Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Placeholder for discussion: Metaprofessional Milk and Cookies, 4/29

Our final Using Theory event of the semester, Metaprofessional Milk and Cookies, will take place on April 29 at 4 p.m.--note the special time. It will involve neither saltines nor ginger ale, at least in the literal sense, but it will involve milk and cookies, perhaps only in the literal sense.

We will be reflecting on graduate-student professionalization through a discussion of two texts on the subject, John Guillory's "Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want," ADE Bulletin 113 (Spring 1996). and Walter Broughton and William Conlogue's "What Search Committees Want", Profession 2001.

Jeff Glover G6 will be helping to lead the discussion. Many thanks to Professor Janice Carlisle, Craig Fehrman, Jeff Glover, and Gabriele Hayden for helping to prepare this event. AG and CG may add additional discussion questions here on the blog, but in the meantime this placeholder entry can serve as a place for discussion. Please feel free to use the comment function to post questions and thoughts. Follow the link below for some additional notes by AG.


Broughton and Conlogue use the Carnegie classification of higher education. More information on the classifications can be found at the Carnegie Foundation's website, on this page. The Carnegie foundation no longer uses the system referred to by Broughton and Conlogue (Research I, Research II...); the Wikipedia entry on the classifications explains the changes.

John Guillory has written at more length on the subject of graduate-student professionalization, in "The System of Graduate Education" [JSTOR], PMLA 115, no. 5 (October 2000): 1154-63.

Click here for the full blog entry.

Gray/Freud/Kohut, 4/21: Minutes

On April 21 we met to discuss Sigmund Freud's "On Narcissism: An Introduction" and Heinz Kohut's "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism" [link on Yale network only]. Patrick Gray led our lively debate and discussion. He also provided several supplemental readings:



Many thanks to Jordan Zweck for taking notes for the minutes below. As always, participants and other readers are very welcome to expand on their comments and to add new ones. Please follow the link below for the full minutes.


Readers take note: What follows is, despite its dialogue format, NOT a precise transcription; it is a joint reconstruction by JZ and AG. Nor are participants' comments in our informal setting meant to be taken either as unassailable statements of fact or as rigorous defenses of position. The participants in this discussion often disagreed about basic matters of fact and of principle. We leave it to readers to resolve these matters as best they can. The purpose of these minutes is to record the themes of our discussion and to give an illustration of our conversations about using theory, in the hopes that this illustration will provoke further discussion.

Present: Patrick Gray, Emily Coit, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Margaret Homans, Justin Jannise, Ben Labreche, Jordan Zweck

Patrick Gray: My definition of psychoanalysis--a general category rather than Freud or Freudian psychoanalysis, though Freud invented the term--is analysis of the soul. Psychoanalysis has a long tradition going back before Freud (Descartes, etc.).

PG: Criticisms of psychoanalysis: It's not scientifically sound. One well-known articulation of this in English literary criticism is Lee Patterson's "Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Clio and Psyche" [JSTOR], Speculum 76, no. 3 (July, 2001): 638--80. PG gave some references to defenses of the scientific validity and therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis, including a return to Freud within cognitive psychology:

  • Jeremy Holmes. "The Assault on Freud." Current Opinion in Psychiatry 9, no. 3 (May 1996): 175-76.
  • Jim Rosack. "More Data Demonstrate Efficacy of Psychotherapy." Psychiatric News 36, no. 3 (February 2, 2001).
  • Drew Westen. "The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science." Psychological Bulletin 124, no. 3 (November 1998): 333-71.

PG also gave references on the kinship of cognitive-behavioral therapy to psychodynamic therapy:

  • Alan F. Javel. "The Freudian Antecedents of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy." Journal of Psychotherapy Integration 9, no. 4 (1999): 397-407.
  • Jane Milton. "Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy--Rival Paradigms or Common Ground?" International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82 (2001): 431-47.
  • Eric M. Plakun. "Finding Psychodynamic Psychiatry's Lost Generation." Journal of the American Acaademy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 34 (2006): 135-50.
  • Drew Westen. "Commentary: Implicit and Emotional Processes in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy." Clinical Psychology 7, no. 4: 386-90.


PG: What is Freud's contribution? He's notorious for the libido theory, but then Newton wrote a lot about alchemy, too. A few basic ideas were essential, like Newton's refutation of Aristotle with his gravitational theory of "action at a distance." But Freud's original work was the hypothesis that hysteria was the result of displaced emotion, not organic brain damage. The mind plays a role in the disease. Now Freud thought, as he says in "On Narcissism," that eventually all mental events would be explainable on a material basis, but his theory tends instead to suggest immaterial causes. In any case, it is neither simply true nor simply false that psychoanalysis is scientifically sound. That depends on its definition.

PG: Now a second major objection to psychoanalysis is historicist and constructivist. One famous articulation of this from Renaissance studies is Stephen Greenblatt's "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture" (in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint; rpt. in Greeblatt's Learning to Curse). Greenblatt argues that psychoanalysis derives from rather than precedes or explains developments in the Renaissance. He gives a picture of a radical break between medieval and early modern subjectivities. This has been attacked by Richard Levin, and PG is preparing an essay on Greenblatt's errors. But Greenblatt's favorable turn to Lacan has influenced Renaissance studies. See for example the recent anthology Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor. (This turn to Lacan--mirrored in the selections on psychoanalysis in anthologies of literary theory--distorts the field of psychoanalysis and indeed misses all the theorists relevant to psychoanalysis today. Lacan is regarded as a quack in Anglo-American psychoanalysis.) Many ideas associated with Freud and Lacan are much older. For sublimation, see Montaigne; for denial, see Aesop's fable of The Fox and the Grapes. In short, they look back to faculty psychology, to Aristotle and the classics--as Freud often remarks. Now this leads Greenblatt to say psychoanalysis comes from the Renaissance; but he overlooks the transhistorical persistence of these ideas. For PG, these really indicate truths of human nature.

PG wants to use the idea of the ego-ideal to reconcile cultural and psychoanalytic approaches. The ego-ideal can also be a cultural ideal. Theology could be seen as a defining characteristic of a culture because that is what sets up the culture's ego-ideal.

Ben Labreche: How are you using this in your dissertation?

PG: I discuss stoicism in Shakespeare's Roman plays. The Romans believe in an impassable God, so they are reluctant to acknowledge their own passivity and mistakes--in contrast to a Christian God, who can suffer and act.

Emily Coit: Your references seem to distinguish psychoanalysis from psychotherapy. Is that right?

PG: Kohut said he did psychotherapy, not psychoanalysis. All these terms--interpersonal, psychodynamic, etc.--can be united under the etymological sense of psycho-analytic. I relate this to the concept we learned about from Lisa Zunshine: Theory of Mind or "mind-reading." Interpretation of minds. Many ways.

EC: AG's blog comments focused on methodology. Does the current incarnation of psychoanalysis have a different methodology?

PG: I would say that there are lots of things science can't really rule on, like theology. The competence of science in certain spheres of inquiry has led people to want to apply it everywhere, including in literary criticism. It's an overstepping of bounds.

AG: This is a useful either/or moment. If the choice is between, on one side, the qualitative, the subjective, the singular, and on the other the material, the scientific, the generalizable, and you put psychoanalysis on the former side, then I see that a psychoanalytic approach actually does require admitting non-material causes. That's useful, because it tells me that if I do not admit those causes--and I absolutely do not admit them--I don't have to take on board a psychoanalytic approach.

PG: In speaking of the material causes of mind, it's one thing to say mind is a product of the brain, and another to reject non-material qualities of mind. To say everything is material would mean that thoughts are things in the brain.

AG: This is the philosphical question of the existence and nature of "qualia." See Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, especially the chapter "Qualia Disqualified."

CG: PG's introduction suggested that he, and psychoanalysis, make transhistorical claims about human nature. But if there are precendents for Freudian concepts in Western European texts, that doesn't necessarily prove a transhistorical, universal human nature. Freud read those classical European texts in his education and was influenced by them. You need stronger evidence for the transhistorical claim. Could you find evidence for this human nature in Native American or Chinese culture? Could you give an explanation of how these aspects of human nature evolved by natural selection? Because Aesop, Montaigne, and Freud just aren't that far apart.

PG: I'm not qualified to talk about other cultures. That's really an anthropology question. Nonetheless, there is a remarkable continuity in the human psyche. I can understand translations of ancient Chinese literature.

AG: Okay, but that doesn't mean any of the accounts, including the psychoanalytic one, that seem comparable can be used to explain all the others. The causes for the historical continuity still need to be demonstrated.

PG: What is the proper scope of a literary critic? I use psychoanalysis only for analogy; its concepts help me describe the authors I'm studying. Let me give another example. Jung describes ideas of the anima and animus, female and male natures inside each gender. That's useful for describing what's going on in Shakespeare when he personifies aspects of men's psyches as female, but in saying that I'm not saying the anima is real or that Shakespeare is a psychoanalyist. I don't take the step of saying Shakespeare was right about the mind---that isn't our purview as literary critics.

EC: You're explaining by analogy, then?

PG: Yes, as far as I'm only doing literary criticism.

CG: I wouldn't want to totally dismiss your use of psychoanalytic texts, but you did say that the similarities between Montaigne and Shakespeare and Freud reveal transhistorical human nature. But you didn't have to. As literary critics, we're discussing cultural representations.

PG: I think this argument, about what explains the beliefs of the authors I study, can be separated from literary criticism. New Historicists like to move horizontally within a culture, but I want to move through time.

AG: That's a stronger claim than the claim that you only want psychoanalysis as an analogy. For if there were only analogy, what would it mean? What matters is what explains the analogy.

PG: I concede the point.

BL: But let's talk about your research topic of Stoicism in particular. Do you really need to make claims about universal human nature to make your arguments about Stoicism in Renaissance culture?

PG: In some ways, yes. In literary criticism, we feel that we have to go back to material causes, especially economic ones, but I believe in immaterial causes. To explain a work of literature is to translate it from particulars into a more general statement of the author's belief about humanity. We can leave why an author believes what he believes out of our picture, and we can leave put own beliefs aside when we do literary criticism.

CG: I'd be skeptical of claiming to derive Shakespeare's beliefs from the Riverside Shakespeare. There should be diversity in ideological issues in our field, but truth matters. Even on a practical level: if PG and I were on the same faculty and planning an undergraduate curriculum, we wouldn't agree about what approaches and texts undergraduates should be required to read. I would want courses with a social-constructivist approach, and you wouldn't.

AG: Right, what you proposed about the task of the critic isn't neutral; it is itself a set of claims about what literature is and how it works--that it offers specific examples than can be generalized. So you don't have to be a total relativist; you could argue for a much more forceful and particular version of the basis for your approach.

PG: In my experience, all literary criticism involves this translation from particular to universal. Even Greenblatt says Shakespeare's plays are a personal perspective on reality. When did we become an anthropology department? Why don't we just do literary criticism?

CG: We're a minor social science. That's fine. We should have some standards of truthfulness.

EC: Somehow PG has become the relativist and CG an absolutist. Funny. I'd like to add another term: morality. A recent Yale Daily News op-ed piece ("Shvarts explains her 'repeated self-induced miscarriages'") by Aliza Shvarts defending her senior art project disturbed me with its use of a literary-critical discourse we're all comfortable with. My initial reaction was: If only she'd read George Eliot, she'd never have made these errors. We are teachers, and we have a responsibility to students. We have to trace out the effects of our theoretical work. If I know that PG is a humanist in real life, how do I reconcile that with the relativist position he's advocating here? And CG--

CG: [raises eyebrows] I'm a post-humanist.

EC: What happens when we put morality and humanism on the table?

CG: I don't think PG and I are that far apart. I want to believe literary criticism is a form of knowledge production that doesn't just move from trend to trend, but actually progresses. Evidence-based literary criticism is essential to this. If we're going to take up psychoanalysis, I want it to be evidence-based. Some modes of literary criticism have been discredited, and that's okay, but if it's impossible to disprove a form of criticism, then no knowledge can be produced by it.

Click here for the full blog entry.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Gray/Freud/Kohut, 4/21: Discussion Questions

Our next Using Theory lunch takes place tomorrow, Monday, April 21, at 12:30 p.m. We will be debating the status of psychoanalysis for the humanities, as Patrick Gray leads a discussion of Freud's "On Narcissism" and Heinz Kohut's "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism."

In the meantime, CG and AG offer some preliminary thoughts and questions, as a way to set up the debate; to read them, follow the link below.


AG: Although I recognize that there are interesting passages and side-points we might discuss in the readings, I want instead to try to put the big question as strongly as possible. What possible use could any form of psychoanalysis have within literary studies, given its invalidity as an account of human psychology? Why pay any attention to something so wrong?

Of course, many in literary studies would by no means accept that psychoanalysis is invalid as an account of psychology. But this is the consensus of the scientific community, and for reasons that even humanists ought to, but seemingly often don't, understand. Other people can explain the consensus and the reasons far better than this humanist, but, since we are blogging, here is my version. The discrediting reasons are more than visible in the Freud essay--the reliance on reasoning by analogy, the tremendous apparatus of unfalsifiable hypotheses (e.g. sublimation, p. 74: certain desires are really, underlying sexual, even though they are not sexual in any observable way), the pervasive gender, sexual, and racial stereotypes shaping the "explanations." (Freud's stereotypes are common for his time and place, of course, but the point is that they are used as the principal evidence for major psychoanalytic claims, especially ones about sexual desire. If the stereotypes are untrue, then the claims lack evidence.) Freud's bad understanding of evolution also looms large, in the way he essentializes and opposes reproductive and self-preserving instincts. And then the central ideas of "energy" or "libido" flowing through the psyche have about the same scientific status as analogous notions from many cultures--qi in traditional Chinese thought, for example--which is to say, they serve as infinitely flexible cover terms for many heterogeneous phenomena. Freud's--and Kohut's--use of the vocabulary of science should not deceive any but the most naive readers. For them, "empirical" observation seems to consist entirely in the ad-hoc interpretation of single clinical cases--and they usually assert the validity of their theory on the basis of the clinical successes they claim to have made by following it. These are norms of evidence which have been out of date since Francis Bacon.

What I am saying, in short, is that psychoanalysis is folk science. That doesn't mean it isn't very interesting for cultural history and for the history of science, in the same way as astrology or alchemy are. Freud certainly did open up ways of thinking about mental processes that have been important in the development of scientific understandings of the brain. But mostly he, along with the pseudo-discipline he inaugurated, testifies to the enduring appeal of manifestly invalid kinds of reasoning. (In light of Lisa Zunshine's session, I reflect that psychoanalysis makes strong appeals to our Theory of Mind capacities, because it populates the mind with a whole set of homunculi--ego, superego, id--all of them acting just like persons, with intentions, strategems, etc.) But when it comes to formulating and trying to answer questions about how the mind works, we now have something better, in the accumulated knowledge of empirical science and in the philosophy of mind--principally Anglo-American--which is developing in concert with that science.

My own suspicion (not, of course, unique or original to me; compare Frederick Crews' statements in this PBS interview), which depresses me tremendously, is that psychoanalysis retains its appeal in the humanities precisely because it is unscientific. Psychoanalysis--posed, despite its protestations to the contrary, against reason and empiricism, dependent on the individual case study for "evidence," endlessly staging and celebrating the sophistical ingenuity of the analyst--offers humanists a vision of the triumph of humanism over science. Freud's and his successors' love for quoting and appropriating literature and myth reinforces this vision by granting to literature an unsurpassable insight into human cognition. Given the manifest victory of science as the premiere form of knowledge (the existence of "creation science" testifies to this prestige better than anything else could) in our culture, such a vision has obvious appeal to humanistic disciplines struggling to be taken seriously by the wider culture and to keep their hold on institutional resources. [John Guillory has offered convincing descriptions of this struggle and its ideological products in Cultural Capital and related work since, especially his 2002 Critical Inquiry essay "The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism".] Needless to say I also think psychoanalysis' vision is wholly phantasmatic and ought to be discarded forthwith. Literary studies should place itself in something other than a blindly oppositional relation to scientific knowledge and scientific methods.

Now let me imagine utopia for a moment. Suppose that the bankrupcy of psychoanalysis as an account of the workings of the mind were fully acknowledged within literary studies and its cultural prestige annulled. Psychoanalytic understandings of desire, motivation, development, memory, and language production would no longer contaminate interpretations of these themes by literary critics, who could then take up Zunshine's call for a criticism that would understand historically specific interactions between our cognitive capacities--as far as we understand them--and cultural formations. What use might then be made of the interesting cultural artifact of late-19th/early-20th century pseudoscience that was psychoanalysis? What comparative method would be adequate? And would there be any payoff?

CG: I share AG's skepticism about psychoanalysis as a theory of mind as a theoretical framework for literary scholarship. I think using Freud or his psychoanalytic followers (however far they depart from The Founder's original system of ideas) to describe some universal and transhistorical feature of human nature, without acknowledging the contested status of psychoanalysis as a theory of mind, is a deeply problematic enterprise; indeed, it verges on dishonesty. If we as literary scholars are going to use psychology to analyze literature and to explain the creative processes of the author and the reading practices of his audience, then it is our responsibility as scholars to use the most truthful theory of psychology, not merely the most attractive one (or the most attractively complex). This means that we should respect the consensus of our colleagues in the sciences, when there is a consensus (and there is a consensus regarding psychoanalysis, as Andrew stresses); and keep up with ongoing debates in the fields of psychology most relevant literary scholarship.

However, I'm not quite ready to toss all 24 volumes of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud onto the fire just yet. The present and past cultural prestige of Freud and Freudian theory, however misplaced, means that Freud will continue to demand the attention of scholars of the twentieth century (and probably of the twenty-first as well). That is to say, psychoanalysis may be a pseudo-science, but it has been more influential than astrology or alchemy and, indeed, we still feel its influence today. As many historians of sexuality have observed, Freud played an important role in the emergence of the modern concept of sexuality as a crucially important yet partially knowable domain of the self. We live in a world made possible, in part, by Freud, and, by analyzing psychoanalysis as a cultural artifact, we can show how certain things (like modern categories of sexual identity, e. g. heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, etc.) are not immutable facts of natural reality but historical phenomena. For this reason alone, I believe Freud should and will remain a major subject of scholarship in the humanities for decades to come. Before Freud's historical influence can fully be assessed, however, Freud (and all of psychoanalytic theory) must be returned to its original historical context--the vestiges of which are visible in Freud's citation of and passing references to other psychological and medical scientific work in "On Narcissism: An Introduction." (Freud's works are an archive that would benefit hugely from digitization. Imagine you could instantly click through html links to all of Freud's sources!)

The question that I'll pose for our discussion concerns the status of current scholarship that draws on psychoanalytic concepts. I'm not ready to toss this stuff on the fire either, and not simply because it's been influential in our field. (This brings us right back the issue of citation and authority that AG brought up regarding Althusser in the last post and that PR expanded on in his comment.) A lot of extremely valuable and interesting scholarship has made use of Freudian theory (Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler come to mind first). Is it possible to use such scholarship while also recognizing that psychoanalysis is a flawed and outmoded science? And, if so, what is the most responsible way to do that?

Click here for the full blog entry.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Minutes, 4/10/08: Colin Gillis/Elizabeth Povinelli

Present: CG, Anne DeWitt, Jeff Glover, Andrew Goldstone, Gabriele Hayden, Ben Labreche, Patrick Redding, Jordan Zweck

Due to the negligence, prompted by excitement at the discussion and absent-mindedness in equal parts, of AG the minute-taker, the following notes on the discussion are short. CG has generously supplied the typescript of his lucid introductory remarks. Participants are warmly invited to restate or elaborate their comments here. For the full minutes, follow the link below.


Colin Gillis: Introduction. Povinelli is an anthropologist. Her first two books, Labor's Lot and The Cunning of Recognition, are about the place of aboriginal peoples in Australia's multicultural liberal democracy. Studying the process by which indigenous people in Australia constructed themselves as subjects in order to gain recognition from the Australian government, and her own deeply disorienting experience moving between queer culture in North America and the indigenous social world of northwestern Australia, has allowed Povinelli to see that the discourses of individual freedom and social constraint--which she refers to as the autological subject and the genealogical society--are what constitute bodies, sociality, and love in late liberalism. Povinelli describes The Empire of Love as a critique of Late Liberalism. I understand "late liberalism" to mean a political philosophy that originated in Europe, became the ideological basis for modern Western democracies, and has been exported and continues to be exported to such an extent that has become globally hegemonic. The core commitment of liberalism is liberty--the belief that humans are naturally free; and that any restraint on individual freedom must be justified. In other words, liberalism conceives of persons in terms of individual freedom and social restraint, and implicitly values freedom and self-determination.

Why does Povinelli prefer the terms "the autological subject" and "the genealogical society," or "autological discourse" and "genealogical discourse," to "individual freedom" and "social restraint"? I think it's because these terms provide some distance between her critique and the vocabulary of liberalism, because they clearly signal that they describe forms of discourse and not material realities, and because they're more flexible--genealogy isn't negative, like social constraint, and it includes things like kinship; and autology isn't automatically positive, like individual freedom, and describes individual freedom as a process of self-actualization not a given fact of natural reality. In the introduction to The Empire of Love, Povinelli defines the terms this way:


By the autological subject, I am referring to discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracy and capitalism. By genealogical society, I am referring to discourses, practices, and fantasies about social constraints placed on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances. (4)

In the chapter of The Empire of Love from which the selection in the packet is taken, Povinelli uses a sore that she acquired while living in the aboriginal community in Belyuen as a way of exploring how her body is constituted by autology and genealogy. The social world of Belyuen is one of thick kinship relations and face-to-face sociality: there, people live in poverty and in nearly constant physical contact; sores are common; and doctors regard them with indifference. The social world of North America, specifically Montreal during the diver-cité gay pride festival, is one of stranger sociality: people take individual responsibility for their health and are obligated to warn potential sexual partners when they have an infection; they expect to live a long time; sores of the type that Povinelli has are rare and potentially a cause for great concern among the doctors she visits. Because autology and genealogy are configured differently in the social worlds of Belyuen and Montreal, the sore actually is two different things in those social worlds--if Povinelli were an aboriginal person who had lived all her life in northwestern Australia, she would accept the sore as a fact of life; or, if she were a North American tourist who had visited some exotic locale and picked up the sore there, she would see it as a medical emergency. But because Povinelli herself inhabits the stranger sociality of North America and the thick kinship lifeworld of Belyuen simultaneously, the sore is neither one of those things--her flesh is actually strained between two incommensurate lifeworlds.

What her experience with the sore reveals, I think, is two things:

  1. That it is possible to manage the way one's body is constituted by autology and genealogy. The meaning of the sore--which seems obvious in each separate social world--is actually something that Povinelli herself can and does alter as she moves between them. She thinks carefully about what she tells and doesn't tell her doctors in North America so that she can receive treatment, without causing too much alarm but while also being responsible. And, in Australia, she seeks care in a way that others wouldn't: she has the sore treated with minor surgery and she asks that her friend cut the sore without feeling sorry for her; she can hold herself down for treatment, as she puts it. Her ability to manage how her body is constituted in these different social worlds opens up space for experimentation with new modes of life.
  2. That the incommensurability of the discursive constitution of her body in Belyuen and in North America has dire material consequences. It is the reason why her indigenous kin are condemned to live what is essentially a slow death while her friends in the North America expect to live a long life and structure their sexual lives in light of that expectation. Ghoul health--which Povinelli defines as "the global organization of the biomedical establishment, and its imaginary," around the fear that the next plague is the real threat that haunts the global division of developed and undeveloped worlds--arises from and produces her sore's double meaning. Certain populations are stuck with horrific health conditions because healthcare resources are distributed according to a discursive distinction between the ordinary bodies of stranger sociality and the exceptional bodies of persons who inhabit a thick kinship sociality.


Povinelli wants to show how autological and genealogical discourses shape life on a huge scale, from the personal experiences of her and her friends to the uneven distribution of global resources that has emerged in the wake of settler colonialism. In a word, she wants her work to be disturbing: Disturbing is a good description of the effect of reading these essays, and it is a keyword for Povinelli: she wants to dislodge critical discourse from its moorings in Late Liberalism and find a vocabulary capable of describing the complexity of social relations in the world that has been created by the discourse of late liberalism. This is how she puts it in the introduction:

My goal is not to say yes or no to individual freedom and social constraint, the intimate event or the genealogical society. All I can hope is that by understanding how these discourses work to shape social life, we can begin to fomulate a positive
political program--something I have begun to describe as a politics of "thick life"--in which the density of social representation is increased to meet the density of actual social worlds. (21)

Now we should talk more about how Povinelli conceives of social representation as a positive political program--this is the question of mediation that Andrew raised on the using theory blog. Bracketing this question for the moment, I think that the first part Povinelli's argument--that our current modes of social representation are incapable of describing the "density of actual social worlds" is immediately valuable to us as critics.

I think one of the most basic objectives of using theory is to be disturbed. We read theory so that it will shake our preconceptions, make us disillusioned with our current vocabulary and our current set of analytical tools, and feel that we urgently need to replace them. The best theory also disturbs our assumptions about who we are as scholars, and what our duties and responsibilities are both to ourselves and to what we study. Now, the specific way in which I'm planning to use Povinelli is less profound, but I think it models one really practical way that we can respond to something like The Empire of Love by changing our day to day practice as critics. In about two weeks, I'll be giving a paper at the ACLA for a panel on sexual tourism. The paper is based on a short position paper that I wrote for a seminar on the same topic last fall for the MSA. It compares two texts: "The Woman Who Rode Away," a short story by the English writer D. H. Lawrence; and Season of Migration to the North, a novel by the Sudanese author al-Tayyeb Salih. In "The Woman Who Rode Away," an unnamed female protagonist leaves her family and, motivated by a primitivist fantasy, travels to a remote indigenous tribe in the mountains of Mexico. Once she arrives, she is promptly captured, drugged, and then ritually sacrificed in an ice cave. In Season of Migration to the North, the protagonist, Mustafa Sa'eed, a Sudanese man, travels from the global South to London, the colonial metropole, to study; and, while he's there, he plays on English women's primitivist fantasies, has sex with many of them, marries one, and eventually murders her. He then returns to Sudan, marries a Sudanese woman, and then disappears (it is suggested that he commits suicide); at the end of the novel, it is revealed that in his home in Sudan, there is a locked room containing an English library and a portrait of his dead English wife.

My seminar paper used these texts as examples to argue that the structural violence of colonialism foreclosed the possibility of intimacy between colonizer and colonized. And that the violence in these stories literalizes the fantasies domination and submission with which imperialism is inextricably bound up. Reading Povinelli has altered my original argument and provided a better, more precise vocabulary for articulating it. Now, what I am going to argue, is that moving between incommensurate social worlds unmoors the identities of these two characters. And this unmooring reveals that the liberal humanist claim that what makes us most human is our ability to recognize and value the freedom of another person in our intimate lives is also what sustains the structural violence of colonialism. Lawrence and Salih aren't just interested in the fantasies bound up with imperialism. These texts explore the way in which love is a site--in fact, the site--in which imperial power is deployed and can be resisted.

Discussion.Our discussion returned multiple times to the question of the historical presuppositions in Povinelli's text. When and how did autological and genealogical discourses arise? Are there aspects of these discourses which are not products of Late Liberalism? Jeff Glover wondered whether the tendency is to imply that indigeneity and traditional culture simply have no existence before liberal discourse imposes itself and creates them as an other; but for JG, oral culture is real and does have a history which is not restricted to the genealogical discourse invented by settler society. CG replied that perhaps Povinelli is saying we don't have the right tools for thinking about the pre-colonial period. AG wondered whether autology and genealogy might not be highly generalizable concepts, far predating modern imperialism and modern liberalism. Indeed, Ben Labreche is working with the conflict between individual self-making and the constraints of inheritance in his research. Patrick Redding noted that in general anthropology is more oriented towards comparative cultures in present time than towards history. Gabriele Hayden concurred and noted the allusion to Fabian's work on time and anthropology in Povinelli's South Atlantic Quarterly article.

A second thread of discussion concentrated on Povinelli's politics. GH and BL had reservations about her queer politics. Povinelli's discussion of the Radical Fairies came up, but CG has been focusing on her treatment of the Belyuen community. BL wondered: what is she calling for? CG: thicker social representations. BL: Is this just better liberalism?

Finally, PR asked about CG's notion that the purpose of Using Theory is to be disturbed. Is this a contrast with Susannah Hollister's approach to the Marxist theorists she is using? Would CG take on board Povinelli's methodological and political positions? CG: yes, these do matter. Theory isn't just something picked out of the anthology to support what you were already going to do.

Click here for the full blog entry.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Gillis/Povinelli, Thursday 4/10: Discussion Questions

The next Using Theory lunch will be Thursday, April 10, at 12:30 p.m. Our own Colin Gillis will lead a discussion of an excerpt from Elizabeth A. Povinelli's Empire of Love and a related essay by Povinelli in South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (Summer 2007), "Disturbing Sexuality."

Follow the link below for AG's discussion questions on the reading.



1) Perhaps the most appealing thing about Povinelli's work in the Empire of Love excerpt is the feeling that she is trying to be mindful of absolutely everything she ought to be: combining the local, culturally and linguistically precise observations of fieldwork with a sense that even local discourses are entangled with national and global discourses and networks of power, moving back and forth between the body and the imagination, departing from Butler's reconstruction of sexual and other identity as citation but moving into the specifics of north-coastal Australian Aboriginal life, situating herself self-reflexively in the midst of all of this, trying to lay bare the disciplinary constraints shaping what she has to say. It's the kind of theoretically sensitive work one wishes to do, the product of the accumulated knowledge of the humanities and the social sciences. This sensitivity also produces an autobiographical text, and a difficult one. I am completely compelled by the choice of this participant-observer anthropologist to include herself within her "thick life" description. If literary critics were to work at the same level of rigor, would the same self-referential, autobiographical turn then be required? Would it be necessary to speak of the context in which we ourselves read literary texts, to call to mind the whole network of social causes, of material production and circulation, that conducts our object of study from the place and time in which it appeared into our hands? (My own suspicion is that the answer is yes, and that it is just such concern which motivates self-reflexive thinking about the nature of our discipline and our institutions in criticism of recent years, but that even more specificity and detail in research is needed. Certainly these issues have captured my dissertation.)

2) I saw it coming a mile off: on p. 78 of Empire of Love, in the midst of her wonderful discussion of "ghoul health," Povinelli invokes Althusser's definition of ideology, the "imaginary relation to real conditions." In the South Atlantic Quarterly article she speaks of "interpellation." In fact, these two tokens seem to me to be the only pieces of Althusser's work still circulating regularly in critical discourse. I wish they had been disposed of long ago. Why does Althusser's name retain its prestige when even the most cursory perusal of his work--like mine; I know only the famous short essay on ideological state apparatuses and one chapter from Reading Capital--lays bare its intellectually empty cynicism, its lack of rigor, its unfalsifiability, its flamboyant bullshit? One need not even take the ad hominem detour of recalling his insanity and his murder of his wife---as Tony Judt does in a caustic essay about his own encounter with Althusser. Obviously serious social thinkers continue to find the twin formulae of ideology as imaginary relation and interpellation by ideology useful, but why take on the baggage of Althusser simply to bring in truisms about the relation between spoken and unspoken cultural assumptions on the one hand and identity and material conditions on the other? Surely one could find a better, more concrete theorist of that relation than a lunatic fake-structuralist Marxist. (My own current nominee would be Pierre Bourdieu and his interlocutors in American and French sociology of culture.)

The price paid for continuing to use Althusser at key moments is not just the taint of the name. There is a failure in model-building precisely where Althusser is invoked, to cover over the unarticulated mechanisms that must in fact join the "imaginary relation" to the "real conditions," or the "interpellation" to the subsequent social practice of identity. Behind the screen of Althusser lies an implicit social psychology which needs explicitation: why and how do the real conditions get distorted into one imaginary relation and not another--if they do? What cultural forms "interpellate," and when and how? In the case of "ghoul health," it is deliciously plausible that public panic over new bugs like Ebola or SARS retraces in a fearful mood the relation between imperial powers and their current and former imperial domains--but can it be proven? What implicit psychological and sociological assumptions lie behind this claim? What justifies taking post- or neo-imperial facts of global economy and politics as determining a phenomenon within medical science, the media, and the culture of health and disease? These are the questions--questions of mediation, or, in a post-Marxist version (Laclau and Mouffe), articulation---which will also govern any attempt to transfer over Povinelli's thinking into our own literary studies.

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