Phelan: AG's preliminary discussion questions

Two thoughts occurred to me as I read the first chapter of Phelan's Unmarked:

1) Why does Phelan reverse the standard definition of markedness/unmarkedness from Prague School linguistics? From a structural point of view, in the opposition male:female, it is "male" which is the unmarked member, because it is the default; that is why sexists and linguistic conservatives think that "he" can be a gender-neutral pronoun in the phrase "everyone likes to hear his own name" or why many people can use "you guys" to address a group of any gender composition, whereas "you gals" would never be applied to a group containing even one male. For an explanation of the basic linguistic case, see, e.g., sections 12ff. of the introduction to Greg Nagy's Pindar's Homer; Nagy studied with Jakobson, so this is orthodox. Nagy's example is the opposition long:short in English. If I ask "how long is it?" I do not presuppose anything about its length; whereas "how short is it?" does already imply that it's short. "Long" is the unmarked member, here given its zero interpretation of a general category of which both "long" (+interpretation) and "short" are specific instances. How would thinking about the politics of visibility change if we went back to this conception of the marginalized, non-normative minority as marked rather than unmarked?

2) I am fascinated by Phelan's description of her response to the Louise Bourgeois sculpture Nature Study, Velvet Eyes. Phelan speaks of being "oddly reassured" (21) after the initial shock of seeing eyes in the rock. I am not compelled by the Lacanian jargon of the object's return gaze--but I do recognize that feeling of satisfaction in the face of a display of self-referentiality by an avant-garde artwork. What is comforting about frame-breaking? What are the politics of that comfort?

More to follow--live tomorrow!

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The return of La/can!

This week Lacan's sardine can surfaces in Using Theory for a second time. (The image is from here.) We first encountered the sardine can back in April, 2007, when we read Lacan's "Of the Gaze as Objet petit a." Now, in February 2008, we encounter it again in Peggy Phelan's Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. For Phelan, Lacan's allegory of the sardine can helps to reveal the gaps in what she calls the "psychic and aesthetic economy of the Western gaze" through which a "psychic resistance" can be asserted. This "psychic resistance" may, in turn, lead to progressive political change. The not-so-straightforward understanding of the gaze in Lacanian psychoanalysis provides the basis for a hermeneutics of visibility and representation that Phelan identifies as an alternative to the conventional tactics of identity politics. An identity politics that tries to counteract male/Western hegemony by making female/non-Western others more visible through mimetic representation, Phelan reasons, actually just creates an opening for conservatives to further limit the power of the under-represented. (Some of you may remember Bruce Robbins's talk at the twentieth-century colloquium last year. Robbins offered a similar critique of Naomi Klein's No Logo, though from a totally different theoretical viewpoint.) Phelan recasts invisibility as a powerful position that exists outside of and also deconstructs the Western gaze and the exclusive and hegemonic social unity (celebrated by "the Right" and critiqued by the multiculturalist "Left") that is imposed on the world by the Western gaze. (Others may remember Heather Love's talk a couple weeks ago. Phelan's idea of the invisible/"unmarked" might be understood as a domain of being that exists outside the purview of modern social stigma and, by existing outside that purview, erodes the statistically-generated categories that organize populations into normal and marginal groups.)

I'm sympathetic with Phelan's political objectives in this project, and I find her claim that the "unmarked" can be a powerful position convincing and useful; but her mobilization of Lacan to theorize visibility/invisibility gives me pause. Phelan presents the "unmarked" as a domain where new modes of social relation and new conceptualizations of the real of generic become possible. It seems to me, however, that her use of Lacan introduces into the liberated, limitless space of the invisible some constraining and limiting presuppositions: an essentialized understanding of gender difference (see, for example, her discussion of "the theatre of drag" on p. 17: "A man imitates an image of a woman in order to confirm that she belongs to him."); a heteronormative understanding of sexuality (see, again, the discussion of "the theatre of drag" on p. 17); and an extremely limited model for subject formation. So this is what I want to know: Is it possible to use Phelan's provocative and valuable theory of the "unmarked" without also bringing on board the normative presuppositions that are operative in the Lacanian toolkit that she uses to develop that theory? Or: Could Phelan have disavowed or accounted for those normative presuppositions while still using Lacan to develop her theory?

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Julia Fawcett uses Peggy Phelan, Thursday, Feb. 28

Our next meeting will take place in LC 319 at 12:30 p.m. on Thursday the 28th--not Thursday the 21st as previously announced. The reading packets, with chapter one of Peggy Phelan's Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Yale network only), are now available in the English department lounge. In the meantime, early thoughts and discussion can begin here! Comments welcome. CG and I will try to post some questions ahead of the meeting here.

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Wai Chee Dimock, Digital Media: Minutes

We met on February 6, 2008, to discuss the debate on digitization in PMLA 122.5, including Ed Folsom's "Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives," replies by Peter Stallybrass, Jerome McGann, Meredith McGill, Jonathan Freedman, and N. Katherine Hayles [for a posthuman cyberscholar, Hayles' web presence is spotty indeed--AG, ed.], and a further response by Folsom. Wai Chee Dimock led the session, and Gabriele Hayden took notes. I have transcribed GH's excellent notes below, and would be grateful to any participant who could help fill in missing bits; thanks to those (GH included) who have already helped there. And I very much hope that discussion can continue here; see the two discussion-question posts and the comments on them: CG's comments and AG's).

Present: Andrew Goldstone, Colin Gillis, Nathalie Wolfram, KC Harrison, Julia Fawcett, Adrienne Bernhard, Leslie Jamison, Anthony Domestico, Patrick Redding, Aleksandar Stevic, Susannah Hollister, Nicole Wright, Emily Setina, Sam Cross, Ryan Carr, Gabriele Hayden

Wai Chee Dimock: I am interested in three aspects of the database:

1. Storage, retrieval, and access: once texts are digitized, our basic assumption that a text is what you find between the covers of a book evaporates. A text isn't an object; instead, it's more like a field. Furthermore the boundary between the textual and visual fields is blurred. Think of a text as something that resembles a database: a DB can answer many kinds of questions. A text is reconstituted every time we access it; like the DB, the text has multiple ontologies, depending on what kinds of questions we put to it. Thus the database asks us to think about levels of inquiry and modes of response.
   
2. Interface: the main point in McGann's essay. Basically not different from reader-response criticism, which is also a theory of interface. Higlights the importance of the reader--who, in the twenty-first century, can be anyone. We shouldn't only think about Whitman's nineteenth-century readers, but also about contemporary ones. Whitman always had Latin American admirers, but now he has readers from all over the globe. So questions of interface are tied up with questions of translation, interlingual and intralingual. (Example of intralingual translation: Seamus Heaney's Beowulf.) Intellectually, English and Comp Lit belong together, even though for strategic reasons they should be administratively distinct.
   
3. Remediation and kinship: Remediation is a mainstream phenomenon: think of Henry James novels being made into films. Kinship means both friendship between authors and relation of authors across time. A fruitful area of inquiry; we should loosen up period boundaries, if only to look at the reading of the writers we study. Focus on traceable kinship.
   

Susannah Hollister: Is inquiry into kinship in order to understand particular authors, or are kinships themselves the object of inquiry?

WCD: Kinships could be just context, or it could be the focus (a new thing to think about).

Andrew Goldstone: Isn't this a traditional kind of literary history?

WCD: Yes, and I'm not bothered by the resemblance to traditonal modes of criticism. What is new is the emphasis on new media and on genre.

WCD: Virginia Jackson objects to the use of "lyric" in analysis of poetry; she wants to substitute a finer-grained concept of genre. But genre itself could be made into a less rigid system--the motion of words leading to the migration of genres.

WCD: Danger: is literary study non-cumulative? In the sciences, paradigm shifts are very rare, and there's less of a star system.

AG: That's a utopian idea of science. They have stars. But yes, it's more cumulative.

WCD: We should have a sense that we're engaging in collective, cumulative, work.

KC Harrison: What about Moretti's concept of distant reading?

WCD: Moretti might ask, How any novels refer to 9/11? An attempt to get empirical data.

KCH: But that relies on systems of classification which are themselves always interpretive.

WCD: That's exactly my critique of moretti. We can't get away from interpretation. We should avoid too rigid classification.

Patrick Redding: The theme here seems to be how we should see relations between texts. Your model is more anthropological. But here's my question: it's one thing to think about searching a database for a few words, but how could you query it about genres?

WCD: You can be a creative searcher.

Nathalie Wolfram: What about teaching? How would you use digital databases constructively without leading students astray with an apparently cut-and-dried, "scientific" model of literary study?

WCD: Well, databases aren't so great in a seminar setting. I used some digital material, especially images, with mixed results in a lecture course.

Colin Gills: How has the database started to structure scholarship? It's already changed how we research. I've changed a paper title to make it more searchable.

Gabriele Hayden: Is the move from scroll to codex like the move from codex to database?

WCD: [?]

Leslie Jamison: What about authorship? Doesn't taking the database as a literary object imply thinking of it as authored?

WCD: But actually it would be okay if the collaborative editors of something like the Whitman Archive are forgotten. [But then why are their names prominently at the top of the home page? --AG, ed.] Anyway, the emphasis on kinship takes away the pressure to original; I agree with Stallybrass that the premium has been set too high on originality.

Emily Setina: to what degree is the premium on originality that we've been talking about particular to American scholarship? How does it compare to other models of literary scholarship?

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Feb. 6, 2008: Digital Media Discussion Questions II

Here's what this week's packet has got me thinking about:

1. When we talk about digitization, we tend to celebrate the internet as an infinitely accessible space. Folsom glorifies the volume of usership and diversity of users that access the Whitman archive, and his enthusiasm is understandable; but just how accessible is this online database and other digital media? Are all modes of access the same? Does digitization always expand accessibility? This is more than just a question of who can afford a computer or find some means to get on the internet. Digital media have multiple locations--in cyberspace, in the world, in institutional structures. And the locations of digital media determine who can access them and how they may accessed. Think about this the next time you toggle between a proxy server and a direct connection.

2. McGill is right to point out the way the Whitman Archive replicates "normative ideas of the author and the work" and that this replication acts as a "conceptual and structural horizon that keeps such projects from functioning in the radical ways that Folsom describes [i.e., complete access to Whitman's rhizomorphous work]." This leads me to wonder: Are those normative ideas of the author and the work so thoroughly embedded in the archive that no amount of digitization can move us beyond them? What would the database look like without those normative ideas?

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Wai Chee Dimock, Feb. 6: Digital Media Discussion Questions I

Here's a placeholder entry for the upcoming Using Theory lunch on digitization, to be led by Wai Chee Dimock (Wednesday, Feb. 6, 12:30, LC 319). Colin and I (AG) thought we would post a few of our broad questions...The discussion can begin here, continue at the lunch, and then resume here afterwards, when we'll also post minutes.

And by the way--it's instructive to look at Folsom and Price's Whitman archive and McGann's NINES, both discussed in the reading.

Having read the packet, two big questions hovered for me:

(1) What is the status of reading in digital media? Even if we accept that networked, digital forms allow the presentation of texts in a way that is truer to their complexity (multiple versions, rich contexts, continuous re-editing) than any printed text can be--how are we to think about the fact that such electronic forms are more or less unreadable? That is, they serve scholars and students well for specific kinds of research, but they pose a challenge to the kind of sustained reading that I am used to doing with a printed book containing more or less a single version of a text. What will the status of "texts for reading" then be?

(2) I found Stallybrass' challenge to the values of originality and thinking truly provocative, but found him frustratingly vague on alternatives. What values could actually replace them in intellectual work? How would we have to redefine individual creativity and accomplishment in an age of massively distributed, massively networked inquiry--since presumably we're still going to distribute resources, jobs, etc. to some people and not others?

CG will post his questions soon. More to follow...

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