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.