Reviews 2000

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Textual Practice 14(1) , 2000, 145 –222
Reviews
Michael Coyle
Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xviii + 247 pp., £37.50
(hardback), £13.95 (paperback)
Ira Nadel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1999), xxxii + 318 pp., £37.50 (hardback),
£13.95 (paperback)
Modernist literature now nds itself in a much-companioned time. As the

market for academic titles grows smaller, with libraries buying fewer and
fewer titles that appear in ever smaller and more expensive runs, a clutch of
presses traditionally oriented to new scholarship have been producing
titles that aim to redirect scholarship to more general audiences. That such
audiences might include student populations is in itself a noteworthy
development. Cambridge and Oxford, along with Longman, Garland and
Routledge, are all now publishing or working on ‘companions’ to modernist
literature, or to particular modernist writers and poets. Michael Levenson’s
Companion to Modernism, and Ira Nadel’s Companion to Ezra Pound, join
A. David Moody’s Companion to T. S. Eliot (1994), Scott Donaldson’s
Companion to Hemingway (1996) and J. H . Stape’s Companion to Joseph
Conrad (1996) in Cam bridge’s growing, though still essentially male, list of
Modernist companions. Collectively, this growing body of material testi es
to a number of signi cant historical changes.
The rst of these, as Michael Levenson observes so trenchantly, is that
Modernism will shortly become ‘the name of a period at the beginning of
a previous century, too distant even to serve as a gure for the grandparent’
(p. 1). Modernism, which represented ‘the dream of a movement that
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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Textual Practice
would never age and never end’, has become the subject of history, and as
such now requires contextualizing points of entry for new generations of
readers and students. That ‘we are still’, as Levenson judges, ‘learning how
not to be Modernist’ does not belie the fact that only recently have
we begun to see how dif cult, sometimes even painful, this learning has
been.
This dif culty is apparent in a slow generic shift particularly evident
in Nadel’s volume, but that of late frequently informs volumes of this kind:
in a new generation of pedagogical aids, the features of the ‘Companion’
tend to mix with the features of ‘Reader’s Guides’. W hereas the
‘Companions’ of old tended to be topically organized encyclopedias,
exploring particular historical contexts, ‘Reader’s Guides’ inclined towards
the point-by-point elucidation of particular texts. In recent years, Modernist

studies have joined the inclination of literary scholarship in general towards
what is ever more loosely called ‘cultural studies’. As scholars grow more
self-conscious of their historical distance from period work, this inclination
becomes increasingly pronounced. Besides essays on Modernist poetry,
ction and drama, Levenson’s volume also offers chapters on Modernism
and cultural economy, politics, lm, gender and metaphysics. The mix
is different in Nadel’s volume, as are the expectations with which Nadel’s
contributors address their topics.
In Pound’s case, especially since the Bollingen controversy of 1949 ,
strictly form alist study has never been much more than a studied
impossibility. But the real legacy of Pound’s Bollingen Prize is that scholars
sympathetic to Pound have often resented the pressure to address questions
other than those of Pound’s poetic vision (ironically, a vision which famously
works to include politics, economics and o ther public discourses); that
resentment marks more than a few of the essays that Nadel has collected.
Indeed, Nadel’s volume borrows much more heavily from the model of the
reader’s guide than does Levenson’s. Four of Nadel’s ten essays offer poem-
by-poem commentaries of successive stages of Pound’s career, and Nadel’s
own introduction offers ‘an outline of the Cantos, corresponding to their
publication in book form’.
The complexity, not to say obscurity of the Cantos perhaps makes this
solicitude inevitable; the outlines and glosses of Nadel’s Companion seem to
pursue interpretive orthodoxy, homogenizing Pound’s wildly hetero-
geneous work while purporting to recover, as Richard Taylor characterizes
it, the poet’s ‘singular and unchanging intention’ (p. 163). At its worst, this
homogenization of perspective leads to such apologetics as Tim Redman’s
claim that ‘Pound’s support of Italian fascism remains problematic’ (p. 260).
‘Problematic’ indeed: whatever the vagaries of Pound’s personal convictions,
as Ron Bush’s contribution to this volume makes clear, there is no doubt
about the de ant dedication of Pisan Cantos. Similarly, Redman suggests
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that Pound’s politics were somehow the natural outgrowth of the dinner-
table conversations of his childhood, and as American as apple pie.
Comparable trouble arises when Wendy Flory works to explain away
Pound’s anti-Semitism as the function of a genuine insanity that set in
around 1935, or dismisses out-of-hand forty years of critical and theoretical
activity, charging ‘poststructuralism’ with sensationalizing the ‘case against
Pound’ and impeding a fair analysis. This kind of intransigence will
inevitably limit the usefulness of Nadel’s volume.
Nevertheless, Nadel includes some innovative work. Helen Dennis’
‘Pound, Women and Gender’ is an un inching look at a still insuf ciently
regarded question, and one which nds Pound’s recurring images of the
‘archetypal female’ fundamental to his poetic vision. Ron Bush, who has
made a career of careful, archival work, makes occasion of his essay on the
late Cantos to consider how ‘the coils of Pound’s own political and ideo-
logical misapprehension combined with the contingencies of history to
produce a more complicated outcome than the one he had foreseen’
(p. 109). Here we might pause to compare Bush and Flory on the question
of Pound’s sanity. Bush writes, ‘it now seems all but certain, that, under
great stress and as amboyant as ever, Pound was not insane, but acceded
to a political compromise out of fear for his life and in ignorance of the long-
term consequences of the decision’ (p. 110). Flory demurs, declaring that ‘a
commonly held conspiracy theory claims that, with the connivance of the
superintendent of St. Elizabeths, Pound faked insanity to avoid possible
execution. In fact, his medical records, letters, and the testimony of many
visitors to St. Elizabeths show clear evidence of psychosis, as this is now
de ned’ (p. 287). Doubtless this question can never be settled, but the issue
here is not one of critical tone so much as the purchase of a critical position.
By arguing for psychosis, Flory individualizes Pound’s moral failings, and
indeed excuses him from them. Bush’s position is much more uncomfort-
able, implicitly requiring an entire society to acknowledge its being fouled
in a messy affair, and to see the juxtaposition of beauty and beast in the same
mirror.
Such implications of the reader into the text serve Richard Taylor as a
necessary point of departure. Taylor’s ‘The Texts of The Cantos’ suggests
not only the dif culties that have marked the publication history of
Pound’s major work, but also the extent to which critics routinely construct
the texts they construe. ‘The text is not,’ he submits ‘so m uch a “material
thing” as it is an event or set of events in which certain communicative
interchanges are experienced’ (p. 167). Consequently the process of publi-
cation is actually one of ‘socialization’, a process inextricably caught up in
interpretive activities, as well as in the production of subsequent poetry.
Peter Nicholls’ ‘Beyond the Cantos: Pound and American Poetry’ considers
how the Cantos proved ‘the seedbed of a whole range of different poetries’
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(p. 140). Poets as various as Bunting, Zukofsky, Oppen, Creeley, Duncan,

Olson and the Language poets are all perhaps unimaginable without Pound
as a point of reference. And yet, Nicholls judges, The Cantos ‘retains its
Alpine prominence precisely because it fails to achieve the kind of coherence
Pound desired for it’ (p. 156). For Nicholls, as for Dennis, Taylor and other
recent Pound critics not included in Nadell’s volume, Pound’s failures are
inseparable from the enduring power of his poetry.
In Levenson’s volume that conjunction of what twenty years ago
might have been called ‘blindness and insight’ fortunately receives repeated
attention. His introduction attends to the ‘pressing need to clarify our
own late-century, millennial’ relation to Modernism: the real pressure for
a new understanding of Modernist activity, Levenson understands, is less
our debt to the past than it is our own need for self-clari cation before
an uncertain future. The range of work in the Companion to M odernism
is virtually encyclopedic. Michael Bell’s contribution alone essays ‘the
massive intellectual challenge offered by Marx and Nietzsche, Freud and
Frazer, Heidegger and Wittgenstein.’ Bell conceives ‘m etaphysics’ not in
strictly philosophical terms, but in view of developments in science, in the
practice of history, changing sexual mores, the period obsession with the
‘primitive’, and even – acknowledging our own moment – ‘the linguistic
turn’.
Lawrence Rainey’s essay is superb, and among his best work. Enlarging
on material he published previously in M odernism/M odernity, Rainey
critiques Andreas Huyssen’s celebrated account of ‘the Great Divide’ between
high and low culture, and traces ‘the institutional pro le’ of Modernism in
‘the social spaces and staging venues where it operated’ (p. 34). He eventually
turns to the question of patronage, and to the Modernist fascination with
little magazines and limited editions: less a fascination with ‘craft’, as previous
critics have seen it, than a deliberate manipulation of the ratio of supply and
demand. As Rainey demonstrates, the same kinds of market manipulation
informed the differences in (and dynam ics between) editorial policies and
circulation am ong perio dicals like the Little Review, the D ial and Vanity
Fair. This is a genuinely ground-breaking essay, with matter in it for dozens
of subsequent studies.
Other essays work to break down the received distinctions that framed
Modernist study for earlier generations. James Longenbach’s ‘Modern
Poetry’ considers the fundamental relation between poetry and politics
while scrutinizing the pressures on late-century notions of Modernist
poetry from the competing models of Romantic and Postmodernist poetry
on either side of it. Sara Blair’s ‘Modernism and the Politics of Culture’
contributes another argument against the segregation of Modernist New
York from the Harlem Renaissance, or as she usefully frames it, between
Greenwich Village and H arlem. These distinctions chime happily with
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Glen MacLeod’s point that, ‘although London may well have remained
the center for poetry during the 1910s, the New York poets were actually
in closer touch with the latest Parisian developments in the visual arts’
than were their counterparts in London (p. 207). Marianne DeKoven’s
‘Modernism and Gender’ barely avoids being crushed by the weight of so
vast a topic. For DeKoven, ‘a closer look at Modernism through its
complex deployment of gender reveals not only the centrality of femininity,
but also, again, an irresolvable ambivalence toward radical cultural change
at the heart of modernist formal innovation in the works of both male and
female writers’ (p. 175). Here is a thesis that resonates throughout the
manifold forms of Modernist production.
One of the surer signs that this volume sees Modernism in broad
cultural terms, and in terms that re ect the interests of our time, is the
essay that closes the volume: Michael Wood’s ‘Modernism and Film’.
Wood begins by acknowledging that ‘the largest fact about cinema over the
hundred years since its birth is its comfortable embrace of ancient
conventions of realism and narrative coherence’ (p. 217). In this vein,
Wood reviews Virginia Woolf ’s ‘The Cinema’ (1926), an essay that
does not seem to tell us a lot about the movies. She mentions only one
lm by name, glances at the contents or conceptions of a few others.
Yet with characteristic shrewdness and indirection Woolf manages to
evoke an essential feature of the cinema, an abstract, nonmimetic
expressive possibility that the lm industry, both before and after
1926, has devoted considerable amounts of time and money to
refusing.
(p. 219)
It is now a commonplace to observe the effect of montage and other
cinematic techniques on Modernist writing, but one of the welcome
features of Wood’s essay is his interest in viewing the relation from the
other side. Like Rainey, Blair and others, Wood conceives Modernism as a
dynamic exchange between elite and popular discourses.
Levenson provides the best description of his volume when he af rms
that it is ‘better to be minimalist in our de nitions of that conveniently
accid term Modernist and maximalist in our accounts of the diverse
modernizing works and movements, which are sometimes deeply congruent
with one another, and just as often opposed or even contradictory’ (p. 3).
If the weakness of the Pound Companion is its impulse to try to deliver ‘the
real’ Pound, one of the strengths of the Modernism Companion is that the
constituent essays generally resist trying to rm up any de nitions of their
subjects.
Instead, the essays in this volume recognize that what we understand
as ‘Modernist’ is largely a function of our attempts to understand ourselves.
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The function of the cultural studies orientations we nd in this volume,

and even in much of the Pound volume, is less an argument about what we
should regard from a receding historical moment than it is how , or in what
terms, we should understand those productions that we nd of enduring
power.
Colgate University
Willy Maley
Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, &
Renaissance Literature (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,

1999), xii + 227 pp., £32 (hardback)
Researching his ‘History of Ireland’, Engels made notes on a book by

Goldwin Smith entitled Irish History and Irish Character (1861). Irked
by what he saw as Smith’s justi cations of colonialism, Engels wrote:
The apologetic intentions of this English bourgeois professor are
concealed behind a cloak of objectivity. Even from a geographical
point of view, Ireland, he says, is destined to be subjugated by
England, and he attributes the slow and incomplete conquest to the
width of the Channel and to the fact that Wales is situated between
England and Ireland. 1
Thus Engels identi es a central tension in Smith’s thesis, for despite the
closeness as the crow ies of England and Ireland, water and Wales are
barriers to the progress of colonialism. The trouble with the appeal to
proximity is that it turns out to be merely an excuse for assimilation. It
also masks an intolerance of difference. Thus Smith, having asserted the
primacy of geography as the grounds of Anglo–Irish interaction, warns
that, should Ireland act untoward, she ought to be excluded:
An alien and disaffected element incorporated in a nation can only be
a source of internal division and weakness. It would be better in every
point of view, that the British Empire should be reduced to a single
island, to England, to Yorkshire or Kent, than that it should include
anything which is not really its own. 2
Proxim ity is problematized at the very moment that it is invoked as a
pretext for colonialism. Geography is political through and through, even
when it seems natural.
Andrew Murphy’s compelling monograph tackles the contradictions
and cross-cultural confusions of closeness and colonialism head-on,
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exploring, in a series of intricate individual studies, the question of

‘proximity’ in English Renaissance colonial discourse on Ireland as it is
worked through by the major authors of the period – Spenser, Shakespeare
and Jonson. The opening chapter, ‘“W hite Chimpanzees”: Encountering
Ireland’, sets out in sharp relief Murphy’s methodology and theoretical
matrix. Murphy uses the term ‘proximity’ as it is employed by Jonathan
Dollimore in Sexual D issidence (1991), citing Dollimore’s contention that
‘within metaphysical constructions of the Other what is typically occluded
is the signi cance of the proximate’, and his concomitant question as to
whether ‘we fear sameness as much as we fear difference?’
Murphy wants to stress the ‘complexities’ of Ireland’s colonial
position, ‘shaped by the extended relation of “proximity” between the two
islands of Britain and Ireland’, and he does so by underlining the

ambivalence of proximity, encapsulating as it does elements of identity and
difference:
Ireland and Britain are ‘proximate’ in the sense that they lie close to each
other geographically, but that geographical proximity has lead [sic] to
a complex relationship of closeness between the populations, so that,
even by the sixteenth century, they had shared an extended political,
ethnic, and religious heritage. . . . The value of the term proximate in
this latter sense is that it indicates, as well as a relationship of closeness,
a certain kind of ‘approximateness’ – the Irish are, in some respects, very
like the English, but they are also distinctly different from them – being
possessed of their own culture, language, legal systems, and traditions.
They are, in other words, im perfect aliens.
(pp. 6–7)
Murphy’s thesis is that the troubled nature of colonial discourse in an Irish
context is the result of ‘the imperfect Otherness of the Irish’.
If the ambiguous nature of proximity is the main conceptual plank of
Murphy’s book, its principal focus in terms of textual analysis is the work
of writers who represent English views of Ireland at their most penetrating,
polemical and profound. Engels saw Ireland as ‘the driving force of the
Empire’, and Murphy is one of a new breed of critics who seek to show the
extent to which English Renaissance culture was premised on the conquest
and colonization of Ireland. 3 Before launching into the readings of
Renaissance canonical texts that occupy the bulk of the book, Murphy has
a preliminary chapter on Gerald of Wales that ought perhaps to have served
as a warning. Gerald’s two tracts on Ireland are described by Murphy as
‘foundational documents in the tradition of British imaginings of Ireland’
(p. 9). The titles of the texts in question – the Topography and the Conquest
– are arguably suf cient to engender suspicion of the concept of proximity.
Topography and conquest go together like geography and colonialism.
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The phrase that forms the title is taken from a treatise entitled A True
Discovery of Ireland (1612), written by Sir John Davies, Attorney-General
of Ireland, where the author imagines a future state in which all that comes
between England and Ireland is the sea, and the bloody history of conquest
will be just so much water under the bridge: ‘we may conceive an hope,
that the next generation, will in tongue & heart, and every way else, becom
English; so as there will bee no difference or distinction, but the Irish Sea
betwixt us’ (p. 145).
This is about assimilation, not af nity. In two letters written to the
Jacobean Court in 1609, Davies touched on the topic of proximity in quite
different ways. In the rst, he alludes to a map-maker decapitated by the
native Irish ‘by cause they would not have their cuntrey discovered’. In the
second, he wishes that James I were able, ‘with the help of one of his farr-
Seeing Glasses’, to witness the work being done in Ulster to pave the way
for plantation. 4 These two letters reveal the need to make Ireland familiar
for colonial purposes, as well as the distance between court and colony, as
perceived by those ‘on the ground’.
Murphy takes Terry Eagleton and Edward Said to task for con ating
Irish and other colonial projects, painstakingly unpacking the process of
othering that critics engage in when they force Ireland into a postcolonial
framework, and pointing up the underlying complicity between this
othering of Ireland and the original colonial project. Old colonists and new
critics share a tendency to render Ireland remote for their own political
ends. For Murphy, ‘The Irish are curiously hybrid, approximating both
to the colonial stereotype and, simultaneously, to the English themselves’
(p. 15). Murphy sees this vacillation between the familiar and the foreign as
much more interesting and productive than any simple binary opposition.
The ‘seminess’ and sameness of Ireland is the stuff of dreams and
drama. As an example of ‘semi’ or ‘internal’ colonialism Ireland obviously
presents special problems, problems which make for intriguing exploita-
tion in literature. Murphy notes that unlike other communities colonized
during the Renaissance, ‘the Irish had, in this period, a relationship with
their English neighbours stretching back over several centuries, and they
shared a certain ethnic and religious heritage with them’ (p. 4). Behind the
rhetoric of ‘relationship’ and ‘shared . . . heritage’ lies a history of colonial
violence. In trying to correct the complicity of recent postcolonial criticism
in othering Ireland, Murphy gets caught up in the counter-rhetoric of
assimilation and incorporation. Irish historians of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries can be divided into those, like Nicholas Canny, who
see English colonial activity as part of an Atlantic project that would stretch
from Ulster to Virginia, and those like Steve Ellis, who argue for Ireland to
be placed rm ly within a British context. Murphy seems to me to accept all
too readily the arguments of revisionist historians such as Ellis, who insists
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that medieval and early modern Ireland ought to be seen as ‘another region
of the English state’. 5 In opting for Ellis’ ‘borderlands’ theory Murphy, in
my view, buys into a problematic British perspective. I nd Canny’s
Atlanticism much more palatab le than Ellis’ surreptitious assimilationist
strategy.6
Murphy constantly resists any comparison of Ireland and the ‘New
World’, but he does so in the face of comparisons made by early modern
English commentators. Murphy quotes Francis Bacon’s treatise on the
Ulster Plantation in support of his argument, where Bacon waves away
any expectation of exotic climate or culture in Ireland, epitomized in the
absence of oranges. Unfortunately for his argument, Murphy includes in
this quotation the conclusion that Bacon draws from the apparent absence
of an orientalist incentive: ‘So as, there can be found, no Foundation made

upon Matter of Pleasure, otherwise, then that the very Desire of Novelty, and
Experiment, in some stirring Natures, may work somewhat’ (p. 20). Novelty,
experiment, and an invitation to stirring natures – none of this suggests
that Ireland is regarded by Bacon as familiar territory. As for the absentee
orange, that was to be recti ed before the century was out.
Ireland is problematically proximate in that it is too close for comfort.
It was perceived as a back door for Catholic Europe by English Protestants
from Spenser to Milton. Murphy states: ‘Unlike Europe and its trans-
atlantic territories, the islands of Britain and Ireland lie in close physical
proximity to each other’ (p. 27). But what about the proximity of England
and Ireland to Europe, that is, to the Continent? W hat ought to have
been emphasized perhaps is the extent to which it was precisely Ireland’s
proximity to Europe that made colonization necessary. Murphy speaks of
‘an extended history of contact’, and ‘a certain close relationship’, which is
putting it mildly.
Murphy maintains that ‘the instability that proximity provokes
within colonial stereotyping rebounds on the colonizer, calling the English
sense of self-identity into question as much as the English sense of an Irish
identity predicated on essential and enduring Otherness’ (p. 58). Murphy
points to the ‘tropes of union and conjunction’ that abounded after
the Anglo–Scottish Union of Crowns, but he tends to see Anglo–Irish
proximity as not so much a trope as a fact of geography (p. 152). To see
Ireland as a back door is to succumb to the very backyardism that has been
used by the United States to interfere in Central America.
Not that proximity means much in our postmodern political milieu.
In an era of globalization, spheres of in uence go beyond any strict sense of
geographical proximity. Global policemen have a big beat. W hen trouble
ares, the U SA and Britain are always somewhere in the region. Anthony
Giddens de nes globalization ‘as the intensi cation of worldwide social
relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings
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are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.’7 If it was
ever applicable, except as a deliberate colonial strategy – and I remain
unconvinced by the arguments – then the notion of proximity appears
anachronistic today. It is no longer tenable in a world where Britain’s
backyard stretches from Belfast to Baghdad, via the Balkans.
A review is akin to a round of proximity talks, where critical distances
and resistances can be mapped o ut. Reading this challenging book,
by turns fascinating and infuriating, there were times when I felt myself
wishing a pox on proximity, which at its worst sm acks of colonialism by
proxy, while at others I found myself astonished at the depth and dexterity
of Murphy’s approximations. The problem lies with proximity, which is
such a slippery expression that it threatens to undo both the discourse of
colonialism and its nationalist mirror image, which may be no bad thing.
Proxim ity can be a pretext for intervention or occupation, or it can be
an argument for alliance and accommodation. The lie of the land has long
been used as a convenient excuse for annexation, appropriation, invasion,
and the impositio n of militar y rule. Dominance clo ses distances. Close
encounters of the territorial kind are different from those of the textual kind,
and Murphy’s intimate engagements with The Faerie Queene, Henry V and
Jonson’s Irish M asque at Court are much more persuasive than his pervasive
and problematic deployment of proximity as an overarching rubric.
Throughout his literary coverage, Murphy brings to book recent
work on Renaissance colonialism by David Baker, Andrew Had eld,
Chris Highley and Michael Neill, and he freely admits to ‘traversing
ground that has already been mapped out for me by others’ (p. 8). But
Murphy does more than merely record, however elegantly, the views of
others. He wrestles nimbly with a range of critical approaches and
proves himself an excellent sampler and synthesizer. Indeed, Murphy’s real
strength lies, not in his Renaissance scholarship, sound as it is, but in an
enviable ability to splice arguments drawn from current critical paradigms,
speci cally postcolonial theory and revisionist historiography. The concept
of proximity may ultimately be too narrow a term on which to hang his
subtle and searching observations, and readers may nd most helpful, as
I did, his eclectic use of ideas elicited from diverse disciplines, and the ways
in which he opens up our understanding of an earlier period by recourse to
debates raging in our own.
University of Glasgow
Notes
1 Frederick Engels, ‘From the preparatory material for the “H istory of Ireland”’,
in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, ed. R.
D ixon, trans. Angela Clifford (London: Lawrence and W ishart, 1978), p. 356 .
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2 Ibid., p. 365 .
3 E ngels to E duard Bernstein, 12 M arch 1881, in Marx and Engels, Ireland and
the Irish Question, p. 447. For recent encounters with E nglish Renaissance
colonialism see e.g. D avid J. Baker, B etween N ations: Shakespeare, Spenser,
M arvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford U niversity Press,
1997); Christopher H ighley, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Crisis in Ireland
(Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity Press, 1998); Claire McE achern, The
P oetics of English N ationhood, 1590 –161 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity
P ress, 1996).
4 C ited in the Introduction to Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew H ad eld and W illy
M aley (eds) Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Con ict,
1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity Press, 1993), p. 13.
5 Steven G. Ellis, Reform and Revival: English Government in Ireland , 1470 –153 4
(London: W oodbridge, 1986), p. 215.
6 See e.g. Nicholas P. Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic W orld,
1560– 1800 (Baltimore, M D : Johns H opkins University P ress, 1988).
7 Anthony G iddens, ‘The consequences of modernity’, extract reprinted
in Patrick W illiams and L aura Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-
Colonial Theory: A Reader (Brighton, Sussex: H arvester W heatsheaf, 1993),
p. 181.
Drew Milne
Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (London:

Macmillan, 1999), 192 pp., £12.99 (paperback)
John Russell Brown, New Sites For Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience
and Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1999), 224 pp., £12.99 (paperback)
Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations,

Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), 248 pp., £15.99
(paperback)
During the 1917 Revolution the Bolsheviks debated what to do about

peasant attacks on churches avenging centuries of religious oppression and
tithe theft. Such iconoclasm appeared to echo the materialist atheism
of socialism. As the English and French Revolutions revealed, however,
iconoclasm tends to reproduce rather than abolish religion, ending up in
new cults of idolatry. The Bolsheviks took the strategic decision to turn
churches into museums. This echoes bourgeois conceptions of cultural
heritage in opposition to futurist and avant-garde desires to destroy the
institutions of religion and art. But Bolshevik resistance to fundamentalist
attacks on fundamentalism was well judged. Socialism does not involve
taking a JCB digger to the pyramids just because those who built them
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believed in false gods. Does Shakespeare nevertheless belong in a new

museum?
I was reminded of such issues by desires to take a hammer and sickle
to London’s new Globe Theatre. Artistic practice in Britain seems doomed
to repeating greatest hits for tourists rather than engaging with the present.
The irony of the new Globe, apparently the rst major thatched building
in London since the re of 1666, is heightened by its proximity to the
Bankside power station currently being transformed into a new modem
art museum. Capitalism’s transformation of avant-garde art into museum
culture makes these buildings sites where the social contradictions of
secular spirit are pickled and preserved. But as the Bolsheviks recognized,
new social frames can deny art’s relative autonomy. The theatrical pleasures
of the new Globe are those of a peculiarly virtual museum, a ghostly

pseudo-historical voyeurism. Its performance aesthetics are comparable
to so-called living museums and military enthusiasts who reconstruct
massacres for light entertainment. But from the painfully harsh wooden
seats to curiously wooden performances, the experience reveals the need to
resist iconoclasm, and to attend instead to the social contradictions
involved in the historical reorientation of theatre as a live art.
Pauline Kiernan’s Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe is one of the
rst of what promises to be a thriving subsect of the Shakespeare industry.
As someone who teaches courses on Shakespeare in performance I recognize
a need for analysis. Sober demolitions of ‘authenticity’ in actually existing
postmodern pastiche would provide useful health warnings: believing in
the Globe could seriously damage your historical imagination. Kiernan’s
stance is that of a participant-observer funded by a Leverhulme Research
Fellowship. Part I of her book considers ‘The Shock of the Old’ through
quotations from the often scanty evidence familiar to theatre historians.
Part II discusses the Globe’s Henry V. Sam Wanamaker wanted one
production every season to be as ‘authentic’ as possible, and Henry V was
chosen for the opening season, though audiences generally assume that
‘authenticity’ is the aim of the whole theatre and are puzzled by perverse
modernizations in the midst of rampant historicism. Part III provides
some upbeat and uncritical documentation of what actors and participants
have felt about this new theatre. The Globe’s value for testing scholarly
speculations is self-evident. Kiernan con rms as much: ‘Going back to
Styan’s Shakespeare’s Stagecraft of 1967 after watching the rst performances
at the new Globe, one is struck by the accuracy and depth of his
understanding of the effects of the physical conditions of an Elizabethan
open playhouse on the performance and reception of a play’ (p. ix). One
might quibble with the hermeneutic circularity in which the Globe
con rms the same academic accounts on which it is based. More awkward
are Kiernan’s claims for the implications of the Globe for the future: ‘This
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book re ects the hope that a reconstruction of the Globe offers an
opportunity to recover something of the dynamic which existed in the
theatrical space for which Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote many
of their plays so that it can invigorate live theatre today’ (p. xi). Thus far
the Globe’s attempts to re-create the past have overdetermined future-
orientated invigoration, but such is the problem of museum Shakespeare.
Kiernan’s book is offered more in a spirit of rapid documentation than
qualitative analysis. Her enthusiastic defence of the Globe’s potential to
reveal lost theatre practices involves a rather one-dimensional evocation of
‘conventional’ theatre, as if existing theatre practices were not more various.
Experience of the RSC’s Swan Theatre suggests, for example, that the
latter’s reconstruction of selected aspects of Elizabethan theatre allows for
intriguing reworkings of ‘historical’ and modern staging. Kiernan’s claims

for the novelty of connections between audience and actor at the Globe
seem somewhat naive. She suggests, for example, that reviving the post-
tragedy jig will have considerable implications, but its use after the 1999
production of Antony and Cleopatra was not that considerable, though
engaging as a form of curtain call.
W hile the new Globe may stir debates among theatre historians, the
significance for contemporar y theatre’s future is more limited. Kiernan
reports that ‘a surprising majority in the yard stuck it out in the rain for the
complete duration in “wet” performances’ (p. 5), as though unfamiliar with
audiences for sport. In my own experience of ‘wet’ performances, the semi-
translucent rain wear provided by the Globe turns the gro undlings into
an array of dancing condoms. The effect is entertaining as performance
art, but neither instructive nor invigorating. Similarly naive are Kiernan’s
comments on the need for several cam eras to record perform ances and
playgoers’ response. On this evidence, Skysport has more to teach us about
live theatre’s future. Two principal ‘revelations’ claimed by Kiernan in
a chapter entitled ‘Revelations and discoveries’ are that the audience
quickly learned to accept a woman played by a man and that the Globe is
‘pre-eminently a listening space, a place for telling a story’ (p. 117). These
are hardly revelations. Actors at the Globe, moreover, seem barely conscious
of performing dramatic poetry, though embarrassment with verse is endemic
in contemporary Shakespeare productions. The surprises mostly concern the
audience. Kiernan tells us that an unusually large number of playgoers fainted
during performances and that the com pany was much troubled by the
need to ‘control’ noisy schoolchildren. In general, however, Kiernan has
little to say about audience demo graphy or whether the new Globe’s
commercial success amounts to more than a tourist come student museum
experience. Audience dynam ics in the productions I have seen prom pt
speculations regarding the depth of licence available to Elizabethan or
Jacobean audiences. Modern actors and audience appear blithely indifferent
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to the sociopolitical sensitivities po rtrayed, and need to be confronted

with their historical complacency, if only to become aware of the liberties
fought for as secular theatre. Kiernan’s account is a useful early attempt to
document the new Globe , but it is disappo inting as a critical discussio n
of its theatrical and ideological significance , adding little to the debates
between Andrew Gurr and Graham Holderness published in The European
English Messenger.
John Russell Brown’s New Sites For Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience
and Asia approaches the cultural paralysis of museum Shakespeare through
experiences as a participant-observer and theatre tourist. This is an avowedly
impressionistic book. Brown’s long professional and academic experience
of Shakespeare is reconsidered in an engagingly enthusiastic form o f
revisio nism . Part I offers accounts of ‘visiting’ a range of Asian theatres.

Part II applies this experience as a process of ‘returning’. The project is to
imagine new and popular form s of theatre. Brown opposes the often
celebratory academic reception of contemporary Shakespeare performances:
‘Productions by the most respected and successful companies of our time do
not provide appropriate sites in the mind’s eye for imagining the plays in
performance’ (p. 161). He argues, accordingly, for new forms of reception
aesthetics: ‘theatre’s essential life lies in the imaginations of the audience, not
in playscripts or what happens on stage’ (p. 2). His polemical purpose is
clearest in the concluding ‘Forward Prospect’: ‘W hen we go to the Globe we
do not travel backwards in time but enter a little, carefully fabricated theme
world with the rarity, pretence, and educational advantages of an Elizabethan
theme park. To stage Shakespeare’s plays authentically at the new Globe, a
culture which has almost entirely disappeared would have to be reconstructed
along with it’ (p. 19 1). Brown’s awareness of the problem of audience
reconstruction contrasts with Kiernan’s account. For Brown: ‘Asian theatres
offer a better site than the new Globe for reconsideration and reform .
Flourishing in their own rights as the original Globe was able to do, they have
no experim ental or educational agenda’ (p. 19 1). Brown’s scepticism is
productive but his counter-proposals are no less pro blematic, offering a
different version of the hermeneutic circle. Selective admiration for aspects
of Asian theatre is used to con rm an ideologically selective view of the old
Globe.
Directions to emerge from Brown’s account include giving greater
prominence in an understanding of Elizabethan plays to entrances, costume
changes, and the less-rehearsed qualities of more spontaneous performance
practices. The old Globe’s conditions of production involved rapid
rehearsal. But the assumption that this can be recovered by a greater stress
on improvisation or via cue-scripts, a tendency of the Original Shakespeare
Company’s work, is a theoretical hypothesis with Luddite consequences.
The skills of Elizabethan actors working as a professional ensemble
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have been lost, as has the expertise of the regular Elizabethan playgoer.
Neither can be re-created without constructing a new culture and society of
performance. The awkward consequences of reconstruction are suggested
by Mark Rylance’s claim that he modelled his new Globe performance
as Cleopatra on Princess Diana. Brown dramatizes the dif culties of
such ideological fantasies. On the one hand, he asks: ‘Would a renewed
emphasis on ceremony in productions of Shakespeare’s plays lead,
inevitably, to museum-like reproductions, attempting to mirror a forgotten
and irrecoverable society’ (p. 65). On the other hand, he claims that:
‘A search for new and current ceremonies in the audience’s own lives would
offer a more open road to the rediscovery of that element of the plays which
uses purely physical means to concentrate attention and express relation-
ships’ (p. 68). This echoes the value accorded to the ‘purely physical’
in much contemporary theatre ideology, as if the mediated dynamics of
performance could somehow return to the live body. The values accorded
to particular performance dynamics are inevitably selective. Brown cites
Kabuki cross-dressing to suggest that recent interest in the homoeroticism
of the boy-actor has been overdone. As with Kiernan’s suggestions regarding
the boy-actor, theatre practice is enlisted as an ideological resistance to
critical and theoretical reinterpretations of Shakespeare.
W hile Brown resists the tendency to fetishize theatre architecture, he
nevertheless fetishizes non-Western theatre practices as alternatives to the
contemporary culture industry. This allows him to imagine Shakespeare’s
original production conditions in new ways, notably in suggestions
regarding ‘possessive intervention and mutual collusion during perfor-
mance of a scripted play’ (p. 15). In this vein, Brown attempts to recapture
the Globe for the imagination. Although their approaches are different,
Brown shares Kiernan’s concern for the reinvigoration of live theatre, and
his nostalgia for forms of theatre lost in the ‘West’ is comparable. Brown,
like Kiernan, tends to romanticize the old Globe, as if a return to original
performance dynamics might free Shakespeare for a rebirth: ‘We cannot
visit Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres to join with audiences that took a
more active role than in our own theatres but in Bombay we can experience
at rst hand the im provised interplay which arises in a similar kind of
performance’ (p. 101). This ‘we’ is evoked in surprisingly naive ways
given the occasions he provides for thinking about audience differences.
Temptations to idealize globalized theatrical anthropology to recover a lost
Shakespearean Eden vitiate such modes of ‘internationalism’. Kiernan
and Brown con rm the contradictory trajectory sketched by Peter Brook’s
conception of ‘rough theatre’. Brown points to the work of Katie Mitchell
and Simon McBurney as prom ising developments, but Brown’s ‘return’ to
contemporary British practice irons out the multicultural contradictions
thrown up by new sites for Shakespeare.
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Given Brown’s tendency to orientalize Asian theatre for imagining a

newly globalized but apparently precolonial Shakespeare, Thomas Cartelli’s
Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations
provides a welcome alternative perspective. W hat emerges is not a survey
of ‘Third World’ appropriations of Shakespeare, but an eclectic range of
conjunctions, perhaps best indicated by Cartelli’s own summary:
polemical essays by Walt W hitman; a nineteenth century play
entitled Jack Cade commissioned and staged by the rst major
Shakespearean actor; the 1849 Astor Place Riot; an essay on labor-
management reform authored by the social activist Jane Addam s;
novels by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Michelle Cliff, Aphra Behn, Tayeb
Salih, Nadine Gordimer, and Robert Stone; lms directed by James

Ivory and Gus Van Sant; and a Shakespeare tercentenary masque
performed on the campus of the City College of New York.
(p. 2)
Part I explores democratic vistas provided by American appropriations.
Parts II and III consider the rami cations of The Tempest and Othello in
postcolonial contexts. The focus is on diverse moments of Shakespearean
revision, misreadings and appropriation, rather than on systematic recep-
tion history. Against the way Kiernan and Brown refer back to idealized
pasts, Cartelli positions Shakespeare within a series of cultural and political
con icts. Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V lm is dismissed as a conservative
reworking, while Peter Greenaway’s lm Prospero’s Books is ‘thoroughly
colonial in its postmodernism’ (p. 203). But the cultural politics of early
modern England or contemporary Britain are largely ignored. Instead, the
resources assembled suggest the dynamics of radical resistance in the ‘new’
worlds of the ‘Third World’ and America. In this hermeneutic circle,
Shakespeare’s texts are subordinated to what history has made of them,
while the attempt is made to discern new forms of agency in the texts
produced by subsequent writers.
Among Cartelli’s most interesting case studies is Walt W hitman’s
critique of Shakespeare’s comedies within conceptions of Shakespeare as an
anti-democratic poet of aristocracy. Resistance to the interests Shakespeare
has been made to serve can then inform an understanding of American
‘postcolonial’ resistances to English literature. Cartelli nevertheless begs
questions about the use of Shakespeare by other American writers, such as
Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville or Louis Z ukofsky. This in turn opens
questions about the mediation of Shakespeare by English romanticism,
developed through con ict with hegemonic forms of literary classicism and
authoritarianism. But while Cartelli acknowledges that Shakespeare has
been ‘an unusually charged medium of textual exchange’ (p. 23), his use
of selected critical moments makes it dif cult to understand the radical
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potentials found in Shakespeare by successive generations, as though the

dominant models of Shakespeare were truer than such intimations of
radical difference. The dynamics of creative borrowing are overshadowed
by the need for postcolonial narratives to relegate Shakespeare to the
superseded domain of anti-colonial applications. On the one hand, Cartelli
claim s of Season of Migration that: ‘Salih’s novel decisively arrests the traf c
in signs and markers that allows the originary act of misrepresentation that
is Othello to underwrite succeeding acts of misrecognition’ (p. 169). On the
other hand, Cartelli asserts that Salih also indicates that: ‘there is no
particularly crucial role for Shakespeare to play at this juncture in Third
World postcolonial societies’ (p. 169). If a process of misrepresentation
whose origins are continually reproduced can be arrested, it is hard to see
why reading postcolonial texts as Shakespearean revisions amounts to more

than recolonizing such texts. A more dialectical account of the relation
between production, reception and reproduction would suggest how
Shakespeare is both a help and a hindrance, part of the history that needs
to be buried while also a creative resource for resistances to forms of
political and cultural oppression.
Cartelli’s arguments for thinking of the USA as a postcolonial culture
help to offset the tendency in ‘postcolonial’ discourse to ignore the
dynamic relations between colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. W hile
Cartelli is more attuned to problems of intercultural con ict than Brown,
there are residues of a comparable idealization. Cartelli claims, for example,
that: ‘Third World writers are better positioned to conduct oppositional
transactions with Shakespeare and the Shakespeare myth, and to bring
to them alternative models of social and textual organization’ (p. 11). The
context suggests that such writers are better positioned than Americans.
This invites questions about British or European writers such as Bond or
Brecht, but the book’s general tendency is to construe resistance to British
imperialism as a de ning feature of ‘critical’ rather than merely ‘emulative’
appropriations of Shakespeare. Cartelli reads towards the hope that
Shakespeare’s plays may be allowed to circulate ‘more freely, unconstrained
by their overextended afterlife as adjuncts to British imperial resolve and
postcolonial rage and resentment’ (p. 4). This motivates the idealization
of non-British and non-American positions as ‘better’, despite the obvious
economic contradictions which such claims elide. Later Cartelli claims
that: ‘The Tempest is not only complicit in the history of its successive
misreadings, but responsible in some measure for the development of
the ways in which it is read’ (p. 104). But the causal relation between
Shakespeare and British imperialism remains rather obscure. Shakespeare’s
positioning in the ‘second’ world is left undiscussed.
Cartelli also claims that: ‘The socially divisive references to Othello
generated by more recent events like the O.J. Simpson trial indicate that
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Othello has not only failed to unsettle or dislodge established racial

stereotypes, but has played a formative role in shaping them into what may
well be termed the “Othello complex”’ (p. 123). W hile liberal claims that
Othello is not a racist play are often contradicted by the play’s reception,
this does not explain the play’s agency or formative role as that which is
responsible for its reception. If the play’s dramatization makes a social
complex recognizable, then the use made of this dramatization can also
be critical, a representation which allows ideology to be examined. W ithout
some account of the power of writing to shape reception, creative
appropriations of Shakespeare cannot circulate any more freely than new
critical readings or stagings of Shakespeare. Cartelli’s account of how
Othello xes and enforces racial stereotypes is too brie y stated, and
requires an aesthetics of production less dependent on the assumptions

of reception history. Such objections are not decisive since Cartelli asserts
that: ‘The Shakespeare reproduced by these texts and events is not directly
answerable to the evaluative or interpretive criteria that apply to an under-
standing of Shakespearean drama at its moment of production’ (pp. 1–2).
As such, his book is not about Shakespeare but about what becomes of
Shakespeare’s work. Nevertheless, given the reproduction of Shakespeare as
a con ict of interpretations, the central part played by Shakespeare in new
conditions of production remains curiously inconsequential.
A gulf between aesthetics of reception and production em erges in
all three books, suggesting an impasse in the critical thinking informing
theatre, academic histo ricism, postcolonial writing and S hakespearean
teaching. The impulse to shut down secular theatres or position Shakespeare
in new m useum s rem ains torn betw een bardolatr y and iconoclasm.
Appro priations suggest that Shakespeare is available for a variety of
purposes and contexts. Cultural relativism regarding the value and truth
of Shakespeare leaves Shakespeare’s own agency or complicity open-ended,
both ideologically co nstrained and yet fruitfully creative, witho ut
determinate content. Attempts to show how implicated Shakespeare has
been in cultural appropriations demystify Shakespeare’s assum ed authority,
but the effect is to reinscribe the interminable iterability of Shakespeare for
new and emergent sites. It is tempting to think that iconoclastic revisions of
Shakespeare can destroy his aesthetic status, but the continual emergence
of reinvented Shakespeares suggests that a mo re radical refram ing of the
museum s o f Shakespeare is needed. The critical task is to displace the
authority of the museum and selective reception histories to enable more
active and meaningful aesthetics o f production. For as long as new sites
for Shakespeare idealize the present conditions they would transform, the
reproduction of Shakespeare will remain within a nostalgia that reinvents
early m odernism. The postm odern Shakespeares offered in these bo oks
suggest that it rem ains easier and m ore critical, both comm ercially and
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pedagogically, to argue for new cultural forms through Shakespeare than

through the history of Shakespearean iconoclasm and museum building.
The more dif cult task would be to write an account of the present that
no longer needed any reference to the pro ductive contradictions of
Shakespeare.
Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
Alex Benchimol
Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds), Re guring Revolutions:

Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic

Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), x + 376 pp.,
£31.50 (hardback), £12.50 (paperback)
One of the most positive developments in interdisciplinary studies of

the last decade has been the richly varied debate concerning all aspects
of cultural history as a new working research methodology. From the ‘new’
cultural history to New Historicism this largely internal academic dialogue
between the departments of history and English literature has allowed for
new conceptions in the historical interpretation of modern aesthetics,
intellectual practices and cultural politics. W hat is at stake in this ongoing
methodological discourse is more than individual de nitions of academic
identity in our brave new world of pluralist cultural studies. The very
nature of historical periodization and the ways in which we conceive
historical periods as discrete episodes in the larger narrative of modernity
seem also to be implicitly questioned in this debate about cultural
historiography. Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker’s new cutting-edge
collection, Re guring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English
Revolution to the Romantic Revolution, adds to this debate by examining the
aesthetic, ideological and cultural continuities between two formative
periods in British cultural history. Like their in uential previous collection,
The Politics of Discourse (1987), Sharpe and Zwicker have set out to
question in some fundamental ways the current scholarly consensus
centred around the Renaissance and the long eighteenth century. Simply
on the basis of the fascinating contributions from Zwicker and Sharpe
alone, this ambitious new study may yet arrest the agging fortunes of
New Historicism with its refreshing re-examination of cultural practices
between the Renaissance and Romanticism.
In their prefatory remarks, Sharpe and Zwicker argue that the current
way of conceiving historical periods in English literature and other
associated elds conceals the internal ideological continuities to be found
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between such watershed cultural episodes as the English and Romantic

Revolutions. They write:
The conventional periodization that separates the Puritan Revolution

and the Romantic Revolution forecloses aesthetic and cultural histories
enacted between and by those revolutions. We seek to return aesthetic
history to the center of politics, to argue that the aesthetic writes the
political – even that the subjugation of the aesthetic is an attenuation
of the political narrative itself.
(p. ix)
This turning on its head of the organizing components of conventional

historiography seeks to map out a larger historical framework for the kinds
of cultural microhistories made familiar by New Historicism, for Sharpe

and Zwicker seem to argue that the cultural and ideological continuities
between historical (or literary) episodes actually amount to a new aesthetic
history of British modernity. So, for example, the failed politics of cultural
representation during the Commonwealth analysed by Sharpe in his essay,
‘“An image doting rabble”: the failure of Republican culture’, is actually
instrumental in de ning the ideological struggles enclosed within the larger
political development of British democracy. If we take this argument to its
logical limits, cultural history should replace political history as the new
scholarly paradigm in British historiography. In short, the cultural now
de nes the political.
There is something immensely attractive for literary and cultural
historians in this reconception of historical practice. Aspects of scholarship
long taken for granted in these elds – the meaning of literary texts in
their larger sociopolitical contexts; the ideological signi cance of the
development of cultural institutions; the value of explicating marginal
cultural practices in a particular period as a way of complicating a historical
picture – would now seem to constitute the new frontier of an enlarged
historiographical practice. This new conception of British history forces
scholars to seek out larger continuities that may be contained within the
cultural politics of discrete historical episodes. According to Sharpe and
Zwicker:
A recognition of 1649 and 1789 as both aesthetic and political

moments discloses a narrative quite different from the disjunctures
and vicissitudes of dynastic change, party fortune, and factional
intrigue. It suggests a long historical trajectory from the collapse of
one model of a naturalized polity to the construction of another
organic conception of the social, perhaps too a history of romanticism
inscribed in part by civil war.
(p. 4)
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This kind of ambitious historical extrapolation helps to link up the

distinctive contributions in the collection, from the Sharpe essay that
examines the failed cultural project of the Commonwealth, to Zwicker’s
own study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century marginalia as a kind of
alternative site of political con ict, entitled ‘Reading the margins: politics
and the habits of appropriation’, by way of Harriet Guest’s ‘“These neuter
somethings”: gender difference and commercial culture in mid-eighteenth-
century England’, an ideological explication of the meaning of gender
during the commercial revolution of the mid-eighteenth century in
London, and Roy Porter’s ‘Medicine, politics and the body in late Georgian
England’, which examines the politics of medicine as part of the larger
political discourse of the period. These essays continually emphasize the
in uence of aesthetic practices on larger questions of state politics and elite
intellectual culture. The collection’s eleven essays are organized into ve
sections which explore both orthodox political themes like ‘Republic and
monarchy’, and some of the more tangential considerations of cultural
history like the politics of gardening in ‘Nature and culture’.
Kevin Sharpe’s essay convincingly argues the thesis that the Common-
wealth’s lack of a coherent and compelling public iconography – or indeed
any coherent overall cultural programme – was the primary reason for its
political collapse. Sharpe suggests that the Commonwealth’s larger political
failure lay in its inability to establish an effective counter to the still powerful
hold that royalist imagery was able to secure on the post-revolutionar y
popular consciousness: ‘The failure of republican politics was a failure to
forge a republican culture that erased or suppressed the images of kingship,
images that sustained a monarchical polity, even in the absence of the king’
(p. 26). Indeed, even the prodigious polemical output from the new regime’s
most talented intellectuals such as John Milton and Marchamont Nedham
only served to remind their readership of the royal absence they sought so
desperately to erase from the collective m emory of post-revolutionar y
England. It was not only in printed intellectual argument that the
Commonwealth failed to establish its hold over the people. Of cial state
iconography from the portrait of Oliver Cromwell to the publication of
popular hom ilies, also defined the new cultural experiment of the
Commonwealth in terms of a lost royal presence. In some cases this lack of
an of cial visual counterpoint to the overthrown monarchy was a deliberate
choice of the Puritan intellectual establish ment. Milton typi ed the attitude
of the new state by igno ring the ‘image doting rabble’, as he put it, and
instead concentrating on the construction o f a revolutionary literature
worthy of Europe’s newest republic. As Sharpe argues, this noble but
misguided cultural strategy was the primar y reason the Comm onwealth
could not counter the powerful residual hold of the Stuart monarchy over
the people of England: ‘If Milton’s contempt for images expressed a broader
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reluctance to engage on these terms, it was a polemical disaster. The image

of the king dominated the visual culture of the Commonwealth; given the
force of symbols and emblems the absent king, as we shall argue, remained
a presence and power in the political culture too’ (p. 35). Sharpe’s argument
rem inds the modern reader of the vital political impo rtance of cultural
propaganda to the construction of democracy in fragile early modern states
like the English Commonwealth. In short, the failure of the cultural project
of revolution in England ensured the return of monarchy in the Restoration.
Steven Zwicker’s essay examines the various practices of reading and
literary consumption as a guide to the hidden discourse of con ict during
this same period. By studying the differing ways that readers during this
period ‘marked their texts’, and hence contributed to the wider political
debate, Zwicker restores a direct political agency to an activity previously

considered private and passive. The focus moves from the writers who
‘constructed’ the debate to the readers who interpreted and refracted it in
their many secret readerly appropriations: ‘In such a world it was not only
the production of texts but as well their consumption that was driven by
partisanship; with the raising of arms, reading was commandeered by
parties and faction and the apprehending of books was shaped by political
urgencies and religious passions’ (p. 102). Zwicker shows that the m ilitary
con ict that dominated the middle years of the seventeenth century in
England was accompanied by a vigorous cultural con ict played out in the
contestatory reading practices of republican and royalist gentlemen. More
importantly for the overall thesis of the collection, Zwicker demonstrates
that these differing habits of consumption developed during the political
crisis years of revolution and restoration persisted and in uenced the
conception of cultural subjectivity during the early eighteenth century and
up to the Romantic period. W hat his essay makes clear is that there
never existed politically neutral ways of reading or consuming literary texts.
From the engaged reading practices exhibited during the revolution to the
more re ective modes practised during the Romantic period, Zwicker
convincingly shows that these ‘rhythms of intellectual habit . . . are driven
and constituted by public life’ (p. 115).
Harriet Guest’s contribution explores the ways in which the consumer
revolution of the eighteenth century in England created vexing cultural
ambiguities – including crises of gender identity – for some contemporary
essayists and novelists. This was nowhere expressed more directly than
in the ways in which these writers interpreted the super cial blurring
of gender encouraged by the fashions of the day. Guest demonstrates
how, in the minds of some of these writers, anxieties of moral degeneration
often accompanied the cultural trends born of commercial revolution:
‘Fashionable society represents, often in the same breath, the same sentence,
both the desirous and competitive energies that are seen to characterize
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commercial progress, and the indolence, frivolity, and dissipation to which

commercial industry is opposed’ (p. 174). Guest shows how this cultural
crisis was de ned by the differing intersections of class, gender and political
ideology in her review of the essays and novels produced to satisfy the
appetites of a growing middle-class reading public. The periodicals of
the day re ected these concerns of a culture increasingly obsessed by a
private commercial ethos that often destabilized the boundaries of class and
nationhood:
In this culture, the periodicals suggest, notions of the public become
peripheral, almost accidental to the private interests that are the
motor of commercial progress, and within the apparently expanding
sphere of the private that is governed by commerce, distinctions –

between social stations, between national identities, or between vice
and virtue – seem increasingly evasive, seem to melt into air.
(p. 179)
In the second part of her essay she looks at some of these cultural
contradictions of mid-eighteenth-century English consumer capitalism
manifested in the novels of several lesser known women writers. In these
readings she demonstrates how gender itself becomes problematized in
the new cultural politics of fashion and consumption. It is within this
renegotiation of gender identity, she argues, that the new man or woman
of feeling can nally unite ‘in their ambivalent relation to the commercial
culture that produced them’ (p. 194).
The medical histo rian Roy Porter’s essay traces the conception of
the body as a m etaphor for political conflict during the turbulent
years between the French Revolution and the rst Reform Bill in Britain.
Porter suggests that the development of medicine during this period was
accompanied by a parallel discourse of popular satire that seized upon images
of the sick body and the corrupting physician to com municate popular
political fears, hopes and aspirations. He writes, ‘In many ways a medical
politics thus emerged that mirrored the wider political struggles of the age
of reform’ (p. 220). Perhaps the most intriguing insight to be gained from
Porter’s metaphorical history is how ideas of physical sickness during these
years contributed to the larger aesthetics and subjectivity of Romanticism:
‘new representations of the body and o f suffering form ed an essential
component in that journey into the self that constitutes the intense
subjectivity of the romantic interlude’ (p. 222). The essay culminates in an
examination of the Anatomy Act of 1832, a medically progressive reform
which allowed practitioners for the rst time to dissect unclaimed corpses
from public hospitals. However, in Porter’s narrative this supposedly neutral
legislation is analysed in terms of both popular fears of the secretive practices
of an elite profession, and the metaphorical dissection of the Reform Bill by
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reactionary Tories. This historical episode completes a cultural histor y of

medicine in which patient–doctor relations often mirrored the adversarial
dynamic of political con ict, so that ‘Politicians were practitioners and the
people patients, suffering from the diseases of war, impressment, taxation,
and poverty’ (p. 234).
Refiguring Revolutions begins with a frank acco unt of the strengths
and limitations of progressive interdisciplinary projects like the New
Historicism and British cultural studies. W hile acknowledging their role in
re-situating literary texts within historical and material contexts, Sharpe and
Zwicker bemoan the lack of methodological integrity of a movement whose
historical practice ‘seemed serendipitous rather than deeply researched,
casually anecdotal, in short, insuf ciently historical’ (p. 1). This critique of
New Historicist practice seems oddly placed in the introduction of a study

that, at its best, seem s to co mplement the signal techniques of N ew
Historicism within a larger historical and cultural schema. Indeed, the
theoretical absence at the heart of m uch, but not all New Histo ricist
practice can be recovered in Sharpe and Zwicker’s ambitious project to map
various cultural practices across som e of the pivotal aesthetic and political
episodes of modernity in Britain. But how does one nally assess the value
of this collection beyond its obvious utility as a macrohistorical and meta-
theoretical corrective to m uch New Histo ricist scholarship? By bringing
together contributors drawn equally from the disciplines of English literature
and histo ry, and mo reover by establishing as their guiding histo rical
parameters the political and aesthetic markers of the English and Romantic
Revolutions respectively, Sharpe and Zwicker have attempted to construct a
new historical framework for the practice of cultural history that respects
the political integrity of aesthetic practices while also recognizing the need
for a more inclusive, and more rmly grounded, materialist conception of
cultural politics. If this effort in the end resem bles a more thoro ughly
historicized take on New Historicism, then perhaps we should accept this as
another small victory in the long march towards a truly interdisciplinary and
materialist practice of cultural history.
University of Glasgow
Tim Woods
Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent
Occasions (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), xv + 376
pp. £14.95 (paperback)
The celebrated soccer manager, Bill Shankly, once famously wrote: ‘Some
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people think football is a matter of life and death. I don’t like that attitude.
I can assure them it is much more serious than that.’ Substitute poetics
for football, and one gets an inkling of Marjorie Perloff ’s commitment
to the subject of poetic writing in its various forms during the twentieth
century. Perhaps I exaggerate, but for the past twenty years or so Perloff
has been investigating, describing and explaining modernist practices and
tenaciously seeking to preserve the vitality, pertinence and relevance of
avant-garde artistic practices to contemporary aesthetic concerns and
issues. With books on Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, modernist poetics,
John Cage and Ludwig Wittgenstein, she has charted the wide panorama
of poetic activities, from the condensed poetry of Imagism to the expansive
‘open eld’ work of the Black Mountain poets; and from the linguistic and
social experiments of the Italian Futurists and the Russian Constructivists

to the radical linguistic examinations of the language poets. She appears
equally at home with visual art, photography, contemporary m usic, word
art, philosophy, literary theory, ethnography and poetry, and manages
comparative analyses with ease between the practices of European, South
American, Russian and American artists, due to her dexterity with
languages other than English.
Poetry On & Off The Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions extends this
breathtaking comprehension of the contemporary artistic world in a
collection of fourteen essays published over the past decade, thematically
connected by their reconsideration of the role that historical and cultural
change has played in the evolution of twentieth-century poetry and
poetics. Her persistent question is how poetry can act as a marker of
or document for cultural and social understanding; or whether and how
poetry’s function on the page (i.e. the stylistic techniques, typographies,
generic decisions, metrical forms) can be connected to its function off the
page (i.e. its ideological relations to and impact upon wider cultural and
political issues, such as war, feminism, racial differences, national identity).
Blending micro-analyses with macro-analyses of poetry – thus avoiding
the frequent weak link in programmatic approaches to poetry driven
by particular literary theories, which fail to key grand ideological under-
standings into local practical analysis – Perloff invites the reader, not in
any patronizing way, to accompany her quests and forays into the often
apparently impenetrable forests of avant-garde poetics. Thus new paths
are forged in her chapter addressing the rise of the American Objectivist
poets in the 1930s and their baf ing set of poetic practices, as she offers
extremely good close readings of poems by Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky,
Edward Dahlberg, and photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott;
in her chapter on the culture and counterculture of the 1950s, wide
clearings are created as she offers a synchronic study of 1956, exam ining
a poem by Richard W ilbur, ‘The Family of Man’ museum exhibit,
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photography by Robert Frank, and close readings of poetry by Ginsberg,

O’Hara and Ashbery. In all instances, the reader is engaged, informed,
enlightened and encouraged to think laterally about the interactions and
effects of poetic activity.
Indeed, the synchronic study is a characteristic approach: a single
issue of the little magazine Pagany, a year in the mid-1950s, a case-study
of a particular poet’s oeuvre – Perloff is most exciting when she works
laterally from a cultural event, document, work or text and combines
this with her deft close readings. Although the book is structured in two
sections, ‘Histories and issues’ followed by a series of case-studies, the latter
are never entirely divorced from the former: individuals and particulars
are never treated autonomously or formalistically estranged from the social
and ideological circum stances which determine them. Perloff constantly

and insistently urges the necessity of historicization when seeking to under-
stand the signi cance of cultural artefacts. Countering the universalism
inherent in a 1950s’ W ilbur poem or a museum exhibit, cautioning against
the unhistorical use of radicalism when placing a Ginsberg poem alongside
something from the early 1920s, arguing for a more careful historiciza-
tion of what constitutes ‘free verse’, Perloff contends that it is only by
contextualizing and historicizing that we can understand the politics of
the constructions of everyday life and the representations of society. For
example, in a discussion of Michel Leiris’ work on African ethnography,
the constructions of masculinity and manhood based on images of sex
and violence, the primitivism bound into the heart of modernist aesthetic
practices, and the dif cult and tendentious issue of how to approach the
‘other’, Perloff demolishes Mariana Torgovnick’s book Gone Primitive:
Savage Intellects, M odern Lives (1990) on the grounds that it ‘ignores . . .
history’ and that ‘We cannot hope to address such questions without a
consideration of history as well as geography’ (pp. 48–9). Elsewhere, a
discussion of the formal idiosyncracies and poetic identity of the Hungarian
Jewish poet Mina Loy results in the deceptively simple demonstration of
how history can change the reception of a poet’s work and her identity over
a period of fty years.
Verging on a sort of Jamesonian injunction to ‘Historicize! Always
historicize!’, Perloff nevertheless stops short of a complete allegiance to a
Marxist position. In fact, there does seem to be a subtle and veiled running
suspicion of any heavily theoretical approach to literary studies, especially
that of deconstruction. Yet this does not, I am glad to say, preclude her
invocation of theories by Derrida, Foucault and Barthes, as well as Raymond
Williams, Henri Meschonnic and Anthony Easthope, when it suits her
purposes to describe and explore the elaborate graphic and paragrammatic
activities of the avant-garde writers. W hat it does seem to suggest, though,
is that her critical analyses work much more through the bricoleur’s approach
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than an out-and-out adherence to any particular political or ideological

perspective. This can cause occasional frustration, especially since this
resistance seems, at least on the face of it, to prohibit a clearer explanation
of the historical determinants on formal characteristics and a bolder state-
ment of political intent in her analyses.
Despite this caveat though, one is left in no doubt that Perloff ’s
ideological colours have been nailed to the mast, by her critical attention to
the work of the non-canonical American and European writers. Examine
her arguments more carefully, and Perloff does have a political project,
partially articulated in her opening essay on the politics of postmodernism:
‘It is, I think, the drive toward totalization and hence toward closure that
bedevils current discussions of postmodernism’ (p. 18). For Perloff is
stimulated by poetry and art that makes the reader work rather than
passively imbibe an aura of aesthetic beauty. W hile her intellect is clearly
engaged by texts that resist closure in all conceivable ways, she is concerned
with articulating issues that go beyond the now well-used rhetoric of
the politics of difference, identity and totalization. Consequently, she
insistently urging intellectual engagement with, critical attention to and
historical understanding of all aspects of aesthetic practice, large and
small, an urge that one gradually comes to recognize is embedded in a rm
conviction of the ethical value of many of these aesthetic practices. She
is self-confessedly intrigued by the ‘absence of designated exits’ (p. 243) in
Lyn Hejinian’s Oxata; she is intellectually taxed by the poem as a visual
space in the work of Steve McCaffrey and the linguistic innovations of
John Cage’s m esostics; Bill Viola’s video art is ‘Urgent, moral, and practical’
and Perloff ’s pleasure in it derives from the artist (in Viola’s words) ‘as
someone who thinks well’; and she nds Christian Boltanski’s photography
provocative for its ‘phantom uniqueness of the endlessly reproducible
photograph’ (p. 263). In her discussion of the vigorous debate that blew
up between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov during the 1960s about
the nature of poetry during war, how it affects war, or should respond to
war, Perloff appears to concur with Duncan that poetry ought not to be
polemical or moralistic in an agitprop mode about what is politically
acceptable. Rather, it ought not to oppose evil but imagine it, presenting
it without preaching about it. Poetry can be a matter of life and death, at
the very least, if perhaps not about something more serious. U ltimately,
Perloff ’s investment in this artistic lineage appears to have an ethical edge
to it, which cannot but possess political intent.
The British actor Kenneth Tynan maintained that a good drama critic
was one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time, while
a great drama critic also perceives what is not happening. W hile it may be
verging on the sycophantic to describe Perloff as a ‘great poetry critic’, it
redounds to her credit that one of her most signi cant essays in this volume
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deals with what she perceives is not happening in contemporary poetry

criticism and reviews. In a searing indictment of the limited and narrow-
minded construction of poetic activity by the literary establishment in
the major newspapers and reviews, Perloff points out how so much poetry
and writing activity escapes the attention of the reading public through the
frankly censorious and prejudiced attitudes of reviewers and press editors.
To her relief, she is able to point to the fact that despite the biased approach
of literary journalism, poetry thrives, succeeds and sells. Although Perloff
may castigate the current woeful standards of literary journalism about
contemporary poetry, the strength and health of contemporary poetic
practices will only bene t from the lucid articulation, vigorous commit-
ment and high standards of poetic analysis offered in the essays of this
book.
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Richard Martin
John Jervis, Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and

Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), v + 360 pp., £55.00 (hardback),
£15.99 (paperback)
Margaret A. Somerville and David Rapport (eds), Transdisciplinarity:

Recreating Integrated Knowledge (Oxford: Encyclopedia of Sustainable
Life Support Systems, 2000), v + 190 pp., £19.99 (paperback)
Ian Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity

(London: Sage, 1999), viii + 159 pp., £16.99 (paperback)
Peter Gizzi (ed.), The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of
Jack Spicer (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England,
1998), vi + 180 pp., £16.99 (paperback)
Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory,

Cubism, Narrative (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999),
xii + 185 pp., £25.00 (hardback)
‘It is as though to discuss modernism is to become a member of some

obscure cult, at some distance from the concerns of most people in their
ordinary lives.’ Paradoxically, the downside to living in an information
age is that it becomes more and more dif cult to speak, and Jervis’ remark
rem inds us that just as social structures atten, so intellectual hierarchies
grow more ingrained. Not that these acts of academic recoil should neces-
sarily be read as political in themselves, but as C.P. Snow noted in his famous
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‘Two Cultures’ lecture some forty years ago, knowledge is frequently

specialized at the expense of understanding. Explicitly, Snow was referring
to the blown bridge between the humanities and the physical sciences, 1 and
while there have been a number of moves since to return the kind of holism
which emerges from relativity and quantum mechanics we are still very far
from being able to coordinate a nisus in which different kinds of authority
might meet and exchange dialogue on equal terms. 2
Although it is not an example mined in any depth by the authors
of the collab orative volume Transdisciplinarity: Recreating Integrated
Knowle dge, there is a sense in which educational institutions might very
well bene t from the kind of networking modelled at NASA. In order to
advance understanding of the human condition in time and space, it was
recognized prior even to John F. Kennedy’s endorsement that disciplinary

knowledge was only valuable if it could be orchestrated in consilience with
information drawn from other elds. Rather than expecting individuals
to come up with solutions to complex interdisciplinary problems – what is
inside modernism? – the goal at NASA became one of coordinating
research teams in a kind of Venn diagram of activity. In Kevin Kelly’s terms,
the resultant synergetic entity corresponded to a HiveMind – a coexisten-
tial being larger than the sum of all its constituent parts, yet simultaneously
utterly dependent on the ongoing submissions of each individual actor3
and, as the ‘wavelengths’ of the imbricating clusters came together, so what
Somerville calls the ‘white light’ of transdisciplinarity was created and the
Apollo crew stood on the moon.
Clearly, the release of Internet and Web technologies from the domain
of the U S military places such an organic model of intellection within easy
reach, 4 so why is it that the academy still responds to the idea as utopian?
From Transdisciplinarity we might suspect that NASA has an important
advantage over the college system in that its primary language of delivery is
mathematical. W hile contemporary theory busily emancipates subjectivity
and thereby problematizes grammatological discourse at every level, science
recognizes that the virtuosities of Derridean différance are ultimately
grounded within a cosmos which stretches from the atoms to the stars. If
the hum anities deploy languages which revolve around the individuation
of the human mind, then mathematics is essentially a language of the
body – a common ground which has even found ways of coordinating
the im plications of quantum uncertainty via recourse to the theory of
complementarity advocated by Heisenberg and Bohr. 5
Were it possible to speak of emotions, politics, disasters and all the
other fundamentals of life in purely mathematical terms, it m ight well be
possible to re-create the kind of integrated knowledge structures Somerville
and Rapport equate with the ancient ‘Ionian Enchantment’ (and, to a
certain extent, with the Renaissance dream); however, the indications are
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that language will remain a divisive barrier to pro table exchange until
such time as its subjects agree to disagree within the frame of a ‘common
axiomatics’ (p. 19). Certainly, the projects discussed at the colloquium at
Royaumont Abbey, France, from which their volume grew, are of the
utmost signi cance – from risk analysis to law reform, ecosystem main-
tenance to bioethics – yet the common dif culty which Transdisciplinarity
highlights is the breakdown of collaboration in the face of personal
con ict. By and large, this is attributed to the hermetic nature of academia
itself (used to working alone in ‘top-down’ organizations, scholars typically
nd it hard to perceive authority in rhizomorphic forms and argue over
non-essential points with co-workers from different elds), and so, with its
attack on inherited environments and implicit call for a metalinguistics, it
is a very intense critique of institutionalized working practices in which the

authors are engaged.
Indeed, while it is fair to say that contemporary philosophers working
along similar lines have frequently sacri ced pragmatism in order to make
the jump to empyrean hyperspace, the company led by Somerville and
Rapport is keen to realize practice from abstrac tion. From Burkitt’s ne
study of post-Cartesian thought it is certainly possible to discern marked
agreement about the need to overcome what Heisenberg de ned as the
‘sharp’ separation of res extensa (or sphere of matter) and res cogitans (sphere
of mind),6 yet it is equally clear that the philosophical line which runs
from Spinoza through to Deleuze and Guattari is characterized more by
the im possibility of Heidegger’s question ‘How do I think beyond the
self as the relational centre of all that is?’ 7 than the attempt to proceed
past solipsism into a relationship of dialogism with the others implicitly
assumed by the enquiry. Of course, comprehension of the metaphysical
vinculum which ‘folds’ all subject–object relations together within the
‘magic formula’ which Deleuze and Guattari de ne as ‘M ONISM =
PLURALISM’ is an ultimate goal,8 but Burkitt points out that it is reckless
for philosophy to continue ontological speculation without refocusing ‘on
the relations within an ecosystem between people themselves, and between
people and things’ (p. 66).
‘Here hum ans are’ he continues, ‘like other things in the world,
non-central points in the networks of relations’, drawing on Marx’s idea that
only through ‘sociologic’ attention to the ‘active body’ can the twin peaks of
materialism and idealism coincide (pp. 88–9). In this regard gender theorists
like Judith Butler are roundly condemned for their problematization of ‘the
relational search for connection in difference’, and thinkers like Merleau-
Ponty are seen as foundational for the more ‘interconnected’ philosophies
of Evald Ilyenkov, Rom H arré and Kenneth Gergen (himself drawing on
the physicist of ‘implicate order’, David Bohm).9 Rather than ‘advocating
a turn either to a purely sensual way of knowing or a purely cognitive
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re exivity of the body’ (p. 149), Burkitt’s view is similar in nature to the
metalinguist Benjamin W horf ’s in that he believes, since we all, at root, share
consciousness of the same universe in process, it must be possible to deliver
a core phenomenological discourse. Such a mode of articulation would seek
‘not the eradication of difference but the necessity of relatedness acro ss
boundaries or borders’, and, although the language would have to proceed
from a priori ethical principles, these would constitute a temporar y base
rather than a prescriptive end: ‘It is from this sense of relatedness that ethics
grow and ourish’ (p. 151).
At this point, however, language stops and we are returned to the
apt but also problematical line from Walt W hitm an’s ‘I Sing the Body
Electric’ which introduces Burkitt’s book: ‘And if the body were not the
soul, what is the soul?’ W here to from this rough and ready perspective,
without careless homogenization or undue accentuation of différance?
Responding to precisely this question it is important to note the American
poet Jack Spicer’s approach. To some degree W hitman’s inheritor, Spicer
agreed with his forebears Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence that the problem
with Leaves of Grass lay not so much in the nineteenth-century poet’s desire
to assert a ‘uniform hieroglyphic’ in the form of the pronoun ‘one’ (which,
in turn, produced the spectacular question ‘W ho is we?’),10 but in ‘ego’, the
engine of grammatology itself. At heart (the term he takes from Antonin
Artaud to replace ego), 11 Spicer was a poet profoundly concerned with the
problem of communication in a post-Einsteinian world, and Gizzi shows
how he sought to arrive at an ‘ungrammatical’ metalanguage with which
to communicate the ‘vast other’ which always manifests outside the
‘performance’ of conventional discourse. 12
W ith his mentor Charles O lson, the question Spicer posed was
how to proceed back through language (‘Against wisdom as such’) so that
the interrelated world as it had existed prior to Aristotelian ‘classi cation’
might begin again. 13 Like the authors of Transdisciplinarity, he called for
‘Ununderstanding’, 14 and I feel very strongly that Gizzi’s transcription
of his previously uncollected lectures (dif cult as they are) supplement the
two main thrusts of the Royaumont Abbey agenda: rst, the case made by
Roderick Macdonald in his summing up that there are really strong reasons
for abandoning the single-discipline degree – ‘The self-congratulator y,
self-consciously partial acid of disciplinary rigor is no place for the critical
thinking that should ground undergraduate education’ (p. 171); and second,
William Newell’s advocacy of a joint partnership between university senates
and governm ent which might proactively curb epistem ological frag-
mentation via the following six-step ‘strategic approach’:15
cooperate (disciplines engage in parallel play);

appreciate (disciplines come to understand each other’s perspective);
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dismantle (disciplines bring to light and debate each other’s assumptions);

reconstruct (disciplines work together to develop overarching concepts);
modify (disciplines shift time-horizon assumptions, or methods to
collabo rate);
transform (disciplines are so altered that they cannot return to business
as usual).
(p. 175)
Of course, such plans are easily criticized – how many decades would it
take to get from point A to point B? W ho would be responsible for
students’ welfare in the meantime? – yet if NASA and Spicer’s poetics are
any yardstick, the long-term results would clearly outweigh any short-term
disadvantages. If Transdisciplinarity and The House That Jack Built issue

a call, it is one which requires us to be brave: not in that outmoded
Herculean sense with which we are so familiar, but in the possibly more
arduous sense of a real commitment to dialogism – a participative, ‘open’
courage which can be measured and, above all, shared.
So, given that we have the technology and might be prepared, in a
sense, to mathematize grammatology, what m ight such a ‘transformation’
do for contemporary debate? In a strong sense, Somerville and Rapport
believe the question can only be asked by the same breed of sceptics who
are currently pushing for a return to the Gutenberg era – those, that is, who
relish the sense of having twelve labours to complete and can only perceive
power in pre-Foucauldian terms. 16 Far from brushing those recurring
questions concerning the fundamental isms of our time even further under
the intellectual carpet, it is speculated that a meeting of scienti c and
artistic m inds will put an end to the monograph in which attempts to
align the disparate shades of modernity are currently being played out and
give further credence to the idea of the collaborative venture and the
collaborative text which in themselves will clear the ground from under the
idiosyncrasies of disciplinary parlance.
To some degree, we can see that the road is already being paved.
Introducing their learned volume on the ‘epistemological trauma’ wreaked
by relativity theory across the arts, Vargish (a professor of English at the
University of Maryland) and Mook (a professor of physics and astronomy
at Dartmouth College) describe the limits of the two kinds of interdis-
ciplinarity now gaining commercial stock. The rst, what they term after
Dickens the ‘Eatanswill method’, as practised, I feel, by Jervis in Exploring
the Modern. Boasting to M r Pickwick of the talents of his ‘critic’, the
ambitious editor of the Eatanswill Gazette discourses on the methodology
of a ‘copious review of a work of Chinese metaphysics’:
‘He read up for the subject, at my desire, in the Encyclopedia
Britannica.’
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‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Pickwick; ‘I was not aware that that valuable
work contained any information respecting Chinese metaphysics.’
‘He read, sir,’ rejoined Pott, laying his hand on M r. Pickwick’s
knee, and looking round with a smile of intellectual superiority, ‘he
read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the
letter C, and combined his information, sir!’
(p. x)
For Vargish and Mook, the adoption of this approach not only results in
‘deplorable absurdities’ but ‘encourages intellectual thrombosis’, since the
end result is the further calci cation of disciplinarity. Ploughing through
Jervis’ thick tome which begins with the question ‘W hat is “modern” in
“modernity”?’ and seeks to arrive at a sequence of ‘patterns’ in literature,

fashion, advertising and art in which ‘The Modern Self ’ and ‘The Modern
Age’ manifest, one is left with the feeling that his attempt to ‘popularize’
the ‘cultural aspect’ of modernity is well intentioned but ultimately passé.
Indeed, while Jervis is keen to claim an ‘ex-centric’ focus, a quick run-down
of chapter titles (‘The theatrical self ’, ‘The politics of everyday life’, ‘The
city as experience, dream and nightmare’, ‘Machines and skyscrap ers’,
‘The image, the spectral and the spectacle’) reveals the book to be a
hotchpotch of familiar ingredients reinforced with the sauce of an equally
well-nourished selection of commentators (Bakhtin, Bataille, Baudrillard,
Benjamin, Debord . . . neatly glossaried at the end).
Although Jervis’ frame is certainly wide, the number of wheels on the
volume’s axle seems to risk steamrollering any kind of speci city at all, and
it is only when the author comes to address the fundam ental question of
the modernist sublime in Chapter 7 and enters the less charted territory
of thinkers like de Bolla and George Steiner that I am saved from branding
Exploring the Modern too synoptic. Placed centrally, the author’s enquiry
into ‘the development of selfhood’ following the ‘Death of God’ and his
exposition of the manner in which the individual imagination was called
upon to deliver the sublime as a localized zenith makes fascinating reading,
and, indeed, underlines what he terms as ‘the whole paradoxical story of
modern art’:
[I]t is on the terrain of this asocial sacred that we encounter the
powerful fusion of elements that constitutes the modern myth of the
artist. . . . The imagination, now rmly linked to the subject, becomes
a powerful source of artistic creativity, even though there is a cost:
the constant threat that celebrating its very creativity may detract
from the claims to insight into, and representation of, the challenge of
transcendence and otherness. Thus there is always a tension in this
art, through this very emphasis on the intensely personal nature of the
sublime. In a sense, the sublime is unrepresentable, inexpressible, and
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therefore incommunicable; the attempt to depict it necessarily draws

on established images and strategies of representation, but these can
never wholly capture it, whereas totally novel strategies necessarily
become as incommunicable as the experience they strive to replicate.
(p. 193)
Passages like this, where Jervis swerves away from his immediate subject
matter and begins to weave in the sociological context which twentieth-
century modernism inherited, go some way towards redeeming what is
an otherwise disappointing (but well-packaged) book. As the chapter’s
philosophical basis unravels, there is almost full correlation with Burkitt’s
point that, under modernity, ‘the body becomes closed and more tightly
controlled, but at the expense of fragmentation, of losing the experience

of a whole body open to the world, replaced with feelings of a mental or
personal essence divided from the automaton it must inhabit’ (p. 131);
how interesting it would have been, though, if at precisely this moment
both authors had turned to science (which, by and large, they shun) as a
pivot upon which to rest the argument.
Ultimately, this is where Vargish and Mook come on stage, working
forward from Einstein’s rst publication in 1905, but saying very little
about the nature of the sublime in the artworks and narrative structures his
theory affected and failing to provide adequate philosophical grounding for
the ‘inherently counter-intuitive nature of Relativity’ (pp. xi–xii). Here, as
the authors acknowledge themselves, the second limit of interdisciplinarity
arises: in order to address speci c goals across ‘conceptual distance’, any
collaborative team needs to secure ‘editors and readers who can take on
the decision-making process’ (pp. 3, xi). As well as critiquing the lack of
funding for interdisciplinary projects at the institutional level, they provide
a telling example of the problems their book faced in getting off the
ground:
The director of this university press (which had already enjoyed a

long and prosperous relation to the authors of the new project) wrote
that he duly showed the proposal to his art history editor, his
literature editor, and his physics editor. As none of these editors could
speak with enthusiasm for the proposed book, he was unable to go
further with it. He had in fact looked up art under A, physics under
P, ction under F and failed to nd means for judging the result.
The Eatanswill Gazette, in its opportunistic simplicity, was more
advanced.
(p. xi)
To get the volume through, Vargish and Mook clearly faced a similar
paradox to the one Jervis identi es at the core of modernism itself: on the
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one hand, their intellectual imperative was to address weighty and highly
technical materials which had conventionally been separated for the reason
that they were believed to be unrepresentable outside disciplinary parlance;
on the other, the commercial imperative that what they wrote made sense
for a non-specialist audience. Unsurprisingly, somewhere in the balance
things had to give, and so what arrives at the door is really a volume riding
piggy-back on another, Vargish and Mook’s earlier Inside Relativity (1987),
which is constantly referenced in the footnotes and breaks up the read in a
rather confusing way.
Given that Inside Modernism does not promote itself as an introduction
to relativity, though, the book’s achievements remain considerable, especially
in terms of delivering the ‘major traumatic effect’ which Einstein’s theory
exerted on normative modes of realism and its role in the contextualization

of identity. Particularly worthy of mention are the sections on the planar
dynam ics in back of the Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s wo rk (which
supplement the more familiar studies of Picasso, Braque, Léger and Matisse)
– useful plates support the discussio n – and the handling o f narratives
including W illiam Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Woolf ’s The Waves
I nd unsurpassed. Borges, Cam us, Joyce, Henry James and Kafka are also
dealt with in some detail, but there are surprising omissions and, while the
volume does not attempt to claim poetics within its remit, it seems very often
that longer analyses of works by Apollinaire and Reverdy would have led to
a more promising use of terms.
In describing a fundamental shift from ‘reality to observation’ in
Chapter 4 the authors could well have drawn on the work which has been
conducted within poetic theory regarding the shift from ‘representation to
presentation’, and the language which recent poets – for example, Susan
Howe and Lyn Hejinian – have used to describe the generative, prismatic
devices of the literary encounter in which disclosure has been freed
from imposition would have enlivened the debate. In the nal analysis,
Heisenberg, who opened up chasms even Einstein could not seal, believed
with Spicer that the algorithms of poetic language were the ‘only way to
approach the “one” from wider regions’; 17 the processual shift from inter-
to transdisciplinarity is poetic in itself, but in a mobile world which
requires language to be concrete we will have to see how far the quest for
meta-understanding leads.
University of Sussex
Notes
1 Snow, a theoretical physicist tumed novelist, delivered ‘The Two C ultures

and the Scienti c Revolution’ as the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University
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in 1959. For a recap, see Melvyn Bragg, ‘W hose side are you on?’, The
Observer Review, 7 M arch 1999, pp. 1–2.
2 Cf. Paul Davis and John G ribbin, The M atter M yth: Towards 21st Century
Science (New York: Alfred A. K nopf, 1998): ‘The paradigm shift that we are
now living through is a shift away from reductionism and towards holism; it
is as profound as any paradigm shift in the history of science’ (p. 22–3). In
deploying the term ‘nisus’ I am drawing on the British idealist Bernard
Bosanquet’s notion that religious belief is ‘true’ insofar as it is an expression of
a ‘nisus to totality’; i.e. that ‘truth’ is possible only once all singularities of
judgeme nt are re ected in the ‘content of a single, persistent and all-embracing
judgement’ – something that does not deny, but transcends all particularities.
Bosanquet (1848 –1923) is experiencing a Renaissance: his Collected Works are
available in twenty volumes (edited by W illiam Sweet) through the Thoemmes
Press of Bristol.
3 Kevin Kelly, ‘The electronic hive: em brace it’, Harper’s, 288 (1994): 17–28.
4 On the development of parallel distributed processing systems from
AR PAN ET, an Am erican military computer network, see Rob Shields (ed.),
Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living B odies (London: Sage,
1996).
5 See W erner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Modern Revolution in
Science (London: G eorge Allen & Unwin, 1958) and N iels Bohr, Atom ic
Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: W iley, 1958) for the orchestration
of unambiguous and ambiguous knowledge within a metaphysical ‘One’
manifesting as the consilience of all subject–object relations. M ax Jammer’s
The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (New York: W iley, 1974) provides a
useful overview.
6 H eisenberg, Physics and P hilosophy, p. 75.
7 Cf. M artin H eidegger, ‘The age of the world picture’, in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W . Lovitt (New York: H arper
Colophon, 1977) .
8 In describing the relationship between subjectivity and the objectively held
universe, G ottfried L eibniz used the algebra ic term vinculu m as a way of ges-
turing at ‘the substantial bond or metaphysical “ligament” which functions at
once as a façade and as a fold which, moebius-like, infolds itself one side into
the other’. Deleuze inherited the ‘baroque in ection’ of Leibniz and Spinoza
in The Fold; for his later advocation of the rhizome as a viable textual form
in the wake of postnormal science see Gilles Deleuze and Félix G uattari On
the Line, trans. John Johnstone (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
9 ‘[If we] can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall
whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border, then . . . from this
will ow orderly action within the whole.’ D avid Bohm, Wholeness and the
Im plicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), quoted in Kenneth J. Gergen,
The Saturated Self: D ilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York:
Basic Books, 1991), p. 239 .
10 See Pound’s essay ‘Villon’ in The Spirit of Romance, Lawrence’s Studies in
Classic American Literature and Adrienne Rich’s ‘Notes toward a politics of
location’, in B lood, B read and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979 –1985 (London:
Virago, 1986), p. 231 .
11 ‘It is as if Jack too had said, “I don’t want to eat my poem but I want to give
my heart to my poem . And what is my heart to my poem? My heart is what
isn’t my ego. To give one’s self to one’s poem is also to risk being violated by
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it”.’ Antonin Artaud, ‘Revolt against poetry’, in J. H irschman (ed.), Artaud

Anthology (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1965), p. 101, quoted in The
Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser (1975; Santa Rosa: Black
Sparrow P ress, 1989), p. 323 .
12 Ibid., pp. 291, 304, 308 .
13 The fundamentals of Olson’s paradoxical ‘push’ towards an understanding of
‘Trobriand space–time premises’ from the ancient Mayan and G reek may be
found in his Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. D onald Allen (New York:
Grove Press, 1967).
14 Collected Books of Jack Spicer, p. 183.
15 Roderick M acdonald is F.R. Scott Professor of Constitutional and Public
Law, M cG ill University, and President of the Law Reform Comm ission of
Canada; W illiam N ewell is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami
University, Ohio, and D irector of the Institute of Integrative Studies.
16 Contrast, for example, Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of
Reading in an Electronic Age (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) with Rob
Shields, ‘Foucault’s microtechnics as sociotechnics?’, in Adam Podgórecki,
Jon Alexander and Rob Shields (eds), Social Engineering (Ottowa: Carleton
University Press, 1995).
17 H eisenberg, N atural Law and Structure of M atter (New York: Rebel Press,
1968), p. 112; Physics and Philosophy, p. 155.
Paul Edwards
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public

Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), x + 227
pp., £16.95 (paperback)
Eugene Jolas, Man from Babel, ed. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), xxxix + 326 pp.,
£20.00 (hardback)
Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the
World Wars (Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California
Press, 1999), xii + 263 pp., £35 (hardback), £14.95 (paperback)
How is modernism to be made manageable for criticism, and in the light

of what theories are adjustments or revolutions in the modernist canon to
be justi ed? The will to change canons is currently an ethical one, but no
ethical will has ever been able to impose its criteria on aesthetics for very
long, so ethics needs to be reinforced from other departments of thought.
One of the most promising theories (but one which, surely, everyone is
beginning to tire of ) has been Peter Bürger’s, which distinguishes between
the avant-garde and the ‘modernist’, the former premised upon an ambition
to overturn the bourgeois institutional art–life distinction within which the
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latter is still content to operate. The theory combines ethics, or politics, at

least, and formal description. But one of the problems with routine
applications of it is that the relationships with real institutions – economic
and cultural – of both the avant-garde and modernists were inevitably less
black and white than the theory suggests. Wyndham Lewis maintained
– no doubt slanderously – that the ‘avant-garde’ Marinetti funded his
Futurist campaigns with money derived from his father’s string of brothels
in Egypt, while one of the characters in Tarr is said to have ‘just enough
money to be a cubist, that was to say quite a lot’.
Lawrence Rainey claim s for the close historical study o f the actual
relations of writers to mechanisms of publication contained in his Institutions
of Modernism that it shows that no de nitive dichotomy between modernism
and the avant-garde exists:

W hen seen in institutional terms, the avant-garde was neither more
nor less than a structural feature in the institutional con guration
of modernism. It played no special role by virtue solely of its form,
and it possessed no ideological privilege; instead it was constituted
by a speci c array of marketing and publicity structures that were
integrated in varying degrees with the larger economic apparatus of
its time.
I’m not sure that his book entirely justi es this claim, not because it is
wrong as such, but because the book actually contains no close historical
comparisons of the institutional con guration of an ‘avant-garde’ enter-
prise (in Bürger’s sense) with a ‘modernist’ one, for the focus of his research
is the ‘high m odernist’ trio, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce (with
a coda on H .D.). The closest it gets to making a comparison with the
avant-garde is in its opening account of Pound’s efforts to establish himself,
with a ‘movement’ to consolidate his position, in London during 1912 to
1914. These efforts are paralleled by Marinetti’s few ying visits to London
over the same period, through which Futurism became both a newsworthy
topic for the illustrated press and a model for the English avant-garde
movement, Vorticism.
The rst thing that should be said about this account, and it applies
to all of the studies in this book, is that for thoroughness and detail
the treatment of its topics is simply unsurpassed. Something should be
said about the choice of topics, however. Rainey’s method is that of an
archaeologist selecting some scattered, unlikely-looking spots and digging.
One spot is 34 Queen Anne’s Gate where Pound gave a series of three
lectures on medieval poetry in March 1912. One of them happened to
coincide with Marinetti’s lecture on Futurism in literature and art at the
Bechstein Hall. There was Pound, enmeshing himself in the aristocratic
connections of his prospective mother-in-law (tickets for the series, strictly
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limited in number, were obtainable ‘on application to Lady Low’ for a

guinea), while Marinetti was sim ultaneously beginning the progress that
would culminate in 1914 in a series of lectures and Futurist performances
at the Coliseum music-hall. Pound’s model for the literature of the future
was, at this time, the trobar clus of aristocratic twelfth-century Provence.
Sifting the various strata of this lecture series, Rainey gives us a potted
history of the family who owned the house, the Tennants, including a
sum mary of one of Pamela Tennant’s books, The Children and the Pictures,
an account of the modi cations the family made to the house after they
bought it, and a detailed list, not only of the paintings on the walls of the
gallery where Pound gave his lectures, but (in one of many discursive
footnotes) an account of where each of the paintings is now to be found.
(In another such example from the chapter on Ulysses the quest is less
successful: Rainey gives us the number of the copy of the limited edition
that Alfred Knopf bought – number 454, now at the HRHRC at Austin –
but is tantalized to discover that ‘[Sylvia] Beach’s record books show that he
purchased two copies, the second of which is not identi ed’.) It is easy to
mock the apparently obsessional thoroughness of such minute scholarship,
which is applied to all the ‘moments’ of modernism’s progress discussed
in the book, but the truth is that m ost of this is fascinating stuff and it is
also genuinely illuminating, even when it tells us what we thought we knew
already, that there was, for example, no real chance for an avant-garde to
sustain itself in England in 1914 .
The method exacts its costs, however. Pound’s progress may be
exemplary, but it is simply not as instrumental in the formation of the
avant-garde (or its relations with Marinetti) as it cannot help but appear in
this history. The result is that the Vorticist movement appears in a false, or
at best highly relative, perspective simply as Pound’s ‘polemical onslaught’
and is judged by his Blast poems, ‘the dreariest he ever produced’. Rainey
simply repeats and endorses a contemporary judgem ent of the magazine
and of Vorticism (‘a feeble attempt at being clever . . . a at affair’),
apparently relishing the reviewer’s ‘cutting words’. ‘Dig here’ would be my
archaeological advice: for the reviewer was J. C. Squire, and his world-
weary tone of superiority modulated into something quite different in the
editorial of his London M ercury in 1919, when he attacked the modernists
for ‘experiments, many of them foredoomed to sterility . . . dirty living
and muddled thinking . . . fungoid growths of feeble pretentious impostors
. . . platitudinous rubbish . . . hectic gibberish’. Rainey criticizes literary
modernism for a ‘strange and perhaps unprecedented withdrawal from the
public sphere of cultural production and debate’ into a world of ‘patronage,
investment and collecting’ of limited editions, and he has little time for the
old myths of the modernists as heroic pioneers battling against a ‘public
sphere’ that was determined to exclude them. But Squire was not that
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exceptional, and the fact is that no publisher in England would touch

T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (and its 500 copies took ve
years to sell out), and none would publish either Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr or
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist. Harriet Shaw Weaver became a publisher
and issued these books for that reason. This fact alone, by the way, belies
the customary deduction that modernism is complicitous with bourgeois
and reactionary institutions while the avant-garde is not.
There is an ethical impulse in Rainey’s history (at times a slightly prim
one), but he appears not to be able to make up his mind whether the
real damage was done to modernism by its compromising exploitation
of the marketplace or by its failure to submit its products to the rigour of
commercial competition. The test case is Ulysses, issued in a lim ited edition
designed to attract investors and book dealers: an ‘immense tragedy’

according to Rainey, whose confusing argument (that the operation of the
market in books is never congruent with the processes of cultural debate
by which books are valued) seems designed to lead to the conclusion
that books should simply be given away, especially since the marketplace ‘is
not, and never can be, free from systemic distortions of power’. Ulysses
is the crucial case because, of course, it was immensely saleable, and if
issued through normal channels could have brought the separate spheres
of market and cultural debate into as close a congruence as could be hoped
for in an imperfect world suffering the ‘deepening penetration of capitalist
relations’. But in fact it was saleable precisely because it was ‘unpublish-
able’: a book that was not only publicly certi ed as lth, but guilt-free
lth endorsed by a cultured elite – so really the market and the public
sphere of ‘discussions about cultural and aesthetic value’ were both in a
mess, and Joyce, debarred from cashing in on his notoriety through normal
commercial channels, can surely be forgiven for exploiting the limited
editions ramp instead.
Intellectually, the strongest parts of Institutions of Modernism are
its analyses of the role of patronage in modernism. The chapter on Pound’s
idealization of renaissance patronage, embodied in his celebration of
Sigismondo Malatesta, who he thought offered a model for a new
renaissance in Mussolini’s new state, is simply one of the nest pieces
of cultural analysis I have read. It encompasses a close textual analysis of
the Malatesta cantos, analyses of their cultural and textual sources, a
detailed account of Pound’s experiences while amassing his materials
for them (including his pride in the humiliation, by local fascists, of an
overworked librarian whose genuine scholarship undercut in advance
Pound’s own romantic mythologizing) and an exposition of fascist ideology
and its aesthetic im plications. The nal chapter on H .D., disputing the
posthumous image of her enshrined in slack feminist accounts, is very
funny – unless you’re an investor in her cultural stock. She is included
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because she illustrates, for Rainey, the worst consequences of the modernist
withdrawal from the public sphere back into patronage, private publication
and coterie art. From 1918 she lived a cocooned life of unimaginable
luxury as the protégée of Bryher, the daughter of the wealthiest man in
England. To put it more crudely than Rainey does, this ruined her work,
and all the claims for her as a ‘marginalized’ but right-thinking author
collapse in the light of genuine research.
Several retorts are possible, and many readers will no doubt want to
make them. The one I want to make has nothing to do with the value of
H.D.’s work, however. Surely the real test of Rainey’s thesis is not H .D.
but, again, James Joyce, living at the heart of the avant-garde in Paris for
seventeen years following the publication of Ulysses, composing and issuing
in constantly revised instalments his ‘work in progress’, Finnegans Wake ?

During this period he was living off patronage that, though not in the
H.D. class, still made the £500 a year and a room of one’s own desiderated
by Virginia Woolf look like the wages of the bootboy at Claridges. A case
could tactfully be made that this was the real withdrawal from the public
sphere, that Finnegans Wake remains, except in exceptionally arti cial
enclaves of discourse, an unassimilable product, and that a different
judgement of the relations between modernism and the avant-garde from
the currently fashionable one is accordingly called for.
At the heart of that Parisian avant-garde was Eugene Jolas, and any
reassessment of its signi cance will have to take account of his memoirs,
now published in a handsome, scholarly, but very reader-friendly edition
selected from a number of versions of Jolas’s original manuscripts. Jolas was
one of the founders and editors of transition, which published m ost of
Joyce’s work, virtually on a no-expense-spared basis; printing could be held
up while Joyce provided new matter, necessitating the insertion of sheets
numbered out of series into the already-printed sections. W here the money
for this came from is not explained by Jolas, probably because his mind
was on higher things. It would be dif cult not to like, even revere this
holy fool, the ‘man from Babel’, as he calls himself. Brought up in Alsace-
Lorraine under German occupation, and himself bilingual, he came to
feel the antagonistic pull between French and German intolerable, seeking
escape into Americanness and the English language, just as he sought an
escape from the horrors of the daylight world into the irrational world
and language of the night. It is somehow typical of his fate that he should
both edit the wildly irrationalist transition and be a prime mover in the
reform of journalism during the period of de-Nazi cation in Germany
after the war. ‘Only the dream matters’ to the avant-garde editor, but the
newspaperman insisted that ‘essential facts should be given in the lead, that
is, in the introductory paragraphs, to be followed by paragraphs dealing
accumulatively with the chronological enumeration of details’. As a poet, at
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least in English, he was utterly non-existent, but his ambition was to invent
a language that would transcend those splits he felt in his own identity. It
was only late in life that he began to realize that the romantic, irrationalist
culture he valued, epitomized by the German Romantics, ‘had also a
certain share of responsibility for the genesis of Nazi ideas’.
Jolas remains famous for his proclamation of the ‘revolution of the
word’ – exempli ed, as he thought, in Joyce’s night-writing. One of the
signatories of the manifesto was the young Sam uel Beckett, and, partly as a
result of this (and his transition-associated defence of Joyce), his own work
is usually understood as a late owering of the modernist urge to transcend
signifying practices and achieve ‘direct expression’ that cuts through the
deadened perceptions of habit. One of the most interesting features of
Tyrus Miller’s attempt to redraw the map of modernism in Late M odernism

is his rejection of this model of Beckett’s practice. Yes, Beckett indulged in
pro-modernist polemic for the backward public in Ireland and in defence
of the efforts of his master, Joyce, but Miller traces a derisive mockery
of the whole project, arising initially out of the defensive irony of the
latecomer unable to compete with the master on his own territory. Beckett’s
true af nities, rather, are with Wyndham Lewis and Djuna Barnes, and he
even surreptitiously endorsed Lewis’s erce critique of transition and the
Parisian avant-garde. All three of these writers replace the transcendent,
epiphanic moment fetishized by high modernism with that irreducible
hum an minim um of self-assertion, laughter: what remains when reality
can no longer be subdued to modernist aesthetic formalization, and when
the body itself is penetrated and traumatized by the shocks of war and
social disruption.
Here then, is another attempt to make modernism manageable,
bringing canonical shifts through theoretical rede nition. Apart from
the chapter on Beckett, the most interesting is the rst, theorizing the
‘end of modernism’ and its replacement by a mode presided over, both
intellectually and artistically, by Wyndham Lewis. The actual chapters
devoted to Lewis and Djuna Barnes (and a too-short coda on Mina Loy)
are by comparison a little haphazard and disappointing, despite containing
excellent analyses and ideas. Miller makes his case, though, and he also
shows the degree to which Lewis’s writing, especially in The Apes of God,
is dominated by (and exposes) those compromising mechanisms of
modernism’s ‘institutional’ assimilation that are the subject of Lawrence
Rainey’s study. But after all, ‘late’ modernist or whatever, Lewis had been
there from the beginning, in Montparnasse from 1904, in dialogue with
Marinetti in London from 1910, and, in 1914, reluctant to compromise
the avant-garde purity of Blast by including the Imagist poetry of Pound,
Aldington and H .D., work which to him seemed m erely ‘pompier’.
Bath Spa University College
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Robert Eaglestone
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1999), xx + 264 pp., £18.99 (hardback)
Snow was right
In the ‘Two Cultures’ debate, an event which usually serves as lynchpin

for any discussion of arts and sciences, C. P. Snow was right and Leavis was
wrong. Leavis, in fact, was wrong twice over. First, his infamous response
took for granted that Snow was praising science over the arts and
hum anities – Snow wasn’t, he was only asking for a rapprochement. Second,
Leavis missed out completely on the chance to pick up on a much more
important series of binary oppositions that Snow’s lecture touched on,
that would, interestingly, have helped his case. These oppositions, which
have taken on considerable importance in recent years, can be explored in
a number of different ways, each one severely spun by whoever outlines the
position: Edward O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology, contrasts sensible
‘empiricists’ with gullible ‘transcendentalists’; John Searle and Daniel
Dennett have a running battle between, roughly, the uniqueness of qualia
contrasted with forms of arti cial intelligence; Steven Rose contrasts a
biology of ‘lifelines’ with biological determinism and what he calls ‘ultra-
Darwinism’. 1
Yet despite the sense of Snow’s basic argument, few people on the ‘arts’
side have tried to bridge this gap. 2 ‘Philosophy and the subjects known as
“hum anities” are still taught,’ as Dawkins writes rather crossly, ‘alm ost as
if Darwin never lived’. 3 Dawkins himself has tried to cross the divide in his
recent book Unweaving the Rainbow, but few have followed his example,
which is a pity: just as we (‘arts and humanities’) have a lot to learn from
them (‘science’), they have a great deal to learn from us (do works of art, for
example, ‘communicate feeling directly from mind to mind’ as Edward
Wilson argues?) 4 For myself, I believe that this interdisciplinary work is of
absolutely central importance. It is, however, extremely dif cult to under-
take, as Susan Blackmore’s The M eme M achine shows.
Blackmore’s ambitious project to link culture and science takes one
of the most tempting and widely discussed bridges as its starting point:
following the call from people like Wilson and Dennett, Blackmore
outlines the new discipline of memetics, a biologically based – but not
sociobiological – theory of culture. In the speculative nal chapter of The
Sel sh Gene, Dawkins de ned a meme as:
a unit of cultural transmission . . . examples of memes are tunes,
ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots and of
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building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool

by leaping from body to body via sperm of eggs, so meme propagate
themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a
process which, in the broad sense, can be call imitation.5
Despite a later rede nition in The Extended Phenotype, this de nition
has remained at the core of what Aaron Lynch describes as the ‘newly
emerging science of memetics’. 6 Genes are replicators of biological
material: memes are replicators of culture. Just as Mendel provided the
mechanism – the gene – through which Darwinian evolution by natural
selection took place, and so led to the ‘new synthesis’ of neo- or modern
Darwinism, so it is hoped that Dawkins’s ‘meme’ will provide the
mechanism, the ‘base-unit’ of culture, through which cultural evolution

takes place, and, as a result will provide the key insight in a new cultural
synthesis. Memes, as Blackmore points out, have an entry in the OED and
are discussed in the Encyclopaedia of Semiotics. 7 The fact that memes are
about culture should be enough to claim our interest. But memetics claims
to offer more than a theory of cultural evolution (as if that weren’t enough),
it aims to explain ourselves and our identity as well. Blackmore and others
argue that our selves and our cultural life are nothing but memes: ‘Our
memes is who we are’ [sic] (p. 22). 8
This new science isn’t without its critics. Mary Midgley, one of the
most acute and clearsighted thinkers on science today, writes: ‘Memetics,
in fact, is phlogiston, and what is more it isn’t even useful phlogiston’. 9
Midgley’s view, if strong, seems to be generally correct: there are a number
of general problems with meme theory, highlighted by Blackmore’s book,
which I will just touch on here.
General problems with memes
De ning a meme
The rst is, simply, the question of de nition. In a rough sense, it’s ne to
say that memes are ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions’ and so on:
indeed, Dennett gives a longer and broader list of this sort. 10 For popular
science this vague idea is ne, but ‘memetics’ might need a more speci c
de nition. 11 For Blackm ore, memes are a range of things: ‘incessant
thoughts’ (p. 39); ‘an element of culture’, ‘whatever it is that is passed on
by imitation’, ‘ideas’ (pp. 43, 66); ‘brain structures that instantiate those
ideas . . . and their versions in books, recipes, maps’ (p. 66); ‘four notes or
a whole song’ (p. 56); discreet, imitable sounds as well as language itself
(pp. 100–4) and so on: there is no single de nition of what a meme
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actually is, whether they are internal or external (or both, or neither) and so
forth. Other attempts to de ne the meme have been more successful: for
example, Durham offers:
the unit of culture is an ideational unit, potentially highly variable
in size, complexity and con guration . . . the unit embraces cultural
instructions varying from the most ‘micro’ to the most ‘macro’. Memes
are viewed as information guides to behaviour; their relationships to
human phenotypes parallel that of genotypes, creating a second ‘track’
of inheritance. 12
However, all these are still very provisional and, in a sense, vague: they say
‘we know what they do but not what they are’. Moreover, they risk
sounding either circular (‘a meme replicates: we know it is a meme because

it has been replicated’) or simply vapid (‘I know a meme when I see one:
you know what I mean, a tune, idea, catch-phrase, etc.’).
Meme units
This problem is made worse by the demand that memes are, as W ilson
argues, supposed to be ‘a culture unit, the most basic element of all’. 13
‘Mensuration’ is one of ve ‘diagnostic features’ that W ilson uses to
distinguish science from pseudo-science (if something can be properly
measured, using universally accepted scales, generalisations about it are
rendered unambiguous’).14 If memes can’t be measured, as the problems
with de nition suggest, what hope for a ‘science’ of memes? Second, it is
equally possible to suggest that culture doesn’t have units. Midgley argues
that culture
is not a substance, a solid stuff of the kind it might be expected to
consist of particles. Instead it is a complex of patterns. And patterns
are not the sort of thing that breaks down into ultimate units. 15
Although Blackmore clear-sightedly faces this problem head-on, it is more
than just a question of size and measurement: it also highlights the fact
that, in distinction to what many ‘memeticists’ believe, there must be more
than just memes to spread memes in culture. As Andrew Brown wrote,
re ecting on Blackmore’s book, a ‘practice spreads because it makes sense to
people. . . . The spread of such things can only be understood by talking
about personality, motive, self-hood and all the other things memes are
meant to replace.’16
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Meme transmission
Dan Sperber also expands this criticism of memes by stressing the impor-
tance, in cultural ‘evolution’, of context, interpretation and transmission.
Although Blackmore makes clear that memes are not digital in the same
way that genes are taken to be (‘on/off ’), she treats them as such. Sperber
points out that cultural reproduction does not function in an ‘on’ or ‘off ’
way, 100 per cent or 0 per cent, but usually by mixture and in uence:
hybridity. As Rushdie writes, ‘hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the trans-
formations that come of new and unexpected combinations of human
beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs . . . mongrelisation. . . .
Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the
world.’17 Sperber goes on to point out that, although genetic reproduction

is nearly always perfect (allowing for mutation), cultural reproduction
rarely is:
Medieval monks copying manuscripts – apparently perfect examples
of cultural reproduction – understood what they copied and, on
occasions, corrected what they took to be mistakes in earlier copying
on the basis of what they understood. In general, human brains use
all the information they are presented with not to copy or synthesise
it, but as more or less relevant evidence with which to construct
representations of their own . . . most cultural descendants are
transformations, not replicas.18
Ideas – whether memes or not – spread because they make sense to people
in some way.
Truth and orders of memes
Moreover, the issue of transmission seems to create another problem for

memeticists who want to make truth claims (such as ‘the theory of memes
is true’ or ‘religion is false’).19 If, as is often argued and as Blackmore writes,
‘Our memes is who we are’ (p. 22), then how can we judge memes false or
true rather than ‘not in accordance with our current dominant memes’?
Blakemore’s answer is to postulate a ‘memeplex’ or a ‘meta-meme’, where
the ‘memes inside can replicate better as part of the group than they can
on their own’ (p. 20). But this just moves the question up a notch. The
‘memeplex’ becomes a second order meme which ‘decides’ (in fact it has
no agency) whether or not to accept inside itself a particular meme. If
the second order memeplex ‘decides to accept’ a particular meme as true,
that m eme will survive; if it is ‘thought of ’ as false, it will perish. But in
turn there must be third order memes which ‘decide’ whether a meme/
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memeplex is a successful second order meme/memeplex or not (is the

‘memeplex’ religion true or false?) and so in turn a fourth order meme
which decides on the third order one (is the meme that decided whether
religion was true or false true or false itself?), and so on inde nitely, rather
like the discussion of proofs in Lewis Caroll’s W hat the Tortoise Said to
Achilles. 20
Metaphorical memes
The question arises: Isn’t this all just a metaphorical tangle, begun by
assuming that memes are the same as genes? In fact, this book, like m ost
on memes, is a metaphorical nightmare: gene and memes have no agency,

but are always actively deciding and doing things (trying to survive, for
example); they are ‘blind’ but we can take a ‘meme’s eye view’; they have
no sense of time but project themselves into the future and so on. But on
the basic point, Blackmore is very clear. Unlike some writers, she is aware
that genes and memes are not the same: ‘there is an analogy there but only
because both are replicators. Beyond that the analogy is weak’ (p. 66). 21
Despite this, Blackmore does sometimes elide genetic understandings into
memetic ones (see, for example, her chapters on sex). The analogy is even
weaker than Blackmore and others think, in fact, because, according to
Steven Rose’s Lifelines, even the genes are not ‘genes’ in Blackmore’s sense.
He points out that they are not ‘hard impenetrable units which might be
seen as counterparts of the atoms of the early twentieth century physicists’:
in fact, the ‘gene as a unit determinant of character remains a convenient
Mendalian abstraction, suitable for armchair theorists. . . . The gene as an
active participant in the cellular orchestra in any individual’s life is a very
different proposition’ (he offers a lucid table laying out the differences
between ‘theoretician’s genes’ and ‘biologist’s genes’).22 If m emetics takes
genetics as its point of origin, and this point of origin is not what it
presupposed, then the foundations of memetics surely begin to look very
shaky indeed.
In addition to these larger problems with m emetics, there are
some issues speci cally with Blackmore’s book. Blackmore, taken up in
what she argues is a the novelty of the idea, seems to ignore the long history
of this discussion. Although the word ‘meme’ was coined in 1976, the
ideas of cultural evolution and units of culture have been around for a
long time. Lumsden and Wilson provide a six-page list of books and
papers going back to Dahlberg in 1947 and Durham offers a detailed
and rather revealing history of both the idea of cultural evolution and the
cultural unit going back further. 23 This serves to take the edge off the
novelty a little.
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The book also has omissions: some are unproblematic and stem from
the ambition and dif culty of the project. Nobody can know everything,
and when you work in an area that crosses disciplines, omissions are bound
to occur: it behoves others trained in those elds to be tolerant. W hen
literary theorists and philosophers use examples from science we know
(pace Sokal) that some scientists often get annoyed. W hen scientists seem
to know very little of major philosophical and literary traditions, do literary
theorists and philosophers have a right to be annoyed? Not really. Two
examples of this from the nal chapter: it’s not really news for literary
studies that the self is a narrative and cultural construct nor that ‘creativity’
doesn’t stem purely from the (romantic) individual; but the book should
not be criticized for these Miranda-like insights. In fact, they provide
interesting material to work with.

There are other omissions, however, from the eld of ‘memetics’. The
most glaring is that, although she mentions it, Blackm ore doesn’t seem
to have read in detail William Durham’s Coevolution from 1991, a (if not
the) major, well-researched book in the eld. For example, Blackmore
identi es two forms of gene/meme interaction: Durham identi es ve
different forms of interaction including the two which Blackmore explores
(Blackmore mentions four of Durham’s ve in a simpli ed way, without
citing Durham, p. 111). She goes on to write: ‘I have no idea whether
memetic-driving [i.e. one form of interaction] of this kind has ever taken
place’ (p. 161): Durham takes up many pages offering detailed examples
which claim show just this. In her brief discussion of him (p. 35), she
appears to have misunderstood the way Durham discusses ‘ tness’ (which
means only ‘suitability for replication and use’, equally applicab le for genes
or memes). Finally, she writes that what makes her theory of gene/meme
interaction new is that both ‘replicators have equal status’ (p. 108) (other
accounts, like those offered by Wilson, suggest that ‘m emes’ are held on
a leash by genes, i.e. their range and diversity are lim ited by genetic
constraints). 24 In fact, this equality is exactly what Durham argues in what
he calls, in the context of his book, ‘dual inheritance with ideation units’. 25
Blackm ore has a deep and admirable commitment to Buddhism ,
which comes into play towards the end of the book. She reveals that
she wants to maintain a space for a mystical (I use this word technically,
not pejoratively) self of no self, what she calls the Buddhist idea of
‘anatta’ (p. 230). This spiritual accent is in direct contrast to thinkers like
Dennett and Dawkins, from whom she draws so much, and her courage in
diverging from the party line here should be praised. It does mean,
however, that she has reservations about taking the ‘memes’ idea as far
as, for example, Dennett does. It also puts rather an odd spin on her
very disparaging remarks about religion, especially Catholicism (which
emerges as a Gothic cult for the superstitious and sim ple-minded: I often
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wonder if much ‘Guardian-reader’ anti-Catholicism is simply a ‘descendant’

of virulent English anti-Irish and anti-European racism – after all, the
American Dennett makes the same points without painting the same
‘Monk’ Lewis-style picture).
Conclusion
No one could deny that culture is passed down ‘vertically’ from generation
to generation. Traditions, canons and curricula, for example, all do this.
No one could deny either that (unlike genetic material) culture is passed on
‘horizontally’ between groups that exist at the same time. And it’s also the
case that some bits of culture (books, say) carry on being passed down (the
famous 500th M iddlemarch seminar) or across (Captain Corelli’s M andolin)
and some fail to be passed at all. This process is obviously analogous to
evolution, to ‘descent with modi cation’ (or perhaps evolution is analogous
to it: after all, people took and developed ideas, and discussed doing so, long
before Darwin visited the Galapagos).
W hat Dawkins’ idea of the meme tried to offer was a mechanism for
this. It seems to me that the ‘meme’ begs too many questions and makes
too many assumptions to be an effective mechanism.
In a sense, much of meme theory echoes the debates over structural-
ism and narratology of the 1960s and 1970s (memes as ‘functions’, for
example). Indeed, when Wilson cashes out his approach to culture and
art in Consilience, he writes that the ‘structuralist approach is potentially
consistent with the picture of mind and culture emerging from the natural
science’, for him, a genetic/memetic picture. 26 This project failed too, but
it produced a great deal of fascinating and fruitful material.
W hat is interesting about the failure of the ‘meme’ hypothesis is how
little other work this actually effects. Despite his enthusiasm for them , it
is possible to remove memes from Dennett’s work and replace them with
‘some form of cultural passing down’. After all, he writes that what ‘we are is
very much a matter of what culture’ (not memes, notice) ‘has made us’. 27 If
you remove ‘memes’ from Durham’s study, much of his argument still holds.
It’s not that culture isn’t passed down, and hasn’t played a huge role in our
adaptive tness as a species: but it just isn’t memes. Moreover, the success or
failure of the meme hypothesis hasn’t and won’t affect the work of what I
might m ischievously call, in Blakemore’s terms, ‘real memeticists’ (surely
studies of the idea of pedigree in the Victorian novel or of contemporary
Arthurian fantasy are explorations of how a cultural idea, or ‘meme’, evolves?
A study of the idea of nature in Anglo-Saxon England, as shown in poetry,
is a study of how one ‘memeplex’ interacted with others?).28 And nally and
unhappily, memetics may well become the term that is associated with the
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study of ‘cultural evolution’, just as ‘aesthetics’ (originally the science of

sensation) became the name for the philosophy of art (Hegel imperiously
wrote, ‘We shall, therefore, permit the name aesthetic to stand, because it is
nothing but a name, and so indifferent to us, and, moreover has up to a
certain point passed into common language’).29
But just because this mechanism turns out not to be the one doesn’t
mean that Snow was, and that Blackmore is, wrong more generally: science
is making the ‘revolution of the age’ and we – Textual Practice readers –
need to engage with it more than we have in the past. Our task is not, like
Leavis, stupidly to ‘oppose science’, but to explore it, and, more, explore
with it. Sperber writes that the spectre of a ‘natural science of the social’
haunts the social sciences and humanities. 30 As scholars, we have to speak
to it.31
Royal Hollow ay, University of London
Notes
1 See Edward O. W ilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (London: Little,

Brown and Company, 1998); for a sense of D ennett’s and Searle’s disagree-
ment, see John Searle, The M ystery of Consciousness (London: Granta Books,
1997); Steven Rose, Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, D eterminism (London:
Penguin, 1998). These oppositions, are, of course, ripe for deconstruction.
2 In E nglish studies, the work of M ark Turner might be an exception here: see
e.g. Mark Turner, The Literary M ind (Oxford: Oxford U niversity P ress,
1996); Reading M inds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science
(Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1991).
3 Richard D awkins, The Sel sh Gene (London: Paladin, 1978), p. 1.
4 W ilson, Consilience, p. 242.
5 D awkin s, The Sel sh Gene, p. 206.
6 Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society (New
York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 2.
7 Encyclopaedia of Semiotics, ed. Paul Bouissac (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), pp. 404 –8.
8 For nuanced versions of these claims, see D aniel Dennett’s two quite brilliant
books, D arwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London:
Penguin, 1995) and Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1991). These
are, as Blackmore writes, the source of much of her work.
9 M ary M idgely, ‘Being scienti c about ourselves’, Journal of Consciousness
Studies, 6:4 (1999), pp. 85–98, 94.
10 D aniel C. D ennett, ‘Mem es and the exploitation of imagination’, Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48:2 (spring 1990), pp. 127 –35, 127–8.
11 ‘Mem eticists’ have discussed this as a problem: see e.g. N ick Rose,
‘Controversies in meme theory’, Journal of M emetics, 2 (1988) (http://www.
cpm.m mu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998 /vol2/rose_n.html).
12 W illiam D urham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human D iversity (Stanford;
Stanford U niversity P ress, 1991), p. 224 .
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14 W ilson, Consilience, p. 57. This is exactly what W ilson tried to do in his

in uential book with Charles J. Lum sden, Genes, M ind and Culture: The
Coevolutionary Process (London: H arvard U niversity Press, 1981).
15 M ary M idgely, ‘Being scienti c about ourselves’, p. 93.
16 Andrew Brown, ‘Commentary: has the meme “meme” run out of steam?’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (1999) pp. 82–5, 85. This echoes Searle’s
much stronger dismissal of memes in Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness,
pp. 104–7.
17 Salman Rushdie, Im aginary Homeland s: Essays and Criticism 1981 –199 1
(London: Granta Books in association with Penguin, 1991), p. 394 .
18 D an Sperber, Explaining Culture: A N aturalistic Approach (London: Blackwell,
1996), pp. 106, 108. Thanks to Adrian Pilkington for introducing me to
Sperber’s work.
19 For a broader discussion of religion and mem es, see John Bowker, Is God a
Virus? Genes Culture and Religion (London: SP UK, 1995) and Richard
D awkins’ chapter in Dennett and his Critics, ed. Bo D ahlbom (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993).
20 See, for text and discussion, D ouglas H ofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An
Eternal Gold Braid (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 33–45.
21 One example of confusion (from several): Douglas Rushkoff, M edia Virus:
Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (New York: Ballentine Books, 1996).
22 Rose, Lifelines, pp. 102, 125–6.
23 Lum sden and W ilson, Genes, M ind and Culture, pp. 258 –63; D urham,
Coevolution, pp. 29–32, 187 –90.
24 See W ilson, Consilienc e and Lum sden and W ilson, Genes, M ind and Culture.
25 D urham , Coevolution, p. 188ff.
27 Dennett, D arwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 340.
28 See Sophie Gilmartin, Ancestry and N arrative in Nineteenth-Century B ritish
Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridg e
University Press, 1999); Adam Roberts, Silk and P otatoes: Contemporary
Arthurian Fantasy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998); Jennifer N eville,
Representations of the N atural W orld in Old English Poetry (Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
29 G. W . F. H egel, Introductory Lecture on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet
(London; Penguin, 1993), p. 3.
30 Sperber, Explaini ng Culture, p. vi.
31 A H amlet meme, with a Marx and D errida inheritance?
Merrick Burrow
Martin McQuillan, Graeme MacDonald, Robin Purves and Stephen

Thomson (eds), Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 220 pp., £40.00 (hardback), £16.95
(paperback)
Stuart Sim (ed.), Post-Marxism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 1998), 196 pp., £40.00 (hardback), £15.95 (paperback)
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Textual Practice
Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psycho-

analysis, History (London: Macmillan, 1999), 268 pp., £45.00 (hardback),
£16.99 (paperback)
Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998), 288 pp., £14.99 (paperback)
The demise of ‘Theory’ has been on the cards from the beginning, from
before the beginning, its terminal destiny inscribed within its unfolding
as a discrete and circumscribable phase of academic history. Or so we
hear. In the words of one commentator’s memorable valediction, ‘we have
passed beyond that heady and in m any ways justi ed moment when it
seemed that only Continental theory had the necessary force to displace
the complacencies of our own tradition.’1 Implicit within the bald histori-
cism of this kind of argument is a prophylactic enclosure of Theory.
If Theory is historically determined, then it cannot itself condition
the concept of History. So long as Theory can be bracketed in this way,
historicism acts as its own conceptual guarantor. And yet it is anything but
clear that Theory can be historicized in this way. Moreover, it is dif cult to
see precisely how this issue could be resolved and the ghost of Theory
laid to rest without reinvoking some kind of Theory to legislate the out-
come.
And so, like Valdemar in Poe’s short story, Theory still perversely
keeps on producing discourse, despite the diligence with which its demise
is pointed out. Indeed, this sense of Theory’s ‘haunting’ the scene of its own
death(s) could scarcely be more apt: post-theory emerges from ruin, the
very mode of its posteriority betraying an irreducible entanglement with
context and event. But this entanglement does not necessarily indicate a
failure or hazard which might have been avoided with greater vigilance. On
the contrary, the failure of transcendence is the very possibility of Theory’s
effective force from the outset, which is why it cannot with any rigour be
held in simple opposition to praxis. Nor can this force be amply contained
within the limits of a discrete historical epoch, since it is precisely in its
capacity to trouble such limits that Theory’s force becomes apparent. If we
are now embroiled with the ‘post-’ of Theory, it appears as a spectre,
trembling between the seemingly irreconcilable domains of the transcen-
dental and the historical.
It is towards this equivocal sense of the ‘post-’ that we are pointed by
Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism. As Ernesto Laclau remarks in his
brief Preface, ‘although we have entered a post-theoretical universe, we are
de nitely not in an a-theoretical one’ (p. vii). The problematic sketched
out across this collection of essays is that of the challenge of thinking the
‘post-theory condition’ in a manner which does not simply reduce Theory
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to a historical phase, nor one which elevates it to a transcendental method,

or ‘Theory as sausage machine’, if you prefer (p. x).
In fact, the rumoured ‘end’ of Theory has been with us for some time 2
– so much so that even the arguments refuting periodizing accounts of
the ‘post-theory condition’ are themselves deemed to have been rehearsed
to the point of tedium. Sti ing a yawn, the editors of Post-Theory declare
that ‘we are the rst to call for an end to reporting the death of reporting
the death of Theory’ (p. ix). This characterization of the state of the debate
(such as it is) chimes also with the rumours of a ‘post-postmodernism’ one
hears from time to time, insofar as both focus upon the raw chronological
succession of different positions, rather than upon their logical priority.
Forget Foucault, Bye-Bye Baudrillard, Thank you: Drive Thru.
However, despite the negative formulation of calling for (yet another)

end rather than for an opening, Post-Theory casts light upon the need for a
more thematic, and indeed less eschatological, treatment of the vicissitudes
of Theory and History within the politics of the academy: one with an eye
for the ghost in the ‘post-’. As Geoffrey Bennington suggests, a more
complex understanding of the ‘post-theoretical’ can usefully be thought
through in terms of Lyotard’s discussion of the postmodern in his appendix
to The Postmodern Condition: 3 that is, in terms of ‘a post- that seems to
precede everything’ (Post-Theory, p. 119). In Lyotard’s formulation, this
‘post-’ is the condition of possibility for the emergence of anything like
modernity (in which the present comprehends itself as ‘future anterior’:
as that-which-will-have-been). This, Bennington argues, ‘suggests why the
post- has always already been at work in theory, and why we will never
reach a post-theoretical state’ (p. 119). In this sense, the ‘post-’ endlessly
multiplies itself as the internal condition of possibility of Theory. To talk
about a single monolithic ‘post-theory’, then, ‘can easily become an excuse
not to think very hard, a sidestep from thinking into a simple, slightly
phantasmatic cultural monitoring or reporting service, “Late-Show”
journalism . . . which proudly steps back, observes and analyses trends in
cultural and intellectual life, as though this were the main or determining
issue’ (p. 105).
If Bennington warns of the complacencies of such ‘intellectual
journalism (preoccupied by the question of news)’ (p. 105) we are also
cautioned against ‘the dead hand of a self-satis ed and hypostasised
“Theory” (pp. xi–xii). Between the quick and the dead, the scene is thus set
for a family drama involving ‘three generations of theorists’ (pp. xv–xvi).
Yet there is little blood on the carpet. Post-Theory is a signi cant collection
of essays, not only because it features essays by some of the most prominent
gures in debates concerning Theory over the years, but also and more
importantly insofar as it attempts to move out of stale polemics by
sketching out the contours of this equivocal ‘post-theoretical condition’. In
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fact, the articles themselves tend to be very like the type of thing that ‘good’
Theory (as opposed to the sausage-machine variety) has always tended to
produce: committed, inventive and resistant to intellectual complacency.
At the level of the signi er, the proliferation of ‘posts’ has been one
of the most visible traits of academic discourse in the wake of Theory. This,
one hopes, has less to do with a decline in our imaginative capacity for
nomination than with a generalized questioning of foundations in relation
to discursive formations such as Enlightenment or colonialism. Such also
has been the destiny of Marxism, and it is the vicissitudes of this destiny
that Post-M arxism: A Reader aims to survey. Intended as a source book
for teaching, and comprising essays and extracts from a variety of largely
familiar sources, the volume is divided into three sections. The rst of
these, ‘Rede ning Marxism’, is organized around the intervention into

Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (1985), and the responses of Marxist thinkers
and critics to it. Laclau and Mouffe are taken as pivotal gures in the
emergence of ‘post-Marxism as a de nite theoretical position in its
own right’ (p. 2), seeking to resituate radical politics in a world in which
‘The plural and multifarious character of contemporary social struggles
has nally dissolved the last foundation for that political imaginary’ of ‘a
perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will’ (p. 15). The responses
to this of Marxists range from the sympathetic to the vitriolic, but all tend
to suggest that Marxism cannot survive except as a totalizing theory of
the oppression and liberation of a ‘universal class’. As Stuart Sim remarks,
‘One is tempted to say that Marxism is a universal theory or it is nothing’
(p. 8).
The organizing principle of Post-M arxism is an opposition between
post-Marxism, which consigns Marxism to the past, and post-M arxism,
which seeks to reanimate classical Marxism through the introduction of
‘new theoretical developments such as poststructuralism, postm odernism.
and fem inism’ (p. 6). This ‘such as’ in fact marks the limit of the ‘new
theoretical developments’ that are included here, with the second section
comprising postmodernist and poststructuralist interventions and the nal
section devoted to feminist engagements with Marxism. W hile exclusions
are an inevitable feature of any editorial selection, the absence of any
serious engagement with postcolonialist theory seems Eurocentric and also
more generally rem iss, since it is (at least arguably) the ground upon which
post-Marxism is most likely to thrive.
Unlike Post-Theory, Post-M arxism seems marked by a certain
pessimism , a sense that Marxism is something of a Humpty-Dumpty,
unreconstructable despite valiant efforts. However, it is not as though
Marxism was an unfragmented body prior to falling off the Berlin wall.
The quite distinct Eastern and Western traditions, as well as the notorious
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incompleteness and overdetermination of Marx’s own writings, suggest a

broad range of openings that are not exhausted by, say, Engels’ or Lenin’s or
Stalin’s efforts to stabilize and totalize the vast, unwieldy remains. It is to
this sense of Marx’s legacy as both multiple and irreducible that Derrida
draws attention:
[N]o future without Marx, without the memory and inheritance of
Marx: in any case of a certain Marx, of his genius, of at least one of his
spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more
than one of them, there must be more than one of them.
(p. 144)
As with ‘Theory’, Marx has a ‘spectral’ value, one which disturbs the
historical linearity that sustains the simple opposition between past and
present, and between present and non-present, by way of the return of the
revenant. It is precisely this, Derrida argues, that ‘haunts’ the triumphalism
of liberal capitalism, as manifested in Fukuyam a’s announcement of the
end of history. For, ‘no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s
ghosts. Hegemony still organises the repression and thus the con rmation
of a haunting’ (p. 145). The very gesture that tries to dispose of Marx thus
raises his spectre and registers his legacy as one which has not yet had done
with history – nor, therefore, with the future:
Before knowing whether one can differentiate between the spectre
of the past and the spectre of the future, of the past present and the
future present, one must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality
effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this
dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other.
(p. 147)
It is to the ‘spectrality effect’ that Ghosts: D econstruction, Psychoanalysis,
History addresses itself, governed by the ‘contention that the most sustained
engagements this century with the gure of the ghost do not revolve
around thinkers attending séances, but rather in the texts of what has
come to be called “theory”’ (p. 5). The rst section of essays, ‘Spectrality
and theory’, arises more or less speci cally from readings of Derrida’s
Spectres of Marx (1994). Each one addresses itself to an investigation of the
rhetoric of the ghost within the philosophical discourse of modernity with
a degree of variety and inventiveness that is suggestive of the capacity of
‘theory’, deconstruction in particular, to survive its own death(s), troubling
foundations and instituting haunting effects.
However, as it moves into the second and third sections, Ghosts drifts
towards a domestication and containment of the ‘spectrality effect’, making
the unheimliche heimliche in an ironic reversal of the movement Freud
famously described in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (1917). In the second
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section, the gure of the ghost loses its status as a radically undecidable
categorial trembling (between past and future, presence and non-presence),
becoming instead a determinate metaphor for something else: for example,
property which, ‘in The M ysteries of Udolpho remains frightening and
dangerous, conjuring fears of ghosts rather than circulating freely and
without history as in the bourgeois ideal’ (p. 157). In this reading the
uncanny has, as it were, been put back in its proper place, translated from
a ghost into an element of political economy which can be calculated
within the broad spreadsheet of historical decidability: ‘culture’.
The decidability of ‘spectral culture’ is, however, complicated to an
extent within the nal section, which is concerned with spectral tech-
nologies and corporate capitalism; returning, in the main, to the treatment
of the ghost in the rst section, by displacing the ground of ontology into
the ‘hauntology’ of the telematic trace. It is something of a curiosity,
though, that the concluding essay, written by Ralph Noyes (Honorary
Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research until his death in May
1998), should be a self-confessedly credulous apologia for the ‘independent
existence’ (p. 244) of the ghost. Then again, by over owing the academic
hygiene of the other pieces – for example, regarding the necessary
precautions to any discussion of the impossible ontology of the ghost, or
the futility of debates which pivot upon points of faith – the nal essay also
transgresses the frame between legitimate (materialist) and illegitimate
(spiritualist) discourses. If this leads ultimately to the region of the absurd
(at any rate, that of the ineffable), it also gestures towards the aporia of
decidability that also haunts ‘legitimate’ discourses at the border between
historical and transcendental analyses. The ‘spectrality effect’ can be neither
instantiated empirically (though this is precisely the kind of absurdity that
the Society for Psychical Research dreams of resolving into science), nor
accounted for within the limits of reason alone. It lies rather in the tying
and untying – the stricturation – of the opposition.
It is across this border between the empirical and the transcendental
that Marian Hobson situates Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines, an important
book which discusses Derrida’s work both in terms of a rigorous theoretical
commentary and contextualization, and according to the textual economy
of his corpus. Hobson writes that the book
takes more and more as its centre . . . the relation of argument to

mode of writing: it is claimed that to a degree, at any rate, the import
of an argument made can be modi ed not just by its words, but by
other factors, like the structure induced on it by the order in which it
is advanced, and repetition. The reader has to work out what the
relevant factors for understanding the argument are.
(p. 2)
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In a dubious gesture, though perhaps an unavoidable one in the context

of this project, Hobson institutes a kind of internal periodicity within
Derrida’s oeuvre, whereby texts are grouped and dealt with according to
the chronology of their ‘genesis’. However, any ‘hard’ historicism or
biographical determ inism is effectively dissolved through the increasing
emphasis upon the textual elements which Hobson argues constitute the
overarching coherence of Derrida’s work: ‘lexemes’, ‘syntax’ and ‘circuits
of argument’.
W hile terms such as these may sound oddly structuralist, Hobson’s
discussion of Derrida steadfastly refuses to force it into systematicity.
Indeed, she is at pains to demonstrate the insuf ciency of any such reading,
offering powerful refutations of the argument that Derrida simply forwards
tu quoque remonstrations or that his work constitutes an invariant method

of uncovering invariance in the texts of others. Rather, Hobson aims to
account for the emergence of a sense of coherence across Derrida’s work
(Derrida being perhaps the least incoherent thinker of all, despite the
immense diversity and obvious dif culties of his writing) which is never-
theless irreducible to system or methodology. Situating Derrida between
attachment to the context of writing and the circuits of repetition that
traverse these attachments, Hobson concludes that:
Derrida’s circuits, the programmes attached to lexemes, are local
but also extensible: what they are not is universally valid forms,
systems of relations outside any linguistic or historical situation, and
the deliberate alteration of vocabulary, its occasionally highly invested
nature, forces this recognition.
(p. 234)
Jacques Derrida adds to the growing body of work on Derrida that has
emerged over recent years which attempts to combine clarity and rigour
of commentary with a sensitivity to the implications of deconstruction
for any project of systematic exposition. Hobson seeks to show that the
coherence of Derrida’s writing does not arise from its reducibility to a set of
constative principles, nor to its performative ‘literary’ practice, but rather
from the circuitry of its repetition effects which run between the two.
Hobson argues that Derrida’s ‘lexemes’ (‘différance’, ‘supplement’,
‘trace’, ‘iterability’, ‘spectre’, and so forth) participate in a kind of ‘syntax’
(whereby the host-text and the parasitical commentary become irremedia-
bly contaminated) and in ‘circuits of argument’ which cannot be reduced
to hypostasis or invariance precisely because there can be no repetition
without difference. No categorial purity of histories or transcendentals;
only the ‘opening lines’ of a non-absolutizable failure of the present to be
present to itself. And it is precisely this detour of the quasi-transcendental
– of the ‘spectrality effect’ – this looping rise and fall through a structurally
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unlimited series of contexts and iterations which means that we will never
be done with the spectres of Theory.
King Alfred’s College, Winchester
Notes
1 Jonathan D ollimore, Sexual D issidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 70.
2 See e.g. Robert Young, ‘Post-structuralism: the end of theory’, Oxford Literary
Review, 5 (1 and 2) (1982), pp. 3–20.
3 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. G eoffrey Bennington and Brian M assumi, Foreword by Fredric Jameson
(Manchester: M anchester U niversity Press, 1984), appendix: ‘Answering the

question: what is postmodernism?’, trans. Régis D urand, pp. 71–82.
Marjorie Welish
Barrett Watten, Frame (1971–1990) (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press,
1997), 325 pp., $13.95 (paperback); Bad History (Berkeley: Atelos,
1998), 152 pp., $12.95 (paperback)
Poetry is the sentence in praxis. Poetry is a mental event – thwack!

Although if gauged by standards of conventional verse Barrett
Watten’s writings appear to be prose, by the norms of prose, his sentences
constitute another sort of literary object. In virtue of being materially
speci c and/or compositionally disjunctive and/or ideologically gural,
his sentences are decidedly poetic in their engagement with the poetics of
modernity.
Disjunctiveness may be noted even in the sequencing of the eight
books comprising Watten’s retrospective anthology of poetry, which does
not progress chronologically and indeed closes with Opera – Works,
published in 1975. Plotted differently, his collected poetry begins with a
beginning: the lyric-as-poetics manifesto. ‘Mode Z’, from 1–10, published
in 1980, opens Watten’s collection. In its entirety it reads:
Could we have those trees cleared out of the way?

And the house, volcanoes, empires? The natural
panorama is false, the shadows it casts are so many
useless platitudes. Everything is suspect. Even
clouds of the same sky are the same. Close the door
is voluntary death. There is one color, not any.
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Prove to me now that you have nally undermined

your heroes. In ts of distraction the walls cover
themselves with portraits. Types are not men. Admit
that your studies are over. Limit yourself to your
memoirs. Identity is only natural. Now become
the person in your life. Start writing autobiography.
In a poetics for which identity is merely natural, and as such, irrelevant and
uninteresting – not to mention untrue – the reader addressed is one for
whom the literariness of a life is autobiography.
How this imperative squares with autobiography as something that
happens to a speci c person not entirely naturally becomes the problematic
concern – especially given that for Watten cultural politics is of the here
and now, rendered from the viewpoint of the person’s historical moment.
Indeed, the second text supplies the next move. A block of words,
margin to margin, ‘Statistics’ installs the sort of writing that offers a caustic
antidote to traditional lyric. It begins:
There is no language but ‘reconstructed’ imaged parentheses back

into person ‘em phasizing constant’ explanation ‘the current to run
both ways.’ The ocean he sees when as ‘sour frowns of the ancients’
“signi er”’ that person jumps in. We are at liberty ‘to take “the” out of
“us,”’ to have ourselves ‘not here’ in the machiner y of dramatic
monologue to ‘smash, interrupt.’
Meant to be taken as prose rather than as a poem encoded metalinguistically,

this passage, bristling with quoted material as be fits the conv ention for
academ ic criticism, thwarts the explanatory function and renders it
problematic, to say the least. Explanation is sabo taged throughout, with
the com municative function o f prose emphatically jamm ed and m ade
unintelligible through the device. The opacity of prose so obtained establishes
the poetic function writ large. H ere literariness is outrageous, having
overgrown sense with the proliferation of quotation marks designating, at
once, value-dominant key terms (as though simulating a text by Raymond
Williams), semiotic concepts, and self-conscious behaviour owing to the
code for Internet searches. (Needless to say, Am erican convention in
deploying quotations marks runs counter to British usage, with no semantic
distinction made between cultural terms, reported phrases and alleged
material, and with which single quotes within appearing to preserve
syntactical intelligibility.)
‘Statistics’ is dedicated to Bob Perelman, from whom we might expect
such a caper; yet Barrett Watten is perfectly capable of foregrounding
language as explicitly as he. The assumption that poetry is an enacted
investigation of poetics – an assumption that many modernists share – is
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pursued by Watten in his broad theoretical writing. Co-editor with Lyn

Hejinian of Poetics Journal from 1982 to 1998 when the editors determined
that it had completed a series, Watten has always been one to take the
initiative in advancing a constructivist theory and practice of language. In
that inaugural issue of the journal, for instance, he contributes an essay on
‘The politics of style’, in which he proposes that style sets itself between
technique (as the determinate way of writing prior to the nished work)
and method (as the activity of the writer in the world subsequent to, and in
consequence of, the nished work). 1 In the course of the essay, Watten lays
out Roman Jakobson’s functions of speech, but beyond this it is Charles
Olson who gives such a scheme subjective authority. ‘The signifying
process is thrown into a certain relief ’, Olson is quoted as saying. Watten
mentions Olson only to worry the issue, and, enlisting Terry Eagleton in
this, calls for ‘non-solutions’ in poetics. And in closing, Watten raises the
question of what is to follow the romantic stance of poetry and poetics
giving testimony in the Donald Allen anthology.
Conduit, published in 1988, may be taken as representing Watten’s
own poetic non-solution to the question posed. For him, poetry m ay well
be aggregated messages inscribed with some measure of self-conscious
literary and cultural theory, a discourse of which the following is a
sam ple:
IV
‘To whom am I speaking?’
You realize native rock is subliminal to begin

with.
They do not make a spectacle only to repeat

themselves.
Chapter 1 has been suspended in a warehouse

of textiles for 1000th of a second.
The route passes through air, in spite of a

m isreading. I speak to the horizon of a
xed point.
The dying sun in a book holds back
verbalization.
We learnt the original author, & we learnt
application of his method easily and fast.
This picturesque taking off of shirts, sweaters,
bathrobes, and putting them back on.
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A midnight impulse cannot make the bus leave

its route.
But abstrac tion is acknowledged in ever more
complex artifacts from the Iron Age until now.
As in this passage from the title poem, hand-hewn sentences or their
equivalents in found sentences, crushed, if not disused – linguistic detritus,
still with some cultural content clinging to it – marshal materials of
language to show the functions of speech from referential to poetic. But in
addition to a structuralist inventory, there is to be seen another source
of linguistic thought appropriated for poetry.
‘The conduit metaphor’ for which Watten’s ‘Conduit’ is named
derives immediately from communication theory. Of particular interest

is ‘The conduit metaphor: a case of frame con ict in our language about
language’, Michael J. Reddy’s own linguistic study of unintentional
content’s being transmitted despite what is said and meant.2 ‘The dying
sun’ does not die yet is a dead metaphor, as we say: and the linguist
might note the cultural assumption of vitalism to reveal values imputed
to language as such. Neither do literary renderings of dying suns ‘hold
back’ anything in any literal sense. Citing Reddy’s essay in his own ‘New
meaning and poetic vocabulary: from Coleridge to Jackson Mac Low’,
Watten is keen to emphasize his ‘nonsensical’ attribution of depth or an
interior to language by speakers who would wish to show that meaning
abides ‘inside’ words. 3 It is precisely this nonsensical aspect to language
as it is in fact used that quali es it, in Watten’s poetics, both as poetic and,
by virtue of its being expressive, emotive. Incorporating such semantic
nonsense into his writing reveals Watten’s mission to alter the protocol
of basic – and BASIC – diction to allow for the most inclusive poetic
vocabulary, even to ‘verbalization’. From slang to dialect to archaism to
jargon, Watten would assert that the poets’ birthright is that of empha-
sizing the historical practice of language over its epistemic, mythic stature.
It is his array of messages in use that might be claimed provocatively for a
‘slice of life’ poetics.4
Conduit, again, is a term from the discourse of cybernetics
dissem inated and popularized in the 1960s and since. In The American
Tree, edited by Ron Silliman, is an anthology of L=A=N =G=U =A =G =E
advancing its own metaphor, a cybernetic metaphor for algorithmic
and other patterned information. W hether displayed as the hierarchically
organized information tree or as the non-hierarchically organized infor-
mation network, patterns of information as such constitute the content of
language and signify style. In the poststructural discursive networks
through which poetic messages whiz, beauty is information, cybernetically
speaking, patterned yet admitting of no redundancy. The non-narrative
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intends more information in this sense; and, so the reasoning goes, the
more information and the more emphasis placed on interpretive frame-
works for history, the better the history. ‘The quest for universals should
make us shudder’, Gilles Deleuze has said in a call to conscience that has
become a leitmotiv in others’ arguments. 5
In this sense, Conduit is typical of Watten’s drive towards informa-
tion. Entities corresponding to sentences scroll paratactically, maximally
discrete. For this congeries of messages, what coherence that obtains comes
from participating in the encoded poetics of the ‘discourse network’ rather
than from adhering to practised verse forms. Compared with Frame, his
most recent book in the collection, Conduit is also more varied tactically,
and so does not overtax the list structure that is a favourite for non-
narrative discursive practices. (M achine Language, blank verse on linguistic

issues by the linguist Melissa Monroe, shows what can be done utilizing
the traditional sentence.6 ) Non-narrative construction of history is a
poetics thoroughly advocated by Watten in his theoretical writing as
well.
‘Non-narrative and the construction of history’, from 1996, is am ong
his more recent pieces in support of plotlessness and how this staple
of structuralism might be enlisted for narratological polemics in current
poetic practice. ‘Non-narrative is at once a form of temporal organization
and a form of historical self-consciousness’ Watten asserts, and goes on
to consider positive contributions to temporal understanding.7 The sense
of an ending, the sense of a beginning, have long been opportunities
for imaginative gambits in experimental writing; and so his discussing the
recent ‘Exit’ by Lyn Hejinian will suf ce for Watten in a demonstration of
retaining the tenor of opening and closing remarks without the received
wisdom that attaches to such narrative moments. Very different, and with
‘an even more radical temporality’, is ‘Wall Rev’ by Jackson Mac Low, who,
following Louis Zukofsky in m anipulating BA SIC, renders functional
semantic functionless through syntax, aleatory in means. Watten believes
these writings to evidence forms of historical self-consciousness adequate
to a critical attitude towards an assum ption of linguistic transparency and
historical self-evidence. The concept of the reality, made known through
deterioration of its representations, is to emerge poetically elsewhere;
as again in ‘Conduit’, wherein ‘native rock’ is ‘subliminal’ by virtue of being
exposed to view and to cultural exfoliation (paradoxically enough). In
sentences like these, Watten forcibly wrenches phenomenological meta-
phors into linguistic ‘constructs’.
In ‘Non-narrative and the construction of history’ Watten uses new
revisionist history and historiography yet also the cognitive topologies
proposed through poststructuralist thought to continue to advocate for
history made conscious insofar as it is made problematic. If, for instance,
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the smallest unit of temporal sequencing is the anecdote, writes Watten

citing Joel Fineman, then the anecdote can be deployed to stay the ‘ ow’ of
time and alter the nature of the historical message. 8 However, disjunctive-
ness as strategy and tactic may now be said to have a continuous tradition,
identi ably linked to modernity. Not only must this a priori principle resist
its status as received wisdom in poetic terms, it must also engage narratives
of continuity if it is to prove itself constructive in practical terms. Now
for a writer, the expository essay has been the proving ground for sustained
argument on behalf of the poetic interventions by other means, and
Watten, associate editor of Representations from 1984 to 1994 until joining
the faculty of Wayne State University and moving to Detroit from
Berkeley, has been a force for articulating the positive contribution
of modern poetics to cultural theory and for being an activist in the

classro om. In ‘Non-narrative and the construction of history’ he employs
the poetics of narrative to articulate and m ake problematic certain political
events and their representation in verbal and visual culture. (Susceptible to
taking visual culture at face value if it accords with his own cultural theory,
Watten believes Barabara Kruger’s posters exemplify good history, even
though their application of simpli ed constructivist-derived graphic design
to gender polemics may be criticized for cultural complacency. For non-
narratives engaging cultural theory a better exemplar would be Öyvind
Fahlström’s end-game board games.)
Good and bad history, gured and driven, is put into practice in
creatively expository pieces published independently of Frame. ‘Bride of
the assembly line’, published through The Impercipient Lecture Series in
1997, presents Watten’s foray into reading the ‘text’ of a city, through the
cultural messages sent along Interstate 696, which is the Walter J. Reuther
Parkway in Detroit, the main artery, as we say, of this industrial American
city. 9 American modernism becomes the analogue for American modernist
poetics in Watten’s scheme of things, and with Gertrude Stein the exemplar
here, he extrapolates a cultural politics from her mode of production and
the style of her public life from which he then posits a recent comparable
poetry. Marshall McLuhan meets Franco Moretti in this poststructural
techno-poetics of place and politics.
Bad History (1998) is a study in subjectivity. Short prose pieces
provoked into being through introspective enquiry into anecdotal evidence
reporting cultural events that may not have happened, or may have
happened but not as remembered, witnessed or read, establish the premise
of constructed memory informing historical accounts. The subjectivity is
in the telling. With recursive mental activity centring on the Gulf War, yet
also elaborating on such cultural phenomena as traf c-collision reports and
screen-saver patterns, Watten’s raft of mythologies is at once more factual
and yet more personal than that written by Roland Barthes.
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In a larger sense, the subjectivity informing ‘bad history’ would seem

to attain to a false relation to historical truth. As against the presumption
of objectivity and the model of universality, a bad history is not merely
naive, interpretively weak or accidental, but is perhaps unethical compared
with normative narratives. Watten’s ironic stance in this regard is evident,
however: for him, espousing falsifying attitudes as necessarily entailed
in story-telling is crucial, and the very key to writing history from the
personal point of view. Revisionist history and historiography have given
his memoir its rationale yet also suggested ways in which the autobio-
graphical annals may derive from cultural – not natural – materials.
For the author of Frame and other subjectivities, certain words, being
very frequent, are marked and, indeed, enjoy the status of keywords. But the
dominant ideas and values of ‘history’, ‘non-narrative’ and ‘constructivist’ and

others that in his essays on poetics assume the status o f categorical
propositions are subject to a process of actively resourceful m ediated
qualification in the poetic im plem entatio n of these term s. In Frame,
‘technology’ becomes the technique, then, for working through the concepts;
indeed, in not using sentences programmatically, merely to facilitate social
experiment but rather to concentrate, transform , interrogate and defer
coming to conclusion too fast, Watten achieves his dif cult and important
poetic object.
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn
Notes
1 Barrett W atten, ‘The politics of style’, P oetics Journal, 1(1) (1982), pp. 49–60.
2 M ichael J. Reddy, ‘The conduit metaphor – a case of frame con ict in our
language about language’, in Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (1979;
C ambridge: Cambridge U niversity Press, 1982), pp. 284–324 .
3 Reddy, p. 288. Reddy is mentioned in ‘New meaning and poetic vocabulary:
from Coleridge to Jackson M ac Low’, p. 149, Poetics Today, 18(2) (summer
1997), pp. 147 –86.
4 M arjorie W elish, ‘E xposed wires of the electrical age’, San Francisco Chronicle,
B ook Review, 5 February 1989, p. 4.
5 Reinhold M artin, ‘The organizational complex: cybernetics, space, discourse’,
Assemblage, 37 (1998), pp. 102 –27. M artin employs this statement as a refrain
throughout his cultural recapitulation of communication theory and its impact
on architecture.
6 M elissa Monroe, M achine Language (New York: Alef Books, 1997) .
7 Barrett W atten, ‘N onnarrative and the construction of history’, p. 210, in Jerry
H erron et al. (eds), The Ends of Theory (Detroit: W ayne State University Press,
1996), pp. 209 –45.
8 Joel Finem an, ‘The history of the anecdote: ction and ction?’, in Aram
Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49–76.
9 Barrett W atten, ‘The bride of the assembly line: from material text to cultural
poetics’, The Im percipient Lecture Series, 1(8) (October 1997), pp. 1–36.
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Barrett Watten
Paul Mann, Masocriticism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 274 + xvii pp.,
$19.95 (paperback)
Paul Mann wanted to write a dark book. As an example of criticism en

abîme, M asocriticism is the darkest book he could imagine. In it, the author
aunts the privileges of critical negativity as the perverse repetition of a
n-de-siècle aesthetics that he identi es everywhere as our common culture.
Disposing of what he proposes, destroying what he produces, Mann wants
to take to the limit, once and for all, what he sees as the fatal paradoxes
of contemporary critical practice as both object and method. Like Sade,
who precedes him in his task, Mann intends his book simultaneously to
annihilate its targets of critical and cultural polemic and, having dispensed
its provocations, to disappear from the face of the earth forever. Given such
admittedly radical intentions, anyone who would read or follow him in his
perverse task must be reproducing their own masochistic drives as a species
of self-punishm ent. W hy would anyone submit to such a destructive game
of criticism? Mann himself repeatedly asks. The enactment of a ‘maso-
criticism’, in which all attempts to account for destructive urges within a
normative protocol are preassigned to oblivion, would be as painful for the
reader as it is pleasurable for the writer.
I want to answer the question of Mann’s book from the perspective
of a writer, not simply the masocritical reader. As the author of Bad
History (Berkeley, CA: Atelos Press, 1998) – a creative/critical work that,
like Mann’s, is compelled to discover the deathward traces of the negative
in the progressive illusions of culture – I feel duty-bound (or self-
condemned, as he would have it) to accept his ambitions and to admit the
necessity of his pre-scripted failure. If that were all this book were about,
however, one could simply consign it to a category of kinky, late-modern
aestheticism as an exam ple of the post-marginality Mann analyses in detail,
and either accept or deny it depending on one’s immediate aesthetic
(or entertainment) needs. There is a category of cultural consumption – a
bin in the techno store, a leather accessories outlet, an ink-smudged page of
discipline and bondage ads in the weekly reader – that hyper-postmodern
adventures in radical critique at times seem to fall into. Mann is well
aware of the risk he takes in imitating, within critical discourse, cultural
gures like Marilyn Manson and Bob Flanagan as much as Nietzsche and
Bataille. In terms of an ancient idiom, this is what suspicious readers
will label ‘trendy’ criticism taken to a logical extreme, as it cancels even the
progressive illusions necessary to grant it any status of new meaning. But it
is precisely as an aesthetic example, a challenge to normative discourse
indebted to the methods and values of the avant-garde it imitates as well as
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attacks, that Mann’s book will outlast his stated intentions – to survive its
own self-cancelling and the oblivion of the techno bin.
Mann begins by recounting the argument of his previous book, The
Theory Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991). It is precisely in its reception – its reproduction in the reader as
much as in institutions such as museums or concert series – that the avant-
garde suffers a paradoxical erasure of its own agency. Avant-garde negativity
cancels out its politics of opposition through its surplus of productivité; as
Mann writes in the present volume, ‘The rage to say everything is the equal
sign that links silence and death’ (p. 8). In the face of such unassimilable
surplus, the modern world behaves either as if the avant-garde has been
wholly absorbed into it, or as if the avant-garde had never existed: one and
the same thing. Any further insistence on the negativity of the avant-garde
would be a form of repetition compulsion, a deathwardness that inspires
Mann in his theoretical efforts but that is always contained within the
paradoxes of the aesthetic, and which anaesthetizes its own opposition
as much as it acculturates or instructs. Culture after the avant-garde (and
there is no other for Mann) is a big nothing, a useless production that can
only celebrate the failure of its politics. A certain strand of anti-aesthetic
cultural studies, not at all Mann’s perspective, also supports this view. The
avant-garde is the paradigm of uselessness:
Every manifesto, every exhibition, every review, every monograph,
every attempt to take up or tear down the banner of the avant-gardes
in the critical arena, every attempt to advance the avant-garde’s claims
or to put them to rest: no matter what their ideological strategy or
stakes, all end up serving the ‘white economy’ of cultural production.
(p. x)
The violence of Mann’s argument is, at the very least, thrilling to him; he
experiences a vertiginous emptying out of agency that drives him forward
in his critique. Just so, dying into commodity, the avant-garde exhausts
itself, until it is ‘circulation alone that matters’ (ibid.).
A devolution of the avant-garde into the econom ic indeed to ok
place at least in the visual arts in the United States during the time when
Mann wrote his attack, the late 1980s (as with artists such as Cindy Sherman,
Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons). It is arguable that the overheated art market
in the United Kingdom is going through a similar period of devolution to
the economic. In that market, however, there has been an increasing sense
of boredom with the kinds o f comm odity critique that encouraged
the American artists in their ‘necessary-impossible’ illusion of an identity
between antagonism and cooptation. Looking at Mann’s position through
another lens, his deathward totalization of the economic now seems more
to align with the perspective of a posthisto rical liberalism that se es the
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‘end of history’ in the overthrow of the progressive illusions of the Hegelian

state, after which only the plus and minus signs of pro t and loss remain. This
is the position identi ed with the historian Francis Fukuyama, but in the
cultural sphere there has also been convincing evidence of an alignment
of liberal posthistoire with a ‘necessary-im possible’ market critique. Take,
for instance, the notorious foray into the world of consumer advertising
by our colleague in the Language School, poet Charles Bernstein. Sometime
around New Year’s Day, 1999, as the big ad campaigns were being rolled
out during American football bowl gam es on television, there appeared
on the screen for several mom ents of sound bite the once-marginal
avant-garde poet in an advertising spot for, of all things, the Yellow Pages
– that hyperpublic docum ent of comm ercial viability, in short of profit
and loss. Parodying a poststructuralist ‘nutty professor’ beside himself with

arcane m usings – in Mann’s terms, trying to ‘say everything’ – Bernstein
offered a deconstructive reading of the text of the Yellow Pages, comparing it
to epic poetr y such as Paradise Lost while gesticulating in all directions,
imitating its compendious performativity, acting out its sublime bulk. Was
this a confirmation of the avant-garde’s final self-authored suicide at
the hands of the economic, an absorption by the arti ce of capitalism we
were all supposed to be writing against? Authorial intentions here, of course,
can only devolve into form, and one was left, jaw agape, holding the clicker
helplessly as the next spo kesperson for the transparent opacity of the
economic bodied forth.
W hether one reads Bernstein’s testimony as heroic distancing or fatal
collusion, it provides a spectacular example of the ‘theory death’ of the
avant-garde artist disappearing into the ‘white economy’ – or Yellow Pages
– in Mann’s account. In homage to what he has learned from the avant-
garde, it is at just such a moment of self-cancelling intervention that Mann
stages his own critique, even in a violent rejection of its prior example. The
negative status of the ‘example’ is therefore important here. W here avant-
garde theory-death cancels out any agency it may have claimed, Mann will
go on to extend its analogy to literary theory, war studies, popular culture
and postmodern ethics in a carefully staged series of arguments. (The
agency of the avant-garde is, of course, always overstated by Mann to be the
overthrow of the ‘system’, reproducing a ‘damned if you do/damned if you
don’t’ paradigm akin to the Leninist perspective on the Cabaret Voltaire.)
At the same time, Mann’s self-cancelling paradox of argument could well
be imagined as a synthesis of two foundational texts of the avant-garde,
Lautréamont’s Chants de M aldoror and Poésies, in terms of its critical
connection between radical evil and the negativity of form. In inculcating
theory-death, in other words, the avant-garde is an example of self-undoing
that compels destruction, of itself and those who would im itate it. Mann,
in this sense, is one of the avant-garde’s most profound imitators as he
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ful ls the destiny of its paradoxical intentions, its self-destruction as an

object. This ‘object’ is then immediately extended by analogy – from the
virtually repeating bobbins of Duchampian theory-death to that which
compels a critical account of their effect and, by extension, to any object
that compels a critical account. Criticism thus becomes a re-enactment of
a destructive relation to the object whose paradigm is the avant-garde.
In The Theory Death of the Avant-Garde, Mann rejected the avant-
garde as a betrayal of its critical stakes; in M asocriticism, he reverses polarity
to show how the critic’s self-m ystification leads to his fatal attraction to
any object as an act of self-destruction. Criticism can only be masocritical
in submission to this duplicitous object. In thus bracketing the object of
criticism from the self-scrutiny of the critic, Mann implies som ething rarely
said about criticism, something a writer (like myself ) of those very ‘objects’
that critics find so antagonistic or self-undoing will readily confirm . As
any practising writer who has had a serious intellectual engagement with
a practising critic is aware, a relation between their two perspectives
constructed on the basis of a shared interest in a work of art as critical ‘object’
may be one of destructive envy. Critics often criticize simply to overwhelm
and neutralize the object of their critique; so it is with prescient insight that
Mann identi es the avant-garde as an exemplary object that perform s this
task for him, leaving him to speculate on further motives for his m asochistic
critical attraction to it. As Terry Eagleton has recently written, ‘Nothing is
more voguish in guilt-ridden U S academia than to point to the inevitable
bad faith of one’s position. It is the nearest a Post-Modernist can come to
authenticity’ (‘In the gaudy supermarket’, review of Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, London Review of B ooks, 13 May
1999). Such a display of bad faith is clearly the risk of both Bernstein’s and
Mann’s masocritical acts. The débâcle of postmodern intervention turning
into a commodity thus sets up for Mann his more proper question: the guilt
of the coopted critic.
Mann’s masocriticism is a metacriticism without examples, at least to
begin with, but it is easy to nd instances of the critical bad faith he wants
to unveil. We may take (and I am sure Mann would agree) Terry Eagleton’s
above-mentioned review of Gayatri Spivak (as well as in many ways the
work under consideration, The Critique of Postcolonial Reason) as a species
of masocriticism every bit as self-undoing as Bernstein’s Yellow Pages ad.
Apart from anything Spivak says, her book is the antagonistic and perse-
cuting object that generates the ambivalent self-display of Eagleton’s
review, focused as it is on punishing Spivak for her guilty inauthenticity.
The critic’s intention is clearly to ‘wipe out’ his antagonist, to annihilate
her, but this destructive desire is played off, at the outset, on to her own
work’s negativity: ‘There must exist somewhere a secret handbook for post-
colonial critics, the rst rule of which reads: “Begin by rejecting the whole
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notion of postcolonialism”.’ Identifying the object as self-cancelling

becomes the basis for an extended harangue on the duplicitous contra-
dictions of Spivak’s work, apart from any motivations of content that
would account for them (an odd position for a materialist like Eagleton):
‘Indeed, an essay remains to be written on the unpublished writings
of Gayatri Spivak, which would take as its subject all those footnotes in
which she has announced a work which never actually appeared.’ Spivak
as trickster drives Eagleton’s rage; far from the high-mindedness of his
Enlightenment call for rational argument and discursive clarity, his review
moves quickly to a masocritical display of mastery and envy. It follows that,
while destruction of the object is his goal, at the same time he is compelled
to identify with it, in the sense that Spivak, like Eagleton in his own
estimation, is a world-class public intellectual with emancipatory aims.

Eagleton thus praises and damns his object to the same degree: Spivak
is a self-indulgent, politically defeatist, obscurantist entrepreneur: ‘In this
gaudy, all-licensed supermarket of the mind, any idea can apparently be
permutated into any other’; at the same time, she is one of the truly
important critics on the world-historical stage: ‘There can thus be few
more important critics of our age than the likes of Spivak, Said and Homi
Bhabha, even if two of that trio can be impenetrably opaque.’ It follows
that ‘her comment that much in the area [of postcolonial criticism] is
“bogus” is largely an aside’, even if these asides, digressions and reversals
have been demonstrated to be the fatal error of her postcolonial self-
advertising.
Common to both judgements is Eagleton’s enlightened self-interest
as progressive critic. His glaring reversals, however, show that even the
liberatory necessity of his critique has long since undergone the same
‘theory-death’ as the subversive claims of the avant-garde or the post-
colonialist. As a result, a self-masking disavowal of ultimate ends (aka the
irony of history?) comes through his review; it must certainly be to avow a
spectacle of futility that Eagleton argues so carelessly, as if all outcomes
were pre gured in advance. This rational disavowal is hardly lost on the
reader, but it is interpreted (and can only perpetuate itself ) in a register that
is the opposite of what it seems to perform. Finally, it is the spectacle of the
irrational attack on the antagonistic object (both person and work) of the
postcolonial critic that draws readers in to Eagleton’s review. For Mann,
these dynamics must be taken into account as the denied irrationality of
critical practice. As he writes in a memorable passage:
We have plenty of psychoanalytic criticism, formalist criticism,

ideological criticism, and so on, but where is our fear criticism? Our
despair criticism? Our disgust criticism? Our criticism of resentment?
Of petty ambition? Of treachery, deceit, jealousy, hysterical rage?
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Nowhere in sight, yet it would hardly require m uch effort to discover

them all just beneath the thin civility of the strictest critical decorum .
(p. 21)
W hat, indeed, is the status of the shitty remark the critic makes in the
corridor, on his way either to or from the podium? Eagleton’s review may be
read precisely in that spirit, as an attempt, through the disavowal of its own
rationality, to destroy its object by underm ining itself. Insofar as this
destructive drive is initially given in terms of the object, here the work of
Gayatri Spivak, it is generalized by Mann as the critic’s self-undoing address
to any object: ‘W ho is that in the text, behind the gure of whoever it is I
think I see? And why submit myself anyway to this other, for whatever reasons
I claim or believe or pretend to believe that I make this sacri ce?’ (p. 22). It
is the terrible necessity of writing about, not the other, but simply another that
draws Eagleton into the spectacle of playing the fool in this serious business;
he is aghast that, once again, he must give himself over, sacri ce himself, to
another as the fundamental critical act. For Mann, the vulgarity of the critic’s
disavowal takes place precisely as ‘the entry into culture’ that goes along with
mastery of object loss as a self-constituting display:
W hatever stands behind the other that one affects to see in the text,
submission to its rule is a highly formalized attempt to control its
anticipated retribution for the aggressive identi cations one imagines
oneself in icting upon it. . . . Criticism perform s a homeopathic
preemption of the forever-imminent revenge of the text, and of our
own revenge against ourselves.
(p. 37)
The emancipatory reason of criticism is motivated by its irrational object.

One wonders whether Eagleton, or his readers, are aware of this.
And why am I writing about Mann’s book? This is a question that
must be asked. It certainly is not to give my own masocritical account of its
argument, or to rehearse its major points as if I were unaware of the
fundamental nature of its larger stakes. Simply, I have enjoyed surviving
Mann’s prior attack on the avant-garde – it hardly hurt a bit – and thus nd
his posthistorical anti-progressivism useful in thinking through my own
position. Such will be the ethics of Mann’s text – that its readers survive
his attack – towards which his argum ent is relentlessly devolving. First,
however, it is necessary that the object of the masocritical act be further
discerned – so that one can clearly show how it is a situation of the critic
rather than his object that matters – with some supporting examples, even
as they paradoxically reinforce the metacritical aspects of the work
by inserting it into already concluded arguments. It is from this point of
departure that Mann undertakes, brie y, an account of the critical situation
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of the object in two of his own role models: Bataille and Nietzsche – on his
way to an ethics without examples.
The situatio n with Bataille is, in fact, easily paraphrased: it is not
possible to read Bataille in the spirit of his work without disrupting the
‘restricted economy’ of critical discourse; as an object, the work of ‘general
economy’ will destroy the critic. The critic, therefore, must desire self-
destruction suf ciently to continue his futile act of paraphrase. This failed
but necessary attempt to represent the unrepresentable is then traced back
to Nietzsche’s account of tragedy, which, nally, is a performative act that
intends the edification of the comm unity in terms o f that which would
destabilize and destroy it. Tragedy attempts to re-present these antagonistic
(Asiatic, barbarian) elements in the gure of the Dionysian, at which point
they become, guratively at least, a moment of self-undoing. This becomes,

for Mann, the politics of any act of representation, and indeed he claim s
that all representation, and by extension all culture, is masocritical, a mere
celebratio n of the limits of representation in its own undoing: ‘All
representation depends o n the order of m asochism’; ‘It is a necessar y
condition of culture as such’ (pp. 28–9). Bataille and Nietzsche, as precluding
any paraphrase, make inevitable a masochistic motive that will be engaged
in the reproduction of culture insofar as it nds itself, of necessity, described
by them . Culture, for M ann, is the negative unfolding of an impossible
containment.
It is a relief, then, to nd that culture, even so negatively de ned, still
has objects. In his derivation (by analogy) of the necessity of a developing
‘ethics without examples’, Mann gives accounts of two recent developments
in critical discourse and popular culture that spur on the self-staging of
his relentless devolution. In ‘The nine grounds of intellectual warfare’,
Mann predicts an emergence of ‘war studies’ in the period immediately
following the convulsively self-punishing display of the 1991 Gulf War. At
the moment of posthistorical crisis, criticism will elevate war to an object
of rational critique in order to better understand its own structuring devices;
this Mann terms criticism’s ‘eventual phenomenalization, through proxy
objects of study, of the devices that structure it’ (p. 92). There is no critique
of war, however – it is an ‘impossible’ object where, as in Tolstoy’s depiction
of the Battle of Borodino, every representation of an event shatters its own
perspective (it turned out that the appropriation of war, which Mann
predicted, did not become a major theatre of critical operation, however).
War studies, instead, reveals the essentially substitutive nature of critical
discourse, as it employs Nietzsche’s ‘mobile army of metaphors’ precisely in
the self-punishing absence of its object. The payoff is that, in analogizing
criticism to the rhetorical strategies of ‘position taking’ or the nomadic
tactics of ‘stealth technology’, we can try to argue for another form of
effective engagement:
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One might nd oneself, for instance, no longer putting forth

positions, outlining, defending, and identifying oneself with them:
one might nd oneself engaged in an even more severe, more rigorous
discipline of af rming ideas without attaching oneself to them,
making them appear . . . only so as to make them disappear.
(p. 109)
Criticism, as in Eagleton’s review, clearly fails in its adherence to the logic

of position; Mann advocates something like the site-speci c and ephemeral
‘relays’ of the Internet, where ‘assem blages will serve as the auto-erosive
becom ing-machine of what was never exactly the intellectual “subject”’
(p. 112). Lest we become too optimistic in our embrace of the resulting
Deleuzian nomadology, however, Mann reminds us that the Internet began

as a military operation.
Having thus proposed and disposed of another possible arena of
oppositional critique, Mann goes on to explore an entire universe of similar
constructions in his chapter on ‘Stupid undergrounds’. The destructive
rhetoric of his account of failed resistance is enough to make the maso-
critical reader howl with pleasure and pain, as he attacks
apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, collèges and phalansteries, espionage

networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of home shoppers
for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-biomorphic, and
anarchoterrorist cells; renegade churches, garage bands, dwarf
com munities, no-risk survivalist enclaves, unfunded quasi-scienti c
research units, paranoid think tanks, unregistered political parties,
sub-employed workers’ councils, endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac
fan clubs . . . and the endlessly multiplied hybridization of variant
combinations of these.
(p. 127)
Mann’s entire chapter betrays the repetition compulsion of the masocritic:

‘W hy this stupid fascination with stupid undergrounds?’ he asks (p. 128).
In an extended argument by analogy, critical terminology is stupid, as are
the hybrid quasi-entities that are its objects; such is the residual trace of
Mann’s prior fascination with the Hegelian avant-garde at the moment
of its theory-death by recuperation. Now all that one has for opposition are
avant-gardes of posthistoire which, like Marilyn Manson, are pre gured as
media stars at the same time that they create their market niches by
pitching resistance. This resistance is ‘everywhere and nowhere’ at the same
time; a true underground, it disappears at will and surfaces whenever it
feels like it. Mann is clearly fascinated by, and wants to imitate, this effect
– even as it makes criticism ‘as painful and dif cult as possible’ (p. 129). In
fact, Mann has constructed here a brilliant counterposition to the stale
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progressivism of much of cultural studies. The inconsequential negativity

of his critical approach, objectively correlated in his objects, allows for a
whole range of emerging cultural phenomena to be theorized and discussed
without the guilt of failed opposition that has been identi ed as the critical
aporia of the traditional avant-garde. As positive facts of late capitalist
culture, these phenomena are intrinsically important and revealing, and
they must be discussed in a way that does not simply reproduce them on
the model of the prior avant-garde claims to agency. Paradoxically but
ef ciently, Mann’s self-cancelling critique points the way.
W hat we then get is a return of the repressed modernist moment of
‘participant observation’ in Mann’s fascination with the negative phalanxes
of tattoo parlours, punk rock acts, virtual reality, Japanese animation, or (a
more current fan interest of my own) techno music: a whole new horizon
of research topics opens up. Even beyond trendy research topics, however,
this critical fascination with negative objects is the site for deep knowledge
of the critic’s profession. As Mann identi es with the underground, so he
claims that any critic identi es destructively with his object:
Any cultural (political, philosophical, critical, artistic) activity
orbits elliptically, masologically, around such null points: one is a
Freudian, a Marxian, a Derridean, a Habermasian; a Shakespeare,
Dickens, Austen scholar; one becomes a New Historicist not only for
considered methodological but because one has already recognized
something of what one might call oneself were it so conscious a
recognition, in reading Greenblatt or McGann; one becomes a perfor-
mance artist because, sitting in the audience during a performance,
one saw without seeing (through a fundamental méconnaissance,
through stupid recognition) oneself on stage, as the other of one’s
desire.
(p. 155)
I became a language poet because. . . . I’m willing to consider this; we have
here, in the moment of ‘stupid recognition’, a logic of social reproduction
that must be accounted for. Mann, however, seems to offer a positive
approach to thinking this problem through, even in terms of his own
project, that he then retracts. It turns out that no such knowledge would
be possible because all identi cations will be essentially misrecognitions.
It does not matter whether there is a context for particular identi cations,
whether they are motivated in any way. Here, Mann misses the oppor-
tunity to found a new, negative tendency of cultural studies that would
base its insights on the politics of misrecognition. Having shown how
Dick Hebdidge misrecognizes a gure of resistance in the punkette
with outrageous tattoos in the London Underground as merely his own
projection, Mann will not go further to discuss why these projections occur
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in any but the m ost discredited, coopted, utopian ways. There is nothing
one can do as a form of positive cultural resistance in terms of the agency
of any identi cation; this is symptomatically described in a revolting
passage on the counter-utopia of the ‘day job’, where the pre-Yuppie
wannabe artist works at degrading tasks while simultaneously ‘seeing
himself as’ a heroic example:
In a slightly older bohemia, the artist’s dream: uninterrupted time

for the real work. Or rather, what came to be seen as the real work,
that painting or writing which was by force an avocation in a world
where one was a slave to the day job. Each day demanded the
most intense struggle to steal or conserve time from the world of the
job for yourself, your spirit, your art. . . . A thousand petty tasks and
distractions staged endless raids on your energy and attention, until it
seemed that art itself was at war with everything else. The pitiable
heroism of each momentary victor – each nished painting or poem
– was belied by the manifestation in a world in which, after all, a
poem is merely a poem, and therefore a sign that a much more
pervasive defeat had already occurred.
(pp. 169–70)
Now that’s criticism! – even as my marginal notes read, ‘Kill dog’ –

complete destruction of the object, complete abasement of the critic.
Mann’s critical violence to the object becomes a permanent cultural
condition: having been there, done that, what’s left?
The disappearance of the object – however delimiting, because it
abolishes all forms of historical or contextual enquiry; and debilitating,
as it shows the dependence of the critic on identi cations he cannot
comprehend – is necessary to throw the author into the crisis of his book,
which he must survive or the book would not have been possible to
publish. Here, I feel compelled to admire the rhythm of proposal and
disposal that guides Mann’s work. Of how many critics could it be said that
their enquiry is necessary in its form of its unfolding, not simply a rehearsal
of position? For Mann, the via negativa can only empty out, until one
stands, under the intense light of a philosophical formalism, at the meta-
discursive crossroads of one’s enquiry. Having dispensed with the object,
the critic must turn the scrutiny on himself precisely to account for
his desire to destroy it (would more critics account for that central
and motivating fact!). This is so even if one’s object is critical discourse:
so Mann begins his anti-triumphal nale at an even higher, more
encompassing level of generality with an obituary for ‘ethics’ as the
ultimate discourse about itself. As the consequence of three millennia of
philosophical enquiry,
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there are a thousand obituaries of ethics, and every one of them

is written in the zone of what I have been disposed to call theory-
death, that event-horizon where a discourse reaches its point of
termination without coming to an end, where it ought to die but
does not, where its persistence is a form of death and death sustains
it interminably.
(p. 205)
W hatever ‘ethics’ is, nothing may be said of it that has not been said already:
this is the discursive moment of its theory-death. Therefore, Mann begins
his discussion of ethics without rehearsing any of its privileged concerns;
ethics is entirely a metadiscourse, completely dissociated from any terms for
an ethical life: ‘In ethics, one constantly tries to say something that does
concern and can never concern the essence of the matter.’ The rst third
of Mann’s account of ethics is thus curiously emptied out, a place-holding
formalism that becomes, precisely, the condition for an alternative or
parallel discussion. This parallel track Mann calls an ‘anethics’ (of all his
idiosyncratic terms, from ‘theory-death’ to ‘masocriticism’ to ‘stupid under-
grounds’, the only one with half a chance to survive):
Anethics involves this division, this back-stretched connection,
between the vast eld of ethical discourse and the im possibility
of ethical totalization it indicates. That is why it will do no good to
re ne and defend a position . . . not in the name of any fashionable
inconsistency but at the very lim its of a discipline faced with
everything it cannot dominate, even in the mere act of writing.
(p. 198)
If anethics is an ethics of no position, Mann immediately goes on to
produce one: a crossroads of ethical decision in which agency is suspended
in retroactive determination of any ultimate outcomes. Psychoanalysis,
then, becomes a model for thinking, formally rather than causally, about
what one will have done. In a reading of the Greek maxim ‘ethos anthropo
daimon’ (often interpreted as ‘character is destiny’), both ‘ethos’ and
‘daimon’ become mutually constituting for the poor ‘anthropos’ who tries
to imagine any prospective agency. This is rst of all a problem of ethical
discourse, which tries argumentatively to erase that which is ‘only
displaced, veiled, repressed, translated . . . the residual force of everything
we believe we have left behind’ (p. 222). Agency, then, must address all
possibilities of an outcome: ‘the status of the hypothetical is an ethical
problem’ (p. 226). It is here, in the relation of agency to possibility, that
Mann formally reproduces what he has gone to great lengths to exclude
in the entire course of his book’s argument: the example, which returns to
re-present exactly what might be imagined as possible at the moment
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of action at a crossroads. The example, in a very long tradition, is a crux,

but Mann wants an anethics without examples – even as he reproduces its
formal necessity. Such reliance on an example that is none immediately
recalls Mann’s initial point of departure – the avant-garde. And indeed it is
my nal act of revenge on the critic to show that his entire project has been
to reproduce, by attempting to short-circuit his envy for the object that is
the avant-garde, the avant-garde’s contribution to ethics.
Anethics is avant-garde ethics without guilt over recuperation (and
hence defeat of agency) in its objects. It is the horizonal possibility of
the avant-garde; in other words, as if its objects were entirely transparent to
the crossroads of ethical decision. In order to show this, we may return
to examples – or we may, with Mann, hold them in abeyance. The central
moment of man at the crossroads, attempting to act without example, is his

submission to a law that will determine the meaning of his acts. He must,
in the end, give him self over to the law in the default of the example, as
the example would merely be some idealization of heroic agency: a role
model, teacher or preceptor that would mediate between subject and law.
But ‘ethical decisions and the general question of ethics would not arise
if the law had not prepared us for them, if there had not been something
to mandate ethical decisions’ to which he is subject (p. 237). Exam ples
become agency (or not) by the retroactive determination of the law.
The law is thus the retroactive effect of that which undoes the mediation
of agency: whether that would be in the stabilizing imagination of a
means (hero or preceptor) or in the condition of possibility of extremes
(all that deviates from the law in terms of historical or cultural relativity
or difference). It is here that an anethics offers, in an act of violence,
its non-alternative as a way of knowing that one is, precisely, at the
crossroads:
Hence the strange possibility, that the paralytic, paralyzing anethics of
complexity would be the most ethical ethics of all. It would be the
task of anethics no less than of psychoanalysis to persist in addressing
our attachment to the law and the drives that bring us to it, even at
the expense of logical clarity and action.
(p. 243)
Anethics comprehends the determination of that which ethical decision
represses. Oedipus may act, but his knowledge is not con ned to the
outcom e.
Is there a practical criticism in Mann’s derivation of an anethics, rather
than merely a self-cancelling tilting at windmills? I think so. It is one that
returns, however, to the scene of writing, or to the construction of any
example, at the crossroads of ethical decision. Let us imagine an ethical
decision that someone really had to make: to abrogate one’s rights as a
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citizen or to compromise one’s refusal to participate in a war (it does not

matter which war). One is prepared to take an action one way or another.
Let us imagine, also, that the moment of decision never comes; what is the
status of the action not taken? Some years later, one nds that which has
been repressed in the moment of ethical decision remains, that one’s agency
is decisively imbricated with non-agency, to an action that never took
place. And one writes a poem. W hile the poem is being written, it is not
clear what the poem represents; it is hellishly dif cult, fraught with every
colliding hypothesis one could imagine as to the outcome of an action that
never took place. Its ethical prospect, its exemplarity, is equally motivated
by a forthcoming dogmatism of retroactive determination: it sets forth as it
will have been: the poem, complete. W hat was work in progress becomes
Progress (New York: Roof Books, 1985) under the retroactive determina-
tion of the law, ‘which cannot be reduced to the effect of human agency,
however unconscious, since it is what calls up agency in the rst place’
(p. 240). And what is that but the drive, meaning the same thing that
causes us to act as if we were continually in the place of an ethical decision,
at the very crossroads of our lives: ‘There is no decision between active
and passive. We are in a zone where the most insistent actions are over-
determined effects of indetermined force’ (p. 252). As I have just shown,
and Paul Mann will believe, the avant-garde is simply not concerned with
its mere recuperation – except insofar as one may substitute ‘agency
suspended in its retrospective determination’ for ‘recuperation’. Rather,
in the sense of the m axim ‘ethos anthropo daimon’ Mann elucidates,
Bernstein would turn out to have accepted the Yellow Pages ad; I would not.
The avant-garde is always at the crossroads of the example; it writes as if
its complexities will become the knowledge of an outcome. ‘Anethics is
the threshold where the ethical dualism of the crossing gives way to over-
whelming complexities, to the gordian knot of conditions, to incomplete
and multiple overlapping contexts and frames, to drives whose trajectories
can never be fully mapped’ (p. 258). As Mann’s book itself demonstrates,
agency is neither the immediacy of an outcome nor the fatality of one that
will never be achieved. Agency is equally the conditions it proposes and
disposes of itself.
The solution of the critic’s dilemma is to see himself as a writer, a
producer of those objects his ambivalent envy wants simultaneously to
idealize and attack. The gain in knowledge, then, will not only be his
alienation but the complex unfolding of all that remains unexplicated in
his decision to pursue a particular critical path. This is knowledge, indeed,
that Mann has an inkling of in the pursuit of his self-cancelling examples.
And it is knowledge enough to compel a continued respect, as well, for
those examples that give him the rule for his self-cancelling enquiry: or else
he could not have written his book. The crucial test of Mann’s book is what
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it will have been, not only what it wants to be taken to be. Criticism should
be at least as well written as the objects it sets out to destroy.
Wayne State University
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Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism

Ira Nadel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge:

Modernist literature now  nds itself in a much-companioned time. As the

the point-by-point elucidation of particular texts. In recent years, Modernist

(p. 140). Poets as various as Bunting, Zukofsky, Oppen, Creeley, Duncan,

The function of the cultural studies orientations we  nd in this volume,

Renaissance Literature (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,

Researching his ‘History of Ireland’, Engels made notes on a book by

exploring, in a series of intricate individual studies, the question of

islands of Britain and Ireland’, and he does so by underlining the

of an orientalist incentive: ‘So as, there can be found, no Foundation made

Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (London:

Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations,

During the 1917 Revolution the Bolsheviks debated what to do about

believed in false gods. Does Shakespeare nevertheless belong in a new

of the new Globe are those of a peculiarly virtual museum, a ghostly

intriguing reworkings of ‘historical’ and modern staging. Kiernan’s claims

to the sociopolitical sensitivities po rtrayed, and need to be confronted

revisio nism . Part I offers accounts of ‘visiting’ a range of Asian theatres.

Given Brown’s tendency to orientalize Asian theatre for imagining a

Salih, Nadine Gordimer, and Robert Stone;  lms directed by James

potentials found in Shakespeare by successive generations, as though the

why reading postcolonial texts as Shakespearean revisions amounts to more

Othello has not only failed to unsettle or dislodge established racial

requires an aesthetics of production less dependent on the assumptions

pedagogically, to argue for new cultural forms through Shakespeare than

Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds), Re guring Revolutions:

Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic

One of the most positive developments in interdisciplinary studies of

between such watershed cultural episodes as the English and Romantic

The conventional periodization that separates the Puritan Revolution

This turning on its head of the organizing components of conventional

of cultural microhistories made familiar by New Historicism, for Sharpe

A recognition of 1649 and 1789 as both aesthetic and political

This kind of ambitious historical extrapolation helps to link up the

reluctance to engage on these terms, it was a polemical disaster. The image

debate, Zwicker restores a direct political agency to an activity previously

commercial progress, and the indolence, frivolity, and dissipation to which

sphere of the private that is governed by commerce, distinctions –

reactionary Tories. This historical episode completes a cultural histor y of

New Historicist practice seems oddly placed in the introduction of a study

social experiments of the Italian Futurists and the Russian Constructivists

photography by Robert Frank, and close readings of poetry by Ginsberg,

and ideological circum stances which determine them. Perloff constantly

than an out-and-out adherence to any particular political or ideological

deals with what she perceives is not happening in contemporary poetry

John Jervis, Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and

Margaret A. Somerville and David Rapport (eds), Transdisciplinarity:

Ian Burkitt, Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity

Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory,

‘It is as though to discuss modernism is to become a member of some

‘Two Cultures’ lecture some forty years ago, knowledge is frequently

recognized prior even to John F. Kennedy’s endorsement that disciplinary

is a very intense critique of institutionalized working practices in which the

 cooperate (disciplines engage in parallel play);

 dismantle (disciplines bring to light and debate each other’s assumptions);

Modernist literature now nds itself in a much-companioned time. As the

The function of the cultural studies orientations we nd in this volume,

Salih, Nadine Gordimer, and Robert Stone; lms directed by James

Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds), Re guring Revolutions:

cooperate (disciplines engage in parallel play);

dismantle (disciplines bring to light and debate each other’s assumptions);

De ning a meme

these, ‘Rede ning Marxism’, is organized around the intervention into

Prove to me now that you have nally undermined

ful ls the destiny of its paradoxical intentions, its self-destruction as an