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.