Power

B.C. and Z.K.

Nancy Armstrong, in her paper “Gender Must Be Defended,” aligns the biopolitical with an external social force and the panoptic with an individually subjectified body. She writes: “Discipline persuades us that we harbor within us a form of desire that expresses itself through a body that can be governed by a mind sensitive to the dangers posed by forms of physical pleasure…Biopower asks us to think of desire as an external force that operates upon and through us on behalf of a group or species” (543). If Armstrong reads Jane Eyre solely through the lens of gender, which “makes the difference between the two forms of desire” (543) (i.e., the difference between the panopticon and the biopolitical), then she concomitantly ignores geographical displacement, race, temporality and history, class, and many other factors that are central to character-subjectivities in Brief Wondrous Life. The accumulation of these different factors generates a consciousness that is predicated both upon the experience of the individual and the social collective.

There is a process of introjection/projection that occurs continually and cyclically. Not only is this process embodied through the physical relationships amongst characters in novels, but it is also a structured logic in society. In the actions that people undertake, the mediation of this structural logic, the influences of external biopolitics and panoptic self-discipline, is inherent. It is not a matter of so simple an opposition (inside/outside), which Armstrong claims --  her simplification is problematic and impossible. Thus, if Armstrong’s formulation is untenable, we would have to ask: what is the relationship between the biopolitical and the panoptic as concepts that enforce themselves upon individuals within a greater social collective?

It is not adequate to create a binary between the panoptic and the biopolitical. Foucault himself struggles with differentiating these two concepts in “The Mesh of Power;” Indeed, it seems that the two are centrally, complexly enmeshed in one another. There is a myriad of factors at work in which the panoptic/biopolitical structure themselves and operate. There is an irreconcilability at work, which demonstrates this complicated correlation.

What is the effect of this correlation upon consciousness?  

Milian provides another variable through her reading of race in Brief Wondrous Life. She claims: “Diaz globalizes this emergent but fairly obfuscated subject adjusting its “who-ness,” ” what-ness,” and “how-ness,” but not necessarily guaranteeing a clear (read: Latino) outcome” (14). Conversely, Armstrong focuses on one category, gender, addressing the “who-ness,” but not addressing the “what-ness” or the “how-ness.” Milian claims that Diaz addresses all three without ultimately providing a “Latino” outcome to the story’s protagonist. However, we would argue that Diaz purposefully does not attempt to guarantee a Latino outcome for his characters, especially Oscar.

Instead, Oscar struggles against the societal and familial expectations for his assumption of a pure Latinity. In rebellion, he envelops himself with stereotypically “white” pastimes of which his Dominican relatives do not approve (comics, sci-fi films, Rutgers, role-playing video games, etc.). At the end of the novel, he attempts to rediscover a discrete Latinity, but his death perhaps signals his inability to ever truly have a unified identity that is purely Latin (or white, or the product of any other single category); his existence is necessarily imbricated with the various other facets of his being, which are always produced socially. This social structure, in Foucauldian terms, is represented in “Discipline and Punish” by the panopticon within the prison, as an analogy for the heterogeneous society at large. Therefore, we can see the effects upon not only women and people of color (excluding Asians) (i.e., Armstrong and Milian, respectively), but upon all members in a society, simultaneously. Identity and, therefore, our relationship to the biopolitical and the panoptic is not defined by a singular category, because we can see these concepts working not only through gender but also through race, class, socioeconomics, geographic location, etc.

Hyding in Dunnet Landing

The relationship between lost or subjugated peoples and those who attempt to retrieve or recover them is fraught with complexity. Historians, working in a culture built upon exclusionary practices, can never be "proper" to the subaltern "consciousness" they are attempting to resurrect (Spivak 16). The most they can hope to achieve or recover is a “subject-effect” -- an elusive echo of a network of “politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language and so on” (Spivak 12-13). The relationship between the historian and his/her object of study is ultimately a “complicity between subject and object of investigations" (28). This complicity is also apparent in The Country of the Pointed Firs and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We can align narrators with historians as both frame our experiences of the stories they transmit, although the comparison between the two is complicated by our cultural stereotypes that historians speak truth and narrators speak fiction. Spivak’s essay, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” reminds us of the imbalance of power between narrators and their subjects, while encouraging readers to be aware of the interpretative aspects of a narrative voice.

The protagonists of both The Country of the Pointed Firs and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde use their object of study to access or express a repressed aspect of themselves. In The Country of the Pointed Firs, the narrator occupies the position of the privileged writer who ventures into working class rural Maine as an escape from a place, most certainly urban, in which she finds herself “a foreigner” (Jewett 99). Through her narration, we learn more about her powers of interpretation than of the reality of the place she describes. She appropriates and idealizes the daily lives of Dunnet Landing locals to tell a story of the place, but instead of creating a realistic representation of their suffering, she flattens characters and brings her own loneliness to the fore. Similarly, Jekyll uses Hyde (the embodiment of bourgeois stereotypes of the lower classes) to strengthen his elite position. Hyde functions as a mask to protect Jekyll’s pristine reputation. Torn between both needing and simultaneously hating him, Jekyll constantly denigrates and dehumanizes Hyde, describing him as "not only hellish but inorganic,” in order to maintain the boundary between himself, the civilized intellectual, and his animalistic, “primitive” other (91). Moreover, Hyde is pushed even further away from the elite position of his creator by being allowed no interiority in the novel's structure; he is never the narrator, never do we see the world through his eyes. He remains a "subject-effect," a thought or terror within the other characters’ minds or experiences but with no clear subjectivity himself.

In content, both novels reveal the imbalance of power between the tellers of stories and their subjects. However, in their form, the novels also affect the reader’s relationship with the power dynamics being presented; the novels are structured as narratives traversing through time and then end with a reflective or revealing chapter that reshapes our understanding of the narrative that we have just passed through. The historians that Spivak discusses see themselves as writing the last revisionary chapter of the subjects they wish to uncover. But they, like the final chapters in our primary texts, serve to solidify their own position of power as creators of public opinion. Though we would never argue that Edward Hyde or the Dunnet Landing locals are subaltern in Spivak’s sense of the term, both of these novels and Spivak’s historians rely on the fact that their subordinate subjects will not speak back to them and reveal the fragility of narrative, both historical and fictional.

Word Count: 600. The power of collaboration...right there. 

Haertig and Emrich

Mutual Entanglements

"When people write about class, or poverty, they are writing about race, but how? When people write about gender, they are writing about race, and class, but how? When people write about sexuality, they are writing about gender, and race, and class, but how? 

I simply don’t think there is a thematic question here. There is a question about thinking mutual entanglements of problems, and thinking them outside the sets of limits offered as non-limits by the current dispensation, whether it be within or without the academy, within or without poetry communities."

I think this letter by Joshua Clover (in response to this discussion of race by Rankine/Hoagland) helps make some sense of what I was trying to get at on Monday in my critique of the totalizing politics of Armstrong's paper on gender and Milian's chapter on race.  It is an interesting, important and far-reaching conversation (that we need to be having).

Unruly Minds in The Little Stranger and The Picture of Dorian Gray

While discussing the potential of biopolitics to generate a different understanding of gender in the Victorian novel, a genre long dominated by analyses focused on discipline, Armstrong argues that “the novel set about producing…a sense of self embedded in a body that housed asocial instincts and abnormal impulses” (530).  Both of our post-Victorian novels rework this model of a disciplinary self by showing how these “abnormal” desires might arise, not from the body, but from a socially conditioned “mind” or “consciousness.” This reworking of discipline in turn creates subjects that seem to escape both disciplinary and biopolitical forms of control.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian’s “asocial” and “abnormal” behaviors do not seem prompted by embodied “instincts,” but rather by the corrupting influences of art, literature, and his acquaintances. In following Lord Henry’s injunction to “give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream” (21), Dorian must first rely on Henry, and art-objects such as “the yellow book” (119) to instruct him in various modes of dangerous, indulgent, and sinful behavior. Dorian’s crimes are enacted through his body, but they first arise in his socially conditioned consciousness: as Lord Henry insists, “It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place” (21). Dorian’s subjectivity is dangerously undisciplined and out-of-control precisely because the “self” is not invested in curbing the problematic desires of the body, but in creating and pursuing desires of its own.

Dorian’s lack of discipline should, according to Armstrong’s argument, place him among the populations governed by biopolitics. Yet, the unembodied-ness of his desires also makes them impossible to reduce to discourse or statistics. Part of this can be attributed to the interference of Dorian’s supernatural portrait: while Bertha’s deviance is inscribed on her body – in her improperly feminine appearance, her mental disorder, her racial heritage – Dorian’s deviance never achieves the physical expression that would allow for easy categorization of his body and the “self” that it houses. But even if the consequences Dorian’s behavior were made manifest, it seems that many of Dorian’s actions would not find a place in discourse: from the novel’s first publication, reviewers and critics have insisted on describing Dorian’s crimes as “unspeakable” (Lippencott’s review, 217). Within the narrative itself, Basil despairs of being able to comprehend the nature of Dorian’s actions in words: “Before I could [describe you], I should have to see your soul” (146).

While physical desire does have a role in The Little Stranger in Faraday’s courting of Caroline, the novel presents it as a side effect of the relationship rather than its driving force. This bodily desire is not what gets Faraday into trouble. Instead, it is the desires of the mind that impel Faraday to displace the Ayreses from their home. We see his desire for the Hall between the lines throughout the novel. In what he afterward calls a “fit of discontentment,” he spends the night after his first adult visit to the Hall envisioning its inhabitants, its “cool fragrant spaces, the light it held like wine in a glass…” (41, 40). His longing never truly becomes expressed through his body and, in fact, is never fully accepted by his conscious mind. This double displacement of desire occurs through the poltergeist, a “shadow-self” that is “motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away” (389). Like Dorian, one could argue that Faraday’s unembodied desires help him escape from not only discipline but also the grasp of the biopolitical. However, there is also the sense that, because Faraday ends up alone, unlike the happy couple of Jane Eyre, and haunting Hundreds Hall, he has become “the living dead” of population (Armstrong 544). The novel, if not the state, could be said to have deemed him not fit to reproduce.

wc: 643

Censoring Speech, Censoring Silence: Or, Spivak and Milton Walk Into a Bar (By Ashley and Samantha)

In the paradox of the subaltern and the intellectual, Spivak locates a dissonance between speech and identity that calls into question the ability to “author” one’s existence, both on the level of the subject and of the investigator. She notes a

“common phonocentrism, the conviction that speech is a direct and immediate representation of voice-consciousness, and writing an indirect transcript of speech…. However, over against this restricted model of writing one must not set up a model of speech to which is assigned a total self-identity based on a psychological model…By contrast, post-structuralist theories of consciousness and language suggest that all possibility of expression, spoken or written, share a common distancing from a self so that meaning can arise—not only meaning for others, but also the meaning of the self to the self. I have advanced this idea in my discussion of “alienation.” These theories suggest that the ‘self” is itself always a production” (21-22).

Spivak’s aim in defining the failures of phonocentrism is to argue for a different model of utterance that does not immediately interpret an individual’s attributes based on what they say and/or write. While this is particularly sensitive to the project of uncovering subaltern consciousness (see her discussion of rumor), her point raises questions of authorship and the interpretative currency of authorship. If the speaker is alienated from his text, then it is a presumption on our part to read or discern an identity behind the text. For Spivak, the quest of a “subaltern biography” gleaned from study of the subaltern utterances is a fallacious project.

Milton also finds a similar disconnect between an author and his text. He asks, “And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy as to have many things well worth the adding come into his mind after licensing…which not seldom happens to the best and diligentest writers….Meanwhile, either the press must stand still… or the author lose his accuratest thoughts” (360). Milton here envisions a fluid text, one that the author can shape, correct, and revise—and by extension, experiment with forms and ideas. His attack on censorship is predicated on the assumption that an author’s texts can be explorations rather than truthful and complete representations of an author’s interiority. Based on the idea that “a wise man like a good refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book,” Milton argues that government-sponsored censorship should cease, and literary evaluation should reside in each man’s mind—or more precisely, in the minds of educated men.[1]

While both Spivak and Milton observe a separation between author and utterance, they also run into similar paradoxes about the nature of speaking and writing. For Milton, if texts are never fully the author’s thoughts at “his accuratest” then censorship is a perilous exercise in silencing the speaker while he speaks. The locus of censorship also shifts, from a government agency to an unseen panel of elite readers, who Milton terms “educated men”; these men become a new licensing board who referee texts—by advocating and canonizing rather than inhibiting—and in the process silence other texts.  On the other hand, Spivak’s concept of academic advocates for the subaltern also operates within the speaker/non-speaker binary. In the process of drawing attention to the subaltern’s lack of speech, Spivak’s position of speaking relies the presumed silence of the subaltern. If the subaltern were to find a way to speak, the voices of academics like Spivak would be silenced—or at least severely censored.[2] By speaking about/for/to the subaltern, Spivak gains the position of speaker in lieu of a diversity of voices: someone is silenced for someone to speak. In vastly different times and referring to different classes (elite readership vs. (post)colonial population), Milton and Spivak generate similar concerns about censoring silence and speech and seem to operate in similar binaries of speaking and non-speaking.

---

[1] Milton may here be constructing several sets of subalterns—fools, uneducated people, women—but he does not go so far in this text as to say that such people cannot speak. Rather, that is something that early modern scholars have done, although current scholarship may be working against such generalizing moves.

[2] We are aware that in Spivak’s formulation it is material conditions of colonization and not academic scholars that silence the subaltern; the idea of the subaltern and subaltern studies is an object of study that allows for Spivak and other academics to speak.

Mbembe Update

How the upswing in African economic activity (and the massive investment by the likes of China) is altering necropolitics. An interview with Mbembe.

http://africasacountry.com/africa-and-the-future-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/