Susannah Hollister using Lynch, Jameson, and Harvey: Meeting Minutes

On Wednesday, March 26, Susannah Hollister led a very lively discussion of three linked excerpts: the beginning of Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City, Fredric Jameson's "Cognitive Mapping" (later incorporated into the first chapter of his Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism), and the beginning of David Harvey's Spaces of Hope. Emily Setina generously volunteered to take minutes, which follow below. Comments or corrections by participants and blog readers welcome.


Present and accounted for: Susannah Hollister, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Jordan Zweck, Gabriele Hayden, Ben Labreche, Patrick Redding, Chris Grobe, KC Harrison, Liz Appel, Dave Gorin, Julia Fawcett, Antonio Templanza, Patrick Gray, Emily Setina.

Susannah Hollister: The questions that Andrew and Colin posted on the blog are in line with the question I want to ask--using-theory questions more than theory questions. The question Julia posed about Phelan and the impermanence of performance at our last session is also relevant to a question I want to ask, which is: what obligation do critics have to the theory they use? In my own project I look at a group of postwar poets who use terms from geography to describe a style of poetry. I see theory and poetry converging in two ways: Lynch and Harvey are defining fields the poets I write about are drawing on. These are not theorists that my poets read directly; they are at at least one remove.

The theorists' concerns are also analogous to those of the group of poets I am writing about. Jameson and Harvey are calling for a new terminology for describing space; these poets are concerned with an analogous project. Here I want to use theory to delineate a problem that literature might provide one answer to. This lets us ask what's distinctive about literature--is a poem better somehow at delineating scale--a question that Colin's post raises.

But using this theory raises a problem: even when Jameson and Harvey are talking about aesthetics, politics is still their main concern. If we take seriously the question of the cultural dominant, we can't just abstract their terms from their politics. By using their terms, I know that at some level I'm implying a Marxist poetics that I'm not sure I want to imply.

Lynch's Image of the City was written in 1960, a key moment in the definition of the field of urban planning theory. He argues for a shift away from modernist theory and planning, towards a theory that reintroduces the individual as the central measure. The poetry of geography, as I am calling it, is also returning to the body to recalibrate scale. So another way of using theory here is to compare rhetorical strategies used by the theorists with those used by poets who were writing at the same moment. But here the theorists and poets use the same analogy in opposite ways: the poets are using space as an image to explain writing; Lynch, with his metaphor of "legibility," uses images of writing to describe physical space. Finding these common elements in bringing the poetry and theory together means there's something in each that's useful to the other. What emerges is quite different from the usual picture of postmodernism. Here what we find is not fragmentation but new kinds of continuities. Both identify alienation as the part of modernism they want to reject and overcome.

Jameson gives another example of how to use Lynch. He applies Lynch to the network of global capital movements. The talk included here becomes the introduction to Postmodernism and gives an overview of that book's argument. He describes postmodern effects of flatness as a reaction to late stage capitalism, but for Jameson, this aesthetic reaction doesn't solve the problem of connecting the individual to this new form of the social totality. The question I have in reading Jameson is what role the aesthetic can and should play (what role does he think it should play?). It seems like there are two possibilities: on the one hand, art shows the problem; on the other hand, art might come up with the solution.

David Harvey, as a geographer, comes from a different background. While Jameson was writing a dissertation on Sartre, he was writing a dissertation on hop production in Kent. He played a key role in the shift in the discipline of geography from a science to a social science. I've included an extract from his recent writing to give us a selection across time in our packet. The Condition of Postmodernity is quite different from this recent work in Spaces of Hope--more detailed and historical. In Spaces of Hope he begins to give us what Jameson calls for, begins to imagine what the aesthetics of late capitalism might look like. Here he is looking explicitly at Marx. He joins discourses of the body and of geography in his answer. He wants to reclaim for the left a discourse of universalism. His utopian vision at the end involves a reorganization of scale (the hearth is the basic unity). Unlike Jameson and Lynch, Harvey tries to imagine, rather than just call for, a movement across scales.

The major questions I am facing in my work then are these:

Can theories of scale from economic and urban theory help me to develop a theory for scale, and movement across scales, in poetry--poets coming up with other units that could guide movement across space?

To what extent are theories helpful as analogies? To what extent are they helpful as explanations? I would have to know more to take up as explanations (I would need a historian's knowledge to evaluate in this way), but it's not fully satisfying finally to take them just as analogies.

David Gorin: Jameson is interested in bringing about ideological reform; poems probably not. To what extent do poets look to different goals than theorists?

Colin Gillis: You could answer that in different ways, right? I can imagine two answers, one sociological and one Marxist: 1) Poets are trying to negotiate scale from individual to world to get published in that world, or 2) Poets are trying to negotiate scale from individual to world to change that world.

SH: The answer here also depends on how much we need to take writers on their own terms; Olson does define poetry as pedagogy, but...

CG: Another way we might use this theory is for teaching. Think about the map at the end of Edward P. Jones's The Known World, which many of us have taught for Amy Hungerford's class. There the spatial is prioritized over narrative. So this could also apply to the novel as well as poetry.

Julia Fawcett: I was thinking about this too. Poetry is obviously concerned with space; does thinking about literature and spatial theory work better when how words arranged on the page is significant, or can this theory also be used in working on novels, say thinking about the novel's origin in stories of the journey.

Andrew Goldstone: The novel is easy to think of as representation of world. The lyric is where we're least likely to think that it's the form's job to show the world.

Gabriele Hayden: The lyric is very particularly concerned with universal v. particular. A political poem is making a plain claim for representation, but a lyric poem can also make a claim to universal by calling on the spiritual or love--

AG: or inspiration--

GH: Or inspiration, by claiming these it can also make a claim to universal.

SH: The question Andrew brought up on line about scale in publishing seems most relevant to novels. Work on quantitative scale, Moretti's work, is work about novels.

GH: It's happening in poetry! Kirstin Silva-Gruess looks at Longfellow's translations and at poetry as a more transferable genre. She wants to broaden the definition of lyric and writes about high poetry in relation to poetic circulation. There's also work on this in the new lyric studies issue of PMLA.

Patrick Gray: Shouldn't we just say there's something inherent in literature that turns particulars into universals? For a thinker like Aristotle, lyric by its nature claims universality.

AG: I think that here the point is to articulate steps from self to community-what are the mechanisms by which we connect one with another?

SH: This is also the period of confessional poetry, which does rely on the idea that one person's life might stand for universal. Some poets, the poets I'm writing on, are skeptical of this idea.

CG: When was Voyager sent out? There was a debate about what to put on it, and Carl Sagan was given the task, and comes up with a gold disk with a representation of a white couple... (Voila! Chris Grobe produces the golden disk in question on his laptop screen.) [The information about the disk is at this NASA site. The image of humans is here.]

JF: --but Sagan tries to give the couple composite features--a weird attempt to represent totality on one face--

DG: It's interesting the degree of specificity that forecloses...for instance on the gold you can't show skin color.

SH: You start to universalize, but then you lose what's particular.

GH: Have you read Harvey's article on Kant's specificity? It's rad!

CG: It's going on the blog. [David Harvey, "Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils" Public Culture 12, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 529-64, available here (Yale network only). The same issue of Public Culture also has an essay by Elizabeth Povinelli, whose work will feature in our next session, to be led by CG on April 10.--ed.]

GH: It's about how Kant's ideas of universalism jostle against racist ideas he lays out in abstract in his geography. There's another idea of the universal that Judith Butler brings up in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, of fracturing that leads to competing universalities (universal ways of looking at world filtered through particular ideas), and the problem of negotiating among them.

SH: Harvey says it's finally about class--his example is of a living wage campaign in Baltimore--but what else does class hold in it? Is class made to stand in for something else? Why is class special?

AG: I want to pull us back, since we're nearing the end of the hour, to our first question. We all love to talk about politics, but what do we make of the political direction in theory we want to use in literature?

PG: Roger Scruton has an article that might be relevant on the problem of scalability in modern architecture.

PR: The question of oppositionality seems false. You can use this theory, but it's never read by people who actually oppose these theorists' ideas. In the end, the discussion that follows the Jameson talk is just infighting between Marxists. I've been thinking about this in reading Language poetry criticism, which is mostly written for a very receptive audience.

CG: Moretti is calling for the kind of scholarship that meets opposition.

AG: Why does political debate keep entering our discourse?

DG: Critics will "take on board" theory to try to make claim for relevance of literature.

KC Harrison: But often they're taking up the poet's or writer's own concerns, so it is relevant.

CG: Plus this is hardly unique to our field (that is, a broadly leftist consensus certainly isn't unique to literary studies).

GH: But then the question is how not to just use the names--to say, oh I've read Lyotard, now I'll read some poems and make loose connections. Susannah, where are you in this?

SH: In my introduction, I will use it, but I'll be careful to say that I'm not talking about their politics.

AG: Our own professional self-interest requires us to name-check against the big, interdisciplinary touchstone theorists, but the question is how to do more.

SH: Another alternative is to read theorists as alternative literary figures, which perhaps places us at a better perspective from them.

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Imagining Utopia: Discussion Questions

Our next session takes place tomorrow, Wednesday, March 26, at 12:30 p.m. Susannah Hollister will lead our discussion of excerpts from Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City, Fredric Jameson's "Cognitive Mapping," and David Harvey's Spaces of Hope. Follow the link to the full blog entry for discussion questions by CG and AG.


CG: I think we should give further consideration to the exchange between Nancy Fraser and Jameson in the discussion after Jameson's talk. Fraser first points out, for the record, that Jameson has oversimplified a long and complicated debate about the question of totality, then she asks, "...because I am so sympathetic to a certain kind of totalizing thought, namely, a critical social science that would be as total and explanatorily powerful as possible. Thus, I wonder why you assume that cognitive mapping is the task of the aesthetic? Why wouldn't that task be a task for critical social science? Or are two different tasks conflated in your paper?" Jameson's response, that the aesthetic addresses individual experience in a way that social science cannot, isn't very satisfying. However attracted I am to thinking about things aesthetically, I'm not convinced that envisioning Utopia has to be an aesthetic project. It seems to me that something is necessarily lost when we imagine Utopia as an organically unified art object--or even a totality that can fit inside one person's imagination. And imagining Utopia--or, better, appreciating Utopia--seems less important than achieving it. I suppose my question, then, is this: Is literary or art criticism the best means for envisioning the ideal social order?

A second, more practical question is this: What exactly is the difference between aesthetic representation and cognitive mapping?

AG: My questions are along similar lines. (1) So much of the theory that literary critics have liked to use in the last two or three decades is explicitly political in orientation. Jameson is of course a premier example; he makes the tendency helpfully explicit in the opening of his essay by admitting that his discussion of the aesthetic may only be a cover for a debate about Marxist political theory and strategy. Harvey, likewise a Marxist, is directly concerned with politics. What happens when we as literary critics use texts with this kind of explicit strategic aim--and use them only for analytic or heuristic purposes? Few of us, I think, conceive our research (perhaps unlike our teaching) as directly involved in any kind of political project, least of all a classical socialist revolutionary one. But what is the relation between political framework and cultural analysis in Jameson or Harvey? Do we try to get one without the other, or is there a critical use to be made of their politics? (For that matter Lynch has a politics too, as Jameson says. But I am less interested in the covert politics one could find in any theory than in the critical use of overt political tendentiousness.)

(2) As I'm sure Susannah will be discussing, all of these texts raise the question of how to relate different spatial scales to one another. Here is my variation on that theme: as literary critics, how do we cognitively map our object of study? In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova argues that no European work of the last 400 years and no literary work of the last 100 can be understood without locating it with respect to an emergent "international literary space," in which authors and nations compete with one another for recognition in an increasingly shared literary field. This would imply that our range of reference when we look at a poem or a novel should include not only local, contemporary historical context and a national or monolingual tradition but potentially a field of global rivals and touchstones. When I read this, I experienced a major failure of cognitive mapping: how do I look at a modernist novel at the word-to-word level while still conceiving it as shaped by processes operating at the inter-national level? This is, I suppose, simply the question of contextualization, but with the current rise of comparative interests (the trans-Atlantic, cosmopolitanism, the hemisphere, Weltliteratur, the global) in English literary study, our own problem of scale seems to me suddenly more acute.

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Julia Fawcett, Peggy Phelan: Minutes

On February 28, 2008, we discussed chapter one of Peggy Phelan's Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. A festive atmosphere prevailed. CG took notes. Please, if you notice any errors or misrepresentations, email CG or AG and one of us will change this post.

Present: AG, CG, Nathalie Wolfram, John Muse, Jesse Schotter, Susannah Hollister, Anne DeWitt, Christopher Grobe, Gabriele Hayden

JF: Although Phelan's book is more performance theory than psychoanalysis, her use of Lacan is difficult for me. Unmarked is hard, especially the introduction. This is why:

1. The meaning of her key term, "unmarked," changes halfway through. At first, "unmarked" refers to marginal, invisible, powerless peoples. But then "unmarked" starts to refer to white men in business suits whose power comes out of not being marked. The film Paris Is Burning shows drag queens trying to look like normal women and, so doing, marks them. Phelan's point seems to be that invisibility is powerful because it means you can mark yourself. Performance is empowering precisely because it is ephemeral and non-representational. The performing self controls the interpretation of its performance; there is no record that can be interpreted by others.
   
2. Lacan creeps in--and style trumps clarity--because Phelan wants to analyze the the parts of performance that disappear and psychoanalysis provides a hermeneutic system for things that are lost or invisible.
   

This is why Phelan is useful: She brings performance theory into English departments, where textuality is privileged. Richard Schechner [biography on this Princeton library page--ed.] and Victor Turner pioneered performance theory in the 1970s, but it was Phelan who expanded the definition of liveness so that literary scholars could talk about it. Phelan makes performance more about the interpretation of the reader and the text, focusing on what gets erased with the reader hits the text (defined broadly to include film, photography, and anti-abortion posters). Now, with Joe Roach's suggestion that memory is as important as history, performance theory can be carried over into theater history. This is how my project uses Phelan's version of performance theory. The proliferation of printed texts in the eighteenth century heightens the possibility of visibility for marginalized peoples (colonized subjects, for instance), and this possibility has increased yet again with the new media (television, the internet, etc.) that emerged during the twentieth century. What's most useful about Phelan's theory, for literary critics, is that the things she examines leave traces.

But there are some important problems with Phelan's method for analyzing performance. Is it possible to honor invisible or ephemeral things by writing them down? Phelan is, in an important sense, marking the unmarked things that she takes as her subject. This is symptomatic of a much larger problem in performance studies: when the performance theorist discusses a performative text something is lost in the process, the unfamiliar is made familiar. Turner, for example, finds parallels between African rituals and Aristotelian drama. Likewise, Joe Roach pointed out that the UNESCO World Heritage project's attempts to preserve languages and rituals as "sites" necessarily changes their meaning--performances once for small communities now become performances for a global audience. Phelan is ahead of her time in attempting to address this basic conceptual problem in performance studies: recognizing that academic discourse is premised on enlightenment assumptions that privilege rationality and textuality, she tries to make the post-Enlightenment age legible through enlightenment-inflected academic writing. So when the media celebrates video footage depicting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for making underprivileged people visible, and therefore more powerful, Phelan rightly points out that we need to rethink our understanding of the relationship between value/power and visibility. Visibility does not have to be, and indeed should not be, equated with power.

Nathalie Wolfram: What about Adam Smith's argument that the visible man is powerful because everyone wants to be him--does that make applying Phelan's theory to the eighteenth century problematic?

JF: Yes, Phelan is writing against that idea of visibility; Phelan is trying to articulate an alternative to the enlightenment idea that Smith helped to develop. Although Phelan doesn't address Smith directly.

NW: In the autobiographies that you're writing about, do the actors see themselves in terms of enlightenment notions of visibility?

JF: Yes, they're all influenced by Tristram Shandy--and therefore Locke. The actors are objectified but not marginalized; they should be powerful, but they're never actually standing for themselves and always told what to represent. Bringing in Phelan, you could say that the actors don't have the luxury of being unmarked so they overexpress themselves. Colly Cibber, for example, performed the role of a fop and he overexpressed his heterosexuality. Similarly, Charlotte Charke performed a role where she cross-dressed as a man who cross-dressed as a woman. In these performances, normative gender roles eroded.

Andrew Goldstone: Is invisibility really powerful? What about the ephemeral is redemptive? Visibility politics is an easy target. The problem there is that it's based on a misunderstanding of racism--a misunderstanding that the enlightenment may solve. But what then? What's left?

JF: This is a problem in Phelan and there's no easy solution to it. Performance is only valuable in its negative form, but what political system honors invisibility?

Colin Gillis: I wonder if Heather Love's notion of modern social stigma as something that comes out of statistical thinking could help us see how invisibility could be a legitimate form of resistance? If in the modern world groups are marginalized through the statistical organization of populations, then perhaps invisibility can hotwire the style of reasoning that makes that makes modern social stigma possible.

JF: Performance theory extends the conceptual boundaries of performance to include [gap in notes--note-taker trying to think of what to say next. Note the relevance of performance theory.]

CG: Maybe the double consciousness DuBois describes could transcend this visible/invisible binary so that a subject could be both visible and invisible at the same time.

John Muse: Double consciousness is rendered as a performance. Performances can be understood as bids to power. The problematic form of identity politics that Phelan is critiquing has not gone away.

CG: Could the older form of identity politics be more effective? In queer studies, for example, constructivist notions of sexual identity prevail in academic discourse, but there's a general recognition that essentialism is more effective politically.

AG: This is unique to America.

Nathalie Wolfram: No it's not. Look at the treatment of muslim populations in Europe.

Gabriele Hayden: I've been reading The Gnostic Gospels, and I think Pagels describes a similar conflict in early Christianity: orthodox Christianity celebrated martyrdom as a public performance of faith, while the gnostics believed that faith could be private and secret.

JF: I think Greenblatt's notion of self-cancellation is relevant here: Thomas More argued that inner faith is valuable, but so is participating in the church as an institution.

Gabriele Hayden: Yes.

John Muse: What do you think about positive forms of performance?

JF: Performance theory teaches us not to identify people based on how they look. For my own project, this is useful because it helps us see how actors achieve liveness in the process of recording their lives.
But I don't have an answer to your question.

AG: Why would you want one? Don't we want more visibility?

JF: Visibility is not in your control.

AG: But in utopia, after the revolution, say, visibility politics won't be a problem.

Nathalie Wolfram: Isn't the idea that it's good to be unmarked, not necessarily invisible?

CG: What about alternative media, like the local access program Democracy Now, where people try to wrest control of visibility?

JF: It's important not to confuse visibility and reproduction. Performance can't be reproduced or made into a commodity.

John Muse: But isn't performance all the more commodified because it's ephemeral? What I want to know is why does Phelan stress the ocular so much? Why equate visibility with permanence and invisibility with impermanence?

Gabriele Hayden: In the current election, for example, there's this obsession with consistency, which is based on the presumption that consistently supporting one position means that you will follow through with it after you are elected. This same obsession with consistency is legible in racial and class politics in America. There's this anxiety about authenticity, this fear that in performing class or race you risk becoming inauthentic.

JF: Yes, we want to appropriate the politician. This is an interesting example because, in electoral politics, the most visible candidate is the easiest to appropriate.

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